Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (16 page)

Robinson, in the hatch of 201, saw the man being caught up in the treads. He heard a crunch. It was the nastiest sound he’d ever heard. The body was tossed free, spinning into the air in a messed-up, distorted shape. The legs were facing the wrong way, almost touching the head. He saw it all as a picture. He felt nothing. It was the weirdest thing. The amtrack lurched, but once the treads had churned out the mangled body, it leveled out.
These amtracks have got pretty good suspension.

Castleberry headed for the bridge. As they crested it, Robinson wondered what was going to happen next. The maneuver had gone out of his head.
Is Bravo ahead of us?
He thought they might be on the other side of the bridge. But when he looked up, he saw nothing but an empty bridge with a wide, desolate expanse of land on the other side. That’s when he realized that they had been the first ones through Ambush Alley.
Maybe
that’s why they attacked us like that.
He was dismissive, then angry, then confused.
Dumb-ass hajji ragheads. What the hell is going on? This wasn’t
the enemy we were expecting.

Behind 201, the rest of the Charlie convoy now had the bridge in their sights. Sergeant Jose Torres was sitting in the rear of the overcrowded track C211. Marines from the overspill of track 209 were sitting on top of him. When he’d heard the AAV’s engines gunning up to go down Ambush Alley, it had blown his mind. He’d expected the tanks to be with them. He heard the roar of the AAV’s engine and a
ping ping
against the side of the track. He looked at the other marines in the AAV. They let out a collective “Whoa” and started laughing. From his position, in the belly of the track, he couldn’t see much. There was a small peephole he could look through, but it offered such a narrow range of vision that it was not worth trying to angle his body into a position where he could see through it. By the time someone had shouted out a target, they had already sped by. He felt sick and nervous. The AAV was swaying from side to side. It was dark, noisy, and reeked of diesel. He had no idea what the outside world looked like. All he heard was marines up top yelling at each other. He almost wished that he, too, was up there. Down below, he felt small, vulnerable, and powerless.

Torres had wanted to be a marine ever since he could remember. He signed up on August 3, 1994. It was his junior year of high school. His mother thought he was crazy, but she knew that’s what he wanted to do, so she supported him. In the end, he wasn’t allowed to join till his senior year, so he had to go through the delayed-entry program for a year before he got to Boot Camp. He was the company’s machine-gunner section leader. During his five years of training, he’d had plenty of practice but never fired a round in anger. Now he was looking forward to getting out there and doing his stuff. He’d had enough of endless hours sitting in this metal box. He looked at his watch. It was 1305. They’d loaded up at midnight and had driven for thirteen hours without getting out of the back of the track. He turned to the marines around him.

“Hey, you guys. Do you realize we’ve been in these tracks on a thirteen-hour movement?”

Directly above Torres, lying on the top of track 211, Quirk saw a black-robed fighter jump out from behind a house on the right side of the road and put the RPG to his shoulder. As he swung his rifle around to engage him, the Iraqi launched the grenade. He watched the missile fly toward the track and impact the side about three feet below him. The explosion lifted him up and knocked him on his back. For a second the world went black.

Inside, Torres was smoking a cigarette with Corporal Randy Glass when the RPG hit. The track was lifted up in the air. It was all in slow motion— a blinding flash, an ear-shattering explosion, a rush of hot air that seemed to suck away energy as it passed through the back of the track. Thick, black, acrid smoke filled the track’s belly. Jose Torres first noticed that sound had been emptied of all its force as though everything echoed down a long tunnel. He heard a muffled shriek. There was a smell of burning flesh. People’s legs were in other people’s laps. His vision went all hazy and foggy.

When Quirk looked up from the top of the track, the black-robed figure was still standing there with the RPG launcher on his shoulder. Quirk walked rounds down the wall.
I’m gonna kill your ass.
The rounds smacked into the wall until they reached the man. The pitch of the rounds changed as they tore into him. The man shuddered, bounced, and collapsed into the dirt as track 211 sped past.

In the belly of the track, Torres screamed.

“My eyes, my eyes.”

