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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Luck, good soldiering help troops find weapons cache


U.S. Army 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry soldiers search a building while on patrol in Mosul, Iraq, on Monday. 
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Ken Dilanian Knight Ridder

BAGHDAD, Iraq – On Sunday night, soldiers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, hit the jackpot.

It began when a sharp-eyed, soft-spoken sergeant noticed a suspicious truck that appeared to be following his Humvee on patrol. By the time it was over at 3 a.m. Monday, the soldiers had detained five men and seized the biggest cache of weapons they’d seen in their 10 months in Iraq.

It was a big success for the regiment, which typically spends its days driving along dusty streets hunting for insurgents with weapons, often finding nothing. And it had added significance coming in the midst of a string of violent insurgent attacks aimed at disrupting Sunday’s parliamentary elections.

But the night’s events also were a typically messy and incomplete affair that shows just how tough it is for soldiers to stamp out the insurgency. While they seized a startling array of weapons and explosives that could have killed hundreds of people, the men they arrested appeared to be bit players who didn’t know or wouldn’t reveal the source of the cache. Three other suspected insurgents may have escaped.

In their haste to quickly exploit new information found in the raid, the soldiers barged in on one family in the middle of the night by mistake, leaving a house full of sobbing women and children with only a cursory apology.

Still, these 1st Cavalry Division troops had disrupted at least one small corner of the insurgency’s killing machine, a result of happenstance and luck — along with good soldiering.

From two nondescript houses they passed every day, the troops pulled out three 100-pound bags of plastic explosives, fertilizer and diesel fuel, which can be made into a bomb; 51 rocket-propelled grenade launchers; 16,000 rounds of ammunition; dozens of rifles and machine guns; and eight mobile phone-connected switches, which can be used to set off roadside bombs.

Perhaps the most chilling finds were a group of artillery shells fashioned into the kind of bomb that routinely has killed American soldiers; a pressure switch, used by suicide attackers; eight Iraqi police uniforms and several police radios; and several of the kinds of black ski masks worn by the people who have beheaded hostages on videotape.

The cavalry unit has uncovered a number of such caches in recent months – one reason, its soldiers think, that the frequency of attacks in their sector has diminished since November.

“The way I think about it, I may have saved my own life tonight and, hopefully, a lot of other soldiers’ lives as well,” said Sgt. William Bowman, 29, of Fort Myers, Fla., who first spotted the truck that led to the weapons.

Bowman was on a routine patrol with his squad, the kind they have conducted nearly every day since they arrived in southwest Baghdad last March. He noticed a white Nissan pickup pulling out of a driveway across from the city’s largest Catholic church.

Soldiers had been on the lookout for a white truck that had been seen tracking American patrols. After a few minutes, they began to suspect the Nissan was following them, so they swerved in front of it, jumped out and pointed their rifles at the driver. He resisted, they said.

In the truck were three artillery rounds connected to make a bomb, six AK-47 assault rifles, eight hand grenades and a camcorder with a DVD of a man in a ski mask building a bomb.

Other soldiers arrived and took the slightly injured prisoner back to the base, while others drove to the house where they had seen the truck pulling out. On the floor in the house were machine guns, rockets, grenade launchers, silencers and bomb-making equipment.

It was only after other soldiers from the company arrived with metal detectors that they realized exactly what they had. Buried in the front yard were five barrels with a fearsome array of rockets and explosive materials inside them.

Such seizures occur frequently in Iraq, but for the company of soldiers, it was a big deal. One of their buddies had been killed just a few hundred yards from the house in November.