Last week I wrote a bit about the rules of engagement. It is a topic that could have entire books written about it, so I attempted to give the basics about it and cover as much of it as I could in a short amount of space, but there is a bit more to it than just the basics. As I said last week, it isn’t always as simple as one might think it. And as I said, the rules of engagement could change depending on where you were or what you were doing. Our rules of engagement in the city of Baqubah were a bit more open to interpretation because of the situation that we were in. We were a bit more aggressive because if you were always on the defensive, then you were in trouble. We didn’t always wait for the bad guys to engage us and then react, we went out to find them, and then kill them.

Among the things that we did during training before our deployment were some very basic tactical maneuvers that the Army called ‘Battle Drills’. There are eight of them and they cover basic things like how to conduct an offensive attack on an enemy force, take out an enemy bunker, reacting to an ambush, and how to react to contact, meaning if you are on a foot patrol and someone starts shooting at you then this is how you should react to attempt to gain an advantage. A lot of the missions we did were termed as a movement to contact meaning we didn’t have a specific target. Our mission was to patrol a certain area of the city or a certain palm grove and essentially wait to be ambushed and then react accordingly. While we did become very good at doing this, it immediately puts you at a disadvantage because it assumes that the enemy is already in a fortified position and is waiting for you to be in a position that they have deemed as vulnerable. But these missions weren’t always the case. We couldn’t afford to always be waiting to be shot at because if you are ambushed it is a reasonable assumption that you are going to sustain some casualties. So, we had to conduct offensive missions.

The main objective of setting up ambushes is a concept called positive identification. It is pretty self-explanatory, but very important. Normally the rules of engagement are applied to a situation where someone else escalates the situation and you are acting defensively to protect yourself or others. But in the case of setting up an ambush we had to apply it to who and when to shoot at someone who is not only not shooting at us, but in most cases doesn’t even know we are there. So before shooting, you had to be very sure that they were bad guys.

One day we were on a patrol with another platoon. We were moving parallel to each other on different streets and had stopped for a while and set up in a couple of houses that were a couple blocks apart. As usual, I was on the roof with my machine gun. While we were sitting there the shooting started. A group of bad guys were in another building about 200 meters away and had spotted the other platoon and started firing at them. They weren’t firing at us, but I knew they couldn’t see me as they were firing at the other platoon. So I could basically sit there on the roof and pick them off one at a time as they exposed themselves to me so that they could shoot at the other platoon.

Setting up ambushes was a little different. If we could determine with ‘reasonable certainty’ that someone was a bad guy then we were given the OK to engage them. On one occasion we were on a rooftop and another machine gunner and I were watching a house across a large open field. We saw four guys wearing all black clothes with black face masks taking a lot of guns out of a house and loading them into a vehicle. When we were positive that they were not Iraqi Police or Army, we opened fire on them.

We routinely had to make decisions like this. If someone doesn’t see us and isn’t presently a threat to us then we had to rely on our best judgment to make the best decision. I was a soldier, and it was part of the job to kill people, but I still had and do have a conscience. I have to live with whatever decisions I made, so it wasn’t something that I ever took lightly.