The Ramadi Files, Episode 1

What I watched the Marines do at a Ramadi intersection, October 2006

FIRECRACKER

by Andrew Scott Fayal / 17th SOG Media

“THE RPG STRUCK THE FRONT OF AN ██ , RESULTING IN A CATASTROPHIC KILL. THE VEHICLE CAUGHT ON FIRE AND THE UNIT WAS UNABLE TO PUT THE FIRE OUT IN TIME DUE TO TACTICAL RESTRICTIONS.” — SIGACT, classified SECRET, central Ramadi, 29 October 2006, 1651 local

I. The Red Circles

It starts in the dark, at a combat outpost called COP FALCON.

Night. The COP is asleep except for the watches. In a blacked-out OP, two company-grade officers are bent over a battle map of one small, ugly piece of Ramadi — an Army captain handing off his kingdom, a Marine captain receiving it. Their voices are low. This is that. This is this. Here’s your route. Here’s your dead space.

Then the Marine taps the map.

“Hey — what are these red circles here?”

The Army captain doesn’t have to look. “Oh. Those are really bad areas. We don’t go into those.”

The Marine studies them for a second.

“Oh,” he says. “Well — that’s the first place I’m sending my Marines.”

I was standing close enough to hear it, and I have carried that exchange for twenty years. Because he wasn’t posturing. There was nobody awake to posture for. He was just telling the man what was going to happen next.

And it happened.

II. The Trade

In the fall of 2006, Ramadi was the most dangerous city on earth, and the plan to take it back was almost insultingly simple: stop commuting to the war. Drive combat outposts straight into the red circles, one block at a time, and live there — in the enemy’s living room — until the neighborhood changed its mind about who owned it.

The Army’s Ready First Brigade had been fighting that fight all year with tanks and Bradleys — steel and main guns. In mid-September, the Marines of 1st Battalion, 6th Marines flowed into the city’s center. Where sectors changed hands, the trade was stark: heavy armor out, Marines in — kids in humvees and boots, moving into positions armor had held. No BS. Alpha Company took a battered three-story on 17th Street. And in the last week of October, Alpha pushed deeper — to a crossroads the maps called the Firecracker intersection.

The name was not ironic. The classified record calls the blocks around it “historical locations” for attacks. There was a lot on the northeast corner the locals refused to walk across. Everyone in that city knew what Firecracker was.

The Marines went there to build a house.

III. Building It

The record — SECRET-classified significant activity reports, written by tired watch officers in real time — tells you what building a combat outpost in the middle of a red circle actually costs.

Five days before the barriers went up, surveillance caught an insurgent cell emplacing an IED at the intersection: digging the hole, driving a car back and forth over the dirt to pack it flat, running command wire up a telephone pole from a ladder they’d carried in a trunk. They never got to use it. Air support arrived, and the report ends with twelve enemy dead and the bomb cooking off in secondary explosions.

Then, on 28 October, the reports start using a phrase that makes it official: “the COP FIRECRACKER construction.”

That same morning, at 0800, an IED detonated underneath one of the Marines’ up-armored humvees sitting on the strongpoint. The truck caught fire. They dragged it inside the barrier material and kept building.

Read the log of that single day and it sounds like a city trying to strangle an infant in its crib. An RPG at 0810. A machine gun and mortars together at 1044. Small-arms fire at 1305, answered at the muzzle flashes. Mortar rounds at 1419, at 1519, at 1545 — some of them duds thudding into the dirt around the position. The Marines shot the mortar cell’s observer off a rooftop at 1430 when they caught him flashing hand-and-arm signals to the tube. Overwatch positions above them spent the whole day quietly taking the enemy apart — the man carrying an RPG round between buildings, the man glassing their positions, the man maneuvering in to assault. Eight separate attacks. The COP did not stop growing for one hour of it.

That was the day before the day I can’t forget.

IV. The Window

29 October 2006. Late afternoon. My element was occupying a school near the new COP — four of us on the top floor, at a staircase window, there to watch over the Marines below. What follows is what I saw with my own eyes, laid against what the official record wrote down the same hour. They agree.

The Marines had a humvee at the intersection. To my right, an Abrams tank sat overwatching the street that ran behind them. To my left were the blocks the trouble always came from.

The record says a round had already come in over the tanks that afternoon — and I watched a blast go off right at that Abrams. The tank sat there. Unaffected. Unbothered. Then it did the most American thing I have ever seen: it rolled forward slightly, trained the tube down the street behind the Marines, and fired one 120mm main gun round down the block. The record has that shot: one round, one mortar tube destroyed, at the corner of Racetrack and Fire Station Road.

At 1651, the RPG came out of the northwest.

It struck the front of the Marines’ humvee dead-on. The report calls it a “catastrophic kill” — the truck was dead where it stood, burning. The men were IN it when it hit. They bailed out.

And then — this is the part I need you to slow down and actually picture — they went back.

