Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (2 page)

I

THE ROAD TO NASIRIYAH

MARCH 23, 2003 0600–1230 Hours

1

Private First Class Casey Robinson readjusted his lanky body, trying to squeeze his wide, swimmer’s shoulders into any gap that he could find. He was lying on the deck of vehicle C201, one of Charlie Company’s twelve AAVs, trying to get some sleep. As soon as he dozed off he’d get a cheesy whiff from the feet of his fellow marines and he’d wake with a start. There were twenty of them squashed into each AAV. Some sat on metal benches; some were perched on ammunition boxes; some, like Robinson, lay on the metal floor, squeezed between interlocking legs, M16 rifles, machine guns, Javelin antitank missiles, and enough cans of ammo to do serious damage to a small town.

It had been like this for two days now. The AAVs, short for amphibious assault vehicles, were not much more than tub-shaped, watertight, metal boxes that on land ran on tank treads rather than wheels and in water deployed small but powerful propellers. They had been designed in the 1970s to transport marines, in short stretches, from ship to beach landings, but now, two days into the combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, many of the marines’ AAVs, including C201, had clocked more than 150 kilometers of southern Iraq’s moonlike landscape. The plan was to drive them even farther, all the way to the gates of Baghdad. The marines called them amtracks, or just tracks. While 201’s treads allowed it to go over rough terrain, the marines inside were taking a pounding. Robinson was not happy.
This is like riding in a sardine can.
There were no windows, just tiny slits of reinforced glass that passed as spy holes. With no sense of space or direction, Robinson was tossed from side to side, at the mercy of the AAV’s rubber and metal tracks meeting hard-packed rocks, dirt, and pitted Iraqi earth.

Robinson fought back a wave of tiredness and boredom.
What am I
doing here?
Except for a few short breaks for vehicle maintenance and to relieve the pressure on the bladder, they had hardly stopped. The previous night he’d spent a few hours pulling security in a fighting hole by the side of Highway 8, a few kilometers east of the air base at Jalibah. His job was to stop the Iraqis from interfering with the long military convoys that the Army was moving up to supply its combat troops just ahead of the Marines, along the MSR, the main supply route. Robinson and the rest of the Marines from Charlie Company were in a blocking position with their tracks pulled up by the side of the road. Luckily, they were on 50 percent security watch. He got an hour’s sleep while another marine took watch, and then they switched. He made sure he stayed awake on his watch. He’d heard that the previous night, a marine sleeping outside his AAV had been crushed in the dark by a passing tank.

Robinson yawned and got a blast of his own foul-smelling breath. He’d not washed for two days, and oral hygiene was no more than an occasional scour with a sand-and-grit infested toothbrush. The sun was coming up over the horizon. He didn’t really know where he was. He knew they were heading northward toward a city but he couldn’t remember its name. The previous night they’d been told that they were going to stop short of the city and set up a blocking position on its southern approach. Then they might have to go into the city and seize some bridges to secure a route so the rest of the Marine Corps units could pass through. He was hazy on the details. Humble grunts like him were only handed out information on a need-to-know basis. But what he did know was that it was going to be an easy mission. His commanders had warned them against complacency, but they had all been told that the city’s population was Shiite Muslims and that they hated Saddam.
They are going to greet us with open arms and
give us the keys to the city.

Robinson had been a marine for two years, and even during the preparations to ship out to Iraq he was convinced that he would never see combat. The only gunshots he’d heard so far were some dumb-assed POGUES who had accidentally fired off their weapons. That’s what the infantry marines called anyone who wasn’t a hard-core, frontline rifleman—people other than grunts. Now that they were in Iraq, the prospects of getting involved in a fight were not good. There was a rumor going around that his unit, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was merely a supporting force for the Hollywood Marines. That was the semidisparaging, semienvious nickname that East Coast marines like Robinson gave to the marines out of Camp Pendleton, California.
They are too soft. But it would
be nice to have those Californian girls and beaches so close.

Another wave of frustration swept over him. For two years at Camp Lejeune and on maneuvers in the Californian desert at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base, he’d learned the art of mechanized infantry warfare. He’d learned about geometry of fire, how to form a defensive perimeter, how to employ machine guns, how to strip and reassemble an M16 in seconds, how to kill the enemy with his bare hands. He was supposed to be one of “the Few, the Proud.” Now, instead of fighting the enemy, he was being jolted around in a metal box, fending off the diesel fumes and the taste of vomit slowly making its way up his throat. He took a gulp from a bottle of tepid water and had the uncomfortable feeling that his two years in the Marine Corps had mostly trained him in tedium and loneliness. Private First Class Robinson had had enough. His parched mouth was sucked dry of any moisture by the fine sand that coated everything and the warm, fetid heat that clung to the AAV’s deck. He was fed up, weary, and very hungry. For the first time he felt envious of the POGUES and the REMFs, the rear-echelon motherfuckers, who were probably sitting on their clean, fat asses in an air-conditioned dining hall well away from the front line, getting ready to bite into a hot breakfast of ham and eggs, washed down with coffee.

He kicked the shin closest to him.

“I’ll trade you a chicken teriyaki for the Mexican burrito.”

The track erupted in a frenzy of bartering.

“Oh man, I got the jambalaya again. Who’ll swap it for the vegetable tortellini? How about you, Worthington?”

“Peanut butter for a chocolate milk shake?”

“Fuck you, Wentzel. You can keep your cinnamon cake.”

Swapping food from their MREs, meals ready to eat, was the one activity that kept the marines entertained during the endless wait for battle. Robinson had it down to an art. He thought of himself as a real chef. He would take the spaghetti from its plastic bag, mix it with the ravioli, get some jalapeño cheese, take the salsa from the Mexican burrito, cut the brown plastic MRE sleeve, and mix it all up under a flame so it was real hot. For dessert he’d take the wheat bread, cover it with peanut butter, shake some cocoa powder on it, and decorate it with M&M’s. He would wash it down with water mixed with a drink powder from the MRE packet. Marines called the garishly colored liquid “bug juice.” It looked vile, but it made a change from bottled water. If he could get all the elements to make a meal like that it was a good day. It would be an even better one if he could get rid of a jambalaya or the nasty-tasting beef hot dogs he’d nicknamed the four fingers of death. Fortunately, there were some weirdos out there who liked the nasty ones. That was how Robinson and his fellow Marines passed the time. They were young men, at the peak of physical fitness, who had spent months and years training hard in the art of warfare. But for the past two days as they rolled around inside their track, all they had done was trade food, play cards, tell dirty jokes, eat, and fart. And those MREs really did make you fart.

The 176 marines of Charlie Company had formed a tight bond during their time together. Some had been with the company for several years. Others had joined straight from Boot Camp only a few months before. They reveled in their nickname of “Crazy” Company, convinced that they always came out on top during training exercises with Alpha and Bravo, the other companies in their battalion. But what really set them apart was that they were a wild and determined bunch. Marines took pride in their reputation as untamed warriors, but somehow Charlie seemed to have more than its fair share of troublemakers.

Private First Class Robinson was one of the wildest. He didn’t mean to get into trouble. Trouble somehow always found him. It probably started sometime when he was a kid and his dad went off the rails and ended up in prison. But how can you really know? He didn’t really like talking about it. As a six-year-old kid, Casey Robinson lived with his mom and stepdad in Santa Cruz, California. He admired his stepdad for looking after his mom and working hard in his construction business, but the two of them just didn’t get along. The freedom of growing up in a beach community probably didn’t help. By day he would work at the Chicken in a Basket stall on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk; by night he would drink and hook up with girls or get in a fight with the Eastside surfers.

He had no idea how the rivalry between the Westside and Eastside surfers began. Ever since he’d surfed the waves at Steamers Lane as a kid it had been like that. The waves there were short and tricky and exhilarating, not like east of the San Lorenzo River, where the waves were longer and more consistent. But sometimes the Eastside surfers would ditch their longboards for shortboards, cross to the Westside, and start surfing on the waves there. And if you took someone else’s wave you’d better have a lot of friends, because otherwise they would whip your ass. That’s how the fighting would begin. What started with a young Casey Robinson getting into trouble from his mom for staying out late, ended with a police record for drunkenness and assault after he smashed a rival surfer within half an inch of his life during a beach brawl. A police record, beach life, and sex real young had made Casey Robinson grow up pretty quick.

