‘What is that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?’
I think about that line from Full Metal Jacket a lot, but no more so than when I spend time reflecting on my first deployment to Iraq, and the city of Ramadi. Through 2004 and almost all of 2005, it really felt like life had aligned for me perfectly and landed me somewhere I had never thought I would be, yet felt like where I might belong. There was even a brief flirtation with the thought that this might actually be the career I chose to pursue, and despite what I’m about to write, that thought would persist until my second deployment. However, from November 2005 when we first arrived, until we left the subsequent year, that time in Ramadi would lead to it feeling like more of a curse at times.
It is hard to reflect on the war with uncolored lenses, given what was thought at the time versus what we would initially know. There was a sense among us all that the war was over, but at the same time, there were continuing reports of insurgency and even battles being fought in isolated areas. No battles in the variety that we had actually been trained for, no maneuver warfare, no advanced rushes to capture bridges or critical infrastructure, flanking maneuvers or blocking positions. Instead, small incidents here and there. You’d ask three guys who had just returned from deployments what their tour had been like; one would tell you he had been at peace the entire time without discharging his weapon once, the second would have one or two stories of a small engagement, and the third would look like he was just coming back from hell. For some reason, we were expecting that we would be the first or the second, but as fate would have it out for us, we would be the third.
A few days after transferring into the country, we would begin the journey from Baghdad to Ramadi. Peaceful isn’t a term that could be used for any area, they all had problems or sparks waiting to ignite, but for the most part, Ramadi seemed to be going the right way. Participating in the process, engaging in democracy, bad actors being turned over by people who wanted to do the right thing. We transited in without issue, arriving at Camp Corregidor, which would be our initial home for the deployment alongside an odd collection of different units from both the Army and the Marines, all under the command of a National Guard unit of all things. That first month, it was almost all security operations and the kind of propaganda interactions with the local populace that the Public Affairs offices love to show off.
For a little while, it was actually nice. People were friendly, the men would greet us and try to make jokes in broken English, genuine interest and inquiries about where we were from and who we were. Young boys would excitedly approach, looking for candy, or cash, or oddly sometimes cigarettes, but happy to see us. The girls would steal glances and blush when they were caught. If there was ever a place where hope seemed to be underpinning it, even while occupied, it was there. We even celebrated New Year’s Eve at the base. Which made what happened shortly after all the worse.
On January 5th, 2006, that peace would evaporate in an ear shattering explosion heard throughout the city. 56 Iraqi police recruits, and one American officer, would be killed by a suicide bomber. It changed the city instantly, a veil of fear setting in like a fast rolling bank of mist coming off the sea. A few days later it was made even worse when a wave of assassinations targeted many local politicians who had worked with us. Suddenly, all that friendliness was gone, no one wanted to be around us and we couldn’t blame them. Insurgency, and the members of Al-Qaeda helping to fuel it, had taken up residency in the town, and they had made it quite clear they had two specific targets; collaborators, and us.
I’d experience my first gunfight two days later. In an effort to reclaim some of the trust and goodwill we had been cultivating, we were deployed in certain civic areas to provide additional security for government facilities and civilian markets. The tension was thick, everybody was on edge, and as I sat in the passenger seat of a Humvee, watching the crowd while listening to our comms, it would happen. Three or four men, intermingled with a crowd of civilians, would draw weapons and fire on our vehicles. One bullet lodged directly in the frame right next to the front window, and had it not stopped there, my helmet would’ve been in for the worst stress-test of its manufactured life.
Was it terrifying? Absolutely, it is hard not to be put in a situation where your own mortality is being contested and not have some fear about the outcome or result, and as I’d come to find out down the road, the people who aren’t afraid in those moments can be dangerous for all the wrong reasons. I was well trained, though, drilled and practiced in what to do in those moments, and the response was already reflexive. Exit the vehicle, set up a protected position, and identify the target. Hard to do when there are scared and frightened civilians fleeing every which way, but as the crowd began to clear, it became obvious where they were. At which point it became inevitable what the outcome would be; numerical, training, and equipment superiority on our side, it was over in less than 30 seconds.
