The first question caught me off guard. “Are you an officer?” he asked. It was a pointed question. Why would this man care? I got the feeling that only an insurgent would want to know.
Partly intrigued and also being one of the only men in the room with a weapon, I answered truthfully. “Yes.” The man was silent for a moment and then began to joke with his family in Arabic. I desperately wanted to know what they were saying, but there was only one interpreter and he wasn’t here. The father was speaking only to his son, who was the IP. I got the feeling they were talking about how great it would be to kill me. I knew I was being slightly paranoid so I decided to leave. I wished the old man good health. The mother was still crying as I got up to leave the room. She didn’t look at me the entire time. What was there to fear? I decided I was standing among a group of insurgents, but there was nothing I could do. No evidence. The squad moved on.
Outside the home was a company of Marines at work. Rage 4 and Rage 1 elements were clearing the exterior lanes. Rage Company’s team of combat engineers was finishing up the sweep of the POO site, which turned up nothing. The squad I was with was now sprinting across the field to hit the far houses. As in HC1, we were running out of darkness.
The company staff went firm in a house on the southern side of the open field. Rage 6 began to coordinate our egress out of the objective area. To avoid putting on our own version of the Bataan Death March, we consolidated all of the detainees at our position. They totaled seven in all. None of the detainees were from any of the squads I traveled with.
The platoons continued to clear south. Rage 1 found an insurgent safe house with a mural of propaganda drawn on the wall. I had to give the mujj artist credit: he could draw. I moved up to the roof and watched a squad from Rage 1 clear two houses in six minutes. The guys were proficient. They were the only platoon to clear their entire lane. They also took the most detainees. Rage 1 was the main effort for a reason.
At 0455 the platoons went firm. Rage 1 left first, echeloning its squads out of the objective area. I was still with the headquarters element attached to Rage 4. We were waiting on a BFV to come pick up the detainees, so Rage 2 left next. The BFV took what seemed like an eternity to show up. When the ramp came down, there were already a few soldiers sitting in the back. Perfect. We needed transport and received a vehicle that was already almost full. It must have been all they had. When the soldiers realized who was getting thrown in with them, they were a little upset. Ramadi had no running water, and these Iraqis didn’t smell good.
The first two squads from Rage 4 left the objective. Our numbers now totaled twenty Marines, a BFV, some soldiers, and seven detainees.
It was forty minutes to sunrise. I told myself it didn’t really matter. It was 98 percent moonlight anyway, so it wasn’t exactly dark. Lieutenant Grubb walked out of the house.
The BFV was full. The detainees were sitting and lying on top of one another, and there were two more to fit in. Lieutenant Grubb was ready to move. “Damn it, get those fuckers in there!” Grubb said. We had been standing in the courtyard long enough. There wasn’t enough darkness left to keep track of, and we still had 2,000 meters to cover. What looked like a mosh pit was quickly forming in the back of the armored vehicle. I was interested to see whether Lieutenant Grubb could fit the last detainee in. He couldn’t.
Rage 4 actually pulled out the last two detainees and shoved each one in the direction of a Marine. With each push, he muttered a word to the infantryman: “Escort.” The Bradley raised its ramp and drove south to COP Iron. When it left, it seemed to take the darkness with it. Visibility with the naked eye increased every moment we stood there. I took off my NVGs and put them in my drop pouch. It was the first time I had felt defenseless on the mission.
Grubb walked next to me, taking a moment to rest against the wall I stood next to. I was ready to move and wondered where Captain Smith was. “Dude, we need to go; where’s the boss?” I said.
Grubb exhaled heavily and said, “Talking to some hajjis or something.” He got on the PRR and confirmed with Rage 4 Bravo that the platoon was accounted for and ready to step. Moments later, Captain Smith emerged from the house and we left.
The formation headed directly south, taking the shortest route to the old railroad tracks. I moved at the back of the dismounted column of Marines. Only Rage 4 Bravo and one other Marine were behind me. Directly in front of me were the two detainees and their escorts. It took only a few minutes for us to make it out of the eerily quiet city.
