Rage Company
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgements
PART ONE - 1st Battalion, 37th Armor
Chapter 1 - BECOMING A BANDIT: THE BAPTISM
November 27, 2006
Chapter 2 - DETAINEE WATCH
November 28, 2006
Chapter 3 - FORTRESS RAMADI
December 1, 2006
December 3, 2006
Chapter 4 - MASTER OF PUPPETS
December 7, 2006
PART TWO - 1st Battalion, 6th Marines
Chapter 5 - ENTERING QATANA
December 16, 2006
Chapter 6 - DEMONS OF HURRICANE POINT
December 19, 2006
Chapter 7 - THE BATTLE OF CHRISTMAS DAY
December 21, 2006
Chapter 8 - A DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY
December 29, 2006
January 9, 2007
PART THREE - 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry
Chapter 9 - SILENCE THE DOGS
January 12, 2007
January 13, 2007
2000, January 16, 2007
0100, January 17, 2007
0600, January 17, 2007
1300, January 17, 2007
January 25, 2007
Chapter 10 - THE SCOUTS
January 25, 2007
Chapter 11 - RUNNING OUT OF LUCK
0700, January 27, 2007
2300, January 27, 2007
0700, February 1, 2007
0200, February 2, 2007
Chapter 12 - DEADLY GAMES
February 5, 2007
February 8, 2007
February 17, 2007
Chapter 13 - BY WAY OF DECEPTION
February 20, 2007
February 24, 2007
February 28, 2007
Chapter 14 - A DOG’S DYING BITE
1130, March 11, 2007
1200, March 14, 2007
March 16, 2007
March 25, 2007
March 30, 2007
Chapter 15 - OPERATION SQUEEZE PLAY: A SUMMARY
Part 1: The Situation
Part 2: Changing the Tide of the War
PHOTO INSERT
Index
Iraq: The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Anbar province 2006-2007
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2010 by Thomas P. Daly. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Photo Credits: courtesy of Sergeant Martin Bustamante, 41, 42 (top), 125 (top), 266, 267; courtesy of Staff Sergeant Jerry Eagle, 275 (bottom), 276, 277; courtesy of Corporal Brian Holloway, 45 (bottom), 128 (bottom right), 270 (bottom), 271 (top and bottom left); courtesy of Lieutenant Richard Jahelka, 129 (top), 271 (bottom right); courtesy of Captain John Smith, 272 (top); courtesy of Lieutenant James Thomas, 129 (bottom), 130, 131, 132, 272 (bottom), 273, 274, 275 (top).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daly, Thomas P., date.
Rage company : a Marine’s baptism by fire / Thomas P. Daly. p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-57340-2
1. Operation Squeeze Play, Iraq, 2006. 2. Iraq War, 2003-Campaigns-Iraq-Ramadi. 3. Iraq War, 2003-Personal narratives, American. 4. Ramadi (Iraq)-History, Military-21st century. 5. Daly, Thomas P., 1982- I. Title.
DS79.766.R36D35 2009
956.704’4342-dc22
2009028777
For lost friends
and fallen heroes.
May the world know of your sacrifice.
Foreword
Counterinsurgency theoreticians talk about winning hearts and minds; the practitioners—the grunts—in Ramadi focused on staying alive. When Lieutenant Thomas Daly arrived in late 2006, the U.S. battalion inside the city had mapped the location of eighty-three roadside bombs on the main streets. More bombs were planted each day than the Marine engineers could clear. No sensible patrol leader took the same route twice. No sane infantryman walked into the open. No convoy drove down a road that the engineers hadn’t swept an hour earlier.
Insurgencies that are fought for the allegiance of the people are inherently local. Insurgencies are won or lost at the local level. “Rage”—the radio call sign of Daly’s infantry company—vividly describes a local fight that illustrates hard truths and gets down to the nub of the matter: how do you break a tough insurgency? Daly’s answer is: deploy tough troops who will persist year after year under grim conditions, absorbing and giving back blows, day after day, until a political and cultural dynamic grabs hold and changes the nature of the war.
Rage Company is a straightforward, honest account of what U.S. soldiers and Marines do when placed in a hostile urban area. Daly describes the valor and the selfishness, the heroics and the mistakes, the rushes to judgment and the regrets. His particular skill is his ability to suspend judgment and to present each wrenching combat decision from different points of view, empathizing with U.S. and Iraqi leaders even when he believed their snap decisions and impetuous commands were in error.
When Daly arrived in the fall of 2006, the United States was losing on the two critical fronts in Iraq. On the western front, concentrated around the province of Al Anbar, a U.S. Marine intelligence assessment reported that al Qaeda controlled the population. In Baghdad on the eastern front, a civil war was raging, and the Sunnis were being driven from their homes. Yet a year later, the tide of war was flowing in the coalition’s favor.
What happened? According to one narrative that has achieved mythical status, in 2007 President Bush surged five brigades, imbued with counterinsurgency tactics that won the war. According to this view, the U.S. Army in 2007 finally grasped and implemented the four “pillars” of counterinsurgency: (1) provide the population wit
h security, (2) give them services and jobs, (3) appoint honest government representatives, and (4) apply the rule of law. Given these four pillars, the population turned against the insurgents.
Most in the mainstream press subsequently subscribed to the “four pillars” explanation. But it’s not what happened in Iraq. A combat veteran once wrote, “There is a vast difference in the perception of wartime events in histories and documents written later.”1Rage Company tells how Ramadi turned around, from the viewpoint of a modest, sharp-eyed lieutenant who recounts the actual events, independent of theories.
Ramadi was the capital of Al Anbar, a Sunni province the size of North Carolina. During the war, Al Anbar was an economy of force operation, accounting for one-fifth of U.S. forces in Iraq and two-fifths of the casualties. A vast land occupied by truculent tribes, Al Anbar, according to the conventional wisdom, would be the last province to be pacified. The fractious Sunni tribes fostered several insurgent resistance groups, and by mid-2004, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, had emerged as the most ruthless. Composed mainly of tribal youths but led by outsiders, AQI summarily executed any sheikh who opposed its wishes and declared that its “emirate” would be ruled from Ramadi, a city of four hundred thousand, sixty miles northwest of Baghdad, along the banks of the Euphrates. In 2005, the arch terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi preached in a mosque in the city and narrowly avoided capture twice. In early 2006, the sheikhs in Ramadi agreed that their followers could join the local police. Al Qaeda responded by murdering several sheikhs and killing more than fifty recruits.
So in September 2006, when a midlevel and rather obscure sheikh named Abu Risha Sattar urged the tribes around Ramadi to rebel against al Qaeda, he wasn’t given much chance of succeeding. Things looked bleak in Al Anbar, while to the east, Baghdad was falling apart. In Washington, the press and the administration believed the war was lost. The first half of Daly’s book graphically depicts why. He describes the frustration of undertaking patrol after patrol, all the while knowing the unseen enemy is watching every move of his Marines and deciding when and how to attack.
The rough rule of thumb was that every soldier or Marine in a line unit patrolled outside the wire at least once a day. Many units cycled between internal guard and maintenance duties and external patrols. In a rifle company, each squad conducted one dismounted or mounted six-hour patrol each day (or night). That was a heavy grind after three or four months. It was much harder for the soldiers with twelve- to fifteen-month rotations than for the Marines with seven to ten months.
Iraq was essentially a police war. We didn’t do a good job of modifying military training and force structure to include police methods and measures. Soldiers aren’t policemen—except when they are. In a U.S. city, about two policemen conduct detective work for every four police officers patrolling the streets. In Daly’s battalion, nine soldiers performed the intelligence-gathering and detective tasks for five hundred infantrymen. Daly describes how frustrating it was to patrol.
In the second half of his book—about the winter of 2007—the tone of the book and the tide of the battle change. Local Sunnis commanded by former Iraqi army officers appeared at Daly’s outpost, calling themselves “Thawar Al Anbar” and carrying notes of approval from a Marine battalion located outside the city. At first suspicious, Daly and the other beleaguered U.S. soldiers and Marines were quick to grasp the implication. Their greatest, most frustrating challenge was identifying the enemy hiding among the civilians outside the wire. Now Sunnis were offering to point them out. So vivid are Daly’s descriptions that the reader can sense the tipping point and can anticipate that al Qaeda in Iraq will strike back savagely. What a tale Daly tells! You won’t read this in textbook theories about counterinsurgency.
