How a Special Forces ODA Survived an 18-Hour Gunfight

we go through this whole gauntlet of fire you know the vehicles were just getting pinged up rpgs were coming in the the near ambush that we drove through i didn't think we were gonna survive that i was waiting for an rpg round to come right through the windshield my name is sean kirkwood i'm the director of training for field craft survival i kind of break the world into two camps there's training guys and there's gear guys i like gear but i love training i think if i give you a sharp stick and i train you really well you'll defeat a poorly trained guy with the modern most latest weapon system i just think training is everything i joined normal when i was 17 i actually made a 17 year old decision and decided i didn't need to graduate high school because i was going to be a soldier it was a dumb decision to leave high school early my mom wasn't very happy about it but i was as strong-willed as she was and she knew that okay if he's going to do this he's going to do it i went to basic training in 1987 when i was 17 years old my first unit that i went to was the 8th infantry division in west germany that's how old i am it was two countries back then and then i decided you know i wanted something different i decided i was going to go to special forces i'd been in an army about ten years nine years at the time i went to the q course and i got to fifth group in late 99 and then i spent the rest of my time in there from an 18 bravo senior weapons sergeant and i was a team sergeant and a troop sergeant major in the commanders in extremist forces each group is geographically oriented and fifth group is middle east so when the middle east kicked off you know we were focused primarily on everything going on there what's funny about fifth group was before the war if you had to have everybody list where they wanted to go fifth group was always like last because nobody wanted to go to the middle east for training but you know people wanted to go to south america or okinawa or japan or germany and all the all the european countries but then when the war kicked off it's like everybody wanted to come to fifth group all of a sudden you know everybody wanted to be there i was standing in the team room at work at fifth grade uh we heard about the towers getting hit and then things started happening rapidly after that especially within fifth group mobile started moving fast the mindset was like this is total war we're going after it we're basically going to drop every bomb we got on every taliban and terrorists we could find you know september 11th happened and the first fifth group teams went in like early october in afghanistan there it goes in the fifth group we kind of switched our focus to iraq i was never better trained at any point in my life than i was for the invasion of iraq you know we had like four months that we just went out in the desert we built a camp with all the supporting assets and ammo we could shoot and training time we could do and we trained i mean we were good at things you know we were rolling in and out of iraq constantly for the next you know a few years we would you know get our sleep that we had to get do some training gear up and and go hit targets i mean it was that simple we were going out every other night generally if you quantify it out it wasn't uncommon to get in a four-month trip 70-80 missions we had vehicles just like this they look a little bit different than this but they're pretty much the same but we outfitted them all with the swing arms and the guns it's funny some of the little details they have on here are cool remember like the the vf17 panel tied over the tires so friendly aircraft knew that it was us you know the strap to step up and get on the back because they didn't have one the coffee pot in the back surprisingly enough we had a coffee pot that would charge into the power inverter up there and we had you know regular coffee pots that we brought with us that's all pretty accurate it's cool they did a good attention to detail on all this we infield from jordan right above this little cut right where the n is and jordan is kind of where we went across the border and then we had another company that came in through saudi arabia [Music] the jobs in southern iraq which is a large shia area a lot of iranian influence in southern iraq very religious based city like a lot of the cities but definitely every time we went there it was hot there was lots going on lots of enemy activity a lot of the high value targets that we were chasing were going to be there the battle was 27 january they pushed the ictf element that i was working with downed in joff to basically stage and wait well the ictf was the iraqi counterterrorism force and basically the initiative what it was is they knew they needed a high-end direct action capability within the iraqi army like iraq's version of delta force kind of is what the idea was each troop of about 20 iraqis would have two americans embedded with them that were there with them and they did everything with them they trained with him they ate with him he went to combat with him you might be the number two man in a four-man stack and the guy in front of you and back he's an iraqi these guys were good i mean i would go to combat with them anytime they were good well trained and motivated one more time ready that was foreign internal defense done right if you ask me so we started out at camp david outside on the joff the team that was there oda 566 was on the ground they got a call that an operation had happened it was an iraqi only operation they went out there to arrest some people and they had guys decisively engaged a lot of people dead 38566 wanted some help from us their teamster got them all ready to go and they they took off toward the target area to help out we were probably 10 minutes behind as soon as 566 got there they pretty much got very decisively engaged we were still about five minutes behind them but we could hear the gun fire we could hear the radio chatter and they were heavily engaged when they got there we pulled up and there was lots of fire coming in at us and at them a lot of the guys were out of the vehicles because the rpgs were coming in on the vehicles pretty hot and heavy and machine gun fire so we knew just from the sound of the conflict there was a large enemy force we didn't know what was going on we just pulled up and boom in the middle of a gunfight we were taking fire from three sides my job as a troop star major is command and control i'm supposed to be make sure people are going and doing what they need to be doing i had two humvees with many guns on them you know 6 000 rounds a minute the whole back of the truck is basically ammunition i pushed those up on either side of the oda 566 trucks got the iraqi assaulters and my guys out of their trucks and got them up online so we could start trying to get some fire superiority because at that point we didn't have it i talked to their team star and i talked to their commander they had a couple guys wounded already it was basically a big operation that had gone completely sideways one thing i noticed right off the bat was the enemy was not the same as a lot of the forces that we got in contact with they were disciplined they were trained they were using fire maneuver techniques there was something different about them they had positions dug in a lot of times you'd see forces maneuvering but they were maneuvering to get away from you these guys were maneuvering toward us to gain a tactical advantage which was definitely rare we were losing that gunfight for a good period of the day like i got bracketed by like two rpgs like boom boom hit you know within this room from me i still can't believe i didn't get killed by those rpgs i was getting ready to leave a vehicle and i had moved out i picked up my rifle and i was shooting and uh i felt something hit my arm pretty hard and a bunch of dust flew up around me and i thought i felt something hit my side i thought i was shot under my armpit which goes in between your body armor and i was i figured i was dead i threw myself back and my radio got hit so i think i had a couple rounds i came really close then i realized okay this is a this is a big a big fight so here's the uniform pattern that i wore for most of the global war on terror what's interesting about this one is one of the reasons that i'm glad i kept it from my family is that's that's the bullet hole in the shirt uh i was wearing this in the joff and that's where the bullet went into my arm and came back out through the shirt figure that's a good thing to keep so at that point we started gaining a little bit of fire superiority we started getting some aircraft on site we ended up pushing forward we had a group of about 50 people over in the palm grove area that we needed to evac through us but we didn't know who was who got them all searched and we ended up pushing them back through the lines once that got done i went back to the company commander today sir we got everybody out that we could see the only things in front of us now our enemies said hey what do you want to do now basically okay what we're going to do is we're going to evacuate 566 we're going to evacuate everybody go back to camp david and then we're going to refit and we're going to probably come back out here see what happens [Applause] so as we're retrofitting and i'm getting guys ammo and guys are moving around trucks getting loaded up on fuel and everything else tires change you name it what's going on my captain comes back out and says hey man they just had a helicopter get shot down there's americans down in enemy territory and two there's sensitive items and equipment on an apache helicopter we needed to secure it was like spin it up everybody let's go we're going back it feels like it was no more than 30 minutes it might have been less we weren't completely done with refitting the vehicles and getting everybody loaded back up yet when we went back when we pulled out of the target area shortly after we left basically from a different route but almost in the same position that we were in oda 563 rolled in when they rolled up they immediately got engaged by the same people that were fighting with us we get up there and we start walking around the corner and also we see some other americans there we said hey you guys stay here we're going for the helicopter at this point we're closer up there we were in a different perspective where we could see that it was a kind of a compound and then once we could see where the smoke was and kind of vectored in off the flares and figured out where it might be we took the most direct road we could toward that crash site so we could secure it we decided we're gonna find a way into this compound our mission at this point is to get to the helicopter so we load everybody up we get in there we do this slow worm turn with all the vehicles and we drive back up where we just came in all this is while we're under fire we're driving on this dirt road in this eight or nine vehicle convoy dust is kicking up it's kind of hard to see and people start coming over the top of the berms just breaking the convoy two of our iraqi gunners got shot and killed right there you know the vehicles were just getting pinged up rpgs were coming in [Applause] i'm inside and the round hit my window the window right next to my head had a big spider in it the the near ambush that we drove through i uh i didn't think we were going to survive that i i was waiting for an rpg round to come right through the windshield if a vehicle in front of us would have got disabled any of them it would stop us dead in an ambush that was my biggest worry the guy in my vehicle my gunner anthony deardorff was up there on twin 240s two m240 machine guns dual mounted so he could fire him both he was up there and he went through almost all his ammo just raking people off the top of that berm and they were so close that at one point i was 100 sure he was gonna get killed i get up on a knee getting ready to get up in the machine gun because if that machine gun goes down we're not able to do anything at that point they could swarm all over us anthony couldn't get his machine gun on a guy that was about to shoot an rpg at us and there was a group of them he was trying to turn the turret the shell casings come out of that they roll around on the top of the truck they got jammed under the turret somehow so he couldn't get his turret around so he pulled his pistol out and he emptied a magazine into the group of guys and he killed the guy with the rpg that was going to shoot at us that's how close he was off of a vehicle he threw a grenade and i handed him up another grenade he threw another grenade at him but that's just how compact this all was this is us moving through the ambush basically as we as we push through the middle of this you know enemy hornets nest that it was i tell you that right there gives me chills because that's when one of our iraqi counter-terrorist force gunners that was on the top of the truck we had a mix of american and iraqis acting as gunners um and that gunner got shot right in the face and killed he was k.a that day he fell down in the vehicle and that that vehicle gun had to be manned by somebody else but uh you know that's a patriot that gave his life for his country he was up there where with no armor around him uh trying to engage the enemy as we pushed through this ambush and he he lost his life for it we go through this whole gauntlet of fire but then we turned a corner and it all kind of died down a little bit because we were out of that little gauntlet we knew the crash site was close [Music] the helicopter was destroyed and both pilots were dead so we come pulling up again get everybody out of the vehicles we get everybody online we start engaging the enemy suppressing the enemy because at this point our only job there now is to protect that crash site at this point all our vehicles basically had flat tires a lot of our guns were going down we were running low on ammunition because this is a constant firefight the whole day and then at that point we just got on a good defensive perimeter where we could overwatch we just held for a couple more hours until just about dark with them [Music] basically loaded up and went back to camp david again i can't believe we made it out of that on the way back that's pretty much what i was thinking about and then started refitting again we look like we look like a train wreck rolling out of there it was pretty traumatic day long day i'd say start to finish was about 18 hours i've never slept that hard in my life i just laid on a floor and went to sleep like i was in a coma and then the next morning we task force raptor that i was with we packed up one of the baghdad drove back up there and then that evening we run another target in baghdad the strikers took over the battle space they were engaging targets throughout the night and then gradually when morning came about the next morning people started to surrender i've heard everything from 600 800 people inside the compound there was upwards of 400 enemy kias in there and we had like 14 wounded and two dead on our side which is still amazed me this day [Music] they were very violent very trained very uh ready to go to battle element we had to go after the army of heaven which was basically a super ultra violent faction break off of ramadi militia the pentagon has called the mac the army the greatest threat to peace in iraq it's estimated to have up to 50 to 60 000 fighters it's fear they're now splintering into different groups the money militia wasn't radical enough for him so this disgruntled guy broke off i fought the mayan militia a few times in the job and these guys were better trained and better equipped and better organized it was an organized military unit and even after the fact the intelligence said that they were organized into companies like you know a company b company c company they were organized like a military organization there's a lot of those enemy forces that train and you got to respect them [Music] i was awarded the silver star the silver star is the third highest valor award that they have i believe i got it for leadership i didn't get it because i was the guy in the battlefield slaying most people i didn't have a commander on the ground that day so i kind of did both jobs and i think it's just for the commanding control that went on in any environment that i was doing it in people have to be trained to make decisions on their own because in a chaotic environment like that with so many things going on in so many moving parts the individual on the ground needs to be trained well enough to do their job with little or no direction lack of communication just breeds chaos and that's always a problem but you got to do your best to mitigate that as much as you can it's the way fights go sometimes you know everybody likes to think every operation is just just planned awesomely executed you have all the information you could possibly have but 99 of the time that day it was the individual guys on the ground that were making good decisions doing the right things taking it to the bad guys the iraqis man those guys nothing but respect for the iraqi counter-terrorist force they took it to them and they they went after it dealing with high pressure situations you just have to go to work a lot of times it's a choice between a bad choice or a worse choice it's not always there's a good answer make decisions stick with them if your decision's not working adjust that'd be the best advice i could give [Music]