My Men are My Heroes Read online

  LIFELONG OBSESSION

  “I read every book on military subjects I could find at my local libraries,” he says. “Whenever I could, I watched war movies on TV and at the theater in Creston, the closest town with a movie theater. I probably didn’t know what the word ‘obsession’ meant at the time, but being a Marine someday was always on my mind.”

  Even now, at age 41, the obsession remains. “I spend my time training and studying and practicing things that make me a better Marine,” he says. “In the days preceding the war in Iraq, I used to scuba dive, jump out of airplanes, ride my motorcycle, go fishing, and check out the ladies.” He insists with a straight face that the last activity contributes to a Marine’s performance.

  “Ladies,” he says, “are always good for morale.”

  And he still watches war movies. One of his favorites is Heartbreak Ridge, the fictional story of a Marine Force Recon platoon that wipes out the Cuban Army and their evil Socialist sidekicks on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. Clint Eastwood plays a Marine named Gunny Highway. “Gunny” is short for Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, a rank one step below first sergeant. In the movie Gunny Highway is a hard-nosed, foulmouthed “Old Corps” Marine who likes to get drunk and fight when he isn’t savagely drilling his men.

  Kasal isn’t nearly as crude as Gunny Highway. He rarely drinks. He almost never swears in public. But he respects Highway’s hard-core image—that last vestige of the “Old Corps” that was once the stuff of legends.

  “Today’s Marine Corps stresses professionalism and honor and duty,” Kasal says. “When I was a young Marine, I got in more than my share of fights in liberty ports. I was lucky; for some reason I was never written up. I suspect it is because fighting is what Marines are supposed to do, and I only got into fights when I had to. The hardest part of learning that particular skill is knowing when it is appropriate to fight. A real-life Gunny Highway probably wouldn’t make it in today’s Marine Corps.”

  Gunnery sergeants remain legends, however, for ruling their young charges like kings of old. To most young Marines their Gunny is the nearest thing to God they will meet on this earth. Gunnery sergeants teach young Marines how to be warriors. Their job is to make tigers out of kids and do it with finesse. It is an awesome responsibility.

  “Some of the stuff Eastwood does in the movie is good leadership technique and some of it is pure Hollywood,” Kasal says. “One thing for sure is phony: Gunny Highway didn’t get dirty, and he didn’t get killed despite taking foolhardy risks that no Marine would undertake with the expectation of surviving.”

  Even without their faces full of dirt, Kasal thought both Wayne and Eastwood did great jobs promoting the Marine Corps—except when they glamorized combat. War can be exciting—but combat, from Kasal’s perspective, is a foul business where people die horrible, gruesome deaths devoid of compassion and sympathy.

  During the American Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “War is hell,” while defending his Union Army for sacking and burning Atlanta. It was hell then and still is, but Kasal says no image of war can compare to the gruesome intimacy of combat.

  “War is hell and combat is a motherfucker,” he says matter-of-factly. “There is no politically correct way to describe it. It doesn’t deserve a kinder word. It is unrelenting, tremendously unforgiving, treacherous, and deadly. Good Marines quickly learn to understand and adapt to the dangers and intricacies of combat or face the consequences. Marginal Marines are liabilities that get good people hurt; it is as simple as that. Teaching young Marines to understand and recognize the subtle complexity of war is what keeps them alive, and keeping them alive is what leadership is all about.”

  Marine leaders exist to make sure their Marines do the killing and not the dying. Dying is reserved, whenever possible, for the other side. So Marines preparing for battle are trained to eliminate as many of the enemy as is humanly possible. If it is a legal killing, a Marine is expected to take the shot. “There is no place for mercy in combat,” Kasal says.

