Carnivore Read online

  DEDICATION

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  My loving wife, Amy, for the support, understanding, and sacrifices she has made.

  My children, Daniel, Janise, Jaycob, and Max, for understanding when I was gone and for the sacrifices they had to make because I wasn’t home.

  The Big Three group, David Fortier, and James Tarr for pushing me to write this book.

  The best Commanders anyone could ask for, Captains McCoy, Bair, and Burgoyne.

  First Sergeant Roy Grigges, SFC Jason Christner, and Lieutenant Garrett McAdams for their leadership and support.

  CSM Tony Broadhead for his never-ending support, and for always saving my ass when I bit off more than I could chew. Without Tony Broadhead there would be no Crazy J or Carnivore—Bradley or book.

  The crew of the Carnivore: Soprano, Sperry, Sully, and Patten, for putting up with all my crap and being the finest fighting crew in history.

  My wingmen: Geary, Carter, Wallace, Williams, Miller, Sowby, and Kennedy, and to the Crazy Horse troopers of 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, past and present, the finest fighting force ever trained.

  And finally, the lost warriors of 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry: SFC Parson, SSG Mitchell, and SPC Williams.

  Dillard (CJ) Johnson

  February 2013

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map of Iraq

  Prelude

  1. Bosnian D-Day

  2. Junior Jackassery

  3. No Such Thing as Friendly Fire

  4. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

  5. Love and Marriage, Army Style

  6. Eight Ball and the Lipstick Lizards

  7. Deathtrap

  8. First Contact

  9. Carnivore, Camel Toe, and Circus Freaks

  10. Steel Beast

  11. Ambush Alley

  12. Junkyard Dogs

  13. Line in the Sand

  14. Every Truck in the Country

  15. Repo Men

  16. The Great Baghdad Tank Battle . . . Sort Of

  17. Iraqi Bullfighting

  18. The Mafia Hit

  19. Stage 3

  20. Exchanging RPGs for IEDs

  21. Sniping Is as Sniping Does

  22. The Lion’s Mouth

  23. Syria vs. Kentucky

  24. Blood, Sweat, and Tears

  Photos Section

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Publisher’s Note

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAP OF IRAQ

  PRELUDE

  March 27, 2003

  Outside An Najaf, Iraq

  Emerging from the Commander’s hatch of my Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Carnivore, I stared out through my goggles and saw hell. A monstrous sandstorm swirled around us, and in the haze the flames from the dozens of destroyed vehicles that had charged our position cast a devilish glow on the terrain. Their steel carcasses stretched over a mile across the plain before us, but right then I could only view the few that had made it to within shouting distance of our little canal bridge: tanks, cars, trucks, a bomb-laden bus that had tried to ram us, and the tanker truck that had been burning for two days.

  The sandstorm seemed as if it had been going on forever, like we’d been inside a vortex of dust the entire war, and it was only getting worse. Visibility was down to ten feet. The thick sand made the dancing flames even more orange, and the whole area was bathed in eerie light. The glow from the flames was enough to screw up our thermal and night sights, but not sufficiently bright for us to actually see what we needed to, namely the Iraqis we knew were out there. Luckily, that meant they couldn’t find us, either; so in between troop trucks charging our position on the canal bridge we only had to contend with random, inaccurate AK fire.

  Crazy Horse Troop, 3/7 Cav, had seen so much action in the first two days of the war that the Commander had decided to give us a break. He’d put us in the rear of the column on the march north, guarding the 100 or so thin-skinned vehicles that made up our headquarters and medical and support elements. Those 100 vehicles were stretched out three-quarters of a mile behind me all the way to the bridge we’d crossed over the Euphrates River and made one hell of a tempting target. Especially since we were no longer advancing and had been told to hold both bridges. I was at one end of the convoy in the Carnivore and Sergeant John Williams was at the other, guarding the bridge over the Euphrates in his Bradley, the Casanova.

