Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 14
Tears began streaming from the G.I.’s unbandaged eye, and Harned felt a hot salty sting on his own face. When he looked at the tired faces of the doctors, nurses and corpsmen who crowded around the stretcher, every one of them was crying too.
• • •
For Paula O’Connor, the war began on the afternoon of January 16. The deadline for the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait had passed and O’Connor joined the dayshift in the cavernous aircraft shelter as they armed two F-117As with laser-guided bombs.
Finally, the last fuse was tested, and the last bomb-bay door sealed. As the pilots climbed into their cockpits, O’Connor looked up at the captain perched above her. He stared back, his eyes impassive above the rim of his oxygen mask.
“Bring it back safe,” she said into the crew chief’s headset.
The pilot raised a gloved hand, thumbs up. “You bet,” he answered. “See you tomorrow.”
The aircraft rumbled onto the taxi ramp, and one by one they rose into the clear desert night. Soon their nose lights winked off. They were invisible.
Just before 3 a.m., a Stealth fighter from O’Connor’s wing dropped the first bomb of the air war, destroying a radar station outside Baghdad. For the next 41 nights, the fighters of her unit flew more than 1200 sorties, bombing targets in Iraq and occupied Kuwait. O’Connor worked 12-, then 18-hour days, as the pace of operations increased. The crews grew closer than a family, each member watching out for the other, double-checking the work. It didn’t matter that O’Connor was a woman. She was engaged in a vital combat assignment.
• • •
Ray Tyler and Alleykats led the 3rd Armored Division into Iraq on the afternoon of February 24. Engineers had cut wide lanes through the berms and mine fields along the border. From the open hatch of the driver’s “hole,” Tyler could see the dust columns of thousands of armored vehicles moving behind him.
For the next 48 hours, the division, screened by Tyler’s cavalry scouts, plunged deep into Iraq across a hundred miles of desert. Tens, then hundreds of surrendering enemy troops swarmed out of bomb-blasted bunkers as the Bradleys fired on the fortifications.
By midday on the 26th, the division had reached its point to pivot east and assault the elite Republican Guard dug in along the northern Kuwaiti border. A howling sandstorm blew up, reducing visibility to 300 meters and forcing the gunners to rely on their thermal sights, normally used at night. The sights showed only ghostly, reddish hot spots, not the crisp detail of the optical instruments.
To the left of Alleykats, the crew of “3-6,” its sister Bradley, commanded by Sgt. Ron Jones, scanned the sector ahead. Suddenly gunner Darren McLane spotted three wavering hot spots in his sight. “Bimps!” he shouted into his helmet mike, G.I. slang for Iraqi BMPs, armored personnel carriers.
In Alleykats’ turret, gunner Clint Reiss sighted more BMPs at the same moment. “Light ’em up!” Ed Deninger ordered.
Reiss and McLane fired their cannon, and the thermal sights flashed with the glare of burning Iraqi vehicles. More BMPs appeared ahead among the sand dunes, firing at the advancing scouts. Down in the driver’s seat, Ray Tyler had a clearer yiew than the men in the turret. What he saw frightened him.
Republican Guards were swarming along the ground, lugging rocket-propelled grenades and strange, suitcase-like missile boxes.
“Dismounts,” Tyler yelled into his microphone, “eleven o’clock, a bunch of them.”
Now larger, more ominous shapes appeared in the blowing sand ahead. The roar of heavy tank cannon sounded above the cracking of the Bradley’s lighter weapons. Darren McLane rotated his turret and fired a steady burst of 25-mm rounds. Each round hit, but there was no explosion.
My God, McLane thought, it’s a T-72 tank!
He switched to his missile control and fired a TOW. The explosion ripped the turret off the tank’s hull.
Then, inevitably, the outnumbered scouts suffered losses. To the left, Sergeant Jones’s Bradley took a hit from an enemy cannon round. The vehicle was now motionless, an obvious target.
“We’re coming to pick you up,” Ed Deninger called on the radio.
Ray Tyler raced to position Alleykats between 3-6 and the enemy, to shield Jones’s crew as they bailed out. Platoon leader 2nd Lt. Michael Vassalotti had heard Jones’s distress call as well. He raced his own Bradley up from the other angle and ordered Jones’s crew inside.
