My Men are My Heroes

by Nathaniel R. Helms

  With Weemer out of the picture Chandler took the lead. He told his team they would have to flood the room to rescue Carlisle. He ordered them to shoot into the ceiling around the top of the stairs while he grabbed Carlisle. After a few more seconds of discussion he kneed Sanchez in the back and yelled, “Go!”

  Chandler and Severtsgard went to their right. Farmer had just cleared the door behind them when a grenade dropped on the floor and exploded in a huge cloud of dust and debris. The noise was deafening. Farmer went flying into the foyer he had just come from and Severtsgard and Chandler were sprayed with shrapnel. The insurgent who threw the grenade followed up with a long burst of automatic weapons fire that struck Chandler three times in the leg. Although wounded, Severtsgard used one hand to drag Chandler into the back of the house where the kitchen was located. They would remain there until the end of the fight. Farmer, his hand shredded by shrapnel, could do nothing but scream curses at the insurgents.

  As Chandler’s group was fighting for their lives inside the house more Marines arrived on the scene. Private Rene Rodriguez and Lance Corporal Michael Vanhove had seen Weemer come out yelling for reinforcements. The two men rushed in looking for Sanchez, their fire team leader.

  They found Sanchez in the back of the building putting a pressure bandage on Carlisle’s grotesquely twisted leg. With nothing else to do, they hunkered down to provide security. Meanwhile, insurgents sprayed the doorway to their front with fire. There was no way out except back through the gauntlet they had just survived. For the moment they were trapped and useless.

  Weemer didn’t know what was happening inside. He was agonizing over what to do when more help arrived.

  “Grapes and Wolf showed up,” he says. “I saw Grapes and I told him Carlisle was still in there and so was Chandler. I wasn’t sure who else was until later. I told him, ‘I am ready to go back in there.’ Grapes told me to stay there and let Jensen work on me. He tells me, ‘Jensen is giving you first aid; you need to let him give you first aid.’ He probably told me five times not to go back in there. It was all I could think about. I wanted to go back because my team was in there. From what I saw in that house I thought they were dead. Jensen kept holding me back. I think that was when Kasal and Nicoll showed up.”

  Kasal first saw Pruitt staggering up the street toward him covered with blood. He still didn’t know anything about the fate of Pruitt’s team. Behind Pruitt the noise of automatic weapons fire and exploding grenades was still coming from the house.

  “I noticed Pruitt walking toward me,” Kasal says. “He appeared to be in a state of shock and I quickly noticed he had wounds to his hand and lower leg.”

  Kasal ran to Pruitt and pulled him in between two buildings for cover. There Pruitt explained how he had gotten out but that the other three were trapped in the house wounded or possibly dead.

  “The first thing that came across my mind was getting to those three wounded Marines as quickly as possible because I knew the enemy would give no quarter to a wounded Marine,” Kasal says. “I was particularly concerned they would be captured and later tortured or beheaded. So I grabbed a nearby Marine and directed him to treat Pruitt’s wounds and provide security for him while I headed directly for the house.”

  TRAPPED AND WOUNDED

  Mitchell remembers how clearly and concisely Pruitt gave his report to Kasal despite being shot in the leg and wrist. “He kept his composure,” Mitchell says. Mitchell was trying to administer first aid but Pruitt was still in the fight. “Even though he was wounded Pruitt still had his head on a brass swivel. He knew exactly what was going on. Outside of First Sergeant Kasal, Pruitt is the epitome of the Marine Corps.”

  Mitchell radioed Grapes the information he obtained from Pruitt informing him they were in contact and had wounded Marines trapped in the house. 2d Platoon, the designated Quick Reaction Force (QRF), also headed to the scene. The report immediately burned its way through the ether to battalion. Hell House was suddenly the center of attention.

  Lopez heard the gunfire break out but didn’t pay too much attention to it until he heard Mitchell’s call to Grapes on the radio in his CAAT vehicle. His attention was focused on watching over 1st Squad while they prepared the unexploded ordnance for demolition.

