thedrifter
09-18-07, 06:01 AM
The Marine from down the street
By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau
Even the wisecracking Patrick D. Murray was grim with anger and grief as his platoon strapped on armor and helmets to go back out on night patrol.
The 23-year-old machine-gunner from North Kingstown was dog-tired but still wired after a two-hour break for water, food and decompression at Baharia, the lakeside Marine camp a few kilometers east of Fallujah.
Nowhere near enough time to absorb the events on some of the meanest streets in Iraq on that Monday, a year ago Sept. 4. “A devastating day for all of us,” in the words of Murray’s kindred spirit, Mark Wills, a fellow corporal in their weapons company.
Three comrades were dead in a roadside bombing — one of them a close buddy of Murray’s from Bishop Hendricken High School, Lance Corporal Eric Valdepeņas. A fourth was on the brink of death. Their truck had been blown up as they guarded the memorial service for a Connecticut Marine shot a few days before in a drive-by.
In the frantic action after the morning ambush, Murray’s commanding officer — another Hendricken graduate — walked away from a rocket-propelled grenade blast that ripped the hood off his Humvee. Captain Brendan C. Fogerty and his men all had concussions.
By sunset, the Marines had recovered their dead, collared some of the insurgents who fled from the attack, and, in 110-degree heat, cleared every scrap of wreckage and gear and flesh from the bomb site.
But the fourth of September was far from done with the Weapons Company of the 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. The 1st Platoon still had night patrol duty. Wills walked Murray to his truck, gave him a hug and said in his fierce Boston accent: “Be safe out there, man.”
Captain Fogerty led seven trucks down the road to the cloverleaf that turns Route Michigan toward a decrepit industrial zone of the city.
Somewhere in the shadows within eyeball range, somebody triggered the electronic signal — from a cell phone, perhaps, or a cheap remote-control garage door-opener — that detonated the blast beneath the belly of the sixth Humvee in the line. Murray’s Humvee.
Three Marines flew from the Humvee: Murray, Sergeant Terrence “Shane” Burke and Lance Corporal Jonathan Goldman. Then came the ambush from at least two vantage points near Al Jabal Hospital, on the north side of Route Michigan — the stutter of AK-47 automatics, the pop and whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades.
Fogerty hardly needed to give orders. As bullets pelted their armor, his Humvees formed a defense around Murray’s flaming wreck. Fogerty’s men counterattacked instinctively, spraying fire from their M-16s and 50-caliber machine guns to suppress the fire from their unseen attackers.
Murray’s brain registered a flood of sensations as he thrashed in the darkness. He fumbled to pull the helmet away from his debris-blasted face. He could feel his hands but — “Damn! What’s wrong with these things?” — they were fire-stung to vibrating numbness. He struggled to get up off the pavement but, arms broken and legs shattered, he could manage only a pathetic shimmy.
Murray’s eardrums were ruptured, muting the cries of men and the crack of guns. His right eye, nicked by shrapnel, was swelling shut. His body was falling deep into shock. Pain had yet to dig in at his nerve endings. Time slowed to a crawl.
But his perception of danger was keen as a knife-blade. Death was as near as the tracers of machine-gun fire overhead.
Murray shimmied back under the meager protection of his helmet.
Lying in his rack back at the lakeside camp, Corporal Wills heard the blast from Mobile Assault Platoon 1. Almost instantly the battle code for Murray’s Humvee blared over the radio.
“MAP One’s been hit!” Wills thought. “It’s Pat.”
Wills and his platoon raced to the scene to join the fight. As their column neared the cloverleaf, they could see the battle zone to the west on Route Michigan, lit up like the Fourth of July.
“I felt a pit in my stomach as I was riding down there, and I could see the glow of the vehicle,” Wills said.
“You arrive on the scene and all you see is fire and the guys defending, with rounds going off in the vehicle, and everything is chaos.”
There was a job to be done. “But you’re like: Jesus Christ, a few minutes ago I was holding this kid,” Wills said. “And you say, ‘What’s going on? I need to know!’ ”
CORPORAL Patrick D. Murray is the Marine from down the street in North Kingstown. He’s the fire chief’s son, the youth soccer goalie, the highly opinionated Red Sox fanatic, the devoted student of cheesy ’80s rock bands like Styxx.
Murray went from the University of Rhode Island to a sand-blasted Marine base in Iraq and home again the hard way, landing broken and burned in a hospital bed in Texas. He was missing most of his right leg but he still had his confidence and his cracked sense of humor.
The journey began at the dinner table of the Murrays’ raised ranch on Haverhill Street one night in March 2003, when their middle child dropped his bombshell.
“Well, Mom, I went up to Boston today to enlist in the Marines,” Patrick said, as casually as “pass the potatoes.”
“You did what?” his mother exploded.
“Well,” Patrick ventured, “Big Joe was at Brown and he enlisted in the Marines.”
Not the wisest comeback from her University of Rhode Island scholar, thought Suzanne Murray, a seventh-grade English teacher in Cranston. The United States is about to invade Iraq, and Patrick brings up his grandfather’s war. Good Lord, doesn’t he remember that Big Joe was almost killed in Korea?
Suzanne began to cry. She wanted to fight this decision, but deep inside she knew it was what Patrick wanted to do. Family tradition was part of it. Patrick’s other grandfather had spent World War II in the Navy. Suzanne’s mom and dad, Joe and Sally Motherway, had both been Marines. Two of Suzanne’s eight brothers and sisters were career military officers. One of her younger cousins was headed for Iraq.
Then there was Patrick’s nature. The Murrays’ only son had taken the Sept. 11 attacks to heart. Suzanne and David Murray had been so proud to see this boy — a young man now, she had to keep reminding herself — channel his anger into action, fixing up care packages to ship to the workers at Ground Zero. And now, four of Patrick’s closest friends were preparing to fight in Iraq.
It took some days, but Patrick’s mother reconciled herself to his decision. “I had to support him,” she said, “but it was the hardest thing in the world.”
Patrick sought out the nearest reserve unit that was likely to see combat, based 90 minutes from home at Fort Devens.
He timed his official signup so that he could attend his sister Erin’s graduation from URI and finish his sophomore year. Then he reported to boot camp at Parris Island, S.C.
Murray and his class of recruits followed generations of green Marines to a rude awakening: they were too slow, too weak, too witless to find their way to the toilet, never mind do credit to the work they had signed up to do. They had to be broken down and relieved of their freedom and their self-regard. Then they could be rebuilt into the assets of a fighting team.
Thirteen weeks later, Murray was a Marine rifleman.
“I never want to do it again,” Murray said of boot camp. But there was something to be said for shared oppression. The bonds forged in the sweltering swamps of Parris Island — and later the frostbitten woods of Fort Devens — would hold fast in the furnace of war in Fallujah.
In the early months of the war, the Pittsburgh-sized port on the Euphrates was untouched by the U.S. invasion force and largely ignored in news accounts. All the same, Fallujah was an insurgent cauldron in the making a full year before the Marines arrived there in force in the spring of 2004, two years before Murray would be rotated in with the 1st Battalion of the 25th Marine Regiment — 1/25.
Fallujah was overwhelmingly Sunni — the branch of Islam that had ruled Iraq for decades. The U.S. invasion and the rise of Iraq’s Shiite majority was a grave threat to the Sunnis who ran Fallujah. When cheering Iraqis and U.S. troops pulled down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad in the spring of 2003, citizens rioted in the streets of Fallujah.
IN HIS OWN MIND, Pat Murray was a machine-gunner from the minute he visited the Marine recruiting office. No foot patrols in heavy packs for him. He would survey the field from the turret behind a 50-caliber gun that could spray hundreds of rounds a minute to an accurate range of more than a mile.
“Coolest job in the Marines,” said Murray.
