Carnivore Page 13

  Third and Fourth Platoons were at the rear of the column, with Staff Sergeant John Williams acting as tail gunner in the Casanova. He started taking small arms fire from the town on the other side of the Euphrates, but not too many people were dumb enough to try to cross that bridge. If they did, they didn’t last very long.

  Williams was a good man, with a good crew. Sergeant Thomas Hudgins was his gunner, a good ol’ boy from Georgia who was always cracking jokes. Specialist John Pecore was the driver. He was a tall kid from Texas, and Williams liked him a lot. Williams’s dismount/loader/observer was Specialist Clint Leon, who hailed from Arizona. With them watching the troop’s back I didn’t have any worries.

  The sandstorm got so bad we lost communications with the rest of the squadron. So there we sat, in the middle. We had Iraqi soldiers on at least three sides of us, with no visibility. We tried the thermals, but they didn’t work through the sand, day or night. The Commander told us to stop any vehicles from coming into our perimeter. With our Bradley not really set up for traffic control, I did this by standing up on top of my turret, waving my arms for everyone to see my signals to turn around.

  It started off with a car.

  It came rolling into view through the sand, and for all of my waving I might as well have been invisible. The car swerved around the Carnivore and drove into the front of the Lieutenant’s Bradley. The driver jumped out with an AK-47 and Broadhead shot him three times with his pistol. The Iraqi dropped his AK and ran into a ditch. He later crawled out of the ditch, bleeding from three very visible gunshot wounds, and walked off into the woods.

  “Let him go, he’s done fighting,” Broadhead called out over the radio, so we did. We pushed the vehicle off the road and shot it with 25 mm HE until it caught fire. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I would get killed if I stayed up on top of my turret.

  The new plan would be to fire coax (which had a four-in-one tracer mix) in front of the oncoming vehicles so they would see the tracers and turn away. Broadhead moved off the road to my right rear where he could get a different angle on the vehicles, just in case either of us had to shoot. This worked much better, and a lot of civilians did hasty U-turns after seeing us loom up through the sand or seeing tracers whip past their bumpers. However, we kept seeing one truck roll up close enough to see us through the sand, pause, and then move away. He did it over and over. We thought he was a bad guy, but didn’t want to fire until we knew for sure.

  Finally, the driver grew some balls or made his peace with Allah and came roaring down the road at about 80 miles per hour. We fired in front of him, and I was waving and waving, but he kept coming. He had to slow down to make it around me, but when he saw the Lieutenant’s Bradley on the road right behind me, blocking his way, he locked up his brakes. There had to be 15 guys in the back, and he launched a half dozen of them over the cab of the truck. The rear of the truck was still packed with Iraqi soldiers, however, all with weapons, and they were right next to my Bradley.

  “Sully, kill those motherfuckers!” I yelled. He was in the back with the M240 and let loose with one 200-round burst and killed them all, raking the gun back and forth, not taking any chances. I got on the main gun and started throwing HE rounds into the truck, and it caught on fire.

  We had barely finished firing into the truck when two more vehicles, cars this time, came roaring down the road at us. The sandstorm was still going strong, but it wasn’t consistent—at times we could see 400 meters, others only 40 feet. Lieutenant McAdams and I fired coax in front of the cars, then into the cars when they didn’t stop. One of them rammed the Lieutenant’s Bradley, but no one made it out of the car. McAdams pushed the car back up the road to slow any more traffic. We pushed the burning truck off the shoulder of the road.

  The area was getting to look like a junkyard, with half the vehicles on fire. Between all the burning vehicles and the shooting, everyone had to know the Americans were in town. If I’d been living in that area I would have stayed the hell away from us, but I also realized we were on a main road, so we couldn’t automatically assume everyone driving toward us had evil intentions. The sandstorm complicated things as well. Just as the Lieutenant got back in his position, Soprano called out.

  “Got a bus coming down the road toward us. It’s hauling ass.”

