Carnivore (8 page)

Eight Ball backed up when he saw the lizard. Little did we know, those lizards live off scorpions. That lizard looked at Eight Ball and was like, “Hey, what's up, bitch?” and jumped up and bit Eight Ball in the face.

Eight Ball grabbed him with both claws. He's got one leg in one claw and he's got the lizard's body in the other claw, mashing down on him as hard as he can, and he was jabbing his stinger into this lizard's head. Well, the lizard just kept crushing down with his mouth until he straight-out killed Eight Ball and started eating him. Son of a bitch. The biggest scorpion ever, the champion of Udairi, the Kuwaiti world champion of scorpion fighters, and this stupid lizard with lipstick on killed him.

We wouldn't let the lizard eat Eight Ball. We took the rest of the scorpion away from him and we buried Eight Ball. We gave him a military funeral with full honors. He served his country well.

I
was always very good at getting people to do things they didn't think they could do. A lot of times my guys thought I was an asshole. Maybe I was one, but I got things done. However, when you have a bunch of guys out in the desert for months, with not enough to do, you're going to have friction even if everybody gets along at first.

When my crew messed up, I didn't really chew their ass and make them do push-ups or clean things. I would just give them the shovel. We had two T-handled shovels on the Bradley. It's always nice to have two shovels in case you get stuck or throw track, so you can dig out faster. Two shovels work better than one. I would always tell the guys, “Get the fucking shovel and start digging.” And they'd do it. If they got me really mad, I'd tell them I wanted a fighting position for the Bradley.

The day we got our ammunition, Sully was fucking with me bad. All day. We were loading TOW missiles out of the Conex shipping container, breaking DU (depleted uranium) ammo out of the break-handled boxes and putting it in the Bradley's ready boxes, but not loading it into the guns yet, and Sully kept screwing with me. He'd draw a circle in the sand around himself and dare me to cross it. “It's my line in the sand. What are you going to do?” he'd taunt me.

So I'd get him and I'd roll him up in the circle. I'd give him a big wedgie and I'd make him eat the desert sand, and then he'd do it all over again. I put his face in the sand again and said, “No more circles, right? We're done with circles?” I'm not tall, but I'm stocky and have a lot of muscle underneath the padding. Plus, I like to fight.

“Yeah, we're done, Sergeant Jay. We're done.” And I'd let that fucker up and he'd rinse his mouth out and he'd draw a square. “You didn't say nothin' about squares.” So then we'd go again. That went on for about four hours. Me rollin' him up, him drawing squares, stars, isosceles triangles, octagons . . .

W
hen we'd packed everything up in the States to ship over to Kuwait, I bought Copenhagen, Mountain Dew, gum—small everyday things. I always kept extra stuff inside the Bradley to square other people away, because, you know, when somebody runs out of their dip they're really hurting. It's always nice to be able to pitch them a can of dip or something else that lifts their spirits. That's why I had the coffeepot in the Bradley. Guys could always count on coming over and being able to get a warm cup of coffee or play a video game. I was the senior Scout, and guys from the different platoons could come over, sit down, and relieve a little stress. We called it the Crazy Horse Café.

Coffee wasn't coffee. Coffee was normalcy. Coffee was a little bit of America in an alien place. Coffee was forgetting your troubles, if only for a few minutes. Just sitting there with your crew, your buddies, talking about nothing for as long as possible, which was never long enough. If you haven't been there, you just can't understand.

I also bought a bunch of Mountain Dew for my guys. Mountain Dew was the Red Bull of the day, and I shipped a lot of it over there. I would always tell the guys, “Don't ever drink the last soda. You can drink all the Dew you want, but don't drink the last soda.” Well, we were getting ready to move into the desert before going into Iraq, and I looked in the Bradley and saw the last Mountain Dew was gone.

“Where the fuck is the last Mountain Dew?”

Jason Sperry, my driver, and Sully were up in front. I asked them, “Which one of you fucking guys took it?”

They both chimed in, “It wasn't us.”

I said, “Get them shovels.”

