Combat and Other Shenanigans Read online

  Combat and Other Shenanigans

  By Piers Platt

  To my wife, who is still putting up with my shenanigans.

  Introduction

  One of the first things a veteran learns when he returns from a combat zone is that war defies easy summary. Upon seeing me for the first time after I had served in Iraq, and after a suitable period of small talk, every one of my civilian friends inevitably asked me what Iraq was like. For all my willingness to share my experiences, I found it nearly impossible to describe it.

  “Hot,” I would say. “So hot you can’t touch the armor of your tank without gloves on.”

  Which is true, but it doesn’t convey the grinding oppression of 130° heat, day after day, what it feels like to sweat through a two-inch thick Kevlar vest in a matter of minutes, or the fact that you have to force yourself to eat despite feeling full from the gallons of water you must drink to survive. So this book is, I hope, a reasonably accurate response to all of those people who asked me what it was like.

  The stories in this book are all true, or at least, as close to the truth as my memory allows. However, I changed the majority of names, and certain operational details have likewise been omitted or changed. My apologies to any of my comrades who feel they have been misrepresented, misquoted, or forgotten. My thanks to Joe Comley, John Orbe, and Steve Turner, comrades who helped clarify some stories and technical details, and to Mark Glassman and my father, who agreed to be subjected to painfully early drafts of this book.

  While the stories in this book are true, and hopefully paint a better picture of what serving in Iraq was like, any collection of humorous anecdotes about war is – by its nature – woefully incomplete in conveying the true experience of war. For all the absurdity of war, there is exponentially more pain and suffering. Bulldawg Troop lost three of our brothers in Iraq: PFC Owen Witt, PFC Anthony Dixon, and SGT Armando Hernandez. Mere words will never be able to convey the sacrifice they made, as much as their story deserves to be told. There are those of us who left that place and took up our lives again. There are others – far too many others – who will never come home.

  Chapter One

  “Mushrooms on point!”

  -Armor Officer Basic Course 03-04 Troop Motto. Mushrooms, like junior officers in training, are fed crap and kept in the dark

  I knew that I wanted to join the Army by the time I was in high school. I joined my college’s ROTC program partly out of genuine patriotism and a desire to give something back to my country, and partly because I felt like I had something to prove. Although I am extremely grateful for it, I led a privileged childhood – learning Latin and French in private schools, traveling to Europe with my family – and I knew that the rest of my life would probably go just as smoothly. I would go to a good college and get a decent job … and some part of me would always feel like I hadn’t really earned any of it. I wanted to force myself out of that comfort zone and test myself in a world where that background was completely irrelevant – where my success or failure was determined by me, and me alone.

  As a result, while most of my friends were getting settled into their new jobs after graduating from college, I reported to Fort Knox, just before the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. Along with the 60 other newly-minted officers in my class, my ROTC training had taught me the fundamentals of leadership and ground warfare tactics; we were at Knox to become tank platoon leaders, to learn how to lead four M1 Abrams into combat. So we spent four months at the United States Armor Center being forged into warriors, soaking in the details of administrative protocols, memo writing, how to inventory equipment, the correct paperwork process for vehicle maintenance, how to write evaluation reports, the disciplinary action process, the evils of venereal diseases (cue 30 minute slideshow of STD-stricken genitalia), how to use PowerPoint, and on Friday afternoons from 4 to 5 p.m., how to lead tanks in actual tactical maneuvers.

  No one had bothered to update our curriculum since 1952, so one day we had the pleasure of listening to several lectures on how to socialize with other officers in the Army, including dinner table etiquette, and how to write a proper “thank you” letter. I guess there’s been an epidemic of rude Lieutenants ruining dinner parties all over the Army, because our troop commander decided we needed a practical exercise to get that lesson to sink in, and we were all invited to dinner on Saturday at his house. After all the classes, I was expecting it to be a formal affair, but his wife had other plans. In a gesture of protest at the Army for forcing her to feed 60 young men, she handed out paper plates and pointed us at a make-your-own cold cut buffet before disappearing for the evening.

