Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War

by Tim Pritchard

  He watched Grabowski talking on the radio, trying to give out orders. Sosa wished that the battalion commander wouldn’t spend so much time on the radio. He had a habit of talking at length, and just as he was getting to a crucial piece of information someone would key in and he would lose the comms. It was frustrating for everyone.

  Charlie Company is on the bridge. How do we reinforce them? How do we support them? He couldn’t just move companies around. Each of them had their own mission. He couldn’t get hold of another battalion because that was tied to what the regiment as a whole was doing. And he couldn’t talk to regimental headquarters because they kept losing communications. He was on the point of despair. The one good thing he could take from it was that Bravo’s young infantry marines were keeping the enemy at bay. They were lying in ditches, behind walls, and in water holes, firing at anyone that got too close. Command and control at battalion level was breaking down, but at the small-unit level the marines were doing exactly what they’d learned in training.

  It was coming to decision time. Sosa realized that from where they were, the forward command couldn’t coordinate the fight. If we can’t coordinate the fight, we’re not doing what we need to do. Our whole mission in life is to coordinate the fight. He turned to the battalion commander.

  “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit here.”

  Grabowski had already decided he was going to press on with the original mission by going for the northern bridge. They agreed to leave a small force to guard the stricken vehicles. The rest of Bravo’s marines and the remainder of the battalion staff would continue to push their way north. Hopefully, we can find a pause where we can get better comms.

  One of Bravo’s infantrymen, Corporal Neville Welch, was lying in one of the alleyways with his fire team when he got the call to return to the track.

  “The helos have found a way out. They’ll lead us out of here. Back to the tracks.”

  Marines congregated around their vehicles, some causing confusion by clambering into the wrong tracks. Welch made sure he was up at the hatch scanning the rooftops. There were only two thoughts in his mind. I’m going to kill, and I’m going to make sure that I’m going to stay alive.

  The convoy set off more tentatively than earlier in the day. Welch was nervous about heading off without the support of the tanks. The column of some ten vehicles snaked its way through the labyrinth of dusty streets and alleyways, trying to avoid the water holes that threatened to suck them back into the mud. Some marines ran alongside the tracks, providing security at road junctions. They ducked and crouched and weaved their way through the streets, staying close to each other, keeping their eyes looking left and right and up and down just as they’d learned during MOUT training. From the hatch, Welch saw that the marines on the ground looked nervous and vulnerable. He had no idea where they were heading, but he was glad they were on the move. The buildings around them provided some cover. At each junction, the column halted while the lead vehicle checked that it was safe to continue forward before punching through. The problem was that the resulting blockage in the column resulted in some vehicles halting in the middle of an intersection, dangerously exposed to fire coming from four directions.

  “Keep the column moving, for fuck’s sake.”

  Welch watched an officer jump out of his Humvee and sprint forward to the lead track.

  “You gotta keep moving.”

  He saw white pickups mounted with machine guns and carrying RPG teams maneuvering in and out of the alleyways, charting the convoy’s progress. They stayed hidden. Any time one of the technicals got out into the open, a marine in one of the AAVs would take it out with the .50 cal or the Mark 19 grenade launcher.

  From the top of the track, Welch kept his eyes focused on the windows and alleyways in his sector of fire. Sometimes people waved at him. Sometimes they shot at him. It was crazy. This is not the enemy we’ve been briefed about. They’re not playing by the rules. Everything he had learned about identifying hostile intent now seemed to go right out of the window. Welch had always believed that he would be able to get what he wanted through hard work and determination. It’s what had got him out of Guyana and put him through college. But now he was disturbed by the realization that however determined, however well prepared he was, some things were just way out of his control. His convoy was making slow progress through a battlefield and an enemy that he did not understand. Even the maps seemed unable to offer him some measure of clarity. What looked like a straight road north to the bridge turned into a mess of dead ends, narrow alleyways, and dusty streets blocked with water holes, trash dumps, and irrigation canals.

