At the rear of the column in track 211, Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk and the rest of 3rd Platoon were celebrating Lance Corporal James Prince’s birthday. Quirk thought he was a goofy sort of guy, but it was good fun singing to him, and everybody in the track joined in a tuneless chorus.
“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Prince . . .”
It was something to do. They’d given up playing cards inside the track because it was too crowded. They couldn’t play outside because there was too much wind blowing around. They had a few porno mags floating around, but they’d all read them five or six times and were sick of them. Anyway, now that they were moving, rather than sitting in tents in Kuwait with nothing to do, they were all numb to the thrill of flicking through pages of naked girls or reading out the porno stories to each other. Quirk hadn’t had sex for three months. He’d been seeing a girl on and off for ten years, and just before he’d gone to Iraq he’d traveled to New York to spend the night with her in her apartment in the Bronx. It was sort of a loose relationship, but they felt really comfortable with each other. She’d already written to him, but each time he started a letter to send back to her he’d crumpled it up. He could never quite put down what he really wanted to tell her. Sometimes he felt there was too much to say. Other times he felt there wasn’t enough.
Marines around him took a sharp intake of breath. Thomas Quirk looked up at the commotion. Ahead of him he saw the burned-up 507th convoy. Marines were crawling all over the vehicles, trying to rescue some of the equipment, pulling off machine guns and spare parts before the flames got too high. Some vehicles were already lost. My God. The Army fucked up badly. But the charred and mangled Army vehicles were too much to take in. There was too much destruction, too much blood on the road. This place is fucked up. It didn’t click that this was a real situation, that this was here and now. It’s like seeing your name on a winning lottery ticket and having to look at it three times before you are like, Oh okay. I guess this is for real.
Quirk couldn’t quell the agitation he was feeling. He started praying. The day had been so exhilarating and his adrenaline was pumping so madly that his head had begun to spin.
“Dear Lord, give me strength for the day ahead . . .”
He’d often prayed to himself during training exercises, to get through the next drill, to complete the next run.
“. . . give me a calm heart and clear mind . . .”
Toward the front of the column, First Lieutenant Conor Tracy, in the gunner’s hatch of track 204, was just coming up to the railroad bridge when he heard Mike Seely of 3rd Platoon on the company net.
“This is Palehorse 3. Be advised that we’ve got something wrong with our track. We’re trying to fix it. If it’s not fixed in three minutes, we’re going to execute the bump plan.”
Track 209 was down. Tracy was the AAV platoon commander. Those tracks were his responsibility. He wanted all his tracks with him, but he knew that he couldn’t hold up the attack. If he didn’t fix 209, he would have to “bump” the marines from that track into some of the other tracks. The whole of Charlie Company halted while AAV crewmen tried to get it going again. Each time they thought they’d sorted the problem out, it would break down again. What are we going to do now with track 209? He glanced around at the strange situation in which he found himself: trying to fix a track on a dusty highway in Iraq. What a poor, sad place this is. He was reminded of his first impressions of Iraq when he crossed over from Kuwait. The first sign of life he’d seen were a few miserable mud huts with a scrawny, weather-beaten bedouin crouched on his heels, tending a scraggly looking herd of goats.
“Hey, Palehorse 6, this is Palehorse 3, we’ve got to execute our bump plan.”
Twenty Marines from the deadlined track 209 dismounted and clambered into tracks 210 and 211. Quirk wasn’t pleased. His track, 211, was already pretty full. He and nine other marines clambered out of the hatch and onto the roof of the track to make room for the new marines. He took out a can of Copenhagen to take a wad of tobacco. We’re just about to go into the city. Maybe it’s not such a good idea. Copenhagen tobacco was being traded among the marines for $40 a can. He didn’t want to lose it.
In the delay to get 3rd Platoon going again, 1st Platoon had taken the lead. Captain Wittnam’s voice came back over the company net.
“All Palehorse units, be advised that Palehorse 1 will take the lead. I say again, Palehorse 1 will take up the lead.”
