Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (6 page)

Peeples could now see five army vehicles. Three of them were large tractor-trailers, which looked as though they carried maintenance equipment. One was a Humvee and the other was a fuel truck. They looked battered and beaten. He looked back at his tanks. For the past two days they had stayed, clumped together on the hard road, unable to spread apart because of the numerous irrigation canals. It was not ideal. Normally, his company tried to spread itself over an area of one thousand meters to give the tanks more maneuvering room and to present a more difficult target. Now he saw one of his tanks attempting to do that by moving off the road onto the shoulder. Moments later he received a panicked radio transmission.

“Panzer 6. We’re stuck in the mud.”

Peeples turned to see a tank, commanded by Captain Romeo Cubas of 3rd Platoon, sinking into some of the worst mud he’d ever seen. What looked like hard-packed dirt near one of the irrigation ditches was a pool of thick, oozing mud.

Peeples grabbed the radio handset and called Staff Sergeant Aaron Harrell, one of 2nd Platoon’s tank commanders, and tasked him with the recovery. The tanks were still receiving small-arms and machine-gun fire.
Thank God it’s not that accurate.
With one eye on the unfolding fight and the other eye on the stricken tank, he switched between manning his guns and giving orders on the radio. He saw Harrell’s loader crouched on the front slope of the tank, unhooking the tow cables as rounds passed overhead and mortars landed in the fields off to the side. Harrell hooked up the cables to Cubas’s tank and ordered his driver to push his own tank forward. Slowly Cubas’s tank was pulled out.

At the same time, Captain Jim Thompson, a marathon runner and triathlete, had jumped off his tank and was running toward one of the wounded soldiers. He expected to be able to carry him to safety, but as he tried to heave him up in a fireman’s carry, the weight of the soldier just crushed him. Thompson was so exhausted from the fight that he could hardly lift him. Two other marines ran over and helped the soldier limp to safety behind one of the tanks.

Captain Dyer rolled to the conduct of fire net. As the leader of the company’s designated FiST, or fire support team, his job was to communicate with battalion staff to get more fire power. Frustratingly, he still didn’t know whether he was getting through. He shouted instructions into the radio. No one acknowledged him. The amount of incoming fire had now increased. Mortar and artillery shells were throwing up mud and dirt around the dump.

“I need counterbattery support. I need to know where those mortars are coming from. We need to run some air missions.”

The fire support net was silent. He tried again on battalion tac 1, not sure whether anyone could hear him.

With him was Major Donald Hawkins, the forward air controller, who supervised air support from the ground. With no reply from battalion, Hawkins called up close air support using the UHF “guard” frequency. Several Cobra attack helicopters and fixed-wing planes had come on station and were circling overhead, surveying the unfolding firefight from the air. Speaking directly to Hawkins, they told him that they could see hundreds of Iraqis beginning to encircle them. They started to take antiaircraft fire. Then one of the pilots spotted a T-55 tank moving toward them.

Dyer and Hawkins both looked. They couldn’t see it because it was hidden behind a railroad bridge. The Cobra pilot had a good view of it and took aim with a Hellfire missile. Dyer saw it leave the rail and then go “stupid,” losing its direction and missing the target. Hawkins called on the Cobra to laser designate the target and then contacted a Hornet circling overhead to drop a laser-guided bomb. The Cobra pulled to the right, painted the target, and the Hornet came in to attack. Just then, the voice of the battalion fire support coordinator, who was based at the forward command post, and whose job was to oversee what each FiST was doing, came over the radio.

“Abort! Abort! Abort!”

The Hornet pulled away, just before dropping the bomb. The tank, now alerted to the danger, sped off into the tree line.

Dyer and Hawkins couldn’t believe it. Dyer got on the radio to the battalion command.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“We’ve got counterbattery fires in the area.”

Dyer was furious.

“Guys, these are not tire stacks out there. This is not a training exercise. These assholes are shooting at us. I’m on the ground. I can see what is going on. I’ve done the deconfliction. This is perfectly legit.”

Dyer was boiling with frustration. The fire support coordinator had a perfect right to call off the mission. But the FSC was sitting miles away, buttoned up in an AAV. Dyer and Hawkins had their eyes on the target and were well aware of what was going on.
When I need battalion they aren’t there.
But when I’m working well, they throw a wrench into a perfectly good run.

He thought it was just another example of battalion trying to micromanage everything that was going on. They’d already made it clear that they wouldn’t take Peeples’s or Dyer’s advice on how best to deploy the tanks. In fact, every time they suggested something, Major Sosa seemed to do the exact opposite. Dyer’s resentment was growing. The relationship with battalion was not getting any better.
This is my second firefight and I’m in the
game and I’m clicking. They are yet to do a goddamn thing.

