With Fallujah cleared of nearly all enemy fighters, the Marines turned to cleaning up the war-torn city. They focused on gathering up enemy bodies, clearing debris from the streets, and removing all of the weapons and explosives from hundreds of caches. The streets were filled with the refuse of war: burned-out cars, dangling wires, and debris of all shapes and sizes. Feral dogs roamed the streets, and cats that once had slep on children’s laps now dined on the bloated bodies of former fanatic fighters.

The Hydra Mosque and the nearby Cultural Center contained the “Home Depot” of caches. Inside both were rooms stacked to the ceiling with mortar rounds, rockets, and artillery shells. Janabi’s Mosque was also loaded with weapons. Colonel Shupp ordered the ordnance removed and blown up in the street. Afterward, the Marines placed photographs of the weapons in the mosque, accompanied by the statement: “Look what was done in your Mosque by the enemies of Iraq. Americans do not destroy Mosques.”¹ The Marines finished clearing most of the caches by the 18th of December.

Task Force Bruno spent days clearing caches and fighting the last insurgent holdouts. Late in the afternoon of December 22 while clearing Sector 19 in the northeast section of Fallujah, Major Desgrosseilliers’ Marines got into another fight and killed a couple more insurgents. When they ran out of daylight, Desgrosseilliers suspended his operation and planned to return the next day to finish up.

The Last Diehards

Desgrosseilliers had an established rotation, alternating his Marines so that they patrolled one day and rested the next. On December 23, Task Force Bruno returned to Sector 19, the same neighborhood they had been working the day before. Sergeant Jarrett Kraft, Corporals Jeremiah Workman and Raleigh Smith, and Lance Corporals Eric Hillenburg and James Phillips were in the city with other Marines and their platoon commander, 1st Lieutenant Al Butler, Jr. Workman cleared one side of the street while his friend Kraft worked the other.

The block they approached was infested with nearly thirty insurgents, and Butler’s men came under heavy automatic weapons fire, followed by a flurry of grenades. As usual, the enemy had waited until the Marines were inside their stronghold before opening fire. They had learned the hard way that it was foolhardy to fight the Marines from afar. Their only real protection was to trap some within their own building, because the enemy knew more Marines would swarm into the structure to help their fallen brothers. They knew that death was certain eventually, but hoped they could kill more Americans on their way out of this world.

Smith, Phillips, and two more of Kraft’s men climbed a staircase onto a landing, not knowing that eight insurgents were barricaded in the upstairs rooms. They were moving to check the first bedroom when an enemy fighter jumped out of a wardrobe and tossed a grenade onto the landing. The shrapnel killed Smith and seriously wounded two more Marines. Miraculously, Phillips emerged unscathed. Leaving Smith’s body in the doorway, the Marines retreated, bleeding, stumbling, staggering, and diving out onto a second-floor balcony.

Lieutenant Butler was standing in the street below when heard the fight break out. He moved into a nearby house with more Marines and raced to the roof. From that position he couldn’t see the target house, but he could see where he needed to be: on the roof of a larger house next to the target house. From there, he would be able to look down into the insurgent-filled building. Butler left a couple of Marines on the first roof and took the rest to the building and raced up two flights of stairs.²

Workman was across the street when he heard the distinctive rattle of AK-47s and the burp of a SAW when the encounter began. He rushed from the house he was searching, crossed the street through a hail of grenades and gunfire, and raced into the fight.³

As Workman entered the house, he saw Kraft and Sergeant Samuel Guardiola on the stairs yelling at someone on the second floor. Enemy fire drilled the walls on the stairwell, turning concrete to a fine, misty powder. Reluctantly, Guardiola and Kraft retreated downstairs.

“Some of our guys are trapped up there!” Kraft shouted at Workman. He was referring to Smith (who was already dead), Phillips, and two other Marines.

Not knowing whether the men were wounded, dead, or unhurt, Workman, Kraft, and Guardiola pulled together a team to charge back into the house to rescue them. But no one wanted to take point. Workman watched for a few nervous seconds before blurting out, “Screw it! I’ll go first!” He rushed back into the house, with eight or nine other Marines right behind him.

When Workman stopped at the foot of the staircase. One of the Marines behind him tossed a grenade onto the second floor. The Marines watched in surprise as it rolled back down the stairs, scattering for cover to avoid the coming blast.

BOOM!

The blast tore into the walls but no Marine was injured. Workman and the others regrouped at the base of the stairs. The Marine second in line encouraged Workman with a shove, indicating, “Go on, we’re right behind you!”

Enemy bullets whizzed and snapped past Workman’s head and pocked the wall behind him as he rushed up the first set of stairs. Halfway up at the landing the stairs turned ninety degrees and provided some cover. Workman paused there and looked back. No one had followed him up the stairs. Alone, he inched partway up the second flight to get a better look at what was waiting for him. Even though the firing remained intense, he could see two downed Marines. He could almost reach out and touch his friend, Raleigh Smith.

Workman turned and looked down. The Marines below were motioning and yelling at him: “Get back down here!”

“No—you get up here!” he shouted back.

Workman was sure he would be shot if he tried to run back down, but he returned to the landing. When it became clear that no one was coming up, he jumped down the entire first flight. Bullets whizzed past, but none so close to his head that he heard the tell-tale snapping of its passage.

Meanwhile, trapped upstairs, the uninjured Phillips covered the door while the two wounded Marines searched for a way off the flat roof. Bleeding badly, they decided to dangle off the balcony and drop to the ground. Phillips stayed behind to hold off the enemy while his wounded buddies fled. The two were hanging from the second floor when an insurgent raced into the doorway leading to the balcony, reached around the door jamb, and sprayed the rooftop patio with AK fire. One of the bullets hit Phillips in the head, killing him instantly.

By now, Butler and his Marines had made it to their new vantage point. From there, they could see down onto the second floor patio where Smith and Phillips lay dead. Butler left a couple of Marines on the roof to cover the patio door while he and a team jumped across to the target house and dragged the two fallen Marines out of the line of fire.

Downstairs, the Marines regrouped again, and this time the entire assault team rushed up the stairs—Workman again on point. Seeing the Marines charge, the enemy opened up with everything they had: automatic weapons fire filled the house as the Marines on the stairs lobbed grenades toward the upstairs bedrooms. The enemy fire continued unabated. Workman peeked around the corner to discover that Smith’s body was gone.

From the front of the stack at the top of the stairs, Workman saw a yellow grenade bounce out of one of the bedrooms onto the landing.

“Grenade!” he shouted as he crunched his body up into a ball.

BOOM!

The room filled with flames. Shrapnel struck every Marine in the stack and knocked them back on the stairs. One chunk of hot metal seriously injured a Marine when it tore into his eye; he was helped out of the house for medical attention. Workman felt as if someone had smacked him in the leg with a baseball bat. As he would soon discover, metal was embedded in both legs and his left elbow, though he was not bleeding much. Satisfied that he was still in the fight, Workman charged back to the top of the stairs and fired into the bedrooms until he ran out of ammunition.

The Marines were forced to fall back again. When Workman reached the street, he saw the two wounded Marines who had dropped off the roof staggering out of an adjacent building. One was covered in blood and looked like a zombie. Workman rushed to his aid. The wounded infantryman could no longer walk, so Workman dragged him, through gunfire about 100 yards down the street to the casualty collection point. With his adrenalin pumping, Workman reached the corpsmen, handed over his wounded comrade, and charged back to the fight with more Marines.

When Major Desgrosseilliers heard the gunfire, he hopped into his truck and raced toward the fight. He knew exactly where to go and drove right to the buildings he had been in the day before. The major rolled up an alley in the middle of an escalating firefight. As the Marines were now discovering, the enemy was holed up in a group of five buildings. As soon as Desgrosseilliers came to a stop, his vehicle came under fire. When one of the rounds knocked his goggles from his helmet, the major hit the deck behind his vehicle and rolled to a wall. He looked up—and there was Workman.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Desgrosseilliers asked.

Workman just stared blankly at his XO.

Desgrosseilliers rose, grabbed him by the shoulders, and slammed him into the wall. “Tell me what’s going on!” he demanded.

