March 31, 2003
Around two in the morning, I lay awake on my cot under the Bradley’s bustle rack. There was a heavy, choking fear crawling between my gut and my throat. I wondered how I could do this to my wife and children, and I wished I was with them. I thought about whether I was going to be killed outright by a clean shot, burned to death inside the track, or just horribly maimed in a few hours time when we went in. I know I wasn’t the only one in camp doing this.
I don’t think I allowed it to last more than 10 minutes. I had experience with the kind of fear that wants to become panic. Fear is manageable, but when you feel panic start to creep in around the edges, you want to shut that down right away. I thought about the fact that I was exactly where I wanted to be. I remembered my buddy Mike Kirsch’s comic-book hero pronouncement before he threw himself across a bullet-riddled Bosnian clearing: “Well, gotta die somehow.” There were a lot worse ways than getting killed here. I managed to fall back to sleep again before we all began moving around 0330 or so. First Sgt. Ortiz called the stand-to at 0430.
Our battalion’s objective this morning, the bridge over the Euphrates at al-Hindiyah, would put us within artillery shot of the gates of Babylon. Our company was leading the assault, and would push through to the north side of the town to assume a blocking position to the north, the direction from which Iraqi reinforcements might come down from Karbala. The infantry company and the other tank company would turn right and push through town to the bridge. It was a feint designed to draw enemy forces out of Karbala and Hillah for purposes of their destruction, and distract the enemy from our intended route across the Euphrates farther north, on Baghdad’s western flank. Strength of enemy defenses around the bridge at Hindiyah were unknown.
On Ortiz’s order, the company’s 14 Abrams tanks, the fire-support Bradley, the M113s all started their engines, formed into a column by platoons and shortly afterward headed east toward the river and Hindiyah.
We came out of the desert at dawn. The tanks kicked up dust by mud hut farms, their skull-and-crossed-saber guidons whipping in the wind.
“This all looks so ancient … Nothing has changed here in 2,000 years,” said the LT, up in his turret hatch. There were people in the doorways of the farmhouses watching us pass.
As we neared al-Hindiyah, Wolford radioed the order to pour on speed for the assault. Our vehicle lunged forward, the vibration and already deafening track and engine noise intensifying as Baxter accelerated. It was the 21st century equivalent of a cavalry charge. It felt like surfing toward rocks, on a massive heavy metal wave. The anticipation of fire brought all our senses alive and we were all wired, beneath the mutual small-talk and joking pretense that this was somehow normal, a Monday morning carpool to work. I suppressed the thought of fire coming through the steel walls of the Bradley and being dead in a few minutes, and it was not so hard, as we became engaged. Our Bradley was in line behind the Red Platoon tanks, where the Bradley’s fire-support team could call in artillery as needed, with White and Blue Platoons following. The Red tankers just ahead of us reported Iraqi RPG teams scrambling into roadside ditches as we approached.
“We’ve got contact,” Lustig said over the radio, matter-of-fact and cool about it.
The tankers opened up with their .50 caliber and 7.62 mm machine guns. For the first time, I heard a 120 mm main gun fire. It was a horrific, merciless noise. It cut right through the track noise, right through my CVC helmet’s headphones where I sat in my regular perch in the back of the Bradley, taking notes. Then the shock wave rocked our 27-ton armored vehicle.
LT: “He blew the fuck out of that thing. It was awesome. That’s shit you see in the movies.”
Sgt. Will, also up in the turret: “I see somebody. A lot of people down the road, running.”
LT: “I’d be running too.”
Baxter, up front driving: “Y’all see that dog? The main gun round go off, that bitch just froze!”
LT: “Oh shit! RPG!”
Baxter: “Where, where?”
LT: “Left, left!”
Sgt. Will: “Fire?”
LT: “Yeah… Fire!”
The Bradley rocked with the recoil of its 25 mm cannon, and acrid bluish smoke wafted into the rear cabin.
