Читать книгу Fallujah Awakens - Bill Ardolino - Страница 15

Sgt. David Kopera’s men moved in zigzag formation through a lush field on the edge of Albu Aifan village. Barely midmorning on November 4, 2006, the strong Fallujan sun warmed the dry ground and desert air. Sweat ran down the men’s torsos under heavy armor and equipment, applying a fresh coat of grimy ochre stain to their faded brown Kevlar vests. The Marines had good dispersion but little cover among the leafy green shoots that brushed their shins and stood in uneven clumps atop grayish-brown sandy soil.

Kopera had deployed his undermanned squad—those who remained after the loss of Tommy Gilbert, Jonathan Thornsberry, and Brad Bueno on October 25—into two staggered columns. Ruben “Doc” Muñoz, the medical corpsman, trailed about fifteen feet behind the squad leader. Kopera’s team methodically approached the backyards of a cluster of muted tan, concrete-block houses lining a main road. Cpl. Matthew Zofchak’s second team traveled along the edge of the field, parallel with them, less than one hundred meters to the southeast.¹ As the Marines moved along, they saw a robed woman and a teenage girl harvesting a crop along a deep irrigation ditch.² Nearly twenty meters from the village, Kopera’s world erupted.

Incoming bullets rent the air with cracks; the muffled sound of rounds churning the ground around him mixed with the stuttering of at least two RPK light machine guns and the chatter of AK-47s.³ The crackling boom of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) echoed from somewhere to the left.⁴ The rounds were landing so close that Kopera knew they were shooting right at him. Exposed in the open field, he had to move. The sergeant sprinted to a concrete outhouse in the backyard of the nearest house.⁵

When the shooting began, Doc Muñoz had been looking at the ground in order to carefully choose his footing in the field’s sinking, uneven soil. His worries about twisting an ankle evaporated when he saw the powdery dirt begin to hop, and the air around his ears exploded with the familiar sound of flying metal shredding the sound barrier. Ahead, he saw small puffs silhouette Kopera as the rounds landed. It was obvious to him that they were targeting his team leader, who had a prominent radio antennae jutting skyward from his back. “God! That’s close!” Muñoz later recalled thinking.⁶

The corpsman hit the ground hard, crawling for cover behind a small berm that rose less than a foot above the rest of the field. He raised his weapon to return fire and willed himself small as bullets zipped around him. He saw Kopera make a play for the outhouse. “Shit, that’s a better idea,” he thought. “I have to get the hell out of here…. My luck is going to run out.” Adrenaline surged through his body, lifting him off the ground and into a pell-mell sprint for safety as rounds slapped around him. He leaped behind the outhouse, joining Kopera with a thud as the ceramic plate in his carrying vest smacked the concrete wall.⁷ In the first few seconds of the engagement, it seemed like hundreds of rounds had hit in a terrifyingly close cluster around the two men. Even though it was clear the attackers knew how to shoot better than most of the others the Marines had run into, they somehow had missed. The insurgents maintained their fire, with bullets chipping the concrete structures in front of the pair.⁸

Kopera tried to get a handle on the situation. The members of his squad that he could see had found good cover behind a house. He then tried to figure out where the fire was coming from. About 125 or 150 meters to the southwest stood a group of low buildings fronting a single-story peach-colored mosque. Peeking around the outhouse, Kopera spotted muzzle flashes above the low walls bordering the roof of one or two of the buildings.⁹ “The fire is coming from that side,” he told Muñoz, pointing. After unsuccessfully trying to raise his other team on the radio, Kopera and the corpsman started returning fire.¹⁰

Before “the shit hit the fan,” Cpl. Matthew Zofchak had been walking along the raised berm of the wide irrigation ditch bordering the field. His team was moving to the right of the watery trench in a staggered southwest-northeast column spread out over ninety meters. Only Sgt. Caleb Inman, an artilleryman and truck driver who had volunteered to augment the undermanned infantry squad on this patrol, was close to Zofchak.¹¹ Although Inman had already served a 2004 tour in Fallujah, non-infantry augments were always assigned to a team leader, who would closely watch their performance. Zofchak drew the assignment. They were walking in tandem, less than ten meters apart, while LCpl. Eddie O’Connor, the squad’s lone machine gunner, pulled “tail-end Charlie” at the rear of the formation.¹² Zofchak took advantage of Inman’s proximity, joking that the twenty-five-year-old Texan was a “damned POG [person other than grunt].” Then the crack of small-arms fire pierced the air.¹³

MAP 2 Morning Ambush, Albu Aifan, November 4, 2006

Zofchak and the others hit the ground as rounds began landing near them. The woman and her daughter who had been working in the field bolted for the cover of a house.¹⁴ Zofchak saw a distant Muñoz and Kopera get up off the deck and do “the chicken little dance” as they ran through incoming bullets to the safety of the concrete outhouse. Zofchak and Inman watched bursts of dirt spring into the air maybe a dozen feet away. The loud crumple of an explosion washed over the pair of Marines. An RPG had overshot them and landed nearby. O’Connor saw the rocket explode near the two men, front and to the left of him, as he took cover behind a mound of dirt.¹⁵ Zofchak and Inman looked at each other incredulously, momentarily stunned by the sudden explosion. Zofchak’s surprise mutated to anger. The corporal took to a knee and oriented himself south toward the attackers, looking for a target through a tangle of reeds that lined the canal.¹⁶ “Hey, Tyink! Tyink!” Inman yelled to Cpl. Andrew Tyink, the man ahead of him in the column. For some reason, the prone Marine, another augment, this one from the company’s intelligence cell, didn’t answer. Tyink raised his weapon and started firing off rounds at a target.¹⁷

Zofchak shouldered his rifle and scanned for the source of the fire through his advanced combat optical gunsight. He spotted movement on the top floor of a low building maybe twenty degrees to the left of the mosque. He thought he saw a man briefly profiled above the low wall bordering the roof. The corporal fired off a quick couplet of rounds toward the target to try and suppress any attackers.¹⁸ “What are you firing at?” yelled Inman from his newfound cover behind a narrow tree alongside the ditch. The trunk’s three- or four-foot radius had barely obscured his body. Bits of foliage fell as bullets whipped through the cattails covering the trench. Inman soon thought he gained “positive identification” (PID) of a target, and he fired back as well.¹⁹

Zofchak looked for the rest of his team. LCpl. Scott Serr had been near the head of the southern column when the gunfire erupted and quickly crouched behind one of the brick ovens found in the backyard of many residences.²⁰ Others had sprinted or were now sprinting forward for the cover of the nearest house at the back of the village.²¹ After getting his bearings behind the oven, Serr moved inside one of the houses to look for a concealed angle of return fire.

