Rage 6 got on the radio next. “Warlord, this is Rage 6, we just took an RPG shot from the abandoned COP. Can you ID the—” His transmission was interrupted by Lieutenant Thomas, who shouted, “Break, break, break! Rage 6, this is Rage 2, we just took another sniper shot from the COP. Requesting tank main gun, over.”
Moments later, Tarheel approved Rage 2 to use the tank’s 120mm cannon.
Bustamante videotaped from the Ice Palace.
Warlord fired from 15 meters away, directly into the second floor of the building. Dust and debris blew out of the open windows. The concussion shook Bustamante’s camera. There was one problem. The tank was firing from the southern side, and its blasts were not impacting the northern corner where Rage 2 was taking fire from.
Another sniper shot hit the side of Rage 2’s building. It was followed by a few shots at Rage 1. At some point, the Wasp showed up again. The arrival of the flying lawn mower temporarily ended the chaos that was developing. Captain Smith, Lieutenant Jahelka, and I all huddled around Albin and the small video screen he held. With three officers watching, he flew the UAV around each platoon, starting with Rage 1.
As he progressed, our frustration built; there were no insurgents running through the streets on the video feed. The enemy, knowing the UAV was overhead, was going to wait it out. They understood the concept of battery life, and they patiently waited. During the UAV’s flight, we saw a few suspicious vehicles, nothing more. Again, Albin flew the Wasp back to Hurricane Point.
Everyone was tense. Rage 2 took another sniper shot from the same position in the abandoned COP. We responded with a tank main gun round. With our attention focused to the north, Corporal Conley’s squad across the street was tested next.
Three teenage boys walked down an east-west alley toward Conley’s compound. On the roof was Lance Corporal Ezekiel Aranez, who painfully watched the boys casually walk closer to his position. Two of the young men held hands.
The previous day, in the same alley, was where the SEALs had shot the teenager for walking toward them in such a manner. Now, in accordance with ROE, Aranez watched. It wasn’t the first time teenagers had walked toward him that day, but it would be the last.
The boys walked so close to Aranez that the exterior wall on the roof blocked his view of them. The three had come to the intersection with the north-south alley that bordered Conley’s compound and ran north to the Ice Palace. Aranez knew that the alley was covered by a fighting position in the Ice Palace. He didn’t know the Marine there was not at the ready. His weapon was leaning against the wall next to him.
This simple mistake allowed two of the teenagers to remove hand grenades from their pockets without consequence.
The Marine at the Ice Palace reached for his weapon.
Aranez saw only the first grenade. It sailed over the roof’s exterior wall and bounced off his chest, landing at his feet. Merry Christmas, Aranez.
The second grenade hit the top of the wall and fell back toward the trio of Iraqis, who were now 50 meters down the east-west alley and out of sight of the Ice Palace’s fighting position.
The Marine at the Ice Palace watched the grenade in the street explode. As it did, Aranez desperately dove for cover. For whatever reason, the grenade that had hit him in the chest did not detonate. Lying on the dusty concrete roof, Aranez stared at the circular object he had thought was going to kill him. Instead he was alive, spared by luck or some higher power. Merry Christmas, Aranez.
In the Ice Palace, those of us in the COC were putting together what had just happened. After the grenade throws, the insurgents had backed off, or so I thought. What they were really doing was waiting. They thought they had just caused a casualty at Conley’s compound. Now they were waiting for the convoy to come pick up the injured Marine. Surely, they planned to ambush us as soon as we exposed ourselves to take the casualty to the Medevac vehicle. They finally figured out that no one was hurt when the convoy never came.
The insurgents began to harass Rage 1 and Rage 2 with more small-arms fire. Rage 2 fired another tank main gun round into the abandoned COP. Again the Wasp flew overhead, and a lull in the shooting developed. We circled over Rage 1 and the Ice Palace first. There was civilian activity, or what appeared to be, to our south. All of the civilians were males. They seemed to wander aimlessly. I figured they were following the directions written on the walls we had seen during Hue City II.
