Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (4 page)

“No, I think someone is shooting at us.”

Then, about fifty meters to the east of where he was standing, a plume of dirt splashed up from the ground, followed by another loud clap.

He saw a flash about five kilometers off toward the northeast and another splash off to the side of the road. Over the radio he heard the voice of one of the CAAT marines.

“We’ve got small-arms fire coming in at us from both sides of the road.”

Sosa couldn’t believe it.
They’re actually shooting at us.
Like the others, he’d been briefed that there would be little resistance but he thought he’d been pretty careful about not allowing himself to fall into a false sense of security. He’d warned his marines to prepare for the worst, that the Iraqis were going to fight. Now he realized that he’d bought into the capitulation theory. He was angry with himself for making assumptions about enemy action.
If you don’t validate those assumptions, you might be in a world of
hurt.

3

“Panzer 5, this is Panzer 6. Have we got air on its way? Where is the helo overwatch?”

At the head of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines column a company of M1A1 Abrams tanks from the 8th Tank Battalion out of Fort Knox, Kentucky, was pushing forward toward Nasiriyah. The tank crews were reservists, part-time marines who left their civilian lives for one weekend a month and two weeks every summer to train as marines. They had been activated on Friday, January 10, 2003, assigned to 1/2 Marines, and within seventy-two hours they had packed, left Kentucky, arrived at Camp Lejeune, embarked on ship, and were on their way to Iraq.

The company was commanded by Major Bill Peeples, a thirty-five-year-old city planning officer from Jackson County, Indiana, a suburban area south of Indianapolis. For four years in his early twenties Peeples had been an active duty Marine Corps maintenance officer but then had left to do other things. Two years later he faced a choice. Unless he rejoined the Marine Corps, he would be taken off the reserve officer list. He decided to rejoin as a reservist, and after five years working in a tank company he was appointed commander of Alpha Company, 8th Tank Battalion. That was a year ago. Now he was leading his men into battle from his M1A1 tank, which his crew had named “Wild Bill” in his honor. He’d named the machine gun “Maximus” after his newborn son.

He had organized his tanks in a wedge formation with one up front and two tanks behind like an arrowhead. It gave the lead tanks maximum sectors of fire. The lead took the twelve o’clock sector, or front. The tanks behind protected the flanks to three o’clock on the right and nine o’clock on the left. The tanks at the back had their turrets to the six o’clock position to protect the rear. With his torso half out of the tank commander’s, or TC’s, hatch he could see the sun rising on the right side of the road, illuminating a flat, scrubby, and endless wasteland stretching off into the distance. The early morning light glinted off the swirls of dust, kicked up as the convoy passed. Much earlier that morning, Peeples had seen, off to the west, ribbons of light belonging to a never-ending convoy of Army support vehicles making their way north toward Baghdad along Route 1. It was eerie. It looked like a California freeway. Now, though, there was no one on the horizon. They were on their own.

For two days his twelve tanks had led the battalion through the desert. It had been uneventful apart from one tank breaking down; it was currently under tow at the rear of the column. Now they were on a road speeding toward the city of Nasiriyah. His tank company possessed enormous firepower.
We are the tip of a very hard spear.
In consultation with the battalion command, he’d configured his eleven remaining tanks into Team Mech and Team Tank. Team Tank consisted of seven tanks plus a platoon of infantry from Bravo Company. In return, Peeples gave a platoon of four tanks to Bravo Company to create Team Mech. At one stage, during heated discussions about how to best organize the battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski and his operations officer, Major Sosa, had wanted to give each of the three infantry companies a platoon of tanks. Peeples had persuaded them that he could offer more support as a separate Team Tank maneuver unit. His crews had trained as a company and knew how each other thought and worked. He didn’t think they were so effective when they were put under rifle company commanders who had little experience of working with tanks.

It was not the first time Major Peeples had crossed swords with the battalion staff. His war had not started well. When his company arrived at Camp Lejeune from Kentucky, less than twenty-four hours after being activated, he had discovered that they didn’t have time to inspect or fix the original fourteen tanks assigned to them from Camp Lejeune’s 2nd Tank Battalion.

“You can fix them on the way over.”

Peeples didn’t like the answer. The battalion staff was already on ship when they arrived so there was no welcoming party, or any chance to discuss what the battalion expected from them. To make matters worse, his company of 125 marines was split into three groups and embarked on different ships; the USS
Ashland,
the USS
Portland,
and the USS
Gunston
Hall.
Communication between the ships was virtually impossible so they could not coordinate with each other or talk to the battalion’s logistics officer to tell him what they needed. When at last they did manage to inspect the tanks, they found that they were in terrible condition—to the point where ten of them were deadlined and totally unsuitable for combat.

When they finally got together in Kuwait, it was no better. He felt as though he was treated as a second-class citizen. Even though, as a major, he was the third most senior marine in the battalion, he suspected that he was excluded from a lot of the battalion-level planning. No one really said anything about it, but he put it down to a feeling among the active-duty marines that they were somehow better than the reserve community.
Of
course, they mouth the usual platitudes about how the Marine Corps is a
total force and that the reservists and those on active duty are the same.
But that’s all it is. Talk.
What made it worse was that there was an undercurrent in the Marine Corps that the infantryman was its heart and soul and that any other specialty was somehow not the real thing. It was true that the Marine Corps was built around the infantry, and he understood that armor and airpower were there to support the infantry companies. However, since he’d joined the battalion, he’d never really felt that the command staff had a proper appreciation of the support and firepower tanks could bring to a fight. The M1A1 Abrams was a $4.3 million killing machine. It could light up vehicles and buildings three kilometers away with its accurate 120 mm laser main gun that had a 360-degree firing capability. Its 7.62 mm coaxially mounted gun and .50-caliber machine gun could rip human beings in half. Its twelve-hundred-horsepower engine could move it along at speeds of up to forty-two miles per hour. It had a range of over 450 kilometers and a stabilization system that meant it could fire its main gun accurately when moving. There was no faster or more accurate tank in the world, and he loved being in command of it.

Peeples picked up the radio. He wanted a CAS update from Captain Scott Dyer, his executive officer. He had requested and been promised a flight of helicopters, but as yet there was no sign of them.
It’s all quiet at the
moment, but it would be good to have some air support as we move forward.

“Panzer 5, this is Panzer 6. Any news on air support?”

Captain Scott Dyer, call sign Panzer 5, was riding in his tank just behind Major Peeples in the center of the wedge formation. His huge six foot eight inch frame, ridiculously tall for a tanker, was clad in a green Nomex tanker’s jumpsuit, and jutted out of the TC’s hatch. On his head he wore a bullet-resistant CVC, or combat vehicle crew helmet. His tank was named
Dark Side.
It was a reference to the fact that as an enlisted marine he had once been one of the guys. Now that he was an officer, they teased him for crossing to the Dark Side. He’d marked his turret with a huge red hand-print like the Native Americans marked their ponies. He and his crew liked to call it the red hand of death
.
His driver, Lance Corporal Michael Shirley, and his gunner, Corporal Charles Bell, had painted a large Playboy Bunny on the left side of the tank’s skirt. It was a ruse to get
Dark Side
in the magazines. It hadn’t yet worked.

It was Dyer who had borne the brunt of the battalion’s hostility toward the reservists. He had responsibility for getting the tanks back up and running in Kuwait. They were lacking so many pieces of vital equipment that he had put in a parts request that exceeded the budget for the entire battalion. He’d watched a succession of generals and experts come down to inspect their tanks. He could tell what the battalion and regimental staff were thinking.
Those nasty reservists don’t know what the hell they are
talking about.
Part of him understood why they were so freaked. Peeples and Dyer had one-tenth of all the tanks available to the Marine Corps in Iraq.
If 80 percent are deadlined, that’s cause for pause.

It took several weeks before he convinced the battalion staff that he did know what he was talking about. Only then did they pull together to help him get the tanks up and running. Navy engineers had managed to machine some of the parts on ship, like firing pins and bustle rack extensions, to carry even more gear. He, his maintenance chief, Staff Sergeant Charlie Cooke, and the tank crews had begged, borrowed, cannibalized, and even stolen parts from other units waiting in Kuwait. On March 19, after days working around the clock, they had managed to get fourteen working M1A1s up to FAA Hawkins, the force assembly area, for the push into Iraq. While they were there, waiting for the order to cross the line of departure, one of the tanks broke down. Another was driven into a hole and couldn’t be recovered. In spite of their achievements in getting twelve tanks ready for combat, it was a bad start, and Dyer realized that it had left a nasty feeling between them and the battalion staff. He knew that Major Peeples had felt it, too. There was bad blood from which they might never recover.

