Joker One (39 page)

T
o our surprise, the Turnover of Authority went two days earlier than announced, on June 28 instead of June 30. Ambassador Bremer, former head of the now-defunct CPA, flew home, anticlimactically, the very next day. We, however, stayed and dealt with the aftermath of the CPA’s regime: a splintered and ineffectual Shia-dominated central government that couldn’t provide even the most basic services—water, electricity, a functioning police force—for its citizens in the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar.

As a result, the much-anticipated turnover brought us nothing but more of the same: more OP missions at the oft-attacked Ag Center, more twenty-four-hour postings at the extremely vulnerable Government Center, and more frustration and disappointment with the complete failure of Ramadi’s Iraqi security forces. Even worse, the attacks on us increased sharply after we turned over security responsibilities to the Iraqi police and army. The enemy activity grew in ferocity and frequency throughout July, and by the end of the month, Golf Company found itself fighting large-scale, citywide battles at least once a week.

The first of these fights occurred on Wednesday, July 14. A group of insurgents
attacked Weapons Company just west of the Saddam mosque, and, after about ten minutes of exchanging rifle and rocket fire, it became apparent that the enemy’s numbers were sufficiently large to warrant reinforcements. Our platoon, along with third and fourth, launched out of the Combat Outpost on foot, with two Humvees mounting medium machine guns in support. After fighting our way west through the city for an hour or so, Joker One received orders to hit a building “just north of the Saddam mosque minaret, at the very middle of the city.”

Immediately, the Ox’s voice crackled over the radio. “Roger, Bastard Five, will do. Be advised, what’s a minaret? Over.”

A long silence followed, then the radio barked back: “Joker Five, the minaret is the large tower that every single mosque in the city has next to it. Looks like a big dick. Over.”

Even in the middle of a firefight, the sheer magnitude of the Ox’s lack of knowledge brought me up short for a bit, but the moment didn’t last for long. Less than five minutes after receiving the order, we stormed across an open field, weapons at the ready, and hit the designated building. Weapons Company had received heavy fire from its top floors, so we expected to have to fight our way up to the roof. However, on entering we encountered no resistance—the building was eerily quiet. Soon we found out why: Every one of Weapons’s ambushers had been wounded during the company’s fierce counterattack. When we made our way carefully to the building’s second floor, we found four bearded men, surrounded by spent bullet casings and bleeding from their chests, stomachs, and legs. They were shrieking and groaning and rolling slowly over the floor. Smith and Camacho immediately got to work.

The wounded weren’t all that we discovered inside the building. Shortly after the docs had stabilized the enemy fighters, Noriel motioned me over to a door that was barely hanging off its hinges. As my squad leader ushered me inside, I found a large room lined with storage lockers and brown crates. Noriel’s men had smashed open the crates, and each of them contained dozens of RPGs. Ten or so AK-47s littered the room, stacked up against the wall or scattered on the floor. Propped up in the corners were several RPG launchers, and assorted ammunition crates, knives, swords, machetes, and machine gun bandoliers rounded out the room. Even for Iraq, it was an impressive display of hardware.

A few minutes later, Carson and Noriel began kicking at closed storage lockers. Very few things that the Iraqis had constructed could resist Carson, so after about the fourth blow, the doors buckled inward to reveal their contents. More RPG rockets. Dragunov sniper rifles. Crates of mines and hand grenades. Mortar rounds. In our five months in-country, Joker One had yet to find a weapons cache of this magnitude. For the next ten minutes, Noriel and I moved from room to room on the second floor, discovering more of the same in each. Once our survey was complete, I headed back down to the first floor, out into the compound courtyard to report our findings. On the way out of the building, the white sign we had noticed coming in caught my eye. The English letters
ANC
stood out from the Arabic lettering all around, and I finally realized why they seemed familiar. The ANC was a legitimate political party, one that was supposedly cooperating with our battalion’s efforts to build a peaceful political process in Ramadi. I shook my head in disgust.

