by Chris Martin
Hollenbaugh drafted two Marines up to the roof to assume the vacated sniper positions. He pointed them in the right direction, assuring all sectors remained covered as the tension continued to ratchet up in lieu of actual enemy engagement.
The lull, it turns out, was not indicative of a disorganized or unmotivated adversary. Quite the opposite.
The first sign they were facing something greater came in the form of a small pack of maneuvering insurgents who were spied advancing toward the north house only minutes after JN and three other Delta snipers had left the immediate vicinity.
In response, Captain Zembiec took up station across the street, joining Lt. Wagner and his larger contingent of Marines in the north house. He hoped to improve his situational awareness and gain command and control as the shifting scene picked up its pace.
* * *
Less than five minutes later, “the whole world opened up,” Hollenbaugh recalled. “It got so loud, so fast. Mortors, RPGs, gunfire, and grenades. Everything was coming.”
The American troops were suddenly hit with a complex assault. An overwhelming enemy force that had silently occupied a host of adjacent buildings was hitting them from multiple directions. A mass of insurgents—estimated to be 150 to 300 strong—flooded the vicinity, hauled to the fight from throughout the interior of Fallujah by bus, taxi, and pickup.
The initial assault was devastating. Dozens of RPGs cascaded on the American positions, fifty or sixty impacting the buildings during the first fifteen minutes. Sniper fire pinned them down and grenades were lobbed from adjacent roofs with a concentrated effort to decisively finish the job.
The open cemetery to the west, along with the repositioned Delta snipers who were now in overwatch behind it, prevented the marauders from closing the loop completely on the two houses. However, the assailants did successfully obtain a three-quarter pinch of the area. They also managed to suppress the FLOT, preventing reinforcements from storming to the Americans’ aid.
Hollenbaugh gave those devils their due. “When they opened it up on us, it was coordinated. You could tell it was because they just turned it on full blast like a faucet, which is the way you’re supposed to do it.
“Between the first rounds in the morning that came in, to two and a half or three hours later with the whole world blowing up … If you know where guys are, that’s a lot of time to plan. Plus, they had been waiting for the invasion. Fallujah had been cordoned off and leaflets had been dropped in saying if you are not a fighter, you have this amount of time to leave. So everybody in that place was a fighter. Period. There was no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
Almost immediately, a four-man Marines element on the north roof was hit by a grenade. All were wounded and pulled down from the roof to the relative safety of the second-floor interior. The screams could be heard from across the street in the south building.
Five more Marines would quickly be added to the casualty list in the north house. Delta medic Dan Briggs didn’t hesitate.
“Don, I’m going over.”
“Roger that. Go execute.”
Hollenbaugh described Briggs’s subsequent heroism with no shortage of awe in his voice: “Dan grabbed his medical bag and ran down the stairs, which was exposed to the enemy. Very well exposed. Several Marines found that out quickly, as did I. Well, we already know—they just showed us that they knew as well.
“Dan continued down the rest of the house and ran across the open street, which was being riddled with bullets. Rounds were skipping around him.”
While Briggs’s audacious charge across the street in the face of a literal hail of bullets ended with him unscathed, his predicament was only to become more problematic. Twenty-eight years old and youngest among the Unit element augmenting the Marines, Briggs would demonstrate his mettle yet again: the casualty collection point was actually located back across the street in the south house.
That location had the advantage of a covered and concealed route through which the wounded could be evacuated back to the FLOT. Of course, Murphy’s Law demanded that the north house be hit first and be hit hardest, forcing Briggs to transport injured Marines back across an invisible wall of supersonic lead.
“In my count, Dan exposed himself to enemy fire no less than six times to do his job,” Hollenbaugh recounted. “And he did a great job.”
* * *
The north house’s situation soon became even direr. The “40 mike-mike” vest of a wounded grenadier was left on the roof after he was evacuated, there to be used by the next man up. However, an explosion detonated one of the 40mm grenades and set the vest on fire, causing the remainder of the munitions to sympathetically detonate.
Seven more Marines were hit in the following minutes. Nearly half of the infantrymen had been incapacitated in the battle’s chaotic opening minutes.
Captain Zembiec joined Briggs in making the impossible dash across the contested street—multiple times. He frantically attempted to call for indirect fire but that request was denied for fear of civilian casualties. He also sought the advance of the M1A1 tanks, along with any way possible of evacuating the wounded—a group that was rapidly multiplying.
With helo extraction out of the question, First Sergeant William Skiles came to the rescue, racing into position in an unarmored Humvee to remove the most serious casualties. He made the three trips under intense fire, his entrances and exits made possible by the relentless suppressive fire provided by Lance Corporal John Flores.
After helping with their downed brothers, Lance Corporals Aaron Austin and Carlos Gomez-Perez reinforced the north roof, which simultaneously existed as a strategic strongpoint and an all-too-easy target.
Both men attempted to lob grenades at the hordes of amassing fighters. Austin was hit multiple times in the chest in the act but still managed to release his grenade as he spun to the ground and slumped down the open staircase.
