by Bing West
The five-hundred-pound bomb smacked into the courtyard next to the building and rammed through the macadam with a heavy thud. Connors held his breath, tucked into the fetal position. Nothing happened. Thank God, a dud.
Booom! The shock wave was so powerful, the Marines never heard the explosion. Connors looked up to see a vertical geyser of dirt and chunks of cement rocketing straight into the air, hanging, defying gravity, then pausing and falling back down. He could plainly see parts of the street plunging toward his head. He tucked his rifle under him and squatted down, trying to draw his legs under his armored vest and thrusting his helmet forward so that it banged against the helmet of the Marine next to him. They pushed their bodies toward each other, hoping the Kevlar and the heavy plates on the backs of their armored vests would absorb the blows. They were buffeted and thrown off balance by the rain of rocks and stones, but they considered themselves lucky when it ended and they saw a slab of concrete as long as a man lying next to them.
“Brown’s arm is a mess!” a corpsman yelled. “Desiato’s down. Medevac!”
Lance Corporal Travis R. Desiato was lying on his back inside a window, knocked out by the blast. After a few minutes he groggily stumbled to his feet, refusing to be evacuated. Staff Sergeant Richard Pillsbury, the platoon sergeant, rushed over to Hunt.
“Hummer’s out back for Brown, sir,” he said. “Time for you to go.”
Hunt shook his head.
“I’m not arguing with you, sir,” Pillsbury said. “Colonel Brandl’s here. I’ll get him if I have to. Doc says you’ll lose your fingers if you stay.”
The firing on the roof above them had increased. Connors was lying on the lip next to a Force Recon sniper team. Through a mousehole he saw a flash from a window and poked the spotter next to him.
“See that?”
The spotter squinted at the target, rolled onto his back, and checked his grenade launcher. Then he nodded at Connors, rolled over, knelt up, fired at an angle, and ducked back down. A half-dozen Marines edged up the wall and watched the black dot arc out and down, exploding inside the target window. The Marines cheered and laughed. It was like watching a hole-in-one shot at the golf course.
Two floors down, LtCol Brandl sized up the firefight. He had brought the battalion surgeon forward to the Government Center, determined to have medical aid as close to the frontlines as possible. In the past two days, he had lost ten killed and over seventy wounded and was struggling to wall off his emotions. He told himself, I’m the leader and this is the battle. Get it done. Focus on the mission.
Getting it done meant crossing the main highway and keeping the pressure on. I wish I had flame, Brandl thought. Instead, he had Basher lurking overhead and the Marines owned the night. That was the time to move.
“This is where they’re making their stand,” he said to Captain Aaron Cunningham, the Alpha Company commander. “Get a foothold behind those apartments after it’s dark, then proceed down Henry and roll them up.”
Just west of the Government Center the highway split into a Y, with each broad avenue leading to a bridge across the Euphrates. A cluster of restaurants and shops called the “pizza slice” occupied the center strip at the fork in the Y. Captain Cunningham told Lieutenant Elliot Ackerman to gain a foothold in the pizza slice for the company.
As a young boy, Ackerman had decided he wanted to be a Marine, although there was no Marine heritage in his family. At Tufts College he had joined Marine Corps ROTC and volunteered for extra training courses every summer to bolster his chances of being selected by the infantry branch. Before leading his platoon across Highway 10, Ackerman asked Basher to work over the building he had marked as his objective. Basher obliged with a barrage of 105mm shells.
At three in the morning Ackerman trotted across the highway with the forty-six men of 1st Platoon. Not a shot was fired. The pizza slice was empty. Basher had done such a thorough job that the building the platoon was to hold had collapsed. So Ackerman decided to push on south in the dark. The platoon crossed the avenue called Fran, chose at random a four-story building, broke open the door, and took up positions at the windows on each floor.
At first light the Marines saw that they had taken up lodging behind enemy lines. On both sides of their building, insurgents were slipping forward in bands of four and six. Wearing civilian clothes, most had on either black trousers or a black shirt, with a chest rig for their AK magazines. They were unaware of the Marines until the M16s opened up, hitting three or four before the others ducked into the surrounding buildings. With his ACOG three-power scope, Corporal Ramon Bajarano sighted in on a man standing in the middle of the street, not knowing which way to run. Using the window ledge as a rest for his M16, Bajarano shot the man in the chest, swung his rifle slightly to the right, and shot a second man smashing in the door to an apartment.
