Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  Bam-Bam contacted the radio operators at all of our positions and relayed the specifics of this important request to ensure the family’s safe passage to the hospital. The call went out to all stations on the radio net: A blue four-door sedan would be passing through our area directly past OP South House and then ECP 8 on Sufia Road with four passengers, bringing a woman to the hospital for emergency medical attention.

  Everyone was explicitly advised that the car would be marked with glowing green chemlights taped to the roof and behind the windshield. Bam-Bam also expressly instructed each radio operator to pass the word to their respective platoon commanders, platoon sergeants, and the Marines on watch and to report back when they completed the task.

  After double-checking with each platoon to reconfirm 100 percent notification, understanding, and acknowledgment, Bam-Bam felt certain that he’d done all he could to ensure that the Marines would not mistake the vehicle for one possibly packed full of explosives with a suicide driver behind the wheel—and allow it to pass safely.

  Bam-Bam went back to his normal routine and listened to the radio transmissions intently. A few minutes later, he was startled by the distant sound of machine gun fire.

  A sinking feeling hit the pit of his stomach.

  Bam-Bam called each platoon for an update. They all confirmed they had not opened fire.

  OP South House and ECP 8 verified that the sedan had passed by their positions safely. But when he checked with a U.S. Army radio operator that was adjacent to our position, his worst fears were confirmed.

  The sedan had driven clear past our positions as slowly as it could into the boundaries of another Marine unit to our northwest. It crept up the unimproved road and directly in the line of fire of some Marines on post. The ones who had manned the post earlier were aware of the sedan’s passage, but, when they conducted a turnover of the post, they didn’t pass the word about it to those who relieved them. Fearing for the safety of their fellow Marines, when the sedan came into view, they opened fire on it.

  Multiple three- to six-round bursts of 7.62mm machine gun fire blazed from the muzzle of the weapon and ripped through the car, bringing it to a halt. The driver, who was the husband of the woman who’d miscarried her child, survived. She and her sister did not.

  I later talked about the incident with Bam-Bam.

  He knew he had done everything within his power to ensure that the Marines of Echo Company let the sedan through safely, and they had done so.

  He said, “If I could go back and do it all over again, Scott, I would have checked with the battalion headquarters next door to verify that the adjacent units were notified between higher headquarters. I did everything I could.”

  I told him, “You did.”

  Hindsight is always twenty-twenty in combat, and it’s often the only way to learn some hard lessons to pass on to other warfighters.

  Later, the husband received payment for the deaths of his family from Civil Affairs personnel. It wasn’t a disgrace to accept the money by Arab standards. The Diya (Dee-Yah)—essentially a non-negotiable payment of blood money—is customary, if not downright expected, in cases of accidental deaths.

  The grief-stricken man left with the handful of cash, a menial amount considering what had happened. I only imagined the level of disgust and contempt he must have felt for us.

  I could have been wrong, however.

  Iraqis had a very fatalistic view of life. You often heard them say in response to an event or when proposing a plan, “Insha’Alla,” basically “If God wills it,” or as we might say, “God willing.” This man believed that if God willed that his family would die, that’s exactly how it had to be—and it was forbidden to question the will of Allah.

  Although we’d done everything humanly possible to mitigate the shooting I still felt terrible about the incident.

  Afterward, the family’s vehicle was towed over to our firm base at ECP 8 and parked in the middle of the cul-de-sac comprised of dozens of concrete barriers.

  Burnt-out plastic chemlights sat still intact underneath the windshield wipers. A white cloth flag—symbolic of truce or surrender—had been used as a signaling device, and lay crumpled up in the back seat of the car. Bullet holes had punctured the grill, hood, and windshield. The blue velour fabric interior of the sedan was stained with blood, the seat backs mottled with dark red blotches. Fragments of shattered safety glass from the windows were scattered about the interior and on the dashboard.

  The car sat outside of our position for days on end as a constant, bloody reminder of how things can go so fucking wrong in war. As hard as we had tried to do good that night, things turned out badly. The car served as a physical, daily reminder of the damage that a moment of inattention or the smallest of mistakes could cause—and of our inability to fix it.

  We carry those grave events with us forever.

  After a little while, I couldn’t stand looking at the car anymore and made a point to have the task force drag it away.

  The car was gone the next day.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ta’meem

  We had been patrolling hard throughout the night and had gone firm in one of the houses we cleared at around 0300 hours. One of my men went outside to relieve himself in a building that looked to be some sort of an outhouse. He turned on his flashlight before he took care of business and looked down a four-inch hole in the concrete slab he was about to piss in.

  Something caught his eye. He knelt down and shined his flashlight into the hole. It was hollowed out, and there was a strange looking object at the bottom. He called to the other members of his team, and they came out to inspect. They spotted what looked like a pile of weapons, unexploded ordnance, and ammunition that lay at the bottom of the latrine.

  They exited the tiny building and made their way outside. The structure’s concrete slab foundation sat on an elevated wall of concrete cinder blocks. The Marines called for sledgehammers and specially designed Halligan tools—and began pounding and smashing the cinder blocks until one of the walls collapsed, revealing a hole in which was packed a huge weapons cache: dozens of RPGs, AK-47s, rocket motors, ammunition, body armor, flares, grenades, and a variety of other makeshift explosives. It was a big win for the team that night. The Marines always reveled in denying weapons to the insurgents, and they liked proving that they were better at the hide-and-seek game than the enemy.

