JSOCMarine
9 May 2003, 21:18
Pretty good account of one Marine Infantry Battalion during Nasiriyah fight.
Note the comment the one Marine Sergeant says about "Blackhawk Down" and "We were Soldiers." I don't think anyone should get too worked up over this comment. There's always a chance that he did not say it as the reporter wrote it here, or he did not say it at all, or he simply used a poor choice of words to convey that he was scared shitless during that portion of the battle. I believe this is most likely the case. Some of us have had similar "religious expriences" when we were on the tip of the spear.
I think the article contains some good insights for all to learn from and I don't want anyone to be insulted by this comment. S/F
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Battle for Nasiriyah
Leathernecks of 1/2 ran into a buzz saw and the bloodiest day of the war
By Gina Cavallaro
Times staff writer
NASIRIYAH, Iraq — The rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds seemedto come at them in slowmotion. Small-arms fire whizzed past from all directions, pinging and clanging against metal, against body armor. Bad guys — some dressed in women’s clothes, some barely into their teens —wielded sawed-off AK-47 assaultrifles, spraying fire indiscriminately from behind windows, roadsideberms and doorways.
Neighborhoods had names likeAmbush Alley and Martyr’s District.
There were casualties. Theirbuddies got killed.
“It was like a Nintendo game,” one junior Marine said as he described the surreal experience of being in this city on March 23, the day 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, lost 18 Marines, the highest single toll paid by a U.S. unit in the war in Iraq.
That day, the Marines learned their enemy was capable of using their own rules of engagement against them, firing from mosques and hospitals and using women and children as human shields. That day, the Marines used anything they could to cover the bodies of their dead, many seeing for the first time a fellow Marine’s blood on their hands.
The Marines expected resistance and were ready for a fight, but no one anticipated how stiff the resistance would be. The task of securing two bridges that would give coalition forces access to a critical alternate supply route north was not supposed to be the bloodiest battle of the war.
Ready for a fight
For the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the war began March 21 with the seizure of an airfield at Jalibah. As Army and Marine units streamed across the border, infantry units from the 2nd MEB — dubbed Task Force Tarawa for the Iraq operation — headed for the town of Jalibah to secure an airfield there.
Following units from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division that had done much of the heavy lifting in Jalibah, the Marines of the task force found seizing the airfield to be “kind of a minor mission,” said Col. Ron Johnson, task force operations officer.
The next day, the Marines were ordered to move out for Nasiriyah, a city 35 miles to the northwest. After Jalibah, they thought the Nasiriyah fight would bring more of the same limited resistance.
Part of the task force’s regimental combat team, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, was assigned to attack north and seize two key bridge crossings — the south bridge over the Euphrates River and a second bridge over the Saddam Canal about two miles north. Seizing those bridges would open passage for the 1st Marine Division onto Route 7 and create an alternate supply route on the less built-up eastern side of the city.
The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski, and battalion operations officer Maj. David Sosa a week earlier had requested information from unmanned aerial vehicle over-flights on terrain, enemy positions and other city characteristics. But those requests were never fulfilled because the task force wasn’t part of the main effort at the time of the request, Grabowski and Sosa said.
Yet had they been armed with that battlefield intelligence, they still likely would have been surprised by a fierce enemy. It was to be a quick operation on the road to Baghdad, but Nasiriyah became an extended urban battle that lasted nearly two weeks.
“We met resistance almost from the start, stronger resistance than we had anticipated,” Johnson said. “The enemy that was in the area was not only the Iraqi army, but there were numerous Fedayeen [and] Baath Party” militiamen.
About a week after the Marines took the bridges, the battalion leaders learned why the Iraqis fought so viciously.
In a rare opportunity, Grabowski, Sosa and other battalion leaders sat in as a team of intelligence Marines talked with the commander of the Iraqi army’s 23rd Brigade. The Iraqi was captured as he tried to sneak past a checkpoint in an ambulance with other Iraqi officers, including one who was badly burned.
Through an interpreter, the commander said the Iraqis intended to get the Marines to dismount from their vehicles south of the Euphrates bridge and walk into a fight in the city. He also spoke candidly about his impression of the first coalition troops that came through. He said the Iraqis were surprised by how slow and weak the coalition forces seemed and how they were expecting coalition units to hit the city quickly and with tremendous force. He didn’t seem to be able to distinguish between Marines and soldiers, he just knew someone was coming.
