The second time we came under attack, a mere two days later, we took several RPGs all at once. We were walking along Michigan to the Government Center when the engineers at the head of our patrol located an IED in the middle of the road. It was a dull olive artillery shell, and it looked much like a gigantic, two-foot-long bullet. As we moved quickly to cordon it off, I heard several explosions in rapid succession—several RPGs, all launched at us. One of them drilled a neat hole through the thin armor of the passenger door on our lead Humvee and continued onward to drill another neat hole through the two off-white blocks of C-4 that our engineers had placed on the vehicle’s center console. Fortunately, neither block exploded. Two of our engineers took shrapnel from the blast: One had minor cuts on his hands while the other, a six-foot, three-inch giant named Canouck had a sizable chunk embedded in his right leg. When I arrived at our damaged Humvee, Docs Smith and Camacho had cut off Canouck’s pant leg, bandaged his wound, and tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent him from standing and shouting obscenities at our vanished attackers. Shortly thereafter, a medevac vehicle from the Outpost and an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team from Hurricane Point arrived. We sent Canouck back, blew up the IED, and continued on to Ramadi’s Government Center. An inauspicious way to start the day, but we had handled it with no serious casualties or loss of life.
If the point of our mission was to bring stability to Ramadi, the city’s Government Center was often the focal point of that mission. Inside a double layer of ten-foot-tall concrete barriers, roughly eight buildings housed all the administrative and logistical machinery necessary for the governance of the entire Anbar province. We were primarily concerned with one building, a large, four-story, L-shaped monstrosity where the governor, the mayor, and various other high officials met daily, but we couldn’t completely ignore the rest of the compound. With its front butting up against the teeming souk and its rear extending halfway to the butchers’ district in the southwest quadrant of the city, the entire complex was, to say the least, a security nightmare.
We had left the Outpost early, at 7 AM, and after the RPG attack we made our way on foot to the Center, walking straight down Route Michigan until we reached its huge concrete barriers, nestled securely in the heart of Ramadi’s downtown market area. The crowds were fairly light as we passed through, but by 10 AM they had become so thick that the one-squad security patrols we ran out of the Government Center every two hours could barely thread their way through the clogged sidewalks. Snarling traffic jams replete with the ubiquitous orange-and-white taxis packed the previously empty Route Michigan—the highway ran directly in front of the Center’s double concrete walls.
As the day wound on, hundreds of people necessary to keep Anbar province functioning would pass into and out of the front of the building we were protecting, and searching every one of them was clearly unworkable and likely counterproductive. We decided to concentrate our efforts on repelling any direct attacks on the building, positioning ourselves at stationary posts around the L of the building’s roof, watching the crowds of people and cars just dozens of meters away, wondering whether one of them might explode, marveling at how everyone went about their mundane daily business in such an uncertain environment. These crowds, and our anxiety level, remained high until well after sundown.
The private security contractors operating in Iraq have occasionally come under criticism for their excesses, but on that day—and most others following—we felt incredibly fortunate to have help from the men of Triple Canopy, the company that had received the contract from the U.S. government to protect key American personnel and infrastructure facilities in Ramadi. For the Center, this mandate meant setting up a series of guarded checkpoints (using Iraqi forces) along the two approaches to the building’s entrances and periodically sweeping its halls with bomb-sniffing dogs. It also meant occasionally training and equipping the fledgling Iraqi police and national guardsmen who operated out of the provincial police headquarters just west of our L-shaped government building.
Mostly ex–special forces types, the Triple Canopy guys probably had regular names like Joe or Frank, but we knew them simply by their colorful call signs, among them Highway, Pigpen, and Pipebomb. The Triple Canopy guys seemed equally happy to have our help, and they had quickly equipped us with their own long-range Motorola radios so that we could communicate with them at all times. The first time I used them, I was ecstatic—the Motorolas beat our U.S.-issued PRRs hands down, and there were enough of them to equip each squad leader with one. We were finally able to send our squads more than two blocks away and still keep in contact with them (we still didn’t have enough long-range radios to give any more than one to each platoon).
