Trust is a goal of mine, part 2.

This is Matt Bricka's story. I'm just borrowing it.

This is the extension from my last post Trust is a goal of mine.

This story doesn’t belong to me, and my version probably doesn’t sound like anyone else’s, but here is my version of a story that belongs to Matt “Sergeant” Bricka. I put the Sergeant in there because Bricka was a Sergeant when I met him in 2003. He was a late addition to our unit as we prepared for deployment to Iraq in 2004. Sergeant Bricka was already a badass when I met him. He had a Sapper tab and combat experience. He was shorter than me, but he was one of the guys I looked up to. Bricka was tactically proficient and a solid leader. He’s the kind of guy you want as a squad leader.

Fast forward to 2004, I am in a mechanized Combat Engineer Battalion where our normal jobs range from Combat Earthmover driver to Advanced Land Bridge(think of an older style tank with a giant foldable bridge on top) driver to Bradley Gunner to Demolitions Specialist. Our job in Iraq becomes driving around Baghdad in semi-armored Humvees. Lower enlisted soldiers like me had 3 options: humvee driver, humvee machinegunner, or dismount(guy that rides in the backseat of the humvee). I received a brand new 240 Bravo machine gun a few weeks before deployment, it was still in the packing grease when I cleaned it for the first time on the loading dock at Fort Hood, Texas. I was a Humvee machine gunner, and that’s what suited me best. If 5 of us had to drive around Baghdad in a Humvee every day for the next 15 months, I wanted to be the guy standing up out of the hatch with the machine gun.

A typical day in a combat zone is very peaceful for a machine gunner. He or she has the extra duty of carrying the machine gun back to the barracks or tent, cleaning it every few days, and keeping the ammunition belts clean and aligned. During the patrol, the gunner may sit low on a sling or stand up and look around. The gunner has a 360-degree view and decent ventilation. Inside the vehicle they have tiny windows and minimal vents. There are only a few things that can ruin a gunner’s day.

1. Snipers. Gunner’s have to stand up sometimes to direct traffic or to get eyes on a potential threat with binoculars or the machine gun’s scope, but if you’re standing, you better not be stationary. Keep moving and don’t repeat the same patterns. Be hard to kill. Make the sniper work for it.

2. IEDs. Improvised explosive devices can ruin a gunner’s day with direct shrapnel if standing in the hatch, or by blowing the vehicle apart so the gunner is stuck in the hatch, or the vehicle can be flipped or on fire.

3. Other Gunners. Nothing is more frustrating as a gunner, when you’re so focused on staying awake and alert, to see another vehicle in your convoy go around a turn, and the gunner’s head is just flopping around like a bobble head doll, and they are fast asleep. That’s the guy who is supposed to be watching your back. Friendly fire is a constant threat as well. When you are in a moving vehicle, and your finger is on the trigger of a machine gun, you have to be very careful to watch what the other vehicles are doing around you.

4. Drivers. When drivers make mistakes, gunners get hurt. It’s that simple. The driver can fall asleep and crash, and typically be fine. A good friend of mine named Pineapple was driving a Humvee, and I was in the gunner’s hatch in Baghdad. We were the first vehicle in a convoy, and Pineapple had never driven a Humvee with the extra weight of the armor on the suspension. An Iraqi civilian cut us off, Pineapple hit the brakes and swerved so hard that the Humvee spun a full 360-degree circle in the middle of the highway. I don’t know how it didn’t flip. I injured my back that day in a spot that I feel every single day between my lower vertebrates. It’s not service-connected(veteran affairs joke), but it always reminds me of that spin when it happened.

As a driver or gunner, being cramped with body armor in a tight armored vehicle with no air conditioning, the biggest enemy is sleep. It is very difficult to stay awake on a long, hot patrol. A driver in another squad crashed a Humvee into a concrete barrier because he was asleep. He was laterally moved to machine gunner.

In Iraq, Sgt Bricka became our commander’s gunner. Normally we would patrol with 4 Humvees, adding the commander to our patrol meant 5 Humvees. 5 Humvees usually means a ranking officer or VIP guest is added to a regular combat patrol. This is not a secret; the enemy already knew this.