“I’m looking over at Dave [Sosa] and I’m looking over at the [battalion executive officer] and I’m thinking, ‘Is he talking about us? I thought we came in pretty damn hard and fast,’”Grabowski recalled. “And then I thought, ‘I bet he’s talking about that maintenance company.’”
A convoy of more than a dozen trucks from the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was making its way north during the early morning hours of March 23 behind Army combat units and made it past an Iraqi checkpoint at a railroad bridge south of the city.
Then the Iraqis struck. In the ambush that followed, at least nine soldiers were killed and six were taken prisoner. “He said it had been so easy to take them out, it just sort of energized everyone,” Sosa said. “Anyone with a weapon at that point was just waiting” for the next unit to show up.
While the Iraqi commander would not discuss his forces’ total numbers or the number of casualties they suffered, he admitted that 60 percent of the troops deserted from brigades in the northeast, the south and in the city center, the Marines said.
But when the Marines of 1/2 headed north from Jalibah, the Iraqis were still ready for a fight.
Rescue mission
Staged south of a cloverleaf intersection near Jalibah about 3 a.m., the battalion readied for its assault on the bridges even as hundreds of Army vehicles moved north past their position near Route 1, possibly including the 507th convoy that was later ambushed. A few hours later, the battalion moved north, to a railroad bridge about eight miles south of the city.
“While moving that distance, we came under indirect fire from the northeast. We chose to respond with one round at a time, because it was clear to us they were trying to get our range,” Grabowski said. As one of the battalion’s mortar platoons set up to fire, Iraqi forces began firing from positions directly east as well.
At the same time, as Combined Anti-Armor Team vehicles and M-1A1 Abrams tanks responded to fire they were getting from the east and west, the Marines saw an Army vehicle headed south from the city. As they watched, the vehicle turned back to the north, perhaps because the soldiers believed the Marines were enemy forces, Grabowski said. About 20 minutes later, they saw the vehicle approach again.
“I don’t know what made them change their mind that we weren’t enemy, but they came back and told us they had wounded soldiers forward,” Grabowski said. The task force sent tanks north to retrieve the wounded soldiers.
“They rescued 12 soldiers, a lot of them were wounded, some were pinned down. All the vehicles were destroyed,” Johnson said. “We brought them back, then we had a report there were other soldiers that were trapped or pinned down further north. We ended up finding various positions where the 507th had been attacked. We continued to find more vehicles the further north we went.”
As the tanks moved up to recover the wounded soldiers, two 1/2 companies — Alpha and Bravo — entered the fray. Taking fire from houses 50 feet to 150 feet off the roadway, the infantry units pressed forward to the railroad bridge, where they encountered a rude surprise: nine Iraqi T-55 tanks.
“No one expected that many tanks near that bridge,” Grabowski said. “So there was a surprise to all of us when we got up there and we kept getting reports of T-55s.”
The tanks were spread out, in positions where the crews thought they could get good shots or good fields of fire, Grabowski said. Many of the tanks had no engine or transmission, serving instead as impromptu pillboxes. The Marines quickly dispatched all nine tanks, destroying four with TOW anti-armor missiles fired from vehicles on the move and one with a Javelin shoulder-launched anti-armor missile.
The assault slowed after the battalion reached the railroad bridge, as the Marines were forced to wait for their tanks before they could press the attack. The 12 tanks had burned almost all their fuel rescuing the soldiers and had to return to the rear to refuel.
With the tanks back in the area about 1 p.m., the battalion began the move to the Euphrates and the first main objective, the south bridge.
Wrong turn
Alpha Company was to lead the assault and take the first bridge, with Bravo Company set to cross soon after and turn right and move north to the Saddam Canal bridge after bypassing a residential area east of the roadway. Charlie Company was to follow Alpha and Bravo.
“That was a risk we took, that was a decision that I made, that, hey, let’s press, let’s get up on this bridge,” Grabowski said. “Up to that point, we were not receiving what I would call effective small-arms fire.”
Alpha Company crossed the bridge with little difficulty and took few casualties despite the heavy fire that continued unabated from Iraqis holed up inside the two-mile stretch of roadway between the bridges, a built-up urban area that came to be known as “Ambush Alley.”
But when Bravo crossed the bridge, they missed their turn and took the next available right, running straight into a neighborhood filled with uniformed Iraqi army troops.
