Carnivore Read online

  Except for the occasional screw-ups (and they’re the only things that seem to make the news back home), the people I supervised were professionals and acted like it. We weren’t running our own war or running wild, we were doing a job. Any time we fired a shot we had to write up an incident report, and that report was reviewed by an agent of the State Department. We couldn’t go back out until he’d cleared us.

  While we operated under fewer inane rules than the U.S. military, we still had them. Not too long into my contracting life, we were told by the powers that be that the guys working on PSDs couldn’t have any optics on their weapons with higher than a 1.5x magnification. Whoever made this decision apparently concluded that anything higher than 1.5x was an “offensive” sight, and we were only supposed to be operating defensively. The inexperience and ignorance, if not outright stupidity, of this decision was the kind of thing we dealt with every day

  It just so happens that my favorite optic that I used while contracting in Iraq was a 1.5x Trijicon mini-ACOG, so the optics restriction didn’t excessively piss me off. The extra little bit of magnification over a nonmagnified red-dot sight was sometimes just what I needed to get the job done. I beat the snot out of that thing and it never let me down. In fact, I still have it.

  Contracting isn’t easy—that’s why it pays so well. You’re risking your life every day in a high-stress environment. Standard rotation was three months in-country, one month home, and I did that for five years. Most of the time I was in Iraq, but I spent a little time contracting in Afghanistan, too. Even if nothing happened, riding around in 100-plus-degree heat for hours on end waiting to get shot at or blown up by an IED is as stressful as hell. Waiting for hours in the trucks was also boring, and the practical jokes we played on each other were brutal.

  We would make MRE bombs with hot sauce—you take the chemical heater from the meal, fill it up with hot sauce, add water, seal it, and drop it down inside a vehicle, then block the doors so the guys inside couldn’t get out. The vehicle would fill up with improvised OC gas—pepper spray. Or you could drop it inside a water bottle and leave it there until it exploded. Guys would like to see who was quicker with knives, as well, so the medics would always be stitching them up in the back of the trucks.

  I spent a lot of time in the TSTs (tactical support teams). One of the guys I supervised was named Oatridge, but we didn’t call him that for very long. The daughter of one of the other guys on the team, Jackson, had sent him a five-pound bag of frosted animal crackers. Jackson had it in the vehicle with us when we were on standby at a checkpoint one day.

  “Jackson, can I have some of your cookies?” Oatridge asked.

  “Sure, dude.” Oatridge stayed in the vehicle while Jackson and I were nearby. After two hours it was time to get back in the vehicle and head out.

  “Lemme have the cookies,” Jackson said to Oatridge. Oatridge handed over the box, and Jackson reached inside. There was one cookie left.

  “Motherfucker, are you kidding me? I said you could have some of the cookies, not all of them! My daughter sent me those.”

  “There’s some left,” Oatridge said defensively.

  “There’s one left!” Jackson roared.

  “You ate five pounds of cookies?” I said in disbelief.

  After that, Oatridge was forever known as Cookie.

  I did my best to keep in shape, both for self-preservation and to burn off stress, and ran regularly on the treadmill we had in our compound. At one point I was running five miles in half an hour, which was close to an 800-calorie workout—and I was still chunky. What the hell, distance running breeds cowardice anyway, right? If you can’t run far, you have to stay and fight.

  While contracting I wrote several more articles for Soldier of Fortune detailing Crazy Horse’s second tour in Iraq. The editors actually chose one of the photos I submitted for the cover of the August 2006 issue, inside of which was my write-up of my brief adventure in the freshwater navy.* It was a group “hero” shot of some of the troop, including Lieutenant Dejesus, Sergeants Cochran, Sowby, and Williams, and me, posing with our weapons.