  Our troop commander was undoubtedly the worst part of training. A better man might have skimmed through the bullshit with a knowing wink (“I know guys, let’s just get it over with and move on to the stuff you care about”), but he made wasting our time into an Olympic sport. He was a military history nut, and while I am, too, that somehow translated into twice the standard amount of homework, and him dragging 60 hung-over Lieutenants around Kentucky’s civil war battlefields every other Saturday. He was also a Mormon, which I don’t have an issue with, but on several occasions he lectured us on the evils of alcohol, which went over about as well as if we had tried to tell him his religion was a thinly-veiled excuse to have sex with multiple women. One of my classmates, who could play dumb enough to pull it off, brought a bottle of wine to the cold cut dinner party as a gift.

  * * *

  Officer basic training includes five days of field training on the tanks, a series of tactical exercises known as “The Gauntlet.” It sounds a lot cooler than it is: considering that each tank is crewed entirely by brand-new Lieutenants, it’s a miracle we got the tanks all moving in the right direction. But given how little tactical training we’d had so far, I was looking forward to those five days as the only useful thing that Officer Basic Training included.

  In the week leading up to the Gauntlet, I had a few bad nosebleeds – one during a Physical Fitness test, which caused me to finish my 2-mile run with a blood-stained shirt, to the great amusement and cheering of my friends. I was embarrassed, figured I was dehydrated, and shrugged it off with a couple extra glasses of water a day. Several days later, we were driven out to the Gauntlet training area, and my crew was standing around, waiting for our instructor and the tanks to show up, when my buddy Wes pointed to me.

  “Dude, Platt – your nose.”

  I was bleeding, again. I wadded a tissue up the offending nostril and tried to laugh it off, annoyed at the inconvenience. But the bleeding wouldn’t stop – soon I had soaked through my tissues and was bleeding fairly freely into one of my canteen cups, for lack of a better solution. The instructor soon showed up and whisked me off to the medic area, where they gave me some gauze bandages and had me try all the usual nosebleed tricks. At about the half hour mark they started getting worried (my passing out briefly from blood loss didn’t help) – I got an IV drip and a speedy ride to the base hospital. The ER doc on duty told me that the skin inside my nose had been damaged somehow, exposing a vein. He was going to try a special type of bandage, and if that didn’t work, cauterizing. All of this sounded fine until he explained that the damaged area was: “way up there.”

  He took a tongue depressor and a giant tampon-like bandage, and told me I might feel some discomfort, which turned out to be the understatement of the century. He then proceeded to use the tongue depressor to shove the tampon up my nose, to the point where about half of the tongue depressor was up there, too. It felt exactly like someone was jamming a tongue depressor most of the way up my nose. I cursed him loudly and repeatedly, so he added a morphine dose to my IV bag and I fell asleep in the middle of explaining the
horrible things I was going to do to him and his family.

  When I woke later, he told me that the cauterization was unnecessary, but the trade-off was that I now had to spend the next five days with a tampon up my nose, and in the final blow to my remaining dignity, the tampon bandage even had a string dangling from it, which would be taped awkwardly to my face.

  “I can live with that,” I told the doctor. “Can I call my unit and get a ride back out to the field now?”

  He laughed at me. “No – while that thing is in, you need to keep from aggravating it any further – no tanks, no physical exercise, nothing that could open it up again. You need to keep it in there for five days.”

  Five days – I would miss all of the field training. On the plus side, if the Iraqi insurgents decided to throw a dinner party, I was ready to politely thank you letter the hell out of them.

  Chapter Two

  “Tanks are easily identified, easily engaged, much-feared targets which attract all the fire on the battlefield. When all is said and done, a tank is a small steel box crammed with inflammable or explosive substances which is easily converted into a mobile crematorium for its highly skilled crew.”