Zofchak soon made out muzzle flashes next to the mosque, raised his weapon and fired maybe three to five rounds. He then pulled out a 40-mm grenade from his ammunition harness and loaded it into the M-203 launcher slung under the barrel of his rifle.²² He shot two grenades at the structure. After gaining PID and “going trigger happy,” Zofchak, Inman, and O’Connor executed a bounding leapfrog movement toward the rest of their team behind the house, using the cover of the trees and a raised berm next to the ditch.²³

Still behind the outhouse, Kopera could not see Zofchak and his team, who were closer to the attackers. He suspected the raised profile of the canal’s berm and cattails must have screened them from the clear view of the insurgents as well. He failed to raise them on his radio, but soon heard the high-pitched, nearer banging of their M-16s mingle with the throaty chatter of RPKs and AK-47s. The pressure on Kopera’s position lessened as some of the insurgents shifted their fire to the other group of Marines. Another RPG whooshed and exploded to his southeast.²⁴

Whoomp! His second team had started slinging grenades onto the insurgent position. Kopera again peeked at the enemy. He thought he glimpsed tiny figures crawling to their feet, running, and then dropping over the opposite side of the lower roof of a building. Two “40 mike-mikes” (grenades) had sealed it. The attackers seemed to be retreating. Kopera moved his group southeast to consolidate the squad. Sporadic outgoing fire continued as they moved toward the other Marines. The firefight only lasted a couple of minutes at most, but to some it felt like ten, to others about one. It “was one of those things that could have been two seconds or twenty minutes,” O’Connor said, recalling how adrenaline had warped his sense of time.²⁵

Kopera had allowed himself a brief moment of pride in his Marines’ performance. Zofchak’s team had taken initiative, quickly grabbing cover and gaining “fire superiority” by dousing the enemy with bullets and grenades. The appraisal was brief, however. Kopera’s mind returned quickly to the task at hand. He felt alert, but fought a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. At least one RPG had landed close to his second team, and someone on his side of the formation had speculated that a Marine had been injured.²⁶ The squad leader had been unable to raise them on the walkie-talkie, but once the squad was consolidated, he was relieved to discover that everyone was OK.²⁷

The Marines had been surprised, with several of them caught in the open. More than a hundred rounds had hit within feet, even inches, of Kopera and Muñoz. At least one of the exploded RPGs had flung its cloud of shrapnel just a few meters from Zofchak and Inman. None of the Americans were injured, but one of the Marines told the others that he had seen the attackers “pulling wounded with them” when they retreated.²⁸ The squad leader had little time to bask in relief or contemplate the vagaries of fate. He successfully radioed Lt. Jerome Greco back at the patrol base, reporting that the enemy had broken contact, and his Marines were moving in pursuit along the main road.²⁹

A kilometer and a half away at the patrol base, Greco was concerned but pleased with the performance of his squad leader. Kopera already had proven himself in garrison and under fire. Somewhat of a “profane intellectual,” the lanky sergeant was reliably sarcastic but turned serious when it came time to run his teams. Having now experienced what sounded like his first sustained contact (relatively speaking), the sergeant was calmly telling his platoon leader what he planned to do, rather than asking for instructions. Greco liked the initiative. His sergeant was getting after it.³⁰

The Americans didn’t know it at the time, but intelligence sources later revealed that one of at least six insurgents had been wounded, and another, a member of the Abu Yousseff subtribe largely based in an area south of the village, had been killed by the Marines’ return fire. The dead attacker’s compatriots had withdrawn to remove his body and lick their wounds. Islamic tradition stresses that the dead receive a proper, ritual burial as soon as possible. Muslim fighters and even noncombatants strive to fulfill this sacred mandate, snatching up and carting off bodies in the middle of terrible fighting. Some Americans grudgingly admired their opponents’ efficiency at recovering the dead, a cultural sensibility that resembled their own ethos of “leave no man behind.”³¹

Occurring after the Marines had barely been in country for a month, this engagement was a first for most of them in its immediacy and duration.³² The insurgents had learned painful lessons from the all-out frontal melees waged against the U.S. military during the early phases of the war. Blood-soaked blankets filled with dead insurgents had been stacked in grim piles in front of the mosques of Fallujah and Ramadi during the battles of 2004.³³ Most serious rebels were either clever or dead, and the smarter ones had adapted by shunning stand-up fights in favor of more tentative guerrilla tactics.

By late 2006, the peninsula’s insurgents were usually engaging Kopera’s men from at least two hundred yards out, if not more, and would then pull back immediately after the initial volley. Marines called it the “shoot and scoot.” This attack in the field had been mildly sustained and had been launched from little more than a football field away, causing Kopera to speculate that either they had run across a particularly brave group of jihadists or the sudden appearance of the Marines had surprised them.³⁴

Before issuing orders, Kopera instructed his squad members to quickly brief him on what they had seen and to check their ammunition and equipment. His team would head south, along the main road splitting the village, for a direct assault toward the mosque and the lower row of buildings in front of it that may have housed some of the attackers.³⁵ Zofchak’s team was to move along behind the backyards of the homes on the eastern side of the road and commandeer a house to the side of the mosque. The position offered fields of fire that would cut off the enemy’s escape if the main assault drove them to flee toward the network of irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the fields. Zofchak’s team would serve as an anvil for Kopera’s hammer. The Marines moved out.³⁶

Zofchak’s route offered the better cover and was supposed to get his team into position faster than the other team, but it also involved crossing two seemingly small irrigation creeks. Unfortunately for the Marines, the roughly three-foot-wide trenches held water four to five feet deep, were covered in cattails, and had mushy bottoms of thick sticky mud.³⁷ The men grunted or yelled in surprise as they plunged into the ditches, thrashing and churning their legs across the grasping bottom. At least one of the Marines lost his footing and went under. Inman became angry when his cigarettes got soaked.³⁸ “Fucking Zofchak,” several muttered in disapproval of their leader’s navigational decision.³⁹ Some seventy-five meters that should have taken less than a minute to travel took several. After emerging from the steep bank of the second channel and finding firm footing, the five muddy Marines hustled for their destination—a tan, two-story house that offered fields of fire over the likely escape routes from the mosque.

