Carnivore (3 page)

Boys are naturally stupid, or prone to do stupid things, and I was no different. The list of idiotic things I've done could fill a book in itself, and it's a wonder I stayed alive long enough to make it into the Army.

While Kentucky's not too far north, it does get cold in the winter. Wandering around in the woods with some friends once, we found an old oil tanker. The bottom was rusted out, so we kicked our way inside. There was tar or congealed oil or something all over the ceiling of the tanker. Since we were cold, we built a fire. Thinking we were smart, we built the fire at the entrance so the smoke could get out, and it was really smoky because the fuel we used for the fire was plastic bottles.

So there we were, at the back end of the tanker, with the fire at the entrance to keep us warm, and we went to sleep. Three hours into the night we woke up and had dripping fire on us—not just fire, dripping fire. The tar or whatever it was on the ceiling had caught fire. We managed to get out, but did I learn or wise up? Nope.

One time I was at the barber shop with my dad and stuck my hand in the barber pole and felt what I thought was fur. I found out the hard way it was a beehive. I was stung so many times my dad had to take me to the hospital. I had more than 500 bee stings all over my body. I was red, blotchy, and so swollen my eyes couldn't open all the way. There was so much toxin in my body, I don't know how I didn't die.

A few more stories. My neighbor had a Yamaha 80 motorcycle, and there was an old lady in the area who had raked up a big pile of leaves. Our plan was to ride through it so fast she wouldn't even see who we were. We woke up in the road all cut up and bleeding, with what was now a useless Yamaha. Turns out the pile was only partly leaves: the rest of it was fire hydrant.

Motorcycles have always seemed to bring out something in me. I remember I had a Honda four-cylinder with flat tires. I had a brilliant idea, and a friend of mine helped me take the tires and tubes off of it and ride it on the rims. Well, when you're riding just on the rims and try to take a turn at about 30 miles an hour, you realize pretty quickly that you no longer have any traction.

I have a permanent scar in a very private place due to an incident involving a motorcycle, a patch of carpet, a long piece of rope, and an anchor made out of a piece of rebar.

This seems as good a spot as any to mention the time I shot my muzzle-loader into a five-gallon bucket. The bucket had a layer of lead on the bottom of it, and I felt sure I'd be able to knock a hole in the bottom. I turned it sideways and from about 10 feet took the shot. Half an hour later I woke up.

My maxiball hit the layer of lead, ricocheted right back, and hit me in the forehead. I had a knot sticking out of my head so far I looked like a unicorn. Did being thick skulled save my life? Maybe if I hadn't been hardheaded I wouldn't have shot into the bucket in the first place.

Like most kids I worked off and on during high school. We were out in the middle of farm country, so a lot of the work was agricultural—picking tobacco, driving a tractor, whatever needed doing. I didn't necessarily like it, but it was work—and it paid.

My father was in the labor union and worked construction, and after high school I fell into the construction thing with my dad. We labored on a lot of the big power plants in the area, doing concrete pours, building power plants and roads, or helping when there were power outages.

Why did I go into the Army? Well, some boys want to be astronauts, or fire fighters, or cops, but ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a platoon sergeant in the U.S. Army. Go ahead and laugh, but I wanted to be Sergeant Rock. I had
Sergeant Rock
and
Sergeant Fury
comic books—that's who I always wanted to be. Sergeant Rock and Easy Company, I can still remember that from the comics. Hell, I still have the comics as a matter of fact. In high school, I joined ROTC.

Doing construction with my dad was work, but it wasn't how I wanted to spend a career. Unfortunately, there weren't a whole lot of other jobs in the area. Finally I decided to pull the trigger. I went to a military med station and got my physical right after I took the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. Three days later I was at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I went into the Army on March 6, 1986. I was in the Army for more than seventeen years before I saw any serious combat—Desert Storm notwithstanding—but when I did, I was at the tip of the spear with the 3/7 Cavalry in Iraq.

