Iwish that I could tell the story of the battle as it happened—give some sort of traditional, blow-by-blow account of the different troop movements within the city, where the various units were engaged, how the enemy forces arrayed themselves—but I can’t. In fact, I can’t even give a reasonable account of my own platoon’s fighting, because most of the time my squads were separated from one another, without communication, in the middle of an urban jungle that had suddenly sprouted fire from all directions. I can’t begin to describe the chaos, let alone try to make sense of it. My Marines and I fought house by house and block by block in a series of small, intense, mostly separate battles, and we experienced that day not as a linear, understandable progression of events but as a jumbled array of brief, intense snapshots. All that I can do is share some of these snapshots and hope that they at least convey faithfully our experience of the all-out fighting of April 6.
We piled out of the vehicles at the very bottom of the Farouq area, along Baseline Road just north of where the train tracks ran along the very bottom of the city. Baseline was entirely deserted, and where its northern sidewalk ended, the dense housing compounds sprang up, forbidding and seemingly impenetrable. The fight had gotten more intense, judging by the brief pauses between bursts of gunfire. Based on how distant that firing sounded, I guessed that the fighting was still several hundred meters away, to our north. As I was about to hop out of the Humvee, it suddenly struck me that we couldn’t take the seven-tons off the wide Baseline Road and into the narrow streets of Farouq. They’d assuredly get stuck somewhere, and then we’d be tied down defending hunks of metal instead of rescuing our trapped comrades.
Still, I couldn’t just leave the vehicles and their four drivers all alone in the most hostile part of town. I used the PRR to radio Bowen, who was standing one hundred meters behind me on Baseline. If anyone could handle being isolated in this dangerous area, protecting a stationary target without any communication with other friendly units, it was he.
“One-Three, this is One-Actual. I need you to provide vehicle security here. One-One and One-Two will move with me farther north.”
“Roger, sir. You need me to stay with the vehicles. Uh, sir, do you have a 119 [long range radio] I could have?”
“No. Mahardy’s got the only one for the entire platoon, and the CO needs it. There’s no fighting here, so you might be safe. And if you take any casualties, at least you can perform your own medevac with the vehicles. That’s the best I can do, One-Three. We don’t have any time to wait. I’ve gotta leave you—somewhere in this city Joker Three’s got a couple of Marines bleeding out, and we’ve got to get ‘em. If anyone can handle this shitty mission, it’s you.”
“Roger that, sir. I’ll make it happen. Don’t worry about us. Get Joker Three. I’ll see you in the fight.”
During our conversation, the rest of the platoon had finished dismounting. I jumped out of the Humvee and looked up ahead. The CO was sprinting west down the road with Mahardy in tow, so I took off after them. Once again I heard someone screaming for Marines to get in front of the lieutenant, and suddenly Teague passed me and positioned himself directly in front of me.
The CO called me over the PRR: “Hey, One. Third platoon isn’t where we thought they were, and we don’t know exactly where they are now. I bet we’re too far south. We’ve gotta move north, and quickly.”
“Roger that, sir. Moving.”
Neither of us had any idea where, exactly, to go, so first squad, second squad, the CO, and I did the only thing we could. We ran straight toward the sound of the guns as rapidly as our feet would carry us.
Ten minutes later, we had made our way into Farouq, and we found ourselves running toward a major north-south road called Easy Street. The sounds of fighting were much closer now. I was functioning mainly on autopilot and adrenaline—there were no decisions to be made until we either found third platoon or got attacked. The CO was leading the way, and he and Mahardy suddenly popped around the corner of a house, jumping out onto the sidewalk lining Easy Street. I was about thirty feet behind, and the two disappeared from my view. Suddenly firing erupted, very close now, and Mahardy and the CO immediately reappeared, backpedaling as fast as possible. Teague ran up to join them; arriving there, he, too, dived for cover.
My PRR erupted with the CO’s voice: “One … they’ve got us pinned down with some heavy fire … Probably at least one machine gun position … Get off this street … Move south, try and flank.”