When we arrived at the berm, my bandolier came untied around my leg. I ended up having to hold the six twenty-seven-round magazines in place while I helped one of the escorts shove a blinded, flexi-cuffed, and barefoot detainee up the sandy hill. I’m sure Rage 4 Bravo was laughing deep inside, watching the three of us.
Once we were on the far side, the movement was long but simple—it was a straight shot. We did have to cross about 75 meters of ground that was nothing but jagged rocks. The barefoot detainee was having a hell of a night.
By the time we arrived at COP Iron, it was daylight. I immediately began to process the detainees. There was enough on each individual to warrant his going to the ARDF. After I finished all of the paperwork, however, and eighteen hours later back on Camp Ramadi, the ARDF decided to prosecute only one individual. They based their decision purely on the evidence provided. So be it.
After leaving the ARDF, I went to the dining facility on Camp Ramadi. I wanted to go to sleep, but my hunger pangs prevented it. When I got there, I loaded my plate with pizza, a burger, fries, and salad. I chose two lemon-lime Gatorades to drink. I found Captain James sitting at a table with some other 1-37 officers and joined them. I filled him in on the detainees. He had figured as much; none of the Iraqis were known terrorists.
While we were eating, a soldier came up to the table. “You guys hear? COP Eagles Nest just got hit by a coordinated suicide car bomb attack. The insurgents suppressed the COP with heavy small-arms fire from the Papa 10.”
I didn’t say a word for the rest of the meal.
On the way back to my tent, I couldn’t help but wonder if the guy from Saudi Arabia was the suicide bomber. Just about all the guys who conducted suicide attacks were foreign. It would have explained his dejected attitude. The guy was going to blow himself up the next day. I then wondered about the IP and his father. Were they talking about their plans after I told them I was an officer? I forced it out of my mind. Operation Windmill Point was only days away.
4
MASTER OF PUPPETS
December 7, 2006
It was a crisp, cool night as I checked my watch: 1730. Time was slowly going by, the pre-mission jitters were setting in, and we had just arrived at Combat Outpost Falcon. It was the night of December 7, 2006, and I was about to move out on Operation Windmill Point. Tonight’s ordeal was a 7-kilometer foot movement through downtown Ramadi. The mission was to clear the Lima 2 patrol sector, roughly eight hundred buildings. It was our third and final mission as Bandits, and Captain James would be moving with us during the operation. He was shocked that nothing had been found in the Papa 10. This time he would see for himself.
I was walking out of the army COC aboard COP Falcon. The army captain in charge had just thrown out all of the Marines because we were eating too much of his food. It was a ridiculous situation; the COP had received extra food specifically for the Marines that day and now he was hoarding. I was infuriated, but the issue wasn’t worth wasting time on. I headed toward a huge cinder-block structure with my team of scouts in trace. We were in a different world; arguing over food and listening to a distant firefight was becoming normal. I was coming to accept the city’s state of affairs. Attacks across the AO continued unabated, and we had yet to confirm any enemy killed in action. Nearly all of the detainees we had taken on our previous two missions had already been released and were now living among the local population. None of this was shocking to us.
Operation Windmill Point: The dense urban te
rrain between Combat Outpost Falcon and the Lima 2 patrol sector.
I came back to the mission at hand. American forces had not cleared any portion of Lima 2 in more than a year. The idea of walking through it wasn’t sitting well with my mind. To make matters worse, today was a busy day. When an army convoy had driven near the area we were about to clear, it was attacked by an IED and a subsequent direct-fire ambush. The attack claimed the lives of two soldiers and one Marine (Major Megan McClung). I had met two of the fallen previously while I was on advance party to the brigade staff. The ambush turned into a sporadic firefight that raged until about 1700, allowing us to hear the last hour of hostilities because we had just arrived at the COP.
I entered the cinder-block structure. “Lieutenant Daly, sir,” said Lance Corporal Albin.
“What?” I snapped back, still upset about being thrown out of the COC. “There’s room for us in here.”
Joash Albin was sitting inside a room built out of plywood and two-by-fours. Albin, standing about six feet tall, was everything I could ask of a Marine. He worked hard, had initiative, and was competent at his job. What he lacked in judgment, he made up for in his motivation and ability to listen to my lengthy lectures. Besides, judgment was my job. Lance Corporal Eakin and I were both standing in the doorway to the building. Like all buildings in Ramadi, it was made out of concrete and was literally empty except for the plywood rooms. There was a “toilet,” a glorified hole in the ground, in the back of the building. The structure was partitioned by a concrete wall in the center. Rage 2 had moved into the left side of the building, leaving the right side, where Albin was, completely empty. The empty space was eventually supposed to be occupied by Rage 4, but for now it was a perfect place for us to hang out.
Lance Corporal Eakin went into the room and sat down against the wall. “Go ahead, Eakin, do what you do best and go to sleep,” Albin said with a chuckle.
“Shut up, fag,” Eakin retorted.
Benjamin Eakin was the team’s radio operator. At five feet nine inches and thinner than many poor Iraqis, he was often the subject of Albin’s and my jokes. To convince Eakin that he slept too much, Albin and I had resorted to taking pictures of him while he was asleep in random places. He was an average Marine and extremely loyal. In comparison to most radio operators I’d had in my short career as a forward observer (FO), he was the most knowledgeable. During our training for deployment, the radios of every other FO team went down during a live-fire exercise. Eakin single-handedly fixed the radios for the rest of the FO teams on the hill. Of course, our radio worked fine, and what confused all of the other lance corporal 0621s took Eakin five minutes to figure out. I challenged myself to transfer that technical knowledge into a vocabulary.
I sat down next to the two Marines. “Holy shit,” I said, “this floor is cold as—”
Albin interrupted me. “Well, sir, if you had prepared properly, you would have put on some long johns.” He stretched out on the concrete floor, relishing the moment that he could correct his boss. During our previous missions, I had told both Albin and Eakin not to wear any layers. With the men’s adrenaline pumping, the added clothes usually led to profuse sweating. The temperature continued to drop as the days went by, however, and now hovered in the mid-thirties at night. With the bare floors and the concrete walls, sitting anywhere for more than five minutes left you freezing.
“Damn it, Albin, if I hear you say I told you so, I will non-req you,” I said.7 I pulled out my long john top, quickly dropped my gear, and put it on.
We sat around in that room for about two hours, doing anything we could to get warmer. During that time, I walked into the COC and acquired some food. I did so with pleasure. Time continued to inch along. At about 1930, we could hear the noise of the massive seven-ton trucks and the BFVs coming to the COP. Rage 4 was arriving. The mission was fairly complex. Over the course of the late afternoon, various elements of Rage Company would move into their staging positions at combat outposts Falcon and Grant. Each COP would receive two platoons, while the company commander and the headquarters element would go to COP Grant.
For this mission, Captain Smith had again decided to use an Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Team as his fire support element. This decision was essentially giving someone else my job yet again. I decided to attach my intel cell to Rage 2. We would basically be nothing more than an added fire team, commanded by a lieutenant. The company had a platoon of tanks and a platoon of BFVs attached; there would also be a company from 1-37 clearing the patrol sector to the south. The routes we were using would again be cleared by Pathfinder, which would drop off the cordon force of BFVs and tanks as it went. The cordon force would be spread out over the entire 7-kilometer movement in an attempt to keep the whole route clear. I wasn’t so sure. Once Pathfinder was done clearing the objective, Rage 2 and Rage 4, which were at COP Falcon, would step off. It was logical because those of us at COP Falcon had the farthest distance to travel. Rage 1 and Rage 3 would follow shortly after us and move along a different route. The platoons would follow the same tactics used in HC2, clearing designated lanes in a south to north direction.
Rage 4 filed into the building, and the three plywood rooms were quickly crammed with Marines and gear. In the corner, one of the corporals was explaining to another Marine how to use a shotgun. The infamous words “now all you have to do . . .” were no sooner uttered than there was a huge explosion. Instantly, dust and splinters of wood sprayed my face. I was dazed and confused. What seemed like an eternity was probably only a matter of seconds as people came to their senses. We sat in stunned silence. I brushed off my face, and the touch brought me back to reality.
I was amazed to see that all of the Marines standing in the corner were fine. In this room, no more than ten feet by ten feet, there were roughly thirteen Marines. A shotgun had just been fired and had ricocheted off the wall into the ceiling. Two Marines had literally been looking down at the weapon as dozens of pellets flew past their faces and into the wall. If the weapon had been leaning at any other angle, it would have deflected into the plywood and hit the Marines crammed into the room next to us.
“Albin, Eakin, you okay?” I said, breaking the silence.
“We’re still here, sir,” stated Albin.
I began to feel that I was working with a bunch of amateurs. Nothing shakes your confidence more than witnessing Marines, who have trained over and over again, nearly kill one another with such a blatant disregard for safety. In a dark room a noncommissioned officer was “teaching” another junior Marine how to handle a shotgun, and the junior kid just figured why not pull the trigger? The issue was not exclusive to Rage Company; it was Marine Corps-wide.
The standard rifleman’s training focused on the organic weapons of a fire team: M16A4 or M4 rifle, M203 grenade launcher, and M249 light machine gun. Only a select few received basic training with the different types of shotguns available to Marines. Yet this didn’t prevent the Corps from distributing dozens of the weapons to its infantry units before deployment. Rage Company’s senior enlisted Marine, First Sergeant Eric Carlson, gave numerous classes on the operation of these shotguns, but with only days until movement into Iraq, muscle memory did not have time to set in. It wouldn’t be the last incident involving the Marines of Rage Company and shotguns.
The gross negligence displayed here had added to the pre-mission jitters rattling my nerves. I wasn’t sure whether it was the cold air that made me shiver or the thought of trusting these Marines with my life.
We heard more distant small-arms fire. Surprisingly, the next hour and a half went by quickly. With all of the action, we knew the enemy was going to play tonight. I walked over to the COC again and talked to Lieutenant Thomas about the shotgun incident. As we spoke, it came over the radio that Pathfinder was nearing the release point, meaning we would be clear to step off.
Rage 2 began to form up on the dusty road and oriented down Baseline Street. Baseline ran east-west through southern Ramadi, and we would move down i
t for about 2,000 meters. I went back to the building to get Albin and Eakin, who met me outside. “Gents, we are going to move with Corporal Holloway’s squad. We will be directly behind his first fire team. Albin, you have point, followed by myself and then Eakin,” I said.
“Roger, sir.”
The sound of sporadic gunfire could be heard in the distance. As we formed up, it began to pick up in intensity. Measuring the distance of a firefight from one’s position, especially in an urban environment, is rather tricky. It sounded like we were going to be in a hailstorm of fire as soon as we left COP Falcon. We began to step, and when I moved onto Baseline, still inside friendly lines, I could see bursts of tracers flying over rooftops about 1.5 kilometers away. Nothing like this had happened during HC1 or HC2. I punched the clock, sending my M4 to condition one. Tonight was going to be different.
There was complete silence as we began to move. The road was about two lanes wide in each direction, and the Marines maintained good dispersion with at least 5 meters between each man in a staggered column. We moved faster than usual, a direct result of the sounds of combat. The street was lined with small garages on either side, which had served as market stalls in a different lifetime.
I tightened my Kevlar helmet. The weight from my NVGs, which hung over my left eye, was forcing the helmet forward. I had literally tied the bandolier of ammunition magazines on my left thigh. It wasn’t falling off tonight. On my right side hung a sustainment/drop pouch where I put spare batteries, my map, and a small notepad. On my body armor vest, I had another six magazines, a fragmentation grenade, a first aid kit, a butt pack with some chow, and a bottle of water. The vector and the dagger, a target location device and the essential tools of any forward observer, were slung over my left shoulder inside their carrying case. With a burden of right around one hundred pounds, I was carrying one of the lightest loads in the company. My M4 was at the alert. The moon was high, and vision with the naked eye was good out to roughly 150 meters.
Rage Company Page 8
