Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (13 page)

3

To the north and east of Alpha’s position, on the east side of Ambush Alley, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski was trying to deal with the chaos unleashed by so many vehicles floundering in the mud bog. Some marines were already out of their vehicles, waist deep in mud, trying to attach towropes. Others were lying in small depressions in the ground, behind mounds, or against walls providing the tankers and trackers with some protection so they could get on with their job. Keeping well away from the mud bog, Grabowski ran to the rear hatch of the C7, which was already half submerged. He couldn’t get too close. Standing a couple of meters away from it, he looked into the rear hatch where his fire support–coordination center team was frantically working away at calling in air support, mortar, and artillery fire for the battalion. He yelled into the back of the track.

“Have you got comms?”

His air officer made a slashing movement with his hand.

“Sir, I haven’t had comms since we entered the city.”

“Well, keep working on it.”

The C7 was pushed up against a two-story house. Grabowski wondered whether that was masking transmissions from the PRC-119 radio. It worked on line of sight and was limited to a range of twenty-five kilometers. Any obstructions could block the transmission. The area was also crisscrossed with overhead high-voltage power lines. He wondered whether that was causing electromagnetic interference with the high frequencies of their VHF radios. Thankfully, no one had yet suffered an electric shock from their antennas hitting the power lines. All units had been told to get off the radio when they got close to high-tension lines.

How are we going to get those tanks out?
Grabowski knew that the tank company’s combat trains had some M88 tank retrievers with them. Doctrinally, the 88s follow in trace of the tank company, but because one of the 88s was towing a broken tank, Grabowski had ordered the combat trains to the rear so that they wouldn’t slow the battalion’s movement. Now he realized that they were dozens of kilometers from where they needed to be. He got on the radio to Captain William Blanchard, the AAV company commander. Until he got those 88s up, he couldn’t get those tanks out.
If I
don’t get those tanks out, I can’t push forward.

There were now some seven vehicles floundering in the mud. As one of the tracks tried to pull another track free, it also became caught. One of the CAAT Humvees tried to ram another of the Humvees to push it out. It knocked the Humvee free, only to sink into the mud bog itself. A group of Iraqi civilians stood on their doorstoops and watched the marines helplessly running around trying to free the tanks, Humvees, and tracks.

Staff Sergeant Harrell, the CVS pharmacy shift manager, had maneuvered his tank close enough to Staff Sergeant Insko’s tank,
Death Mobile,
to reach it with one of his inch-and-a-quarter-thick steel tow cables. He jumped off his tank, ran around to the rear of Insko’s tank, and dug away at the mud with his hands in an attempt to get to the attachment points. Just when he thought he could attach the cable, the mud flowed back into the space he had just cleared. Two attempts ended with broken cables and hooks. Finally, he managed to connect one end of the cable to the front of his tank and the other to the rear of Insko’s tank. Slowly, his driver reversed away from the mud and pulled Insko’s tank clear. Now free from the bog, Staff Sergeant Insko maneuvered
Death Mobile
around a corner to support the rest of the platoon. He had nearly reached Staff Sergeant Dillon’s tank when Insko felt
Death Mobile
jolt. Once again, his tank slowly started to sink back in the mud.

Nothing was going right. Harrell kept back a wave of panic.
We’re
stranded.
The sound of the helicopters flying overhead, pushing back the encroaching Iraqis, reassured him. The
boom
of a main tank round reverberated around the maze of streets and alleys. It was a warning shot to any enemy that tried to get too close.

Corporal Neville Welch, the fire team leader with Bravo Company, now had a clearer vision of the layout of the eastern part of the city. It was set out in a grid pattern of sorts. He’d begun to recognize which streets were likely to be dead ends. His squad leader had ordered him to take his fire team and start expanding the perimeter farther into the city to keep the Iraqi fighters away from the mired tanks. Using walls and vehicles as cover, his four-man team gradually pushed farther out from the tanks, keeping a couple of meters apart so they didn’t provide an easy target for the Iraqis shooting at them from the roofs and windows. The marines were taught to turn defense into offense.
The harder you hit the enemy on the battlefield,
the more protection you will have. Catch the enemy off guard and you’ll
lessen his chances of interfering with what you want to do.

“Jones. Get your head out of your ass.”

He tried to keep his team alert. None of them had slept much, and he was aware that he had to keep talking to them, encouraging them, and watching for anyone lagging behind.