So, shortly after arriving at the Center on that early March morning, I rendezvoused with Highway, collected the radios, and trudged tiredly up to the roof with Noriel and third squad to man our fighting positions in the hundred-degree heat. It had already been a long day. As Noriel and I popped out into the blazing sun and clomped across the sticky tar slathered around on the building’s roof, I was less than enthusiastic about what lay ahead. Security duty on the Government Center roof involved cramming yourself and another man into a four-foot-by-three-foot sandbagged plywood box and then sweating for two hours underneath the 120-degree desert sun while having to maintain constant vigilance. But I soon found that being up there meant I could sweat side by side with my Marines, mostly free of the pressures of navigation and constant communication that defined our patrols. Sometimes we talked about Ramadi, sometimes about life in general, and sometimes we just sat there, watching the streets together in companionable silence.
During those early days I learned a great deal about my men on that roof. Feldmeir told me of his troubled past, of the series of foster homes he’d grown up in, of his constant fear each time he was moved. Mahardy told me about growing up in upstate New York with a tight-knit Irish family of seven and how he and his siblings were still best friends.
It was on the roof that I learned that Noriel had enlisted in the Marines at age twenty because he saw no future in busing tables as a green-card immigrant in Lake Tahoe. Shortly after his enlistment, my fiery squad leader had been charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Sometime during his infantry finishing school, Noriel had been pulling guard duty, carrying an M-16 and a full magazine of ammunition (as all guards do) when one of his fellow privates began “screwing” with him. Noriel being Noriel, he had immediately pulled back the bolt on his weapon, locked and loaded a round, and proceeded to threaten the offender with grievous bodily harm if he continued. The next day, Noriel found himself arraigned on some very serious charges and assigned to a disciplinary platoon whose sole purpose was to beat down its members by making them perform such Sisyphean tasks as carrying a boulder on a five-mile round trip, painting and unpainting rocks, and, the all-time classic, digging a trench only to immediately fill it in again. For a year, my future first-squad leader endured the treatment, refusing to quit because he knew he had nothing to go home to. Then one day all charges were inexplicably dropped, and Noriel was sent right back to the school to finish his infantry training.
Less remarkable but slightly more amusing were PFCs Niles and Ott, the two team members led by the giant Carson. In their shared bunker up on the roof, they interacted in the unique way that only the pressure and close confines of extended combat can produce. The two Marines were as opposite as the day was long, and stuffed together into the little pillboxes up on the Government Center roof, they played off each other like a two-man comedy act. Nineteen-year-old Niles was one of the smartest, quickest, and lankiest Marines in the platoon, and he probably had the most expansive vocabulary of any of its members. He was also possessed of endless reserves of twitchy, nervous energy. By contrast, the short, solid Ott was one of our slowest, most laid-back men—by his own admission, he had smoked a lot of weed before joining the Corps, and I suspect that the drug combined with his own God-given personality to make him Niles’s polar opposite. Typically, Niles would take Ott around and around, tying him in verbal and intellectual conundrums until Ott finally broke out with “Ah, shit, you’re making fun of me again, aren’t you, Niles?” It was their own game, and they played it endlessly to help ease the strangely tense monotony of watching a particular patch of city for hours on end.
Whenever I made my rounds on the roof, walking from sandbagged bunker to sandbagged bunker as I checked on each team, the two often as not broke off their practiced dialogue, and I found myself fielding Niles’s incisive questions, questions that ranged from the feasibility of representative democracy in Iraq to why the blatant disconnect between the CPA in Baghdad and those of us on the ground tasked with executing its apparently half-baked policies. My answer to the latter question, by the way, was that if Joker One also lived in a mini-America (Baghdad’s Green Zone) with discos featuring half-naked women, bars, movie rental parlors, swimming pools, and the like, and that if we only rarely ventured outside its four walls, then maybe we, too, would lose all contact with reality and concoct fantasyland plans of stock market exchanges before bothering to turn on the water. Maybe we, too, would prefer the comfort and the safety of something that mimicked America, and maybe we, too, would prefer to leave the dangerous, dirty work of policy implementation to nineteen-year-old lance corporals.
