Carnivore Read online

  “We’ve got this knife you might be interested in,” Mark told me. “We haven’t got it out yet, but we’ll send you fifteen or twenty and you guys see if you can break it. See what you can do with it.”

  “You got it,” I told him.

  Thanks to the articles, other companies tracked me down and provided more gear for Crazy Horse, including Blackhawk and Bushnell. Bushnell gave us several mil-dot Elite 4200 rifle scopes and laser range finders, which would later come in very handy.

  Things overseas weren’t quite going the way the military had expected, and the unrelentingly negative and biased news coverage wasn’t making things any better for anyone. I wasn’t surprised when we got the word that we would be heading back to Iraq sooner rather than later.

  Crazy Horse Troop returned to Iraq in January 2005. I arrived on January 22 and went right back to work. Since I’d been there last, the situation had changed somewhat. The ground war with the Iraqi army was long over, but the guerrilla and insurgent attacks, the IEDs, and the bombings presented real and continuing problems.

  The nightly news in America was full of car bombs and snipings, all the bad things. They ignored all the good things the U.S. military was doing with the power grid and the education system; in fact, the U.S. news media seemed to forget that we were the good guys. Some of them were still on the “no one can find any weapons of mass destruction” rant, conveniently forgetting that Saddam proved to the world he had them when he used them on the Kurds, long before the United States sent troops to the region. Hell, that’s how Chemical Ali got his nickname.

  Back in Iraq, I was quick to see that most reporters hardly ever stepped outside of the Green Zone. Their news reports were videos after the fact, often provided by Al Jazeera, while they hid behind the fences, protected by the very military they despised. Did that make them willing stooges or simply propagandists?

  I’d been to Iraq before and seen more combat than most combat vets. While Crazy Horse was heading back in-country with a number of experienced troops, we had a lot of fresh young faces as well. As the combat-seasoned veterans, it was our job to teach the new recruits and do as good a job as we could getting all of them back home in one piece. I was cocky and conceited before I’d gotten a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, and beaten cancer, so I just knew that I was going to be better than the last guy. I can remember telling my soldiers how we were going to find all the IEDs and get the sons of bitches who had emplaced them. The battle-hardened Platoon Sergeant I was replacing wasn’t impressed by my cockiness and told me not to worry about finding the IEDs—they would find us. No truer words have ever been spoken.

  As the conflict had evolved into more of a guerrilla affair, the spec-ops and small-unit types were in their element—that was what they lived for. However, the last thing command wanted was another Black Hawk Down scenario, so for the first six months back in-country Crazy Horse was detailed to be the armor package for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and Task Force 6-26. That was our Brigade Commander’s decision. We were based out of Al Asad Air Base, which was run by the Marines. I wish I could tell you we were doing all sorts of high-speed ninja stuff with those elite troops, but the fact of the matter is we spent six months getting shot at and blown up, and even then most of the time it was boring. We hardly got to shoot at anybody, but even so I can’t write about anything we did in any detail.

  For the first part of my tour I was back in a Bradley, which I christened Carnivore II. Yeah, I know, not very creative—but why argue with success? We ended up going on 45 combat missions in Carnivore II and traveling over 25,000 miles, even though we later transitioned to up-armored Humvees, so it earned the name.

  For one TF 6-26 mission we were outside of Fallujah in the town of Haditha. The mission was a cordon and search, with the armor doing the cordon part and the spec-ops guys doing the search. I had to cut down the side of a riverbank to cross over to an alley, and the riverbank gave out behind me. There was no way for me to go back; I had to go forward, but I found myself looking at an alley full of cars. The street was three cars wide, so with cars parked bumper to bumper on either side there was just barely enough room for someone to drive their car through. A car had plenty of room. My Bradley didn’t.

  I literally crushed 20 cars driving down the street. Cars on both sides of the road, all the way down the road, car alarms going off, the Iraqis standing there waving their arms at me and yelling the Arabic equivalent of “What the fuck?” I made canoes out of those cars, crushed them like bugs. Even though I felt bad that it happened, that was some funny shit.

