Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq

by John C. McManus

  SEAL and Cottonbaler sniper teams performed overwatch missions, shooting anyone they could positively establish as planting an IED. Before long, Route Irish got dramatically better, to the point of almost complete safety. “That’s why you really don’t hear about Route Irish anymore,” one soldier said, with disgust dripping from his voice.

  Throughout the rest of Rashid, the best way to defeat IEDs was to know the area. Over time, the Cottonbalers got to know their neighborhoods so well that they could spot anything that was amiss. “You have to patrol the same area over and over,” Lieutenant Peter Robinson, a platoon leader in Easy Company, said. “My guys could look at the curb and tell you the cinder block’s been moved.” They came to know instinctively what was normal and what was threatening. “There’s absolutely no way to replicate that except by patrolling over and over.” The only problem was that, once the Americans came to dominate one part of Rashid, the insurgents would simply relocate to another, creating a whack-a-mole scenario. There simply were not anywhere near enough soldiers in the battalion to control the whole AO.

  The battalion’s worst incident occurred on April 19 when a suicide bomber attacked a dismounted patrol from Alpha Company’s 1st Platoon. The grunts had just dismounted from their vehicles and were on their way to a school in the Jihad neighborhood when a car drove into the middle of their formation and detonated. The hellish blast instantly killed Corporal Jacob Pfister and Specialist Kevin Wessel. Four other soldiers were wounded, two of whom had to be evacuated out of Iraq. Just moments after the blast, the platoon’s vehicles turned around and roared back to the terrible scene. “People in the buildings around us were shooting at us,” Sergeant James Malugin, a gunner on one of the Humvees, recalled. The gunners returned fire. As they did, medics did everything they could for the wounded and other soldiers policed up the remains of the two dead soldiers.

  Several other Cottonbaler patrols, and many Iraqi policemen, scrambled to the scene. The standard procedure in these tragic instances was to seal off the entire site. Eventually, the shooting from the buildings petered out. “Once we got there, quickly everything was cordoned off,” Staff Sergeant Gerard Leo, a gunner from Charlie Company, recalled. “We were watching the buildings. We weren’t letting anyone walk near. The kids were trying to come out and play and we were chasing ’em back into their homes. The . . . guys were medevacked and gone within minutes.” In addition to Pfister and Wessel, two other battalion soldiers lost their lives during the year in Iraq—Corporal Stanley Lapinski of Bravo Company and Corporal Manuel Lopez from Delta Company.

  In another harrowing incident, a suicide car bomber attacked a Charlie Company traffic control point. The soldiers had set up barbed wire and orange traffic cones to maintain at least one hundred meters of standoff between themselves and the traffic. The troops were in the process of questioning a man whom they suspected of selling illegal gasoline. All of a sudden a white car veered around the cones. “I’ll never forget it until the day I die,” Staff Sergeant Michael Baroni said. He was standing several yards away from his Humvee, watching the terrible scene unfold, as if in a dream. “As soon as he swerved around the cones, it was all like slow motion. You could just hear the vehicle just gassing down [accelerating]. He hit the wire. As soon as he hit the wire . . . we pulled our weapons. By that time my gunner and my loader just started opening up on him. I remember just seeing the guy [suicide bomber] go down . . . on the windshield and then the fireball, and feeling the heat. It detonated . . . about fifteen feet or ten feet behind my Humvee . . . so close, the wreckage was . . . underneath my Humvee.”

