Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War

by Tim Pritchard

“Say again.”

  It was his platoon commander, Lieutenant Tracy, who answered.

  “We’ve got to keep moving and pushing.”

  “Roger. We’re going to push.”

  He checked to make sure that his platoon sergeant, Gunnery Sergeant Myers, bringing up the rear of the column, was up and ready. He didn’t want to go tearing off alone. Then he got back on the radio and, using his call sign, made sure that everyone knew that track 201 was on the move.

  “Eight Ball, Oscar Mike.”

  With that order, Schaefer’s driver, Lance Corporal Castleberry, revved up the AAV’s 525-horsepower engine and gunned the track into the city. I’m just going to haul ass. Ahead of him, Schaefer saw Iraqis running across the streets and trucks maneuvering back and forth. It was like going into a beehive. And then it started. At first it was just a few dinks on the side of the track. Then they just got louder and more insistent. Schaefer, manning the .50 cal, sent bursts of automatic fire into the buildings ahead. Scott Swantner, the infantry platoon commander who was fairly new to the Marine Corps, was sitting right next to him, his rifle by his side. He heard Schaefer yell at him over the sound of the AAV’s engine and the incoming rounds.

  “Hey, sir, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you started shooting?”

  Robinson, posting air security in track 201, was still real hazy about the plan. Somewhere in his head, he knew that they were supposed to be following Bravo, but he couldn’t see them. He also remembered that in Kuwait, their platoon commander, Lieutenant Swantner, had mentioned something about avoiding a route called Ambush Alley. They had all looked at each other in bemusement, but they wrote it down in their notebooks. And now they were taking off at speed, and from what he could make out, they were heading right down the road they were supposed to avoid.

  Groups of Iraqis were running across the road ahead of them. He wanted to look behind him to make sure the other tracks were following, but knew that he mustn’t. He had to keep his eyes on his area of responsibility—the left side of the road.

  “Where did these friggin’ hajjis come from?”

  Suddenly, the world around Casey Robinson exploded. Shots came in from every angle, bullets whooshed overhead. It was like hitting a firestorm.

  Robinson went into shock. He shut down. It was as though he wasn’t there. It was in slow motion. Then suddenly, something clicked. He felt a round whiz past, and he just started firing.

  “Fuck, they’re firing at us.”

  “Well, shoot back, you asshole.”

  There were two-story houses on either side of them. To his right side, the houses were set back only a few meters. On the left, the houses were set back fifty to one hundred meters with a scrubby and dusty wasteland in between the houses and the road. He now saw that there were Iraqis stretched out all along the highway, some standing in doorways by houses or crouched behind sandbagged positions against walls, while others were lying in ditches in the wasteland area or running across the road in front of him. He had never shot live ammo at human beings before, and he had never imagined that this was how he would have to do it. He could see the people he was shooting at. Some of them were only meters away from him. There were no soldiers or military vehicles to shoot at. Some were women and children.

  He let out a burst from his M249 at a group of people firing at him from an alleyway. He saw some of them drop. He picked targets in front of him, but by the time he had let off a few rounds his track had sped past and he missed them. He moved on to the next target. Training just took over. He didn’t think. Look for targets and fire. Look for targets and fire.

  “Wentzel, to your right, to your right. One hundred meters to your right.”

  Yelling, he pointed to a crowd of people in a square on the west side of the road. Most of them were scattering, but as they split they revealed an Iraqi dressed in black, firing from the hip with an AK-47. He saw Wentzel fire the M203 grenade launcher, which arced in the air and landed in the middle of the fleeing crowd. Pieces of rocks, debris, and people flew into the air.

  There were white flags fluttering from a window. As he passed, the white flags were whipped away and he saw muzzle flashes from the same place. What the fuck is going on? He saw more white flags ahead. This time he fired right into the windows. He tried to take aim at the groups of people huddled in doorways, but it was hard to tell who was the enemy. Some were women and children who just seemed to stare in amazement at the convoy as it hurtled past, rounds whistling up and down the street. Robinson looked again. He couldn’t believe it. He swore that was a kid firing an AK-47 at him. Just as he got ready to fire back, the kid ducked into a doorway. Fuck, I’ve got to fire at anything that might be a threat.

