Carnivore Read online

  By that point Sully was biting his lip so hard to keep from laughing that it was bleeding, and there were tears running down his face. George looked over at him, saw the tears, and said, “Yes, it is very sad.”

  George told us there had been 1,500 soldiers inside that compound. He was one of only 10 who survived. He would go on to tell me how he was pulled from the pile of bodies by his soon-to-be wife. What are the chances? The guy who destroyed the Crazy Horse Café two years later became my interpreter. I never did tell him that I was the one who’d killed all his friends.

  Finally, we were officially relieved and off the line. Still, the first thing we did was track down the HEMTT fuel and ammo carriers and top off. HEMTT stands for heavy expanded mobile tactical truck—we called them Hemmitts. They are eight-wheel-drive off-road-capable supply vehicles and carried all of our fuel and ammo. The fuelers have big tanks in back, but the ammo carriers are just giant flatbed trucks.

  Sully and I were finally able to go see the medic, Sergeant Todd Cardone. He would patch me up many more times. Amazingly, none of our injuries were life-threatening, even though—at some point—I’d been shot in the leg. Maybe while protecting Geary’s Bradley? I honestly couldn’t say for sure when.

  It was a small bullet or fragment, and it’s still in my leg to this day. It went in the side of my left leg about four inches above the ankle and damaged some nerves. Part of my leg and the top of my foot are still numb, and the doctors are afraid that removing the bullet might cause more nerve damage. The medics bandaged that up, and my hands as well, but that was really all they could do for me in the field. My eardrum was definitely burst, but they couldn’t do anything for that either. The shrapnel wounds to my arms were officially Purple Heart number one for me, the medal nobody wants to get, and the bullet in the leg was number two. The medics were pretty sure I had a concussion, too, but seeing as they couldn’t do much of anything to treat it, they just let me go back into the line. That was the first, but not nearly the last, serious pounding my head took over there.

  Captain McCoy came over to see how we were doing. We were just glad to be alive. Thirty-six hours of taking incoming, of being swarmed by the enemy, of not knowing if the next RPG would take us out . . . Soprano had a flag from Hooters, and we opened it in front of the Carnivore and took a picture. That picture ended up in Soldier of Fortune magazine, ultimately. To be honest, at that point I’d never been inside a Hooters in my life, but it was a piece of America, a symbol of what we were fighting for. Not only that, the fact that Hooters employed pretty girls in short shorts probably was hugely offensive to the guys who’d been trying to kill us for the better part of two days, so it was a win-win.

  My crew and I were just happy to be alive. Heading to Kuwait, we knew we’d probably see some combat, but those two days in As Samawah—it was insane, incredible. We drove up not expecting much of anything and got hit by more than 2,000 men. Between the fighting and the lack of sleep, everything seemed surreal to me. I had to fight myself just to think clearly.

  While we were monkeying around with the Hooters flag, a Toyota Hilux pickup approached the troop’s position, and after the last two days every eye and gun swung in the pickup’s direction damn fast. The truck skidded to a stop, and the men inside nearly busted their wrists deploying VS-17 visual signaling panels. In this case, they meant “Don’t shoot us.” The guys in the truck were a Special Forces team and needed to get on our radio net, fast.

  They had located Chemical Ali, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the King of Spades in the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards deck, the fifth-most-wanted man in Iraq. The bearded spec-ops guys had pinged his cell phone and knew right where he was, not too damn far from where we were sitting. They needed an air strike and needed it fast.

  The request went up the chain but was denied because Ali was located right next to a school, and command didn’t want to cause that kind of collateral damage. Those Green Berets were pissed, but they knew the score. They threw their shades on, piled back into their pickup to head out for their next job, then paused.

  “Dudes, can we get some gas?” they asked Broadhead and me. “We’re bone dry.”

  “I’m a Bradley, he’s an Abrams,” I told them. “Diesel.”

  Broadhead decided to help out. “Give them the gas you have for your generator,” he told me.

  Thanks a lot, Tony. “It’s all I’ve got,” I told him.

