Rage Company

by Daly, Thomas P.

  As roommates at the University of Rochester, Lieutenant James Thomas and I had dreamed of this moment during our final two years. We prepared ourselves mentally and physically. We took Arabic courses at 0800 after two hours of physical training and drank a mixture of Kahlúa and black coffee to stay awake. We debated the war, protested Michael Moore’s speech on campus, and skipped classes when something big was on the television news from Iraq. We were both exactly where we’d prepared ourselves to be, yet I had failed.

  James Thomas was the last man of the patrol to walk back through the door. So much had changed in such a short period of time. I didn’t know what to say. Our eyes met, and I knew there must have been a million things going through his mind. I had seen that face so many times before. It was tired and dreary, the exaggerated pick-me-up-because-I-am-down look. But I was dumbfounded. I let my best friend, covered in blood that dripped from his hands, walk right by me without saying a word. I even had to suck in my gut so he could squeeze past me in the hallway. I had control of half of his platoon, and I couldn’t get them out the door. Now I couldn’t even utter a single word. I never felt so low in my life. Welcome to Ramadi.

  After five minutes, I finally mustered the intestinal fortitude to go talk to my friend James. I found him in the outhouse between the buildings, scrubbing the blood off his hands. He noticed me standing behind him.

  “That was the first day-patrol the army has done since they established this COP a few months ago.” James was scrubbing and talking at the same time.

  “What?!” It was all I could think to say.

  “Yeah, as I came back into the COP, one of their lieutenants told me that this was why they don’t patrol during the day, ever.” He held his hands up, showing the bright-red blood to emphasize his point.

  “And the insurgents, they were waiting for us. They must have watched Rage 1 and Rage 4 head out on successive patrols. So the third time trucks carrying Marines arrived at another southern Ramadi COP, they knew what would follow—another patrol.” James scrubbed harder.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened. Our purpose on that patrol replayed itself in my mind. The company was dispersed to four different combat outposts in order to gain some familiarity with the area. On arrival at the COPs, each platoon would conduct a day - patrol, followed by another at night. Because we had only a limited number of vehicles to transport the platoons to the COPs, we were forced to conduct multiple trips from Camp Ramadi. Through the course of the morning the following happened: convoys went out, and, on arrival at a COP, a platoon of Marines dismounted, conducted hasty planning and preparations, then went out on a joint patrol with some soldiers from the respective COP. Well, by the time Rage 2 got to COP Grant, it was nearly 1500, and insurgents had watched two other platoons perform the previously stated plan.

  With regard to the enemy, Lieutenant Thomas was absolutely right: we had set ourselves up. We were 100 percent predictable, and Heidbreder was the price we paid. The soldiers’ apprehensiveness as we stepped off on the patrol began to make sense as well; it was their first day-patrol, too. The bastards might as well have been using us as their guinea pigs. I headed back into the command building and waltzed arrogantly into the COC.

  “You still want to conduct—” said Cobra 6, the army commander. He was sitting with his feet propped up against the wall.

  I didn’t let him finish. “Yes, let’s execute the night-patrol as soon as it is dark, and I want to head right into the area of the earlier firefight.” I was shocked at the captain’s response.

  “You’ll get one of my squads, eight soldiers. Do not bring more than fifteen out there. And come brief me on the route when you have it.”

  I nodded and headed back to our staging area in the far building. I found Lieutenant Thomas relaxing on the second floor, smoking cigarettes with Corporal Holloway.

  We quickly discussed the plans for the upcoming patrol, and I got Lieutenant Thomas’s blessing to take Holloway and one of his fire teams. I then went back to the command building to find Sergeant Arias, the army squad leader who would be on my patrol and the very same sergeant who was on point with Heidbreder earlier in the day. He had already been briefed on the patrol, and his boys were loading their assault packs with C4 and extra ammunition when I found him. He pulled out his strip map of the immediate area.

