Carnivore Page 24

  The first truck was in the way, blocking the road. It was overheating, and steam was coming out of it. We had a pretty good idea that the truck was going to die. We didn’t want the guy to get back in the truck, because he might try to drive off or ram something, so I hopped in the truck to drive it off the road. I can drive just about anything, or at least get it into gear. I stopped the tractor trailer on a steep incline, almost a 45-degree slope, so steep the truck almost tipped over. The ground was so slanted that it was hard for me to push the door open to get out.

  We searched the other trucks, tearing through the boxes, and all we found was tobacco and more tobacco. After about an hour we gave up on it and realized that these guys weren’t insurgents, they were just stupid. So we gave up on it and left them there to load the tobacco back into the trucks. Well, about 20 minutes later we were up on the rooftop, watching, and I saw the driver get back into the first truck. He put it into gear to drive off, and the truck turned over as soon as it started to move, landing with a big thump. Oops. Well, he did it, I didn’t.

  Apart from the incident at the car plant, Kennedy and I never got attacked while we were set up in a sniping position. After we shot, they were either trying to get away or confused as to exactly where we were. Williams, on the other hand, had an exciting night when somebody tossed a grenade into his position. He was fine, but there’s nothing like a live grenade to get your heart beating fast. He was the Section Sergeant, but I was the Platoon Sergeant and Platoon Leader, so I had other missions and responsibilities. Williams did nothing but go out on sniper missions every night. He was by far a better shot than me and took out more guys than I did.

  Private Flint, the only member of our unit who had attended sniper school, got his first kill with a sniper rifle one night when I was with him. I wasn’t spotting for him, I was up there with my M14 working in tandem, but I verified and confirmed the kill for him through my scope. The shot was about 600 yards. I actually just ran into Flint a few months ago, at the SHOT Show in Vegas. He was still in the Army and in fact had joined the Special Forces.

  In late October 2005, my platoon was set up in two overwatch positions on the Tigris. Staff Sergeants Sowby and Craig were to the south of my location on top of an old pool house, and we were on the roof of a big old house that allowed me to see the other side of the river. Gilbert, my new Iraqi interpreter, had told me about the spot, and it was perfect.

  After setting up on the roof, a new guy, Private First Class Patty Turnbull, told me he had movement on the other side of the river. It was a long way away, and other than movement he couldn’t pick out any detail. Then we heard a mortar being fired from the other side of the river, at the 3rd POB headquarters. They were firing from behind a wall in some trees; we knew exactly where they were but couldn’t actually see them. I called my Commander for air support—Apaches—and was told it would be a little bit before they could get there.

  The Bushnell laser range finder told me it was over 500 meters to the mortar position. I didn’t want to wait for air support; those bastards were mortaring my guys. But what to do? Then I had an idea.

  I pulled out four 40 mm HEDP rounds and told Turnbull to do the same, then called to two other nearby soldiers who also had M4/203s. One of them was Specialist Gillespie, whom we called Gummy Bear. Gummy Bear got his nickname at Fort Irwin NTC when he ate an entire 10-pound bag of gummy bears by himself.

  “Follow my lead, aim like I do, and shoot after me in one-second intervals,” I told them.

  I’d put a lot of 40 mm grenade rounds downrange that tour and was getting pretty good with the thing. While the under-barrel launcher could throw the grenade round a lot farther than anyone could throw a hand grenade, the 40 mm grenades still had a pronounced rainbow trajectory. I fired the first round, Turnbull fired the second round, and we did a round robin. In total we fired 12 HEDP rounds. Gummy Bear shot the last one.

  The M203 and its 40 mm round isn’t the most accurate weapon in the world, but the HEDP round is damn effective and has a good blast radius. We were able to curve them over the top of the wall. I watched the first round hit almost on top of the mortar team and 11 more hit that same area in just as many seconds. By the time the Apaches got there the mortar was silent. The chopper pilot could see hot spots on the ground but couldn’t tell if they were bodies. It would be almost a week before we found out that we had taken out an enemy 81 mm mortar team with our improvised mortar barrage, killing three insurgents.

