Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  We had orders to head west.

  CHAPTER 20

  West

  January 2007

  Echo Company departed Task Force 1-77 Armor and Camp Ramadi and headed to Camp Korean Village (CKV), forty miles west of our ultimate destination: Rutbah, Iraq. We’d move in ground convoy and, once there, begin supporting the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Command Element (CE).

  Bam-Bam planned for Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters to escort the first half of our movement. They’d hand off midway to UH-1Y Hueys and AH-1W Cobra gunships—that we called “Skids”—of the 15th MEU’s Air Combat Element (ACE) that were operating out of a Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP) at CKV.

  The Hueys and Cobras never showed up. We had to travel the rest of the way to CKV without air cover.

  Bam-Bam was enraged and felt a little betrayed—until he contacted the 15th MEU’s Air Officer, who told him that the pilots were just finishing their flight brief for the convoy escort mission.

  Bam-Bam realized that he had made a rookie mistake: when he made the air request, he used local time (the actual time zone we were in) instead of Zulu, or Greenwich Mean Time, which is the standard time zone used for the military because units are so widely dispersed over several times zones.

  Although Echo Company had been exposed during the movement, I was less upset about it than Bam-Bam. I knew he had been running on fumes for weeks in Ramadi. As a pilot, however, he trained to be meticulous, and he was embarrassed by this lapse in attention to detail.

  To add insult to injury, during the drive west, Bam-Bam’s Humvee died—the hood of his truck spewed into flames with the engine completely blown out. His vehicle had to be towed into CKV by another Humvee.

  Friction.

  CKV was the main base of operations for the 15th MEU Command Element and where our rotary-wing CAS was sourced from while we were in Rutbah. CKV sat in one of the farthest western parts of Al Anbar Province, roughly forty miles west of the city of Rutbah. It reportedly got its name because it was where Korean laborers who helped build the Amman-Baghdad Road (which we knew as MSR Michigan) during Saddam Hussein’s regime were housed.

  In addition to the tactical support, CKV also provided a place where Marines could relax every few weeks, shower, get supplies from the PX, make phone calls, and use the Internet.

  People often wonder how the Marines had comforts like this in a combat zone when the majority of their time was spent fighting. But we did. We had iPods, Sony PlayStations, and Internet service at times. Marines had to have some sort of release in their downtime—they needed to decompress. To me, it was equivalent to what Marines and soldiers in previous wars did when they went back to the rear area.

  In World War II, when the Marines rotated off the front lines, they probably did similar things to take their minds off the madness. They played cards or checkers. We used PlayStation. They’d write letters. We typed emails. In Vietnam, they’d take snapshots with Kodak film. We used our phones and digital cameras. It’s simply relative to the generation and technology available at the time. Either way, in any era, it’s essential to include some normalcy to keep the chaos in check.

  Despite the amenities, CKV was still an austere place, and the buildings were dilapidated concrete structures, while the exterior walls were white with a three-foot swath of trim painted around the top in a horrible shade of turquoise green.

  Rutbah itself was a city in the middle of nowhere in the desert of Iraq. With twenty thousand residents, almost all of them Sunni Muslims, it was the closest population center in western Iraq to both Jordan and Syria, roughly seventy miles from each border.

  I jokingly referred to Rutbah as the “Truck Stop of Iraq” since it was one of the only towns that had a functional gas station right on MSR Michigan. When it was open for business, maybe one or two days out of the week, it was always jam-packed with customers. They’d line up for more than a mile.

  Many Americans would throw a fit if they had to wait in line at a gas station for more than five minutes. In Iraq at the time, however, it was not uncommon for locals to wait in line for a half day for fuel. The Iraqis would fill up not only their vehicles, but also fuel jugs they carried in their cars’ trunks to make sure they could get through the weeks or months between the chances to gas up—ironic in a country where gas only costs less than fifty cents per gallon.