  I got my ass chewed by the Commander. “Why did you do that? What in God’s name possessed you to do something so stupid? Do you have any idea what kind of public relations disaster I’m dealing with?” And so on. I explained that I had no choice. With the riverbank collapsing behind me, it was either go forward through the parked cars or abandon my vehicle. I couldn’t do that, because the task force guys were in the middle of a major assault and I had to support them. Besides, there was no way I was giving up my vehicle. Letting it sit there would be no different from handing it over to the enemy.

  The raid was a big success. They collected so many prisoners that they needed to use two Bradleys to take them back for questioning. We had them in the hell hole (the narrow slot behind the driver’s seat), sitting on the turret floor, or standing up in the back of the Brad. When we raised the ramp it mashed them in so tightly they couldn’t move. We had at least 20 people in the Carnivore II, which is designed to fit 7.

  In early April 2005, we were working an escort mission for TF 6-26. Staff Sergeant David Miller was in the lead Bradley and I was at the rear, with four thin-skinned vehicles between us. We’d been out driving back and forth in 100-plus-degree heat for the better part of 12 hours, and we were burned out. With less than two miles left to base and no enemy contact, Miller and I rolled ahead of the other vehicles in our Bradleys so we could take out any threat that might lie ahead. It was almost 6 P.M. and I was glad my day was almost over.

  I had a different crew in my Bradley this tour. Sergeant Sean Cochran was my gunner, and he was feeling a bit like a Thanksgiving turkey in the heat. He was a good guy and had the perfect build for riding around in armor all day—he was even shorter than me.

  “Sergeant Jay, okay if I stand up and get some air? Aren’t we about back?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  No sooner had I spoken than everything went black. The explosion was huge and rocked the whole Bradley. When the smoke from the IED cleared, I was happy to see we were still in one piece.

  “Contact right!” Cochran yelled out. “Got a guy running into a building.”

  I tried to call Miller on the radio but got nothing.

  “Shoot that guy!” I yelled at Cochran. There was no response, so I looked down into the turret to see what was taking him so long to fire. Smoke was coming out of the turret floor; apparently we weren’t as undamaged as I’d thought. With the turret power out (which explained why Miller didn’t answer: the radio was out with the power), Cochran was doing just as he had been trained, putting the 25 mm gun into manual operation.

  Miller had been several hundred yards ahead of us but had heard the IED go off. As he was turning around to come help us out, Cochran, using the hand crank, fired half a dozen 25 mm HE rounds into the building after the fleeing insurgent.

  With the thin-skinned vehicles we were escorting coming up fast, we couldn’t press the attack. I shouted to Miller to call them and warn them of the danger ahead. While we were busy trying to get the Carnivore II back up, he found a bypass for the vehicles we were escorting.

  We weren’t having a lot of luck getting our power back up. Miller positioned his Bradley between the IED site and the bypass route, and he and his gunner, Staff Sergeant Jared Kennedy, kept overwatch on us until we could effect a repair. We finally realized we couldn’t handle the job ourselves and put out a call for help. With the assistance of some very t
alented Marines, I had my Bradley up and running in no time at all. Semper fi.

  That’s how I got Purple Heart number four: flying debris from an IED. If it hadn’t been for the Blackhawk tactical goggles I was wearing, I would have lost my eyesight. The goggles took most of the blast, saving my eyes, and all I suffered was a small cut on my face. I also had on body armor and Blackhawk’s light assault gloves, and it’s a good thing, because I got peppered with debris and shell fragments. The body armor took most of the shell fragments, but three pieces of metal went into my right wrist. The Blackhawk gloves did a damn good job of protecting my hands. We later found out that the IED was a hot-wired 155 mm artillery round, which packs a lot of explosive. That was the first but not the biggest or the last IED that Carnivore II would encounter. In my first tour it was RPGs; in the second, IEDs.

