by Piers Platt
* * *
When we weren’t burning shit, we were handling the unpleasant duty of clearing the roads through Muqdadiyah twice daily to protect convoys from IED attacks. Route clearance consists of driving slowly along the main roads, looking for telltale signs of IEDs, and hoping that you don’t drive over one – it’s basically like playing Minesweeper in real life. If you find one, you’re supposed to radio it in and wait for the nearest Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team to come dispose of it properly. We hated route clearance for several reasons:
1. EOD teams were spread unbelievably thin and often took hours to get to your location.
2. IEDs were often hidden inside piles of trash, which were nearly ubiquitous in a country that has no organized sanitation removal. Hence, many false alarms.
3. Nothing like driving down the same exact roads at roughly the same time twice per day to make it easy for the enemy to plan attacks.
Because the EOD teams were rarely available, we often had to check out possible IEDs ourselves, in order to avoid being stuck for hours routing traffic a safe distance around what would later turn out to be a totally innocuous garbage heap. Luckily, in the month or so that we were stationed there, we only discovered one IED in Muqdadiyah. This particular IED was “total amateur hour,” according to Sergeant First Class Nicholls, upon closer inspection. We happened to be paired up for the mission, and Sergeant Cleary, my gunner, spotted something that looked like a mortar round on the edge of the road as we did our return sweep. After several minutes of anxious examination through our high-powered tank sights, Sergeant First Class Nicholls told me he was going to take a closer look on the ground, so he took another crew member with him and dismounted.
Nicholls gave the device a wide berth, but examined it from several angles, and confirmed: it was indeed a mortar round simply lying in the road, no wires or visible detonation devices. What’s more, from the markings on the round, Nicholls suspected it was a smoke round – designed to burn and emit thick smoke to mark or obscure an area, rather than explode and kill people. I’m not sure if the insurgents hoped that we’d drive over it by accident to make it go off, but even if we had, the tank wouldn’t have been damaged in the slightest.
“Well, I don’t want to pick the damn thing up, even so.” I told Nicholls, who had clambered back onto his tank to radio his findings to me.
“Yeah, ditto. But it’s going to take EOD hours to get out here, and fuck if I’m sitting out here and missing dinner again. I got a better idea.”
“Oh shit,” I said, but he was already climbing off his tank and out of radio contact before I could reply. He took up a prone firing position behind a dirt mound, aiming his rifle at the mortar round.
There are countless Hollywood movies where the hero shoots his pistol at something stuffed with plastic explosive, and it dutifully explodes in a dazzlingly bright orange cloud of flame. First of all, most explosions aren’t bright orange: there generally is very little “flame” involved other than the initial split-second flash, and the rest of it is a grey-brown cloud of debris, which is disappointingly un-photogenic. Second, it’s harder to detonate things than one would think: plastic explosive, for instance, can be hit with a hammer, shot with a bullet, even lit on fire, and it’s unlikely to explode. Even if you shoot a high explosive tank round into a bunker full of artillery shells, those shells aren’t all going to explode, as somebody found out at an abandoned Iraqi ammo depot we later visited. Most of them explode, but a significant portion of them just get thrown in every direction by the explosion and lay around the remains of the bunker in an extremely unstable and dangerous state. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still a shitload of fun to blow things up, it’s one of the biggest benefits of going to war. I just didn’t have high expectations that Nicholls would have any success with the mortar round we found.
He hit the round with his first shot, it made a loud “pop,” and then sizzled for a minute or so, emitting white smoke. And then it was done. I could see Nicholls’ grin as he jumped back on his tank and picked up his radio mike.
“Who needs EOD, sir?”
* * *
While we were there, the Special Forces “A” team in Muqdadiyah planned a major raid on an insurgent safe-house, and they requested that we put a couple of tanks on standby just in case they bit off a little more than they could chew. We were happy to oblige, so they invited us over to their compound to take part in the planning stages of the raid.