“Nguyen. Keep up and stay close.”

He demanded fire discipline. The Iraqis were firing at random. He kept his shots down to ten to twelve rounds per minute. He only squeezed the trigger when he had selected his target. Exceeding that rate was a waste of ammo.

Slowly, some order appeared out of the chaos. Fire teams were working within their squads, and soon the squads were working within their platoons.

“First Squad, secure the right flank. Second Squad, you take the rear. Third Squad, you take the left flank.”

The barrage of rounds that had greeted them when they first arrived was calming down. Welch and the other infantry marines had pushed the security perimeter well away from the tanks and kept any Iraqi fighters at bay. Crouched behind a wall, M16s and M203 grenade launchers pointing at windows and roofs, Welch and his fire team maintained a precarious peace and waited for their squad leader to give them their next order.

4

As Bravo Company and Alpha Company had moved out to cross the bridge, Charlie’s twelve tracks and three Humvees had pulled out from the fields and onto the road behind them. At the head of the column were the three tracks of Second Lieutenant Mike Seely’s 3rd Platoon, followed by Captain Wittnam and Lieutenant Tracy in the command track with Lieutenant Reid and the fire support team’s track just behind. First and 2nd Platoons followed the FiST track with the Hummers, one equipped with Avenger missiles for air defense, and the first sergeant’s medevac track brought up the rear. The original plan called for Charlie to keep close to Bravo Company so that they, too, were protected by the tank platoon assigned to Bravo. But the last-minute change of order meant that Alpha Company was sandwiched between the two companies, leaving Charlie exposed at the rear.

In back of track 201, sixth in line, Private First Class Casey Robinson still wasn’t sure where they were going.
That’s the trouble with being a grunt.
Nobody tells you anything.
Information was handed out on a need-to-know basis.
Apparently I don’t need to know.
When he joined the USMC, he thought they would be treated well, given some respect, but after two years he knew that as a grunt, he was the lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel. Many of his brothers in arms were from broken homes, had police records, and were condemned to live out shitty little lives. Some of them were aware, deep inside, that joining the marines was their chance to make something of their lives. Others didn’t want to make it. Robinson was one of those who didn’t yet know. He knew he performed excellently in the field. But there was something in him that wanted to destroy and rebel against all he’d achieved. He was proud of being a grunt, proud of being hard, proud of being a rebel, proud of getting into bar fights. Every fight he’d been in was a badge of honor. Only grunts understood. The POGUES didn’t have the balls.

He adjusted the barrel of his squad automatic weapon, pointing the M249 out toward the fields on the west side of the road. With him, pulling air security from the hatch, was his team leader, Corporal Wentzel. All the other marines were inside the track, keeping their heads down.

He knew that the other companies had set off some minutes before, and he’d seen the CAAT vehicles roll ahead of them. He expected to see them in the distance. But they had all taken off so fast that all he could see ahead was an open road.

He tried to listen to the snatches of information on the radio.

“Sitrep . . . squad-size element . . . out in the open, west of main MSR. Small arms. Basic infantry.”

“Receiving mortar fire from inside the city.”

“Gunfire one hundred meters north of railway bridge. West of MSR.”

So much information was being passed over the net that he had trouble taking it in. He wasn’t a radio operator, but he could tell that there was too much talking on the radio. As the amtracks sped toward the railway bridge, he noticed a new urgency to the radio transmissions.
Something bad is
going o f.
Without knowing how, he picked up from the transmissions that things were beginning to spin out of control. There was very little he could do. He didn’t know much more than that he was in Iraq and the marines were on their way to Baghdad. The higher-ups said they were there to liberate the Iraqi people. But Private First Class Robinson didn’t give a shit about that. He would struggle to write a high school essay about Iraq or its people. He hadn’t a clue about Shias and Sunnis. All he cared about right now was getting out of the track, firing his weapon, and staying alive.

Ahead of him, to the side of the highway, he saw the charred, smoking hulks of some trucks. Shards of glass from the peppered windshields littered the highway; a mangled gas mask, a lone helmet, and some spent ammo lay in pools of blood. Robinson had no idea that they were U.S. Army trucks. Others in the tracks who had heard the radio transmissions knew exactly whose trucks they were.

“Get up here and look what happened to the friggin’ Army.”

Twenty marines fought to pop their heads out of the hatches. They let out a collective whistle.

“The Army fucked up again.”

They laughed uneasily.

Captain Wittnam, in the fourth track from the front, also saw the railway bridge and, at its foot, the burned-out 507th Army vehicles.
Whoa. They’ve
had a tough time.
He thought about telling his platoon commanders more of what he knew of the 507th, but he didn’t want to distract them. He wanted his men to think that things were going well. He needed them focused on their mission to take the bridges. Panic was a virus that replicated itself at speed. Under certain conditions, one small setback can quickly accelerate into a military disaster. That was not going to happen with his company.

One by one, as the Charlie AAVs pushed northward, marines posting air security saw the burned-up smoking vehicles. Lieutenant Reid, in the fifth track, looked over his shoulder and saw some crashed Humvees and two U.S. Army trucks with flames pouring out of the trailers. What the fuck?

He got Lieutenant Pokorney on the radio.

“Fred, do you see that? Holy shit, man, that’s an Army truck. What the fuck is going on?”

He looked in disbelief at the windshields riddled with bullet holes and the flames licking the canvas covers. He couldn’t resist taking out his camera and snapping a couple of pictures.

At the rear of the column in track 211, Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk and the rest of 3rd Platoon were celebrating Lance Corporal James Prince’s birthday. Quirk thought he was a goofy sort of guy, but it was good fun singing to him, and everybody in the track joined in a tuneless chorus.

“Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Prince . . .”

It was something to do. They’d given up playing cards inside the track because it was too crowded. They couldn’t play outside because there was too much wind blowing around. They had a few porno mags floating around, but they’d all read them five or six times and were sick of them. Anyway, now that they were moving, rather than sitting in tents in Kuwait with nothing to do, they were all numb to the thrill of flicking through pages of naked girls or reading out the porno stories to each other. Quirk hadn’t had sex for three months. He’d been seeing a girl on and off for ten years, and just before he’d gone to Iraq he’d traveled to New York to spend the night with her in her apartment in the Bronx. It was sort of a loose relationship, but they felt really comfortable with each other. She’d already written to him, but each time he started a letter to send back to her he’d crumpled it up. He could never quite put down what he really wanted to tell her. Sometimes he felt there was too much to say. Other times he felt there wasn’t enough.

Marines around him took a sharp intake of breath. Thomas Quirk looked up at the commotion. Ahead of him he saw the burned-up 507th convoy. Marines were crawling all over the vehicles, trying to rescue some of the equipment, pulling off machine guns and spare parts before the flames got too high. Some vehicles were already lost.
My God. The Army
fucked up badly.
But the charred and mangled Army vehicles were too much to take in. There was too much destruction, too much blood on the road.
This place is fucked up.
It didn’t click that this was a real situation, that this was here and now.
It’s like seeing your name on a winning lottery
ticket and having to look at it three times before you are like, Oh okay. I
guess this is for real.

Quirk couldn’t quell the agitation he was feeling. He started praying. The day had been so exhilarating and his adrenaline was pumping so madly that his head had begun to spin.

“Dear Lord, give me strength for the day ahead . . .”

He’d often prayed to himself during training exercises, to get through the next drill, to complete the next run.

“. . . give me a calm heart and clear mind . . .”

Toward the front of the column, First Lieutenant Conor Tracy, in the gunner’s hatch of track 204, was just coming up to the railroad bridge when he heard Mike Seely of 3rd Platoon on the company net.

“This is Palehorse 3. Be advised that we’ve got something wrong with our track. We’re trying to fix it. If it’s not fixed in three minutes, we’re going to execute the bump plan.”

Track 209 was down. Tracy was the AAV platoon commander. Those tracks were his responsibility. He wanted all his tracks with him, but he knew that he couldn’t hold up the attack. If he didn’t fix 209, he would have to “bump” the marines from that track into some of the other tracks. The whole of Charlie Company halted while AAV crewmen tried to get it going again. Each time they thought they’d sorted the problem out, it would break down again.
What are we going to do now with track 209?
He glanced around at the strange situation in which he found himself: trying to fix a track on a dusty highway in Iraq.
What a poor, sad place this is.
He was reminded of his first impressions of Iraq when he crossed over from Kuwait. The first sign of life he’d seen were a few miserable mud huts with a scrawny, weather-beaten bedouin crouched on his heels, tending a scraggly looking herd of goats.

“Hey, Palehorse 6, this is Palehorse 3, we’ve got to execute our bump plan.”

