Combat and Other Shenanigans by Piers Platt

Author:Piers Platt [Platt, Piers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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The raid I would be leading Red Platoon on for my first mission as a scout platoon leader was an attempt to capture the #1 High Value Target in Samarra, an Iraqi insurgent leader who had supposedly called for a meeting among his subordinates at a house south of the city, along the Tigris. I wrote out my operations order that evening, then called the men together the following morning, anxious to make a good impression. After briefing them on the raid, I quizzed a few of the soldiers on the key details, and then turned them over to their NCOs.

“How was that?” I asked Sergeant First Class Martin, as our scouts started to head out to prepare for the mission.

“Fine,” he shrugged. “Don’t sweat it.”

A dark-haired Sergeant walked up to us and stuck out his hand.

“Sergeant Wasser – I’m your new gunner, sir.”

I shook his hand, “So you’re my babysitter, huh?”

Martin slapped Wasser on the back. “Wasser here knows his way around the turret – he’ll take care of you,” he told me.

“Yeah, speaking of which – can you take me out to the motor pool and walk me through some stuff on the Bradley?” I asked Wasser.

He nodded eagerly, “Sure, sir. We’re headed out to prep the tracks now.”

One big perk of running a scout platoon, I discovered, was the fact that we had two Humvees assigned to us, which meant that we could drive to the motor pool instead of walking the hot, sweaty mile or so. At the Bradleys, I met my new driver, a young Specialist known to all as “Scooter.” Scooter wore coke-bottle glasses thick enough to cause me slight alarm.

“What’s your vision like, Scooter?”

“20-20, as long as I’ve got these on, sir!”

“Keep ‘em on, then,” I chuckled.

From his driver’s station, Scooter lowered the ramp at the back of the passenger compartment, and we walked up it into the rear of the vehicle. The M3 Bradley is designed both as a fighting vehicle in its own right, and an armored personnel carrier. In its infantry configuration, it carries up to six soldiers in the back, on two narrow benches lining the walls of the compartment. In its cavalry configuration, the right-hand bench is replaced by a storage rack holding extra anti-tank missile rounds. The rear end of the vehicle is a thick steel-plate ramp with a door in it – dismounts can either go in and out through the door, or the driver can lower the whole ramp to the ground, which is hinged at its base. The vehicle’s turret sits at the front of the passenger compartment, and is accessible via a door that the commander and gunner can awkwardly squeeze through. The door is closed for safety during operations – otherwise, someone might get a limb caught in the spinning turret mechanism. The driver’s seat is accessible both through its own external hatch on the front left of the vehicle, and by crawling through the “hell-hole,” a narrow crawlspace next to the turret which connects the driver’s station to the rear compartment.

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