I put my hands to my face. I was fine. I looked at Langford. He had gashed his hand somewhere in the fall but it wasn’t debilitating. Other than that he was ok. I was boiling mad. I couldn’t believe that we got hit with an artillery round. I was slightly confused by the impact though because I figured it should have killed us. I didn’t understand how we survived that.
We kept Mewborn in the driver’s hole and the three of us jumped onto the ground. SSG Terry was speeding towards us, leaving the city behind him. We walked around to the left side to inspect the damage.
“Goddam. Look at the number 7.” SGT P pointed to the number 7 roadwheel and control arm. The arm looked ok but one quarter of the two roadwheels that make up the number 7 assembly looked chewed up.
My crew walked towards the track to have a closer look. It was stretched out from end to end.
“Check this out,” Langford said. “I think it was a mine.” He bent down towards the crater which the track was laid across. In the crater, he picked up a piece of plastic. It was about the size of a quarter of a donut. It was ribbed like those old carousel slide projector rings. It definitely looked like a piece of a tank mine.
SSG Terry pulled up to us. He got on the ground and tied a cargo strap to the front end of his plow. He tied the other end of the strap to the end of the track that was on his side. SGT P. meanwhile, guided Mewborn forward. This made the tank move forward and turn left which roughly lined our tank back up with the track.
SSG Terry bent down to examine the track. The explosion damaged a 4-block section of track. “Alright this ain’t no big deal. SGT P, get a 4-block off of your bustle rack. Stoker, Dawes, get one of the 4-blocks off our tank and bring it down here. We’ll take off 8 to be safe and put in 8 new blocks. Let’s get this lined up!”
Each tank had two roadwheels attached to the back corners of the bustle rack as well as two 4-block sections of track. Being self-sustaining and being able to self-recover is vital to battle. You don’t want to wait on recovery assets and you sure don’t want to tie them up when somebody out there needs recovery more than you.
“Goddamnit. This fucking sucks.” SGT P was mad. He was pissed that we were out of the fight. He continued to curse sporadically about it here and there.
“Hey guys. I’m really sorry about this,” Mewborn apologized. He was real upset. I knew he really meant it
“Mewborn, what the fuck are you talking about? This wasn’t your fault. Shut up.” I told him.
“Well, I was driving…” He trailed off. We had been through this before. Mewborn was the best driver I had working for me. He’s knocked us around in the hatches a few times and we grunt and holler as our ribs slam into the insides of the hatches. But it’s never due to any lack of skill on his part; it’s the situation and the terrain. He’ll apologize and we’ll laugh. “8 seconds…” SGT P would always say. He was referring to something about riding a bull. But I never knew what the source was he was referencing.
“Relax, Mewborn. Not only could you not see where you were going, but you were just doing what I told you. It’s never your fault. You know I’m ultimately responsible for what happens to this tank. If I backed you up off a cliff, it’d be my fault, not yours.”
“Yeah Sir, but you don’t understand. I try my hardest not to fuck you guys up. You don’t know the pressure I feel to not smash you guys around in the turret…” Mewborn went on. He was right. I didn’t understand. Unlike NCO tank commanders like SSG Terry, I never had and never will have the humble upbringing of starting out in the loader’s hatch. Then moving to the driver’s hole, the gunner’s hole, and climbing the ladder of positions to become a tank commander. But that was irrelevant. I didn’t care what pressures he felt about being a driver and making us feel comfortable. All I knew was that he was a good driver, and he always took care of us. I had a platoon to worry about and manuever. End of story.
“Mewborn. Shut the fuck up. It wasn’t your fault.” SGT P said to him. And that was that.
Dawes and Stoker worked to get the track block off of the bustle rack on Terry’s tank. They were standing on the edge of the hull to get the section off. Suddenly Dawes tripped and fell off the tank. He landed on his back in the sand but quickly got up. He was fine so we all had a good laugh at that one. He could be a klutz sometimes.
I looked out at my surroundings. I saw CPT Mayfield walking towards me out in the open. I started walking towards him.
“Can you believe this bullshit? They were walking artillery on us. Who the hell was firing artillery?” I yelled at him.
“Are you guys ok?”
“Yeah we’re fine.”
“Alright well the M88 is on its way with Phantom 5. Listen, here’s what happened. CPT Fowler was calling for fire. But it wasn’t his fault. After that first round landed, he called an adjustment of ‘RIGHT 200’, but for some reason the round dropped 200. And it was too late to stop them, the rounds were inbound. He made the proper adjustments. The guns were fucked up.” And with that, CPT Mayfield headed back towards his humvees.
I was no longer pissed at the observer. For one, it was my company commander, CPT Fowler. But secondly, he was on Phase Line Isabella, where we held the line last night. If he called “RIGHT 200” from his position, then from my position, the second round should have moved away from me, and west into the city in the same direction that I was facing. Instead it dropped 200 and came north towards me.
“Hey Sir,” SSG Terry called out to me. “Can you come take a look at this?”
I looked back at SSG Terry. He was dragging the track in the sand with his tank and the cargo strap when he suddenly had the tank halt. His arms were in the air with his hands clasped. His lips were puckered up with an “uh-oh” expression on his face.
“I saw this get uncovered as we was dragging the track from side to side so I kicked it to see what it was.”
Underneath the long length of track, under the portion pulled up by the strap, SSG Terry had unearthed a large round flat cylinder. It looked like there were a few more next to it. The thing was about the size of a plastic dog food bowl. It was light tan colored and dirty looking. Like it had been there for a long time.
“SSG Terry. That’s a goddam tank mine.” I said to him quietly. “You kicked it?”
“ALRIGHT NOBODY FUCKING MOVE! GET UP ON THE GODDAMN TANKS NOW! WE’RE IN A GODDAMN MINEFIELD” SSG Terry barked at the guys.
