by Trish Wood
So I tried to assess the situation. There are maybe three or four marines in there already and they are all stacked on the far wall, and I get in and I look through the second doorway and the other guys grab me and yank me back and I was like, “What?” and they said the insurgents have a direct line of sight on that doorway. One of my guys said, “That’s how Sergeant Norwood got killed. He went to go look in that room and they shot him.”
This whole time I could hear marines yelling, “Help, we have got to get out of here. He’s bleeding out!” I found out that there are four or five marines trapped in the building, plus another one on the other side of the building who is wounded and all by himself. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was like, “Hurry up, get me the fuck out of here. He’s bleeding out, we need to get a corpsman in here!” We were saying, “All right guys, hold on, we’re—we’re going to get you out of this. We’re going to get you out of this mess.”
They were all trapped in different rooms that were off a central room and the central room was open to a second floor where there was a catwalk and there was at least one insurgent up on the roof, and one guy on the catwalk that could pretty much shoot from any direction into any room. It was hard for us to know where he was, hard for us to shoot at him.
First Sergeant Kasal and Pfc. Nicoll had gone in to try to retrieve some of the other marines that were stuck in the house already, not knowing the situation, and that is when I believe they got shot. The insurgents were shooting down at them, I think, and that’s why they were mostly hit in the legs. They were already hit when I got there. We could hear them. They were kind of screaming, you know, “Help us, help us . . . you’ve got to get us out of here.” Corporal Mitchell, who was with Nicoll, was saying Nicoll was bleeding out; we need to get somebody in here quick. Nicoll was so badly wounded that he eventually lost his leg.
I was freaked because we were trapped and we couldn’t just rush into the room or else we were going to get shot too. My squad leader was looking through a sight into the room and I guess one of the insurgents poked his head out and my squad leader took a real quick shot, but he missed; and he was really upset because he likes to think of himself as a good shot and he had the perfect opportunity to get rid of this threat and he missed, but he only had a split second and it’s not his fault.
Someone came up with the plan: we get as many people into as many open spots as we could so we could all shoot at the same time up toward the catwalk area, because even if we don’t hit anybody it will force the insurgents back. We got everybody we could facing a different corner of the catwalk and on a count of three we all started to fire. When we did that, these two marines were able to run across and retrieve the wounded as quickly as they could under our fire. I just remember that because it was so loud . . . the bullets on concrete. I was dizzy it was so loud, and I was literally shaking. We had probably ten different weapons going off at the same time. I had to take a step back when it was all done. We did that two or three times in a matter of minutes. We were shooting up with M16s and SAWs with two-hundred-round bursts because we needed to give as much time as possible for the guys to pull out the wounded.
Two of the guys that got rescued were 1st Sergeant Kasal and Pfc. Nicoll. They were both shot in the leg, I think. When they went down they both kind of crawled into a room, but before they made it a grenade was dropped from above. First Sergeant Kasal kind of rolled over onto Pfc. Nicoll to protect him from the blast, taking pretty much all the shrapnel himself, to protect Nicoll. Those are the kind of stories that you hear about in boot camp. You kind of say—Yeah, it’s great and all and I would do that for my buddy, but when it really comes down it, would you really do it? That’s just one of the greatest things I think you could ever do, really. Sergeant Kasal was already wounded and when he did that he was wounded again.
It was interesting because Kasal and Nicoll have a little history together. Pfc. Nicoll had been in the same time I had been, almost four years by now, and was still a private. He was kind of the wild kid who just didn’t really care what happened. You know, he would get drunk, he’d do stupid things, and Sergeant Kasal would bust him down. He busted Pfc. Nicoll down a couple of times because Nicoll was your token troubled marine who was getting in trouble but was still a good marine. In fact, he was an excellent marine.
I was one of the marines who carried Sergeant Norwood out of the building. We knew we were going to take him out and we had our opportunity, so I grabbed another marine and we just grabbed him and started running out of the building. We had to run right past the doorway that the insurgent had a line on us, so it wasn’t the safest place to run, but it was the only way we could get him out. I was trying not to look at Sergeant Norwood because he was shot in the head. He’d been dragged out of the way, so he was more in the center of the room. You don’t want to look at your friend who’s just been shot. You know, it’s sort of a hard thing to digest. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to look at him.
Maybe look at the rest of his body, but you don’t look at his face. I think he was turned faceup. You know, you just . . . but once you see it, I mean . . . I mean, it’s not a good expression on their face.
After we got everybody out of the building, a buddy of mine, Corporal Gonzales, who was the demolition expert of the company, blew up the building. He had a satchel charge, which is twenty pounds of C4, and he rigged it up and we threw it in front of the building. I think there were still a couple of live insurgents in there.
There was a pink cloud that came up after the explosion from all the blood that was in the building. You know, because there were at least two dead insurgents and the blood of marines . . . so there was a lot of blood in the building.
After the explosion there was someone who was still alive caught in the rubble, and I’m sure he was pretty shaky because of the blast, but he still tossed a grenade as the marines were walking by. They all got in line and pretty much shot him because he was still alive.