  The noise level had reached a terrifying pitch. Rounds were pounding on top of them. From the hatch, he now worked his fifteen-pound squad automatic weapon almost continually, spraying hundreds of rounds a minute into the houses along the street. He saw a muzzle flash from a window, then a roof, then a balcony. He just let it rip. He was so focused on looking for new targets that he hardly glanced at the masonry and glass that exploded from the buildings as he pounded them with his SAW.

  Marines below were linking up his ammo and handing it up to him. Robinson got the feeling that they were almost jealous that he was doing all the shooting.

  “RPG.”

  A smoking RPG flew right toward him and blew apart one of the packs attached to the outside of the amtrack.

  “Get up here, someone.”

  Two marines poked their heads out of the hatch and returned fire. Robinson was glad that there were more of them firing from the hatch. When he turned back, though, they had ducked down again. Someone else poked his head up and then quickly ducked down. Then no one dared put his head up. He knew that the men inside the track were terrified.

  Fuck. How come I’m not getting hit? Iraqis on the balconies above him were just sticking their AKs over the small parapet walls and firing wildly at the column of vehicles. They can’t shoot for shit.

  All the same, he started to sink lower and lower into the hatch to keep out of the way of the rounds that were ricocheting off the track. The marines below had gone quiet, apart from that goofball Milter trying to be funny.

  “I hope you’ve taken your malaria pills.”

  Some marines laughed uneasily. Robinson didn’t think it was that funny, but in spite of the anxiety he felt he couldn’t help smiling.

  Schaefer, in the gun turret of 201, flipped back and forth between the .50 cal and the Mark 19 grenade launcher. He was having trouble seeing what was going on. The sight on his guns was blown and he had to keep half his torso out of the turret. He wasn’t having a good time. Combat’s not as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

  “Sergeant, a hundred meters to your right.”

  Ahead of him was a sandbagged machine-gun pit on the corner of a two-story building overlooking the street. It was manned by three men in black robes. Castleberry maneuvered the track into position. Schaefer aimed the grenade launcher and fired.

  Boom.

  The grenade hit directly under the sandbags and exploded the position, making big holes in the building. Just as in the movies, Castleberry saw men being flung into the air and then limbs and pieces of flesh raining down into the street.

  “Castleberry. RPG. Get out of the way.”

  The smoke trail of an RPG careered wildly, almost comically down the street toward them but passed by harmlessly. Castleberry saw what looked like a school bus come to a halt in the middle of the street ahead and off-load black-robed fighters with RPGs. Schaefer saw it, too, pressed the electric turret control button with his foot, and spun the turret to face them. He squeezed the trigger of his Mark 19. He watched the grenade loop in the air and hit the target. The bus jumped in the air and exploded. One of the fighters crept out from behind the wreckage, crouched on one knee, and aimed an RPG directly at the track. Schaefer flipped back to the .50 cal and let off a burst of fire that punched
holes through the top half of the man’s body.

  “Fifty meters to the right. Hajji on the roof. Hajjis in the ditch by the road. Port side. Machine guns down alleyway. Hajjis coming from east.”

  Castleberry tried calling targets to the marines in the hatches, but there were just too many to call out. Through the driver’s hatch, he saw Iraqis out in the open, shooting from the hip by the side of the road. It was against everything he’d ever been taught about infantry. Friggin’ hajjis. I could get shots off all day. He kept his right hand on the bow-shaped steering wheel, and with his left he put his M203 out of the window and shot grenades at anyone he could see. Everyone around him was screaming and yelling, but he couldn’t tell whether it was through fear or whether they were just having fun.

  It seemed as though the whole town was out in the streets. Some were just watching; others standing with them were aiming AK-47s at them. Castleberry couldn’t understand why there were so many kids running around in a war zone. If you cared about your kids, why would you let them out like that?

