Carnivore (15 page)

While we were asleep, the other Cav troops went back across the bridge and secured it. The next day, an infantry unit came up and did a blocking position on the town, locking it up a bit tighter. As soon as they were in position, however, the Iraqis opened up with D5 artillery again. One of the infantry's Bradleys, parked behind the berm just across the bridge where I'd hidden out for most of the day before, took a direct hit that killed everybody in the vehicle. It was pretty vicious. I don't know if the Iraqi spotter moved, or they just got lucky, but things like that make you think. What if that had been us? Why did they get hit, and we didn't? I got a medal, and they got killed. There was no reason to it, and trying to make any sense out of it could drive you crazy.

That day the Iraqis were throwing D5 rounds everywhere, and our whole troop was displacing all day, moving around to keep from getting hit by the artillery. First Sergeant Grigges told the Hemmitt fuelers and the ammo truck to stick with him no matter what, but I don't think he quite thought that order through. As we were getting hit by artillery, he was trying to haul ass and maneuver away from it in his M113, and he had that huge 5,000-gallon Hemmitt fueler right on his ass, not letting him get away. The fueler, following orders, wanted to stay with him, and Grigges was trying to get away from the fueler, because, well, it's a big bomb. That was funny as hell to watch, like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

That evening I picked up two combat engineers on my vehicle, because once we'd been blooded, command assigned engineers to the squadron. One of the engineers' vehicles, an M113 APC, broke down. We abandoned it, took everything off it, and spread the crew among our vehicles. The Carnivore got two of them, including a great Korean kid named Sun, so then we were six. We also managed to fix Sully's M240B, so all of our weapons—minus the M4 shredded by the mortar round—were back in business.

Our original objective was to hold the bridges so the armor units—a tank battalion—could pass through us. We would follow them through to the other side of town and hold the bridge over there, then do a feint and make the Iraqis think we were attacking that way. After dodging artillery for the better part of a day, Captain McCoy decided that a change of plans was in order. Instead of going through the town, we'd go around it. As Samawah was just costing us too much time, and we weren't going to be able to get where we needed to be if we kept banging our collective heads against this town, where we hadn't even thought we'd see much resistance.

The Squadron Commander decided that since Crazy Horse Troop had done so much in the battle of As Samawah, he would give us a break. That night, at dusk, Apache Troop moved out. Bravo Troop followed them. Our job was to follow Apache and Bravo, protecting the field trains. We had the fuelers, the ammo trucks, the headquarters platoon, all the soft-skinned and supply vehicles with us. We were heading to a town called Nafen, en route to An Najaf. All three troops would be following the same route, but because we were bypassing As Samawah, command told us enemy contact wasn't likely, and it would be an easy move. Riiiiight.

We were supposed to take a lateral route, almost a scenic tour, that had us going through farm fields on back roads and then along some canal roads, but the canal bridges weren't big enough to support us. We started along that route, but soon realized we had to turn around, and actually took a mortar round at that first bridge. I could cross the bridge, but Broadhead couldn't, and that seemed to be the story line all the way through Iraq—the Bradleys could make it, the tanks couldn't. The problem for armor in Iraq was the deep canals everywhere. The canals are 10 feet deep and 15 feet wide, with concrete banks and fast-moving water, so there's no way you can ford them. So we had to cross using the bridges, which were designed for trucks and tractors. The Bradleys could make it across most of the bridges, pushing our luck, but at 60 tons the M1s just couldn't. We actually had two tanks fall through bridges, so command said to stay on the main road. We stayed on the main road.

The official designation of the road we took was Route Appaloosa, and it paralleled the Euphrates River. Appaloosa headed in a general northwest direction and stretched between As Samawah and An Najaf, the two largest cities in the area.

There were three roads that went north from As Samawah. Command knew there was a lot of enemy in the area north of As Samawah, including armor, but the trick was to get them to show themselves. Our plan was to get into a fight and bait them into engaging us in force. We wanted to get into a decisive engagement with them and make them commit, thinking we were the main effort. Because we were Cav, we had our own artillery, our own reconnaissance, our own aircraft, and our own armor—we could throw a lot of weight around for our size. Once they committed, we would then bring the armor brigades in and crush them. It didn't quite work out that way.