The team lined up in a wet “stack” in front of a door before rushing inside the house. The wet clomp of boots was met by high-pitched screams from the women and children inside—three little girls between the ages of four and eleven, three middle-aged women, and two elderly women, the latter of whom wore conservative black robes and head coverings. The Marines fanned out past them and throughout the house to look for threats. Some of the Iraqis cried or screamed as they were herded into the house’s main room. The muzzles came down. The weathered, older women, whom the Russian American Zofchak referred to as “babushkas,” moved forward. The eldest female quietly confronted the invaders with a look that was at once confused, scared, and resigned.⁴⁰ The Marines tried to calm the kids because “they were freaking out.”⁴¹

Zofchak attempted to communicate with calming hand gestures and stilted Arabic. “Ali Baba [bad guys]?” The older babushka looked at him, shook her head, and said, “Laa Ali Baba. Laa Ali Baba” (No Ali Baba). Zofchak felt bad for kicking in their door and frightening them, but didn’t give it a lot of thought. They needed this house, and that was that. Eventually the civilians quieted to a state of wary alarm. With the residence secured, one of the Marines was assigned to watch over the women and children clustered in the main room while the rest of the team deployed around the property. The kids were “glued to the women’s hips.” The women remained standing and quietly murmured to each other as they kept an eye on the wet, dirty Americans.⁴²

Nearby, Kopera’s team of Marines had been rushing in accordion-like bounds across the front yards of homes lining the road during their move to the mosque. A group of two would run from the safety of one residence to the next under the cover of the others’ poised weapons. Along the way, half the team was put on a rooftop for lookout, while the other Marines quickly bounced in and out of the low tan and gray residences, conducting cursory searches and asking the occupants about the insurgents.⁴³

Most of the local men were typically out and about at mid-morning. The Marines encountered a smattering of old folks; women of varying ages cooking, folding laundry, or doing yard work; and children sitting inside waiting out the gunfire. Reactions to battles in the community varied, but to the Americans, Iraqis could be a strange bunch.⁴⁴ When firefights broke out, as long as the bullets weren’t directed at them, many families would ignore it or move inside, but then quickly return to hanging clothes or performing whatever chores had been interrupted by the sounds of explosions or rifles. Many were used to this: Whatever God willed—insh’allah.⁴⁵

Whether it was bravery, Arab world fatalism, or something else that drove the Iraqis to carry on, Kopera admired and sympathized with them. His men tried to show respect in their dealings with the locals and executed what he thought of as well-considered rules of engagement and detainee-handling procedures. But no amount of good intentions and careful execution could blunt the terror of war and the disruption to their way of life, perhaps especially for Iraq’s politically displaced Sunni minority. Kopera thought Americans should try to imagine how they would feel if a super-power invaded the United States and dismantled the government, directly or indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of fellow citizens.

Complicating matters were the tragedies, abuses, mistakes, and public relations disasters since the 2003 invasion that had consumed the local consciousness. The stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the confused shooting of Iraqis during a protest outside the Fallujah Government Center on April 28, 2003, and other terrible stories were told and retold, often with embellishment, while the Americans’ acts of kindness and attempts to establish security were little acknowledged, poorly understood, or overlooked. It seemed that the good the Marines and others tried to do had little chance of competing for a place in the narrative.

On top of that, the tempo of rougher operations, including raids and mass detentions of military-age males, had been especially high in the early years of the war, as the U.S. military reacted forcefully to the growing insurgency. If an American unit had treated locals with disrespect, and some had, it made Kopera’s job exponentially harder. This was especially true in the context of a tribal society that demanded restitution, or revenge, for an insult. The challenges could be depressing, but they were simply the products of culture and human nature. These were facts Kopera understood, even as he struggled with them.

Kopera had come to respect Iraqis’ way of life, even to admire them. The heritage of the Middle East dates back thousands of years, he mused, and there was a decency in most Iraqis’ personal standards and civility, even to invaders. Kopera could go to a restaurant as a paying customer back in the States and find the hospitality worse than what he experienced after forcing himself into the house of a surprised Iraqi, abruptly face-to-face with Marines bristling with helmets, armor, antennae and weapons. If only he could somehow show other Americans what was happening in Iraq. Let them walk in Iraqi shoes for a minute, and they might want to help these people too.

Fallujan tribal society is based on the concepts of shame and honor. Everyone must live by a code. As a Marine, the thirty-year-old Kopera understood the idea. He had joined the Corps while attending community college in 2000. An avid painter, he had dropped out of art school after deciding he didn’t want to try to make a living as an artist, opting instead for a more practical associate’s degree in auto repair technology. He ran into a military recruiter while drifting through a couple of courses and living week to week on his modest income working a few shifts at a restaurant. Patriotism was part of it, sure. But he also didn’t really have a plan and craved direction, something military life offered in abundance. Kopera chose the Marine Corps, figuring that if he was going to take such a drastic step as joining the armed services, he might as well go with the toughest branch. He also liked the Marine Corps ideals. It demanded high standards of physical fitness, training, and personal discipline, and the challenge of achieving something noble and difficult appealed to him. Kopera wanted his own code.

