"I would go so far as saying that I agree this was a good killing."
I thought he would stroke.
All that time I was looking at that gear and wondering what the hell I was going to do with it. Nice to not have it as a threat anymore. But . . . damn . . .
Okay, we didn't need any Strykers. Stryke those. I was not going to fuck around with Paladins. I'd loved to have been able to, but I wasn't gonna. Scratch all the Brads, too.
What I wanted was a way to get it all up to the Kurds. No way in hell. Why?
I was looking at over four hundred vehicles. Okay, say that we just took the Abrams. There were nearly a hundred of those. I had about a hundred and seventy effectives. But an Abrams requires a crew of four, commander, gunner, loader and driver.
And none of my guys knew diddly about them. A tank doesn't just run itself. Sure, the Abrams as a sweet vehicle and very easy to use. But maintaining it? Hell, even boresighting the gun we didn't know how to do.
I didn't even want to take the time to fuck everything up, but I knew I had to do it. I couldn't leave this shit in my rear. Somebody was bound to butt-fuck me with it.
But the Nepos were just sitting there . . .
We took twenty Abrams and forty Bradleys.
How? Wait, didn't you just say . . . ?
Ten of the Abrams were fully crewed by guys drawn from the infantry. That left me with very few ground shooters. I'd live.
The other fifty were driven, and driven only, by Nepos, some infantry, the news guys and techs. Why?
Abrams are very hard to destroy. Even with a Javelin if one got hit it was unlikely to hit the driver's compartment. Which was the only way the driver would get killed.
I wasn't taking them to use them, I was taking them to keep them from the enemy. And, hopefully, get them to the Kurds.
They're also very easy to drive.
All of them were fully armed and fueled. We took two trucks of Abrams ammo, a bunch of 25mm and four of parts. They weren't all parts for Abrams and Brads but what the hell.
Then we used five Abrams to shoot up all the rest. Last but not least, we shot those five. They'd fired so many rounds, their barrels were "depleted" and why used "depleted" barrels when you have brand new ones?
I had sort of enjoyed blowing up the LOG base in Iran. I nearly cried at this one. This shit could have really helped out the Kurds. I cursed the bastard that left it here.
I also took two Avenger anti-air systems, fully crewed. They were Stryker Avengers, which I'd left in Iran not thinking I'd need them. And we grabbed four more fuel trucks. We had, essentially, nobody riding in the Strykers.
If I'd known about CAM(P)ing I would have taken a HERCULES. I wanted to take everything. We just didn't have the manpower.
Oh, by the way. Fully armed Abrams with their ammunition doors opened? They blow up really nice. It was heartening. Sort of. We were now in them.
We rolled out after a bare two hours and continued our thunder run.
Going through Baghdad was . . . unpleasant. There were quite a few fedayeen with RPGs. They got one of the Strykers near the bridge and I think another on the west side. Also one of the fuel trucks. There were, I think, some Javelins. But Baghdad is pretty built up, and I kept as much as possible to the built up areas. The reason I think we took some Javelin fire is that a couple of times buildings had explosions we weren't causing.
We were causing a lot of explosions, though, so I'll take that as a "possible."
A Thunder Run everybody looks out and keeps an eye out for targets. The track commanders were the most exposed and we lost one of them to effects of an RPG. But, mostly, we were laying down so much fire, not much was coming back. We were burning through ammo, but the most important thing was to get to the other side of Baghdad.
We had to slow down, though, for the vehicles that got hit. All the guys weren't dead. We had wounded, now. Lots of wounded. Since we didn't have a doctor or any way to evac them, that was going to suck.
We went Abrams (fully crewed) to the front, then a group of gun Strykers, then some trucks, then more gun Strykers, then the rest of the trucks, then all the rest of the shit (nearly empty infantry carriers, mortars, Avengers and the line of uncrewed Abrams and Brads), then some more gun Strykers. The HERCULES were near the rear in case we needed to tow anyone. I wasn't planning on stopping to tow if I could avoid it.
The satellite intel said the bridge was up and engineering intel said it could take all our vehicles.
It was up and it did.
It was also defended by a cluster of fedayeen with RPGs. Which was where we lost one of the gun Strykers. It had an explosion go off on the overhead which I think was a Jav. On the far side we lost a Stryker, again. One of the nearly unmanned infantry carriers. At first I thought it was an RPG. I'm still not sure if it was RPG or Javelin.
Three wounded in the first, one dead one wounded in the second. All my critical infantry troops. Pissed me off.
I do not know, nor do I care, how many we killed on the run. I do know that at one point there was a sort of human wave charge of a few hundred.
What's that line from Patton? We used them to grease our treads.
Did we kill civilians? Possibly. Probably. When an Abrams TC spots a guy with an RPG in a window and orders "fire" and the gunner replies with main cannon . . . Anything in or around the guy with the RPG gets killed. And we weren't just firing at RPG holders. You don't have enough time in combat to say "is that an RPG or a guy with a pipe on his shoulder? Is that person leaning out for a good look or to fire something?" You see anything that looks like a target and you fire.
Getting out of Baghdad actually scared me more than going through. We were back in open country and anyone with a Jav could have lit us up. But we didn't take any.
Oh, prisoners.
While we were "reconfiguring" at the pad and such, I had Hollywood and a couple of other guys who had gotten some "bedroom" instruction in Arabic interrogate the survivors. Which is where I got the narrative about the Iraqi general. Also about him sending most of the Jav teams up and to the east to stop us.
Last bit. We found the main cache of what had been left behind as well. It was in a base on the west side of the Tigris. "Lightly defended." Also had been mostly emptied out. We took some more shit from there (including refueling our fuel trucks and vehicles and ammoing up) and then blew up anything that resembled military hardware.
Take that, State Department.
Chapter Fifteen
It's a Good Place to Hallucinate
So where were we going?
Nowhere. We were going nowhere.
As in "Bumfuckistan," "East Bumfuck," "middle of nothing," "beyond the Pale."
We stayed north of the Euphrates out in the salt wastes. There was, operationally, a choke point near Ramadi between it and the Thartar which is a big shallow salt lake kind of like . . . well, Salt Lake. Our dust could easily be seen from Ramadi.
But there wasn't any reaction. It looked as if we were headed for Syria. Our basic path, except for avoiding roads, was the one I'd taken when I did my deployment as Scout Platoon leader. This was the path that the Sunnis had smuggled fighters in throughout the whole Resistance in Iraq, from all over the world to Syria and then down the Al-Ramadi trail.
But there was fuck all in most of that area. If you didn't stay down by the Euphrates there weren't any towns and hardly any roads. It was a big fucking open desert.