ONE
BAND OF BROTHERS PLAYS AT THE HOTEL PARTY
I’M A HANDS-ON LEARNER. I mean no disrespect when I say this, but because of that, I often felt like much of the time I spent back in the States doing classwork assignments was a waste. I know that there were some other guys that I went through various training program with who benefited from watching PowerPoint presentations, but I really didn’t. I mean, I sat through them and I understood the information and the strategies that were being discussed, but a lot of times that didn’t translate when it came time to perform during an operation while I was downrange in Iraq. It’s also important to understand that in those early years of the conflict, we were all learning a lot about urban warfare. Back stateside, we could sit there and have things drawn up for us on paper, but what I learned in that first deployment was that things are sometimes a lot more fluid out on the battlefield. Forgive my play on the word “fluid,” considering that some of what I was experiencing on that operation—the fatigue and some of the disorientation and foggy thinking—was due to dehydration.
The higher-ups seemed to understand how important it was for us to have on-job training and how hard it was to simulate that in an exercise. At least in my experience, they tried to ease us into the really nasty shit. Think of it as kind of like how some people prefer to get into a body of water a bit at a time versus those who like to just dive right in. Diving into the middle of hot combat isn’t the best thing for anybody—too many lives could be placed at risk. For that reason, a lot of what I and the other new guys did on operations was to sit in one of the vehicles we used to get to a zone and listen on the comms—our communications systems—while the more veteran guys went out and performed. Another way to think of it is like being a rookie on a team or the underclassman who was brought up to play varsity. The coaches expect you to sit there and pay attention and learn from watching, but even that isn’t enough to prepare you for how chaotic a firefight can be.
I’m not trying to pin the blame on anybody else for some of my early mistakes. That’s not the point. Everybody was doing their best to prepare us, and I was trying to pick the brains of some of the guys coming back who already had three or four deployments under their belts. Even doing that, I wasn’t as prepared as I would have liked. I wasn’t alone in that. The 75th Regiment, 3rd Ranger Battalion, was undergoing a big change as we moved toward a fast-strike and small-unit strategy. We were adapting methods that other elite units—the SEALS, Delta Force, and other Special Operations (Spec Ops) teams—were utilizing and evolving best practices as time went on. Before I was first deployed, what the Rangers were mostly doing was pulling outer security for Delta Force when they went in and did room-clearing operations. Once we proved that we were capable of doing that, when the Delta Force guys were engaged in other operations we earned the right to take on more of those responsibilities. It was a cool time to be in the Rangers, to see how things were changing, but I can’t say that I sensed all of that at the time. I was just glad to be a part of the in-and-out operations that involved enemy captures and kills.
I’d wanted to be involved in combat for so long that I was always pretty impatient and had a hard time following rules. Some of what we were told seemed flat-out stupid—for example, that as machine gunners we shouldn’t fire our weapons unless ABSOLUTELY necessary so as not to reveal our weapons strength. Some rules made more sense to me, but I went ahead and violated them anyway. For instance, on one operation I took the suppressor that one of the assaulters never used. He kept it with the rest of his gear, and when we were called out on an operation, I took it and put it on the end of my M4 for no other reason than that I wanted to see what it would be like. Snipers used them all the time, and I wanted to do what they did.
Juan was my team leader at that point and, when he heard the distinctive sound of a suppressed weapon being fired—something that no weapons squad guy had any need to be doing—he gave me the evil eye. He was cool about it, knowing how eager I was and all. Everything would have gone down better if I had immediately put the suppressor back where I’d taken it from. The assaulter—I’ve long since forgotten his name—came back and was in a panic. He knew he’d catch hell for losing that piece of equipment. Before I could explain anything, his commander was all over him, giving him a dressing-down for losing an item that cost thousands and thousands of dollars.
I did what I had to do. I stepped up and said, “He didn’t lose it.” I felt like I was going to lose my lunch when the commander glared at me like I’d shit on his shoe or something.
I held out the suppressor. “I took it. I used it.”
I knew it was going to take some time for the commander to trust me. I took my punishment like a man, but in the end, things weren’t too bad. I better understood what my role was and where the lines were that I wasn’t to cross. That didn’t mean I didn’t ever cross them again, but at least I wasn’t so obvious about it. Every soldier needs discipline, but I think that if you turned us all into computers or into some other kind of instruction-and-rule-following machines, we wouldn’t be as successful of a military unit as we are. You still need guys to be flexible and to think on their feet and to want to test limits.
I can’t say that I looked at it like that when I was a nineteen-year-old kid out there on the pavement in Iraq at our forward operating base in 120-degree temperatures, changing the oil in one of the Strykers. I knew that I sure as hell didn’t want to be doing maintenance work like that for the rest of my deployments, so I’d better become a better soldier. That meant paying my dues and not fantasizing so much about where I wanted to end up, but focusing on doing a better job at what I was assigned to presently. That’s not easy when you’re nineteen—or twenty-nine or thirty-nine, I imagine—but I was going to give it my best shot.
