I had assigned OP South House to 1st Platoon.
Shortly after taking over the position, 1st Platoon decided it was too small and asked to move into a larger house a dozen meters away. I agreed.
If they were anywhere other than Ramadi, the move would have been easy, but the deadly operating environment demanded that they move at night.
The next day, Echo Company relieved all the Army units from their new positions.
Within hours, the calls started coming across the radios that Marines were engaging the enemy. Scanning the battlespace with rifle sights, scopes, binoculars, thermal devices, and infrared optics, the Marines started picking up the insurgents’ every move. More than two hundred sets of fresh eyes watched every detail.
We never stayed static at these positions, what we called “firm bases.” We would move continually and patrol aggressively as combat hunters to do what we had come here to do—kill and capture the enemy.
From day one at boot camp Marines are trained to kill. Punctuating their sentences in the affirmative with the word “kill.” They are indoctrinated and imbued with a warrior mentality—it’s an accepted form of behavior.
Training was about to be set into action.
CHAPTER 4
Pressure
In Iraq, I faced two pressing responsibilities. The first was to bring all my boys home safely. There were times when I told myself not to give a fuck about anything else but that. But I couldn’t do that because we were sent to Iraq to kill the enemy. It meant I had to put my men into dangerous situations—despite the admirable love I had for my Marines, I knew they’d have to fight, and possibly die. My only goal was that by killing more insurgents, we’d suffer fewer casualties—like an insurance policy that we’d have to pay for every day.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about another responsibility that I had.
I received an email from my wife containing a short video clip of my two-year-old daughter, Bailey. This precocious little redhead stood on top of a chair in our kitchen in Yorktown, Virginia. She wore a red-and-white checkered chef’s hat and apron that were two sizes too big and was icing a sheet cake with a rubber spatula.
In the background, I heard my wife faintly prompting my daughter what to say.
Bailey announced in a singsong voice, “Daddy, we’re making you a cake.”
My wife asked, “What kind is it?”
Bailey replied in her delicate, high-pitched voice, “It’s pink!”
She could not have been more pleased with herself. But it made me think of how much I had to lose as well if I didn’t make it home alive.
29 November 2006
Major Jared Norrell called me into his office. He was the Task Force 1-9 Infantry operations officer, and asked if I felt comfortable taking on some more battlespace in Ramadi to help some of the other Army units in the task force south of MSR Michigan. He wanted to establish more combat positions in southern Ramadi.
From Dallas, Texas, Norrell already had six combat deployments as an Army Ranger. He’d enlisted out of high school and then received his commission after attending North Georgia College. Norrell was never happy to just wait out his time in Ramadi. As the task force operations officer, he was aggressive in how he orchestrated units on the battlefield, and his methods made them more lethal—and he made Ramadi a safer place.
At the time, the U.S. Army and the Iraqi Army (IA) soldiers had been taking heavy casualties in the Ma’laab (Mah Lob) District located south of the Industrial District, our principal areas of operation.
The area between the Industrial District, Quatana (Kah Tana) and Ma’laab districts formed a three-by-three-kilometer area of the battlespace. They were known to be crawling with insurgents. Phrases like “The Heart of Darkness” and “Hotbed of Insurgent Activity” were commonly thrown around to describe them.
At this time, Army infantry companies could put only about eighty to a hundred soldiers into the zones because of the casualties they had taken during the more than a year they battled it out in Ramadi before we arrived. The unit, call sign “Manchu,” would spend nineteen months in-country during its deployment.
Echo Company with all our attached personnel—combat camera photographers, military working dog (MWD) handlers, interpreters, combat engineers—boosted our top strength to more than 250. In the eyes of the Army, we looked like rock stars by our sheer numbers alone. The Army units had been crushing the shit out of the insurgency, but our manpower provided the task force leverage needed to go after the enemy like never before.
After Norrell and I had talked a bit, he handed me a black grease pencil and gestured at the Plexiglas-covered map.
