Carnivore Page 20

  After the medics looked him over, the guy was sitting at one of the wooden desks in the schoolhouse. He kept giving me this look of utter contempt. I said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He said in plain English, “Because you come over to my country and kill my fellow men because of our leadership. I hope you all die.”

  I walked over to him and said, “You hope I die?”

  “Yes.”

  So I walked over and grabbed the front of his shirt and lifted him out of the chair. “Saddam’s been torturing and executing people for thirty years, and you hate me?” Okay, maybe Geary wasn’t the only person with a short fuse. The fact that it was so hot that it felt like our brains were being stewed in our skulls probably didn’t help my temper any.

  “Yes. I hate you all.”

  I threw him back in the chair and said, “You can stand up and do something about it. You don’t have to sit there and take it.” I wasn’t going to punch him flat out, but if he took a swing first—hell, maybe I needed a time-out, too, or maybe it was just the heat.

  There was an ice factory in Balad, and when we arrived the Iraqis were selling blocks of ice for 50 cents. After the Americans showed up, they decided they weren’t making enough money and started price gouging. Blocks of ice went from 50 cents up to 5 dollars.

  The heat was still insane, and Sergeant Wearnes got seriously pissed. He drove his Bradley up to the ice factory and blocked the door. He pulled a one-man blockade on the factory and sat there until all of their ice sitting on the trucks melted. He sat there in his Bradley until he came to an agreement with the guy running the factory—Americans got their ice blocks for 50 cents, and Wearnes got his for free.

  The blocks of ice were three feet long. The guys laid on them, on their backs and their bellies, and it wasn’t long before some, er, smartasses were sitting bare-assed naked on them. The blocks had three-inch holes running through the middle of them so they could be carried on poles, so you know what happened next.

  “Bet you can’t stick your dick in it!” someone shouted. Soprano took that bet and lasted seven minutes. The female reporter, Rita Leistner, was still with us, and she monitored the action very closely.

  Since we’d been told to look out for expensive vehicles, we noticed when a new van rolled up to our checkpoint, driven by a guy who didn’t necessarily look like he could afford a new van.

  “Where’d you get the van?” I asked him. “You steal it?”

  “No!” he told me. “George Bush give me.”

  “All right, get out.”

  I put him in time-out until he decided to start answering questions. He was as miserable in the heat as we were. We pulled the van over to the side, and in doing so we discovered something magical—the van had a working air conditioner. Trust me, you don’t appreciate air-conditioning until you’re wearing a combat load in triple-digit heat.

  My guys rotated through the van in five-minute shifts until the gas ran out, then we made the guy walk back home. He was much more polite when he returned the next day with a gas can.

  Every day outside our camp in Balad an Iraqi we called “Hamburger Guy” would show up and cook us some damn good hamburgers. I have no idea what was in them, probably sheep, but they tasted good. He would thin-slice cucumbers and do what he could to make them taste like pickles. Hamburger Guy really did a good job with what he had to work with. His food was one of the few things about being stuck in Balad that didn’t suck.

  One night Crazy Horse did a raid on a suspected insurgent compound and hit the jackpot—there were all sorts of guys in the house. We brought them back to our base and put them in a makeshift jail, and our intelligence people started talking to them one at a time, trying to get somebody to talk. That day, Hamburger Guy didn’t show up. He didn’t show up the next day either. So we went to where the prisoners were being kept.

  “All right, which one of you bastards killed our Hamburger Guy?” we asked them. “We know you did it. You didn’t like that he made food for us, right? So you killed him. You better tell us now, because if we find out . . .”

  The colorful descriptions of hellfire and damnation continued. Finally, one of the prisoners raised his hand.

  “You killed Hamburger Guy?”

  “Uh, no, I . . . I am Hamburger Guy.” We squinted at him. Son of a . . .

  So we dragged him out of there. “I’m not an insurgent,” he told us. “I love America. I love Americans. I was just sleeping there. I’m an honest businessman, just trying to make money.”

  Maybe he was lying, maybe he wasn’t. The country was full of people who lied to us and tried to kill us, but this guy had something they didn’t. He had a valuable skill set. He could cook.

  “If we keep you locked up, you’re going to get sent down to Baghdad and interrogated, and I don’t know when you’re going to get home,” I told him. “They may send you to Abu Ghraib. If we let you go, you need to prove to us we didn’t make a mistake.”

  So we got half-price hamburgers for the rest of the time we were stationed in Balad.

  We were out one day on patrol, my head and shoulders sticking out of the hatch as usual, when I got shot by a sniper.

  The bullet didn’t hit me; it actually hit my vest and cut across the front of it from right to left, going in and out of the vest about seven times. The impact of the bullet—a 7.62x54R sniper round, equivalent to a .30-06—yanked my vest around, and I got a laceration on my neck.

  The laceration wasn’t a big deal as injuries go, but my neck started to swell up. The medic, Sergeant Cardone, was concerned because the laceration was near my jugular, so he sent me down to BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) for the doctors to look at it.

