Carnivore (24 page)

W
e weren't seeing a lot of action, but I know there were Army and Cavalry units all in and around Baghdad, some of them getting shot up quite frequently. The first few days after we pushed into Baghdad we took on whatever Iraqi army forces decided to fight. The rest of the time we did patrols or sat at checkpoints and waited to get shot at.

Around April 13, we got an order for change of mission. Another unit's HQ had been hit by a missile, killing their Sergeant Major, and they needed us to move to the east side of Baghdad to help out in their sector. We rolled out and arrived in the area at dusk. The first thing we saw was tanks, a hell of a lot of tanks, sitting just like new in the palm trees. We assumed they'd been shot up with DU by the unit we were helping out, but the not knowing for sure made for a long night.

The next morning I went out on patrol with McAdams and Broadhead—two tanks and a Brad. We were able to determine that the tanks we'd seen when we arrived had been shot up, but we rolled up on three T-72s that were still intact. Broadhead shot two of them, one with a HEAT round and the other with the M1's DU round, an armor-piercing sabot like we had, only bigger. If we'd had any doubt before about the T-72's armor, that was when we knew that it was real crap: the sabot round went in the front deck and right out the back. He shot the other tank in the side and the HEAT round popped the turret right off it in one big fireball. I killed the third.

We couldn't find any soldiers who wanted to fight. All we found was an amazing amount of abandoned equipment, all of which we were told to destroy. It was just insane—Broadhead destroyed more than 100 missiles and two ammo dumps. McAdams blew up more than 25 troop trucks. Soprano had a field day and shot the snot out of two MiG-23 jets, three fuel trucks, two MTLBs (Russian-made tracked APCs), and one large ammo bunker.

After being in the Army for more than 15 years and never getting enough ammo to shoot, I found myself in an unexpected position—tired of hearing the guns firing, tired of seeing stuff on fire; just plain tired.

W
hile ambushes and snipers were a daily threat, there were no more big battles in Baghdad. What we settled into couldn't exactly be called routine, not with people shooting at us and trying to blow us up, but we had our jobs and we did them. Our time in Baghdad was mostly spent doing two things: running patrols and manning checkpoints, which were usually at intersections or bridges.

A short time after we arrived in Baghdad we were sent to Fallujah. Fallujah is about 60 kilometers west of Baghdad, and it took us two hours to drive there. Two Iraqi armored brigades had capitulated, and we had to drive there and meet with their Commander so he could officially surrender to us. There wasn't a lot more to it than that; he was basically promising they would play nice, in hopes of staying alive. While we were there we drove around to several of their motor pools and shot up a lot of T-72s—not on a whim, but following orders. If the tanks were broken, they couldn't be used against our troops. Then we returned to Baghdad and went back to running patrols and manning checkpoints.

We had enough time on our hands to get into trouble. Thinking to destroy more enemy matériel, I shot a 20,000-gallon fuel tank with HE when I was downslope from it. In hindsight? Bad call. I had a flaming barrel of fuel chasing me. Kind of like being on the bottom of a volcano with lava rolling toward you.

About a month after first roaring into Baghdad, we had settled in and were parked along a main thoroughfare. In addition to my regular crew of Soprano, Sully, and Sperry, we had a terp—an interpreter. He'd been with us for a week or so and was a big help. He'd saved us from having to shoot a lot of stupid and obstinate people.

A block down, a Suburban-sized vehicle turned onto the road and started heading toward us. It was white, with orange bumpers front and back—a Fedayeen vehicle, the kind that we'd first encountered in As Samawah.

“I got it!” Sully yelled out, and jumped on his M240. He fired a burst at the vehicle, which veered off the road and crunched into a ditch. The driver staggered out, Sully hit him with another burst, and he went down.

“Nice,” I said.

There was a pause, and then our interpreter asked us, “Why you hate taxis?”

Wait, what?

Our interpreter had seen us shoot up at least a dozen such vehicles and just never understood it, so he finally asked the question. And that was when we found out that white vehicles with orange bumpers were taxis, not Fedayeen vehicles. The entire U.S. military had spent the last month destroying every white vehicle with orange bumpers that dared appear on the streets of Baghdad. There were probably 50 such vehicles on fire in the city at that very moment. It was a simple mistake with huge consequences, all because during the first engagement of the war, at As Samawah, the Fedayeen took taxis into battle.

