Precise fires

Army Rangers on a raid hunting an al Qaeda assassination cell in Mosul on Christmas morning got an unwelcome present: The sight of two gunmen playing the “human shield” game. Unfortunately for the terrorists, it’s hard for two grown men to hide behind an eleven year old child. Using precise fires, the Rangers killed both men, leaving the child unharmed.

That’s when it started to get interesting:

(After killing the gunmen) Rangers… found 10 women and children huddled in the back of the house. The Iraqis conflicting accounts of how many men remained in the house made the soldiers suspicious.

Lashaun, 27, a sergeant first class from Chester, Va., searched a bathroom and noticed a nylon strap protruding from the bottom of a shower basin.

“That’s when I called in Pete and told him to help hold security on the shower basin as I pulled the strap out of the floor,” Lashaun said. “That’s when the basin came up and revealed a hidden passageway to a hidden bunker.”

When he rolled back a concrete block that was sitting on rails, gunfire erupted. Pete estimated the entrance at 2-by-2 feet, barely large enough for a Ranger with 45 pounds of gear to pass through. Lashaun and Pete fired into the hole and backed out of the room.

Pete tossed in a grenade.

After the grenade exploded, the Rangers moved back into the shower room, Lashaun said. Suddenly, he said, grenades started flying back at them.

Lashaun said he saw one grenade bounce, so he and another Ranger dove through a door before it exploded. Pete and the Ranger retreated to a different room.

Blake, the company commander, said the soldiers had split into two groups of nine each. Gunfire from the insurgents poured out of the bathroom, while Lashaun’s Rangers fired back.

Pete figured bullets passed within 1 foot of him. “I was really stuck basically in a crossfire,” he said.

You may file away in your moral equivalency burn bag the fact that even as they were engaging in the proverbial knife fight in a phone booth, the Rangers were helping the non-combatants escape the firefight:

Meanwhile, Lashaun hustled the women and children toward safety over a courtyard wall.

“He’s risking his life, taking enemy fire, while he’s literally extending himself and pushing women and children over the wall,” Blake said.

Lashaun then linked up with two Rangers, re-entered the house and fired into the bathroom. One insurgent came around the corner, Lashaun said, and the Rangers killed him “right there on the spot.”

As the Rangers tried to move into the shower room, “another guy came up out of the hole,” Lashaun said. The Rangers shot him dead.

“After that we came to the conclusion that we need to get out of the house,” Lashaun said.

Their commander agreed.

Really no need to grapple at close quarters when you have the advantage of airpower and a clear target. Terrorists may be contemptuous about the value of human life – reason in itself to put them down – but you rarely win by dying. AC-130’s were called in during the evening, followed after sunrise by fast movers carrying JDAMs.

Hot work, that.