April 5, 2003
Stumbling across the field before dawn looking for a place to relieve myself, I saw bright flashes and what appeared to be large amounts of anti-aircraft fire arcing across the northern sky, toward Baghdad.
By 0640 we were rolling toward the headquarters of the Medina Division, where we had been told to expect the epic tank battle. At 0905, on the outskirts of As Suwayrah, Red Platoon and the Bradley fired on some military trucks and armored vehicles. Baxter noticed a red crescent on one of the vehicles.
Baxter: “It’s a goddamn ambulance!”
LT: “Cease fire, cease fire! It’s an ambulance.”
Baxter: “So, Sgt. Will, what’s it feel like to be a murderer?”
Sgt. Will: “About the same as it felt last time.”
There was nothing to indicate any of the vehicles were occupied.
Baxter: “You’re going to hell, Sgt. Will.”
Baxter reflected: “I’ll be right there with you.”
An ammo truck began cooking off. It exploded massively behind us. Smitty and I watched it through the rear periscope blocks. We heard Wolford on the radio telling Lustig, “Hey, Red Four, don’t destroy any more trucks that close to the road until we go by.”
Ammo cookoffs were spectacular, but a problem for vehicles coming up behind, when RPGs started flying out of them and exploding artillery shells started throwing stuff around.
The LT and Sgt. Will reported seeing uniforms and boots lying on the ground by the vehicles we were passing, where deserters had stripped them off. This part of As Suwayrah seemed to be largely, but not entirely deserted.
Baxter: “Don’t let Sgt. Lustig see that guy on the roof. He’ll fuck him up. Hey, look at that guy on the motorcycle, hauling ass!”
LT: “Holy shit, it’s a fucking wasteland out here.”
A T-72 tank was smoking by the road, its turret upside down beside it. We pulled through the gates of a military base that was the Medina Division HQ. Red Four was dispatched to cut down the division’s flag.
Sgt. Will: “You see those buildings? They blown to shit. What the fuck are we doing here?”
The Air Force or cruise missiles had been here long before us. The place was in ruins and empty, no sign or smell of bodies in the rubble when we went through them later. Not even much in the way of furniture. No vehicles whatsoever. It looked as though they pulled out and took everything with them before the war even started. I don’t know why the satellites hadn’t noticed any of that.
LT: “Everybody’s just circling around.”
Smitty: “So where are all the tanks and the soldiers?”
Baxter: “Baghdad!”
We had already seen a lot of them. Vehicles placed along the roads, abandoned or manned by corpses. Deserters walking away.
But the brass estimated that in the last day or so, the brigade had destroyed only about 40 of the Medina Division’s tanks. That left about 100 unaccounted for. We moved on from the Medina HQ buildings to a vast, empty tank training ground, and lounged in the shade of our tracks for a while. White Platoon was dispatched to inspect a suspected chemical weapons storage site nearby, but found nothing.
Assassins Company was sent on to Mahawhil, headquarters of the Medina Division’s 14th Brigade, to destroy their base. Heading out the gate at As Suwayrah, we watched an M88 tank hauler pulling down a statue of Saddam.
Rolling through Al Mashru enroute to Mahawhil in the afternoon, Lustig reported seeing men with AKs mixed in with a crowd. The people there were subdued as they watched us pass, knowing the men with the AKs would still be there when we were gone.
As we rolled into the base at Mahawhil, Wolford directed the Bradley crew over to a flagpole to cut down the brigade’s colors. When we pulled up in front of the base administrative buildings, I saw an Iraqi flag up another flagpole in a courtyard, and as the soldiers went in to clear a building, I went over and cut that one down for myself.
Several soldiers and I were following Wolford, grime streaked across his face, when he kicked in the front door of a building, strode in and began firing his pistol … BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. We ran in after him, expecting to see a pile of dead Iraqis. There was a big portrait of Saddam Hussein.
“What’s going on?” a soldier yelled.
“The fucker was pointing at us,” Wolford said, already bounding upstairs to check out the offices and conference rooms.
