by Chris Martin
The Delta recce operator followed the USMC officer as they ran down the stairs. As they arrived on the second-floor deck, Hollenbaugh looked around for the Marine pulling security for them so that he could yell, “Last man!”
While “peeling”—a simple but effective technique utilized to systematically move troops to the flank or to the rear—an individual on the move will inform the man covering the maneuver that he’s become the last man. The new last man will then be the next to move and he’ll in turn inform his awaiting security that they have become the last man as he moves past.
When Hollenbaugh hit the second-floor terrace, that last man was nowhere to be found. When he and the Captain darted into the building on its second floor, again, there was no last man.
The same was true of the interior stairway, the first-floor hallway, and the main-floor living quarters.
As they exited the house and ran into the courtyard, there was still no last man in sight. Nor was there one guarding the hole that had been knocked through the courtyard wall in the middle of the night to hasten an escape.
Only then did it dawn on Delta Force Master Sergeant Don Hollenbaugh how genuinely he earned the title of “last man” on that day.
* * *
Hollenbaugh had shown himself to be the ultimate expression of the advanced assaulter—yet another JSOC sniper who turned the tide of battle without a sniper weapon in hand. He fended off a determined and coordinated enemy force armed with his assault rifle, a borrowed M203 grenade launcher, multiple AT4s, numerous grenades of various types (fragmentation, smoke, and thermobaric), exceptional proficiency, and immeasurable valor.
His actions directly enabled an escape that saved the lives of dozens of U.S. heroes.
Although he and Zembiec had cleared the courtyard, they weren’t home free just yet. They still had several hundred meters on foot to cover to get back to the relative safety of the FLOT.
As Hollenbaugh came through the hole, he was struck by the image of Lance Corporal Thomas Adametz, who was armed with a light machine gun he had retrieved from one of the many wounded E/2/1 Marines.
“When we finally get through the hole, there was Larry Boivin and a Marine,” Hollenbaugh said. “It’s another Marine I’ll always give credit to. He was shooting at a gun position that I couldn’t get to. He had that M249 SAW and he was just waylaying in there.
“He had himself exposed, standing up on a mound of bricks. I just remember standing there for a moment, just taking in some pride—‘Now that’s a Marine.’ I was watching the brass coming out of his gun. For a moment I was thinking, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ but then I kind of snapped out of it.”
“Dude, you’re exposed, get down! Oh, and good work.… That was awesome.”
With Boivin accounted for and Briggs helping to evacuate the wounded, Hollenbaugh and Zembiec bought up the rear as the crippled force made its way back to the front line as quickly as it could under those conditions.
“We went running down the street and I was literally the last guy. I let everybody go, and I pulled cover for everyone, and as we got out of that little area where that Marine was shooting on top of those bricks, I turned around and started shooting back up at that machine-gun station.
“Everybody went and I just kept shooting. I remember off to my right-hand side, I saw one of the Marine tanks had actually made it down into the area. And then I noticed there were some helos above—strafing the streets. It was a significant fight.”
One of the M1A1s destroyed the minaret that had been scouted before the attack and had served as a sniper hide for the insurgents. Meanwhile, a pair of USMC AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters pounded the enemy combatants. E/2/1’s 3rd Platoon advanced with the tanks to provide additional support.
Included among the reinforcements was Place, the Scout Sniper who had proven so effective during Echo Company’s opening days in Fallujah. Following the three actions mentioned earlier, Place continued to excel, racking up thirty-two confirmed sniper kills during a two-week period in the middle of April. On the twenty-sixth, he again performed with skill and heroism, as he “disregarded his own safety and left the cover of his defensive position to close with and destroy the enemy.” The Corporal was awarded a Silver Star for his combined action during the months of March and April.
* * *
More than half of the forty-odd men who went out in the dead of night to advance beyond the front lines were wounded. A third of them were evacuated on stretchers.
