Knife Fights Read online

  Specialist Jud Davis, Sergeant Shoe, me, and Specialist Mac in Wadi Al Batin during Operation Desert Shield, 1990.

  A GP–Medium was just the right size for a tank platoon. Each soldier had a cot, with his two duffel bags stored underneath it. Tank commanders took the four places closest to the tent’s two doors so that they had humanity close on only one side. Rank has its privileges, even if it’s only a bit of canvas on which to string some cord to hang sweaty clothes. Stifling in the summer, the tent got cold enough in the winter that we’d sometimes pull up a tank to the flap doors first thing in the morning to warm it up with engine exhaust, as the turbine didn’t create carbon monoxide like an ordinary internal combustion engine. It did make everything in the tent smell more like diesel fuel, but that was better than most of the other smells that occupied it.

  The days quickly developed a battle rhythm consisting of physical training—calisthenics followed by long runs over the desert sand—hasty wash-ups in the gravity-fed shower enclosures when the water truck had come the day before to fill them up, and then tank maintenance or training exercises. Breakfast and dinner were prepared by the cooks at battalion and trucked out to our company location, with brown bag “Meals, Ready to Eat” (or excrete, depending on the variety) for lunch.

  Mealtimes were when the company officers would get together to plan training, discuss personnel issues, or just gossip. Ghostrider Six, the company commander, was a thin, vain, handsome captain with a short temper. His second-in-command, “Five,” Executive Officer and First Lieutenant Scott Riggs, was a Texan with a real gift for leadership who had served as a tank platoon leader in Korea before joining the First Cav. Scott—or “Turtle,” from the way he looked when wearing his helmet—would become a source of endless wisdom to the other lieutenants in the unit. Other than me, his charges included Buffy, a fraternity boy still locked in college attitudes who led the second “White” platoon, and Pete Johnson, a natural sportsman from California who could hit anything with a rifle or shotgun but couldn’t qualify a tank to save his life. Pete, or “Blue One,” became my best friend in the unit over dozens of games of chess that he invariably lost. He would later become one of the few Army chaplains to sport a Ranger tab, signifying his graduation from the elite infantryman’s school.

  We were stationed on a strategic patch of ground just south of the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq in a dry riverbed, or wadi, that ran from northeast to southwest and was named after the Saudi town of Al Batin. The arrival of the First Cavalry Division’s tanks, artillery pieces, and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles here in Wadi al Batin marked the success of Operation Desert Shield. Saddam Hussein’s Army stood little chance of breaking through the Cav and continuing his assault into Saudi Arabia unless he used chemical weapons to disable us first, which would have caused some of us to die slowly and agonizingly but mostly would have limited our ability to operate our weapons effectively. That, President George H. W. Bush had promised, would result in the strongest possible reaction from the United States (a clear threat to use nuclear weapons in response to a chem strike), but we spent a lot of time practicing tasks in our chemical suits in case the threat of nuclear retaliation didn’t work.

  Our gas masks went with us everywhere. I used mine as a pillow when I slept on top of the tank during exercises away from base camp. One night a soldier on radio watch sounded the chemical alarm after hearing a report of “Gas! Gas! Gas!” on the radio. I scrambled inside the tank to my duty position, abandoning my fart sack, or sleeping bag, but putting my mask on before closing my tank commander’s hatch with a clang to seal out the invading chemical cloud. I looked down to see Sergeant Shoe sitting in his gunner’s seat with the saddest expression I’d ever seen on his generally jolly face, which was unprotected by a mask. He’d left it up top while scrambling into the confines of the gunner’s hole. He pointed mournfully at the hatch.

  For a long moment I looked into his sad eyes, then steeled myself, reopened the hatch, and exposed myself and my crew to chemical annihilation to fetch Shoe’s mask. He’d have done anything for me after that, even if the whole thing had been a false alarm. Shoe never left his mask behind again.

