My Men are My Heroes

by Nathaniel R. Helms

  Kasal was also a confidant of Sergeant Major E. T. “Ed” Sax. Together with the other officers and senior NCOs, they were charged with leading mostly teenagers—18-, 19-, and 20-year-old Marine Corps riflemen—who were fighting as much for each other as for any other cause. The most experienced of them had fought with Kasal during OIF 1; the least experienced among them were barely out of high school. But to a man they were all Marines.

  In the final days and hours before the looming battle, the young Marines privately took inventory of their leaders. They willingly followed Kasal and the other professionals in Weapons Co. because they knew they were tough, hard, unrelenting officers and noncommissioned officers. They did it out of respect and even a bit of awe. However there were always plenty of young Marines trying to buck the system.

  Sometimes good field Marines don’t fare so well in the rear where peace tends to reign and mayhem of any sort is frowned upon. Like Animal Mother, the fierce Marine in the movie Full Metal Jacket, they need somebody throwing grenades at them occasionally to feel engaged. Kasal didn’t mind coming around to explode in their faces when he deemed it necessary.

  Corporal R.J. Mitchell knew something about Kasal’s explosive capability, although he says it never arrived undeserved. “First Sergeant could really chew some ass,” he remembers. “He could go crazy. Then he would tell you what you needed to do to correct it. First Sergeant could chew ass with the best of them.”

  Under their leadership the proven warriors of 3/1 had fought the good fight for more than five long months and were ready for more. A rare few of them didn’t want to fight and more of them faced the realities of concentrated combat with a terrible dread. They all knew that the professionals among them had gladly chosen the unforgiving life of a field Marine so they could lead them into battle. No matter what their personal feelings, the younger men had no intentions of letting their leaders down.

  Some who have experienced combat say there is no prouder action a man can take. Some who have witnessed combat leaders plying their craft say there is no more noble a profession. To a man, the officers and noncoms of 3/1 stood proud and straight and walked with a particular certainty that is almost chilling to the uninitiated. Even the young leaders, the first-term corporals and sergeants who had earned their stripes in training, were all about being professionals. Like all the Marines who have passed before them, the Third’s leaders at Fallujah remembered that duty and honor were never far away.

  Kasal considers his service with the Thundering Third at Fallujah the most rewarding of his career. “It was an outstanding battalion,” he says. “We had the best men, NCOs, and officers in the Marine Corps. Lieutenant Colonel Buhl was a great officer and every man in Weapons Co. was outstanding. We had trained together for a long time. All the first sergeants were excellent, and Sergeant Major Sax was a fine sergeant major. We knew each other and knew our mission.”

  Buhl, a former NCO and Force Recon Marine who was no combat slouch himself, describes Kasal as “mentally and physically the toughest staff NCO I have ever served with.

  “Kasal is larger than life with the young Marines. He praises them and kicks them in the butt when required,” Buhl says. “He is everywhere all the time, and that becomes apparent to the young PFC—that First Sergeant Kasal, now Sergeant Major Kasal, is there for the young Marines all the time.”

  Buhl says Kasal always knows what he is talking about before he opens his mouth, an important asset when seconds count. And he says the rugged Marine had an uncanny ability to be wherever he was needed the most. Whatever the situation, the first sergeant of Weapons Co. would be part of the action.

  Kasal says he was simply checking on his men just like any other first sergeant would do. The fact he always found himself in the thick of things was coincidental.

  “Weapons Co. Marines supported all the companies,” he says. “I would hear something on the radio, or Major [at the time Captain R. H.] Belknap or maybe even Colonel Buhl would require something and I would head that way. The sergeant major was out there and so were the other first sergeants. 3/1 was always that way. We all talked to each other.”