They lived in a walled compound surrounded by barbed wire within the FOB – in the event that the main base was overrun, they could have defended it rather easily. Their motor pool contained a handful of Humvees, a few SUVs for traveling incognito, and some four-wheeler ATVs, each of which had an M240 machine gun mounted on the handlebars, allowing the user to drive and shoot at the same time, or stop and use the ATV as a stable weapons mount. We instantly felt like the cool kids had invited us to sit at their table at lunch.
Inside, we walked through their armory (a bristling collection of sniper rifles and suppressed submachine guns) and into the living room. We were just a few hundred yards from our own barracks area, where we were still living in ramshackle cement buildings without doors or windows, sleeping on cots under mosquito nets, without power or running water. We were showering using water bottles with holes punched in the lids. The Special Forces building was air-conditioned, painted, and well-lit, and the living room held a leather couch with a 60-inch flat-screen TV with a satellite hookup. Each man had his own bedroom, with a real bed and mattress, and they had an indoor shower, laundry machines, and a full kitchen. It was like stepping out of a war zone and into the ultimate bachelor pad, except for the guys cleaning their rifles on the couch. They even had real beer, in defiance of the prohibition on alcohol for U.S. forces in Iraq.
The team commander’s mission briefing was short and sweet, in true Green Beret style: they would approach on Humvees, then dismount before they came in audio range of the target house, which he pointed out on the satellite maps their intelligence specialist had downloaded. They expected the house to have several sentries outside, who would be eliminated with silenced pistols to avoid alerting the occupants. They would then clear the house, hustle the insurgents into the Humvees, and roll back. If things went sour, they would “strongpoint” (seize and defend) whatever building was closest and call us in to help deal with the enemy.
The brief completed, we headed back to our own area and prepped our vehicles. We parked our tanks at the main gate as night fell, and settled in to wait things out, tuning our radios to the Special Forces channel. On combat missions, we had been trained to stay in close radio contact with headquarters at all times – even if nothing changed, we would send a radio report every five or ten minutes just to let everyone know we were still out there. In sharp contrast, the Special Forces’ radio chatter was both sporadic and informal.
As they pulled out: “Let’s go.”
Several long minutes later: “Tabasco, this is Big Sexy, turn right ahead.”
After another long pause: “Yeah, stop here. Everyone out.”
We guessed they were approaching the target house on foot, but we weren’t sure. As the minutes dragged on, we thought about trying to raise them on their net just to check in, but there are times when radio silence is critical to a mission, and we didn’t want to blow it for them just because we wanted to know what was going on. We didn’t hear anything again for 30-40 minutes, and then they suddenly appeared at the gate and rolled inside.
“Hey Bulldawg, thanks for the backup, appreciate it.”
Apparently they were done.
* * *
Like fighter pilots, tankers place enormous significance on the number of enemy tanks one kills in combat. Now that major combat operations were over in Iraq (at least according to our Commander-in-Chief at the time), there were no more opportunities for us to prove our worth as armored crewmen in a vehicle-to-vehicle duel, however. Or so we thought.
I was lying on my cot one afternoon, trying to catch some sleep after an early morning route clearance mission, when someone ran out of the troop command post and yelled for me. I swore, pulled my flip-flops on, and headed next door, my lack of proper uniform garnering a frown of disapproval from my commander as I walked in.
“What’s up, sir?”
“How fast can you be ready to roll out?”
“Ten minutes,” I said, turning to leave.
“Stand by, don’t get spun up yet.”
I shrugged. “Okay. What’s going on?”
“White 4 is in contact with a tank.”
I was quiet for a second, looking at him closely. “Are you fucking with me, sir?”
He shook his head, and a shiver of excited disbelief ran through me. Twenty minutes previously, a guard post on the perimeter had reported seeing an enemy tank. Lieutenant Pierce and Sergeant First Class Nicholls had been on Quick Reaction Force duty, so they had immediately departed to go check it out, though no one really believed the guard post’s report. Anywhere else in Iraq, the guard post would have been laughed at immediately and the report forgotten – it was just too preposterous to be true. In Muqdadiyah, however, two unlikely situations might just have occurred:
1. Insurgents could have snuck inside the wire and stolen an Iraqi Army tank from the thousands that littered the FOB’s abandoned motor pool
2. Situated as we were near the eastern edge of Iraq, the Iranians could have crossed the border in force
I was extremely skeptical of either scenario – even Iraqi insurgents trained how to operate one would have to be pretty brain-dead to try to man a single tank against U.S. forces: they would become the biggest and shortest-lived target in history. The second scenario was less ridiculous given the historical tension between the two countries (not to mention Iran’s beef with the U.S.), but it was still pretty unlikely that an armored Iranian unit could have crossed into Iraq without anyone noticing. So no one had given the guard post report much credence … until Sergeant First Class Nicholls arrived to check it out and reported making contact with the enemy tank.
This caused all kinds of uproar which we didn’t even know about for days. First, Nicholls reported it in to the FOB’s command center. One of their “high priority” reporting criteria, based on the off chance that the Iranians might invade, happened to be contact with an armored vehicle, so they immediately passed this information on up the chain to Brigade headquarters, who likewise sent it to 1st Infantry Division headquarters, who then called it in to Multi-National Headquarters in Baghdad. Pretty soon, a General with many stars on his uniform was calling the FOB’s operation center wanting to know the size and composition of the Iranian invasion force.
Nicholls had made contact with a tank, alright – an ancient rusted Russian hulk which obviously had been used for target practice many times by the Iraqi tank unit that had been stationed at the base before we invaded. His exact report to the command center was:
“Ramrod X-Ray, Bulldawg White 4. I have identified the tank. It is a T-54/55 with more holes in it than my underwear.”
Apparently failing to pick up on the sarcasm about the holes, the command post became fixated on the “T-54/55” part of Nicholls’ transmission. Nicholls was implying that he wasn’t sure the specific type, whether it was a Soviet T-54 or T-55, which are nearly indistinguishable, especially after being shot at for years. Somehow, the command post missed that nuance, and came to believe that there were two tanks: a T-54 and a T-55. Apparently delirious at the prospect of reporting on the most significant combat action of the post-invasion period, they ordered him to engage the enemy tanks. So Nicholls clarified his earlier report, clearly stating that this tank – emphasis on tank, singular – was no threat at all.
Again, they failed to understand him, or did not believe him, perhaps recalling the report from the guard post that had started the whole fiasco (we never did figure out what the hell they had seen, but it wasn’t a tank). Nicholls lost patience at this point, and for shits and giggles, happily complied with the order to fire – tankers don’t ever refuse to blow things up, even when it’s redundant. Not to be outdone, Brian Pierce took this opportunity to put a second round in the target for good measure. Eventually, the command center staff calmed down a bit, the truth of the matter was sorted out and disseminated to all parties involved, and the tankers were recalled to the FOB. Nicholls got a “kill,” Bulldawg Troop got mentioned in some four star general’s daily update briefing, and thankfully, World War Three was narrowly averted.
* * *
It was at FOB Normandy that I got my first taste of what it was like to be targeted by an IED. In addition to running route clearance missions, we often used the tanks to augment security for logistics convoys moving out of the FOB, providing armored support while the cargo trucks moved through the danger areas in town. On one of these missions, we had interspersed our tanks with the cargo vehicles and were passing the southern edge of Muqdadiyah when a massive BOOM rocked the convoy behind me.
I had felt the IED as much as seen it, the shock wave smacking me in the back like a strong shove, even from several hundred meters away. I turned immediately and saw a cloud of dirt-brown smoke rising from the side of the road, with debris raining down on the trucks behind me.
