My Men are My Heroes (35 page)

When everybody was in position Grapes gave the order to fire. Simultaneously all the shooters opened up on the stairwell, forcing the insurgents back while Marquez and Schaeffer sprinted across the kill zone. In seconds they appeared in front of Kasal.

“As they suppressed the enemy two young Marines came storming into the room,” Kasal says. “They came to pull us out and I remember the first thing I noticed about them was they weren't carrying any weapons. I also knew the only way out of there was right back through the kill zone that the enemy had covered by fire.

“As they grabbed me I kept hold of my 9mm pistol, thinking if the enemy started shooting then at least I could fire back and, hopefully, get them first. I was now worried about the two young Marines who were helping me. Still under the suppressive fire laid down by Grapes and Boswood, the two young Marines and I started across the room and toward the outside door. Due to the enemy being pinned down we were able to make it without incident.”

When they came out the door Lucian Read snapped his now famous picture.

After recovering Kasal the two young Marines made two more trips to bring out Mitchell and Nicoll. That left Sanchez, Rodriguez, and Carlisle still in the back room. Corporal Jensen, having completed bandaging Weemer, came up with a plan to get them out. He attached a long chain to a Humvee and pulled the bars off the back bedroom window to give them an escape route. As soon as the window was clear Sanchez and Rodriguez passed Carlisle's unconscious form through the window, then bailed out through it themselves. Once they were clear Boswood
and Grapes made a firing retreat out of the main room. For the moment the insurgents had the house to themselves.

The two young Marines cleared the door and set Kasal down on the outside steps where Doc Williams, a Navy corpsman, and Lopez from Weapons Co., along with other Marines grabbed him and laid him in the back of a Humvee to be evacuated. He was placed into the Humvee next to Chandler, who also was wounded, and they were rushed to the Battalion Aid Station outside the city.

Lopez ran around to the front of the house after Kasal and the others were rescued. There he saw his friend Byron Norwood being carried out on a poncho.

“I didn't recognize him when they pulled him outside the courtyard. I knelt right down beside him and looked at him,” Lopez says. “I am never going to forget him.”

Weemer was also evacuated but not until later. “I tried four or five times to get back in the fight,” he says. “I knew I wasn't going to die. Doc Edora, who had also treated Eldridge, came by to check me out. Later he would work on Nicoll and Carlisle. After that he just sat around watching the war swirl around him until the fight was over. Then he helped with the casualties.

“Once we finally got Carlisle and Nicoll, they pulled Norwood out. I helped put him in the back of the Humvee. Then I got in the back with Norwood. There were three or four vehicles full of casualties. When we got everybody loaded we took off.”

Mitchell was in on exploding the house. “I didn't go back to the BAS until two hours later,” he says. “One of the docs gave me a Percocet and I went back to the firm base. It was still in the mansion. We all went back there after everybody else was medevac'd and we blew up the house. We had so many casualties. We had 11 people from Kilo hit, and Norwood was
killed. I had stuff to do—accountability for weapons, personnel equipment, gear that was lost.

“I told Grapes I had work to do. He said I didn't and that I had done enough and needed to go to the BAS. When I got there I got a shot of morphine. They sent me to Bravo Surgical Team and then I went home. I had been wounded four times.

“I always thought three Purple Hearts was an automatic ticket home. That ain't true. I got to go home but not because I had the Hearts but because I was hurt bad enough.”

Grapes was appalled by the casualties. He said the confrontation at the House of Hell changed the way Kilo, 3/1 cleared houses in Fallujah for the rest of the battle.

“As it turned out my platoon had suffered the most casualties of any platoon in my company,” Grapes says. “Our platoon lost its combat effectiveness due to casualties. After that we never entered a house until we threw something in it that exploded.”

Even as he was being transported, Kasal was still testy and full of fight. He was worried more about his men. He still didn't know how many casualties there were, but he knew it was a substantial number. He already knew about Norwood and he could see many of the men from Kilo being medevac'd out to the BAS at the same time he was transported.

“There I was given my first shot of morphine and medical treatment,” Kasal says. “Throughout the entire process from beginning to end, I never lost consciousness despite the wounds and severe blood loss. I forced myself to stay awake as I knew a Marine's survival and my own depended on it.

“My adrenaline was still flowing when I got to the BAS. Until I knew that all the other Marines were safe and made it I didn't let my guard down. Once I found out that everybody else was out and everybody else was safe, and medevac'd, and going
to be okay, then I finally let my guard down. Then I finally let them take my weapons off me, take my gear, and put morphine in me. Even back in the BAS I didn't part with my 9mm until all that happened.

“Two days before I was wounded I ran into Lieutenant Colonel Buhl in the center of Fallujah, and he asked me if I was ‘staying out of trouble.' I told him ‘of course.' The next time I talked to Lieutenant Colonel Buhl I was lying bloody on the stretcher, and he asked me what happened. ‘Sir,' I replied, ‘I found some trouble.'”

Kasal reportedly lost more than half of his blood before he arrived at the Battalion Aid Station in the Fallujah train depot. He and Chandler made the trip to the BAS in the back of a Humvee on a mad, 20-minute dash through the still-dangerous city streets.

Nicoll, near death and floating in and out of consciousness, was in another Humvee in the same convoy. He couldn't have known at the time that one Marine was dead and 10 more were wounded in the 90-minute clash.

Doctors assessing his wounds were afraid Nicoll might end up the second KIA of the fight. He was gut shot, had fractured ribs, and shrapnel had cracked his spine and punctured a lung. At the very least he was going to lose his lower left leg.

