Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (29 page)

19

Captain Eric Garcia was at Task Force Tarawa’s command post, some sixty-five kilometers south of Nasiriyah, when he got the call to scramble. He was in the middle of a brief with air officers from the task force, getting updates on the weather, intel, and the combat situation. Reports were coming in that 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines were suffering casualties in Nasiriyah and needed a casevac immediately. Garcia had been briefed that the enemy threat was medium to high, and he was told to expect a hot LZ. He had already had one casevac mission canceled.
Now at last I can
get to the front line and play my part.
A few hours earlier, he had flown in from the USS
Saipan,
floating off Kuwait, to conduct a turnover with the existing casevac crews. They did three days in the field, then three days rest back on ship. It had been a quiet start to the war. Nothing much had come in since his ship had arrived in the Persian Gulf except for a few training accidents and minor civilian injuries. Garcia’s war had consisted of sitting for three days in a landing zone at Camp Ryan in Kuwait with nothing to do except keep fit, check and recheck his equipment, and go to briefings.

It was early afternoon when he lifted his twin rotor CH-46 helo off the ground. Nicknamed the “frog,” the CH-46 was a squat and bulbous, Vietnam-era Marine transport helicopter that could carry twelve personnel with equipment. They were robust and hardy helicopters. Many of them still displayed patches covering up bullet holes from Vietnam and Korea.

The sky was clear and visibility was over seven miles as he directed the helo over a parched landscape toward Nasiriyah, using Route 7 as a guide. All he could hear through his headphones was the throb of the twin rotors and calm radio chatter directing him into the city. To his right was another CH-46 as his wingman. They always flew in pairs. Out in front were Huey and Cobra gunships to escort him into the city. The CH-46 only carried defensive weapons. On each side of the helo sat a gunner manning a .50-caliber machine gun. Garcia was happy to have the two gunships to clear the way for them. Up ahead, a cloud of smoke rose into the sky as the artillery fired a round. When it exploded, it sent a thick black plume of smoke spiraling into the air from its target.
This is for real. There’s real
stuff going on here.

Garcia never quite understood how he’d got to be a Marine pilot. As a young kid, growing up in El Paso, Texas, he’d certainly had no burning ambition to fly planes or helicopters. Yes, he’d joined the Marine Corps reserves straight out of high school and had trained as an artilleryman, but he wasn’t planning to make a career out of it. What he really wanted to do was go to premed school. His parents, both born in Mexico, had become American citizens and were proud of what he was doing with his life. Then, somewhere along the way, he ran into a marine who suggested he try out for Officer Candidate School. Before he knew it, he was taking his flight exam. The Marine Corps paid for twenty-five hours flying time in a small commercial plane, and he was hooked. Flight training at the naval air station in Pensacola was something else. There he got to train in a T-34, a small, fixed-wing plane with a turbine engine. It was like going from a Volkswagen to a Ferrari. There was no turning back. He got his wings in December 1996, and he’d been flying CH-46s ever since. He was fond of the old workhorse. The helo was reaching the end of its life cycle and lately he’d been testing its replacement, the new Osprey with retractable rotors that allowed it to lift like a helo but fly at the speed of a fixed-wing plane. But the CH-46 would do for now. He knew its speed, range, and carrying limitations.
You can’t treat it like a race car, but it’s
steady and reliable.

“Parole 26, this is Parole 25.”

Garcia called up his wingman.

“When we get there, I want you to hold off just to the east.”

Ahead he could see the dusty mass of the labyrinthine low-rise buildings of Nasiriyah. Puffs of smoke billowed up between the buildings.
The
grunts are involved in some sort of firefight.
Marine pilots, especially the helicopter pilots, had a good relationship with the infantry on the ground. The grunts liked to complain that jet pilots were soft because they didn’t get down and dirty on the ground. They went easy on the helo pilots because they supported them directly in combat. Garcia got on the radio for an update on casualties. He knew for sure that they were going in for at least two marines. As he hovered south of the city, all his thoughts focused on his job: staying clear of the gunships that had escorted him in, listening to the radio, and making sure that he was aware of what was going on around him.
I’m going to get in there and do what I need to do.

