8 November(D-Day): The Line of Departure

1900. The BRT was positioned on the highway above and to the north and east of the city. We were all oriented slightly south with flat open desert directly to our west. But it was dark. So off to my right it looked like a black ocean. And in it, the armada was pushing forward. Every vehicle had either an IR chemlight or an IR strobe on it.

“We don’t use IR strobes,” Phantom 7 had said the day prior, ‘In the NVGs, it looks like muzzle flashes.”

The BRT first sergeant was absolutely right. Those vehicles with IR strobes on them looked like they were popping off rounds. That wasn’t very smart. The rest of us had IR chemlights attached to our antennas.

Bradleys and Tanks, still 500 to 1000 meters north of the city edge, were firing into the city with their 25mm and main gun. Flashes exploded everywhere, briefly lighting up the night and allowing the enemy to take a peak at what was headed their way. The main gun rounds streaked through the blackness like red laser beams. As I watched the show in my night vision goggles, SGT P was watching it all in the thermal sights of the tank.

“So…many…vehicles,” he laughed.

In preparation for the assault, artillery guns dropped white phosphorus or “Willy Pete” on the city. The FA guys later told us this was the newest WP in the way it deployed. Whatever it was, it was incredible. As the rounds came in, they burst in the air several hundred feet above the ground. They streaked towards the ground in little spider trails burning bright orange. The WP hit the ground creating a thick white smoke screen but it still burned bright orange on the ground. This lit up the battlefield for the main effort, and created a smoke screen. The thermal sights on tanks and bradleys could still see through it, even though with the naked eye, everything was obscured.


The net call came out to prepare for the artillery barrage. We waited in anticipation. After what we had seen in artillery already, we couldn’t wait for hell to rain down 155mm all over the bad guys waiting here at the tip of the assault. Artillery has such a shocking effect. Combine that with a spearhead of tanks and you’ve got a very demoralizing warfront. The psychological impact of tanks is incredible. It instills a feeling of hopelessness and pure fear into the hearts and minds of the enemy. The reason I know this, is because at the end of the battle, and MI officer showed me an intercepted cell phone call between two insurgents. Unfortunately, the contents are secret, but I was laughing myself stupid at their distress. They were absolutely terrified and disoriented. They had no idea where their key terrorists leaders were and they were in complete shock at the strength and resolve of the U.S. Army.

Boom. A few minutes passed. Boom. Boom.

“That was IT?!?” SGT P exclaimed. “ That was the fucking barrage? Oh my lord. That was fucking gay.”

Langford and I laughed so hard sitting outside our hatches. I had been videotaping all of this and the barrage was such a disappointment. The troop net exploded with mockery. Everyone in the BRT started calling up to each other about how stupid the barrage was.

“We had a better barrage with the main gun all day. And that was with just two tanks,” SGT P said. The barrage was over in 15 minutes. Maybe 8 rounds exploded. Whatever.
The tanks approached the point where they were going to create a breech lane across the railroad tracks. Behind it came an M88 towing the MICLIC. This was going to be awesome.

Over in Outlaw Platoon, 1LT Boggiano was describing the MICLIC to his platoon. “It’s awesome. There’s going to be this huge explosion.”

In my gunner’s hole, SGT P watched the M88 lumber towards the forward most tanks poised in front of the breech point. “Ah shit. Here it comes.” The M88 looked so little in our thermal sights. Like a stupid cow or something, making it's clumsy way to the point. It pulled up to the rear of a tank and stopped.

SGT P and I tried to explain the MICLIC to PFC Langford as he and I watched the breech unfold from the two hatches. SGT P described it to us from his training experience.

“Check it out. THey are doing it just like in Hohenfels. They have the breech point secured with two tanks. The MICLIC’s pulling up. Now he’s going to launch it. This is exactly how we do it,” SGT P said. He had been to several Hohenfels rotations for High Intensity Conflict training. The outdated stuff based on Cold War tactics. Outdated as it may be, you still learn a lot about tanking. And it’s fun. Tank-on-tank brigade level warfare.

“Get ready,” 1LT Boggiano told his scouts.

I started recording with my digital camera held up against my PVS-14 NVGs. Something went up in the air. It looked like someone chucked a tiny 4th of July sparkler. It made a high arc into the sky as it shot southward. Little sparks from the rear of the rocket sprayed backwards. And then it disappeared.

“That was IT?!?” the scouts asked their lieutenant, “That was so gay.”
“Weak.”
“Sir, that sucked.”
“No, I swear there’s more. Just wait. I mean, I think there’s more,” 1LT Boggiano said, doubting himself now.
“C’mon, Sir. What happened to this big huge ex-“

BOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM

My crew all exclaimed at once.
“Holy SHIT!”
“Godddd-DAMN!”
“Oh FUCK!”

