Combat and Other Shenanigans

by Piers Platt

  As the city itself came into view, Bill Oberfeld’s platoon peeled off the highway and headed north into the desert, the rest of the troop following him. The adrenaline was pumping through my veins now, a potent mix of fear and excitement; I took several deep breaths to calm myself, and tried to focus on my tasks ahead. We stopped when Staff Sergeant Barnes, in the trail Bradley, pulled several hundred yards off the road. Our vehicles then executed a 90° turn to the left, facing the city like a firing squad. We stayed there, hidden in the dark outside the city, and waited for the signal to attack. At midnight, Anvil 6 came on the net.

  “Anvil, this is Anvil 6: start your movement.”

  It was a slow, deliberate movement, controlled with deadly calm. The troop was arrayed in a shallow vee formation running from north to south, the two tank platoons with Anvil 6 in the center leading slightly, Anvil Red Platoon in their Brads to the north, and my platoon to the south and slightly behind the tanks. We crested the final rise and the city unraveled before us, disconcertingly quiet and peaceful despite the situation. A shiver of anticipation ran down my spine.

  The northern half of the troop reported small arms fire first, enemy tracers arcing out of the city towards the approaching vehicles. They returned fire immediately, Bradley gunners laying waste with 25mm fire, tank co-axial machine guns shredding off rounds into the night. I was momentarily distracted by the beauty of it – the brightly-glowing tracers zipping back and forth, criss-crossing the ground between us and the city. As I turned my attention back to the ground ahead of me and guiding my driver, a massive explosion rocked the earth ahead and to the right of us. Mortars!

  I checked where the round had landed – it had not hit any friendly vehicles, but it had been close enough to rattle us.

  “Red 1, Red 4.”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” I replied.

  “Roger: observed one round indirect fire, estimate 120mm mortar, grid: MC 982 874, over.” Sergeant First Class Martin was as composed as ever, calmly rattling off the grid coordinate where the mortar had landed so I could report it on up the chain.

  “Roger, out.”

  I jotted down the grid, checked it against my map, and grabbed the hand-mike for the troop radio. Anvil White was reporting an enemy dismount destroyed in their sector, and once they finished, I hopped in.

  “Anvil 6, Bulldawg Red 1.”

  “Go ahead, Bulldawg.”

  “Roger.” I passed on the mortar report, just as another round shattered into the ground ahead of us. They could clearly see us, and were getting closer with every round. “… just observed another round, stand by for location, over.”

  “Roger, I saw it, no need for location, over,” Captain Black told me.

  “Roger, out.”

  We continued closer to the city, the lumps of concrete coalescing into coherent buildings and streets, roofs and windows. When Captain Black judged we had approached close enough, we halted. At the southern edge of the battle, we were set at an odd angle to the city, and my gunner, Sergeant Wasser, let me know he couldn’t see directly down the streets. I dropped down into the turret to see our sector through the gunsight. He was right – the city looked like one block of buildings from our angle, and we both knew that most of the enemy movement would be along the streets.

  “We can’t move,” I told him, “It’s too dangerous to clump together any closer with that mortar fire coming in.”

  As if to punctuate my warning, another round landed ahead of us. I stood back up in my turret hatch to see where it had hit. Farther up the line, an Anvil tank opened fire with the first main gun round of the fight, the flash momentarily whiting out my night vision goggles.

  “Hell, yeah!” Schufeld yelled from the driver compartment.

  “Wasser, concentrate your scanning on the rooftops if you can’t see down the streets,” I said. “I bet that’s where their spotters are calling in the mortar fire from.”

  “Roger that,” he replied. I saw the gun tube elevate and the turret began spinning slowly.

  The mortars were only firing at us sporadically, but they were distressingly close – a single round landing on one of our vehicles could have killed that entire crew, armored plating or not. We needed air support, but only our lightly-armed Kiowas were on station so far, orbiting behind us, and I knew they were not likely to get permission to move over the city without ground forces below to support them – none of us wished to stage a Blackhawk Down reenactment this night. We would just have to gut it out and hope the mortars didn’t find us first.