  As some of the Marines dug out the weapons, the security teams posted on the perimeter began to shout. I made my way over and saw they had detained a local Iraqi on the ground. He was on his knees in black plastic flexicuffs. He was in his late twenties, with a beard and mustache, and wore a brown traditional men’s dishdasha robe (or “man-dress” as the Marines called it), a blue lightweight winter jacket, and, despite the freezing temperature, he wore blue plastic flip-flops.

  They brought him inside the house and Jake began to question him. I wanted to know what the fuck he was doing on the street at three in the morning and why he was skulking around the house where we had found the cache.

  He provided us with little information other than his name. He told us he was out for a walk—or, going to his brother’s house for a visit.

  Bullshit.

  We asked him what his brother’s name was and where he lived. He couldn’t come up with a good answer.

  More bullshit.

  I had a suspicion he was either the occupant of the house or a spotter for the insurgents who had stockpiled the cache. I wanted to know where the insurgents were.

  The sun was nearly up. I knew that if we let him go, he would most likely alert the enemy to our presence which would almost certainly lead to an ambush later that morning. Not the way we liked to start our day. We kept questioning him while we called 3rd Platoon to come to our position and transport the detainee back to COP Steel.

  I told Jake to tell him, “Look. We’ve already detained you for being out after curfew. If you don’t tell us which buildings the insurgents are in now, I�
��m going to call the Iraqi Police to come get you, and you can tell them.”

  He became physically flustered at this threat and began to whimper. The Iraqi Police were ruthless, and the way they handled detainees reflected it. This guy knew that if I turned him over to the Iraqi Police, his fate might very well be sealed.

  This time, I was bullshitting. We didn’t even have a direct link to the Iraqi Police in Ramadi when we were out on patrol. It wasn’t as if we could simply call 911 and they’d appear. But those facts never stopped us from using the police’s reputation as leverage to get people to provide us information on the spot. The detainee still said nothing and was carted off by our QRF for processing back at COP Steel—now, with tears visibly running down his face.

  One of the toughest challenges we faced was stomaching the bureaucratic party line referred to as, “Putting an Iraqi Face on it.” That meant when we conducted an operation we had to make an effort to have Iraqi soldiers or policemen with us. It was designed to give some sort of legitimacy to their army and police, and give the population more confidence in the Iraqi government, and turn them against the insurgents. I never got it. Too often, putting an Iraqi face on it was equivalent to putting an incompetent face on it.

  Despite the years of training that the Marine and Army Mobile Transition Teams (MTTs) and Police Transitions Teams (PTTs) had given them, the Iraqis had never taken ownership of their duty to be professional soldiers. They were steadfastly proud to wear a uniform and be Iraqi, but never really got what it meant to serve their country for its greater good. They simply wanted the status, legitimacy, and authority that a uniform afforded. They didn’t grasp the responsibility that came with it.

  The uniform was a bobble—like a brightly festooned costume to them. The Iraqi soldiers and police were not Patriots akin to our American Revolutionary War fighters in any way, shape, or form.

  The Iraqi Army’s soldiers were underpaid and ill-equipped, its logistics efforts were inefficient, and its officers were incompetent, corrupt, and demeaning to their subordinates—and prone to bickering among themselves. It led to a constant breakdown in authority, and their command and control was a joke. Soldiers and police would often abandon their posts and units without notice. Some would even take off in the middle of a patrol. Sometimes, they’d just flat out refuse to work. It was so dysfunctional the Marines would use them at the beginning of an operation and then let them lay back while we got on with the task at hand—and relegated them, like cannon fodder, at the onset of an operation since Echo Company always did the lion’s share of the work anyway.

  As Echo Company patrolled in the Ta’meem, First Sergeant Foster, my senior enlisted Marine, was in charge of the HQ Platoon. I posted him at a forward operating base in the middle of the city at COP Steel which served as a main re-supply point.

  Foster was one of a handful of Marines who lived at COP Steel—the majority of Echo Company lived out in the city. The soldiers living there agitated him easily because they didn’t have the same standards he did. He was always needling them to pick up after themselves. The mess drove him crazy.

  Throughout our time in Ramadi, we had been subjected to very few enemy mortar attacks. It was a luxury we enjoyed after the local tribal leaders stamped them out for us in return for our unyielding assistance to stabilize their tribes. Foster’s luck ran out late one afternoon as he made his way to one of the resupply trucks to get gear to start improving the company position.

  He walked between the vehicles and the outer wall of the building toward an Oshkosh 7-ton truck. In an instant, he was slammed violently against the side of the vehicle. Dirt sprayed him. Dust filled the air. His Kevlar helmet flew off his head and rolled unevenly underneath the vehicle. Foster lay on his side from the brunt of the explosion. A peaceful feeling washed over him as he lay there, stunned. His ears were ringing. A high-pitched hum wouldn’t go away. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew he was alive.

