Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  PROLOGUE

  I - THE ROAD TO NASIRIYAH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  II - AMBUSH ALLEY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  III - THE NORTHERN BRIDGE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  POSTSCRIPT

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For my father,

  who continues to be an inspiration

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  The individual marines experienced the events of March 23, 2003, as a series of chaotic moments, which bear no relation to any normal understanding of time and place. Time seemed to stand still or speed up. Marines had little idea what was going on with the other marines at their sides, let alone with another company a couple of kilometers away.

  Through interviews with some fifty marines, I have tried to piece it together to produce a detailed account of what turned out to be the most terrifying battle of the war in Iraq. My aim has been to re-create combat as the marines experienced it. The dialogue and feelings expressed by individual marines are their best recollection of what happened that day.

  While this is predominantly about the thoughts and deeds of a group of U.S. marines, there is another side to the battle that can only be imagined. Because of the deteriorating security situation, few Iraqis felt able to talk openly about the events of March 23. However, I hope that my account will give some idea of the confused feelings of relief, rage, anguish, and suffering experienced by combatant and noncombatant Iraqis on the streets of Nasiriyah that day.

  During the battle, many enlisted marines and some officers commonly referred to the Iraqi fighters as “hajjis.” In the Arabic world, a “hajji” is a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is both a mark of respect and a common surname. The vast majority of marines would not have been aware of the religious connotations of the name. One marine believed that the name came from a character in a TV sitcom.

  My interviews with marines have been supplemented by official documents, diaries, and photographs. Many of the facts relating to the attack on the 507th Maintenance Company are taken from the U.S. Army report on the Private Jessica Lynch incident. The facts relating to the A-10 friendly fire attack are taken from the Department of Defense inquiry into the case. Newspaper articles that have helped my research include Mark Franchetti’s dispatch from Nasiriyah for The Times of London on March 30, 2003, and Rich Connell and Robert J. Lopez’s report of September 5, 2003, in the Los Angeles Times.

  I’d like to thank all those marines at Camp Lejeune and elsewhere who gave me so much of their valuable time, especially Chief Warrant Officer David Dunfee, Captain Scott Dyer, Captain Teresa Ovalle, and First Lieutenant James Reid. Special thanks to David Coward, David Mack, everyone at Darlow Smithson, Jean Reynaud for his helpful comments, and my family and friends for their love and support.

  “Ambush Alley” runs between Nasiriyah and Baghdad

  Company positions at the height of the battle.“Ambush Alley” between the Northern Saddam Canal and Southern Euphrates bridges

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  TASK FORCE TARAWA—BUILT AROUND 2nd MARINE REGIMENT

  Brigadier General Rich Natonski, Commander

  2nd MARINE REGIMENT

  Colonel Ronald Bailey, Regimental Commander

  1st BATTALION, 2nd MARINES

  Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski, Battalion Commander

  Major David Sosa, Operations Officer

  CHARLIE COMPANY, 1st BATTALION, 2nd MARINES

  Captain Dan Wittnam, Company Commander

  First Lieutenant James “Ben” Reid, Weapons Platoon Commander

  Corporal Jake Worthington, Javelin Gunner

  Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk, Rifleman

  Private First Class Casey Robinson, Squad Automatic Weapon

  (SAW) Gunner

  First Lieutenant Conor Tracy, AAV Platoon Commander

  Sergeant William Schaefer, AAV Platoon Section Leader

  Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry, AAV Driver

  ALPHA COMPANY, 1st BATTALION, 2nd MARINES

  Captain Mike Brooks, Company Commander

  BRAVO COMPANY, 1st BATTALION, 2nd MARINES

  Corporal Neville Welch, Riflemen Team Leader

  ALPHA COMPANY, 8th TANK BATTALION

  Major Bill Peeples, Company Commander

  Captain Scott Dyer, Executive Officer

  MARINE AIRCRAFT GROUP 29

  Captain Eric Garcia, CH-46 Medevac Pilot

  HM3 (Hospital Man 3rd Class) Moses Gloria, Navy Corpsman

  PROLOGUE

  On September 17, 2003, I was traveling with U.S. forces in a convoy of Humvees through the western outskirts of Baghdad, to report on the success of the military operation that had toppled Saddam Hussein. Yet talk among U.S. soldiers and marines that day was not of their achievements, but of the local population’s growing mood of resentment after the euphoria of the U.S. forces’ initial sweep into Baghdad. It was an airless, sunny afternoon as we traveled along a dirt road to our base in a former Iraqi army compound. It was eerily quiet. Suddenly, an ear-shattering explosion cracked through our vehicle and a rush of hot air and debris swept past my face. The heavily armored door of the Humvee warped inward into my legs and the vehicle lifted off the ground. There were cries of “Get down, get down.” As I dived to the floor, I looked up to see a shattered windshield and clouds of dust, reflected against the sunlight, falling slowly toward the ground. The acrid smell of explosives filled my nostrils and stuck in my throat. We had been ambushed. Hidden members of the Iraqi resistance had detonated an improvised bomb made from an old shell casing filled with stones and debris underneath the wheel of our vehicle. Soldiers were screaming in terror and anger, clutching bloody arms and backs. They were rushed to field hospitals with broken arms and shrapnel wounds. Within twenty-four hours I had been evacuated to Germany with ear damage.

