thedrifter
10-10-06, 07:56 AM
Marines try to make sense of Iraq war's deadliest tour
After seven bloody months in Ramadi, Camp Lejeune Marines question heavy losses holding the line without enough troops to subdue the insurgents
Jay Price and Jim Nesbitt, Staff Writers
CAMP LEJEUNE - Some days, these Marines had nearly half the Iraq war to themselves, just 800 guys taking ambush after ambush, bomb after bomb, repelling ground attacks. A big chunk of all hostilities against U.S. forces, distilled into a couple of square miles of city streets, twisting alleyways and the rubble of shot-up buildings.
Ramadi was so violent that when the young Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Regiment lay in their bunks between patrols, images of bombs and snipers formed patterns that felt real but might be imagined.
Some seemed unlikely: If it was cloudy when they left on patrol, they would get hit.
The chances that they would be attacked on any two-hour patrol were as high as 90 percent -- plenty of fodder for minds seeking order from the chaos of combat.
Members of the 3/8 returned home last week to Camp Lejeune, jet-lagged, grabbing their wives and girlfriends and children, survivors of the deadliest deployment of U.S. forces this year. They struggled to understand the meaning of their seven months of service in the worst place in Iraq.
To people on the outside, the unit's time in Ramadi was just another anonymous tour of duty. But by other measures, including the most somber, it was extraordinary.
The Marines left the base in Jacksonville in March. By the time they returned home, their unit had 17 men killed in action, including a Navy medic. It is the most this year of any U.S. battalion, according to The News & Observer's analysis of a database kept by The Associated Press.
A U.S. civilian translator was also killed. About 129 Marines were wounded, a third of them so badly that they had to be flown home. One of them was Lance Cpl. Dustin Gross.
"Something happened every day," said Gross, a short, wiry and enthusiastic Marine who looks younger than his 21 years. "Either you got shot at, or you got blown up. Every day."
Few U.S. troops in Anbar province have it easy. In September, national media reported that the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq had filed a classified report saying that the chances of securing Anbar were faint. With no functioning government, the report said, al-Qaeda in Iraq had filled the power vacuum.
One of the reasons U.S. forces were doing poorly, the report said, was that not enough troops were assigned to the region. That shortage only got worse this summer when an Army battalion that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent instead to reinforce operations in Baghdad, where U.S. troops are trying to quell sectarian violence.
Gross, whose feet were shattered when an improvised bomb blew up the Humvee he was driving during a July ambush, greeted his returning buddies as they turned in their rifles and machine guns at an armory near their barracks. His bones have knitted enough for him to shuck his wheelchair and walk with a leg-dragging limp, his left foot still in an open-toed sports cast.
He considers himself among the lucky. But Gross also struggles with hair-trigger anger and frustration, fueled by a rising sense that he and his buddies were put in harm's way as place-holders charged with a dead-end mission -- too few in number to crush the insurgents of Ramadi.
"It just seemed to be a lost cause over there," he said. "Very, very frustrating. If you won't do anything, you're not really taking care of the boys."
Other grunts in Gross' unit have the same take.
"We're Marines," said Lance Cpl. Jake Mathers, 19, an infantryman from Monroe, La. "We're good at what we do. But why couldn't we do more? This war would be long over with if people would let us do our job from the get-go. ... Kill people. That's what we do."
A perilous place
Ramadi, with a mostly Sunni population of about 400,000, has been a violent place since the beginning of the war in 2003, but it got worse after U.S. forces staged a major assault on Fallujah in 2004. That forced many of that city's surviving insurgents to find a new home.
Ramadi, which is nearby, is the capital and largest city of Anbar, a sparsely populated western province roughly the size of North Carolina and by far the most dangerous Iraqi region for U.S. forces. For part of the deployment, the 3/8 was responsible for the bulk of the city. Later, an Army unit took over some of the Marines' territory, but the battalion still had about two square miles of the worst turf.
The Marines didn't have enough troops to subdue the city. But they trained Iraqi security forces and guarded the provincial government complex and the governor. They patrolled aggressively and manned several small outposts around the city.
They were there to hold the line and to prevent the insurgents from taking over, a defensive posture that Marines loathe.
