Apparently while we were stumbling around at night in sandstorms, getting ambushed, the brass heard there was a thousand-vehicle strong Republican Guard element heading south to intercept the Marines, who were closing in on Baghdad. We were sent to intercept them, in a place called Karbala. Everyone in ACE squad was suddenly clamoring for more firepower, and Top finally relented and gave us all nice new M16A4s, never fired. We only got two mags and no tracers, but suddenly we all felt like Rambo. Back across the river we went South, then off into the desert once more. I was starting to wish I had joined the Marines. We drove for two days through absolutely nothing(thank God for GPS) and finally my ACE abruptly broke. Turned out the water-pump impeller disintegrated but all I knew is that I was stranded. Fortunately we were at a halt when it happened, and I was still able to limp the thing forward. I had heard all of the stories about what happened to soldiers who had been ordered to leave all their gear and jump into a passing vehicle and had determined that I would rather be demoted than left in Iraq for six months without any gear. If I had had faith in my immediate chain of command to give a damn about me things would have been different. I had also seen what had happened to the stranded US vehicles we passed. We had thought at the time that the Hadjiis had been stripping them, but we found out later that the US soldiers were actually the worst. My LT showed up and ordered me to hook up my ACE to another so it could be towed. I informed him that this would destroy the transmission. He ordered me to "fix it" and proceeded to scream at me while I spent the next hour crawling around under the ACE removing belly-pans to get a face-full of oil and unbolting the drive axles so it could be towed. Ah I miss the Army. When I was done I looked like I was Nigerian, I was so black. The LT told me to leave every thing but my Sensitive Items" and we'd get it later. I said "Sure thing, LT", and got every piece of my gear and piled it on top of his Humvee. I don't think he ever forgave me, but as soon as we were ready, a Cav Bradley showed and suggested that he would be faster towing the ACE than another slow ACE would be. What could we say? And that was the last I saw of my vehicle for 3 days. I rode into Karbala clutching my 16 in one hand, and my laptop case in the other.

In the Resupply depot in Karbala we picked up my vehicle. Everything inside the hatch had been picked clean, and the lock on the BII box had been bashed off. The German interior lock I had fashioned into place on the boxback in Bamberg hadn't given up the ghost, though, and all my tools were safe. Fuck you in the ass with a SAW, LT O'Hare. If I had listened to him, I would have lost everything but the clothes on my back and my weapons. I still lost a good amount of "TA-50"(the issued gear you have to clean and return to get out of the service). I later got fucked out of about $1100 because my idiot Plt Sgt didn't turn in the right paperwork for me to write off these items.

To give you an idea of why I was so concerned about my stuff, I later ran into my platoon-mate SPC Rudden, who told me about how he and SGT Vanderbeck had hit a mine or mortar(or fell asleep, I wonder) in their HEMTT(Think huge Semi-truck) and driven off the road. SGT V had dragged a dazed Rudden out of the cab and, carrying only their weapons, they had staggered up to a CAV Bradley. As soon as the CAV guys heard everyone was out of the truck, an M1 put a HE round into the demo packed on the truck's bed so the Hadji's couldn't loot it. Rudden & Sgt V spent the next two weeks with nothing but their rifles and one clip each. They didn't even have their BDU tops, as like all of us, they had been riding in their undershirts under flak vests. Sgt V had no socks. Upon hearing this story I gave Rudden a toothbrush, and he said he really appreciated it.

I was able to limp my ACE along for about 10 miles before it would overheat, so with the help of the civilian GPS I had bought before deploying I found the rest of my platoon. They were camped in the middle of the desert again, about 20 miles East of Lake Karbala and 30 miles South-West of Baghdad. This was our view of lovely Lake Karbala.
Here we parked our asses in the sun for what turned into two weeks. The second day we were there, Sergeant Ricke and I fixed my ACE's water pump. Ricke was an asshole, but he could fix anything. He made an impeller out of an alternator fan and welded it to the shaft. Here he is at work.
The big, heavy green MOPP suits turned out to be a blessing, as they kept all the oil off our pristine tan desert DCUs.

