No True Glory (44 page)

At around noon Ackerman’s platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Michael Cauthon, and Sergeant Corey Menard were crouching near a window behind a machine gun trying to get a fix on a persistent sniper when a bullet zinged off Menard’s helmet. Cauthon pushed him out of the way and was struck in the helmet by the next bullet. Cauthon went down as though hit with a hammer, then crawled up on his knees and shook his head.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Just a little woozy.”

When he tried to stand, the room swirled about, and he had to sit down. The next bullet struck the machine-gunner, Lance Corporal Matthew Brown, in his right thigh, nicking the femoral artery and causing profuse bleeding. Cauthon provided covering fire while Brown was pulled back to cover. When he tried to stand, he had no feeling in his arms or legs.

“You’re gonna have to help me to a firing pos, Lieutenant,” he said.

“No way. You’re getting out of here with Brown,” Ackerman said.

The platoon commander called for a medevac and the company first sergeant came forward with an amtrac, supported by Humvees with Mark 19s. The insurgents concentrated their RPG fire on the amtrac, setting it on fire but not crippling it. Tanks swung up to protect the amtrac while Ackerman put his wounded in the Humvees. The first sergeant took out seven wounded.

After the casualties were evacuated, Cunningham crossed Highway 10 with the company and attacked south. A six-lane avenue with a grass median, called Phase Line Henry, ran north-south along Cunningham’s west flank. He radioed Ackerman to move out and cover the east flank. Ackerman stuck his head out the front door and flinched. From the south an RPK machine gun was beating a tattoo on the outside of the building. Anyone venturing onto the street wouldn’t last five seconds. Needing his flank protected, Cunningham was yelling over the radio at his platoon commander to get moving.

“I got you covered, Lieutenant. We’ll go out the back,” Corporal Luke Davy said.

Davy, the leader of the engineer team, packed a wad of C-4 against the back wall and blew a large hole through the cement.

“That should be big enough,” he said, giving Ackerman his patented toothless grin. Davy had no front teeth, and months earlier his false teeth had been lost in a fire.

The Marines crawled out the hole, waited for two tanks to take the lead, and headed south. The insurgents were running down the side alleys, and when they ducked into a building, Ackerman would pick up the phone hooked to the back of the tank and request a shot. When a tank fired, Marines were supposed to stay over sixty meters to the rear, with fingers in both ears. On the narrow streets that wasn’t possible. If the Marines knew the shot was coming, they’d bend away, crouch, cup their ears, and brace for the shock. When the 120mm gun went off, rocking all sixty tons of the tank and raising clouds of dust, the shock wave would batter the Marines. The water in their bodies vibrated, and the blood dropped from their heads to their toes, as if they were trapped in an elevator whose cables had snapped. Their lungs felt like they were being sucked from their chests, and their hearts seemed to expand. They stood wobbly-kneed in the dust, not able to hear a thing, not wanting to feel what it was like on the receiving end.

The insurgents bailed out of the buildings in front of the tanks and ran up the narrow alleys between the rows of buildings. Behind the tanks and the platoon came the Humvees hauling water and ammo. As they passed the alleyways, the gunners were opening up, frantically yelling “Stop! Stop! I got targets!” Walking and trotting northward up the alleys were RPG teams and men with AKs in their hands. Many had green ammo pouches slung across their chests. As the Mark 19s opened up, they hammered on gate locks and climbed over the walls to escape. The Humvees leapfrogged each other, each driver trying to claim an open space looking down an alley.

The infantry on the flanks and the insurgents were colliding in dozens of five-second encounters, throwing grenades, shooting at rooftops, and ducking around courtyard walls. RPG and SMAW rockets were whizzing back and forth, the explosions hurling small shards of cement at a hundred miles an hour.

After advancing two blocks, Ackerman had to send the second squad forward to take over for the first squad, which had seven injured. Reaching the next intersection, Ackerman heard a garbled radio transmission from Cunningham. “Go firm!” Cunningham shouted. “Get your people off the streets! Let them come to us!”

Ackerman screamed at his men. No response. So deafening was the roar of the M16s, AKs, machine guns, tanks, mortars, RPGs, and SMAWs that Ackerman couldn’t hear his own shouts. He ran out into the street, waving his arms like a crazy man, then sprinted into a doorway, arms still above his head, hoping his platoon would follow to protect their suddenly crazed leader. They did. As one fire team after another piled into the building, Ackerman told them to stay inside.

