Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  According to Jake, the taxi driver said that he had a passenger who was going to her family’s house, but they were lost. Things got more interesting when the passenger, an elderly woman, probably in her seventies, got out of the back of the cab and began shouting frantically and waving her arms. She stood confused in the middle of the road in broad daylight attracting attention.

  Then we began taking fire from across the field. I heard the cracking of rifles and then the sharp snaps as the bullets hit the dirt—I could see several rounds splinter as they hit the ground right next to me. Quickly we took cover.

  I opened the door on the red Opel sedan for cover and grabbed Jake by his gear and jammed him to the ground behind me. The old woman was terrified. Still wailing frantically, she crossed her arms across her chest in terror, trying to curl herself into a small silhouette, unable to move. One of the Marines quickly grabbed her and moved her behind the Opel.

  The enemy fire increased. Automatic fire came from the vicinity of the buildings off of Millions Street. The Marines on the rooftop of Building 15 began returning fire—suppressing the enemy attack.

  I looked around and ordered the Marines to bound back to the house and get inside. In a smooth, well-trained motion, they did so, taking the shaken woman and the cab driver with them.

  A few minutes passed before I realized I was now alone behind the door of the Opel with Jake hunkered behind me—I could feel him cringing as he used my frame as a human shield. As a company commander, I normally directed the fires of the Marines I led. It took a moment or two before my training overtook my delayed reaction as I thought to myself, “Hey, dumbass. You have a rifle. Now would be a good time to start shooting it!”

  Through the window of the Opel, I could see muzzle flashes from multiple floors of the buildings on Millions Street. I flipped my M4 off “safe” and rose up to return fire and sighted in. I aimed in on two targets and squeezed the trigger twice, and tiny shards of glass shattered all around me.

  “Fuck me!” I thought. They were zeroing in on me. However, in my adept aiming technique at the time, I didn’t compensate for the muzzle on my rifle and had inadvertently shot out the side view mirror on the car. That’s what shattered.

  Friction.

  “Rookie move,” I thought.

  The cover fire picked up, and Jake said, “Sir, what the fuck do I do?”

  “When I’m shooting, you move. Got it?”

  This time, I scooted to the back of the sedan behind the trunk to fire. As I suppressed, Jake and I made our way quickly back inside the walls of the house. Within minutes, all firing ceased.

  We told the taxi driver and elderly woman to stay inside the house with us since it wasn’t safe to drive out on the streets. They’d be safer leaving after dark—so would we.

  It was never smart to stay in one house too long. It gave the insurgents the advantage of time to formulate a plan to attack us. It’s what I would have done. I told the boys to start prepping our gear to move out of the house.

  Before we left, I took a moment to promote Staff Sergeant Mackenzie to Gunnery Sergeant in the living room. We had scribbled out a makeshift promotion warrant on an MRE box with a black felt-tip pen. We got the wording as close as we could and gathered a handful of Marines to witness the ceremony.

  Lee read the warrant. “To all who shall see these Presents. Greeting: Know Ye that reposing special trust and confidence in the fidelity and abilities of James W. MacKenzie, I do hereby appoint him a Gunnery Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps…”

  We pinned his new rank insignia chevrons on the collar of his uniform. It was official—well, as official as it could be under the circumstances. Mac smiled and thanked me as he shook my hand. He knew I could have easily waited until we were back in the rear area to promote him. I could have—I had a lot of important things to worry about right then besides promotions—but I didn’t want another day to go by without having my new Gunny in the company.

  The Marines on the roof started calling for me again.

  When I got there, Muscle told me that there was a lot of activity going on in the area. I moved from various sides of the roof keeping a low profile behind the four-foot wall that protected us. Across the way on Millions Street, several men with weapons in their hands were moving from house to house.

  A couple of rounds popped off in the distance, but they weren’t shooting at us. Yet. But between the massive blaze in the morning and the firefight behind the Opel, the enemy knew where we were and were gearing up for a fight. We could feel it.

  Rounds then began to sting the sides of the building. I slid to the south wall and peered over the side. I had a clear line of sight behind the house into an alleyway. Men darted out of the houses directly behind our position.

  Two houses down, a blue steel door swung open. A man popped his head out from behind it and looked directly at our location. He repeated the motion twice.

  I looked through the Trijicon ACOG scope of my M4 to get a clearer view. The third time he popped out I saw he had an AK-47 in his hands.

  He crouched down as if he were about to sprint across the alley; the muzzle of the AK peeked past the edge of the door. I clicked my weapon off safe and fired two rounds through the blue door. It swung open a few inches.

  I readied my aim for another shot. I saw another enemy fighter through my scope approach the edge of the door. He bent down and pulled the downed insurgent inside. I saw his limp feet protruding from the edge of the door. Running shoes. The man was dragged slowly back inside. The door closed and I heard a loud clank as the latch dropped.

  We had worn out our welcome on Millions Street. It was time to move.

  CHAPTER 18

  Damage

  Uncontrollable variables occur in war and, sometimes, innocent people die. It is unfortunate, but true. These people and their deaths aren’t just statistics to Marines who fight—or those that wind up as some sensationalized news story on cable news. They are terrible realities that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.