I also knew this, and it didn’t take me spending any time in a classroom to understand it. We had to have each other’s backs out there. Even when I screwed up and took that suppressor, I knew that I had to step up and admit that I was the one who took it. I couldn’t see another guy taking the fall for something I did. From early on in my days in the military and through the end of my time, the bonds that I formed with the guys went deeper than any other relationships I had. That camaraderie and brotherhood was one of the most special parts about serving in the Army, and in Spec Ops that was even truer, because you were dealing with a smaller set of guys. It was one thing to be in boot camp and be all excited about being part of a team, but when you saw that in action out on the battlefield, it was way more impressive. It wasn’t so much that you talked about it; you just went out there and lived it. That’s the way I liked it.
My second deployment found me in the city of Mosul in 2007. I didn’t know a whole lot about Mosul prior to learning that it was our next base of operation. Once I found out where we were headed, I learned a few things to help me prepare for another go downrange. Mosul was a sprawling city of about 2.5 million people in northern Iraq. It was situated right along the Tigris River and had been strategically important to Saddam Hussein because of its location close to the Kurdish territories. The other major thing I knew about Mosul was that Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, a couple of really, really evil dudes, had been killed there early in the war in 2003.
The 101st Airborne had set up operations there and the Battle of Mosul was won in November of 2004, but at a pretty high cost. A lot of the Iraqi security forces fighting on our side left the area. It was hard to blame them. The insurgents had come in and let loose with a series of attacks against the police and security forces. They weren’t the only ones who left. About a half million or so other Iraqis got the hell out of there because things were so unsafe.
Without those security groups in place, the city was left in chaos for a while. With no homegrown security forces, and with infrastructure and things like power plants being severely damaged, it was a bit of a Wild West town, with the bad guys running loose. We were there to try to keep control and help with the rebuilding efforts; but we’d been trained to fight battles, and this transitioning into the roles of peacekeepers and rebuilders wasn’t what most of us had signed up for.
We were in country less than eight hours when we were sent out to do a bit of recon in the area. I was thinking of it as a tour of the city to help us get a sense of what was where more than any kind of really detailed exploration or intelligence gathering. Because the regular Army forces were on rotations that lasted anywhere from a year to a year and a half instead of the 90 to 120 days our Special Operations units were doing, and none of us had been in Mosul before, we hooked up with a guy from the 101st Airborne to be our tour leader.
Keith was a good guy, a gangly blond with a horsey grin who was really amped up to be working with us. I can still picture him coming up to us, his feet wide and his hips thrust forward, looking like he’d just gotten off a horse a few seconds earlier.
“Well, all right then. Rangers need some showing around. I’m down with that.”
He stuck his hand out and I shook it, noticing how bony it was and how pale it was compared to his deeply tanned face. He took off his Oakley sunglasses to look me in the eye, and I could see the faint lines where the glasses’ temples had blocked the sun, giving his face a kind of war-paint look.
I was still so new that I didn’t think much about how I was a Ranger and he was just a regular grunt. I was on his territory and wanted to learn about the best routes through the city and what we were supposed to be on the alert for and where. I didn’t say anything to him like this, but I was really pretty concerned about—okay, scared of—improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
By that time, probably everybody in the States and definitely everybody in the military knew about this tactic that the insurgents employed. They’d taken the old idea of mines—their use goes back centuries and centuries to when gunpowder was first developed—where you’d have to come in contact with a pressure plate or some other device to detonate an explosive charge. Those kinds of things were manufactured in mass quantities back in the day and were planted in the ground in big numbers in certain locations to keep infantry and vehicles from getting though.
An IED has five components: a switch (activator), an initiator (fuse), a container (body), a charge (explosive), and a power source (battery). What the Haji—a term we used for any of the various factions we fought against—had figured out was how to set them off in sophisticated ways that didn’t require coming in contact with them. They’d figured out ways to have them explode by remote control. That was scary to me in a way that a more passive land mine wasn’t. Just the idea that some kind of sophisticated electronics were involved made them feel more deadly, maybe because I grew up in an age when electronics and technology had become so advanced it was hard to understand how things worked. I guess we fear more what we don’t understand.
Eight hours into my time in country, I was at the controls of a Stryker following our tour guide. Richie, a guy who was just a couple of months ahead of me in Ranger School, was the tank commander (TC). We had about the same amount of experience, so Richie was always pretty cool in dealing with me as equals. Because you don’t drive a Stryker by looking out a view port or window, the TC and the driver have to coordinate their efforts. I was looking at the little 10-by-12-inch screen, which really only gave me a view of what was directly ahead of me maybe ten feet or so, while listening to Richie guide me through a series of right- and left-hand turns.
