The Power of a Radio: SSgt Brian Keith

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today we’ll hear from Staff Sergeant Brian Keith. Keith was among the first Marines deployed to fight in the Gulf War. He served as a Forward Observer.

SSgt Brian Keith:

Well, I was going to college doing the whole football gig, and I decided that I didn't have the level of commitment or discipline, frankly, to put in the time for the academics. So I decided that I needed a big change, and I definitely got it when I joined the Marines.

Frankly, I didn't know a lot about artillery or anything like that. Of course, I knew big guns, but I didn't know anything about forward observation. When I went to the School of Infantry because I'd signed up as an infantryman, they had selected me to be a mortarman, originally. And so I went through mortar school, and learned how to be a mortarman. And then shortly thereafter, they asked me if I wanted to be a forward observer.

It was interesting. I was in pretty good shape, I was a tall, thin guy, had quite a bit of endurance. And one of the things that they said about forward observation is that, "You're going to be carrying not only all the equipment that everyone else carries, plus a radio and batteries and cryptological gear, and all that other kind of stuff." So they have to be in excellent condition, excellent shape and all that. So I thought, "Well, that sounds pretty challenging as well."

I guess as far as the description that they gave me was, "Your responsibility is to support and protect," and I guess in a sense, "defend the units that you're out supporting." It was a pretty incredible responsibility when you think that as a young lance corporal, I was responsible for taking care of all these other people indirectly, so to speak.

Someone had told me at some point that the life expectancy of a forward observer on the battlefield was about 30 seconds, so I didn't really think one way or the other, I guess. To me it seemed very interesting. Frankly, it beat carrying and mortar around.

The majority of the time when I went out, I was with, like I said, with an infantry unit, but generally out front. In the Gulf, I was with a forward element, the tanks, and we also had a machine gun element, a machine gun platoon, and then our universal spot team, which consisted of myself, who was a forward observer for both artillery and mortars, and also a forward air controller. And we did have a naval gunfire liaison with us as well, and then plus a driver/communicator.

And as I said, primarily when I first got into it, I just did mortars, 81mm mortars. Every Marine infantry battalion has an 81mm mortar platoon. And so I was the forward observer with a particular company. For instance, we had forward observers that went out to all the infantry companies to provide either direct or general support of whatever unit it was that was out there. And so I'd go out there and literally locate the enemy, reference the map. And that was one of the things that they had mentioned to me too, in describing what forward observation was all about, is that you had to be an incredibly good land navigator. You had to be able to identify and do terrain association because you not only need to know where you are and where friendly troops are, but you also need to know where the enemy is, and need to be able to direct that fire accurately because it doesn't take much with an artillery piece that's firing 18 miles away, it doesn't take much in error to have it land in the wrong place. So you have to be real careful about what you do.

Frankly, it could land on friendly troops, which I remember even prior to the Gulf or anything like that, I used to have dreams about calling in for fire. My former wife actually had said that I would call for fire in my sleep and had dreams about bombing my own people, and so I was just deathly afraid of that. So I did everything I could to prepare myself to frankly be the best forward observer I could be. I studied all the time, I practiced my land navigation, I stayed in excellent condition. I did everything that I could possibly do to make sure that when the time came, I was ready.

We were in Panama at the time, and we got the word, "Hey, we're going back to the states a little bit early," but they didn't tell us why. And so when we got back to the parade deck at Camp Pendleton, they told us, "You have 10 hours from now, be back here and don't unpack any of your gear." So we knew we were going somewhere, we just weren't certain of it, but we had a pretty good indication that it would probably be to the Middle East.

And we got back after our 10 hours of liberty, and boarded buses and went to Twentynine Palms, California, and did about a week's worth of training, getting acclimatized, I guess, to some extent, and doing a lot of shooting, a lot of live fire exercises and things like that to make sure that all of our equipment and our weapons and whatnot were working properly. And then we boarded planes and took off.

I likened it to... because we had, thankfully, had a lot of a number of years of peace, if you will, and it was like practicing for the football game you never got to play. And while I don't think anyone hopes for war or anything like that, I think it's inherent in all of us, at least we that were in the military, that we wanted... It was a test. It was to see how you did. "Can I do this?" And you never really know until the time comes.

One of the times that I remember the most right before we went is when we were in the hangar bay waiting to get on the plane, and a couple of our NCOs came around with crates of ammunition and started handing out ammunition and we started filling magazines before we got on the plane. And so that started to lead us to believe, "Okay, this is for real. This is the real deal."

And frankly, we didn't know what the situation on the ground was. All we knew is that we were given ammunition, so I thought as soon as we get off the plane, we might be in a gunfight. So of course we had our equipment as best we could ready to go. But when we stepped off, of course, the airport was secure, thankfully, it was about 135 degrees on the tarmac when we stepped off, and we were in helmets and flak jackets. And the plane was air-conditioned. So for basically about 24 hours, we'd been in an air-conditioned environment, and then all of a sudden you step out into this blast furnace, and it was the most amazing heat, just wilting heat, that one would ever feel.

