My Men are My Heroes (16 page)

Like most plans based on unrealistic expectations, the plan to pacify Fallujah and rid it of insurgents was conceived in presumption and executed with dysfunction. Arguably parts of the plan were working, but winning the hearts and minds of the insurgents wasn't one of them. McCormack, as a part of S-2, was one of the guys who had to figure out why.

“We talked to people who told us they could make $6 a day working for a Coalition contractor, or they could make $100 placing an IED,” McCormack says. “Where's the choice? These people didn't have anything. Just a few people had all the money. You could tell because they were fat. They had enough to eat. They were paying for the insurgency.”

McCormack's intel shop determined 3/1 was facing multiple four- to eight-man insurgent cells that had the ability to regenerate. They were well paid from caches secreted away during the Saddam regime and from contributions collected worldwide and filtered into Iraq from foreign sources. It was nothing extraordinary to find a furtive foreign fighter with $20,000 in American money destined for payrolls that enticed the unemployed Sunni malcontents.

“The insurgents knew the terrain much better than the Marines,” McCormack says. “We said they had the jungle working for them. They could hide weapons and people out in the countryside.”

Catching the bad guys was a challenge because they were so hard to identify. Residents were permitted to keep rifles for self-defense, so they were only implicated if they were caught carrying a detonator, planting an IED, or linked to large caches of arms.

They hid their caches away from their homes and yards, McCormack explains. Weapons and ammunition could turn up anywhere—near roads, alongside canals, even hidden in the furniture of homes in Fallujah.

Intimidation was a key factor in the insurgents' success. Local leaders would play both sides, according to McCormack. They took money from the foreign fighters supporting the insurgency as well as from Moneybags. “Sometimes they did it to survive,” he explains. “If they said no to the insurgents, particularly the foreign fighters, they were killed. But some of it was because they agreed with the insurgents and because they earned a lot of money working for them.”

Toolan was aware of the political realities of al-Anbar province and it concerned him greatly because the insurgents' tactics
incited his Marines. The pinprick attacks were wounding and killing his men and they couldn't respond. In his estimation they showed considerable restraint despite provocations that made the young Marines pray for payback. They held to it in part because Americans have a certain standard of decency and in part because NCOs like Kasal kept them in check, Toolan says.

“There is this guy, Jim Collins, in
Good to Great
[Jim Collins,
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap,
Audio, Jim Collins 2005]. He speaks of the Level Five leadership, which is the highest. He says there are two components of the leader who not only can take an organization from good to great but who can transform the organization. In other words he can go from traditional combat to this crazy form of warfare we now have in Iraq. Collins' study was pretty extensive—several years, I think—and he found that the Level Five leaders had an overwhelming will to get something accomplished. Add to that humility and you have got a leader of an organization that can do just about anything. Kasal fits that description of a Level Five leader pretty well.”

Kasal had his work cut out for him in Weapons Co. The young 3/1 Marines said they didn't know exactly what their mission was after a few months of the mushrooming insurgency. It certainly didn't seem to be about creating jobs and earning people's trust. Lance Corporal Alex Nicoll, in Kilo, didn't buy it at all. He figured that the whole place would fall apart eventually and they would be killing each other; he just didn't know when.

“When the IEDs and all that started, it was more about staying alert,” Nicoll says. “We knew we had a pacification mission, but we also were told we better pay attention and keep our shit together.”

Most of the young Marines claim they didn't start out hating the Iraqis when they arrived in al-Anbar province. The ones who remembered OIF 1 and their triumphant reception in Baghdad two years before had good memories of Iraqis greeting them as liberators. Some even compared their experiences to the
jubilation in the cities of Europe during World War II. Kasal said it was such a powerful feeling he volunteered to go back again.

“I saw what we were doing for the Iraqis was helping,” he says about his first deployment in Iraq. “They had been oppressed for 30 years, especially the Shiite areas in the south, and they were thanking us. They viewed us as liberators. The media made us out like we weren't liberators and in the Sunni areas they were right. We took away their corruption and their criminals and their money and everything else by throwing Saddam out of power. They thrived on Saddam because they were the thugs. But the rest of the country—the Kurds up north and the Shiites in the south—they are thriving. They were really helping us.”

Not all the Marines shared Kasal's optimistic view. Many distrusted the Iraqis, insisting they were sneaky liars. They tried to be friendly anyway because that was the mission, but the young Marines weren't always convincing. The hate started when their buddies began to die and the Rules of Engagement (ROE) prevented them from retaliating. The resentment was hot in 3/1 before Fallujah burned.

Many of the Marines were bitching that the ROE were too rigid. Corporal R. J. Mitchell and Nicoll said they were getting ready for some payback. All the line companies were taking hits on the roads between Fallujah, Al Kharma, and Ash Shahabi to the west. The roads in between—called “Ratlines” among Marines—were named Michigan/Chicago, Michigan/Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, Richmond, and the River Road. On one 2,100-meter stretch of Michigan east of the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison, the Marines encountered 24 IEDs, one for every 100 meters of road. That kind of death-dealing situation has a strong effect on young men who can't adequately fight back.

Kasal and the other Weapons Co. NCOs spent a lot of time counseling young Marines who were getting too aggressive. Long-term mission objectives and lofty ideals are hard to see
amid the dust of incoming mortars, burning vehicles, and fellow Marines writhing in agony. It was his job to see they kept those objectives and ideals in mind.

“I believe that when wearing the uniform and standing up front as a leader, it is vital to show confidence and instill in your men an attitude that they are the best,” Kasal says. “Your men are a direct reflection of you. What they know is what you taught them. If they're out of shape, you allowed it. If you don't know them, you've failed. And their confidence and pride comes from you, the leader setting the example by your own actions and putting them through challenging and hard training so they have a sense of accomplishment and continue to learn.”

Kasal has always taken that responsibility seriously: “Whenever I would take over a new unit, starting from a fire team leader to a company first sergeant, I would always push my men hard and set extremely challenging yet attainable goals for them. And every time it was the same. In the beginning there would be widespread grumbling and bitching about why they had to do this or that. But the grumbling only lasted for a short time before the unit would start seeing the improvements and the hard work pay off. They would then develop a tighter unit cohesiveness and pride in the unit—even to the point of making fun of other units for not doing as much.”

Part of Kasal's strength came from other members of 3/1's leadership. They were all professionals with more than a century's combined experience. Kasal credits their leadership as much as his for the capabilities of the Thundering Third.

“Once a week in Iraq each company's staff would meet together with the battalion staff to do planning and operations briefs,” he says. “It was a good time to get organized. Each company in the battalion spread out and separated over the entire area of operation [AO]. It was a good time to catch up with the other four companies' first sergeants.

“They were a very professional and proficient group I was proud to call my friends. I looked forward to the days we all were able to get together. We'd tell stories and joke with each other in typical Marine fashion. It was also a time I could let loose and share emotions of war I never would openly do in front of my Marines.”

Tim Ruff was always there. Kasal called him “Shorty.” Wayne Hertz would lend his martial spirit. The others included First Sergeant Scott Samuels, a rough and gruff Marine Kasal “trusted immensely,” and First Sergeant Wayne Miller, Kasal's replacement in Kilo and a brave Marine who was wounded earlier in the year and stayed with his Marines instead of going home. Kasal called his action “a testament to his character.”

“I was blessed to serve with these men,” Kasal says.

By November all the 3/1 Marines were salty, hard-core, and seasoned by five months of pain, policing insurgents who used sneak attacks and hidden explosives to bedevil the Devil Dogs at every opportunity. 3/1's Marines were hurting for payback.

Lieutenant Jesse Grapes was Kilo Co.'s third platoon leader in the months leading up to the Fallujah fight. He and Kasal went all the way back to OIF 1 when Kasal was the first sergeant of Kilo. They shared a mutual admiration for each other's combat talents.

“We made an attempt, an honest attempt, to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis,” Grapes says. “We got some real good cultural training, and the first three or four months we went out of our way to win their trust. My best mission over there was when we guarded the civil engineers building a water project. These people hadn't had running water for 30 years. They were grateful.”

In the five months preceding the second Fallujah battle, 3/1 was involved in small operations performing raids, cordon-and-knock missions to capture enemy suspects, and ambushes that
kept the insurgents off balance. What the Marines were itching to begin, though, was large-scale operations to clear the area of the insurgents who were inflicting casualties.

“We had to keep the Marines focused on the current mission without straining their aggressive emotions. That is what leadership is all about. You set aside your personal feelings for the mission—the mission itself always comes first. I wouldn't just tell my young Marines; I would lead by example,” Grapes says.

Being restrained was particularly hard on the young riflemen who stayed on the firing line day after day. Their life was an endless round of patrolling, ambushes, listening posts, and roadblocks. It was dirty, dangerous work that was getting deadlier every day. They wanted to kick some ass, take some names, and get some payback. Alex Nicoll was among them.

“It gets tedious. Fucking ambushes, patrol, hang out, and then go back on patrol. The officers and NCOs would remind us about not killing the Iraqis. They were shooting at us all the time—IEDs, snipers, mortars—but it was really boring most of the time,” he says. “We would go out at night with our night vision and try and sneak up on some dude, an insurgent, and the damn dogs would start barking. Nasty dogs, not like pets; the Iraqis kept them around for barking. They hate dogs. And we would find some guy, and he would have his papers, and we would detain him anyway because he would fit the profile. It was considered a good mission, but the real guy we were looking for would be gone.

“It was mostly the dogs. They would start barking. I must have shot a good six of them—loud dogs. They would bark, and the bastards would take off running. Sometimes we could see them in our night vision running away. We couldn't shoot unless they had a weapon.”

3/1's Marines could take the pain and uncertainty. They could even grudgingly take the boredom; after all, enduring pain and boredom is an important part of the traditions Marines hold in
reverence. In a fight they never stray far from the customs and rituals of Marine Corps history. The most irreverent Marine knows that the discipline is what makes the Corps unique among famous fighting formations around the world.

Even so, things started getting confusing while they patrolled al-Anbar province. Before OIF 1 Major General J. N. Mattis had released a letter to his 1st Marine Division Marines urging them to be “no better friends” to the Iraqis who welcomed them and “no worse enemies” to the ones who didn't. His mandate was the ultimate double-edged sword. The restraint inherent in his order was considered a noble concept by many of the forward-thinking Marines in 3/1, but it was also one the insurgents viewed with contempt. Strength is a virtue in that part of the world. The Marines could not let themselves be considered weak. Weakness invited attack.

“No better friend was certainly our first and foremost objective, but we also knew that we could be their worst enemy if they decided to make life difficult,” Colonel Toolan says. “In Bing West's book
[No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah,
Bantam, 2005] he brings out the combative nature of Marines. Let's face it—that is what we are all about. But we spent an amazing amount of time and energy getting the Marines mentally ready to be their friends. Maybe friends is a bit of an exaggeration, but at least be present and earn their trust and confidence that we would be there. Instead of an insurgent, a Marine would be there and their family wouldn't be abused in the night or threatened or whatever. That was our going-in objective.