I've gotten a lot of attention for what I did in Iraq. Bits and pieces of my story have appeared in books and magazines, and I even found myself on the cover of
Soldier of Fortune
. What I had to do for me and my men to survive was brutal, but I didn't do any of it without a conscience. I've killed a lot of people—some say my KIA total is near the record for an American soldier—but for every life I took, there were a hundred I
could
have ended. Either they gave me a reason to kill them or there was a reason that they needed to be killed. I did exactly what was called for, and I don't apologize for it. It was war.

This book is just about a guy who was in the wrong place at all the right times. Unfortunately for the enemy, I was ready for what came my way.

T
he first time I was ever under fire was in Germany.

If that's got some of you scratching your heads, trying to figure out how an Iraq War veteran is old enough to have fought in Germany, let me explain.

When I first joined the Army, I was assigned to the 11th ACR (Armored Cavalry Regiment) in West Germany. We were positioned in the Fulda Gap, back during the Cold War when the Soviets were Public Enemy Number One. If you've never heard of the Fulda Gap, here's a little context: if the Cold War had ever turned into a land war in Europe, because of geography, it was a good bet the Soviet tanks would pour through the Fulda Gap in Germany. The Fulda Gap is actually two lowland corridors between East Germany and Frankfurt. They go around the Vogelsberg Mountains and are very strategically important.

When the 11th ACR came back from Vietnam it took over the Gap from the 14th ACR, which had been in place since 1951. The job was patrolling the area, providing reconnaissance, and spotting any pre-attack Soviet movement. In war our job would be to delay a Soviet attack until other units of V Corps could be mobilized.

Because I was in ROTC during high school, they made me an E3 (Private First Class—PFC) as soon as I got out of basic training. About four months after I graduated Basic and OSUT (One Station Unit Training), they sent me to Grafenwoehr, Germany. I was in 1st Squadron in the Black Horse Regiment and came in as a 113 Scout. I was basically a dismount, which is what we in the cavalry call someone who actually is supposed to, at some point or for some reason, get off the vehicle and walk. I was originally assigned to an M113 APC (armored personnel carrier).

I like the 113s. For APCs, they are small, quiet, and have lots of room. They are such a good design that they're still being produced today, even though they were introduced in 1960. The 113 is a tracked vehicle, basically a bullet-resistant maneuverable box designed to get soldiers into or out of trouble spots. The typical crew is seven men, and the 113 is armed with an M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun. Compared to the M2—“Ma Deuce”—the 113 was a brand-new design.

John Browning originally designed the M2 machine gun in 1918, and it has been in service with the U.S. military since 1933. Browning was a genius when it came to designing guns, and nowhere is that more evident than in the M2—after almost 90 years in service, nobody has yet to come up with a better heavy-caliber belt-fed machine gun. They served us well in World War II and Vietnam, and in Iraq we mounted them on 113s, Humvees, and M1 Abrams tanks.

However, in the early 1980s the Bradley Fighting Vehicle came out, and many of the 113 crews transitioned over. I soon found myself transferred over to the Bradleys. The Bradley could be considered the halfway point between an APC and a main battle tank (MBT). It is tracked and has a small turret like a tank and a large compartment in back for troops.

The U.S. Army's main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, weighs 60 tons yet can do upwards of 60 miles per hour. It has a 120 mm main gun, with an M2 .50 machine gun for backup. The Bradley had just a 25 mm (25 mm = 1-inch diameter) main gun, and while it only weighed half what the Abrams did, an Abrams could easily outrun a Bradley. The adoption of the Bradley was a long and tortured process, and many people thought the end result was a complete dog—it was undergunned, either too big or too slow, and so on. To be honest, nobody knew how well the Bradleys would fare in actual combat, and it wasn't until the 2003 invasion of Iraq that they were really put to the test.

The first Bradley I was ever assigned to had a driver, a gunner, and a Bradley Commander. Back then I didn't even know how to drive the Bradley, because I'd come up on the M113s and M1 tanks, but when the Bradleys started coming in, quite a few tank crews transferred over. Our squadron had gone through a transition, but I hadn't done the driver training yet, so I was just the dismount/loader in the rear of the vehicle.