And a friend of mine, Todd Hanssen, I think he was from Queens, he said, "Keith." He said, "Man," he said, "I can't even do six days here, let alone six weeks." Because that's what they had said, "We'll be here for about six weeks." And he said, "I'll go crazy." I'm like, "Well, where are you going to go? It's not like you can run away." But yeah, it was pretty incredible when we first got there, I've just never felt anything like it ever. And like I said, we'd just come from Panama, and we'd just come from Twentynine Palms, the American desert, so I thought, "No problem." But just completely different. Miserable.

Well, actually we didn't get our first mission until the very first day of the war, which I think... was it 22nd of February? I think it was 22nd of February. We had moved up incrementally really when we got there. We arrived August 12th, which was 10 days after the invasion. And so we moved up incrementally, I guess, as time progressed and negotiations faltered and all that kind of stuff, they continued to move us closer and closer to the border. And I think it was January 17th is when the air campaign began. And I remember I was laying in my hole and I had a Walkman, and I could listen to the BBC. And they just had announced, "The air war has begun." And whoops and cries, and people, I don't know, kind of celebrating, I guess, finally getting started because we'd been there, at that point, almost, I don't know, six and a half, seven months training in the desert and sitting around. And there's not a lot to do in the desert, if you can imagine that.

It was a little unsettling, I guess, when we got our vehicle prepared and everything ready to go, and I realized we had seven antennas on our vehicle. Prime target. It's like a pink neon sign saying, "Shoot us. We have a lot of radios and all that kind of stuff, take a shot at us. What do you think?"

Yeah, even my time as a sniper, we trained all of our people to be able to utilize supporting arms, artillery, mortars, and close air support because it's such a valuable asset. And you can change the tide of a battle. One person can change the tide of a battle with a well-placed fire mission, or with an accurate airstrike or whatever. So being a forward observer has a great deal of impact on what can occur on the battlefield because you're really shaping the battlefield for the infantry and for the ground troops and everything, prepping a particular position prior to them going in and clearing trenches and bunkers and things like that. So you provide them a valuable asset and some valuable support, so it's a very proactive role that you take with being a forward observer.

So actually we got... I think it was the 22nd of February, it was the first day of the ground campaign. We had finally moved up the night, or I guess it was the day before into, I guess, our final position. And this is where things even became more real because that's when we actually took the anti-tank rockets out of the cases and the hand grenades and all that kind of stuff. And so we knew that was really... "We're going in for sure this time, there's no coming back."

And then about, I think it was 4:30 in the morning is when we actually started the first push. They dug a hole through the Saudi sand berm. And I don't know, it's just this enormous berm, probably 20 feet high and, I don't know, 50 feet thick. So they dug big holes through this, and that's what separated Kuwait from Saudi Arabia. And through the gap we went.

And we were probably 50 yards on the other side of the berm when I had my first near-death experience. It was dark, and the tanks were all buttoned up because we had intelligence and whatnot had said, "The Iraqis, they're there, and they might be there right away, so everybody be prepared." Well, we were driving straight and a tank was not, it was driving at an angle and literally we stopped and the tank stopped almost at the same time within six inches of us. Because the tank probably wouldn't have noticed a whole lot of it, it would've just kept on rolling. So it's kind of an odd start to the day.

Yeah, we had a general direction that we would be heading. We had essentially a corridor that we would be moving up through. We had Task Force Papa Bear to our right, which would've been our east, and then we had some of the 2nd Marine division, I think it was 1st Battalion, 8th Marines on our left flank as we moved up through. So we had our lane of responsibility, if you will, moving right up the center headed for Kuwait City.

We were moving so quickly, and the battle progressed so fast that there really was no time to set up any kind of forward observation posts. So we were doing it on the move in our vehicle. Like I said, we had a Humvee with four guys, so it was a pretty busy vehicle.

It actually worked well. What I did is kept track of our position. As I told you before, we didn't have a GPS, we didn't have a Global Positioning System, so I had to keep track via my compass and an odometer, and keeping track of a couple of vehicles I knew that did have GPSs and orienting myself from them. But I guess necessity is a mother of invention, so you just basically did dead reckoning. Once we would have an opportunity to stop, I would check my coordinates again, make sure I knew where I was at. And then once we would begin to move again, obviously on that direction and that distance, I knew that I was headed on that line and I knew where I was at. So that worked out, frankly, pretty well.