  Marines are taught that “sympathy” is a word found in the dictionary between “shit” and “syphilis.” “It doesn’t matter whether Marines kill with rocket launchers, artillery fire, a mortar, a rifle, a pistol, a grenade, a knife, a shovel, or simply grabbing the other guy and choking the living shit out of him until he dies,” Kasal says, “In real war there is no other way to win, and Marines are trained to win.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FALLUJAH: ACT 1

  Operation New Dawn, the battle on which Kasal’s fate turned, was known locally as al-Fajr (Arabic for dawn). Ironically it began near dusk at 7:00 p.m. on November 7, 2004—D-day in the ancient Iraqi city of Fallujah, a simmering metropolis in al-Anbar province roughly 43 miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River.

  AN ANCIENT BATTLEGROUND

  Anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered ample evidence that Fallujah is thousands of years old and was inhabited well before Babylon. Many scholars claim the origin of the town’s name is a variant of its ancient Syrian name, Pallugtha, which is derived from the word “division.”

  If that is so, the name was prophetic as the city has been fought over time and again. Often the conflicts were religious: Fallujah hosted many important Jewish religious academies for several centuries before the bitter rivalry that grew between Islam and Judaism drove the Jews away.

  At the close of the Ottoman Empire 80 years before the current conflict, Fallujah was an unimportant place, little more than a watering hole on one of the main roads across the desert west of Baghdad. When the British gained control of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Turks in 1920, competing tribes fought the British and each other for pride and plunder. The British government sent an expedition to Fallujah to quell a riot soon after taking over. The attempt led to a military disaster.

  Leading the charge was famous British explorer Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman, a senior colonial officer. Leachman was killed just south of the city in a fight with local leader Shaykh Dhari after underestimating the tenacity of his opponents. Next the British sent an army to crush the rebellion. It was barely enough. Before the battle was over more than 10,000 Iraqis and 1,000 British soldiers lay rotting in the desert heat.

  In subsequent decades both Fallujah and the province capital at Ramadi were determined centers for the Arab nationalists shaping the political destiny of modern Iraq. Due to its proximity to Syria during the 1930s and 1940s, Fallujah was the center of Iraqi nationalism seeking to rid the region of its British and French colonial masters. During the turbulent 1950s the sheiks and imams of al-Anbar province opposed the secular Baathist Party because of its ties to the godless Iraqi Communist Party. But with the rise of Saddam Hussein—and the consolidation of his rule beginning in 1968 when the Baathists seized political power—the so-called “second” Baath regime was generally welcomed.

  Fallujah has long been known as “the city of mosques” for the more than 200 houses of worship found there and in surrounding villages. It is one of the most important places in the region to Sunni Muslims. Before the war it had been a stronghold of Saddam Hussein’s followers and therefore lavished with unusual prosperity.

  By 2002 the city’s population had grown to 350,000 in a conservative, devoutly Islamic region where medieval Sunni traditions coexisted with traffic jams, blaring boom boxes, and modern graffiti preaching Islam in wild bright paint. It was also a severe Islamic city where the Koran was understood literally and blasphemers dealt with harshly.

  Fallujah’s architectural makeup, coupled with its bloody history, made it well-suited to defending against a siege—even a modern, hi-tech siege conducted by the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force in the world. In addition to the many mosques with turrets that offered excellent sniping positions, insurgents had the advantage of block after block of one-, two-, and three-story buildings made from reinforced concrete—the same stuff used to construct bunkers and fortresses. Thick-walled courtyards surrounded the bui
ldings, and everywhere ran a maze of alleyways, passages, and safe houses where radical Islamist warriors could flee and regroup to attack again. For an invading force, Fallujah was a deceitful, deadly place. Even without an entrenched opposition, an invasion here would be risky and tough.

  A GATHERING STORM

  The political reasons for the battle that erupted there in November 2004 are many, varied, and complex. Their various weights and merits are still being argued today.

  The easiest reason to understand comes from the young Marines who were there: The bad guys were in Fallujah and the Marines had been called upon to kick them out. Even new recruits understood that rationale. Kicking ass is what Marines do.

