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Explosion effectively finishes off squad
By Ellen Knickmeyer
05/12/05 "Washington
Post" - - HABAN, Iraq - The explosion enveloped the armored vehicle in flames, sending orange balls of fire bubbling above the trees along the Euphrates River near the Syrian border.
Marines in surrounding vehicles threw open their hatches and took off running across the plowed fields, toward the already blackening metal of the destroyed vehicle. Shouting, they pulled to safety those they could, as the flames ignited the bullets, mortar rounds, flares and grenades inside, rocketing them into the sky and across pastures.
Gunnery Sgt. Chuck Hurley emerged from the smoke and turmoil around the vehicle, circling toward the spot where helicopters would later land to pick up casualties. As he passed one group of Marines, he uttered just one sentence: "That was the same squad."
Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when a bomb exploded under their amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five wounded.
In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had just ceased to be.
Every member of the unit -- one of three squads that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon, which Hurley commands, had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.
"They used to call it Lucky Lima," said Maj. Steve Lawson, commander of the company. "That turned around and bit us."
Wednesday was the fourth day of fighting in far western Iraq, as the U.S. military continued an assault that has sent more than 1,000 Marines down the ungoverned north bank of the Euphrates River in search of foreign fighters crossing the border from Syria. Of seven Marines killed so far in Operation Matador, six came come from Lima Company, 1st Platoon. As many as 100 insurgents were killed in the first 48 hours of the offensive.
Lima Company drew Marine reservists from across Ohio into the conflict in Iraq. Some were still too young to be bothered much by shaving, or even stubble. They rode to war on a Marine amtrac, an armored vehicle that travels on tank-like treads.
On Monday, when the Marine assault on foreign fighters formally began, the young Marines of the squad from 1st Platoon were already exhausted. Their encounter at the house in Ubaydi that morning and the previous night had been the unintended first clash of the operation, pitting them against insurgents who fired armor-piercing bullets up through the floor. It took 12 hours and five assaults by the squad -- plus grenades, bombing by an F/A-18 attack plane, tank rounds and rockets at 20 yards -- to kill the insurgents and permit recovery of the dead Marines' bodies.
Afterward, they slept in the moving amtrac, heads back and mouths open. One stood up to stretch his legs. He fell asleep again standing up, leaning against the metal walls.
Squad members spoke only to compare their knowledge of the condition of their wounded. Getting the latest news, they fell silent again. After one such half-hour of silence, a Marine offered a terse commendation for one of the squad members shot at Ubaydi: "Bunker's a good man."
Commanders had hoped the latest operation would swiftly capture or kill large numbers of foreign fighters. But the foreigners, and everyone else here, had plenty of warning that the Marines were coming.
By the time the squad from Lima Company crossed north of the Euphrates, whole villages consisted of little more than abandoned houses with fresh tire tracks leading off into pastures, or homes occupied only by prepubescent boys or old men.
After a day of uneventful house searches, the amtrac with the squad from 1st Platoon was rolling toward the Euphrates in a row of armored vehicles, headed for more house searches, when the vehicle rolled over the explosive.
Hurley and others pulled passengers out of the Amtrac as flames detonated its ammunition and sent it flying. As Marines carrying stretchers ran to the amtrac, bullets snapped out of the burning hulk and traveled for hundreds of feet.
The Marines ran back through the fusillade, carrying out the wounded. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" some shouted, desperate to get the wounded out.
The four dead were trapped inside the vehicle, Lawson said.
"That's the last of the squad," Cpl. Craig Miller, whose reassignment last month had taken him out of the unit, said as he surveyed the scene. "Three weeks ago, that would have been me."
Copyright: Washington Post.
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