Cobra II by Michael R. Gordon

Author:Michael R. Gordon
Format: mobi
Published: 2006-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

At Rams, the rest of the regiment’s supply column had finally begun to trickle in. When the soldiers arrived, Captain John Cochran was stunned. As the assistant operations officer for the regiment, Cochran had been driving for four days. He had snaked his way north past blown-up Iraqi trucks, overturned and wrecked Army trucks, and the earth-shattering explosion of an oil storage tanker in Samawah, which had sent up a 400-foot wall of flame. But nothing had prepared him for what he encountered when he reached the assembly area at Rams. Helicopters were strewn everywhere. After a few near collisions, the returning pilots had put down wherever they could, the exhausted crews curled up underneath their aircraft with no security. Cochran ran up to Captain Gary Morea, the chief planner for the Medina attack. Morea was near his TacSat radio and appeared to be shaken. “It was a bad mission, a really bad mission,” Morea said.

John Lindsay, the operations officer for the regiment, wrote in his diary that U.S. intelligence had left the regiment utterly unprepared for the mission. “G2 really screwed the pooch on this one,” he wrote. “No assessment ever accounted for the threat we faced.” Said Hobart, the intelligence officer or S-2 for the regiment, “This ambush was rehearsed. It was trained for. This was asymmetrical warfare at its best. They had decided they can’t turn on their radars because they knew we would kill them, but they knew we were going to send Apaches in to clear the way.”21

Still, the damage had been extensive. One Apache had crashed on takeoff; another had been shot down and its crew captured. Virtually all of the thirty aircraft had returned with bullet holes. With the helicopters all over the assembly area, it took hours even to determine how many aircraft had managed to return. As the count proceeded, Lindsay was relieved to find a Black Hawk with seven unaccounted-for personnel parked in the distance. In Ball’s squadron alone, aircraft had cumulatively been hit more than 300 times by enemy air defense and small arms fire. The list of problems that the regiment had encountered was long: sixty-two rotor blades were hit; seven fuel cells were banged up; eight engines were stuck; and six canopies were damaged beyond repair. The night flight systems of some helicopters were knocked out. The Iraqis had also targeted the weapons mounted on the Apaches: eight damaged Hellfire missiles caused three in-flight fires. As if this were not enough, the Iraqis were able to move the captured Apache—with its sophisticated suite of electronic aviation and fire control systems—before CENTCOM could destroy it. Special forces eventually went in to try to locate Williams and Young but had to be pulled out when they heard that V Corps was planning to fire ATACMS missiles at the position to destroy the helicopter and deny the Iraqis an intelligence bonanza. But U.S. fire came too late.

The mission had failed: the Medina Division had been hard to locate and had barely been attacked.

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