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Operation Iraqi Freedom

A Personal Account of the Battle of An Nasiriyah

   "Punch Out the TAC!"

As the lead battalion moved further north into the city, I became concerned that they might move out of our radio range. I told the Executive Officer that we would soon need to send out a radio retransmission (retrans) site or move the TAC CP forward to control the battle. He told me the CO was forward with 1/2 and we couldn’t move the TAC out until he returned. Therefore I started planning a retrans site, but was extremely concerned about their safety. My best bet was to position them north where 2/8 was assembling in attack positions to join the fight. I knew 2/8 wasn’t going to stay there as long as my Marines would require security, so I was relieved when the CO pulled back into our position. After I explained the situation to him, he agreed that it was time to move the TAC CP forward.

I passed the word to the members of the TAC CP to get ready to move and went to find my vehicle, which had been staged with the others a couple hundred meters up the road. Most of the drivers were there sleeping off the previous night’s exhausting ride. I told the convoy commander where I wanted to set up the command post and he held a quick briefing for the drivers. Someone passed out grenades and I grabbed one. We moved forward at 1330

Wreckage from the 507th Maintenance Company's Convoy

Passing wreckage from the 507th Maintenance Company's lost convoy on the way into An Nasiriyah

A short while later we were setting up in what was definitely part of the city dump. The flies were horrible and there were stray dogs everywhere but it was home. One of the dogs had missing leg and we started calling him "lefty". He became our mascot for the next two days. We kidded the Sergeant Major about "his" dog for the rest of the war. Spirits were high and everyone worked with a professional sense of urgency and competence that I have never before witnessed.

We were having difficulty getting medivac helicopters into the city to pick up our wounded. It started with a few injuries, then dozens. Before long, we had nearly 50 casualties awaiting evacuation. The reality of the fierce fight was really setting in. It hit me hard when the OpsO, who was working the Regimental Tactical radio net, yelled over to the Air Officer. "1/2 has eight more medivacs: two urgent, four priority, and two routine! Two of them are routine because they’re dead." He threw the handset down. After several long seconds of stunned silence, the radio chatter drew picked up again, and everyone went back to his work.

1/2 Attacking North

Action in the TAC CP

During the attempt to find a bypass route around "ambush alley", the amtracks and tanks of Bravo Company became mired in thick mud. Charlie Company pressed ahead straight up Route 7 through the alley. Their tracked vehicles became the targets of a withering hail of machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades (RPG’s). One RPG struck an amtrack with 23 Marines in it. Several were injured. A while later, an Air Force A-10 mistakenly attacked another Marine amtrack. Several Marines were killed north of the bridge.

It took several hours to organize and conduct the recovery of six stuck Bravo Company vehicles. It was a very tenuous situation as the Iraqi’s organized to exploit the Marines’ predicament. Marines fanned out through in a circle through the neighborhood around the vehicles to provide security. Several wounded Iraqi civilians approached the Marines and requested medical treatment. Enemy fire increased and became more accurate as the Iraqi’s homed-in on their position. 1/2's TAC CP abandoned their stuck armored vehicle, jumped in soft-skinned HMMWV’s and moved back into position where they could control the battle.

2/8 Attacking North

2/8 moves North into An Nasiriyah

The Iraqi’s began a series of sharp counterattacks against Alpha Company on the southern bridge. We ordered 2/8 into the battle to relieve Alpha Company who was instructed to move north. I stood on the side of the road watching, waving and shouting encouragement to the Marines of 2/8 as they passed me heading north in their trucks towards the fight. I could only imagine what was on their mind as they rolled into close combat.

For next several minutes, I listened on the radio to 2/8’s Battalion Commander attempt to coordinate a link up between his lead forces and Alpha Company, 1/2. The fighting in that area was heavy and there was a real danger that the two Marine units might mistakenly shoot at each other.

