April 4, 2003
Baxter and I were sitting on my cot, backs against the Bradley’s skirt plate, eating MREs for breakfast and talking about Sgt. Lustig. He was the tough platoon sergeant who didn’t talk much and always meant exactly what he said. He was the one with “ACHTUNG BABY” stenciled on his tank’s gun tube. His platoon was always out front, the first to receive contact.
“He’s like fucking Satan,” said Baxter. “He don’t hesitate to blow these motherfuckers away. That’s why I told him, ‘If you were going to Hell to fight the devil, Sgt. Lustig, I’d go with you.”
“What did Lustig say?”
“He said, ‘Thank you, Pvt. Baxter, I appreciate that.’”
I pretty much felt the same way. Lustig and Wolford were aggressive, didn’t flinch, but knew when to pull back or hold their fire. They made sure things happened. They were hardasses and didn’t have the rosiest personalities, but they looked after their men. People like that would keep you alive, but there was more to it than that. They were leaders. No frills, not much charisma. But I was beginning to realize, like Baxter, I would follow them anywhere.
Riding around in an armored vehicle, blowing shit up, trying to avoid being blown up, was beginning to feel like the entirety of existence. The past and other places were very far away, and the future didn’t exist.
As Baxter and I spoke, we heard a couple of main gun rounds and some .50 caliber machine gun fire up ahead. The Red tanks were working over a strange, irregularly shaped mud mound, at least 50 feet high with weeds growing out of it, sticking up by the road just short of the woods where we had our trouble the night before. The tankers saw some armed men moving around on top of it and what appeared to be a dug-out up there overlooking us. That was not permissible. The mound didn’t look natural in this flat muddy flood plain. I wondered whether it could actually be the badly eroded remains of a mud-brick ziggurat or something like that, ancient and manmade. This was Mesopotamia, after all, and the map indicated this area south of Baghdad was rotten with ruins.
Four infantry Bradleys rumbled by our position. It was about 7 a.m. I walked over to Lustig’s tank and asked permission to climb up. We sat on the turret drinking lukewarm coffee in our canteen cups and having a smoke. The Bradleys pulled up in the area where we had been hit by RPG fire the night before, and started pumping the woods full of 25 mm cannon rounds and 7.62 co-ax fire.
Lustig and I talked about how, if these guys were the Viet Cong, same weapons but with some tactics and discipline … and a cause, any cause, something to die for … then we’d be the ones dying. Those turned out to be prescient thoughts, but we didn’t know that then.
“They’re on the receiving end of accurate fire. They’re just trying to get lucky,” Lustig said. He was puzzled by the pathetic state of their defenses, and pitied soldiers who were so poorly led. “Their fighting positions are right by the road. Coming up the road, there must have been 10 or 15 bunkers with dead guys lying all around that were right by the road. I thought, that’s a bad place to put your shit.”
Up ahead, the Bradleys dropped their ramps, and the infantrymen shuffled out. There was some shouting and arm signals. The grunts spread out and moved into the woods, rifles and SAWs leveled. A little later we heard some small arms fire in the woods.
Lustig, nearing the end of his 20 years in the Army, was soft-spoken in conversation. I told him what Baxter said about him, and added that I might put it in a story. Lustig, a family man, said he preferred to be known as a nice guy. If he was hard on his soldiers and unforgiving in battle, it was because he wanted his soldiers to prevail and live.
“My dad always told me, never lose your ability to have compassion,” Lustig said. His dad was a Korean War combat vet. “When you’ve lost that, you’ve gone over to the other side. Be brutal when you have to, but don’t lose your compassion or you lose everything.”
Compassion wouldn’t be the first thing that came to mind if asked to describe Lustig. But he had been gracious when I was imposed on his platoon back in Kuwait. If he was tough and confrontational, he was also thoughtful.
Lustig said he told his tank crewmen they had to fire without hesitation on his orders. But he said he worried about them.
“That guy down there,” he said, pointing at his gunner down inside the tank, “is close enough to see the expressions on the faces of people when he fires. I’m telling my guys, you don’t have to like this, but you do have to do it. That’s the way home.”
