In a few short seconds the world had gone from right side up to upside down and submerged
in two and a half feet of water.
Our humvee had been roaring along at a decent clip next to an irrigation ditch when my driver
panicked, swerving to avoid incoming fire.
He cut the wheel too far to the left and misjudged the distance between the humvee and the ditch,
and moments later we were upside down and rapidly filling with water.
It's the dry season, so there's not much water in the irrigation ditch, but that doesn't
matter much when you're stuck upside down in the narrow confines of an up-armored humvee.
I felt myself panicking, the humvee was too tight a fit to squirm my way right side up,
and the water was rising fast, already almost to my elbows.
My head was completely submerged, and in the shock and surprise of the accident I had inhaled
a large gulp of dirty ditchwater when we landed roof down.
I forced myself to calm down, during training I'd learned to hit a place of 'nothingness'
as I called it, a place where I pushed everything out of my head- pain, fear, anger- all gone
and replaced with a semi-calm sense of purpose.
The rising water threatened to rip me straight back into the real world though, and I had
to move fast.
The heavily armored humvee door took all my strength to open with half of it underwater,
and I barely managed to make it out before passing out.
Thankfully the open window made it so I wasn’t pushing against the full weight of the water
or I would’ve never made it out.
Gulping fresh air and fighting the stars exploding in my vision, I struggled to retain consciousness
and after a few moments, immediately started assessing the situation.
The humvee was upside down and buried to just below the bottom chassis leaving the wheels
and part of the body sticking out.
Across from me my driver had managed to crawl out, and I spotted the rear passenger side
door being pushed from the inside.
Immediately I ripped at the door, helping our assistant gunner to crawl out of the drowned
humvee.
Our gunner though hadn't been so lucky.
He had been in the turret when the humvee flipped, and now lay crushed under the vehicle.
No chance of saving him, he'd probably died on impact or shortly after.
The sound of a world gone mad brought us all back to reality.
Overhead, Apaches were flying fire support missions all over the insurgent-held city,
and getting back about as good as they got.
This entire war we'd enjoyed almost complete superiority on the ground and in the air,
but this city was an enemy stronghold and they'd been preparing for this fight for weeks.
Heavy machine guns reached up to meet the Apaches, their armored canopies ringing out
with the sound of heavy impacts and forcing the choppers to pull back for safety.
Damn tough birds that they were, I had heard that we'd lost at least one today, shortly
before my personal world went upside down.
The insurgent fighters were taking an absolute pounding on the air and on the ground, and
just about every weapon in the US military's arsenal was being brought down on their heads
like the wrath of God himself.
They would lose this fight eventually, both sides knew this, but they didn't care- they
just wanted to make this as costly a victory as possible for the Americans and their NATO
allies.
How can you truly win a war against an enemy that doesn't count success by objectives seized
or destroyed, but by the sheer cost in human lives they can inflict on their foe, with
no regard to their own losses?
In hindsight, I guess I knew back then that we wouldn't.
The roar of what seemed like a jet engine came to a sudden stop right above us in the
ditch.
An Abrams crew had seen us flip into the irrigation canal and taken up an overwatch position,
part of the crew jumping out to help us back up.
One of the crew asked me if we needed a medevac, I shook my head and told him to make a note
of the accident location- someone from the graves service would need to return and pick
up a body here.
Suddenly, the Abrams roared, firing off a canister shot into a nearby building.
The grapeshot munition is like a giant shotgun shell, and absolutely devastating against
enemy infantry.
A few bad guys had appeared on the balcony but the gunner had spotted them before they
could open up on us, sending hundreds of steel pellets their way at the speed of sound.
The small building was effectively turned into swiss cheese.
We'd been part of a small two-vehicle convoy, and the first humvee finally noticed that
we weren't following anymore.
They probably tried to reach us over the radio but our radios and a large amount of our gear
had been lost in the humvee.
Mine had gotten ripped loose from my body armor as I struggled out of it underwater,
and realizing that I was completely unarmed I hopped back down to fish up my rifle from
inside the humvee.