“Just show me how much more you think you can take on in the Ma’laab, Scotty.”
I drew an odd-shaped triangle and carved out a new zone that stretched from MSR Michigan south to Market Street that lay between the Grand Mosque to the west, and the Al-Haq Mosque to the east. I also estimated that the Echo Company Marines at OP Hotel could patrol another five-hundred-by-one-thousand-meter section of real estate to the south of MSR Michigan.
The area was not much bigger than our original area, but it was densely populated—crawling with insurgents, comprised of two-to three-story residential houses. A mix of light and dark brown structures looked as if they had all been standing at point blank at the barrel of a shotgun blast on multiple occasions. They were riddled with bullet holes the diameter of a human thumb from the .50 caliber machine guns that pounded them during past attacks. No glass stood in the panes of the windows; most had been smashed or blown out from attacks and the overpressure of explosions.
That same day, the commander of 2nd Platoon, Second Lieutenant Jonathan “Jay” Grillo, who was in charge at OP Hotel, decided to start getting into it in the Ma’laab right away and submitted a plan for a patrol to the TOC at Camp Corregidor. His patrol request was approved.
He and his Marines had no way of knowing the bloody day that lay in store for them.
Grillo studied engineering at Clarkson University. He never intended to put his degree to practical use. After 9/11, he knew he wanted to join the Marines and fight. He grew up in Arkport, a one-stoplight town in western New York surrounded by fifty miles of alfalfa and cornfields. As a kid, he learned to shoot at a young age and always filled his quota of woodchucks, and then counted the days until deer season. It made him a quintessential outdoorsman, and made the infantry seem like a natural fit to him.
It was. He was a natural.
He was almost six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds; he was trim and solidly built. His brown eyes always seemed to squint with a bit of mischief. Always full of energy, he was eager to take on the world. I loved lieutenants like Grillo. I would rather have one lieutenant like Grillo, whose leash I might have to yank now and then, than one hundred that I had to kick in the ass to get moving.
Knowing that Grillo sent out a patrol, I went to monitor the unmanned drone feeds of the area. I stood there watching intently when word came in that there was a casualty, shot by a sniper.
Shortly afterward, the radio operator came across the radio with the wounded Marine’s “battle number.” Every Marine had one; it consisted of the letter “E” for Echo Company, the initial of his last name, and the last four digits of his Social Security number. Most Marines morbidly referred to them as “Kill Numbers.”
Quickly reaching into my left breast pocket, I fished out my personnel roster and scanned the column with all the battle numbers listed on it to make a match.
“Fuck! It’s Espinoza,” I thought.
Sergeant Jonathan Espinoza was 1st Squad Leader in 2nd Platoon, Echo Company.
I was incensed. “They shot one of my squad leaders!” I thought. “Motherfuckers!”
I immediately ordered First Lieutenant Pete Somerville to jock up a convoy and get ready to move. Within minutes, he had Humvees staged out front ready to roll, and I climbed aboard.
Before we left the gates of Camp Corregidor, we tried to ra
ise 2nd Platoon on the net, but couldn’t get through on the radio.
There is a simple term that I use when, because of chaos, weather, equipment breakdowns, or simple human error, things don’t work the way they’re supposed to or were planned—Friction. We know it happens—and we train to deal with it. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating. We had communication with other supporting and adjacent units.
We pressed on.
Espinoza had joined the Marine Corps out of El Paso, Texas, at the age of seventeen. He had one brother and two sisters. Like every young recruit, he envisioned serving his country gallantly and experiencing the romance of what he’d bought into the day he stepped out of his recruiter’s office.
He had been to Ramadi in 2004 as a lance corporal with 2d Battalion, 4th Marines—his first test in combat. He was in direct contact with the enemy daily on the city’s streets. One day, during that deployment, a 120mm mortar round sailed through the window of the fighting position he and his fellow Marines occupied. When the round, roughly the size of an NFL football, exploded, it destroyed the post.
