My Men are My Heroes

by Nathaniel R. Helms

In the narrow confines of the old section of Fallujah MK-19s and TOWs were hard to use because they needed space to arm and safely deploy. The fighting was close—sometimes only 15 or 20 meters separated antagonists firing RPGs, hand grenades, emplaced machine guns, and automatic weapons from one another. Sometimes the fighting was so close that blood from both sides mingled on the floors and walls. Victors and vanquished would be covered in each other’s blood. There have been few fights like it in the annals of the Corps.

  Occasionally a self-declared Iraqi martyr would surrender, but Kasal says the foreign fighters almost never did. Among them were Saudis, Syrians, Georgians, Pakistanis, and Afghans. Before it was over the Marines captured insurgents from 16 countries.

  There were clues that Chechens were also there. Kasal remembers seeing a knitted, multicolored beanie that Chechens liked to wear lying on the ground outside a house that had been flattened. Other Marines reported similar finds. Whoever they were, the light-skinned jihadists inside the buildings didn’t quit until they were exterminated. Even then they sometimes had the temerity to toss out a grenade with their last gasp.

  Although the insurgents did not deploy tube artillery in Fallujah they made liberal use of free-flight rockets, mortars, and RPGs. They lobbed these at the attacking Marines in much the same way mortars and artillery shells are launched. The Marines retaliated with air strikes, helicopter assaults, and precision-guided munitions that picked out strongpoints and obliterated them and anyone inside.

  BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE

  One of the Marines’ favorite methods of announcing themselves to insurgents hiding in a structure was to “keyhole” the house before making their entrance. They did it using two Shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon (SMAW) rockets. The first one, containing a conventional warhead, would blow a small hole in the wall. It was followed by a second thermobaric SMAW round, correctly identified as the shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon-novel explosive (SMAW-NE), intended to kill anybody inside and collapse the roof on the rare survivor.

  Thermobaric weapons distinguish themselves from more conventional weapons by their mind-boggling explosions, created using atmospheric oxygen instead of carrying an oxidizer in their explosives. In laymen’s terms the warhead uses all the available oxygen in the area to enhance the explosion. The largest variant of the warhead in the U.S. inventory is the fearsome GBU-43/B massive ordnance air blast bomb (MOAB), a 21,000-pound GPS-guided bomb nicknamed the “Mother Of All Bombs.”

  The young Marines in 3/1 delighted in calling the SMAW-NE a “mini-nuke” because it could flatten the building the enemy was in, eliminating the need for the Marines to dig them out. As Gunner Wade says, they “worked quite satisfactorily.”

  The gunners in the line companies eventually used up the battalion’s supply of SMAW-NE and had to rely on ordinary high-explosive rounds to clear rooms. After the roof crashed in riflemen would summon the Marines’ Israeli-built armored bulldozers to mash the structure into the ground.

  Keyholing was not exactly what higher headquarters had in mind when it promulgated the ROE for Fallujah, Buhl acknowledges. According to its tenets someone inside a building had to display hostile intent before the Marines could engage him.

  When the rules were followed precisely they often put the young Marines taking the risks at a significant disadvantage, so they were quietly ignored. Once the fighting began in earnest, Mitchell says, the Marines preferred facing disciplinary action to getting shot in the face while looking around corners for the enemy.

  Whenever the Marines suspected an insurgent was holed up in a house they initiated their visit with a SMAW, a satchel charge, or a grenade. Buhl says he was well aware of the challenges imposed by the ROE, and in this tactical situation he considered them a guide rather than a mandate. Buhl even invited the Regimental Judge Advocate up to the front lines to get a first-hand look at the tactics the enemy was using and how the Marines had adapted to defeat them.

  “The correct criterion is that you confirm you have an enemy presence in a structure either by physical observation or by receiving fire—troops in contact,” Buhl explains. “Well, it is impossible when people are waiting for you quietly. They did not give their positions away in most cases. They waited until Marines physically entered a structure before they would fire on them.