I was glad I couldn't see much through the murky water, knowing that the crushed remains
of our gunner were still sitting there.
Our lead humvee returned and took stock of the grim situation.
We were officially down a man, bringing our nine man force- they were carrying an extra
passenger- down to eight.
Our objective was simple, and the situation on the ground so damn chaotic and out of control
that it was determined only two small teams would be sent, in effect making us little
more than an oversized squad.
Our small size would make us more mobile, and we'd have to be if we were going to be
successful.
Somebody in the city was coordinating enemy radio communications, and despite the electronic
warfare guys doing a hell of a job suppressing enemy signals, you can never be 100% successful
with such a large area to cover.
Every time a drone in the air zeroed in on the suspected transmitter, it went off the
air and popped up thirty minutes later somewhere completely different.
They wouldn't stay on the air long enough to get a good lock and have one of the flyboys
drop a nice JDAM on their heads either, and despite the entire city being a warzone, there
were enough civilians on the ground still that command absolutely forbade anything less
than precision strikes.
In a way I was proud of that decision, US forces shouldn't be slaughtering civilians,
but in another way it also meant that now the eight of us had to find our highly mobile
transmitting friend and silence him personally.
And it had already cost one life.
Luckily for NATO forces, the equivalent of a city administrator had brought us detailed
info on the city's infrastructure early in the fight.
It was his hope that the intel would save civilian lives, and he was dead right.
The intel however also let us pretty quickly figure out that our insurgent radio dj was
using a series of sewer and irrigation tunnels to move around.
We guessed that he was receiving general orders over cell phone or even satellite radio, both
of which can be a lot harder to jam, and then relaying orders to fighting units over regular
radio before disappearing again, preventing us from pinpointing his location.
With the city plans though we were able to dispatch several small teams to sewer entrances
throughout the city and start the hunt.
Most of them even made it in one piece
We re-geared up with spares from the first humvee and took off on foot, our assigned
entry point not too far from our present position.
Besides, with so much lead in the air it was actually safer to move on foot, vehicles were
drawing too much unwanted attention from anti-tank weapons and RPGs.
Thick foliage grew near the irrigation ditch, giving us plenty of concealment as we pressed
forward, finally arriving at a large metal grate.
A circular saw made quick work of the old, rusty metal, and in moments we were plunging
into the underground darkness.
I remember hearing stories about the tunnel rats of vietnam, and I shuddered every time
I heard them.
I had no problem jumping out of airplanes, swimming through snake and croc-infested swamps,
or doing any number of extremely unpleasant things- but going underground, now that was
terrifying.
If I was going to buy the farm, I wanted to do it topside, not in a hole in the ground
barely big enough to squeeze through.
Luckily these irrigation tunnels/sewers were rather large, big enough to stand up in and
for two men to walk side by side.
Still, it gave me the creeps.
Down here though the air was at least cool and the sound of the fighting above was muffled
by the earth.
Occasional blasts- probably air strikes- sent dirt falling from the ceiling though and I
worried about a collapse.
I took point along with one of my own guys, he was a loaner from British SAS but we'd
gotten close over the last few weeks.
I could tell he liked the prospect of what we were doing about as much as I did, but
we pressed on anyways.
Flashlights were out of the question, the water was waist deep here and would reflect
the light around corners and give us up from a mile away.
Instead we slipped on our night vision and lit the way with infrared flashlights.
The water level gradually dropped as it shot off through smaller exits cut along the stone
wall, finally reaching to just above our knees.
We were moving silently as we could, but sound does strange things underground- specially
when mixed with running water.
Up ahead there was a major intersection, and I heard the sound of men talking far away,
only to suddenly see three men with flashlights appear at the intersection from another tunnel.
They hadn't been far away at all, they had literally been only meters away from our location
but the strange tunnel acoustics made their voice seem very far.
Our two groups were equally surprised, but we reacted first.
With such a narrow tunnel, only us two at the front could open fire without hitting
the person in front of us, and we both hit our marks- unfortunately we had been aiming
at the same guy.
