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4
Five Minutes to Live
D
UNE
B
UGGIES AND
M
UD
D
ON’T
M
IX
G
eared up and strapped in, I sat vibrating in the gunner’s chair of
the DPV shortly after nightfall March 20, 2003, as an Air Force
MH-53 lifted off the runway in Kuwait. The vehicle had been
loaded into the rear of the PAVE-Low aircraft, and we were en
route toward the mission we’d spent the past several weeks
rehearsing. The waiting was about to come to an end; Operation
Iraqi Freedom was underway.
My war was finally here.
I was sweating, and not just with excitement. Not knowing
exactly what Saddam might have in store, we’d been ordered to
wear full MOPP gear (“Mission Oriented Protective Posture,” or
spacesuits to some). The suits protect against chemical attacks, but
they’re about as comfortable as rubber pajamas, and the gas mask
that comes with them is twice as bad.
“Feet wet!” said someone over the radio.
I checked my guns. They were ready, including the 50. All I had
to do was pull back the charging handle and load.
We were pointed straight toward the back of the helicopter. The
rear ramp was not all the way up, so I could see out into the night.
Suddenly, the black strip I was watching above the ramp speckled
with red—the Iraqis had kicked on anti-aircraft radars and
weapons that intel had claimed didn’t exist, and the chopper pilots
began shooting off decoy flares and chaff to confuse them.
Then came the tracers, streams of bullets arcing across the
narrow rectangle of black.
Damn,
I thought.
We’re going to get shot down before I even
get a chance to smoke someone.
Somehow, the Iraqis managed to miss us. The helicopter kept
moving, swooping toward land.
“Feet dry!” said someone over the radio. We were now over
land.
All hell was breaking loose. We were part of a team tasked to
hit Iraqi oil resources before the Iraqis could blow them up or set
them on fire as they had during Desert Storm in 1991. SEALs and
GROM were hitting gas and oil platforms (GOPLATs) in the Gulf,
as well as on-shore oil refinery and port areas.
Twelve of us were tasked to hit farther inland, at the al-Faw oil
refinery area. The few extra minutes it took translated into a hell of a
lot of gunfire, and by the time the helicopter touched down, we
were in the shit.
The ramp dropped and our driver hit the gas. I locked and
loaded, ready to fire as we sped down the ramp. The DPV
careened onto the soft dirt . . . and promptly got stuck.
Son of a bitch!
The driver started revving the engine and slapping the
transmission back and forth, trying to budge us free. At least we
were out of the helicopter—one of the other DPVs got stuck half
on and half off the ramp. His 53 jerked up and down, trying
desperately to free him—pilots hate like hell to get fired at, and they
wanted out.
By this time I could hear the different DPV units checking in over
the radio. Just about everybody was stuck in the oil-soaked mud.
The intel specialist advising us had claimed that the ground would be
hard-packed where we were going to land. Of course, she and her
colleagues had also claimed that the Iraqis didn’t have anti-aircraft
weapons. Like they say, military intelligence is an oxymoron.
“We’re stuck!” said our chief.
“Yeah, we’re stuck too,” said the lieutenant.
“We’re stuck,” said somebody else.
“
....
, we got to get out of here.”
“All right, everybody get out of your vehicles and go to your
positions,” said the chief.
I undid the five-point harness, grabbed the 60 off the back, and
humped in the direction of the fence that blocked off the oil facility.
Our job was to secure the gate, and just because we didn’t have
wheels to do it with didn’t mean it wasn’t getting done.
I found a pile of rubble in sight of the gate and set up the 60. A
guy came up next to me with a Carl Gustav. Technically a recoilless
rifle, the weapon fires a bad-ass rocket that can take out a tank or
poke a hole in a building. Nothing was getting through that gate
without our say-so.
The Iraqis had set up a defensive perimeter outside the refinery.
Their only problem was that we had landed inside. We were now
between them and the refinery—in other words, behind their
positions.
They didn’t like that all that much. They turned around and
started firing at us.
As soon as I realized that we weren’t getting gassed, I threw off
my gas mask. Returning fire with the 60, I had plenty of targets—
too many, in fact. We were heavily outnumbered. But that was not
a real problem. We began calling in air support. Within minutes, all
sorts of aircraft were overhead: F/A-18s, F-16s, A-10As, even an
AC-130 gunship.
The Air Force A-10s, better known as Warthogs, were
awesome. They’re slow-moving jets, but that’s intentional—they’re
designed to fly low and slow so they can put a maximum amount of
gunfire on ground targets. Besides bombs and missiles, they’re
equipped with a 30-mm Gatling cannon. Those Gatlings chewed the
hell out of the enemy that night. The Iraqis rolled armor out of the
city to get us, but they never got close. It got to the point
where the
Iraqis realized they were
....
and tried to flee.
Big mistake. That just made them easier to see. The planes kept
coming, nailing them. They had them zeroed in, and zeroed them
out. You’d hear the rounds coming past you in the air
—
errrrrrrrrr
—then you’d hear the echo—
erhrhrrhrh,
followed
closely by secondary explosions and whatever other havoc the
bullets caused.
....
,
I thought to myself,
this is great. I
....
love this.
It’s
nerve-wracking and exciting and I
....
love it.
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