Rage Company

by Daly, Thomas P.

  6. Build a COP to sustain long-term control of Julayba.”

  I wrote down each of the tasks. During the briefing of intent, I couldn’t help but notice the difference between Churubusco and our previous missions. We weren’t simply clearing a district. The colonel’s tasks specifically stated that we were to find and recruit the tribal sheikhs. Rage Company was being ordered to engage the local populace and no longer treat them as neutral observers.

  “We are currently in the initial phase of Churubusco: the reception of Rage Company,” Lieutenant Colonel Ferry said. “The second phase will commence on 17 January. On that night three separate raid forces [RF] will enter Julayba, each clearing their respective objective areas.” He went through the task organization for the mission. Raid force 1 was the SEALs and Baker 1/9. They would amphibiously insert in the northern portion of Julayba, utilizing DSU riverine patrol craft. Rage Company was the second RF, and Dog Company 1/9, which would also assume operational control of Lieutenant Jahelka’s Rage 3, was the third. Each raid force had its own attachments, including Apache and Cobra gunships, a platoon of Iraqi army soldiers, interpreters, and so on. For heavy support, there would be a company of Bradley fighting vehicles and another of Abrams tanks.

  The next slide was a map of Julayba. The prominent geographical feature of the area was the Euphrates River; the northern boundary of Julayba, it cut the region into the shape of an ancient shark tooth with soft, rounded edges. Using a laser pointer, Lieutenant Colonel Ferry continued: “For this phase there are six objective areas: Chihuahua, Dachshund, Doberman, Bulldog, Pit Bull, and Beagle. RF 1 is responsible for Chihuahua and Bulldog; RF 2, Doberman and Dachshund; RF 3, Pit Bull and Beagle. The S2 [intel section.] has identified five potential river crossing points: Frog, Newt, Salamander, Komodo, and Cotton Mouth. In order to successfully isolate the region, all units are authorized to destroy any boat near these points. Next slide.”

  The colonel went through a few slides, highlighting the main roads and names of local tribes, as well as the locations for known schools and mosques. Then he went over the four targeted high -value individuals (HVI). “Hamid Ali Hamadi is the current head of AQI in Ramadi. AIF propaganda says he has left the area, but his wife and children still live on the western edge of Julayba, near the intersection of Route Nova and Orchard Way. Hamadi is well versed in the planning and coordination of IED, VBIED, and direct-fire attacks. He facilitates the movement of foreign fighters within the region, and his stated goal is to control or destroy the government of Ramadi.” Hamadi was one of our standard targets. Every battalion had him on their list of active terrorists.

  “Daham Hanush Hamid is the emir of AQI’s legal court within Ramadi. A former nationalist turned extremist, he passes judgment on local nationals in accordance with his interpretation of Sharia law. His personal wealth allows him to finance and coordinate attacks throughout the Euphrates River Valley between Habbaniyah and Ramadi. His four sons all lead their own insurgent cells that are capable of mortar, rocket, sniper, IED, and direct-fire attacks against coalition forces. The Marines to our east, 3/2, have received the brunt of the Hanush network’s attacks and believe the family is based out of Julayba.” The picture accompanying the slide showed Hanush in a black suit and a tie. He resembled a middle-aged businessman.

  “Ali Hamid Mutar, aka Ali Siyagah, is a Wahhabi religious leader. His network is financed through Saudi Arabia and provides him with the money to recruit suicide bombers, as well as to afford the logistical assets to preach at a large number of Anbar’s mosques. Siyagah is also Daham Hanush’s personal religious adviser. Our intel assessments placed Siyagah and a small security detachment in Julayba preaching at the Albu Musa mosque two days ago.” Siyagah was a new target. He was also the first terrorist I’d heard of who was actively preaching to the populace.

  “Hatim Hussain Ali Sa’id is the only known sheikh in Julayba. He has close ties to multiple IED cells and uses his tribal influence to recruit for AQI. Hatim also houses and facilitates the movement of foreign fighters for Umar Daham Hanush. Hatim has three sons: Marwan, Wissam, and Muthana. Marwan runs a construction company that provides significant funding to AQI through its business. We have no information on the other two sons.”

  The colonel paused to drink from his glass of water. I looked at Hatim’s picture projected against the wall. There was a bit of irony in the fact that we were ordered to find and recruit the local sheikhs after we arrested the only known one. I foresaw dozens of Iraqis claiming to be sheikhs and wanting to fill the power vacuum we would create.

  The rest of the brief served as an opportunity for the representatives to coordinate their unit’s actions. I met up with the battalion intelligence officer, Lieutenant Hopper. I asked him about the battle for Sofia.

  He was more than happy to provide a summary. “The Abu Soda tribal area was a historic point-of-origin site for mortar attacks against Corregidor and the Combat Outpost [a small facility housing 1/9 INF units across Corregidor on the northern side of Michigan]. Our response was usually two or three rounds of 155mm artillery from Camp Ramadi. The result of our response was the destruction of the Abu Soda’s crops and fields. Their leader, Sheikh Jassim, pressured us for a long time to stop firing the counter-fire missions into his fields. Obviously, we told him to stop the mortar attacks.” Lieutenant Hopper was distracted for a moment while he answered a soldier’s question.

  “Sorry about that. I have nine companies to support and three soldiers who work for me. To be honest, it’s a bit much. So Jassim agrees to stop the mortar attacks. He orders his tribesmen to set up checkpoints along Route Nova and Apple, as well as on some of the secondary access roads into his territory. He doesn’t order his men to fight al Qaeda, just to tell them to go away and use a different place. Fertile ground is hard to come by in a desert. After about a week of these checkpoints, mortar attacks against Combat Outpost and Corregidor stopped. Then AQ, either Mullah Qahttan or Daham Hanush, orders the destruction of the Abu Soda tribe. A couple hundred AQI fighters, mostly tribesmen from Julayba supporting Hanush’s cells of well-trained insurgents, invade Jassim’s territory. Intense fighting results, and we get a satellite call from Jassim pleading for assistance. We threw a bunch of AKs, 7.62 ammo, and food in the back of some five-tons and drove it out there to Jassim. With the extra weapons and the support of a few Apache helicopters, his men repulsed the al Qaeda attack.” Hopper rushed the last few sentences. Lieutenant Colonel Ferry was motioning for his presence.

  I left the brief and went to chow with some of the platoon commanders. I was surprised by the variety and amount of food available at the base. It was almost the same as at Camp Ramadi, just on a smaller scale. After all, Camp Ramadi housed roughly six thousand soldiers, while Corregidor supported only a thousand. I shared the hundred-meter walk back to the company command post with Lieutenant Thomas. An entire platoon of Iraqi army soldiers was going to execute Churubusco with his men.

  “You have an interpreter for the Iraqis?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I put Sergeant Karras in charge of them. I basically told him that he was the Iraqi platoon commander,” replied James.

  “Have fun, you freak; I’ll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs,” I said.

  I thought about how I would be stuck at Corregidor during Churubusco’s execution. The XO and I were going to act as the company’s quick reaction force (QRF), commanding a convoy of armored humvees that would react to scenarios as needed. It was a job nobody wanted: pure boredom. If you did get called out, it was usually because someone was killed or wounded. Then you immediately regretted thinking about how you wished the job wasn’t so damn boring. Plus, IEDs target vehicles more than they do dismounted infantry. Being a member of the QRF was a mental triad of boredom, danger, and regret: a wonderful combination for any man’s psyche.

  “Tom, I’ve got eighty-eight guys going into this raid. That’s about the same number of soldiers operating out of COP Falcon or Grant,” said James.

&nb
sp; “So?” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.

  “So . . . there is an army captain I am in charge of, a Marine lieutenant who is senior to me, and an Iraqi army lieutenant. Not to mention the tanks and helicopters in support.” I sensed the optimism in his voice and realized that he wasn’t unsure of how to handle the situation. He was excited.

  “Hey, man”—there was more giddiness in James’s voice—“I think you left before he said this, but Lieutenant Colonel Ferry wants all of our squads to be outfitted with one suppressed rifle.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “He wants to maintain the element of surprise. He thinks suppressed weapons will allow us to silence the local dogs without anyone noticing we are there.” James was chuckling as he finished.

  “Sounds like some Ranger shit to me,” I said as we parted ways. James headed to his platoon’s barracks, while I went to the command post.

  I thought that shooting the dogs was an absurd idea. With helicopters, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and a few hundred heavily laden American infantrymen, the colonel was worried about the local dogs compromising the element of surprise. Plus, one raid force would have ended up shooting at another when the dogs ran between our separate groups. Hell, if we had told our Marines to silence the dogs, they would have used fixed bayonets and saved the ammunition. No need for suppressed rifles.

  I did, however, like where the colonel’s mind was. He wasn’t going to let anything prevent us from capturing the enemy. In fact, “silence the dogs” became something of a motto for Rage Company’s officers before the mission. We said it to one another as a greeting, a joke, and mostly as a threat to our enemies. In our minds, the dog wasn’t a four-legged animal, it was al Qaeda. And al Qaeda would be silenced.

  2000, January 16, 2007

  The convoy of seven-tons drove down Route Michigan with a tank - and-Bradley escort. Lieutenant Thomas watched the turrets of the armored vehicles spin from side to side, scanning the darkness with their high-powered night optics. The vehicles traveled 6 kilometers to his insertion point and began to unload his men—a motley collection of Iraqi soldiers, U.S. Marines, military working dogs, and a human-intelligence team. As they dismounted the vehicles, the platoon commander arrayed his raid force in a defensive posture. Dozens of wild dogs were barking at the intruders, and 1/9’s battalion commander’s orders to maintain the element of surprise were already unrealistic. Maybe the suppressed rifle wasn’t that bad of an idea.

  Lieutenant Thomas surveyed the ground. The terrain to his immediate front was open and relatively flat. Two hundred meters east was a lone gas station. In the opposite direction and at the same distance were the outskirts of an Iraqi village. A few lights illuminated the dozen walled homes. His objective, however, was 800 meters north, across the open, flat terrain. There the platoon commander hoped to find Sheikh Hatim, his sons, and a suitable position to establish as Combat Outpost Rage.

  “Sir, can you tell the trucks not to leave yet?” asked Davila. His voice was coming over the intrasquad radio.

  Lieutenant Thomas directed his radio operator to relay the request on the convoy net. He didn’t get a response.

  “I’m not getting them. What do you need, Davila?” replied Thomas.

  The trucks began to execute a three-point turn on Michigan.

  “Shit, sir, we left our rockets on the seven-tons,” stated Davila. Fury gripped James Thomas. Thoughts of his infantrymen being ambushed by fortified machine gun positions flashed in his mind. Without antitank rockets, it would be a nightmarish scenario.

  He thought about yelling at Davila, but he could see the squad leader taking action. A column of Marines, Davila’s entire squad to be precise, was running onto Michigan. They flagged down the seven-tons like hitchhikers a few miles from a prison.

  To the dismay of Lieutenant Thomas, the vehicles behaved like passersby in the prison scenario. The first two seven-tons swerved around the men, ignoring the pleas.

  The third stopped. It took Davila’s Marines a few moments to secure their misplaced rockets. Then Rage 2 began its movement to objective Doberman.

  Minutes into the tactical movement, Lieutenant Thomas began to appreciate the geographic features of Julayba. In this suburban, agricultural-based region, his men could properly maneuver, machine guns could fire at their max effective range, and sophisticated night optics could spot the enemy 1,000 meters out, rather than two buildings away. The fields and the dispersed populace also offered the opportunity to use supporting arms: mortars, artillery, and close air support were readily available.

  Although the infinite ambush points of Ramadi’s urban sprawl were missing, they were replaced by a less deadly and more annoying nuisance: hundreds of wild dogs. As the Marines approached the first street they would cross, Irish Way, packs of dogs heckled the raid force. Multiple Marines requested permission from their platoon commander to shoot the dogs. James Thomas said no. That was before a massive white husky went after the highly trained German shepherd military working dog. Without permission to kill the wolflike beast, Corporal Davila threw a smoke canister at the animal. The dog immediately bit onto the canister and stepped away from the group.

  Unfortunately for the animal, the canister had a delayed fuse. When the smoke grenade “popped,” sparks shot from its mouth. They were followed by a loud whimper and a cloud of smoke that outlined the path the dog took away from the Marines. Lieutenant Thomas figured the dog wasn’t coming back.

