Since 12-23-05
A Mission That Ended in Inferno for 3 Women
Since 12-23-05
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Subject: A Mission That Ended in Inferno for 3 Women
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/international/middleeast/20marines.html?pagewanted=4
Three
male marines, including two who provided security for the cargo truck, were also
killed. Corporal Saalman and six other women were flown to a burn center in
Texas, where even morphine, she said, could not kill the pain of having their
charred skin scrubbed off.
The ambush in Falluja made June 23 one of the worst days in the history of women
in the American military. Yet it faded into the running narrative of Iraq,
tallied up as another tragic but unavoidable consequence of war. At the White
House the next day, President Bush spoke generally of the terrorists' resolve:
"It's hard to stop suicide bombers." Answering questions over the next week
about the attack, the Defense Department issued assurances that the women had
been adequately protected.
But an examination of the attack, pieced together through interviews in Falluja
and the United States, military documents and photographs taken by marines at
the time, shows the opposite.
The military sent the women off that day with substandard armor,
inadequate security and faulty tactics, and the predictability of their daily
commute through one of the most volatile parts of Iraq made them an open target.
The problems mounted in a lethal chain.The cargo truck the women
rode in was a relic, never intended for warfare with insurgents, and had mere
improvised metal shielding that only rose to their shoulders. The flames from
the blast simply shot over the top. Their convoy was protected by just two
Humvees with mounted machine guns. A third was supposed to be there but had been
diverted that day by a security team that strained to juggle competing demands.
But the Falluja area was so dangerous that the local Marine commander typically
had four Humvees when he ventured out. Perhaps most significantly, the security
team let the suicide bomber pull to the side of the road as the convoy passed,
rather than ordering him to move ahead to keep him away from the women. Marines
involved in the operation called the tactic, commonly used, a serious error.
"The females should never have been transported like that," said Sgt. Carozio V.
Bass, one of the marines who escorted the convoy.
"We didn't have enough people or proper vehicles." If anything, the women needed
more protection because of their work in Falluja and the tension it was
igniting, some marines said. They had been searching Iraqi women for weapons and
other contraband and felt certain the task was infuriating insurgents. Even so,
the military had the women follow a predictable routine: traveling to and from
their camp each day at roughly the same time and on the same route through the
city.
Some marines questioned whether they should have been traveling at all. Male
marines also worked at the checkpoints, but did not have to face the dangers of
the daily commute. They slept at a Marine outpost in downtown Falluja, but
Marine Corps rules barred the women from sharing that space with the men.
In the weeks that followed, the wounded women said, they were told not to speak
with reporters. Two sergeants said they were asked to chronicle the attack in
written statements, but the Marine Corps said it decided against investigating
the episode.
Lance Cpl. Matthew K. Hacker, Marine Corps
Lance Cpl. Erin Liberty of Niceville, Fla., with the Purple Heart she received
after surviving a suicide car bombing in Falluja, Iraq, in June.
Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette of the Marines was killed in the attack.
Marine officials defended the security measures that had been taken in
transporting the women and armoring the vehicles. They said that suicide
bombings were still infrequent in Falluja at that time.
"That convoy was as protected as many of the convoys that were run before," said
Col. Charles M. Gurganus, who commanded Marine operations in Falluja at the
time. "There is absolutely no way that you can prepare for every eventuality."
The day after the attack, however, the Marines in Falluja increased to five the
number of Humvees in the convoy transporting a new crew of women, added more
weapons for protection and stopped letting cars wait on the side of the road for
the convoy to pass. Eventually, they switched to armored Humvees instead of
cargo trucks.
The marines killed and wounded that day were part of the heavy toll that the
Marine Corps has borne since it returned to Iraq in early 2004 to replace
exhausted Army units.
Marine officials point out that they have inherited some of the most violent
turf in Iraq. But some marines said that their trucks, training and personnel
were more suitable for their traditional mission of establishing beachheads than
for combating a sustained insurgency. Since returning to Iraq, the Marines have
had one-sixth of the military personnel in the war, but have accounted for
one-third of the deaths, Pentagon records show.