  I was minding my own business one day when one of the Iraqi cops with the 3rd POB came up to me and said, “I’ve found an IED.”

  “Cool,” I told him. “Let’s go.” Cochran and I grabbed our rifles.

  We jumped into a Humvee and drove down the road a while until he told me to stop. We got out and walked a short distance, Cochran watching our backs. I was expecting the Iraqi cop to stop, point down the road a good distance, and say, “There it is, over there.”

  After a short walk, he stopped, pointed at his feet, and said, “Here it is, right there.” Next to his foot was a hole, and visible inside the hole was the top of what I recognized to be an IED.

  “Motherfucker, are you kidding me?” I yelled at him. Actually, I didn’t yell, because you never know what might set those things off, but I cursed him up one side and down the other as we beat feet away from the bomb.

  I backed the Humvee up until we were a safe distance away and called in EOD. EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal—handled most of the IEDs we encountered. They were usually able to defuse them, but from time to time they had to blow them in place. Talk about a job I would not want to have—bomb disposal was number one on that list. The EOD tech showed up with his little remote-controlled bomb robot, Johnny 5. He drove Johnny 5 over to where the hole was.

  “I can’t see any IED,” the EOD tech told me, looking at his video monitor.

  I looked at the screen. “Some of the dirt’s fallen into the hole and covered it,” I told him. “It’s there.”

  “I don’t see it,” he insisted.

  “Dude, there’s an IED in the hole, just put the C4 on it and blow it up,” I told him.

  “I can’t do that without confirming that there’s an IED there,” he told me obstinately.

  “I’m confirming it,” I growled, starting to get a little pissed.

  He shook his head. “I need to see it or something.”

  “So take Johnny 5’s little robot arm and dig out some of the dirt or something,” I told him. “Seriously, what the hell’s the problem?”

  “Fine,” he said. Very carefully manipulating the controls, he started working the robot’s arm. As soon as he touched the dirt over the top of it, the IED went off with a huge blast. Dirt and little robot pieces rained down all over the road.

  I laughed hard and long. “Looks like you need another Johnny 5,” I told him.

  He turned to me, rage in his eyes, and grabbed me by the front of my vest. He almost lifted me off the ground. I said quickly, “Dude, dude, relax, I was just making a joke.” I held up my hands. Nobody had been hurt by the blast, and nothing had been destroyed, so I wasn’t sure why me being a smartass had made him so upset.

  “You don’t understand,” he told me, angry and sad all at the same time. He sagged and let me go. “That was my last robot. Now I’ve got to go look at the IEDs myself.”

  With the year winding down, the weather wasn’t getting any warmer. I’d been cold in September lying on a roof all night, and October wasn’t any better. November and December were just as brutal. I called Amy, my wife, and told her to go to Walmart and buy a Thermos to send to me, because I was freezing my ass off at night. Every night it was bone-chillingly cold. I described to her what I needed, how it was insulated and would keep soup or coffee hot for hours.

  Package delivery, depending on how it was mailed, isn’t as slow as you might think to Iraq, but after a week and no Thermos I called Amy again. “Hey, babe, when you sent that Thermos, how did you send it? Because it�
��s still not here.”

  “Oh. Well, I didn’t get it yet,” she told me. I understood, she was busy, she had the kids to deal with, and her job, but I was in the business of killing people before they killed me.

  “Okay,” I told her. “You need to go get that Thermos and send it to me, because it’s cold.”

  I waited for almost another week, and still no Thermos, so I called her again. “Did you get that Thermos?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’ve just been so busy . . .”

  I don’t have the best patience when I’m in a good mood, but at that point it had been close to three weeks. It was just me and Kennedy up on the roofs and I was practically freezing to death. At night it only got down to 31 or 32 degrees, but if you’re sitting and not moving for hours and hours, that is really damn cold. It was 80 degrees in the daytime, and we had to dress for that, too. When you’re in a sniper position, you might have to E&E (escape and evade) in a hurry, so you don’t want to be weighted down with anything more than you need.

