Ken McDonald relates the Iron Pony team’s experiences over the next two nights: “When the marines rolled up, they had eight gun trucks loaded for bear. In one sense, that was comforting. We had often made these runs with only three or four gun trucks. In another sense, the fact that they brought eight trucks was scary. You think to yourself, What in the hell do you expect we are going to run into that we need eight gun trucks? We didn’t know them and they didn’t know us. It wasn’t the usual joking around like we would do with the 1544th. These guys were all business.
“We had been accustomed to mission briefings where all the soldiers and drivers stood together and reviewed the night’s mission. On this night, just three marines came over to where we were gathered. These marines all seemed to have that blend of a southern accent with a military formality: ‘Y’all fall in, on the double!’ They briefed the mission, situation, intelligence, and started to walk away. I shouted, ‘Hey hold on a minute! We don’t head out without a prayer.’ The marine in charge looked at us for a long moment, ‘You boys want a prayer?’ he asked. ‘OK, we got a guy that does that for a living back in the world.’ The marine in charge hollered something like, ‘Hey Schmidty, these boys need a prayer! You got one for ’em? Get over here.’ A young marine cut across the staging area on the double. You could tell he was happy to be called. The young preacher from Alabama led us in a prayer. It wasn’t the psalm we were used to saying, but it was a good prayer and the marine put in his best effort. We appreciated it.” The Iron Pony saddled up and headed out for TQ.
“I’m sure all the drivers were still thinking about Jessica. It was especially hard not to think about her as we passed the scorched, blackened, and gouged-out section of highway where she had been killed. I know I couldn’t get her off my mind. The trip to TQ went pretty well. We had a few sticky points as we began our standard procedure of reporting RPs and suspicious sightings. The marines, who were monitoring our radios hadn’t expected that type of communication from us. They came up on the net [communications channel] and asked what that was all about. I gave them some ‘on the road’ education as to how the Iron Pony operates. They were surprised. As the trip went on, I think their respect for us increased. We pulled into the entry checkpoint at TQ without incident. We figured that we would be swapping out trailers and heading back to BIAP.
“The marines told us that those plans had changed and we would be spending the night at TQ. One of my many jobs, albeit an unwritten responsibility, was to always secure the hooches, cots, food, and shower situation for our soldiers and drivers. Oftentimes I was left to my own resources to work out the specifics. Sometimes I traded ‘stuff’ for other stuff to secure the best accommodations available. Sometimes the stuff was 80 proof. I enjoyed looking out for the team and had developed a reputation as the Iron Pony’s scrounger. To my surprise the marines were as concerned about our welfare as I was. They offered to let us sleep in the same billets with them. I thought this was too much an imposition and hesitated. They thought it over, and then decided to clear out their MWR center and set up cots for us to sleep on. They made certain we had everything we needed and that the DFAC was prepared to feed us. They cared about us as they would have cared about their own men and women. This was a very encouraging sign.
“On the next evening, as we ran our pretrip inspections and got our mission brief, we learned through the rumor mill, and later at the briefing, that the enemy had been attacking convoys throughout the area. A lot of IEDs had blown up a lot of trucks. Everything had heated up. Our route would take us from TQ, around the outskirts of Fallujah, through the town of Abu Ghraib, and into BIAP. Due to insurgent activity, we had to clear Fallujah before 0300 hours. After that time, the Fallujah area would be off-limits for the convoy. The town of Abu Ghraib worried us too because that’s where we had been hit several times recently. Our ‘pucker factor’ was up.
“For this run, we had seven mail trucks; a few of the trucks had empty mail containers and the rest were packed with letters to home. We also had two military trucks, an LMTV [light medium tactical vehicle] and an HET, and another seven or eight ‘Haji’ trucks and their drivers. All together, somewhere around eighteen big rigs, my bobtail, plus our eight gun-truck escorts and thirty-two heavily armed marines. The lineup was: KBR trucks, my bobtail, followed by the two military trucks, and the Hajis behind them. The marine gun trucks were integrated every third or fourth vehicle and one was a ‘Rover.’ Throughout the run, the Rover would alternate between passing the convoy on the left, and then crossing over to the right and letting the convoy pass him. In this manner, he could keep a constant vigil on every truck in the convoy. We also had air cover from an unmanned aerial vehicle [UAV] that was assigned to shadow our convoy.
