Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (36 page)

5

The sun was going down as Major Sosa walked around the battlefield on the north side of the canal where Charlie had been fighting. Scattered all around him was the debris of war—twisted metal from RPG hits, pieces of burned flesh, smashed-up vehicles, spent rounds of ammo, empty water bottles, shreds of Marine clothing. The air was thick with the taste and smell of explosives. From the radio reports he’d picked up in the city, he’d had no idea that it was this bad. He was relieved to see that, contrary to Swantner’s earlier information, Dan Wittnam was not dead. But Dan looked haunted, his face streaked with dried blood and dirt. As he went around to the groups of Charlie marines, he found it hard to look at them. Some were sobbing; others were hugging each other in their grief; a few were sitting in the dirt, alone, staring into space. He could tell that they had fought hard. They were cut and beat up. Yet now he had to ask them to do more. He had received intel that fedayeen fighters were going to try to get back into the city on buses from the north. They would now have to deal with that threat and get ready to support the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force’s move through the city and on toward Baghdad. He issued a frag, or fragmentary order, to set up a defense for the night at the T intersection a few hundred meters farther north of the bridge.
I gotta ask them to do more—
set up for the night, establish a defense, get ready for the passage of lines.
He knew that the marines were only half listening to him. It was almost as though they felt that he had no right to tell them what to do because Sosa hadn’t been through what they had. They had other concerns on their minds. What they most wanted was their buddies back.
They won’t be able
to rest or put the horror of the day behind them until they know where all
their buddies are.

A few meters away, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski gathered his company commanders together. Around him were Captain Mike Brooks of Alpha, Captain Tim Newland of Bravo, Captain Dan Wittnam of Charlie, Major Bill Peeples of Team Tank, and Captain William Blanchard of the AAVs. They appeared to be exhausted. Dan Wittnam was in a state of shock. Grabowski had received radio reports throughout the day and built up a picture of what had gone on, but he wasn’t sure whether he really understood. He paused before speaking.

“Gents. It’s been a hell of a day.”

One by one, he asked the company commanders how many marines were still unaccounted for. He started with the tank company, then Mike Brooks from Alpha.

“Tanks has got everyone accounted for.”

“There are no missing and no KIAs in Alpha Company.”

Grabowski was confused. He remembered the radio conversation about casualties when Brooks was still on the southern bridge.

“I thought you had some KIAs?”

“They weren’t mine, sir.”

For Grabowski, that was excellent news. Alpha was up. It was the same with Bravo. No wounded, no missing in action, and no KIAs. This is not as bad as he’d thought. He then came to Dan Wittnam.

“What about Charlie, Dan? Give me your status.”

It was written all over Wittnam’s face. He looked long and hard at Grabowski without blinking.

“I’ve got nine dead, twelve wounded, and nine missing. I think.”

“Damn.”

Grabowski didn’t know what to say. He was stunned. All he could ask them to do was check their numbers again and to get dug in for the night.

“Gents, you’ve done a hell of a job today. But the fight ain’t over yet. We’ve still got a lot of bad guys out there. We don’t know what is going to happen tonight, or tomorrow. I need you to keep your head in the game.”

As they turned to leave, Grabowski called Wittnam back. He knew that Charlie’s marines had suffered and needed some time to get their heads together. He’d seen that the young marines were feeling bitter and confused.

“I’m putting you in reserve tonight. Do you need anything?”

“No, sir. I just want to find out where my guys are.”

As Wittnam walked away, Grabowski thought he had done the wrong thing. Maybe it would have been better to keep them in the front line just to keep them busy.

Grabowski looked up to see Newland of Bravo Company and his FAC, call sign Mouth, coming toward him. They had talked to Wittnam about the A-10 friendly fire incident on the northern bridge, and they now had a good idea of what had happened. As they approached, Grabowski saw that they were carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. They hardly looked up as they told him how they had not realized that Charlie Company had overtaken them as the lead element. The FAC explained how he had presumed that any vehicles north of the bridge were enemy. He had cleared the A-10 pilot to fire on them without realizing they were marine vehicles. The FAC was distraught. Grabowski tried to give what reassurance he could.

