Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  The rocket unit in Fallujah fired five missions within roughly one hour’s time, starting at 0017 and ending at 0119 that night.

  When the rockets hit, their warheads detonated with a sharp, but somewhat muffled explosion. We barely felt any shockwaves even though we were less than two football fields away. It was sort of underwhelming—that is until we saw the massive damage they inflicted.

  I would use the GMLRS throughout my time in Ramadi. I discovered that one rocket on a target would suck the life right out of the building and paint the walls red; two in the same building would bring it to the ground, and there’d be no need for a search afterward. Nothing would survive such devastating impacts.

  After the last rocket struck, the enemy fire ceased. Keyed up, the Marines were still blazing away at whatever targets they still had in their sights. I heard screaming from the rooftop. It was the squad leaders yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire! Fucking cease fire!”

  They did.

  Crickets.

  The rockets killed the insurgents and sent any remaining for the closest avenue of escape from the destruction that had just rained down on them.

  In the quiet, the Marines scanned the area with their thermal imaging scopes—the dead, but still warm, bodies lay waiting to be counted—a massive number of enemy killed in action.

  Reports began to come in as the Marines and soldiers started identifying the enemy that littered the streets.

  There were dead insurgents in the doorways of the houses. In the middle of the streets. Behind abandoned cars.

  Some asked permission to go out on patrol to search the enemy dead for intelligence. I refused. In all our time in Ramadi, I never allowed it. I always told them, “Fuck ‘em. Count them up and then let the fucking dogs have ‘em for dinner.”

  Comments like that motivated the hell out of the boys. In reality, I knew that the risk of trying to recover the bodies far outweighed the value of any intelligence they’d provide. Plus, the insurgents fighting in the area had their own highly effective means of conducting casualty collection. They forced civilians to bring the dead and wounded to safe houses and mosques; the latter of which were offlimits to the MNF.

  I remained focused on controlling the battle at ECP 8, but 2nd Platoon at OP Hotel and 1st Platoon at OP South House had been heavily engaged as well. Several other Echo Company Marines were wounded that night, but none of their injuries were life-threatening. I was amazed that we suffered so few casualties considering that we’d been in contact for almost five hours.

  It was past 0300 hours.

  Nicholson looked at me as we sat in the COC. “Hey, sir, I’m glad you were here tonight.”

  “Glad I could make it. I wouldn’t have missed this shit for the world.”

  I rubbed my head and looked around surveying the green plastic containers full of chow sitting at their position. The boys had just started eating dinner when the fighting began. MRE boxes sat on the floor as makeshift dining tables with a few plates of ice-cold spaghetti sitting on them. Grease coagulated around the edges of the misshapen meatballs.

  Nicholson picked up one of the plates. I knew he was about to devour it, but I still asked, “Are you really going to eat that shit?”

  Sure as anything, he wolfed down the plate of spaghetti. “I’m fucking starving, sir. I think this spaghetti just saved my life!”

  “Now that’s bravery—eating that shit.”

  Muscle dug into a dirt-covered can of Maxwell House and started a pot of coffee. He knew everyone in the platoon would need it.

  The other Marines gave Muscle a hard time. They referred to him as my little brother since he had a brush of red hair on his head, and we were both about the same size. He was five-eleven, 190 pounds and athletic. He was a twenty-year-old rifleman from Lewisville, Texas, north of Dallas. His accent was not as thick as some of the other Texans’, which was why he was possibly one of the best radio operators in the company.

  Muscle was bright. He was always studying books on field medicine, tactics, and patrolling. He read whatever he could find about war and combat. His maturity, aptitude, and collected nature set him above his peers.

  We sat and waited for the mobile QRF to come pick us up as we sipped the strong, hot, black coffee from little tan paper cups that Muscle made.

  Staff Sergeant James “Mac” Mackenzie, Somerville’s platoon sergeant, walked into the COC and briefed me that all the casualties from the night were back safely at the COP. With great foresight, he and Somerville had mustered a couple of rough squads of men from 3rd Platoon to start relieving the boys at ECP 8 who were worn out from fighting all night. These Marines stood post in place of their exhausted brothers for several hours, even though they’d all been driving from post to post, conducting ammo resupply all night.

  Mac was a drill instructor, and it showed in the self-confident way he carried himself. He was a stocky thirty-year-old and stood five-seven and 180 pounds. He had been the quarterback and captain of the football team at Bristol-Plymouth Vocational-Tech High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, where he grew up—forty miles due south of Boston.

  Mac was a military brat. His dad served in the Air Force and raised him and his two siblings alone. He knew he wanted to follow his dad into the military, but he wanted nothing to do with the Marines. Being a crazed killer, like the Marines he saw in every movie, was not for him. He was much more attracted to the relatively cushy lifestyle of the Air Force.

  A year after high school he sat in the Armed Forces Recruiting Office, waiting patiently for the Air Force recruiter to show up.

  A Marine staff sergeant walked through the door instead, glared at Mac, and growled, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Mac was taken aback but intrigued by the man’s audacity. In no time at all, he was practically shamed into leaving the Air Force office and sitting in front of the staff sergeant’s desk that was draped in camouflage netting. There he signed his enlistment papers guaranteeing him infantry duty in the Marines.

  Mac was proud of what he had done, but he was nervous about the reaction he would get from his father.

  His dad was surprised but smiled big, then chuckled. “Well, good luck with that.”

  I made one last sweep on the rooftop to talk to all of the boys and tell them how proud I was of them. The roof of ECP 8 looked like a goddamned brass factory, scattered with spent cartridges from all of the ammo they’d shot over the past five hours; literally, thousands of shell casings covered the roof. Random gunfire cracked in the distance of the city like the last few kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn after the timer had shut off.

  Physically banged up from the events, I was exhausted and emotionally drained—running off pure adrenaline.

  I kept my motivation high. I wanted to make sure all the boys knew I was there for them. It was important for me to look collected and confident, even though I may have felt beat to shit personally.

  With the fighting over for the day, Neris lay down and slept. He dreamed that night about Libby, but not as the tough Marine. He appeared in a white suit, strolled toward Neris, and thanked him. In his dream, Neris thanked him back. Libby gave him a cool, approving head-nod.

  Neris woke up. It was all very real to him.

  Muscle, too, was spent. He looked like a zombie. Nicholson knew that he hadn’t slept in days and said, “Muscle, go use my room and rack out for a few hours.”

  Muscle made his way into his lieutenant’s room to crash out. Before he could get settled in, he noticed Libby’s body armor and gear were staged neatly against the wall of the tiny room, a painfully visible reminder to Muscle of the loss his platoon suffered that night.

  Before he lay down, Muscle walked over to Libby’s gear and gently draped his soft, digital camouflaged poncho liner over it. He couldn’t rest knowing that if he woke up, someone had disrupted Libby’s gear. I don’t know if he did it for his peace of mind that morning before he slept, or as a final gesture to his fallen comrade.r />
  By mid-morning, all of the Marines found out that Libby had died.

  My one regret that night was calling back to the TOC at Camp Corregidor to ask the status of my Urgent CASEVAC (Libby) during the fight over the radio. I had the sense to turn off the volume on the radio speaker box before I made the call.

  Norrell called back, “Do you really want to know?”

  I said, “No, disregard. I got it.”

  It was a tough lesson for me to learn. There are some things you don’t talk about on the radio.

  We’d conducted plenty of patrols and had multiple contacts with the enemy before 6 December. But the intense, grueling five-hour firefight that night set a new standard for all of Echo Company of what it meant to fight in Ramadi.

  CHAPTER 8

  Angels

  I never knew what exactly happened to my dead and wounded Marines once they left the battlefield from the point of injury. The injured—well, I figured they went from the aid station and then to some hospital that was unknown to me.

