“Are you sure there are no friendlies?”
“I can’t see, sir.”
Dunfee couldn’t be sure that there weren’t marines still in the track. He wouldn’t let McCall shoot. McCall had to sit there and watch the Iraqis dragging stuff away.
Grabowski wasn’t going to wait any longer. He’d got the news that almost all the vehicles were out of the mud, except for the C7 and the Hercules M88 tank retriever. They would have to leave them. He got hold of the battalion staff he’d left with the stuck vehicles and told them to move out. Some of the mechanics refused to leave the M88. It was only when Major Peeples gave them a specific order that they agreed to abandon it. Marines stripped as much as they could off the two vehicles and pulled out onto Ambush Alley. Ahead of them, Grabowski and the rest of the forward CP and Bravo Company were already waiting. At last, the remaining vehicles of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, headed up Ambush Alley in one long convoy. When it reached track 201, marines from Bravo Company jumped into the troop compartment and found the mangled body of Lance Corporal David Fribley. They pulled it free and loaded it into one of the Humvees. Other marines ran into the house to look for the stranded marines. There was no one there. They didn’t realize they had all been rescued earlier by Peeples and Doran. It was 1715. As they set off toward the northern bridge, Grabowski saw, on the other side of the road, the charred hulk of track 208 still burning. No one could have survived that.
3
Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk had heard the Alpha convoy arriving at the northern bridge, but he was so focused on looking for Iraqis to kill that he didn’t pay much attention. He was lying in the dirt behind a mound of earth on the east side of the road, eyes locked on one small sector of marshy terrain where he had seen figures running about. He heard someone over his shoulder yell out.
“Hey, we’re through here. Get over here and get in your platoons. Let’s get a count.”
It was weird. It happened out of the blue. The shooting stopped as though someone had called a time-out. What am I doing? Where is everyone? Where is my platoon? It was like suddenly waking up and finding himself in a different world. Quirk did not have a clue what had happened. He’d stayed with the same ten or twelve guys throughout the fight and had no idea where anyone else was or what they’d been doing.
He jumped on a track and headed three hundred meters north of the bridge to the spot where his platoon was getting into formation. Out of thirty marines, there were only eleven left. Where the fuck is everybody?
Quirk was agitated. As had happened so often in the past, his brain just went into overdrive.
“Where’s Fribley? Where’s Carl? Fribley’s in my team. Where the fuck is he?”
Private First Class Brian Woznicki tried to calm him down.
“Hey, Corporal, don’t worry about it.”
“Fuck you. Where’s Martin? Where’s Olivas?”
“Don’t fucking worry about it. Calm down.”
“Who’s fucking dead? These are my friends. Where the fuck are they?”
Quirk had lost his cool. Nobody knows where anybody is or what has fucking happened. What kind of fucked-up shit is this?
He went up to marines in his platoon and asked them where his buddies were. Some marines just hung their heads. He walked up and down the lines, yelling out names.
“Martin, where are you? Martin. Jared Martin. Lance Corporal Jared Martin. Where are you?”
An officer walked past with his head bowed, looking at the ground.
“I hope you find your buddy.”
That was the last thing Quirk wanted to hear. The whole day, things had just gone from bad to worse. For the thirtieth time today, things have just gotten worse. Now we’ve reached rock bottom. His buddies Olivas and Martin were not there. If they weren’t there, they might be dead. It was too horrible to contemplate.
He ran over to the side of the road where the bodies were lined up, covered with ponchos. As he arrived, a chopper came in and blew the ponchos off the bodies. With Woznicki and a bunch of other guys, he ran over and started to cover the bodies up again. Through the gore and blood, he recognized a tattoo on one of the lifeless bodies. The face and body were so mashed up that if it hadn’t been for the tattoo, he wouldn’t have known who he was looking at. But he’d seen that tattoo many times before on the left arm of Corporal Randal Rosacker. It was a tattoo of the American flag. He’d never seen a dead person up close before, and now he was staring at a guy he’d hung out with, drunk beer with, talked shit with. They were not best buddies by any stretch of the imagination, but they’d been to bars together and he’d thought the guy was cool. Holy shit, what the fuck am I looking at? None of it was registering. So much had happened in such a short amount of time that he was overloaded.