  Military doctrine defines collateral damage as the injury inflicted on something other than an intended target—specifically, civilian casualties of an operation. In a perfect world, that definition seems pretty clear, but for those of us who have fought for years in combat, it is never cut and dry.

  Like many units that fought during the surge, Echo Company was not immune to the grim reality and damage caused on the battlefield by both sides. The collateral damage didn’t result just from the actions of the Multi-National Force (MNF).

  The insurgents committed their share, along with the deliberate violence they often inflicted on the locals. I’m confident when I say that when we did the shooting, collateral damage was avoided as much as humanly possible. We adhered to the rules of engagement. Knew our targets, determined positive identification (PID) before firing a shot, analyzed patterns of life (POL), and made collateral damage estimates (CDE) before we squeezed the trigger, dropped our bombs, or launched our rockets to destroy the enemy. We had years of training, self-discipline, and a moral code that guided our actions as we fought.

  For the insurgents, killing their own people was business as usual. They did it with wanton disregard for the people they harmed and for nothing more than getting their hateful point across. To them, civilians were obstacles on the way to their objectives—or pawns to use to gain an advantage on the battlefield. Time and again, we encountered the effects of their callousness and blatant disregard for human life.

  The winter skies over the desert were gray and overcast as the enemy sprayed fire at us from buildings northeast of our position. Mid-day, Echo Company came under heavy attack as we staged near ECP 8 to conduct a targeted raid on an insurgent stronghold to the west.

  McLaughlin’s platoon maneuvered to a set of buildings close enough to gain sight on the enemy, and returned fire with more than two thousand rounds of machine gun fire and about a dozen 40mm grenades, to suppress a concentration of insurgents who
tried to close the distance on our position.

  I called up Somerville and the Quick Reaction Force. When the four Humvees and four M113s arrived, they opened up with their .50 caliber machine guns with devastating effects to support McLaughlin and 1st Platoon as they fought back the attack.

  A squad of insurgents who survived our fire ran south down Route Apple and took up positions in some of the abandoned buildings and re-engaged us, apparently determined to keep up the fight. The Army M113s’ crews saw a few teams not able to run fast enough to take cover and cut them down. No one is fast enough to outrun the .50 cal—epitomizing the adage, “You can run, but you’ll only die tired.”

  A barrage of small arms fire came from the insurgent stronghold from the buildings to our west. The accuracy of their fires surprised us and slowed our advance as we tried to close in on their positions.

  We figured that in Ramadi we’d be up against a well-trained enemy. After several weeks in the city, we knew we were. I often found myself thinking, “Man, these fucking guys know what they’re doing.”

  They weren’t a bunch of pussies either. No one willing to go toe-to-toe with the Marines and the Army could be. We knew they’d lose in the end, but we never underestimated their will to fight.

  As our QRF sat in overwatch, its vehicles began to take hits, suffering some minor, cosmetic damage. We were holding the enemy tight and suppressing them, but we had to find a way to close in on them.

  The mission of the Marine rifle squad is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat. Marines never have difficulty locating or repelling. Destroying is second nature to them. But closing with—that was the most inherently dangerous part of the mission, the time when Marines were most exposed to enemy fire.

  The secret to closing successfully with an enemy was suppression of the bad guys—keeping them pinned down with indirect fire or machine guns to the point where they were too scared to pop their heads up. Then they had only two choices: try to run and get torn to shreds by the rockets, artillery, mortars, and machine guns, or be drilled with rifle fire from the Marines who were closing with them.

  Standing atop ECP 8, I had a superior vantage point and solid radio communication with McLaughlin as he and his men continued to repel the enemy’s assault toward our position. He had his Marines tucked back on the east side of Route Apple.

  I raised McLaughlin on the radio. “Do you think you’re far enough back for me to call in a GMLRS rocket strike?”

  We’d become familiar with the accuracy and destructive power of the GMLRS rockets during our fight on 6 December and relied on them again to get the job done.

  He replied, “It looks like the buildings they’re in are a good 150 meters or more from our location, sir. I think we’re good to go.”

  I checked the map and plotted all of the friendly locations. We had some intervening terrain, mostly concrete buildings that would mitigate the blasts from a rocket strike.

  McLaughlin made it clear there was at least an enemy squad or two moving from between two buildings and taking well-aimed shots at us. I requested two GMLRS rocket strikes, one rocket for each building. The task force approved both missions.

  I got the “read-back” of the fire mission from ANGLICO at Camp Corregidor. As our vehicles continued to suppress the enemy with machine gun fire, we informed all of our units that a GMLRS strike was inbound.

  Within minutes we heard the distinctive low, bellowed sound of the strike. The rockets echoed as they hit their targets dead-on. They drilled through the tops of the buildings, exploded, and sucked the life out of everything inside.

  There was a deafening silence after the strike. The enemy ceased fire, and so did we.

  I walked out of ECP 8 with a fire team of security and my interpreter and linked up with McLaughlin and the other Marines from 1st Platoon, and we began to close on the buildings in order to clear them out.