  One afternoon we were coming back from a mission with TF 6-26 and rolled over a bridge to see a Humvee lighting a truck up with its roof gun. We slowed down to see what was happening, and as we got closer we saw that the Humvee was part of a convoy—one of our convoys, in fact. They were the support battalion for the 3rd ID.

  Passing a convoy was just about number one on the list of ways to get guns pointed at you in Iraq at that time. Apparently when the truck was approaching, the troopers in the convoy had waved it off and tried to flag it away, but nothing was working. The truck started rolling past the convoy, and nothing the troopers were doing could get the driver to stop or slow down. At about the time the truck was getting ready to pass the lead vehicle in the convoy, somebody spotted what looked like an IED in the road ahead. Because the truck was ignoring all of their attempts to signal it, the Commander told the Humvee gunner to engage.

  The vehicle was full of nothing but kids. Not one of them was over the age of fifteen, and they shot it with a .50-cal machine gun.

  I immediately blocked the road so other traffic wouldn’t get in the way, called squadron for assistance, and started doing first aid on anybody left alive. A lot of them were dead. I’ve seen horrible things, but that was just about the worst.

  The Army did a full investigation to find out exactly what happened. They walked through everything, talked to witnesses, put the entire incident back together. Just prior to that incident two units had lost an M1 and a Bradley to IEDs. They were catastrophic losses; the crews had burned inside the vehicles. Two days before the incident I’d lost a Humvee in almost the exact same place when an IED had gone off. Nobody had died, but the Humvee had burned down. So everybody in the convoy was on edge: a big vehicle refused to stop and started passing them, and up ahead was what everybody thought was an IED. Even EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), when they came out to defuse the bomb, thought the object was an IED, although it turned out to just be a muffler on the side of the road.

  I understand exactly why it happened. There was a pile-up of extenuating circumstances, due mostly to escalating terrorist attacks in the area, and because of that a bunch of children died.

  When the experts start talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about, sometimes they do. The gunner in that Humvee was fucking devastated. Thinking he was about to come under attack by terrorists, he machine-gunned a truckload of children.

  For the first part of my second tour we had an interpreter who went by the name of George. He was the soldier at As Samawah who destroyed the Crazy Horse Café coffee box on the side of the Carnivore with an RPG. I decided to let bygones be bygones, because I’d shot him four times and killed all of his friends—not that I ever told him that. The Iraqis working with us had their loyalty tested enough.

  George was an excellent interpreter, but, like most of the Iraqis, he didn’t know a lot about weapons handling. Sergeant Williams, George, and I were walking down a street on patrol in Salman Pak one day and George had what we in the business call a negligent discharge: he emptied an entire 30-round AK magazine on full auto into the ground between Williams and me. Since he was such a good interpreter and, honestly, not much worse with an AK than a lot of the Iraqis, all we did was take his rifle away. He wasn’t supposed to have it anyway, but in a combat zone, one more good guy with a gun is never a bad idea. Well, almost never.

  George also had this habit of stealing stuff out of every car we stopped. We tried to discourage it and kept a close watch on him, but he was persistent. Every time we raided a house, George came walking out with jewelry or money. I wish I could say he was unusual, but a lot of the Iraqis were like that. Whenever the Americans searched an area, like a neighborhood, looking for insurgents, we called it a “Cordon and Search.” If any Iraqi troops were helping us out, we called it a “Cordon and Shoplift.”

  After surviving the Carnivore at As Samawah, George ended up dying young of a brain aneurysm. You never know when you’re going to go.

  Remember the trouble I had with the gate guard in Bosnia?

  When I was working for TF 6-26 we were based out of Al Asad Air Base. It was a Marine base and a Marine sector. Normally when you left the base you were supposed to give the gate guards your unit, where you were going, how many people you had with you, and so on, because they were tracking everybody who was leaving and entering the base. We often had to roll out of the base at no notice to go support our task force, which was flying out on Blackhawks from different sites. The Marines at the gates were giving us a lot of problems, slowing us down, so we talked to the Base Commander. He gave us an All Access card to show to the guys at the gate.

  When we showed them the card, they were supposed to write down the number on the card and then let us through without delaying us.

  So one day our column rolled up to the gates, and there was a Marine Corporal there. I was the third vehicle in line, but ended up next to the guard vehicle.

  The corporal asked, “Where you guys going?”

  I showed him the card.

  He glanced at it, then asked, “What unit are you?”

  I said, “Read the card. It says ‘Do not detain, let us leave immediately.’ Just write down the number.”

  He frowned and said, “So how many people are going out?”

  I said, “Dude, read the fucking card.”

  And he said, “Well, I’ve got to call this to higher.”

  Son of a . . . I got on the radio and called up ahead to Sergeant England in his M1. He was the lead vehicle. “This is Sergeant Johnson back here. Please crush that gate if you need to to get out of here. We need to support our elements.”

  Sergeant England’s tank started to move forward, and I heard the Corporal say, “Hey, bring that gun around on him.” There was a Humvee next to the gate, and the Marine in the roof turret swung a .50-cal machine gun around to bear on Sergeant England.

  England stopped. There was a brief pause, then the turret on England’s M1 started to rotate. England brought his 120 mm main gun tube around, it gently knocked the barrel of the Marine’s .50 sideways, and the guy who was holding on to the .50 was now staring at the muzzle of an M1 Abrams main gun from six inches away.

  Sergeant England yelled at the top of his voice, “Your move, fucker!”

  So they raised the gate with no further issue. The guy in the Humvee hopped off it (probably to get away from the 120 mm muzzle) and opened it for us.

  To add insult to injury, England ran over one of their concrete Jersey barriers and crushed it with the M1, and everybody rolling after him did the same thing. I got my ass chewed for that a little bit, but we told command that the checkpoint was too narrow and the M1 just needed to make some room to get through.

  One fine day in Iraq we were going to do an entry into a house where we thought there were some bad guys. Some of my troops were going in the back, the rest of the guys were going in the front, and I was the last guy going in. I called it in on the radio, as we were doing two houses at the same time: “Breaching, breaching, breaching!”

  They breached the front door, and everybody ran by this big guy in the front y
ard asleep on a mattress like he was a guard. This dude was big—Wilt Chamberlain/Shaquille O’Neal big. I ran by him, and just as I did the motherfucker jumped up and grabbed me and spun me around. He was so huge that he grabbed another one of my guys and was shaking him by his vest while I was riding on this guy’s shoulders like a Chihuahua humping a Great Dane. I was trying to buttstroke him and trying to get off him, but he was just slinging me around, yelling incoherently. That’s when I learned the value of quick release slings, because he had my rifle where I couldn’t hit him or do anything with it. He had me about twisted in half by my own sling, all the while yelling, “Aaaaaah, aaaaaah!”

  I finally got my pistol out and was about to put it to his head and drop him when his mother ran out of the house yelling, “Mister! Mister!” She was frantically twirling her finger around her temple to indicate that he wasn’t right in the head.

  “No shit!” I yelled at her. “Calm him the fuck down!” That dude was messing us up without even trying, but I learned something that day—apparently a finger spinning next to the head is the universal sign for crazy.

  Something else I learned? Most of the time I was carrying an M4/203, an M4 carbine with an M203 40 mm under-barrel grenade launcher. Shooting at a door with a 40 mm grenade from 20 feet away? Bad idea. Some of the grenades don’t arm until they’ve traveled a certain distance, but apparently 20 feet’s good. You know, in the movies, it just knocks the door down. In reality, it knocks you down. It’s really cool in the movies. In real life it’s not so cool. I got a nice chunk of scrap metal in my leg from that self-administered IQ test.

  Someone once asked me how good the TF 6-26 guys were at house clearing, since that’s their specialty. Our platoon at one point was spending 16 hours a day doing nothing but house clearing, We were just as fast at it as the ultra-high-speed spec-ops guys, but every shot they fired hit exactly what they were aiming at. Those dudes could shoot.