In an instant, and with a deafening noise, the side of the road was lit up with flashes of machine-gun fire. Five, eight, perhaps ten Iraqis went down. “Cover your ears!” Dakel shouted at me. “Blue Three’s firing their TOW.” There was a huge explosion and the sky turned bright. Staff Sergeant John Williams’s 25 mm cannon had jammed so he’d used his bigger weapon, an anti-tank missile. He fired a second time and hit a concrete canal barricade beyond the berm. Any Iraqis who’d evaded the gunfire were now running for their lives through irrigation ditches, dispersing beyond our line of sight. We were wide-eyed, powerful, and safe, the Bradleys’ heavy armour wrapped around our lucky asses.
“Action right!” the Captain said. It was a standard battle drill. The five Bradleys manoeuvred right in perfect synchronicity and headed into the grove. Fifty metres to our left, “Criminal Minds,” commanded by First Lieutenant Justin McCormick, had got into trouble and was teetering on the brink of the canal. The captain ordered him to pull back and provide fire protection from atop a hillock while our track and Staff Sergeant Dillard Johnson’s Bradley looked for a better way over the canal.
The two Bradleys advanced slowly now, searching for bodies. The heat and moisture from the grapes on the vines were obscuring the night-vision optics and it was hard to tell what was still out there. The drivers turned their lights back on, casting grim cones of illumination into the darkness. We stopped and dismounted and I stayed close to Dakel and Malecha, who were creeping through the dense vegetation, sweeping the area with flashlights.
“Hey sir, I got one of the fuckers,” Johnson shouted. Crazy J, as he was called, was about fifty metres from our position. He’d remembered seeing an Iraqi go down and found him by keeping the trail of blood in his headlights. The Iraqi was still armed and moving, so before hopping off the track, Johnson shot him a couple more times.
We ran and jumped over the canal ditches to find Johnson, the Captain, and Second Lieutenant Garrett McAdams standing over the mangled remains. Dakel pointed a flashlight at the dead man’s face. Soldiers die with their eyes wide open and this man was no exception. Lying in the dirt beside him, where his arm used to be, was an AK-47 and a knife with a large, curved blade. A bandolier full of ammunition was wrapped around his tunic and in his pocket was a small, orange-plastic-handled kitchen knife.
By now it was past two a.m. and Captain Bair was uncomfortable keeping his men out much longer. Even if Headquarters was urging them to bring in bodies, one was enough, he reasoned. He gave the orders to bag the dead man.
Private First Class Michael Sullivan dug through the bustle rack of their Bradley looking for a body bag. They’dnever planned on using one and Sullivan didn’t even know what they looked like. For some reason, he thought they’d be green, but, to his surprise, the one they found was blue. While the Captain held the flashlight, Johnson and Sullivan wrangled the remains into the bag. There was blood everywhere, dripping out of the bag and onto Sullivan and Johnson. It took several men to lift the body up onto the front slope of the Bradley and strap it down. “Arrrrgh – fucking gross!” Sullivan yelled when his hand slipped into the bag.
Johnson was angry. A veteran of the Gulf War, he had killed hundreds of guys and there was nothing special about this one. “A dead guy is a dead guy,” he said. “That’s what you get for bringing a pistol to a tank fight.”
On the ride back to Anaconda the only sound was the deep throbbing of the engines. The men’s dirt-caked faces betrayed signs of physical and emotional exhaustion, but also a strange look of resignation, a mere hint of what they had seen. Captain Bair was right: there was something about looking into a dead man’s eyes.
There were no more ambushes that night. Halfway back to camp we saw a convoy of ten 4ID Humvees travelling under full light. It was stupid as shit, everyone agreed, an easy target. Back at Anaconda, we drove up to Headquarters. Captain Bair kicked the body bag off the front slope of the Bradley onto the front steps and left it there.