  “Stay alert,” I told Sperry, my driver, but I was talking as much to myself as I was to him. How long had we all been awake? Four days of near-constant combat, most of two days crossing the desert before that, and three days in Kuwait to start it off, when they’d been afraid of the troop getting hit by rockets, so we’d been on the move almost nonstop. How many days was that in a row? With only snatches of sleep here and there. I couldn’t count the days. I could barely think. The concussion didn’t help. The pain from all the mortar shrapnel in my arms and shoulders and the bullet in my leg wasn’t keeping me alert anymore. Everything was just a dull ache.

  Lieutenant McAdams was behind us on the road in his Bradley. Sergeant Wallace was to our right in his Bradley, off the side of the road by the canal where he could get a different angle on any oncoming vehicles. The sandstorm roared and hissed, and the engines of the Bradleys were loud anyway, so we couldn’t hear any vehicles approaching. I watched and waited.

  A truckload of Iraqis rolled up right on us—to the far side of the canal bridge, 40 damn feet away—before we even spotted them. And they had their fucking headlights on! Wallace got on his gun quicker than we did and killed everybody in the truck with a short burst from his machine gun.

  “I’m getting down!” I called to my crew.

  Visibility was bad enough without headlights shining in our faces, so I jumped down to turn off the lights of the truck. My knees were so stiff from standing in the hatch, I could barely walk. When I reached the ground and started limping toward the truck, I looked over and saw an Iraqi soldier on foot just 10 feet away from me with an RPG launcher on his shoulder. Before I could react, he fired at the Carnivore. The rocket hit the driver’s hatch, flipped up in the air, and exploded over the bridge.

  I drew and fired my Beretta, hitting him in the arm and chest, then the pistol jammed. AGAIN. That pistol was trying to kill me. There was an AK-47 on the seat of the truck, and I dove for it. As I went down, I was spattered with gore as the man’s head exploded all over me.

  Over my shoulder I saw Soprano, my gunner, less than two feet away, holding an AK of his own. He grinned, held it out, and said, “Here you go. It shoots a little high.” Smartass.

  Soprano had gotten off the Bradley to back me up and had moved to my right to avoid the lights of the truck. He had one of the more than 100 AK-47s we’d picked up the day before that we hadn’t gotten around to dumping in the canal. We’d been too busy keeping one another alive, which meant we’d done an extraordinary amount of killing.

  Soprano headed back toward the Carnivore. As I turned off the lights of the truck, two more dark shapes appeared on the road about 200 meters out. McAdams and his gunner, Sergeant Mulholland, had picked up the movement and were watching to see if the trucks that were rolling closer were troop transporters or some clueless farmers. When they stopped, the swirling sand was thin enough for us to see they were troop trucks, and the enemy soldiers started jumping out. I ducked down behind the Iraqi truck. I knew what was coming.

  Mulholland opened up with 25 mm HE (high-explosive) rounds on full auto, shooting right past me, and the Iraqis scattered like cockroaches when the light hits them. Most of the dismounts ran toward us, firing their AKs, but a few smart ones ran for cover.

  Thirty s
oldiers charged our position, and I had AK bullets whipping past me in one direction while Mulholland fired the Bradley’s main gun in the other. Looking up at the winking muzzle of that gun as Mulholland worked it back and forth was an unsettling experience—now I knew how the enemy felt. Mulholland was able to kill two-thirds of the soldiers before they’d gotten within 100 meters of the bridge. The rest of them were determined and kept working their way toward us. AKs are a poor match for 25 mm HE, however, and Mulholland was able to pick them all off in a few minutes.

  I got up from behind the truck where I’d been crouching and headed back to the Bradley, which I never should have left. Remember the line from Apocalypse Now, “Never get off the boat”? Note to self—Never get off the Bradley, dumbass.

  As I climbed back up on top of my Bradley, I checked the driver’s hatch for damage from the RPG round that had slammed it. Sperry opened the hatch and looked at me with his baby face.

  “What the hell hit my hatch?” he asked me.