  6

  Out in the fields to the east of the road by the northern bridge, Robinson tried to maintain his situational awareness. He was in an irrigation ditch, his legs sodden with water, some two hundred meters from the amtracks, within shooting range of the far bank of the canal. Up ahead, he saw fedayeen fighters crawling among the reeds and scrubland. What had started as the odd crack of gunfire had now increased to a hail of machine-gun and AK fire coming at them from around the bridge. Lying prone, he aimed and fired at anything that moved. Around him, he heard the sound of panic as rounds smacked into the ground and marines went down.

  “I’m hit. I’m hit.”

  “Corpsman up. Corpsman up.”

  “He’s been shot in the leg.”

  With no warning, the air around him started to explode. RPGs were flying toward them from every direction. Mortars were landing nearby. It mystified him how a mortar would land behind him and yet a person fifty meters in front of him would go down. What a fucked up thing. How the fuck does that work?

  There was now fire coming at them from under the canal bridge. It seemed like it was raining down from all sides.

  “Grenade.”

  Robinson watched as a missile slowly looped over his head and landed in a berm to the side. The explosion threw up dirt and stones and made his teeth and guts shudder. Marines were writhing in the fields around him. Some of them were beginning to freeze.

  “Corpsman up.”

  He saw the Navy medics sprinting from marine to marine as they went down. But there were so many marines dropping that there were not enough corpsmen to go around. Robinson’s heart sank. He had long imagined this moment: in combat, killing people and doing macho stuff in Force Recon. But this was for real, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it.

  Corporal Jake Worthington had set up his Javelin gun on the top of track 201. He had helped write the book for the battalion on the antitank weapon. Its unique targeting system meant that once fired at a tank, it would automatically come down on its target from above, where the armor was most vulnerable, rather than impact the thick armor on the side.

  It had been a boyish, macho dream of his to be in combat. He had always wanted to know, when it came down to it, whether he was going to have more than the average life. If it comes to kill or be killed, me against someone else, who’s favored? It was like a test. He was adopted as a baby and had never known his real parents. Maybe that had something to do with it. He needed some proof that he was favored, that he was loved. His adoptive parents had been real good to him, but they’d split up when he was young and he stayed with his adoptive mom. She’d bounced around a bit so he never really had a home. She was going on marriage number five. He’d been in Los Angeles, teaching kids with learning disabilities for his adoptive father’s company, when he decided that it was time to test himself in combat. The marines seem like hard-asses and they’ve got better uniforms. That’s why, some two years ago, he’d stepped into the Marine Corps recruiting office in Los Angeles.

  “What can the Marines do for me?”

  “Get the fuck out my office.”

  Worthington was taken aback.

  “What?”

  “Get the fuck out of my office.”

  Worthington went next door to the Army office and asked the same question. The recruiter was sitting there munching on a
sandwich from Burger King with a piece of food sticking to his chin. Between mouthfuls of burger, the Army guy began to tell him how they could give him extra money for college and help him out with this and that, but Worthington just sat there wondering why the Marine recruiter had reacted like that.

  As he was sitting there listening, the Marine recruiter poked his head around the door.

  “Had enough yet?”

  Worthington nodded.

  “Well, come back around here. Now, then, why don’t you try another question?”

  “I suppose you want me to say what can I do for the Marines.”

  “Now that’s what we’re trying to get at.”

  Worthington signed on then and there for four years. As he signed, he couldn’t help but smile. Damn, I can’t believe I fell for that trick.

  From his position on the top of the track, he scanned the horizon through the Javelin’s CLU, the thermal imaging sighting system that could pick out tanks and other moving vehicles and personnel. He felt vulnerable and wished they had their own tanks with them. He knew that an Iraqi T-72 would be able to hit them from eighteen hundred meters away. None of his marines would be able to see that far. He felt the weight of responsibility. It’s up to me to take the tank out before it gets us. At his side he had an M16, ready to fire on any Iraqis that Sergeant Schaefer wasn’t getting.