The insurgents scattered for cover, then converged on the platoon. Within minutes the fighting fell into a pattern. The platoon held a stout building with open ground on all sides, which made a frontal assault suicidal. Instead, enemy snipers, RPG teams, and machine-gunners were running from floor to floor and across the roofs of the adjoining buildings, looking for angles to shoot down. They stayed away from the front of the windows and bobbed up and down along the low rooftop walls, trying not to expose themselves for more than a few seconds.
The Marines tried to pick out a window or a corner of a building where an insurgent was hiding and smother it with fire. The shooters on both sides were like experienced boxers, jabbing and weaving, never leaving themselves open. The Marines punched mouseholes in the walls and threw up barricades in front of their machine guns, shifting from room to room every ten minutes.
One insurgent sniper had a fine field of view from a window that looked down on the platoon’s building. Every few minutes a well-aimed round drove a Marine back from his firing position.
“I can nail that bastard,” Corporal Dylan Rokos said. Rokos was an assault squad leader, an expert in blowing breaches in walls and employing the SMAW. He ducked outside with his gunner and climbed onto the roof of the carport to sight in on the sniper’s window. With bullets flicking by, the SMAW team set up. Rokos tapped the gunner to take the shot. Just as the rocket was fired, Rokos looked around, saw a Marine crouching in the backblast area, and dove backward, knocking the Marine clear. No one was seriously injured.
Ackerman had gone up on the roof to call in artillery. The air sounded full of invisible hornets and bees buzzing and snapping, the cracks! of the AKs sounding distant and remote, almost disconnected from the bullets whizzing by. The platoon commander was amazed to see SMAW team after SMAW team repeat what Rokos had done—breaking from cover, kneeling in the street, taking a shot, and then ducking back inside.
With his GPS, Ackerman had an exact fix on his position and called 81s and 155s on the buildings to the west. The red tracers from the platoon’s machine guns marked targets for the main guns of two tanks. Sometimes air joined in, hitting buildings two hundred meters south. But tires were burning up and down the main streets, and a brisk westerly wind mixed the smoke and the dust of the battle, obscuring target observation.
Most of the firing was at suspected locations inside buildings. With rifles resting on chairs and windowsills, both sides could hit any target they could fix. Insurgents ventured outside only to sprint across openings. It was rare to see a man for more than two or three seconds.
The platoon had the upper hand, with ample supporting arms and clear fields of fire. No Marine had been killed. Capt Cunningham was satisfied to let Ackerman fight from his redoubt while the company attacked on an axis one hundred meters to the west. That would relieve the pressure and they could join up later.
At around noon Ackerman’s platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Michael Cauthon, and Sergeant Corey Menard were crouching near a window behind a machine gun trying to get a fix on a persistent sniper when a bullet zinged off Menard’s helmet. Cauthon pushed him out of the way and was struck in the helme
t by the next bullet. Cauthon went down as though hit with a hammer, then crawled up on his knees and shook his head.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just a little woozy.”
When he tried to stand, the room swirled about, and he had to sit down. The next bullet struck the machine-gunner, Lance Corporal Matthew Brown, in his right thigh, nicking the femoral artery and causing profuse bleeding. Cauthon provided covering fire while Brown was pulled back to cover. When he tried to stand, he had no feeling in his arms or legs.
“You’re gonna have to help me to a firing pos, Lieutenant,” he said.
“No way. You’re getting out of here with Brown,” Ackerman said.
The platoon commander called for a medevac and the company first sergeant came forward with an amtrac, supported by Humvees with Mark 19s. The insurgents concentrated their RPG fire on the amtrac, setting it on fire but not crippling it. Tanks swung up to protect the amtrac while Ackerman put his wounded in the Humvees. The first sergeant took out seven wounded.
