He said, “Hey, sir. Where’d you find this?”
Lee pulled out his map and showed him. “It was placed as a decoy on the road right where the rest of our company is clearing.”
“Well, I got news for you, sir. This ain’t no decoy,” he said, with certainty garnered from twenty years of experience handling explosives under every condition. “See that white, flakey stuff right there? That’s what we call homemade PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, one of the most powerful explosive compounds, commonly known as plastic explosives), and if you look real close, jammed in there you can see the blasting cap shoved in.”
Lee, suddenly flushed, shook his head. He instinctively knew that he’d made a grave error in tampering with the device in the first place. He left the IED in the capable hands of the master sergeant.
When Lee told me about the event, I was shocked. Then I was enraged. I’m quite sure I ripped into Lee for his lapse in judgment that afternoon but was also keenly aware that sleep deprivation and fatigue always played a hand in everything. In retrospect, I was grateful that no one was hurt, and I had to acknowledge that Lee and his team’s actions, although slightly misguided, probably saved lives despite risking their own.
Chance plays a significant role in war, but so does experience. We were all learning as we went along. There were no standard operating procedures for dealing with the unknown and the massive amounts of chaos and uncertainty placed in front of young men.
The Marines always did a superb job under those circumstances. They made a lot of the tactics up as they went along—something not that uncommon in combat in a continually changing environment.
Ramadi proved to be an unforgiving battleground that taught them while they fought, and they did it extremely well.
CHAPTER 15
Mopeds
The Marines had patrolled as hard as I have ever seen since we’d been in-country—going house to house, rooting out weapons and engaging the enemy every day. Although capable of killing the enemy at distances of up to five hundred meters, most of the fighting was close-up in the city—fifty to one hundred meters.
In addition to racking up enemy kills—Echo had an informal rivalry with Fox Company as to who could find the most insurgent contraband—we found rockets, RPGs, rifles, ammo, body armor, intelligence, you name it. Whether it was buried in a hole in the ground, stashed under a house, shoved into the trunk of a car, put underneath a bongo truck, or stuffed up the ass of a camel, my boys would find it. It got to be such a competition they wanted to patrol all night and sleep all day; that—and killing insurgents—was pretty much the order of business for months on end.
One night, we raided a known insurgent house in the Ta’meem District. Insurgents had been cooking their evening meal as we moved in on the site—a small plate of uncooked goat meat sat next to a tiny stove. We must have scared the living piss out of them right before we made entry and they fled—we’d missed them by seconds.
The house itself was no more than twelve hundred square feet, small by American standards, made of big red bricks—globs of mortar oozed from the cracks from the primitive construction—and was surrounded by a ratty, wrought iron fence.
As most of the team scoured the interior for weapons, other Marines searched outside. In the house, Bam-Bam found some small, strange-looking items lying next to the goat meat. They looked like tiny triangle paper footballs—the kind kids make in grade school and kick with their fingers through imaginary goalposts or use to pass notes in class. They were wrapped tightly in plastic Saran Wrap. When we unraveled them, we discovered they were indeed secret notes—crude messages that insurgents used to share information. They safeguarded them in the caches.
We were applying the most advanced military technologies in the world, and the insurgents were using the most basic. It’s called “asymmetric warfare,” a fancy way of understanding that the enemy often didn’t afford us the courtesy of engaging in a stand-up fight, allowing us to bring our superior firepower, technology, and manpower to bear.
As advanced as our technology evolved to be on the battlefield, the insurgents always found a way around it. They believed in the basics of how to get things done at any expense, no matter how rudimentary it was, or if it took more time to do so. Time was always on their side.
A clamor out in the front yard pulled our attention away from the notes.
Sergeant Ken Liesche came inside. “Hey sir, you got to come and check this shit out.”
Liesche was a twenty-year-old rifleman and the only sergeant in his platoon. He was from Kansas City, Missouri—a self-assured, bold physical specimen at six-two, 200 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes.
When I strode onto the front porch, I saw Liesche standing there with a huge 120mm mortar round in his hand.
I said, “Where the fuck did you find that?”
Liesche replied, “In the garden.”
“Garden? What garden?”
He responded excitedly, “In the front yard. The whole front yard is a fuckin’ garden full of unexploded ordnance, sir.”
I made my way out to the “garden.”
Six Marines had already broken out their entrenching tools—the small, collapsible shovels that Marines and soldiers have been carrying since World War I trench warfare—and were digging vigorously. Every single scoop of dirt they turned up revealed mortar rounds, RPGs, rocket booster motors, cans of ammo, and, amazingly, even the wings of a downed U.S. drone. They dug and dug and kept finding more stuff popping out of the garden.
It was a weird harvest.
By 0300 hours, the boys had finished the three-hour excavation. They climbed out of the chest-deep hole and stood in the front yard, with hundreds of pieces of ordnance stacked around them. Dirt was piled high around the eight-foot-long cache and thrown onto the sidewalks and over the front wall. They looked like a pack of hound dogs that had dug up a pile of bones.
The Marines were filthy—dirt is a close companion to most Grunts, and it’s also a vocational aspect of the nature of our work. Their cammies were soaked through with sweat. The digital camouflage pattern of their uniforms was almost indistinguishable by now—their grime-soaked cammies looked like solid, dark khaki trousers from continually wiping their hands down the front of their pants.
By this point, all I could think was, “Man, how the hell are we going to get rid of all of this shit?”
We called on the radio for a team of explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians for several hours as we sat staring at the mountain of unexploded ordnance (UXO).
In 2006, EOD teams were probably the most in-demand experts in the entire country. The country was awash in weapons and ordnance of all sorts, and, when we found it, we had to destroy it. EOD teams worked more, slept less, and blew up more unexploded ordnance than any other soldiers. Military working dog handlers and Terps came in at a close second because of their extremely unique and specialized skill sets.
I was always impressed by those in their right mind who sign up for a job in which their entire mission is based on stumbling across bombs and massive piles of explosives and get paid to detonate that stuff—EOD techs are those guys.
By a sheer stroke of luck, an EOD unit came up on the net and requested permission to cross through our area of operation.
Standard courtesy when going through another unit’s boundary is to do a face-to-face link-up with the unit’s commander to identify yourself and, by doing so, reduce the chances of “blue on blue”—that is, fratricide between friendly forces. It’s critical to know where all of the pieces on the battlefield are at all times.
When the EOD team arrived, they hopped out of their trucks. We introduced ourselves and played the “name game” for a bit. As we spoke, I discovered that this particular unit happened to be a U.S. Marine EOD team based out of Camp Pendleton, California—a sheer coincidence for us that night.
I didn’t take the time to tell them how we’d come across this massive weapons cache. All that mattered was
that we had no way of hauling it back to a firm base and we obviously couldn’t leave it in the middle of the street. It had to be dealt with.
Daylight was around the corner. I asked the EOD team if they had any C4 (military-grade plastic explosives) in their Humvees so they could manage to set a charge and destroy the cache in-place.
Dawn crept closer as the Echo Company QRF, led by Lee, rolled up, bolstering the security we had from the Marines manning rooftops in overwatch positions.
Most of the locals were aware of what we were up to—we had made enough noise. All of the commotion we made in the early hours brought snooping eyes to see what was happening. Some flicked on their front porch lights and others were peeking through their windows.
I knew they were curious—and probably pretty annoyed that we’d awakened an entire neighborhood. I was also keenly aware that now the locals had been alerted, some might give away our position to nearby insurgents to try and ambush us as we worked to detonate the massive stack of ordnance.
Even if the insurgents didn’t mount a full-scale attack, snipers could work themselves into position. As the daylight came close, they’d be able to see who was huddled up with their radio operators who carried backpacks from which projected long whip antennas—the equivalent to a big neon sign that read, “Shoot me first! I’m important.”
We felt exposed and extremely vulnerable. The longer we stayed in one position, the higher the risk was for us to start taking fire. We were racing against the clock.
Round by round, rifle-by-rifle, RPG-by-RPG, the EOD team and the Marines laid the ordnance out in neat rows. Then they put every block of C4 they had on top of it. They placed detonation cord and primers in the bricks of C4 and daisy-chained them together. One more step needed to be taken before they could unleash what would certainly be a massive and spectacular explosion.
The staff sergeant in charge of the EOD team wandered over to me casually and said, “Sir, we’re cool on C4, but we got one problem: we don’t have any way to tamp this det.”
They needed a huge counter-weight on top of the ordnance that would ensure that the C4’s blast would be directed down onto the UXO. Otherwise, everything would get tossed into the air, and a lot would not be destroyed.
I told him to hold on. I had the solution.
While clearing out the front yard of weapons, we had come across a minivan the insurgents were modifying to use as a VBIED. The leaf springs were welded flat, the shocks removed, and the back seats were taken out, and the trunk was completely bare. Not a normal piece-of-shit ride, even for Iraqi standards.
Insurgents knew tricks like this to make sure that the cars they packed full of explosives didn’t sit low in the back as they were driving them to the intended targets. Despite their efforts, we had figured this out long ago after hundreds of VBIED attacks. We had developed a keen eye for which vehicles looked out of place.
I directed the Marines from HQ Platoon to tow the minivan over to the pile of UXO using one of the Humvees. Once they had it situated next to the UXO, a squad of Marines pushed it over on its side onto the heaping mass of ordnance.
I turned and said to the staff sergeant, “I went to Illinois State, so it’s safe to say I don’t have a degree in physics. Is this going to be enough weight to tamp this down?”
“I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “You don’t need a degree to know that this is going to make one hell of a crater in the ground once it blows. It’d be better if we had some more weight on it.”
Two moped scooters sat parked on the side of the house where we’d dug up the cache—probably the insurgents’ intended get-away vehicles. Quickly, a couple of Marines retrieved the scooters and hefted them on top of the ordnance in addition to the minivan.
The staff sergeant came back over to me. “You guys might want to get some video of this. It’s going to be one hellacious fireworks show.”