  “Sir, I recommend we offset our approach a few blocks to the east.” He pointed to the map, tracing the route as he spoke. “Then we will hit the cluster of six homes making up the block where the CCP was earlier today. We start at the northeast corner, and 146 will be the fourth house we hit. I have been to this block multiple times at night and each house has its own family living in it.”

  I was impressed with his unsolicited recommendation. The houses on the northern side of the block were slightly higher than the others in the area, and establishing ourselves there first made perfect sense.

  “Roger-that, Sergeant. Have them downstairs at 1830.” I looked around at each of his soldiers as I spoke, but not one of them looked up at me. The group was focused.

  I walked down the spiral staircase, again amazed by the decorative Arabic script lining the tiles. I stopped in the COC and gave Cobra 6 a quick brief on the patrol’s route. His demeanor told me that whatever I wanted to do would be approved. I spent five extra minutes staring at the situation map in the COC. A prominent intersection only 200 meters east of building 146 was circled in red.

  “Sir, what’s this intersection circled for?”

  “That’s where the insurgents would have ambushed our casevac if I sent ’em to pick up the casualty earlier.”

  I was puzzled.

  Sensing it, the captain stood up and moved beside me. “The insurgent’s wet dream is to cause a casualty, because then you, the injured dog, become predictable. Wounded, you choose the quickest way out, and at that point where casualty meets vehicle he is always waiting. He has already calculated where he wants to shoot you, so that you use his ambush site as the casevac location. Lieutenant, never take the easy path.”

  He was serious. I knew then that he had learned this lesson through immense pain. My earlier doubts about this man’s judgment were instantly erased.

  I headed back to the rest of the platoon and found a spot next to a snoring Lieutenant Thomas. I pulled out my own strip map and began to memorize the building numbers and the patrol sectors of every dominant structure that would affect my patrol. If we took fire from one, I wanted to be capable of coordinating a rapid response. I circled each intersection we would cross and added them up at the end. The number opened a pit the size of Texas in my stomach: twelve. We were moving a total of 700 meters, and I would go through twelve intersections. I slowly got up and tiptoed through a maze of sleeping Marines. I walked into the mess room and grabbed an O’Douls. No sooner had I taken it than I put it back. I jokingly reminded myself I didn’t even like the taste of alcohol, and an O’Doul’s was someone’s attempt to replicate it without the actual kick. I’d be better off drinking a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. I returned to the corner in the wall next to the sleeping Lieutenant Thomas and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes until I was ready. Then I headed back to the staging room in the command building.

  Flak, Kevlar, side-SAPI’s, drop pouch, bandolier with 162 rounds, AN-PRC 148 radio (the size of a large walkie-talkie), and PVS-14 night-vision goggles (NVGs). I touched each item as I mentally went through my own pre-mission checks. I grabbed my groin pad and crotch as I noticed Corporal Holloway staring at me, probably wondering what the hell I was doing.

  “Made you look, fag,” I said with a smile. He shook his head in amusement. The soldiers and the Marines were ready to go, and Sergeant Arias was heading out the door. Two-thirds of the way back in the formation, I followed the same path out of COP Grant that Lieutenant Thomas had taken a few hours earlier. It was a completely different world at night. Through my NVGs, everything seemed to tower over me. The formation moved down the thick dust o
f Farouk Way and passed Graves, heading east. We were moving pretty quickly, but the pace wasn’t too fast for us to notice our surroundings. I could tell Sergeant Arias had done this a few times before, and his squad knew what was and wasn’t out of place in the random piles of debris that littered the street.

  We approached the first intersection and halted. A flickering light illuminated the far side and would have revealed our shadows to distant observers as we passed. A soldier lifted a broken piece of the curb at his feet and nailed the light with a forty-yard throw. The elongated bulb shattered into a thousand different pieces. The soldier congratulated himself, and I began to rethink my decision to play soccer in high school.