Austin, too, earned a Silver Star, albeit posthumously. He ultimately succumbed to his injuries, the only American to die in the frenetic battle that nearly claimed dozens more.
Marines Perez-Gomez and Adametz also were awarded the Silver Star while numerous others earned Bronze Stars for their actions that day.
For his selfless actions, disregarding his own safety in order to save others, Briggs was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. The DSC is the second highest military award available to a member of the Army, and one reserved for acts of extreme gallantry.
In later reflection, Hollenbaugh feels it should have been even higher. “Dan was well deserving of the DSC. And knowing what I know now, I probably should have put him in for the Medal of Honor, quite honestly.”
Hollenbaugh, too, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He said, “Everybody always asks me, ‘Were you scared? Did you feel anything?’ No, I was just working. It’s training. I was forty years old, I had been in the Army for almost twenty years, and was a senior NCO. Not my first gunfight sort of thing … although definitely the largest.
“If you only knew the events of all the Marines and everyone else. A few people’s stories tend to stand out because of who knows what. Those are the guys who get much of the credit for doing what they did, but I always see the awards as representing all those who were in that fight.”
He continued with a small sampling of the heroism he observed that day, stating, “It was Larry continuing to fight once we got him bandaged properly. It was Dan who went across and exposed himself to fire I don’t know how many times. It was the selflessness of the Marine who was shaking his hand saying, ‘Take him first,’ and then the other Marine up on the bricks, exposing himself to suppress the enemy.
“It was Captain Zembiec and his poor RTO who had to go everywhere with him. He came into an empty building and exposed himself up that stairwell under heavy fire after everybody else was already off the objective. There was no one providing suppressive fire. He ran up that stairwell to come back and get me and drag me back down.
“It was pretty selfless. It was a lot of guys doing a lot of hard work.”
There was one final act of courage from that day that sticks in Hollenbaugh’s mind. As the platoon was heading back to the FLOT a Marine was shot as he negotiated the chokepoint. The shot knocked him off course and he fell into the concertina wire that lined a hole separating inner and outer Fallujah. Another Marine and an embedded reporter ran to his aid and pulled him to safety.
Amazed at what he had witnessed, Hollenbaugh later wrote the reporter’s editor, stating that he was deserving of an award in his own right.
While Austin was the only American to die in that battle, he was not the last of the day’s heroes to sacrifice their lives for those of others.
Douglass Zembiec later referred to April 26, 2004, as “the greatest day of [his] life.” His legend quickly spread, earning him the apt moniker, “the Lion of Fallujah.” He was promoted to Major but had no desire to continue his meteoric rise up the officer ranks with the Marine Corps.
Rather than be promoted off the battlefield, he sought an elusive slot at Ground Branch, a key element of the CIA’s enigmatic Special Activities Division/Special Operations Group.
Ground Branch is the Agency’s premier black ops unit, capable of tackling unconventional warfare and counterterror operations of the greatest sensitivity. Typically, experienced Delta Force operators and their ilk are their prime targets for recruitment as Gro
und Branch usually requires a decade of SOF experience for consideration. It’s been claimed that only one Marine officer every few years makes the cut.
Zembiec was that one.
He was later killed while performing a high-risk snatch-and-grab operation in Sadr City in May of 2007, the domain of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Sensing something was amiss, Zembiec yelled for his men to take cover moments before being gunned down himself.
At the time, his death was reported as occurring while he was still on active duty with the Marine Corps, and Zembiec was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for his actions. However, unknown until several years later, he was also honored with an anonymous star on the Central Intelligence Agency Memorial Wall.
Sergeant Major Larry Boivin, who was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for his part in the First Battle of Fallujah, later retired from Delta Force following twenty-four years of military service. Tragically, he and three other decorated servicemen were killed while riding on a float during the Hunt for Heroes parade in Midland, Texas, in November of 2012.
The float was struck by a freight train. Boivin died as he lived—a hero. He pushed his wife, Angela, to safety fractions of a second before he was killed by the impact.
