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  “Uhhhhh, Roger that. Sir, is there a chance I can get any indirect fire to support my position?” Pretty, pretty please?

  “Negative, Red 2,” McCoy told me. “You are still out of range.”

  “Roger that, sir. How about air support?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Ten minutes later, the CO called, and I was hoping it was good news about the air support, even though I could see the sandstorm was still nasty. Nope. “Red 2,” he told me, sounding tired, “JSTARS now reports that they have twenty BMPs moving toward your position from the southeast.” First the troop trucks, now armored personnel carriers? The hits just keep on coming . . .

  McCoy started doing whatever he could to make things as tough as possible for the Iraqis, but he hardly had any space to work with, much less pieces to move around the board. Broadhead was already in the rear, doing what he could to support Third and Fourth Platoons, to suppress the incoming small arms from the town until the tanks showed up. Then the real fun would begin. Headquarters Platoon had already tightened their positions all they could, but thin-skinned vehicles weren’t going to be enough—the XO, First Lieutenant Keith Miller, had our troops start digging fighting positions and placing claymore antipersonnel mines on either side of the road.

  Vehicles couldn’t make it across the canal, but dismounted soldiers could. Contact was sporadic through the night, but no one was immune—the unit was fully engaged, including command. Captain McCoy was working on getting air support for us when Iraqi soldiers came running out of the darkness at his tank, positioned in the center of the column. McCoy grabbed the AK-47 I had given him earlier, aimed it at the Iraqis charging his side of the tank, and pulled the trigger. He stitched all three of them, emptied an entire 30-round magazine, fighting the rifle to keep it from climbing off target on full auto.

  My Bradley was in the best position I could get, blocking the bridge. With Broadhead gone I moved Sergeant Wallace (Wild Wally) up on my right side and had McAdams watch our rear. There was nothing for me to do but wait: they would have to get through me to make it to the rest of the troop. Not knowing if I could stop everything coming down on me, I planted some C4 on the canal bridge. As I was hanging off the bridge, I dropped my demo bag into the canal—that was the last I saw of the Gerber multitool I’d commandeered off Soprano to fix the radio at As Samawah. Son of a . . .

  While it may seem like we were just one unit, fighting to defend an insignificant bridge, that was the pivotal point of the conflict—if Saddam crushed us it could have been the turning point of the whole war. It would have been an entire cavalry squadron getting slaughtered. Because once they went through us, the armor, it would have been our fuel trains, our aviation assets, aviation fuel, aviation mechanics, cooks, supply guys, ammunition, headquarters maintenance element for the squadron, everything. Our entire package was sitting right there between me and Sergeant Williams.

  Everybody was invested equally on this one. Our headquarters platoon, the people who normally are behind the lines, had dug foxholes and set up claymores, that’s how bad it was. Captain McCoy called me on the radio.

  “Red 2, I just wanted to let you know I have been moving heaven and earth to get you some air support, but as yet I have had no luck. The sandstorm is shutting everything down.” He’d been trying to get helicopters, get fixed wing, get something flying our way to give us some air support, but the sandstorm was just too tall. The attack air was all grounded. They brought in F-15s and F-18s, but they couldn’t see anything. The ceiling on that fucking sandstorm was 15 miles. They couldn’t drop on radar, not from that high, because they didn’t want it to land on us. Even with all their smart bombs, they couldn’t see through it, at least not accurately enough to keep from killing us. I knew McCoy knew the situation when he told me, “It’s been an honor working with you, Crazy J. You’re a super scout, thanks for leading us. I’m proud to have served with you.”

  “Roger that, sir, the feeling is mutual.” We had a lull in the action, and for once my radio was working. I had a good, calm, five-minute conversation with my Troop Commander, a man I both respected and admired.

  “When you boys are out of ammo, or out of the fight, you need to get the hell away from your Brad, get away from the road, because I’m going to have the entire troop firing at your Bradley on the bridge.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The First Sergeant, Roy Grigges, called us up on the radio as well. He knew the score. “It’s been an honor and a pleasure working with you guys.” I told him the same. I’d been in the unit a long time, knew these men, knew their families, and they knew mine. Hell, Crazy Horse was a family.