Just as Darren McLane leaped from the top of the vehicle, 3-6’s turret exploded. McLane was thrown to the sand and hit by shrapnel. His driver was also down. As Tyler watched frantically, the lieutenant’s crewmen dragged the wounded inside.
“Get out of here,” Deninger ordered. Just as Tyler pulled away, two T-72 sabot rounds hit Vassalotti’s vehicle. Smoke poured from the holes, but incredibly the Bradley still rolled along.
Mortar and artillery rounds exploded now in the sand as the Iraqis fought desperately to disengage from the scouts of Alpha Troop. Deninger’s order echoed in Tyler’s ears as he went left, then right, then straight ahead. Finally, the platoon fell back to allow the heavy American armor forward in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. Four American vehicles had been destroyed or damaged, two men were dead, and 12 wounded. But that evening, as the troop formed into a circular defense position, their radios crackled with news that the 3rd Armored Division had overrun the fleeing tanks and BMPs, and was ripping the enemy apart. By God, Tyler thought, we did it.
• • •
Troy Gregory managed to call home one last time before his unit moved north to the Kuwaiti border. “Don’t worry,” he told his mother. His job, he explained, was to help select fire positions as the assault column advanced. He would be well back from the forward units.
In the predawn darkness of February 23, Gregory’s battalion rumbled forward, a wedge of TOW-equipped vehicles and heavy trucks towing howitzers. The flat horizon lay hidden beneath a sooty pall of smoke from the hundreds of wellheads the Iraqis had set aflame in the Al Burgan oilfield.
For three hours on the 24th, the Marines repelled a savage counterattack by enemy forces. That night the troops dug in. Along the horizon, the burning carcasses of Iraqi armor lit the overhanging smoke with flickering tongues of orange.
“Isn’t this something else?” asked Cpl. Chris La Civita, a gunner in Hotel Battery. “It’s like fighting in hell.”
The next morning, as the Marines moved forward through dense, acrid fog, the Iraqis sprang a second, even larger counterattack. Enemy-tank rounds exploded in the sand, kicking up clouds of shrapnel. Several fragments hit Corporal La Civita in the face, ripping a bloody chunk of flesh from the side of his jaw.
As the counterattack threatened to envelop the battalion position, Gregory’s survey team was ordered to search a nearby trench for enemy holdouts. As they entered a bomb-cratered bunker, Gregory tripped a mine.
An hour later, he was driven to the battalion aid station, where La Civita was waiting for the evacuation helicopter. Gregory was in shock, strapped to a stretcher, a medic holding a unit of blood plasma above him. But he was more concerned at the sight of his friend’s heavily bandaged face.
“Man,” Gregory whispered, “are you okay?”
La Civita’s eyes filled with tears. One of Gregory’s legs was blown off and the other was badly mangled. “Yeah, Troy,” he said. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“What about the other guys? I hope nobody else got hit when I stepped on that thing.”
La Civita turned away to hide his tears. The battalion chaplain took Gregory’s hand and prayed with him while corpsmen worked on his wounds. Finally the helicopter clattered down through the smoke to take the two wounded Marines to a field hospital in Saudi Arabia.
La Civita stayed with Gregory in the triage tent while corpsmen and nurses prepared the gravely wounded Marine for surgery. The next morning, La Civita searched for his friend among the patients. But Troy Gregory was gone.
• • •
Senior Airman Paula O’Connor returned to the qui
et streets of Godfrey, Illinois, on a cool April morning. Her home was decorated with yellow ribbons, American flags and a huge “Welcome Home” banner. Her first request was for the Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings, that she had missed while on duty 7000 miles away.
After the initial excitement, O’Connor found herself spending quiet time with her dad. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, she didn’t seem much different from the tomboy who’d mastered a unicycle only 11 years before. But Joe O’Connor and his daughter found they had a new bond. Both had been to war.
• • •
Cpl. Robert Ray Tyler came home to McAllen, Texas, on a warm June afternoon. Cissy Tyler and her mother had prayed for his safe return for months. In their family, ties of love and devotion ran deep. But Tyler now felt a new kinship with his Uncle Robert and Rey Ortiz. Like them, he had gone to war when his country called.
