by Peter Telep
Sometimes an operation like this would call for a false insertion or extraction, and the boats had already conducted one prior to reaching the rally point. Now, as the last man from each stack exited, the coxswains threw their engines in reverse. The boats exfiltrated to the left in their current order. They coxswains kept their engines turned away from the landing site to avoid exposing them to fire and to reduce their noise signature.
The single wave insertion had gone off without a hitch, the gunners marking their fields of fire, the zone identified onshore by a security team who planted infrared strobes. Corey’s coxswain followed the lead boat to another small island. They brought the boats in tight to the shoreline, near the stands of trees and a tarpaulin of taller bulrushes beneath which they found excellent cover. From there they would wait, monitoring the platoon net for the call to extract.
The men on Corey’s boat were consummate professionals, standing tall against the wind-swept rains. Corey shifted out from beneath the control station’s awning. He flipped up his NODs and drifted back to his aft gunner, Corporal Quiroz, who banged fists with him then immediately returned to his fifty cal. Corey went up to check on the bow gunners, not that they needed his supervision, but he wanted to show his gratitude for them standing up there in the miserable weather. Their grins said, “Oorah, bring on the storm.”
Corey glanced across the bow toward Josh’s boat, nearly lost beneath the heavy reeds drumming on his hull. That tapping, along with the falling rain, filled his ears with a white noise that further concealed their position. The gunners scanned the opposite riverbank, but this was a more rural area with broad fields and few houses, a well-chosen hide position. Corey’s night vision revealed little more than the oily water lapping at the shore. He thought of Johnny and Willie and the rest of the GCE out there and how he had almost become an infantryman himself. He had left the small town of Girard, Pennsylvania with the goal of transforming himself into a 0311 rifleman but had emerged from infantry training school as a 0331 machine gunner, which was just fine with him. As is often the case with many recruits, he had had no long-term intentions of joining the Marine Corps. Yes, he was getting burned out in high school, but he was not failing, just getting worn down by the grind. Coaches told him he was a damned fine baseball player and could take his skills somewhere and maybe earn a college scholarship, so that had been the original plan. As fate would have it, he had linked up with a friend, Dusty, who was a few years his senior. Dusty had joined the Corps and shared stories of his experiences. Corey was intrigued and wondered if he had what it took.
His first deployment was to Colombia and Honduras. He was thrilled to be a part of an eighteen-man team of experienced operators who groomed him into a maritime warrior. The unit acted as a quick reaction force, did humanitarian work, and supported drug interdiction operations for the DEA. During those nine months, Corey was meritoriously promoted, and his commanders told him he was well ahead of his colleagues who had joined the Corps with him. The sandy-haired kid from a sleepy football town in Pennsylvania had made his mark and was continuing to do so half way across the world in a country booby-trapped by a crazed and suicidal insurgency.
Corey returned to the control station and checked his watch. The platoon should be nearing the compound. Any minute now, some Marine in those hills would recall the famous quote from Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, who, in 1918 at the battle of Belleau Wood, urged his comrades to attack by shouting, “Come on you, sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”
* * *
Asad al-Zahawi shuddered over the beeping noise. For a moment, he was not sure if the sound originated in a dream. He reached over to the night stand and fumbled for his cell phone. The boy on the other end said he was Malik and spoke in a broken lilt, his voice infected by nerves or by the sound of falling rain seeping into his phone. He spoke of boats headed toward the compound, of Americans, and of the bonus he wanted if the information was correct. Just as al-Zahawi sat up in the bed, a knock came at his door. He answered to find his brother-in-law with a rifle slung over his shoulder. “My spotters called. Four boats. A platoon of Marines.”
Al-Zahawi shook his head and spoke through his teeth. “They found me.”
His brother-in-law raised a palm. “Calm down. We’ll move quietly. And remember, we have Allah, along with every neighbor you’ve helped on our side. You lifted them all out of poverty. They haven’t forgotten you, and most already belong to the insurgency.”
“Where are the Marines?”
“Just outside. We can’t get to the cars. Not yet, anyway. I’ll give you some men, but stay here until I call for you.”