  “Hey, sir?” It was one of my dismounts calling from the passenger compartment.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “The Air Force dude wants to get out and film stuff, sir.”

  I was slightly annoyed – he was just asking to do his job, but right now I had a platoon to command in combat, and I didn’t want to have to worry about a Public Relations team as well.

  “Negative – these mortar rounds are coming in too close, I don’t want him running around outside the vehicle while there’s so much shrapnel flying around.”

  “Roger.”

  “And tell him we might have to move again soon, so I don’t want to have to wait for him to load up before we can displace.”

  “Roger.”

  I sat back down in the turret, set my night vision goggles aside, and pressed my face to the gunsight, watching the city as Wasser swung the turret back and forth across our sector, his eyes glued to his own gunsight. In contrast to the tank, which displays the thermal images in green, the Bradley sight is red-hued, which gives everything a menacing, sinister air. As we scanned, we picked up a hot spot – a splash of pink-white amidst the darker crimsons and blacks. Wasser centered the sight on the spot immediately.

  “I got something,” he said.

  “I see it.”

  It was hard to see what the object was from our angle, but it looked like a man crouched in front of a wall. To our right, I heard the deep thud-thud-thud of a 25mm cannon. As we watched, the image onscreen vanished in a blur, hot clouds of fire and earth spraying around the man as the rounds impacted. One was a direct hit, chunks of gore spraying in all directions, splattering the wall behind him.

  “Oh, man …” Wasser said.

  “Fuck, that was nasty,” I agreed. We could see pieces of the man stuck to the wall, still giving off heat in the infrared scope.

  “Red 1, Red 6 – engaged and destroyed one enemy dismount with AK-47, over.”

  “Roger, nice shooting,” I replied, and switched to the troop net to pass on the report.

  “Sir, I think I got one!” Wasser told me.

  “Where?” I put my face back onto the gunsight pads, peering into the viewer.

  “Right there – see? On that rooftop?”

  On a mid-sized building, a man was lying prone facing our direction.

  “Yeah, roger – I see him.” I squinted, trying to see him better. “Do you see a weapon?”

  “Uh, I thought I did,” Wasser answered, without much conviction.

  I thought about it – by our rules of engagement, we were supposed to fire only at targets that were directly threatening us, but the rules tonight were murkier given the enemy situation – anyone in Samarra who wasn’t hiding under their beds right now was looking for a fight. Regardless of whether the man had a weapon or not, he could easily have been serving as a spotter for the mortar team that was still lobbing rounds our way, so I decided that he was fair game.

  “Can I shoot?” Wasser asked, clearly eager to record his first kill.

  “Roger, engage.”

  I dimly heard Schufeld hooting with excitement down in his driver’s station, but he was drowned out by the metallic din of the chain gun rattling into action as Wasser depressed the triggers. His first rounds landed slightly left, so he adjusted slightly, and put the second burst directly on target before the man had a chance to move.

  “Nice,” I told him. “I get to shoot next.” I flipped to the troop rad
io. “Anvil 6, Bulldawg Red 1, engaged and destroyed one enemy dismount on rooftop, vicinity grid …” I rattled off the numbers, and added Red 6’s earlier action report as well.

  “This is Anvil 6, roger.”

  The troop was continuing to engage targets regularly up and down the line, the contact reports coming in a constant stream as more and more enemy appeared on the edge of the city for their chance to take a shot at us. It was a completely unfair fight: though they fired several RPGs at our positions, we had deliberately set our attack position outside their maximum range, while our weapons could easily reach out and touch anything we could see. I spent most of the time up in my hatch, scanning the city through my night vision goggles, and checking to make sure no enemy had snuck up on us on the ground.

  “Switch out with me, sir?” Wasser asked. “My eyes are getting tired.”

  “Yeah, roger.”

  I hopped down again and sat, taking the controls and swinging the gun tube slowly back and forth across the city, stopping to check possible hot spots from time to time. It was hot down in the turret, and the sweat pooled where my forehead rested against the foam pad of the sight. I wiped my eyes and continued to scan. Suddenly, I saw a white blur in the sight. I flipped the magnification switch, zooming in on it.

  “I think I got something,” I announced, and heard Wasser drop down to his position next to me. My heart was pumping loudly.

  “Another guy on a rooftop,” Wasser noted, as I let the gun’s glowing reticule rest on a hot spot partly obscured by a low wall. The spot ducked below the wall for a second, then came back up again, clearly a man looking in our direction, using the flat roof’s perimeter wall as cover.

  “Okay,” I said, “Gun’s hot? Just put the reticule on him and fire, right?”

  “Yup,” Wasser said. “Fire about a three or four round burst, we’ll check your rounds, then adjust if necessary,” he told me.

  “Got it.”

  I thought, for a second, how completely absurd it was that my first time firing the Bradley would be in combat. I gripped the control handles firmly, feeling the massive turret respond smoothly to my touch as I eased the gun to the left a little, lining the insurgent up in the sight.

  “On the way,” I said.

  The whole sight shook as the Bushmaster thundered out four rounds, the image blurring momentarily as the gun fired, and I watched the rounds arc through the picture, falling well short and destroying the corner of a hut a hundred meters short of the target.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah. Your line’s good, just bring it up. Eyeball it,” Wasser told me.

  I pulled back on the handles, hearing the hydraulics whine in response as the heavy barrel elevated. The reticule was several increments above the man now, who had ducked lower behind the short wall, but was still visible. I pulled the trigger again, bracing for the rounds this time.

  “Target!” Wasser called out.

  The rounds smashed into the wall in front of the enemy, blowing it apart and passing through into the man beyond. He disappeared in the cloud of exploding rounds, and we saw nothing of him again. I had killed a man.

  It was strangely surreal for me – it’s hard to feel one way or the other about such a momentous event when it’s so impersonal, so detached and distant. It felt exactly like killing an enemy in a video game: there was no humanity to that white spot on my scope, no blood or agony to acknowledge having caused, just the simple fact that he was no longer there. I had expected to feel changed somehow by the experience, but nothing seemed different. I felt like I should feel sorry somehow – had he really been threatening us? Was I right to kill him? Had he died immediately, or suffered horribly? I felt slightly guilty that it had been so easy and so disproportionately unsporting of a fight.

  I had little time to reflect on it further, as the battle progressed quickly after my kill. As I stood back up in my hatch to get a better picture of the tactical situation, a mortar round crashed into the earth about 75 meters from our vehicle, the impact rattling the whole vehicle.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah, that was too close.” I sent the report to Anvil 6, pointing out that the rounds were getting closer to my platoon’s locations. Technically, we don’t report that over the net – if the enemy has managed to get hold of a U.S. radio, if he has the proper decryption key and knows how to code it in, and if he’s figured out what channel we’re broadcasting on and is monitoring our radio traffic, he could theoretically adjust his aim if we reported the incoming rounds’ location relative to our own. But that’s a lot of really big “ifs” – if we were fighting the Russians in World War Three, it might have been a possibility, but Iraqi insurgents? Not so much. Anvil 6 didn’t call me on my faux pas.

  “Roger, Bulldawg Red 1. All Anvil elements: Squadron has received control of a Specter gunship coming on station, and is passing control to me.”

  The AC-130 Specter gunship is a modified version of the standard C-130 cargo plane; instead of an empty cargo hold, the AC-130 is equipped with a variety of heavy weapons, which, depending on the specific variant, can include a 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm cannon, and a 105mm light artillery piece. All of these weapons are tied in to a sophisticated thermal video camera, which allows them to target individual enemy soldiers and vehicles with pinpoint accuracy from several thousand feet in the air.

