An hour later, we were on the third man. To me, someone who had no idea what was being said, the previous two detainees had done a lot of talking. Jack informed me every time the detainee admitted to doing something wrong. The first man said he had personally conducted or was complicit in the murder of local civilians. The second guy admitted to planting IEDs and killing an Iraqi general. Each of the events was accompanied by the date the event took place. I decided that later I would try to get the scouts to let me have the yellow pad of paper. The information written on it was worth translating.
The questioning was interrupted by a shrieking blast. The sound of shrapnel ricocheting off the COP’s concrete perimeter wall startled me. I jumped up off the floor, realizing that it was an incoming mortar round. The general and the scouts seemed oblivious to the explosion. They continued their questioning without interruption. I figured, as former insurgents, that they had been on the receiving end of countless mortar and artillery rounds, not to mention American close air support and helicopter missiles. They weren’t going to be threatened by only one incoming round.
I, on the other hand, did feel threatened, very threatened. I moved to the room’s only window. It faced southwest, directly toward the sound of the blast. Peeling back the white cloth that covered the gaping hole, I spotted the dissipating smoke. It was only 50 meters outside the perimeter wall, no more than 100 meters away. For an observer, it was almost a perfect initial round. All the insurgents had to do was adjust 100 meters to their technical-firing data and drop in a few rounds, and COP Rage would have been blown apart.
A minute later, a second blast struck to the northwest. It was the same deal as the first, just outside the concrete wall. This time, the scouts paused to look at one another. A couple picked their helmets up off the ground and put them on. Then they continued questioning. I grabbed Jack and moved into the central foyer. It was the only interior room, meaning that its walls did not connect to the structure’s exterior and had no windows. It was the safest place from incoming shrapnel.
The moment I began to sit down, the building was shaken by the concussion of another round. The explosion was deafening, only a few meters outside the nonexistent door. I listened to the 120mm mortar round’s twisted iron shrapnel fly through the air, impacting the COP’s generator and vehicles. It even flew through the hallway that led into the building, pinging off the narrow walls opposite each other. The round landed directly in the center of the COP. If the enemy dropped a few more with the same data on the weapon system, we would be in trouble. Fortunately, it was the last incoming round.
The scouts responded to the danger by returning to the original room that contained the majority of the detainees. They snatched a young man, probably in his late teens, and dragged him out into the foyer. They threw the boy at my feet and told me he was a member of the mortar team that was firing at us. Then the two questioning scouts heckled him for the rest of the detainees to hear. They spouted off the names of the boy’s family and friends. They even rattled off the names of the other members of his mortar cell. It was sort of a morale crusher for the detainees, who had probably taken satisfaction in knowing their comrades were dropping mortar rounds all around us. The scouts were informing them that their one advantage over the Americans was no longer in play. The shadow of anonymity surrounding the local militants was thrust into the light. Instead, the insurgents would now wonder who was helping the Americans. For the first time I felt that my deployment to Ramadi might mean something; I might leave with some sort of accomplishment. I think the general read my mind.
“They will fight you much harder,” he whispered into my ear, motioning toward the sky with his finger. “This is only the beginning; they will respond. All of the people know what we have done.” I couldn’t possibly have known the truth of which the general spoke.
For the rest of the day, I watched the scouts question the detainees. It was fascinating but also mind-numbing. I knew that the information being obtained had to be captured, but Jack wasn’t very capable of speaking proper English, let alone writing it. So, during piss and chow breaks, I showed the dozen other scouts, who were relaxing inside the COP, how to write out sworn statements against each of the detainees. They were not enthused about having to fill out the bureaucratic paperwork of the Americans, but none of them complained after I explained that any detainee who didn’t have two statements against him would be released.
In the early evening, the company staff discussed how to proceed with the scouts. Some of the men wanted to continue working with us, but all of them wanted to go home first. They said that going home was the best way to stay anonymous, and once they gathered new information on al Qaeda they would return. I wasn’t so sure. There was, however, a carrot dangling in front of the scouts. Captain Smith had decided to begin a formal request to build an Iraqi police station in Julayba. The proposal, which took about six months to be approved, would be sent to the prime minister of Iraq’s office. That office would have the final say on how many police would be authorized and what their pay would be. I thought the idea might be premature. But if the scouts did come back, they would get to decide who would fill the positions at the station. They would essentially provide us with their nominee for police chief, as well as the other officers. If none of them came back, somebody else would fill the position, maybe someone from a rival tribe.
