Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (23 page)

Henao realized that he might not get out of this.
Man, I might get shot,
too.
He thought of his wife and eight-month-old daughter.
I just want my
little girl to see her dad again, that’s all.

As Henao got up and ran toward the bridge, he heard the sound of a plane. He looked up and saw it flying low toward him. He heard the groan of its gun and recognized it as the buzz of an A-10 on a gun run. As it kicked up rounds in front of him, he launched himself to the ground and covered his face. He looked up again and saw another A-10 firing terrifying bursts from its Gatling gun as it came in on its strafing run. As it passed, he looked up to see three marines lying next to him.

Corporal Matthew Juska, from Roxboro, North Carolina, was just reaching track 203, parked south of track 201, about three hundred meters to the north of the canal bridge when one of the A-10s made another gun run. There was so much noise around him that Juska didn’t know what it was. He jumped into the track and pulled the hatch shut behind him. Corporal Randal Rosacker, a twenty-one-year-old machine gunner from San Diego, California, whose father was a Navy submariner, was already inside setting up his weapon to provide cover for marines darting across the road. Out of nowhere, Juska saw white sparks hit the top of the track. A blast of hot air swept through the track and blew the sides out. It was filled with 7.62 mm and 5.56 mm ammo on the left side and 40 mm grenades to the rear. He watched Rosacker’s feet get swept out from under him as the blast lifted him up and dropped him back onto the deck of the track. Lance Corporal Bradley Seegert, posting air security in the hatch, felt his own arm burning. It was a hot, sticky mess. Hot metal fragments had shredded his triceps. The air swirled with dust, paper, and pieces of metal. There was debris everywhere. Juska didn’t know about the A-10 overhead. He assumed they were being attacked by rockets.
They’re tar
geting RPGs at us.

Juska grabbed the marines with him and they poured out of the track and ran to a dirt mound. There was too much going on to think about what had happened to Rosacker. He didn’t know that the blast had killed him instantly. Now more rounds rained down on the ditch where he’d taken cover.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

All around the northern bridge, it was chaos. Some marines popped off every bit of signaling pyrotechnics they could lay their hands on, sending green-and-red smoke into the air in an effort to get the A-10s off them. Tracks all around the northern bridge were being targeted. There were so many shells landing on and around the tracks that the marines couldn’t tell whether they were being hit by the A-10, enemy artillery, or mortars. Wounded marines clambered into the back of any track they could find.

Lieutenant Mike Seely grabbed the radio handset and tried to call up battalion on the net. He screamed into his radio.

“Timberwolf, cease that damn A-10 fire. Cease fire. It’s hitting friendlies. Cease fire. Cease fire. You’ve got to turn off that air.”

11

For nearly an hour, at the southern Euphrates Bridge, Alpha Company’s commander, Captain Mike Brooks, had been nervously looking over his shoulder toward the river for signs of the tanks he’d been promised. The streets ahead were in turmoil. Iraqi gunmen were bounding from house to house, drawing closer to his battle positions.
The enemy is becoming more determined and
better coordinated.
He almost felt the physical pressure of the encroaching enemy fire pushing in on the perimeter his marines had set up.
Where the hell
are those tanks?
As he reached for the handset to get an update, he heard a deep rumble across the river and four tanks crested the bridge’s span. The earth shook violently as they crushed the barrier separating the highway and moved up toward Brooks’s frontline position. His heart leaped.

From the turret of
Desert Knight,
as he came down the span of the bridge into Nasiriyah, Major Peeples saw marines spread out around the foot of the bridge and into the city. Many were lying prone on the west side of the road, taking cover behind a long mud wall. Ahead, the mouth of Ambush Alley was teeming with military vehicles, taxis, trucks, and figures running from house to house.
How am I going to find the company commander?
He still couldn’t quite believe that the battalion had just gone into the attack without them. He couldn’t get anyone up on the battalion net.
Why is
everyone still yammering away incoherently?
He looked out for an AAV with a diamond on it. It signified the company commander’s vehicle. Just to the northwest of the bridge, he spotted it. As he jumped out of his tank, he saw Captain Brooks running toward him.

“What the hell is going on? What do you need?”