The Marines faced an unusually aggressive opponent willing to slug it out in the streets and use the hit-and-run tactics common to this guerrilla war.
The enemy instigated an average of 16 or 17 "significant acts" a day -- basically any time U.S. troops shot at someone or were shot at or attacked with bombs or grenades, said Maj. Thomas Hobbs, 37, of Springfield, Va., the unit's executive officer. In July and August, the incidents were more frequent.
Those numbers reflect the urban battlefield of Ramadi, Hobbs said. With so much more cover than the open countryside, the city gives insurgents more places to attack from; and when Marines shoot back there is more danger of accidentally hitting innocent people. This risk is heightened by a favorite insurgent tactic: blending in with civilians.
The restricted space allows insurgents to get close, depriving the Marines of the some of the advantages of superior firepower, equipment and training.
"We're great at long-range, mobile fighting with our tanks, our planes, our optics," Hobbs said. "You see far, you kill far. You get in an urban environment, it takes away a lot of our advantages."
Helicopters refused to fly cover, Hobbs said, and when it was overcast enough to restrict the use of drones and piloted jets, the likelihood of attacks rose sharply.
That is why the insurgents attacked on cloudy days. It wasn't anyone's imagination.
The Marines knew the tour would be tough even before they arrived in March. The battalion they replaced had about a dozen men killed. Its men told stories of street fighting that sounded more like World War II or Vietnam than an insurgency.
The attacks came every four to seven days for about the first half of the deployment, Hobbs said. The Marines thought these assaults came from al-Qaeda in Iraq, which wanted the symbolism of being able to disrupt the provincial government.
Marines aren't the only target. Insurgents have killed provincial officials this year and have tried 30 times to kill the governor, according to several published reports. These days, he travels to and from work in a convoy of Marine guards. Only a handful of workers at most show up each day at the heavily fortified complex.
In the ground assaults, the attackers took a big beating every time. The U.S. positions were well-protected, and the Marines inflicted heavily casualties while seldom taking any themselves.
B for bad luck
Bad luck Bravo, they called it. The four Humvees of a small section of the 3/8 always seemed to be taking fire or getting blown up. Whenever journalists dropped in for a brief taste of combat, unit leaders would put them with Bravo.
You want action? You sure? OK, these guys will find it for you.
Gross was from a small tobacco- farming town in northern Kentucky. He had dropped out of college -- he was studying music -- to join the Marines. He just decided that after 13 years of classes, he needed to do something else.
Gross was the driver of "the One Truck" -- the Humvee that always took the lead. Staff Sgt. Chris Winship, the savvy, stocky section leader, rode with him. Winship has had plenty of combat experience -- nine deployments. Cpl. Amarinder Grewal, 24, a machine gunner from Detroit, was usually the turret gunner for One Truck.
Their base, Camp Hurricane Point, was at the tip of a peninsula where a big canal split off the Euphrates River on the southwest edge of town. From there, they would head into the city for patrols.
Their routine was eight days on day duty, eight days on night duty and eight days guarding a nearby bridge. The bridge duty was relatively safe but the worst, Gross said, because there was little to do but think about home.
On patrol, their job was partly to deter the insurgents by their presence, kind of like a beat cop. They also would stop suspicious cars, creating an instant vehicle checkpoint, and stop anyone acting strangely on the street.
The deployment started quietly for Bravo. The troops would ride around, catching nothing more lethal than the standard dirty looks -- "mean mugging" from the local adults, though the children were always glad to see the Marines, who tossed fistfuls of candy and bags of soccer balls.
Then, one night about two weeks after they arrived, insurgents hit them with four roadside bombs and five rocket-propelled grenades.
Some contradictions about combat don't sound good but are simply true. While there are few things worse than seeing a friend gunned down by a sniper, or dragged dead from a shredded Humvee, combat sometimes brings sheer exhilaration. The Marines would sometimes yell wildly as they returned fire, Gross and Grewal said.
"It was like being in a candy store," Grewal said. "They came out, and I killed them. That's pretty much it. You come at me with an AK in the street, you're not going to make it off that street."