A short time later we were somewhere else in Baghdad, outside an ice cream factory, taking it easy. We'd picked up a 60 mm mortar and a bunch of illuminating rounds from somewhere and thought it would be cool to shoot them over the top of the ice cream factory. Like fireworks.

We thought Bravo Troop was inside the factory, but they'd been replaced by the 82nd Airborne. The change had been announced over the squadron net, but we didn't hear it. I started launching lume (illumination) mortar rounds over the top of them, and we were laughing our asses off—because it was fun and the lumes looked cool. They are flares, but they have 60 mm steel tubes around them that fall off so the flares can ignite and the parachute deploys. I'm not a mortarman, so I didn't know that I wasn't putting enough charges on them to get them high enough. The troops in the 82nd were getting bombarded by the falling steel canisters, and the lume rounds were exploding just overhead and hitting in the middle of their position, but we didn't know because we couldn't see. We launched about 20 rounds but finally gave up because there was no reaction from Bravo. We thought they'd left.

So, 20 minutes later we were sitting in the back of the Carnivore with the ramp down, bullshitting. We had the mortar tube sitting next to the ramp while we cooked a sheep—it was an enemy sheep—over a tanker's bar and a couple of 25 mm ammo cans we'd stacked up. If we'd had beer it would have been perfect. Suddenly all these guys from the 82nd maneuvered up on us, weapons out, until they saw we were Cav.

“Hey, what's up, dudes?”

They weren't in a friendly mood. “Have you seen anybody launching mortars?”

“Ummmmm, no, why?”

“Because we just got a Humvee damaged, and they just shot the shit out of our base, dropping all these incendiary rounds on us.”

“What? Really?” I was pushing the mortar tube underneath the ramp of my Bradley with my toe. “What? We haven't heard anything.”

“Are you sure? It sounded like it was over here. Maybe you can look around with your thermals and help us out.” My crew was sitting there, afraid to say anything. I looked around and saw a mortar box here and a couple of mortar rounds there. I wiggled my eyes at Sully and cocked my head. He got up, went over, and sat on the box. After some grumbling, the 82nd guys maneuvered on, none the wiser. We gathered all the mortar stuff we had, dug a hole, and buried it. Oops. At least nobody got hurt.

Here's something you never want to do: SA-12s, the large Russian surface-to-air missiles that launch off a rail? You never want to destroy them by shooting them with coax, because you can ignite the rocket motor. The rocket doesn't take off, it breaks apart, and the engine flips and rolls and chases you like a dog after a squirrel. I was busy screaming, “Back up, driver, back up
now
!” Those rocket motors? They're about the size of a Volkswagen. Once is all it takes to learn that lesson.

More helpful advice from Iraq? Cornering a howler monkey and trying to pet it is a bad idea. We gave asylum to one that had been a prisoner in a zoo. If you chase the howler monkey down (it takes a while), get him caught in a corner where he's got no place to go, and reach in to pet him, he will bite down on your finger and dig the claws of his back feet into your forearm while he's trying to rip your finger off. I saw it happen. Try explaining that injury to a medic.

I've never been to Africa, but I've killed a lion. I actually killed several rare animals in Iraq, because in addition to his zoos Saddam had game preserves where he kept a lot of endangered species. We rolled into his Water Palace, which is outside the airport, not long after reaching Baghdad, and you wouldn't believe the cash and gold guns we found lying around. I found a full-auto M16 manufactured by Colt, which I kept in the Bradley as backup. There was a large game preserve at that palace, and all the animals were dying. We didn't have the resources to take care of them and we couldn't let them go, not that a starving lion running through the streets of Baghdad wouldn't have been entertaining. We were under orders to kill them, and that's what we did, but we didn't let them go to waste. In case you're wondering, gazelle tastes just like deer.

