Pilots thwarting ambush

Pilots thwarting ambush

07 November 2007

By Sgt. 1st Class Rick Emert

1st ACB, 1st Cav. Div. Public Affairs

CAMP TAJI, Iraq - Set up in five trucks with heavy machine guns, enemy forces sat in wait for a helicopter to fly over their location west of Baghdad on the last day of May.
It appeared their plan was to strike a blow to Multi-National Division-Baghdad by taking down a U.S. Army helicopter.

The enemy forces were trained and prepared with personnel to drive the trucks, man the guns and keep a lookout for any of the U.S. helicopters that patrol the skies of Baghdad in search of roadside bomb emplacers or insurgent mortar teams.

The 1st Air Cavalry Brigade's Apache crews had become a thorn in the insurgency's side by regularly disrupting terrorist attacks on Coalition Forces and Iraqi civilians.

As they waited, four Apache pilots from 1st "Attack" Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st ACB, 1st Cavalry Division, were getting an intelligence briefing before heading out on their mission. The intelligence indicated that there were up to 30 gun trucks in a specific area, and the pilots' mission was to check it out.

With both determination and caution, 1st Lt. Brian Haas, chief warrant officers 4 Steven Kilgore and Elliott Ham and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Cole Moughon took to the skies to check the validity of the report.

All four said they thought from the onset that some sort of engagement was imminent. They expected to find at least several trucks with gun mounts that could easily be modified to attack air and ground assets.

The two Apache crews, each with a pilot in command and a copilot-gunner, came up on a truck and sedan that stopped suddenly; the occupants quickly exited the vehicles and low crawled toward a ditch. The crews didn't know if this meant the people were being cautious, preparing for a possible engagement by taking cover, or if they knew that an engagement was imminent.

"That instantly heightened our awareness; something is going on out here," said Kilgore, a Portage, Ind., native. "These people aren't just scared of us. They may be a little bit, to an extent, but there's something going on out here. We started keeping an eye open."
It didn't take long for their suspicions to be confirmed.

"I remember ... thinking this is weird; something's up," said Moughon, from Gray, Ga. "We (in the lead aircraft) heard (Kilgore) make the call over the radio: "Hey, I'm taking fire at my rear." We heard (Haas) say there was a big gun. I looked over to my right, and I was about to say: "Oh, I got it." I just got out "oh." I could see the flash from the muzzle. I saw a stitch of dirt in the road coming up towards us."

It was even worse than the intelligence report had predicted; the trucks had more than just weapon mounts.

"We were looking for trucks with mounts - not trucks with heavy machine guns looking to kill us," Moughon said. "At that point, it was pretty scary, because I knew - back in February, we lost an aircraft to heavy machine gun fire - we knew what the deal was right away. We knew that we were in something pretty dangerous."

Kilgore spotted a gun truck about one-and-a-half kilometers away shooting at the helicopters, but there was a much more ominous threat.

"We started taking fire from my right side about 1,500 meters away," Kilgore said. "What I didn't know is there was another gun about 300 meters away in the same line that started shooting at the same time. That rattled the aircraft. It didn't hit ... but rattled the aircraft."

A seasoned Apache pilot with multiple deployments under his belt, Kilgore initially thought his aircraft had been hit.

"We were so close to the gun that when the aircraft started to rattle, I thought I was taking hits," Kilgore said. "I actually saw muzzle flashes from it. It was about 250 to 300 meters out my right door."

Within a couple of minutes, the Apache crews had gone from searching for the gun trucks to becoming the targets of a planned ambush by the enemy forces.

"I was definitely at a position of a disadvantage, and I needed to gain an advantage," Kilgore said. "That meant ... moving out away from that (gun truck) to get out of his ability to track me. I was able to put a salvo of (rockets) on that gun truck and clear that gun truck. We came back later and destroyed the gun truck."

Both aircrews broke contact safely, and then came back in to engage the trucks and insurgents.
The trail aircraft had disabled one of the trucks, and Moughon and Ham in the lead aircraft took out another one on the second pass.

"They broke off that truck, and we followed them out and then came back in. (Ham) called and said he had trucks fleeing to the north," said Haas, from Ashley, N.D. "They came around and engaged there. We came in behind them and just kind of suppressed again as they were breaking. They shot another missile. I think we made two more passes."

With nearly half of the gun trucks already disabled, the aircrews were not about to let some of them get away to launch an ambush on another aircraft.

"I saw three trucks with machine guns in the back in kind of like a straight trail formation hauling ... down the road," Moughon said. "As soon as I got the sight on them, I launched the missile. I saw the guy swing his gun around and just a bright flash of the gun firing. The (driver) braked. The missile hit right in front of the truck and didn't do anything. We broke, I think (the trail aircraft) suppressed, then we came back around and fired another missile.

"(It was) the same thing; the guy knew what he was doing. He slammed on the brakes, but this time it killed the driver. That caused him to careen into his buddy and pushed him off the road. We further engaged with the (30mm) gun and got several guys that were running away. We just started (destroying the weapon systems) from there."

The seemingly determined enemy forces had blinked and tried, without success, to flee.

"Once they knew that we weren't going to run away from them, that's when we got the advantage and just got real aggressive," Haas said. "I think that helped us, because we got noise and rockets flying off the helicopter, and they saw that and they knew they were in for it."

A couple of days later, with plenty of time to reflect on the engagement, the pilots realized there were some things they could have done differently.

"In this situation, you're going to make mistakes," Moughon said. "It's not like (training) back at Fort Hood where we've got time. Everything was heat of the moment. You had to get rounds out. It was all a matter of who made fewer mistakes - whether or not you were going to be going home. Obviously, we made fewer mistakes than the enemy."

While that may have been true about their actions during the 15 intense minutes that the engagement lasted, the Apache crews were simply more prepared, thanks to a whole team of Soldiers from the 1st ACB who provided support back at home base, Kilgore said.

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