  “We were hearing gunfire. We were always hearing gunfire,” Lopez says. “Then we got the call. We had some casualties inside the building. Each vehicle has a VRC-99 radio so we always had comm with each vehicle. Grapes left a few men from 1st Squad with the cache and we headed for the contact.

  “We had to make a left turn down the next block. The rest of 1st Squad came with us. I was driving alongside them, going about as fast as they could go. They were jogging, still providing bounding and overwatch. It took us just a couple of minutes.”

  When Lopez arrived with Grapes to help out he discovered he didn’t have a way to help. There was no way to use the TOW because of the Marines inside the building, and he didn’t have a target for anything else. In the next 90 minutes Grapes and Lopez would try several avenues of approach to the house without being able to bring a weapon to bear. Although the TOW on his CAAT was too big to use without endangering the Marines inside, the M240G was just right, Lopez says, but he had to have something to shoot at. Lopez left the rest of his section facing outboard, securing the building’s perimeter while he and Grapes tried to find a place to bring fire.

  Lopez thought the jihadists were smart to have picked that house. Nothing about its innocuous appearance suggested it was part of the great deception they had waiting for the Marines. Pruitt agrees. He thought the jihadists who picked that particular house were trained soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing. “They were all trained soldiers in that house, good soldiers except for the first one,” he says.

  FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES

  The fighting inside the house was still going on. Somebody was screaming. Then a grenade exploded. The whole street was suddenly alive as Marines up and down the road took up firing positions while trying to get a grip on what was suddenly happening. Word that Marines were trapped in the house was traveling fast.

  Mitchell and his fire team rushed to the same gate Pruitt had stumbled through to get away Mitchell says they almost instinctively pulled together to formulate an attack. Surprisingly there was no fire coming at them. For a moment it was very quiet.

  “We guided in between the walls,” Mitchell says. “We had a four-man stack. The first two guys were Nicoll and Kasal. Nicoll had Kasal’s back. I was with McCowan. We went in and sort of staged for a second in this little room. There was a dead insurgent lying there. We knew there was a casualty and we had to go in there and get him. I could see two doors and a stairwell. Beyond the second doorway I could see a Marine’s boots. Then we just headed inside.”

  Before Kasal went into the house he grabbed two passing Marines he didn’t know and told them to cover the doorway. Then Kasal, with Nicoll covering his back, moved into the house.

  KASAL STORMS IN

  Kasal quickly sized up the situation after storming the door and entering the first room—one dead insurgent, the floor covered in blood, and a pair of doors straight in front of him leading to two other rooms. “In the room on the right I saw one of the wounded Marines lying on the floor,” Kasal says. “In the door on the left there was a second dead insurgent.” He noticed a ladder well to the left, which would be to their rear as Kasal’s team entered the room. Immediately the Marines with Kasal started fanning out through the house.

  “I quickly noticed in the far right corner a room by itself that was bypassed by all the Marines,” Kasal says. “I recognized that as being uncleared and thus a danger area, so I grabbed Nicoll, the Marine nearest to me, and told him to help me clear that room. I also realized the stairwell was now to our rear and also uncleared, making it a danger area to myself and all the Marines inside the building. To protect our rear I grabbed two unidentified young Marines and directed them to lay security on the stairwell and keep it secure. I
then moved across the room to the far doorway with Nicoll on my heels.”

  Before Kasal entered the overlooked little room he paused outside the door and took a careful look, using a technique called “pieing,” mentally divides the room into pie-shape slices and visually searches one “slice” at a time.

  “All of a sudden no more then two feet from me there was an enemy insurgent with his AK-47 barrel pointed right at me,” Kasal says. “By pieing off the room and exposing only a little of my body at a time I was able to avoid him getting a good aim at me until we were so close we could have shook hands.

  “He brought his weapon up to fire and at the same time I moved back a step and brought my barrel to bear on him. He was too close to aim directly as my rifle was longer than the distance between us, so as he fired a short burst, the rounds were skimming in front of my chest and impacting to my right.