A little farther south, and in the same spot as the previous day, was a group of two dozen kids playing soccer. We watched them for a few moments. A black vehicle pulled into the middle of the group. Three adult males wearing mostly black got out of the car. The kids stopped playing soccer and stood motionless, looking at the men. A conversation that we obviously could not hear was taking place. After a few moments, the men got back into the car and drove away. With the children dispersing, Albin followed the black car’s progress with the Wasp.
I looked at Captain Smith; he, too, was watching the screen. What had the men told the children? Stop playing soccer; there is going to be an attack? Were they recruiting fighters or a suicide bomber? Something was going on, but we were almost powerless to stop it. Captain Smith turned away, probably to update his platoon commanders. He never got to the point where he actually made a transmission on the radio.
I continued to watch the screen. The black car crossed over Racetrack, heading east, 150 meters north of checkpoint 296. It made a left at the intersection where I had spotted the three men smoking fewer than twenty-four hours earlier.
That’s when I saw it.
A man in black pajamas with an RPG on his shoulder sprinted across the street. “RPG! RPG!” I shouted, telling Albin to take a picture; it was a unique capability of the Wasp. He took the picture but wasn’t quick enough to catch the guy going across the street. Rage 6 got on the net and asked battalion whether they had seen the man sprint across the street on their monitor. They had not.
We stared at the map. The RPG gunner was only 400 meters from our position. As we stared at the map, a blast smacked the wall above us. My first thought was that the RPG had taken out the .50cal position.
“Holy shit! Holy shit!” a Marine above was screaming. I sprinted up the stairs. At the top I froze, not in horror but in sheer amazement. An RPG had not hit the building; a sniper round had. The large-caliber bullet had smacked directly into the ballistic glass that Lance Corporal Cooke, who manned the .50cal and was the source of the screaming, sat behind. Inches from his face was the spiderwebbed glass containing fragments of the bullet. The shot was perfectly aligned with his head. I must have been in a similar state to Eakin’s only a few days earlier because Lieutenant Jahelka sprinted past me to reach his shocked Marine.
The lieutenant leaned beside the now-useless glass; another round would have gone straight through it. “Man that fucking .50cal, Cooke!” Jahelka was taking control. He scanned the distant horizon, lining up the angle of the bullet’s impact with the only two -story structure dead ahead of the position. It was only about 200 meters away. He analyzed the building through his rifle combat optic. “Movement! Second floor!” shouted the platoon commander. Cooke sighted in on the position, awaiting the word to open fire.
“PID! Give him a burst!” Jahelka had spotted the weapon the insurgent was using, and the thundering recoil of the large-caliber machine gun rocked the Ice Palace.
I skipped down the stairs and back into the COC. Albin had the Wasp hovering over the black car. It was parked outside the front door of the home Cooke was now blasting with the .50cal machine gun. Captain Smith got on the radio and requested a guided multiple launch rocket (GMLR).
GMLRs were the most accurate weapon in our inventory. The flying telephone pole carried a significant punch, and the enemy never saw it coming. The weapon could be fired from more than 300 kilometers away and still maintain a high degree of accuracy, the degree of which is obviously classified. An observer didn’t simply request for a GMLR to be used; he specified which part of the buil
ding he wanted to destroy. It was the power of pinpoint target location. Observers refer to it as a mensurated grid (three-dimensional target location).
Being an artilleryman, I had made it my purpose in life to observe the use of this weapon. It would be a unique experience for me; my unit was transitioning from cannon to rocket artillery on its return to Camp Pendleton. It would be sweet if I could say I spotted for one in combat. To ensure that I got my wish, I repeatedly rambled off the capabilities of the GMLR to Captain Smith.
The weapon system sold itself. It was more accurate and all-weather, and it had a quicker time to impact than air. On average, it took slightly more than twenty minutes from the time that contact with the enemy was initiated to the impact of an aerially delivered munition. If the GMLR’s use was approved, the building would have been gone in five minutes or less. The best part was that you could be standing 100 meters from the impact and walk away without a scratch. The top-down angle of attack blew all of the structure’s debris straight up into the air and usually left the building standing while completely destroying its interior.
The bandits of 1-37 had a video of a GMLR striking a large structure on Broadway outside COP Falcon. An insurgent who had been on the roof at the time could be seen falling back down to earth moments after the dust cloud cleared. To great fanfare, the video was widely circulated among the population of Camp Ramadi. With such a natural PR campaign, this accurate form of rocket artillery was the precision guided munition of choice for the coalition. I knew Captain Smith was sold.
Unfortunately, the battalion’s response to our request was no. They denied it because we weren’t taking continuous fire from the insurgents. I thought it was a foolish rationale; how do you define continuous fire when you are engaging snipers? The insurgents were clearly used to 1/6’s not-so-aggressive tactics. We had been taking sniper fire all day, but it wasn’t continuous enough to rate the GMLR. If Cooke had been killed by that sniper’s bullet, we would have leveled the building. Because he was still alive, however, we would allow the enemy to escape.
We fired another burst from the .50cal into the structure. With the black car still sitting outside, the Wasp left for Hurricane Point. When the UAV came back, the car was gone.
Later in the afternoon, a single shot was fired from Rage 1’s position. Lieutenant Shearburn’s voice came over the radio and stated that Corporal Dustin Anderson had just scored Rage Company’s first confirmed enemy killed in action (KIA). The platoon commander reported that the insurgent had attempted to sprint out of the four- or five-story building that Rage 1 had received fire from earlier in the day. An alert Corporal Anderson shot him only a few steps outside the door.
With most of the Marines in the room smiling or cursing the recently deceased hajji, Captain Smith asked Lieutenant Shearburn whether the man was armed. The cheering stopped as we waited for Shearburn’s answer: no. Captain Smith ordered his lieutenant to take out a squad when it was dark and search the body.
As soon as the cover of darkness set in, Rage 1 went out to search the body of our first confirmed kill. The Marines maintained observation of the deceased man until the end of the day, in order to ensure the body was not booby-trapped. It took them less than five minutes to make it to the fallen man. Seconds later, they confirmed that he was an insurgent.
“Rage 6, this is Rage 1 Actual, confirm KIA as enemy. Two grenades on his person; recommend we BIP, over,” said Lieutenant Shearburn.
Inside a small metal container that the twenty-something Iraqi had been carrying were two hand grenades. Captain Smith approved the request to blow the items in place (BIP). Staff Sergeant Eagle detonated the fragmentary devices, and Rage 1 headed back to their position.
I was ready to zone out and reflect on past festive Christmas holidays. All day the enemy had desperately tried to cause a casualty, without success. I noticed Captain Smith staring at the map, debating our next move. The day wasn’t over yet. Rage 1 came over the net. Lieutenant Shearburn was requesting to execute a raid south into the region they had been taking fire from during the day.
Captain Smith liked the idea. With the insurgents recovering from the day’s activities, we would go on the offense. Rage 1 proposed to take two of his squads and raid the structures in the vicinity of the Pope-Zazu intersection. They would also search the large commercial buildings they had taken fire from closer to their location.
It was a dangerous raid. None of the roads in the objective area had been cleared by Pathfinder. There was no way to know whether any of the buildings had been mined. Shearburn would not be deterred, however. There was one concept the officers of Rage Company all agreed with: the best defense was a good offense.
Rage 1 stepped off on the raid. Within moments of arriving at Pope and Zazu, they discovered a network of fighting positions on the roofs of the area’s abandoned buildings. The exterior walls all had spider holes broken into their sides, each of which was oriented toward Rage 1 or the Ice Palace. Most of the fighting positions still had empty 7.62 shell casings around them, evidence of their use during the day.
The most interesting part of Shearburn’s find was the connectivity between the fortified structures. Holes had been knocked out of the structures’ adjoining walls. The same style of two-by-fours that we had found on my first patrol littered the roofs of the buildings. None of the homes were occupied. Either the insurgents had kicked everyone out, or the occupants had left long ago.