The last bit was redundant—I had already backtracked to the closest north-south street, and now I was running south as fast as I could with the back half of first squad following. The front half was still pinned down, and second squad had somehow gotten separated from the rest of us. We moved down one block, then I stuck my head around the corner of a compound wall to get a visual on the houses across Easy.
Less than a foot to my left, the wall suddenly exploded in a solid line tracing up from the sidewalk to well above my head. The left side of my face was peppered with shards of concrete that pinged off my sunglasses and scraped the skin where they hit. Reflexively, I jumped backward around the corner so quickly that I almost fell over. There was at least one machine gun position directly across the road—I had seen the flashes out of the corner of my eye—and we needed to somehow get rid of it. I glanced back and spotted Corporal Walter, one of Noriel’s team leaders.
“Walter,” I yelled. He couldn’t hear me above the din, so I caught his eye and motioned frantically for him to come alongside me. “We’ve got a machine gun right across the street; first house you see, second story. We need to get some fire on it so we can cross the street and hit it hard. Grab one of your Marines and get him ready to go. You and I are gonna suppress and cover him.”
“Roger, sir,” Walter screamed back, then turned around and grabbed Lance Corporal Boelhower, a Marine who had joined us only one month before deploying, from where he was kneeling behind a parked car. Ten seconds later, Boelhower and Walter were both standing behind me.
I put my mouth right next to Walter’s left ear and yelled, “Okay, on the count of three, we’re going to pop out and fire. Watch my tracers—they’ll tell you where that gun is … Got it?”
“Got it, sir,” he screamed back.
“Okay, one, two, three.”
We lunged around the corner, out into the open again, and I started pouring fire at the window where I had seen the enemy. Corporal Walter followed suit. Immediately the gunner opened up again, then went silent; our combined fire had eliminated him. I felt nothing at the possibility of having shot my first human, just the need to continue pouring fire on the other houses across the street and a distant irritation that I could no longer hear anything out of my right ear since Walter had placed his muzzle right next to it before opening up with his weapon.
I kept pulling the trigger as fast as good shooting allowed, and Walter turned around and waved Boelhower forward, screaming, “Go, go, go.” Without any hesitation, the Marine set off across the street at a dead run, and Walter and I started opening up again on more enemies who had suddenly appeared on a nearby rooftop and begun shooting at our runner. Tracers were streaming back and forth across the road, but somehow Boelhower made it safely across. More of the squad moved up alongside me and added their fire to Walter’s and mine. I briefly stopped shooting and looked to my south, trying to figure out where on earth my second squad had gone. I spotted them about fifty meters away, crouched down behind a gigantic mound of dirt right in front of the southern soccer stadium. Tracers from more enemies across the street were pouring into the mound, and it looked strangely as if a laser light show had suddenly started, with all lasers converging to a single point two-thirds of the way up the large mound. Carson later told me that while he was crouching behind that mound, he suddenly became certain that he wouldn’t live through the next five minutes.
I tried calling Leza and Staff Sergeant over the PRR, but got nothing in response. I wondered if they had been killed, then I started shooting again.
Somehow, I had made it across Easy with the back half of first squad, and
I paused to shift the receiver of the PRR to my left ear after realizing that the hearing in my right one still hadn’t returned. The radio squawked to life with Noriel’s voice, and it distantly occurred to me that it could very well have been squawking at me this entire time without my knowing. He and the front half of first were still pinned down on the opposite side of Easy Street. I could hear his shouted instructions.
“Tig, above you, Tig, above you!”
Corporal Teague’s voice came back. “Ser’ent, I can’t see him. I can’t see him!”
“He’s on the balcony, Tig, one house down, on the balcony! Throw the damn grenade there. Throw him!”
I looked back across Easy Street, one block north of the way I had just come, and I spotted Sergeant Noriel standing on the roof of a house, completely exposed and totally heedless of the bullets that were clearly zipping all around him. One hand was on his weapon, and the other was on his PRR. I glanced farther up Easy on my side of the street just in time to see Teague heave a grenade up in the air. A balcony above him exploded, and I saw a flash, smoke, and dark redness suddenly splashed all over the balcony’s railing.
