April 1, 2003
The company spent the day after the action at al-Hindiyah back out in the desert, rearming and cleaning up. Sgt. Will took apart the housing of the 25 mm cannon and the 7.62 mm co-axial machine gun. The ammunition feeders were entirely clogged with road dust, after 10 days on the road and the three-day dust storm, hence the jam the day before at Hindiyah.
We were full of ourselves with our successful action. We had good reason to be. None of us were dead. No one had even been scratched. A U.S. Army tank battalion against what turned out to be an infantry battalion of the Republican Guard’s Nebuchadnazzer Division, recruited from Tikrit, dug in and fighting.
An RPG a couple of feet lower would have taken out Harry McFarland and Willie Cooke in the lightly armored medic track. The tank commanders went into a rain of RPGs and small arms fire up in their hatches. Someone reported the Fox News crew was sprayed with shrapnel down by the bridge, but the word came back they suffered no serious injury. An RPG burned a hole through the skirt plate of a Bradley there, but didn’t penetrate the hull. Any one of those half-dozen GIs could have got it in the brief firefight with the holdouts, or all of them. I had come within 25 feet of those Iraqis in their overgrown ditch moments before the shooting broke out, and they had to have been watching my approach before some quirk prompted me to look over at Wolford and the interpeter, C.J. Grisham, checking bodies for documents out in the field. I have never believed in things of this sort, but I’ve examined that situation to see if it was my dead mother gently guiding me to make that 90-degree course change away from that encounter, just as it must have been her hand my 5-year-old son felt on his shoulder, stopping him dead in his tracks when he ran ahead, just short of the alley when a truck came roaring out. I don’t have any answer to any of that.
There had been the LT’s wrong coordinates that would have brought the devastating fire of the mortars down on our heads instead of the Iraqi trenchline, and of course the incident with the recoilless rifle, when our guns were jammed, and Wolford’s quick work with the grenades eliminated the threat. It is impossible to make sense of what-ifs in combat. There is no underlying logic, nor does there need to be. It doesn’t always make sense and it doesn’t need to. There are the physics of volume and direction of fire, cover, all those things, but in the end it is random. All that stuff flying around in the vastness of the world. You either get it or you don’t. We had volume of fire on our side, with the deadly accurate firepower of the 120 mm main guns and pinpoint accuracy on the mortars, and there was no question who would ultimately prevail. But at the end of the day, they were the ones shot up and missing chunks of flesh, not us.
On April 1st, we just felt good, full of ourselves. We laughed a lot.
Some of the GIs were ragging on McFarland, the medic. He had been patching up a badly wounded Iraqi soldier when the Iraqi raised himself up and kissed McFarland. The Americans were treating the Iraqis far better than they would have treated us, better than their own military would have treated them.
“That’s gay!” the GIs teased McFarland.
McFarland was bummed about it. I told him, “Those guys are idiots. Ignore them. That man was thanking you for treating him like a human being and saving his life. You should be proud.”
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:44 am on Sunday, April 1, 2007
2 Responses to “April 1, 2003”
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April 1st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.01
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April 1st, 2007 at 2:28 pm
April 1, 2003
Critter Crittenden remembers: The company spent the day after the action at al-Hindiyah back out in the desert, rearming and cleaning up. Sgt. Will took apart the housing of the 25 mm cannon and the 7.62 mm co-axial machine gun.