  We continued north on the side street, passing multiple parked cars with low-lying power lines drooping over the road. Although none of the wires actually ran to the vehicles, I fully anticipated that each one would explode as I walked past. We finally hit the target block of houses. The formation staged for entry on the northeast courtyard wall. I could hear Arias trying to pound his way through the locked gate without success. His voice came over the PRR: “Breaching in five . . .” The small charge of C4 blasted through the gate, giving the soldiers entry. My ears were still ringing as I went through the gate, and our presence was definitely known by the entire neighborhood. I came through the door to the sound of soldiers shouting, “All clear on two.” Sergeant Arias stood in the foyer and said, “All clear, sir. The family is in that room on your left.” He began to stage his soldiers for movement to the next house.

  I grabbed the interpreter and entered the family room. The man of the house was about sixty years old, with gray hair and a well-trimmed mustache. His wife, daughter, and three grandchildren huddled in the corner, sharing a pile of blankets around a kerosene space heater. The interpreter began to go through the scripted list of questions I’d given him before we left. From my basic Arabic, I could discern that the old man answered each question with “No” or “I don’t know what you are talking about.” I felt insulted—this man had experienced 40mm grenades and .50 caliber machine gun rounds landing all around his home earlier that day, and now he denied even knowing about the firefight. I became more frustrated. Through his fear, the old man was telling me that the insurgents were the obvious power in the area. I had a limited amount of time. I jumped on the PRR and yelled, “Next house, go!” I staged in the courtyard, as Arias mechanically breached the gate this time.

  The superbly quick clearing of the home repeated itself, as it would all night, only this time no one was home. I walked into the foyer, where Sergeant Arias greeted me again.

  “They scattered, sir; they must have known we were coming.” The sergeant pointed to the plates of half-eaten food on the floor. I looked over his shoulder and saw a brown leather jacket draped over the refrigerator in the corner of the room. I had seen a middle-aged man walking outside the COP in that jacket earlier in the day, before our first patrol. Added adrenaline was pumping through my body.

  “Search it for two minutes; there has to be something here.”

  “Already on it, sir. Last time I was at this house, there were three middle-aged men living together. All three were teachers, surprisingly enough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything then, and I will be surprised if we do now.” The soldiers searched for a few minutes in an extremely detailed but messy manner. They found nothing.

  We moved on to the next house, which was occupied by another extended family. The man of the house refused to provide any information about the neighbors and again denied knowing anything about the earlier firefight only yards from his home. He even said he didn’t know that Marines had been on his roof. Again I was frustrated.

  Standing in the courtyard, I began to think there was no way in hell this city would ever get any better. Firefights like the one today were a daily occurrence, and the locals didn’t seem to care anymore. The next house was building 146, the CCP. Sergeant Arias had no problems with the gate; it was already blown open. I sprinted down the sidewalk and into the confines of the courtyard. The driveway was smeared with a dark red bloodstain. Corporal Holloway’s team of Marines picked up external security at the gate.

  I moved in through the main door to the house. It was almost a replica of the previous four homes we had been in. The stark similarities between the houses reminded me of suburban America. Arias was pointing to the family room on the left as he directed his soldiers with verbal insults. His extended finger told me where the family was. As I entered the room, the man of the house, about thirty-five years old, with black hair and a dark complexion, immediately asked my interpreter to put his wife and three children in a separate room. As soon as they left, he began to speak candidly. After a solid minute of fast-paced conversation, the interpreter turned to me mid-sentence and asked, “Can he see the map you have, Lieutenant?”

  I quickly pulled it out of my drop pouch. I placed it at the man’s feet and kneeled on the floor. It was only a strip map and didn’t show the distant sectors of the city, so I quickly oriented him to the confusing satellite imagery he was looking at. I pointed to the north and said, “Qatana,” pointed to the east and said, “Mila’ab,” and then pointed to his home and said, “Casa.” Realizing I had spoken Spanish, I laughed and the interpreter filled in the word I was looking for. The man grabbed my orange map pen out of my hand and began to circle intersections on the map. He was almost barking orders to the interpreter.