  When he signed off I called Sergeant John Williams, at the other end of the column in the Casanova. He and I had a great talk. We basically made our minds up, the two of us, that it stopped there. They weren’t going to come any damn further, they weren’t going to attack our wingmen, they weren’t going to attack our unit. Regardless of what happened, he and I were going to stay in our turrets. When the driver was gone, and the rest of the crew was gone, we were going to stay there, and we were going to fight the good fight until it was over for us. And we were calm. We weren’t scared, we were relaxed.

  “I’m going to fight until I’m out of ammo, and then I’m going to go hand to hand,” I told him.

  Sergeant Williams moved the Casanova up onto the bridge into the path of the expected T-72 tanks. He was not going to let them get by him. Williams said to me, “They ain’t coming through me, brother. I’m going to fight until they get up on me, and when they take me out, they’re going to take me out sideways and on fire, because they ain’t crossing the fucking bridge.”

  “Roger that.” The Carnivore at one bridge and the Casanova at the other. Somehow that seemed right.

  I knew John Williams and his whole crew. I knew they would hold the bridge, and protect our rear or die trying.

  When I got off the radio I looked at Sully. He’d been listening to the net, and my end of the conversation, and from the look on his pale face, he knew exactly what was going on.

  “So we’re drawing the line in the sand here?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  He just nodded. Nineteen years old, and a pain in my ass, but he’d proved himself to be a true soldier when the time came. He’d started the war a meek kid, and in five days he’d killed dozens of Iraqis, saved the lives of the crew over and over again, and never quit, not even in the face of overwhelming odds.

  I got the attention of everybody in the Bradley and let them know the situation. “I don’t know if we are going to make it out of this. If you see a fireball in the turret don’t worry about us, we’re done. Just get off and run to the closest farmhouse and stay there till daylight.”

  CHAPTER 14

  EVERY TRUCK IN THE COUNTRY

  I knew there were all sorts of dismounts working their way toward us, because during the breaks in the weather—the sandstorm would be heavy, and then it would be light—we could see them and hear them shooting. We’d destroyed so many vehicles that 2,000 meters out, where the dogleg was, the road was actually blocked by burning trucks. The trucks kept coming, though, so they’d stop and the soldiers would get out and start walking, moving up in the ditches. Guys would stop from time to time and shoot for a while in our general direction. They knew we were there, but couldn’t see us. Hell, we couldn’t see them any better than they could see us, because the thermals didn’t work for shit in the sandstorm. They didn’t know where we were until they were right up on us.

  The lack of sleep was getting to me. I had to concentrate very hard on even the smallest task, and I felt like I was moving in slow motion. As I stood there somewhere between awake and asleep, I heard the radio come alive: First Lieutenant McCormick, our fire support officer, came over the net and told everyone that we had air support, that we had aircraft stacked over us. Yeah, great—like we hadn’t heard that before. The sandstorm was as bad as ever, or worse. Nothing cou
ld fly in it, and it was still too high.

  Ten minutes later Sergeant Williams came across the radio net. “Contact tanks! Lot of tanks!”

  He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them. The tanks were maneuvering through the streets of the town on the other side of the bridge toward him.

  Finally, McCoy called on the radio and gave us the first bit of good news we’d had in a while. “Be advised, we have two bombers on-station overhead,” he announced.

  Instead of F-15s or F-18s, they gave us two B-1B bombers, and McCoy had control of them. This was the first time any Army officer had ever had direct control of his own B-1B bomber—let alone two. The B-1Bs could not see through the sand either, but they could drop their precision-guided munitions where JSTARS told them the enemy was. JSTARS had no problem seeing through the sand, and B-1Bs regularly drop ordnance from amazingly high altitudes.

