In 2000, Hollywood scriptwriter Graham Roland enrolled in college, halfheartedly taking classes at Cal State-Fullerton when he decided he needed a challenge. He wanted to become a writer but needed money for school. A California resident who spent his summers with his dad in Oklahoma, Roland was also looking for a male role model in his life and found it in the Marine Corps.
“Coming out of high school, I was an OK student, not a great student,” Roland said. “I had already formulated this idea I wanted to write and hadn’t really focused in on writing for film and television yet, but I knew that I needed something to write about.”
Initially motivated by the promise of the GI Bill, a couple of key experiences inspired Roland to join the Corps. A friend of his had joined the Marines right after graduation, and his transformation left an impression on Roland.
“I saw him when we came back and he was like a totally different person. … His personality, the way he carried himself … [In school] he was a knucklehead, he wasn’t very focused. He was a good student … after boot camp leave. That really changed him. That stuck in my mind.”
Roland enlisted in the Corps in 2000 at a recruiting station in the Bay Area and completed boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. He trained for two months at Fort Sill, Okla., to become a forward observer, 0861 MOS, in artillery, and the base was about two hours from where his dad lived.
Cpl Graham Roland, center, with GySgt Dallas Miller, left, and LCpl Roberto Mancha, waiting to leave the wire at Camp Ramadi, Iraq, December 2005.
Roland had come of age in the ’90s, and believed there wouldn’t be another ground war. The ’90s involved a lot of bombing people, and Desert Storm happened fast. But by the time he deployed to Fallujah in 2005, the Corps didn’t need forward observers. He had been taken out of his artillery battery, where he was a reservist in Seal Beach, Calif., and put with an active-duty field military police (MP) company, the only MP company in the 1st Marine Division. Roland didn’t do anything artillery focused during the deployment. Instead, his unit executed convoy security and prisoner transfers in country. They also did security for Personal Security Detachment missions around the election, escorting high-value individuals.
“[We would] take them to a house in Ramadi. Watch the house, they would come out and we would take them back to Camp Fallujah.” In hindsight, he said he liked how it turned out. He didn’t know what it would have looked like to be in an artillery battery during the occupation phase of OIF. He had friends he trained with who had been part of OIF 1 in 2003. When it came time for Roland to go the war, “it had shifted into such a different place,” he said. “I am grateful for how it happened.”
Within his MP company, Roland, a corporal at the time, led a small unit of 25 to 30 reservists. The reservists attached to three platoons. Most of his platoon was active duty, doing their second or even third tour in Iraq.
“They whipped us into shape, told us what to expect, and I felt a great measure of comfort being with these guys because they had done it before,” Roland said. He got to see much of the country during deployment because his team, while based in Fallujah, was constantly moving between Baghdad and Ramadi. His team even went to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. “We were on the move a lot,” he said. “It was an exciting job to have.”
Having arrived in Fallujah in September, his team spent the winter working almost exclusively at night. They didn’t have a lot of enemy contact or activity during the winter, but that changed as the weather turned and got warmer, with longer days around mid-February 2006. Roland recalled, “The last couple of months of our deployment, things really started to pick up. We went through a period of a couple of weeks [where we] got hit with IEDs three or four times in a really short period of time.” Nobody was severely injured because their vehicles were up-armored, although a few of his teammates were concussed. Roland’s own vehicle was hit. He didn’t see the IED, but his driver saw it and swerved the truck violently, thinking it looked like an 88 mm mortar wired with a piece of detonation cord.
“I don’t remember the incident,” Roland said, “but the aftermath of it … being in shock and looking for the people that might have set it off.”
They finished the mission and headed back to base. He remembers the adrenaline. “I was young, we all were young. I thought naively that nothing bad was going to happen to me. Nothing really did … it was scary, but physically I was OK.
“The IED was on my side, and had he not [swerved] we would have rolled right over it. The one soft spot in the humvees was the undercarriage; he could have driven right over it. … Who knows, it might not have done any damage … that was the first time I felt like, ‘This is real.’ ”
It was jarring for him, and near the end of the deployment, it put him in a “different mental space for the rest of [his] time in country.”
“I was very hyper-focused, and so hyper-aware, every time we left the base; we were all counting the days; ‘We’re almost home, nothing bad can happen.’ ”
After their deployment, some of the Marines whom he had served with in Iraq ended up going to Afghanistan. “The stories I heard, it was much more kinetic, and the fighting was much more [like] Vietnam. For us, our deployment was like fighting ghosts. You would get hit with an IED, or someone would shoot off a couple of rounds at your direction, and they would just be gone.”
He remembers the frustration of the enemy taking cheap shots but never having the ability to confront them. He remembers enemy attacks as poorly executed and not very effective. “In our battalion, we had a couple of people KIA doing security at a polling station when a suicide bomber was in line and detonated his vest. It was in our battalion, but not my platoon or company.”
Roland shared a vivid memory from his deployment. “[There was] a guy that was, in hindsight, doing a dry run to see what our reaction would be. … We were on our way back to Abu Ghraib, and he was coming at us from a frontage road. We passed him, and the .50-cal from the truck behind us engaged him. He didn’t stop. ‘Shots fired’ came over the radio, and we stopped. [Our] gunner put a lot of rounds in the engine block and wind-shield, completely disabled the vehicle. I thought that guy was dead. We surrounded the vehicle, and he came out.
“He survived and, even with all those rounds, he had only lost his thumb. It was like a miracle. There was nothing in the vehicle. … We had given so many different warnings with flares, used our escalation of force (EOF), and everybody knew the EOF rules.
“This guy went way past it. … You could tell they were planning something, and this was the dry run. They were poking the bear to see how we would react to it.”
A lot of Roland’s memories of Iraq are in the gray-green night vision goggles. His team wore the old, heavy ones that give you headaches. He and his team had to learn to drive and operate at night, wearing them for hours on end. They would operate blacked out (with no lights) and experienced lot of tense moments that were so “eerily spooky that you didn’t know what was going on, and it ended up being nothing.”
His team called their trail vehicles “ghost vehicles,” and when he got promoted in country to sergeant, he was put in charge of one of them. Roland’s job at the end of his deployment was to be the first one out of the wire, to check to make sure there was nothing laid out in the road. He’d be “getting out of the truck and deciding if it [was] enough to call explosive ordnance disposal on a pile of trash in the road. Either we had extra-ordinarily good luck or, by combination, they just weren’t very good.” His team’s experiences were after the Battle of Fallujah, “so it wasn’t totally safe, but nothing like it was.”
Graham Roland, left, brings his Marine experiences on set with director Morten Tyldum during the filming of “Jack Ryan,” Season One, June 2017, Marrakech, Morocco. (Photo courtesy of Graham Roland)
Roland’s enlistment was up six months after he returned. He had a year of college left. He changed his major from film and took a writing class taught by TV writer/producer Robert Engels (“Twin Peaks,” “Andromeda,” “SeaQuest DSV”). Engels was teaching a class that had never been offered at the university before, on the one-hour TV drama. Roland had taken other writing classes but had “no aspirations at all to be a TV writer. I wanted to work in features and be a director. I thought my career was going to be very different.”
He wrote a spec script, a hypothetical episode, of his favorite series, “The Sopranos.” He turned out his first round of pages for the professor about three weeks into class. At the end of one class, Engels said, ‘Who’s Graham?’ Roland responded with, “That’s me.” He said, “Oh, yeah, the Marine guy … Walk with me to my next class.”
Engels told him, “I really like your writing, but I’m curious about your experience in the Marines. I’m wondering if you can write me an original pilot about being a Marine and your experience overseas. It doesn’t have to be true; it just has to be inspired by that.”
Roland said, “I think I can do that.”
Engels replied with, “If you can do that, I will give you an ‘A.’ All you have to do is finish it. It doesn’t have to be good. Give me 50 pages of you and your story.”
He wasn’t doing this with anybody else in the class; he was making them spec their favorite TV show. Engels wanted to see what Roland could do. Roland “rogered up” and finished the script. Engels gave him notes as if he were a working writer.
When he finished, Engels said, “I think you can do this for a living.”
Roland had never met a working TV writer, and this experience boosted his confidence. Engels helped him get a manager within a couple of weeks of graduation. The manager told him to move out to LA.
“He really got the ball rolling,” Roland reflected. Engels’ practical advice and support stemmed from his own experience as a working writer on “Twin Peaks,” a show Roland loved growing up. Telling Roland he thought he could “make a living at this,” he said, was maybe the “biggest thing that ever happened to me, career-wise.”
“It went from being like, ‘We’ll see how it goes,’ to a tangible kind of thing where this guy believes I can do it, and now I believe I can do it. I got very lucky. That same spec I wrote about being in Iraq, it got me a manager, an agent and my first job on the show ‘Prison Break,’ all within a year.”
He’d been back from deployment for less than two years when he started his career on “Prison Break.” Using his Marine Corps experience as a touchstone, Roland said, “Really, had I not had that [deployment] experience, I could have never written that script. … Looking back on it, I didn’t know anything. … I knew very little about being a writer. I learned about being a writer after I got a job being a writer.”
Early in his writing career, although he was inspired by certain shows, Roland was unable to sit down and have a clear concept of what made “a good drama.” He struggled to tell someone what made a good scene and settled for things he thought were “cool.” Conveying authenticity, though, was something he was good at.
Authenticity is what people respond to in his writing.
“All those moments and characters … that I came across in my deployment [were given an outlet in that] script,” he said. The script was science fiction, not based in reality at all, but “it was the setting … the world … how Marines talked to each other. How the characters interacted was what people responded to.”
The script he wrote led to his second job on “Lost.” He had the opportunity to co-write three episodes for the hit show. The opportunity introduced him to producer and showrunner Carlton Cuse, who he has worked with several times since. They even produced one of Roland’s own shows together. “That spec did everything for me,” he said. “It changed my life.”
On set of “Dark Winds,” Season 2 (left to right): director, Chris Eyre; co-creator, Graham Roland; and showrunner, John Wirth.
Roland carries the Marine Corps’ training with him—the perseverance and putting in the hours to continue pushing forward when “you think you can’t anymore. That is definitely something I got from being a Marine … and the tactfulness and chain of command. All of those things I learned there has played a role in my career.”
Roland drew on his Marine Corps service to co-create the hit Amazon Prime Video “Jack Ryan” series. “I had done some traveling, but I had never been to a place that was seemingly so different from my home [than when I was in Iraq]. These people are a lot more like me than people realize. That was born out of being around them every day. Their lives were kind of existing around us. Seeing the majority of them just wanting the same things we all wanted—take their kids to school, take care of their families, be able to work, [although] yes, there were differences. … When we decided to do a story on Islamic extremism, the antagonist for that season was a Middle Eastern terrorist. I remember … thinking, ‘If I am going to do this, I am going to do my best to show that person’s story too.’ ”
Graham Roland, second from right, with the cast and producers of “Dark Winds” at the show’s premiere in Santa Fe, N.M., June 2022. (Photo courtesy of Graham Roland)
He wanted to show “how they could have gotten to that place. That is why the pilot started out with the [character] when he was a little boy. You find out that this extremely traumatic event happened to him and his brother. There is a scene in one of the episodes I wrote where he is playing an Arabic version of Monopoly. They were all little attempts to say this person is misguided and lost, but I think, at the core of it, there is more to the story and to people, that [they] are more similar than dissimilar. I don’t think I could have done that storyline had I not deployed and had that experience.”
Roland’s new series, “Dark Winds,” which airs on AMC, is based on the novel series Leaphorn & Chee, written by decorated Army World War II veteran Tony Hillerman. He has strong characters who are military veterans throughout the show. The lead character, Joe Leaphorn, portrayed by Zahn McClarnon, is a Korean War veteran. Sheriff Gordo Sena, played by A Martinez, is shown as a World War II veteran.
“I got everything I thought I wanted out of [the Marine Corps,]” Roland shared, “and a lot more. The things that I carry with me are those friendships that are unlike any other you’ll ever have. … When I see them, it is like no time has passed.” The Corps was a “tough experience,” but, he said, “I wouldn’t change anything about it. Some of my favorite memories are from that period. They are all usually based around those friendships.”
Featured Image (Top): Future Hollywood writer Graham Roland in Camp Fallujah, Iraq, September 2005.
Authors Bio:
LtCol Joel Searls, USMCR, is a journalist, writer and creative who serves in COMMSTRAT for the Marine Corps Reserve. He has completed the Writer’s Guild Foundation Veterans Writing Project, is a produced playwright, a commissioned screenwriter and an entertainment consultant. His most recent feature film-producing project is “Running with the Devil,” and his most recent TV series producing project is “Top Combat Pilot.” He is a graduate of The Ohio State University.
Executive Editor’s note: The following article received 1st place in the 2025 Leatherneck Magazine Writing Contest. The award is provided through an endowment by the Colonel Charles E. Michaels Foundation and is being given in memory of Colonel William E. Barber, USMC, who fought on Iwo Jima during World War II, and was the recipient of the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. On Jan. 1, we will begin accepting submissions for the 2026 Leatherneck Magazine Writing Contest.
Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima and the Chosin Reservoir are the Marine Corps’ three touchstone battles—names that hit like a mortar round in the chest. They’re the gold standard: Marines charging into hell, bleeding for every scrap of ground and coming out on top when the odds say we shouldn’t. I carried those stories with me through my time at 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, Scout Sniper Surveillance and Target Acquisition (SS STA) 3/6, Camp Lejeune, N.C., until I hung up my uniform on Jan. 25, 2004.
As the Corps turns 250, I’ve been chewing on what other fight deserves to stand with those giants. For me, it’s the Battle of Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968. That siege wasn’t just a battle—it was a crucible, a 77-day gut check that forged Marines into something unbreakable. It belongs up there with the big three, and here’s why.
Khe Sanh started in January 1968, when the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) clamped down on the Khe Sanh Combat Base, a speck of dirt near the DMZ and the Laotian border. About 6,000 Marines and allies—mostly the 26th Marine Regiment—found themselves surrounded by 20,000 to 40,000 NVA troops. The enemy’s plan was straight out of its playbook: besiege, bombard and bury, just like they did to the French at Dien Bien Phu. For 77 days, those Marines took a pounding—over 10,000-15,000 rounds of artillery and rockets, in addition to U.S. bombing, and more than 1,000 rounds a day at the worst of it. Hill 881 South, Hill 861, the main base—they became islands in a sea of mud and fire. Supplies ran thin, the weather was a soup of fog and rain, and the NVA kept coming. But the Marines didn’t just hold—they fought.
That’s what makes Khe Sanh a touch-stone: the sheer stubborn will it took to stay in the fight. I picture those grunts in their trenches, caked in red clay, patching bunkers after every barrage. Resupply drops came under fire, with C-130s and Hueys dodging antiaircraft guns to get ammo and chow through. It was chaos, but it was controlled chaos, the kind I saw in my own small way at Lejeune with SS STA 3/6. We weren’t in combat, but we kept the battalion’s gears turning—logistics, comms, planning. Khe Sanh was that on steroids: Every Marine, from the commanding officer to the newest private, locked in to keep the machine running. Patrols slipped out to hit NVA positions, artillery crews fired until their barrels glowed, and air support—Marine, Navy and Air Force—dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs, turning the hills into a wasteland. When Operation Pegasus rolled in with Army and Marine reinforcements in April, the NVA limped away, leaving bodies and broken plans behind.
Air Force F-100s deliver close air support following an assault on ARVN Ranger positions, Khe Sanh, 1968.
Khe Sanh mirrors Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima and Chosin in ways that cut to the bone. Belleau Wood was raw guts—Marines rushing German lines, taking casualties but never stopping. Khe Sanh had that same fire, just pinned down instead of charging. Iwo Jima was about digging in, making a volcanic rock a fortress—Khe Sanh’s hills were the same, only with jungle and mud instead of ash. And Chosin? That frozen march out of a Chinese trap, outnumbered 10 to one? Khe Sanh was its echo—surrounded, outgunned but never outfought. The difference is the siege itself: 77 days of unrelenting pressure, a modern test of what Marines can endure. It wasn’t about maneuvering or grand strategy; it was about standing fast when everything said to break.
Now, some will argue Khe Sanh doesn’t fit because we pulled out after the siege. The base got torched and abandoned in July ’68, and critics say that stains the victory. Fair point: Nobody’s raising a flag over Khe Sanh today like we did on Suribachi. But touchstones aren’t about holding dirt forever; they’re about what the fight reveals. Khe Sanh was a slugfest that messed up the NVA’s Tet Offensive, tying down divisions they needed elsewhere. It cost them thousands—estimates run from 10,000 to 15,000 dead—while we lost under 500 KIA. More than that, it was a middle finger to the idea that Marines could be cracked. I’d tell those doubters victory isn’t just a map pin; it’s the message you send. Khe Sanh screamed, “You can’t take us.”
Khe Sanh was that spirit writ large—Marines doing the dirty, thankless work to hold the line. I remember a gunny who’d been at Chu Lai in ’69, not Khe Sanh, but he talked about Vietnam like it was yesterday. He’d say, “You don’t win by running—you win by staying.” That’s Khe Sanh: staying when every instinct says go. I left the military in ’04, honorable discharge in hand, but that lesson stuck.
In the White House situation room, President Lyndon B. Johnson (second from left) examines a scale model of the Khe Sanh Combat Base, Feb. 15, 1968.
It’s what I’d tell the boots today: Stand your ground, because that’s what Marines do.
The battle’s legacy runs deep. It showed combined arms at its peak—air strikes syncing with arty, infantry holding the perimeter. I can see the forward air controllers on those hills, calling in Phantoms while mortars pounded the treeline. It’s a blueprint for how we fight now—integrated, relentless. Khe Sanh also cemented small-unit leadership. Lieutenants and sergeants kept their squads tight, kept them believing, even when the sky was falling. That’s the Corps I knew: NCOs running the show when it counts. And the vets? I’ve met a few—gray-haired, quiet types at VFW halls. They don’t brag, but you see Khe Sanh in their handshake, their nod. It’s the same steel you feel from Chosin survivors or Iwo vets—a brotherhood forged in the worst of it.
Khe Sanh’s place as a touchstone isn’t just about ’68; it’s about 2025 and beyond. It’s a reminder that wars change but Marines don’t. We adapt, sure—Vietnam wasn’t Belleau Wood’s trenches or Iwo’s beaches, but the core stays: Fight hard, fight smart, fight together. Khe Sanh teaches that isolation isn’t weakness; it’s a chance to prove what you’ve got. I’d tell any Marine to study it. Feel the weight of those 77 days. It’s not just history—it’s us, at our toughest, our proudest. Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Chosin—they’ve got a brother in Khe Sanh. On our 250th, let’s give it the honor it’s earned.
Marines of 1st Platoon, Company K, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, salute as the American flag is raised during a memorial service at Khe Sanh. Joined by soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ceremony paid tribute to those lost during the 77-day siege. (Photo by SSgt Fred Lowe III, USMC)
Featured Image (Top):During the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh, Marines stacked tons of expended 105 mm shell casings,a testament to the intensity of the bombardment. (Photo by Sgt T.H. Nairns, USMC)
Author’s bio:
HM3 Brian Nielson served with 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, Scout Sniper Surveillance and Target Acquisition (SS STA) 3/6 at Camp Lejeune and was honorably discharged in 2004. Nielson served as the senior corpsman of SS STA on Camp Lejeune and is the founder and CEO of Kern + Bellows, a defense contractor specializing in re-cruitment and advertising.
On Nov. 27, 1950, the 5th and 7th Regiments of the 1st Marine Division were in Yudam-ni, a mountain hamlet on the western side of the Chosin Reservoir, positioned for a thrust west across the upper reaches of the Taebaek Mountains and a link-up with the American 8th Army. The Marine offensive would be part of the “Home by Christmas” offensive, the grand design of the U.S. Commander in Chief, Far East, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, to end the Korean War. As proposed in his double envelopment strategy, found in Roy E. Appleman’s “South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu,” the X Corps, which included 1stMarDiv, and 8th Army would act as giant pincers, ensnaring and destroying the remnants of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) that were fleeing north after the breakout of the 8th Army from the Pusan Perimeter and the successful amphibious landings of 1stMarDiv at Inchon in September.
In developing this stratagem, MacArthur’s war planners seemingly disregarded reports that Chinese Communist Forces (CCF) were amassing in southern Manchuria, and that perhaps tens of thousands of them had already crossed into North Korea by the middle of October, writes Appleman.
Entrapment and Breakout
The 5th and 7th Marines began moving west and were shortly engaged, not by the disorganized units of the NKPA but by the hardened troops of the 79th and 89th Divisions of the CCF’s IX Army Group, 3rd Field Army. A third division, the 59th, struck to the rear at the Toktong Pass to interdict the main supply route (MSR). After four days of violent combat, the 5th and 7th Marines began a fighting withdrawal to Hagaru-ri, the division’s forward operating base some 14 miles south. They brought with them all their wounded and dead; and they did so during one of the coldest winters seen in northeast Korea—blustery, snowy Siberian winds dropped the temperatures into the minus 30s, causing weapons, artillery and vehicles to malfunction. Moreover, though they had been issued cold-weather gear, an alarming number of cold-weather casualties began to appear—hypothermia, chilblains, trench foot and frostbite of the face, hands and feet.
The 7th Marine Regiment at Yudam-ni prepares to depart, ready to fight its way back to Hagaru-ri and on to the sea for extraction in December 1950.
Meanwhile, more divisions of the IX Army Group struck south at Hagaru-ri, Koto-ri and Chinhung-ni and cut the MSR in several places. The hardest hit was Hagaru-ri. There, on the night of Nov. 28—“Hagaru’s Night of Fire,” according to Lynn Montross and Nicholas Canzona’s “The Chosin Reservoir Campaign”—the 58th Division attacked the southwest defensive perimeter and threatened to overrun a medical battalion hospital and the partially completed airstrip, which Lieutenant Colonel John H. Partridge’s 1st Engineer Battalion had been working on since the division arrived in Haragu-ri on Nov. 15. Fortunately, with the help of a detachment of engineers who left their heavy equipment and took up arms, the attack was thwarted.
As the fighting in the southwest wound down, another CCF division attacked East Hill, the largest of the hills surrounding Hagaru-ri. During the ensuing seesaw battle, the Chinese Communists took the hill and resisted several attempts to dislodge them. By the morning of Nov. 29, the only force preventing a CCF breakthrough at East Hill was a ragtag group of defenders—administrative and supply personnel, and bits and pieces of infantry units—bolstered by several tanks and machine-gun emplacements.
Though seriously outnumbered, the doughty defenders of Hagaru-ri had held the line, and further CCF attempts to breach the defensive perimeter would fail.
During the early morning of Dec. 1, General Oliver P. Smith met with his division surgeon, Captain Eugene R. Hering Jr., at the division command post at Hagaru-ri. Smith recorded the reason for the meeting in his aide-mémoire (war journal) entry for that day: “The casualties in his installations were piling up and he was concerned over his ability to provide suitable medical care. At that time he had about 600 casualties at Hagaru-ri awaiting evacuation.” Hering expected “400 additional casualties” to arrive from the east side of the Chosin Reservoir, where the 7th Infantry Division’s 31st Regimental Combat Team had been decimated by several CCF divisions, and many, many more from the 5th and 7th Marines, who were fighting their way back to Hagaru-ri. “The only solution to our casualty problem,” wrote Smith, “was the completion of the C-47 strip.” However, he noted that “the Engineers considered the strip to be only 40% completed”; nonetheless, “it was decided to bring in a C-47 on a trial run.”
At about the time of their meeting, General William H. Tunner, commander of the Combat Cargo Command of the U.S. Far East Air Force, received a message from Colonel Hoyt Prindle, his liaison officer with X Corps—a composite of 1stMarDiv and the 3rd and 7th Infantry Divisions, commanded by Army General Edward M. Almond. In the message, Prindle related the important details of recent staff meetings at the Corps headquarters in Hungnam, which can be found in Tunner’s book “Over the Hump”: “I am in General Almond’s outer office and waiting to get in to see him. I attended briefings both last night and this morning … The situation at and near the Chosin Reservoir is critical. We must exert every possible effort to airdrop supplies and ammunition into that area in order to get the 1st Marine Division out or we will be lost. There are already between 900 and 1,000 casualties that urgently need air evacuation now. If we don’t get them out, they won’t get out.”
