Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (17 page)

Second Lieutenant Fred Pokorney, the artillery forward observer, was one of the first out followed by mortarman Corporal David Johns. Reid was anxious to get the battalion’s 81 mm mortar platoon and the “arty” or artillery batteries way back on the southern side of the Euphrates up and firing. He didn’t know where the mortar platoon had set up, but he feared they would be out of range. He knew they couldn’t reach much more than 5,700 meters.

“Fred, get comm up and let arty know our position. Help Corporal Johns with the 81s. I’m going to get the 60s up and firing.”

As FiST leader, Reid’s job was to coordinate fire support for the company, making sure that Charlie had available to them the full force of the Marines combat power. In his immediate team, he had an artillery forward observer who could call in strikes from the rear batteries and a marine who could call in 81 mm mortar strikes. He did not have a FAC with him, but he could relay requests for airpower through the battalion’s FSCC, the fire support coordination center. Reid’s job was to decide what fire support he needed and to deconflict the area by calling in artillery, mortars, and airpower at different times and onto different targets so they worked in sync. He had to make sure that the weapons systems were directed at enemy positions and didn’t hit each other, or friendly troops. It was the “big sky, little bullet” theory. Yes, there was lots of space up there and the bullets were small, but all it would take was one of those bullets to hit a Marine aircraft and it could cause a friendly fire incident. It was nerve-racking stuff, but when it worked it was like watching the intricate movements of a ballet.

Reid had gotten in a lot of practice at the combined arms exercises at Twentynine Palms over the previous summer. He’d tasted how chaotic communications could be and how time-consuming it was to call in fires. At CAX, it sometimes took forty minutes from working out where and how he was going to use his fire support to the moment the rounds were sent downrange. He had to draw the gun target lines and the final attack headings for the airpower, pass it on the firenets to the fire support coordination center, and request an ETA for the incoming fire. In training, there was always a well-scripted scenario, and they already knew where the threat was going to come from. He felt that they hadn’t done as well as they could have at CAX, but it was valuable experience. He knew it was more difficult in combat when he might not have the luxury of knowing where the attack was coming from or what he needed to target first.

He ran over to where his three 60 mm mortar squads were getting together their equipment. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Seely’s track, 211, still on the highway and in flames from the burning packs and the ammo inside. He didn’t know that anyone had been injured. A couple of marines were on top of the AAV vainly trying to cut the packs free. Reid shouted over to his platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Philip Jordan.

“Get those dumb-asses off the fucking track. Tell them to just leave the burning packs.”

Now he found that his fears about identifying targets and coming up with the right combined arms package in combat were justified. He tried to get a sense of where the enemy positions were located. About every minute or so an RPG would whistle over his head, landing to the east of his position. Then small-arms fire would crisscross from what seemed like the west, south, and north. It wasn’t heavy incoming fire, but it was confusing because he couldn’t identify where it was coming from. He saw a white building complex to the north and recognized it as a military compound marked 44 on his map. That’s where he would start.

He needed to get the three 60 mm mortars up and firing. The marines called them 60 mike mike. They could fire shells up to 3,490 meters. On impact, they would kill anything within a radius of about 15 to 25 meters. If he could take out the enemy fighting positions, the infantry squads could maneuver into killing range. They didn’t have time to dig foxholes. He got the mortar crews to lay down the baseplates on the east side of the road. They attached the barrel and bipod, fixed the sight, and got ready to drop the first round of mortars. Months of practice had gotten the procedure down to a fine art. They took only minutes.

Reid took out his wiz wheel, a chart which told him how much propellant he needed for the round to hit the target and what elevation the mortar needed to be set on. He began to issue firing orders.

“Line it up on the fucking big-ass white building. Charge 1. Elevation 1420.”

A marine pulled off the safety pin and dropped a round into the barrel. Reid didn’t even watch as the round soared toward the building. He was already yelling orders at Corporal Manny Espinoza for the next round.

“You just keep firing up that military compound.”

Fred Pokorney grabbed him.

“We’ve got no comms. We’ve got no communications. I don’t know if it’s a transmitting problem or whether we are out of range.”

“Well, keep working on it. Until we get comms, we can’t get any arty.”

Reid lay down on the road and looked for some targets. He put some dots on his maps. He really needed those comms so that they could get some artillery rounds on those targets. Fred was the arty expert. Reid was there to give guidance and to deconflict the area by making sure that he didn’t have weapons systems or aircraft interfering with each other, but Fred Pokorney had to do his job.

“Fred, put fire on these two points. I don’t care how you do it, use the work-around nets. Those grids aren’t perfect, so you need to do your arty shit to refine them a bit. If you need me, I’ll be with the 60s over there. They are all we’ve got right now.”

Reid pulled one of the mortar squads out of action and redirected their fires away from the compound to the north and got them to fire to the west, where there was a big berm with Iraqis and their vehicles in exposed positions. Reid was concerned about mortar ammunition. They had only packed out with ninety high-explosive rounds, thirty illumination rounds to light up the landscape, and thirty white phosphorous rounds that explode on impact and burn white hot. He was going through his combat load pretty fast.

Jordan ran up to him and lay down on the road next to him.

“Torres is wounded.”

“What the fuck?”

Reid couldn’t believe it. Torres was one of his most experienced machine gunners and a section leader. Reid had deliberately put him in charge of a young section. There was a lot of punch in his Weapons Platoon. But the M240G machine guns were the backbone of the company’s firepower. To hear that Torres was down was a massive blow. Jordan saw the look of horror on Reid’s face and tried to soothe him.

“He’s bad, but not that bad.”

Reid still couldn’t quite compute what Jordan was telling him and carried on looking at him in disbelief.

“Sir, it’s all right. I already killed two or three of their guys, so now we’re even. So what do you want to do?”

Reid had only been in the battalion for two years and was grateful for Jordan’s experience. Jordan, a native Texan whose home was now in Enfield, Connecticut, was forty-two and had been in the Marine Corps for twelve years. He had served in Panama, Bosnia, and during the Gulf War. The younger marines looked to him to make sure everything was okay. If he was worried, they should be worried. But when Reid looked at Jordan, he seemed to be taking it in his stride. No. It was more than that. He seemed to be having a good time. He suspected that Jordan had told his marines to take care of him. Whenever he got off a track, he always found that one of the marines had already pulled off his pack. When he got back in again, he would find that his pack was already loaded. They would even save their chili and macaroni MREs for him because they knew he hated the other choices. The marines in his platoon took care of their lieutenant.

“Hey, we need to redirect any machine guns we can find and get them faced back toward the city to the southwest.”

Jordan sprinted across the road to sort out the machine guns. Reid was lying on the elevated roadside near his three mortars. He could see 1st Platoon on the other side of the road but had no idea where 2nd and 3rd were located. Reid was not sure whether everyone had made it across the canal. Through his binoculars, he saw teams of black-robed fighters with rocket-propelled grenades out to the west. They ran out of some buildings about six hundred meters away and lobbed RGP rounds toward them. None of them were accurate. They must have just pointed the things up in the air and hoped for the best. Kentucky windage, Reid called it. He told his mortars to aim toward them and helped them out by taking an M16, propping it up in the dirt as a makeshift aiming stake.

“Elevation 1242. Charge two. Fire two rounds.”

By firing two rounds, he could be sure that the explosions he was seeing were his rather than a random hit. He watched them land and made his corrections.

“Right two. Drop one.”

Once on target, his mortarmen turned the traversing handwheel one turn after each round and fired a can of eight rounds. It allowed his mortar squad leaders, Corporals Patrick Nixon and Jose Garibay and Lance Corporal Joshua Stickney, to cover a wider area. Reid stood up to get a better view to the west.

Pokorney rushed over to him and tackled him to the ground.

“You stupid fucker. You’re going to get us all killed.”