  The short story is this: Four American civilians from a private security company were ambushed and killed in Fallujah on March 31, 2004. After their fiery deaths their blackened bodies were strung up on a bridge into the city code-named “Brooklyn Bridge” by the 1st Marine Division (1 stMARDIV) Intelligence staff. The insurgents’ barbaric actions enraged Americans and resulted in the Coalition’s decision to invade the city in an attempt to quell its growing insurgency movement.

  The first operation to retake Fallujah began with a bang and ended with a whimper in April. It started when several battalions of Marines from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF1) and U.S. Army troopers from a variety of armored, infantry, and cavalry units surrounded Fallujah and then pressed inward.

  Just as the force began to make inroads, the Coalition offered the insurgents a unilateral cease-fire. It was a big disappointment to the Marine brass, who knew they could take the city before the enemy had a chance to dig in. At the time, their enemies were still a disorganized mob of Sunni insurgents, even fewer Saddam loyalists, and a handful of foreign fighters who had infiltrated from Jordan and Syria.

  But a relatively easy takeover was not to be. After the ceasefire came six months of negotiations to “free” Fallujah. The negotiations might have been comical had they not led to such a bloody end. A variety of Iraqi generals, imams, and wannabe politicians took turns negotiating with Coalition generals, Iraqi politicians, and moderate wannabe religious leaders. They were trying to convince Fallujah’s predominantly Sunni population it wanted to be part of a “new Iraq.” No agreement was reached and the months of negotiations allowed the insurgency to gain strength. They gathered weapons and manpower, fortified positions, laid explosives (the notorious improvised explosive devices, or IEDs) and other traps for the Coalition forces that would eventually invade.

  Meanwhile 1st Marine Division’s 22,000 troops were spread across 1,200 square miles of the most hostile region in Iraq. Major General J. N. Mattis, the commanding general of 1st Marine Division, told the press his division had two missions during the negotiations. First was to find and destroy any foreign fighters making their way to Fallujah or anywhere else in the province. Thus offensive operations were first and foremost. The division’s combat-hardened Marines had marched from Kuwait to Baghdad the year before, and they knew how to fight. Mattis expected resistance but he knew his Marines were prepared to confront any opposition they would encounter.

  The second mission was more complicated: win the hearts and minds of al-Anbar province’s residents, many of whom were virulently anti-Coalition Sunnis. The aggressive Marines were instructed to seek common ground with their enemies. It was one of Kasal’s jobs to make sure his men did.

  “Our motto came from General Mattis,” Kasal recalls. “He sent around a letter on our first deployment that said our motto was to be ‘No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.’ My young Marines had to be trained—to be instructed—that we couldn’t go around indiscriminately killing people. They understood that and did what they were supposed to do. But there were people there who were trying to kill us at the same time.” Kasal underscores this dicey duality: “Leadership is important in that situation.”

  The Marines had reason to be leery of the locals. The Marines’ headquarters was only 10 miles from Fallujah, and in the months preceding their impending attack, insurgents had often sortied out of the city to clash with Marine patrols in the endless sand and scrub.

  “For five months we endured IEDs, snipers, and daily attacks on our convoys,” says Kasal’s boss, Commander Lieutenant Colonel Willard “Willy” Buhl. “We had 35 killed and hundreds wounded yet our Marines practiced remarkable restraint. I never saw a civilian woman or child killed before Fallujah during the battalion’s second deployment. It was Kasal and the other NCOs’ leadership that came into play. It was essential. They were instrumental in keeping our men low-key.”

  AN ENTRENCHED OPPOSITION

  Meanwhile a growing number of experienced foreign fighters were making their way to Fallujah from Baghdad, Ramadi, and Mosul to the north. Exactly how many was unclear. Although the Coalition sent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Special Forces spooks, and informants to count the growing insurgent army, the reported numbers ranged from 1,500 to 15,000, depending on who was telling the tale. The most accepted figure was about 3,000 regular fighters and another 5,000 active supporters of the insurgency, although these numbers are still hotly debated.

