The din of the battle was a constant roar, and McCoy was thinking it would never subside when “Jason,” a senior special forces NCO, came up to him. Jason was advising a platoon from the 36th National Guard Battalion, attached to 3/4. The Iraqi platoon had just cleared two buildings and captured an insurgent who had talked immediately.
“No rough stuff, the guy started jabbering on his own!” Jason shouted in McCoy’s ear. “The muj headquarters is that mosque to your front. The imam is on our bad guy list.”
All morning the Marines had seen armed Iraqis dodging in and out of the wall surrounding the mosque.
“I’m taking it down,” McCoy said.
McCoy turned the target over to Capt Delpidio and the FAC talked to an F-16 loitering overhead. Delpidio marked the friendly lines with flares and had the pilot make a practice run from southwest to northeast. When that went well, the pilot swung around and made a second pass. With eyes on the F-16 and sure of its alignment, Delpidio said, “Cleared hot,” and the pilot dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs, knocking down the minaret and collapsing half of the main building.
After the usual several moments of shock that follow a successful bomb run, the insurgents resumed firing. McCoy wasn’t sure what effect the strike on the mosque had had on their leadership. Running low on ammunition, he pulled his Marines back, and the insurgents made no effort to follow. McCoy radioed to Col Toolan that he estimated about a hundred insurgents had been killed or wounded, and more still held the town of Karma.
Toolan told 3/4 to return to the lines in northeastern Fallujah. He had heard enough to recommend to Mattis that the surrounding suburbs, to include Karma, be swept by another regiment. Toolan’s regiment needed to focus on Fallujah.
_____
Battalion 3/4 wasn’t the only unit heavily engaged on April 13. At about one in the morning, a special operations CH-53 “Pave Low” helicopter on a secret mission was hit on the outskirts of Fallujah and went down in a controlled crash, landing southeast of 1/5’s lines. LtCol Byrne had organized his Weapons Company into mounted Mobile Assault Platoons to respond to emergencies. Byrne tapped a MAP commanded by 1/Lt Josh Glover to go to the aid of the downed helicopter. Glover had an easy rapport with his Marines and an instinct for navigation, a useful talent for a Quick Reaction Force. Glover—radio call sign Red Cloud—headed out with fifty-five Marines packed into nine Humvees.
After driving ten kilometers, the Hummers turned off the paved road and cut across farm fields, guided by the infrared spotlight from a circling AC-130. They reached the crash site after another special operations helicopter had evacuated the downed crew. The CH-53 lay crumbled in a wheat field, the front canopy smashed, the nose of a rocket-propelled grenade stuck through the windshield. The left pilot seat was smeared with blood. The Marines recovered some sensitive items—crypto gear, a tan knapsack, and a transmitter—and settled into a defensive perimeter for the night, with the AC-130 hovering above them.
In the morning mortar rounds started dropping in while many of the Marines were still sleeping. With shells bursting around them, the platoon drove hastily away with three wounded. In the sandy soil of wheat fields in spring blossom, the wheels of the Humvees were spinning out. To avoid bogging down, the drivers chose to speed along the tops of the irrigation ditches, where cows and water buffalo had packed down the mud.
As they jounced along, they were easy targets and began taking small-arms fire from the fields. A burst struck the radio in Sgt Cyparski’s lead gun truck, and not knowing which way to go, he turned south instead of west. Under fire from both sides, the column headed in the wrong direction, braking to a halt at a small pond. Glover got them turned around, handing Cyparski a Garmin GPS showing the route to get out.
Cyparski led them back through the gauntlet a second time. The insurgents had gathered by the dozens during the night, drawn like a magnet to the downed helicopter, the symbol of a triumph over America. This was the fourth chopper to have been brought down in the Fallujah area. As the vehicles drove past them, the insurgents fired, some standing up and spraying from the hip, some shooting RPGs, others staying hidden in the wheat fields, firing at the sound of the trucks.
Cyparski, in the lead with the .50 caliber on his truck, pounded through seven hundred rounds. Behind him the next gun truck in line ripped off a thousand rounds of 7.62mm machine-gun bullets. Then came the five highback Humvees, with Marines sitting on center benches facing outboard and firing their M16s. Two gun trucks brought up the rear. When the Mark 19 jammed in the last gun truck, Corporal Christopher Moss-Warrington and his crew unhooked the gun and replaced it with a .50 cal in under thirty seconds. The gun was barely operational when Moss saw two Iraqis firing at him from behind a dumptruck. He put thirty shells through the cab, hitting both men crouched on the other side.
“Die, bitches!” he yelled. “You wanna shoot at me? This ain’t no picnic!”
Hunched over the steering wheel, Lance Corporal Victor Didra was laughing at Moss when a man hopped out of the weeds, aiming an RPG directly at him. There was an immediate explosion and a cloud of dust—and Didra breathed again, thinking the insurgent had blown himself up. Then he glanced to his left and saw smoke where the grenade had burst. The man had missed from ten feet away.
Bouncing along at high speed, the Marines were shooting frantically in all directions. No one could hear over the whine of the engines and the roar of the guns. The Marines saw RPGs zipping past, felt concussions from near misses, sensed some hits, and dimly heard some grunts and screams. All were praying that no one fell out and no vehicle rolled over. Practically every tire had been hit, and strips of rubber were peeling off. If one Hummer stopped, they all stopped, and then it would be the Little Big Horn. It was a melee, both sides blazing away for ten minutes.
At one point Lance Corporal Charles Williams, shooting from Glover’s Humvee, counted nine RPG gunners out in the fields. The speeding Humvees were proving hard to hit. Not all of the excited RPG gunners missed, though. Private First Class Noah L. Boye, shooting from a highback, was hit by an RPG in his upper leg, ripping open a huge hole too large for pressure bandages. As the highback bounced along, the Marines frantically tried to stanch the flow of blood with a poncho liner. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Daniel Santiago, had told Boye more than once to stop playing his guitar at three in the morning, imitating Mötley Crüe and the Temptations, improvising weird lyrics, and enticing other Marines to join in. Life wasn’t, the platoon sergeant said, one long party. Boye would grin and tone it down—for about a week.
Once they hit the paved highway, Santiago screamed over the radio at the drivers to push faster on the bare rims. They had to get Boye to surgical. But no one could stanch the blood flowing from the terrible hole, and Boye died before they reached the aid station at the cloverleaf.
Nate Jensen, the foreign service officer assigned by the CPA to be on scene at Fallujah, was at the cloverleaf when Glover’s vehicles skidded in. The diplomat had driven to the aid station to collect evidence about foreign fighters and terrorists inside the city. Battalion 1/5 had found suicide vests, stashes of money, and foreign passports. A wounded Marine had a sniper’s bullet embedded in his armored vest. If it was foreign made, Jensen intended to show it to the Iraqi negotiators.
The Marines were smoldering at the costs of the “cease-fire” and resented the presence of a civilian who was part of the negotiations. Jensen understood their feelings and stayed off to one side as they pitched handfuls of spent brass and sopping bandages out of the vehicles.
Of the fifty-five Marines who went out, twenty-one were wounded. Seven had to be hospitalized. Lance Corporal Merado Alcaraz was wearing shatterproof glasses that saved his eyes when an RPG had exploded overhead, peppering his face. Shrapnel had grazed Glover’s face and scratched up his glasses, but his eyes too were fine. Glover sent to the rear three highbacks slippery with blood that needed to be washed down, along with several Marines who had to change out of their sticky cammies before the blood dried like a coat of paint.
While Glover was sorting things out, two amtracs were delivering supplies to a sniper position forward of Bravo Company’s lines, near the center of town. They took a wrong turn and bumped into a company-sized group of insurgents of all ages, from their teens to their fifties. The surprised insurgents reacted quickly, firing RPG rockets as the amtracs spun on their treads and raced east. A rocket punched through the armor of the rear trac, ripping a chunk out of the leg of the platoon commander, Lieutenant Christopher Ayers. The white-hot shell lodged in the engine, which burst into flames, trapping the crew chief, Corporal Kevin T. Kolm, a third-generation Marine. Kolm’s grandfather had fought on the island of Peleliu in World War II, and his father had fought in Vietnam.
The smoke-filled amtrac turned the wrong way, heading down what the Marines called Shithead Alley, a cluttered street leading west, deeper into the city. As the Marines desperately tried to extinguish the blaze and free Kolm, the crippled trac faltered to a halt. With the blaze spreading and dozens of insurgents running down the street to finish them off, the Marines on board poured out of the trac before its ammunition cooked off. They heard Kolm scream, but his hatch was locked, the flames were searing, and they had no way of prying the hot metal open.
Lieutenant Ayers pulled himself halfway out of the top hatch, only to have his armored vest snag, pinning him to the burning chassis. Staff Sergeant Ismail Sagredo and Lance Corporal Abraham McCarver grabbed Ayers by the vest and pulled with all their might, ripping the Velcro strip from the vest and spilling Ayers into their arms. Propping him up between them, they hobbled into a nearby house and set up a hasty defense, with snipers on the roof and Marines peering out the windows on all sides.
Close behind, the insurgents didn’t stop to make a plan. They rushed toward the house, and Sagredo shot the first man who ran into the courtyard, hitting him in the head. Marine snipers on the roof shot down two more in the street. The other Iraqis fell back, ducking into alleys and running around the back of the house, searching for an uncovered approach. Although seven of the sixteen Marines were wounded, Ayers and Sagredo had set up a strong defense. Radio communications were sketchy, but they knew the battalion wouldn’t leave them out there for long.
The fire inside the amtrac continued to blaze, the flames feeding on the electric wiring, the aluminum sides melting slowly from the top. Occasionally the insurgents fired another RPG rocket into the trac, an instinctive gesture, saying,
See what I’ve done.
It pained Sagredo to think of Kolm’s body being pummeled, but there was nothing he could do until help arrived.
Back at Battalion 1/5’s ops center, 1/Lt Glover’s Quick Reaction platoon had guzzled down bottles of Gatorade, stocked up on ammo, and patched the bullet holes in the radiators and hydraulic lines. Glover had six vehicles and thirty-seven Marines ready to go when Maj Farnum told him to mount up and find the missing amtrac.
Supported by four tanks, Glover’s platoon cut west to where the fight had been reported. No one was there, no Marines, no insurgents, and no civilians—only a cluttered, empty street and courtyards with shuttered and locked gates. Upon climbing to a rooftop, a Marine sniper team saw a column of thick black smoke about a kilometer to the southwest. The Marines hopped back into their vehicles and headed that way.
At the next block the street narrowed and the column continued in single file, Marines walking beside every vehicle, Glover’s Humvee in the lead. Within a minute he saw two men in tracksuits with RPGs run out of an alley thirty meters away and fire. Both rockets missed. The Marines shot the men and dragged the bodies out of the way of the tank treads. The tankers buttoned up their hatches, and within seconds the street erupted, men leaning out windows and peeking around walls to shoot for two seconds, then duck away.
“I know you can hear me,” Glover yelled over his radio, set to the frequency of the tank commanders. “I can’t hear a word with all this shooting going on. I’ll guide you. We’re all around you, so don’t fire your main guns.”
It was shortly after six in the evening, and the buildings cast long shadows across the dirty street, making it difficult to spot the insurgents. The Marines were shooting in all directions, the tanks joining in with their coaxial machine guns.
Behind Glover, Cyparski was following in his gun truck. An RPG rocket skidded along the ground and lodged in a rear tire without exploding. The radiator and the gear hub each took two bullets, fragments from the side mirror grazed Cyparski’s face, a case of MREs in the rear compartment was shredded, and the exhaust pipe was peppered. The windshield was not even scratched. Sitting in the front passenger seat with the .50 cal hammering away above his head, Cyparski began to feel he was immune to the bullets cracking by.
Glover’s Humvee was wheezing, having taken two bullets in the windshield and four in the radiator. While the driver, LCpl Williams, popped the hood to inspect the damage, Glover called Sgt Cyparski over to check their position. With bullets snapping by, Williams was stanching leaks in the radiator and Glover was poring over his map. Cyparski doubted the middle of the fire-swept street was the proper place to meet.
“Don’t worry,” Williams said as he slammed down the hood. “It’ll make it.”
While they were stopped, LCpl Didra drove his gun truck forward to resupply Glover with four cans of ammo. Not wanting his truck to be riddled, Didra then reversed at high speed. The rear door flung open, and Sergeant Louie Osborne was catapulted into the street, his helmet, rifle, ammunition, pack, and everything else in the backseat tumbling all over the macadam. The firing ceased momentarily as the insurgents as well as the Marines watched the furious sergeant grab for his rifle and Kevlar, screaming at Didra to come back. The firing resumed as Osborne hopped back in.