  I put a wall of tracers in front of it, but it did not stop. This was a big, city-type bus, and we assumed it was full of civilians and only driving fast to make it a harder target for anyone in the area with itchy trigger fingers—I’d seen the same thing in Bosnia. I got on top of the turret and was waving like a madman, trying to get that bus to stop. At the last second I could see he was going to ram us.

  Soprano had good eyes and spotted the driver. He yelled out, “Hey, that guy’s getting out of his seat.”

  I knew that wasn’t good and said, “Shoot that guy!” We didn’t know if he was going to bail out of the vehicle or what was going on. With one hell of a fine piece of shooting, Soprano shot the driver as he was running backward in the bus. One round of 25 mm HE and he was dead, but the bus still rammed the Lieutenant’s Bradley at about 30 miles per hour. McAdams’s whole Bradley rocked, and he was knocked back down inside the turret.

  McAdams got on the radio. “That hurt.” Several of his crew were almost knocked unconscious. We pushed the bus back sideways to block the road, getting pretty damn tired of being rammed.

  To disable the bus Broadhead shot it a few times with his .50, and suddenly there was a huge explosion—the bus had been packed with explosives and had been on a suicide run. The driver had been running to detonate the bomb when Soprano killed him.

  The official campaign history of the U.S. Army’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, On Point, credited Bravo Troop with the destruction of that bus.* I don’t know if someone in Bravo took credit for it or credit was mistakenly given to them, but Michael Soprano, my gunner, took out that bus driver and probably saved the life of Lieutenant McAdams, if not of his whole crew. That’s not to say we were the only troop taking fire—far from it. Alpha and Bravo troops had to fight hard just to get to their positions, as the area was filled with Saddam’s paramilitary forces, with more on the way.

  Night showed up, but it didn’t make much difference with the sandstorm, at least in the amount of light we had. A sandstorm is filled with static electricity, and there was an orange glow everywhere that had nothing to do with the burning vehicles. It was very otherworldly, like being on Mars.

  The vehicles running down the road weren’t the only activity in the area, and we were taking small arms fire from every direction. Between the dark and sandstorm they couldn’t really see us, only hear our engines, and were just shooting at the noise and in the general direction of the burning vehicles. If dismounts got close enough to see us, we could see them as well and took them out pretty quickly.

  Sergeant Wallace came over the radio. “Heads up. We’ve got a fuel tanker headed our way.” He was the only one who had the angle to see around the burning bus, and in his thermal sight he had spotted a full-sized fuel truck driving down the road toward us. It got closer, and closer, and while we were pretty sure the driver’s intentions weren’t good, shooting at what in effect was a big bomb was not something we wanted to do.

  The tanker couldn’t get around the burning bus and instead rammed it and started pushing it toward us. A fuel truck pushing a flaming bus straight at you is not a good combination. Broadhead opened up with his .50 and took out the driver, and the forward momentum of the vehicles stopped.

  The troop watched the two vehicles for a while, especially the fuel tanker. “What are we going to do about that fuel truck?” Broadhead said to me.

  “If we shoot it we won’t be able to see anything in the thermals,” I told him.

  “We’ve got to take it out,” he argued. “If we leave it there, they might try ramming it closer to us and blowing it later tonight.”

  “If we blow it, we won’t be able to see shit,” I told him agai
n. We could hardly see anything around the bus anyway, but some visibility was better than none.

  The next thing I know Broadhead made a command decision and launched a 120 mm HEAT round into the fuel truck. That truck burned for what seemed like forever but was really three days. A lot of fuel went into the canal, and the canal was on fire too. We had flames across half our horizon. Son of a . . .

  When I finally got past the urge to kill Broadhead and could use words suitable for the radio net, I called up McCoy and told him that I couldn’t see anything because of the thermal package in front of me.

  “Sir, I want to push forward onto the bridge and take control of it, put more standoff between me and the supply train.”

  “Roger that.” He had the soft-skinned vehicles pull tighter together to give us more room to fall back, if needed. Williams, at the rear, was dealing with some dismounts hitting him with small arms, but he hadn’t had any vehicles try to ram him—yet.