• • •
On a breezy afternoon in late April, a chartered 747 jet landed at Bolk Field near Madison, Wisconsin. Almost a thousand friends and relatives lined the airstrip to greet the soldiers of the 13th Evacuation Hospital. Col. Lewis Harned was first out the door. His daughter Debbie’s three young children rushed forward, each carrying a sign. Eric, four, held “Welcome.” Catie, six, had “Home,” and nine-year-old Jason, “Colonel Grandpa.”
Harned, one of the oldest Americans to serve in the combat zone, grinned broadly. But his joy would always be tempered by the memory of the young Americans who had paid a heavy price to serve their country.
• • •
Lance Cpl. Troy Lorenzo Gregory, United States Marine Corps Reserve, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery on the raw afternoon of March 4, 1991. He had died two weeks before his 22nd birthday. His mother, grandmother and fiancée sat in the front rank of mourners while the Marine honor guard folded the flag that had covered the bronze coffin.
Beneath the collar of her funeral dress, Adrienne Ward wore the dogtag Gregory gave her before he left. Only now was she beginning to comprehend the scope of his sacrifice—and their lost dreams. She would never again see his warm smile, feel his loving touch. Then the March wind keened, as a lone bugler blew the somber notes of taps.
Over the next two weeks, the letters Gregory had written to his fiancée from his foxhole continued to arrive in Richmond. Reading his words, Adrienne Ward could almost pretend he was still alive.
Finally, one morning when the first buds of early spring appeared on the trees, the letters stopped.
THE WAR ON TERROR
One Man Bomb Squad
BY MARK BOAL
From Playboy
It’s early December 2004 when a caravan of Humvees rumbles out of Camp Victory carrying Staff Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver’s bomb squad from the U.S. Army’s 788th Ordnance Company. Bouncing down rutted roads outside Baghdad, the convoy passes a helipad where Chinooks, Black Hawks and Apaches—some armed with laser-guided missiles and 30-mm cannons—thump in and out. Bradley and Abrams tanks sit in neat rows, like cars at a dealership, their depleted uranium bumpers precisely aligned. Impressive as it looks, all the lethal hardware is more or less useless against the Iraqi insurgency’s main weapon in the war’s current phase: the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made from artillery shells, nine-volt batteries and electrical wire that now account for most American hostile deaths.
Turning onto a main road, the trucks enter Baghdad—massive, filthy, foul-smelling, and teeming with life despite two decades of war. Jumping curbs on side streets, the Humvees push through traffic like VIPs. The lead driver leans on his horn. In the .50-caliber machine gun turret up above, a gunner keeps his finger ready on the trigger. At last, the convoy arrives at an intersection. A Ranger team is manning a roadblock, and traffic is backing up.
Sarver darts out of his seat and up to a cluster of Ranger officers. He’s just five-foot-eight in combat boots, and his helmet bobs near their shoulders as he steps up and slaps one of them on the back. “What’s goin’ on, boys?” he asks. “What have we got here? Where’s the ah-ee-dee?”
The Rangers point to a white plastic bag fluttering in the breeze, 300 meters downrange.
Behind wraparound shades, Sarver, a baby-faced 33, considers the possibilities: Is it a real bomb or a decoy designed to lure him into the kill zone of a second IED? A hoax aimed at pulling him into a sniper’s range? Is it wired to a mine? Daisy-chained to a series of other IEDs? Is it remote-controlled? On a mechanical timer or wired in a collapsible circuit that will trigger an explosion when he cuts it?
Sarver runs back to his truck, a few inches of belly fat moving under his uniform. He moves quickly, limiting his time on the ground. He tells Specialist Jonathan Williams and Sgt. Chris Millward to deploy the team’s $150,000 Talon robot, with its tank-like treads and articulating plier grips. Using a laptop perched on the Humvee’s hood, Millward starts up the bot. The Talon zips to the fluttering bag and pulls it apart.
But the job isn’t done. The Army can’t declare the area safe until a human explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) tech confirms with his own eyes that the bomb has been defused. It’s time for Sarver to get into his bomb suit.
• • •
When Jeff Sarver was six years old, his dad, a carpenter, took him hunting for the first time. They left their home near Huntington, West Virginia, and went into the forest. His dad showed him how to be alone, how to be self-sufficient. He learned that if you were willing to bear the isolation of waiting for hours in a thicket, you could catch an animal in its natural grace, a flash of fur, muscle and hoof.