  At that moment, Baroni could think of little else except the welfare of his men. He had promised their families that he would bring them home safely. Amid the smoke and flames, not to mention the concussion from the explosion, he had trouble figuring out where they were. One man was lying on the ground, shaken but okay. Another was inside the Humvee, slumped over. For a horrible instant, Staff Sergeant Baroni thought he was dead. The NCO began screaming for him to wake up and get out of the vehicle. “He gets out of the Humvee and he’s okay. He said he was waiting for a second one [suicide bomber] so he ducked down. You could see the whole back of his helmet from his neck and his IBA [interceptor body armor] was all burnt up. Debris was all over the Humvee. He got out and grabbed his weapon. You get mad because now they’ve attacked you.” Fortunately no Americans were hurt in this near miss.10

  Suicide bombings spiked in May and June. Most of them were carried out by foreign jihadis or, in a few instances, Iraqis handcuffed to the steering wheel (the terrorists would threaten to kill the person’s family if they did not carry out the attack). In one day alone, fourteen of them detonated in the brigade’s area of operations (3-7 Infantry was attached to the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division). From that point onward, though, they diminished substantially. Nonetheless, in response to the threat of such attacks, the Americans began implementing a greater standoff distance between themselves, local vehicles, and even the people they encountered on dismounted patrols.

  For the average grunt, the life-and-death pressure of preventing the bombings was nearly overwhelming. That pressure was especially heavy on Humvee and Bradley gunners and dismounted soldiers. “There’s a kind of courage that you don’t really think about when you talk about combat operations,” Staff Sergeant Keith Orr, a Bravo Company rifle squad leader and veteran of the Gulf War, said. “You’ve got these gunners up there and they’re young and Iraqis are the stupidest drivers. I mean, they’d just do some dumb shit and you’ve got this kid . . . on the trigger. He’s watching this car come up. Is that a VBIED? Is that a bad guy doing something or is that a family of five . . . not paying attention. It takes a lot of discipline and courage to hold your fire for that extra second to verify before you put . . . a half a pound of lead into a car.”

  At the exact same time, the gunner was responsible not only for the lives of his friends but also the Iraqis around him. On the one hand, the soldiers always knew that if they made the wrong choice, they could be court-martialed. On the other hand, if they held their fire too long, it could cost their lives and the lives of their buddies. Their momentous decisions had to be made in seconds. Every incident, no matter how small, could be a strategic event. Most of the gunners were not even twenty-one yet. “We literally are asking more of our soldiers today than ever in history,” Lieutenant Colonel Funk asserted. “I have corporals on the ground literally making strategic decisions. There are young corporals and sergeants on the ground who are learning to interact with people, who are learning to determine very quickly the essence of a military problem and work their way through it. I know when I was a young man coming up, I wasn’t nearly as talented as we ask our young platoon leaders and captains to be nowadays.”

  Truly, the stakes were immense. When they made the wrong choices, it poisoned relations with the locals and, often as not, it turned into a media event. One ugly tragedy could undo months of good relations. For instance, in June, at the height of the suicide bombings, a Cottonbaler opened fire at a car in the Sadiyah neighborhood and killed an innocent fifty-seven-year-old woman who was a local teacher. “To them, killing a human being is nothing,” a furious bystander said of the soldiers. “When an American soldier gets killed, they make a big fuss. When an Iraqi gets killed in the street, it means nothing to them.” Unfair though this perception certainly was, it resonated with many people in the wake of this incident.

  The scathing media coverage that resulted from the tragic shooting only exacerbated bad feelings all the way around. The Cottonbalers respected reporters who would embed themselves with the unit and patrol with them, but they were few and far between. Truthfully, though, most of the soldiers were predisposed to distrust and dislike reporters. Negative coverage only fueled their disdain all the more. They would return to the FOB, watch television, and be amazed at what they believed was completely inaccurate, slanted reporting of the war. By their estimate, only 10 to 2
0 percent of what they saw was accurate or fair. “The media is a business,” Lieutenant Follansbee said. “It’s not really so much the pursuit of truth as meeting the bottom line as a lively institution. Blood is sexy. That’s what sells so that’s what they show. They don’t show the MEDCAPs [medical patrols that dispensed free health care throughout Rashid] or the food distros [distributions] or us walking around talking to people, dropping off school supplies . . . because that’s not sexy.”