“It’s always an experience running with the Haji drivers. The American KBR drivers all knew the drill if we were attacked, but if we got hit when the Hajis were with us, God only knew what they would do. In addition to the language barrier, they didn’t have the training we had. Sometimes they just stop, jump out, and run into the wilderness. Afterward, it was a real pain in the ass trying to round them up to continue the mission.
“I would be driving the bobtail tractor. I used to say that I was just your average coward and liked to bobtail because it made me a smaller target than a complete rig with trailer attached. Of course, that assumed that I wouldn’t have to be recovering some blown-up hunk of metal in the middle of the night. If our convoy got hit with an IED and one of our trucks bit the dust, the rest of the group would go on a few klicks to a holding area. Then myself and a couple of gun trucks would have to try and salvage the load and hope that the insurgents weren’t still hanging around.
“Our Marine Corps–appointed preacher of sorts was standing by and ready with a new prayer. He had probably worked on it all day; he had a new mission in life. Leading us in prayer was probably the best part on his entire tour in Iraq. We bowed our heads. After the prayer, everything was silent. The marine convoy commander looked at us and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, put on your game face.’ We took a deep breath and loaded up. A moment later I heard a marine’s radio crackle, “Weapons status Red.” The marines were locked and loaded. Once again, the Iron Pony rolled out the gate. The time was 8:30 p.m.
“I had barely wiggled my butt into a comfortable position when KBR truck 2 blew up. We had been on the road just seven minutes. KBR 2, driven by Craig Gambrel, struck a really dirty IED. By dirty, I mean one of those that isn’t just a big flash-bang, but one that is loaded with lots of shrapnel and sends out a huge black cloud when it blows. Out of those black clouds, and flying in all directions, are thousands of steel shards. KBR 3, with Phil McCall, lost visibility and plowed into the back end of Craig’s trailer. The two rigs lurched off the road and piled up a few yards down a gradual embankment. Unknown to me at the time, this attack was not a typical hit and run. This time, the insurgents were waiting for us to become ducks in their shooting gallery.
“I was behind KBR 7 and sped past them to get to the scene. I jumped out of my bobtail and yelled and motioned at the trucks behind me, ‘Go, go, go, keep going, keep going.’ The convoy needed to get out of the danger area or else we risked losing more trucks and getting bogged down in a possible attack. It was very dark now, and I ran toward the two stricken vehicles. Their engines were still running and lights were on, but there were no signs of life. I got to KBR 3 first. The door was open, the seat had broken off, the steering wheel collapsed into the dash, but there were no signs of Phil McCall. I shut off the engine and lights and bolted for KBR 2. Craig’s truck was a mess: the door was closed, all the windows blown out, tires flattened, fuel tank leaking, shrapnel everywhere inside the cab, but again, no driver.
“I grabbed my small LED flashlight and began looking down the embankment for the drivers. I figured they must have been thrown or taken from the vehicles. I pushed the talk switch on my handheld radio and asked the marines, ‘My drivers, the drivers, they aren’t here, where the fuck are
the drivers?’ Just then a humvee gun truck rolled up with lights out. I heard over their radio one of the marines respond, ‘We’ve got the drivers.’ A marine jumped out of the humvee with two M16s in his hand; he tossed me one. The marine asked, ‘Alright, what’s gotta be done to get out of here?’ I told him to hold on a minute and I ran to the KBR 3 and then to KBR 2 and took a look at the mail containers on the trailers. The marine asked, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, ‘Listen, the rear truck has no seal on the container; that means it’s empty. The hell with it. The one in front has a seal. That’s the one we have got to recover. It’s loaded with mail!’
