Shock Factor (36 page)

His finger fluttered from the side of his M4 to the trigger.

“Pleez … ple…”

“No. I won't do it. I won't kill him,” Bumgardner said.

He motioned to the kid under the bus and said, “Come to me.”

With supreme effort, the Mahdi militiaman crawled from under the bus and somehow found the strength to stand up. He was little more than human wreckage. Blood poured from a dozen wounds around his face, head, shoulders, and chest. One arm dangled limply from shredded tendons. The boy looked down in horror and realized it was barely connected to his body. It swung like a bloody pendulum until he tried vainly to hold it in place with his left hand. But his left hand had been torn apart by shrapnel or bullets. Ruined flesh hung from shattered bones. He stood there, the full magnitude of what had happened to his body sinking in, and he began to scream.

Tyson looked on in horror. He heard himself reflexively say, “Dude, I don't think you're going to make it.” Randy heard that and thought it was terrible thing to say. But in such an extreme moment, the mind reacts in unusual ways.

“Save me. Help me. Pleez, pleez,” the teenage militiaman wailed.

He took a shambling, desperate step toward Tyson, but that was all he had left. He fell to his knees, his voice hoarse and fading as he started to beg Allah for salvation. His right arm swung free as he lifted his left hand beseechingly up to the Oregonian in front of him.

Tyson called Lt. Boyce and asked for a medic. Later, he said, “It was the only humane gesture I could offer him in a hopeless moment.”

Lieutenant Boyce denied the request. The situation was just too chaotic, and the column was about to mount up and get out of there.

The dying kid lost his balance and collapsed, face-first in the street. Arm still outstretched, his hand fell atop Tyson's boot, leaving a smear of blood across it. He bled out in the gutter and died only a few seconds later. Tyson stared down at him, unsure what to do next. Then he remembered the mom and her children. Glancing over his shoulder, Tyson saw them watching him through the storefront's window.

Mitts heard Boyce's voice over his Motorola radio ordering them to come back to the vehicles. Mitts relayed the order to Tyson, whose gaze had returned to the kid who had just died at his feet. There was so much blood.

“Let's go, Bum.”

As if in a dream, Tyson looked up at his friend. He'd come to Iraq to help students, not shoot them. A wave of pure anguish washed over him.

“Come on, Bum,” Mitts said gently as he grabbed his shoulder.

Bullets still impacting around them, they moved back to their Humvees. As they did, Tyson ventured one last look. The loader, arm outstretched in death, lay in a crimson puddle by the fender of the shattered minibus. A pair of shoes smoldered in a charred circle in the street.

The shoes had not been empty.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Red Mist

AUGUST 9, 2004
BAGHDAD
NOON

Keith Engle sat atop the Ministry of Interior, bored out of his mind. Months had passed since the torture scene had unfolded beneath them at this observation point. Since then, they'd seen almost no activity from the compound. He and Maries had been watching the Shia Uprising unfold around them, but had little ability to influence things from their perch.

He happened to be looking toward Sadr City when somebody started firing mortars at Patrol Base Volunteer. Engle saw the first launch and noted the Point of Origin (POO)—right on the edge of Route Pluto, the north-south highway that divided Sadr City from the rest of Baghdad. The enemy was mortaring their base several times a day, and there was nothing Keith or Kevin Maries could do about it from their vantage point. If only they could call in counterbattery fire, but the 39th Brigade would not allow that. The mortar teams used busy civilian neighborhoods, and smacking them with 105mm rounds would have devastated those areas. The civilian casualties would be high, and the cost of rebuilding the structures destroyed would fall to the American taxpayer. Engle grabbed the radio and called the launch in to the battalion operation center, thoroughly frustrated. It was all he could do.

The first mortar impacted on the American base. The civilian contractors working there scuttled for cover. Inside the scout platoon's barracks, the detonation roused Andy Hellman, the proud driver of the platoon's unarmed Rat Rig. Quiet, sometimes to a fault, Andy stayed on life's periphery, and moved through it as anonymously as possible. At parties, he was the guy in back watching everything, saying nothing. In battle, he always seemed to be a target, and he'd gotten the reputation as an RPG magnet. No matter, he strapped his gear on every day and went to work with a rock solid resolve that overcame all fear.