  The point element began to cross the linear danger area that was Irish Way. The far side was a small tree line. Once the first squad crossed and set up security, another squad established a blocking position along the road. The Marines laid out a spike strip and used barrels and other debris littering the side of the road to stop all north-south traffic. Then they continued their movement to the objective.

  Walking under the tall palm trees, the German shepherd was attacked again. James Thomas recognized it as the same white dog. Enough was enough. He shot the animal. Like in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, the dog struggled back into the shadows it had come from.

  A few hundred meters through the palm trees, the raid force entered an orchard. Orderly columns of fruit trees lined the area. Beyond them was a steep incline. The change in height was only about 10 meters, but in a mainly flat landscape it was advantageous terrain. More important, there was a solitary building on the higher ground overlooking the orchard and the palm trees. It was a commanding presence, accompanied by a dirt path that led to the structure from Irish Way. The path was clearly a secondary access point because Lieutenant Thomas knew, from his map, that Route Nova ran along the front of the structure. The building became James Thomas’s primary location for COP Rage.

  The raid force continued north toward Route Nova and approached the paved road 200 meters east of the large building. A single row of homes rested between the troops and the road. On the far side of Nova was the southern end of objective Doberman. From the cover of the tree line, James Thomas spot-checked his position against his map.

  “Sir, Bradford has eyes on the Hatim target house. It has the large water tank on top of it,” said Corporal Davila via the intrasquad radio.

  About a quarter mile east, the sounds of Rage 1 and Rage 4 using shotguns to breach doors inside objective Dachshund filled the night. The near-simultaneous raiding of Julayba was beginning.

  James Thomas confirmed that all elements were set. Then his Marines emerged from the tree line, crossed through two backyards, and stormed across Route Nova. Davila’s men kicked down the door to Sheikh Hatim’s house.

  Inside, the squad of shouting Marines cleared the structure. The military-age males were consolidated into one room. Lieutenant Thomas removed the target package from his drop pouch and matched faces with two of the sitting men. Sheikh Hatim and his son Marwan were in Rage 2’s custody. The men were blindfolded and flexi-cuffed.

  With the primary objective, Sheikh Hatim, secured, James Thomas turned his attention to the
secondary task. “Sergeant Karras, take the IA platoon and check out the house that overlooks our avenue of approach. I want to know if it is capable of housing the company,” said Lieutenant Thomas over the radio.

  “You want me to send the detainees over there, too, sir?” asked Corporal Davila. He was standing next to his platoon commander.

  “No, I want to search the objective area as fast as possible. Let’s go.”

  Davila’s men exited the house. Above, helicopters hovered in the dark sky; armored vehicles stood by along Route Michigan, and six separate units were raiding their respective objectives. Faced with such a large air-ground task force, the local al Qaeda militants offered no resistance during the night.

  0100, January 17, 2007

  “Manchu, this is Rage Mobile, requesting permission to depart Camp Corregidor. Seven victors, twenty packs,” I said into the radio headset. I was impressed with the communication system inside my vehicle. I could talk internally to the driver and the turret gunner merely by speaking into the microphone, rather than having to yell over the roaring engine. To communicate over the humvee’s radios, I simply pressed a switch and spoke into the same microphone. It was much more convenient than holding the handset to your ear for hours on end.

  The battalion cleared my resupply convoy to leave the camp.

  “Lieutenant Daly, what time is Gunny Bishop leaving in the morning?” asked First Sergeant Carlson. Rage 8 was bored with sitting around and found a seat in the back of my humvee.

  “Around 0700. His convoy is going to focus on our guys in the south. This one is more focused on the soldiers in the northern area of Julayba,” I said.

  We drove onto Michigan and headed east. I took the convoy slowly, only about ten miles per hour. Pathfinder, which was clearing our route, was ahead of us and going the same speed. I decided that I would stay between 400 and 800 meters behind them. If I stayed too close on Michigan, my less-armored vehicles would be easy targets for any lurking insurgents. Pathfinder’s white light would negate the darkness of my convoy, which drove by infrared light. But I had to stay as close as possible because once we started to make stops to drop off supplies, Pathfinder would get ahead of me. It didn’t take insurgents very long to emplace IEDs after Pathfinder went past.