They were burning. It was like everything was hazy and in double vision. He tried to stand up to get a breath of clean air through the open hatches. It was chaos. He felt himself detaching from the scene, like some impartial observer watching the mayhem unfolding. He saw marines choking on the smoke, struggling to put on gas masks, a heaving tangle of limbs and torn clothing. Playing cards were floating in the whirling dust of smoke and debris. The RPG had hit right under the wheel well and sent pieces of hot metal ricocheting around the inside of the track at leg level.

“We’ve got to stop. We’ve got injured marines.”

The driver, Sergeant Michael Bitz, slightly wounded and stunned from the explosion, slowed the track down to a crawl. Furiously, Seely banged on Bitz’s Kevlar helmet.

“Go, go, go. We can’t stop. We’re out in the open. We’ve got to get to cover.”

“We got a man down. We got a man down.”

“Glass is dead.”

Blood was dripping from Glass’s leg as though it were pouring out of a faucet. A flap of skin was hanging off, revealing flesh and gristle throbbing in a bleeding mess. He was shaking, but he was breathing.

On top of the track, Quirk saw that Corporal Mike Mead was down, splayed out by the hatch, clutching a knife to his right leg. Quirk and Lance Corporal Donald J. Cline Jr. tried to tear off the MOPP suit around his right leg. It didn’t look too bad, some kind of burn, but the skin wasn’t blistering or bubbling over. At the same time, he noticed that the packs on the side of the track were on fire.

“Get some water up here. Get some fucking water up here. The packs are on fire.”

He had no idea that anyone inside the track was hurt.

“Why is nobody fucking helping me? We need some fucking water.”

Lance Corporal Jordan Fitzgerald handed up a canteen.

“You asshole. What the fuck am I going to do with a canteen? Give me a fucking Ka-bar so I can cut these packs off.”

Quirk wanted the traditional Marine fighting knife. It had an incredibly tough and sharp edge that could punch through a quarter. Instead, Fitzgerald handed him an M16 bayonet.
You can’t cut butter with these
things.
Cline was real short, so Quirk grabbed him by the ankles and lowered him over the side to try to cut the packs off. They were moving again, and the air was feeding the flames. He knew that what they were doing was pointless.
We’re not going to cut the packs off with this fucking bayonet.
But what option do we have?

“Pull me up, pull me up. It’s burning my face.”

The flames had begun to leap upward and singe Cline’s face and hair. Quirk pulled him up.

“Did it burn my hair, did it burn my hair?”

He crossed himself. Still neither of them realized that just below them, in the belly of the track, marines were writhing around in a bloody smoking mess of limbs and debris.

“We are so fucking lucky that RPG didn’t kill us. We were so fucking close to that thing.”

Lieutenant Tracy, in the command track 204, had crossed the bridge and was herringboned to the east side of the road when he heard the radio call from Sergeant Beaver, 211’s AAV commander.

“I’m hit, I’m hit.”

He watched the track fly by. Thick black smoke poured out of the open hatches and flames were licking the marines’ rucks attached to the outside of the AAV. There was screaming from inside. Like some growling, wounded beast, the track kept moving up and over the northern canal bridge, coming to a halt about two hundred meters on its northern side.

Sergeant Schaefer also heard Beaver on the radio.

“We have wounded.”

Schaefer got Castleberry to pull toward a berm on the west side of the road to build up an armored coil, a hasty 360-degree defense. The tracks maneuvered around each other to face outward sheltering the marines in the middle of the coil and allowing the guns in the front of the tracks more shooting space.

Track 211 had stopped in the middle of the raised highway in an exposed position. Schaefer ran over to the track and pulled open the rear hatch. The fire was already spreading across the top of the track. Someone thrust Corporal Glass into Schaefer’s arms. Schaefer went into shock. Glass’s leg, tied with a rifle sling as a tourniquet, was a bleeding mess. Schaefer had never seen anybody so messed up. He just stood there for a second.
What
the fuck do I do?
Nothing in training had prepared him for this. He dragged Glass away from the track and laid him by the side of the road out of the line of fire. It was a slap in the face.
We’re Americans. This is not
supposed to happen to us.

He ran back to his track, furiously firing his M16 back toward the city. He was confused and out of control.
Motherfucking hajjis.

Robinson saw Schaefer from the hatch of track 201. He saw him firing off rounds until he ran out of ammo. He then watched the frustrated tracker hurl his M16 onto the ground. Robinson couldn’t understand what he was doing, throwing his rifle away like that. An infantryman is taught that the rifle is almost a part of him. It’s like an extra limb. It could save his life. It has to be treated with care.
He’s lost his head. What is he thinking?
Why the hell is he doing that?

Inside 211, Sergeant Torres was trying to feel where the burning, searing pain was coming from. He grabbed his leg. He felt solid flesh, but it was wet and dripping blood. His desert boot was red and glistening. It looked as though a tiger’s claw had ripped through it.

“Open the goddamn loading ramp.”

“It won’t open.”

“Just get those marines out of there.”

He felt someone grab his arm from the top of the open hatch. At the same time, someone still inside grabbed his other arm and tried to pull him down.

“Don’t leave me. I can’t breathe.”

A hand grabbed him and yanked him through the back hatch into the sunlight and onto the side of the road. He gulped a lungful of clean air. He let himself be carried into a ditch a few meters from the track. Within moments a Navy corpsman, a Marine Corps combat medic trained by the Navy, was at his side. It was HM3 Robert Richie. He pulled bandages out of his combat lifesaver MOLLE bag.

“You’re gonna be fine. But you got real bad shrapnel wounds to your right leg.”

Next to him, a twenty-two-year-old Navy corpsman, HM3 Luis Fonseca, worked on Glass, assessing the injuries to his leg. He gave him some morphine and wrote 1327 M in black ink on his forehead to communicate what time it had been given. The corpsmen were sprinting between the wounded, who were laid out in a line in the ditch. There were five of them, all with lumps of flesh missing below their knees. The RPG had hit the side of the track and set off a secondary explosion inside it, scattering chunks of hot metal under the track’s benches where the marines were sitting.

Quirk, still on the top of 211, looked down into the hatch and thought about getting out by going into the track and out of the back hatch like he usually did. Fitzgerald was with him.

“No, just jump off the fucking track. Jump off the top.”

It was over ten feet to the ground. They were loaded down with their deuce gear, the pouches holding their magazines and their grenades, their asspacks with flashlights and some food, flak jackets, and Kevlar helmets. They were carrying over thirty pounds of equipment. They both took a running jump over the burning packs and landed in the dirt. Fitzgerald screamed out in pain.

“I’ve broken my fucking ankle.”

Quirk realized what a dumb thing they had just done.
If we hadn’t had
a million pounds of adrenaline rushing through us, we would have never
made the jump.

Quirk heard screaming and gurgling from the men in the ditches around him. It was the sound of pure pain as marines were pulled out of the track. He never thought he would ever hear those kinds of noises. Now he knew it was a sound that he would never forget. He looked at them lined up on the ground, a bloody, screaming mound of pulsating blood and flesh with a smoking AAV as a backdrop.
This is like a scene from a horror
movie. It’s a fucking bleeding mess.
The marines with whom he’d spent a year partying, yelping and hollering at war movies, going to strip clubs, and training for the peak of physical fitness were now a bloody mess of pale flesh, their faces scared and wide-eyed with pain. For a moment his mind just froze up, overcome by the awe of what he was looking at.
This wasn’t
part of the plan. This is fucking wrong.

Quirk didn’t know what to do. Lieutenant Seely shouted at them to get over to a berm on the east side of the road and provide security. Quirk sprinted over there and dived into the dirt, glad to be doing something. Rounds were whizzing over his head, but he had no idea where they were coming from.
Where do we shoot? What is going to happen?

Lance Corporal Trevino, driving track 208, brought it to a halt about 125 meters to the north of the bridge and herringboned on the east side of the road near 204, the command track. Lieutenant Ben Reid crawled out of the command hatch, threw his Kevlar helmet and maps on the ground, and jumped down after them.
This is a pretty big drop. I’m in combat, I’m in
the air without thinking, and I’m going to break a leg. What a stupid way
to get hurt.
The landing was hard, but safe. He ran around to the back of the hatch and banged on the rear ramp, frustrated that it seemed to take so long to drop.