The convoy ground to a halt. I clamored down off the back of the seven-ton truck. With my M-16 rifle tucked into my shoulder, I peered around the corner of the truck’s tailgate into the darkness.

Lightning flashed through the drizzle silhouetting the slow rise of Fallujah’s south bridge, the reed-choked Euphrates and the city’s grim skyline beyond. Several palm trees blazed near the river a hundred yards away, victims of poorly aimed mortars meant for us. The smell of pregnant earth and burnt metal hung heavy in the air. The noise went far beyond my capacity to hear. Deep concussions, from bombs pounding targets less than 800 yards from my position, rattled my organs and teeth. Tucked between the cacophony of explosions and machine gun fire, defiant Arabic calls for Jihad blasted from the city’s mosque minaret loudspeakers and echoed across the murky water. I raised my night vision goggles to my eyes. Heat signatures from hot flying metal—tracers, shrapnel, and rockets—danced wildly across the horizon in eerie green relief.

A few seconds passed as I stared into the abyss, slack jawed, trying to process what my overloaded senses were telling me. I then took a deep breath, swallowed the bile in my throat, and moved forward towards the chaos.

I crept up the parked convoy of military tractor trailers. Armored D-7 bulldozers—30-ton monstrosities as tall as semi-trucks—snorted and jerked on their wet trailer beds like bulls in the chute. The angled armor protecting the operator’s cabs resembled Darth Vader’s helmet. The bulldozers’ ground guides—experienced operators themselves—used hand signals and radios to communicate with the drivers, whose only images of the outside world came through the two dimensional tunnel of night vision goggles and the dozer’s tiny bulletproof glass windows. At the front of the convoy I found Lieutenant Robert Gerbracht, the officer in charge of my company’s engineer detachment.

“Sir, we are moving up toward the south bridge to liaison with the Wolfpack’s army guys, and then we will start to dig their vehicles’ fighting positions,” Gerbracht said. He was tall, confident, and had an acid wit that melted metal. I told him that I was taking the convoy back to get the fourth bulldozer. We grinned and shook hands. He then jumped into his makeshift-armored Humvee and drove off, looking to liaison with elements of Task Force Wolfpack near the bridge.

The last bulldozer crept by on my left, tracks biting into the pavement as it slowly crawled toward the south bridge. Corporal Joshua Palmer—the dozer’s ground guide—walked snugly behind it for cover. He turned and waved. I waved back, watching them march into the soggy night—into hell unleashed. 

It was 0300 November 8, 2004. I was a 29-year-old captain in the Marine Reserves serving my second tour of duty in Iraq. My company of reserve engineers and truck drivers found ourselves fighting with Taskforce Wolf Pack in the opening salvo of the Second Battle of Fallujah—America’s largest urban military campaign since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam.

The battle’s moments became life lessons—painful and priceless. I learned that the battlefield is dynamic and unforgiving, where the necessity of action is clouded by incomplete information. I learned that combat is an ugly game of chance often measured in millimeters. And when the moments were counted and weighed, I realized that my countrymen were disconnected from the war we had created. America had become numbed—by a powerful social Novocain—to the war’s costs and consequences, deaf to the hard lessons learned by those sent to fight it.

The meat eaters rehearse

On November 3, 2004, Taskforce Wolfpack conducted a command rehearsal of their battle plan at Camp Habbaniyah, their temporary headquarters 11 miles west of Fallujah. Fifty plus warriors gathered around a 20 x 20 foot terrain model. It was a functional modern art masterpiece. Constructed from the materials on hand—bricks, broken glass, wire, and scrounged spray paint—it depicted Fallujah and its surroundings in striking three-dimensional detail. The cavernous room was battle-scarred, walls punched through and partially collapsed by kinetic energy from a forgotten fight. The pungent odor of mold, urine, and stale cigars hung heavy. The entire building was in its death rattle, already half reclaimed by the lush vegetation of the Euphrates Valley.

Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Steven Dinauer, the commanding officer of Task Force Wolfpack, rose from his canvas stool and took center stage. He was tall, erudite, and smoking a fat cigar. All eyeballs fixed on him. Then, like a maestro beginning his opus, he dramatically pointed a whittled stick at the terrain model and said, “Gentlemen, I want this attack to be spectacular. Show me what you got.”

