The company spent the day after the action at al-Hindiyah back out in the desert, rearming and cleaning up. Sgt. Will took apart the housing of the 25 mm cannon and the 7.62 mm co-axial machine gun. The ammunition feeders were entirely clogged with road dust, after 10 days on the road and the three-day dust storm, hence the jam the day before at Hindiyah.
We were full of ourselves with our successful action. We had good reason to be. None of us were dead. No one had even been scratched. A U.S. Army tank battalion against what turned out to be an infantry battalion of the Republican Guard’s Nebuchadnazzer Division, recruited from Tikrit, dug in and fighting.
An RPG a couple of feet lower would have taken out Harry McFarland and Willie Cooke in the lightly armored medic track. The tank commanders went into a rain of RPGs and small arms fire up in their hatches. Someone reported the Fox News crew was sprayed with shrapnel down by the bridge, but the word came back they suffered no serious injury. An RPG burned a hole through the skirt plate of a Bradley there, but didn’t penetrate the hull. Any one of those half-dozen GIs could have got it in the brief firefight with the holdouts, or all of them. I had come within 25 feet of those Iraqis in their overgrown ditch moments before the shooting broke out, and they had to have been watching my approach before some quirk prompted me to look over at Wolford and the interpreter, C.J. Grisham, checking bodies for documents out in the field. I have never believed in things of this sort, but I’ve examined that situation to see if it was my dead mother gently guiding me to make that 90-degree course change away from that encounter, just as it must have been her hand my 5-year-old son felt on his shoulder, stopping him dead in his tracks when he ran ahead, just short of the alley when a truck came roaring out. I don’t have any answer to any of that. ...