Hollenbaugh said, “Larry was very disciplined—very motivated and tough as nails. He always wanted to do more. He always wanted to do more. He was a great soldier.”
The mission in Fallujah would be Hollenbaugh’s last as a sniper with the Unit. He retired in 2005 following twenty years of service.
“I am very proud to have served with the [Unit] guys,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have been in it with anybody else. And those Marines … I don’t take anything away from those Marines. They worked and they worked hard and they sacrificed.
“I’m just sad that all of our work that day was for naught.”
The First Battle of Fallujah ended just days after the Jolan stand. The United States withdrew from the city, handing operations over to the newly constituted Fallujah Brigade as the coalition attempted to put a local face on an increasingly desperate war.
That decision proved to be disastrous. The Fallujah Brigade not only collapsed almost immediately, it also served to furnish the entrenched extremists with American-made arms and equipment. This development set the conditions for an even bloodier, more brutal battle that would be waged for the city later that year.
8
Making of a Legend
A newcomer—at least officially—to the murky world of special operations hit the ground on its first combat deployment in April of 2004, just as Iraq was set to erupt in unbridled carnage.
That the United States Marine Corps did not previously field a spec ops unit was more a question of semantics, mantras, and bureaucratic decision making than ground truth. Its Force Reconnaissance platoons—trained to freefall or dive behind enemy lines to conduct special reconnaissance and direct action raids—certainly passed any reasonable common-sense test.
Even the infantry battalions’ Scout Sniper Platoons (SSP)—highly trained marksmen who operate in small teams and ply their trade relying on stealth—checked a handful of key boxes, at least in terms of how the general public tends to imagine special operations.
However, the USMC chose to keep Force Recon off the table when SOCOM was formed in the mid-’80s, preferring to retain control over its forces rather than fund and train a unit that would partially “belong” to what felt suspiciously like an emerging fifth service.
While Marine leadership may have been prescient in that sense, what they did not anticipate was a fundamental shift in geopolitics, nor the related exponential increase in the prominence of (and budget for) special operations forces.
As a result, the motto “first to fight” had become less and less accurate; the Marine Corps was initially sidelined and then given less critical taskings in the immediate response to 9/11—a humbling lesson for the proud service concerning the new age of warfare.
A second chance at a slice of the expanding SOF pie was forced down the Marine Corps’s throat when SOF-enamored Rumsfeld insisted on closer USMC/SOCOM collaboration.
Lieutenant Colonel Giles Kyser made it his mission to transform that mandate into a full-time Marine component to SOCOM, although he encountered considerable resistance on both sides of the table. Many inside the USMC held on to their pre-9/11 beliefs. Meanwhile, a number of key figures inside SOCOM were reluctant to share the mission, money, or glory with the Marine Corps, whom they felt had already chosen their fate two decades earlier, while also questioning the USMC’s ability to field a force with the right qualities to excel in real-world special operations.
Despite the reluctance, a proof-of-concept pilot program with an eye on establishing a permanent Marine presence in SOCOM was realized in 2003 with the activation of Marine Corps Special Operations Command Detachment One (MCSOCOM Det One).
Among the detractors of the initiative within SOCOM, Naval Special Warfare was viewed as the most determined to block any permanent commitment. When NSW offered to serve as SOCOM’s executive agent—and thus be given operational control of Det One—it was a move viewed with considerable suspicion. Some inside the fledgling unit thought NSW merely accepted the role so that it would be better positioned to kill it rather than foster its growth.
Det One stacked the odds in its favor by drawing its personnel from a talent pool consisting of only the most veteran and talented Force Recon Marines. It then outfitted them with higher-spec gear and weaponry, and provided them with intensive training—including whirlwind CQB instruction from a former Delta Force operator, who made them completely rethink how they fought in tight spaces.
