Carnivore (20 page)

Broadhead rolled out of the way and hobbled back toward his tank. He yelled at his driver, “Okay, it's hooked up, back up!” We watched as the M1 rolled slowly backward. The cable grew taut, the Carnivore shifted, then it came fully down onto its tracks and back onto the road. I unhooked the tow cable and scrambled into the Bradley.

“Go, let's get the fuck out of here!” I told Sperry.

“Okay,
now
shoot them,” I told Soprano. “Kill everything you see. Make them keep their heads down, keep them right there until the bombs hit!”

Back up on the bridge, then back on the safe side of it, roaring in reverse toward the rest of Crazy Horse, the main gun and coax both roaring—and the world exploded. The Carnivore rocked and almost rolled again and the electronics in the turret went out. It felt like an elephant sat on my chest, and all I could see were white spots. Holy—what the—I wondered for a second if I'd died, then realized the B-1Bs had arrived.

They dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs in a crescent around our position. My turret power flickered, then came back on, and I stuck my head outside the hatch. Sperry still had us rolling in reverse, but we were at an angle now and about to head off the road again, this time ass first.

“Stop! Stop the fucking Brad!” Luckily the turret power was back on, otherwise he wouldn't have heard me over the radio. The Carnivore stopped just in time, knocking off part of a guardrail. I had to shake my head.

“Everybody still alive?”

The first bomb had impacted 400 meters from my position. While that may not seem close, the minimum safe distance from the kind of ordnance they dropped all around us is 2,000 meters, 2,500 during training. After making sure nobody was seeing double, we slowly rolled back up to the canal bridge.

After that crescendo, the rest of the night was relatively quiet. We watched a few Iraqis—and by a few I mean only 15 or 20—who had somehow survived the bombing stumble out of the area. As they had no weapons, we let them go. No more trucks rolling up on us, no more BMPs.

I discovered I had two bullet holes in my pant legs right next to my thighs from when Broadhead and I were standing in the open screaming at each other. Broadhead found a bullet hole on the underside of his sleeve. How neither of us managed to get hit I can't explain.

Finally, the dawn arrived. The bridge was still there, but beyond it—it was like looking at the moon. The bomb craters were the size of houses. Big houses.

“Jeezus Christ.” Sully had his head out of the hatch, looking around.

The Carnivore was in sad shape. We'd lost our radio antenna again, and two of my road wheels had holes in them from RPG hits. Sperry's periscope was destroyed and two of the armor plates for the track shoes had been blown off at some point during the last—how long had it been? Two and a half days. It seemed a lifetime.

And, once again, we were out of ammo. We had none left, as in, if the bombers hadn't shown up when they did, we were minutes away from having to throw insults at the encroaching Iraqis, maybe some rocks.

Sergeant Williams and the Casanova had survived the night, but he'd been beat up as well. He had one radio out and his night sight was going in and out. For some reason he could only run it for three hours and then he would have to turn it off for half an hour before it would work again. Maybe it was overheating. That day townspeople came up to Williams's Bradley, carrying pieces of the tanks that had been destroyed in their streets—I don't know if they wanted to give him souvenirs or what. Maybe the Casanova looked so bad they thought he needed spare parts.

The Hemmitts rolled up again and gave us a full upload of ammo. They topped off our fuel, too, but it was the ammo I was thankful for. We wiped down our weapons with a light coat of 15W40 motor oil, then checked to make sure there was nothing else that needed doing. Nope. We were squared away, at least for the moment, and there was nobody coming down the road.

I sat down to eat an MRE, then jerked when the radio came to life.

“Red 2, you have hostiles moving in and around a house to your front,” Broadhead told me.

“Roger that. Watch my move and we'll go take care of them.” A quick glance around the Brad showed me everybody was out cold. Wait, when did . . .? I checked my watch and saw that I had sat down to eat the MRE and fallen asleep for four hours. I didn't even remember closing my eyes, and nobody else even twitched when Broadhead called.

“Sperry.” He didn't move, and I nudged him with my foot. “Wake up. We've got some work to do.”

Sperry rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and moved us up the road. We stopped in the midst of the destroyed trucks, most of which were still smoking. I didn't wake anybody else up, because I knew how badly my crew needed to rest. When we stopped I spotted two Iraqi soldiers running down a bank to a ditch and took them out with the coax.

