Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  Period.

  I explained to my lieutenants, “Every infantry officer is expected to know how to lead a platoon. I know you can lead a platoon. That’s what IOC produced. My job is not to train you how to be platoon commanders. My job is to teach you how to be company commanders.”

  They were probably shocked to hear this, and some may have falsely assumed that IOC gave them their learner’s permit and I would be the one handing them the keys to the car along the way. That wasn’t the case. I expected them to be able to drive in the fast lane when they showed up.

  They all had different personalities, but all had one thing in common. They were so enamored with the guts and glory aspects of what being an infantry officer should be—they shunned the other mundane but essential tasks of being officers.

  Like most, they did not enjoy tasks like writing fitness reports, preparing page after page of operations orders, creating PowerPoint briefs, the relentless bureaucracy of the awards system, and all the other administrative headaches they neither understood nor appreciated.

  I was proud of my ability to excel, not just in spite of the minutiae we all coped with, but also because of it. I learned early on from my mentors that it is easy to be good at your main job, but excelling at the collateral duties young officers are assigned is what sets you apart from the pack.

  Honing communication skills, learning to write with clarity, serving as something like the voting officer, recognizing a Marine’s accomplishments through awards and acknowledgment—these were the sort of “little things” that made the difference.

  Put another way, they saw the bureaucratic aspect of the Marine Corps as a nuisance. I saw it as a channel through which I properly took care of my Marines.

  An example of this came in late December 2006 in western Ramadi.

  We had just ended a long clearance operation during which we didn’t sleep or eat much, even by Marine Corps standards. We were under a tight timeline to clear a part of the city, and we pushed hard, at times working twenty hours a day straight. It was mentally draining and physically exhausting work.

  After a long push, I’d pull my Kevlar helmet off and could feel the top of my head throbbing from its weight that had dug into my skull. I scratched my hair for some relief.

  I cursed my helmet often.

  At the conclusion of this and similar operations, the immediate reflex is to take care of yourself—get some sleep, take a shower, find food, or just decompress at the firm base.

  We weren’t back for more than an hour or so when I called for all of the lieutenants to come to the company office. It was a metal cargo box on the back of a dilapidated U.S. Army 7-ton truck parked outside of the Task Force 1-77 Armor Battalion (TF-1-77 AR) command post at Camp Ramadi.

  When they arrived, I told them that the commander of the task force had given us the opportunity to recognize our Marines who had been fighting in his unit’s battlespace for weeks by awarding them medals—called “impact awards” that are presented for actions during specific time periods of meritorious action and valor. The catch was that we—that is to say, they—needed to write the award citations. Furthermore, they had to be done immediately so the task force could approve them the next day. I did not want to miss any chance to recognize the Marines.

  They were tired, hungry, and filthy, but I ordered them to sit down at the computers and start writing out the citations for deserving Marines.

  For the next few hours, I made them work on the citations until they delivered acceptable products.

  I returned draft after draft to them saying, “These need to be better, cleaner. These are your Marines. Don’t give anyone a reason to deny your Marines the recognition they earned.”

  I sensed the resentment for being so strict about something the lieutenants thought others should have to do. I’m quite sure they were under the impression that there were little award fairies who typed these things up and sent them to some magical place from which shiny medals and colorful ribbons and proper award citations then appeared.

  I am quite sure they were thinking, “Why the fuck are we doing this? Isn’t this what administration Marines do? We’re warfighters. Admin is bullshit!”

  The fact is, good officers do the right things for their Marines. Making sure Marines were recognized for their actions was the right thing to do. In the end, their hard work paid off and we got the citations in on time, and my lieutenants and I pinned Army Achievement and Commendation Medals on fourteen Marines in our company. My officers saw how their jobs as leaders were not limited to leading their men on the battlefield.

  Each lieutenant had his strengths, but each still had a lot to learn about the gravity of his responsibilities. Their leadership development was vital to the success of the company.

  Ever since Second Lieutenant John McLaughlin was a child, he fantasized about the military. He didn’t know that he would be a Marine, but he did know that he would serve the military in some capacity.

  The advertised culture of the Marine Corps is what drew him to it. The more he learned about the Corps, the more he desired to earn the title of U.S. Marine. The more closely he followed the news of the burgeoning stages of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more he realized he had to contribute as much as the Marines who were serving.

  McLaughlin was oblivious as he watched the Middle East conflicts unfold, not realizing that many of the young men whom he admired and wanted to emulate would soon be under his charge.

  McLaughlin imagined that his first platoon would be an experienced group of guys. Subordinates, yes, but only in rank and billet. Trusting the guys who had been in for a while was a tenet of leadership that would be unchallenged. For the Marines of Echo Company, the term “experienced” was never thrown around loosely.

  About fifty of the Marines in the company had experienced a grueling deployment to Ramadi in 2004. During that mission, Echo Company and the battalion as a whole sadly amassed a casualty count that would be rivaled by few other units during the War on Terror.

