Authors: Dillard Johnson
“What I miss is the Hooters in Savannah,” Sully said with a smile. “I really miss those wings.” He was the one who'd grabbed the Hooters flag for us to display proudly across the Carnivore in the photo taken at As Samawah.
“What you miss is Lulu,” I told him. Lulu was one of the hotties working there that he'd mentioned more than once. “And it wasn't wings, I think it was breasts and thighs.” That got a laugh.
My eatery of choice was Sonny's Bar-B-Q in Hinesville, Georgia, and their Big Deal, a pulled pork sandwich to die for. Several of the guys sitting around gave Sonny's raves.
“Y'all don't know what you're talking about,” Sergeant Jason Raab told us. “The only place to go in Hinesville is Gilly's. Now
that's
a country bar.”
“Any of you guys ever go to Doc Holliday's in Jesup?” John Williams asked us. “I want one of their big fat T-bones. That's real food.”
Sergeant First Class Bennett wandered away from his mortar track long enough to join the conversation. “Food? Nawâall I want is to get back to the new Bass Pro Shop in Savannah,” he told us. We passed as much time as we could, talking about home, good food, and loose women.
We actually got to bathe, then, for the first time since the war had started. There was a canal nearby, so we all stripped down and washed ourselves as best we could. Soprano ended up riding around on the shoulders of one of Christener's guys, both of them completely naked, blowing off steam like drunk frat boys. We tried to clean our uniforms a little, get the stink and dirt and sweat out of them, because when all the washing was over we were going to have to put back on the same uniforms we'd been wearing for a week straight. Why?
Remember how I mentioned that all of our duffel bags were strapped around the outside of the Carnivore's turret as we rolled into Iraq? Well, when the bullets and RPGs started flying in As Samawah, none of us ended up with a piece of spare clothing that didn't have 10 bullet holes in it. We wore the same uniforms for weeks, and seeing as my toiletries were also in my duffel bag, I didn't shave for three months.
Before long it was time to head back to our checkpoints. Williams would head back north and I would move south and set up with Broadhead again.
For two days Broadhead and I and our crews sat out in the sun and had only limited contact. Having to shoot up charging vehicles or dismounted soldiers several times a day was practically a vacation after what we'd been through. Most of the vehicles we saw, however, were civilians just trying to get from one part of Baghdad to another. Before we let them through our checkpoint, we would search their vehicle. I don't know whose idea it was, but before too long, to indicate that the vehicle had been searched and the occupants were okay, we began spray-painting Nowatay, our Indian-skull insignia, on their vehicles. That pissed off the Iraqis at first, but before long they stopped putting up a fuss. Turned out that our insignia on their vehicle saved them a lot of hassle at subsequent checkpoints, because the other units knew we didn't fuck around. If we spray-painted a vehicle, it was okay. Soon, we had Iraqis driving up in brand-new Mercedeses and BMWs, asking us to spray-paint Nowatay on them. I wonder if any of them are still driving around Baghdad.
We spent a while doing “blocking moves,” setting up checkpoints in different spots around the city to control access. Command sent Broadhead and me out to an intersection one day, and as I rolled up toward the position we were supposed to secure I saw an Iraqi BMP with some dead guys hanging out of it. I could tell just by looking at them that they stunk, badly, and we scared away some dogs that were chewing on them.
When I had Sperry pull the Bradley up just far enough for Broadhead to do overwatch with me, Broadhead had to park next to the BMP.
“Red 2, you want to move forward, I've got some dead bodies over here stinking up the whole street,” he called.
“Negative, sorry. I'm where I need to be in case anybody rolls up and we need to engage them.”
It was a hot day, and it wasn't very long before he called me again on the radio. “Red 2, you need to move up, we can't sit here.”
“White 4, Red 2, that's a negative. I'm in the right position. I cannot move forward.”
The stench must have been incredible, because finally Broadhead sent out a couple of his guys. They pulled the bodies out of the BMP and buried them in shallow graves, covering them up with enough sand to cover the smell. I waited until they had them covered up, and then I moved forward. As I may have mentioned, sometimes I'm an asshole. But it was funny.
