Chapter 33: Hold The Line!

Saturday, May 27, 2006

If there was one thing I absolutely fucking hated, it was escort duty in a gun truck. By now everybody in the platoon knew about Riley’s smiling-little-yellow-ducks theory of combat in Iraq and not too many people disagreed with him. At least if I was up on over-watch or on patrol somewhere, the smiling little yellow duck might just get a chance to shoot back. Riding around in an armored Humvee while waiting to get blown up by an IED was a lot more nerve-wracking for me.

All through April and May the hajjis tested us and felt us out for weaknesses. They’d do something and we’d react, changing how we did something. We’d do something and they would change their practices. For instance, the road on the opposite side of the canal was a weak spot, since they could drive along it, park, take a few shots, and then drive off. We reacted by simply shutting down the road. No, we couldn’t station people on the other side of the canal, but we could destroy it as a functioning road. Our forward observers managed to order up a flight of F-16s, who dropped a bunch of bombs that cut and cratered the road. That was cool!

That ended vehicle traffic on the road on the opposite side of the canal. If you needed to drive, you had to come down Route Indigo, which meant you had to be inspected by us. The hajjis reacted by having mortar teams infiltrate the broken road at night and set up position in bomb craters or depressions. We reacted to that by pre-sighting in on any place that could hide the hajjis. If they started firing, we could rain down return fire inside of thirty seconds, and we were a whole lot more accurate!

Well, two could play at the road-busting game. Route Indigo, by its very presence, was proof that we owned the road. IEDs became the name of the game along Indigo. The hajjis would send small two- or three-man teams out at night to try and bury IEDs along the roadway. It reminded me of what we went through at Camp Custer on my first tour. Once again, we reacted by targeting anybody trying to be sneaky on the road at night. They reacted by moving their IED sites to places either out of range of our response or out of sight completely.

That became a definite problem. Route Indigo was not as much of a main road as Route 1 from Baghdad to Ramadi. It was narrower, had some twists and turns to it, and was easier to interdict. There was one spot, about halfway between Anaconda Two and Anaconda Three, where the road took a sharp turn along the bank of the canal. We called it the ‘Bend’. It was completely out of sight from either Anaconda Two or Anaconda Three, and it became a favorite of the hajjis for planting devices and taking potshots at us.

My personal feelings were to simply let the whole bunch of them kill each other off, but that didn’t seem to be the policy of the United States Army. That policy seemed to be that the smiling-little-yellow-ducks were going to damn well drive up and down Route Indigo and show the locals that they couldn’t stop us. We ended up with a lot of traffic up and down the road, usually supply convoys, each of which required armed escorts and teams of anti-IED Buffaloes. You drove around watching everything and everyone, stopping at each fortified position to load or unload, and drop off busted-up vehicles and busted-up soldiers.

Most of the time the engineers managed to detect and neutralize the IEDs along the road, but not always. Improvised explosive devices were usually made of artillery and mortar shells that were pulled from the endless arsenals that Saddam Hussein had planted all over the Sunni heartland. However, you could make bombs from any number of things. The repurposed ordnance had the benefit of being military-grade explosives, but generally came in metal casings that could be detected magnetically. You could make just as big a BOOM with commercial diesel fuel and fertilizer, an ANFO bomb, and that could be put in plastic barrels. Additionally, while Iron Claw and Husky could search for bombs buried in the road, they weren’t particularly good at finding secondary devices, which were often set near the road, and were designed to blow up when a primary device managed to stop a convoy.

Route Indigo was where we took most of our casualties. Attacking Anaconda Three was pointless, at least if the idea was to cause significant casualties. We were simply too well protected. By mid-summer we had a semi-permanent garrison of about two platoons’ worth, with plenty of heavy weapons. It would take the better part of a battalion to overrun us and that was simply not realistic. Even if a battalion could have snuck into position to attack, unless they overran us in the first five minutes, they were all dead. We had plenty of available firepower in the form of gunships and bombers on call, and they were designed to chew anything up that got close to us.

