Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (33 page)

28

The marines in the house in Ambush Alley lay on the roof tucked in the shelter of the parapet, scanning the road for signs of the enemy. They kept glancing anxiously up the road to their right for signs of a rescue squad. Their faces were caked in sweat and dirt and etched with anxiety.

For the third time that day, they heard the rumble of vehicles coming up Ambush Alley, this time from the Euphrates Bridge on the left side of the road. Looking up from the roof, Robinson, Ortiz, and Martin saw a long convoy of marines speeding toward them. There were tanks, tracks, and Humvees. A whole company was on the move. Robinson’s spirits soared. At last they were going to get out of there.
They have come to get us out.
Masonry and dirt exploded into the air as the approaching convoy shot up buildings on both sides of the road along the entire route. Robinson and the others waved their guns and Kevlar helmets to signal that they were friendlies.

As the convoy reached the house, Ortiz, manning a corner of the roof, heard the crack of a round as it ricocheted off a wall. He then felt a smack to his head and dropped to the ground. Robinson saw him drop.
He’s not
moving. He’s dead.
He quickly moved to cover his position. They had survived two hours besieged by hostile forces only to be shot at by their own marines. Martin ducked out of the way of the incoming rounds smacking against the walls around him and cursed themselves for their stupidity.
What a dumb thing to do, waving our rifles around like that.
Ortiz opened his eyes and slowly started to regain vision. He wasn’t dead. He had blacked out. The round had gone into the back of the Kevlar helmet, penetrated it, but came out of the top without touching his head. He couldn’t hear a thing, though. He just saw people mouthing at him in slow motion. He sat slumped in a corner, completely out of it.

Castleberry and Worthington watched the rest of the convoy just zoom by.
They’ve fucking missed us.
But as the last vehicle in the convoy drew level with them, a gunnery sergeant in a Humvee, shooting a pump-action shotgun out of the window, spotted them and drew up to the house. He was Gunnery Sergeant Jason Doran, a twenty-year marine veteran.

“What do you need?”

For some reason, Worthington didn’t say the obvious. He didn’t say, “
We need to get out of here right now.
” He was so tightly focused that he was thinking only of immediate needs. He wasn’t thinking of the big picture. Right now, all he knew was that everyone was dead thirsty.

“Water. We need water. And radio batteries.”

The gunnery sergeant ran around to the back of the Humvee and threw a five-gallon can of water and a pack of batteries at the marines in the house.

“I’ll be back.”

Milter ran outside to pick up the water jug. It was empty. In frustration, he hurled it into the air.

All Castleberry and Worthington could see was an empty water jug flying past their line of vision.

“They are fucking empty. And they are the wrong batteries for the fucking radio.”

They looked at each other.
Goddamnit. We’re fucked again.
Castleberry almost laughed in frustration.
It fucking figures.

Robinson was getting jumpy. It would soon get dark, and although marines now knew where they were, they were still no closer to getting out of there.
We might just not make it out of here tonight.
Grabbing Ortiz and Olivas, he told Worthington and Wentzel that he was going back to the track to pick up anything else that might be useful.

It was the same drill as before. Ortiz and Olivas covered for him as he waited for the countdown. It was like watching a bull jump out of a gate. When they started firing, he ran out and jumped into the track for a third time. He grabbed some more AT4s and tried to pull out a Javelin antitank missile for Worthington. There were four of them in the track. Getting it was no easy task. They were several meters long, each one weighing thirty-six pounds. Robinson yanked one from behind the benches and pulled it free. He then grabbed anything else he could lay his hands on and threw it all out of the back of the track. Then he tried to do what he had wanted to do all day. He tried to get Fribley out of there. But each time he grabbed him, Fribley’s body just came apart in his hands, spilling his intestines all over the floor and over his hands and arms. He was jammed in pretty good between the ramp and the bench. For a second, Robinson got the chills at the macabre scene. Then he went numb and just moved on, leaping out of the track and back into the house. At that moment, he shook off the sight of Fribley’s broken body. He wondered whether, in months to come, it would be as easy.

The sun was sinking fast. It was now getting to the point where Castleberry didn’t think they would survive the rest of the day. Robinson, Wentzel, Worthington, and Martin began to discuss the unthinkable. They thought of
Black Hawk Down. We might have to shoot our way out of here and patrol back along Ambush Alley on foot.

III

THE NORTHERN BRIDGE

1600–0500 Hours

1

Captain Mike Brooks and the convoy of Alpha Company vehicles shot their way through Ambush Alley toward the northern bridge. Brooks didn’t have time to focus on what was going on. They just fired a wall of lead at buildings and bunkers lining the street. Just before the bridge span, Brooks saw the two damaged and twisted AAVs. One of them was no more than a charred hulk still churning out black smoke. He felt it as a slap in the face.
Good Lord. What happened there?

