Chapter 9

Semper Fi! And Happy Birthday

“On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of the Continental Congress. Since that date many thousands of men have borne the name Marine. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our Corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history…”

– MajGen John A. Lejeune, USMC, November 1, 1921

Wednesday, November 10, 2004: D+3

The United States Marine Corps’ 229th birthday was a sunny, blue-sky day in Fallujah, but the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines of Task Force Blue Diamond would have little opportunity to celebrate on this day of intense combat. As Kilo Company, 3/5 prepared for the coming fight through the Jolan, Captain Drew McNulty went on his Human Exploitation Team’s loudspeaker to read the birthday messages of General Lejeune and the Commandant. McNulty’s voice echoed through the assembly area in the early morning light. After reading the birthday messages, he concluded with these words: “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Today, I expect the enemy to stand and fight. Kill him and kill him twice. HooRah, Semper Fi, and happy birthday.”¹

Lieutenant Colonel Rainey wanted to change his style on the tenth. He had been attacking under the cover of darkness for the last two nights, so he figured a change of pace would throw the enemy off their game. Rainey knew the enemy was choosing to fight only during the day, and he surmised that they would be up and ready to fight at first light.

Like an experienced quarterback running a draw play, Rainey waited thirty minutes past sunrise to launch his next attack. At 0630, Twaddell’s A/2–7 soldiers attacked out of Jolan Park. They rolled in their tanks and Bradleys south past Captain Glass’ soldiers at OBJ VIRGINIA and turned right onto Fallujah’s main thoroughfare, Highway 10—MICHIGAN. Alpha Company fought its way along MICHIGAN for a half-mile, taking fire from the south side of the street. Twaddell’s tankers and Bradley gunners sprayed each of the enemy positions in the buildings to their left as they slowly drove toward the Highway 10 Bridge. When they reached the structure, OBJ KENTUCKY, and found fewer than a dozen enemy fighters, they quickly dispatched these guards and secured the bridge by 0900.

Rainey had warned Twaddell to stay off the bridge. He knew that the enemy would like nothing better than to drop a couple of tanks and Bradleys into the river. That would have been a great victory for them. So Twaddell stayed on the eastern bank. It was lucky that he did. The enemy had placed a string of IEDs nearly the entire length of the bridge, paving them over with a fresh layer of asphalt. EOD teams found the wires later and defused the threat. Was there an insurgent waiting to take the bridge down? If there was, he must have been extremely disappointed that Twaddell’s men never set foot on the structure.

Instead, Alpha Company turned north and moved to secure OBJ OHIO, better known as the Blackwater Bridge. The expected fight there failed to materialize because no resistance was encountered during their short drive north, and the bridge itself had been abandoned. The icon of the insurgency—the bridge where the Blackwater contractors had been burned and hung for the entire world to see—was now in American hands, with Task Force Wolfpack’s Marines on the west bank and Rainey’s Ghost Troopers on the east bank. Twaddell set up a perimeter and remained at OHIO and KENTUCKY for the rest of the day.

At 0800, a mortar round screamed into Bravo 1/23’s command post at Sheikh Ghazi’s multi-million dollar mansion on the western shore of the Shark’s Fin. The projectile exploded in the courtyard and took out the Company’s FiST team, severely wounding four Marines. Aviation commanders had restricted flights over the peninsula because there was a real hazard of rocket attacks on allied helicopters. When Major Wittnam heard the call for a casevac, he knew that his boats could get the wounded Marines to medical attention much faster than if they were driven overland.

Wittnam immediately got on the radio, volunteered for the casevac, and ordered two of his boats to the Sheikh’s complex. The boats sped upriver less than half mile from their blocking positions and picked up the wounded Marines. Hospital Corpsman Juan Rubio took charge of the injured men, loaded them aboard his boat, and started IVs. Parrello gunned his engines and raced farther upriver at full throttle, with Major Wittnam following in the second boat.