Six years in the Marines had mostly validated his choice. Yeah, it was tough, and there were occasional disappointments. One of them was that some of Alpha Company’s Marines had opted out of the tour in Fallujah after a short-lived order stipulated that Reservists who had already deployed in support of Iraq or Afghanistan could not be forced to deploy again. His battalion had already conducted a quiet rotation in a combat zone, pulling security on a Special Forces base in Djibouti. Although the majority of the men from Alpha Company 1/24 had embarked on this subsequent, far more dangerous trip to Iraq, about twenty-five Marines had taken advantage of the decree and declined deployment. Kopera was shocked that the government would let members of the service “cop out like that,” go back to college or do whatever they pleased. “When you join the armed services, you swear an oath to serve a time commitment and do your job, regardless of personal” preference, he thought. For someone to voluntarily sit back and watch fellow Marines go off to a combat zone—“with some of them almost certainly coming back in a pine box”—was anathema to Kopera.⁴⁶ The great whys and hows of the invasion of Iraq hovered distantly outside of his job description, which at the moment simply consisted of finding and killing the insurgents who had just tried to kill him.⁴⁷

Many of the locals Kopera interviewed on the way to the mosque were less than helpful. In most of the eight or nine houses they briefly searched during roughly twenty minutes, the eldest woman would come forward to meet them, answer questions, and then shadow the Marines as they quickly peeked inside her house to look for insurgents, bullet casings, weapons, or blood trails.⁴⁸ Almost none of the civilians testified to having seen much of anything. Toward the end of their movement, an old man proved to be an exception by providing a lead.⁴⁹

The witness told the Marines that he had seen the ambush party—five young men who weren’t from the village. The attackers had fled the buildings around the mosque in two cars, traveling south. Kopera thought the man seemed genuinely agitated by outsiders picking gunfights with Marines in the middle of his village; he probably didn’t want Americans to blame his neighbors and come down hard on anyone.⁵⁰ The Iraqi’s stooped shoulders and wrinkled face also conferred that elderly aura of just not giving a damn. He seemed to disregard the possible consequences of feeding actionable information to the Americans. Kopera bought the man’s story.⁵¹

Widely dispersed and moving briskly, his men soon arrived at their target, the al-Shahid mosque. The small, single-story building whose name translates as the “witness” or the “martyr,” was surrounded by a low wall and a southern border of trees that blocked the view of an open field behind it. The simple concrete edifice was covered with stucco and a fading coat of light peach paint. On the roof was a small square turret crowned with speakers.⁵²

The team had taken no gunfire during their movement toward the building. It seemed that the insurgents had fled. The sergeant consolidated his squad a second time and consulted with Zofchak when he reached the mosque. Members of the squad thought that the insurgents might have been shooting from behind the low wall that edged the roof and from the reeds in a field next to the building.⁵³ But standard operating procedure stipulated that unless taking direct fire from a holy site, Americans couldn’t set foot on the grounds, much less search the interior. Procedure also dictated calling headquarters and asking for Muslims from an Iraqi Army unit to come to the village and case the structure. That might take hours, however, and the Marines did not trust the Iraqi Army units anyway.⁵⁴

Zofchak’s blood was up, and he wanted his prey, which might be hiding, or dead, inside the mosque. His thought process consisted of an equation involving three parts adrenaline, plus three parts “We need to investigate,” minus four parts “Shit, we can’t go in there, otherwise our ass is grass.” He did the math and concluded, “I don’t care if it’s a mosque, I want to go.”⁵⁵ Kopera wrestled briefly with what to do. He weighed the politics but ultimately decided he didn’t have time to call for an Iraqi unit if he was going to find any trace of the insurgents. “Fuck it, I’m jumping,” said the sergeant.⁵⁶

Without informing his platoon leader, Kopera opted to split the difference by climbing the mosque’s exterior staircase to look for shell casings on the roof, thus avoiding setting foot inside the building itself. He leapt over the courtyard wall and bounded up the stone stairs, but found no rebels or remnants of their presence on the roof. At the top, Kopera peeked through an upper window to verify that no attackers were hiding inside. He scampered back to the ground. The Marines found a few bullet casings on a road by the mosque, but it looked like the locals had already mostly picked the scene clean of brass, and the ambushers had made their getaway.⁵⁷

Kopera formulated a new plan and informed Greco: His squad would move south to the abandoned house of a wealthy sheikh that stood on the well-traveled intersection of Water Tower and Main Street. They would run a roadblock along the heavily trafficked thoroughfare and, with any luck, catch the insurgents if they were dumb enough to move back through the area.⁵⁸ First Squad formed up and moved out along the front yards lining the road, ready to duck quickly behind the courtyard walls if they were engaged a second time.

They approached the sheikh’s white, tan, and peach house, a large, lavish structure surrounded by a high elliptical wall on three sides and a thick row of hedges on one. The wall of the front courtyard was split by a wide, sloping driveway, and the roof was blessed with the standard low wall, which gave great cover while Marines capitalized on panoramic views from the unusually high third story. The residence resembled a mix between a small fortress and one of the stylized theme restaurants that dot the fancier strip malls of south Florida and California.⁵⁹

Kopera ordered the majority of his squad and the Navy corpsman into the house to begin overwatch and get a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a general purpose machine gun capable of laying down a steady wall of suppressive fire, set up on the roof. Meanwhile, Kopera, Inman, and Serr moved to initiate a “snap vehicle control point” at the intersection.

Almost immediately, a sedan with three young men drove toward their position from the southwest.⁶⁰ The Marines snapped up their weapons and “drew down on them.” The car and its occupants matched the old man’s general description of the attackers—sedan filled with young males. Kopera waved at the car to stop and looked at the men, searching their faces for signs of aggression. No visible weapons, and something in their manner clicked with the sergeant. He made an instinctive decision that they were of no immediate threat. Such snap judgment calls about who might be trying to hurt you, and over life or death itself, were played out millions of times across Iraq as coalition forces struggled to find the balance between self-preservation and sparing the innocent. Outcomes were varied, and sometimes tragic.

Despite having been terrifyingly ambushed less than twenty minutes before, now conducting a hunt for his attackers, and seeing a car whose make, color, and occupants roughly matched a witness’s description of the insurgents, Kopera made the accurate call and eased off the trigger. He cautiously moved to search and speak with the young men. When the Iraqis exited the car, however, Inman didn’t like their attitude. To him they seemed too jovial, almost taunting, as the Marines searched the vehicle and found nothing. The trunk was empty but fresh grass and soil were scattered about it. Something about that and the men’s cocky demeanor struck Inman as “not right.” But a hunch was insufficient evidence. The men had no weapons, explosives, or other contraband.⁶¹ Serr disagreed with Inman’s take on the situation. He thought Inman was “still pissed” about the previous firefight and therefore took the Iraqis’ casual attitude as a threat or perhaps a sign that they “knew something we didn’t.” Serr’s instincts told him the men had no knowledge of the shooting.