  We expected chemical weapons to be delivered by SCUD missiles—unguided projectiles with sufficient range to hit our positions from their bases inside Iraq, but so inaccurate that a high-explosive warhead was unlikely to do much damage. Late in the war one conventionally armed SCUD would hit a logistics unit in the Saudi port of Dammam, killing more than a dozen soldiers in the most damaging attack of the entire fight for the United States; but the one that came closest to me cost me only a cheeseburger.

  In the town of Al Batin, the First Cav had set up a shower point—GP–Mediums with hot water sprayed at pressure, rather than the cold water trickling down from the gravity-fed showers we used on a daily basis (except for Sergeant Kebble) after our morning workouts. My turn to visit the fabled shower point came up one day, and I was lucky enough to share the trip with Lieutenant Gray Cockerham, from our battalion’s Charlie Company. An infantryman, Gray was short and powerful, so strongly built that he was unable to fit into the cramped turret of his Bradley fighting vehicle while wearing a heavy Vietnam-era flak jacket. Gray was also very smart—and, unfortunately for him, hungry that day.

  When we arrived at the shower point, he headed straight for the grill to grab a cheeseburger, while I decided to eat after I was clean. Having taken more than my share of hot water, I was happily scrubbed and standing in the burger line when a SCUD suddenly landed in the vacant lot across the street, blowing out the lights and power in the burger stand—and cutting off water in the shower just as Gray was about to lather up. Unsure whether the SCUD had included a chemical warhead with the high explosive, we put on our protective masks—even Gray, for whom a mask was the only thing he was wearing. He dressed quickly, just in time to jump into the back of the Humvee as it roared away, taking us back to our tanks and Brads in case the SCUD marked the start of an Iraqi attack on our positions.

  It didn’t. Instead, the next move was ours. President Bush, who had previously stated firmly that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait “would not stand,” made the critical decision to continue sending U.S. Army units to Saudi Arabia after sufficient forces were already in place to preclude an Iraqi attack. The additional tanks were intended to send Saddam Hussein the message that we would attack to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty if he refused to yield in the biggest American military operation since the Vietnam War.

  The move was greeted with great relief by soldiers who were already growing tired of the desert and who could see in front of them an endless future of beerless, yearlong tours defending Saudi Arabia. A cartoon of Bart Simpson wearing a Kevlar helmet appeared in our tent with the inscription “I’m not waiting here for a year without beer, dude.” We increased the tempo of our training, switching our focus from practicing the defense of battle positions to the more complicated task of attacking prepared positions, and were delighted that the Army decided to give us a Christmas present prior to kicking off the assault that appeared increasingly likely to be in our future.

  The M1 Abrams tank was an aggressive design that incorporated a 1500-horsepower gas turbine engine and room for a 120mm main gun, although the initial version carried a smaller rifled 105. The smoothbore 120, a German weapon, featured greater range and killing power and a combustible shell casing, most of which burned up inside the gun tube, leaving behind only a small stub that was much prized by tankers as an ashtray. This ensured that the tank didn’t fill up with two-foot-long brass shells that tended toward the hot side of the temperature spectrum. Tankers wore boots with leather straps instead of bootlaces because the shells had a history of burning through cotton or nylon. The First Cav, for all its history and bold horsehead-on-a-Norman-shield patch, was still equipped with worn-out “slick” M1 tanks with 105mm guns in 1990.

  But just before Christmas, we received new M1A1 tanks with the bigger 120mm main gun, then had the chance
to fire practice rounds from our new toys at a range that the division master gunner had carved out of the desert. It was hard to imagine a more explicit indication that we were going to war, but just as hard not to feel more confident about the prospect in the new M1A1, which rocked like a bronco when the 120mm main gun fired its load. We were lucky that Mac was as strong as he was skinny. The 120 round was both heavier and harder to maneuver in the tight confines of the tank’s crew compartment than the smaller, shorter 105. Mac was able to load them repeatedly within three seconds, even the heavy high-explosive antitank (HEAT) rounds, designed to be used against armored personnel carriers or, as we would soon demonstrate, infantry fighting positions.