Looking around the Euphrates Valley farmland where we had pulled up for the night, with small mud-brick huts among the palms, Lustig said, “I didn’t think I’d see this kind of poverty this deep into Iraq.”
“You know those little farms out by the edge of the desert where we camped the last few nights?” Lustig said. “I was thinking about those people watching us, and how we just left them alone. If roles were reversed, and they were rolling into our country, their army would be killing us. But we don’t mess with them. People who are no threat can go about their business.”
Around noon, the fire-support Bradley’s crew received orders to accompany Blue Platoon and XO Lt. Tomlinson’s tank on a route that would take us north and then east through farmland, then south along the west bank of the Tigris, to engage and destroy whatever we found. The other platoons would follow other routes, linking up for the night at a point north of As Suwayrah.
Then, my notes say, “tank drops in ditch, sideways. 3-0 left to pull security.”
This was the first of a series of aggravations that would mark this 36-hour road march of destruction. We had been rolling no more than 15 minutes and had left the main road to follow what was allegedly a road through some farm fields when the muddy edge of an irrigation ditch collapsed under the left tread of Tomlinson’s tank. All 70 tons of his Abrams were pitched at a 45-degree angle in a six-foot deep ditch. After some discussion over the radio with a pissed-off Wolford, the Bradley was cut loose from Tomlinson. The M88 tank hauler was called up to pull him out. The CO wanted us with Blue Platoon to provide fire support in case they got in trouble on their patrol.
We started off again. The LT saw that the Blue tanks were most of the way across a big plowed field ahead of us, having churned up wide track marks through it. The alternative route was a narrow track atop a causeway.
“Follow them through the field,” the LT told Baxter.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, LT,” Baxter said. “We’ll get stuck if we go down there.”
“We’ll be OK,” the LT said. “Look, they’re doing fine.”
“Their treads are twice as wide as ours and they’re higher, LT. We’re gonna get stuck,” Baxter said.
“Just do it, Baxter,” the LT said. In the back Smitty and I, listening on our headsets, rolled our eyes.
“You’re the boss, LT,” Baxter said. He gunned it, dropping us off the embankment and down into the field. He did his best, charging a good 100 feet or so into the field before we slowed and stopped, mired in about 6,000 years worth of Mesopotamian mud.
“We’re stuck, LT,” Baxter said.
“Goddamn it!” the LT said. “Try backing up.”
Baxter tried that, and then tried going forward again. He tried pivoting one way and then the other. He tried rocking it back and forth. Then we all got out of the track, and watched him go through those motions again. We all offered opinions on how best to do it. At some point, we got the shovels and picks out to see if we could loosen the death grip this heavy clay had on the road wheels, with a suction-like effect on the Bradley’s flat hull and a tendency to berm up in front of the bow every time Baxter made any headway forward. The four Blue tanks were stopped up on the road, about 150 feet away. Blue Platoon leader Lt. Laughlin did not care to risk miring one of his tanks to extract us, and indicated he would wait on the road until we were out.
Laughlin’s tankers lounged on their tanks, smoking and watching us, while we dug and swore. In a nearby farmyard – presumeably the one belonging to this field we were churning up – several Iraqi farmers were moving around, tending to chores and studiously ignoring us.
I have never in my many years in several third-world countries seen locals so disinterested in crazy foreigners, particularly crazy foreigners in an embarrassing jam. I suspect they were just too scared to stare openly at this remarkable spectacle enfolding in the middle of their plowed field, unparalleled though it may have been in the 9,000-year history of agriculture in this place.
Smitty, Sgt. Will and I stripped off our shirts as we dug in the blazing sun. We dug for what seemed like an hour, shifting lumps of dark brown clay as heavy as bowling balls. The LT got in there and dug some, too. We stepped back periodically to let Baxter have another go at shifting the track.
It was getting ridiculous. Smitty, swinging a pick in the blazing noonday sun, started getting in touch with his inner Uncle Tom.
“Swiiiiiiiiiiiiing low, sweeeeeeeeeeeet chariot,” Smitty sang. “Comin’ for to carry me home! Swiiiiiiiiiiiiing low, sweet chari-eye-ot. Comin’ for to carry me home!”
