April 3, 2003
We crossed the Euphrates around noon. I was asleep in the back and missed it. Another brigade, bounding ahead of us, was responsible for all the wreckage around the bridge. I learned later my friend Sig Christenson of the San Antonio Express-News had spent the night under heavy fire there, at Objective Peach. Sig had expected to die there.
Baxter was bored and annoyed that someone else was getting all this action. He began bitching about the failure of the Iraqis to put up sufficient resistance.
“This war is gay!” Baxter said.
A major battle was anticipated ahead with the Medina Division of the Republican Guard. Second Brigade, with 4-64 Armor and our company in the lead, was supposed to bound ahead and destroy the Medina Division south of Baghdad. But the enemy increasingly appeared to be combat ineffective. Iraqi tanks, guns and personnel carriers were dispersed along the roads, which were lined with makeshift bunkers. Many of them were now abandoned or manned by corpses, compliments of whoever had rolled through here ahead of us. There was little to do but take in the sights. Baxter in his driver’s hatch and the LT up in the turret kept up a running commentary on the intercom.
Baxter: “Check out that motorcycle with the sidecar with a recoilless rifle mounted on it … Whoa, dead Hajji on the right!”
LT: “Totally fried dead Hajji.”
Baxter: “The gayness is coming off a little.”
In a town, dozens of people lined the streets, waving at the passing tanks. The GIs commented on the civic art.
Baxter: “I bet this is another picture of Saddam on this big fucking billboard up ahead.”
LT: “Yeah, go figure.”
Baxter: “Look, there’s a picture of Saddam holding a rifle. … Twenty bucks says that’s another picture of Saddam coming up.”
Baxter described roadside cigarette stands, fully stocked with Iraqi Sumers, and what purported to be Marlboros, Salems and Dunhills. The stands were open for business even though an armored column was rolling through, a few hours after another armored column had blasted its way through, leaving destroyed vehicles and bodies lying around. Smitty and Baxter began developing a plan to bolt over and conduct business if the column so much as hesitated near one of these stands. The column kept rolling.
Baxter kept up his running monologue about the war’s sexual orientation. We egged him on: “So, how gay is this war?”
Baxter: “Well, it’s so gay …”
Baxter was still doing it, in increasingly pornographic detail, when we finally had contact late in the afternoon.
LT: “What the fuck! Something just blew up right in front of me!”
Capt. Wolford: “Assassin Three-Zero, it looks like you’re getting mortared.”
Wolford reported seeing men and an armored vehicle in the tree line across a farmer’s field, a couple hundred yards to our right. Sgt. Will fired a 25 mm round. Wolford moved forward and put a tank round into the Iraqi vehicle. Then Wolford told the LT to move up and rejoin the Red Platoon tanks, entering a wooded area a quarter of a mile ahead.
In the Bradley’s rear compartment, Smitty stirred from his nap.
Sgt. Lustig to Wolford: “Assassin Six, we’ve got contact. We’ve engaged a civilian vehicle. We took rounds from the vehicle. We destroyed it. Now we’re engaging dismounts.”
LT to Sgt. Will: “Fire along the wall. You can see the Hajjis over there.”
Twenty-five mike mike cannon and 7.62 machine gun fire rocked the Bradley, filling the cabin with acrid gunsmoke. Smitty sat up, fully awake now. Over the track’s roar, without keying his CVC mike, Smitty mouthed the words, “We got action?”
I nodded and mouthed back, “Yeah, we got action.”
“Fuck yeah! All right!” Smitty mouthed, flashing a goofy grin.
I gave him a thumbs up and a big goofy grin back, mouthing the words, “Fuckin’ A!”
LT: “All right!”
The LT was happy his guns were working right, after the jamming debacle at Hindiyah. Wolford warned his tankers there were friendlies on our flanks and told them to make sure they had “eyes on” before firing. Looking back, the LT noticed in a dug-out bunker by the road next to Wolford’s tank.
Sgt. Will: “You want me to shoot it?”
LT: “It’s too close to Six.”
Wolford, up in his own hatch, had seen it already and was busy opening up a grenade can. He tossed the grenade into the bunker. Then, a sustained burst of .50 caliber machine gun fire sounded up ahead, as another vehicle raced toward the Red tanks.
Baxter: “Sgt. Lustig just blew that guy’s head right off … It just exploded!”
Baxter reported that the car slammed into the front of the tank and was hung up on its main gun.
Sgt. Will: “That was the shit!”
The deep boom of a main gun shook the air.
Baxter: ‘‘They just blew that bitch off the end of the main gun!”
Lustig later claimed that never happened.
Sgt. Will: “That fucker was probably on his way home from work.”
Baxter: “Shouldn’t have come speeding at Sgt. Lustig.”
The Bradley was idling a short distance behind the Red Platoon tanks. The LT and Sgt. Will surveyed the area where we were expected to sit for the night, in a blocking position with the Red tanks.
LT: “I don’t like those woods to the right.”
Sgt. Will: “I don’t like those woods to the left or the right. … Oh shit! Get down!”
BOOM!
Sgt. Will: “RPG!”
The rocket-propelled grenade had come flying out of the woods to the vehicle’s right, exploding between the Bradley and the Red tanks. We heard another.
BOOM!
In the rear cabin, Smitty and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. As we waited for the return fire to begin rocking our vehicle, we both reached for M4s in the rack on the turret housing, in case we were hit and had to get out. We slapped magazines into the rifles and sat on the edge of our seats, ready to scramble for the hatch. I was supposed to be a non-combatant, but I had no intention of going outside without a rifle, and I wasn’t going to wait until we were hit to see how much time I’d have to grab one.
