Carnivore Read online

  Iraqi #1 climbed up, opened the door, and sat in the driver’s seat. It looked like he was trying to start the truck. After a few minutes, you could see him smell it. He looked around, smelling, looked around some more, did some more smelling, and then he stuck his hand in the seat behind him. He pulled his hand up, saw what he had on him, and was like, “Aaaaaah.” He spat out a few choice words and got out of the truck. His white man-dress had a big smear of brown on the back of it. We were crying in the Bradley by that point, laughing as hard as can be.

  About that time his buddy came down the back steps of the truck. The guy who’d sat in the cab very sneakily pulled the smeared part of his man-dress up with his hand so his buddy couldn’t see the smear and started talking, gesturing to the driver’s seat. So the second guy climbed up into the driver’s seat, tried a few things to see if the truck would start, and then saw his buddy fall down on the ground laughing.

  Iraqi #2 was like, “What?” and the first guy showed him the smear on his man-dress. Iraqi #2 reached down, got it on his hand, jumped down from the cab, and started screaming and chasing his buddy, hitting him with his shoe. It was absolutely hilarious. We cried.

  After a couple of days, command informed us we were to start doing patrols in addition to manning the checkpoints. Geary would be my wingman in his Bradley, as a lot of the roads and bridges in the area would not support tanks.

  The first day out we rolled up on an abandoned Iraqi army post. Geary pulled overwatch as I checked it out for documents, weapons, whatever. Finding nothing inside, we moved out and headed down the road to another large building where I saw an Iraqi flag flying. Nobody shot at us, so I had Sperry take the flag down for our Troop Commander.

  For a patrol in a combat zone we weren’t seeing much action; it was more like a Sunday drive through Detroit. The Carnivore was in the lead on the way back when the road suddenly exploded next to my Bradley. I turned in the hatch and looked at Geary, thinking he’d fired his main gun at something next to me. That was when I saw four guys with RPGs fire a volley at him.

  “Contact!” I ducked down inside the hatch and slewed the turret to more or less the right direction and yelled at Soprano to return fire as I got on the radio. As I called in a contact report to Captain McCoy, two RPG rounds hit the Carnivore. The first one hit my rear two road wheels, half-mooning them. The second one hit the driver’s hatch but, luckily for Sperry, didn’t go off. Thank God they rarely remembered to take the pins out of those warheads.

  Soprano fired a burst of 25 mm, then another one. “RPG team is down!” he called out to me.

  “Then where the hell is all that fire coming from?” Bullets were rattling off the hulls of both Bradleys, and more RPGs went whizzing by. “Geary, you see where they are?”

  “Negative, negative!”

  Our comm back and forth between the two vehicles was going across the net. Broadhead had been my wingman all the way through the war, and we’d taken care of each other when things got hairy, so it was killing him that I was in a firestorm and he could do nothing but listen to his radio. So he did what any good cavalryman would do: he got on his horse and charged to my aid.

  The Camel Toe came roaring up the road, engine wide open. Let me tell you, that’s a hell of a sight—60 tons of angry steel. Broadhead fired on the move and took out two guys in a building to my left with one 120 mm HEAT round. Hell, that one round took out the whole building. His gunner, Sergeant Hull, fired the coax 7.62 at a soldier running away, then Broadhead’s tank got hit by an RPG round in his right-rear sprocket, knocking off part of one tooth. More AK rounds poured at us from nearby buildings.

  “Red 2, White 4, you want to stand and fight?” Broadhead asked me.

  “Fight for what? There’s nothing here,” I replied. There was no objective to protect or seize, we just had a bunch of assholes shooting at us from inside and in between buildings. Considering that was the heaviest fighting we’d seen in days, we moved back and called in indirect fire on that position. Actually, having indirect fire was a luxury we were hardly used to, and I hated to waste the opportunity.

  Our 155 mm Howitzers have a range of 20 miles or so. For the next hour those poor bastards who decided we looked like an easy target got brutalized by our battery. The following day there wasn’t much left of the buildings, much less the Iraqi soldiers who’d been shooting at us. I did get the sight off an RPG launcher for the museum at Fort Stewart.