  As for the dead, I had a few ideas, based on what I had seen in films and books about World War II and the Vietnam War. The dead stacked up like cordwood in the back of a truck or stuffed into black plastic body bags with heavy metal zippers, scattered randomly in a rice paddy and then unceremoniously chucked onto the back of a Huey helicopter. Eventually, they’d make their way to some cemetery for a military funeral, complete with a flag-draped coffin, three volleys, and Taps.

  Even as an officer with more than fifteen years of service at the time in 2006, I never really knew how the whole process unfolded. I had no classes on the matter. I couldn’t describe the chain of custody for a Marine who died on the battlefield. I had a simple faith that they’d be taken care of—or hoped they would.

  Libby died shortly after arriving at the Combat Outpost, despite all possible efforts to save him. After he died, I left him in the capable hands of Foster and the medical staff. That was the last time I saw him.

  First Lieutenant Mike Perkins was twenty-six years old and from Sunrise, Florida. A KC-130 pilot, his call sign was “Dolby,” which he’d gotten from his squadron mates due to the uncontrolled volume of his voice every time he spoke. Dolby was loud. He was six feet tall, with brown hair and matching brown eyes. He was making the third flight of his first combat deployment to Iraq when he learned that he would be handling fallen Marines, flying them to Kuwait. From there, an Air Force C-17 would fly them and others to Dover Air Force Base, where all fallen U.S. military personnel first come home.

  As he stood by the side of his plane before he boarded, a mortuary affairs soldier handed him a piece of paper. It was the manifest, listing the fallen Marines he’d be taking to Kuwait that night. There were three names on it. Dolby was perplexed. He distinctly remembered seeing only two caskets being fastened down in the plane’s cargo bay.

  He summoned the soldier back over. “Excuse me, but you’ve got three names on this, and I only have two caskets on board.”

  The soldier stood quietly for a moment before responding. “Well, it’s unfortunate, but sometimes there isn’t much left, and we have to put what we can together and send them home in one casket.”

  Dolby’s stomach tightened. He exhaled sharply through his nose. His first thought was contempt toward the government for trying to spare a minuscule expense of using one casket for two fallen warriors. But as he thought longer, he imagined the two Marines were flying home together—and the “who” became critically important to him.

  He climbed into the flight deck of the plane and pulled out a three-by-five-inch green U.S. government issue notebook with the word “Memoranda” stamped diagonally in cursive writing across the cover. Dolby copied the names of the three Marines into his book, the names of his first three Angels. The term “Angels” is not something Dolby came up with; it is how Marines refer to fallen warriors once they are aboard an aircraft.

  Five months later, the pages of Dolby’s notebook bore the names of dozens of Angels—and his plane was in the air, headed to Al Asad airbase in Iraq on a cargo mission when he received a tasking for an Angel Flight. He turned the plane around immediately—Angels took priority over everything else—landed, and offloaded the Humvees and pallets loaded with supplies that it had been carrying.

  A white van made a trip to and from the back of his plane for each casket. When it had made its last run, the cargo bay was entirely filled with fifteen caskets. A soldier again handed him a manifest. Seventeen names.

  The plane took off to Kuwait and carried the Marines and soldiers—a gut-wrenching feeling fell over the flight crew carrying the seventeen heroes killed in action.

  They flew back to Al Asad—the cargo mission still had to be completed. Dolby took out his notebook and began to count up the names in it. Page after page, he counted.

  There were ninety-four.

  A wave of guilt washed over him. He felt as if he had done something wrong by keeping this horrific list. He also found himself wondering why the United States was even in Iraq. What did their sacrifices add up to?

  In retrospect, it is not surprising he felt this way. He never saw what men like those in Echo Company were doing on the battlefield, the fights we were winning, and the defeats we were inflicting on the insurgents. All he ever saw were the dead we had lost.

  Now, as he stared down at the page, the hand in which he held his GI black Skilcraft pen began to shake. Four flights later Dolby wrote the one-hundredth name in his notebook.

