Where was the 704th?
A Soldiers Real Life Experience
by GetaKungFuGrip
It was 4 AM, 30 degrees, and I was standing guard in a
foxhole, watching the perimeter when it hit me: I was going to
be in the middle of a real shootin’ war, and I was poised to
witness some of history unfolding right before me. The war in
Iraq was in its beginning stages; the search for Saddam’s
Weapons of Mass destruction had begun. It was March, 2003. I
was on maneuvers with the 704th Chemical Recon Company that
night, and it was dark, starless, and I was cold, hungry, and
scared. We were some of the soldiers who would be on the hunt
for WMD’s. The war was still 7000 miles away. I was standing
in a hole, in the woods, Wisconsin, USA.
That night was just training. Training for a battlefield
I’d never set foot on. I would never have imagined that night,
as I restlessly paced to stay warm, that the unit I was
training with would not “ship” to Iraq. We thought we were
certainly headed to perform our war time mission of seeking
out WMD’s. The war was made for us to win. We would prove to
the world once and for all what a threat Iraq had been to the
USA.
I suppose I should be glad we never did ship, and in a
way, I am. I volunteered for combat, in fact came out of
Inactive (IRR) status against my wife’s wishes to serve in the
looming war – I was not looking for a way out. I was looking
for my ambulance ride to the Alps. Of course we weren’t headed
for the Alps, and I would actually be manning a SAW (Squad
Automatic Weapon) on top of a HMMWV (Hummer). If you’ve seen
“Blackhawk Down” you get the visual of the vehicle with the
weapon on top, and the soldier sending cascades of hot lead
towards the bad guys. I was feeling pretty gung ho, at least
until it all hit me that night in the foxhole.
Chemical Reconnaissance (Recon) companies are the
units the US Army uses primarily to determine if Weapons of
Mass Destruction have been used on the battlefield. The WMD’s
can either be Chemical, Nuclear, or Biological.
For instance, if a unit suspects that a chemical
munitions has been used, on say, a SCUD missile that has been
shot down, they submit a report stating the reasons, and a
Chemical Recon unit is dispatched to inspect the site. The
Recon “survey’s” the site, marks the outer edges with special
tape, similar to crime scene tape, and prepares maps detailing
the dangerous areas, along with the details on the agents
found in the area.
They are also used to inspect sites where WMD’s may
have, or currently are, stored. The units are equipped with
sophisticated chemical “sniffers” that analyze air samples,
and report hazards.
For Nuclear hazards, Recon units have Geiger
counters to detect radiation, and dosimeters to meter total
exposure to radiation. There is actually a lot more to it, but
that’s the “Reader’s Digest” condensed version of it, anyway.
As detailed, it’s obvious that a recon unit is uniquely
specialized. No one wants to ever have to deploy a unit like
this, but the current war in Iraq hinged/hinges upon the
success of these units finding hidden WMD’s. As I stated
earlier, we never went. It wasn’t because we did not know how
to do our jobs, as we “qualified” as a unit to ship out. The
ARMY had certified that we could perform our wartime mission
as a unit.
Now, truth be told, we qualified as a unit late - too
late to arrive for the invasion itself. The unit was severely
understaffed during peacetime (sorry, shouln't mention troop
strength numbers), so it took a little while to “man up”, and
get everyone trained, and outfitted to deploy. The unit was
“filled” with soldiers from around the country and the 704th
had the strength/qualifications it needed to go to war by the
first week of April .
Someone, somewhere, thought they needed us all in
the 704th. Many of the soldiers transferred to the 704th came
from units already on their way to Iraq. I was one of those
soldiers, having originally signed up to go fight with B Co
244th Combat Engineers, out of Ft. Collins Co. They went to
Iraq, and even suffered at least one combat death in the
company I was originally assigned to. Perhaps I truly dodged a
bullet?
I arrived at Ft. McCoy, Wisconsin, March 15th, 2003, and
was among the last members of the unit to arrive and round out
the unit. March turned to April, and we were still at Ft.
McCoy. Some of the original members of the unit from Minnesota
had been on the ground at McCoy since January. That’s a long
time to live in the decrepit, noisy, open WWII barracks we
called home on McCoy. The wait seemed even longer, as we were
obviously in a holding pattern as early as the first week of
April.
By the end of April, however, before the commander in
chief made his dashing aircraft carrier landing to declare the
“mission accomplished”, we knew we were not “joining the
party.” We had a new mission to accomplish.
The 704th was headed to Ft. Lewis Washington to work at
the National ROTC Advanced camp, and we had our first day of
work May 7th, 2003.
It took less than 2 months for the US Military to
determine after invading a country the size of California that
they either:
A: Had enough Chemical Recon resources on the ground to look
for the WMD’s Iraq supposedly had, or…
B: There were no WMD’s to be found, so why send any other
units over to look for them?
Frankly, option “A” isn’t really an option at all
if the US had little or no intelligence on where the supposed
caches of WMD’s were, but truly believed the WMD’s were in
Iraq. The US Army was going to need every Recon element that
they could bring to bear in option “A” to look for what was
described as a “needle in a haystack” in Iraq. Chemical
reconnaissance is slow, deliberate work, especially if you are
in danger of being attacked.
While I do not know how many actual Chemical
Recon units the US has, the number cannot be too large. In ten
years as a Chemical soldier, I had only met a handful of
people who served in a recon unit. From my experience they are
a rare breed. In fact, my job designator, 54B, has always been
a “shortage MOS” for the Army for as long as I have been in.
In my opinion, the likelihood of the US Army having “enough”
Chemical Recon units to survey all of Iraq for WMD’s in 6
weeks is pure fantasy.
This leaves option “B”: There were no WMD’s to be found,
so why send any other units over to look for them.
Now, please let me clarify this option. I am not
necessarily suggesting that the USA did not really believe
that Iraq did not have any WMD’s. I simply suggest that the US
Military, during the short duration of “official” combat
operations, using the Chemical recon asset’s already in
theater, determined that the locations indicated with pre-war
intel did not contain the suspected WMD’s. In other words, the
US Military rushed to the suspected locations to secure the
suspected WMD locations, and came up totally empty handed. No
residue, no leftovers, and nothing to indicate that the WMD’s
ever were at these locations to begin with. Maybe our
intelligence gatherers had been purposefully duped?
Perhaps worse, there may have items at these
locations that had been mis-identified as potential WMD’s. How
else could the US Army have determined that a unit such as the
704th was not needed 6 weeks into a war predicated on finding
and removing WMD’s? Could it be that the USA rushed into a
pre-emptive war, invaded a sovereign country without
provocation, ignored the will of the United nations, based
upon faulty/false intel that could be refuted within a mere 6
weeks of war? The fact that the search was for WMD’s was
obviously curtailed, if not abandoned altogether, raises these
serious questions.
The 704th and I spent a glorious summer in the Pacific
Northwest. I myself put 13,000 miles on my motorcycle
traveling around all the wonderful National Parks in
Washington State, Mount St. Helens, the San Juan Islands, and
British Columbia, Canada. That was when I was off duty, of
course.
When I was on duty, I had the cushy job of safely
hauling tomorrows 2nd Lieutenants to and from training, often
goading them into raucous choruses of “Tiny Dancer” ala
Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous.” In many way’s, it was the
best summer of my life. The 704th and I spent a total of
three and a half glorious months in Washington State, and then
went back to our homes across the country, our regular lives,
and comfortable daily routines. Soldiers were still dying in
Iraq, and continue too to this day.
No WMD’s were ever/have ever been found in Iraq.
Where was the 704th?
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