My Men are My Heroes (25 page)

At night the Marines holed up somewhere relatively safe, posted sentries and observation posts, and tried to get some sleep. The FACs kept busy and so did the men manning the observation posts (OPs). Only the snipers and Special Forces snatch teams were on the prowl.

That didn't mean nighttime brought solace to the insurgents. American night-vision technology owned the darkness. Long after the sun went down Basher's unblinking eye could detect the heat of an insurgent's body against the background of a cooling building or the darkest street. On the operator's targeting screens the insurgents looked like ghosts slinking across the dark terrain. The discovery brought their almost immediate destruction.

The jihadists called Basher the “Finger of God.” During negotiations with the Coalition during the first Fallujah fight, one of the insurgency's non-negotiable demands was to end the AC130 overflights. Once night fell the jihadists were locked into a fixed position for the duration of the darkness unless they wanted to risk obliteration.

Some, however, were willing to take the risk and Marines in OPs around the battalion area observed movement as the insurgents tried to regroup. PUC Gallogly and the other FACs were especially busy on D+3, calling in 14 AC-130 air strikes
against targets the battalion was assigned to take out the next day.

November 10 was also the first night Landing Zone North Penn Station, located with the battalion Forward Command Operations Center (COC) at the train station, opened for business.

PUC spent a lot of time in his blue boxers over the next four nights; Kasal would not have been amused. The casualty rate was soaring as the Marines encountered stiffer and stiffer resistance, and PUC often didn't have time to get into his pants.

“We had urgent Casualty Evacuations [CASEVACs] coming in frequently,” PUC remembers. The Marines used CH-46 “Sea Knight” twin-rotor helicopters and occasionally smaller Hueys to fly their wounded from the battlefield. For the next four days any bird going in to pick up an urgent casualty flew through a gauntlet of enemy fire from the northern portion of the city.

“The Hueys and Cobras would escort them in,” PUC says. “I would hear that we had urgent casualties being rushed to the BAS [Battalion Aid Station] in a Humvee or an M-113 armored ambulance the 2/7 Cav had loaned us. I will never forget seeing a 113 [M-l13 armored personnel carrier] driving about 55 miles per hour flying into the train station. It would come sliding into the station on the concrete and drop its ramp.

“We never allowed one of these casualties to wait. As soon as we heard of an urgent there was a marriage between the arriving helicopter and the casualty. At the BAS they would try to stabilize the injured Marine. CPO [Chief Petty Officer] Frank Dominguez, the senior Navy corpsman, saved dozens and dozens of lives. He was phenomenal!”

Nonetheless, PUC says, “Some of the urgents would die. It was heartbreaking sometimes.”

Back in the streets, alleys, courtyards, and houses of Fallujah, the Marines were encountering two kinds of enemy, Kasal recalls.

The first kind were classic guerilla warriors taking a page from Mao and Geromino, Giap and Crazy Horse. They tried to engage the Marines at a time and place of their choosing, then slip away.

Most of these were local Iraqis. Almost chimerically they would disappear from sight through the maze of strongpoints into bleak warrens of refuge in the rubble or underground into craftily hidden tunnels. Then they would pop up out of nowhere, pray and spray down the street, and disappear into another hole.

The second kind of enemy was scarier: self-anointed martyrs who wanted to die at the hands of Marines after a long, slow digging-out process. Their aim was to find a strong position where they could kill as many Marines as possible before they died. They were reminiscent of the Japanese at Iwo Jima and Saipan, or more recently the Afghan and Chechen guerilla mujahedin who badly abused the Russians in Afghanistan and Grozny, the capital of the Republic of Chechnya.

These suicide fighters waited in barricaded homes, shops, and factories that they had prepared for their final stands. Negotiations were pointless and seldom sought in the no-quarter life-or-death struggle in which the young men of the Thundering Third found themselves. It quickly became obvious that the martyrs had no intention of surrendering, intending to fight until they were dead. Kasal says it didn't take any longer for the young Marines to discover they were in the fight of their lives.

In the narrow confines of the old section of Fallujah MK-19s and TOWs were hard to use because they needed space to arm and safely deploy. The fighting was close—sometimes only 15 or 20 meters separated antagonists firing RPGs, hand grenades,
emplaced machine guns, and automatic weapons from one another. Sometimes the fighting was so close that blood from both sides mingled on the floors and walls. Victors and vanquished would be covered in each other's blood. There have been few fights like it in the annals of the Corps.

Occasionally a self-declared Iraqi martyr would surrender, but Kasal says the foreign fighters almost never did. Among them were Saudis, Syrians, Georgians, Pakistanis, and Afghans. Before it was over the Marines captured insurgents from 16 countries.

There were clues that Chechens were also there. Kasal remembers seeing a knitted, multicolored beanie that Chechens liked to wear lying on the ground outside a house that had been flattened. Other Marines reported similar finds. Whoever they were, the light-skinned jihadists inside the buildings didn't quit until they were exterminated. Even then they sometimes had the temerity to toss out a grenade with their last gasp.

Although the insurgents did not deploy tube artillery in Fallujah they made liberal use of free-flight rockets, mortars, and RPGs. They lobbed these at the attacking Marines in much the same way mortars and artillery shells are launched. The Marines retaliated with air strikes, helicopter assaults, and precision-guided munitions that picked out strongpoints and obliterated them and anyone inside.

One of the Marines' favorite methods of announcing themselves to insurgents hiding in a structure was to “keyhole” the house before making their entrance. They did it using two Shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon (SMAW) rockets. The first one, containing a conventional warhead, would blow a small hole in the wall. It was followed by a second thermobaric SMAW round, correctly identified as the shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon-novel explosive (SMAW-NE),
intended to kill anybody inside and collapse the roof on the rare survivor.

Thermobaric weapons distinguish themselves from more conventional weapons by their mind-boggling explosions, created using atmospheric oxygen instead of carrying an oxidizer in their explosives. In laymen's terms the warhead uses all the available oxygen in the area to enhance the explosion. The largest variant of the warhead in the U.S. inventory is the fearsome GBU-43/B massive ordnance air blast bomb (MOAB), a 21,000-pound GPS-guided bomb nicknamed the “Mother Of All Bombs.”

The young Marines in 3/1 delighted in calling the SMAW-NE a “mini-nuke” because it could flatten the building the enemy was in, eliminating the need for the Marines to dig them out. As Gunner Wade says, they “worked quite satisfactorily.”

The gunners in the line companies eventually used up the battalion's supply of SMAW-NE and had to rely on ordinary high-explosive rounds to clear rooms. After the roof crashed in riflemen would summon the Marines' Israeli-built armored bulldozers to mash the structure into the ground.

Keyholing was not exactly what higher headquarters had in mind when it promulgated the ROE for Fallujah, Buhl acknowledges. According to its tenets someone inside a building had to display hostile intent before the Marines could engage him.

When the rules were followed precisely they often put the young Marines taking the risks at a significant disadvantage, so they were quietly ignored. Once the fighting began in earnest, Mitchell says, the Marines preferred facing disciplinary action to getting shot in the face while looking around corners for the enemy.

Whenever the Marines suspected an insurgent was holed up in a house they initiated their visit with a SMAW, a satchel charge, or a grenade. Buhl says he was well aware of the
challenges imposed by the ROE, and in this tactical situation he considered them a guide rather than a mandate. Buhl even invited the Regimental Judge Advocate up to the front lines to get a first-hand look at the tactics the enemy was using and how the Marines had adapted to defeat them.

“The correct criterion is that you confirm you have an enemy presence in a structure either by physical observation or by receiving fire—troops in contact,” Buhl explains. “Well, it is impossible when people are waiting for you quietly. They did not give their positions away in most cases. They waited until Marines physically entered a structure before they would fire on them.

“At this point, we were able to use all of the powerful combined arms at our disposal with only enemy to our front. This is when the Thundering Third became the most lethal infantry battalion on the earth. We tried to do it carefully. But from commanders right down to that small-unit leader, that young corporal or lance corporal leading a fire team who thought he needed to throw a grenade into a room before he entered or fire weapons through a house before he sent his people in—that was his prerogative.”

It truly was a dirty war and Weapons Co. Marines were in the thick of it. They fired more than 200 TOWs and dozens of Javelins before the fight concluded. Both weapons are very expensive and always in short supply so shooting them randomly was not an option. The Marines had to wait for permission before they let one rip.

“The Marines on the ground would request to shoot from the local commander,” Kasal says. “Now if it was a target of opportunity—an Iraqi tank pops out of nowhere—the TOW gunner is going to shoot automatically. But if it were a building or something like that the local commander would give the authorization to fire.”

That authorization could come from one of the section leaders, the platoon commander, or the company commander responsible for the TOW, Kasal says. Someone had to determine whether there were soldiers or Marines on the ground nearby and if a particular building was a safe target.

“When you shoot a building with an M16 it isn't going to hurt anything,” Kasal explains. “When you shoot a building with a TOW you are going to hurt a lot of people. So you had to be real careful and make sure there were no friendlies inside.”

One weapon the jihadists never seemed to get a handle on was the Marines' Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a $10,000 flying camera that instantly fed live pictures back to the COC. The battalion had six of them, giving the CO and Major Griffin (S-3) an unprecedented view of their enemy's dispositions.

The intel Marines could store single pictures or watch events unfold in real time from downloaded computer images. The UAV's optics were capable of taking a close look at an insurgent strongpoint. The UAV operators could occasionally even coerce the insurgents into taking a shot at the flying cameras. Then Marines could confirm the enemy's position. It was costly in airplanes and after a while the practice ceased; but the video was amazing, Buhl recalls.

Often the Marines used the intelligence gleaned from a Dragon Eye to direct air strikes onto targets. PUC says a good formula was two 500-pound bombs on a two-story structure equaled a collapsed pile of rubble.

In one recorded scene an insurgent was videotaped shooting at a 3/1 UAV with his machine gun. A few moments later the insurgent, his house, and the threat he posed were erased by a 500-pound bomb. It truly was death from above.

In another incident in the Jolan district on November 11, a Dragon Eye cruising at 291 feet at a sedate 31 mph was used to coordinate an air strike on a jihadist strongpoint. At 11:47 a.m. local time its pictures were used to direct a fighter bomber onto the target. At 11:58 a.m., cruising at 318 feet and 22 mph, it returned to film the bomb damage assessment (BDA). It was almost instantly determined that the target was destroyed.

The little plane could be flown from wherever the Marines needed a look. Dragon Eye operators would pick a roof for flight ops, put the little airplanes together, and launch them exactly like radio-controlled model airplanes. With a wingspan of only 45 inches, a length of about 3 feet, and weighing 5 pounds, it cruised at about 40 mph and could stay in the air up to an hour at altitudes between 300 and 500 feet.

3/1's leadership credits the little planes with identifying many strongpoints and possible ambush sites that were neutralized without any loss of friendly life. But even with all the eyes in the sky and armor on the ground most of the time Fallujah remained the same dirty, debilitating site of combat stress for Marines who faced deadly risks from grenades, RPGs, snipers, and ambushes.

At 10:00, Kilo moved out to seize Regimental Objective D, the mosque. At the same time Lima was to conduct a surprise attack on the city's water treatment plant just to the north of the mosque, and India was to seize the dominant terrain along the river.

Prior to the attack the mosque had been prepped with multiple GBU-12 guided 500-pound bombs directed by Captain Smay. Additionally all three companies were supported during their attacks by a rolling barrage from 155mm howitzers and 120mm mortars reminiscent of the Great War. The barrage moved forward at a stately walking pace striking targets just in front of the battalion's line of attack.