LT: “I don’t see anyone moving around anymore.”
RPGs were now rocketing through and over the column. One skidded skyward off an Abrams turret’s angled armor. Another barely cleared the medic track. Small arms and mortar fire was kicking up dust around the vehicles.
Wolford to White One: “There are dismounts behind that wall. Take down the wall.”
Wolford a few seconds later: “I don’t hear you firing, White One.”
Several thunderous main gun discharges shook our vehicle.
Wolford: “We just killed seven dismounts. They’re lying on top of that bunker complex. There’s still another bunker. Take it out, White One.”
There was another boom of main gun fire.
White One: “One bunker destroyed, sir.”
Up ahead, Red Platoon arrived at the company’s designated blocking position north of town. Lustig reported that a vehicle was ignoring repeated warning shots and kept coming on. Another main gun discharge.
Lustig: “He’s got the message now.”
The burning pickup truck was a short distance from where we would spend the day. Two men lay face down on the ground beside the vehicle, thrown out by the blast. One was on fire. His body fat would remain aflame for at least a couple of hours. The other just a bloody mess, his back gone.
The Bradley pulled up beside the Red Platoon tanks, pivoting right to face the east side of the road. What turned out to be a company of Republican Guard infantry was dug in among the date palms there. Mortar, recoilless rifle and RPG positions, obscured among the brush and palms immediately before us, were backed across an open field at a distance of about hundred yards by a large berm, from which more fire was coming. There were farmhouses on both sides of the field, where terrified farmers and their families huddled, along with Iraqi soldiers who had taken up positions there. Wolford’s tank was herringboned beside the Bradley, call sign “Assassin Three-Zero.”
Wolford: “Hey Three-Zero! You’ve got dismounts right in front of you. Fire your fucking weapon!”
LT on our vehicle’s intercom: “I don’t see shit.”
Wolford: “Hey Three-Zero! Put that 25 on the wood line!”
The Bradley’s 25 mm cannon sounded. “BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!” The vehicle rocked and filled up with gunsmoke again.
Smitty, in the back with me: “Yeah! Shit! We’re killing!”
Baxter: “Whoa, fucking RPG right on the side of the road!”
Sgt. Will: “Misfire!”
Wolford: “Hey Three-Zero. There’s a recoilless rifle right in front of you. You’d better put a 25 round in that recoilless or it’ll light up your ass!”
LT: “Fuck!”
Both the 25 mm cannon and the 7.62 mm co-axial machine gun were jammed.
Sgt. Will: “Hey, hand me that M4 up here.”
The recoilless crew was in the ditch about 25 feet on our right flank. If they got a shot off pointblank, their armor-piercing round could shred us to pieces inside the Bradley.
Wolford: “Three-Zero, he’s about to fire behind you, you need to get down!”
Wolford couldn’t manuever his 120 mm main gun or even angle his .50 caliber machine gun down to destroy the recoilless in the ditch. So he dropped down into his turret, grabbed two grenades from a box he kept handy, and threw them out the hatch in the direction of the gun. When he came back up, the recoilless was on its side, and two Iraqis were dragging a dead or badly wounded Iraqi back into one of the farmhouses.
Baxter: “I see some of those motherfuckers moving to the right.”
LT: “I see ‘em.”
Wolford to battalion fire support: “Tusker Three-Zero. We need some artillery out there.”
Smitty, who was becoming increasingly excited, his knees jerking with pent-up energy, took his M-4 from the rack on the turret housing and slapped a magazine into it.
Smitty: “God, I want to go Rambo.”
Baxter: “We’re taking small arms. I can see some dust kicking up here.”
Lustig: “We’ve got some personnel running. I can’t identify whether they are in uniform, but they are definitely hauling ass.”
Baxter: “We got Hajjis in front of us running, to my direct front. He’s got something. He’s got a fucking RPG right over there!”
Sgt. Will: “We’ve got a feeder malfunction!”
