Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  “Sir, can you tell me your serial number on your rifle?” he asked politely.

  I quickly recited my rifle serial number, and the sergeant handed me my M4. I thanked him profusely for safeguarding my weapon.

  The soldier who returned my weapon said, “Sir, don’t worry about it. It happens all the time.”

  It was apparent he was right as I glanced again at the stack of abandoned rifles behind the podium from which mine had been pulled. In my sleep-deprived state, walking around in a daze, I had left my M4 abandoned sitting only feet away from the soldiers at the podium.

  I was mortified. In combat, your rifle is your life and something you never take for granted. Thankfully, there was an unwritten rule—nobody fucks with anyone else’s weapon in combat, deserted or not.

  New Year’s Day 2007

  Echo Company had been pressing hard for several days, conducting clearance ops in the Ta’meem District. Lee had orders to take elements from the mobile QRF and set up a firm base on the south side of the Euphrates River.

  By now, I had learned the best way to operate in Ramadi. I spread my platoons throughout our battlespace, allowing each platoon commander the ability to gain particular familiarity with his unit’s area of operation and also de-conflict our fires by terrain (meaning we wouldn’t have friendly forces shooting at one another because buildings would serve as protective barriers between them).

  It wasn’t a complicated process. I studied a map of the area we worked in and plotted all of the friendly units, main roads, and checkpoints with a black Sharpie marker. Then, I divided by three.

  Platoons were never more than several hundred meters apart at any time. That way, although they were protected from fratricide, they could mutually support each other in the event of a coordinated attack from insurgents—which, we knew by now, they were fully capable of conducting.

  As my dismounted platoons swept through the Ta’meen District methodically, I sent Lee and his team ahead to a key piece of terrain near a place we called End Road Bridge.

  Over the course of our time in Ramadi, we had received intelligence updates that insurgent forces used a technique to shuttle weapons, ammunition, and bomb-making materials across the Euphrates River from one zone to another. They did so in order to avoid the numerous vehicle checkpoints that the Army and Marines had established.

  Lee and his team provided overwatch east of End Road Bridge from the compound they occupied, a half-completed bridge abutment that sat on the sandy bank of the Euphrates—not usable by any vehicle traffic. Built of concrete and with large support pillars, it had been under construction when the war began. Had it been completed, it would have served as a main artery for transportation from northern Ramadi to the south.

  Lee had a great vantage point. It was an ideal spot to observe enemy movements across the river.

  They often spotted weapons and ordnance floating across. Insurgents would create makeshift rafts by filling large truck inner tubes with air, and line the bottom with netting or rope. They’d build the rafts in the city, pack them full of weapons, and then sneak them into the tall reeds near the river. When they deemed the time right to cross the two-hundred-meter-wide expanse, they’d launch them, hoping they’d sail safely across and be picked up by their fellow insurgents across the river.

  Lee and his men would park their Humvees near the river, sitting like hunters waiting for deer to come out of the edge of a tree line into a razed cornfield. Mounted on Lee’s vehicle was an MK-19—an impressive weapon. It is a belt-fed, blowback operated, 40mm grenade launcher capable of shooting sixty rounds per minute out to fifteen hundred meters.

  He made easy target practice of the insurgent’s futile labors. Using the MK-19, his gunners unloaded multiple strings of fire of high explosive, 40mm rounds at the rafts, sinking them to the bottom of the Euphrates.

  From the onset of the fighting, we’d stumble across the most bizarre occurrences.

  We targeted a house for a nighttime raid while conducting clearance ops in Sector Bravo 13 in the Ta’meem. I was patrolling with 3rd Squad, 4th Platoon, when we isolated the building.

  It was pitch black.

  The house was a one-story affair surrounded by a high concrete wall pierced by a high metal gate. A Marine moved toward the gate wielding his Mossberg 12-gauge. He racked the pump action on it and, standing at a 45-degree angle to the target, blasted the gate’s lock. The squad flooded the compound through the now-open gate. Fire teams dispersed, looking for entrances to the house.