  “At this point, we were able to use all of the powerful combined arms at our disposal with only enemy to our front. This is when the Thundering Third became the most lethal infantry battalion on the earth. We tried to do it carefully. But from commanders right down to that small-unit leader, that young corporal or lance corporal leading a fire team who thought he needed to throw a grenade into a room before he entered or fire weapons through a house before he sent his people in—that was his prerogative.”

  It truly was a dirty war and Weapons Co. Marines were in the thick of it. They fired more than 200 TOWs and dozens of Javelins before the fight concluded. Both weapons are very expensive and always in short supply so shooting them randomly was not an option. The Marines had to wait for permission before they let one rip.

  “The Marines on the ground would request to shoot from the local commander,” Kasal says. “Now if it was a target of opportunity—an Iraqi tank pops out of nowhere—the TOW gunner is going to shoot automatically. But if it were a building or something like that the local commander would give the authorization to fire.”

  That authorization could come from one of the section leaders, the platoon commander, or the company commander responsible for the TOW, Kasal says. Someone had to determine whether there were soldiers or Marines on the ground nearby and if a particular building was a safe target.

  “When you shoot a building with an M16 it isn’t going to hurt anything,” Kasal explains. “When you shoot a building with a TOW you are going to hurt a lot of people. So you had to be real careful and make sure there were no friendlies inside.”

  EYE IN THE SKY

  One weapon the jihadists never seemed to get a handle on was the Marines’ Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a $10,000 flying camera that instantly fed live pictures back to the COC. The battalion had six of them, giving the CO and Major Griffin (S-3) an unprecedented view of their enemy’s dispositions.

  The intel Marines could store single pictures or watch events unfold in real time from downloaded computer images. The UAV’s optics were capable of taking a close look at an insurgent strongpoint. The UAV operators could occasionally even coerce the insurgents into taking a shot at the flying cameras. Then Marines could confirm the enemy’s position. It was costly in airplanes and after a while the practice ceased; but the video was amazing, Buhl recalls.

  Often the Marines used the intelligence gleaned from a Dragon Eye to direct air strikes onto targets. PUC says a good formula was two 500-pound bombs on a two-story structure equaled a collapsed pile of rubble.

  In one recorded scene an insurgent was videotaped shooting at a 3/1 UAV with his machine gun. A few moments later the insurgent, his house, and the threat he posed were erased by a 500-pound bomb. It truly was death from above.

  In another incident in the Jolan district on November 11, a Dragon Eye cruising at 291 feet at a sedate 31 mph was used to coordinate an air strike on a jihadist strongpoint. At 11:47 a.m. local time its pictures were used to direct a fighter bomber onto the target. At 11:58 a.m., cruising at 318 feet and 22 mph, it returned to film the bomb damage assessment (BDA). It was almost instantly determined that the target was destroyed.

  The little plane could be flown from wherever the Marines needed a look. Dragon Eye operators would pick a roof for flight ops, put the little airplanes together, and launch them exactly like radio-controlled model airplanes. With a wingspan of only 45 inches, a length of about 3 feet, and weighing 5 pounds, it cruised at about 40 mph and could stay in the air up to an hour at altitudes between 300 and 500 feet.

  3/1’s leadership credits the little planes with identifying many strongpoints and possible ambush
sites that were neutralized without any loss of friendly life. But even with all the eyes in the sky and armor on the ground most of the time Fallujah remained the same dirty, debilitating site of combat stress for Marines who faced deadly risks from grenades, RPGs, snipers, and ambushes.

  ON THE MOVE

  At 10:00, Kilo moved out to seize Regimental Objective D, the mosque. At the same time Lima was to conduct a surprise attack on the city’s water treatment plant just to the north of the mosque, and India was to seize the dominant terrain along the river.

  Prior to the attack the mosque had been prepped with multiple GBU-12 guided 500-pound bombs directed by Captain Smay. Additionally all three companies were supported during their attacks by a rolling barrage from 155mm howitzers and 120mm mortars reminiscent of the Great War. The barrage moved forward at a stately walking pace striking targets just in front of the battalion’s line of attack.

  The strategy played out almost like clockwork: The Thundering Third captured all three objectives in less than four hours.

  The next day, November 11, Kilo was involved in a series of running fights with insurgents holed up in strongpoints and supported by indirect fire from mortars and RPGs lobbed onto them from nearby buildings. Along with India, Kilo attacked abreast from south to north to clear out the insurgents still shooting up the train station. Kasal recalls that mortars rained on Kilo and RPGs sizzled into their positions from every direction.

  At nightfall the company again went firm, establishing static OPs and attacking by fire any enemy forward of their positions. Throughout the night all three company FACs and the air officer conducted continuous air strikes using fast movers and two AC-130 gunships.

  By now Corporal Mitchell was on a holy mission of his own, he says, to kill every insurgent he found until the battle ended. “With me personally, it was kind of a religious thing. These guys were trying to kill me. I wanted to kill them. I wanted to get a big white flag like the Crusaders had. It was my fucking Crusade. I knew that it would make them angry. I was all into taking down the Islamists. I hated them; I was passionate about it. A lot of it was about revenge.”

  KILLER QUEENS

  On D+53/1 attacked the southernmost part of Fallujah, nicknamed “Queens” by the Marines. It was November 12, but most of the Marines didn’t know that. They didn’t need to know that so they didn’t bother remembering. They had bigger things to worry about.

  Queens was the most dangerous part of Fallujah. In this district the most capable and best-equipped insurgents had dug themselves in. Most were foreign fighters who positioned themselves there early on when they still believed the Marines’ main attack would come from the south.

  The move is vivid in Kasal’s memory: “We started entering the Queens and all that morning it was heavy fighting—building by building—the whole way down the streets.

  “I was on the street outside of houses or on the radio all morning long doing different firefights, different controlling procedures, whatever. The next thing I know we were moving out. That’s when Lieutenant Grapes [3d Platoon Leader, Kilo Co.] asked if I had any extra people to help out the fire team in our building to the left.”

  Kasal’s answer was a resounding yes. It was the toughest fight he had been in and his account gives a moment-by-moment picture of what the battle of Fallujah was like:

  “Sergeant Mitchell, Lance Corporal Nicoll, Corporal Wolf, and Lance Corporal [Samuel] Severtsgard and me got together. We ended up getting pinned down in this building. We were trying to clear a building full of enemy, and while we were in one room an enemy sniper shot Sergeant Mitchell through the back of the arm.”

  Fortunately, the sniper’s bullet tore through flesh but missed the bone. “It went through the back triceps, the meaty portion of the arm,” Kasal says.

  “Corporal Wolf and I bandaged him up and then we formed a plan to clear this building. I said, ‘First, let’s try to go through the front.’ So Sergeant Mitchell sends Marines up on the roof to do overwatch that suppressed the street, the alley, and anyone they could see in the building. Then me, Mitchell, Nicoll, and Severtsgard stayed down on the bottom. I said to Sergeant Mitchell, ‘Let’s punch a hole through the building and go through.’

  “I told Mitchell I had a TOW out there, so let me just go tell Corporal Hurd to fire a TOW through that building. So I ran back out in the street and small-arms fire started to shoot around us. I ran out there anyway and told Corporal Hurd to pull up into position to shoot that building with a TOW, hoping that we could blow a big enough hole so that we could make our own entrance and that it would also kill everybody in the immediate area inside the building.”

  It was a good idea and probably the safest approach given the weapons they had at their disposal, but this proved to be a particularly robust building. Powerful as the TOW is it only managed to punch a 12-inch hole in the wall—too small for anyone to squeeze through. It was time for Plan B, which was considerably more dangerous—running right up to the building and trying to force open a door. That didn’t work either. “It was a big metal door,” Kasal recalls. In addition to exposing the men to enemy fire it created another danger in their midst.