Boelhower was trying to get into a house, the one from which most of the enemy’s fire had come, but first he had to kick in the metal gate that opened up into the house’s courtyard, and several kicks failed to produce the desired effect. The rest of the Marines were stacked up behind him, along the compound wall, waiting for the gate to break so that they could pour into the breach. I was still on the sidewalk, trying to raise Leza on the PRR but having no success. I had no idea whether any of his second-squad Marines had made it across the street, or whether any of them had been killed or wounded in the fighting. After ten or so attempts failed, I gave up, and I ran down the street to rejoin the fragment of my first squad as it finally entered the house.
No sooner had we gotten inside the wall than the CO called me. “One, this is Six. I’m across Easy with part of your first squad. Where are you?”
“Six, I’m also across Easy. I’m about to go into a little housing compound that we’re breaching.”
“Negative, One. We need to keep moving. Third platoon isn’t at the south water tower like we thought. It’s at the north one [a distance differential of roughly half the city]. We’ve got at least ten more blocks to go. I’m moving north on the sidewalk now.”
“Roger, Six, I’ll pick up the rest of the squad and move to you.”
I could see Walter, so I yelled at him to get his guys out of the house—whose door Boelhower had finally bashed in—and to follow me back to Easy Street. He gave me a thumbs-up, and I did an about-face and started running back the way I had come. A stream of tracers passed smoothly through the spot where I had just been standing. Corporal Brown stared at me wide-eyed as I ran past him.
When I got to Easy, a beautiful sight greeted my eyes. Weapons Company, the battalion’s QRF—and its big guns—which lived at Hurricane Point, had arrived on the scene with Humvees equipped with heavy .50-caliber machine guns and Mark-19s, our automatic grenade launchers. The Marks were dusting off the rooftops of the buildings lining Easy while the .50-cals slammed through their walls in their wonderful, slowly rhythmic thumping. One block north of me, I could see the CO, Noriel, Teague, and Mahardy. Weapons Company Marines were streaming out of the Humvee to join them, and the sidewalk in front of me suddenly filled up with at least five of them. I glanced back—the rest of first squad was behind me on the street—and started moving north to rejoin the CO.
With Weapons’s arrival, the fire had slackened, but it was still snapping around us from all directions, and I had taken maybe five steps along the sidewalk when the Weapons Company Marine directly in front of me suddenly doubled over, crouched down, and then fell on his side in the fetal position. He had just been shot through the stomach. Time stopped, and all sound seemed to fade away again. I looked across the street just in time to see another Weapons Marine spin around and sit down heavily. I could see tracers zigzagging crazily in front of me, creating almost a lacework pattern of light across the street directly in front of me. At that exact moment, all I remember thinking was Wow. This is just like in the movies.
Then time kicked in again, the gunfire and the cracking resumed, and I ran like hell to the wounded. A corpsman got there first and started work. As I passed him, I realized that my current magazine was running low on ammo, and I should probably change it. I did, and kept on moving.
We were nearing the end of Easy, about four blocks south of where it ended at Michigan. Teague’s team was walking point, and I was right behind them. Two grenades came tumbling over the wall of the nearest house, neatly splitting the team in half. Without thinking, I turned around and sprinted for the nearest corner, even though it was probably futile; the grenades had landed only about ten feet away. One of Teague’s team members, I don’t know who, tossed his own grenade back over the wall. I heard one explosion, then nothing, so I turned back around. There, lying nicely in the middle of the sidewalk, were the two enemy grenades. For some reason, they hadn’t exploded.
Everyone stopped moving. With half of Teague’s team in front of the grenades and the rest of first squad behind them, I was briefly at a loss for what to do—should I risk moving past the unexploded little bombs, or try to get everyone into cover and then shoot the grenades, or wait in place for something else to happen? I stood motionless, just staring at the sidewalk for about five seconds, then Noriel solved my problem. Appearing out of nowhere, he streaked past me, spewing a mixed stream of English and Tagalog curses as he went. With no hesitation whatsoever, he ran up to the grenades, bent over, grabbed one, heaved it as far as he could into the houses to our west, then grabbed the other and did the same. Finished, he turned around and shouted at the rest of us.