Afterward, some would come back to the big metal building where they slept, hit their bunk and clamp on the headphones for something loud and heavy -- maybe the group Disturbed -- while they coasted down the backside of that adrenaline rush:
"Looking at my own reflection
When suddenly it changes
Violently it changes
Oh no, There is no turning back now
You've woken up the demon ... in me
Get up, come on get down with the sickness"
Picked off by snipers
The adrenaline was always there, waiting for that instant of disorientation before they recognized a bomb blast, or the flat, repetitive pops of an AK-47.
The insurgents are widely derided among U.S. forces for poor marksmanship. In parts of the country, though, a handful of skilled snipers have become nearly as feared as improvised explosive devices. In Ramadi, there were one or two working in the north-central part of the city. Four members of the unit were killed by snipers and about half a dozen wounded by them, Hobbs said.
On March 31, the 3/8 lost the first Marine killed in the deployment. Lance Cpl. Jacob W. Beisel, 21, of Lackawaxen, Pa., was hit by a sniper.
Later, Gross and his friends were in the cross hairs.
The men were on patrol when they saw a suspicious-looking vehicle and decided to search it. Lance Cpl. Nicholas J. Whyte jumped out of the Two Truck and walked over to the car.
When Gross first came to Lejeune, Whyte, who had been around longer, didn't join in the usual ritual of giving the new guy a hard time, and the two became friends. Whyte, who was black, once had coaxed Gross, who was white, to tell him a racist joke.
"You want me to what?" Gross had said.
Checking the Iraqi car, Whyte was doing everything right, keeping on the move like they had been taught, to make shots harder. But the sniper was good.
Gross was sitting at the wheel of One Truck, looking at his friend when he fell.
Grewal said Whyte was his best friend.
"They probably killed the one person in the section who didn't have any hatred toward any people," he said.
Their luck runs out
The improvised bombs planted along roads in Iraq aren't always lethal. In April, Gross and the other guys in Bravo noticed an unnerving pattern.
The Two Truck got hit with a bomb, he said, then the Three Truck, then the Four. Then the pattern was repeated. Then it happened again, each time skipping the One Truck.
"They kept skipping us," Gross said. "We just looked at each other and said, 'We're next.' "
In early July, they were. One Truck was hit twice in four days -- the second time was July 7, his birthday. "We kind of caught up," Gross said.
Gross had three vehicles blown out from under him in four months, and his section lost about 15. The big military tow trucks came to get the vehicles and dragged them to a nearby base. Then the guys who climbed out of the wreckage headed for the motor pool to get another one.
"It was a pain," Gross said. "You'd lose a truck, and it would be, 'Oh crap, we've got to move everything out of this truck into another one.' "
On July 22, a reporter and photographer for Newsweek were in camp, and they wanted to go out. As usual, the unit leaders assigned them to Bravo. By this point, Bravo had been hit about 20 times with IED's and had replaced about 15 Humvees.
Gross, as always, took the lead, the photographer in his truck. Grewal, normally the turret gunner in Gross' truck, rode shotgun in the Four Truck.
As they rolled along, Gross looked for oddly colored pavement or other clues to hidden bombs. He didn't see anything, though, that revealed the one that lifted the truck, broke both his feet and knocked out the turret gunner.
The blast threw the Humvee's heavy driver's side door about 30 feet skyward, Grewal said.
Gross fell out of the ruined truck onto the street.
"I couldn't see anything, I couldn't hear anything, and I couldn't feel my feet, and I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to bleed to death,' " he said.
Some of the patterns to the violence in Ramadi were simple. Often Marines would get hit with an IED, then brace for the rest of the ambush, maybe just a couple of quick bullet stutters if they were lucky. Maybe a flock of rocket-propelled grenades if it was going to get really ugly.
On this day, it got ugly. Real fast. For two hours.
As the ambush started, Hospitalman Patrick "Doc" Coyle, a Navy combat medic, sprinted to Gross' side. An insurgent with an AK popped up and sprayed rounds their way as he ran down the street.
"I shot him while I was taking care of Gross," Coyle said. "That was a good day for job satisfaction."
The Newsweek photographer was shooting photos. One of Gross lying on the street later appeared in the magazine. His face was hidden, but his white legs and gym socks were exposed to the world.