Life quickly settled into a routine. We'd wake up at like 10, then spend all day under tarps we had rigged. Nothing happened until after 1500, when you could almost stand to walk around without dying from the heat. I would wander through the spread-out convoy to see if there was any news. Thanks to my shortwave & the BBC, I had regular visitors. Cigarettes were going for $2 each or $25 a pack. A major event was when we got the new-style MREs, which we promptly fought over. I can't recall which books I read, which is amazing, since I read them all at least twice. I started paying a cigarette per book or magazine collected and received over 20. One day I dug a latrine ditch for our Cav neighbors and bartered a pack for a full case of the new MREs all for myself. An hour later their 1st Sergeant come screetching up and runs out of his Bradley towards me. "Oh no," I thought, "this is going to be bad." He explained that he had heard I was trading smokes for new MREs and would I care for 10 cases? I had to say No, but traded 3 packs for 4 extra magazines, lots of tracer rounds, a mag pouch, combat sling, etc etc. Amazing, the power of addiction.

At night we would stretch out on top of our tracks and watch the MLRS batteries light up the sky while listening to the A-10s buzz their 30mms against the hapless Republican Guard.

During this time I was able to call home on a CAV sat-phone. Picture a table and phone attached to a little fan-antenna in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else in sight in the desert but your far off vehicles. My Mom almost cried and my Dad told me he was proud of me. I must say I was too, at that point.

We got to blow up some abandoned Iraqi weapons.
When we would find just a few of them we didn't want to waste our demo so we improvised.


Eventually, after the war quite seemed like a bad dream and I was starting to imagine becoming a Beduin, we got our orders and fired up for Baghdad.

We climbed up an enormous escarpment that stretched as far as the eye could see. I remember wondering how a geologist would explain it.
We crossed the fucking river AGAIN and headed North.


Along the way, we saw more weird shit, like one of our own AVLBs with the 18-ton bridge stuck in the up position for two weeks.
I towed this HETT(Flatbed) out of the sand. It had a T-72 on it that was apparently headed back to Fort Benning for display.
I really learned my lesson about airpower vs armor
We headed up Highway 28, the "Highway of Death" and met up with most of the rest of the company in another ricepaddy just a few miles S of Baghdad. Some unit had actually set up a shower here and so I actually managed to get clean, for the first time in a month. We explored a palace the rumor mill said belonged to Uday Hussein but found nothing interesting.

A few of us followed the highway North and met up with two other ACE-squad members who had apparently been having all kinds of fun. They had been fighting fires and clearing roads, raiding stores, basically NOT sitting in the desert for two weeks. They were at a Cav mortar platoon roadblock on HWY 18. Here is what the Cav did to motorists who didn't stop.
We found several dead tanks under over-passes that had been knocked-out by long-range Bradley fire. Note the arm sticking out of the hatch.

We pushed a lot of dead tanks off the road.
While half of us had been stuck in Karbala working on our tans, the line platoons had been busy. Apparently 1st platoon had raided a warehouse arms factory and captured all kind of cool toys. The also found a safe, which they carefully prepped with C4, using the TM(Technical Manual. "Technical" to a Combat Engineer means it has words) to know the exact amount. Normally we just used the "P-Formula". It stands for "P for plenty"
And what was in it??? AK rounds! American-made AK rounds! What a find.

One of ACE squad's major jobs(besides burying huge numbers of dead Iraqis) was assisting the line platoons blow up ammo caches.


I must have personally done 5 or 6, but I remember one especially fondly. My and PFC Jimenez's ACEs were assigned to a line platoon. We raced up some pretty good-sized Iraqi town South of Baghdad and parked in front of an ordinary-looking store. The Cav Bradley that had been guarding it took off, and we proceeded to pull all the arms out and stack them in the bowls of our ACEs and a trailer behind a 113. I helped the "Line Dogs" haul out a couple of loads of arty and grenades and mortars, but then got tired to bumping elbows and watching sleepy soldiers drop live RPG rounds and retired to the hatch of my ACE. They stacked so much assorted weaponry in the bowl of my ACE that I had to shout at them not to put in anymore. Here's SPC Flores loading me up, with SFC Corner overseeing things and a few Iraqis clowning in the background.
Note how huge the Iraqi main streets are, how funny the buildings look and how dusty every thing is. The line guys kept tossing armed rounds(mortar, arty, grenades, etc) up and into my bowl, even after I had fired up and hydraulically raised it. Here's Jimenez's ACE behind me, also full to the brim with bombs, and to the left, one of the Line 113s, towing an Iraqi field gun. (sorry about the angle)
"Go slow!" I shouted at them before we pulled out, and I attempted to follow them. I say "attempted", because a 113 is 10mph faster than an ACE, so they were soon almost out of sight. I remember wondering at the surreal nature of the mission: Here I was, driving a sedate 20mph down a busy Iraqi street, weaving in and out of traffic, with enough ordinance bouncing a few feet in front of me to turn the 25-ton vehicle into a pretzel. I watched one egg-carton holding twenty loose Chinese-made grenades slowly slip off the pile to tumble a few feet down, and came the closest to praying I had so far.

