March 23, 2003
Smitty and I had spent most of the last 40 hours in a six-by-six vibrating, roaring steel box, just two small dust-clogged periscope blocks for a view. The good news was it was just Smitty, even with his elbows and knees and size 14 boots everywhere. A lot of guys were packed in spaces like this in sixes and eights, and had to switch leg positions in unison. Smitty and I had enough room to take turns sacking out on an improvised duffle bag mattress on the floor. I dreamt strange anxiety dreams. The column was leaving, and I needed to get back to my vehicle. The radio chatter and electronic beeps over my CVC helmet’s headphones was the running soundtrack of my dreams. Baxter drove all but a few hours. Sgt. Will and the LT just slumped in their seats up in the turret when they wanted to sleep. Dust poured in, covering everything. We pissed in empty plastic water bottles, which we handed up to be thrown out the turret when they were full. I got half a mouthful of watered-down piss and soggy cigarette butts when I picked up the wrong bottle in the dark. I gagged and spat a lot and used a lot of Listerine. The taste of piss has the same property as the smell of rotting dead people: you don’t forget it.
Around midnight, we pulled up on the southwestern flank of Najaf. Rogue, or 1/64, our sister battalion, was engaged in a fight up ahead. Rogue had encountered technicals -– gun-mounted pickup trucks -– and Iraqis in a trench complex. They killed about 40 of them.
Around 0300, 4/64 with Assassins in the lead was ordered to bound ahead of Rogue and secure the northern approach to the brigade’s new area of operations. Wolford radioed that we’d be fighting our way through, and gave orders to his platoons to move. Everyone had got out of formation to fuel up, and now everything immediately got fowled up.
Wolford to platoon leaders: “Are you guys fucking idiots? You’re killing me here. We have tanks everywhere! Get your heads out of your asses and maneuver your platoons!”
LT to Wolford: “Assassin Six, what’s our ET on movement?”
Wolford to LT: “Momentarily, as soon as we can unfuck ourselves.”
Baxter to the Bradley crew:
“Y’know, we’re supposed to be the best army in the world because we’re so fast, so swift. What the fuck?”
“Listen up, guidons,” Wolford said. ”Rogue is still in contact … We’re going into a hot situation. Once we cross the 33 ( map grid line), it’s weapons free, and I want you to kill fucking everything. There are dismounts to the east of the road and dismounts to the west, and those guys aren’t fucking around. They’ve got RPGs and rockets and they’ve taken casualties.”
“Game time,” the LT said.
“Assassin Three-Zero, when we cross the road, I want you to blow the shit out of that 271365,” Wolford told the LT, refering to the grid position of an Iraqi trench complex. He ordered the tanks to move forward at 20 kph, with a 100-meter dispersion.
“Red One,” he told Lt. Middleton. “I want you to draw those fuckers into a fight so we can kick his ass.”
“We are in the shit now,” Baxter remarked.
First, however, we needed to fuck up some more. At 0410, my notes say, “Red misses a turn, tried to correct by going thru desert, causes a cluster fuck.”
At 0430 we moved past Rogue. Wolford told Red Platoon, “I want you to go down the road, fire every machine gun you’ve got. The intention is to draw fire or make him run, or make him fire back so we can get this fight going.”
But just before entering the town, Wolford changed his orders to ”weapons tight, no recon by fire.” There was concern about Bedouin farmers.
The LT said, “Guidance from Spartan coming down. We cannot fire our artillery targets without confirmed enemy.”
“Fuck them Bedouin!”Baxter said. “Motherfuckers oughtn’t be hanging around with them Iraqi soldiers if they don’t want to die.”
It was 0507 now, and it would be light soon. We listened on the company net as the Red Platoon tankers, with night vision and thermal imaging devices, spotted figures darting around buildings and two of them walking down on the road. A burst of machine gun fire sent the pair running for a ditch. One of them ran back for something in the road, and then dove back into the ditch. The Red tanks withheld their fire, and a discussion ensued with Wolford, who told them to move forward and fire off to one side to see if it drew a reaction.
