House to House: A Tale of Modern War (10 page)

Just as I get to my Bradley’s ramp, Lieutenant Iwan appears. He’s making one last sweep through the company to make sure everyone’s good to go. He is in an armored Humvee. That strikes me as odd, so I smile at him and bust his nuts a bit.

“Hey sir!” I call from the ramp, “where’s the Brad?”

“It broke down. It’s a piece of shit. Fucking 1988 relic.”

I call from the ramp, “Whatever happens, we’ll always have Paris.”

He laughs, “Yes, Sergeant Bell, we’ll always have Paris.”

I notice that Joey Seyford is gunning for him. Joey’s a close friend of mine. He’s also the unluckiest human I’ve ever known. In basic training, he nearly died in a vehicular rollover. Later, on a training range, one of his own SAW gunners accidentally shot him in the ass at point-blank range. He recovered from that only to slip while trying to take a piss in the dark. That mishap severed two tendons in his wrist. There’s bad luck and then there’s Joey Seyford.

“Joey? Sir, what the fuck are you letting him gun for? He’s cursed.”

Our XO shrugs and smiles. Joey seems hurt.” I’m golden, man. That shit is in the past. Check it out: I can almost close my hand now.” He balls his fist and pumps his arm. “I’m GOLDEN, Bell! Fucking GOLDEN!” He laughs and waves as the Humvee speeds off and leaves me standing on my Brad’s ramp.

And then I’m inside the belly of our steel beast. The ramp closes, and I squash down next to Lawson. Normally, Brads carry five to six men. Today, we’ll ride into the city with eight. I’ve got my Bravo Team, led by Sucholas, plus Lawson and Pratt from the weapons squad. Pratt had been one of my soldiers, but Lawson needed a team leader so I swapped him Pratt out of my squad. With all our gear stored and stacked around us, the ride will be cramped and uncomfortable as hell.

We start to roll. The tracks clank, the Brad bounces us around. Through the viewing ports, I can see column after column of vehicles—Marines and Army both—moving toward the staging area. The earth rumbles from within, as if a gigantic subterranean machine has just been activated.

A half hour later, we reach the attack position, which is nothing but a vast stretch of empty desert just over a mile northeast of Fallujah. The ramp drops and we spill out into the morning again. We’re surrounded by vehicles. From horizon to horizon, they carpet the desert like long trails of ants. There are gun trucks and five-tons, armored personnel carriers, Humvees, Bradleys, and Abrams tanks. To the west I can see the Marines’ Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs) and their boat-shaped amphibious vehicles. Beyond them, a new Stryker unit has taken its position on the western flank. Longbow Apache helicopters buzz protectively over them.

And then the Paladins—155mm self-propelled artillery tracks, essentially gigantic cannons on wheels—unleash their firepower. Huge shells pass overhead to burst inside the city. The ground quakes. The Air Force, Navy, and Marines send waves of F-16 and F-18 fighter jets. They whistle over the city to drop laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). The
whomp-whomp
of their detonations can be both heard and felt, even at this distance.

I take this all in, watching with awe as a fresh wave of Apaches and Cobra helos provide security to our flanks. So much power. So much strength. How can anyone stand against it? I try to notice everything, every detail, every explosion. I don’t want to miss any of it. This is the moment we’ve trained for since we first joined the army as raw recruits. The Greatest Generation had Normandy. Generation X will have Fallujah.

Sergeant Charles Knapp settles down next to me in the powdery sand and opens a ready-to-eat meal. We share few words. He’s intent on eating. I’m intent on watching.

If this is it, I’ve got to be able to tell my grandkids some day. I want to remember the feel of the sand, like hot cocoa mix. I want to remember the sizzle and swoosh of the rockets. I want to remember what those 155s sound like. I need to be able to tell them what this day meant to all of us.

Knapp polishes off one MRE and wades into another one. I can’t eat. I’m too excited, too nervous, too everything. Yuri and Michael Ware appear. They settle down in the sand and start watching the show next to me. Knapp eats another MRE, and I start to wonder how many damn stomachs he has. He is ravenous.

Every weapon available in our arsenal short of nukes is turned on Fallujah. The pre-assault bombardment is unrelenting. Jet after jet drops its bombs and rockets. Warthogs—the big, bruising A-10 Thunderbolt II close-support aircraft—strafe the main avenues into the city with their 30mm antitank cannon. Fallujah is smothered in bombs, shrouded in smoke. Buildings collapse. Mines detonate. Artillery roar.

