Carnivore (6 page)

Nobody knew what the hell was going on, but they rushed to my aid. My coveralls and my ass were stuck, and my crew had to push the cupola up for me to get free. I ended up with a huge blood blister across both cheeks, like a long purple line. It turned into a scar that lasted for years.

If you're in the Airborne, that means you jump out of planes when you go into combat—or at least you need to know how to. It takes five jumps to get “jump qualified.” On my first night parachute jump I came down and landed without a problem, but I didn't know the landing area. As I was walking around, trying to get oriented, I started kicking and tripping over tank parts.

“Dammit, they should brief us that there are going to be tank parts on the ground out here, we could get injured,” I said to one of the experienced 82nd guys nearby.

He looked at me, and said, “Buddy, that's
your
tank.”

The chute never opened, and my Sheridan burned right in. That's why you jump separately from or after your armor.

The Sheridan was armed with a Shillelagh missile, which we fired out of the main gun. The actual range was about 5,000 yards, but they called it an infinity missile. It was an IR (infrared) missile, and it would pick up any IR signal—like a garage door opener. So we were out at the range, I launched this bad boy, and it was tracking toward the target—and then it hit a little berm. The missile bounced, and then it picked up the IR beam coming back at me.

My gunner started yelling, “Hey, the round's coming at us!”

I screamed back at him, “Dump the gun! Dump the gun!”

He was still tracking the laser, and we had a missile coming back at us. A Shillelagh missile, a 152 mm round, coming right for the vehicle, and my gunner panicked and was trying to get out of the vehicle. So I had to take the Commander's override, which doesn't really work very well, and dump the missile. The missile hit about 20 feet in front of my vehicle, bounced in the air, and landed behind us underneath the First Sergeant's Humvee. Luckily it was an inert training missile, so it only blew the wheels off the Humvee. Nobody was hurt. If it had been equipped with an actual explosive warhead, the First Sergeant would be dead, and so would I. Hell, our troop had one land in a housing area, and another fly through a drop zone with paratroops jumping. Crazy ass missile.

Part of the rotation with the 82nd Airborne was being assigned to South Korea. I tried to get out of that, due to having an “exceptional family member” (that's the military term), but that did not work out. Part of my lack of success was the fact that I wasn't part of what I call the 82nd Airborne mafia, guys who had only ever been in the 82nd and treated everybody else like shit. Inspector General (IG) complaints were filed, because I wasn't the only person that this had happened to. I was told it was just a personality conflict, when in fact some of my paperwork was deliberately mislaid. There's no such thing as a personality conflict. Some people are just assholes. My Platoon Sergeant was one of them.

When I left for South Korea, Amy was pregnant with Max, my youngest. To add insult to injury, right before I got orders for Korea we had a rat in the ceiling of our house. He chewed some wiring or something, and one day when both Amy and I were at work the house, which we owned, burned down. So the house was torched, we're living in a hotel room, and I get orders to go to Korea. Insert profanity of choice here.

All my efforts to fight the system through the IG went nowhere, so I told Amy, “The hell with this. I'm going to get us a house and move you close to your family.”

We had a lot going on with the insurance company rebuilding the one house, trying to find another home in Florida, and me getting ready to head to South Korea, but somehow everything worked out all right. I was able to go home on leave to be there for the birth of my son Max, but I wasn't stateside for very long. The flight is eighteen hours each way.

Tours in Korea are supposed to be longer, but I was only there for a year. In 2000 we were on a training mission against the 3/15 Infantry. I was climbing up on the back of my Bradley, and my driver saw a guy out on the ground with a flashlight. He thought that was a signal to move forward. So he took off and hooked my right leg with the track. The track dragged my right leg down the side skirts of the Bradley. My right ankle was crushed, and my tibia and fibula were in bad shape. They had to take the track apart to get my leg out. I was air-evaced out of there and then spent three weeks down in Seoul with my leg up in traction, pins and other hardware in it.