Reid looked up at the sky and noticed for the first time that hot metal was whizzing around from every direction. He’d had such tunnel vision, focusing on his mortars, that he hadn’t noticed the increase in gunfire.
Fuck. We really are getting shot at.

Lance Corporal Michael Williams, who carried Reid’s radio, handed him the handset.

“Sir, Lieutenant Swantner is calling you on the radio.”

Reid heard the urgency in the 1st Platoon commander’s voice.

“Palehorse 4, this is 1. We’re taking mortar fire. Do something about it.”

Reid was frustrated. What did Swantner think Reid’s men were doing?

“We’ve got all three mortars putting rounds downrange. That’s all we’ve got right now. Comm to battalion is down right now.”

He really needed the 81 mm mortars or artillery. They had a wider killing radius of thirty-five to fifty meters. But they were all to the south, and the FiST had not yet managed to get communication with them. Reid had four radios at his disposal, but he couldn’t get anyone up on them.
If
we can get hold of the forward command post or Bravo, we can relay
everything to the artillery batteries through them.
He didn’t think about using the radios on the track. There was just too much going on. In any case, the tracks weren’t set to the firenet frequencies, and they would have had to spend time plugging in new frequencies.
We’ll just have to work
with the 60 mm mortars and keep working out the comms.
Reid shouted at Garibay.

“Pick up your shit and bring your crew. We’re going to move your position sixty meters to the south.” As the small group ran south, Reid looked back to find Jordan running along behind with two more cans of ammo. He began to feel even better.
This is working. Things are working out.

From the top of track 201, Casey Robinson had watched the drama of the burning track 211. He saw marines scrambling out of the track and hitting the dirt. Thick black smoke poured from its hatches and floated over the wide expanse of desolate wasteland into a cloudless sky.

Below him, in the driver’s compartment, Edward Castleberry lowered the ramp. It was the sign he gave for the 1st Platoon marines in the rear to dismount and to start doing their infantry stuff. As a tracker, he had to stay with his vehicle, ready to maneuver it in case the track was targeted. Sergeant Schaefer, the AAV commander, stayed with him to provide supporting fires from the track’s up-gun system. A third tracker, Lance Corporal Kyle Smith, who looked after the crew compartment, passed up ammo.

Robinson and the twenty marines in back of 201 tumbled down the ramp, disorientated. Many of them had been cooped up inside the track for hours and struggled to run without their legs collapsing from under them. A round snapped past Robinson’s head, followed by the whistle of what he thought were incoming mortars. The missile exploded about fifteen meters away, shaking the ground around him. Another one came over.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

It was a terrifying, awesome thud.
So that’s what live mortars sound
like.
It went quiet again. He ran out into the mud fields and launched himself into the dirt behind some low berms. It would have to do for the moment while he worked out where everyone was. Other marines from his squad jumped breathlessly into the ditch beside him, glancing at each other anxiously. They were wearing kneepads, already ripped and battered from diving onto the hard, stony ground.

He needed to get situational awareness. To his left, on the south side of the canal, were the low buildings of the city. Occasional bursts of gunfire came from that direction. Straight ahead, looking west, were long flat mud fields, dotted with a few huts and brick buildings. To his right, in the north, was a large white building that he guessed was the military complex they’d been told about. Behind him, to the east, was the road they’d just driven along. It was raised, so he couldn’t see what was on the other side, but he guessed the landscape was similar to the scrubby expanse in front of him. He went back to a basic lesson on infantry skills.
When you can accomplish it, get into an o fensive position.
The aim was to take the fight to the Iraqis.

“Let’s push forward.”

Someone yelled that they should head out toward the canal to expand the security perimeter. It seemed like a good idea. They split into squads of twelve marines. One squad covered while the other leapfrogged them in bounds, just as they had done in training. Then they took cover and provided covering fire for the first squad to leapfrog them. They moved forward, running through a muddy landscape crisscrossed with ditches and mounds, toward the canal, getting closer to where the fire was coming from. Robinson realized he was doing things without even thinking. And the marines around him were doing the same. All that mind-numbing training was paying off.