12 November: Jumping Track Flash

SSG Terry plowed a lane for us all the way from the eastern edge of the city where we had become disabled, all the way to the highway – MSR Mobile. There we waited about an hour for CPT Freihl, the TF2-2IN BMO, to arrive with a HET and an escort of humvee gun trucks.

Someone somewhere along the way had the foresight to feed us because he showed up with one plate full of cold mashed potatoes for the 8 of us to share. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. We hadn’t eaten for almost 9 hours and we were a little hungry. And morale was at a slight downturn, so the mashed potatoes were a nice change from the usual muffins and powerbars.

The HET had these powerful chains to pull the disabled tank onto the flatbed, but it was ugly to watch them hoist the tank up. Since the number 7 roadwheels were chewed up, they didn’t roll like normal. For you tankers out there, pulling a tank backwards with an arm that’s twisting forward isn’t good for the torsion bar. We all stood there watching and waiting for the hub to break, the arm to pop off, or the torsion bar inside to snap. Fortunately, the mechanics and support soldiers from some other National Guard unit managed to get the tank on the flatbed without any more disasters.

“Dawes, go back with One Six(A16).” SSG Terry ordered. Dawes seemed to be limping as he hobbled off of A18 and climbed up my tank.

“What’s up with Dawes?” I asked.

“Eh, his feet are bleeding.”

“No shit?” I replied quite suprised. I remember doing regular foot checks in Ranger School. They were mandatory. We all sat on our asses every morning in the dirt, pulled our socks off and held our feet in the air while the medics went by and examined them. White, sickly, blistered cow tongues are what our feet had looked like. But it was understandable. We had ruckmarched all day and night through rivers and swamps and up and down the Tennessee Valley Divide. Number one rule: Take care of your feet. My best friend had made the march to Camp Darby, but his feet had fallen apart along the way and he was forced to recycle. I remember looking at his feet in the aid station. The soles of his feet looked exactly like ground beef. Specifically, that 75% lean stuff, where it’s mostly red but with specks of white mottled here and there.

But we were tankers here. We didn’t road march. So it never occurred to me to do foot checks. But some people’s feet are softer than others. And 5 straight days without changing your socks or even taking your boots off for some air will take its toll.

“Well Sir. Let’s go.” SSG Terry beckoned for me.

I looked at my guys. They rode in the tank as it sat defeated on the back of the HET. I felt horrible. Up until this point, I had been there for all the maintenance in my section. And not for just my tank, but SSG Terry’s too. When we changed track, we did it as a platoon. Changing track was an all day affair. And our OPTEMPO when we arrived in Iraq was such that we were changing track on a tank every 3 weeks.

Now some platoon leaders might feel obligated to do maintenance to prove to their soldiers that they aren't afraid to get dirty. That wasn't my motivation. I wasn’t there to pull maintenance with the guys to earn credibility. It’s just that there was such a tremendous amount of maintenance to be done, that it only helped to have extra hands. Disconnecting final drives, linking track sections together, greasing track, tightening wedge bolts, changing arms, hubs, and road wheels; there was a lot of work to be done.

Now, here my guys went; off to repair a side of track. Just the 4 of them. Normally it’s 20 of us and even then it takes about 4 to 6 hours to put on one side of track, tighten the wedge bolts and grease the shock housings. To add insult to injury, not only was I not helping to get the tank up, but I had the pleasure of getting to stay in the fight. Of course that’s how it had to be. It’s always the case. If the platoon leader’s track goes down, he must jump track and get on his wingman’s tank. His job is to maneuver the platoon, not worry about his tank going down. I knew that. In Desert Storm and in 3rd ID’s assault for Baghdad, tanks went down for maintenance here and there. The platoon leaders left their tanks in the hands of their gunners and in the hands of the rear maintenance trains while they plowed ahead with the main assault. I knew I had to continue the fight with the rest of the platoon, but I just felt bad about not being able to help them.

“Sir, you can ride in the loader’s hatch.” He said, smiling at me.

“That’s fine, SSG Terry.” I replied, knowing exactly where he was going with this.

“Well I had this one lieutenant in Hohenfels during a HIC rotation and he had to jump track. Boy, he jumped up on here and tried to kick me out of the TC’s hatch. I said, ‘Listen here Sir. This may be your platoon, but this is MY tank. You can ride in the loader’s hatch and talk to the platoon and the commander, but I’ll command this tank.' ”

“Well relax SSG Terry. You can run this tank however the hell you want to. As long we do what we gotta do.” I jumped into the loader’s hatch and we headed back to where the main body of the task force had assembled. It was now 1500.

The task force vehicles lined up on Phase Line Isabella. The TF2-2 headquarters element maintained a stronghold among some buildings. And the BRT had an area of buildings and open space behind them. We headed there for further instructions.

I informed CPT Mayfield of the situation with my tank. We were still mission-capable with one tank and 2 Bradleys. Especially for the mission we had coming up this evening.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Green 6 had lost a good friend of his in this strong surge of enemy resistance. The Terminator executive officer was killed in his Bradley. During the forward push into the south this morning, he was hit with an RPG while standing in the hatch. There was a debate about whether or not the RPG hit him or the RPG struck the hatch cover. The reason that was significant is that (and you may have noticed this in the first picture I ever posted on Armor Geddon back in December) many of us slung our AT-4 rockets across the backs of our hatch covers. While the enemy was shooting at us, we were sitting with a lot of explosives on our backs. This was true for the Bradleys, humvees and the only tank to carry AT-4s...mine. Regardless of what happened. The enemy showed some uncommon patience in attacking our forces. The task force suffered some tough losses and so far it was the deadliest day for us.