At the time I was in 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry, Apache Troop. A little after July of that year, I had orders to go back to Fort Bragg and flew back to the States. I'd had enough of the bullshit with that unit, though. I was in Daytona Beach on leave and I just drove to Fort Stewart in Georgia. I went and talked to the Cav Sergeant Major there and I said, “Hey look, here's the deal. I've got an exceptional family member. We're already living down here. He's going to see the doctors out of Winn Hospital, and I'd really like to be a part of this unit.”

The Sergeant Major was no dummy. He said, “You're still on leave?”

“Yeah.”

He said, “Just sign in off of leave here.”

So I signed in off leave a week early to the 3rd Infantry Division. They sent in the paperwork, informing my previous unit that I was now with this new unit. The sergeant who had caused me all those problems at the 82nd did everything he could to get me back under his boot heel. Finally, my Squadron Commander called down to the officer in charge of the assignments and said, “Look. We're keeping this guy here. He's a good dude. We want to keep him.”

The officer said, “There's no problem with him staying there, why is there an issue coming up?” When it was explained to him, he said, “I didn't know anything about it, and that assignment NCO—well, we're replacing him because he's got some issues anyway.”

So I was able to stay with the 3rd ID, and that was the best damn unit I was ever in. But I wasn't at Fort Stewart very long. I was only there for about six months before I did my rotation in Bosnia.

W
e returned to the States—to Fort Stewart, Georgia, specifically—from Bosnia in November 2001, and we immediately started spinning back up, hitting our training hard. We went to Fort Irwin NTC (National Training Center) and Fort Polk JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center), doing everything that needed to be done. We knew that we'd be heading over to Iraq, or rather Kuwait. We just didn't know when.

At that point we were pretty sure the war in Afghanistan had already started, but we didn't know anything more about what the Special Forces were doing than anyone else, until it hit the news. But there was almost no doubt we'd be going over to Iraq. We could see which way the wind was blowing. And we knew the Iraqis had a lot of tanks and APCs, and you don't fight armor with Special Forces—you fight armor with armor. That meant us.

My son Jaycob was about eight years old at that time, and he was dealing bravely with his cerebral palsy. Amy and I were doing whatever needed to be done to help him as much as possible. We discovered a clinic in Poland, the Euromed Rehabilitation Center. They were unique, doing things that nobody else was as far as physical therapy and other treatment for cerebral palsy. In particular, they had something called an Adeli suit to help with his treatment.

I knew I was going to get deployed soon, and so did my wife; the only question was when. So, while I was getting ready for Kuwait, my wife was preparing to go to Poland with Jaycob and Max, my youngest, who was three or four at that time. Jaycob could get this intense physical therapy much cheaper over there.

I have to say, my wife Amy was astonishingly courageous to head to a second-world foreign country all on her own with two little kids. We weren't getting any support from the Army whatsoever, as far as any of Jaycob's issues were concerned. We had to take it all upon ourselves to get this treatment for him. I was getting ready to go and possibly fight on behalf of our government, but did we get any help with Jaycob? No.

Amy actually left a week before I was deployed. It was around Christmastime. For me, it meant one more week without seeing them, and it was a pretty sad time. A trying time. I hadn't told her I was going into combat. She had enough to worry about, being in another country by herself, in the winter, with two small children, one of them handicapped.

W
e finally went over to Kuwait in December 2002. The fact is, however, that I could have gotten out of it. I was on PCS orders and was supposed to be leaving Fort Stewart before we deployed. I had a sweet-ass gig lined up at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas. There I would be working with National Guard and Reserve people, completely low stress. I already had my reporting date and everything else.

My Troop Commander at the time was Jeff McCoy. He had 21 years in the Army and was undoubtedly the best Commander I ever had. He was a stocky little barrel-chested Irish fireplug of a guy from the mountains of Colorado. I got lucky because toward the end of my career I had three really great Commanders.

McCoy asked me, “Hey, I know you've got combat experience from the first war and you really know what you're doing . . .” He hemmed and hawed for a little while, then said, “Is there any way that you can stay?”