"There I was in the middle of Ramadi in my boxers and a helmet," Gross said.
After the ambush finally ended, Coyle, built like a linebacker, hoisted Gross over his shoulder and carried him to a truck that took him to be treated.
Gross told the driver, "If you hit another IED, I'm going to kill you."
The tow truck sent for Gross' Humvee was hit with not one, but two.
A helicopter took him to a field hospital at a larger base in Balad. In two days, he was flown to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
Gross had been in Iraq less than five months. But the quiet, green German countryside was a shock after the endless attacks, the gray-brown ugliness, the suffocating heat and latrine stench of Ramadi, the endless noise in the barracks, the constant outgoing U.S. artillery fire.
He took big gulps of cool air, inhaling the scent of all the greenery.
Marked by combat
With his reddish-blond crew cut and boyish face, Gross still looks like a kid, but he isn't, couldn't be after what he has seen and done. When he got back, his mother tried to hang on him -- as she always had. He had never minded it before, but he just could not take it.
"Stop it, stop that right now," he told her.
When he rides somewhere now, he can't help but scan the road. If he sees a spot where the pavement changes color, he can't help but think that if he were driving, he would go around it, might be an IED. Or if there are traffic cones, same thing, they might be wired.
Not that he is some sort of dark brooder. He's still a cheerful guy, talks rapid-fire. Before he could walk again, he learned to balance his wheelchair on two wheels.
"I'll look back and say I had true friends," he said. "I'll say that I really meant something to someone, and they meant something to me. We had each others' backs, no matter what."
Gross and his friends have been replaced in Ramadi by another unit from Camp Lejeune. The 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment now faces the same grim uncertainties of urban combat.
"Tell them this is the most dangerous city on earth, this is why they joined the Marines," Grewal said. "Everybody wanted to be a grunt, and this is your chance. And a chance to avenge the Marines who went before you."
When Gross describes the tour of duty, he reaches for a word that isn't fresh or original, but it carries heft anyway because it's the one so many Marines before him used for places such as Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir and Khe Sanh.
"You know, there's only one word for it," he said. "Hell."
(Database editor David Raynor contributed to this report.)
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at (919) 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com.
Ellie
After seven bloody months in Ramadi, Camp Lejeune Marines question heavy losses holding the line without enough troops to subdue the insurgents
Jay Price and Jim Nesbitt, Staff Writers
CAMP LEJEUNE - Some days, these Marines had nearly half the Iraq war to themselves, just 800 guys taking ambush after ambush, bomb after bomb, repelling ground attacks. A big chunk of all hostilities against U.S. forces, distilled into a couple of square miles of city streets, twisting alleyways and the rubble of shot-up buildings.
Ramadi was so violent that when the young Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Regiment lay in their bunks between patrols, images of bombs and snipers formed patterns that felt real but might be imagined.
Some seemed unlikely: If it was cloudy when they left on patrol, they would get hit.
The chances that they would be attacked on any two-hour patrol were as high as 90 percent -- plenty of fodder for minds seeking order from the chaos of combat.
Members of the 3/8 returned home last week to Camp Lejeune, jet-lagged, grabbing their wives and girlfriends and children, survivors of the deadliest deployment of U.S. forces this year. They struggled to understand the meaning of their seven months of service in the worst place in Iraq.
To people on the outside, the unit's time in Ramadi was just another anonymous tour of duty. But by other measures, including the most somber, it was extraordinary.
The Marines left the base in Jacksonville in March. By the time they returned home, their unit had 17 men killed in action, including a Navy medic. It is the most this year of any U.S. battalion, according to The News & Observer's analysis of a database kept by The Associated Press.
A U.S. civilian translator was also killed. About 129 Marines were wounded, a third of them so badly that they had to be flown home. One of them was Lance Cpl. Dustin Gross.
"Something happened every day," said Gross, a short, wiry and enthusiastic Marine who looks younger than his 21 years. "Either you got shot at, or you got blown up. Every day."
Few U.S. troops in Anbar province have it easy. In September, national media reported that the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq had filed a classified report saying that the chances of securing Anbar were faint. With no functioning government, the report said, al-Qaeda in Iraq had filled the power vacuum.