“Espo,” as many of his friends called him, survived, but received shrapnel wounds to his head and a large portion of his back. He was CASEVAC’d—and received his first Purple Heart Medal at the age of eighteen.
29 November 2006
Espo’s day started by putting together a patrol request and a map overlay that detailed his plan of action and the route his patrol would take into the Ma’laab, on Grillo’s orders. By 2200 hours, Espo submitted his plan and reviewed it with Grillo. The initial plan included taking a squad of Iraqi soldiers with them on patrol. The IA soldiers shared space at OP Hotel with the units that occupied it, and it was common to incorporate them into the plans. Espo felt uneasy taking the IA soldiers with them in an unknown area. He felt rushed. He also wasn’t comfortable with the fact that the U.S. Army never went south into the patrol area—which meant it had not been cleared for quite some time.
Around 2300 hours, the IA captain bailed out of the patrol, saying his men had been tasked to support another unit. Espo was skeptical. He didn’t completely trust the Iraqi soldiers, thinking that they might be collecting information on them and providing it to the insurgents.
He felt as if they were being set up for a trap.
He told his theory to Grillo, but Grillo said that the patrol would go ahead regardless of Espo’s uneasiness of any unconfirmed suspicions. The squad was scheduled to step off from OP Hotel at 0500 hours, but modifications had to be made to the patrol route, and the start time slid back to 1000 hours.
Friction.
Espo woke up his squad of twelve Marines at 0800 hours and began to prep for combat and conducted their pre-combat checks and inspections for the daytime patrol.
Patrolling during the day in Ramadi was something we eventually learned not to do.
We learned the hard way.
The step-off time came and went as the number of Marines on the patrol increased by one—Grillo.
Espo called the personnel roster into the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Wayne Nugent. He wasn’t a fan of last-minute changes, or of officers sticking their noses in what he considered enlisted business.
Nugent had a harsh deportment most of the time. He was direct and had a distinct, monosyllabic tone when he addressed the Marines. He was aggressive and confident to a fault. The boys fed off that. They liked their leaders to be assertive—Nugent fit that to a T.
Espo checked his kit and realized he’d forgotten to take his pyro—signaling flares and smoke grenades—with him. He made a mad dash back to get it. When Espo did his final communications check, the cryptographic fill—a secret code which scrambled the radio signals so the enemy could not intercept them—had been erased. Espo had to return to the COC again to get the radio working.
It was around 1100 hours when the squad finally stepped off on their patrol. One of their first objectives was to check out and conduct a raid on a suspected sniper position or “hide-site” on Front Door Alley.
They crossed south on MSR Michigan and grabbed some loose plywood and tossed it onto the triple-strand concertina wire (C-wire) so they could walk across it. C-wire has sharp razor-barbed blades on heavy gauge wire that comes in fifty-meter rolls like a giant Slinky Toy that will cut the shit out of anyone trying to walk through or over it. The Army had thrown up a lot of it around its positions in Ramadi. It certainly kept out the enemy, but it kept us out too.
Espo planned for overwatch and supporting fires from the rooftop of OP Hotel to cover their movement into the zone to the sniper hideout—there would be a team of Marines with high-powered, long-range rifles and observers watching their every movement. As the patrol approached the objective, Espo directed Corporal Jeremy Ramirez and Lance Corporal Joshua Bradford to take their four-man fire team into the building while the third fire team would isolate the area. One team would gain a foothold at the entrances while the other, led by Lance Corporal David Quetglas cleared the building.
Bradford was a lanky twenty-year-old from Duncanville, Texas; Ramirez was a twenty-three-year-old grunt from Erie, Illinois. They both enlisted to fight.
The raid went off in a textbook manner. The squad found it empty, save for a few shell casings. They also found some spider holes—spots knocked through the walls that snipers used to target the Marines and soldiers.