Twenty Marines from the deadlined track 209 dismounted and clambered into tracks 210 and 211. Quirk wasn’t pleased. His track, 211, was already pretty full. He and nine other marines clambered out of the hatch and onto the roof of the track to make room for the new marines. He took out a can of Copenhagen to take a wad of tobacco.
We’re just about to go
into the city. Maybe it’s not such a good idea.
Copenhagen tobacco was being traded among the marines for $40 a can. He didn’t want to lose it.

In the delay to get 3rd Platoon going again, 1st Platoon had taken the lead. Captain Wittnam’s voice came back over the company net.

“All Palehorse units, be advised that Palehorse 1 will take the lead. I say again, Palehorse 1 will take up the lead.”

Charlie Company headed toward the Euphrates in a different configuration from the original plan. They were down to eleven tracks with 1st Platoon in the lead, followed by 2nd and 3rd Platoons, with the first sergeant’s medevac track and three Humvees bringing up the rear. This configuration meant that Private First Class Casey Robinson, in track 201, was at the very front of the column. There were some twenty other marines with him, including Corporal Jake Worthington, Corporal John Wentzel, Sergeant William Schaefer in the AAV commander’s hatch manning the Mark 19 and the .50 cal, and Lieutenant Scott Swantner in the troop commander’s hatch. From his position posting air security through one of the AAV’s open hatches, Robinson could just make out 201’s driver, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry. Even though Castleberry was a tracker, Robinson enjoyed his company. He had a mad, chaotic irreverence about him that he could relate to. He found some of the other trackers too geeky, too hung up on the boring mechanics of their vehicles.
Castleberry
is a good guy. We’ll look out for each other.

Clutching the bow-shaped steering wheel of 201, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry was too preoccupied to think of anything except catching up with the rest of the battalion. He’d seen Alpha’s and Bravo’s tracks disappear off into the distance, and he knew that he had to stay close to them. But the breakdown of 209 had delayed them. Castleberry had the driver’s hatch open at a thirty-degree angle so he could look through it rather than through the bulletproof vision block, which limited his visibility. He gunned the track and set off at full speed toward the Euphrates Bridge. On one side of the road he saw the turret of an Iraqi T-55 tank. The marines ahead seemed to have taken care of it because it was pretty beaten up.
Holy moly.
He thanked God that he hadn’t been in front. All through training it had been drummed into him what damage a T-55 could do to his vulnerable track and its thin aluminum skin.

Castleberry was from Mount Vernon, near Seattle, Washington. He had a reputation among his fellow trackers of being unpredictable, a bit of a rebel. It probably had something to do with his childhood. As a kid, he’d had a strained relationship with his parents, and at sixteen he’d moved out to live with a friend. His mother was superreligious. His dad, it seemed to him, hated God and spent most of his time fishing and doing his own thing. So Castleberry took off by himself. He’d been thrown out of school so many times for missing classes and for getting into fights that the state system wouldn’t have him back. That’s how he ended up in and out of jail.
I was a
punk kid who thought the most important thing was to be cool.
Now, looking back, he could see what an asshole he was.
I would have been fed up
with myself.
He didn’t really know how it happened, but suddenly he stopped smoking dope, got a job, and put himself through a private high school to get a diploma. He began to have civil conversations with his parents and got a succession of well-paid jobs. Not as well paid as his brother, though. He was always quite jealous of his brother. His brother dyed his hair green and wore sandals and hippie shirts, but he still managed to earn very good money working at Microsoft. Edward Castleberry was much more into manual jobs. He was working for $27.50 an hour laying cables in the Seafirst skyscraper in Seattle when someone shouted to him to get down from the building because a plane had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York. He’d taken the elevator down to the lobby to see what the fuss was about. Then, on the TV monitors, he saw the second plane crash into the tower. It spurred him into action. The next day, he went to the Marine Corps recruiting station and signed on. It took him a month to leave for recruit training because of his criminal history. There was nothing that serious: a few misdemeanor charges and one felony for breaking and entering. He’d had to go to the Military Entrance Processing Center and talk to the Marine colonel there to convince him. He couldn’t remember what he’d said, but it had worked. On October 15, he was in San Diego at recruit training. That was a blast. Most of the time he got into trouble for laughing. He’d never met so many stupid people before he joined the Marine Corps.
I don’t know what sort of fucked-up education
they had, but they were retards.
Some of them were so scared of asking the drill instructor if they could go to the bathroom that they would piss their pants. That’s what would set him off.