Meanwhile, back at Merrill Village the SF soldiers and Bolivian infantry would be policing the area for mines, booby traps, and other unexploded ordnance, so that the villagers could return ASAP. That event was scheduled to take place on Monday the 8th, with rebuilding and CA actions following that.
Once these goals had been accomplished, Operation Marauder would be over by the end of the week. All in all, a well planned and tidy schedule.
Now if events proved to be equally tidy ...
I laid out my maps and SOTD-supplied briefing books, and quickly worked out the places I’d visit and my observation points.
My first trip took me to the camp where Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs—the current State Department babble for “refugees”) from Merrill Village were located. 109 The IDP compound, about a mile from the SOTD headquarters in a pleasant little forest clearing, was completely surrounded by antipersonnel obstacles and wire, and contained a small tent village, complete with mess hall, showers, and recreational facilities. Inside were around two dozen IDP roleplayers (TRW contractor personnel), as well as a number of other “players,” including representatives of the local constable’s office and representatives of the Cortinian government who actually ran the IDP camp. Protecting the IDP facility were the Bolivian infantry that had flown in some days earlier via C-17. The Bolivians were being supervised by a 1st/7th SFG ODA team, who provided translation services as well as logistical support.
Though initially everything seemed quiet and pleasant, that wasn’t exactly the case.
Because of the simultaneous running of JRTC 99-3 for the 101st Airborne, Opposing Force (OpFor) assets were thin for R3. Nevertheless, there had already been several sightings of insurgent scouts around the IDP camp, as well as a sniper attack on the compound. Though nobody had been hit, the IDP roleplayers were getting edgy. And as I passed inside the wire, they were beginning to show unruly signs, and there were shouts: “When are we going home? When will the Americans win it back? When will our own government take charge again?”
Because of obvious Operational Security (OPSEC) considerations, the IDPs would not be told the details of Operation Marauder until after it was completed. Therefore, they would just have to sit tight until Merrill Village was liberated.
After I left the IDP compound, I headed back to my billeting area. Since I was scheduled to spend the entire night of the assault in the field, I’d need some “down” time for rest and preparations. It was good that I had that.
Fort Polk Live-Fire Range, Louisiana, March 6th, 1999
I slept late on Saturday ... intentionally: I knew I’d get very little rest the coming evening. I gathered my gear, dressed in military Battle Dress Uniforms (BDUs), and headed out into a beautiful day that looked to warm up to the mid-80° F/30°C range.
By midafternoon, I had connected with Lieutenant Colonel Rozsypal at the Fort Polk live-fire range control complex. Located some miles north of the main post, this was the entrance to the Peason Ridge area. We parked our vehicles, climbed into an O/C HMMWV with our gear, and headed north toward Merrill Village. A half-hour later, we arrived at the settlement and parked a few hundred meters away. Walking in from the east, we identified ourselves as O/Cs and began to look around.
Just under two dozen OpFor personnel occupied the village (they’d been borrowed from the 101st for a few days). As the young captain (O-3) commanding the “insurgents” showed us around, it quickly became obvious that the Marauder plan was already beginning to leak a little.
One of the three SR teams on Peason Ridge had accidentally been discovered by the OpFor. About half had been “killed,” while the four remaining had been taken prisoner. Meanwhile, a half-dozen Merrill villagers had been taken hostage by the insurgent soldiers, and were being held in one of the main buildings.
Clearly, the captain commanding the Rangers was going to have his hands full. One of his only sources of intelligence about the village was now out of action; and he was in total ignorance of both the SF POWs and the hostages. If any of these wound up “killed” as a result of “friendly fire” during the assault, that could later be judged as a “mission failure.”
But the war gods tend to hand out bad luck evenly; and so, as it happened, the “rebel” intelligence proved to be just as bad. Interrogation of the captured SR team members had resulted in no information about the coming assault. In fact, they thought the main attack would come from SF soldiers on their western flank (not a bad guess—the woods in that direction offered plenty of cover, and the hill sloped down into the village).
Meanwhile, the OpFor was planning to face a force with superior numbers and firepower. To protect their position, they had spread over two dozen simulated land mines, fortified several of the village buildings, and scouted several escape and evasion (E&E) routes, including one that allowed them rapid evacuation with a commandeered truck.
Not surprisingly, in view of the lay of the land, their E&E routes all went south—right into the lanes planned for the coming Ranger assault. If the Ranger assault plan went forward as ordered, the insurgents would be retreating right into the attacking Rangers.
As the sun dipped behind the trees to the west, it was looking like the Rangers were going to have a very easy time when they made the assault scheduled some four hours hence.
But then, just as we were about to hand victory to the Rangers, Mother Nature came along and reminded us of who is the real boss. A fast-moving storm front was pushing in from the northwest, and the warm winter day, which had made our afternoon tour of Peason Ridge such a joy, began to rapidly change. Soon, the temperature plunged (by morning, it would drop to around 27° F/-3° C, bringing misery to everyone on Peason Ridge), and a fierce, gusting wind blew in from the northeast. For the attacking Rangers, this was potentially a worse problem, since the wind was blowing exactly 90° off-axis from DZ Burma and running at over 20 knots, with gusts over 25 knots. The strong off-axis winds meant that chances for the Rangers to successfully parachute into DZ Burma were rapidly heading into the toilet. (JRTC range safety rules dictate that drops with crosswinds over 12 to 15 knots should be waved off depending upon the gusts.)