  “It’s only ten gallons. You’ll find someplace to fill it back up.” With some grumbling I gave them the 10 gallons, and with a grateful wave they sped off in their pickup. You hate to give anything up in a war zone, because you never know when you’ll be able to get more. Scavenging can become an art form.

  U.S. forces almost nailed Chemical Ali with an air strike the next month, but it wasn’t until August of that year that he was finally captured. It was the Iraqi Kurds who had given him his nickname, after he used chemical weapons in attacks against them. He was charged with a number of crimes including genocide, tried, and ultimately hanged on January 25, 2010.

  I then went over to the mortar team to thank them for their help. That is when I found out that not only did the Iraqis pound my side of the bridge, they’d pounded everyone, everywhere. My first sergeant, Roy D. Grigges, and the Second Platoon leader, 2nd Lieutenant Charles Tucker, a 23-year-old West Point grad from Haleyville, Alabama, had both been wounded by the mortars. Grigges had been with the Commander near the objective when the mortars started landing. One mortar round landed so close it almost turned his armored personnel carrier over.

  While Sully and I were getting worked on by the medics, our squadron CO, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Farrell, walked up. He’s a handsome guy with dark hair and looked young for an LC, which is probably why they chose him to speak to the media. He’s a Brigadier General now, in charge of the National Training Center. We provided him with an informal after-action report of our adventures in As Samawah during the previous 36 hours. Not long after that he gave a television interview to Fox News. Your battle roster ID is your troop, the first initial of your last name, and the last 4 of your Social Security Number, so my battle roster was “Crazy J 1248.” That is why the Colonel, when he was talking to Fox News about the battle of As Samawah, kept referring to me as “Crazy J.” The name stuck. As nicknames go, it’s a pretty good one, and a pretty good way to get one.

  CHAPTER 11

  AMBUSH ALLEY

  Colonel Farrell let Crazy Horse go 100 percent down for the afternoon. We’d led the way and been the first unit to fight, and he thought we’d earned a little rest. Like we were going to argue?

  We parked on the reverse slope of a ridge and the troop took artillery all afternoon and into the evening. At least, that’s what they told us. We were so dead tired we slept right through the barrage. Luckily, the incoming headed in our direction missed and hit behind our position.

  The U.S. military got quite a bad reputation during the Vietnam War for inflating enemy casualty figures. The body count exaggerations got so bad that eventually nobody believed them. During the Iraq War, casual observers may not even have noticed that we rarely released numbers of confirmed kills to the press or public, except in rare instances. That doesn’t mean we weren’t counting.

  Part of a soldier’s job in combat is BDA—battle damage assessment. During the entire engagement at As Samawah—when my radio was working—I called in the BDA for my vehicle, which included enemy KIA as well as number and types of vehicles destroyed. We weren’t involved in a jungle war, and the enemy generally didn’t carry off their dead, so our body count resulted from counting actual bodies. When the whole troop came over in force and we were trying to unstick Geary’s Bradley, we did a body count around that vehicle. I don’t know how many people Geary shot with his M4, how many Soprano hit with the coax while we were en route to or parked beside Geary’s Brad, or how many I shot in the ditch while protecting Geary’s crew during their transition to my vehicle, but we counted a total of 221 bodies around tha
t location.* I’ve read that the official BDA just for my vehicle on March 23, 2003, the day we crossed the bridge and entered the Ba’ath Police compound, was 488. I’ve heard the unofficial body count was over 1,000. I was too busy, that day and the next, to keep an accurate total, but Crazy Horse Troop did their best to kill everyone who was trying to kill us. We were just better at it.

  I was awarded the Silver Star for my actions rescuing Geary and his crew, and there was some talk about putting me in for the Medal of Honor, but politics apparently reared their ugly head on that. They quite often do, when you’re talking about any award at or above the Silver Star level. As far as I’m concerned I didn’t do anything that anybody else wouldn’t have done, I just happened to be the guy there at the time. Most of the time medals should be called the “Hey, Dumbass” award, and this case was no different. Actually, in this case it was a team effort. When it was time to do the right thing, we all stepped up. Broadhead received the Silver Star for his actions at As Samawah. Sperry, Soprano, and Sully were all awarded Bronze Stars for their actions as well, and Sully and I received Purple Hearts.