Workman shook it off and came around, relating the story of the trapped Marines, the barricaded insurgents, and the hand grenades. Desgrosseilliers could hear Butler and his Marines yelling inside the building, but he didn’t know exactly where they were. He knew they were alive, and that he had to do everything possible to get to them. Desgrosseilliers snapped at Workman and the other Marines standing in earshot, “We’re going in there!”⁴

Desgrosseilliers decided to approach from the opposite side of the complex, hoping to divert the enemy’s attention away from Lieutenant Butler and the isolated Marines. As he raced to flank the enemy, insurgents fired from rooftops and windows and tossed grenades into the street.

Desgrosseilliers led his men into the target building where Workman again led the stack up the stairwell, exchanging gunfire and grenades with the enemy. Several times, enemy grenades and automatic weapons fire drove Desgrosseilliers, Workman, and the others out of the building. Each time the determined Marines regrouped and reentered the house. Their goal was to get in behind the enemy to force them to break contact with Lieutenant Butler and his Marines.

The insurgents were operating as an organized military unit. They had set up ambush sites and fortified their positions, chiseled out rat holes that allowed them to move from building to building within their stronghold, and had guards well posted. The Marines outside were killing one or two insurgents at a time but, as Desgrosseilliers explained it, “there were more of them than there were of us.”⁵

Workman was at the head of the stack but he had reached the limit of his endurance—throwing up, bleeding, and about to give in to exhaustion. It was then that he heard a bloodcurdling scream and he turned to find his friend, Lance Corporal Philip Levine, had been hit in the arm with an armor-piercing round. Major Desgrosseilliers, who was fighting right behind Levine when he was hit, had been splattered with so much blood and gore that the major thought that he himselt had been shot in the face. What was left of Levine’s arm was black and smoking. Workman stopped thinking of himself and reached down for another shot of endurance.

Although he was in real danger of bleeding to death, Levine continued trying to shoot his rifle with his good arm as Workman and the others dragged him from the fight. It was the commotion of the Marines dragging the screaming Levine from the building that distracted the enemy sufficiently for Lieutenant Butler and his men to get off the roof of the house, with Butler carrying Smith’s lifeless body. Workman rushed Levine to the corpsmen, who worked fast to bandage his severed arm. Levine kept insisting that he could continue the fight, and asked Sergeant Major Rudy Resto for a pistol.

“You are not going back,” replied the sergeant major. “You’ve done your part.”

Once Levine had been calmed, Workman noticed two of his friends lying in the back of a HMMWV. Neither was moving. Workman jumped up into the back of the truck to see how they were doing. Raleigh Smith was lying face-up with his arm resting across his forehead. To Workman, it looked as though he was shielding his eyes from the sun. He leaned over to give Smith a few words of encouragement.

“Raleigh,” he said. Smith did not respond.

“Doc! Get over here!” Workman shouted to one of the corpsmen.

“Naw, man, he’s all right, he’s all right,” Corpsman 3rd Class Rakesh Sundram responded.

Workman shook Smith once, then again—harder. “Doc, get over here! He’s not moving.”

“He’s all right, Workman, he’s all right.”

Shaking uncontrollably, Workman leaned over and listened for a heartbeat or a breath. “Sonny! Get the fuck over here!” he yelled, refusing to understand what he knew was the truth.

“Workman—he’s dead, man. He’s gone.”

He had seen many dead insurgents during the last few days, but he had never seen a dead Marine. Now, when the realization swept over him, a wave of anger gripped Workman. He turned to the second Marine. It was Eric Hillenburg, and he had a gaping bullet hole in his head.

Workman jumped from the back of the truck, gathered the remaining Marines, and ran back into the house, sprinting up the stairs determined to exact his revenge.

While Workman and the others were racing Levine to medical attention, Major Desgrosseilliers cordoned off the area and called for tanks and air power. He moved his Forward Air Controller into position and radioed Kilo Company, which sent a rifle platoon to reinforce the Marines who had been fighting now for more than an hour. Before long, Lieutenant Colonel Malay appeared with a bunch of satchel charges.

By now, most of Captain Bodisch’s tanks were 10,000 hours past scheduled service and his mechanics were working day and night just to keep them rolling. Radios were out and numerous other systems were beyond repair, leaving many tanks little more than rolling pillboxes. But they still had their armor and guns, and they could still move. Two of Bodisch’s tanks were still good to go.

Bodisch had been monitoring the escalating combat on his radio while sitting at Jolan Park with his XO and had already mapped out his route to the fight. When he heard Desgrosseilliers call for assistance, he and his XO hauled ass through the city, racing down MICHIGAN in their pair of tanks, traversing three miles in fewer than five minutes.

Meanwhile, back in the house at the top of the stairs, Workman said to himself, “Fuck it!” and moved to rush into the bedroom. Sergeant Jarrett Kraft grabbed the back of his web belt just as RPK rounds sprayed out the door. If not for Kraft, Workman would have been killed by the burst of machine gun fire.

Desgrosseilliers, meanwhile, had moved back into the building so that he could order Workman and the others out. The major didn’t want to lose any more Marines in this stairwell slog. It was time to pull everyone outside so he could use bigger weapons against these diehards. In order to deliver the order, however, Desgrosseilliers had to get back in the stack with Workman.

When an insurgent popped out with a grenade, the Marines opened fire. One of the shots hit the Muj in the elbow and the grenade fell from his hand and bounced down the stairs, exploding close to Desgrosseilliers. Thankfully his body was protected, but the grenade tore a chunk out of his helmet and a few small pieces of shrapnel hit his leg. The concussion of the blast blew Workman down the top flight of stairs to the landing, knocking both Workman and Desgrosseilliers unconsciousness. The major came around first and moved to Workman, shaking him in the hope he had not lost another Marine. When Workman regained consciousness, they helped each other from the house. Desgrosseilliers ordered all the Marines from the buildings and Workman fell back for a final time.

Kilo Company had the stronghold surrounded, with Marines lining the rooftops and a CAAT section covering the road north of the enemy’s hideout. Kraft showed up with an EOD sniper who had a rifle with a scope.

“Where in the hell did you get that?”⁶ Desgrosseilliers asked.

“It was in my truck,” the young Marine replied.

Desgrosseilliers immediately posted the sniper on a nearby roof.

It had been about fifteen or twenty minutes since Desgrosseilliers had called for tanks. Bodisch was just pulling up as everyone was pouring out of the building for the last time. Bodisch could see that a tough fight had been going on: the bodies of two Marines were visible in the back of a HMMWV, and the remaining Marines were still under heavy fire. Nonetheless, Desgrosseilliers rushed out into the street toward Bodisch’s tank.

“Look at this crazy son of a bitch,”⁷ Bodisch radioed Smithley.

The major ducked behind Bodisch’s M1 and picked up the grunt phone. It was not until he heard the voice that Bodisch realized it was the battalion XO. Desgrosseilliers asked him to turn due north and to fire on the houses on the block.

Bodisch and Smithley slowly clanked forward as Desgrosseilliers walked behind the lead tank directing Bodisch’s fire into the insurgent stronghold. Enemy fighters on the rooftops tried to kill Desgrosseilliers by lobbing grenades at the tank and firing wildly into the alley as he crouched behind the tank while rounds and shrapnel pinged off the armor. The young EOD sniper across the street picked off more than one insurgent as they popped up to take a shot. Once in position, Bodisch and Smithley fired main gun rounds into the buildings.

Each time Bodisch’s tank fired up its engine to move, a huge plume of heat spewed out the rear vents and washed over Desgrosseilliers, melting his fleece vest under his body armor. At one point he was hit by a ricochet that added a superficial wound to his mounting injuries.

Lieutenant Colonel Malay barely recognized Desgrosseilliers, who had blood and who knows what splattered all across his face, with the rest of his body covered in soot, dust, and dirt-caked blood. He had a dent in his helmet, his clothes were melted, and his leg was bleeding. Because of the repeated shocks to his ears and brain he could not hear well, so he was yelling at the top of his lungs and did not even know it.

The tanks were running out of ammo but the insurgents refused to die. Around 1300, the Forward Air Controller took over, calling in circling aircraft, identifying and verifying the target buildings. He managed to “convince the Air Force pilot to drop his bombs even though we were only fifty or sixty feet away,”⁸ remembered Desgrosseilliers. The Marines were so close that Desgrosseilliers recalls watching in amazement as the bombs flew into the windows of the buildings, the explosions rattling the tanks. The aircraft dropped fifteen JDAMS on the enemy complex.

