'We put hellfire into them'

Chief Warrant Officer 4 John Moseley says that what struck him most about his first tour in Iraq was the incongruity of the battlefield scenes.

“Najaf was insane,” he said of the March 25-28, 2003, battle to take the city about 96 miles south of Baghdad.

He was the leader of a team of two Apache helicopters engaged in close combat attacks on enemy positions identified by troops on the ground.

“It was daylight action, so when you’re flying over the city, you’re a target, too,” he said. “We only attacked what the ground guys said to attack and what had positively been identified as the enemy.

“It was crazy,” said Moseley. “There’d be a serious battle going on over one city block and three or four blocks away we’d see kids playing soccer.”

Moseley, 41, is now a maintenance test pilot with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment at Camp Eagle, South Korea. He is a recipient of six Air Medals — two with “V” devices — that he was given for general combat action during his first tour in Iraq from March 2003 to January 2004. He received a seventh Air Medal for his second tour, from January to December 2005.

When he deployed to Kuwait in February 2003, “we had no idea what to expect,” he said. “Most of our time leading up to the war was doing ‘brown-out’ landings and take-offs. The conditions were nothing like back in the southeast United States. The soil is like … brown talcum powder. Whenever you got close to the ground, a huge cloud of this stuff would engulf you and you couldn’t see. It was like learning to fly all over again.”

When the war began, the Apaches supported the 3rd Infantry Division on their sprint to Baghdad.

“They were the real heroes of the war,” he said. “They really knew what they were doing. After all, they had left equipment in Kuwait after Desert Storm and came back every year practicing to invade Baghdad.”

Moseley’s first taste of combat was attacking the crack Medina Division of Iraq’s Republican Guard at the Karbala Gap, a narrow strip of land between the Euphrates River and a lake. It was the last large obstacle on the 3rd ID’s advance to Baghdad.

“We had to defeat the Medina Division prior to getting the bridges across the Euphrates,” Moseley said. “No one knew what to expect. The Medina Division was supposed to be the best of the best, and Saddam Hussein was known to use chemical weapons.

“It was hot and cramped in the Apaches,” he said. “With my flight suit and chemical protective gear and my body armor and my pistol in a shoulder holster, my co-pilot and I were like Robocops in that tiny cockpit. I felt like the Michelin Man.

“We attacked at night; dropping rocket-propelled anti-artillery rounds to make them keep their heads down. It was like the Fourth of July.”

The enemy fire was much lighter than expected, he said.

“Most of their tanks and trucks were parked along Highway 9 and we zoomed in as low as possible — about 35 feet off the ground — and wiped them out,” he said.

Using special heat-detecting night-vision equipment, the rule was “if it glows, it blows,” Moseley said. “We put hellfire into them. Just that one night we killed the majority of the vehicles of the Medina Division.”

Moseley’s unit was next sent to Najaf, where they zeroed in on weapons caches and snipers. That’s where he got his second Air Medal with a “V.”

Moseley, a 15-year veteran who now has more than 3,000 flying hours under his belt, said waiting for the invasion to begin was the toughest time.

“I was most frightened while waiting for the war to kick off,” he said. “We expected every Scud missile to come over us to have biological weapons, and sometimes we had to sleep in our protective gear.

“Trying to sleep in this Darth Vader mask — that was pretty scary,” he said. “We itched for the fighting to start. Better to die in combat than dying like a cockroach from nerve agents.”