One of the reasons U.S. forces were doing poorly, the report said, was that not enough troops were assigned to the region. That shortage only got worse this summer when an Army battalion that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent instead to reinforce operations in Baghdad, where U.S. troops are trying to quell sectarian violence.
Gross, whose feet were shattered when an improvised bomb blew up the Humvee he was driving during a July ambush, greeted his returning buddies as they turned in their rifles and machine guns at an armory near their barracks. His bones have knitted enough for him to shuck his wheelchair and walk with a leg-dragging limp, his left foot still in an open-toed sports cast.
He considers himself among the lucky. But Gross also struggles with hair-trigger anger and frustration, fueled by a rising sense that he and his buddies were put in harm's way as place-holders charged with a dead-end mission -- too few in number to crush the insurgents of Ramadi.
"It just seemed to be a lost cause over there," he said. "Very, very frustrating. If you won't do anything, you're not really taking care of the boys."
Other grunts in Gross' unit have the same take.
"We're Marines," said Lance Cpl. Jake Mathers, 19, an infantryman from Monroe, La. "We're good at what we do. But why couldn't we do more? This war would be long over with if people would let us do our job from the get-go. ... Kill people. That's what we do."
A perilous place
Ramadi, with a mostly Sunni population of about 400,000, has been a violent place since the beginning of the war in 2003, but it got worse after U.S. forces staged a major assault on Fallujah in 2004. That forced many of that city's surviving insurgents to find a new home.
Ramadi, which is nearby, is the capital and largest city of Anbar, a sparsely populated western province roughly the size of North Carolina and by far the most dangerous Iraqi region for U.S. forces. For part of the deployment, the 3/8 was responsible for the bulk of the city. Later, an Army unit took over some of the Marines' territory, but the battalion still had about two square miles of the worst turf.
The Marines didn't have enough troops to subdue the city. But they trained Iraqi security forces and guarded the provincial government complex and the governor. They patrolled aggressively and manned several small outposts around the city.
They were there to hold the line and to prevent the insurgents from taking over, a defensive posture that Marines loathe.
The Marines faced an unusually aggressive opponent willing to slug it out in the streets and use the hit-and-run tactics common to this guerrilla war.
The enemy instigated an average of 16 or 17 "significant acts" a day -- basically any time U.S. troops shot at someone or were shot at or attacked with bombs or grenades, said Maj. Thomas Hobbs, 37, of Springfield, Va., the unit's executive officer. In July and August, the incidents were more frequent.
Those numbers reflect the urban battlefield of Ramadi, Hobbs said. With so much more cover than the open countryside, the city gives insurgents more places to attack from; and when Marines shoot back there is more danger of accidentally hitting innocent people. This risk is heightened by a favorite insurgent tactic: blending in with civilians.
The restricted space allows insurgents to get close, depriving the Marines of the some of the advantages of superior firepower, equipment and training.
"We're great at long-range, mobile fighting with our tanks, our planes, our optics," Hobbs said. "You see far, you kill far. You get in an urban environment, it takes away a lot of our advantages."
Helicopters refused to fly cover, Hobbs said, and when it was overcast enough to restrict the use of drones and piloted jets, the likelihood of attacks rose sharply.
That is why the insurgents attacked on cloudy days. It wasn't anyone's imagination.
The Marines knew the tour would be tough even before they arrived in March. The battalion they replaced had about a dozen men killed. Its men told stories of street fighting that sounded more like World War II or Vietnam than an insurgency.
The attacks came every four to seven days for about the first half of the deployment, Hobbs said. The Marines thought these assaults came from al-Qaeda in Iraq, which wanted the symbolism of being able to disrupt the provincial government.
Marines aren't the only target. Insurgents have killed provincial officials this year and have tried 30 times to kill the governor, according to several published reports. These days, he travels to and from work in a convoy of Marine guards. Only a handful of workers at most show up each day at the heavily fortified complex.
In the ground assaults, the attackers took a big beating every time. The U.S. positions were well-protected, and the Marines inflicted heavily casualties while seldom taking any themselves.
B for bad luck
Bad luck Bravo, they called it. The four Humvees of a small section of the 3/8 always seemed to be taking fire or getting blown up. Whenever journalists dropped in for a brief taste of combat, unit leaders would put them with Bravo.