After the casualties were evacuated, Cunningham crossed Highway 10 with the company and attacked south. A six-lane avenue with a grass median, called Phase Line Henry, ran north-south along Cunningham’s west flank. He radioed Ackerman to move out and cover the east flank. Ackerman stuck his head out the front door and flinched. From the south an RPK machine gun was beating a tattoo on the outside of the building. Anyone venturing onto the street wouldn’t last five seconds. Needing his flank protected, Cunningham was yelling over the radio at his platoon commander to get moving.
“I got you covered, Lieutenant. We’ll go out the back,” Corporal Luke Davy said.
Davy, the leader of the engineer team, packed a wad of C-4 against the back wall and blew a large hole through the cement.
“That should be big enough,” he said, giving Ackerman his patented toothless grin. Davy had no front teeth, and months earlier his false teeth had been lost in a fire.
The Marines crawled out the hole, waited for two tanks to take the lead, and headed south. The insurgents were running down the side alleys, and when they ducked into a building, Ackerman would pick up the phone hooked to the back of the tank and request a shot. When a tank fired, Marines were supposed to stay over sixty meters to the rear, with fingers in both ears. On the narrow streets that wasn’t possible. If the Marines knew the shot was coming, they’d bend away, crouch, cup their ears, and brace for the shock. When the 120mm gun went off, rocking all sixty tons of the tank and raising clouds of dust, the shock wave would batter the Marines. The water in their bodies vibrated, and the blood dropped from their heads to their toes, as if they were trapped in an elevator whose cables had snapped. Their lungs felt like they were being sucked from their chests, and their hearts seemed to expand. They stood wobbly-kneed in the dust, not able to hear a thing, not wanting to feel what it was like on the receiving end.
The insurgents bailed out of the buildings in front of the tanks and ran up the narrow alleys between the rows of buildings. Behind the tanks and the platoon came the Humvees hauling water and ammo. As they passed the alleyways, the gunners were opening up, frantically yelling “Stop! Stop! I got targets!” Walking and trotting northward up the alleys were RPG teams and men with AKs in their hands. Many had green ammo pouches slung across their chests. As the Mark 19s opened up, they hammered on gate locks and climbed over the walls to escape. The Humvees leapfrogged each other, each driver trying to claim an open space looking down an alley.
The infantry on the flanks and the insurgents were colliding in dozens of five-second encounters, throwing grenades, shooting at rooftops, and ducking around courtyard walls. RPG and SMAW rockets were whizzing back and forth, the explosions hurling small shards of cement at a hundred miles an hour.
After advancing two blocks, Ackerman had to send the second squad forward to take over for the first squad, which had seven injured. Reaching the next intersection, Ackerman heard a garbled radio transmission from Cunningham. “Go firm!” Cunningham shouted. “Get your people off the streets! Let them come to us!”
Ackerman screamed at his men. No response. So deafening was the roar of the M16s, AKs, machine guns, tanks, mortars, RPGs, and SMAWs that Ackerman couldn’t hear his own shouts. He ran out into the street, waving his arms like a crazy man, then sprinted into a doorway, arms still above his head, hoping his platoon would follow to protect their suddenly crazed leader. They did. As one fire team after another piled into the building, Ackerman told them to stay inside.
A few minutes later Cunningham radioed again, telling them to pull back to a three-story house to give the tanks room to work. After two squads made it across, the insurgents concentrated all their fire on the intersection, pinning down the second squad. Lance Corporal William Long, who had fought in Fallujah in April with 3/4 and had volunteered to extend, had taken over after the squad leader had been wounded. Insurgents had hopped onto the roof of the building and were moving around on the second floor.
“We gotta get out of here,” Long radioed to Ackerman.
Across the street, two Iraqi Army machine-gun teams that had been moving behind the Marines were hunkered down in the three-story house. Sergeant Garret Barton, who was teaching himself to speak Arabic, led the Iraqis onto the roof. From there they placed beating fire on the insurgents circling Long’s building.
Inside, Long posted himself at the foot of the stairs, firing up and driving the insurgents back. Then the Marines ducked out and ran across the street under the protective machine-gun fire.
