_
On April 7th, we were really just moving
from Camp Fallujah over to another base
which should have been a routine drive.
The mission obviously changed
the moment we encountered the enemy.
They kicked off with RPGs,
and a lot of machine gun fire.
If we're gonna get shot, we're gonna fight back,
and sure enough, that's what we did, we fought back.
When you decide that you want to survive,
whoever it is, if they have a weapon, they're gonna die.
One thing we brought to the table that day
was that overwhelming acceptance of violence.
Synced & corrected by -robtor- www.addic7ed.com
_
We deployed to Iraq in 2004.
I'd been to Iraq before with the invasion,
but I could tell that somethin' was different.
It went from the groups of kids cheerin'
and givin' you the thumbs up
and wavin' on the side of the road,
saying things like "Bush, number one," you know,
to staring us down,
derisive looks, you know,
like they weren't hiding the fact that we weren't welcome.
So I knew it was a different war.
And I knew that it was gonna be more dangerous and more difficult.
Today, four American contractors... civilians,
were massacred in Fallujah.
Four Americans in two SUVS stuck in traffic.
They're ambushed. The four men, all civilians,
ex-military, worked for a Carolina firm, Blackwater USA.
The jubilant crowd, honking their horns
the same way people here rejoice at weddings,
set the SUVs on fire,
then tied ropes around the charred bodies
and dragged them through the streets,
and hung two of the Americans on a bridge.
When the Blackwater contractors got killed,
we had just spent a little bit of time with them.
I don't know, maybe a week before? Something like that.
So that brought it home.
Once we'd heard about it,
we're like, "Man, we were just with them."
And now to find out that two of their bodies
were hanging from the bridge,
and the other two were drug through the streets,
it kind of hit us.
We'd only been there about a month when that happened,
so we hadn't really learned what was actually out there.
You know? How many of the enemy were actually out there.
Our platoon sergeant pulled us aside
and said, "All right, let's put this in perspective.
because it's gonna be us out there on the line managing this.
We're gonna be the response to this
in some way or another."
This is outside Fallujah, Iraq.
They pretty much have the whole city surrounded
and they've been hitting it for a couple days.
Second Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Recon Battalion.
I couldn't have asked for my first recon platoon
to have been a better group of guys.
We just meshed well.
So this is one of the things that we do out here...
drive around
looking for cachet sites.
We just found some IEDs on this road.
We had darn good leadership.
Dan Griego kicked us square in the nose and made sure we were ready.
I was platoon sergeant for Bravo Company.
I wanted to make sure that my teams had as much
as they needed, so they would be ready
in case of, you know, contact or fighting with the enemy.
This is from our rooftop position here in Fallujah.
He was a hands-on platoon sergeant,
but he let the team leaders run the teams.
He didn't micromanage,
and he did well working with our platoon commander,
Captain Brent Morel.
Captain Morel and I were like...
we were friends.
We worked well together,
and he would listen to any input I had
on what we were gonna do or how we were gonna do things.
Some of the guys, you know,
were having a hard time warming up to him.
He took us to the gym one day before we deployed.
He proceeded to try to box everybody in our platoon.
And I was impressed at how many shots he could take.
I thought that was cool of him to put himself out there like that.
Blair... "Doc Dell"... knew his job really well.
He worked real hard with us
and ran us through combat trauma,
and made sure we were all well-trained
on first aid and trauma medicine.
I was an assistant team leader.
Assistant team leader
actually does most of the controlling of the team
and making sure everything's together.
The team leader tasks him with that and he takes care of it.
Ready to go out and patrol.
Eddie Wright was a machine gunner.
Definitely serious as hell when it came time to do the job.
This was a platoon of straight-up alpha males.
Everybody out there was the baddest dude on the planet.
But we loved each other through our hard training
and we were real tight.
- One, two, three... - Kill!
All right, get in your vehicle, get out of here.
_
April 7th was supposed to be an administrative run
to move our company headquarters.
We knew we were just gonna go down
this main supply route, Route Boston.
It was gonna be our platoon, five vehicles,
the headquarters element with administrative personnel leadership.
