Carnivore (18 page)

“Take 'em out then.”

“Okay.” He opened up with his M4. He fired, paused, fired some more, then looked through the goggles again. “Oh, I think they still moving,” he said and fired again.

This honestly went on for close to half an hour, until I'd finally had enough. “Sun, quit the fucking shooting, you're going to use up all of your ammo.”

“It's okay, Sergeant Jay, I shooting Sully's ammo,” he told me cheerfully.

“Stop shooting at them!” I told him. “If they're not dead by now they deserve to get away.”

When morning rolled around I sent Sully out into the field to see what Sun had been shooting at. He called me on the radio. “Sarge, there's nothing out here but a cow that's been shot about a hundred times.”

“They must have been hiding behind the cow,” Sun told me. “There was two guys.”

“Two guys.”

“Yes, two guys walking in the field, holding a backpack between them.”

“Two guys,” I said slowly, “walking in the field?”

“Yes.”

“Holding a backpack between them?”

“Yes.”

“Right where that cow is.”

“Yes.”

“
Right
where that cow is?”

Sun looked at me for a few seconds, then his eyes went wide. “I no shoot cow, Sergeant Jay. I no shoot cow!” He seemed offended that I could even suggest such a thing.

The troop trucks showed up all night, at irregular intervals, and through the next day as well. We shot them, they ran off the road, we shot them and the troops scrambling around them some more, until the trucks were burning and everyone around them was dead. Then it was time to wait for the next one. The sandstorm abated for several hours during the day again, and we got what rest we could. While we were able to kill most of the soldiers in or around the vehicles, many were getting to cover. Those soldiers weren't giving up, however; they were working their way closer to us on foot, and the amount of small arms fire we were taking was growing. Because we were the point of the spear, all the ammo flowed up to us. The Hemmitt drivers and the crews of the other Bradleys ran ammo up to us whenever we were running low.

A lot of civilians have heard of AWACS planes and have a picture in their head of a jumbo-jet-sized aircraft with a white dish mounted on the top. We had something even better looking over us in Iraq, the JSTARS. The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System uses an Air Force's E-8C (basically a Boeing 707), and instead of all the high-tech sensors filling a giant dish on the top, they are in what looks like a long fuel pod under the forward fuselage. JSTARS can simultaneously track 600 targets on the ground at more than 250 km (152 miles).

As night fell, we got the word from command—JSTARS had spotted 44 T-72 tanks, an entire tank brigade, on the move toward Sergeant Williams's position. Oh, shit.

McCoy got on the radio. “White 4, I am going to need you to reposition.” He told Broadhead to move to the rear of the column to help support Third and Fourth Platoons.

Not 10 minutes after Broadhead left, Captain McCoy called me. “Um, Red 2, JSTARS reports that they have approximately one thousand troop trucks moving on your position.”

“Sir, can you repeat that, did you say one thousand troops?”

“Negative, Red 2, that is one thousand troop
trucks
.” If each truck carried up to 20 soldiers, I would be facing nearly 20,000 soldiers coming to take my bridge.

“Uhhhhh, Roger that. Sir, is there a chance I can get any indirect fire to support my position?”
Pretty, pretty please?

“Negative, Red 2,” McCoy told me. “You are still out of range.”

“Roger that, sir. How about air support?”

“We're working on it.”

Ten minutes later, the CO called, and I was hoping it was good news about the air support, even though I could see the sandstorm was still nasty. Nope. “Red 2,” he told me, sounding tired, “JSTARS now reports that they have twenty BMPs moving toward your position from the southeast.” First the troop trucks, now armored personnel carriers? The hits just keep on coming . . .

McCoy started doing whatever he could to make things as tough as possible for the Iraqis, but he hardly had any space to work with, much less pieces to move around the board. Broadhead was already in the rear, doing what he could to support Third and Fourth Platoons, to suppress the incoming small arms from the town until the tanks showed up. Then the real fun would begin. Headquarters Platoon had already tightened their positions all they could, but thin-skinned vehicles weren't going to be enough—the XO, First Lieutenant Keith Miller, had our troops start digging fighting positions and placing claymore antipersonnel mines on either side of the road.

