The Last Centurion

by John Ringo

  The first "reaction" force had been sent out pell-mell to attack the drop area. That's the one that got the scout Stryker with the Jav. He was being smart, though, and putting most of his "light" force that he could scramble quick, fedayeen militia some of them organized into Javelin teams, up in the curve of villages I really didn't want to work my way through.

  So about half his local supply of Javelins went to the wrong area.

  Then he did what any good Middle Eastern commander does. He gathered his regular forces for a harangue. Had them line up with their tanks and trucks and AFVs and told them that they outnumbered the small American unit and that it would be easy to stop. That he knew right where it was going and by the time they caught the "thieves and butchers" that most of us would be smoking wrecks from the Javelins of the fedayeen militia. That there was nothing to worry about.

  Scout Team Two-Five had a very specific mission. Barrel down the north side of the Baghdad highway to screen our advance. Don't stop for anything.

  Why in the hell they went onto a fucking Iraqi military base I have no fucking clue. They said they got turned around and thought it was a parallel road to the Baghdad Highway.

  Two-Five consisted of a regular Scout Stryker and the one commanded by the Scout Platoon leader. I happen to know that Boner could read a map better than that. Otherwise, he wouldn't be the Scout Platoon leader. They had fucking GPS and a clear route. How in the hell did they take a wrong turn?

  What I got at the time went like this.

  "Fillup, Fillup, Boner. Have encountered a small checkpoint. Area cleared."

  "Roger. Fillup out."

  "Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. We are stuck in some sort of army base. Am encountering scattered resistance. Getting a little turned around."

  "Roger, Two-Five. Blow through. Only base in the area is Damran Base. Be aware, that is part of the LOG we left behind. Expect resistance by U.S. military grade hardware. Boner, get the hell out of there."

  Ten minutes later.

  "Command, Two-Five! We are in encounter with large force . . . !"

  The call cuts off.

  "Two-five! Two-Five!"

  All the BFT indicators are up on Two-Five. Our little boxes are talking to their little boxes and their little boxes are talking back which means the vehicles are not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke. Not responding to radio calls, but not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke . . .

  "Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. Happy to report have captured Damran Base and large store of military equipment including approximate equipment for an armored regiment. There has been a good killing."

  There has been a good killing.

  Picture this.

  You're an Iraqi general. You have carefully gathered your armored regiment. The Abrams, Bradleys, Strykers, Paladins and such are lined up in serried rows at the rear. They are an amazing sight, all that armor just waiting to be let free to bring death and destruction to the enemies of Allah.

  In front are the users of those vehicles. The drivers, gunners, infantry, techs and their officers. They are in dressed ranks standing at attention listening to you talk. And talk. And talk. Some five thousand men.

  You have just told your armored regiment, equipped with the latest U.S. military equipment and capable of taking on any force in the Middle East, that you know where the enemy is going and that they will mostly be destroyed before they are ever encountered. Soon they will engage the small remnant of the enemy in an unstoppable wave which is right and just because Allah is on their side.

  As you are delivering your harangue to your freezing troops (it was cold that day), there is distant firing. You ignore it. There is often firing. The Shia continue to resist, militias settle quarrels. People fire off every sort of gun in "happy fire" all the time. When one gets going, others follow. And, anyway, it cuts off abruptly.

  As you continue your long-winded speech, there is a bit more firing. It's closer. So what? More people doing "happy fire" for the heck of it.

  You may even recognize it as Bushmaster and M240 fire. Again, so what? Your forces are equipped with both.

  You might pause as you notice smoke beginning to billow up. But you're well into your speech and others are responsible for fire-fighting. Besides . . . things blow up and burn. Your guys are not exactly experts with their equipment.

  Then you see two Strykers enter the (extremely large) parking stand. You have Strykers but they are all supposed to be parked with their crews listening to your harangue. Perhaps they are from another unit, but all the rest of the units are up north fighting the Kurds. Your unit has just been "stood up" on the American equipment that was left and is preparing to head up there and break the Kurds for once and for all.