As they crossed the bridge, Brooks came face-to-face with the horror of war. It was a sight he thought he’d never see. There were marines lying on the ground, bleeding out by the side of the road, their faces contorted with pain and anguish. The lifeless bodies of KIAs, covered in ponchos, were laid out behind a mound of earth. Around them, Charlie’s marines were dug in, wide-eyed and fearful, faces caked in blood, sweat, and dirt. A hundred meters beyond the bridge were a couple of AAVs. One, destroyed in the middle of the road, still had smoke spewing out; another was lying in a ditch, as impotent as a beached whale.

Brooks looked for Dan Wittnam. He asked a couple of Charlie marines where their commander was. They just stared at him, too badly shaken to make any sense. Then he saw him by one of the tracks, trying to work the radio. Blood and dirt had dried in blotches on his face and the front of his chemical suit. His legs were covered in thick mud.
Good Lord. What have
you been through?
Brooks looked him in the eye, trying to gauge how he was doing.

“Dan, am I glad to see you. How are you doing?”

Wittnam looked back with a steady gaze. Brooks could see that he was being strong and trying to hold it together. But there was real anguish behind those eyes.

“How are you doing, Mike?”

Brooks didn’t need to ask him what was going on. That was clear. Neither of them had any idea where Bravo Company and the forward CP were. They looked back into the city, but there was no sign of them.
They
must be somewhere in there doing God knows what.

“Dan, I’m going to get to work on drumming up the defense and getting a solid perimeter. We’ll chat more in a few minutes.”

Brooks set up a battalion minus defense with the tanks and the CAAT team. It was a way of defending the position without full battalion strength. He wanted to chat more with Dan but could tell that he was preoccupied with the job of accounting for his marines.
It’s wearing on him
that he doesn’t know where everyone is.

Alpha’s arrival at the northern bridge had changed the balance of power. They were now a force to be reckoned with. Alpha’s FAC called in air strikes on the buildings around the canal where much of the fire was still coming from. The 81 mm mortar platoon laid down baseplates, attached cannons, and blasted buildings to the north and south. Tanks traversed their turrets while their gunners looked through the crosshairs and locked onto the buildings and bunkers from where they were still receiving fire.

Mike Brooks had seen the difference the tanks had made by the Euphrates Bridge. He now saw it all over again. As soon as the tanks started firing, the incoming stopped. He didn’t have time to analyze it fully, but he had the fleeting thought that they had poorly task organized the deployment of the tanks.
It would have been better to give tanks to each of the
companies.

Staff Sergeant Anthony Pompos, one of the Charlie Company marines who had run the gauntlet of Ambush Alley with the medevac convoy and had now made it back to the northern bridge, tried to link up with the rest of the marines from his platoon. Even though he had managed to consolidate all those who had mistakenly traveled back to the southern bridge in track 210 with him, there were still some marines missing. As he was trying to account for them all, he ran into Gunnery Sergeant Jason Doran.

“Hey, half my platoon is missing and I don’t know where they are at.”

It was like a lightbulb went off inside Doran’s head.

“There are marines inside the city. I just drove past them. They are from Charlie Company. Help me clear this Humvee up.”

Doran and Pompos cleared some equipment out of the Humvee and grabbed a couple of machine gunners. Doran got back into his Humvee and headed back down Ambush Alley.

Robinson, Castleberry, Worthington, and the other marines inside the house on Ambush Alley had been waiting for what seemed like hours since the gunnery sergeant from the Alpha convoy had pulled up to the house and thrown the water jug at them. Robinson thought they were never coming back.
They’ve left us here. They’ve forgotten about us.
Now he finally saw the same gunnery sergeant, Jason Doran, hurtling down the road toward them with five Humvees. Castleberry thought he was like something out of a movie. He saw the shotgun at his side and shotgun rounds slotted in his flak jacket. He lit a cigarette just like the Marlboro Man and started pumping off rounds in the direction of some Iraqis. His chin strap was hanging down.
This guy’s rough and ready, just like John Wayne.

Doran ran to the house and shouted at Worthington.

“Hey, man, why didn’t you say you needed out of here the first time?”

Worthington couldn’t answer. It just didn’t occur to him.

“Well, let’s get the fuck out of here now.”

The marines in the courtyard downstairs piled into the Humvees, followed by those on the roof. Doran ran into the house to make sure that everyone had gotten out. When he got back into the street, he saw a group of marines just hanging around the vehicles.

“What’s wrong?”

“We don’t know which vehicle we should get into.”

“Get the fuck out of here. Get in any of the vehicles. Just get in.”

Some piled into the back of Humvees; others had to hang off the sides and lie on the hood. As the Humvees took off, they fired off all the ammo left in their rifles at every window, every alley, every building on both sides of the road. Guns were blazing as the marines fired so many rounds that they burned themselves on the hot barrels. Robinson was relieved to have finally gotten out of the house. He felt much more comfortable in the familiar surroundings of a Marine Corps Humvee. Castleberry didn’t. He felt vulnerable. Normally, he was hidden inside the metal compartment of his track. The sides of the Humvees were no more than canvas flaps.
I’ve
just got to get as much lead out there as possible. We’re getting out of here.
Let’s not fuck it up now.
There was a feeling of group elation. During the three-minute drive back to the northern bridge, a wall of lead flew out from both sides of the convoy.