Prindle also briefed Tunner on the status of the landing strip at Hagaru-ri: “A 3,200-foot strip being hacked out of the frozen earth will be ready by 4 p.m. this afternoon. It may or may not be under enemy fire. We will have to take that chance. If usable it will help the air evacuation situation and also re-supply the unit that is near the strip. The support of others must be handled by air drop.”
He further expressed the need for immediate action, stating that “roughly ten Chinese Red divisions” were “closing in” on Hagaru-ri and that waiting a “few more days” was not an option. He wrote, “The roads to this area are cut in a number of places and everyone will have to fight his way out.”
Later that same morning, Prindle again messaged Tunner: “I just came out of Almond’s office and he asked me to express to you in the strongest terms the urgency of the situation in the Chosin Reservoir area. Re-supply of those units will have priority over all other requests.” Prindle emphasized in his closing remarks that “the drop situation and the relief of the 1st Marine Division is most urgent,” and recommended a course of action: “It is a C-47 operation entirely from the way I look at it … if we are able to air land into the strip which is located one mile south of the southern end of the reservoir.” C-47s and their Marine Corps variant, the R4D, were large, multi-engine transports that could carry up to 6,000 pounds of cargo, 28 troops or walking wounded, or 18 stretcher cases—and more often than not carried far more.
Tunner, who had directed the 1948 Berlin Airlift, agreed with Prindle. After receiving the approval of his superior, Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, commander of the U.S. Far East Air Force, he recalled telling Pringle, “I am going to move every C-47 I’ve got up there.” He also committed to using “two squadrons of C-119’s … to do air drops of ammunition, clothes, and anything else” the Marines needed.
According to Paul C. Fritz’s article “The Kyushu Gypsy Squadron in Korea” in Air Power History, word was soon passed to the 21st Troop Carrier Squadron (TCS)—the “Kyushu Gypsies”—at Itazuke Air Base in Japan to dispatch 11 C-47s to Yonpo Airfield, the aviation facility closest to the port city of Hungnam, the southern anchor of 1stMarDiv’s MSR.
Last Days at Hagaru-ri
The first Gypsy C-47 touched down at Hagaru-ri on the afternoon of Dec. 1, but, according to “The Chosin Reservoir Campaign,” the landing and subsequent takeoff were anything but uneventful: “It was a tense moment, at 1430 that afternoon, when the knots of parka-clad Marine spectators watched the wheels of the first FEAF C-47 hit the frozen, snow-covered strip.
The big two-motored aircraft bounced and lurched its way over the rough surface, but the landing was a success. An even more nerve-racking test ensued half an hour later when the pilot took off with 24 casualties. It seemed for a breath-snatching instant that the run wouldn’t be long enough for the machine to become airborne, but at last the tail lifted and the wings got enough ‘bite’ to clear the hills to the south.”
Several more planes of the 21st TCS flew into Hagaru-ri after that, offloaded their cargoes and left for Yonpo fully loaded with casualties. The last arrival of the day, a Marine Corps R4D heavily laden with ammunition, broke its landing gear on touchdown and crashed. A total of 211 casualties were flown out of Hagru-ri that day: 157 by C-47s and 54 by Stinson OY-1 aircraft and Sikorsky HO3S-1 helicopters of Marine Observation Squadron 6.
According to Captain Annis G. Thompson’s “The Greatest Airlift: The Story of Combat Cargo,” few planes flew in and out of Hagaru-ri without experiencing damage from harassing enemy groundfire or mishaps.
In fact, the Air Force considered the flights to be so dangerous that it prohibited flight nurses of the 801st Medical Air Evacuation Squadron based at Yonpo from participating in them; only aeromedical technicians of the squadron provided in-flight care.
When casualties from Hagaru-ri arrived at Yonpo Airfield, they were triaged by X Corps medical clearing teams to one of the three fully staffed and equipped hospitals in the Hungnam area; to the hospital ship, USS Consolation (AH-15), moored in Hungnam Harbor; or flown to a military hospital in Japan.
The evening of Dec. 1, survivors of the embattled 31st Regimental Combat Team began arriving at Hagaru-ri. About 1,050 of those making it to safety required evacuation.
On Dec. 2, “an all-out effort was made to evacuate the casualties on hand by both C-47 and liaison plane,” Smith wrote in his aide-mémoire. Nine hundred and sixty casualties were flown to Yonpo that day. According to Gail B. Shisler’s book “For Country and Corps: The Life of General Oliver P. Smith,” things were so busy at the airfield, that it reminded Smith of LaGuardia Airport.
At about this time, Fritz, the assistant squadron officer of the 21st TCS, flew into Hagaru-ri, and later wrote of the experience: “Hagaru-ri lay in a bowl formed by mountains in all directions, except on the north side, which opened to the reservoir, a long narrow lake extended northward. The hamlet and our newly hacked airstrip area were protected from excess water by a long east-west dike about twenty-five high. The airstrip was oriented north-northwest to south-southeast, with the north end pushing right up to the dike. These features dictated landings north, with a guarantee of no over-shooting, and takeoffs south.”
Fritz also noted that runway was “about 2,500 feet” and that there was a “parking area for three C-47s.” Between the hamlet and airfield to the west was a “drop zone for C-119s,” above which “Marine Corps and Navy fighter aircraft droned in lazy circles.” But what he found most memorable was what he saw in and around the makeshift terminal: “After parking, I learned that people can overcome unbelievable difficulties. To an ex-Minnesotan and ex-infantryman/officer, this was a composite of a disaster and catastrophe. Severe cold greeted us, with a horrible stench—a pungent combination of vehicle exhausts, fired gunpowder, smoke from bonfires, and men’s bloody clothing over unwashed bodies.” Those ambulatory casualties who were waiting to be evacuated were “huddled speechless in knots, their eyes vacant from witnessing untold horrors, unshaven for days, and wearing blankets draped over their shoulders.” Everyone was disabled in one way or another: “Many hobbled about with walking poles or canes fashioned from tree limbs. Some were barefoot with bright-red or gangrene-blackened feet. One man who boarded my C-47 flipped away all of his toes like rotten apples before getting aboard. Not a word was spoken—a brief flicker in their eyes was their thanks for our ‘magic-carpet’ that would whisk them away to safety and medical attention.”
Some 464 casualties were evacuated to Yonpo on Dec. 3. At dusk, when air operations ceased, most of the casualties remaining at Hagaru-ri were those unable to be transported out and those among the survivors of the 31st Regimental Combat Team trickling in.
Sometime that day, Capt Hering went to the division command post to see Gen Smith. In his oral history transcript in the Marine Corps University Archives, Smith would remember that Hering was “fit to be tied” because he realized that some men with minor wounds or mild frostbite were gaming the system. Apparently, medical malingerers “would go down to the strip and get a blanket and a stretcher and then groan a bit,” and try to talk their way onto a flight. “It was our fault probably,” Smith admitted, “because the Air Force had sent up what they called an Evacuation Officer, and the doctor [Hering] assumed that the Evacuation Officer would see that the proper people got aboard the planes, but that was not his function at all; he was just thinking in terms of planes, not on what was flown on the planes.” As a stopgap measure, Hering promptly introduced a stationed at the loading area of every outgoing plane. “Nobody after that got on any plane without a [doctor-issued] ticket that showed that he was due to get out,” said Smith.
Hering also issued strict, multilevel triaging procedures for frostbite casualties, documented in a 1stMarDiv special action report dated Oct. 8-Dec. 15, 1950: “All frostbite [cases] were screened three times, once by their own unit surgeons, again by the medical companies and finally by a team consisting of the Division and Regimental surgeons and a senior line officer from each regiment. As a working criterion, those with large blisters or large discolored areas [Grade 3 frostbite] were considered candidates for evacuation.”
Borderline cases were referred to Hering, who later explained the simple but austere standard—the “Lessenden Rule”—that he used to decide for or against evacuation in his article, “Combat Medical Practice”: “This sorting of frost-bite added greatly to our medical burden and was … almost brutally done, as we needed every man capable of bearing a rifle … I personally passed on all controversial cases, using as my criteria the feet of the 5th Regimental Surgeon [LCDR Chet Lessenden]. He refused to be evacuated although he could not walk without great pain, but insisted on riding in an ambulance with his medical section. Those worse than we evacuated, those less fought their way back.”
Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, set up a command post in the hills around Chosin Reservoir.
Just after 7 p.m. on Dec. 3, the lead element of the column from Yudam-ni entered the Hagaru-ri defensive perimeter, and about twenty hours later, the rear guard arrived. As noted in one account of the heroic withdrawal from Yudam-ni in “The Chosin Reservoir Campaign,” “The four-day operation passed into history. Some 1,500 casualties were brought to Hagaru, a third of them being in the non-battle category, chiefly frostbite cases. It had taken the head of the column about 59 hours to cover the 14 miles, and the rear units 79 hours.”
The medical needs of the arriving casualties overwhelmed the medical facilities and personnel at Hagaru-ri. Yet, as Capt Hering later recalled, “Somehow they were sorted, those in need given resuscitation and definitive care, sheltered, warmed, and fed.” The critically wounded were shunted to the two medical battalion hospitals, Charlie and Easy Med, which were near the airstrip.
The commanding officer of Easy Med, Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles K. Holloway Jr., a veteran of the Second World War and one of the most experienced surgeons in the division, vividly remembered the challenges he faced on Dec. 4, as recounted in his unpublished manuscript “Escape From Hell: A Navy Surgeon Remembers Pusan, Inchon, and Chosin”: “We had so many patients lying, sitting, and standing that we could hardly see the floor. The 300 triple-deck bunks of our expanded capacity were simple wooden frames that held the patients’ own litters. I stacked patients like sardines in the commandeered pyramidal tents, 25 casualties in a circle around the center stove.
Their own body heat and warmth from the heater kept them from freezing until we could load them on planes in the few hours of safe operation left at the airstrip. There was not much else we could do for them at the time, but it was enough to save most of them.”
Those requiring “emergency surgery, and there was surprisingly few, managed to get it.”
CAPT Eugene Hering, USN, 1st Marine Division surgeon, right, shows Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews the hospital at Hamhung.
Those whose surgery could be delayed “were evacuated by air to get needed surgical treatment later at the First Marine Division Hospital in Hamhung.” Those “who had made the supreme sacrifice for their buddies” were placed in a “morgue tent” erected in front of the hospital.
Dec. 5 was 1stMarDiv’s last full day at Hagaru-ri, and the rush was on to evacuate the remaining casualties. That day, according to Air Force historian William M. Leary’s book “Anything, Anywhere, Any Time: Combat Cargo in the Korean War,” the 21st TCS “flew 44 missions into the perimeter … the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing flew 10, and a detachment of C-47s from the Royal Hellenic Air Force flew 8.” Together they “brought in 254,851 pounds of freight and 81 replacement Marines” and evacuated “1,561 casualties.” Regretfully, wrote Leary, “there was neither the time nor the space on the airplanes to bring out all the bodies of the dead.”
While the busiest day of the airlift unfolded, correspondents scrambled to file their last-minute reports from Hagaru-ri. All civilians and nonessential personnel were directed to leave by the end of the day, as Gen Smith had ordered 1stMarDiv to begin the breakout from Hagaru-ri the following morning.
Their dramatic stories, accompanied by maps, filled the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Their common theme: The oldest and most venerated division in the Marine Corps, the finest group of fighting men in the world, was in mortal danger of being annihilated by an overwhelming force of Chinese Communists. An estimated nine divisions had taken up positions along the MSR with the avowed intent of exterminating the 1st Marine Division. When a reporter asked Gen Smith whether he was retreating or withdrawing from the Chosin Reservoir, he replied that he had done neither. There is no retreating or withdrawing when you’re surrounded, he was purported to say, you can only attack. His response was quickly transmuted by the press into perhaps the most memorable phrase of the war: “Retreat, Hell! We are just attacking in a different direction.” Smith had refused General Tunner’s earlier offer to fly out the entire division—“It just didn’t occur to us that we wouldn’t be able to fight our way out,” he later said, according to the Marine Corps University Archives transcript.
During the snowy, sub-freezing morning of Dec. 6, the 7th Marines passed through the Hagaru-ri defensive perimeter and proceeded along the MSR toward Koto-ri, some 11 miles to the south; the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir had begun. “Twenty miles of icy, winding, mountain road barred by a 6,000-foot pass with enemy spread on both sides, stand between the Marines and the open road to the ocean,” wrote war correspondent Keyes Beech that day.
A wounded Marine sips hot coffee from a canteen cup while awaiting evacuation to a rear area hospital for treatment.
While this was unfolding, the evacuation of the remaining casualties continued. At noon, the director of operations for the Combat Cargo Command, Colonel Robert D. Forman, flew into Hagaru-ri to direct the final evacuation flights. Accompanying him was Michael James of the New York Times, who later described the final moments they spent at the airstrip: “By this time the whole area was a sea of flames. Not only were Marines burning their surplus stocks, but two slightly damaged C-47 transports, neither of which could be flown out due to lack of immediate repairs, went up in flames.
Colonel Forman who flew the last transport out … was notified by radio jeep that there was one more wounded man desperately in need of expert medical attention. For one hour Forman waited while the enemy closed in on the field. Eventually a jeep drove up with the last casualty who was taken aboard.”
As the plane lifted off through a swirling snowstorm and hail of enemy gunfire, countless Chinese Communist foot soldiers swarmed over the abandoned airfield.
An Unparalleled Aeromedical Operation
The following day, General Stratemeyer sent a redline message to the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, General Hoyt Vandenberg, reporting that 4,369 wounded Marines and soldiers had been evacuated by the Combat Cargo Command during the six-day Hagaru-ri airlift, as documented in “The Three Wars of Lt. Gen. George E Stratemeyer: His Korean War Diary.” By any standards, it was a historic achievement—a “very outstanding performance,” commented Stratemeyer in a dispatch to General Tunner. Time magazine was so impressed with the airlift that it featured Tunner on its Dec. 18 cover, calling him the “Airlifter.”
Marine tanks maneuver around a blown bridge south of Koto-ri as the allies push to break out from a Chinese Communist encirclement en route to the beachhead at Hungnam, December 1950.
Gen Smith was unsparing in his praise of the Hagaru-ri airlift. “I believe the story of this evacuation is without parallel,” he wrote in his aide-memoir. “Credit must go to the troop commanders whose determination and self-sacrifice made it possible to get the wounded out, to the medical personnel whose devotion to duty and untiring efforts saved many lives, and to the Marine and Air Force (including Greek) pilots who accomplished this difficult task without a fatal accident in spite of the hazards of the weather and the rudimentary landing strip.”
The “fabulous” airlift ushered in a new era in combat medicine, Hering said in a press conference after 1stMarDiv reached the safe environs of Hungnam, prompting one exuberant Kansas City Star reporter to label aeromedical evacuation as the “great medical weapon” of the war. Later, Hering would clarify its role in military medical operations in the article he wrote for The Military Surgeon journal: “Air evacuation is only a link in the chain of casualty care. It is a strong member of the team, but it is not the whole answer. Every other member of the team must be utilized under most conditions, from the company aid men all the way through to the evacuation hospital, the naval hospital ship, and the base hospitals in the zone of the interior. It is a wonderful adjunct, our greatest advance in the evacuation of casualties, but still an adjunct.”
Featured Image (Top): Casualties are loaded onto a C-47 at Hagaru-ri for evacuation during the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, December 1950. Over six days, more than 4,300 casualties were flown out under constant threat of enemy fire.
Authors:
Dr. Eugene Ginchereau is a military historian and retired Navy physician.
André B. Sobocinski serves as the historian at the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.
In July 2005, the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) put to sea from California with Battalion Landing Team (BLT) 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, embarked. The deployment began in typical fashion. Marines made port calls and participated in exercises through Australia, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries. By September, the MEU had sailed into the Red Sea and on to Egypt. As the Marines transited the Suez Canal, word disseminated of their next operation. The BLT was headed to combat in Iraq.
The new orders proved largely expected. Throughout the previous year, numerous MEUs supported the fighting in Fallujah, Najaf and other areas of Iraq. Even 2/1 had previously experienced an identical situation in 2003 as part of the 15th MEU, surging north from Kuwait with the initial invading force. By 2005, several invasion veterans lingered in the battalion. Considerably more had fought through the battalion’s next Iraq deployment during the First Battle of Fallujah in April 2004. Now on its third deployment in as many years, senior leaders called on the BLT to support the largest Marine Corps operation in Iraq since Operation Phantom Fury. The main effort focused on arresting control of the wildest part of Iraq’s “Wild West,” the Al Qa’im region.
Then-GySgt Michael D. Fay produced numerous paintings and drawings during Operation Steel Curtain. In this scene, Capt Ross Parrish, the Fox Co Commander, coordinates his forces over the radio in Karabilah, Iraq, during combat on the Marine Corps Birthday.
Al Qa’im made up the northwest corner of Iraq along the Syrian border. In 2004, while 2/1 battled insurgents some 200 miles down the Euphrates River valley, other Marines faced uprisings throughout Al Qa’im. On April 14, 2004, in Karabilah, Corporal Jason Dunham was mortally wounded smothering a grenade and saving the lives of two other Marines. He became the first Marine to receive the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Conditions worsened as the year progressed, culminating in November when virtually all American forces departed Al Qa’im to support Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah. The battle forced insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi out of the city. He retreated northwest and reestablished a base of operations in Al Qa’im. Zarqawi cemented his control over the region throughout 2005, despite a persistent Marine presence and limited offensive operations. The approach of Iraqi parliamentary elections, however, demanded a secure environment in which to conduct voting. The balance of power in Al Qa’im would not truly be tested until the arrival of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, that August.
The Marines of 3/6 occupied Camp Al Qa’im, based several miles south of the urban centers along the Euphrates River. One company operated out of another American outpost called Camp Gannon, guarding over the Syrian border crossing in Husaybah. The Marines executed Operation Iron Fist at the beginning of October, sweeping through portions of Karabilah and Sadah and establishing forward battle positions across the region. The battalion was spread thin manning each position, most engaging the enemy in daily firefights to hold their ground.
3/6 occupied the Al Qa’im region prior to BLT 2/1’s arrival. Beginning at the western edge, Operation Steel Curtain aimed to clear through Husaybah and Karabilah before pushing east into Ubaydi.
As 3/6 maintained the foothold in Al Qa’im through the remainder of the month, BLT 2/1 flew into Iraq. Both battalions would work together through the next phase of the Marines’ attack plan, dubbed Operation Steel Curtain, to clear the entire region, building by building, and drive out the insurgency before the election. The BLT transitioned rapidly from the MEU training mindset to mental preparation for imminent combat.
“Everything felt pretty surreal as I remember it,” said Justin VanHout, then a lance corporal in 2/1’s Fox Company, 2nd Platoon, 1st Squad. “Everything happened so fast. We flew from Kuwait up to Al-Asad and staged there. They sent a convoy up from Kuwait bringing all of our equipment. About that time, we got word there was some sort of accident, a vehicle rollover, and we lost our first Marine. Lance Corporal Christopher Poston. I think that moment kind of set a demeanor for a lot of us, like, ‘Well, here we go.’ Kind of gave us the impression that we were actually in it.”
LCpl Jeff Jendrzejczyk, an 0351 assaultman attached to 2nd Plt, Fox Co, BLT 2/1, rests during combat operations in Karabilah on the Marine Corps Birthday. Michael D. Fay produced a painting based on this photograph titled “The Other Side of Exhausted.”
“For me, things still weren’t hitting that we were actually in a combat zone,” added Shawn Studzinski, another lance corporal in 2nd Platoon’s 1st Squad. “We’d be walking around base at Al-Asad and all of the sudden an alarm would go off because there was a mortar strike, but still it’s not clicking. Then, on one of our company’s first missions, we were barely outside the wire when one of our 7-tons hit an IED. Everybody made it out OK, but that really kind of woke me up.”
By Nov. 5, VanHout, Studzinski and the rest of 2nd Platoon had staged at the Syrian border crossing on the outskirts of Husaybah, prepared to attack east into the city. Fox Company occupied the left flank of 2/1’s advance. Their objective was to clear a modern grid-style section of the city known by Marines as “the 440 district” for the number of buildings it contained. Tense house-to-house fighting erupted across the front in spurts, increasing in frequency and ferocity as the Marines advanced. Grenades, rockets or tank main gun rounds frequently preceded grunts kicking in doors to soften up the enemy inside. The Marines worked methodically through Husaybah for three days, then moved directly on to Karabilah. After nine days of fighting, anyone left to oppose the Marines fled east down the Euphrates.
Through Steel Curtain’s opening days, 3/6 operated as the main effort. As the battalion advanced, rifle platoons re-mained behind to establish new battle positions and prevent the enemy’s return. By Nov. 13, 3/6 occupied nine separate positions sprinkled throughout Husaybah, Karabilah and Sadah. There was only one city that hadn’t been cleared. That task fell to BLT 2/1.
The city of Ubaydi lay in the center of a heart-shaped bend in the Euphrates at the eastern edge of Al Qa’im. The main road running directly up the center of the heart divided Ubaydi into “old” and “new” sections. Old Ubaydi consisted of sparsely populated farmland and anti-quated structures. New Ubaydi looked mostly like the modern urban center the BLT Marines had advanced through in Husaybah. Commanders called in supporting U.S. Army units to sweep through Old Ubaydi, while also securing any avenues of escape to the north across the river. BLT 2/1 was tasked with clearing the new city. Shooting it out in the streets morphed into point-blank combat house to house, with booby traps and hardened defensive positions greeting Marines behind each barricaded door. The insurgents’ backs were against the river, and with Americans waiting on the opposite bank, they faced the oncoming wave of Marines with no option but to hold out and fight to the death.
The grunts marched into their as-sembly areas outside Ubaydi under the cover of darkness on the night of Nov. 13. They moved dismounted into the city due to the significant threat of IEDs surrounding the area, especially along the roads. Tragically, their concerns proved well founded. As the battalion approached Ubaydi before dawn on Nov. 14, Major Ramon J. Mendoza Jr., the Echo company commander, stepped on a pressure plate. The resulting explosion killed Mendoza and wounded other Marines in the vicinity.
Marines from Fox Co, BLT 2/1, push into the palm grove standing between the edge of New Ubaydi and the Euphrates River. Many of the enemy who ambushed 2nd Plt on Nov. 16 were killed as they fled into this wooded area.
The BLT assaulted north shortly after sunrise. A new level of intensity hindered their progress. From Fox Company’s 1st Platoon, LCpl Christopher M. McCrackin burst into one house, triggering a hidden explosive device. Shrapnel tore into his body, leaving him mortally wounded. Several hours later, Cpl John M. Longoria breached a door with his fire team and ran into five insurgents armed with machine guns. In the ensuing firefight, Longoria was shot in the neck and killed.
“There was one point where our [standard operating procedure] was to put a grenade, M203 round or SMAW rocket into every building before Marines went in because you just didn’t know what you were going to meet on the other side of the door,” said Jeff Jendrzejczyk, an 0351 assaultman and SMAW gunner attached to Fox Company, 2nd Platoon, 2nd Squad. “I fired 113 SMAW rockets in combat. Most of those were in Ubaydi.”
LCpl Jeff Jendrzejczyk, an 0351 assaultman attached to 2nd Plt, Fox Co, BLT 2/1, fires a SMAW rocket in Ubaydi, Iraq
For two days, Fox Co pushed through the city, emerging from the urban maze into a sprawling countryside of farmland leading up to the Euphrates. On the morning of Nov. 16, the company spread out on line to sweep across the remaining ground. 2nd Platoon fell in the company’s center. A complex of 20 farmhouses and other structures stretched across several hundred meters along the Marines’ path—the last buildings between them and the river. A large grove of palm trees stood beyond the houses, obscuring the Marines’ view of the riverbank.
Three rifle squads filled out 2nd Platoon. 1st Squad cleared through structures around the outer rim of the complex, while 3rd Squad moved up the center. 2nd Squad remained behind, providing ground security for the BLT’s tank platoon.