  Oh, nothing, just a rocket that should have killed you. Hell, Sperry, Soprano, my loader Sully—we all should have died a dozen times over the past few days, and yet somehow we kept battling. They were still just kids, and there they were, fighting a war. Not just fighting, but kicking ass and taking a whole bunch of names.

  I was old and angry and liked to fight, but this Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid last-stand bullshit wasn’t exactly what they signed up for. As much as we were killing dismounts and destroying vehicles, we just couldn’t seem to stop them.

  Captain Jeff McCoy, the Troop Commander, had already given us the bad news—in between rare breaks in the sandstorm, JSTARS, our eye in the sky, had spotted 44 tanks heading toward the rear of our column, right at Sergeant Williams sitting on the Euphrates bridge. If that wasn’t bad enough, they’d then radioed there were 1,000 troop trucks—not troops, mind you, but troop trucks, each one of which could hold at least 20 soldiers—bearing down on our position. Potentially 20,000 troops. The sporadic trucks we’d seen so far were just the disorganized advance troops, random drops ahead of the oncoming tidal wave. We didn’t have enough ammunition, enough time, enough visibility, and they just kept coming.

  What we didn’t know then was that Saddam Hussein himself was personally moving these pieces around the board. He knew he had a U.S. cavalry squadron surrounded and was going to destroy it to get his victory over the Americans. Whatever it took, he was going to wipe us out, and he sent all the assets he had at that early stage in the war, which was most of the Medina Division. We had an entire enemy tank battalion coming at our rear and a whole infantry brigade advancing toward us from the front. Coming straight at our little canal bridge. Destroying Crazy Horse and all the assets we were protecting could alter the course of the war, and Saddam Hussein knew it.

  Korea is known as the Forgotten War. Iraq isn’t a forgotten war; everybody knows someone with a relative who served there, but it was a war. People forget that before it devolved into snipings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the evening news, it was a real war, where thousands of American troops lined up against thousands of Iraqis—the fourth-largest army in the world—and despite bragging claims to the contrary, nobody knew for sure quite what would happen.

  This is the story of the Iraq War you never heard about in the media. First and foremost, this was a war fought by and between armor—M1 tanks and Bradleys against top-of-the-line Soviet T-72s, APCs, anything and everything the Iraqis could throw at us. The Special Forces operators are the darlings of the media, but the regular army always does the heavy lifting, and in Iraq things were no different. Armor wins wars.

  I was lucky enough to ride at the front of the American war effort and serve with some of the finest soldiers and men you’d ever want to meet. Crazy Horse Troop, 3/7 Cavalry, 3rd Infantry Division, was the tip of the spear throughout the war, and this is their story as much as it is mine.

  This book should have been written long ago, but I’ve been too busy. After recovering from cancer caused by firing all those depleted uranium rounds on my first tour, I did a second combat tour with Crazy Horse, then spent six years as a private contractor. I’ve retired from that life, though. In addition to being able to spend time with my wife and kids, I now have the opportunity to pass on what I’ve seen and learned. Not just that—I have a duty.

  After all the close calls I have had in my life, I thought my purpose was to tell everyone this story. A tale of the young men and women of the cavalry making a charge into history, where a young soldier in a supply truck without armor raced to the front lines under a hail of bullets to resupply a Bradley under heavy fire. The supply soldier was black, the Bradley crew was a mix of Italians, a Korean, one white rapper, and an old hillbilly. There is no race or sex when you are fighting for your life: there are only the fellow soldiers around you. I was willing to give my life to save them, just as they were ready to do the same for me.

  But why did I wait? I was afraid that if I ever did tell this story my life’s purpose would be completed. As I am writing this, my body is again fighting cancer from the depleted uranium rounds that saved my life so many times. Every soldier who fought in Iraq has had to face his or her own demons, and I’m no different; my demon just happens to be cancer.

  God bless the Cav, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the United States of America!

  CHAPTER 1

  BOSNIAN D-DAY

  On 9/11 I was in Bosnia with the 3rd Infantry Division. We went over in 2000 as peacekeepers, part of the United Nations forces.

