No True Glory (16 page)

It was too late. The Humvee drove smack into the insurgents, who had gathered to rush across the road and were lying in the weeds among the tank hulks. The unarmored Humvee, with eight Marines sitting in back, was riddled. Rounds ricocheted off the barrel-release latch of the 240 Golf machine gun, putting the gun temporarily out of action. Private First Class Brandon Lund had a round go through his hand, and as he wrapped it with a pressure bandage, he thought,
I don’t believe it. I’m shot and I don’t see anybody.

Private First Class Benjamin Carmen pitched forward, blood spurting from his right arm. Lieutenant Valdez grabbed the machine gun, slammed down the release latch, and sprayed the area to the left side of the Humvee, while the corpsman, Hospitalman 3rd Class Tyronne Dennis, worked on Carmen. Dennis saw that a high-velocity bullet had gone through a gap in the plates of Carmen’s armored vest, plowed through his arm and chest, and exited his back. There was nothing Dennis could do. Carmen turned white, then pale blue, blood coming from his nose.

“We’ve lost him,” Valdez said. “This Hummer’s a magnet. Get out! Get out!”

If caught in an ambush, the immediate action drill was to counter-attack, not to remain inside the kill zone. Even as Valdez was arranging his men in a skirmish line to push toward the Tank Graveyard, mortar shells were landing around them. With the first explosion, the squad leader, Corporal Hurtado Barron, felt he had been punched in the stomach. He leaned over, gasping for breath and patting the front of his armored vest. None of the hot slivers had sliced through the front plate. He grabbed his rifle and ran to catch up with his squad.

Seeing Valdez pushing east into the Graveyard, Santiago and his sniper team crossed the road to protect the southern flank, firing as they dog-trotted along. Staysal was snapping off shots, and to his delight an Iraqi dodging around a tree a few hundred meters away went down and didn’t get back up. Staysal started shouting like a madman.

“I got that mother! I nailed him! Oorah!”

I wish Staysal would shut up,
Santiago thought. His four-man team was moving forward two hundred meters south of the Marines with Valdez. The two groups could plainly see each other and communicate by yelling and hand signals. Santiago didn’t want to get out in front and have his team attract all the fire. When the sniper team reached the tank hulks, Staysal yelled that some insurgents were running up behind them.

Corporal Stanton felt a hammer had hit him in the back, knocking him to his knees. He lay down and yelled for help. Ferguson trotted over, tugged at the back plate of Stanton’s armored vest, and saw a hole about the size of a dime, oozing blood. He didn’t know what to do about it, unsure whether a compression bandage could stop the bleeding.

“Piece of shrapnel. No blood,” Ferguson said. “Forget it. Get up and fight.”

No blood? Bullshit no blood,
Stanton thought, feeling the sticky wetness. He got to his feet and started forward. Rounds were snapping around them, closer now, making that distinct
crack!
that means someone is aiming at you, not shooting wildly.

“The fucker’s hiding behind there!” Staysal was yelling, pointing at a tank. “He’s over there, I tell you, over there!”

Then a bullet hit Staysal in his shoulder, and he screamed and went down. Santiago froze, standing erect, rifle in the classic offhand position, sweeping back and forth with both eyes wide open, waiting for a movement. He saw a man leaning over the engine compartment of a tank to steady his rifle, less than a hundred meters to their rear. Santiago put a round into his left chest. The man slid sideways and fell clear of the tank. Santiago shot him twice more in the chest and moved forward to make sure he was dead. He reached the body—a clean-shaven man with no mustache, dressed in a dark gray dress and sandals—and picked up a Russian Dragunov SVD sniper rifle with a scope.

Staysal lay on the ground screaming for Stanton, who was still concerned about his own wound. As Stanton cut away Staysal’s armored vest, he forgot about his own worries. The Iraqi sniper’s bullet had broken Staysal’s collarbone, plunged downward into his chest, and exited his back, leaving a large hole pouring blood.

“How bad is it?” Staysal asked. “Don’t lie to me. It’s bad, isn’t it? My mom’s going to be pissed.”

Time and again wounded Marines mention their wives or mothers, concerned that someone is going to be upset or sad because somehow they’ve screwed up. Stanton felt he was going to throw up. He clumsily wrapped a pressure bandage around Staysal’s chest, waited for a lull in the firing, and yelled across the open field to Corporal Pedro Contreras, the nearest Marine in Valdez’s skirmish line: “Corpsman up! Corpsman up!”