He nailed down the job in the summer and fall after boot camp, during Infantry School at Camp Lejeune, N.C. As a machine-gunner, Murray joined the mortarmen, anti-tank missile operators and other heavy assault specialists who made up Weapons Company. His battalion also included rifle companies from around New England. It was a reserve outfit, with a regional flavor missing from the active-duty units. “You’re fighting with your friends, your classmates, people you know outside the Marine Corps,” said Murray. “I think maybe it makes it a little bit better.”
His buddies were an odd lot, among them Sergeant Burke, a Boston policeman; Lance Corporal Goldman, a University of Massachusetts sociology major from Brookline, Mass.; the wickedly funny Corporal Wills, a worldly late-vocation Marine who ran a lawn-sprinkler service in Waltham; and Lance Corporal Valdepeņas, a Seekonk doctor’s son with a sunny disposition, two years behind Murray at Bishop Hendricken, now on leave from UMass.
By Halloween of 2003, Murray was back in Rhode Island with his parents and sisters — Erin, 21 at the time, and Colleen, 15. He had received a meritorious promotion and was ready to go back to college. “We were extremely proud,” his mother said. The Marine who came home was still their Patrick, but he carried himself with a new seriousness.
Still, the next 18 months was a time of anxiety. “This war was just not ending,” said Suzanne.
Especially in Fallujah. In March 2004, insurgents killed and mutilated four American contractors and hung their charred remains from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The episode symbolized an emerging reality: things in Iraq were not going so well for the Americans.
What came next encapsulated the American dilemma in Iraq. A newly arrived Marine expeditionary force was first ordered to smash the insurgent enclaves in Fallujah. Then the Marines were ordered to stand down. Finally the brass pulled the Marines out of the city proper and turned Fallujah over to Iraqi forces and local Sunni police. Within days, the so-called Fallujah Brigade buckled under the pressure of insurgent killings and intimidation.
EVEN AS A RESERVIST back home in Rhode Island, Murray found his focus shifting from campus to combat preparation — monthly drill weekends at Fort Devens, special courses at other installations, and summer training at Quantico. Murray and his buddy Wills honed their skills well enough to become instructors. They worked just as hard at another key aspect of building their teams in 1/25: keeping things light.
Murray staged a legendary kidnapping at Quantico in July of 2004. He anonymously ransomed Gunnery Sergeant Joe Grabbert’s favorite coffee cup for a company beer party.
That summer in Fallujah, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led al-Qaida in Iraq, consolidated his headquarters, taking personal part in the beheadings of hostages. To the Marines, the City of 100 Mosques became “the bomb factory” — and once more the brass in Baghdad and Washington made an about face. The Marines were ordered in November to seize Fallujah.
They drove out Zarqawi — later located by U.S. intelligence and killed — and routed the insurgents who stayed to fight. But the victory was the bloodiest and most destructive of the war. After being displaced for weeks, the people returned to a city largely in ruins, further than ever from embracing the American cause. The jihadists immediately set about reinfiltrating.
The national elections of January 2005 — so widely viewed as a sign of hope — were a non-event in Fallujah, boycotted by the Sunni majority.
Later that summer, the 1/25 Marines were alerted of their deployment to Fallujah. Murray took a leave from URI to settle his affairs, begin his goodbyes and report to Fort Devens in December. Live-fire exercises in arctic weather seemed downright dangerous. Living conditions were worse than boot camp, 10 Marines jostling for sleeping space in rundown, randomly furnished rooms. “Man, that place stunk,” Murray said.
Last stop before deployment to Iraq was the Marine camp at Twentynine Palms, Calif. Now the training stepped up to a much higher level, sharpening skills and rehearsing battle situations.
Everybody needed to know something about every job: the repair of a disabled Humvee, the application of a pressure bandage to a gaping wound, the navigation of an assault patrol within the urban gridwork through night-vision goggles, the firing and maintenance of an array of weapons.
But it was also drummed into the Marines that “this was going to be urban warfare — the ultimate small-unit engagement,” said Murray’s platoon commander, Captain Fogerty. No training could simulate the moment in battle when everything goes wrong.
jmulligan@belo-dc.com
Ellie
By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau
Even the wisecracking Patrick D. Murray was grim with anger and grief as his platoon strapped on armor and helmets to go back out on night patrol.
The 23-year-old machine-gunner from North Kingstown was dog-tired but still wired after a two-hour break for water, food and decompression at Baharia, the lakeside Marine camp a few kilometers east of Fallujah.
Nowhere near enough time to absorb the events on some of the meanest streets in Iraq on that Monday, a year ago Sept. 4. “A devastating day for all of us,” in the words of Murray’s kindred spirit, Mark Wills, a fellow corporal in their weapons company.
Three comrades were dead in a roadside bombing — one of them a close buddy of Murray’s from Bishop Hendricken High School, Lance Corporal Eric Valdepeņas. A fourth was on the brink of death. Their truck had been blown up as they guarded the memorial service for a Connecticut Marine shot a few days before in a drive-by.
In the frantic action after the morning ambush, Murray’s commanding officer — another Hendricken graduate — walked away from a rocket-propelled grenade blast that ripped the hood off his Humvee. Captain Brendan C. Fogerty and his men all had concussions.
By sunset, the Marines had recovered their dead, collared some of the insurgents who fled from the attack, and, in 110-degree heat, cleared every scrap of wreckage and gear and flesh from the bomb site.
But the fourth of September was far from done with the Weapons Company of the 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment. The 1st Platoon still had night patrol duty. Wills walked Murray to his truck, gave him a hug and said in his fierce Boston accent: “Be safe out there, man.”
Captain Fogerty led seven trucks down the road to the cloverleaf that turns Route Michigan toward a decrepit industrial zone of the city.
Somewhere in the shadows within eyeball range, somebody triggered the electronic signal — from a cell phone, perhaps, or a cheap remote-control garage door-opener — that detonated the blast beneath the belly of the sixth Humvee in the line. Murray’s Humvee.
Three Marines flew from the Humvee: Murray, Sergeant Terrence “Shane” Burke and Lance Corporal Jonathan Goldman. Then came the ambush from at least two vantage points near Al Jabal Hospital, on the north side of Route Michigan — the stutter of AK-47 automatics, the pop and whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades.
Fogerty hardly needed to give orders. As bullets pelted their armor, his Humvees formed a defense around Murray’s flaming wreck. Fogerty’s men counterattacked instinctively, spraying fire from their M-16s and 50-caliber machine guns to suppress the fire from their unseen attackers.
Murray’s brain registered a flood of sensations as he thrashed in the darkness. He fumbled to pull the helmet away from his debris-blasted face. He could feel his hands but — “Damn! What’s wrong with these things?” — they were fire-stung to vibrating numbness. He struggled to get up off the pavement but, arms broken and legs shattered, he could manage only a pathetic shimmy.
Murray’s eardrums were ruptured, muting the cries of men and the crack of guns. His right eye, nicked by shrapnel, was swelling shut. His body was falling deep into shock. Pain had yet to dig in at his nerve endings. Time slowed to a crawl.
But his perception of danger was keen as a knife-blade. Death was as near as the tracers of machine-gun fire overhead.
Murray shimmied back under the meager protection of his helmet.
Lying in his rack back at the lakeside camp, Corporal Wills heard the blast from Mobile Assault Platoon 1. Almost instantly the battle code for Murray’s Humvee blared over the radio.
“MAP One’s been hit!” Wills thought. “It’s Pat.”
Wills and his platoon raced to the scene to join the fight. As their column neared the cloverleaf, they could see the battle zone to the west on Route Michigan, lit up like the Fourth of July.
“I felt a pit in my stomach as I was riding down there, and I could see the glow of the vehicle,” Wills said.
“You arrive on the scene and all you see is fire and the guys defending, with rounds going off in the vehicle, and everything is chaos.”
There was a job to be done. “But you’re like: Jesus Christ, a few minutes ago I was holding this kid,” Wills said. “And you say, ‘What’s going on? I need to know!’ ”
CORPORAL Patrick D. Murray is the Marine from down the street in North Kingstown. He’s the fire chief’s son, the youth soccer goalie, the highly opinionated Red Sox fanatic, the devoted student of cheesy ’80s rock bands like Styxx.
Murray went from the University of Rhode Island to a sand-blasted Marine base in Iraq and home again the hard way, landing broken and burned in a hospital bed in Texas. He was missing most of his right leg but he still had his confidence and his cracked sense of humor.
The journey began at the dinner table of the Murrays’ raised ranch on Haverhill Street one night in March 2003, when their middle child dropped his bombshell.
“Well, Mom, I went up to Boston today to enlist in the Marines,” Patrick said, as casually as “pass the potatoes.”
“You did what?” his mother exploded.
“Well,” Patrick ventured, “Big Joe was at Brown and he enlisted in the Marines.”
Not the wisest comeback from her University of Rhode Island scholar, thought Suzanne Murray, a seventh-grade English teacher in Cranston. The United States is about to invade Iraq, and Patrick brings up his grandfather’s war. Good Lord, doesn’t he remember that Big Joe was almost killed in Korea?
Suzanne began to cry. She wanted to fight this decision, but deep inside she knew it was what Patrick wanted to do. Family tradition was part of it. Patrick’s other grandfather had spent World War II in the Navy. Suzanne’s mom and dad, Joe and Sally Motherway, had both been Marines. Two of Suzanne’s eight brothers and sisters were career military officers. One of her younger cousins was headed for Iraq.
Then there was Patrick’s nature. The Murrays’ only son had taken the Sept. 11 attacks to heart. Suzanne and David Murray had been so proud to see this boy — a young man now, she had to keep reminding herself — channel his anger into action, fixing up care packages to ship to the workers at Ground Zero. And now, four of Patrick’s closest friends were preparing to fight in Iraq.
It took some days, but Patrick’s mother reconciled herself to his decision. “I had to support him,” she said, “but it was the hardest thing in the world.”
Patrick sought out the nearest reserve unit that was likely to see combat, based 90 minutes from home at Fort Devens.
He timed his official signup so that he could attend his sister Erin’s graduation from URI and finish his sophomore year. Then he reported to boot camp at Parris Island, S.C.
Murray and his class of recruits followed generations of green Marines to a rude awakening: they were too slow, too weak, too witless to find their way to the toilet, never mind do credit to the work they had signed up to do. They had to be broken down and relieved of their freedom and their self-regard. Then they could be rebuilt into the assets of a fighting team.
Thirteen weeks later, Murray was a Marine rifleman.
“I never want to do it again,” Murray said of boot camp. But there was something to be said for shared oppression. The bonds forged in the sweltering swamps of Parris Island — and later the frostbitten woods of Fort Devens — would hold fast in the furnace of war in Fallujah.
In the early months of the war, the Pittsburgh-sized port on the Euphrates was untouched by the U.S. invasion force and largely ignored in news accounts. All the same, Fallujah was an insurgent cauldron in the making a full year before the Marines arrived there in force in the spring of 2004, two years before Murray would be rotated in with the 1st Battalion of the 25th Marine Regiment — 1/25.
Fallujah was overwhelmingly Sunni — the branch of Islam that had ruled Iraq for decades. The U.S. invasion and the rise of Iraq’s Shiite majority was a grave threat to the Sunnis who ran Fallujah. When cheering Iraqis and U.S. troops pulled down the statue of Saddam in Baghdad in the spring of 2003, citizens rioted in the streets of Fallujah.
IN HIS OWN MIND, Pat Murray was a machine-gunner from the minute he visited the Marine recruiting office. No foot patrols in heavy packs for him. He would survey the field from the turret behind a 50-caliber gun that could spray hundreds of rounds a minute to an accurate range of more than a mile.
“Coolest job in the Marines,” said Murray.
