The Midnight Hour

“RPG!!!” was the first thing I heard. The three staccato letters emanated in a flurry of excitement and confusion from my turret gunner. The rocket had sailed about three feet over the top of our HMMWV, actually coming closer to his head than the truck. It benignly exploded in mid-air on the other side of the road, safely away from our HMMWV. When later questioned as to exactly how close the rocket came to us he replied,

Sir, it was green. I can see it in my mind’s eye right here (extending his left hand above his left elbow) and I can vividly see that it was green. Can I get a purple heart if it singed my eyebrows?

We were rolling with a CAAT (combined anti-armor) platoon from the 2^nd Battalion, 6^th Marine Regiment. There isn’t much of an anti-armor mission in Iraq, so CAAT platoons have increasingly been used as QRF (quick reaction forces) and for heavily armed vehicular patrols. We were positioned along one of the MSRs (main supply routes) in the city of Fallujah, in front of a hospital. How fitting, huh? The insurgent had two vehicles to choose from, and he shot at us. I guess it was our lucky day.

671 grains of diplomacy, attached to the top of your highback HMMWV.

As Gmur was popping off his second and final burst I told my driver “Get us moving!” I didn’t want to present another stationary target. I had him point us at an oblique to the origin of the rocket and keep the HMMWV moving so that we could all figure out exactly what was going on. As he slipped the HMMWV into drive I pushed the bottom button on my small PRR radio, activating my link to the SINCGARS radio in the center of the truck, and to the CAAT platoon commander we were rolling with. “We’ve got contact. RPG. It’s at our 7 or 8 o’clock. West side of the hospital.” “Roger,” he replied. He was only a few meters away, so he knew the exact position I had replayed. Furthermore, six months of almost daily patrols had ingrained a picture of the city streets into his brain. He relayed instructions and street names to his platoon faster than I could comprehend them, telling them to seal off the area and trap the insurgents in place.

An Iraqi cityscape

His platoon swung into action. Another HMMWV from the CAAT platoon picked us up in front of the hospital and we made our way over to the site of the insurgent fire. I didn’t observe the next scene with my own eyes, but it is reconstructed from the details told to me by other Marines of the CAAT platoon. As the first HMMWV reached the site it came in from east to west parallel to the MSR on a road behind the hospital. The VC (vehicle commander) observed three MAMs (military aged males) fleeing the scene in a red car. I don’t know how he quickly discerned they were the ones who shot at us. Perhaps he saw the RPG launcher. Perhaps they were the only people around and their haste to escape the scene made it obvious. Either way, his initiative in the next maneuver was clutch. He rammed them. The HMMWV struck the car hard, disabling it by mangling the front driver’s side tire and wheel. The car ground to a halt as the rest of the platoon closed in on the position, sealing off all access to the site.

We moved to one of the side streets leading to the site and cordoned it off with our HMMWV. We then jumped out of the HMMWV to help augment the security already in place and see what was to be made of our attackers. When I arrived the three MAMs were detained, face-down on the ground inside a large metal gate leading to a residence. The fact they were all on the ground face down actually initially made me think my gunner had killed all of them with his machinegun fire. I was really proud of him. Then I looked closer and saw their chests moving and discerned they were just on the ground at the direction of the Marines from 2/6, ready to be detained. The car’s trunk was popped open, revealing a relative arsenal of low-brow soviet weaponry. AK-47s, a PKM machinegun, RPGs, and plenty of ammo for each littered the trunk of the car. A large dent to the front quarter-panel and flat tire hinted at the cause of the car’s demise. In the cab a large push-button switch was poised conspicuously on the dash, with a large wiring harness leading into the engine compartment. There was no trace of any explosives in the car, but the tell-tale Looney Tunes “Acme” style plunger switch left no doubt as to the vehicle’s future plans (a suicide vehicle-borne IED).

It wasn’t really a storm, just continuously high winds that kicked up a lot of dust. It was not fun to walk outside, especially without eyewear.

To the northwest we heard a boom. Could be an IED, another rocket–who knows. The echoes within the city made it impossible to judge the cause and distance. Just the day prior we had responded to the scene of a SVBIED that hit one of the ECPs (entry control points) in Fallujah. The blast had killed one Marine, wounded at least two more, and killed/wounded numerous Iraqi army, police, and civilians. One thing was for sure: it was time to leave. We loaded up the insurgents, collapsed back to our vehicles, and started the egress back to our firmbase, but not before ensuring our prisoners knew one key Arabic word: “Abu Ghraib.” They didn’t seem to be as enthused with its enunciation as we were.

When it was all said and done there were three insurgents captured, their weapons removed from the insurgency, and a future SVBIED was destined for the junkyard outside an American firmbase. We got lucky, I’ll admit. If that insurgent had better judged his distance to us, used a little better trigger control, or even steadied himself against a wall we might have sustained serious injuries. The insurgency’s lack of training is possibly our biggest ally in the war on terror.

The preceding event happened in early March. Almost five months later, in early August, one of my Marines and I went to Baghdad to testify in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq against the men we captured. Only two were present. One had been released, possibly through confusion or bribery, but that is all speculation. Their stories were lame but consistent. We presented our case, they presented theirs, and the facts were recorded. Their actual trial will be at a later date, and will be conducted from the facts recorded from our testimony in front of the Iraqi judge as well as their rebuttals.