We were in an older part of Mosul and the streets were so narrow I couldn’t believe that they were designated as two-way streets. The Stryker barely fit in between the cars parked haphazardly along each side of the road. At one point, I popped open the hatch to get a wider view. The rest of the guys—there were three of them in addition to Richie—were all hanging out of their ports in the back. We weren’t on a formal operation, so we felt comfortable being exposed like we were.
Our guide, Sergeant Davis, was calmly narrating for us, and his voice had started to become white noise, like the sound of the engine and the tires crunching over rocks and bricks, debris from the bombing we’d done there.
“We’re going to make a left here onto a route designated Chicago, but what we call RPG Alley.”
That got my attention. I felt a quick flutter in my gut as RPGs—rocket-propelled grenades—got added to my list alongside IEDs. I turtled my head closer to my shoulders and felt my helmet drop lower over my night vision goggles, suddenly immersing me in darkness. A few seconds later, I adjusted everything and I had to squint to make out anything beyond the greenish glare flaring from glass on the road and from the parked vehicles. My eyes climbed the walls of the buildings, using the pockmarks from shrapnel as visual footholds.
What had left those marks?
I scanned the rooftops. In my mind’s eye I saw, from that heightened perspective, an RPG like a hard-thrown but wobbly football coming right at us.
At that point, I felt my knees go a little weak and I started to bounce my legs a bit with nervous anxiety.
“We’re going to make a left again and then another left and head back in,” Davis said, his voice again soothing and practiced, like a tour operator in Chicago pointing out the city’s architectural highlights. “This is the easy route back. Been down this way a bunch of times. Nothing ever goes on. The people along here seem friendlier than a lot of other folks. Not sure why, but we get a few smiles and waves and nods.”
I settled back down inside the Stryker and gunned the throttle to keep our spacing. We were moving pretty good, rumbling along at about thirty-five miles an hour. The Stryker’s chassis was sending pleasant vibrations up through my boots, a gentle kind of massage.
A few seconds later, the lead Stryker, carrying our tour guide and piloted by Keith, was suddenly engulfed in a plume of black smoke rising up out of the ground. A moment after I saw that on the screen, I could feel the concussion wave knocking my head from side to side like I was a bobblehead doll wobbling before it stilled.
“IED. IED. IED,” I screamed over the comms while simultaneously thinking, “WTF could have lifted that Stryker off the ground like that?”
I didn’t have much time to think of an answer. I immediately went into autopilot; we’d trained and trained for situations just like this one. I throttled up and maneuvered alongside the damaged vehicle, Richie’s instructions barely registering in my mind. I popped back up into the open air, the smell of burning rubber and superheated metal stinging my throat and nose. I could barely see through the smoke, but I could make out the sides of the Stryker, streaked with oil and singe marks like some kind of horrible camouflage. I couldn’t see any of the guys in Keith’s Stryker moving around outside the vehicle. A terrible thought hit me. What if its fuel tank had ignited, and with all the electronics down and the hatches inoperable those guys were trapped in there? How frigging awful would it be to get incinerated inside that thing?
Fortunately, the emergency hatch had a mechanical release, and I saw some of the guys spilling out the back of it. We’d trained for those kinds of exits. The guys were moving quickly, but they didn’t look panicked.
Over the sounds of my thoughts and the clamor inside our rig, I could hear Keith yelling, his voice high-pitched and rapid, “I’m hit. I’m hit. My leg. I think it’s fucked up. It might be gone. Holy shit.”
I watched as a guy from our unit named Lash, one of the really balls-out assaulters, clambered onto the top of the Stryker. He knelt down and started yanking at the hatch above the operator’s position. Finally, he got it open and then reached down with one arm like he’s sticking it down a storm drain, and I saw his white teeth through the swirling smoke. A few seconds later, Keith’s helmet came out, and it was bobbing around while Keith was still yelling that’s he’s been hit. In a way, it was like I was watching some kind of bizarre birth scene. Lash reached in again, this time with both hands with his legs spread and his feet on the rim of the opening for leverage. He leaned back and heaved, and Keith emerged, bloody and screaming.
While I was watching this, I reached down and pulled out my M4. I was hoping that I’d spot somebody with a weapon, some bad guy who I could take out all of my anger on. I figured that somebody nearby had called in our position and had that device detonated.
A couple of medics swarmed all over Keith, lowering him to the heaved-up pavement. They cut off his pants. I watched as Keith tried to keep his junk covered up, not wanting to expose himself to everyone as he’s being carried to the medical Stryker. His eyes were slammed shut and it looked like someone was pulling all the skin of his face tight and tying it into a kind of bun.
