He Pushed Back The Ambush
By SEAN HIGGINS | Posted Monday, May 04, 2009
The 17-hour mission in Iraq was nearing an end on Sept. 15, 2004.
Orlando Ortega just wanted to get his convoy back to the base.
Terrorists in the war zone had other plans for him.
As the team of 30 drove through a hamlet in southeast Baghdad, two improvised explosive devices blew up — right under Ortega's vehicle.
The convoy came to a screeching halt. Enemy snipers then fired from a nearby building.
Ortega, a captain during his 2004 stint in Iraq, was honored with the Bronze Star and was promoted to major after making sure his outfit prevailed.
After checking to make certain his legs hadn't been blown off, Ortega assessed the situation. The convoy was far from its base and outside of radio contact.
So the Army captain ordered his men to counterattack.
When smoke cleared, five to seven terrorists were dead and Ortega hadn't lost a single man.
Ortega's coolness under fire and boldness in ordering a counterattack earned him the Bronze Star with Valor.
"I'm very humbled," Ortega, now a major, told IBD. "Out of the 650 missions we did, probably 60 involved hostilities. Of those, about 10 were what we call hell days. Those are the days where you count your blessings that nobody dies."
First Lt. Adam Clark, an Army medic, was in the same vehicle as Ortega that day. Despite the shrapnel that had just pierced his Humvee, despite the smoke and confusion, despite everything, Clark said Ortega never let the pressure get to him.
In Step
The military has been Ortega's life. His father was a sergeant major in the Army, and Orlando was born at Fort Campbell, Ky., in January 1974.
From there, the youngster hopped around military bases around the world — in Germany, Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone.
That nomadic upbringing made him feel like a "duck out of water" wherever he landed. He yearned for someplace more solid.
He also wanted a military push. So after graduating from high school in 1992, he joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at Marion Military Institute in Alabama. "I felt that I was very undisciplined," he said. "I decided to go into the military so I could have a life with structure and then go from there."
Ortega went to Ole Miss for a marketing degree in 1997 and jammed in Army duty overseas — in Bosnia, South Korea and Kuwait — before leaving the service in 2001.
He wanted to give the civilian side a try. Yet he didn't want to leave the military behind completely, so he transferred to an Illinois National Guard unit. His civilian experiment didn't last long. After the Iraq War started in March 2003, his 200-troop unit — G Battery, 2nd Battalion of the 202nd Air Defense Artillery — hit the scene.
Ortega's outfit was a cog in the U.S. war machine: providing security at bases, transporting Iraqi prisoners and Iraqi army recruits, scouting the enemy. And fighting in battles.
"We ranged from going as far up as Syria and Turkey and as far south as Kuwait and the Iranian border," Ortega said. "We did a lot."
His soldiers were not in the regular Army. They were people pulled from civilian life to serve in Iraq. His job was to mold the guardsmen into an effective fighting force.
That sure helped in September 2004. Reflecting on the battle, Ortega says he reacted as best he could.
As soon as he heard a pinging sound, he shouted: "Wake up, everyone! We're under fire."
Discovering that all of the convoy's vehicles were still functional, he ordered them forward and away from the snipers. Ortega knew his men had to speed it up.
"I was in the front of the convoy when soldiers in the last vehicle reported that (terrorists) were coming out of a building and starting to approach the convoy," he said.
The unit was at least an hour's drive from the nearest base and in a communication dead zone. It almost became a human dead zone for the Americans. The enemy hit with quick ambushes, then scattered.
Ortega thought fast through the fog. He cataloged the number of men he had, the amount of ammo they had and the difficulty in evacuating potential casualties. He weighed all of that against the likelihood the next convoy to come would also be attacked. "That's when I decided to do a counterattack," he said. "I thought if we didn't do this today it would just mean the life of another coalition soldier. We have a chance to make sure the insurgents don't do that."
The decision was the toughest of his young career, he says. Suddenly he was ordering his soldiers to not merely defend themselves, but to track down and take out the enemy. He knew the result could mean death for some in his command.
He added: "It was not all agreed upon by my senior NCOs (noncommissioned officers)."
Still, the Americans attacked.
"I was the only other officer," said Clark, "and I understood his thought process completely. You cannot just allow (such an ambush) to happen, then move on out. We had to get intel (on the attackers) before we moved out."
For G Battery, it was time to lock and load. The men rushed to the kill zone and riddled the enemy's building. Ortega ordered his troops to do four maneuvers, splitting the area into four zones to attack.
Ortega had another worry. Iraqi civilians were in the area, and the captain had to avoid provoking them into confronting his troops as well.
As for firepower: "If an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) had shown up, that would have definitely ruined our day because at that range they could have taken out a vehicle," Ortega said. "I did not want to stay there without any backup; 30 of our guys vs. a whole population did not calculate well with me."
He wanted his attacks to be swift and contained. As soon as his men killed terrorists, Ortega ordered them to pull back. The whole battle took 15 minutes. Despite the bombing and the assault, not a single GI was seriously hurt.
"There's been a lot of speculation that guardsmen are not equal to active duty, but I think we proved we are capable of doing the same missions as our active component brothers," Ortega said.
Ready For Action
Clark notes that G Battery had seen numerous convoy battles and knew how to react when that IED went off: Hit back hard and shut the threat down.
How much credit for the group's readiness belongs to Ortega?
"All of it," Clark said. "It is his company. He is responsible for how well they do and any failures they have."
Within 48 hours of the shootout, G Battery was back on the road running missions.
Two months later, Ortega learned he was up for the Bronze Star.
"I didn't really want it just because I did what I thought was right at that time," he said. "But if I were to do it all over again, I still believe it was the right thing to do."
Nowadays Ortega is stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., studying at the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies.