Bullets Rain Through a Skylight
While 1/8’s Marines were closing with 3/1 near PL JENNA, Jent’s Kilo Company drew the morning’s house-clearing patrol north of the palace. Third Platoon pushed off first while Second Platoon stayed in the palace as the Quick Reaction Force. The morning was eerily quiet. After four days and nights of steady fighting, the empty streets were a welcome sight.
The quiet streets gave the exhausted Marines a false sense of security. The long days and nights of combat had dulled their senses and their razor-sharp edge; they were running on adrenalin. As a result, the morning’s clearing was routine—perhaps a little too routine. They entered houses and cleared rooms more casually than they would have done a day or two earlier.
The morning’s clearing was nearly complete and only one house remained on the block, a modest light yellow single-story dwelling on the corner with the typical gated courtyard and a short wall surrounding a rooftop balcony.
As Sergeant Christopher Pruitt, Third Platoon’s Guide, Corporal Ryan Weemer, and Lance Corporal Cory Carlisle approached this last house, each had a feeling the enemy was nearby, but the streets remained quiet. Pruitt led the three Marines around to the back of the house, where they found a single locked metal door. Pruitt, Weemer, and Carlisle continued around the house, whose windows were covered with metal gratings. They continued circling until they got back to the open gate at the front of the house.
Weemer took point with his 9mm pistol and the three Marines moved into the courtyard. They checked the outhouse just inside the gate and found fresh human waste on the floor; someone had used this facility recently. The three Marines stacked at the front door and Weemer entered first. A dazed insurgent was waiting just inside. All three Marines opened fire, dropping the surprised man before he could lift his weapon.
Weemer, Carlisle, and Pruitt rushed into the darkened foyer. Two full-length swinging doors led to the next room. Carlisle pushed the doors open and Pruitt rushed into the center of the house, with Weemer following. A large bearded man stood in the shadows. When he saw Pruitt he opened fire, spraying the interior room with AK fire, hitting Pruitt in the wrist and leg. Weemer emptied his 9mm into the man, and both Marines retreated back to the foyer.
Pruitt, his wrist shattered and his leg bleeding, decided to return to the street to get help. He was exiting the house when he was knocked to the ground by a tremendous blow to his back. The short wall on the roof sheltered an insurgent fighter, who had shot Pruitt from behind. Luckily, his SAPI plate saved his life. Before the sniper could shoot again, Pruitt jumped to his feet and stumbled into the street.
Lucian Read, a freelance news photographer, was talking with the Marines in the gun truck when shots, dozens of them, shattered the conversation. “What the fuck is that?” Read exclaimed before jumping from the vehicle and sprinting around the corner toward the gunfight.2
More Marines were moving to the sound of the gunfire. Brad Kasal, Weapons Company’s First Sergeant, was walking alongside one of his CAAT vehicles with Corporal Mitchell, Staff Sergeant Jon Chandler, Private First Class Alexander Nicoll, and Lance Corporal Samuel Severtsgard. When the shots rang out, all five men rushed toward the target house.
Covered in blood, Pruitt staggered out of the front gate into the street, his hand a mangled piece of meat. Kasal hustled Pruitt between two buildings. “Come over here and sit down,” Kasal gently ordered. Mitchell, who had been wounded the day before, rushed to Kasal’s side and together they tended to Pruitt, Mitchell bandaging his leg and Kasal attending to his hand.
As they worked on him, Pruitt explained the situation inside the house, including the fact that Marines wre still inside. Mitchell got on his radio and reported to Lieutenant Jesse Grapes: “We are in contact. We have wounded.”
After Pruitt exited the house, Weemer left Carlisle in the foyer and he too ran for help. Just as he reached the courtyard, Severtsgard, Corporal Jose Sanchez, and Chandler were rushing through the gate. All four Marines charged into the front room where Carlisle still guarded the swinging doors. Shell casings covered the floor along with two discarded pistol clips. A bespectacled insurgent lay dead in the corner with several gunshot wounds to the head. The five Marines stacked and prepared to assault the house again.
Severtsgard cracked the saloon door to the room in the center of the house. It was a large, open space with stairs on the left leading up two walls to a rooftop balcony. The center of the room was dominated by a large skylight. Severtsgard lobbed a grenade into the room, and Weemer and Carlisle followed the explosion into the center of the house, with Weemer going left and Carlisle going right.
Two insurgents sprayed the large room with AK fire from the skylight above. Weemer was hit in the leg, dove back into the foyer, and staggered out the front door with two rounds lodged in the bone below his right knee. Carlisle also went down but was lying against the far wall inside and bleeding badly. One or more rounds had shattered his leg, and he had a twisting fracture from his hip to his knee. Helpless, Carlisle lay screaming in pain and unable to move.
Staff Sergeant Chandler surveyed the open room from his position at the swinging doors. Three more doors opened onto the large center room: one next to the door leading outside, and two more on the opposite side of the interior room.
Chandler organized the first rescue attempt. He stacked everyone on the wall and they charged in to get Carlisle—Severtsgard and Chandler going right while Sanchez headed straight across the open room to the wounded Marine corporal.
The rescue attempt was dashed by a single grenade dropped through the skylight. The explosion peppered Severtsgard and Chandler with shrapnel, and another long burst of automatic weapon fire hit Chandler in the leg. Severtsgard dragged his platoon sergeant into one of the back rooms on the far side of the house. As the insurgents above focused on Chandler and Severtsgard, Sanchez dragged Carlisle to relative safety in a back bedroom.
Standing in the front room and unsure what was happening, Private Rene Rodriguez shouted, “Corporal Sanchez! Sanchez!”
“I got Carlisle!” Sanchez replied.3
Rodriguez and Lance Corporal Michael Vanhove braved the kill zone to rush toward the bedroom. Vanhove was driven back into the foyer by the hail of gunfire, but Rodriguez made it to Carlisle and Sanchez. Because the windows of the house were barred, they were now trapped—unable to go back, unable to get outside. Sanchez did his best to help Carlisle while Rodriguez covered the door.
By now all of Third Platoon had converged on the fight, along with their CAAT support. After talking with Weemer, Grapes ordered his men to surround the house. The Marines swarmed around it and cordoned off the area. Next, Grapes called for Second Platoon, the QRF, and then set out to find a way into the house. What he found were the grated windows and the locked metal kitchen door. There was no easy way into the bunkered structure, and there was no nearby high ground, so the insurgents on the roof were protected by the rooftop patio wall.
While Grapes was assessing the situation and searching for a weak spot in the enemy stronghold, the next wave of Marines mounted another rescue attempt. First Sergeant Kasal, Mitchell, McCowan, and Nicoll rushed into the courtyard and entered the house, Kasal and Nicoll going in first, Mitchell and McCowan following. The foyer floor was covered in blood. The men moved to the door leading to the center room, where Kasal peeked through the swinging doors to get a better understand of what was inside. After a few moments, he took a deep breath and moved into the center room to get to his wounded Marines; Nicoll was right on Kasal’s heels.
As he moved into the center room, Kasal noticed a dead insurgent lying in the doorway to a small room back in the far right corner—the big guy Weemer had killed in the first gunfight. Kasal grabbed Nicoll and shouted, “Help me clear that room!”4 The two Marines moved across the open room to the far doorway. Luckily for Kasal and Nicoll, the insurgents hidden above held their fire, waiting for more Marines to enter their kill zone.
Kasal cautiously moved toward the door, scanning as much of the small room as he could before he moved into the doorway. When Kasal and Nicoll reached the far wall, Kasal sidestepped to view more of the room and found an insurgent, close enough to shake his hand, brandishing an AK-47. The enemy combatant raised his weapon and fired. The bullets barely missed Kasal, who took a step back, pressed his muzzle into the guy’s chest, and pulled the trigger. The insurgent dropped to the floor. Kasal finished the job with two rounds to the forehead.
On his own, Mitchell had moved across the open room to the bedroom where Carlisle lay bleeding. Mitchell tried to slow the flow of blood, but when he applied a pressure bandage Carlisle screamed in pain and Mitchell could feel bones shifting. He stopped, not wanting to hurt Carlisle any more than he already was.
The enemy upstairs finally decided to open fire again. Kasal heard the gunshots and felt a sledgehammer blow to his lower leg. His legs gave way and he fell to the floor. Nicoll was also hit in the leg, but he didn’t go down. Kasal’s world turned to slow motion as rounds continued impacting around him. He clawed his way to the doorway, pushed the dead insurgent out of the way, and continued crawling into the small room. Nicoll dove toward the door as another shot rang out. He grimaced and grabbed his stomach, watching as blood flowed out between his fingers. Kasal grabbed Nicoll, rolled him over the top of his own body, and pushed him deeper into the small bathroom. As Kasal was twisting out of the line of fire, another round struck him square in the ass. The shooting stopped as quickly as it had started. Wounded Marines were now trapped in three separate downstairs rooms.
More Marines rushed into the house, but stopped short at the door to the center room. They stacked along the wall, reached around the door frame, and sprayed the ceiling of the ambush room with bullets. Outside, Sergeant Byron Norwood, part of the CAAT section attached to Grapes’ Third Platoon, wanted to use his CAAT vehicles to turn the tide by pumping 40mm grenades onto the roof with his MK-19. First, though, he needed to ensure that he would not be endangering any of his fellow Marines. Norwood raced into the building and crouched in the doorway.
“Where are our guys?”5 Norwood shouted into the room, not addressing anyone in particular. “Where are the bad guys?”
Not waiting for an answer, he moved to the doorway to see for himself.
As Norwood peered into the house, the room exploded with another hail of insurgent bullets. The rounds hit all around Norwood and kicked up debris on the floor at his feet. In the blink of an eye a single deadly round struck Norwood in the temple. The hammer blow knocked him to the ground, and he was dead before he hit the floor. “Norwood didn’t have to go into that house,” Colonel Shupp later explained. “He heard that his buddies were hurt inside, so he went in to help them.”6
The failed effort left another Marine dead and Kasal, Nicoll, Carlisle, and Chandler bleeding and still trapped in the rooms downstairs. Kasal was determined to keep Nicoll alive, and he used all of the dressings they both carried on Nicoll’s wounds. He also kept talking to keep Nicoll awake.
The Marines outside needed to get their buddies out before they bled to death, but the insurgents firmly entrenched on the roof were frustrating every effort. The Marines tossed flash-bangs into the room and tried to charge into the house again, but the unfazed insurgents sprayed the room with fire again and forced the Marines to fall back yet again. Direct assaults weren’t working; Grapes would have to do something else.
As Second Platoon rolled up with reinforcements from the palace, Kasal was getting weaker by the moment and Nicoll was drifting in and out of consciousness. Still with enough presence of mind to attempt a defense, Kasal lay there, weapon ready, in case an insurgent tried to enter the room. It was not an enemy fighter who made an appearance but a grenade, which bounced onto the floor and came to rest only three feet from Kasal and Nicoll. Kasal rolled on top of the young wounded Marine to shield him from the inevitable blast.
BOOM!
The concussion pounded the two Marines and sent more shrapnel tearing into Kasal’s already battered body.
The grenade explosion worried Mitchell, who knew his first sergeant and Nicoll—the most popular Marine in the company—were trapped in the small room. Worried about their safety, Mitchell sprinted across the center room as bullets rained down from above and another grenade exploded behind him. Somehow he managed to dive into Kasal’s bathroom.
Kasal looked up at Mitchell. “We need help,” he told him in his matter-of-fact style. “Don’t worry about me, just save Nicoll.” Both Marines were bleeding badly, but Nicoll was dying.
Mitchell turned his attention to the unconscious Marine, trying as best he could to stem the bleeding. A short time later he got on his squad radio to talk to his platoon commander. He informed Grapes that Nicoll and Kasal were in bad shape, that Carlisle had a badly mangled leg, and that other Marines were with him in the back bedroom. He also described the merciless fire from the skylight above.
Grapes decided to try to get to Mitchell, Kasal and Nicoll by smashing a hole in the concrete wall with a sledgehammer. Large chunks of concrete showered the wounded Marines inside the small room. Mitchell radioed Grapes to stop pounding.
About ths time Nicoll came to, looked up at Mitchell, and out of nowhere said, “Your rifle ain’t worth a shit.” Mitchell looked down and saw that a bullet hole in the bolt of his rifle had rendered it completely useless.
Meanwhile, Severtsgard had pried the metal kitchen door open just enough to allow him and Chandler to squeeze out to safety. While Severtsgard covered the inner door, other Marines pulled Chandler, screaming in pain, through first. Once Chandler was out, Severtsgard squeezed through, too.
Lopez ran for bolt cutters and started working on the grate over a window in an empty back bedroom. After several minutes he was able to remove the metal covering. Grapes and Private Justin Boswood stripped off most of their gear, handed their weapons to nearby Marines, and then shimmied through the tiny window. Once inside they retrieved their weapons. Grapes dropped to the floor and slid on his back through a pool of blood into the doorway, M16 pointed skyward; Boswood took a knee over his platoon commander, aiming toward the roof.
As Grapes and Boswood positioned themselves, Rodriguez and Vanhove moved to the doorway of their room. Lieutenant John Jacobs was in the foyer, and he ordered one of his SAW gunners to the swinging doors. Outside the front door, Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Dan Schaeffer set down their weapons and prepared to rush into the house.
When all were in position, Grapes gave the command and everyone opened up, unleashing a torrent of gunfire toward the balcony from three different directions. The insurgents above dove for cover, unable to return fire. Marquez and Schaeffer sprinted into the house, through the kill zone, and into the small room where three Marines lay bleeding. First they scooped up Kasal and whisked him to safety. The Marines opened fire a second time, and Marquez and Schaeffer ran back to retrieve Nicoll. One last time the Marines fired all they could into the ceiling while Marquez and Schaeffer ran back to rescue Mitchell.
Sanchez, Rodriguez, and Carlisle were still trapped in the back bedroom—but not for long. As Marquez and Schaeffer shuttled back and forth, Marines wrapped a chain around the grating over Carlisle’s window and, using a HMMWV, ripped away the entire window, metal grating and all like a Wild West prison break. Sanchez and Rodriguez carefully handed Carlisle, who was now unconscious, out the window and then climbed out themselves.
Now there were only two men left inside: Boswood and Grapes. Grapes gave a fourth, and final, command for all of the Marines to open fire and the two Marines ran for it across the killing field.
Corpsmen started working on Kasal as soon as he was in the street. He had more than forty shrapnel wounds and had been shot seven times. Kasal had also lost more than half of his blood, but he was still conscious and still clinging to his 9mm pistol. Miraculously, Nicoll was also alive, though just barely. Mitchell had been seriously wounded too, peppered with grenade fragments as he ran to rescue Kasal. In all, eleven Marines were wounded in the fight, many seriously, and Norwood had been killed.
Once all of the Marines were out of the house, Jacobs ordered it demolished. Gonzo, the company’s “mad bomber,” had learned that C-4 worked much better when used in conjunction with the homeowner’s propane tanks. Gonzalez piled his twenty-pound satchel charge next to the propane tanks in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Lucian Read and Gonzo screamed at each other to provide the illusion that all the Marines were still in the house. When the charge was ready, Gonzo ignited the satchel fuse and the two men ran for cover across the street. The explosion raised a giant cloud of dust and debris high into the air. As the dust settled, the Marines and Read saw that the building and even the outer courtyard wall had been reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.
They also spotted a single insurgent lying dead, half buried in the debris. Read limped over to get a picture, and as he was framing his shot he noticed movement in the corner of his eye: a second insurgent was pinned in the rubble, alive but buried up to his rib cage. Only eight feet apart, Read and the insurgent’s eyes locked in a deadly stare. And then Read saw the dying insurgent’s outstretched hand.
“GRENADE!”7 screamed the photographer, and all of the Marines scattered for cover.
Read and the Marines around him somehow managed to elude the grenade’s shrapnel. A dozen rifles turned on the trapped enemy fighter and as many shots rang out before the reverberation of the explosion had subsided. The final Hell House insurgent was now dead. Jesse Grapes, whose platoon had suffered so many casualties in this fight, calmly walked up and put a three-round burst into the corpse—just to make sure.
A Texas Shootout
Just a block north on HENRY, A/2–7’s First Platoon came under attack around 0900 from a mosque and a complex of houses. Twaddell dismounted his rifle squads to clear the surrounding buildings. During the clearing an insurgent jumped from cover and sprayed one of Twaddell’s Bradleys with AK-47 fire. He ran into a house on the east side of HENRY, north of HEATHER.
Staff Sergeant Carlos Santillana’s Third Squad rushed the house. Santillana’s squad members, most of them from Texas, were incredibly tight and seemed to fight with one brain. With little chatter, they all charged the two-story grey dwelling. Some of Santillana’s men rushed in and cleared the building to the left of the target house, while the rest of the squad stacked along the courtyard wall. Sergeant Akram “Abe” Abdelwahab was on point, with Specialist Wayne Howard right behind him.8 Abe was the personification of “an Army of One”: he walked and talked like a seven-foot-tall, 300-pound killer, but under his gear he was just a skinny farm boy from Spartanburg, South Carolina.