“Well, what the hell are you alls waiting for! Move, move, move!”
We did, continuing north for another block until the CO reached me via PRR.
“One, we need to move west. I don’t know exactly where third is, but they’re somewhere in the next couple of blocks. Move west, off of Easy, and do it quick. Third’s got one dead and some badly wounded. We’ve gotta get to them soon.”
“Roger, Six.”
The PRR sprang to life again, this time with a broken transmission from Staff Sergeant. “One-Actual … moving where you are … moving …”
“Say again, Staff Sergeant. Say again.” I was desperate for news. I still had no idea where my second squad had gone or whether they had any killed or wounded.
“Moving to you. We’re moving to you …”
“Do you have any wounded, do you have any wounded, Staff Sergeant?”
“Negative … Okay … no … hurt … see Weapons. We’re coming.”
“Okay, come find us. We’ve gotta keep moving to third. Marines are dying.”
I listened, but didn’t hear anything else. Teague was looking back at me, so I motioned him to head west down the nearest street. He nodded, then moved off at quick patrol pace. The rest of us followed, and when I turned around to make certain that the squad was still together—that no one had been wounded without us knowing—I saw something amazing. Citizens were standing at the entrances to their houses, watching us pass them by. The gunfire down the street had slackened, but it hadn’t died away altogether, and just a few blocks away we could hear fierce, unremitting fire from wherever third platoon was pinned. None of that seemed to matter to the locals. Now that the worst of the fight had passed their street by, they wanted to see what was going on outside their front doors. Some of them even darted across Easy to get a better look, and, amid all the running, I noticed a few people calmly carrying sacks of goods across the main street.
I shook myself loose from the surprise of this outbreak of everyday life in the midst of our war. Teague and first squad were still moving, and the insurgents were still ferociously attacking third platoon somewhere nearby. I turned around and trotted off, again moving straight toward the noise of heavy firing.
The sounds of continuous fighting were very close now, perhaps only a few blocks away. As I pressed myself up against a compound wall located somewhere in the middle of the city, about four blocks due south of the Saddam mosque, I again heard the cracks of passing bullets. The fire seemed to be coming from behind us, from our east, not from our west, where third platoon was still fighting desperately. Noriel swung around and spotted a window with some flashes, and he pointed it out to Feldmeir, who aimed his grenade launcher in its general vicinity and somehow managed to put a grenade right through that window. The opening filled up with smoke and the firing ceased for a moment. Then it picked back up again. First squad stopped advancing and took cover as best it could.
I ducked around the nearest corner, intending to head toward this most recent fire to get a better picture of our attackers’ positions. Suddenly, I saw two men dressed head to toe in black, from the ski masks on their heads to the black tennis shoes on their feet, standing twenty feet away and staring at me. The all-black getup was the standard battle dress of the hard-core insurgents, the uniform they favored for the all-out, stand-and-fight battles. The men and I made eye contact, and in that quick instant both they and I knew exactly what I was going to do next. Before I could lift my muzzle high enough, though, both men ducked through the open steel gates in front of which they had been standing; then they clanged the doors shut. I loosed off about fifteen shots, hoping to hit the men through the thin sheet steel, and I called for a grenade. Walter ran up and slapped one into my outstretched hand. I carefully popped the thumb clip off the spoon, pulled the pin, and then lobbed the little round, smooth object over the compound gates. We ducked up against the wall and waited for the explosion; when it went off, I screamed at Walter for another.
“We’re all out, sir. No more left,” he shouted back.
“Roger that. Let’s hit this house.”
We charged the compound, kicked down the door, and streamed through, weapons raised to fire. Nothing was inside save a large hole in the dirt, some dark streaks on the wall, and some dark dribbles on the ground. They had probably only been wounded. We cleared the courtyard and then turned around and headed back the way we had come.
