by Peter Telep
Out on the riverbank, another pair of eyes was riveted on them, eyes belonging to a fourteen-year-old spotter named Yusef who had buried himself in the mud and was armed with a pair of binoculars looted from an Iraqi soldier’s corpse. He had picked up the four boats shimmering in silhouette and tracked them as they swept by. He reached for his cell phone. Not in his pocket. The other? He reached again. Nothing. It was gone! He would have to run to the next spotter’s station to alert the compound. He waited until the boats passed, then pushed up on his elbows like a zombie heaving from the mud. Barely two seconds later, the skies opened, and the rain pummeled him with a vengeance. He fell twice before reaching the edge of the field.
A gunnery sergeant on the second boat probed the rutted riverbank with his NODs. About a hundred meters off now, date palms thrashed in the wind like some unearthly cheer squad glowing phosphorescent green. Beneath them lay clusters of one- and two-story homes constructed of cement or cinder blocks, their flat roofs festooned with power cables, their windows darkened, their inhabitants sleeping under extra blankets to combat the cold. Beyond those homes, and past the kebab shops where the old men usually loitered, stood the twisted hulks of cars stripped to their bones. Those chassis formed a winding fence near a field draped in darkness. It was here, along this part of the riverbank, where the danger grew more enigmatic, where the opportunities for cover and concealment were the greatest.
The gunnery sergeant detected movement in the field, a collection of shadows that seemed to wrestle with each other. He looked again and found nothing. He flipped up his NODs and took a deep breath. A mistake. That god-awful stench boiling up from the water was produced by Fallujah’s runoff system now swollen from an earlier deluge. Raw sewage was coursing through the garbage-filled streets and forming dozens of poisonous tributaries. The men around him waved off the noxious fumes while the rain drummed louder and the outline of the ancient city appeared and vanished like enemy recognition flash cards in a training class.
As the boats rocked through more wake turbulence, the gunnery sergeant clung to his seat and stared back at the field. There was no fear in his gut, only a premonition that began to gnaw at him. He cursed off the feeling. Nothing to worry about. Easy day. No Drama. And besides, this operation was nothing compared to what his father had been through.
One summer evening, after a pack of cigarettes and a few shots of Jim Beam from a cracked glass, the old man had finally broken down and told him about his time in the U.S. Army and the fighting in Vietnam. He recounted the December 1966 attack on Landing Zone Bird, a fire base located in the Kim Son Valley some fifty kilometers north of Qui Nhon. Over 1,000 North Vietnamese Army regulars overran the fire base’s perimeter, which at the time was manned by only 170 American troops. Presidential Unit Citations, Distinguished Service Crosses, and one Medal of Honor were awarded to those who had fought, bled, and held the LZ that night. Consequently, there were few people or situations in the civilian world that ever frightened the old man. He said that men are like steel: they both need a little temper to be worth a damn.
All of his life, Gunnery Sergeant James “Johnny” Johansen had lived by his father’s words and refused to let adversity stand in his way. He had joined the Marine Corps and risen to the rank of gunnery sergeant. Now he was 3rd Platoon’s senior enlisted man and “platoon sergeant,” advising the commanding officer and ensuring optimal standards of proficiency, conduct, and cohesion in the unit. On a daily basis he demonstrated that his men were the smartest, toughest, and most readied force in the world. There were none better.
Johnny leaned toward Staff Sergeant Paul Oliver, the B stack leader who was hunkered down beside him on the boat. He mouthed the words, “Easy day. No drama.”
Oliver grinned.
Because there were so many hard days in the Corps, and the drama in country was particularly high this past year, Johnny had become fond of those phrases to put his men at ease. He would tell them they were “all that and a bag of chips” and that they were all over this mission “like a fat kid on a cupcake.” They knew that if there was one man above them who truly cared about them it was Johnny. They would walk through Hell, and he would walk with them. “Thanks, Gunny,” they would say. “You’re the man, Gunny.”