Charlie Company headed toward the Euphrates in a different configuration from the original plan. They were down to eleven tracks with 1st Platoon in the lead, followed by 2nd and 3rd Platoons, with the first sergeant’s medevac track and three Humvees bringing up the rear. This configuration meant that Private First Class Casey Robinson, in track 201, was at the very front of the column. There were some twenty other marines with him, including Corporal Jake Worthington, Corporal John Wentzel, Sergeant William Schaefer in the AAV commander’s hatch manning the Mark 19 and the .50 cal, and Lieutenant Scott Swantner in the troop commander’s hatch. From his position posting air security through one of the AAV’s open hatches, Robinson could just make out 201’s driver, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry. Even though Castleberry was a tracker, Robinson enjoyed his company. He had a mad, chaotic irreverence about him that he could relate to. He found some of the other trackers too geeky, too hung up on the boring mechanics of their vehicles. Castleberry is a good guy. We’ll look out for each other.
Clutching the bow-shaped steering wheel of 201, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry was too preoccupied to think of anything except catching up with the rest of the battalion. He’d seen Alpha’s and Bravo’s tracks disappear off into the distance, and he knew that he had to stay close to them. But the breakdown of 209 had delayed them. Castleberry had the driver’s hatch open at a thirty-degree angle so he could look through it rather than through the bulletproof vision block, which limited his visibility. He gunned the track and set off at full speed toward the Euphrates Bridge. On one side of the road he saw the turret of an Iraqi T-55 tank. The marines ahead seemed to have taken care of it because it was pretty beaten up. Holy moly. He thanked God that he hadn’t been in front. All through training it had been drummed into him what damage a T-55 could do to his vulnerable track and its thin aluminum skin.
Castleberry was from Mount Vernon, near Seattle, Washington. He had a reputation among his fellow trackers of being unpredictable, a bit of a rebel. It probably had something to do with his childhood. As a kid, he’d had a strained relationship with his parents, and at sixteen he’d moved out to live with a friend. His mother was superreligious. His dad, it seemed to him, hated God and spent most of his time fishing and doing his own thing. So Castleberry took off by himself. He’d been thrown out of school so many times for missing classes and for getting into fights that the state system wouldn’t have him back. That’s how he ended up in and out of jail. I was a punk kid who thought the most important thing was to be cool. Now, looking back, he could see what an asshole he was. I would have been fed up with myself. He didn’t really know how it happened, but suddenly he stopped smoking dope, got a job, and put himself through a private high school to get a diploma. He began to have civil conversations with his parents and got a succession of well-paid jobs. Not as well paid as his brother, though. He was always quite jealous of his brother. His brother dyed his hair green and wore sandals and hippie shirts, but he still managed to earn very good money working at Microsoft. Edward Castleberry was much more into manual jobs. He was working for $27.50 an hour laying cables in the Seafirst skyscraper in Seattle when someone shouted to him to get down from the building because a plane had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York. He’d taken the elevator down to the lobby to see what the fuss was about. Then, on the TV monitors, he saw the second plane crash into the tower. It spurred him into action. The next day, he went to the Marine Corps recruiting station and signed on. It took him a month to leave for recruit trainin
g because of his criminal history. There was nothing that serious: a few misdemeanor charges and one felony for breaking and entering. He’d had to go to the Military Entrance Processing Center and talk to the Marine colonel there to convince him. He couldn’t remember what he’d said, but it had worked. On October 15, he was in San Diego at recruit training. That was a blast. Most of the time he got into trouble for laughing. He’d never met so many stupid people before he joined the Marine Corps. I don’t know what sort of fucked-up education they had, but they were retards. Some of them were so scared of asking the drill instructor if they could go to the bathroom that they would piss their pants. That’s what would set him off.
“If you think it’s so funny, then you can do some push-ups, too.”
That would set him off even more, and he would laugh as he did the push-ups. He could cope with the mental stuff. He’d been to jail before, so he knew what respect and discipline was. And he was in great shape, so the physical stuff was easy. I treated the whole of the Boot Camp thing like a game.
