What Was Asked of Us Read online

  The AAV belonged to Charley Company and was racing away from their fight at the northern bridge with casualties for medevac. They had been hit hard and had headed through Ambush Alley looking for help from us at our position. We all knew it was very, very serious when a young marine fell out of the back of the vehicle and he was on fire.

  The vehicle came to a rolling halt right in front of us, not more than thirty meters away, and I saw the crewmen who were on fire but still moving. They were hanging out of the hatches or maybe trying to climb out, and the men that were in the back were falling out, and they were on fire. There were seven to nine marines in there. The whole thing played out in slow motion, and the weirdest thing was that no one was running toward the vehicle. The scene was just playing out in the midst of this chaos.

  Doc and I ran over, and I’ll never forget how dumb we were because we didn’t have our helmets or flak vests or anything—not even our weapons, just his medical pack.

  The first thing I saw was the severed leg of a marine lying on the ramp, so I picked that up, and I handed it to Doc. I said, “Lay this off to the side because we’re going to find who that belongs to.” I thought that if the marine is still alive, the leg could be reattached.

  There was black smoke billowing out, and we could barely see, but we started triage, and I went to pull a marine out of the back, and as I was pulling him, his upper torso separated from his bottom torso, and all I had in my hands was his upper body. I handed Doc half of a marine and said, “Put this in the back of the Humvee because marines don’t leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield; everybody comes home. Even if it’s a piece of you, I have a responsibility to your mom and dad to bring everything back.” So, the marine grabbed it, and his eyes were wide open, but he did exactly what he was told to do.

  At this point, Doc and I were still alone at the vehicle, and I was worried about his safety, but this little Puerto Rican kid looked up at me and said, “I’m here as long as you’re here, Gunny; I’m not going anywhere.” He was very noble because we were in a grave situation. That vehicle was going to blow up inside of ten or fifteen minutes. There was diesel fuel all over the place, and also parts of the vehicle were on fire, and the fire was burning near the ammunition. It was also sitting in the middle of the street, so it had to be a prime target for the Iraqis. It was only a matter of time, I felt, before they were going to hit this vehicle again. But we still didn’t know if anyone was alive inside the vehicle, so we just kept at it. Also, I had to make a decision about removing the radios and other gear so it doesn’t fall into enemy hands, where they could use it against us.

  We went digging around and found a live marine underneath two bodies. They were lying on top of him, so we pulled them off and looked down, and from the base of this guy’s neck, all the way up to the top of his forehead, it looked like somebody had just taken a saber and cut his head open. We got him up, and Doc pinched the skin of his head together, and we started to try to pull him out of this vehicle, but we couldn’t do it. We worked in there for what somebody said later was almost forty-five minutes. Getting him out of the vehicle took about three or four of the marines who had showed up. We yanked him out of there and put him into the back of my AAV, and Doc stayed back there with him. We started to get on the radio to get a medevac helicopter, but we are in the middle of Nasiriya and where are we going to land one of these? So Doc stayed back, and I ran back out onto the street and found out that the company XO, Lieutenant Mathew Martin, had set up a casualty house. They had cleared the bottom portion of a building in what we call “hasty clear” and made a place to put the casualties. I made my way there, and I heard Iraqi voices in the back of the house.

  Inside the house was one of the crewmen from the blown-up amtrack, leaning up against a wall in the house with a blank stare on his face, and I could tell that he couldn’t hear what I was saying because he had blood dripping from his ears. I knew he had been blown out of the vehicle.