As soon as he was loaded in, the Stryker took off.
We all formed a defensive perimeter around the vehicle. A couple of mechanics came up and assessed the damage. The last thing we wanted was for any of the bad guys to get ahold of our equipment. The guys aboard it had done their job immediately. They’d secured any sensitive documents and electronics they could carry out with them. Next we faced a decision: to call in a 500-pound bomb to destroy the Stryker completely to keep the enemy from getting ahold of it, or to salvage the thing and get it towed out of there. We decided to go for the second option.
As we stood around waiting, I talked to one of the mechanics.
“Lucky,” he said, and then thought about that statement. “Hard to use that word, but it’s true. The dumb fuck who planted the thing went too deep. Another six inches, a foot closer to the surface, would have split that Stryker open like a can of beans.”
I didn’t want to think what that would have meant for the guys inside. I could tell the mechanic didn’t either.
“Glad to be a Ranger,” he said, a mix of a question and a statement.
“Roger that,” I told him.
I knew that he was referring to our equipment. Once again, being with a Spec Ops unit had paid off. Our Strykers were more heavily armored than the standard-issue ones were. For whatever reason, our budgets were much higher than the regular Army’s. Didn’t really seem fair, but I knew that if I was to ask Keith what he thought about “fair,” he’d have a hard time seeing it any other way than this: He got out of it alive and essentially intact and that was all that mattered. Questions of budgets and whys were above his pay grade.
Later, we’d learn that Keith had a fractured tibia and some lacerations. He returned to his unit within a month and a half, and would eventually be awarded the Purple Heart.
I can’t say for sure what happened to the Stryker, but for all my fears about IEDs, seeing firsthand how that one stood up to what was a substantial blast gave me a lot more confidence. The insurgents could dish it out, but we were adapting and proving that we could take it.
In the immediate, though, I was scared shitless. First day in, traveling down a road that was supposed to be no problem and an IED doing that to us? What was in store for us the rest of the way in Mosul?
Shortly after Keith returned following his rehab, we got approached by a commander from the 101st Airborne. Even though for security reasons we didn’t have any kind of markings on our uniforms, he knew that we were likely Spec Ops. Privately, I kind of got off on the idea that some guys might have thought we were CIA or NSA, since all those agency guys were similarly unmarked, but I was never really comfortable with the idea that rank, individual or group, came with privileges. I was grateful that we had the best kit and the best, most armored Strykers, but that didn’t mean that I was going to flaunt any of that. That also doesn’t mean that I wasn’t proud to be a Ranger—far from it. I liked the idea that other units looked up to us and that from time to time we could lend them a hand. That was all a part of leading the way. These guys needed us, and we were glad to help them out.
In early 2007, not only were some of the other regular Army units laboring under the handicap of not having the best equipment, but the rules of engagement (ROEs), which seemed to be constantly changing, had them kind of hamstrung. That’s why this commander came to us to ask for our help. Rules of engagement are a necessary part of warfare, but you ask any guys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan during this period and they’ll likely tell you—as would guys who fought in Vietnam and likely every other conflict we’ve been involved in as a country—that our respect for and implementation of ROEs was far more strict and far more restrictive than what the bad guys had in place. Look at it this way: We weren’t beheading people, burning up bodies and hanging them in public places, or doing anything remotely barbaric.
The problem this commander was facing was kind of simple. By the time he approached us in 2007, the ROEs had changed to the point that even when his guys were under attack, they weren’t allowed to return fire. In particular, this happened every time they passed a particular hotel in Mosul. All they could do was to drive past the area as quick as they could to avoid taking too many hits. They were motoring along a major thoroughfare that was a regular “secured” route. Because we were Rangers, we operated under a different set of ROEs. We could, and took every legitimate opportunity to, return fire.
We were so eager to help out that we didn’t ask too many questions about why the commander felt like this was the best solution. I wasn’t about to ask, since it seemed like this was a chance for me to get some real action under my belt. Despite how I felt about IEDs and the threat they posed, I was still itching to see some real combat. See, I didn’t mind the idea of facing a real enemy fair and square. I didn’t like the idea of some Haji sneaking around at night planting IEDs and then some other bad dudes sitting there in the safety of some room pressing a button or whatever to try to blow us up. I know that all is fair in love and war and all that, but to me that’s just a saying, not a way human beings ought to behave.
I’d read a lot about war as a kid and I once came across a book about a special unit that the Army developed in World War II. They recruited a bunch of actors, artists, and others who practiced deceptive tactics—forging documents, using fake balloon tanks and various equipment to fool the enemy into thinking we had taken positions we hadn’t, and perpetrating all kinds of other trickery. So when the commander suggested that we “pretend” to be like his regular Army unit, I was all for that. We’d wear uniforms like theirs, put on their regimental patches, and drive by that hotel and give those bad guys all kinds of hell.