It was dark when Crazy Horse Troop started rolling. The Carnivore was in the lead, with Broadhead and the Camel Toe right behind us. We weren't moving fast, and we weren't trying to—we were leading over 100 wheeled vehicles of all types. Apache and Bravo, two troops filled with aggressive guys just itching for a fight, were out front, and we knew they'd take care of the heavy lifting.

The road we were driving on was elevated, with fields and occasional houses off to either side in the distance. We'd been on the road an hour and had covered about 10 miles, when Specialist Bobby Hull in Broadhead's M1 spotted a cow off in the field. For whatever reason, Hull decided to shoot at the cow using the tank's .50-cal—and that touched off the longest ambush in military history. For the record, that is only the first of two cow-initiated ambushes I experienced in Iraq.

When Hull shot at the cow, guys hiding behind the cow ran in every direction, and beyond the cow was an Iraqi BMP. The BMP is a tracked infantry fighting vehicle, and as soon as those guys started scrambling away from the cow the BMP opened fire on us. That was apparently the signal for the ambush, because the world around us exploded.

“Contact dismounts east!” Broadhead yelled over the radio, which was not good, considering the BMP was to our west. We started taking mortars from the distant houses. Soprano spotted a pickup truck on a side road with a 14.5 mm heavy machine gun mounted in the back and took that out with the 25 mm. We were ducks in a row on that road, and moving slow. The Iraqis had a target-rich environment.

When responding to an ambush, there are two ways to react: you can fight, by assaulting the ambushers, or you can run. Acting as an escort to 100 slow-moving vehicles, we couldn't really do either. Our job was to protect those vehicles. We could slow some vehicles down and let other vehicles pass us, but we had to keep them inside our formation so we could provide protection. Our major defense was speed. When the mortars and bullets started flying everybody sped up, but with that amount of traffic, nobody was going as fast as they could, much less as fast as they wanted to. Our plan was to get out of the ambush zone, as fast as possible. The only problem was, it never seemed to end.

Staff Sergeants John Williams and Heath Thayer in Third Platoon were doing all they could in their Bradleys. They would stop and fire at the enemy and let the fuel trucks pass through them, then race up ahead of them and do it again.

Mortars were hitting the road when the medical platoon passed through it. One of the medic trucks was hit, on fire, and taking small arms fire. The medic platoon's First Lieutenant, Sammy Gram, stopped his truck in the middle of the firefight and engaged the enemy until his soldiers were in another vehicle and rolling.

BMPs were positioned in alleys between buildings and would take keyhole shots, shooting through a narrow slot across the road. They could hear us coming and were just launching rounds across the road hoping that somebody would run into them. Their 30 mm tracers would zip right across the road. I just slowed down as I was coming up, and when I could see the corner of their vehicle I would just start shooting into (through) the buildings to get at them. I'd watch for the explosion, then we'd roll up to where the next one was firing. We were hitting the BMPs with DU rounds, and a few not hiding behind buildings we hit from 1,000 meters while driving down the road.

As we kept moving forward, getting closer to town, there were a lot of trees on the side of the road and houses built right up next to it. A lot of the houses had little concrete-block walls, and Iraqis were hiding behind the houses, behind the trees, behind the walls, and had dug foxholes right on the side of the road.

“Run over them,” I told Sperry, pointing at the foxholes on the right side of the road. He did, and the weight of the Bradley crushed the guys in them, while Sully shot the Iraqis to the left. There was no finesse to it, but there rarely is in war. Half the time Sully was shooting his M240B with the buttstock sticking straight up into the air, shooting right down into the ditches, that's how close the Iraqis were.

Soprano engaged the Iraqis who were farther out and firing RPGs at us. Looking back behind me, all I could see were white lines from the firefights. The barrel of Broadhead's .50 was white hot. I fired the AK-47 I'd picked up to replace my gunner's shredded M4, reloading from the pile of loose mags we'd collected at As Samawah. When Sully's ready box was empty, if he didn't have time to fill it between incoming, he fired his M4/203 into the enemy. They were everywhere.

Up ahead I saw the back of a Bradley. We'd caught up with the forward unit and had to stop. All the ready boxes in my Bradley were out of ammo, and my crew was scrambling to upload. Sully was getting the ammo ready when I saw eight mortar tubes and more than 100 dismounts in the wood line to my left.