  Buhl says Kasal had been on the firing line in every fight Weapons Co. was engaged in since they landed in Iraq. On his first combat deployment he performed exactly the same way while leading Kilo Co. Every one of the officers and men who spoke about Kasal described him as a tough, tenacious fighter and a merciless hunter. His men stood in awe of him then and now. Even today, long after some of them have left the Corps, they still call him “First Sergeant” in a familiar way that sounds like “Firs Sar’ent.” Far from being a slight, it is the manner in which Marines show unmitigated respect to their noncoms. NCOs that didn’t add up were quickly forgotten. In the lexicon of their lives “First Sergeant” is First Sergeant Kasal.

  Mitchell, who would play a huge role in Kasal’s future, says Kasal was one of the biggest influences in his Marine Corps career. “In Fallujah First Sergeant Kasal was in Weapons Co., not even in my company. He would just show up and fall in like a lance corporal,” Mitchell recalls. “I would tell him what to do and he would go off and do it. He was awesome. If we had to take down a house he would do it. He had the TOWs and Javelins.

  “One time some dude with an AK or something was firing out of this house in Fallujah—maybe the second or third day—and we couldn’t see him because he was backed up into the room or something. I was going to take it out with a team until the first sergeant had a Marine fire a TOW missile into it. I was talking to him on the radio. It imploded the whole fucking house on this dude. Then several of us ran up to shoot him to be sure. Me, Kasal, Nicoll, and another Marine moved forward, but we couldn’t find the guy because the whole house was a big rubble pile.”

  Kasal’s leadership impressed Mitchell, especially his style of correcting an error or instructing a subordinate to improve his performance. “If I screwed something up or did something he thought was wrong, he didn’t start yelling or correcting me in front of the other Marines,” Mitchell explains. “Later he would say something and see if I agreed. You could tell him why you did something, and if he thought you were correct he would say so. I was a corporal then and there weren’t too many first sergeants who would do that. He could chew some ass; he could go crazy, but never in front of anyone.”

  Mitchell adds with a tone of admiration: “I never minded when Kasal showed up. He could kick some serious ass. He was just a bad dude.”

  CHAPTER 9

  SNIPERS, SNOOPERS,

  AND SELLERS

  The campaign to retake Fallujah officially began November 1, 2004, and would capture the world’s attention for nearly a month. That day Marine Corps Forward Operating Base (FOB) Delta took two rounds of incoming mortar fire from insurgents. Delta was located in the city of Al Kharma, 30 miles west of Baghdad, near Fallujah in the middle of the desert.

  One result of the pinprick attack was that somebody far higher up the food chain than 3/1’s Marines decided enough was enough. The Marines were finally going to put a stop to the insurgent activity bedeviling al-Anbar province. Fallujah was the viper’s nest; insurgents had been operating there with impunity for six months.

  First, though, there was much work to be done to prepare for an attack. 3/1 contributed on several fronts: Scout-snipers probed the insurgents in small deadly teams to determine their whereabouts, response times, communication methods, and strongholds. Snoopers of various kinds infiltrated the city, listened in on cell phone and two-way radio transmissions, and flew unmanned missions over the city, taking pictures. Finally Marine leadership endeavored to sell the idea of the occupation to the local leadership—sometimes the very people who were trying to kill the occupiers.

  SNIPERS

  In the weeks before the battle for Fallujah the scout-snipers were used to deceive the enemy about where the Marines intended to strike. Their job was part of a larger deception plan to confuse the insurgents about the location of the main attack.

&nb
sp; Officially military records say these operations “served to attrite the enemy, stimulate electronic communications which revealed enemy command and control nodes, and to determine enemy reinforcement response times and basic operational capabilities.”

  More specifically their job was to scout for the company they were attached to and perform any other reconnaissance missions assigned: report intelligence information, seek out enemy snipers, and serve as overwatch for Marines on patrol to make sure the Iraqis didn’t sneak up on them. An especially popular task was taking out Iraqi snipers if they got into contact.

  Chad Cassidy was a corporal in H&S Co.’s scout-sniper platoon when the battalion geared up for Fallujah in November of 2004. His radio operator and spotter at al-Anbar province was Lance Corporal Russell Scott.

