Read Online Carnivore by Dillard Johnson - Free Book Online

The M4, one of many variants of the M16, was designed in the 1990s and features a shorter 14.5-inch barrel with a cutout where an under-barrel 40 mm grenade launcher (the M203) can be mounted. Thus equipped, it is designated the M4/203. That’s what we had.
    The 40mm grenade fired out of the M203 is a big, slow round with a near rainbow trajectory. The great majority of the ammunition we used was HEDP (high-explosive dual-purpose) rounds. The explosive warhead is surrounded by a conventional casing that fragments and works like a typical frag hand grenade—except you can hit people hundreds of yards away with them, something not possible with a standard hand grenade.
    I estimate I had a metric ton of ammunition in the back of the Carnivore. We had so much that there wasn’t room in the back to do anything, except maybe lie down on the boxes. With the ammo we probably weighed about 36 tons.
    Jason Sperry was my driver. He was an E4 (Specialist) and liked to rap, like a chubby Eminem. I gave him a lot of shit, but the fact of the matter was he had been in the Army for two years and knew his job. He was from New York, had a very young wife and a small child, and had joined the Army as a means of supporting his family.
    Michael Soprano, who was my gunner, was an E5 (Sergeant) from the Atlanta area. He’d only been on my crew four months at that point, but he knew what he was doing. He looked a bit like a dark-haired James Dean.
    Michael Sullivan—Sully—was our loader/observer/dismount. He was from Florida, and I believe his father had a furniture store in St. Petersburg. Sully wore a dual hat, because in addition to being the designated guy to jump out and inspect something on foot when necessary, he worked as a loader. The Bradley system is loaded by traversing the turrets around at an angle. You then open the doors up on the side, one guy in the back hands the ammo up, and the gunner drags the ammo over. The gunner then either hooks the links to the rounds that are still in the ready box or he feeds it up into the main gun. Sully had arrived in the unit just before it deployed to Kuwait. He’d only been in the Army for a few months and had just turned 19. I guess you’d say he was “black Irish,” because he looked Italian. He was a pretty meek, mild kid, and when I say meek and mild I mean he was a huge teenage pain in my ass—up until the shooting started.
    I was the vehicle Commander. I had another driver, Private First Class Jesse Gardener, but he broke his leg a few weeks before we went into Iraq. He wound up in Headquarters Platoon driving the First Sergeant. So it was just the four of us in the Carnivore. I look back at the pictures of us, and while I look young compared to now, they look like babies. Heck, they were kids: Sully was just 19 and the other two were barely into their 20s. But they were soldiers to the core, and they damn sure got the job done when we faced the shit. I’d just had my 39th birthday and had been in the Army for 17 years. I had more time in the Army than the rest of the crew combined.
    I wasn’t the only one to name my vehicle—everybody christened their rides. Staff Sergeant John Williams in Third Platoon called his Bradley “Casanova.” He was starting to lose his hair, just like me, and both of us shaved our heads. That worked a lot better when wearing the CVC helmet. Williams was a stocky, friendly faced guy, and a former national archery champion. When I asked him why he picked that name for his Bradley, he told me, “The same reason you named yours ‘Carnivore.’ It fits your personality. You’re a rough guy, but me, I just love the ladies.”
    â€œYou can shave your head like me all you want,” I told him, “trying to look like Bruce Willis, but I’m the one who’s got dimples. The ladies love the dimples.”
    â€œI’ve got something for your dimples . . .”
    I’m