Carnivore (28 page)

One afternoon we were coming back from a mission with TF 6-26 and rolled over a bridge to see a Humvee lighting a truck up with its roof gun. We slowed down to see what was happening, and as we got closer we saw that the Humvee was part of a convoy—one of our convoys, in fact. They were the support battalion for the 3rd ID.

Passing a convoy was just about number one on the list of ways to get guns pointed at you in Iraq at that time. Apparently when the truck was approaching, the troopers in the convoy had waved it off and tried to flag it away, but nothing was working. The truck started rolling past the convoy, and nothing the troopers were doing could get the driver to stop or slow down. At about the time the truck was getting ready to pass the lead vehicle in the convoy, somebody spotted what looked like an IED in the road ahead. Because the truck was ignoring all of their attempts to signal it, the Commander told the Humvee gunner to engage.

The vehicle was full of nothing but kids. Not one of them was over the age of fifteen, and they shot it with a .50-cal machine gun.

I immediately blocked the road so other traffic wouldn't get in the way, called squadron for assistance, and started doing first aid on anybody left alive. A lot of them were dead. I've seen horrible things, but that was just about the worst.

The Army did a full investigation to find out exactly what happened. They walked through everything, talked to witnesses, put the entire incident back together. Just prior to that incident two units had lost an M1 and a Bradley to IEDs. They were catastrophic losses; the crews had burned inside the vehicles. Two days before the incident I'd lost a Humvee in almost the exact same place when an IED had gone off. Nobody had died, but the Humvee had burned down. So everybody in the convoy was on edge: a big vehicle refused to stop and started passing them, and up ahead was what everybody thought was an IED. Even EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), when they came out to defuse the bomb, thought the object was an IED, although it turned out to just be a muffler on the side of the road.

I understand exactly why it happened. There was a pile-up of extenuating circumstances, due mostly to escalating terrorist attacks in the area, and because of that a bunch of children died.

When the experts start talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes they don't know what they're talking about, sometimes they do. The gunner in that Humvee was fucking devastated. Thinking he was about to come under attack by terrorists, he machine-gunned a truckload of children.

For the first part of my second tour we had an interpreter who went by the name of George. He was the soldier at As Samawah who destroyed the Crazy Horse Café coffee box on the side of the Carnivore with an RPG. I decided to let bygones be bygones, because I'd shot him four times and killed all of his friends—not that I ever told him that. The Iraqis working with us had their loyalty tested enough.

George was an excellent interpreter, but, like most of the Iraqis, he didn't know a lot about weapons handling. Sergeant Williams, George, and I were walking down a street on patrol in Salman Pak one day and George had what we in the business call a negligent discharge: he emptied an entire 30-round AK magazine on full auto into the ground between Williams and me. Since he was such a good interpreter and, honestly, not much worse with an AK than a lot of the Iraqis, all we did was take his rifle away. He wasn't supposed to have it anyway, but in a combat zone, one more good guy with a gun is never a bad idea. Well, almost never.

George also had this habit of stealing stuff out of every car we stopped. We tried to discourage it and kept a close watch on him, but he was persistent. Every time we raided a house, George came walking out with jewelry or money. I wish I could say he was unusual, but a lot of the Iraqis were like that. Whenever the Americans searched an area, like a neighborhood, looking for insurgents, we called it a “Cordon and Search.” If any Iraqi troops were helping us out, we called it a “Cordon and Shoplift.”

After surviving the Carnivore at As Samawah, George ended up dying young of a brain aneurysm. You never know when you're going to go.

R
emember the trouble I had with the gate guard in Bosnia?

When I was working for TF 6-26 we were based out of Al Asad Air Base. It was a Marine base and a Marine sector. Normally when you left the base you were supposed to give the gate guards your unit, where you were going, how many people you had with you, and so on, because they were tracking everybody who was leaving and entering the base. We often had to roll out of the base at no notice to go support our task force, which was flying out on Blackhawks from different sites. The Marines at the gates were giving us a lot of problems, slowing us down, so we talked to the Base Commander. He gave us an All Access card to show to the guys at the gate.