A few minutes later Cunningham radioed again, telling them to pull back to a three-story house to give the tanks room to work. After two squads made it across, the insurgents concentrated all their fire on the intersection, pinning down the second squad. Lance Corporal William Long, who had fought in Fallujah in April with 3/4 and had volunteered to extend, had taken over after the squad leader had been wounded. Insurgents had hopped onto the roof of the building and were moving around on the second floor.

“We gotta get out of here,” Long radioed to Ackerman.

Across the street, two Iraqi Army machine-gun teams that had been moving behind the Marines were hunkered down in the three-story house. Sergeant Garret Barton, who was teaching himself to speak Arabic, led the Iraqis onto the roof. From there they placed beating fire on the insurgents circling Long’s building.

Inside, Long posted himself at the foot of the stairs, firing up and driving the insurgents back. Then the Marines ducked out and ran across the street under the protective machine-gun fire.

Ackerman brought up a Marine machine-gun crew to reinforce Barton, and soon all three guns were hammering away. The insurgents responded by climbing to adjoining roofs and lobbing RPGs. Too exposed, Akerman ordered everyone off the roof while he stayed to call in fires.

An argument broke out. “It’s my machine gun, sir,” Cpl Bajarano said. “I can do more damage than you can. You go downstairs, and I’ll stay here.”

The Iraqis, who had accepted Barton as their leader, refused to obey Ackerman.

“Sir, you can’t drag my gun crews out of here,” Barton said. “We got here first. Benjy goes, not us.”

“I’m tired of this macho bullshit,” Ackerman said. “We all get under cover—now.”

They pulled off the roof and set up firing posts on the floor below. For the next hour the three machine guns provided streams of red tracers to direct the fires of the tanks. As darkness fell and the firing dropped off, the 1st Platoon slumped over their weapons in exhaustion, too tired to trudge half a block to the seven-ton carrying their gear. During the twelve-hour battle the platoon corpsman, Hospitalman 3rd Class Jordan Holtschulte, had treated twenty-three Marines for wounds and heat exhaustion. While eight had to be evacuated to the States, none had died.

After talking with Capt Cunningham, LtCol Brandl changed the tactical pattern of his battalion. Instead of attacking in the morning, 1/8 would move forward at night when the insurgents were scattered in their safe houses. Brandl told Alpha Company to get some rest before resuming the attack at three the next morning.

On November 11 the 1st Platoon of Alpha Company 1/8 had begun the day with forty-six Marines and ended with twenty-one.

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While Battalion 1/8 was taking a rest, to the north Battalion 3/5 had finished another day of squeegee tactics and formed into defensive lines. It was the best time of the day, when the squads unloaded their packs from the seven-tons, straightened out the night’s guard duties, scrounged cushions to sleep on, boiled water for coffee, and ate MREs while swapping tales of the day about near misses, wild jihadists, and feral animals. Abandoned cats and dogs, starved for weeks, were eating the corpses, and everyone had a story of a kitten with a human eyeball in its mouth and or a cat gnawing on the cheek of a dead insurgent.

Around midnight, on the roof where Kilo Company had set up its command post, those not on watch were sacked out in their sleeping bags when a man ran out of the stairwell and bumped into a Marine, almost knocking him over.

“Dammit, watch where you’re going!”

The man disappeared in the dark as the company’s translator ran up the stairs shouting, “Irahabin! Irahabin!” From the dark came a wild burst of firing. The startled Marines rolled out of their bags, clicked off their safeties, formed a skirmish line, and slowly walked across the roof, ready to fire. Nothing happened. They reached the edge of the building and peeked over. Again, nothing—no ladder, no rope, no secret exit. They searched for an hour, poking into the smallest crannies. There was no place he could be hiding. The man had disappeared.

No one wanted to go to sleep with a wild jihadist lurking in their midst. The only structures on the roof were a covered cistern and a square tank filled with heating oil. Standing next to the tank, a Marine heard a slight metallic tap. As he looked at the surface of the oil, a man’s nostrils and closed eyes appeared. The man drew in a long breath and submerged. Two Marines aimed in, while the others drew back to be out of the line of fire. When the man bobbed back up, they shot him and returned to their sleeping bags.

