by Bing West
Hearing the heavy fighting to their front, Lieutenant Jesse Grapes, the 3rd Platoon commander, gathered his squad leaders inside a blown-up retail store to discuss their attack. “There’s no point getting jammed behind Second Platoon,” Grapes said. “We don’t want to be stuck on the road with no fields of fire or room to maneuver.”
Corporal Robert Mitchell and Sergeant Christopher Pruitt, who had been with the platoon for two years, argued to place squads on both sides of the street to be able to shoot in all directions. At first, Grapes was not convinced. With sniper fire pinging against the storefront, they peeked around the corner and watched the other platoons fighting farther to the south on Henry.
“We had a hard time controlling two squads yesterday,” Grapes said.
“We were bunched up then,” Pruitt said. “Henry’s large enough to work both sides.”
“Okay, two squads up,” Grapes said, “one back with our Humvees for rear security and medevac.”
A bullet struck the doorway a few feet over Grapes’s head, and he ducked back. A few seconds later a second round hit in the same place. Pruitt pointed to a second-story barred window in a sturdy, gray concrete home about a hundred meters away.
“Get a rocket in there!”
Sergeant Christopher Heflin and Private First Class Christopher Davis grabbed an AT-4 rocket and lay down behind some rubble. Grapes snapped off a string of red tracers to mark the target, and Davis put the rocket right through the window.
A Bradley fighting vehicle from Battalion 2-7 was passing by, saw the explosion, and pulled over. “Want it hosed?” the driver yelled to Heflin.
“We’d appreciate it,” Heflin said.
The Bradley’s 25mm chain gun proceeded to pour rounds through every window in the building.
“I think that does it,” the driver said as he drove off.
Many of the houses enclosed the rooftop entry to the stairs in a cement box that made an excellent sniper post. Under fire from the cement shack on another house, Grapes called up the TOW and Javelin Humvees that were supporting his platoon. The TOW was a wire-guided sixty-pound warhead that could knock a huge hole in any building. But it required a direct shot and, with all the telephone wires dangling at wild angles, had to be employed with caution lest it explode or go off course.
“It’s that house with the tall stack,” Grapes said, pointing.
The gunner adjusted the thermal sight on the Javelin, snapped a picture of the target, and transferred it to the warhead. Seconds later he fired the Javelin. The missile shot straight up in the air, curled over, and plummeted straight down, obliterating the rooftop box.
Casualty reports were flooding Kilo Company’s radio frequency. The 1st and 2nd Platoons had taken close to twenty casualties, including one KIA. From their position, 3rd Platoon watched the arcs and explosions of RPGs down the street. Small-arms fire was tearing the air in all directions.
“Third herd, close it up,” Jent radioed to Grapes. “Cover my rear.”
With six tanks in support, the path of Kilo Company was marked by tumbledown walls, splintered telephone poles, demolished cars, and sagging apartment buildings. Slugging its way down Henry in four hours, Kilo fired 160 TOW rockets and 180 main tank rounds into walls and through windows at the firing positions of the insurgents, following up with air strikes whenever resistance stiffened. Fixed-wing air circled in a cloverleaf formation called a keyhole, enabling four air strikes to be controlled simultaneously inside the city. Kilo’s forward air controller was Captain David Smay, an F-18 pilot with the call sign Porkchop. The F-18 pilots waiting in the stack knew Porkchop personally and on his command had dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs two hundred meters in front of the lead platoon. Fires smoldered in the shattered buildings, the mounds of shattered concrete and cement preventing the flames from spreading. Columns of black smoke marked the progress of Kilo.
India Company was advancing on Kilo’s left flank, a few blocks east of Henry. Like Kilo, India had tanks up forward with the lead platoons. As Master Gunnery Sergeant Ishmael Castillo maneuvered his tank, he could see Iraqis in civilian clothes darting from house to house on both sides of the dirt road. The pock-marked track was barely wide enough for his tank to squeeze by the courtyard walls. From his open commander’s hatch eight feet above the ground, he could look over the walls and shout warnings to the Marines trotting behind his tank. Two insurgents lobbed grenades that bounced off the armored plates and exploded harmlessly. He thought of buttoning down the hatch but decided against it so he could continue to warn the grunts. Instead he swiveled—“pivot-steered”—the tank back and forth on its treads, smashing in first one wall, then another. An RPG shell skipped off the tank’s front plates without detonating. Another struck the side of the tank and exploded without doing any damage.
