by Leadership;Brotherhood Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage
I also drank water furiously. It was ninety degrees outside in the Iraqi desert and I was wearing sixty pounds of gear on a Kevlar vest that didn’t breathe. Soon, the high caffeine/high water combination proved more than my renal system could handle, and I found myself performing in real time the one thing that I had forgotten to practice earlier: urinating into an empty water bottle while moving at forty-two miles per hour and checking our direction with my wrist compass. Thankfully, these unpleasant exercises were the most eventful things to happen to me during the entire convoy. At 4 P.M. on the same day, the Jokers pulled into the city that would be our home for the next seven months.
Ramadi. The capital city of the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, it contained roughly 350,000 people, a sweltering mass of humanity packed into less than nine square miles—one of the highest population densities on earth. As we pulled into the city from the north, its alien nature struck me almost like a physical blow. No amount of training at abandoned U.S. bases could have prepared us for the rows and rows of close-packed, high-walled compounds that made up the city blocks, or the mounds of trash that lined every street, or the throngs of people who stared at us as our convoy crawled through their midst on the way to our first stop.
We pulled into Ramadi from the city’s west side and made our way into a base located at the tip of a peninsula formed by the Y intersection of the Euphrates River and one of its tributaries. Called Hurricane Point, the place was one of three main U.S. bases located on the western border of the city. We were relatively pleased with what we saw. The main base headquarters was inside an elaborately constructed former palace of Saddam Hussein’s. Air-conditioning units protruded from nearly all the boarded-up windows, and the outside walls were covered in sandbags stacked five feet high. Palm trees lined a nicely paved road that ran throughout the base. Hurricane Point also featured running water in its shower areas, nearly twenty-four-hour electricity, multiple phone banks, an Internet café, and a mess hall. Though we knew we wouldn’t be staying here—we had simply pulled in to drop off a few vehicles and personnel who belonged to another of 2/4’s companies—we hoped it would be representative of what we’d find at our own, as yet unnamed base.
We drove on toward the far eastern side of Ramadi, an area isolated from Hurricane Point and the two other large U.S. bases next to it. As we drove from west to east down the city’s main highway, Route Michigan, I realized that between our base and the closest reinforcements would be nearly the entire population of Ramadi. We hit the very eastern edge of the city, and the buildings began to taper off. I had started wondering where our base was when a gigantic wall of concrete barriers appeared to my left, on the north side of the highway. I guided the convoy into the base’s entrance, denoted as such by a giant red-and-white-striped pole that blocked the opening between barriers. Slowly, we approached, and slowly the Army guards next to the pole raised it vertically. Looking around there was little evidence of the relative luxury of Hurricane Point. There were no trees, no paved roads, and no contract mess halls. In fact the giant square building that would become our mess hall had only three walls and half of a roof. Most of the open areas of the base were covered in the same desert sand that surrounded it. There were no shower facilities, or Internet cafés, or phone banks. Indeed, there wasn’t any running water or electricity. And we weren’t housed in one of Saddam’s expansive former palace complexes. Instead, we occupied a former chemical manufacturing facility, about three hundred meters wide and five hundred long.
The compound itself was shaped vaguely like a rectangle that had had its top left corner violently removed at a forty-five-degree angle, leaving a square base at the bottom and a rough triangle at the top. Near the tip of that triangle the compound wall had crumbled, so the base’s Army occupants had strung rolls and rolls of concertina wire across the gap. Inside the compound sat eleven main buildings of varying sizes and varying degrees of repair. One building had a crumbling wall and yellow-and-black warning tape wrapped all the way around it. When we later asked the Army why the tape, we were told simply that we probably shouldn’t go in there—the unit we were replacing wasn’t sure what the building had previously been used for, but they did know that their hazardous-chemical detection equipment went off wildly every time someone went inside. We took them at their word. For all the disrepair, it could have been far worse, I thought as the trucks ground to a halt. After all, during my previous deployment I had lived in a tent. Once the convoy was safely inside the base, vehicles lined up on a stretch of gravel that pretended to be a road, I hopped out of the cab and unloaded my weapon. Behind me, Joker One began slowly climbing out of the truck beds, and the squad leaders started assembling their men for inspection. Behind us, the other platoons were doing the same thing. As the squad leaders took charge, I joined the CO, Hes, and Quist, and we made our way into a gigantic hangar bay at the very center of the compound, where the Army captain commanding the base waved to us.
