Generation Kill - Evan Wright [152]
Burris, whose team led the way through the ambush at Al Gharraf, volunteers to lead the AT-4 strike on the tank. It’s potentially a highly risky mission. The shoulder-fired AT-4 missile isn’t really designed to defeat a T-72. At best, Marines believe an AT-4 can score a “mobility kill”—blowing a track off the tank—and to do this Burris will have to get in close to the tank, within 150 meters.
Nearly every engagement Burris has been in since the invasion started has somehow turned into his own personal, comic mishap. From the time he tripped on his rifle stock at Nasiriyah, giving himself a shiner, to the ambush at Al Gharraf, where he was sprayed from head to toe with human excrement when his Humvee plowed into the town’s open sewer puddle, Burris has concluded almost every firefight he’s been in knocked on his ass, laughing.
Now he approaches the T-72, with several Marines and his platoon commander by his side. They reach the stepping-off point, where Burris will continue on alone to get in close to his target, and his platoon commander, Capt. Kintzley, slaps him on the back. “Burris,” he says. “Don’t miss.”
Burris ducks down, runs across the road, dives into a berm and creeps up behind the tank. He gets even closer to the monster T-72 than his superiors had ordered him to go, crawling to within 125 meters. He sees an auxiliary fuel pod on the back of the tank and aims for it, figuring it will multiply the effects of his relatively puny AT-4 missile. He fires the missile.
Initially, Burris sees only a small flash where the missile hits. He’s worried that perhaps the missile glanced off the armor (believed to be nearly invincible on the T-72) and berates himself for not aiming at the track. An instant later, it feels like a giant fist comes out of the sky and pounds Burris on his back, slamming him to the ground. The tank erupts in a massive explosion.
Down the road, his platoon commander can actually see individual pieces of the tank—flywheels and gears—flying overhead. Several hundred kilometers farther back from the blast, twenty-three-year-old Corporal Steven Kelsaw, standing by a headquarters vehicle, is struck in the helmet by a piece of the tank and knocked down. It feels to him like someone just hurled a bowling ball at him. His Kevlar helmet is partially shattered, but all he suffers is a bad headache.
Burris’s hit on the T-72 produces one of the biggest explosions many Marines have seen in the entire war.
When Burris walks back to rejoin his team, Capt. Patterson, his company commander, walks up to congratulate him. Patterson wants to commend “this kid”—as he refers to each of his Marines—for going out there all by himself against the T-72. But as soon as he sees Burris’s dirty face and his dazed, somewhat confused-looking smile, Patterson is seized by a fit of laughter. Finally, he manages to say, “Burris, I was worried sick about you.”
“Sir, what’s so funny?” Burris asks, still shaken up, his ears still ringing from the explosion.
“Nothing, Burris,” Patterson says. “Good job.”
AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the T-72 tank, ten Humvees from Charlie Company race into Baqubah, with A-10s flying overhead as escorts. The roads are blockaded with rubble and concertina wire. Abandoned Iraqi military positions are everywhere. The Humvees snake through the barricades and make their way toward two military command centers—headquarters for a Republican Guard division and a brigade. The division headquarters is in ruins from repeated American airstrikes. The brigade headquarters is still partially standing. A team of Recon Marines speeds up to the building. They jump out, run inside and steal the Iraqi “colors”—the enemy’s flag.
The Marines have reclaimed, in part, their honor, sullied after the loss of their own colors in their truck burned outside Ar Rifa.