Carnivore (27 page)

Soldier of Fortune
of course jumped on it, because it
was
a great story. What was published, however, made it seem like I was taking credit for a lot of stuff I didn't do. I didn't mention other soldiers during the interviews because the officers were talking to all of us, and we were each telling our individual stories. While nothing in what
Soldier of Fortune
published was untrue, it was only a small part of the story and made me seem like a conceited asshole.

The story was a big success for
Soldier of Fortune
because it got them a lot of attention, both good and bad. A lot of people wrote into the magazine reaming them out for printing such obvious fiction. I tracked down the senior editor at the time, Don McLean, and asked him to print a retraction.

“Look,” I told him, “you don't have it right. I didn't do it all myself, there were a bunch of people over there fighting and they need recognition.”

“Sorry, the story stands as printed. We're not going to print a retraction. We'd be happy to print your side of the story, though.”

Well, shit.

The first thing I did was contact the Public Affairs Office at Fort Stewart and talk to the Lieutenant there. He didn't see a problem with me setting things straight. The PAO looked at and approved everything I eventually wrote before it went out to the magazine. I couldn't eat or sleep and was too weak to do anything physical—I had nothing but time on my hands, which worked out well, because I am not a fast writer. The doctors couldn't give me any hopeful news, so maybe it was good that I found something with which to occupy myself. What I wrote for
Soldier of Fortune
was hugely long, but I did my best to mention everybody who was over there, everyone who played a part, and set the record straight. Crazy Horse was just starting to come back from Iraq at that time, and I wanted to give them their due. The magazine ended up running what I wrote for them as a six-part story, starting in the January 2004 issue and running through the June 2004 issue. A few guys from the unit, including John Williams, provided photos for me to submit with the articles.

So that was how I, suffering from cancer, a Kentucky kid with horrible dyslexia, ended up writing a six-part, 18,000-word feature for
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. To tell you the truth, Broadhead is still pissed at me about that. He saved my life more times than I can count, and I did the same for him, but when we weren't getting shot at, for some reason we just didn't get along. The whole
SOF
thing really put a nail in that coffin.

I don't know how long I underwent chemo. Four months, six months—forever. That was such a dark and lonely time that I'm just sad when I think back to the place I was at. It was so bad that I can't even say “At least it's better now,” because when I do think about how things were it drags me down. It's shitty that it happened, but it happened, and that's all there is to that. Could I, should I, blame the military for the DU ammo? Hell, that ammo did a much better job saving my life than it did trying to end it. By the way, the military doctors would never come out and confirm it was the DU ammo that gave me cancer. Officially it is “Cause: unknown.” I got another Purple Heart, number three, from the round hitting me in the vest and cutting my neck, so there's that.

Between the chemo and the super-chemo and the ultra-mega-chemo and surgery, eventually the doctors got the cancer under control. As I write this it is in remission. Hopefully it's still in remission when you're reading this, but there are no guarantees in life.

^*
Soldier of Fortune
, October 2003, p. 38.

^*
On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom
, by Col. Gregory Fontenot, U.S. Army, Retired; LTC E. J. Degen, U.S. Army; and LTC David Tohn, U.S. Army. Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (2004), pp. 129–30.

S
tage 3 cancer? Three Purple Hearts including part of a bullet still in my leg? That was more than enough to earn me a medical discharge, and who could have blamed me? At that point I'd been in the Army for 18 years, had seen more than my share of combat, and had a few medals to show for it. But, as I wrote before, ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a platoon sergeant. I wasn't going anywhere.

With the party still going on in Iraq, I knew it was only a matter of time before Crazy Horse went back over. In one of the
Soldier of Fortune
articles I had mentioned how I had dropped my Gerber Multi-Plier into a canal, conveniently forgetting to mention I had originally commandeered it from Soprano at As Samawah when I was trying to fix the matching unit for the radio. I ended up in contact with Mark Schindel at Gerber Legendary Blades, who hooked up the whole unit with Gerber gear, including preproduction prototypes of one of their new fixed-blade knives, the LMF II.

