Lookee above, ma! Now in paperback! Just the thing for your four nephews: freefrugal, freetightwad, freemiser, and freepennypincher!
I was in the chow hall at Camp Fallujah eating lunch with Mulvaney, one of my fellow platoon commanders from TBS and IOC. He got buzzed on his radio to fire up the Quick Reaction Force. Off he went. I wallowed in my uselessness, dumped my tray of uneaten chow, and headed to the COC to see what was going on. Then I heard a captain yelling in the hallway, "Easy has taken casualties." I raced down to the COC, which was getting crowded as news spread of Marines in contact. The unit log looked like this:
1215 EASY MORTARED FROM SOUTH
1220 EASY MORTARED FROM NORTH
Twice. Hadn't seen that before.
1223 EASY 3 QRFS
1227 EAST 3 AMBUSHED
My heard was thudding, slow, then fast. I wanted to scream.
My boys had been ambushed ARFing the mortars. CAAT Blue swooped down from the north in their gun trucks, and initial reports of enemy KIAs had the room cheering. Then elation subsided, as all that was found were blood trails. The enemy, once again, had faded away, dragging their dead and wounded with them. By all accounts it was a platoon~plus-sized element, at least thirty.
(Later investigation revealed that the insurgents had dug fighting holes for their crew-served weapons. One was a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun that was able to punch through the titanium armor on the big truck. That was what wounded our Marines.)
A platoon of insurgents...Why? My only thought was that they hoped the BBC was still with us. If they could kill some Marines in front of a news crew, a European news crew no less, they knew they would score big points. The Marines had been notoriously tight-lipped about the where, when, and how of our casualties. Usually, the only information we released was that Marines had been killed or wounded conducting security operations in the al Anbar Province."
That was our way of hiding the blood trails.
Much later, I got a note from Sergeant Word describing the ambush. His message carried the ragged immediacy of an ambush and counter-ambush.
FOB took mortars that were very well adjusted. So the CO told Glew to get someone out and find them. So Glew told 2nd squad to load up, but after a couple of min. they were taking too slow so 1st squad loaded the trucks Victor 1: Word, McPherson, Chicas, Brown, Gocadack. Victor 2: Magdaleno, Sacchi, Perry. Victor 3 (7-ton): Doc, a driver, Smith, Johnson. Victor 4: Braun, Davis, Dunham. We went to the south found nothing & went to the north at FOB exit north on "Bristol." We held there to get a grid from the CO when all hell broke loose. They started the ambush with an RPG aimed at Victor 1 which bounced off the front of it, then it was pure hell. Chicas' bolt blew up. He switched to his 40 mm and had a direct hit on two guys, it was a great shot. Then the 7-ton hauled ass out of the fight and we moved to block the rounds while it went back to the FOB. I knew something was wrong but did not know what. But what happed was Johnson was trying to jump over the center set to get where he could fire got hit several times in the right arm and he went down. Smith then stopped firing and started to treat Johnson while his truck was under heavy .50 cal (12.7 mm) AK-47, RPG, and 7.62 machine gun rounds. A .50 cal armor piercing round went though the side of the truck and fragged and several pieces of frag hit him in the face and he fell. Johnson tried to help him out. Doc saw what happened and pulled the machine gunner down and grabbed his medic bag and crawled through gunners hole and started to apply life saving aid. He had a tourniquet on Johnson and field dressing on Smith by the 3 min drive back to the FOB, that was when I heard on the net that they were calling in a medevac, we were still in the fight when dust off came, no one knew what happened but me until we got back to the FOB. ~~~~~~~~~~
Maybe Domenico's birthday present was that his daddy was still alive. Maybe the wretched truth in sitting here on a folding chair in a Camp Fallujah tent, while my men fought for their lives, was that this April 15 shooting investigation had saved my life. Maybe killing those two insurgents at the white car beside the darkening canal had saved my life twice. That day, and this day, Father's Day.
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