  While we were asleep, the other Cav troops went back across the bridge and secured it. The next day, an infantry unit came up and did a blocking position on the town, locking it up a bit tighter. As soon as they were in position, however, the Iraqis opened up with D5 artillery again. One of the infantry’s Bradleys, parked behind the berm just across the bridge where I’d hidden out for most of the day before, took a direct hit that killed everybody in the vehicle. It was pretty vicious. I don’t know if the Iraqi spotter moved, or they just got lucky, but things like that make you think. What if that had been us? Why did they get hit, and we didn’t? I got a medal, and they got killed. There was no reason to it, and trying to make any sense out of it could drive you crazy.

  That day the Iraqis were throwing D5 rounds everywhere, and our whole troop was displacing all day, moving around to keep from getting hit by the artillery. First Sergeant Grigges told the Hemmitt fuelers and the ammo truck to stick with him no matter what, but I don’t think he quite thought that order through. As we were getting hit by artillery, he was trying to haul ass and maneuver away from it in his M113, and he had that huge 5,000-gallon Hemmitt fueler right on his ass, not letting him get away. The fueler, following orders, wanted to stay with him, and Grigges was trying to get away from the fueler, because, well, it’s a big bomb. That was funny as hell to watch, like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.

  That evening I picked up two combat engineers on my vehicle, because once we’d been blooded, command assigned engineers to the squadron. One of the engineers’ vehicles, an M113 APC, broke down. We abandoned it, took everything off it, and spread the crew among our vehicles. The Carnivore got two of them, including a great Korean kid named Sun, so then we were six. We also managed to fix Sully’s M240B, so all of our weapons—minus the M4 shredded by the mortar round—were back in business.

  Our original objective was to hold the bridges so the armor units—a tank battalion—could pass through us. We would follow them through to the other side of town and hold the bridge over there, then do a feint and make the Iraqis think we were attacking that way. After dodging artillery for the better part of a day, Captain McCoy decided that a change of plans was in order. Instead of going through the town, we’d go around it. As Samawah was just costing us too much time, and we weren’t going to be able to get where we needed to be if we kept banging our collective heads against this town, where we hadn’t even thought we’d see much resistance.

  The Squadron Commander decided that since Crazy Horse Troop had done so much in the battle of As Samawah, he would give us a break. That night, at dusk, Apache Troop moved out. Bravo Troop followed them. Our job was to follow Apache and Bravo, protecting the field trains. We had the fuelers, the ammo trucks, the headquarters platoon, all the soft-skinned and supply vehicles with us. We were heading to a town called Nafen, en route to An Najaf. All three troops would be following the same route, but because we were bypassing As Samawah, command told us enemy contact wasn’t likely, and it would be an easy move. Riiiiight.

  We were supposed to take a lateral route, almost a scenic tour, that had us going through farm fields on back roads and then along some canal roads, but the canal bridges weren’t big enough to support us. We started along that route, but soon realized we had to turn around, and actually took a mortar round at that first bridge. I could cross the bridge, but Broadhead couldn’t, and that seemed to be the story line all the way through Iraq—the Bradleys could make it, the tanks couldn’t. The problem for armor in Iraq was the deep canals everywhere. The canals are 10 feet deep and 15 feet wide, with concrete banks and fast-moving water, so there’s no way you can ford them. So we had to cross using the bridges, which were designed for trucks and tractors. The Bradleys could make it across most of the bridges, pushing our luck, but at 60 tons the M1s just couldn’t. We actually had two tanks fall through bridges, so command said to stay on the main road. We stayed on the main road.

  The official designation of the road we took was Route Appaloosa, and it paralleled the Euphrates River. Appaloosa headed in a general northwest direction and stretched between As Samawah and An Najaf, the two largest cities in the area.