  By the time I got in to see the doctors, my neck was purple and as big around as my head. I’m no doctor, but I didn’t think that was good. They started asking me questions to try to figure out what was causing the swelling, assuming it was a massive infection. When the doctors heard that I still had a piece of a bullet in my leg and shrapnel in my arms and shoulders, they thought I had gangrene. They immediately put me on massive antibiotics and a lot of pain medicine and threw me on a big medevac. I officially left Iraq on August 26, 2003, and was transported straight to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

  I was in a lot of pain and had swollen glands all over my body. None of the antibiotics they were giving me were working, and doctor after doctor was asking me questions to try and figure out exactly what the problem was while they waited on the results of all the blood work. One day a doctor came into my room and informed me, “You don’t have gangrene, you’ve got Stage Three cancer.”

  That’s exactly how they do it, too. No “Hey, how you feelin’, I’ve got some bad news for you” or “Um, do you have anybody you can call to be here with you?” before they break the news to you, they just walk up and say, “You’ve got Stage Three cancer, which means you’re probably going to die. We give you a one in four chance of living. But, hey, it could be worse, it could be Stage Four.” Fucking Army.

  Further work on their part revealed that it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After that, Army personnel from Aberdeen Proving Ground and Redstone Arsenal came to my room and started asking me all sorts of directed questions.

  “Were you wearing your MOPP 4 gear while firing DU rounds in the Bradley’s main gun?”

  “Hell no. You know how hot that suit is? Plus, there’s no room to move around when you’re wearing it, and you can’t see for shit with the mask on.”

  “Well, were you at least wearing the mask?”

  “No, I told you, you can’t see for shit with the NBC mask on.”

  “Sergeant, when you were engaging the enemy, was your Bradley buttoned up? All hatches and vents closed?”

  “Seriously? No. I had my head and shoulders sticking out of the Commander’s hatch most of the time.”

  “How many depleted uranium rounds did you actually fire while your head was outside of the hatch?”


  I had to think about that one. “Maybe seven thousand.”

  The questions went round and round. Did I have my NBC suit on, why not, you’re supposed to have your NBC mask and protective gloves on when you handle that ammo, on and on and on. When you shoot DU ammo, you’re supposed to be fully closed up in the vehicle, with the mask on. That’s a great theory, but it doesn’t work so well when applied to the real world. Sort of like communism.

  They kept trying to rule out the type of lymphoma with which I was eventually diagnosed, because doctors only ever saw that particular kind in guys who had worked in power plants and underneath power lines for 50 years. It’s a radiation cancer, which means the only way you can get it is by exposure to radiation.

  Depleted uranium is not radioactive. When you fire it, however, it’s not depleted anymore; it becomes reactive from superheating. The Bradley’s 25 mm main gun barrel generates particulate matter every time you fire a round. I was standing in the open Commander’s hatch the whole time, getting the blowback from every round.

  I wasn’t joking about the one in four chance. I was given a 25 percent chance to live. They immediately put me on some sort of super-chemotherapy, but the only thing it did was make me wish I was dead. If you’ve never been through chemo, it’s horrible. Basically, what it does is kill all your blood cells to try to get rid of the bad ones, so it takes you down until you have almost nothing left. You’re too sick to eat. You’re throwing up all the time. They give you shots of adrenaline, which are supposed to give you the energy to move around but don’t. You’re hyped up, heart racing, but you can’t do anything. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling, and I went through it alone.

  Why alone? Amy had a job in Florida and was taking care of Jaycob with his cerebral palsy, and Max was still little, so she couldn’t come visit me in Walter Reed. I was all by myself. Being alone in a situation like that was life changing. I guess it changed my persona in regards to how I look at life and how I accept things.

  I’m a stocky guy, and that chemo got me down to 120 pounds. I looked dead. I think Amy didn’t want to come up because she couldn’t bear to look at me, I was in such bad shape.

  At that point, in late 2003, Crazy Horse Troop was still in Iraq, and I hadn’t had any contact with anybody in the unit. Command sent a few guys stateside to meet the Secretary of Defense at some fancy ball, since our unit had seen so much action. Broadhead was one of the guys who came back over, so he was one of the people who tracked me down and started motherfucking me, as in “Motherfucker, I can’t believe you wrote that shit like you were the only one there.”

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I soon found out—the October 2003 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine was on newsstands, and in it was an article about the battle of As Samawah that appeared to have been written by me. Broadhead was pissed because it seemed that in the article I was trying to take credit for most of the killing that happened at As Samawah, as if no one else had been there. Somebody at Walter Reed tracked down a copy of the magazine for me so I could figure out exactly what was going on. I hadn’t written anything: I was too busy trying not to die from cancer.

  The article, entitled “Bradley,” was listed on the magazine’s table of contents as being written by Anonymous, but my name was on the first page of the article. It was mostly a quick run-through of the events at As Samawah and immediately after, told solely from my point of view, with hardly a mention of any other troop. SOF wrote that the piece

  passed through so many hands before it reached us, we have been yet unable to identify its author other than by name and rank as given. With the action recorded as taking place at Al Samawah, one might attempt to make assumptions regarding which American unit was involved, but we do not know for certain. In fact, we have been yet unable to further document this fragment of combat history other than by its own face. So we must leave the reader with a caveat: If this story is not true in every regard, it should be. If any reader has a POC (point of contact) for Staff Sergeant Johnson, we would appreciate it.