  Calculating more refined estimates of the opposition was doubly difficult because it was so diverse. Among them were soldiers, street criminals, politically motivated secular insurgents who wanted to rule, part-time neighborhood warriors looking for glory vicious foreign fighters with murky agendas, and disenfranchised Baathists who did not necessarily agree with anyone else. There were simply too many factions with too many agendas to count them accurately. Estimates would have to do.

  Some of the insurgents preferred rhetoric to combat, and others seemed almost eager to die. But not all were fractious amateurs. If that had been true, the battle would have been over in hours instead of weeks.

  Marine intelligence officers identified jihadists from at least 16 countries. Among them were Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans, and Iranians. Many were veteran warriors who had fought in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

  Most notorious among those was the infamous Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi. He had set up his al Qaeda network in Fallujah, and in the interval preceding the battle he orchestrated a few beheadings for al Jazeera television to let the world know he was back in action. At the same time Zarqawi and his followers made serious preparations for a fight-to-the-death invasion. They organized bomb-making factories, torture chambers, and booby-trapped death houses. They also intimidated the city’s residents into joining, or at least not opposing, their cause. Zarqawi’s presence brought even more attention to the situation. Everyone with a title in Iraq wanted to capture him. For the moment he posed a greater evil than Osama bin Laden himself.

  Some of the Iraqi fighters were formidable as well. Among them were well-trained, well-equipped, battle-hardened soldiers who had been fighting the Marines for more than five months and other Marine Corps units before them.

  In their own way the insurgents were as determined as the Coalition to prevail. To have even a small chance they had cobbled themselves together into die-hard squads and companies. Most would not survive the invasion.

  “Some of them were well trained and some of them had never touched a weapon before,” Buhl says. “But they were brave and willing to die. One time a squad of them blew down a house on top of themselves to kill Marines. At Fallujah I told my men to kill every one of them because if we didn’t, they would be trying to kill us on our next deployment or the one after that.”

  To the insurgents defending Fallujah it all made sense. They believed that they were warriors of Allah, and Allah had a plan to defeat the Marines. Fortunately for the Marines and soldiers who would soon confront them, the insurgents were wrong.

  “Every Marine knew that someday we were going to have to crush them,” Buhl says.

  A final battle was inevitable.

  THE OLD BREED

  Opposing the Islamic warriors was the entire 1 st Marine Division, “The Old Breed
,” 22,000 marvelously trained Marines with the temperament of junkyard dogs.

  All across the northern boundary they strained at the leash to get the on-again, off-again operation under way. The Old Breed made its reputation of handling its enemies with unparalleled toughness at Guadalcanal. Marines have been dying to preserve that reputation ever since. One Marine said he would rather chew off his arm at the shoulder than tangle with the 1st Marine Division.

  The heart of the Old Breed is its infantry battalions. They are the “mailed fist.” Their job is to root out the enemy and destroy them posthaste. Afterward the infantry occupies the conquered territory to provide absolute proof of who ultimately prevailed. In the battle of Fallujah, the Blue Diamonds, as the division is also called, fielded four superbly prepared, nearly self-contained battalions each with more than 1,200 highly trained Marine infantrymen. The attacking infantrymen intended to use rockets, grenades, small arms, and their fists to gain the upper hand in the city.

  The 5,000 infantry were backed up by a host of supporting arms specialists including military police, recon, armor, artillery, intelligence specialists, radar operators, aviation mechanics, communication experts, aerial surveillance crews, supply units, engineers, construction troops, and linguists. These elements are designated “combat and logistical support” units and make up the essential “logistical tail” of the division.

  THE THUNDERING THIRD

  In the thick of the action was Buhl’s “Thundering Third,” a proud unit that keeps a bull for a mascot and a battle flag bearing a thick tassel of campaign streamers. In Marine Corps vernacular the Third is “Three-One,” usually written “3/1” on maps and in logs and other places where formality is unimportant. The battalion’s colorful battle streamers carry the names of almost every major American conflict around the world since the battalion was formed in 1942 at the beginning of World War II. Like most of the battalions in the 1st Marine Division, 3/1 fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm.