His Huey began its descent toward his frontline troops on the outskirts of Nasiriyah. He saw the approach to the city, dominated by the three huge circular oil tanks, which he’d so often imagined from his maps. It had only taken him a few minutes to fly in from his combat operations base at the Jalibah air base. Now, as he approached the regimental command post, he was working out his next move.
He’d been watching the progress of his lead element, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, on his Blue Force Tracker. Through onboard GPS, each command vehicle relayed its changing location to a satellite transmission system that transferred the information to digital maps dotted with blue icons to show where his forces were positioned. First Battalion, 2nd Marines was making slower progress than he had expected, and he had come forward to see what was holding them up. I’ve got to get them moving. The regimental commander, Colonel Ronald Bailey, had reported to him that 1/2 Marines was receiving sniper fire. Natonski didn’t want that to stop them. We’re a mechanized force. We can’t have snipers holding us back. He knew that the 1st Marine Division was already refueled and waiting to move through Nasiriyah on its way to Baghdad. His strategy had been built around the military concept of tempo. If he could get his units operating faster and more aggressively than the enemy, his forces would always retain the initiative and knock the enemy off balance. They would not be able to react in time. It had worked well during Desert Storm when the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions had attacked violently and unexpectedly through Iraqi defenses to seize the outskirts of Kuwait City. He had to get that route through Nasiriyah open, and fast.
Natonski ducked as he jumped out of the Huey and hurried, bent over double, through the heat and dust whipped up by the helo’s rotors. The first thing he saw were four U.S. servicemen lying on litters with bloody bandages around their arms and legs. From their equipment and the patterns on their desert cammies he realized they were U.S. Army soldiers. Alarm bells started ringing. What’s going on? What are soldiers doing here?
He ran over to them, beads of sweat already forming on the back of his neck.
“Who the heck are you?”
The soldiers were wide-eyed and pale. They were in a state of shock. One of them tried to explain how they were part of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. They were supposed to be following an Army convoy but somehow they had taken a wrong turn in the dark. Instead of bypassing Nasiriyah according to plan, they had mistakenly gone right into the heart of the city and been ambushed by Iraqi forces.
Natonski tried to look as calm as possible, but inside he was raging. What the hell is going on? This shouldn’t be happening. U.S. Army units shouldn’t have been there in the first place. And what Iraqi forces had they come up against? The intel he had received was that the entire Iraqi 11th Infantry Division inside Nasiriyah would capitulate rather than fight.
“Well, I’m glad you are okay. We’ll get you out of here as soon as possible.”
Natonski found Colonel Bailey, the regimental commander, and went forward to look for the battalion commander, Rick Grabowski. On the flanks, young marines were busy clearing buildings. Some of them were knee-deep in mud, their spongy, charcoal-lined MOPP suits dripping with water soaked up from the small irrigation ditches lining the highway. They looked so miserable as they waded through the muddy ground that Natonski felt a pang of pity for them. Many years ago he’d been in their position. When he reached Grabowski’s Humvee, he was stunned to find six more U.S. soldiers gathered around an Army vehicle. This is getting confusing. What the hell is going on? They were soldiers from the same 507th Maintenance Company. Natonski pieced the story together. They had just made the most unbelievable wrong turn. At the junction of Routes 7 and 8, south of Nasiriyah, instead of turning sharp left to head around Nasiriyah to the west, the convoy had gone straight into the heart of the city. Iraqi soldiers waved them through several checkpoints until they emerged on the other side of the city. It was then that they realized they had made a mistake. The sun was rising, and they had just turned around to retrace their steps when they were attacked. Under fire from Iraqi fighters, the convoy’s eighteen vehicles had sped back through the city, trying to avoid debris and blockades erected in their path. A few vehicles had gotten through. Most had been hit and were disabled somewhere in the city.
Natonski’s eyes grew wider as he heard the full absurdity of the story.
“Is that all of you?”
“No, there are some still missing.”