In the rear of the CH-46, Navy corpsman Hospital Man 3rd Class Moses Gloria was giving his Black Hawk bag one last check. He’d been sent to Afghanistan right after 9/11 and had treated several combat injuries, so he knew what medical equipment he wanted to carry. He’d modified the bag he’d been given and added a few things. He’d taken Israeli bandages that he found more adaptable than the standard Vietnam- and Korea-vintage dressings. He also brought along QuikClot, a powder that speeded up the coagulation of blood.

“It’s just like pixie dust. Sprinkle it on a wound and it will stop the bleeding.”

That’s what they told him in training, but he hadn’t yet used it in combat. He tried to keep calm and said a bunch of Hail Marys to himself. He was amazed at how hyped up he was. When he’d returned from Afghanistan he’d thought of himself as a combat veteran who knew it all, even though he was only twenty-six. The other medics thought he was a jackass and full of it. The truth was, he was still suffering from the experience. When he got back, he found he put on loads of weight from eating crappy food, drinking too much beer, partying too much, chasing too many women. Now he knew it was his way of trying to forget about the bad things he’d seen. Even seeing those hollering and giggling girls having a good time in the mall used to upset him.
Jeez, they don’t know what life is
about. They shouldn’t laugh. There’s too much nasty stuff out there.
It was sometime before he realized that their carefree existence was the way of life he was trying to protect.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”

Looking out of the window, he could see the reassuring presence of a Cobra gunship, their escort. The marines had come up with the idea of casevac to save more lives. Medevac meant taking injured from one safe place to another. Casevac meant getting the wounded out of a war zone. When the call had first come through, there was talk of mass casualties. Now he heard Captain Garcia calling in over the radio to clarify the mission. Moses Gloria didn’t know whether the casualties were civilians, Brits, or marines. He just knew they were going into a hot LZ. They were going to land in an area where they would be targeted.

“. . . pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Moses Gloria had been born on an army base in Honolulu. His parents were from the Philippines, but his dad had joined the U.S. Navy and Gloria had spent most of his childhood traveling from base to base in Saudi, Italy, Greece—pretty much all over the world. He thought of Maryland as home because he’d got a scholarship to the University of Maryland in College Park. He had ambitions of being a lawyer or a politician, but the pressure of being the first in the family to go to school got to him. His grades started slipping, and he dropped out of school. Joining the Navy was the safest thing he knew. It was only when he got to corpsman training that he realized that he might not spend all his time in a clean white naval hospital on shore surrounded by pretty nurses. They’d showed him and other new recruits a video of the Vietnam movie,
Full Metal Jacket.

“See that guy who’s running around while marines are yelling out, ‘Doc’? Well, that’s you.”

The Marine Corps didn’t train its own combat medics. It took those trained by the Navy. Most Navy corpsmen like Gloria ended up being with the Marines, and most guys liked it. Gloria didn’t look like the sort of guy who would be happy running around a battlefield in the dirt. He was short and chubby. He looked as though he enjoyed the good things in life. Yet he found he got a lot more respect from the marines than from officers in the Navy. The grunts just loved their docs. They were held in special esteem. Gloria would have to put up with the grunts making fun of the rest of the Navy, but they treated him as one of their own.

Garcia was now a couple of kilometers south of the city. He saw the Cobra and the Huey go in with guns blazing to clear the ground and make sure it was safe. Apart from the two corpsmen in the rear, he had his copilot and two aircrew who manned the guns and loaded the equipment. They were all vulnerable. The CH-46 had very little armor. The cockpit might stop a round, but the main body of the helo was just thin metal. A round, or piece of metal traveling at speed, would penetrate right through it. In the cockpit, Garcia sat on a bulletproof seat and wore fragmentary armor, which would stop shrapnel but not a well-aimed shot. If an RPG hit one of the rotors it would desync them; they would hit each other and the helo would drop out of the sky.

He now had direct comms with Captain Jim Jones, the forward air controller on the ground, whose call sign was Koolaid.

“Parole 25, you are clear to land.”