  The bridge was big enough for one Bradley. We set up in the middle of it, and that was where we were going to make our stand.

  In one way we actually had it easier than Alpha and Bravo Troops, because of the bridge—the enemy could only come at us from the east and had to come across the bridge if they were going to get to the support vehicles. Alpha and Bravo, to the north of us, were set up with fields all around. They had no way to predict from which direction the enemy would be coming.

  * * *

  * On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, by Col. Gregory Fontenot, U.S. Army, Retired; LTC E. J. Degen, U.S. Army; and LTC David Tohn, U.S. Army. Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (2004), p. 205.

  CHAPTER 13

  LINE IN THE SAND

  The sandstorm lessened for several hours during the day, and we took the opportunity to sleep in shifts. The bridge was a good spot to sit. When the sandstorm thinned out, we could see that the road in front of us went more or less straight and flat for about 2,000 meters, then turned a dogleg and went out of sight.

  That morning the Troop Commander, Captain McCoy, came forward to survey my position.

  “How you holdin’ up, Jay?” he asked me.

  “Tired and cranky,” I told him. “But we’ll hold this bridge. How about you, sir?”

  “The .50-cal on the tank is tits up, otherwise we’re doing fine,” he told me.

  “Yeah? Hold on a second.” I gave him the AK-47 I’d picked up in As Samawah and the AK magazines we had been collecting all night. Some of the AKs lying around from the guys we’d killed were in sorry shape, but mine worked, and I wanted my Commander to have one he could depend on. There were plenty of others around for me to grab, and I could test fire them off the bridge if I needed to. One thing I learned about combat—you’ll always have an opportunity to get a resupply. You may have to kill someone to get it, but it’s out there.

  Most of the time, during the day at least, I could spot the trucks coming around the curve 2,000 meters out. The Iraqi troop trucks were pretty easy to identify, and we had good resolution in our optics, but I would always wait to engage them until I was positive.

  Usually I would have the opportunity to contact the Commander on the radio. “Sir, I’ve got a truck coming, looks like a troop truck, I’m going to go ahead and engage.”

  “Roger, Red 2, go ahead and engage.”

  We would wait until the trucks were about 800 meters away. Soprano was as good with the main gun as I was, and we’d usually only have to fire one shot. BOOM with the 25 mm and the truck would roll off the road into the ditch. I’d call the Commander back up. “Yeah, it’s on fire, dismounts on the ground, engaging,” and I’d hit them with the coax. Between the distance and the sand there were always a few soldiers who were able to scramble away.

  With Broadhead on overwatch, my crew and I went out and did BDA during a break in the storm and collected weapons off the dead. We tossed them onto the back of the Bradley when we were out there but didn’t really have a place to store them. When we got back to the bridge we threw them into the canal. The Iraqis came at us in everything that had four wheels: two buses, four cars, four Toyota trucks, one fuel tanker, and three Iraqi army trucks. I checked all of the vehicles. Every one had soldiers in them with a shitload of weapons. There were a lot of dead men, more than I could count in the short time I had for my recon. The rest of the day was quiet, but I knew night would bring more activity.

  The sandstorm grounded most of our air assets, and the ones that could fly couldn’t get anywhere close to us. We were too far away from our artillery, much less mortar support, to call in any indirect fire, so defending that objective was solely on the shoulders of those of us on the ground, there at the bridge.

  The first truck that came down the road after dark had about 30 Iraqi soldiers in the back. Soprano took it with a 25 mm round into the cab at 1,100 meters. The truck rolled another 300 meters before it stopped gently on the right side of the road in a small pond. Iraqi soldiers jumped out of the truck and were running around like ants. Lieutenant McAdams had the angle to engage them, so he opened up with coax from his Bradley, then moved up to 25 mm HE. The high-explosive rounds killed most of the soldiers and blew large holes in the ground. As the first truck was burning, another troop truck tore around it, headed straight for the bridge.

