Kurt Schlichter - Indian Country

While the Crusader Company tanks were fighting through the ambushes on the way to the center of town, Turnbull had driven over and gotten ahead of them. Now he was waiting there for the armor to come, praying his plan would work.

The AT-4 light rocket launchers had made three mobility kills on the M1s along 231 – the guerrillas fired them close, right at the treads, since the rockets would bounce off the depleted uranium composite armor of the sides and the turret. If you got a mobility kill, the tank was still a mighty dangerous pillbox – but it was just that, a pillbox. The guys in it had to come out eventually to eat.

Turnbull paced across the rooftop with several other insurgents, who were preparing their weapons. It was dark, and that gave the armor something of an advantage with its night vision gear. The tanks made the turn and roared under them.

Turnbull waited.

“Come on,” he whispered.

An explosion, a big one. He could hear the gears and track grinding below. Turnbull peered over the edge.

One M1 directly below him was up on the sidewalk, smoking. The one behind it, with the commander in the cupola blazing away with his .50 cal, was pulling around it.

“Now!” Turnbull shouted. Lights came up from the high schools portable floodlights hooked to a generator. The entire road below was illuminated like daylight, and that disoriented the tankers for a moment.

The street was covered by dark objects. The lead tank dodged them, but the next didn’t. The mine exploded under its body, lifting the tank and blowing out its treads. It stopped. When the commander tried to get out of the hatch, someone shot him.

Turnbull leaned over with his M4 and began spraying the gunners standing in the turrets. Then the rest of the guerrillas arose, with their Molotov cocktails lit, and threw them down on the tanks below.

Flames erupted on the tanks, on their engines, their turrets, their tracks, and on the street itself. One of the fire bombs went into an open hatch and detonated inside. That tank veered left into the abandoned hardware store across the street, stopping about 20 feet inside it.

Cardillo watched his lead tank get taken out and immediately knew it was an anti-tank mine. He screamed it into his intercom, and his driver dodged the two mines lying in the street to his front. He went for his machine gun again, but flaming objects were raining down on him, and he knew what they were too. Just before he ducked into the hatch and pulled it closed, he saw the tank behind him detonate a mine.

Inside his tank he could hear the faint sound of bullets hitting the exterior armor. The guerrillas were on the roofs of the buildings surrounding them. The tactical response was obvious.

Eliminate the buildings.

“Target, right, HEAT!” he shouted and the loader slammed a 120 millimeter shell into the breech. The turret spun.

“Fire!”

The building buckled and collapsed under Turnbull’s feet, or at least it felt like it did. The roof split and Turnbull fell ten feet to the second floor in a cascade of dust and debris, along with some other fighters. Unfortunately, so did some of the unlit Molotovs, which rolled inside and fell, spreading gasoline throughout the second floor.

“Oh, hell no,” Turnbull said. “Get out!” he yelled, and ran to the shattered side window facing the alley. It was another ten feet down. He jumped.

The building shook apart from a second HEAT round as he leapt, and the wall fell inwards behind him. He hit the ground hard, but instinctively executed a passable parachute landing fall. The meat of his buttocks and thigh took the brunt of the fall, and felt like it. But he didn’t break his ankles and he could still move.

Cardillo, from inside his tank, ordered the second round into the building where the guerrillas were. That took it down. No more Molotovs.

He keyed the mic.

“Quebec One-Seven, this is Crusader Six! Fire mission! Fire mission! Over!”

“Crusader Six, this is Quebec One-Seven, go!”

“My position! Troops in the open!” He read out his grid coordinates. The cannon cockers acknowledged.

Three M1s were either burning mobility kills or parked inside a building along 8th Street. There was one tank that had gone ahead and another still on Route 231. That one was shooting anything that moved not only with its coaxial and turret machine guns but with its main gun.

The ground shook as the tank fired, and Turnbull could hear the groan of collapsing buildings. Guerrillas were running all around and firing, but with no organization or purpose.

Turnbull pivoted and there was a ghost standing before him. A ghost with a .357.

“Larry? What the hell?”

Langer smiled, but the front of his shirt was drenched with blood. His incision had ripped open.

“I ain’t never walked away from a fight before,” he said. “Ain’t starting now.”

“You’re bleeding out,” Turnbull shouted. “Go back to the damn hospital!”

Langer shook his head. The ground shook as the main gun fired again. A guerrilla position in an empty coffee shop exploded.

“Shit,” Turnbull said as he saw he had little choice, and sprinted toward the tank,

The senior sergeant on the firing line of M119s understood what the fire mission meant. The tanks must be in the midst of being overrun or they would not call for artillery on their own position. What the hell was going on down there? The gunners had been firing missions in support of the infantry nonstop since sundown.

The Jasper fight had priority – they were rejecting missions left and right from the units near the bridge. Three guns could only do so much. But they could do something.

He shouted out the next mission and felt like he was punched in the gut. He staggered back and felt another punch. Except it was a .308 round from Banks’s M14.

The gun bunnies scrambled, trying to grab their weapons, but the guerrillas were past the sentries and to the gun line too quickly.

With most of the artillerymen dead or running, Banks took out his radio and made the call.

“Gandalf, this is Orc,” he said. It still annoyed him, but he persisted. “Mission accomplished. I say again, mission accomplished. They are black on arty.”

Bullets zipped around him, pinging off the pavement and the armor of the tank ahead of him. Its gunner was blazing away to the west, and Turnbull was coming from the east. If the guy at the machine gun turned around, Turnbull would be shot in half.

Turnbull was at a full run and dropped his M4, then leapt on the tracks of the Abrams and pulled himself up onto the deck of the tank.

The machine gunner was still firing at targets to the west as Turnbull stood up and drew his .45 from his thigh holster.

He aimed it and fired at the man’s head. The gunner dropped into the tank and Turnbull reached the pistol inside the hatch and fired again and again, stopping only when it clicked empty. He pulled it out and inserted another mag, and peered inside.

Thanks to the floodlights, he could see nothing was moving in there.

Turnbull breathed hard and looked up at the 120 millimeter barrel pointed directly at him. The other tank had gone to the end of the block but had come back. They saw him with his gun on the tank containing their dead friends.

I’d do me too, thought Turnbull, and he waited for the HEAT round.

Langer stumbled forward from the alley with something round and black in his hands, right toward the other tank. The tank was buttoned up, so he was in their blind spot until he crossed in front of the coaxial 7.62 millimeter machinegun that was mounted parallel to the main gun.

But by then it was too late. Larry Langer, who had watched Turnbull eliminate the tank that was demolishing his town, had summoned every last bit of strength to pick up one of the anti-tank mines and slam it, contact detonator first, onto the side of the cannon’s barrel.