The Iraqis, who Grabowski believes were heading south to reinforce the Euphrates bridge, were stunned by the unexpected arrival of a Marine infantry company reinforced by Abrams tanks.
“We greeted them with an M-1A1 tank and opened up on them with a 7.62 machine gun and killed them. In fact, the guy that was lying there that we saw had been hit by a .50-caliber round,” Grabowski said. “If you knew tanks and tracked vehicles were coming down your street, why would you be standing in the middle? They were caught by surprise.”
But after the firefight, Bravo Company’s vehicles ran aground, sinking into a field of mud covered by a deceptively sturdy-looking crust on top. Six vehicles bogged down and needed to be towed out, leaving the Bravo leathernecks stuck in position.
‘It was mayhem’
With Bravo Company bogged down, Charlie Company moved up and passed through Alpha Company’s lines north of the Euphrates bridge, pushing into Ambush Alley for a fight north to the Saddam Canal bridge. The enemy fire, largely small arms and RPG rounds, was intense as they raced up the city street.
One Amphibious Assault Vehicle was overloaded, carrying 23 Marines after picking up a group of infantrymen from another vehicle that had broken down. Just south of the canal bridge, it took a direct hit from an RPG round, near the right-side rear of the vehicle. Four Marines were injured, suffering burns and major limb damage. The AAV limped across the bridge, where Marines on the north side pulled out the wounded troops and put them on another vehicle.
The ramp release on the damaged AAV was jammed, so wounded Marines were crawling out of the vehicle through the rear hatch one at a time and jumping off the top and sides, said Lance Cpl. Jared Martin, 26, of Phoenix.
“It was mayhem, everyone was screaming,” said Martin, an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon gunner. The outside of the vehicle and the attached rucksacks were on fire, filling the air with a heavy smoke that led many to put their gas masks on.
“The gas masks made it hard to hear what everyone was saying. I thought I was hurt, but it was just the concussion, my ears were ringing and my jaw hurt,” Martin said.
All the while, enemy soldiers and militia were running from berm to berm, lobbing mortar rounds and RPGs at the Marines. “We couldn’t get away from it,” said one fire-team leader, Cpl. William H. Bachmann, 22, of Belvidere, N.J.
But as they loaded wounded onto another AAV, the Marines were hit again — this time in what likely was a friendly fire strike.
Throughout the day, the battalion had air cover from AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters. But faced with intense fire from mortars, RPGs and small arms, the Marines needed more punch and the Cobras were later joined by other Marine and Air Force jets.
“Since we were not the main effort, there was no air dedicated to us,” Sosa said. “Once we got into a fight, what they did was they started stripping air away from other people, so whatever was up and available started getting pushed toward us.”
One of those aircraft, an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt attack jet, arrived on the scene to provide close-air support for the ground troops. The Marines who were north of the bridge say they were hit by fire from the A-10.
At the time, Bravo Company was beginning to move north again after extracting some of its vehicles from the mud. The Marines heard an ominous call over the radio from 1st Lt. Mike Seeley, Grabowski said. “Abort air!” came the urgent request, one which meant something had gone terribly wrong.
One of the Charlie Company Marines in the AAV that was hit recalled that he heard a loud “grunting” sound and felt a lot of heat.
“I got pushed up in the turret, heat was all over and they started screaming, ‘We’ve got casualties! We’ve got casualties!’” said Sgt. Jeremy Donaldson, 22, of Bangor, N.Y., an assistant section leader. “I didn’t hear the plane at first. I didn’t know where to go. We got orders to engage, but engage what?”
Another Marine recalled seeing the A-10 through the reinforced glass windows of his AAV.
“It’s the biggest explosion I’ve ever seen,” said Cpl. John Brown, 22, from Aliquippa, Pa. “My gunner was hit.”
Nine Marines were killed in the confused skirmish north of the canal bridge, at least six of them in the A-10 strike, according to some published reports.
Return to Ambush Alley
Now the Marines had even more wounded on their hands, many seriously hurt and in desperate need of treatment. Yet it was still too dangerous to evacuate the casualties by air, leaving them no choice but to make another run through Ambush Alley to bring the wounded to the rear. The Marines gathered six vehicles together for the quick run to the south.
Less than 500 yards into Ambush Alley, the convoy was hit by a hail of enemy fire. Two vehicles suffered direct hits from RPGs; one that was carrying mortar ammunition was hit by two RPGs and was destroyed, killing nearly everyone inside.