It was also incredibly, incredibly frustrating. In a span of seconds, one man could create a situation that had the potential to injure or kill many innocent people. This was the first time experiencing this, but it wouldn’t be the last, and it never failed to piss me off. In addition, it just served to further drive a wedge between the locals and us. A layer of distrust on our end, not knowing whether the person we were interacting with was plotting against us, prepared to act directly, or providing information to those who would. A layer of fear on the end of the locals, because now the friendliness they were once being approached with could no longer be afforded, and something as simple as a misunderstanding could end with them being arrested or potentially killed. All exacerbated by a language barrier.
What happened in the market that day would frighteningly become the norm. Day after day, unit after unit would come back with similar stories. Over the course of a few weeks, everybody experienced their first, and that would soon be coupled with the threat of mortars being dropped on the base. Imagine living in your house, feeling unsafe about the people surrounding it, only to add the extra problem that any given moment might end with an aged munition plunging through the roof and ending your life. It wouldn’t be long before the battalion suffered its first casualties, and that wasn’t something that ever became easier to deal with.
The response to this was inevitable, it was known that there were insurgents in the city, sometimes in control of entire areas, and this wouldn’t be allowed to stand. Entire neighborhoods were designated for sweeping, battalion sized maneuvers that would see us combing an area completely, going through every building, every home, and the amount of stress that could induce is unreal. Locals, in fear of retaliation, never had any valuable information, and I can’t blame them for it, but it created a tense atmosphere that could, and frequently did, boil over. It is hard to clarify for someone who has never seen it, but a hammer that size looking for nails leaves a large impact. A single shot from an insurgent could easily trigger a response of several hundred bullets through a building in a matter of seconds.
Even worse, the sweeps were largely ineffective. On good days, we might eliminate many of them, capture several more, but as soon as we were gone, more just moved back in, and the tactics being used produced more than a few new enemies as well, until an area became so overrun that we would once again have to conduct a mass sweep. It was during one of these sweeps that my platoon would suffer its first casualty. Only twenty years old, he stepped on a trip wire when entering a home and would lose his right leg, and the image of him screaming and clutching at the wound while the medic tended to him is not one I’d ever be able to forget. The first, but not the last.
The situation continued to deteriorate, and before long, there wasn’t a day that we were going outside of the wire and not being subjected to some form of attack. Sometimes it was direct, people engaging us with firearms and being engaged back. Other times, it was sniper fire, doubly aggravating because by the time we located and made it to the shooter’s location, they would be long gone, and of course no one would have seen or known anything. Then came the worst form of escalation, and the one that tended to get the most play back home, the one that would worry families and friends most of all. Improvised Explosive Devices, or the roadside bombs.
Perhaps more than anything else, and it is hard to truly qualify that, the I.E.D.s were the thing that stuck with many of us long after the war was ‘over’ and we were back home. To this day, I can still feel an occasional nervous sweat and unease at something as simple as a bag of trash on the side of a road or walkway, and I’m not always able to get past it, moving lanes, changing sides, anything to avoid being in its proximity. The first time you encounter one, it's life changing in all the worst ways. A percussive blast loud enough to feel like your ear drums just ruptured, a shockwave that can make your insides feel like gelatin, and depending on where or what you were in when it went off… Humvees are ‘light’ vehicles only on paper, there is nothing light happening when one is flipped over multiple times before being sent through a building’s wall and its axle ripped off and floated through the air. I experienced it personally once, and it isn’t anything I’ve ever forgotten, ‘fortunate’ only that it struck the driver’s side of a vehicle I was a passenger in. My driver would need a medical evacuation, years of rehab, and would never be the same again.
Nothing happens singularly in the field, and the detonation of a roadside bomb is seldom just a detonation. Sometimes there is a second one nearby. Other times, the detonation area has been pre-sighted, and a rain of mortars is the immediate follow up, meant to get those who may have survived the initial explosion. Other times, it is the signal for an attack, a rush of insurgents from crevices coming out to attempt to pick off those still bewildered. Does it happen immediately? Not always, sometimes they wait for the emergency responders to show up, to draw more into a kill zone, and even the mere suggestion of that can turn an already tense situation into an absolute pressure cooker.
Everything combined served to turn the city into absolute chaos, and it was hard not to feel like we were losing, unable to eradicate the threat because it was a case of severing a hydra heads, forcing us to run from dangerous area to dangerous area to remedy a threat only for two more to develop while we dealt with the previous one. Responding from the Camp alone was no longer viable, and the order was given that we would be occupying several different locations in order to expedite responses as needed. Bravo Company would draw the short straw in this regard, being tasked with taking over an outpost eight kilometers away from the main camp, and my platoon would draw the even shorter straw, with our new home being known as OP Graveyard, a few kilometers away from the rest of the company.
Alone, isolated. Now, being trained for Air Assault and Airborne operations, this was actually well within our job description, the tactical doctrine quite literally being built around the fact that we’d be surrounded. It was still a jarring thing to know, that our closest support was not directly next to us, and that the heavier support was farther away and would be exposed to all kinds of risk trying to get to us. Still, it wasn’t what the Marines dealt with at Khe Sanh or Chosin, or what our own division had been forced to endure in the harsh winter of 1944 at Bastogne. It was hard not to notice some of the similarities though.
For one, we were thoroughly underequipped. You might’ve noticed quite a few times I’ve mentioned the Humvees, and that was because despite being an Air Assault unit, we were without our helicopters, yet an armored unit wasn’t attached to us. That meant as far as firepower, what we had available were the small arms each soldier carried, with the heaviest weaponry being the .50 Caliber machine guns that sat in the gunner turrets mounted on the Humvees. Additionally, orders to limit any collateral damage meant that air support would be non-existent save for only the gravest of situations, and that was something beyond my decision making ability. I could ask, but there would never be any guarantee. Finally, we were undermanned; not every wound meant someone had to be taken away, but that was sometimes the case, and there were no replacements. On top of that, we suffered our first K.I.A. a few days after being transferred to the outpost, the victim of an I.E.D., a feeling that leaves someone completely powerless.
As for OP Graveyard, you would be forgiven to think that is just the kind of morbid name soldiers enjoy attaching to their surroundings, but you’d be wrong. It was an actual graveyard, an abandoned one, but still a graveyard. Someone was actually renting it to the U.S. government, allowing us to occupy and use it. So, for the rest of my time in Ramadi, I would be the ghoulish warlord in charge of a kingdom of the dead, and that was quite an experience. At times sleep deprived and overstressed, there were more than a few reports of ghosts, and a few times, especially night missions where we would be responding to a cluster of explosions or arson attacks happening throughout our area of responsibility, we would drive through the cemetery gates into darkness only illuminated by flames in the city; ghastly figures riding from our necropolis into the fires of hell.
We were tested, every single day, and sometimes multiple times a day. An attack on the walls, be it a few shots, a bomb, or an actual wave of assault. Mortars, snipers, suspicious activity. In tandem or sequenced one after the other. When you hold the ultimate responsibility to how these things are responded to, it is an incredible amount of stress. I’ve no doubt the subsequent months of this probably shaved more than a few years off my life, and many hours of sleep at night, during and after.
A platoon is generally supposed to be 50 men, four squads, a senior NCO, and the officer in charge. Already with a handful of injured and evacuated, those injured but not evacuated, and one deceased, the actual number was fewer. I was determined to avoid sending my men beyond the wire in short numbers, which limited what kind of response we could muster. At most, I’d send two squads at any given time, making sure the outpost wasn’t susceptible to being overrun, but at other times, I really had no choice than to leave a handful of minor injured behind to guard the walls. Also not content to sit in semi-security while I sent my men out, it was at this time I’d begin a habit of regularly accompanying them on missions, something the upper brass didn’t necessarily care for, but the soldiers underneath me respected; in my view, it was nothing less than unethical to ask someone to be first through a doorway if it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take myself.
This became the new routine, a pure storm of chaos that we would be caught in the middle of. Our job was purely to make sure that the Main Supply Route into the city wouldn’t be cut off while responding to any security threats in our area of control, but the entirety of the time, the situation just continued to grow worse and more dire by the day. Finally, in June of 2006, change would come when the National Guard division that had been in charge of the city was rotated out, and a new commander would be brought in. No more half measures would be applied, no more docile or responsive-only doctrines. While we wouldn’t be moved from the outpost, and much of our day-to-day would still be similar, it would be on a different footing, reclassified as the Battle of Ramadi.