  When he received his commission as an officer in the Marine Corps from the U.S. Naval Academy, the war in Iraq was already more than two years old. McLaughlin didn’t know what to expect, but by the way the news portrayed the war, he anticipated an incessantly kinetic environment in which both he and his Marines would perform superhuman acts in the face of certain death on a daily basis.

  Certainly, the combat that Echo Company experienced was frequent, intense, and probably quite similar to what thousands of other operators on the ground experienced during their time in Iraq. Nonetheless, it was not a constant. In fact, the experience of Ramadi could be best described as periods of extreme boredom punctuated by episodes of inexplicable chaos.

  McLaughlin was twenty-four years old. He stood six-two, physically fit, with broad shoulders. His short, cropped hair was dark brown and he wore a smile on his face even when things were at their worst. He spoke with a thick, muddled New York accent, like a cab driver from Long Island. His voice was deep and fitting for his size, but I could always hear traces of the innocuous kid within it. He was confident about everything but humble. He knew he had as much to learn about following as he did about leading—it was one of his most admirable qualities.

  While he never diminished the sacrifice, diligence, and courageousness of the Marines of Echo Company, McLaughlin never boasted that his platoon or the company had experienced more combat than any other unit. His accomplishments in Ramadi gave him a professional education like no other, and rid him of any inaccurate preconceptions of service in the Marines, and helped him grow as an officer. He found quickly that being boisterous about what Marines endured in war was reckless and it was immature to make trite comparisons of death, destruction, and wildness.

  Most Marine units are given definitive timelines and are assigned to specific areas of operation well before they deploy to a combat zone. This deployment was one plagued by uncertainty and continual extensions. Living aboard the USS Boxer, it seemed as i
f we floated around aimlessly. We didn’t find out where we’d end up. We didn’t know how long we would be there. We didn’t know when we would go. We were only told to “Be Prepared.”

  The USS Boxer (LHD-4) was a 40,000-ton Wasp Class amphibious assault ship—an eight-hundred-foot-long mini-aircraft carrier with more than forty helicopters and airplanes from which the Marines launched operations. Nearly two thousand Marines and sailors lived inside the large vessel. It was one of the several ships in the Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) that sailed together out of San Diego to the Middle East.

  Platoon commanders had to get to know the Marines. Beyond their likes and dislikes, they became intimately acquainted with who they were, the commonalities shared, and the differences they had. The tight confines of the ship made becoming familiar much easier.

  Over the course of several months, McLaughlin came to understand that the Marines who had been in combat before were different than the rest of the men in his platoon. They had an intangible grit to them, and something that exacted respect. It wasn’t necessarily synonymous with maturity. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on it, but he believed it was something that could only be possessed by young people who have both lived amongst—and caused—unnatural death for an extended period.

  After McLaughlin had received official word from me that we were getting called forward to reinforce a U.S. Army unit in Ramadi, he experienced what he later described as “a scared giddiness” to share the news with his platoon.

  McLaughlin got his platoon together in the berthing spaces and told them everything I had briefed him on. Knowing the system by then, McLaughlin would never take full credit for breaking the news to them. The ubiquitous “Lance Corporal Underground,” a rumor mill that spread faster than wildfire, tended to beat anyone to the punch every time, and it certainly did in this case.

  They still talked about it, though, as a platoon. As vividly as anything else that had ever happened in McLaughlin’s life, he quickly learned that the area that Echo Company would be operating in was the same exact place where his combat-experienced Marines had deployed two years prior. He listened intently to his platoon’s Ramadi veterans.

  Some appeared detached from the discussion. Others spoke with a level of detail he’d never heard before. It wasn’t their eloquence but the palpable emotion behind every fact they stated that made everything seem more real.

  McLaughlin, like many other lieutenants, would lose Marines during his time in combat. He thought about the Marines who paid the ultimate sacrifice. He thought about the other Marines in the platoon and how much those incredible young men meant to each other.

  Combat is a very real thing, but the severity of it has a tendency to escape you if you are not being shot at, and mortared, or whatever else. The repetitiveness and the boredom, the chaos and the horror seemingly don’t exist. But they do—and they are never more real than at those moments when you look the parents of a young Marine in the eye and express your sympathies for the death of their son, the young man who was ultimately your responsibility.

  McLaughlin braced for the shock of what he imagined his first war would be like as we drew nearer to Ramadi—many of the other Marines did as well. Their training was sound, but even the most demanding training can never fully prepare anyone for the full force of war’s impact or teach how to react to it.

  Echo Company’s seven-month deployment would ultimately turn into almost nine—extended twice by our higher command—a psychological kick in the sack for all of us. But we endured for over two hundred fifty days.

  For most, they would be the most important months they ever lived.

  CHAPTER 3

  Movement

  It is not easy to kill another human being. Not for anyone—no matter how it is portrayed in fiction, on television, or in movies. There is nothing romantic or cavalier about it. It is horrific. Life-changing. Killing is what happens, and Marines are trained to kill. But in war, destruction is everywhere. It eats everything around you. Sometimes it eats at you.

  Killing is an unnatural act.