  The sheer terror of that moment gave me a new understanding of the realities of war—the sights, smells, sounds, taste, and touch of combat. That gave me a starting point for this book. But what drove me to write it was meeting the marines of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, a couple of months after I got out of Iraq, at their home base of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. These marines had been at the heart of the U.S. forces’ push to Baghdad and they had an amazing story to tell—a story of boundless camaraderie and bravery amid the anguish, suffering, brutality, and stupidity of war.
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br />   Like the rest of the coalition forces who went to Iraq, the majority of the men of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines had never tasted combat. They arrived in Kuwait as unremarkable, brash young men hyped up by the prospect of testing themselves, of firing their weapons for real, of killing people. They also arrived as part of the world’s most technologically advanced fighting machine, bristling with awesome weaponry and backed by top-class military training.

  Yet nothing prepared the marines of 1/2 for what happened next. It was March 23, 2003, the third day of the war. Their commanders had tasked them with an important but relatively straightforward mission in Nasiriyah, a city in one of the least hostile parts of Iraq. As they attacked into Nasiriyah, the marines of 1/2 were brimming with the confidence of a military force that knew what it was doing and why it was doing it. As the day went on, they were caught up in the chaos and uncertainty of combat, what has been called “the fog of war,” fighting for their lives against an enemy that they hadn’t anticipated and didn’t recognize. This is the story of what happened to that group of ordinary young men on the battlefield that day. It was a day that changed them forever. And a day that revealed some of the reasons for the confusion and chaos that still reigns in Iraq.

  I

  THE ROAD TO NASIRIYAH

  MARCH 23, 2003 0600–1230 Hours

  1

  Private First Class Casey Robinson readjusted his lanky body, trying to squeeze his wide, swimmer’s shoulders into any gap that he could find. He was lying on the deck of vehicle C201, one of Charlie Company’s twelve AAVs, trying to get some sleep. As soon as he dozed off he’d get a cheesy whiff from the feet of his fellow marines and he’d wake with a start. There were twenty of them squashed into each AAV. Some sat on metal benches; some were perched on ammunition boxes; some, like Robinson, lay on the metal floor, squeezed between interlocking legs, M16 rifles, machine guns, Javelin antitank missiles, and enough cans of ammo to do serious damage to a small town.

  It had been like this for two days now. The AAVs, short for amphibious assault vehicles, were not much more than tub-shaped, watertight, metal boxes that on land ran on tank treads rather than wheels and in water deployed small but powerful propellers. They had been designed in the 1970s to transport marines, in short stretches, from ship to beach landings, but now, two days into the combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, many of the marines’ AAVs, including C201, had clocked more than 150 kilometers of southern Iraq’s moonlike landscape. The plan was to drive them even farther, all the way to the gates of Baghdad. The marines called them amtracks, or just tracks. While 201’s treads allowed it to go over rough terrain, the marines inside were taking a pounding. Robinson was not happy. This is like riding in a sardine can. There were no windows, just tiny slits of reinforced glass that passed as spy holes. With no sense of space or direction, Robinson was tossed from side to side, at the mercy of the AAV’s rubber and metal tracks meeting hard-packed rocks, dirt, and pitted Iraqi earth.

  Robinson fought back a wave of tiredness and boredom. What am I doing here? Except for a few short breaks for vehicle maintenance and to relieve the pressure on the bladder, they had hardly stopped. The previous night he’d spent a few hours pulling security in a fighting hole by the side of Highway 8, a few kilometers east of the air base at Jalibah. His job was to stop the Iraqis from interfering with the long military convoys that the Army was moving up to supply its combat troops just ahead of the Marines, along the MSR, the main supply route. Robinson and the rest of the Marines from Charlie Company were in a blocking position with their tracks pulled up by the side of the road. Luckily, they were on 50 percent security watch. He got an hour’s sleep while another marine took watch, and then they switched. He made sure he stayed awake on his watch. He’d heard that the previous night, a marine sleeping outside his AAV had been crushed in the dark by a passing tank.

  Robinson yawned and got a blast of his own foul-smelling breath. He’d not washed for two days, and oral hygiene was no more than an occasional scour with a sand-and-grit infested toothbrush. The sun was coming up over the horizon. He didn’t really know where he was. He knew they were heading northward toward a city but he couldn’t remember its name. The previous night they’d been told that they were going to stop short of the city and set up a blocking position on its southern approach. Then they might have to go into the city and seize some bridges to secure a route so the rest of the Marine Corps units could pass through. He was hazy on the details. Humble grunts like him were only handed out information on a need-to-know basis. But what he did know was that it was going to be an easy mission. His commanders had warned them against complacency, but they had all been told that the city’s population was Shiite Muslims and that they hated Saddam. They are going to greet us with open arms and give us the keys to the city.

  Robinson had been a marine for two years, and even during the preparations to ship out to Iraq he was convinced that he would never see combat. The only gunshots he’d heard so far were some dumb-assed POGUES who had accidentally fired off their weapons. That’s what the infantry marines called anyone who wasn’t a hard-core, frontline rifleman—people other than grunts. Now that they were in Iraq, the prospects of getting involved in a fight were not good. There was a rumor going around that his unit, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was merely a supporting force for the Hollywood Marines. That was the semidisparaging, semienvious nickname that East Coast marines like Robinson gave to the marines out of Camp Pendleton, California. They are too soft. But it would be nice to have those Californian girls and beaches so close.

  Another wave of frustration swept over him. For two years at Camp Lejeune and on maneuvers in the Californian desert at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base, he’d learned the art of mechanized infantry warfare. He’d learned about geometry of fire, how to form a defensive perimeter, how to employ machine guns, how to strip and reassemble an M16 in seconds, how to kill the enemy with his bare hands. He was supposed to be one of “the Few, the Proud.” Now, instead of fighting the enemy, he was being jolted around in a metal box, fending off the diesel fumes and the taste of vomit slowly making its way up his throat. He took a gulp from a bottle of tepid water and had the uncomfortable feeling that his two years in the Marine Corps had mostly trained him in tedium and loneliness. Private First Class Robinson had had enough. His parched mouth was sucked dry of any moisture by the fine sand that coated everything and the warm, fetid heat that clung to the AAV’s deck. He was fed up, weary, and very hungry. For the first time he felt envious of the POGUES and the REMFs, the rear-echelon motherfuckers, who were probably sitting on their clean, fat asses in an air-conditioned dining hall well away from the front line, getting ready to bite into a hot breakfast of ham and eggs, washed down with coffee.

  He kicked the shin closest to him.

  “I’ll trade you a chicken teriyaki for the Mexican burrito.”

  The track erupted in a frenzy of bartering.

  “Oh man, I got the jambalaya again. Who’ll swap it for the vegetable tortellini? How about you, Worthington?”

  “Peanut butter for a chocolate milk shake?”

  “Fuck you, Wentzel. You can keep your cinnamon cake.”

  Swapping food from their MREs, meals ready to eat, was the one activity that kept the marines entertained during the endless wait for battle. Robinson had it down to an art. He thought of himself as a real chef. He would take the spaghetti from its plastic bag, mix it with the ravioli, get some jalapeño cheese, take the salsa from the Mexican burrito, cut the brown plastic MRE sleeve, and mix it all up under a flame so it was real hot. For dessert he’d take the wheat bread, cover it with peanut butter, shake some cocoa powder on it, and decorate it with M&M’s. He would wash it down with water mixed with a drink powder from the MRE packet. Marines called the garishly colored liquid “bug juice.” It looked vile, but it made a change from bottled water. If he could get all the elements to make a meal like that it was a good day. It wo
uld be an even better one if he could get rid of a jambalaya or the nasty-tasting beef hot dogs he’d nicknamed the four fingers of death. Fortunately, there were some weirdos out there who liked the nasty ones. That was how Robinson and his fellow Marines passed the time. They were young men, at the peak of physical fitness, who had spent months and years training hard in the art of warfare. But for the past two days as they rolled around inside their track, all they had done was trade food, play cards, tell dirty jokes, eat, and fart. And those MREs really did make you fart.

  The 176 marines of Charlie Company had formed a tight bond during their time together. Some had been with the company for several years. Others had joined straight from Boot Camp only a few months before. They reveled in their nickname of “Crazy” Company, convinced that they always came out on top during training exercises with Alpha and Bravo, the other companies in their battalion. But what really set them apart was that they were a wild and determined bunch. Marines took pride in their reputation as untamed warriors, but somehow Charlie seemed to have more than its fair share of troublemakers.

  Private First Class Robinson was one of the wildest. He didn’t mean to get into trouble. Trouble somehow always found him. It probably started sometime when he was a kid and his dad went off the rails and ended up in prison. But how can you really know? He didn’t really like talking about it. As a six-year-old kid, Casey Robinson lived with his mom and stepdad in Santa Cruz, California. He admired his stepdad for looking after his mom and working hard in his construction business, but the two of them just didn’t get along. The freedom of growing up in a beach community probably didn’t help. By day he would work at the Chicken in a Basket stall on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk; by night he would drink and hook up with girls or get in a fight with the Eastside surfers.

  He had no idea how the rivalry between the Westside and Eastside surfers began. Ever since he’d surfed the waves at Steamers Lane as a kid it had been like that. The waves there were short and tricky and exhilarating, not like east of the San Lorenzo River, where the waves were longer and more consistent. But sometimes the Eastside surfers would ditch their longboards for shortboards, cross to the Westside, and start surfing on the waves there. And if you took someone else’s wave you’d better have a lot of friends, because otherwise they would whip your ass. That’s how the fighting would begin. What started with a young Casey Robinson getting into trouble from his mom for staying out late, ended with a police record for drunkenness and assault after he smashed a rival surfer within half an inch of his life during a beach brawl. A police record, beach life, and sex real young had made Casey Robinson grow up pretty quick.