No True Glory (17 page)

Lieutenant David Dobb—call sign Rainmaker—and his platoon drove up and joined the fight. There were now sixty Marines scrambling to engage the elusive enemy. A taxicab emerged from a side street, the occupants firing out the windows. In seconds the car was riddled; one man escaped and staggered off. A man popped out from behind a truck firing an AK-47. He was hit, dropped his rifle, and ducked back. Two men with AKs ran across the road and tried to climb over a wall—neither made it. The Marines pumped steady fire into a field next to the road where they had pinned down two men in black dishdashas. Suddenly both leaped up and, exhibiting world-class speed, ran away unharmed.

The insurgents didn’t seem to care where they were shooting, as long as they were firing their weapons. The machine-gun fire was too high, and there was no pattern to the RPG rockets. Staff Sergeant Coleman, a huge man, was hit in the face with light shrapnel. Like a ferocious pirate, he rushed around, blood dripping down his chin, roaring at his Marines to “kill any fucker who shoots at you.” His Marines laughed and urged him on.

A near miss forced Weiler to duck inside a courtyard, where he found four Iraqi police in their blue shirts hiding behind a wall. They invited him to hide with them; he invited them to join the fight. They didn’t appear to have weapons, but as he stepped back out into the street, he wondered whose side they were on.

Several rockets were fired from the courtyard of a small mosque with a graceful blue-hued dome. A Marine on a nearby roof said he was positive there was a man in the minaret, shouting down instructions to the RPG crews. Weiler wasn’t authorized to take down the minaret, but the wall surrounding the minaret was fair game. Dobb called up a Humvee with an antitank TOW missile and blew out a section of the wall, sending body parts high into the air.

Under sporadic fire, Stephens directed a rush over the front wall of an attractive, well-kept house with expensive windows and fragile dome-shaped arches. Inside the courtyard a blond camel was calmly nibbling at the grass. An old man introduced himself as a sheikh. Stephens flex-cuffed him and led him away as several women rushed down the driveway shrieking and screaming, certain he was going to be killed.

The fight went on for two hours. Nylin saw about fifteen insurgents, one here and two there. No other Marine saw more than six in total. The insurgents knew how to find concealment along the roads, in the palm groves, and among the houses and alleys. When they were in the open, the Marines had to be quick to get off a shot, and most snapshots missed. Sergeant Jeremiah Randle fired at a man in a gray dishdasha about a hundred meters away who ran into the middle of the street with his AK, danced a little jig mocking Randle, and then ran back to cover. A few minutes later the man repeated his dance act, and again Randle missed. When two more tried their luck, Randle found the range with his grenade launcher and knocked one of them down.

As the fight petered out, Weiler hopped up onto a small wall, raised his rifle, and began yelling, “Come on, you bastards! We’re here, we’re here! Is that all you got?”

Thereafter Weiler was stuck with hearing his men murmur
We’re here, we’re here
whenever he called a staff meeting.

When MAP 3 reached Head Hunter 2, it was midafternoon. First Lieutenant Valdez and Col Connor had the situation under control, and the battle had shifted to the east.

_____

When the Head Hunter fight broke out, Capt Royer had sent out patrols to cover the flanks. Shortly after noon a squad came under fire to the east near “the arches,” an Iraqi National Guard barracks that had been mortared and blown up before it was completed. Royer set out for the arches with two platoons, commanded by Second Lieutenant John Wroblewski and Second Lieutenant Tom Cogan. Three kilometers down the road, they linked up with the patrol that had taken light fire and spread out to search dozens of houses. Cogan led a squad on foot across a series of irrigation ditches to check out the sound of firing to the north. A few hundred meters away another squad with Royer had also moved off the road.

Cogan’s unit was coming under fire from rooftops several hundred meters away, and he found the fight frustrating. The Marines would advance by bounds. When they closed on a house, men in dishdashas or long pants would come out of nowhere and walk away. They had no weapons or military clothing. A few minutes later bullets would fly overhead from another house or palm grove hundreds of meters away.

Half a kilometer away Royer and a separate squad were finding the same pattern. They would take fire, advance by bounds, and search a house where frightened children cried and unarmed, sullen men denied knowing anything. They would emerge from the house and take fire from another location.

When Royer’s radioman told him that another patrol from Echo Company was in a heavy firefight several clicks to the north, Royer decided to pull all the squads together, get back in the vehicles, and move north.

