Shock Factor (23 page)

The killing of four American Blackwater contractors at a bridge on the outskirts of Fallujah on March 31, 2004, sparked the uprising. Within days, almost every province in Iraq seethed with violence and rebellion. The Coalition was caught completely by surprise, especially in the south where the Shia were considered to be pro-occupation.

All across southern Iraq, Shia militias and insurgent groups struck at the Americans and nascent Iraqi security forces. Entire towns and cities fell into their hands. The militias, including the notorious Mahdi Militia, used their success to terrorize the local populations as they enforced their radical brand of Islam. Shop owners selling Western DVDs were told to shutter their doors. Those who didn't were dragged into the streets of Basra and Najaf to be beaten or murdered. Women who did not cover themselves completely when they went outdoors were shot or beaten—or worse. Couples who dared display affection to each other in public were set upon by the militias, pummeled and left bleeding in the streets as examples.

The British and American forces in the south were spread very thin. Nobody had expected this sudden onslaught, and the majority of the Coalition's fighting power had been deployed in Baghdad or Al Anbar Province. This sudden development threatened the supply lines to Kuwait, and in many places the highways the logistical convoys used were overrun and fortified by the Shia insurgents.

The U.S. had to switch gears. The offensive began just as the first wave of troops were rotating home in what was one of the military's largest relief in place operations ever. Tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines who had been trying to establish order for the past year suddenly found themselves forced to call their families and tell them they would not be home after all. The 1st Armored Division was among the first units to have their deployment extended. Instead of going back to Kuwait, then home, the tankers and mech infantry were thrown into a counteroffensive in the south, supported by the freshly arrived 1st Infantry Division.

As the battle raged from Baghdad to the Kuwait border, the Marines in Al Anbar Province bore the brunt of the Sunni half of the national uprising. The press focused on Fallujah, where the Marines launched an assault into the city to clear the rebels out. Breathless reporters recounted street fights raging throughout Fallujah, but they ignored the broader scope and context of what soon became a transformative moment in the history of the Iraq War.

The battle for Fallujah soon got mired in politics made worse by intervention and micromanaging from Washington. Elsewhere, the Sunni insurgents managed to cut the main supply route from Baghdad through Anbar Province in at least two places. Those bold moves forced the Marines to react; they pulled troops out of other areas and cleared the highway. In Ramadi, the insurgents launched a series of coordinated attacks that rocked the Marines and Army units there. Everywhere, the Americans were reacting to the enemy. The Sunnis held the strategic initiative.

On the western edge of Al Anbar Province stood the city of Husaybah. Long an outlaw stronghold during the Saddam regime, it was sort of Iraq's version of the Mos Eisley Space Port from the first Star Wars movie. When Obi Wan told Luke, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy…” he could have been referring to this last outpost on the Syrian border. Remote, far from centers of authority, Husaybah was Iraq's lawless Wild West.

The place functioned on greed, corruption, and smuggling. The border crossing was the city's main source of revenue. Everything from oil to booze to weapons came across the frontier there, and the Iraqi security forces manning the checkpoints simply took their cut and looked the other way.

When the insurgency gained traction through the fall of 2003, Husaybah became one of the key resupply routes for the Sunni rebels. Syria was to Al Anbar as Pakistan was to the Taliban in Afghanistan—a safe zone from which to shuttle men, materiel, and weapons into the fight.

Choking off this supply network became the task of 3/7 Marines, starting in February 2004. But the Americans quickly discovered they had been given an impossible task. Every day, thousands of vehicles crossed the border at Husaybah, and checking them all was simply beyond the capabilities of the battalion. They didn't have the men or the resources to do it, and the Iraqi frontier guards could not be trusted. Plus, the smugglers and criminals who had been making these runs for years, and knew how to hide stuff, were now working for the insurgents. Each day, hundreds of semitrucks filled with fruit or other perishables lined up to cross the frontier. Hidden deep within their beds would be weapons, ammunition, and even young foreign volunteers eager to join the Jihad. Short of emptying each truck and searching it from the frame up, there was no way to fully halt the flow.