We had downtime during the day, so we could fit the operation, which we called the Hotel Party, into our schedule. This would be a daytime operation, and we normally operated at night.
Just before we set out, Bill Youngman, one of the other Stryker drivers like me and a member of the weapons squad, said, “I don’t know about this. It’s pretty cool and all that we’re going to be able to do this, but we’re Stryker drivers. We haven’t trained for this kind of thing.”
“Are you kidding me?” Hogan said, his voice a kind of hacking cough that reminded me of a dog trying to get a hair out of its throat. “What’s to train for? Drive. Shoot. Hell, fucking gangbangers do this kind of thing all the time.”
We all laughed a bit at that.
I sat there fitting a mini-scope to my M4.
Using my nickname, Hogan said, “Look at Irv, dude. He’s into it. Like being back in the ’hood, right?”
I let that pass. I didn’t know what kind of a ’hood he thought I came from, but the only things I ever shot in my ’hood were a bird and a window, and I felt guilty about both for weeks after. I wasn’t feeling guilty about the possibility of shooting a bad guy in Iraq, though. In a way the scope was kind of ridiculous, but I was still fascinated with sniping and all that went into it, and if I could use that scope and my M4 to get some feel for what it was like to take aim and take out a guy at six or eight hundred meters, then I was going to do it. And I wasn’t going to care what anybody else said or thought.
We finished kitting up and I climbed behind the controls of the Stryker, my heart beating at a rate nearly as fast as the pistons pounding in that Caterpillar diesel engine. I grabbed my M4 and put it in what I called the abyss—this space right next to the operator’s seat that was a deep and dark-seeming black hole. Anything smaller than an M4 put in it would just get swallowed up, never to be seen again. Our platoon leader, Richie, shook his head when he saw me stowing my weapon there. He added his M4.
“I’m not even going to ask where you got that scope from,” he said. He paused and a second later said, “That’s badass, Irv. Good thinking.”
Just like the video displays we had to watch when we drove the Strykers offered us just a limited view of our surroundings, the same had been true of our night vision. Going out into the streets of Mosul in full-on daylight was literally and figuratively eye-opening. I’d heard people say that we should blow the Iraqis and others into the Stone Age, and it kind of looked like we had tried. Shattered buildings and islands of rubble all dotted the landscape, things that I hadn’t been able to see when I was caught up in the visual tight close-up of our operations. I was reminded of the photos I’d seen of American cities in the ’60s when riots tore through places like Detroit and other urban areas.
As we approached the building that the commander had told us about, I could see that it was about ten stories tall and stretched along for nearly half a block. And just as we’d been told, as soon as we were within a few hundred yards, I heard small-arms rounds plinking off our armor. I was driving the lead vehicle and before I could report the enemy contact, I heard the other drivers chiming in.
“Fuckin’ bastards,” I heard Keith say. He was no longer a driver since the IED incident. His leg was better, but he’d come back and taken on a role as a .50-cal gunner, utilizing its remote control operation with great accuracy.
As we drew even with the building, I braked hard and brought us to a quick stop. That had to confuse the snipers. The regular Army guys would just have hauled ass in their Humvees instead of staying put like we were. We were much more protected in the Stryker and wanted to take those guys out in the worst way.
We took a beat and assessed the situation. I grabbed my M4, and while I was doing that, I could hear the RWS (remote weapon station) guns—the .50-cal machine guns—swiveling to our right. There must have been fifty or more windows facing the street in that building and, from the sound of things, an insurgent was in every one of them. What was funny was that as the guns were pivoting on the enemy position, the plinking and reports from the Hajis’ weapons went quiet. I could imagine all of them looking out at us and in unison saying their version of “Holy shit” as they realized what was about to happen. It was almost like I could hear the collective sound of a hundred or more assholes puckering simultaneously.
In the next instant, the .50-caliber guns started spitting fire at them. Instead of that plinking sound, I heard the spent casings of the .50-cals rattling around, and I smelled the chemical odor of our weapons discharging. I guess the bad guys had time to recover, because in the next moments we started to take really heavy fire. I don’t know why I did this, but I had lit up a cigarette like some stupid punk thinking he’s in a movie and squinting past the smoke down the barrel of his rifle. I popped open my hatch and looked through the scope to see what was going on. I caught a glimpse of a group of our assaulters busting across the short gap between the Strykers and the building, maybe three hundred yards at the most. They were bent on doing a room clearing. I was thinking that there were way too many rooms and way too many bad guys, but there they were. I was always amazed by how efficient these guys were when clearing rooms, but I figured there were at least a hundred rooms and that was going to take a couple of hours at least—especially since there seemed to be targets in every room.