  The next day Geary, McAdams, and I went out on a reconnaissance mission to find out how the insurgents were getting into our sector. They weren’t getting past us, and they weren’t coming in through Sergeant Williams’s area, but somehow they were getting in.

  While we were driving around, Geary spotted a pontoon bridge built over the river. It was low in the water and looked like it was getting ready to sink at any time.

  We had an engineer with us, and I turned to him. “Hey, you think you could help it along any?” He just smiled.

  The engineer went out onto the center of the bridge while we covered him and he planted C4. When it blew, the top panel off one barge came flying over to where we were and almost hit McAdams’s Bradley. McAdams was a flying-debris magnet—if anything was going to hit a vehicle, it was going to be McAdams’s Bradley. He’d been rammed by a car and rammed by a bus, and now flying bridge pieces were whinging off his turret.

  Apparently pontoon bridges are tough to kill, because even after the C4 blew, most of the pontoons were still floating. Insurgents would still be able to get across on foot and into our sector. So Geary and I backed up. He engaged the pontoons with TOW missiles and I used 25 mm HE until we sank it.

  Just as soon as we returned to our position the Squadron Commander called Captain McCoy, who then called us.

  “Red 2, he needs you to do a reconnaissance on a pontoon bridge, because the Colonel wants to use that bridge as a supply route for our vehicles.” He gave me the coordinates of the bridge we’d just blown up.

  “Uh, yes sir, however, there’s no bridge floating there, it’s sunk.”

  “Negative, Red 2, you must be mistaken, the squadron’s recon aircraft flew over it this morning and it was still intact. He wants to take a look at the bridge himself and wants us over there to pull security.”

  “Yes sir, roger that.” As soon as I got off the radio, I yelled, “Geary!”

  Geary and I hauled ass over to that bridge. He grabbed his spent TOW launcher tubes and threw them into the river, and I frantically kicked my 25 mm cases in after them. Luckily for us a sandstorm rolled in and the Commander called off his visit, because that bridge did not look like it had died a natural death.

  Early in April more special ops guys came roaring into our command center. They had a lead on where Saddam Hussein was. They had solid, verified intelligence as to his current location, not just the area, but which building, which house in Sadr City he was inside. They wanted armor to back them up, and they wanted me and Geary on the mission.

  We broke out the maps and started planning the operation. Geary and I and our crews were ready to roll, just waiting for the go-ahead. Our Squadron Commander, however, wasn’t completely sold on it. He got the Division Commander involved. They didn’t really like the plan we’d worked out, going up there and making the raid with just two Brads, because they didn’t think there would be enough support. They also didn’t quite believe the intel, and then there was the matter of who would be in charge of the mission.

  By the time command made a decision on what was going to happen and who was going to go, two days had gone by and Saddam had moved.

  We weren’t seeing a lot of action, but I know there were Army and Cavalry units all in and around Baghdad, some of them getting shot up quite frequently. The first few days after we pushed into Baghdad we took on whatever Iraqi army forces decided to fight. The rest of the time we did patrols or sat at checkpoints and waited to get shot at.

  Around April 13, we got an order for change of mission. Another unit’s HQ
had been hit by a missile, killing their Sergeant Major, and they needed us to move to the east side of Baghdad to help out in their sector. We rolled out and arrived in the area at dusk. The first thing we saw was tanks, a hell of a lot of tanks, sitting just like new in the palm trees. We assumed they’d been shot up with DU by the unit we were helping out, but the not knowing for sure made for a long night.

  The next morning I went out on patrol with McAdams and Broadhead—two tanks and a Brad. We were able to determine that the tanks we’d seen when we arrived had been shot up, but we rolled up on three T-72s that were still intact. Broadhead shot two of them, one with a HEAT round and the other with the M1’s DU round, an armor-piercing sabot like we had, only bigger. If we’d had any doubt before about the T-72’s armor, that was when we knew that it was real crap: the sabot round went in the front deck and right out the back. He shot the other tank in the side and the HEAT round popped the turret right off it in one big fireball. I killed the third.

