War Stories (33 page)

The flight into the zone is another hair-raising adventure in rooftop terrain avoidance, and Maj. O'Neil drops the bird into a tight little intersection. My camera lens catches the litter-bearers, bending low, racing for the ramp of the bird—and Pennington's .50-caliber hammering at the second story of the building on the right side of the helicopter.

To our left front, the up gun on an AAV pumps a stream of high-explosive rounds into a building as O'Neil lifts off, carefully threading
both rotors between the wires that seem only inches from our blade tips.

Then, just as it seemed we were clear, the crack of AK-47 fire comes from a rooftop sniper. Invisible to the troops and armor on the street, the sniper empties his magazine as we fly by.

Bullets hitting the skin of a helicopter sound a lot like someone striking sheet metal with a ball-peen hammer. As we fly through the hail of fire, fuel spurts from the engine area and drains down over the tail ramp. Pennington's response, as he unleashes a burst of .50-caliber fire at the offending Iraqi or fedayeen, is, “Man, they shot my helicopter. Now I'm really pissed.”

From the cockpit, Maj. O'Neil, still unflappable, asks, “Everything okay back there?”

Pennington quickly checks with the two corpsmen who have continued attending the wounded as if nothing has happened. He reports, “No other casualties, but it looks like we've got a ruptured fuel line up top.”

O'Neil, apparently ignoring the fact that several people have just spent the last ten minutes trying to kill him, replies, “Okay, let's see if we can get some help for these wounded grunts before this thing quits on us.”

Most Marine grunts will tell you that the guys who fly helicopters are all a little crazy. First, according to the guys on the ground, the thing they drive around in the sky is sort of like a bumblebee, with a body that seems way too heavy for the little “wings.” Second, helicopters have far too many moving parts. Logic dictates that anything with that many pieces is likely to end up in pieces, along with the people it carries. Pilots and air crewmen like the Red Dragons of HMM-268 apparently don't think much of such criticism, since they jump at the chance to fly these ancient contraptions into harm's way, even though tooling around Camp Pendleton in them is dangerous enough.

When we land at the shock-trauma hospital back down Route 6,
we're still well within range of Iraqi artillery and rocket fire, but O'Neil says, “Let's shut her down and see how bad the damage is.”

Pennington is immediately on the ramp, bathed in jet fuel, looking for the rupture. When he finds where the bullet nicked the fuel line, he takes out his Leatherman tool, pinches the aluminum tube on either side of the rupture, and snips out the damaged length of metal pipe—about the diameter of a soda straw. He looks at it for a few seconds, climbs atop the helicopter, opens the forward rotor nacelle over the cockpit, and snips a length of tubing from the unused heater hidden inside. Climbing back down, he takes the piece of “pipe” he just extracted from the heater and a pair of clamps and repairs the damaged fuel line, all in less than ten minutes. After making sure that the clamps are as tight as he can get them, he puts on his helmet and says over the intercom, “Okay, Major, let's see if we've got this thing fixed. Would you start her up, sir?”

The engine screeches to life and we make an uneventful flight back to the RCT-5 CP. When we land to await the next cas-evac call, I ask Pennington where he had learned to make that repair, adding, “I can't imagine that what you did with that heater fuel line is in the Boeing tech manual.”

“No, it's not,” Pennington replies with a grin. “But years ago, when I was a corporal, a staff sergeant told a bunch of us youngsters, ‘If you ever need a length of fuel line in an emergency, the fuel line for the heater is the same as the ones for the engines.' Turns out he was right.”

Marine staff NCOs are said to be the repositories of all the wisdom the Corps has collected since 1775. It's moments like this that make me believe the axiom is true. But I didn't have long to ponder the mysteries of that extraordinary fraternity; Chief Barry now needs us to remove our gear from inside the helicopter. The corpsmen, using five-gallon cans full of water and bleach, are scrubbing the litters, troop seats, and floor. Everything has been soaked with Marine blood. By the
time they finish, the sand behind the helicopter is tinged red and there is a small mountain of bloody battle dressings, IV bags and tubes, latex gloves, morphine styrettes, and syringes, as well as boots and pieces of uniforms that the docs cut away while saving lives.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #26

      
With RCT-5 and HMM-268

      
Route 6, southeast of Baghdad

      
Friday, 4 April 2003

      
2200 Hours Local

By the end of the day we've evacuated more than three dozen Marine casualties. One of them was a staff sergeant who had walked aboard the helicopter while helping to carry another wounded Marine on a litter. We've been admonished not to show the faces of U.S. casualties, and so my camera catches only his right hand, wrapped in a blood-soaked battle dressing, as he sits down in one of the troop seats.

