Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (8 page)

Now he could only watch with dismay as all eleven tanks rumbled back past the infantry companies lined up along the side of the road, toward the refueling point several miles to the rear of the column.

Brigadier General Natonski was still trying to digest the news that the whole of Nasiriyah would now be well aware that U.S. forces were in and around the city. This was bad. Operation Iraqi Freedom had been planned around speed and stealth. If the Army and Marines could get to Baghdad quickly, they would seize the initiative and surprise Saddam’s forces before they had time to react. Speed and stealth also guided Natonski in his plans for taking Nasiriyah. He wanted to keep the Iraqi defenders guessing as to whether they were going to march into the city or bypass it. When the time was right, he would make a lightning strike into the heart of Nasiriyah and seize the crucial bridges across the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal. Now the 507th had endangered that plan. The Iraqis, alerted to their arrival, might blow the bridges before his marines could get to them.
Goddamnit.
Silently, he cursed the Army. He couldn’t help thinking that the 507th got lost because the Army didn’t train their support services as well as the Marine Corps. There had always been rivalry between the services, but the rivalry was greatest with the Army. Natonski believed the Marine Corps gave the American taxpayers more bang for their buck. The Army was far bigger and better equipped than the Marines. It got the latest technology, while the Marine Corps made do with patched-up helicopters from the Vietnam era. But the Marines preferred it like that. They prided themselves on doing more with less.
The Army might win the war, but it was the
Marine Corps that won the battles.

As some tanks rolled past, he looked up.

“What’s that?”

Grabowski told him that the tanks were heading back to refuel.

Natonski had to make a decision. He’d had enough combat experience from Vietnam, Somalia, and Bosnia to know that the best-laid plans always fall apart at first contact. They were OBE, overtaken by events. He wished it hadn’t happened so early in the campaign. Twenty thousand marines and eight thousand vehicles from the 1st Marine Division were backed up waiting for him to clear Nasiriyah so they could get their convoys on the road to Baghdad along Route Moe. He could no longer take the bridges by surprise—the 507th’s wrong turn had put paid to that and there was clearly some sort of resistance along the route. But if he moved quickly he might be able to get to those bridges before they were blown. Otherwise it might take days to find another crossing site. He’d grown up with the Marine Corps doctrine of maneuver warfare as stated in its Warfighting Skills Program: “It is a state of mind born of a bold will, intellect, initiative, and ruthless opportunism. It is a state of mind bent on shattering the enemy morally and physically by paralyzing and confounding him, by avoiding his strength, by quickly and aggressively exploiting his vulnerabilities, and by striking him in a way that will hurt him the most.”

He turned to Rick Grabowski. He wanted those bridges as soon as possible.

“We’ve got to accelerate the attack. We’ve got to find those missing soldiers and get to those bridges before they’re blown.”

As Natonski turned to go he looked back again at the battalion commander.

“Rickey. Those soldiers are still in the city. Try and find them if you can. The Army would do it for us and we need to do it for them.”

“Roger, sir, I’m already working on that.”

6

Private First Class Robinson’s stomach fluttered with excitement as the news filtered down that Charlie Company was to move out. They were still toward the rear of the column, but now they were going to move up toward Alpha and Bravo marines who had started to see some action. As they moved forward, Robinson, from the hatch of track 201, saw four M1A1 Abrams tanks heading toward them, driving away from the city, on the other side of the road. Corporal Wentzel shouted over to him.

“Hey. Aren’t those our tanks?”

The marines in the rear of the other AAVs also saw the tanks driving back the way they’d come. They were surprised. They’d all been briefed that the tanks were supposed to be leading their attack.

“They’re scared. They’re running away.”

A few of the marines in the rear laughed. The infantrymen had never really practiced that much with the tankers or the trackers, and they didn’t think of them as marines. The feeling among them was that the real marines were the riflemen who wrought havoc on an enemy with nothing more than an M16 rifle. It was all very well sitting inside a highly engineered, well-armored military equivalent of a Cadillac, but if you wanted to prove yourself in battle you relied on only three things: your training, your weapon, and the buddies on either side of you. All the same, the marines felt uncomfortable seeing those tanks disappearing to the rear with their massive firepower. Robinson couldn’t really explain it. He just felt better when the tanks were around.

The chat down below turned to girls. Some of the guys talked about which girl they were going to fuck when they got home or how they were going to cheat on their girlfriends. That was all allowed. What wasn’t allowed was to suggest to a marine that his girl might be cheating on him. Robinson understood the rule.
It’s better to say that you want to fuck his
mother than to tell him that his girl is cheating on him.
He remembered one guy on ship acting real weird after a telephone call. Later he found out the guy’s wife had just told him that she was leaving him to move back to California with an Air Force pilot. He tried not to think about it too much. They were a long way away, and there was nothing they could do. He’d been ditched like that before. But once he got over the shock, he remembered that his buddies had forced him to joke about it. That’s what helped him get through it.

From the hatch of 201, Robinson looked at the palm-lined streets and the two-story cinder-block houses in front of him, on either side of the highway. It looked quiet enough.
Look at those hajjis running across the
road. They’re probably scared.
A few locals dressed in rags stood by the side of the road and watched as the American war machine rumbled through the outskirts of their town. Robinson couldn’t quite figure out what they must be thinking. None of them smiled. He briefly remembered that they were supposed to be pro-American in this town.
Clearly no one
has told them that we are here to liberate them.

Driving track 201, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry could hear and see a flurry of activity ahead of him. He was ordered to move off the road and press north through some cane fields on a parallel axis to Bravo Company. Overhead he heard and saw Cobras fly by and shoot stuff up farther ahead of him.
This is awesome.
They had the tracks arranged in a wedge formation to give the gunners in the tracks a clear view ahead and to provide maximum firepower to the front and sides. Every one hundred meters or so, Castleberry would be ordered to stop and drop the ramp. The infantry dismounted and provided security by taking cover around the track in a 180-degree arc, looking for signs of the enemy. They didn’t need to cover the right-hand side because the .50-caliber machine gun and Mark 19 could take care of anything that came from the east.

Farther back, in track 208, Lieutenant Reid had also seen the tanks drive by on their way to being refueled.
Wow, those guys have been shot at.
Reid still hadn’t seen any enemy. He couldn’t tell whether it was light enemy fire or something heavier that they were getting into. As they drew alongside Alpha Company, he saw that Alpha’s marines were coming out of the ditches covered in mud. They were not happy. It was almost funny to see the pissed look on their faces.
I wonder how the water will a fect the MOPP
suits if we get gassed?

Off to the side of him the cannon cockers of 1/10 Marines were firing “Red Rain” counterbattery into the city. They were picking up where the incoming artillery and mortars were being fired from and targeting the positions with their own artillery.

Gathered around their Humvees, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski and Major Sosa tried to formulate a plan. Natonski had now made it clear to them that he wanted them to push for the bridges. They were not going to stop and block the road to the south of the city. They were going to attack, into Nasiriyah. Sosa knew that they had rehearsed the plan on ship and in Kuwait. They had even driven out into the desert with key personnel and gone through the mission with engineering tape simulating the bridges. But that was a couple of weeks ago.
The last plan we briefed before leaving
Kuwait was the defensive plan to hold south of the city.
He’d also remembered a briefing in which the regimental commander, Colonel Bailey, had stressed they would not seize the bridges if they were under fire. Now they seemed to be going against all that.

The speed at which the decision had been made had taken them by surprise. Neither Grabowski nor Sosa had realized the pressure Natonski was under from the 1st Marine Division to get Route Moe open.

Grabowski was still confident. He had gone over the mission again and again with his company commanders on ship and in Kuwait. It was a clear and simple one. They knew they didn’t have to clear the route. The follow-on unit, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, was supposedly the experts at clearing urban areas and would deal with that. He also knew from intel briefings that there was nothing in the city that could stop his mechanized force with the heavy armor of the tanks. All they had to do was seize the two bridges.

I’ve got to get the tanks back from refueling as soon as possible.
Their thick armor meant that they were more or less invincible to anything that the Iraqis might throw at them. He didn’t really want to send the AAVs into the city without tank support. The Marine Corps AAV was only made of reinforced aluminum. The vehicle’s skin might stop an AK-47 round but an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade, flying through the air at three hundred meters per second would cut right through it. On impact, the firing pin would shoot a jet of molten metal to pierce the skin, allowing the grenade to explode inside the track. Unfortunately, Grabowski knew that none of Task Force Tarawa’s AAVs were equipped with EAAKs, or Enhanced Appliqué Armor Kits, the thick antiballistic plates, developed by the Marine Corps, that could be attached to the outside of an AAV.

He consulted with Sosa.

“Let’s start to send the infantry companies forward and hope that the tanks won’t take too long to refuel.”

He got on the radio to his XO, Major Jeff Tuggle, who was at the rear, closest to the refueling point.

“We need those tanks back here as soon as possible.”

Sosa and Grabowski knew that they would have to change their original plan. That called for Team Tank to establish a support-by-fire position on the southern bank of the Euphrates, allowing Alpha to go through first and seize the Euphrates Bridge. Then Bravo, with its tanks, would cross the Euphrates Bridge onto Route Moe, known as Ambush Alley, turn immediately to the east, and work its way to the northern canal bridge around the eastern outskirts of the town. The forward command post and Charlie Company would follow in trace, and Charlie would move through their lines and take the northern bridge.

The urgency of Natonski’s request had changed that plan. Grabowski could see that Bravo Company was at the head of the column while Alpha Company marines were still out in the fields clearing buildings. It would take too long to get Alpha Company to leapfrog Bravo.
We’ll just
have to get Bravo Company to lead the attack and Alpha can follow in
trace.

The pace of their mission had just picked up. It was now up to Major Sosa to make it happen. He didn’t panic, but he now realized that there were several questions about the terrain that they were going into that had never been answered by the intelligence people at regimental level. He’d wanted to know about the current, depth, and silt level of the waterway by the northern canal bridge. He had also asked about the terrain and street layout to the east of Nasiriyah. No one seemed to know what it would be like. There were maps and photos, but they had very little human intelligence. There was no one on the ground who could tell them what state the streets were in, how the Iraqis would greet them, and what sort of resistance they should expect.
It would have been nice to have answers to those
questions, but maybe regiment has other priorities.

Grabowski got on the radio to the company commanders. Natonski had given him a timeline he’d been unaware of. Natonski wanted those bridges by 1500. That was less than four hours away. And Grabowski and his men had the added complication of looking out for U.S. soldiers stranded in the city. He didn’t want his marines firing on them, thinking they were bad guys.

“This is Timberwolf 6. We need to get moving. Keep your eyes open for American forces on the ground. Don’t engage the enemy unless they clearly demonstrate hostile intent toward you. We’ve got to get those bridges.”

7

“Timberwolf, this is Tomahawk 6.”

Captain Mike Brooks, commander of Alpha Company, stood up in the TC’s hatch of his track to get a better view of the scene ahead. On the horizon, plumes of black smoke billowed from the jagged outline of the city. Hueys and Cobras hovered overhead. The
boom
of an artillery shell echoed in the distance.

He reached for the radio and glanced down at his military-issue GPS, checked his position, and gave Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski at the forward command post a quick situation report.

His column of twelve AAVs and three Humvees was in front of Charlie Company but still several kilometers behind the tanks, the CAAT vehicles, and Bravo Company.

He’d heard on the radio that up ahead, the tanks were under fire and that they had rescued some U.S. soldiers who had been ambushed in the city. As his company had moved forward, it, too, had started receiving small-arms fire. He’d got some of his marines to dismount and to clear on foot some suspicious buildings a hundred meters or so to the east of the road. It was muddy out there, and he could see that they were not happy struggling knee-deep through the water and the dirt.
This is frustrating.
The opposition isn’t determined, but they are harassing us and it’s slowing
us down.
He hadn’t been expecting to fight like this. There was no tactical formation of Iraqi soldiers, just faceless figures dressed in black, shooting at them from behind buildings and irrigation ditches. To be honest, he wasn’t even sure exactly who he was fighting. He knew there might be some opposition from Baathists and fedayeen troops loyal to Saddam, but these fighters were shooting from what looked like normal, humble homes.

“Timberwolf. Tanks are going back to refuel.”

Brooks had felt a chill when he learned on the radio that the tanks were going to the rear. He always felt more secure when the tanks were around. For two days the movement through southern Iraq had gone smoothly and to plan. There was no sense of urgency; they were controlled and methodical. Even the reports of the tanks getting into contact ahead of them hadn’t fazed him. But as he saw them speed past on the way to the refueling point he had a strange sensation that something was beginning to unravel. They looked dirty and shot up, and his sense of discomfort got worse. The feeling of invincibility that the tanks gave when they were up front had gone. He checked his thoughts.
Nothing is wrong. They’ll probably get refueled quickly so it will be okay.

Brooks was thirty-four, with a mild, thoughtful manner and boyish bright eyes that flashed with determination. He was married with three young sons. He’d been brought up on a farm in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. As a kid, he hadn’t done very well at high school. He hated books and exams and always seemed to get into mischief. It was nothing serious, but he did once get a disorderly conduct fine for throwing eggs at someone’s house. He did whatever it took to have a laugh and some fun. To this day, he didn’t really know why he changed. He just got tired of being a smart-ass. He wanted something more focused, more solid. A friend had signed up for the Marine Corps a year before, and he had seen what that had done for him. He left high school and rather than become an officer, he enlisted at nineteen. He wanted to do it the hard way, to learn some humility, and self-respect. He worked his way through Boot Camp and then went to field artillery. That’s when he decided he wanted the challenge of leading marines. He wanted to be an officer. Four years after leaving the Naval Academy at Annapolis he was made a marine captain. He was disappointed when he was given command of a headquarters company. He wanted to be in the front line, training for war. But he persevered, and a year before the invasion of Iraq he was made commander of his very own rifle company—Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines.

Most of his marines had already been with Alpha for several months, even years when he took over command. But some of them had also joined at the same time, and others were straight out of Boot Camp and the School of Infantry. He made a point of getting to know everything about them. He had spent a lot of time with them in training and got to know their strengths and weaknesses and their different characters. He would push them during training, asking them to do things that he knew were hard for them. Sometimes he’d wondered whether he pushed them too hard, but when he saw them do it and do it well, he felt proud.

“Tomahawk 6, this is Timberwolf. Hey, you need to wrap up your activities there. We need to get going. We need to push.”

It was Grabowski, the battalion commander, and there was a new sense of urgency in his voice. Brooks was momentarily taken aback. He had no idea why the movement forward had suddenly become more immediate.

“Bravo, you’re in front, you take the lead. You will cross the bridge first.”

Brooks knew that’s not how they’d planned to take the bridge. He was supposed to lead Alpha Company onto the Euphrates Bridge. Bravo and Charlie would follow in trace, go around to the east, and head toward the northern bridge. He would then follow once 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines had relieved him on the southern span, the Euphrates Bridge. Since early January, when the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowksi, had entrusted them with the possible task of taking the bridges at Nasiriyah, they’d revised and changed the plan many times. On ship with his fellow company commanders, Captain Tim Newland and Captain Dan Wittnam, he had pored over maps and satellite images to check that they could make it happen. They had war-gamed the scenario with other officers in a packed wardroom, to make sure that they hadn’t missed anything. Following classic Marine doctrine, they had visualized the operation, determined the critical events, and developed a scheme of maneuver that they were convinced would overwhelm anyone defending the city. The intelligence officers provided a lot of images and information on the terrain and on the disposition of Iraqi military units built up over the last twelve years from U.S. Air Force sorties monitoring the no-fly zone for Operation Southern Watch. It was supposed to be like any other combined arms drill executed over and over again at CAX the previous summer. They had perfected their scheme of maneuver and now, suddenly, the battalion commander had changed their attack formation.
What’s going on?

He saw it made sense to go with Bravo across the bridge first. He still had marines out in the fields, and it would take some time to get his company to leapfrog Bravo. Nevertheless, he felt that something was not quite right. He wanted to be fluid, to adapt to change, but the urgency with which it was unfolding didn’t give him a good feeling.
Where would that leave Charlie?
In the original plan, Charlie was going to follow Bravo. But they were even farther away, in fields to the west of the road. It would take them even more time to mount up and get into position between Bravo and Alpha.

He heard Captain Wittnam, company commander of Charlie, on the radio.

“Sir, Alpha is already behind Bravo. I recommend we follow in trace of Alpha.”

That at least made some sense and was closer to the original scheme of maneuver. He felt a bit more comfortable. If only the tanks were up there he would feel better. He was glad he knew Dan Wittnam so well. Implicit understanding between commanders enabled them to work better as a team. It was something they had focused on at CAX.

He got back to the work ahead.
What can I do now? What do I need to
do?
He called his men back and tried to make it clear that Bravo was now going to take the lead. He got messages out by radio to his platoon commanders that he wanted everybody back to the tracks as quickly as possible.