  We couldn’t find any soldiers who wanted to fight. All we found was an amazing amount of abandoned equipment, all of which we were told to destroy. It was just insane—Broadhead destroyed more than 100 missiles and two ammo dumps. McAdams blew up more than 25 troop trucks. Soprano had a field day and shot the snot out of two MiG-23 jets, three fuel trucks, two MTLBs (Russian-made tracked APCs), and one large ammo bunker.

  After being in the Army for more than 15 years and never getting enough ammo to shoot, I found myself in an unexpected position—tired of hearing the guns firing, tired of seeing stuff on fire; just plain tired.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE MAFIA HIT

  While ambushes and snipers were a daily threat, there were no more big battles in Baghdad. What we settled into couldn’t exactly be called routine, not with people shooting at us and trying to blow us up, but we had our jobs and we did them. Our time in Baghdad was mostly spent doing two things: running patrols and manning checkpoints, which were usually at intersections or bridges.

  A short time after we arrived in Baghdad we were sent to Fallujah. Fallujah is about 60 kilometers west of Baghdad, and it took us two hours to drive there. Two Iraqi armored brigades had capitulated, and we had to drive there and meet with their Commander so he could officially surrender to us. There wasn’t a lot more to it than that; he was basically promising they would play nice, in hopes of staying alive. While we were there we drove around to several of their motor pools and shot up a lot of T-72s—not on a whim, but following orders. If the tanks were broken, they couldn’t be used against our troops. Then we returned to Baghdad and went back to running patrols and manning checkpoints.

  We had enough time on our hands to get into trouble. Thinking to destroy more enemy matériel, I shot a 20,000-gallon fuel tank with HE when I was downslope from it. In hindsight? Bad call. I had a flaming barrel of fuel chasing me. Kind of like being on the bottom of a volcano with lava rolling toward you.

  About a month after first roaring into Baghdad, we had settled in and were parked along a main thoroughfare. In addition to my regular crew of Soprano, Sully, and Sperry, we had a terp—an interpreter. He’d been with us for a week or so and was a big help. He’d saved us from having to shoot a lot of stupid and obstinate people.

  A block down, a Suburban-sized vehicle turned onto the road and started heading toward us. It was white, with orange bumpers front and back—a Fedayeen vehicle, the kind that we’d first encountered in As Samawah.

  “I got it!” Sully yelled out, and jumped on his M240. He fired a burst at the vehicle, which veered off the road and crunched into a ditch. The driver staggered out, Sully hit him with another burst, and he went down.

  “Nice,” I said.

  There was a pause, and then our interpreter asked us, “Why you hate taxis?”

  Wait, what?

  Our interpreter had seen us shoot up at least a dozen such vehicles and just never understood it, so he finally asked the question. And that was when we found out that white vehicles with orange bumpers were taxis, not Fedayeen vehicles. The entire U.S. military had spent the last month destroying every white vehicle with orange bumpers that dared appear on the streets of Baghdad. There were probably 50 such vehicles on fire in the city at that very moment. It was a simple mistake with huge consequences, all because during the first engagement of the war, at As Samawah, the Fedayeen took taxis into battle.

  A short time later we were somewhere else in Baghdad, outside an ice cream factory, taking it easy. We’d picked up a 60 mm mortar and a bunch of illuminating rounds from somewhere and thought it would be cool to shoot them over the top of the ice cream factory. Like fireworks.

  We thought Bravo Troop was inside the factory, but they’d been replaced by the 82nd Airborne. The change had been announced over the squadron net, but we didn’t hear it. I started launching lume (illumination) mortar rounds over the top of them, and we were laughing our asses off—because it was fun and the lumes looked cool. They are flares, but they have 60 mm steel tubes around them that fall off so the flares can ignite and the parachute deploys. I’m not a mortarman, so I didn’t know that I wasn’t putting enough charges on them to get them high enough. The troops in the 82nd were getting bombarded by the falling steel canisters, and the lume rounds were exploding just overhead and hitting in the middle of their position, but we didn’t know because we couldn’t see. We launched about 20 rounds but finally gave up because there was no reaction from Bravo. We thought they’d left.

  So, 20 minutes later we were sitting in the back of the Carnivore with the ramp down, bullshitting. We had the mortar tube sitting next to the ramp while we cooked a sheep—it was an enemy sheep—over a tanker’s bar and a couple of 25 mm ammo cans we’d stacked up. If we’d had beer it would have been perfect. Suddenly all these guys from the 82nd maneuvered up on us, weapons out, until they saw we were Cav.

