In this particular house, there were two MAMs sleeping under blankets with the other eight members of the family. I pulled the red-and-yellow blanket off the closest MAM’s face and told the interpreter to start with that one. The young Iraqi’s eyes were the size of watermelons. The interpreter began to question him, but he merely stared into my face with no response. I gave him a mean, quizzical expression. I pulled flexi-cuffs out of my drop pouch and grabbed the young man’s right hand. It was a poor attempt to get the kid to say something through fear. Apparently, fear worked only for the insurgents. The young man began to cry. The mother in the room was now shouting at the interpreter. She was obviously pleading with us to leave him alone.
The interpreter began to laugh. “Sir, he is what you call, uh, stupid?” We looked at each other with confused expressions. The interpreter was still searching for the correct English term, and I was still primarily focused on the people in the room.
Corporal Holloway spelled it out for me. “Congratulations, sir, you just tried to detain a mentally challenged Iraqi.” The Marines in the room were laughing now, and the story of Lieutenant Daly taking down the retard spread throughout the house as if Britney Spears had been photographed without her underwear again.
I photographed the family, and the squad staged to move to the next house. As I stepped out into the courtyard, the crisp December air cooled my mind. I felt like such an ass, and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the exaggerated story I was going to hear all day at Camp Ramadi tomorrow. I reminded myself that forty minutes earlier, I had narrowly escaped death. I followed behind Albin as he sprinted through the courtyard gate and 10 meters down the street to the next home.
As I moved up the driveway, a Marine was pounding away on a locked shed door in order to search its contents. The sound of metal banging on metal was like fingernails on a chalkboard. On entering the home, I found Holloway separating the men from the women and children. The Marines had found an AK-47 and four loaded magazines in the kitchen. The man of the house was legally allowed to have all of the items, but we decided to test his hands for gunpowder residue anyway. The test came back negative. On the roof the Marines found what appeared to be spider holes and firing positions knocked out of the concrete on the retaining wall. I photographed the potential hasty fighting positions and hurried back downstairs. The other two squads in Rage 2 were moving faster than we were, and we needed to pick up the pace. To increase our speed, I cut out two of the four questions I had given the interpreter to ask each MAM.
The remaining clear portion of the mission was rather simple. The process of searching homes and questioning residents continued for another hour and a half. It was nearly impossible for me to distinguish insurgent from civilian based on the few questions we asked as we entered each house. Unless the insurgents were keeping IEDs in their bedrooms, searching their homes was pointless. In order for them to maintain the average of five IEDs a day, they had to be keeping them somewhere. We needed to hit the Qatana. Being a mostly abandoned commercial district, it was the only logical place for a large cache of explosives.
When we hit the drop-dead time, we finished the house we were clearing and moved back down to Vic Mackey. As in the insertion, the platoons offset their movements back and we used slightly different routes. Instead of heading back to COP Falcon, every platoon was directed to go to COP Grant in order to make our trip back to Camp Ramadi easier.
As we proceeded south along a side road, I heard what sounded like music. The column of Marines in front of me came to a halt. I took a knee, leaning against a courtyard wall opposite Albin and Eakin. They did the same on the far side of the street. Right after we halted, we began to move again. I got up slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible. I wanted to avoid another incident of being the Marine picked out as the target by a machine gunner. I heard the music again. It was very faint, but I could make out the words “Master! Master!” in English. I was immediately freaked out, and as the sounds got louder there was no mistaking them: it was American rock. Unfortunately, I had never heard the song “Master of Puppets” by Metallica before. I was pretty sure the guy in front of me hadn’t either because I could see him visibly shaking. After about a minute of fear, I realized how much of a blessing the blaring music was.
As we got closer, I could have literally shouted across the street, and no one would have heard except the Marines with me. It was like being at a concert, only everybody had rifles. The psychological operations team for 1-37 Armor was masking our movement back to COP Grant. I never felt more like a badass, scanning rooftops and windows as dark turned to light with that song in the background. It was surreal.
Rage Company made it back to COP Grant at 0555 without a shot being fired during the egress. After a brief look at the detainees taken by the other elements, eight in all, I took a quick nap. By 0830, I was on a seven-ton escorting the detainees to Camp Ramadi for processing. My tour as a Bandit was over. Our inability to defeat al Qaeda was apparent.
PART TWO
1st Battalion, 6th Marines
5
ENTERING QATANA
December 16, 2006
The front door was solid wood and heavy. I had a difficult time opening it. While the structure and the architecture itself were uniquely Middle Eastern, the door reminded me of a posh estate in America’s Northeast. Lined with concrete barriers and reinforced fighting positions, the exterior of the compound bore a sole reminder of its former affluence: the door I was now opening. Camp Hurricane Point was a Marine base, the headquarters for 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, located where the Saddam Canal and the Euphrates River meet. Situated on the northwest corner of downtown Ramadi, Hurricane Point was a former Ba’ath Party palace and symbol of the Saddam regime. Now it was an American fortress. The company staff had traveled to the camp to receive the order for the next mission: Operation Hue City.