The noise and concussion mellowed the jihadis for a short time, but the bombs didn’t do as much damage as the Marines had hoped. Some of the insurgents were still alive and eager to continue fighting. It was starting to get late and Desgrosseilliers wanted to finish off these guys. The last thing he wanted was to give them time to regroup and return for a third day.

“Screw this,” Desgrosseilliers thought.

The major decided to send in the engineers with Malay’s satchel charges to level the buildings and kill the enemy inside, once and for all. The charges collapsed the structures around the remaining diehard insurgents. By now the Marines had used tanks, bombs, and had dropped the second floor of several buildings. Somehow, one last enemy fighter popped up out of the rubble like a “Terminator” with a machine gun and shot Lance Corporal Ilarraza in the leg.

Bodisch had been slowly slewing his turret to cover Ilarraza’s stack as they rounded a corner into the driveway of one of the destroyed buildings. When he saw Ilarraza go down and the rest of the Marines in the stack fall back, Bodisch ordered his driver to reorient the tank. “HEAT round, on my command!” he yelled.

Bodisch kept his turret trained on the insurgent as his tank pivoted in place beneath him. When he noticed that he had awakened the sleeping behemoth, the enemy combatant shifted his fire toward the tank. Bodisch jerked back away from his shattered periscope as chips of glass brushed his face.

“Holy shit,” Bodisch thought. “This guy is fucking nailing me!” Bodisch radioed Desgrosseilliers: “Clear your Marines.”

Desgrosseilliers and Lieutenant Casey Brock rushed to Ilarraza to drag him to safety. Just as they reached the wounded Marine, a shot rang out and Lieutenant Brock went down. He had been hit squarely in the back in his SAPI plate. Brock shook it off, jumped back to his feet, and continued to help Desgrosseilliers. Together, they dragged Ilarraza out of the line of fire as the enemy hit the wounded Marine again and again.

Once behind the wall, Desgrosseilliers looked up at Bodisch and gave a thumbs-up.

“Fire!” Bodisch commanded.

The machine gun-toting insurgent saw the giant fireball erupt from Bodisch’s main gun, may have felt the earth tremble, but never caught sight of the supersonic 120mm main gun round that blew him into oblivion.

Malay announced their success: “Pink mist, good job!”

This had been no rag-tag group. The entire block of buildings was fortified. The enemy fighters had even rolled up carpets and stacked them everywhere, and overturned the furniture and stacked that up, too. It had been a bitter, hard-fought, close-quarters battle.

The Marines found the bodies of at least thirty insurgents and uncountable body parts. No one really knows how many of them had made their last stand in these buildings. When all was said and done, the Marines found papers indicating that most of these men were not even Iraqis. They were hardcore foreign fighters who had come to Fallujah on a one-way ticket. Stuck in the city, they were going to either hijack the government or die as martyrs.

The last battle of the fight to free Fallujah claimed the lives of Raleigh Smith, James Phillips, and Eric Hillenburg, and wounded twenty other Marines.

The Marines found mountains of ordnance on pallets stacked to the ceilings throughout the Askari District. There were so many explosives that it was too dangerous to move it all, so senior leadership ordered it blown in place. The explosions destroyed six, eight, and even ten houses at a time.

When the detonations ended and the dust settled to the ground, the fight for Fallujah was over.

Unfinished Business

Miraculously, Colonel Larry Nicholson had recovered enough from the rocket attack on his office in Camp Fallujah to join the fight. He would need more surgery, but he arrived at Camp Fallujah on December 24 to take Joe L’Etiole’s spot so that L’Etiole could return to the United States to assume command of his own battalion. On Christmas day, Colonel Nicholson and General Joe Dunford drove to an Entry Control Point north of the city to hand out candy to some of the local children. When Nicholson climbed out of his HMMWV on PL APRIL, Lieutenant Colonel Malay had difficulty believing his eyes: all he could remember was Nicholson being carried out of his office barely clinging to life. Not only had Nicholson survived the rocket attack, but he had kept his vow and made it back into the fight.

Colonel Shupp became the military governor of Fallujah. During the transition period he was responsible for security, cleanup, and the repatriation of Fallujah’s civilian population. As the governor, Shupp walked the streets with his small security detachment, making himself accessible to the Iraqi civilians. He also attended the city council meetings every Monday. One day, an Iraqi complained to Shupp that he had been attacked by an American dog. On another occasion, an angry Iraqi arrived at the city council meeting with a strange accusation: “They shot and burned my motorcycle,” the Iraqi explained through Shupp’s interpreter.⁹

“They shot your motorcycle?” Shupp didn’t understand why anyone would do that.