  After five years of contracting, I’d had enough. Forty-eight was still too young to retire, though, so in addition to getting to spend time with my wife and sons I started doing firearms training at a facility called the Big 3 Training Center outside of Daytona Beach, Florida. After the war it seemed like everybody who’d ever worn a uniform or heard a shot fired in combat started up a training school. Some of them were good, some of them not so much, but after a quarter of a century as a professional soldier I’ve learned a couple of things.

  When I went to Iraq the first time, in 1991, I shouldered my rifle like a lot of old-school trap and skeet shooters—with my right elbow way up and out there. However, on that first visit to Iraq I took a round in the elbow. It went through the sleeve of my shirt and took a little piece of skin off the underside of my elbow when it was up in the air, but that was enough to teach me—tuck your wings in. This was long before trainers started teaching people to tuck in their elbows during CBQ (close-quarters battle). The fact that keeping your arms tucked in while house clearing prevents you from banging your elbows against doorframes is a bonus.

  I have been reading about how unreliable the M16 is for years. Stoppages are a big problem, you have to keep it spotless for it to work, blah, blah, blah. In 20 years of active duty and 5 years of contracting I had only three—yes, three—issues with M16s and M4s. One was with an old M16A1 that had had tons of rounds fired through it, so it was due for a new ejection spring anyway. The second was when the M4 I was using at As Samawah was disabled by the airburst mortar round. (Hell, before it was disabled, I emptied 14 magazines through that M4 on three-round burst as fast as I could load them. That was after 238 miles of desert sand and cold rain.) The third was when I stuffed elephant grass into the mag well of my M4, late in my second tour.

  Once, while contracting, we headed out to secure the crash site of a downed helicopter. Our M249 SAW (a light belt-fed machine gun) was out of operation, so I grabbed an M4 and a five-gallon bucket full of 30-round magazines. I took a position on a rooftop overlooking the crash site and almost immediately had to deal with a number of insurgents on the roof of an apartment building opposite me. They were slightly above me and protected by a wall, and it was my job to keep them from shooting at the wreck until the cavalry arrived. I put 500 rounds of ammo through that M4 on full auto as fast as I could fire and reload. The barrel turned orange from the heat, but the rifle never stopped working.

  I have been asked about M16 barrel failures, but I have never seen one; they are sort of like Bigfoot to me. I just don’t think an M4 barrel will fail without sticking it full of mud. Did we use some sort of secret, high-tech lube on our M4s? Nope. I used 15W40 motor oil for lube during both tours in Iraq with Crazy Horse. Ask the insurgents how it worked.

  Another common complaint about the M16 is the caliber. It is a small-caliber (.22) round, albeit a high-velocity one. Lots of people have referred to the rifle as a “poodle shooter” because the bullet is so small, and that was before the Army started issuing the SS109 green-tip armor-piercing ammunition that doesn’t expand and rarely tumbles. How well did SS109 ammo work for me? It worked just fine—it kills bad guys dead. However, I don’t belong to the same school of thought as the “magic bullet” people, always looking for the rifle or cartridge that will give them the mythic “one-shot stop.” I shot people until they were dead. How many rounds that took depended on what I was using. The most effective weapon I ever utilized was a B-1B bomber.

  The Beretta M9, on the other hand, I fucking hated. I can’t even remember how many times it tried to kill me. Several times during the battle at As Samawah it jammed on me, but I can’t really lay all the blame for that on the pistol—politics are to blame as well. In 1994 Congress passed a bill banning the sale to civilians of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. The only new full-capacity magazines being manufactured in any bulk afte
r that time were going to fulfill military contracts, where I suspect the manufacturers thought oversight was pretty much nil. So they put out magazines that seemed to only meet the bare minimum requirements, maybe. If the magazines we were issued sucked and we had the inclination to buy some of our own, we couldn’t afford any because the prices went through the roof on those few pre-ban magazines still for sale. I wasn’t the only soldier having problems with substandard Beretta magazines, either; I heard it was quite a widespread problem.

