Carnivore (14 page)

I spotted an Iraqi pointing an RPG at us, and before I could do anything I saw it coming at us in slow motion again. I knew we were fucked. There was nothing we could do; I could only watch it coming in to kill us.

All of a sudden there was an explosion that knocked me back down inside the hatch. When I stood up I had splinters all over me, the air was filled with this white cloud, and I could taste it on my lips . . .

“Goddammit!” I looked down.

I'd bolted a wooden ammo box on the Commander's side of the track. In it I had my little Coleman stove, my coffee, my sugar, my creamer, and a couple of coffee cups, even a piece of Corian countertop we could use as a little tabletop while we sat around and BS'ed. That was the Crazy Horse Café, which I'd written on the side of the box. The box that was now gone.

The RPG hit the Crazy Horse Café and blew up. It blew the box off the side of the Bradley, and the box acted like reactive armor—it gave its life to save the Carnivore. However, all I could do was taste my sugar and creamer swirling through the air in a white cloud, like a cocaine bust gone wrong, which made me even angrier. The Iraqi who'd killed the Crazy Horse Café was standing there looking at the swirling cloud of coffee and creamer, and I put a burst into him. Fucker.

My radio wasn't working for shit, and I could only communicate with Broadhead. I found out later that the rest of the platoon was behind the compound where they'd discovered a number of mortar positions. They were as busy as we were.

In military parlance, “black on ammo” means you are out. By the time we stopped taking incoming, we were black on 7.62 for the coax and black on HE for the 25 mm main gun. We were black on ammo for the M4s and Berettas. We literally had nothing left but DU rounds for the main gun, and my commandeered AK.

Broadhead dismounted his tank and was inspecting one of the Iraqi arms rooms when an enemy soldier walked in on him. Just like the Old West, it was a quick draw—Broadhead with his pistol and the Iraqi with his AK-47. Broadhead emptied his M9 pistol into him. The Iraqi officer only got one round off, and it hit the floor.

There was a flagpole in the compound and I had Sperry run over it, which made me feel all sorts of warm and fuzzy. We took their flag, which now hangs in the 3rd Infantry Division Museum at Fort Stewart.

How long were we in there? I could only guess. Time seems to lose meaning in those situations, but we were told later it was less than half an hour. It seemed a lot longer. There were bodies everywhere. We were still taking a lot of sporadic fire from the buildings and could see movement behind a lot of the rubble. The last thing we were going to do was clear the buildings on foot: we'd need a company of infantry, so Broadhead and I pulled back.

We joined Christner and the rest of First and Second Platoons to the north of the compound where they'd been providing overwatch. We had six Bradleys and four M1s on line, and we just pounded the shit out of the compound with whatever ammunition we had left. We also called Sergeant Bennett with the mortar platoon and had him drop rounds into the compound. Fuck moderation. We shot through the walls, through the buildings, into the fuel tanks behind the compound, everything. Burning fuel splashed everywhere, helping us level the place. I later heard that we'd killed an entire battalion of infantry inside those walls. There was a small number of wounded and prisoners that we dealt with as best we could, then we got relieved by Apache Troop. When we headed back across the bridge, the area behind us was nothing but a huge fireball.

Life is strange, to say the least. God really has a dysfunctional sense of humor. Two years later, during my second tour with Crazy Horse, I was talking to George, my interpreter in Baghdad. He was a great interpreter—I think his English was better than mine. George had a bunch of scars—bullet wounds—but a lot of the Iraqis we worked with did. You learned not to ask about them, because there was no way to know if they had earned them fighting Iran, the Kurds, or us. George was telling us the day he gained respect for the Bradley. It was back in 2003 at the beginning of the war, and he was in an infantry battalion at a base in a town called As Samawah.

That got my attention. “Um . . . oh, really?” I said. Sully was with me on the second tour as well, and he sat up, his eyes darting between me and George.

“Yes. This steel beast pushed the wall down to my post and started killing everyone.”

“At As Samawah?” I said, just to be sure.

“Uh . . .” Sully started to say, but I shushed him.