They threw two grenades over the wall and charged into the courtyard behind the explosions. Abe went straight for the house and charged through the front door into the kitchen. As he rushed in, he spotted two insurgents in the next room back in one corner, and another two under a stairway. Abe was on the far side of the doorway before the enemy could even react. When the two combatants under the stairs started shooting, Howard was in the doorway. Santillana’s squad fell back into the courtyard, but Howard and Abe were now pinned down.
Santillana’s squad moved on muscle memory, taking up positions at each window in the courtyard, where they all started firing into the house. Specialist Benny Alicea moved to another courtyard door and fired into the darkened room. Suddenly a sniper started shooting at Santillana’s soldiers from the house across the street. Specialist Jose Velez, Alicea’s good friend and the squad’s SAW gunner, spun around and sprayed 5.56 rounds into the sniper’s window.
Meanwhile, Abe and Howard were locked in a fight for their lives, picking off insurgents one by one inside the house. Alicea moved with a team around the west end of the building, looking for another entrance. There they stumbled into a dozen insurgents running into the back of the house. Alicea took five of them out with a grenade, but the others rushed inside unharmed. As fast as Abe and Howard shot them, more appeared. Abe and Howard just kept shooting, popping jihadists as they entered the house. They hit more than a dozen Muj fighters, but more kept coming.
The trapped pair started lobbing grenades into the house, and the enemy started throwing their grenades at Abe and Howard. One made it through their door. “GRENADE! Get out, get out!” Abe yelled to Howard. Howard ran out of the house, but Abe stayed behind, unwilling to cross the open doorway. Instead, he tucked in on the wall like a pill bug. The grenade injured him, but Abe’s adrenalin was running so high he did not feel his wounds. Instead, he resumed his fighting position at the edge of the doorway and continued shooting. He pitched another grenade into the house. His opponent picked it up and tossed it back.
BOOM!
The explosion broke Abe’s right leg. His adrenalin still pumping, Abe later recalls feeling no pain, although he was now seriously wounded. He returned to the fight again, and a third grenade landed only inches away.
BOOM!
Shrapnel peppered Abe’s leg a second time. Having had enough of this, Abe stumbled to the front door and collapsed, unable to go any farther. Lying on his back, he continued to fire his weapon into the house.
Howard grabbed Abe’s flak vest and dragged him outside. As he was pulling Abe to safety, the sniper appeared again in a window in the house across the street and fired. The bullet ripped through Howard’s shoulder. He realized something was wrong only when his right arm quit working and he dropped Abe. Not even realizing that he had been shot, Howard grabbed Abe’s vest with his other hand and continued dragging him away from the house.
Velez, in his brown-frame “birth-control” glasses, rushed to his two wounded friends. Determined to protect them, he stood over them in the open, rocking away with his SAW and pouring rounds into the building across the street.
Meanwhile, everyone else was trying to reorganize to re-assault the building. Santillana stacked his men at the door again, but as they did so two more grenades bounced outside.
The squad scattered, some dropping to the ground while the the rest ran.
BOOM! … BOOM!
“Who’s hit?” Santillana yelled. One soldier had been struck in the hip, and Goodwin, the youngest in the squad, had been struck in the leg. Santillana realized that he was outnumbered, so he ordered everyone out of the courtyard. To cover their retreat, he told Velez to spray the target house. With empty drums and shell casings piled up at his feet, Velez turned, reloaded, and lit up the target.
When Velez paused to reload, the window sniper put a bullet through his neck. Velez dropped like a stone and fell dead across Abe’s legs. Velez and Alicea had been planning a motorcycle road trip across the western United States once he returned home from Iraq. But now there would be no road trip. There would also be no more SAW gunfire to cover the squad, so Alicea rushed to take Velez’ place. He turned his fire on the sniper, lobbing M203 grenades at the house. The determined sniper kept firing, hitting Abe two more times before Alicea managed to get a grenade through the window, finally silencing his friend’s killer. Just as Alicea was running out of ammunition, two Bradleys rolled down the street. Alicea directed the gunners to fire into both houses. The remaining insurgents had no stomach for fighting against Bushmaster cannons, and the enemy fire subsided.
Abe and Velez were loaded into the track and rushed to the aid station. Santillana was shattered. He was unharmed, but nearly everyone else in his squad—his family, his band of Texas brothers—had been wounded. Velez—the quiet, determined soldier—was gone.
Santillana wished that it had been him.