Al-Zahawi reached under his bed and slid out his AK-47, along with two magazines. “I told you I wanted to leave. You promised I’d be safe.” He rose and nervously stroked his graying beard. “I turn fifty this year. I hope I live long enough to celebrate that birthday.”
“You will. My men will stop them, and we’ll get you out..”
Al-Zahawi snickered. “How many do you have?”
“Over one hundred.”
* * *
Johnny held back his assaulters as Willie’s security team pushed out to the row of palm trees marking the edge of their last covered and concealed position. Ahead lay twenty meters of pockmarked ground that terminated at a square formation of compound walls rising nearly three meters. Partially eclipsed behind those walls were a pair of two-story block homes with, Johnny estimated, two to three bedrooms each. Their flat roofs and arched windows protected by ornate metal screens were not uncommon in Fallujah; however, surrounding them was an improbable and lavish landscape design featuring fountains, imported shrubbery, and topiaries better suited for a palace. According to aerial photographs, three late model sedans were parked inside. The entire compound was owned by Asad al-Zahawi’s brother-in-law, and recent intel gathered by an Army Operational Detachment Alpha team indicated that the insurgency financier himself was staying at the compound. Coalition forces had been trying to capture al-Zahawi for months as he used foreign fighters and couriers to smuggle cash in bulk across Iraq’s porous borders while creating a complex array of indigenous money sources. He garnered most of his funding from petroleum-related criminal activity, kidnapping, bribery, and blackmail.
Attached to the platoon and crouched beside Johnny was Sergeant First Class Nunez, an operator from the ODA team who could positively identify al-Zahawi from the dozens of other bearded men wearing ManJams and sandals. Johnny had earlier warned Nunez to shelve any ideas he had of being a rock star; his job was to stay alive so he could ID the target, not get himself killed trying to prove that Army SF guys were superior warriors. Nunez said he had nothing to prove, that SF guys already were masters of the universe. Johnny had chuckled. “You think you’re all that and a bag of chips, huh? We’ll see.” For his part, Nunez remained tight on Johnny’s heels, safe and sound.
In addition to Nunez, Sergeant Ashur Bandar was attached as a linguist (MOS 2712). He was born in Kuwait, raised in Syria, and taken to the United States as a boy, where he received his legal citizenship because he had never been a legal citizen of Kuwait or Syria. Like Corey, he grew up in Pennsylvania but had gone on to graduate from Penn State. Instead of joining the Marines as an officer, he enlisted because he wanted to get down and dirty as an infantryman. Indeed, every Marine in 3rd Platoon spoke some Arabic, but Bandar, known as “the terp” (short for interpreter), was the go to guy should they need rapid fire information.
“Hey, Johnny, it’s Willie,” came a familiar voice over the platoon net.
“What do you got?”
“Looks clear so far. Could be some guys on the roof behind those ledges, but I doubt it with all this rain. We’ll keep an eye on them, though.”
“Roger.”
“We’re moving out,” Willie added.
The platoon’s advance on the compound was so well-choreographed that it seemed twenty-eight men were being guided by a single mind. The security teams split of
f into static positions from which they would establish a base of fire along the perimeter, while Johnny gave the hand signal, and his twelve men pushed through them and charged across the open field to the main gate, which was secured by a rusting chain and thick key lock. A pair of bolt cutters rendered the lock useless. Team Leader Oliver gently removed the chain from the gate and opened it just wide enough to pass through. Sergeant Brandt, Bravo stack’s assistant team leader, hustled off with his six men toward the house on the left, while Johnny took his six, including Oliver and Nunez, to the right. Four Marines from Willie’s team trailed the assaulters to provide added support, while another group exploited the assault team’s movement to the gate. Once there, they broke off to circle around the back and open the rear gate, should the assaulters need to extract out back. The idea of a precision raid was to advance on the objective as quietly and simultaneously as possible, avoiding anything that might give up the assault team within the compound’s walls.
