Swack! The convoy immediately stopped. Two of the Iraqi drivers had managed to smash their Leylands into each other—not an auspicious beginning. We continued out the east gate. As we rolled into the town Nuts shouted, “Gents, the streets are clearing up ahead and people are running the hell out of the way, I recommend you get in the truck and standby.” All Marines know that you are screwed when the locals evacuate a bustling area because it is a sure sign an insurgent attack is imminent.
Before we knew it we were taking incoming sporadic machine-gun fire from insurgents flying across the intersection. The insurgents had planned an ambush, but our slow departure meant we did not advance into their ambush at the time they desired. If we had progressed at our original pace, we would have been in the teeth of the ambush. We wanted to hunt insurgents, but we needed to establish a patrol base at the WTF before dark. We would fight the insurgents in the future, but it would be on our own terms and not theirs.
We snaked the convoy around, headed away from the insurgent ambush and toward the west exit, which led us into the outskirts of town. Going out the western gate created another problem. We had never been on this route before and were entirely at the mercy of the Iraqis’ navigation skills to get us back to the center of town. Relying on Iraqis for anything besides a cup of chai (tea) with heavy sugar was rarely solid advice. To make matters worse we were being led by the infamous Mulazim Jaffer, a young second lieutenant Iraqi army officer who was a few 155-mm artillery rounds short of an IED.
Moving at fifty miles per hour along a single lane dirt road, the only thing I could see was the road directly in front of me, dust clouds the size of a tornado coming off Jaffer’s Humvee, and perplexed townsfolk in my peripheral vision. I yelled to Major Gaines, “Sir, you think we should try to get him to slow down before he gets in a serious wreck and this operation is over before it even begins?” With all the bustling on the road, and the radio traffic in both Arabic and English flowing through the cab of the Humvee, he could only respond, “Jamal, I can’t hear you.”
Jaffer somehow had managed to snake through the outskirt village and find his way back to the main road through town, Route Boardwalk. Just as I felt relief as a result of our seemingly good luck, I witnessed Jaffer’s lead Humvee come screaming around a blind corner onto Route Boardwalk. As soon as his Humvee banked a left onto Boardwalk, a chubby Iraqi man driving a red motorcycle came flying along the left side of the Humvee. The next thing I saw was a vintage 200-cc motorcycle violently careen off the road and a short fat Iraqi go flying through the air spinning around in a helicopter-like fashion.
The motorcycle crashed fifty feet away along a house fence and stalled. The Iraqi man was not so lucky. While flying at twenty feet in the air, the man had blasted into the nearest telephone post at twenty-five miles an hour, bounced off the post, helicoptered a few more times in the opposite direction, and crashed to the ground. For a few seconds I could not see the man, as the dust cloud from his landing engulfed him completely.
“Holy shit, Sir, that guy has to be dead!” Major Gaines was equally shell shocked at what we had witnessed. We both took a deep breath. We were in the middle of the hottest neighborhood in Haditha, we had just killed a local, and we were traveling in a large convoy with limited firepower. What in the hell were we going to do? Gaines made a quick decision. “Jamal,” he said, “pull up on the south side of the road to block traffic, the Iraqis will block north, and the rest of the convoy will have to standby. We’ll give Doc five minutes to assess the situation.”
“Roger, Sir, makes sense to me,” I responded as I smashed the accelerator to block the road, hoping to stop any traffic from entering the scene. “Doc, get your ass out there and tell us what we need to do next,” Major Gaines commanded. “Roger, Sir,” Doc replied. “If this guy is dead, or not about to die, we are going to get the hell out of here. If he is about to die, we need to abort the mission and bring him back to the dam so they can perform surgery on him.”
The situation was getting tense. It seemed everyone in the town had come out to see what was going on. By my count twenty-five locals were on the scene and the crowd was multiplying by the second. We were in the worst possible situation imaginable. Furious Sunni Iraqis surrounded us and were ready for vengeance.
My heart was racing for Doc. That poor bastard was out there trying to explain to the Iraqis through an interpreter that it was an accident and that the Iraqi soldiers were sorry for causing the man harm. It seemed as though he was out there for an hour, but in just a few minutes, he returned. “I don’t know if that guy has Allah on his side or what,” Doc said, “but he is alive with some minor lacerations and perhaps a broken rib. He is good to go. I think his fat ass actually saved his life. Let’s get the fuck out of here before we end up on the receiving end of an RPG!” We reformed the convoy and continued north along Route Boardwalk until we reached the WTF a few miles ahead.
As we pulled away from the scene of the crime, I felt terrible for the man and for all the people in the village. Tribal members and family were rushing to the man’s aid. Women were outraged, screaming at the convoy as we left them in our dust trails. It was a disaster. Our situation had been so precarious that we had no option but to leave, and while I felt bad about leaving the man there, our actions kept the insurgents from killing a platoon’s worth of jundi sitting in the back of Leylands. We lost some hearts and minds this go-round. But now was not the time to dwell on this, as we were quickly approaching the WTF.
Establishing a Patrol Base
Recent HUMINT (human intelligence) reports had concluded that the WTF was a base of operations for insurgent activity. We went in expecting the worst but hoping for the best. We approached the main gate to the facility, which was surrounded by a six-foot-high wire fence that had not been serviced since the rule of Saddam Hussein.
The WTF was a small facility the size of two football fields placed side by side. From a tactical military perspective it was perfect as a defendable patrol base. The patrol base had a five-hundred-meter buffer that separated the compound’s fences and the nearest residential areas, multiple exit points that allowed options from which to commence patrols, and a convenient location alongside Route Boardwalk that allowed us to maintain visibility on IED activity at all times.
We established initial security of the compound without incident. As the Marines secured the boundary, the jundi searched all the residential homes and informed the residents that we would be taking over their lives for the next few days. Amazingly, the residents of the facility were friendly to the jundi, inviting them to live in their homes for the course of the operation. I was not sure what to make of this kindness. It might have been old-fashioned Arab hospitality or it might have been the local’s fear of telling a group of sixty-two soldiers toting machine guns “No.”
By the time the jundi had settled into their basic defensive positions it was nearly 2100. We had one problem. In our efforts to ensure that the patrol base was established and the Iraqis were settled, we had forgotten to settle ourselves. “Jamal,” Major Gaines said, “take Doc and find us a place to set up a COC.”
Doc and I stumbled in the dark and tried to find a building that the Iraqis had not yet occupied. We decided to try the generator building in the center of camp. As we entered the building the drumming noise of generators running at full steam and the rusty taste of oil and gasoline in the air greeted us. Doc and I quickly realized that the fact the jundi had avoided the generator building should have been a warning. Nonetheless we wandered through the building in complete darkness. I felt that at any moment an insurgent would jump around the corner and stab me in the neck or blow out my brains. The building was nasty—plain and simple—but it was late and we needed to kick a patrol out early the next morning. The generator building was our only option until we could get a better assessment of the compound the next morning.