“1st Squad was moving along this long stone wall towards a building on the edge of a collection of farmhouses,” VanHout said. “We stopped for a minute and all of the sudden there was a big boom. Something went off on the other side of the wall. Next thing we knew, there was gunfire everywhere and everything is going to hell. We sprinted to the end of the wall and got into our assigned building. Just as we finished clearing the first floor and another team was moving up the stairs, an insurgent burst into the house through an open back door. He had no idea we were in there. Shawn Studzinski and several others were still in the hallway when the insurgent started firing. Sparks were flying everywhere and one of our engineers got shot through the wrist. I was just inside a room next to them. I remember watching Shawn like in slow motion. He turns, drops to a knee, perfect freaking Marine form, and ‘Boom! Boom!’ Double-taps the guy right in the chest.”
“The insurgent fell into a room down the hall … and we could see his feet sticking out into the hallway,” said Studzinski. “We could see he was still moving. The engineer who was shot started screaming behind me. One of the team leaders yelled at us to frag the room. I kept watch on the doorway while VanHout moved up and pitched a grenade into the room. Somehow, the guy was still alive after it went off, so we captured him and turned him over to the Iraqi forces with us.”
“I made it up to the roof and someone told me to start firing 203 rounds into the palm grove beyond the houses,” VanHout said. “I looked down into the courtyard outside the house and saw a blown-up car and dead cow blown to pieces. I was trying to connect all the dots; the explosion, the gunfire, the insurgent we killed. In that moment, we were all so isolated inside that house. We had no knowledge of what was going on with the rest of the platoon. In hindsight, I think that initial explosion was the kicker that started everything that morning. But at the time, we had no idea that 3rd Squad and some of the other guys were in total mayhem.”
As the shooting began, 3rd Squad moved toward the buildings near the center of the complex. The squad oper-ated short-handed with only two fire teams. One team set up in a building to provide overwatch while the remaining team prepared to make entry into a farmhouse 75 yards away.
Nineteen-year-old LCpl Ben Sanbeck stacked up with his fire team outside the front door. Sanbeck took point with Cpl Joshua J. Ware next in line and two more Marines behind him. Ware pushed his hand against Sanbeck’s shoulder, silently signaling the junior Marine to dart right once they made it through the door. Over the preceding days, every Marine in 3rd Squad had expended their fragmentation grenades clearing house to house. The only thing Sanbeck possessed was a flashbang.
Above: In this heartbreaking depiction, Michael D. Fay captures a glimpse of the emotional and chaotic scene inside the casualty collection point on Nov. 16, 2005.
“I threw the flashbang through the door and all that did was stir the hornet’s nest,” Sanbeck reflected today. “That gave them timing. They knew as soon as it went off, we were coming through the door. I rounded the corner and as soon as I made entry, the insurgents already had a grenade in the air. It landed between me and Ware and went off before I could even yell ‘Grenade.’ Then an RPK machine gun opened up and chaos ensued.”
The Marines unknowingly made entry into a barricaded insurgent stronghold: the enemy’s last stand. Numerous enemy fighters lay behind toppled wardrobes or other objects providing cover. Others carved small mouse holes through walls at waist level, directing their fire just below the Marines’ body armor. More of the enemy waited outside in other structures or concealed within the palm grove, waiting to engage additional Marines coming to rescue those who ended up inside.
Sanbeck’s momentum carried him through the doorway and into a room off the main hallway just inside. Three machine-gun bullets grazed off his helmet as he fell. The grenade blast decimated both his legs and blew his M16 out of his hands. The grenade mortally wounded Ware, who slumped in the hallway. A machine-gun bullet struck the next Marine in line in the center of his helmet, ricocheting off the night vision goggle mount and knocking him back through the door. The last Marine in the stack also fell back outside the front door with shrapnel wounds from the grenade blast.
“I was so beat up from that grenade, I’m pretty sure the enemy thought I was dead,” Sanbeck said. “There was so much blood coming out of my legs, I’m pretty sure at some point I probably lost consciousness. I was stuck inside that room, knowing the rest of my team was pinned down outside, trying to figure out where they were, but they couldn’t hear me over all the gunfire.”
From their overwatch position 75 yards away, the remainder of 3rd Squad watched in horror as their fellow fire team shattered. They were close enough to see and hear what was going on, but too far away to communicate. Each team possessed personal short-range radios. Amidst the gunfire and explosions, no one from the team inside the stronghold was answering. Cpl Jeffry A. Rogers, LCpl John A. Lucente, LCpl Joshua Mooi and a combat engineer attached to the squad immediately sprinted toward the house.
Insurgents opened fire as the Marines dashed over the open distance. One bullet tore through the engineer’s leg. Rogers helped him move to cover while Mooi and Lucente reached the house and staged outside the front door. The last two Marines from Sanbeck’s fire team lay bleeding and dazed just inside. Mooi and Lucente snatched them both and moved them 25 yards under fire to another structure nearby.
“That building became our casualty collection point simply because we brought the wounded there and that was the best we could do,” remembered Mooi today. “This very quickly went from a casualty incident to a mass casualty incident.”
In the aftermath of the ambush on Nov. 16, 2005, one of the structures where enemy fighters took shelter stands in ruin.
Staff Sergeant Robert Homer pushed up to the front door as Rogers, Lucente and Mooi returned to search for Sanbeck and Ware. As 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, Homer immediately communicated the situation over the radio and ordered 1st and 2nd squads to collapse on the house. Standing at the front door, Mooi shouted through the opening trying to locate Sanbeck, who struggled to respond over the roar of gunfire. Finally, the Marines lay down enough covering fire for Mooi and Lucente to push inside and drag Sanbeck out by his Kevlar vest.
Rogers, Lucente and Mooi stacked up again at the front door, determined to recover Ware. A burst of machine-gun fire tore through Lucente’s abdomen as they pushed back into the house, mortally wounding him. As he lay dying, Lucente passed a grenade to Mooi. He shoved it through the mouse hole in the wall where the enemy fire originated, killing the enemy gunner behind it.
Second Lieutenant Donald R. McGlothlin, the platoon commander of 2nd Platoon, entered the house and pushed passed Mooi and Lucente, placing himself between his Marines and the enemy trying to kill them. He returned fire as Mooi dragged Lucente back outside. Mooi returned and finally recovered Ware while McGlothlin remained engaged.
LCpl Joshua Mooi, painted by Michael D. Fay during Operation Steel Curtain. For his outstanding heroism, initiative and dedication to his fellow Marines on Nov. 16, 2005, Mooi received the Navy Cross.
“I was outside talking to Rogers, and I asked him where the Lieutenant was,” Mooi remembered. “I didn’t realize that he never came back out. I knew I had to go get him, so I went back inside. That was the last conversation I had with Rogers.”
Mooi pushed back into the house on his own and located McGlothlin lying mortally wounded from grenade shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. As he neared a stairwell leading to the roof, Mooi encountered an insurgent standing on a landing, throwing grenades over the roofline into the courtyard. Before the enemy could react, Mooi shot and killed him. As Mooi dragged McGlothlin out the front door, he discovered that in the time it took him to kill the insurgent and remove McGlothlin, Rogers had also been shot and killed. The scene outside the house juxtaposed absolute chaos with astounding heroism, as wounded Marines and corpsmen treated and packaged for evacuation others who were more wounded than themselves.
Simultaneously, 2nd Squad walked behind a line of tanks several hundred feet away, advancing toward the farmhouses. The tanks throttled up and bolted toward the enemy fire when the ambush kicked off. 2nd Squad sprinted behind the last tank, trying to keep up. Tiny explosions impacted the dirt around them as they ran from insurgents targeting the Marines. The last tank finally stopped, and the Marines took cover. Cpl Javier Alvarez, the 2nd Squad leader, picked up the phone on the back of the tank and directed the crew to put a main gun round into the house where the enemy fire originated. The Marines plugged their ears as the 120 mm cannon roared. They trudged alongside once again as the tank rolled out, enemy rounds still cracking through the air.
“I was focused on engaging the area next to us where a lot of enemy fire was coming from, so I wasn’t paying attention to the radio to know what was going on,” Alvarez remembered. “Someone told me to have the tank put another main gun round into the building in front of us, only about 40 feet away. I relayed that to the guy inside the tank, and he said he couldn’t because there were friendlies inside. I looked around the side and saw Cpl Rogers down injured next to the building. There were insurgents popping out and shooting at us and our machine guns were engaging them. It was really close. I had been in my own world and had no idea what was going on in that house. It was chaos.”
Alvarez organized his squad and sprinted across the open area between the tank and the house. He emptied one magazine into the windows and reloaded as he ran. Abrupt punches across both his legs stole his attention. Bloodstains on his trousers rapidly increased in size, flowing from multiple gunshot wounds. Somehow, the injuries failed to take him down. He inserted a fresh magazine and continued sprinting until he fell against the side of the house beneath an open window. Seated upright with his back to the wall, Alvarez spread his legs out in front of him. Multiple bullets tore through both thighs and his left calf, each wound bleeding steadily.
A Marine pulled tourniquets for both of Alvarez’s legs. As he placed them high on Alvarez’s thighs, an insurgent appeared in the window above them and shot the Marine in the head. The round struck off his helmet, knocking him to the ground between Alvarez’s legs in a daze. Alvarez lifted his rifle and emptied another magazine into the window.
“I brought my rifle down to reload and was looking off to my right,” Alvarez said. “When I looked back down, I saw a grenade rolling around next to me. There were friendlies inside, a stacked team in front of me, a Marine behind me, a Marine in between my legs; instantly I just thought, ‘I need to get this away from us.’ So, I picked it up and tried to throw it away, but as I turned to release it, it detonated.”
The explosion went off an arm’s length above his head, causing Alvarez to black out. He came to seconds later and im-mediately felt his hand burning. When he raised his arm, he discovered the hand was completely gone. The Marines around him lay wounded by the blast. Homer ignored his own injuries and ran up to Alvarez, placed a tourniquet on his devastated arm, and assisted him to the casualty collection point (CCP).
Hospital Corpsman Third Class Jesse Hickey accompanied 2nd Squad up to the house. He immediately went to work treating the wounded Marines piling up outside. The insurgent inside lobbing grenades over the roofline maintained a steady barrage until Mooi finally pushed through the house and killed him. Hickey, Homer and numerous others suffered wounds upon wounds as the explosives detonated.
“It was just grenade after grenade after grenade,” remembered Jendrzejczyk, who also made the dash under fire with Alvarez’s 2nd Squad. “Me and Doc Hickey carried Rogers’ body to the collection point, then went back to grab Lucente. When we went to pick him up, a grenade came out the window and Doc took all the shrapnel from that. Now, he’s there trying to bandage himself while I’m trying to bandage Lucente. It was just absolute chaos.”
“Our other platoon corpsman, Doc Eric Rust, had almost the same wounds as me,” said Sanbeck. “He took a grenade to the legs while he was bent over working on somebody. Our corpsmen were just remarkable. We called them, ‘Devil Docs’ because they were really just Marines with band-aids. They aren’t supposed to be in the fight like that, and yet here is Doc Rust shooting his 9 mm pistol with one hand and putting a tourniquet on with the other. I don’t think anything in medical school prepared him for that.”
Lance Corporal Roger W. Deeds served as a machine-gun section leader attached to 2nd Plt. As Marines began to fall in and around the house, Deeds handed off his machine gun to another Marine and sprinted forward to help. He assisted the corpsmen treating the wounded and prepared them for evacuation. Like so many others, Deeds responded when the platoon sergeant called for help. He remained exposed outside the house providing covering fire until he too was mortally wounded.
Homer crossed the deadly 25-yard kill zone between the house and the CCP numerous times, moving casualties away from danger. Grenade shrapnel stitched across his side, leaving him severely wounded, yet he refused to join the others piling up at the CCP. Mooi eventually found Homer at the CCP after they both helped evacuate separate casualties to inform him Lt McGlothlin was dead and Homer was now in command.
After evacuating Lucente, Jendrzejczyk realized he was the most medically trained Marine available at the CCP.
“I had gone through advanced combat lifesaver training in Egypt before we flew into Iraq,” he said. “That probably helped me the most. I threw down my rocket and was able to help the corpsmen because nobody else was really trained, and both corpsmen had been hit. There were enough rifles around that I didn’t need to go out there and fight the fight. What I needed to do was help with the mass casualty [situation], so I focused on the CCP and trying to get all these wounded Marines to the medevac bird while the fighting was still going.”
Mooi returned to the house once again, following his conversation with Homer. After watching his entire squad wiped out in the fighting, Mooi determined to personally finish what they had started.
“I decided, it took all of them, so it was either going to take me, too, or we were going to win this,” he stated. “At the time, I’m a 19-year-old infantry Marine; like, I thought I was untouchable. I ran back to the house and took point on a mixed team from 2nd Squad. Someone passed me a hand grenade because I didn’t have one. I tossed it inside, then went back in.”
Several Marines followed Mooi as he led back through the house clearing room by room. They engaged more insurgents, eventually arriving at the back door. Mooi burst into the light with his rifle shouldered at the ready.
“We came rolling out the back door into the yard. There was a pile of fuel barrels right there, and a guy with a machine gun lying next to them. I turned and fired a couple rounds at him as he turned and fired a couple rounds at me. I don’t know if I hit him, but he definitely hit me. I am the luckiest person in the world. Three of the rounds he fired hit my rifle magazine and did not go through. Another round hit the upper receiver and got stuck in the bolt carrier group. That all would have been in my neck and face. I went to fire again and realized my rifle was down, so I rolled back to try to get back inside the house. The Marine behind me opened up and was able to kill the insurgent.”
By the time Mooi and the Marines from 2nd Squad finished clearing the house, the majority of casualties outside were moved to the CCP. First Squad arrived from their supporting position to assist with the casualties.
“Everything was happening so fast,” VanHout said. “So fast it really kind of rocked us. We cleared through our house and got onto the roof, then we got the call over the radio about the mass casualty incident and immediately moved down and were trucking back along the stone wall towards the CCP. As we were coming back that trail, that’s the first time all of us in 1st Squad saw one of our casualties coming out of the battle the rest of the platoon was in.”
“We got to a little break in the wall and I saw a Marine dragging another body,” Studzinski remembered. “I realized the person he was dragging was wearing our cammies, then saw the name tape on his back and it was Ware. Then I turned towards the building where all the fighting was going on and saw Cpl Rogers’ body leaning up against a pillar of the carport parking area. Lt McGlothlin was lying nearby, and I could see in his face that he was dead as well. We moved towards the CCP and as soon as I was about to go through the door, I saw another Marine lying face down. I saw the name tape on the back of his Kevlar and it was LCpl Deeds. The first thought that immediately came into my brain was that he just had a daughter born while we were on ship. I went inside and saw Cpl Alvarez with a chunk out of his leg and his hand looking like a fist full of spaghetti. I went into another room and saw Lucente laying on the ground with Jendrzejczyk and Doc Hickey working on him, while another Marine was working on Doc Hickey because he was wounded too.”
“By that point, most of the combat in that main house was over, and we were already starting to get Blackhawks in for medevac,” VanHout added. “I don’t know what adrenaline was doing to the timespan, but this was only a matter of 15 or 20 minutes. I remember seeing Lt McGlothlin at the CCP leaned up against a wall with a poncho liner over him, half blown off by the breeze. It was the most surreal moment of my life. A couple of us went to him and started getting him ready to go on the helicopter. We brought him to the chopper, and I thought I was watching a scene from ‘Apocalypse Now’ or something, with blood running out of the bird and down over the skids. I just couldn’t believe it. But, we loaded him up and I just turned around and went back looking for the next guy.”
While 2nd Platoon’s battle raged inside the house, the Fox Company command group set up on the roof of a three-story building nearby. Captain Ross Parrish, Commanding Officer, Fox Company, ordered a 100-round fire-for-effect mor-tar mission into the palm grove beyond the house. Numerous enemy fighters fleeing the buildings were cut down in the trees by falling explosives. Standing next to Parrish, Capt Brian Gilbertson masterfully worked the radio coordinating air support. A C-130 transport pilot by trade, Gilbertson attached to Fox on the deployment as their forward air controller. Less than 30 minutes after the shooting started, he had U.S. Army and Marine Corps helos on the ground evacuating casualties. Simultaneously, he vectored in Cobra gunships from Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 369, pouring rockets into the palm grove.
While Fox Co remained in Ubaydi for several days, a Marine etched marks on the side of one building tallying the enemy dead. By the time the Marines departed, the count reached 57.
“We reconsolidated at the command post after clearing the house,” said Mooi. Miraculously, he emerged from the ferocious firefight without a scratch. “There was stuff going on all around that building now; tanks shooting main gun rounds into it, helicopters flying all around doing gun runs. There was a mortar team on the roof at the CP just letting it rain down into the palm grove where the remaining bad guys were at. It was beautiful. We were at the point where all the support weapons are doing their job, so all the ground guys kind of slowed down. That’s when everything really started to sink in, and all the adrenaline started to fade.”
The fighting lasted less than an hour. The house where 3rd Squad encountered the insurgent stronghold partially col-lapsed under a barrage of tank main gun fire. Thousands of bullet holes, scorch marks, and spalling marred the outside walls. The BLT remained in Ubaydi for three more days patrolling around the same area. At some point, a grunt began scrawling tally marks on one of the buildings counting the enemy dead who lay where they fell. By the time the battalion departed, the tally reached 57.
Operation Steel Curtain closed successfully achieving its goal. The Marines of 3/6 remained in Al Qa’im to oversee the elections. BLT 2/1 pulled out of the region to the city of Hit, where they remained through Christmas. After the new year the battalion returned to their ships, and the 13th MEU sailed home.
Fox Co’s 2nd Platoon completely disintegrated in the aftermath of Nov. 16.
“We went into Ubaydi with 43 Marines,” said Jendrzejczyk. “Only 17 of us walked out. That changed all of us forever.”
The survivors amalgamated into other platoons, left to wonder how many of their brothers fared after disappearing from the battlefield on medevac helicopters. The wounded dispersed through hospitals across Iraq, Germany and eventually the United States, all of them only later learning the full extent of what happened to their platoon.
Sanbeck underwent his first surgery to save his legs while still in Iraq. Despite the heavy dosage of morphine coursing through his bloodstream, doctors made him sign a waiver stating he understood they might have to amputate both lower limbs. As more casualties from the battle arrived, Sanbeck overheard someone listing the Marines who had been killed. Only then did he understand how devastating the ambush had been.
Alvarez woke up in a hospital in Germany with burns across his face, eardrums blown, shrapnel throughout his body, four gunshot wounds in his legs, and his hand completely gone. He went unconscious and was intubated during the flight to Bethesda, Md., where his long road to recovery began. Alvarez’s rapid evacuation immediately severed him from contact with his platoon. Without any telephone numbers or an account on social media, Alvarez struggled to reconnect with the remainder of 2nd Platoon.
Capt Parrish undertook the monumental task of piecing together the ambush in the weeks following Nov. 16. On the voyage home, he asked his Marines to write witness statements detailing their individual points of view. The resulting picture of the battle revealed the awesome depth of selfless heroism exhibited by many Marines that day. Parrish next determined to ensure his Marines were appropriately recognized and worked with his staff to author citations for individual medals.
“November 16th is certainly an exception from my 30 years in the service,” Parrish reflected today, now a colonel still on active duty nearing retirement. “It’s what we train for, but those kinds of high intensity, close quarters engagements don’t occur that frequently. Those Marines fought like lions. I couldn’t be more proud of them. When fatigued, when under duress and under fire, with an enemy that has you ambushed, they flipped the script with their level of proficiency, professionalism and violence.”
The awards churned slowly through the Corps’ bureaucracy. After three years, Robert Oltman, the commanding officer of BLT 2/1 during their time on the 13th MEU, received promotion to colonel and a transfer to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. Oltman never lost sight of his Marines from 2/1 and those who died in Iraq. He regularly drove across base to the awards branch to inquire on the status of the awards. He became a persistent visitor, personally ensuring the packages for each of his Marines worked through the system.
“There were a lot of heroes that day that nobody knows about,” Oltman said. “So many Marines did so many extraordinary things that allowed more people to come home than may have, had they not taken the actions they took.”
Joshua Mooi left active duty in August 2008 and returned home to begin civilian life around Chicago, Ill. That fall, he received a call informing him the Marine Corps had awarded him the Navy Cross, a medal for valor second only to the Medal of Honor. He flew to Camp Pendleton, Calif., the following January, where Oltman proudly presented him with the medal. Mooi did not stand alone. Homer, Alvarez, and Doc Hickey shared the stage, all receiving Silver Stars. The family of Lt McGlothlin came forward to posthumously accept a Silver Star on his behalf. Numerous others received Bronze Stars with combat distinguished devices, including Lucente and Deeds recognized posthumously. Additionally, Oltman pinned Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals with combat distinguished devices on Marines such as Jendrzejczyk, and Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals with “V” on many others like Sanbeck. Still more came forward to receive a Purple Heart.
“I had it all written down at some point because it was just mind-blowing how many citations and commendations were awarded,” Sanbeck remembered. “When we had that ceremony, more of Fox Company went forward for some kind of award from Col Oltman than not. Here are all the young guys in the battalion looking at us like, ‘Holy cow, these are the guys training us now.’ It reminded me of when I came to 2/1 and all my seniors were receiving awards for things they did in Fallujah.”
The passage of 20 years has done little to dull the memory or pain of Nov. 16. For the Marines of 2nd Platoon, the awards they received serve as a persistent call to memory of the brothers they lost.
“I have carried that day with me ever since,” said Jendrzejczyk. “The guys who were there, we very rarely talk about it. What we lived through wasn’t just combat. It was hell. Through it all, we forged a bond that it doesn’t matter the distance or the time that goes by, nothing is going to erase that. We all know Steel Curtain is still there, and if we are struggling and need to talk about it, we can. We always try to remind ourselves that we need to live a life that they would have been proud of.”
“We all live for who we lost and try to do them proud,” echoed Sanbeck. “We were so young and everything happened so fast. I don’t think a day goes by that I haven’t thought about them or that I haven’t made a decision based on that. I think early on, a lot of us didn’t want to have fun in life because we had guilt and felt like you shouldn’t enjoy life. A lot of us were mad and angry at the world for losing what we had and trying to fit into ‘normal’ civilization with no one understanding and listening to people complain about such simple, meaningless things. Now, I think it’s more of a mentality where a lot of us feel like, ‘You know what, they wouldn’t want us to live like that.’ Not everyone can just make that shift, but for me, I don’t leave any rock unturned in life now. If there’s something I can go do and enjoy it, I’m going to go do it. It’s time to take ahold of life, because that’s what they would have wanted us to do.”
BLT 2/1 holds a memorial service in Iraq for the Marines killed in action. During three months in country, the BLT suffered nine killed and many more wounded. Five of the KIA died on Nov. 16.
“Sixteen November: The Line Held”
By Devon Wilfong
In eternal memory of:
2ndLt Donald R. McGlothlin
Cpl Jeffry A. Rogers
LCpl Roger W. Deeds
LCpl John A. Lucente
Cpl Joshua J. Ware
The sun rose slow on foreign sand,
Where war had scarred the
river’s hand.
Fox 2/1 moved house to house,
Through Ubaydi’s deathtrap, silent,
doused.
They knew the risk, they knew the cost,
Each man beside them worth more
than lost.
Then thunder broke from
walls unseen—
An ambush split the desert scene.
No time for fear, no room for doubt,
Just fire and smoke and shouted route.
The alley screamed, the rifles spoke,
And every breath drew heat and smoke.
They fought with grit, they fought
as one,
Five lives were taken before
day’s done.
But not before their courage roared—
Their names now etched in
Marine Corps lore:
2ndLt Donald R. McGlothlin, bold,
Who led them straight into the fold.
Cpl Jeffry A. Rogers, fierce and fast,
Who stood defiant to the last.
LCpl Roger W. Deeds, unshaken,
proud,
Who faced the storm and never bowed.
LCpl John A. Lucente, sharp and true,
At just nineteen, he saw it through.
Cpl Joshua J. Ware, all heart and fire,
Whose will outlasts the gunman’s ire.
They did not run. They did not bend.
They held the line until the end.
And though they fell on foreign ground,
Their echoes in the Corps resound.
So raise your glass and say their names,
Not lost to time, nor war’s cruel games.
For they remain in memory sealed—
On Sixteen November, the line held.
Author’s bio: Kyle Watts is the staff writer for Leatherneck. He served on active duty in the Marine Corps as a communications officer from 2009-13. He is the 2019 winner of the Colonel Robert Debs Heinl Jr. Award for Marine Corps History.