If the wind kept up, the aircraft would circle for as long as possible, trying to slip in a drop between gusts. If the drop proved impossible, then the MC-130 transport aircraft would divert to the Army airfield at Fort Polk, and the Rangers would be bussed into DZ Burma. This would mean a delay of several hours, and might even cancel the night’s operation entirely.
It was dark as I drove with Colonel Rozsypal in the HMMWV to the southern end of DZ Burma, and things were not looking good. We took shelter in the HMMWV, and grabbed a short dinner break (the colonel’s driver had brought along a case of MREs and a thermos of hot coffee). After we finished, we camouflaged our faces with black and green paste (a JRTC O/C rule), and did what we could to stay warm.
Around 2000 hours, the O/C radio net came alive with the reports of observers reaching their posts and checking in. Overhead, we could hear an Air Force Special Operations AC-130 Spectre gunship moving into orbit (it would provide observation and fire support for the drop). Though the winds had faded a bit, they were still strong enough to make the drop problematic, and still cold enough to make life miserable.
We uncased our PVS-7B night vision goggles (NVGs) to look around the ridge for signs that the night’s action had started.
A short time later, the AC-130 began to fire its “simulated” 105mm howitzer at nearby targets. All around us, JRTC contractor personnel were throwing fire markers that went off with bright flashes and loud bangs. At the same time, the rebels launched simulated man-portable surface-to-air missiles (called MANPADS for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems), which filled the night sky with rockets. It was an impressive fireworks display.
Meanwhile, the O/C drop zone team monitoring the situation at DZ Burma reported that wind conditions were marginal. If the crosswinds grew no worse, then the drop just might take place, albeit with a high degre
e of scatter. There also was concern that the wind might blow the Rangers into the tree line along the southwestern edge of the DZ.
A few minutes before 2100 hours, we heard turboprop engines to the northwest. Squinting through the NVGs, we could just make out the subdued running lights of the three MC-130s, flying in line-astern formation with about a mile separating them. Over the radio circuit, the O/C on the lead MC-130 was talking to the DZ team, trying to determine if a drop was still possible. The jumpmasters waved off the first two passes, but on the third pass they finally okayed a live jump. This window only opened briefly. For only a handful had exited the aircraft before the wind again gusted over 25 knots, and the drop was scratched by the jumpmasters on the lead MC-130. (In a real war, the jump would have gone off anyway.)
Meanwhile the half-dozen parachuting Rangers were drifting rapidly toward the tree line, and were quickly lost to our view. The MC-130s made one more pass, but the winds rose even stronger, and that was it.
The DZ O/Cs called the cancellation over the radio net, and the transports were ordered to head for Fort Polk. After a delay of several hours, the Rangers would be bussed back to DZ Burma, where they would be turned loose for their movement to Objective Frank. With the night’s planned execution schedule in ruins, there was nothing for the O/C teams to do but round up the handful of Rangers who had been blown into the tree line, and try to stay warm. (The Rangers would be allowed to rejoin their companions when they arrived at the DZ, and would continue in play.)
We headed back to Merrill Village, pulled on our coats, and walked toward a campfire in the middle of the settlement. There we joined a dozen or so other O/Cs, and an impromptu planning meeting broke out around the warm blaze. Meanwhile, the OpFor, the “hostages,” and the “POWs” snuggled down in sleeping bags and waited. Overhead in the circling AC-130, the O/C radioed down that he could see us on his thermal imaging system—one bright blob with a circle of smaller blobs around it.
It took almost five hours for the buses to get the Rangers to their line of departure at DZ Burma, and even longer for them to maneuver the several kilometers through the trees to Objective Frank.
It was coming up on 0300 hours Sunday morning when the OpFor troops were rousted out of their bivy (bivouac) sacks. Two minutes later, all the OpFor defensive positions were manned, and silence returned to the clearing.
The O/Cs doused their fire, and began to move to their observation positions. I quietly headed with Colonel Rozsypal over to a position at the base of a simulated water tower on the eastern side of the village where we would watch the attack. Standing at the base of the tower, we made sure we were visually marked as O/Cs (soft camouflage caps, etc.), trying to make sense out of the conflicting reports coming in over the O/C net on the colonel’s radio. Clearly something was going awry with the Rangers’ movement from the DZ.
Bear in mind that the original Marauder assault plan had the assault coming in from the south, following a march along the western edge of the village. Thus, in theory, we should have been seeing Rangers charging in from our left and moving uphill to our right. Now we were getting reports of the Rangers deploying to the north of the village, and the OpFor clearly was shifting their attention to that axis.
