Back from the Brink [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

09-18-07, 05:57 AM

Back from the Brink, Part II: First months in Iraq

12:33 AM EDT on Monday, September 17, 2007

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

Frozen-fingers training at Fort Devens was weirdly appropriate for the reservists of the 1st Battalion of the 25th Marines. No training could truly prepare them for what they found at the end of March 2006 when they arrived in Fallujah in the western Iraqi province of Al Anbar.

There was the ungodly strangeness of the weather — blazing hot during the day and often chilly at night.

“Once you got on patrol for more than two or three hours, now you’re like just zoned out,” said Patrick Murray, a Marine corporal from North Kingstown, on his first combat deployment. “Doesn’t matter who you are, you’re going to start to break down,” mentally as well as physically, he said.

There was wind, too, and the odd sandstorm — a boiling brown squall line, visible from afar against the blue sky. It was a miserable thing to be inside of, stinging and all-pervasive. “In your hair, in your eyes, in your Humvee, in your weapon, in your boots,” Murray said. “Ugh.”

Every bit as strange was the fight. This was definitely not the war that Big Joe Motherway, Murray’s grandfather, fought in Korea — or what the Marines faced in Vietnam.

“That was line of battle. It was guys with uniforms and flags,” Murray said of Korea. Fallujah was bad guys with beards and flowing robes and sandals. Or guys in flip-flops and PJs in two tones of tan. “Zero way of telling them apart from the perfectly innocent citizen,” he said.

Fleeing foes in Fallujah melted into the urban crowd. Or they jumped through an alley into beat-up Opals or orange-and-white taxicabs and roared away to one of Saddam’s excellent modern highways. This was guerrilla warfare with commuting.

And unlike Vietnam, Iraq had booby traps that were smart: improvised explosive devices, hidden on roadsides in burlap bags or in the carcasses of animals, remotely detonated at the instant of the enemy’s choosing.

As often as not, an IED blast was a prelude to an ambush for Marines who would rush to rescue their comrades at the blast scene.

Sometimes the roadside burlap bag was a decoy to stop an armored patrol and draw the Marines into the center of a tactical triangle: shooters from three points on rooftops. The insurgents also made cunning use of the city’s mundane features. Power lines sagged between utility poles across streets in every neighborhood. Hidden among them could be the wires that linked an IED to its detonator.

Murray was a machine-gunner with Weapons Company of the 1st Battalion of the 25th Marines, and — compared with other units — the company lived in splendor at the lakeside retreat of Saddam’s son Uday, a short drive east of town. Their “hootches,” former servants’ quarters across the water from the palace, were cramped — four Marines in bunk beds at the corners of a room about 15 feet by 25 feet. But there was great comfort at Camp Baharia: air-conditioning, real showers in nearby trailers and — best of all — security.

“You could walk to the bathroom or go to eat in T-shirts and shorts,” Murray said. Downtown, where other units lived in jerry-built “firm-bases” at the railroad station and other sites, nobody ventured outside without full armor.

There were DVD movies and sounds. (Pat Murray’s mix: West Coast gangsta rap and ’80s rockers Journey and Styxx.) There were the openly devout, Corporal Eric Valdepeñas of Seekonk, for example, who always took his rosary beads on patrol. There were the guys who saw to the enshrinement of Naomi the Night Nurse, a mail-order inflatable, in their hootch.

With its oppressive strangeness and heat, its ageless decrepitude, its high-tech violence loosed from tenement roofs and compact cars, Fallujah was like nothing in Murray’s experience, except maybe the movie Blackhawk Down.

Within a few days of his arrival on March 26, Murray’s platoon had its first real action. The column of six Humvees was zig-zagging across the city when the lead Humvee rounded a corner to surprise three men loading weapons into the trunk of a white Opal. The men spotted the bristling armored truck and bolted, one jumping into the driver’s seat to rip down the street, the others disappearing into the alleyways.

Suddenly, the Opal screeched to a halt, blocked by piles of dirt in the middle of the street. The driver fled on foot. The chase — Marines loaded with 40 or 50 pounds of gear; insurgent, literally running out of his sandals — was no contest.

All the same, the Marines had a trunkload of confiscated weapons.

“That was a good day,” Murray said. “Hey, maybe they would have gone out and killed one of my friends.”

NEAR THE END of June, the insurgents did kill one of Murray’s friends, Corporal Paul Nicholas King. First reports had King shot through the shoulder as his patrol wrapped up a successful detail to disarm an IED. The sniper’s hit seemed to be a nasty but survivable wound.

But first reports through the haze of battle can deceive. The bullet passed through King’s arm and into his lungs and he bled to death in the streets within minutes, leaving a young wife back home in Tyngsborough, Mass. At Baharia that night, there was no joking around. “Everybody expresses grief kind of differently,” Murray said. “Some guys kick chairs. Some people get real quiet. Some guys were crying. Everybody was real down.”

King’s memorial service was held in the chapel at the lakeside camp — an old disco club with stained glass windows that had been rigged for worship. This first close death did not really sink in for Murray until he saw the marker by the lake: King’s helmet atop his rifle standing bayonet-first in the ground, his boots and Kevlar vest arrayed alongside.

Murray’s weapons company participated in one major action that summer. Operation Spotlight began when a camera on a drone aircraft captured a roadside kidnapping on the western outskirts of the city. The flying drone followed the kidnappers to an apparent lair of insurgents in the farmlands, a 15-minute drive away.