Featured Image (Top): 2nd Plt, Fox Co, BLT 2/1, entered Ubaydi on Nov. 14, 2005, with 43 Marines. When the operation ended a few days later, only 17 walked out unscathed. The survivors are pictured here preparing to leave the city. Then-GySgt Michael D. Fay accompanies the platoon in this photo, leaning on the truck door in the foreground.
On Nov. 10 across the globe each year, Marines in every clime and place don dress blues with freshly mounted medals and slip on high-gloss Oxford shoes, or the spit-shined “Hershey’s,” to celebrate the Marine Corps Birthday. We listen intently to Major General John A. Lejeune’s message read aloud, feeling goosebumps as we listen to “The Marines’ Hymn.” We envision ourselves in a grand formation spanning the ages, surrounded by the historic pageantry of brother and sister Marines across 10 generations. This year, we celebrate a special milestone, the “Sestercentennial,” celebrating 250 years as the finest all-domain fighting force the planet has ever known.
To understand the context behind how we celebrate our birthday, Leatherneck recently explored the National Archives, Marine Corps History Division, the Library of Congress and other online repositories. Along the way, we discovered a cast of unsung trailblazers who tirelessly supported the Marine Corps’ most storied leaders in codifying what is today’s most coveted and time-honored tradition. Their contributions, preserved yet faded by time, shaped today’s celebrations through art, writings and recommendations. From the crimped and brittle materials emerged a passion for tradition still vibrant today. Their teamwork may have also proved crucial in helping leaders secure the Marine Corps’ existence.
Our modern celebrations were born out of uncertain times. One hundred years ago, as the Marine Corps approached its 150th birthday, postwar sentiments might have derailed the Corps from reaching that date. To reinstill public confidence, preserve our legacy and galvanize our place as America’s premier “force in readiness,” the Marine Corps had some work to do to avoid extinction.
Following the Great War, the “postwar disarmament period” found the Marine Corps struggling for existence. Downsizing shrank the Corps from a 75,101 peak end strength in 1918 to 27,400 by 1920, a nearly two-thirds diminishment in manpower. America wanted time to recover and to prosper in hard-won peace, having made the world safe for democracy.
An isolationist fervor emerged and dominated the political climate. In a speech, U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding asserted, “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration; … not surgery but serenity.” His comments reflected common sentiments to leave international problems overseas for a return to domestic “normalcy.” Harding’s views would elevate him to such prominence that he secured his inauguration as President of the United States on March 4, 1921. Calls to broaden U.S. Navy downsizing added to the sentiment. On Nov. 12, 1921, Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes declared in front of an international audience in Washington, D.C., that the United States needed to limit naval capabilities, as should the other major world powers, including Great Britain and Japan. He proposed a 10-year shipbuilding holiday and 66 ships to be scrapped. Reports indicated that the attending audience responded with “wild applause,” indicating popular support for what represented large-scale disarmament. This led to deep budget cuts, military downsizing and a bureaucratic reset, echoing the challenges of our modern interwar period. Marine Corps senior leaders had a legitimate cause for concern.
Commandant Lejeune remained focused, driving what later became the Marine Corps’ “first enlightenment,” emphasizing unique expeditionary and amphibious capabilities. He knew that, to remain relevant, our Corps needed to change. He reorganized the headquarters, developed schools, instituted Advanced Base Force training, modernized equipment and built rapid-deployment amphibious capabilities. The Marine Corps already had a suitable place to train, educate, experiment and deploy expeditionary might, well proven during World War I. The Marine Barracks Quantico, Va., had emerged as a powerhouse for expeditionary deployment that MajGen Lejeune himself developed while serving as one of the first commanding generals.
BGen Smedley D. Butler takes the oath of office as the Director of Public Safety for Philadelphia, January 1924.
Quantico’s real estate boasted capabilities for all warfighting domains, representative of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force. The base offered ample space to quarter troops, conduct artillery and infantry maneuvers and sustain troop transport by water and rail. Brown Field, now Officer Candidates School, teamed with biplane aircraft, undoubtedly frequented by the Corps’ first Marine aviator, Alfred A. Cunningham, the base assistant adjutant and inspector. The Quantico pier regularly docked Navy steam-powered ships for swift embarkation.
When MajGen Lejeune had been selected for his two-star grade and Commandant on July 1, 1920, he appointed his right-hand man, Brigadier General Smedley Butler, to succeed him. The insightful two-time Medal of Honor recipient continued the Commandant’s intent by further developing the base, expanding schools, training for Advanced Base Force operations and showcasing Marine expeditionary capabilities to the public. The base hosted a variety of public events, including football games at the new stadium (now Butler Stadium) to rally public support. Most visible to the public, Butler and his Marines conducted a series of marches to reenact battles at the Wilderness and Gettysburg, showcasing modern equipment and tactics. He and the Commandant hosted influential political leaders, including President Warren G. Harding and former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.
MajGen John A. Lejeune (back to photographer) orients President Warren G. Harding and former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels during a Marine Corps Civil War reenactment at the Wilderness Battlefield just outside of Fredericksburg, Va., 1921.
However, MajGen Lejeune needed to continue to develop ways to appeal to the public, while at the same time inculcating the shared pride that esprit de corps delivers. Documents show that Lejeune was keenly aware of the importance of public awareness through the media. Not only did celebrating the Marine Corps build a sense of institutional pride, esprit de corps and unity within, but the occasion could serve to garner public support as well. But there was a problem. Until 1921, the Marine Corps’ founding date was believed to be July 11, 1798, due to a law signed by President John Adams establishing the Marine Corps as an independent branch of military service.
Major Edwin North McClellan, a studious, prolific writer assigned to lead the Historical Section of Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC), played a key role in the establishment of Nov. 10, 1775, as the Marine Corps’ birthdate.
Reviewing McClellan’s many writings showed variances in the Marine Corps’ exact origins, complicated by 11 state navies, including all but two of the original colonies, New Jersey and Delaware. He grappled with questions on when to draw the line on what constituted the original Marines. Evidence supported going as far back as the first British Royal Marines on American soil, state-appointed Marines or Marines who served on the first American warships to fight in the Revolutionary War aboard the sloop Liberty and the schooner Enterprise. He had to parse through a confusing start where the 1775 resolution created the Continental Marines, but they were disbanded after the Revolutionary War. The 1798 Act later reestablished the Marine Corps under the new U.S. Constitution, which led some to view that date as a new “founding” moment, until historical research prioritized the earlier date. McClellan settled on what came from the American people via the Second Continental Congress resolution signed on Nov. 10, 1775, in Philadelphia, Pa. Accordingly, he delivered his recommendations to the Commandant on Oct. 21, 1921, on what celebrations he thought most appropriate to mark the occasion each year. Maj McClellan’s work formed the genesis behind Marine Corps Order No. 47, Series 1921, read aloud today, signed by MajGen Lejeune on Nov. 1, 1921.
Despite all these efforts, critics continued to argue about the Marine Corps’ disbandment. One of these critics, Brockholst Livingston, a wealthy, influential New York resident, wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy on June 13, 1923, asserting that “a plan should be outlined in which the Marine Corps would be joined with the Line [Navy], doing away with Marines entirely.” He argued that retaining the Corps would be purely sentimental and less a matter of economy. Livingston proposed that most duties performed by Marines could be assumed by the Navy and that camps at Quantico and Parris Island, S.C., should be abandoned. He asserted that other capabilities could be absorbed by the Army, such as overseas garrisons in Peking, Haiti and Santo Domingo. He likened these changes to replacing horses with motor power, or sailing ships with electric drives, by “replacing obsolete organizations with modern ones.”
MajGen Lejeune, ever the consummate professional, replied to Livingston’s letter within six days, thanking him for furnishing him a copy and stating that his concerns would “receive due consideration.” He then drafted and delivered a memo to the Secretary of the Navy, pulling no punches between professionals. He posited that Livingston’s arguments were a “fallacy,” arguing that Marines had been employed aboard naval vessels since the earliest times. Commandant Lejeune went on to argue they should be retained, that the Navy did not train Sailors to operate ashore and that the Army did not have “sufficient numbers in times of emergency” nor the proper training or organization to operate promptly and in harmony with Naval forces. In his final argument, Lejeune declared that Marines “are abreast of the times in the use of modern methods which they employ in their operations,” and that “they are as modern and up to date as any troops or any body of armed men in any country in the world.”
As the Marine Corps continued the fight to exist, the 150th anniversary rapidly approached. The Corps’ birthplace in Philadelphia, Pa., emerged as a natural choice to celebrate the occasion. However, in the early 1920s, the city was hardly a place to support parades and ceremonial events or play host to dignitaries. The crime rate had escalated. Bootlegging and police corruption ravaged the city and threatened peace and public safety. So, the city mayor, W. Freeland Kendrick, frustrated with police union influences and corruption, turned to his friend BGen Smedley Butler for help. He petitioned President Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Harding following his death, to select Butler to take charge as the city’s director of public safety, and, in an unprecedented peacetime measure, Coolidge granted his request. In December 1923, Commandant Lejeune relieved BGen Butler of his Marine Expeditionary Forces, U.S. Fleet command. The Commandant granted him one year’s leave from the Marine Corps to assume his civilian duties, and in the process, he set the stage for a city-wide crime-fighting field day to enable preparations for Sesquicentennial events.
Immediately following his oath in January, Butler swapped his Marine Corps uniform for a police uniform and began work in earnest, summoning police leadership, captains and lieutenants and directing them to clean up the city within 48 hours or he would replace them with Marines. He moved a cot into his headquarters, disbanded the police union and initiated what resulted in a mass exodus of criminals from Philadelphia. Adjacent cities, including New York, reportedly set up barriers to keep “the undesirables from coming within their gates.” Crime rates went down. Of the 1,200 saloons raided by Philadelphia police under Butler, 973 were closed for illegal bootlegging. Butler served two years at the post, extending his second year by request. In his final year, having set the conditions for safe celebrations, he hosted the Commandant and numerous dignitaries in what became the first major Marine Corps Birthday celebration of its kind.
BGen Smedley D. Butler takes the oath of office as the Director of Public Safety for Philadelphia, January 1924.
As the Marine Corps Birthday Sesquicentennial approached, planning began in earnest. David D. Porter, a Brevet Medal and Medal of Honor recipient, Commanding Officer of the Marine Corps Eastern Recruiting Division Headquarters in Philadelphia, submitted recommendations to MajGen Lejeune on how to celebrate the occasion appropriately. In his Feb. 27, 1925, letter, he credited an enlisted Marine, Quartermaster Sergeant Victor H. Rogers, with the following eight recommendations, listed verbatim:
“That a short history of the Corps be written and that same be read to all commands on that day.
That all ships be ‘dressed’ with flags, etc., on which Marines are stationed.
That a holiday be declared at all posts, etc.
That special athletic events be held.
That a dance or other suitable entertainment be held in the evening.
That a special dinner be served, the same as on Christ-mas, etc.
That a special story be written by the Recruiting Bureau and distributed to the newspapers, together with appropriate pictures.
That the Recruiting Bureau issue an appropriate poster for display on ‘A’ signs.”
Tablet unveiling where the original Tun Tavern once stood with Navy Secretary Curtis Wilbur, Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot and MajGen John A. Lejeune in attendance.
Philadelphia’s Thomas Roberts Reath Marine American Legion Post No. 186 sponsored the venue with the active co-operation of the mayor of the city of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Their membership boasted the only chapter that consisted solely of Marine Corps veterans nationwide. The sequence of events would begin on Nov. 10, 1925, with a bronze tablet dedicated at Tun Tavern’s original site, followed by a parade in the afternoon, then a birthday party celebration and dinner conducted at the Ben Franklin Hotel, to be followed that evening with a separate “Military and Naval Ball” sponsored by the Marine Post at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. More than 1,200 people would be invited to the dinner and 2,500 to the ball that would follow. This is widely accepted today as the “first” formal Marine Corps Birthday Ball.
The Tun Tavern tablet, sculpted by John J. Capolino, is a historic marker commemorating the birthplace of the Marine Corps.
Preparation took months leading up to the events. National Archives documents support that invitation letters went out to 56 military, civilian and local dignitaries, including 15 state governors, 16 senators and 20 representatives responsible for Naval affairs. Many written replies expressed sincere regret due to scheduling conflicts with Armistice Day celebrations the following day and other events. An HQMC memo showed pencil annotations next to the names of eleven field- and company-grade staff officers who could not attend. This initial celebration would be optional for Marine Corps attendees. However, formal tasks went out from HQMC for troop support from all East Coast Marine Corps installations, including Quantico, the Navy Yard, Philadelphia and the Eastern Recruiting Division.
To kick off the first event, the distinguished guest entourage presented the bronze tablet at Tun Tavern’s original site. One of the first artists commissioned by the Marine Corps, John Joseph Capolino, created the token. He also is credited with producing a series of large murals depicting the Corps’ early history, hung in the first Tun Tavern replica built the following year for the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926. Today, copies of the prints line the third-floor walls of the U.S. Marine Corps History Division, Marine Corps University, in Warner Hall. The original tablet is no longer at the site in Philadelphia and resides today at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, though not on display. The artifact is now covered in patina and aged greenish with corrosion but still bears the legible inscription.
After the tablet dedication ceremony, a parade immediately followed. The parade featured a special float containing a birthday cake with 150 candles at the top, along with 13 American flags. Four Marines accompanied the cake, dressed in period and colonial uniforms. The traditional eagle, globe and anchor depicted the fouled anchor opposite in appearance today, with the anchor oriented diagonally behind the globe from left to right.
Marines march through the streets of Philadelphia in the Marine Corps’ Sesquicentennial Parade on Nov. 10, 1925. (Photo courtesy of National Archives)
Following the parade, Marine senior leadership, dignitaries, Marines and their guests headed to the Ben Franklin Hotel for the banquet. Later that evening, the culminating event at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel followed. Newspaper clippings out of the National Archives, Smedley Butler and John A. Lejeune collections, show that the event was broadly circulated in print and well attended. The Evening Star, a Washington, D.C., newspaper, reported that Secretary Wilbur declared during the banquet, “The accomplishments of the United States Marine Corps from the day of its foundation, November 10, 1775, to the present time have more than fully justified the wisdom of its establishment.” The event succeeded in capturing the attention, the imagination and the appreciation of a grateful nation. In essence, the entire team of Marines, active, on leave and veteran, coalesced together not only to reignite our heritage but to rekindle America’s love for her Marines. Indeed, these original celebrations not only delivered the Marine Corps’ case for preservation but ignited a torch of tradition that we bear in ceremony to this day. Standing on the shoulders of our ancestral teammates, we bear the same responsibility to preserve our storied legacy as we celebrate our 250th year.
The words below from MajGen John A. Lejeune to President Calvin Coolidge to commemorate the 150th in 1925 ring as true today for the Sestercentennial as they did back then:
“Marines have therefore traditions to uphold, traditions of loyalty, well exemplified not only by our motto, ‘Semper Fidelis,’ but by the heroism of our predecessors,” Lejeune wrote in the Oct. 21, 1925, memorandum. “Our country is now at peace, but we have still the obligation faithfully to carry out the duties assigned us and keep ourselves in readiness should our nation again be engaged in war, to defend her as of old.”
From left to right: Col John Muckle, Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore D. Robinson, Assistant Secretary of War Hanford MacNider, MajGen John A. Lejeune and BGen Smedley D. Butler at the celebration of the Marine Corps’ 150th Birthday.
Featured Image (Top): A Marine Corps Birthday cake, surrounded by Marines dressed in uniforms representing leathernecks of the past, sits atop a drivable float that was used in a parade in Philadelphia, Pa., to celebrate the Marine Corps’ 150th Birthday, Nov. 10, 1925.
Authors’ bios: LtCol Brad Anderson, USMC (Ret), is a freelance writer and researcher for Leatherneck.
Katie Cashwell is a veteran Marine. She is a graduate of the Uni-versity of Mary Washington with a degree in historic pres-ervation. She has spent decades providing research supporting recoveries of America’s Missing in Action. She was instrumental in researching the lost graves of Tarawa.
In March 1942, just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Marine Corps Chevron published a short but powerful piece titled “My Rifle: The Creed of a United States Marine.” Its author, then-Brigadier General William H. Rupertus, was serving as the commanding officer of Marine Corps Base San Diego, Calif. A career Marine and seasoned marksman, he understood better than most that a Marine’s rifle was more than a weapon—it was a lifeline.
That simple yet stirring creed, written during a time of global chaos and national mobilization, would go on to define the ethos of the United States Marine Corps for generations. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, I want to share the story behind the rifle creed and the man who wrote it. He was my grandfather.
MajGen William H. Rupertus began his Marine Corps career as a competitive shooter and expert marksman. While commanding 1stMarDiv in the Pacific, Rupertus instilled in his Marines the same discipline and respect for the rifle that defined his own service. His legacy endures through the Rifleman’s Creed, a reflection of his belief that a Marine’s rifle is his most trusted companion in battle.
A Marksman from the Start
Rupertus joined the Marine Corps in 1913 after transferring from the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (USRCS). He had graduated from the USRCS Academy second in his class but was denied sea duty due to his diagnosis with Bright’s Disease, which was supposed to kill him within three to five years.
Determined, he set his sights on the Marine Corps and graduated first in his class from the Marine Officers’ School. By 1914, he had been chosen, along with several classmates,to serve on the Marine Corps rifle team, a prestigious group that competed at the national level and symbolized the Corps’ elite marksmanship tradition. In addition to his duty on the USS Florida (BB-30), his early career centered on the rifle team and the disciplined culture it required.
Rupertus was not just a competent marksman—he was an Expert, earning several awards and the Distinguished Marksman badge.
Later, he spent time at the Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, D.C., working closely with legendary marks-men and instructors, shaping the next generation of Marine riflemen. In an era when precision shooting was still revered and rifle qualification meant something personal, Rupertus helped instill a culture of marksmanship that remains a hallmark of the Corps to this day.
When he was stationed in China as a commanding officer with the 4th Marines, he also oversaw many rifle matches, a popular activity for these “China Marines” and competing countries.
Why He Wrote the Creed
After the Japanese attacked our fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, catapulting us into World War II, the Marine Corps expanded rapidly, and thousands of new recruits filled training depots. In early 1942, Rupertus headed from Marine Corps Base San Diego, where he oversaw one of the nation’s largest hubs for preparing new recruits, to New River, N.C., to join General Alexander A. Vandegrift in the formation and training of the 1st Marine Division.
These young men came from all over the country, many with no military background and little experience with firearms. But they were ready to fight.
Rupertus had witnessed the brutal Japanese military tactics in China during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai while with the 4th Marines on his second duty tour in China; he and many of the officers and men there had predicted the Japanese would attack the United States.
Rupertus understood that the rifle had to become personal and sacred to each Marine if it was going to save their lives and win the ground battles in the Pacific. According to family and Marine Corps lore, Rupertus wrote the creed on a piece of paper in late February 1942 after reflecting on the importance of personal responsibility, discipline and survival in combat. He wanted every Marine, especially those new to the service, to understand that their rifle was not merely another piece of issued equipment.
And so, in quiet reflection, he wrote “My Rifle: The Creed of a United States Marine.”
“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. … My rifle is my life. I must master it as I master my life.”
Upon publication, the creed was immediately embraced. While the Chevron is no longer in print, Rupertus’ words have become a permanent fixture in the soul of the Corps.
A Quiet Tradition
William H. Rupertus went on to command 1stMarDiv during some of the most brutal fighting of the Pacific War, including Tulagi, Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester and Peleliu. His belief in the rifleman, forged on the rifle range and articulated in the creed, never wavered.
When you understand the background, this rifleman’s creed is poetic, brutally practical and profound, knowing what America, our allies, the Marine Corps and all of the U.S. military were facing in 1942. And what we face today.
Since the creed was first published, it has been memorized by generations of Marines and other branches of our military. It’s been recited in the movies “Full Metal Jacket” and “Jarhead” as well as the popular video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.” Though modern boot camp training no longer has recruits reciting it aloud daily, its words still echo in the ethos of every rifle range and combat zone where Marines serve.
Rupertus, right, meets with Col Jerry Thomas, left, and Gen A.A. Vandegrift, on Guadalcanal.
ADM Chester Nimitz presents Rupertus with the Navy Cross on Oct. 1, 1942, on Guadalcanal.
A Legacy Carried Forward
Though he fought hard, Rupertus did not see the end of the war. He died of a heart attack in March 1945 at the Marine Corps Barracks Washington, during a party with fellow veterans of 1stMarDiv.
In recent years, while researching his military background, I learned to recite the rifle creed myself. It’s more than military prose. It’s a reflection of who my grandfather was: precise, principled and utterly dedicated to the mission and the Marine. Above all, understanding that in the fog of war, a Marine must rely on what he knows best: his rifle, his training and his brothers and sisters in arms.
Over 80 years later, the rifle creed still speaks not only to the Marine Corps but to anyone who understands what it means to take responsibility, to train with purpose and to treat their tools—and their mission—with respect.
As we honor 250 years of the Marine Corps in 2025—and reflect on the nation it has served for two and a half centuries—I offer this story in remembrance of a man who knew that the heart of the Corps beats in the chest of every rifleman and riflewoman. Because before the battles, before the medals and before the victories—there was a Marine and his rifle.
Semper Fidelis.
Then-BGen William H. Rupertus outside of his command post on Guadalcanal, November 1942.
Author’s bio: AmyRupertusPeacock is a daughterandgranddaughterofU.S.Marinesandco-authorof the book “OldBreedGeneral.”
Editor’s note: The following article, written by the commander of Weapons Company, pro-vides a firsthand account of 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment along the Emerald Wadi in Al Qa’im, Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in October 2005.
The 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment deployed to the Al Qa’im region of Iraq in late August 2005. When 3/6 assumed control of the battlespace from 3/2 late in the summer of 2005, the entire region was strongly influenced by insurgents and foreign fighters.
Operation Iron Fist began on Oct. 1, 2005, in the towns of Sadah and eastern Karabilah in the Al Qa’im region of Al Anbar province. Task Force 3/6 was given the arduous mission of clearing insurgents and disrupting the lines of communication along the Euphrates River Valley from Syria. The intent was to establish battle positions (BPs), maintain a presence in the towns and create relationships with the locals. The mission was accomplished, and both towns were cleared as the battalion began to conduct patrols and build a rapport with the local population.
The Emerald Wadi, running left to right above, is the dry creek bed separating eastern and western Karabilah, Iraq. The 3rd Bn, 6th Marines’ Scout Sniper Plt, known as Reaper, was tasked with maintaining observation of its two bridges.
After the success of Operation Iron Fist, elements of Weapons Company, 3/6 oriented to the west along the dried creek bed known as the Emerald Wadiin order to disrupt and interdict insurgents attempting to move to the east. According to Captain Brendan Heatherman, the commanding officer of Co K, 3/6, the positions along the wadiled the insurgency to believe that a push into Karabilah and Husaybah from the east was imminent. This mistaken belief would be especially beneficial in later months during Operation Steel Curtain when 3/6 came from the opposite direction.
Lieutenant Colonel Julian D. Alford, CO, 3rd Bn, 6th Marines, assigned Weapons Co’s First Mobile Assault Platoon (MAP 1), led by First Lieutenant Jeremy Wilkinson, and its Scout Sniper Plt (Reaper), led by Gunnery Sergeant Donald Rieg, with the mission of maintaining continuous observation of the two bridges (one north and one south) over the Emerald Wadiseparating western and eastern Karabilah. Gunny Rieg had recently taken command of the platoon when 1stLt Tom Wilberg was wounded after his up-armored HMMWV (high-mobility, multipurpose, wheeled vehicle) struck an improvised explosive device (IED) a few days earlier.
Gunny Rieg, along with two four-man sniper teams (Sergeant Jeremy Riddle’s and Lance Corporal George Hatchcock’s teams), established a position in a building along the wadi. It was a typical large two-story concrete house with a walled roof that provided clear observation of both bridges and good fields of fire. The house, known as Reaper base, also had an unusually tall and thick concrete-walled yard where two or three gun trucks could be parked.
It did not take long for the enemy to take umbrage at Reaper’s presence, and they launched a volley of rockets, mortars, small-arms and machine-gun fire at Reaper’s position. During the fight, one Marine finished staging ammunition and equipment in a ground-floor room when a C5 rocket exploded in the house, narrowly missing both the Marine and the ammunition. Reaper exchanged fire across the wadi for at least two hours until shortly after nightfall.
