Carnivore (12 page)

I learned later that when Sergeant Christner's radio went out, he was doing everything else he could to get information about what was happening on our side of the bridge. The rest of the unit wasn't even quite sure where we were. Christner desperately wanted to find out how he could assist me and Broadhead, but with the confusion and my radio being out, he was unable to do so.

Iraqi mortar rounds started landing all over, and we could see a mortar team out in the field, between 300 and 400 meters away. Broadhead turned his main gun on them and blew them up, then called me on the radio—I could talk to him, maybe because he was so close, but that was it.

“We need to get the fuck out of here. My gunner needs time to reload the ready box.”

“Roger that. You lead out and I'll follow you so you don't get an RPG in the grille.” The weakest part of an M1 is its ass, where the grille and exhaust are.

Broadhead charged out of there and headed for the road. I fired the 25 mm right past him at a truck filled with dismounts in the back. Broadhead just rammed the truck and knocked it out of the way, then floored his tank.

The Camel Toe popped out on the road with us right behind it, and in front of us was a large, blunt-nosed flatbed truck. There were half a dozen Iraqis in the back of it, one with an RPG. The guy with the RPG fired, but the warhead hit the road and rolled off into the ditch before blowing up. The backblast blew out the rear window of the truck, which veered off to the side and hit a wall. All of the men who were in the back of the truck flipped out and landed in the road, holding their heads and faces, which had been burned by the backblast. I grabbed the control for the main gun and put a long burst into them, and then Soprano hit them with the coax for good measure.

A huge barrage of what I first thought were mortar rounds started falling all around us, so many that it looked like the world was raining dirt. We discovered later it was Iraqi artillery, D5s, pounding us. They hit the road; they hit cars; they struck buildings, Iraqi civilians, everything. The D5s were big 152 mm artillery pieces.

What with the M1 being faster than a Bradley, and our brief pause to finish off the truck, Broadhead got close to a 400-meter lead on us. As his M1 hit the bridge, artillery rounds were falling right behind him, blowing huge holes in the road.

We were close to the bridge and rolling as fast as possible when more rounds hit in front of and all around us. One of them was so close it damaged the Carnivore's track, and we started jinking wildly.

“Fuck, Sarge, that hit fucked up our track!” Sperry announced. “I can't go straight anymore, or right. It'll only go left.”

“Do what you can,” I told him.

Sperry did a great job keeping control of the Bradley and turned off the road just before the bridge. He got us into a protected spot between a berm and the raised railroad tracks.

It only took me a few seconds to realize that we were the only American unit still on our side of the river. We were probably a mile from the American forces posted at the bridge, with Iraqis all around us, in a Bradley with a busted track and no radio. I discovered our coax had been damaged in the firefight as well, so neither of our M240s worked. Shit.

W
e could see both the compound we'd thrashed and another, larger one beyond it. We didn't know it at the time, but that larger compound was a Fedayeen training barracks, and the area was swarming with Iraqis. We'd had no idea that either the police station or the military compound were there. Let me edit that statement: I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in the U.S. command structure knew that the two compounds were spitting distance from our objective, they just neglected to tell us.

The Fedayeen facility was four times as large as the police station compound, and I could see hundreds of Iraqis organizing and looking for someone to kill. They'd heard me and seen Broadhead driving around, but at that moment they weren't quite sure where we were. Or, possibly, they knew where we were and were working up the courage to come after us again. Meanwhile, the mortar and artillery teams were still dropping rounds everywhere.

“Sperry! Get in the back and start loading HE into the ready boxes!” The HE came in 25-round links, and filling up the 270-round box took 10 minutes. “Soprano, see if you can spot those fucking mortars.” Meanwhile, I checked out Sully.

Both his hands were cut up from shrapnel, but his CamelBak, a soft-skinned canteen that covered his back, had helped save his life. He was stunned, though, and a little bit out of it. I was bleeding from everywhere and couldn't hear out of my right ear, but I was alive.

