What Was Asked of Us Read online

  Later on that night, I went from treating all my marines to treating all these civilians. It was just nonstop. Me and the doctor were the only medical personnel that far north with the unit. We were getting called to all these different checkpoints, and people were dying all night long. It was just a night of death, of people just dead everywhere, and we would just leave their bodies where they were at, and then I guess later on in the morning, the civilian ambulances pick up all these bodies. Like a garbage truck—they just come pick them all up and leave.

  There was babies that were killed. There was older people that were killed. Entire families wiped out. There was one little kid that was—

  his whole family, mother and father, sister—they were all killed, and he was all by himself. It kind of . . . That takes a toll too. Seeing stuff like that, especially little kids, kind of . . . It bothers you. It takes a toll. You don’t think about it then, but you kind of think about it more later.

  There was an old guy that had drove through the checkpoint, and they shot him all over the place, and we were taking care of him. It was me, the doctor, and another corpsman, and we were taking care of him. I was the one trying to get the IV into him. I had some trouble getting it in, and they were talking with him. He was breathing a little bit, and I’m trying to get the IV in. They rolled him on his side to see if he had any wounds, and then they realized he had gunshot right in his spinal cord, and it was all exposed. The spinal cord, the spine, everything was exposed, so I kind of knew then if this guy was going to live, he definitely wasn’t going to be walking again.

  I remember telling the doctor that I was having trouble getting the IV in, because there’s a little thing called flashback. If you hit a vein, there’s a little tube in the catheter that fills up with blood, and that’s how you know you’re in. I wasn’t getting anything back, and then we looked at him, and the guy was dead, and that’s the reason why—because his heart wasn’t pumping, so I wasn’t getting any flashback. We were that close to . . . I don’t know if we were going to save him or not, but we were that close to really doing things for this guy, and he just died. And there wasn’t really anything we could do to save him. So we just kind of left him there.

  That was the first time someone died in my arms, and you know . . . He was an older guy and stuff. I didn’t know if this guy was someone’s grandfather or father or, you know, how big his family was, and it kind of bothered me. I didn’t feel like I failed him. I just felt like this guy was mixed into this. He didn’t mean to be mixed into it, or who knows what was happening with him. I just felt bad for the situation. Not so much the job we did, because I knew we were doing what we had to do with the resources that we had. If we couldn’t save him, it wasn’t really our fault. You know, we only had the supplies that we had, and if we couldn’t . . . I knew it was out of our control. But just the situation was what really bothered me. You know, these poor people. We’re there to help them, and we’re killing them.

  I had to open fire on the bus to protect the people that we were taking care of, you know, the civilian people in the ambulance. I shot into it. There were civilians in there, and everybody in the whole bus was killed. I don’t know if physically any of my rounds hit anybody, but I shot into it and that bothered me.

  I went and I spoke with the chaplain about that and let him know what had happened. He talked to me and tried to calm me down a little bit. He just told me that, you know, God knew what we were there for. He knew we were there to do the right thing.

  I knew I had to protect the guys around me, my brothers that were there with me.

  I kind of put it behind me, but every once in a while I’ll think about what happened—you know, Was it me that killed anybody on that bus? I didn’t physically go on the bus and check. We had marines that went on, and they came out telling what they seen and stuff. Everyone was dead, so I didn’t . . . There was no need for me to go on there. But I remember there was a lieutenant that went in there and came out, and he said, “I’ll never forget the way this one girl was laying—she was dead, with the way her body was positioned.” I’ll never forget that.

  That was just . . . It was a long night. It was all night long. It went on the whole night.

  There wasn’t a shot fired from when we left that checkpoint into Baghdad. Not like it is today where you have to be careful. When we hit Baghdad, it felt like we were home. That’s what it felt like to me. Felt like we were home. It actually felt like if we were to come home, and the States had a parade for us. As soon as we hit Baghdad—I mean it got to a point where we could barely even drive because there were so many people coming out into the road. Everyone was cheering. I don’t know what they were saying in their language, but they were cheering.

  I thought when we left, that was it. We went in there, did what we had to do, the job was done. I didn’t think it’d still be going on to this day. I thought by now, at least two years later, two or three years later, we’d have bases set up, like real bases set up over there, and things would be calm, and they have a new government going already and all that stuff. But never in a million years did I think this stuff was going to happen. I mean if it ends up being for nothing, then—then we might as well pull them out. But I don’t think . . . I don’t think it’s for no reason. I think we did a good thing.

  “How did it come to this

  madness and chaos?”

  JUSTIN LEHEW

  1ST BATTALION

  2ND MARINE REGIMENT

  “TASK FORCE TARAWA”

  MARCH-JUNE 2003

  NASIRIYA

  NAVY CROSS

  We were part of RCT2, out of Camp Lejeune, and it was tagged Task Force Tarawa. It’s from an old battle on November 20th, 1943, during the island-hopping campaign of the marines in World War II, making their run to Japan. It was a small island less than a quarter of a mile wide and not very long—just enough to maybe put a small airstrip, and this was one of the first actions that the amphibious assault vehicle was actually put into employment and used for what it was created for. The island was secured at the loss of twenty-five hundred marines. In World War II, those were the type of casualties that were being sent back on a weekly basis, and we were proud to be given this name. Tarawa is not considered a bad-luck name, because without securing that island we would never have had the foothold we needed to get to Iwo Jima and to final victory.

  Before we went in, we knew that Nasiriya was roughly five-hundred-and-thirty-five thousand people, so it was a substantial-size city, and there were four bridges: two that crossed the Euphrates River and two that crossed the Saddam Canal. Our job was to secure the two bridges on the eastern side, because the battle plan was to skirt the outside of the major cities, and because of shock and awe the 1st Marine Division could make its run to Baghdad. They would be supporting the attack on Baghdad, so ours were the first U.S. Marine actions in this part of Iraq.

  Before we went into Nasiriya, we had a general knowledge of what we were supposed to do, but we hadn’t rehearsed the takedown of the actual bridges because we didn’t know the geography. All we had looked at was a few maps up until that point.

  We started rolling on the mission at about three in the morning on March 23rd. There’s Alpha, Bravo, and Charley Companies, so that’s three amtrack units of twelve apiece, and they are each carrying respective rifle companies. We are moving in a column, and the roads look like any improved roads here in the United States. It is dark, and we were using our NVGs and the ambient light of the moon. We were headed toward what we were calling the southern bridge on the southeastern side of Nasiriya. We do know that there are Iraqi forces there, and the evening prior we had heard over the radio that eight thousand Iraqi forces in and around Nasiriya had capitulated, which meant surrendered. But it turned out that it wasn’t true, and that ended up being very bad for us.

  My experience as a young marine was in the Gulf War, where I dealt with hundreds of Iraqi prisoners of war. We rarely fired a shot, and whenever you did, m
ost Iraqis threw down their weapons and surrendered. We dealt with an overwhelming amount, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who just gave up. So now in Iraq, a lot of my guys were saying, “Hey, Gunny, is it going to be like the first time? When we shoot, are they going to throw up their hands?” The report we heard about these Iraqis capitulating kind of gave them the idea that was going to happen again. I had to quell that real quickly, because I didn’t see it turning out that way. When we assaulted Kuwait, we were pushing Iraqi forces out of a country they had invaded. But now we are invading their country, and so if somebody’s coming into my backyard, why should I surrender?

  So as the mission into Nasiriya gets under way, we’re running through farm fields, with sporadic adobe-type farmhouses on the sides of the road, and the people weren’t exactly cheering. The local farmers just stood in disbelief at the rows and columns and the firepower that was coming in. The column stretched back as far as the eye could see. For most of these people, it might as well have stretched to Antarctica because that’s exactly how far it seemed. We counted four straight hours of vehicles, five miles with no end whatsoever, and it was the most awesome thing I had ever seen.

  About three hours into it, at about six-thirty in the morning, we heard there were Iraqi tanks and some small-arms fire up ahead of us, so that was the first enemy contact. We also heard over the radio that there was some U.S. soldiers that our tank unit had thought they had seen off to the side of the road. I was considered a pretty good navigator, and our lieutenant called down with a grid position where they thought these guys had been seen, and I told him I’d take a vehicle and push up north to find out what’s going on up there. We pushed forward up to the grid position, but there was absolutely nobody, nothing there. So I decided we should keep going forward until we get to our tank unit, because they were the ones that actually saw the soldiers who were in trouble. Eventually, my driver spotted them about two hundred meters off of the side of the road. There were a couple soldiers, and they were waving their hands up in the air, so we pulled over to stop, and as soon as we did, we started receiving small-arms fire from the Iraqis that were out in the fields.

  We ran out to the first group of soldiers, a small group that was still combat operational, meaning they could still fight. They had made a small circle in the middle of the field, and in the middle of the circle were two very bad casualties. One of the soldiers had one gunshot wound to his arm, and the other soldier had four gunshot wounds. The one kid who had been shot once was screaming out of his mind, and the kid who had been shot four times was laughing.

  I called for my corpsman—Alex Velasquez from Puerto Rico —and it was the first time he had ever seen anything like that. He could barely speak a lick of English, but he was a great kid, and he ran over to the wounded soldiers and his eyes got huge, but he went right to work on them, plugging holes with whatever he had at hand. About five army soldiers had surrounded them and were fighting to keep the Iraqis out in the fields from capturing them.

  We found a second group, and they had casualties and were in trouble too. We got there, and a warrant officer walked up and said, “Thank God you guys are here.” We asked how many soldiers were out there, and he said, I don’t know, but some had been taken. And he pleaded, just pleaded with us, “Please help me find my people. I am missing a lot of soldiers.” And that was the column of the army’s 507th Maintenance Company with Jessica Lynch in it.

  I suppressed the Iraqis with .50 cal. machine gun fire, giving us time to get out of there. We drove about two and a half kilometers back to where the waiting medical forces were, and then we rejoined our company. Within twenty minutes, they gave us the orders we’re going to attack the city of Nasiriya. We are going to take the bridge.

  My company commander says we’re going to roll on our mission, and then there was a little exchange over the radio about which unit was going to take which bridge. Bravo Company had already gone over the southern bridge and had already made a turnoff into Ambush Alley—

  the mile shot between the northern and southern bridges, a place where you are totally exposed. They have already gone through there, but then they started to get badly bogged down, but we didn’t know that yet. There was also a bridge just before southern bridge that was very confusing on the map. It was big enough for maybe a single car to go over. . . . We called it the railroad bridge because the railroad tracks ran right across it.

  Just as we were entering Nasiriya, between these two bridges, RPG trails started flying and exploding into the streets. Now we could see the Iraqis sticking their heads out of the houses in the alleyways. We could see weapons, and then we saw them talking. Through our scopes, we could see a couple of hundred meters down these roads that the Iraqis were getting into vigilante-type swarms. We have also got some artillery coming in, and we don’t know where from. We assume these are Iraqi mortar rounds and artillery rounds. All of this was happening at the same time. I realized at this point that we are completely surrounded.

  They started coming at us from the other side of the southern bridge and driving into our position, and the vehicles were not stopping, so we were shooting at them, and they were using what we found out later were taxicabs, white vehicles with orange-painted panels. We didn’t know any of their color schemes or anything, so we assume that these must be attack vehicles, so we started to shoot those vehicles, and they’re driving right for us, and as soon as we hit one of these cars, the doors would fly open and out would jump guys with AK-47s. These are not uniformed soldiers. And we’re also starting to see soldiers that are dressed in Vietcong-type black pajamas with little red triangles on their sleeves, and that unit was found out to be the Saddam fedayeen.

  The guys in the cars weren’t civilians, either; they were combatants who weren’t wearing uniforms. There were a small number of uniformed soldiers that you could see controlling certain positions, but the majority, 90 percent of the people attacking us with weapons, weren’t wearing uniforms, and therefore you couldn’t tell if they were civilian. I briefed my guys by saying, “If they have a weapon in their hand, they’re fair game.” They are attacking our position. They weren’t just defending their homes, they were firing at us. This was very confusing to a lot of the young marines, because the fighters were using every tactic you could imagine.

  A marine ran up to me saying, “Hey, Gunny, check this out.” I look down this alleyway and there is a woman that comes out, and she’s holding a young child, and when she walks back into that building, we get an RPG shot from that building every time. Was she spotting for her husband, who was shooting an RPG out of the building? We had to start making the decisions real quick, so I talked to another gunnery sergeant who was also a sniper, and I said, “The next time she comes out the door, shoot her,” and he did exactly that. We couldn’t tell if it was a sack of potatoes or a baby that she was holding. He did not harm the child or anything at all because there was other Iraqis in the area that grabbed whatever it was. This sniper dropped her in the street, and we never received another shot from that position again.

  The tanks didn’t get to our position for at least an hour and a half. They had ate through so much fuel on the march up that they had to pull out of the column to refuel, and it would take hours because they take about five hundred gallons of diesel fuel. While we’re surrounded on the bridge and the tanks are gone, all I have got is my thin-skinned amtracks and even thinner-skinned marines that are down on the ground who are holding off all these major assaults. It was very overwhelming. They held the line as much as they could, but I can still remember looking over the southern bridge and seeing the first two tanks come back and then seeing the smile on my marines’ faces. They stood up like something out of an old Saving Private Ryan-type movie. They knew that the Iraqis were scared crapless of those vehicles.

  So once the tanks got into position, I went over to talk to the tank commander and told him, “You need to fire at this building with these red windows because we’re getting a lot
of fire out of that building. And watch yourself, because it’s right next to a mosque.” So they validated everything that they needed to, fired, and blew the second story right off the building. Who knows who was in the back of that building?

  People that were carrying children and people that were shuttling from one place to another that were older were not getting mowed down in the streets. But college-age men that were fighting, even though they were in civilian clothes—they got hit. There was no hand-to-hand combat at that point, but they were running in between our position from one side of the road to another. It was so close that marines were pulling out their personal weapons—their pistols and their knives—getting ready to defend themselves.

  Later, when the tide starts to turn in our favor, I went back inside my vehicle to check my battle positions over the radio. And as I turned around, I saw a vehicle that was going the opposite direction, and it was an AAV. I assumed it was one of mine, and I said over the radio, “God, don’t let that be one of mine,” because I didn’t tell them to go anywhere, and it looked like they were running. It looked like they were leaving the whole scene and driving back over the southern bridge. It just looked really strange, and my driver, Pfc. Sasser, said, “Hey, Gunny, look at those clowns. They’re driving with their ramp dragging on the street.” It was the ramp in the back that lowers to let the troops out, and it was dragging and sparking up on the street, and that’s very unusual. The next thing that I saw was a vapor trail from an RPG that hit the vehicle. Actually, it was hit by two RPGs, which I knew because I could see the vapor trails.