Echo in Ramadi

by Scott A. Huesing

  They probably figured out fast that if they tried to attack in a conventional fashion with rifles, RPGs, and mortars, they surely would have had their asses handed to them tenfold. They would need to attack in a different way if they wanted to be sure to make their mark. They chose a suicide bomber.

  They’d studied the routines of the Marines at the ECP, and, when they saw the large entourage that was the battalion staff gather at the ECP, they must have figured that someone important was there. Sensing an opportunity, they made their move.

  The ECP sat on the east side of the Euphrates River on the south end of Barwana. The ECP wasn’t much, just an old building reinforced with rows of sand-filled HESCO barriers. The rows formed lines for pedestrians to walk through, long lanes constructing a security checkpoint like those at an airport. The locals would walk through—men in one lane, women in another—and be searched at stations set up along the lanes. Female Marines searched the women in order to avoid offending cultural sensitivities. It was crude, but it was effective.

  On this day, it was all routine—until it wasn’t.

  Without warning, there was a flash. Dark, gray dust billowed up followed by a deafening explosion. Sand and debris fell around the ECP, on top of the barriers and those standing close by.

  Ellis, who had been talking to some Marines close to where the bomb went off, was killed instantly.

  Another Marine and a Terp also died. One Marine from Golf Company lost both of his legs in the attack. Others were severely wounded.

  When the quick reaction force responded to the scene, it was already too late. It was a horrific aftermath.

  It would have been much worse had the bomber not made an error. He had detonated his vest just before the search point. The HESCO barriers, therefore, absorbed most of the blast and the shrapnel that followed—limiting its path of intended destruction. Had the bomber made it much further through the checkpoint that day, his bomb could have killed or wounded dozens more people.

  A few weeks later, a patrol led by Captain Scott Gehris, the commander of Weapons Company, came across a weapons cache. I knew Gehris well. We shared a stateroom on the Boxer. From Bowers, Pennsylvania, he had a stoic demeanor. When he did manage to smile—and that wasn’t often—it was just out of the corner of his mouth.

  Among the contraband they confiscated was a fanny pack that lay near some explosives and some monofilament line. After they had confiscated the cache, Gehris and his men figured out how the bomb that had killed Ellis and the others was constructed.

  The bomb maker had loaded the fanny pack full of explosives and projectiles, such as ball bearings and nails. They fused the device inside the fanny pack that fastened around the bomber’s waist and tied the fishing line to the detonators at one end and his elbows at the other. When the killer arrived at the search point, he would, as instructed, raise his arms. Doing so would pull the line taut and trigger the detonators.

  I couldn’t believe Ellis was gone. He was an amazing Marine. I loved talking to him, and I did every chance I got. Throughout my entire career, I classified Sergeants Major in one of two ways: the great and the average. Ellis was one of the great ones. I was not alone in my assessment. Everyone in Echo Company and the rest of 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, admired and loved him.

  Making his death all the more painful was the fact that Ellis was on his final deployment. He’d made no bones about his plan to retire after we returned home.

  My Marines acted differently after that day. On patrol, they were edgy and more cautious, especially around the locals. Each of them must have thought if it could happen to our senior enlisted leader, it could happen to anyone.

  CHAPTER 26

  Wreckage

  It was a strange day. The sky was overcast as rain came down sporadically when a fourteen-man squad from Nicholson’s platoon went out on a dismounted security patrol.

  Nicholson was with the patrol. Most leaders, including myself, made it a point to go out on at least one patrol, if not more, during the day in order to gauge the atmospherics of the town and to see how our Marines were performing.

  I’d often get strange looks from other Marines when I’d tell them I’d go out on patrols with my Marines. In response, they’d delve into stories about how their COs had “never left the FOB” or never came out from behind their computers. I always took these stories with a grain of salt—maybe these guys had an ax to grind with their COs—but if there was an ounce of truth to the stories, I found it detestable.

  I have an unequivocal distaste toward any commander who would not lead his Marines from the front. It seemed an abrogation of the heavy responsibilities of leadership and an insult to his Marines, as if sharing in the dangers they faced was somehow beneath him. I always felt it was my place to be with my Marines. Even more so, I felt privileged to be with them. I like to think they welcomed it, too. Nicholson was cut from the same bolt of cloth in this regard.

  The men in that patrol later said that they felt uneasy that day as they walked slowly in a staggered formation along MSR Michigan. It was one of the busiest streets in town, but there was very little traffic. The number of cars parked along the road seemed too numerous.

  All but three Marines in the patrol had turned west with the main element. They had stopped short to check the rear, or six o’clock position, of the formation.

  Lance Corporal Raymond Bowen joined the Marines from his hometown in Joliet, Illinois, at nineteen. His parents, brothers, and sisters were so proud of him when he joined, but like many families, they were nervous he was heading to Iraq. Bowen was a SAW gunner with 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon, and this was his first deployment.

  When he joined the Marines, I don’t think he ever expected he’d have to make such life-changing decisions.

  Bowen was at the tail end of the patrol when he noticed a light-colored, four-door sedan speeding up toward the formation, going about thirty to forty miles per hour. Iraqis knew when Marines were on the road they had to slow down and wait for us to signal them to pass. For some reason, this car was not slowing down.

  The Marines began to wave their arms at the vehicle that was now no more than one hundred meters away, motioning for it to stop.

  They yelled, “Kiff! Kiff!” Stop! Stop!

  The vehicle continued to close in on their position. The Marines now trained their weapons on the front of the car. It continued to speed forward.

  With the vehicle showing no sign of stopping, just a few car lengths away, Bowen feared for his life and his fellow Marines. He looked through the sights of his SAW, aimed at the car’s grille, and squeezed the trigger. A quick rip and a bright muzzle flash from the barrel of the SAW erupted, and the car came to a screeching halt short of where Bowen stood. The driver made a quick U-turn and sped off.

  Nicholson heard the loud, distinctive gunfire from the SAW at the rear of his patrol and moved quickly to gain better situational awareness.

  Nicholson’s attention was drawn to a group of Iraqi men standing near the corner of a building not far from where Bowen now stood. The men were yelling frantically. Their apoplectic shouting became more panicked as they stood over a wounded man. They motioned to the others.

  Nicholson quickly ordered the patrol to form a 360-degree defensive perimeter and took some of his Marines over to the group of agitated men. His heart sank as he saw what they were standing around: a young Iraqi man, no more than twenty years old, lying in the street. He had been hit in the head by a bullet.

  Bowen couldn’t force himself to look at the scene. He posted outward for security, already assuming the worst.

  Nicholson immediately called for his Corpsman, HM3 Nate “Doc” Dicks. Lance Corporal Christopher Muscle, a combat aidsman, also rushed over to provide medical care. They placed the man into the bed of a pickup truck that sat close and began to examine him. Part of his skull was missing, and blood pooled rapidly in the grooves in the bed of the truck.

  As Doc Dicks checked the man for any other wounds, Muscle re
ached into his medical bag and pulled out an airway tube which he slid carefully into the patient’s mouth. As Dicks and Muscle worked on the man, Nicholson got on the radio and called for an urgent CASEVAC to fly the patient to the shock trauma facility located at CKV.

  When the team arrived, they rushed the patient to the helicopter-landing zone at TCP 2 and loaded him into the back of a U.S. Army H-60 helicopter for the flight.

  Forty minutes later, when the man arrived at the shock trauma center, the medics pronounced him dead on arrival. Later, Doc and Muscle told Nicholson that what had happened was what Bowen feared: the man had been struck by one of Bowen’s bullets, which had ricocheted off the speeding car. The errant bullet had hit the man in the front of his head, causing massive damage. There was nothing anyone could have done to save him.

  Hours later, his grieving father was paid the Diya, a condolence payment for the accidental death of his son. It was $2,500. He took it willingly and went on his way.

  After returning to The Bank with the other members of 2nd Squad, Bowen ran through the incident in his mind. He knew that, because he had squeezed the trigger, the man’s death was his responsibility. He was despondent that the man was dead, but he was certain that he had done the right thing. He had been protecting his squad from a clear threat, a speeding car that would not stop. The sheer randomness of it bewildered him. The ricochet could have just as easily hit a building or the ground.

  But it didn’t.

  Despite the dark cloud of grief that hung over him, Bowen continued to go on patrols and do his job. None of the other Marines ever asked him about the incident. They knew how difficult it must have been for him, what a burden it had to be to bear.

  After that day, Bowen didn’t remember any other patrols.

  But this was one he’d never forget.

  Despite the fact that we paid the dead man’s father $2,500, there is no price you can put on a human life. I know this. I never look back and think about how much more training we could have given the Marines to avert these tragedies, because we did. We trained. We ran scenarios. Shoot. Don’t shoot. We held classes. We did our best with the time we had.

  The bottom line is that war is a tough, uncertain business, and bad things happen to everyone involved even with the best-laid plans.

  It’s never clean.

  I’ll never think that the lives of the innocent men and women of Iraq who died in the crossfire of that war didn’t matter. They did. They meant something to me. They meant much more to the families they left behind.

  Many Iraqi locals were decent and kind to us as we disrupted their way of life. I guess they figured it was the price they’d have to pay for us helping them out. They gave us small cups of black spiced chai when we were cold. They generously fed us stacks of Iraqi flatbread they cooked in large clay ovens. It was dry and flavorless, but the closest thing to home cooking we had at times. Many willingly gave us information to help fight the insurgents whom they desperately wanted us to kill so the madness around them would end.

  Despite the kindnesses that many showed to us, the Qur’an advocates “an eye for an eye.” It dominates Arab culture. It bothered me because it meant that there was always the potential for retribution.

  There were dreadful thoughts that went through my mind after something like that happened—especially while we were still fighting. Although I knew the event constituted a tragedy, I asked myself, “Was the man who died shooting at me days earlier? Was he innocent or an insurgent? Did his family use the condolence payment to buy weapons to fight against us in retaliation?”

  At the end of the day, I buried those thoughts deep inside for another time. I had a job to do.

  Weeks later, Echo Company Marines shot at another moving vehicle. Three men drove their car down the alleyway behind Building 500 without their lights on. This was a violation of curfew, and it was curious for them to be driving so slowly—and with no lights.