  We could hear the aircraft circling above us, the drone of its heavy propeller engines distinct over the background noise of the battle, but we could not see it. The Kiowa team in our sector, which had been working their way up and down the edge of the city looking for targets of opportunity, pulled back away from the city, banking hard and fast to clear the impact area. The enemy mortar team was the first to go, the spotters in the aircraft quickly locating them from above. With shocking force, a 105mm shell crashed into the inner city, lighting up the night as it detonated, showering sparks and flame everywhere. Three more shells followed right behind it in quick succession: BOOM-BOOM-BOOM! We whooped and cheered from our hatches, awestruck at the demonstration. The Specter shifted targets rapidly, smearing first one enemy position and then another, often firing with multiple weapons systems at the same time. It was like watching someone use a sledgehammer to squash cockroaches – total overkill. I turned to Wasser, who had given up scanning to come out of his hatch and watch the fireworks show.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “That thing is fucking bad,” he agreed.

  I nodded, wide-eyed: “I think if God ever smote someone, he would use Specter.”

  After several minutes of gleeful hunting, the gunship ran out of targets, the rattled and dazed enemy survivors going to ground to escape the menace above. Under the new threat, the enemy stopped firing at us, too, so in order to maintain enemy contact, Anvil 6 decided to press forward with his tanks. The Bradleys – whose thinner armor made them more vulnerable to mines, IEDs, and RPGs – would remain in place, covering the tanks’ movement, and move forward when the tanks had cleared the area of larger threats.

  Staff Sergeant Neathery was in my northernmost Bradley, and was monitoring the platoon internal net of Anvil Green, the tank platoon next to him. He watched as the tanks moved forward of his position, approaching the buildings cautiously, turrets scanning fast. Anvil Green 4 was the closest tank to his position, and as he watched, the tank rolled past what looked like a bomb crater or some other large hole in the ground. Suddenly, two men stood up in the hole – they had been lying flat in the hole and had managed to remain hidden while the tank passed. One of them shouldered an RPG, pointing it at the rear deck of the tank.

  Neathery had no time to warn Anvil Green 4 – he grabbed his Bradley’s control handles and fired a sustained burst into the hole, with the tank still just feet away. The RPG team vanished in a burst of exploding shells. The tank screeched to a halt.

  “Woah! What the fuck, Bulldawg Red?!”

  Thinking the rounds had been fired in error, Anvil Green 4 was justifiably pissed, a
nd was getting ready to chew some ass when he took a look in the hole and saw what was left of the RPG team.

  “Hey, ignore my last – thanks, Red 5, owe ya one.”

  “Roger, that – we’re here for you.”

  Even with the Spectre gunship still on station, the tanks regained contact easily, sparking up several close-quarters gun battles with insurgents on the streets and in buildings. As their machine guns dealt out death to the enemy close in, the gunship above destroyed any enemy forces foolish enough to try to move to the tanks’ location to reinforce their comrades. On one occasion, the gunship even cleared “danger close” fires with Anvil 6, the tankers buttoning up in their hatches as the Air Force gunners poured a ring of fiery steel onto targets surrounding the tanks at close range.

  The tanks in the city took some pretty heavy contact – several were hit by RPG rounds, which glanced harmlessly off their armor, detonating ineffectively or ricocheting into a nearby building. They fired their main guns several times, destroying dug-in enemy positions in buildings and street barricades. But after half an hour of stirring up trouble within the objective area with the tanks, contact began to wane, and Anvil 6 made the call to withdraw. At around 3 a.m., the tanks left the city, rejoining us in our attack position while we waited for the elements of 2nd Brigade to arrive to conduct the passage of lines and take over the area. By 4 a.m. they had showed up on the highway to the south, and the ground commander contacted Anvil 6 to initiate the passage of lines. For whatever reason, perhaps because I was closest, Captain Black decided to delegate the linkup duties to me, so as Anvil Troop prepared to move back to FOB Mackenzie, I located their commander’s Humvee section and hopped down from my Brad with my map.