Free Carnivore by Dillard Johnson Page B

doing that Saddam launched another SCUD. It landed close to the Alpha Troop Commander’s tank, maybe 400 meters away, and blew up in the desert. At that point we knew things were getting serious.
    You can still see those berms on Google Earth. They are big ridges made of earth and sand that have been pushed up by heavy equipment. And there wasn’t just one berm—there were three. The 3/15th Infantry and 34th Engineers had to cut lanes through them with dozers. The first berm was the Kuwaiti border, and the last one was Iraqi. In between the two was the United Nations berm in the UN Zone, and there were tank ditches on either side of it. There was a UN outpost in there as well.
    The gap between the first and last berms was 10 kilometers. The 34th Engineers were actually the first unit inside Iraq, as they cut through the Iraqi defender berm. After they did that, the 3/15 Infantry charged in and headed straight for the nearby Iraqi outpost, but there was nobody there; it was abandoned. Once units started to punch through the berm they got organized on the far side and started spinning up. Some were heading north on Highway 1, others were heading out on Highway 8.
    My unit, 3/7 Cav, consisted of three armor troops, Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, also known as Apache, Bone Crusher, and Crazy Horse—because that just sounds cooler. Apache Troop was to head up the main highway to the town of As Samawah and Objective Pistol. They were the main element. Our mission was to take a dogleg to the west, to the chemical manufacturing site at As Salman. We had two Fox vehicles with us that were supposed to do a chemical survey of the objective. Bravo Troop was going to be behind us, and the headquarters troop, supply trains, and aviation assets would be behind Bravo.
    Things always go wrong, of course. The road was dusty and it was one or two in the morning, and Sergeant Williams in Third Platoon stopped suddenly for some reason. Sergeant Soby, his wingman, rammed him in the back so hard it cracked the fuel cell on Williams’s Bradley, the Casanova. Williams, of course, didn’t want to give his vehicle up and miss the fight, so the guy in the back of his Bradley was ankle deep in fuel, sucking diesel fumes, for days.
    We hadn’t been rolling through Iraq for very long when we spotted what looked like some big long missiles and SCUD tents, so we went charging up the valley toward them. It turned out to be bedouins. Their tents, when folded up and from a distance, looked like SCUD emplacements.
    Apache Troop had the first engagement—they identified it as a ZSU-23 (an antiaircraft gun), but it was actually an old tank hull. I ID’d another tank but didn’t engage it because I could tell it was destroyed, and there was no heat signature. There were vehicles scattered everywhere from the 1991 Gulf War.
    We hooked up with everyone else at our first refueling site. All the fuel trucks were with us, in the supply train behind Bravo Troop. The site was maybe 125 or 150 miles inside Iraq. Bradleys can go a lot farther before needing to be refueled, but we had M1s with us, and they are total hogs; they suck the diesel down twice as fast. We pulled aside and let the M1s refuel first.
    There are two different ways you can handle refueling, a tailgate or a service station. A tailgate is where you stay in your fighting position and the trucks pull up behind you and top you off individually. It takes longer, but it’s the safest way to do it in a combat area. We hadn’t been in contact yet, so we did a service station—that’s where the fuel trucks stop and everybody cycles through and tops off their tanks.
    After the fuel stop we drove through the rest of the day. I remember it was hot. That sun beat down on us all day. We passed a few towns, though I don’t know if town is the correct word. They were dusty desert villages, just some mud huts and tents and bedouins. At this point we were ducks in a