Around two in the morning, I lay awake on my cot under the Bradley’s bustle rack. There was a heavy, choking fear crawling between my gut and my throat. I wondered how I could do this to my wife and children, and I wished I was with them. I thought about whether I was going to be killed outright by a clean shot, burned to death inside the track, or just horribly maimed in a few hours time when we went in. I know I wasn’t the only one in camp doing this. ...
And we came out of the desert at dawn. The tanks kicked up dust by mud hut farms, their skull-and-crossed-saber guidons whipping in the wind.
“This all looks so ancient … Nothing has changed here in 2,000 years,” said the LT, up in his turret hatch. There were people in the doorways of the farmhouses watching us pass.
As we neared al-Hindiyah, Wolford radioed the order to pour on speed for the assault. Our vehicle lunged forward, the vibration and already deafening track and engine noise intensifying as Baxter accelerated. It was the 21st century equivalent of a cavalry charge. It felt like surfing toward rocks, on a massive heavy metal wave. The anticipation of fire brought all our senses alive and we were all wired, beneath the mutual small-talk and joking pretense that this was all somehow normal, a Monday morning carpool to work. I suppressed the thought of fire coming through the steel walls of the Bradley and being dead in a few minutes, and it was not so hard, as we became engaged. Our Bradley was in line behind the Red Platoon tanks, where the Bradley’s fire-support team could call in artillery as needed, with White and Blue Platoons following. The Red tankers just ahead of us reported Iraqi RPG teams scrambling into roadside ditches as we approached.
“We’ve got contact,” Lustig said over the radio, matter-of-fact and cool about it. ...