  There were inevitably many contentious moments on the days that the gas station was open. It was not uncommon for fistfights between the locals to erupt while they waited in line. My Marines thought the entire spectacle was utterly hilarious.

  Besides having a working gas station, Rutbah also had some large mansions and many well-preserved smaller homes. It was a welcome contrast to Ramadi, in which every structure bore some mark of the war that waged there.

  One thing Rutbah did not have was a functioning infrastructure. It had once, but the fighting had taken its toll. Power was intermittent at best. To run lighting in any of the homes, we were like the locals, dependent on gas-powered floor generators. Garbage was everywhere, and raw human sewage flowed through the streets.

  In an attempt to correct these horrible conditions, we were ordered to orchestrate “Team Garbage Cleanup.” The idea was to get the locals engaged in taking care of the city and give them a sense of pride. For me, it meant reducing the garbage piles and removing the broken-down vehicles on the shoulders of the roads that could easily hide IEDs and weapons.

  My Marines were more than incensed at the thought of having to pick up the Iraqis’ trash and debris. I wasn’t too crazy about it either.

  I continually put in requests to have U.S. Marine TRAMs with buckets and forklifts come into the city. I needed them to scrape the shoulders of the roads to remove the piles of garbage and to haul away the abandoned, shot-up vehicles to a consolidated dumping location.

  My requests were constantly denied because the vehicles didn’t have sufficient armor to operate in the city. I pleaded my case that if my Marines were willing to patrol every day in the town in nothing but their body armor, a TRAM driver could wear his and be equally safe if we provided security during the cleanup and debris removal. I made my point, and the requests were finally approved.

  When we weren’t picking up trash, Echo Company spent its first week at CKV planning and preparing for Operation Gateway: a citywide clearance operation scheduled to kick off on 19 January 2007.

  Although several 15th MEU and other Marine units had patrolled in and around the city, they had been engaged only sporadically by insurgents who operated from the bowels of the city. This activity kept the Marines on the outskirts of town controlling the main Traffic Control Points (TCPs) in and out of the city from the east, west, and south. To root out the insurgents who remained embedded in the town, they needed more manpower.

  Clearance operations had been our bread and butter in Ramadi. Piece of cake, I thought.

  Go in. Hit hard. Get the job done. I soon found out though that the landscape would not be the only thing in Rutbah that was different than Ramadi.

  During our stay in Ramadi, it was an infantryman’s game.

  If someone was digging a hole in the road, they were assumed to be planting an IED in the ground—shoot them.

  If there was a car driving down the street toward your position, they were assumed to be driving a car bomb into your operating base—shoot them.

  If someone was out walking around at night past curfew, they were considered an insurgent on patrol—shoot them.

  If someone was using a cell phone during the daytime it was presumed they were about to detonate the trigger on a roadside bomb—shoot them.

  If they had a weapon of any kind, they were the enemy—shoot them.

  This interpretation of the ROE in Ramadi was not cavalier, but the standard routine since all of these events were commonplace in Ramadi and what we witnessed firsthand.

  Our mission in Rutbah was focused more on support and stability operations (SASO) rather
than the daily raids and constant firefights in Ramadi.

  In Rutbah, we would fight what the Marine Corps called a “Three-Block War.” The idea was that, in the space of three city blocks, you would go from full-scale, conventional war to police and peacekeeping operations to providing humanitarian aid. It was a fluid concept. Any Marine could find himself in any part of that spectrum at any time. My men had become used to doing all sorts of tasks that weren’t in the job description of Marine Corps infantry.

  The ROE, however, went from extremely permissive in Ramadi to painstakingly restrictive in Rutbah.

  Not only the mission and the ROE, but also the atmosphere was vastly different in Rutbah. It was a shock to our senses. Traffic drove freely and local shops were open for business—which we used to our advantage. When we patrolled the streets in any city in Iraq, the children also stood out to me. Children roamed the street freely during the day in Rutbah since none of the schools were functioning.