Baxter: “He’s fucking out there somewhere!”
Smitty: “Fucking kill him!”
LT: “Oh shit, man! … Oh, it’s a dog, never mind.”
Baxter: “That berm over there. That’s where the cocksucker is at!”
On Wolford’s order, the LT began preparing a fire mission on the Iraqi trench line.
LT to Smitty: “257014.”
It was Smitty’s job to relay the fire mission grid coordinates to battalion fire-support.
LT: “No, that’s our position! Hold on! 264014.”
Smitty relayed the new grid.
Baxter: “I still see those motherfuckers running around out there. There’s about 20 of them by that big building.”
Tusker Three-Zero: “Mission approved, stand by to observe incoming.”
Moments later, a series of massive explosions, a heavy, rolling rumble.
Sgt. Will: “Smitty, left 400, drop 200 on the mortars.”
LT: “I can’t see shit!”
A second salvo impacted.
Smitty: “End the mission. Over six dismounts and a bunker destroyed.”
Tusker Three-Zero: “Did we kill ‘em?”
Smitty: “Roger, they saw bodies flying in the air.”
LT: “Smitty, you can’t just make shit up in combat!”
Smitty laughed.
Lustig: ”OK, right now we’ve got a white flag from that bunker we engaged. Now we’ve got four personnel with the white flag.”
Tusker Three-Zero: “Just keep an eye on them. A white flag doesn’t mean shit until they are bound and gagged.”
Sgt. Will: “You don’t need to tell me!”
Most of the Iraqi soldiers had stripped out of their uniforms. Some wore gymsuits or t-shirts and shorts, one had on nothing more than a baggy pair of bikini briefs. Through the rear periscope block, I could see Wolford and a couple of tankers dismounting to meet them. The Iraqis had their hands on their heads, and Wolford was waving them down onto the pavement with his 9 mil. The LT reported a woman in a black, head-to-toe abaya emerging.
LT: “I can’t see one of her hands. Keep an eye on her.”
I asked the LT for permission to get out of the Bradley.
LT: “What the heck. If the CO doesn’t want you out there, he can tell you to get back in.”
The woman was one of a family of terrified farmers coming out from a farmhouse 100 feet in front and to the right of us. Wolford directed them to cover behind the Bradley. Two women in abayas and two little girls in dirty pink and red smocks huddled there and wept. Wolford asked who had candy for the kids. I took some MRE candy from my pocket and offered it, but the kids refused to look at me and the women angrily waved it away. Wolford, trying to reassure them, showed pictures of his own wife and kids. Heavy machine-gun fire resumed from the vicinity of the berm, answered by the .50 cals on the tanks. Red tracer streaks darted through the palms. The Iraqi women pushed the little girls down and covered them with their bodies. One woman, crouched over, began breastfeeding an infant I hadn’t noticed before.
An incendiary grenade was fired into the farmhouse to dislodge a suspected sniper, and a teenaged youth huddling with the women began speaking and gesturing frantically. It took a few minutes, but when C. J. Grisham, one of the Arabic-speaking counterintelligence specialists, understood his request, the Iraqi youth was allowed to go in. He re-emerged a few minutes later with a hobbling old man. Then Wolford told the family they needed to leave. They didn’t want to go but, Grisham translated for Wolford, if they didn’t get moving down the road, they’d be zipstripped. They argued a little more, but finally moved out.
The surrendering Iraqi soldiers sat zip-tied on the pavement in front of us. They stared at us, a couple with dark, menacing looks, most just frightened. One of them was trembling uncontrollably. One had what looked like a smirk. He was the one who could barely keep his genitals inside his baggy bikini briefs. Baxter was out of the vehicle now and covering the prisoners with his rifle.
Bikini Briefs to Baxter: “What is you name?”
This was funny. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard some kid in a Pakistani village or a Bangkok slum say that exact phrase, usually followed by a request for something. This guy had a lot of attitude for someone who had just survived a mortar barrage to surrender in his underwear.