Rage 1 began to demolish the fighting positions. For hours into the night, the Marines used sledgehammers, plastic explosives, and incendiary grenades to dismantle the network. When Shearburn ran out of C4, he conveniently found an insurgent stash of plastic explosives to continue his demolition with. It was a successful raid.
The next day saw almost no enemy activity. Whether it was the raid executed by Rage 1 or the insurgents simply taking some time off did not matter. We were regaining the initiative, and that night we looked to keep it that way.
Captain Smith studied the map all afternoon. He had already ruled out heading south that night, fearing defensive IEDs laid by the insurgents to prevent another successful expedition. Rage 6 decided that going south was too predictable, so he looked to the north. The intersection of Annapolis and Farm Road contained half a dozen target buildings within 200 meters. I informed him that 1/6 had never actioned any of the targets. Americans hadn’t been in the area in half a year.
We debated the purpose and the risks of the mission. There had to be a defensive belt of IEDs in the area; Pathfinder had never cleared the roads before. It became the one precondition for the operation. Pathfinder had to clear our insertion route to the target homes. Captain Smith got on the net and made the request to Tarheel. They put us on standby while they relayed the request to brigade.
Waiting in the Ice Palace, Captain Smith hashed out the details with Rage 2 and Rage 3. Rage 2 would take two squads, while Rage 3 brought one into the raid. We used the intersection to deconflict the targets. Rage 3 would hit the targets west, and Rage 2 got the east. Captain Smith was also taking out the headquarters element. He wanted to establish the forward COC in building 11, Golf 6. The three-story house overlooked the Annapolis-Farm intersection and appeared to be a commanding structure on the map.
Tarheel came back with their answer: yes. Pathfinder was going to break off its planned route and begin to clear our designated streets within thirty minutes. We prepared our gear.
I did not smoke with Holloway or James Thomas before the mission.
On the first floor of the Ice Palace, the Marines of Sergeant Ahlquist’s squad waited for the word to step off. The floor was completely open and empty. The lone object of mention was a wall of sandbags with a Marine standing behind it. He covered the Ice Palace’s only entrance.
We left the Ice Palace in silence. The sound of boots sloshing through three inches of water was the only noise we made. I scanned the alleyways around Conley’s compound as we went past. There was a sense of determination in my min
d that I had not felt before. Maybe it was a reaction to being shot at all day on Christmas. Regardless of the reason, Christmas’s feeling of defenselessness was gone, replaced by the adrenaline of action. The damp cold attacking my wet legs was of no consequence. Unlike previous nights, there was no fear of death, no anxiety of hidden enemies, only an acute sense of awareness.
This inner voice directed my rifle from window to window and down every alley. I walked past houses but saw fighting positions. A young boy stood in the front doorway to a house 50 meters away. I sighted in on the target. I had become engrossed in my environment and was having an emotionally withdrawn response. I welcomed its calming effect.
The squad turned north onto Racetrack. We followed the familiar street to Give Me and passed the stationary tank on the corner. Its roaring engine was a reminder of the vehicle’s awesome power. Captain Smith informed Rage 2 of our location. The intersection was the release point for Rage 2, meaning that they would now step off from building 17 en route to the objective area.
Less than 30 meters up Give Me, we turned off onto a small alley that led to the five-way intersection of Annapolis and Farm. The alley was flanked by six-foot walls on either side. The Marines’ silhouettes quietly followed behind them in the moonlight.
The first team halted at the end of the alleyway. Ahlquist moved up and assessed the intersection. I leaned against the six-foot wall, letting it hold the weight of my body armor for a few moments. My back was to the target house, the one that would become our forward COC. Ahlquist spoke to his first team leader. With the nod of the leader’s head, the first team sprinted out and breached the gate 20 meters to the left. The rest of the squad followed. Headquarters brought up the rear.
Rage Company Page 17