An Army captain, almost sobbing, explained that some twenty soldiers and thirteen vehicles were still unaccounted for. Among the missing were Private First Class Howard Johnson, Specialist Shoshana Johnson, Sergeant George Buggs, Specialist Edgar Hernandez, Private First Class Jessica Lynch . . .
As Brigadier General Natonski talked to the soldiers, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski and Major Sosa tried to figure out how the army convoy had got in front of them. When the tanks had called back with news of U.S. soldiers, Sosa’s first thought was that it might be an Army scout unit that had originally planned to link up with them. That plan had been scrapped some days ago, but maybe the message hadn’t got through to them. The news that it was an Army maintenance convoy came out of the blue.
They cast their minds back. Grabowski remembered that in the very early hours of the morning, as they had been trying to cross a cloverleaf junction some sixty kilometers south of Nasiriyah, he had been aware of an Army convoy passing them along the highway. He didn’t think anything of it. He assumed they were just heading toward the western side of Nasiriyah and wouldn’t interfere with his mission on the eastern side of the city. The only thing Grabowski was concerned about then was not getting his vehicles mixed in with the Army convoy.
Now he realized that the Army convoy had jeopardized his mission. How am I going to respond?
When he’d first heard the reports of wounded U.S. soldiers up ahead and that Major Peeples from the tank company had gone off to locate them, his main concern was that Peeples didn’t get stuck up there without support. They were the only tanks he had in the task force.
He had been frustrated when he had difficulty reaching Major Peeples on the radio. He knew Peeples was probably switching to his company net to talk to his marines, but he wanted a clear picture of what was going on.
“Bill, I need you to stay in your tank. You need to stay on the radio.”
He was even more frustrated when he heard the tank company XO, Captain Dyer, get on the radio with another request.
“Timberwolf, this is Panzer 5. My tanks are less than half full. We need to refuel before the decision is made on whether we are going to do a blocking position.”
The tanks had gone through gallons of fuel in their rush to locate the U.S. soldiers.
“Roger that. We are setting up an RP for you now.”
The Abrams was fast and quiet. Its advanced suspension made it a comfortable ride. Tankers said it was like riding in a Cadillac. But its fifteenhundred-horsepower gas turbine engine drank up fuel, and it could only go three hundred miles on a full tank. At full speed it went through fiftysix gallons an hour. Even when it was idling, it drank ten gallons of fuel an hour. It couldn’t stray too far from an RP, or refueling point.
Major Sosa also had a bad feeling about sending the tanks back to refuel. It wasn’t just a few tanks that would be out of action. They all have to go back. It had to be done, though. They didn’t want the tanks stuck without fuel on the northern side of the city after the mission was completed. They would be a long way from any of the fuel trucks. Nevertheless, a wave of anger came over him. That’s what the fuel bladders were for. He was silently fuming that Major Peeples had cut them loose. They carried fifty-five gallons. That was an extra quarter of a tank for each M1A1. He and Peeples had already got into a fight over the issue back in Kuwait. Peeples had said it was SOP, standard operating procedure, to drop the bladders once they got engaged. Sosa hadn’t thought it was a good idea. Rather tetchily he had suggested that they review their
SOP. He was also unhappy with the way Peeples passed his information. In Sosa’s view, he was out of his tank too much or talking to his marines on the company net rather than keeping battalion informed. The summer before at the CAX in Twentynine Palms, they had trained with another tank company commander. Sosa remembered being very impressed by how effectively that tank commander had passed information across the net.
Now he could only watch with dismay as all eleven tanks rumbled back past the infantry companies lined up along the side of the road, toward the refueling point several miles to the rear of the column.