  Cassidy and Scott were an inseparable team. Cassidy usually took the shots using a scoped, precision-built M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle that can kill a man 1,000 meters away. Cassidy’s job was to keep in radio contact with headquarters, spot targets, and provide added security. He also took an occasional shot. During Fallujah the team saw plenty of action before both men were seriously wounded the third day by shrapnel. They were medevaced home to recover. After healing Cassidy decided to try for an officer’s commission. He attended Officer Basic Course at Quantico, Virginia, and earned a promotion to Second Lieutenant.

  Scott’s still-healing wounds remain quite painful, making being a Marine a lot tougher for him physically than it had been. He has been promoted to Corporal and is now helping to train Marines at Camp Lejeune’s Special Operations Training Group. Scott plans to run out his military string, finish his interrupted college education, and get a graduate degree.

  Cassidy and Scott are tight in a way only combat veterans can be. They fought together, got wounded together, and have survived their personal hells since by working it out together. In the spring of 2006 they met over breakfast at a hash house in Quantico, Virginia, talking to one another for the first time since they fought in Fallujah. Their sentences often drifted off before reaching the end—the listener simply nodding to indicate he already understood what the speaker had not yet said. They had perfected such silent communications in Iraq when talking any more than absolutely necessary might have gotten them killed. Watching and listening to their conversation it was easy to imagine them quiet and purposeful on a rooftop somewhere, waiting for the shot.

  Both men were on the firing line almost daily during the month before the storm broke. 3/1’s Cassidy, always quiet and controlled, says of his job in the time leading up to Fallujah: “It was a heavy and deadly responsibility, not some kind of twisted sport.” But they also knew they had a moral responsibility to use their skills as justly as the rules of warfare allowed. It was a dangerous job that marked the men for a bad end if the Iraqis ever caught them.

  As a result, Scott says, “We tried really, really hard to fit in with the Grunts.” The signpost M40A1 rifle would be kept out of sight. “It was slung down the side,” Scott says. “Unless somebody was really, really looking and had optics, they wouldn’t see it.”

  But sometimes scout-snipers were forced into the open during cordon-and-sweep operations. That put their two- and four-man teams at risk because of their small numbers. Cassidy says the best way to handle that situation was to swagger their way through towns and villages.

  “We’d walk like we owned the fucking street,” he recalls. “The way we’d move our bodies, how we’d sweep, everything we did made it look like we were just daring somebody to come out in the street and do something.” It was a bluff that got them out of several potential jams.

  Their M40A1 rifles were deadly weapons in their own right, but scout-snipers’ ability to call in the rest of the regiment’s assets—mortars, artillery, and both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft—made them even more powerful.

  In addition Cassidy says, “We knew the area that we worked in better than any Americans.” Part of their scouting mission was to talk to the locals, many of whom spoke a little English. “We had conversations as best we could with Iraqi people,” he says. “We knew who they were, and sometimes we would look for a specific guy because he would be known to be involved in something.”

  SNOOPERS

  The intelligence that headquarters received from the scout-snipers about Fallujah was useful but it had its limitations. Scouts couldn’t go into the city before the incursion—at least not without a serious fight—so the picture they provided of the insurgency was incomplete.

  Fortunately there were several other sources of intelligence flowing back to 3/1 headquarters and a whole team of specialists whose job it was to gather and interpret it. Heading this Intelligence Section (S-2) was Captain McCormack, a former Grunt who headed a group of more than 150 Marine technicians, mapmakers, photo interpreters, and radio intercept experts plying their black arts around al-Anbar province.

  The input was diverse. In addition to the scout-snipers’ intel, McCormack had human intelligence (HUMINT) coming out of Fallujah from spies. Some was good, some was flawed, and some was outright lies—the mix an intelligence officer expects from informants who are not particularly fond of those to whom they are giving information.

  Army Special Forces and the supersecret Delta Force also had teams inside Fallujah that took huge risks to detect and identify high-value targets. That data had limitations: Bad guys move around a lot, and what was true today might be useless tomorrow.