  I’d see an insurgent 100 yards out, which is practically point-blank range for a sniper rifle, and I’d shoot at the center of his chest and hit him in the shoulder, or his hip. I was shaking so bad I couldn’t hold on to the damn gun. We’d gotten so cold, Kennedy and I, that we were hugging on the roof and shaking, just a poncho liner wrapped around the two of us. When the sun finally came up, we didn’t care about insurgents or targets, we were just trying to get into direct sunlight, get warm, like a snake on a rock.

  “You need to go get that damn Thermos!” I yelled at my wife, and hung up the phone. Not my best moment, I admit.

  Amy left work right then, went out and bought a Thermos, and mailed it to me. I was waiting, and waiting, and then I had to wait some more, because she sent it regular mail. It took two weeks to get to Iraq. When it finally did arrive, I opened up the box and saw that she’d sent me a coffee cup with a screw-on lid. It wasn’t a Thermos at all.

  I picked up the phone without a pause, dialed her number, and when she answered, yelled, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Excuse me?”

  I said, “I tell you to send me a Thermos over here, I’m freezing my ass off, and not only does it take you four weeks to get one over here, you send me a fucking coffee cup?!”

  I finally got one in the mail three days before I left the country.

  That’s the closest we’ve ever come to getting a divorce, over a stupid Thermos. And it’s still a sore point between the two of us. Say “Thermos” to Amy and she gets murder in her eyes. When you’re in a combat zone half a world away, having instant telephone or Internet access to your loved ones can be a wonderful thing, but it’s a double-edged sword.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE LION’S MOUTH

  We hadn’t been stationed in Baghdad during our second tour but rather had been moved all over, wherever we were needed. Late in 2005 they were having problems with insurgents planting IEDs outside of Salman Pak, so Kennedy and I headed over there to see if we could help out.

  Salman Pak is 15 miles south of Baghdad along the Tigris River, and most Iraqis know it as a historical and recreational area. It’s the site of the Arch of Ctesiphon, in the remains of the ancient Persian capital, and is named after Salman the Persian, who was a companion to Muhammad and is buried there. Before the war it was a common day-trip destination for residents of Baghdad and even featured a floating casino. Under Saddam, however, Salman Pak became better known to U.S. forces as a center of chemical weapons production and secret police training.

  We did a lot of patrols along the river, usually south of Salman Pak. There was a mosque there with a minaret, and we were pretty sure the insurgents, after planting IEDs, would stand in the mosque so they had a good view up and down the road as they waited for U.S. troops to drive by. Then they’d detonate. Ironically, there was a Pepsi factory right next to the mosque, which is not something you see every day.

  One night Sowby, Kennedy, and I were on patrol in that area when an IED blew up between Kennedy’s Bradley and mine. The Carnivore II took all the shrapnel, but the blast itself really rattled me—I know I got a concussion, as I had a little bit of fluid coming out of both of my ears.

  Kennedy saw movement, hopped down inside the turret of his Bradley, and told his gunner to engage.

  “My optics are out!” the gunner said. Kennedy and I had been rolling down the road pretty close together, and the blast had blown out his ISU (integrated sight unit).

  Kennedy called me on the radio. “I can’t identify, my optics are out.”

  I couldn’t engage them because Kennedy was between us. “Shoot from the hip, shoot from the hip!” I told him.

  Kennedy saw several guys running in front of the Pepsi factory. He grabbed the Commander’s override and opened up the 25 mm with HE rounds on high rate, trying to hit the fleeing insurgents. He started off really high, because you never know where the barrel’s going to hit—you shoot and you adjust from that—and he worked his way down and across the front of the building, chasing the guys with about 70 rounds of high-explosive. It just destroyed the front of the factory, chunks flying everywhere, and looked like a scene from an action movie.

  The insurgents made it to the riverbank, and Sergeant Sowby, who was behind me, finally had the angle and opened up his 25 mm. He pounded the guys in the bushes right before they got to the river.

