Thomas P. Daly - Rage Company: A Marines Baptism By Fire

Table of Contents

Iraq: The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Anbar province 2006-2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright 2010 by Thomas P. Daly. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

Photo Credits: courtesy of Sergeant Martin Bustamante, 41, 42 (top), 125 (top), 266, 267; courtesy of Staff Sergeant Jerry Eagle, 275 (bottom), 276, 277; courtesy of Corporal Brian Holloway, 45 (bottom), 128 (bottom right), 270 (bottom), 271 (top and bottom left); courtesy of Lieutenant Richard Jahelka, 129 (top), 271 (bottom right); courtesy of Captain John Smith, 272 (top); courtesy of Lieutenant James Thomas, 129 (bottom), 130, 131, 132, 272 (bottom), 273, 274, 275 (top).

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572- 3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daly, Thomas P., date.

Rage company : a Marines baptism by fire / Thomas P. Daly. p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-57340-2

1. Operation Squeeze Play, Iraq, 2006. 2. Iraq War, 2003-Campaigns-Iraq-Ramadi. 3. Iraq War, 2003-Personal narratives, American. 4. Ramadi (Iraq)-History, Military-21st century. 5. Daly, Thomas P., 1982- I. Title.

DS79.766.R36D35 2009

956.7044342-dc22

2009028777

For lost friends
and fallen heroes.
May the world know of your sacrifice.

Foreword

Counterinsurgency theoreticians talk about winning hearts and minds; the practitionersthe gruntsin Ramadi focused on staying alive. When Lieutenant Thomas Daly arrived in late 2006, the U.S. battalion inside the city had mapped the location of eighty-three roadside bombs on the main streets. More bombs were planted each day than the Marine engineers could clear. No sensible patrol leader took the same route twice. No sane infantryman walked into the open. No convoy drove down a road that the engineers hadnt swept an hour earlier.

Insurgencies that are fought for the allegiance of the people are inherently local. Insurgencies are won or lost at the local level. Ragethe radio call sign of Dalys infantry companyvividly describes a local fight that illustrates hard truths and gets down to the nub of the matter: how do you break a tough insurgency? Dalys answer is: deploy tough troops who will persist year after year under grim conditions, absorbing and giving back blows, day after day, until a political and cultural dynamic grabs hold and changes the nature of the war.

Rage Company is a straightforward, honest account of what U.S. soldiers and Marines do when placed in a hostile urban area. Daly describes the valor and the selfishness, the heroics and the mistakes, the rushes to judgment and the regrets. His particular skill is his ability to suspend judgment and to present each wrenching combat decision from different points of view, empathizing with U.S. and Iraqi leaders even when he believed their snap decisions and impetuous commands were in error.

When Daly arrived in the fall of 2006, the United States was losing on the two critical fronts in Iraq. On the western front, concentrated around the province of Al Anbar, a U.S. Marine intelligence assessment reported that al Qaeda controlled the population. In Baghdad on the eastern front, a civil war was raging, and the Sunnis were being driven from their homes. Yet a year later, the tide of war was flowing in the coalitions favor.

What happened? According to one narrative that has achieved mythical status, in 2007 President Bush surged five brigades, imbued with counterinsurgency tactics that won the war. According to this view, the U.S. Army in 2007 finally grasped and implemented the four pillars of counterinsurgency: (1) provide the population with security, (2) give them services and jobs, (3) appoint honest government representatives, and (4) apply the rule of law. Given these four pillars, the population turned against the insurgents.

Most in the mainstream press subsequently subscribed to the four pillars explanation. But its not what happened in Iraq. A combat veteran once wrote, There is a vast difference in the perception of wartime events in histories and documents written later. Rage Company tells how Ramadi turned around, from the viewpoint of a modest, sharp-eyed lieutenant who recounts the actual events, independent of theories.

Ramadi was the capital of Al Anbar, a Sunni province the size of North Carolina. During the war, Al Anbar was an economy of force operation, accounting for one-fifth of U.S. forces in Iraq and two-fifths of the casualties. A vast land occupied by truculent tribes, Al Anbar, according to the conventional wisdom, would be the last province to be pacified. The fractious Sunni tribes fostered several insurgent resistance groups, and by mid-2004, Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, had emerged as the most ruthless. Composed mainly of tribal youths but led by outsiders, AQI summarily executed any sheikh who opposed its wishes and declared that its emirate would be ruled from Ramadi, a city of four hundred thousand, sixty miles northwest of Baghdad, along the banks of the Euphrates. In 2005, the arch terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi preached in a mosque in the city and narrowly avoided capture twice. In early 2006, the sheikhs in Ramadi agreed that their followers could join the local police. Al Qaeda responded by murdering several sheikhs and killing more than fifty recruits.

So in September 2006, when a midlevel and rather obscure sheikh named Abu Risha Sattar urged the tribes around Ramadi to rebel against al Qaeda, he wasnt given much chance of succeeding. Things looked bleak in Al Anbar, while to the east, Baghdad was falling apart. In Washington, the press and the administration believed the war was lost. The first half of Dalys book graphically depicts why. He describes the frustration of undertaking patrol after patrol, all the while knowing the unseen enemy is watching every move of his Marines and deciding when and how to attack.