The other two turned runners, shouting a warning, but we dropped the second guy almost immediately.
The third managed to run out of our line of sight and down the tunnel he was traveling
originally, but not before one of us wounded him.
The gig was up, he was rushing to warn somebody of our approach.
No time for stealth now, so we booked it- no easy feat in knee-deep water.
I actually laughed, I remembered back in training having to run through thigh-deep water for
PT and thought to myself, when the Hell would I ever need to do this.
I think that sometimes I laugh at inappropriate moments because the only other option is sheer
panic and bowel-emptying terror.
Here we were running down a darkened tunnel and chasing a guy warning the entire world
that we were coming.
Just one bad guy with a machine gun could gun us all down in the tight confines.
For a wounded man, the SOB ran fast and hard, always just out of sight enough to prevent
a clear shot.
Finally he broke into what through our night vision looked like a large room and we could
hear the sound of many other men angrily shouting and likely preparing to end our day in the
worst way possible.
When you've trained with a team long enough, there's little need for words, and it's sort
of a beautiful, terrifying thing.
I often wonder what we could accomplish if men could cooperate so closely together, so
efficiently, in anything other than murdering each other.
With just a few short words, those of us in front dropped to a knee, and those of us behind
us hurled a combination of fragmentation grenades and bangers into the room ahead of us.
The room erupted in a staccato burst of explosions only partially muffled by the grenades landing
in what was now ankle-deep water, but the bangers still put out one hell of a light
show.
I'd squeezed my eyes tightly shut to avoid ruining my night vision, but could still see
the brightness through closed lids.
The moment the light went away we charged forward.
Light was coming in through holes in the roof of the large aqueduct so we'd ripped the night
vision off our heads.
The contrast between light and dark though made it incredibly difficult to see targets
as my eyes fought to adjust to the new lighting conditions.
The bad guys though had it far worse than us, who'd been prepared for the incredibly
disorienting blast of the bangers in such a tight space, though I'm pretty sure my hearing
was permanently damaged for it.
Compared to the bangers going off, the roar of rifles in tight confines sounded like angry
popcorn noises.
These things always seem like an eternity, but actually only last a few seconds- if that.
The large room had practically no cover to hide behind, only a few large pipes crossing
through the opposite side of the room.
It was in effect like shooting fish in a barrel- for both sides.
We however had the advantage of having deployed a generous amount of disorienting flashbangs
and frag grenades before entering.
By the time it was over, their guys were dead, but two of our own didn't look good.
An enemy grenade had landed right at the feet of one of them, and curiously enough I don't
remember this happening at all.
It happens like that though, you lose entire sections of your memory in these situations-
that's why after action reports are so important.
His feet were shredded, he'd end up losing everything below the knee on both legs, but
he'd live.
The other guy had taken several AK rounds straight to the chest plate of his body armor,
and they hadn't penetrated.
The impact trauma though was too much for his heart to handle- he'd die shortly later
from internal bleeding and trauma to his heart.
Yeah, you can still die in body armor even if your armor holds up.
Another team ended up finding Iraq's most wanted DJ and permanently taking him off the
air, and my best guess is that the guys we found were a security element waiting for
him to show up, make his transmissions, and then help him get away again.
I guess we accomplished our mission, and I guess we had a pretty good loss ratio to boot,
far better than any of us had expected.
Underground fighting is just... ugly, and costly.
But to this day I can't stop thinking about my turret gunner, crushed to death by a flipped
humvee.
I think about being trapped under that filthy, rising water.
I can't do those closed-up water slides at water parks anymore, you know the ones with
the black tube that you slide down in as it twists and turns.
I can only do the open top ones, the one time I tried a few years ago I ended up breaking
down in tears.
Some teenage kid in line laughed as I was helped down the stairs back to the bottom,
I guess everyone just assumed I'd reached the top and been too scared to take the plunge.
Did you miss the first parts of the How I Survived Combat series?
Go check it out now or if you’re all caught up then go watch this one instead!