Hearing the call, HM3 Dennis dropped out of the line and trotted toward Stanton.

“Take the grenade out of my pocket. It hurts lying on it,” Staysal said to Stanton. “Hey, pull the pin and throw it. Let’s see what it looks like.”

“Fuck you and your stupid-ass ideas.”

Stanton rummaged through Staysal’s daypack for more bandages, finding only a crumpled-up poncho liner.

“Son of a bitch!” Stanton shouted. You should’ve carried extra ammo.”

One field over, the squad with Valdez continued to engage. Lance Corporal Marcos Cherry eagerly shouted to Cpl Barron, his squad leader.

“I got one!” Cherry yelled.

Then a machine gun opened up, killing Cherry instantly. Barron took Cherry’s wallet and ID and hurried to rejoin the skirmish line. Valdez was pushing east in the tall grass, following drag marks, intent on finishing off any insurgents lurking around. Santiago and Ferguson, too, headed on.

Dennis and Stanton stayed behind to tend to Staysal, as mortar shells dropped randomly in the fields. They were two hundred meters in from Route Nova, wondering about their next move, when two army Bradleys pulled up on the road. The Marines waved wildly, and the soldiers gestured back, signaling that the trac vehicles couldn’t cut across the ditches. The Marines would have to make it to the road.

“Can you walk?” Stanton asked Staysal.

“No, goddammit.”

Staysal would have been a load to carry, and Stanton and Dennis, both small men, were already exhausted.

“Well, that’s too fucking bad for you, because you’re too heavy to carry,” Stanton said. “We’ll leave you a vest to keep off the mortars.”

“Fuck you, stand me up.”

With Stanton and Dennis propping him up, Staysal limped and hobbled across the lumpy fields, breathing hoarsely through a punctured lung, blood pouring from his shoulder and back.

Colonel Connor was standing beside the Bradleys. He had monitored the fight on the radio, and as he had done with Joker 3-1, had brought forward a doctor and an armored ambulance. Staysal was properly bandaged and the medics moved on to tend to two other wounded.

With Staysal attended to, Stanton was eager to rejoin the fight. It was approaching two in the afternoon. In the past two hours, the sniper team had seen more than a dozen insurgents ducking and dodging over the course of the four-hour engagement. They had shot perhaps three or four. The Iraqi fighters weren’t bent on suicide; they were employing sound hit-and-run guerrilla tactics.

Seeing the two about to strike out on their own to find the other Marines, Connor offered help. “You’re a little short-handed,” he said. “Want a few more shooters?”

“I’d appreciate it, sir,” Stanton said.

Connor walked to his command vehicle, radioed the 1st Battalion of the 34th Infantry to block the roads leading out of Sofia, and told the three soldiers in the back of the Bradley to join Stanton.

His command sergeant major, Riling, shook his head. “They’re raw green, sir,” he said.

“So?”

“We should go along.”

The sergeant major and the colonel told the recruits to follow them and got on line next to Stanton. They advanced cautiously, killing one Iraqi before coming under sniper fire from some distant houses. They moved by bounds to close on the houses, and by then the firing had ceased. Stanton led the stack into the first house and found nothing. It was the soldiers’ turn at the next house.

“Go in as a three-stack,” Connor said.

The three soldiers looked blankly at him. Fresh out of infantry school, it was their first day in country.

“You want me to show you how?”

“Yes, sir. If you would.”

Connor guessed the young private would quickly make corporal. The colonel went in first, followed by the sergeant major. As usual, no armed insurgent was in the house and the occupants knew nothing. When Stanton pointed to blood in the dirt of the courtyard behind the house, the occupants repeated that they had seen nothing.

Head Hunter 2’s fight at the Tank Graveyard had come to an end. The insurgents had melted away, becoming unarmed civilians in a suburb filled with civilians.

_____

Upon hearing that Head Hunter 2 was engaged, LtCol Kennedy had ordered Weapons Company to assist. The company commander, Capt Weiler, assembled Mobile Assault Platoon 3, commanded by First Lieutenant John Stephens, and set out from Hurricane Point. In six vehicles the thirty Marines drove pell-mell east up a narrow road lined with one-story shops and an occasional parked car or truck. Rocks the size of soccer balls were scattered across the road, but the Humvees easily dodged among them. With Iraqi men wandering in and out of shops along the road, 1/Lt Stephens didn’t think the flimsy rock barricades were meant to trigger an ambush.

