by Bing West
Head Hunter 2’s fight at the Tank Graveyard had come to an end. The insurgents had melted away, becoming unarmed civilians in a suburb filled with civilians.
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Upon hearing that Head Hunter 2 was engaged, LtCol Kennedy had ordered Weapons Company to assist. The company commander, Capt Weiler, assembled Mobile Assault Platoon 3, commanded by First Lieutenant John Stephens, and set out from Hurricane Point. In six vehicles the thirty Marines drove pell-mell east up a narrow road lined with one-story shops and an occasional parked car or truck. Rocks the size of soccer balls were scattered across the road, but the Humvees easily dodged among them. With Iraqi men wandering in and out of shops along the road, 1/Lt Stephens didn’t think the flimsy rock barricades were meant to trigger an ambush.
Then they were hit by a sustained burst of fire from a field about 150 meters to their right. The bullets passed high overhead but could easily have killed the men in the shops, who had known the ambushers were lying in wait and hadn’t taken cover. The Marines wheeled their Humvees left and right off the road in a herringbone pattern and jumped out, looking for targets. A moment before there had been a dozen vehicles on the road. Now most traffic had stopped. Off to the right a bongo truck was bouncing over the ruts in the field. The Marines let it go, giving the driver the benefit of the doubt that he had not dropped off the insurgents who were firing at them.
Stephens watched as a ten-year-old boy with a lighted torch ran by him, shoved the flames into a pool of black fuel, and proudly ran back inside a shop. The fuel burned with a low flame, throwing off stifling black smoke. A man in a black dishdasha and red-checked kaffiyeh ran out of an alley with an RPG on his shoulder and fired a rocket that went skipping down the street. In a minute it was raining RPG rockets. Some were arcing in like mortars, exploding in the maze of overhead telephone wires. Others were skidding and sizzling through the dirt as though someone were skipping rocks. One bounced up and caught in the cattle catcher of an open-back Humvee just as another burst alongside in a swirl of black smoke. Shaken but unhurt, the driver pulled up closer to the next Humvee in line.
Stephens, deciding the stones in the road and the smoky fire were target reference points for the RPGs and machine guns, moved his platoon farther up the road and watched as the insurgents continued to fire into the smoke. The road was a mess of burning oil slicks, black smoke, and Humvees snarled amid civilian cars. Shadowy gunmen and bulky Marines were firing in all directions. Staff Sergeant Patrick Coleman burst into a house and found five men with AKs hiding under the stairs with women and children. Unsure whether they were insurgents or homeowners, he flex-cuffed the men. As he herded them toward a Humvee, he skirted around a pool of blood, where a severed foot protruded from a sandal.
Rounds were snapping steadily, and taxis and motorcycles were dropping off more fighters. Stephens watched as two ambulances slowed down and men hopped out and ran down an alley. He was fairly certain they were insurgents catching a ride to the battle, but he chose not to shoot the ambulances.
Captain Weiler didn’t want the Marines to become so engaged that they couldn’t get to Head Hunter. Trying to gauge the extent of the ambush, Weiler kicked in the door to a house and dashed up to the roof to gain an overview and figure out how to get out of the area.
Corporal Luis Perez, his radio operator, followed Weiler and handed him the handset to talk with Kennedy. “Head Hunter’s been reinforced,” Kennedy said. “Your mission is to kick the shit out of any enemy encountered. Keep pushing east. This one’s big, very big.”
Weiler called back for another platoon to come forward, while 1/Lt Stephens pushed forward. The Marines, catching only passing glimpses of the shooters, were attacking by fire team rushes in the direction of the heaviest fire. They ran by an old woman baking bread in an outdoor oven, oblivious to the chaos, and broke into the courtyard of a mosque where there was a stack of wooden coffins. A dark blue BMW had pulled to a halt up the road, and four men, without weapons, hopped out and ran into an alley. Within seconds, rounds were coming from the alley. Minutes later a white and orange taxi pulled up. A Marine fired an AT-4 rocket that rocked the small car, sending thick smoke billowing from the hood. A passenger stumbled out a rear door, spilling ammunition onto the road. A man on a motorcycle sped out of an alley behind the smoking car, firing an AK with one hand. He was greeted by a fusillade, dropped his weapon, kept his balance, and swerved down the street, the bike on fire.