Meanwhile, Knapp continues his MRE-athon. I’ve never seen a man eat so many MREs. It borders on the obscene.

We’re at the head of our task force’s column. Just behind us are the engineer tracks, relics from the Vietnam era. Once we get to the pre-assault point, they’ll pass through us and advance to the five-foot-high railroad embankment, called a berm, that runs along the northern outskirts of Fallujah. This is our breaching point. In order to get into the city, we must blow holes through this berm. Our engineers plan to use a Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC) to get the job done. Essentially, a MICLIC is a 350-foot-long rope with bundles of C-4 explosive attached. They were designed during the run-up to Gulf War I to clear lanes through minefields. A hydraulic launcher throws the MICLIC several hundred meters. When detonated, anything surrounding the MICLIC gets vaporized. What the explosions don’t destroy, the concussion waves finish off. Today, if there are mines or IEDs at the breach point, the MICLIC’s devastating power should cause them to detonate harmlessly. Once the engineers have made the breach, we will drive through it in our Bradleys, supported by a pair of Abrams tanks. We Terminators, my Alpha Company, will be the first American infantrymen in the city.

Staff Sergeant Bryan Lockwald, one of the engineers, plops down in the sand next to me. He utters a greeting, then smiles devilishly. I’ve known Lockwald for over a year. I helped train his engineer platoon on room-clearing techniques back in Germany, and we instantly became friends. I can tell he’s excited.

He looks out over the smoke on the horizon and remarks, “Imagine what our MICLICs can do inside that city.”

“What?”

“Fire that thing down a street, and I’m talking everything three stories on down destroyed or dead from the concussion of this thing. If you wanna clear a neighborhood fast, this is the bad bear you want in the fight.”

As an engineer, Lockwald loves the MICLIC because it is the most powerful arrow in his quiver. Yet Lockwald has spent the deployment trying to avoid killing anyone. He and his engineer mates have set off explosives plenty of times back at our base, but Lockwald was not like the others. He quit smoking in Iraq. He read literature and talked about God and nature. He wears wire-rim glasses and his passion for blowing stuff up stands in stark contrast to blowing
people
up. He always makes that distinction. I always had him pegged as a frustrated beatnik. He loves trees and plays folk music on his acoustic guitar. With his huge, handlebar mustache and his nostalgia for the natural world, he’s long since become the spiritual leader of our engineer platoon.

Engineers usually get abused by the infantry, but the truth is they are the intellectuals of the combat arms branches. They have a million crafty solutions to problems that would make us knuckle-dragging infantry types scratch our heads and pause.

I pray he doesn’t pull his guitar out. His impromptu folk-song sessions are unbearable. Fortunately, he just sits with me and looks on at the unfolding bombardment with the same awe I feel.

“Where did you get that coffee?” he asks me.

“Dude, don’t even start.”

Behind us, Lieutenant Joquin Meno gathers up the platoon. He spreads out a map on the sand and starts to talk. I get up and go over to the huddle. Fitts reaches it at the same time. We both notice that Michael Ware and Yuri are busily photographing and filming this spontaneous gathering. This turns me off completely. Is Meno’s chalk talk going to turn into a posing session for the cameras? I stay in the back and avoid the discussion.

Meno wants to go over what we’ll do once we’re through the breach. Unlike what has happened in the past, he wants to make sure we fight as an integrated platoon, not as disparate squads. This sounds good to all of us.

Fitts says, “Alright, Bell, we’re gonna take down the first building. You bring your boys into our foothold and we leapfrog. Don’t get too far away. Then we’ll bring Lawson’s guns up and get them in the fight. We stick together, Hooah.”

“Hooah.”

“We’ll pick out some good rooftops and set up those machine guns for overwatch,” I add.

My squad is slated to make the first leapfrog after Fitts’s boys secure a foothold, and the first leapfrog usually draws the first contact.

Just as we wrap up our chalk talk, Lieutenant Meno gets a call from Captain Sims, who orders him to take a Humvee forward and recon the breaching point. Meno grabs Sergeant Knapp and climbs into a Humvee carrying Chaplain Brown, Captain Fred Dente, and our forward observer, Sergeant Shaun Juhasz. The Humvee rushes past us, kicking up a plume of powdery sand behind it.

