As Cunningham was preparing to push the rest of his company across the open, four-lane, divided road at 1500, a Marine approached First Sergeant Fry. Fry’s track was still smoking in the street from the earlier RPG hit. “First Sergeant, we got you a new track.”

“Fuck you,” he snapped, “I’m walking.”⁵

Fry might have preferred to hoof it, but Cunningham was concerned about taking his company across that large open, and dangerous area in broad daylight. It had been easy to fight from behind walls, but now the Marines would be completely exposed as they attacked across MICHIGAN. Their only protection would be the amount of fire they could lay down. Cunningham ordered Meyers to move his tanks back out onto MICHIGAN, and he ordered his entire CAAT Platoon to lay down a barrage of rockets and machine gun fire. Weapons Platoon created enough chaos that Cunningham’s Marines were able to charge on foot across MICHIGAN without taking a single casualty. Once on the far side of the wide thoroughfare, the Marines swarmed into the alleys around the Candy Store, where Ackerman’s platoon was still trapped.

Because the enemy still covered the only door in or out of the former butcher shop, Cunningham had his engineers blow a hole in the back of the building. First Platoon’s Marines charged through the shattered wall to join the rest of the company. Together, they all pushed south, with Meyers’ and Lee’s tanks in the lead.

Lee, Ducasse, Meyers, and Markley led Cunningham’s Marines down several small alleyways. Lee pulled into one of the narrow alleys just west of the Candy Store, and before Sergeant Ducasse could pull in behind him, an AMTRAC, minus 1stSgt Fry, followed Lee’s tank between the buildings. One of Alpha Company’s squad leaders, Sergeant William Leo, and Staff Sergeant Ricardo Sebastian, followed Lee into the alley. Lee made a small S-turn about fifty meters from MICHIGAN.

The enemy opened fire from the side streets and every window in sight. They had set up a complex ambush and had been waiting for the Marines to approach. Lee’s tank acted like a bullet magnet: every insurgent in every window zeroed in on it. Luckily, the RPG rounds bounced off the M1 and the enemy’s small-arms fire harmlessly pinged off its thick skin. Sebastian took cover at the corner of a nearby building, while Leo ducked behind Lee’s tank.

Leo picked up the “grunt phone”⁶ and yelled into it, “Destroy everything from 9 o’clock to 3 o’clock.”

Cunningham’s infantry were pinned down in the small alleys. They were fighting in such close quarters that Lee barely had room to traverse his turret. He needed Ducasse, his wingman, to protect his flanks, but Ducasse could not get in behind his boss because the AMTRAC blocked his path. Around the corner behind Lee, Captain Cunningham was on the ground trying to get the track to back up in the narrow alley while Lee fired as fast as he could. Corporal Rios slewed his turret as far as he could to the left, found a target, and let loose with his main gun. While his loader, Lance Corporal Matthew Sevald, slammed another round into the main gun, Rios rotated the turret slowly to the right, spraying coax gunfire. Lee continued to fire his .50- caliber machine gun.

As soon as Sevald finished reloading, he yelled “Ready!” Rios stopped the turret and aimed the main gun.

BOOM!

Another 120mm shell slammed into the nearby buildings. Rios resumed slewing and spraying 7.62 bullets while Sevald reloaded again. By now, Leo had returned to the corner of the building with Sebastian. He took a knee and fired at the muzzle flashes ahead. Sebastian stood above Leo and also fired. An insurgent jumped out into “Haji Alley” and fired an RPG at Lee’s tank; Sebastian answered with a SMAW.⁷ Leo and Sebastian continued firing until they were nearly out of ammunition, knowing they were providing Lee’s only security.

When a bullet snapped past Sebastian’s head, he pulled back around the corner for a second. “That would have really hurt,” he thought. Had the bullet found its target, it would have done more than just hurt.⁸

Nearly out of ammo, Sebastian sprinted north, leaving Leo at the corner of the building. He ran up to Captain Cunningham and Lieutenant Barnes and grabbed all of their magazines, stuffed them in his pockets, and ran back to rejoin Leo.