Two and one-half miles west of the Shark’s Fin, the rapidly moving boats sped toward a railroad bridge to continue west toward the nearest Shock Trauma Platoon at Habbaniyah. As they raced under the bridge, the Marines spotted military-aged men milling about along the banks of the river. Some of the insurgents took potshots at the passing boats. Both Rubio and Parrello thought they were going to have to fight through this on their way back, but first they had to get their wounded charges to medical attention. They were at the ramp in Habbaniyah in less than thirty minutes.

Wittnam needed to report the enemy presence along the riverbank, so he told his Platoon commander, Lieutenant Andrew Thomas, to take the two boats back to the Shark’s Fin while he returned to the Company’s HQ to contact the commanders at Division. “I’ll come back later tonight,” he told Thomas as he pulled away from the ramp.²

Sure enough, the boats came under heavy machine gun and RPG fire as they approached the railroad bridge on the return trip. The enemy had established ambush positions along an 800-meter stretch of the river just west of the bridge. Parrello and the other driver slammed their throttles to full speed and the boats’ gunners returned fire as they ran the gauntlet. Adrenalin pumped through Parrello’s body as he drove through the incoming barrage. His heart pounded so fast and hard that he could hear his heartbeat. Once safely through the hot zone, Parrello slowed his boat and they cruised back to their positions near the Shark’s Fin. The Marines of the Small Craft Company would soon return to the railroad bridge to clear that hornet’s nest.

Malay’s Marines cleared every building in their path. They entered every room, tilted beds up against walls, and opened every cupboard. The methodical process uncovered massive weapons stockpiles: rooms stacked to the rafters with pallets of 155mm artillery rounds, 122mm missiles, 82mm mortar rounds, and 57mm rockets. Al Qaeda had set up a factory for VBIEDs. It had a warehouse full of explosives, an assembly line, and computers to download instructions on building and connecting detonators. There was a separate packaging area and even a small classroom. The Marines found a distribution area and a planning room with network and targeting information. “These guys were not the run-of-the-mill chumps,” concluded Colonel Malay.³ They even found a torture chamber, complete with a Jihadi flag and a plastic chair.

Malay’s Marines moved slowly and deliberately through the tangled maze of alleys in the Jolan District. They covered the northeastern corner of Fallujah like a bottle of spilled ink on a white tablecloth: nothing was missed. Chontosh pushed east toward HENRY, then south while Bitanga moved his Marines through the buildings along the river and McNulty’s Marines pushed forward between the two.

Corpsman UP!

In 1/3’s area, Charlie Company had been taking sniper fire from nearby buildings so Captain Tennant sent his Second Platoon out to clear the row of houses next to the Mujareen Mosque. It wasn’t long before his Marines were calling for help: they had run into thirty insurgents barricaded in a group of houses with barred windows.

Tennant’s Marines had rushed into the first house and cleared the first floor. Lance Corporal Aaron Pickering was the first up the stairs. When he stepped into view, the insurgents opened up with a machine gun. Pickering took most of the gunfire and was killed instantly. The four Marines behind Pickering were also hit. As they tumbled down the stairs, Corporal Kane sprayed 5.56 rounds up at the machine gunner. Everyone managed to scramble out of the line of fire under this covering barrage.

Across the street, when Corporal David Willis heard the radio call for help he grabbed his squad and headed over. Willis’ corpsman, HM3 Julian Woods, said, “I wanna come with you.”⁴ Willis responded by telling Woods that all of Second Platoon was over there, and it had its own corpsmen.

“I’m coming whether you want me to or not,” Woods replied.

“Okay, roger that,” Willis relented. “Just stay behind me.”

Willis, Woods, and his squad reached the target house just as an AMTRAC was pushing over the courtyard wall. A fire team jumped over what was left of the barrier and, before Willis could say anything, Woods was following the other Marines into the courtyard. Willis followed on the corpsman’s heels. The Marines in the fire team stacked at the front door.

