Headlong into battle

Do Ab is not exactly a household name, unless you are among the 41 Iowa Army National Guard soldiers who fought an intense, important and decisive battle in the Afghanistan hamlet on May 25.

It should be, though.

“It was one of the most significant engagements (Iowa's 2nd Brigade Combat Team) has been involved in since World War II,” said Guard spokesman Maj. Mike Wunn, who deployed with about 2,800 other Iowa Guard troops in the fall.

Do Ab seemed like a formula for disaster: When the 60-soldier coalition force arrived at 1:30 p.m. via helicopter, they immediately found themselves on an open landing zone surrounded by at least five times as many Taliban warriors, shooting down on them from fortified heights.

Seven hours later, when the surviving insurgents finally backed off, they left behind more than 100 dead comrades - more than 200, according to some estimates - without having inflicted a scratch on their joint Iowa National Guard-Afghan Army opponents.

“We believe it was a baited ambush. When word got out that insurgents had taken Do Ab, a district center, they knew we'd come,” said Maj. Aaron Baugher, the battalion operations officer and the battle's senior ground forces commander.

Baugher said the battalion had to react quickly to a dangerous situation. “There were not a lot of guys fired up to do this one,” said Baugher, 39, of Ankeny.

“I had doubts we'd make it out alive. It was truly a miracle,” said Lt. Justin Foote, 30, of New Hartford, the leader of the battalion's reconnaissance platoon, whose 32 men made up the bulk of the coalition force.

“What could easily have been a huge Taliban win, with all the propaganda opportunities that would have entailed, turned out to be a huge loss for the insurgents,” said Lt. Col. Steven Kremer, commander of the Iowa Guard's Waterloo-based Ironman Battalion, officially known as the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry.

The enemy “was looking for an opportunity to inflict a large amount of casualties,” said Kremer, of Cherokee.

Apart from the grief that would have beset Iowans at the loss of their loves ones, a Taliban victory would have struck fear in the hearts of the Afghan nationals whose trust and confidence U.S. forces have been striving to earn, Kremer said.

“That would have been a big one for them if they could have taken out an entire American platoon. Imagine headlines reading, ‘41 Americans killed in Afghanistan,' ” said Staff Sgt. Jeremy Buhr, 32, of Waverly, leader of the platoon's sniper team.

Even though the mission was basically reconnaissance - to determine the accuracy of reports that insurgents had taken over the district center at Do Ab and, if so, to ascertain the enemy's strength - “you plan on a battle no matter where you go,” Kremer said.

Foote said he had “a bad feeling in his stomach” when he realized that intelligence reports of as many as 400 insurgents at Do Ab were accurate.

“When you hear 400, you think, ‘That's Taliban math,' but after the smoke cleared it proved to be an accurate number,” Buhr said.

Foote said the soldiers fought the first hour of the battle from exposed positions on the landing zone.

“It was a 360-degree ambush. They had us completely surrounded coming off the bird. We were hiding behind rocks with nowhere to go,” said Sgt. Kris Henshaw, 23, of Sioux City.

“There was no clear route off the landing zone without running the gantlet,” Buhr said.

Henshaw said the platoon could have easily taken 100 percent casualties. “If one guy had gone down on the landing zone, that would have started a chain reaction, where they could have picked off all of us as we tried to get each other to cover,” he said.

With the lack of cover and concealment, casualties would have made a bad situation even worse, said Buhr, who can't imagine how the soldiers escaped injury with shrapnel-dealing mortar rounds bursting within 15 feet of them.

“Fractions of seconds saved our lives. When you are moving around and bullets are missing your head by inches, luck is involved,” Buhr said.

Foote, Buhr and other Do Ab battle participants also credit support from Army helicopters and Air Force fighter planes with saving their lives.

“We'd have been hurting without our air assets,” which counterattacked about 15 minutes after the battle started, Foote said.

Baugher said his unit trains constantly on incorporating air support into battle plans.

“It was beautiful to see all those assets work together at Do Ab,” he said.

A lull an hour into the battle, which Foote attributed to damage inflicted by coalition forces and enemy maneuvering, enabled the Guard soldiers to secure defensive positions behind stone walls in a complex of livestock huts.

Reinforcements - 26 members of Afghan special forces and a few U.S. Special Forces ­- arrived about seven hours into the battle, he said.

Meanwhile, the Guard troops and their Afghan allies had to be resupplied with food, water and ammunition brought in by helicopters that were repeatedly hit but miraculously not disabled by enemy fire.

While the helicopters and fighter jets pounded the enemy, “we were getting our fair share,” Buhr said.

The snipers in his unit were making first-round hits at 1,325 meters, which is more than 0.8 mile, said Buhr. “That sends a somewhat demoralizing message to the enemy: ‘If we can see you, we can shoot you,' ” he said.

The platoon's newest member, Spc. Neil Stradt, 25, of Dows, who joined the unit a month before Do Ab, said the competence and composure of his comrades helped him through a difficult experience.

“Being the new guy, you don't quite know what to do, but with these guys, you feel like you're going to be OK if you just do your job,” Stradt said.

Buhr said he believes it was bad Taliban luck that the 1-133rd's reconnaissance platoon stepped into their baited trap.

“These guys are so well trained and well worked that no one hesitated once about returning fire or executing maneuvers,” he said.

Baugher said he doubts the Taliban expected the highly organized and expertly executed resistance provided by the recon platoon, which, in his estimation, has “the most direct-fire engagement experience” of any Iowa Guard unit in Afghanistan.

“Going into that kind of situation, you always wonder how you would act. Iowans need to know that their soldiers performed at an amazingly high level in a life or death situation,” Baugher said.

Battalion Commander Kremer said Guard soldiers “give up the comforts of home and family and put their careers on hold, knowing they will go to war if they enlist. As far as I am concerned, they are true heroes.”

Foote said he thinks about Do Ab every day and doubts that he will ever completely decompress from the strain.

His platoon, which lost Spc. Don Nichols, 21, of Shell Rock, to a bomb blast in April, seemed to have a target on its back, he said.

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Soldiers of the Iowa Army National Guard's Ironman Battalion - 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry - board a Chinook helicopter May 25 for Do Ab, a district center in Afghanistan's Nuristan Province. There they encountered and defeated, with Army and Air Force air support, a much larger Taliban force. The Iowans suffered not a single casualty. Photo by Maj. Aaron Baugher/Iowa Army National Guard

Soldiers with the Iowa Army National Guard's Ironman Battalion scramble for cover after debarking from a helicopter under intense Taliban fire May 25 at Do Ab. Helmet cam photo by Lt. Justin Foote/Iowa Army National Guard