Nicholls, who was at the front of the column, beat me to the radio report, calling in the contact quickly but calmly. I keyed the radio to the rest of the patrol, asking for a damage report to see if anyone was injured, and to see why the trucks in the “kill zone” had stopped moving. A Humvee commander close to the truck that had been hit jumped out and climbed the side of the truck, yelling at the crew. They were okay, and the truck appeared undamaged, but it had stalled from the blast. It started when they tried it, however, and I gave the order to move again and clear out of the area, lest the insurgents follow up with a small-arms attack on our stationary convoy. Had it been a patrol of tanks alone, we might have stuck around to try to deal with the enemy, but our mission was to get these vehicles safely on their way, and that took priority.
Once the convoy was past the town, Nicholls and I turned around and returned to the scene of the attack, approaching extremely cautiously and scanning the roadside closely to ensure there wasn’t a second IED. We saw nothing to indicate a second attack, and soon found three gaping holes about ten feet apart in the tarmac – it had been a daisy-chained IED, no less. While I secured the road and blocked traffic, Nicholls inspected the site more closely on the ground, finding the detonation wires, which led back to an abandoned mud hut about 50 meters from the road. The hut had a perfect view of the road and a thickly overgrown field at its back, through which our assailants had escaped after the attack. Even if we had been quick enough to realize where the bombs had been detonated from right after the attack, the insurgents had disappeared into the field before we could have done much about it.
The hut showed signs of men having lived there for several days – food scraps, the remains of a fire, and feces. Knowing the logistics convoy operated on a regular basis, the men had laid their trap and then waited for their moment. They had even set up two short stakes in the field in front of the house as crude aiming devices: from the hut, the stakes lined up with the edges of the kill zone. It was a patient, well-planned operation. Nicholls and I agreed that the buildings could be used again in the exact same manner and needed to be demolished. He was worried, however, that the 2-2 Infantry command center would be reticent about firing main gun rounds at a house, abandoned or not.
“Let’s just shoot it,” he said. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?”
SGT Cleary and I swiveled our turret, and put a high explosive round into the building, crumbling a wall. The 2-2 Infantry command center was on the radio immediately, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Nicholls told them we were demolishing a building [pause for round two – BOOM!] used for ambushes. They were miffed we hadn’t cleared it with them first, but let it go. We
finished off the building, toppling the remaining walls by ramming them with the front of our tanks, and then headed back to base.
* * *
While we were in Muqdadiyah, our normal Troop Executive Officer, First Lieutenant O’Brien, was detached to another unit, lending them the firepower of his Bradley and a couple of our tanks. During this time, Joey Thomas, our troop Fire Support Officer, served as the substitute troop Executive Officer, which he handled admirably. The Executive Officer is technically second-in-command of the troop, but his real job is making sure all of the vehicles are properly maintained. That’s a tough job, especially in Iraq, where the physical conditions and unrelenting pace of operations take an enormous toll on the vehicles. As an added bonus, our habit of hopping from base to base every few weeks as the Division’s mobile reserve meant that the spare parts we ordered never caught up to us – they were constantly arriving a few weeks after we left each base, and naturally getting put to use by the units we had left behind.
The American soldier is known for being resourceful and innovative, which is generally true, but is also a euphemism for being good at breaking the rules when necessary. Every unit has individuals who are even more resourceful than most, and we were no exception. Sergeant First Class Peterson was leading fuel convoy escorts later during our tour when one of his Humvees blew a tire. As usual given our supply woes, he was totally out of spares. He happened to be near a major support FOB at the time, and after a brief search at the supply depot (who wouldn’t resupply him because all of their tires were ear-marked for other units already), he found a motor pool with four or five Humvees in pristine condition, each of which carried a spare. Given how clean they were, the Humvees were clearly not used for missions outside the FOB – they were glorified golf carts that got washed weekly and never left the wire. Peterson and his men were in the midst of stealing two of the spares when a Sergeant from the unit that owned the tires strolled into the motor pool.
