Carnivore (33 page)

“I should have fucking known,” he spat.

“What? What the hell's going on?” I asked him. “What did you see?” He told me.

That donkey had been in front of both of the men and raised his head just as I shot. As he did that, the man in back apparently caught up to the other guy. I hit the donkey right between the eyes. You could see the bottom part of his sockets, and the top of his head was still on. That big .50-caliber bullet kept going, hitting the guy behind the donkey in the chest; his collarbone was gone. The bullet deflected up and the guy behind
him
caught the bullet in his face. The top half of his head was gone. One bullet from a Barrett killed two guys and a donkey, so instantly that Kennedy couldn't get a shot off. The Barrett, remember, was designed for destroying big things, and its heavy bullet has a hell of a lot of momentum.

The EOD guy stared me straight in the face and said, “I'm never getting another bomb for you, ever, in my life. Don't even fucking call.”

O
utside of Salman Pak, the Iraqi police forces went out and captured a whole small town because there had been an IED set off on a police truck. They brought the whole town in and were beating them with sticks—even the kids. One of the kids was maybe 10 years old and had lumps the size of goose eggs on him. I was so offended by how badly they beat him that I called my squadron XO and told him that we needed to get down there and stop that shit. While waiting for orders I made a command decision—my platoon pulled some of the kids they were beating away from the Iraqis at the police station. We pulled them into a different room and were pretty much in an armed standoff with the police. There was a whole Sunni-versus-Shiite backstory going on there, but we didn't care. If you're beating children you're in the wrong.

I
n 1981, the Israelis bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. The reactor was built with the help of the French and was nearly completed when it was bombed. It was located 18 miles south of Baghdad, and the Israelis believed it was going to be used to build nuclear weapons. The facility was far enough along that there'd been radioactive material in place. Bombs and nuclear reactors are never a good combination—a lot of people on that side of the river had birth defects due to the radiation.

There was a small village in the area, and the head of the village was the local imam. He had a grandson he was very proud of, but his grandson had a lot of health problems. The little boy had severe cerebral palsy, and with my boy having CP, I had a special place in my heart for him. We would frequently stop at the village, and I would have my medic go in and check on the grandson and we would do whatever else we could for them. I had a good relationship with the imam.

When we stopped we would have chai with him and his family, and they would always serve us homemade pita bread. It was really good bread. In the summer, we met with him in his house, but now that it was cooler, we were outside in the sun. His daughter was just a few feet away, making the bread. My medic was checking on the boy, seeing if he was all right, while Kennedy, Cochran, and I were just sitting there getting ready to eat some bread.

The daughter pulled a blob of dough out, kneaded it with her hands, and threw it inside their mud brick oven. Then she squatted down on the ground, grabbed a cow patty, and threw the cow patty into the fire under the bread. I've learned since then that dried dung is a common fire fuel in a lot of parts of the world, but not when cooking food (or at least, I hope not). Anyway, with those same hands she rolled out some more dough and threw it in the oven as well. No hand washing for any of it.

Needless to say, I ate very little bread that day, but I did drink the chai. About the time we were ready to head out I watched the daughter take the chai cups down to the Euphrates River. She dipped the cups in, wiped them out with her dirty dress, brought them back up, and put them on the serving tray, which she then took back into the house. I think I would have rather eaten the cow patties than drunk Euphrates River water, after seeing everything that was dumped into it. So there I was, eating cow shit and drinking piss for about six months, just so I could help out that little boy.

D
ecember had arrived, and as we were scheduled to rotate home in January we were all looking ahead to what we'd been missing. I wanted to spend time with Amy, and most of the other guys were thinking about women as well. The Iraqi elections were coming up quickly, and they were a big deal. They were the first elections in post-Saddam Iraq. You probably remember seeing photos of smiling Iraqis holding up their ink-stained fingers to show they'd voted. Well, we assumed that the insurgents would pull out all the stops to disrupt the elections, so we were working 18-hour days.