2

Gunnery Sergeant Howard and his tanks had now been stuck in the mud on the east side of the city for over three hours. He was still waiting for the Hercules M88 tank retrievers to show up. There was just no way they were managing to pull out the stuck tanks and tracks with the tow cables they had with them.

He heard the M88s before he saw them. The battalion staff had not wanted support vehicles getting mixed up in the fighting in Nasiriyah. But Gunnery Sergeant Greg Wright, Staff Sergeant Charlie Cooke, and the tank company’s mechanics had detached from the battalion log trains to drive the two M88 tank retrievers, unescorted, over the Euphrates Bridge, into the city, and toward the mud bog.

This time, a couple of tankers, led by Sergeant John Ethington, reconned the route on foot so that the M88s wouldn’t get stuck in the mud. Once again it didn’t help. Howard’s heart sank when he now saw one of the 88s slide into a mud hole. Marines yelled in disbelief. The other 88 maneuvered around it and managed to pull it out. The mechanics on that 88 now positioned the vehicle close enough to pull Howard’s tank out. Just as the 88 raised its crane arm and pulled Howard’s tank out, the 88 began to sink into the mud. Howard now had to use his tank to pull out the 88.
How
are we going to get out of this mess? As they tried to get the C7 amtrack out, the 88 got stuck again. The other 88 couldn’t get close enough to pull it out without getting stuck itself.

No matter what combination of vehicles they used to tow each other out of the mud, one of them would always seem to get stuck. It was getting dark. Howard knew that they had to get out of there before nightfall, yet two vehicles, the C7 forward command-and-control track and now one of the M88 tank retrievers, were still stuck. The only way to get enough purchase on the ground would be to demolish one of the corner houses. They decided it wasn’t a good idea.

A couple of miles north of the mud bog, Major Sosa had seen, through the gap onto Ambush Alley, the long convoy of Alpha’s vehicles, led by the tanks, hurtle past them from south to north. As they moved through the town, fire rained down on them from the western side. Sosa was relieved. He finally knew that with so much firepower heading north, they were going to accomplish their mission.
We’re going to make this happen.
Now they needed to get the stuck vehicles out so that they could join the fight, too.

Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski also saw the Alpha convoy go through. At last, things were starting to happen. He’d picked up from radio comms that there were now several dead and an unknown number of wounded. He’d had reports that some of the wounded were with Alpha and others with Charlie. He didn’t know how many. Some of the reports suggested there were mass casualties.
This was not how it was supposed to be.
Grabowski was frustrated and angry.
The gloves are now o f.

He got his artillery liaison officer, First Lieutenant Kevin Jackson, to call back to the artillery batteries of 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, call sign Nightmare, to shell the Martyrs’ District, on the northwest side of the city, where most of the fire had come from. Until now, the city had been a restricted area. To cut down on what the U.S. military euphemistically called “collateral damage,” Grabowski and his marines had been told not to fire into residential areas unless they positively identified targets. The bitter fighting over the last five hours had changed all that. Now he ordered artillery shells to strike the city. He watched as the shells came over and landed in the Martyrs’ District, sending up fountains of debris and smoke. They hit right on the money.

From his position on the edge of Ambush Alley guarding the forward CP, Corporal McCall, one of the CAAT marines, looked through the 13-power sight system of his TOW. In the distance, he saw a marine AAV disabled against a building and Iraqis dragging objects from the rear of the vehicle.
Were they the bodies of marines or were they packs?
He didn’t know that it was track 201, which had been carrying Robinson, Castleberry, and the other marines who had been holed up in the house on Ambush Alley. He had no idea how the AAV had got there. He asked permission from the battalion gunner, Chief Warrant Officer David Dunfee, to engage the track.

“Are you sure there are no friendlies?”

“I can’t see, sir.”

Dunfee couldn’t be sure that there weren’t marines still in the track. He wouldn’t let McCall shoot. McCall had to sit there and watch the Iraqis dragging stuff away.

Grabowski wasn’t going to wait any longer. He’d got the news that almost all the vehicles were out of the mud, except for the C7 and the Hercules M88 tank retriever. They would have to leave them. He got hold of the battalion staff he’d left with the stuck vehicles and told them to move out. Some of the mechanics refused to leave the M88. It was only when Major Peeples gave them a specific order that they agreed to abandon it. Marines stripped as much as they could off the two vehicles and pulled out onto Ambush Alley. Ahead of them, Grabowski and the rest of the forward CP and Bravo Company were already waiting. At last, the remaining vehicles of 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, headed up Ambush Alley in one long convoy. When it reached track 201, marines from Bravo Company jumped into the troop compartment and found the mangled body of Lance Corporal David Fribley. They pulled it free and loaded it into one of the Humvees. Other marines ran into the house to look for the stranded marines. There was no one there. They didn’t realize they had all been rescued earlier by Peeples and Doran. It was 1715. As they set off toward the northern bridge, Grabowski saw, on the other side of the road, the charred hulk of track 208 still burning.
No one could have survived that.