  As in Ramadi, some would taunt us and others would beg for candy. The incorrigible ones would throw rocks at our vehicles and Marines. They could be an annoyance, but they sometimes provided a welcome distraction. Besides, the children made us smile.

  Iraq was a war-torn country with a host of problems, and the people lived a rough life, but children are children anywhere in the world. They had ways of finding mischief and time to play. Despite the language barrier, kids were kids. They grew on us in the areas we patrolled, and we were always delighted to see their familiar faces.

  A few weeks into our stay in Rutbah, Corporal Brian McKibben was on a two-hour patrol. He was out front conducting double-point coverage to protect the alleyways with overlapping fires as he led the patrol.

  The mission had been quiet, almost uneventful, until McKibben halted his squad no more than a few hundred meters from our firm base. They were almost back.

  McKibben conducted a head count and realized that Lance Corporal Brackamonte wasn’t with the patrol. McKibben was frantic. He had no idea where Brackamonte had gone or what had happened to him.

  Brackamonte was a nineteen-year-old from Las Vegas, Nevada. He was five-ten and weighed 150 pounds. He came from a long line of veterans in his family, but none were Marines. He lied to his parents about being in the infantry. He told them he was going to be a military firefighter, thinking it would be easier for them to understand. His mom cried when she found out the truth. She pleaded with his recruiter to change his orders, but it was a done deal.

  McKibben halted the patrol. His squad posted security, and he took a team of Marines to backtrack their route. He pressed no more than three hundred meters from where they had come and peered around a corner.

  McKibben spotted Brackamonte squatting down on the side of the street. He was talking to some little kid and giggling with him. He seemed oblivious as McKibben advanced toward him. Brackamonte was in his own little world with this kid. He’d just stopped, connected, and forgot about everything else that was going on.

  McKibben laid into Brackamonte when they got back to the firm base and threatened never to let him go out on patrol again and take away his SAW and ammo for the stunt. He was furious with him for not staying with the squad. The warning brought Brackamonte to the threshold of tears.

  When McKibben told me about the incident, I wasn’t shocked. I empathized, in fact, with what Brackamonte must have felt: the need to be human if just for a short amount of time—albeit at the most inappropriate moment on patrol—but human nonetheless. For some Marines, it was quite easy to lose that side of themselves after everything they’d been through.

  CHAPTER 21

  Gateway

  17 January 2007

  The 15th MEU’s assistant intelligence officer, Captain John Kelly, arranged for me to conduct my first leader’s reconnaissance from the air. The flight proved invaluable as did Kelly’s briefing. He gave me a detailed lay of the land where Echo Company would be working in Rutbah. In the future, I would come to depend on his solid, unvarnished intelligence updates and the phenomenal pictures he took with a digital camera.

  The following day I was scheduled to conduct my second leader’s reconnaissance. This time I’d see things from the ground.

  I was happy to be greeted outside my command post by a friendly and familiar face, that of Captain Giles Walger, the commander of Charlie Company, 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) Battalion. Call sign, “Chippewa Six.” Giles made his way toward me with his widemouthed smile, clean-shaven head, and tall, athletic frame.

  Giles and I had known each other for years. We had cut our teeth together in Virginia at Officer Candidate School, The Basic School, and the Infantry Officer Course in 1997 and 1998. We followed each other to the operating forces stationed in Twentynine Palms, California, and then again in 2004 as young captains at the Expeditionary Warfare School.

  We spent the entire day combing the outskirts of Rutbah in his eight-wheeled, armored machines assessing the city. Giles pointed out the areas of most concern in the city. The patterns. The traffic. The people. I still felt like somewhat of an outsider looking in. It was strange not to hear a single gunshot fired as we patrolled along. It gave me an odd feeling, and I wondered what lay buried inside Rutbah.

  The 15th MEU operations officer, Major Paul Nugent, had tasked Echo Company to conduct a daytime clearance operation from east to west to clear the city. That did not go over well with me—or anyone in Echo Company. We were all justifiably paranoid at the time, having moved out of Ramadi.