Jimenez & I caught up with the line vehicles just out of town, in an abandoned field. We all unloaded the ACEs, then he & I dug a big pit, pushed up a berm around it and helped them put all the ordinance in the hole and prep it with C4. This is how it looked when we were about half-way done, with Jimenez's ACE in the background.

After digging the trench, Jimenez & I watched the Line Dogs efficiently place the weapons, covering them with lots of C4 and rigging everything together with a "line main" of Det Cord. He & I got back on our ACEs, as we obviously weren't needed. I jumped down 10 minutes later to take a piss, when I suddenly heard a "WHOOOSH" and felt a great heat on the side of my face. Glancing in the direction on the pit, I saw twenty soldiers leaping in every direction and running at top speed, as behind them a huge wall of flame shot up. I turned my head back to see Jimenez in mid-jump off of his ACE, running in mid-air. I was normally a faster runner, but having to hold my pants up with one hand slowed me enough for him to overtake me. We ran about 50 yards then dived behind a little hump. After 5 minutes we carefully headed back.

Turned out that those funny donut-shaped "packing foam" things packaged with all those mortar rounds were actually booster charges that one could too into a mortar tube to give the mortar a little extra "oomph". They were NOT just trash, as we had supposed. Of the 25 guys there, at least half were smokers and a quarter actually were smoking, right outside of the pit. One of their ashes had ignited a pile of these booster charges. It was shown to me that one of the det-cord lines had had the green insulation actually burnt off to the point where you could see the white powder inside. We had all come less than a millimeter from certain death. One of the smokers, PFC Sinai(an Albanian, of all things, who only cared about beer and pussy and thus was much beloved by the platoon) was accused and made to were full-battle-rattle and do exercises across the enormous clearing. He denied it was his fault and I believe him. Whoever almost killed twenty-five of his best friends in the middle of a war zone certainly isn't going to fess up. Sgt Corner re-created the scene for the camera. We were all pretty happy to be alive. You can see the ring main staked around the pit. I'm standing to the left, looking relieved that I'm not going to die with my pants around my ankles.

When we finally blew it made a pretty picture.
One time we blew an arms cache in the middle of a town. Before we hit the time-fuze, we had our interpreter go around the block with a loud-speaker warning people to stay in their homes. Did they? Zoom in on the right side of the picture.
Everywhere we went, the Iraqis seemed to greet us happily, especially the kids.
I suspect it was because we were mostly in the Shi'ite areas.

1st Platoon called themselves The War Pimps.
And there was a lot of truth to it. Maybe it was my fevered imagination, but they seemed to get the best of everything. I think it was because their Platoon Sergeant, the soft-spoken but imposing SFC(Sergeant First Class) Corner knew how to stretch his orders and the platoon's available resources to make things better for his men, to even have fun while fighting a war. This was the platoon that tied Iraqi license plates to the back of their vehicles. When 2nd platoon ran out of ammo, they stopped and waited for the Cav to resupply them. When 1st platoon ran out they used their captured AKs. When it looked like we were going to stop for a while, Sergeant Corner found a little palace to hole up in and sent his men out to find AC compressors and goats to eat. When I visited them, they were eating fresh fish and goat and prying stuff out of the palace walls for souvenirs.

I asked if they had an extra AK and they told me to go pick one out of the pile. Later, when I was transferred to 2nd Platoon, we very nearly had a mutiny because the NCOs were keeping most of the bottled water for themselves, while the regular Joes had to drink the horrible "treated" pondwater. 1st Platoon, on the other hand, had pallets of water that they had specially organized a "night-op" to steal from the Air Force.

