Carnivore (5 page)

He's playing innocent. “I didn't do anything.”

I told him, “Bullshit. You took it out to put a battery in it and you broke it putting it in. How did you drive all the way up here with it broke?”

He was insistent. “I didn't do anything to it.”

Then the water splashed up on me.
What the hell?
“Where the hell's the water coming from?” It wasn't coming from the sky, it was coming from the front of the vehicle. Oh shit, I thought, here we go. “Did you bust the radiator?” The radiator sits up on the front, and I thought that was it, or we'd broken a fan drive and it was overheating and spraying me. But the water was cold.

So I turned around and took a good look, and the water can on the front of the vehicle was leaking everywhere. I yelled at Simmons, “What the hell did you do to the water can?”

He yelled back at me, “I didn't do anything to the water can!”

About that time we started shutting the vehicle down. I was on top of the vehicle and could hear what sounded like somebody pinging a metal roof with a hammer. I lifted my CVC helmet up a little higher and said, “What the hell is that noise?”

Then Sergeant James McCormick yelled, “Contact! Contact!”

It suddenly dawned on me. For the past ten minutes I'd been up on top of my vehicle arguing with my driver about his night sight as we were getting fired upon. Those weren't flashlights, they were muzzle flashes, and between the noise of the 113's engine and the helmet, we couldn't hear the rifles. They were just pounding the shit out of us.

They were only about 300 meters away, but they didn't have night vision, so they were just shooting at the sound of our engines. The Iraqis were positioned in a pseudo-ranger triangle for security, with their machine guns set up at the corners. They also had a tank at each corner of the triangle, as well as a few assorted armored personnel carriers and other vehicles here and there.

It could have been quite a battle, but they'd already been bombed long and hard by the U.S. Air Force. We had three tanks with us, and when everybody hit them in the middle of the night with .50-cals and Mark 19 full-auto grenade launchers, the tanks launching HEAT (high explosive antitank) rounds, it was just overwhelming. Any Iraqi who could stick their hands up and wave at somebody to get their attention to surrender was doing it. We took a lot of prisoners.

The Iraqi troops hadn't been getting supplies for a long time. Not only were they short on fuel, they were all skinny because they weren't even getting enough food. An armored division, 1/64 or 2/63, went up and secured the airfield with their M1s while we were still fighting and mopping up Objective Brown.

And that was the whole ball of wax. That was it for combat. Admittedly, a lot of the units that went into Iraq for Desert Storm never even fired a shot. I seem to be a bit of a bullet magnet, always in the right place at the wrong time. That said, I left the States in August and came back the following July. I was gone for a year to fight for 100 hours. That sucked. A lot. We didn't come straight home, we went back to Saudi Arabia first and actually stayed in the Khobar Towers, which are famous for being destroyed by a truck bomb in 1996.

Before we came back, we spent some time destroying Iraqi vehicles. They were all stacked up in a line and we shot them and blew the breeches on their guns and burned them, because we didn't want to leave them for the Iraqis. We soaked rolls of toilet paper in diesel, lit them, and threw them inside next to their open fuel cells, mostly, and that worked real nice. Well, little did we know, General McCaffrey had put those vehicles aside. He was going to bring those back as show vehicles and put them on display. Nobody told us. Boy, was he pissed. You look up
conniption
in the dictionary and there was a picture of his face when he found out what we did.

But anything I'd done, on purpose or by accident, up to that point paled in comparison to what happened when I returned to Iraq in 2003.

A
fter Desert Storm I left the 197th Infantry Brigade and went over to the 2nd ACR (Armored Cavalry Regiment). The 2nd ACR was involved in the Battle of 73 Easting, the biggest tank battle of Desert Storm, so those guys had a much bigger part in the war than I did. When I showed up in Amberg, Germany, I helped them refurbish all of their vehicles and do the turn-in process.