  -Brigadier Shelford Bidwell, British military historian

  After we graduated from the basic course, each of us received our duty assignment – the combat unit where we would begin serving our four-year active duty commitments. The war in Iraq was supposedly over – President Bush had just pulled his infamous “Mission Accomplished” publicity stunt – but the news reports we saw made it clear that the insurgency was rapidly gaining momentum. So all of us wanted to know whether we had drawn a unit that was already deployed, or whether our unit was simply training at its home base. Some of my friends got assigned to deployed units, and within weeks they, too, were in Iraq. Along with several of my classmates from Fort Knox, I was assigned to the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry regiment (better known as 1-4 CAV, or the “Quarterhorse”) which was based in Schweinfurt, Germany. The Quarterhorse was part of 1st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One,” which had not deployed to Iraq for the initial invasion, but it would be deploying soon.

  I had only a dim idea of the difference between a cavalry squadron and a regular armor battalion, but I soon found out: the “Cav” was infinitely cooler, and flaunted that fact at every possible opportunity. Whereas an armor battalion is made up of three tank companies, each comprised of three tank platoons, a cavalry squadron has three “troops” instead of companies (A, B, and C Troop), each of which contains two tank platoons (made up of four M1 Abrams each) and two scout platoons (made up of six M3 Bradleys – armored vehicles which can also carry several soldiers). In addition, the Quarterhorse also had two troops of Kiowa Warriors: small, lightly armed scout helicopters.

  The cocky élan of the cavalry was apparent as soon as I showed up for work on the first day, as the motto painted on our headquarters building proclaimed: “Cavalry is a state of mind.” And it was – we called ourselves different things (squadron instead of battalion, troop instead of company, trooper instead of soldier) and set ourselves apart whenever possible. Cavalrymen wear black Stetsons in defiance of Army uniform regulations, decorated with rank insignia, unit crests, and any awards that that trooper may have received. In addition, every cavalryman may earn the right to wear spurs (a throwback to our horse-riding heritage) by participating in a “Spur Ride,” a 48 hour test of physical endurance, technical skills, and tactical knowledge, accompanied by a healthy dose of hazing. I earned my spurs a different way: by serving in a cavalry unit in combat.

  We were always getting into trouble with the authorities in Schweinfurt, since we were co-located with the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team. Technically, 2nd Brigade is commanded by a full Colonel, who outranks the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the Quarterhorse. However, since we weren’t a part of 2nd Brigade and instead reported directly to the General commanding all of 1st Infantry Division, we weren’t subject to the Brigade commander’s rules, much to his chagrin. One of his pet peeves was soldiers playing games (flag football, soccer, ultimate frisbee, etc.) during physical training, so a few months before we deployed, he outlawed them across Schweinfurt. We ignored this, naturally, and continued our weekly Lieutenants vs. Captains matches. Invariably, some outraged officer from 2nd Brigade would march up and ask to speak to the senior guy there. Whoever that happened to be would saunter over and listen politely while the new “no games” rule was explained to us.

  “Ah, I see. So this is a 1st Infantry Division rule now?”

  “No, it’s Colonel Dragon’s rule for 2nd Brigade.”

  Smiling: “Ahh … well, here’s the thing: we’re not in 2nd Brigade, so unless the General says ‘no games,’ we’re gonna keep on playing.”

  I was soon assigned to lead a tank platoon: 4th or “Green” Platoon in B Troop, the “Bulldawgs.” In true Army tradition, my first introduction would be at Physical Training on Monday morning. Physical Training has never been my strong suit – I was skinny enough to not have any issues with push-ups and sit-ups, but running had always been the bane of my existence. Predictably, Monday in 4th Platoon was “long run” day.

  I was in pretty good shape, but my two new section sergeants were eager to show me that they could run me into the ground. I hung in there, but only barely, and only because we slowed the pace for a couple of our soldiers who were straggling. I came close to puking twice – which would not have been a good start. Throughout the run, Staff Sergeants Peiper and Kean (I didn’t get their names until afterwards) harassed and bullied the soldiers like twin sheepdogs, nipping at heels and generally inferring in no uncertain terms that they would prefer to take a bunch of schoolgirls to war rather than the sloppy, overweight, shit-for-brains crew they had been given.