“Awwww.” So they're diggin'. “How big?” they asked me.

I told them, “I want to be able to put the Bradley hull down.” I was really pissed.

They said, “What?”

I said, “Hull down. I don't even want to see the turret anymore. I want you that fucking deep.” In case you're wondering, a Bradley is just over nine feet tall.

So they're digging and digging and digging. About 35 minutes later, they walked down to the tent. “Sergeant Jay, we found your Mountain Dew and you owe us an apology.”

“What?”

“You owe us an apology.”

I said, “All right. Explain this to me.”

They walked me over to the Bradley, and they had a half-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. You could tell where they crawled underneath the Bradley and stuck it underneath the ramp, at the gap of the ramp. They just set it on the ground there, and they're pointing underneath the ramp: “Look, there it is. It fell through the gap.”

Well, I'm the guy who shipped over all the Mountain Dew from the States, and what I shipped over was cans. I told them, “Uh, guys? That last Mountain Dew was in a can.”

“No, Sergeant Jay. It was in a bottle. You're just mistaken.”

“It was a can. And don't tell me that bottle fell there, it can't even fit through that gap.”

We went back and forth, and finally I just got tired of arguing. I said, “Fine. I've got a Mountain Dew. We're good to go. Just leave it at that. Put the shovels back.”

I
n mid-March 2003, a sandstorm started to kick up. It didn't last as long as some, but it was still bad. We had to close all the hatches. The sandstorms are crazy: you can barely talk on the radio and you can't see 10 feet.

We spent the night all buttoned up inside the vehicle. The next morning was a nice sunny day. There was really nothing going on outside and we were on the very end of our desert laager, so we were as close to Iraq and the berm as we could get. Everybody else was in line with us.

Sully came in and said, “Hey, they're doing an NBC drill.” (NBC stands for nuclear, biological, and chemical.) We were in the back of the Bradley playing Nintendo and lounging around. I looked out and could see everybody down the line running around in MOPP 4 gear and closing the hatches on their vehicles.

One big worry we had was Saddam shooting missiles loaded with anthrax or sarin gas or chicken pox or whatever at us, so we did all sorts of NBC drills where we got into our protective gear as fast as possible. MOPP stands for mission-oriented protective posture, and the number afterward indicates the level of protection. MOPP 4 was the highest level of protection. In addition to a gas mask we had to put on gloves, overboots, and a protective suit. If you think it gets hot in the desert, try standing around in a uniform covered by a full-body protective suit.

I said, “Hell. Sucks to be them.” Since we were all the way at the end of the line, no one would notice if we didn't play along.

We finished the game and we shut the Bradley off. I was just getting ready to lie back and stretch out on the TOW missile boxes (because there was nowhere else to lie; we'd packed the Brad to the hatch with ammunition) when I heard on the radio, “All clear. All clear.”

I said, “Looks like the training drill's over with.”

And then I heard the Commander come across and say, “Roger, just got a call from Squadron Fox and they confirm that the missile that landed did not have chemical agents in it.”

Um, wait, what?

Our Fox group responded to any biological or WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attacks. They rolled out in big six-wheeled vehicles that have all sorts of seals and protections. Officially the German-designed vehicles are called M93 CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) reconnaissance vehicles. Turns out Saddam had launched a SCUD missile and it went right over the top of our site and landed a mile or so to our south; that's why everybody went to MOPP 4 protective gear.

With the Bradley running and the video game going, we didn't hear anything because the missile's rockets weren't running. It was just the
whoosh
of it coming over. We didn't hear the explosion when it landed either; the desert is so wide open that sound really disperses.

At that point we dug around to find our masks and MOPP gear. Better late than never, right? I think mine was under a bunch of 25 mm ammo in the back.

That rocket going over apparently jarred command, because for the next three days they had us moving. Continual movement, so we were harder to hit, I guess. Between that movement and the sandstorms, we barely slept for three days. And I mean
barely
—10 minutes here, half an hour there.

So of course that's when command decided we should start the invasion.

