My Men are My Heroes (23 page)

Between deployments 3/1 had practiced attacking urban settings at training areas on George and March Air Force Bases in California. They learned fundamentals of combat in built-up areas, called Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) warfare. The training helped but nothing can completely prepare anyone for Iraq, Kasal says. That waited until the Marines arrived in al-Anbar province and did it for real. Kasal says the intense fighting in there was the real training ground to their subsequent success at Fallujah.

Even so. Fallujah was a far tougher nut to crack. In other places they had fought in Iraq the cities teemed with people, cars, kids, dogs, and donkeys. Activity washed back and forth across the streets in mind-numbing progression even while the fighting raged on. Fallujah was a city with its eyes plucked out. All that was there was death.

As battles roared around them the few noncombatants who had stayed in the city seemed pathetic. Trapped, deathly afraid, and without options, they would sometimes welcome the Marines in for tea, Scared, shaking, timorous, the trapped civilians would humbly offer a glass of tea in return for their lives. It made the Marines want to pity them, but it was too late for that. Amid all the crashing noise the Marines would accept a glass from them after searching the premises. If the suspicious searchers found weapons or too many supplies, or more than an AK or two, the residents were hustled off in flex cuffs for delivery to the ING
interrogators. By the end of the fight they got hustled off simply for being there. In the end there were no innocents in Fallujah.

What was safe and what was dangerous looked the same. Houses, apartments, and industrial sites rose together in confusing profusion. Every shadow posed a threat. The battle had barely begun and it was already clear to Kasal it was going to be a tough one.

“The insurgents usually let the tanks go by,” Kasal explains. “They wouldn't attack them because they knew it was a loser. They would wait until the tanks got in front of us. After a while the tanks got pretty far ahead of us and we were fighting from house to house. We were usually in a MOUT situation.”

When the Marines found insurgents the war moved into warp drive. The Marines attacked relentlessly and the insurgents resisted fanatically, hoping to kill as many Marines as possible before escaping. Often they got away, but not always. Sometimes it was a fight to the death. Even Kasal grudgingly admits it was good tactics. The Marines had to root them out. They would die and so would Marines. In the insurgents' hopped-up and often drugged-out minds, that was a fair trade, Kasal says.

Countering their suicidal tactics required a combination of force and finesse. Kasal preferred brute force whenever possible. It saved Marine lives at the expense of the insurgents. Every insurgent who died in a massive explosion was one less the Marines would have to kill with their personal weapons. Each opportunity required a different approach, a different set of the tactics that Kasal had been practicing for his entire adult life.

“In MOUT [Military Operations on Urban Terrain], you have to cover everywhere,” he explains. “You had a guy pointing in the front, a guy pointing high, guys covering high in other directions, a guy covering the rear. Every MOUT is dangerous. The fire can come
from anywhere. It can come from up high, low, down in a sewer. He could be in a window; you have to have everything covered.

“The reason when you look at pictures and see everybody pointing everywhere is because they are in a kill zone. Everywhere is a kill zone. You never know where the fire is coming from. We would see the muzzle flash and light the bastard up but it was always dangerous.”

Occasionally the Marines would stop and regroup. Nighttime brought respite from the constant fighting, but the men still had to pull guard duty, patrols, and listening posts.

During the day movement was potentially deadly all the time, Kasal recalls. Going through doors and gates and over walls was very dangerous. Blasting holes through the sides and backs of houses and walls to avoid exposing themselves was safer. The existing ROE prevented them from arbitrarily destroying the city, so at first they followed the rules. They didn't blow up houses where no resistance was offered, and they didn't shoot unarmed civilians, even those who were highly suspect. But that all changed when the word got around the insurgents were playing the Marines for suckers. By the third day into the battle there were no more rules and the Marines made paths from one fortified structure to another any way they could.

Sometimes the Marines called on Weapons Co.'s tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles (TOWs) to punch holes in the buildings or Javelins to level the ones still protecting stay-behind death squads. 3/1 fired hundreds of them at Fallujah. Kasal made sure the mud Marines had all they needed to do the job. “The more shock and firepower you had up front, as quick as possible, the better your chances of success,” Kasal says.