This place had been deserted in a hurry. It had not been bombed, and paperwork was still arranged on the desks, around ashtrays overflowing with smoked butts. Soldiers hauled out hard drives and documents for the intelligence analysts to pore over. We grabbed little model tanks, the kind arms dealers might hand out to prospective buyers. We stripped posters of Saddam from their frames and rolled them up, collected dog tags and insignia the deserters had left behind, and searched in vain for unsmoked cigarettes. We checked out a nicely built terrain model on which the Iraqis had done whatever planning they had done. It was odd walking around this place, which had so clearly been in heavy use recently. The presence of the Iraqi officers was strong, especially in an officers’ ward room, with a large beat-up oriental rug on the floor and beat-up couches all the way around, typical Arab lounging arrangement, with more overflowing ashtrays. These guys had been smoking a lot.
Then the GIs threw incendiary grenades to torch the buildings. Nothing military was to be left in usable condition. As smoke and flames billowed out the windows, the GIs began comparing and trading their loot. Wolford told Baxter to come along with his M203 grenade launcher. A couple dozen Iraqi armored personnel carriers were parked about 100 yards away across a large parade ground.
Wolford fired, but went long.
Baxter fired, but fell short.
“Let’s see how good a shot the reporter is,” Wolford said. Baxter handed me the M203, showed me how it worked. I angled it and fired, landing one right in front of one of the tracks.
“Hey, the reporter’s a good shot!” Wolford said.
Standing watch outside the gates, Blue Platoon came under fire when a dug-in RPG team left behind to defend this place finally got their nerve up, popped up from cover and fired off their rockets. Two flew over the tanks, but one exploded against Sgt. Terry Brake’s turret. It burned some of the sleeping bags and other personal gear strapped to the outside, but the tankers inside were safe.
“If I had been up in the hatch, my top half would be gone,” Brake said later. The tanks began ripping up the RPG team’s dugout with machine gun fire, killing two. The third, a young Iraqi soldier, waved a white sack and was allowed to live.
The prisoner’s hands were zip-stripped and he was hefted up between the hatches on top of an Abrams turret for the ride back to our battalion’s assembly area south of Baghdad. There was no room in the tank. Several times we passed exploding Iraqi ammo trucks, RPGs cooking off in all directions, scary even for us inside. The terrified prisoner flattened himself on the roof of the turret.
“We could see him through our periscopes. He was petrified,” Sgt. Desman Simmons said later.
Around sunset, Smitty took over driving from Baxter.
Smitty: “Hey, I just got saluted by a Hajji.”
LT: “I think he was saluting me.”
Smitty: “He did it good, too, clicking his heels and everything.”
We had a long ride back. It went on for five hours through the dark. Smitty tried to fix the night vision device on his periscope blocks, but he was too tall and kept knocking it off with his CVC helmet. Baxter was out cold, and the LT decided that he would direct Smitty from his hatch up in the turret.
“Left … left,” the LT said. “No! Right, right, right! Left!”
I was convinced they were going to drop us in a canal, which for some reason I feared more than fire, the idea of being trapped in the vehicle and drowning. I began plotting in my head the steps I would take to get out the rear hatch or the rooftop crew hatch as fast as possible. Meanwhile, in our ongoing trash talk, I began complaining about Smitty’s erratic driving. I said I was too old for this shit.
Big mistake. Smitty, to entertain himself during this long night drive, began describing over the intercom exactly how old I was.
“Critter so old, he make Methuselah look like a kid,” Smitty said. He decided this was a rich vein and kept digging.
“Critter got baloney butt cheeks, all flappy and nasty,” Smitty said. “Critter’s dick, it all shriveled like a mummy’s dick, and his balls like two raisins.”
That was the mild stuff. The rant got increasingly pornographic. I responded for a while with my own cracks about how exactly young and stupid Smitty was, but that of course only encouraged him. Normally, an exchange like that would have ended after a few salvoes, but Smitty was enjoying himself too much and kept going. And going.
Eventually, I got tired and cranky, because it had been a long day and, let’s face it, I’m old. I told Smitty, OK, I’m old, now give it a rest. He did, for about 30 seconds. But the inspiration just kept coming to him. He paused only to let the LT give directions to keep him from going off the road. I have to admit, he was good. I probably should have been taking notes so generations yet unborn could admire Smitty’s verbal dexterity. Instead I became pissed off. Eventually, I took my helmet off so I didn’t have to listen to it. When we finally pulled up for the night, back at the intersection by the woods where we had been ambushed two nights earlier, I went over to Smitty.
