IRAQ: US efforts to kill or capture non-Iraqi fighters are failing because everyone knew the Marines were coming, reports Ellen Knickmeyer from Haban
The explosion enveloped the armoured vehicle in flames, sending orange balls of fire bubbling above the trees along the Euphrates River near the Syrian border.
US marines in surrounding vehicles threw open their hatches and took off running across the ploughed 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 US marines, he uttered just one sentence: "That was the same squad."
Among the four marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted 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 squad - one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment - had been killed or wounded. 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 US 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 US marines killed so far in the operation, six came from Lima Company, 1st Platoon.
Lima Company drew marine reservists from across Ohio into the conflict in Iraq. Some were still too young to be bothered much by shaving.
They rode to war on a marine Amtrac, an armoured vehicle that travels on tank-like treads. US marines in Iraq typically crowd thigh to thigh in the Amtrac, with one or two men perched on cardboard boxes of rations. Only the gunners manning the top hatches of Amtracs have any view of the passing scenery. Those inside find out what their field of combat is when the rear ramp comes down and they run out with weapons ready.
On Monday, when the assault on foreign fighters formally began, the young US 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 armour-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.
With the operation underway, commanders kept the 1st Platoon largely to the back, letting its men rest. Lima Company reconfigured itself from three squads into two.
Commanders had hoped the operation would swiftly capture or kill large numbers of foreign fighters. But the foreigners, and everyone else here, had plenty of warning that the US 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. Men of fighting age had made themselves scarce. The AK-47 assault rifles ubiquitous in Iraqi households had disappeared.
Many US marines complained bitterly that commanders had pulled them out of the fight at Ubaydi while the insurgents were still battling, to start the planned offensive. "They take us from killing the people they want us to kill and bring us to these ghost villages," one said.
Uneventful house searches stretched into late afternoon, the tedium broken only by small-arms fire and mortar rounds lobbed by insurgents hiding on the far side of the river.
This correspondent had just got off the Amtrac and the reconstructed squad from 1st Platoon was rolling toward the Euphrates in a row of armoured vehicles, headed for more house searches, when the vehicle rolled over the explosive.
Marines initially believed the blast was caused by two mines stacked on top of each other. But reports of an artillery round and two hand-held radios near the blast site raised suspicions that a remotely activated bomb had been used, said Maj Lawson.
Hurley and others pulled passengers out of the Amtrac as flames detonated its ammunition. As marines carrying stretchers ran to the Amtrac, bullets snapped out of the burning hulk and travelled for hundreds of feet. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," some shouted, desperate to get the wounded out.
The four dead were trapped inside the vehicle, said Maj Lawson.
"We passed right over it. We passed right over it," one of many Marines in the convoy ahead of the burning Amtrac said of the explosive, puzzling over why he was still alive.
Another Lima Company platoon commander ordered his men to bed early, in preparation for the next day's operations. Mourning could wait, the commander said. "We don't have time," he said.