  Worthington had trained in the Weapons Company and was an expert in most weapon systems. He’d enjoyed training with the battalion, but what he couldn’t understand was the battalion commander’s passion for backbreaking humps. Carrying a heavy machine gun and a TOW and all that heavy-assed bullshit on long humps is no fun. All you are doing is hurting marines and lowering morale. He couldn’t see why they didn’t go on long hikes with just their packs.

  Worthington sensed the level of incoming fire being ratcheted up. He heard the whistle of incoming artillery and mortars and watched the ground in front of him explode in splashes of dirt, each hit getting closer. I’m going to get nailed. It will be steel on steel. He leaped from the back of the track and lay down in the small depression in the dirt left by the AAV’s treads. This is ridiculous. No way would the shallow ground protect him from the incoming rounds. He heard the radio squawking with the sound of marines in a panic. He low crawled, slithering on his belly back toward the road. The truth was that he didn’t have a clue what to do next. His “A” gunner, Lance Corporal Brian Wenberg, the assistant gunner who helped him load the Javelin and identify targets, was at his side.

  “Corporal. What are we doing?”

  “I don’t really know. Let’s get back in the track.”

  The two of them low crawled back to the track to figure out what to do next.

  Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk was still taking cover behind a berm in a ditch by the side of the road. None of the marines with him were in his fire team. His squad leader wasn’t there. There was no one telling them what to do. All command structure had collapsed. They just did whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. There were rounds cracking and whizzing all around them.

  “Where are those fucking rounds coming from?”

  “They’re coming from our own track.”

  Track 211 was no longer just in flames. The ammo inside was starting to cook off. Quirk was only fifty meters away when rounds inside the track punched through the skin of the AAV and whistled through the air in all directions. High-explosive rounds, demolitions, and rockets punched through the track and exploded in the air, scattering sharp, hot shrapnel all around. Our own shit is firing at us. Quirk looked on with disbelief. He had no idea what to do. I can shoot hajjis, but what do I do with a smoking track? You can’t kill a track. As he’d done so often before, he began to pray to calm himself down. Give me a calm head and a strong heart . . .

  Reid had led one of his three mortar squads toward the canal bridge, about sixty meters south of the other two mortars that were still firing toward the military compound to the north and enemy positions to the west. The volume of fire coming at them from the city was increasing, and Reid knew that he needed to get Corporal Garibay’s squad firing to the south to shut it down. Reid asked Garibay for his wiz wheel. He had left his own with Corporal Espinoza. But Garibay didn’t have one, either. Fuck. We’ve left the wiz wheel behind. He sent Private Jonathan Gifford back to get it. At the sight of Gifford scooting back to the original position to the north, bent double and zigzagging to avoid the rounds, he and Jordan burst out laughing. It was partly nerves. But it just looked so funny.

  Reid used the road as defilade. Because it was raised, he and the mortar squad could tuck themselves up against it as cover. They can’t hit us here. All the same, he watched as several RPG rounds, coming from the southwest, flew over his head, slow as day, and smacked into the dirt a hundred meters away. The world around him had shrunk to what was going on in the few meters around him. He wasn’t sure where any of the other platoons were, or what Captain Wittnam was doing. He was focused on the marines on either side of him and getting those mortars up and firing.

  Fred Pokorney, the artillery FO, came over and lay down next to Reid.

  “I got some fire missions out.”

  “Roger that, Fred.”

  “You might want to get your head down.”

  Reid was confused. Keep my head down? What the fuck is he talking about? For a moment he thought that Pokorney meant that he had altered the targets and they were going to be closer than those he had marked earlier.

  “Were those missions where I told to shoot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s okay. We’re good to go.”