“We are going to report this, and there will be an investigation. You did what you thought was correct, but war is a confusing, bloody mess.”

He thought back to the warnings he tried to give young marines who looked forward to war with glee and excitement.
As you grow older, you realize that war is an ugly, brutal business, and it leaves scars forever.

“Gents, this is what we do for a living. It’s ugly. The bottom line is that you both did a tremendous job today and I need you in the fight because we don’t know what will be out there tomorrow.”

“Roger that.”

They both looked up at him, turned, and walked away.

There was so much to get on with that he didn’t know where to start. He wanted to talk to the marines from Charlie Company, to tell them what a great job they had done and what a success the mission had been, but now was not the time. And besides, he didn’t know quite what to tell them. They were hurting too much. They were surrounded by a shield of emotion. He couldn’t tell whether it was resentment, bitterness, anger, or hurt, but it was a shield that kept him out.

He called Colonel Bailey at the regimental HQ with an update on the number of dead, wounded, and missing. He had to use the satellite radio. The VHF radio wouldn’t reach back that far.

“Tell General Natonski that we’ve got his damn bridges. Timberwolf 6 out.”

At Task Force Tarawa’s command post, well south of Nasiriyah, General Rich Natonski greeted the news that 1/2 had secured the bridges with relief. He’d been under pressure all day from the follow-on forces of the 1st Marine Division to secure the bridges so they could get en route to Baghdad.

“Sir, there are several DUSTWUNs.”

“What the hell is DUSTWUN?”

He’d never heard that expression before: duty status whereabouts unknown. Some marines were missing somewhere in the city. He knew it would affect the marines on the ground still fighting. He made a point of making sure to walk the lines in the coming days. He remembered how, as a young marine, he’d been terrified and overawed by the generals. He wanted the young marines to see that he was there with them. But for now, he had to start making plans for the next day. They needed to start clearing the city, and they needed to find the missing marines from Charlie Company and the missing soldiers from the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company.

Up by the T intersection, a couple of kilometers north of the canal bridge, Mike Brooks checked and rechecked the security perimeter that marines from Alpha had set up to stop enemy vehicles from the north getting to the canal bridge and back into the city. His marines were digging fighting holes, talking to each other in a soft hum. Others just stared off into the middle distance, reliving the events of the day.

The sun had gone down and it was getting very dark. Brooks was too exhausted to eat. He’d been perturbed by the short conversation he’d had with Grabowski. He felt that the battalion commander still didn’t really understand what had happened at the northern bridge that day. Now he just collapsed in the dirt, relieved to be reunited with the rest of the battalion. This was all the family he had with him at the moment. He thought of his wife and three sons back home. He wanted to smell his wife’s hair and feel the hugs from his three little boys.
I don’t want them ever to have
to go through this.
He wondered whether the events of that day would change him, whether he would be scarred by war, whether he would be able to love his wife and sons in the same way as he had done before. He’d now seen dead bodies. It didn’t matter whether they were American or Iraqi. There was no Hollywood message telling him that those dead Iraqis were evil. They were dead people, and it wasn’t a good sight to see. He already looked forward to the day in years to come when he could meet up with former brothers-in-arms and share stories about the events of March 23, when the visceral pain and sorrow he now felt might be transformed into romantic memories of battle.

Dug into a trench, facing the Iraqi military compound just by the T intersection, Neville Welch was peering into the darkness. He was disturbed by what had happened to Charlie Company. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to sleep. He was terrified that an Iraqi would crawl up under cover of darkness and slit his throat.
That’s all they want. To kill just one of us.
He stayed awake by opening an MRE packet of coffee powder, pouring it down his throat, and washing it down with cold water. He hadn’t washed in a week. He hadn’t taken a shit in days. The only clean clothing he had on his body was a pair of socks that he’d washed by shaking around in a plastic MRE sleeve filled with water and soap. He climbed out of his hole, walked ten meters away, knelt down, and took a piss. It was the first he’d taken all day.