When we showed them the card, they were supposed to write down the number on the card and then let us through without delaying us.

So one day our column rolled up to the gates, and there was a Marine Corporal there. I was the third vehicle in line, but ended up next to the guard vehicle.

The corporal asked, “Where you guys going?”

I showed him the card.

He glanced at it, then asked, “What unit are you?”

I said, “Read the card. It says ‘Do not detain, let us leave immediately.' Just write down the number.”

He frowned and said, “So how many people are going out?”

I said, “
Dude
, read the fucking card.”

And he said, “Well, I've got to call this to higher.”

Son of a . . . I got on the radio and called up ahead to Sergeant England in his M1. He was the lead vehicle. “This is Sergeant Johnson back here. Please crush that gate if you need to to get out of here. We need to support our elements.”

Sergeant England's tank started to move forward, and I heard the Corporal say, “Hey, bring that gun around on him.” There was a Humvee next to the gate, and the Marine in the roof turret swung a .50-cal machine gun around to bear on Sergeant England.

England stopped. There was a brief pause, then the turret on England's M1 started to rotate. England brought his 120 mm main gun tube around, it gently knocked the barrel of the Marine's .50 sideways, and the guy who was holding on to the .50 was now staring at the muzzle of an M1 Abrams main gun from six inches away.

Sergeant England yelled at the top of his voice, “Your move, fucker!”

So they raised the gate with no further issue. The guy in the Humvee hopped off it (probably to get away from the 120 mm muzzle) and opened it for us.

To add insult to injury, England ran over one of their concrete Jersey barriers and crushed it with the M1, and everybody rolling after him did the same thing. I got my ass chewed for that a little bit, but we told command that the checkpoint was too narrow and the M1 just needed to make some room to get through.

O
ne fine day in Iraq we were going to do an entry into a house where we thought there were some bad guys. Some of my troops were going in the back, the rest of the guys were going in the front, and I was the last guy going in. I called it in on the radio, as we were doing two houses at the same time: “Breaching, breaching, breaching!”

They breached the front door, and everybody ran by this big guy in the front yard asleep on a mattress like he was a guard. This dude was big—Wilt Chamberlain/Shaquille O'Neal big. I ran by him, and just as I did the motherfucker jumped up and grabbed me and spun me around. He was so huge that he grabbed another one of my guys and was shaking him by his vest while I was riding on this guy's shoulders like a Chihuahua humping a Great Dane. I was trying to buttstroke him and trying to get off him, but he was just slinging me around, yelling incoherently. That's when I learned the value of quick release slings, because he had my rifle where I couldn't hit him or do anything with it. He had me about twisted in half by my own sling, all the while yelling, “Aaaaaah, aaaaaah!”

I finally got my pistol out and was about to put it to his head and drop him when his mother ran out of the house yelling, “Mister! Mister!” She was frantically twirling her finger around her temple to indicate that he wasn't right in the head.

“No shit!” I yelled at her. “Calm him the fuck down!” That dude was messing us up without even trying, but I learned something that day—apparently a finger spinning next to the head is the universal sign for crazy.

Something else I learned? Most of the time I was carrying an M4/203, an M4 carbine with an M203 40 mm under-barrel grenade launcher. Shooting at a door with a 40 mm grenade from 20 feet away? Bad idea. Some of the grenades don't arm until they've traveled a certain distance, but apparently 20 feet's good. You know, in the movies, it just knocks the door down. In reality, it knocks you down. It's really cool in the movies. In real life it's not so cool. I got a nice chunk of scrap metal in my leg from that self-administered IQ test.

Someone once asked me how good the TF 6-26 guys were at house clearing, since that's their specialty. Our platoon at one point was spending 16 hours a day doing nothing but house clearing, We were just as fast at it as the ultra-high-speed spec-ops guys, but every shot they fired hit exactly what they were aiming at. Those dudes could
shoot
.