The officers of Task Force Wolfpack came forward—one by one—and articulated their battle plans as if assembling a deadly jigsaw puzzle. Their confidence was contagious. Their mission was to seize the Fallujah peninsula—a suburban crook in the Euphrates River southwest of the city, about two kilometers wide and three kilometers long. They would then become an anvil, blocking any avenue of escape for insurgents attempting to flee the city while the main attack—the hammer—pounded and squeezed Fallujah from the north. With more than 1,200 troops equipped with tanks, armored personnel carriers, riverine assault boats, and an on-call air force at their disposal, Task Force Wolfpack had enough firepower to topple a banana republic.

They were meat eaters—the tip of the spear.

My company was usually located somewhere on the spear’s shaft. I was the executive officer of Combat Service Support Company 113, a 200-man outfit of logisticians, engineers, and maintenance specialists. We were mostly reservists, cobbled together from nooks and crannies across America—some called up just ten days before deploying to Iraq. When we were assigned to support Task Force Wolfpack for the coming battle, it was like a minor leaguer getting called up to play in the World Series of War. 

I told Dinauer in detail how we would contribute to the fight—delivering logistics, maintenance, and engineering support wherever and whenever they needed it. Dinauer nodded in approval and added, “Good to go, Captain. Welcome aboard. You and your Marines are now part of the Wolfpack.”

A voice with a high-pitched, South Philly accent quietly spoke behind me. “Hey, Captain. Did you hear that? We’re now part of the Wolfpack. That’s pretty cool.”

I smiled at Master Sergeant Nicolas Formosa’s comment. At 55, Formosa was our company’s senior motor transport enlisted man and a bona fide Marine Corps tribal elder. He was short, weather worn, South Philadelphia, and Sicilian to the bone. Drafted during Vietnam, he spent his tour there running convoys through the jungle. Understated and wily, Formosa had more combat experience than most of the men in the room.

After the rehearsal concluded, Formosa spotted the company commander of the riverine assault boats, Captain Daniel Wittnam. A slim man with a quick smile, he was poring over a laminated map as the crowd of officers buzzed around him. Formosa wandered over and said, “Young man, the last time I saw somebody plotting a riverine map like that, he was about to head up the Perfume River in ’Nam.”

Wittnam flashed a puzzled smile, probably wondering who let the old man out of the VFW Hall.

The River Styx

As dawn broke to gray drizzle, I found myself rolling up Route Boston with our fourth dozer, heading back into the battle. Route Boston—the military’s code name for a nameless two-lane road running north onto the Fallujah peninsula—had been designated the Wolfpack’s main supply route. Since dropping off the engineering team three hours before, our reality had changed in two terrible ways. One of the bulldozers was in the river. Two of my Marines were dead.

After offloading in the darkness a few hours earlier, the engineer detachment advanced 400 yards east to the base of Fallujah’s four-lane South Bridge. Time was of the essence. Lieutenant Gerbracht met with a sergeant from one of the Wolfpack’s attached platoons of Army Bradley Fighting Vehicles—vehicles that resemble tanks but carry infantry soldiers in their back halves. The sergeant needed Gerbracht’s team to begin digging fighting positions for his company’s Bradleys along the riverbank—in which their hulls are burrowed underground, leaving only the heavily armored turret exposed to enemy fire. Gerbracht immediately sent a two man dozer team, Corporal Josh Palmer and Lance Corporal Jeffery Lam, to dig the first position 100 yards south of the bridge. Lam drove as Palmer directed from the ground. They followed the Army sergeant through a dense palm grove and emerged at the riverbank. The sergeant told them that was the spot, wished them luck, and left them to their mission. It was the last time anyone saw Jeffery Lam and Josh Palmer alive.

No one knows exactly what happened on that riverbank, but two detailed investigations later sketched the picture.

The terrain and chaos greatly added to the difficulty of their mission. Explosions and lightning continued to light up the night, degrading their night vision goggle’s effectiveness. Ten yards offshore, a tall carpet of reeds choked the river, making the riverbank deceptively disappear in the darkness. A Bradley only 50 yards from their position hammered targets of opportunity across the water at will. The noise must have been deafening, making communication through their two-way radios very difficult.