  “I placed my weapon over the top of his rifle and stuck my barrel straight into his chest and pulled the trigger,” Kasal says. “I emptied eight to 10 rounds into his chest before he went down. And as he fell to the floor I noticed him still moving, so I placed two more well-aimed shots into his forehead to make sure. Even after this he was still moving around but I was convinced he was dead. I directed my attention to deeper inside the room, which by now was dark and dusty—filled with the smoke and dust caused by the firing from our weapons in such a small space.

  “I had my weapon trained on the darkness to my direct front when all of a sudden I remembered the stairwell to our rear and became nervous because it was a real danger area. Not wanting to take my eyes off my front, I yelled behind me to the two Marines I placed as security on the stairwell.

  “I got no answer and so I yelled again. Then, out of nowhere, all hell broke loose from my direct rear.”

  CHAPTER 15

  FIGHTING

  FOR LIFE

  When Kasal and Nicoll turned, Mitchell and McCowan went straight ahead into a room where they could see Carlisle. For some reason the insurgents on the roof did not immediately fire at them when they ran through the main room to get to the wounded man. When Mitchell got there he discovered several Marines already crowded inside.

  “I went into that first room where Carlisle was,” Mitchell says. “Nicoll and Kasal had gone to the left. Chandler and a few more of us went in that back room. I think Farmer and Severtsgard were there. Carlisle was lying face down on the floor bleeding from his leg. I started to apply direct pressure to stop the bleeding. I felt his bones shift. He screamed and I stopped. I was afraid I would do more damage and cause him more pain.

  “That is when I think I heard Nicoll and First Sergeant get hit. Shooting was going on everywhere. Somebody fired an AK and I heard a scream. I think it was Nicoll screaming in pain although I am not sure. There was noise, explosions, shooting, and screaming. I decided to go back to where Kasal and Nicoll were. I didn’t know for sure they were down, but I knew they were getting shot at.”

  Kasal and Nicoll were still looking forward when shots rang out behind them. The room was dark, filled with smoke and dust. Kasal still doesn’t know what happened to the pair of Marines he had posted to protect their rear. They may have been called away by their squad leader, or perhaps they were ordered to some other urgent duty—but for whatever reason they left, the repercussions were profound.

  SHOT FROM BEHIND

  “I never saw it coming or even where it came from,” Kasal says. “I just heard automatic weapons fire and then what felt like someone hitting me in the lower leg with a sledgehammer as my legs crumpled from beneath me; I fell to the floor. I heard Nicoll yell in pain behind me and immediately knew he was also hit.

  “Rounds were still impacting all around as I lay there. I started crawling inside of the room I just cleared in order to find some cover. However the enemy insurgent I just shot was blocking the doorway, so I had to push him out of the way and get around him. Nicoll then fell inside the doorway. I looked back and saw rounds still impacting around him, and then he winced and grabbed his stomach, and I saw blood coming from between his fingers.

  “Realizing he was still in danger, I crawled back out into the doorway. The enemy started shooting at me again and I grabbed Nicoll to try to pull him to cover. As I was doing so I felt a round hit me directly in the buttock and the sharp pain that followed. Rounds were still coming and I felt like a duck during hunting season. But I was able to grab Nicoll and pull him into the room. I rolled him over the top of me so that I was between him and the enemy with the door to my immediate right.”

  The room was so small that Kasal was lying partially on top of a dead enemy combatant. “His system was still kicking from all the drugs the insurgents would take so they could keep fighting until the end,” Kasal says. “They would take huge amounts of different drugs so that they could take pain and multiple wounds and still stay alive to, hopefully, take one more Marine with him before he died.”

  Pictures of dead insurgents with drug-filled syringes found on or near their bodies were taken in grisly monotony by Marine intel specialists at Fallujah. During the fighting the Marines found large caches of amphetamines, adrenaline, and painkillers with their attendant syringes donated by humanitarian aid organizations in Europe and the United States. The drugs were intended to treat innocent wounded civilians, but they ended up being used to hype-up insurgent killers so they could kill more.