As he grew up, Sarver kept on hunting. He started with squirrels, rabbits and deer. One time, he shot a buck that ran 40 yards before dying. Later, he worked his way up to trapping coyotes and hunting turkeys. He fell for all of it. His mother never understood him. She always wanted to take him shopping, to visit relatives, or to socialize. He preferred to spend his free time hunting. When he wasn’t hunting, he pored over hunting catalogs.
After high school, Sarver worked briefly as a carpenter before joining the Army at age 19. (He was following a family tradition: Both his father and grandfather had served in the military.) Once in, he proved himself an excellent soldier, a natural. After four years, he volunteered for EOD, where brains mattered more than biceps. He relished the challenge, and again, proved to be a natural.
Now, at the Baghdad intersection, Sarver’s team kneel in the dirt, and, like squires attending a knight, adjust his armor. Soon he is strapped into a 68-pound bomb protection envelope, a suit that, depending on the circumstances, could save his life from an IED blast.
“Come on, man, let’s go,” Sarver says as the men secure the suit. “Let’s go.”
Williams seals him in by inserting a clear visor over the helmet. He taps his boss on the shoulder, and Sarver is off, each step bringing him closer to the device. At 10 feet out, the point of no return, he gets the adrenaline surge he calls The Morbid Thrill. His heart thumps and his breath rasps over the amplified speakers in his helmet. “It’s a numbing, sobering time,” is how he describes it later. “It’s the loneliest spot on earth.”
Then he sees it up close, the IED, an ancient artillery round wired to a blasting cap, half-hidden in the plastic bag. Sarver grabs the cap and heads back toward the safety zone. He almost doesn’t notice the second white bag sitting in a nearby gully. For a moment, he doesn’t breathe. Should he run from this secondary bomb—placed specifically to kill him as he worked on the first one—or should he dive on it and take his chances? Deciding to act, he pitches himself into the dirt, reaching for the blasting cap with shaky hands. He pulls it apart, pink wire by pink wire (all the bombs here seem to be wired with the same discolored Soviet detonation cord).
Sarver exhales, removes his helmet and stands up. He is sweating, pale, and shaking from the rush. The area is reopened to traffic, and Sarver’s Team One turns toward the base, speeding down Route Irish while mosques broadcast the call to evening prayer. Soon it will be dark, curfew time. The bomb ma
kers will be at home. Sarver often wonders about these men. Would they shout Allah akbar (“God is great”) if he were splattered on their streets?
As the Humvee rattles down the road, Sarver, lost in thought, stares out the window at the blazing Iraqi sunset. I like what I do, he thinks to himself.
• • •
Sarver arrived in Iraq from Fort McCoy in Wisconsin in July 2004. He was excited to be there. During his first nine years as an EOD tech, he’d been to Egypt, Bosnia and Korea, but those were peacetime jobs. This was a full-on combat operation. And with IEDs being the enemy’s primary weapon, Iraq was the ultimate proving ground to a bomb tech like Sarver.
Not long after he arrived, he received orders to assemble a team and head to An Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad. When he and his team got there, the team joined up with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Marines were fighting some 2,000 insurgents under the command of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the Wadi al Salam cemetery. (Among Shiite Islam’s holiest places, the cemetery adjoins the shrine of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.) The insurgents fired on the advancing U.S. forces from behind gravestones and tombs. Little by little, American air power drove them back. But as they retreated, the insurgents booby-trapped the cemetery with mines, rockets and IEDs.
With the main U.S. fighting force backing them up, Sarver and Williams went in with a Marine EOD tech team. They worked together amid the tombs for the better part of two weeks, sweating like pigs in the 120-degree heat. Gaining 10 to 15 feet of ground at a time, they disarmed bombs as mortars crashed down around them. Sarver worked freestyle. He had to. There were no protocols to explain how to disarm a ground-to-air missile lashed to the top of a palm tree while dodging bullets.
When he wasn’t being shot at, Sarver worried about the frag from the mortars exploding around him, scraps of metal traveling at 2,700 feet per second. More than that, he feared over-pressure, the wave of supercompressed gases that expands from the center of a blast. This compressed air comes at an unlucky bomb tech with a force equal to 700 tons per square inch and a speed of 13,000 miles an hour, a destructive storm that can rip through the suit, crush the lungs and liquefy the brain.