THE LAST MARINE:
When he lost the 11 others in his squad, he lost a 2nd family —and his zeal for the war
Associated Press reporter Antonio Castaneda was with Marines in Lima
Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, 4th Division, when they led an
offensive into the city of Haditha in late May. And he returned to the
area after an August blast killed 14 Marines — and shortly before
the unit began demobilizing to return to the United
States
By Antonio Castaneda
Associated Press Writer
HADITHA
DAM, Iraq — Cpl. David Kreuter had a new baby boy he’d seen only
in photos. Lance Cpl. Michael Cifuentes was counting the days to his
wedding. Lance Cpl. Nicholas Bloem had just celebrated his 20th
birthday.
Travis
Williams remembers them all — all 11 men in his Marine squad
— all now dead. Two months ago they shared a cramped room stacked
with bunk beds at this base in Northwest Iraq, where the Euphrates
River rushes by. Now the room has been stripped of several beds, brutal
testament that Lance Cpl. Williams’ closest friends are gone.
For
the 12 young Marines who landed in Iraq early this year, the war was a
series of hectic, constant raids into more than a dozen lawless towns
in Iraq’s most hostile province, Anbar. The pace and the danger bound
them together into what they called a second family, even as some began
to question whether their raids were making any progress.
Now,
all of the Marines assigned to the 1st Squad, 3rd Platoon, Lima
Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment, based in Columbus, Ohio, are
gone — all except Williams. They died in a roadside bomb set by
insurgents on Aug. 3 that killed a total of 14 Marines. Most of the
squad were in their early 20s; the youngest was 19.
“They
were like a family. They were the tightest squad I’ve ever seen,” said
Capt. Christopher Toland of Austin, Texas, the squad’s platoon
commander. Even though many did not know each other before they got to
Iraq, “They truly loved each other.”
All
that is left now are photos and snippets of video, saved on dusty
laptops, that run for a few dozen seconds. As they pack up to return
home by early October, the Marines from Lima Company — including
the squad’s replacements — sometimes huddle around Williams’
laptop in a room at the dam, straining to watch the few remaining
moments of their young friends’ lives. Some photos and videos carry the
squad’s adopted motto, “Family is Forever.”
In
one video, Lance Cpl. Christopher Dyer, who graduated with honors last
year from a Cincinnati area high school, strums his guitar and does a
mock-heartfelt rendition of “Puff the Magic Dragon” as his friends
laugh around him.
In a
photo, Kreuter rides a bicycle through a neighborhood, swerving under
the weight of body armor and weapons, as Marines and Iraqis watch and
chuckle.
Each video
ends abruptly, leaving behind a blank screen. Some are switched off as
soon as they start — some images just hurt too much to see right
now.
Insurgent hunt
The
August operation began like most of the squad’s missions — with a
rush into another lawless Iraqi city to hunt insurgents and do
house-to-house searches, sometimes for 12 hours in temperatures near
120 degrees.
On Aug.
1, six Marine snipers had been ambushed and killed in Haditha, one of a
string of river cities that line the Euphrates, filled with waving palm
trees. Two days later, Marines in armored vehicles, including the 1st
Squad, rumbled into the area to look for the culprits.
Like
other cities in this region, Haditha has no Iraqi troops, and its
police force was destroyed earlier in the year by a wave of insurgent
attacks. Marines patrol roads on the perimeter and occasionally raid
homes in the city, which slopes along a quiet river valley.
Commanders
say insurgents have challenged local tribes for control and claim
Iraq’s most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, once had a home
here.
Since their
arrival in February, the Marines had spent nearly all their time on
such sweeps or preparing for them, sometimes hurrying back to their
base to grab fresh clothes and then heading off again to cities that
hadn’t seen American or Iraqi troops in months.
Surprised by combat
The
intense pace of the operations, and the enormous area their regimental
combat team had to cover — an expanse the size of West Virginia
— caught some off guard.
The combat was certainly not what the 21-year-old Williams had expected.
“I
didn’t ever think we’d get engaged,” said the soft-spoken, stocky
Marine from Helena, Mont. “I just had the basic view of the American
public — it can’t be that bad out there.”
In
some sweeps, residents warmly greeted the Marines. But in others, such
as operations in Haditha and Obeidi near the Syrian border, the squad
members met gunfire and explosions. In the Obeidi operation in early
May, another squad from Lima Company suffered six deaths. Williams
himself perhaps saved lives, once spotting a gunman hidden in a mosque
courtyard, said Toland, the platoon commander.
The
night before the Aug. 3 operation, an uneasy Toland couldn’t sleep.
Instead he spent his last night with his squad members talking and
joking, trying to suppress worries the mission was too predictable for
an enemy that knew how to watch and learn.
“I had concerns that the operation was hastily planned and executed, with significant risks and little return,” Toland said.
The
road had been checked by engineers and other units, Marine commanders
say. But insurgents had been clever — hiding the massive bomb
under the road’s asphalt.
Massive blast
Several Humvees first drove over the bomb, but the triggerman in the distance apparently waited for a vehicle with more troops.
Then,
as the clanking sound of their armored vehicles neared, a massive blast
erupted, caused by explosives weighing hundreds of pounds.
It threw a 26-ton Amphibious Assault Vehicle into the air, leaving it burning upside-down.
The
blast was so large that Toland and his radioman, Williams —
traveling two vehicles ahead and not injured — thought their
vehicle had been hit by a bomb.
They scrambled out to inspect the damage, but instead found the blazing carnage several yards down the road.