“Suppressive fire! Suppressive fire!” I heard their team leader yelling over the comms.
I heard the report of multiple .50-cal machine guns going off. Then I heard Keith firing words as fast as rounds.
“It’s gone. It’s gone. Mother—” The .50-cal was normally pretty reliable, but ours had gone down. I grabbed the M4 and scrambled out of the hatch. I took a spread-eagle position behind the .50-cal’s mounting platform. I squinted through the scope and fanned along a line of windows, looking for any kind of movement. A couple of times, I saw a head moving or the muzzle of an AK waggling around the corner of an opening, and I squeezed off a few rounds, but every one of them missed. I held focus on a position I’d fired on and saw a puff of smoke coming from the stone façade of the building. I fired again and got the same result—too low!
“Aww, crap!” I muttered, and shook my head at my stupidity.
“Hold up, dumb shit,” I told myself.
I aimed again, this time holding the rifle so the number 3 hash mark in the ACOG scope was centered right on a bad guy’s head. I squeezed the trigger and then watched as the dude dropped out of sight below the window ledge.
It took a moment for it to sink in. I’d just shot somebody in the head. I was pumped, but I knew that I had to relax a bit; too much adrenaline would make it hard for me to stay focused. I aimed again on that same window, because I saw another shape in it. I fired. Same result. Another one dropped. I blinked; it was like I was playing whack-a-mole or something. Another dude popped up. Was it the first guy that I thought I’d taken out? Were there a bunch of dudes in that room?
Didn’t matter. I needed to take them out even if they seemed like they were zombies or something.
The firefight went on like that for what seemed to be hours. I was changing mags while a couple of other guys were working to repair the .50-cal. Richie was up there with two other guys and the next thing I know, I see him standing behind the .50-cal. He was tearing at the pins that held it on its stand. In a few seconds he had it loose, and instead of firing it from the safety of the cabin using the remote control functions, he started to free-gun it. I couldn’t tell if it was a snarl or a smile or a little of both that lit up his face, but he was bouncing a bit with the recoil and the weight of the gun as he manually operated it.
A few seconds later, one of the bad guys fired a shot that hit inside the ammo can that held the .50-cal rounds. The can jumped with the explosion and I kept thinking all hell could break loose if that set off a chain reaction. Richie looked down at the can, frowning and shaking his head but still letting loose with the machine gun.
“Where’s the new guy?” he shouted above the din of discharging weapons.
For a second I was confused. I could barely hear Richie, and then I remembered that we’d had a newbie join us for a ride-along—kind of like what I’d been through when I was first downrange.
I pointed down the hatch into the cabin. A second later, another round from one of the Hajis’ AKs struck the ammo can again. I watched fascinated as a single .50-cal round spun up out of the can like a fish going after a fly, then disappeared beneath the surface into the cabin. I cringed and waited, but heard nothing.
“Tell that asshole to get the fuck up here. I need help loading!” Richie screamed.
I peered inside the cabin. The new guy sat crouched with his back pressed against the rear bulkhead of the vehicle. His eyes were wide as grapes and he sat there with his hands pressed against his ears.
“Dude, we’re losing fire superiority. We need you.”
I wasn’t sure if the cherry new guy didn’t hear me or if he didn’t care. I was pretty pissed off at that point. We thought we were going out for a kind of joyride to take care of some punks that were messing with our little brothers, but now we were engaged in a serious battle and this shithead wasn’t doing a damn thing to help us out.
I screamed at him, calling him every name in the book, but he just sat there cringing.
Fuck this, I thought, I don’t have time to convince this dude to do his job. I got back on the deck and resumed firing. Richie looked over at me and set the weapon down for a second and stood there with his hands at his sides, his palms forward, shrugging his shoulders as if to say, “What’s up?”
“He’s freaking out,” I said between pulls of the trigger. “He’s down there sitting in a puddle of his own piss.”
In the middle of all this chaotic action, Richie stood there for another second, looked skyward, then raised his arms up like he was asking the gods for an answer as to why this new guy was down there while the rest of us were up there getting our asses fired at. He dropped to his knees and peered into the cabin. He pulled his head out and started laughing, raising and lowering a closed fist in man-code for a guy beating off.
Enough said. We didn’t have time for any more attempts to get our “reinforcement” off his ass.
I resumed firing as quickly as I could and was growing frustrated with my inaccuracy and the seemingly endless supply of bad guys popping up in the same window.
After a while, I heard the distinctive thumping of a chopper’s rotors and out of the corner of my eye saw the fish-head shape and eyes of an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter coming in on the attack. Above it was another chopper and above that one, with maybe two hundred feet of elevation distance separating it from the rest of the school, was a third. They took turns coming on a shallow dive to fire rockets and their machine gun rounds at the hotel. It was like this big three-pedaled elliptical machine rising and falling, coming forward and falling back in a kind of brutal ballet. I had to take my eyes off it and concentrate on my job, but man, those dudes could handle those machines.