Brigadier General Natonski was still trying to digest the news that the whole of Nasiriyah would now be well aware that U.S. forces were in and around the city. This was bad. Operation Iraqi Freedom had been planned around speed and stealth. If the Army and Marines could get to Baghdad quickly, they would seize the initiative and surprise Saddam’s forces before they had time to react. Speed and stealth also guided Natonski in his plans for taking Nasiriyah. He wanted to keep the Iraqi defenders guessing as to whether they were going to march into the city or bypass it. When the time was right, he would make a lightning strike into the heart of Nasiriyah and seize the crucial bridges across the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal. Now the 507th had endangered that plan. The Iraqis, alerted to their arrival, might blow the bridges before his marines could get to them. Goddamnit. Silently, he cursed the Army. He couldn’t help thinking that the 507th got lost because the Army didn’t train their support services as well as the Marine Corps. There had always been rivalry between the services, but the rivalry was greatest with the Army. Natonski believed the Marine Corps gave the American taxpayers more bang for their buck. The Army was far bigger and better equipped than the Marines. It got the latest technology, while the Marine Corps made do with patched-up helicopters from the Vietnam era. But the Marines preferred it like that. They prided themselves on doing more with less. The Army might win the war, but it was the Marine Corps that won the battles.
As some tanks rolled past, he looked up.
“What’s that?”
Grabowski told him that the tanks were heading back to refuel.
Natonski had to make a decision. He’d had enough combat experience from Vietnam, Somalia, and Bosnia to know that the best-laid plans always fall apart at first contact. They were OBE, overtaken by events. He wished it hadn’t happened so early in the campaign. Twenty thousand marines and eight thousand vehicles from the 1st Marine Division were backed up waiting for him to clear Nasiriyah so they could get their convoys on the road to Baghdad along Route Moe. He could no longer take the bridges by surprise—the 507th’s wrong turn had put paid to that and there was clearly some sort of resistance along the route. But if he moved quickly he might be able to get to those bridges before they were blown. Otherwise it might take days to find another crossing site. He’d grown up with the Marine Corps doctrine of maneuver warfare as stated in its Warfighting Skills Program: “It is a state of mind born of a bold will, intellect, initiative, and ruthless opportunism. It is a state of mind bent on shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him, by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively exploiting his vulnerabilities, and by striking him in a way that will hurt him the most.”
He turned to Rick Grabowski. He wanted those bridges as soon as possible.
“We’ve got to accelerate the attack. We’ve got to find those missing soldiers and get to those bridges before they’re blown.”
As Natonski turned to go he looked back again at the battalion commander.
“Rickey. Those soldiers are still in the city. Try and find them if you can. The Army would do it for us and we need to do it for them.”
“Roger, sir, I’m already working on that.”
6
Private First Class Robinson’s stomach fluttered with excitement as the news filtered down that Charlie Company was to move out. They were still toward the rear of the column, but now they were going to move up toward Alpha and Bravo marines who had started to see some action. As they moved forward, Robinson, from the hatch of track 201, saw four M1A1 Abrams tanks heading toward them, driving away from the city, on the other side of the road. Corporal Wentzel shouted over to him.
“Hey. Aren’t those our tanks?”
The marines in the rear of the other AAVs also saw the tanks driving back the way they’d come. They were surprised. They’d all been briefed that the tanks were supposed to be leading their attack.
“They’re scared. They’re running away.”
A few of the marines in the rear laughed. The infantrymen had never really practiced that much with the tankers or the trackers, and they didn’t think of them as marines. The feeling among them was that the real marines were the riflemen who wrought havoc on an enemy with nothing more than an M16 rifle. It was all very well sitting inside a highly engineered, well-armored military equivalent of a Cadillac, but if you wanted to prove yourself in battle you relied on only three things: your training, your weapon, and the buddies on either side of you. All the same, the marines felt uncomfortable seeing those tanks disappearing to the rear with their massive firepower. Robinson couldn’t really explain it. He just felt better when the tanks were around.
The chat down below turned to girls. Some of the guys talked about which girl they were going to fuck when they got home or how they were going to cheat on their girlfriends. That was all allowed. What wasn’t allowed was to suggest to a marine that his girl might be cheating on him. Robinson understood the rule. It’s better to say that you want to fuck his mother than to tell him that his girl is cheating on him. He remembered one guy on ship acting real weird after a telephone call. Later he found out the guy’s wife had just told him that she was leaving him to move back to California with an Air Force pilot. He tried not to think about it too much. They were a long way away, and there was nothing they could do. He’d been ditched like that before. But once he got over the shock, he remembered that his buddies had forced him to joke about it. That’s what helped him get through it.