  That magazine ban expired in 2004, and since then our soldiers have been able to get what they need, thank God, even if they had to buy it themselves, with their own money.

  The problem, however, wasn’t just the magazines. I shot several Iraqis half a dozen times with the Beretta, and the 9 mm full-metal-jacket ammo just didn’t put them down. On my second tour in Iraq, as soon as I had the opportunity, I ditched my Beretta for a Browning Hi-Power. It was still a 9 mm, but at least I didn’t have to worry about it jamming on me. You want to know how much I hated the Beretta? I can tell you exactly when and where I replaced it with the Hi-Power: March 23, 2005, in Salawa, Iraq.

  There seems to be a bit of an argument within the “sniping community” as to whether the traditional bolt-action sniper rifle is outdated. Yes, bolt-action rifles are inherently more accurate than semiautos such as the M14 and Barrett, but having to physically work the bolt doesn’t allow for quick follow-up shots. In Iraq, quite frequently we had more than one person to shoot at when the time came to pull the trigger.

  How many of the 121 confirmed kills I had as a sniper were taken with a bolt-action rifle? None. That should pretty much make my opinion on the subject clear. After leaving the Army I often used an AR-10 pattern rifle when working overwatch. The AR-10 is an upsized AR-15 chambered for the larger .308 round, the same round that the M14 fires. AR-10s tend to be more finicky about ammunition but are also (generally) more accurate.

  This is not just a book about me. It is about young men who deserve your respect, and because I was there I can write about them. They fought for their country and their friends, and will forever be changed.

  Where is everyone now? To be honest, I’ve lost track of too many of them. Broadhead was a career man and was still in the Army the last time I checked. Sergeant Major Brahain just recently retired. Soprano got out of the Army and went back to school. Sully stayed in Crazy Horse for a while, but we lost touch. Jason Sperry, my driver, got out of the Army after 2003 and headed for parts unknown. He did all that was asked of him, but now he wants the past to be the past. I stayed friends with Captain Burgoyne, who is still in the Army and is now a Major. Captain Bair is now a Major as well. Captain McCoy received the Silver Star for his actions in and around An Najaf and got promoted out of the field. Lieutenant David Dejesus was well on his way to becoming a fine officer but was tragically killed in a non-service-related accident after his return to the States.

  There were too many troopers in Crazy Horse to mention everybody, but one soldier I did want to credit was Jerrod Fields. Early in 2005, when I was in-country, he got the lower part of his left leg blown off when an IED hit his Bradley. He was so concerned with getting his crew out of the kill zone that he continued to drive even though he’d lost his leg, for which he received a Bronze Star. Jerrod went back and got a prosthetic and stayed in the Army. In fact, he was reenlisted by Vice President Dick Cheney. Not just that, he’d always been a great athlete, and he continued with that, ending up in the Army’s World Class Athlete Program. He was featured on the cover of the April 23, 2008, issue of ESPN The Magazine. Jerrod is still a Bradley gunner, a Crazy Horse trooper through and through.

  Carnivore is my story. Maybe 5,000 soldiers saw direct combat in the first few months of the war, and every one of them has a story. This is what I saw and did. There were a lot of things that went on that aren’t in the book, but this is what I felt was important to show the effect that armor had on the war.

  I can’t speak for what anyone else saw and did. I know I was just a small part of a huge effort—and also lucky as hell. My nickname should be Lucky Jay, not Crazy Jay, because I should have died a dozen times over. That’s how I know there has to be somebody up there looking out for me. I was blown up—or almost blown up—so many times that a lot of my memories of the war are jumbled or completely gone. I don’t know how many concussions I received, because I never had the time to get them diagnosed, much less treated—I was too busy shooting back. I don’t think the super-ultra-mega-chemo did anything positive for my brain cells, either. A spoken word or something I’ll see will jog my brain, and all of a sudden I’ll remember something that happened in Iraq that I’d completely forgotten about.