We were gonna take them to a secure point.
We have, total, 25 Marines.
We've been on this route before.
Usually there's kids running around,
there's people walking.
There's local vendors.
But this day, there wasn't.
It was just eerie.
Almost like in one of those movies
where you get the little tumbleweed
that jumps across the main street.
It was almost that quiet.
On this movement, I was in the lead vehicle.
so I could see the vehicle traffic coming towards us.
When you see... flip a U-turn and take off,
you know, that right there's a big red flag, like,
"Uh oh," you know.
So I stopped the convoy. I got on the radio.
And I radioed back, you know, like,
"Hey, something's going down here.
We should probably stop and get eyes on it."
And the word came back, like, "Okay,
well, push forward and pick up your speed."
"Roger that."
Yeah, I just got ready.
It was like we knew we were rolling into an ambush.
It's one of those things where you've got a job to do
and don't have the luxury to worry about it.
It's like, "Okay, here we go."
It was two low fields
with one road right down the middle of it,
and we're talking about hundreds of meters.
Basically, if you were to pick
the ultimate place to set up an ambush,
they chose wisely.
Those senses start kicking in, you know,
that sixth sense that some people have?
Contact right! Contact right!
Contact left!
I see muzzle flashes.
We're getting shot at from both sides.
It looked like they wanted to wipe us out.
_
Contact right, contact right!
It was basically a close ambush.
And our SOPs for this type of engagement
was to stop and lay down a base of fire...
...so it kind of was counter-intuitive
to what you'd think you'd do,
like run away or get out of Dodge.
No, you go right to it.
We were not in a good spot.
We were in the kill zone, basically.
I kept hearing these explosions.
You know, just boom, boom, boom, boom.
I thought, "Damn, they're shooting RPGs
at the back half of our platoon."
Well, they weren't shooting 'em at them,
they were shooting 'em at us.
They were missing us and exploding... hitting behind us.
That's when I got hit.
It was like... like a tremendous thunderclap
originating from inside your head.
You know, like, you can't really...
it was just a "boom!"
I thought I got shot in the face.
I was thinking to myself, "All right,
I guess I'll see what it's like to die."
And then I thought to myself, "Okay,
you gotta chill out, 'cause you're going into shock.
Like, relax."
And as soon as I made that conscious thought,
it's like somebody hit the light switch
and turned the lights on.
Everything cleared up in my vision,
and I started to assess the situation.
My hands were killin' me.
Like, I was just in pain everywhere,
and I remember liftin' my arm up and looking down,
and it was just nasty. It was gone.
It was shredded, and I remember thinking, "Damn."
And my right hand was hurting,
and I, you know, lifted my arm up and I looked down,
and I saw, uh...
where, you know, my hand was blown off
right at the base of my palm.
And it was kinda strange, 'cause my hand was hangin' down.
It was like a... it looked like a glove that got shredded,
like somehow all the meat and bones were out of my hand,
so it was like an empty glove, but shredded.
And I remember thinking,.
Both of 'em?"
I looked down and my femur was stickin' out of my leg,
off at an angle, kind of.
And the whole top of my quadricep
from the knee all the way up almost to my hip
was blown open, and it was just nasty.
A pulpy red mess.
And I remember thinking, "Damn,
I gotta get a tourniquet on that,"
and you know, "How am I gonna do this?"
You know, my hands are shot up.
So I turned to the radio operator and I'm like,
"Bro, get the blow-out kit."
and he was just looking at me...
Like, he probably thought I was gonna die,
'cause I looked terrible.
I was born in Chicago. I moved around a lot growin' up.
I always had to make new friends.
Sometimes I'd make good friends,
and sometimes I didn't make good friends.
I actually joined a gang in high school,
a Samoan gang.
It's crazy. I was the only white guy in the gang.
You know, those guys were my family
when I didn't really feel that I had anybody I could connect with.
I got expelled.
Spent some time in juvie for fighting, you know.
I was a little punk.
But getting in trouble was also
one of the best things that's ever happened to me.
I needed to get in trouble.
I needed to think about the path my life was going.
And I had to make a conscious decision to change it.
I had always wanted to be a Marine,
and I gravitated towards the reconnaissance community.
The books that I had read about recon teams in Vietnam
were to me, as a kid, amazing.
And it took some time, you know?
I had to make amends for all the fights that I'd been in
and pay some restitution.
But I stuck with it,
and I talked to the recruiter for over two years.
The fact that I was able to join the Marine Corps
in itself is a small miracle in my eyes.
But I think I was put on this earth to be a Marine.
I thought he was a bit of a jokester,
you know, the typical smart aleck
that every group's gonna have.
I went to the Marine Corps standards board last week.
Apparently piercings are "eccentric,"
but paper clips, and uh, clothespins are not eccentric.
That sense of humor
and just general smart-aleck approach to things,
how could you not bond with that?
He really is full of life.
I mean, he's an individual that has so much heart in him,
if you need something, Eddie will be there.
Just from the boom that went off,
you knew that the Alpha element had been hit bad.
In my mind, I thought I was dying.
There was a radio operator,
and he was looking through the back of the Humvee,
trying to get the first aid kit,
and he couldn't find it.
And I'm like, "Just get my tourniquet," you know.
And I leaned like this
'cause we had the pockets in our sleeves.
So my radio operator gets a tourniquet on my left leg.
By this time, my team leader turned around
and grabs the tourniquet to make sure it's on tight,
and the thing pops off,
and I'm like, "Oh, my gosh."
The radio operator has to reapply it,
and this time he really cranked it on there.
He probably saved my life,
'cause I probably would have bled out, slowly.
He put a tourniquet on my left arm.
When we got hit, the blast deafened us,
so you didn't hear that small-arms fire anymore,
so it's like "Oh, they're not shooting at us anymore."
No, they were shooting at us. We just didn't hear it.
As our hearing kind of came back,
we realized, "Oh, man, we gotta get out of this kill zone."
_
If you count all of the different positions
that were shooting at us, almost 360 degrees.
It was building up into the southwest,
one behind us to the northeast.
We had at least five positions in the berms,
I was in vehicle two.
We were trying to attract attention to us.
Vehicle One was hit.
That's when our platoon commander,
Captain Brent Morel said dismount.
Assault back, Assault back!
To get out of a close ambush,
you assault through. That's in the handbook.
Unless you want to be a sitting duck,
you know, you're gonna close with
and destroy the enemy.
Most of the guys went through, straight through the field,
right into the teeth of the gunfight.
We're running through a hail of bullets
up to the first berm.
The Marine that I was with,
he starts to shoot his machine gun,
and he can't because his weapon got shot
and he didn't realize it.
And now he has a weapon that doesn't function.
Moving!
I see a couple of enemy fighters
just rockin' away with their PKs.
It was a perfect setup for an ambush.
They never knew what was coming to them.
I was in disbelief.
I was like, "Did I just shoot my first guys?
Did I just kill somebody? Did I just take a soul?"
I was in shock after that,
but I just accepted it.
I accepted the violence.
I accepted, you know, where we were.
That's just what I knew and that's what I ran with.
I knew I was gonna be a Marine, since I was a young age.
It could have been the "Rambo" movies I was watching.
I don't know where the seed was planted,
but I always knew that I was gonna join the Marine Corps
ever since, I would say, I was a grade-schooler.
You know, I bypassed, you know, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force.
I went straight into the Marine Corps recruiting office
and I was, like, "Hey, wanna join the Marine Corps."
He was like, "Well, you want to know anything about it?"
I was like, "Well, all I know is that, you know,
I wanna shoot guns, I wanna blow things up."
And he says, "Well, Infantry, it is."
Um, that's the route that I took.
Mike Mendoza was pretty quiet,
so I really never, you know, heard him say much
or do something that was, you know,
gonna draw my attention to him.
I guess as a platoon sergeant, that's good,
because if my attention is drawn towards you
it's probably for something bad.
I just always knew I could go to him for advice,
talk to him, just chat, you know, sanity check.
He's the type of guy you want beside you in a gunfight.
It was chaos.
I looked to my left, somebody was shooting.
I looked to my right, somebody's shooting.