Curiously, he stepped out onto a second-floor veranda to see what was going on. Another scout, Sergeant George Gordon, soon joined him. As they observed the scene together, a second round exploded near the motor pool.

“Wow, that was pretty close,” Gordon observed wryly.

The attack had caught Lieutenant Ross Boyce out in the open. He and Lieutenant Chris Boeholt, the battalion mortar platoon leader, had been walking back from the chow hall when the first round had landed. Now they ran through the incoming to get back to their men.

The third mortar struck midway between the motor pool and the scouts' barracks, sending up a thin column of smoke and dirt perhaps a hundred yards away. That was enough for Andy. “That's too close! Let's get back inside!”

The two Oregonians abandoned the veranda and went down the second-floor hallway, intending to get on the first floor. They could hear their medic, Mike Giordano, shouting something to some KBR employees who were outside and running for cover.

“That's right, run you fucking pussies!” they heard him yell in his irascible growl.

Vintage Giordi. Hellman stifled a laugh. He thought the world of the platoon's grouchy medic and his bah-humbug sense of humor.

The barracks convulsed. A flat, metallic burst of sound deafened Andy in the stairwell. Then a concussion wave slammed into Andy and nearly threw him off his feet. He stumbled down to the first floor.

Giordi lay sprawled on the ground a few feet from the open main door, covered in blood. Tendrils of smoke wafted through the room. Splinters of glass from shattered windows crunched underfoot as Hellman and Gordon rushed to their wounded medic.

Giordano had been hassling the contractors from the doorway of the barracks when a fourth 82mm mortar struck right in front of him. That he was even alive was a miracle.

“Check my eye!” Giordi growled.

“Your eye is fine,” Gordon reported.

“Is my liver okay?” the medic demanded.

“You've been hit in the neck, Giordi.”

Angry, seething with pain and fear, Giordano told Gordon how to treat his wound. More scouts and snipers emerged from their rooms to help out. Boyce and Boeholt arrived moments later. The sight of their medic roused everyone to fury. This mortaring shit had to stop.

A meat wagon arrived. The men lifted him into it, and he was sped first to the battalion's aid station, then to the Baghdad Combat Support Hospital. He had suffered a serious shrapnel wound to his neck and was lucky to be alive. Later, he was evacuated to Germany, then to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland, where he barraged the doctors with demands to let him rejoin his platoon. It took months, but he finally talked the docs into it. When he returned to the scouts, he received a warm and hearty welcome.

But that was all in the future. In the meantime, the mortar attack had wounded two Volunteers. Enough was enough. Boyce and his men sat down to brainstorm ways they could put an end to them.

Boyce was not a Guardsman, but a regular army officer who'd been a general's aide at Fort Hood when Hendrickson promoted the scout platoon leader to a company command. The Volunteers were running very lean on officers at the time, and Boyce received an offer to take the platoon. The men greeted him with quiet skepticism at first, but he soon won them over with his willingness to learn, listen, and keep an open mind.

Together with Kevin Maries, Boyce developed a plan that was both bold and fit within the narrow parameters of the current Rules of Engagement. They knew that Hendrickson faced a tough tactical situation, thanks to the cagey nature of the Mahdi Militia. The insurgents had discovered where the unit boundary was between the Volunteers and 2-5 Cav, which was assigned to Sadr City. The Mahdi promptly exploited the boundary by launching their mortar attacks on the Patrol Base Volunteer from inside 2-5's battle space. Had they just attacked from inside 2–162's area of operations, Hendrickson would have simply sent his Quick Reaction Force to chase down the mortar teams and kill them in the streets. Instead, the Oregonians couldn't get permission from 2-5 Cav to cross the unit boundary and hunt down the mortarmen with their motorized infantry platoons.

Lieutenant Boyce and Kevin Maries came up with a solution. Why not use the snipers to locate and kill the mortar teams with precision gunfire? The enemy had been lobbing rounds at their base from the same general area every day since the uprising began. If his scouts could find a tall building with a good view of western Sadr City, his snipers could take them out. That way, they wouldn't have to cross the unit boundary and run afoul of 2-5 Cav's commander or that battalion's own operations. With the sniper teams, they could stay in 2–162's own battle space and ambush the mortar teams from long range. If all went well, the Mahdi would never know what hit them.