As we met up with the captain and his officers, the Gunny took charge of Golf Company. Shouting and storming about, he herded the slightly bewildered platoons into the open area inside the hangar bay. As soon as they were all assembled, the Gunny set the Marines to work building bunk beds, and the concrete walls of the bay echoed with the relentless clanking of metal on metal. Meanwhile, the Joker officers met with our counterparts in the company command room in an effort to understand better the task assigned us.
We soon discovered that our area of operations (AO), the part of the city for which we would be responsible, comprised almost the entirety of Ramadi. Looking at the photographic map beforehand, this had seemed reasonable enough, but after the drive across the city to our base, we weren’t so sure. We had known before arriving that Ramadi was, to say the least, densely populated, and that we, at 150 men, were not. The Army company currently occupying the base would leave for the States in a mere two weeks, at which point in time Golf Company would be the only ones operating throughout the heart of Ramadi. Having now seen the dense blocks filled with massive crowds, we began understanding what it would really mean to try to control a city of 350,000 with only 150 Marines. We had earlier calculated ratios of one of us for every two thousand of them. Those numbers had now taken on a whole new meaning.
My eyes had certainly been opened enough to make me want to pay close attention to the Army company that we were relieving. However, after about an hour of conversation, the captain hosting us at our new base revealed that the soldiers we were supposed to be relieving had actually already left. Those remaining were just caretakers of the base, and they rarely left the gates and so didn’t know much about the world we’d be entering. Over the past two weeks, an interim Army force, the 1st of the 506th, had patrolled the city; they would arrive the next day to pick us up and begin driving us around Ramadi, showing us their missions and introducing us to the key leaders with whom they had developed relationships. Our hosts did give us one bit of good news: In the six months that they had been in Ramadi, their unit had not suffered a single fatality.
Happy to hear this statistic, the three other platoon commanders and I left the command room and stepped back into the hangar bay to check on our men. The bunk beds had all been set up, and the Marines were in various stages of undress, preparing to sleep after three days’ hard journey. Seeing that they were set, we tromped up to the second floor of the hangar bay and set up cots along it. I took off my boots, sat on my bunk, and stared at the cityscape silhouetted to our west. The distinctive slim minarets spiked upward at strange intervals. The city was mostly dark, but the stars in the desert sky were brighter than I’d ever seen them in America.
TEN
I slept for five hours and awoke to find that our Army counterparts had shown up bright and early. They lived in a different base, about fifteen minutes away, and they had driven over to pick us up. Noriel, Bowen, Leza, Captain Bronzi, and I made our way over to the six Army Humvees (all of which were heavily armored) and readied ourselves for the pre-mi
ssion briefing. The platoon may have been fairly new to the city, but as they talked with us that morning, they seemed to know it well enough. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Mitchell, spoke with confidence, and he covered all the standard bases—medevac plans, reaction to enemy attacks, communication failure plans, and so on—just as (if not better than) I would have. His NCOs, in turn, briefed my squad leaders. The Army enlisted seemed as competent and experienced as their officer.
Unfortunately, the platoon from the 506th had room in their Humvees for only five or six of us on each of their rides. As Golf Company’s first mission after turnover with the Army would fall to Joker One, my three squad leaders and I had priority on the first several trips. Zipping around the city in the thick, squat vehicles with the Army was exhilarating, even if it wasn’t entirely representative of the way in which we planned to fulfill our mission. The 506th confined itself mainly to the city’s major highway and a few other significant roads, and they only rarely left their vehicles to move on foot. Unlike the Marine Corps, the Army had money for massively armored Humvees, and it provided plenty of these monsters to its troops in harm’s way. We, by contrast, still didn’t have enough unarmored Humvees to carry an entire forty-man platoon. So we planned to walk the city on foot, exploring Ramadi in a way that no unit before us had, but on some level we envied the equipment and mobility of our sister service.
