Carnivore Read online

  It has taken a long time to put my story down in ink. After years of combat and one too many traumatic brain injuries, I find it hard to remember some things now. I still get flashbacks and try to write them down when I can. For some things in here, I had to rely on the book On Point and friends who were there, as some of my memories are still fuzzy. We are all a product of the choices we have made, however, and I wouldn’t do anything differently. I did what needed to be done, and because I was there and made the tough decisions that had to be made, my men went home to their wives and their children.

  * * *

  * “3/7 Cavalry: Fighting the Good Fight, Part 2,” by SFC Dillard J. Johnson, Soldier of Fortune, August 2006, p. 22.

  PHOTOS SECTION

  First Platoon, Crazy Horse, 3/7 Cavalry. On the eve of battle along the Iraq-Kuwait border, 2003.

  Crazy Horse in Baghdad, 2005. Back row, left to right: Rodriguez, Dejesus, Cochran, and myself. Front row, left to right: Williams, Taylor, Liesbish, and Sowby. I’m carrying my M14 EBR, the rifle I used to take the 852 meter sniper kill, my longest shot. On the ground to my left is my Barrett M82, the weapon I used for most of my sniping. This photo would appear on the cover of Soldier of Fortune in August 2006.

  Posing with the first AK and Iraqi flag I captured at As Samawah, where one of the bloodiest engagements of the invasion took place.

  Riding around Iraq in the early days of the invasion, waiting for people to try to kill us. We usually didn’t have to wait very long.

  We counted the tanks, artillery pieces, and planes that we’d destroyed with the Carnivore and painted them on its side like a World War II fighter plane.

  A peek inside the Carnivore. Look cramped? Well, this was shot before we began loading our ammo.

  That’s me with one of the thousands of AKs we took off dead Iraqi soldiers. This one had a folding stock, which made it very handy in the close confines of the Carnivore.

  A shot of the Carnivore feeding on one of Saddam’s personal armored Mercedeses.

  An artillery piece.

  If you look closely, you’ll see “SSG J” spray-painted on the front of this Iraqi tank that was destroyed by the Carnivore.

  An Iraqi MiG-23 on fire outside Al Asad Air Base. We had a lot of fun destroying Saddam’s toys.

  Reporter Rita Leistner, Forest Geary, and me outside the oil refinery in Iraq where I ran the security for a short time.

  Soprano with one of the lizards that were all over Kuwait. He named it Tara Reid.

  Cochran gets a little sun with a new friend.

  Jason Sperry, driver of the Carnivore in 2003.

  The Carnivore and crew not too long after reaching Baghdad. I’m standing holding the .303 Mk III Lee-Enfield I took off the Iraqi sniper who was stomped by the bull. Soprano’s smoking a cigarette and trying to look cool, Sully of course is lying down, and the kid in the helmet is Correa, another one of the many fine troopers we had in Crazy Horse. I used that same Enfield as a sniping weapon—it worked well for targets within a few hundred meters.

  My sniping spotter, Sergeant Jared Kennedy.

  Here I am getting a Purple Heart (the result of an IED) pinned on me by the Commander of Task Force 6-26.

  That’s Sergeant Tony Broadhead Captain Burgoyne in front, with Sergeants Leon and Broussard in back.

  Captains McCoy and Bair, relaxing in between missions.

  Pulling guard duty on the bridge in Balad, we were on the lookout for weapons and large amounts of cash. Here I am listening to an Iraqi try to explain to me why he had a wheelbarrow’s worth of money in his car trunk. Do I look like I believe him?

  Guard duty can be boring—so I put on an Iraqi antiaircraft gunner’s helmet over a gas mask, jumped out of the bushes next to cars stopped at our checkpoint, and spoke like Darth Vader. It scared the hell out of the Iraqis.

  Back in Iraq in 2005, holding up just a couple of weapons we seized—a British Sterling submachine gun and an RPG warhead.

  Sergeant Craig took this shot through his Bradley’s gunsight while he was supporting our “naval” missions.