The sound of the gun woke Soprano up. “Hey, let me have the gun, I'll do it,” he told me sleepily.

We were on a plain filled with smoking husks of trucks stretching over half a mile in every direction. It was postapocalyptic, and I wouldn't have been surprised to see zombies shambling around. There wasn't much movement to see, other than the flames and swirling sand, but here and there another Iraqi soldier appeared and tried to work his way close to us on foot.

Over the next hour we killed 10 soldiers, driving around burning trucks like tourists at Armageddon, and while we were out there we did BDA for the Commander.

In the time the Carnivore was on that bridge we had engaged close to 100 troop transports, not to mention pickup trucks and cars filled with Iraqi soldiers, and the BRDM and BMPs. Each troop truck had between 10 and 20 troops on board when they rolled up to do battle. We stopped counting at 2,000 bodies. There were soldiers still sitting in the back of many of the trucks, or stacked like logs on the floor, killed before they'd ever had a chance to dismount. Their bodies burned with the trucks. It looked like hell, and it smelled like hell, too.

We did five full ammo uploads on that bridge. Over 3,000 rounds of 25 mm, and we went through it all, as well as 7,000 or 8,000 thousand rounds of 7.62 mm for the coax. The coax shot so much, I found, when we finally got to Baghdad and I was able to clean it, completely break it down, and take it out, that it was almost welded to the trunnion.

We collected 600 rifles, stacking them on the back of the Carnivore until the teetering pile made the Brad look humpbacked. Finally, we started moving back to the bridge at a crawl.

“Dismounts left!” I yelled out. Three soldiers ran into the house closest to the bridge. Soprano slewed the turret around and put 10 rounds of 25 mm HE into it. The front of the brick house blew apart, but there was no way to know if we'd gotten the soldiers.

“Shit, we gotta go in and check,” I said. The house was too close to the bridge to just hope we'd gotten them. “Sully, Soprano, let's go.” We left Sperry and the two engineers in the Brad, providing overwatch to make sure nobody came at us from the rear.

As we approached the house on foot, Sully in the lead, an Iraqi ran out of the ragged hole the HE had blasted in the front wall of the house. Soprano shot him in the face with my pistol. Very carefully we entered the front of the house and found the bodies of the other two Iraqis.

“All right, check the back of the house,” I told my guys. “I'm going to check these bastards for documents.”

The first Iraqi had an M1911 .45 pistol on him. God only knows where he got it, and the path it took from the United States to end up in his hands had probably been long and interesting. I laid down my AK and picked up the .45 to see if it was loaded—it was. As I was checking it out to see if there were any U.S. Army markings on it, another Iraqi with an AK stepped out from behind a pile of wood just feet from me.

“Shit!” I pointed the pistol at his chest, pulled the trigger, the hammer fell—and nothing happened. Just a click. We looked at each other for a fraction of a second, then I lunged at him and with a roar hit him in the face with the pistol. He dropped his AK as I dropped the 1911. I went for the Buck hunting knife I'd carried while turkey and deer hunting in Kentucky and all through Desert Storm. As he grappled with me I stabbed him under the arm and tried to stab him again—but I couldn't get the knife out.

I don't know if his chest muscles clamped down on the blade of the knife or what, but I couldn't pull it out of him, and he kept fighting and fighting. He took forever to die, or maybe it just seemed like forever.

In the movies, people who get stabbed just fall over and die. In the real world, it takes a long time to bleed out. He didn't go quickly or quietly. As I watched him die, I thought how stupid he was, how stupid I was. He could have surrendered, but instead he'd died. For what? Saddam and his torture chambers? And my lack of sleep had me making mistakes that probably should have killed me. Four hours of accidental nap time didn't begin to address the sleep deficit we had. Getting myself killed was one thing, but what I didn't want to do was get my crew killed. We needed a break.

Back at the bridge, we dumped the rifles into the canal while Broadhead covered us. We threw so many rifles down there that the canal was choked; you wouldn't have been able to get a canoe through it. A short time later, the Commander came over the radio net and told Crazy Horse we were going to be relieved, that another unit was going to replace us. Thank God. We'd all had enough of that damn road between the two bridges, although the sandstorm had finally died down.