  Williams barely had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief when Captain McCoy got back on the radio to him. “As of right now, JAG will not let us engage those tanks, as they are inside a town.” Unbelievable. They wanted to avoid unnecessary collateral damage—never mind the fact that Third Platoon had been receiving incoming from the town for two days. McCoy was told he could only drop bombs on the tanks if they were firing on us. So we waited, the sound of tanks growing louder and louder in Williams’s ears.

  Sergeant Hudgins, Williams’s gunner, saw a T-72 between two houses across the river and fired a 25 mm round at it, but missed. The tank moved behind a house. Williams spotted another tank moving behind another building—the two of them were trying to get him into a crossfire. The sandstorm was so bad, most of the time visibility wasn’t much more than 50 feet, which might have been the only thing that kept them from killing Williams.

  Williams got McCoy on the radio. “Sir, I’ve got eyes on two tanks. They are maneuvering around behind buildings, trying to get me into a crossfire, and I can’t get a shot at them.” The tension filled his words.

  McCoy was on the radio immediately. “Roger that. Wait one.”

  I don’t know what McCoy said to whoever was on the other end of the line at JSTARS, but when he came back on the radio he told Williams, “Payload is now inbound, and you are danger close. You need to get as far away as possible.” McCoy was in the center of our train and working with an Air Force JTAC (joint terminal attack controller), Staff Sergeant Shopshire. He was a great kid and knew his job—bringing the steel rain.

  Williams didn’t need to be told twice. When the bombs from the B-1Bs hit, I was 2,500 meters away and could feel them through the floor of my running Bradley. Williams was only 300 meters away from those bombs, and I could only imagine the fireworks show rocking his world.

  Twenty minutes after the last bomb hit, Williams moved back to his last position to call in the BDA. The sandstorm was as strong as ever, but he could see the fires of the burning tanks in the town. The bombers blew their wad on Williams’s tanks and didn’t have anything left for me, so my hope of air support was a pipe dream. How long it would take to get more bombers overhead with fresh ordnance was anybody’s guess.

  It’s unknown how many of the tanks the airstrike took out, but no more showed up to fight. Meanwhile, Third Platoon was still getting hit by small arms fire and Iraqi soldiers on foot charging their position. Williams stayed busy.

  The rest of Crazy Horse didn’t exactly have a night off. They had sporadic contact all night, and then I heard Sergeant Christner over the radio net talking to McCoy. “Sir, be advised I have two Iraqi soldiers armed with AK-47s approaching my position . . . riding a donkey.”

  “Did he say ‘donkey’?” Soprano asked me.

  Christner fired tracers in front of the donkey to see what it—and the soldiers—would do. When they turned the donkey his way and picked up the pace he knew. Christner waited until the very last second, then opened up with his M240 machine gun, hitting both men in the chest but sparing the animal. The donkey was still alive and wandering around the next day.

  Just down the road, Sergeant Geary was in a firefight with 10 dismounts who had spent the night working their way close to his position along the wood line. Once they were close enough to see his Bradley, however, Geary had no problem seeing them in his thermal sight. Geary was still pissed from being stuck in a disabled Bradley at As Samawah and being used for target practice for hours. Firing the main gun on semiauto to conserve ammo, he took the first soldier with one round of HE to the chest. The man died instantly and on fire.

  Sergeant May was sitting next to Geary. After a lot of cross talk, they worked the other nine dismounts into their crossfire. After a brief burst of full auto fire from both tracks, the nine Iraqis lay dead.

  The sandstorm came roaring back bigger and badder than ever. At least Broadhead and one other Bradley were coming back our way—with the tanks taken out in the town across from Williams, I needed him backing me up again. The storm was so bad that Broadhead could not find his way to me. The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to my position, knowing how many Iraqis were out there on foot (because they kept shooting at my Brad from time to time, the rounds pinging off the hull when they got lucky), but I had to help Broadhead and Sergeant May, his wingman, find us. When I turned on the Carnivore’s headlights it looked just like swirling hell, and standing right there next to us were two Iraqi soldiers. The storm was so bad they walked right by me and none of us knew it.