  There’s a gagglefuck of hajjis ahead. As he’d been trained to do, he stopped the track and turned into the fire so Schaefer could take them out with the .50 cal and the grenade launcher. On the radio, he heard the exasperated voice of his platoon commander, Lieutenant Tracy.

  “Quit fucking stopping. Push, push, push.”

  In track 204, fourth in line, Captain Wittnam was shouting out targets for Tracy to take out with the up gun. There was a mass of Iraqis running across the street firing at them. I just hope the column keeps moving. Several of the regiment’s AAVs had broken down in the two days since they left Kuwait. If one of them broke down now, it would create one hell of a problem. What if one of them is hit by an RPG and immobilized? He tried to think what they would do if they found themselves isolated and under fire in Ambush Alley. There was so much going on that he put the thought out of his mind.

  Lieutenant Reid was behind Wittnam in track 208 with a mortar squad and his FiST. They were a couple of hundred meters into Ambush Alley before he heard the first sound of small-arms fire pinging off the side of the track. Like most of the marines, he couldn’t quite believe that anyone was shooting at them. He saw the tracks ahead blasting away at something by the side of the road. Some Iraqis, dressed in the black robes of the fedayeen, were jumping over the rubble ahead of him, trying to escape the gunfire. He yelled at the vehicle commander, Corporal Elliot, sitting in his gun turret.

  “Hey, Elliot, light those guys up.”

  Reid saw Elliot get on the net to ask his AAV platoon commander for permission to shoot. By the time he got an answer, the Iraqis had gone. Reid was livid.

  “Hey, Elliot, the next time I tell you to fire on hajjis, if you don’t fire, I’m gonna haul your ass out of there and I’m gonna get up there myself.”

  Reid was pissed that they’d never clearly sorted out their relationship with the trackers. Elliot, like all trackers, found it difficult to take commands from the infantry guys. During training they would say, “Hey, you don’t break my track.” The infantry guys would answer, “We don’t want to break your shit, so we’ll do it your way.” It meant they had never really established the right relationship. For Reid, the right relationship was that they should do what he told them. Reid was the troop commander of that vehicle and, according to Marine doctrine, Elliot had to answer to him. It was as simple as that.

  As they pushed forward, Reid looked behind him. He saw guys blasting away with their M16s from the hatches. He clutched at the pistol by his side. He didn’t take it out. He wasn’t going to waste his fifteen rounds going up Ambush Alley. He felt like General George Patton sitting up there in his hatch, watching his marines unleashing so much firepower. We are invincible.

  “I’m hit. I’m fucking hit.”

  It was Lieutenant Pokorney on the intercom. Reid looked back and saw him sprawled on the deck of the track. He was clutching his right arm, but it wasn’t bleeding. Pokorney scrambled to his feet. Reid thought it must have been a round that had ricocheted off the track.

  “It hurts like hell, but I’m fine.”

  Pokorney pulled himself together, put his head up out of the hatch, took out his pistol, and continued scanning for targets.

  The company net had come alive.

  “RPG teams left and right.”

  “Enemy fire from roof to left.”

  “Keep pushing.”

  “RPG heading this way.”

  A barrage of RPGs swept past the convoy leaving a trail of thick white smoke. One thudded against the side of one of the tracks. The marines inside waited for the inevitable explosion. It never came. The grenade had impacted with the line of rucks strung up on the outside of the AAV and embedded itself.

  Elliot, in 208’s gun hatch, was thrown out of his seat as his driver, Lance Corporal Noel Trevino, executed a sagger drill, weaving from side to side to avoid the RPGs that were now whooshing across the road.

  “Whoa.”

  Something sped past Elliot’s head, whipping up a blast of concussion and heat. I wonder if today’s my day. I wonder if I’m gonna make it or not. Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. He didn’t feel anything at all and was almost apologetic at being so passive. What a bland reaction to being shot at.