  The Marines opened fire, putting several well-aimed shots through the windshield of their car.

  A quick reaction squad moved quickly on foot after the shots rang out, swarming the vehicle.

  Of the three men inside, only the driver had been shot. Two 5.56mm rounds had grazed his right shoulder. He bled mildly and winced in pain as the Corpsman treated the two long gashes across his arm with an antiseptic.

  We detained them and turned them over to our interrogators from HET. The men were shady, and the Marines were well within their rights under the ROE to engage the vehicle. Turned out the men were on the command’s wanted list. The Marines made the right call that night.

  Our departure date from Iraq was finally announced. We would begin turning over our battlespace in Rutbah with 1st Battalion, 2d Marines. We were ordered to turn over Building 500 to its rightful owner and were told to make sure it was in top shape before we left for CKV.

  We didn’t.

  It was a significant—and oddly emotional—event rooting out three months’ worth of trash, gear, sandbags, equipment, radios, and all our personal gear from Building 500. We filled in the hole behind it with everything we didn’t need—gear, dirty uniforms, trash, shit, torn cammie netting—then we set it on fire. Flames from it reached high into the night sky as we departed. The 15th MEU TOC came across the net and advised us that there was a huge fire in our zone.

  The radio operator blurted without a verbal filter before replying, “Yeah, no shit, it’s our fire.” Then, he keyed the handset, acknowledged the message, and politely let them know it was ours.

  For the most part, the Marines were ready to go, but they also had become accustomed to living so close together, under such austere conditions, for so long, that the reality took a while to sink in. After being extended on the deployment twice already, they braced for the impact of another letdown. This time, however, there would be no letdown.

  We were headed home.

  CHAPTER 27

  Liberty

  As we cruised home, there were no gratuitous stories of killing or destruction or death. I suppose I expected to overhear the Marines telling stories of the fighting, filled with bravado—but they were relatively absent from conversations and routine shipboard gossip. I think most of us had already begun tucking away what we had seen and done. No one was ready to talk about it.

  Everyone was excited to get home. The loud whooshing of the Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft as they lumbered onto concrete ramps at Kuwaiti Naval Base was deafening. They kicked up sand and blew saltwater mist in our faces. We didn’t care. We wanted to get aboard and start the trip back home. When we boarded, we saw that the crew of the ship, who had been floating around for almost nine months waiting for us, had draped “Welcome Home” banners all over the ship. It was uplifting to know that our naval brethren felt this way about us.

  Our ride back to the States would be a long one—five weeks. We worked out in the gym on the ship. We slept until we were hungry and ate until we were sleepy. There really wasn’t much else to do. Unlike other combat deployments where I flew home, I was grateful to be locked away at sea for weeks on end. It allowed me to decompress. I think it did the same for a lot of the Marines.

  We stopped in Perth, Australia, as our first liberty port. Most of the commanders and senior staff braced for impact, expecting a flood of liberty incidents: drunkenness, fighting, and run-ins with local authorities.

  To our astonishment, during our three days in port, we didn’t have a single incident. I was never able to put my finger on the source of this strange anomaly of good behavior. Maybe most were so keen to get home that they weren’t willing to jeopardize it by committing some half-cocked antics in a foreign country. Either way, we were proud of their conduct and fortunate not to have to deal with the headache of sorting out any troublemakers.

  The ESG continued to sail on to Hawaii where we made another port call. A week later, we were off the coast of southern California. Echo Company boarded the helicopters and flew off the Boxer and land
ed at Camp Pendleton—eager to greet our families after a deployment we’d never forget.

  As we flew off the ship, I thought that all the battles and the bloodshed were in our wake. I could not have been more wrong.

  CHAPTER 28

  Tribute

  Marines die in combat. It is inevitable. But the inevitability of death does not make it any less painful, any easier to accept. Every day, I remember that men I knew are now gone. Gone forever—and there is nothing that anyone can do to change that.

  Since 2004, I have had to attend more memorial services than I care to remember. I respect those who choose a life of faith, but I have never been deeply religious as an adult. Perhaps this combination has left me looking at things through a different lens.

  As I sit during memorial services, I don’t fantasize the dead are looking down on me or are keeping me safe. Nor do I think that angels lift the deceased to Heaven during the eulogy.

  I’m unmoved by the usual stage at the memorial services—the upside-down rifles, suede combat boots, aluminum dog tags, and Kevlar helmets—but the somber expressions of grieving parents and heart-wrenching faces of crying spouses and children break my heart. It is then that I’m on the verge of tears and find myself consciously looking away, trying to think of something mundane. I count the smooth rivets on the airplane parked conspicuously nearby or try to identify the state flags on display as they wave gently in the wind. I felt like an asshole at times for not paying attention to the service or worse, not allowing myself to grieve like everyone else.

  But that’s how I dealt with it.

  I think about parents who have to bury their kids and children who now have to go through life without a parent. I know that receiving a folded flag and a loved one’s medals help provide closure to these Marines’ families. Whenever I see a commander doing that, I can only think what a horrible, heartbreaking moment that is.