While back there, I grabbed our spare antenna and started trying to attach it, but it was really hard for me to grip anything. I was losing dexterity in my hands because of the shrapnel, plus I was fuzzy-headed from the mortar round going off right above us. I'm pretty sure I sustained a concussion. I always carry a Leatherman multitool, but I wasn't able to get it open because of my injuries.

“Soprano! Don't you have a multitool?”

“Yeah, Sarge, here.”

He had a Gerber Multi-Plier, which was designed to be opened with one hand. I was able to get it open, twist the wires together on the radio mount, and tighten them while holding another part. Just then, somebody must have spotted us, because we began taking fire from something heavy, maybe a 12.7 mm (their equivalent of a .50-cal machine gun). It was kicking up dirt all around us, trying to pound through the berm.

“I got it!” Soprano was listening to the net as I worked on the antenna mount, and he yelled out when he heard Sergeant First Class Talmadge Lee Bennett's voice over the radio net. MacGyver can kiss my ass.

I can't tell you how happy I'd been to hear that Bennett was our mortar platoon leader. He was from Jacksonville, Florida, and had been in the Ranger Battalion for a number of years. He was the man you wanted on the other end of the radio when you need indirect fire and you needed it to bracket the target quick. I got on the comm as fast as I could.

“This is Red 2, Red 2, does anybody copy, over.”

“Roger, Red 2, Jesus. Where the hell have you been? Uh, over.”

Let me tell you, they were as happy to hear from me as I was from them. They'd been doing everything they could to raise me on the net. I reported our situation to Bennett, told him we needed some mortars and quick, and gave him the grid coordinates. Soprano had spotted the mortar team along a tree line, and we were getting tired of them hanging 120 mm projectiles in our general direction. I could see them with my binoculars—which were badly damaged, so at that point it was a monocular, but that one side still worked. The tree line was actually a date grove, and I could see a whole bunch of bad guys in there, waiting to do some serious damage to the Americans.

Our mortar track was an M113 with a 120 mm mortar mounted in the back of it and had a range close to four miles. Bennett fired one ranging round and then waited for our call, as he couldn't see what he was aiming at. That first round hit, and it was close enough.

“Fire for effect!”

Our mortar track opened up, blew apart the Iraqi mortar team, and killed everybody in the area. They fired 20 rounds, and after that there were no more Iraqi mortars making the sky rain mud. We were still taking fire from the heavy machine gun, however, wherever the hell it was, and now we were taking small arms incoming as well. My radio kept going in and out, so I was only getting part of the troop's conversation.

At that point I saw a missile fly out of the town. I wasn't sure if it was a SAM (surface-to-air missile) or SSM (surface-to-surface missile), but I think it was a SAM. It got everybody on the net all hot and bothered—missiles tend to do that. Meanwhile I was pulling parts off Sully's M240 in the back, trying to get the coax M240 in my turret working again. I got it running without too much trouble.

During the fight our TOW launcher had been damaged. I don't know if it took an RPG or what, but the hydraulic arm that raised and lowered it had been blasted away. The way the launcher was hanging, it was actually interfering with the turret traversing. We had to climb out of the Bradley with the tanker's bar, which is nothing more than a giant 60-pound crowbar, and crank on it. We pried the launcher up and then ratchet-strapped it down to keep it out of the way.

Even though our mortars had pounded the Iraqis, they were still all over the place, and we kept taking fire. The Troop Commander, Captain Jeff McCoy, called me up on the radio.

“Red 2, did you plan on coming back to this side of the river any time soon?”

“Roger that, sir, we're still working on the track.” That D5 round put a bunch of gashes in the hull and the wheels, and hit the Adler arm for the sprocket gear, which provides the tension. We could see the track shoe was messed up, but it looked like the only part we were missing was a pin. We put a pin in, but we didn't have any tension on the track, which meant we couldn't really turn or drive faster than a slow jog, but at least we'd be able to move.

I radioed in the details of my situation and requested air support.

“Red 2, I'm going to send the platoon to you, and to seize the objective. If you're in a protected position just wait there.”