Now that the high-intensity combat was pretty much over with, media started to show up. When we were at the Water Palace a news crew interviewed me. I don't even remember what they asked or what I said, but they sent the segment to
Good Morning America
. Saddam had several armored Mercedes limos at the palace, and we entertained ourselves by driving over them in the Carnivore.

Bored out of our minds one day, we put 100 pounds of explosive all over a Toyota pickup, just to see what would happen. Well, not just to see what would happen: the driver had tried to smuggle weapons through our checkpoint, and our experiment was intended as an object lesson for any other would-be smugglers. It was very entertaining. It left a large black spot on the ground, and nobody else tried to sneak anything through. I don't want it to seem as if we weren't doing anything but getting into trouble, but the majority of our days consisted of waiting for somebody to try to kill us, either while we were manning a checkpoint or while we were patrolling. That can get damn stressful, and we got very imaginative when it came time to blow off steam.

Early on, we rolled up on an abandoned air base while on patrol east of Baghdad. It was one of the Iraqis' main bomber bases. There were a lot of buildings and the tarmac was covered with jets and trucks, helicopters and BMPs. We were under orders to destroy any Iraqi army ordnance or matériel, and one thing we spotted was an Iraqi army water truck. We were destroying all the vehicles we could find, so we shot the water truck with 25 mm. It was like shooting a beer can with a .22, one of the most awesome things I've ever seen. When you shoot a full beer can, it explodes and sprays everywhere. Now imagine that beer can was big enough for Godzilla to take a drink—that's how huge the explosion of water was.

The area had already been cleared of enemy combatants, so we weren't in any immediate danger, and we decided to search the buildings.

We found an Iraqi air force bunker full of 2,000-pound bombs. Standing orders were to dispose of enemy ordnance, so we decided we were going to blow the place up. We wired one of the bombs with a block of C4, put a five-minute time fuse on it, and drove as fast as the Carnivore could handle, which at that time wasn't very fast at all. Did I mention that there were fifteen hundred 2,000-pound bombs in that building? Not the best decision I've ever made in my life.

We were maybe half a mile away when it went off. It looked like a nuke, with a mushroom cloud and everything. I could see a purple pressure wave chasing us, flipping over BMPs like they were nothing.

“Faster, drive faster!” I yelled.

Sully was struggling with the back hatch and got it latched right before the blast wave hit us. It nearly flipped us over, probably would have if we'd been turned sideways to it. It blew windows out 23 miles away. There were Hind-Ds (large Soviet helicopters) on the airfield, and it destroyed them. We couldn't even find their rotors. MiG jet fighters were rolled 200 yards across the runways. All the buildings on the base were leveled, leaving just one giant crater the size of a big high school.

“What did we do?” Sully asked in awe, looking up at the giant mushroom cloud. “What did we do?” The shock wave from the explosion gave him two black eyes.

Minutes later several U.S. helicopters cautiously flew into the area, radiation detectors going. Command honestly thought a nuclear bomb had gone off. We couldn't exactly claim ignorance of what had happened, because there we were, one lone Bradley limping slowly away from the blast zone. There was so much debris in the air that command grounded all the helicopters in the area for a while.

Sergeant Christner was the first person from our unit to come roaring up, wondering what had happened and hoping nobody was injured by whatever had happened. He looked past us, at the mushroom cloud now a mile high, and then back at me. “What the hell was that?”

Since we were officially following orders, we didn't get into too much trouble, but after that a Corps-wide, theater-wide order went out for all of Iraq: troops were not to destroy any more munitions.

I did the math, in case you're wondering: fifteen hundred 2,000-pound bombs equals 3 million pounds of high explosives.

F
or two weeks or so I was in charge of security at the largest oil refinery in Iraq. It was just south of Baghdad, but when I was there it was more of a fuel distribution point than it was a refinery. It was supposed to be running 24/7, but the plant manager was having some problems. If the truck drivers arrived in the afternoon, coming in from Turkey and Syria and all sorts of places, they were refusing to drop off their loads until the next morning, and it was really jamming things up. I told them that I was going to start shooting them if they didn't unload their fuel when they arrived, and apparently they believed me, because they started unloading their fuel at night. The plant was able to keep operating 24 hours a day, and the plant manager absolutely loved me.