  There were three roads that went north from As Samawah. Command knew there was a lot of enemy in the area north of As Samawah, including armor, but the trick was to get them to show themselves. Our plan was to get into a fight and bait them into engaging us in force. We wanted to get into a decisive engagement with them and make them commit, thinking we were the main effort. Because we were Cav, we had our own artillery, our own reconnaissance, our own aircraft, and our own armor—we could throw a lot of weight around for our size. Once they committed, we would then bring the armor brigades in and crush them. It didn’t quite work out that way.

  It was dark when Crazy Horse Troop started rolling. The Carnivore was in the lead, with Broadhead and the Camel Toe right behind us. We weren’t moving fast, and we weren’t trying to—we were leading over 100 wheeled vehicles of all types. Apache and Bravo, two troops filled with aggressive guys just itching for a fight, were out front, and we knew they’d take care of the heavy lifting.

  The road we were driving on was elevated, with fields and occasional houses off to either side in the distance. We’d been on the road an hour and had covered about 10 miles, when Specialist Bobby Hull in Broadhead’s M1 spotted a cow off in the field. For whatever reason, Hull decided to shoot at the cow using the tank’s .50-cal—and that touched off the longest ambush in military history. For the record, that is only the first of two cow-initiated ambushes I experienced in Iraq.

  When Hull shot at the cow, guys hiding behind the cow ran in every direction, and beyond the cow was an Iraqi BMP. The BMP is a tracked infantry fighting vehicle, and as soon as those guys started scrambling away from the cow the BMP opened fire on us. That was apparently the signal for the ambush, because the world around us exploded.

  “Contact dismounts east!” Broadhead yelled over the radio, which was not good, considering the BMP was to our west. We started taking mortars from the distant houses. Soprano spotted a pickup truck on a side road with a 14.5 mm heavy machine gun mounted in the back and took that out with the 25 mm. We were ducks in a row on that road, and moving slow. The Iraqis had a target-rich environment.

  When responding to an ambush, there are two ways to react: you can fight, by assaulting the ambushers, or you can run. Acting as an escort to 100 slow-moving vehicles, we couldn’t really do either. Our job was to protect those vehicles. We could slow some vehicles down and let other vehicles pass us, but we had to keep them inside our formation so we could provide protection. Our major defense was speed. When the mortars and bullets started flying everybody sped up, but with that amount of traffic, nobody was going as fast as they could, much less as fast as they wanted to. Our plan was to get out of the ambush zone, as fast as possible. The only problem was, it never see
med to end.

  Staff Sergeants John Williams and Heath Thayer in Third Platoon were doing all they could in their Bradleys. They would stop and fire at the enemy and let the fuel trucks pass through them, then race up ahead of them and do it again.

  Mortars were hitting the road when the medical platoon passed through it. One of the medic trucks was hit, on fire, and taking small arms fire. The medic platoon’s First Lieutenant, Sammy Gram, stopped his truck in the middle of the firefight and engaged the enemy until his soldiers were in another vehicle and rolling.

  BMPs were positioned in alleys between buildings and would take keyhole shots, shooting through a narrow slot across the road. They could hear us coming and were just launching rounds across the road hoping that somebody would run into them. Their 30 mm tracers would zip right across the road. I just slowed down as I was coming up, and when I could see the corner of their vehicle I would just start shooting into (through) the buildings to get at them. I’d watch for the explosion, then we’d roll up to where the next one was firing. We were hitting the BMPs with DU rounds, and a few not hiding behind buildings we hit from 1,000 meters while driving down the road.

  As we kept moving forward, getting closer to town, there were a lot of trees on the side of the road and houses built right up next to it. A lot of the houses had little concrete-block walls, and Iraqis were hiding behind the houses, behind the trees, behind the walls, and had dug foxholes right on the side of the road.

  “Run over them,” I told Sperry, pointing at the foxholes on the right side of the road. He did, and the weight of the Bradley crushed the guys in them, while Sully shot the Iraqis to the left. There was no finesse to it, but there rarely is in war. Half the time Sully was shooting his M240B with the buttstock sticking straight up into the air, shooting right down into the ditches, that’s how close the Iraqis were.