Meanwhile, O’Connor and another Marine had sprinted toward the back of the house to clear it and set up a rear watch and field of fire, as others cleared the structure. LCpl. Steven Auton moved toward the front of the house. The dark-haired lance corporal was a compactly built “tough kid” described by one Marine as “a little ball of fuck you up.” According to some of his squad mates, Auton showed little regard for authority in peacetime and made a lousy “garrison Marine,” but his aggression made him a good “combat Marine.” Auton was not the type of guy one would choose to conduct a gentle detainee interrogation, according to Serr, but once someone won his respect—a rare occurrence—his loyalty was absolute. He was “the type of guy who would punch a sergeant major in the face for you.”⁶²

Auton jogged over to the staircase leading up to the front porch of the house. As he reached it, all hell broke loose, again.⁶³ The familiar growl of an RPK erupted from a surprisingly close position less than a hundred yards away, somewhere to the southeast.⁶⁴ Rounds cracked the ground and cement around the SAW gunner, who barely had time to dive under the staircase. O’Connor saw bullets landing “literally inches from him” as the stairs were riddled with impacts.⁶⁵ O’Connor let off a couple of long bursts from his SAW to quickly “get something going” because Auton “was in a bad spot.”⁶⁶ Someone yelled at the Marines to “get in the house,” where they could set up a field of fire from the roof. O’Connor recalls telling LCpl. Jeff McAlinden “let’s get in the house,” but as they moved toward the porch, he saw “a line of [bullet] impacts between us and the front door along the outside wall” and thought better of the idea.⁶⁷ He could tell from the angle that the fire was emanating from a field catty-corner to the home. The SAW gunner recalls shooting back with a series of “short five-to-eight round bursts” while McAlinden started returning fire with his M-16, as little bits of concrete knocked loose from the incoming bullets “landed on [their] heads.”⁶⁸

Muñoz recalls moving toward the residence with Tyink, Zofchak, and LCpl. Brandon McCarty when they suddenly came under fire. Muñoz was in the road in front of the circular wall when bullets started hitting the stairs at the front of the house. The laconic corpsman thought the insurgents had left the area, so he was surprised, and maybe a little angry, that the Marines were getting ambushed again. “These guys want to kill my ass,” he thought, as the men sprinted the remaining few yards toward cover. Zofchak and Tyink moved behind a concrete outhouse that stood next to a ditch lining the front yard while Muñoz ducked behind the courtyard’s curved brick wall.⁶⁹

MAP 3 Afternoon Ambush, Albu Aifan, November 4, 2006

Zofchak tried to establish the locations of his team and the source of the fire but couldn’t immediately figure out “where the hell” it was “coming from.” Gaining situational awareness under fire can be difficult, even for experienced combatants. The snapping air and impacts of bullets told the Americans that a heavy volume of machine-gun fire was aimed at them. The directional echo of the firearms and the path of landing bullets can orient an observer only to the general source of the attack; there’s not much else to go on in the first few seconds.⁷⁰ In an instant, the body floods with adrenaline, and time seems to slow down or speed up. Some people feel numb, undergoing a vaguely out-of-body experience as their senses become selectively sluggish and sharp at the same time. And there is fear. It’s not the slow, creeping variety felt when anticipating hidden roadside bombs from the seat of a Humvee, rather a stabbing terror that promptly gives way to something else, or sticks around and incapacitates.

With Marines, their training usually kicks in, making the first, crucial order of business to discern the source of the incoming rounds and to quickly return a large volume of fire to subdue the ambush and eliminate the attacker’s advantage—that is, “suppressing them to gain fire superiority.” The problem is that the men shooting at you already know where you are and are suppressing you. And doing what needs to be done to obtain eyes on a position in a firefight—exposing oneself, even a little bit—might mean catching a bullet. Even wildly aimed machine-gun fire is unforgiving.

Muñoz crouched behind the courtyard wall and watched as Zofchak twice shifted from the cover of the outhouse to find the enemy’s position. “That’s pretty crazy,” the corpsman thought. Zofchak spotted muzzle flashes at two houses merely seventy-five to a hundred meters southeast, along Water Tower Road. He focused on flames he recalled blinking in the window of one of the houses. The corporal popped from cover, shot at the insurgents, looked around or yelled to someone, stuck his neck and shoulders out, and shot again.⁷¹

Tyink was next to Zofchak behind the outhouse, his legs still sprawled in front of him after an urgent slide for cover. According to Zofchak, Tyink was momentarily frozen. He had a distracted look on his face. Zofchak glanced at him, thinking, “What the fuck are you doing?” and then returned to shooting at the insurgents. At the renewed gunfire, Zofchak recalls that Tyink seemed to shake himself from his open-eyed slumber. He too raised his weapon and started peeling off rounds toward the attackers.⁷²

During a lull in incoming fire at the front porch, Auton escaped the space under the stairs and ran into the house. O’Connor and McAlinden followed “maybe twenty or thirty seconds behind him, at most,” according to O’Connor. When the two men entered the house, Auton was nowhere to be seen, and they later surmised that he had gone “straight to the roof.” The two following Marines rapidly cleared the large house room by room to make sure no one was hiding in the building. By the time they made it to the top, Auton had set up a field of fire.⁷³

From his spot behind the courtyard wall, Muñoz looked for something to shoot at and watched Zofchak for clues to get PID of a target. He admired the team leader’s calm.⁷⁴ Muñoz tended to be pretty calm himself. In the social hierarchy of Alpha Company, most everybody seemed to like the quiet Navy man, who rotated in and out of the three squads as one of the platoon’s two overworked medical corpsmen.

The amiable Colombian American was known as “the Puma.” Their platoon sergeant had coined the nickname on an earlier deployment to Iraq in 2005. Some claimed that comparing the short corpsman to a jungle cat was a play on his South American heritage, but others speculated it might be because of his graceful movements or the way he “pounced” on injured men to render treatment. Whatever the actual etymology, the serene Muñoz merely smiled when he heard “The Puma” and an accompanying Rawrrawarrr!—a stream of terrible, throat-cracking impressions of a cat’s roar. He had also been christened with the ethnically incorrect handle of “Ruben the Cuban,” which played on his Hispanic lineage and the bottomless cups of strong Cuban coffee he drank and shared with the Marines.