Choosing his MOS—military occupational specialty—wasn’t difficult. A friend of his had signed up as an amtracker and got stationed in Hawaii. He seemed to spend most of his time surfing the beaches.
“Whatever you do, don’t sign up as an infantryman.”
He’d done a lot of snowboarding and body boarding and was good with mechanical stuff, so he signed up to be an amtracker. In the end, he didn’t get to Hawaii. Instead, he was sent to Camp Lejeune. It was okay. He loved the camaraderie and enjoyed messing about with the tracks. The thing he didn’t like was the way the grunts thought of themselves as better than the trackers. They always taunted the trackers, calling them POGUES, people other than grunts, and saying that the infantry was the backbone of the Marine Corps. He always hated that because he saw the same amount of combat that they did. I have to bring them to the fucking fight. Castleberry always had a reply.
“If it wasn’t for us trackers you’d be walking twenty-five miles with a pack on your back, you goddamn Earthpigs.”
He also called them Dirtpeople because they painted on their silly camo faces and ran around in the dirt. But his favorite was Crunchies. It’s the sound they make when you run them over.
Castleberry, like most trackers, saw himself as different from the other marines. Trackers even had their own individual call signs to set them apart. First Lieutenant Conor Tracy was Whaler because he wanted to bring the Whalers hockey team back to Hartford, Connecticut. Gunnery Sergeant David Myers was Taz, like the Tasmanian Devil of cartoon fame. Sergeant Matthew Beaver was Rotty because he was six feet seven inches and his life outside the Marine Corps revolved around breeding rottweilers. Corporal Nicholas Elliot was Axel because he did a mean Axel Rose impression. And Sergeant William Schaefer was Eight Ball. No one knew why.
In Kuwait, trackers and grunts didn’t always train together because the trackers had to spend so much time maintaining their vehicles. The heat and sand caused an endless stream of mechanical failures. The tracks were their homes. They rode in them, ate in them, and slept in them. That’s why it would send Castleberry into a rage when the grunts messed up his vehicle.
“Push, push, push.”
It was Captain Wittnam’s voice on the radio, urging Castleberry on to catch up with the rest of the battalion. His eyes were focused on the road ahead of him. Castleberry saw the rise in the span of the Euphrates Bridge. At any moment, he expected to see Alpha Company’s tracks whipping up dust in front of him. But there was nothing. All he heard over the roar of the engine were snatches of confused and urgent radio transmissions and the occasional ping against the side of the track. Is that someone shooting at us? From his driver’s seat, he remembered hearing discussions about tanks having to refuel, but he assumed they were now back in action and offering the line companies fire support. He felt safer when the tanks were in front because they were like bullet sponges and attracted fire away from his vulnerable vehicle. Now, as he began to cross the bridge, he realized that there was nothing between him and the city. Holy shit. There are no tanks. This is for real.
Three tracks behind, in track 204, Wittnam saw Alpha Company under fire on the far side of the Euphrates Bridge. As his track crossed the span, he got a better view of Alpha’s marines dismounting from their tracks and taking up positions behind walls and dirt mounds. After weeks in the desert and days traveling across an empty landscape, it was a jolt to take in the sight of a swarming city. It looked as though it was teeming with fury. And he was going into the heart of it. As he reached the downside of the bridge span, the convoy stopped. From their respective hatches, both Wittnam and Tracy scanned the east side of the road ahead of them. They knew that the marines of Bravo Company were supposed to be in front of them, heading around to the east of the city. But there was no sign of them. Although the mechanical failure to the track had delayed them, Wittnam was still expecting to catch the tail end of the Bravo convoy. He tried to call Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski at the battalion forward CP. There was so much chatter that he couldn’t break through.
