Grunts (52 page)

The Americans maintained a disciplined formation, advancing and firing in rushes. Vehicles generally operated in pairs, employing Air Force wingman tactics. American artillery observers, riding in thinly armored M577 personnel carriers, called down devastating, continuous 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer fire on the Iraqis. The M577s were buttoned up and almost unbearably hot. “We all stripped down to our boots and underwear, drenched with sweat,” Specialist David Battleson, one of the crewmen, said. Another observer, Specialist Chris Harvey, peeked outside of his vehicle at the chaos raging around him. The panorama of destruction took his breath away. “All I saw were things burning. For three hundred sixty degrees. Nothing but action.”

Several thousand meters to the rear, the howitzer crews worked without interruption, priming, loading, and firing. “No one could do the same job all night,” Specialist Adeolu Soluade recalled. “I think I did almost every job on the gun that night.” Some of the crews actually ran out of ammo until resupply convoys caught up with them. Flames shot as far as twenty feet from the muzzles of the guns. The noise and concussion waves of the shooting were immense, like an earthquake. “The guns had been firing so long that carbon was building up in the tubes,” one soldier said.

While the tanks took the lead, the Bradleys pummeled the flanks. Their 25-millimeter rounds easily penetrated the armor of Soviet-made BMPs and even some of the tanks as well. Deadliest of all were their TOWs, which Bradley commanders fired at tanks, bunkers, and antiaircraft guns. One Bradley commander remembered rotating his turret just in time to see a T62 tank fire at his vehicle. “The enemy tank missed, throwing dirt in the air.” The explosion was frighteningly close. “After we fired a TOW at the tank and destroyed it, we had to get out and clean off our weapons optics so we could continue.” The Bradley crewmen, with help from their dismounts, had to do all this under extreme stress. “Violent explosions followed the impact of the perfectly aimed and guided fires,” McMaster recalled. “All vehicles were suppressing enemy infantry to the front, who fired machine guns at us and scurried back and forth among the endless sea of berms which comprised the enemy position.”

For the men in the Bradleys, the battle amounted to a constant struggle to keep up with the tanks, sight targets through the blowing sand, figure out their range, and engage them. The TOWs were like grim reapers stalking their prey. They flew within a few feet of the ground, trailing their guiding wires, seemingly picking victims with relish. One soldier saw a TOW score a direct hit on an Iraqi APC, exploding it “as if it were made of plastic. The metal armor shot up into the air accompanied by a fireball and it seemed to rise and fall in slow motion. In the blink of an eye a perfectly functional vehicle had become a burning heap of metal.”

Lieutenant Daniel King and Alpha Troop, 4-7 Cavalry Regiment, were a few kilometers to the south, covering 2nd Armored Cav’s flank. To the left of King in the turret of their Bradley, his gunner spotted, through the foggy mists of sand, a large heat blob on their thermal sight. “We raised our TOW missile, fired, and it exploded almost right away,” King said. “I put my head up out of the turret and saw a T72 tank in a fireball about 300-400 meters away.” Jumping up and down in the turret, he and his gunner exchanged high fives and whoops of pure elation. For them, the killing was impersonal, as if they had only destroyed a vehicle and not people. Armored combat tends to be that way. It also tends to be solitary, with crews in their own vehicular world.

But other men saw enemy soldiers and shot them, especially as Iraqis attacked from behind or fled when American columns advanced past destroyed vehicles. Amid the smoke and dust, Iraqi soldiers with machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) found concealment from which to hit the Americans. Some of the Republican Guard soldiers even had Sagger missiles, capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams if fired from a close enough range. McMaster saw his Abrams and Bradley crews “cutting down hundreds of infantry fleeing to subsequent positions. Some tried to play dead and pop up behind the tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. They fell prey to the Bradley 25mm and coaxial machine guns.” Of course, “fell prey” meant that they got torn up by machine-gun bullets or blasted into pieces by the 25-millimeter rounds. “Men were cut in half right in front of our eyes,” a soldier later wrote. One Bradley commander even mowed down several with an M16 rifle and a few grenades. For the Americans who unleashed this storm of death, the killing was personal. “They kept dying and dying and dying,” First Lieutenant Keith Garwick, a platoon leader in Ghost Troop, at the northern edge of the American advance, recalled. “Those guys were insane. They wouldn’t stop.” The twenty-five-year-old West Pointer and his men mowed them down in droves, but still the Iraqis kept counterattacking or stubbornly defending revetments and berm-side bunkers. For Garwick and company, the horror of it all was deeply troubling. “A certain part of you just dies . . . somebody trying to kill you so desperately, for so many hours, and coming so close. I still don’t understand it. I couldn’t wait to see combat. What a fool I was.” To another soldier, the experience was “intoxicating . . . also macabre.”