It was an indication of what was to come for the next 21 days.
On the morning of Oct. 7, other Reaper teams and two tanks (Tiger teams 3 and 4) arrived, and improvements for the defense of the house began immediately. The plan was for Tigers 3 and 4 to rotate with Tigers 1 and 2 every few days. Loopholes were created, and sandbags were trucked in to reinforce the walls and sniper hides. During the day, the enemy launched more than a half-dozen rockets and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at the house and tanks—with little effectiveness. The tanks returned fire with main gun rounds at the enemy firing positions, silencing the rocket and RPG fire. Sporadic and inaccurate small-arms fire was received throughout the day, which proved to be more annoying than effective. The pattern continued for the next two days.
CAMP AL QA’IM, Iraq (Oct. 26, 2005) — A shot helmet, belonging to Lacey Springs, Ala., native Lance Cpl Bradley A. Snipes, antitank assaultman, 3rd Mobile Assault Platoon, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, rests on a benched marked as property of Weapons Company, 3rd Bn., 6th Marines. (Official U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Jerad W. Alexander)
On Oct. 10, a squad of “Kilo” Co Marines arrived from BP Chosin to help with security as sniper teams were pulled from Reaper base to conduct other missions. Capt Heatherman, the Co K commander, said, “We didn’t feel our mission was to go out and find firefights because they would find us.” His words were proven true that day as the squad from Kilo Co was welcomed by the enemy opening up with RPGs and small-arms fire.
Reaper teams led by Sgt Riddle and Sgt Thomas Smith departed Reaper base early the next morning across Route Diamond to set up an ambush on an enemy firing position. At 0700, two men were spotted with rockets moving to another firing position. Shortly afterward, rockets were fired at Reaper base, causing no damage. Knowing the probable egress route the men would take, the Reaper teams prepared for their return. The two men, carrying their rocket launchers, soon returned the same way they had come; they would not fire at Reaper base, or anyone else for that matter, again.
Later that day, one of the Tiger teams engaged with and killed three men who were preparing to launch RPGs from a house across the wadi. Two main gun rounds ensured no fire was received from that house again. Later that night, mortar rounds landed just outside the house walls. Reaper remained on alert throughout the night, expecting a night attack that did not materialize.
The morning of Oct. 12 dawned with sporadic rifle fire on Reaper base, but the origin of the shots could not be determined. Two hours later, Sgt Smith was in the firing position on the north side of the house when he spotted two insurgents shooting at the base. He took two shots with his heavy barrel M16, putting one man down immediately and hitting the other. The second insurgent managed to find cover before he was killed. It had become clear that as long as Reaper base was occupied, the insurgents would try to force out the Marines.
The leadership of 3/6: Capt Clinton Culp (CO, Wpns Co); Capt Conlon Carabine (CO, Co I); Capt Justin Ansel (CO, H&S Co); Maj Chris O’Connor (S-3); LtCol Julian “Dale” Alford (Bn CO); Maj Toby Patterson (Bn XO); Capt Rich Pitchford (CO, Co L); Capt Brendan Heatherman (CO, Co K); Capt Mike Haley (CO, Co B, 3rd AA Bn) and Capt Robb Sucher (CO, Wpns Co, 1st LAR).
LtCol Alford sent one of the battalion’s forward air controllers, Capt Ryan Pope, call sign “Zero,” and his radio-telegraph operator, Corporal Kevin Williams, to assist in the fight. They went right to work as, yet again, machine-gun and mortar fire was inbound. With marking assistance from the tanks, Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron (HMLA) 369, the “Gunfighters,” made several gun runs on the insurgent firing position and forward observer.
At the same time, Kilo Co was under mortar attack at BP Iwo Jima. Cpl Scott Royal’s Reaper team 2 and LCpl Hatch-cock’s team 7 had moved to a building in eastern Karabilah to observe Main Supply Route (MSR) Diamond, west of BP Iwo, looking for the insurgent mortar crews. Within five minutes of the mortar fire stopping, two men forced their way into the building where the Reaper teams were located but were shot by the security man on LCpl Hatchcock’s team as they entered the building. The insurgents started to fire on Reaper base early on the morning of Oct. 13 and continued to do so with small arms until midday when machine guns began firing from multiple positions.
Kilo Co’s 3d Plt had a BP to the south, and it began to receive fire as well. The accuracy of the insurgents’ rounds seemed to improve dramatically. Reaper identified one building across the wadi from which insurgents were firing; Zero had the Gunfighters engage with hellfire missiles, and the fire from the enemy decreased significantly.
Cpl Eliel Quinones, or “Q” as his fellow Marines called him, was in the “crow’s nest” on the roof of Reaper base when he took a single round to the head. The round cracked his skull, removing his hair and portions of his scalp, yet somehow he remained conscious. As he was pulled out of the firing position and moved into the house, he managed to identify the building from which the insurgent shot him. A medevac was called for, but Army helicopters were out too far to assist.
Zero and Cpl Williams worked diligently to get a UH-1N Huey on station from the Gunfighters to conduct the medevac, and with two tank teams and a light armored reconnaissance (LAR) platoon providing covering fire, the Huey was able to conduct the medevac. In an incredible feat of flying prowess, the helicopter put down in the tiny landing zone, with less than 6 feet from the rotors to light poles. It took less than eight minutes from the time Cpl Quinones was hit until the time he was placed in the Huey. He was awarded a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with combat “V” for his efforts in identifying the source of fire despite his wounds.
Marines from the Scout Sniper Plt on the roof of Reaper base in October 2005. (Photo courtesy of Maj Clinton A. Culp, USMC (Ret)
As the insurgents’ accuracy increased, Reaper Marines took more and more care with their movements, even ducking behind curtained windows. A C5 rocket sailed just over Reaper base and hit the house to the south. It missed Reaper base by only a foot or so.
On Oct. 14, Zero vectored in ScanEagle, to take a look at the buildings and road just to the west side of the buildings that were directly adjacent to the wadi. As the afternoon began, enemy machine-gun and small-arms fire began anew. ScanEagle located the source of fire, and a GBU-12 bomb was dropped on the position. Shortly afterward, the tank platoon commander was struck by small arms while moving down MSR Diamond. The tanks returned fire as the tank moved back to a covered position for the medevac. As the sun went down, so did the incoming fire.
The morning of the 15th brought more of the same, including more accurate small-arms fire from one or two shooters. The tank teams needed to pull back to the railroad station at Al Qa’im (3/6’s main base) for some maintenance, so the LAR Plt took up positions to Reaper’s immediate flanks. No sooner had it pulled into position than it began to receive RPG fire. The platoon returned fire while Zero dropped another GBU-12 on the insurgents’ position. Insurgent fire died off for the rest of the day.
Before sunup on Oct. 16, Cpl Royal’s and Sgt Erik Rue’s Reaper teams moved to a hide position that would cover the flank of the LAR Plt. At 0815, the teams spotted two insurgents moving along MSR Bronze with RPGs and AK-47s in order to get a firing position on the light armored vehicles (LAVs) and tanks. The enemy was dispatched, but the teams began to take fire from other insurgents.
As the LAR Plt moved to extract the teams, more insurgents were spotted mov-ing to get a line of fire on the LAVs. Mean-while, Zero brought in rotary-wing close air support (CAS), and it seemed the per-fect time to try the MK19, which had re-cently been installed on the roof of Reaper base after one of the snipers had remarked, “If 240s are good, MK19s are better!”
The tall mount was then taken off a cargo HMMWV and sandbagged on the roof and a tarp placed over it for concealment. The MK19 thumped away as the Gunfighters made a few runs in support of the extraction. The engagement escalated as more insurgents moved to isolate the Reaper teams; even 3rd Plt, Kilo Co got into the mix as the fire and movement spilled over into its sector. LAR Plt and the Reaper teams were able to return to the Reaper base around 1230. Every vehicle had taken multiple small-arms and machine-gun hits. Each also had at least one flat tire and several near misses of RPGs. At least 18 insurgents had been killed with no Marine casualties.
Brass litters the rooftop of Reaper base after one of many firefights during October 2005.
The next few days were relatively quiet, and on the 19th, Air/Naval Gunfire Liaison Co’s (ANGLICO’s) Wild Eagle 3-1 arrived on deck to assist Zero with the CAS fight. One of the Reaper teams spotted several insurgents setting up a mortar on a roof-top. After waiting until the insurgent mortar team was ready to fire, Reaper opened up with the MK19. It took a few rounds to get on target, but all five insurgents and their weapon system were eliminated. The battalion took a hard hit that same day when a suicide vehicle was driven into a squad of Marines from Co K just north of BP Iwo Jima. LCpl Norman Anderson III was killed and every other squad member wounded. The next day brought another near miss from a C5 rocket, which impacted the house to the south again.
On the morning of Oct. 22, a large dust cloud formed in front of one of the tanks after an RPG impacted less than one meter in front of it. The tanks returned fire with .50-caliber rounds and a main gun round. About an hour later, Reaper teams spotted two insurgents with AKs and RPGs trying to sneak across MSR Diamond; the teams dispatched them. Only light fire was received throughout the rest of the day and for the next few days.
After a relatively quiet few days, six insurgents were spotted on MSR Diamond on Oct. 25; one was shot before the LAVs maneuvered on the insurgents’ anticipated route and caught them in the open. Mortar fire was called in to close off the insurgents’ egress. At the same time, Reaper base was receiving small arms and machine-gun fire. Tanks returned fire with the help of a Hellfire missile from one of the Gunfighters’ Hueys.
The highlight of the day occurred shortly after the engagement ended as LtCol Alford reenlisted Sgt Riddle on the roof of Reaper base.
The morning of the 26th started at 0625 as more than 20 insurgents with AKs and RPGs were spotted moving on the west side of the Emerald Wadi. Reaper base, tanks and LAR were put on “stand-to,” and air was requested. Reports were received of several of the insurgents placing IEDs along the roads on the west side of the bridges that crossed the wadi. Both 3rd Plt, Kilo Co and MAP 1 were put on notice as well. Before the air arrived on station, the tanks and LAR Plt maneuvered into position and mortars were called in as Reaper, tanks and LAR engaged. Several of the insurgents fell in the initial volley, and the rest fled into the surrounding buildings. The insurgents tried to consolidate their position and returned AK, RPK (Soviet light machine gun) and RPG fire to no avail as rotary-wing and fixed-wing CAS arrived on station.
From left: Sgt Thomas Smith, Reaper team 5 leader; Cpl John Stalvey; and Cpl James Guffey, Reaper team 1, before the Battle of the Emerald Wadi. Cpl Stalvey, one of the battalion’s snipers, was killed by an IED, Oct. 3, 2005.
Capt Phil Laing and his LAR Co arrived at the same time for a battle handover. The 27th saw light small-arms fire which Laing’s company easily returned. On the morning of the 28th, 1stLt Durand Tanner’s MAP 2 arrived to extract Reaper. The LAR Co provided cover for Reaper as they withdrew to Al Qa’im to rest and refit for the next mission: Operation Steel Curtain.
The Scout Sniper Plt, with the help of MAP 1, 3rd Plt, Kilo Co, tanks, LAR and CAS had kept the insurgents looking in the wrong direction for 22 days. Alford later reflected proudly, “Those boys had a hell of a fight for those three weeks, and it allowed us to move behind the enemy and attack them in the rear. Classic operational flanking movement.”
The Battle of the Emerald Wadiwas a critical element in 3/6’s ability to consolidate combat power in Al Qa’im before the launch of Operation Steel Curtain.
Executive Editor’s note: The November issue of Leatherneck will include an article about the “Fox” Co, 2/1 Marines who were fighting in New Ubaydi during Operation Steel Curtain.
Author’s bio: A prior enlisted Marine, Maj Clinton A. Culp was commissioned in 1997 and served as an advisor to the Afghan Commando Battalion during Operation Enduring Freedom and as the CO of Weapons Co, 3rd Bn, 6th Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He re-tired in 2009.
Featured Image (Top): A Marine sniper from 3/6 takes a well-earned break.
Team Rubicon has made a name for itself by leading from the front and being on the ground in some of the world’s largest and most significant catastrophes.
Most recently, the humanitarian organization was in Texas, supporting the relief efforts from the floods that devastated the state’s south-central region. They arrived in Kerr and Tom Green counties less than a week after the tragic floods on July 4; by July 10, Team Rubicon volunteers, known as Greyshirts, were deployed to remove debris blocking homes and provide muck-out services for the survivors.
“Our Greyshirts stepped in pretty early, and we were initially helping with the volunteer coordination,” said Jeff Byard, Marine Corps veteran and senior vice president of operations. “You can see the best of humanity and the worst of humanity in a disaster. … [There was] a lot of outpouring from all over Texas and beyond. There was such a volume of spontaneous volunteers that it made our workload a little lighter, which was good.”
Team Rubicon’s Greyshirt volunteers were already on the ground on July 10, providing support less than a week after the Texas floods killed more than 130 people.
Team Rubicon had 30-man operations running in Kerr County, where Camp Mystic and the bulk of fatalities occurred. Many of the homes were destroyed, and a lot of the area was actively conduct-ing search and rescue, said Byard. Vol-unteers conducted a traditional muck out by removing drywall, flooring and everything down to the studs in order to eliminate mold growth.
“Everyone that you talked to either had a direct fatality or they were one person removed,” Byard said. “The emotion was really thick. It was a heavy one for many of our first-time Greyshirts to walk into.”
In the aftermath of the Texas floods, Team Rubicon’s Greyshirts conducted a variety of tasks including damage assessments, clearing routes, removing debris, performing expedient home repairs and mucking out flooded homes.
Much of the firm’s top leadership was on-site to lead and support the operations. Jim Brooks, the new CEO—a former Navy SEAL and CIA officer—exper-ienced the devastation firsthand during his fourth morning on the job in Hunt, Texas.
“We’re driving down here in a three-vehicle convoy with our strike team, and you just begin to see the flood zone, and the debris far and wide across a very large river valley,” Brooks said. “And you see toilet seats 25 feet up in a tree hanging from branches. Immediately, you just feel how chaotic, how scary, it was. What that disaster must have been like as it was unfolding. A bunch of families were disrupted here, and you go in and you see their lives; their homes that were sitting here along what was normally a flowing, simple, peaceful river, and you see that they were immediately destroyed.”
Brooks was on-site with Team Rubicon co-founder Jake Wood, a Marine Corps veteran who is now serving as the organization’s executive chairman of the board. Wood believes that Brooks has the moxie to lead the organization in a future filled with larger, impactful weather events.
Jake Wood, center, and Jim Brooks, right, meets with Greyshirts about ongoing Team Rubicon operations. A surge of volunteers impacted by the Texas floods joined forces with Team Rubicon to support their communities.
“I’m excited for Jim,” Wood said. “You know, we’re 15 years into this organization, and the one thing that we can’t afford to be is complacent. This organization has been founded with a bias for action. I think we’ve always operated with that urgency … leaning into those moments. I think that’s more important now than ever. Disasters are increasing in frequency and cost. We’re sitting here in the midst of one of the worst flooding disasters in the history of the country, and this is going to continue to happen. So, this organization has to continue to scale, has to continue to innovate. We have to continue to expand the capabilities that we can bring into communities, the types of missions that we can meet in the future. Jim Brooks brings this incredible ground as an executive who has operated at scale within large, complex enterprises. He has demonstrated the ability to innovate, and I think he’s just going to shepherd us into this next version of Team Rubicon, which is going to be bigger and more badass.”
Team Rubicon Greyshirts clean dirt and debris from the inside of a home after devastating flooding in Texas.
Team Rubicon started in 2010 in re-sponse to the 7.0 earthquake that dev-astated Haiti. Wood saw a critical need for help and responded with a proactive team of eight to Port-au-Prince three days later. His small team provided care and support for thousands of survivors and changed the world for humanitarian aid. They trailblazed beyond the normal world of disaster response. The name for Team Rubicon comes from the boldness of Julius Caesar as he crossed the Rubicon River in Italy, passing the point of no return.
Team Rubicon has pressed forward to lead from the front for hundreds of operations, including global crises. They have responded to support relief for numerous hurricanes, snowstorms, small tornadoes and flooding. Their board of advisors has included many high-profile leaders such as General David Petraeus, General Stanley McChrystal, General James T. Conway, Andy Bessette, Jeff Dailey and Jeff Smith. The team is now over 180,000-plus strong.
From Desert Storm to Team Rubicon
Team Rubicon Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Byard joined the Marine Corps in the delayed entry program at 17 years old and was in boot camp the Monday after graduating from high school, a memorable experience given what was going on at the time.
“We were awakened in mid-August by a drill instructor and told Iraq had invaded Kuwait,” Byard said. “ ‘All the 0300s step forward,’ said the DI. Half of the platoon stepped forward. The DI told them, ‘You’re all going to die in a chemical gas attack. Get back in the rack.’ ”
Byard said he was shocked, adding that he had convinced his mom to sign for him to enlist, assuring her that he would be fine.
But the situation had now changed for Byard, and he deployed for Desert Storm. After he returned, he was put on a Marine Expeditionary Unit to the Mediterranean and was meritoriously promoted on ship. For his last year and a half, he was stationed in Parris Island, S.C., and was the basic weapons instructor for all of the infantry weapons.
At the end of his initial four-year enlistment, he wanted to “stay in, move from infantry to light armored infantry, [but] they had no more boat spaces,” so he decided to get out and attend college.
His initial involvement with Team Rubicon was as a FEMA appointee; he joined the nonprofit permanently in February of 2020 after having dinner with fellow Marine Team Rubicon executive David Burke.
“I saw an opportunity with a lot lined up,” Byard said. “The mission is awesome: help people.”
The organization’s strong culture resonated with him, as did the Team Rubicon Marine Corps roots. He said it gave him “the ability to still do what [he loves] doing … the field-level disaster response. It is the chaos and teamwork.”
Byard said he had a moment of reflection during Hurricane Laura in 2020, while working in the heat of southern Louisiana. His team was placing a blue tarp on the roof, and he stood there, thinking.
“I got emotional as it dawned on me, over my career, I probably ordered a million blue tarps through my work with the state of Alabama,” Byard said. “It dawned on me that I had never put a blue tarp on a roof. It was my first time doing that during a disaster. It brought a sense of personal satisfaction and told me this is where I needed to be.”
His purposeful experiences continued with Team Rubicon. One of his learning points was going from the government to a “for impact” organization.
“When you move into providing impact, you don’t manage volunteers,” he said. “You lead and inspire volunteers. Any leader needs to have the adaptability gene. In our business, whether government or for impact, people look at emergency management, disaster response or humanitarian work. It’s all people’s work. You’re helping people that have been devastated. It is a chaotic environment. If you’re a people person, that’s a constant improvise, overcome and adapt. Squarely rooted in the Marine Corps.”
Byard loved his time in the Corps, meeting lifelong friends from 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, whom he still talks to today. The Corps continues to influence his leadership style and success, and he bases his foundational approach on his Corps leadership experiences.
“Operationally, from the Marine Corps, I view our operations as getting Greyshirts to the need. Then get out of there. Don’t be the 3,000-mile screwdriver.”
It’s basic Marine Corps small unit leadership, he said, empowering his people to lead and do the right thing.
“Our job is resources, give them the tools, get the Greyshirts to the need and they will figure out how to overcome and adapt. Our job is a resource provider.”
Team Rubicon has developed a quick reaction force. If a storm hits and if they have the right trained Greyshirts with equipment, they don’t necessarily go through their normal planning process, said Byard. “Speed to need, and … we need to be there when the need is there.” Byard hopes to have a Greyshirt leader in every county and parish in the country.
LtCol Joel Searls, USMCR
To support Team Rubicon in their disaster relief efforts, visit https://team
rubiconusa.org/
Featured Image (Top): Team Rubicon Greyshirts at a flood zone while responding to the Texas Hill Country floods. (Photo courtesy of Team Rubicon)
Author’s bio: LtCol Joel Searls, USMCR, is a journalist, writer and creative who serves in COMMSTRAT for the Marine Corps Reserve. He has completed the Writer’s Guild Foundation Veterans Writing Project, is a produced playwright, a commissioned screenwriter and an entertainment consultant. His most recent feature film-producing project is “Running with the Devil,” and his most recent TV series producing project is “Top Combat Pilot.” He is a graduate of The Ohio State University.
Author’s note: By the time I left active duty in 2013, I knew the name “Abbate.” Sergeant Matthew Abbate posthumously received the Navy Cross in August of 2012, almost two years after his heroic actions while deployed with “Kilo” Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, in Sangin, Afghanistan. Abbate evolved into a living legend before he was killed in combat. His posthumous medal further propelled his stature within the history of his storied infantry battalion and cemented his place in the Marine Corps’ history of the war in Afghanistan. When I was asked to develop a story idea fitting under the umbrella of the global war on terror for Leatherneck, Abbate immediately stood out in my mind as a preeminent example from that generation; one of the best sons our nation had to offer. I knew the name and had read the Navy Cross citation but failed to grasp his importance to the Marines who served alongside him or the traits that made him purely “Abbate,” inevitably propelling him to the greatness he achieved and limited only by his untimely death.
Matthew Abbate deserves a place in our history, standing prominently alongside others such as Smedley, Chesty, Daly and Basilone. The Marines who knew him understand this best and can offer the rest of us a glimpse as to why. What follows may, hopefully, provide this insight. Thank you to Britt Sully and Jake Ruiz, both veteran Marine sergeants; Sergeant First Class John Browning, USA (Browning previously was a Marine sergeant); Gunnery Sergeant Chris Woidt, USMC (Ret); Staff Sergeant Ryan Salinas, USMC (Ret); Lieutenant Colonel Tom Schueman, USMC; and the other warriors interviewed for this story. Thank you for allowing me to laugh through the good times you shared with Matt and grieve with you through his death. If anyone can show us who Matt really was, it’s you guys.
The Boot
Britt Sully: Let me try to start at the beginning. When I graduated the school of infantry, all I wanted was to go Recon, but Recon was full, so they sent me to 3/5. I thought that was a death sentence. This was 2007. When I showed up, the battalion was still in Iraq, so we sat around for like a month waiting for them to get back. I viewed everyone around me as stupid and lazy; all these corporals serving as our temporary seniors that yelled at us and lightly hazed us.The battalion finally got back from Iraq. We unloaded all their seabags for them into their rooms and began our first experience dealing with salty lance corporals and drunk corporals fresh from deployment, further cementing for me, I have to get the f—k out of here.
A few days later, it was a Thursday evening, I was out in the barracks hallway cleaning the deck with a scuzz brush; just playing more stupid games for drunk 20-year-olds. While I’m outside cleaning the stairs, I see rounding around the corner of the barracks this 6-foot-2, handsome, square-jawed, tan-skinned man in boots and utes wearing a loaded Vietnam-era Alice pack. Long, glorious, thick black hair—WAY too long for a PFC to dream of having—and he’s running with a sledgehammer at break-neck speed. All these other Marines are standing around cheering him along as he’s just smiling and laughing holding up the sledgehammer above his head. I stopped cleaning and asked my senior, “Uh, Lance Corporal, who is that?” He snaps back, “That’s Matt Abbate and you don’t even f—king rate to look at him, now get back to cleaning!” Everyone else is just drinking and yelling at privates while this dude has a clearly heavy backpack and a sledgehammer and is sprinting towards First Sergeant’s Hill on a Thursday night. In that moment, I said to myself, “Whoever that guy is, whatever that guy is doing, wherever he is going, I want to follow him.”
Sgt Matthew Abbate at Twentynine Palms, Calif., during predeployment training.
At this point, Matt had been in for maybe two years. After he enlisted, he graduated boot camp as company honor man, making meritorious lance corporal, then finished the school of infantry as honor grad with a gung ho award. His character, demeanor and enthusiasm were just so genuine and magnetic that instructors were all talking about him, to the point that the Recon cadre got wind of who he was and poached him for Basic Recon Course. He goes to day one of MART, Marines Awaiting Recon Training, and is told to show up in green on green at 0530 for their initial PFT. He somehow f—ks it up and showed up in boots and utes. They were all told if they didn’t run a first class PFT, they would be immediately dropped. They tell Abbate, “You showed up in the wrong uniform, we don’t care. You still need to get a first class PFT.” Boom, Matt knocks out a 300 PFT in boots and utes. They made him run it a second time just to see if he could. Matt ran a second 300 PFT.