_____

On the morning of November 12, Col Michael Shupp, commanding RCT 1, sent Battalion 3/1 south across Highway 10 to the west of Battalion 1/8. The dividing line between the two battalions was the avenue called Phase Line Henry. Kilo Company, led by Captain Timothy Jent, took the lead heading down Henry. Jent’s Marines were immediately swarmed by gangs of insurgents rushing out of side alleys and firing from the windows of dozens of buildings. Loath to direct the tank guns to the east where Battalion 1/8 was, Jent employed Mark 19s and machine guns, advancing at a steady pace with two platoons up and one back.

The 3rd Platoon was to guard the rear and blow the caches of IEDs, mortar shells, and small-arms ammunition found on every block. This was the second day Marines had attacked south down Phase Line Henry, and the insurgents were adapting. They tried to stay out of the line of fire of the lead platoons and run around the flanks to shoot from the rear.

Hearing the heavy fighting to their front, Lieutenant Jesse Grapes, the 3rd Platoon commander, gathered his squad leaders inside a blown-up retail store to discuss their attack. “There’s no point getting jammed behind Second Platoon,” Grapes said. “We don’t want to be stuck on the road with no fields of fire or room to maneuver.”

Corporal Robert Mitchell and Sergeant Christopher Pruitt, who had been with the platoon for two years, argued to place squads on both sides of the street to be able to shoot in all directions. At first, Grapes was not convinced. With sniper fire pinging against the storefront, they peeked around the corner and watched the other platoons fighting farther to the south on Henry.

“We had a hard time controlling two squads yesterday,” Grapes said.

“We were bunched up then,” Pruitt said. “Henry’s large enough to work both sides.”

“Okay, two squads up,” Grapes said, “one back with our Humvees for rear security and medevac.”

A bullet struck the doorway a few feet over Grapes’s head, and he ducked back. A few seconds later a second round hit in the same place. Pruitt pointed to a second-story barred window in a sturdy, gray concrete home about a hundred meters away.

“Get a rocket in there!”

Sergeant Christopher Heflin and Private First Class Christopher Davis grabbed an AT-4 rocket and lay down behind some rubble. Grapes snapped off a string of red tracers to mark the target, and Davis put the rocket right through the window.

A Bradley fighting vehicle from Battalion 2-7 was passing by, saw the explosion, and pulled over. “Want it hosed?” the driver yelled to Heflin.

“We’d appreciate it,” Heflin said.

The Bradley’s 25mm chain gun proceeded to pour rounds through every window in the building.

“I think that does it,” the driver said as he drove off.

Many of the houses enclosed the rooftop entry to the stairs in a cement box that made an excellent sniper post. Under fire from the cement shack on another house, Grapes called up the TOW and Javelin Humvees that were supporting his platoon. The TOW was a wire-guided sixty-pound warhead that could knock a huge hole in any building. But it required a direct shot and, with all the telephone wires dangling at wild angles, had to be employed with caution lest it explode or go off course.

“It’s that house with the tall stack,” Grapes said, pointing.

The gunner adjusted the thermal sight on the Javelin, snapped a picture of the target, and transferred it to the warhead. Seconds later he fired the Javelin. The missile shot straight up in the air, curled over, and plummeted straight down, obliterating the rooftop box.

Casualty reports were flooding Kilo Company’s radio frequency. The 1st and 2nd Platoons had taken close to twenty casualties, including one KIA. From their position, 3rd Platoon watched the arcs and explosions of RPGs down the street. Small-arms fire was tearing the air in all directions.

“Third herd, close it up,” Jent radioed to Grapes. “Cover my rear.”

With six tanks in support, the path of Kilo Company was marked by tumbledown walls, splintered telephone poles, demolished cars, and sagging apartment buildings. Slugging its way down Henry in four hours, Kilo fired 160 TOW rockets and 180 main tank rounds into walls and through windows at the firing positions of the insurgents, following up with air strikes whenever resistance stiffened. Fixed-wing air circled in a cloverleaf formation called a keyhole, enabling four air strikes to be controlled simultaneously inside the city. Kilo’s forward air controller was Captain David Smay, an F-18 pilot with the call sign Porkchop. The F-18 pilots waiting in the stack knew Porkchop personally and on his command had dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs two hundred meters in front of the lead platoon. Fires smoldered in the shattered buildings, the mounds of shattered concrete and cement preventing the flames from spreading. Columns of black smoke marked the progress of Kilo.