“That’s so cool,” Sergeant Shane Nylin said.
RPG rockets were whizzing across the road, hitting telephone poles and shaking loose hot wires that snapped and danced in showers of sparks among the parked cars. A man in a running suit dashed across the street and tripped over a live wire. He rolled and thrashed about, sparks sizzling around him, then got up and staggered away. The Marines broke into several houses, confronting silent women, crying children, and grim-faced men who said they knew nothing. It was like fighting a swarm of mosquitoes. Within an hour the Marines had flex-cuffed sixty men and Weiler knew they’d soon have hundreds, with no proof any had fired a weapon. The Marines lacked chemical test kits for determining the residue of gunpowder.
“Cut ’em loose unless you catch ’em with a weapon,” Weiler said.
Lieutenant David Dobb—call sign Rainmaker—and his platoon drove up and joined the fight. There were now sixty Marines scrambling to engage the elusive enemy. A taxicab emerged from a side street, the occupants firing out the windows. In seconds the car was riddled; one man escaped and staggered off. A man popped out from behind a truck firing an AK-47. He was hit, dropped his rifle, and ducked back. Two men with AKs ran across the road and tried to climb over a wall—neither made it. The Marines pumped steady fire into a field next to the road where they had pinned down two men in black dishdashas. Suddenly both leaped up and, exhibiting world-class speed, ran away unharmed.
The insurgents didn’t seem to care where they were shooting, as long as they were firing their weapons. The machine-gun fire was too high, and there was no pattern to the RPG rockets. Staff Sergeant Coleman, a huge man, was hit in the face with light shrapnel. Like a ferocious pirate, he rushed around, blood dripping down his chin, roaring at his Marines to “kill any fucker who shoots at you.” His Marines laughed and urged him on.
A near miss forced Weiler to duck inside a courtyard, where he found four Iraqi police in their blue shirts hiding behind a wall. They invited him to hide with them; he invited them to join the fight. They didn’t appear to have weapons, but as he stepped back out into the street, he wondered whose side they were on.
Several rockets were fired from the courtyard of a small mosque with a graceful blue-hued dome. A Marine on a nearby roof said he was positive there was a man in the minaret, shouting down instructions to the RPG crews. Weiler wasn’t authorized to take down the minaret, but the wall surrounding the minaret was fair game. Dobb called up a Humvee with an antitank TOW missile and blew out a section of the wall, sending body parts high into the air.
Under sporadic fire, Stephens directed a rush over the front wall of an attractive, well-kept house with expensive windows and fragile dome-shaped arches. Inside the courtyard a blond camel was calmly nibbling at the grass. An old man introduced himself as a sheikh. Stephens flex-cuffed him and led him away as several women rushed down the driveway shrieking and screaming, certain he was going to be killed.
The fight went on for two hours. Nylin saw about fifteen insurgents, one here and two there. No other Marine saw more than six in total. The insurgents knew how to find concealment along the roads, in the palm groves, and among the houses and alleys. When they were in the open, the Marines had to be quick to get off a shot, and most snapshots missed. Sergeant Jeremiah Randle fired at a man in a gray dishdasha about a hundred meters away who ran into the middle of the street with his AK, danced a little jig mocking Randle, and then ran back to cover. A few minutes later the man repeated his dance act, and again Randle missed. When two more tried their luck, R
andle found the range with his grenade launcher and knocked one of them down.
As the fight petered out, Weiler hopped up onto a small wall, raised his rifle, and began yelling, “Come on, you bastards! We’re here, we’re here! Is that all you got?”
Thereafter Weiler was stuck with hearing his men murmur We’re here, we’re here whenever he called a staff meeting.
When MAP 3 reached Head Hunter 2, it was midafternoon. First Lieutenant Valdez and Col Connor had the situation under control, and the battle had shifted to the east.
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When the Head Hunter fight broke out, Capt Royer had sent out patrols to cover the flanks. Shortly after noon a squad came under fire to the east near “the arches,” an Iraqi National Guard barracks that had been mortared and blown up before it was completed. Royer set out for the arches with two platoons, commanded by Second Lieutenant John Wroblewski and Second Lieutenant Tom Cogan. Three kilometers down the road, they linked up with the patrol that had taken light fire and spread out to search dozens of houses. Cogan led a squad on foot across a series of irrigation ditches to check out the sound of firing to the north. A few hundred meters away another squad with Royer had also moved off the road.
Cogan’s unit was coming under fire from rooftops several hundred meters away, and he found the fight frustrating. The Marines would advance by bounds. When they closed on a house, men in dishdashas or long pants would come out of nowhere and walk away. They had no weapons or military clothing. A few minutes later bullets would fly overhead from another house or palm grove hundreds of meters away.
Half a kilometer away Royer and a separate squad were finding the same pattern. They would take fire, advance by bounds, and search a house where frightened children cried and unarmed, sullen men denied knowing anything. They would emerge from the house and take fire from another location.
When Royer’s radioman told him that another patrol from Echo Company was in a heavy firefight several clicks to the north, Royer decided to pull all the squads together, get back in the vehicles, and move north.
The original plan had been for 2/Lt Wroblewski to move all the vehicles forward to a checkpoint, a kilometer northeast. Marines on foot with Royer and Cogan would cut across the fields and meet the vehicles there. Wroblewski had just started the vehicles rolling to the checkpoint when Royer radioed and waved to him to stop. Cogan did the same thing. As he went around a corner and out of Royer’s sight, Wroblewski slowed down, trying to listen to the radio over the noise of the engine. While most of the other vehicles stopped behind him, two highbacks—Humvees with benches for troops to sit in the rear—swung around Wroblewski and kept going toward the checkpoint.
In front of the two highbacks the road sloped upward and joined another road at a right angle. The two roads formed a T, and the Marines proceeded up the long stem. At the top a row of dingy single-story shops crowded each side of the road; lying flat on the roofs behind low cement walls were a dozen or more insurgents. A grove of palm trees and shrubs to the side concealed a heavy machine gun.
The lead highback had a mounted machine gun but no armor. The insurgents waited until the highback was almost on top of the hidden machine gun before opening up from three sides, catching the vehicle in a fusillade of plunging fire. The windshield and tires were peppered; the driver died immediately and the truck rolled to a stop. For a few seconds the Marines futilely returned fire, with Private First Class Ryan Jerabek swinging the machine gun in all directions and cutting down two Iraqis before being killed.
The tailgate was down, and Lance Corporal Deshon Otey rolled out and sprinted behind a low wall. Lance Corporal Travis Layfield and the corpsman Hospitalman 3rd Class Fernando Mendezaceves also flopped out and ran into the nearest shop, while the attackers on the roof above them fired down. Mendezaceves was killed inside the shop. Layfield staggered out the back door and succumbed to his wounds. The other Marines never got out of the truck. Their attackers were too close, firing point-blank on them from the roofs and sides, while the machine gun to the front shredded the cab of the Humvee. Big, muscular Staff Sergeant Allan Walker and four other Marines quickly died.
While the ambushers were pouring their fire into Walker’s vehicle, the Humvee behind Walker jerked to a stop and the Marines piled out and dashed into a small storehouse. In seconds, bullets were chipping at the thick cement walls. The building was set back from the road, unattached to the row of shops occupied by the ambushers. The seven Marines inside were trapped, but the insurgents weren’t about to close on them across open ground.
Seeing his chance, Otey leaped up and sprinted for the open door as the Marines shouted “Run! Run!” Otey dove through the door and lay panting on the dirt floor, patting himself on his armored vest, amazed that not one of the bullets zipping by him had even grazed him. The Marines, led by Corporal Marcus Waechter, slammed shut the door, took up posts on either side of the one tiny window, and waited for the ground assault.
When the ambush was sprung, Walker’s truck and Waechter’s Humvee were about three hundred meters in front of Wroblewski. The insurgents on the roofs could see Wroblewski’s Humvee, and soon a machine gun was hammering away and rocket-propelled grenades were ricocheting off irrigation ditches. While his crew sought cover in the ditches, Wroblewski knelt beside the passenger door, calling on the radio. A bullet smashed into the side of his face, and he went down. Firing from a dozen roofs the insurgents raked the edges of the ditches where Wroblewski’s crew had taken cover. Corporal Ken Smith, the acting platoon sergeant, lay facedown, watching the bullets churn up the dust on the road.
“Get some fire down range!” he yelled to the Marines scattered behind him. “Suppress! Suppress!”
One by one the Marines began squeezing off bursts, short ones at first, then longer ones. Soon the ambush turned into a firefight—as many rounds were going out as coming in. No one could stand erect on that bullet-swept road and live. Smith listened to the rounds cracking and snapping past. At eye level he was looking into Wroblewski’s bloody face, ten meters away. The lieutenant was holding the handset, still trying to talk on the radio.
“Ah, shit,” Smith said. “Fuck it, I’m going out. Fire, you sons of bitches, give me fire!”
The Marines ripped through magazines in long bursts as Smith gathered himself and dashed out, bullets kicking up dirt around him. In a few frantic strides he reached Wroblewski, gathered him up like a sack of clothes, and pulled him back to the safety of the ditch. A corpsman crawled to the lieutenant and applied pressure bandages to his neck and jaw. Two army Bradley fighting vehicles, their hatches closed, came up behind the beleaguered Marines and drove straight on toward Walker’s shattered Humvee, their tracs kicking up clouds of dust. A few minutes later one returned, and the driver stuck his head out of the hatch.
“You’ve got wounded up ahead around the bend!” he yelled at Smith. “We’ve gotta haul ass to another mission.”
With that, he closed the hatch and drove back up the road, firing the 25mm chain gun in short spurts. Corporal Smith was on his own. With 2/Lt Wroblewski down, the next senior person was SSgt Walker, and he was up ahead where the Bradley driver said there were wounded Marines. Smith knew he had to get this mess straightened out. He shouted orders for the squad leaders to spread their men out. Then, drawing a deep breath, he rushed out a second time to scoop up the radio so that he could contact his company commander. Again bullets struck the road around him. Smith sprawled back into the ditch and pressed the handset.
“Lieutenant Ski’s down hard,” he told Royer. “I’m sending him back. The Bradley said we have wounded up ahead. Do you want me to push up?”
Royer was as much in the dark as Smith. He had seen the Bradleys rush past and assumed they were part of the brigade’s QRF. But he hadn’t been able to raise them on his radio, and no one had told him anything about wounded Marines to the front.
“Go, go, get on up there,” Royer said. “I’ll cover your north flank. Don’t wait on me.”
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Smith called forward a Humvee and gently placed Wroblewski inside. The Humvee raced back to the casualty collection point at the Combat Outpost, a ten-minute drive. At the outpost Dr. Kenneth Son and the corpsmen had already been busy. Earlier two Abrams tanks had come screaming in, with no advance warning, throwing up vast clouds of dust and severing the electric cables running to the main generator, cutting off all power.
“They’re dying, they’re dying!” screamed a soldier standing upright in the turret of the first tank, pointing to the other tank.
The navy corpsmen swarmed on board the second tank and from the blood-soaked compartment pulled out one soldier with his right hand and wrist missing and another with his jaw dislocated and his right leg dangling at the knee by a few tendons, blood gushing everywhere. While the Blackhawk medical helicopters were en route, the medical crew applied tourniquets, transfusions, and oxygen bags. On the way to the makeshift helipad, the medics shielded the two wounded from the dust raised by the blades of the medevac birds. Inside fifteen minutes they were on their way to a hospital.
When Wroblewski was brought in, the medical crew was ready. He was conscious, and though his pulse was weak and his blood pressure low, they thought he was going to make it when they put him on the Blackhawk, but Wroblewski succumbed on the way to the hospital.
Back in the field near the ambush site, 2/Lt Cogan knew Wroblewski had been taken to the rear, but he didn’t know how badly his platoon sergeant, Walker, and the others had been hit. Cogan was in his own fight, pinned down by a machine gun firing from a house only fifty meters off the road.
“I need suppressing fire,” Cogan radioed to Smith. “I’ll mark target. Watch my tracers.”
Seeing Cogan’s tracers bouncing off a nearby house, Smith directed a seven-ton truck to pull up and fire its Mark 19. The rounds punched some holes but didn’t do much damage.
“Never mind,” Cogan radioed to Smith. “I’ll take care of it. You punch up to Walker’s pos.”