Muñoz was no “shit talker,” but he had to occasionally bare his teeth in the never-ending cycle of abuse that Marines and corpsmen heap on one another. While some guys flung endless volumes of crap at the wall and hoped that some of the insults stuck, the Puma would quietly observe or endure “beaner” jokes with a slight smile, waiting for an opportunity. When the right moment presented itself, he would strike, slipping a rhetorical knife through an attacker’s ribs in the form of a quiet insult, often followed by everyone bursting into laughter. His low-key put-downs gained authority from his selective use of them. Most of the Marines liked the chubby-cheeked corpsman, but more important, they respected him as possibly the best medic in the company. The thirty-five-year-old had seasoned himself as a first responder in his eleven years as an EMS technician and then as a fireman in Miami, Florida. He inspired confidence when the Marines witnessed him leap into action when people were injured. Assessed one man, “The Puma was unflappable.”⁷⁵

For four years before leaving the service in 1995, Muñoz had been an active duty Navy man on the ship-based—“blue side”—of the corpsman hierarchy. After the September 11 attacks, he volunteered to resume his work as a Navy medic, but on the “green side”—Marine infantry. He wanted to do his part, and serving with the Marines guaranteed him a crack at the combat he had missed during the Persian Gulf War. Muñoz wanted to test his skills in action.⁷⁶ He was getting plenty of that now, being shot at by a machine gunner for the second time in a day. He projected calm, but incoming bullets imbue anyone with great turmoil.

Firefights happen impossibly fast and generate a jumble of conflicting emotions. For Muñoz, there was excitement; there was piercing fear. He was sure that everyone was scared to some extent, but there was an unspoken, often successful struggle among the Marines not to show it. You had to display confidence to avoid making your buddies think you might crack up and fail to do your job. In the end, the fear of letting down friends and looking weak before alpha male competitors tended to eclipse the stark terror of being shot at.⁷⁷

At the sheikh’s house, everyone, according to Muñoz, seemed to keep things cool as they returned fire on the insurgents. He perceived the men they were fighting that day as acting professionally as well. In the first ambush, the insurgents had set up impressive fields of fire and then successfully retreated, only to position themselves to surprise the Marines a second time. Maybe these guys knew what they were doing. Muñoz waited for the call to treat any wounded.

Back at the checkpoint, Kopera, Serr, and Inman dropped behind the white car for cover when they heard the stutter of RPK fire directed toward the men at the house. The young Iraqis they had stopped and pulled from the vehicle were scared and unsure about what to do; they panicked and ducked in the middle of the road as bullets passed high and wide of their position. Kopera called to them and motioned toward a reed-filled ditch along the road’s right shoulder. One of the men eagerly complied and sat down in the dirt with hunched shoulders. Another ducked behind a shack in someone’s front yard, and the other man remained behind the car with the Marines.⁷⁸

Kopera heard his men at the house returning fire toward a target somewhere to his south. Peeking around the hood of the car, he determined the enemy’s general location from the close staccato of their weapons, but his line of sight was blocked by tall rushes lining the edge of the road. After a few seconds, he discerned the flicker of muzzle flashes through the high green shoots. Kopera carefully aimed and shot toward the insurgents, but his men around the house had a better line of sight, so he let them do most of the shooting.⁷⁹

Through his scope, Serr saw “four or five … men with guns” in the yard of a house catty-corner to the building the Marines had moved to secure; he shot maybe twenty rounds at them.⁸⁰ Inman, taking no chances, quickly burned through two magazines shooting at the enemy.⁸¹ Once the Americans at the car heard covering fire from their teammates near the house, they took the opportunity to jump into a roadside ditch for better cover. The young Iraqis from the car joined them.⁸²

For Kopera, time slowed during a gunfight. He had seen a few Marines panic when they were shot at, losing their minds in an instant. Some got angry and yelled. He and many others just responded. The sergeant explains that he never encountered a feeling he identified as “fear” during a battle; he never felt the instinct to flee, and he never got particularly excited. He just acted. Only after an engagement, after his adrenaline had surged and crashed, would thoughts of what had just happened or almost happened suffuse him with excitement and dread.⁸³

The Marines on and around the sheikh’s house could see their attackers firing from inside and around a couple of smaller homes no more than about 100 meters away. Over several minutes as the firefight progressed, the insurgents initially “held their ground,” but then moved to break contact. They tried to escape through a field of thigh-high green crops behind the houses. Two of the Iraqis were cut down before their companions managed to retreat through the series of irrigation ditches that split the field.⁸⁴ Subsequent intelligence reports identified one of the dead as a local man whose family lived in the modest house next to the scene of the original ambush in front of the al-Shahid mosque.⁸⁵

The gunfire tapered off. This second exchange had probably lasted two to five minutes, though again, no one could tell for sure.⁸⁶ Within seconds of the stillness, the Americans on the roof heard women screaming and wailing.⁸⁷ Another sedan generally matching the description of the insurgent getaway vehicle could be seen rolling toward the Marines. Kopera quickly glimpsed at one of the men from the first car sitting among the weeds in the ditch. He had a panicked look on his face. The Marine then refocused on the new vehicle.⁸⁸

As the car slowly approached the Marines, Kopera recalls seeing two men in their fifties or early sixties waving their arms from the front seat, trying to communicate with the Americans. Kopera motioned them forward. He briskly moved toward the car. Peering inside, the sergeant saw four middle-aged and elderly men with agitated looks on their faces and a barely conscious woman in her early thirties lying across the back seat.⁸⁹ She was wailing, in pain.⁹⁰ A small bloodstain across the front of her dark abaya marked a wound in her upper chest.

