Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War (9 page)

8

Corporal Neville Welch was in the hatch of AAV B203, the third track from the front of the column of Bravo Company vehicles. He was scanning the fields and houses on either side of him when he heard his platoon commander say that they were moving out. Now that the tanks had gone to the rear to refuel, Bravo was at the very front of the battalion, with Alpha and Charlie following in trace.

Like many of the other marines, he had heard that Army units were in trouble up ahead and that tanks had gone to help, but that didn’t strike him as odd. He didn’t know that there should have been no units in front of them. He was an ordinary grunt, at the bottom of the chain of command. It was not surprising that some information just never got to Corporal Neville Welch, or that when it got there, like an elaborate game of Chinese whispers, it sometimes wasn’t exactly the same as what was sent out.
Maybe the Army is there to escort us into the city.
He trusted the higher-ups to know what was going on with the big picture. Most grunts drank up the slightest piece of news because they got so little information. Not Welch. He tried to ignore the rumors. He just kept his focus on his job.

At that moment, his job was to watch out for hostile targets. There had been some firing up ahead, and he was told to look out for any suspicious activity. The sun, no more than a dull glow of light, was peeping through a mixture of clouds and thick dust that seemed to clog the air. To the east, set back a hundred meters from the road, were some tumbling mud brick buildings. They looked as though they were abandoned, but flying from the roof was a black flag. It looked threatening, but he’d been told that it was no more than a sign that Shia Muslims lived there. Helos flew overhead, scaring the goats and dogs standing by the side of the road. A loud thud rocked the horizon and black smoke billowed out from a target ahead. A whoop of joy went up among the marines around him.

Corporal Welch did not join in. For him, this was a serious business. He’d enlisted in the Marine Corps days after September 11, 2001, outraged by the terrorist attack on innocent people. He’d felt victimized and vulnerable and saw it as a call to war. He felt the attack had penetrated the soul of America. It was his generation’s Pearl Harbor. He didn’t want to sit on the sidelines. He had decided then and there that he was going to give something back to the country that had put him on the path of selfactualization.

He’d been born in Guyana into a traditional and poor family. He’d gone to school and technical college there, but at the age of twenty-one he realized that Guyana was no place for an ambitious young man desperate for education. He was given federal grants to study at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York, where he improved his reading and writing. Then he got a place at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he studied health systems management and immersed himself in African American literature. Every day he’d spend hours at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center reading an eclectic mix of writing: August Wilson, Paulo Freire, Kenneth Clark, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, even Sir Walter Raleigh. He wanted to understand the consciousness of black America. The more he read, the more he felt that African American activists were missing something, that their focus was too narrow and local. He realized that even the civil rights movement was a parochial struggle. What he wanted was for African Americans to think bigger, in a more universal way, to understand that what was happening in America was just a small part of a larger struggle being played out in the Caribbean and Africa. That’s how he met his wife, Bashen, an African American from Birmingham, Alabama.

Welch was tall and educated, and had a severity about him that could be intimidating. He spoke with a lilting Caribbean British accent. Straight out of college, Welch had set up a janitorial business that had been quite successful. Then September 11 happened, and Welch closed the business down. It was no surprise that when he walked into the Marine Corps recruiting station on Flatbush Avenue in New York, the recruiter was taken aback. He tried to persuade him to work in the public affairs office or pick some other specialty in which he could use his bachelor’s degree. But Welch had seen the videos. He wanted to be in harm’s way, out in front. He wanted to be an infantryman, a grunt. He signed on right away for four years. Bashen was upset. Her father had done several tours of duty in Vietnam and had come back a changed and wrecked man. She didn’t see him anymore because he drank too much. Neville Welch did what he could to comfort her, but he had made up his mind. Within days he was on his way to Boot Camp.

“Dismount. Dismount.”