Brooks was so grateful to see him. In the middle of the road, with shots ringing around them, he pulled out a map and the two of them pored over it.

“I’ve got a platoon up to the north here and we’re taking fire from buildings on the east of the road at about here. I want two tanks orientated that way to the north and another tank to the east.”

“Roger that.”

Peeples ran back to his tank and sent two of 1st Platoon’s tanks a couple of hundred meters to the north. He told his XO, Captain Dyer, to take his tank,
Dark Side,
and face to the east. He rolled his tank forward and started shooting at some of the buildings on the west side.
This is not the
way I thought we’d be fighting.
It was nondoctrinal warfare. Peeples’s training had been about identifying and shooting targets a kilometer or so away. Now they were shooting at targets only a hundred meters away. He quickly switched his mind-set. This was close-quarter urban fighting. He saw muzzle flashes from windows and from bunkers.

Brooks’s voice came over the radio.

“I want you to shoot the building with the blue door.”

Peeples popped his head out of the turret.
There are three buildings
with friggin’ blue doors.

“Gunner. MPAT.” There was a frustrating pause while he tried to describe the target to his gunner.

“Shoot at all the fucking buildings with blue doors.”

There was a huge boom, a massive fireball, and the first building just disintegrated. Methodically, the gunner traversed the turret, loaded another round, and fired the main gun.

In
Dark Side,
positioned just to the east of Peeples’s tank, Dyer and his FAC, Major Hawkins, had managed to make radio contact with the tanks from 2nd Platoon. They had gone to help the 3rd Platoon tanks and the Bravo amtracks that were stuck on the east side of the city. Via messages relayed through Captain Thompson of 1st Platoon, Dyer now realized the full horror of their situation. At least three tanks were mired in mud and sewage in an area they were now referring to as
the shitbog.
Hawkins was on the radio and was speaking directly to the pilot of one of the helos flying overhead. The pilot painted a grim picture of waves of Iraqis trying to get at the mired vehicles. It was only the firepower of the Cobra gunships that was keeping them at bay. But now the pilots themselves were coming under attack from antiaircraft artillery fire.

“How does it look?”

“It looks okay, but we have to get them out of there.”

Dyer had already called back to his tank leader, Gunnery Sergeant Greg Wright, to see if he could get the M88 tank retrievers moving north to help recover the tanks. There was little else he could do for the moment.
I’ve got to concentrate on the task in hand.
He needed to help Alpha’s marines in securing the Euphrates Bridge. He yelled at his driver to maneuver his tank into position to give supporting fire. His tank was like a bullet magnet. As soon as it appeared on the scene, the Iraqis went for it, taking the gunfire away from the marines. All he could hear was a relentless
ping, ping, ping
as bullets bounced ineffectually off the thick armor of the Abrams.

“Driver. Hard left.”

His driver, Lance Corporal Shirley, located in the driver’s seat in the belly of the tank underneath the main gun, wasn’t responding. He had been driving for thirteen hours and had only three hours of sleep the night before. Each time they stopped, he fell asleep in his seat. Dyer yelled at him again to wake him up.

“Driver. Hard left. Steady.”

There were mud pools all around. He didn’t want to get stuck like the others to the east.

“Gunner, we are going downhill. Raise the gun tube.”

He saw waves of Iraqis running about ahead of him, darting in and out of buildings, preparing to attack the tank. He made a point of not calling them hajjis. He called them Baathists or fedayeen. He shouted at his driver to avoid the marines who had taken up positions all around him.

“There are grunts all over the ground, so be careful. I want you to pivot to the right. Okay, move forward, hard left.”

He wanted to maneuver
Dark Side
ino a position where he could shoot long. He spotted machine-gun positions and bunkers. From what he could tell, Iraqi runners were resupplying the enemy’s defensive positions with RPGs. Another round zipped past his head. He had never felt such clarity of thought. The adrenaline was flowing, his mind was clicking.
I am in the game.

“See that wall? I want you to pull right up against that wall.”

Dyer leaned out of the turret to make sure they didn’t hit anything.

Gunfire poured down on them from roofs, windows, and behind buildings. Many of the marines on the ground around him were not shooting back. Maybe they were conserving ammo, but it was perplexing not to see them firing. Dyer worked on maneuvering his tank into a more effective position.