You want action? You sure? OK, these guys will find it for you.
Gross was from a small tobacco- farming town in northern Kentucky. He had dropped out of college -- he was studying music -- to join the Marines. He just decided that after 13 years of classes, he needed to do something else.
Gross was the driver of "the One Truck" -- the Humvee that always took the lead. Staff Sgt. Chris Winship, the savvy, stocky section leader, rode with him. Winship has had plenty of combat experience -- nine deployments. Cpl. Amarinder Grewal, 24, a machine gunner from Detroit, was usually the turret gunner for One Truck.
Their base, Camp Hurricane Point, was at the tip of a peninsula where a big canal split off the Euphrates River on the southwest edge of town. From there, they would head into the city for patrols.
Their routine was eight days on day duty, eight days on night duty and eight days guarding a nearby bridge. The bridge duty was relatively safe but the worst, Gross said, because there was little to do but think about home.
On patrol, their job was partly to deter the insurgents by their presence, kind of like a beat cop. They also would stop suspicious cars, creating an instant vehicle checkpoint, and stop anyone acting strangely on the street.
The deployment started quietly for Bravo. The troops would ride around, catching nothing more lethal than the standard dirty looks -- "mean mugging" from the local adults, though the children were always glad to see the Marines, who tossed fistfuls of candy and bags of soccer balls.
Then, one night about two weeks after they arrived, insurgents hit them with four roadside bombs and five rocket-propelled grenades.
Some contradictions about combat don't sound good but are simply true. While there are few things worse than seeing a friend gunned down by a sniper, or dragged dead from a shredded Humvee, combat sometimes brings sheer exhilaration. The Marines would sometimes yell wildly as they returned fire, Gross and Grewal said.
"It was like being in a candy store," Grewal said. "They came out, and I killed them. That's pretty much it. You come at me with an AK in the street, you're not going to make it off that street."
Afterward, some would come back to the big metal building where they slept, hit their bunk and clamp on the headphones for something loud and heavy -- maybe the group Disturbed -- while they coasted down the backside of that adrenaline rush:
"Looking at my own reflection
When suddenly it changes
Violently it changes
Oh no, There is no turning back now
You've woken up the demon ... in me
Get up, come on get down with the sickness"
Picked off by snipers
The adrenaline was always there, waiting for that instant of disorientation before they recognized a bomb blast, or the flat, repetitive pops of an AK-47.
The insurgents are widely derided among U.S. forces for poor marksmanship. In parts of the country, though, a handful of skilled snipers have become nearly as feared as improvised explosive devices. In Ramadi, there were one or two working in the north-central part of the city. Four members of the unit were killed by snipers and about half a dozen wounded by them, Hobbs said.
On March 31, the 3/8 lost the first Marine killed in the deployment. Lance Cpl. Jacob W. Beisel, 21, of Lackawaxen, Pa., was hit by a sniper.
Later, Gross and his friends were in the cross hairs.
The men were on patrol when they saw a suspicious-looking vehicle and decided to search it. Lance Cpl. Nicholas J. Whyte jumped out of the Two Truck and walked over to the car.
When Gross first came to Lejeune, Whyte, who had been around longer, didn't join in the usual ritual of giving the new guy a hard time, and the two became friends. Whyte, who was black, once had coaxed Gross, who was white, to tell him a racist joke.
"You want me to what?" Gross had said.
Checking the Iraqi car, Whyte was doing everything right, keeping on the move like they had been taught, to make shots harder. But the sniper was good.
Gross was sitting at the wheel of One Truck, looking at his friend when he fell.
Grewal said Whyte was his best friend.
"They probably killed the one person in the section who didn't have any hatred toward any people," he said.
Their luck runs out
The improvised bombs planted along roads in Iraq aren't always lethal. In April, Gross and the other guys in Bravo noticed an unnerving pattern.
The Two Truck got hit with a bomb, he said, then the Three Truck, then the Four. Then the pattern was repeated. Then it happened again, each time skipping the One Truck.
"They kept skipping us," Gross said. "We just looked at each other and said, 'We're next.' "
In early July, they were. One Truck was hit twice in four days -- the second time was July 7, his birthday. "We kind of caught up," Gross said.