When he got back, Lance Corporal Nicholas Jones was in his fighting hole. He was glad for another set of eyes. For days, Welch’s marines had talked about nothing other than the girls they were going to hook up with once they got home, about getting wasted, having a blast, and getting laid. That night, Jones wanted to talk about God.

“When I get out of this, I’m gonna turn my life around.”

Jones told him about the cookies his aunt’s church had sent him and how, back home, they were thinking of him and praying for him. They talked for hours, agreeing that God had delivered them from Ambush Alley and that they were relying on God to get them safely back home. For some reason, God had chosen to save them, not the marines from Charlie Company. Welch knew two Charlie marines who were still missing. Lance Corporal Slocum used to be in Welch’s platoon. Private First Class Burkett used to come over sometimes and borrow CDs. It could have been us. We
could have been the ones that died.
He gave honor to God and vowed to purge and cleanse himself in the wide, open desert. Then he thought about
Matrix Reloaded.
He’d seen the first
Matrix
movie and had loved the cinematography. But
Matrix Reloaded
had come out just after they left for Iraq.
Oh man, I just gotta see
Matrix Reloaded.
I want to see it so bad.

In a Charlie Company hole down the line, Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk felt a bitterness rising in his throat. It was a feeling that somehow he’d been let down by the higher-ups. Not Captain Wittnam, his company commander.
He was awesome. I’ll go to war with him any fucking day of the
week.
Those who were in charge, those who should have known what it was going to be like in Nasiriyah, had let them down. The Iraqis didn’t surrender. They fought like the world was going to end, and those in charge didn’t know it. And when it had come to the fighting, who had died? It wasn’t the commanding officers; it was the grunts, the infantrymen, who had suffered. They were the ones who lived on a need-to-know basis.
Guys
like me didn’t need to know a fucking thing. Guys like me died.
Quirk was angry. It was the first time he’d been in combat. He knew it was the first time his commanders had been in combat, too, but he felt that they’d failed him. They’d given the order to remove the orange air panels, designed to ward off friendly fire, from the roofs of the tracks. He was glad he hadn’t come across the battalion commander.
I wouldn’t have been too
fucking pleased to see him. They are a bunch of cocksuckers, and I’d like to
knock them all down.

He questioned why so many of his buddies had died. He had known everything about them, and now they were no longer there.
And they knew
everything about me.
He was struggling with it all.
It becomes pretty real,
real fast. It’s something else. It’s weird right here.
There was too much information going through his head.
What will happen in the rest of the war?
What will happen tomorrow?
And tomorrow might be worse than today.

He thought about writing to his girlfriend.
But what am I going to say?
That he’d killed women and children? There were certain things he just couldn’t unload. People wouldn’t understand.
Some of the shit that has
happened today is so intense that the average dude won’t be able to grasp
it without thinking of Nazi Germany. Unless you were in it, you won’t be
able to understand it.
He decided he would just write to her and tell her how great she was.

He had lost his pack from the outside of the burning track 211. It had everything in it: his sleeping gear, ponchos, poncho liner, change of clothes, socks, food, letters from home, pictures of his girlfriend, extra batteries. The marines carried no spare gear with them. But that’s how he liked it.
We carry no spare gear because we are harder than the rest of the
faggots.
Now he was having to dig his fighting hole with a bayonet because he’d also lost his e-tool, the small spade used to scrape away ground for cover. Next to him, a corporal, the same guy who had been shitting himself all day, was telling him to dig the hole deeper. And all Quirk could reply was “Aye, aye, Corporal.”

He felt himself getting crazy again. He tried to pray.
Dear God, give me
strength . . .
The words would not come out. He felt breathless and panicky. He wasn’t able physically to continue with his prayer. He just couldn’t concentrate. He tried again.
Dear God . . .
Each time he started, he wondered what sort of God would make a world where his buddies could be shot up by Iraqis or other Americans, where he would be put in a situation where he was allowed to kill people. He tried to pray, but the words wouldn’t come out.