  Foster pushed himself to his feet within seconds and crawled toward the front tires of the truck—instinctively knowing that he was in the worst possible spot during a mortar attack.

  The ringing in his ears dissipated and he could now hear yelling. He got to his feet and made his way to the top floor of COP Steel where three 120mm mortar rounds had struck. Ironically, the U.S. Army had mounted a brand-new radar system and counter-ballistic computers designed to detect incoming mortar rounds on the building’s roof—it lay in pieces, destroyed.

  Foster jumped over a pile of cinder blocks and rubble and began to dig through the debris with his bare hands looking for injured soldiers. He looked down and saw blood on his hands. His first thought was that he’d found a wounded soldier. He found no one. He paused. A stream of warm blood trickled from his nose. He was thankful it was his blood and not someone else’s.

  Foster looked around to assess the damage. A portion of a wall had collapsed on top of where his Marines normally slept. Fortunately, they had all been awake during the attack and not in the area.

  January 2007

  We continued to push out of COP Steel and were tasked to patrol and provide security for an assessment at a proposed site for a new Iraqi police station in the Ta’meem District. A team of U.S. Army engineers were going to determine the suitability of a building that they thought might do the job. The site was close to a massive apartment-housing complex called the White Apartments. It was different from other such places in Ramadi in that criminal activity was equal to, if not greater than, the insurgent activity in it—and one often overlapped the other in this urban ghetto.

  The police station grand opening was designed to be a showcase event to let the citizens of southern Ramadi know that the Iraqi Police (IP) was back in town and had taken control. It was another “Iraqi Face” operation that reeked of disaster and disappointment from the start.

  By the time we arrived, the insurgents had gotten word of the planned event and had blown up both ends of the building, leaving only the center of the structure, rubble-filled, but tenuously standing.

  McLaughlin, Bam-Bam, Jake, and I surveyed the building. It was in shambles. Chunks of cinder blocks and loose concrete covered every inch of the floor. The ceiling looked as if it would cave in at any second and had pieces of metal re-bar jutting out, still clinging onto blocks of concrete at the tips. There was no power, and cut wires hung randomly from the overhead. My team of Marines looked around and shook their heads in disbelief that the IP and the U.S. Army still entertained the idea that this could be made to work.

  Bear and some of his soldiers arrived on the scene shortly after we surveyed the area. I met him on the street and gave him the run-down on where Echo Company was. We’d linked up ahead of time with the Army and Navy SEALs who were providing overwatch for the event and coordinated to avoid any “blue-on-blue.”

  A loud boom echoed closely.

  It sounded like a mortar impact, but when Bear and I turned around, we saw smoke billowing from the top floor of a building across the street.

  Bear asked if I had enough Marines to run over and sweep the site. A squad of Marines from McLaughlin’s platoon was close by, and I led them cautiously over to the house.

  Two teams set up an outer cordon on the building as we pressed inside. We were leery. We’d heard too many stories of insurgents who booby-trapped buildings, waiting for unsuspecting Marines and soldiers to walk into them and then detonate devices inside. We checked every inch of the building, looking for trip wires and suspicious devices. Some of the Marines took out small cans and sprayed Silly String into the doorways to uncover thin trip wires. Silly String wasn’t issued gear, but would always show up in care packages in the mail from family members at the Marines’ request.

  Desert Storm care packages of Corn Nuts and grade-school letters had been upgraded to meet more mission-essential needs of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Silly String to check for trip wires. Fresh socks to keep our feet clean and dry. Flashlight batteries, eye protection, custom Oregon Aero he
lmet pads, and even embarrassing Tampax feminine hygiene products to carry on patrol to fill bullet wounds and stop bleeding.

  Our families and friends realized the severity of the environment we were fighting in and supported us with things needed to help ensure everyone made it home alive.

  When we made it to the second floor of the building where we’d seen the smoke, we quickly figured out the cause. The room was a mess. It had a damp, charred odor to it. There was little furniture in the house itself. It almost looked abandoned. There was fresh blood spattered on the walls as if a water balloon had popped, but there wasn’t a body in sight. A metal kitchen table stood in the room. The floor was cluttered with pieces of junk, like someone had dumped a box of spare radio repair parts all over the place—spools of unraveled wire scattered around.

  It was clear to us that an IED maker was in the process of building a device in the room, and it had accidentally gone off.

  The locals had already made off with the body in less than the twenty minutes it took us to get on site. They were quite effective at policing up their dead. In the end, it was one less IED we’d have to face and one less insurgent we’d have to worry about, judging by the amount of blood on the floor and walls.

  By the time we walked back to the police station, the celebration had already begun in the ghetto. Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army were driving around the large center square of the White Apartments, flying IP and Iraqi national flags from, respectively, the beds of white Chevrolet pickup trucks with blue doors, and atop the Humvees, both given to them by the MNF. Most of the men had their faces covered with red-and-white-checkered shemaghs. They were screaming and shouting fanatically and doing victory laps.

  It was a spectacle, but it was farcical.

  I never knew if the Iraqi Police ever occupied that police station. It wasn’t my problem, either way. That was Echo Company’s final mission with the Steel Tigers.