He ran to the casualty collection point and saw Corporal Carl, his team leader, on a stretcher, pale and morphined up. There was a tourniquet around his leg. He was surrounded by medics who were freaking out, screaming at each other. As they carried him away, Carl gave him a thumbs-up.
“Be safe.”
It was the creepiest thing Quirk had ever seen. I can’t fucking believe it. Two days ago I was hanging out with these guys, walking around in shorts and goofing around, and now I’m looking around at them and they are in the dirt, bleeding to death.
That’s when he saw Fribley’s body, covered by the Stars and Stripes. A huge bloodstain was seeping through the flag in the area of the chest. His mouth went dry. Quirk had always had an American flag in his room as a kid. He’d saluted it countless times, and now he saw it draped over his friend’s body, oozing with blood. He knew that he would never be able to look at the American flag the same way again. From now on, every time he closed his eyes, that would be the image he saw.
A TV cameraman was taking pictures. Quirk ran over to him and stood in front of the camera.
“I hope you make a lot of fucking money off this.”
The cameraman said something back to him and Quirk just flipped. He ran at him, screaming. Woznicki grabbed him and tried to calm him down.
“It’s okay. Leave it. He’s just doing his job.”
None of it was making any sense to him. I’ve fucking shot my fucking rifle all day and I’ve watched fucking people fall to the fucking ground and see shit getting blown up in such a fucking small period of time. I don’t know what the fuck is going on and I’m looking at a bunch of my dead friends lined up in the street and half my platoon is not fucking here and nobody fucking knows what’s going on.
That’s when he heard one marine mention that some of his buddies were stranded in a house in the city.
The CAAT vehicles, which had gone back into the city to rescue the marines stranded in Ambush Alley, pulled into the reinforced position. The marines inside were battered and bruised, their vehicles riddled with bullet holes and dents and cracked windshields.
Private First Class Casey Robinson, Lance Corporal Jared Martin, Corporal Jake Worthington, and Lance Corporal Richard Olivas clambered wearily off the Humvees in a daze, unable to digest what they had been through. They were shaking and ragged; the barrels of their weapons were still hot. Sweat and dirt caked their faces. Blood coated their flak vests. For hours they had kept intensely focused on staying alive. Now they felt flat and disorientated. They had no idea where to go or what to do next. Their platoons were scattered all over the battlefield.
Robinson wandered as if in a dream across a battlefield strewn with burning tracks, debris from exploded missiles, empty water bottles, torn pieces of battle dressings. The acrid smell of spent ammo hung in the air. The metallic taste of burning metal stuck to his tongue. By the side of the road, bodies were laid out in a line. Robinson wondered who they were. He saw marines carrying body parts covered in ponchos to the casualty collection point. Cobras were still circling, and the odd round cracked overhead. But it was a different place from where he had been a few hours earlier. He had time to breathe. He saw artillery strikes pound Nasiriyah over to the we
st, on the south side of the canal. The ground shook. Some marines around him whooped with excitement.
“Let’s nuke the whole place.”
When he found his platoon, he counted no more than a squad and a half. Half his platoon seemed to be missing.
“Hey, Robinson. We got word that you died. Thank God you are here.”
He sat with the others and tried to figure out who was still alive. Someone said Rosacker was dead. Someone else said Juska was dead. Another company of marines had been assigned the gruesome task of loading up the dead and wounded. The higher-ups didn’t want Charlie Company marines loading up the Charlie KIAs.
He sat on the ground and did an ACE report, checking his ammo, casualties, and equipment. Then someone shoved an MRE in his hand and he just sat there eating it, tasting nothing.