“Yes,” George told me. “It shot us in the buildings, killed us when we attacked, killed us without mercy. But I was not scared, I was brave. I jumped up and fired an RPG at the beast. My aim was true. But I could not believe what happened. There was a huge ball of fire, and black-and-white smoke . . . but the smoke cleared, and I saw it did nothing to the vehicle, the Bradley. Nothing. Then the soldier on top of the vehicle turned and shot me with a machine gun four times.”

By that point Sully was biting his lip so hard to keep from laughing that it was bleeding, and there were tears running down his face. George looked over at him, saw the tears, and said, “Yes, it is very sad.”

George told us there had been 1,500 soldiers inside that compound. He was one of only 10 who survived. He would go on to tell me how he was pulled from the pile of bodies by his soon-to-be wife. What are the chances? The guy who destroyed the Crazy Horse Café two years later became my interpreter. I never did tell him that I was the one who'd killed all his friends.

F
inally, we were officially relieved and off the line. Still, the first thing we did was track down the HEMTT fuel and ammo carriers and top off. HEMTT stands for heavy expanded mobile tactical truck—we called them Hemmitts. They are eight-wheel-drive off-road-capable supply vehicles and carried all of our fuel and ammo. The fuelers have big tanks in back, but the ammo carriers are just giant flatbed trucks.

Sully and I were finally able to go see the medic, Sergeant Todd Cardone. He would patch me up many more times. Amazingly, none of our injuries were life-threatening, even though—at some point—I'd been shot in the leg. Maybe while protecting Geary's Bradley? I honestly couldn't say for sure when.

It was a small bullet or fragment, and it's still in my leg to this day. It went in the side of my left leg about four inches above the ankle and damaged some nerves. Part of my leg and the top of my foot are still numb, and the doctors are afraid that removing the bullet might cause more nerve damage. The medics bandaged that up, and my hands as well, but that was really all they could do for me in the field. My eardrum was definitely burst, but they couldn't do anything for that either. The shrapnel wounds to my arms were officially Purple Heart number one for me, the medal nobody wants to get, and the bullet in the leg was number two. The medics were pretty sure I had a concussion, too, but seeing as they couldn't do much of anything to treat it, they just let me go back into the line. That was the first, but not nearly the last, serious pounding my head took over there.

Captain McCoy came over to see how we were doing. We were just glad to be alive. Thirty-six hours of taking incoming, of being swarmed by the enemy, of not knowing if the next RPG would take us out . . . Soprano had a flag from Hooters, and we opened it in front of the Carnivore and took a picture. That picture ended up in
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, ultimately. To be honest, at that point I'd never been inside a Hooters in my life, but it was a piece of America, a symbol of what we were fighting for. Not only that, the fact that Hooters employed pretty girls in short shorts probably was hugely offensive to the guys who'd been trying to kill us for the better part of two days, so it was a win-win.

My crew and I were just happy to be alive. Heading to Kuwait, we knew we'd probably see some combat, but those two days in As Samawah—it was insane, incredible. We drove up not expecting much of anything and got hit by more than 2,000 men. Between the fighting and the lack of sleep, everything seemed surreal to me. I had to fight myself just to think clearly.

While we were monkeying around with the Hooters flag, a Toyota Hilux pickup approached the troop's position, and after the last two days every eye and gun swung in the pickup's direction damn fast. The truck skidded to a stop, and the men inside nearly busted their wrists deploying VS-17 visual signaling panels. In this case, they meant “Don't shoot us.” The guys in the truck were a Special Forces team and needed to get on our radio net, fast.

They had located Chemical Ali, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the King of Spades in the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards deck, the fifth-most-wanted man in Iraq. The bearded spec-ops guys had pinged his cell phone and knew right where he was, not too damn far from where we were sitting. They needed an air strike and needed it fast.

The request went up the chain but was denied because Ali was located right next to a school, and command didn't want to cause that kind of collateral damage. Those Green Berets were pissed, but they knew the score. They threw their shades on, piled back into their pickup to head out for their next job, then paused.

“Dudes, can we get some gas?” they asked Broadhead and me. “We're bone dry.”

“I'm a Bradley, he's an Abrams,” I told them. “Diesel.”

Broadhead decided to help out. “Give them the gas you have for your generator,” he told me.

