By Adam Wojack
The “cherry” story is prized in military folklore because we like to believe that no matter how awkward a “first time” mishap, the person’s reaction tells us what we need to know about their character and potential usefulness to a group. Do you have a story you’d like to share?
ere’s my “cherry” story. I’m the cherry, or rookie, and the mistakes in this recollection are mine, but as you’ll see, I get a little help. I’m the motor officer for my battalion at Forward Operating Base, or FOB, Brassfield-Mora near Samarra, Iraq in March, 2004. It’s my first combat patrol as a leader. |
I’m an infantryman, but I’ve been asked to think like a maintainer and get our battalion’s fleet of wheeled and tracked vehicles fixed and to keep them running. This requires a large section of working Army mechanics – which we have – and a continuous supply of replacement parts for the vehicles: tires, tracks, engines, transmissions, fuel pumps, igniters, generators, window glass, and anything else you can name – which we don’t. This is simply the nature of the maintenance business: Replacement parts flow into theater to a central location, and it’s your job to drive to that place two or three times a week to pick up the parts you’ve ordered.
I have been in this job for a month, and already I am frustrated. I have elected to lead a separate patrol to our parts warehouse, located at FOB Speicher, which is 45 minutes to our north and passes through some areas notorious for IED ambush. Ordinarily, I send our parts team – which is two soldiers and a 10-ton truck – with the battalion’s twice-weekly food, fuel and ammunition convoy to get our needed parts. But for whatever reason, my team hasn’t been bringing the right parts back, if many at all, and my battalion commander, who has no patience for unserviceable vehicles when parts are available, has hinted publicly that I need to be more aggressive in getting our “down” vehicles back “up.”
As a root cause, I suspect that my main parts guy, a young sergeant not known for assertiveness, is not asking the right people at Speicher for parts, or maybe not even asking at all. Thinking that “leadership by example” might cure what ails, I organize a patrol around the parts team and their big, 10-ton cargo truck, adding three armored Humvees crewed by mechanics and an assorted group of soldiers from other sections in the battalion headquarters, all of whom have business on Speicher that day. My mission: get the critical parts I need and “show” my parts guy how this business – at which I am also very new – is done.
The patrol starts on time, which is promising, and as we roll down the main north-south highway in Iraq, the one we call Route Tampa, I’m thinking this is simpler than we make it seem. We’ve planned, rehearsed and inspected, but all we’re doing is driving down the road to another secured FOB to load parts into the back of a truck. How complex is that?
I soon get my answer. We aren’t ten minutes down the road when I’m contacted on the FM radio by my trail vehicle – mechanics – who say they’re having a problem with their Humvee and want to stop and check it out.
I have no choice but to stop, so we roll to a halt on the northbound shoulder of the four-lane highway. I depart my vehicle with weapon at the ready and walk back to the trail Humvee, which already has its engine hood raised and two mechanics in full gear peering into its dark jumble of metal, belts and hoses. Before they tell me what the problem is, they say the vehicle is down and that we can’t drive it any further.
The senior mechanic, Sergeant Chase I’ll call him, tells me this vehicle needs a new throttle position sensor, and that it can’t be driven any further unless we want to damage the engine. These words stick in my ears because a TPS is one of the critical parts on my list and it’s one that my parts team has failed to pick up for the past week. I start giving an earful of frustration to Sergeant Chase – maybe because he’s the bearer of bad news – until he informs me that we can stand here in the open and bitch about it or we can hook up this Humvee to the 10-ton truck and tow it to FOB Remagen, which is on our way and closer to us than Speicher, and then try to fix it there.
This, of course, makes good sense, so Chase and his guys hook up the Humvee to the 10-ton. In minutes, the Humvee is attached to the rear of the big cargo truck, but the crew is still sitting inside the small vehicle. We have exactly two empty seats in the other three vehicles in the patrol to seat these four soldiers. Chase and I and the crew stand there for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to get everyone seated. We debate having them ride in the 10-ton’s cargo bed (bad idea), double them up in the other Humvees (not enough room) or leave them where they are. Since this Humvee is attached by a V-shaped steel tow-bar to the 10-ton – which stabilizes the towing situation more than would, say, a chain – and because we aren’t going that far, I make the final decision to move two and have the other two stay put. Everyone takes their place, and off we go, Humvee in the lead, Humvee in trail, and truck-Humvee combo in the middle.
The drive toward Remagen is short and routine, and things are looking up. I’m sitting in the passenger seat marking our progress on a paper map by counting terrain features and overpasses, and I ask my driver, a big, easygoing kid I’ll call Williams, who ordinarily drives for the company first sergeant, if we are near the entrance. Williams has been to Remagen before and tells me he knows where to turn. But maybe his mind is wandering, because only a few seconds after he responds with, “No worries, sir, we’re good,” he turns his head and gives me the You May Never Trust Me Again look and says, “I think we just passed it.”
Okay, I tell him, let’s turn around. I pick up the FM radio handset and transmit this news to the rest of the patrol. Williams starts braking in preparation for our u-turn across the highway.
And this is where things get memorable. Out of habit, I look into my side-view mirror to check on the position of my trailing vehicles, but instead of seeing anything owned by the U.S. Army behind me on the road, I see something bright and small and silent – a civilian automobile – sliding forward quickly and upside down, its tires and dark underbelly oriented upward. This inspires one of those feelings of disbelief into my mind, like, I didn’t really see what I thought I did, did I? And I tell Williams to stop.
I step out of our stopped Humvee and all traffic behind me has also stopped. Behind us in the next lane, a small white car is resting on its roof – bent, twisted and leaking fluids onto the road. Our 10-ton truck is on the shoulder a short distance behind us as well, but it’s facing the opposite direction. A long semi-circular skid mark on the road ends where the 10-ton sits. And the Humvee it has been towing is still attached to its rear, but is now resting on its side, with its bottom facing us.
I’m still looking around, trying to figure out how things suddenly came to look this way when people start emerging from their vehicles. The turret gunner from the capsized Humvee helps himself out of the top – now side – of his vehicle, spilling MREs and water bottles onto the road shoulder, which merge with the automotive fluids that are also draining from this vehicle.
My parts guy, the driver of the 10-ton truck, has dismounted and walks over to me with a half-smile on his face that might be embarrassment but doesn’t seem to convey to me that he understands the gravity of this situation. Maybe I misread his expression, but I’m already so frustrated with him that I walk the other way. From the smashed civilian car, two Iraqi men are pulling themselves out from inside the upside-down hull. A mere minute earlier, they’d been thoughtlessly driving along the highway in their little white Opel. They are wearing white dishdashas, and these long shirt-dresses are spotted with their own blood.
All of us except drivers and turret gunners have dismounted by now, and several soldiers in my patrol rush over to the wrecked Opel and assist the injured Iraqi men. Our signal officer, a young captain named Jaison, plops down in the middle of the road with the more wounded of the two Iraqi men and applies a pressure dressing to a cut on the man’s head. I radio the situation to my battalion and ask for whatever help or advice they can provide. I’m clueless. I have a 12,000 pound Humvee that is off its wheels and leaking fluids but is still attached by tow-bar to a 10-ton truck. Plus, we have a destroyed civilian car and two injured local men.
On the radio, I’m told that it’ll take 45 minutes for someone from Remagen – a FOB we can see from the highway – to respond to us.
While we wait, I gather leaders from my patrol to re-create the accident. I reach this tentative finding: my 10-ton truck driver, towing a 12,000 pound Humvee, was not able to slow his vehicle in time to make our unplanned u-turn, maybe because he was following us too closely or going too fast. To avoid rear-ending us, he slammed his brakes hard enough to put his truck into a 180-degree spin with a 12,000-pound “tail” which swung around behind the truck with such force to schwack the little Opel that was attempting to pass. The 10-ton truck/Humvee combo batted the Opel forward with such force during that it flipped the little car onto its roof and caused it to continue its slide in the direction of travel. Finally, as the 10-ton truck came to a rest from its 180-degree tailspin, the Humvee’s lateral inertia caused it to tip over just as the big truck reached a stop.
Eventually, a wrecker from FOB Remagen arrives to pull the Humvee back onto its four wheels. We watch as the same wrecker easily moves the Opel off the road, and we watch as an Iraqi ambulance picks up the two injured Iraqi men and takes them away. Jaison, the signal officer, has been applying the field dressing to the injured man’s head the entire time. I also watch a U.S. Army field ambulance take away two of my mechanics – the crew of the capsized Humvee. They hadn’t appeared injured, but since they had been in a vehicle rollover, the medics insisted they be x-rayed.
We spend hours at Remagen, waiting and wondering when we’ll see these two again (they are now at FOB Speicher, fifteen minutes up the road) and discussing backup plans to return to our FOB, such as splitting up the group or staying overnight at Remagen. We discuss how unlucky those Iraqi men were, but agree that they shouldn’t have gotten so close or attempted to pass when they did. We know that the Army has a procedure for property damage or injury claims made by local nationals, and we know that these men, if they file, will probably get a few thousand bucks for their trouble.
We have too much time on our hands and while we wait, cannot imagine our situation easily correcting itself. Plus, we will obtain no needed parts here at Remagen. We are, for precious hours that day, a unit with broken vehicles, missing soldiers and an unfulfilled mission, stranded on an unfamiliar FOB. We are military homeless, and this sucks.
By sunset, a minor miracle happens: another patrol from our battalion shows up at Remagen on its way back from Speicher with the two soldiers who had been taken there for x-rays. We are able to assemble our original patrol and attach it to this other element – which is part of the miracle because they have the extra seats we need so nobody has to ride in the towed Humvee – and the big bunch of us drive back to FOB Brassfield-Mora by sundown.
Back at our FOB, I head to our tactical operations center to report completion of my patrol. My battalion commander has already heard all about my day, and searches me out to get my side of the story. I can see in his eyes that he is angry: for the accident, the vehicle damage, the injured soldiers, and the embarrassment this will surely cause him in the eyes of his boss, our brigade commander. He angrily asks me which soldiers and vehicles I have left at other FOBs, but changes his tone when I tell him that everything we’d brought with us – soldiers, vehicles and equipment – have all returned with us to base.
“Good job,” he says, and walks away.
I learn that even though we have acquired no repair parts, bringing everyone and everything home by dinner is something that a commander – like any parent – can appreciate.
I stand there and hope that every patrol will not be like this first one. Our next one is not: two days later we try this again, but this time we make it to Speicher, pick up the critical parts we need (including a TPS), miss no turns, injure no people and damage no property. When I tell my battalion commander that several vehicles are now mission-capable or will be shortly, all is forgotten.
The statements made in this article are the express opinions of the author, and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States Army.
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