“Give me a cigarette, Smitty,” I said. He had the only pack in the track at this point, and I needed to get one before I laid into him, because I might not after that. Smitty obliged.
“Smitty,” I said, smoking his cigarette. “You need to learn when to shut the fuck up.”
“Hey,” said Sgt. Will, “Smitty was just talking shit. We all do that. You do that.”
“Not for a whole fucking hour,” I told Sgt. Will. “You need to learn how to run this track. It’s like McHale’s fucking Navy.”
“Hey, hey, hey! I’m running this track,” snapped the LT.
“Well, then fucking run it,” I said.
“We’ll deal with this in the morning,” the LT said.
It was after I stormed off from the stupid fight with the Bradley’s crew that I got the news about Michael Kelly.
I was probably no more than 5 or 10 miles away when it happened, but it was two days after the fact before I found out about it. I called my wife on the sat phone, looking for a distraction from the argument and needing to touch base with home. I hadn’t spoken to her in days.
“A reporter was killed. He was from Massachusetts.”
“Who is it?”
“His name is Michael Kelly. He was from the Atlantic Monthly. Do you know him?”
I was stunned. I had seen him briefly six days before at al-Hindiyah. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him. He was supposed to be hanging out with higher command, to write the big-picture story about how the 3rd Infantry Division won the war.
My wife had been reading my reports every morning in the newspaper, and as she told me later, was becoming increasingly dazed. Kelly’s wife Max told me much later she did not believe her husband would be in combat, and my wife also didn’t believe the Army was going to put us where it did. But there it was when she opened the newspaper in the morning. Then Kelly was killed. He was drowned April 3 along with Sgt. Wilbert Davis when their Humvee came under fire and veered into a canal.
It was after midnight for me, but late afternoon for her when I called, and she was in the process of writing a card to Kelly’s widow when the phone rang.
“I guess it won’t do any good to ask you to come home,” she said.
“No. I’m sorry.”
She put our kids on the phone next. Devon, 5, said, “Daddy, we planted plants in school yesterday.” Seven-year-old Ian said he had new sneakers and wanted to know if I was in a tank. I said no, but I was standing next to one, and we’d build a model of it when I came home. Alex, 9, told me she went swimming with her Brownie troop. They were sliding into the water and her swimming was good.
I felt like exactly what I was; thousands of miles and a world away from them. I was saddened by it, as though I was drifting away and might never make it back to the world they inhabited. My buddy Sig, another reporter, told me later he dreamt of coming home as a ghost, and not being recognized. That was exactly the feeling, and not so far from the truth. I was very far from home now. My life, as Baxter had put it, revolved around a tin can, and these young men I shared it with were my family for now. We lived together and a couple of times had come close to dying together. We were filthy, covered with dust and grime we could never quite wipe away. Our hands were cracked and embedded with grit, and inside our boots it was getting rotten, with skin sloughing off our feet and sores that wouldn’t heal. We were shitting in the open, within view of each other, and considered this normal. We were seeking out desperate men who wanted to kill us, but when we found them, they did most of the dying. I was glad to see them killed when it came to that. I might feel pity or compassion for them when I saw their bodies bloody and mangled, but it didn’t bother me that they were dead. It was what was happening and could as well be any of us lying there. I found myself looking forward to action. I had found myself ready to kill if circumstances called for it. All of this was normal now. It had taken less than a month to get here.
In the morning, I climbed up by the Bradley’s turret, where the LT was waking up. Maybe he or Sgt. Will should have shut Smitty up, but I was the guest here and had mouthed off at the head of the household in front of the whole family. I was not going to let this become a problem. The Bradley was very well placed in the line of march for my purposes. Anyway, the relaxed approach to discipline was one of the strong suits of this vehicle. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if Baxter and Smitty actually had to behave themselves.
“About last night. I apologize. I was out of line,” I said.
Smitty was up on the back of the Bradley and looked over the top of the turret.
“We good, Critter?” he said.
“We’re good, Smitty,” I said. “Old guys like me just get grumpy sometimes.”
That was the end of the matter. Smitty, wherever you are, sorry I was a dick.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:00 am on Thursday, April 5, 2007
2 Responses to “April 5, 2003”
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April 5th, 2007 at 2:23 am
TypePad’s flaky tonight; probably why I can’t leave you trackbacks. I linked from Old War Dogs and from Bill’s Bites.
April 5th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Great story.