Gradually, the insurgents lost the initiative. Incidents of violence in Al Anbar plummeted from more than 450 per month in late 2006 to fewer than 100 by mid-2007.2 U.S. fatalities in Anbar fell from 43 percent of the total in 2006 to 17 percent in 2007.3 From late 2006 onward, the coalition and Iraqi forces initiated a majority of the contacts in Al Anbar.4 The number of tips from the citizenry, who sensed that al Qaeda was being driven out, skyrocketed, while Sunni recruits for the police and the army (with assurances of assignment inside Al Anbar) exceeded the number of openings.5
General David Petraeus and Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno skillfully orchestrated the deployments of the U.S. surge forces. The crucial precondition for success was that the Sunnis were predisposed to greet the surge troops positively in 2007, which had not been the case in 2004. Al Qaeda, resembling Robespierre’s Terror in 1792, had killed too many sheikhs, while empowering the criminal class and antagonizing the Sunni population. But the tribes weren’t strong enough to push out al Qaeda on their own. So they turned to the strongest tribe—the U.S. military.
The U.S.-Sunni battlefield cooperation in Ramadi that Daly writes about spread across Iraq. Petraeus, who took command of all forces in Iraq in January 2007, used the “Awakening” as the lever to flip over the war. In February 2007, he visited Ramadi and was impressed by the thousands of tribal Sunnis joining what the American high command called “emergency response units.” Petraeus authorized U.S. commanders across Iraq to recruit similar irregular forces. Petraeus and his operational deputy, Odierno, had already established U.S. company-size outposts—identical to Daly’s outpost in Ramadi—throughout Baghdad and the surrounding belts of farmlands. By 2008, U.S. battalions were paying ninety thousand Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, who had volunteered for neighborhood watch groups called the Sons of Iraq and who operated under the supervision of the U.S. outposts.
Ramadi, Baghdad, and a dozen other cities were taken back piece by piece, erecting barricades and fortifying police precincts. The greatest contribution of the tribal uprising—the Awakening—occurred outside the cities, by “draining the swamp.” Thousands of kilometers of lush farmlands and dense undergrowth had enabled al Qaeda to rest and refit in safety. Once the tribes turned, those scattered hiding places of al Qaeda were eliminated.
The war in Iraq that had seemed a lost cause and a huge international embarrassment for the United States ended with reasonable stability and the gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces. America’s mortal enemy—the al Qaeda organization that plunged the airplanes into the Twin Towers—suffered an enormous setback. Al Qaeda claimed to be fighting for the sake of the Sunnis. By the end of Daly’s tour, al Qaeda was despised and hunted by those same Sunnis.
Daly does a terrific job of bringing the reader onto the urban battlefield and showing what happened that caused the turnaround and why. Without the perseverance, decency, and grit of U.S. soldiers and Marines, the Sunnis would not have turned against al Qaeda.
—Bing West
Former assistant secretary of defense for
International Security Affairs
in the Reagan administration
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the countless Americans who have served in Ramadi. Regardless of your branch of service, military occupation, race, or gender, your sacrifice and perseverance in the face of a bold and determined enemy is a proud addition to our nation’s history. With that in mind, I have tried to write as factually as possible regarding your daily existence in Ramadi. For any oversight on my part, I humbly apologize.
To the officers and Marines of Rage Company, you truly are magnificent bastards. May this book serve as a constant reminder of this fact. To Rage 6, your leadership enabled the Sunni Awakening.
T. X. Hammes, this book is the result of your introduction. Without it, Rage Company may never have been written. To my agent, E. J. McCarthy, your knowledge and skill are outdone only by your professionalism.
I’d also like to thank the staff at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and in particular my editor, Stephen Power, for their support and belief in the potential of this story.
A special thanks to my father, who as a Marine officer set the bar very high. To my loving mother, brothers, and sis
ters, I am blessed to have your support.
Finally, I thank my wife. You were the light at the end of every firefight.
Greater Romadi. The capital of Anbar Province, Ar Ramadi.
PART ONE
1st Battalion, 37th Armor
1
BECOMING A BANDIT: THE BAPTISM
November 27, 2006
Lieutenant James Thomas walked out the front door of Combat Outpost (COP) Grant. Two concrete structures made up the American fortress in southern Ramadi. A few months earlier, two Iraqi families had called the structures home; now the buildings were covered in camouflage netting, sandbags, and reinforced wooden fighting positions. About three feet away, directly in front of the lieutenant, was a seven-foot wall of dark green sandbags. He briskly walked out from underneath the camouflage netting, following the wall as it snaked back to his left. The ground-level view of Ramadi confronted Lieutenant Thomas.
This was a city—a dense, quiet (for the moment) urban sprawl of structures. Block after block of small storefronts and houses occupied his vision. If you replaced the towering minarets and mosques with steeples and churches, Ramadi didn’t look all that different from urban America. That is, assuming you could visualize what the city had looked like before undergoing years of conflict and neglect.