Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War Read Online Free PDF Page A

ahead of him were the tanks and the CAATs, or combined anti-armor teams, Humvees bristling with heavy machine guns, and antitank missiles. The marines around him were pulling security, lying in the prone position in a perimeter around their amtracks, just as they’d been trained. Everything was going to plan. It was just as it should be.
    It was 0715. All of a sudden Sosa heard a rumble in the distance. Then, seconds later, there was another rumble. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski.
    “I think that’s artillery.”
    “No, I think that’s thunder.”
    Sosa wasn’t sure. There was another rumble. Sosa knew it couldn’t be friendly forces because there were no units in front of them. First Battalion, 2nd Marines was the lead element.
    “No, I think someone is shooting at us.”
    Then, about fifty meters to the east of where he was standing, a plume of dirt splashed up from the ground, followed by another loud clap.
    He saw a flash about five kilometers off toward the northeast and another splash off to the side of the road. Over the radio he heard the voice of one of the CAAT marines.
    “We’ve got small-arms fire coming in at us from both sides of the road.”
    Sosa couldn’t believe it.
They’re actually shooting at us.
Like the others, he’d been briefed that there would be little resistance but he thought he’d been pretty careful about not allowing himself to fall into a false sense of security. He’d warned his marines to prepare for the worst, that the Iraqis were going to fight. Now he realized that he’d bought into the capitulation theory. He was angry with himself for making assumptions about enemy action.
If you don’t validate those assumptions, you might be in a world of
hurt.

3
    “Panzer 5, this is Panzer 6. Have we got air on its way? Where is the helo overwatch?”
    At the head of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines column a company of M1A1 Abrams tanks from the 8th Tank Battalion out of Fort Knox, Kentucky, was pushing forward toward Nasiriyah. The tank crews were reservists, part-time marines who left their civilian lives for one weekend a month and two weeks every summer to train as marines. They had been activated on Friday, January 10, 2003, assigned to 1/2 Marines, and within seventy-two hours they had packed, left Kentucky, arrived at Camp Lejeune, embarked on ship, and were on their way to Iraq.
    The company was commanded by Major Bill Peeples, a thirty-five-year-old city planning officer from Jackson County, Indiana, a suburban area south of Indianapolis. For four years in his early twenties Peeples had been an active duty Marine Corps maintenance officer but then had left to do other things. Two years later he faced a choice. Unless he rejoined the Marine Corps, he would be taken off the reserve officer list. He decided to rejoin as a reservist, and after five years working in a tank company he was appointed commander of Alpha Company, 8th Tank Battalion. That was a year ago. Now he was leading his men into battle from his M1A1 tank, which his crew had named “Wild Bill” in his honor. He’d named the machine gun “Maximus” after his newborn son.
    He had organized his tanks in a wedge formation with one up front and two tanks behind like an arrowhead. It gave the lead tanks maximum sectors of fire. The lead took the twelve o’clock sector, or front. The tanks behind protected the flanks to three o’clock on the right and nine o’clock on the left. The tanks at the back had their turrets to the six o’clock position to protect the rear. With his torso half out of the tank commander’s, or TC’s, hatch he could see the sun rising on the right side of the road, illuminating a flat, scrubby, and endless wasteland stretching off into the distance. The early morning light glinted off the swirls of dust, kicked up as the convoy passed. Much earlier that morning, Peeples had seen, off to the west, ribbons of light belonging to a never-ending convoy of Army support vehicles