“I lowered the landing gear on KBR 2, disconnected the air lines, and disengaged the plate that locks in the trailer. I pulled my tractor around to the front of the crippled truck [and] hooked up a chain. It was going to be a challenge to get the damaged tractor out from under the trailer. The air lines were blown and the brakes had locked up. This was going to be a dead-weight pull. I remember saying to the marine, ‘Here goes nothing!’ I revved my engine, popped the clutch, damn near did a wheelie, and yanked that sucker out from under the trailer. I dragged it about forty yards away and came back and slid my tractor under the mail trailer. I was feeling pretty proud of myself and stepped out of my tractor and began to raise the landing gear. The marine was standing next to me.
“Just then, bullets began pinging off the mail containers, thumping into the ground, sparking across the pavement, and whizzing past my head. The marine literally knocked me to the ground and began returning fire. We could see muzzle flashes about a hundred and fifty yards at four o’clock. We had no protection and rounds were striking all around us. I’m an old elk hunter from Colorado, but I wasn’t real familiar with M16s. It took me a moment, and what seemed like an eternity, of fumbling around before I got the safety off and was ready to fire. The marine was blocking my body. I asked him to move aside. He said, ‘Sir, I ain’t gonna let nothing happen to you!’ I came back with, ‘Who you calling Sir? Sir was my dad. My name’s Ken.’ Then the marine said something like, ‘Well Ken, you see them muzzle flashes? You take the right and I’ll take the left. Together, he and I began popping off rounds at the insurgents. I know that every time that we saw a muzzle flash, it wasn’t but a split second later, one of us put several rounds on that exact spot.
“Now the humvee gun truck began to open up with their .50-caliber machine gun. I swear it just seemed to fire forever. That thump-thump-thump of the .50-caliber raining down on the enemy is every bit as sweet a sound as the sound of a bugle must have been when cavalry reinforcements were riding to the rescue. A second gun truck joined in and began popping flares into the night sky. The flares floated down from their miniature parachutes like lightbulbs dangling in the breeze. The firing had stopped. There was no movement coming from the berm where the insurgents had fired from. We lay frozen for a few minutes. It was only then that I realized my heart was pounding through my shirt. I was trembling, and sweat was pooling on the pavement beneath me. Later, I would learn that the UAV overhead had video of four dead insurgents. I can’t say that I killed anyone, but then again, I can’t say that I didn’t.
“I finished the hookup of the crippled mail trailer and hopped up into my tractor. I turned to the marine and said, ‘Let’s go find us a convoy!’ We began hauling ass with our lights off. About three miles up we found the convoy waiting for us. On the way I had been on the radio, alerting them we were coming and checking on the status of our drivers. Aside from a few minor shrapnel wounds, both Phil and Craig were physically fine. The military trucks had been alert enough to leave a space for me to slip into. I pulled into the lineup.
“I got on the radio and called our KBR convoy commander, Bob Garza, who was in KBR 1. ‘Wait for me,’ I said. ‘I have to go back to the blown trucks. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’ At first, Garcia was incredulous, but then he understood when I reminded him that we had to recover the sensitive gear, like our Qualcomm satellite trackers and messaging systems, as well as the other radios. If those fell into enemy hands, the text messaging system could have been used by the insurgents who might try to deceive us with false messages.
“I climbed out of the tractor just as a marine gun truck pulled alongside. I got into the rear passenger side of the humvee and told the marines that we had to go back. The driver looked over his shoulder and said, ‘You have got to be shitting me.’ The vehicle commander, who was sitting shotgun, was the same marine [who] had been on the ground with me. He turned to the driver and said, ‘Turn around. Do what he said.’ We headed back down the road. My stomach was in knots. On the way back to the damaged trucks, Craig called on the radio and wanted to make sure I brought back his pocket watch. Then Phil called and asked me to make sure to bring back his hat. You’d thought I was just stopping at the neighbor’s house or something.
