Carnivore Page 5

  My son Jaycob was about eight years old at that time, and he was dealing bravely with his cerebral palsy. Amy and I were doing whatever needed to be done to help him as much as possible. We discovered a clinic in Poland, the Euromed Rehabilitation Center. They were unique, doing things that nobody else was as far as physical therapy and other treatment for cerebral palsy. In particular, they had something called an Adeli suit to help with his treatment.

  I knew I was going to get deployed soon, and so did my wife; the only question was when. So, while I was getting ready for Kuwait, my wife was preparing to go to Poland with Jaycob and Max, my youngest, who was three or four at that time. Jaycob could get this intense physical therapy much cheaper over there.

  I have to say, my wife Amy was astonishingly courageous to head to a second-world foreign country all on her own with two little kids. We weren’t getting any support from the Army whatsoever, as far as any of Jaycob’s issues were concerned. We had to take it all upon ourselves to get this treatment for him. I was getting ready to go and possibly fight on behalf of our government, but did we get any help with Jaycob? No.

  Amy actually left a week before I was deployed. It was around Christmastime. For me, it meant one more week without seeing them, and it was a pretty sad time. A trying time. I hadn’t told her I was going into combat. She had enough to worry about, being in another country by herself, in the winter, with two small children, one of them handicapped.

  We finally went over to Kuwait in December 2002. The fact is, however, that I could have gotten out of it. I was on PCS orders and was supposed to be leaving Fort Stewart before we deployed. I had a sweet-ass gig lined up at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas. There I would be working with National Guard and Reserve people, completely low stress. I already had my reporting date and everything else.

  My Troop Commander at the time was Jeff McCoy. He had 21 years in the Army and was undoubtedly the best Commander I ever had. He was a stocky little barrel-chested Irish fireplug of a guy from the mountains of Colorado. I got lucky because toward the end of my career I had three really great Commanders.

  McCoy asked me, “Hey, I know you’ve got combat experience from the first war and you really know what you’re doing . . .” He hemmed and hawed for a little while, then said, “Is there any way that you can stay?”

  I’d already talked to the wife about the new orders. We had a house in Florida, but we were looking forward to going out to Austin. We had heard a lot about it, plus it was going to be a good career move for me. At that time I hadn’t really done much on the training side of things. I’d been straight combat arms all the way through, except for the gunnery training I did in Germany.

  This was a really tough decision to make. I remember talking to Jason Christner, my Platoon Sergeant, and he said, “Hey, I really want you to stay. We’re going need you here.” I respected his opinion—Christner was a true professional soldier and had been wounded in Somalia.

  After thinking about it, I decided to stay. So I called the DA (Department of the Army rep) and he said, “No can do. You know you can’t get out of your orders. You’re already on orders assignment to Mabry. Besides, your squadron doesn’t have orders to deploy yet, so you’re not Stop Lossed where you can’t go anywhere else.”

  I found out that the orders were coming, but they were two weeks away. So I called up the DA again and told him the orders were coming in. I said, “Hey, look. Here’s the day, the date, and I want to get a three-week extension before I leave out of here.”

  He said, “Absolutely not. You are not going to be able to do it.”

  Fine. I may be aggressive and bull-headed and have a bit of a temper, but at this point I’d been in the Army for 16 years and knew how to work the system. I told them, “Well, okay. But I’m going to take thirty days’ leave before my PCS.” And they said, “Okay, that’s good.” Because they had no reason to deny it.

  With that, I had 30 days before I had to go to my next duty station—but I never signed out on leave. I didn’t really clear and I didn’t sign out on leave, so I was still technically in the unit, just letting the days click down. I didn’t pack anything up. I didn’t ship anything. I was just sort of hoping that I would get the Stop Loss before I had to go. I had about four days left on my leave, four days before I would have had to report to my next duty station, when they hit us with Stop Loss.

  I didn’t have to go to Iraq again. I made a conscious decision to go with my Commander, my Platoon Sergeant, my First Sergeant. I wanted to go with those people. I chose to serve with them.