In the cacophony of the battle, Lam’s dozer drove right off the riverbank and into the Euphrates. The engine continued to churn as the dozer sank, the paddle-like tracks propelling the dozer forward until water flooded the air filter. It settled on the muddy bottom upright about eight feet from the bank, the armored cab half submerged. The sudden shock of cold water rushing into the pitch black cab must have caused Lam to panic. Instinctively—with his flak jacket, armor plates, and helmet on—he crawled through the cab’s open hatch and into the water.  

Meanwhile, on the shore, Palmer took off his flak jacket and helmet, slung his M-16, and jumped into the water. He made his way to the submerged dozer’s cab and pulled himself onto it. His fear must have been unimaginable: alone, in enemy territory, his Marine missing under the black water. At that point, Palmer made a fateful decision. Out of responsibility, desperation, and fraternal love, he laid his M-16 on the dozer’s cab and jumped into icy blackness after Lam. 

Neither Marine came up. The last thing they felt was blind panic as the Euphrates's frigid water clogged their lungs.

* * *

After radio communications had failed, Lieutenant Gerbracht and Staff Sergeant Mark Case set off on foot into the night to find Palmer and Lam. Dread gripped them when they arrived at the riverbank. Fresh dozer tracks led to the water’s edge. The top half of the dozer’s cab rose three feet out of the water. No Marines were within sight. Immediately, they feared Palmer and Lam had been kidnapped.

Gerbracht and Case ran back to their detachment position near the South Bridge. They radioed the situation to Taskforce Wolfpack, got their Marines organized, and drove their humvee back to the riverbank. They expected to kick in doors and search the neighborhood.

A hazy light was beginning to shine through the city’s rising smoke and showed clues to what had happened. There was an M-16 on the dozer cab. There was a helmet and flak jacket placed on the ground a few feet from the riverbank. The Marines began to piece it together. Case knew the water needed to be searched. “Rodriguez, you go.”

Lance Corporal Joshua Rodriguez removed his flak jacket, helmet, and blouse to reveal his portly frame. Rodriguez had often been kidded by his platoon for being overweight. The ribbing ended forevermore as he swallowed his fear and slid into the chilly water.

The water’s depth abruptly went to about six feet within two feet of the bank. Rodriguez shivered as it slipped past his waist. He could barely feel the spongy bottom with his feet, and a yard out it disappeared entirely. He swam to the dozer and began searching around its edges, feeling with his feet. After a minute of searching, he felt something. Rodriguez froze, looked up at Case, and said, “Staff Sergeant?” It was Palmer.

The reality was devastating for the marines. Palmer—a 24-year-old from Blandinsville, Illinois—had been well liked and considered a true leader by his peers. He was a man’s man, but also—as his published poetry attested—capable of deep sensibilities and personal reflection. Palmer had served four years on active duty and fought in the First Battle of Fallujah in April 2004. During that battle six months earlier, another dozer had fallen into the Euphrates. While in an unarmored dozer and under enemy fire during the battle in April, he attempted to pull the submerged dozer out of the river. It was deeply personal for him. He had gone to high school with the Marine who died when that bulldozer sank. For his heroism, he was awarded a Navy Achievement Medal with a Combat V.  Palmer left the Marines when his contract ended early in the summer of 2004, but he soon grew restless and bored. He missed the camaraderie. He also felt there was something more he needed to do in Iraq. So he called up a local reserve unit and volunteered to go back.

Rodriguez found Lam about five feet away from the dozer. He had all his gear on—flak jacket, Kevlar shoulder pads, and load bearing vest with canteens and ammo. Lam was from New York City, the son of Chinese immigrants. He was soft spoken and quiet, but he possessed a contagious laugh that could spread like a prairie fire. Involuntarily activated from the reserves, he joined our company just two weeks before shipping out to Iraq. The weekend before deploying to Iraq, while home in New York on a four-day pass, he watched his 20-year-old wife give birth to their daughter. He got to hold his baby for only a few minutes before racing to the airport to catch his plane back to California.

Now both Marines were dead and blue, lying on the muddy riverbank in the gray dawn. Their futures—the limitless possibilities of what could have been—permanently snuffed out.

The Marines placed the bodies inside two Gortex sleeping bag shells. Sergeant Chet Bennetts helped carry Lam and Palmer to the back hatch of a waiting Bradley Fighting Vehicle to begin their long journey back home. He was crushed. Over the months in Iraq, Palmer had become one of his best friends. Bennetts placed Lam inside the back hatch of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle first. But then he faced a dilemma that broke his heart. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get Palmer’s cold, rigor mortis legs to fit into the Bradley to close the hatch. They just wouldn’t bend. He pushed hard on Palmer’s legs, straining to bend them. He then heard a sickening pop. Weary with grief, he closed the hatch.

* * *

My convoy stopped just before a traffic circle where Route Boston intersected Route Michigan, about 600 yards from the submerged dozer. The battle across the river was at full tilt, with jihadists still railing against the “infidels” from mosque loudspeakers. I climbed down from the back of a seven-ton truck and saw soldiers transferring two bodies, blue and stiff, from sleeping bag liners into body bags.

Captain Matthew Good grabbed my arm as I started walking towards them. Captain Good was the Headquarters and Service Company Commander for Taskforce Wolfpack. He was the caricature of a Marine—in the best sense. While built solid like a linebacker, his square jaw and soft eyes telegraphed an earnestness only matched by his warrior spirit.

“Chris, there is no need for you to go over there.”

“But Matt, I have to….”

“We got this,” Good said with finality. “I am going to have my guys run them to mortuary affairs at Taqaddum.”

I then saw Lieutenant Gerbracht. He looked like I felt—tired, full of anger, no one to take it out on. He told me what little he knew. He also told me that Rodriguez had fished both Marines out of the river and asked if I could take Rodriguez back to the Rock Ammunition Supply Point (Rock ASP)—Taskforce Wolfpack’s base of operations for the battle, six miles south of the Fallujah peninsula. I agreed and we shook hands. He jumped into his humvee and took off for the river bank to continue his mission.

I had hitchhiked onto the Fallujah peninsula on one of Captain Good’s convoys. The convoy had split up to run various errands all over the peninsula, most of them aimed at flushing out insurgents and delivering supplies. Rodriguez and I tagged along with the convoy’s rapid reaction team—a squad of Captain Good’s marines in a seven ton truck, extra muscle ready to respond to a variety of threats.

While waiting for Captain Good to return, we took up a defensive position along Route Boston, not far from the traffic circle, lying prone in front of some small dirt piles a few yards east of the road. We were alert, facing what we perceived as our immediate threat—the smoldering city of Fallujah across the river.

Rodriguez was on my right, about ten yards away. A lance corporal from the rapid reaction squad—a mechanic by trade, but infantry by default—was about five yards to my left. After a half hour of lying there, the battle quieted down. Bombing stopped. Automatic weapon fire waned.

The dirt pile was almost comfortable. It fed my fatigue. The stock of my M-16 became a prop for my helmet, alleviating my stiff neck. My eyelids started to get unbearably heavy as I hovered on the twilight of consciousness.

Suddenly, I heard a whiz go over my head, the whistling of a bumblebee. Puzzled, I looked at the Marine five yards to my left. He said, “Sir, did someone just shoot at us?”

“I don’t know,” I said, scanning the area in front of us frantically, looking for anything unusual. Nothing. Then I heard another whistling bumblebee.

“Holy shit! It came so close it made my cammies flutter!” the Marine to my left exclaimed. His widened eyes telegraphed panic.

“I think it’s coming from behind us!” Rodriguez said.

The words had barely passed Rodriguez’s lips when a bullet passed by my right ear, striking the ground in front of me, missing my head by about a foot.

“Take cover!” I yelled. “They are shooting at us from behind.”  I got up and sprinted about 20 yards to my left, ducking behind a large pile of gravel. I looked up and saw the rest of the squad running for the seven-ton truck.

Cursing, I ran across the exposed street to the truck, praying to God I made it before the sniper got a bead on me. As the last one up the ladder, I could hear rounds hitting the truck bed’s armor plates, ringing them like a tuning fork. We all raised our M-16s and scanned the building tops to the west, desperately trying to spot whoever was hunting us.

The Marine next to me said, “There he is!”

“Where is he?” I said.

“On top of that building!”

I followed the trajectory of the Marine’s rifle and saw a silhouette on a flat second-story rooftop about 300 yards distant. He popped up and down a couple of times and looked as though he was carrying something, but I couldn’t be sure. Then I saw a muzzle flash.

“Did you see that? Shoot him!” someone said. A shot rang out. Then my own rifle joined with everyone else’s for about ten seconds, blasting away at the insurgent’s position. The insurgent dropped down and disappeared, but I couldn’t tell if he was ducking or got hit. A hot piece of brass then hit me on the cheek. Smarting, I looked away for a second and saw Captain Good running toward the truck, yelling “Cease fire!”

I then saw why. A couple of hundred yards away, an Army fuel truck was moving down a road that intersected our lane of fire.

We pointed to the sniper’s location. Good screamed at our driver to get our truck under some cover. We lurched forward, moving a hundred meters south and parked behind a building out of the sniper’s line of sight. I then saw a Light Armored Vehicle (LAV)—a nimble eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier—charge west down Route Michigan with its 25-millimeter Bushmaster cannon blazing away. I heard sickening crunches as the cannon’s shells pulverized the sniper’s mud brick building, turning it—and presumably him—into Swiss cheese.

It was the first time someone had tried to kill me. It was also the first time I had ever shot at a man. I felt no hatred or remorse. My only thought was that I wanted him dead. I looked down at my M-16—the mechanical extension of my will—and realized that I had become a killer.

An island in an ocean of sand

Three hours later, I lay on a dirt pile with my M-16 tucked into my shoulder. The safety was off. My finger tickled the trigger. Three hundred yards away, an elevated train trestle crossed Route Boston via an overpass. An access road ran parallel, next to the train tracks, and intersected with Route Boston at the base of the train overpass above the highway.

I followed three civilian cars through my weapon’s sites as they cruised down the access road and came to a screeching stop at the junction. My heart raced. I watched several young men get out of the cars and hold an impromptu conference. Their body language broadcast the nervous panic farm animals display before an earthquake hits. As far as I could see, they weren’t doing anything to get themselves shot—yet. None carried arms or cell phones—also considered a weapon under the battle’s rules of engagement—nor were their actions hostile. But they were military age males, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in my gut I wanted to pull the trigger.

Our 14-man team was alone, awash in chaos as the battle just two miles north vomited panicked civilians and insurgents at us. Rodriguez and I were still tagging along with Captain Good’s marines, trying to get back to the Rock ASP. Good was chasing down insurgents a few miles north of our position. Our single seven-ton truck had pulled 50 yards off of Route Boston into the front yard of a ramshackle farmhouse. We dismounted, spreading out into a loose circle around the truck, weapons trained outward. Rodriguez lay prone—covered with slime and mud—behind a small dirt pile next to mine. He shivered quietly. Like me, he was making countless decisions—second to second—whether he was going to start pulling his M-16 trigger. 

The farmhouse was a mud brick, single-story shack. Two kids peered out the front door, mildly curious about the squatters camping in their front yard. Their mother came to the door, gave us a cold look, and took the children back inside. A medium-sized mutt snarled and snapped only five yards away from the Marine closest to the house.

“I am going to shoot this dog!” the Marine nervously blurted out.

“Don’t shoot the fucking dog unless he attacks you.” I said. I dreaded the unintended repercussions that could follow such a thing—the mongrel’s angry owner confronting us or grief-stricken kids running out of the house.  It would only go downhill from there. 

The Iraqi men got back into their cars and hesitatingly turned south onto Route Boston, heading for us. They crept along until they saw our truck and its turret mounted 240G machine gun pointed directly at then. They stopped dead in the two lane road, paralyzed, not knowing what to do. I imagined their eyes as round as saucers.

“If they turn off of the road toward us, light them up,” I said.

A couple of Marines responded with, “Roger that.”