The details of how we would ultimately achieve our “security and stability” mission were still a bit hazy, but we wanted to try to get a sense of all of Ramadi’s neighborhoods. We wanted to interact face-to-face with its people; to get to know its politicians, policemen, and sheiks; to demonstrate that the entire city was ours and that we cared about all of it, that no place would be a no-go area for the Marines. After all, Ramadi was the capital city of Anbar province. Over the last several months, the vast majority of Iraq’s hostile incidents had happened in Anbar, which was why the Marines had been sent to the restive area. Like the rest of Anbar, Ramadi was populated almost exclusively by Sunni Arabs. While Saddam Hussein had ruled, the city’s most prominent export had been officers for his army, and it had been well treated as a result. The city still retained some vestiges of his largesse—beautiful mosques, functioning traffic circles, road signs, and so on.
However, the Ramadi we saw on the Army’s early tours had suffered as a result of the war’s aftermath. When the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) disbanded the Iraqi army, quite a few of Ramadi’s residents had lost their jobs. Though the city’s downtown still teemed with commerce, male unemployment was high, well above 50 percent. Furthermore, in the aftermath of Baghdad’s downfall, most of Saddam’s civil servants had found themselves out of jobs, and most of the violent criminals had found themselves out of jail. Thus ten months after President Bush made his “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier landing, Ramadi’s basic services were nonexistent and crime was rampant. Trash and human waste littered every street. Massive open-air garbage dumps were scattered across the city, and no one tended to them. A few of the buildings had the distinctive bullet-hole pock-marks scattered across them, and a few of the roads had the scorched and blackened potholes that indicated an IED had gone off there. Still, those things aside, most of the city had been spared war’s rampant physical destruction.
Ramadi proper could be roughly divided into four quadrants. In the northwest was the souk: a vibrant, bustling marketplace with streets so narrow that it was impossible to fit a Humvee down most of them. Here a clever shopper could buy everything from the latest consumer electronics to European house music to hard-core pornography and anti-American videos. From about 10 AM onward, with the exception of some downtime in the early afternoon, the souk was jammed solid with pedestrians. Most buildings in this quadrant’s southern portion were three-to four-story commercial structures; these gradually gave way to two-story residential properties as one moved farther north. Everything, it seemed, was connected by dense networks of wire that stretched crazily in all directions in rat’s nests of tangled connections some ten to fifteen feet off the ground. Some of these wires tapped into the city’s power supply, probably illegally; some served to hang laundry; and some did double duty. Across from the souk, in the southwest quadrant of Ramadi, the past and present were skirmishing. Multistory, relatively modern government buildings dominated the top half of the area, but butchers ruled the bottom. Here, individual two-story residences mingled with halal shopkeepers who slaughtered animals in the same manner as their Bedouin forefathers. Skinless, glistening pink-and-red corpses hung in front of small, dirty storefronts, and unpaved streets ran dark with blood. The air was thickly heavy with a sharp metallic tang. Packs of wild dogs—animals considered unclean by the Iraqis—roamed these streets, looking for food.
The southeastern quadrant of the city was a similarly solid urban area that we called the Farouq district, named after the volubly anti-American Farouq mosque located at the quadrant’s southwestern tip. Aside from a gigantic, professional-quality soccer stadium directly across the street from this mosque, the Farouq district had little else to distinguish it; just row after row of the two-story walled compounds that serve as the standard residential structure in Ramadi. In this city, every house was surrounded on all four sides by an eight-foot-high concrete fence, with some sort of steel gate serving as the only entrance into or out of the compound. Inside the walls, an open courtyard of varying sizes surrounded each house, which usually sat at least five or so meters back from the gate. Each exterior wall was joined to that of its neighbor’s, and each city block was some seven to ten houses long and two houses wide.
