Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (32 page)

25

Back at Task Force Tarawa’s command post, Brigadier General Rich Natonski was trying to picture the battlefield. He was working out of two light armored vehicles, positioned back to back, with a tent covering the gap. He’d let Lieutenant General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, know that his lead elements had run into the Maintenance Company’s convoy. The general had been as surprised as they all were. Now, six hours later, he was struggling to keep up with developments. Reports coming back to him were sporadic and confused. He hadn’t been expecting a big fight in Nasiriyah. He’d known that the Iraqi 11th Infantry Division was based up there, but they’d received reports that its soldiers were carrying civilian clothes. As soon as the first shots were fired, he thought they would get rid of their uniforms and run away. That’s how he’d planned the battle. But it wasn’t happening like that. He could hear the artillery going off. All hell was breaking loose.
It’s like the gunfight at the OK Corral.

One of his staff came through with the latest information.

“Sir, they are reporting mass casualties.”

What is going on?
Natonski felt the fog of war descend on him. He’d read a lot about it, but he’d never experienced it so clearly. In spite of all the planning, the battlefield had become confusing, chaotic, uncertain, and unstable. Nobody seemed to have a clear idea of where the different companies were located. There were reports that Bravo and the forward CP were lost somewhere in the city. There was hardly any news from Charlie at all. He found it hard to believe that the remnants of the Iraqi army and a few fedayeen fighters had the firepower or determination to hold up one of his armored battalions.
Where the hell are they?

Protected by marines from Bravo Company, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski was plotting his next move on an improvised map he’d drawn in the dirt at his position in the open area to the east of Ambush Alley. Just when he thought that he was reestablishing some sort of control, he began to receive reports from his air officer that a Huey pilot had spotted some marines on the roof of a house in Ambush Alley.
What is going on? How did they get
there?
He was surprised at how little he knew of what was going on around him. In training during the CAX at Twentynine Palms, they were given a scenario and had to react to it. That was difficult. But now he realized how difficult it was to react to a scenario that was constantly changing and which you didn’t fully understand. He called his staff together, drew lines in the sand on his improvised map, and began to work out a plan to get the marines out of there. The Huey pilot had given them a rough location for the house: a few hundred meters north of their pause, on the east side of the road. As soon as they got confirmation that the tanks and tracks stuck in the bog were out, they would move up Ambush Alley with their tracks on the west side of the road. He would place his soft-skinned vehicles on the east side of the road to give them some cover from most of the fire, which was coming from an area to the northwest described on their maps as the Martyrs’ District. When they got to the house, marines in the soft-skinned Humvees would jump out and grab the marines from inside.

As Grabowski was talking, Major Sosa could see Iraqi civilians walking around the outer edge of the open area where they had stopped. Others were waving flags from rooftops.
What does that mean?
Gradually, more and more people, including women, children, and old men, began to gather and slowly pressed toward them. Some were smiling and waving. Sosa and the marines with him became concerned.
Are they pleased to see
us, or is this an orchestrated ploy?
His big fear was that civilians were being used as human shields by the fedayeen and that at any moment someone in the crowd would open up on them.

“Keep those people back.”

Shots were fired in the air and interpreters yelled at the crowd to stay away and go back to their houses. Some refused to move and just stood, looking on as if it was normal to have hundreds of marines, tracks, and Humvees bristling with weapons camped out in their backyard.

The women wore traditional burkas. It made him uncomfortable to see the women wrapped in their headscarves. He didn’t know much about the culture, but he sensed the oppression. It might have been an excuse, but it made him feel better about what they were doing. To the side of the square, an Iraqi civilian was being looked after by a corpsman. He’d been shot in the abdomen and was lying on a stone slab near the parked vehicles. The corpsman hooked up the IV bag and began to work on him. They bandaged him up and turned him over to some civilians. Sosa watched with unease as the man got up, blood still coming out of his stomach, lit a cigarette, and walked off as though nothing had happened.
He’s probably
going to die, and he’s carrying on as if it were normal life.

Corporal Neville Welch of Bravo Company was one of those making sure the throng of Iraqis didn’t get too close. No one in the crowd seemed to have weapons, but Welch was ready for them. He kept his mantra going in his head.
I am going to get out of this alive. If you want to take me on, I’m going
to drop you.
From the rooftops, a fedayeen let off the occasional round. But Welch had good cover, tucked in behind a thick wall in the shelter of a building. His marines had superior marksmanship. If his team saw anyone crawling around on roofs or balconies with hostile intent, they were taken out. He had no idea how long they had been fighting or what was going on elsewhere. His knowledge of the battle was confined to a twenty-square-meter area around him and the few marines by his side.
How will this end?