It was doubly frustrating for Scott Dyer because he had started his career as an infantryman with 2nd Marines and was looking forward to working with them again. He had enlisted when he was seventeen. It was looking for a fight that had got him interested. He’d been on his way to enlist in the Army when, because of his height, he’d banged his head on a sign hanging outside the Marine Corps recruiting office. He started cussing. The recruiting officer had yelled at him.

“What the hell are you doing to my sign?”

“Well, if your sign wasn’t so friggin’ low I wouldn’t have bashed my head.”

“You’ve got an attitude, kid.”

Dyer had followed the marine into the office, ready to continue the fight, when he saw a sign on the marine’s desk: IF YOU ARE HERE TO BE ONE OF THE BOYS YOU ARE IN THE WRONG OFFICE.

On the walls were posters and action photographs of tanks speeding through the desert and helicopters swooping over blue seas. They started talking. The recruiter didn’t tell him about college money or job training. He talked about challenges and teamwork. He made no promises other than that the Marine Corps would train him harder than he’d ever worked in his life.

“Not everyone is tough enough to be a marine. We are the Few and the Proud for a reason.”

When he’d told his mom that he was joining the Marines, it was the first time he’d ever heard her swear.

“The fuck you are.”

She had refused to sign the papers. Even though she worked for a civilian contractor that made spare parts for the defense industry, she had a bad view of the Marine Corps. She said that marines beat up on their women, drank too much, and behaved badly. For a whole month they argued, but eventually he wore her down. Sure enough, as soon as he got out of Boot Camp, she put a photo of him in his dress blues on the mantel-piece. Each time people she respected and admired made a fuss over her for having a son in the Marine Corps, she glowed with pride.

He’d spent seventeen years as an active duty and reserve marine. The higher he rose, the more he disliked the careerism. The grunts would help each other out, but the officers wouldn’t hesitate to stab each other in the back. Once he’d become an officer, all he could see was a succession of desk jobs.
There’s no way I am going to become a staff weenie.
He’d left the Marine Corps to study law but hadn’t wanted to cut his ties completely. He knew, though, he wasn’t going to return to Camp Lejeune. His wife was an attorney, and he couldn’t see her processing divorces in North Carolina or working in the Marine Corps store. He rejoined as a reservist for a second time. He’d chosen to be a tanker.
If the Marines go to war one day, they
won’t leave their tanks behind.

“Palehorse 6, this is Timberwolf. Can you give us your current position?”

“Roger, Timberwolf. We are pushing through the 22 northing.”

“Timberwolf, this is Mustang 6. Marines dismounting to pull security.”

As they pressed ahead, Dyer listened to the radio chatter on the battalion net. It was routine stuff, delivered with calm authority. Company commanders were giving situation reports and updates on their positions. Up ahead they saw the first real signs of human activity since leaving Kuwait. There were a few groups of brick houses on both sides of the road. Farther south, they’d only seen mud huts. Women and children were being hustled into white pickups and driven away. He didn’t think it was suspicious. He thought that they had just taken fright at the sight of the might of the U.S. military on the move. It was quiet.
We are still several klicks south of the
city. We are well south of anywhere we might make contact.

Dyer knew they were going into a fight, and he lived by the motto “Plan for the worst, hope for the best, and accept whatever happens.” He tried to drum it into his marines. Nevertheless, he wasn’t convinced that they would see any action that day. They had spent weeks discussing a plan to seize the bridges at Nasiriyah, but a few days ago that plan had lost priority. The order he had been given was to get to the interchange of Routes 7 and 8, well south of Nasiriyah, and occupy blocking positions to isolate the city. He remembered what he had been told.
The enemy hasn’t left their
barracks. They have prepared no defensive fortifications. There is no indication that the enemy is prepared to fight. They may well capitulate.
Anyway, there were all sorts of rumors, fueled by radio reports on the BBC, that the Army had already taken the city.

Traveling alongside the tanks, five hundred meters in front of the rest of the battalion, were the CAAT vehicles, the Humvees of the combined antiarmor team. They were equipped with state-of-the-art TOW antitank missiles, .50-caliber machine guns, and MK19 grenade launchers. They were lighter and quieter than the tanks and were useful in scouting out the terrain and enemy situation ahead of them. With the thirteen-power sight on their TOW systems, they could see almost five kilometers. They had a lot of firepower, but Dyer knew their punch was limited. The CAAT marines felt better when the tanks were around.
If you get in contact, you
want to bring out the heavy right hand of the boxer. You want to bring out
your bruisers.