Garcia’s body tensed. He was the lead as his wingman anchored toward the east. He flew over some palm groves, uneasy because he couldn’t see what was underneath. He reached the river, followed the bridge across, and saw vehicles maneuvering on the road and figures fighting it out in the streets below.

“Parole 25. Watch for the smoke.”

It was Koolaid, letting him know where to land. Instructions were coming over the radio thick and fast. Garcia focused on avoiding the accompanying Huey. He didn’t have time to feel scared. He saw the purple smoke and dropped onto an east-west road. It was pretty open, and he saw an ambulance off to the side of the road. Garcia brought the bird in. As soon as they landed, they started taking fire.

“Parole 25. You have to reposition.”

The FAC sounded calm. They were in a bad spot. He wanted to bring him back down, farther north along the north-south road. Garcia didn’t know it, but that was the road the marines were calling Ambush Alley.

“Roger that. Show me where you want me.”

“Popping smoke.”

One of the lessons the Marines had learned in Vietnam was that neither the ground forces nor the pilot would announce which color smoke was being popped. The Vietcong would listen in and pop the color called to try to lure the helo into an ambush.

“I see purple smoke.”

Garcia confirmed the color and came in for a second time. The smoke was billowing up between some power lines. It was too tight, so he looked for somewhere with more space. Right across the street he saw an alleyway.
It’s tight, but we can get the CH-46 in there.
As he came down, he saw marines forming a perimeter to protect the helo. Garcia circled the CH-46 and slowly dropped the bird into the middle of the alleyway between two six-foot-high walls.

As the helo came to a rest, he heard the AAVs around him directing suppressing fire toward two buildings to his right. His copilot, Captain Tod Schroeder, got jumpy, pulled out a 9 mm sidearm, and held it out of the window. Garcia thought it was kind of funny.
Why’s he doing that? We’ve
got two .50-cal machine guns on either side of us.

He monitored the chatter between the FAC and other aircraft. A huge dog was standing to the side of the road, taking it all in impassively. Garcia turned to Schroeder.

“It can’t be that bad if the dog is not freaking out.”

Just at that moment, a Huey flew overhead and the dog took off in fright.
So much for my theory.

Moses Gloria checked his medical gear one last time. In the rear of the helo, he had the litters prepared to bring in the casualties. He went through his ABCs. Airway, breathing, circulation. Make sure we have our
airways out, nasals and orals are reachable, bandages open and ready to
go, IVs set and flowing.

He heard the pilot and crew chiefs talking on the radio.

“Taking fire from eleven o’clock. Now from two o’clock.”

“Shall we fire back?”

“Hold fire until it’s direct fire.”

He prayed one last time and waited for the first casualties to arrive.

“Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

20

As the CH-46 came in to land, Captain Dyer, in
Dark Side,
was maneuvering his tank around the foot of the Euphrates Bridge. Next to him, his FAC, Major Hawkins, was busy talking on his handheld radio, running air down Ambush Alley and making sure that helos were still flying over the tanks stuck in the mud in the east of the city. Dyer had his own priority, though. A lone sniper had been shooting at him for the past thirty minutes and he had been unable to locate him.
I’ve got to find him. It’s only a matter of time before he gets me.

Each tank was working an area of about five hundred meters. Each time Dyer maneuvered his tank within his area to get in a better position to help the marines on the ground, the sniper seemed to seek him out.

Another round cracked past his ear.
That was close.
It sounded like a baseball bat striking concrete.
I’ve got to find that son of a bitch.
The bullet had come from one of the buildings on the east side of the street, but it was difficult to know which one.
He must be properly trained. He is located somewhere deep inside, hidden well away from the window.
He hoped he wasn’t firing from too high up, because his gun tube could only be elevated to a certain height. He scanned the windows for any signs of the sniper.

At that moment, his radio crackled with a transmission. The message was unusually loud and clear.

“This is Palehorse 3. We need assistance. We need tank support.”

Dyer was concerned. That was the call sign for a Charlie Company platoon commander. On battalion tac 1 you might hear the commander or his deputy, sometimes called the 6 or the 5, but not the 3, the platoon commander.
You get your ass handed to you if you are on the battalion net and
not supposed to be there. Something is badly wrong.

