We Were One

STILL STUNNED BY THE LOSS of Wood and Larson, 1st Platoon kept pushing south. Second and 3rd Squads cleared houses while 1st Squad remained in reserve, providing security for Staff Sergeant Slay’s tracks.

“The death of Wood and Larson was an emotional shock. It taught us that you can’t assume anything, everything has to be checked two or three times before you can call it safe; even then you have to watch your ass,” recalled Jeff Sommers.

Lima Company’s objective was to reach two roads inside the city designated Phase Lines Kathy and Isaac. First Platoon’s objective was a school located next to a water treatment plant, unceremoniously dubbed the “tits of the Euphrates” for its large, dome-shaped filtration buildings. Resistance would prove heavier than expected, and the battalion eventually decided to “go firm,” or hole up for the night, in houses near Phase Line Isaac, a road less than two thousand meters from the edge of the city.

Around midday, after a brief firefight forced the muj to melt away down the back alleys, 1st Platoon moved into a T-intersection of cobblestone streets. Realizing that a lucky RPG hit could cook everyone inside the tracks standing in the intersection, Staff Sergeant Slay snapped: “Go re-clear these houses again.”

Second and 3rd Squads resumed the now all-too-familiar task of kicking in doors and clearing rooms. Conner’s 3rd Squad took the left side of the road, while Sergeant Kyle’s 2nd Squad went to the right. After clearing several empty houses, Hanks heard a noise.

Simultaneously, across the street, 2nd Squad encountered more fighters in buildings that had previously been cleared by Kilo Company. Private Sean Stokes was on point. “I was being complacent, since they said the houses were already clear. For the hell of it, I threw a flash bang grenade (they weren’t very effective) into one of the rooms we were clearing. My ears were ringing so hard from all the fighting that I couldn’t even hear hardly anything. So I yelled to the other guys, ‘Did you even hear it go off?’ They responded, ‘No.’ I kicked open the door and went into the room. Two guys in there stood up.” Sergeant Grantham followed him in.

The muj fighters were unprepared; their weapons, AKs and an RPG, were stacked against the wall. As Stokes tried to take the men prisoner, one of the terrorists made a desperate move. According to Stokes, “The other guy stood up and grabbed the muzzle of my weapon. I threw him against the wall. He landed next to the RPG and tried to grab it. I shot him point blank in the face.” Grantham and Stokes walked out of the building, and Sojda and Hanks walked in.

Despite his horrible face wound, the fighter shot by Grantham was only playing dead. “Hey, this guy is alive!” Hanks shouted as the insurgent went for an AK lying across his stomach.

Sojda quickly took action. “I could see him breathing. Grantham had put a bullet in his head, his brains were out on the floor. As he went for the AK, I grabbed his bayonet and put it right in the center of his chest and twisted it. A normal person would have died with a bullet hole in their head and multiple stab wounds, but he wouldn’t die. I figured he was meant to live, so I pulled the weapons away from him and left.” Drugs had given him superhuman ability to absorb punishment. Nearly all of the mujahideen 1st Platoon would encounter during the battle were high on a cocktail of drugs.

Shortly after both squads “re-cleared” the houses, a crack rang out and bullets ricocheted off the street. A sniper had opened up on 3rd Squad.

A hundred meters behind Sergeant Conner’s squad, Staff Sergeant Slay’s tracks, which were parked at the T-intersection, came under sniper fire. Lieutenant Sommers recalled what happened next: “The turret on his track was having problems, so he courageously got out of the track to spot and direct the fire on the sniper. We shot enough stuff there that we knocked out the sniper. As Slay was directing the fire, the enemy dropped about fifteen mortars on his position.”

The mortar was one of the mujahideen’s favorite weapons. With months to prepare their defenses, the terrorists had pre-targeted many positions in the city for mortar strikes. Mortar tubes concealed in underground bunkers were largely undetectable by Dragon Eyes and other airborne surveillance assets. All the mujahideen had to do was adjust their mortar tubes into the pre-marked positions and drop mortar shells into the tubes. The T-intersection had been pretargeted and was now a deathtrap—and the area was occupied by the tracks, their crewmen, 1st Squad, and many of Lima Company’s support troops.

Lance Corporal Donald Baker had just finished fastening his flak vest when, all of a sudden, he heard incoming shells. “I heard the whistling and I saw the first explosion. Staff Sergeant Slay got thrown back and blood splattered on the wall behind him. I saw Grantham drop and roll behind Corporal Henning. Corporal Henning got hit by shrapnel and said, ‘Ah!’ Next, a piece of shrapnel hit off the side of the door and comes into the track. I saw a spark and the shrapnel hit me in the mouth. It felt like someone just socked me as hard as they could in the mouth, and I just fell over on the side of the track.”

“The mortar landed right between his feet, I got over there and he’s got holes all over his body. Stuff hanging out places, blood was just pouring out of his body. His eyes are going in the back of his head and he is choking on his own blood. At that point, I realized I couldn’t do anything for this guy. I watched Staff Sergeant Slay die for about thirty seconds.”

Corporal Henning, a member of Baker’s machine gun team, remembers thinking, “It should have been me, not him.” In Henning’s view, “We are Marines, we work together, live together. When you lose somebody, it’s like losing a part of yourself.”