After a few weeks, while out on liberty, Matt met a girl from Tijuana and disappeared. He showed up after a week AWOL. At this point, usually if a guy shows up after a week, that’s like grounds for getting kicked out, but because he was impossible not to love, the instructors just NJP’d him, busted him down in rank and dropped him from the program. He showed back up to 3/5 as a PFC.
Ryan Salinas: Abbate wasn’t in my platoon initially, but everybody in Lima Company kinda knew that kid when he arrived as a boot. He was just super motivated, running around crazy. You tell him to go do something, it was like 100 miles per hour, no quit, no questions asked.
I first met him in Yuma at WTI while we were setting up cammie netting out at tent city. At one point, a group of us looked over and saw all these boots just standing around. We walk over there like, “What the f—k are you doing?” and we see one kid just getting after it by himself, swinging a sledgehammer and e-tool and whatever else he had. While the other guys started yelling at the other boots for letting this guy do all the work by himself, I went up to him and was like, “Hey, what the f—k are you doing?” He says, “Corporal, I’m gonna get this tent set up.” I told him he needed to get all these other guys just standing around to help him, and he just said, “I don’t got time for that bulls—t.” He kept working, meanwhile, it’s like 100 degrees, he’s pale white, and I noticed he had stopped sweating. I told him to go get some water, but he’s like, “No, no, I’m good.” Finally, I had to force him to go sit down in the shade. He was super upset he didn’t get the job finished. He wasn’t even in my platoon, I just saw it and was like, “What the hell is wrong with this kid?” So, I sat down and talked to him about understanding your limits and learning how to delegate within your peer group.
Chris Woidt: We came back from Iraq the first time in August of ’06. That’s when we got Matt in Lima Company. We knew then that we were already going back to Fallujah again. By that point, 3/5 had already done three previous OIF deployments. We still had guys around who were OIF 1 vets from ’03, OIF 2 vets from Operation Phantom Fury in ’04, then obviously all of us from the ’06 deployment, and we knew we were going back in ’07-’08. Initially, I was a squad leader and Matt was one of the junior Marines in the platoon. During our workup for the deployment, it became clear that Matt was pretty much a physical specimen. He always wanted more, which makes sense why he ended up coming into the sniper community.
Matt was a SAW gunner starting off. Prior to the deployment, we were at Twentynine Palms during the workup doing a shoot house with non-lethal Simunition rounds. With each scenario, they randomly changed the setup of the house. You’d bust into the room, and it may be full of enemy in an all-out gunfight, or it may be just a family. Your adrenaline is pumping, and it’s trying to teach escalation of force through these shoot, no shoot scenarios. Well, there was one scenario where there was just one woman sitting on a couch reading a book. She’s wearing a paintball mask and everything, and Abbate charges into the house blazing and just drills her like four times. Obviously, the instructors were like, “What are you doing?? She didn’t have a gun!” You could see Abbate was very self-critical, but he had a good sense of humor. During the debrief, when an instructor asked him why he “killed” a woman reading a book, Abbate held out both hands with palms up and smiled wide with those big, white teeth, and made a joke: “Because knowledge is power.”
Our deployment to Iraq was definitely kinetic, but there was a lot of political pressure to downplay the issues. There were numerous suicide bombers and casualties occurring around Fallujah, but the combat was waning. It was frustrating because there were a lot of handcuffs with the escalation of force and rules of engagement. Matt ended up getting meritoriously promoted to corporal during the deployment, so by the time we came back he was one of my peers.
After he was promoted, Matt was made a vehicle commander. We were primarily doing mounted patrols throughout the southern half of Fallujah. Matt would get really frustrated … from the mundane patrols and the lack of aggressive stance. That was just kind of a hard time too because the way we had fought the Iraq war and what had been drilled into his mind was now different. We were trying to do a lot more of civil affairs-type stuff. Matt had a lot of frustration because he wanted to do more. There were definitely times where we could have shot some people and done some stuff, but the reins were being pulled very hard because they were trying to bring down the number of firefights with the enemy to show a de-escalation in violence. We had pounded into his head and everyone else’s head the company’s experience in Fallujah over the previous deployments. We went back again very much with the expectation that we were going to take casualties. We were going to get in gunfights and kill people. But then we got there and transitioned from hot and heavy into more stability and security operations.
The Brotherhood
Chris: When we got back from Iraq, I don’t know if it was intentional, but they put all the 3/5 guys on the same street in base housing. All the Lima Company guys were neighbors living around a cul-de-sac. Matt was living in the barracks, but naturally whenever we’d do barbecues and hang out in the cul-de-sac, he would come over. One night I was in my house and I’m upstairs asleep. I heard noises downstairs, so I got up. I didn’t have a gun in base housing, so I grabbed a knife. I get down the stairs, and I can hear somebody right around the corner. I jump out ready to stab somebody, and there’s Matt standing in the kitchen with a bowl of Mac n cheese from the fridge, shoveling it into his mouth and laughing his ass off.
Matt was somebody who was welcoming, immediately part of your family, almost to his detriment. So many guys talk very highly of Matt because he died, but it almost doesn’t show his true personality. He was absolutely a flawed character, but his flaws really made us love him more. To the guys who really knew him, the tattoos, the long hair, the jokes, the bar fights, those were all part of the things that we loved about him. He had a really interesting childhood. We would really only get glimpses and pieces of it. There were definitely time periods where it wasn’t smooth. There were times he spoke about where he was sleeping on a beach in Hawaii where some other homeless dudes taught him how to catch eel and cook it over a fire. He worked as a waiter on a cruise ship one summer and had been to Thailand. He just had a big hunger to see the world, push the boundaries, and do big things, so coming into the Marine Corps made perfect sense, especially with the wars going on. Matt was the quintessential “break glass in case of war” type Marine. He joined for that, and that’s what he wanted to do.
Ryan: While we were in Iraq, we had a buddy who had a Harley back in the States and he got me and Matt interested. We started doing a bunch of research, looking up different bikes whenever we could get internet. As soon as we got back to California, the first thing we did was buy bikes, and all we did was ride.
Armando Hurtado, left, Ryan Salinas, center, and Matthew Abbate, then a lance corporal, in Iraq during their 2007 deployment with Kilo Co, 3rd Bn, 5th Marines.
We were in my garage at my house in the cul de sac one day and he brought his bike over. We were changing the oil or whatever on my bike and he decided to do some work on his bike too. Well, there’s this metal derby cover over the clutch that he decided to pull off. I walk inside the house to grab some drinks for us and as I’m walking back around the side of the house, all of the sudden, I see this shiny metal disk go skipping down the driveway and stick in the grass in the neighbor’s yard across the street. I ran into the garage … he’s like, “Go look at that f—king derby cover!” So, I go grab it and I’m like, “Well yeah, it’s all scratched now.” He’s like, “No, turn it over bro.” So I turn it over and it says, “Made in China.” I look at Matt and he yells, “How the f—k are you gonna have a Harley and it says made in … f—king China?! Get in the truck! We’re going to buy an American-made … derby cover!” We drove all over southern California to every damn bike shop just to find one … derby cover that was made in the U.S.A. so he could put it on his bike. I mean, he was absolutely pissed off that this thing was made in China. He was just like the patriotic, steak-eating, red-blooded American. I can still see his face right now the way he looked at me when he found that out.
The Beast
Britt: My first experience personally meeting Matt was a few days after I saw him running out of the barracks. I was a PFC, he was a corporal. As a young PFC, speaking to a corporal meant like parade rest, don’t look him in the eyes, especially in the infantry. I did not expect to be spoken to like a human by anyone who had been in the Marine Corps more than 40 seconds longer than I had. I met Matt on the basketball courts with our gear list to begin sniper indoc. Matt was just like, “What’s up, bro? Are you excited? You ready to do this?” I was just speechless, like, “Uh, why don’t you hate me?” He just gave me a slap on the shoulder and said, “Let’s f—king go!” He was always in front of the rest of the pack, finishing everything ahead of everyone else, then looping back to make sure the last guy made it in.
Jake Ruiz: I met Matt during scout sniper indoc. I was a junior Marine. They actually gave Matt time away from squad leader’s course to do the indoc. My first impression was just how much of a beast he was. He was just destroying all of us on the physical events. I was like, “Who is this guy?” I didn’t really get to know him until a couple weeks later when me, Britt and Matt all joined the sniper platoon working up for the MEU, but we all got close quickly. He graduated honor grad from squad leader’s course, even though he missed part of it for the sniper indoc. His ability to learn military skills in general was second to none. That’s one thing that gets lost in all the stories about Matt. Everyone talks about how much of a beast he was. I mean the dude was huge. 6 foot 2, 220 pounds, strong as an ox; everyone talks about that, but they don’t talk about how smart he was. His intelligence related to military skills blew me away.
Matt started getting tattoos while we were gone on the MEU, and he didn’t stop until we left for Afghanistan. So, over the course of maybe a year and a half, he got two full sleeves. At the time, it was that weird policy on tattoos; couldn’t be visible or had to be spaced a certain way or whatever, but Matt never really got in trouble for anything. He was just untouchable. Everybody in the battalion knew who Abbate was, from the sergeant major down to every PFC. Over the course of the MEU, everybody in the MEU knew who he was. He was that guy who would talk to you once and you’d think, “Man, this guy is my best friend!” Matt liked his hair, he liked his tattoos, he was high risk on libo, but that’s just part of what you get when you have a man like Matt. You’re not gonna get one without the other.
While we were gone, Matt tried to lateral move back to Recon, but something kept getting messed up with his package and it never worked out.We were all pretty downtrodden being on the MEU. Everybody just wanted to go combat. We got back in September 2009. Right before Christmas leave, we found out 3/5 was going to Afghanistan. Matt could not have moved faster to get the paperwork done and reenlist. I had to extend my contract to stay with the battalion for the deployment. We were all like, “OK, send us to sniper school and let’s get this done.” We deployed on the MEU with the sniper platoon, but we were not yet school trained. I lucked out, and I got to go with Matt.
While we were getting ready to go to sniper school, Matt pushed us super hard everywhere we went. He had to work out every day, it didn’t matter what we did that day. We’re doing all this deployment workup training during the day, then we get back to the barracks and Matt is dragging me out of my bunk to the pull-up bar and dragging his 53-pound kettlebell with him. We’d be driving all over base getting our medical paperwork or whatever else all signed off so we could go to sniper school, he’d see a pull-up bar and make me pull over. Looking back, that’s just how he was, who he was. He never missed an opportunity to make himself better. By the time we went to sniper school, I knew Matt really well; I knew what kind of performer he was. But under the microscope in a school like that, he elevated his already high performance and outshone everybody. It was wild watching him perform at that level. He finished sniper school number one in every skill except for stalking. Stalking is extremely hard. It’s a very, very patient skill, and Matt was terrible at it. It was his kryptonite.
Sgt Matthew Abbate sighting in on an enemy target in Sangin, Afghanistan, during 3rd Bn, 5th Marines’ 2010 deployment.
Britt: During our workup for Afghanistan, Matt was given meritorious sergeant. In the sniper platoon, he only wanted to be called Matt, he never wanted to be called sergeant, because he truly believed that you didn’t follow people because of their rank. You follow people because you trust their decision making, maturity, experience and character. He went to scout sniper team leader’s course, finishing high shooter and honor grad. He eventually became our team leader, working with John Browning, our assistant team leader, in charge of the 10 snipers of “Banshee Three” attached to Kilo Company.
The Artist
John Browning: I had done three previous deployments, two in Iraq, but 2010 was my first time in Afghanistan. Iraqi insurgents were more just thugs with guns; they were pretty easy to dominate, at least around Ramadi and Habbaniyah where I was. The Taliban were much better fighters, much more dangerous. They were there to fight. They did a lot of support by fire with machine guns, just like we do. As the sniper team, we took advantage of that. We’d hunt in places where we thought they might set up; opportunistic-type stuff. An infantry squad would go out on a pre-planned patrol route, and we’d have already been there all night. When the Taliban engaged the squad, we were there to shoot them.
Chris: When Matt got to Afghanistan, he finally had gotten into the free-fire zone of a highly kinetic area. Sangin was the canvas, and he was the artist. We knew him as a junior Marine, up and coming, but making dumb boot mistakes and those kinds of things. By the time he made it to Afghanistan—a sergeant, a sniper team leader, on his third deployment—he was highly developed. He’d mastered the art.
Jake: Our sniper team arrived to Afghanistan at the end of September 2010. We were forward staged in Sangin, operating out of Patrol Base Fires. Matt and John got there before the rest of us and were doing left-seat-right-seat patrols with the sniper team we were relieving. They got into a TIC [Troops in Contact] and killed some guys before we even got there. From that point forward, Matt was absolutely relentless. He wanted to do nothing but go out, find Taliban and shoot them. Once we all got there and started operating, he was personally going out two or three times a day, to the point where John would have to be like, “Dude, you need to take a break.” Matt just didn’t want to ever slow down. It was almost like he took it as a personal challenge that he had to keep people safe. It’s like he just knew that he was better that anybody else and he needed to be out there.
At that point in the deployment, we were extremely active. We were going out, either on our own as snipers or in small teams with the squads, two or three times a day. It was just so much combat. Those first couple months, it felt like you didn’t go outside the wire without getting into a firefight or somebody hitting an IED, or both. The days really ran together. It just felt like one continuous firefight and mass casualty incident.
Very early on, Matt wanted to go out super early one day. He got us all up probably 3 or 4 in the morning, we do our pre-combat checks and leave the wire under night vision. Matt wanted to set up near an area where the squads had been getting hit from when they left the patrol base. We made it a couple hundred meters outside the wire. Matt was running point behind the engineer with the metal detector. We hit an IED, but it low-order detonated, so a small portion of the homemade explosives inside detonates, but most if it just kind of gets thrown out. I was four or five people behind Matt. When we hit this thing, it scared the s—t out of me. I thought Matt was gone, thought the engineer was gone; what the hell are we going to do now? All the sudden, I just see Matt pop up and ask if everybody was alright. We made our way back to the patrol base, and I was just terrified. We get back and realize that Matt and the engineer are coated head to toe in the explosive material. They looked like they were covered in glitter from the aluminum powder in the explosives.
Britt: Matt just laughed it off and told us it looked like he was at a rave. He went right back out on patrol when the sun came up.
Jake: Later that day, the EOD techs went out to investigate and dismantle the IED. Well, they found it was a daisy-chained IED, and the secondary explosive on the daisy chain was so big that, had it gone off, it would have killed our entire team. I want to say that was unique, but it wasn’t for Sangin. It was just like that everywhere; the IEDs and the level of danger. To be honest, it was scary realizing how vulnerable we really were and how little we could mitigate that. I remember telling Matt, “Dude, I don’t know how are we gonna do this?” He was just like, “Bro, it’s our job.” That’s when it really clicked for me that Matt was just a different breed.
Britt: Matt was always so willing to go out where there was 100% probability there was going to be a gunfight. He would put himself there, and he would aggressively maneuver. He got his first patrol and first kill in before the rest of us touched down. For most people, when there’s machine guns and rockets going off, it’s intuitive to seek cover. But Abbate would just maneuver. He’d trudge off through the mud with his tree trunk quads in the direction of where he thought he could smoke people, like a Belgian Malinois unaware of what bullets are. Honestly, Matt doing something like action-movie heroic was just a day-to-day occurrence. When we heard about what he did on Oct. 14, it was really just more of Matt continually doing his thing; more of Matt just being Matt. To us, the real significance of that day was that we took a lot of casualties.
The Hero
Jake: On the morning of Oct. 14, 2010, we had gone out and done our own thing, and the patrol had been uneventful. We were just kind of kicked back relaxing when we heard a firefight start, and it sounded pretty heavy. After a while without breaking contact, the squad requested QRF. Matt jumped up and threw his gear on and was like, “Come on, let’s go!” So, four of us kitted up and jumped in with a squad getting ready to push outside the wire. The idea was that we were going to set up a blocking position and either draw the contact away from the other squad or at least provide them some covering fire as they withdrew back to the patrol base. At some point, the Taliban realized we were out there and broke contact, so the other squad was able to start making their way back to the base. The squad leader we were with decided to head back as well.
There was a huge open farming field that we bounded across from one irrigation canal to another on the opposite side. Generally, in recently planted fields like that we weren’t too worried about IEDs, so me and another guy just sprinted across and got to the canal. Some of the Marines in the squad made it right after us, and the SAW gunner immediately detonated an IED along the canal. I was probably 15 feet away and my bell was rung. After that, all hell broke loose. It felt like the sky opened up, and we were under fire. By that point, then entire squad was moving. The squad leader got shot in the leg as he reached the canal and fell down right next to me. A bunch of the rest of the guys tried to take shelter in this mud hut that was just to our left. We knew better, but that machine-gun fire was just so intense that I think it just pushed them in there, like an involuntary reaction to seek cover. They moved in, and one of the guys immediately hits an IED inside. The corpsman from the squad knew the Marine was down inside the compound, so he went inside and stepped on another IED. All the while, we’re taking heavy machine-gun fire.
By this time, Matt was in the canal with me. I was trying to pull the SAW gunner out of the water. I was so disoriented. One of the guys helped me get him up on the bank and that’s when I realized that he was gone. I assessed the squad leader and was trying to get a tourniquet on his leg. Meanwhile, Matt is realizing, “Oh s—t, I’m it. I’m the only one here who can do this.”
Matt jumped up with the minesweeper and made his way into the mud hut. Funny thing is, Matt didn’t even know how to use the thing. So, looking back, you realize he was just doing that to make other people feel better. In reality, he was clearing that compound with his feet. He cleared it and one of the other snipers started treating the casualties inside.
I was on the radio calling for a medevac. The whole time, Matt was super composed, getting people on task. Calm is contagious, and that is what he was; he was the calm. We finally started to make some headway, and the machine-gun fire died off a little bit. I was shook up. This was the first mass casualty I’ve been in. The first dead Marine I’ve dealt with. It was pretty overwhelming. Had Matt not been Matt, I don’t know that I would have composed myself.
Author’s note: According to other sources and eyewitness accounts of Abbate’s actions on Oct. 14, Abbate ordered the remaining Marines to freeze following the three IED blasts that decimated the patrol. Ignoring his own order, Abbate swept the ground for IEDs all the way to the structure where multiple bombs already exploded, then arranged the remaining Marines in a defensive posture. When the sounds of medevac choppers echoed overhead, Taliban fighters resumed machine-gun fire from the opposite side of the open field that would serve as the landing zone. Abbate charged across the open, unswept field, initially on his own, driving the Taliban away in a hail of gunfire. He then single-handedly swept the entire landing zone with his feet for IEDs to ensure it was safe for the helicopters to land.
Jake: We got told the Brits were coming in for medevac, so I popped smoke to mark our location. The bird came in out of nowhere, flying low to avoid RPGs. It circled the LZ then hit the deck so hard I could feel it through the ground. Some dudes ran out the back with guns and started laying down rounds, while some others ran out with stretchers. I was trying to get the SAW gunner to the bank of the canal and onto a stretcher. He was bigger than me, and I was just struggling. I grabbed … his hand to pull him up, and I felt his hand come apart inside his glove. It was the most surreal thing, and I just froze, standing there in the open. Matt came up and put his hand on my shoulder and just said, “I got this.” And he did it. He got the kid up on the stretcher.
The bird lifted off with the casualties, and we bounded back all the way until we made it inside the wire. All of us were absolutely smoked; just that huge adrenaline dump and a rush of emotion. I was crying. Matt came up and put his arm around me and said, “You feel that?” I said, “Yeah, yeah I feel that.” He said, “That’s why we’re gonna kill more.” That was his mentality. He wasn’t going to let them get away with hurting the Marines. Within the hour, I went back to hooch, and I fell asleep. It was early, probably like 5 or 6 in the afternoon. I didn’t wake up until like 9 the next morning. Matt was already back out on another patrol. He let me and the other snipers sleep. It was just his way of looking out for us. He knew we needed a break, but he wasn’t going to take a break.
U.S. Marines, veterans, and family members of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (3/5), hike up First Sergeants Hill while attending a memorial ceremony for the Battle of Sangin on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., April 29, 2016. During the Battle of Sangin in 2010, 3/5 sustained heavy casualties in what is considered the bloodiest battle ground of Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps Combat Camera photo by Lance Cpl. Sergio RamirezRomero/ Released)
The Symbol
Jake: Throughout the deployment, Matt was really big on symbols. We had a wall where we carved stick figures for all the enemy we killed or even buildings we destroyed in air strikes. Matt encouraged it because he wanted people to know what we were doing. He wanted us to know that we were making a difference, and whenever we would leave, he wanted them to know that we made a difference. The gunfighting commandments and rules of war were his own creation. To me, they were reflective of his personality.
Matt was a really over the top guy. His favorite movies were ’80s and ’90s action flicks. He just thought they were awesome. When he showed us the gunfighting commandments, he thought it was hilarious, but he also thought it was badass. I think for Matt it was a way to make light but also be serious.
John: Matt came up with this thing called, “slack” in his bandana. Matt loved bandanas. His first gunfighting commandment was, “Thou shall never leave the wire without a bandana containing at least 4 inches of slack.” He’d always say it in his surfer voice, and it was funny as hell. The slack was the loose ends of the bandana dangling like a ponytail. We’d be getting ready to go out and he’d be like, “Ok everybody, get your slack” as he’s tying on a bandana before he put his helmet on. I still do it to this day when I ride my motorcycle.
Britt: The gunfighting commandments were just Matt’s mentality towards wearing the uniform that were unspoken but lived. Not necessarily the words themselves, but the attitude he took towards everything. He so much loved wearing camouflage, sweating and carrying guns with the potential of blasting holes in people, and he lived that. He could have written the gunfighting commandments a million different ways, but it all would have said the same thing; look cool, feel cool, protect your homies and kill the people trying to kill you. In the least eloquent way, that’s just who he was.
Jake: His rules of war I think were based off something he read in a book, but he put his own spin on it, but it hit home for all of us. Someone’s got to walk point, that was just reality, and some of us weren’t going to go home. I think what separated Matt from the rest of us was that he had already accepted that before we even got there. John, too, already knew. He had significant combat experience and was blown up by an IED in Iraq. He knew the consequences of what we were going to deal with and was OK with it. I guess the wild part for Matt is that he was prepared for the reality but had not yet experienced anything like it. By the time we left Afghanistan, we all could go out, and we knew what we were looking for, we knew what the contact would be like, we knew we could step on an IED, but that fear was kind of gone. Matt was like that from day one. I think his gunfighting commandments and rules of war were just helping the rest of us get accommodated.
Courtesy of Patrol Base Abbate
The One in Ten Million
Britt: On Dec. 2, 2010, me and Jake had just come back from a two-man sniper operation. We went out at dawn and came back four or five hours later with nothing really happening. I’d been back inside the wire for maybe 30 minutes cleaning my gear and refilling my water. We heard a gunfight start up in the distance. We heard the radio traffic, and it sounded like Matt and the rest of the guys out there totally had the initiative, but I geared back up just in case they needed a QRF. The guys saw some Taliban go inside a building. On the radio, we heard jets get called in for air support. We watched both birds go overhead, and we watched both bombs drop. We had made a habit of calling in the first bird to drop a short delay 500-pound bomb so that it would penetrate inside the building and blow it up. The second bird would follow up with an air burst above the same target to kill anyone who survived the first drop and was trying to flee.
Maybe 30 seconds after the second bomb dropped, we hear that there is an urgent surgical wounded. Abbate threw his gun back up on the berm and started scanning for somebody to shoot after the first bomb. Just the geometry of chance unluckily caught him in the neck with a piece of metal from the second bomb. We didn’t know that then, we just heard Abbate’s kill number come across the radio. But, Abbate was larger than life. I’m thinking, “Matt will be fine. He’s Abbate. Nothing can touch him.”
Jake: Within a few minutes of the medevac bird taking off, we all received notification that we were “River City,” which means that we’ve got somebody dead and all communications with home were cut off to prevent anyone from communicating with the Marine’s family. My heart sank; just gut wrenching. I was trying to reach our Kilo Company HQ to confirm what we just heard, because I just couldn’t believe it. I ran up to the patrol base’s comm shack and got on the radio. I said, “Kilo main, this is Banshee, confirm your last traffic.” Our forward air controller, a great guy, came back and was just like, “I’m so sorry, Banshee.”
