Mon, Aug. 23, 2004
A deadly trap in the streets of Ramadi
By David SwansonJoseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder News Service
RAMADI, Iraq - The Marines of Echo Company jumped from their trucks into Ramadi's narrow streets and alleys and ran toward the sound of the guns.
They followed their commander, Capt. Kelly D. Royer, through palm trees and warrens of cinder-block buildings.
One of Echo's sniper teams had come under fire, and Royer's "quick-reaction force" was on its way to reinforce the pinned-down Marines.
Before they'd gone far, headquarters called on the radio. The snipers had repulsed the attackers. But now Echo Company's 1st Platoon, which had been sent out earlier to clear the main supply route through Ramadi, was taking fire.
Royer radioed 2nd Lt. John Wroblewski. As Royer's team moved on foot, "Lieutenant Ski," as his men called him, was leading a second Echo quick-reaction force in Humvees through the chaotic streets of Ramadi.
Pick us up at the intersection at the marketplace, Royer told Wroblewski.
The day before, Wroblewski had told his men to be alert. Something's not right, he said. In this neighborhood, the residents didn't wave and the children didn't flock to the Marines, as they did in other parts of the city.
They only stared.
Although neither Royer nor Wroblewski knew it, earlier that morning, April 6, Iraqi and foreign fighters had slipped through the marketplace, telling shopkeepers to close their stores and kiosks and issuing a warning:
"Today, we are going to kill Americans."
If the Iraqi insurgency has a center of gravity, Ramadi -- a bastion of Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence services -- probably is it. The city sits astride the main road from Baghdad to Jordan, and the insurgents in Ramadi were far better organized and far better schooled in guerrilla warfare than the Marines originally realized.
Gunfire rattled to the east, where Royer's force had been moments earlier. Marines appeared to be under attack everywhere.
Royer and his men started running to reinforce their comrades in the 1st Platoon.
Two Marines from the 1st Platoon, Pfc. Benjamin Carman, 20, of Jefferson, Iowa, and Lance Cpl. Marcus Cherry, 18, of Imperial, Calif., were already dead.
Back home in Iowa, Carman's exploits were legendary.
His high school coach said he was "one of the hardest-working football players I've ever had."
Five large tires lie in a field near Jefferson-Scranton High School. Four are for tractors; the fifth and largest is for a combine. It's 5 feet tall and weighs 80 pounds. As part of their daily workout, the football players had to flip each tire 10 times.
Medium-sized Ben Carman ran straight to the big tire every day. He flipped it 12 times.
Like Carman, Marcus Cherry had wanted to be a Marine. But he had to practice that Marine Corps stare. He would stand in front of a mirror at home, jaw forward, eyes hard, and hold it as long as he could before his trademark grin gave him away.
In a letter home from boot camp, Cherry wrote: "I knew, Mom, the Marine Corps was the best decision for my life at the time I joined. It's a fast way to grow up, but I was made for it."
As Royer and his men raced to help the 1st Platoon, Wroblewski rolled past with his convoy. Royer radioed Wroblewski again: Stop and pick us up.
"Roger, Six," Wroblewski responded, using the military term for "commanding officer."
Royer and his men heard Wroblewski's Humvees and trucks slow as they approached the marketplace.
Then, they heard the staccato sound of AK-47 rifle fire, the deeper growl of a machine gun and the thuds of rocket-propelled grenades.
Like Cherry, Wroblewski was where he'd always wanted to be: leading Marines in combat. He'd even named his Alaskan malamute pup Semper, after the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fidelis ("Always faithful").
Six-foot-two, with piercing blue eyes and a linebacker's build, Wroblewski, 25, was a natural leader, popular with his men and respected by other officers. Royer called him "one of my best."
The day before the firefight, "J.T." had talked about home as he led a 10-mile foot patrol through Ramadi. He talked about fishing, about the Marines, about his wife, Joanna.
He grew up in Morris County in northern New Jersey, where he was a high school football and baseball standout, and he graduated from Rutgers University before he joined the Marines in 2002.
Wroblewski had caught Joanna's eye at the County College of Morris in Randolph, N.J.
"Wow, that guy's hot," she thought. He was also shy. "I had to ask him out," she said. They were married in July 2003.
He had been at home with her in Oceanside, Calif., on Valentine's Day when he got his orders to Iraq. She was making waffles with strawberries for breakfast when the call came. He had to leave the next day.
His last phone conversation with her had been April 3. Instead of signing off as usual by saying, "I'll see you soon," he'd told her, "I'll always be with you."
In the Ramadi marketplace, on all sides of the intersection, Iraqi fighters with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers had taken positions on the roofs of the one-story buildings.
A heavy .50-caliber Russian-made machine gun was on one corner rooftop, where the gunner could sweep the street. Other fighters were hidden behind trees just beyond the market stalls.
In all, about 50 well-armed insurgents were waiting for Wroblewski and his Marines.
Editor's note: The Marine force in the central Iraqi town of Ramadi, the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marines, has had the highest casualty rate of any U.S. battalion since the war began. This is the story of Echo Company, which has lost 22 of its 185 men, more than any other Marine or Army company.
REMEMBERING THE MEN OF ECHO COMPANY
Lance Cpl. Marcus Cherry, 18
Hometown: Imperial, Calif.
Died: April 6, 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq
In a letter to Cherry's mother after his death, one of his superiors described him as a "fast-burner" who could have risen in the ranks. 2nd Lt. V.S. Valdes praised his dedication and more.
"Whenever we would run platoon or squad PT (physical training), he would get out to the side of the formation and just sing. His singing was beautiful, and it motivated those Marines in the formation to step a little smarter and to hold their heads just a little higher," Valdes wrote. "He never complained, did things at one hundred percent and always had an infectious smile on his face."
Pfc. Ben Carman, 20
Hometown: Jefferson, Iowa
Died: April 6, 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq
Marie Carman remembers the day in December 2002 when she and her husband watched their son graduate from boot camp. When Carman saw him in the sea of dress blues that California day, she whistled her ear-piercing whistle, the one that brings the horses around from the pasture. The one she used to call her children when they were little. Ben looked up into the crowd and smiled. His mother smiled as she remembered, then the tears came.
"What he could have been ... what he would have been, you just don't know."
2nd Lt. John Wroblewski, 25
Hometown: Parsippany, N.J.
Died: April 7, 2004 in a helicopter over Iraq
Mike Wroblewski remembers when his big brother called last winter and told them he'd be leaving for the Persian Gulf in 24 hours, heading to Ramadi, Iraq.
"It's real American-friendly," John Wroblewski told his brother, who was crying on the other end of the line. "Don't worry. Don't worry about it, Mike. Everything's going to be fine."
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Aug. 24, 2004
Deadly ambush
By David Swanson;Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder News Service
RAMADI, Iraq - The first of 2nd Lt. John T. Wroblewski's three Humvees slowed as it entered the Ramadi marketplace, where about 50 insurgents waited behind machine guns and grenade launchers. Earlier that day, the fighters had vowed to cut down Americans in the streets.
Seven Marines and a Navy medic, ranging in age from 18 to 28, were inside the unarmored green vehicle.
Most were following in their family's footsteps. The driver, Lance Cpl. Kyle Crowley, 18, of San Ramon, Calif., had a great-grandfather who was a Marine in World War II. The radio operator, Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield, 19, of Fremont, Calif., had a grandfather who was a Seabee.
The father of machine-gunner Pfc. Ryan Jerabek, 18, of Oneida, Wis., served in the Army during Vietnam. Ryan Jerabek had pre-enlisted in the Marines with his friend Mike Andrews when he turned 17.
"He had the sweetest smile," said Faye Girardi, one of Jerabek's teachers at Pulaski High School, who thought that he was "too gentle" to become a Marine.
Jerabek's sense of humor survived boot camp. He called his military-issue glasses "BC glasses" -- birth-control glasses -- because they were so effective at keeping girls away.
When Travis Layfield was about 9, his family visited an air show at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif.
"He saw kids in uniform and he said, 'I want to sign up,' " said his sister, Tiffany Bolton. "That's where it started."
The driver of the Humvee, Kyle Crowley, had been something of a troubled youth who drove around San Ramon in the San Francisco Bay area in a 1980s Cadillac he'd inherited from his grandmother. He signed up in a pre-enlistment program when he turned 16, over the objections of his father, Mark, a sheet-metal worker who'd raised Kyle by himself from age 4.
Navy medic Fernando Mendez-Aceves had been a scrawny boy, but boot camp changed him. His biceps grew so big that he had to wear oversize shirts. At the Naval Medical Center in San Diego they called him Rocky, the Muscle Man or Hulk. He volunteered for duty with the Marines in Iraq because he didn't want his combat training to go to waste.