  The battalion also listened in on insurgents’ cell phone conversations, although that traffic decreased dramatically after the power went off in the city and insurgents could no longer recharge phone batteries. The insurgents occasionally used radios and walkie-talkies, generally commercial sets that were easily identified and pinpointed. 3/1 listened to those conversations too.

  Finally there were the visuals of real-time photographic and video downloads from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These ranged from 3-foot-long radio-controlled airplanes called Dragon Eyes, each carrying a tiny camera, to 450-pound, man-size Pioneers and huge high-tech, high-flying Global Hawks operated by the U.S. Air Force. All were orbiting Fallujah counting cars, people, mortars, insurgent cells, and men with weapons rolling in from Syria.

  All sources revealed that there were a lot of bad guys arriving in Fallujah almost daily in the weeks before the attack—information that did not bode well for the 1st Marine Division Devil Dogs slowly circling the city like hungry wolves eyeing potential prey.

  SELLERS

  While the scouts were scouting and the snoopers were snooping the division leadership was driving from city to town and town to village selling the benefits of the Coalition occupation to the irascible Sunnis. Lieutenant Colonel Buhl headed up this effort and his mission was twofold: To soften the presence of the Marines with money, assistance, and medical care; and to seek out and destroy the Baathists and foreign fighters who had come to dominate the sheiks and imams. The latter were local leaders who might be willing to negotiate rather than fight if they weren’t intimidated by the Baathists and foreign fighters who had taken control of al-Anbar province and Fallujah.

  Buhl had to establish a relationship with these men, the same men who were trying to kill his Marines. One day he would be at the hospital at Camp Abu Ghraib visiting his wounded Marines and the next he would be breaking bread with the elders in the town where the Marines had been attacked. He couldn’t allow his intense anger to overwhelm him. He constantly reminded himself he was doing it for his men.

  Once a week McCormack joined Buhl in a city named Garma, where they met with the town council. McCormack quickly had to discern which of the many sheiks they met were important and which were merely window dressing.

  “You could tell the wealthy guys because they were heavy,” McCormack remembers. “They could afford to eat, so they were fat. In fact it was food that got us in with these guys. Buhl started having these things catered; we started feeding these guys with battalion money. Then they began showing up
. They would bring in their bodyguards with them. Buhl would be in there smiling and shaking hands. That was okay because these sheiks weren’t going to talk to you, but their bodyguards would.

  “At the end of the day intel isn’t rocket science; it is who you know. Buhl [knew that and] embraced town councils. At one meeting, a Shia meeting, he literally danced with a guy. He did good. We weren’t getting attacked in these cities.”

  Out on the range in al-Anbar province Kasal was only vaguely aware of the machinations of the officers and locals going on about him. He was focused on making his rounds and keeping up with his teams. They had already suffered some serious casualties.

  That’s because having wheels instead of boots for transportation had both rewards and costs for the Marines of Weapons Co. Their AO extended from Fallujah almost to Baghdad. Weapons Co. had sections with every line company and two platoons of 81mm mortarmen advising Delta and India companies of the Iraqi National Guard. That meant the commanders had to travel the roads where IEDs, ambushes, and normal road hazards all presented dangers to the Marines in the Humvees.

  Their vehicles weren’t armored with the latest armor. Some of them didn’t have any at all, some had bolt-on doors and other ad hoc setups, and a few had the upscale stuff just arriving in Iraq. With or without armor the Weapons Co. Humvees were still high-value support and targets of opportunity because of their impressive weapons. Everybody likes firepower and Weapons Co. offered it all.

  RIGGED TO EXPLODE

  3/1’s first serious casualties were the result of an IED.

  “Lance Corporal Paine and Gunnery Sergeant Christian Wade and their turret gunner were out on patrol and ran over a mine,” Kasal remembers. The explosion blew the front off the Humvee and effectively destroyed what remained. All the men riding in it were hurt. “Paine took the brunt of it and he was our first serious casualty,” Kasal says. “The explosion shattered his leg. He is up and around doing fine now. Gunny Wade had a concussion; the turret gunner got thrown out of the vehicle and also had a concussion.”