  KASAL DECIDES TO DIE

  “The enemy’s fire in the next room stopped momentarily now that we were behind cover, and I couldn’t hear any movement,” Kasal says. “It was just the dead insurgent, badly wounded Nicoll, and me in the room with an undetermined number and location of enemy right next to us.”

  Both Marines were bleeding profusely from multiple wounds, but each man carried only one pressure dressing. “I knew a tourniquet was needed on the legs of both of us in addition to the upper body wounds,” Kasal says. “So this is where I made my first decision to die that day.

  “I decided to use all our dressings on Nicoll so that at least one of us could live. I knew I was tough and what I was physically capable of, so I decided to try to gut it out while I stopped his bleeding. I also thought of the enemy next door and kept listening for sounds of movement.

  “I realized that when friendly forces reached us they might not know who was inside the room. I was concerned that hearing our movements they might think we were the enemy. So I decided to use my M16 to mark the doorway. I knew any Marine seeing it would at least pause before spraying the room. I then pulled out my 9mm pistol and laid it on my stomach to use for defense.”

  Satisfied that he had accomplished all there was to do to protect them, Kasal turned his attention to saving Nicoll. As he did so his own blood was steadily seeping onto the sand-covered floor. Kasal struggled to put a tourniquet on Nicoll’s leg to stop the bleeding. “Being in the position I was in I couldn’t do a very good job but did manage to get a half-assed tourniquet in place,” he says. Although he could barely move Kasal wrestled with Nicoll’s gear, fighting to get a dressing on his upper body wounds.

  “I was talking to him to try to help him remain conscious. It was then that I became aware of the enemy presence again—kind of like a sixth sense—and I heard a noise to my right. I rolled half over to get ready for whatever was next. When I looked down I saw a pineapple grenade lying about three feet away from me on the floor.”

  With nowhere to go and feeling too wounded to try, Kasal says he made his second decision to die that day.

  “In all honesty I thought I was going to bleed to death from severe wounds and lack of medical treatment anyway,” he says. “So out of instinct—and love for the Marine next to me—I did the only thing any Marine would do if faced with the same situation: I protected my brother. I rolled over, pushed Nicoll down, and lay on top of him, using my body to shield him from the grenade blast.

  “The grenade went off, sending sharp pain from shrapnel into my legs, buttocks, and lower back and causing my head t
o spin and my ears to feel like they had just burst. But my gear absorbed some of the blast, and the closeness of the grenade caused much of the blast to go above me. Those two things probably saved me.”

  MITCHELL MAKES HIS MOVE

  Mitchell knew Kasal and Nicoll were trapped in the small room on the other side of the house and he intended to get to them. As he started to cross the main room of the house the insurgent at the top of the stairs sprayed the open space with his AK. The 7.62mm slugs whacked into walls and scampered about the floor, each impact a sharp crackling explosion. Movies that have filmed such attacks simply can’t capture the sound of a high-power automatic weapon on full-auto in an enclosed space. It is literally numbing. Yet Mitchell scarcely noticed.

  “I had to cross that danger area—4 or 5 feet—in that middle room,” he says. “An insurgent on the roof had it covered through the skylight. When I came running in he started shooting. Bullets were hitting all around me. I just remember small-arms explosions until I got into the room with Nicoll and First Sergeant.”

  Mitchell found Kasal facing the doorway with his pistol at the ready. “It was spooky,” he says. “I ran into that room. If I remember right I had to pull Nicoll—one of them—out of the doorway a little bit. I don’t think Nicoll was conscious. He slipped in and out. I could see he was hurt real bad.”

  Kasal was still trying to shake off the concussive effects of a grenade exploding 3 feet from his prone body. “I tried to shrug it off and get back in the fight,” he says. “I was thinking that the enemy would follow it up with more or even come in after us. Then out of nowhere Mitchell came bursting into the room. He stopped in the doorway and immediately enemy fire began impacting all around him. He was immediately hit with some of the shrapnel from the exploding rounds as they hit the wall. He managed to get out of the way and joined us in the room.