I got a little worried because at one point, one of the OH-58s came in and must have hit a pocket of turbulence caused by the concussive effects of the rocket explosion and lost altitude, dipping way down to maybe twenty feet off the ground before the pilot saved it and gained airspeed and climbed steeply and banked sharply to get to the top of the ride, then hovered there. A few moments later, another chopper came in and experienced a similar kind of flutter in flight path. A rocket flared off its flanks, and I knew that something wasn’t right. I’d seen laser-guided missiles before, and they don’t always travel in a straight line; instead, they veer from side to side and take a funky route to their target. This wasn’t like that, though. This was a straight shot and seemed to be coming right at us at about a 25-degree angle.
Those missiles haul ass. I didn’t even have time to scream; I watched it as it hit the pavement maybe fifteen yards from the left front quarter panel of our Stryker. I heard it plink as it struck the ground, watched sparks splay off its flanks as metal hit asphalt, and then felt my jaw drop and my balls contract as that missile skipped off the ground and into the air before it exploded halfway between our position and the hotel. Its fireworks display may as well have spelled out, “Today is your lucky day!”
Richie and I exchanged dumbfounded looks before getting back to firing our weapons. Next thing I know, I hear over the comms that some of the teams are going black on ammo—running out. The assault team was still trying to close the gap between our position and the building.
“Bounding back! Bounding back!” I heard them say.
I laid down cover fire yards in front of them. For some reason, one of the Hajis came out of a sliding door on the ground floor and I took him out, wondering for a minute how many of them I’d killed that day.
It’s weird the kind of things you remember from these firefights that go on for hours, but at one point I became fixated on an assault gunner by the name of Davis. Maybe it’s because I’m so short, but it seemed like Davis was a giant of a guy, six-five or so, so tall that his military-issue stuff never seemed to fit him right. I saw him behind a little rock, a whole lot of his body sticking out around it, but a rock big enough that I could have been completely hidden. He darted from there, moving with the kind of quickness you wouldn’t expect from a guy that size, kind of like Rob Gronkowski of the Patriots sneaking out from the offensive line and settling into a little zone. Only Davis wasn’t behind the D-line and the linebackers, he was settled in behind a rectangular utility box out in front of the building.
He was to my right and I kind of saw him in a full side view, and I saw this splash of spray come out behind him. I thought, “Man, that was a huge sneeze, even for a big guy like that.” He rocked back on his heels and then lurched forward a bit, his helmet going from a twelve to two and then to ten o’clock. I resumed firing and took my eye off of him for a few seconds. I returned my gaze to his position and I could see that something had changed. He was in direct sunlight and yet his back seemed to be in shadow. He was still firing his weapon, and then I watched him testing his shoulder, moving it around like a football player does when he’s trying to get his shoulder pads back in position after taking a big hit.
Then I heard him over the comms.
“Hey, Platoon Sergeant Gritzer. I think I may be hit. A rock or something.” Davis had this thick Southern accent. He’s a gentleman country boy from the Deep South, very quiet and respectful and despite what he’s reporting on, he sounds like he’s ordering biscuits and gravy or something from a waitress who reminds him of his mom.
A second later, he added, “Aw! Dang it. I am hit.”
I couldn’t believe it, but he stood straight up, all six-foot-five of him, and he’s now exposed three quarters of his body above that utility box. There’s not a lot I could do but hope and pray for the guy and keep firing, so I did all of those.
Out of the corner of my eye, Doc Daniels was flying toward Davis. He grabbed him around the waist and it was like a little bitty defensive back trying to take down Gronk. Davis would not go down. Doc was too short to get up high enough to yank the big guy’s shoulders and head and he’s hopping and leaping, but Davis was still more or less upright. Doc must have got ahold of the quick release on Davis’s body armor, because that clattered to the ground.
As I’m watching all that take place, I could hear Davis; he’s madder than hell. I’d never heard him curse before but he was spewing quite a few of them.
“Son of a bitch shot me!” he screamed.
“Get down!”
“Gonna be hell to pay!”
“Get down!”
From my position I could see a large hole below Davis’s shoulder blade and blood dripping down his back. We could hear everything over the comms and Doc was asking for the medical Stryker to get there ASAP and for a quick extraction. “ASAP! ASAP!” I kept hearing those words over and over.
Doc was trying to calmly explain to Davis what was going on. He was afraid that the bullet had come in on such an angle that it snuck in beneath his body armor at shoulder level and exited about three quarters of the way down his back. Doc was concerned that Davis had gotten his lung punctured.