And it was perilous duty. Husaybah was full of armed criminals, Sunni rebels, and a growing kernel of al-Qaida operatives just securing a foothold in this part of the country. On April 14, 2004, an Iraqi pickup truck was stopped by a fire team of 3/7 Marines. Corporal Jason Dunham approached the driver, who lunged at him when his car door was opened. Dunham punched and kicked the man, trying to subdue him. As he did, the driver activated a grenade. Dunham saw it fall to the ground next to his feet and knew that it would kill or wound two of his fellow Marines standing nearby. He let go of the driver, pulled his helmet off and used it to cover the grenade. Then he fell atop it to further shield his brothers from its blast.

It exploded and mortally wounded Jason Dunham, who died several days later at a Stateside hospital. His comrades were unharmed by the blast, and as they recovered from the shock of it, they spotted the driver trying to run away. They killed him with rifle fire, then discovered his pickup truck had been full of weapons and ammunition. He'd been one of the mules smuggling for the insurgency.

Jason Dunham later received a posthumous Medal of Honor, the first Marine to be awarded one since the Vietnam War.

But not the last.

The smuggler Dunham's friends had killed turned out to be part of the logistical support for a new offensive the insurgents planned to unleash in Husaybah. For days, Sunni cells had been infiltrating Husaybah from Ramadi and Fallujah. More poured over the border by the truckload. Soon, they had at least three hundred well-armed and well-led fighters deployed around the city. What followed was one of the most intense, and unheralded, battles of the Iraq War.

APRIL 17, 2004
MORNING

Jason Delgado awoke with that slow burn of anger in his stomach. From day one on this second deployment, what he was seeing through his scope flew in the face of the assumptions being made by his chain of command. While the leadership thought there was only a scattering of criminals and Saddam loyalists hiding in the rabbit warren of streets and alleys in Husaybah, Jason sensed something else entirely was going down.

On their first mission in February, Jason and the other 3/7 snipers went out to overwatch an Iraqi police station from the local Ba'ath Party headquarters building. It was the tallest structure in the area, so it afforded a good view. Within minutes of arriving there, though, they took sustained small-arms fire and had to be extracted.

In the weeks that followed, Jason was the only sniper in the battalion taking shots. Whether his experience and training with 3/4 made him quicker to identify threats, or if the others were too concerned about a bad shoot, he didn't know. But they were clean kills against armed men actively threatening Coalition forces. Yet every time he pulled the trigger, his chain of command stuck him in a room and grilled him like he was a criminal. Combat was stressful enough; being hammered like this by his own people for doing his job was almost unbearable.

It didn't help that the sniper section of the scout platoon was undermanned. Instead of ten teams, they were lucky to field three with five men. Casualties over the past year and the demands on the Corps had left every battalion short-handed, so 3/7 was not unique in this regard. Still, the numbers game just added to the burden. They'd only been in country for about six weeks, and already the daily (and nightly) grind was taking its toll.

Jason and the scouts stayed at Al Qaim with the rest of 3/7's headquarters element for only a short time as the battalion settled into its new AO. The town sat about a mile from the Syrian border and the base was only a few minutes' driving time to Husaybah, where a hundred and fifty man company from the battalion had been forward deployed. A week after arriving, Jason and the rest of the snipers packed up and joined them.

*   *   *

That morning, outnumbering the local Marines two to one, the insurgents launched a full-scale assault in Husaybah.

In began with a baited ambush. They detonated an IED on the main road through town, not far from the Ba'ath Party headquarters building. The blast triggered an immediate reaction from Captain Richard Gannon's company. He and a platoon sortied from their outpost—and drove straight into an ambush. Machine guns, mortar fire, and AK-47s raked the platoon. The fighting spread from the street into the nearby buildings.

