What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  There was a point where the insurgents started getting very, very accurate with their mortars and you just got into this routine where you’re all just sitting on this line and you would hear the distant pops of the mortar tubes firing in the distance. Then a few seconds later you’d hear the whistling mortars coming in overhead. A lot of times, they’d just walk them right down our lines. All you could do was just get down between the tombs and hope one didn’t land on you. My platoon sergeant, corpsman, and I were in this little tomb room once when one hit right above our heads, skidded off the wall with a big thump, and landed smack on the ground. It was a dud! We were lucky as hell and we knew it.

  Anyway, as soon as the barrage ended, the next thing you hear is screams and shouts because someone’s been hit. The corpsmen and some of us guys who weren’t manning fixed positions would run down the line to try to take care of wounded marines. It almost became routine and that sucks. You still feel totally helpless and they’re getting so accurate that a lot of guys are getting hit and wounded. Father Shaughnessy was at that moment just absolutely in the thick of things. He was a real hero of the day and the marines had just the utmost respect for him because he was so brave being out there with us.

  On the evening of the second day, Father Shaughnessy was asked to bless one of the marines in the platoon. Marines are not the most religious bunch, but right there in the cemetery this tough kid from New York comes up to the Catholic chaplain and says, “You know, can you bless me, Father?” something like that.

  When Sergeant Reynoso was killed over in Lieutenant Breshears’s platoon, which was right next to mine, it was clear things were getting worse and worse. There’s very little water to drink. It’s starting to get really dark and obviously communication and control is so difficult. That’s your primary problem as far as just making the whole attack work. Simply keeping everyone in line is extremely difficult under the best of circumstances, and in the cemetery, with night falling and having almost no means of communication amongst each other, it was almost impossible.

  At that point Major Morrissey got together with his 1st sergeant, his executive officer, and I remember them discussing what they should do, and they made the decision to pull back to the road. We had crossed this diagonal road, and just across it is where things had really gotten bad and some marines had gotten killed and wounded. And it’s kind of a big decision for a marine to make because marines don’t retreat. Now, this wasn’t retreating. I mean, we were just falling back to a better defensive position for the night. Usually the marine thing to do would be to keep pushing all night. But that would have been disastrous. We could have been just decimated, and it speaks to Major Morrissey’s leadership that he was able to make a difficult decision. After that we probably spent the next forty-five minutes to an hour simply just getting everyone back and putting them into defensive positions, because again it was so difficult to communicate and coordinate all this. I was constantly running back and forth between Major Morrissey and my platoon and the other platoons, trying to link up with the different commanders in person because we couldn’t talk on the radio. I remember running over to Lieutenant Breshears’s platoon and some people didn’t even know we were going to pull back. Some people were still going forward. It was crazy. While we’re pulling back they are still shooting at us and there’s fire coming from the rear as well, which is very disconcerting because it was coming from a place I thought we had already cleared.

  I ran down the road looking for Lieutenant Lewis and I remember standing on the road talking to this marine and saying, Where is Lieutenant Lewis? He said, “Oh, he’s right here, sir. He’s just coming back right now . . . just coming through the last few tombstones.” At that moment, an RPG landed right between me and Lieutenant Lewis. The next thing I know, Lieutenant Lewis came over the wall just covered in blood, head to toe, and he was looking in really bad shape. I ran back to find my corpsman and the two of us ran back and with some other marines were able to get Lieutenant Lewis out of there. Then I found his platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Willis, and I remember saying something like “All right, Staff Sergeant, you’re in charge now. Are you good?” And he said, “Yes sir, I’m good.”

  So we get set into defensive position for the night, basically to try to get some sleep. But you had to obviously make sure that people were very, very diligent about having a good watch rotation and not falling asleep when they’re on watch, because I think we really all felt we might get overrun in the middle of the night, from behind or whatever.

  They brought in a Spectre gunship, an AC-130, to fly around overhead with their infrared cameras to spot the insurgents in the cemetery and shoot them. So you’re sort of sitting there in the midst of all these tombstones, incredibly uncomfortable and hot and sweaty and everything else and trying to find some way to position yourself that you can get a little bit of sleep. It was pretty frightening, but it was amazing how comforting it felt when that plane was flying around overhead. You’d watch them circle in the sky and then every few minutes they shoot the cannon and kill some bad guys who were making their way toward us. And then they left. I mean, God, it was—you just felt totally naked out there. Totally exposed. All you could do was sit there and stare—

  stare through your night-vision goggles and hope to God that the marines next to you were somehow managing to stay awake and do the same so you wouldn’t get overrun.

  The next morning, the resistance didn’t feel like it was as close as it had been. We were still taking gunfire and we were taking occasional mortar rounds, but there was a feeling that there weren’t as many insurgents right in the actual cemetery itself, at least not right in front of us. There was a feeling that more of the fire and the gunfire was now coming from these buildings in the old city that looked over the cemetery.

  We didn’t see that many dead Iraqi bodies as we were pushing through. It is a phenomenon of this war that you don’t see as many dead as you might expect because Iraqis think it is so important to bury them immediately. It seemed that the guys who had been killed the night before had already been dragged out of there.