That's when I saw Captain Brent Morel.
He just fell, and I just knew he was shot.
I tried to carry him,
but Morel is a big boy.
He's tall and full of muscle.
I think I made it about three feet
before, you know, my knees gave out under me
because he was such a large individual.
Fire started zipping in right at us.
You could hear the cracks and see dirt
kicking around around us.
And then we started taking off his body armor.
We wanted to see exactly where he was hit.
My hand feels a small hole here,
and then I look on the other side.
All my fingers pretty much just fell into his body cavity.
He just said, "I gotta get outta here, I'm gonna die."
Um...
when he said that to me, it was eye-to-eye contact.
So that's why it's pretty much... it burned.
It's burned in my mind.
So...
So when he said, "We gotta get outta here, I'm gonna die,"
I lost it inside. Not physically,
but I was just like, "I don't know what to do."
_
There was three battles happening in one ambush.
On the kill zone, Eddie's vehicle
was disabled by the RPG.
And then the second battle where I was,
was Captain Morel, who was severely injured.
We were being shot at.
The Marines that were with us,
they were doing their best to make radio contact
to try to get a vehicle to extract them out.
And then we had another battle, which was Dan Griego.
_
He was our Bravo element.
He broke off from our convoy,
and he did like an L-shaped position.
From the time we started taking fire,
I immediately said, "Turn right."
When we made our flanking move,
now we were on a dirt road,
and it's next to a canal.
Get ready to flank!
I initially thought we could move the vehicles
into a position where we'd be able to just fire
big guns from the vehicle.
I got too much grass in front of me.
Look out.
And we couldn't tell where the enemy was
because we had the tall reeds to our left-hand side.
I got a shot. You want to take the hill?
Get in position!
Not being able to see them,
we had to get out of the vehicles
to go through the reeds, across the canal
up to the other side so that we can see
where the enemy was.
The biggest thing was just to draw the fire
away from the Alpha element.
When we started firing, then machine gun fire started coming at us.
We knew they'd turn their fire in our direction,
which takes fire off that Alpha element,
which would allow time for them to move.
You turn yourself into this person
that will kill anybody in front of you
to protect your guys.
I'm not gonna take time to think about it.
I'm not gonna take time to, you know...
I'm gonna kill you.
I grew up in Whittier, California,
and hated school,
so I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
I enlisted when I was 17,
and then I went in, actually went in when I was 18.
I had an actual long lineage
of another Marine that was from my family.
The great-great-great- grandfather
that was in... in...
like 1786, something like that.
My mom wasn't supportive.
She was like, "You're not gonna make it,
because you don't listen to me,
and you're not gonna listen to anyone else."
I stayed in the reconnaissance community
the entire time in my 20 years.
Pretty much I was deployed, I mean, constantly.
I'd come back, retrain, and then redeploy.
By the time we deployed in 2004,
that was my ninth deployment.
Dan Griego, he was the most senior enlisted
member in our platoon. He was our platoon sergeant.
He had more deployments than, I think,
any vehicle put together.
He's very... he's very smart
when it comes to tactics.
Here we are, back out in the desert again.
It's a day out at the range.
We're firing the MK19s.
When other teams and other platoons
were out getting a soda or something like that,
he had us out doing rehearsals
and beating the hell out of us with that,
which is what we should be doing.
We never doubted what was required of us,
because of his leadership.
At that time, we were way outnumbered,
but the Bravo element was in the best position possible.
And the enemy had set up only expecting us
to be coming from the direction that they initially engaged in.
They didn't expect us to be coming from the side.
We're laying on a berm,
and it's open ground in front of us,
with an open enemy in front of us.
So we're able to shoot straight across the ground,
and with a .50 caliber sniper rifle, it's pretty easy
to, you know, be able to hit whatever you want with it.
There is really no thought,
other than "try to hit as many people as you can."
This is basic infantry,
close with and destroy the enemy
by fire and maneuver.
You would think that your heart would start racing
and you know, everything would pick up and speed would pick up,
but it seemed more like time slowed down.
I remember breathing and everything
was just like really relaxed.
And I was able to fire
just the way you should fire a sniper rifle.
I know at least I hit the guy that fired the RPG at Eddie.
I shot him right through the face.
Our team leader told our driver to punch forward
and the vehicle really is barely moving.
It's like "putt-putt... putt-putt, putt, putt-putt."
Obviously we have mechanical damage to the vehicle,
but it did start to move us out of that kill zone.
About then, Eddie's vehicle started
finally moving again, starting to move our way.
Everybody in Eddie's vehicle
was injured to some degree or another.
They were working their way back to us.
We needed to set up a casualty collection point.
And we set up our own security
right there in the middle of the kill zone.
So we had kind of a triangle of vehicles.
Eddie had both arms ripped off,
and a good chunk of his left upper leg.
Shrapnel everywhere.
First words out of his mouth,
with a smart-aleck grin on his face,
"Hey, Blair, can you give me a hand?"
And he meant every bit of that pun.
Testament to his will to live,
and his warrior spirit.
As a medic, you want to take care of every patient,
but it means a lot more when it's somebody you know.
Grew up in Washington state. Allyn, Washington.
Little town still waiting on its first stop light.
Had the Olympic Mountains as my backyard,
and the Puget Sound as my front yard.
Couldn't ask for much better.
I had the opportunity when I was 16,
and I joined the fire department as a volunteer.
While I loved what I was doing with the fire department,
I knew there was more I could do.
Started with the grunts, with Marine grunts,
infantry, 1996.
And saw... just about every country you could hope for.
And thought I was gonna go back to the fire department,
and realized the Marines had ruined me,
'cause I couldn't be a reactive medic anymore.
I couldn't wait for people to get screwed up
and then me and my buddy show up and fix it.
I wanted to be more proactive.
Blair, he was our doc.
He was our platoon corpsman.
Blair was the "wise owl."
He always had something clever to say.
Blair was like a happy-go-lucky kind of a guy.
Knew his job really well,
didn't have to worry about him medically,
you know, how he was gonna take care of anything.
I was working on Eddie for quite a bit,
and then I got the word Brent Morel was hit.
At some point they had managed
to get a vehicle out to him or something.
I don't know, I'm not familiar
with how they got him back to me.
But I turned around and they were laying him down.
Yeah, and...
That definitely punches you in the gut.
I checked on Eddie one more time real quick.
I said, "Hey, buddy, I'm gonna have to go
take care of the boss."
Brent had a torso wound...
pretty significant.
I did everything I could,
and it seemed like nothing I was doing
would, uh...
...gain purchase.
I was not... I...
didn't want to give up.
He deserved nothing less than everything I had,
but at some point,
some wounds, you're just not gonna win.
_
First I heard the Cobras fly over a couple of times,
and I could hear them firing their rockets
and I could hear their machine gun.
That's a wonderful sound. You're just like,
"Ah, yes, we're good. We got Cobras."
That really helped to turn the tide of the battle.
It seemed like ages, but I think it might've been
like 45 minutes or something.
But the medevac chopper finally came,
and landed.
Captain Morel, my platoon commander,
he was, uh,
white as a ghost.
He'd lost so much blood that he... I mean, he was just...
I'd never seen somebody that white.
You can't hear anything, the bird's so loud,
but I told him, I said, "Hang in there, sir."
At that point, they informed us that
Captain Morel had been hit,
and Eddie had been hit, and were medevacked
in the aircraft that we had just seen
come over and fly off.
I knew it wasn't good.
The company commander told us,
"Just get your guys back outta there,"
and, you know, he already had known
how severe the injuries were,
you know, who we'd already possibly lost
and let's just get the rest of us
back out of there and move out.
That enemy was ready for a battle that day.
They had more weapons.
They had equal to or more, you know, than we had.
They were ready to take on a city.
Captain Morel didn't do what he did,
we would've had more casualties.
We realized later how many people
they threw at us that day.
We've heard varying accounts, from as little as 30
to as many as over 100, 150.
So once we finally got time for us,
I remember the CO bringing us all together,
and letting us know that, officially, Brent had passed.
It was really tough to swallow that information.