The assault charge almost cost him his place in the Marines. He was a fine swimmer and a junior lifeguard. At first he wanted to be a Navy SEAL. A lifeguard he’d looked up to, a guy who he saw as a sort of mentor, had told him stories about life in the Special Forces. But when he’d gone to the Navy recruiting office, the officer there told him that the SEALs was too tough.

“Sign up for the Navy and you might get a chance at it later.”

Casey Robinson saw through the ruse. He’d heard stories about people being sucked into a contract and then given shitty Navy jobs. Instead, he went next door to the Marine Corps. There the recruiter was real straight with him and sold him on Force Recon, the Marines’ elite, fast-reaction reconnaissance force.

“Join the infantry first and then you’ll get your shot at Force Recon.”

Right then and there, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Casey Robinson had signed up to be a grunt. But somehow, as usual, things just didn’t work out. He’d done really well during his three months at Boot Camp and was the only one to come out as a private first class. But when he went to the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton in California, a routine inspection uncovered steroids in a locker. A couple of marines snitched on him. They weren’t his steroids. Yes, he was going to buy them, but they weren’t his. His urine and fingerprint tests came up negative, but they still investigated. When he joined the Fleet Marine Force he was sent to 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune. No one there knew about the steroid allegations, and he was promoted to lance corporal and given his own fire team to lead. Then somehow they found out and his platoon sergeant started talking about NJPing him. That meant giving him a nonjudicial punishment, slapping him on the wrist, and busting him back to private first class. Robinson wanted to have a full court-martial hearing so he could fight his case, but by the time it came up they were on ship on their way to Iraq, and he was told he couldn’t refuse NJP and didn’t have the right to a lawyer. A few days after they’d weighed anchor he was summoned to an onboard hearing and was given an NJP. He was lucky, he guessed. He thought the 1/2 battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski, might throw the book at him, bang him up, and put him on bread and water for the rest of the sea journey. His company commander, Captain Dan Wittnam, had stood up for him and had told the board he was a good guy and was responsible. That was a surprise. He thought Captain Wittnam would have been really tough on him. Wittnam kept Charlie Company on a tight leash. He worked them hard during physical training and didn’t let any of them step out of line. He was a classic Marine, the guy Robinson wanted to be like. He got a kick out of running faster, harder, and for longer than any of his marines. That’s why they’d nicknamed him Captain Insano.

Robinson regretted the episode with the steroids, but somehow he couldn’t help himself. He was already tall and powerful, but it wasn’t enough.
No matter how fast I go, I want to go faster. No matter how much
I lift, I want to lift more.
He knew it was kind of messed up, but the world was against him and he had to get stronger and bigger to fight his way through it. Maybe he was trying to prove something to his father who was never there. Or maybe he was proving something to himself. Whatever it was, twenty-two-year-old Casey Robinson, recently demoted from lance corporal to private first class, was currently somewhere in the middle of Iraq, trying to fend off the stench of diesel, the body odor of twenty unwashed grunts, and deep, dark thoughts that sometimes made his two years service in the Marine Corps feel like a prison sentence.

His steely blue eyes darted around at the faces in his track. They were mostly, like him, from Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon. Opposite him, attached from Weapons Company, were the Javelin gunner, Corporal Jake Worthington, and his “A” gunner, Lance Corporal Brian Wenberg. On his left, in the commander’s hatch, was his platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Scott Swantner, and on his right were Lance Corporal Douglas Milter and his squad leader, Corporal John Wentzel. He didn’t know whether it was resentment, but he had a tough time with Wentzel. Wentzel had been promoted to squad leader just as Robinson had lost his job as team leader. He liked the guy but thought he was too soft, a bit of a pussy. When he went into combat he wanted to know that he could rely on the guys to the left and right of him. Somehow he didn’t think Wentzel would make the grade. Driving the AAV was the lanky tracker, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry. In the AAV commander’s hatch was another tracker, Sergeant William Schaefer. The trackers, from the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion headquartered at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune, were a breed apart. Their job was to drive and maintain the AAVs and to work the tracks’ up guns, the 40 mm Mark 19 grenade launcher and the .50-caliber heavy machine gun. There was some rivalry between the two groups. The infantrymen thought of themselves as the heart and soul of the Marine Corps and considered the trackers as a mere appendage. The trackers thought the grunts were arrogant and cocky. At Camp Lejeune, the two groups never mixed much, but in Kuwait, Robinson had gotten to know Castleberry and liked the guy.