Vehicles couldn't make it across the canal, but dismounted soldiers could. Contact was sporadic through the night, but no one was immune—the unit was fully engaged, including command. Captain McCoy was working on getting air support for us when Iraqi soldiers came running out of the darkness at his tank, positioned in the center of the column. McCoy grabbed the AK-47 I had given him earlier, aimed it at the Iraqis charging his side of the tank, and pulled the trigger. He stitched all three of them, emptied an entire 30-round magazine, fighting the rifle to keep it from climbing off target on full auto.

My Bradley was in the best position I could get, blocking the bridge. With Broadhead gone I moved Sergeant Wallace (Wild Wally) up on my right side and had McAdams watch our rear. There was nothing for me to do but wait: they would have to get through me to make it to the rest of the troop. Not knowing if I could stop everything coming down on me, I planted some C4 on the canal bridge. As I was hanging off the bridge, I dropped my demo bag into the canal—that was the last I saw of the Gerber multitool I'd commandeered off Soprano to fix the radio at As Samawah. Son of a . . .

While it may seem like we were just one unit, fighting to defend an insignificant bridge, that was the pivotal point of the conflict—if Saddam crushed us it could have been the turning point of the whole war. It would have been an entire cavalry squadron getting slaughtered. Because once they went through us, the armor, it would have been our fuel trains, our aviation assets, aviation fuel, aviation mechanics, cooks, supply guys, ammunition, headquarters maintenance element for the squadron,
everything
. Our entire package was sitting right there between me and Sergeant Williams.

Everybody was invested equally on this one. Our headquarters platoon, the people who normally are behind the lines, had dug foxholes and set up claymores, that's how bad it was. Captain McCoy called me on the radio.

“Red 2, I just wanted to let you know I have been moving heaven and earth to get you some air support, but as yet I have had no luck. The sandstorm is shutting everything down.” He'd been trying to get helicopters, get fixed wing, get something flying our way to give us some air support, but the sandstorm was just too tall. The attack air was all grounded. They brought in F-15s and F-18s, but they couldn't see anything. The ceiling on that fucking sandstorm was 15 miles. They couldn't drop on radar, not from that high, because they didn't want it to land on us. Even with all their smart bombs, they couldn't see through it, at least not accurately enough to keep from killing us. I knew McCoy knew the situation when he told me, “It's been an honor working with you, Crazy J. You're a super scout, thanks for leading us. I'm proud to have served with you.”

“Roger that, sir, the feeling is mutual.” We had a lull in the action, and for once my radio was working. I had a good, calm, five-minute conversation with my Troop Commander, a man I both respected and admired.

“When you boys are out of ammo, or out of the fight, you need to get the hell away from your Brad, get away from the road, because I'm going to have the entire troop firing at your Bradley on the bridge.”

“Yes sir.”

The First Sergeant, Roy Grigges, called us up on the radio as well. He knew the score. “It's been an honor and a pleasure working with you guys.” I told him the same. I'd been in the unit a long time, knew these men, knew their families, and they knew mine. Hell, Crazy Horse was a family.

When he signed off I called Sergeant John Williams, at the other end of the column in the Casanova. He and I had a great talk. We basically made our minds up, the two of us, that it stopped there. They weren't going to come any damn further, they weren't going to attack our wingmen, they weren't going to attack our unit. Regardless of what happened, he and I were going to stay in our turrets. When the driver was gone, and the rest of the crew was gone, we were going to stay there, and we were going to fight the good fight until it was over for us. And we were calm. We weren't scared, we were relaxed.

“I'm going to fight until I'm out of ammo, and then I'm going to go hand to hand,” I told him.

Sergeant Williams moved the Casanova up onto the bridge into the path of the expected T-72 tanks. He was not going to let them get by him. Williams said to me, “They ain't coming through me, brother. I'm going to fight until they get up on me, and when they take me out, they're going to take me out sideways and on fire, because they ain't crossing the fucking bridge.”