“We've got this knife you might be interested in,” Mark told me. “We haven't got it out yet, but we'll send you fifteen or twenty and you guys see if you can break it. See what you can do with it.”

“You got it,” I told him.

Thanks to the articles, other companies tracked me down and provided more gear for Crazy Horse, including Blackhawk and Bushnell. Bushnell gave us several mil-dot Elite 4200 rifle scopes and laser range finders, which would later come in very handy.

Things overseas weren't quite going the way the military had expected, and the unrelentingly negative and biased news coverage wasn't making things any better for anyone. I wasn't surprised when we got the word that we would be heading back to Iraq sooner rather than later.

Crazy Horse Troop returned to Iraq in January 2005. I arrived on January 22 and went right back to work. Since I'd been there last, the situation had changed somewhat. The ground war with the Iraqi army was long over, but the guerrilla and insurgent attacks, the IEDs, and the bombings presented real and continuing problems.

The nightly news in America was full of car bombs and snipings, all the bad things. They ignored all the good things the U.S. military was doing with the power grid and the education system; in fact, the U.S. news media seemed to forget that we were the good guys. Some of them were still on the “no one can find any weapons of mass destruction” rant, conveniently forgetting that Saddam proved to the world he had them when he used them on the Kurds, long before the United States sent troops to the region. Hell, that's how
Chemical
Ali got his nickname.

Back in Iraq, I was quick to see that most reporters hardly ever stepped outside of the Green Zone. Their news reports were videos after the fact, often provided by Al Jazeera, while they hid behind the fences, protected by the very military they despised. Did that make them willing stooges or simply propagandists?

I'd been to Iraq before and seen more combat than most combat vets. While Crazy Horse was heading back in-country with a number of experienced troops, we had a lot of fresh young faces as well. As the combat-seasoned veterans, it was our job to teach the new recruits and do as good a job as we could getting all of them back home in one piece. I was cocky and conceited before I'd gotten a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, and beaten cancer, so I just knew that I was going to be better than the last guy. I can remember telling my soldiers how we were going to find all the IEDs and get the sons of bitches who had emplaced them. The battle-hardened Platoon Sergeant I was replacing wasn't impressed by my cockiness and told me not to worry about finding the IEDs—they would find us. No truer words have ever been spoken.

As the conflict had evolved into more of a guerrilla affair, the spec-ops and small-unit types were in their element—that was what they lived for. However, the last thing command wanted was another
Black Hawk Down
scenario, so for the first six months back in-country Crazy Horse was detailed to be the armor package for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and Task Force 6-26. That was our Brigade Commander's decision. We were based out of Al Asad Air Base, which was run by the Marines. I wish I could tell you we were doing all sorts of high-speed ninja stuff with those elite troops, but the fact of the matter is we spent six months getting shot at and blown up, and even then most of the time it was boring. We hardly got to shoot at anybody, but even so I can't write about anything we did in any detail.

F
or the first part of my tour I was back in a Bradley, which I christened Carnivore II. Yeah, I know, not very creative—but why argue with success? We ended up going on 45 combat missions in Carnivore II and traveling over 25,000 miles, even though we later transitioned to up-armored Humvees, so it earned the name.

For one TF 6-26 mission we were outside of Fallujah in the town of Haditha. The mission was a cordon and search, with the armor doing the cordon part and the spec-ops guys doing the search. I had to cut down the side of a riverbank to cross over to an alley, and the riverbank gave out behind me. There was no way for me to go back; I had to go forward, but I found myself looking at an alley full of cars. The street was three cars wide, so with cars parked bumper to bumper on either side there was just barely enough room for someone to drive their car through. A car had plenty of room. My Bradley didn't.