With the grunts urging him on, Castillo rumbled down the dirt track, firing the 7.62 and .50 caliber machine guns into the doors and windows of every house. Using the infantry phone on an outside box in the back of the tank, the squad leaders directed the fire of the tank’s main gun. One shell exploded against the side of a house and threw an insurgent into the courtyard, where he lay like a rag doll. Castillo watched as a huge D-9 bulldozer clanked across the courtyard to demolish the house, squashing the body.
The tanks advancing with India and Kilo Companies were smashing down dozens of walls, the shock causing hidden jihadists to fire blindly, giving away their hiding places. North of Highway 10 Kilo had encountered suicidal jihadists in about one in every fifty houses; advancing down Henry, it seemed one house in every twenty contained enemy fighters.
“Enter every room with a boom” was a standing order.
Jent slowed down Kilo’s advance so that Grapes could catch up. On the rooftops the snipers were shooting at the insurgents flushed by the tanks while SMAW gunners systematically destroyed the houses designated by the squads. It was exhausting, dangerous work clearing Henry, walking down narrow, dust-clogged alleys behind the growling tanks, barely able to hear the shouts of the fire team and squad leaders, hurling grenades in windows, slapping C-4 to door fronts, ducking from the blast, waiting for the dust to clear a bit, then bursting in, a stack of four or six Marines with rifles and pistols, firing and blasting from room to room.
Grapes pushed his platoon at a fast pace for about three hundred meters, then slowed his advance. “I think I’m close enough,” he radioed to Jent.
The platoon had cleared a few more buildings when Mitchell called to Grapes. “Bradleys coming north,” he said.
A column of Bradley fighting vehicles from 2-7 was heading to a resupply point, having finished their advance-guard “gun-run” for the company. When they were abreast of the platoon, one of the Bradleys slowed to a stop in a ball of smoke as an RPG hit its side. Three more RPGs exploded near the vehicle.
As the crew leaped out, Grapes saw Corporal Francis Wolf run toward a two-story concrete building.
“They’re shooting those fucking RPGs from there!” Wolf yelled.
Before he had run a dozen steps, fire erupted from a half-dozen houses not fifty feet to his front. Wolf and the rest of the squad ducked behind courtyard walls and the scrap metal piles that littered the streets. Over the screaming orders of NCOs, Wolf kept pointing at the house in front of him, gesturing for others to move up. Grapes called back for the platoon’s four Humvee gun trucks to come up, while Mitchell and Private First Class Alexander Nicoll linked up with Wolf. When the first Humvee rolled up, Grapes pointed at the house, and the Mark 19 gunner proceeded to hammer the building with hundreds of grenades.
“We could never use this much ammo in training!” Grapes said to Mitchell.
Once the Mark 19 ceased firing, Wolf and Nicoll kicked open the gate and threw a grenade inside the front door. The explosion ignited some propane tanks in the front rooms. With smoke pouring out the windows, Wolf yelled, “Go!” and he and Nicoll charged inside, putting rounds through every door they passed. The insurgents fled up the st
airs to the second story. In the courtyard, Mitchell and Grapes were scanning the rooftops for the insurgents who had been throwing down grenades.
“First floor clear! We’re going up top!” Wolf yelled at them.
Mitchell and Grapes laughed. Wolf was crazy.
On the western side, AK rounds were impacting all around Corporal Jose Sanchez and Private Rene Rodriguez. They dove behind a rusty engine block lying on the curbside. Peeking out, they saw six or eight insurgents firing from roofs on the eastern side, a few blocks in from Grapes. Sanchez wanted to warn Mitchell and Grapes, but he had no radio, and if he stood up to wave at them, he’d be hit.
“We need a fucking tank or something to go get those muj,” he said to Rodriguez. “They’re too far back for Mitchell to chase them.”
Sanchez kept waving his arms, and finally Grapes got the message. He looked up just as one insurgent popped his head over the edge of a nearby roof. Fifty feet apart, the two men stared at each other. Grapes felt he was paralyzed by the man’s gaze. They stared at each other for perhaps a second before the insurgent ducked back down.