Two battalions joined in the operation. On the predawn run through the undulating terrain, a Humvee flipped off a narrow road between irrigation canals and landed upside down in the water. Sgt. Terrence “Shane” Burke, of Boston, Murray’s close friend and platoon-mate, pulled the Marines out of the Humvee, resuscitating one who had taken water into his lungs and helping to organize a helicopter evacuation for the man. Then Burke jumped back in the column, which soon surprised the insurgents in a network of bunkers.

The Marines captured three insurgents, rescued three hostages who had been caged in the lair for a month, and blew up a ton of explosives and weaponry, including the makings of a car rigged as a suicide bomb. They took some mortar fire from inside the bunker network, but a Marine artillery barrage silenced that attack.

There were no serious U.S. casualties, thanks partly to Burke, who won a Navy Achievement Medal for his actions that day.

LATE IN JULY, a distant political decision plunged Fallujah into its worst violence since the 2004 battle that dispersed the jihadists and destroyed large expanses of the city.

In a goodwill gesture widely portrayed as reparation for the abuse of detainees by American soldiers, the U.S. and Iraqi leadership ordered the release of more than 1,000 men from Abu Ghraib prison. It was the first installment in shutting down the prison by summer’s end.

“Seven hundred of the prisoners came back to Fallujah in one fell swoop,” said Francis J. “Bing” West, a military analyst and author from Newport who was in Fallujah that summer.

The very next weekend “the place just went crazy,” Murray said. It started that Friday, the Muslim holy day. Now “the level of violence just skyrocketed,” Murray said — against Iraqi civilians and police as well as the Marines. Rampant violence continued for the remaining weeks of 1/25’s deployment, and beyond.

“Now every single day, with like a combat patrol, you were expecting something,” Murray said. “We were sure going to get shot at today. Or our friends were going to get blown up. Or there was going to be a sniper out there. Or an IED.”

One ambush began when a 3rd Platoon patrol stopped to avoid entangling a Humvee’s antenna in a thick nest of wires hanging low across the street. It was a trap. The Marines — Valdepeñas, Navy Corpsman Christopher Walsh and Corporals Jared Shoemaker and Cody Hill — jumped from the Humvee. Men from other Humvees got onto the street to help deal with the power wires. Grenades and AK-47 fire rained down on them from atop buildings on both sides of the street.

The Marines poured waves of suppressing fire onto the rooftops above them, and escaped unscathed to tell the tale back at Baharia.

“When we heard that, we were like, man!” said Murray. “A: How did they get away from that? B: How are we going to get away from it when they do it to us tomorrow?” Lessons-learned sessions were a fixture of their routines, even as they swapped war stories in the hootches by Uday’s lake.

MURRAY HAD A NARROW ESCAPE on the first day of September 2006. An IED detonated just forward of his Humvee, shredding the engine block, tossing the Marines about like dolls, and momentarily deafening all.

Murray, Burke and Lance Corporal Jonathan Goldman of Brookline, Mass., all suffered concussions, with the usual severe headaches and ringing ears. By the book, a serious concussion was supposed to rate time off to let the brain recover, because successive head blows within a few days can cause permanent damage. The rules said a second concussion required a longer break. A third serious concussion during a Marine’s tour was a fast ticket home.

“So we had some time off coming,” said Murray. “Sweet.”

But they did not take it because, hey, nobody did. If everybody with ringing ears and a headache skipped patrol, patrol strength would dwindle. More Marines would get hurt.

The main thing was, everybody was basically OK. With the horrible exception of Nick King’s death back in June, Weapons Company had been free of major casualties. October — and homecoming — were right around the corner. “We were so close to the end,” said the boyish-looking Corporal Pat Foley.

Murray, Goldman and Burke were woozy but relieved on Sept. 1 as they hitched a ride back to the motor pool at Baharia, where they drew a replacement for their blasted wreck.

That left just one chore before they could get back to the hootches to shower, eat and rest their bomb-rocked brains. Sergeant Burke insisted that they sweat and grunt for another 15 minutes, hauling heavy scraps of Kevlar vest and surplus armor from the floor plates of their dead Humvee and carefully arranging them as extra shock prevention on the floor of their new Humvee.

That was Murray’s one gripe about Burke. When it came to supposed safety precautions that made for more heavy lifting in 120-degree heat, Shane was a total pain in the butt.

Tomorrow: Sept. 4, 2006 — The deadliest day.

ABOUT THIS STORY

The principal sources for Corporal Murray’s story were extensive interviews with Patrick Murray himself and the Marines, family members and friends who lived through these experiences with him. Some are directly quoted; others furnished detail or verification not specifically attributed to them.

For historical context and technical background, the story also relies on research of topics pertinent to Murray’s experience, such as the war in Iraq, military training and procedure, and the treatment of battle wounds. Sources include books, magazines, research papers, Web sites and newspaper and wire service accounts. Sources for specific episodes in this story include: No True Glory, A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Francis J. “Bing” West; “Saving Baby Mariam,” by Kevin Cullen of The Boston Globe; and “A Bittersweet Reunion,” by Sig Christenson of the San Antonio Express-News.

—John E. Mulligan

jmulligan@belo-dc.com

Video: Learn why Cpl. Murray signed up, return with him to the day he was wounded, and go for his final prosthesis fitting at Walter Reed

www.projo.com/video/murray-index.html?nvid=174638&shu=1

Ellie