  Our area of responsibility, of operations, was to the north, a town called Brcko (“Birchko”). We were right across from Croatia, and the entire situation was sad and horrible. Imagine being in post–World War II Germany. Everybody was starving, and a lot of people were wearing little more than rags. The city was in shambles and everything was falling apart. Most people were just trying to find food. The Russian mafia was there in force taking advantage of the chaos, and that meant a lot of human trafficking was going on, as well as pirating of videos and God knows what else. It was a free-for-all of exploitation.

  That was an eye-opening experience for me, seeing a country in that shape. An impoverished country. Not a poor country, but a nation whose people have just been devastated by war. Whether they were Muslims or Christians, Serbs or Croats, I started really feeling what they were going through. It stuck with me. They looked like us, like Americans. The places we were, some of them looked like Anytown, U.S.A.

  We did what we could, keeping the Croats on their side of the river. Our forces were based at Camp McGovern, which was in the Zone of Separation (we called it “zoss”). McGovern was right where the border had been before the whole conflict started. They built the camp outside the town, and there were minefields on both sides of us. Every day it was an adventure going out on patrol or trying to do anything. If you didn’t stay right on the road, you’d hit a land mine. It was nothing to be driving down the road and see land mines right on the shoulder of the road.

  When the countryside flooded, land mines actually floated up against our fences. So there’d be a land mine. You’d sit and watch it because you knew they were all using the Soviet land mines, and with the Soviet stuff, you just never knew. They weren’t exactly reliable. We’d watch them float by, see them in a line like little wooden docks.

  As far as action, actual combat, we had snipers firing at us every once in a while. They weren’t really that big an issue, but you did have to watch out. We’d drive through and rounds would bounce off the turrets or whatever else, but they weren’t really focusing on us. We were right on the border between Croatia and Bosnia, and the two sides were more concerned with each other.

  Our duties involved frequent meetings with the Serbs. Many times we were going to disarm them, and they had big warehouses where we had to inventory their weapons. There had to be parity—if we went into Croatia and counted out 89 rifles in this country, then we would go to Bosnia and count out 89
rifles in that country. Everything had to be exactly the same.

  On one of our trips I did get to meet one of the Serbian tank commanders, which was very interesting. He had something like 50 tank kills, 50 Soviet T-72s, which is what the Croatians were using. I wish I’d been able to take pictures of his tank. It had been hit by sabot rounds on the sides of the turret. They weren’t direct hits but grazes, where the rounds just caught on the side. It looked as if somebody had taken a big knife and ripped through the side of the tank. The damage had happened when he’d taken on four tanks at once.

  Fifty is an amazing number of tank kills. The Serbian tank commander would set up inside a building and wait for the Croats to drive down the street past him. When they rolled by he would shoot them in the ass (the most vulnerable side on any tank), but as soon as he took them out he would get out of there and set up somewhere else. They would send more tanks to try to find whoever had taken out the first one, and he would get more of them. It was guerrilla warfare with a tank. He was quite effective. I don’t think there are very many people, even American Iraq War heroes, who have as many confirmed tank kills as that. I know in World War II the Germans had a lot, but this guy—one tank gunner, he’d just sit back and blast ’em. And I got to get in that tank and spin the turret around and work the gun, which was pretty cool.

  There’s another thing that sticks with me. I found a Tommy Gun, a Thompson submachine gun, in one of the warehouses. It was supposed to be destroyed. The weapon was engraved with a name, Sergeant Wilson, and it had D-DAY 1944 and JUNE 7TH carved in it with a knife. Talk about holding a piece of history in your hands—that was one of the machine guns actually used on D-Day. I hope it served Sergeant Wilson well. (Yes, I know D-Day was June 6, but I’m guessing Sergeant Wilson was a little too busy to keep track of his calendar.)

  We attempted to get that Thompson sent back to the States for the division, but it had to be destroyed due to the United Nations mandate. There were lots and lots of guns like that in their armories, but the Tommy was the one I’ll never forget.