We heard more explosions and automatic weapons fire outside, but still no fire from our own vehicle. Baxter and I both keyed our mikes:
“C’mon! Light up the fucking woods!”
Up in the turret, we could hear Sgt. Will and the LT muttering to each other, something about not being able to see the target.
BOOM!
Baxter and I were yelling into our mikes now, exasperated by our vehicle’s silence as the RPGs kept flying out of the woods and exploding around us. We begged:
“Just light up the fucking woods!”
“Make them put their heads down!”
“Just do it!”
Wolford couldn’t hear me and Baxter, but he could see what was happening.
Wolford: “What’s the problem up there, Assassin Three-Zero?”
Sgt. Will: “Assassin Six, we’ve got contact, RPGs, AK 47s. We’re trying to figure out where they are coming from.”
They had remembered Wolford’s warning about friendlies on our flanks. Something Baxter and I had ceased to give a shit about.
Wolford: “Light up the fucking woods, Three-Zero! Keep their heads down!”
Sgt. Will immediately started pumping 25 mm cannon rounds and spraying 7.62 co-ax rounds into the woods. The Bradley began rocking and filling with gunsmoke. The afternoon sunlight angling through of the rear periscope blocks cut shafts of light through the blue wisps of smoke.
Baxter, exultant: “Light up the fucking woods! That’s right!”
In the back, Smitty and I slumped back in our seats and grinned at each other again, relieved by the return fire but still holding the rifles as the encounter continued. Two more RPGs sailed over the Bradley, and one over the Red tank just ahead.
That’s when Lustig’s Red tankers decided to put an end to it. They began firing main gun rounds into the woods.
I’m not sure I’ve done full justice to the Abrams’ 120 mm main gun. It can knock the turret off a Soviet-made tank, turn a Japanese SUV on the fly into a flaming hulk, take down walls and empty out rooms. It does these things with uncanny precision.
Its sound has several distinct parts to it. There’s the massive BOOM of the propellant charge; the air-ripping noise of the round headed downrange; and finally the high-explosive impact. All compressed into one concussion-inducing noise.
Fired in anger, it felt and sounded exactly like the Angel of Death hurling down the vengeance of an angry God. Horrific and biblical in its proportions. And if you think that sounds at all melodramatic or trite, then you are not sufficiently familiar with the 120 mm main gun.
The Red tanks fired four times in rapid succession. Nothing came out of the woods after that.
Wolford rolled up behind us.
“Red Four, stop the main gun rounds. We’ve got friendlies down this way! Co-ax only!”
Wolford considered the situation for a minute.
“This is untenable. We can’t hold these woods. We’re going to roll back, blocking that intersection back there, oriented this way.”
To the LT, he added: “If I were you, I’d get a good grid, and pulverize that fucking grid.”
We heard the LT and Sgt. Will up in the turret calculating a mortar mission on the woods. Then Sgt. Will radioed Wolford that they didn’t want to submit it.
Sgt: Will: “We don’t have eyes on.”
Wolford didn’t press the matter. He repeated his order for the Red Platoon tanks to withdraw.
Wolford: “We’re fucking sitting ducks up here.”
Baxter started backing out of the woods, directed by the LT up in his turret hatch.
“This war ain’t so gay anymore,” Baxter observed.
The Bradley crew dissolved into a collective giggle fit.
We settled in for a watchful night at the crossroads amid the farm fields a quarter mile back from the woods. I went into the CAS track – the M113 that carried the two Air Force close-air-support spotters – to write and transmit the day’s story. I couldn’t risk a glowing laptop screen in the open around here. The Bradley’s turret was traversing as Sgt. Will stayed on watch, so I couldn’t access the battery in there. The CAS guys were agreeable and let me disrupt their gear to get at their battery so I could power up my laptop. I set up the sat phone on the roof, with its cable coming down through the open commander’s hatch. It was hotter and more humid here in the Euphrates valley than it was in the desert. I sweated heavily inside the Air Force track, mopping myself with a cravat, one of the olive drab arm slings from the first aid kits we used as all-purpose do-rags. The CAS guys proudly showed off their banks of electronics, and let me listen to the fighter pilots’ chatter for a while.
The task of writing and filing done, I considered my sleeping arrangements. We were out of the wide open security of the desert and in among the farm-dotted woods and date palm orchards of the Fertile Crescent, no more than 10 miles south of Baghdad, where the Iraqis could sneak around at will. After the afternoon’s ambush, everyone else planned to sleep inside the vehicle. I already knew how hot and cramped that would be, so I got one of the collapsible cots out of the Bradley’s bustle rack and set it up next to the track. If we were mortared or sniped at, I’d roll off the cot and down the four-foot embankment into the furrowed field by the road.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:03 am Comments (4) on Tuesday, April 3, 2007
4 Responses to “April 3, 2003”
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April 3rd, 2007 at 1:30 am
“This war ain’t so gay anymore.”
*Snort!*
Good writing, Jules……thanks for posting this series. Don’t stop yet!
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:53 am
April 3, 2003
Critter Crittenden remembers: We crossed the Euphrates around noon. I was asleep in the back and missed it. Another brigade, bounding ahead of us, was responsible for all the wreckage around the bridge. I learned later my friend Sig Christenson
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:54 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.03
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April 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Its sound has several distinct parts to it. There’s the massive BOOM of the propellant charge; the air-ripping noise of the round headed downrange; and finally the high-explosive impact. All compressed into one concussion-inducing noise.
Oh man, we are supposed to be helping with tank tables at Camp Shelby in May. I can’t wait.