  There was a growing sense on the morning of that second day that there was absolutely no way that these two companies of marines could clear this entire city, and there was also a sense that we didn’t even know where we were going. OK . . . we get to the edge of the cemetery and then what?

  Sometime around noon, I heard these shouts and a marine from Lieutenant Sellars’s platoon comes up looking like there is a very, very serious problem. So I ran over to see what was wrong. Lance Corporal Larry Wells had been shot in the neck and had bled out, and it was pretty apparent to me that he was already dead, lying in this huge pool of blood in the middle of these tombstones.

  So I ran over and I got there and I think the marine right next to him kind of didn’t want to believe that he was dead. To me it was—it was apparent that he was. The other person who ran over was 1st Sergeant LeHew . . . he’s a fantastic marine and he even tried to wake this lance corporal up, which was the right thing to do, but I mean, it was also obvious to me that he was long gone.

  He had been shot not long ago, but the sad part is—and I think that what—what made his death more difficult for the marines right around him—is that because we’re in this cemetery, guys who were right next to him had not actually seen he had gotten shot. It’s always sad when someone dies, but I think it was especially sad to think about the fact this poor kid, a real good marine, had just spent his last moments essentially completely alone. And that was—that was really hard.

  In the end we got out of the cemetery but not very gloriously. We went through another night and there were things that happened during the night. I mean, we had to call artillery into positions. We had the tanks shooting up some mortar positions, a lot of buildings that overlooked the cemetery that we completely destroyed, and then the insurgents would come back into the shells of these buildings and shoot at us again, so we just kept lighting them up.
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  It was just so—fucking miserable in that cemetery that I think all the marines there that day were all very, very happy to hear the news that we were going to pull back and get a break. It was pretty apparent that we clearly did not have enough forces to do the whole thing.

  Najaf was eventually fairly peaceful and it has been cited by a lot of people as probably the number-one or -two success story in Iraq. We kicked out insurgents who had been terrorizing the people, and the general popular reaction is very, very sympathetic to our cause.

  The average citizen in Najaf, once we got rid of the militia, they were able to go to their mosque again. There’s always some resentment and it’s toward the occupation, but overall the reaction among the people in Najaf was incredibly positive. I mean, for the remainder of our deployment in Najaf from September through February, it was one of the most peaceful cities in Iraq. I don’t think we took a single casualty in the entire battalion in Najaf from September through February.

  I think the thing that is lost in talking about events like the Najaf cemetery fight is in the description of how we truly felt as marines there experiencing it at the time. When faced with that shit as marines you don’t cower in fear, you suck it up and drive on, and a lot of times you even do it with a smile. In most of the photographs taken of me in the cemetery during the downtime, I’ve got this big shit-eating grin on my face. It doesn’t make sense, but that is the attitude you had to have, especially as a leader. I couldn’t show fear or weakness to my men. And there is a part of it, because of the adrenaline rush and excitement, that you can even enjoy. So you don’t commiserate about your predicament, you make light of it. You can joke about the most terrible thing. It’s not, “Oh my God, an insurgent almost shot my head off.” It’s, “Holy shit, man, that jackass in that fucking building over there almost shot my fucking head off.” And that’s with a “Gee, it’s great to be alive, I’m one lucky son of a bitch” grin on your face. It’s not that you were actually enjoying it. I would dream of being somewhere else . . . the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and how nice it would be to be swimming in a cold mountain stream rather than sucking in the hot, acrid dust from bombs and mortars in that fucking cemetery, but even if I thought of that, I did not wish that anyone else was in my place.

  My platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Boydstun, took a nasty piece of shrapnel in his leg way back at the police station and he should have been evacuated, but he refused to leave his marines and I respected that. On day two I ordered him to get patched up, but he got himself back to us in about three hours. What a good man. You have to be tough and you have to be able to take this shit. You can analyze it later.

  In the end, pride and sense of accomplishment stick with us, but so does a real sense of anger over the dichotomy of the Iraqi people. For instance, the cemetery itself was considered this reverent place, and although it wasn’t something you thought about when you were dodging bullets there, even if it meant stepping into somebody’s grave . . . it was more just a hindrance than sort of a spiritual, religious faux pas or something. Nonetheless, you still couldn’t get past the fact that this was a cemetery. It was very sacred to the Iraqis and this was a pretty big step we were taking by just being willing to push through it and show the militia that we meant business, right? Well, about three or four months after the fighting had ended in Najaf, I remember driving downtown one day and there are all these bulldozers. The Iraqis had these bulldozers out there bulldozing down a corner of the cemetery to expand a bus terminal. They were literally bulldozing it. To me, this was a metaphor for Iraq. So much was made of how important this cemetery was and how careful we had to be, and then a few months later you just see them fucking bulldozing this place. Not the whole cemetery but a good little portion of it, to expand their fucking bus terminal. I mean, it was just—it was unbelievable. It was completely unfathomable to me. Here you have the most important cemetery in all of Shia Islam and it got in the way of the bus terminal expansion plans, so they just bulldozed part of it over. It’s amazing.