“Roger that.” The Carnivore at one bridge and the Casanova at the other. Somehow that seemed right.

I knew John Williams and his whole crew. I knew they would hold the bridge, and protect our rear or die trying.

When I got off the radio I looked at Sully. He'd been listening to the net, and my end of the conversation, and from the look on his pale face, he knew exactly what was going on.

“So we're drawing the line in the sand here?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

He just nodded. Nineteen years old, and a pain in my ass, but he'd proved himself to be a true soldier when the time came. He'd started the war a meek kid, and in five days he'd killed dozens of Iraqis, saved the lives of the crew over and over again, and never quit, not even in the face of overwhelming odds.

I got the attention of everybody in the Bradley and let them know the situation. “I don't know if we are going to make it out of this. If you see a fireball in the turret don't worry about us, we're done. Just get off and run to the closest farmhouse and stay there till daylight.”

I
knew there were all sorts of dismounts working their way toward us, because during the breaks in the weather—the sandstorm would be heavy, and then it would be light—we could see them and hear them shooting. We'd destroyed so many vehicles that 2,000 meters out, where the dogleg was, the road was actually blocked by burning trucks. The trucks kept coming, though, so they'd stop and the soldiers would get out and start walking, moving up in the ditches. Guys would stop from time to time and shoot for a while in our general direction. They knew we were there, but couldn't see us. Hell, we couldn't see them any better than they could see us, because the thermals didn't work for shit in the sandstorm. They didn't know where we were until they were right up on us.

The lack of sleep was getting to me. I had to concentrate very hard on even the smallest task, and I felt like I was moving in slow motion. As I stood there somewhere between awake and asleep, I heard the radio come alive: First Lieutenant McCormick, our fire support officer, came over the net and told everyone that we had air support, that we had aircraft stacked over us. Yeah, great—like we hadn't heard that before. The sandstorm was as bad as ever, or worse. Nothing could fly in it, and it was still too high.

Ten minutes later Sergeant Williams came across the radio net. “Contact tanks! Lot of tanks!”

He couldn't see them, but he could hear them. The tanks were maneuvering through the streets of the town on the other side of the bridge toward him.

Finally, McCoy called on the radio and gave us the first bit of good news we'd had in a while. “Be advised, we have two bombers on-station overhead,” he announced.

Instead of F-15s or F-18s, they gave us two B-1B bombers, and McCoy had control of them. This was the first time any Army officer had ever had direct control of his own B-1B bomber—let alone two. The B-1Bs could not see through the sand either, but they could drop their precision-guided munitions where JSTARS told them the enemy was. JSTARS had no problem seeing through the sand, and B-1Bs regularly drop ordnance from amazingly high altitudes.

Williams barely had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief when Captain McCoy got back on the radio to him. “As of right now, JAG will not let us engage those tanks, as they are inside a town.” Unbelievable. They wanted to avoid unnecessary collateral damage—never mind the fact that Third Platoon had been receiving incoming from the town for two days. McCoy was told he could only drop bombs on the tanks if they were firing on us. So we waited, the sound of tanks growing louder and louder in Williams's ears.

Sergeant Hudgins, Williams's gunner, saw a T-72 between two houses across the river and fired a 25 mm round at it, but missed. The tank moved behind a house. Williams spotted another tank moving behind another building—the two of them were trying to get him into a crossfire. The sandstorm was so bad, most of the time visibility wasn't much more than 50 feet, which might have been the only thing that kept them from killing Williams.

Williams got McCoy on the radio. “Sir, I've got eyes on two tanks. They are maneuvering around behind buildings, trying to get me into a crossfire, and I can't get a shot at them.” The tension filled his words.

McCoy was on the radio immediately. “Roger that. Wait one.”

I don't know what McCoy said to whoever was on the other end of the line at JSTARS, but when he came back on the radio he told Williams, “Payload is now inbound, and you are danger close. You need to get as far away as possible.” McCoy was in the center of our train and working with an Air Force JTAC (joint terminal attack controller), Staff Sergeant Shopshire. He was a great kid and knew his job—bringing the steel rain.