And the deadly encounters, like the one in Falluja, take a toll far beyond the
numbers.
"I think about it every day, 24 hours a day," said Lance Cpl. Erin Liberty,
whose seatmate on the truck that day in June was so badly burned that her body
was identifiable only by dog tags. "You're never happy, you're never sad, you're
never mad. You're just pretty much numb to everything."
A Sense of Dread
For four months this year, about 20 women called Camp Falluja home. They made up
a sort of platoon, called the Female Search Force, working out of the Marine
camp, an asphalt and gravel base that lies a few miles outside Falluja.
The Marines prohibit women from participating in direct ground combat. So some
of the women had performed duties in the mailroom, others in the radio shack. In
February, though, the military formed the group to help search Iraqi women at
the city's checkpoints.
But if screening Iraqis did not constitute a combat job, the daily commute
between camp and city would amount to one.
Each day at 5 a.m., the marines rose from their canvas cots and were taken by
truck to downtown Falluja. They often did not return until 11 p.m. On good days,
the women joshed with the Iraqis, their huge goggles bringing either squeals or
tears from children. But many older Iraqi women objected to being searched.
"One lady came through and had a bunch of ID's on her," Cpl. Christina J.
Humphrey, of Chico, Calif., said in a phone interview from a base in Okinawa,
Japan. "I said I have to confiscate them and she grabbed my flak jacket."
By June, the checkpoints were sweltering and, the women said, a sense of dread
was setting in.
Eighteen members of the military had been killed in the Falluja area and nearby
Ramadi that month. Marine and Iraqi forces were encountering explosives nearly
every day. In the week before the women were attacked, an Iraqi general survived
a suicide car bombing in Falluja.
Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez, 20, who worked at the Statue of Liberty before joining
the Marines in early 2002 to support her mother in the Bronx, regularly asked to
be relieved from the checkpoint duty. The job even spooked Petty Officer First
Class Regina R. Clark, a 43-year-old Navy Seabee from Centralia, Wash., who was
in Iraq for the second time. She had taken her previous tour in such stride that
she had even shipped a stray dog back home.
This time was different. "She had bad feelings all around," said Kelly
Pennington, a friend in Washington. "Her whole attitude went from getting the
dog home to getting herself home safe."
Making sure the women's commute was safe was the responsibility of the men who
provided convoy security. "That was their job," said Corporal Saalman, the
group's leader, of Branchville, Ind.
Two weeks before the attack, the mood changed for the worse. The Iraqi women
became withdrawn, and the marines began to suspect trouble.
"It was like a cold feeling," Corporal Saalman said. "Everything was slow
moving."
Shorthanded Forces
The skies in Falluja on June 23 were beginning to clear from a sandstorm when
Sergeant Bass, the convoy member, prepared to help take the women back to camp.
His unit provided security for the short trip, dubbed the Milk Run, but members
had mixed feelings when they got the job a few weeks earlier. The marines were
already escorting five or more convoys of supplies and military personnel in and
around Falluja each day and Sergeant Bass and other team members said they
struggled to provide each convoy with full protection.
Petty Officer First Class Regina R. Clark also died in the attack.
Cpl. Ramona M. Valdez of the Marines was also killed.
The problem was particularly acute when it came to Humvees.
Sgt. James P. Sherlock, whose Humvee would have been in the convoy that day
behind the women's truck, said he had been pulled off to patrol a nearby highway
that was seen as more of a threat.
"It was a manpower issue," Sergeant Bass said.
He said his section of the security unit had roughly 10 Humvees at its disposal.
But each vehicle required three to five marines, and by June their numbers had
dropped to about 30, which stretched them thin.
Sergeant Bass said no one raised any objection to using just two Humvees that
day because, while all of Falluja was dangerous, there had been no recent
attacks on that stretch of road. Moreover, he said, the Marines were trying to
lower their profile.
"We were trying to give the people some normalcy," he said. "We didn't want to
appear to them as being bullies."
Colonel Gurganus, the former commander in Falluja, said that while he usually
had an escort of four Humvees, that number rose to as many as eight when other
officers or dignitaries joined him.
There were no hard and fast rules on how many Humvees to use, nor were there any
on how to position the women in the convoy. Often, the women would mix with the
men in a second cargo truck, which Sergeant Bass said he preferred because it
made them a less enticing target.
The Marine compound in downtown Falluja, where the convoy was staged, is easily
observable from nearby buildings, and Sergeant Bass said he was convinced that
the insurgents did their homework.
"They planned this maybe for months," he said. "Scoped our convoy out and saw
typically where do the females sit. Maybe they had someone watching and they
called on the cellphone."
That evening, however, Corporal Saalman said she was focused on a routine but
necessary chore: calling the roll. So she had all the women climb onto the bed
of one truck.
'Flames Everywhere'
Falluja should have been bustling on a Thursday evening in summertime. But the
streets had been deserted for much of the day, which the American military had
learned could be a signal that residents had been tipped off to an impending
attack.
"I even told my buddy, 'Something bad is going to happen today,' " Corporal
Saalman said.
At 7:20 p.m., there was only one car on the road when the women's convoy left.
The marines in the lead Humvee waved the driver of a car to the side of the road
and later said that his demeanor had raised no alarms.
The driver waited, they said, for the lead Humvee to pass and then hit the
women's cargo truck, striking just behind the cab on the passenger's side.
The blast instantly killed the truck's assistant driver, Cpl. Chad W. Powell, an
outdoorsman and third-generation marine from West Monroe, La., and Pfc. Veashna
Muy, 20, of Los Angeles, who was in charge of operating a gun atop the cargo
truck.
In the back, two of the women, Petty Officer Clark and Corporal Valdez, died
within moments, according to casualty reports. Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, 21,
of Cranston, R.I., the former cheerleader, died three hours later after
receiving treatment at Camp Falluja, the records show.
"It was orange and black and red smoke, flames everywhere, coming at us,"
Corporal Liberty recalled. "I didn't see my childhood, or a big white light. I
just closed my eyes and I'm like, 'Wow, I'm going to die.' "
The marines in the rear Humvee heard the explosion, but were so far back they
did not know what had been hit. Sergeant Bass took a photograph that shows a
huge plume of smoke some 200 yards away.
Then came the radio call from the marines who were leading the convoy: "We've
been hit! We've been hit! We've taken mass casualties. Get the doc up here."
Sergeants Bass and Timothy Lawson ran, with the medic, just as snipers across
the road opened fire. When they arrived they found Corporal Liberty trying to
hoist a woman away from the burning truck.
I tried to pick her up by the back of her flak jacket," said Corporal Liberty,
who is now being treated in North Carolina for an injured neck, shrapnel in one
leg and combat stress.
"She was
a big healthy woman with lots of muscle, and she was down in the dirt and blood
and I said, 'Come on girl, we've got to go.'
Another marine grabbed Corporal Liberty and told her to let go. The woman was
already dead. The women took shelter at a storefront about 100 yards off the
road and the few men who were present had to run back and forth carrying the
wounded. In all, 13 women and men were injured.
Against orders, two men from the second cargo truck jumped out and raced ahead
to help, including Cpl. Carlos Pineda, a 23-year-old from Los Angeles. When
smoke from the flaming truck cleared for a moment, a bullet found the gap in the
armor on his side and sliced through his lungs.
His widow, Ana, said she later received a letter he wrote the day before, saying he had narrowly escaped harm in another attack. "He said, 'I feel my luck here is just running out.'
"When
another Marine unit arrived on the scene, the dead and wounded were loaded onto
the second cargo truck and the convoy pressed on to camp.
One of the two Humvees then broke down, and one of the injured women had to be
moved to the cargo truck.In the back, Corporal Saalman started to sing. First,
"America the Beautiful," then "Amazing Grace."
"I have this thing ever since I was little, if I get scared or I'm worried or someone else is worried, I sing," said Corporal Saalman, whose nickname is Songbird.
It
calmed her platoon, the marines said, and between verses she consoled the woman
whose scorched head lay in her lap.
Wrong Armor for the Mission
Long before that June day, Marine commanders were wrestling with a vexing problem: their troops lacked the right protection for a war exacting its toll in roadside bombs.
To carry
out its traditional mission of leading invasions, the Marines have lightly
armored amphibious vehicles to get them onto dry ground and trucks to ferry them
and their supplies on the back lines.
The cargo truck that carried the security checkpoint workers through Falluja
each day was conceived of in the early 1990's without armor for noncombat supply
lines.
"We equip for what we fight and the truck was not designed to be an armored vehicle," said Maj. Gen. William D. Catto, the leader of the unit responsible for equipping marines, in an interview at his headquarters in Quantico, Va.
In
November of 2003, as the Pentagon was ordering the Marines to relieve Army
troops in Iraq, General Catto's team told Oshkosh Truck, which makes the cargo
truck, to help create an integrated armor system, according to records released
to The New York Times.
"During the fall of 2003, we noted the alarming increase in the number of Army
vehicles under attack," Col. Susan Schuler, a Marine procurement official, said
in an e-mail message. "Therefore, anticipating that Marine units would return to
Iraq in early 2004, we had to address vehicle hardening of all our fleets."
General Catto said the plan was ideal but was taking too long. In the meantime, they began buying ceramic panels used on military aircraft, but could not get enough from the single company that was making them.
So they
obtained metal plates, which were neither as strong nor as tall as the factory
armor that was being developed.
The women's truck that was hit in Falluja had been fitted with the plates and
General Catto said he had been told that they repelled the blast. But the
makeshift shielding, just 36½ inches tall, left the women's necks and heads
exposed.
A year
earlier, when four marines were killed in Ramadi after a roadside bomb hit their
Humvee, their company leader told The Times that a few inches more of steel
would have saved their lives.
A contract to produce the new factory armor for the cargo trucks, which is
double-walled and 46 inches high, was awarded in September 2004, but the Marine
Corps said it could find only one company to make it: Plasan Sasa, based in
Kibbutz Sasa, Israel.
With
nearly 1,000 cargo trucks in Iraq, General Catto said he would like to have
multiple companies making the armor, but Plasan Sasa holds the rights to the
design. However, Plasan's chief executive, Dan Ziv, said his firm had more than
kept pace with the Marines' schedule. "We are not the bottleneck at the moment,"
he said.
The armor kits take 300 hours of work to install, and General Catto said that
with the marines so pressed by the war, they could not easily give up their
trucks to have the work done. The first trucks retrofitted with factory armor
began showing up in the field on May 31, the Marines said, and as of last week
half of its cargo trucks had this armor installed. That leaves about 460 trucks
in Iraq with the same protection as the truck that carried the Marine women in
Falluja.
Despite the June 23 ambush, Corporal Saalman said she was willing to return to
Iraq. Sergeant Bass, who has returned to a marketing job in San Diego, said he
had turned the events over and over in his head. "I don't want to blame
everything on the Marine Corps," he said. "Leaders make mistakes and aren't
perfect." Then he added: "We were undermanned and overtaxed, and that is not out
of the norm for the Marine Corps. But in a wartime situation it really hindered
our capability and sometimes our willingness to do things."
--------------------------------------------------------------
Contributed,
YNCS Don Harribine, USN(ret)
Any man or
woman who may be asked in this century what they did to make life worthwhile in
their lifetime....can respond with a great deal of pride and satisfaction, "I
served a career in the United States Navy."