He nailed down the job in the summer and fall after boot camp, during Infantry School at Camp Lejeune, N.C. As a machine-gunner, Murray joined the mortarmen, anti-tank missile operators and other heavy assault specialists who made up Weapons Company. His battalion also included rifle companies from around New England. It was a reserve outfit, with a regional flavor missing from the active-duty units. “You’re fighting with your friends, your classmates, people you know outside the Marine Corps,” said Murray. “I think maybe it makes it a little bit better.”
His buddies were an odd lot, among them Sergeant Burke, a Boston policeman; Lance Corporal Goldman, a University of Massachusetts sociology major from Brookline, Mass.; the wickedly funny Corporal Wills, a worldly late-vocation Marine who ran a lawn-sprinkler service in Waltham; and Lance Corporal Valdepeņas, a Seekonk doctor’s son with a sunny disposition, two years behind Murray at Bishop Hendricken, now on leave from UMass.
By Halloween of 2003, Murray was back in Rhode Island with his parents and sisters — Erin, 21 at the time, and Colleen, 15. He had received a meritorious promotion and was ready to go back to college. “We were extremely proud,” his mother said. The Marine who came home was still their Patrick, but he carried himself with a new seriousness.
Still, the next 18 months was a time of anxiety. “This war was just not ending,” said Suzanne.
Especially in Fallujah. In March 2004, insurgents killed and mutilated four American contractors and hung their charred remains from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The episode symbolized an emerging reality: things in Iraq were not going so well for the Americans.
What came next encapsulated the American dilemma in Iraq. A newly arrived Marine expeditionary force was first ordered to smash the insurgent enclaves in Fallujah. Then the Marines were ordered to stand down. Finally the brass pulled the Marines out of the city proper and turned Fallujah over to Iraqi forces and local Sunni police. Within days, the so-called Fallujah Brigade buckled under the pressure of insurgent killings and intimidation.
EVEN AS A RESERVIST back home in Rhode Island, Murray found his focus shifting from campus to combat preparation — monthly drill weekends at Fort Devens, special courses at other installations, and summer training at Quantico. Murray and his buddy Wills honed their skills well enough to become instructors. They worked just as hard at another key aspect of building their teams in 1/25: keeping things light.
Murray staged a legendary kidnapping at Quantico in July of 2004. He anonymously ransomed Gunnery Sergeant Joe Grabbert’s favorite coffee cup for a company beer party.
That summer in Fallujah, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led al-Qaida in Iraq, consolidated his headquarters, taking personal part in the beheadings of hostages. To the Marines, the City of 100 Mosques became “the bomb factory” — and once more the brass in Baghdad and Washington made an about face. The Marines were ordered in November to seize Fallujah.
They drove out Zarqawi — later located by U.S. intelligence and killed — and routed the insurgents who stayed to fight. But the victory was the bloodiest and most destructive of the war. After being displaced for weeks, the people returned to a city largely in ruins, further than ever from embracing the American cause. The jihadists immediately set about reinfiltrating.
The national elections of January 2005 — so widely viewed as a sign of hope — were a non-event in Fallujah, boycotted by the Sunni majority.
Later that summer, the 1/25 Marines were alerted of their deployment to Fallujah. Murray took a leave from URI to settle his affairs, begin his goodbyes and report to Fort Devens in December. Live-fire exercises in arctic weather seemed downright dangerous. Living conditions were worse than boot camp, 10 Marines jostling for sleeping space in rundown, randomly furnished rooms. “Man, that place stunk,” Murray said.
Last stop before deployment to Iraq was the Marine camp at Twentynine Palms, Calif. Now the training stepped up to a much higher level, sharpening skills and rehearsing battle situations.
Everybody needed to know something about every job: the repair of a disabled Humvee, the application of a pressure bandage to a gaping wound, the navigation of an assault patrol within the urban gridwork through night-vision goggles, the firing and maintenance of an array of weapons.
But it was also drummed into the Marines that “this was going to be urban warfare — the ultimate small-unit engagement,” said Murray’s platoon commander, Captain Fogerty. No training could simulate the moment in battle when everything goes wrong.
jmulligan@belo-dc.com
Ellie