“Driver reverse! C’mon, back up, back up!” As his hilltop perch became an inferno of high explosive, Ralph McKay decided it was time to pull off the ridgeline. Trees splintered overhead as McKay dropped down inside the Bradley’s turret, shrapnel pinging off the hull as he pulled the hatch closed. They drove twenty or so meters in reverse before the driver cut sharply, trying to execute a three-point turn to get them facing downhill. Even through his CVC, McKay could hear the roar around him. Known, suspected, and likely, thought McKay, those are the positions they’re shooting at now. The concussions from the shelling shook the Bradley. They couldn’t have spotted us, but the S2 said they have lots of arty. This ridgeline looks right down on them and they don’t want us up here. Why? What don’t they want me to see? As they pulled forward, the track suddenly shook and his ears rang. The Bradley lurched forward and started to climb, then rocked backward. McKay heard the engine whine as the vehicle’s tracks clawed air.
“Sir,” came the driver’s panicked voice over the intercom, “the arty knocked a tree down and we’re hung up on the stump.”
“You’d better get us un-fucking-hung up before that incoming finds us.” Keep your cool, troop commander, McKay said to himself, set the example. What did they call it, “grace under pressure”? He shook his head. “Neutral-steer us off.”
The driver shoved the transmission lever, and one track pulled forward, the other in reverse. For long seconds, as the hillside erupted around them, the beached Bradley shook until finally, helped along by the force of another too-close-for-comfort explosion, they rocked off the obstacle. McKay heaved a sigh as they sped downhill and away from the cauldron.
Six hundred meters down the trail and beyond the impact of the explosives, he hit the intercom. “Take the next trail to the left,” McKay ordered his driver, “get us back up on the ridge.”
“Sir? We just got out from underneath that incoming.”
“We’ll be away from the crest. I gotta go where I can see.”
Through his binoculars and bloodshot eyes, Billy Travers could see his positions of the previous night take a ferocious beating. Whole trees blew skyward, roots tumbling over branches as they shot into the air, rolled over, then crashed down. Some of the wood began to burn, the smoke mixing with the dust and dirt thrown up by the artillery. The combination formed an ugly gray-brown cloud held low and close to the ground by the morning’s temperature inversion.
“The ’rads are coming, El-tee,” called his gunner. Travers couldn’t see through the haze, but the gunner picked them up easily in the thermal sight. “We got one, two… four tanks, and — ahh — ten, maybe more, tracks behind them.” A hint of a breeze blew a window in the haze and Travers confirmed his gunner’s sighting.
“What’s behind them? Is it the main effort or a diversion?”
“All I can see is what I told you, Sir: the ground dips.”
Travers reported the sighting to the brigade TOC, calling back twice until they confirmed that the message had been passed to Stern. Regardless of the threat, the platoon would have to hold to confirm the size of the German push.
He looked down to consult the sketch map he’d drawn at first light. “All Bravo elements,” called Travers over the radio, too tired from the night’s mission to switch back call signs, “tanks and Marders in Engagement Area Black. Switch to TOW if you haven’t already.” His platoon consisted of only three Bradleys, yet four tanks bore down on their position.
Travers coached himself: Knock out the center two and the one on the most dangerous flank first, Lieutenant. Their platoon leader should be in the center of the formation. Mass fires on the survivors with your second volley.
“Platoon. Cross. From the left tank, at my command.”
He paused, popping up from the Bradley’s gun sight and out of the hatch, lifting his binoculars to his eyes. Thirty-seven hundred meters away he’d marked two trees with three-foot-wide strips of aluminum foil, staking out the left and right limits of the engagement area and the imaginary line over which the enemy would come in range of the platoon’s missiles. The Germans were not quite there^Travers had a minute or two.
“Gunner, tell me when they pass the trees we marked with foil.”
“Wilco, Sir.”
In the back of Travers’s Bradley sat a young soldier with a radio. A specialist fourth class, he was a small man, grubby from too much tension and too much danger. As the platoon’s FO, his job was to get accurate, timely indirect fires on enemy targets in support of the platoon leader’s plan. The young man had no place from which to see, however. The platoon leader and his gunner took up the key positions and, by the time the specialist’s digitized calls for fire went through, the enemy had long since passed. Frustrated, Michael Khries had lapsed into inaction. Travers startled him by handing him his sketch and pointing to the map.
“Fire for effect on target Tango one-zero-four,” shouted Travers above the Bradley’s engine noise. “Enemy company, tanks and APCs, in the open. Repeat it until I tell you to stop.” Only when Khries nodded and began to punch the keyboard did Travers slide back up and out of the hatch.
Battlefield smoke rolled lazily across his field of view, and for a minute he lost sight of both the enemy and his range markers. Then a small orange flash caught his eye — the light of a fire glinting off the foil on the left boundary. Despite the haze he could see that the advancing tanks were at least a hundred meters inside the line. He hit the transmit switch.
“Platoon, fire!”
Two missiles sped toward the Germans. A third flew straight for a hundred or so meters, then did a crazy spiral into the ground and exploded. Travers groaned — some gunner had switched directly from TOW to 25mm without punching the button that deselected the TOW missile. The software inside the turret computer, believing the missile was already gone, had automatically cut the TOW guidance wires. When the gunner reselected TOW and fired, what came out was an unguided missile, one that did no more than call the enemy’s attention to their position.
Fourteen seconds after launch the two guided missiles found their targets. One Leopard stumbled to a halt after it was hit; the tank began to smoke. Travers could see the crew bailing out. The second Leopard absorbed the missile impact; slowed; stopped; then continued to advance, the TOW’s warhead either not penetrating or doing only minor damage. Without orders Travers’s platoon re-engaged, trying to deal with the tanks before the Bradleys lost their standoff advantage. The Germans were more alert for the second volley, however, losing only one tank as they dodged behind trees and small folds in the ground. Again Travers was on the radio.
“Bravo Three, Bravo Two. Get on that center tank and stay on it until you kill it. I’ll take the other one. Be ready to switch to chain gun when the Marders come in range — and remember to punch the damn ‘deselect’ button!” He didn’t wait for the answer. Instead he twisted down and around to look back at his FO. Khries yelled something, but over the engine noise and the sound of his gunner sending another missile toward the Germans, Travers had to read his lips. Khries, realizing this, exaggerated his facial movements until Travers got the message.
“D-P-I–C-M-on-the-way.”
The lieutenant spun back to look again at the enemy. One tank was stationary — the missiles had crippled but not killed it — and the other was still moving, half hidden, its crew snaking the tank along while taking advantage of every meager wrinkle the ground offered. The Marders continued to advance, the tracks also beginning to make use of terrain. The Germans were half in formation and half out of it when the artillery caught them.