As it happened, a Marine Recon team had been on the top floor of the Ba'ath building. Now, they discovered the insurgents had taken over the bottom floor and used it as an ambush position against Captain Gannon's reaction force. The Recon guys crept downstairs, burst into the first floor and killed all the insurgents there.

*   *   *

In a nearby building, a squad of Marines ran into a die-hard group of insurgents. Fighting room to room, several Marines were killed. Others were wounded. The casualties piled up. Captain Gannon called for MEDEVAC and reinforcements. More men from his company flowed into the fight, but they were outnumbered and the enemy was well emplaced.

In the chaos of this point-blank urban firefight, Captain Gannon disappeared. For an hour nobody could raise him on the radio or locate him on the battlefield.

Gannon and several of his men had assaulted into a nearby building. It turned out to be full of well-equipped and determined insurgents. They wounded Captain Gannon and killed the other Marines as they fought room to room. As Captain Gannon lay helpless on the floor, the insurgents disarmed him. He was a student of military history, the son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, and a devoted patriot. But now, in this terrible moment, he alone faced a barbaric and merciless enemy, the likes of which Americans had not seen since the Pacific War.

The terrorists executed him with his own 9mm pistol. The same fate would later befall an Army company commander from Task Force 2/2 during the Second Battle of Fallujah later in the year.

At Al Qaim, the remaining scouts and all other available Marines piled into Humvees and raced toward Husaybah to offer their beleaguered brothers assistance. The scouts would sweep into the city from the south while the rest of the battalion struck the enemy from the west. Hopefully, the insurgents would be caught by surprise and trapped between the two elements.

Jason and the rest of the scouts approached a cluster of homes and businesses known as the “440” (there were four hundred forty structures in it). The place was basically a suburb of Husaybah, separated from the main portion of the city by a stretch of open terrain. The Marines dismounted in the desert between the two built-up areas and began to move toward the fighting on foot.

They hadn't gone far when something white fluttered on a rooftop. Jason brought his scope to his eye for a better look. A ten-year-old kid was up there, waving a stick with a white plastic sack attached to it. In previous patrols, Jason had seen other boys doing this as pigeons flew overhead and assumed the kids were just training their birds.

But not this time. There were no birds in the air around him.

Jason watched him for a long moment, considering his next move. His gut told him the kid was signaling the enemy. But what could he do? He couldn't put a bullet in a ten-year-old boy.

The Marines reached a set of railroad tracks. On the other side, a drainage ditch ran parallel with them. It looked like a natural defensive position, except for the heaps of trash strewn throughout its length. The stench boiling up from the ditch was vile, and clouds of flies boiled and buzzed over the mess.

Somebody said, “If the enemy is nearby, I bet they'll be in there.”

Jason looked around. The 440 was just to their left, the main part of the city ahead and to the right. From both flanks, an ambush could be executed, and the Marines would have a hard time just trying to figure out from where the shooting originated. They'd walked into a terrible tactical situation, and a feeling of dread welled in Jason.

An officer appeared next to him and said, “Scope that building and see what's going on.”

“On it, Sir.”

He checked the rooftop. The boy remained in full view, waving his makeshift flag.

That's it.

Calmly, Jason turned to the officer and said, “Maybe we should get into that ditch, Sir.”

The officer agreed and gave the order. The Marines began jumping down into the trench. The smell of rot and corruption was nearly overwhelming, and the men were both bitching and laughing about it at the same time.

*   *   *

That's when four machine guns opened fire on the Americans from multiple elevated positions. The fusillade of bullets chewed across the top lip of the drainage ditch as the Marines pressed themselves down as far as they could into the muck. A host of AK-47s unleashed a hail of rounds and added to the cacophony.

In seconds, the insurgent ambush pinned the scouts down. Totally defensive, they couldn't even raise their heads without drawing a crossfire that filled the air around them with cracking 7.62mm bullets.

Jason lay at the bottom of the ditch, listening to the four machine guns rip off burst after burst. The ditch was their salvation, but it also was their death trap. The absurdity of the situation suddenly overwhelmed him. He began to laugh.