Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  Choking off this supply network became the task of 3/7 Marines, starting in February 2004. But the Americans quickly discovered they had been given an impossible task. Every day, thousands of vehicles crossed the border at Husaybah, and checking them all was simply beyond the capabilities of the battalion. They didn’t have the men or the resources to do it, and the Iraqi frontier guards could not be trusted. Plus, the smugglers and criminals who had been making these runs for years, and knew how to hide stuff, were now working for the insurgents. Each day, hundreds of semitrucks filled with fruit or other perishables lined up to cross the frontier. Hidden deep within their beds would be weapons, ammunition, and even young foreign volunteers eager to join the Jihad. Short of emptying each truck and searching it from the frame up, there was no way to fully halt the flow.

  And it was perilous duty. Husaybah was full of armed criminals, Sunni rebels, and a growing kernel of al-Qaida operatives just securing a foothold in this part of the country. On April 14, 2004, an Iraqi pickup truck was stopped by a fire team of 3/7 Marines. Corporal Jason Dunham approached the driver, who lunged at him when his car door was opened. Dunham punched and kicked the man, trying to subdue him. As he did, the driver activated a grenade. Dunham saw it fall to the ground next to his feet and knew that it would kill or wound two of his fellow Marines standing nearby. He let go of the driver, pulled his helmet off and used it to cover the grenade. Then he fell atop it to further shield his brothers from its blast.

  It exploded and mortally wounded Jason Dunham, who died several days later at a Stateside hospital. His comrades were unharmed by the blast, and as they recovered from the shock of it, they spotted the driver trying to run away. They killed him with rifle fire, then discovered his pickup truck had been full of weapons and ammunition. He’d been one of the mules smuggling for the insurgency.

  Jason Dunham later received a posthumous Medal of Honor, the first Marine to be awarded one since the Vietnam War.

  But not the last.

  The smuggler Dunham’s friends had killed turned out to be part of the logistical support for a new offensive the insurgents planned to unleash in Husaybah. For days, Sunni cells had been infiltrating Husaybah from Ramadi and Fallujah. More poured over the border by the truckload. Soon, they had at least three hundred well-armed and well-led fighters deployed around the city. What followed was one of the most intense, and unheralded, battles of the Iraq War.

  APRIL 17, 2004

  MORNING

  Jason Delgado awoke with that slow burn of anger in his stomach. From day one on this second deployment, what he was seeing through his scope flew in the face of the assumptions being made by his chain of command. While the leadership thought there was only a scattering of criminals and Saddam loyalists hiding in the rabbit warren of streets and alleys in Husaybah, Jason sensed something else entirely was going down.

  On their first mission in February, Jason and the other 3/7 snipers went out to overwatch an Iraqi police station from the local Ba’ath Party headquarters building. It was the tallest structure in the area, so it afforded a good view. Within minutes of arriving there, though, they took sustained small-arms fire and had to be extracted.

  In the weeks that followed, Jason was the only sniper in the battalion taking shots. Whether his experience and training with 3/4 made him quicker to identify threats, or if the others were too concerned about a bad shoot, he didn’t know. But they were clean kills against armed men actively threatening Coalition forces. Yet every time he pulled the trigger, his chain of command stuck him in a room and grilled him like he was a criminal. Combat was stressful enough; being hammered like this by his own people for doing his job was almost unbearable.

  It didn’t help that the sniper section of the scout platoon was undermanned. Instead of ten teams, they were lucky to field three with five men. Casualties over the past year and the demands on the Corps had left every battalion short-handed, so 3/7 was not unique in this regard. Still, the numbers game just added to the burden. They’d only been in country for about six weeks, and already the daily (and nightly) grind was taking its toll.

  Jason and the scouts stayed at Al Qaim with the rest of 3/7’s headquarters element for only a short time as the battalion settled into its new AO. The town sat about a mile from the Syrian border and the base was only a few minutes’ driving time to Husaybah, where a hundred and fifty man company from the battalion had been forward deployed. A week after arriving, Jason and the rest of the snipers packed up and joined them.