On Day 2 the battle sounds around Kilo were from the east and west. Where 2/7 Cav moved it was relatively quiet except
for the tremendous booms when the Abrams let loose with their 120mm main guns or the Bradleys digested the contents of a building with a loud burp. The insurgents either had no stomach for fighting the behemoths or they had slipped away to wait for the Marines they knew were following behind.

As usual a few insurgents died in tremendous explosions or tearing roars that shredded their bodies and spattered their remains around the interiors of the buildings they were defending. More important the Cav destroyed a majority of the IED ambushes and obstacles spread all around the city to delay the attackers or channel them into killing zones. Many of the automobiles the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) had photographed exploded with bright orange and black secondaries—proving McCormack's theory that any car left behind more than a few days was a bomb.

When 2/7 Cav reached a map coordinate called Phase Line Cathy, a perky name for a dismal jump-off point, the Thundering Third rumbled into Fallujah. India moved east and Kilo headed west to clear any buildings still containing insurgents that popped up in the rear.

Behind all of them and still led by Iscol were the two Iraqi ING companies under the operational control of Buhl. Their tasks included clearing caches, identifying insurgents, gleaning local intelligence, and backing up the main thrust. Iscol says the Iraqi ING continued to perform admirably.

“We spent the 9th doing patrols north of the train station,” Iscol remembers. “I think we went into the city on November 10—the Marines Corps' birthday—but we eventually moved in behind Lima. We found RPGs, weapons, small-arms ammo, detonators, you name it. We found drugs that a few people left behind.

“Lima had been back clearing for Kilo. We took 7-ton trucks down into the city, I think to around Phase Line [PL] Elizabeth, and started pushing west toward the Euphrates. We split up the
Iraqi platoons into reinforced squads and attached one of them to each of the line platoons. It became apparent it was too much for the platoon commanders and squad leaders to worry about an additional 15 guys so Lima Co. gave us our own battle station. The Iraqis did real well.”

India discovered light enemy contact when it moved into the city. Its job was to secure the east flank along PL Henry, a long ink line running south down the map of Fallujah that marked the boundary with 1/8 Marines, Buhl says.

Kilo initially enjoyed the same light resistance as India but that changed quickly when its Marines began encountering stiff resistance from pockets of insurgents firing volleys of RPGs. Two of the C Co. tanks assigned to Kilo were damaged by multiple RPG impacts. The RPGs couldn't penetrate the tough Cobham composite armor, but they could blast away antennae, optics, and other protrusions on the tank turrets.

At the same time the battalion command elements traveling in trace behind Kilo came under indirect fire and heavy, up-close enemy small-arms fire along PL Isaac, nine blocks west of PL Henry. Lima, following behind Kilo, also started taking heavy small-arms fire from around the compass.

Kasal remained with Kilo after it moved into the city. That's unusual: Normally Kasal liked moving among his sections. But for once the enemy had taken away his initiative. He could not safely move between sections without risking being hit. The fire was too intense, too multidirectional, and too accurate to disregard.

Captain Tim Jent. Kilo's CO, was glad to have his old first sergeant around. He considered Kasal and First Sergeant Wayne Miller, Kilo's first sergeant, outstanding NCOs who couldn't help contributing to his mission.

“We had four AAVs and four tanks and plenty of high-backed Humvees when we were moving down [PL] Henry,” Jent says. “We were being attacked from the east side of the road. On the other side of the insurgents was 1/8, in eyesight of us. They were so close to the phase line we couldn't shoot. We owned the boundary but they were too close for indirect fire. We had to be very careful even using aimed fire.” Jent adds that it was one of the few times the enemy showed good tactical judgment.

“I think the insurgents did it on purpose,” he says. “They were attacking us from the buildings along the main road there. It was much more concentrated there; there was a higher concentration of buildings and it was much narrower. It had a slum feel to it. It was all three-, four-, and five-story buildings.”

