Joker One

by Donovan Campbell

  Just as we had finished settling in, third platoon rumbled by, driving down the wrong side of the road as fast as the street allowed. Ten seconds after their last vehicle passed us, all hell broke loose. A massive explosion, closer now, rocked the Ag Center, and streams of tracers lanced out of the buildings west and north of us as the enemy triggered another ambush. The double booms of RPGs started ringing out, and several of them slammed into the front of the first vehicle of third platoon's convoy, completely disabling it and stopping the Humvees behind it dead in their tracks. Trapped in the middle of the kill zone, Hes screamed orders to his men as he took cover behind the open door of his Humvee.

  Under withering enemy fire, the Marines of third platoon jumped out of their vehicles, pointed themselves south, and ran straight into the teeth of the enemy's ambush. Behind them, the gunners in the backs and tops of the Humvees remained in their positions, motionless and completely exposed to the enemy but pouring out fire so that the assaulting infantry would have cover. The quick thinking worked—the insurgents hadn't fully set in their ambush position by the time third platoon rolled by, and most of the running Marines were able to slam through the gates of nearby housing compounds without taking major casualties. Those manning the guns behind them spotted a small civilian car unloading RPGs and RPG gunners. The Marines laced it with their guns, and the car caught fire. For the next twenty minutes, explosions rang out as the dozens of RPGs inside cooked off from the heat.

  Up on the roof of the Ag Center, we were under heavy fire as well. Insurgents popped out of the buildings to our north and south and started pumping round after round of automatic weapons fire at us, and the bullets snapped and cracked all around as they passed. We took cover as best we could below the parapet. Two huge antitank missiles, launched from an alleyway just to our south, ripped through the floor below us, tearing huge chunks out of the wall, shaking the building like a tree in a violent wind. Every Marine in second squad started firing back at the tracers that lashed our position. To our south, Carson alternately shouted orders and popped off rounds from his grenade launcher. Across the roof, Niles screamed and fired the machine gun like a man possessed. Next to him, Ott lifted ammo belt after ammo belt and slapped them down on the gun when it ran dry. Together, the two of them were a sight to behold. A skinny but fearless Niles dashed from position to position on the roof, slamming the machine gun down on the wall wherever he could find the best firing position to engage newly emerging threats. Ott shadowed his every movement, carrying yards and yards of belted machine gun rounds across his shoulders and two cans of additional ammo in each hand. If I hadn't know better, I would've thought the two were a trained machine gun team, and for a brief second, I marveled as I watched them work.

  My quick reverie was interrupted by Leza, who, nearly tackling me as he ran across the fire-swept roof, announced in breathless tones that one of our men had just shot an Iraqi policeman. I was stunned, but Leza continued. The policeman had apparently driven his patrol car nearly all the way up to the Ag Center, and our men had refrained from shooting—after all, the police were supposedly our friends. When the driver jumped out of his car, however, he had a beefed-up AK-47 in his hand, and he immediately proceeded to let loose at us on the roof. After about twenty seconds of stunned observation, Lance Corporal Pepitone shot the man dead. Shaking my head, I told Leza to tell Pepitone good job. Very little surprised me anymore. Then I grabbed the radio and asked the COC to send out the rest of my platoon. We were going to need them in this fight against all comers.

  Back at the Outpost, the recovered Staff Sergeant began furiously rounding up the rest of Joker One. Upon hearing the call for reinforcements, he bounded into the platoon's house and screamed at the Marines to put their gear on and head out. Midway through the rant, Noriel reminded him that first and third squads had just recently returned from the action and that they were still filling up their water bottles. He also pointed out that no one had eaten yet that day, because, without me knowing, Staff Sergeant had forbidden Joker One from taking any food to our OPs—the Gunny was concerned about the trash buildup, and Staff Sergeant was apparently taking no chances.

