NORFOLK
Along a mile-wide front, passing through the forward units of the 2nd Armored Cavalry, the 34th Armor, along with elements of Lieutenant Colonel Baker’s 16th Infantry—all in all, a universe of iron—opened up in a shattering rippling volley of tank and TOW fire, an outburst of fire and thunder that could be seen from twenty miles away, could be seen through the cloud cover like flashes of sheet lightning.
Later, some of the Air Force guys who had been manning a radar screen on one of the J-STARS told one of the brigade officers that they all saw the whole AO light up, watched the clouds flickering and glowing from the cockpit of the J-STAR, an eruption of light that rippled and rolled and flickered across miles of thin ragged clouds, as if the land underneath it had broken open and begun to burn.
Down in the middle of it, Crane was literally stunned by the size of that first bombardment, and he believed at that moment that he knew what it must have been like at Verdun or the Somme or Dresden. The cracking and booming of main guns underlay the hissing shriek of TOWs and Hellfires and the ribbons of fire from the chain guns. The darkness was literally made day, the cold wet air began to burn, the world became one solid rolling explosion of fire and thunder, an insanity of molten iron and white-hot incoming rounds.
Underneath the first volley, the forward units of the Iraqi tank lines dissolved into a landscape of burning machinery. Hundreds of men died in the time between one breath and another, never knowing what had killed them, seeing the steel around them glow white hot, feeling their eyes boil away, or blown into vapor and smeared across the walls of their APCs and BMPs, or pounded into ruined meat by concussion.
On the Internet, the Military Intelligence monitors heard brief cries and half-issued commands, curses, and shouted warnings—all cut off as the barrage came down on them and the shot lanced in, the TOWs and the missiles. Units of the Guard that were hull-down and forward were literally erased from the terrain. What had been an army minutes before was now a disintegrating melee of burning iron and cooking men.
Firing at will now, the armor accelerated, main guns traversing and settling—blam—and the area around the tank would light up white and red, the earth would rock and dust swirl upward from the shock, and the tanks would roll forward out of their own shock wave, looking for new kills, firing as they came.
Pounded, deafened, Crane hunched into the turret as his face and shoulders caught the backblast from Godzilla’s main gun along with the guns of Blue Three and Blue Two beside them, and all the guns down the line.
The green landscape in his NVGs blossomed into a solid sheet of fire. Crane ducked his head to save the circuits and stowed them under his hatch plate. Ears ringing, nose running blood, he held on to the hatch-rim grips as Godzilla roared across a little wash and bounced up a gravel slope. His world was strangely muted, as if there was a wall of thick glass around him, a bell jar of soft sounds and rapid muffled drumming as thousands—millions—of red streaks and blue-white tracers and high-arching howitzer rounds slammed out of the line and flew into the Iraqi positions.
It was like nothing he had ever seen before. Nothing in his whole lifer career had ever come close, not in Vietnam, not in his dreams or visions or nightmares. It was something biblical, like the cracking open of the world, and as he watched it, the lights flickering across his face in a liquid dance of red and green and blue and white and orange, he experienced a wild soaring upsurge, a burst of nameless joy and wonder, for he was alive and here and not yet killed, alive inside the red thundering heart of war.
Dimly, as if through water, he heard Boomer shout, and then Godzilla—over the slope—was plunging downward, traversing, looking for her secondary targets, the long barrel settled, a momentary stillness, and then another shattering explosion and a flat streak of fire as the red-hot round lanced into a target.
Now the entire front was a latticework of crossed tracer fire, eruptions of fire and earth, and in the distance he could see huge Iraqi T-72s laying down smoke grenades and throwing up wakes of dust and gravel as they cut left and right, treads churning, main guns firing wildly, trying to get out from under the rounds and dodge the Apaches and Cobras arcing and swooping over them.
Bright green fountains of tracer fire wavered and shimmered through the darkness as Iraqi turret machine-gunners tried to catch a chopper in the fire. The entire night skyline was a trembling, scintillating web of interlacing tracer fire, green and red and blue-white, with here and there the heavier cables of TOW rockets as they sliced into the Iraqi units. Iraqi APCs were rushing back out of the killing zone, soldiers clinging to the hulls and running alongside them—and in a few seconds, they were inside the Iraqi positions and there were targets everywhere.