Whenever possible Jent called for air support to clear a path for Kilo's embattled Marines. Usually he went directly through his company FAC, Captain David “Pork Chop” Smay, an F-18 fighter pilot armed with a computer that shared information with both the Air Officer and the pilots in Fallujah's air space. Captain Gallogly (PUC) says Smay was totally competent to carry out his own strike missions and often did. In addition he was often talking to his former squadron mates in VMFA-242 (“Bats”) flying overhead. Before deploying with 3/1 he had piloted an F-18 in that squadron.

PUC preferred the services of the Air Force's deadly Spectre whenever it was available. It only flew at night and was vulnerable to certain kinds of threats, so he had to be careful when he asked for Spectre's support. When he did, Spectre's unique droning engines proclaimed to all that it owned the night.

“We called Basher at night, which was the call sign for the AC-130s,” PUC says. “It had a 25mm cannon, a 40mm automatic cannon, and a 105mm gun. The 105 gun camera is really
accurate. The next best player was the 2-seater Marine F-18s. That squadron did everything in their power to stay on station. We also had Harriers dropping bombs for us, Super Cobras, and Air Force F-16Cs.”

PUC says they didn't spare ordnance. “During Fallujah, we dropped 91 laser-guided 500-pound bombs and 35 GPS 500-pound bombs. We dropped two 1,000-pound GPS bombs on a large complex—they flattened it. We dropped 10 laser Mavericks, called in 119 AC-130 strikes, 21 Hellfires, four TOWs, and nine fixed-wing strafing attacks. 3/1's FACs did not have one incident of fratricide while dropping all that ordnance.”

He emphasizes: “The air officer was not just me. We fought as a team. All the battalion's Forward Air Controllers were equally part of the team. I was there to coordinate and help. None of them needed me to call in an air strike.”

When air was too much and the CAAT teams not quite enough, Kilo called for Marine tank support. With all the Abrams grinding around Fallujah it would seem there would be plenty of them to go around. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. Tanks are high maintenance and require plenty of attention to give up their wares, and 3/1's companies and sister battalions all needed tank support, so they were in high demand. Buhl remembers that getting tanks was never easy, especially after battle damage began degrading them and they were taken out of battle for repairs.

“We couldn't touch the tactical integrity of the tanks,” Buhl explains. “They were loaned to us from Regiment and were part of RCT1. Each of the infantry battalions had a company of tanks. A company sounds like a lot of tanks—three platoons of four tanks and the commander and XO—but with two up and two back for rearming and refueling, and sometimes maintenance that took them out, we never had too many at once.”

The next best thing to tanks was Weapons Co.'s own weapons. It could provide Mark-19s that knocked the buildings down chunk by chunk, TOWs that could flatten them or kill everyone inside, Javelins that were deadly accurate and almost as destructive as the TOWs, and Ma Deuce, the .50-cal weapon they could always count on to ruin an insurgent's day. When Ma got done talking most of what had been in front of her was blasted to oblivion.

Occasionally the Marines simply bashed their way through strongpoints using satchel charges made from C-5 plastic explosives and sledgehammers—whatever it took to make a hole. Later on, after casualties mounted and the fight grew personal and bitter, they simply blew houses to pieces without going inside. According to Lieutenant Grapes, the rule was “Never enter a house without throwing into it something that explodes.”

One of the Marines who wholeheartedly believed in following Grape's rule was R. J. Mitchell. The self-assured sergeant with Hollywood good looks believed in never giving the insurgents a chance. His ability to think under fire earned him a meritorious promotion to Sergeant at Fallujah, but he was too shot up to know about it until he got out of the hospital a month later. Mitchell was awarded the Navy Cross in July 2006, the Marine Corps' second-highest honor, second only to the Medal of Honor, for bravery for his actions with Kasal at Fallujah. Kasal considers Mitchell's small-unit leadership skills impeccable and his warrior spirit unquenchable. Grapes says Mitchell never flinched until he was wounded for a fourth time and finally yielded to his pain.