Thanks a lot, Tony. “It's all I've got,” I told him.

“It's only ten gallons. You'll find someplace to fill it back up.” With some grumbling I gave them the 10 gallons, and with a grateful wave they sped off in their pickup. You hate to give anything up in a war zone, because you never know when you'll be able to get more. Scavenging can become an art form.

U.S. forces almost nailed Chemical Ali with an air strike the next month, but it wasn't until August of that year that he was finally captured. It was the Iraqi Kurds who had given him his nickname, after he used chemical weapons in attacks against them. He was charged with a number of crimes including genocide, tried, and ultimately hanged on January 25, 2010.

I then went over to the mortar team to thank them for their help. That is when I found out that not only did the Iraqis pound my side of the bridge, they'd pounded everyone, everywhere. My first sergeant, Roy D. Grigges, and the Second Platoon leader, 2nd Lieutenant Charles Tucker, a 23-year-old West Point grad from Haleyville, Alabama, had both been wounded by the mortars. Grigges had been with the Commander near the objective when the mortars started landing. One mortar round landed so close it almost turned his armored personnel carrier over.

While Sully and I were getting worked on by the medics, our squadron CO, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Farrell, walked up. He's a handsome guy with dark hair and looked young for an LC, which is probably why they chose him to speak to the media. He's a Brigadier General now, in charge of the National Training Center. We provided him with an informal after-action report of our adventures in As Samawah during the previous 36 hours. Not long after that he gave a television interview to Fox News. Your battle roster ID is your troop, the first initial of your last name, and the last 4 of your Social Security Number, so my battle roster was “Crazy J 1248.” That is why the Colonel, when he was talking to Fox News about the battle of As Samawah, kept referring to me as “Crazy J.” The name stuck. As nicknames go, it's a pretty good one, and a pretty good way to get one.

C
olonel Farrell let Crazy Horse go 100 percent down for the afternoon. We'd led the way and been the first unit to fight, and he thought we'd earned a little rest. Like we were going to argue?

We parked on the reverse slope of a ridge and the troop took artillery all afternoon and into the evening. At least, that's what they told us. We were so dead tired we slept right through the barrage. Luckily, the incoming headed in our direction missed and hit behind our position.

The U.S. military got quite a bad reputation during the Vietnam War for inflating enemy casualty figures. The body count exaggerations got so bad that eventually nobody believed them. During the Iraq War, casual observers may not even have noticed that we rarely released numbers of confirmed kills to the press or public, except in rare instances. That doesn't mean we weren't counting.

Part of a soldier's job in combat is BDA—battle damage assessment. During the entire engagement at As Samawah—when my radio was working—I called in the BDA for my vehicle, which included enemy KIA as well as number and types of vehicles destroyed. We weren't involved in a jungle war, and the enemy generally didn't carry off their dead, so our body count resulted from counting actual bodies. When the whole troop came over in force and we were trying to unstick Geary's Bradley, we did a body count around that vehicle. I don't know how many people Geary shot with his M4, how many Soprano hit with the coax while we were en route to or parked beside Geary's Brad, or how many I shot in the ditch while protecting Geary's crew during their transition to my vehicle, but we counted a total of 221 bodies around that location.
^*
I've read that the official BDA just for my vehicle on March 23, 2003, the day we crossed the bridge and entered the Ba'ath Police compound, was 488. I've heard the unofficial body count was over 1,000. I was too busy, that day and the next, to keep an accurate total, but Crazy Horse Troop did their best to kill everyone who was trying to kill us. We were just better at it.

I was awarded the Silver Star for my actions rescuing Geary and his crew, and there was some talk about putting me in for the Medal of Honor, but politics apparently reared their ugly head on that. They quite often do, when you're talking about any award at or above the Silver Star level. As far as I'm concerned I didn't do anything that anybody else wouldn't have done, I just happened to be the guy there at the time. Most of the time medals should be called the “Hey, Dumbass” award, and this case was no different. Actually, in this case it was a team effort. When it was time to do the right thing, we all stepped up. Broadhead received the Silver Star for his actions at As Samawah. Sperry, Soprano, and Sully were all awarded Bronze Stars for their actions as well, and Sully and I received Purple Hearts.