March 25, 2003
We spent half a day on the road, moving farther to the northwest, toward Karbala, back out into the open desert. We stopped near a scattering of cinderblocks, weather-beaten boots, rusty jerry cans, military truck frames and other junk half buried in sand. Most of the company’s tanks spread out in a long line facing the northwest, dispersed every 200 feet or so, with other tanks covering our flanks. Our more lightly armored vehicles – the fire-support Bradley, the medic tracks, the maintenance trucks and tracks and the M577 tactical operations center – were within this perimeter, an area of perhaps a square kilometer. We could see the vehicles of Task Force 4-64 HQ and the supply train formed up about half a kilometer behind us to the southeast. Cyclone Company and Attack were somewhere back there forming the rest of the battalion’s protective perimeter.
A dusty haze turned into a full-blown duststorm by mid-afternoon. It was like a blizzard, engulfing everything, reducing visibility to a matter of feet. We hunkered down in our vehicles, barely able to make out the tracks just 50 feet away from us.
The air around us was yellow at mid-day, orange in the late afternoon, blood-red at dusk and pitch black when night fell.
None of the surrounding vehicles were visible at all, and except for the radios, we were entirely cut off from each other. When Smitty and I went out into it to share a butt, Smitty was a dim shadow, standing just a few feet away. Grit flew into my mouth and formed a layer of mud on my lips. I looked down, and through my dust-covered goggles, I could make out something darting around my feet. It was a desert rat, eyeballing the open leg of my baggy J-list chemical warfare suit, a dark hole that probably looked inviting. I kicked at it, and it bolted to safety under the Bradley.
Word passed early in the evening that Spec. Terrance Johnson was missing. He had left his tank in the afternoon to go visiting at the next tank 200 feet away, and never showed up. Parties were formed to go looking for him, with their GPS pluggers for guidance and, for those who had them, thermal imaging devices to see through the storm as best they could. They were out all night.
“I was driving around, I couldn’t see shit,” the XO, Lt. Tomlinson, told me later. “Maybe three, four feet in front of the vehicle with the lights on. When we turned off the lights, closed our eyes and opened them, no difference. We could have driven right past him and never seen him.”
As the night went on it rained mud. The wind got colder. Enemy raiders attacked somewhere nearby, and we heard the clatter of small arms fire and booming artillery muffled by the dust cloud.
Everyone in our crew, except whoever was on sentry duty up on the thermals in the turret, packed themselves into the back of the Bradley to get out of it. It was cramped and suffocating, even with the temperature dropping outside. Screw it, I thought, and went out and took a cot out of the bustle rack. Don’t want to sleep on the ground with the rats and snakes. I set it up next to the left track, under the bustle rack’s steel overhang, which would keep rain off me and keep me from getting run over if anyone drove through camp. There was the issue of crunchies running around out there, as Smitty put it, but that threat seemed remote despite the evidence to the contrary. I burrowed into my sleeping bag and tucked a keffiyeh over my face.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:25 am on Sunday, March 25, 2007
2 Responses to “March 25, 2003”
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March 25th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.03.25
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March 25th, 2007 at 2:17 am
I linked from Bill’s Bites. The trackback isn’t taking for some reason. Still looking forward to the book.