many of them as we could for intelligence-gathering purposes. We’d been watching these buildings through an ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) drone feed for several hours prior to spinning up from base to confirm that everyone inside was a legitimate fighter, so by the time we got in the air, we knew there was a high probability that they possessed information worth…how should I put this…extracting? Yeah, the Department of Defense will like that word. I’m going with extracting.
The plan was to execute a basic offset infil, which means that the helicopters drop our teams about three to six kilometers from the target location so the enemy can’t hear us and we can use the cover of darkness to walk in and fuck their souls in the middle of the night. Everything was going according to plan on our flight into the HLZ (helicopter landing zone) when, wouldn’t you know it, the drone feed showed six enemy combatants run out from one of the buildings carrying AK-47s, RPGs, and PKMs (belt-fed machine guns). They jumped into a truck and took off.
In the military we have a name for guys like these—enemy combatants who somehow catch wind of the twenty to twenty-five inbound Americans and choose flight over fight. We call them “squirters” because they are usually holed up inside a juicy soft target where, if you apply enough consistent, vigorous pressure in just the right way, from the front or the rear, eventually something’s coming out. The only questions are how much, how fast, and in what direction?
Back at base, our drone operator re-tasked the ISR to chase the squirters as we touched down, jumped out of the helicopter, and started hiking toward the target. About halfway there, we spotted their truck trying to outflank our element. Since they were mobile and we were on foot, our ground force commander immediately cleared an AC-130 gunship to orient to their position and say hello with its 105mm howitzer shells and 40mm Bofors cannons.
A few minutes later, listening to the radio chatter in my capacity as a team leader, two facts soon became clear: (1) the AC-130 had disabled the vehicle, displacing the combatants; and (2) my squad of nine men would reroute to find and handle them while the rest of the platoon headed to the target buildings.
I leaned in to my team.
“Just so you guys know, I guarantee most of them will still be alive when we clear through, so be ready,” I instructed. “Load your 40mm, and make sure you’re ready to get nasty.”
By this point in my service, I had been through enough combat that I didn’t fuck around anymore. If I thought there was a credible threat in front of us, we were going in like a Ruth’s Chris baked potato—fully loaded—and doming assholes. If I was pieing a hillside and I saw what looked like a dead body lying motionless in the brush, I would put one through its head just to be sure, because half the time the guy wasn’t dead at all. When you came up on his position, you’d discover that he was alive and armed, hoping you’d let your guard down. Or, if he was even more patient, he might wait till you got close enough and then blow himself up. After enough of those instances, there was no hesitation or cautious optimism left inside me. If they were known combatants, we made sure they were dead as we tidied up the mess they made.
Once we were all squared away, my squad slowly made its way to the squirters’ last known position. Distance-wise it wasn’t far, but time-wise you never knew how long it would take. The undulations of the Iraqi desert constantly messed with your depth perception, so when you were looking for something that you didn’t have a fixed position on, it almost always caught you by surprise when you finally found it.
Ten minutes in, we saw a flickering glow on the horizon. We’d all seen that glow before. Most of us on the squad had made that glow at one time or another. Vehicle fire. The glow guided our way, but we actually ended up hearing the vehicle before we saw it. The heat from the fire was cooking off all the 7.62 AK-47 rounds still in the bed of the truck and the noise was echoing out in all directions.
Following the sound, we crested a berm and finally came upon the burning vehicle. The fire was so