Chaos, Missteps Led To Soldiers' Deaths

[Team Infidel]

Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
February 3, 2008
Pg. 1
750-page report on friendly-fire error that took 2 lives fails to soothe grieving Tucson family
By Aaron Mackey, Arizona Daily Star
Part 1 of 2
Extra ink could have saved Spc. Alan McPeek's life.
A year after the 20-year-old Mountain View High School graduate and a comrade were killed by friendly fire in Iraq, a U.S. Army investigation has found a spate of mistakes that led an inexperienced tank gunner to shoot in the wrong direction.
Chief among them: During an early-morning firefight in western Iraq, the tank crews called in for backup couldn't distinguish between friendly forces bunkered down in nearby buildings and insurgents who had swarmed the area.
Updated maps could have fixed that, but when the tank crews arrived on that Ramadi street on Feb. 2, 2007, they used 3-month-old maps that conflicted with those being used by the soldiers under attack.
The newer versions were rolled up and sitting on a desk a few miles away, waiting to be used by replacement units.
Like McPeek — who was training a replacement during his final day in Iraq — the tank crew was leaving the next day.
They later told investigators they couldn't print out an extra set of maps because their printer was out of ink.
The 750-page investigation into the incident recently obtained by the Arizona Daily Star describes a deadly series of mistakes by soldiers that night.
They include:
*Allowing an unqualified soldier who had never fired a main tank gun to shoot at what turned out to be McPeek's and Pvt. Matthew Zeimer's position.
*Failing to load enough machine-gun ammo onto both tanks because the soldiers didn't want to open new ammo boxes, which would have required extra paperwork.
*Leaving for the fight without full crews, forcing the tank commanders to move around inside the tank, limiting their ability to focus on the firefight.
*Allowing a tank commander with a documented past of battlefield stress — which had previously relegated him to supply duties — to suit up that night.
*Never resolving miscommunications between soldiers in the tanks and commanders in the outposts under attack, leading tank crews to fire in a different direction from what they had been directed.
The investigation never says fixing the problems would have prevented McPeek's death.
It concludes that the tank crews needed additional training on how to distinguish friend from foe, which they later received.
No criminal charges were filed against the tank crews, and it's not clear whether the Army disciplined them in any way.
Federal privacy laws bar officials from saying if the tank crews received any administrative or other informal punishment, an Army spokesman said.
Also unclear are what steps, if any, the Army has taken to prevent similar incidents. Infrared beacons were placed on the outposts involved in the firefight that night in order to allow forces to identify them, but other specifics weren't released by officials.
Angry and frustrated by what they see as a lack of answers, McPeek's Tucson family said the ambiguity surrounding the report's conclusions has made it impossible for them to move on.
Rose Doyle, McPeek's mother, and her husband, Kevin, are astounded that no one has taken responsibility for the deaths.
"Obviously, they went at this thing half-assed," Kevin Doyle said of the tank crews. "They didn't even have updated maps. They didn't know what direction they were headed."
Insurgents flooded area
Rocket-propelled grenades shattered what had been a relatively quiet beginning to Feb. 2, 2007, at Eagle's Nest. The Army outpost is on the outskirts of Ramadi, a corner of the Sunni Triangle and a hotbed of insurgent activity.
The RPGs struck at around 1 a.m., followed by mortars and small-arms fire from AK-47- toting insurgents, who quickly surrounded the outpost, according to narrative reports released as part of the investigation into the incident.
About 1,000 yards down the street, another Army outpost, Combat Outpost Grant, also known as COP Grant, was struck minutes later.
That's where McPeek stood on the roof with Zeimer, returning fire as mortars and RPGs exploded around them.
Insurgents flooded the area, running to the rooftops of buildings between the two outposts, trying to get the soldiers to shoot at one another.
The tactics were nothing new. But the ferociousness of the attack was unlike anything many of the soldiers — some of whom had been in Iraq for 14 months — had ever seen.
The commander inside Eagle's Nest moved quickly to suppress the insurgents, requesting a rocket strike on a building immediately west of him.
He was told that would take several minutes. He called for backup.
Monitoring the radio traffic a few miles away, members of that night's tank support crew were anticipating the call, despite being mostly packed up and ready to leave the next day.
Normally, it takes four people to operate an M-1 Abrams tank. The tanks are 68-ton vehicles with 120 mm cannons, and they form the backbone of the Army's heavy infantry.
But both tank commanders decided they didn't want to bring their loaders — who prepare the main cannon to fire — with them that night.
One loader was overweight, so he was left behind, and both tank commanders later told investigators that there was little need to put anyone else in harm's way so close to the end of their rotation.
Crew members loaded the tanks' machine guns with 1,000 rounds of ammo, roughly one-third of their regular capacity, using only what they had left in one ammo box. Opening a second would have required signing the ammo out and signing it back in once the tanks returned.
One tank commander had been assigned to the supply room until a month earlier. He had been in a tank when an RPG killed one soldier and had witnessed several other grisly scenes while in Iraq.
His commander told investigators that he suffered flashbacks and "was kind of a mess" after the incidents.
Commanders had removed the staff sergeant from tank duty to relieve some of his stress, but that morning he was back with the tanks, running a crew he'd never worked with before.
His gunner that night had no formal training on the tank's main gun. He had some experience firing the tank's machine gun, but had never fired a tank shell, in practice or in combat.
He later told investigators: "This was the first and only (main gun) engagement for me in Ramadi, and I was pretty fired up to fire."
The crews loaded into their tanks and prepared to drive toward Eagle's Nest without any briefing or a pre-combat inspection, which was required.
One of the tanks wouldn't start. It had to be jump-started by the other tank before the crews moved slowly toward Eagle's Nest.