  I wanted to go to war because the bottom line is, human nature’s a bitch. You never know how you’re going to react even if it’s the same situation you’ve been in before. It wasn’t going to be the way it had been during Desert Storm. We weren’t going to be the backup element, we would be the men who led the charge. I knew that. I wanted to be in the charge. I just didn’t realize I was going to be THE guy to lead the invasion.

  CHAPTER 6

  EIGHT BALL AND THE LIPSTICK LIZARDS

  There were endless things to do before we headed out to Kuwait. We packed up a million things and started shipping them out months ahead of time.

  Whenever we were out on training or maneuvers, everybody would always visit my Bradley. I had a coffeepot, and creamer and sugar for the guys who liked coffee that way. They would come by and we’d spend a lot of time drinking coffee and talking during breaks in the action. As the time to leave approached, I went to Sam’s Club and got all the coffee and all of our other supplies, and the plastic containers to put them in. (Just so you know, if you have something with an aroma, like soap, and you store that with your creamer and your sugar, even though they’re in different containers, all your coffee’s going to taste like soap. Six thousand miles away from the nearest grocery store and all the coffee we had tasted like Irish Spring. Quite a disappointment.)

  Once we arrived in Kuwait we moved to an instant tent city called Udairi. It was in northwestern Kuwait and was only put in place in January 2003. Now it’s this big complex, and they renamed it Camp Buehring after one of the highest-ranking U.S. officers killed in the war, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Buehring. They run the Predator drones out of there now, but back in 2003 it was just a tent city in the middle of the desert. It was us, camels, goats, sheep, and the bedouins. And sand berms.

  We didn’t ship our Bradleys over there. My Bradley, which I named “Carnivore,” was PREPOSed—prepositioned. Sometime between the end of Desert Storm/Desert Shield and 9/11, it had been put into storage in Kuwait, waiting for the next dustup. Maintenance people would go out to where the vehicles were and start them up occasionally, make sure they were working, but when we got there and were assigned a vehicle we had to do the PMCS—primary maintenance checks and services. If something wasn’t working, or wasn’t the way it should be, that’s when we called a mechanic.

  My Bradley, the Carnivore, was officially an M2. M2 Bradleys are designed to carry infantry and have seats in the back. An M2 crew consisted of the driver, the gunner, the vehicle Commander, and a seven-man dismount team. We turned our M2 into an ad hoc M3. The M3s are cavalry/scout vehicles and carry more gear than people. The first thing we did to it was rip the seats out of the back. That enabled us to load all the ammo that would fit into the back.

  The Commander and gunner are in the turret of the Bradley, and the Commander’s hatch is on top of the turret. The driver is below, in the body of the vehicle, and he has his own hatch, in front of and below the turret. There is a large door at the rear of the vehicle for loading, as well as a cargo hatch on the top of the rear deck.

  The Bradley Fighting Vehicle has a 25 mm main gun, and there is a coaxially mounted M240B machine gun. Wherever the main gun was pointed, so too went the coax. The M240B fires the 7.62 NATO round, and our belts were loaded with standard FMJ (full metal jacket) ball ammunition in a four-and-one mix (four rounds of ball with one tracer). The ready box for the coax holds 800 rounds.


  Our Bradley also had a TOW (tracked optically, wire-guided) missile launcher. The launcher held two missiles, and the range on those is in excess of two miles. We had the standard load of 12 missiles with us. The ironic thing is, in all my time in Iraq, I only fired one TOW, and that was during my second tour.

  The basic load is 1,500 rounds of 25 mm for the main gun. I loaded my Brad with 4,500 rounds of 25 mm, heavy on DU—depleted uranium—rounds. We used saboted tungsten ammo in training, but when we went to war we were issued DU. The DU round was nicknamed the “silver bullet.” Depleted uranium is both heavy and hard, and the projectile itself was shaped like a fat needle. It worked even better than tungsten, and had a similar trajectory, but was too damn expensive to use during training. We thought we’d be getting into huge battles with tanks, so I wanted as much armor-piercing stuff onboard as possible. We hadn’t really gone up against the BMP-3 yet (the Soviet-built armored vehicle the Iraqis favored), so we weren’t sure what they were worth, but I wanted every advantage.