We lost our first soldier on Indigo at the Bend in April, when a Second Squad Humvee detonated an ANFO barrel that Iron Claw had just rolled past and not detected. The Humvee was lifted off the ground, landing on its roof, crushing Rollie Barnes, the gunner. Everybody else in the truck went to the hospital, though Sergeant Madison broke his back and ended up going home, paralyzed from the waist down. It was just one more reason I wouldn’t marry Kelly until I got home in one piece. A week later one of the engineers was caught by a secondary blast while rigging up a tow on a supply truck and lost a foot. At least he could get a peg leg and hop around on it. Jack Madison wouldn’t be able to do that.

We started seeing a chaplain, Captain Homer. He was a little preachy for my taste, but most of the guys liked him. He often traveled with the convoys, hitching rides from compound to compound. I ignored his Bible thumping, though, since he had stones the size of boulders. Word came down that at the end of April he had been wounded pulling two guys out of a burning truck near Musayib while under fire. He got a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for that. He could preach all he wanted if he was there to pull my ass out of a burning truck!

Still, driving up and down Route Indigo reminded me of the old joke about the barrel. A young fellow got hired by a logging company. He gets out to the ass end of the woods and is in the worst possible logging camp in the world. Surprisingly, everybody is happy to be there. The foreman tells him about the wonderful food and the great medical care and the satellite television and free phone calls. “Best of all, if you ever get horny, see that barrel over there?” he said pointing to a barrel near the bunkhouse.

“Yeah,” says the new logger.

“Any day but Thursday, you can go over there, pull your dick out, stick it in the hole in the barrel, and get a free blowjob!” he’s told.

“What happens on Thursdays?” the kid asks.

“That’s your day in the barrel!”

Bravo Three’s day in the barrel happened on the last Saturday of May, the 27^th. You don’t get weekends off in Iraq. Well, you probably do at Camp Victory, but that was almost a world away from Route Indigo. We were lucky to get meals and sleep. If you weren’t on defensive over-watch, you were probably doing escort detail on a convoy. Maybe you’d be going into the nearest town with an interpreter kicking in some doors to find bad guys. You might be fixing equipment or cleaning the latrine or storing supplies in the stockroom or armory. The one thing you were not doing on a Saturday afternoon was laying back in a recliner, drinking beer, and watching a football game. Well, again, maybe you could do that in Camp Victory, but not at Anaconda Three.

That Saturday, Bravo Three and the rest of Third Squad were doing convoy escort. We had driven all the way over to Musayib in the morning and were on the way back. It was late in the day, but there was plenty of light out. We had traveled past Anaconda Two, on the way to the Bend, and then would be home at Anaconda Three. That was when the shit hit the fan.

The radio crackled and Bixley’s voice came over. “Bravo Three One, look left. Do you see that Blackhawk?”

I twisted my head to the side and saw a helicopter flying low, with smoke pouring from an engine. It was a Blackhawk, and it was in trouble. I pointed and Givens nodded. He was driving, with Montoya up on the roof manning a Ma Deuce. I grabbed the radio and replied, “I copy Lima Two Six.” We were designated as Lima Two Convoy, and Bixley, the convoy boss, was Lima Two Six.

“Looks like he’s in trouble. We might have to assist. You’re closest,” said Bix.

I glanced at Givens, who just nodded. We were leading the convoy, following a pair of Buffaloes. Bixley was in the middle with the supply trucks, and Alpha Three was at the end. The helo was in definite trouble, but under control. Smoke was coming from one of the engines and it was flying too low, but it was still in controlled flight. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones to see it. Tracers began climbing towards it, along with a few rocket trails. They didn’t look very well aimed, and in fact looked like RPGs, and not anti-aircraft rockets. Still, there were too many for comfort. If they managed to stay in the air long enough, they could get to Anaconda Two or Anaconda Three, or even land on Route Indigo near us.

Suddenly one of the RPGs connected with the helo, blowing off a piece of the tail, and it started to drop, fast. Before I could even say anything, Bixley yelled out, “Oh shit! They’re going down! Bravo Three, go get them!”