We headed west again, still trying to locate the beleaguered third platoon. Coming around another corner, I saw Corporal Hayes—a third-platoon team leader—and one other Marine crouched down on our street’s sidewalk, just one block to our north. Finally we had linked up with at least part of the missing unit. I ran over, and, as I got closer, I noticed that Hayes was white-faced and shaking slightly. He was bleeding from one of his hands.
“Hayes, where are the rest of your guys? Are any more wounded? Who do we need to get?”
He stared blankly at me for a bit, then, despite his pain, pointed out a spot one block to our north. “Sir, last I saw them, they were somewhere around there. We got separated early on. Now all of us’re wounded.” He stopped talking after that, exhausted and in pain.
The Marine to his right was also injured, and he was crying and rocking to himself. As I walked off, Noriel walked up.
“Hey. It’s gonna be okay,” he told them, and knelt down and put his arms around the crying Marine. “Now give me your magazines,” he said, more softly. “I’m low on bullets, and you won’t need them anymore.”
Doc Camacho moved up and immediately got to work on the wounded Hayes, so I moved off, trying to locate the rest of Hayes’s team, including the one dead Marine that I knew about. Ten feet in front of me, another wounded third-squad member suddenly staggered around a corner toward us. It was third’s Lance Corporal Gentile, and he was weaponless. Both hands were pressed against his face and neck; they were covered in blood, and blood was seeping through his closed fingers. Gentile had taken a round through the back of his neck, and it had blown off part of his nose and most of his right cheek when it exited his body through his face. I motioned Gentile back toward Doc and then moved up to the street from which he had emerged. Glancing down it, I saw the dead body of Moises Langhorst sprawled out, arms akimbo, in the middle of the street, maybe thirty feet away from me. Even from that distance, I could tell that Langhorst had been stripped of his weapon and all gear, leaving a strangely naked-looking body clad only in cammies and boots.
Noriel came up alongside me and, glancing over at Langhorst, asked, “Sir, do you want to go get him?”
I pondered the question briefly, and, right at that moment, two Army ambulances appeared out of nowhere and started rolling down our street. They stopped right at Doc Camacho, and an unknown Army colonel jumped out of the vehicles, ran up to the CO, and offered to evacuate our wounded for us. Seeing this, I turned back to Noriel.
“No. My concern right now is for the living. Let’s keep moving north. Let’s find the rest of third.”
We were still missing half of Hayes’s squad and two other full squads from third, and I knew they had at least one other seriously wounded Marine in their ranks. We couldn’t do anything for Langhorst now, and, even though the firing around us had ceased, our first priority was still breaking through to the besieged and helping the people we could. Noriel and I moved off north, to the end of the block, and I called the CO over the PRR to see if he knew where to go from here. He was still the only one with a long-range radio, and still the only one who had even some idea of where the rest of third was located.
When the CO didn’t reply, I glanced back, only to discover that he and the Army colonel were busy conferring at the entrance to the street containing Langhorst’s body. They suddenly straightened, and the CO and one other Marine, probably Mahardy, took off down the street to retrieve Langhorst. Behind them, the Army colonel started firing down the same street with a shotgun. I had no idea what he was shooting at, since the enemy guns around us had halted altogether, and I hadn’t seen any worthwhile targets on that street thirty seconds ago. Maybe it was random covering fire.
No help was going to come from this quarter for the time being, so I turned my PRR to third platoon’s channel and started calling out to them. After the third try, I heard Sergeant Holt, Corporal Hayes’s squad leader, bark back at me.
“Goddamn, sir, it’s good to hear you guys. How close are you?” he said.
“Holt, I don’t know. I don’t know where you are, but you’ve gotta be within a few blocks if I can hear you on this.”
“Well, sir, can you fire something in the air? Maybe we’ll see it.”
“Wait one.”
Sergeant Noriel had heard the whole exchange, and before I could turn to him, he slapped a red star cluster—a small aluminum canister that fires a red flare one hundred feet into the air—into my hand. “You can shoot this, sir.” Then he started tugging at my cammies, but I was too engrossed with finding the rest of third platoon to pay attention to him. I fired the pyrotechnic up into the air, and Holt informed me that we were only a block and a half away, just to his south.