“You fucking kicked it?!? What’s the matter with you?” I asked dumbfounded.
“I had to see what it was,” SSG Terry said with a smile.
“You dumb fuck. What if it blew up?” I asked, laughing in disbelief.
“It looked pretty old. The top just popped off.”
I looked around us and suddenly everything became crystal clear. There were little mounds of raised sand everywhere. On a few of the mounds, short little sticks looked like they were coming out of the top like snorkels.
I looked at SSG Terry. “I think those are tilt-rods.” Tilt rods are mechanical triggers on mines. If a tank drives right over a mine and the track happens to miss driving on it, then the pressure detonator will not set off. As a secondary, the tilt-rod will scrape along the belly of the tank and set the mine off right under the hull. The results would be far more catastrophic. We hadn’t come upon any tilt-rods in the weapons caches we found yet, so I wasn’t sure if the enemy was using them. But I didn’t want to find out.
I heard a low rumble. It was the distinct sound of the M88. We looked to our northeast and saw Phantom 5 leading the M88 towards us and into the minefield.
“SSG Terry, take control of this. I’ll be back.” I sprinted towards the recovery vehicle with my arms over my head in an X. “MINEFIELD!” I hollered.
Phantom 5 got out of his humvee and watched me run towards him. It probably looked like I was doing agility drills. I was high-stepping and darting left and right to avoid mounds in the sand. “MINEFIELD! STOP!”
I reached him and told him the situation. “You can’t go in there, Sir. We’re just going to end up blowing the M88 up and getting that stuck too.”
“So what do we do?” He asked me.
“Well, we didn’t bring a mine plow for nothing.” I ran back to SSG Terry. He had already formed a plan.
“All I gotta do is plow a lane from here to the M88 to get me to him. Then I’ll plow a lane from him to the back of your tank that he can use. Once he hooks up the tow-bar to you, you guys just follow in my plow lane back to the MSR.” SSG Terry was good. Being the oldest, crustiest, most experienced tanker in the battalion, there was nobody better to have on this mission.
The guys had successfully repaired the track but now that we were in a minefield, there was no more screwing around. We couldn’t risk moving the tank around just to get the track back on. We just needed the M88 to tow us the hell out of here. Leave the track right where it is.
I looked at my tank. There was an impression in the sand where Langford had unhooked the 4 block track section from the bustle rack and let it fall. The dent in the sand was right next to a land mine. I looked at right side of SSG Terry’s tank where Dawes had fallen and rolled in the sand. Next to the body-sized impression was what looked like a tilt-rod.
Jesus Christ. This is ridiculous.“SGT P. I’m sorry.” Mewborn apologized again. The guys were so pissed that we missed out on the fire mission. And they were pissed to be knocked out of the battle now. We take a lot of pride in keeping a tank up. For all the tankers out there, you understand how many millions of things go wrong with a tank. Engine Startup aborting, roadwheels wearing, control arms breaking, torsion bars snapping, inner seals and hubs leaking. The list goes on. I bet most people think a tank is just this big steel mule that goes and goes. Just taking the abuse and plodding on. Nothing could be further from the truth. A tank is like a high-maintenance girlfriend. She’s so demanding and fickle and sometimes, you can’t even figure out what’s wrong with her. Mechanics sometimes just keep replacing parts and components until the problem goes away. Sometimes new problems spring up from replacing components, like switching out an RTNB.
Alpha section was the best section in the company. Our tanks were cared for like Triple Crown champs. But it was race day here in Fallujah. When it was time to push these beasts, we pushed them hard. We ran them all day and all night without shutting off the engine. Shoot. Drive. Fill up. Shoot. Drive. Fill up. Drove them through the desert – sand sucking into the air filters. And the icing on the cake - we fired a whole hell of a lot of main gun rounds. The concussion of the main gun rounds sometimes rocks the turret so hard that we’ve had radios and circuitry go haywire on us during gunnery training. But here in Fallujah, where we needed the tanks the most, they never let us down. We had made it through some serious shit so far and the tanks hadn’t had a single thing go wrong. 45 main gun rounds in the first hour, almost 12 hours before H-hour on D-Day. 4 days of continuous operations without a single maintenance issue. That’s a miracle.
This time, I was starting to feel the blame. I had steered us right into a minefield. Because of my direction, we blew our track off and were down. I wanted to kick myself but I tried to justify it in my head.
Look at your options. It was either this or stay where you were and get hit by artillery.
Yeah but no more rounds landed after that one blew up in front of you. If you had just stayed put, you would have been fine.
But how could I have known no more rounds were coming in? It wasn’t worth risking it.
You shouldn’t have backed up so far. If you had stopped short, you could have avoided the minefield.And I went back and forth like this in my head.
SSG Terry kicked his crew off of his tank except for his driver, Padilla. He climbed on the front slope and grabbed the metal oval ring that was attached to his plow arms and yanked hard. With the motor burned out, he manually lowered the plow. Each plow arm lowered gently to the ground. He climbed up on his pig as Stoker and Dawes joined the rest of my crew standing on the turret of my tank. Mewborn had turned the tank so it was facing north. All he had to do was drive in reverse to make it turn. We turned the turret so the gun tube over the back deck. This way, when the M88 arrived, the tank could be hitched to it without the gun in the way.
SSG Terry crept away slowly, allowing the blades to sink into the sand. The turbine was screaming as he pushed at the earth. We watched him pull away toward the M88 as the spoil fell to his left and right. He turned his turret over the left side. Now his gun tube was over the side of the tank and his tank commander hatch was closest to the front. This way, if the plow set off a mine, it would not damage the gun tube. We watched closely at the spoil, wondering if we would see mines come up, but it was just plain better if he didn’t run into any at all.
