Carnivore Read online

  “Goddammit! Hold on, hold on. Everybody still here? Shit. Sperry, can you get us back upright?”

  “Yeah, Sarge, I think so.”

  Sperry was able to get the Brad back on the road, but it was close. We managed to find a good spot for Exxon without flipping the Bradley.

  When we pulled aside to let the M1s refuel first, I told Sully, “Hey, I’m going to get some sleep, you stay awake for as long as you can and then wake me up.” All of the other crews were doing the same thing.

  Next thing I know, the entire scout platoon was asleep, laid out on top of their vehicles like lizards. The muffled sounds coming across the radio were sort of like a dream, or maybe they’d made their way into my dream. Either way, I woke up and said, “What the hell?”

  Sully was out, just laid out on top of the vehicle. Everybody in the Bradley was asleep. All around us were the crews of other Brads, asleep on their vehicles as well. “Hey, wake up, the fuelers are waiting on us.”

  As we were just waking up we could see cruise missiles coming in and flying over us. It was still a starry night, and cold, and it was very cool watching them. You could hear them coming in, and then they’d whoosh by overhead. They were flying nap of the earth and coming right over the top of us. I don’t know where they were headed. Baghdad? When you care enough to send the very best . . .

  When we started moving, one Fox vehicle rammed another and cut a tire on it. Maybe they were watching the cruise missiles fly over, I don’t know. At that point, our exhaustion was a big safety factor. Plus, night vision does not give you good depth perception, as I’d just learned. Their vehicle Commander called First Sergeant Roy D. Grigges and told him they were going to have to change a tire—oh, and there was a specific procedure to change the tire on one of those vehicles, which meant it would take four hours.

  “You’ve got twenty minutes,” Grigges told them, “and we’re fucking rolling. We’re in enemy territory, it’s nighttime, we’re on the move, and now you’ve got nineteen minutes.” Grigges was from Ocala, Florida, and was the best First Sergeant I ever worked with.

  The Fox guys said, “But it’s not recommended to drive on a flat tire!”

  Grigges was reasonable. He told them, “Okay, I’ll drop a case of MREs [meals, ready-to-eat] off with you, and the next unit coming up will pick you up. We’ll just leave you there by yourself.”

  Needless to say they drove on the flat.

  Somehow before we got to Exxon we had found ourselves the lead element for the squadron. Alpha Troop was supposed to be in the lead, but they had fallen behind us—I think they ran into minefields. Everything at this point was just a big push to get forward, get forward. Our objective was the small town of As Salman, and we were supposed to make sure there weren’t any chemical weapons factories there. We were to send our Fox NBC vehicles into town first. After that small town, the road bent north and went straight into As Samawah. We had some objectives in As Samawah, but they were secondary to the WMD check at As Salman.

  Past Exxon, back on the march, we came to another checkpoint in our route. At that point the Troop Commander, Captain Jeff McCoy, contacted me on the radio. “Hey, you are now the lead element for the squadron, and we need you to push north.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  He wanted us to turn off the main road using Route Mule, cut across the desert, and rejoin the main road just before As Samawah. He was giving me coordinates and numbers for our maps, which we called graphics (for topographic maps). This would have been very helpful had I brought those graphics along.

  Our graphics were very detailed—very, very detailed. On top of that, we’d covered hundreds of miles. We literally didn’t have room for all of the maps that we could have brought with us, and we still brought a shitload. It was like a vehicle tarp, there were so many maps, and they were covered front and back. It was just impossible for us to have all the maps that we were going to need to get from point A to point B, and I figured there was no chance in hell that we’d need those graphics. Turned out I was wrong.

  We’d been traveling east all day and needed to turn north. I had Sully in the back of the vehicle going through all the maps, trying to find a zone designator. I did my best to pick up the trail by memory, but that wasn’t working so well. And our GPS? We were so deep in the desert, there weren’t any satellites, and my instrument wasn’t working.

  “You have to go north,” Sully told me, sitting on ammo and buried in maps.

