Finding enemy rat holes in Tal Afar

Stars & Stripes:

Staff Sgt. Jeff Anderson had barely searched the room before he got a bad vibe.

The rest of the house was filled with furniture and “lots of nice things,” he said, but this room was different. It had a simple wood couch, a wall closet and a framed poster. That’s all.

The 24-year-old Montgomery, Ala., native tugged the poster off the wall. There was a ventlike opening behind it — the kind of place where insurgents stash weapons. He dragged the couch over to boost himself up and have a peek.

“I pulled the couch away from the wall and I heard this ‘click, click, click,’” Anderson said. “I turned to the guy behind me and looked at him like — did you just hear that? And that’s pretty much when the couch exploded in my face.”

Amazingly, the blast did little more than deafen Anderson for a few seconds. Before the smoke cleared, Anderson’s squad from 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment got their next surprise: A grenade dropped out of the hole, skittered across the floor and exploded.

“If I never moved that picture frame nothing would have happened,” Anderson said. “Once that couch blew up, he knew we were coming to get him.”

As 1st Armored Division troops in Tal Afar pursue an aggressive strategy of house raids and random searches, soldiers have experienced only fleeting contact with the enemy. In most instances, insurgents have chosen to fire and flee, or used roadside bombs and booby traps.

But on Monday, Company B soldiers found themselves locked in a rare, five-hour showdown with a cornered gunman and suspected suicide bomber who had bunkered himself into the wall of a home. Soldiers used rifles, grenades, blocks of C-4 explosives and a remote-controlled robot on the insurgent, who — it seemed — simply refused to die.

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It is an amazing story of ineffective destruction on both sides. You have to read all the way to the end.