Red Metal

CHAPTER 34

Sweat streamed from twenty-two-year-old Obergefreiter Oliver Lutz’s hairline, leaving clean white vertical streaks in the grease, carbon gun dust, and mud that covered his face and neck.

Ninety minutes after the first salvo came in from the Russian tanks, the battle had been nonstop, and Lutz worried it would continue on until his tank was blown to bits.

Lutz’s clear plastic ballistic goggles had broken almost in half. One of the eyepieces had fallen to the metal deck of the Leopard 2 main battle tank amid a clutter of brass 140mm case bases, chow wrappers, pine needles, and empty packets of Jacobs Krönung instant coffee.

The moment he’d smacked his face against the turret, the goggles had earned his appreciation, even though they’d been damaged in the process. Lutz had been too busy furiously loading his L/51 tank cannon to bother with the half-destroyed goggles, so he’d left them on. But now his tank commander, Major Ott, seemed to have stopped firing on the Russians for a moment to maneuver, so Lutz took the opportunity to pull the goggles off of his face and toss them down onto the discarded remnants of war under his and the crew’s feet.

And Lutz’s thick elbow-length leather-and-Nomex gloves were still covering a part of his sleeve that had been ripped off his body when it got caught on the breech.

Better than my hand or arm, he remembered thinking.

His ears rang, and there was an unrelenting buzzing sensation in his skull. Did we get hit? He found he couldn’t remember everything that had happened through the exhaustion and stress.

Major Ott broke in over the intercom. “Target! Twelve hundred meters. APC.” The momentary lull was over, and Lutz snapped out of his stupor and back to full awareness.

“Identified. Load HEAT,” said the gunner in a loud bark.

Lutz pivoted sharply in his seat, tapping the metal pedal with his foot, opening the ammunition storage compartment door, grabbing a high-explosive anti-tank round, and jamming it into the breech. The main gun mechanism closed itself automatically when the round entered, slamming upward with a sharp clack.

“Up!” Lutz yelled hoarsely into his mic, knowing his voice needed to be louder than what his crew members could hear over the malfunctioning intercom.

More sweat poured down into his eyes.

“Fire!” ordered the commander. Lutz looked over at Ott, his hands cupped over the thermal sight system as he peered intently through the darkness.

“On the way!” yelled the gunner, and with a resonating boom the huge tank’s 130mm main gun fired. The breech roared back, ejecting a metal disk called the base case, and a thick knot of gray smoke entered the turret as the gun locked open.

There was a delay of a few seconds, and then Ott spoke again. “Target destroyed. Gunner, pick up a scan.”

The noise of one flat blast, followed by a succession of distant explosions, entered through the tank’s two open top hatches.

Secondary detonations, thought Lutz. Must’ve nailed their ammo magazine.

The crew of the tank had ceased calling one another by name. Their minds were so focused, they reverted to the language they used at tank school and only referred to one another by their position in the machine. Any pretense of life outside the tank, along with any niceties over the intercom, had been dropped the moment that first Russian main tank round came sailing into the trees.

Every second and every decision meant death or life, so each man was all business.

Lutz’s fingers felt like thick, fat sausages. Pain lanced across his back from pivoting to the ammo ready rack and then back to the main gun to load it. A thick fog crept about his head whenever he paused in between ramming the twenty-five-kilogram depleted-uranium A4 penetrator tank rounds.

He had one luxury the other tank crew members didn’t: he couldn’t see anything outside. He relied on their commands, his instinct, and the urgency he ascertained in every voice, the pitch of the engine, and the rapidity with which the turret pivoted. Faster meant trouble; slower meant a steady, cautious scan by the gunner or the commander.

Some recent moments had been more intense than others. Drastically more intense. He could feel it in the others’ voices, how they stiffened their bodies up against the sight’s eyecups, the shrill and distinct whine of incoming enemy shells. The loud pop when a round flew overhead.

Fear pervaded the tank, but none of them had time to acknowledge it.

Lutz moved at the pace his gunner and commander demanded. When they had targets, he was committed to action. When they hunted for targets or moved the tank to a new position, he sat, held on, and tried to imagine what was happening outside the eighty-two-centimeter-thick armor of their Leopard 2’s turret.

The numbness that clouded his brain crept in again. A fatigue-induced exhaustion was beginning to swarm all around him.

Then he heard the memory of his old tank instructor, an Oberfeldwebel, or staff sergeant, yelling at him again: “Idioten! What is the third rule in tank combat?” He was referring to the German tanker’s Platinum Rules of Armored Warfare.

The young students would then answer in chanting unison, “Go ahead, let your attention drift. Now your enemy receives his gift!”

It hadn’t meant much then. Just memorize the eight rules and you didn’t get yelled at — as much.

But now he fully understood the Oberfeldwebel’s meaning. If he fell asleep at his gun now, the enemy T-14s would rip them open, just as they had several other German and American tanks in the composite regiment.

The secondary explosions came again. They were lighting up the night and a glow flickered into the turret, shadows cast around, waving gently back and forth. Lutz’s tired eyes lazily followed them.

Just like Mutti’s Weihnachten candle, he thought, remembering Christmas at his mother’s house.

She still uses real candles, he remembered, energy fading from his body. His eyes tracked the darkening shadows, and then another pop made him smile, as it sounded like the fire his father always lit in the fireplace during the holidays.

His eyes shut themselves.

Lutz shook his head. Tried hard to break through the haze and not to think about the Christmas candles’ sweet scent.

A sickening smell inside the turret filled his nostrils and broke him out of the stupor. Wet sweat, excrement, gunpowder. Grease and diesel fuel.