  The new year featured a series of artillery raids and practice attacks on the border posts that marked the line in the sand between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Conducted with live rounds and against manned positions, they were designed to convince the Iraqi military that the First Cav would lead the main American attack, “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” along Wadi al Batin into the teeth of the prepared Iraqi defenses. This had, in fact, been the initial war plan, but a new technology of which Saddam was unaware had opened up a different option to the United States and her allies.

  Nascent global positioning system receivers drew on satellites in geosynchronous orbits to precisely identify the location of friendly tank units and enabled the famous “left hook” around Saddam’s defenses through what otherwise would have been unnavigable empty desert. Meanwhile, even as this attack was being prepared many miles to the west, the Cav blew tank-size holes through the ten-foot sand berms that marked the border just north of our positions and shelled the guard towers that protected the border. We were working to convince the Iraqis of something they already believed—that we were planning to attack them following the established contours of the wadi, the historical invasion route. It is always easier to convince an enemy that you are going to do just what he thinks you’re planning to do anyway, and the deception plan worked marvelously on the operational level of war.

  There was, however, a price to be paid for making the deception believable. The day after I fired my first tank round in anger, destroying one of the guard towers along the berm so that our engineers could blow attack lanes through the protective barriers, was Valentine’s Day 1991. The next day our sister battalion, the Black Knights of 1-5 Cavalry, passed through the lanes we had constructed in the berms and attacked into what we thought was the enemy’s soft underbelly in their Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. We couldn’t know that it was the other side’s turn to draw blood.

  The Black Knights ran into an ambush—T-100 antitank guns dug in on the flanks of the wadi. Tanks were invulnerable to fire from T-100s, at least along their heavily armored frontal arc, but Bradleys were not as well protected. Several American soldiers in Bradleys were killed, and 1-5 was forced to withdraw. Our crusty company motor sergeant, Sergeant First Class Cunningham, helped with the recovery of the disabled vehicles and the cleanup of the remains of the fallen soldiers. It was a subdued dinner that night, as for the first time the cost of war impressed itself on a unit composed almost entirely of soldiers who had never seen combat before.

  Of the eighty or so soldiers in Ghostrider Company, only our well-worn first sergeant was a Vietnam veteran. When the company came under mortar fire, the rest of us hunkered down and took it, trusting in luck, our armor, and the minimal skills of our enemy to protect us. Having been on the receiving end of mortar rounds before, he headed away from the enemy as fast as his armored personnel carrier would go. Like the first sergeant, the Ghostriders had now seen a glimpse of the elephant, in the wonderful Civil War phrase for combat, and we weren’t sure we liked what we had seen.

  There is much to be said about going to war for the first time. Life is heightened, more intense and intensely focused, like having sex, but with a real death rather than what the French call the little death at the end. Rhodes scholar Karl Marlantes, who earned the Navy Cross in Vietnam after departing Oxford early to serve as a Marine infantry officer, has written a marvelous book about the experience, titled What It Is Like to Go to War. In short, if no one close to you gets killed, and if you don’t get too close to those you kill, it is exhilarating and vivid and intoxicating, every minute an adventure. But when you lose people you love, when the vengeful war gods consume the young flesh on which they thrive, it is unspeakably terrible. The ghosts of the departed on both sides haunt many of those who fight for the rest of their lives. Though I knew none of the young men killed in Operation Knight Strike, their loss was close enough to peel back a translucent corner on the window into the true horror of war, although I would not see clearly into the depths of hell until another decade had passed.

  We paused briefly after the attack, but we didn’t have long to lick our wounds. The deadline Washington had given Saddam Hussein to get out of Kuwait approached rapidly, and on February 24 we again attacked through the berm and up Wadi al Batin, covering the opening swing of VII Corps’s “left hook” far to our west with our own assault straight up the middle. Quickly overwhelming the T-100 fighting positions that had stymied the Black Knights ten days before, the entire brigade came on line, running headfirst into prepared defensive positions of an Iraqi infantry division. For the first time in my life, I was shooting at someone who was shooting real bullets back at me.