Mike Bonaldo served an earlier tour of Iraq from March to July 2003.
“I am changed”
DOMINICK KING
7TH MARINE REGIMENT
1ST MARINE DIVISION
AUGUST 2004-MARCH 2005
FALLUJA
I usually don’t tell people about it, about what I did in Iraq. I was picking up dead bodies. They’d look at me as a victim. I don’t want to think of myself as a victim. I want to think of myself as somebody who’s actually privileged to have a role in something that’s changed the lives of so many people.
I was walking through my dorm one night, and I guess somebody might have dropped something or jumped up or up and down or something on the floor above me, and it was just this loud bang from above and I jumped like—like there was a mortar round hitting a couple feet away from me. Everyone around me just started to laugh and thought that it was a big joke, and I just kind of went with it and laughed along with them, but that’s how it is. Whenever there’s a loud bang or something, my first thought is, Oh, this is a gunshot or mortar round, or something like that.
My grandmother has a beach house down in Plymouth, and every single Fourth of July they have a bonfire and lots of fireworks, and I can’t deal with fireworks anymore because the sound of the fireworks going off is the same sound as the mortar rounds. I go there because it’s a great weekend, but a couple months ago, over the last Fourth of July, I just put on headphones and read a book or something while everyone else was at the fireworks. And then once they came back—my buddy came back—we went out to the bars and went on and carried on as normal people would.
When I first got back, I felt lucky to . . . to have a story that no one else does. But then there was also the resentment for me having to bear this whole burden for everyone else back home who, you know, just wants to go to school and get drunk and party. Actually, the toughest thing is trying to pick up girls. Because I thought going in there that it’d be great, because I’m this older guy and everything. But I in
timidate a lot of the younger girls who are in the same grade as me. I’m twenty-two, a lot older. And they can’t seem to get past the fact that I’ve been to war. I’ve never really been able to experience college life.
There’s a lot of subtle type of disrespect that I get. Not so much meaningful disrespect, just ignorance. They don’t know any better. But the only overt sign of disrespect that I got wasn’t just to me, but it was to veterans of Vietnam and World War II and Korea. It was disrespecting every single person who has ever either died for their country or risked their life for their country. It was when the Student Democratic Party at Assumption, which is my school, put up a sign on the wall asking for . . . for donations for food, clothes, and maybe money or something to help feed the homeless Vietnam vets because it was around Thanksgiving. And on the sign it had the word Veterans in big letters, and some idiot walked by and crossed off Veterans and put Illiterate Morons. It was done sometime between ten-thirty and eleven-twenty in the morning during regular school hours, because it was just the normal sign when I left to go to my first class at ten-thirty. When I came back at eleventhirty, that’s when it was crossed over. So it was done by somebody in a normal state of mind, and the fact that they wrote Illiterate Morons just shows some sort of thought about it; I mean, in that they look at all veterans as just the guy on the side of the road who’s begging for money. Or, you know, some guy who doesn’t know how to read and he decides to join the military because that’s his only option. And that’s what that person thinks of the military.
So I went to my friends and I said, “This is unacceptable. I want to find the person that wrote this.” And I actually gave a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone that gave me credible evidence as to who did it.
Later that night I had just had enough and I wasn’t just going to wait around, so I went up to the second floor and banged on every door. I’d do about four doors at a time. I’d explain to everybody what was going down and I told them that I want to find the person that wrote that. And I was going to beat him to within an inch of his life.
I’m actually kind of glad I didn’t because I would have gotten into a lot of trouble. And I would have just gone nuts on the person and probably would just go too far. And I’m sure, you know, one kid might know that his friend did it and just won’t tell me because he knows that the consequences for that kid will be disastrous.
I am changed. When I’m with all of my veteran buddies, I’m usually one of the more outgoing people. I do nothing but joke around with them. But when I’m out with my college friends, it’s just completely different. I’m more quiet, more detached. Girls will say I’m shy, but it’s not shy—I mean, you know, I have no problem talking to girls. I just, it’s just, I don’t . . . I can’t really relate with these people anymore. I’d say that’s the biggest thing for me—it’s not that, that I’ve changed in a negative way . . . I just can’t relate with the average college kid anymore.
People are supportive of the troops as long as it doesn’t take any sacrifice from them, and I just get so furious with people sometimes that I . . . that I just have to leave the room. And I have a long, long list of people who are on my shit list. When we got back from Iraq, me and my friend Tabor were in the car driving to Dunkin’ Donuts or something in the morning, and we were at the stop sign with a car in front of us saying, “Freedom Is Not Free,” and he just looks at me. He goes, “Can you believe this? ‘Freedom’s not free,’ what has he paid?”
Dominick King did his first tour of Iraq from March to June 2003.
