Another Crazy War Story VI: Combat
Sun Nov 18, 2007 at 10:33:09 PM PDT
At the end of the last diary in the series, I promised to tell a tale about how filthy war is. I will get to that, as it's a pretty funny story. But today, I want to jump about a year ahead. I told all of you how bad I was in the band, as my whole enlistment in the program was predicated on a lie, and after I returned from Iraq the first time, I had no more chops on the clarinet. I managed to move, by sheer luck, to Combat Camera. While being in the Marine Corps was still a bad fit for me, being a videographer was not.
So, when I left for my second tour I left with an entirely different unit. Combat Cameramen are still POG's (person other than grunt), but they end up attached to the real thing. I was surrounded by crude, foulmouthed, angry grunts. While I saw no combat with the band, I saw more than I wanted to with these guys.
I ended up with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. They were the crown jewel of the 7th Marine Regiment. At first they were stationed at the Haditha Dam, but about a month into my attachment with them they pulled up stakes and headed for Fallujah. Now, this wasn't the Battle of Fallujah that everybody remembers. I'm talking about the forgotten action on Fallujah that started the day after Easter, 2004. Bush sent us in to clean out the city, his poll numbers started to tank, and he pulled us back. We made it two blocks in. After Bush won re-election in November he sent the Marines in again, and that's when they did the job. We called our action Operation Just Kidding.
Two weeks later I was on patrol with Kilo company. It was April 15th. I remember few dates from either of my deployments, but I remember that one because I woke up and thought, with envy, about how people's biggest worry back home was filing their taxes on time.
The mission when patrolling Iraq is simple; put a big fucking target on your back and wait for the enemy to find you. That day's patrol was no different. All we did was drive around. Grunts load up in big 7-ton trucks, appropriatley called "seven tons." They carry about twenty Marines in the back of these things, and they have little to no armor. That day we had about three of them in a convoy. I rode around in the tail vehicle, among Lance Corporal McCallum's squad.
Squad leader is a Corporal level position, so that should give you an idea about what kind of Marine McCallum was. He was a hard guy, with a wife and a little girl. I've told his story before, in my very first recommended diary. McCallum was mutilating his forearms. He put cigarette butts out on them. He had three burns and a cross carved into his left arm. Those were for friends he'd lost. The five burns on his right arm were for people he'd killed. It was a grotesque cemetery, and I completely understood it. I pray for McCallum, in that non-secular way that I do, to this day, because I know he's one of the broken. I just hope he got the help he needed.
Anyway, the convoy had stopped, as convoys always do for no reason. We sat there for an hour, just asking to get attacked. Sure enough, across an irrigation canal about 200 yards away, we saw a white sedan pull up, drop people off, drive away, and they return with more people. McCallum knew they were setting an ambush, and I remember him talking to the platoon sergeant about it. I also remember the moron boot in charge of the platoon, 2nd Lieutenant Broadstreet. Broadstreet, as his men would tell me, was an asshole. He graduated from Havard Law, and subsequently joined the Marines in order to strengthen his political resume. The kind of putz who's probably still firmly in Bush's camp.
We begged this guy to let us attack, because we saw the ambush we were riding into. McCallum was especially adamant, as the tail vehicle is always the one that gets hit. Broadstreet says no. Eventually we begin to drive away.
And sure enough an RPG round comes flying over our heads. We hadn't gone one hundred feet. Everybody on the side of the truck facing the enemy opens up. It was the first time I ever heard M16's go off without earplugs. The sound was deafening.
The first volley affords us enough time to jump off of the truck. I climbed over the sidewall and down around the back. I took a knee and fired three shots wildly, giving others some covering fire.
The road we were on was moderately elevated, so we use the hill as cover. We trade rounds with our enemy for about forty-five minutes. Incoming bullets make quite possibly the scariest sounds I've ever heard. They break the sound barrier, so you hear them as they pass by, like a whip-crack. It's the sound of frission. The enemy got another RPG off as well, but it burst in the air about thirty feet over our head.
Eventually we called in for air support, and some planes dropped some bombs on the bastards. No one on our side was hurt, except for one guy. In the craziness, a humvee driver accidentally ran over his ankle. Miraculously, he didn't sustain serious injury. He wasn't even limping at the end of the die. We all cheated death one more time. McCallum was proud of his boys.
But, the experience made us paranoid, and when we drove away I'm pretty sure we accidentally killed some innocent people. Come back next time, and I'll tell you about it.
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