The incensed Iraqi led Shupp to one of the checkpoints. Apparently, the man had ignored orders to stop at a Marine traffic control point. The Marines hadn’t opened fire on the man, but when they managed to finally stop him, an angry Marine emptied his M16 into the motorcycle and set it ablaze. Shupp chided the Marine for the wanton destruction of the man’s bike and had the Iraqi compensated for the loss of his transportation.

The man left happy.

New Year’s Day, 2005

Al Qaeda in Iraq and all of the anti-Iraqi forces had suffered a major defeat in Fallujah, but the insurgency in Anbar Province was not over; the fight just shifted to the Anbar countryside. Those insurgents not killed or captured scattered to the winds. Some went to Ramadi, and others to Hit, Karmah, Habbaniyah, and to Haditha—and especially Muj Island. They were far from defeated, but they were on the run and the Marines were in hot pursuit.

“Muj Island” was an insurgent stronghold in the fast-moving waters of the Euphrates River about eight kilometers south of the Haditha Dam. Wittnam’s Small Craft Company had moved to Haditha Dam on December 22 to patrol the Euphrates and try to clear the river down to Muj Island. The water was shallow in this region. Because the older river craft drew too much water to safely navigate between Haditha Dam and Muj Island, previous commanders had restricted their water patrols to waters north of the dam. Wittnam wanted to start patrolling south of the dam with his new shallow-draft, Small Unit Riverine Craft. On New Year’s Day, he sent his first patrol downriver.

Gunny Vinciguerra, Brian Parrello, and Juan Rubio were supposed to be off-duty. Vinciguerra was planning to chill out and do laundry, Rubio went to the computer center to check his email, and Parrello was just trying to get some rest. When they heard that Wittnam’s first patrol had been ambushed and one of their Marines wounded, all three volunteered to go back out after the unseen insurgents near Muj Island.

Together, they raced to the boats with Lieutenant Andrew Thomas, 4th Platoon’s Commander, and Captain Jonathan Kuniholm, an engineer who was along for the ride to familiarize himself with the area for future operations. As they were boarding someone exclaimed, “Wait! We didn’t bring the radio.” Without comment, Parrello sprinted away, returned with the radio, and jumped aboard the boat. He never asked, “Who’s going to carry this thing?” He naturally assumed he would act as the radioman on this trip.

The boats sped downriver and put the Marines ashore 800 meters north of the first ambush site. The coxswains beached their boats and Thomas, Rubio, Parrello, Kuniholm, Vasey, and Vinciguerra jumped to dry land with twelve other Marines to track the enemy down. They moved on foot south toward the original point of contact. It took them thirty minutes to reach the old water-pumping station from which the first ambush had originated.¹⁰

Sergeant Vasey noticed the blood first. “Sir, I’ve got blood and drag marks here,” he told Thomas. It looked as if the Marines had hit an insurgent in the first ambush, and that he had been dragged away from the river.

The entire platoon spread out in a tactical formation and headed south. Vasey took point about 100 meters out front, Vinciguerra assumed rear security, and the other fire teams spread out around Lieutenant Thomas, Captain Kuniholm, Parrello (with the radio), and Rubio.

When the Marines passed a short wall, Captain Kuniholm noticed a five-gallon water can and issued a caution: “Those are the kind of cans the enemy has been using for IEDs,” he told the group. Parrello, however, was on the radio reporting the ground unit’s position to the boats and missed the warning. Everyone else moved away from the can except Parrello. Rubio noticed that he hadn’t heard Kuniholm and tugged on his blouse. “Hey, brother, we need to get away from here.” Parrello and Rubio turned to put distance between themselves and the can when their universe exploded.¹¹

Parrello took the brunt of the blast and was slammed into Rubio, the force hurling both into a mud wall. The impact knocked Rubio unconscious. Rubio came to a minute later, his ears ringing and his wrist, elbow, and legs feeling as if they were on fire. He did a quick check to make sure he was okay. His arms were working, but he was still groggy and his senses rattled. After awhile he could make out the crack of Aks and the whoosh of RPGs being launched, and then the snap of M16s and 203s firing. About 100 feet behind Rubio, Gunny Vinciguerra was pumping out 40mm grenades as fast as he could, and all of the Marines were firing on the enemy.

