"Fillup, Fillup, Boner. Have encountered a small checkpoint. Area cleared."
"Roger. Fillup out."
"Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. We are stuck in some sort of army base. Am encountering scattered resistance. Getting a little turned around."
"Roger, Two-Five. Blow through. Only base in the area is Damran Base. Be aware, that is part of the LOG we left behind. Expect resistance by U.S. military grade hardware. Boner, get the hell out of there."
Ten minutes later.
"Command, Two-Five! We are in encounter with large force . . . !"
The call cuts off.
"Two-five! Two-Five!"
All the BFT indicators are up on Two-Five. Our little boxes are talking to their little boxes and their little boxes are talking back which means the vehicles are not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke. Not responding to radio calls, but not a pillar of smoke. Still not a pillar of smoke . . .
"Fillup, Fillup, Two-Five. Happy to report have captured Damran Base and large store of military equipment including approximate equipment for an armored regiment. There has been a good killing."
There has been a good killing.
Picture this.
You're an Iraqi general. You have carefully gathered your armored regiment. The Abrams, Bradleys, Strykers, Paladins and such are lined up in serried rows at the rear. They are an amazing sight, all that armor just waiting to be let free to bring death and destruction to the enemies of Allah.
In front are the users of those vehicles. The drivers, gunners, infantry, techs and their officers. They are in dressed ranks standing at attention listening to you talk. And talk. And talk. Some five thousand men.
You have just told your armored regiment, equipped with the latest U.S. military equipment and capable of taking on any force in the Middle East, that you know where the enemy is going and that they will mostly be destroyed before they are ever encountered. Soon they will engage the small remnant of the enemy in an unstoppable wave which is right and just because Allah is on their side.
As you are delivering your harangue to your freezing troops (it was cold that day), there is distant firing. You ignore it. There is often firing. The Shia continue to resist, militias settle quarrels. People fire off every sort of gun in "happy fire" all the time. When one gets going, others follow. And, anyway, it cuts off abruptly.
As you continue your long-winded speech, there is a bit more firing. It's closer. So what? More people doing "happy fire" for the heck of it.
You may even recognize it as Bushmaster and M240 fire. Again, so what? Your forces are equipped with both.
You might pause as you notice smoke beginning to billow up. But you're well into your speech and others are responsible for fire-fighting. Besides . . . things blow up and burn. Your guys are not exactly experts with their equipment.
Then you see two Strykers enter the (extremely large) parking stand. You have Strykers but they are all supposed to be parked with their crews listening to your harangue. Perhaps they are from another unit, but all the rest of the units are up north fighting the Kurds. Your unit has just been "stood up" on the American equipment that was left and is preparing to head up there and break the Kurds for once and for all.
Perhaps it is from one of those units?
Then you notice the American flag on the lead Stryker's aerial.
By then it is too late.
Picture if you will . . .
Armored vehicles cannot express "body language." Or can they?
The sudden braking as the Scout Strykers, which had been doing a good 40 miles an hour, skid to a stop on the extremely large concrete pad. The concrete pad filled with more armored equipment and enemy troops than they'd ever wanted to see in their lives. The main guns shifting left and right as if wondering just what in the hell they're going to do. Perhaps they begin to back up . . .
So what does our intrepid Iraqi general do?
He shouts into his squealing microphone: "IT IS THE AMERICANS! ATTACK!"
Picture if you will, the troops starting to scatter as the general and his staff and commanders try to run. Picture both tracks opening fire.
The nearest cover for the assembled troops are the armored vehicles. The Scout track commanders are not stupid. (Okay, they were stupid, but also very lucky.) They lay down the majority of their fire in that direction. They know if the crews get those vehicles up and running they're toast.
The next cover is on the other side of the reviewing stand in a set of buildings.
All the way down the five-hundred-meter pad are more buildings associated with a motor pool.
The other direction are the Strykers and nobody is running that way.
25mm Bushmaster. Coaxial 7.62. Track commander with .50 caliber.
Two sets.
They ran out of 25mm ammo. They ran out of .50 caliber ammo. The track carries thirty-five thousand rounds of 7.62.
They ran out of most of that, too.
This I had to see.
It was ugly. You might have seen the shots but it doesn't really convey the ugliness of it. The guys had been fallen out without their personal weapons (probably because the "general" was afraid of getting shot). Not that that would have done much good against Strykers. They definitely didn't have anti-armor weapons. They had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
I had seen the word "windrows" in military histories before. "Windrows of bodies." I'd never actually seen what they were talking about but I recognized it immediately. Those guys writing histories back in the Civil War were familiar with agriculture. It wasn't like today when everybody thought their food came from the stores.
When a big wind hits a field of wheat, it lays down the wheat in sort of waves. It forms rows of beaten down wheat that hump up almost as if they'd been plowed by the wind. Neat, regular, long lines of destroyed wheat.
The Iraqis were the wheat.
Massacre? Yes. "Evil!," "illegal!" No. They were enemy combatants. A few might have tried to surrender. See the whole thing on taking prisoners. Besides, in the gun-camera footage I didn't see many trying until the end and by that time Boner was taking prisoners.
All that beautiful beautiful equipment and, at first, I could not think of a damned thing to do with it but blow it the fuck up.
Even with all the equipment and bodies there was still room to park Farmer's Freaks. (We didn't call ourselves The Centurions. Ever. In reunions we still don't except the techs when they're drunk. We were Farmer's Freaks.)
I climbed out of the commo van, up on the front slope and just sat there looking at what Boner had wrought. I tuned the bodies out pretty quick. I was looking at the vehicles. There were more HERCULES and Hemmitts and Bradleys and Strykers and Paladins. Fuck, there was everything. Even Avenger anti-aircraft systems.
Boner came over wagging his tail like a Lab that had just brought back a bird. I let him babble for a bit and then nodded.
"Not bad, Boner, not bad."
He looked like he'd just been handed the Holy Grail with a Medal of Honor in it.
There's a point to only praising to the most limited degree.
(Doesn't work with all personality types but the types that it doesn't shouldn't be on a battlefield. They have important things to do in civilian society but if you need people blowing smoke up your ass all the time, don't join the military. I don't work well with that personality type but I tell them I don't and why.)