“Contact left, one hundred meters, multiple dismounts and mortar tubes!”

All I could do was watch as the mortars fired at me and the dismounts charged the road. The first mortar round knocked me down into the turret. Mortar rounds hit almost on top of the Bradley. A direct hit would kill us all. I heard our vehicles in front and behind me start hammering the wood line. Broadhead called over the radio.

“Red 2, stay down inside the turret, you've got guys almost on top of you. I'm going to take care of it.”

I kept inside the turret, opened the turret shield door, grabbed Sully by the leg, and pulled him down into the safety of our Bradley. Heavy machine-gun fire hit the side of my vehicle and raked back and forth.

“We're getting hit!” Sully yelled.

“No shit!”

Then Broadhead's calm voice came over the net: “Red 2, you're clear.” Broadhead had hosed down my Bradley with 7.62 mm machine-gun fire, killing three Iraqi soldiers trying to climb aboard. Dismounts were swarming everywhere.

If you're wondering what the hell had happened to Alpha and Bravo Troop, when they went rolling down the road they weren't getting much fire. The Iraqis could see that both troops consisted of armored vehicles, so they were waiting for a more inviting target—which was us. When Alpha and Bravo did receive fire, they usually did the smart thing and hit the gas pedal. They just didn't know we were getting hammered as hard as we were.

The Squadron Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Farrell, was riding with Alpha Troop. He had no idea what we were going through until the squadron Executive Officer (XO), First Lieutenant Keith Miller, called him up. Miller was riding in our train. He was normally a happy-go-lucky guy, a third-generation soldier who had joined our troop just before we headed to Kuwait, but when he was finally able to get through to the Colonel on the radio, he in no uncertain terms expressed his wish that Alpha and Bravo start killing the bastards shooting up the supply train. That's why we ran up on the back of a Bradley—Alpha was stalled in a big firefight and had stopped to slug it out with the Iraqis instead of speeding out of the kill zone like they'd been doing.

I had never seen anything like what was happening in front of me at that moment. My entire troop was all firing at the same time, in every direction. It was massive—120 mm, 25 mm, .50-cal, and 7.62 mm, tracers and explosions, incoming AK and RPG fire, Iraqis running and screaming, BMPs blindly firing straight across the road. We might have technically been in their kill zone, but in fact they were in ours. Our training and weapons and armor were the best in the world. We were just too well equipped.

The cross talk over the radio was constant and, considering what we were facing, surprisingly calm and professional. I heard everyone from Staff Sergeant Harris, our maintenance Platoon Sergeant, to First Sergeant Grigges. Everyone was working the net, laying fire into the Iraqis, calling out targets. Sergeant Christner had his Bradley firing on an Iraqi mortar position to our left front. Enemy mortar rounds landed all the way around him, but his crew was very lucky and didn't take a hit. Every round he fired hit true, and the mortar team died in place. Staff Sergeant May, Christner's M1 wingman, fired 120 mm HEAT rounds into another mortar position.

Geary's Bradley was running a lot better and he got some payback—his 25 mm was barking like a mad dog in a cat farm. He only stopped firing long enough to reload his coax machine gun.

I heard Harris talking to Sergeant Willey, and with their .50s they were killing Iraqi troops who had moved to within feet of the road. They couldn't use the sights on their vehicles because the Iraqis were too low and close, so they were holding their NVGs (night vision goggles) with one hand while they fired their .50s with the other, walking the tracers into the dismounts. Third and Fourth Platoons were firing up 200 dismounts in a nearby wood line. Sergeant First Class Lessane and Staff Sergeant Hamilton, from Fourth Platoon, were engaging dismounts who had been trying to work their way up to the support vehicles in the dark. They didn't even get close.

Remember how Williams's fuel cell had been cracked right after entering Iraq? Well, at this time, he had commandeered Sowby's Bradley and was towing the Casanova behind it. He ended up renaming his new ride Casanova 2. His 25 mm was to the front, though, and he was able to slew his turret and engage targets as fast as he could identify them. We emptied and reloaded our ready boxes at least twice. The wood lines on both sides of the road were on fire before we finished our very slow roll-through.