* * *
Soaked and out of breath, Yusef reached the next spotter’s station where he found his counterpart, Malik, fast asleep inside the small earthen bunker. Yusef shook the older boy awake and shared the news. Malik snorted and said there was no way to tell where the boats were headed and that the other spotters upriver were now tracking them. Yusef argued that they should call the compound anyway. Malik widened his eyes and shoved Yusef against the dirt wall. “You woke me up for this! Let someone else do it, and let someone else take the blame for crying wolf.”
Yusef spied Malik’s cell phone tucked into a mesh pouch attached to a backpack. He reached into the pouch, snatched the phone, and took off running.
* * *
Staff Sergeant Josh Eriksson commanded the second patrol boat, radio call sign Game Warden 2. He spoke over the boat’s VIC-3 system, informing Johnny that they were ten minutes out from phase line green and reaching the Objective Rally Point (ORP). After crossing that line marked by a terrain feature, they would make their final radio checks and ensure all weapons systems were operational. The Ground Combat Element would stand and prepare to disembark.
This was the fourth mission Josh had run with Second Force, and he enjoyed the camaraderie and vivid tales of buffoonery that Johnny and the others shared in their down time. Johnny was a popular and charismatic leader with an enormous network of friends throughout the Corps. Josh respected him because he had taught his boys to appreciate Small Craft Company’s mission capabilities and did not write them off as taxi drivers. Johnny and his men counted on the boat teams as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) should the need arise, and they valued Josh’s obsessive attention to planning and maintenance. Through reciting the Marine Corp’s Rifleman’s Creed, Marines learn that the rifle is your life. You must master it as you master your life. For riverine operators, the boat is your life, and Josh was intimately familiar with every square inch of his, from the hydraulic bow door to the aft heavy machine gun mount.
Officially known as Small Unit Riverine Craft (SURC), the patrol boats were, in effect, high-speed death machines on water. A skilled coxswain could pull a hard 180 degree “J-turn” and put the gunners back on target in seconds. Violent emergency stops from forty-plus knots were accomplished within an incredible single boat length. Josh was the captain of his boat and the section leader who commanded all four. He thumbed a dial on the VIC-3 panel to his left, switching to the platoon net so he could check in with the other boat captains, who each responded over their 152 radios.
To his right sat his coxswain, Lance Corporal Wilson, whose attention was split between the boat ahead and the Furuno Navnet radar positioned left of the wheel. The radar’s screen glowed dimly, and Wilson was monitoring his speed and searching for obstructions in the water. Each range ring showed him one quarter of a nautical mile.
Up near the bow, Lance Corporal Duffy stood tall at the boat’s MK-44 minigun station mounted to the SURC’s port side and fitted with a heavy gun shield. Arguably the sexiest weapon on board, the minigun was an electrically driven rotary machine gun whose six barrels spun like a bundle of axles to unleash salvos of tracer-lit fire that lashed out from the boat like a dragon’s tongue. The other bow gunner, Lance Corporal Blount, manned the M240G 7.62mm machine gun. Blount and Duffy alternated between the minigun and the 240 “Golf” so they were proficient with either weapon, and Josh was pleased to have his two favorite bulldogs peering out from behind their gun shields, searching for prey.
Standing behind Josh at the aft gunner’s station was Corporal Keller, who kept a firm handle on “Ma Deuce,” the nickname for the M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun. Keller had an ammo can attached to the gun with a belt of .50 caliber sitting in the cradle. He caught Josh
glancing back at him and lifted his chin, as if to say, “Ready to rock-n-roll, Staff Sergeant.”
These were Josh’s men. This was his boat. He loved them as much as he loved the Corps, which was why he could converse for hours about his unit and constantly brainstormed better ways to exploit their gear and win more fights. He even sported a tattoo on his left outer forearm that depicted the POW/MIA flag in silhouette, along with the words: I AM MY BROTHER’S KEEPER. He literally wore the bond between Marines on his sleeve.