The unit replacing us rolled up a while later, and they still had gun covers on their .50-cals. I looked over at Broadhead, who just smiled tiredly at me. What could you say? Their covers would come off as soon as it got dark again, of that I was sure.

What's interesting is that at As Samawah, Broadhead and I had gone tearing across the bridge after that Iraqi truck, and we'd gotten stuck on the wrong side. Geary had come across the bridge in his Bradley as part of an attempt to rescue our dumb asses. I received the Silver Star for helping to rescue his crew, but whether we rescued his crew or not, what we did was of no strategic or tactical importance to the war effort. We were just saving fellow soldiers.

At Objective Floyd outside An Najaf, however, Crazy Horse took on a tank battalion at one end of our column and an infantry brigade at the other, preventing what could have been a slaughter and a turning point in the war, in the process killing thousands of enemy troops. And nobody got a single medal. We weren't there for medals, but that just shows how arbitrary they can be. I don't think anybody even got a Purple Heart—not that you want those, of course.

Would things have been completely different for us if there hadn't been a sandstorm? Well, if there hadn't been a sandstorm, I would have been able to call in air, and we would have had a lot of other assets available to us. However, the Iraqis would have been able to see exactly where we were. I can only have so much ammo on board my vehicle and can only reload so fast. I'm still amazed that we survived, given everything we went through to secure that little worthless canal bridge.

We lived, they died. That's good enough for me.

W
hen we were relieved, we were to proceed to Objective Rams. Finally, an objective that wasn't a bridge.

Rams was a flat field in the middle of nowhere, southwest of An Najaf. It was a short move to get there, only an hour, and it was a safe location. Once we arrived we set up in a laager position. We would have a chance to rest and repair our gear while the 2nd BCT (Brigade Combat Team) would be pulling overwatch.

I had gone so long without sleep that I don't have coherent memories of my time at Rams. It was just snapshots in my mind, shades of color. There was an MKT (mobile kitchen trailer) set up, but they were done serving, because we'd arrived so late. I grabbed a bunch of T-rats and warmed them up on the engine of the Carnivore on the way back, then set up a hot meal for the entire troop so they didn't have to eat MREs again.

Just sitting on the ground, eating and talking with my crew and the guys who walked by, seemed an almost alien experience after living inside the Brad for days. The lack of sleep, lack of food, and being under almost constant attack for a week had aged Soprano 20 years. He went from looking like a baby-faced teenager to a tired 35-year-old. Jason Sperry, my driver, wasn't much better. I didn't want to even know what I looked like. My knees were so swollen from standing up for days that it was hard to walk. For the first time since the start of the war I got to change my socks.

The meal was lukewarm eggs and sausages. It was a good meal, and it was good to see the faces of my friends and fellow soldiers. We had traveled far and been through hell, but amazingly enough we hadn't lost anybody. We were all still there.

Specialist Ryan Hellman from S-3 (Headquarters Platoon) pulled up in his Humvee with Staff Sergeant Todd Young. They knew what we had been through and wanted to check on us.

“Jesus, how you guys doing?” Hellman asked us. He eyeballed the Carnivore, which wasn't nearly as pretty as the last time he'd laid eyes on it.

I was having a hard time doing much more than blinking, and polite conversation seemed almost impossible. I looked past him at his ride. “I'm stealing your antenna,” I told him.

“What?”

I took the matching unit—what we called the radio antennas because they were interchangeable—off his Humvee to fix the radio on the Carnivore. “You need anything else?” Hellman asked me.

“What do you have?” I asked him.

Young gave us some more batteries before they moved on. Captain Stephen Balog, the unit chaplain, came by to see us as well. Seeing his friendly face meant a lot and made me feel a little more human.

After eating I walked over to catch up on small talk with the First Sergeant—just being able to do that was a luxury. Turns out the .50-cal on his M113 APC hadn't functioned at all, not since we'd crossed into Iraq. The troop hadn't gotten a chance to test fire any of our weapons before they'd cut through the berm, and Grigges had been riding around for a week with a nonfiring machine gun. We put our heads together, and with a little tinkering and one big hammer, we got his .50 working again. Meanwhile, some of the guys were trying to ride one of the camels that were there. The camels belonged to the bedouins in the area. The riding attempts did not go well, except as entertainment for everyone watching.