The Burning Tip of the Spear

The five Bradley Fighting Vehicles started up their engines under a crescent moon, kicking up vast, unruly curtains of sand and revving so thunderously you could barely hear yourself speak. I was on Staff Sergeant Forest Geary’s track, nicknamed “Circus Freaks,” standing chest-deep in the open rear hold sandwiched between Sergeant Michael Malecha and Corporal Dustin Dakel, who were already poised with their weapons ready. . . .

It was June 7, 2003, and we were in Balad, about ninety kilometres northwest of Baghdad along the Tigris River. Moving forward in single-file formation, we rolled slowly through Base Camp Anaconda, past stands of tanks and support vehicles barely visible in the swirling sand, past the latrines, past Command Headquarters, past the thousands of soldiers who would remain behind tonight. As we rumbled through the gate and into the darkness, it had the feeling of a fleet of warships heading out to sea. The soldiers on this patrol were Cavalry scouts, members of Crazy Horse, which is how the 150 men in Charlie Troop sometimes referred to themselves. Crazy Horse was part of the 3rd Squadron of the 7th United States Cavalry Regiment – the 3/7 for short – which in turn was part of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 3ID. The Cavalry had been summoned to Balad from Baghdad for a specific reason: an unexpected guerrilla war had broken out in the Sunni Triangle of North Central Iraq, and Balad was the focus of the problem. The 4th Infantry Division -– 4ID – who had just arrived in Iraq and had already suffered casualties, needed backup. The Cavalry had “combat mentality.” They had a reputation for being tough and implacable in battle. In March, they had led the ground incursion from Kuwait into Iraq: in their parlance, they were “the burning tip of the spear.” They claimed to have captured the first Iraqi flag and to have killed over a thousand Iraqi troops before reaching Baghdad, and they’d done it all without losing a single man. This had earned them the respect of other units, but it had also won them some notoriety.

Tonight, on their first patrol in the region, they’d been given unusual orders: to bring back the bodies of any Iraqi insurgents they happened to kill. Headquarters wanted to know more about the new enemy they were dealing with, but Captain Brett Bair, the troop commander (whose code name was Crazy 6), didn’t like the idea. “I’ve been in combat before and I never heard of bringing in bodies,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about dead eyes – I don’t think it’s good for some of these guys to see.”

Beyond the gate the Bradleys drove slowly along the road in the pitch dark. They were now at full black-out, their headlights off while the crews scoured their surroundings with thermal night-vision optics. The landscape was blissful in the gracious cool of night. Your mind cleared; you were alert to the sudden beauty. I looked through Dakel’s hand-held night-vision sight and could see endless groves of date palms and vineyards criss-crossed with irrigation ditches. There were little villas, the occasional dog. There was also a danger of ambush all around, and compared to the endless heat and boredom of the days, it was exhilarating.

Geary, perched atop our Bradley, was the first to spot the enemy. “Sir,” he said calmly, talking to Captain Bair over the intercom, “I got people up here on the berm behind the irrigation canal.”

Shrouded in the eerie green optics of the night-vision sights on their machine guns, they could see at least twenty men dressed in what looked like typical Fedayeen militia garb – baggy pants, head scarves, bandoliers of ammunition. They were about five hundred metres ahead, half hidden in the vegetation, and they looked bewildered. These were the first heavy armoured vehicles they’d encountered in the region, but we were invisible to them and we could see them searching with their ears for what their eyes could not see.

As the convoy of Bradleys approached, the Iraqis stood up, raising their weapons.

“I got weapons to the right,” said Geary over the radio. “At least twenty of the fuckers.”

Captain Bair confirmed the sighting. In unison, Malecha and Dakel laid a hand each on the top of my Kevlar helmet and pushed me down into the safety of the hold, but I popped back up again. “I can’t get a photo from down there,” I yelled into Dakel’s ear.

“Contact right!” said the Captain. Five Bradley turrets simultaneously whirred and rotated right, the five main guns now pointing into the grove. Fifteen seconds later, Captain Bair gave the order: “Fire right!”