Another shell landed twenty-five meters to the east of his tank.
That’s
the third bracketing shot. That was damned close. And they will get closer.

Dyer yelled at 1st Lieutenant James Carter, his artillery forward observer. They needed to get their own artillery, call sign Nightmare, to start tracking where those shells were coming from.

“Why haven’t you got up with Timberwolf and got this artillery shut down?”

“I’m trying, but I can’t reach them.”

“Well, why don’t you get onto regiment? Call Viking. If you can’t get them, call Nightmare direct.”

“What do you think I’m doing? You keep interrupting me.”

The wounded soldiers of the Army maintenance company were now sheltered behind Peeples’s tank. Dyer counted ten soldiers. Five of them looked to be seriously wounded. Dyer knew there were no corpsmen to give them medical attention.
How the hell are we going to get them out of
here?

Just then a track from Alpha Company came up the road. Marines jumped out and got ready to medevac the wounded.

The tanks and CAAT vehicles had destroyed most of the close-in resistance. Helicopters still buzzed overhead taking out mortar positions and machine-gun bunkers. The counterbattery fire from the “cannon cockers,” the artillerymen of 1/10 Marines at the rear of the column by the 20 northing, had now begun to destroy enemy artillery positions. Captain Dyer was able to take a moment to relax. He had an extreme case of cotton mouth. He’d hardly drunk anything since the early morning. He reached over to grab his canteen. A thick black layer parted and rose off the side of his tank as a cloud of flies flew back to what he now realized was a foul stinking trash tip.

4

It was around 0900 when Captain Dan Wittnam, the thirty-three-year-old commander of Charlie Company, heard the radio reports of fighting up ahead. His twelve AAVs and three Humvees were well toward the rear of the column, but he heard the sound of gunfire and saw smoke and flashes in the distance. Overhead he heard the clattering of helicopters. It was the first time Wittnam had seen helos flying like that since they’d crossed into Iraq. Usually they flew over the marines on the ground almost disdainfully, as though they were on some highly important mission. Now they were hovering with intent just ahead of them. His company’s AAVs were herringboned, parked at an angle just off to the side of the road, waiting for the order to push ahead. Some marines were outside their tracks, pulling security; others were inside, catching up on some sleep. He knew they were weary. It had been stop and start all morning, and his marines would only have been able to snatch some unsatisfactory shut-eye.

Charlie 1/2 was the first company Wittnam had commanded, and it had been a trial. Wittnam drove his marines with an intensity that belied his soft eyes and calm, kind, and patient demeanor. They weren’t elite soldiers— they didn’t have the commitment of Special Forces, the fitness of the SEALs, or the expertise of the D boys from Delta Force. Most of them would be too scared to jump out of a helo, some couldn’t shoot for fuck, and a few were on the chubby side. But for the year or so that he’d had them, he’d watched the Marine Corps transform them from ordinary guys who would otherwise have been propping up the local bar, wasting their lives at the bowling alley, or beating their wives, into young men with heart, capable of extraordinary things. It was frustrating, though. Some of them could be doing even better. Private First Class Casey Robinson was one of the most difficult. He was excellent in the field but was always getting into trouble. He’d had problems with steroids and with fighting. Just before leaving for Iraq, he’d hit a police officer down in Wilmington while on liberty. And then he’d had a fight with a noncommissioned officer on board ship. He’d been charged with assault and disobeying a direct order. Wittnam had tried every motivational technique in the book but none of them had worked. It was a waste. Robinson should be a corporal by now, not a private. He had the potential to be a good marine. If only he could sort his head out. He knew what the problem was. The marines who settled in quickly were the ones who managed to forget who they were before they signed on. It seemed that Robinson refused to let go of who he used to be.

Wittnam put his binoculars to his eyes to see if he could follow what was happening up ahead. He hoped that his young marines would be able to cope with the challenges that were waiting for them.

It was the roar of the M1A1 Abrams tanks setting off in front of him that woke Private First Class Robinson from his lethargy. The chat on the radio was calm, professional, but he could tell there was an undercurrent of excitement. From his position at the hatch he heard isolated booms and saw puffs of smoke on the horizon.
At last something is happening. At last I
know that a war is going on.
He wanted to be in combat, but at the same time he was glad he was not up there getting hit by whatever was flying through the air. He saw marines ahead running around and vehicles going backward and forward. There was a lot of activity, but he had no idea what was going on. He guessed at some point his company would be told to do something. He was discovering that even actual combat was mostly a question of waiting around for something to happen.

Robinson, along with the rest of Charlie Company, had been looking forward to getting out of Camp Lejeune. He longed for the adventure that awaited him in Iraq. His two years of Marine Corps life had consisted of long hours doing pointless drills, humping hundreds of miles on marches, carrying ammo to a distant rifle range, scrubbing floors, walls, and shitters, sweeping the path outside the barracks, waiting to embark and disembark boats, get in and out of vehicles. Sometimes he even had to wait in line to get his pay packet of $800 paid on the first and fifteenth of each month. That was usually because the assholes from DPAC, the accountants and bureaucrats who handed out his money, had messed with his pay. He thought they did it on purpose just to have a go at the grunts for being cocky. It was on those days that the radio commercials in Jacksonville, Camp Lejeune’s hometown, would go into overdrive, and tempting signs about low-cost loans would appear outside car dealerships along the town’s main drag. They would spend their money at titty bars like Driftwood and at bars and clubs like Coconuts that offered free entry to women on Thursday nights. Some marines managed to spend all their pay within days of getting it. That’s why they were looking forward to getting out of North Carolina. Life at Camp Lejeune could be mind-numbingly boring with brief moments of action.

The boredom had continued on ship. He had been packed beneath the decks with the rest of the enlisted marines, condemned to spend hours waiting in line to brush his teeth or get to the chow hall. When he finally sat down, he was forced to scoff his food quickly to give up his seat for someone else. They had to clean their crowded berthing area every morning, and they weren’t allowed back in until the ship’s XO had inspected it.

In Kuwait they were billeted in a dust bowl of a tented compound called Camp Shoup. For six weeks they had to survive the monotony of life in a featureless desert by looking at porno magazines, jacking off, and writing love letters to wives and girlfriends. They weren’t allowed alcohol, but some enlisted marines managed to get their family and friends to send them miniature whiskey bottles in their care packages from home. It was never enough to get drunk on, though. He was pretty sure that the officers managed to smuggle in quantities of alcohol, too, although they would never admit it. Otherwise, life there consisted of drinking European mineral water, pissing, waiting for the hot chow that made Robinson so ill that he gave up on it, trading prepackaged MREs, drinking more water, pissing, visiting the foul smelling Porta Pottis for a shit, more water, more pissing. The only excitement was when the cry of “
Lightning, lightning,
” or “
Gas,
gas,
” the code words for a SCUD launch, went up. But they had all very quickly tired of the mad scramble to put on gas masks and MOPP suits and the endless sweaty minutes that ticked by as they waited for the all-clear signal.

The one aspect of training that had energized him was the desert patrols. He loved learning about the desert and getting acclimatized to the heat and the unfamiliar terrain. It was so much more interesting than all the crap he’d learned in the classroom. They’d practiced identifying targets and threats with their night-vision goggles. Arabic speakers came over and taught them how to take down Iraqis with nonlethal stuff. They taught them how to yell out instructions in Arabic.
Stop where you are. Drop your
weapons. Down on your belly.
Robinson doubted whether he would be close enough to use it. Weapons training on the range was limited so they did a lot of hand-to-hand combat. Robinson’s favorite was Bull in the Ring. Two marines would kneel back to back and then fight it out in the sand. They had to wrestle, without punching, and get the other guy to surrender. Armlocks, ankle locks, or finding pressure points by the neck usually did the job. Captain Wittnam even had them doing platoon-on-platoon Bull in the Ring and they would all go at it. It reminded Robinson of his first few months in the Marine Corps when the senior marines subjected the juniors to Bull in the Ring as a form of hazing, a rite of passage. Some of the junior marines were terrorized by the experience. Robinson saw it as toughening them up.
I don’t want no pussies with me when I go to war.

What kept Robinson and the rest of Charlie Company going during the misery of Camp Shoup was the prospect of using their weapons in anger, of combat adventure with their buddies.
We are going to kill some motherfucking Iraqis.
The thought of finally going to war had sent a thrill through the marines of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.

The order to cross the LD, attack into Iraq across the Line of Departure, had come unexpectedly. For a while, Robinson had thought they would never go to war. They could see from the TV that people were demonstrating against it.
The whole thing is going to be shut o f.
One day they were told to get ready, the next day they had to stand down. Then, on March 19, they were told they were going. It was a day earlier than the original plan called for. Rumors in the Marine Corps spread like syphilis, and this was no exception. One was that Saddam Hussein had already given up and that they were going to head straight for Baghdad. Someone else said that a “target of opportunity” strike had been made on Saddam and that the war had started earlier than planned. It didn’t matter. This was it. H hour had come and gone. They were going to war.

At dawn, on March 20, the adrenaline rush took Private First Class Robinson by surprise. He’d always thought of himself as a cool dude, not easily fazed. Now, as he watched the sky light up with artillery fire and air strikes and listened to the booms and crackles of shells raining down on Iraqi positions, he was overawed by the spectacle of supreme power. The target was Safwan Hill, an Iraqi observation post on a prominent mound in the desert. The commander of the 1st Marine Division, Major General James Mattis, told his artillerymen to pound it so that after the bombardment “it would be a foot shorter.” Robinson looked at the sky above and watched the Patriot missiles dueling with the SCUDs.

“Yeah. All right. Up yours, Saddam.”

Marines around him cheered and yelled. Robinson whistled to himself. It was like being off his head on the Fourth of July.

In front of Robinson, inside the belly of the track, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry, the driver of track 201, jiggled his legs in anticipation. Castleberry’s position was just in front of the bank of radios so he could listen in to what was happening on the battalion tactical net. He heard explosions and people getting real excited on the radio. Unlike Robinson, he could tell from the radio transmissions why the tanks had set off at such speed.

“We need to evac. We’ve got several wounded soldiers. Some of them are real bad.”

He was confused. The Army was not supposed to be there.
The Army
beat us here? Are you fucking insane? No fucking way.

He didn’t say anything out loud, but in his head he made fun of the Army.
They must have fucked up badly. They can’t fight anyway. They are
screwed. It’s lucky we showed up.

In the back, some marines were trying to sleep, but others were desperate to know what was going on. They could hear nothing but the screaming motor and the odd sound of gunfire. He tried to keep them informed.

“Army is up in front and they’re all shot up. Alpha is helping them out right now.”

Some of the marines joined in the jokes about the Army. He felt their excitement mounting.

“Come on, let’s go and join in the fight.”

Castleberry would have liked to oblige, but he was a lowly lance corporal.

“Sorry, guys. It’s not my call.”

Just behind track 201, sitting in the troop commander’s hatch of track 208, was First Lieutenant James “Ben” Reid. He was tall, with earnest, adult eyes that chimed wrongly with his lanky, almost adolescent way of carrying himself. He was in charge of Charlie’s weapons platoon and was Charlie’s FiST leader. It was a crucial job, and he took it seriously. Charlie was a long way to the rear of the column so he sat, huddled over the radio, listening to the battalion net. The information was coming through clearly and simply. The net wasn’t clogged up, and he had time to put red and blue dots on his map board, propped up on the edge of the hatch, to mark the positions of friendly and enemy forces.

In his weapons platoon he had heavy machine guns, shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons known by the acronym of SMAWs, and 60 mm mortars. He had divided his mortar squad into two parts. He put two mortars in the company commander’s track with enough ammo to do a quick hip shoot if necessary. He had his FiST and a third of the mortar squad and ammo with him in 208. What he had done was unorthodox, but he figured that it was safer to split up the mortar squads just in case one of the tracks got hit.

He’d picked up the news about the Army over the radio.
What the hell
is going on? I thought we were supposed to be out in front here.
He stayed plugged into the battalion and company net and he switched back and forth between the two to maintain his situational awareness. He heard Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski come over the net and talk to the commander of the tanks.

“Hey, Panzer 6, you need to stay in the tanks so that I can talk to you.”

Reid thought the order was a good one. His battalion commander spoke up when he needed to and yes, the tank commander did need to stay in his tank.

But then came a radio transmission that worried him. Over the battalion net he heard Staff Sergeant Troy Schielein, one of the CAAT marines fighting up ahead alongside the tanks, say he was going to launch a TOW. There was a loud explosion, and then his voice came back on the radio.

“I just took out a machine-gun position with a TOW.”

He then heard Lieutenant Colonel Grabowksi reprimand him.

“Hey, I didn’t authorize you to shoot that TOW.”

Reid couldn’t compute what he was hearing.
Hey, wait a minute. Schielein’s up there on the scene and he knows what’s going on. The battalion
commander can’t control every detail of the battle.
It worried him that the battalion commander seemed to want to influence every course of action. He kept this thought to himself.

It was followed by more radio transmissions with information that there were some soldiers still stuck in the city and that they’d been ambushed by Iraqis faking surrender. Then Major Tuggle, the battalion XO, had come back on the net and said that the Iraqis had not been faking surrender. Reid tried to work out what it all meant from the bits and pieces he could hear.
Why did we get one report and then have it squashed?
Maybe Tuggle was worried that the marines would get trigger-happy and shoot up Iraqis who were surrendering for real.