  Perhaps it is from one of those units?

  Then you notice the American flag on the lead Stryker's aerial.

  By then it is too late.

  Picture if you will . . .

  Armored vehicles cannot express "body language." Or can they?

  The sudden braking as the Scout Strykers, which had been doing a good 40 miles an hour, skid to a stop on the extremely large concrete pad. The concrete pad filled with more armored equipment and enemy troops than they'd ever wanted to see in their lives. The main guns shifting left and right as if wondering just what in the hell they're going to do. Perhaps they begin to back up . . .

  So what does our intrepid Iraqi general do?

  He shouts into his squealing microphone: "IT IS THE AMERICANS! ATTACK!"

  Picture if you will, the troops starting to scatter as the general and his staff and commanders try to run. Picture both tracks opening fire.

  The nearest cover for the assembled troops are the armored vehicles. The Scout track commanders are not stupid. (Okay, they were stupid, but also very lucky.) They lay down the majority of their fire in that direction. They know if the crews get those vehicles up and running they're toast.

  The next cover is on the other side of the reviewing stand in a set of buildings.

  All the way down the five-hundred-meter pad are more buildings associated with a motor pool.

  The other direction are the Strykers and nobody is running that way.

  25mm Bushmaster. Coaxial 7.62. Track commander with .50 caliber.

  Two sets.

  They ran out of 25mm ammo. They ran out of .50 caliber ammo. The track carries thirty-five thousand rounds of 7.62.

  They ran out of most of that, too.

  This I had to see.

  It was ugly. You might have seen the shots but it doesn't really convey the ugliness of it. The guys had been fallen out without their personal weapons (probably because the "general" was afraid of getting shot). Not that that would have done much good against Strykers. They definitely didn't have anti-armor weapons. They had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

  I had seen the word "windrows" in military histories before. "Windrows of bodies." I'd never actually seen what they were talking about but I recognized it immediately. Those guys writing histories back in the Civil War were familiar with agriculture. It wasn't like today when everybody thought their food came from the stores.

  When a big wind hits a field of wheat, it lays down the wheat in sort of waves. It forms rows of beaten down wheat that hump up almost as if they'd been plowed by the wind. Neat, regular, long lines of destroyed wheat.

  The Iraqis were the wheat.

  Massacre? Yes. "Evil!," "illegal!" No. They were enemy combatants. A few might have tried to surrender. See the whole thing on taking prisoners. Besides, in the gun-camera footage I didn't see many trying until the end and by that time Boner was taking prisoners.

  All that beautiful beautiful equipment and, at first, I could not think of a damned thing to do with it but blow it the fuck up.

  Even with all the equipment and bodies there was still room to park Farmer's Freaks. (We didn't call ourselves The Centurions. Ever. In reunions we still don't except the techs when they're drunk. We were Farmer's Freaks.)<
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  I climbed out of the commo van, up on the front slope and just sat there looking at what Boner had wrought. I tuned the bodies out pretty quick. I was looking at the vehicles. There were more HERCULES and Hemmitts and Bradleys and Strykers and Paladins. Fuck, there was everything. Even Avenger anti-aircraft systems.

  Boner came over wagging his tail like a Lab that had just brought back a bird. I let him babble for a bit and then nodded.

  "Not bad, Boner, not bad."

  He looked like he'd just been handed the Holy Grail with a Medal of Honor in it.

  There's a point to only praising to the most limited degree.

  (Doesn't work with all personality types but the types that it doesn't shouldn't be on a battlefield. They have important things to do in civilian society but if you need people blowing smoke up your ass all the time, don't join the military. I don't work well with that personality type but I tell them I don't and why.)

  "I would go so far as saying that I agree this was a good killing."

  I thought he would stroke.

  All that time I was looking at that gear and wondering what the hell I was going to do with it. Nice to not have it as a threat anymore. But . . . damn . . .

  Okay, we didn't need any Strykers. Stryke those. I was not going to fuck around with Paladins. I'd loved to have been able to, but I wasn't gonna. Scratch all the Brads, too.