The original plan had been for 2/Lt Wroblewski to move all the vehicles forward to a checkpoint, a kilometer northeast. Marines on foot with Royer and Cogan would cut across the fields and meet the vehicles there. Wroblewski had just started the vehicles rolling to the checkpoint when Royer radioed and waved to him to stop. Cogan did the same thing. As he went around a corner and out of Royer’s sight, Wroblewski slowed down, trying to listen to the radio over the noise of the engine. While most of the other vehicles stopped behind him, two highbacks—Humvees with benches for troops to sit in the rear—swung around Wroblewski and kept going toward the checkpoint.

In front of the two highbacks the road sloped upward and joined another road at a right angle. The two roads formed a T, and the Marines proceeded up the long stem. At the top a row of dingy single-story shops crowded each side of the road; lying flat on the roofs behind low cement walls were a dozen or more insurgents. A grove of palm trees and shrubs to the side concealed a heavy machine gun.

The lead highback had a mounted machine gun but no armor. The insurgents waited until the highback was almost on top of the hidden machine gun before opening up from three sides, catching the vehicle in a fusillade of plunging fire. The windshield and tires were peppered; the driver died immediately and the truck rolled to a stop. For a few seconds the Marines futilely returned fire, with Private First Class Ryan Jerabek swinging the machine gun in all directions and cutting down two Iraqis before being killed.

The tailgate was down, and Lance Corporal Deshon Otey rolled out and sprinted behind a low wall. Lance Corporal Travis Layfield and the corpsman Hospitalman 3rd Class Fernando Mendezaceves also flopped out and ran into the nearest shop, while the attackers on the roof above them fired down. Mendezaceves was killed inside the shop. Layfield staggered out the back door and succumbed to his wounds. The other Marines never got out of the truck. Their attackers were too close, firing point-blank on them from the roofs and sides, while the machine gun to the front shredded the cab of the Humvee. Big, muscular Staff Sergeant Allan Walker and four other Marines quickly died.

While the ambushers were pouring their fire into Walker’s vehicle, the Humvee behind Walker jerked to a stop and the Marines piled out and dashed into a small storehouse. In seconds, bullets were chipping at the thick cement walls. The building was set back from the road, unattached to the row of shops occupied by the ambushers. The seven Marines inside were trapped, but the insurgents weren’t about to close on them across open ground.

Seeing his chance, Otey leaped up and sprinted for the open door as the Marines shouted “Run! Run!” Otey dove through the door and lay panting on the dirt floor, patting himself on his armored vest, amazed that not one of the bullets zipping by him had even grazed him. The Marines, led by Corporal Marcus Waechter, slammed shut the door, took up posts on either side of the one tiny window, and waited for the ground assault.

When the ambush was sprung, Walker’s truck and Waechter’s Humvee were about three hundred meters in front of Wroblewski. The insurgents on the roofs could see Wroblewski’s Humvee, and soon a machine gun was hammering away and rocket-propelled grenades were ricocheting off irrigation ditches. While his crew sought cover in the ditches, Wroblewski knelt beside the passenger door, calling on the radio. A bullet smashed into the side of his face, and he went down. Firing from a dozen roofs the insurgents raked the edges of the ditches where Wroblewski’s crew had taken cover. Corporal Ken Smith, the acting platoon sergeant, lay facedown, watching the bullets churn up the dust on the road.

“Get some fire down range!” he yelled to the Marines scattered behind him. “Suppress! Suppress!”

One by one the Marines began squeezing off bursts, short ones at first, then longer ones. Soon the ambush turned into a firefight—as many rounds were going out as coming in. No one could stand erect on that bullet-swept road and live. Smith listened to the rounds cracking and snapping past. At eye level he was looking into Wroblewski’s bloody face, ten meters away. The lieutenant was holding the handset, still trying to talk on the radio.

“Ah, shit,” Smith said. “Fuck it, I’m going out. Fire, you sons of bitches, give me fire!”

The Marines ripped through magazines in long bursts as Smith gathered himself and dashed out, bullets kicking up dirt around him. In a few frantic strides he reached Wroblewski, gathered him up like a sack of clothes, and pulled him back to the safety of the ditch. A corpsman crawled to the lieutenant and applied pressure bandages to his neck and jaw. Two army Bradley fighting vehicles, their hatches closed, came up behind the beleaguered Marines and drove straight on toward Walker’s shattered Humvee, their tracs kicking up clouds of dust. A few minutes later one returned, and the driver stuck his head out of the hatch.