It was hard to imagine civilians out for a stroll in the dark when there had been machine gun and tank fire going on half the night all around in the neighborhood. Were these people out of their minds? We would be variously bemused, baffled, sickened and even bitterly enraged and distraught as we discovered that Iraqi civilians seemed to operate on the assumption that all that fire was intended for someone else and couldn’t possibly be a matter of concern for them. The deeper in we got, the more of them got killed.
“These are little Bedouin farms. We’ll never know who the enemy is,” the LT said, up in his turret perch.
“Fucking shoot ‘em all!” said Baxter.
Over the radio, Wolford said, “All right, roll up on ‘em. Let’s see what they’ve got.”
Lustig said, “I see more dismounts, ducking behind walls.”
“If I lived here, I’d be ducking behind walls, too,” the LT said.
“If I lived here, I wouldn’t fucking come out,” Baxter said.
No one was spotted with a weapon, and no one was killed. The enemy had bolted, and ride through town had gone without contact. We took up our blocking position just north of the town, and watched the sun rise over peaceful farmland. There was the sound of gunfire to the south of us, but in the little farmyards nearby, there were roosters crowing and sheep baaing. The pre-dawn tension was over. Looking around, I felt like I was finally in Iraq now, out of the desert and in a place where people actually lived, in the Fertile Crescent, where things grew. It was familiar, this little farming village waking up, like a lot of places I had been before, and I was glad that the soldiers not killed these people during the night, and that they hadn’t destroyed these wretched little mud houses.
Our fire-support Bradley was stopped in the middle of the road, facing north. In the bright morning light of March 23, the one lone tank 100 feet up the road and a couple of others in the fields on our flanks were the northernmost U.S. conventional forces in Iraq.
We used our first downtime in 48 hours to make instant coffee in our canteen cups with lukewarm water out of the inefficient heater in the back of the Bradley. Then we rinsed our cups, brushed our teeth out of them and then shaved out of them, resting the cups and our toiletries and Sgt. Will’s pocket mirror on the edge of the armor plating at the rear of the Bradley, where it forms a little shelf. It also served as a handhold and foothold for climbing up and down, and became one of the most familiar places in the world, in the weeks I lived in and on and around that machine. I walked out into the plowed field to relieve myself. We changed out filthy socks and underwear, and used baby wipes and sponges to wash off what we could of the grime of two days of desert travel, plus two days before that since our last chance to stand under the shower bucket back in Kuwait. But we had not even begun to get filthy.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 2:40 am on Friday, March 23, 2007
5 Responses to “March 23, 2003”
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March 23rd, 2007 at 3:12 am
March 23, 2003
Critter remembers:Smitty and I had spent most of the last 40 hours in a six-by-six vibrating, roaring steel box, just two small dust-clogged periscope blocks for a view. The good news was it was just Smitty, even with his elbows
March 23rd, 2007 at 3:13 am
March 23, 2003
Critter remembers:Smitty and I had spent most of the last 40 hours in a six-by-six vibrating, roaring steel box, just two small dust-clogged periscope blocks for a view. The good news was it was just Smitty, even with his elbows
March 23rd, 2007 at 3:42 am
There you go again, Critter, indulging in those obscene amenities we’ve heard about.
March 23rd, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Complaining about the damned nastiness is spot on. You grab whatever sleep you can get and eat MREs without too much complaint, but being dirty sucks. I also like the bit about making MRE coffee, I’ve got a little one-burner gas Coleman stove that packs away pretty neatly and I have used it for everything from making coffee to heating up canned food and it is a real crowd pleaser. Solar showers are OK too, but I doubt if you guys were sitting still long enough to use one for most of this trip.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:38 am
You haven’t been dirty until you’ve got so nasty it feels like you’ve got damp clay shoved down the front of your trousers and the seat of your pants constantly stick to your ass after siting down.