Baxter: “Hey, this fucker’s speaking English to me.”
Bikini Briefs: “You give me cigarette.”
Baxter: “Shut the fuck up!”
It was turning into a bright, sunny day. More Iraqis came out, a couple of them carrying a wounded comrade. First Sgt. Ortiz was zipstripping prisoners. Sgt. Harry McFarland, the medic, was working on a young Iraqi soldier who had been shot through his upper thigh and buttocks. Part of another Iraqi’s boot had been blown off, and it was a bloody mess. He didn’t look good. He was going into shock.
Around mid-morning, an M577 command track and an Abrams tank pulled up. Col. Perkins, the brigade commander, and 4-64’s CO, LTC deCamp, jumped out and went to talk with Wolford. Atlantic Monthly writer Michael Kelly, my acquaintance from the embed bus, climbed out of the 577 behind Perkins. Kelly’s round face was swimming in his oversized chemical warfare suit and helmet. He beamed. As others who knew him have noted, Kelly had the ability to make you immediately feel like an old friend. I was surprised and pleased to see him.
“How are you doing?” he said.
“Fine. Busy morning,” I said. I told him what had been happening here, and he gave me a little about the fight through town to the bridge, where the mechanized infantry had encountered moderately heavy resistance.
I got a couple of quotes from Perkins, and then the HQ vehicles left. Down the road, the body was still burning by the pickup truck Lustig had destroyed, but the shooting had eased off and the locals were beginning to come out. They walked by with their hands in the air, big grins and white cloths held high to show their good intentions. A pair of boys on a horse cart went by, standing up in the driver’s seat, waving a white hankie just like the grownups.
Fighting continued down at the bridge in town, where the Americans reported seeing gun-mounted trucks on the far side moving behind lines of women and children. Wolford remained concerned that our flanks were open and reinforcements might try to work their way back in. I climbed up to talk to Lustig on his tank. He was sitting by his .50, eyeballing the locals.
“You watch these guys and look at their body language. Some are genuinely concerned. Others are leaning in doorways, their arms crossed. Those are the ones you watch,” Lustig said.
As we talked, an RPG streaked out of the trees a couple hundred feet or so down the road, a white-hot flash trailing white smoke. It flew high and wide. The tankers in that part of the column opened up.
Wolford took a party of tankers and combat engineers in among the date palms to gather up the Iraqi weapons and ammo. I moved in with them, examining the places where the Iraqis had slept around their weapons in shallow depressions. There were cheap multi-colored civilian blankets lying in depressions around the mortars, forming dusty little nests. In one place, there were some tin mess kits and a pot of half-cooked lentils. We had surprised them at breakfast.
The dogs who had been barking all morning were quiet and a pair of donkeys were chewing their fodder in a farmyard nearby. As some soldiers hefted the Iraqi ammo to the collection point where they would be destroyed, a couple of artillery rounds whistled overhead and exploded in the palm groves across the highway.
“That stuff’s going the wrong way. Let’s get this stuff and get out of here,” said Wolford. The destruction of Iraqi defenses around the bridge at Hindiyah and the theoretical confusion of Iraqi military command had been accomplished. Unclear whether we had succeeded in luring anyone out of Karbala or Hillah to get killed by the Air Force. No one told us.
As the soldiers hefted the Iraqi weapons, I walked over to what appeared to be an irrigation or drainage ditch and walked along it, looking down at the weapons and crates full of RPG and mortar rounds where the Iraqis had set up fighting positions in it. Then I looked up and saw Wolford and Grisham checking some Iraqi bodies for documents out in the field and walked over to join them.
I had just reached them when several bursts of AK and M4 rifle fire sounded behind me.