  But, like it or not, in the modern age, a story would be told in the mass media. “The question is whose story is it gonna be?” Funk rhetorically asked. “You can ignore the media, get pissed off at ’em and say you’re not gonna engage these guys anymore or you can try your level best to get the truth out to them.” Even though Funk understood the importance of media relations, he too reached a point of exasperation in the wake of the accidental killing of the teacher. He was outraged by one story in particular, written by a reporter who spoke with the Iraqis at the scene of the shooting but had never patrolled with 3-7. “I should have been suspect when she was interviewing me over the phone. Well, when the article came out . . . it really, really, really painted us in a bad light.” Lieutenant Colonel Funk challenged the substance and accuracy of the story. He also decided that, from then on, he would only deal with reporters who actually spent time with his soldiers. “I . . . made it clear to her that I would not be talking to her on the phone anymore but . . . if you want to join us on a patrol, I welcome you down anytime. Of course, she never took us up on it.” Nor did many others, and that was fairly standard for most reporters in Iraq.

  So, for 3-7 Infantry, the media gap was never really bridged. The battalion did not control the modern information war well enough. The soldiers continued to nurture the anger and mistrust they felt toward media members, in effect choosing to isolate themselves. This was a dysfunctional and self-defeating choice. In that sense, they were very typical of most combat units in Iraq at that time. Fair or unfair, the print and electronic media reported the war as they saw fit. That often did not work to the advantage of the American position in Iraq.11

  What, if anything, did 3-7 accomplish during its year of counterinsurgent warfare in Baghdad? On the face of it, they had many successes. By and large, the soldiers comported themselves with discipline and compassion. The Iraqi Army and police in Rashid clearly got better over the course of 2005. The Cottonbalers of 3-7 participated in several large raids and operations that captured dozens of insurgents. The soldiers forged many positive relationships with sheiks, imams, and everyday people in southwest Baghdad. The Americans improved the schools, dispensed food and medical care, and generally enhanced the lives of some in Rashid. Route Irish improved dramatically on 3-7’s watch. The battalion also presided over two peaceful and successful elections in October and December.

  On the downside, there were accidental killings, raids that targeted the wrong people, and everyday insults dispensed by culturally ignorant GIs. The isolation of living on an FOB and commuting to war only served to deepen that ignorance. It also undermined the security of those Iraqis who wanted to help the Americans. A significant amount of bad will also came from the heavy-handed presence of military vehicles on the crowded streets of Rashid. Many civilians were terrified of the American convoys. At times, the heavy Bradleys and tanks could damage infrastructure. The American concern with standoff and force protection sometimes led to traffic snarls and overly aggressive driving by Cottonbaler drivers. To some locals, the mere presence of foreigners was offensive, no matter how well or poorly behaved they might have been.

  Overall, 3-7 Infantry left Rashid a better place than they found it, but this was not good enough. By the time the Cottonbalers went home in early 2006, the American position in Iraq was deteriorating, mainly because of the poor strategic decisions made by American leaders. The political and military decision makers still did not understand that counterinsurgency war requires a saturation, troop-intensive presence, cultural outreach, and a willingness to sacrifice troop safety for the security of the population. This sort of war, like most, could not be won the easy way by technology and long-range weaponry. Political will, and everyday engagement, human being to human being, counted for much more.

  Both 2-7 and 3-7 did the best they could within the confines of the flawed American strategic outlook in 2005-2006. Venturing forth from their FOBs, operating with pathetically small numbers, there was only so much they could do. Both units enjoyed some level of success, but this hardly mattered because their efforts did not lead to victory in the overall war effort. Their experience was actually a cautionary tale. Although nowhere near as bloody, the 7th Infantry’s tour of duty was quite similar, in one sense, to the bitter experience of the soldiers at Masher/White Wing and Dak To: even the success of grunts on the ground can mean little in the face of the flawed strategies of generals and politicians.