“Palehorse 3, this is Panzer 5. Roll to 158.”

Dyer wanted to speak to him on the company net so that they could get away from the cacophony of chatter on the battalion net.

“Panzer 5, this is Palehorse 3.”

“Roger. Send it.”

It was Lieutenant Seely, Charlie Company’s 3rd Platoon commander.

“We are cut off behind enemy lines and we are completely surrounded and we are taking casualties. We have a platoon cut off from the rest of the company and our forward observer is dead. Our FiST leader is wounded. I’ve tried Timberwolf, but I’m getting no response.”

“What’s your position?”

The radio went quiet while Seely was checking his grid coordinates. Just then, Dyer saw a muzzle flash from a window on the third story of a distant building on the right side of the road. At the same time, an AK round cracked past his ear.
There you are, you son of a bitch!
It was the sniper. He yelled at his gunner.

“Bell. Kill that son of a bitch. Colocate an MPAT round with that fucking sniper. Fire the main gun!”

Boom.

The round just blew a big hole in the window and the surrounding wall. The floor of the building where he’d seen the muzzle flash just disintegrated. The sniping stopped.

Dyer looked down to see Hawkins in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the turret. Unaware that Dyer was about to fire the main gun, Hawkins had been hanging out of the turret watching the helos make their gun run. The concussive force of the main gun had knocked him off his feet.
Oh my
God, he’s dead.
To Dyer’s relief, Hawkins stirred and threw him an accusatory stare.

Palehorse 3 came back on the radio with a grid reference. Dyer couldn’t believe it when he heard it.

“Say again.”

The grid reference would put them beyond the Saddam Canal Bridge.
That means Charlie is well north of where anyone can help them.

“Roger. Stand by.”

He didn’t want to leave the poor guy hanging on the radio, but he needed to talk to Major Peeples.

Near Dyer’s tank, as the search team looked through the wreckage of Charlie track 206 for survivors, Alpha’s marines saw another AAV speeding south through Ambush Alley into their position. The Alpha marines didn’t know it, but it was Charlie 207, the track driven by Corporal Brown, which had turned round to pick up Lieutenant Swantner and Sergeant Schaefer when they had jumped out of the deadlined track 201. Inside, Schaefer was shaking with fear and his blood was pumping with adrenaline. Of the five medevac tracks in the convoy that had set off together from the northern bridge, only two, 210 and 207, had made it safely back to the southern bridge.

Brown brought the track to a halt just north of the Euphrates Bridge. Schaefer jumped out, ecstatic to be out of the terrifying darkness. He didn’t know where to go or what to do. There were so many things he thought he should be doing that he didn’t know where to start. He saw one of Alpha’s tracks, bristling with antennae, parked off to the side of the road on the east side of the bridge. He presumed it was the C7 command track. He was hyped up and desperate.
I’ve got to get some help to Charlie. I’ve
got to let them know what a fucking mess it is up there.
He wrenched open the back hatch of the track, finally relieved to be in a position to help. A captain, closest to the door, stepped back in shock.
The poor guy thinks I’m
an Iraqi come to kill him.
Inside there was a bank of radios, boards with Post-it notes, and marines with headsets plotting positions on maps.

The words tumbled out. Schaefer explained who he was, about the fight that Charlie was having on the northern bridge, about the destroyed tracks in Ambush Alley, that the marines inside might have been killed while trying to get out. He said that Captain Wittnam and Lieutenant Tracy might also be dead.

The captain shook his head. He said there was too much going on at the Euphrates Bridge and that they didn’t have any one they could spare.

“There’s nothing we can do to help you right now.”

Schaefer was frustrated and disgusted. He ran over to one of the tanks,
Desert Knight,
and banged on the hatch. An officer popped his head out. It was Major Peeples.

“What do you need?”

Schaefer told him that Charlie Company was stranded on the northern bridge, that they were taking casualties and that they needed help.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Schaefer jumped off the tank and headed back to his track. He was in a world of his own, pissed off, manic with frustration and anger. It was a world that was crumbling around him. The Marine Corps had been his life since he was eighteen. It had given him a home and friends. He’d joined because he’d gotten tired of his parents, back home in Charleston, South Carolina, manipulating him and using their money to control him. He’d gone to a military academy, but it cost $16,000 a year, and they kept on saying that unless he got better grades, they would stop paying his fees. By the end of his freshman year, he was sick of them and decided to jack it in and join the Marines.
They walk taller and prouder than the other branches of
the military. Who wouldn’t want to join them?
As a tracker, he’d been sent to Bosnia and Egypt, but Iraq was the first time he’d seen combat. When his dad found out he was going, he was disparaging.

“Son, you’ll be nothing but a bullet catcher.”

His father’s comment had pissed him off at the time. But now he wondered whether the Marine Corps really was the secure home he’d thought it was. As he crossed the open street, he took fire from some Iraqis in a building off to the side. Instead of taking cover, he just stood there in the middle of the dusty street, punching out rounds from his M16. He was possessed, temporarily insane with hate and fury. Part of him knew that standing in the open like that was against everything he had ever been taught. But part of him didn’t care anymore.

Some marine snipers looked at him with astonishment as he made his way back to his track.

“Where are you going, Sergeant?”

“I’m going back up there.”

“We’ll go with you.”

Brown was waiting for him. Schaefer didn’t know whether Castleberry and the others from track 201 were alive or dead. He felt bad that he’d left them there. They were his marines to look after, and he’d abandoned them. Overwhelming feelings of guilt mixed with anger and bitterness at the way the marine captain had reacted when he’d asked for his help began to take over. He didn’t stop to think what a dangerous and stupid move it was to go back along Ambush Alley for a third time in a single AAV. Brown turned to Schaefer.

“I think we’re going to die.”

“Probably so.”

“Let’s do it.”

Major Peeples now knew that he was not the only one who was experiencing difficulty in communicating with the battalion staff. Captain Brooks was also finding it difficult to break through the chatter and give out important information. But at least his knowledge of the battlefield was becoming clearer. Captain Dyer had just informed him about the distress call he had received from Charlie on the northern bridge. It confirmed what the Charlie AAV platoon commander, Sergeant Schaefer, had just told him.
Charlie Company is in trouble, and the battalion commander doesn’t
know what the hell is going on.
Peeples had never been in combat before, but it had been drummed into him during training that sometimes the battalion command structure is not going to be able to control the fight. To reassert control of the battle, marines were trained to break down into squads or into the smallest unit of four-man fire teams. A large, chaotic battle can still be won by breaking it down into smaller fights. Ducking to avoid the incoming small-arms fire, Peeples ran over to Brooks.

“Charlie Company is having a rough time. They are taking a lot of casualties. They need some tanks up there.”

Peeples saw Brooks’s face drop. He knew Brooks didn’t want to lose those tanks. Since they’d arrived, they had begun to turn the tide.

“Are you going to take all four tanks?”

Peeples saw the distress on Brooks’s face.
His face looks as though I’ve
just kicked him in the nuts.

“I’m going to leave two here with you, and I’m going to take the other two north.”

He jumped back on
Desert Knight
and told the driver that they were going to drive straight through Ambush Alley.

“Here’s what you are going to do. You are going to pull back the cadillacs as far as possible and you are going to shoot down this road as fast as we can go. Do you understand?”

“Roger that, sir.”

Peeples called his XO, Scott Dyer, to follow him in
Dark Side.

“Captain Dyer, get your tank on the road and follow me.”

Dyer maneuvered his tank behind
Desert Knight.
He saw that the other two tanks from 3rd Platoon, Red 1 and Red 2, were not following them.

“Panzer 6, this is Panzer 5. I don’t see Red 1 moving. Is Red 1 coming?”

“Negative, I’m leaving Red here. I need to leave some tank support for Alpha Company. It’s just you and me.”

Dyer had seen the number of Iraqis that were running up and down Ambush Alley resupplying their ammo and getting into position. He’d seen the machine-gun and RPG positions along the road. He really didn’t want to be driving all the way up it. Another RPG whooshed past his head as they took off up Ambush Alley.
Oh shit. The major must have brass
balls. Huge brass balls.