One day I was sitting in the back of our moving Bradley. The gunner, Sergeant Carter, was sitting on the vehicle's steps, where you climb up from the outside to gain access. It was cold and he was sitting half in the turret with his feet hanging out, looking back and talking to me. We were having a conversation and then all of a sudden he disappeared, everything but his feet. Then he popped back up real quick. I was looking at him, trying to figure out what was going on, and then he completely vanished.

I thought, What the hell just happened? Then the Bradley stopped. I had my helmet on, but I didn't have a CVC (combat vehicle crewman) helmet with built-in radio, so I couldn't hear what was going on. The vehicle stopped, they dropped the back ramp of the Bradley, and everybody came rushing over. I couldn't hear what was going on or see what they were looking at.

The Bradley Commander had been inside the turret and hadn't been paying attention to where his gunner was. He thought Sergeant Carter was sitting in his seat and didn't realize he was only half in the vehicle. The Commander traversed the turret, Sergeant Carter got pinched between the wall and the turret hole, and the turret stopped.

The Commander thought something on the outside of the Bradley was sticking, maybe a tree limb or something else underneath the turret. So, still without checking to see where the gunner was, he moved the turret back over to the 12 o'clock position and then hit the Slew button. He slewed it again to the 3 o'clock or to the 9 o'clock position. There are two speeds for the turret—Traverse is the slower one, and Slew is the faster one. The Bradley has the fastest rotating turret in the world, or it did at that time.

When the Commander did that, it just raked Carter and dragged him around inside the hole. There's a little bit of room inside; there's a heater back there and part of a shelf, but the Commander dragged him right over the top of that stuff. We'd been at Grafenwoehr for all of two days. The Commander got relieved for cause. Carter was all broken up, and I don't mean his feelings were hurt: he had a broken pelvis and dislocated collarbone.

O
ne of the things that a crew was required to do when they got to Grafenwoehr was qualify at the range with their Bradley, and now we didn't have a crew to do that. Ludville was our driver at the time, and we got a new guy as a replacement Commander, Sergeant Thompson. He didn't really have any experience with the Bradley either.

My Platoon Sergeant was Sergeant Green, and Green was a big black guy who was a Korean War veteran. Sergeant Green said, “Hey, let's let Johnson shoot, give him an opportunity to gun the vehicle. He can't do any worse than us not shooting at all. If he doesn't qualify, we'll just say that it's a crew in training. At least we can have six crews shoot for our platoon.” He got approval from higher up.

Thompson told me, “Look, I'm never going to touch the gun. You're gonna shoot everything. I'll read the fire commands off and all you have to do is yell ‘Identified' and ‘Fire.'”

What could I say other than “Okay”?

We headed to the range and shot in Table 8, which is individual crew gunnery qualification. There is a daytime and a nighttime qualification. During the daytime qualification I pulled a perfect 700. The scoring went off a point system then, and you had a specific amount of time to engage a target. You also had a swing task, in which you could have six engagements in the daytime and four at night or seven in the daytime and three at night.

One of the swing tasks we had during the nighttime qualification was a moving engagement. I shot a perfect 300 at night, so I shot a perfect 1,000 points total, and out of the four squadrons that came down and shot there, ours was the only one to get a perfect 1,000 points. And I had found my calling.

I can't take too much credit. Thompson was right on with all his fire commands. He was reading them off cue cards. Ludville was really good too. He got us in and out of the positions quickly so I was able to engage all the targets and destroy them in the time allotted.

My job, after hearing the fire commands, was to say “Identified” and “Fire.” When the first round hits, you zero the reticle and then use Kentucky windage for subsequent rounds. With the Bradley, you use a one-two-three system: fire one round to see where it hits, adjust, then fire two rounds to see if you're on the target, and then fire the next three to destroy it. You've got an exact number of rounds to do the job, and for whatever reason it was easy for me. Maybe because that was how I'd always shot growing up. If I was using a rifle with a scope, I'd never adjust the scope, I'd just see where it was hitting and then adjust my aim accordingly.