Broadhead and I had crossed the bridge around 7
A.M.
, and by now it was barely an hour later, yet it seemed like days had passed. He'd run the Camel Toe to fumes and was still getting refueled when the rest of the troop headed toward the bridge. Staff Sergeants Carter and Geary were heading to the bridge in their Bradleys, accompanied by Staff Sergeant Fred Housey in his M1.

Geary was in the lead and had made it almost to our side of the bridge when all hell broke loose. The wood line in front of me opened up with small arms fire, RPGs, and mortars, and the D5s started coming down again. Something big landed right next to Geary's Bradley—Circus Freaks—and blew the ground out from underneath his track. Circus Freaks slid down the bank on the edge of the road, hanging by one track at such an angle that he couldn't engage anything with his main gun or coax. Carter and Housey pulled back under orders from Captain McCoy, because a direct hit by a D5 could take them out. So much for our rescue.

All of the Iraqis scared out of the area or shut down by our mortars saw Geary's track just hanging there and came running back. They were everywhere, and beyond his track on the low ground (which I couldn't see) were even more Iraqis. They had all come from the military compound and were sticking to the low ground and wadis to make their approach. I couldn't see them, but I could hear a hell of a lot of shooting.

I got on the radio to Bennett again and called in more mortars on the positions I could see, and his crew filled the air, but there were too many Iraqis, moving too fast, and a lot of them I couldn't see because of the low ground.

My crew and I could only watch Geary's Bradley taking fire, and after fifteen minutes it was getting bad. I could see him popping up from his hatch, firing his M4 in every direction just to make the Iraqis keep their distance. My radio was going in and out, and most of the time I could only reach Bennett. I never could reach Geary. Carter and Housey had displaced across the bridge and I kept looking for someone to come help Geary, but no one did. I learned later that Captain McCoy had been working on a plan to get Geary and coordinate counterbattery fire, while the rest of the vehicles were fueling. He also didn't know just how bad Geary's situation was, but at the time it seemed to us like Geary was on his own, as if the squadron had abandoned him. I thought it had to be us or no one.

“Guys, he's screwed, we've got to go help him. What do you want to do?”

In Kuwait, when we had nothing to do, we were each other's worst enemy, but when the bullets started flying, my crew did what had to be done. They could see the shit storm of lead raining down on Geary, knew that we'd be heading into a world of hurt, but still they looked at me and said, “It's your call, Sarge.”

“Fuck it, let's go.”

W
ounded, the Carnivore could only do five miles an hour, and we might throw track if we tried any serious turns, so we couldn't exactly race to Geary's side. We got the Carnivore rolling toward the bridge and almost immediately spotted 20 Iraqis off to our right who had worked their way into a ditch directly across from our position. They had been expecting to ambush us, and instead we surprised them. I slewed the turret around and engaged them with the coax M240, and we continued our slow crawl toward the bridge.

Another Iraqi mortar barrage came in, but it fell short of Geary's Bradley. The Iraqis didn't seem to have any concept of friendly fire, because they were dropping rounds on their own guys.

As soon as we pulled out from behind the berm the amount of incoming rattling off our Bradley grew immensely. Soprano let a long burst of 25 mm go into the wood line, and I opened up with the coax on the dismounts getting close to Geary. There were a few in front of his vehicle on the road, and the ones we didn't kill took off running.

Sperry pulled the Carnivore onto the road near Geary's Bradley, and we dropped the ramp. We hadn't been able to reach him on the radio, but he'd seen us coming and knew what he and his crew needed to do.

“Let's go, let's go!” I yelled. I headed out on foot with the AK-47 I'd picked up at the police compound and covered his crew as they headed toward my Bradley. I don't know why I left the Bradley. I could have covered Geary and his crew from my hatch, but for some reason I climbed down. There was a huge amount of fire coming at his vehicle from the far side, down low in the field where I couldn't see, and I hooked around the back of Circus Freaks. There I found a cutout leading into a ditch running alongside the road, jumped down there—and found myself looking at 20 Iraqis, firing wildly up at Geary's track. Oh, shit.