U ntil that point, I had spent an uneventful, even boring fourth deployment in Iraq.
Delta Platoon had arrived roughly a month before, traveling out to al-Qa’im in western Iraq, near the Syrian border. Our mission was supposed to involve long-range desert patrols, but we’d spent our time building a base camp with the help of a few Seabees. Not only was there no action to speak of, but the Marines who owned the base were in the process of shutting it down, meaning that we’d have to move out soon after we set it up. I have no idea what the logic was.
Morale had hit rock bottom when my chief risked his life early one morning—by that I mean he entered my room and shook me awake.
“What the hell?” I yelled, jumping up.
“Easy,” said my chief. “You need to get dressed and come with me.”
“I just got to sleep.”
“You’ll want to come with me. They’re putting together a task unit over in Baghdad.”
A task unit? All right!
It was like something out of the movie Groundhog Day, but in a good way. The last time this had happened to me, I was in Baghdad heading west. Now I was west, and heading east.
Why exactly, I wasn’t sure.
According to the chief, I had been chosen for the unit partly because I was qualified to be an LPO, but mostly because I was a sniper. They were pulling snipers from all over the country for the operation, though he had no details of what was being planned. He didn’t even know whether I was going to a rural or urban environment.
Shit, I thought, we’re going to Iran.
I t was an open secret that the Iranians were arming and training insurgents and in some cases even attacking Western troops themselves. There were rumors that a force was being formed to stop the infiltrators on the border.
I was convoyed over to al-Asad, the big airbase in al-Anbar Province, where our top head shed was located. There, I found out we weren’t going to the border, but a place much worse: Sadr City.
L ocated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Sadr City had become even more of a snake pit since the last time I’d been with the GROMs a few years before. Two million Shiites lived there. The rabidly anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the city had been named for his father) had been steadily building his militia, the Mahdi Army (known in Arabic as the Jaish al-Mahdi). There were other insurgents operating in the area, but the Mahdi Army was by far the biggest and most powerful.
With covert help from Iran, the insurgents had gathered arms and started launching mortars and rockets into Baghdad’s Green Zone. The entire place was a vipers’ nest. Like Fallujah and Ramadi, there were different cliques and varying levels of expertise among the insurgents. The people here were mostly Shiites, whereas my earlier battles in Iraq had been primarily with Sunnis. But otherwise it was a very familiar hellhole.
This was all fine with me.
T hey pulled snipers and JTACs, along with some officers and chiefs, from Teams 3 and 8 to create a special task unit. There were about thirty of us altogether. In a way it was an all-star team, with some of the best of the best guys in the country. And it was very sniper-heavy, because the idea was to implement some of the tactics we’d used in Fallujah, Ramadi, and elsewhere.
There was a lot of talent, but because we were drawn from all different units, we needed to spend a bit of time getting used to each other. Small differences in the way East Coast and West Coast teams typically operated could make for a big problem in a firefight. We also had a lot of personnel decisions to make, selecting point men and the like.
T he Army had decided to create a buffer zone to push the insurgents far enough away that their rockets would reach the Green Zone. One of the keys to this was erecting a wall in Sadr City—basically, a huge cement fence called a “T-wall” that would run down a major thoroughfare about a quarter of the way into the slum. Our job was to protect the guys building that wall—and take down as many bad guys as possible in the process.
The boys building that wall had an insanely dangerous job. A crane would take one of the concrete sections off the back of a flatbed and haul it into place. As it was set down, a private would have to climb up and unhook it.
Under fire, generally. And not just pop shots—the insurgents would use any weapon they had, from AKs to RPGs. Those Army guys had serious balls.
A Special Forces unit had already been operating in Sadr City, and they gave us some pointers and intel. We took about a week getting things all worked out and figuring out how we were going to skin this cat. Once everything was settled, we were dropped off at an Army FOB (forward operating base).
At this point, we were told we were going to foot patrol into Sadr City at night. A few of us argued that it didn’t make much sense—the place was crawling with people who wanted to kill us, and on foot we’d be easy targets.
But someone thought it would be smart if we walked in during the middle of the night. Sneak in, they told us, and there won’t be trouble.
So we did.
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