The Iraqis had proven—to themselves and us—that they were no match for us in a straight-up fight, even when they had armor. In guerrilla warfare, however, even when you don't know what you're doing, you can cause a lot of problems. Some of the people we were going up against—whether they were Iraqis or Syrians or from wherever, in Iraq to participate in the jihad against America, the Great Satan—had smarts, talent, guts, or a combination of all three. Many of the IEDs we ran into weren't so damn improvised.

On a night in June we were doing another escort mission, protecting thin-skinned vehicles on their way to another base, then returning home. The route would be long—three hours each way—but easy, as the whole trip was on blacktop. Protecting the vehicles were me and my crew in the Carnivore II, and Staff Sergeant Sowby and his able Bradley crew.

When we were doing task force work, we usually had close air support. Considering they could pretty much get whatever they wanted, we either had Apache helicopters or an AC-130 Spectre gunship. When it comes to combat, the Spectre is a soldier's wet dream.

We were almost halfway there when the Spectre called on the radio.

“Hey, we're picking up a signal; somebody is trying to detonate on you guys. We're jamming the signal right now, but be advised this is a hot area.”

Shit. “Roger.”

We were behind the convoy, and the gunship was hovering near the front of it as we put on some speed to get out of the area. I don't know if the Spectre pulled farther away from us, or the range of their jammer wasn't too great, because it was only a few seconds later that a huge IED went off behind us. The blast was enormous and rocked the Brad, even though the detonation was more than 100 meters behind my vehicle. Sowby was a mile ahead of me and he felt the explosion.

We didn't see any insurgents, although we knew they were around. Even though we would have loved to stick around and see if we could draw some fire—and return it with interest—we had a job to do.

After making it to our destination without further incident and refueling, I checked out my Bradley. The suspension had been hit hard—we had a damaged right rear sprocket, right front sprocket, and idler wheel. We took rubber and a screw and beat it into the spall holes so it would hold oil until we got back, as we had a lot of oil leaks. Our two Bradley crews went to work using the battle damage repair kit (BDRK) that our troop XO, Bret Chastain, had gotten for us before we left for Iraq. In less than an hour we had the Bradley up and running. Since we weren't escorting anyone back, we left as soon as the Carnivore II was fixed.

On our way back to our base we came upon two Marine Corps Humvees that had been hit. It looked like they'd been caught in an ambush. One of them was just starting to burn, and the other one had been hit pretty good. We stopped and checked them out. Somebody had been wounded there; there was blood on the ground and signs of a firefight.

The Humvee that was on fire we just let burn, but the other one the Marines had unassed so quickly that they hadn't had time to pull all their sensitive items off it. So we removed a pair of NVGs and the Blue Force tracker (GPS unit), and disabled the .50-cal on top. We then watched the other Humvee burn to the ground. Not only didn't we want insurgents taking any gear out of it, but also we didn't want them taking any pictures of it to show on the Internet for bragging rights.

When we returned to Al Asad Air Base, we brought in the sensitive items we'd recovered to the Base Commander in the operations center. The battlefield in that area at that time was so confusing that they didn't even know which patrol had been hit. The Marines were escorting fuel trucks, water trucks, and ration trucks back and forth through the desert, and they were often out of radio contact.

So these young Marines doing the escort missions had almost no support, to the point where nobody knew which group had been hit, what had happened, or if there'd been any casualties. Nobody at the base knew anything. There was a big scramble after that; they sent out aircraft trying to find out who'd been hit, who was lost, whatever.

The next day we did a few more post-IED repairs and then took the Bradley out on a test drive. The left front drive sprocket immediately broke off and fell on the ground. Oops. Apparently the IED had done more damage than we'd guessed—and we were 100 meters away when it went off! We later found out that the IED had been made from two 500-pound aircraft bombs—1,000 pounds of explosive, detonating 100 meters away. No wonder the blast had seemed big—it was! Between the mortars, RPGs, and IEDs, I know I suffered a number of concussions during my two tours in Iraq, even though they were never diagnosed. Headaches? Take a handful of aspirin.