They called Staff Sgt. Allan Walker, at 28 one of Echo Company's senior noncommissioned officers, the Beast. At 6 feet 2 and 230 pounds, he'd played high school football and flipped burgers in the Mojave Desert town of Palmdale, Calif.
Walker "had all these little twists and turns," said Jim Root, his old football coach and friend. Walker was a high school jock who also hung with the drama students, and a rebellious teen-ager who wore punk rock T-shirts and spiked hair but loved poetry.
"The Marine Corps was his intervention program," said his father, Kenneth Walker.
When the war came, Allan Walker volunteered to go.
"How can I teach a corporal how to take a hill if he's been there and I have never?" he asked his father. "How can I teach men to fight if I've never been to battle?"
Deadly attack
As the green Humvee neared the T-intersection at the Ramadi marketplace, the insurgents hidden on the rooftops opened fire. Bullets plowed through the windshield and the metal doors.
Crowley, the driver, was killed, and the truck canted sideways. Jerabek opened up with his machine gun, but he, too, was quickly cut down.
Lance Cpl. Deshon E. Otey, 24, of Louisville, Ky., leapt from the Humvee and fired from behind a low wall. The others stayed in the truck and were quickly gunned down.
"We all took cover," Otey said. "There was firing coming from all directions. They were shooting AK-47s, RPK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades."
Mendez-Aceves, the Navy medic, was killed next to Walker, apparently as he worked to save the sergeant's life.
Wroblewski was behind them in the second Humvee. He was hit in the face by a bullet that smashed through the radio handset he was holding.
Reinforcements led by Capt. Kelly Royer, Echo Company's commander, moved toward the firefight. They quickly came under fire, too.
Running toward the cover of nearby houses, Royer yelled at his radio operator to keep up with him: "Suck it up, find it. ... Find it, son. Your Marines are being shot at!"
Royer's Iraqi translator, a man everyone called "007," was smiling as he ran, in tan sandals, a sleeveless jogging outfit and a navy blue T-shirt that said "Operation Iraqi Freedom" across the front. Wearing neither a helmet nor a protective vest, he was blithely fatalistic: "Inshallah," he said. God willing.
Royer and his men reached the relative safety of a house. Other Marines were already there, and so was an Iraqi family, huddled in the living room. Bullets smacked into the side of the house as Royer led his Marines up the stairs to the rooftop to begin returning fire.
Royer got on the radio and called for air support, but the helicopters were in action elsewhere, circling over firefights in the center of the city.
Royer sent a team to silence the insurgents' Russian-made machine gun on the corner rooftop. But by the time the Marines got there, the Iraqi machine-gunners had vanished, leaving only a pile of spent shell casings.
Fallen comrades
Other Marines entered the marketplace and began removing the bodies of dead Americans from the green Humvee. Royer and his men joined them.
Remnants of trauma supplies littered the ground. The truck bed was littered with empty water bottles and exploded green packages of meals-ready-to-eat mixed among brass shell casings. The handle of an M-16 was sheared off in a pile of debris.
Blood, water and diesel oil drained into the ground.
A Marine passed by slowly, carrying the body of a fallen comrade on his shoulder. He gently placed the heavy, dark green bag in the back of a Humvee.
A pair of military-issue eyeglasses lay smashed on the ground by the lead Humvee, blood drying on the right lens.
Jerabek's birth-control glasses.
"I talk with some of the other guys in the platoon about what happened, but it still hurts," Otey, the lone survivor from the green Humvee, said later. "Every time I walk into our living space I see the empty racks [bunks]. Those were guys I used to talk to about my problems. Now I don't hear their voices anymore."
Two months later, Otey was killed on a rooftop in Ramadi with three other Echo Company Marines.
As they took the rooftops of nearby houses that April day, the Marines gained control of the intersection, and the sound of gunfire died down.
A sergeant arrived from headquarters. He said he'd seen Wroblewski and that he would be OK.
He was wrong.
Wroblewski died as a helicopter was evacuating him. An enemy bullet had severed an artery, and the medics couldn't control the bleeding.
The bodies of four Iraqis lay in the street, one beside a red-and-white taxi. Royer stood over one of the dead men for a few seconds, then stepped over the body. The translator, trailing Royer, kicked the body hard and muttered, "Bastard."
The evening light was growing softer, cooler.
Editor's note: Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, has lost 22 of its 185 men in Iraq, more than any other Marine or Army company. On April 6, the company ran into disaster in the streets of the central city of Ramadi.