  Right about the time I finished this book I found out that my cancer was back. There have been a lot of medical advancements in the almost nine years since I last beat it, and I’m confident I can beat it again. It’s not going to be fun or pleasant, but chemo is better than the alternative.

  Large numbers of soldiers and Marines have gone to combat, but only a small number have stepped into the mouth of hell, shed blood, and experienced the loss of friends. The fighting men and women of this country put everything in their lives on hold for the freedom of another people and some have given their lives for this true and just cause. We must never let our fallen friends be forgotten. Going to Iraq I think has made our military stronger and made our country stronger. Far too many of our citizens have forgotten that freedom isn’t free. I lost good friends. The old saying that what does not kill you makes you stronger is not true. What does not kill you leaves you in pain for the rest of your life.

  Contrary to what a lot of people who have never been to Iraq think, I believe it was a good thing for the United States to go over there. From what I personally observed, I feel that the Iraqi people are better off now than before. There has been no change of heart on my part, even after all I’ve been through.

  For those who lost a loved one in Iraq, know that they died winning freedom for the Iraqis. I am truly sorry for your loss and hope that you are not bitter about it. Your loved one has done the greatest thing any human can do in their lifetime, and there is a very good chance that he or she changed someone’s life for the better.

  As for myself, all the combat I’ve seen has changed me. You can’t go through what I and my crew went through and not be changed in some way. I’ve seen too much death, caused too much death.

  I try to remember the good things, the brave things, the funny things, but I have a lot of memories that aren’t so great. At As Samawah, the second day, when the Commander told us to go back across the bridge and hold it, I was stopped next to the little guard shack. That shack was the first thing Broadhead and I had shot up, and there were 15- and 16-year-old kids going inside the building and stealing Iraqi weapons. The Lieutenant’s gunner was right next to me, and he opened up on the guard shack with HE rounds. They passed right in front of my face, and he killed or maimed those kids as they were coming out. I don’t think they were getting the rifles to fight, I think they were just going to sell them, but he saw them as weapon carriers on a battlefield and thus fair game.

  Iraqis from the village came out, crying and screaming, and a woman holding one of the boys ripped her clothes, showing us her breast, signaling to us that he was her kid. I got out and was trying to put pressure dressings on them—we didn’t have tourniquets back then—whatever I could use out of my vehicle’s combat lifesaving kit, trying to help those kids.

  That was a horrible thing for me to see, because I’m a father of three boys. I try not to think about it, and the memory fades over time. But it still happened.

  Before heading to Iraq in 2003 I hunted a lot in Kentucky. Now, when I hear guys talking about going deer hunting or bagging a big buck, I just sort of snort. How hard is it to kill a deer? Did he have an AK or an RPG? Was he shooting back? I don’t really hunt anymore, because I get nothing out of it. Something Ernest Hemingway wrote I have found to be co
mpletely true for me: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue.” It takes a lot to get my adrenaline going.

  We went over as liberators, not conquerors, but it’s like when a bully has kids under control on a playground. When you take that bully out, all of a sudden you have 30 little bullies instead of that 1 big bully. That was what happened in Iraq. We took out the big bully, Saddam, and then we had a bunch of little groups to deal with who didn’t respect us. They thought we were weak because we were helping them, so they were particularly brutal to us. I wasn’t the “hearts and minds” guy, because I realized early on that the only way we’d be able to do our mission and survive was for us to be brutal right back. So I was brutal.

  Some people may ask, why did you and your men drag that guy out of the car and smack him around? Because we never had a problem with that guy again. Why did you blow that truck up with 10 pounds of plastic explosives? Because we never had a problem at that checkpoint again. I protected those who needed protecting, I gave medical treatment to those who needed to be treated, and I punished those who needed to be punished. I did not rob, I did not rape, and I did not pillage, and neither did anyone under my command. I took care of my men and my unit, up front and to the utmost. I brought every one of my soldiers home from every tour.