The rear ramp of Welch’s AAV dropped and marines poured out into the road and started setting up a security perimeter around his track. In front of him he saw the span of a bridge. To one side there were burning vehicles, to the other a smelly landfill site. The tarmac was slick with fuel and covered in shards of glass from broken windshields, spent ammo, blackened pieces of metal. Within seconds he was covered by huge black flies. He couldn’t quite work out where he was or what they were supposed to be doing, but clearly something had happened here. He didn’t realize it, but he was at the same trash dump where the tanks had rescued the soldiers from the 507th half an hour earlier. Whatever opposition there had been was now mostly gone. It looked as though the tanks had dealt with it.

He got his men to take cover, positioning them so their sectors of fire did not overlap. As a fire-team leader within Bravo’s 1st Platoon, he was in charge of the Marine Corps’s smallest combat unit. He had three other marines in his team. One carried an M249 automatic weapon, and the two others were armed with M16 rifles. He carried an M203—an M16 rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher attached under the barrel. His training at the School of Infantry at Camp Geiger in North Carolina had taught him that the fire team was always at the hard edge of any combat. As a fire-team leader he was responsible for keeping his guys together and working as a unit. He kept them low, their weapons scanning the fields for targets, each taking a sector of responsibility. They kept ammo discipline, not firing unless they had a target. Other marines from his company were out in the fields clearing buildings. Suddenly squad leaders started calling their fire teams back.

“Bravo 1st Platoon, back to the tracks.”

Welch jumped back into the track and they were off. He was thrown first backward, then forward. It was all stop and start. One minute they would get the order to go, then they would have to pause. The AAV treads churned up the mud on the edge of the road. It looked as though it had rained here a few nights before. A lone cow chewed on the sparse vegetation, oblivious to the chaos around. Iraqis watched passively as they moved by. Welch could hear constant chatter on the radio. It didn’t make much sense to him, but it sounded calm and purposeful.

“Tanks are refueling.”

“This is Timberwolf. Sitrep, over.”

“Small-arms fire from port and starboard. Nothing we can’t handle. Over.”

To his right, he could make out a road sign, half of it written in English: WELCOME TO NASIRIYAH. It put Neville Welch on edge.
Why was it written
in English?
He thought it was a deliberate and cynical message to the Americans rolling toward the town. It wasn’t a message of welcome. It was a message of death.
This is your burial spot.

As if on cue, the patter of small-arms fire pinged off the side of Welch’s track. It was coming from some huge oil tanks to the northeast, just over the span of the bridge.

“Keep pushing. Keep pushing.”

Marines around him were now yelling at each other.

“See that green mosque thing with the onion-shaped dome? There are troops inside with small arms.”

“Port side, port side. No, to the right. They’re dressed as civilians. They’ve got a white flag but they’ve got AKs and they’re not surrendering.”

Welch saw the mosque a hundred meters from the road. To the side of the mosque was a small dirt berm. He saw an Iraqi stand up, put an RPG to his shoulder. Welch fired two rounds. The man didn’t go down. The RPG shot out of its launcher. Several other marines from another track let out a burst of gunfire. The figure collapsed in the dirt. The RPG and its trail of white smoke spun wildly off into the distance. To the right of the mosque, a crowd of women and children seemed to be waving at them. Welch wasn’t quite sure whether to wave back. And then the crowd parted and some men, dressed in black robes, stepped out between the women and let out a burst of AK fire. Welch and the other marines on his track shot back. He wasn’t shocked. He was in an Arab country and knew that women and children were prepared to commit acts of suicide.
This
isn’t an environment of love. I’m not going to assume that people here love
me. Am I going to get back home or am I going to let them send me back
home?
He didn’t have time to contemplate whether they had good intentions. The rules of engagement were clear and had been drummed into Welch during training. They shouldn’t fire indiscriminately. That would exact a heavy toll on the civilian population. But for Welch, the reality was more complicated.
If they are out in the street, they mean to do me harm.
If they mean to do me harm, they are a target.
All his focus went on protecting himself, his marines, and their vehicles. He let out another burst of gunfire.