There was no interpreter available, but the sergeant could tell that the Iraqis wanted permission to drive her to the local hospital. Kopera didn’t think that she would make it without first being stabilized.⁹¹ He yelled for Muñoz and directed the driver to move the car up the driveway to the front porch of the house. The sergeant had Inman round up the men they had initially stopped at the checkpoint and motioned that they were free to go. Their faces filled with relief as they jumped in their car and sped south.⁹² Kopera ordered all the Marines into the house to plan their next moves.⁹³ “I’m tired of getting shot at,” Kopera said matter-of-factly to Zofchak.⁹⁴

From inside the house, Muñoz heard the call that “somebody is shot.”⁹⁵ The Puma rushed outside, meeting the car as it drove up to the porch. The Iraqi men left the vehicle and opened the door of the beat-up old sedan, giving the medic access to assess the patient. He saw a slightly heavyset woman slumped but conscious in the backseat. Her breathing was labored as a Marine and the corpsman helped her out of the vehicle and walked her up the stairs and into the house.⁹⁶

They sat her gently on the off-white marble floor, and Muñoz began a culturally delicate attempt to assess her wounds while allowing her to retain her modesty. He incrementally uncovered small swaths of her layered dress to probe for entrance and exit wounds. She didn’t object, realizing he was a “doctor” trying to help her. There was a small entrance wound in her left upper chest below the clavicle, with a slightly larger exit wound through her back.⁹⁷

The woman’s dress was soaked with blood. It wasn’t life-threatening, arterial bleeding, but instead pulsed steadily from her body.⁹⁸ The woman’s breathing was ragged. A lot of chest wounds eventually result in a collapsed lung, but Muñoz knew that this was not an immediate threat as “she had good lung sounds” and she wasn’t rapidly “decompensating.” The corpsman cut off a portion of her clothing to access the wound and applied an occlusive dressing and a trauma dressing over that to prevent air from entering the space around her lung and crushing it.⁹⁹ He secured the elastic bandages with duct tape and continued to check her airway and pulse. Muñoz didn’t think the woman would die anytime soon, but she would have little chance of surviving the day without more sophisticated medical attention, including insertion of a chest tube to prevent her chest from collapsing in on itself.¹⁰⁰

The woman’s male relatives realized he was a medic and quietly observed her treatment. They stood in the living room, concerned and watching, occasionally murmuring to each other in Arabic. In the distance, the Marines could hear the high, mournful wailing of a group of women who had gathered in a nearby house to lament the shooting.¹⁰¹ The men in the room looked upset but didn’t panic. Once they had judged the Marines’ intentions as being helpful, they relinquished control to the will of God (albeit through the Americans) to help her.¹⁰²

A couple of Marines sat on a half-circular staircase and smoked a cigarette as they watched Muñoz at work. Inman looked at Zofchak, who stood nearby.¹⁰³ “She’s bleeding a lot,” he said. “Yeah. She’s bleeding, a lot,” repeated Zofchak.¹⁰⁴ The injured woman occasionally moaned but she had otherwise become quiet. Inman was impressed with how she handled the injury. “Man, she’s a little bad-ass,” he said to another Marine.¹⁰⁵

Muñoz offered his assessment to Kopera that she was “stable,” but she “would die without better treatment.”¹⁰⁶ Serr recalls that the corpsman was “really firm” as he made his case. The squad leader paused for a second. “We have to get her out of here,” decided Kopera, radioing his intentions to Lt. Greco: No U.S. casualties; one critical civilian casualty; calling a medevac or casevac.¹⁰⁷

He then tried to raise an on-call medical helicopter on the predetermined frequency, but couldn’t get through to the pilot. He later found out that the frequencies, which were regularly changed, had been incorrectly set up to transmit as text.¹⁰⁸ The helicopter’s crew could hear him, but he couldn’t hear them. The sergeant called back to Greco and asked his lieutenant to direct the bird to his location. Marines weren’t required to evacuate civilians to U.S. care unless they had been directly injured by Americans. Kopera was unsure how the woman had been shot; her entrance wound did not reveal the guilty round to be a 5.56 mm used by the Marines or the 7.62 employed by insurgents. The insurgents had started shooting at the Marines from a field behind and to the side of her house, and several women had been standing in the yard, almost directly in the middle of a withering crossfire.¹⁰⁹

Kopera’s training had instructed him to prioritize the care of Marines, and after that treat both wounded civilians and insurgents as they would their own. He didn’t know how well others took that directive to heart, but making the attempt to save the woman was an instinctive decision. She would certainly die from her wound otherwise. If the slow ground travel through multiple checkpoints didn’t kill her, he thought the conditions at the local hospital most likely would.¹¹⁰ Evacuating her was not, however, without risk. A helicopter might make an attractive target for the group or groups of insurgents undoubtedly still lurking in the area, and the roads, sometimes used as landing zones for the helos, were studded with IEDs. The last thing anyone wanted was for his Marines to get killed evacuating a civilian or for a helicopter to take a catastrophic hit. Back at the patrol base, Lieutenant Greco deferred to Kopera’s call.¹¹¹

The Marines in Kopera’s squad prepared to execute the order. Some supported the decision, but others grumbled about it.¹¹² Serr assumed that the woman’s family “was forced to use her yard as a battlefield” and consequently he “thought it was the right thing to do.” Inman nonchalantly followed orders, but he recalled the times he had had to drive a seriously wounded Marine to the hospital at high speeds on a road potentially packed with bombs. It didn’t seem quite fair that an Iraqi would be rushed out on a medevac bird in only a few minutes.

Zofchak tried to fix the radio and raise the helicopter, but it was a lost cause. To compensate, the Marines played a high stakes version of the game “broken telephone.” Their walkie-talkies were unreliable and had a very limited range, so Muñoz used his personal role radio to relay instructions to a Marine on the roof. The altitude allowed the second American to switch frequencies and project a message farther, to Sgt. Christopher Dockter’s 2nd Squad, which had moved into a position a few hundred meters away.¹¹³

Dockter’s radios to air support had also failed before they rushed out to back up Kopera’s squad after the first engagement, so he was relaying instructions via short-range radio to Greco. Mercifully, the platoon leader’s encrypted line to the helicopter still worked, and one of his Marines interpreted these instructions and tried to direct the inbound helicopter toward a field set up as a landing zone immediately northeast of Kopera’s house.¹¹⁴ Muñoz, Kopera, and three Marines waited near the front of the house, while the rest of the men maintained security and overwatch from the roof.

The Americans were annoyed by how long it took for the helicopter to arrive.¹¹⁵ Some became concerned. After two ambushes in the last hour, they could not rule out a third attack as the vulnerable helo landed in an open field and the Marines escorted the patient to meet it.¹¹⁶ Within a few minutes, a distant hum gestated into the unmistakable beating of the large, tandem rotors of a CH-46 Sea Knight. The ancient airframe resembled a light gray-blue beetle that had been grabbed at both ends and stretched out. The pilot made a low pass over their position. A sleek AH-1 Super Cobra attack helicopter circled nearby as an escort.

The Marines had thrown a dark smoke grenade on the road next to the landing zone to signal the pilot. After spotting his destination, the CH-46 pilot banked sharply and circled back through the blue midday sky toward the field. The helicopter’s lumbering outline grew and then receded as it flew toward and then past the marked landing site.¹¹⁷ “What are they doing?” wondered Muñoz, as the pilot cut speed and raised the bird’s stubby nose to descend 75 meters to the south of the field. “That is the dumbest fucking thing in the world,” thought Zofchak. The chopper was landing in the middle of the frequently bomb-sown street, where Alpha Company had lost Gilbert and Thornsberry to a massive IED. The large crater left by the deadly bomb was still visible less than twenty meters from where the helo was setting down. For all anyone knew, there were other bombs hidden beneath the surface.¹¹⁸ “Oh God, please don’t let them land on an IED,” thought Muñoz.

When the helicopter touched down and nothing exploded, the Americans directed one of the Iraqi men to start the sedan and slowly drive the wounded woman toward the nearby intersection. Some of the Marines and the corpsman jogged in a loose cordon around the white car, weapons poised and eyes peeled for ambushing insurgents or bombs along the road’s shoulder. At least three Marines fanned out to form an ad hoc perimeter.¹¹⁹ Once in the open, they were “sitting ducks,” according to Inman. Others weren’t worried much at all, because the presence of a Cobra attack helicopter escort overhead tended to scare off insurgents.¹²⁰

Through the dust-filled air, a female corpsman or nurse commanding a stretcher crew emerged from the back of the helicopter to meet them.¹²¹ Inman saw blonde hair and for a moment, he forgot his surroundings. She was “really hot,” he recalled. The thirty-something-year-old medic, whose gender and attractiveness were apparently distinguishable in a bulky helmet, vest, and flight suit, jogged to the vehicle and yelled a brief report to Kopera. Muñoz shouted an assessment of the patient over the deafening engine whine and rotor wash. Two crew members set down the litter and gently loaded the Iraqi woman onto it.¹²² Her four male relatives, who had been projecting resignation and quiet gratitude despite lacking an interpreter, now made agitated gestures and raised their voices.¹²³

“Can we send someone with her?” Kopera yelled in the ear of the medic. “We can take one,” she replied. Kopera made eye contact with the worried men, pointed at them, raised one finger, and pointed at the helicopter. The eldest male, who might have been her relieved father, uncle, or husband, moved to the side of the litter and trotted along with the crew members as they loaded the injured woman onto the chopper.¹²⁴

The engine whine became urgent as the rotors gathered speed and beat rolling clouds of dirt over the Marines and remaining Iraqis. The Sea Knight strained its cylindrical bulk into the sky, gaining altitude and speeding the injured woman northeast, to the care of doctors in the surgical shock trauma unit at al-Taqaddum Airbase. Her journey would end at a U.S. hospital in Baghdad. She would live. Kopera never met her again, but he later learned that she had been able to return to her home about a month later.¹²⁵

Kopera bid the remaining Iraqi men goodbye and consolidated his squad back at the house. They were to hole up in the home until thirty minutes after sunset and then make their way back to the rest of the platoon at the patrol base. The men had time to review the day and fill each other in about what they had witnessed. There was still a lot of confusion. They itemized their close calls: the rounds hitting the ground near Muñoz and Kopera, the accurate RPG near Inman and Zofchak, bullets chipping at the stairs over Auton’s head. Some thought they may have cut down some of their attackers.¹²⁶ Firefights were exciting and to some could almost seem like fun when no Marines were seriously hurt.

Kopera reflected on the day’s events. It was never a good thing to have a firefight blow up in the middle of someone’s neighborhood and wind up with a wounded (or dead) civilian. They did, however, fight off two ambushes, possibly kill some insurgents, and give the wounded woman a fighting chance—all without an injured Marine. He liked to think that the care they had shown the civilian differentiated them from the insurgents and would help win local favor, but he knew better than to expect it.¹²⁷ The sergeant and the members of his squad didn’t rehash things long. They had had a lot of enemy contact in the past few days, and certainly more would come. It was almost always time to get back to work.¹²⁸

The officers at the platoon and company levels were pleased with the day’s engagements. Subsequent intelligence reports relying on Iraqi sources drily quantified the squad’s effectiveness: three enemies killed, one enemy wounded, one civilian wounded, and no Marines injured or killed. In Alpha Company’s growing tally of good, bad, or downright confusing days on the peninsula, this was considered a small victory.¹²⁹ Other battles ended differently.

Three weeks later, near the southwestern village of Hasa, Kopera would be shot in the head. His Marines were conducting a patrol when an insurgent’s bullet penetrated his Kevlar helmet and embedded itself in his brain, briefly knocking him down and out cold. Zofchak was about twenty meters away and had immediately jumped into a ditch for cover. When he turned around, the corporal watched in horror as a now conscious Kopera stood up and began stumbling around in the open, dazed, as machine-gun fire cracked around him. Zofchak ran to his squad leader and pulled him into the safety of the ditch.

Muñoz assessed the injury.¹³⁰ “My head hurts,” slurred Kopera.¹³¹ The sergeant tried to take his helmet off but Muñoz stopped him; the corpsman feared it was the only thing keeping his head intact.¹³² A mostly lucid Kopera was quickly medevaced, walking onto the helicopter under his own power. He survived after having a nickel-sized piece of his brain removed. Now medically discharged, Kopera suffers short-term memory loss and loses his temper a little more often than he did before his injury. It sometimes strains his marriage. He jokes that he’s “the same asshole, but now [he has] an excuse.” He voices no regrets about his days as a Marine.

For his actions during several engagements prior to his injury, Kopera was nominated by Greco for the Bronze Star with Valor Device, which the sergeant received. The lieutenant was impressed with his squad leader’s ability to maintain focus, go after and kill attackers, and successfully conduct the difficult symphony of decisions demanded by counterinsurgency. Quickly ramping up to kill and then just as quickly making the choice to hold a trigger finger is difficult. And helping the civilian woman, although it carried risk, was a proper call, from a COIN perspective: “Protect the people.” But in retrospect, Greco thought it probably never occurred to Kopera not to call for the medevac. For a guy with a code, it was just the right thing to do.¹³³