Lee’s tankers continued fighting for about an hour, slewing, shooting, and reloading, firing thirty main-gun rounds, 8,000 7.62 shells, and 4,000 .50-caliber rounds. By this time, Lee was also running low on ammunition. Fortunately, he had stored extra boxes of ammo on top of his tank; all he had to do was reach out of his hatch and grab the boxes. When he popped his head out of the turret, he immediately spotted a sniper in a building just to his right—and the sniper was aiming directly at him! Before Lee could act the insurgent pulled his trigger and a burning sensation ripped through his biceps. To Lee, it felt as if his arm were on fire or melting off. Refusing to button up without what he needed, he remained exposed, grabbed the ammo, and dragged it down into the turret.

As Rios focused on Lee’s wound, Sevald took the ammo and started reloading, and also worked to replace his machine gun’s hot, carbon-fouled barrel. Rios rummaged inside the turret for anything he could find to stop the bleeding. He ended up grabbing a roll of duct tape and wrapping it tightly around Lee’s wound while the injured commander got on the radio to speak to his wingman.

“I need you in front of me—NOW!” Lee ordered. “I don’t care how you do it, but you better be in front of me in thirty seconds, or you’re fired.”⁹

Ducasse got the message. His driver gunned his engine, smashed through a wall, plowed the giant tank between two buildings, knocked the corner off a house, thundered through another wall and, with guns blazing, exploded into the alley. He was in front of Lee’s tank in less than ten seconds.

With double the firepower, both tanks sprayed the enemy positions with main gun and machine gun rounds. As Lee and Ducasse slowly pushed twenty feet forward, Cunningham’s Marines rushed into the first building. Once that was cleared, Barnes’ Marines jumped to the next rooftop, and Lee and Ducasse pushed forward another twenty feet, with Leo and Sebastian following on the ground.

First Sergeant Fry joined his Marines in the ground attack. A young corporal looked up. “First Sergeant, what are you doing here?”

“I’m shooting motherfuckers like you,” Fry gruffly replied. “Shut up and keep shooting.”¹⁰

As the battle raged, Gunny Ramirez filled his AMTRAC with eleven casualties and raced back to Dr. Jadick’s mini-BAS at the Government Center. He delivered his load of wounded Marines, loaded up with water and ammunition, and returned to the fight.

In the BAS HM1, Brian Zimmerman kept everyone calm in an exceedingly tense atmosphere. He was a funny guy. Jadick would scream at his men, and Zimmerman would come around and pick them up with his kind words and lighthearted attitude. Zimmerman really made the mini-BAS work.

Just west of Lee and Ducasse, Markley’s alley was full of hundreds of low-hanging wires. As he pushed slowly forward, his gun barrel snagged the wires, dragging them down to the base of his turret. Before long, Markley had snagged so many that his tank started pulling up telephone poles and dragging them through the street. The wires jammed between his hull and turret like fishing line in a tangled reel. It would take the tank leader, Frank Herbert, and his maintenance Marines all night to pull the turret and remove the fouled wires.

Farther east, Captain Juarez had ordered his First Platoon Commander, Lieutenant Paul Webber, to move west and link up with Omohundro. Webber moved out with his platoon of LAV-25s¹¹ to link up with 1/8, rolling west on MICHIGAN in his three vehicles. When they reached the intersection with ETHAN, his Marines came under sporadic fire from the south. Webber stopped to return fire, dismounted his scouts, and reported the contact. The enemy was firing from buildings hundreds of meters south of MICHIGAN. Webber felt good about his position; it would be nearly impossible for an enemy RPG to hit his vehicle from such a long distance, yet his 25mm gunner could direct accurate fire more than a kilometer downrange.¹²

Webber held his LAV in position on MICHIGAN, firing at the enemy while Sergeant Rhyne Spencer and the scouts fanned out to provide security for Webber’s vehicle. They continued to cut down insurgents, but the enemy kept advancing. Gun toting, black-clad muj and RPG teams dodged between buildings for more than an hour, getting closer to Webber’s vehicle with every bound. Omohundro’s Marines were attacking south, just to Webber’s west, and the enemy fighters were squirting over onto ETHAN in an effort to get behind the Bravo Company Marines. As the enemy moved north through the buildings along ETHAN, Webber’s fight started to escalate.