  What I wanted was a way to get it all up to the Kurds. No way in hell. Why?

  I was looking at over four hundred vehicles. Okay, say that we just took the Abrams. There were nearly a hundred of those. I had about a hundred and seventy effectives. But an Abrams requires a crew of four, commander, gunner, loader and driver.

  And none of my guys knew diddly about them. A tank doesn't just run itself. Sure, the Abrams as a sweet vehicle and very easy to use. But maintaining it? Hell, even boresighting the gun we didn't know how to do.

  I didn't even want to take the time to fuck everything up, but I knew I had to do it. I couldn't leave this shit in my rear. Somebody was bound to butt-fuck me with it.

  But the Nepos were just sitting there . . .

  We took twenty Abrams and forty Bradleys.

  How? Wait, didn't you just say . . . ?

  Ten of the Abrams were fully crewed by guys drawn from the infantry. That left me with very few ground shooters. I'd live.

  The other fifty were driven, and driven only, by Nepos, some infantry, the news guys and techs. Why?

  Abrams are very hard to destroy. Even with a Javelin if one got hit it was unlikely to hit the driver's compartment. Which was the only way the driver would get killed.

  I wasn't taking them to use them, I was taking them to keep them from the enemy. And, hopefully, get them to the Kurds.

  They're also very easy to drive.

  All of them were fully armed and fueled. We took two trucks of Abrams ammo, a bunch of 25mm and four of parts. They weren't all parts for Abrams and Brads but what the hell.

  Then we used five Abrams to shoot up all the rest. Last but not least, we shot those five. They'd fired so many rounds, their barrels were "depleted" and why used "depleted" barrels when you have brand new ones?

  I had sort of enjoyed blowing up the LOG base in Iran. I nearly cried at this one. This shit could have really helped out the Kurds. I cursed the bastard that left it here.

  I also took two Avenger anti-air systems, fully crewed. They were Stryker Avengers, which I'd left in Iran not thinking I'd need them. And we grabbed four more fuel trucks. We had, essentially, nobody riding in the Strykers.

  If I'd known about CAM(P)ing I would have taken a HERCULES. I wanted to take everything. We just didn't have the manpower.

  Oh, by the way. Fully armed Abrams with their ammunition doors opened? They blow up really nice. It was heartening. Sort of. We were now in them.

  We rolled out after a bare two hours and continued our thunder run.

  Going through Baghdad was . . . unpleasant. There were quite a few fedayeen with RPGs. They got one of the Strykers near the bridge and I think another on the west side. Also one of the fuel trucks. There were, I think, some Javelins. But Baghdad is pretty built up, and I kept as much as possible to the built up areas. The reason I think we took some Javelin fire is that a couple of times buildings had explosions we weren't causing.

  We were causing a lot of explosions, though, so I'll take that as a "possible."

  A Thunder Run everybody looks out and keeps an eye out for targets. The track commanders were the most exposed and we lost one of them to effects of an RPG. But, mostly, we were laying down so much fire, not much was coming back. We were burning through ammo, but the most important thing was to get to the other side of Baghdad.

  We had to slow down, though, for the vehicles that got hit. All the guys weren't dead. We had wounded, now. Lots of wounded. Since we didn't have a doctor or any way to evac them, that was going to suck.

  We went Abrams (fully crewed) to the front, then a group of gun Strykers, then some trucks, then more gun Strykers, then the rest of the trucks, then all the rest of the shit (nearly empty infantry carriers, mortars, Avengers and the line of uncrewed Abrams and Brads), then some more gun Strykers. The HERCULES were near the rear in case we needed to tow anyone. I wasn't planning on stopping to tow if I could avoid it.

  The satellite intel said the bridge was up and engineering intel said it could take all our vehicles.

  It was up and it did.

  It was also defended by a cluster of fedayeen with RPGs. Which was where we lost one of the gun Strykers. It had an explosion go off on the overhead which I think was a Jav. On the far side we lost a Stryker, again. One of the nearly unmanned infantry carriers. At first I thought it was an RPG. I'm still not sure if it was RPG or Javelin.