  At the rear of the column track 211, packed with some marines who had off-loaded from 209, followed the convoy into Ambush Alley. Thomas Quirk was one of nine marines lying on the top of the track. He had expected combat to be different. He was expecting it to be like a Hollywood movie. Right before they went in, they would stop just before the bridge, break the mission down one last time, and get this giant pep talk. That’s what is gonna happen. But it hadn’t happened like that, and now Quirk realized they were rolling headfirst into a battle. His track had gunned it, picked up speed real fast, and now they were heading down Ambush Alley. Lieutenant Mike Seely, the platoon commander, yelled at the men.

  “Nobody fires until I tell them to.”

  Firing? What’s he talking about? That’s when Quirk realized that this was it. This was combat. He was going to fire at real, live human beings. Then and there his mind-set just switched. Seely yelled at them, pointing to a window.

  “AK-47.”

  Everybody just opened up. Quirk squeezed the trigger. It was his first combat shot. He didn’t think about whether it was on target. He thought about how dangerous it was. He was on top of a track with eight other people, squashed between Seely and Sergeant John Maloney, trying to get off shots. That’s pretty close. I don’t want to shoot one of our own guys.

  There was a blur of Iraqis in windows, on roofs, darting out from alleyways, in bunkers by the side of the road—and they were all shooting at him.

  A round whizzed over his head. Thank God these fucking bullets aren’t hitting me. He realized that the enemy fighters couldn’t have been well trained. With a few machine-guns bursts, they should be able to wipe all of us out. Now he found himself doing everything as he had been taught in training. It was muscle memory. The drills had been learned so obsessively that it all just came to him then and there as if he’d known how to do it all his life.

  “Changing magazines.”

  The men had laughed whenever they said it during training because it had seemed such a stupid thing to yell out during a real firefight. Now he just did it and understood its value. The guys next to him picked up their rate of fire, covering for him while he slammed in a new magazine.

  “Machine-gun position behind the wall.”

  “Guys with AKs on the roof.”

  “RPG in the alleyway, nine o’clock.”

  Marines, some sitting on the shoulders of those inside the track, were lobbing M203 grenades over a wall, trying to hit a machine-gun post. They walked rounds onto the target. It was kind of guesswork, but there was too much going on to get an accurate reading off the sight.

  “There’s a motherfucking hajji on that wall. Shoot your fucking 203.”

  Quirk was y
elling at the marine next to him to shoot into the dead space behind a wall. The guy didn’t want to do it. He had clammed up.

  “Shoot the motherfucker.”

  The marine just stared at him with a look that said, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to shoot people.

  “You’re taking it like a pussy. Shoot at the hajji.”

  “I can’t.”

  Quirk knew that the marine didn’t want any part of it.

  Right next to him, firing into the buildings on the left side of the road, another marine was working a M240G machine gun. It fired a large 7.62 mm round and was rattling so hard in Quirk’s ears that he felt it was fucking them up. He switched over to the right side of the road. He saw hands and arms reach over the parapets of balconies and roofs above him and fire AK-47s without aiming them. In his fury, he wanted to kill all of them. He saw nothing of the street, the buildings, the tracks in front, the sky. Nothing existed for him except his weapon and the Iraqis he was trying to kill.

  “Hajjis with RPGs port side.”

  “Kill those motherfucking ragheads.”

  “Keep fucking pushing.”

  Castleberry, driving at the head of the column in 201, could hardly keep the AAV straight as it swerved across the road, buffeted by rounds from all sides. Looking ahead, he now saw that the four lanes of Ambush Alley were about to turn into two lanes where the road hit the bridge across the northern canal. They were nearly at the end. They had nearly run the gauntlet. All of a sudden two guys jumped out from an alley fifty meters ahead of him, took a knee, and aimed RPGs right at him. This is it. I’m a dead man. Castleberry knew that an RPG could penetrate the hull of a track and mess everyone up inside. Castleberry almost screamed into the intercom.

  “Sergeant, there is someone standing in the middle of the road. And he’s shooting fucking rockets.”

  Schaefer was stung with annoyance. Castleberry was highly strung and nervous. In the year he’d been his section leader, he’d had to lead him constantly by the hand.

  “Well, run him over, asshole.”

  Schaefer expected the Iraqi to move. That hajji will get out of the way.