My Men are My Heroes (24 page)

Mitchell is a civilian now, a new dad, and a serious student studying Harley-Davidson motorcycle technology in Phoenix. He has a son named “R. J.” whom he adores, a wife he loves, and a lot of memories from Fallujah.

For the moment Mitchell is sharing his home with former squad member Alex Nicoll, down from his home in northern California to go to the same motorcycle school. Still spirited and rambunctious despite terrible wounds, Nicoll has welded a metal bolt to his prosthetic leg so he can use the stock foot controls on his Harley. Both men share many of the same memories from Fallujah, many of them ugly.

Mitchell is getting VA disability now and deserves more, he thinks. Even so, he is content with life. He is glad Phoenix is a long way from the frozen winters of his Nebraska youth even if it does hit 135 degrees in the summer. It was even hotter when 3d Squad, Kilo Co. crossed through the breach in the berm at Fallujah and went on the attack in November of '04.

Mitchell remembers the places where he fought in Fallujah were jammed together with courtyards and walls creating natural fortresses that demanded a grenade or a satchel charge before they were entered. The buildings were constructed from brick and mortar, thick and strong to keep out the heat, but equally efficient at keeping out Marines. The architecture forced the Marines to work their way room by room across the gut of Fallujah, killing and dying in their relentless pursuit of the stubborn insurgent Iraqis.

“I really don't know how or where to start,” he says now. “And I wouldn't pretend to remember everything from the first day that we went into Fallujah. I remember getting into the city with relative ease. 1st Squad, led by Sergeant Chris Heflin and my good buddy Corporal John Arzola, led the way into the city to our squad release point. At that point my squad broke away and started our advance south while 1st Squad pushed one more block to the east before beginning their advance to the south. 3d Squad was to follow behind mine and catch whatever we had to pass up or got by us, as well as act as the casualty evac detail.”

When the 2/7 Cav began their drive into the city, Mitchell says, “it was one hell of a sound and light show.”

From time to time Mitchell would see Buhl come up for a look. The fighting was intensifying and bullets were whizzing in all directions. Buhl tried ignoring the fire while he conferred with Jent and Miller. When it got too hot he would hole up in a building with his Marines. If a squad was kicked back he would come over for a chat.

Whenever he would see Kasal he would stop for a word.

“A few days before Kasal was hit I saw him,” says Buhl. “I think it was either at our attack position or when we first got inside Fallujah. I asked him what he was doing. When we got done talking I told him to stay out of trouble.”

That simply wasn't going to be possible.

It had taken the men in 3/1 a while to get used to Buhl when he took over command from his more reserved predecessor. He would stick out a hand to the junior Marines and introduce himself as “Willy Buhl, your new battalion commander.” The men couldn't have been more surprised than if they woke up with their heads sewn to the floor.

Sometimes Buhl would spend hours riding in his Humvee, listening to the war on the radio while he moved between units. Other times he sat through long brainstorming sessions. Most of the time he was on his feet, dashing from one position to the next during a fight. He says he likes it there. Commanding from the front allowed Buhl to watch his companies, evaluate their performance, and determine what needed to be fixed.

Fatigue numbed both bodies and minds and part of Buhl's job was figuring out when people were too tired to perform. At the same time Sax and the company first sergeants were watching their commanders for the same symptoms. Keeping each other
from getting loopy was more of a mutual aid effort than anything else. They all spent their time worrying about everybody else while they all sank into a fog of exhaustion.

Buhl's vantage also allowed him to measure the battalion's company commanders, ordering changes when his Marines started making too many mistakes. He says it is a tough job when the commander has to interfere with his subordinates because it sows self-doubts in them that they don't necessarily deserve.

“Command is just knowing your people, employing your units within their capabilities,” Buhl says. “It may sound boring and flat but it's knowing your people—putting the right resources to whatever needs to be done. Sometimes you don't have a choice. You just have to tell people, ‘Hey, I need you to do this.' It may not be your first choice but, because of circumstances or time, you do it.

“I had to pull companies off the line for fatigue just like Sergeant Major-select Ruff had to tell me, ‘Sir, you need some rest.' You can't run somebody continuously every day without mistakes. You had to plug different companies in.

“Sometimes you quickly realized specific units weren't suited for that task you just gave them. They would be taking excessive casualties and you would have to pull them off. You go up and have a look yourself to see.”

Doing so was essential to spot mistakes.

“When things aren't going well,” Buhl says, “you see Marines putting people in danger areas, not employing all their combined arms at their disposal, doing things the hard way, insisting on taking down houses the hard way, using a satchel charge that requires an approach—that requires the physical emplacement of a charge vis-à-vis an air strike—or using the combination of tanks and bulldozers. These are just simple examples.”

Meanwhile the enemy was everywhere and nowhere until they wanted to be cornered—and then it was a fight to the death.
Mitchell's squad took its first casualty almost as soon as they slipped into the city.

“No more than 15 minutes after my squad started its push south from the squad release point we had our first causality,” Mitchell says. “Corporal Korey Kaufman, my First Team leader, had a malfunction with the breach of his M203. First the damn thing didn't fire and he and I both tried to pull it open.

“I didn't see it happen but I guess out of frustration he slammed the butt of the weapon on the ground causing it to either fire and graze his hand or blow up inside the breach and somehow fuck his hand up that way. However it happened the injury resulted in Kaufman being medevac'd away from the fight.

“It was probably five or 10 minutes after Korey left that we started taking fire. It was coming from some kind of bunker on a rooftop of a house between the street that my squad was operating on and the street block to our west.

“I made the decision to have a team clear a nearby house to see if they could take out the bunker from there, and I took the advice from my assistant patrol leader, Corporal [Francis] Wolf, to have 3d Squad flank from the west.”

The consequences of that decision will stick with Mitchell forever because it cost the life of a dear friend.

“That was when Segura got killed,” he says slowly, recalling Lance Corporal Juan E. Segura. “I still don't know exactly how it happened. I guess his squad started flanking but got hit from the flank as they did. He was one of my best friends for over 3½ years and will never be forgotten.”

Segura's loss also bit deeply into Kasal who considered Segura one of “his” Marines. When Kasal was the Kilo Co. first sergeant from 2001 through 2003, Segura was one of his young Marines.

“By 2004 he was a pretty seasoned Marine; he was a team leader,” Kasal says. “When we were staged at Abu Ghraib right before we motored up and headed out, I saw him. I told him to
keep his head down and that I would be watching out for him while we were out there.

“He said, ‘Roger that, First Sergeant, you take care too,' and then we left our different ways. Then the first day of the assault, I got a report over the radio that he was killed by small-arms fire that hit him in between the strike plates on his body armor while he was clearing a house.”

Kasal adds: “That kind of hit me hard. Just the day before I had told him I would be watching out for him. Then the next thing I know, on the next street over from me, he ended up getting killed. So I was pretty sad about that.”

Mitchell says the attitude of the Marines around him changed after Segura's death. He was a popular Marine who was thought to be both salty and savvy. If he could die, so could any of them. His death got their blood up, and they were even more ready to fight.

“As soon as that happened, we all started killing people,” Mitchell says. “I know at least four fighting-age males died when 3d Squad put a large shaped charge on a wall in front of them. There were four or five in a house. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In 24 hours the battle had evolved into a contest of extermination. There would be no quarter asked and none given. The only prisoners taken were the ones who wisely surrendered before the fighting began. After that it was too late.

The first page in a new chapter of Marine Corps history had just been written.

On D+4 the battalion pivoted east from its southern direction and attacked toward the Euphrates River. The area was densely built up, old, and poor. It was in the oldest part of the city, the inner sanctum of conservative Islamic thought. Many of the Marines were on their second and third days without decent sleep. The air was hot, smoky, and filled with the echoing sounds of war erupting all around them. The only rest they earned was in their night defensive positions when they got to pull half watches and every other man was allowed to sleep for two hours between stints of guard duty.

The Marines were scheduled to jump off the morning of November 10 into the “Byzantine” quarter of Fallujah. It was an ancient labyrinth of streets and alleyways that connected the jihadist warrens. 3/1's objective was Regimental Objective D, the A1 Jamah Kabir mosque along the Euphrates. The regiment called it “the heart of the insurgency” because of its importance to the jihadists' control of the city. They expected to find weapons, supplies, and insurgents prepared to fight to the death.

The new direction took Kilo south of PL Cathy. Meanwhile 2/7 had slipped behind them to guard the battalion's rear and disrupt any jihadist reinforcements attempting to get into the area. The preceding day the cavalrymen had taken Regimental Objective I—dreaded Jolan Park—a huge open space in the center of the city that was the reported spiritual center of the uprising. For the moment the cavalrymen owned the ground they occupied and little else. Protecting the Cav's left flank from the west side of PL Henry were hard-pressed 1/8 Marines. Between the two American forces the insurgents holed up in thick-walled houses. The Marines called the situation a “shit sandwich.”

The enemy's intransigence since D-day forced Buhl to make some adjustments in 3/1's fighting style. Marines are trained to find gaps in enemy lines—areas that the enemy isn't defending—and attack. But at Fallujah the Marines were attacking regardless of circumstance and smashing headlong into the enemy, resulting in too many casualties. Buhl had to find some way to slow his Marines down. Instead of immediately attacking whenever his Marines encountered the enemy, he told them to wait for reinforcements to ensure an overwhelming advantage.

“One of the things we had to adjust to quickly was to reinforce contacts,” Buhl says. “Because we had all the advantages of combined arms and firepower—and, thank God, we had authorization up the chain of command to employ whatever means were required—we could act quickly.

“Our young men are trained to run through walls, so we had to teach them that when they got bad guys in a house, not to just send in people. The minute you get into contact back away, cordon, coordinate, and drop it. Try to get them to come out and surrender. In our case at Fallujah they didn't—or did so very rarely—so the alternative was to take the structure down.”

Buhl insists: “We were not there to destroy Iraq. We came to rebuild Iraq. But if you have people's lives on the line, you use what means you need to save lives. Destroying buildings might not have been a goal, but to preserve lives it was often necessary.

“Eventually we got the word down to the small-unit leaders,” the commander recalls. From then on most of the Marine casualties “happened in extremis, when a man was wounded, when men got hurt, couldn't get themselves out of contact, and the mission became a rescue effort. This is where we found we had most of our casualties—when it was ‘no buddy left behind.'”