  Three wounded in the first, one dead one wounded in the second. All my critical infantry troops. Pissed me off.

  I do not know, nor do I care, how many we killed on the run. I do know that at one point there was a sort of human wave charge of a few hundred.

  What's that line from Patton? We used them to grease our treads.

  Did we kill civilians? Possibly. Probably. When an Abrams TC spots a guy with an RPG in a window and orders "fire" and the gunner replies with main cannon . . . Anything in or around the guy with the RPG gets killed. And we weren't just firing at RPG holders. You don't have enough time in combat to say "is that an RPG or a guy with a pipe on his shoulder? Is that person leaning out for a good look or to fire something?" You see anything that looks like a target and you fire.

  Getting out of Baghdad actually scared me more than going through. We were back in open country and anyone with a Jav could have lit us up. But we didn't take any.

  Oh, prisoners.

  While we were "reconfiguring" at the pad and such, I had Hollywood and a couple of other guys who had gotten some "bedroom" instruction in Arabic interrogate the survivors. Which is where I got the narrative about the Iraqi general. Also about him sending most of the Jav teams up and to the east to stop us.

  Last bit. We found the main cache of what had been left behind as well. It was in a base on the west side of the Tigris. "Lightly defended." Also had been mostly emptied out. We took some more shit from there (including refueling our fuel trucks and vehicles and ammoing up) and then blew up anything that resembled military hardware.

  Take that, State Department.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It's a Good Place

  to Hallucinate

  So where were we going?

  Nowhere. We were going nowhere.

  As in "Bumfuckistan," "East Bumfuck," "middle of nothing," "beyond the Pale."

  We stayed north of the Euphrates out in the salt wastes. There was, operationally, a choke point near Ramadi between it and the Thartar which is a big shallow salt lake kind of like . . . well, Salt Lake. Our dust could easily be seen from Ramadi.

  But there wasn't any reaction. It looked as if we were headed for Syria. Our basic path, except
for avoiding roads, was the one I'd taken when I did my deployment as Scout Platoon leader. This was the path that the Sunnis had smuggled fighters in throughout the whole Resistance in Iraq, from all over the world to Syria and then down the Al-Ramadi trail.

  But there was fuck all in most of that area. If you didn't stay down by the Euphrates there weren't any towns and hardly any roads. It was a big fucking open desert.

  We lost some vehicles. I don't know how a group of reasonably intelligent Arabs could fuck up Abrams and Bradleys as fast as they did, but fuck them up they did.

  We dropped four Abrams and two Bradleys on the first part of the run. And we were running. There was no ability to switch drivers. We logged and we ran, logged and ran, logged and ran until the guys were obviously becoming too punch drunk to log in movement.

  It took us two days to get to the "oasis" of Abu Samak. Part of the time we spent on a road that had been laid down, way back when, for the Iraqi military. They used to perform training operations, when they trained at all, out in this area.

  Problem was, the area was crossed by wadis. Wadis are gulleys formed in desert terrain by the occasional rainshowers it gets. They flood to their banks at the slightest rain then go down to dry. Arroyos is the term used in the Southwest.

  Wadis can really ruin a tank or Stryker's day when they don't notice them. Oh, there were always places to cross. But when you're tired as hell and crusing along at forty knots in the middle of the night, you don't always notice an arroyo. Then you drop four feet through the air and generally slam into the far wall. Even if you climb it, you've just shaken your crew around like peas and somebody is probably injured. Especially the guys in "white daze" or dead asleep.

  Taking the road kept us out of wadis. It was a chance and I took it and it never bit me in the ass but I didn't like it.

  At Abu Samak we did a full stop.

  Abu Samak is where the story "Stones" came from. When we left the guys wanted to just waste the place and be done. But we left it standing.

  It had been a fair sized village before the Plague. Did an op there when I was Scout Platoon leader. (Not the one where I got the scars.) Recovery had been centered around three families from two different clans. Only about sixty people left. Which was why killing one of their breeders was stupid. Besides the whole thing being stupid.