Britt: It felt totally unreal to all of us. Everyone felt very mortal in Sangin, but nobody thought you could touch Matt. He was invincible. We all just felt like, “If Abbate can get killed out here, there is no way I’m going to survive this.” His death reverberated through the entire battalion.
Author’s Note: 3/5 remained in Sangin until April 2011. The battalion suffered 25 killed in action and more than 200 wounded. Throughout the entire 20-year war in Afghanistan, 3/5 suffered the worst casualty rate of any Marine battalion.
Jake: Our deployment to Sangin 100% shaped everything about the remainder of my time in the Marine Corps and still does to this day. Matt’s relentless nature in everything he did, his relentless strife to be the best and outperform his best pushed me to be a better performer and made me push my Marines to outperform their best.Matt never had an ounce of quit and never left anything on the table. As a Marine, you can’t have any quit because, ultimately, no matter what you do, the enemy always has a vote.
Marines with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, salute during the playing of taps during a memorial ceremony, April 29. Moments before, the Marines fired a 21-gun salute in honor of the 25 fallen warriors of the battalion.
Britt: Be as excited and proud to wear the uniform and do the job that you were the day you went to MEPS. When you didn’t know any better, when you didn’t know how stupid the games could be, when you didn’t know how lame the regulations are, and all the things it takes to get to wear the uniform and do the job; just show up every day excited to wear that uniform. Matt was just excited to get to be a Marine. To take off his uniform drenched in sweat and dirt, sore from trudging up hills carrying a machine gun. That was a good day to Matt.
It’s tough to call him anything close to an example of a window into what the Marine Corps was like during our era because Abbate was truly one in 10 million. I don’t know how many Marines served in the GWOT, but in that 20 years, there are only a few other dudes that had the impact on the people around him and the larger-than-life impact in the day to day. His exemplary character, attitude and performance in everything he did had so much gravity. Everyone who served with him on a day-to-day basis knew this guy was what you think of when you think ‘real Marine.’ When I say ‘real Marine,’ I don’t mean textbook recruiting poster, handsome, barrel-chested, shaved face dude. I mean absolute f—king killer, that’s a libo risk, that takes care of his dudes and leads from the front.
Jake: Matt taught me that you have to love your subordinates, whether you like them or not. He took every opportunity to train hard. He was the epitome of a Marine. He set the standard that I strive to reach, both through my time in the Marines and my current career in law enforcement. The lessons that I learned by watching Matt have shaped my entire adult life. I count myself very fortunate to have known him.
Author’s note: Matt Abbate was 26 years old at the time of his death. He is survived by his wife, Stacie Rigall, his son, Carson Abbate, his mother, father and three siblings.
A U.S. Marine Corps carry team transfers the remains of Marine Sgt. Matthew T. Abbate of Honolulu, Hawaii., at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Dec. 4, 2010. Abbate was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif. (U.S. Air Force photo by Jason Minto)
Major Gen. Ronald L. Bailey, commanding general, 1st Marine Division, presents the Navy Cross to Sgt. Matthew T. Abbate’s mother during a Navy Cross award ceremony aboard Camp Pendleton, Calif., Aug. 10. Abbate was posthumously awarded the medal for the actions he took on Oct. 14, 2010 in Sangin, Afghanistan during his deployment as a scout sniper with Company K, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Abbate was killed in action in Helmand Province later that year.
Courtesy of Patrol Base Abbate
Featured Image (Top of page): Sniper Team “Banshee Three” at Patrol Base Fires, Sangin, Afghanistan, during their 2010 deployment with 3rd Bn, 5th Marines. Sgt Matthew Abbate, wearing a tan bandana, is holding the left side of the flag. Abbate’s story was shared with Leatherneck by several Marines including Sgt Britt Sully, standing far left, Sgt Jake Ruiz, holding the right side of the flag, and then-Sgt John Browning, kneeling, front right. Etched into the wall behind them is the sniper team’s running tally of confirmed kills during their deployment.
Author’s bio: Kyle Watts is the staff writer for Leatherneck. He served on active duty in the Marine Corps as a communications officer from 2009-2013. He is the winner of the Robert Debs Heinl Jr. award for Marine Corps History. He lives in Richmond with his wife and three children.
The Iraq war didn’t go as planned for Jerod Murphy, but it started out the way any Marine might have hoped. He was there at the very beginning. He deployed in 2003 as the maintenance chief of 3rd Platoon (Reinforced), Company A, 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion (AABn).
Being the only active-duty member of the unit’s Inspector-Instructor (I&I) staff assigned to 3rd Platoon, Murphy felt especially responsible for the reservists who were alongside him. The amtrackers staged in Kuwait with thousands of Marines and other U.S. servicemembers massed for invasion. On March 20, the Marines finally cranked up their tracks and pushed across the border into Iraq.
Murphy’s war lasted six days. His platoon’s amphibious assault vehicles (AAVs) rolled through Nasiriyah laden with infantry, and by the 26th, battled insurgents in Al-Shatrah. Murphy stood in a cargo hatch, fighting partially exposed above the roofline of the vehicle when a bullet shattered his arm. The injury required evacuation back to the States, where Murphy begrudgingly convalesced and assumed a new role supporting the war on the homefront.
His job looked much like a World War II-style “war bond tour” with travel and public speaking. Local news agencies touted Murphy as the first Mississippian wounded in Iraq. He obediently smiled, waved and shook hands. No one seemed to care he wasn’t from Mississippi. Murphy adopted the role as the primary point of contact with the families of Marines still deployed. He earned their trust and admiration despite the stories he fabricated to convince families their loved ones were safe overseas.
Fast forward two years, Murphy’s morale reached an all-time low. The intervening time improved little about his situation. His arm refused to properly heal. His hand worked but felt minimal sensation even after a major surgery on his ulnar nerve. He pushed himself to get back into fighting shape, but regular running caused shin splints. Shin splints evolved into stress fractures.
When the unit activated again for deployment, the officers in charge refused to let Murphy come along. For the second time in as many years, the disgruntled staff sergeant would spend a combat deployment trapped at platoon headquarters in Gulfport, Miss. Seventy amtrackers from the battalion returned to Iraq in March 2005. Given his experience with the families, Murphy led the battalion’s Casualty Assistance Program, acting as the link between the Marines in combat and their families. His duties included the heartrending task of notifying spouses, siblings, mothers and fathers when their Marine was injured or killed. Tragically, he kept busy.
The unit deployed in support of a reserve infantry battalion: 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines. Anyone familiar with the Iraq war remembers this deployment, where 3/25 suffered staggering and historic losses. The Marines from 4th AABn ferrying the grunts around the battlefield were not immune.
On Aug. 1, Staff Sergeant Shannon Sweeney arrived at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport. An armorer by trade, Sweeney had recently wrapped up several years as a recruiter in Montgomery, Ala. Her new orders placed her on I&I duty with Murphy, serving as the chief armorer for the Marines working on the naval base. Two days after she came on deck, Aug. 3, 2005, tragedy struck in Iraq. One of the platoon’s AAVs detonated a roadside bomb near Haditha, killing 15 of the 16 men inside. The incident remains the deadliest attack of the war. Three amtrackers died in the explosion. A fourth, the driver, survived after the explosion ejected him through his hatch, landing in the road a few dozen feet away.
Word of the disaster raced back to Gulfport. Murphy enlisted Sweeney and several others to aid in his casualty assistance duties. Murphy knew each of the amtrackers killed or wounded, one of whom he had personally recruited to join the unit. A shockwave jolted the entire community as the Marines traveled from home to home through Mississippi and Louisiana speaking to families. Numerous others reached out to Murphy as their one and only trusted link to their son or brother still in combat. No stories about Iraq could be fabricated now to make them feel better. Everyone stood on edge, dreading every phone call or knock on the door.
One week later, another potential disaster brewed beyond the horizon. A tropical storm took shape over the Atlantic, barreling past the Lesser Antilles toward the East Coast of the United States. The storm increased to a Category 2 hurricane on an uncertain path. Murphy paused the work coordinating funerals to stand up a quick reaction team in the event the storm made landfall.
Gulfport, Miss., September 6, 2005 — Destroyed houses in Gulfport, Miss. Hurricane Katrina caused extensive damage all along the Mississippi gulf coast. FEMA/Mark Wolfe
“I volunteered for the react team when I got to the unit several years earlier,” Murphy remembered today. “As one of the only amtrackers on the permanent I&I staff, I just felt like I was one of the only ones who could be available on a sustained basis. SOPs existed on how the team should operate, but they were written a long time prior and there had never been an actual incident that required the deployment of Marine Corps assets. Every time we stood this team up for whatever hurricane was coming through, we took it serious initially, but then we kind of realized that we basically just went down to the ramp with the tracks and played cards for a day or two. Nothing happened, then we went home. That happened probably four or five times while I was there.”
With the unit deployed, a skeleton crew remained behind in Gulfport. Even fewer of the Marines left were licensed to drive an AAV or had even been inside of one. Assembling a technically qualified team would be impossible. Murphy tapped Sweeney to join him. The fact that she was brand new to the unit and an armorer, completely unfamiliar with AAVs, meant little. The fact that she was a female, at the time still barred from service in combat arms, including AAVs, meant even less. She was a Marine, and a competent staff noncommissioned officer. Murphy would teach her whatever she needed to know. Within a day or two, the hurricane swerved back out to sea and dissipated, avoiding the continent entirely. The reaction team stood down. Murphy and Sweeney rejoined the others in the casualty assistance office.
In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, AAVs were the only vehicles capable of traversing the devastated and submerged landscape of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast region. Recognizing this fact, the Marine team in Gulfport set out into the storm on the night of Aug. 29. (Photo courtesy of Shannon Sweeney)
Work with the families continued. Sweeney stayed so busy that after more than three weeks in Gulfport, she had not found the opportunity to enter the armory she was sent to administer. None of the Marines paid much attention on Aug. 25 when another hurricane made landfall more than 600 miles away on the east coast of Florida. Barely a Category 1, computer models varied on the path it might take. The storm tore across the peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico and intensified over the warm waters. The hurricane grew into a Category 5 monster with sustained winds of up to 175 miles per hour, one of the strongest recorded hurricanes ever to enter the Gulf. Models shifted and aligned. Everything pointed to a second landfall in Louisiana. President George W. Bush declared a state of emergency along the Gulf Coast. The mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city, stating, “We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared.” By Aug. 28, every Marine and Sailor stationed in Gulfport knew the hurricane by name: Katrina. Murphy dropped all other duties to form another reaction team.
He needed six total, three Marines apiece to fill out two amtrac crews. Sweeney joined up just as she had earlier in the month. Like Murphy, another Marine staff sergeant remained at the base healing after his leg was broken in a motorcycle accident. Like Sweeney, he had zero AAV experience, but as a communications Marine, he could work the radios. Two brand new privates first class had just graduated from their military occupational specialty schools and checked into the platoon. One was a mechanic and the other, by sheer luck, was an AAV crewman who was licensed to drive. With five down and one to go, Murphy racked his brain. The Marine detachment at the base was spread so thin that there was not a single additional leatherneck available. Finally, he called his neighbor, a U.S. Navy Seabee assigned to Gulfport. Murphy discovered the Sailor was ordered to remain behind on a working party after his family evacuated. Murphy visited the base commander and negotiated his neighbor’s release, embellishing the Sailor’s AAV experience. He had, after all, brought his kids to climb over the vehicles a time or two, which made him more experienced than most others left.
On the second day of their rescue mission, Aug. 30, 2005, the AAVs of Murphy’s team weave their way through Pass Christian, Miss. Pass Christian endured the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, maxing out at nearly 28 feet high. (Photo courtesy of Shannon Sweeney)
Katrina slammed into Louisiana on Aug. 29. Murphy staged the team’s two AAVs inside the structure that housed the base’s hurricane command post. He attended all the briefings. None of the Seabees seemed to understand the capability the Marines and their amphibious machines could offer. Meanwhile, the storm raged.
“I am from Ohio; the biggest thing I’d ever seen was a snowstorm,” Sweeney mused today. “The wind started picking up. We could see the commissary from where we were. The cars in the parking lot got rocked. Windows were busted out. Eventually, the roof was blown off. That’s when I knew this was for real. We were going to have to go to work.”
Murphy argued the case for deploying his team. All the Marines felt obligated to go out into the storm and help in the way that only they could. Murphy especially, having lived and worked in the area for nearly five years, felt compelled to assist his community. With power lines coming down, buildings collapsing, wind howling and water rising, the AAVs remained the only vehicle still able to negotiate the area. The base CO flatly refused. No one was leaving the command post. Hours ticked by into the evening as the eye of the hurricane passed over the Mississippi coastline. Finally, an official call for help arrived.
“I don’t remember if our cell phone coverage was dead yet, but the CO had some kind of contact with the police department in Biloxi, which was the city about 15 miles to our east,” Murphy said. “The messages we were getting from Biloxi were like, ‘hey, we’ve got people hanging out in trees over here and we can’t get to them.’ I overheard all of this and approached the CO while he was figuring out how we could respond or if we could respond at all. I told him, ‘Sir, I’ll pick my team up and we can go right now.’ Finally, he gave us permission to go. His condition, though, was that no one else was leaving the command post and literally gave us the keys to the base gate. We were on our own and we took off.”
The team exited the base headed east along Pass Road, a main thoroughfare into Biloxi. Winds up to 100 miles per hour pummeled the 30-ton machines as they crawled through an unrecognizable debris field. Rain battered Murphy’s face as he peeked through a crack in his hatch, driving into the dark. The AAVs splashed through tides fluctuating up to 8 feet across the already flooded urban landscape.
“It was the middle of the night, the winds were high, the waves were coming in,” Sweeney remembered. “It was for real like a movie. It was just crazy to go out there and see what water and wind can do to property.”
They finally reached the Biloxi police department headquarters, where officers came on board. They directed Murphy several blocks farther east into areas of the city totally inaccessible before the Marines arrived. Murphy weaved into the area. Suddenly, despite the winds and rain, the overpowering reek of natural gas smacked him in the face. He halted in the road, imagining all the sparks his tracked vehicles made while traveling on a paved surface. Through the storm ahead, he could see people, stuck and waiting for someone to save them.
“When you’re in Iraq doing a convoy or something, you get that serious pucker factor,” said Murphy. “That’s how this was. But at the same time, we could physically see people in despair so it’s not like we were ever going to stop doing whatever we were going to do. We couldn’t get over there on foot, or else we were going to wind up in the trees with everybody else. So, what do we do? All of my decisions were based on some-what-informed guesses that, thank God, happened to work out.”
Murphy ordered the police out of his AAV into the other vehicle behind him. Sweeney and Murphy’s neighbor volunteered to remain with him in the lead vehicle as he drove alone over the remains of houses toward the victims. All three buttoned up inside, praying that nothing would ignite the gas. They rescued victims one or two at a time until they arrived outside a Vietnamese Buddhist temple. The people who met him spoke no English, but Murphy quick-ly surmised that a large group had gathered inside. He filled the amtrac to capacity and returned to the other vehicle staged at the police station. Once the civilians offloaded into the care of first responders at the station, the AAV crew immediately turned around heading back into the area.
For the next several hours, Murphy drove trip after trip with Sweeney and his Seabee neighbor, evacuating the Buddhist temple. Once completed, they moved on to other areas farther east searching for anyone else stranded in the storm.
“With the wind, we were worried about getting smashed in the face by something, so we kept our comm helmets on just in case,” said Murphy. “But we were very serious about clearing everything. We came across this freaking reptile museum thing. I knew it had snakes and stuff in there. I f—king hate snakes. I hate them! But I had to go in there. I’m wading through water up to my nipples imagining the worst-case scenario. Not only do I have to go looking for people in this snake house, the damn things could be floating right up to my face! I went in there, but I was NOT happy about it. But I also knew that we had to go make sure, and I wasn’t going to force anybody else to do it.”
Throughout the night, the two Marine amtracs remained the only rescue vehicles operating in the entire area. They encountered their first body outside a casino. Mercifully, the living they encountered far outnumbered the dead. By the end of the night, Murphy’s team searched all the worst affected areas from Biloxi Bay all the way back to Gulfport, rescuing nearly 150 civilians. The two AAVs pulled back through the gate at the Seabee base well after midnight.
The team crashed for a few hours of well-deserved rest. Murphy rose with the sun to attend the next briefing from the base commander. By the morning of Aug. 30, Katrina pushed north of Gulfport, a pristine blue sky left in her wake. The trail of extraordinary ruination attested to her warpath. Through the night, more calls for assistance poured in. To the west, leaders from Pass Christian sounded the alarm over citizens trapped, the majority of whom resided in a waterfront senior living facility. Murphy’s team saddled up.
On day two of the rescue mission, Shannon Sweeney sits on top of an AAV on the beach in Pass Christian, Miss. Jerod Murphy sits in the driver’s seat of the AAV in the background.
With the water greatly receded and the storm abated, the amtracs covered ground more quickly. Still, the rubble-strewn streets severely hindered progress. Future analysis of the storm would later reveal an unfortunate distinction for Pass Christian. The small town endured the worst part of Katrina’s storm surge, maxing out nearly 28 feet high. As a result, almost every structure lay in complete devastation. Cars and boats and pieces of buildings filled every street and yard. Power lines tangled the mess together, with sewage overflowing to contaminate the water. The Marines found numerous civilians in Pass Christian, not trapped, but having already returned to their homes only to find them vanished overnight. The team passed out case after case of water bottles to them all, now destitute and dehydrated.
The local chiefs of fire and police came onboard to help the amtracs navigate to the senior living facility. The complex stood in a marshy area on Henderson Point at the mouth of the Bay of St. Louis. According to the locals, the entire first floor was completely destroyed, and the facility had not been evacuated before the storm hit. Even in AAVs, the Marines couldn’t reach the site. Murphy explored multiple paths into the area, but an opening refused to yield.
“I was looking at the map and realized we were going to have to go out into the open water. That was our only way to get there,” Murphy said. “I know that’s what these AAVs are designed for, but I didn’t have time to do a pre-water op check to make sure they would actually float. And even if we found something, what’s that going to change? So, we just made sure there were hull plugs in the bottom and that the bilge pumps worked, then we took off.”
The AAVs pushed through debris-filled water around Henderson Point. The wreckage of the St. Louis Bay Bridge loomed ahead. Two days earlier, the bridge linked the 2-mile gap across the mouth of the bay. Now, huge spans of concrete angled out of the water against regularly spaced pillars like a row of fallen dominoes. The amtracs conducted an amphibious landing up the sandy beach in front of the facility and stopped outside the front door. The Marines spent the remainder of the morning evacuating residents of the home and searching the marsh around it for any other victims.
As the rescue mission in Pass Christian wound down, Murphy received a call from the command post. The CO needed a radio retransmission site established to support his communications network. He selected the roof of the U.S. government-sponsored Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport as the ideal spot. The tracks rolled up to the building in the late afternoon. While the Marines set up antennas and comm equipment on the roof, Murphy checked in with the retirement home staff and residents.
Throughout his time in Gulfport, Murphy remained in close contact with the facility, visiting routinely to meet the veterans who lived there. He learned from the staff that through the night, the first floor flooded, and residents were evacuated to the higher floors. Through the chaotic process, conducted in dark-ness while the hurricane raged, two residents fell down the stairs sustaining critical injuries. After the comm gear was installed, Murphy directed his team to load the injured victims on stretchers into the tracks, along with several others suffering from heat exhaustion. The Marines evacuated the casualties to a nearby hospital. Bewildered staff watched the amphibious monsters roll right up to the awning designated for ambulance entrance to the emergency room.
Jerod Murphy drives an AAV through the open water around Henderson Point in order to reach a senior living facility in Pass Christian, Miss. The ruins of the St. Louis Bay Bridge can be seen in the background.
“The best part of that day was when we were offloading those guys,” remembered Murphy. “One of them, an old World War II Marine looked at me and said, ‘Man, I always wanted to ride in one of those things, so thank you!’ ”
The team returned once more to the command post. By the end of day two, they rescued more than 70 additional victims, their total now well over 200 in barely more than 24 hours. Word of their staggering feat failed to impress or failed to reach beyond the city of Gulfport, however. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) arrived on scene, took control of the disaster response, and shut down all Department of Defense rescue efforts.
Murphy loaded the team up again the following day and drove the AAVs down Interstate 10 into Louisiana to where FEMA organized their command. With news reports of looters on the rise and police being shot in New Orleans, Sweeney opened her armory, finally seeing it for the first time, and issued sidearms to each member of the team before they departed. Now several days into the hurricane response, the urgent rescue efforts transitioned into a methodical recovery. FEMA wielded strict control and accounting over every search and recovery asset. They assigned the Marines to link up with an urban search- and-rescue team out of Virginia to search areas along the coast in western Mississippi, through Waveland and Bay St. Louis. The tracks got them into the area, but the searching had to be done on foot.
“We were wading through mud and filth up to our waist with sticks trying to figure out if we were stepping on bodies in the mud beneath us,” Murphy said. “It was pretty gross. We did that for hours. I remember getting down to the shore where a row of trees extended all the way to the beach. There was a line of trash across the top of every single tree where the waterline had risen. We had been out in some high water and saw it for ourselves, but seeing that was like, holy cow, I couldn’t believe it.”
“I think the hardest part for me was seeing people coming back and trying to find what would have been their property, but there was nothing there,” added Sweeney. “Stuff was everywhere; a door frame hanging from a tree, an exhumed casket washed up somewhere. People were trying to sift through all of that, and we were trying to help them get to it as best we could.”
After a few days of searching, Murphy learned that additional 4th AABn assets were finally involved in the effort. Apparently, word of their exploits and capabilities got around and FEMA called for additional AAVs. The battalion’s Company B loaded numerous tracks onto trailers at their home base in Jacksonville, Fla., and trucked into New Orleans. With more DOD personnel on scene, Murphy requested to stand down his exhausted team. They hardly showered or slept in more than 96 hours. They had yet to check on their own homes and loved ones. The battalion commander told Murphy to send his team home to take care of their families. Their job was finished.
Jerod Murphy drives an AAV through the open water around Henderson Point in order to reach a senior living facility in Pass Christian, Miss. The ruins of the St. Louis Bay Bridge can be seen in the background.
Murphy drove home to his family in North Carolina. The visit was extremely short-lived. His job had only just begun. Before Katrina hit, he and Sweeney worked tirelessly to visit families and calm their fears, worried sick over the Marines in Iraq. Now, fortunes abruptly reversed. Messages poured into Gulfport from the Marines overseas, unable to contact their families. Halfway around the world, they saw the pictures and knew Katrina was bad. They feared the worst for their loved ones scattered across the impacted area. Murphy and Sweeney took on the task of visiting them all once again.
“The second we stood down, our focus shifted to driving to every single one of those 70 reservists’ families,” said Murphy. “We had to let the boys know their families were OK. That took a long time. We took chainsaws with us and things like that and did whatever we could to reach them. Thank God, no big issues with any families. We felt it was super important to get that information back to them after the losses they suffered at the beginning of the month.”
The Gulf Coast’s recovery after Katrina would take many years to return to a version of normalcy. Through the remainder of 2005, the region remained in a state of shock and desolation. Nothing about life endured unaffected, but life continued on. That fall, officers over the region named Sweeney as the lead coordinator of the Toys for Tots campaign based out of Gulfport. Always a tremendous undertaking, even under normal circumstances, how could toys be collected and distributed through such a ravaged area?
“The short story is that we just did it,” Sweeney reflected. “I’ll tell you one thing, as screwed up as this United States can be, we can really come together.”
Tractor trailers full of toys offloaded in Gulfport every day from across the nation. If they ran short, Sweeney drove an hour north to the Toys R Us in Hattiesburg to boost their stock. The Marines returned from Iraq in October and became Sweeney’s elves in the operation. Numerous nonprofit organizations set up stations from Pass Christian to Biloxi, passing out toys and provisions.
“The Toys for Tots Foundation gave me $50,000 to host a Christmas party,” Sweeney said. “I had no idea how or where they wanted me to pull that off. Our unit had some ‘good ol’ boy’ networks, and we found an indoor skate rink in Biloxi that didn’t really get damaged, so I threw a party in there. Schools were back in session, meeting in trailers. I printed off a ton of tickets at the office and handed them out to all the trailers. We brought in a ton of toys and a Marine dressed as Santa. Everyone got Subway, a Coke and toys. Throughout the whole campaign, we handed out over 90,000 toys and books. We didn’t turn anyone away and everyone was grateful.”
In December 2005, each member of the reaction team received the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. The Corps also announced that all Marines involved in disaster relief efforts after Katrina would rate the Humanitarian Service Medal and the Armed Forces Service Medal. Sweeney was honored with a more prestigious recognition the following summer. For the combination of her rescue efforts with the reaction team and her critical role in the successful Toys for Tots campaign benefiting the devastated area, Sweeney received the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service. She accepted the award presented by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Founda-tion in Washington, D.C., alongside four other recipients, one medal presented to a nominee from each branch of service. Sweeney retired in 2019 after 30 years of service. She achieved the rank of master gunnery sergeant, the first female in her MOS to earn this highest rank.
For her role on the reaction team in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and for her role leading the 2005 Toys for Tots campaign benefitting the devastated region, then-SSgt Shannon Sweeney received the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service. Standing left of center, Sweeney received the award along with one recipient from each branch of service at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Murphy was selected for warrant officer in late 2005. He moved to Quantico, Va., to attend The Basic School in February 2006. While there, he too learned that others had nominated him for a higher personal decoration. In a ceremony in front of his classmates, an officer pre-sented Murphy with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the highest noncombat decoration awarded for heroism that a Marine or Sailor can receive. He later learned that no one within his 4th AABn chain of command outside of Gulfport even knew his team was operating until after the second day. The officer who penned his award citation confided that he was instructed to either write up Murphy’s initiative for a medal or write up his freelancing for an Article 32 investigation. Murphy eventually retired from the Marine Corps in 2020 as a chief warrant officer 4.
Today, 20 years later, the actions of Murphy’s team in the aftermath of Hur-ricane Katrina remain a preeminent, and perhaps unparalleled example of Marines on the homefront being exactly who the American public expects us to be. The 33rd Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Michael Hagee, personally called attention to the Marines who responded to natural disasters in 2005 in his Marine Corps birthday message that November.
“This past year has been one of con-tinuous combat operations overseas and distinguished service here at home … In Iraq and Afghanistan, Marine courage and mastery of complex and chaotic environments have truly made a difference in the lives of millions. Marine compas-sion and flexibility provided humanitarian assistance to thousands in the wake of the Southeast Asian tsunami, and here at home, Marines with AAVs, helicopters, and sometimes with their bare hands saved hundreds of our own fellow Americans in the wake of Hur-ricanes Katrina and Rita. Across the full spectrum of operations, you have show-cased that Marines create stability in an unstable world and have reinforced our Corps’ reputation for setting the standard of excellence.”
“There was no game plan for what we did at all,” Sweeney reflected. “We just had to go out as a team and do what we had to do to help the folks of Mississippi along that 26-mile stretch of Gulf Coast. Witnessing something like that, you start to view things differently. You cherish things more. You care for what you have. Over the years, the higher in rank I got, I always tried to make sure that my Marines and their families were taken care of. We are all part of the puzzle and have to be ready.”
Author’s bio: Kyle Watts is the staff writer for Leatherneck. He served on active duty in the Marine Corps as a communications officer from 2009-13. He is the 2019 winner of the Colonel Robert Debs Heinl Jr. Award for Marine Corps History. He lives in Richmond, Va., with his wife and three children.
Featured Image (Top): Marine AAVs conduct an amphibious landing in Pass Christian, Miss., to rescue civilians stranded at a senior living facility on the shore at the mouth of Bay of St. Louis. The building proved completely inaccessible by land, even for AAVs, requiring the Marines to utilize the vehicle’s unique amphibious capability. (Photo courtesy of Shannon Sweeney)
It was all but over in 100 hours. Saddam Hussein, in his bunker, still babbled something about his army’s might, but few were listening. America and its allies had decapitated him from his army so quickly that the head in Baghdad didn’t want to realize it had been severed.
Pilots who strafed and bombed vehicles fleeing via the road west of Kuwait City called it the “Highway of Death.” In this photo taken in March 1991, remnants of the Iraqi army, most with loot stolen from Kuwait, died in their vehicles as American and coalition aircraft awaited their turn to unleash their ordnance. (Photo courtesy of BGen Granville Amos)
Heaps of Iraqi corpses were being interred in mass graves (estimates of Iraqi casualties range from 85,000 to 100,000) throughout the desert littered with 3,700 tanks, 1,875 armored vehicles and 2,140 artillery pieces burned or abandoned. Groups of Iraq’s best roamed the desert, dazed, hungry, thirsty, humble and pathetic, looking for someone, any-one, to surrender to. Allied estimates say that as many as 150,000 prisoners nearly overwhelmed allied holding areas and flooded military medical facilities to have their wounds treated. Still others, who deserted the officers who had failed them, headed north to home, having had enough of Saddam’s military adventures.
They had fought eight years of war with Iran and gained nothing. They had faced the Americans and their allies and, under six weeks of constant air bombardment (approximately 102,000 allied sorties), capped by four days of lightning-quick war, lost everything, including their pride and honor.
The military architect of what has a high probability of becoming the most studied battle of modern times was Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who also drew up the basic operational order for the ground war in Europe that never came. It called for feints, envelopments, bold tactics, deception and modern equipment operated by professional, thinking warriors. In the Persian Gulf, GEN Schwarzkopf modified the plan to call for shock troops to charge head-on into the maw of heavily fortified enemy defenses, while his heavy armor made a “Hail Mary” sweep around. It called for Marines.
Marines bristled with more firepower than they would need for the invasion of Kuwait. Gun crews had run countless drills prior to breaching Iraqi lines at the Saudi border.
In what newsmen have facetiously called the “mother of all briefings,” given by GEN Schwarzkopf in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 27, the commander of Operation Desert Storm forces praised all of his units, but particularly the Marines who, in a matter of hours, not only breached the enemy defenses, but also blew halfway through Kuwait in the process.
“I can’t say enough about the two Marine divisions,” said the general about the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions who worked in tandem for the first time in history. “If I use words like ‘brilliant,’ it would really be an under-description of the absolute superb job that they did in breaching the so-called impenetrable barrier. It was a classic, absolutely classic military breaching of a very, very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier. They went through the first barrier like it was water. They went across into the second barrier line, even though they were under artillery fire at the same time. They continued to open up the breach. And then they brought both divisions streaming through that breach. Absolutely superb operation, a textbook, and I think it’ll be studied for many, many years to come as the way to do it.”
Later, when a reporter asked if the defenses the Marines went through were perhaps overrated in the first place, GEN Schwarzkopf shot back, “Have you ever been in a minefield?” The stunned pundit answered that he had not.
A Marine M1A1 Abrams tank equipped with a mine-clearing plow pushes into Kuwait past an abandoned, shrapnel-riddled truck.
“All there’s got to be is one mine, and that’s intense,” the general scolded. “There were plenty of mines out there, there was plenty of barbed wire, there were fire trenches, most of which we set off ahead of time, but there are still some that are out there. … There were a lot of booby traps … not a fun place to be. I got to tell you, probably one of the toughest things that anyone ever has to do is go up there and walk into something like that and through it and consider that while you’re going through it and clearing it, at the same time, you are probably under fire by enemy artillery. That’s all I can say.”
It was enough.
Marines, with Kuwaiti and Saudi forces, had been in their traditional forefront role on Feb. 24 as more than 200,000 allied troops made a blitzkrieg into Iraq and Kuwait after President George H.W. Bush’s deadline of high noon passed, having been arrogantly ignored by Saddam Hussein and his followers.
It was another in a series of gross miscalculations by the man who many Marines have dubbed as the “Bozo of Baghdad.” In this case, it effectively ended any chance of an 11th-hour settlement and spelled the end of Saddam’s prized, fourth-largest army in the world. President Bush said, in effect, that the time for lame speeches was over and that talking from now on would come from the business end of allied howitzers.
What may have been, according to many military experts, the best planned and most perfectly executed massive assault in history caused detractors of Americans and their allies to retreat to the drawing boards. Analysts say the Soviet military, who heavily equipped, supplied and trained the Iraqis, will certainly have to rethink their methods and re-examine their weaponry. The doomsayers such as one congressman, who in late February confidently predicted 30,000 to 40,000 allied casualties, have been silenced for now, like Iraqi gun positions along the Saudi border. As with the start of the air war on Jan. 16, it immediately became apparent that the ground assault was nothing short of a total success.
Marines go over the top of a sand berm into Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, Feb. 24, 1991
The Marines had made a predawn assault at 4 a.m. on Feb. 24. Lieutenant General Walter Boomer, Commanding General, I Marine Expeditionary Force, said that 30 minutes after the invasion started, Marines had overrun the mine-fields, barbed wire and other obstacles of Saddam’s highly touted “walls of death.” In less than six hours, members of the First and Second Marine Divisions with the Tiger Brigade of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Division had cleared eight lanes through the minefields, sliced through the Iraqi defenses and waded through a 35-mile sea of surrendering Iraqi soldiers.
Marine combat correspondent Staff Sergeant Ken Pettigrew was with the assault as the 2ndMarDiv moved, caravan fashion, into Kuwait and reported his experience:
“Moving delicately through the narrow breaching area (wide enough for one vehicle), the 65 tracked and wheeled vehicles passed through a minefield, well-marked with signs and strands of barbed wire.
“Line charges had been used by engi-neers to clear the way. Ugly plumes of black smoke billowed from burning oil rigs; the flames of these wells were an unpleasant yellow. Acrid and perhaps toxic fumes dirtied noses, choked the lungs and squeezed the temples. The dirty sky looked like someone had put carbon paper over it, giving everything a dull, ugly appearance. Low-flying birds skimmed along the road, perhaps attracted by the MRE (meals, ready to eat) trail left behind the convoy.
“The vehicles were 10 to 200 meters from each other, depending on the terrain and hazards. Just north of the border was a burnt, abandoned commercial vehicle, perhaps a casualty of the country’s civilian exodus. Several hundred Iraqi soldiers were spotted walking in formation. They were the first prisoners and among them were a general and a colonel.
“The morale of the Marines was high. They wanted to liberate this tiny country and then head back to Camp Lejeune.”
It was Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy, updated with high mobility, air, armor and other modern-day weaponry and tactics up against a mustachioed gangster, pseudo-tactician playing World War I trench warfare in his version of World War II’s Maginot Line.
“As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist,” sneered GEN Schwarzkopf at his briefing, “he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man.”
Iraqi POWs who surrendered to Marines of Task Force Shepherd are kept warm and under guard while their weapons and personal documents are inspected.
Saddam’s oath to make the allies swim in their own blood and of making the earth burn beneath their feet was only talk. As the ground war started, the bully of Baghdad abandoned the Palestine Liberation Organization and others who had befriended him, as well as his own troops, while his lackeys over the “Mother of Battles” radio reassured Arabs that his army was winning the jihad (holy war). His forces knew better. They surrendered in waves that almost overwhelmed the allies. In many instances, they were gunned down or beheaded by their own officers or execution squads. The military leadership, unable to face the onslaught and before fleeing north without their troops, took to torching nearly 600 Kuwaiti oil wells which oil-fire expert Paul Neal “Red” Adair estimated would take more than two years to snuff out. They then set out to rape, pillage and murder residents of the capital, Kuwait City, before escaping and reportedly hiding behind thousands of Kuwaiti male hostages.
“The mother of battles has turned into one mother of a corner for Saddam Hussein,” said one television commentator. Indeed. Allied forces stopped count-ing Iraqi prisoners when in two days their numbers exceeded 26,000, according to Marine Brigadier General Richard I. Neal, Deputy Director of Operations, U.S. Central Command, in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The number was estimated to be more than 35,000 the next day. There were so many that American soldiers joked that Iraqi soldiers needed to take a ticket number to surrender.
“There were a very, very large number of dead in these units, a very large number of dead,” explained Schwarzkopf. “We even found them when we went into the units ourselves and found them in the trenches. There were very heavy desertions. At one point, we had reports of desertion rates of more than 30 percent of the units that were along the front. As you know, we had quite a large number of POWs [prisoners of war] that came across, and so I think it’s a combination of desertions, people that were killed, people that were captured and some other people who are just flat still running.”
Thick black smoke fills the sky as oil wells burn out of control in the al-Wafrah Forest, set ablaze by retreating Iraqi forces. The toxic plumes posed serious health risks, causing respiratory issues for many Marines involved in the liberation of Kuwait. (Photo by TSgt Perry Heimer, USAF)
“They look like little ants in a row, coming from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich somebody left on the ground,” said Captain John Sizemore, a pilot who watched the trail of prisoners from above the desert. Most were conscripts of the Iraqi Popular Army. In one case, Marines came upon a soldier who, dressed in Bermuda shorts and wearing a Chicago Bears T-shirt, said to them in English any American would understand, “Gee, guys, where the hell have you been?” It turned out he’d been an Iraqi student in Chicago, Ill., who’d gone to Baghdad to see his grandmother, only to be pressed into service in the Iraqi army.
A Marine had his high-mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle stuck in the sand and saw an Iraqi tank rolling toward him. Thinking he was going to die, he watched as an enemy tank crewman jumped out, hooked the Humvee to the tank, towed it from the rut and then, with the rest of his crew, politely surrendered to a very relieved young man.
Those few who chose to fight were simply outgunned. Marine M1 Abrams and M60 tanks, tracked landing vehicles, light armored vehicles (LAVs), Humvees mounted with tube launched, optically tracked, wire command link, guided missiles (TOWs), AH-IW Sea Cobra helicopter gunships, OV-10 Bronco spotter aircraft and AV-SB Harrier, A-6 Intruder and F-18 Hornet attack jets shot across the desert with power and speed that stunned and devastated the Iraqis. Those Iraqis who did fight mounted a battle formation of 80 tanks only to have three-quarters of them pulverized. Cluster bombs blew 50-foot craters, and incoming 155 mm and 8-inch artillery shells created a vacuum noise as they fell, sending the crescendo of impact and shock waves across the desert floor. “Hellfire” missiles slammed home in blinding blasts and sent jagged parts of Soviet-made T-55 and T-62 tanks flying like so many pieces of shrapnel in every direction. Those few Iraqis who didn’t join the ranks of prisoners or run from the battle died.
Marines load AGM-88A high-speed anti-radiation missiles under the wings of an F/A-18A Hornet of VMFA-451 during Operation Desert Storm. Allied forces flew an estimated 102,000 sorties during six weeks of constant air bombardment.
“If we had another 12 hours of daylight, most of the forces inside Kuwait would have given up,” said another Marine at the end of the first day. One Marine jumped from his truck deep in Kuwait and shouted, laughing, “Oh man, I love this. Isn’t this great? I’m gonna re-enlist!” It did seem too easy. Most found it hard not to share the Marine’s exuberance; however, many cautiously waited for the proverbial “other shoe to fall.” It never did. The advance through eastern Kuwait was so far ahead of schedule that approximately 18,000 Marines offshore with the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade seemingly had to settle for feints which kept several Iraqi divisions guess-ing where and when the amphibious assault would come.
GEN Schwarzkopf had never intended for them to land unless required later. “It became very apparent to us early on that the Iraqis were quite concerned about an amphibious operation across the shores to liberate Kuwait, this [pointing] being Kuwait City. They put a very, very heavy barrier of infantry along here [the coast] and they proceeded to build an extensive barrier that went all the way across the border, down and around, and up the side of Kuwait.”
Amphibious ships such as USS Nassau (LHA-4), loaded with Marines, waited offshore. They launched helicopters in assault formation without Marines to fool the Iraqis. The ruse worked.
“We continued heavy operations out in the sea because we wanted the Iraqis to continue to believe that we were going to conduct a massive amphibious operation in this area. And I think many of you [the media] recall the number of amphibious rehearsals we had, to include ‘Imminent Thunder’ that was written about quite extensively for many reasons,” GEN Schwarzkopf noted. The U.S. media, some of whom had willingly prostituted themselves as a propaganda vehicle in Baghdad, could hardly cry foul when they found that an American general had led them to believe a landing was inevitable. During the assault into Kuwait, several dozen Marine CH-53 and CH-46 helicopters from the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit flew in mock assault formation from their ships in the Gulf, confusing the Iraqis. In reality, there was literally little room for another major force on the battlefield. Between Kuwait and southern Iraq, the total combined forces of the allied coalition had the Iraqi military surrounded in an open desert the size of Texas.
Schwarzkopf went on. “Very early [January 16], we took on the Iraqi air force. We knew that [Saddam] had very limited reconnaissance means. And therefore, when we took out his air force, for all intents and purposes, we took out his ability to see what we were doing.
“Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what could best be described as the ‘Hail Mary’ play in football. We did a massive movement of troops all the way out to the west, to the extreme west, because at that time we knew he was still fixed in his area [southern Iraq and Kuwait] with the vast majority of his forces, and once the air campaign started, he would be incapable of moving out to counter this move, even if he knew we made it.”
By the end of the second day the U.S. Army, with French and British troops, had swept far west in an arc that reached its apex less than 150 miles from Baghdad. Kuwait City was abandoned by the Iraqis and left in the hands of the Kuwaiti resistance. South of the city, Marines were fighting an armored battle near the international airport.
It was there that the Iraqis sent 100 tanks including 50 of their top-of-the-line Soviet-made T-72s up against the aging, Marine M60 tanks. The battle lasted all day and into the night, and Iraqi tank survivors recalled swearing at their Soviet tank sights which in the dust and heat of battle proved useless. The battleships USS Wisconsin (BB-64) and USS Missouri (BB-63) fired their 16-inch guns, sending 2,000-pound Volkswagen-sized shells into the air-port. Hangars, terminals and tanks disintegrated, nearly vaporized. Marine tankers picked off the rest of the tanks whose crews were, according to Marine commanders, “literally jumping out of the tanks.” Marine and Army snipers dropped the rest.
Though it is the afternoon, the battlefield looks like midnight as an M60A1 Marine tank with Task Force Papa Bear advances through thick smoke. The sun is completely blocked by the black clouds rising from burning oil wells.
The plain around Kuwait City was a graveyard for Iraqi armor, “a field of burning tanks,” according to LtGen Boomer. Outside an oil field, the men of the 1stMarDiv cut off Iraqis who had just set fire to several wellheads. Against a backdrop of orange fires, black soot, burning vehicles and sand turning to glass, the Iraqis counterattacked. It was, figuratively speaking, a firefight in hell. “We fired on two gathering points, and it wasn’t 30 minutes before we scattered them like rabbits out of the bush,” said Major General J.M. “Mike” Myatt, commander of the 1stMarDiv. “The Cobras and LAVs had a field day.” The “hunter-killer” package of the Marine air/ground team continued to search out and destroy Iraqi equipment before it could be moved out of the area. In other action, a Marine commander reported that when Iraqi forces began attacking his troops, a wave of surrendering Iraqis attempted to surrender ahead of the firing. The Iraqis fired their Soviet-made “Frog” missiles, which fell short, killing their own troops. Meanwhile, 10 miles north of the airport at the abandoned U.S. Embassy, a scout force of Marines from 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company and Army Special Forces soldiers entered the compound. One servicemember, who refused to be identified, did what American fighting men have traditionally loved to do and raised the flag of his country on a make-shift staff. A few yards away, apparently unnoticed, the American flag left by U.S. Ambassador Nathaniel Howell, who stubbornly held out for more than four months before leaving in December, still flew over the compound and was still there when Edward “Skip” Gnehm, America’s new ambassador to a liberated Kuwait, arrived Feb. 28.
Marines waited in fighting holes for word to move up. Once the word came, they moved so quickly that in less than 100 hours, the war was over. On Feb. 27, Marine forces surrounded Kuwait City. They paused to allow the Arab forces, led by the Kuwaitis, the honor of liberating their city. The initial success had been nothing less than astounding. Not a single tank or armored vehicle had been lost. However, in the 72 hours since taking the offensive, five Marines had been killed and 48 wounded.
It is no secret that the allies expected their losses to be higher. With Iraqi air virtually eliminated at the start of the air war, the Iraqi army was pounded mercilessly for weeks, supplies were destroyed and, most importantly, Iraq’s command and control communications were severely degraded. Blind, without spotter ability, unable to come into the open and unable to regroup, the army was depleted by lack of food, water, fuel, supplies, intelligence and information. Eight years of war with Iran had tired them more than it had hardened them.
“You can have the best equipment in the world, you can have the largest numbers in the world,” said GEN Schwarzkopf, “but, if you’re not dedicated to your cause, if you don’t have the will to fight, then, you are not going to have a very good army. … Many people were deserting, and I think you’ve heard this, that the Iraqis brought down execution squads whose job was to shoot people.”
“I’ve got to tell you what: The soldier doesn’t fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him on his own whim. That’s not what military leadership is all about. I attribute a great deal of failure of the Iraqi army to fight to their own leadership. They committed them to a cause that they didn’t believe in. They were all saying that they didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to fight their fellow Arab. They were lied to. They were deceived. Then after they got there [Kuwait], they had leadership that were so uncaring for them that they didn’t properly feed them, give them water and, in the end, they kept them there only at the point of a gun.”
Only Saddam’s Republican Guard made any attempt to stand, and the all-powerful armor of the United States Army, with its French and British counterparts, had thundered across southern Iraq, sealing them off. They rolled so fast that Saddam’s promise to use chem-ical weapons remained as empty as his capacity for statesmanship. The U.S. Army and its allies, itching for haggling for a ceasefire as if in some Baghdad bazaar. His efforts fell on allied ears deafened by his previous lies and rhetoric.
His words could not be heard in Kuwait City where Arab forces and a jubilant population exploded in delirious joy that marked the end of seven brutal months of Iraqi occupation. Kuwaitis gleefully paraded a jackass, saying, “This is Saddam Hussein! This is Saddam Hussein!”
Kuwaiti soldiers, choked with emotion, sang their national anthem as they raised the green, white, red and black colors of their country. “Thank you! Thank you!” they screamed, waving almost as many red, white and blue American flags when Marines later entered the city.
A reunion took place between a Kuwaiti resistance fighter and his brother, a U.S. Marine who joined when Iraq invaded, when the Marine arrived in his hometown as part of the lead Marine units.
LtGen Boomer said, “It was a once in a lifetime experience. There are some things worth fighting for. When you see them regain their freedom and their joy at seeing them [the Iraqis] leave, it is quite a feeling. I’m glad we could be part of returning it to them.”
But there were also persistent rumors of atrocities and war crimes by the Iraqis who, many claimed, shot, tortured and raped their victims. Though some stories were later discounted, there was evidence of enough brutality to anger and dampen the spirits of victorious Kuwaitis, their Arab allies and other coalition forces. Reports of atrocities in the later stages of the war were, in part, reasons for GEN Schwarzkopf’s eagerness to see the Marines in Kuwait City.
“We’ve heard they took up to 40,000 [Kuwaiti hostages, but estimates have since downgraded the number to nearly 20,000],” he explained, “but that pales to insignificance compared to the absolutely unspeakable atrocities that occurred in Kuwait in the last week. They are not part of the same human race, the people that did that, the rest of us are. I’ve got to pray that’s the case.”
While it was high technology and sophisticated equipment that played a big part in this war, it still came down to individuals, skilled and trained in the professional military arts, to make it all work successfully.
GEN Schwarzkopf explained, “It is not a Nintendo game. It is a tough battlefield where people are risking their lives at all times … and we ought to be very, very proud of them. I would tell you that casualties of that order of magnitude … is almost miraculous as far as the light number of casualties. It will never be miraculous for the families of those people, but it is miraculous.”
And finally, the general credited his boss for providing the military with its most important weapon: trust and con-fidence. “I’m very thankful for the fact that the President of the United States has allowed the United States military and the coalition military to fight this war exactly as it should have been fought. And the President in every case has taken our guidance and our recommendations to heart and has acted superbly as the Commander in Chief of the United States.”
Featured Image (Top): Artillerymen of the 2ndMarDiv send the first rounds into Kuwait from their M198 155 mm howitzer, launching the offensive to free Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm.