A tremendous fireball erupted from the north side of the city in front of all of the tanks. It was so big that it looked like it was in slow motion. Now I knew it was happening at a normal rate, but because the explosion was so huge, the rate at which the fireball grew looked like a slow motion action movie scene. I have never seen a MICLIC before. But this was the biggest explosion I have ever seen in my life. The fireball grew and grew, feeding off of God knows what. It wasn’t a normal mushroom cloud. It was long. It was like a mushroom cloud if you looked straight at it, but at our angle, the back stretched out. Suddenly, at the base of the mushroom cloud where it was all white and orange, several explosions went off. White flashes within the smoke plume on the ground lit up everywhere. Sparks flew off of those explosions too. The MICLIC did exactly what it was supposed to do.

The MICLIC is an engineer asset used to clear minefields and obstacles. The Mine Clearing Line Charge is 100 meters of rope launched by a rocket. Attached to the rope is 1,850 lbs. of C4 explosive. The rocket carries the line of C4 over the minefield and lays it across the point you want to breech. Then when you’re ready, you detonate the charge and the C4 blasts any mines upwards and outwards. It’s like parting the seas. You hope it won’t just displace the mines, but detonate them as well. In this case, it blew up a lot of IEDs that were set up to hit the assault front.

“Oh look at that bitch go,” SGT P was watching the M88 hauling ass away from the breech point. His work was done, and it was time to let the tanks penetrate. Tanks pulled up through the breech point and pulled security as the TF2-2 moved to through the lane. Terminator went through first with their Bradley-strong company. Once they were through the lane, Avenger followed behind and pushed westward so they could get on line. From there, the 2 company teams began the attack south; Terminator in the east, Avenger on the west.

(From talking with the engineer soldiers in Avenger Company later…) The “Avenger company got on line. The tanks got side by side. And then we hear Avenger 6 get on the net saying ‘Top Hat Top Hat in 4…3…’ and we’re like, ‘What the fuck is Top Hat?’ and then ‘…2…1...BOOM!’ Goddam. Ten tanks all fired at once. It was insane. We were like ‘What the fuck!’ Are we being attacked? That shit was loud as fuck. What the hell IS Top Hat? Is that a real order?”

The engineers had witnessed their first company fire command. It’s not too often that a platoon or company fire command has the opportunity to be executed. I couldn’t even imagine how that must have sounded.


In the BRT, we watched all of this unfold from the highway. For my tank section, we thought about our close friends and peers, superiors and subordinates. All of them were pushing through the city right now. We wondered what they were going through. Was it a hornet’s nest of bad guys running around firing RPGs? The S2 told us the enemy had underground bunkers dug in, where they would wait for the tanks to pass and shoot them in the rear. Did any tanks get taken out? Did anyone get killed? We talked about wishing we were part of the main assault and not just in a support by fire position. We felt like we weren’t going to see as much action as them.

”Red 6, Phantom 6. Occupy SBF 2.”

I left SSG Terry and his Brad wingman in place, and I bounded south with my wingman to a pre-planned position on the highway.

”Legion 9, Red 6. I don’t care where you go. As long as we got each other covered. Just find a nice alley to get line of sight. It should be a turkey shoot if we see anybody.” The intent was for us to always stay ahead of the assault, shooting west or south of west and picking off insurgents running south to flee, or running north to reinforce the resistance. In the day, we had seen maybe 2 or 3 bad guys at most running around. They would appear in view so briefly that it was impossible to get a shot at them. We were hoping to see some action now that the assault began, but surprisingly, there was pretty much no activity whatsoever. We remained vigilant; SGT P was constantly scanning, looking for targets.

Since he was a senior gunner, and a proficient one at that, I left him to his own devices. I watched the center of the city where the WP continued to drop over the assaulting forces. In the heart of the assault, the city was on fire from the WP. It still burned bright orange and within it all, flashes went off from the main gun. A few rounds of 25mm would zip across the sky in a huge arc. The Bradleys were shooting high at targets and the red tracers would launch off in the black night and just go over the whole city.

It was now getting late into the night. Maybe midnight or so. SGT P started to get tired, so I picked up the scan for him with the TC’s override. It looks exactly like a flight joystick, even with all of the red buttons for the cadillacs, the laser and the fire button. Plenty of cherry lieutenants get busted out for calling it a joystick. I stared through the GPSE for the next few hours. I started feeling the exhaustion from being up for forty hours straight. And my eyes started playing tricks on me. Our instructors at OBC told us about getting the “green eye” from staring in the GPS for too long when they were in Desert Storm. Your eye starts to ache, your head starts to hurt, and you start seeing things. Maybe that last one was the sleep deprivation. Suddenly, I saw an image of The Screamer, that famous painting of the apparition with his hands at his face and his mouth screaming. It appeared in a building window, sort of hovering. I blinked a few times. It scared the shit out of me. Not because I was scared of enemy targets, but because it looked like a damn ghost.