As Rubio’s vision cleared, he realized to his horror that the dirt around him was being kicked up by enemy fire: he was in the middle of a firefight and that the Muj were shooting at him! Before he could react, an RPG slammed into the wall and exploded right above him, sending two pieces of shrapnel into his head just under his helmet. He reached for the back of his head to check it as he remembered that Parrello and Captain Kuniholm had been right in front of him just a few minutes ago. “Where are they?” he wondered. His wounds were not important now; he had to find Kuniholm and Parrello.

The enemy fired an RPG in Vinciguerra’s direction that detonated twenty-five meters to his left. The gunny continued firing his high-explosive grenades as a second RPG exploded just fifteen meters away. Unscathed by the initial blast, Lieutenant Thomas fell back to Vinciguerra’s position at the base of an old foundation. “I’ve got two guys down,” Thomas told Vinciguerra. A third RPG slammed into the foundation, this time only eighteen inches from Vinciguerra. Fortunately, he only had his arm exposed, but when he dropped his rifle and pulled his arm back, he saw a large hunk of gore and exposed bone. Vinciguerra wiggled his fingers and thought, “I’m good to go.”

Rubio found the severely wounded Parrello lying nearby. Without thinking, Rubio sprayed shots from his M16 as he crawled toward the fallen Marine, emptying three magazines in the process. When he reached the wounded Marine, Rubio pulled him behind a wall to get him out of the line of fire.

Rubio pulled the mangled radio off Parrello’s back, cut open his flak jacket, and did what he could to stabilize his friend. He could see that Parrello’s chest was badly bruised, he was bleeding internally, and one of his arms was mangled. Parrello regained consciousness as Rubio was splinting the shattered limb. He complained that his chest, arm, and legs were all hurting. Rubio tightly wrapped Parrello’s broken ribs and then dragged him to a safer location while other Marines within sight laid down covering fire.

Kuniholm had also been critically wounded by the IED blast. Rubio, wounded himself and running on adrenalin alone, left a Marine with Parrello and reentered the kill zone to help Kuniholm. The captain was bleeding badly from an arm that had been nearly blown off below the elbow. He was holding his wounded right hand in his left. Rubio applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding and wrapped the mangled arm. Once Rubio had bandaged the wound, he instructed another Marine to continue caring for the captain and set out in search of more wounded Marines.

Rubio found Gunny Vinciguerra next. He applied a tourniquet, bandaged the wound, and started an IV. The gunny had little doubt that Rubio’s actions saved his life. “I’d like to tell him he’s my hero,” Vinciguerra confirmed, “and without him I wouldn’t be standing here today.”¹² Rubio told Lance Corporal Kevin Powell to remain with Vinciguerra and get him down to the bank of the river.

With the radio destroyed, the Marines had no way to call the boats to come get them. Lance Corporal Rich Rupert, the company’s fastest runner, volunteered to sprint north 800 meters to get word of the wounded Marines to the boat captains. He ran back to the boats as fast as he could, jumped aboard, and guided them down to the ambush site. As Rupert was running for the boats, Rubio grabbed a few Marines and told them to cover him while he ran back for Parrello and Sergeant Vasey. Thomas ordered his men to head for the boat landing: “Okay, guys, let’s move back, let’s move back.”

Rupert was the first off the boats. He grabbed Parrello and dragged him down to the shoreline as the other Marines gathered their wounded aboard and then climbed aboard themselves. Even though he was wounded, Gunny Vinciguerra stood on the bank counting his Marines. Once he was sure that all of his men were accounted for, he boarded and the boats raced north toward the dam.

Vinciguerra yanked his dog tag off and gave it to Lance Corporal Stoddard. “Call this in as a medevac,” he ordered. “You’ve got one urgent surgical, one urgent, and one routine.” Vinciguerra didn’t realize just how seriously wounded Parrello was. He considered his own wounds minor; after all, he could still wiggle his fingers. He was the most concerned about Kuniholm.