I ordered my men to move back several hundred meters and to take cover wherever they could. The Marines in the vehicles were pushed back to the top of an elevated road, a safe distance away but still with a good line of sight to the blast.
I told Lee to get on the radio and call the task force HQ and tell them there was going to be a controlled det in our zone in twenty minutes. Before detonating a charge, we always passed it over the radio network so that all friendly units in the area knew it was friendly fire and not some random IED going off.
We expected the worst every time we heard a loud boom in the city. If it wasn’t a controlled det, it would always give pause for the inevitable bad news of a friendly casualty.
The det was approved.
I got back on the company net and passed the word, “Controlled det in five minutes. Everyone stay covered. Over.”
The EOD Marines pulled the time fuses and walked back calmly and confidently to their vehicles as if they’d done this a thousand times before—which, of course, they had.
The countdown began, and almost to the second, we felt the overpressure. A smooth wave of heat and force rolled over us. There was a deafening noise, and a massive fireball, fifty feet high, shot into the sky. Bright sparks scattered into the breaking morning light, and yellow-orange shrapnel, all that was left of the UXO, whistled down range.
Cheers erupted from Marines, many of whom had obviously not heeded my command to stay undercover but peeked out from wherever they could to watch the show. They screamed and hooted—like a crowd at a high school football game.
From the rooftop of a building to my right, there was a team of Marines in overwatch. One yelled to his teammate, “Holy shit, did you see the fuckin’ size of that blast? Fucking unbelievable!”
They giggled like adolescent pranksters—the Marine Corps unintentionally bred a high school mentality in most cases.
The Ta’meem District proved to be as busy for us as we were in central Ramadi. There was never any relief for the Marines. They stayed busy, but that’s how they liked it.
It may be hard to understand for those who have never been in the military how men thrive on the continual need for risk and danger. The best example I ever provide is to imagine a professional football team that practices all week, and there is never a game on Sunday. For the Marines that’s how they viewed it.
Echo Company trained for months on end, and it was their game day—every single day—and they were winning.
CHAPTER 16
Rafts
Camp Ramadi had turned into a massive sludge bucket of dirt roads in late December. It had been raining for several days on end. Every vehicle inside the one-square-kilometer compound was covered with mud. Marines and soldiers walked around with huge dirt clogs caked to the bottom of their boots. It splattered up the backside of their uniforms as they walked and left tiny, wet dirt speckles—the kind similar to those you get when riding your bicycle through a puddle.
25 December 2006
Christmas day in Ramadi was as good as could be expected, seeing as we weren’t home and weren’t with our families and friends. We had each other, though. That seemed to help ease the separation. We were missing one member of our Echo Company family now, but we still were incredibly grateful to be together.
As we had on Thanksgiving Day, all of the Marines gathered together in the DFAC. The men made their way around the tables to wish each other a Merry Christmas. We gorged on turkey and Baskin-Robbins ice cream and tacos and anything else we could devour. I broke from my normally strict diet without an ounce of guilt, figuring that this might be the last chance I would get to eat foods that I now considered indulgences. I was thirty-seven years old, and my days of stuffing my face with massive quantities of pizza and guzzling soda without guilt were long gone.
It also was the first Christmas dinner at which I had to fill sandbags before I could eat.
But this was a hard and fast rule for the “Ready First” Brigade Combat Team at Camp Ramadi. Every Marine or soldier had to grab a shovel, fill ten sandbags, and stack them on metal pallets outside of the D
FAC before getting served.
A four-by-six plywood sign at the entrance of the DFAC read, “Do it for THEM.”
“Them” referred to the real “door kickers,” the soldiers and Marines who usually were out on the streets, patrolling and fighting, and who rarely had the opportunity to have a sit-down meal like the soldiers and Marines who worked at the forward operating bases (FOBs). A good share of these “warriors” permanently parked their asses on the FOBs and never went beyond the wire—never leaving the relative safety of their positions. Infantry types referred to them derogatorily as “Fobbits,” a spin-off of the little home-loving people from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels.
For the infantry Marines and soldiers who were the ones out in the city doing the fighting, it galled the grunts—the ones who were in danger every day—to have to fill sandbags.
I made it all the way through the chow line with my tray full of food, ready to sit, when I reached down to adjust my M4 carbine, to make sure it didn’t clank on the bench as I sat down.
It wasn’t there.
I dropped my tray on the table in a panic and backtracked my route through the DFAC the way I had entered, all the way to the entrance where a couple of soldiers were checking ID cards.
I blazed past the soldiers with the dread that I had lost my rifle. I started scanning the area around the pile of loose sand where I had filled my quota of sandbags. A knot hit my stomach as I feverishly looked around for my weapon. It wasn’t there. I knew where I had rested my rifle precisely when I filled my bags, but it was gone. I sprinted a couple of meters back to the podium where the soldiers were standing.
I asked, “Excuse me. Has anyone turned in a…” Before I could get the rest of the sentence out of my mouth, one of the soldiers turned away from the podium and reached into a stack of maybe seven or eight rifles.
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