  When I turned around this young corporal came walking up, and it turned out he was the crew chief of the vehicle that was blown up. He was gray with soot from head to toe, with the exception of the back of his leg, which had a chunk missing and another from the back of his foot, and there was red starting to pour through the gray, and I started to tell him, “Hey, get over here and take care of your brother.” I say, “I’m going to get you two out of here,” and it broke my heart. This young corporal says, “Gunny, I don’t want to go anywhere; I can still fight.” We patched up his wound, and I racked and chambered a round in my M16, and I put him in the middle of the doorway, and I told him, “The direction that I’m running from—don’t shoot anybody if they come that way. But if anybody comes from the other side of the hallway, you shoot him, because I heard Iraqi voices in the back of the house.” We eventually got those wounded marines out of there and on board a medevac helicopter. We sat down for the first time in three hours, staring up in the sky and seeing those marines’ legs hanging out the back end. They all lived.

  By the time the helicopter was gone, the company commander, Mike Brooks, had already made the decision that we were going to load up all of our infantry, since our bridge was now secure, and were going to go up Ambush Alley to the north to help those guys out at the northern bridge. They needed help because they were getting hammered and taking massive casualties. They were missing six of their amtracks that had turned around and gone back into Nasiriya, one of which was the one that got to our position. The other ones were destroyed. They needed help to get their wounded medevaced out.

  For the marines, this battle was complete chaos, because nobody had envisioned us fighting into Nasiriya. We were only supposed to stay on the outskirts. They thought the city had capitulated the night prior, but they were wrong. As a result of this bad intel, they had not, in my opinion, launched one artillery round into that city, nor did I see a lot of air strikes.

  At one point before we went in, my sergeant and I were sitting outside of Nasiriya, and off to the left-hand side as we’re facing toward the city, about five miles or six miles south, we watched an artillery unit which was call sign “Nightmare” out in the field. They were getting their gun tubes up to support the attack into the city, and we heard them over the radio saying that they were fire capped, which meant they were ready to fire missions, all they need is targets. They repeatedly called over and over and over again, throughout an hour-long period. I heard on the radio that they were asking for missions to fire into Nasiriya, and they never got any. The next thing I heard on the radio was that they wanted to hurry up and get the infantry into the city. Look, no one wants to be responsible for firing two hundred artillery rounds into a civilian city. That’s the only thing I can assume, but usually we never go into an attack like that without prepping the city with artillery fire. You don’t just ever put the infantry, soft-skinned soldiers, into an urban fight like that. We got sent into a city with thin-skinned armored vehicles and just basically infantrymen to control Nasiriya, and as a result we were meat-grindered in there. We really were.

  We gather up all of our marines, and we’ve got about twenty marines per AAV with all the combat equipment, and my job is to make sure that everybody gets a ride, whether you are on top of a tank or whatever, because we are leaving this position. I would say that was one of my proudest moments of my entire career. That in that kind of a hellish situation, we got everybody, and we turned north to go up Ambush Alley.

  I told my drivers, “You go up this piece of road at maximum speed, and aim your weapons at the tops of these buildings,” because my biggest fear was that they would hit us with rockets from up there. We were very vulnerable from the top down. We’re starting to take hellacious fire from the rooftops and from everywhere else, but the boys are really fighting back, and we didn’t lose anybody going up Ambush Alley. That is a testament, to this day, to those kids. But the trip up broke my heart, because we started seeing burning amtracks along Ambush Alley, and those were some of the ones comi
ng back into Nasiriya after they had already been hit up north. I realized for sure that all those amtracks that were on fire were my friends. I knew the leaders of those units personally. There were marines laying everywhere . . . dead, wounded, exhausted. They were still in shock. They had taken the bridge with minimum problems, and when they headed north, the Iraqis hit them with an artillery unit, and they had already established the area as a preplotted fire zone, meaning our guys had walked into an area the Iraqis had planned already as their artillery positions. They were hit by Iraqi artillery, and they were hit by Iraqi mortars, and that blows people to bits. They were hit by RPGs. They had probably lost fifteen people that were dead, and dozens of people were wounded. And in all the chaos they were fighting back. . . . It was just madness. The gunnery sergeant kind of ran up to us, and he was almost incoherent. He just was babbling, and all he kept saying is “Did you see what happened to us? Did you see what happened to us?” I sat him in a ditch and just said, “You stay here,” because he wasn’t doing anybody any good. All he kept saying was “Did you see what happened to us?” And then we started hearing the stories. . . .

  I’m triaging marines, sorting the wounded from dead, and I’m trying to find out what actually happened to these guys, and I’m starting to hear that the air force shot them. One of the guys tells us, “We got north of this position. We stopped. We put our infantry out. We started getting hit with all this artillery fire and everything, and as we’re trying to figure out where it’s coming from, we’re starting to take casualties. Now we’re starting to load the casualties up in the amtracks to get them back into the city to get help. The Iraqis are hitting the amtracks, and then this American air force A-10 Warthog makes three runs on our position.”

  That unit did not have a forward air controller with it. The forward air controller that controlled that air space was with Bravo Company, and Bravo Company was bogged down in the city. The air force could not see that this unit had pushed north of the north bridge. No one could verify who it was, so they must have figured these are Iraqi vehicles making a counterattack, and the A-10s were cleared to fire. The A-10 shoots depleted uranium rounds, and the A-10 is a tank killer. It is meant to destroy an armored vehicle, and the round of depleted uranium will melt right through the side of the vehicle and will absolutely destroy anything that it shoots at. A tank might have a little bit of a chance, but people have no chance.

  The sickest thing about it, and what a lot of marines couldn’t accept or understand, was we don’t look like anybody else: we’re green, and we’re uniform, and we have armored vehicles. And the second thing was that the reports stated that the A-10s made the first run across the position at one hundred fifty to two hundred feet above the deck. So they could see. And then they made two more runs and killed more people. This is what the marines on the ground could not accept. How can you not know this is us?

  They even had a marine run back to his track and grab a huge American flag and run down the center of the road while these A-10s were strafing them. He was trying to get them to waive off. I can look back now while I was fighting in that city, and I can remember seeing those planes in the air, and I can remember hearing those cannons going off. . . . I imagine the timelines with my buddies, and now I know exactly what was happening when I was watching those aircraft. They were killing marines.

  When I started triaging people . . . most of the ones I dealt with still had their limbs, and they were hit with fragmentations, not gunshot wounds. It was a lot of secondary explosions and a lot of shrapnel that chewed them up. It was friendly fire from the A-10s. We’re the best-trained unit in the entire world. How did it come to that point where not only were we engaged by the enemy, which is totally acceptable, but we’re engaged by our own forces, not just once but making repeated attempts? How did it come to this madness and chaos?

  It’s funny who ends up being awarded the medals in wartime. It isn’t the guy you expect it is going to be. It doesn’t have to be the best leader. It doesn’t have to be the guy that everybody thinks is gung ho. It doesn’t have to be the guy that everybody would say is the guy who would win the Medal of Honor. You know who it is? It’s the kid who basically scored just enough to get into the military. It’s the kid who, when I was a drill instructor in boot camp, would stand and stare at the Pacific Ocean and start crying because it was the first time he had ever seen it in his entire life.

  I would get a kid that I would have to make go into the bathroom and shave, and I would have to do it for him. . . . His hygiene was so poor because he had never been taught. It’s the kids that come into the marine corps at eighteen who never had shoes on their feet, and we’re putting them on the battlefield out there and saying, Defend the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic, and these kids do everything and even more than what is ever required of them.

  My being awarded the Navy Cross was very humbling, and I wouldn’t say validating, but it recognized what the marines did in Nasiriya under some very difficult circumstances. By the end of that first week of the war, my unit was responsible for medevacing seventy-seven Americans out to safety. I am surprised Medals of Honor weren’t awarded to some people on this one particular day, because I saw some people do some pretty amazing things.

  Justin LeHew served a second tour of Iraq from May 2004 to February 2005.