After the discussion, I loaded up the twenty-seven detainees into the back of one seven-ton and the twenty-five scouts in another. Standing in the darkness of the COP’s parking lot, the general told me that he would not come back to Julayba. He had work elsewhere to finish. I knew what he meant; he hadn’t exactly being shown the respect deserving of a general. To add insult to injury, I replied by making him sit in the back of the seven-ton. With the large number of detainees and armed Iraqis, all of the humvee seats were filled by Americans for extra security. The prospects of future cooperation with the Iraqis seemed rather dim.
2300, January 27, 2007
“Rage 6, this is Manchu 3, over.” The battalion operations officer was on the net. Lance Corporal Eakin, who was radio watch in COP Rage’s COC, gave the handset to Captain Smith. After exchanging a few greetings, the operations officer got to the point.
“Rage 6, we need you to recover the vehicle you found at Hamadi’s house last night. We want to run a few forensic tests and try to collect DNA, over,” said Manchu 3. Captain Smith was beside himself. The night before this, Rage 6 had refused the same order; now he was being told to do it again.
“Negative, Three, I’m not going to have my Marines driving an Iraqi vehicle on uncleared roads, over,” said Captain Smith. The two men exchanged a few more radio transmissions. Then Manchu 3 informed Rage 6 that it was an order, directed by higher headquarters. Captain Smith took a moment to weigh his options. He could refuse, but to do so would cost enormous social capital. Such an action would likely result in greater micromanagement from the battalion. After making a decision, he got back on the radio. “Manchu 3, my Marines will secure the vehicle, but you get Pathfinder out here to pick it up, over.”
The operations officer wasn’t happy with the answer, but he knew it was acceptable. In a few hours, Pathfinder was clearing the intersection where Hamadi’s house was located. As a compromise, the battalion had added an extra vehicle to Pathfinder’s convoy to tow the car to Corregidor.
Captain Smith moved to the map and found the closest unit to Hamadi’s house. It was Corporal Seth Collard’s 3rd Squad, 3rd Platoon strongpointing just north of the Irish Way-South Bend intersection. Captain Smith passed the mission on to Lieutenant Jahelka. A few minutes after midnight, the squad was moving toward the target.
Corporal Collard planned to head directly west, almost as the crow flies, to the home. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Crippen, accompanied the patrol. Neither man was at all enthused about the mission. Both knew that Sergeant Ahlquist had requested to destroy the vehicle the night before and was denied. They also knew Capt
ain Smith had refused to recover the vehicle during that same incident. Plus, nobody likes to visit the same place twice, especially on consecutive nights and at roughly the same time as the last visit.
After leaving the house that was their strongpoint, the Marines zigzagged through the alleyways and the dirt paths on the northern side of the bowl shape made by South Bend. The area was dark. Not many houses were running generators, and only a few distant bulbs flickered. The patrol passed through the village and came to an open field. The point element was now about to cross South Bend about 200 meters south of its intersection with Nova.
“Corporal, I got something. Looks like an IED at the intersection with Nova about ten meters off the road,” said Lance Corporal Duvall over the radio. Collard immediately spotted the object. It appeared to be a small rock pile next to an empty car. The squad leader put his Marines in a defensive posture and moved closer to get a better look. He shined his PEQ-2 laser at the object. The infrared light illuminated command wire running from a tube above the rock pile and into the field on his right. Collard knew the tube wasn’t an IED; it was an improvised rocket launcher (IRL). The launcher was oriented south along South Bend, at his entire squad.
Collard acted quickly. There weren’t any combat engineers with the squad, so both he and Staff Sergeant Crippen moved to the command wire. They cut it with a leatherman. What was left of the wire ran out into the field. Opposite the open space was a tree line, sort of a palm grove. At both the northern and the southern side of the grove was a single house. The wire seemed to run toward the southern house, about 200 meters away.