We radioed our find in to an incredulous battalion headquarters, and after three recitations of our cache’s contents, they finally believed me. Five minutes later, Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy showed up with a TV news crew in tow. Kennedy took a quick survey through the upper rooms and then ordered us to move the cache from the building’s second floor to its courtyard. Properly arranged, the weapons would make a nice picture for the cameras.

So, as the fighting all around us began to peter off, we slung our weapons across our backs and started passing the rockets, mortars, swords, and other assorted instruments of death down to the first floor. In the courtyard, Bowen and I supervised the arrangement of the weapons under the battalion CO’s watchful eye. I felt like a perverse florist. Halfway through this process, the ANC party leader showed up at the compound, brandishing an English-language letter from an Army colonel who, he claimed, had allowed him to keep these weapons for “defense.” On the CO’s orders, we arrested the party leader, zip-tied his hands behind his back, and placed him in the back of a truck. Then we continued the unloading.

Twenty minutes later, we had brought down all the weapons and were preparing for the photo shoot when the battalion CO stopped us. He wanted the ANC sign placed in the middle of our layout, so we pulled it off the wall and propped it up behind the water-cooled machine gun. It was a
bizarre sight—”Iraqi National Unity Party” was written in English and Arabic below the letters
ANC,
but surrounding the sign were all the implements of national discord. Staring at the weapons and the sign among them, I lost most of my hope that local city leaders would be able to use the political process to build a more stable, more peaceful Ramadi anytime in the near future. If they were anything like the so-called “National Unity Party,” these politicians probably didn’t want to. Across the city, there were almost certainly political-party arms caches such as this one, all of them just waiting for the day when the U.S. forces would leave and the real political process—a winner-take-all fight to the finish—would begin. Given the short occupation time frame predicted by our civilian leadership before the war, I didn’t know whether the U.S. military would be allowed to remain in Iraq long enough to convince the people that political reconciliation was the best, and only, way to resolve their differences. That sort of change has historically taken roughly a decade, but we were furiously engaged in it nonetheless. Apparently, the citizens of Ramadi didn’t know whether we’d stay long enough, and they were definitely hedging their bets.

I’m told that our little weapons arrangement made the evening news back home. Even if we had had access to network TV at that point, I wouldn’t have watched it. I hated being reminded that the world outside Ramadi still existed.

E
xactly one week later, Ramadi exploded into violence yet again. It took us a bit by surprise—after the citywide fighting of the week before, we didn’t expect our enemies to recover for quite some time. Additionally, the day had started out fairly quietly, with Bowen and his men spending six uneventful hours at the Ag Center, and Noriel’s squad spending eight at another OP to our east. However, on the patrol back to base, first squad had been caught in the middle of a mortar attack, forcing them to take cover in a few abandoned buildings nearby. By the time the explosions ceased and the COC allowed the men back into the base, my first squad had spent close to ten hours baking in the 130-degree heat. So, when second squad and I relieved Bowen at the Ag Center around noon, nearly two-thirds of my platoon were exhausted and thoroughly dehydrated.

Still, for the next hour or so the city remained completely quiet, and I had just started to relax when a massive explosion and small-arms fire rang out to our west. A few minutes later, the COC squawked over the radio that Weapons had been hit by an IED and a follow-on rocket attack. Third platoon was about to launch in support, and we needed to be ready to cover their movement.

Less than two minutes later, Leza’s entire second squad was on top of the Ag Center. From the middle of the roof, I surveyed their arrangement. Niles had a 240 Golf, our medium machine gun, propped up in the very northwestern corner, ready to hose down Michigan and the buildings to our north. His partner, Lance Corporal Ott, stood just three feet away, busily laying out long strings of linked machine gun ammo. When Niles ran out of ammo for the 240, Ott would slap one of these belts on the gun to get it up and running again. Across the roof were Carson and Pelton’s fire team, covering the large open area to our south, and hovering over everything was Sergeant Leza. He moved from position to position, making small changes here, speaking words of encouragement there, preparing his Marines for the inevitable fight to come.