I waved at the cars, motioning with my left hand for them to pass us and continue going south. Our rifles followed them as they slowly began to move south along the road, just waiting for them to do something stupid.

They didn’t.

This scenario was repeated dozens of times as a steady stream of cars fled the Fallujah peninsula. Most would pass underneath the railroad overpass, barreling along like a downhill skier. Then they would see us and slam on their brakes, rubber squealing. Sometimes drivers—paralyzed with fear that we would shoot them—wouldn’t move forward no matter how much we waved them on. Behind them cars would honk incessantly until they found the courage to budge.

Many refugees were on foot. Entire families walked south on Route Boston into the desert wastelands—mothers, fathers, children, teenagers, grandparents—all carrying what they could. They staggered along the road, shell-shocked, their entire world turned upside down. A few gave us the evil eye, but most ignored us. They were too absorbed with their own immediate survival. Young children skipped and pranced around their traumatized elders, their innocence sparing them from knowing the full gravity of their situation.

We lay there for hours, making a steady stream of split-second judgment calls—to kill or not to kill. Paranoia—justifiably earned—tormented us. We wondered what the refugees hid underneath their robes. AK-47s? Grenades? Explosive belts? We trusted no one.

As I stared through my rifle sights into the refugees’ eyes, dull and spent with shock, I realized there would be no winning of hearts and minds here.

Sucker punch

As Rodriguez and I struggled with Captain Good’s convoy to get back to the Rock ASP, another convoy from my company was building three traffic control points at the base of the Fallujah peninsula. The traffic control points were manned checkpoints on main roads designed to keep insurgents from infiltrating back onto the peninsula. During their day-long mission, they had survived several close calls—sniper fire, mortars, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) that came within a whisker of hitting their trucks. After building the third and final checkpoint, the convoy headed south on Route Boston, back to the Rock ASP.

Corporal Steven Reyna, the commander of the convoy’s lead vehicle, keenly watched the sides of the road. The sun had set, and the fading twilight was rapidly surrendering to the night. It was a dangerous time that demanded extra vigilance.    

Reyna was riding in the front passenger seat of what my marines derisively called a “hobo” humvee. The vehicle’s doors—quarter inch thick steel sheets generically cut to cover the head and torso of a sitting man—offered token protection for the occupants. The sides of Staff Sergeant David Ries, the humvee’s turret gunner, were completely exposed from his legs to his neck. While the Marine Corps considered these humvees “armor enhanced,” they weren’t fully “up-armored” humvees—those built from the chassis up with thick armor plating. The Marines who rode in the “hobo” humvees knew they were playing Russian roulette. Our company had repeatedly requested “up-armored” humvees beginning in September, but our urgent pleas had disappeared into the glacial bureaucracy.

Reyna strained to spot IEDs in the fading dusk. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a burned-out vehicle hulk about five feet off the left side of the road. He had seen it earlier that morning coming from the opposite direction. As they passed it, Reyna’s stomach knotted. The hairs stood up on his arm. He could feel that something wasn’t right.

Reyna heard a loud pop as a sheet of flame engulfed the humvee. He felt as if someone had sucker punched him in the back of the head. His ears began ringing at a distinct tone. The skin on his neck felt on fire.

The first coherent thought that ran through his head was, “Those sons of bitches finally got us.”

The IED—planted inside the vehicle hulk—squarely hit the left side of the humvee, spinning it 180 degrees from the direction it was traveling. Hot metal shrapnel peppered the humvee, blowing the tires and slicing though the doors like a hot knife through butter. A thick, acrid fog filled the cab. A layer of black powder residue covered everything, including the victims.

“Is everyone all right?” Reyna asked.

“I can’t feel my legs!” screamed the driver, Lance Corporal Michael Smith. Reyna looked over at him. Smith’s face was covered with lacerations. His legs were soaked with blood. He continued screaming as shock-induced panic overtook him.

“I’m OK,” a voice from behind him said through the screaming. It was Corporal Hugo Carrillo in the passenger-side back seat.

Reyna looked over his left shoulder. Staff Sergeant Ries—who normally stood in the turret in the middle of the vehicle—had fallen into the back seat and lay in a heap. Both he and Lance Corporal Thomas Zapp, sitting in the driver’s-side-rear seat, were unresponsive.