I set off again, Noriel following me, still tugging at my cammies—later he told me that he felt like a little kid, tagging along after a distracted parent. Finally it dawned on me that he had something to say.
“What do you want, Noriel?”
“Just wanted to say, sir, that you’re a pretty tall guy. Maybe you should think about kneeling or taking cover occasionally. You keep this up, you’ll get shots soon.”
Shortly after we arrived on the scene, the firing at Sergeant Holt’s squad
slackened enough to allow them to leave the housing compound where they had taken refuge. The seven remaining able-bodied men moved just behind my first squad, and shortly after all of them had left their building, yet another third-platoon squad emerged from a nearby housing compound. They, too, inserted themselves among us, and I told Noriel to head off again, farther into the city. I started walking again before being stopped dead in my tracks by one of Sergeant Noriel’s team leaders, Corporal Brown, calling over the PRR.
“Sir,” he said, “I’m standing next to a dead Marine here. What do you want me to do?”
Dead bodies are classified as routine medevacs, but there’s never anything routine about zippering up the lifeless husk of one of your comrades and loading him like so much cordwood into the nearest vehicle. For three minutes, that’s exactly what we did. Then we headed west again to find the still-living—the priority and the urgent medevacs.
By midafternoon I had managed to hook up with my full platoon as well as most of third, and all 1,200 of 2/4’s Marines had deployed in force into Ramadi to crush the fighters. We had now been fighting for almost five straight hours, and I felt tired and frantically busy. Fire would erupt fiercely and die down again just as quickly as small pockets of resistance all around us sprang into life, then disbanded. During one of those quick firefights, I was moving with Leza when the bullets started snapping all around.
“Get the guys into a house. Strong-point and return fire,” I yelled, meaning they should guard the doors and windows.
“Roger, sir,” came the reply. “Carson, get us inside the gate.”
I looked behind me, and, sure enough, Lance Corporal Carson had just rammed his entire body against the sturdy metal gate of a compound wall. He rebounded, then shook his head just like a bull in a bullfight and charged again. This time the gate exploded inward, and second squad streamed inside to relative safety. Leza started running inside, then paused, turned around, and grinned at me despite the heavy fire.
“Hey, sir. That’s Carson for you, huh?”
For the first time, I found myself grinning during a firefight. “Yeah, it sure is. Let’s get the hell inside, huh?”
We poured into the building and climbed up to the roof, ignoring the people inside, if there even were any. Rows and rows of nearly identical housing compounds surrounded us, and, looking at them, I realized we were on the very western edge of the Farouq district, almost at the edge of the gigantic aboveground cemetery that marked the city center. Hes and the final squad from third platoon had taken cover among its tombstones.
Half an hour later, Hes and the rest of his men were found at the very western edge of the cemetery. It was early evening, and by now the fire inside the city had ceased altogether. The CO worked out a grid containing most of the butchers’ district and all of the Farouq district, and he put fourth platoon, mine, and the remnants of third into action searching every house along the east-west streets of the grid. The streets of the city were devoid of traffic, but the occasional pedestrian walked the sidewalks, sometimes even passing us, and from every third or fourth compound we passed residents stared at us from their rooftops or their open doors. Seeing them silhouetted against the evening sun made me slightly nervous, but I was still numb to most emotions outside my extreme focus. Once citizens had been identified as nonthreats, I lost all interest and moved on to the next task and/or suspicious person.
I walked by an open compound gate and glanced briefly inside. I saw a kid, about fifteen years old, with curly black hair and the very beginnings of a mustache tracing his upper lip, dressed in a black Adidas jacket and black nylon pants. Both hands were in his pockets. If he had been standing upright, he would have been leaning almost jauntily against a wall, with one leg crooked at the knee to rest on the other. He wasn’t standing, though. He was lying down, and his legs were twitching spastically. He had a neat red hole between his eyes. I walked on.
