Shock Factor Read Online Free PDF Page A

man to chat with him. Casica, who had tattooed his daughter’s name on his arm before the deployment, said something to the Iraqi. The man spun around and pulled a 9mm pistol from his waistband. He shot Casica in the neck, then turned his weapon on Staff Sergeant Travis Nelson, a forty-one-year-old Alabama native. Nelson had been facing the other way, and the Iraqi’s first shot caught him in the back of the head. Babineau dove for cover behind a Humvee as the gunman fired at him, then tried to kill the soldier in the turret of the vehicle. He missed, and a second later, a short burst from the turret gunner’s M240 Bravo machine gun blew the Iraqi’s head off.
    After that incident, the men of 1st Platoon treated every approaching Iraqi as a potential threat.
    But on this night, not a soul stirred—at least not that the three men at the bridge could see. But in the darkness, hiding in the shadows, was a well-trained team of devoted Jihadists. Silently, they watched their target, waiting for the moment to strike.
    Al-Qaida’s spies had long since noticed the Americans left only one Humvee’s worth of troops to guard the engineer bridge. In Baghdad proper, it had become standard Army procedure as early as 2004 to never leave the wire with less than three vehicles. Here in the heart of al-Qaida Iraq’s stronghold, the lone Humvee was terribly vulnerable, and the insurgents knew it. They watched the shifts change every day, and they plotted an attack. They knew the nearest American reinforcements were almost a mile away, so they devised a way to delay their response. That left only a nearby Iraqi Army outpost as the only possible source of help for the three Americans. The Iraqi troops were poorly trained and undermotivated. Either al-Qaida convinced them to stay out of the fight, or they had no stomach for it. Whichever the case, the insurgent force knew it would not be impeded by America’s Coalition partner.
    The hours dragged by that night. Tucker, Babineau, and Menchaca let their guard down as the darkness offered nothing but emptiness and boredom. Exhaustion set in. Almost twenty-four hours into their shift, they retreated into the Humvee, closed the armored doors, and pulled off their heavy Kevlar helmets. One of them tossed a pack of Skittles into his helmet.
    The eyes on them had seen this happen before. In early June, the assault team had rehearsed their attack for two straight days as part of their final preparations.
    Now was their moment. Sweeping out of the darkness, AK-47s blazing, they charged the Humvee. The soldiers bailed out of their vehicle, but they stood no chance. Before any of them could fire a shot, the enemy probably wounded Tucker and Menchaca. Babineau, in a desperate bid to escape the onslaught, bolted down the bank of the canal. Behind him, the al-Qaida assault team opened fire, raking his back and head with bullets. He fell dead into the reeds and shallow water at the edge of the canal.
    The soldiers at the nearest checkpoint heard the gunfire and tried to radio the men at the engineer bridge. When they received no response, they climbed into a Humvee to go investigate. The vehicle refused to start—its battery was dead. Sick with worry, the soldiers dismounted and ran to their only other ride, an ancient, Vietnam-era M-113 armored personnel carrier. The track spun onto the road and rumbled toward the bridge, only to encounter two large objects blocking the route ahead. The driver stopped, worried that there might be a roadside bomb.
    Time ticked by. The four men in back grew almost frantic. Finally, they piled out and decided to run the rest of the distance on foot. The M-113 and its crew remained behind for an hour and a half, stalled by a couple of oil drums the insurgents had placed across the road.
    Fifteen minutes after they’d heard gunfire, the four men from 1st Platoon reached the engineer bridge. The Humvee appeared intact, its M240 Bravo machine