They find a small ridgeline and stop just shy of its crest. From this vantage point, they have an excellent view of the city. As they study the breach, Captain Dente spots a flash of sunlight reflecting on glass. It is an insurgent with a pair of binoculars. He’s been watching them from the northeast corner of the city. Dente and Juhasz call in a fire mission to take him out. Binos Man has the same idea. He calls his insurgent buddies, and suddenly Meno’s Humvee vanishes behind a towering cloud of sand and smoke.

“What the fuck?” Somebody calls out.

The smoke clears. The Humvee is intact. Captain Dente and Chaplain Brown call in to say they are okay. It is a miracle—an 82mm mortar just missed their rig.

Juhasz finishes his call for fire. Seconds later, our own shells impact on a building. They’re right on target, so now they fire for effect. It is over in seconds. All that is left of Binos Man is a pink splash and a mist of blood in the air.

Meno’s rig scoots back to our formation, victors of this unusual artillery duel. I wonder what Chaplain Brown must be thinking after that brush with the hereafter.

The radio in our Bradley crackles. The marines from the battalion that will be advancing alongside us to the west want to know if we’re ready to go. We are. They tell us to button up and wait for the signal to advance.

Lockwald shakes my hand good-bye and returns to his vehicle. I watch Ware and Yuri clamber aboard Fitts’s overcrowded Bradley. The ramp goes up and shuts them inside like sardines in an armored tin. Then it’s my turn. I settle down next to Lawson.

We’re ready. Our synapses are firing; adrenaline is coursing through our systems; we grip our weapons and wait for the drive into the battle. If the Marines need us to go early, we’ll go early.

Instead, we wait. The Brads idle and don’t move. The air grows stale. It grows hot inside our metal boxes. We sweat and start to stink. Lawson mutters to himself. I grow anxious, wishing we’d just get on with it.

The Brad lurches forward a few inches, and I think we’re on our way. Then we stop again. A few minutes pass, and then we’re moving again. Is this it? Are we rolling now?

No.
Fuck.

We jerk forward again and stop. Somebody grumbles, “Goddamn, it’s one dick tease after another.”

The sun starts to fade in the west. The sky turns orange, then red. Still, we sit at the edge of the attack position. We must be waiting for nightfall after all.

Thanks for telling us.

As dusk darkens the desert around us, our engine revs and our driver throws our Bradley in gear. We’re on the move.

The pre-assault area is our final stop just before the breach. Again, it is nothing more than a vast expanse of flat desertscape, perfect for organizing a massive armored assault. Every unit spreads out in a line and comes to a halt along the east-west line of departure laid out on our maps.

It is a dramatic moment, and I can see we’ve formed gigantic waves of vehicles that will soon pour forward and funnel into the breaches the engineers create for us. In the meantime, we’ve got all our fighting tracks on line. We can’t dismount, so we’re stuck inside. We face the waiting game again. It is interminable.

Off in the distance, a mortar round explodes. Another one soon follows. We’re within indirect fire range, and the insurgents are throwing what they can at us. I peer out one viewport and see a mortar explode about two hundred meters away from our Bradley. That’s not too close, but the enemy has been known to walk their fire, aiming steadily closer to a target until it gets hit on the third or fourth try.

More shells splash around us. Somebody says laconically over the radio, “I guess we’re drawing fire out here.”

“Fuck it,” comes the response.

Not far from us, Lockwald and the engineers pile out of their vehicle and start to work on the MICLIC. The weapon is carried in a U-Haul sort of trailer that the engineers tow behind them.

Thommft!
A 60mm mortar explodes right next to their armored carrier. Somehow, Lockwald and his men escape injury. Amazed, I watch Specialist Michael Sievers adjust gear on the MICLIC as if nothing is happening around him.

More shells explode around us. Things are starting to get hot.

Over the radio we hear that two Marines have died when their bulldozer rolled over while moving for the breach. The news angers us. We want to just fucking go.

But still we wait, poised at the start line, engines revving. This must be what a NASCAR race is like seconds before the green flag is waved, only instead of a few seconds our wait lasts for hours.

Our asses grow sore. When we try to reposition ourselves, we squash our balls. I check my watch reflexively. The minute hand drags.

Bombs explode. More shells fall on the city. The pre-assault bombardment swells to a climax. Every three or four seconds a 155mm shell lands. Larger, deeper thumps shake the Brad. Those are the 500-pound precision-guided JDAMs. And we sit.