Joker One (24 page)

“Ser’ent, Ser’ent. I shot that guy, Ser’ent. I think I killed him. He was laying on the ground, Ser’ent, just laying there, dead I think. He’s dead. What should we do, Ser’ent?”

At that exact instant, Noriel had Golf Company’s first dead Iraqi lying in the middle of Ramadi’s main thoroughfare, a young man who had just killed his first human being asking for advice and guidance, a live grenade clutched tightly in his own right hand, and Corporal Brown tugging at his cammies, holding the grenade’s pin and trying urgently to get the squad leader’s attention so that they could reinsert the pin and defuse the bomb.

“But, sir,” Noriel later told me, “you know what the only thing I could think about at the time was? How much trouble I was going to get into cuz Feldmeir was talking on that damn radio again.”

A few minutes later, the grenade’s pin reinserted, first squad had collected themselves and their gear and moved out of the observation position and down to the street to get some more information and collect the body. It was gone—a few passersby had loaded both Iraqis into a taxi just minutes after the shootings—but others had approached the squad and told them that the man they had just killed was very, very bad. “Saddam, Saddam,” they repeated, shaking their heads and pointing at the man’s car.

A
s I sat outside the gym and listened to the story, it seemed fitting to me, somehow, that our first kill had come not in our own defense but in defense of a citizen of Ramadi. It was too bad we hadn’t been able to recover the body, but at first glance, it looked like we had not only saved an innocent life but also killed an actual insurgent in the process: after speaking more extensively with the locals, George confirmed that the car’s owner was indeed the now-dead giant. He then nonchalantly informed me that my platoon’s first kill had been Iraq’s champion bodybuilder, aka “Mr. Iraq,” which left me with one dead celebrity insurgent and a plastic grocery bag filled with explosives. Maybe the situation wasn’t quite as black-and-white as I had initially assumed, but I was still happy.

Finding nothing else, I ordered first squad to hunt down another building
and continue the observation mission. I returned with second squad back to the Government Center, where I called the CO and explained everything to him. He was as puzzled as I was, but very pleased that Golf Company had killed its first apparent terrorist. When I finished the transmission, I took my little special grocery bag down to the Triple Canopy guys. They were all ex–special forces, so they should know a bit more than I about what we were dealing with. I found Pigpen and proudly showed him our catch. His eyes widened.

“Nice work, lieutenant. Those are some nasty explosives. Let’s see here, yep, PE-4, some TNT, oh, what are these? Blasting caps, I see.” He paused, then swallowed hard. “Well, lieutenant, I only have one recommendation. You might want to put the detonators and the explosives in two different bags. The explosives are stable, but those blasting caps are not, and they’ll probably go off if you drop or shake them. If that happens next to one of those blocks of explosive, well, it would probably be bad.”

Oh. Important safety tip. I should have known about the caps—we’d all had a decent amount of explosives training—but the night’s events had moved the little detonators down to a much lower priority in my mind.

“Yeah, right. Thanks, Pigpen. You got another bag?”

“Sure, I’ll get it for you. By the way, some of those blasting caps are electronic squibs, which means you can set them off remotely. These are some nasty things with some nasty uses. I’m glad they’re not floating around anymore.”

“Yeah, and I’m glad I haven’t exploded yet.” Pigpen handed me a bag. “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, good night.”

W
e made it back to the Outpost early the next morning after the usual harrowing route sweep. However, what I didn’t know at the time—but found out a few days later from our Information Operations officer—was that Mr. Iraq had been considered a hugely pro-American personage by U.S. forces, and he had played some role in their current public relations efforts. In their eyes, my men had just killed an important Iraqi spokesperson. Even the CO started doubting despite the fact that, when we killed him, Mr. Iraq had been about to pump several rounds into the head of an unarmed
man, and his car had contained a few kilos of military-grade explosive and detonators. The CO repeatedly pointed out to me that since the Iraqis were known to use explosives for fishing, maybe all of the so-called “IED material” that we had found was simply fishing gear. My response was simple: It was highly unlikely that an urban gym owner played at rural fisher man in his spare time, and if Mr. Iraq was such a pro-coalition figure, then why was he transporting enough explosives and remote detonators to destroy several of our partially armored Humvees?

Questions surrounding the IED material aside, the laws of war and general morality compelled us to intervene to prevent atrocities, atrocities like an armed man shooting a wounded, unarmed man in the head. All of this and more I explained to Teague when a few days later he asked me whether I thought that he had done the right thing by killing Mr. Iraq. He had, I told him, and I was very proud of his quick thinking, his straight shooting, and the life he had saved. I should have told Teague all of this sooner, though, because watching a man fall to the ground as he spurts blood out of his carotid arteries because you just put three pieces of metal through them is no small thing for a twenty-one-year-old to handle. Though the killing is easy and emotionless in the moment, it can sometimes comes back, especially if the man you killed wasn’t shooting at you when you shot him.

And, though I kept it solely between Teague and myself, my final response to all of our doubters, from the CO to the Army, was simple: Welcome to the world of deception and shifting allegiances that is Iraq, Golf Company. Only a fool would take a person at his word and at face value in this place.

Aside from the mystery terrorist’s celebrity status, there was one more relevant fact that I didn’t know on March 30, and it was that our platoon’s aggressive actions on that day were too little, too late. To date, nearly every unit in the battalion had been involved in at least one, if not several, enemy attacks, and 2/4 had responded with our own fire on fewer than five occasions. Our hesitance to engage our enemies spoke volumes about both their willingness to sacrifice civilians in pursuit of their aims and our willingness to sacrifice ourselves in pursuit of ours, but this powerful message had somehow been lost in translation. At the company and platoon level—the units actually on the street day in and day out—we had done almost no work with our Iraqi counterparts, the police and the national guard. Aside from
George, there was no one to help us explain our seeming passivity in the face of repeated attacks to a population largely on the fence. Therefore, our kindness quickly became perceived as weakness by the insurgents and by most of Ramadi’s citizens, and by late March, 2/4 had earned itself the nickname
awat,
an Iraqi Arabic term for a soft, sugary cake that crumbles easily to the touch.

We didn’t know it then, but the insurgents had decided to touch us, to crumble us just like the soft cake that had become our namesake. The battalion had extended the velvet glove, and it was about to get its hands severely bitten.

B
y early April, Golf Company had developed a solid feel for Ramadi’s daily pattern of activities, an understanding that allowed us to gauge the city’s normalcy. In the early morning, just after sunrise, men gathered at the local tea shops to drink shot glasses full of steaming chai; women began walking their children to school; and storefronts all across the city raised their locked steel doors and opened for business. The hustle and bustle of daily life reached its peak shortly before noon, with thousands of people thronging the souk and the industrial area, shopping, working, or, more probably, looking for work. At noon, the streets and marketplaces emptied as most people retired to their houses to try to sleep during the scorching afternoon heat. A few hours later, around 3 or 4
PM,
commerce resumed until nightfall. Then the streets became largely empty again, and strict Islam, it seemed, took a backseat to practicality. During our early curfew enforcement patrols, the vast majority of erratic Iraqi drivers whom we pulled over at our checkpoints were inebriated.

Governing these rhythms of life were the muezzins’ chants. Five times a day they rang out across the city, in a ritual unchanged since the ninth century, save that in the twenty-first, electronic speakers magnified their sound.

Before people arose, while the city was still dark, the muezzins invited them to wake and pray. After everyone retired, just after darkness returned to Ramadi, the muezzins closed out the day with their chants. And three times in between, as life ebbed and flowed according to the heat and commerce, the muezzins reminded everyone to pause, just for a bit, and to pray.

Normally, we had no idea what different sentiments these chanted prayers contained as they competed with one another for the attention of the faithful in a furious cacophony of noise. We simply walked on through the babel and perhaps gave our own quick thanks that the streets were clear. At 10
AM
on April 6, though, Golf Company knew that something was wrong, because for the first time since our arrival, we knew exactly what each mosque was saying during its call to prayer. From every minaret in the city, the same word rang out, over and over, in short, chanted blocks:

Every single muezzin in Ramadi was calling for a holy war against the Marines.

Unbeknownst to us, during the previous week several hundred hardcore insurgents had infiltrated the city with the intent of attacking head-on, and ultimately crumbling, the weak American Marines. Implementing a tactic that was currently working for them in Fallujah, the terrorists went from one house to another, staging weapons at each and telling the head of the family that if the caches were not there when the fighters returned, they would simply behead the family in front of the father before torturing the man to death. This prestaging of fighting positions eliminated the need to carry weapons openly in the streets. Knowing that we would not shoot unarmed individuals, the insurgents could thus use our rules of engagement against us by fighting from one house until they were overwhelmed, then leaving their weapons and retreating—unarmed and thus relatively safely mixed with the civilian populace at large—to the next house and the next
fighting position. There they would take up arms again and repeat the process.

Making matters worse, the ranks of these “professional” insurgents were swelled by thousands of part-time volunteers, local Ramadi residents who grabbed the family AK-47 and ventured outside their compounds to take potshots at nearby Americans before returning and continuing with tea or television. Of course, not all Ramadians took part in the fighting, and estimates of the size of the force that we faced on April 6 vary widely, but consider the following: In the city of 350,000, it would have taken only 1 percent of the total residents to field some 3,000 volunteer fighters, a number easily four times that of our battalion’s roughly 800 able-bodied infantrymen. And one thing is certain—far more than 1 percent of Ramadi resented the American crusaders enough to take a relatively risk-free shot at them.

Thus, on the morning of April 6, Lieutenant Hesener and his platoon, Joker Three, were patrolling a wide swath of the city on foot, en route to the Government Center as the jihad prayers drew to a close. Suddenly they started taking sporadic fire. Within half an hour, the sporadic had turned intense, and Joker Three soon found itself separated into three isolated squads, each pinned down in a different house in the middle of Ramadi, taking fire from and returning it at an enemy that seemed to be everywhere. As we were on QRF that day, Joker One was sent in first to relieve them and to extract the dead and wounded, but it soon became apparent that every man who could be spared from the Outpost was needed, so the CO called in Joker Four and the battalion’s Weapons Company to reinforce us. To our east, Porcupine, the sister company sharing the Outpost with us, was also hit by numerous well-coordinated, well-planned ambushes. Eventually every available man in the battalion would be deployed into the fight, and by the time the sun set on April 6, twelve Marines had lost their lives. At least twenty-five others were wounded in the bloodiest day of the Iraq War since the fall of Baghdad.