  The outgoing platoon leader, Vince Taylor, would be handing things off to me over the coming weeks, before being promoted to take over 1st “Red” Platoon, a scout platoon in the same troop. After we did some cool-down exercises, Taylor introduced me to Kean and Peiper, who would each be commanding one of my four tanks (the other two being commanded by me and my platoon sergeant). Before I could even shake his hand, Staff Sergeant Peiper was giving me a hard time.

  “How old are you, sir?”

  I grinned, “Twenty-three.”

  He spat loudly, threw a disgusted look at Kean, and walked off, shaking his head.

  “Don’t worry about him, sir,” Kean smiled warmly, gripping my hand. “As long as you listen to us, we won’t let you fuck up too bad.”

  * * *

  I was barely done inventorying my new equipment (thank god my training had prepared me for the rigorous challenge of counting wrenches and then putting a check mark on my clipboard), when I had a chance to demonstrate my complete lack of field leadership experience – we were all heading to gunnery training.

  Field training is both exhausting and exhilarating, the most fun you can have in the Army under the least comfortable conditions. Over the course of two weeks, we would have to qualify all soldiers on their pistols and rifles, test-fire our tanks, conduct three or four preliminary tank gunnery “Tables,” and qualify each tank crew on Table VIII, the final exam of tank crew qualification. Each tank “Table” consists of a series of engagements designed to replicate the different combinations of targets a tank crew could face, escalating in complexity and number of variables involved. These variables include: day and night firing, degraded operations (i.e., the tank has been damaged and is not fully working), firing while stationary and while moving, firing at stationary and moving targets (both troops and vehicles), firing the tank’s main gun and three machine guns both individually and simultaneously, and, everyone’s least-favorite: firing while in a simulated nuclear/biological/chemical attack scenario, which means wearing a gas mask and protective suit.

  Gunnery is rehearsed for hours ahead of time in specially designed simulators, fully operational mockups of tank turrets which include a computer-generated gu
nnery program, like a video game. The tank commander and his gunner practice the exact engagements they will be facing in Table VIII, for hours on end, until they are functioning as a synchronized team. Nearly as important as actually hitting the targets – which a good gunner can do out to a range of two miles, with the first round almost every single time – is the communication between the two men, known collectively as “fire commands.” The rules of fire commands must be followed strictly, otherwise points are deducted from the crew’s score. Not only must your crew engage the targets that pop up in the correct order (most dangerous first), the tank commander must quickly and accurately report the results of his engagement following each round, so that, as in actual combat, his troop commander can build an accurate picture of how the fight is developing.

  The inside of the tank turret is a white-painted metal box about five feet wide, six feet across, and five feet deep. It can be sealed off from the outside world by closing the two hatches on the roof, but this severely limits how well you can see outside the tank, aside from making it unbearably hot (tanks have no air conditioning). Inside the turret, the tank commander sits on the right, with his gunner immediately in front of and slightly below him, while the loader stands to the left. The fourth man of the crew, the driver, has a separate seat down in the hull of the tank, which is accessible via a hatch on the front slope of the tank.

  For their own safety in the cramped confines of the turret, each member of the crew must remain completely focused on and synchronized with the correct sequence of tasks during gunnery. The loader is in the most danger: his job is to open a hydraulic door (which will easily crush his hand when it closes should he be incautious), select the correct round for the target, pull it out of its rack, flip 80 pounds of high explosive end-over-end, ram it into the open breech (being careful to quickly withdraw his arm lest the breech close on his arm), and then flip the main gun’s safety off after moving out of the breech’s recoil path. Our fastest loaders could accomplish all of this in three seconds flat. Should he fail to clear the recoil path and should the tank commander, being lazy or forgetful, fail to check that the path is clear, nearly a ton of steel will slam into the loader at breakneck speed when the gun fires and the breech slams backward.