In a perfect world and on a perfect night, their high value target would be lying fast asleep in his bed, and the first thing he would hear was his front door exploding inward. By the time he sat up and rubbed the grit from his eyes, a Marine would have a rifle jammed in his face. “Don’t move, motherfucker.” Their target would recognize those instructions because he was a fan of American action films and because he assumed the word “motherfucker” was the preferred pronoun of the United States Marine Corps.
Working alone, Sergeant Pat Rugg, the lead breacher from Florida who had the grin of an alligator and the shoulders of a black bear, rushed forward to unfurl the green-colored detcord and place the sticky side along the hinges of the metal door. The rest of the team stacked up and held security behind him near two palm trees and a row of manicured shrubs. In case the charge failed to detonate, the others carried a sledgehammer and a Halligan bar like those wielded by firefighters to pry open residential doors. The assistant breacher, Sergeant Tom Marshall, had a pistol grip pump action twelve-gauge shotgun with breaching rounds, along with an alternate roll of detcord. Johnny hunkered down with the others and turned up the volume on his radio.
“Alpha set,” came Willie’s voice over the platoon net.
“Bravo One is almost there,” answered Johnny. “Brandt, how you doing, son?”
Brandt answered tersely, “Bravo Two is set.”
“Roger that.”
Trailing the shock tube behind him, Sergeant Rugg returned to the group. Nunez assisted by holding up the breacher’s blanket to protect the team from any shrapnel triggered by the blast. Rugg now clutched the Qualtech firing device, a remote-control sized igniter with dual initiated priming system that was attached to the end of the shock tube.
Johnny reported to Captain Zabrowski that Bravo One and Two were ready and that the breaching charges were set.
“I have control,” the captain announced over the radio.
Rugg removed the Qualtech’s safety pin, then threw a lever, releasing the second safety.
Zabrowski began his countdown: 5, 4, 3, 2...
The last second used to hit Johnny the hardest. Esprit de corps, he knew, was rooted in all Marines. Without it there was no way to survive that moment between the verge of battle and the battle itself, a moment once riddled with self-doubt and untested faith in his brothers-in-arms. Now, after all these years in the Corps, after watching bravery come fully alive before his eyes as bleeding Marines carried each other from the battlefield, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he could trust these boys with the mission and with his life.
Rugg pressed the firing button. Pale-orange light flashed from the doorway, followed by the sharp bang and powerful concussion of explosives. From the other side of the compound came the echoing rumble of Brandt’s charge.
Johnny was already on his feet, raising his M4A1 rifle. He sent off Willie’s four men to the cars, where they would lie in wait for anyone attempting a break.
Staff Sergeant Oliver jogged out front, hollering, “Clear!” He was first to the door, which had blown off its hinges and collapsed in a mangled heap. Tightly behind him were Pat Rugg, Tom Marshall, and Sergeant Carlos Padilla. They flipped up their NODs, activated the SureFire flashlights mounted to their rifles, and entered the home. Johnny, Nunez, and Bandar brought up the rear. They were five assaulters, one intel guy, and one interpreter.
As the stench of the explosives wafted into their faces, they crossed into a large foyer tiled in expensive white marble. The beams of their flashlights cut like lasers through the swirling dust. Now they would employ initiative-based tactics to clear the rooms, remembering to fill all voids in security; flow to meet the danger area; then go assault the next danger area. The phrase was “fill, flow, and go,” and the Marines practiced clearing rooms until they could do so almost unconsciously, relying on muscle memory and the rhythm of their breathing and boots.
Beyond the foyer lay a living room with a wall of sagging bookshelves, the kind made of thin particle board and pumped out of Chinese factories. The furniture looked equally inexpensive, as if the owner had built the houses but run out of cash before he could properly furnish them, or perhaps he did not care. The place was a tacky knockoff of a rich man’s house. Weird juxtapositions like this were common in Iraq. Staff Sergeant Oliver pushed forward with his guys and cleared the living room and adjoining kitchen, while Johnny, Nunez, and Bandar started down a short hall toward a staircase, from where the putrid scents of body odor and stale tobacco made Johnny want to hold his breath.