When asked why he joined the Marines, Josh would narrow his gaze and without hesitation state that the Marine Corps saved his life. To describe his childhood as rough was like describing the sinking of the Titanic as a “little boat accident.” Suffice it to say he had come a long way from that mobile home park in Asheville, North Carolina, where his father had nearly died from an overdose and where he had been blackmailed into some criminal activity that had nearly sent him to prison. He had taught himself to look at the world through the eyes of his enemy, realizing that sometimes you are your own worst enemy. The mistakes he had made were never far from his thoughts, but they were lessons learned and made him who he was today, leading this section of boats, calling over the 152 and the intercom that they had reached the Objective Rally Point. Now they were approaching the Shark’s Fin—a hairpin turn in the river that posed great danger to the boats because the small islands and irregular shoreline were a nesting ground for insurgents.
* * *
When he looked back through the torrential rain, Yusef spotted Malik racing over the asphalt like a coal black skeleton with colossal eyes. Malik narrowed the gap between them as they splashed up the road, pieces of broken asphalt pinching the soles of their bare feet. Yusef needed to slow down so he could dial the compound, but Malik would stop at nothing to reclaim his phone. The man who had hired Yusef had promised a large bonus if he provided information that became valuable to the insurgency, and notice of these boats could be very valuable. Yusef needed to pass it on, despite Malik’s cynicism. Gritting his teeth, Yusef ran faster toward the crumbling ruins of four houses that had been demolished by an air strike. Maybe there, among the piles of twisted rebar and slabs of concrete, he could lose his pursuer.
* * *
Staff Sergeant Joseph “Willie” Parente glared at the old iron bridge, its triangular girders gleaming like perforated teeth in the gloom. It was from here, back in March, that the charred and dismembered bodies of two Blackwater contractors had been strung up like cattle in a butcher shop. A convoy of SUVs had been ambushed and those men, along with two others, were brutally murdered in an incident that had sparked the First Battle of Fallujah. All Willie could do now was shake his head in disgust as the rain momentarily stopped and the rusting green underbelly of the bridge passed overhead. A fresh sheet of rain confronted them on the other side, and then they started into the Shark’s Fin turn, leaving the bridge and the nearby Fallujah hospital behind.
Willie was Alpha Stack’s leader and seated aboard Game Warden 3 with the rest of his men. The boat’s captain, Sergeant Corey McKay, was an articulate and generous operator, a warrior prodigy who bought beers and told good stories that made him seem much older than his youthful face suggested. He lifted his voice and announced they were hitting the bottleneck. His gunners remained vigilant, covering their sectors of fire with an efficiency both expected and appreciated by everyone. As the coxswain rolled his wheel left, the boats swept parallel to a liver-shaped collection of small islands divided by a lattice-work of channels. Unsurprisingly, a few rifles cracked in the distance, but none of those reports was followed by an echoing thump along the boat’s collar or clang off the armored plates. Two more pops resounded from the islands but apparently the rest of the insurgency was too cold, too wet, or too tired to fight.
“Hey, Willie, phase line green,” Corey said over the intercom. “Three minutes out.”
“Roger.”
He reached for his radio and dialed the platoon’s internal net so he could notify Captain Zabrowski, who was seated up near the bow with the platoon’s communications chief, Sergeant Edinger, and the corpsman, HM2 Milam. Although the captain did monitor the boat’s intercom, oftentimes he was speaking with “higher” on another channel and unable to catch every report on the intercom or internal net.
At the same time, all four coxswains set their engines to 1800 rpms so that the harmonic tone made it difficult to identify their exact number and position. This was an old trick proven effective by running drills with troops on the shoreline. Those men would turn their backs to the water and listen as boats passed. They were asked how many and in which direction those craft had traveled. For the most part, they failed miserably, meaning the insurgents would, too.
With the captain notified, Willie gave the order, and the men stood and began their last minute comm and equipment checks. This was Christmas morning seconds before opening the presents, and nothing could stop that familiar and formidable rush of adrenaline warming Willie’s chest like a shot of Jim Beam. The boats would make a final turn and reach the Riverine Landing Site (RLS) just a kilometer ahead.
