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

  The assault charge almost cost him his place in the Marines. He was a fine swimmer and a junior lifeguard. At first he wanted to be a Navy SEAL. A lifeguard he’d looked up to, a guy who he saw as a sort of mentor, had told him stories about life in the Special Forces. But when he’d gone to the Navy recruiting office, the officer there told him that the SEALs was too tough.

  “Sign up for the Navy and you might get a chance at it later.”

  Casey Robinson saw through the ruse. He’d heard stories about people being sucked into a contract and then given shitty Navy jobs. Instead, he went next door to the Marine Corps. There the recruiter was real straight with him and sold him on Force Recon, the Marines’ elite, fast-reaction reconnaissance force.

  “Join the infantry first and then you’ll get your shot at Force Recon.”

  Right then and there, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Casey Robinson had signed up to be a grunt. But somehow, as usual, things just didn’t work out. He’d done really well during his three months at Boot Camp and was the only one to come out as a private first class. But when he went to the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton in California, a routine inspection uncovered steroids in a locker. A couple of marines snitched on him. They weren’t his steroids. Yes, he was going to buy them, but they weren’t his. His urine and fingerprint tests came up negative, but they still investigated. When he joined the Fleet Marine Force he was sent to 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune. No one there knew about the steroid allegations, and he was promoted to lance corporal and given his own fire team to lead. Then somehow they found out and his platoon sergeant started talking about NJPing him. That meant giving him a nonjudicial punishment, slapping him on the wrist, and busting him back to private first class. Robinson wanted to have a full court-martial hearing so he could fight his case, but by the time it came up they were on ship on their way to Iraq, and he was told he couldn’t refuse NJP and didn’t have the right to a lawyer. A few days after they’d weighed anchor he was summoned to an onboard hearing and was given an NJP. He was lucky, he guessed. He thought the 1/2 battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski, might throw the book at him, bang him up, and put him on bread and water for the rest of the sea journey. His company commander, Captain Dan Wittnam, had stood up for him and had told the board he was a good guy and was responsible. That was a surprise. He thought Captain Wittnam would have been really tough on him. Wittnam kept Charlie Company on a tight leash. He worked them hard during physical training and didn’t let any of them step out of line. He was a classic Marine, the guy Robinson wanted to be like. He got a kick out of running faster, harder, and for longer than any of his marines. That’s why they’d nicknamed him Captain Insano.

  Robinson regretted the episode with the steroids, but somehow he couldn’t help himself. He was already tall and powerful, but it wasn’t enough. No matter how fast I go, I want to go faster. No matter how much I lift, I want to lift more. He knew it was kind of messed up, but the world was against him and he had to get stronger and bigger to fight his way through it. Maybe he was trying to prove something to his father who was never there. Or maybe he was proving something to himself. Whatever it was, twenty-two-year-old Casey Robinson, recently demoted from lance corporal to private first class, was currently somewhere in the middle of Iraq, trying to fend off the stench of diesel, the body odor of twenty unwashed grunts, and deep, dark thoughts that sometimes made his two years service in the Marine Corps feel like a prison sentence.

  His steely blue eyes darted around at the faces in his track. They were mostly, like him, from Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon. Opposite him, attached from Weapons Company, were the Javelin gunner, Corporal Jake Worthington, and his “A” gunner, Lance Corporal Brian Wenberg. On his left, in the commander’s hatch, was his platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Scott Swantner, and on his right were Lance Corporal Douglas Milter and his squad leader, Corporal John Wentzel. He didn’t know whether it was resentment, but he had a tough time with Wentzel. Wentzel had been promoted to squad leader just as Robinson had lost his job as team leader. He liked the guy but thought he was too soft, a bit of a pussy. When he went into combat he wanted to know that he could rely on the guys to the left and right of him. Somehow he didn’t think Wentzel would make the grade. Driving the AAV was the lanky tracker, Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry. In the AAV commander’s hatch was another tracker, Sergeant William Schaefer. The trackers, from the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion headquartered at Courthouse Bay, Camp Lejeune, were a breed apart. Their job was to drive and maintain the AAVs and to work the tracks’ up guns, the 40 mm Mark 19 grenade launcher and the .50-caliber heavy machine gun. There was some rivalry between the two groups. The infantrymen thought of themselves as the heart and soul of the Marine Corps and considered the trackers as a mere appendage. The trackers thought the grunts were arrogant and cocky. At Camp Lejeune, the two groups never mixed much, but in Kuwait, Robinson had gotten to know Castleberry and liked the guy.

  None of them had even been near a combat zone before. Some were only seventeen years old, barely out of high school. Robinson had gone through Boot Camp with a couple of them. Others he’d met on ship. But now after weeks together living side by side he knew everything about them, even down to the sex games they played with their girlfriends and wives. He’d watched them laugh hysterically at a dumb-ass prank on a drill instructor or sob at bad news from home. The faces he knew so well were obscured behind the hard, metallic face of war. They were all equipped with Kevlar helmets, with night-vision goggles attached, taut body armor with bulky ceramic plates in the front pocket, gas masks and weapons hanging clumsily by their side. They were used to most of the equipment, but what really made them uncomfortably hot and sticky were the charcoal-lined MOPP, Mission-Oriented Protective Posture, suits they had to wear over their desert cammies in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. Over the past few weeks they had practiced putting them on and taking them off again as part of their NBC drills, but they’d never really grown comfortable with them.

  “My turn at air security.”

  Robinson stood up, grabbed hold of the ridge of the hatch above him, and pulled himself up to take over posting security. Precariously balancing himself on an ammo box with his torso half out of one of the AAV’s two rectangular hatches, he pulled up his M249 squad automatic weapon, or SAW, after him. There were four marines up there already, scanning the horizon from each corner of the amtrack’s hatches, their M16 rifles at the ready. As a SAW gunner, Robinson had specialist training. His M249 fired the same 5.56 mm round as the M16 but, at a rate of up to one thousand rounds per minute, it packed a much bigger punch. He mounted it on the top of the AAV and, using the sandbags around the hatch as support, looked down the sight. There was very little out there. The sun was slowly rising over a flat, scrubby, burned-orange landscape dotted with small mounds of dirt and the odd mud brick house. Every so often an Iraqi tending goats would give the marine convoy a desultory wave. The hajjis don’t look too hostile. In front and behind him stretched a long line of military vehicles. He knew that somewhere at the front of the column were the tanks assigned to their battalion, followed by the AAVs of the three infantry companies, Alpha, Bravo, and his own company, Charlie.

  Robinson felt better with his head out of the track. It was hot and dusty, but the air was fresh and the wind on his face felt good. The past few weeks of life in a hot, featureless desert had been mind-numbingly boring. But maybe today would be a better day.

  2

  “Viking 6, this is Timberwolf 6. Sitrep. Over.”

  Using his call sign, Timberwolf, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski, the commander of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, stood by his Humvee and called back to Viking, the regimental command post, with a situation report. With his husky voice, which some of his marines made fun of behind his back, he told the regiment that he had reached the 22 northing, a position about twenty kilometers south of Nasiriyah. The night before, his boss, Colonel Ro
n Bailey, the commander of the 2nd Marine Regiment, had given him the 20 northing grid reference as his holding point. He was told to be there by 7:00 a.m. local time. Grabowski had made it with time to spare. Now Grabowski had been asked to move north for a few kilometers to the 22 northing to give room for 1st Battalion, 10th Marines to set up their batteries. They were going to provide artillery support for the upcoming mission. He was feeling confident. There was a chill in the air, but the sun was coming up on the horizon and he felt good about the day ahead. The two days since they had left Kuwait had been uneventful. But today they might get their first proper mission accomplished.

  For months, Grabowski and his company commanders had pored over maps and satellite photos of Nasiriyah. It was a featureless, medium-size Iraqi city with a population of five hundred thousand living in the densely packed center and surrounding areas. It was unremarkable except for two bridges of strategic importance. On the southeastern edge of the city was a bridge over the Euphrates River. The Euphrates was one of the main obstacles facing the U.S. military in its push toward Baghdad. A road from the Euphrates Bridge led to another bridge, about 4.5 kilometers to the north, over a narrower waterway, the Saddam Canal. That bridge led directly to a highway that took a northeastern route all the way to Baghdad. Grabowski and 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines had been given the mission of capturing the two bridges. That would open up a route for the Marines to enter Baghdad, some three hundred kilometers to the north.

  The mission was straightforward. But there was one major difficulty: how to get from the southern bridge to the northern bridge. The road in between the two bridges went right through the heart of Nasiriyah. Grabowski knew that Operation Iraqi Freedom was built around speed. The aim was to get to Baghdad as quickly as possible without being slowed down by urban fighting. Moreover, no one wanted public opinion to turn against them because of civilian casualties from a big firefight in an Iraqi city. On February 6, on ship, Grabowski was at a planning meeting when Colonel Ron Johnson, operations officer for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, had pulled out an aerial map of the city and pointed to the road running between the Euphrates Bridge and the Saddam Canal Bridge.

  “Army planners call this stretch of road Ambush Alley. But we’re not going to call it Ambush Alley. This is not Mogadishu.”

  Johnson was referring to the chaotic urban fight that Army Rangers and Special Forces had been sucked into in the Somalian capital in 1993. Most of the marines knew it as the terrifying but exhilarating battle portrayed in the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down. No one wanted a repeat of that debacle. That was why, when tasked with the mission of taking the bridges, Grabowski, with Johnson’s agreement, decided to find a route around to the east of Nasiriyah so they wouldn’t have to push along what was officially called Route Moe. But somehow the comparison with Mogadishu had slipped out. Inevitably, some of Grabowski’s marines were already referring to that stretch of Route Moe as Ambush Alley.

  To accomplish his mission, Grabowski had a battalion of nearly a thousand men under his command. First Battalion, 2nd Marines was composed of his command element, three infantry line companies—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie—a weapons company, a headquarters and service company, and a tank company of Marine Reservists who had been attached to his unit for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  During the weeks on ship and in Kuwait, Grabowski and the staff of 1/2 worked on a plan for approval by the 2nd Marine Regiment. It was based on the Marine concept of maneuver warfare. His three line companies, the tanks and weapons company would work in support of each other to seize the bridges through a series of rapid, violent, and unexpected maneuvers. Alpha Company, supported by M1A1 Abrams tanks, would roll onto the first objective, the Euphrates Bridge. Bravo Company, accompanied by tanks, would then roll across the Euphrates Bridge, pass through Alpha’s lines, turn to the east, and circle around the outskirts of the town. Bringing up the rear would be Charlie Company. It would move through Alpha’s position on the Euphrates Bridge, follow Bravo Company to the east, and pass through its lines to take the second objective, the northern Saddam Canal Bridge. Then Bravo would pass through Charlie’s lines to take a third objective—a T intersection a couple of kilometers north of the Saddam Canal Bridge. It was a maneuver designed to surprise any Iraqis defending the city by avoiding Ambush Alley, the more direct, but potentially hazardous, four-lane highway connecting the bridges.

  The seizure of the bridges was a “be prepared to” mission. Grabowski still didn’t know whether they were going to carry it out that day. It might never happen. What he did know was that they were going to advance toward the city and take up a defensive blocking position around the southern Euphrates Bridge and await further instructions.

  Veterans of Desert Storm had talked with disappointment about turning up for battle during the last Gulf war, finding the Iraqis had all fled, and then having to wait in the desert for buses to take them back to their camps in Saudi Arabia. Grabowski hoped this war wasn’t going to be like that. He was a gruff man who wore a trademark blue scarf around his neck to keep the sand out. He’d been commander of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines for two years. He’d enlisted in the Marine Corps while still in high school and spent four years with the infantry. After college, inspired by the stories his father had told him of life as a pilot in Vietnam, he tried out for flight school. His hearing wasn’t good enough, though, and he failed his physical. He went back to Camp Lejeune and worked his way through the ranks. For over twenty-five years his life had been with the Marines. He’d humped hundred-pound packs up and down hills, ridden through steaming jungles, floated on hot, sweaty ships in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and fired millions of rounds from M16 rifles and M60 machine guns. Although he’d been sent to Haiti in 1994, during the unpredictable weeks before the chaos that took Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to power, he had never really tasted combat. Now it was dawn on Sunday March 23, 2003, and Rick Grabowski, commander of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, part of the six-thousand-strong Marine Task Force Tarawa, was finally at war. They were on their way to kick Saddam Hussein’s ass.

  The intel 1/2 Marines had received from CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command, was reassuring. In 1991, after Desert Storm, the Shia population in Nasiriyah had launched a rebellion against Saddam’s ruling Baath Party. The Americans had failed to support that rebellion and it was brutally squashed by Saddam’s henchmen. This time, though, the higher-ups believed that the Shia population would again rebel against Saddam once the Americans entered the city. Grabowski was confident. They are going to be happy to see us.

  For several weeks he had tried to find out how the enemy was positioned around the city. In particular, he had wanted to know more about several large complexes on its northern edge. He knew that Nasiriyah was a military town, but Intel had only managed to tell him that they were “military compounds.” But they did have intelligence that Iraqi soldiers from the 11th Infantry Division, based around Nasiriyah, were carrying civilian clothes and that once they saw the Americans, they would just slip out of their uniforms and disappear into the local population. Any Iraqi units guarding Nasiriyah would then crumble and surrender. It was one of the reasons why it had been decided not to “prep” the area beforehand with air and ground fire. Grabowski and his staff had carried on long discussions into the night about the enemy. Although they had little information on paramilitary fighters in the town, they were pretty sure that no one would put up much resistance. He hoped it wasn’t misguided optimism, but there was a serious amount of talk about the number of EPWs, enemy prisoners of war, they would take. That very morning there had been reports that around Basra, the 51st Iraqi mechanized brigade had already given up.

  Grabowski looked back at the snaking column of military hardware stretching back several miles as far as the eye could see. He was toward the front of the column, traveling in his HMMWV, or high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle, known to the military and civilians alike as a Humvee. He hated traveling in the C7, the command-and-control tr
ack that contained most of the battalion staff and comms equipment. It didn’t have windows and he could never see what was happening on the ground. He’d divided the battalion command post into two groups. He had decided that he would take some of his senior staff with him as a forward command post that would control the battalion’s movement from a position just behind the tanks and frontline troops. That way he could see exactly how the mission was unfolding and could react to it. The main command post, led by the executive officer, Major Jeff Tuggle, would be at the rear of the column. Tuggle would take over if he got hit or couldn’t communicate.

  Grabowski reached for the radio handset of the PRC-119, the Marines’ basic tactical radio.

  “Panzer 6, this is Timberwolf 6. Sitrep over.”

  He wanted a situation report from the tank company up ahead. Grabowski monitored two nets. He used the battalion tactical network 1 to communicate with his company commanders. To speak to the regimental commander and staff, he used regimental tac net 1. There was also a battalion tac 2, which was for nonurgent logistics and administrative purposes, but he hardly ever used it. The sun was up, the chatter on the radio was calm. Lieutenant Colonel Rick Grabowski was excited and happy.