My Men are My Heroes (19 page)

Officially military records say these operations “served to attrite the enemy, stimulate electronic communications which revealed enemy command and control nodes, and to determine enemy reinforcement response times and basic operational capabilities.”

More specifically their job was to scout for the company they were attached to and perform any other reconnaissance missions assigned: report intelligence information, seek out enemy snipers, and serve as overwatch for Marines on patrol to make sure the Iraqis didn't sneak up on them. An especially popular task was taking out Iraqi snipers if they got into contact.

Chad Cassidy was a corporal in H&S Co.'s scout-sniper platoon when the battalion geared up for Fallujah in November of 2004. His radio operator and spotter at al-Anbar province was Lance Corporal Russell Scott.

Cassidy and Scott were an inseparable team. Cassidy usually took the shots using a scoped, precision-built M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle that can kill a man 1,000 meters away. Cassidy's job was to keep in radio contact with headquarters, spot targets, and provide added security. He also took an occasional shot. During Fallujah the team saw plenty of action before both men were seriously wounded the third day by shrapnel. They were medevaced home to recover. After healing Cassidy decided
to try for an officer's commission. He attended Officer Basic Course at Quantico, Virginia, and earned a promotion to Second Lieutenant.

Scott's still-healing wounds remain quite painful, making being a Marine a lot tougher for him physically than it had been. He has been promoted to Corporal and is now helping to train Marines at Camp Lejeune's Special Operations Training Group. Scott plans to run out his military string, finish his interrupted college education, and get a graduate degree.

Cassidy and Scott are tight in a way only combat veterans can be. They fought together, got wounded together, and have survived their personal hells since by working it out together. In the spring of 2006 they met over breakfast at a hash house in Quantico, Virginia, talking to one another for the first time since they fought in Fallujah. Their sentences often drifted off before reaching the end—the listener simply nodding to indicate he already understood what the speaker had not yet said. They had perfected such silent communications in Iraq when talking any more than absolutely necessary might have gotten them killed. Watching and listening to their conversation it was easy to imagine them quiet and purposeful on a rooftop somewhere, waiting for the shot.

Both men were on the firing line almost daily during the month before the storm broke. 3/1's Cassidy, always quiet and controlled, says of his job in the time leading up to Fallujah: “It was a heavy and deadly responsibility, not some kind of twisted sport.” But they also knew they had a moral responsibility to use their skills as justly as the rules of warfare allowed. It was a dangerous job that marked the men for a bad end if the Iraqis ever caught them.

As a result, Scott says, “We tried really, really hard to fit in with the Grunts.” The signpost M40A1 rifle would be kept out of sight. “It was slung down the side,” Scott says. “Unless somebody was
really, really looking and had optics, they wouldn't see it.”

But sometimes scout-snipers were forced into the open during cordon-and-sweep operations. That put their two- and four-man teams at risk because of their small numbers. Cassidy says the best way to handle that situation was to swagger their way through towns and villages.

“We'd walk like we owned the fucking street,” he recalls. “The way we'd move our bodies, how we'd sweep, everything we did made it look like we were just daring somebody to come out in the street and do something.” It was a bluff that got them out of several potential jams.

Their M40A1 rifles were deadly weapons in their own right, but scout-snipers' ability to call in the rest of the regiment's assets—mortars, artillery, and both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft—made them even more powerful.

In addition Cassidy says, “We knew the area that we worked in better than any Americans.” Part of their scouting mission was to talk to the locals, many of whom spoke a little English. “We had conversations as best we could with Iraqi people,” he says. “We knew who they were, and sometimes we would look for a specific guy because he would be known to be involved in something.”

The intelligence that headquarters received from the scout-snipers about Fallujah was useful but it had its limitations. Scouts couldn't go into the city before the incursion—at least not without a serious fight—so the picture they provided of the insurgency was incomplete.

Fortunately there were several other sources of intelligence flowing back to 3/1 headquarters and a whole team of specialists whose job it was to gather and interpret it. Heading this Intelligence Section (S-2) was Captain McCormack, a former
Grunt who headed a group of more than 150 Marine technicians, mapmakers, photo interpreters, and radio intercept experts plying their black arts around al-Anbar province.

The input was diverse. In addition to the scout-snipers' intel, McCormack had human intelligence (HUMINT) coming out of Fallujah from spies. Some was good, some was flawed, and some was outright lies—the mix an intelligence officer expects from informants who are not particularly fond of those to whom they are giving information.

Army Special Forces and the supersecret Delta Force also had teams inside Fallujah that took huge risks to detect and identify high-value targets. That data had limitations: Bad guys move around a lot, and what was true today might be useless tomorrow.

The battalion also listened in on insurgents' cell phone conversations, although that traffic decreased dramatically after the power went off in the city and insurgents could no longer recharge phone batteries. The insurgents occasionally used radios and walkie-talkies, generally commercial sets that were easily identified and pinpointed. 3/1 listened to those conversations too.

Finally there were the visuals of real-time photographic and video downloads from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These ranged from 3-foot-long radio-controlled airplanes called Dragon Eyes, each carrying a tiny camera, to 450-pound, man-size Pioneers and huge high-tech, high-flying Global Hawks operated by the U.S. Air Force. All were orbiting Fallujah counting cars, people, mortars, insurgent cells, and men with weapons rolling in from Syria.

All sources revealed that there were a lot of bad guys arriving in Fallujah almost daily in the weeks before the attack—information that did not bode well for the 1st Marine Division Devil Dogs slowly circling the city like hungry wolves eyeing potential prey.