Worthington looked for the other members of the Javelin team. When someone told him that Rosacker was dead, he went numb. They’d been through the School of Infantry together. It was disturbing. It was too much to compute. Guys he’d been joking with the day before were wide-eyed with apprehension. No one knows who is alive and who is dead. All sorts of rumors were flying around about what they’d been through, who had been shot, who was missing.
Martin’s first thought when he clambered out of the Humvee was Where are my buddies? Someone said one of them was dead. Another said they’d just seen him. Martin didn’t know what to think. He knew that those who had stayed on the northern bridge had been hit real hard. How many of my friends are dead? What he did know was that he wanted to get away. We need to leave here and get out. He forced himself to keep going. But his energy was dropping. The marines who had been in the house with him were beginning to suffer. They had been sustained by fear and adrenaline. Now they felt drained and empty. Martin’s bleeding forehead, which he had forgotten about for so long, now throbbed with a sharp pain. Tiredness hit him out of nowhere.
That’s when Quirk and Martin found each other. Quirk was shocked at Martin’s pale and drawn face. Quirk had had enough.
“I don’t want to do this again.”
The two of them talked a little about the battle. Martin didn’t want to talk about the house on Ambush Alley. He wasn’t ready to go into details. Quirk almost felt as though he’d missed out on something. He wanted to have been in the house with the rest of them. At the same time, he was glad he hadn’t been there. He remembered how he had been that morning. We were talking big shit about wanting to go to war and killing people. And now this. It had started as the most exciting day of Quirk’s life and ended as the most horrible day anybody could imagine. Nobody should ever have to go through such a fucking ridiculous day.
He looked around and saw the destroyed tracks, the burned-out Humvees, the bodies lying on the ground. This is sick. This is fucking sick. He breathed in the air deeply, very deeply and thought, I’m alive. I fucking made it without a scratch. But there was no standard operating procedure for what to do next. I don’t know whether to piss or shit, sit, or stand. No training he’d done had prepared him for this. Instead, they started fooling around. Woznicki showed him the big shrapnel wound he had caught in his butt. Quirk remembered the scene from the movie Forrest Gump when Tom Hanks, running through the jungle of Vietnam, gets shot in the ass. Quirk imitated Forrest Gump’s voice.
“Something bit me.”
The two of them balled up with laughter and repeated their newfound catchphrase.
“Something bit me . . . Something bit me . . . Something bit ME.”
They rolled around in giggles. Fooling around was the only way they had to release their anxiety. Then someone put an MRE in his hand.
“You guys, go ahead and break out chow.”
Quirk broke open an MRE, put food in his mouth, and chewed. He didn’t taste anything. It was just something to do. That was the longest forty-five minutes of my life.
A marine next to him looked at his watch.
“Do you know we’ve been doing this shit for over six hours?”
That blew Quirk away. His buddies told him things that he’d done, things that had happened. Quirk couldn’t remember any of them. Bits of the day had just been erased from his memory.
Captain Dyer, the executive officer of Alpha Company, 8th Tank Battalion, was still several hundred meters north of Quirk’s position, with his tank facing northward toward the white military complex. For the first time that day, combined arms had begun to work like a dream. For the past thirty minutes, as Dyer took out targets with his main gun, his FAC, Major Hawkins, had been calling in F-16 and A-10 fire to destroy targets to the north. An F-16 streaked across the sky and dropped a guided missile on a radar installation. An A-10 worked the tree line to the north where vehicles were going back and forth, picking up and dropping off combatants. The pilots identified dug-in mortar positions, enabling the tankers to call in artillery fire. Artillery fire also began to take out the mortar and artillery batteries firing at them from inside the complex. Wave after wave of aircraft came in and took out targets on a 270-degree arc to the north of the canal.
He now looked back and saw that Alpha Company had arrived to reinforce Charlie. He was relieved to see two more tanks coming toward him to back him up. It worried him, though, that all the battalion’s vehicles were packed in too tightly around the foot of the Saddam Canal Bridge. If a shell lands, they are going to be wiped out. He called back to the main CP.