“We just killed two of them!” a GI shouted. But the heavy thunking noise of AK 47 fire resumed and the GIs, half a dozen of them, flattened themselves behind palm trunks. Wolford, Grisham and I began moving toward the fight, going from one palm to another. Recognizing that both parties of riflemen were intently focused on each other about 50 feet ahead of us, my initial feeling of vulnerability to fire in the open field subsided. I leaned against one of the date palms, looking around and taking notes. I could see five or six GIs kneeling behind piles of earth and palm stumps, exchanging fire with some unseen Iraqis in a ditch, under a large clump of brush. The leaves were fluttering and puffs of dusts were kicking up on both sides of the exchange. Looking back, I saw Grisham’s head poking out one side of the next tree back, and Wolford looking around the other side.
Grisham ran forward to the next tree ahead of me, yelling “Esteslem, esteslem!” He explained later that meant “Surrender!” The Iraqis answered with AK fire, and the GIs returned a heavy volley of M4 fire and the plunk of an M203 grenade launcher.
“I think I got him!” yelled the GI with the grenade launcher, one of the combat engineers. But the AK fire resumed. Wolford, exasperated, ran ahead emptying his 9 mil at the ditch. Taking cover, he yelled at the GIs, “Anyone got a grenade? When you throw it, bound up on him while he’s still stunned!”
The GIs followed Wolford’s advice, and finally the firing stopped. A wild animal-like moaning noise came out of the ditch. The Iraqi who was making that noise crawled out from under the brush.
“I got him! I got him!” the M203 gunner yelled, running up and pointing his rifle down at the blood-smeared Iraqi. The Iraqi was writhing on the ground, wailing and moaning in pain and anger. One of his buttocks was ripped open.
“Stay down, motherfucker!” the GI shouted. The Iraqi kept moaning loudly. A couple more GIs came up and pointed their rifles down at him.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“How’s that 203 round taste, motherfucker! That was me!”
“I told him ‘esteslem,’ ” Grisham said. The Iraqi, lying on his face, heard that and waved his hand dismissively. He interrupted his moaning to spit out the words, “esteslem, esteslem” in an “all right already” tone.
There was a dead kid lying in the ditch, shot in the head. Two more Iraqi holdouts lay 15 feet farther down on their backs against the rear of the ditch, one dead and the other in shock, ashen-faced, with a gaping hole in his thigh, ragged bloody meat and white sinew showing where a grenade had torn a chunk out. We thought it was over, but as the GIs began carrying that one out, AK fire erupted from a position 100 feet farther along.
“You might want to get behind this tree, sir. We aren’t done killing them all yet,” one of the engineers said politely.
“You don’t have to call me sir. I’m a reporter.”
“You’re a reporter? Where from, sir?”
“Boston Herald.”
“Boston Herald. Oh … cool, sir. You getting some good stories?”
“Yeah, everything’s good.”
The exchange of M4 and AK fire continued as we talked. Then the engineer with the M203 got back into it and fired a grenade. It exploded with a whump, kicking up some dust. There was more AK fire. We could see some rustling in the brush. The engineer checked his aim and fired another grenade, dead on this time. The AK fire stopped.
The GIs were moving back up to the road, carrying the two wounded Iraqis out of the ditch. I stopped for a minute by one of the dead ones. He was a clean-cut, nice-looking teenager in a forest-green Republican Guard uniform, lying on his side against the back of his ditch, still holding his AK in his hands. His eyes were wide open, staring at the branches a few inches in front of his face. He had a neat hole in the side of his face where a bullet had drilled straight back into his brain. He barely looked dead. I remember thinking what a waste it was, and that his parents were going to be upset about this. I remember thinking: “You stupid motherfucker. Your buddies zip-tied up on the road over there will be eating MREs tonight. And look at you. All done.”
Wolford said later this was a battalion of the Nebuchadnazzer Division, recruited from the Tikrit area. “Saddam’s boys,” he said. That might explain why some of them held out and fought the way they did. Nine months later, when Saddam was captured, I remember feeling like something was wrong, not being sure what it was, and finally realizing that it was about that kid, the tears I could barely hold back, because he died for nothing, for Saddam. And I remember thinking much later, that if he had lived, the little fuck would have just gone back home to Tikrit to build car bombs.