“The idea of returning to the scene after we had left it unguarded was more than a little unnerving. The marines got on their radio and notified their headquarters that we were headed back to the ambush area. The UAV was circling the area watching the trucks. We crept up with lights off. The marines were using their night operating devices (NODs). They scanned the area. It looked clear so I jumped out, climbed up on the truck catwalk, pulled out my Gerber knife, and began cutting wires under the Qualcomm radome roof antennae. Then I went inside each cab, [then] cut the wires from behind the text messaging screens and the mobile UHF radios. I also grabbed the handhelds left behind and found both Craig’s watch and Phil’s hat. I tossed everything into a black plastic garbage bag. Almost as an afterthought, I grabbed the fire bottles and tossed them into the humvee also. We bolted back up to the convoy.
“When I first came to Iraq, whenever we were hit with small arms or a roadside explosive, I would take a deep breath, thank God I came through it OK, and have a sense that the threat was over for the day. I’d look forward to getting a good night’s sleep at the next military base an hour or two up the road. Then one day we got hit and just a few miles later we got hit again. I knew then that the day was never over until it was over. Only when you were back inside the wire could you take that deep breath, count your fingers and toes, and go to sleep.
“During the time that I was back at the ambush site, the guys in the convoy inspected my rig for me. I had a couple of blown outside tires on the driver’s side but it looked like I could run with it. We started rolling again. Around seventy miles from BIAP the tires started coming apart and wheels started sparking. In my side-view mirror, I could see sparks rooster-tailing out thirty yards behind my vehicle. We kept going. I knew we had to clear Fallujah. The split wheels started to completely disintegrate and come apart now. Rubber and metal were blowing out all over the road.
“The rover came alongside and radioed, ‘Hey bobtail, you’re starting to catch on fire. I think we need to address this situation.’ The convoy slowed down and the rover pulled alongside of me and began spraying one of the fire bottles on the flames. We repeated this about seven or eight times until we had passed Fallujah and were winding into Abu Ghraib. I could see the glowing lights of the prison up ahead. The wheels were really flaming now and I was down to one tire on the rear axle. The whole trailer cantered to the left and was very hard to control. At one point, we had to stop at Abu Ghraib to put out the wheel fires, which were now burning the underside of the trailer.
“Finally I rolled, or should I say slid, the truck past the line of barrels and through entry checkpoint seven at Baghdad Airport. As I slid into the JMMT complex, flames and sparks trailed for fifty yards behind me. I brought the rig to a halt and climbed out. Dozens of marines and a whole bunch of guys from the KBR operations center came out to greet us. They had been monitoring our radio traffic all night and now they were pouring out of the makeshift buildings to greet our returning convoy. I remember some marine giving me a hug. And another one asking which we liked better now that we had run with both marines and the army. I told him the marines were good but jokingl
y asked, ‘Hey, we still got hit. Didn’t we?’ An army captain walked over to me, stopped, looked at my smoldering vehicle, looked back at me, smiled, and said, ‘Rough night?’
“You know, I was really proud that we completed the mission with all our drivers, all the critical equipment safe, and brought back all the mail. OK, so the mail was a little screwed up from bullets passing through a few boxes and envelopes, but at least the insurgents weren’t reading it. I remember that when I got out of the truck at the JMMT, I was soaked with sweat and everyone around me was just saying over and over again, ‘We did it, we did it!’”
Ken remembers one other poignant moment from that night: a marine approached him at the JMMT later on and handed him a note from the marine who had fought next to him earlier that evening. The note said, “Consider yourself an honorary marine.” Ken looks back on that moment and says, “If I had been thinking, I should have written him a note: ‘Consider yourself an honorary member of the Iron Pony Express.’”
IV. Malfunction Junction
On a typical muggy summer afternoon in June 2005, the town of Paris in east-central Illinois welcomes home the 1544th U.S. Army, Illinois National Guard Transportation Unit. Early that morning, scattered summer storms drenched the area. Tornados loomed in the weather report. Lightning flared and thunder crackled throughout the preceding night. The local high school gymnasium is decked out in red, white, and blue. In front of the stage, there are five lonely bayoneted rifles, stuck in the floor, with desert boots in front of each, a pair of dog tags dangling from the hand grip of each rifle, and helmets placed on their butt stocks. They stand as a silent tribute to the “kids” from Paris who didn’t come home.
A Bloody Business Page 10