After Rubio checked Kuniholm to make sure he hadn’t started bleeding again, he turned his attention to Parrello. Rubio knew he was bleeding internally, and he knew what he had to do—but he didn’t have the equipment he needed. Rubio found the largest syringe he had and conducted a poor-man’s thoracentesis by driving the needle in just below Parrello’s lung in an effort to remove fluid. The procedure immediately relieved some of the pressure on Parrello’s collapsed lung.

Still, Parrello was in dire need of a surgeon. His chest cavity was filling with blood, which soon would make it difficult for his heart to continue beating. Rubio needed a chest tube; if he had one, he knew he could keep Parrello alive another few precious minutes, and maybe long enough to get him to an operating room.

“Doc, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! I CAN’T BREATHE!” Exclaimed the former radioman.

In the racing boat Rubio could do nothing else except continue to give him morphine. It took the coxswain less than fifteen minutes to get back to Haditha Dam. Parrello was rushed from the boat to a HMMWV ambulance that whisked him up to the top of the dam where an Army Black Hawk medevac helicopter was waiting with rotors turning.

Rubio remained at Parrello’s side in the ambulance during the mad dash to the helicopter, cradling him, talking to him, and trying to keep him awake and alive. Just as they pulled up to the helicopter, Parrello looked up and asked, “Are you okay, Doc? I know you were right next to me.”

“Don’t worry about me, brother. We’re going to get you home.”

A calm look passed across Parrello’s face, as if he was relieved that Rubio was not injured. “I’m getting sleepy,” he said before taking in one last shallow breath—and then he stopped breathing.

Parrello was rushed into the waiting helicopter with Kuniholm; Vinciguerra was loaded last. As the Black Hawk lifted into the sky, Vinciguerra looked to his right and saw Rubio standing there, tears streaming down his face, repeating over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”¹³

Vinciguerra looked away to the left. The medics had bagged Parrello and were frantically working to keep him alive. Vinciguerra knew Parrello would not survive, yet these medics refused to give up and kept working on Brian for the entire flight. When they landed, he was rushed into surgery but it was too late to save him. Lance Corporal Brian Parrello had lived a short life, but he died doing what he loved, and will forever be remembered as a United States Marine.

And what an honor that is. The Marines have defended the American people throughout our history, and have brought peace and stability to countless people in nations around the world. They are ferocious fighters yet compassionate human beings—“no worse enemy and no better friend.”¹⁴ It is amazing how quickly they can turn from full-scale combat to humanitarian assistance operations. By January 2005, the Marines were working to help the citizens of Fallujah clean up their city and return to their homes.

The People of Fallujah

Colonel Michael Shupp insisted on knowing whenever there was a gathering inside the city of more than fifty people. Later that month he got a call that a large crowd was gathering at the Jolan Park humanitarian site. When he heard the news, the colonel called Major Arnold and told him to gather his Personal Security Detachment and they drove to the center of the city.

The citizens of Fallujah were normally compliant in the face of authority, but on this morning things had gotten out of hand. The women in their separate queue were pushing and shoving, old women were being crushed in the crowd, and people were being pushed into the concertina wire barriers.

“Sergeant Major,” Shupp said, “we can’t let this happen.”¹⁵

Shupp and his Marines jumped over a sand-bagged wall and pressed into the crowd, pushing the Iraqis back with their rifles. They never fired a shot; they pressed forward. Shupp turned to his interpreter, Mohammed Hawlery, and told him to stay at his side and keep telling the crowd what he was saying: “Treat each other with dignity.” “Help each other.” “Don’t push each other.”

Mohammed continued yelling at the top of his voice to everyone in earshot while Shupp and his Marines pushed toward the concertina to break up the crowd and rescue the victims of the hysteria.

Shupp later recalled the incident:

I reached down and there was an old mother in her black robes. It was so bad that my bodyguard, Corporal [Cameron] Sims—he’s just a moose of a man—he’s holding people back. I say, “I gotta get my Leatherman out to cut her out.” I pick her up, and as I’m picking her up, she grabs my hand and she kisses my hand and says, “God bless your mother and father.”

It wasn’t just me. Every Marine out there was doing one thing. They weren’t out there to hurt any of the Iraqi people; they were out there to protect them, to serve them, to give them a chance. And this little old lady captured it all in that one little moment.¹⁶