We realized on that first tour that this section of the city would present us with a serious challenge in the form of thirty-meter-wide, hundred-meter-long solid lines of wall. Crossing between houses was a near impossibility, for it usually meant climbing three eight-foot-high walls in rapid succession—the one in front of the nearest house, that house’s rear wall, and the street-facing wall of the new compound you had just dropped into—or breaching three separate sturdy metal doors. The easiest and most practical way to transition from one block to another was simply to walk to a block’s end and then use the streets that ran around each block to cut over. We would find out the hard way that this typically Middle Eastern housing array meant that if any squad was more than two blocks away from its counterparts, the squad was, for all intents and purposes, completely on its own.
Finally, Ramadi’s northeastern quadrant was its industrial zone. Though the area had some residential buildings concentrated in its northern and western areas, the vast majority of the quadrant was taken up by fifteen warehouses, one gigantic parking lot, and scores of small mechanic shops. Each of these automobile repair places usually had an actual automobile on top of its flat roof, transforming what would normally have been one-story buildings into one-and-a-half-story buildings. At the zone’s easternmost point, another smaller soccer stadium provided a playing field for many of the area’s children, and those who couldn’t get a spot inside the stadium itself could always use the dusty plain just to the north. Both stadium and plain were bounded on the east by what had previously been a gigantic trash dump, and the eight-foot-high, rolling mounds of garbage still reeked fetidly in the heat of the day.
Neatly through all of this ran Route Michigan. The city’s most vital transportation artery bisected Ramadi in a perfectly straight west-east line from one end of the town to the other. On that first tour, our Army guides pointed out several important sites situated along the highway. The al-Haq mosque, located directly across Michigan from the northern stadium, broadcast anti-American rhetoric from its loudspeakers every Friday, the standard Muslim day of worship, equivalent to Western Sundays. The al-Haq had, our guides told us, distinguished itself from other mosques by the intensity of its diatribes and its propensity to advocate immediate military action against U.S. forces. Smack dab in the center of the city, perched inside a gigantic traffic circle in the middle of Michigan, stood t
he massive Saddam mosque, commissioned by the former dictator himself in the mid-1990s, sometime after he decided that his Baath Party would no longer be a secular, communist organization. On some Fridays that mosque also broadcast hatred of the infidel foreigners, but on most it simply exhorted devout Muslims to live their lives in a manner hewing more closely to the dictates of the Koran.
Just one hundred meters west was the city’s cemetery, a gigantic triangle that extended its tip nearly ten blocks south of Michigan, deep into the butchers’ area. A flat plain dotted with small aboveground mausoleums and headstones, the cemetery was considered the most sacred area in the city (outside of the mosques), according to our Army guides. Six blocks west of this cemetery, near the western edge of the city, lay the provincial Government Center, a four-block-long, five-block-wide walled compound that contained all the infrastructure necessary to support the oversight of Anbar province. Leaning over as we passed it, Lieutenant Mitchell yelled to me that it was here that the governor, the mayor, and their respective councils met every day, and here that the province’s police chief held court.
After we passed the Government Center, our six-vehicle convoy ran into the western boundary of Ramadi, a wide tributary of the mighty Euphrates River. We drove south along it until we ran into the city’s southern boundary, a set of railroad tracks running west to east. Turning east again, we paralleled the tracks. For nearly the entire length of the city, an open-air trash dump bordered the railroad. The stench was incredible, even inside the Humvees. After some twenty minutes of driving down a potholed, intermittently paved road, we ran into the city’s eastern boundary, a wide irrigation canal. We headed north, and five minutes later we were back on Michigan, a mere two hundred meters west of our base. The rural areas outside the city were dotted with occasional housing compounds, well-tended fields, and lush greenery—as long as they were close to the Euphrates. Get more than three kilometers from the river, though, and the fields, the houses, and the trees disappeared. In their place was the vast desert.