“Wolf! Nicoll! They’re on the roof with you!” Grapes hollered.
The two Marines already knew that. They had burst onto the roof as an insurgent was jumping over to the rooftop of the next house. They let loose a barrage of fire, and Nicoll threw a grenade, wounding the man. They were about to jump over the roof in pursuit when rounds snapped over their heads, too close to be random fire. They lay down and began to return fire, not seeing any clear targets.
Down in the courtyard, Lance Corporal James Crossan had run up to Grapes and Mitchell. Out of breath, he yelled. “Farmer’s in a big fight up the street! He has a man down.” Lance Corporal Tyler Farmer was prone to aggressive action.
“I’d better get up there,” Grapes said to Mitchell. “You stay here to cover Wolf. I’ll send someone to help out.”
Grapes and Crossan ran out onto Phase Line Henry just as a Humvee firing its Mark 19 came down the street.
Grapes yelled at the driver, “I need someone to help out Corporal Mitchell.”
The Weapons Company first sergeant, Bradley Kasal, was sitting in the backseat, supervising the TOW and Javelin crews.
“I’m in!” Kasal said, jumping out of the vehicle.
Kasal was a salty combat veteran and Kilo Company’s former first sergeant. He knew every one of the Marines.
While Kasal went to help Mitchell, Grapes ran south a hundred meters, diving to the pavement as enemy machine-gun fire poured out of a connecting alley onto Phase Line Henry. Behind him Lance Corporal Clay Narey was being carried back to the medevac vehicles, blood pouring from his leg.
LCpl Farmer gestured to Grapes. “I’m on it, sir,” he said. “I see the bastards.”
Farmer grabbed a SAW gunner, Lance Corporal Dennis Stephens, and a rifleman, Lance Corporal Andrew Wright, and positioned them to shoot down the alley at a courtyard a block away.
“They’re behind that wall,” he said. “Keep them pinned. I’ll get up on a roof.”
Farmer and Lance Corporal David Stone climbed to the roof of a large two-story building and looked down to see three insurgents in the courtyard fifty meters away. Farmer nodded at Stone, and they opened fire. Stone, normally a quiet, even-tempered young man, ripped through a two-hundred-round drum in his SAW, screaming, “Yeah! Get some! Come on, motherfucker! Get some!” Farmer burst out laughing.
Grapes yelled up at him.
“We got targets, sir!” Farmer yelled.
Grapes grabbed a SMAW rocket team and headed to the roof. As bullets snapped overhead, Farmer pointed out a nearby roof to the rocket team leader, Corporal Jermaine Nelson. “Hit that window over there,” Farmer said. “They’re right behind it.”
“Dog, there’s no way I’m standing up to shoot this thing unless y’all give me some cover fire!” Nelson said.
Farmer looked at Grapes and Stone. “Okay,” he said. “On three we all go. One, two, three.”
They popped over the lip and fired wildly. Nelson and his gunner, Lance Corporal Scott Viera, lined up the shot and put a rocket right inside the second-story window.
“Perfect!” Nelson said.
Farmer grabbed Stone to assault the building and yelled to Nelson for support.
“Fuck you, dog, I’m outta here!” Nelson hollered back and ran down to the street.
Great, Farmer thought, so it’s just me, Stone, and the lieutenant. Well, let’s get on with it.
They rushed down to the street. As they moved up the alley, Lance Corporal John Winnick, a machine-gunner, ran toward Grapes with an RPG launcher and a bag full of rockets. “Sir, can I shoot these back at them?” Winnick yelled.
“Do you know how to use that thing?” Grapes asked.
Winnick had never held or fired an RPG. “Yes, sir! Fired one in a threat weapons course!” Winnick said.
“Then start firing!”
Farmer pointed to the gate to the building where the insurgents were holed up. Winnick loaded an RPG, sighted in, fired the rocket, and smacked the gate dead on, blowing it wide open. “Whoa!” the Marines cheered. Winnick grinned, reloaded, and put the second round through the doorway, hitting a fuel drum. In minutes the fire had spread through the first floor, and the insurgents had fled.
Jensen yelled, “Crossan’s hit! We need a medevac!”
Grapes headed to the urban shack where Jensen was bandaging up Crossan.