As he crossed the courtyard, Woods spotted the wounded Marines through the living room window, hunkered down inside the house waiting for assistance. Woods never broke stride. He ran right through the front door to get to the wounded Marines. Insurgents on the second floor were waiting for him and opened fire just as he hit the threshold. One bullet pierced his helmet and hit him in the top of the head, killing him instantly.

One of the Marines stacked at the front door helped Willis drag Woods out of the house. Willis continued dragging the body backward across the courtyard, unware that he was dead. When he hit the remaining knee-high wall, Willis tumbled backward into the street, pulling Willis over with him. Willis was covered in so much blood and gore that his squad thought that both he and Woods were dead—until Willis rose to his feet.

The combined fire of the Marine SAW gunner at the foot of the stairs and the fire team at the front door suppressed the enemy machine gunner long enough for all of the Marines to be pulled from the house. Once the place was clear, Captain Tennant fired rockets into the house and brought a D9 up to knock a corner off the building. The Marines killed the remaining and now fully exposed holdouts. The last insurgent continued to fire on the bulldozer’s armored cab, startling but not injuring the driver, who raised the giant blade and dropped it on the last living insurgent, ending the siege of the house with a sickening thud. Once the enemy had been silenced, the Marines moved in and retrieved Pickering’s body.

The Fight Along MICHIGAN

In the center of Fallujah, meanwhile, the enemy woke up to find that 1st Battalion, 8th Marines’ Avenger Company had occupied the Government Center during the night. Insurgents started firing on the Marines around 0730. Cunningham’s Marines returned the fire from every building that faced south. Enemy snipers and machine gunners continued, escalating the action. Meyers’ tanks knocked down a wall and Markley and Meyers pulled their tanks in between the parade ground bleachers, next to the buildings where Cunningham’s Marines were taking fire. There, they began shooting across MICHIGAN into a mosque and hotel on the far side of the main east-west thoroughfare.

Alpha Company’s infantrymen were involved in a sharp 150-meter gunfight. Cunningham and his headquarters team fought from atop the tallest building in the complex. The six-story structure provided a great vantage point from which to call in artillery. First Lieutenant Dan Malcom, Avenger’s Weapons Platoon Commander and FiST, was a young studious graduate of the Citadel and a veteran of 1/8’s first deployment to Iraq. Malcom called in 81mm mortar fire while the FAC called for close air support to suppress the insurgents in the tall buildings on the south side of MSR MICHIGAN.

There was only a foot-and-a-half ledge on the roof, too little cover to protect Cunningham and his Marines, so when snipers started firing on the command group from a nearby minaret, Cunningham ordered his men off the roof to the safety of the top floor. There, however, visibility was severely restricted.

Meyers and Markley were pounding the enemy from the protected positions among the concrete bleachers. The insurgents fired back from the mosque and charged out in groups of two or three onto MICHIGAN with AKs blasting and RPGs leveled for a shot. Most of them were quickly mowed down by the tankers’ machine gun fire. One determined insurgent ran to flank Meyers’ tank on his right, hoisted his RPG, and squeezed the trigger. The rocket whooshed toward Panzer 6 and exploded against the side of the tank, rocking the entire vehicle off the ground a couple of inches. The anti- armor projectile penetrated the hull, narrowly missing the fuel cells. Fortunately, none of Meyers’ crew was injured and everyone kept fighting; they would worry about the damage later.

After checking to make sure he hadn’t been wounded, Gunner Ball returned to scanning for targets, his turret whining like a vacuum cleaner as it rotated from side to side. When he caught a glimpse of the tip of an RPG at the corner of the building next to the mosque, he notified Meyers and got the order to use a main gun round. Ball fired at the corner and watched the High Explosive, Anti-Tank (HEAT) round blow away the side of the building. Bodies flew when the round exploded. Meyers and Markley continued to fight from their protected positions until they were called down to the “Pizza Slice” to help Cunningham’s Marines get across MICHIGAN.