  My team was out back.

  With me was Corporal Brian Lee Dickinson, the platoon’s radio operator. He stayed by my side so that I would have the radio at my disposal. A twenty-year-old rifleman, he was a big kid, weighing in at 220 pounds, probably 265 with all of his kit.

  Dickinson grew up in Locust Grove, Oklahoma—population: 1,571—fifty miles east of Tulsa. In high school, Dickinson was a troublemaker who wasted most of his time partying and evading run-ins with the local sheriff rather than focusing on a plan for his future. He was quickly lured into the Marines when the recruiters came by his high school his senior year delivering their best sales pitch. His graduating class was less than one hundred. Four joined the Marines, including Dickinson.

  There was a heavy, white, steel screen door that appeared to lead into the kitchen. We could hear the other Marines up front banging on the door. No one answered. Dickinson turned his back to the door and cocked his leg forward and thrust it back into the handle, mule-kicking the door.

  Nothing. It didn’t budge.

  Dickinson turned to me with a look of defeat on his face. “Sir. Fucker won’t budge! Wanna’ blow it?”

  I knew the Marines were close to entry up front. My patience was thin, but my team didn’t have a shotgun and were short on sledgehammers—but not on great ideas.

  I walked over to Dickinson. I slid my hands up inside the back of his sweaty body armor, high, behind his armpits, squeezing tightly, digging my fingertips into the nylon material.

  “Dickinson, on three we’re going to bust this fucker in. You got it?”

  Dickinson responded with the typical, “Roger that, sir.”

  We hugged our bodies close together.

  I was guiltless using Dickinson as a human battering ram.

  We took three steps back. “One…two…three.” We yelled out loud as we hurled ourselves at the door.

  The latch gave way, and the door flung violently open from the combined force of 500 pounds of Marine. The door’s glass shattered from the impact and shards sprayed us as we landed on top of one another on the kitchen floor.

  We were in.

  The Marines behind us flooded into the house, stepping over us with little regard as I lay there on top of Dickinson, now flattened to the ground.

  I pressed myself off of him like I was doing a push-up. He grunted as I shoved off him. I reached down to grab his hand as he looked up at me.

  “Well, sir, it worked,” he said.

  We heard the call “Clear! Clear,” throughout the house as the men checked room by room. Dickinson and I made our way to the rest of the squad, as two Marines stood watch over a family kneeling on the ground. The terrified occupants sat hidden as we made entry but were quickly discovered by the search team. The Marines shined their flashlights in their faces as they knelt on the ground.

  We combed through the house, searching for weapons and other contraband. We searched every room, pulling AKs out of closets and from behind sofas.

  A Marine called out, “Sir, you gotta get down here.”

  I went through a door that led into a cellar-like room in the basement. Basements were not common in Iraq.

  I stopped in my tracks. I looked down in bewilderment to see a man in his mid-thirties with Down Syndrome. That wasn’t all: he was bound to the pole of the staircase with a large, stainless steel chain and a medieval shackle around his ankle. Like some animal in a circus.

  Another “Holy fuck” moment washed over me.<
br />
  Chaining people with disabilities in basements may have been more commonplace than I knew—albeit eerily disturbing. But because there were no functional special needs facilities in Iraq, I think folks just didn’t know any better and seriously thought that this was the solution for caring for them. We were shocked at the sight, but our only recourse was to report it once we got back to the firm base.

  We had seen a lot so far: rafts, cleverly disguised IEDs, suicide bombers, full-on firefights. There were times we thought we had seen it all. But there always was a new madness waiting for us the next day—most of us simply thought, “You just can’t make this shit up.”

  Often, it became more insane than we ever could have imagined.

  CHAPTER 17

  Millions

  The days of letting families stay in their homes had come and gone as we gained experience in the city. It became evident that letting them stay didn’t make sense. We had to sequester them in the house all day and guard them at all times—they just became a massive burden and even bigger risk. Additionally, it took Marines off the streets or pulled them from security duty. If the insurgents attacked the house, the locals would be exposed to greater danger as well.

  We were blunt. “Hope you have some family or friends nearby because you can’t stay here, but we’ll make sure that you get back home safely the next day. It’s not safe for you if you stay here with us now.”

  We always added that if the insurgents thought they were helping us they might be targeted for later retribution. That usually served as an added incentive for them to vacate. They also could tell the insurgents in all honesty that we kicked them out. The next day, we generally gave them a few hundred dollars for their troubles from our Commander’s Emergency Reparation Funds (CERF) that we always carried with us. I had a few thousand U.S. dollars in my stash.

  We pushed through the Ta’meem to Route Cindy; we found a great position to go firm. It had good observation and plenty of room for the whole platoon. It always helped if the houses contained oil heaters and a pile of faux mink blankets to help keep us warm as we tried to get some sleep. Allowing ourselves some creature comforts when we had time to rest—instead of toughing it out—was another lesson we took a while to learn.

  The house did have one problem, however: a grove of reeds across the street. It was a huge ditch—five football fields long and another one hundred yards wide—dense with reeds, grass, and brush. The plants stood twenty feet high in spots, obstructing our view across the ditch to the buildings on the other side of the town, limiting our observation of any enemy movement, and severely restricting our ability to identify insurgents and return fire.

  We knew we had to stay there for more than a day to allow the other platoons to catch up to us. Early that same morning, we started taking sporadic small arms fire from across the ditch. The rumor mill had spread news of our presence pretty fast. It was kind of hard keeping a platoon of Marines a secret as they occupied any house. We’d also observed military-aged males (MAMs) running in and out of the ditch, presumably grabbing weapons they had hidden in the cache.

  I got on the radio to the Steel Tigers and relayed my concerns. I requested that the task force send a refuel tanker to our position and soak the reed-filled area with gas so we could burn out the vegetation.

  Most of my guys thought this was crazy, including my XO, Lee, but the Steel Tigers approved my request, and dispatched the tanker truck from Camp Ramadi.

  A couple of hours later, around 1500 hours, the truck crew raised “Longhorn” on the net and requested permission to enter friendly lines. Most soldiers or Marines didn’t feel completely safe driving through Ramadi in an M1-A1 tank. But the tanker crew did it in a vehicle protected only with light-skinned armor on the doors and a bulletproof windshield. Not to mention they were towing a tanker trailer filled with two thousand gallons of gasoline. In broad daylight.

  One of the crew, a private first class, maybe nineteen years old, reported to the command post and asked what he needed to do.

  I said, “Thanks, warrior. You have some steel balls rolling around town in that rig. I need you to run your lines as close and as safe as you can to that ditch and hose it down with fuel so we can torch it. Can you handle it?”

  He didn’t even hesitate. “No problem, sir. That’s why I’m here. Just give me plenty of security, and I’ll be ready to push two thousand gallons into it for you.”

  I was utterly astounded by how calm he was.

  With Echo Company Marines in overwatch from multiple buildings and protected by two teams of infantry, the soldiers flooded that field just as I asked. It took less than a half hour. They were gone before I could thank them again.

  Now we had another dilemma to sort out: how the hell were we going to light this particular candle? After kicking around some less than stellar ideas, I decided to launch a couple of 40mm high-explosive grenades into the ditch and hope they would trigger the fire. I went to the rooftop and grabbed Corporal Jonathan Yenglin, one of the fire team leaders.

  “Alright, let’s see how good you are with that thing.” I gestured to the Colt M-203 40mm grenade launcher that was attached to the bottom of his M16-A4 rifle. “I want you to park one round at each end of the ditch and light this bitch up right where that soldier hosed it down. Got it?”

  “No sweat, sir.” Yenglin flipped up the leaf sight on the M-203, shouldered his weapon, and took aim.