Godzilla had forty rounds—make that thirty now—a combination of HEAT and sabot, and in five minutes Boomer and Bigrig had fired off ten rounds and made nine confirmed kills. Lymons was keeping a count and he made it six T-72s, all in the first three minutes, a T-62, and two BMPs.
The one unconfirmed was being shared with Blue Two, whose round had come in at the same second, totally obliterating what had looked to Bigrig’s infrared to be a BTR-60 armored personnel carrier covered with a mound of fleeing soldiers. It had gone up in a yellow gout of fire, little black mannequin figures twisting and breaking up in silhouette in the flames, and secondary lancets of green tracer as the ammunition and small-arms magazines popped off.
It was at that point that Crane began to feel a kind of sickness, and his fleeting exhilaration dissipated. So far, the Iraqis hadn’t managed one aimed shot.
All they were doing was spraying out fire and shot in a panicked attempt to back up out of the battle and get away alive. He could see their cohesion coming apart, see their fields of fire dissolve into a disorganized output of erratic tracers and random grenades. Even the T-72s were missing every shot, if they even made the attempt.
They had seen what happened to the braver tankers right at the start. Because the T-72 had to slow down almost to a crawl to acquire a good target and make the shot, they were obliterated by the faster and more accurate fire coming from M1s, agile gun platforms that could fire on the fly at thirty miles an hour going sideways down a ditch. It was simply no contest and although Crane felt no sympathy at all for the men dying in all that molten armor, it was still an ugly thing to see.
Once they had closed in with the Iraqi forces, Boomer had come up top to man the .50-caliber, because now one of the main threats to Godzilla would come, theoretically at least, from flanking foot soldiers or light antitank vehicles.
As Godzilla ground forward through a dense thicket of pine bush and bramble, Bigrig fired again, blowing most of the brush away and setting the rest on fire. Flames swirled up around the hull and blistered the paintwork around the steel plates covering the treads. Boomer looked disgusted but said nothing, staying with the .50 as the turret swayed and jolted and they headed back downgrade and out onto another broad stretch of open desert. In the distance, they could see Iraqi tanks in a full-out retreat. They were also dispersing, fanning out into the terrain, the entire armored division breaking up into random panicked units. And any tank in range, any armored vehicle, was immediately fired on by at least two or three M1s. The competition for kills was becoming intense, and underneath that was the slowly developing rage that comes over soldiers who see their enemy in full flight.
It was a kind of sadism, perhaps a response to the prebattle fear, but Crane could feel it growing even in these relatively innocent troopers. Now the Iraqis were deeply into the shit. Unless they managed to lose the pursuit, they’d be hunted down one by one and crushed without quarter.
Hardcore.
War is a nasty thing. People who start them are hardly ever the people who end them, and the people who end them are never what they were at the beginning. No one gets out without being touched by fire, and that fire changes everything, changes it forever.
Later they called it the Battle of Norfolk, although Crane remembered it chiefly for the long straggling lines of beaten Iraqis that they raced by in their pursuit of the fleeing Republican Guard tanks. They had no time to take prisoners, and no place to take them, and no intention at all of letting a string of sorry-assed ragheads foul up what was beginning to look like an all-out barn-burning massacre. Leave them to the MPs coming up behind.
They just waved at the Iraqis—many of whom were waving those surrender passes—and barreled on through into the eastern reaches of Kuwait, through to Highway 1 out of Kuwait City, across the Tigris and the Euphrates, gaining speed and bloodlust with every mile and every blown-up and butchered Iraqi vehicle.
The breakthrough became a rout in about one hour, and in a little while the entire advance was strung out in a highspeed charge, tanks and IFVs and APCs and every vehicle that could keep up, a thundering herd, racing east over the desert, deep into Iraqi-held territory, with the bitter wind in their faces, and the clouds of smoke rolling like black ink in bad water … T-72s went up in white showers of steel, their crews shot to bits as they scrambled out. T-62s pounded the same way, and BMPs and Erks and APCs loaded with frightened soldiers. Godzilla blew her last round on a BTR-60 and had to fall back to refuel and reload, but Boomer rode her hard and within an hour they were back up with the pack, part of a wave of American iron that rolled across southeastern Iraq that night, killing and burning as they went, an all-out armored runaway charge that went on through the night and into the early dawn. It was a seamless war-dream of hunting and killing and destruction, of tanks rocking from blowback and loaders sweating with the shells, of little orange numbers flickering across amber screens, the crackle and hiss of cross talk and sudden shouts and bursts of static, of green ghosts wavering under blossoms of white flame in a shimmering green landscape.