While the fire took the truck, while the intersection was still cracking with incoming, these kids went back INTO that burning vehicle and started stripping it: ammunition, the TOW missiles, everything they could carry, hauling it out of the flames so the fire and the enemy couldn’t have it. The official report explains, in its bloodless way, why nobody put the fire out: “unable to put the fire out in time due to tactical restrictions.” Tactical restrictions. Meaning: men were shooting at them the entire time.

The base element got into covered positions and returned fire. The report says they identified the shooters — men with AKs and an RPG launcher at the corner of Fly Road and Alley Road — and answered with 7.62.

Then they did what Marines do. They maneuvered.

One of the men beside me was our comms operator, and he had their radio net in his ear. So the fight came to us in two channels at once: through the glass, the base element hammering away with the burning truck behind them — and through the radio, a play-by-play of the flanking element I never once laid eyes on, working around the block, pushing the enemy backward into a building. I watched the base. I heard the flank. Fast — insanely fast. These kids had been blown out of their own vehicle minutes earlier, and they had already flipped from ambushed to hunting.

I want to tell you what it sounded like, because it isn’t what the movies taught you. It was sporadic. Snaps in the distance, then quiet. Marines shooting, bad guys shooting — snap… snap-snap… snap — with dead air in between. Underneath it all, the humvee burned like a percussion section: small-arms rounds cracking off in the flames, and then the deeper BOOM of grenades and ordnance letting go inside the hull. The truck never exploded the way trucks explode in films. It just kept detonating in pieces, all afternoon, while its crew fought around it.

The four of us watched from that window — a group of men whose entire profession is violence — and the commentary in that stairwell was one sentence, over and over:

“Look at these motherfuckers. These Marines are BADASS.”

The official record ends the engagement the way real fights end. The Marines pushed the enemy into a building and the report goes quiet: unable to maintain visual… could not confirm BDA. Smoke over the intersection. No Marine casualties. After dark, another RPG came in and impacted wide, as if the city was getting the last word in an argument it had already lost.

What I felt, standing at that window, took me years to name. Pride, and humbleness, at the same time — a feeling of being privileged just to be the witness.

V. The Bill

The COP held. That’s the whole point of the story — it held, and holding it was not free.

The record keeps going after my window closed. On 27 November, Marines from that same company were ambushed near a mosque while patrolling with Iraqi police; they suppressed the enemy with everything from rifles to a LAW to carry out their casualties, and one of them died of his wounds. On 4 December, a 120mm mortar round and a sniper’s bullet arrived at COP Firecracker in the same minute, and two more died. The reports log it all in the same flat voice — casualties evacuated, positions manned — a whole later episode of this series lives inside that flatness.

They never gave the intersection back. Within months, the red circles on that Army captain’s map started dying — Ramadi, the graveyard city, turned. Historians credit the outpost strategy and the tribal awakening. Fine. I credit something smaller and harder: kids who bailed out of a burning truck, and went back in for the ammo.

VI. Their Faces

Here is the part that stayed with me longest.

I never saw their faces. From the school, from the glass, from the overwatch — they were figures in armor, moving correctly. At the time I didn’t even know for certain what unit they were. For twenty years I carried a battle with no names in it.

Then, two decades later, I went looking in the war’s own paperwork — the leaked SIGACT database, the SECRET record of that intersection, written while I was standing at that window. And there, in the metadata of report after report, the same unredacted line:

Reporting unit: 1ST BN, 6TH MARINES.

Alpha Company. The kids at Firecracker. The record knew their names all along.

So if one of them ever reads this — the man who bailed out of that truck, the man who went back in for the TOWs, any man who ran the flank I could only hear — this is what I, a Master EOD technician who spent three deployments beside the most celebrated units in the American arsenal, want you to know:

Marines are the truest warfighters in American military might. Simply put. They operate with hardly anything — gear passed down from one Marine to the next, made to last until it falls apart — and with hardly anything, at a crossroads named Firecracker that better-equipped men had circled in red and avoided, they went first, they went back into the fire, and they won.

I watched you do it. It was an honor.

Author’s note: Every date, time, grid, and quoted phrase from the official record in this story comes from significant activity reports (SIGACTs) of the Iraq War, classification SECRET, released in the WikiLeaks Iraq War Diaries; report IDs are on file. The eyewitness material is mine, witnessed from a school building near COP Firecracker, and is labeled as memory where the record is silent. Where my memory and the record disagreed, I went with the record.

A note on the name: My media company is called 17th SOG Media, and for years people have read their own meanings into that number — for some, 17 is code for the seventeenth letter of the alphabet. Not for me. 17th is a street in Ramadi. In mid-October 2006, two weeks before the events in this story, the Marines of 1/6 assaulted a three-story building on 17th Street and turned it into the first joint Marine-Iraqi outpost in the city — the proof of concept for everything that followed, Firecracker included. I have signed that street onto everything I’ve published since. It was never a letter. It was always the Marines.