  “Fuck!” I grabbed the AK I had close at hand and emptied the magazine at them. The only reason I didn’t die was quicker reflexes—that was too damn close.

  Broadhead came over the radio. “Red 2, I see your lights. Rolling up now.”

  “Roger that,” I told him, panting and shaking from the close call. (Just the latest in a long list.) “I’ve got a spot I want you to set up in for a good firing position.”

  Using the radio I talked him into place as best I could, but the sandstorm was so bad that when he moved to set up in the fighting position, he overshot it and got high-centered on a wall or something—in that orange hell it was hard to even recognize the shape of his tank. Broadhead dismounted his tank to check out what he was hung up on when he tripped and fell facefirst in the dirt, hitting his knee on a big rock.

  When he got back up he could barely stand and limped back up to the M1, where he got on the radio and laid into me with a profanity-laced tirade that would have made a porn star blush. His knee swelled up so badly that he could barely walk for the next two weeks. After Tony calmed down and had said everything he wanted to about my mother, I was able to talk his tank into the right position, just in time for the sandstorm to stop and open the night up to us.

  Our visibility was now 1,000 meters or more. Mother Nature’s timing was great for us, but sucked for the platoon of Iraqis who had been working their way on foot to Geary and Crawford’s position just down the road. The pause in the sandstorm caught them out in the open, and they couldn’t outrun the 25 mm HE.

  We had about 25 troop trucks on fire in front of us, and a lot more assorted vehicles in various states of projectile-assisted disassembly. I got on the radio to Broadhead.

  “White 4, we are going to head across the bridge to do BDA while we have a break in the weather. You need to move up with me and set up in overwatch while I recon.”

  “Red 2, roger that. Moving now.”

  We moved across the bridge, Broadhead rolling shotgun. As we headed into the field of disabled vehicles, we flushed Iraqis like quail. They’d been hiding in ditches, behind vehicles, anywhere there was cover.

  Soprano opened up on them with the coax while Broadhead’s gunner, Sergeant Bobby Hull, did the same.

  We fired and maneuvered, fired and maneuvered up the road, with none of the returning AK fire even coming close. Just as Hull killed the last of the dismounts, Soprano called up to me.

  “Sarge, I think I’ve got a BMP up ahead.”

  Shit. Was this the first of the 20 BMPs headed our way? I dropped down inside the turret
and looked in the sight. The vehicle didn’t have tracks, but it was armored and had rolled into view from the wood line to our southeast.

  “White 4, can you ID the armored vehicle out there?”

  He was back on the radio. “Negative, Red 2. Can’t see it, you’re in my line of sight.”

  Well, I guess it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t one of ours. I said to Soprano, “AP, three rounds, fire!” My eyes stayed glued to the sight.

  The round in the chamber was HE, and it hit short because Soprano was using the AP (armor-piercing) reticle, but the next two rounds were armor-piercing depleted uranium and hit the front of the vehicle. I could see impact, but there was no other reaction from the vehicle.

  “You’re on target. Smoke it.” He let out another burst of AP, and this time there was a small fire, then one big explosion.

  “Okay, Sperry, I want to know what we just killed. Move us a little closer.”

  “Hold on.”

  We rolled forward enough for me to see that we’d just destroyed a BRDM. The BRDM is a Soviet-manufactured armored amphibious combat patrol vehicle with a 14.5 mm main gun and a supporting coax. Instead of having tracks like the BMP, they rolled on four tires.

  “Chalk up one BRDM,” I announced. I was feeling pretty good about that when out from behind the burning BRDM rolled another damn truck. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole—kill one and another one pops right up.

  Before Soprano could get on target, Broadhead nailed the truck with the M1’s main gun, and it exploded.

  “All right, enough sightseeing, get us back to the bridge,” I told Sperry. “Heading back into position,” I radioed Broadhead.

  While we were still rolling, Broadhead set up in his old firing position and started engaging one truck after another as they rolled down the road into view. The Carnivore assumed its position on the bridge, and I stared at the wood line. The 20 BMPs were coming from that direction. How long did we have?