  Honestly, it wasn’t much of a fight. The Iraqi soldiers, demoralized by weeks of U.S. Air Force bombing, fired mortars and machine guns at us to little effect, not that the first sergeant stuck around to find out. Their defense hinged on trenches filled with oil that they set afire to establish a smoke screen. It was not particularly effective—oil is hard to set on fire unless it is under pressure, and the Iraqi infantry had few weapons that could put a serious dent in an M1A1 Abrams tank. I can clearly remember firing a HEAT round into a mortar position that was the closest thing to a threat we faced. It disappeared in a satisfying explosion that would probably have given me nightmares if I’d seen the results up close.

  I didn’t get the chance. By this point, other elements of VII Corps had already advanced through lanes in the border berm farther west, cleared by the famed First Infantry Division, the Big Red One. We had accomplished our objective of convincing Iraqi Republican Guard tank divisions that we were the main attack, and we now received orders to pull back and join the left hook, the real main attack. Many Republican Guard tanks were still facing south in our direction, ready to meet the phantom First Cav attack, when they were shot in the flank or rear by our friends in VII Corps who were now bearing down on them from the west, traveling through the trackless desert with the aid of global positioning system satellites.

  We scrambled to join them, withdrawing south after our feint and then moving fast to the west, passing through the Big Red One’s passage lanes and turning north. Over the next three days the First Cavalry Division had a plausible claim to have moved faster through enemy territory than had any division in military history, although we had the great advantage of following in VII Corps’s tracks.

  After some ninety-six hours of nearly continuous movement, we pulled up into a lager outside of Basra around midnight on February 27. Bleary from exhaustion, I kicked Sergeant Shoe in the head to wake him up. He was well rested. The tank gunner, wedged into his hole like a passenger in coach on a transatlantic flight, generally sleeps during road marches. I gave Shoe command of the tank while I curled up behind my hatch on top of the turret in my beloved poncho liner, falling immediately into an exhausted sleep.

  I didn’t hear the sound of a multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) pulling into positions behind our tanks, and I knew nothing of the Washington negotiations on ending the war after one hundred hours of ground fighting. The Army interpreted the “cease fire at dawn” order that emanated from the national security decision-making machine as a good reason to do as much damage as possible to remaining Iraqi units, and the MLRS rockets had the range and lethality to make a ma
rk.

  They certainly made a mark on me. I was jerked awake by a sound like jet engines igniting on my chest as the rocket motors lit a dark night on fire. Convinced that the end of the world had arrived, I made the completely illogical decision that I wanted to die on the ground, rolling off the tank turret into a ten-foot drop onto hard sand. With my arms wrapped inside my poncho liner, I couldn’t break my fall and performed an ignominious face plant that brought me fully awake and conscious. Unrolling myself, I climbed painfully into the turret, shaking uncontrollably for some time, as Shoe laughed and laughed while the MLRS fire turned the night into a fiery and very intense day.

  They eventually ran out of missiles, and actual daylight found all of us alive and thrilled with the news that the United States had declared a cease-fire. It was my twenty-fifth birthday, a fact that I made the mistake of mentioning to Shoe. The platoon celebrated by spanking me in a small celebration of being alive, a ritual softened somewhat by the charcoal chemical suit that I, like all the rest of us, was wearing in case of chemical attack. It was very, very good to be young and alive and combat veterans of a war that had gone far better than any of us had expected.

  Shoe decided that our combat experience together meant that military courtesies could now be disregarded, and he began calling me John when the two of us talked. Much as I loved him, I couldn’t let this pass. I ordered Shoe to come to the position of attention in the sand next to the tank and then had him write himself a counseling statement in which he agreed that if he committed the offense of calling me by my first name again, he would be subject to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There were tears in his eyes when he handed me the scrawled counseling statement, which I promptly rolled into a ball and told him to eat. He didn’t call me John quite as often after that.