  Our original mission was to head to a small town south of Salman Pak and try to locate a known terrorist. The plan was to head to his house in the middle of the night just to see if we could catch him at home. Even though we’d been a bit rattled, none of our vehicles were damaged, and we continued on our patrol. Since Kennedy’s ISU was out I put him in the middle of our small column, with Sowby in front and me in the rear, because I was still really rattled from that IED. We called the Apaches in and one came into the area and covered us as we rolled—our old friend Max 26. When we got to a point in the road where we needed to make a turn, we slowed down, and an IED went off in front of me.

  Honestly, we were lucky that the IEDs we were dealing with were just rewired bombs. Insurgents would plant them in the ground and blow them up when the Americans drove by. If we weren’t right on top of them, usually all we got was blast. Other troops were having to deal with insurgents planting EFP (explosively formed penetrator) bombs—these were charges that would rip through just about any armor we had.

  The second IED of the night rattled me as well. Max 26 was on station but radioed us that he couldn’t see anything or find anyone for us to kill. We were too far south to call all the way to base, so I called Sergeant Wyatt of the mortar platoon at Salman Pak. “Hey, please relay back to the Commander that this is a wash. We’ve already been hit with two IEDs. No real damage to the vehicles, no injuries. We’re coming back up to Salman Pak.”

  “Roger that.”

  Max 26 was low on fuel and handed off to Gunslinger 24, which was on station overhead as we started rolling back. The Apaches we used were aviation assets with the 101st Airborne, and they were great. They saved our asses more times than I can count.

  Our column was almost all the way back to Salman Pak in a little village when we got hit with another IED. This time it caught the rear of Kennedy’s vehicle and the front of Sowby’s vehicle. That’s when I’d had about enough. We stopped. I left the gunners and drivers in the vehicles, but the Commanders and our dismounts got out and went kicking in every door in that village looking for somebody, anybody, whose ass we could kick. Finally we found the sheik in the town. I grabbed my interpreter and had a very intense conversation with that sheik in the front yard of his house.

  “Make this very clear to him,” I told my interpreter. “If we or any of our forces get hit by another IED on this road, I’m going to come back here and drive my Bradley through his house. Crush his house. Make sure he understands me.” I stuck a thumb over my shoulder at the Carnivore, which had rolled up.

  The interpreter relayed my message.
The sheik, through the interpreter, told me, “There’s nothing I can do, I am very sorry.”

  “There better be something you can do,” I told him, motioning my driver to pull forward.

  He kept saying, “There’s nothing I can do,” and I kept motioning for my driver to pull forward. My driver kept pulling forward until the Carnivore hit and ran over the wall around the guy’s yard and was creeping toward his house. The Bradley was in his front yard, inches away from his front door, before the sheik told me in English, “Okay, I understand, I understand.”

  “You understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But I have people coming here. I can’t keep the people who are doing this out, they’re coming from the river. They’re coming from the other side, I can’t stop them.”

  Okay, now we were having a conversation. “What do you need to stop them?” I asked. “Do you need the police here?”

  “No, the police are worse than the people crossing the river.”

  “So what do you need?”

  “I need guns and ammo.”

  “How much guns and ammo?” I asked him.

  “A lot.”

  I smiled. “Okay. We’ll give you AK-47s and ammo.” We always had AKs and mags in our Bradleys, taken off the insurgents that we’d killed. I gave him four AKs and magazines, then told the interpreter, “You tell this guy to handle his shit or I’m going to come back and raze his village. Do you understand me?”

  The interpreter passed it along. The sheik looked at me for clarification. “What?”

  “I’m going to burn it to the ground and crush every fucking thing in here. If anybody gets shot at while we’re driving down this road or if another IED goes off.”

  We never had another problem on that road again.

  That sheik took care of his business, and he gained a lot of respect from the people in that area because he handled it himself. Because of that, he got his village back, and we actually developed a good relationship with him and his people. It wasn’t uncommon for us to be driving through that area on patrol and have somebody run out and flag us down. Through our interpreter we’d hear that the sheik wanted to honor us with chai (tea). So we’d stop and have chai and talk with him.