From there I went up to Vilseck to the Bradley Transition Team. That was a teaching assignment. The ADA (Air Defense Artillery) guys were moving from the old Vulcan cannons and 113s to Bradleys with Stinger missile pods. They needed people to transition them over to those vehicles, and I became a gunnery instructor.

They had no idea about the Bradley or anything else. We had to start from scratch—go out to the range, teach them dismount tactics, everything. I was an instructor for about a year and a half. After that I switched over to Platoon Gunnery Training. This was a new program the Army developed that used the UCFT (Unit Conductor Fire Trainer), which was a first-generation computer trainer. The unit was designed for one vehicle to shoot in simulated battlefield scenarios. They had computers in that bastard bigger than Coke machines, and you had to have about twenty of them to run what we run now on an iPhone.

I was one of six guys selected in Germany to help General Electric with this simulator program in Daytona Beach, Florida. I was picked because of both my gunnery ability and the fact that I'd seen combat. I'd shot Distinguished, which means shooting a score of at least 900 out of 1,000, in many gunnery exercises, including multiple 1,000s. So I headed down there on TDY (temporary duty assignment) to help them work the bugs out.

We were working on a plan to have four of the platoon gunnery trainers tied together so that the guys could come in and work with their wingmen. More than one unit meant they could help each other maneuver, engage targets on the battle line, screen, or do route reconnaissance. The programs were pretty detailed, following existing maps and everything.

It was down there that I met my wife, Amy.

Actually, I'd been married once before, and I like to joke that everyone needs a practice marriage before they settle down for the real thing, but the fact of the matter is I was just too young. I got two great kids out of it though, Daniel and Janise.

When we met, Amy was with her friend Robin, and I was hanging with a guy named Dave. He was part of what I like to call the Alcoholic Infantry. They don't have their own MOS (military occupation specialties) yet, but they should, because there are enough of them.

We were at a bar in Daytona. The Atlanta Braves were playing the Toronto Blue Jays and I remember seeing Amy. She had on a white dress to about midthigh and it had a red flowery pattern on it, maybe roses. She has blond hair, but that wasn't what grabbed me—I can remember seeing her blue eyes from across the room. I knew that night that I wanted to marry her.

Amy and I traded phone numbers, but everything was casual, at least on her part. She said she was going to school and wasn't interested in dating anybody. Well, soon we bumped into each other again, and I said, “Hey, you know, could you just show us around town? I'll take you out to a nice place to eat or whatever. We're not familiar with the area.” I ended up taking her to a Japanese steak house. This time Amy and I hit it off for good. This was in fall 1992.

I was stationed in Daytona for close to three months. It was only supposed to be thirty days, but it wound up being longer than that because they kept extending the project, as the test wasn't ready. Then it was back to Grafenwoehr, Germany, for me.

Not too long after I headed back to Germany, I flew Amy out there. I took her all over the place, showed her the sights—and asked her to marry me. She didn't really need any convincing. We just had that connection. I guess we felt we deserved each other.

At the time I was doing the Bradley instructing thing as a Master Gunner at Grafenwoehr. I was back transitioning ADA gunners over to the Bradley. We had a three-day weekend, and I took a so-called whether pass—as in, you take off whether you have a pass or not. I called my boss and said, “I'm going to be up in northern Germany doing blah blah blah.” He didn't have a problem with it, so I left that Thursday after work.

This wasn't a surprise. I had already talked to Amy and told her to get everything organized. Well, I arranged as much surprise into the situation as I could, which wasn't much. I picked out the ring at Service Merchandise and called Amy and told her she had something to pick up there. When I came back to the States she already had her wedding dress and everything was set up. We got married at a place called Chez Paul's. Her friend Robin, who'd been there when we'd met, was the maid of honor. Amy's brother was my best man, but none of my family or friends were there. That's life in the Army for you.

That day my boss called and told me, “Hey, one of the guys is sick, you're going to have to work tonight.”

I told him, “Look, I'm up in Bremerhaven, and there's no way I'm going to make it back.”

He told me, “I'm going to have to write you up.”

“Whatever, I don't care.”