A onetime illegal immigrant who moved to the States from Mexico City at the age of nine, Gomez-Perez pulled his fellow American behind cover but was struck while in the act. Despite being hit in the cheek and having his right shoulder torn open by heavy machine-gun fire as he pulled Austin to the relative safety of the roof’s surrounding wall, he managed to stay in the fight, throwing grenades and firing his weapon with his off hand.
Gomez-Perez attempted to perform CPR on Austin before the twenty-one-year-old Texan was attended to by Briggs and a Navy corpsman. The two dragged the critically wounded Marine down the exposed staircase and into the interior of the second floor of the north building, where they performed a tracheotomy in a desperate attempt to save the young Marine’s life.
Lance Corporal Craig Bell chose to fight fire with fire. After being injured by an incoming grenade himself, he launched an estimated one hundred grenades over the next hour from his M203, placing several into windows of enemy-held buildings.
* * *
With Briggs, Zembiec, and the Captain’s RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) on the move, the south roof was now manned by just Hollenbaugh, Boivin, and the two Marines pulled up to replace the Delta snipers who had returned to the FLOT.
Bear-sized Boivin held down a critical lane while Hollenbaugh bounced back and forth to cover his position as well as that of Briggs and JN. While ducking from spot to spot, Hollenbaugh noticed some insurgents moving in on the north house.
“I threw a grenade, engaged them, but didn’t quite know what the results were—they take cover like anybody else,” he said. “Another guy rounded the corner with an RPG. By the time I got up to shoot, he had launched it. I still shot even though by then he was already gone. I just shot to say, ‘I know you’re there—don’t do that again.’”
While Hollenbaugh was keeping the swarm off the other house—which was increasingly undefended due to the rapid attrition—his roof was in turn hit with a grenade. Both Marines suffered serious injuries in the blast. One stood up in a daze, holding his hand over his face, covered in gore.
The Delta sniper yanked
the staggering Marine down to cover. (“In a fight you don’t stand up—you stay down. There are rounds going everywhere. The enemy is on roofs also, so if you stand up, you just expose yourself.”)
Hollenbaugh then forced the young Marine down the stairs and directed him into the building, at which point he returned to aid the other wounded infantryman.
The Marine was moving backward in a low crawl, leaving a streak of blood. Hollenbaugh grabbed his belt to help move him to safety.
“Let’s go!”
“No, no … Take him first! Take him first!”
“I already got him!”
Hollenbaugh yanked the Marine up by his belt and muscled him over to the stairwell.
“I’ll always give that guy credit,” Hollenbaugh said. “You could tell he was in pain—just hurtin’. But he shook his head and pointed his finger at where he thought the other guy still was.
“I would have rendered aid to them but I knew they were hurt really bad and they needed to get out of there; we had too much work to do. It was not a time to treat casualties, it was a time to work.”
Now Hollenbaugh’s frantic life-and-death game of rooftop Whac-a-Mole had been expanded from three positions to five, plus the exposed area to the north he recently discovered. “I looked over at Larry and I rolled my eyes and just started covering the other avenues. Once again, all I was doing was going from hole to hole to hole, just kind of covering where we’re at.
“Larry had the south flank, so we couldn’t take him out of his position. He couldn’t be bouncing around. These other positions had help from other positions. But that south flank, there was a tall wall downstairs, so nobody else could cover it. Even guys on the second story couldn’t cover into that south flank.”
As Hollenbaugh was covering the north house, yet another explosion rocked the south roof just behind the sniper’s back. He heard Boivin call out.
“Don, I’m hit!”
Hollenbaugh continued to cover multiple positions as the situation rapidly plummeted downward.
“Can you make it over here?”
“Yeah…”
“All right—get over here.”
Boivin had been struck by shrapnel behind his left ear and arm, and his head was bleeding heavily. As Hollenbaugh was gauging the big soldier’s wounds, another grenade landed nearby, rolling across some blankets the wounded Marines had been using to provide shade as the penetrating midday sun began to deliver punishment from yet another direction.
The two men looked at the grenade (“It looked like a mouse running under the blanket”), looked at one another, and then both shouted, “Grenade!”
Boivin dove into the stairwell, while Hollenbaugh took cover behind the stairwell’s wall. After the grenade went off, Hollenbaugh grabbed a grenade of his own and walked over to the wall near where the offending explosive had just appeared. He cooked it off.
“One … two … three … I better get rid of this.”
“Tit for tat.”
The Master Sergeant then raked his gun alongside the wall, pushing it out to guide his rounds to the bordering home that sheltered aggressors less than twenty meters away.
With no one else available to man the roof of the south house—or the north house’s roof for that matter—Hollenbaugh went back to work, covering each position by himself. Ducking in and out of position, firing a round here and a round there, the Delta operator made himself appear to be several defenders at once in the opposition’s eyes. By doing so, he hoped to mask the effectiveness of the insurgent assault and deter a mad rush that could have easily finished off the reeling Americans.
Hollenbaugh explained, “At that point, I was covering all the holes. It was no longer a matter of really sitting there and effectively keeping each position at bay and properly covered. It had become going to each position, identifying likely spots where the enemy might be, putting a couple of rounds in each one of those.