Out of his window, Reyna saw muzzle flashes and a couple of shadowy figures running in the open about 250 yards away. Still punch drunk, he rested his rifle on the door armor and fired a couple of shots. Pissed and wanting vengeance, he then opened the door and stumbled out of the humvee.

First Lieutenant Miguel Valle Portillo, the convoy commander in the humvee behind Reyna’s, witnessed the entire event. He ordered the main body of the convoy to push through the ambush. He told the convoy’s assistant commander and security element leader—Master Sergeant Formosa and Sergeant David Blecman—to stop and assist the downed vehicle.

Formosa and Blecman’s security team arrived on the scene less than a minute after the IED exploded. Incoming rounds snapped through the air as Marines scrambled out of their vehicles. Formosa saw Reyna firing from the window of the downed humvee. Blecman’s security team saw the shadowy figures running and joined in the fire. Formosa hoisted his M-79 grenade launcher—a Vietnam-era weapon resembling a sawed-off shotgun on steroids –and fired. A muffled thump flung a 40-millimeter grenade downrange. It fell short, exploding with a pop. Formosa quickly loaded another grenade and tilted the weapon higher, leading the fleeing shadows. Thump. The grenade exploded next to a building as the shadows ran behind it and disappeared. The firing stopped.

The Navy corpsman, “Doc” Timothy Brotsch, jumped out of Blecman’s humvee and ran to treat the casualties. Reyna had been extremely lucky, only getting minor shrapnel burns on his neck. Carrillo had small puncture wounds in both knees. The driver, Smith, was still screaming in agony. Shrapnel had penetrated the flimsy door, cutting up his face and slicing into his left thigh, breaking his femur. Twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Thomas Zapp—back seat, driver’s side—was still, head cocked unnaturally to the side. The blast’s concussion had killed him instantly.

Brotsch and Reyna pulled Staff Sergeant Ries out of the back seat and onto the ground. Wide eyed, he gasped for air that would not come. Frantically, they pulled off his body armor and discovered just how catastrophic his wounds were. Shrapnel had sailed over the door’s silhouette, striking Ries in the side of his abdomen as he stood in the humvee turret. It had disemboweled him. Brotsch attempted to perform CPR, but Ries died within seconds.

* * *

I stared at the radio, my gut churning as Formosa reported the names of the dead and wounded. I was at the Rock ASP. I couldn’t help them. It was beyond my control. I knew that back in America, in Vancouver, Washington, and Houston, Texas, casualty call officers would soon be knocking on doors—informing parents, wives, and children that their world had just imploded. A deep sense of helpless gripped me and didn’t let go.

“Get the dead and wounded loaded up!” Formosa commanded. With blazing headlights broadcasting their predicament to the neighborhood, he knew they needed to act quickly.

Blecman, a Harley-riding cowboy from Arizona, barked orders into the night. Dozens of Marines moved urgently, fueled by a keen sense of self-preservation. Their friends were wounded and dead, but they had no time to dwell on it. The dead were hoisted onto the bed of a seven-ton truck; the wounded were placed on another. Radios and weapons were yanked out of the blown humvee.

As a tow truck hoisted the destroyed humvee onto the trailer of an LVS—a military semi-truck—two LAV’s raced down Route Boston from the north. Captain Good had heard the radio traffic and came to help. A tail fin from an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade, fired only moments earlier, was sticking out of one of the LAV’s tires. Formosa asked Good to escort the dead and wounded to Camp Taqaddum.

“Roger that,” Good said.

As the convoy began to roll again, Formosa looked at his watch. Thirteen minutes had passed since the IED exploded. In thirteen minutes those Marines’ lives had changed forever—men lost, bravery shown, families shattered. The survivors, like Hugo Carrillo, would be left to ponder why fate had spared them. He had originally been assigned to be the humvee’s turret gunner. Earlier that morning, minutes before the convoy began to roll, Staff Sergeant Ries—ever the warrior and wanting to be in the fight—made him trade places.

Continued on page 2

Reach the reporter at chshep1302@yahoo.com.

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The Cronkite Zine showcases the coursework of individual students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.

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