I literally crushed 20 cars driving down the street. Cars on both sides of the road, all the way down the road, car alarms going off, the Iraqis standing there waving their arms at me and yelling the Arabic equivalent of “What the fuck?” I made canoes out of those cars, crushed them like bugs. Even though I felt bad that it happened, that was some funny shit.

I got my ass chewed by the Commander. “Why did you do that? What in God's name possessed you to do something so stupid? Do you have any idea what kind of public relations disaster I'm dealing with?” And so on. I explained that I had no choice. With the riverbank collapsing behind me, it was either go forward through the parked cars or abandon my vehicle. I couldn't do that, because the task force guys were in the middle of a major assault and I had to support them. Besides, there was no way I was giving up my vehicle. Letting it sit there would be no different from handing it over to the enemy.

The raid was a big success. They collected so many prisoners that they needed to use two Bradleys to take them back for questioning. We had them in the hell hole (the narrow slot behind the driver's seat), sitting on the turret floor, or standing up in the back of the Brad. When we raised the ramp it mashed them in so tightly they couldn't move. We had at least 20 people in the Carnivore II, which is designed to fit 7.

In early April 2005, we were working an escort mission for TF 6-26. Staff Sergeant David Miller was in the lead Bradley and I was at the rear, with four thin-skinned vehicles between us. We'd been out driving back and forth in 100-plus-degree heat for the better part of 12 hours, and we were burned out. With less than two miles left to base and no enemy contact, Miller and I rolled ahead of the other vehicles in our Bradleys so we could take out any threat that might lie ahead. It was almost 6
P.M.
and I was glad my day was almost over.

I had a different crew in my Bradley this tour. Sergeant Sean Cochran was my gunner, and he was feeling a bit like a Thanksgiving turkey in the heat. He was a good guy and had the perfect build for riding around in armor all day—he was even shorter than me.

“Sergeant Jay, okay if I stand up and get some air? Aren't we about back?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

No sooner had I spoken than everything went black. The explosion was huge and rocked the whole Bradley. When the smoke from the IED cleared, I was happy to see we were still in one piece.

“Contact right!” Cochran yelled out. “Got a guy running into a building.”

I tried to call Miller on the radio but got nothing.

“Shoot that guy!” I yelled at Cochran. There was no response, so I looked down into the turret to see what was taking him so long to fire. Smoke was coming out of the turret floor; apparently we weren't as undamaged as I'd thought. With the turret power out (which explained why Miller didn't answer: the radio was out with the power), Cochran was doing just as he had been trained, putting the 25 mm gun into manual operation.

Miller had been several hundred yards ahead of us but had heard the IED go off. As he was turning around to come help us out, Cochran, using the hand crank, fired half a dozen 25 mm HE rounds into the building after the fleeing insurgent.

With the thin-skinned vehicles we were escorting coming up fast, we couldn't press the attack. I shouted to Miller to call them and warn them of the danger ahead. While we were busy trying to get the Carnivore II back up, he found a bypass for the vehicles we were escorting.

We weren't having a lot of luck getting our power back up. Miller positioned his Bradley between the IED site and the bypass route, and he and his gunner, Staff Sergeant Jared Kennedy, kept overwatch on us until we could effect a repair. We finally realized we couldn't handle the job ourselves and put out a call for help. With the assistance of some very talented Marines, I had my Bradley up and running in no time at all.
Semper fi
.

That's how I got Purple Heart number four: flying debris from an IED. If it hadn't been for the Blackhawk tactical goggles I was wearing, I would have lost my eyesight. The goggles took most of the blast, saving my eyes, and all I suffered was a small cut on my face. I also had on body armor and Blackhawk's light assault gloves, and it's a good thing, because I got peppered with debris and shell fragments. The body armor took most of the shell fragments, but three pieces of metal went into my right wrist. The Blackhawk gloves did a damn good job of protecting my hands. We later found out that the IED was a hot-wired 155 mm artillery round, which packs a lot of explosive. That was the first but not the biggest or the last IED that Carnivore II would encounter. In my first tour it was RPGs; in the second, IEDs.