“I just kept things busy and alive from our point, so they don’t feel they are attriting us. That was the whole point. Our positions were not unoccupied. I did not want them to think that because if they did, they could have established maneuver and executed on it. Pretty straightforward.”
After a couple more rounds of “work,” Hollenbaugh noticed that Boivin was still sitting in the stairwell, now in a ghostly pale white daze.
“Larry, you okay?”
He wasn’t. A New Hampshire native born four decades earlier to two Canadian immigrants, Boivin also brought a wealth of military and special operations experience to the fight.
However, now he appeared to be on the verge of passing out from blood loss, and his large, muscular frame would not have made for an easy carry down the fatal funnel the second-floor stairway had become. He was transitioning from force multiplier to force divider before his team leader’s eyes. “Oh, great.”
“There was nobody in the stairwell and nobody on that deck,” Hollenbaugh reflected. “Larry was just sitting there and I couldn’t have him as a casualty. I couldn’t take him out of there. If he passed out, he might have passed out half-sprawled on that stairwell, which means I would have had to go down the stairwell, drag him down, pick him up, and get him inside the house. And that also would have meant that all the positions went unoccupied.”
Hollenbaugh decided to take a timeout. He sat down on the staircase with Boivin sitting a step lower. The sniper grabbed the go-bag and pulled out some medical supplies. The gauze fell off his leg and picked up some sand—a tiny moment in an overwhelming day that still sticks in Hollenbaugh’s head.
“I don’t know why that sticks in my memory, but I’ve talked to a lot of guys and they were like, ‘Yeah, there’s some dumb stuff that just sticks in your memory.’”
He immediately composed himself after fighting with the gauze (“It was probably two seconds, but it felt like an eternity”), prepared a new bandage, and put a drive-on rag over Boivin’s head to hold it in place. He then cranked it on tight with the knot tails hanging down low.
Boivin put his helmet back on and turned around to face Hollenbaugh. The side of the breacher’s face was caked in blood, which had also gushed down over his uniform. The bloody helmet and drive-on rag combo lent him a truly menacing appearance. Hollenbaugh couldn’t help but admire the visage.
“Man … you look really cool.”
That fleeting moment of levity breathed new life into Boivin, the color rushing back to his face almost instantly. Satisfied, Hollenbaugh didn’t have time to witness the miraculous comeback any longer.
“You should be good.… I’ve got to go back to work.”
Hollenbaugh resumed his series of rapid transitions and engagements, putting rounds, grenades, or rockets into any suspected position—anywhere he saw a muzzle flash or gases escaping a window.
Lacking angles of fire or any means of calling in artillery or close air support, he intentionally ricocheted rounds off walls, banking shots to reach otherwise inaccessible enemy positions.
“There was a narrow, long horizontal window and I could see where the gases from that gun were coming out of that building,” he explained. “I couldn’t directly engage him and I couldn’t put anything through his window, but through this little narrow window, I could. I skipped a few rounds off of the sill up into his area.
“You learn over time that rounds keep moving after they hit something. It was improvising … ‘I can’t get to you, but just maybe’ … kind of like playing pool.
“And then I launched an AT4 over there. And his fire stopped.”
Eventually, he noticed that Boivin was gone from the roof as well, along with several magazines of ammo from his opened go-bag. Encouraged that the veteran Unit breacher was back in the fight, Hollenbaugh just went back to plugging holes in the dam, successfully keeping the flood of insurgents at bay.
Boivin, it turns out, had moved down to the second-floor landing area, which had also gone unoccupied by that point. His courageous stand could only last so long, as t
he wall behind him was getting peppered by RPGs and he was eventually forced to abandon the position and head down through the house.
That constant barrage of rocket-propelled grenades shook the entire building nonstop, creating conditions so deafening it was impossible to communicate verbally even across the road to the other house.
“I remember seeing two enemy maneuvering on their building,” Hollenbaugh said. “And out of the corner of my eye, I caught a Marine running up that stairwell exposed to them. I was going to try to yell and I couldn’t. I just stood up and started putting down fire and they scurried.
“That’s just how it was.”
* * *
Hollenbaugh faced an impossible task. There was only so long he could fend off an entire army before he ran out of ammunition or the other side finally realized they were battling a solitary warrior.
“I was alone on the roof, but I just knew I could not leave. We were getting attrited, I knew we were getting attrited. I had three casualties just on my roof and I knew there was a bunch more across the street because I had heard the yelling and screaming.”
He continued bouncing from hole to hole, throwing grenades and launching AT4s. After a few more rounds, a critical enemy gun position that had been suppressing the FLOT screamed into action again. Making matters worse, it wasn’t only preventing the arrival of reinforcements; it was also in a prime location to cut down any attempted retreat back to the FLOT.
Hollenbaugh grabbed a thermobaric AT4 and lined up his shot.
Just then Captain Zembiec reemerged on the south house roof.
“Don, it’s time to go!”
“All right … just let me shoot this thing first.”
Despite having been engaged in hours of frenzied gun-battling, Hollenbaugh placed the rocket with pinpoint accuracy. “The gun shut up and we left.”