“You need to contact the companies at the bridge and tell them to spread out.”
Maybe there was too much going on at the main command post, but Dyer didn’t like the answer he received.
“If you can get them to do it then try it out.”
It was just another chunk of frustration. Battalion, that’s your job to get the guys to spread out. Dyer had felt all day long that battalion staff had been interfering in the fight when they didn’t need to. And now that there was something that was clearly their responsibility, they didn’t want to know. He was still feeling sore that the fire support coordinator had aborted their attack on the tank earlier that morning. It was frustrating when we couldn’t get hold of battalion, but at least they couldn’t screw it up for us. He knew it was unprofessional to think like that, but that’s how he felt.
In spite of everything, as he looked back and saw the marines regrouping at the bridge, he felt that the way the U.S. Marines did business had worked. Even though the battalion staff had not been able to coordinate the battle, the three separate companies, from platoon and squad level down to individual marines, had fought their separate fights and got the job done.
He worked out that throughout the day he must have fired at least ten main gun rounds and thousands of machine-gun rounds. But it was getting quiet now. He got hold of his driver, Lance Corporal Shirley, who had been holed up in the driver’s seat in the belly of the tank for hours.
“It’s safe enough to pop your hatch and get some air.”
Just as he did, a mortar round landed so close that he was clobbered in the face with mud. Shirley quickly ducked back down and closed the hatch.
With the lull in the incoming fire and the extra security Alpha’s presence had brought them, Lieutenant Conor Tracy, commander of Charlie’s AAV platoon, could begin to account for his trackers and his vehicles. He’d started the day with forty-eight men and twelve working vehicles. Now he counted no more than ten men and only two working tracks. He’d been with most of his platoon for a year and a half. He knew almost everything about them. Now he was facing up to the prospect that his platoon was decimated.
He was on the eastern side of the road, working out what he was going to do next, when the first of his missing trackers pulled back into his area in a working AAV. It was Corporal Brown and Sergeant Schaefer, who had followed Major Peeples’s tank back up Ambush Alley. Tracy was delighted to see them.
Schaefer, too, was overjoyed to see Tracy. At one stage during the battle, he was convinced that Tracy, his platoon commander, was dead. He’d had to take over t
he responsibility of leadership, and he didn’t like it. He was feeling confused and guilty. A few hours earlier, he had led a convoy of five vehicles south and had now come back with only one functioning track.
“I’m so fucking sorry.”
Schaefer and Tracy sat down in the dirt and shared a cigarette, taking cover under an overhang where part of the eastern side of the road had been blown away. Tracy didn’t smoke, but someone had given him the cigarette early that morning. He’d kept it in his pocket, and it was so bent out of shape that it looked like the McDonald’s logo. Someone had to light it for him. His hands were shaking from shock.
“I’m so fucking sorry that I lost those vehicles.”
Schaefer was on the point of breaking down. He analyzed everything he’d done, picked apart every decision he made. He could feel the tears welling up. Guilt started to overwhelm him. He felt bad about taking so many vehicles south, and he felt bad about leaving Castleberry and the others in Ambush Alley. Schaefer, at twenty-five, was one of the senior guys. He’d been with the Camp Lejeune AAVs for four years. He remembered the day Castleberry and the others had arrived at the 2nd AAV Battalion headquarters at Courthouse Bay. He’d enjoyed training them and teaching them everything he knew. Castleberry was highly strung and overexcitable, but Schaefer always felt real proud when he gave him something hard to do and he pulled it off. It was the same with Elliot. He was a good Christian pretty boy who never did anything wrong. But he felt protective toward him and the others. Now he felt as though he’d let them down. He’d abandoned them in Ambush Alley. He was glad Lieutenant Tracy was sitting next to him, because otherwise he would have lost it.
“You did what you thought was right. At least you were able to let them know of the situation at the northern bridge.”
Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Page 32