Then they were hit by a sustained burst of fire from a field about 150 meters to their right. The bullets passed high overhead but could easily have killed the men in the shops, who had known the ambushers were lying in wait and hadn’t taken cover. The Marines wheeled their Humvees left and right off the road in a herringbone pattern and jumped out, looking for targets. A moment before there had been a dozen vehicles on the road. Now most traffic had stopped. Off to the right a bongo truck was bouncing over the ruts in the field. The Marines let it go, giving the driver the benefit of the doubt that he had not dropped off the insurgents who were firing at them.

Stephens watched as a ten-year-old boy with a lighted torch ran by him, shoved the flames into a pool of black fuel, and proudly ran back inside a shop. The fuel burned with a low flame, throwing off stifling black smoke. A man in a black dishdasha and red-checked kaffiyeh ran out of an alley with an RPG on his shoulder and fired a rocket that went skipping down the street. In a minute it was raining RPG rockets. Some were arcing in like mortars, exploding in the maze of overhead telephone wires. Others were skidding and sizzling through the dirt as though someone were skipping rocks. One bounced up and caught in the cattle catcher of an open-back Humvee just as another burst alongside in a swirl of black smoke. Shaken but unhurt, the driver pulled up closer to the next Humvee in line.

Stephens, deciding the stones in the road and the smoky fire were target reference points for the RPGs and machine guns, moved his platoon farther up the road and watched as the insurgents continued to fire into the smoke. The road was a mess of burning oil slicks, black smoke, and Humvees snarled amid civilian cars. Shadowy gunmen and bulky Marines were firing in all directions. Staff Sergeant Patrick Coleman burst into a house and found five men with AKs hiding under the stairs with women and children. Unsure whether they were insurgents or homeowners, he flex-cuffed the men. As he herded them toward a Humvee, he skirted around a pool of blood, where a severed foot protruded from a sandal.

Rounds were snapping steadily, and taxis and motorcycles were dropping off more fighters. Stephens watched as two ambulances slowed down and men hopped out and ran down an alley. He was fairly certain they were insurgents catching a ride to the battle, but he chose not to shoot the ambulances.

Captain Weiler didn’t want the Marines to become so engaged that they couldn’t get to Head Hunter. Trying to gauge the extent of the ambush, Weiler kicked in the door to a house and dashed up to the roof to gain an overview and figure out how to get out of the area.

Corporal Luis Perez, his radio operator, followed Weiler and handed him the handset to talk with Kennedy. “Head Hunter’s been reinforced,” Kennedy said. “Your mission is to kick the shit out of any enemy encountered. Keep pushing east. This one’s big, very big.”

Weiler called back for another platoon to come forward, while 1/Lt Stephens pushed forward. The Marines, catching only passing glimpses of the shooters, were attacking by fire team rushes in the direction of the heaviest fire. They ran by an old woman baking bread in an outdoor oven, oblivious to the chaos, and broke into the courtyard of a mosque where there was a stack of wooden coffins. A dark blue BMW had pulled to a halt up the road, and four men, without weapons, hopped out and ran into an alley. Within seconds, rounds were coming from the alley. Minutes later a white and orange taxi pulled up. A Marine fired an AT-4 rocket that rocked the small car, sending thick smoke billowing from the hood. A passenger stumbled out a rear door, spilling ammunition onto the road. A man on a motorcycle sped out of an alley behind the smoking car, firing an AK with one hand. He was greeted by a fusillade, dropped his weapon, kept his balance, and swerved down the street, the bike on fire.

“That’s so cool,” Sergeant Shane Nylin said.

RPG rockets were whizzing across the road, hitting telephone poles and shaking loose hot wires that snapped and danced in showers of sparks among the parked cars. A man in a running suit dashed across the street and tripped over a live wire. He rolled and thrashed about, sparks sizzling around him, then got up and staggered away. The Marines broke into several houses, confronting silent women, crying children, and grim-faced men who said they knew nothing. It was like fighting a swarm of mosquitoes. Within an hour the Marines had flex-cuffed sixty men and Weiler knew they’d soon have hundreds, with no proof any had fired a weapon. The Marines lacked chemical test kits for determining the residue of gunpowder.

“Cut ’em loose unless you catch ’em with a weapon,” Weiler said.