“Staff Sergeant, I think we should investigate this, look for the triggerman,” said Collard. Crippen agreed and after he passed it over the radio, so did Rage 6, who gave the patrol permission to deviate from the original task.
Corporal Collard put his squad into a wedge formation. Duvall’s team took point, accompanied by Crippen. Lance Corporal Anthony Melia’s team was on the left, Lance Corporal Jackie Clinton’s on the right. The formation moved slowly through the field, with Collard at the center of the group. A helicopter flew overhead and got a radio check with Collard’s platoon commander, Lieutenant Jahelka. The aerial gunship had an hour of playtime with the battalion, and Collard’s squad was the only patrol out at the moment.
The slow progress of the squad became slower. Staff Sergeant Crippen and Duvall were finding all sorts of command wire running through the field. The formation’s movement slowed down every time they ducked over and cut another wire. Collard noticed that Melia’s team was moving too far up; they were almost online with Duvall’s stationary Marines. Such things happen on patrol, and Melia probably would have adjusted once the group began to move again, but Collard was demanding. He wasn’t going to accept the risk of exposing his left flank for a few seconds.
“Melia, back the hell up; maintain dispersion,” said the squad leader into his PRR, the intrasquad radio. Melia quickly moved his team back a few meters. Lance Corporal Melia was one of the youngest team leaders in the company. Unlike most Marines, Melia arrived to the battalion as a lance corporal, the result of superior performance in boot camp and SOI, the School of Infantry. Such performance was noticed by his current leadership, and Collard held Melia to a high standard for good reason—Melia had already been selected to be a squad leader on the next deployment. Such a selection was made by the collaboration of Lieutenant Jahelka, Staff Sergeant Crippen, and the platoon’s squad leaders. Basically, Melia was on the fast track because he was a damn good Marine, although Collard never would have told him as much. In Collard’s mind, his responsibility was to treat Melia like the rest of his team leaders, which included nitpicking his positioning on patrol.
Crippen and Duvall got up off the ground after cutting another wire. The patrol began to move again. It was less than a hundred meters to the house, and the palm tree line was directly in front of them. The Marines were about to find out that four Iraqis, two separate two-man machine gun teams, were watching them. The IRL was sort of a decoy for the enemy, channeling the Marines directly toward the ambush position. The four insurgents waited for the Marines to get close, probably too close. They didn’t maximize the amount of suppression they could have achieved if they had opened fire a little sooner. Regardless, with the Marines about 70 meters away, the two machine guns opened fire.
Dozens of incoming 7.62mm rounds sent every Marine into the dirt. Collard hit the ground so hard, the battery cap to his NVGs came off, momentarily thrusting him into total darkness. While Collard fumbled with the cap, his patrol’s three squad automatic weapons began to battle the insurgents for fire superiority. Hundreds of tracers flew through the night. Collard requested the company QRF from his platoon commander.
The squad leader then asked whether the helicopter could identify the insurgent position. The eyes above said no, the enemy was too close; opposing forces could not be distinguished from friendly. Corporal Collard shouted at his men, “Stay down!” then he stood up and sprinted toward Duvall’s team, closer to the ambush point. He shined his PEQ-2 laser at the enemy position and let off a few rounds. The laser shining at the insurgent position didn’t matter; the helo said the enemy was still too close.
The enemy’s withering fire negated the fact that the American infantrymen outnumbered them three to one. Collard thought about buddy-rushing through the objective, with one man suppressing while his partner closed on the insurgents by three or four steps, but the incoming fire was too great. Stranded in a field of reeds and grass, each Marine desperately searched for micro-terrain between magazine changes.
“Collard! We got one down; he’s urgent!” shouted the squad’s corpsman. Machine gun bursts were still raking the squad, but the number of outgoing 5.56mm rounds greatly outnumbered the incoming 7.62mm. The squad had gained fire superiority.