“Driver. Hang right, hard right, hard right. Steady. Go straight.”

It was hard to identify who was a threat. No one seemed to be in uniform. Some civilians had weapons; others were just standing around, looking as though they had been pushed out into the streets and didn’t know how to get away.

“Hard left. Now, now, now.”

He turned to see a group of Iraqis with weapons run into a building in front of him.

“Gunner, coax, fire into that building.”

His gunner, Corporal Bell, couldn’t see which target he meant.

“Which building? I don’t see anything.”

“Fire a Z pattern through that whole building. There is at least a fire team in there.”

The hum of the NBC system came on and the heavy machine gun mounted on the same axis as the main gun started chattering. Chunks of masonry exploded in the air as Bell fired first one way, then another. When he ceased fire it was eerily quiet. Nothing inside the building moved.

Dyer yelled down to the marines on the ground.

“Where do you need fire?”

One of the marines ran in front of the tank and fired two shots into a side alley. Dyer took it as a hint and fired the coax into the alleyway.

From the radio chatter, Dyer could hear that the battalion net was still clogged by everybody talking at once. And those who were talking shouldn’t have been on it. Again he blamed it on Grabowski and Sosa.
They want too much control. This is what happens when every movement
has to be authorized by them.
He wished the battalion command lived by a different maxim.
You keep the dogs of war on a leash until it starts, then
you cut them loose.
He was both frustrated and relieved that he couldn’t raise either Grabowski or Sosa on the net.

Suddenly, from around a corner of the same alleyway he had fired into earlier, an Iraqi with an RPG launcher on his shoulder popped out, took a knee, and fired. Dyer felt his heart freeze and drop into his chest.
Fuck me.
I’m gonna die.
It was in freeze-frame. The gunner was rooted to the spot. Dyer stood still in his turret. The grenade spiraled toward him, trailing a snake of thick white smoke. He felt nauseous.
I’m gonna die.
In an instant it was over. The RPG flew past his head and exploded harmlessly behind him. The gunner disappeared around the corner. Dyer yelled at Bell.

“Gunner. Fire into that building.”

The tank rocked back as a round exploded out of the muzzle and smashed into a corner of the building, spraying bricks and mortar into the alleyway.
I must have got him.

The marines on the ground cheered and started pointing out targets. Iraqis were now trying to rush the tank on foot. He couldn’t help but admire their bravery and their confidence in their ability to win. But they were stupid with it.
How on earth do they think they can take out a tank?

Dyer worked between the main gun and the tank’s coaxial machine gun. The coax punched big holes into the Iraqi fighters as they ran through the streets toward him. They would fall back and drop to the dirt. When he hit them with the main gun, they simply disintegrated. There was nothing left of them. With each
boom
of the main gun, marines would cheer and big grins would appear on their faces. Dyer noticed they got back to the fighting with renewed vigor.
It’s like they’ve been given a shot in the arm.

He now had a clearer view of how the Iraqis were managing to keep in the fight. Some of them were talking into cell phones and what he recognized as French-made infantry radios. He guessed they were target spotting for the mortar and the RPG teams and calling for taxis to drop off more fighters and ammo.
If only Special Forces had shut down the
cell phone network.
He was relieved that he had ordered in extra ammo. In Kuwait, he had fought with the battalion staff, particularly the logistics officer, Captain Christopher Lynch, to get what he wanted. He knew that others in the staff had bitched about how much ammo he requested, but already he was eating through the main gun and the .50-cal rounds. He had adopted a simple survival strategy when dealing with the battalion staff.
I have to work with these guys, but I don’t have to like them.

Captain Mike Brooks looked over toward the tankers. They weren’t buttoned up; instead, they were out of their turrets manning their guns and looking for targets. Infantry sometimes looked down on tankers, but now Brooks had to admire their courage. They didn’t often train with armored vehicles. But he could see their value. With each terrifying shot, the ground shook. It was awe inspiring. Whatever the tank targeted, the incoming fire from that position just stopped. Even the concussive force of each round going off seemed to wear down the energy with which the city’s defenders were prepared to fight. He’d never understood what a difference a tank can make on the battlefield. For the first time in hours, he felt he was beginning to reassert some control.