Recon Battalion hadn't lost anybody
up to that point in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
For me, it was the only time I'd ever lost a Marine
that was, you know, in my platoon...
for my time in the Marine Corps.
It hit us all pretty hard.
No medic ever wants to lose one of their guys,
but we were so small and so close-knit
that we... every loss is felt exponentially.
Brent Morel took it straight
into the, you know, the monster's mouth.
I don't know if there's much more
you could ask for in a leader.
There was no "mourning" feeling.
I guess it wasn't the time to mourn.
It was the time to fight.
Mourning was when the mission's done,
when we're back in the United States.
I don't think I processed it
until I met with his father,
and sitting on the beach, smoking a cigar
and talking about everything,
that's when, you know...
when you understand it's someone else's son.
You know, that's... I mean, that's the biggest thing
is knowing he's never gonna see him again.
His mother's never gonna see him again.
But it's just not the time to process it out there.
Maybe it's forever processing it.
_
When I woke up at the National Naval Medical Center
in Bethesda, Maryland, I was happy to be alive.
I had been out for nine days
in a medically-induced coma.
I found out later I had to be resuscitated three times.
I spent some time... a month... in ICU.
I handled it all relatively pretty well from the beginning,
because I knew no amount of lamenting
the loss of my hands is gonna make my hands come back.
And it was kind of the attitude that I've always had.
I'm always coming up with little ways
to cut corners or adapt,
or do things the way... I mean,
so that I can still do what I used to do.
You know, part of me, it was just killing me
that I wasn't gonna be deployable.
I wasn't gonna be able to do the job
that I'd always dreamt of doing.
Done a lot of introspection I guess, you know,
trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with myself
for the rest of my life, but, uh,
You know, as of yet I haven't made up my mind 100%.
You know, I'm only limited by my imagination, I guess.
But you know, I try to put it into perspective.
Eventually, everybody has to get out of the Marine Corps.
Does it get easier if you put 20 or 30 years in?
I doubt it.
Mmm.
Dee-licious.
I ended up using Eddie's case
quite a bit over the years following
as a case study,
as we were developing new technologies,
and from 15 years of war, we have tools now,
based on his and other similar cases,
that would've made that whole day an easy day.
Junctional tourniquets, hemostatic dressings,
things like that that we just didn't have at those times.
Silver lining out of all that.
The things that happen to me in my life
are things that shape me into being the person that I am today.
So I don't think that I would really change anything,
and that includes getting my hands shot off.
April 7th, it was life-changing, for sure.
That's... I guess that's a good way to put it.
I sure enough became a different person that day.
When I returned,
good friends that I'd had throughout my career
in the Marine Corps just said that...
my whole face had changed, that I was a different person.
You don't turn violence on and off.
You decide to do it,
allowing yourself to be that person.
If you're the enemy and I'm talking to you,
I'm gonna eat you.
I'm gonna kill anybody I have to
to get back to my kids.
And I think that is what will effect people
throughout their life, is the process
of turning yourself into that.
You know, we're just not out there being violent to be violent,
but you have to meet...
you have to meet your enemy
with equal and greater force
than what they're bringing to you.
That doesn't need to mean that we need to be animals,
but that just means we have to be very effective
in our jobs, or we lose.
I think one of the things that we've really identified more
in the whole operational psychology,
everything that we've tried to learn,
is that you just adapt that to winning in another environment.
You still plan for everything with the same intensity
you would for a mission.
Why would I give up that intensity?
That's what helped me win in the military.
I can't do what I was doing before,
and it was my dream job.
But now I can find another dream.
A lot of people don't get a chance
to live two dreams in the same lifetime.
But I do.
When I look back on that day,
I'm really proud of my brothers.
Man, they did a great job.
We were able to fight our way out of that ambush
and turn the tide on the enemy,
and I don't think there are very many units
that could've done that.
If I wasn't with men of that caliber,
I would be dead, you know?
_
Yeah, we came down here
into south in Fallujah.
Pretty nice building here behind us
that they've taken over and it overlooks
the entire area around here,
including the palm tree growth
that they were really having a problem with.
Let's go.