Heavy Metal - A Tank Company's Battle to Baghdad

“Go right,” I told England. It turned out to be a most propitious decision. We had no satellite photographs of the area and were being guided only by our maps and hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Then England came on the radio again: “Sir, the road ends here.” “What do you mean it ends? “It ends. There’s no more road.” I moved up to take a look for myself. It appeared we were in the middle of farm fields. We knew where we were and where we wanted to go; we just were not sure how to get there. The maps and the roads had absolutely no correlation to one another. What was on the map was not on the ground, and vice versa.

As we were trying to figure out how to get back to Highway 8, we were still being peppered by small arms and RPGs. They were more a nuisance than a danger, because we were being fired on from considerable distances. We were in open terrain with a good view of everything around us. When we took fire, we sent it right back, usually in industrial strength quantities, mostly with machine guns. But occasionally, when we spotted a vehicle with weapons, a main gun round would take it out.

Finally, England radioed that he saw a bus travelling down a road to the east of our position. It was across an open field, and there were concerns about getting stuck in soft ground. Pinkston’s tank, with Pfc. Justin Mayes in the driver’s hole, plunged ahead and made the crossing first. When he did not get stuck, the rest of us followed.

It was about 3 p.m. when we got back on Highway 8. We knew the headquarters of the Medina Division’s 14th Mechanized Brigade was just a few miles to the south. We were told before the war that this brigade would likely capitulate early in the fighting and its headquarters and armour might be taken without a shot. We even planned an elaborate ceremony with each of the task force company commanders playing a role. But, like so much of the intelligence we received during the war, this also proved faulty.

The task force’s primary mission was to destroy units of the Medina Division and here was a perfect opportunity to do it. But it was getting late in the day and we still had to make our way back through some built-up areas before dark. I radioed Schwartz and asked if he wanted us to continue moving south, or turn around and head back north through Mahmudiyah.

He thought the town was too much of a chokepoint and we ran the risk of getting stuck in there. We were all familiar with the book “Black Hawk Down,” and many of us saw the movie version of what happened to a handful of American soldiers caught in the middle of an unfriendly city and surrounded by thousands of enemy fighters. That was Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. This was Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2003.We had no desire for a repeat performance a decade later.

As we moved back onto Highway 8, the road made a wide left turn and began pulling us back into built-up, populated areas.

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