Shots rang out overhead. They whizzed, rather than cracked. The closer the round was, the louder the crack as it whipped past. Wittnam was grateful that the Iraqis seemed to be such poor marksmen. But he couldn’t stay where he was parked up there by the bridge. His 176 marines were sitting ducks. Wittnam had seconds to make up his mind. He couldn’t see any sign of Bravo. Alpha had penetrated farther into the city than the original plan called for. Maybe Alpha is having an easy time of it and the defense of the town is crumbling? Maybe Bravo has not gone around to the east? Maybe Tim Newland has rushed his company straight up the MSR to the northern bridge? He knew that the main supply route that led straight to the northern bridge had been christened Ambush Alley by some of the marines on the ship on the way over. He couldn’t remember who had coined it first, but he knew he had kind of laughed about it in Kuwait. It had been portrayed as an urban canyon where defending forces could set up positions and blast away at any attacking forces. He knew that no infantrymen would want to go down it.
But he also recalled the doctrine of Commander’s Intent. Know what the commander wants to achieve and, in a confused situation, do what you can to make it happen. The battalion commander’s aim was to seize the northern bridge. The regiment’s motto was “Keep Moving.” The shortest route through the city to the northern bridge was along that 4.6-kilometer stretch of Ambush Alley. Maybe it won’t be as bad as they had all imagined. He got on the radio again to try and find out which route Bravo Company had taken. There was no reply. Time was running out. He had to make a decision. He was acutely aware that his next move would have a crucial impact on the course of the battle for the bridges. What should I do? He reached for the radio and called all of his units.
“All Palehorse units. Keep moving along the MSR to the northern bridge.”
Lieutenant Reid, behind Wittnam in track 208, surveyed the scene from the span of the bridge. What’s going on? He recalled the briefing he had been given by those higher up and which he in turn had communicated to his Weapons Platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Philip Jordan. They would establish a defensive position south of the city with a be prepared to mission to seize the southern and northern bridges. He remembered that the tanks would establish a support-by-fire position south of the Euphrates while Alpha took the bridge. Then Bravo and its tanks would cross the bridge, move around to the east, and establish a support-by-fire position at the northern canal bridge while Charlie seized that bridge. Now nothing seemed to be happening as they’d planned.
He couldn’t see any trace of Bravo Company, the CAAT, or the forward CP. He saw that Alpha was in some sort of firefight at the foot of the Euphrates Bridge. He knew that they couldn’t stay exposed on the bridge for long.
“We’re going to move along the MSR.”
It was Captain Wittnam on the radio. He sounded quite calm. He was telling them that they were going to go for the northern bridge through the heart of t
he city. Reid had never called it Ambush Alley, but he certainly remembered it as the road that they had talked about avoiding at all costs while on ship.
He didn’t see it as a warning signal. He wasn’t afraid. He had a lot of confidence in Wittnam. They were Americans. They had a load of firepower. They had Cobras flying overhead. The hajjis might blow off a few rounds to save their manhood but that will pretty much be the extent of it. They’re not going to want to mess with us. They know we can kick their ass.
At the front of Charlie Company, the driver of track 201, Lance Corporal Castleberry, waited for an order. Stretching ahead of him was the four-lane highway of Ambush Alley that led to the northern bridge. There were people and trucks moving about in the middle of the road up ahead. To his left and right, he saw Iraqis climbing over roofs and balconies, appearing at windows and then vanishing again. He saw white flags being waved from rooftops. He saw ghostly black-clad figures running through the alleyways.
To his right, manning the track’s up-gun system, was the AAV vehicle commander, Sergeant William Schaefer. He, too, knew that they were supposed to head to the east to link up with Bravo Company. He looked up at the road ahead of him. My God, there are hundreds of hajjis running around out there. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a round whizzed over his head. He felt the air snap in front of him. It was close. My God, they’re shooting at me.
Then, over the radio, he heard the transmission from Captain Wittnam ordering them to push forward.
“This place is hot. We’ve got to keep moving.”
Schaefer thought he’d heard wrong. Track 201 was at the head of the convoy. There were no tanks and no tracks from Bravo in front of him. That wasn’t in the original plan. The tanks were supposed to be there to protect the vulnerable tracks. He wanted to make sure that he didn’t do anything stupid. He got on the radio.
Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Page 13