The Americans dominated the battle, but they were hardly impervious to damage of their own. Lieutenant Garwick found that his company radio net was so jammed with frantic voices that he often had to dismount and run, under heavy fire, to the artillery forward observer’s vehicle. In one instance, enemy artillery fire was so accurate that he and another man had to take shelter under the lieutenant’s Bradley. “We just sat there crying, just shaken. The air bursts were coming right on top, ricocheting around us. We were in a corner of hell. I don’t know how we made it out of there.” Specialist Patrick Bledsoe, a Bradley driver in Ghost Troop, was absorbed with the movement of Iraqi infantrymen moving toward his track when a tank shell ripped into the turret behind him. “It was just like somebody hit us with a sledgehammer,” he said. In the turret, the gunner, Sergeant Nels Andrew Moller, asked, “What was that?” A second later, another shell hit in nearly the same spot and exploded, killing Moller. Bledsoe got out of the destroyed Bradley and crawled to safety, as did the track commander.

Sergeant Roland Jones’s Bradley in 4-7 Cavalry had dodged several near misses from enemy tanks or infantry, he was not sure which. As sparks and dirt kicked up around the Bradley, the engine got stuck in neutral. A track commanded by his platoon leader, Lieutenant Michael Vassalotti, drove up to shield him. Jones ordered his people to abandon the track. They no sooner got out than a Sagger missile struck it in the turret. “My whole right side felt it,” Corporal Darrin McLane, Jones’s gunner, said. “I caught some shrapnel in the arm. I . . . staggered a couple of steps, then started running.” He and the others made it into the lieutenant’s Bradley just in time for it to absorb two T72 hits just behind the driver, below the turret. “It was smoky inside,” Jones said. “Everyone had been injured in some sort of way. I had flash burns to the side of my head and the back of my neck.” Lieutenant Vassalotti and Corporal Jones also took flash burns to the face. Even as 25-millimeter rounds began to cook off in their casings, the men evacuated the Bradley. Not long after this, another tank round smashed through a nearby Bradley, shearing off the gunner’s leg, mortally wounding him. The commander remembered experiencing “a big flash and a big wind, and the next thing I knew I was burning. I jumped out of the hatch.” Other soldiers extinguished the fire. Fortunately the man’s body armor absorbed much of the flames and shrapnel.

After dark, the battle petered out amid the horrendous stench of burning metal, rubber, fuel, and flesh. The noxious smoke of death—from men and vehicles—hung over the cold desert. The 2nd Armored Cav, and its friends from 4-7 Cavalry, had wrecked much of the Tawalkana Division. Infantry grunts herded thousands of enemy soldiers into captivity. There was little else to do with them except give them some water, MREs, medical care if they needed it, and wait for support troops to come up and take them away. For lack of any other defining feature or objective, American commanders called this engagement the Battle of 73 Easting, after the map coordinates of this otherwise nondescript patch of desert. In the battle, the Americans destroyed 161 tanks, 180 APCs, 12 artillery pieces, and half a dozen antiaircraft guns. Eagle Troop alone accounted for 28 tanks and 16 APCs. No one knew, or was much interested in, exactly how many enemy soldiers they killed—a telling contrast from the body-count obsession of the Vietnam War.
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Tawalkana was not finished yet, though. Like a runner accepting a baton in a relay race, the 1st Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade advanced through the 2nd Armored Cav and kept up the pressure on the Republican Guards. Just after midnight, this combined arms force from the Big Red One collided with them at Objective Norfolk, another artificial American name for a patch of desert. The fighting was pure chaos, a three-hundred-sixty-degree struggle that was the very embodiment of modern combat. Commanders had a difficult time maintaining unit integrity and order of movement. The lack of navigational equipment on most of the Abramses and Bradleys made it easy to get lost. The night was windy and chilly, specked with sheets of light rain. These conditions, combined with the fire and smoke of burning vehicles, made it quite difficult for crews to identify targets through their thermals. Visual identification was a near impossibility in the dark and smudge. “At night, war becomes even more difficult as you try to identify friend and foe,” Father David Kenehan, the chaplain of a nearby cavalry unit, wrote in his diary. “Some guys will shoot first & question later in order not to endanger their crew.”