  “I know I fucking have to go north!” I yelled at him. Finally, I had Sperry just turn off the road and start heading north. In the dark. We found a couple of trails made by guys driving pickup trucks and riding camels. They would go in the right direction for a while, but then they would veer off. They can’t go over big hills. They can’t go over wadis. They can’t go over depressions. So, the trails twisted and turned and I was doing the best I could running north. Whenever the trail we were on started spinning off, either hard right or hard left, we really didn’t have a lot of choice but to not follow it. Because if we followed it, we didn’t know where the hell we would wind up.

  Everybody following me was having a hard time, because the stars had disappeared and it was pitch black and I was sending up a dust cloud behind me like Pigpen in Peanuts. I put Sully in the back of the vehicle, and he was breaking chem lights and tossing them off the back. That might have worked better if the vehicles following us didn’t keep running them over.

  A few times, we went down some steep embankments that we shouldn’t have, let alone the wheeled vehicles we were leading, but they did, and they made it. Everybody behind me was calling me on the radio: “Could you just go straight?”

  I told them, “There is no straight!”

  Wingman 3-2 for Third Platoon, way back behind me, got on the radio and said, “All you have to do is follow this trail . . .” and he’s describing it for me.

  “That trail doesn’t exist,” I told him.

  “I’m driving on it!” he said.

  “No, you’re driving on the trail I’m making.” The Bradley was crushing stones, and by the time Third Platoon got to where I’d been, there’d already been a scout platoon, a tank platoon, a headquarters platoon, and another tank platoon driving behind me. Hell, there was a road by the time Wingman 3-2 got there.

  It probably would have been easier if I’d had a working compass on the vehicle.

  You read that right. The lensatic compass on the Bradley wasn’t working. I don’t know if there was too much metal (ammo?) inside of the vehicle for it to work, but it was useless. I did all the navigating using my $40 Timex watch from Walmart, which had a built-in compass. Seventy-five miles across the desert in pitch black, using my watch compass, dropping chem lights behind me like bread crumbs, and I managed to pop us out on the highway three miles from As Samawah, almost exactly where we were supposed to be. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

  After hours of driving in the dark, weaving back and forth, up and down hills, along camel trails and long-forgotten 4x4 tracks, we popped out onto Highway 8. Finally, a paved road.

  “Who the hell are these guys?” my driver, Jason Sperry, said. I couldn’t see him, but we all had our CVC helmets hooked into the radio so we could talk.

  Laid out in front of us was an American armored battalion. The vehicles were in a laager position, and the troops were just lying on top of their tanks and scout vehicles with their shirts off. They were on the hoods and back decks in sleeping bags or walking around sleepily in T-shirts.

  “I’m guessing they got to take the direct route up,” Soprano said. He was up in the turret with me and eyed the joes wandering around in their T-shirts. “I’m also guessing they haven’t seen any combat yet.”

  We hadn’t seen any combat either, and as it turned out no one had, except maybe for a few Special Forces teams. “We don’t have time to chitchat or sightsee,” I said over the radio. “Let’s get on the road and get organized. Where the hell is my wingman?” />
  I hooked up with Sergeant First Class Anthony Broadhead and his M1 Abrams tank, the Camel Toe. He was the Sergeant for Second Platoon, a 21-year veteran of the Army who, like most of the unit, had never experienced combat. He was a big guy from Virginia Beach, Virginia, laid back and easy to work with. His call sign was White 4, and mine was Red 2.

  General George Armstrong Custer, whose unit we belonged to, was defeated at the Little Bighorn at the hands of a Sioux Indian chief named Crazy Horse, so that’s why we took the name. The insignia of Crazy Horse Troop is an Indian skull named Nowatay. We had it spray-painted on our tracks and on our shirts, and we spray-painted that bad boy all over Iraq—our version of “Kilroy Was Here.”

  Each troop had six platoons—a headquarters platoon, a mortar platoon, two scout platoons with Bradleys, and two tank platoons with M1 Abrams main battle tanks. First (Red) and Third (Blue) Platoons were scout platoons; Second (White) and Fourth (Green) were tank platoons. (Being Red 2 put me in First Platoon.) The plan was to have the First and Second Platoons working in hunter-killer teams, and Third and Fourth Platoons working together as well. Being a “hunter-killer” meant we’d be in the front, tasked with finding the enemy so they could be destroyed. All told, there were about 150 guys in Crazy Horse.