  “The first suicide bombing”

  Adrian Cavazos

  “OUTLAW” PLATOON

  3RD INFANTRY DIVISION

  2ND BATTALION,7TH INFANTRY REGIMENT

  MARCH-AUGUST 2003

  NEAR NAJAF

  I believe it was the first suicide bombing against American forces—it was a major hit against the Americans, against us—and I believe it occurred on March 29th, 2003. Back then it wasn’t even an idea that they would do this.

  We had been steamrolling through there. I mean, nothing was really stopping us. We were told to block a certain highway. We were not allowing any Iraqi vehicles or personnel through so our supply units could travel up the highway. We were just watching cars, and we’d stop them and tell them to go the other way, and we were letting our vehicles drive through. Then we got relieved by another company because we had to go on another mission, and we were going to get a day to relax and regroup and then go do our main mission in Karbala. But there was a change of plans and we were told to get back out to the highway and finish the job. At that point the highway had been occupied for two days and people were watching it. They saw the military out there. Najaf was a couple miles to our north, and to our south it was all desert. We had to go back out there and it was a pain. It was a last-minute thing, and when we got back there, it was a big gaggle-fuck. It was a mess. It was very unorganized. They wanted us to search every vehicle, looking for weapons and for enemy soldiers. On top of that, this is all coming down at the last minute. This is a four-lane highway—two lanes go north, two lanes go south—and there was a median in the middle. On the other side of the median there was a bus, like a Greyhound bus, a civilian bus that was pulled over, and there were probably about thirty Iraqis sitting out around the bus when we pulled up. We need to get them out of there; we’re not going to hurt them, but there is just too much to pay attention to. I think somebody was searching the bus for weapons. I don’t remember too many details because we were there for about five minutes only before the car bomb went off. What happened before that is really just a blur.

  Two cars pulled up, and the first car was a white taxicab. I guess the normal taxicabs have orange fenders in the front and in the back, but this one was all white. The guys who died, all of them except for one, were in Bravo Team, and I’m in Alpha Team. This is exactly how it happened: My squad leader looked at the situation, and he’s like, “OK, Alpha Team, I want you to go over there and get those people on that bus and get them out of here. Bravo Team, come with me. We’re searching the cars.” I was making my way to the bus, but there was an Iraqi sitting on the median. There were a lot of civilians—t
wo cars, the bus was on the other side, and there was a guy on a bike. I remember that after the car bomb, he was fried, dead—he looked like ash. He lay on his face, and his body was completely intact, but he was all grayish black—it looked like ash.

  Me and two other soldiers—really good friends of mine—were standing there in front of this man who was sitting in the median, and this was about twenty-five meters away from the actual explosion. He was sitting there on the ground, complaining about his feet. He was wearing soccer cleats because the Iraqis are poor and so they wear whatever shoe fits.

  Sergeant Williams noticed that the squad over by the car was having trouble with their radio, and—I swear it must have been seconds—

  he was walking toward the car when it blew up, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the throat area and killed him. We fell down and I couldn’t hear anything and you couldn’t see because of the dust, and then you just see flames flying up in the air. I grabbed another soldier, Specialist Black, and said, “Come on. We gotta go.” We started running and we couldn’t see anything but we knew there was a fighting position that we could jump into. The sand kicked up and it created a huge cloud around us, and with the sand and the smoke and the fire, you know, I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. When I got to the dug-in position, I saw the other guys that were already in there and they just looked terrified. They sat there with their eyes wide open and they saw me run in out of the smoke and they’re looking at me like, What just happened? We thought, Hey, we’re gonna get into a firefight just like in the movies. I remember when I was sitting in that hole and we’re facing our weapons out and we’re ready to shoot whatever comes out of that smoke—if it looks like a bad guy, we’re gonna shoot it. At that moment there was ash, snowing ash, and there was shrapnel falling from the sky. There was a piece of shrapnel; it looked like a rosebush, but like a rosebush kind of like in the winter, where it’s really kind of dead but it’s still really big. It was huge and it fell out of the sky and landed right in front of where I was facing. It was a piece of the car.