Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War by Tim Pritchard Read Free Book Online Page A

way. There was no room on his tanks to medevac them, and the platoon of infantry attached from Bravo were nowhere to be seen.
What do I do next?
Looking south, he saw the rest of his tanks coming up the road, including 2nd Platoon, the tanks that were attached to Bravo company. He was relieved. He now had all his tanks with him and could maneuver as a single tank company. There was machine-gun and AK fire coming at them from a building complex to the northeast and from buildings near a railroad track just ahead of them. Machine-gun fire erupted from behind some large oil storage tanks to their north, the rounds skipping off the tanks’ thick armor. His tanks rumbled into position. Second and 3rd Platoons traversed their main guns to point to the east of the road. First Platoon took the west side.
    Peeples radioed his platoon commanders.
    “Use the coax.”
    He was thinking about which gun to fire. The rules of engagement that he’d received meant that he was supposed to return small-arms fire either with the loader’s M240, or with the coaxial machine gun that was mounted next to the tank’s main gun. His marines let off rapid bursts, kicking up dirt around the positions where most of the fire was coming from.
    Whoosh.
    A deadly rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, careered between two of his tanks. That changed things. The rounds in the main gun of Peeples’s tank were “battle carried.” It meant that there was already a round in the chamber.
    “Gunner. MPAT. Target that building.”
    Peeples’s gunner, sitting in front and below him in the well of the turret, traversed the cannon, put the red crosshairs on the small building where most of the fire seemed to be coming from and squeezed the trigger on the power-control handles. The twelve-inch recoil on the thirty-two-foot main cannon rocked the tank. With a deafening
boom,
and an orange fireball from the muzzle, the round, traveling at Mach 5, smashed into one of the buildings. The MPAT or multipurpose antitank round was designed to penetrate a target before exploding. Peeples watched the building disintegrate.
    Below him, the loader pulled a lever to access another round, loaded it with both hands into the gun, and closed the breech.
    “Driver, hard right, hard right. Stop. Forward. Stop. Lower gun tube. Traverse right. Traverse right.”
    His tanks maneuvered around each other, making intricate adjustments by pivot steering—locking one track in order to pivot on it.
    As Peeples traversed his turret, it caught in the fuel bladder and brought the main gun to an abrupt halt. Peeples was momentarily panicked.
I was afraid this might happen.
He got a knife out and cut the bladder away, splashing JP8 fuel over the road. He saw the rest of his company doing the same. It was a relief finally to get rid of the bladders. None of the tankers were happy with a hundred gallons of fuel strapped to their tanks while the rounds were flying.
    Peeples could now see five army vehicles. Three of them were large tractor-trailers, which looked as though they carried maintenance equipment. One was a Humvee and the other was a fuel truck. They looked battered and beaten. He looked back at his tanks. For the past two days they had stayed, clumped together on the hard road, unable to spread apart because of the numerous irrigation canals. It was not ideal. Normally, his company tried to spread itself over an area of one thousand meters to give the tanks more maneuvering room and to present a more difficult target. Now he saw one of his tanks attempting to do that by moving off the road onto the shoulder. Moments later he received a panicked radio transmission.
    “Panzer 6. We’re stuck in the mud.”
    Peeples turned to see a tank, commanded by Captain Romeo Cubas of 3rd Platoon, sinking into some of the worst mud he’d ever seen. What looked like hard-packed dirt near one of the irrigation ditches was a pool of thick, oozing mud.
    Peeples grabbed the radio handset and called Staff