“You’ve got wounded up ahead around the bend!” he yelled at Smith. “We’ve gotta haul ass to another mission.”

With that, he closed the hatch and drove back up the road, firing the 25mm chain gun in short spurts. Corporal Smith was on his own. With 2/Lt Wroblewski down, the next senior person was SSgt Walker, and he was up ahead where the Bradley driver said there were wounded Marines. Smith knew he had to get this mess straightened out. He shouted orders for the squad leaders to spread their men out. Then, drawing a deep breath, he rushed out a second time to scoop up the radio so that he could contact his company commander. Again bullets struck the road around him. Smith sprawled back into the ditch and pressed the handset.

“Lieutenant Ski’s down hard,” he told Royer. “I’m sending him back. The Bradley said we have wounded up ahead. Do you want me to push up?”

Royer was as much in the dark as Smith. He had seen the Bradleys rush past and assumed they were part of the brigade’s QRF. But he hadn’t been able to raise them on his radio, and no one had told him anything about wounded Marines to the front.

“Go, go, get on up there,” Royer said. “I’ll cover your north flank. Don’t wait on me.”

Smith called forward a Humvee and gently placed Wroblewski inside. The Humvee raced back to the casualty collection point at the Combat Outpost, a ten-minute drive. At the outpost Dr. Kenneth Son and the corpsmen had already been busy. Earlier two Abrams tanks had come screaming in, with no advance warning, throwing up vast clouds of dust and severing the electric cables running to the main generator, cutting off all power.

“They’re dying, they’re dying!” screamed a soldier standing upright in the turret of the first tank, pointing to the other tank.

The navy corpsmen swarmed on board the second tank and from the blood-soaked compartment pulled out one soldier with his right hand and wrist missing and another with his jaw dislocated and his right leg dangling at the knee by a few tendons, blood gushing everywhere. While the Blackhawk medical helicopters were en route, the medical crew applied tourniquets, transfusions, and oxygen bags. On the way to the makeshift helipad, the medics shielded the two wounded from the dust raised by the blades of the medevac birds. Inside fifteen minutes they were on their way to a hospital.

When Wroblewski was brought in, the medical crew was ready. He was conscious, and though his pulse was weak and his blood pressure low, they thought he was going to make it when they put him on the Blackhawk, but Wroblewski succumbed on the way to the hospital.

Back in the field near the ambush site, 2/Lt Cogan knew Wroblewski had been taken to the rear, but he didn’t know how badly his platoon sergeant, Walker, and the others had been hit. Cogan was in his own fight, pinned down by a machine gun firing from a house only fifty meters off the road.

“I need suppressing fire,” Cogan radioed to Smith. “I’ll mark target. Watch my tracers.”

Seeing Cogan’s tracers bouncing off a nearby house, Smith directed a seven-ton truck to pull up and fire its Mark 19. The rounds punched some holes but didn’t do much damage.

“Never mind,” Cogan radioed to Smith. “I’ll take care of it. You punch up to Walker’s pos.”

The Bradley crew had indicated that the wounded Marines were to the northeast. But Smith’s force was being hit by machine-gun fire from the east. The twenty-year-old corporal wasn’t going to advance with his flank exposed. Within shouting range he had eighteen men from Weapons, 2nd and 3rd Platoons. It didn’t matter what unit they were from; as the acting platoon sergeant, he had the authority and Royer had given him the mission.

Smith led them east, moving by bounds, pinching in on a house about four hundred meters away thought to be the source of the automatic fire. But it was hard to tell. The weapon was set back inside a window, not showing any muzzle flashes, and the noise of outgoing and incoming fire was constant. Smith’s men ran from one low wall to another, skirting open fields, searching each house they passed so as not to leave an enemy in their rear.

Not that they had any idea who the enemy were. Everyone was in civilian clothes. Some of the dead bodies they passed had on two sets of civilian clothes, dirty shirts and pants, some in flip-flops, most in sneakers. Inside the houses some women said
ali babas
had come that morning and told them to stay inside, promising that many Americans were going to die. These
ali babas
were “outsiders” with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces.