T he thin dust from the dirt roads mixed with the stench of the river and city as we came up into the village. It was pitch-black, somewhere between night and morning. Our target was a two-story building in the center of a small village at the south side of Ramadi, separated from the main part of the city by a set of railroad tracks.
We moved into the house quickly. The people who lived there were shocked, obviously, and clearly wary. Yet they didn’t seem overly antagonistic, despite the hour. While our terps and jundi s dealt with them, I went up to the roof and set up.
It was June 17, the start of the action in Ramadi. We had just taken the core of what would become COP Iron, the first stepping stone of our move into Ramadi. (COP stands for Command Observation Post.)
I eyed the village carefully. We’d been briefed to expect a hell of a fight, and everything we’d been through over the past few weeks in the east reinforced that. I knew Ramadi was going to be a hell of a lot worse than the countryside. I was tense, but ready.
With the house and nearby area secured, we called the Army in. Hearing the tanks coming in the distance, I scanned even more carefully through the scope. The bad guys could hear it, too. They’d be here any second.
The Army arrived with what looked like a million tanks. They took over the nearby houses, and then began building walls to form a compound around them.
No insurgents came. Taking the house, taking the village—it was a nonevent.
Looking around, I realized the area we had taken was both literally and figuratively on the other side of the tracks from the main city. Our area was where the poorer people lived, quite a statement for Iraq, which wasn’t exactly the Gold Coast. The owners and inhabitants of the hovels around us barely scratched out a living. They couldn’t care less about the insurgency. They couldn’t care even less about us.
Once the Army got settled, we bumped out about two hundred yards to protect the crews as they worked. We were still expecting a hell of a fight. But there wasn’t much action at all. The only interesting moment came in the morning, when a mentally handicapped kid was caught wandering around writing in a notebook. He looked like a spy, but we quickly realized he wasn’t right in the head and let him and his gibberish notes go.
We were all surprised by the calm. By noon, we were sitting there twiddling our thumbs. I won’t say we were disappointed but… it felt like a letdown after what we had been told.
This was the most dangerous city in Iraq?
THE DEVIL OF RAMADI
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