Spare Parts

by Buzz Williams

  Nagel didn’t. “Unkey the mike, Williams! You worry about driving, we’ll worry about shooting.”

  That was a typical response from Nagel, but the stakes were too high to remain quiet. If the weapon were configured for any setting other than single shot, then the ghost round would fire along with the live rounds that followed. And they would continue firing until Dougherty released the trigger. Preventing Dougherty from shooting the vehicle in front was worth Nagel’s grief.

  Once my helmet was back on my head, I heard Capt. Bounds call for all red elements to fall in. First Platoon’s vehicles were designated Red. There were four vehicles in all. Our vehicle was Red Two and Capt. Bounds’s was Red One. Sgt. Krause’s and Staff Sgt.

  Sanders’s were Red Three and Red Four, respectively.

  The whir of hydraulics whined as the driver’s seat raised my head up into the opaque night above. To my left I could see a dark hulk moving in front of us, and assumed it was Capt. Bounds. On my right was the menacing barrel of the main gun, its muzzle resting only inches from my head. During training I would have never even S P A R E P A R T S

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  been permitted to have my hatch open with the main gun loaded.

  Not only was my hatch open, my seat was raised. There was no other choice. If I lowered myself into the hull I would have to drive blind. There was not enough visibility to allow me to see through my vision blocks, and there was no time to install my night sight.

  Hopefully it would be installed before we needed to fire. The way things looked, that could be anytime.

  With my head outside the LAV I heard dull crashes and thuds like rolling thunder in the distance. I could feel the ground quake as impacting rounds vibrated the hull. It was difficult to tell if the rounds were incoming or outgoing, artillery shells or mortars, tanks or air support, friendly or enemy. None of that mattered, anyway.

  What mattered was driving, the one thing I could control.

  Nagel’s high-pitched cry wailed inside my helmet. “Get this pig moving!”

  Once I found the shadow of Red One in front, I stepped on the accelerator and we rolled into the column. We crept along at five miles per hour for about fifteen minutes, after which Black Six called the company to a stop. Then he called all vehicle commanders to rally at his vehicle for a brief. That was a relief. It meant that we were not under imminent threat of engagement. Not by the enemy, anyway.

  Shortly after Nagel trotted off into the blackness, the signature thump, thump, thump, of a LAV’s 25mm main gun exploded from behind. Simultaneously the ear-shattering blasts thundered past my head.

  It took a few seconds for the reality to settle in. “Dougherty!

  What the fuck was that?”

  Dougherty called back over the intercom, “We’re taking fire from the rear!”

  He was right, but it was not just fire. It was LAV fire. Friendly fire. It had come from Lance Cpl. Bates’s LAV. His was the last vehicle in our column, and he was the last gunner to have cycled his ghost round—only, he’d done it on rapid fire. Bates’s error had sent three armor-piercing rounds just two feet above the turrets of our 214

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  column. Had the vehicle commanders been standing upright in their usual positions, exposed from the waist up, many would have been gutted. The lack of training and experience had finally caught up with us. And the cluster-fuck had only just begun.

  The unexpected overhead fire sent crews into a panicked frenzy.

  One driver up ahead stepped onto the accelerator and rammed into the LAV in front, starting a chain reaction of collisions. In another vehicle a scout accidentally fired his rifle in the crowded troop compartment, sending the round up and out of the troop hatches. All the while the radio buzzed with erroneous reports of enemy fire that sent our VCs scrambling back into their turrets.

  Once the company regained its composure, we learned what was happening off in the distance. While we’d been waking up, suiting up, and fucking up, an active-duty LAV company was engaging in a battle with Iraqi tanks off to our flank. That was all the information we received before the next order came to move out.

  We never would take enemy fire that night. We never even fired at the enemy. We might have, if we hadn’t missed the turnoff . . . or if the middle of our column hadn’t broken off after a few miles and doubled back to find it . . . or if we’d had some semblance of organization and order. By midnight our company of LAVs had become a discombobulated mess.

  I know now that organization and order are not prerequisites for battle. We had experienced the same combat chaos that U.S.

  Marines have experienced for two hundred years, spanning dozens of generations, battles, and landscapes. It is something all Marines have to experience personally before they can function fully within that environment. We were fortunate to have had the time and space to gain that experience in the absence of casualties. Our active duty counterparts were not so lucky.

  Several days later we learned some of what happened that night.

  We learned that the active-duty LAV company suffered two friendly fire hits during their skirmish. One TOW variant mistook a LAV

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  for an enemy tank and fired on it, killing all four Marines aboard.

  During a separate incident an A-10 Warthog airplane fired a Maver-ick missile into the topside of a LAV-25, killing seven of the eight Marines aboard. The word was that the driver had been blasted upward through his driver’s hatch, and although badly cut and burned, he had survived. When I heard who the driver was I was floored—it was Hunter, the party animal who was jumped in Oceanside during LAV school.

  He was lucky, as far as I was concerned. He knew his fate. He knew he was going home.

  8 FEBRUARY 1991

  We moved around quite a bit during the first days of February, with plenty of action all around. But until this night the action had been little more than radio drama for us. Our new position had moved us closer to the action than we had ever been. During the past few days we had heard reports of nearby units engaging Iraqi tanks, intercepting convoys, and apprehending surrendering soldiers. It was only a matter of time before our company would cross paths with the enemy.

  I was doing fire watch at dawn, scanning for enemy troops with my forehead resting on the rubber pad just above the gunner’s sights. It required a conscious effort to keep it in place. The position made it impossible to doze off for any period, because once I relaxed my neck muscles my head would slide to one side or the other, driving my eye socket into the protruding lens. It worked well. There was a welt under my right eye to prove it. The green glow of the sights, the methodical rotation of the hand wheel, and the constant hum of the radio combined to put me into a trancelike state—just one notch away from sleep.

  To describe our current condition as fatigue would be an understatement. We were all pushing our limits. The only thing keeping my eyes open, and my hand on the wheel, was the constant threat of attack. The fear of Iraqi soldiers sneaking into our perimeter 216

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  haunted me every second of my watch. If that happened, they could do to us what our scouts practiced doing to them. Taking a rocket in the hull, or a grenade down the hatch, or any similar circumstance, would send us all to hell in a flaming fireball. Perhaps the worst threat of all, though, was the possibility of living through an attack that I could have prevented, living with the guilt that others died because I fell asleep.

  My left hand cranked the wheel, which moved the turret and the gun sights mounted to it from left to right and back again. The sights allowed me to see a few hundred meters into the desert, from the nine o’clock position to the three o’clock position. Our vehicle was positioned strategically along a convex arch of LAVs such that my sector of responsibility overlapped with that of Red One to my left and Red Three to my right. Each vehicle was positioned approximately a hundred meters apart from its neighbor. Our company’s
defensive perimeter stretched for nearly a mile. Inside the hub of the arch were the three vehicles of Headquarters Platoon—

  Capt. Cruz’s vehicle (Black Six), the logistics vehicle (Black Three), and the command-and-control communications vehicle (Black One). They formed the nerve center of our company, and protecting them from attack was paramount.

  There was no reason to believe the morning would be any different from any other morning. Cold. Quiet. Boring. The first sign of light was looming on the horizon, and I had almost finished my watch. The first time I saw the small shape in my sights I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. After three checks I still wasn’t sure. The distant blob grew as it moved closer, until finally I could see . . . it was a truck.

  Before I had the wherewithal to call in my sighting, the radio erupted. “Black One! Black One! Enemy vehicle approaching from the front!”

  And another, “Black One! Black One! Truck en route with a machine gun mounted and manned!”

  And another, “Enemy vehicle headed toward Second Platoon!”

  Then Capt. Cruz interrupted. “All rainbow elements move forward and intercept!”

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  I reached across and shook Nagel, who was sleeping in the VC

  seat with his head against his sights. “Truck . . . armed and headed our way . . . a thousand meters out!”

  Nagel didn’t need to hear it a second time. He had his helmet on and binoculars up in seconds.

  Dougherty heard my call and already had the engines fired up.

  Cpl. Shane didn’t waste time reporting that our troops were inside.

  After blasting through my prefire checklist I wrapped my fingers around the joystick and pulled right, searching for the truck in my sights. Dougherty stepped on the gas, thrusting me backward into my seatback. We bounced and shook and swayed from left to right as we maneuvered toward the truck. My head, too, bobbed around wildly, and I had to force it into the rubber headrest to maintain visual contact. Finally, I locked the truck into the kill zone. The ammo select switch was set to the high-explosive type, and the rate of fire was set to two hundred rounds per minute. All I needed to hear was Nagel’s order to fire.

  I wanted to fire. I wanted to make them pay. So I looked through the sight, and held on to the gun control, and prayed for the order to fire. After all, it was their fault I was there. It was their fault I stared through the sights with a cold heart. It was their fault that Gina sat at home with a heavy heart . . . and that Doc trembled in the hull with a chicken heart . . . and that Hunter lay in a hospital bed with a purple heart . . . and that eleven mothers cried at caskets with broken hearts.

  My enthusiasm to fire was curbed, however, as the truck drew closer. The gun mounted on top was turned backward, and a white flag hung from its muzzle. There was a white flag in the passenger’s hand, and another in the driver’s. There were several more being waved by people in the back.

  Capt. Bounds called over the radio for us to hold our fire and hold our positions. As our vehicle rolled to a stop, Nagel told me to keep my eyes in the sights in case the order changed. The truck headed straight into Second Platoon’s formation, white flags flying.

  That was Sgt. Moss’s platoon. Scanning the column of vehicles off to our left flank, I saw one, two, three vehicles in position . . . but no 218

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  fourth. Even after double-checking, there were still only three. Then I saw the fourth, back five hundred meters! It hadn’t moved from our night position. We had moved out and left it behind. That was a problem. A big problem. The vehicle’s absence left a giant gap in Second Platoon’s formation, which provided a window of opportunity for the truck to infiltrate our line.

  As the truck rolled closer to our line of vehicles, I kept it in my sights. It rolled up to our line, then through our line, and then directly into the cluster of headquarters vehicles—Capt. Cruz’s vehicle, our comm vehicle . . . our nerve center! None of us could fire. Our guns were turned such that we could only shoot each other, or the headquarters vehicles. All we could do was watch.

  The truck slowed for a moment, as if to show respect for our command post, but then continued on through our ranks. We continued to watch through our sights as an army unit off to our flank stopped the truck and apprehended the Iraqis. The radio was jumping from its base with Capt. Cruz’s rant. He wanted the VCs to report to his vehicle. He wanted an investigation. He wanted answers, and he wanted them immediately.

  We returned our LAV back into our original positions just in time to watch the drama unfolding. Capt. Cruz ran up to the LAV

  and banged his fist on the hull. There was no answer. No movement. Nothing. Capt. Cruz continued to bang, and shout, and curse, until finally the VC hatch opened. And there before the entire company emerged Sgt. Moss, oblivious to the world outside his LAV, stretching and yawning like a bear leaving hibernation.

  Capt. Cruz went berserk. He was out of his mind with anger, in-censed with fury, and overcome with madness. He cursed and spat and spewed up at Sgt. Moss like he wanted to kill him. Sgt. Moss stood atop the turret, a deer in the headlights, completely clueless that he had missed a vehicle movement, unaware that he had allowed our first prisoners to escape, and ignorant of the fact that he had jeop-ardized the life of our company commander, and even worse—

  embarrassed him. Helplessly, I watched the train wreck that was about to take place before my eyes. Sgt. Moss climbed down from the turret slowly, and prepared for the impact of the runaway locomotive.

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  Capt. Cruz ripped Sgt. Moss’s chevrons from his collar and stomped them into the sand. Sgt. Moss recoiled against the LAV as Capt. Cruz yelled, and pointed, and yelled some more. It was like watching a major league baseball coach going head-to-head with an umpire. But Sgt. Moss did not fight back. He bowed his head in shame and took it. It was difficult to watch. Sgt. Moss didn’t have the kind of inner armor to handle such a personal attack. He kept his head down as Gunny Koffman led him away—away from his vehicle, men, and honor. All I could do was sit and watch.

  That was the last I saw of Sgt. Moss until 21 February, when our LAV cycled back to the rear for maintenance. While at the battalion area we were left to our own devices, and my personal mission was to get as far away from Nagel as possible. My curiosity led me to our enemy prisoner camp, and right to the Marine in charge of the prisoners—Sgt. Moss!

  “Hey, Colonel Klink!” I called to him.

  “Wee-ams!”

  After a handshake he gave me a phony chuckle. “Yeah . . .

  well . . . Here I am”—rubbing his fingers over the holes in his collar where his chevrons had been.

  “So where have you been? What have you been doing?”

  “Right here. Doing this.” He stretched out his arms and turned around in a circle. “This is all mine, brother. I might be a private, but I’m the HMFIC of this prison camp.”

  He got a puzzled stare from me.

  “Head Mother Fucker In Charge,” he explained. “C’mon, I’ll show you around.”

  “So did you really get busted all the way to private?” I asked.

  “Who the fuck knows,” he said. “I’m supposed to meet with Capt. Cruz the next time he rotates back to the rear. I guess I’ll find out then.”

  I thought it best to address him as Sgt. Moss until the CO decided otherwise.

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  Sgt. Moss led me to the back of his truck, where six Iraqi prisoners lay side by side, facedown on a canvas tarp, their wrists bound behind their backs with plastic zip-strip fasteners. It was a sight.

  “Watch this. . . .” Sgt. Moss cued.

  He walked around to their heads, stooped over, and uttered a few strange sounds. The prisoners wriggled themselves to their knees.

  He speaks Arabic? I thought.

  He showed his pistol to them and called out sternly, “Don’t any of
you get crazy on me. . . . I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  And in the same breath he handed his canteen over to one, and an MRE meal to another, and adjusted the head wrap on a third to keep the sun from burning him.

  They appeared so grateful—bowing, and smiling, and thanking him in Arabic. “Salaam aleikum. . . . Salaam aleikum. . . .”

  Sgt. Moss clearly enjoyed his role. “Lekum salam.” He smiled back.

  It was a perfect fit. He needed power. They needed compassion.

  And they got it—at least they did once they arrived at Sgt. Moss’s camp.

  He pulled one of the prisoners to his feet and asked me to step around in front so the others could see.

  Before I could say no, his pistol was in my hand and I was being introduced. “Now, listen up! I’m gonna help you boys out here, but if you try to fight”—he faked a punch—“or run”—he jogged in place—

  “then this Marine will shoot!”—he mimed a shot to the head with his finger.

  None flinched. Sgt. Moss held the prisoner by the arm and cut the zip strip from his bloody wrists.

  “As if these boys haven’t been through enough shit,” he said,

  “they have to put up with the gunny and his henchmen. . . . They tightened these zips down to the bone.”

  As soon as the plastic dropped, the prisoner bowed his head and prayed. Then Sgt. Moss wrapped gauze around the raw flesh and fastened a looser zip. He did the same for all of them. They were lucky to have Sgt. Moss in charge. His loss in rank and stature was their gain.

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  We spent the day reminiscing about drill, and LAV school, and Lejeune. It felt good to remember life before the war, and the day flew by.

  It was difficult to leave Sgt. Moss that evening. The next day we were staging for the ground assault, and my anxiety was beginning to build. How had I gotten to this point? To the brink of the ground assault? To the edge of the berm?