Battle of Haditha Dam
The Battle of Haditha Dam took place in 2003. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, United States Army Rangers seized the Haditha Dam on 1 April in order to prevent it from being destroyed. Destruction of the dam would have significantly affected the functioning of the country's electrical grid and could cause major flooding downstream from the dam. Background. One of the largest dams in the world, the Haditha complex provided fully one-third of the Iraqi electrical grid load in 2003. Located northwest of Baghdad, the dam was built during the Cold War to  provide hydroelectric power for central Iraq, including Baghdad. The Haditha Dam also controlled the flow of the Euphrates into the lower Euphrates/Tigris River Valley. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, United States Army Rangers seized the Haditha Dam on 1 April in order to prevent it from being destroyed. The destruction of the dam would have significantly affected the functioning of the country's electrical grid and could cause major flooding downstream from the dam. Along with providing flood control and a third of Iraq's electrical generation capacity, the dam provided the only other crossing of the Euphrates  River west of Baghdad. An additional bonus would be by capturing both locations the Iraqi Army would be drawn away from their defense of Baghdad, which was under assault by the US Army V Corps. However, the Iraqi high command were not ignorant of the dam's strategic value, and they had stationed a powerful defensive force in and around the Haditha Dam. The Battle. The battle started on 24 March 2003 when Rangers from 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, conducted a combat parachute drop onto H-1 Air Base, securing the site as a staging area for operations in the  west. Delta Force recce operators drove through Iraqi lines around the Haditha Dam on customised ATVs, marking targets for Coalition airstrikes resulting in the eventual destruction of a large number of Iraqi armored vehicles and antiaircraft systems. The Delta team's reconnaissance of the dam indicated that a larger force would be needed to seize and hold it, so a request was made and approved for a second Delta squadron from Fort Bragg to be dispatched with a further Ranger battalion, along with M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks from C Company, 2nd Battalion 70th Armored Regiment. C-17s flew the tank  company and Ranger battalion from Talil to H-1 and then to MSS (Mission Support Site) Grizzly, a desert strip runway established by Delta Force located between Haditha and Tikrit; C Squadron, Delta Force was flown directly to MSS Grizzly. On 1 April, C squadron, Delta Force and 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment conducted a night-time ground assault into the target on foot and in armored vehicles against the Haditha Dam complex. Three Ranger platoons seized the dam's administrative buildings with after initially heavy opposition, while a pair of AH-6 little birds orbited overhead providing close air support to  the Rangers. However, it took the Rangers many hours to clear the dam complex due to its huge size and the hundreds of rooms it contained. Soon after daybreak, the Rangers from the 3rd Company on the western side of the dam started taking RPG fire where Staff Sergeant Ronnie Jones, a Ranger sniper killed three Iraqi soldiers equipped with RPGs. One of the Ranger's rounds went through an Iraqi soldier and into a nearby propane tank, which exploded and killed the other two members of the RPG team. Meanwhile, Rangers on the eastern side engaged a truck carrying  fourteen Iraqi soldiers leading to a firefight that the Rangers won, killing at least five Iraqis. When it was over, Duncan and battalion command sergeant major Alfred Birch rescued three of the wounded Iraqis who had fallen down a steep hill while under fire. For their actions against the enemy, they both received the Silver Star. South of the dam, a Ranger platoon secured the dam's power station and electricity transformer against sabotage. Elsewhere, another Ranger platoon established road blocks on the main road leading into the dam complex to prevent the Iraqis from recapturing that area of the  dam. The road blocks came under sporadic mortar and rocket fire, resulting in the AH-6 helicopters flying multiple gun runs to silence the Iraqi mortar and rocket positions. Another mortar team, firing from a small island, was engaged and silenced by a Ranger Javelin team. The Ranger 3rd Company endured a withering barrage of Iraqi small-arms fire from a pair of buildings, which continued over the next three days, until the Rangers were forced to call in twenty airstrikes on the structures. All day on 1 April, groups of fifty to one-hundred Iraqi soldiers engaged in "human wave