Grunts (65 page)

They summoned a SMAW gunner to blow up the shop, even though the dead bodies of their comrades were inside. The shoulder-launched SMAW fires an 83-millimeter rocket and can puncture eight feet of concrete. It creates massive overpressure capable of collapsing a building and crushing a person. The room where the rocket explodes can heat up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The gunner pumped two rockets into the shop, turning it into jumbled rubble. As it turned out, there were three mujahideen inside. Not only did they survive the SMAW rounds, but they kept fighting, even though they were wounded and pinned in place by rubble. The Marines had to kill them with point-blank rifle shots before they could recover the bodies of their dead friends.

Another time Lima Company’s 1st Platoon ran into a well-hidden group of hard-core Chechen insurgents who were just waiting to ambush them. One squad had three men wounded inside of a building, fighting room to room against the disciplined Chechens. They managed to get their wounded Marines out. Another squad was approaching an adjacent building. The squad leader, Sergeant James “Bennie” Conner, cautiously skulked into the courtyard, making it as far as a window on the house’s southern side. Several yards away, behind the courtyard wall, Lance Corporal Michael Hanks was covering him. Conner chanced a peek into the window and came face-to-face with a man who looked like “Yasser Arafat in his younger days . . . red towel on his head . . . dirty, dark-green coat on.” The man had several rifles and two RPGs arranged around himself. He and Conner both opened fire. Neither had a very good angle to shoot the other, but Conner got hit in the arm. Enraged, the twenty-seven-year-old sergeant emptied an entire magazine into the window. “I’m hit, dude,” Conner told Hanks. “I got to come by the window, so cover me.” Hanks replied, “Okay, dude.”

Hanks lunged forward. Behind him, taking cover behind the wall, was Patrick O’Donnell, a civilian historian who had embedded himself with the platoon. He thought about following Hanks into the courtyard. At that moment, though, a presence told him: “Don’t go any farther, you aren’t trained to clear a house.” An instant later, he heard a long burst of RPK machine-gun fire and then someone screamed that Hanks was dead. Machine-gun bullets had torn into his face. “Michael Hanks’s bloody head was lying next to my boot,” O’Donnell wrote. “There were still a lot of bullets flying, but for a second everyone stopped. The moment seemed to last for an eternity.” The platoon leader, Lieutenant Jeffrey Sommers, ordered everyone to pull back. “They started . . . firing and throwing grenades at the house. Since I thought there was a tiny chance that Hanks was still alive, I grabbed the back of his flak jacket and started dragging him to the rear. A Marine came to help me. I was dragging Hanks with my right arm. Hanks’s lifeless body weighed a ton.” The blood of the fallen Marine soaked the historian’s boots and the incident marked him for life, hardening his resolve to tell the story of such valorous men. “When you’re in the middle of this, it all becomes so personal,” he later said. The 1st Platoon alone suffered thirty-five casualties, including four dead.

In another telling incident, three Kilo Company Marines were trapped inside of a house that was defended by several insurgents (probably Chechens). First Sergeant Kasal of Weapons Company and seven other Marines heard what was going on and came to the rescue. Kasal had once served as first sergeant of Kilo. He was determined to do all in his power to save the three Marines. “All I could think about was three of our own getting captured by the bad guys and beheaded . . . on TV.” Kasal and the others burst into the house and began methodically clearing it. They found one wounded Marine and two dead insurgents. The walls of the house were smeared with the crimson red blood of the mujahideen.

As the other Marines fanned out to clear each room, Kasal noticed one open room near a staircase and two adjoining rooms. He told two Marines to cover the staircase. Then he told Private First Class Alexander Nicoll to cover him as he cleared the room. Kasal did not just charge through the doorway. The first sergeant had twenty years of infantry experience. He knew that the most effective way to enter a potentially hostile room was to “pie” it. In other words, he stood in the doorway and visually inspected each part of the dark room in slices. This technique focused his eyes, steadied his weapon, and minimized his exposure to anyone in the room. The knowledge saved his life. Just as he looked to the near wall, he saw a crouching man, at handshake distance, with an AK-47. As the man raised the weapon, Kasal backed up and shouted “Bad guy!” to Nicoll, who was standing right behind the first sergeant. Just then the jihadi fired a burst that barely missed Kasal. He could feel the sonic whoosh of the bullets as they flew past his chest. “I placed my weapon over the top of his rifle and stuck my barrel straight into his chest and pulled the trigger. I emptied 8 to 10 rounds into his chest before he went down.” Even then the man was still moving, so Kasal fired two more bullets into his head. His body collapsed in the doorway.

Kasal and Nicoll did not know that the two Marines they had posted at the stairwell were no longer there. There were insurgents all over the house and they had gone off to fight them. Meanwhile, a muj snuck down the stairwell and opened up on Kasal and Nicoll from behind. Bullets tore into Kasal’s right leg. Nicoll caught a round in his left leg. Kasal painfully crawled, dragging his right leg behind him, around the dead man’s body, into the room. Then he came back for Nicoll and pulled him in as well. He did all this under fire, as rounds impacted around the two Marines. They were both bleeding badly, pinned down inside of the room. Both of them were carrying a pressure dressing, designed to stanch the flow of blood from open wounds. Kasal decided to use both dressings on Nicoll, “so that at least one of us could live,” the first sergeant later said. “I was bleedin’ pretty bad by this time. Blood was spurting out of my leg. I was kind of getting weak and starting to lose consciousness.” Even so, when the insurgent snuck close to the door and pitched a grenade to a spot about four feet from them, Kasal pushed Nicoll down and draped his body over him, shielding him from the blast. “In all honesty, I thought I was going to bleed to death from severe wounds and lack of medical treatment anyway.” The NCO figured if he himself was going to die, he might as well save Nicoll’s life. The grenade sent hot fragments into Kasal’s legs, buttocks, and lower back, “causing my head to spin and my ears to feel like they had just burst.” His gear absorbed much of the blast, though, and many of the fragments went upward.

It took thirty or forty minutes for other Marines to rescue the men who had originally been trapped and then turn their attention to extracting Kasal and Nicoll. As several Marines, including Lance Corporal Justin Boswood, unleashed a wall of covering fire, Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Dan Schaeffer ran in and pulled the first sergeant and Nicoll from the house. “The whole house was just shaking with 5.56 rounds, just SAWs going off with a two-hundred-round burst and the [M]16s as fast as you could pull the trigger,” Boswood said. The Marines blew up the house with a satchel charge of explosives and, in Boswood’s recollection, “a door was about one hundred feet in the air . . . and pink mist was underneath the door.” Even amid this destruction, the muj were not all dead. From the rubble, one of them tried to pitch a grenade at the Marines. They pumped hundreds of rounds into his remains. Nicoll survived but lost his left leg. Kasal lost 60 percent of his blood and endured over twenty surgeries, but he kept his leg. One Marine was killed in the house and eleven others wounded. Several men were decorated for their part in this “Hell House” fight, including a Navy Cross for Kasal.
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As the battle unfolded, the Marines learned to avoid such costly encounters and make better use of supporting arms, regardless of how much damage they did to Fallujah. “Our young men are trained to run through walls,” Lieutenant Colonel Buhl said, “so we had to teach them that when you got bad guys in a house, not to just send in people.” As at Peleliu, too often the first inclination of tough young Marines was to close with and kill the enemy wherever they found them, regardless of whether it was advantageous to do so. Buhl and many of his junior officers and NCOs told their Marines, “The minute you get in contact [with a fortified house] back away, cordon, coordinate, and drop it.” When the casualty numbers began piling up, the grunts were only too happy to comply.

This meant using combined arms. At Aachen, combined arms teams had been vital to American success. The same was true at Fallujah. Marine battalions like 3/1 were dominated by light infantrymen, but they enjoyed the support of a marvelous array of effective weapons and learned to use them quite well. “I believe that the . . . greatest . . . combat power of a Marine infantry battalion is tied to its employment of combined arms,” Buhl commented. “In an [urban] fight . . . combined arms is everything . . . tanks . . . bulldozers . . . engineers . . . indirect fire . . . aviation fire.” Artillery and mortar crewmen laid down a curtain of fire ahead of the attacking infantry squads.

Most of the time the rifle companies were also supported by a nice array of vehicles, including machine-gun-toting AAVs, plus Humvees equipped with Mark 19s, .50-caliber machine guns, or TOWs. The Mark 19s and .50 cals were capable of tearing chunks out of buildings. The TOWs, of course, could collapse them altogether or, at the very least, punch entry holes into them for the riflemen.

The grunts especially loved working with tanks. Buhl’s battalion was supported by one company from the Marine 2nd Tank Battalion, plus whatever assistance 2-7 Cavalry could provide. “It was like going on an evening stroll in a dangerous neighborhood with a Tyrannosaurus Rex,” one Marine wrote. In addition to its 120-millimeter main gun, each Abrams had a coaxial machine gun and a .50 caliber. RPGs could damage the optics, the treads, or set fire to the carrying racks on the tank’s turret, but they could not penetrate its thick Cobham armor. Nor could the vast majority of IEDs do much damage to them. So, the Abrams truly was like an impervious dinosaur, or at least the baddest kid on the urban combat block. In one instance, a tank was moving down an alleyway with some grunts. Standing in his turret, the tank commander peered over a wall just in time to see insurgents pitch grenades over it. The grenades exploded harmlessly against his armor, shielding the grunts. His driver swiveled the tank back and forth, smashing the walls, and then his gunner unloaded on the insurgents with his machine guns, shredding them.

Four tanks supported each company. “We used the tanks a great deal in terms of prepping buildings before we’d go in with Marines on the ground,” Lieutenant Timothy Strabbing, a platoon leader in India Company, recalled. “We’d have a tank supported by an AAV and two vehicles behind [it]” as they moved warily down each street. The infantrymen positioned themselves alongside or behind the tanks. The grunts could point out targets for their tanker comrades by simply opening fire or talking into the phone on the rear of the Abrams. But they had to avoid standing directly behind the powerful turbine engine because it generated so much heat and such a high-pitched whining noise.

Because Fallujah was almost entirely empty of civilians, the tankers made liberal use of their considerable firepower, spraying rounds wherever the infantry might need them. “I fired twenty-five to forty-one hundred twenty-millimeter rounds each day,” Master Gunnery Sergeant Ishmael Castillo, a tank commander, said. “Every tank did.” In Fallujah, Castillo and his fellow tank crewmen shot approximately twenty-five hundred main-gun rounds at targets within one hundred feet. The concussive effect (not to mention the blast and shrapnel) of each shot was immense. When the Abrams fired its main-gun round, anyone standing near it risked being knocked down, knocked out, or deafened. It was like standing in the middle of a thunder-clap. It physically hurt to be anywhere near an Abrams when it fired its main gun. For obvious reasons, the insurgents usually tried to avoid confrontations with the tanks, but many of them failed. Tank shells dismembered them, shredded their limbs, collapsed buildings onto them, and, in a few cases, disintegrated them.

Close air support was available in large quantities for the Marines. Each company had an actual fighter pilot attached as a forward air controller. In some cases, they called in strike missions from their own squadron buddies. The Marine grunts especially liked their own F/A-18 Hornet two-seaters, Harriers, and Air Force F-16Cs. According to Captain Pete Gallogly, the 3/1’s air officer during the battle, the battalion called upon “91 laser-guided 500-pound bombs and 35 GPS 500-pound bombs. We dropped two 1,000-pound GPS bombs on a large complex—they flattened it. We dropped 10 laser Mavericks, called in 119 AC-130 strikes, 21 Hellfires [missiles], 4 TOWs, and 9 fixed-wing strafing attacks.”

The infantrymen especially loved the AC-130 Bashers. “I’d fuck that plane if it was a woman,” one of them said. In fact, at least one of the AC-130s was commanded by a woman. Few Marines knew that, but among those who did, heartsick rumors circulated that she was sultry and beautiful. This, of course, only added to the black widow mystique of the plane. The jihadis were absolutely terrified of it. Several prisoners testified to that fact. “They really feared Basher, because the aircraft flew at night and was basically invisible to them,” one Marine officer later commented. “They could hear ’em [flying], and they could hear . . . when they fired.” The muj called the plane “the Finger of God” because of the accurate, withering line of tracers that, in darkness, looked like a vengeful finger pointing to the ground.

Basher’s infrared optics allowed the crew to see almost any night movement in Fallujah. Night after night, they flew circles above the Marine infantry positions, killing any insurgents who dared move in their direction with a combination of 105-millimeter howitzer fire and 20-millimeter Gatling gun fire. This afforded the Marines night security, allowing them to rest, and it limited jihadi movement, a real asset because, throughout the battle, insurgents tended to re-infiltrate areas the Americans had previously cleared. When Basher fired, it sounded as though the air above was literally being torn apart like a flimsy piece of cloth. For the grunts, nights in Fallujah were chilly and creepy. Psyops teams roamed around, playing hard-core rock songs such as “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, along with the sound of crying babies, the meowing of cats, and even the menacing laugh of the beast in the movie
Predator
. Amid this phantasmagorical environment, Basher was always a comforting sound.