  The first site we went into had been rubbled to the point where it was nearly impossible to make entry. As we entered through the carport, a silver four-door sedan sat parked underneath. The roof and hood of the car had been crushed by the concrete and brick debris that had fallen on it from the blast. A cinder-block wall was smashed down on the other side of it. Despite the damage, the car’s hazard lights were flashing. For whatever reason, the blinking lights irritated me, and I ordered one of the Marines, “Turn that shit off!”

  Once inside the first floor, we could tell that if anything was living in the building before the rocket hit, it wasn’t now. The effect of the rocket had painted the walls with a pink mist from the blood of the insurgents holed up inside. Blood mixed with the dust from the rubble pooled in parts of the house along with burnt and twisted AK-47 rifles, household effects, clothing, and furniture. Everything was demolished.

  The roof, or what remained of it, had a gaping hole in it, made by the rocket when it punched through. Steel reinforcement bars were broken and bent and poked out of the remaining concrete like a strange, mangled spiderweb.

  We pressed to the houses not yet engaged. I walked through the entranceway of the first one. There was a large smear of blood—three or four feet long—streaked alongside one of the concrete walls on my left-hand side. It looked like someone had taken a rough brush used for whitewashing a fence and tried to make some sort of abstract painting.

  I moved to the living room and found an Iraqi family, gathered around someone on the floor and wailing uncontrollably. I moved closer and saw they surrounded a man in his mid-forties lying on the floor—it appeared that he had a single gunshot wound to the head. His face and head were dark purple and grotesquely swollen. But he was still alive.

  The platoon’s corpsman rushed to his aid and began to triage the victim. A woman stood next to me, holding a child half dressed in a loosefitting shirt that came down past its waist. The baby had long, thick black hair. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child’s legs were covered in someone else’s blood, but it wasn’t crying—in shock, I suppose. But the child’s silence lent a surreal air to the situation.

  My Terp, Bruce, began to question the dying man’s wife.

  Bruce was a five-six, 135-pound warrior who had supported hundreds, if not thousands, of patrols with other units before being assigned to Echo Company. He fashioned himself a little bit after the martial arts fighter Bruce Lee. He was fiercely loyal, and, if given a chance, I’m sure he would have enlisted in the Marines at the drop of a hat. He begged me for a weapon on every patrol so he could kill insurgents. I never gave him one.

  The woman told him that the insurgents we’d been hunting had burst into their house, and demanded the keys to the family’s car so they could use it to escape. When the man of the house refused to surrender the keys, an insurgent shot him at point-blank range in the head with a pistol.

  Blood pooled around the man’s head through the pressure-dressing that Doc had applied. His face had become completely discolored. We managed to get him into one of the M113s and drive him back to the Combat Outpost for treatment, but he never made it—he was dead on arrival.

  The wife asked Bruce a question after watching her husband die in front of her eyes.

  He turned to me. “Sir, she wants to know if it is safe for her to remain here in their house.”

  I was a bit stunned at the ridiculousness of the question given the circumstances.

  “Look. If she hasn’t figured it out by now,” I responded, “I have been parking rockets closer and closer to her house, and it’s not safe. If she knows where any of the other insurgents are holding up, she’d better tell us now. Otherwise, I’d suggest she go find some family to stay with elsewhere.”

  The woman stood there silently with a blank look on her face, sobbing softly. I don’t think she understood the gravity of the situation.

  After we finished searching the houses we hit with the rockets, we headed back to ECP 8 walking south on Route Apple. As we left, I
walked past one of the rocket-smashed buildings. It was a rectangular, single-story building, probably no more than a thousand square feet. The flat concrete roof was completely caved in and sagging in the middle. It looked like a half-pipe ramp at a skateboard park. The remaining walls on the ends of the building were still standing.

  At the far end of one wall sat a mangy, yellow dog. It watched every Marine as we passed, turning its head each time each one of us walked by, like it was checking us off. To me, it was another random event so common in Ramadi.

  Bam-Bam was on watch in charge of the company operations center and received information from the TOC at Camp Corregidor that a blue four-door sedan needed to drive through our area in order to transport a woman who had miscarried her baby to Ramadi General Hospital, a thousand meters west of ECP 8.

  Bam-Bam’s primary responsibility was to be our FAC, directing the actions of fixed-and rotary-wing aircraft in our support. He had also picked up a lot of the administrative tasks. He relayed requests for ammunition, food, water, CASEVACs, and any other support to Echo Company’s other platoons.

  When the TOC advised us of the request to allow movement of the family to the hospital, it represented an important opportunity—to help a local family and give some credibility to our messaging campaign to win “Hearts and Minds” and give it an additional meaning beyond killing insurgents. It also would stand in stark contrast to the insurgents’ preferred method of gaining support and cooperation: fear and intimidation.

  Some believed that the best way to win an insurgency is not to fight the insurgents—but to fight the insurgency. At the end of the day, I never subscribed to that theory.

  That meant making the majority of the locals hate the murderous, callous insurgents who didn’t give a shit about the locals’ well-being and who had zero respect for human life in general. As I saw it, our mission was to kill or capture the enemy, and that’s what we perfected on every patrol—if we gained some support from the locals along the way, even better.