We'd put 25,000 miles on the Carnivore II and done 10 major repairs to it. After traveling as far west as Ar Rummanh, on the Jordan border, as far south as Karbala, and as far north as the city of Balad, we finally got to rejoin the rest of our squadron at Camp Rustamiyah on the southeast side of Baghdad. Captain Burgoyne was more than happy to have his troop intact again. With the upcoming change of responsibility we would have to patrol south to Haji Ali Ash Shahim, a small town that had been handed over to the Iraqi army. Considering that the last time we'd been there we'd been ambushed by IEDs on our way in and out, I wasn't exactly looking forward to the trip. The Salman Pak River Road followed the Tigris River south, and that would turn out to be our last trip down it.

Our job was to check all the polling sites in our zone for the upcoming elections. My platoon would send out three gun trucks, up-armored Humvees designated M1114s. Staff Sergeants Sowby and Williams would be in the lead vehicle, Lieutenants Cummings and Harris would be in the second truck, and I would bring up the rear with my crew.

Most of the ride went without a problem, and at 1
A.M.
we were just two miles to the turnaround point. I'd been doing patrols long enough to feel that something wasn't quite right, however. Even at that time of the morning, there should have been other vehicles on the road, even a donkey cart, but nothing was moving. I had our vehicles change speed and spacing. Less than a mile from the turnaround point, there was a hairpin turn, and we had to close up the distance between vehicles.

Just then there was a bright flash and a blast, and dust and rocks danced on the hood of my Humvee. I was on the radio before the rattling rain stopped. “Contact! All vehicles stop and call in your status!” I ordered.

The first two vehicles had already passed the IED when it went off. It detonated behind the second Humvee, just in front of mine. Luckily the thick armor on the M1114s worked, and nobody was injured. We knew it had to be command detonated, which meant there was someone nearby we could go after. All vehicles stayed where they were while we scanned the area.

Lieutenant Cummings took charge and had me dismount with a small team to try and catch the insurgents who had emplaced the IED. I jumped out with Sergeant Cochran, one of my team leaders, and Private First Class Turnbull. We moved carefully toward the blast site. The bomb had blown a big hole in the road on the side closest to the river. Command detonated meant wires. I was looking for the wires, because I wanted to find them and follow them back.

“I got movement out there!” Cochran called out, pointing. I loaded a flare round into my 203 and fired it into the air. When the parachute deployed we could see at least one man running toward the river across a big field. I opened fire on him and started chasing after him, yelling for Cochran to follow me. The Iraqi was running like a deer through the Tennessee hills, firing his AK-47 wildly over his shoulder. I could hear the rounds snapping around my head as I fired back at him on three-round burst. I tripped and fell in a ditch, and after Cochran helped me up, I took off running again. At a dead run I fired until I emptied my magazine.

I saw the Iraqi go down and I was pretty sure I'd hit him. I stopped and did a quick reload, and moved closer to where the Iraqi had fallen. Right before I reached the spot I checked behind me. Cochran was way back there. He had his flashlight on his rifle and it was waving everywhere. I could hear him yelling and equipment going everywhere as he took a tumble into another ditch. Running in the dark is generally a bad idea even where there isn't anybody shooting at you, and we were running across uneven ground covered with elephant grass.

Right where I expected the Iraqi to be lying on the ground, bleeding out, I stumbled onto the bank of the Tigris River. I hadn't hit the guy at all; he'd just jumped down the bank and was now clambering up into a small boat. There were two other Iraqis in the boat as well, and we saw one another at the same time. Their eyes got huge, but nobody had a gun in hand; they were lying in the boat.

As they went for their rifles, I raised my M4, pulled the trigger, and nothing. Instead of performing an immediate action drill—which is what you're supposed to do when your weapon doesn't go off—I took the rifle off my shoulder, turned it sideways, and looked at it stupidly. As I was doing that, however, one of the guys in the boat went for his AK.

Without thinking I just reached forward and fired my M203 40 mm grenade launcher at the boat. In slow motion I watched the 40 mm round smash into the rifle carrier's hip, ricochet into the back of the boat, and detonate on the chest of the other soldier. The three of them were blown back into the river. The buttstock of my rifle came back and hit me in the chin, and I fell back onto my ass.