So I moved forward, and Broadhead moved up behind me. We were sitting off to one side of what would be an Iraqi freeway. There was a big truck sitting nearby, a tractor trailer with a sunroof and a flat nose. It had been shot up and disabled, and it wasn't going anywhere.
After a couple of hours, Sperry announced that he had to take a dump. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle does not have a toilet. We had an ammo can to use if we had to, but we hated to use it. Considering our cramped interior was already filled with sweaty, unwashed bodies, the last thing we needed was someone doing
that
. There weren't any convenient Porta-Johns, and I wasn't about to let him go inside a building, out of my sight. So he headed for the disabled truck.
Sperry climbed on top of the cab of the truck and took care of his business, which fell through the sun roof onto the driver's seat. He finished up, wiped himself with whatever he had at hand there, and walked back to the Bradley.
That afternoon, two Iraqi guys came walking up. “Mister, Mister,” they called to us, and pointed to the truck.
“Yeah, sure, help yourself,” I told them, waving them on. They walked over to the truck and started checking it out, seeing what was damaged, maybe what they could steal from it or strip off it. Baghdad was pretty much a free-for-all at that point and we were letting the locals do whatever they wanted to as long as they weren't trying to kill us. The two of them were wearing the traditional outfit a lot of Iraqi men wore. I'm sure there's an Arabic name for it, but I just called it the Iraqi man-dress. Usually white, it draped down to their shoes and looked like a baggy dress.
Iraqi #1 climbed up, opened the door, and sat in the driver's seat. It looked like he was trying to start the truck. After a few minutes, you could see him smell it. He looked around, smelling, looked around some more, did some more smelling, and then he stuck his hand in the seat behind him. He pulled his hand up, saw what he had on him, and was like, “
Aaaaaah.
” He spat out a few choice words and got out of the truck. His white man-dress had a big smear of brown on the back of it. We were crying in the Bradley by that point, laughing as hard as can be.
About that time his buddy came down the back steps of the truck. The guy who'd sat in the cab very sneakily pulled the smeared part of his man-dress up with his hand so his buddy couldn't see the smear and started talking, gesturing to the driver's seat. So the second guy climbed up into the driver's seat, tried a few things to see if the truck would start, and then saw his buddy fall down on the ground laughing.
Iraqi #2 was like, “What?” and the first guy showed him the smear on his man-dress. Iraqi #2 reached down, got it on his hand, jumped down from the cab, and started screaming and chasing his buddy, hitting him with his shoe. It was absolutely hilarious. We cried.
After a couple of days, command informed us we were to start doing patrols in addition to manning the checkpoints. Geary would be my wingman in his Bradley, as a lot of the roads and bridges in the area would not support tanks.
The first day out we rolled up on an abandoned Iraqi army post. Geary pulled overwatch as I checked it out for documents, weapons, whatever. Finding nothing inside, we moved out and headed down the road to another large building where I saw an Iraqi flag flying. Nobody shot at us, so I had Sperry take the flag down for our Troop Commander.
For a patrol in a combat zone we weren't seeing much action; it was more like a Sunday drive through Detroit. The Carnivore was in the lead on the way back when the road suddenly exploded next to my Bradley. I turned in the hatch and looked at Geary, thinking he'd fired his main gun at something next to me. That was when I saw four guys with RPGs fire a volley at him.
“Contact!” I ducked down inside the hatch and slewed the turret to more or less the right direction and yelled at Soprano to return fire as I got on the radio. As I called in a contact report to Captain McCoy, two RPG rounds hit the Carnivore. The first one hit my rear two road wheels, half-mooning them. The second one hit the driver's hatch but, luckily for Sperry, didn't go off. Thank God they rarely remembered to take the pins out of those warheads.
Soprano fired a burst of 25 mm, then another one. “RPG team is down!” he called out to me.
“Then where the hell is all that fire coming from?” Bullets were rattling off the hulls of both Bradleys, and more RPGs went whizzing by. “Geary, you see where they are?”
“Negative, negative!”