I'd already talked to the wife about the new orders. We had a house in Florida, but we were looking forward to going out to Austin. We had heard a lot about it, plus it was going to be a good career move for me. At that time I hadn't really done much on the training side of things. I'd been straight combat arms all the way through, except for the gunnery training I did in Germany.

This was a really tough decision to make. I remember talking to Jason Christner, my Platoon Sergeant, and he said, “Hey, I really want you to stay. We're going need you here.” I respected his opinion—Christner was a true professional soldier and had been wounded in Somalia.

After thinking about it, I decided to stay. So I called the DA (Department of the Army rep) and he said, “No can do. You know you can't get out of your orders. You're already on orders assignment to Mabry. Besides, your squadron doesn't have orders to deploy yet, so you're not Stop Lossed where you can't go anywhere else.”

I found out that the orders were coming, but they were two weeks away. So I called up the DA again and told him the orders were coming in. I said, “Hey, look. Here's the day, the date, and I want to get a three-week extension before I leave out of here.”

He said, “Absolutely not. You are not going to be able to do it.”

Fine. I may be aggressive and bull-headed and have a bit of a temper, but at this point I'd been in the Army for 16 years and knew how to work the system. I told them, “Well, okay. But I'm going to take thirty days' leave before my PCS.” And they said, “Okay, that's good.” Because they had no reason to deny it.

With that, I had 30 days before I had to go to my next duty station—but I never signed out on leave. I didn't really clear and I didn't sign out on leave, so I was still technically in the unit, just letting the days click down. I didn't pack anything up. I didn't ship anything. I was just sort of hoping that I would get the Stop Loss before I had to go. I had about four days left on my leave, four days before I would have had to report to my next duty station, when they hit us with Stop Loss.

I didn't have to go to Iraq again. I made a conscious decision to go with my Commander, my Platoon Sergeant, my First Sergeant. I wanted to go with those people. I chose to serve with them.

I wanted to go to war because the bottom line is, human nature's a bitch. You never know how you're going to react even if it's the same situation you've been in before. It wasn't going to be the way it had been during Desert Storm. We weren't going to be the backup element, we would be the men who led the charge. I knew that. I wanted to be in the charge. I just didn't realize I was going to be THE guy to lead the invasion.

T
here were endless things to do before we headed out to Kuwait. We packed up a million things and started shipping them out months ahead of time.

Whenever we were out on training or maneuvers, everybody would always visit my Bradley. I had a coffeepot, and creamer and sugar for the guys who liked coffee that way. They would come by and we'd spend a lot of time drinking coffee and talking during breaks in the action. As the time to leave approached, I went to Sam's Club and got all the coffee and all of our other supplies, and the plastic containers to put them in. (Just so you know, if you have something with an aroma, like soap, and you store that with your creamer and your sugar, even though they're in different containers, all your coffee's going to taste like soap. Six thousand miles away from the nearest grocery store and all the coffee we had tasted like Irish Spring. Quite a disappointment.)

Once we arrived in Kuwait we moved to an instant tent city called Udairi. It was in northwestern Kuwait and was only put in place in January 2003. Now it's this big complex, and they renamed it Camp Buehring after one of the highest-ranking U.S. officers killed in the war, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Buehring. They run the Predator drones out of there now, but back in 2003 it was just a tent city in the middle of the desert. It was us, camels, goats, sheep, and the bedouins. And sand berms.

We didn't ship our Bradleys over there. My Bradley, which I named “Carnivore,” was PREPOSed—prepositioned. Sometime between the end of Desert Storm/Desert Shield and 9/11, it had been put into storage in Kuwait, waiting for the next dustup. Maintenance people would go out to where the vehicles were and start them up occasionally, make sure they were working, but when we got there and were assigned a vehicle we had to do the PMCS—primary maintenance checks and services. If something wasn't working, or wasn't the way it should be, that's when we called a mechanic.