Gross had three vehicles blown out from under him in four months, and his section lost about 15. The big military tow trucks came to get the vehicles and dragged them to a nearby base. Then the guys who climbed out of the wreckage headed for the motor pool to get another one.
"It was a pain," Gross said. "You'd lose a truck, and it would be, 'Oh crap, we've got to move everything out of this truck into another one.' "
On July 22, a reporter and photographer for Newsweek were in camp, and they wanted to go out. As usual, the unit leaders assigned them to Bravo. By this point, Bravo had been hit about 20 times with IED's and had replaced about 15 Humvees.
Gross, as always, took the lead, the photographer in his truck. Grewal, normally the turret gunner in Gross' truck, rode shotgun in the Four Truck.
As they rolled along, Gross looked for oddly colored pavement or other clues to hidden bombs. He didn't see anything, though, that revealed the one that lifted the truck, broke both his feet and knocked out the turret gunner.
The blast threw the Humvee's heavy driver's side door about 30 feet skyward, Grewal said.
Gross fell out of the ruined truck onto the street.
"I couldn't see anything, I couldn't hear anything, and I couldn't feel my feet, and I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to bleed to death,' " he said.
Some of the patterns to the violence in Ramadi were simple. Often Marines would get hit with an IED, then brace for the rest of the ambush, maybe just a couple of quick bullet stutters if they were lucky. Maybe a flock of rocket-propelled grenades if it was going to get really ugly.
On this day, it got ugly. Real fast. For two hours.
As the ambush started, Hospitalman Patrick "Doc" Coyle, a Navy combat medic, sprinted to Gross' side. An insurgent with an AK popped up and sprayed rounds their way as he ran down the street.
"I shot him while I was taking care of Gross," Coyle said. "That was a good day for job satisfaction."
The Newsweek photographer was shooting photos. One of Gross lying on the street later appeared in the magazine. His face was hidden, but his white legs and gym socks were exposed to the world.
"There I was in the middle of Ramadi in my boxers and a helmet," Gross said.
After the ambush finally ended, Coyle, built like a linebacker, hoisted Gross over his shoulder and carried him to a truck that took him to be treated.
Gross told the driver, "If you hit another IED, I'm going to kill you."
The tow truck sent for Gross' Humvee was hit with not one, but two.
A helicopter took him to a field hospital at a larger base in Balad. In two days, he was flown to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
Gross had been in Iraq less than five months. But the quiet, green German countryside was a shock after the endless attacks, the gray-brown ugliness, the suffocating heat and latrine stench of Ramadi, the endless noise in the barracks, the constant outgoing U.S. artillery fire.
He took big gulps of cool air, inhaling the scent of all the greenery.
Marked by combat
With his reddish-blond crew cut and boyish face, Gross still looks like a kid, but he isn't, couldn't be after what he has seen and done. When he got back, his mother tried to hang on him -- as she always had. He had never minded it before, but he just could not take it.
"Stop it, stop that right now," he told her.
When he rides somewhere now, he can't help but scan the road. If he sees a spot where the pavement changes color, he can't help but think that if he were driving, he would go around it, might be an IED. Or if there are traffic cones, same thing, they might be wired.
Not that he is some sort of dark brooder. He's still a cheerful guy, talks rapid-fire. Before he could walk again, he learned to balance his wheelchair on two wheels.
"I'll look back and say I had true friends," he said. "I'll say that I really meant something to someone, and they meant something to me. We had each others' backs, no matter what."
Gross and his friends have been replaced in Ramadi by another unit from Camp Lejeune. The 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment now faces the same grim uncertainties of urban combat.
"Tell them this is the most dangerous city on earth, this is why they joined the Marines," Grewal said. "Everybody wanted to be a grunt, and this is your chance. And a chance to avenge the Marines who went before you."
When Gross describes the tour of duty, he reaches for a word that isn't fresh or original, but it carries heft anyway because it's the one so many Marines before him used for places such as Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir and Khe Sanh.
"You know, there's only one word for it," he said. "Hell."
(Database editor David Raynor contributed to this report.)
Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at (919) 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com.
Ellie