  Before entering the house Severtsgard had armed a grenade. When they couldn’t get the door open Severtsgard was essentially a walking explosion, with only his handgrip on the grenade preventing it from going off and blowing up the four men. Simply giving it a heave wasn’t an option as the four couldn’t be sure there weren’t friendlies around. Such a move could be deadly to their comrades.

  “So now we can’t get the door open; so there is nowhere for Severtsgard to throw the grenade,” continues Kasal. “For the next 15 or 20 minutes while we are still in this firefight he is running around with the pin pulled on a grenade. Finally when we realized there was nobody else around, he was able to throw that grenade into the back part of the house and get rid of it.”

  The men retreated into the adjacent house again where Kasal came up with Plan C. “Now I say, ‘Okay, we will go through an alley that parallels the house and come around and try and enter the back side.’ Me and Nicoll were in front, Mitchell was third, and Severtsgard was fourth. I helped Nicoll get over a wall leading into the alley. Then I jumped over the wall and Sergeant Mitchell and Severtsgard did overwatch while me and Nicoll started moving down the alley.”

  Unfortunately this was just the opportunity for which the entrenched enemy had been lying in wait. “We got about halfway down the alley when all of a sudden small-arms fire started hitting all around us, just barely missing us,” Kasal says. “Then a couple of hand grenades landed right at our feet.

  “Luckily there was a 3- or 4-foot wall right next to us and we were able to jump over that wall and avoid the blast of the hand grenades. So then we knew that wasn’t an option anymore; the enemy had that completely covered by fire.

  “We just barely escaped. We got lucky. We got lucky as hell! There was probably a 20-round burst and all 20 rounds came within inches of us.”

  Plan D involved calling in the heavy artillery. “I had Sergeant Mitchell call Lieutenant Grapes and see if they could get tank support—81s or some other kind of fire support—to bear onto the building and level the whole thing.”

  Unfortunately given the close-quarter fighting that was going on all around them, that option wouldn’t work either—and for the same reason it took Severtsgard so long to dispose of his grenade.

  “We got word back that we couldn’t because of adjacent units being too close,” Kasal says. “Then we got word to move out and give up the building altogether. We marked it with a grid and sent it over the radio up to higher so higher knew that the building had not been cleared yet and was full of enemy activity. There was another battalion on the next street over—I think it was 1/8—so we marked the building for them, hoping they would have better luck coming from another direction, or after we moved out level it with some kind of fire support.”

  Much later when he had time to reflect Kasal decid
ed his close calls on the 12th were a true test of his warrior skills. For him it was an intense exercise in correctly implementing tried-and-true infantry tactics in close-quarters combat. The correct solution was to probe the enemy, make him react to reveal his location, then find a place to flank him and get the upper hand. The ultimate goal was to counterattack and destroy the insurgents as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  “To me a firefight is like a chess game,” Kasal says. “It’s a fight between me and him and I am trying to outwit him. When he fires at me, in my brain housing group [a Kasalism for ‘head’], I am trying to figure out a way to counter him.”

  Irrepressible Nicoll had a much less intellectual reaction. He talks about it as though it were a grand adventure: “The day before we got hurt was probably crazier than the day we got hurt. Anytime there would be something, First Sergeant would be there. He was the only one [senior NCO] I ever saw out there. For the last two days we had been walking side by side. First Sergeant called me up and wanted me to go point for him. We were between two houses and a fence.

  “There was about 2 feet between the houses. We jumped over the fence. Him and me were the only ones who had gotten over. Me and him were taking fire; we were wide open. I got shot in the shin,” Nicoll says. “It barely broke the skin.”

  Almost immediately after Kasal’s intense fight, while moving south along PL Henry, Kilo was ambushed from both the east and west flanks by a skilled group of foreign fighters with good equipment and excellent discipline. The foreigners used booby traps and other obstacles to halt the column in an almost inescapable kill zone. The insurgents’ craftily laid explosives channeled the Marines into killing zones that made them easy targets. Kilo’s Marines were forced to root them out in the face of heavy RPG fire, small-arms fire, and sniper fire, much of which originated from 1/8’s zone.