It was a fine madness, all thunder and speed and searing exhilaration, a night that none of them would ever forget, and they smelled a total victory, a complete and crushing ruin hand delivered to the goddam Iraqis by the goddam United States Army—with a little help from the Marines—but any way you cut it, a definite and undeniable all-out ball buster of a war.
Simply put, it was victory, sweet and neat and totally complete, shoved up Saddam’s personal and deeply deluded butt, and when they pulled up at dawn with their M1s sitting on top of the only highway out of Kuwait and watched the distant flaring lights and heard the groundswell of concussion and the bass-drum booming of the war gods as they incinerated a milling press of fleeing Iraqi thieves down on the Baghdad road, all they felt was the blood singing in their ears and pounding in their chests.
Every combat soldier hears about this feeling, and some of them even get to enjoy it, and what the men of the 1st Infantry were feeling then was an almost sexual lust to turn northeast, go to Baghdad, drive into Saddam’s bedroom, tear up the four-poster and drag the sorry little fuck out from under it and put three rounds into the back of his head.
At eight on the morning of February 28, they regrouped on a butte overlooking the AO, with the Baker Company IFVs all around, and Mosby and Polanyi, and the LTs and all the junior sergeants. Everyone was cleaning weapons, servicing the tanks and vehicles, refueling and refitting. Wolochek was somewhere downrange, probably in a huddle with the adjutant and the HQ Company officers. Mosby was watching Crane stitch up a deep cut on Lymons’s head with a set of needles and thread he had taken from a Holiday Inn in Junction City. After a silence, he set aside his SAW and squatted down beside Crane.
“Sergeant … so waddya think?”
Crane looked up from Lymons’s wound. Mosby’s face was streaked with lime dust and he had a three-day beard. He’d taken the batteries out of his razor and used them to replace the dead ones in Polanyi’s night-vision goggles. Crane could see changes in Mosby’s face, some of them good.
“What’d I think of what?”
“The Hoo-Yah. Is it what you thought it would be?”
“No, Darryl.”
“The casualties, right?”
“Yeah. Aside from the blue-on-blue, we lost a guy in the breach, defusing a mine, and another guy wounded by DivArty.”
“Polanyi and the rest of the guys, we all got confirmed.”
Crane looked at him in silence. “Yeah?”
“So, now we know.”
“Yeah. You do.”
Mosby looked back over his shoulder to the platoon AO, where Polanyi and Orso and Mitchell were scrubbing away at their weapons and talking happily. There were about fifty troopers in the general area, and another hundred or so spread out around their IFVs and M1s all down the side of the butte. A flight of Kiowas droned high up in the northern skyline, and the murmur of voices sounded on the wind. Crane figured Mosby had something to say, and he gave him time to say it.
But Mosby only shook his head after a long silence and then he patted Lymons on the shoulder and grinned at Crane. Grunting, he straightened and slapped some dust off his knees. He smiled again, looking about forty-two years old for that brief moment, and then he went back to his squad. Crane watched him go and knew he was looking at another lifer in the making.
The wind had been building all morning and now it started to whistle through the rocks so they didn’t hear Boomer swearing until he slammed the hatch cover back.
He popped up out of Godzilla, jumped down, and walked over to where Crane was sitting, looked down at Crane with his face blank and shocked. They all looked at him, their talk fading away into an uneasy silence. Boomer looked down at Crane for a full minute.
Crane waited.
“It’s over.”
“What’s over?”
Boomer looked northward, along the great salt valley that rose up into Iraq, along the road to Baghdad.
“The war. The fucking war. It’s over.”
“Waddya mean, it’s over? Like hell it is!”
“Bush ended it. That’s it.”
Some of the men began to groan, others laughed.
“Bullshit, Sergeant,” said Bigrig. “We’re going to Baghdad. We got these motherfuckers on the run. No way they’d stop us. No way!”
Crane looked past the tankers and the APCs. The Baghdad road was a thin black thread lying on the yellow skin of the land. It snaked and twisted up through the long shallow valley and rose into the brown hills and red rock cliffs to the north.
He looked back up at Boomer, and then past him to DerHorst, who was bandaged and burned above his left eye. DerHorst was staring back at him, saying nothing.
“Goddamnit,” said Crane, after a silence. “God damn it.”
“Yeah,” said DerHorst. “Exactly.”