“The one filled with mortar rounds was annihilated,” said Sgt. William Schaefer, 25, of Columbia, S.C. “It blew up. Body parts flew across our vehicle.”
His AAV, disabled by the concussion, lost its steering. Out of control, it bounced off a light pole and slammed into a building. A number of Marines jumped from the vehicles and ran to a nearby building, which they cleared and then set up as a fighting position. The 14 or so Marines inside fought from within the building for the next two hours.
“It was small unit leadership that kept people alive,” Schaefer said. He recalled thinking that their situation made those depicted in movies like “Black Hawk Down” and “We Were Soldiers Once” “look like child’s play.”
“Most guys were so scared, they were just shooting at anything that wasn’t a Marine,” said Lance Cpl. Edward Castleberry, 21, an AAV driver from Seattle.
About the time the vehicles were hit during the return trip through Ambush Alley, another vehicle was destroyed near the southern bridge, contributing to the toll of dead and wounded Marines. How many were killed in each vehicle hit is still unclear.
“We suspect they took casualties from that A-10, but we don’t know and we can’t say that’s the case until the investigation is completed,” Grabowski said. “I can’t sit here and tell you how many casualties were taken at the north side of the bridge versus how many were on the south side, because it’s like herding cats. We’re not certain who saw who, who was on what [vehicle] and how many. My sense is that most of our [fatalities] occurred on the southern side of the bridge trying to get those that were wounded back.”
With sundown fast approaching, the Marines holed up in the building worried that they’d been forgotten. But as the sun was going down, a gunnery sergeant showed up, leading a group of Marines in two Humvees and an Abrams tank to retrieve them. The Marines bolted from the house and jumped onto the Humvees, crowding into the back cargo areas.
“There were Marines sticking out everywhere, and there was no protection, just a tarp,” said Cpl. John Wentzel, 20, a squad leader from Austin, Texas.
It wasn’t until noon the next day that the bridges were deemed secure. The Marines formed a perimeter on the north side of the canal bridge the night of March 23 and fanned out over the next 12 hours, controlling access from east to west as tanks controlled the canal bridge’s southern approach. The fire, both direct and indirect, was still coming fast and furious during the second day of the fight. Though it tapered off as the hours crept by, there were still reports of drive-by shootings and other terrorist-type attacks.
Final farewell
In the 13 days the Marines of Task Force Tarawa were in Nasiriyah, they set up a civil-military operations center, where they distributed 3,000 bags of flour confiscated from the government. They set up a medical detachment, set up two water treatment sites on the north side of the canal, escorted civilians back into their neighborhoods after the fighting had dwindled and gave them diesel fuel from their own trucks.
The task force moved out of Nasiriyah on April 4, covering hundreds of miles in the region southeast of Baghdad, pulling security, guarding prisoners of war and battling pockets of enemy resistance in towns including Diwiniyah, Qalat Sukkar, Kut and Amarah.
“That was their first real test in combat, and a lot of them aged very quickly,” Grabowski said. “With the exception of maybe one or two, they didn’t have a dazed look in their eyes. They were doing what needed to be done and they were ready to continue the mission. At least at that point, we knew we had nine souls that were gone. As for the missing, we were hoping most of those guys had gotten on helicopters. As it turns out, there were another nine” who were killed.
On the way south toward Kuwait, the Marines planned to make a stop in Nasiriyah at the north end of the canal bridge, to say a farewell to their fallen brothers. There was no plan to leave anything behind in memorial for fear it would be stolen or defaced.
“I would give up all the extra money I made, all the medals, all the kudos to get our friends back,” Brown said.
Grabowski shared his thoughts on the importance of the battle for Nasiriyah to the effort to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, saying the fight there gave the Iraqis their first indication of the coalition forces’ resolve.
“I’d like to think we set the stage for the rest of the war by telling the Iraqi leaders that you can use your best shot, and we’re still going to continue to come after you,” Grabowski said. “Maybe the battle in An Nasiriyah caused the guys up in Baghdad, in Al Kut, in Tikrit to say, ‘Hey, maybe we didn’t want that after all. These guys aren’t going to stop. They’re going to keep coming. They’re going to take their objective regardless.’
“I would like to think we thwarted some of their will.”
Gina Cavallaro, a staff writer for Army Times, covered Task Force Tarawa operations in Iraq.
Note the comment the one Marine Sergeant says about "Blackhawk Down" and "We were Soldiers." I don't think anyone should get too worked up over this comment. There's always a chance that he did not say it as the reporter wrote it here, or he did not say it at all, or he simply used a poor choice of words to convey that he was scared shitless during that portion of the battle. I believe this is most likely the case. Some of us have had similar "religious expriences" when we were on the tip of the spear.
I think the article contains some good insights for all to learn from and I don't want anyone to be insulted by this comment. S/F
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Battle for Nasiriyah
Leathernecks of 1/2 ran into a buzz saw and the bloodiest day of the war
By Gina Cavallaro
Times staff writer
NASIRIYAH, Iraq — The rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds seemedto come at them in slowmotion. Small-arms fire whizzed past from all directions, pinging and clanging against metal, against body armor. Bad guys — some dressed in women’s clothes, some barely into their teens —wielded sawed-off AK-47 assaultrifles, spraying fire indiscriminately from behind windows, roadsideberms and doorways.
Neighborhoods had names likeAmbush Alley and Martyr’s District.
There were casualties. Theirbuddies got killed.
“It was like a Nintendo game,” one junior Marine said as he described the surreal experience of being in this city on March 23, the day 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, lost 18 Marines, the highest single toll paid by a U.S. unit in the war in Iraq.
That day, the Marines learned their enemy was capable of using their own rules of engagement against them, firing from mosques and hospitals and using women and children as human shields. That day, the Marines used anything they could to cover the bodies of their dead, many seeing for the first time a fellow Marine’s blood on their hands.
The Marines expected resistance and were ready for a fight, but no one anticipated how stiff the resistance would be. The task of securing two bridges that would give coalition forces access to a critical alternate supply route north was not supposed to be the bloodiest battle of the war.
Ready for a fight
For the Marines of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the war began March 21 with the seizure of an airfield at Jalibah. As Army and Marine units streamed across the border, infantry units from the 2nd MEB — dubbed Task Force Tarawa for the Iraq operation — headed for the town of Jalibah to secure an airfield there.
Following units from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division that had done much of the heavy lifting in Jalibah, the Marines of the task force found seizing the airfield to be “kind of a minor mission,” said Col. Ron Johnson, task force operations officer.
The next day, the Marines were ordered to move out for Nasiriyah, a city 35 miles to the northwest. After Jalibah, they thought the Nasiriyah fight would bring more of the same limited resistance.
Part of the task force’s regimental combat team, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, was assigned to attack north and seize two key bridge crossings — the south bridge over the Euphrates River and a second bridge over the Saddam Canal about two miles north. Seizing those bridges would open passage for the 1st Marine Division onto Route 7 and create an alternate supply route on the less built-up eastern side of the city.
The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Rick Grabowski, and battalion operations officer Maj. David Sosa a week earlier had requested information from unmanned aerial vehicle over-flights on terrain, enemy positions and other city characteristics. But those requests were never fulfilled because the task force wasn’t part of the main effort at the time of the request, Grabowski and Sosa said.
Yet had they been armed with that battlefield intelligence, they still likely would have been surprised by a fierce enemy. It was to be a quick operation on the road to Baghdad, but Nasiriyah became an extended urban battle that lasted nearly two weeks.
“We met resistance almost from the start, stronger resistance than we had anticipated,” Johnson said. “The enemy that was in the area was not only the Iraqi army, but there were numerous Fedayeen [and] Baath Party” militiamen.
About a week after the Marines took the bridges, the battalion leaders learned why the Iraqis fought so viciously.
In a rare opportunity, Grabowski, Sosa and other battalion leaders sat in as a team of intelligence Marines talked with the commander of the Iraqi army’s 23rd Brigade. The Iraqi was captured as he tried to sneak past a checkpoint in an ambulance with other Iraqi officers, including one who was badly burned.
Through an interpreter, the commander said the Iraqis intended to get the Marines to dismount from their vehicles south of the Euphrates bridge and walk into a fight in the city. He also spoke candidly about his impression of the first coalition troops that came through. He said the Iraqis were surprised by how slow and weak the coalition forces seemed and how they were expecting coalition units to hit the city quickly and with tremendous force. He didn’t seem to be able to distinguish between Marines and soldiers, he just knew someone was coming.
“I’m looking over at Dave [Sosa] and I’m looking over at the [battalion executive officer] and I’m thinking, ‘Is he talking about us? I thought we came in pretty damn hard and fast,’”Grabowski recalled. “And then I thought, ‘I bet he’s talking about that maintenance company.’”
A convoy of more than a dozen trucks from the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was making its way north during the early morning hours of March 23 behind Army combat units and made it past an Iraqi checkpoint at a railroad bridge south of the city.
Then the Iraqis struck. In the ambush that followed, at least nine soldiers were killed and six were taken prisoner. “He said it had been so easy to take them out, it just sort of energized everyone,” Sosa said. “Anyone with a weapon at that point was just waiting” for the next unit to show up.
While the Iraqi commander would not discuss his forces’ total numbers or the number of casualties they suffered, he admitted that 60 percent of the troops deserted from brigades in the northeast, the south and in the city center, the Marines said.
But when the Marines of 1/2 headed north from Jalibah, the Iraqis were still ready for a fight.
Rescue mission
Staged south of a cloverleaf intersection near Jalibah about 3 a.m., the battalion readied for its assault on the bridges even as hundreds of Army vehicles moved north past their position near Route 1, possibly including the 507th convoy that was later ambushed. A few hours later, the battalion moved north, to a railroad bridge about eight miles south of the city.
“While moving that distance, we came under indirect fire from the northeast. We chose to respond with one round at a time, because it was clear to us they were trying to get our range,” Grabowski said. As one of the battalion’s mortar platoons set up to fire, Iraqi forces began firing from positions directly east as well.
At the same time, as Combined Anti-Armor Team vehicles and M-1A1 Abrams tanks responded to fire they were getting from the east and west, the Marines saw an Army vehicle headed south from the city. As they watched, the vehicle turned back to the north, perhaps because the soldiers believed the Marines were enemy forces, Grabowski said. About 20 minutes later, they saw the vehicle approach again.
“I don’t know what made them change their mind that we weren’t enemy, but they came back and told us they had wounded soldiers forward,” Grabowski said. The task force sent tanks north to retrieve the wounded soldiers.
“They rescued 12 soldiers, a lot of them were wounded, some were pinned down. All the vehicles were destroyed,” Johnson said. “We brought them back, then we had a report there were other soldiers that were trapped or pinned down further north. We ended up finding various positions where the 507th had been attacked. We continued to find more vehicles the further north we went.”
As the tanks moved up to recover the wounded soldiers, two 1/2 companies — Alpha and Bravo — entered the fray. Taking fire from houses 50 feet to 150 feet off the roadway, the infantry units pressed forward to the railroad bridge, where they encountered a rude surprise: nine Iraqi T-55 tanks.
“No one expected that many tanks near that bridge,” Grabowski said. “So there was a surprise to all of us when we got up there and we kept getting reports of T-55s.”
The tanks were spread out, in positions where the crews thought they could get good shots or good fields of fire, Grabowski said. Many of the tanks had no engine or transmission, serving instead as impromptu pillboxes. The Marines quickly dispatched all nine tanks, destroying four with TOW anti-armor missiles fired from vehicles on the move and one with a Javelin shoulder-launched anti-armor missile.
The assault slowed after the battalion reached the railroad bridge, as the Marines were forced to wait for their tanks before they could press the attack. The 12 tanks had burned almost all their fuel rescuing the soldiers and had to return to the rear to refuel.
With the tanks back in the area about 1 p.m., the battalion began the move to the Euphrates and the first main objective, the south bridge.
Wrong turn
Alpha Company was to lead the assault and take the first bridge, with Bravo Company set to cross soon after and turn right and move north to the Saddam Canal bridge after bypassing a residential area east of the roadway. Charlie Company was to follow Alpha and Bravo.
“That was a risk we took, that was a decision that I made, that, hey, let’s press, let’s get up on this bridge,” Grabowski said. “Up to that point, we were not receiving what I would call effective small-arms fire.”
Alpha Company crossed the bridge with little difficulty and took few casualties despite the heavy fire that continued unabated from Iraqis holed up inside the two-mile stretch of roadway between the bridges, a built-up urban area that came to be known as “Ambush Alley.”
But when Bravo crossed the bridge, they missed their turn and took the next available right, running straight into a neighborhood filled with uniformed Iraqi army troops.
The Iraqis, who Grabowski believes were heading south to reinforce the Euphrates bridge, were stunned by the unexpected arrival of a Marine infantry company reinforced by Abrams tanks.
“We greeted them with an M-1A1 tank and opened up on them with a 7.62 machine gun and killed them. In fact, the guy that was lying there that we saw had been hit by a .50-caliber round,” Grabowski said. “If you knew tanks and tracked vehicles were coming down your street, why would you be standing in the middle? They were caught by surprise.”
But after the firefight, Bravo Company’s vehicles ran aground, sinking into a field of mud covered by a deceptively sturdy-looking crust on top. Six vehicles bogged down and needed to be towed out, leaving the Bravo leathernecks stuck in position.
‘It was mayhem’
With Bravo Company bogged down, Charlie Company moved up and passed through Alpha Company’s lines north of the Euphrates bridge, pushing into Ambush Alley for a fight north to the Saddam Canal bridge. The enemy fire, largely small arms and RPG rounds, was intense as they raced up the city street.
One Amphibious Assault Vehicle was overloaded, carrying 23 Marines after picking up a group of infantrymen from another vehicle that had broken down. Just south of the canal bridge, it took a direct hit from an RPG round, near the right-side rear of the vehicle. Four Marines were injured, suffering burns and major limb damage. The AAV limped across the bridge, where Marines on the north side pulled out the wounded troops and put them on another vehicle.
The ramp release on the damaged AAV was jammed, so wounded Marines were crawling out of the vehicle through the rear hatch one at a time and jumping off the top and sides, said Lance Cpl. Jared Martin, 26, of Phoenix.
“It was mayhem, everyone was screaming,” said Martin, an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon gunner. The outside of the vehicle and the attached rucksacks were on fire, filling the air with a heavy smoke that led many to put their gas masks on.
“The gas masks made it hard to hear what everyone was saying. I thought I was hurt, but it was just the concussion, my ears were ringing and my jaw hurt,” Martin said.
All the while, enemy soldiers and militia were running from berm to berm, lobbing mortar rounds and RPGs at the Marines. “We couldn’t get away from it,” said one fire-team leader, Cpl. William H. Bachmann, 22, of Belvidere, N.J.
But as they loaded wounded onto another AAV, the Marines were hit again — this time in what likely was a friendly fire strike.
Throughout the day, the battalion had air cover from AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters. But faced with intense fire from mortars, RPGs and small arms, the Marines needed more punch and the Cobras were later joined by other Marine and Air Force jets.
“Since we were not the main effort, there was no air dedicated to us,” Sosa said. “Once we got into a fight, what they did was they started stripping air away from other people, so whatever was up and available started getting pushed toward us.”
One of those aircraft, an Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt attack jet, arrived on the scene to provide close-air support for the ground troops. The Marines who were north of the bridge say they were hit by fire from the A-10.
At the time, Bravo Company was beginning to move north again after extracting some of its vehicles from the mud. The Marines heard an ominous call over the radio from 1st Lt. Mike Seeley, Grabowski said. “Abort air!” came the urgent request, one which meant something had gone terribly wrong.
One of the Charlie Company Marines in the AAV that was hit recalled that he heard a loud “grunting” sound and felt a lot of heat.
“I got pushed up in the turret, heat was all over and they started screaming, ‘We’ve got casualties! We’ve got casualties!’” said Sgt. Jeremy Donaldson, 22, of Bangor, N.Y., an assistant section leader. “I didn’t hear the plane at first. I didn’t know where to go. We got orders to engage, but engage what?”
Another Marine recalled seeing the A-10 through the reinforced glass windows of his AAV.
“It’s the biggest explosion I’ve ever seen,” said Cpl. John Brown, 22, from Aliquippa, Pa. “My gunner was hit.”
Nine Marines were killed in the confused skirmish north of the canal bridge, at least six of them in the A-10 strike, according to some published reports.
Return to Ambush Alley
Now the Marines had even more wounded on their hands, many seriously hurt and in desperate need of treatment. Yet it was still too dangerous to evacuate the casualties by air, leaving them no choice but to make another run through Ambush Alley to bring the wounded to the rear. The Marines gathered six vehicles together for the quick run to the south.
Less than 500 yards into Ambush Alley, the convoy was hit by a hail of enemy fire. Two vehicles suffered direct hits from RPGs; one that was carrying mortar ammunition was hit by two RPGs and was destroyed, killing nearly everyone inside.