The first mission, it was at the first obstacle belt. And we had been receiving some sporadic fire and stuff like that. And we pulled up there and we let them have it, I guess, let it loose. It was an infantry, I don't know, I guess a platoon position. We'd been receiving some fire from that area, and so I just called for high explosive ammunition. A lot of smoke and fire and sand and stuff getting kicked up all over the place. It was pretty amazing.

But again, we weren't sticking around for very long. It was shoot, move, and communicate, primarily was, I guess, the order of the day. We didn't have a lot of time, I guess, to look around or do anything like that. We had our mission, and we were making progress pretty quickly.

It was quite a moment, I guess. And really realizing for the first time that somebody's shooting back at you brought you to reality pretty quickly. And one thing that I'd always been told is that you will fight the way you practice, the way you train. And it was absolutely true because there wasn't any apprehension. Certainly there was a lot of adrenaline going on and probably some fear as well. But I got on the radio and just did it. And there wasn't a lot of thought process to it. I just knew what had to be done, and I knew how to do it, and I did it. So it was pretty wild.

You can hear the artillery shells, but they don't whistle like you see on the movies. I can't really describe what... it almost sounds like wind going over the top of you or over the top of your positions or whatever. And they make a hell of a bang when they hit. Because the 155s, they fire 125-pound projectile, and that's the high explosive round. And they have an assortment of ammunition and stuff that they utilize, but that high explosive is pretty standard ammunition.

It has an effective casualty radius of 55 meters, so anything within a 55-meter range is done. And they shred everything. And I guess I should have brought it with me. I had some shrapnel, actually, that I'd picked up. And the shrapnel is probably 10 inches long and probably an inch and a half wide, and about as sharp as a knife on the edges. You could probably cut yourself with it. So imagine that thing flying around at about the speed of sound, red-hot, and just cuts through stuff like a knife through warm butter.

I guess one of the things that I still to this day remember very vividly is all the oil and the smell that just permeated everything throughout the entire battle and throughout the entire conflict. Yeah, there's a smell associated when human flesh is burnt, and it's a smell that you can't describe, but it's not a good smell.

It was really wild to think when I was in the Gulf... I was a corporal at that time and I had, I don't know, an entire regiment of artillery in direct support of us and the breach that we were doing. And I thought, "Wow, that's a lot of firepower for one little guy like me to have at my disposal." And so yeah, it's pretty wild to think about how much power you can actually wield with a radio.

I looked around, I did my battle damage assessment. I thought, "Okay, I got pretty good impact on target. All right, now time to move onto something else." So there wasn't a lot of time to ponder. It was, "Okay, now what's the next threat? What's the next thing?" Trying to, all the time, I guess, be cognizant of what was going on. Situational awareness, I guess, is probably be the best way to describe it.

There were a lot of craters. And actually their positions were not very well made, not very well dug, they weren't reinforced positions at all, it was just sand. It was just basically, I don't know, I guess trenches dug in the sand, and they'd been pounded on so long, I think they stopped making improvements to their positions. So in some places, of course, the sand had filled it in. So it didn't offer a lot of protection for those people.

One of the interesting things is when we would pull up to a position like that and start the barrage, it didn't take very long for those people to give up. There wasn't a lot of fight, I don't think, left in them in a lot of cases. On a number of occasions, of course they came after us pretty hard. But the most amazing thing I saw over there really was when we were driving across the desert, and literally as far as the eye could see from horizon to horizon was nothing but armored vehicles, tanks, and infantry vehicles, literally as far as the eye could see. And of course we had fixed wing aircraft that were buzzing around all the time. We had a lot of rotary wing aircraft, Cobra helicopters and so forth that were providing us with support. As a matter of fact, at one point we had just stopped and, I don't know, I was taking a look at some targets, I think, and a Cobra fired a Hellfire missile right over the top of our vehicle. So I hear this big bam, and your initial reaction is to get on the ground. But I was in a vehicle, so there was nothing I could do. And I had no idea what it was, I thought surely a tank was shooting at us or something like that. But it was actually a Cobra helicopter that fired right over the top of us, but that'll send pins and needles up your spine.

There were actually tanks that were dug in, and our tankers did a really good job of taking care of those threats, I guess, if you will. I remember there were some tanks that had their turrets completely blown off, and were obviously sitting there burning. And yeah, there were, I don't know, 15, 20 bodies laying about. That brings you pretty close to reality pretty quickly, I guess, the level of destruction that can be brought to bear with not really a great deal effort at all, just with basically getting on the radio and making a call.

When we'd pull up to a position, we'd engage targets, for instance, troops or tanks or vehicles or whatever the case might've been at the time, it didn't take very long for them to surrender in droves. And sometimes we would approach positions and we didn't even have to fire a single bullet because they would come out in droves, they would get out, or anything that they could find that was white, they had in their hands and were showing very readily, of course, to everyone that, "Hey, I'm giving up. No, don't shoot me."