Our commander needed to meet someone in our sector of Baghdad, and it was during our platoon’s shift, so we rolled out of the forward operating base into the night to execute this mission. The basic mounted gun tactic with multiple vehicles is that the first vehicle has a sector of fire to the front, the second vehicle has the right or left, then the vehicles alternate right or left, and the gunner of the last vehicle faces to the rear. I was the gunner of our lieutenant’s vehicle, second in the convoy, and my machine gun sector of fire was to the left. I am excited for these night missions because of the confidence I have in the thermal scope I have on my machine gun. It is a huge tactical advantage at night to be able to pick up humans in the scope as white-hot objects in the cooler temperatures of the night.

I never relaxed outside of the wire. I took my job as machine gunner very seriously. It was my job to protect everyone inside my vehicle from outside harm and to watch the backs of the other gunners so they could maintain. The first part of our route took us across a bridge over a large highway, and we entered the neighborhood known as Ghazaliyah. It was evening, and there should not have been people out. As the first Humvee gets to our next turn off this main road towards an open field, I see two guys moving something around in the trunk of a black Mercedes. I’m not discriminatory about luxury cars, but this was a bad guy car. I told LT, “hey there are some guys up here messing around with the trunk of their car, I don’t like it, let’s check them out”. Our LT, who was very intimidated by our Commander, was worried about our timeline and did not want to make the Commander late for the meeting. We drove by them; they looked shady. We make a right turn next to them and drive away from the busy part of the city and down a straight paved road with open fields on either side. One, two, three, four, five Humvees turn down the road. We make it a few hundred meters when the guys in the Mercedes pull out an RPG(Rocket Propelled Grenade) Launcher from the trunk and shoot their rocket at our convoy. I’m facing left, so I see the RPG coming from my left side. I know time is distorted in extreme combat situations, and RPGs are slow for a projectile, but this RPG looked like slow motion, haphazardly spiraling towards our convoy of Humvees. Ok, this part sounds completely fake, but I swear this is what happened. The RPG skipped two times. It skipped along the left side of the rear Humvee, it skipped again off the road next to the 4th Humvee, then it flew up into the air and exploded right next to our commander’s Humvee with Sgt Bricka up in the gunner’s hatch.

I’m going to ask Bricka his version of this story. It will be interesting to see how much he remembers. Sgt Bricka recovered from his injuries enough to come back to the deployment with us. I’ll get his whole story on the podcast.

Here’s the part that gets me, not a single shot was fired in retaliation at the guys who stood and watched all 5 humvees pass before pulling out a rocket launcher and shooting his best shot. I called in the suspicious personnel standing next to the Mercedes before we even made the turn. Everyone should have known about them, and each gunner should have had their eyes on them as we drove by. The gunner on the rear vehicle, with all of the same nighttime firepower superiority that I had, did not fire a single shot. He didn’t see anything. There were stories that he did not have his night sight even mounted. He was not tactically ready to defend the patrol from the rear, and Sgt Bricka was blown up by a RPG shot from the rear. The Humvee gunner in the rear vehicle was the driver who was fired from Humvee driving for driving into the concrete barrier.

Anytime we were attacked, our gunners shot back. Even if it’s an IED, you put out suppressive fire to keep the enemy’s head down while you recover or maneuver out of the situation. To not shoot back is to say, go ahead, you win, keep shooting at us if you’d like. It’s not the impression you want to give the enemy. The worst part of the Army for me was never the hard work or the crappy pay or the long hours or the danger or the deployments. The worst part of the Army for me was the people who didn’t belong there. The people who had great mechanical, communication, or organizational skills but zero tactical skills were put into tactical positions where they were unable to perform. There were some people that you just knew you couldn’t depend on in a tactical situation, but our numbers were limited, and we had to fill patrols with warm bodies. Fresh meat for the grinder.

This is my last bit of protest against trust. It’s this unnerving feeling that you’re putting 110% into something extremely important with the expectation that others are doing the same, and you find out they are giving 0%. There is no amount of me looking out for you that makes you look out for me the same amount. As the width of witnessed human experiences grows, so does the length needed to travel together to trust someone.