By Sgt. Mike Pryor
2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 9, 2007 — Staff Sgt. Darin Morgan’s platoon had just snatched a suspected insurgent off the streets. They had done it without Apache gun ships hovering overhead and without Stryker vehicles blocking the roads. They did it without blowing open any doors or damaging any property. And they did it without firing a single shot. All of which, Morgan said, means they did it the right way.

"We live here. If we have to go in hard, we still have to come back the next day. So if we can take an insurgent off the streets with the minimum amount of firepower and resources necessary, it’s a good thing,"
-- Staff Sgt. Darin Morgan

There’s a time and a place for overwhelming force, but in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah District, paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division are learning that sometimes a soft touch can be just as effective.

“We live here. If we have to go in hard, we still have to come back the next day. So if we can take an insurgent off the streets with the minimum amount of firepower and resources necessary, it’s a good thing,” said Morgan, a platoon sergeant with Battery B, 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

It all began at the end of a long foot patrol April 1, when Morgan’s platoon leader, 1st Lt. Larry Pitts, stopped to talk to a man on the steps of his house in Graya’at, a poor, mostly-Sunni neighborhood in the Adhamiyah district. The 2nd Platoon had just spent five hours knocking on doors and talking to people about their problems. Everyone up to that point had been happy to talk, chatting away as Pitts wrote their answers down in his little green composition pad.

But the owner of this particular house was different. He and his wife were defensive, reluctant to give Pitts any information. After a few minutes of getting nowhere, Pitts took the man's name, thanked him for his time, and walked back to his platoon.

Pitts couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong. He pulled aside intelligence analyst Sgt. Zac Manafort of Moondus, Conn., and asked if he recognized the man's name. Manafort had memorized the names and aliases of hundreds of suspected insurgents in the area, and this one set off an alarm in his head.

“That guy's dirty,” Manafort said. Pitts immediately radioed the man’s name up to headquarters for verification. They said it would take a few minutes. In the meantime, Pitts told the platoon to look busy. The paratroopers spread out, pretending like they were checking out some shops on the suspect's street.

Staff Sgt. Antonio Alvarado and a few others crowded into a record store around the corner, pretending to look for CDs. The shocked shopkeepers stared wide-eyed at the paratroopers as they browsed the shelves, their bulky body armor, radio antennas, and weapons making it a tight fit inside the cramped shop.

“Here's that Ricky Martin CD you wanted,” one paratrooper teased his buddy. Pitts was across the street in a smoothie bar when the response finally came back from headquarters – the suspect's name matched that of a wanted insurgent. Detain him, they told Pitts. He and Morgan quickly huddled together to come up with a plan. They needed to separate the suspect from his family.

“We knew they had kids inside (the house). The family was all there, so instead of blowing the door down or kicking it in, we decided to try to gain entry without force," Pitts said.

Pitts and Morgan decided the circumstances called for a little deception. They went back to the house. Pitts knocked on the front gate, waving a scrap of paper. It was his phone number, he said, in case the man needed to reach him. The suspect came out to get it. As he took the paper from Pitts' hands, Pitts took a step back.

“Get him,” he said, out of the corner of his mouth. San Antonio-native Sgt. Hector Hernandez stepped forward and took the man by the hand, pulling him outside into the street. A humvee pulled up. The man looked confused. Within 30 seconds, he was flex-cuffed, searched, and bundled into the waiting vehicle.

The rest of the platoon rushed up to clear the house and search for evidence. Pitts found Morgan inside. Morgan congratulated the platoon leader on his performance with the phone number. Afterward, Morgan was pleased at how it had all gone down.

“I think it's actually more of a surprise than a traditional raid,” he said. “You're shaking the dude's hand and then you slap the cuffs on him.”

Pitts said he was just happy that the platoon had been able to take the man outside, in the open, when they knew he was unarmed.

“It's safer for our guys and it's safer for the family,” Pitts said. “If we had to go in blind, that's when bullets start flying.”

On the ride home in Morgan's truck, someone realized that it was a fitting day for the kind of deception they had just pulled off. It was April Fool's Day.

Labels: 2-319th AFAR, 82nd Airborne Division, Adhamiyah, Baghdad, Good News, Iraq