  My vehicle was still in the lead, and I got a little confused, having been up for the better part of 100 hours. There was a northern objective and a southern objective, and I wasn’t sure which way we were supposed to go. I did know we were somewhere south of As Samawah, Iraq. It didn’t help that it had begun raining, reducing our visibility—not that there are many landmarks in the desert.

  “Sully!” I called to my loader in the back of the Bradley. “You’ve got the maps. Do you know which way we’re supposed to turn?”

  “That’s not on the maps,” he told me. “That was in the op order we were given.”

  “Well, do you remember whether we were supposed to go for the northern or southern objective? Anyone?”

  “No, Sergeant Jay, sorry.”

  “No, Sarge, not a clue.”

  I called Tony Broadhead on the radio. “White 4, Red 2, do we head north or south from here?”

  “Red 2, White 4. Ummm, wait one.”

  The Troop Commander, Captain McCoy, got on the radio. “We’re burning daylight, people, we need to move and stop dragging ass.”

  Shit. Well, just because I didn’t know quite which way to go was no reason to be late. “North,” I told Sperry, so we turned north and Broadhead and I led the way, with First and Second Platoons following. In total we had two M1 tanks and three Bradleys in our group.

  Sergeant Williams got on the radio. “Heading to the southern objective now with Third and Fourth Platoons,” he announced. I guess that settled that. After thinking back on the orders the troop had been given, I was pretty sure that meant that Williams would be heading to the chemical factory to check for evidence of WMDs. So that would make my objective a bridge.

  Even though it burns more fuel, an M1 can outrun a Bradley without even trying, so I was setting the pace. Broadhead stayed on the asphalt road and I was on his right flank, driving through fields. The M1 is great for some things, but when it comes to maneuvering off-road it’s a pig. It’s just too big and heavy. Which, if you ask me, is completely ass backward. The main battle tank of the United States Army can’t go off-road? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

  We got up to 30 miles an hour in the light rain, and I had to keep wiping the mud and dust off my goggles. Then we hit the outskirts of town. We passed a junkyard, then some sort of big refinery, and big piles of trash. Before long we started driving by houses.

  We began seeing people, and we waved at them, but they stared at us like we were aliens. I don’t think it really clicked with them that we were Americans; they just wondered what their military was doing there, exactly as we would if we saw tanks rolling down the street. Americans would just think it was our Army and wonder what they were doing. If you don’t know anything about armor, one tank looks like another, and we weren’t flying big American flags. It was early enough that I think some of them wandered outside just to see what the noise was.

  They could probably hear us coming a mile away. Hell, they could probably feel us in the soles of their feet. A 60-ton M1 at speed sounds like a screaming bulldozer on steroids. Broadhead’s tank made the ground vibrate like the T. rex in Jurassic Park, and its tracks were trashing the asphalt road.

  “Whoa, shit!” I heard Sperry say, as he slewed the Carnivore around a low wall, then had to swerve to avoid some people. Our tracks sprayed mud sideways. “Armor coming through here people, fucking move!”

  “White 4, Red 2, you wanna slow it down some? We’re swimming through soup and dodging chickens over here.”

  “Red 2, roger that.”

  We closed in on Objective Pistol, which was a railroad bridge in the town of As Samawah. Our mission was simply to hold it so the tank battalion coming up behind us could cross it. Most of Saddam’s armor was further north, and everyone assumed the real war would start when the armor went head-to-head. As Samawah was just a small town, of no specific strategic importance, and we weren’t expecting much of anything to happen there. Everyone knew Baghdad was where the real fight was going to happen. Still . . .

  “Guys, heads up,” I told my crew. This was the first town of any size we’d encountered in our run north. Apart from a few mud huts and bedouins in tents, we had hardly seen any Iraqis, much less the Iraqi army. “I know you’re tired, I’m tired too, but now’s not the time to get your ass shot off ’cause you’re not paying attention.” How much sleep had I gotten over the last three days? I tried figuring it out in my head. Less than an hour a day. No wonder I was so tired.