I slid down the steep and muddy riverbank until I was knee-deep in the cold Tigris. It has a fast current and steep banks, and I had to hold on to the cattails to keep from being swept away. Cochran finally showed up, panting. I'm short, but he's two inches from midget and all of that is torso, so it's no wonder he couldn't keep up with me.

“Fuck, fuck!” Cochran said, looking at the sinking boat and the bodies.

“Fuck nothing, come here and help me!” I yelled at him.

He helped me up the bank. We could just make out the outline of the boat as it sank into the river, the bob of a body or two.

Just as we were getting up, Specialist Jeff Sund, the Lieutenant's gunner, spotted one insurgent on the other side of the river, shooting at us. Sund was the best M240B gunner we had in the troop. At a range of more than 400 meters, he fired across the river at the insurgent. By his second short burst he was on target. He then opened up with a long 75-round burst that ate up the insurgent and the riverbank, just in case there was anybody else lurking about. Max 26, our friendly Apache gunship, showed up then and shadowed us overhead until our vehicles got back to base.

Why did my gun jam? Turns out that I shoved a bunch of elephant grass into my mag well when I reloaded, which bound the bolt carrier up. I learned several valuable lessons from that incident: (1) a scared guy can run faster than a mad guy; (2) never chase a bad guy with someone you can outrun; (3) 20 feet is not really a safe distance to be firing a grenade launcher at someone; and (4) don't load weeds into your rifle.

A
lmost our whole platoon had been involved in a big counterinsurgency sniper operation on the river. We were on our way back and dragging tail, as we'd been up for 36 hours. Right outside Salman Pak we ran into an MP (Military Police) company, which had found some artillery rounds. Those rounds would certainly have ended up as an IED somewhere, and our squadron XO told us to secure the area while the MPs took care of business.

By the time we were finished with that task we'd been up for 40 hours, and we were just trashed. We were so tired that on the way back one of my gunners fell asleep in the turret and lost his rifle. It fell off the Humvee. He realized he'd dropped it, but whether that was three seconds or three minutes after it happened I couldn't say, and neither could he. We turned around and looked for it but couldn't find it, so we headed back to base and reported it. What did they tell us to do? Go look for it again.

So we went back out and searched the route again, but no rifle. By the time we straggled back in through the gate we'd been up for something like 42 or 43 hours and could hardly see straight.

As we were pulling into the base, Sergeant Anthony Mitchell was heading out in his M1. Tony and I had traded off on the Barrett regularly, and he was a good guy and a good soldier. One of his crew had to secure something on his tank, so our two vehicles paused beside each other just inside the gate. “Hey brother, take care of yourself out there,” I called to him.

Tony just gave me a shit-eating grin and said, “I got this shit.”

We passed ways, Tony went out the gate, and he hadn't gone 500 yards down the road when he saw fuel cans sitting by the side of the road. Seeing them as a hazard, Tony used the front of his tank to push them out of the way. There was an IED planted in among the fuel cans, and it went off and killed him instantly.

Crazy Horse was a tightly knit group. We were all family, in some ways more than others—Tony was in one of our tank platoons, and his brother was in the other. We heard the IED go off, and when the word went out across the radio that Tony had been killed, the entire troop was crushed. Everybody liked Tony, and both he and his brother had a lot of friends.

The Troop Commander came over to us as we were just sitting there, not knowing what to do, and he said, “I need you to take your guys back out there. We have to control that sector. The tank platoon is devastated—hell, both tank platoons are devastated, but we have to go back out. I don't want to have to order you to go out there.”

I said, “Not a problem, sir, we'll go out there.”

When we went back outside the gate, it was very hard controlling my troopers, keeping them from shooting every Iraqi who was out there. We left the gate with tears in our eyes and heavy hearts, but we were professional and dedicated. We went back out into the lion's mouth, and my platoon of Crazy Horse troopers swallowed their feelings of revenge and did their jobs. Nobody even fired a warning shot. Tony Mitchell was the only casualty we had in our troop while I was there, and yet we went right back out, did a patrol, and didn't participate in any abuse or revenge killing or anything else. That's one of the hardest things to do in war—after losing a friend, to immediately go back out there with those same hostiles and not let your anger overtake you.