Unfriendly Communications Process Raises Risk of ‘Friendly Fire’

All night and into the morning, U.S. troops on both sides of the Tigris River were taking and returning small-arms fire.

On the west bank, officers of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division realized Friday morning that spillover fire from Marines across the river had accidentally landed near their positions. On the east bank, Marine officers discovered that the Army had mistakenly fired toward them.

At one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, now occupied by Americans, Army Lt. Col. Philip deCamp wanted to talk to the Marines. And at an abandoned riverfront sports club a few miles away, Marine Lt. Col. Chris Conlin was just as eager to speak to an Army officer.

But they couldn’t talk. No one at the top of the U.S. command had provided either the Army or the Marines with the radio encryption and frequency codes necessary to communicate at the combat-unit level.

The military services have liaison officers who communicate by radio at the division level, but no such contacts exist at the brigade level or below. Messages from commanders on the ground are passed up the chain of command of one service, then all the way back down the other service’s command ladder. The process, they say, is time-consuming and often futile.

Marine Capt. David Cooper said he tried for two days to get the frequency and encryption codes from both chains of command but did not get usable information. “It’s sort of like trying to tell a friend over the phone how to program his VCR,” he said.

On Friday, it fell to Cooper and Marine Maj. Mark Jewell to establish communications between the two forces. The officers are attached to the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division to call in airstrikes, and the military radio network is their primary tool.

Their journey across the Tigris would reveal just how autonomous and compartmentalized the two services have become on the ground -- even when fighting the same enemy in the same city. Until DeCamp and Conlin made contact, their troops would continue to be lethal threats to each other.

When their Humvee convoy reached Conlin’s Marine command post, Jewell and Cooper were greeted warmly.

“We figured since we were shooting each other last night, we might as well come across the river and see if you have any cold beer,” Jewell joked.

Conlin peppered the two officers with questions about the Army’s positions on the west bank. He had only a general notion of where they were, he said.

He urgently needed to know whether the Army had positions directly across the river from the Marines. All night, his command post had been taking AK-47 fire from Iraqis clustered around a compound of warehouses. Yet he could not fire back for fear of hitting friendly forces.

Conlin’s operations officer, Maj. John McDonough, was frustrated. “It burns me to see 15 idiots over the river with RPGs and not be able to contact anyone,” McDonough said, referring to rocket-propelled grenades.

“We took stuff all night long,” he said inside the command post, from which figures could be seen scuttling between the warehouses about a third of a mile away. “But we couldn’t engage, because we didn’t know if friendlies were over there.”

The Marines did launch three precision-guided antitank missiles that slammed into the warehouses and that they said did not threaten anyone outside the compound. “That shut ‘em up for a while,” Conlin said.

He peered across the river. “See?” he said. “See them moving around? Their rounds go over us and hit into the town, and now the townspeople are in a panic.”

Jewell and Cooper were eager for the Marines on the east bank to point out their positions as well. The officers and their crew had battled their way to the palace in a Bradley fighting vehicle earlier in the week, along with other U.S. troops, trying to gauge the Marines’ progress from scratchy BBC reports on a shortwave radio. This was the pair’s first trip to the east bank.

They had brought along their radio specialist, Sgt. Robert Martin of Ferriday, La., whom Jewell called a “radio genius.” Martin huddled with Marine radio operators trying to match up the encryptions and frequencies.

To prevent enemies from intercepting or jamming transmissions, U.S. military radio communications are disguised with “crypto” codes. Radios also are programmed to “hop” frequencies every few seconds. The Marines and the soldiers needed to get each other’s “crypto” and “freq hop” and somehow coordinate them.

“The system is so damn secure, it won’t let us talk to each other,” Jewell said.

He, Cooper and their five crew members had survived a perilous week only to discover that their primary threat at the moment was fellow Americans. Cooper had a black eye and a lacerated forehead from an RPG round that had exploded near his face Tuesday.

Jewell was assigned to command an Army Bradley fighting vehicle, directing the crew while firing the vehicle’s weapons and pushing through enemy fire -- and while coordinating U.S. Air Force and British Royal Air Force bombing attacks.

Jewell and his men were exhausted, and they had hoped to take a quick Humvee tour of Hussein’s vast palace complex and private zoo. But the radio crisis was urgent.

“There is a serious ‘friendly fire’ potential here,” Cooper said.

The Marines also were weary and frustrated. They had pushed hard from the south, reaching the east bank Wednesday night. They had sped through the capital at 50 mph, routing Iraqi forces, Conlin said.

Even then, he was frustrated with the lack of radio contact. He had wanted to radio the Army division to arrange a Tigris bridge handshake before international TV cameras.

“We wanted to show the world, and especially the Arab world, the Army-Marine handshake on a bridge overlooking Baghdad,” Conlin said. “But without comms, it didn’t happen,” he added, using shorthand for “communications.”

He paraphrased an adage, saying: “War is simple, but even the simplest things are difficult.”

At last, Martin and the Marine radio team devised a way to integrate Conlin’s 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, with DeCamp’s 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. More time would be needed to establish direct communications beyond the two battalions and link the Army division to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

As an added precaution, Conlin took a convoy to meet DeCamp in person at the palace. He wanted to study DeCamp’s positions on the Army’s maps.

The two commanders bent over a map in the command post inside a palace office. Conlin took detailed notes as DeCamp pointed out his battalion’s positions along the west bank.

Conlin dragged a finger across a peninsula formed by a sharp curve in the Tigris.

“Do me a favor,” he said to DeCamp’s operations officer. “Please tell your people we own this peninsula. Basically, everything you see there -- and this bridge, and this one too -- has a U.S. Marine on it.”

All that remained was for Army officers to make sure there were no reconnaissance scouts or U.S. Special Forces troops near the warehouses. Once he had a clear field of fire, “if we take more fire, we’re going to light them up,” Conlin said of the Iraqis targeting his troops.