  In reply, Staff Sergeant simply tossed Noriel a bottle of water and screamed at him to get the men moving. My first-squad leader sighed, and, shaking off their lethargy, he and Bowen started shouting, getting their sluggish, bone-weary squads moving. Marines with empty canteens and Camel-Baks crammed bottled water into their cargo pockets as they hustled out of the platoon's courtyard. Dehydrated from their long hours in the sun and having eaten nothing all day long, first and third squads threw their heavy combat loads back on and ran through the Outpost's northwestern entrance, back into the fight. Against orders, Yebra attached himself to the reduced platoon as it moved out. I had left him back at the Outpost that day because of severe dehydration brought on by a horrible case of dysentery, but, as Yebra later told me, “Sir, with all due respect, there's no way I was going to lay inside the base while the platoon was out fighting.” Despite his weakness, our radio operator armored up and headed out with everyone else.

  After nearly two hundred meters of sprinting through houses and alleyways, all the water bottles so hastily stuffed into cargo pockets had fallen out. After three hundred meters, Bowen's squad moved out of the cover of the houses and into the open area surrounding the Racetrack, the large road that branched north off Michigan. As the first team sprinted across the road, an enemy machine gun to their north opened up on them. Rounds skipped and sparked off the pavement, and the squad dived for cover, but there wasn't much available. Bowen and his men were more or less trapped in the open.

  Behind them, still sheltered by the houses, first squad froze. The Marines in front of them had halted their advance under heavy fire, and Teague's point team paused to work out their next move. Seeing the hesitation, Noriel lost his temper. He ran to the head of the squad, into the open area, and started doing a dance of frustration, completely ignoring the fire kicking off the pavement behind him. A stream of absolutely unintelligible curse words and orders issued from his mouth.

  The rest of the squad stared back, amazed. Teague later told me that their hesitation wasn't from fear or disobedience—it was simply that, worked up as Noriel was, no one could understand the garbled English. However, the failure to immediately comply only further enraged my feisty first-squad leader. He moved closer to the road and started firing his weapon into the dirt, still dancing his jig of anger. Now the message was clearer: If his squad didn't move, Noriel's bullets might well join the ones the enemy aimed at his men.

  The tactic worked. First squad broke cover and started moving, firing up the Racetrack as they ran. Nearly simultaneously, third squad crossed the road, heading to the cover of the northern soccer stadium. Meanwhile, back on top of the Ag Center, Niles spotted the flashes from the machine gun position nearly seven hundred meters away, directly north of us. He opened up on it, and the gun's tracers made a great target designator for the Cobra attack helicopters that had just arrived on the scene. Coming out of their holding pattern, they dived close to the rooftops and hit the house hard with rockets and 20mm chain guns. Watching the incredible firepower unleashed on the enemy's house, I felt a great deal of satisfaction.

  It didn't last long—I needed to get off the roof and to my first and third squads, by now holed up under fire in the northern stadium. Grabbing Ott, the nearest Marine, I headed down the stairs, out of the Ag Center, and to the gates of the compound. Together we squeezed through the entrance and moved through the tangled concertina wire to the open sidewalk. There we both paused briefly, then sprinted across Michigan, stopping only to struggle clumsily over the waist-high concrete median. Ten seconds later, we reached the stadium and ran inside.

  The first thing that I saw was Mahardy, nearly doubled over, his butt and thighs against the stadium's wall. He was clearly having difficulty standing, but immediately upon seeing me he tried to straighten up, and, failing, he began apologizing profus
ely about his weakened condition. Absently, I reassured my RO that he was fine, grabbed his pack, and slung the radio across my back. Then I climbed the stairs to join Sergeant Noriel.

  Together we surveyed the area to our north. The smooth patch of empty dirt normally used as a second soccer field stretched out for nearly two hundred meters. There was no cover there. However, if we moved west from the stadium, and then north, we could use the housing compound Noriel had spotted to shield us from some of the heavy fire. Moving that way would allow us to cross less than fifty feet of open field before we got to the Racetrack and the cover of the housing compounds across it. It was the only way we could see to move against the attackers to our north, so, after a few minutes of assembly, we headed out at a quick jog.

  The first team reached the intended cover without incident and edged carefully along a set of compound walls until they ended, making room for the rest of the platoon to find shelter. Both squads stacked up along the fifty short feet of concrete, Marines pressed nearly back to back against one another. At the front of the column, Corporal Walter and I carefully peered around the edge of the wall, trying to get some sense of the enemy's firing positions. Nearly immediately, a machine gun started up again, firing down the Racetrack from the north. The rounds cracked all around us, and Walter and I whipped back around the corner to safety.

  Walter immediately turned backward and yelled down the column for Feldmeir and his grenade launcher to move up and lay down some smoke to cover our movement across the road. Running clumsily up the line, Feldmeir arrived, and without warning, pulled up his grenade launcher, placed the muzzle right next to Walter's leaning head, and fired off a smoke round. Walter stumbled backward, reeling and flailing his arms. When he had recovered, he launched himself at Feldmeir and swatted him across the head. Somehow, though, Feldmeir had managed to put the round in almost exactly the right place, and now a disappointingly small cloud of purple smoke was kicking up from where it landed.

  Walter noticed the smoke and took off at a dead sprint across the street, screaming for his men to follow. Behind them, Ott and I moved from the cover of the wall, took a knee, and started firing furiously at windows we suspected housed enemy machine gun positions. It didn't do much good. When Walter's team reached the road, the guns opened up again, but the Marines moved quickly through the smoke and made it unscathed to the steel-gated entrance of a housing compound.

  As the team began kicking in the door, Ott and I hurled ourselves out from the wall, moving quickly across the field as Noriel and his men covered us from the rear. Firing, I moved across the road in a crouch. Ott followed, and soon we were running through the gates that Walter's team had kicked open. As I passed through the entrance, something snagged, and I snapped backward, nearly falling. The radio antenna sticking out of the pack on my back had caught on the top beam of the entrance—unused to carrying the radio, I had forgotten to duck as I passed the threshold. Cursing, I recovered my balance and moved into the courtyard.

  Team by team, the platoon crossed over the Racetrack, and within three minutes first squad had occupied Walter's housing compound, and third was flooding into an adjacent one to our north. Marines raced up the stairs to reach the roof, where they would have better observation and fields of fire. I was moving into the house itself when Flowers's voice came over the radio.

  “All units, be advised, Cobras are doing armed reconnaissance in the area. They're about to start looking for targets. Break. They need all squads to mark their positions with smoke right now. I repeat, all squads mark their positions with smoke right now. Over.”

  I stopped in my tracks and yelled into the PRR for all squads to mark their positions and move to cover. With me, Noriel complied immediately, but from the next compound over, Bowen didn't reply. As the sounds of the helicopter blades came ominously closer, I grew increasingly nervous. Suddenly, Bowen's strained voice came across the PRR.

  “Sir, we can't get to the roof to pop smoke. They've welded the doors shut up here. We're trying to pry ‘em open, sir. We're all in the house but we can't mark our pos!”

  I could hear the Cobra gunships approaching, and I started panicking. I pulled out my GPS and consulted the coordinates quickly. Then I called Flowers over the radio and yelled at him to inform the Cobras of our exact location. No reply came, so I tried again. This time, Flowers's voice responded nearly immediately:

  “All Joker units, be advised, the Cobras are starting their gun runs. Mark your pos now. I say again, mark your pos now. Over.”

  He hadn't heard me at all—something was horribly wrong. I knelt in the courtyard and tore the radio off of my back, frantically trying to roll the radio to the frequency of the Cobras so that I could talk to them directly. Suddenly Yebra was at my side. He knelt, grabbed the radio, and silently began fixing it. I was momentarily nonplussed. I knew Yebra shouldn't be out here because he should have been confined to his bunk, recovering from dysentery and on bed rest. However, my worry about friendly fire was too great, so I shoved my concerns aside. Straightening, I stood back and let my RO start punching buttons. Suddenly, the distinctive pilots’ voices rang out from the handset, crystal clear.

  “Joker COC, this is Cobra One. We have one Marine position below us, marked with red smoke. Looks like there's enemy in the house next door. We're beginning a gun run now. Over.”

  I grabbed the handset back from Yebra, truly panicked now. “Cobra One, this is Joker One. Abort, again, I say abort! That is my third squad to our north. They can't pop smoke right now. Abort! Abort!”

  It was like I was talking to myself. The pilots called again, completely unfazed. “Joker COC, this is Cobra Two. We've got the enemy below us. We're about to engage with twenty mike-mike, over.” I could hear the rotors getting closer and closer now. I looked up, scanning the sky. Just to my east, I could see the first Cobra, maybe two hundred yards distant.

  I dropped the radio handset and screamed back into the PRR. “Bowen, the Cobras are coming. You're gonna get hit. Pop smoke now, damn it! Pop it now!”

  “I can't sir. We're still beating at this door!”

  “Damn it! Move down! Take cover on—”

  I was cut off. The Cobras above me opened up on my third squad. Two helicopters swooped down, their 20mm cannons blazing, tearing the air with the sound of ripping paper amplified fifty times over. It was one of the worst things I have ever heard, and all that I could do was look helplessly up at the helicopter underside as it flew overhead, wreaking devastation on Bowen and his men.

  Unknown to me, inside the squad's house, seconds before the gun run began, Bowen had left off beating at the locked steel door and screamed at his men to start running down the stairs. As the bullets tore through the top-floor walls, all the third-squad Marines were diving down the stairs, Bowen bringing up the rear. The 20mm tank-killing rounds shredded the upstairs, and the squad lay huddled on the first floor, arms over their heads as bits of concrete and plaster rained down on them. Then, suddenly, everything was over. The Cobras had finished the run.

  As soon as the helos banked off to the north, I heard their voices over the radio again. “Joker COC, this is Cobra One. We hit that insurgent position but we're circling back around for another run. Over.”

  My heart sank. I immediately called Bowen, praying that he was still alive.

  “One-Three, this is One-Actual. Are you there? How many casualties do you have?”

  Immediately his voice came back. “We've got no casualties, sir. We're all on the first floor now, sir.”

  “Stay there! The Cobras are coming back around. Stay there! Take cover. I'll try to call them again.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  Yebra was still fiddling with the radio. He had the handset off the radio body now, and he was wiping down the connections between the handset's cord and the radio's plug-in. I knelt back down and reached for the device as he carefully put the two together again.

  “Cobra One, Cobra Two, this is Joker One. Abort mission! Abort m
ission! You are hitting my squad. I say again, abort mission!”

  Nothing happened for a few seconds, but then the pilot's voice came back, calm and unruffled. “Joker COC, this is Cobra One. We have completed our turn and are approaching the house again. We're going to hit it with another run. Over.”

  Flowers came back on. “Roger, Cobra One. There should still be no friendlies in that area. Over.”

  I called Bowen again. “Take cover now, One-Three! The helos're comin’ back! They're going to hit us again. Take cover, I repeat, take cover.”

  “Roger, sir.” Inside his house, Bowen turned to his squad and gave the order. They flung themselves back onto the floor. As the rotor sounds came closer, though, one of his men had had enough. Rising from where he lay on the ground, Lance Corporal Kepler screamed “Fuck this” and began searching for a smoke grenade. As the rest of the squad watched, hunched under whatever cover they could find, Kepler ripped a smoke marker off the nearest Marine and ran back up the stairs to the second floor. As the helos made their final approach, he smashed out a window with the barrel of his rifle, carefully raking the glass from the edges of the window frame. Then, as the guns opened up on the house, Kepler climbed out, up the outside wall until he was close enough to its top to throw the grenade to the roof.

  Even as the bricks next to him ripped apart in a solid line from floor to ceiling, he popped the tab on the marker and tossed it to the roof.