26

At the mud bog on the east side of the city, marines were still desperately trying to haul the tanks, Humvees, and tracks out of the mire. It had become worse by the hour. Staff Sergeant Aaron Harrell, the twenty-eight-year-old marine reservist who worked as a CVS pharmacy shift manager, had heard that the tanks from 3rd Platoon, which had been delayed because of the refueling, were going to be arriving any minute to help them out. He saw them charge around a building, heading toward the area covered in pools of green mud and slime that they were calling the shitbog. He tried to wave them down, but he was too late. Captain Cubas and Gunnery Sergeant Alan Kamper of 3rd Platoon had also been deceived by the terrain, and now their tanks also became hopelessly mired in the muck. It didn’t matter from which way you came—the ground was nothing more than a thin crust, covering watery mud.

Kamper was horrified to see flames coming out of the rear of his tank. The protection filters in the NBC system, designed to protect them from nuclear, biological, or chemical attack, appeared to have caught fire. There was screaming and yelling as the crew evacuated. The driver, Lance Corporal Joshuah Mouser, hauled himself out of the driver’s hatch at the belly of the tank just as an Iraqi, armed with an AK-47, appeared at a door right in front of him. Mouser only had a pistol with which to fire back. The tank’s gunner, Sergeant August Nienaber, tossed Mouser his pistol. With a pistol in both hands, he looked like some Western gunslinger. Mouser fired both pistols at once, scaring the Iraqi so much that he dropped his AK and took off running. He picked up the dropped weapon gratefully. He had shot all fifteen of his 9 mm rounds.

“There’s enemy infantry coming around the wall.”

Harrell, along with several other tankers and Bravo Company’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Judson Daniels, ran to help in the fight. The tanks traversed their turrets and managed to fire a couple of rounds to push back any enemy fighters. Cobra helicopters and Huey gunships thundered in low over the area, making gun runs on the enemy to keep them away from the recovery operations.

Gunnery Sergeant Randy Howard looked around at the chaos. At forty-seven years old, and after fourteen years in the reserves, Howard thought he’d seen it all. In civilian life, he had a comfortable job remodeling houses in Kentucky. He took another look around at the yelling, frightened marines, the Iraqi fighters shooting off rounds at him, the tanks sinking in mud halfway up their treads, and wondered what possessed him to join the United States Marine Corps.
I must have been insane.

What worried him was the state of the young marines from Bravo Company who were posting security. Some were just out of high school.
They
need someone to hold their hands.
He hoped they would be able to hold back the crowds of Iraqis from overwhelming the stuck vehicles. They had set up a strong perimeter around the tanks, but he could see that they were wide-eyed with fright and apprehension. In their eyes, he was an old man. In peacetime, it meant they teased him about being old and stuck in his ways. At war, it meant that they looked to him for guidance. He got off his tank and went to each of them to reassure them. He’d seen a lot in life, and although his insides were churning, he was not going to lose his head now.
If you run around acting like a fool, nobody is going to listen to you.

From the briefings in the weeks before, he’d been given the impression that the Iraqis would be giving them a warm welcome.
I imagined the Iraqi
women would be greeting us with flowers in our gun tubes and holding up
babies to be kissed.
Instead, he was ducking his head from the rounds streaking around him and making sure the kids posting security stayed awake.

“Hey, keep your eyes open for all those ragheads running around.”

Howard tried to get through to the battalion staff on the radio, but there were always too many people talking on the net. They were now low on ammo. Some of his marines had taken the AK-47s from dead Iraqis and were using them to keep the waves of enemy fighters at bay. He looked around once again at the scene.
We badly need the M88 tank retrievers
here.
Trying to pull the tanks out with tow cables just wasn’t working. The tow cables were too short, and the tracks and mobile tanks couldn’t get close enough to pull them out without sinking into the mud themselves.

“Timberwolf. We need the tank retriever up here.”

There was no reply.

Howard was pleased that he had Harrell with him. Harrell had been working on the recovery effort and now came up with an idea to make the inch-and-a-quarter steel tow cables longer. He connected two cables using a piece of scrap metal and a clevis, a U-shaped piece of metal, that marines found lying around in the mud. He twisted them together to make them stronger and attached a third cable to give them length. He attached one end to his tank and the other to the tow bolt on Staff Sergeant Insko’s tank. As he was working on the recovery effort, a lance corporal, shaking with fear, came up to him.