“He took shrapnel right through his tricep,” Jensen said. “That’ll sting.”
A Humvee swung up to provide the medevac. For the rest of the fight Grapes would be without the radio operator who had been his trusted companion for two years.
Further down Henry to the south, Mitchell, Wolf, Nicoll, and Kasal were still pressing the enemy when Mitchell was hit by an AK burst from a window. Wolf cut open Mitchell’s camouflage blouse with his K-bar and applied a pressure bandage to Mitchell’s arm.
“Stay here, man, I’ve got it,” Wolf told Mitchell. “We’ll clear this section and come back to pick you up.”
Wolf hollered to Kasal and Nicoll to press forward. Lance Corporal Samuel Severtsgard joined them, and the four jumped over a dividing wall, landing in the next yard with a cluttered thud. AK-47 fire ripped the yard up around them.
“Back! Back!” Wolf yelled.
“Let’s go around the other side,” Kasal said. “Catch them in the rear.”
Severtsgard led the charge, pulling the pin on a grenade as he ran around the corner and saw there was no entrance to the house from that side. Severtsgard, still holding the spoon down on the grenade, looked at Mitchell, not sure of what to do. Neither of them had any idea how long this firefight, now raging for almost two hours, was going to last or when they would get a resupply. Severtsgard didn’t want to waste the grenade.
“Can you hold it?” Mitchell asked Severtsgard.
“I guess,” Severtsgard replied.
Joined by Mitchell, the Marines tried to work their way up a back alley, only to be again driven back. As he turned around, Severtsgard tripped and fell, clutching the grenade tightly. He stumbled to his feet and ran after the others. When they stopped to catch their breath and figure out their next move, Severtsgard came to his senses and heaved the grenade into a courtyard.
Back on the street, Mitchell had had enough of the insurgents holed up in the house. “Sir, I want to take their position out with a TOW!” he radioed to Grapes.
“Do it!”
Mitchell marked the target and cleared the TOW gunner hot. Shwackk! The missile blew in the side of the house and collapsed the roof onto the defenders.
After fighting their way nine hundred meters down Phase Line Henry, the 3rd Platoon joined up with the rest of Kilo Company and picked out a large house to serve as their base for an evening meal and a few hours’ rest before moving forward again.
27
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THE HOUSE FROM HELL
ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 13 Kilo
Company set out to clear the dense blocks of houses stretching from Phase Line Henry west to the Euphrates. Captain Jent told 1/Lt Grapes that his platoon would take the lead, and Grapes assigned a block to each squad. After the previous day’s fight, the platoon was tired but excited, expecting immediate action, but the insurgents had retreated to the south and no contact was made in the first block.
The 3rd Squad began searching the second block by shooting and hammering at an unyielding lock on a courtyard gate. Admitting defeat, Corporal Ryan Weemer sat down to smoke a cigarette.
Screw this one, he thought. Second Squad has some C-4. They can clear it later.
Sergeant Pruitt, the platoon guide, ran across the street to pry open a side gate of the next house. Tough and muscular, Pruitt had a challenging nature and never relaxed. “Hey, this gate’s open,” he yelled. “Let’s go!”
Weemer threw down his smoke and hustled over with Sergeant James Eldridge and Lance Corporals Cory Carlisle and James Prentice.
The five Marines slipped into the courtyard, and Pruitt looked inside the outhouse. Fresh shit.
“They’re inside!” Pruitt whispered.
The house looked typical of Fallujah—two stories of thick cement squares. Usually on the first floor you entered a foyer with a large living room off to the right, a large common room straight ahead, a kitchen and bathroom with a one-hole toilet in the rear, and uneven cement steps leading to an upstairs corridor with doors opening onto three or four bedrooms. This house, though, had a raised cement dome with skylight windows in the center of the roof, an unusual addition.
The house looked too small to hold more than a few enemy. So rather than wait for a tank, the Marines decided to assault. Weemer, who had gone through the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) special training, posted Prentice as rear security and gestured to Carlisle and Pruitt to stack behind him. He slung his M16 and took out his pistol. Drawing a deep breath, he kicked down the door and charged across the room. He was “running the rabbit,” a technique where the point man rushes across the room to distract the enemy while the second man in the stack does the shooting.