  During my second tour in Iraq, the insurgency was in full swing. We came across this Hummer on patrol. It was crewed by multinational forces, and we medevaced out the wounded.

  This is what happens when big IEDs go off near your Bradley—your idler wheels break and fall off.

  Working as private contractors in Iraq, here we are securing a site after a bombing. We carried a lot more ammo on us than when I was in the Army because we were the backup.

  With my beautiful wife, Amy.

  My sons Jaycob and Max, circa 2005.

  This is me and Mark Schindel of Gerber Legendary Blades at the 3rd Infantry Division’s Museum, at their small display of the things I brought back from Iraq. Visible is one of my uniforms, a sniper logbook, and the buttstock of the M16 I took out of Saddam’s Water Palace. That’s Geary’s Bradley, Circus Freaks, firing a TOW missile during a training exercise at Fort Stewart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have many people to thank for this, and so will proceed in chronological order:

  First, Robert “Buffy” Ellison, for showing me what a true war hero looks like. Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, three tours in Vietnam—and no one reading this book has ever heard of him, because after medically retiring from the Army he went home, lived his life, and raised his kids, like most combat veterans.

  To Patrick Sweeney, prolific book author and Handguns Editor for Guns & Ammo magazine, for seeing something in me and getting me into the professional writing world. This couldn’t have happened without you. Also, for introducing me to Dave Fortier. I can still remember us sitting around the table in Las Vegas, three skinny white guys with goatees. Right after that meeting, they both shaved theirs off. Mine just keeps getting grayer.

  To David Fortier, fellow writer, my conscience and rabbi in the professional gun writing business, who told all his editors they should use me and got me into the TV side of the industry. Some debts can never be repaid. Also, for introducing me to Dillard “CJ” Johnson. My first exposure to CJ was a three-hour ride from the Kansas City airport to Dave’s house with CJ and his three boys in a rented POS Mercury Marquis. You learn a lot about people on long car trips, especially if there are kids present. I learned CJ was a good father. Everything else is secondary.

  To Jill Fenech, who helped transcribe some of my early phone interviews with CJ while he was still contracting in Iraq. She struggled valiantly with some of the military acronyms, doing her own research so she could get things right. And for not once complaining about CJ’s regular use of the term assclown.

  To Richard Venola, former editor of Guns & Ammo and perhaps the Most Interesting Man in the World, for reading through the rough draft of Carnivore and providing numerous helpful insights and comments, all of which made this a better book.

  To Peter Hubbard, my editor at HarperCollins, for reading that first unsolicited query and giving CJ’s story an audience.

  And to Andrea, for believing.

  James Tarr

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Sergeant First Class DILLARD “C. J.” JOHNSON, U.S. Army (Ret.), earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, four Purple Hearts, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Meritorious Service Medal, a Joint Service Commendation Medal, six Army Commendation Medals, seven Army Achievement Medals, and numerous other awards during his twenty years of service. SFC Johnson’s uniform and sniper logbook are on display at the Fort Stewart Museum in Georgia. He is featured in On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon’s exhaustively reported study of the 2003 invasion. SFC Johnson has appeared on Fox News, Good Morning America, and the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Born and raised in rural Kentucky, he lives in Florida with his wife and family.

  JAMES TARR is a contributing editor for both Handguns and Rifle Shooter magazines. He regularly appears on Guns & Ammo TV and the Sportsman Channel’s Personal Defense TV. A former pol
ice officer and nationally ranked competitive shooter, Tarr worked as a private investigator for seventeen years.

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book was submitted to the Department of Defense Office of Security Review, which cleared it for publication as originally written.

  CREDITS

  COVER DESIGN BY RICHARD L. AQUAN

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  Map of Iraq courtesy of the UN Cartographic Section.

  All photographs are courtesy of the author.

  COPYRIGHT

  CARNIVORE. Copyright © 2013 by Dillard Johnson and James Tarr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-228841-7

  EPUB Edition July 2013 ISBN 9780062288400

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