Just as we had finished settling in, third platoon rumbled by, driving down the wrong side of the road as fast as the street allowed. Ten seconds after their last vehicle passed us, all hell broke loose. A massive explosion, closer now, rocked the Ag Center, and streams of tracers lanced out of the buildings west and north of us as the enemy triggered another ambush. The double booms of RPGs started ringing out, and several of them slammed into the front of the first vehicle of third platoon’s convoy, completely disabling it and stopping the Humvees behind it dead in their tracks. Trapped in the middle of the kill zone, Hes screamed orders to his men as he took cover behind the open door of his Humvee.

Under withering enemy fire, the Marines of third platoon jumped out of their vehicles, pointed themselves south, and ran straight into the teeth of the enemy’s ambush. Behind them, the gunners in the backs and tops of the Humvees remained in their positions, motionless and completely exposed to the enemy but pouring out fire so that the assaulting infantry would have cover. The quick thinking worked—the insurgents hadn’t fully set in their ambush position by the time third platoon rolled by, and most of the running Marines were able to slam through the gates of nearby housing compounds without taking major casualties. Those manning the guns behind them spotted a small civilian car unloading RPGs and RPG gunners. The Marines laced it with their guns, and the car caught fire. For the next twenty minutes, explosions rang out as the dozens of RPGs inside cooked off from the heat.

Up on the roof of the Ag Center, we were under heavy fire as well. Insurgents
popped out of the buildings to our north and south and started pumping round after round of automatic weapons fire at us, and the bullets snapped and cracked all around as they passed. We took cover as best we could below the parapet. Two huge antitank missiles, launched from an alleyway just to our south, ripped through the floor below us, tearing huge chunks out of the wall, shaking the building like a tree in a violent wind. Every Marine in second squad started firing back at the tracers that lashed our position. To our south, Carson alternately shouted orders and popped off rounds from his grenade launcher. Across the roof, Niles screamed and fired the machine gun like a man possessed. Next to him, Ott lifted ammo belt after ammo belt and slapped them down on the gun when it ran dry. Together, the two of them were a sight to behold. A skinny but fearless Niles dashed from position to position on the roof, slamming the machine gun down on the wall wherever he could find the best firing position to engage newly emerging threats. Ott shadowed his every movement, carrying yards and yards of belted machine gun rounds across his shoulders and two cans of additional ammo in each hand. If I hadn’t know better, I would’ve thought the two were a trained machine gun team, and for a brief second, I marveled as I watched them work.

My quick reverie was interrupted by Leza, who, nearly tackling me as he ran across the fire-swept roof, announced in breathless tones that one of our men had just shot an Iraqi policeman. I was stunned, but Leza continued. The policeman had apparently driven his patrol car nearly all the way up to the Ag Center, and our men had refrained from shooting—after all, the police were supposedly our friends. When the driver jumped out of his car, however, he had a beefed-up AK-47 in his hand, and he immediately proceeded to let loose at us on the roof. After about twenty seconds of stunned observation, Lance Corporal Pepitone shot the man dead. Shaking my head, I told Leza to tell Pepitone good job. Very little surprised me anymore. Then I grabbed the radio and asked the COC to send out the rest of my platoon. We were going to need them in this fight against all comers.

B
ack at the Outpost, the recovered Staff Sergeant began furiously rounding up the rest of Joker One. Upon hearing the call for reinforcements, he bounded into the platoon’s house and screamed at the Marines to put
their gear on and head out. Midway through the rant, Noriel reminded him that first and third squads had just recently returned from the action and that they were still filling up their water bottles. He also pointed out that no one had eaten yet that day, because, without me knowing, Staff Sergeant had forbidden Joker One from taking any food to our OPs—the Gunny was concerned about the trash buildup, and Staff Sergeant was apparently taking no chances.