Their average age was greater than thirty. All had deployed multiples times and the bulk of the men had previously held leadership positions in Force Recon platoons, while a number had been seconded to foreign units or worked as instructors at the Mountain Warfare School or a Special Operations Training Group.
And well representative of both the experience in its ranks and the immense importance that has historically been placed by the Corps on the role of the sniper, more than half of Det One’s thirty Recon Marines were trained Scout Snipers.
In a forward-thinking architecture, Det One took this supercharged Force Recon element and complemented it with a full-service integral intelligence component. This consisted of a Radio Reconnaissance Team and Signals Intelligence Support Team to secure SIGINT as well as a Counterintelligence Section to focus on HUMINT.
Det One was now ready for war. Placed under the watch of Naval Special Warfare Group One, it was slotted for a tour in Iraq, alongside the SEAL Task Units contained within Naval Special Warfare Task Group-Arabian Peninsula, itself a subcomponent of CJSOTF-AP.
Dubbed “Task Unit Raider” in recognition of its heritage as the spiritual successors of the Marine Raiders of WWII fame, it found itself a frequent collaborator and “kindred soul” in another CJSOTF-AP element—Task Unit Thunder.
While UKSF—most prominently the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS)—lived and operated alongside (and existed as de facto) JSOC SMUs in Iraq and Afghanistan, Task Unit Thunder provided CJSOTF-AP with its own Tier 1–level counterterrorism unit in the vein of a Delta or DEVGRU.
Task Unit Thunder was built around the Polish Military Unit 2305, better known as GROM. Following its formative training at the hands of Larry Freedman and other Delta operators, this hard-core unit had since blossomed into one of the most aggressive, dedicated, and revered CT outfits in existence. In the world of special operations, Poland punches well above its weight.
As the deployment took shape, the operators of Task Unit Raider and Task Unit Thunder stepped up and became the task force’s primary direct action assets, operating in conjunction on multiple occasions.
Det One was aided in its first real mission—a close target reconnaissance op—by a female GROM sniper. And the sniper ultimately apprehended the target—a suspected insurgent sympathizer cod
e named “Rachel.”
Task Unit Raider first operated in and around Baghdad before being directed to the developing snake pit that was al-Najaf in August 2004.
Located one hundred miles south of Baghdad, Najaf was an important stronghold of al-Sadr’s Shia militia, the Mahdi Army. These insurgents had rocked the 11th MEU (SOC), and in turn CJSOTF-AP gave orders to Det One to send its snipers to Najaf to relieve that pressure.
They proceeded to utterly demoralize the Shia militiamen, wiping out dozens of combatants while the terrified enemy force remained confused as to the point of origin of the unrelenting lethal fire.
The unit’s deep sniper core paid dividends, as it was able to keep marksmen on their suppressed SR-25s around the clock, providing no respite for the militia.
Twice the Det One Scout Snipers successfully engaged in countersniper ops. Both times they identified Shia sniper positions, and then obliterated the hides and the shooters hidden behind them with an onslaught of .50-caliber Barrett M82 fire.
Ultimately, the Mahdi Army was forced to cease operations and abandon Najaf altogether.
Det One departed Iraq in the fall of ’04, having flashed its potential despite never being allowed to operate in the fashion that was originally envisioned. Almost as soon as it had arrived in Iraq, Naval Special Warfare Group One sectioned up its organic intelligence component into smaller pieces and farmed them out across its other task units to make up for their deficiencies in that area.
And despite its outstanding debut, Det One returned home facing an uncertain future.
* * *
Between deployments, Chris Kyle attended one course that felt like a gift—sniper school—and another that he saw more akin to a curse. Despite his desires to the contrary, after completing sniper training, the Texan was sent to navigator school.
The advanced schooling taught him how to plan routes to objectives, hasten rapid exfils, use GPS and satellite maps, and the like, which was all well and good. However, he was less thrilled by the fact that the training could potentially confine him to the vehicle while the rest of the fire team actually does the door kicking and gun slinging when they went out raiding.