We got married that weekend and flew back to Germany. Surprise, guys, I'm married! We lived in government housing there. She started working for Northrop Grumman in Hohenfels, and we'd been there about two years when we had our son Jaycob.

J
aycob was born prematurely, and we knew something was wrong with him. We had him at the German hospital in Rosenberg. The doctors kept telling us, “Oh, there's nothing wrong with him. He's fine.”

We took him to see the Army doctors at Wahlsburg and they also told us there was nothing wrong with him. We told them, “Are you sure? It's hard to put a diaper on him; his legs are tight together and he always keeps them crossed.”

The doctor over there told us, “Yeah, it's no problem,” but we knew something wasn't right. So when we took him home on leave, we got him checked out in the States.

As soon as the doctor saw him, he asked, “Have you guys started any therapy or anything for his cerebral palsy yet?” We were floored. We knew there was something not quite right, but
cerebral palsy
? We had no idea.

The German doctors failed to diagnose it. The Army doctors failed to diagnose it. When Jaycob was born, we didn't think that he was going make it, and that was a tough time. And then we find out that he has CP. Amy was upset and I was
really
upset, but I couldn't lose control because she didn't have any family there. I had to be the strong one, be supportive. It was a hard time.

The Army was going to send us back to the States on TDY so we could start getting Jaycob the treatment he needed. They were going to get us out of there in something like three days, handle everything, fly us back, move our things, and put our furniture in storage. However, the Major who I was working for thought it would be a good idea to do a “compassionate reassignment,” instead. It turns out that compassionate reassignment takes anywhere from a year to three years to do. So, in effect, by putting us in for compassionate reassignment, he put a stop to us going back and Jaycob getting treated. A week would go by and I would call the Pentagon (again) to find out my status, or call the VA (again) and beg to be reassigned, and they'd go, “Oh, well, we're still reviewing it,” or “Your case hasn't gotten here yet.”

So a month went by and Jaycob wasn't getting any treatment or anything else. I actually contacted a congressman in hopes of fixing the situation. I had to get Congress involved to contact the Colonel—that's how ridiculous the situation got. And you know what? My regular rotation came up, a PCS (permanent change of station) to Fort Bragg and the 82nd Airborne Division, before I ever got the compassionate reassignment. Some things the Army does great, but as far as taking care of their people when it counts, they suck.

T
he 82nd Airborne didn't have any use for armor that couldn't be dropped out of a plane. While, theoretically, you can drop anything by parachute if you've got a big enough chute, planes can only carry so much weight and still take off. For most of my time with the 82nd I commanded an M551 Sheridan, which is a light tank. The Sheridan was designed to be dropped by parachute and to swim across rivers. It weighed just 15 tons, compared to the Bradley's 32 tons, in part because most of the vehicle was aluminum, except for the steel Commander's cupola. We called it the chicken box.

The main gun on the Sheridan is a big 152 mm designed to fire both conventional tank rounds and missiles. When the M1 Abrams main battle tank fires its 120 mm main gun, the whole tank rocks a little, and the Abrams weighs 60 tons. The first time I commanded a Sheridan and we fired the main gun, the whole vehicle rocked back until we were balancing on our last two road wheels. When we fell back down, I smacked my face on the turret. When I looked down, there was smoke coming out of the vehicle.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” I yelled. I thought the breach had failed. “Everybody out. Un-ass the vehicle!” The rest of the crew poked their heads out of their positions and looked at me in confusion.

“What the hell are you all looking at me for?” I said.

“What do you mean, Sarge? We just fired the main gun.”

I stared at them. “You mean it does that every time you fire it? The breach didn't fail? Holy shit.”

To reduce the number of broken teeth and concussions, I learned to brace myself against the rear of the cupola. However, that didn't work out so well. One day during training I had my ass pressed against the rear of the cupola. The main gun fired, the cupola flexed, and both my ass cheeks were pinched between the steel cupola and the aluminum vehicle body. I started screaming, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”