House to House: A Tale of Modern War Read Online Free PDF Page B

making sure our gunsights are accurately adjusted. Not today. We pull out a couple of plates from our body armor and set them up at various intervals on the range. The plates hold up well, even against our armor-piercing rounds. This is good news and bad news. Our equipment is world-class, but some of our enemies will be wearing it.
    Finally, with our SAWs, we discover a weakness. If we hit the plates with multiple concentrated bursts of fire, our rounds will penetrate the slab of armor that protects a soldier’s heart and lungs. When we’re done, the plates look like sieves. And this discovery, too, has a dual effect on morale—the enemy has captured our SAWs. We’re in an arms race with ourselves—we know how to kill our enemy, but he can kill us in the same way.
    Next, we work on ways to blow up Texas barriers. We operate with Bradleys and tanks for this exercise, and discover that a main gun round from an Abrams tank is the best option. The 120mm shell demolishes even the thickest concrete barrier. As yet we have no reason to believe the insurgents have captured any tanks.
    After lunch, our battalion Command Sergeant Major, forty-six-year-old Steve Faulkenburg, shows up with a cache of leftover Eastern bloc goodies. He arms himself with RPGs and AK-47s and takes aim at a couple of wrecked Humvees that were dragged onto the range. He blasts the vehicles with rockets and small-arms fire, pausing every few minutes to inspect the damage. He searches for weak spots in the armor system. All afternoon, he goes about this chore and takes copious notes. Finally satisfied, Faulkenburg sets off to design extra pieces of “hillbilly armor” to cover our vulnerable spots.
    We move to the vehicle range and work with the Bradleys and M1A2 Abrams tanks, practicing our breaching techniques on fortified houses. For weeks now, we have been working around the clock. Day after day, night after night, the manic routine grinds us down. We rehearse our breaching roles, refine our room-clearing fundamentals. Every mission into Muqdadiyah serves as an operational training exercise. We polish our tactics; we cross-train on different weapons systems. Every man in the platoon is now intimately familiar with everything in our arsenal. Every man can drive a Bradley and work a radio. Every man in my squad goes through combat lifesaver medical classes. I tell them they must be their own medics.
    At the same time, we carry on with our twelve-to fifteen-hour combat patrols around Diyala. We’re training for a fight while continuing to be in one. It leaves us brittle and bone-weary.
    Toward sunset, we finally knock off. The tanks roll back across the road into the base. My platoon stays behind, tasked with guarding the sandbags and pop-up targets from marauding Iraqi thieves. The locals will steal anything.
    It is easy duty, and I stretch out on the ramp of one of our Bradleys. Fitts limps over and sits down next to me. With Sergeant Cantrell on leave, Fitts is our acting platoon sergeant.
    “Not to alarm you, but I am beginning to develop early stages of pretraumatic stress disorder. I want to officially go on the record to say that I am pretty sure we’re all gonna die, dude,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can muster.
    Fitts grins. “You know, you are a difficult subordinate.”
    “Maybe you just can’t handle me as a subordinate,” I shoot back. He has already reorganized the platoon, which is sure to piss off Cantrell when he returns.
    As the two of us smoke and joke, watching the Iraqi sun sinking on the horizon, Captain Sean Sims, our company commander, appears and steps past us to climb inside our Bradley. He sits down and props his feet up. He’s been tense and short-tempered ever since we got the orders for Fallujah. I’ve also seen him head to the call center almost every night to talk with his wife. Prior to October, he rarely did that.
    “Staff Sergeant Fitts and Staff Sergeant Bellavia. How are you two gentlemen doing?”
    I