  “These guys don’t learn.” Soprano fired a 10-round burst of 25 mm HE into the truck. The truck broke apart and caught fire like it was made of kindling. After that truck, there was another one, and another one. They kept coming down the road, and we kept shooting them. The troop trucks were the size of our deuce-and-a-halfs, and most of them were filled with soldiers. The horizon became littered with burning and blackened vehicles and with all the hot spots a lot of the soldiers who escaped the vehicles were able to get to for cover.

  The sandstorm was bad, but you could still see the burning trucks from more than 1,000 meters. This wasn’t random; the Iraqis knew we were there and they were trying to get at us no matter what it took. Thank God they could only approach us from one direction. We again called for air support, but were told it was a no-go.

  At one point Sun, one of the two engineers we had on board, called out to me while he was looking through his NVGs. “Sergeant Jay, there two guys out there walking in the field toward us.” His Korean accent was strong, but I had no problem understanding him.

  “Take ’em out then.”

  “Okay.” He opened up with his M4. He fired, paused, fired some more, then looked through the goggles again. “Oh, I think they still moving,” he said and fired again.

  This honestly went on for close to half an hour, until I’d finally had enough. “Sun, quit the fucking shooting, you’re going to use up all of your ammo.”

  “It’s okay, Sergeant Jay, I shooting Sully’s ammo,” he told me cheerfully.

  “Stop shooting at them!” I told him. “If they’re not dead by now they deserve to get away.”

  When morning rolled around I sent Sully out into the field to see what Sun had been shooting at. He called me on the radio. “Sarge, there’s nothing out here but a cow that’s been shot about a hundred times.”

  “They must have been hiding behind the cow,” Sun told me. “There was two guys.”

  “Two guys.”

  “Yes, two guys walking in the field, holding a backpack between them.”

  “Two guys,” I said slowly, “walking in the field?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holding a backpack between them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right where that cow is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right where that cow is?”

  Sun looked at me for a few seconds, then his eyes went wide. “I no shoot cow, Sergeant Jay. I no shoot cow!” He seemed offended that I could even suggest such a thing.

  The troop trucks showed up all night, at irregular intervals, and through the next day as well. We shot them, they ran off the road, we shot them and the troops scrambling around them some
more, until the trucks were burning and everyone around them was dead. Then it was time to wait for the next one. The sandstorm abated for several hours during the day again, and we got what rest we could. While we were able to kill most of the soldiers in or around the vehicles, many were getting to cover. Those soldiers weren’t giving up, however; they were working their way closer to us on foot, and the amount of small arms fire we were taking was growing. Because we were the point of the spear, all the ammo flowed up to us. The Hemmitt drivers and the crews of the other Bradleys ran ammo up to us whenever we were running low.

  A lot of civilians have heard of AWACS planes and have a picture in their head of a jumbo-jet-sized aircraft with a white dish mounted on the top. We had something even better looking over us in Iraq, the JSTARS. The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System uses an Air Force’s E-8C (basically a Boeing 707), and instead of all the high-tech sensors filling a giant dish on the top, they are in what looks like a long fuel pod under the forward fuselage. JSTARS can simultaneously track 600 targets on the ground at more than 250 km (152 miles).

  As night fell, we got the word from command—JSTARS had spotted 44 T-72 tanks, an entire tank brigade, on the move toward Sergeant Williams’s position. Oh, shit.

  McCoy got on the radio. “White 4, I am going to need you to reposition.” He told Broadhead to move to the rear of the column to help support Third and Fourth Platoons.

  Not 10 minutes after Broadhead left, Captain McCoy called me. “Um, Red 2, JSTARS reports that they have approximately one thousand troop trucks moving on your position.”

  “Sir, can you repeat that, did you say one thousand troops?”

  “Negative, Red 2, that is one thousand troop trucks.” If each truck carried up to 20 soldiers, I would be facing nearly 20,000 soldiers coming to take my bridge.