“Are we going to get out of this hole?”

“We’re going to be fine. Get back and work on getting your tank out.”

Putting his tank in reverse, Harrell slowly sucked Insko’s tank,
Death
Mobile,
out of the mud. Then they managed to get Staff Sergeant Dillon’s tank free. Things were looking up.

27

At Alpha’s position by the Euphrates Bridge, in an alleyway off Ambush Alley, Captain Garcia was waiting patiently for confirmation to lift his CH-46. The casevac was taking longer than he would have wished, but he remained calm and focused. It wasn’t the ground fire that was the most immediate threat. He wanted to make sure he knew where the Hueys and Cobras were overhead so that he didn’t hit them when he took off.

Marines dragged in the first patient on the back of a wooden board. They dumped him on the ramp and ran for cover under a hail of fire. Moses Gloria, Hospital Man 2nd Class Mark Kirkland, and the loading chief pulled the wounded marine in. A second patient stumbled forward on foot and fell to the ground a few meters from the aircraft. Gloria ran out, helped him in, and sat him on one of the troop seats at the back. He and Kirkland immediately set to work. Over the roar of the rotors, they yelled at the one marine who was conscious.

“Where are you hit? Are you okay? Do you have any other injuries?”

The marine grabbed his leg, but he didn’t want help.

“Just take care of my buddy, I’m fine. Look after my buddy.”

The other marine was on a litter on the deck of the helo. Gloria threw in a nasal airway down his nostril and got some IV fluids into him. He was unconscious and had injuries to the lower limbs, but he was stable. If they managed to get him out of there to a shock and trauma medical platoon on the ground, he should make it. The marine was Corporal Matthew Juska, who’d been found alive in the wreckage of track 206.

Gloria went back to the first marine. There was something about his injuries that worried him. The leg was bandaged, but he was losing blood. He did a body sweep under his arms. When he pulled his hands back, they were covered with blood.

“Take your Kevlar jacket off.”

Sure as anything, he saw two circular wounds that went straight through the left biceps. The marine looked at him like a deer caught in the headlights. Over the noise of the rotors, Gloria yelled at him.

“Where did you get those from?”

Rounds were now whizzing around outside and bouncing off the helo.

“Did you get this injury before you were in the AAV or on the way to the helo?”

They both realized at the same time that he’d been hit just as he was trying to get on the helo.

In the pilot’s seat, Captain Eric Garcia made an effort to keep calm. He could hear the AAVs outside his cockpit firing at the buildings around him. He didn’t focus on it too much. He stuck with his job, listening to the FAC talking to the Huey pilots and waiting for the corpsmen and crew in back to tell him it was okay to lift.

“Let us know when you are done there.”

Moses Gloria and his fellow corpsman had stabilized both casualties. The call came back from the crew chief.

“We’re all set. We’re ready to lift.”

The level of bullets increased and Garcia pulled up the joystick.

“Let’s buster out of here.”

Captain Mike Brooks, coordinating the fight from the ground, got goose bumps watching the helicopter take off. Then he got a sick feeling in his stomach.
It’s only a matter of seconds till they destroy that helo.

The helo lifted. By now the word had got around to all Alpha’s marines that it was the signal for them to get in their tracks. They were going to head north to link up with Charlie at the northern bridge. Alpha Company marines ran for their tracks, relieved to be getting out of there. Staff Sergeant Pompos, one of the marines from Charlie Company who had made it back down Ambush Alley unscathed, came up to Brooks. He had twenty-five marines with him and not enough vehicles.

“Sir, we don’t have a ride for a lot of these marines.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a ride? As long as we’ve got vehicles you’ve got a ride. It doesn’t matter how tightly we pack ’em.”

There were thirty marines crammed in each track by the time Brooks got his convoy in position. He put two tanks at the head of the convoy to draw the fire, followed by sixteen AAVs and the entire 81 mm mortar platoon of nine Humvees and four CAAT vehicles. Gunnery Sergeant Lehew, Alpha’s AAV platoon sergeant, brought up the rear to make sure no one was left behind. It was nearly 1600. Brooks didn’t know it, but he and his marines had been fighting at the Euphrates Bridge for nearly three hours. Time had meant nothing to him. He urged his convoy on at top speed. He knew he needed to get to Charlie to help them out at the Saddam Canal Bridge. He hoped that 2/8 was in position to relieve him at the Euphrates Bridge. As they entered the mouth of Ambush Alley, Brooks looked back. He could still see no sign of 2/8.