Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (22 page)

Schaefer was yelling at them to get in. The track was being loaded up with wounded. Robinson peered inside. There were so many bodies in there that he couldn’t work out how they could all fit in.

“Get in, we’re moving. Get the fuck in.”

As Robinson climbed up to the top of the track, a mortar slammed down next to him, tearing up the roof and sending metal flying into the open hatch. He could hear screams of pain from inside.

“I’m hit. I’m fucking hit.”

Robinson stood on the roof and tried to pull the hatch shut. It stuck. He bent his knees, straightened his back, and pulled it again with all his strength.
The damn thing won’t budge.

“Let’s fucking go. We’ve got to go.”

Castleberry freaked out. Even though they were already overloaded, there were still people missing from 1st Squad. He knew that he was not supposed to go until he had everyone with him.

“Hold on, we’ve got more to load up.”

Schaefer screamed back at him.

“They’re on another fucking track. Let’s go. We need to get out of here.”

Neither Castleberry nor Schaefer heard the groaning of the A-10s as the planes began to circle lower overhead. There was too much noise going on right around them. Castleberry could hear people yelling over all of the four nets he was monitoring: battalion tac 1 and tac 2, the company net, and the AAV platoon frequency. He shouted at those still trying to come in through the back hatch.

“Just get the fuck in.”

On the opposite side of the road, closer to the canal bridge, Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk was still lying in a ditch, sheltering from the incoming rounds. He looked around. There was no one from his fire team with him. Private First Class Gary Labarge jumped into the ditch carrying an M249 SAW. Quirk wondered why he wasn’t firing it.

“I don’t have any rounds. I got the weapon but no rounds.”

“Holy shit.”

Quirk ran down the lines, screaming at marines to pull out some magazines for him. The 249 normally used belt-fed ammunition, but you could also load it with 5.56 mm rounds from an M16 magazine. It was unorthodox, but it worked. Quirk threw the magazines at Labarge, who started loading them into the magazine well. At that moment they heard a new sound, the whistle of incoming missiles.

Vrrrrm. Vrmmm. Vrmmm.

Ever since he’d been a kid, he’d played these games where someone would imitate the whistle of an incoming shell and then it would explode and they’d fall to the ground like idiots. Now it was happening for real.
This is as scary as shit.

VRRRMMMMM.

Quirk felt warm air shoot past his ear and heard a thud about five meters in front of him.
Holy shit.
He turned to Labarge.

“What the fuck was that?”

“You don’t want to know, brother.”

“Fuck the bullshit, what the fuck was it?”

“That was a mortar. It missed your head by about a foot and a half. It was a dud, thank God.”

“Maybe we should get the fuck out of here.”

The twelve marines in the ditch piled out. Using the road as defilade, they ran back south toward the bridge. Behind them, just as in the movies, rounds kicked up dust in their wake.

Dadadadadada. Dadadadada.

Then Quirk heard another noise. It was a growling, groaning noise from above. A noise he’d never heard before, a bit like a buzz saw.

“What’s that fucking noise?”

“It’s an A-10.”

“What the fuck is an A-10?”

At the same time, a hundred meters or so north of Quirk’s position, First Lieutenant Ben Reid, blood still running from his face, ran back to the location where his mortar squad had been hit. The bodies were still there, lying in pools of blood. Corporal Garibay hadn’t moved. He was moaning and groaning like a kid with bellyache. Reid didn’t stop to find out what was wrong with him.

“There will be a track coming over. You need to get these guys loaded up. I don’t care how much it hurts. If I don’t make it back to here, you need to get out of here and find the battalion aid station and get these guys help. I am going to grab some guys to help us out.”

He went south to where he had seen a handful of marines lying prone in the dirt. There were mortars and RPGs flying through the air and thudding and exploding in the dirt around him, but he hardly noticed it anymore.
We’re all fucking screwed up. We’re screwed up.
He found some marines lying behind a berm and stumbled toward them. He fell, got up out of the dirt, and fell down again. He staggered to his feet, unaware of the rounds flying over his head. Finally, he reached some marines tucked up in a ditch against the east side of the road. It was Gunnery Sergeant Jerry Blackwell, Corporal Charles Wykstra, and a few others.

All Blackwell and Wykstra could see was a marine with a bleeding mess of a head stumbling toward them out of a thick cloud of black smoke.

“Who the fuck is that?”

“Gunny, it’s Lieutenant Reid.”

Wykstra and Blackwell pulled him to the ground and grabbed some bandages from their first-aid kit.

“Hey, Gunny, is my eyeball still in my head?”

Blackwell looked him over.

“I think it’s still there. You look good.”

“What the fuck is going on? We need to get out of this shit.”

Reid did a quick sanity check on his own situation and realized that he’d been stumbling around without a Kevlar helmet or a gas mask. He’d lost his binos and his map. He didn’t hear the plane overhead, but Blackwell did.

“There’s an A-10 here now.”

“That’s good, Gunny. We need the help.”

“No it’s not. The A-10 is fucking coming at us.”

Mouth, from his position on the eastern side of the city, south of the canal bridge, was now waiting for the A-10s to engage their targets. He knew that he couldn’t control the close air support through Type 1 CAS. He could not see the enemy forces and was unable to satisfy the criteria for positively identifying targets. He did believe, though, that he had satisfied the requirements to safeguard incidents of friendly fire. The plan was that Bravo was always going to be the lead unit. He had checked with the company commander that they were still the lead unit. No one had overtaken them. Type 3 CAS would allow him to give the pilots a geographical area to target. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski, had stated that Type 3 CAS had to be cleared through him. Mouth was stressed. Comms with the battalion commander was virtually nonexistent. He didn’t want to hold up the attack.
There is no time to find
a clear channel to the battalion commander to explain the situation and
then ask for approval for the fires.
He was worried that there were enemy forces congregating north of the canal about to head into the city to attack the marines there.
CAS is use it or lose it. It is flexible and
lethal, but fleeting. If I don’t act now, marines are going to die.
He decided that it was within his responsibility, through Commander’s Intent, to authorize Type 3 CAS allowing the pilots to prosecute their own targets north of the canal.

Overhead, the A-10 pilots assumed that they were under the FAC’s control and that Mouth had eyes on the target. They thought they were operating under Type 1 or 2 control. They got on the radio and asked Mouth for clearance to attack the targets.

Mouth, still operating from his track in the east of the city, was bemused.
Why are they asking for clearance?
Under Type 3 CAS, they were allowed to engage the targets as they thought fit.
I don’t want to get involved in a discussion about close air support doctrine.
He decided to clear them hot so they would get on with the business of dropping their bombs and firing their rounds.

Gyrate 73 and 74 heard their clearance to engage. They wheeled around on a final east-west approach for a gun run on the vehicles below. It was a classic A-10 deployment. The pilots had their eyes on the target vehicles, and they knew their guns were extremely accurate and wouldn’t cause collateral damage. They rolled the A-10s toward the road and lined up on their targets. Gyrate 73, followed by 74, swooped toward the target vehicles. The pilots flicked the triggers of their Gatling guns, unleashing whirling barrels that spewed out thousands of rounds. Both pilots felt a strong surge of energy as they let loose with the weapons. The power was so great that their jets shook as the guns went off, leaving a trail of gun gas blowing over their canopies. They watched as the rounds impacted the ground, tearing up everything in their path.

From his position in a ditch on the east side of the road, Reid looked up with his one good eye to see an A-10 roll in toward them. He watched as rounds from the 30 mm gun began to hit the ground about eighty-five meters to the northeast of where they were. Green sparks bounced off the ground, kicking up the dirt in a direct line toward their own tracks. Reid remembered that each track had been equipped with an orange panel to make friendly forces easier to identify from the air. The night before they left Camp Shoup, the company commanders had come by with orders from higher headquarters to take them off. They didn’t want the tracks to have any panels on them unless they were green or tan.

Reid now watched with bewilderment as the rounds started to tear into their own tracks.
It’s every man for himself.
Reid took off running to the east and didn’t look back.

At track 201, Private First Class Casey Robinson, Corporal Jake Worthington, Sergeant William Schaefer, and Lance Corporal Edward Castleberry were all trying to take cover when the A-10s came in for their strafing run. Worthington first heard the rumble of something in the sky. Seconds later, he saw red sparks leap out of the top of one of the tracks herringboned nearby and more explosions coming in a line right toward them. As he rose to climb up through the hatch, he looked up and saw the underbelly of a plane with engines near the tail. He looked over at Lance Corporal Brian Wenberg.

“What the fuck was that? I thought we had air superiority. What’s going on here?”

Seconds later, Worthington heard an ear-piercing explosion, like metal smashing on concrete, and leaped for cover. Robinson, still standing on the roof of the track, was thrown sideways. Schaefer felt a rush of air from below and was lifted out of his turret. Castleberry saw sparks bounce off the top of the track and something tear through the roof, cutting through the metal as if it were paper. The rounds tore up the ground around them.

Out in the fields, a group of marines were running toward track 201 trying to escape the mortar fire when one of them, the commander of 3rd Platoon, Second Lieutenant Mike Seely, heard a groaning noise overhead that he recognized. He had been strafed by an A-10 during Desert Storm. It was a low, loud growl he would never forget. With him was twenty-six-year-old Lance Corporal David Fribley, from the Florida town of Lee. It was the same Fribley that Lance Corporal Thomas Quirk thought was too nice to be a marine. Running alongside them was Lance Corporal Jared Martin, a twenty-nine-year-old former high school wrestler from Phoenix, Arizona. Martin saw a plane flying low toward them, moaning like some wounded beast out for revenge. He saw the ground up ahead being whipped up in dense clouds of sand. The rounds were heading straight for them. They willed themselves to get to the track. Heat and dirt kicked up all around. Seely felt something hit his side. Martin felt heat in his back. A piece of metal smacked Martin below the eye and blood streamed from his forehead. He looked down and saw his fingers hanging off.

“I’ve been hit.”

“Man down.”

Seely looked up to see Fribley lying in the dirt, almost broken in half, his flak jacket ripped from his body.

As one of the A-10s peeled off, Lieutenant Swantner, from the hatch of 201, saw a marine with blood pouring from his lower back and legs crawling toward him, trying to mouth the words “I can’t walk.” There was so much blood that he didn’t recognize the marine. Swantner had only joined the company five months earlier. He had done pretty well to learn everyone’s names on the ship over and in Camp Shoup, but he didn’t know this guy. He threw off his helmet and jumped to the ground to try and pick the marine up.

Martin and Seely dragged Fribley’s lifeless body to the rear of track 201. His helmet and the remains of his flak vest fell off. His clothes were shredded. As Martin tried to put him in the track, Castleberry felt another explosion. He looked back to see Fribley’s back just blow out, pieces of flesh and guts fall off his body, onto Martin’s face and Kevlar jacket.

On the other side of the road from track 201, Jose Torres was lying behind a mound, his leg still in agony from the RPG that had hit 211 as it was racing through Ambush Alley toward the northern bridge. With him was Captain Wittnam. They both heard the sound of a plane overhead. Wittnam had worked with A-10s during training. He recognized the sound. His first thought was
Thank God.
He was ecstatic that air support had come to help them out. Nearby, Lieutenant Tracy saw sparks fly up in the air. He, too, thought the A-10 was there to help them.
Man, that’s kind of cool. It looks
like a bunch of little sparklers on the Fourth of July.
Neither Wittnam nor Tracy looked up. But Torres did. He saw the A-10 bearing down toward him. Someone yelled out.

“Watch out.”

It was all in slow motion. The rounds were kicking up dust and heading right for him.

“Oh my God.”

At the last moment, he turned to avoid a direct hit. Torres felt a searing pain as burning metal tore through his left side.

Next to him, Wittnam was engulfed in a fountain of dirt and stones that erupted into his face. It was as if the entire world had turned black.

First Sergeant Jose Henao was on the west side of the road near the second mortar position, where they were still trying to pump out rounds to suppress the overwhelming amount of incoming fire. A marine yelled at him.

“First Sergeant. First Sergeant. We are in a shit sandwich.”

“Yes, we are.”

Everyone was yelling at him with news of someone who had been shot.

“I don’t think the sergeant is going to make it.”