From his sixth-floor window in the high-rise building, Dan Malcom itched for a 360-degree view of the battlefield and desperately wanted to go back up to the roof. He was stepping from the stairwell when he took a sniper round in his armpit just above his Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) plate.⁵ The bullet pierced his heart but did not penetrate his front SAPI plate. Malcom fell back into the stairwell onto Cunningham. Malcom’s forward artillery observer reached down and took the maps from his body and continued the fight while several men rushed to his aid. A Navy SEAL corpsman worked to save Malcom’s life. “Stay with me! Stay with me!” he pleaded as several Marines carefully moved Malcom down the stairs. Just as Cunningham turned to go back down, he saw the deadly bullet resting on one of the steps. He picked it up and saved it so that it could be sent back to the Citadel.

On November 10, Colonel Shupp hooked his regiment to the west. Third Battalion, First Marines had already passed behind 2–7 and ahead of 3/5 to turn toward the river. At 0800, Captain Jent had attacked behind Twaddell through the marketplace at the center of the old city, driving toward the Al Kabir Mosque. The attack was largely uneventful. By mid-afternoon, Jent’s Marines had rolled through the mosque and moved south to MICHIGAN. The marketplace, on the other hand, was one giant weapons cache: almost every shop was filled with weapons and ammunition of all sorts and sizes. Malay slowed his Marines to let 3/1 pass in front of them. Captain Brian Heatherman’s Lima Company moved to the Euphrates River behind Jent and secured the Brooklyn Bridge so that Rainey’s tanks could move on.

Malay’s Marines were now encountering a belt of mutually supporting in-depth defensive positions. The enemy had interlocking fields of fire, casualty collection points, and casualty evacuation routes. They had sophisticated communications, including cell phones and Norwegian squad radios. Some of the insurgents even had body armor. They also had excellent weapons—cleaned, maintained and zeroed—including mortars. Many of their tactics had been developed and battle tested in Grozny.⁶

One such tactic was for an insurgent to shoot at the Marines with an AK. When the Marines moved to the sound of the gunfire, they were struck with machine gun and/or sniper fire. The enemy also tried to pick off key Marines—officers, radio operators, and even corpsmen. If the Marines sent vehicles in, they were engaged by RPG teams. This was not a disorganized band of thugs with AKs. These men were sophisticated and tenacious with an ambush mentality. Still, they were no match for Marines.

As Bitanga cleared the houses along the river, McNulty waited for the 3/1 Marines to pass in front of him. Chontosh continued clearing neighborhoods just west of HENRY. Toward the end of the day, India Company took a house that it would use as living quarters and a base for the next several days. Once inside, Chontosh’s men started taking sniper fire from a school across the street. They kept watch on the school all night and put together a plan for clearing it the next day.

Commanders on the Battlefield

Natonski preferred face-to-face conversations over talking on the radio, so he drove into the city every day. “All right, Mike,” he would begin when he reached Colonel Shupp, “where are we going?” The general always wanted to go to the most forward position. On several occasions, Army officers would spot the high ranking commander and ask, “What the hell is going on?” Army colonels and generals rarely visited troops in the field and especially troops on the front lines during active combat operations, but Natonski, Shupp, and all the other senior Marines led from the front. General Natonski, Shupp confirmed, “was fearless.”⁷

Lieutenant Colonel Rainey was in a mosque courtyard on HENRY, where enemy snipers were shooting at his soldiers from protected positions. Rainey was being prudent, standing behind his Bradley. When he looked down the street, he exlaimed, “Holy shit! Who are these guys?”⁸ Walking down the center of the street was a group of Marines, antennas sticking twelve feet up in the air. Colonel Shupp was one of them. Rainey walked out to meet him. When he looked farther up the street he saw another group walking down HENRY. To his surprise, in the center of this second group was General Natonski himself.