O
ur first objective once we rolled through the berm and into Iraq was supposed to be a chemical manufacturing site, used in the creation of WMDs.

The 3/15th Infantry cut the holes in the berm, and while they were doing that Saddam launched another SCUD. It landed close to the Alpha Troop Commander's tank, maybe 400 meters away, and blew up in the desert. At that point we knew things were getting serious.

You can still see those berms on Google Earth. They are big ridges made of earth and sand that have been pushed up by heavy equipment. And there wasn't just one berm—there were three. The 3/15th Infantry and 34th Engineers had to cut lanes through them with dozers. The first berm was the Kuwaiti border, and the last one was Iraqi. In between the two was the United Nations berm in the UN Zone, and there were tank ditches on either side of it. There was a UN outpost in there as well.

The gap between the first and last berms was 10 kilometers. The 34th Engineers were actually the first unit inside Iraq, as they cut through the Iraqi defender berm. After they did that, the 3/15 Infantry charged in and headed straight for the nearby Iraqi outpost, but there was nobody there; it was abandoned. Once units started to punch through the berm they got organized on the far side and started spinning up. Some were heading north on Highway 1, others were heading out on Highway 8.

My unit, 3/7 Cav, consisted of three armor troops, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, also known as Apache, Bone Crusher, and Crazy Horse—because that just sounds cooler. Apache Troop was to head up the main highway to the town of As Samawah and Objective Pistol. They were the main element. Our mission was to take a dogleg to the west, to the chemical manufacturing site at As Salman. We had two Fox vehicles with us that were supposed to do a chemical survey of the objective. Bravo Troop was going to be behind us, and the headquarters troop, supply trains, and aviation assets would be behind Bravo.

Things always go wrong, of course. The road was dusty and it was one or two in the morning, and Sergeant Williams in Third Platoon stopped suddenly for some reason. Sergeant Soby, his wingman, rammed him in the back so hard it cracked the fuel cell on Williams's Bradley, the Casanova. Williams, of course, didn't want to give his vehicle up and miss the fight, so the guy in the back of his Bradley was ankle deep in fuel, sucking diesel fumes, for days.

We hadn't been rolling through Iraq for very long when we spotted what looked like some big long missiles and SCUD tents, so we went charging up the valley toward them. It turned out to be bedouins. Their tents, when folded up and from a distance, looked like SCUD emplacements.

Apache Troop had the first engagement—they identified it as a ZSU-23 (an antiaircraft gun), but it was actually an old tank hull. I ID'd another tank but didn't engage it because I could tell it was destroyed, and there was no heat signature. There were vehicles scattered everywhere from the 1991 Gulf War.

We hooked up with everyone else at our first refueling site. All the fuel trucks were with us, in the supply train behind Bravo Troop. The site was maybe 125 or 150 miles inside Iraq. Bradleys can go a lot farther before needing to be refueled, but we had M1s with us, and they are total hogs; they suck the diesel down twice as fast. We pulled aside and let the M1s refuel first.

There are two different ways you can handle refueling, a tailgate or a service station. A tailgate is where you stay in your fighting position and the trucks pull up behind you and top you off individually. It takes longer, but it's the safest way to do it in a combat area. We hadn't been in contact yet, so we did a service station—that's where the fuel trucks stop and everybody cycles through and tops off their tanks.

After the fuel stop we drove through the rest of the day. I remember it was hot. That sun beat down on us all day. We passed a few towns, though I don't know if
town
is the correct word. They were dusty desert villages, just some mud huts and tents and bedouins. At this point we were ducks in a row rolling up the road, because that's bad desert there. You can't get into line formations or anything else because there are so many wadis, which are basically big desert ditches. When it rains the wadis fill up and flood, a lot like they do in California or in the deserts we have in the southwestern United States. Trying to drive across them was a no-go, so we stayed on the highways, which are paved and slightly elevated.

In case you're wondering, we did have a CD player in the Bradley and had it hooked up through the radio. The setup was such that anytime we got a radio call, the music would cut out, so we wouldn't miss anything. I preferred AC/DC.