 

[Team Infidel]

On track to make sergeant
This wasn't McPeek's first firefight.
A member of the 16th Engineer Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based in Germany, he'd spent the prior eight months working out of COP Grant.
He had gone on patrols, built better defenses and even saved one soldier's life.
McPeek was clearing an Iraqi house with his unit one night when he heard an explosion.
Running outside, he found a Humvee on fire with several soldiers dead and one severely wounded. McPeek carried the wounded soldier out of the vehicle just before it exploded, the injured soldier later told McPeek's parents.
After the wounded soldier was taken away, McPeek resumed his patrol, eventually coming to a bedroom.
Hiding under the bed was a 16-year-old boy who was holding two cables near a car battery, a jerry-rigged detonator for the roadside bomb that had just gone off. The teen was detained, and the roadside bomb was disarmed.
But that was only one side of McPeek.
Despite the buzz cut and uniform, there were shades of the long-haired teen rebel in McPeek's sharp wit and humor. He often rode his sergeant to the point of frustration, but treaded carefully enough to avoid drawing a formal rebuke.
Regularly seen with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, the Hawaiian-born McPeek enjoyed pulling minor pranks on colleagues and derided orders he saw as pointless, soldiers told McPeek's family.
Yet he was on track to make sergeant after three years in the service, and talked confidently to his family about the strides the military was making in Iraq.
McPeek wasn't afraid of insurgent attacks — he said their aim wasn't that good — but he feared roadside bombs and RPGs.
And after surviving numerous previous attacks on COP Grant, he was almost home. He just had to train Zeimer.
While McPeek had nearly a year of advanced combat training in Germany before he set foot in Iraq, Zeimer, an 18-year-old from Montana, was green.
He and close to 140 other soldiers in his unit had just finished boot camp, heading to Iraq without firing their weapons more than a few times, McPeek's family later learned.
Zeimer had arrived at COP Grant earlier in the afternoon and was following McPeek's every step.
Nothing made sense
The firefight near Eagle's Nest lit up the tank crews' night-vision goggles as they arrived on scene.
Tracer fire seemed to be coming from every direction, and bullets deflecting off the sides of the tanks echoed throughout the crew compartments.
A rocket strike came down, but was ineffective. The tanks were directed to shoot their machine guns at several buildings southwest of Eagle's Nest.
They slowly rolled down Farouk Way, which ran just outside Eagle's Nest west down to COP Grant.
The gunners in each tank opened up with machine guns mounted next to the main gun barrel, targeting insurgents in buildings to the west.
It was slow going. Each tank got off only a few rounds before its machine guns jammed.
One of the tank's machine-gun barrels grew hot and had to be replaced. Then the other tank ran out of machine-gun ammo.
Though the tank crews thought they'd moved forward and were firing southwest, investigators later showed they fired only west, toward COP Grant.
The commander of the lead tank, a first lieutenant, asked permission to shoot the main gun.
After clearance, he got ready to fire. But the gunner from the second tank, a specialist who had no training on the tank's main gun, asked if he could shoot instead. He wanted to get into the fight after running out of machine-gun ammo and being "useless," the investigation later detailed.
The lieutenant gave the OK, later telling investigators that he wanted to give the other gunner a chance to shoot before he left Iraq.
In the second tank, the commander moved from his seat to load a tank shell. But before he could fire, his gunner had to know where to shoot.
Throughout the fight, commanders in Eagle's Nest and the tanks couldn't identify the right buildings. The tank crews would say they were firing at a particular building, only to be told they were firing at a different one.
Nothing made sense. Even the two tank commanders couldn't agree where they were supposed to fire the main gun.
Commanders in Eagle's Nest wanted the tanks to shoot at buildings to the southwest, but the tank crews never moved far enough forward to see those buildings.
Rather than continue in vain to try to identify buildings with the three-month-old map, the lieutenant in the lead tank targeted a building using his machine gun's tracer fire, which allows observers to visually track the direction of a shot.
He instructed his gunner to fire toward what he thought was the target Eagle's Nest wanted destroyed. He asked commanders in Eagle's Nest to verify that they were watching the tracer fire.
Next, the lieutenant had to line up the second tank that would take the shot.
The gunner prepared. In his sight he saw what he thought were dozens of insurgents — some of whom were carrying flashlights — on the rooftop returning fire.
But what appeared to be one building full of insurgents was actually two — a short building about 200 yards away whose roof was overrun by enemies and the top of COP Grant, roughly 1,000 yards away from the tank.
Many of the flashlights and muzzle flashes seen in the gunner's sight were U.S. soldiers firing at the building between Eagle's Nest and COP Grant.
The tank gunner tried to lock in the building's distance with a targeting laser.
It flashed an error message: Target is too far or too close.
Resetting the equipment, he manually entered 200 meters and fired.
Between the flash of the tank's main gun and the boom of the blast, a soldier on foot near Eagle's Nest yelled, "What the (expletive) is he shooting at?"