The rest of Kilo continued fighting for another week with a dangerous glint in their eyes. It was an unfortunate insurgent that encountered Kilo's Marines after the House of Hell, Grapes says. Before they were finished with their fight a week later, more than 1,000 Iraqis in 3/1's area of operations would die.

Weapons Co. continued operating effectively without Kasal's personal stamp, probably the highest compliment a leader can be paid. Even so, the men missed their First Sergeant. He had been the Weapons Co.'s center of balance. Wade was made temporary First Sergeant and did a fine job. 3/1's battle continued unabated until the mission at Fallujah was accomplished. No one in the Marine Corps is indispensable. Not even Kasal.

While the remainder of 3/1's Grunts were taking Fallujah, other Marines had transformed the hulking train station into the nerve center of the Thundering Third. It had its own air force of miniature spy planes, an intelligence headquarters, a logistics base, a control tower that talked to dozens of airplanes and helicopters moving through its air space, an aerial medical evacuation facility, and a variety of weapons experts, artillerymen, and engineering specialists advancing the war in a dozen deadly ways.

Most important the complex was home to a mini hospital called the 3/1 Battalion Aid Station, overseen by two very young doctors grandly called battalion surgeons. They were aided by a score of Navy corpsmen under a grizzled chief hospital corpsman named Pete Dominquez and collectively had more practical experience in emergency medicine than a division of civilian technicians working in Level One trauma centers in the United States. If someone had to be shot or blown up, BAS was the place to be.

Kasal arrived still wearing his gear and still armed with his 9mm pistol. The people who saw him first remember he was a bit pugnacious, not ready to give up his gear before he knew his Marines were safe. Kasal hadn't accepted any pain medication yet; he wanted to remain alert. He remembers the pain in his leg as manageable, although the lower limb was nearly severed.
Kasal was still up on his elbows looking around, gruffly refusing entreaties to lie back and take it easy when they put him on an examining table.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Commander Robert Sobehart was the battalion surgeon who initially treated Kasal. Six months before, he had been an intern in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a football player and medical student at the University of Dayton, Sobehart had wanted more out of medicine than a standard progression. Through the recruiting program, he'd heard about Marine Corps medicine from the other battalion surgeon—another 29-year-old, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Shepherd, the senior doctor in 3/1. Shepherd had been practicing medicine an entire year. It was more than a coincidence that Shepherd and Sobehart found themselves together on the outskirts of Fallujah treating grievously wounded Marines.

Both doctors relished serving in the military. Shepherd's dad was a retired Marine Corps staff sergeant and Vietnam veteran who passed on his reverence for the Corps to his son. Sobehart wanted to enter Navy medicine so he could be a flight surgeon, the glamorous arm of naval medicine, or a general medical officer. Either avenue would allow him to practice the kind of medicine he was looking for. But first he had to pay his dues.

Before taking on their new responsibilities the two doctors received a few weeks of orientation into Marine Corps medicine followed by a week of orientation in Iraq. Then they were elevated to the final authority on medicine within the 3/1. Shepherd had more field training than Sobehart because he had deployed with 3/1 stateside so he could see how Marines worked during training exercises.

In the course of the Fallujah fight the two men treated dozens of casualties a day. According to Sobehart, nothing in civilian medicine is comparable to what doctors in Iraq routinely experience. At the civilian hospital where Sobehart
is now training, for example, the busiest day ever has been 17 admissions. In Iraq, he says, “by the end of the first week, we had seen over 250 cases.

“By the end of our first four days in Iraq it was as bloody as bloody can get. You get a little used to that. Chief Dominquez told me Kasal was one of the casualties,” Sobehart says. The doctors knew all the first sergeants from battalion meetings, and among them, Kasal stood out. “Kasal was not as intrusive as some of the other first sergeants. He was the quintessential Marine.

“I knew it had been more than an hour before they made it to the BAS. That made him unusual because most of the time the casualties were pulled out of the cities immediately. He came in with about eight or 10 other Marines.

“His only concern was how the rest of his men were doing. He insisted we care for the other men before we treated him. That wasn't possible. We needed to get a tourniquet on him. After we did that most of the arterial bleeding stopped. He lost about 4 inches of bone in the tibia.” He also had severe blood loss and many other wounds.

It was obvious to the doctors that amputation was a distinct possibility. “He had a gaping hole in his leg,” Sobehart says. “We had another officer with a similar injury who didn't want to go through the years of surgery and recovery; he allowed his leg to be amputated.”

Kasal was at the BAS just long enough for the medics to get him stabilized, relieve some pain, and put dressings on his many wounds to protect them from infection. That is what Battalion Aid Stations do, and they do it well. Almost all the Marines who made it to the BAS survived. Without it many more would have died.

PUC Gallogly, wearing pants this time, arranged Kasal's evacuation from the BAS. “When Kasal was evacuated, it was an urgent,” PUC says. “We had quite a few casualties at once—eight or 10 urgents if I remember correctly—and we had just
started coordinating it. Urgents are Marines who will die within 20 minutes. The pilots did a great job. I would have the helo inbound while the corpsmen were stabilizing the wounded Marines.”

Dominquez was in charge of stabilizing the urgents after the Humvees and armored ambulances skidded to a halt. “That man saved dozens and dozens of lives,” PUC says. “He had been in the Corps as long as Kasal had. He was phenomenal. I would tell him urgents are coming—head wounds, IED injuries, whatever it was—and Dominquez would be ready for them.”