“The one filled with mortar rounds was annihilated,” said Sgt. William Schaefer, 25, of Columbia, S.C. “It blew up. Body parts flew across our vehicle.”
His AAV, disabled by the concussion, lost its steering. Out of control, it bounced off a light pole and slammed into a building. A number of Marines jumped from the vehicles and ran to a nearby building, which they cleared and then set up as a fighting position. The 14 or so Marines inside fought from within the building for the next two hours.
“It was small unit leadership that kept people alive,” Schaefer said. He recalled thinking that their situation made those depicted in movies like “Black Hawk Down” and “We Were Soldiers Once” “look like child’s play.”
“Most guys were so scared, they were just shooting at anything that wasn’t a Marine,” said Lance Cpl. Edward Castleberry, 21, an AAV driver from Seattle.
About the time the vehicles were hit during the return trip through Ambush Alley, another vehicle was destroyed near the southern bridge, contributing to the toll of dead and wounded Marines. How many were killed in each vehicle hit is still unclear.
“We suspect they took casualties from that A-10, but we don’t know and we can’t say that’s the case until the investigation is completed,” Grabowski said. “I can’t sit here and tell you how many casualties were taken at the north side of the bridge versus how many were on the south side, because it’s like herding cats. We’re not certain who saw who, who was on what [vehicle] and how many. My sense is that most of our [fatalities] occurred on the southern side of the bridge trying to get those that were wounded back.”
With sundown fast approaching, the Marines holed up in the building worried that they’d been forgotten. But as the sun was going down, a gunnery sergeant showed up, leading a group of Marines in two Humvees and an Abrams tank to retrieve them. The Marines bolted from the house and jumped onto the Humvees, crowding into the back cargo areas.
“There were Marines sticking out everywhere, and there was no protection, just a tarp,” said Cpl. John Wentzel, 20, a squad leader from Austin, Texas.
It wasn’t until noon the next day that the bridges were deemed secure. The Marines formed a perimeter on the north side of the canal bridge the night of March 23 and fanned out over the next 12 hours, controlling access from east to west as tanks controlled the canal bridge’s southern approach. The fire, both direct and indirect, was still coming fast and furious during the second day of the fight. Though it tapered off as the hours crept by, there were still reports of drive-by shootings and other terrorist-type attacks.
Final farewell
In the 13 days the Marines of Task Force Tarawa were in Nasiriyah, they set up a civil-military operations center, where they distributed 3,000 bags of flour confiscated from the government. They set up a medical detachment, set up two water treatment sites on the north side of the canal, escorted civilians back into their neighborhoods after the fighting had dwindled and gave them diesel fuel from their own trucks.
The task force moved out of Nasiriyah on April 4, covering hundreds of miles in the region southeast of Baghdad, pulling security, guarding prisoners of war and battling pockets of enemy resistance in towns including Diwiniyah, Qalat Sukkar, Kut and Amarah.
“That was their first real test in combat, and a lot of them aged very quickly,” Grabowski said. “With the exception of maybe one or two, they didn’t have a dazed look in their eyes. They were doing what needed to be done and they were ready to continue the mission. At least at that point, we knew we had nine souls that were gone. As for the missing, we were hoping most of those guys had gotten on helicopters. As it turns out, there were another nine” who were killed.
On the way south toward Kuwait, the Marines planned to make a stop in Nasiriyah at the north end of the canal bridge, to say a farewell to their fallen brothers. There was no plan to leave anything behind in memorial for fear it would be stolen or defaced.
“I would give up all the extra money I made, all the medals, all the kudos to get our friends back,” Brown said.
Grabowski shared his thoughts on the importance of the battle for Nasiriyah to the effort to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, saying the fight there gave the Iraqis their first indication of the coalition forces’ resolve.
“I’d like to think we set the stage for the rest of the war by telling the Iraqi leaders that you can use your best shot, and we’re still going to continue to come after you,” Grabowski said. “Maybe the battle in An Nasiriyah caused the guys up in Baghdad, in Al Kut, in Tikrit to say, ‘Hey, maybe we didn’t want that after all. These guys aren’t going to stop. They’re going to keep coming. They’re going to take their objective regardless.’
“I would like to think we thwarted some of their will.”
Gina Cavallaro, a staff writer for Army Times, covered Task Force Tarawa operations in Iraq.