Carnivore (11 page)

There was a small guardhouse right next to Broadhead's tank. A guy kept popping out of it and firing his AK up at him. Broadhead turned the M1's main gun on it and from point-blank range let go with a 120 mm HEAT round. The little building disintegrated, and concrete blocks went flying everywhere. My Bradley got hit with concrete chunks as well as body parts. Broadhead continued to light up the dismounts with his .50 and fired main gun rounds into the buildings.

There was another small pickup truck full of about six guys in uniform trying to get away, and Soprano hit it with the Bradley's main gun. His first round hit a soldier in the chest and he literally disappeared. The next three rounds destroyed the truck and everything in it. I wouldn't have believed the 25 mm was able to do that much damage if I hadn't seen it myself.

Sully was in the back, firing the 240 into a group of Iraqis charging us. Soprano was chewing everything up with the 25 mm, and I was nailing guys with the M4 as fast as I could pull the trigger, reloading, and shooting some more. I saw movement to the right and yelled, “Pivot right!” Soprano slewed the turret.

There was a group of five or six Iraqis holding their hands up or on their knees, hoping we wouldn't kill them. Iraqis were bleeding out everywhere, vehicles were on fire, screams filled the air, and I could see about 60 Iraqis on the ground in the immediate vicinity, dead, dying, or wounded.

Everyone in the compound was wearing what we called “salad suits,” which was the Iraqi military camouflage. We found out later we had rolled into a Ba'ath Party police station, and that was their uniform of choice. Police or not, they were all trying to kill us, but we didn't even know the compound was there until we drove into it.

“Sully, on my six!” I jumped down from the Bradley with the M4 and Sully joined me, while Soprano and Sperry provided overwatch. Sully had his M4 in his hands and was trying to look everywhere at once.

“Hey, I see movement around back, I'm going to check that out,” Broadhead yelled to me.

“Roger, I'm going to clean this area up.” I was looking for prisoners more than anything. I told Sully, “Cover those guys, and see if anybody else wants to surrender—but watch your ass!”

There was a brand-new New Holland tractor just sitting inside this compound, and it seemed out of place to me. I shot it a couple of times with the M4. Soprano was in the turret, hand on the Commander's override of the coax in case something happened. The area was a kaleidoscope of smoke and flames and blood and moans.

Three guys showed themselves in a nearby building, and I shot them with the M4. Somehow we'd parked the Bradley on top of a bunker, and I saw movement inside it. I stuck the muzzle of the M4 in there and emptied it. In all I fired fourteen 30-round magazines through that M4 on three-round burst, but I finally was out of ammo. After tossing the M4 on top of the Bradley, I picked up an AK-47. Sully was rounding up casualties in the open, and I started checking buildings. There were a few guys moving around inside one of the rooms and I emptied the AK through a window at them, then reloaded and went in and cleared it. Finding fresh magazines for that gun was never a problem; there were rifles lying everywhere.

I found one guy hiding in a little building, and as soon as I walked into the building he came at me. I buttstroked him with the rifle and knocked his two front teeth out. He half fell into me, and I grabbed him by the front of his shirt, took him outside, and threw him on the ground. He was an officer, obviously—he had the best uniform on, and it was all clean and pressed.

Between Sully and me we rounded up close to 15 EPWs (enemy prisoners of war). Broadhead was still running around in the field beyond the compound we were in, dealing with machine-gun and mortar teams and dozens of dismounts with AKs (although we didn't know that at the time, we could hear the shooting). As we were standing there, about eight vehicles drove up on the road and stopped next to the compound. Most of them were pickup trucks, and all of them were painted white with orange fenders and/or bumpers front and back. We'd never seen those before but naturally assumed they were Fedayeen vehicles, because that's who got out.

The Fedayeen Saddam was a loyalist paramilitary group established in Iraq in 1995. Saddam used them to do all sorts of nasty stuff. Wearing black track suits and carrying AK-47s and RPGs, they looked like Iraqi ninjas. From the eight vehicles about 60 men dismounted, not much more than 30 meters away from us. The funny thing was, they never even looked in our direction—they were gesturing and pointing at the bridge, the direction we'd come from. We didn't fire on them immediately because we weren't quite sure whose side they were on; we'd been told the Iraqis would greet us with chocolate and American flags and puppies. I wondered if perhaps they were there to help us.

Most of them ran to the first truck, a Toyota with a heavy machine gun in the back of it. There was a guy there giving directions, pointing back at the canal bridge, which was being held by an M1 and a Bradley. Sully and I looked at each other, him with an M4 in his hands and me with an AK.

“What the fuck?” I said. Did these guys really not see us? Standing broadside to us, only 30 yards away, were 60 guys and 8 vehicles, and they don't even know we're there?

I signaled Soprano in the turret to get ready to fire, and Sullivan and I took aim. He took the guy on the machine gun and I aimed at the guy who I thought was in charge.

“Wait until I fire,” I told my crew, as I was still waiting to see whose side the Fedayeen were on. When they took out an RPG launcher and aimed it at the bridge, I knew. I had the AK on full auto and fired three rounds, hitting their Commander in the chest; he turned and fell to the ground. Sully took out the machine gunner and Soprano let about 35 rounds of 25 mm fly into the men and the vehicles on full auto. They were so close Soprano could hardly get the barrel of the gun down low enough to engage them, and we had the same problem with the coax, but where that main gun did hit it was the nastiest thing I had ever seen. We were out of HE in the ready box, and so Soprano engaged them with DU (depleted uranium) rounds. The 25 mm ripped and dismembered the men all to hell, turned them inside out, and the trucks broke apart like toys; meanwhile both Sully and I were shooting everybody we could see with our rifles.

The weird thing was, they didn't seem to know where the fire was coming from; I think they thought our guys at the bridge were shooting them. One of the Fedayeen ran and hid behind a wall, but the wall was between him and the bridge, not between him and us. We could see him fine. He was about 50 feet away from me, on the far side of the road, and I was shooting at him and shooting at him and the damn AK was not zeroed. It wasn't a hard shot, he wasn't really moving, just squatting behind that low wall with his rifle, but I couldn't hit shit. The rounds were flying over his head or hitting the dirt at his feet, and he had no idea where the bullets were coming from. I wasn't the only guy shooting at that time, and wherever Broadhead was it sounded like he was in the middle of a small war.

Finally I shot at the wall, just to see where my AK was hitting, then adjusted my aim and with the last shot in the magazine hit the man in the head. He fell over sideways and didn't move. By that time pretty much everybody else in and around the trucks was dead. Two of the trucks had tried to get away, but didn't make it.

“Stay with them!” I yelled at Sully, pointing to the EPWs still cowering on the ground. I grabbed another magazine for the AK and headed for the road on foot.

Everybody was down, but not out, and there were a number of Fedayeen crawling around in the ditch beside the road with their AKs. I shot half a dozen guys, then ran back to Sully and the Iraqis, and everybody was right where I left them.

“All right!” I started looking for the guy with the good uniform and found him in the group.

“Call the Commander,” I yelled up to Soprano. “Tell him we're going to be bringing him prisoners.”

Mr. Iraqi Officer with the nice uniform just looked at me as I pulled him up and started walking him to the back of the Bradley. Only one or two of the EPWs could fit in my overstuffed Bradley, and officers are usually the only guys who know anything. He was between me and the other prisoners as I pulled him toward the back of the vehicle. Just then a mortar round landed right in the middle of the group of prisoners on the ground. I was blown backward onto my ass and tasted blood, but I seemed to have all my parts. There was shrapnel in my hands, but luckily I still had my CVC helmet on, with its Kevlar cover. It protected my hearing and my skull. If the ground hadn't been sand, or those prisoners hadn't been there to absorb the blast, or the EPW I'd been bringing to the Brad hadn't been between me and the mortar explosion, it probably would have killed me.

The Iraqi I was leading got hit by a big piece of scrap metal and most of his nose was gone. Blood gushed down his face and was coming out of both of his ears. Some of the prisoners I'd grouped together on the ground were screaming and spurting blood, and the rest weren't moving at all.

“Mortar!” I yelled to my guys. “Get ready to move! Get ready to move!”

The hell with taking any prisoners. “Run!” I told the Iraqi I'd dragged over to the Bradley. He probably couldn't hear me with the blood coming out of his ears, but when I kicked him in the ass he got the message and took off running. There was no need for him to die, and I had a feeling things were going to get messy. The other EPWs still able to move understood my hand signals and made for the buildings as well.

You never know what's going to happen in a war, but that guy, that officer, he made it back to our troop's position later so he could be treated for his wounds. Not only did half his nose get shot off, he took a bullet in the stomach. He was the one who told us that the compound we rolled into was a police station, even though they were wearing military uniforms. Headquarters ended up medevacing him out of there. I wonder where he ended up.

I
climbed into the back of the Bradley and had just gotten into the turret when another mortar round hit the top of a palm tree over us and exploded, like an air burst.

The blast knocked me back down into the turret and threw Sully down into the cargo compartment. My right eardrum burst, and the entire Brad got nailed by shrapnel—pieces of twisted steel were sticking out of the hull like broken glass on top of a wall. Sully got hit by shrapnel in his hands, and I had shrapnel in my legs, arms, and shoulders. My hands were even burned a little; that's how close we were to the round when it went off. The mortar shrapnel shredded everything on top of the Bradley—our duffel bags, the M240 we'd mounted on the back, our water cans, the GPS unit, and my binoculars. It also trashed the M4 that I'd thrown on top of the Bradley; only the SureFire flashlight on it worked after that.

Sperry panicked when the mortar round went off above us, and he floored the Carnivore. He ran over the New Holland tractor, then over a car—not easily, by the way, but he kept gunning it until we were over the top—while I was trying to get back in the hatch. He ran over a chain-link fence and some concertina wire, then smashed into a big diesel fuel container, leaving me with about 30 gallons of diesel sloshing around my feet, and he still was hauling ass, the engine wide open. Through it all there was an Iraqi hanging on the outside of the Bradley for dear life. I grabbed my Beretta and shot him three times, then that fucking pistol jammed again, so I had to hit him with the pistol in the face before he fell off. Finally I was able to climb out of my hatch and kick the driver's hatch to try to get Sperry's attention.

“Sperry! Sperry! Jason! Asshole!”

The hatch wasn't closed and I reached down inside through a gap and grabbed Sperry. I had to shake him to get him to stop, he was so panicked. “Plug in your fucking CVC so you can hear me on the comm,” I told him, then got his hatch closed and got myself back in the vehicle.

We found ourselves in a field outside the compound. Sully was down, and I didn't know how badly he was wounded. While I checked over Sully, Soprano slewed the gun around and engaged soldiers in the field who were shooting at us with AKs. There were guys everywhere, and at that time Broadhead showed up again in Camel Toe.

Sully was still alive, just stunned, and when I got back in my spot I saw that Broadhead had run right up on us. Just as I looked at his tank he opened up with his .50-cal, the rounds passing right in front of me.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled at him, then turned around and saw he'd engaged an RPG team setting up to engage the Bradley. Beyond his tank I saw a Fedayeen truck skid up, guys behind it with RPGs, and used the Commander's override to hit them with a burst of DU rounds that whipped right past Broadhead's face. It was like playing chicken, with guns. Big guns.

The field was full of guys firing at us with their AKs, and the incoming rounds were pinging off the hull and trashing Sully's disabled M240 even more. We were just about out of ammo for the M4s and Berettas, and we were down to the coax and only DU for the main gun. Rounds were flying everywhere and I was slewing the turret back and forth, engaging guys with DU. The problem, though, was the cargo hatch in back was open, so I couldn't slew the turret all the way around to fire or the concussion would turn Sully's brain to jelly.

I kept trying to contact command on the radio but couldn't. In the fog of war I either didn't realize or couldn't remember that our radio antenna had been first hit by an RPG and then completely destroyed by the mortar hit. Target-rich environments aren't so great when most of your weapons are either disabled or out of ammo and you don't have a working radio to call for help.