Niles, however, wasn’t the only one with incisive questions. Most of my Marines were pretty savvy, and it didn’t take them long to figure out that we rarely, if ever, saw any Americans other than Marines and Triple Canopy contractors at the nerve center of Iraq’s most volatile province. Up on the roof with them, I learned that to a surprisingly deep degree, my men understood the greater purpose of our mission in Ramadi, and they wondered why, if stability in Anbar augured well for stability in Iraq, we never saw any of the country’s civilian U.S. overlords. Being normal nineteen-year-olds (and me being a mostly normal twenty-four-year old), though, we usually didn’t dwell on these strategic questions for very long, and the conversations generally wandered to topics closer to our hearts. Ott, for example, was very curious about what types of music I listened to and who my favorite bands were. Henderson wondered if he had a future in NASCAR or as a professional stuntman, and Guzon usually wanted someone to listen to his relationship issues with his now-distant fiancée.
On that late March day, I spent about an hour up on the Government Center roof, checking on the Marines, fortifying myself with their boundless energy, and amusing myself with their absolutely absurd banter. As Noriel and I were walking back to our makeshift command post inside the Government Center after a few hours of observation, we came upon a tall, red-haired, red-faced, red-mustached Marine major whom we hadn’t met before. Immediately, he pulled us both aside and began to lecture us about safety. The nameless major was from one of the Marine Civil Affairs Groups (CAGs), the military units tasked to respond to local concerns and to slowly rebuild the infrastructure and institutions necessary for some semblance of normal life to resume.
As he held forth, the major moved around nervously, his head swiveling back and forth the entire time. He began his impromptu instructional by telling us how we had to keep our guard up at all times, how every patrol was a combat patrol and how we had to be constantly ready to engage. After a few minutes, I realized that our new major friend wasn’t so much lecturing us as he was reassuring himself, so I let him ramble on and then thanked him politely for his advice. As he walked off, Noriel turned to me and grinned, and I grinned back. All of the major’s bravado had revealed only one thing—that he hadn’t really seen any combat yet; indeed, judging from his nervous lecture, this might well have been his very first mission. Four weeks into our tour and we were already beginning to feel like combat veterans. For the first time, I began to understand why in the Marines there’s the infantry, and then there’s everybody else.
An hour later, just after noon, first squad and I completed a local security patrol and headed back to the roof. Walking through the gates of the compound, I saw our helpful Civil Affairs major nervously preparing to mount his Humvee and head out of the Government Center, back to whatever base he had recently come from. Noriel saw him, too.
“Sir, he looks kind of scared. Maybe I should go over and asks him to give us some useful combat tips? You know, take his minds off the fears …” He was grinning widely at me again.
“Behave, killer, behave. He’s got enough to worry about without you screwing with him. Let’s just get out of this damn heat.”
“Roger that, sir … Maybe just one little questions?”
Noriel was irrepressible. I couldn’t help smiling back. “No, not even one little questions, you Filipino nut. You’ve got work to do. Get your squad back inside and let me know when they’ve got all their sensitive gear.”
Noriel trotted off, smiling. As he went, he glanced over at the major, then back at me. I shook my head and pointed to our building.
Ten minutes later, the Civil Affairs convoy roared out of the gates, and a few seconds thereafter, a massive explosion shattered the calm afternoon air. I had just taken off my vest and helmet inside our Government Center headquarters, and I immediately threw them back on. As I adjusted the helmet and the PRR headpiece, Bowen called down from the roof.
“Sir, it looks like that Civil Affairs convoy just got hit pretty bad by an IED. They might need some help, sir.”
“Roger that, One-Three. On it.”
I dashed out of the room. Leza and Noriel already had their guys suited up and heading for the compound’s side gates. I joined them, found Teague, and assumed my normal position just behind his point fire team. Then I gave the order to head out, and first squad, followed by second, blasted out of the Government Center and set off at a run, heading south into the butchers’ area. It had been less than a minute since the explosion.