CPT Mayfield cut us loose to head back to the LRP so we could refuel our tank. When we arrived at the LRP, we found most of Avenger company assembled there. I saw Green 6, 1LT Dave Meier, and ran up to him to see how he was doing. He was the same as always. Pretty relaxed. Not frazzled in the least bit after driving through hell.

“It sucked being in the humvees. We really couldn’t dismount and the tanks were doing everything. We wanted to be on the ground. And to top it off, they haven’t used us for much demo.” Dave seemed frustrated that his guys weren’t being employed the way he thought they were going to be. He and his men were combat engineers. He was probably expecting a lot of room clearing or maybe blowing up some enemy weapons caches with demolitions like C-4 explosives. Instead, it seemed to him that they were stuck behind the tanks pulling rear security while the tanks blew up everything in front of him. And the room clearing had really been left to the infantry guys in Terminator company, which was one city block over. As far as demo was concerned, there was an engineer platoon attached to Terminator company that had been tasked specifically to drive around in the PCs and blow up secured caches throughout TF2-2’s sector.

Although I sympathized with Dave’s frustrations, I could see how that could happen to him. Avenger was a tank company with an engineer platoon attached. You always tend to put your most violent foot forward. Back in Baqubah, the 82nd Engineers Battalion had a tank platoon attached. It was Boggiano’s old tank platoon. The engineers always let the tankers do the hammering. Who else had bigger guns? Here, I was attached to a light scout unit. CPT Mayfield insisted that we always lead the troop and hit everything with main gun first. And why not? You got it, use it. So in a tank company, barreling down the streets of Fallujah, blasting everything in their way, it’s hard to stop to let some dismounts get out and it’s easy to neglect their capabilities when you’ve got so much forward momentum. Of course, now you can argue that perhaps that very momentum caused us(as a whole) to overpursue and get caught with our backs vulnerable. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened this morning.

As we relaxed and let our guard down momentarily in the LRP, I looked around and took a moment to find friends. Dave had all 4 of his humvees lined up in the LRP just standing by. His soldiers were milling around. Some were grabbing snacks to eat. Others were wiping down weapons. Most were recounting the crazy ass shit they just went though. I walked up to SSG Durden, one of Dave’s squad leaders, who was standing beside his truck.

“That boy, Stalker 6. Oh man. We call him ‘Lieutenant Dan.’” SSG Durden said. He was referring to my buddy Cole Namken who was the scout platoon leader for TF2-2. On Day 1, hours prior to H-Hour, he had been taking cover by my tank while his sniper team lay out in the middle of the highway picking off guys with the .50cal Barrett Sniper Rifle. And on Day 2, my hunter/killer platoon had gone in to pull him and his sniper team out of a building in which they were trapped. As scout missions go, he and his platoon had been tasked or “bitched” out to wherever they were needed. Today they were attached to Avenger Company.

“That boy is crazy. He was standing in the middle of the street. Bullets were popping off all around him. And he was trying to get some guys to go with him to clear a building. Now we were all standing fast here but man that LT was getting hot. He was screaming for someone to come with him until finally he said, ‘Fuck this,’ pointed ‘You, you, and you. Come with me’ and we all took off following him. He had his M4 in one hand and his ICOM radio in the other. He starts screaming something into his radio and shooting bad guys with his M4.” SSG Durden started acting it out with his arm raised straight out holding his rifle one-handed. He stormed away with a slight lean forward and his hand to his mouth. “Man that kid was walking, talking and killing bad guys. I call him ‘Lieutenant Dan’.”

I shook hands with all the engineers and said goodbye. We finished fueling up and headed back down into our stronghold in the southern half of the city. We pulled in and spaced the tank and Bradleys out to the perimeter of our stronghold. I ran into the center to find CPT Mayfield’s humvee. His plan for us this evening was going to be to use direct fire to hammer the dog shit out of the city blocks that we took contact from this morning. Hopefully, this would dissuade the enemy from holding their position and maybe they would pull back. Pulling back would be fine with us. The funny thing is, the enemy only had a kilometer of city left to withdraw to. After that, it was open desert and the Marines were pushed way out there in the open desert with their tanks and LAVs watching the edges of the city, just waiting for exfiltrators. Also, it was easier to kill bad guys on the run, than bad guys dug in.

“Neil, what I need you to do is plow a lane from the corner of Isabella out into the desert like this.” He drew a 45 degree line on his map that started at the edge of the city right at PL Isabella and went southeast into the open desert where we were supposed to have been this morning to call for fire.

“Plow us a lane, the rest of the troop will follow you. Hunter Platoon will be right behind you. Have your Bradleys bring up the rear for security. We’ll be facing the eastern side of the city and we’re gonna hit it with everything we’ve got. As soon as you go out about 300 meters, turn around and plow a lane just behind the first lane back to your start point. This lane will be behind us and we can use it as a CASEVAC(casualty evacuation) route.”

So the troop was going to move at crawl speed behind the tank as we moved southeast in the sand. Then everybody would do a right face, which would turn us southwest to face the eastern buildings no more than 200 meters away. And then we would unleash hell on the side of the city that inflicted casualties on our brothers. It was too simple.