Baker’s attention quickly shifted to his fellow machine gunner, who was badly wounded. Despite his wound, the fellow Marine had the presence of mind to remember that security came before treating the wounded.

“L-16, L-33, L-37, L-41 ! . . .” Several “zap numbers” were called over the radio. Each Marine is assigned a zap number before the battle in case he is wounded or killed. The numbers tell the corpsmen what blood types they’ll need.

Sergeant Conner’s Marines weathered the mortar attack inside the house they were clearing. “We looked at each other and shook our heads. Everyone became a chain smoker as that steel rain came down.”

RPGs, bullets, and mortars seemed to be exploding everywhere. In the midst of the storm of steel, Baker remembers 1st Platoon corpsman Doc Tovar braving the fire to come to the aid of the wounded Marine. “Doc Tovar rips open one of his trouser legs and there is a huge hole in his leg. Doc T patches that up and leaves.” The Marine had serious shrapnel wounds all over his body. Fearing that he was going to die, Baker was yelling at him to stay awake. “I thought he was going to die. What reassured me a little bit was that he was able to go, ‘Oh God, this sucks,’ stuff like that. It gave me a little hope that he was going to make it.”

Running as quickly as they could through the flying shrapnel, Baker and Henning carried the Marine to the medevac Humvee. On the way, they saw that almost every man in 1st Squad had been wounded.

One of the few members of 1st Squad to escape the fusillade was Lance Corporal Benjamin Bryan, who provided first aid to the wounded while laying down suppressive fire with his M16. Over the thunder of RPG explosions, Bryan started issuing orders. “Set up a casualty collection point over there,” Bryan barked to several Marines.

“Vales, help Grantham.” Lance Corporal Christopher Vales, acting squad medic, scurried over to Sergeant Grantham, but Grantham refused medical attention.

Dodging mortar blasts, Vales ran to Lance Corporal, who had a large piece of razor-sharp shrapnel sticking through his throat protector into his neck. “No! No!” screamed Vales, as he swatted the Marine’s hands away from the shrapnel in his throat.

“It was literally a millimeter from his carotid artery. He’s sitting there pulling it out until I grabbed and pulled the shrapnel out of his throat.”

“His leg was bleeding. I helped get him down and he ended up having a sucking chest wound. One of the snipers, Scott, didn’t have skin from his elbow to [his] thumb, bleeding bad.”

“Meanwhile,” recalls Baker, “Grantham is hopping around. He doesn’t have a Kevlar on, and he’s walking around not knowing where everyone is at. Confused. Corporal Henning helps him find other people.” Grantham refused to get medical attention for himself until he located the men in his squad.

Once the mortar shells stopped falling, the survivors and walking wounded helped move the incapacitated Marines into Humvees, where they could be transported to the battalion aid station.

Vales and Lance Corporal Giovanni Perez had to place Staff Sergeant Slay into a body bag. “Perez was having a hard time putting his body into the bag. So I grabbed him under his arms, I had his blood all over me. I was freaking out, I never saw a dead Marine before. It looked like something out of the movies. His eyes were open, mouth was open, blood was everywhere.”

Gunny Hackett acknowledged that the attack was devastating. “We pretty much lost the entire squad, about twelve men, right there from the mortar attack. That was pretty heart-wrenching. I remember saying to myself, ‘Okay, we are down to just two squads and it’s only the first day, but we are still going to be able to do this.’”

As the sun set on Fallujah, 1st Platoon cleared the final buildings near Phase Line Isaac. What was left of 1st Squad joined Sergeant Conner’s 3rd Squad and Kyle’s 2nd Squad, holed up in a stone house with a walled courtyard. Conner’s men huddled on the bare stone floor, strewn with rubble and glass. It was bitter cold. Grimy blankets and quilted bedrolls, slept in by the mujahideen the night before, were scooped up and used by anyone lucky enough to find one. Everyone’s nerves were on edge, and chain-smoking Marines soon filled the room with smoke. Only Bryan had any American cigarettes left. Everyone else resorted to scrounging abandoned buildings for smokes. Pine cigarettes from Korea seemed ubiquitous in the city.

“Everyone was petrified. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What the hell are these guys up to?’” recalls Lance Corporal Dustin Turpen. According to Sommers, “We thought it was coming from the nearby mosque.” Then the Marines heard a familiar tune:

. . . Let the bodies hit the floor
Push me again
This is the end
Skin against skin, blood and bone
You’re all by yourself but you’re not alone
You wanted in now you’re not alone
You wanted in now you’re alone
You wanted in now you’re here
Driven by hate consumed by fear
Let the bodies hit the floor.

The song was “Bodies” by the rock group Drowning Pool. Now the odd noise made sense. It was not the terrorists, but a Coalition Psychological Operations team at work. The cats and babies were recordings from a movie soundtrack, and the maniacal laugh came from the movie Predator.

The Marines in Conner’s squad spent the night talking about Wood and Larson. “Is it normal for a girl to have a seven inch clit?” roared Hanks, quoting Larson’s infamous icebreaker.

Hanks pulled out a CD containing songs of the Vietnam War. While the songs of Nam played in the background, barely audible over the RPGs and mortars, 1st Platoon’s “go firm” house was peppered all night long by RPG rockets and small arms fire. Baker recalled, “Firefights all over the place, machine gun fire. Explosions. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Where the fuck am I?’”