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

making their way north toward Baghdad along Route 1. It was eerie. It looked like a California freeway. Now, though, there was no one on the horizon. They were on their own.
    For two days his twelve tanks had led the battalion through the desert. It had been uneventful apart from one tank breaking down; it was currently under tow at the rear of the column. Now they were on a road speeding toward the city of Nasiriyah. His tank company possessed enormous firepower.
We are the tip of a very hard spear.
In consultation with the battalion command, he’d configured his eleven remaining tanks into Team Mech and Team Tank. Team Tank consisted of seven tanks plus a platoon of infantry from Bravo Company. In return, Peeples gave a platoon of four tanks to Bravo Company to create Team Mech. At one stage, during heated discussions about how to best organize the battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski and his operations officer, Major Sosa, had wanted to give each of the three infantry companies a platoon of tanks. Peeples had persuaded them that he could offer more support as a separate Team Tank maneuver unit. His crews had trained as a company and knew how each other thought and worked. He didn’t think they were so effective when they were put under rifle company commanders who had little experience of working with tanks.
    It was not the first time Major Peeples had crossed swords with the battalion staff. His war had not started well. When his company arrived at Camp Lejeune from Kentucky, less than twenty-four hours after being activated, he had discovered that they didn’t have time to inspect or fix the original fourteen tanks assigned to them from Camp Lejeune’s 2nd Tank Battalion.
    “You can fix them on the way over.”
    Peeples didn’t like the answer. The battalion staff was already on ship when they arrived so there was no welcoming party, or any chance to discuss what the battalion expected from them. To make matters worse, his company of 125 marines was split into three groups and embarked on different ships; the USS
Ashland,
the USS
Portland,
and the USS
Gunston
Hall.
Communication between the ships was virtually impossible so they could not coordinate with each other or talk to the battalion’s logistics officer to tell him what they needed. When at last they did manage to inspect the tanks, they found that they were in terrible condition—to the point where ten of them were deadlined and totally unsuitable for combat.
    When they finally got together in Kuwait, it was no better. He felt as though he was treated as a second-class citizen. Even though, as a major, he was the third most senior marine in the battalion, he suspected that he was excluded from a lot of the battalion-level planning. No one really said anything about it, but he put it down to a feeling among the active-duty marines that they were somehow better than the reserve community.
Of
course, they mouth the usual platitudes about how the Marine Corps is a
total force and that the reservists and those on active duty are the same.
But that’s all it is. Talk.
What made it worse was that there was an undercurrent in the Marine Corps that the infantryman was its heart and soul and that any other specialty was somehow not the real thing. It was true that the Marine Corps was built around the infantry, and he understood that armor and airpower were there to support the infantry companies. However, since he’d joined the battalion, he’d never really felt that the command staff had a proper appreciation of the support and firepower tanks could bring to a fight. The M1A1 Abrams was a $4.3 million killing machine. It could light up vehicles and buildings three kilometers away with its accurate 120 mm laser main gun that had a 360-degree firing capability. Its 7.62 mm coaxially mounted gun and .50-caliber machine gun could rip human beings in half. Its twelve-hundred-horsepower engine could move it along at speeds of up to forty-two miles per hour. It had