Suddenly, the predawn darkness was split by the blast of an air horn, the OpFor signal that attack was now imminent. Down to our right, we could see movement through our NVGs a few hundred meters away. The Rangers were moving up to the obstacles and wire barriers along the north side of Merrill Village, getting ready to make a direct assault on the main buildings in the complex. At least a full platoon was already directly in front of the large chateau in the center of the village, and another was flanking to the west.
Though it seemed like an eternity, no more than twenty seconds after the air horn blast several parachute flares fired from Ranger M203s flew into the sky and lit the scene with a golden glow. This was followed immediately by the chatter of Ranger-manned M249 SAW light machine guns laying down suppressive fire.110 The fire was quickly returned by six OpFor insurgents in the main village chateau, and in moments the firefight was general.
Farther to our right, a Ranger M240G machine gun also began to pump fire into the chateau, while engineers began to move forward to blow breaches in the wire and obstacles. For several minutes, the fire between the insurgents and Rangers went on unabated, until a loud explosion signaled the detonation of the first breaching charge. Seconds later, another charge was fired farther down the barriers, and Rangers began to flow into the open ground north of the chateau.
A diagram of the attach upon Objective Frank during Operation Marauder.
RUBICON. INC. BY LAURA DENINNO
As soon as the Rangers began to pass through the obstacles, the captain commanding the insurgents again blew his air horn, signaling the rest of his command to begin their E&E to the south. Seconds afterward, almost a dozen insurgent soldiers were running like mad out the back of the chateau to the truck next to the church. Despite the intense cold, the engine started on the first try, and the rebels sped away in a spray of sand and gravel.
Though a number of insurgents had been “killed or wounded,” eleven had escaped with their weapons. These included a mortar with twenty rounds and a MAN-PAD SAM launcher. Had this been a normal JRTC rotation, that force could have made a nightmare of planned operations over coming days. But because the R3 was an experimental scenario, the 1st/7th SFG would pay very little for the Rangers’ mistakes. The lack of a dedicated OpFor (the R3 insurgents were borrowed from the 101st Airborne) meant that friendly actions the next few days would go unopposed.
Even so, we had just witnessed a major fiasco.
The O/Cs at the base of the water tower stared in wonder as the rebels escaped without so much as a notice from the Rangers, who continued to pour fire into the buildings of the village. (The Rangers were living up to their blowtorch reputation, firing at everything that moved.) Only a couple of the OpFor soldiers, probably cut off from the rest of their band, continued to return fire, as they tried to find a way out of the firefight.
Though firing would go on for a few more minutes, the battle was already over. By 0330 hours, the firing had stopped.
The Rangers had taken the objective, and as luck would have it, the hostages and POWs had survived the thousands of “rounds” poured into the building where they had been held. That was good news. Even so, the Rangers’ problems would continue: The stiff wind had blown several Ranger illumination rounds into the ground cover to the west, and a number of small brushfires had started just outside the village. (It had burned several acres before the range service personnel got it under control; and it burned itself out.)
Meanwhile, there were OpFor minefields to deal with. Though the Rangers had entered the village through an unexpected—and therefore unmined—line of advance, it seems they got cocky, or reckless, or were pursuing the rebels, or were simply cold and exhausted (it’s hard to say why), and a half-dozen Rangers stepped on simulated land mines in rebel-laid fields on the other side of the village, doubling the number of casualties taken during the assault.
Despite the Ranger-caused fiascoes, the good guys had won, Merrill Village was in the hands of the U.S. Army, and R3 could now move to Phase III.
As for me, it was time to retreat to the warmth of the HMMWV with Colonel Rozsypal for another cup of coffee and some rest. We stayed there until Task Force Sparrow arrived around 1000 hours Sunday morning.
It’s time for serious questions: Isn’t the point of the exercise to show how a more sophisticated command system, with better comms all around, can be made to work? What good did the increased info flow back and forth to Battlestar do? If Colonel Phillips had close to real-time info about Ranger actions, why didn’t he just step in and order them to do what he’d wanted them to do in the first place?
JRTC observer/controllers (including Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rozsypal, far left) look over Merrill Village the morning after the Ranger assault.
; JOHN D. GRESHAM
The answers to these questions are complex: I said before that it’s hard to fight and talk at the same time. Good commanders know that. Good commanders don’t micromanage. They trust their subordinates to take the best actions under the circumstances they face. (A system that does not allow mistakes will never allow creativity; it will never grow.) So as soon as the Rangers left the DZ, they were for all intents and purposes offline, and this was part of the operational plan. The Ranger captain may well have seen risks on the ground that the plan did not foresee. So he may well have felt that the best option was a frontal assault on the village from the north. More likely, he screwed up. However, the Battlestar staff was unable to do anything to change the situation.
Fort Polk Live-Fire Range, Louisiana, March 7th
Dawn broke cold and overcast. The bad weather was expected to continue.
As we waited for Task Force Sparrow, we ate a breakfast of MREs and drank the last of Colonel Rozsypal’s hot coffee. As we sat there trying to keep warm, questions filled the HMMWV: Why did the Ranger commander scrap the original flanking maneuver to the south and opt for a direct assault on the north side of the village? And why did he take himself and his men out of the Marauder plan, thus creating a command-and-control screwup?