  EPILOGUE

  A Plea for Change

  I WILL END WITH A plea, extended to whoever has the power, or even casual interest, to heed it. We must learn from the lessons of recent history. For the United States, from World War II onward, technology has been a major asset, but not a magic-bullet solution to all security problems. Warfare remained what it has always been—an elemental, wasteful, tragic contest of wills. Contrary to the predictions of techno-vangelists, ground soldiers have done almost all of the fighting and dying in America’s modern wars. Upon their overworked shoulders, the outcome of those wars rested. There were rarely enough of them. Nor was there, in general, enough national emphasis on them as the leading weapon in the American arsenal. Instead, the United States invested the bulk of its power and resources in technological weaponry, too often at the expense of the ground pounders. This must change, or we risk more Pelelius, more Dak Tos, and more Iraqs.

  In the early twenty-first century, with wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, stretching both the Marine Corps and the Army to the breaking point, politicians of both parties talked of placing a new emphasis on building up the ground combat services. They spoke of expanding the Army to over 700,000 active duty soldiers and the Marine Corps to a strength of over 200,000. This was a step in the right direction, although only barely adequate to meet the considerable global responsibilities of the soldiers and leathernecks. The budget appropriations for the Army and Marines did rise, if only out of the sheer necessity that resulted from the two vexing wars and the obvious fact that these two services were doing almost all of the fighting and dying. Plus, the Air Force and Navy were both working diligently to assist the ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  However, the good intentions for expanding ground combat forces did not survive the recession that began in 2008. With the Obama administration seeking to curtail defense spending, the Army took a 17 percent cut in its projected 2010 budget, while the Navy got a nice increase and the Air Force stayed more or less the same. By this time, after eight years of tough ground warfare, the Army and Marines still accounted for only about 31 percent of the defense budget, the Navy and Air Force over half of the rest. The historical pattern that had held true since World War II had not, then, really changed by the twenty-first century, even in the face of bloody ground wars. “Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists, insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork remains the soldier or Marine,” Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters wrote. “Yet, confronted with reality’s bloody evidence, we simply pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems we adore.”

  In the wake of the cuts, the Army now had to reconsider its plan to create three new combat brigades. I do not pretend to be an expert or an insider on the intricacies of Washington budget policies. But I do think it is fair to say that any cut in the Army’s operating expenses is not likely to achieve the goal of adding to the number of ground combat soldiers in America’s defense arsenal. S. L. A. Marshall once wrote that “we in the United States . . . have made a habit of believing that national security lies at the end of a product
ion line.” This indeed has been the American way of war—the material over the corporeal. Marshall understood that infantrymen cannot be cranked out of a production line or hatched from a lab. Not just anyone can become a combat soldier. They are a unique group, always the minority within their society, even within the armed forces, too. They represent the ultimate weapon of war for the mundane reason that no technology has yet eclipsed the human brain, the human will, and the human spirit in potency.1

  The explosion of information-age technology since Marshall’s time has only exacerbated American material predilections and techno-vangelism all the more. If that does not change, then the Americans risk more unhappy reality checks amid a troubling world that continues to rapidly urbanize, an internationalist media whose Net-centric, anti-U.S. hostility seemingly hardens by the day, and the power of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and FARC grows. These are the lessons of recent history, from Guam to Baghdad. In the absence of any meaningful change, the grunts, as always, will pay the steepest price, for it is they who most fully experience war’s unforgiving cruelty.

  To them, war is personal, animal, disturbing, and affecting beyond description. For them, war cannot possibly be seen as clinical, calculating, or material. They view it only through the prism of “the blood-soaked bandages, the smell of gunpowders, the horrendous din of the weaponry, the pain and numbness of a wound and the medic’s syrette, all never to be forgotten, but to play forever within the memory of a ‘Grunt,’” in the estimation of one Dak To veteran. As one Marine grunt put it, “Until you have physically experienced looking an enemy soldier in the face and pulling the trigger, the sensation in your hand as the k-bar [knife] cuts [through] the windpipe, the actual smell of burning flesh, or the human rage, and competition for life that allows a soldier to kill another soldier, you will never fully be able to feel or describe, or convey the emotions” of modern war.