  I think you have to have a really good sense of humor to make it through Iraq in one piece.

  Seth Moulton served an earlier tour of Iraq as part of the invasion force from March to September 2003. His second tour was extended when he was transferred to another unit, where he served in Iraq until October 2005.

  “Just a matter of luck”

  DANIEL B. COTNOIR

  MORTUARY AFFAIRS

  1ST MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

  FEBRUARY-SEPTEMBER 2004

  SUNNI TRIANGLE

  MARINE CORPS TIMES “MARINE OF THE YEAR”

  We had quite a few marines that were blown up in their vehicles and they were on fire and they were . . . crawling to get away and we get there. The guy’s five feet from a fucking river. If he’d gone five more feet, and then it becomes, well, then what? How bad of a shape would he have been in, and then it’s like, is it better that he died? And you start banging that vision around in your head . . . one of them crawling on fire and you bang around the possibilities and then you bang around every freaking scenario while you’re standing there looking at him. It’s just a matter of luck that you are not that guy. No one wants to be that guy, so you beat around in your head how lucky you are. I wouldn’t tell my wife the things that are in my head . . . which sucks because she’s my best friend. But it’s something I wouldn’t want her to know.

  We were at one recovery scene and there was a piece of paper blowing around in the breeze, so we picked it up. It was a sonogram of a baby. It was dated and that poor guy never saw his kid. He had it with him, but it was blowing around in the field, so we picked it up. I remember the chief warrant officer looking at me and he just couldn’t say anything at the time; I think we would’ve both lost it. He had the thing in his hand and we’re looking at it and we just looked at each other, put it in a box, and . . . decided to deal with it when we get back to base.

  “You don’t want to look at your friend who has just been shot”

  MIKE BONALDO

  3RD BATTALION

  1ST MARINE REGIMENT

  JUNE 2004-DECEMBER 2004

  FALLUJA

  I knew we were probably going into Falluja because all the company commanders and platoon commanders started going into meetings at Camp Abu Ghraib. We were just saying, Obviously something’s up; I think we’re going into Falluja. There were always rumors about going into Falluja. It wasn’t something that anyone particularly wanted to do, but everybody sort of accepted it.

  The marines who went in April weren’t given a chance to succeed and we wondered what would happen if we went in. Were we just going to push in a few hundred meters like they did and then be turned around? We pretty much didn’t want that to happen. I think you could say that most of us wanted to finish the job.

  We came into Falluja through the northern part of the city, into the Jolan district. I remember it was in the morning and it was hazy out, which is kind of weird for Iraq because it’s never really hazy in the morning. We could see there were burned-out cars on the sides of the roads and downed power lines everywhere from the aerial raids and from mortars and artillery and stuff. In the northern part, where we were, it wasn’t too bad as far as structural damage goes. Most of the houses were intact, but the cars were just sitting on the side of the roads, all burned out. We were told that the day before that there was a C-130 flying at night and shooting all the cars on the road just to get rid of the vehicle-borne IED threat.

  We didn’t see any people on the streets for the first couple of days. They told us that the people were warned to leave before the bombing started. They went through with a megaphone or something. You guys can either leave or stay and fight or be in harm’s way. Every day we sort of got the count: There were a hundred thousand people in the city yesterday. Today they estimate only five thousand. We saw them leaving and then the numbers dwindling, and finally I think they said there were four thousand insurgents in the city.

  We w
eren’t really looking for Zarqawi, but we were hoping that we’d find him in Falluja. We knew that he had been there and he was running his gang of people out of there. We also knew that he was a fairly intelligent guy and he wasn’t just going to hang around and wait for us to come and get him, and he wasn’t going to give himself up. We had pictures of what Zarqawi looks like and we had a bunch of different pictures of him in different outfits and disguises. We carried that around with us the whole time in our shoulder pockets in case we thought we’d found him; we could do a little comparison against the pictures we had.

  The day after we first got attacked in Falluja—this is sort of a blur because we really weren’t sleeping that much and the days sort of melt together and you can’t really tell one experience from the next, but—

  I’ll never forget this day. We were kind of just sitting around and our commander comes up to us in a kind of nervous way and told us to grab our gear and put it on real quick, so we just put it on, not knowing what we were walking into. He told us we were going on a mission and that 3rd Platoon was in a little trouble a couple of blocks away and we were going to pull out some wounded marines. That was pretty much all the order we got, because from the time we got the word to the time we got to the house was a matter of maybe five minutes.

  We were told that there were insurgents in the house and there’s at least three that are alive. We did not know how many of our guys had been wounded. So our squad heads to the house, and when we got there we saw a couple of wounded marines in Humvees being taken away. I still didn’t know the situation, so I walk in the front door and the first thing I see is another one of my marines, at least an acquaintance of mine, someone I had been friendly with, lying on the floor. He had been shot in the head, and that was one of my first images in that house. It was Sergeant Norwood and I saw him lying on the floor in a pool of blood and not moving.