Rainey, Shupp, and Natonski discussed the attack south of MICHIGAN. The original plan was for RCT–7 to cross MICHIGAN and then swing southwest, but RCT–1 had gotten to MICHIGAN much faster than anticipated, and RCT-7 had met more resistance than expected. Natonski considered moving Rainey’s entire battalion east of HENRY to help Colonel Tucker on the eastern side of the city, but Rainey liked working with Colonel Shupp and First Marines and wasn’t keen on that idea. Everyone knew that it was the wrong course of action to suspend the advance, to shift forces around, or to wait for Tucker to be ready to continue the attack. The enemy had been knocked back on their heels. It was time to press the attack and deliver the crushing blow to the remaining insurgents.

And so here was Natonski, standing in the middle of the fight polling his commanders before he made the decision to move forward. All the while, an enemy sniper in a nearby minaret was drawing beads on and firing at the soldiers and Marines. The Marines returned fire, knocking tiles off the mosque around the group of commanders. Natonski, Rainey, and Shupp seemed not to notice, standing in deep discussion in the mosque courtyard with insurgent bodies piled up all around them.

Delaying the attack would give the enemy an opportunity to regroup, while continuing the assault would keep the enemy off-balance. Natonski turned to Rainey and asked, “Jim, what do you think if I pushed you over to the other side, into the 7th Marine area, and you augment them?”

“Hey, Garry Owen!⁹ Rainey responded. “It would take me about twenty-four hours… would be kind of hard.”¹⁰

Natonski made his decision on the spot: both of his regiments would push forward straight across MICHIGAN, proceeding online with each other to the southern edge of the city. It was evident to everyone that the north side of the city was still crawling with pockets of enemy fighters. Shupp and Tucker would each leave one battalion behind to continue clearing operations: Malay’s Marines would back-clear the Jolan, while Ramos’ Marines remained north of MICHIGAN to clear the eastern neighborhoods. L’Etiole already had a branch plan in place; all that was needed was for Natonski to issue the order.

Once his war council with Rainey and Shupp ended, Natonski left to visit Colonel Tucker at the Government Center. The general had already decided that RCT–7 would not sweep south and west toward the Euphrates River as originally planned. He talked with Tucker about his readiness to execute the original plan, and Tucker told his boss that all of his battalions were receiving attacks from the north. He needed more time to deal with the bypassed threats before he could move south across MICHIGAN. Natonski understood and informed Tucker that he was going to order the execution of L’Etiole’s branch plan: Tucker would leave one battalion in the north to deal with the back-clearing, and prepare to drive straight south with his other two battalions. Newell would continue hugging the eastern edge of the city and attack into the Industrial District, while Lieutenant Colonel Brandl’s Marines would continue their push south into the heart of the city. PL HENRY would remain the regimental boundary. The push south would kick off at 1900—nightfall—on November 11, 2004.

Tucker had handed out MRE pound cakes and cards with the Commandant’s birthday message to all his squad leaders. They were to read the birthday message to their Marines and slice the birthday cakes in the time-honored ceremony—when there was a break in the fighting. As a final ceremonial touch, Tucker asked his commanders to try to play the Marine Hymn at some point during the day.¹¹

After Natonski left the Government Center late that afternoon, Tucker and Brandl were standing around during a lull in the fighting. Brandl turned to his boss and suggested, “Maybe we should play the Marine Hymn now.” When Tucker agreed, he called over to the Army psyops team and told them to play the Hymn over their loudspeakers.

As soon as the music started, every enemy fighter within earshot opened fire. They were either incensed at the brazen taunt, or they anticipated that the music heralded an attack. The hymn triggered a loss of discipline within the ranks of the insurgents, who began to show themselves as they fired on the Marines. With deadly precision, the Marines cut down the exposed fighters as if they were shooting pop-up targets at a carnival shooting gallery. The spontaneous battle raged until the final note, when, as if on cue, the enemy quit firing. Brandl turned to Tucker and said, “That worked pretty well. Let’s play it again.”¹²