One of the insurgent machine guns ceased firing. Some of Duvall’s Marines could hear the enemy trying to execute, unsuccessfully, a magazine reload on their weapon system. With only one operational machine gun and hundreds of incoming bullets, the insurgents withdrew.
Collard was about to order his men to pursue, but his corpsman stole his train of thought. “Melia is down! I barely have a pulse!”
The squad leader had a decision to make. One of his men was dying, and the culprits were getting away. The problem was, he couldn’t safely evacuate the casualty and pursue the enemy at the same time. It would require at least a team of Marines to move Melia back to South Bend and link up with the QRF. That left less than ten men to go after the enemy. If the Marines were caught by another ambush, the unit could be wiped out.
Collard’s greatest fear wasn’t death, however; it was that someone could kill one of his Marines and get away with it. In the awkward silence during the calm that immediately follows every firefight, Seth Collard made up his mind. “Staff Sergeant, take Melia’s team and link up with the QRF at South Bend. I’m taking the rest of the squad onward to that southernmost house.”
In the decisiveness of the moment, Collard realized he wasn’t going to see Melia. He watched from 50 meters away as the remaining members of the fire team picked up their leader and began moving toward South Bend. Collard sensed that Melia wasn’t going to make it. His body was motionless. There were no cries of pain, none of the drama associated with a living gunshot wound. Instead, Melia was at peace. Collard would later find out that a round had sliced into Melia’s NVGs and through the lower portion of his helmet. The young Marine had been instantly killed by a single gunshot to the head.
The helicopter above offered to assist with the casualty. The gunship said it could land and pick up the potentially living Melia. Lieutenant Jahlka asked how he could do that; there were only two seats on an attack helicopter, and both were for the pilots. “My navigator will get out and stay with you; the casualty will take his seat,” said the pilot. It was a truly heroic gesture that would have put Melia in a hospital in roughly fifteen minutes. But Melia didn’t have a pulse.
“Collard, he’s, uh, he’s KIA, man,” said the corpsman via PRR. Collard asked whether he was sure. The corpsman said Melia never had a pulse; he realized when the gunfire stopped that he was feeling his own.
Then Crippen asked Collard whether he had any body bags.
“Staff Sergeant, I don’t . . . ,” said Collard. Crippen already knew as much. He specifically didn’t make his squad leaders carry body bags on patrol: too much bad karma. It wasn’t an unusual thing. The leadership of the company had a diverse collection of rituals to maintain its current streak of two and a half months in Ramadi with no KIAs: James Thomas and I smoked before patrol, Holloway carried shrapnel that had nearly killed him in his previous deployment, and Crippen didn’t carry body bags, just to name a few. No one could predict when our luck was going to run out.
Collard informed Lieutenant Jahelka not to have the helicopter land. The casualty was KIA and no longer urgent. Melia’s status was changed to routine.
With the two elements moving in opposite directions, the QRF showed up. Luckily, instead of the humvees of the company QRF, it was a section of BFVs and an M113 ambulance from the battalion. The lead vehicle pulled through the Nova-South Bend intersection and turned right to scan the tree line with its optics. As it did, it set off an IED on the right side of the road. The blast sent Collard and his men back into the dirt. Fortunately for the BFV, it was a smaller IED. To the heavily armored vehicle’s crew, it was nothing more than a loud noise.
Following the momentary pause in movement, Collard and his men sprinted into their target house. There was nothing suspicious inside, and Collard went straight to the roof. Looking out into the darkness, he realized that the enemy might get away. He leaned against the roof’s retaining wall and listened to the radio. The net was clogged with traffic. The helicopter above was on the four insurgents’ trail, and Lieutenant Grubb was leaving COP Rage with two squads to hunt them down. On the northern side of the tree line, Collard spotted the infrared strobes belonging to a squad of Marines moving south toward him. It was Ahlquist’s squad. The Marines were going to effectively trap the four insurgents. Collard’s team blocked the south, Ahlquist the north, and the BFVs from the QRF the west. The four insurgents split into two groups and headed east, right into Lieutenant Grubb. When the Iraqis realized they were trapped, they hid in two separate houses. Grubb sent one of his squads to each house and detained every military-age male he found.
Rage Company Page 28