It was how he’d been trained at Boot Camp. For twelve weeks at Parris Island, South Carolina, he’d been shouted at, manipulated, indoctrinated. He didn’t mind. He understood that the Marine Corps was preparing him to react to fire, to carry out a mission without question, to develop teamwork, to confront imminent death, to sacrifice himself for fellow marines.
You don’t escape Parris Island without experiencing sacrifice.
Some recruits found it difficult to cope. Welch didn’t.
If you have the eyes to see
why you are doing these things, you understand.
He welcomed the uniformity, the incessant drills, the movement as one mass. He’d seen the smoke pit, a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot sandbox, where those marines who couldn’t conform were made to exercise at a rate that made their hearts want to drop out. Push-ups, jumps, squats—sometimes all day and all night. He understood that the drill instructors had to transform belligerent young men who had grown up answering back to figures of authority into marines who would accept orders without question. Welch understood, and he complied.

A couple of kilometers behind Corporal Welch, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski received a call on the radio from Captain Tim Newland, the Bravo Company Commander.

“This is Mustang 6. Sir, we are on the Euphrates Bridge.”

Grabowski knew he couldn’t be there yet. He could see from the icon on his Blue Force Tracker that Bravo Company had only just arrived at the railway bridge. They were still a couple of kilometers south of the Euphrates.

“Mustang 6, this is Timberwolf. Check your map again.”

Newland’s Blue Force Tracker had broken down. The Blue Force Tracker worked perfectly in the Humvees, but for some reason it didn’t work very effectively with the power output in the tracks. Newland was relying on DCT, a satellite tracking system that related position directly to a map grid. And the maps he had didn’t show up very clearly that there was a railroad bridge south of the Euphrates Bridge.

“Timberwolf, this is Mustang 6. Sir, you’re right, we’re continuing to push.”

Captain Newland, in the track just behind Corporal Welch, ordered Bravo across the railway bridge. Suddenly a cry went up.

“We’ve got tanks. We’ve got tanks.”

The CAAT vehicles that had been flanking Bravo Company on its approach to the bridge pushed forward. As they reached the highest point of the span, the CAAT marines saw two enemy T-55 tanks dug in on either side. The air erupted in a hail of machine-gun fire. Working their .50-caliber machine guns from their Humvees, the marines sent rounds tearing into the dug-in positions, scattering Iraqi fighters in all directions. Some collapsed in the dirt, others took cover behind trenches. Sergeant Edward Palaciaes spotted more dug-in tanks on both sides of the bridge. Their turrets weren’t moving and they were probably so antiquated that they were unmanned, nothing more than machine-gun bunkers. But in Palaciaes’s eyes they were Iraqi tanks, and he wanted to kill them. As the machine gunners showered the area with suppressing fire, Sergeant Palaciaes and Corporal Josh McCall fired off TOW missile after TOW missile, keeping the crosshairs on the tanks and watching them explode into huge fireballs. Palaciaes was in heaven. The Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire command-link guided antitank missile was an expensive piece of equipment. Palaciaes didn’t get to fire too many of them in training.
This
is one helluva exciting thing.

Iraqi fighters were running around in the fields by the bridge, firing at them from both the east and west sides. A fog of thick acrid smoke from the U.S. Army vehicles, which were still in flames, swept across the area, obscuring the marines’ vision.

Palaciaes scanned the horizon for more tanks. The turret of a dug-in T-55, hidden by mounds of earth, turned toward him. The small two-lane bridge was too crowded with CAAT vehicles. His driver maneuvered his vehicle away from the three other Humvees on the bridge. The backblast on a TOW can stretch up to a hundred meters and could easily kill a man. Looking behind him to make sure he was clear, he took a shot. It hit the turret of the T-55, sending a ball of dirt and twisted metal into the air.

The sound of loud cheering and laughing came over the radio.

“Five T-55s engaged and killed.”

Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski, a couple of hundred meters south of the railway bridge, could see the CAAT teams on the span of the bridge ahead of him firing their TOW missiles. He was shocked that they had come into contact with tanks so early on.
They’ve got tanks. There’s more to this mission than we’ve been aware of. This is supposed to be a walk in the park.
This is not how it is supposed to be.
His own tanks were still back being refueled. He knew that he was now on a timeline and he had to get the battalion moving. But he didn’t want to go any farther into the city without the M1A1 Abrams. He got hold of Major Sosa.