After an hour we finished searching the grid and patrolled back into the
base on foot. I was trudging back inside the base’s walls, right next to Hes, carrying my helmet in my left hand with my right dangling limply at my side. My M-16 hung neatly across the front of my chest, suspended by its three-point sling, and all of my gear was still on. It had been a long day of fighting, roughly eight hours, and we were exhausted and filthy, covered with dirt, sweat, and gunpowder residue. Hes had blood all over his cammies, but he wasn’t visibly wounded, so it likely wasn’t his. We walked in silence for a bit, then he spoke up.
“I’ve got a hell of a headache, One.”
“Dehydration, huh?”
“Yeah, well, that and the fact that I got knocked out by a bullet.”
“What?”
“Yeah, we were fighting on a roof near the cemetery when an AK round must have caught my Kevlar at an angle. Look here, you can see the divot it made in the thing. Anyway, I fell over—must’ve been knocked out. I woke up and found my Marines dragging me off the roof, screaming that I had been killed. Man, were they surprised when I jumped up and told them I was okay. You should’ve seen the looks on their faces.”
“Hell, man, you gonna see the docs?”
“Nah, they’ll just treat me and put me in for a Purple Heart. I lost two guys today, One, and a bunch of others have got bullets all through ‘em. Those guys rate Purple Hearts. Not me … Not me.” Hes shook his head and put a lit cigarette up to his lips and took a deep drag. (Hes was as good as his word: He never told the docs, and he never received the Purple Heart he rated.)
I could only stare at Hes in reply. I tried to think of something witty to make light of the situation, but my mind was moving too slowly for humor.
By now, most of the adrenaline had worn off, and I hadn’t slept or shaved in thirty-six hours. I felt dirty, grizzled, and exhausted, and I narrowed my burning eyes to slits after I took off my sweat-blurred sunglasses. Still, I had made it back with my entire platoon, and I felt proud. And about one hundred years older than when I had left that morning.
Each of us, I guess, had something to be thankful for. Hes, that that round hadn’t hit him straight on. Me, that none of my men had been wounded. As far as I knew, Joker One was the only platoon that had fought all day long without a single casualty, major or minor. I couldn’t believe it when all my squad leaders had reported none wounded upon our return to the base, so I had made them check the Marines again. Unsurprisingly, the report came back the same: None wounded, sir. Still, everyone was exhausted, so I postponed the usual debrief. Besides, I wanted to check with the CO and the other platoon commanders to straighten out the day’s big-picture events before I got back to my men.
I was pretty shaken up, but I was relieved that we had made it through unscathed and happy that we had killed a substantial number of our attackers. I had no idea how the Marines felt, though, until Mahardy asked me a question sometime later that night. He was in the hangar bay, smoking, and he pulled me aside as I passed him en route to the COC.
“Sir,” he said, “do you think we fought well today, sir? I mean, that was our first big fight. Would the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, you know, be proud of us?”
On hearing this, I almost broke down crying. I had to turn away, choke back tears, and steady my voice before I answered.
“Yeah, Mahardy. We fought well. The Corps is proud of us. We did fine.”
And we had done fine indeed. Despite being ambushed by well-prepared, highly motivated fighters all across the city, and despite being substantially outnumbered and outgunned for a good chunk of the day’s fighting, Golf Company had hit back hard, ultimately recovering our own and repelling our attackers in some of the fiercest street battles since Hue City in Vietnam. And we had managed to kill, by most accounts, several hundred of our enemies. It would be nearly two months before the insurgency was again able to amass that kind of combat power in Ramadi. And the locals no longer thought of us as easily crumbled awat.
Back in the States, though, our families had no idea of what we had just been through. When Christy turned on the television early on April 7 after returning home from a twelve-hour, all-night shift at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, the first thing she saw was the headlines screaming that twelve Marines had been killed and well over three times that number wounded in fierce fighting in a strange city called Ramadi. There was nothing else—no official calls or e-mails, no contact from the other company wives, nothing from me and nothing from my men. Just the news banner endlessly scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, announcing the deaths of the nameless over and over. Christy collapsed and spent the next few hours on the floor, unmoving.
It would be two days before she knew that I was alive.