Heavy Metal - A Tank Company's Battle to Baghdad

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Heavy Metal - A Tank Company's Battle to Baghdad

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May 3, 2005 Sargeant Scott Stewart saw the tanks first. They were partially hidden in the late afternoon shadows that stretched across the narrow street lined with three-story buildings. The Iraqi T-72 tanks sat nearly side-by-side, the one on the right with its gun tube pointing north, the other close to the curb with its gun tube pointing south, directly at the lead tank in which Stewart was riding. Stewart, only a few months into his job as trigger puller on an M1A1 Abrams, stared into the gunner’s primary sight as his 70-ton tank rounded a corner and slowly moved north through a dingy, dun-colored southern suburb of Baghdad called Mahmudiyah. “Tanks!” Stewart radioed to his tank commander, S.Sgt. Randy Pinkston. Pinkston, a tall, lanky Texan, was buttoned up inside, peering through the small vision blocks in the commander’s hatch. He could not quite make out the shapes of the two objects in the middle of the street about 500 meters ahead. Pinkston looked down the sights of his .50-caliber machine gun and thought the two indistinct blobs looked more like BMPs, Soviet-made amphibious troop carriers, than T-72 tanks. Whatever they were, they were certainly not friendly. Nothing about this entire city about fifteen miles south of Baghdad was friendly. It was home to a portion of the Medina Division, one of Saddam Hussein’s vaunted Republican Guard units, and the whole city seemed to be dripping with ill-disguised contempt for us as we made our way through the congested streets.

“Fire! Fire SABOT!” Pinkston ordered, indicating to his loader, Pfc. Artemio Lopez, that he wanted a tank-killing SABOT round loaded next. A High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) round was already in the tube.

Stewart planted the sight reticle squarely on the back slope of the tank on the right. The gun switch was set to MAIN, the ammo switch to HEAT. When Stewart heard the fire command, he squeezed the triggers on the gunner’s handles and the 51-pound HEAT round rocketed out of the tube at more than 4,500 feet per second.

“Contact! Tanks! Frontal! Out!” Pinkston barked into the radio to let all of Charlie Company know that we found the tanks that earlier that day we set out to kill.

It was 3 April 2003 and the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) out of Fort Stewart, Georgia, was advancing quickly on Baghdad less than two weeks into Operation Iraqi Freedom. We had already travelled farther and faster than any armoured unit in history, fighting determined Iraqis most of the way, and were now knocking on Saddam Hussein’s palace gates.

But first we had to clear pockets of resistance south of Baghdad that we feared would come back to bite us in the butts if we did not render them combat-ineffective, that is to say, kill them.

As commander of Charlie Company of Task Force 1-64 of the division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was given the job of taking my tank company through the suburb of Mahmudiyah to kill any Iraqi tanks or other armour we found. Charlie was the only tank heavy company in the task force. Alpha Company, a tank company, got a platoon of infantry from Charlie Rock, the mechanized infantry company, and gave it a platoon of tanks. That mixture gave the task force more versatility. But the task force commander, Lt. Col.

Rick Schwartz, kept Charlie Company intact. We were to be his knockout punch with our 14 tanks and one Bradley fighting vehicle that served as our fire support vehicle.

Through the first two weeks of the war, Charlie Company was often third in the task force line of march. The exception was at our first battle at a place called Objective Rams, where we ran into several hundred near-fanatical Iraqi fighters that our intelligence reports told us were not there. Now we would have another chance to live up to our company motto: “Cobras lead the way.” It was a last-minute mission, but the orders given by Schwartz were clear and succinct: “Find tanks and kill them.” This is what we as tankers train to do: kill tanks before they kill us. We spent six months in the desert of Kuwait getting ready for this.

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