From the hatch of 201, Robinson looked at the palm-lined streets and the two-story cinder-block houses in front of him, on either side of the highway. It looked quiet enough. Look at those hajjis running across the road. They’re probably scared. A few locals dressed in rags stood by the side of the road and watched as the American war machine rumbled through the outskirts of their town. Robinson couldn’t quite figure out what they must be thinking. None of them smiled. He briefly remembered that they were supposed to be pro-American in this town. Clearly no one has told them that we are here to liberate them.
Driving track 201, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry could hear and see a flurry of activity ahead of him. He was ordered to move off the road and press north through some cane fields on a parallel axis to Bravo Company. Overhead he heard and saw Cobras fly by and shoot stuff up farther ahead of him. This is awesome. They had the tracks arranged in a wedge formation to give the gunners in the tracks a clear view ahead and to provide maximum firepower to the front and sides. Every one hundred meters or so, Castleberry would be ordered to stop and drop the ramp. The infantry dismounted and provided security by taking cover around the track in a 180-degree arc, looking for signs of the enemy. They didn’t need to cover the right-hand side because the .50-caliber machine gun and Mark 19 could take care of anything that came from the east.
Farther back, in track 208, Lieutenant Reid had also seen the tanks drive by on their way to being refueled. Wow, those guys have been shot at. Reid still hadn’t seen any enemy. He couldn’t tell whether it was light enemy fire or something heavier that they were getting into. As they drew alongside Alpha Company, he saw that Alpha’s marines were coming out of the ditches covered in mud. They were not happy. It was almost funny to see the pissed look on their faces. I wonder how the water will a fect the MOPP suits if we get gassed?
Off to the side of him the cannon cockers of 1/10 Marines were firing “Red Rain”
counterbattery into the city. They were picking up where the incoming artillery and mortars were being fired from and targeting the positions with their own artillery.
Gathered around their Humvees, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski and Major Sosa tried to formulate a plan. Natonski had now made it clear to them that he wanted them to push for the bridges. They were not going to stop and block the road to the south of the city. They were going to attack, into Nasiriyah. Sosa knew that they had rehearsed the plan on ship and in Kuwait. They had even driven out into the desert with key personnel and gone through the mission with engineering tape simulating the bridges. But that was a couple of weeks ago. The last plan we briefed before leaving Kuwait was the defensive plan to hold south of the city. He’d also remembered a briefing in which the regimental commander, Colonel Bailey, had stressed they would not seize the bridges if they were under fire. Now they seemed to be going against all that.
The speed at which the decision had been made had taken them by surprise. Neither Grabowski nor Sosa had realized the pressure Natonski was under from the 1st Marine Division to get Route Moe open.
Grabowski was still confident. He had gone over the mission again and again with his company commanders on ship and in Kuwait. It was a clear and simple one. They knew they didn’t have to clear the route. The follow-on unit, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, was supposedly the experts at clearing urban areas and would deal with that. He also knew from intel briefings that there was nothing in the city that could stop his mechanized force with the heavy armor of the tanks. All they had to do was seize the two bridges.
I’ve got to get the tanks back from refueling as soon as possible. Their thick armor meant that they were more or less invincible to anything that the Iraqis might throw at them. He didn’t really want to send the AAVs into the city without tank support. The Marine Corps AAV was only made of reinforced aluminum. The vehicle’s skin might stop an AK-47 round but an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade, flying through the air at three hundred meters per second would cut right through it. On impact, the firing pin would shoot a jet of molten metal to pierce the skin, allowing the grenade to explode inside the track. Unfortunately, Grabowski knew that none of Task Force Tarawa’s AAVs were equipped with EAAKs, or Enhanced Appliqué Armor Kits, the thick antiballistic plates, developed by the Marine Corps, that could be attached to the outside of an AAV.
Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Page 7