Burning rubber from the war outside.

Fuck these Arschlöcher. Have to stay awake. At last, anger and adrenaline returned in a quick but small rush, and he sat up straighter, stretching his back.

Early on, an enemy tank round had glanced off their turret’s sloped armor and knocked their intercom out of whack so that he could now only hear the other crew very faintly.

That’s why my ears are buzzing.

The more recent history, maybe the past half hour, was kind of a blur.

A short while ago the driver hit a deep ravine and Lutz slammed his head against the side of the turret, splitting his helmet and goggles. The driver himself had been knocked unconscious, and Ott had yelled for him over the intercom to wake up. The gunner even crawled outside and banged on the nineteen-year-old’s hatch, to no avail.

Lutz eventually climbed through the tank himself and shook the boy until he woke.

Then they drove on, sprinting to a new position. Advancing on the enemy, who, Lutz had heard from Ott’s play-by-play of the action, was retreating through the forest and onto the autobahn.

Lutz’s only awareness of the tank’s whereabouts was from tidbits of intercom traffic and from the chunks of snow and the pine branches and needles that rained into the turret. Lutz had thirstily eaten the snow chunks that fell inside.

Then a succession of rapid explosions erupted close to the tank and, at least as far as Lutz could tell, the gunner had diarrhea in his tank suit, but no one had had the energy or humor to mention it.

Next their engine had taken a direct and apparently partially penetrating hit from something. No one knew what, but they were only getting about 50 percent power now. They slowed significantly but continued fighting and, from what Lutz gathered from the radio cross talk, remained abreast of the rest of the tanks attacking south as the enemy withdrew.

Lutz had never really believed a night like this was possible.

But here he was, in the middle of it.

Lutz backed himself momentarily against the cold metal hull of the tank and away from the hot breech of his Rheinmetall 130mm smoothbore L/51 tank main gun. Steam rose from his suit. Sweat and heat mixing with the cool air coming through the gunner’s top hatch.

“Gunner, this is loader. Three AT rounds remain,” Lutz said into his headset, using a mundane task of reporting his ammo count to keep himself awake.

“Klar!” was the only response he got from the tank’s gunner.

The gunner, Feldwebel Herbert Kanst, peered into his gunsight system. Lutz took a moment to look him over. If Kanst even noticed his own diarrhea, he didn’t show it. The gunner’s hand gripped the turret joystick with white knuckles, locking the palm switch down to control the turret as he scanned through the dark, trying to spot more Russian tanks or other vehicles before his own tank was detected by the enemy. He was absorbed in his task just like Lutz and the rest of the crew were absorbed in theirs.

From the new chatter Lutz was only partially able to hear on the intercom, he gleaned the driver was asking for permission to sprint toward a copse of trees about two hundred meters to their front.

“Halt!” yelled Feldwebel Kanst now. “Dismounts! Two hundred meters in front… looks like the crew from that BMP the American tank just destroyed. They are lining up in the trees… I see RPGs.”

“Engage. Use coax,” Ott ordered without hesitation.

“Engaging!” replied Kanst, and Lutz listened to the muffled thumping sounds of the 7.62mm rounds pouring from the Leopard 2’s MG3A1 coaxial machine gun. Lutz immediately shifted his body to the machine gun’s feed chute and “escorted” the four-hundred-round belt. He instinctively put his hand out to hold the rapidly moving rounds over the small bump between the ready box and the machine gun’s top cover, where the gun typically malfunctioned during their training exercises.

The weapon fired unerringly. When it stopped, he heard Major Ott’s voice over the intercom again. “Rake that cluster off to the left side. Give it a Z pattern. Sehr gut! Continue firing there. Russian dismounts, that vicinity.

“Panzer links und vorwärts marsch!” Ott said once Kanst stopped firing.

Lutz braced himself against the turret as the sixty-five-ton beast lurched toward the copse of trees the driver had spotted.

Ott spoke again. “Tankers, take out your small arms and prepare to kill any stragglers. I’m up on the pintle.” The major was referring to the pintle machine gun on the top of the tank.

Lutz grabbed his Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun and waited for the gunner to get out first so he could climb through the hatch.

Seconds later Obergefreiter Lutz stepped on the sticky, wet mess that covered the gunner’s canvas seat and crawled out of the turret for the first time in over ten hours. He sat down on the turret next to the gunner, who was already scanning the wood line with his NVGs, his own MP7 at the ready, aiming toward the trees that they were slowly entering.

The freezing December air burned at Lutz’s exposed nostrils and eyes. The sweat soaking his Nomex tanker’s suit instantly chilled, a relief from the unbearable heat in the turret. Major Ott was above him, on the machine gun, scanning the trees ahead.

In the distance, Lutz got his first view of a dozen brightly burning vehicle hulks, some of which had been killed by the 130mm tank rounds he had loaded into the Leopard 2’s gun. To his left he saw an American M1A2 battle tank lurking in the woods parallel to them. It rumbled slowly through the dark and stopped just short of the edge of the woods, the huge turret scanning slowly and methodically. One of the Abrams crewmen sat on his turret, an M4 carbine tight against his shoulder; just like Lutz, he was scanning for enemy dismounts.

Obergefreiter Lutz of the Bundeswehr’s Panzerbattailon 203 inhaled a deep breath of the crisp winter air, and for a second it reminded him it was Christmastime. Then the smell of burning flesh mixed with oil and fuel entered his nostrils. They were new smells to him, but instinctively he knew what they were. He gripped the MP7 tighter and peered into the dark, deep woods and the white snow-covered hills and fields, looking for enemy movement.

The rest of the Russian tanks appeared to have vanished, for now.