“Bravo Three, on it!” I turned to Givens and said, “Floor it!” and then yelled into the radio, “Bravo Three Two, follow us!”

Riley’s voice came back. “Lead the way!” He was driving Bravo Three Two, with Gonzalez manning an M-240 in a roof turret.

We surged on down the road, passing the Buffaloes, which made me decide to change course. The hajjis normally only planted bombs along the main road, Route Indigo. They normally didn’t plant them in the towns along the side. Instead, they relied on the fact that the towns were too congested, and it was too easy to fire at the Americans with machine guns and RPGs at ranges that couldn’t be missed from.

I pointed at a side street ahead of us. “Down there!” Givens turned down the road, and up above us I heard the .50 cal open up. People began diving out of the roadway. If we could do this fast, we might be able to get to the Blackhawk before the locals could get organized. If they got to the helo before us, the crew would be lucky if they died in the crash. “Faster!” I yelled to Givens.

We lost sight of the Blackhawk as it sank down below the buildings, but we managed to blow through a thin cordon of low brick and block buildings into an open space beyond them. I looked behind to see Bravo Two madly careening behind us. Givens yelled out, “There!” and I turned to face the front again. The Blackhawk had crashed to the ground in an open space ahead of us. Smoke was pouring from the engine area, but it hadn’t exploded. We were in what looked like an abandoned railroad yard, mostly empty, about three hundred meters across in every direction. Off to the right side of the helo a bunch of hajjis were coming out of a line of warehouses and beginning to run towards the Blackhawk.

“Move it!” I yelled back. Up on the roof, Montoya was firing wildly as we bounced across the field. The hajjis began firing at us, but Montoya knocked down a couple of them, and they ran back to the buildings. Givens jammed on the brakes, and we skidded to a stop near the right-side door to the Blackhawk.

We were definitely attracting the kind of attention you don’t really want. Bullets began pinging off the armor of the Humvee. I yelled up at Montoya, “Cover left and hold the line!” The Ma Deuce he was firing was an excellent weapon, and we had plenty of ammo. He didn’t answer me, but now that we weren’t bouncing all over creation, he began firing accurately and with good discipline.

Bravo Three Two slewed up alongside us as Givens and I bailed out. I ran over and ordered Riley, “Position it like this!” I motioned with my hands that I wanted the two trucks facing forward at an angle to each other, leaving us a triangle position, with the two trucks and the Blackhawk forming the three sides. “Gonzalez!” Gonzalez stopped firing and looked over at me. “Cover right and hold the line!” He didn’t answer, but nodded, and resumed firing.

Riley joined me and we ran over to where Givens was trying to wrestle the door to the Blackhawk open. Inside we could hear screaming and crying - and women! What the hell? Suddenly a stream of machine gun fire came in from the opposite side of the helo, banging on the Blackhawk and clipping Givens. He went down and then managed to get upright again, blood on his left leg.

“I’m all right!” he told me.

He wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. I ran over to Bravo One and grabbed the M-249 inside, along with some ammo magazines. I ran back to him and pushed him down to a prone position, giving him the weapon. I pointed and said, “Hold the line!”

“Hold the line!” he repeated. Five seconds later he had the weapon in action, firing back towards the machine guns behind us.

I got back to the side of the Blackhawk in time to help Riley get the door partially open. Inside was pure chaos, with about eight or nine screaming men and women inside dressed in civilian clothing, along with a couple of soldiers. One of the men was trying to open the far door, and half were unbuckled, and the other half were still buckled in and trying to get out anyway. “RILEY, GET THEM OUT OF THERE!”

Riley scrambled up into the passenger compartment and grabbed the first person he saw, a screaming blonde. He simply grabbed her by the arm and yanked her towards the door we had opened. She started screaming at him, especially when a loud bang on the door announced somebody was shooting at us. He didn’t care. He just hauled her over and pushed her to me. I grabbed her and dragged her out, and then tossed her to the ground between the helicopter and the trucks. “Stay down!” I told her, but she tried to get up and run, so I tripped her and threw her down again, and screamed “STAY DOWN!”