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Capsized in the canal

Feb-20-2005 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

This is a very long article, but well worth reading.

Link to Full Article

MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

The deadliest day for Fort Lewis’ first Stryker brigade didn’t come during an ambush or a firefight. It came during simultaneous accidents that trapped 19 soldiers underwater. Staff Sgt. Michael Robinson doesn’t remember yelling “Rollover!” just an hour into the Stryker brigade’s first combat mission in Iraq. But his soldiers said he did.
A convoy of the brigade’s namesake armored vehicles trundled down a narrow dirt track that ran between two irrigation canals. Robinson had one leg up out of the hatch of vehicle B-32, checking to make sure they were on the right route, when he felt the Stryker bear left.

Somehow, he managed to drop down into the vehicle before it toppled into the canal.

He saw the landscape through his open hatch, then water. The Stryker filled rapidly.[...]

The soldiers in the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment – the Tomahawks – were looking forward to this night.

Some had been with the Stryker brigade since its inception in early 2000. They had gone through all the training, the introduction of new equipment, the weeks in the field for exercises at Yakima, in the Mojave Desert in California and in the pine forests of Louisiana.

They’d lived and worked for three years as members of the Army’s new concept for warfighting.

This would be their first combat mission.

Duluiyah is a small town in the rich agricultural area along the Tigris River north of Baghdad. It was home to many in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service; the brigade intelligence officer said Stryker troops would not be welcome in “the town of a thousand stares.”

So many U.S. convoys had been attacked along the highway through Duluiyah that they’d taken to calling it Ambush Alley. A cemetery north of town was the suspected launch site for mortar and rocket attacks on the American camp at Saddam’s old air base nearby, dubbed Forward Operating Base Pacesetter by its new American occupants.[...]

Related Features: The News Tribune has also created a multi-media presentation to accompany this article.


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