Hendrickson, who had been impressed with the performance of the scout platoon all summer long, gave Boyce the green light. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant went to work fleshing out the details with Maries and his squad leaders.

The main problem was manpower. With Gushwa hurt and the two outposts needing teams, Maries could only dedicate one team to the mission. Boyce would take enough men and firepower to protect the snipers and their Humvees, while the battalion would have a platoon of Humvee-mounted infantry ready to roll to their aid should they get in trouble. While no air support was available, 2–162's parent brigade, Arkansas's 39th Infantry, tasked a battery of heavy artillery to the scouts. Should they get into trouble, they'd have plenty of firepower at their disposal, plus ready backup only a few minutes away at Patrol Base Volunteer.

The plan was brilliant. Boyce had mobility, he had firepower, he had backup. Instead of using a single sniper team—more of an individualistic solution—the decision to use all the available men in the platoon would give them the firepower to tackle most threats should their hide site get compromised.

This was not a standard sniper employment; Boyce didn't pull it out of any tactical manual or book. But then again, no book has ever won a firefight.

Long after sunset, the platoon mounted up and slid through Patrol Base Volunteer's rear gate. They were going mortar hunting.

The platoon split up to search for a suitable overwatch position. Tyson Bumgardner led one patrol over to an abandoned amusement park by Martyr's Monument. They couldn't get a good vantage point from there, so Tyson and Buchholz climbed into a nearby Iraqi Police tower and observed Route Pluto for a few hours while the rest of the patrol pulled security for them on the street below.

The night was full of fireworks. Mahdi Militia teams kept launching rockets from Sadr City at the Green Zone, the administrative heart of the new government and Coalition forces. The Iraqi Police tower happened to be right under their flight path, and every few minutes one would buzz right overhead before exploding a few kilometers behind them in the blacked-out city.

From time to time, an AC-130 Spectre gunship would open fire from an orbit several thousand feet above Baghdad. Its massive firepower would lay waste to one of the rocket teams, but there always seemed to be more willing men ready to carry out the next launch.

As the night wore on, Tyson and Darren Buchholz decided to head back to the rest of the platoon. As they did, Bumgardner remembered an Iraqi Police checkpoint very close by at the Route Pluto entrance to Martyr's Monument. Three men manned that position, armed with two AKs and a Dragunov sniper rifle. They'd been told to expect the platoon, and they knew of their presence, but the patrol remained cautious as they passed close by it on their way back to Lieutenant Boyce.

When the scouts reunited, Randy Mitts told Boyce his patrol had found a great hide site in a neighborhood just north of Martyr's Monument. He led the way, and the scouts stashed their Humvees at the base of a skeletalized eleven-story skyscraper. A wall ran around the perimeter of the building, which provided perfect concealment for the platoon's rigs. Leaving behind a squad to protect the trucks, the rest of the scouts followed Lieutenant Boyce up into the skyscraper.

The war had not been kind to this building. Above the fourth floor, the fighting had torn away much of the outer wall, leaving the rooms within exposed to the outside. Scaffolding had been erected on the northeast side, a sign that the Iraqis were at least making some effort to reconstruct it. The higher they climbed, the more devastation they found on each floor. In some places, the interior walls had been removed by work crews who had also scattered construction supplies all over the place.

Ross Boyce set them up on the seventh floor, and the scouts settled down to take shifts on their weapons, eat, and sleep. They planned to be up there for several days, if necessary. Even in the darkness, they could tell this place had a prime view of the western edge of Sadr City and the neighborhood where Keith Engle had seen the mortar launches. A perfect ambush site. Now all they needed was an enemy to show up.

The hours of darkness passed slowly. The men grew exhausted. Some dozed. Others scanned the city below. Tyson went downstairs to grab some food from the Humvees. As he chatted with some of the other scouts down there, he remembered that it was his sister's birthday. For a moment, he wished he was at Volunteer so he could call her.