  When we patrolled in Ramadi during the day, it wasn’t a matter of whether we would get shot at, it was a matter of when and by how many insurgents. So, we patrolled during the dark. Everything we had done up to that point had been at night. With our advanced night vision devices, we owned the night. We used it to our advantage.

  I was apprehensive as well about taking Echo Company into a zone not fully cleared. The Maritime Special Purpose Force (MSPF) with the 15th MEU that operated out of CKV had tried to assault the insurgents in Rutbah and had come under sporadic enemy fire. They tried to root out and kill the enemy during coordinated attacks with limited results.

  The MSPF was comprised of a small group of specially trained Marines, about fifty, from the USMC reconnaissance community and other intelligence specialists, but lacked the firepower and large numbers of a traditional Marine infantry company.

  While planning Operation Gateway, I’d been briefed by a good friend of mine, Captain A. J. Goldberg. He told me his platoon with MSPF attempted to push into the city from east to west. They were engaged by a team-sized element of the enemy, four to six fighters, with a single RPG attack and small arms fire—effectively halting their advance on the far side of a dried-up wadi, a sandy area washed out by rain. They had to re-group to formulate another route of advance since the terrain was not in their favor.

  Paul Nugent was thirty-nine years old. Bulky, with brown hair and sharp green eyes, he was from Philadelphia and had received his degree from Pennsylvania State University. He was another familiar face. He had been a mentor and friend of mine, as well as my advisor when I was a student at the Expeditionary Warfare School. He was a Marine that I could confide in and trust completely. He was one of the best officers I ever met.

  After we had gathered for the operations order for Gateway, I voiced my concerns about operating during the day and recommended we modify the plan to execute it at night. Major Nugent was gracious enough to give me the autonomy to come up with a different concept of operations and allowed me to construct it in a way that would best suit the mindset and combat capabilities of my Marines.

  My company staff and I sat around a map of Rutbah on a four-foot-high planning table made out of plywood and two-by-fours in our company headquarters at CKV and came up with a new scheme of maneuver. It better supported how we would clear the city. It took some thought, and once I felt comfortable with the plan, I took it back to Major Nugent for approval.

  It was a simple plan. We would move in at ni
ght by truck, dismount in the southern part of the city, and push north. Our platoons would disperse and move in a manner that would allow us to swiftly and efficiently comb through the city. On our western flank, we’d have the support of Captain Stan Hawk and his Bravo Company, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion. Stan was a solid leader, and his men were well-trained and highly experienced. I trusted them unreservedly to get the job done as we conducted the operation.

  I gave Major Nugent a guarantee after I pitched the plan: within forty-eight hours we’d have the city stamped “Clear,” and we’d be able to start regular patrolling operations.

  19 January 2007

  Echo Company’s strength was more than two hundred Marines that night. We rolled in heavy with a ton of combat power—two AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters, a platoon of LAV-25s armed with 25mm Bushmaster chain guns, eight up-armored Humvees with .50 caliber machine guns and 40mm MK-19 grenade launchers, and six massive Oshkosh 7-ton trucks, fully armored and strapped with turret-mounted machine guns.

  The Marines in Echo Company were loaded down with ammo to feed our ten M240B medium machine guns, thirty 5.56 Squad Automatic Weapons, and five Shoulder Fired Multiple Launch Weapons (SMAW) rocket systems, as well as the ammo that they carried for their M16-A4 rifles and Colt M4 carbines.

  We staged at CKV and loaded up the 7-ton trucks that would drive us forty miles east and then into the southern part of the city for insertion.

  It was an incredibly cold night as we hopped off of the vehicles and assembled into our staging area. We shook from the cold as we fought off the effects of the sharp wind that cut through our bodies.

  We began to conduct our communication checks across the board, to include those with the Skids—already hovering at two thousand feet.