A total of 14 Marines and one Iraqi interpreter were killed.
There
was no time for grieving — not at first. There was only sudden
devastation, then intense anger as the Marines pulled the remains of
their friends from the vehicle.
Then
there was frustration, as they fanned out to find the triggerman.
Instead, they found only Iraqis either too sympathetic toward the
insurgency, or too afraid, to talk.
Although
the bomb had been planted in clear view of their homes, residents
claimed they had seen nothing of the men who had spent hours digging a
large hole several feet deep and concealing the bomb.
It was a familiar — and frustrating — problem.
“They
are totally complacent with what’s going on here,” said Maj. Steve
Lawson of Columbus, Ohio, who commands Lima Company. “The average
citizen in Haditha either wants a handout, or wants us to die or go
away.”
Intelligence scarce
In
a war where intelligence is the most valued asset, the Marines say few
local people will divulge “actionable” information that could be used
to locate insurgents.
Some Iraqis apparently fear reprisal attacks from militants. Many just want to stay out of the crossfire.
Others
hate the Americans enough to protect the insurgents: Marines say
lookouts in cities would often launch flares as their vehicles
approached.
In this
region ruled by Sunni tribal loyalties, few voted for the new Central
Iraqi government, and many suspect the U.S. military is punishing them
and empowering their longtime rivals, the Shiites of the south and the
Kurds of the north.
“From
a squad leader’s perspective, the intelligence never helped me
accomplish my mission,” said Sgt. Don Owens, a squad leader in Lima
Company from Cincinnati, who fought alongside the 1st Squad throughout
their tour.
“Their intelligence is better than ours,” Owens said.
Sobs in the night
The
first night after the attack, Williams couldn’t sleep. He stayed near
his radio, listening to the heavy sobbing of fellow Marines that
punctured the night around him.
He thought of his best friend, Lance Cpl. Aaron Reed, a 21-year-old with a goofy demeanor and a perpetual smile, now dead.
A
world without his second family had begun. The young men Williams had
planned to meet up with again, back in the States, had vanished in a
matter of minutes.
He was alone.
Yet
from a military standpoint, it was important to press on to show the
enemy that even their best hits couldn’t stop the world’s most powerful
military.
The Marines were ordered away from the blast site, to hunt insurgents, just one hour after the explosion.
They
stayed out for another week, searching through dozens of homes in the
nearby city of Parwana and struggling to piece together intelligence
about who had planted the bomb.
“I pushed them back out the door to finish the mission,” said Lawson. “They did it, but they were crying as they pushed on.”
As
word spread back in the United States that 14 men had been killed, the
Marines on the ongoing mission couldn’t even, at first, contact their
families to let them know they had survived.
Progress questioned
Marine
commanders say the large-scale raids in western Anbar province have
kept the insurgency off-balance, killing hundreds of militants and
leaving a dwindling number of insurgent bases in the area.
They
say the sweeps are critical to beat back the insurgent presence in
larger cities such as Ramadi and Baghdad, where suicide bombings have
been rampant. But, among some Marines and even officers, there are doubts whether progress has been made.
The
insurgents lurk nearby — capable of launching mortars and suicide
car bombs and quietly re-entering cities soon after the Marines return
to their outskirt bases.
“We’ve
been here almost seven months and we don’t control” the cities, said
Gunnery Sgt. Ralph Perrine, an operations chief in the battalion from
Brunswick, Ohio. “It’s no secret.”
Even
commanders acknowledge that with the limited number of U.S. and Iraqi
troops in the region, the mission is focused on “disrupting and
interdicting” the insurgency — that is, keeping them on the run
— and not controlling the cities.
‘Maintenance work’
“It’s maintenance work,” said Col. Stephen W. Davis, commander of all Marine operations in western Anbar.
“Because
this out here is where the fight is, while the success is happening
downtown while the constitution is being written and while the
referendum is getting worked out. . . . If I could bring every
insurgent in the world out here and fight them all day long, we’ve done
our job.”
For Williams, the calculation is much more visceral and personal.
“Personally,
I don’t think the sweeps help too much,” he said quietly on a recent
day, sitting in a room at the dam, crowded with Marines resting from a
late mission the night before.
“You find some stuff and most of the bad guys get away
. . . . For as much energy as we put in them, I don’t think the output is worth it,” he said.
Thoughts of home
Williams, a Marine for three years, has decided not to re-enlist.
Instead, in these last days in Iraq, he thinks of home and fishing in the clear streams of Montana.
He hopes to open a fishing and hunting gear shop once he returns and complete his bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology.
He looks forward to seeing his mother, his only surviving parent, and traveling to her native Thailand this fall.
He said his “best memory” will be the day he leaves Iraq. His only good memories, he said, are of his friends:
Of Dyer, 19, an avid rap music fan who would bop his head to Tupac Shakur.
He played the viola in his high school orchestra and had planned to enroll in a finance honors program at Ohio State University.
Of
Reed, his best friend. He was president of his high school class from
Chillicothe, Ohio, and left behind a brother serving in Afghanistan.
Of
Cifuentes, 25, from Oxford, Ohio. He was enrolled in graduate school in
mathematics education and had been working as a substitute teacher when
he was deployed.
“I think the most frustrating thing is there’s no sense of accomplishment,” Williams said.
“You’re biding your time and waiting. But then you lose your friends, and it’s not even for their own country’s freedom.”
Copyright 2005 THE DECATUR DAILY. All rights reserved.
AP contributed to this report.
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Copyright 2005 Associated Press.
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