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Guard troops return home today

Mar- 7-2005 » Filed Under: TF Freedom

The Army National Guard unit profiled below spent time in Mosul attached to Task Force Freedom.

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By DENNIS ANDERSON/Antelope Valley Press

CAMP ROBERTS — The best part of surviving hot combat in Iraq for Bravo Co. tankers was getting sent home to California instead of being parked at Ft. Lewis in Washington state.

"That's my best experience, that we got to come home, got to come home to California, because California is home," Sgt. Patrick Hux of Palmdale said Saturday. [...]

On Feb. 12, during the unit's last patrol, the tankers were deployed a couple hundred miles north of Anaconda in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. On that day, they engaged in a firefight with insurgents that lasted for more than five hours.

"People wondered what we were doing there," 1st Sgt. Jon Larson said. "We weren't there to rebuild bridges. We were fighting insurgents."

Attached at various times to the 1st Infantry Division — "The Big Red One" — and the 25th Infantry Division — "Tropic Lightning" — the tankers found a warm welcome from the foot soldiers that they covered with their machine guns and 120 mm smoothbore main gun. Essentially, the M1A1 Abrams tank is 70 tons of rolling steel wrapped around an enormous gun barrel that shoots rounds powerful enough to take down a house.

"We found out that we were the first tanks to be deployed in Mosul," Larson said.

Mosul, with 2 million residents, has a mixed population of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians and other less populous ethnic groups.

The Bravo Co. tankers sweated out a year's tour in Operation Iraqi Freedom that took them from the 140-plus degree heat of summer to a surprise snowstorm that greeted them in Mosul in January.

The tankers' presence in Mosul aided in providing security for the Jan. 30 elections.

Everyone was surprised at the multitudes of Iraqis turning out to vote, walking to the polls in family groups, and voters holding their inked fingers proudly in the air to prove they had voted.

"They went to vote even though the insurgents threatened to cut off their heads and kill them with snipers," one soldier said.

Larson recounted that the Americans didn't secure the polling places. That was done by Iraqi election workers teamed with Iraqi security forces. American troops formed an outer perimeter of security and watched the spectacle of the election from a short distance away.

"The Iraqi people do want us to leave, but they don't want us to just pack up and go," said Staff Sgt. Adam Gorey, of Wrightwood, whose family lives in Lancaster. "They want to be able to help us leave. And now, people are helping us with a lot of intelligence, like finding (improvised explosive devices)."


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