  * * *

  That morning, outnumbering the local Marines two to one, the insurgents launched a full-scale assault in Husaybah.

  In began with a baited ambush. They detonated an IED on the main road through town, not far from the Ba’ath Party headquarters building. The blast triggered an immediate reaction from Captain Richard Gannon’s company. He and a platoon sortied from their outpost—and drove straight into an ambush. Machine guns, mortar fire, and AK-47s raked the platoon. The fighting spread from the street into the nearby buildings.

  As it happened, a Marine Recon team had been on the top floor of the Ba’ath building. Now, they discovered the insurgents had taken over the bottom floor and used it as an ambush position against Captain Gannon’s reaction force. The Recon guys crept downstairs, burst into the first floor and killed all the insurgents there.

  * * *

  In a nearby building, a squad of Marines ran into a die-hard group of insurgents. Fighting room to room, several Marines were killed. Others were wounded. The casualties piled up. Captain Gannon called for MEDEVAC and reinforcements. More men from his company flowed into the fight, but they were outnumbered and the enemy was well emplaced.

  In the chaos of this point-blank urban firefight, Captain Gannon disappeared. For an hour nobody could raise him on the radio or locate him on the battlefield.

  Gannon and several of his men had assaulted into a nearby building. It turned out to be full of well-equipped and determined insurgents. They wounded Captain Gannon and killed the other Marines as they fought room to room. As Captain Gannon lay helpless on the floor, the insurgents disarmed him. He was a student of military history, the son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, and a devoted patriot. But now, in this terrible moment, he alone faced a barbaric and merciless enemy, the likes of which Americans had not seen since the Pacific War.

  The terrorists executed him with his own 9mm pistol. The same fate would later befall an Army company commander from Task Force 2/2 during the Second Battle of Fallujah later in the year.

  At Al Qaim, the remaining scouts and all other available Marines piled into Humvees and raced toward Husaybah to offer their beleaguered brothers assistance. The scouts would sweep into the city from the south while the rest of the battalion struck the enemy from the west. Hopefully, the insurgents would be caught by surprise and trapped between the two elements.

  Jason and the rest of the scouts approached a cluster of homes and businesses known as the “440” (there were four hundred forty structures in it). The place was basically a suburb of Husaybah, separated from the main portion of the city by a stretch of open terrain. The Marines dismounted in the desert between the two built-up areas and began to move toward the fighting on foot.

  They hadn’t gone far when something white fluttered on a rooftop. Jason brought his scope to his eye for a better look. A ten-year-old kid was up there, waving a stick with a white plastic sack attached to it. In previous patrols, Jason had seen other boys doing this as pigeons flew overhead and assumed the kids were just training their birds.

  But not this time. There were no birds in the air around him.

  Jason watched him for a long moment, considering his next move. His gut told him the kid was signaling the enemy. But what could he do? He couldn’t put a bullet in a ten-year-old boy.

  The Marines reached a set of railroad tracks. On the other side, a drainage ditch ran parallel with them. It looked like a natural defensive position, except for the heaps of tras
h strewn throughout its length. The stench boiling up from the ditch was vile, and clouds of flies boiled and buzzed over the mess.

  Somebody said, “If the enemy is nearby, I bet they’ll be in there.”

  Jason looked around. The 440 was just to their left, the main part of the city ahead and to the right. From both flanks, an ambush could be executed, and the Marines would have a hard time just trying to figure out from where the shooting originated. They’d walked into a terrible tactical situation, and a feeling of dread welled in Jason.

  An officer appeared next to him and said, “Scope that building and see what’s going on.”

  “On it, Sir.”

  He checked the rooftop. The boy remained in full view, waving his makeshift flag.

  That’s it.

  Calmly, Jason turned to the officer and said, “Maybe we should get into that ditch, Sir.”