  Reid was pleased that somehow Pokorney had got those missions out. He must have finally got through on one of the nets. Any moment now the 1/10 artillery batteries, set up some ten kilometers away south of the Euphrates, would start shelling the targets he’d pinpointed. He wished the cannon cockers would hurry up. The terrifying thuds of incoming RPGs and mortars were increasing. And they were landing closer. He turned to look downrange. Out of nowhere there was an ear-piercing explosion behind him. It was as though an iron beam had been dropped from a forty-story building, slamming into concrete right next to him. A searing pain shot through his arm and the blast twisted him back toward the road. He looked down and saw nothing but dust. His first thought was of the Vietnam movie Hamburger Hill, when the platoon commander is talking on the radio and gets his arm blown off and doesn’t even know it. He just keeps talking. My arm has been blown o f. As the dust cleared, he saw his arm dangling uselessly next to him.

  “My arm’s fucking broken.”

  “That’s too bad, sir.”

  It was the voice of Corporal Jorge Gonzalez who was sitting right behind him. There was something about his tone that made Reid think that things were badly wrong. Then it was Garibay, off to the right, who spoke.

  “Sir, Buesing is dead.”

  Reid looked up and saw a big hole in Lance Corporal Brian Buesing’s face. He was sitting Indian style, slumped forward but still upright. He was having body spasms and was gurgling as though trying to breathe. Reid didn’t know what to do. Do I take my pistol out and shoot him? What the fuck do I do? He turned away. He couldn’t deal with it. He glanced to his right at the six-foot-seven-inch gangly frame of Fred Pokorney stretched out on the road. Pokorney was thirty-one and the father of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, Taylor. Next to him lay his weapons platoon sergeant, Philip Jordan, the marine who everyone looked up to and who, just a few moments ago, had seemed to be actually reveling in the sound, taste, and smell of combat. Reid ran over to him and rolled him over. The bone structure on his face was shattered. His body was crumpled. He looked like something out of a movie set. He let go and stared at the body. He looked again at Buesing and then went completely numb. He turned to Garibay, who was right there just staring up at him with the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. He was alive but he too had been hit.

  “You keep everyone here. I’m going to get help.”
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br />   Reid was up and running. He made it about twenty meters and then all of a sudden found himself lying on his face in the dirt. He didn’t feel anything, but he knew he’d been hit. He saw a bunch of blood forming in a pool on the ground in front of him. His eye wouldn’t open. It was all screwed up. I’ve lost my eyeball. He felt himself zoning out. Man, I’m done. This is it. Do I just lay here? How does this work? How did this happen? In the few seconds that he lay there so much went through his mind. He wondered what his wife, Susan, would do with the insurance money from his death. They’d only been married eight months when he left for Iraq. He had a rush of anxiety over what she would do with the $250,000 insurance money. I hope she doesn’t blow it. He wondered whether he should get up or just die right there in the dirt.

  For some reason, he struggled to his feet and went from tunnel vision with two eyes to tunnel vision with one eye. The only thing he saw was a track. He slumped toward it and crawled in the rear. Inside he saw Corporal Elliot and Lance Corporal Trevino. He thought they were breaking out ammo. Reid half screamed, half moaned at them.

  “We got casualties. We need to get them evacuated. You get up on that fucking gun and I don’t care what you shoot but if they are hajjis you fucking kill them.”

  Elliot had to look twice to take in the apparition. Reid’s face was all torn up. There was just a bleeding mess where his eyes should be. There was blood coming out of every orifice. He almost laughed at the horror of it. Oh my god. It was the first time he had seen anyone like that.

  Reid yelled again.

  “We’ve got to get those guys out of here.”

  He stumbled back out of the track and looked to his left to find his other two mortars. He couldn’t see anybody around. No one. Where the fuck is everybody? He felt more alone than he had ever felt before. Like a man lost in space. A man living alone on a distant planet. He guessed he’d been fighting for nearly an hour, but his understanding of the battle was minimal. He had little idea what was going on or who was shooting at them or from where they were shooting. He was a first lieutenant, but, in the heat of battle, his understanding was no more than that of a private or lance corporal. I haven’t been able to control anything greater than the handful of guys around me.