On the way to the Army shock-trauma hospital, I run out of videotape. We arrive at the hospital, and I help unload the litters so that the most grievously injured will be treated first. The corpsmen tell the “walking wounded” seated in the troop seats to wait. After the last litter case is off the bird, I turn to help the staff sergeant with the wounded hand and notice that he is nearly unconscious. As he tries to stand, I see he has been sitting in a pool of his own blood. I yell for one of the docs, who runs up and opens the staff sergeant's flak jacket. He's been gut shot—some of his intestines are bulging out through the wound. The doc yells, “Keep him awake!” and runs to get a litter team.

As we gently load him on the stretcher, I ask him, “Why didn't you say something?”

He says, “The other guys were hurt worse than I am.”

This is some of the stiffest fighting thus far in the campaign, but no one here has any doubt about the outcome. It's also clear that increasing numbers of foreign fedayeen are joining the fight. They've cut fire trenches at nearly every intersection, filled them with oil, lit them, and made movement very difficult and dangerous through streets now nearly obscured by thick, black clouds of acrid, choking smoke.

As 2nd Tank Battalion and 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines chew their way through Tuwayhah, increasing numbers of “civilians” straggle out of the town. Many of them are young men with short haircuts wearing clean white thobes and sandals. Everyone knows that they are deserters, but they simply walk on by, having hidden their weapons and shed their uniforms. No one wants to take the time, troops, or trucks necessary to detain them and transport them two hundred miles to the rear.

When we get our satellite equipment up, we learn that, miles behind us, Task Force Tarawa and RCT-1 have accepted the surrender of an estimated 2,500 troops from the Baghdad division of the Republican Guard. The news from New York also informs us that Iraqis are deserting in northern Iraq, and that to discourage others from doing the same, Iraqi commanders and the fedayeen are conducting public executions of any of their troops caught deserting.

By nightfall, RCT-5 has moved through Salman Pak and Tuwayhah, and Sam Mundy's 3/5 has cleared the highway on both sides of Route 6. For Mundy's Marines the afternoon and early evening were a repeat of the action the day before at Al Aziziyah. Dismounted infantry rushed through the built-up area and then beyond that into the farmlands north of the city. It was exhausting for his already tired troops.

Though the Republican Guard regulars cut and ran after 2nd Tanks broke through Tuwayhah, the foreign fedayeen stayed to fight
there and in Salman Pak. For more than five hours and as many kilometers, the 3/5 rifle companies slogged up the rough ground parallel to the highway, supported by fire from the AAV up-guns on the road. Together they rooted out Syrian, Jordanian, Saudi, Egyptian, and Yemeni fighters who weren't just
willing
to die on their jihad—they
wanted
to die. Mundy's Marines obliged them. There may be prisoners taken elsewhere, but along this stretch of Route 6, I saw only two of the fedayeen taken alive—both were badly wounded.

Not all the Iraqis got away. Late in the afternoon, as we landed next to where the RCT-5 CP would be established for the night, an Iraqi major general, the chief of staff of the Special Republican Guard, tried to run a roadblock in his nice white luxury sedan. It was his last mistake. Griff's camera captured the image—the dead general and his driver, splayed out on the shoulder of the road beside the car. Inside the bloody vehicle was the dead general's pet dog, also killed in the hail of gunfire.

Late that night, a messenger from Mundy's CP brings a sandbag containing captured documents to the RCT-2 command post. It is full of foreign passports taken from those who died trying to kill Mundy's Marines just eighteen kilometers from the outskirts of Baghdad.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #27