The Marines ceased firing, and we analyzed the target yet again. To my surprise, the wooden firing platform was still standing, exactly as it had been before the rocket. Captain Smith quickly directed another rocket to be fired at the room. The same course of events repeated itself, only this time Bradford put the rocket directly through the window. The shot probably impacted the wooden stand itself. I guess the third time really is a charm.
After the third rocket shot, we went back to our normal state of readiness. To calm the Marines, the music changed from rock to Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You Been Gone.” I grabbed Albin and Eakin and brought them up onto the roof. I told the two Marines that I wanted to document the first time they ever fired at a living person in anger. The three of us posed for a picture that Sergeant Bustamante took. Hundreds of shell casings littered the ground at our feet.
The rest of the day went by without incident. The insurgents did not fire a single shot at us following the decimation of their firing position. I wondered whether we had disrupted the enemy to the point where his plans for the day were ruined.
After the evening call to prayer, I headed into the COC. Rage 2 Actual and Rage 6 were discussing the night’s events. Sergeant Sempert, the assistant squad leader for our detachment of combat engineers, was sitting in the corner. He was about to be tasked with taking down numerous palm trees that prevented clear sectors of fire for a few of the building’s machine gun positions. Lieutenant Thomas’s main concern was a suicide VBIED attack. He wanted a straight shot along each road that approached the building.
I sat down next to Sempert and asked him how many games of poker he fit in during the day. “Not enough” was his answer. The Marines, myself included, respected the young sergeant. He had proved himself to be a courageous and tactically savvy Marine during the Heidbreder ambush and other firefights. His expertise with explosives was unmatched, except for maybe by that of his boss, Staff Sergeant Eagle.
The best part about Sergeant Sempert: he was addicted to poker. I will say that the Marine had one hell of a poker face. One night I watched him knock Lieutenant Shearburn out of three games in a row. When he lost, however, everyone knew it. You could hear his shouts from Camp Ramadi’s coffee shop all the way to tent city during a game. It made for some good times between missions.
While we sat, Tarheel came over the net and informed Rage 6 of an Apache raid in our sector. The Marines from COP Firecracker were going to head north along Fire Station, passing by our position, and hit a cluster of target buildings about 300 meters from us. They were going to step off in twenty minutes.
Lieutenant Thomas and Captain Smith quickly finished their planning and decided to execute a squad-size patrol of the immediate area around building 17. After the Marines from Apache went by our position, Sergeant Sempert and Lieutenant Thomas, with a security detachment, headed out to set up the explosive charges that would knock out the palm trees.
We didn’t want to detonate any of the charges until the Marines from Apache were gone, so the squad-size patrol began to search some of the buildings adjacent to us while we waited.
Directly across the street to our south, the Marines entered the first building. It was no more than twenty steps away. In moments, the Marines found a cache of large-caliber mortar rounds. I left building 17 with Sergeant Bustamante in tow to check out the find. By the time I got there, the Marines had laid out all of the rounds in neatly aligned rows. I quickly looked them over. It was a mix of 120mm and 82mm rounds, the standard insurgent calibers. Rage 6 informed Tarheel of the find, and EOD was dispatched to pick up the cache.
After a few minutes and some photos, I headed back to the COC. I stopped in the street and watched as the Marines from Apache went past, moving south along Fire Station. It was the same thing as Comanche: a tightly packed group of men all looking at the ground. They were almost all out of sight when the last man looked over and saw me watching them. He lifted his rifle and pointed it directly at me.
“Hey, Marine, get out of the street, I almost shot you!” he shouted at me.
I was furious. Did the idiot not know he was walking past a platoon-size friendly position? I didn’t exactly look like the enemy in my full-body armor and Kevlar helmet. Not to mention the glowing infrared chem-light in my trouser pocket.
I leaned over and pulled the glowing stick out of my pocket. I shook it vigorously at the 1/6 Marine. I wanted to shout back and contemplated throwing the chem-light at the ignorant bastard. Somehow my professionalism prevailed. I walked back into building 17 and headed up to the COC.
Sergeant Sempert was ready to start blowing up palm trees. I watched from the various fighting positions as the massive trees were cut down by small explosions. It was an entertaining night, counting down to the actual explosion and watching the blasts shake the ground. It wasn’t quite as exciting as the party going on in Times Square that evening, but it was a night I wasn’t going to forget. It was the first time someone had pointed a loaded rifle at me.
Once the destruction of the palm trees was complete, I met James Thomas in the COC. He dropped his body armor and gear and took a seat on his sleeping bag next to the radio. I gave him my camera so he could watch the videos I had taken of Sempert’s work. While he was watching, Corporal Holloway, the acting sergeant of the guard, asked Lieutenant Thomas why he had played Kelly Clarkson during the day’s engagement.
I leaned forward in my chair, angling in the general direction of Corporal Holloway. “You mean you have never heard the story of Captain Chontosh and Kelly Clarkson?” I sarcastically asked Holloway. In an attempt to build suspense, I snapped my head back toward Lieutenant Thomas.
“You didn’t tell your Marines this story?” I asked a smiling James Thomas before I continued with, “They probably think you actually like listening to Kelly Clarkson!”
James took his cue and said, “Okay, here it is. Captain Chontosh”—a highly decorated Marine and a Navy Cross recipient from the initial push—“was my class adviser at IOC [infantry officer course]. He is a Rochester guy like me and Lieutenant Daly, so I like to think he gave me special attention, only I don’t mean in a good way.
“So my group of lieutenants is sitting around listening to me give an operations order in the crushing heat of the Mojave Desert on an August day. Chontosh, with a look of disgust, is evaluating me.” James paused for a second, spitting out a massive wad of dip.
“I get into the Fire Support Plan, talking about my time line for tank, air, and artillery fires. I didn’t get very far. Chontosh jumps up and rips into me hard-core. Once he’s satisfied that he made his point and that everyone understands how fucking stupid I am, he looks at us all and says, ‘Combined arms and Kelly Clarkson.’ Everybody is lost, clueless to the connection. Chontosh then goes off on a tangent about the capabilities of combined-arms assets: tanks, Cobra gunships, artillery, mortars. You name it, he was saying what it could do.
“Then he says, ‘Since you been gone,’ three times real quick, punching his fist into his hand each time. He follows it up with ‘Tank main gun! Mark-19! J-DAM!’ using the same mannerisms; punching his fist into his hand. The guy is shouting at us now. Screaming about how combined arms is contagious like Kelly Clarkson’s songs and that the rhythm of her music is like the pulse of combat. He even says that the structure of a song is similar to the four phases of combat. The lyrics are the unknown; anything can happen during your movement from the line of departure to phase line one. You can get ambushed, take a casualty, get lost, whatever. But the chorus is the constant. You always know what to do at phase line one because it is preplanned, just like the chorus is repetitive. Once actions for that phase line are complete, it’s back to the lyrics during the movement to phase line two. Then he orders us to drop our blouses, and we follow him on a deathly quick four-mile run. He PT’d us into the dirt. Only then did we execute the live-fire exercise.”
Another dramatic pause, then he concluded with, “That’s why we listen to Kelly Clarkson.”
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The group of Marines continued to joke into the early-morning hours. Even though I had heard that story a million times before, I went to sleep that night thinking about the pulse of combat.
For whatever reason, I was genuinely excited during that day’s engagement. I didn’t only surprise my enemy, but I also watched thousands of bullets fly through the air at him. The sensory overload made me another person. Maybe it was the fact that I knew exactly where the insurgent was, as well as who was shooting and why. Whatever the reason, my mind was no longer in fear of the intense nature of battle as it had been during Lima 2. Instead it was focused, trying to anticipate the flow of events. I decided that it was this mental state that Chontosh had described as the pulse of combat.
The following day was uneventful. Not a single shot was fired in anger. In response to the lull, each platoon, except Rage 3, which would act as a reserve, planned to execute its own raids in the surrounding areas. Rage 1 was going to head south into the vicinity of the fortified network of fighting positions they had discovered during our last stay. Rage 2 decided to clear the structures between building 17 and the abandoned COP, which the insurgents had turned into their own position.
Rage 2 stepped off first. Lieutenant Thomas led the patrol with Corporal Davila’s squad. I sat in the COC with Captain Smith and monitored their progress. The first few buildings were empty, but twenty minutes into the patrol James Thomas came over the net and said, “Rage COC, this is Rage 2 Actual; we are going to need EOD. There’s two large cylindrical containers with wires running to them on the second floor of building 4, patrol sector Golf 4. We also found mortar rounds in rice bags on the first floor. In the courtyard there are a few circular targets drawn on the exterior wall with corresponding bullet holes. Next to the targets is a visual depiction of how to shoot down helicopters. Marlo is trying to translate the script around the drawings right now, over,” said Lieutenant Thomas.
I was intrigued by his find and went straight to the map. Finally, it dawned on me that Qatana wasn’t simply the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq; it was an urban training facility for its fighters.
Not even 200 meters to the south, on the other side of Racetrack, was the rifle range and the large cache we had discovered during Hue City I. Farther south, directions dictating a safe path through Qatana’s streets were drawn on the walls, allowing new and most likely foreign (Iraqis refer to out-of-towners as “foreign”) fighters to maneuver around our positions. Even the IED that struck Lieutenant Thomas’s radio operator was within 300 meters of the site, the Arabic script on the wall above it warning the locals of its presence. I wondered how many American lives would have been saved if we all spoke the same language as our enemies and could read the graffiti in front of our faces.
Lieutenant Thomas began to head back with the patrol. He was trying to find the easiest route for EOD to make it to the building. About halfway back, he halted the unit. A round container was partially buried underneath a pile of rocks. It rested against the side of the building they had just been inside. The platoon commander called up Sergeant Sempert and sent him to investigate the device.
“LT! Back ’ em up! Back the fuck up!” shouted Sempert. Lieutenant Thomas quickly did as the sergeant commanded, staring at the flustered Marine, who was cutting every wire running in the direction of the rock pile. Sempert grabbed a copper wire and tugged on it. The opposite end revealed itself, connected to the cylindrical tank atop the pile. Later, the combat engineer would explain that he was almost on top of the device when he spotted what appeared to be mortar rounds beneath the rocks.
The quick-acting Sempert had disarmed the IED. It was a good thing he did. There weren’t only mortar rounds underneath the rocks, but the cylindrical tank was also stuffed with a hundred pounds of explosives. If an insurgent had set off the IED with the squad on top of it, the result would have been devastating. We made another request for EOD to come to our position.
When EOD arrived an hour later, Captain Smith released Rage 1 for their raid. Rage 6, who had probably slept only five hours in the last three days, succumbed to his drowsiness soon afterward. I decided to let him sleep and monitored Rage 1’s progress with Lieutenant Thomas.
Rage 1 Actual, Lieutenant Shearburn, brought two squads out on the raid. First he scoured the network of fighting positions his men had largely destroyed a week earlier and found them in the same pathetic state as they had left them. Along the no-name street paralleling Dobber to the north, however, they found an Impala car, the back of which was reconfigured as a sniper’s firing position. It was also on the same street where they had found the graffiti outlining the safe passage through Qatana.
Lieutenant Shearburn requested to destroy the car. I approved and looked over to Captain Smith to get his permission. Rage 6 was out. I thought about waking him but ultimately decided against it. I found it hard to fathom that he would disagree with the decision. I told Lieutenant Thomas to give Shearburn the green light to destroy the car. I didn’t bother to tell Tarheel.
The Marines of Rage 1 dropped an incendiary grenade through the Impala’s engine block. The resulting inferno lit up southern Qatana, and Shearburn quickly led his men back to their position.
An angry voice spewed out over the battalion net. “Rage 6, this is Tarheel 3!” said the battalion operations officer. I responded in Rage 6’s absence.
“I’ m looking at our UAV feed, and it looks like there is a huge fire in your sector. Did your patrol start that fire?” he asked.
I responded with an affirmative and gave him the specifics of the scenario. What I didn’t ask him was why there was a Predator UAV flying over our positions without our knowledge. There was a litany of enemy fighting positions that we could have used the UAV to observe and recon before our raids left the safety of their defensive positions. Instead, our Marines left before its arrival and therefore increased the risk involved in the operation. I felt as if 1/6 was using the asset to spy on us, rather than to increase our combat efficiency.
“Rage FO, I want to speak to Rage 6. The car just exploded! This is unacceptable!” Tarheel 3 was on a tirade. I leaned over and apologized to a sleeping Captain Smith. Then I woke him up.
Rage 6 rolled his eyes after Lieutenant Thomas and I briefed him on the firestorm he was about to endure. He grabbed the radio handset and got on the net. Then Tarheel 3 berated our commander so that the entire battalion could hear. When he was done, Captain Smith got hold of Lieutenant Shearburn and yelled at him over the company net.
The entire time I awkwardly sat in my chair, wondering why so many people were upset that we had destroyed an insurgent vehicle. Rage Company was quickly becoming a dysfunctional family.
The following day was as uneventful as the previous had been. That night, though, our last full evening in Qatana, was different. It was one of my most unsettling experiences to date.
In the middle of a four-hour watch, I sat listening to the radio. Eakin was dozing off in the corner, but for whatever reason I was having no problems staying awake. Earlier in the shift, I had heard over the net that Weapons Company, 1/6 was going to run a route clearance mission along Michigan, between checkpoints 295 and 296. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Pathfinder had already cleared the route after dark, and the battalion usually executed similar missions every few days. The intent was to ensure that IEDs were not hastily emplaced after Pathfinder came through.
It started when I heard Weapons give Tarheel a radio check, stating that they had made it to checkpoint 295. I recognized the voice of the company commander as my executive officer from the Basic School (TBS). I considered him the best of my instructors.
Five minutes later his voice came over the net again. “Tarheel, this is Warrior; we have two MAMs lying in the reeds on the northwest side of the Michigan-Fire Station intersection. They have what appears to be a wire running from them to an object in the middle of the road. Request permission to engage, over,” said the captain.
My former TBS
instructor’s request told me everything I needed to know about 1/6, Tarheel. They were the dysfunctional family.
There was no reason to ask for permission to shoot two insurgents. Maybe on your first day out or during your first firefight, somebody might say something like that, but these Marines had been here for five months. Everybody knew that the area around the IED was deserted. Every building in the surrounding blocks was incredibly scarred by the war, and the men were lying directly in front of the building that 1/6 had hit with the GMLR only days earlier. The only things that lived there were IEDs.
This wasn’t the captain’s first deployment, either. His question was a result of the command climate. Rage 6, Captain Smith, didn’t really care whether Tarheel 3 berated him on the net; the guy didn’t write his fitness report and therefore couldn’t affect his career.
For the organic 1/6 units, however, Tarheel was the man. The battalion staff approved their awards and coordinated their chow, ammo, and mail. They assigned the companies their sectors, missions, and collateral duties. Basically, the Marines of 1/6 owed their daily existence to their battalion staff. In a bureaucratic sense, it was logical that the captain would ask for permission to shoot; he had probably heard the conversation between Rage 6 and Tarheel 3 the previous night and wanted to avoid such an event. It couldn’t cause any harm letting the battalion know before you opened fire, could it?
Yes, it could. The other side of this coin is the guy behind the desk on the other end of the radio. He isn’t sitting in an M1114 with the engine running. He doesn’t see two guys lying in a small puddle between four-foot-high weeds. He doesn’t realize how obvious the wire running to the plainly visible IED is. By asking him permission, the captain, my former instructor, was forcing the desk jockey, Tarheel 3, to second-guess his judgment. Tarheel 3 had no choice! The Marine on the scene was asking for his opinion.
Rage Company Page 20