  It starts with the enemy fixed in the scope. The breathing is controlled, but the heart races, muscles tense, and eyes adjust sharply. Slowly, deliberately, the finger slips onto the trigger of the rifle and then presses smoothly. A piercing crack. The gentle recoil. The small bullet, no bigger than the tip of a pencil, crosses space in an instant. It penetrates flesh and tears through the body. As the small projectile searches for the path of least resistance to exit the body, it shatters bone, explodes organs, severs veins and arteries. Crushed and mangled inside, the enemy falls. With a small, seemingly simple movement, executing one conscious decision—it is then you know you have killed.

  Marines are masters of their art—but they do it not only with lethality, but also with honor, knowing that they are fighting for a greater purpose.

  8 November 2006

  When the USS Boxer Expeditionary Strike Group moved into the Arabian Sea, it ‘chopped’—that is, it came under the control of—the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain. The amphibious warships then pushed north through the Straits of Hormuz and into the Persian Gulf. Two days later, on the 231st birthday of the Marine Corps, the 15th MEU Commanding Officer, Colonel Brian Beaudreault, stood on the Boxer’s flight deck and announced to the hundreds of Marines and sailors gathered there that we’d be going into Iraq.

  They responded to the news exuberantly.

  I sensed an excitement from the new Marines, the ones who had never been in combat before. Many, I suppose, still harbored romantic notions of how combat was going to be—running into the blaze of battle, firing their M-16s, and annihilating an untrained, inferior enemy.

  If that’s what they were thinking, they’d know better soon enough. They were about to experience the intensity of combat and see death on a scale like they’d never imagined.

  15 November 2006

  Captain John Smith, the commander of Fox Company, 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, and I flew into Iraq after the colonel’s announcement to get an idea of the environment in which we’d be operating. We landed at Camp Ramadi, and we waited for a ride from the brigade headquarters to Camp Corregidor to where we’d meet Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Ferry, U.S. Army, the commander of Task Force 1-9 Infantry.

  At Camp Ramadi, a television was tuned to Fox News—hammering away with coverage of the war. A breaking story came across the air. The correspondent informed the viewers that the Marine Corps was deploying twenty-five hundred specially-trained warriors of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit to Al Anbar Province as part of the broader “surge strategy.”

  Smith and I looked at each other in disbelief. We had been told that our plans to flood the battlefield in places like Al-Anbar Province were secret.

  “So much for Op-Sec,” Smith said.

  “Op-Sec” meant “operational security” steps taken to keep the enemy from knowing your force’s composition, movements, and intentions.

  I replied with appropriate eloquence, “Holy shit!”

  The gall of the news media. Did they have any regard for the fact that what they announced to the world might affect our mission and our safety?

  A surly, older-looking U.S. Army second lieutenant walked into the lobby. He was dressed out in full battle gear: helmet, body armor, and Army-style issued digital battle dress uniform. His M4 carbine rifle, covered in dust, dangled from his right shoulder from a D-Ring clip. His uniform’s nametape read, “Peterson.”

  He spotted us and came over. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I am Lieutenant Peterson, and I’m supposed to be picking up some Marine, some Jack Ryan character. I’m expected to take him over to meet Lieutenant Colonel Ferry. Is that you?”

  The derisive reference to the Tom Clancy novel series didn’t strike me as funny.

  I only responded, “Yeah, that’s us. You ready to roll?”

  He was.

  Outside, a four-Humvee convoy awaited us with the engines running.

  Thes
e were not like the Humvees Marines had. They were outfitted with the most up-to-date gear—high-powered radios, Raytheon GPS systems, Blue Force Tracker—small computer monitors that displayed high-speed digital moving maps that showed all of the friendly unit positions at all times, and electronic counter-measure devices meant to thwart remotely detonated roadside bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Armed with M240B 7.62mm and M2 .50 caliber machine guns, they were combat ready.

  We drove what we would come to know as Route Trans Am, moving slowly, maybe five miles per hour, on the left-hand side of the road which had been cleared of IEDs. The vehicles bounced and rattled as we moved down the unimproved roads that were gutted with potholes and craters from mortar strikes and IEDs.

  On the right-hand side of our Humvee’s windshield, someone taped casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) procedures and call-for-fire (templated methods for calling in artillery and air strikes) like cheat-sheets for a pop-quiz, to the bulletproof glass, ready for immediate use. Additional tactical notes, written in black grease pencil, were scrawled on the glass. The radios chirped and beeped before and after the transmissions as they broadcast across the net.

  It was a crisp, clear day. We could see that during its years of being the site of some of the most kinetic fighting in Iraq, Ramadi had been torn to shreds. Everywhere, there were piles of concrete rubble and garbage, bullet-pocked houses, and shattered remains of houses that barely stood. Some structures literally looked like “half-houses,” as if someone had taken a giant sword and sliced diagonally from the top corner to the bottom corner—one part left standing, the other reduced to a pile of wreckage on the side of the yard.

  Concrete barriers that were once used for counter-mobility were reduced into mounds of rubble on the roadsides from constant attacks—Ramadi looked like a vast wasteland from some post-apocalyptic fantasy novel.