Our comm back and forth between the two vehicles was going across the net. Broadhead had been my wingman all the way through the war, and we'd taken care of each other when things got hairy, so it was killing him that I was in a firestorm and he could do nothing but listen to his radio. So he did what any good cavalryman would do: he got on his horse and charged to my aid.
The Camel Toe came roaring up the road, engine wide open. Let me tell you, that's a hell of a sightâ60 tons of angry steel. Broadhead fired on the move and took out two guys in a building to my left with one 120 mm HEAT round. Hell, that one round took out the whole building. His gunner, Sergeant Hull, fired the coax 7.62 at a soldier running away, then Broadhead's tank got hit by an RPG round in his right-rear sprocket, knocking off part of one tooth. More AK rounds poured at us from nearby buildings.
“Red 2, White 4, you want to stand and fight?” Broadhead asked me.
“Fight for what? There's nothing here,” I replied. There was no objective to protect or seize, we just had a bunch of assholes shooting at us from inside and in between buildings. Considering that was the heaviest fighting we'd seen in days, we moved back and called in indirect fire on that position. Actually, having indirect fire was a luxury we were hardly used to, and I hated to waste the opportunity.
Our 155 mm Howitzers have a range of 20 miles or so. For the next hour those poor bastards who decided we looked like an easy target got brutalized by our battery. The following day there wasn't much left of the buildings, much less the Iraqi soldiers who'd been shooting at us. I did get the sight off an RPG launcher for the museum at Fort Stewart.
The next day Geary, McAdams, and I went out on a reconnaissance mission to find out how the insurgents were getting into our sector. They weren't getting past us, and they weren't coming in through Sergeant Williams's area, but somehow they were getting in.
While we were driving around, Geary spotted a pontoon bridge built over the river. It was low in the water and looked like it was getting ready to sink at any time.
We had an engineer with us, and I turned to him. “Hey, you think you could help it along any?” He just smiled.
The engineer went out onto the center of the bridge while we covered him and he planted C4. When it blew, the top panel off one barge came flying over to where we were and almost hit McAdams's Bradley. McAdams was a flying-debris magnetâif anything was going to hit a vehicle, it was going to be McAdams's Bradley. He'd been rammed by a car and rammed by a bus, and now flying bridge pieces were whinging off his turret.
Apparently pontoon bridges are tough to kill, because even after the C4 blew, most of the pontoons were still floating. Insurgents would still be able to get across on foot and into our sector. So Geary and I backed up. He engaged the pontoons with TOW missiles and I used 25 mm HE until we sank it.
Just as soon as we returned to our position the Squadron Commander called Captain McCoy, who then called us.
“Red 2, he needs you to do a reconnaissance on a pontoon bridge, because the Colonel wants to use that bridge as a supply route for our vehicles.” He gave me the coordinates of the bridge we'd just blown up.
“Uh, yes sir, however, there's no bridge floating there, it's sunk.”
“Negative, Red 2, you must be mistaken, the squadron's recon aircraft flew over it this morning and it was still intact. He wants to take a look at the bridge himself and wants us over there to pull security.”
“Yes sir, roger that.” As soon as I got off the radio, I yelled, “Geary!”
Geary and I hauled ass over to that bridge. He grabbed his spent TOW launcher tubes and threw them into the river, and I frantically kicked my 25 mm cases in after them. Luckily for us a sandstorm rolled in and the Commander called off his visit, because that bridge did not look like it had died a natural death.
E
arly in April more special ops guys came roaring into our command center. They had a lead on where Saddam Hussein was. They had solid, verified intelligence as to his current location, not just the area, but which building, which house in Sadr City he was inside. They wanted armor to back them up, and they wanted me and Geary on the mission.
We broke out the maps and started planning the operation. Geary and I and our crews were ready to roll, just waiting for the go-ahead. Our Squadron Commander, however, wasn't completely sold on it. He got the Division Commander involved. They didn't really like the plan we'd worked out, going up there and making the raid with just two Brads, because they didn't think there would be enough support. They also didn't quite believe the intel, and then there was the matter of who would be in charge of the mission.
By the time command made a decision on what was going to happen and who was going to go, two days had gone by and Saddam had moved.