And there was just too many of them, there were too many to even handle. So it got to the point where we finally just started pointing to the south and letting them go. We had to let the rear units, the units that were following us up, coordinate the prisoner effort, I guess.

I think they were… not only were they beaten militarily, but I think they were beaten mentally. And once someone's lost their will to fight, they're not going to hang out and get shot.

Well, it was four days total, so it was really a pretty short operation, I guess, comparatively speaking. I think the first night we stopped and dug in, and actually I think it was, if I remember right, it was three o'clock in the afternoon and it was pitch black. It was so dark I couldn't see with my night vision goggles on because of all of the smoke from all of the oil fires and everything that had been detonated and were burning. And it was pitch black. And that gives you an odd feeling when you know that there are enemy tanks out there running around, enemy units out there running around, and you can't see, that's a little unsettling. So the first thing I did when we stopped and set up position was dig a fighting hole. I wanted to make sure that I was prepared.

I was out with the tank unit. We had a tank company that was assigned to us, and then also we had a machine gun platoon. And so I was up there in the midst of all of these guys, which was kind of funny because here are these tanks, they're big, heavy protected vehicles, and lots of firepower and everything. And then you've got these machine gun vehicles, which have, I guess, outside Kevlar shell. And we were in a Humvee that was a soft back, it was canvas on the sides. So there we are up there doing our job where everybody else is pretty well protected with canvas doors on the vehicle.

I remember distinctly coming into Kuwait City, it was at night. And we'd received some sporadic fire. But again, at night it's difficult to be able to tell exactly where everybody is as far as units are concerned. So I was very careful about calling in for fire or anything like that. And I remember at one point when we came up to the interstate, right on the edge of Kuwait City, one of the tanks opened up with a 50-caliber machine gun, and the red tracers, and then some of the machine gun platoon had opened up as well. And I remember watching this whole exchange happen and thinking to myself, "Wow, the tracers are really pretty." I remember thinking that to myself, "Wow, it's pretty," but you understood that there's combat going on, not 15, 20 yards from where you're located at. It's pretty incredible. It's incredible stuff.

We were on the west flank of the battalion, and they had told us that a counterattack was eminent, that there was a, I don't know, an armored company or battalion or something like that that was forming a counterattack. And so I was placed out on the flank with our people, with everybody else in our vehicle. And in the distance, probably five miles away, we could see a great deal of a cloud of sand. So what's going through my mind is, "Here they come. Here they come, here comes a battalion of tanks," and the adrenaline starts pumping real hard and everything like that. And so what we did is we punched out even further in the direction of where the origin, I guess, of the cloud so we could get a better point of observation. And what it ended up being, as I got my binoculars out and started observing and started watching, what it ended up being was an American unit coming back our way to join back up with the main body. And so, wow, talk about relief. Talk about relief.

Well, the first thing that you do is you determine the target's location, you absolutely have to do that. Obviously, you identify what the target is. Obviously, you identify that it is foe. And you identify the location of the target. And then you have to think about, based on what the target is, think about what sort of ammunition you need to use in order to engage that particular target. For instance, high explosive ammunition with a quick fuse you would use for troops in the open. A time-delayed fuse is something that you would use on troops who were dug in. You have aerial burst rounds and all that kind of stuff. So you have to look and see what it is, determine, I guess, the best remedy, I guess I'll call it, if you will, and then you put all that together.

And I wrote everything down because I made sure that I didn't make a mistake. It was very important to me. So I wrote down obviously the target location, what I saw. And also everything that I send in is essentially what we call a SALUTE report, which is a report about the enemy size, activity, location, unit, time, and equipment. So when you send in a target description, when you're calling your fire mission, essentially you're giving the headquarters intelligence as to what's out there and the location in addition to, of course, addressing the target or attacking the target. So yeah, just depending on whatever kind of targets we were trying to engage, would determine what sort of rounds I would necessarily request to engage them with.

Well, we had a laser range finder. It was a handheld laser range finder. And what you would do is you would laze the target, obviously laser bounces back and gives you a distance to the target, I think within a meter of accuracy. Because in the desert it's very difficult to tell how far things are away because it's so flat, literally over a two-mile area, you might only have an elevation increase of five meters or something like that. So things seem as though they're farther away. So laser range finder, it came in really handy.

We'd definitely bracket the target. You get your initial impact and optimally make your adjustment and fire for effect after that. And depending on what the situation was and what the targets were that we were engaging would depend on how quickly we would engage, whether or not we would try and bracket the target or not. And optimally you want to get first round effect when that first round comes down, if you have effect on target, automatically go into the fire for effect phase.

It was rewarding because I guess I was able to be a part of something, I was able to be a part of a historical event. And even though that event was pretty tenuous and downright scary sometimes, I'm very proud of what I did and was able to do, and I guess serving my country.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Staff Sergeant Brian Keith.

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