  There are two ready boxes for the main 25 mm gun on the Bradley. One is designed to hold 70 rounds, and that is usually filled with armor-piercing ammo. One ready box holds 230 rounds, and that is usually filled with HE (high-explosive) rounds. I reversed the equation, and filled the big ready box with 230 rounds of DU. The range and velocity of these rounds are classified, but let’s just say I could hit something—and kill it—beyond the range of our optics.

  The 25 mm HE round isn’t something to sneeze at either. It simply looks like a big rifle cartridge, with a green tip and a yellow stripe. Twenty-five millimeters equates to an inch, and a round that’s only an inch in diameter doesn’t sound like much, but the kill radius on the 25 mm HE is 5 meters, with a 10-meter wounding radius. And it did every bit of that, let me tell you.

  The 25 mm had three rates of fire—high, low, and semi. High and low were both full auto, just different rates. Semiauto was one round downrange with every pull of the trigger. The gunner could switch between the ammo boxes with just a quick flip of a switch, but the HE rounds had a completely different trajectory than the lighter, faster DU rounds. We had two different aiming reticles for the two different rounds, and the gunner had to know which one to use. Switching between ammo types—and actually hitting what you were aiming at—meant the gunner had to be paying attention.

  We rigged an additional M240B machine gun on the back deck of the Bradley. We put it on a tripod and fastened it down with some straps so Sully could use it while standing in the open cargo hatch. On my side of the vehicle, I had the coax, which I could operate with the Commander’s override and swing it around to identify targets. I could see to the right out of my hatch, but I couldn’t see off to the left because of the turret. Both the driver and the gunner are on the left side, but they’re always inside of the vehicle, so we don’t really have good vision on that side of the vehicle. With Sully having that 240 in back, he would be able to cover that side of the vehicle much better.

  Having that second machine gun saved my ass more than once. The basic load is 4,800 rounds of 7.62 for the coax, and we had 6,000 rounds on board when we rolled out on the invasion.

  Our load was also supposed to include two AT4s, shoulder-fired antitank rockets, and we had four with us. We also had two M4 carbines, for the driver and dismount, and two Beretta 9 mm pistols, for me and the gunner. We only had a total of 30 rounds, two magazines, for the pistols. That’s not a lot, but remember, the only time you’re supposed to be leaving the Bradley in combat is if it’s on fire or disabled. I’ll say it again: never get off the boat.

  The M16 has been the issue rifle for America’s troops since the 1960s. It fires a small, .22-caliber bullet, but at a very high velocity, and a magazine holds 30 of them. The M4, one of many variants of the M16, was designed in the 1990s and features a shorter 14.5-inch barrel with a cutout where an under-barrel 40 mm grenade launcher (the M203) can be mounted. Thus equipped, it is designated the M4/203. That’s what we had.

  The 40mm grenade fired out of the M203 is a big, slow round with a near rainbow trajectory. The great majority of the ammunition we used was HEDP (high-explosive dual-purpose) rounds. The explosive warhead is surrounded by a conventional casing that fragments and works like a typical frag hand grenade—except you can hit people hundreds of yards away with them, something not possible with a standard hand grenade.

  I estimate I had a metric ton of ammunition in the back of the Carnivore. We had so much that there wasn’t room in the back to do anything, except maybe lie down on the boxes. With the ammo we probably weighed about 36 tons.

  Jason Sperry was my driver. He was an E4 (Specialist) and liked to rap, like a chubby Eminem. I gave him a lot of shit, but the fact of the matter was he had been in the Army for two years and knew his job. He was from New York, had a very young wife and a small child, and had joined the Army as a means of supporting his family.

  Michael Soprano, who was my gunner, was an E5 (Sergeant) from the Atlanta area. He’d only been on my crew four months at that point, but he knew what he was doing. He looked a bit like a dark-haired James Dean.