Willie took a deep breath and steeled himself. He was a card-carrying member of an elite gun club that had once been called teufelshunde or “dogs of the devil” by German soldiers in WWI because they fought with such ferocity. The shadow he cast was centuries long, and the sight of him in full combat gear struck the enemy cold. He was a weapon of destruction. A warlock. But it was not always this way.
Staff Sergeant Joseph “Willie” Parente had once been a spindly school kid from Fairhaven, Massachusetts who had worn thick glasses and a patch over one eye to correct a vision problem. His father, a veteran Marine, was a long-haul truck driver gone for weeks at a time, and his mother worked for the Titleist Golf Ball Company, whose corporate headquarters were on Bridge Street in Fairhaven. Every time his father left home, Willie donned his cowboy hat and holstered his six-shooter cap gun. He assumed his post in the front yard. His two older sisters would inform the neighbors that he was protecting the house until their dad returned. Years later, he joined the Corps, did a stint as a 0352 TOW gunner (antitank missile system operator), and was also on the battalion’s rifle and pistol team. He had worked harder than ever to become a Recon Marine, and now he was at the top of his game, deployed here to Iraq to participate in the Second Battle of Fallujah and Operation Phantom Fury. Along the way he had earned an additional nickname: “Bare Knuckles Willie,” after a run-in with an insufferable staff sergeant who nearly cost him his career.
“Drifter,” Corey began, addressing the unit by their call sign. “Thirty seconds to mark. Stand by.”
Sergeant Heredia, the platoon’s 3rd Team Leader, turned back to Willie and nodded.
Willie clutched the gunwale. It was game on. The riverbank materialized through the rain. Beyond lay the hillsides and swaying palms leading up to the compound.
* * *
Yusef was picking his way over the broken pieces of concrete when the cell phone slipped from his wet hand and tumbled into the mountain of rubble. He had no flashlight, no other way to see where it had fallen, and Malik was coming now, clutching pieces of rebar that jutted from the rocks to form handholds.
“I dropped your phone! I can’t find it,” Yusef told him.
Malik was nearly on him and shaking a fist. Yusef swallowed and turned to get out of there. He padded across the summit of splintered concrete. One foot gave out. He lost his balance, slipped, and plunged backward.
The sharp piece of rebar penetrated his back and went through his left lung as he hit the slab. These details were lost on him, of course. He knew only the pain and reached up to feel the blood-soaked metal jutting like an arrow from his chest.
Malik leaned down and gaped at him.
Yusef struggled to breathe. “I’m sorry.”
Malik shook his head. “You get what you deserve.” He retreated down the pile and shoved his head into the larger crevices, still searching f
or his phone.
The rain kept falling, but Yusef no longer felt it on his cheeks. He lay there, listening, as Malik continued moving across the rubble. “I found it!” he cried. Yusef heard him shoving smaller pieces of concrete aside, and then the older boy groaned as he forced himself down into the rocks. Yusef craned his head and watched Malik disappear up to his waist. A moment later, he wormed himself back up with the phone clutched in his hand.
“Call them,” said Yusef. “My family needs the money.”
“If this call is worth anything, then my family will get the money, not yours. Not the family of a thief.” Malik flipped open the phone and began to dial.
* * *
Sergeant Corey McKay stood beside his coxswain, Corporal Ochoa, as the latter expertly piloted their boat behind Game Warden 2. The lead boat, Game Warden 1, was turning just offshore to the right flank, working security for the insertion, while Game Warden 4 banked to the left. The goal was to insert the Ground Combat Element as quickly as possible and with a minimum of maneuvering.
“Thirty seconds to mark,” Josh called to the other boat captains. And then it was time: “Mark, mark, mark.”
Corey and Josh took their boats head-on toward the riverbank and slammed right up onto the shoreline, the sandy bottom scraping along their aluminum hulls. The hydraulic bow doors were already groaning into position, and the stacks of ground troops were leaping onto the bank, their boots making sucking noises in the mud. They bolted toward the hillside just upriver, where the shoreline gave way to a cluster of towering bulrushes. Corey and Josh took a head count, as did Johnny and Willie.