Sgt Corner was so smooth, I dunno how he got away with it. As lowly engineers, we weren't issued Interceptor vests, just the useless flak vests that wouldn't stop a 9mil. Corner bought his own, personal Interceptor(they were over $600 each) and made whoever was on point in his platoon wear it. After the conex(shipping container) with most of 1st Platoon's personal gear somehow got lost on it's way to us from Kuwait, he made sure that everyone had what they needed. When our new company Commander, Captain ____(a sour little man with no sense of humor and a fondness for doing everything by the book) and I happened upon Sgt Corner out for a jog around the palace complex in Baghdad, Cpt ____ asked Sgt Corner if he shouldn't be wearing more than cut-off BDU pants, cut-off army boots and no shirt. "Probably", said Corner, and then continued his jog around the lake.

We blew up more arms caches and then slowly moved North.
I first knew we were in Baghdad when I saw the airport sign, in English.


A&O platoon re-formed and convoyed up the main highway into Baghdad and then into a huge palace complex. We first parked and lived on our vehicles in a huge field/parking lot away from the palaces.

Hussein's palace architecture could be described as "Neo-classical psuedo-Islamic fascade on pre-fab concrete"

Our platoon sergeant was reluctant to exercise his own initiative(that's the nice way to put it) so it was three days until we moved into our own little house on a street full of other little houses, next to a huge lake fronting other huge palaces.
I heard that some of the guys in my platoon went and begged our 1st Sergeant to make our Platoon Sgt claim a place before they were all snapped up. They were indeed all snapped up very quickly: we were soon surrounded by CAV, Civil Affairs and other units. A field mess was set up only a few feet outside our door, and there was laundry and showers. The transition was lightning-quick and disorienting to me, with a two-week beard, used to sleeping in my hatch and eating MREs. Our building(like all of them) had been lightly looted but was functionally intact. AVLB-squad had stolen an enormous generator the size of an M1(almost) and parked it in front of their little house. Soon most of the places had lights and we scrambled to round up AC units. The water wasn't fit for drinking and word soon came down that swimming in the lake was a no-go due to all the sewage flowing straight into it. Anyone who's ever seen an Iraqi "toilet" knows they are not big on proper plumbing.

We did a humanitarian mission out in town--we used our ACEs to clear a soccer field of huge piles of refuse. The smell of human feces was nightmarish. I later smelled the same thing back on the road and realized that many of the Iraqi roads had shitty water running on top of them. Lots of Iraqi kids came & played in the shit right next to my tank while I was working. I had to be careful not to run them over. They were always shouting "Mister, Mister!" and pointing to their mouths, but I never gave them anything. This day, though, one kid got my attention and pointed to where my tank's sprocket had picked up a huge amount of wire. By carefully backing up I was able to get it off, but it could have been bad. I called the kid over and threw him an MRE. Immediately a bigger kid came over, hit him in the face & took it away. I think there's a metaphor there somewhere.

We did some more arms caches, improved the roads and the walls around the complex and I bought some booze off an Iraqi through the wire. I hid it in my vehicle, next to the AKs and H&K MP5 I had saved from a cache. I later heard(I had spies everywhere) that our 1SGT was going to do a Health and Welfare inspection and so I hid everything elsewhere. Turned out my platoon sergeant inspected everything. He gave each vehicle a quick inspection but carefully searched mine for a half-hour. I got a little concerned, and so gave the bottle of booze to Hamidovic, the commander's driver. Turned out Ol' Ham, while a huge asset to the company for his ability to speak some Arabic and his experience in the Bosnian war, was also the worst kind of buddy-fucker and had actually turned me in himself. This was not the last time I saw him do this to someone. Just goes to show you never know about some people. Here I am standing in the bowl of my ACE with my very-own, super-neato AK. Note the taped-together glasses.


We started doing regular missions to round up arms caches. We would actually transport & store them, which was a change from blowing them up. We found some enormous caches.


Here we are "doing a cache". You can see where someone marked "UXO"(UneXploded Ordinance) on the side of the building. The rope is to lower the mortar & AA shells that were stored up top. You can see the AA gun to the right, lying upside-down where we threw it off the roof.




Next: Peace is Hell!