  Michael Sullivan—Sully—was our loader/observer/dismount. He was from Florida, and I believe his father had a furniture store in St. Petersburg. Sully wore a dual hat, because in addition to being the designated guy to jump out and inspect something on foot when necessary, he worked as a loader. The Bradley system is loaded by traversing the turrets around at an angle. You then open the doors up on the side, one guy in the back hands the ammo up, and the gunner drags the ammo over. The gunner then either hooks the links to the rounds that are still in the ready box or he feeds it up into the main gun. Sully had arrived in the unit just before it deployed to Kuwait. He’d only been in the Army for a few months and had just turned 19. I guess you’d say he was “black Irish,” because he looked Italian. He was a pretty meek, mild kid, and when I say meek and mild I mean he was a huge teenage pain in my ass—up until the shooting started.

  I was the vehicle Commander. I had another driver, Private First Class Jesse Gardener, but he broke his leg a few weeks before we went into Iraq. He wound up in Headquarters Platoon driving the First Sergeant. So it was just the four of us in the Carnivore. I look back at the pictures of us, and while I look young compared to now, they look like babies. Heck, they were kids: Sully was just 19 and the other two were barely into their 20s. But they were soldiers to the core, and they damn sure got the job done when we faced the shit. I’d just had my 39th birthday and had been in the Army for 17 years. I had more time in the Army than the rest of the crew combined.

  I wasn’t the only one to name my vehicle—everybody christened their rides. Staff Sergeant John Williams in Third Platoon called his Bradley “Casanova.” He was starting to lose his hair, just like me, and both of us shaved our heads. That worked a lot better when wearing the CVC helmet. Williams was a stocky, friendly faced guy, and a former national archery champion. When I asked him why he picked that name for his Bradley, he told me, “The same reason you named yours ‘Carnivore.’ It fits your personality. You’re a rough guy, but me, I just love the ladies.”

  “You can shave your head like me all you want,” I told him, “trying to look like Bruce Willis, but I’m the one who’s got dimples. The ladies love the dimples.”

  “I’ve got something for your dimples . . .”

  I’m short, and I’ve stopped waiting for that last growth spurt, but the fact of the matter is you don’t want to be tall and riding around in armor—all you’re going to do is bump your head—so I guess I was made for the Bradley.

  Staff Sergeant Forest Geary named his vehicle “Circus Freaks,” and I didn’t even want to ask about that. He was a fifth-generation soldier from Odessa, Missouri, and one of the few in the unit not taller than me. Staff Sergeant Martin Crawford’s Bradley was “Can’t Puck Wit Dis.” Lieutenant Justin McCormick’s was “Criminal Minds.” In case you’re wondering, it’s not a coincidence that all the armor names in Crazy
Horse started with C. It cut down on the confusion.

  Crazy Horse troop, 3/7 Cavalry, belonged to the Spartan Brigade for the 3rd ID, but we sort of fell underneath the 4th Brigade for aviation as a squadron asset. So while we were at Udairi, most of the other brigades were somewhere else, like Camp Jersey. At Udairi it was mostly us and a few Air Force types.

  Once we got ourselves organized we did training exercises daily. We’d go outside the wire around Udairi, get on line, and run. We were practicing and making sure we could stay on line for the frontal attack because we knew when we attacked, we were going to have to attack on line. You’ll see how well that plan worked out when it came to actual combat, but the theory is sound. Both of our scout platoons were going to attack on line with the tank platoons. It was like a big squadron movement to contact. We rehearsed that pretty regularly and got damn good at it.

  Depending on the exercise, we had between 150 and 200 meters between vehicles. With 12 Bradleys lined up side by side per troop, and three troops, you’re looking at about a two-and-a-half-to three-mile-wide swath of vehicles that could swoop in and roll your ass up.

  We began getting sandstorms, so at night we moved our Bradleys in between the tents to protect them from the wind. We were living in these big tents—I don’t think they were officially Iraqi tents, they were more like bedouin tents, but they were big.

  I can’t tell you how bored we were over there with nothing to do. I remember it as nine months in the desert with nothing to do, but really it was only three months—it just seemed like nine. Guys were so bored they were making a game out of spitting in each other’s mouths. Soldiers would sit on the bunk naked, with their junk hanging off the edge of the cot, and they would see who could throw an AA battery the hardest at the other one’s nuts. How bored do you have to be when that becomes your entertainment?