  “Hey, what’s up, dudes?”

  They weren’t in a friendly mood. “Have you seen anybody launching mortars?”

  “Ummmmm, no, why?”

  “Because we just got a Humvee damaged, and they just shot the shit out of our base, dropping all these incendiary rounds on us.”

  “What? Really?” I was pushing the mortar tube underneath the ramp of my Bradley with my toe. “What? We haven’t heard anything.”

  “Are you sure? It sounded like it was over here. Maybe you can look around with your thermals and help us out.” My crew was sitting there, afraid to say anything. I looked around and saw a mortar box here and a couple of mortar rounds there. I wiggled my eyes at Sully and cocked my head. He got up, went over, and sat on the box. After some grumbling, the 82nd guys maneuvered on, none the wiser. We gathered all the mortar stuff we had, dug a hole, and buried it. Oops. At least nobody got hurt.

  Here’s something you never want to do: SA-12s, the large Russian surface-to-air missiles that launch off a rail? You never want to destroy them by shooting them with coax, because you can ignite the rocket motor. The rocket doesn’t take off, it breaks apart, and the engine flips and rolls and chases you like a dog after a squirrel. I was busy screaming, “Back up, driver, back up now!” Those rocket motors? They’re about the size of a Volkswagen. Once is all it takes to learn that lesson.

  More helpful advice from Iraq? Cornering a howler monkey and trying to pet it is a bad idea. We gave asylum to one that had been a prisoner in a zoo. If you chase the howler monkey down (it takes a while), get him caught in a corner where he’s got no place to go, and reach in to pet him, he will bite down on your finger and dig the claws of his back feet into your forearm while he’s trying to rip your finger off. I saw it happen. Try explaining that injury to a medic.

  I’ve never been to Africa, but I’ve killed a lion. I actually killed several rare animals in Iraq, because in addition to his zoos Saddam had game preserves where he kept a lot of endangered species. We rolled into his Water Palace, which is outside the airport, not long after reaching Baghdad, and you wouldn’t believe the cash and gold
guns we found lying around. I found a full-auto M16 manufactured by Colt, which I kept in the Bradley as backup. There was a large game preserve at that palace, and all the animals were dying. We didn’t have the resources to take care of them and we couldn’t let them go, not that a starving lion running through the streets of Baghdad wouldn’t have been entertaining. We were under orders to kill them, and that’s what we did, but we didn’t let them go to waste. In case you’re wondering, gazelle tastes just like deer.

  Now that the high-intensity combat was pretty much over with, media started to show up. When we were at the Water Palace a news crew interviewed me. I don’t even remember what they asked or what I said, but they sent the segment to Good Morning America. Saddam had several armored Mercedes limos at the palace, and we entertained ourselves by driving over them in the Carnivore.

  Bored out of our minds one day, we put 100 pounds of explosive all over a Toyota pickup, just to see what would happen. Well, not just to see what would happen: the driver had tried to smuggle weapons through our checkpoint, and our experiment was intended as an object lesson for any other would-be smugglers. It was very entertaining. It left a large black spot on the ground, and nobody else tried to sneak anything through. I don’t want it to seem as if we weren’t doing anything but getting into trouble, but the majority of our days consisted of waiting for somebody to try to kill us, either while we were manning a checkpoint or while we were patrolling. That can get damn stressful, and we got very imaginative when it came time to blow off steam.

  Early on, we rolled up on an abandoned air base while on patrol east of Baghdad. It was one of the Iraqis’ main bomber bases. There were a lot of buildings and the tarmac was covered with jets and trucks, helicopters and BMPs. We were under orders to destroy any Iraqi army ordnance or matériel, and one thing we spotted was an Iraqi army water truck. We were destroying all the vehicles we could find, so we shot the water truck with 25 mm. It was like shooting a beer can with a .22, one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. When you shoot a full beer can, it explodes and sprays everywhere. Now imagine that beer can was big enough for Godzilla to take a drink—that’s how huge the explosion of water was.