  The officer agreed and gave the order. The Marines began jumping down into the trench. The smell of rot and corruption was nearly overwhelming, and the men were both bitching and laughing about it at the same time.

  * * *

  That’s when four machine guns opened fire on the Americans from multiple elevated positions. The fusillade of bullets chewed across the top lip of the drainage ditch as the Marines pressed themselves down as far as they could into the muck. A host of AK-47s unleashed a hail of rounds and added to the cacophony.

  In seconds, the insurgent ambush pinned the scouts down. Totally defensive, they couldn’t even raise their heads without drawing a crossfire that filled the air around them with cracking 7.62mm bullets.

  Jason lay at the bottom of the ditch, listening to the four machine guns rip off burst after burst. The ditch was their salvation, but it also was their death trap. The absurdity of the situation suddenly overwhelmed him. He began to laugh.

  Yeah. And the higher ups kept wondering who the hell I’ve been shooting at for the month. Maybe those geniuses will get the message now.

  The guns raked back and forth over the platoon. Several men went down wounded. The situation was getting out of hand. It is in such dire moments that snipers can be the most effective. Usually, the only way to overcome an ambush like this one was to bring in more firepower. Tanks, aircraft, helicopters could dig the scouts out of the jam they were in. Nobody does firepower like the U.S. Marines.

  But it would take time to get air support and artillery. The pounding the platoon endured that morning could not be allowed to go on for long. The ditch wasn’t that deep, which meant the enemy fighters positioned in the taller dwellings around them would be able to get direct fire on at least some of the Marines as they looked down on them. The insurgents began to find the angles. Another Marine went down wounded as bullets began impacting among the men. As the corpsmen went to work, some of the others burrowed into the trash to conceal themselves from the gunmen out there in buildings overlooking the trench.

  Something had to be done, or they’d get picked off one by one. Jason and his spotters, sharp-eyed Joshua Mavica and Brandon Delfiorintino, eased up the ditch wall to try and get eyes on the enemy machine guns. When they reached the top, they used binos and the scope on Jason’s M40 to glass the nearest buildings. At a hundred and seventy yards, the trio observed muzzle flashes coming from an apartment complex. Lots of them. Black clad figures moved around inside the rooms as others darted about on the roof.

  Find the crew-served weapons.

  The air around the sniper team suddenly buzzed with bullets. To Jason, they sounded like pissed-off bees. The enemy had seen their heads exposed above the lip of the trench. Now at least one of the machine gunners had the range on them.

  They ducked low and waited out the fusillade. A moment later they crawled back up to the top and continued their sweep. This time they focused on a building about two hundred thirty yards away. On the rooftop, they found one of the machine-gun positions. The gunner wore black man jammies and Adidas running pants. Another man was with him, similarly dressed but carrying an AK-47.

  More angry bees. The enemy had seen them expose their heads again, and the two Marines had to go to ground once again.

  Half buried in the garbage, the urge to laugh overcame Jason again. Half aloud he said, “Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” The words were swallowed by the din of cracking bullets.

  There was no way the scouts would gain fire superiority in this fight. With wounded men, and the top of the trench covered by so many heavy weapons, if they tried to shoot back they would certainly just incur more casualties. Something needed to be done to level the playing field, or they were going to be in for a long and bloody day in the trash.

  Carefully, Jason inched back up to the top of the trench, swung his M40A3 over the rim, and stuck his eye in the scope. Technically, a two-hundred-thirty-yard shot at an elevated target was not particularly difficult. Wind was light. Sun was not an issue. Enough of the gunner was exposed above the parapet to make an inviting target. Back on a range in the States, it’d be an easy kill.

  But back in the States, nobody was shooting at you. Without any covering fire, Jason was exposed to the full fury of all the guns the enemy had in the fight. He focused on the task, blocking out fear and ignoring the rounds smacking into the dirt on either side of him. The enemy was getting close. He couldn’t let himself think of that or the physical reaction to the danger would ruin his aim.

  A half breath, and his reticle settled on the machine gunner, just a bit above center mass in order to compensate for the angle. He had the shot lined up. He could see the gunner laying on the trigger, his weapon’s barrel spewing flame.

  Jason’s finger slipped into the trigger guard. More 7.62 rounds streaked over his head. He blocked them out. Nothing mattered but the picture in the scope. He left half his breath out, then pulled his own trigger.

  The gunner spun away from his weapon and fell out of view. Jason racked another round into his M40 and drilled the rifleman with his second shot.

  The volume of incoming diminished. What next? There were too many bad guys in the apartment complex for his M40 to make much of a difference there. He hadn’t been able to find the other heavy weapons yet either. An idea struck him.

  Jason took a smoke grenade off his chest rig, pulled the pin, and flipped it over the lip of the trench. The smoke offered a little extra concealment. As it settled over them, Jason called for Joshua Mavica, one of the platoon’s radio operators. Mavica came on the run at once, staying as low as possible as he picked his way over the piles of trash at the bottom of the ditch. When he reached Jason, the sniper grabbed his handset and called battalion to request a fire mission using 3/7’s 81mm mortar platoon.

  The mortarmen brought their A game that day. The first round landed about two hundred yards north of the apartment complex. Jason saw the round explode, lased the distance with his binos, and called back, “Drop two hundred and fire for effect!”

  The mortars landed right atop the apartment building and detonated on its roof. They touched off some propane tanks stored up there, sparking a conflagration that roasted the insurgents using the roof for their fighting positions. One of the machine guns and three men were later found to have been up there.

  The flames swirled and spread to the top floor. As they did, one of the Marines in the trench stood up and fired an AT-4 rocket into the building. The fire spread until the entire structure was consumed.

  Meanwhile, the scout platoon’s leadership had been trying to get a MEDEVAC ride for their wounded men. Helos were out of the question—landing anywhere nearby would be a death sentence to the crew given the amount of firepower arrayed against the Marines. A vehicle evacuation was the only possibility, but there weren’t any Humvees available. At length, the situation grew so critical that 3/7 HQ sent them an unarmored seven-ton along with a fuel truck. The two vehicles were the last ones at Al Qaim.

  They showed up in the middle of the firefight and instantly drew fire. An RPG sizzled over the t
rench and speared the fuel truck just as it came to a halt a few yards away from the Marines. The rocket punctured the truck’s huge tank but failed to explode. That seemed like a moment of inspired divine intervention—if it had blown up, there would have been few survivors in the trench. As it was, the hole it created caused hundreds of gallons of gasoline to spray out into the dirt and flow into the ditch. Soon, most of the Marines taking cover in the trash were soaked with fuel.

  The wounded men were carried to the vehicles and extracted as the surviving insurgents fired back with everything they had left. Fortunately, nobody was hit. The apartment building burned on as Marines from one of 3/7’s line companies cleared the two remaining machine-gun nests.

  Then they moved into the city proper. Jason and the scouts ran into immediate trouble as the streets were laced with roadside bombs. Other Marine elements took sniper fire from well-trained foreign fighters, most of whom were later discovered to be Chechens. They were a cagey and disciplined bunch, and the Americans took more casualties fighting house to house again. At times, the Marine snipers ranged on enemy fighters who were using small children as human shields. The battalion’s executive officer, Major George Schreffler, got on the radio and warned the other companies of this new development, telling the Marines not to take any shots that could harm the kids.

  As the fighting continued, the IEDs stopped the scouts for almost four hours as EOD teams came out to neutralize them. They advanced a block forward, ran into another makeshift IED minefield, and had to wait again as the specialists rendered them useless. Block by block, they advanced at a crawl, taking sporadic fire as they worked. But the main resistance they’d faced had been broken after the 81mm mortar barrage.

  It took fourteen hours of continuous combat to finally break the enemy’s back. Late that night, the Marines finally received air support. Cobra gunships made strafing runs on pockets of resistance near the downtown soccer stadium. Those gun runs signaled the end of the offensive.