  It was then he decided that he was done writing names down. “Why one hundred? What is so significant about that number?” he thought. “Why not twenty-three, or fifty, or seventy-five? Wasn’t that enough?”

  Whatever the reason, he couldn’t do it anymore. Dolby stowed the notebook neatly in a footlocker—out of sight, out of mind. He wanted to become ignorant of the names, and the notebook had become a constant, physical reminder to him.

  Later, he mustered the will to bring the notebook back out. He carried it carefully in the zippered pocket that ran diagonally across the chest of his tan flight suit. A few days later, when he reached into the pocket, it was gone.

  His heart sank—broke, really. He had wanted to keep it, knowing that he’d want it so that, in the years to come, he wouldn’t forget what he had done—as if anyone who experienced that ever could.

  Dolby recalled, “It’s one of those things that gives you goosebumps even to think about it. Regardless of whoever was transporting the Angel, the Marines treated the fallen warriors with so much respect.”

  “The first time I ever saw a fallen Marine moved from the air station to the plane, I couldn’t help but be emotional. I remember thinking that if anything happened to me; they [the Marines] would take care of me. Watching the ceremony, you knew that no matter who it was, they were one of your brothers. I knew every single person on that flight wanted to do everything possible to make sure that the fallen Marine was absolutely one hundred percent taken care of.”

  Even in the midst of demanding combat operations, the Marines at the air bases in Iraq took special care whenever a fallen Marine started the journey back home.

  The engines of the massive Lockheed Martin KC-130 Hercules were shut down for this solemn movement. A white civilian van carrying the Angel’s remains drove from the holding area directly to the awaiting airplane. Personnel from the on-duty squadron marched slowly onto the flight line, instinctively gravitating toward the aircraft and formed up to pay respect to the fallen Marine.

  Once the Angel was ready, a group of Marines formed a traditional pallbearer detail and moved him ever so delicately onto the plane. The flag-draped caskets always went aboard headfirst with the flag’s field of stars over the Marine’s heart. Nothing was allowed to denigrate the importance given to these flights. There was a strict rule—absolutely no other cargo was allowed on the plane. No luggage, pallets, chow, vehicles—nothing besides the fallen warrior. The only exception was the transportation of personnel, and th
ey were usually flying with their comrades to ensure their safe transit home.

  As the casket was carried aboard, the Marines formed on the tarmac near the rear of the aircraft to salute their departing brother. As the ramp began to rise slowly, the Marines dropped their salutes, but remained standing sharply in formation until the ramp closed. It was—and is—one of the most moving moments to witness.

  The aluminum caskets were strapped down onto the deck of the plane as the flight crew respectfully adjusted the American flags covering the caskets, smoothing any persistent wrinkles.

  No one was allowed to walk past the caskets once all were strapped down to the bed of the aircraft. The passengers had to enter from the side of the plane and sit at the front of the troop compartment on the red canvas seats with cargo netting to their backs. They made the two-hour ride to Kuwait International Airport in silence with nothing to look at besides their humbling cargo.

  The crew chief signaled the aircraft commander that the rear of the plane was all set and ready for takeoff.

  The pilot radioed, “Tower, this is Hercules 76 ready for takeoff.”

  The personnel in the air traffic control tower purposefully changed the flights’ call sign by adding the word “Angel.”

  “Roger. This is Tower, over. Angel Flight 76, you have taxi priority. Taxi to runway three-zero via alpha, over.”

  The Hercules sped down the runway, reaching its takeoff speed of 150 knots, just over 175 miles per hour, and gracefully lifted off the runway. The loud, deep, bass-like rumbling of the four massive turboprop engines hummed and reverberated through the entire aircraft.

  The flight crew didn’t engage in the usual acts of humor and grab-ass with which Marines routinely pass the time. There was no idle chitchat. No one used the onboard microwave to cook a burrito. No one brewed coffee. Everyone onboard was fixed on the responsibility of delivering their precious cargo.