Ackerman brought up a Marine machine-gun crew to reinforce Barton, and soon all three guns were hammering away. The insurgents responded by climbing to adjoining roofs and lobbing RPGs. Too exposed, Akerman ordered everyone off the roof while he stayed to call in fires.
An argument broke out. “It’s my machine gun, sir,” Cpl Bajarano said. “I can do more damage than you can. You go downstairs, and I’ll stay here.”
The Iraqis, who had accepted Barton as their leader, refused to obey Ackerman.
“Sir, you can’t drag my gun crews out of here,” Barton said. “We got here first. Benjy goes, not us.”
“I’m tired of this macho bullshit,” Ackerman said. “We all get under cover—now.”
They pulled off the roof and set up firing posts on the floor below. For the next hour the three machine guns provided streams of red tracers to direct the fires of the tanks. As darkness fell and the firing dropped off, the 1st Platoon slumped over their weapons in exhaustion, too tired to trudge half a block to the seven-ton carrying their gear. During the twelve-hour battle the platoon corpsman, Hospitalman 3rd Class Jordan Holtschulte, had treated twenty-three Marines for wounds and heat exhaustion. While eight had to be evacuated to the States, none had died.
After talking with Capt Cunningham, LtCol Brandl changed the tactical pattern of his battalion. Instead of attacking in the morning, 1/8 would move forward at night when the insurgents were scattered in their safe houses. Brandl told Alpha Company to get some rest before resuming the attack at three the next morning.
On November 11 the 1st Platoon of Alpha Company 1/8 had begun the day with forty-six Marines and ended with twenty-one.
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While Battalion 1/8 was taking a rest, to the north Battalion 3/5 had finished another day of squeegee tactics and formed into defensive lines. It was the best time of the day, when the squads unloaded their packs from the seven-tons, straightened out the night’s guard duties, scrounged cushions to sleep on, boiled water for coffee, and ate MREs while swapping tales of the day about near misses, wild jihadists, and feral animals. Abandoned cats and dogs, starved for weeks, were eating the corpses, and everyone had a story of a kitten with a human eyeball in its mouth and or a cat gnawing on the cheek of a dead insurgent.
Around midnight, on the roof where Kilo Company had set up its command post, those not on watch were sacked out in their sleeping bags when a man ran out of the stairwell and bumped into a Marine, almost knocking him over.
“Dammit, watch where you’re going!”
The man disappeared in the dark as the company’s translator ran up the stairs shouting, “Irahabin! Irahabin!” From the dark came a wild burst of firing. The startled Marines rolled out of their bags, clicked off their safeties, formed a skirmish line, and slowly walked across the roof, ready to fire. Nothing happened. They reached the edge of the building and peeked over. Again, nothing—no ladder, no rope, no secret exit. They searched for an hour, poking into the smallest crannies. There was no place he could be hiding. The man had disappeared.
No one wanted to go to sleep with a wild jihadist lurking in their midst. The only structures on the roof were a covered cistern and a square tank filled with heating oil. Standing next to the tank, a Marine heard a slight metallic tap. As he looked at the surface of the oil, a man’s nostrils and closed eyes appeared. The man drew in a long breath and submerged. Two Marines aimed in, while the others drew back to be out of the line of fire. When the man bobbed back up, they shot him and returned to their sleeping bags.
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On the morning of November 12, Col Michael Shupp, commanding RCT 1, sent Battalion 3/1 south across Highway 10 to the west of Battalion 1/8. The dividing line between the two battalions was the avenue called Phase Line Henry. Kilo Company, led by Captain Timothy Jent, took the lead heading down Henry. Jent’s Marines were immediately swarmed by gangs of insurgents rushing out of side alleys and firing from the windows of dozens of buildings. Loath to direct the tank guns to the east where Battalion 1/8 was, Jent employed Mark 19s and machine guns, advancing at a steady pace with two platoons up and one back.
The 3rd Platoon was to guard the rear and blow the caches of IEDs, mortar shells, and small-arms ammunition found on every block. This was the second day Marines had attacked south down Phase Line Henry, and the insurgents were adapting. They tried to stay out of the line of fire of the lead platoons and run around the flanks to shoot from the rear.