  “He says you should place checkpoints at each circle he has drawn on the map and that if you give him back his Kalashnikov you took last time you were in his home, he will kill the insurgents next time they come near his house,” the interpreter translated. The man continued to talk while the interpreter relayed the information. “About a week ago insurgents used a parked car near his home to snipe at COP Grant, and they often come into his house during the day to observe you at the base. The three men who live a few houses over moved in after the family who lives there moved to Syria a few months ago. He thinks they are terrorists.”

  Sergeant Arias interrupted the interpreter and told me, “We had a guy shot on the roof of the COP a week ago from this general direction. Luckily, it didn’t penetrate his body armor.”

  I looked back at the Iraqi man and asked whether he had been in the army before the war. He smiled, revealing a few missing teeth, but said nothing in response.

  The man’s wife appeared at the far end of the room. She was crying. She began to speak quickly, all her words directed at her husband, who immediately stood up and waved at her to go away. The interpreter translated: “She wants us to leave right now and is upset for him talking to us. She says insurgents will know he spoke to us because we have stayed here so long, and they will come kill him. We must leave.”

  The woman was right—we could not stay any longer. As we prepared to move out of the house, the man grabbed me by the arm and said two words: irhabi and Qatana. He was telling me the terrorists lived in the Qatana sector of the city. We made it back to the COP without incident, and the following morning Rage 2 loaded up on its trucks and headed back to Camp Ramadi.

  2

  DETAINEE WATCH

  November 28, 2006

  The brigade conference room was smaller than I’d imagined. Centered in the room was a wooden desk that could comfortably fit twenty people around its frame. Another twenty or so seats lined the walls of the room. There was hardly enough space to squeeze between the seats at the table and those lining the wall. The interior decoration was, as in most places in Iraq, nonexistent. The far side of the room, opposite the end with the door, contained a white projection screen of average size. As the last few Marines entered the room, Major Mayberry, the brigade assistant operations officer, stood up from his chair. He removed the printer paper covering the projector bulb to reveal the motto of 1st Brigade, 1st Armor Division: “Ready First.” It was the standard opening slide for all brigade briefs.

  The officers and the staff of Rage Company sat at the table, w
hile the squad leaders and those of lesser rank filled the exterior chairs. Only a week earlier, Captain John Smith and I had sat in this room for the first time, outlining all the required items for the company to the brigade. Now the entire company was here and ready to go. A sense of cautious optimism surrounded the fresh Marines, many still with thoughts of what had happened to Heidbreder in their minds.

  Operation Harrison Creek I: Rage Company’s objective areas during Harrison Creek I.

  Major Mayberry was the orator for the first of the day’s half-dozen briefs. The pouch of tobacco and the Civil War-era pipe sitting in front of him complemented the Southern accent now heard by the Marines. “Operation Squeeze Play, gentlemen; this is the reason you are here. Roughly one month ago, the staff at Multi-National Forces-West [MNF-W] published the blueprint for this operation.” The major proceeded to the next slide.

  “The title of the operation encompasses its intent; the goal is to simultaneously squeeze al Qaeda out of the urban centers of Al Anbar Province. Once Al Qaeda is isolated in the rural villages, we believe that their grip over the Iraqi populace will falter, thus providing us the time and security to stand up Iraqi Security Forces [ISF].” He proceeded to the next slide, revealing the locations across Al Anbar Province that the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit would surge into: Haditha, Rutbah, and Ramadi. The three cities formed a triangle on the map. Unlike the Sunni Triangle south of Baghdad, the interior of these three points was mostly desert. After a few moments of studying the slide, Captain James, the intelligence officer for 1st Battalion, 37th Armor (1-37 Armor) and a University of Florida graduate, began the intel portion of the brief. “Marines, it is a pleasure to be working with you. Before we carry on with the details of Operation Squeeze Play in Ramadi proper, I would like to capture the current nature of the insurgency for you.”