We traveled two blocks and came upon a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno. In the middle of a deserted four-way intersection, four groaning, screaming, badly wounded Marines lay on the concrete, rolling around in swiftly congealing pools of their own blood. Some already had various parts of their uniforms cut off to better expose their injuries, but others were bleeding right through the cloth. A Humvee was burning brightly, and several of the Civil Affairs officers were frantically running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The streets around were nearly deserted.
Immediately, Docs Smith and Camacho jumped on the wounded, and I ordered Leza and Noriel to position their men to secure the intersection. The IED attack had not, as yet, been followed up by small arms and RPGs, but we needed to be prepared, and the Civil Affairs convoy did not have enough people to defend the intersection properly. When I was satisfied with our positions, I went to find the major to see what else he and his men needed from us.
What I found was the embodiment of all I had hoped to avoid becoming, a frantic and nonsensical officer, clearly in shock though not wounded, repeating over and over that he had taken wounded as he dashed randomly about to check on the various reports coming in over his PRR. After trying unsuccessfully to penetrate his shell shock, I walked off and immediately ran into the Marine artillery lieutenant who was the convoy’s security commander. He, too, was agitated, but he was in much better shape than the major, and he told me that though the casualties were stable for now, we needed to get them out soon. They were urgent medevacs, bleeding badly from severed arteries.
Five minutes later, we had helped load the wounded, and a subsection of the CAG convoy roared off to Junction City, the massive U.S. base just west of Ramadi, right on the other side of the Euphrates. The remaining Civil Affairs folks were preparing to load up, and I radioed Noriel and Leza, instructing them to head back to the Government Center as soon as all the vehicles had left. By this time, the stricken Humvee had burned so fiercely that very little remained—just a five-foot-by-five-foot black, smoldering cube. There was nothing our enemies could do with it, so we decided to leave it in place for the time being. However, just as the CAG convoy was mounting its men to leave, I heard the now-distinctive double boom of an armed RPG ring out, very close to our positions.
I whipped my head left. A fully armored Civil Affairs Humvee guarding an intersection two blocks to our east had just been struck by an attack from its south, and Marines were piling out of it, taking cover behind its heavy doors. Small-arms fire erupted from their assailants, and the Marines started firing back. Unaffected just yet, I yelled over the PRR for Noriel and Leza to collect their squads and meet me in our intersection. Then I ran over to the frantic major to see if I could get a better idea of where the attack was coming from. If the attackers were close enough, we stood a good chance of flanking the insurgents with our two squads if we could move quickly.
Pulling up at the major, I asked him for any information he could give us, but he just stared back, wide-eyed and stunned; then he turned away and began shouting into his PRR headset. I glanced back at my squads. Teague was ready and waiting, and he motioned furiously at me to get on with it and move out south. I held up my hand. Wait. I turned back to the major and tried again to elicit information, but his response hadn’t changed. Blank stare. More yelling into the PRR. Getting information from the man was a lost cause, so I turned around and furiously motioned for Teague to go.
It was like watching a greyhound released from the racing gate—Teague streaked smoothly south, vaulted a wall into a small cemetery, and continued running without any hesitation at all. The rest of first squad, me included, trailed him by about fifteen meters, with Leza and his men running behind us. Up ahead, Teague leaped onto a four-foot-high crypt, and, without breaking stride, used the grave’s height to launch himself over yet another wall. I thought for a second that I was watching an action movie, but it was just twenty-one-year-old Corporal Brian Teague from Tennessee doing what he did best while wearing fifty pounds of gear.
Ten seconds later, the rest of us caught up with him, but I had been too slow giving the order to pursue. Teague had seen only one of the attackers—the rest had escaped by car—and he had raised his weapon to fire, but the man had dropped his AK and merged into the surrounding crowd before Teague could take a clean shot. He took off after the insurgent, but trying to find a particular Iraqi dressed in everyday civilian clothes among several thousand Iraqis also dressed in everyday civilian clothes was like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. We searched a few houses in the vicinity, but the opportunity to cut off our attackers was long gone. Dejectedly, I ordered us back to the Government Center. We patrolled north, the carbon-black cube that used to be an American Humvee smoking bleakly as we passed.
I cursed my slow decision making.