VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 317
Viking Hammer (and the Ugly Baby)
These combined efforts paid off after three hours of steady fighting.
Ansar al-Islam had fought like demons to hold Sargat, but the survivors
among them finally withdrew into the caves and mountains beyond.
The captain had asked the Kurds to leave the search of Sargat to the
Americans. It was essential to preserve all the evidence. At the outskirts
of the town stood the remains of the complex suspected to be the chemical
weapons facility. The buildings had been bombed in the previous
week’s air strikes, but the fence and fortifications around the complex
were still intact. Access obviously had been restricted, even though
Ansar members were Sargat’s only inhabitants. The next day, a sensitive
site exploitation team would be brought in to search it. Beside the complex
stood brick houses, the nicest in town, where the senior leaders of
Ansar al-Islam lived.
The first order of business was to treat the wounded; the medics of
081 set to work on the worst casualties first. One pesh merga fighter had
an eviscerated stomach wound; another Kurd had been shot twice, once
in the jaw and once in the thigh; others had shrapnel wounds. The most
seriously wounded were evacuated in one of the trucks.
The captain surveyed the scene. A pesh merga truck had just arrived
from the rear, carrying a hot lunch of goat kebabs. Sheikh Jafr waved the
captain over to partake. It struck him as utterly surreal: the Kurds had
not been able to get their artillery to the frontline in less than an hour
during a life-or-death battle, but a hot catered meal had shown up right
at lunchtime, at 1 p.m. He shook his head.
It was little short of miraculous that the combined force had not
suffered more casualties. The men had been sitting ducks for the shooters
as they came through that valley, yet no U.S. soldiers had been
wounded. The captain, who had discovered that his back plate was missing
from his armored vest, was especially grateful. The moral of the
story, he guessed, was to never turn tail.
The Kurds brought the one prisoner they’d captured down from the
mountains and handed him over to the Americans. The man did not want
to be taken alive, and kept repeating over and over, “God is great, God is
great.” The papers in his pocket identified him as a Palestinian.
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