“This is what happens when
people speak to each other
with rifles”
BENJAMIN FLANDERS
NEW HAMPSHIRE ARMY NATIONAL GUARD
3-172ND INFANTRY (MOUNTAIN)
MARCH 2004-FEBRUARY 2005
BALAD (LSA ANACONDA)
For soldiers like me there was no grand scheme. I wasn’t sent over there to solve the problems of Iraq. I was sent over just as convoy security detail. Personally, I saw my mission as to help the Iraqi people the best I could. And our unit did do that. If we were patrolling in our sector and there was a civilian accident, our medics jumped out and they tended to whatever casualties were there. When we were interacting with the civilian Iraqi population, we tried to sow as much goodwill as possible—distributing toothbrushes, toothpaste, and shampoo out to the little kids or throwing candy or things like that.
Our actual mission was to provide area security for main supply routes through LSA Anaconda, which is a base in Balad, to another operating base called Camp Taji. Anaconda is about thirty miles north of Baghdad and Taji is about ten, fifteen miles north of Baghdad. We were in charge of that strip of highway. Our primary task was to provide security for Kellogg, Brown and Root convoys that were moving through the country. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, a civilian military defense contract company that was in charge of providing logistical support for the army over there.
The more time I spent in Iraq, the more it seemed that we are just perpetuating our own existence, which didn’t seem like much of a mission at all. I was in charge of bringing convoys up to Anaconda. The niceties that they carried—air conditioning units, living trailers, refrigerated foods, sodas for the PX, CD players, and things like that—
were really great to have and made life easier for the soldiers, but it came at the cost of taking these extremely long convoys through very vulnerable and dangerous sections of Iraq. If we were faced with some sort of enemy contact we would have to respond appropriately to that. So it gets you thinking, Why are we doing this? When are we going to start wrapping this thing up? Convoys could be the second most dangerous job in Iraq. I say it that way because it covers my own butt, because someone could always say, “What about those marines in Falluja who are kicking down doors and hunting the insurgents?” But the roads are extremely dangerous.
There were two periods of significant enemy activity in Iraq. And those coincided with the Falluja assaults. One was in April of ’04 and the other was in November of ’04. I really hope people understand this. I hope that this becomes part of American history, what happened during those two dates, because it was extremely important.
I think maybe the two Falluja assaults also demonstrate some missteps. In April we just routed them out and these armed bands of insurgents traveled up the country into our sector. We had phenomenal, momentous, and hellish ambushes that we went through as a unit during that time.
We were kind of cleaning up the mess of the infantry guys, the marines that were kicking down doors and routing out the bad guys. They sort of took these guys and pushed them out in the Falluja perimeter area, so somebody had to take up the slack. Our company did that. As they were assaulting Falluja, there were rat trails or something like that, where the enemy can escape; there were breaks in the perimeter. You couldn’t stand arm in arm around Falluja. So the fighters would get flushed out and these fighters are organized groups of men who can set up elaborate ambushes and roadside bombs and all that fun stuff. They started making their way north. And when that happens, you get a higher sophistication in the IEDs. They become much more deadly because it’s not amateurs. These are trained military fighters and they come in groups. And they are very effective. So we had this bad period over two days where we had something like eight guys injured in various IED attacks. I just kept thinking nothing we tried was working against these things. . . . Oh, crap, that didn’t work. Oh, crap, that didn’t work.
In the November Falluja assault, our battalion was tasked with providing perimeter support. We were patrolling this sector where there had been an IED blast and there was a perfect hole cut into the pavement of the bridge. We saw the Humvee and it was eviscerated, and it was shocking that the people lived. There was so much compromising of the armor, and we’re talking about steel plating, and it just looked like God took his fingernails and scooped it out like it was pudding. Unbelievable what these blasts do. Not only is it shrapnel, but when the detonation ha
ppens it sends thousands of pieces in different directions. The intense heat and the pressure all at once make them sort of melt through this steel plating like it’s nothing.
So when we were doing our rounds, and we’re coming up around this same damn ramp and this same overpass system where our guys had just been blown up, I remember just kind of like, ducking. I’m thinking, Well, if I survive the blast, the most common injury from these is hearing loss. (The signature wound would be the internal brain damage, but most often it’s hearing loss.) So I plugged my ears. We are right in downtown Baghdad and I just couldn’t think of anything else to do except plug my ears. You can’t get out. You can’t look for these things. They’re hidden in the trash. They’re well disguised. And so the best thing to do would just be to sit tight and plug your ears so that if you survive the blast, you won’t be deaf. And I thought, Man, this is a bad situation.
Oh, it’s dread. It’s nothing but dread. I mean, you just cannot wait until you’re off of the road. We would call it “outside the wire” because the military installations literally had wire, razor wire, surrounding them, no matter how big they were, and Anaconda was large. I think there was about twenty thousand people on the base . . . it was enormous and there’s literally razor wire surrounding every bit of it.
Still, we had it better than the civilian truck drivers. We have the cool job. We have the .50 cal. machine gun mounted on our armored vehicle and we have the MK-19 automatic grenade launcher. We have plenty of ammunition. We have communication with each other. We can call in medevac assets if we need them. We can call for backup if we need, and, hey, we got everything we need to party if we have to.