  “Dismounts, three hundred meters!” Broadhead called out. I saw them.

  Broadhead and I rolled to a stop, vehicles idling. We were within 300 meters of a bridge over a canal in As Samawah. Just past the canal bridge was Objective Pistol. Broadhead was in the middle of the road, and I was still off the road to his right.

  There were about 30 guys on the near side of the canal bridge, in and around a small concrete building or bunker reinforced with sandbags. They had several vehicles as well and were not in uniforms. We could see they had AKs, and maybe an RPG-7 (rocket-propelled grenade launcher). You’d have to be a damn good shot to hit either of our vehicles with an RPG at that distance, and their AKs wouldn’t do anything unless Broadhead or I caught a round in the face.

  The AK-47 is probably the most-produced military rifle in world history, and it has a reputation for reliability. While they aren’t necessarily as accurate as our M4s, someone who knows how to shoot could definitely hit a man’s head at 300 meters with a few shots. My helmet theoretically would stop an AK bullet, but I didn’t really want to test that theory. Soprano traversed our turret and pointed our 25 mm main gun toward the group.

  “Don’t fire,” I told him. “Just hold on.”

  The M1 Abrams is America’s main battle tank (MBT) and has been since the early 1980s. It is both longer and wider than the Bradley, and just about double the weight of a Bradley. Instead of a 25 mm full-auto main gun it had a 120 mm cannon on the front, with a .50-caliber M2 machine gun for backup, as well as an M240 7.62 machine gun coaxially mounted to the main gun. Ammunition for the M1s main gun comes in two types—an armor-piercing DU round, and a HEAT (high-explosive antitank) round. The HEAT round doesn’t cause a general explosion like a bomb; rather, it is more focused, like a shaped charge, and designed to defeat armor. M1s have a crew of four—commander, gunner, loader, and driver.

  The M1 was designed to be superior to the top-of-the-line Soviet MBT, the T-72, of which the Iraqis had plenty. No one had any doubt that the U.S. Army would win any tank battle with the Iraqis. The M1 would also withstand a direct hit from an RPG-7 warhead. My Bradley, on the other hand—let’s not find out.

  While a few had seen some action during the 1991 Gulf War, for all intents and purposes t
he Bradley Fighting Vehicle was untested in combat. The design itself was the result of a decades-long internal Army struggle so divisive it was the basis for a movie starring Kelsey Grammer, The Pentagon Wars. The movie concluded that the design of the BFV had been compromised by politics so badly that the vehicle literally was a deathtrap. It was too big, too heavy, too slow; the armor wasn’t thick enough and the main gun was far too small to be effective. Personally, I loved the damn things, but I hadn’t seen any serious combat in one. I had a feeling this war was going to settle the argument, one way or the other.

  We reached the bridge at approximately 7 A.M. on March 23, 2003. I don’t believe either side had fired a shot in the war up to that point. We were the first major American force (apart from Special Forces teams) to reach that far north.

  We stared at the group on the bridge, and they stared back. After a few seconds, Broadhead, who was standing up in his turret, waved at them. That may sound dumb, but it wasn’t.

  Our rules of engagement at the time were very limited. We had all been told that the Iraqis were just waiting for the Americans to arrive. As soon as we showed up, they would start hugging us and throwing flowers and asking us to kiss their babies and date their girlfriends. If we saw anyone with weapons, we weren’t to fire at them, because as soon as they saw we were Americans they were going to join us in fighting Saddam.

  I don’t know if you watched the news, but it didn’t quite happen that way.

  CHAPTER 8

  FIRST CONTACT

  Objective Pistol was a bridge that went over railroad tracks. We could see it maybe a couple of hundred meters beyond the canal bridge in front of us.

  Broadhead waved at the crowd of armed Iraqis manning the crossing, and, as soon as they realized we were Americans, the guys manning the bridge opened up on Broadhead with AKs and RPGs.

  “Shit, are they shooting at us?” Soprano asked me.

  “At Broadhead,” I told him. “It’ll be our turn soon enough. Heads up!” I told my crew over the radio. “This just turned into a shooting war.”