Normally, Baxter would have joined in, but he was still down the driver’s hatch and way too pissed off to find any of this remotely funny.
“Y’know, this all feels reeeeeeeal familiar,” Smitty said. “Now I know why my people hated this shit so much. This familiar to you, Sgt. Will?”
Sgt. Will didn’t say anything.
“The LT, he the massa,” Smitty said.
“Shut up, Smitty,” Sgt. Will said.
“Sgt. Will, he the house nigger,” Smitty said.
“It’s gettin’ real close to pushup time, Smitty,” Sgt. Will said.
We needed water and that seemed like a good excuse to plop down on the causeway bank in the shade of a lone scraggly bush, light up butts, and forget about this pointless digging. Baxter climbed out and joined us. We began quietly swearing at our predicament and at the LT for insisting on taking this route. I made some louder observations about the Blue Platoon tankers, most of them under 20, sitting up there while we dug, including this civilian who was old enough to be everyone’s dad.
The LT trudged over to discuss the situation with Laughlin. Someone up there on the road figured out that if the eight-foot tow cables from each of the four Blue tanks were shackled together, the resulting 32-foot cable would be sufficient for one tank to perch on the causeway and haul us out without risk of miring itself.
That operation was organized and executed in about 15 minutes. The Bradley was out of the mud, crawling away over the small causeway, and we were happily on our way again, going to blow shit up. The Iraqi farmers, no doubt greatly relieved to see us leaving, probably were thrilled that all we had smashed up was one concrete irrigation ditch. My notes are mostly blank for the rest of the afternoon, but offered up the following exchange regarding a large roadside mural of Saddam Hussein.
Baxter: “Ready, Sgt. Will?”
Sgt. Will: “Y’all ready?”
Baxter: “Do it!”
Twenty-five Mike-Mike: “BOOM … BOOM … BOOM!”
Sgt. Will: “Right in the fucking face!”
Baxter: “All right, Sgt. Will!”
At 17:02, my notes indicate that we were directed to “fast roll to Objectives Jake, Max and Gus,” followed by the notation, “contact at 17:50, RPG, weapons truck, troops.” There is nothing else written down. I only vaguely recall it. The tanks must have dealt with it quickly.
“Not yet with company. Catching up,” my notes say. Sgt Will is noted saying, “I see the trail they left, though, blowing shit up.”
We met up with the rest of Assassins and an infantry platoon that had been sent with us, in a large sheep pasture surrounded by a berm, opposite what appeared to be a small town hall flying a Baathist flag. No one wanted to cross the berm to get it. It was getting dark fast, and we quickly went about the business of eating and tending to personal business while we still had a little light, because it would be pitch black momentarily, no light allowed. Smitty, who generally preferred to relieve himself on an upright, empty MRE carton with a hole cut in it and a trashbag draped inside, had borrowed a collapsible toilet seat from one of the tankers. He was quietly pooping in front of the Bradley when we heard a yelp, an “Oh shit!” and a ripple of laughter. Smitty informed me I had just lived down drinking from that piss bottle two weeks ago. The exciting news now passing from tank to tank was that Smitty had just fallen into his own shit.
It seemed quiet and secure enough that night, but Wolford recalls that our situation was tenuous:
“This was a no-sleep night for me,” Wolford said later. “We were separated from the battalion, no indirect fire support, no good comms with battalion. It was a bad situation that given one or two things could have been disaster. We had traveled down that little canal road, stopping and ground guiding the tanks at times to keep them out of the canal. We circled the wagons in that pasture/depression which at least gave us hull-down protection. To make matters worse if we had to move fast we couldn’t, because of the road network. I talked to all the platoon leaders after we got there. Fifty percent security — half of each crew remains awake — everything stays uploaded and we roll fast if we get into trouble. I stayed up all night expecting the fight that never came.”
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:34 am on Wednesday, April 4, 2007
3 Responses to “April 4, 2003”
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April 4th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.04
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April 4th, 2007 at 1:32 am
I linked from Bill’s Bites, the trackback won’t take.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:10 am
It’s hard being an LT.