Triggermen

Tallil Iraq

275 miles south of Baghdad

October 30, 2005

with E Troop, 108th Cavalry, GA National Guard

The soldiers of the Echo Troop of the 108th Cavalry from Georgia are taking a few days off.  They are sitting in tent city here at Forward Operating Base Adder in Tallil.  They arrived from Mumadiyah south of Baghdad a few days ago, and are taking some time off before taking over from a brigade from Texas which is heading home.

It has been quiet in this area near Tallil.  It wasn�t quiet in the Mumadiyah area, where the troop had casualties.  Each day was a running battle with insurgents, who laid roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices or IEDs, pretty much every day on the approaches to their camp.  The soldiers were mortared down there as well on their base.  Small arms fire against their patrols was so frequent as to become something of a joke.  

The insurgents called that area the Triangle of Death.  The soldiers were just happy to leave and come down here, where they�ll be escorting convoys for the second six months of their deployment.

This company was lucky, or handled themselves well, or both.  Either way their casualties were relatively low.  But still the toll included 3 men killed in action.  

The soldiers see this area around Tallil as a welcome relief.

But they are proud of the work they did farther north.  They got so used to getting fired upon; they developed a technique for tracking down the insurgents' triggerman.

Generally if a bomb goes off on one side of the road, the triggerman will be waiting on that side as well.  If he were on the other side the wires to the IED would run across the road and be exposed and the IED would be easier to find.  The triggerman needs a clear line of sight to guage when to blow the bomb.  He wants the vehicle to be passing broadside when it goes off.  It helps to have a straight shot.

So if a bomb goes off, the cavalry soldier of E Troop would swing several of their humvees off the road on the side the triggerman would probably be on.  They dismount two teams of soldiers.  These men form two lines of a box.  The humvees drive on, and form the two other sides of the box.  Each element can see two other elements others.  Now the soldiers start by foot and by vehicle to constrict their box. This takes time and patience.  When someone pops up and starts running, that their man.

They figure this technique works more than half of the time.

Finding the triggerman is an art in Iraq.  Most of the time an IED explodes, the triggerman gets away 95 to 99 percent of the time.

Most times the triggerman runs off even before people get collected and get looking for him. This is especially true in towns.

The cavalry soldiers have a pre-set plan, and waste no time implementing it, driving off the road immediately in search of the triggerman.  They use a simple technique to search - if they run into a man of military age they search him.  They try to question everybody.

Blowing IEDs is a deadly game that insurgents for too long have got away with, treating IEDs like a crime that has few downsides.  A major key to eliminating IEDs is consistently eliminating the triggermen.

The soldiers of E Troop are glad to have the time off.  They play video games and catch up with the folks back home.  They are glad to be in Tallil and have a change of mission that hopefully will not require them being fired upon every day, several times a day.

But they regret their technique not being put to good use.  They will from here on otu do convoy escort.  If a convey they are escorting is fired upon, they will shepherd the convoy through the danger zone and keep going.  Hunting triggermen not allowed.  Priority one is reaching the destination.

They consider themselves the kings of this game in theater.  They hope the army will adopt their tried-and-true methods.  But for them the application of their theory has become theoretical; not practical.  These hunters are hunters no more.