  [And there, right before the story itself, like a signature, was my name and rank.]

  STAFF SERGEANT DILLARD J. JOHNSON, 19D

  INCIDENT OF 23 MARCH 2003.*

  A second quick read-through of the story was enough for me to figure out where and who it had come from, since I knew I hadn’t written it. When Crazy Horse was still in Baghdad, high-ranking Army officers came through and interviewed everybody as to what we’d seen and done at As Samawah and afterward. These interviews weren’t restricted to our unit, but were part of a huge effort to document the early days of the war. They were the basis for the book On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the official Army narrative of the first five weeks or so of combat in Iraq.

  As near as I could remember, the Soldier of Fortune story came straight from my interviews with those officers. In fact, several sections of the October 2003 article ostensibly written by me can be found in On Point, word for word.* One of the officers who interviewed me and the rest of Crazy Horse—we believe it was a lieutenant colonel or major—thought it was such a great story that he contacted Soldier of Fortune and passed along part of the report.

  Soldier of Fortune of course jumped on it, because it was a great story. What was published, however, made it seem like I was taking credit for a lot of stuff I didn’t do. I didn’t mention other soldiers during the interviews because the officers were talking to all of us, and we were each telling our individual stories. While nothing in what Soldier of Fortune published was untrue, it was only a small part of the story and made me seem like a conceited asshole.

  The story was a big success for Soldier of Fortune because it got them a lot of attention, both good and bad. A lot of people wrote into the magazine reaming them out for printing such obvious fiction. I tracked down the senior editor at the time, Don McLean, and asked him to print a retraction.

  “Look,” I told him, “you don’t have it right. I didn’t do it all myself, there were a bunch of people over there fighting and they need recognition.”

  “Sorry, the story stands as printed. We’re not going to print a retraction. We’d be happy to print your side of the story, though.”

  Well, shit.

  The first thing I did was contact the Public Affairs Office at Fort Stewart and talk to the Lieutenant there. He didn’t see a problem with me setting things straight. The PAO looked at and approved everything I eventually wrote before it went out to the magazine. I couldn’t eat or sleep and was too weak to do anything physical—I had nothing but time on my hands, which worked out well, because I am not a fast writer. The doctors couldn’t give me any hopeful news, so maybe it was good that I found something with which to occupy myself. What I wrote for Soldier of Fortune was hugely long, but I did my best to mention everybody who was over there, everyone who played a part, and set the record straight. Crazy Horse was just starting to come back from Iraq at that time, and I wanted to give them their due. The magazine ended up running what I wrote for them as a six-part story, starting in the January 2004 issue and running through the June 2004 issue. A few guys from the unit, including John Williams, provided photos for me to submit with the articles.

  So that was how I, suffering from cancer, a Kentucky kid with horrible dyslexia, ended up writing a six-part, 18,000-word feature for Soldier of Fortune magazine. To tell you the truth, Broadhead is still pissed at me about that. He saved my life more times than I can count, and I did the same for him, but when we weren’t getting shot at, for some reason we just didn’t get along. The whole SOF thing really put a nail in that coffin.

  I don’t know how long I underwent chemo. Four months, six months—forever. That was such a dark and lonely time that I’m just sad when I think back to the place I was at. It was so bad that I can’t even say “At least it’s better now,” because when I do think about how things were it drags me down. It’s shitty that it happened, but it happened, and that’s all ther
e is to that. Could I, should I, blame the military for the DU ammo? Hell, that ammo did a much better job saving my life than it did trying to end it. By the way, the military doctors would never come out and confirm it was the DU ammo that gave me cancer. Officially it is “Cause: unknown.” I got another Purple Heart, number three, from the round hitting me in the vest and cutting my neck, so there’s that.

  Between the chemo and the super-chemo and the ultra-mega-chemo and surgery, eventually the doctors got the cancer under control. As I write this it is in remission. Hopefully it’s still in remission when you’re reading this, but there are no guarantees in life.

  * * *

  * Soldier of Fortune, October 2003, p. 38.

  * 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), pp. 129–30.

  CHAPTER 20

  EXCHANGING RPGS FOR IEDS

  Stage 3 cancer? Three Purple Hearts including part of a bullet still in my leg? That was more than enough to earn me a medical discharge, and who could have blamed me? At that point I’d been in the Army for 18 years, had seen more than my share of combat, and had a few medals to show for it. But, as I wrote before, ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a platoon sergeant. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  With the party still going on in Iraq, I knew it was only a matter of time before Crazy Horse went back over. In one of the Soldier of Fortune articles I had mentioned how I had dropped my Gerber Multi-Plier into a canal, conveniently forgetting to mention I had originally commandeered it from Soprano at As Samawah when I was trying to fix the matching unit for the radio. I ended up in contact with Mark Schindel at Gerber Legendary Blades, who hooked up the whole unit with Gerber gear, including preproduction prototypes of one of their new fixed-blade knives, the LMF II.