  He smoothly cupped his hand around the ribbed tube and slid open the breach, inserted the high explosive grenade, and locked it shut. Without hesitation, he took his trigger finger and flipped the safety switch forward. He took one cool, collected breath, exhaled slowly and squeezed. There was a low, muffled pop and the round left the tube. It sailed three hundred yards, hitting dead center of the reed field, and let loose a massive explosion.

  The entire field instantly became engulfed in flames. As the fire roared and smoke boiled up, we felt the heat wave and overpressure, even from a distance away. I’m sure the locals were thinking the Arabic equivalent of “What the fuck?”

  I wasn’t too concerned. I’d achieved my objective.

  As the field continued to burn, Marines crept out of their hibernation dens to see the blaze. We heard the cracking of ammunition cooking off and the booms of secondary RPG detonations from the midst of the inferno. My suspicions were correct. The insurgents had stockpiled weapons and ammunition in there for months.

  It was a perfect spot—sitting only a few hundred meters southwest of the Euphrates River and End Road Bridge where they ferried weapons and ammunition across.

  It was one hellacious fire, and it burned for hours, well into the night, throwing a surreal light over the area.

  The next morning the field was burned to the ground. Only a smoldering gully of ash remained. We could now clearly see from our position in Building 15 to Millions Street and the rows of houses from which we had taken sniper fire. We also could see some MAMs running around.

  One of the biggest challenges when fighting an insurgency was figuring out who the bad guys were. It took us a few weeks in Ramadi to crack this one.

  Obviously, the ones who shot at us were bad—they definitely needed killing. But the longer we fought in Ramadi, the better we became at picking those little clues that identified a man as an insurgent as clearly as if he were wearing a military uniform.

  That afternoon, I was called up to the roof.

  Muscle was hunkered down behind the shoddy wall, sitting on a dilapidated bucket seat that had been torn out of some car and now was propped up on a couple of concrete cinder blocks. It looked uncomfortable, but Muscle didn’t seem to mind. He handed me a set of powerful Steiner binoculars.

  “Sir, check this out. Look for guys running in between building 243 and 245 off Millions. You see them?”

  I stood at the edge of the concrete cinder-block wall, rested the binos on the ledge, and scanned the area. It took a few minutes, but I finally saw some runners.

  Mus
cle said, “You see the guys running wearing tracksuits and running shoes under their man-dresses? None of the other hajjis wear running shoes. They’re all wearing sandals.”

  It made sense now.

  Let’s face it, if you were going to get into a fight with a bunch of Marines, you didn’t want to be doing it wearing flip-flops. It made sense to wear running shoes. It also was a dead giveaway. They were smart, but we were the smartest on the battlefield. Being able to identify the “uniform” they chose to fight in had just made our job that much easier to target the guys who needed killing.

  I spent a short time observing the insurgents’ movement. Then a Marine yelled up the stairs, “Sir, you need to get down here now!” I handed the binos back to Muscle and headed downstairs.

  The night we’d moved into Building 15 we told the owners of the house to give us the keys to their vehicles. We also let them know we would leave them the keys in the driver’s seats for them the next day. This was another tactic we had developed through trial and error.

  We needed a way to block the access roads on the streets of the houses we occupied in order to prevent the insurgents from running a VBIED into our position and detonating it. Our solution: we’d take the cars from the houses’ owners and park the vehicles several hundred meters apart, creating a hasty roadblock at either end of our position. The family’s white Chevy Suburban and red Opel fit the bill that night.

  When I got down to the first floor where the radio operator had set up, he told me, “Sir, there’s a taxicab headed east, moving slow down the street toward the red Opel that’s parked out there.”

  I immediately grabbed my interpreter, Jake, and a fire team for security. The Marines on the roof were now on alert and had posted 360-degree security from every angle of the rooftop.

  Jake yelled in Arabic at the driver and told him to get out of the car with his hands up.

  The driver’s eyes were wide, and a look of fear crossed his face. He had good reason: a half dozen Marines had their rifles trained on him.