It was too hot at the bridge for the Alpha Company Marines to remain exposed attempting to affect the linkup. Finally, the two converging forces agreed that Company A would simply move out of the area and the 2/8 Marines would move in. Not the doctrinal method of conducting a relief in place, but effective never the less.

The north side of the bridge was in ambush alley. 2/8 did not have sufficient forces to physically defend the northern side of the bridge. They set in their defenses on the south side of the bridge and covered the north by fire.

Charlie Company, 1/2 took the northern Saddam Canal Bridge next. To cross the bridge, they endured withering, effective fire from an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun. The 23 mm machine gun was trained on the bridge from a prepared position 100 meters to the east.

At some point that afternoon, a two-star general flew in and came into our COC. He was the Assistant MEF Commander. Word had gotten out that we were in quite a fight at An Nasiriyah and he came to personally assess the situation.

The Commanding Officer of RCT-1 was also present in our area. We were taking the bridges in order to facilitate his unit’s movement north to the city of Al Kut. He wanted to know when he would be able to press his attack north. It wasn’t going to be today.

As darkness and the enemy were closing in on Bravo Company, 1/2's CO prudently decided to abandon two of the amtracks that they had not been able to retrieve from the mud. Both Bravo and Alpha Company moved through ambush alley to reinforce the northern bridge.

1/2 was desperately low on ammunition. We called for a helicopter resupply. We were told helicopters could not conduct the resupply because there were no secure landing zones (LZ’s) in which the helicopters could land. Higher headquarters suggested conducting a ground resupply in the morning. The Air Officer yelled in the radio that unless we got the helicopters in tonight, there would be no 1/2 to resupply in them morning. That convinced them. We got our helicopters.

Sometime that evening the ALOC arrived. They gave up on trying to pass the enemy prisoners to higher headquarters. They just loaded them in a truck and brought them to the fight with them.

Here’s a Marine Corps Times article that describes the battle in a fairly accurate manner:

Marine Corps Times
May 12, 2003
Pg. 14

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 seemed to come at them in slow motion. 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 assault rifles, spraying fire indiscriminately from behind windows, roadside berms and doorways.

Neighborhoods had names like Ambush Alley and Martyr’s District.

There were casualties. Their buddies 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] Ba’ath 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.

It was a long and anxious night. However, there was only sporadic fighting. The pace picked up again in the morning. North of the Saddam Canal Bridge, 1/2 pushed three kilometers forward to a major rod junction and established defenses to the west, north and east. Before long, they were getting hit from each direction, as the Iraqi’s mounted a determined counterattack to get the bridge back. Iraqi Saddam Fedayeen and Ba’ath Party militiamen joined the fray. They traveled to the battle in buses and taxis. They jumped out, ran into the groves of palm trees, grabbed a weapon from the pre-staged caches and joined the fight.

The following morning, March 24th, the Main Command Post displaced to a location close by to our northeast. Before noon, they took control of the fight and we packed up and joined them.

Later that morning, March 24th, we were able to push a column of fuel trucks and supplies through to 1/2. The resupply column’s movement was preceded by an artillery barrage along the road designed to keep the Iraqi’s head down and prevent him from shooting at our logistics vehicles. It was a tense few minutes as the resupply convoy rolled down ambush alley, but thankfully it arrived without incident and delivered the crucial supplies.

Citing the successful movement of the resupply convoy, we informed RCT-1 that the route was now secure enough to proceed north. They said they were waiting for orders and remained in place strung out on the road behind us. Throughout the day, higher headquarters called asking when we would accomplish the forward passage of lines with RCT-1. We told them we were ready whenever they got the word.

As the fighting continued unabated, we decided that we needed our Light Armored Vehicles back from the western bridges. We sent our Reconnaissance Company to out to relieve them. LAR arrived in our position by evening and we sent them forward to reinforce 1/2.

After two and a half days without sleep, I hit the rack hard.

Next...

Running the Gauntlet
Racing through 4 miles of enemy held city.


  

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