The five senior Marines of Rage Company—Captain John Smith, Lieutenant Craig Trotter, First Sergeant Eric Carlson, Gunnery Sergeant Edward Bishop, and I—sat around a large T-shaped table. Our four platoons remained at Camp Ramadi, anxiously awaiting the details of the second phase of Operation Squeeze Play that would be relayed on our return.
Area of Operations Tarheel: 1/6 Marines area of operations in central Ramadi.
The Qatana: Before the war Qatana was Ramadi’s commerical hub. When Rage Company entered, it was the capital of the insurgents’ Islamic State of Iraq.
The battalion commander and the operations officer for 1/6 personally briefed us on the first of what would become many incursions into Qatana. The two men were the only other individuals in the room, and I quickly noticed the differences in their personalities. The battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, was short at five-seven and had graying hair and a stocky frame. He silently sat at the table, his eyes scanning the Rage staff and undoubtedly forming opinions of us in the same manner that I now judged him.
The operations officer was the complete opposite. This youthful major was always talking. His jet-black hair provided a direct contrast to the lieutenant colonel’s graying status. It also highlighted the significant difference between the two men: experience.
I sat back and listened to the brief. This first mission, Operation Hue City, was going to be conducted after a daytime movement to Combat Outpost Firecracker. Firecracker was a company-size COP situated on the western fringe of Qatana that would become Rage Company’s base of operations. We would spend one night and the next day preparing for the mission and conducting coordination with Alpha (Apache) and Charlie (Comanche) 1/6. Once we arrived at COP Firecracker, Lieutenant Grubb’s platoon would attach to Comanche for the duration of the operation.
Beginning on the second night at the COP, we would clear east, directly behind a Pathfinder element on the southern side of Racetrack Street. Charlie would clear the northern side, and Alpha would be on our southern flank. For the mission, Alpha was going to be represented by one platoon of Marines, rather than by the entire compan
y. They would bring less than 20 percent of the manpower in Rage Company into the fight.
The purpose of the mission was to clear about 1.5 kilometers east down Racetrack and secure Charlie Company’s new home, Combat Outpost Qatana. It was briefed that the mission would most likely take only one night. If there was a delay, we would execute the remainder of the clear the following night. Somewhere in the brief, the operations officer (OPSO) mentioned that there was an uncorroborated intel report saying that the future COP might be rigged with explosives. To counter this, 1/6 was going to send in a team of bomb-sniffing dogs before they occupied the structure. If it was booby-trapped, then Comanche’s secondary and tertiary buildings to use were across the street.
I was relieved when I found out we wouldn’t be going into the potentially rigged building.
The entire brief lasted about thirty minutes. The operations officer for 1/6 did not go into detail about what would happen after we seized the COP. He also used key Marine Corps phrases such as, “I don’t know how it is in your battalion, but here in 1/6 we . . .” I was immediately unimpressed by his condescending mannerisms. To say the least, it wasn’t anywhere close to the good reception we received from 1-37 Armor.
After a round of questions, which weren’t thoroughly answered, Captain Smith asked the 1/6 battalion commander why the request made by the Navy SEALs to take part in the operation had been rejected.
While working with 1-37 Armor, the SEALs had been in support of our raids. They mentioned that they were never allowed to operate in 1/6’s area of operations. So Captain Smith, who had a background in the force reconnaissance community, decided that he would try to help his fellow operators, telling them to make a formal request to support Operation Hue City. The SEALs followed his advice, and the offer was turned down.
From his facial expressions, I could tell that 1/6’s battalion commander was clueless about the request. He had no idea what Captain Smith was talking about. Not until he was asked by the battalion commander did the operations officer take the opportunity to confess that he had been responsible. “Sir, we don’t need their assistance. They are honestly more of a hassle to deal with than they are an asset,” he said.
That was the first time I had ever heard someone refer to Navy SEALs as a hassle.
Following the brief, I went to visit the battalion intelligence section. I personally knew one of the lieutenants. We had attended Officer Candidate School together in the summer of 2003, and he knew my twin brother from college. A prior Marine sergeant and around six feet tall, Lieutenant Jason Mann was also one of the smartest guys I knew. His strong reputation followed him everywhere he went. As a candidate, he more than earned his place as our company honor graduate. For good reason, I was interested in hearing his valuable opinion about Qatana and the insurgents operating in the area.
I bumped into Jason as I walked past the combat operations center. We exchanged a man-hug, nothing more than a handshake and a back tap. I followed him into the intelligence workspace. For the first time, I was going to view the products of a Marine battalion’s intelligence section. I wondered how their methods differed from 1-37 Armor’s.
At no time during our predeployment workup did 2/4, Rage’s parent battalion, have a fully staffed intelligence section. In training, the products they produced—intelligence summaries, and so on—were nothing of note, not because of a lack of competence but because of a lack of manpower. When I first met Captain James at 1-37, I was blown away by the depth and scope of the intelligence he had access to. It was above and beyond what I had expected.
We walked into a room with a twenty-foot ceiling that contained numerous desks. Maps were strewn about the floor and pinned to the walls. Lieutenant Mann moved to the closest desk on my right. He picked up a stack of small maps, each containing three or four laminated pages bound together by a small D-ring, the contents of which were thorough.
Each page was a map of one objective. Some objectives had multiple target buildings, others only one. On the reverse side of the page were a picture and a description of the high-value individuals who might be located at the target. There was also a three-dimensional image of the target building, with entrances and exits highlighted, as well as details about what the location was used for. I opened my assault pack and started to drop the laminated pages in, counting them as I went.
Jason Mann had essentially done my work for me. Unlike the stack of intel reports that 1-37 Armor gave us to sift through, Jason was giving me the information that mattered to the Marines on the ground. Instead of spending hours scanning through piles of information, Albin, Eakin, and I would do nothing more than hand out the packages. After that, we would have a free night aboard Camp Ramadi.
“So, what did you think of the brief?” Jason asked me.
“It was ambitious. That was a lot of territory to cover in one night,” I casually replied. I thought about mentioning the SEAL conversation but held back, not knowing the rest of the audience.
The other person in the room, a captain sitting at his desk, joined the conversation. “We have been trying to get the battalion to action some of these targets for over a month,” he said. “Others like the amusement park, VBIED [vehicle-borne IED] factory, sniper alley: they have been targets since the battalion got in country. We just can’t convince the operations officer to hit the damn places.” The captain was pointing to a map on the wall of roughly fifty targets within Qatana. He gestured toward some of the places as he spoke. I was struck by the fact that he said “convince the operations officer” and not the battalion commander.
“I guess we will hit them for you.” I felt awkward as soon as I had finished the sentence. It came across as an insinuation that 1/6 wasn’t doing their job. The last thing I wanted to do was burn bridges with the intel section. I changed the subject. “Jason, what is the deal with these buildings they are going to use as the new COP?” I asked, breaking the uncomfortable pause in the conversation. The issue of the booby-trapped buildings was still very real in my mind.
“You don’t want to know,” Jason replied. “Let’s just say that some of our local sources are speculating that the primary, secondary, and tertiary build sites for COP Qatana are now giant mines awaiting our arrival.”
I was in disbelief. The OPSO had failed to mention that the secondary and tertiary buildings were potentially bombs. I didn’t mention this to Jason, not wanting to fan the preexisting distrust among the various battalion sections.
The XO, Lieutenant Trotter, poked his head through the door and looked around the room. His eyes stopped searching when he found me, and I wondered whether I had done something wrong.
“Daly, hurry up!” he barked. “You won’t believe who is here.”
The XO was gone before I could ask him what he was talking about. I stuffed the last of the intel packages into my pack and followed him out, telling Jason I would see him around.
Catching up to the XO in the hallway, I pondered who could generate such interest. “Who is it?” I finally asked, matching him stride for stride.
A smile spread over Trotter’s face. “Oliver North. Captain Smith is going to give him shit for announcing our deployment in country while we were still on the information blackout.”
Back in mid-November, Mr. North had announced the deployment of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) into Al Anbar Province. He had also detailed the assets and the troop strength of the MEU. Then he listed potential cities we would be deployed to. Captain Smith and I watched his announcement on Fox News from the brigade headquarters. The MEU was still cut off from contact with the outside world, and our families thought we were in Kuwait. My family found out I was going into Iraq not from me but from Oliver North. I’m sure al Qaeda’s leadership learned of our presence the same way.
The entire company staff was on the move to the colonel-turned-journalist’s room. We got to the space, which was so small it had likely been used as a closet in the Saddam era. Ollie was sitting at a desk, probably fi
ling a story, while his two cameramen relaxed on their bunk beds. The civilians looked exhausted. Captain Smith introduced himself as a company commander with the 15th MEU. He wasted no time in getting to the point.
“Sir, why did you tell the insurgents we were coming?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Mr. North said.
Captain Smith explained how we were on an information blackout when North had made his announcement on Fox News. I got the feeling from the colonel’s mannerisms that someone had mentioned this to him before.
“The pentagon released it,” North said. “I wouldn’t have said anything unless they had released it to the press.”
First Sergeant Carlson, who was the tallest man in the confined space, shook his bald head over and over in disgust. “Bullshit.” It was all the large man uttered. The rest of us just stared at the colonel.
Not in a friendly way.
Oliver North was visibly taken aback. Captain Smith tried to calm the group. “Well, sir, you know what this means,” he said.
There was a pause while questioning eyes glared at one another.
“You have to take pictures and sign autographs with each one of us,” Captain Smith said with a slight smile. Gunnery Sergeant Bishop, our logistics chief, had come up with the plan to make North as uncomfortable as possible before we walked in. It worked.
“I would be delighted,” replied a relieved Oliver North.
The next thirty minutes were spent posing for photos as if we were standing with a celebrity. The entire time, I waited for Oliver North to hurry us along so he could get some sleep. He never did.
Back at Camp Ramadi, Captain Smith briefed the highlights of Operation Hue City to the platoon commanders. The intent of the mission was to open a secure route to COP Qatana, seize the building to be used as the COP, and then clear the surrounding areas beyond the structure. Racetrack Street was the most direct route to the new COP and was the focus of the operation. The mission would use Pathfinder and dismounted Marines as mutually supporting elements.
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