We continued to bound south in sections, occupying SBF 3. Finally I sent SSG Terry and his Brad to SBF 4, which was on the bridge of the cloverleaf (you can see it in that Time Magazine map). When he got to the bridge, he started pounding away with his main gun west along that east-west highway. He was hitting a bunch of Hesco bastions trying to reduce the obstacles.

When the Marines were pushed out of the city back in April, they never patrolled again into the city. For the next 6 months, the insurgents used that time to build up their defenses, essentially making the city of Fallujah a military stronghold. It was too easy for them. For starters, they used the concrete T-barriers and jersey barriers that we placed in the city for military checkpoints as fighting positions. They also used the Hesco Bastions that we built for the Iraqi National Guard and Police Force(ING and IPF) from a long time back. Basically, they used our own fortifying defense assets to their advantage.

It was now around 0400. I no longer saw the need to maintain tank/brad sections, so I joined SSG Terry and had the platoon return to pure sections. Together we started pounded away at the barriers They were positioned on the highway that ran below the bridge we were on and in front of us about 800 meters. The barriers were all set up at the point where the on-ramps start to get onto the cloverleaf. We didn’t want to take any chances of IEDs being hidden in the Hesco Bastions. It was a technique I’ve seen before in Baqubah. So we just hit them with main gun rounds. Suddenly, there was a holler at the right side of my tank.

“Hey Sir! 1LT Boggiano said I should ask you if I can shoot a main gun round,” SSG Danielsen hollered.

Oh good lord. “Hang on. Let me talk to my gunner,” I shouted.

“Get a load of these scouts, SGT P. They love talking shit about tankers. Everyone loves talking shit about tankers, but you get into battle and they can’t get enough of them. And now they want to play with them. It’s cool with me if he fires a main gun, is it cool with you?”

“Yeah sure, but he’s firing from your station. I’m not getting out of this bitch,” SGT P said.

“Yeah that’s the plan. I want you to lay him on the target anyways. Just let him pull the trigger,” I said. “YO!” I screamed down at the scout.

“Oh ok,” he turned and started to walk away.

“I said ‘YO.’ Come back. It’s fine. Climb on up. You’ll fire from my station. Just put on the CVC and do what my gunner says.” He was a lot happier now. He climbed in the TC’s hatch with his big ass 6’4 self.

I stood up behind the hatch on the turret, with my feet on the blow-out panels. I held up my video camera and started filming.

BOOM. The turret rocked from the recoil and I shuffled around to regain my balance. It wasn’t bright to be standing up, but I just wanted to see what it felt like. A huge fireball blew out of the gun tube and the round went down range. Sparks shot out where the round hit the barriers. Kick ass. SSG Danielsen climbed out of there pretty damn excited. I took some jabs at him about talking shit about tankers. He went back to his scout humvees, with hopefully a slightly higher opinion of tankers.

We stayed poised on the bridge. The entire BRT was localized at the cloverleaf. The main effort had continued to push south through the city. They were going to stop just north of the east-west highway(Fran). That would be their tactical pause where they would check their fires, refit on ammo and refuel the tanks. Meanwhile, the BRT was going to assault west and take the objectives on Fran. The BRT would be in the city. Avenger and Terminator would be directly to our north. Once we took those objectives, we would have the entire north half of the city. More importantly, we had control of a core MSR that ran east and west from one end of the city to the other. If we needed to, we could now run vehicles easily in and out of the city. We could run fuel or casualty evacs by ground quickly. We could get all the way to the west to the Euphrates River and reach the Marines if we had too. The only problem was, the Marines were so far behind us in the assault, that the next two days would involve hanging around waiting for the Marines to catch up on TF2-2's right flank.

Just as it was planned, it took us 8 to 10 hours to take the north part of the city. We had been told we would fight through the night and reach Fran by morning. We knew the next thing on our agenda was to take the industrial zone, which was just south of Fran. Supposedly, there was a VBIED factory to clear. After that, we had no idea where the battle was going to go from there. Of course, the brass had a plan. But at my level, I really only cared about what was happening in the next 24 to 36 hours.

At this point, I really hadn’t seen too many bad guys. I had seen a muzzle flash that we put a HEAT round into yesterday and that was it. The rest of our fires were laid on by telling the scouts or the Marines to mark the targets with Mk-19 grenades or bullets and tracers and SGT P blasting the marked targets with main gun. Overall, it was fun shooting big bullets, but it wasn’t anything crazy. Nothing was going to prepare me for one of the greatest images I will ever remember for the rest of my life:

calling artillery on a bunch of terrorists.