Walking around the dead kid’s clump of brush toward the road, I looked down and realized that his overgrown ditch was the one I had been walking along 20 minutes earlier. There was a crate full of RPG rounds in the ditch and I recognized the spot where I had veered off to join Wolford and Gresham out in the field.
I joined Grisham for the walk up to the road.
“First time I’ve ever been shot at. Pretty exhilarating,” he said.
“You know what Winston Churchill said about that? ‘There is nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without effect.’ It feels great when they miss.”
I realized I had not experienced the same intense rollercoaster of terror and exhilaration I felt the first time, when photographer Brian Walski and I were briefly mortared in Kashmir five years earlier. Not even the brief elevator-dropping gut fear of running toward the sound of AK fire in pitch darkness with some American paratroopers in a Serb neighborhood in Kosovo. This had been different. I had, in fact, enjoyed myself. I had a lot of good material in my notebook. My editors would be happy and impressed. Big bad war correspondent.
Smitty felt the same way. As we cranked down the Bradley’s hatch for the ride back out into the desert, Smitty said, “That shit gonna make me re-enlist.”
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:29 am on Saturday, March 31, 2007
9 Responses to “March 31, 2003”
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March 31st, 2007 at 1:37 am
March 31, 2003
Critter Crittenden remembers: Around two in the morning, I lay awake on my cot under the Bradley’s bustle rack. There was a heavy, choking fear crawling between my gut and my throat. I wondered how I could do this to
March 31st, 2007 at 1:38 am
March 31, 2003
Critter Crittenden remembers: Around two in the morning, I lay awake on my cot under the Bradley’s bustle rack. There was a heavy, choking fear crawling between my gut and my throat. I wondered how I could do this to
March 31st, 2007 at 1:55 am
Some Never Tire of Hyping Bush’s War
In the blogosphere, some conservative bloggers never tire of hyping Bush’s war. Infact, Jules Crittenden, conservative columnist for the Boston Herald is so enamored with it, that he’s re-living his embed days from ‘03 on his blog.
…
March 31st, 2007 at 3:24 am
Great stuff, sir.
(Heh. Idiot thinks its hype.)
March 31st, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Lying Infidel! The filthy Americans were never within a zillion miles of al-Hindiyah!
May the Fleas of a Thousand Camels infest your undergarments for all Eternity! I curse you from my strategic headquaters in Iran, where I have “redeployed” (your famous military expert Colonel Jack Murtha is not the only tactical mastermind on the planet) my forces until they can wreak vengeance on the ineffectual Coalition forces and their so-called “surge”!!!
Bah!!!!
March 31st, 2007 at 4:48 pm
For the first time, I heard a 120 mm main gun fire.
The hammer of freaking God!!!
Several things jumped out at me from this piece: first, I hope that the LT who threw the grenades at the Hajis who were shooting the recoilless rifle was decorated. Second, the image of you leaning up against a tree reminded me of an old “Willie and Joe” Bill Mauldin cartoon where a reporter is standing up, lighting a cigarette at night, telling the boys that “its OK, I’m a noncombatant.” Lot’s of good stuff here.
I’ve heard this “Bush’s war” crap so often I could scream-the last time I looked America was at war in Iraq, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that leftards want to exempt themselves from that considering that they generally exempt themselves from the rest of America, but seeing them take such obvious pride in that view in print still shocks me.
March 31st, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Capt Wolford got a Silver Star but not for that, CavMed
March 31st, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Well, it was worth at least a BSM with V IMHO.
March 31st, 2007 at 7:45 pm
i>Jules Crittenden, conservative columnist for the Boston Herald is so enamored with it, that he’s re-living his embed days from ‘03 on his blog.
And what have you done for us lately, asshole. Been out of your house, yet?