“Gimme a lollipop, Doc,” Davis said, referring to the morphine doses that could be taken orally.
“Nope. Not in this case. Can’t do that.”
“C’mon. I just want a taste of one.” Davis was pretty near to giggling by this point.
“I think you’re going into shock; just lie still. We’ll get some fluids into you.”
“Naw, I’m not in shock. I’m just messin’ with you. Doesn’t hurt at all.”
“Well, it’s about to,” Doc said.
Doc helped hustle him out of there, and as I watched Davis ducking into the Stryker, I heard some not so good news over the comms: “We’re completely black on ammo. Repeat. Completely black,” the chopper pilots reported.
No rockets.
No machine gun rounds.
No air support.
That last one wasn’t true. The pilots did something I’d never seen. While still in control of their aircraft the pilots and the copilots flew in again, hanging out of the cockpit while firing their small arms at the targets, doing flyby after flyby until the ammo was depleted and we’d all managed to return to our Strykers.
As we fired up the engines, I heard the call to go in for an air strike, a 500-pounder. A few minutes later, we heard that payload being delivered from an F-16.
As we pulled into our FOB—our forward operating base—we were all still eager, with the exception of the new guy, to get back out there. We piled out of the Stryker and headed toward our compound so we could refit. The regular Army commander was there. He’d been monitoring things on the radios and he was yelling at us, “Stop. Stop. I want to talk to you guys.”
We rushed past him into our ready room, grabbing C-4 explosive, grenades, and ammo, stuffing as much in as many places as we could. We didn’t get out of there. The commander stood his ground, holding up his hands and telling us, “You’re done!”
We had to accept that, but that didn’t mean that we had to be happy about it. For a few days after, most of us involved in the Hotel Party walked around like we had a really bad hangover, mumbling our regrets but still kind of amped up by what we’d been through and the memories of the crazy shit that went down.
The next day, I called my mom and dad, but I didn’t get into a whole lot of detail about what I’d just been through. As I was talking to them, I saw Davis walk in. His arm was in a sling, but he didn’t seem much the worse for wear, all things considered.
At first I wondered if something was wrong with him, because he was normally so soft-spoken but now he was practically shouting. Then I figured out what was up.
“Grandma! Grandma! I’m sorry, ma’am. I know you told me not to get shot.”
A long pause followed.
“Yes, ma’am, I know that I need to listen to you. I know you’ve got more sense than me, Grandma.” He stood there squinting hard and focusing on her words, then said, “You sure can count on that. I promise I won’t get shot again.”
We gave Davis all kinds of crap for that conversation with his “kinfolk,” but we were glad that within a week or so he was back in action with us. He was really fortunate that the bullet passed straight through him. A deflection of a fraction of an inch to the left or right and it would have hit his lungs or some other vital organ, his spinal column.
Not something you want to think about for too long. Just give thanks and move on.
The good news was, as our deployment went on, we didn’t hear of any more reports of anybody encountering trouble along that route. As a guy on the ground, it was hard for me to understand how somebody back in the safety of their office in the Pentagon could have decided that in our desire to bring the war in Iraq to an end we should take away an Army division’s ability to defend itself.
That was the first time I’d seen one of our guys get wounded, and it shook me up. I was also kind of confused from that point forward about just what our role was there. Not our role as a Spec Ops unit—that was clear to me. What was strange was that during the day, with our government’s decision to close down the war, we had the regular Army guys out there helping to build schools, make a public presence, build a democracy, and all of that. But when the sun went down, we were out on those same streets, taking out targets, trying to rid the country of al-Qaeda big shots. I couldn’t quite grasp the big picture.
Not too long ago, I heard that Mosul had fallen under the control of ISIL, ISIS, or the IS or whatever we are referring to those jokers as these days. We didn’t lose anybody during the Hotel Party operation, but I knew that the regular Army units had suffered a few casualties and fatalities along that corridor. At the time I didn’t think too much about all of that. We’d picked up a mission, helped some guys out, got back, and restocked and refocused the next day thinking that we’d done a good job, done what was asked of us. I wish that I could look at things that simply today.
All I know is that we had each other’s backs at the time and did everything we could to support one another. Whether or not the higher-ups did the same is tough to say. I wasn’t being paid to make all those kinds of high-level decisions about rules of engagement; I was there to make sure that all my brothers got back inside the wire safe and sound. All else aside, that was my job, and the longer I was out there, the more evidence I saw that the rest of the guys felt much the same way. We didn’t need any PowerPoint presentations to spell that out for us. We lived and breathed it every day, and seeing it in action and feeling it to my core was a wonderful thing. All I could hope for the new guy who bailed on us was that he’d learned something from seeing how the rest of the guys manned up and did their jobs.
Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas Irving