Espo’s patrol moved west along their route clearing the houses in their zone—taking weapons out of homes that had been staged inside, awaiting employment at the discretion of the insurgents.
It was never black and white when we found Iraqis with weapons in their homes. We never knew if they were victims of the insurgency or part of it. But unless they were pointing and shooting the weapons at us, we were not allowed to engage them. If there was an overwhelming amount of contraband in a house, we’d detain them and move them back to Camp Corregidor for questioning by the Army’s Tactical Human Intelligence Team (THT). It was a daunting challenge for us to know who the good guys were and who the bad guys were—insurgents didn’t wear uniforms and blended in with the locals all too well.
When the squad pushed to the corner house on the block on Little-A Street, they began to take machine gunfire. Bradford’s fire team ran past Espo, and the other Marines raced for cover, scrambling in multiple directions to escape the hail of bullets.
Quickly scanning the area, Espo saw a large, two-story house with a big, black gate on it. Bradford grabbed a Benelli 12-gauge tactical shotgun, blasted three rounds into the door latch, and kicked it open. Espo told Quetglas to get his fire team inside and directed his other teams to cover them as they did so. As Bradford set security, Espo saw Ramirez’s team bounding up the street.
Espo went into the street to see what was going on, yelling to Ramirez to get his men into the courtyard behind the black gates. As he did, a string of automatic weapons fire snapped between them—they felt the heat and heard the cracking as the bullets laced the ground.
Ramirez instinctively took cover—in the wrong house.
Espo tried to wave them over. As he did, he got a report that two of his Marines—Lance Corporals Shaughnessy and Acosta—were nowhere to be found.
Exposing himself to enemy fire and determined to locate the missing Marines, he stepped past the gates and dropped to one knee.
Espo felt a sharp whack to his chest as if someone had struck him with a baseball bat at full swing. Shaking it off, he stood to go back in the house and get a report. As he did, one of his legs began wobbling and buckled slightly. But he managed to get inside the gates.
Espo made his way in and found Grillo. “Hey, sir. I think I just got hit.”
Grillo sharply replied, “Espo, this is no time to be fucking around!”
Then Grillo took a good look at his squad leader and read the intensity on his face. He saw a tear in the top of Espo’s body armor, on the front of his chest.
Grillo ripped open the body armor and saw an 8mm armor-piercing sniper round
the size and shape of a tip of a crayon, lodged in the vest material. It had grazed the top of the bulletproof ceramic plate protecting Espo’s chest, which had slowed it down. Still, the round had torn through the flesh and muscle—gashing his chest severely. Blood seeped from the wound.
Grillo called, “Doc! Get over here! Espo’s hit!”
The platoon’s “Doc”—the Navy corpsman attached to it, the equivalent of an Army medic—moved quickly to Espo and started first aid. His wound was critical. Within minutes, Doc administered morphine for pain and bandaged the wound with a pressure dressing.
Admittedly not a religious man, Espo began praying out loud. “Dear God, please let me make it home. Let me see my unborn son and hear him cry.”
Lying there with his blood pouring out of the gash on his chest, Espo could hear the Marines frantically yelling as they fought—still, his only concern was for the safety of his men. He tried to get back up.
As he lay in the courtyard, Espo could see Bradford jumping from rooftop to rooftop trying to get his radio to a good spot to raise communications. He could see the top edges of the house burst into dust as the machine gun fire grated into the stone, trying to kill Bradford’s team.
Doc pushed Espo back. “Lie down, Sergeant! Just lie down!”
Espo would later say he was proud of how his squad reacted under fire. Everyone did their jobs, just like he’d trained them to do. The irony was in training he’d always been the one to get shot so the junior Marines could learn to step up to the next level and lead, as Quetglas did that day.
Espo had a half-smile of pride on his face with morphine kicking in. He didn’t have long to wait as two Marines escorted him to an armored personnel carrier waiting outside the house to take him to the battalion aid station at the Combat Outpost.
Echo in Ramadi Page 5