Oliver rushed up behind Johnny and muttered, “Clear down here.” He started up the stairs with the other Marines—
Just as someone tossed a grenade into the stairwell.
* * *
Willie was staring through his NODs, letting the infrared laser generated by the AN/PEQ4 mounted to his rifle play over the rooftops. A parapet about a half meter high spanned the perimeter of each roof, and he felt certain that at least one or more snipers would take advantage of the cover provided by those low walls.
Without warning, the windows of one house flickered with light a half-second before a muffled explosion shook the ground. As he reached to key his microphone, automatic weapons fire ripped across the compound walls, originating from the north, where the densely packed neighborhood lay hidden behind curtains of rain.
“This is Bravo Two,” called Sergeant Brandt. “My house is secure. There’s no one home.”
“Johnny, sitrep, Johnny?” Willie called.
A reply came, but it was not Johnny; it was Captain Zabrowski, who began to speak but his voice was lost by so much weapons fire on Willie’s position that he dropped to his chest as the palms shredded above him, pieces of fronds and bark flying like confetti. The incoming ceased long enough for Willie to raise his head as Sergeant Heredia’s voice cracked over the net. He reported contact to the north, contact to the south, contact to the west.
Jesus Christ, they were being surrounded, Willie thought. Had they been setup? An intel leak? What the hell?
Willie noted that Brandt and three of his Marines had reached the roof of their house and quickly hit the deck as the parapet came alive with ricocheting rounds.
“Drifter, this is Bravo Two,” called Brandt. “I can see them moving up. Large numbers. Company size force, over.”
Willie’s men at the back gate said they were pinned down by withering gunfire from at least two machine guns and a dozen or more riflemen.
“Johnny, sitrep?” called Willie. “Come on, Johnny!”
* * *
In the second that Johnny had spotted the grenade, he had spun back to face Bandar and Nunez and had extended his arms. Driving forward like a defensive tackle, Johnny knocked them squarely onto their backs and shielded them with his own body.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Staff Sergeant Oliver, a young man barely twenty-six, had made a decision—and in that instant he became every Marine. He fought during the founding of our nation and was a devil dog in Europe. He flew with
the leathernecks of the South Pacific and battled with the “Frozen Chosin” in Korea. He waded into the blood-stained rice paddies of Vietnam and reconnoitered the enemy across the scorching deserts of Kuwait and Iraq. He was a special operator infiltrating the Taliban in the tribal regions of Pakistan and a bulldog trekking up the perilous mountains of Afghanistan.
And because he was every Marine, he did what every Marine would have done. Without hesitation. Because he was a member of a fraternity of courage and sacrifice.
Staff Sergeant Paul Oliver leaped onto the grenade.
It all happened in one second. Not enough time for Oliver to recall those glorious winter mornings playing football with his father in Youngstown. Not enough time for him to picture the tears falling from his mother’s eyes when he had told her he was joining the Corps. Not enough time for him to agonize over leaving behind his wife and newborn son... but just enough time for him to remember his heritage, his duty, and his desire to save his fellow Marines.
Johnny screamed for Bandar and Nunez to wait there. He scrambled to his feet, returning to the shattered staircase, where Oliver was lying on his side, missing an arm, a leg, and most of his face. Johnny checked the man’s carotid artery for a pulse. There was none. Rugg, Marshall, and Padilla had fallen back into a small alcove. They were badly shaken, had taken some minor shrapnel wounds, but were otherwise okay. With his stomach twisting in anger, Johnny signaled for them to follow. He took the stairs two at a time, opening fire to force back whoever had tossed that grenade. His breath was labored, his ears ringing from the explosion. He turned into a hallway about five meters long with three doors, two to the right, one to the left. The beam of his flashlight caught something near the left side door, a gleam of metal, and Johnny’s rounds chewed into that door jamb.
A figure spun from the farthest door on the right, and Sergeant Rugg was already pushing past Johnny to hammer that bastard onto his back, the insurgent’s blood-covered AK-47 tumbling from his grip.