The Republican Guards, in hopes of foiling the American heat-seeking thermal sights, shut their engines off or abandoned their vehicles until the Americans got within range or bypassed them. Then they attacked, either on foot or after jumping back into their vehicles. “They were shooting us from the rear, which is the only way a T55 or T62 [tank] can hurt an M1,” a tank commander recalled. “We were ‘coaxing’ [machine-gunning] guys running between tanks, running between our tanks and bunkers, as we were moving through. It was really hairy. There were rounds flying all over the place.” The Americans learned to shoot at all tanks and APCs, even those that looked empty because of cold signatures on the thermals. Surrendering enemy soldiers were sometimes interspersed with the attackers, making it very hard for the Americans to know when to shoot and when to hold their fire. “The passage into enemy-held territory was an eerie, almost surreal experience,” Colonel Lon Maggart, the brigade commander, later wrote. “The night sky was filled with catastrophic explosions and raging fires the likes of which I had never seen before. Horrible fires roared from the turrets of Iraqi tanks with flames shooting high into the night air.” He and the other soldiers were inundated with the unforgettable odor of burning oil, rubber, and flesh.

The air was thick with the thunderous booming of Abrams main guns and Bradley chain guns. Muzzle flashes and tracers flickered in the night like flashbulbs. Coaxial machine guns, firing at small groups of dismounted, RPG-toting attackers, could be heard chattering tinnily when the bigger guns paused for ammo. One Bradley gunner alone killed six attacking RPG teams. The American gunners blew up several ammo-laden trucks and dumps, creating dangerous fireballs and secondary explosions. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Fontenot, commander of Task Force 2-34 Armor, finally ordered his crews to stop shooting up the trucks. “As we made our way through the trucks, many of which were on fire and a hazard to us, we found many enemy soldiers attempting to surrender.” His armor heavy task force had few grunts to disarm the prisoners and move them to safety. Fontenot took to running over their discarded weapons with his tank.

“We were bypassing BMPs, MTLB [personnel carriers], trucks, and empty fighting positions,” First Lieutenant Douglas Robbins, a Bradley-equipped scout platoon leader, wrote. “These vehicles were barely visible through our thermal sights.” His platoon led the way for Task Force 5-16 Infantry, the main brigade grunt element. In an encounter typical of many that night, his gunner spotted two armored scout cars moving directly in front of them. “I halted the platoon, ensuring the four lead vehicles were on-line and ordered them to open fire” with 25-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. The Iraqi scout cars “blew up and began burning.” Later they came upon enemy infantrymen in a bunker system. Lieutenant Robbins hoped they would surrender but they did not. As his vehicles laid down suppressive fire, a platoon of dismounted grunts assaulted the bunkers, killing anyone who resisted. Eventually, after enduring this lethal combination of mechanized infantry power, twenty of the Iraqi soldiers surrendered.

Another scout platoon leader adopted the risky but effective tactic of creeping to within a couple hundred meters of Iraqi infantry positions. “This kept the enemy soldiers from firing their RPG-7 antitank grenade launchers and machine guns until we were almost right on top of their positions.” The sheer violence of these attacks, combined with concentrated firepower, was a deadly experience for the Iraqis. “We destroyed approximately 40 enemy infantry soldiers,” the lieutenant wrote euphemistically, “including one RPG gunner who deployed less than 50 feet forward of my vehicle.” The lieutenant’s use of the word “destroyed” is revealing, as if he and his men had euthanized a lame horse rather than killing fellow human beings. Such is the emotional distance from killing that combat participants must sometimes forge in their own minds.

Throughout the night, the 1st Division tore through three lines of Iraqi defenses, consisting mostly of dug-in tanks and infantry. Like so many other Americans, Colonel Maggart employed movie and entertainment references to describe the carnage of the battle. In his recollection, when enemy vehicles got hit they “would explode in a huge fireball of flame and debris. These explosions were much like those seen on television shows, where space vehicles are vaporized by phasers or photon torpedoes. Metal particles were blown two to three hundred yards into the air. Often, each massive initial explosion was followed by two or three subsequent, but equally violent, secondary explosions as fuel and remaining ammunition detonated.” Maggart constantly warned his crews to be wary of exploding ammo and fuel as they advanced past the funeral pyres.