While the scouts were scouting and the snoopers were snooping the division leadership was driving from city to town and town to village selling the benefits of the Coalition occupation to the irascible Sunnis. Lieutenant Colonel Buhl headed up this effort and his mission was twofold: To soften the presence of the Marines with money, assistance, and medical care; and to seek out and destroy the Baathists and foreign fighters who had come to dominate the sheiks and imams. The latter were local leaders who might be willing to negotiate rather than fight if they weren't intimidated by the Baathists and foreign fighters who had taken control of al-Anbar province and Fallujah.

Buhl had to establish a relationship with these men, the same men who were trying to kill his Marines. One day he would be at the hospital at Camp Abu Ghraib visiting his wounded Marines and the next he would be breaking bread with the elders in the town where the Marines had been attacked. He couldn't allow his intense anger to overwhelm him. He constantly reminded himself he was doing it for his men.

Once a week McCormack joined Buhl in a city named Garma, where they met with the town council. McCormack quickly had to discern which of the many sheiks they met were important and which were merely window dressing.

“You could tell the wealthy guys because they were heavy,” McCormack remembers. “They could afford to eat, so they were fat. In fact it was food that got us in with these guys. Buhl started having these things catered; we started feeding these guys with battalion money. Then they began showing up. They would bring in their bodyguards with them. Buhl would be in there smiling and shaking hands. That was okay because these sheiks weren't going to talk to you, but their bodyguards would.

“At the end of the day intel isn't rocket science; it is who you know. Buhl [knew that and] embraced town councils. At one
meeting, a Shia meeting, he literally danced with a guy. He did good. We weren't getting attacked in these cities.”

Out on the range in al-Anbar province Kasal was only vaguely aware of the machinations of the officers and locals going on about him. He was focused on making his rounds and keeping up with his teams. They had already suffered some serious casualties.

That's because having wheels instead of boots for transportation had both rewards and costs for the Marines of Weapons Co. Their AO extended from Fallujah almost to Baghdad. Weapons Co. had sections with every line company and two platoons of 81mm mortarmen advising Delta and India companies of the Iraqi National Guard. That meant the commanders had to travel the roads where IEDs, ambushes, and normal road hazards all presented dangers to the Marines in the Humvees.

Their vehicles weren't armored with the latest armor. Some of them didn't have any at all, some had bolt-on doors and other ad hoc setups, and a few had the upscale stuff just arriving in Iraq. With or without armor the Weapons Co. Humvees were still high-value support and targets of opportunity because of their impressive weapons. Everybody likes firepower and Weapons Co. offered it all.

3/1's first serious casualties were the result of an IED.

“Lance Corporal Paine and Gunnery Sergeant Christian Wade and their turret gunner were out on patrol and ran over a mine,” Kasal remembers. The explosion blew the front off the Humvee and effectively destroyed what remained. All the men riding in it were hurt. “Paine took the brunt of it and he was our first serious casualty,” Kasal says. “The explosion shattered his leg. He is up and around doing fine now. Gunny Wade had a
concussion; the turret gunner got thrown out of the vehicle and also had a concussion.”

In spite of the concussion that initially left him loopy Wade remembers the incident vividly “We were going on a standard night patrol that ended at about 5:30 a.m.,” he says. “We were all wearing night vision. We were on the road we called Mobile, a main highway that ran from Baghdad to Syria. We stopped in Abu Ghraib Prison to pick up some ice before going to our firm base—it was very hot. While we were there I talked to the section leader I was attached to. He said he knew a new shortcut so we headed back down the Mobile and tried his new shortcut.

“On the way we had to go through a fjord at a creek. It had high walls and you had to go through it. We got hit by double-stacked 5-inch-diameter PVC pipes about a foot long that were buried right where the vehicles had to cross over. They were filled with SEMTEC [an Eastern-Bloc plastique explosive] or something like it, all water-proofed with plastic bags. It was wired together with red British-style detonator cord.

“I think it counted our vehicles. It was a pressure fuse we had to drive over and it waited for the second or third vehicle before it exploded. I know what it was made from because only one deck detonated and I saw the other one.”

Wade is, among other things, a weapons expert. This particular IED told him there were some very sophisticated terrorists in the neighborhood. “These were an experienced group,” he says. “They knew our tactics—knew that the old guys usually rode in the second or third vehicle and knew where to place the device to do maximum damage. They had this one set to wait for the following vehicles.”

The attack on Wade's vehicle forever changed the trust he was trying to develop with al-Anbar's defiant citizens. It hardened the rest of the men in Weapons Co. too, Kasal says. The Marines were
now more likely to shoot instead of watch a few seconds longer when something bad started happening.

“When we were doing road security we had weapons pointing down every road. If a car would all of a sudden turn right and head toward us, it would have got lit up before it made 10 feet,” Kasal says.

Such quick-responding trigger fingers averted disaster for the Marines when an Iraqi died in a hail of gunfire for trying to ram a Weapons Co. Humvee. Pictures of the incident show a small car burned black with an equally destroyed human body next to it. Whatever possessed the man to try to ram an armed vehicle full of Marines disappeared in the fireball that engulfed him.

“They opened up on it with M16s, 9 mils, and ultimately a .50 cal,” Kasal says. “It not only stopped the car and shot the guy, but it lit the car on fire. They were using incendiary bullets.”

Buhl remembers many of the roadblock shootings with a touch of sadness. He thinks that some of them could have been prevented through better communication with the Iraqis because simple misunderstanding was often the culprit.

“Here in America we simply assume most people can see, hear, read, and comprehend while driving cars that have most of their normal safety functions intact,” Buhl says. “We assume our brakes work and someone driving a car knows how to do it. It wasn't important to the Iraqis. They were trying to survive. The Iraqis don't always see too well, they have no glasses, and many are illiterate, and they are dazed and confused and bad things happened, They didn't always understand the signs because they couldn't read.”