Dispatches From Afghanistan Holding Garmsir
After the Marines in Mustang Platoon routed the Taliban to capture a key stronghold in southern Afghanistan, they were faced with an even more difficult mission: defend against the heat, the boredom, the stress, the homesickness, and the weight of history in a place that had never been conquered—and held—by outsiders.
Mustang platoon on patrol near a road to Pakistan in Jue 2008.
Photograph by John Spong
Tom Ray says: John, excellent story. Sorry we couldn't hook up. We're all very proud of Dennis. Thanks for educating everyone else on the stories of these fine young men. God Bless. Tom Ray. (December 26th, 2008 at 5:09pm)
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Only a handful of the Marines in Mustang Platoon actually saw Gallucci get hit. They were three hours into a battle that had started at four-thirty that morning, on May 29, 2008, just as dawn had broken over the collection of compounds and bazaars that make up the Garmsir District of southern Afghanistan. The shower of Taliban RPGs and small-arms fire had been near constant, coming from the north, south, and west. During a brief respite Lance Corporal Cody Brown had started on foot toward Gallucci’s Humvee for a bottle of water. Corporal Michael Gallucci, a 25-year-old Ohioan who answered to “Gooch,” was manning the grenade launcher on top of the truck. He made eye contact with Brown and then looked down. He probably never saw the white flash of the RPG. It was an impossibly lucky shot from some three hundred meters away, directly on his turret.
The news raced through Mustang over the Humvees’ radios. Gooch was one of the platoon’s turn-to guys, admired beyond his rank. Now he was down, and the instant reaction was rage. Mustang opened fire, emptying their weapons in the direction of the RPG’s source, then reloading and draining them again. Grenade launchers. SAW machine guns. .50-cals. 81 mm mortars. The platoon’s commander, Lieutenant John Branson, held radios to both ears, directing air support on one and a casualty evacuation, or caz-evac, on the other. His second in command, Staff Sergeant Stephen Neumeyer, called out in a daze for Mustang’s two corpsmen, the platoon’s medics, then started screaming “my Gooch!” as he emptied his M4.
The feeling was all too familiar for much of the platoon. Two thirds of Mustang had fought during the bloodiest months in Ramadi, Iraq. Still in their early twenties, they were already veterans, and they all had a reference point for this moment, some memory they tried to tamp down, an image of a Humvee engulfed in flames or a sniper finding his mark, some specific, defining instant when they learned they weren’t invincible. For Mustang’s “boots,” the green Marines doing their first buck here in Afghanistan, losing Gooch would provide that realization.
And until then, the only blood the boots had seen shed had belonged to the Taliban. Compared with what they’d heard about Ramadi, fighting in Garmsir had been fun. This was, as Branson called it, “a no-shit battlefield with front lines.” There was none of the brutal ambiguity that comes with fighting insurgents in an urban setting, where every trash pile might hide an IED, suicide bombers could wander out of crowds, and children would stray into the middle of street fights. When the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), to which Mustang belongs, had pushed into Garmsir in mid-April, most of the four thousand or so families were long gone, warned off by the Taliban and the thunder of U.S. helicopters. Only a few locals had remained to harvest the spring poppy crop. Now with all the opium scraped and squeezed from the bulbs, the tall flowers stood sun-browned and brittle in the fields, where tree lines and irrigation canals provided cover for textbook conventional warfare.
Mustang had been among the last of the MEU’s platoons to join the battle. They belong to the motorized Weapons Company, manning the Humvees that carry the big guns, and they’d entered Garmsir after the MEU’s three dismounted companies—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie—had secured positions in dun-colored compounds during three weeks of nonstop fighting. As soon as Mustang arrived, they had been hit by a complex, three-point ambush at a sharp bend in the road outside Alpha’s position. The attack was well planned, but the Taliban were outmatched. Their bullets pinged off Mustang’s trucks, and their RPGs sailed high and wide. While Branson radioed for air support, the platoon’s interpreter, a Kabul University medical student who had fled his home and the Taliban for, of all places, Dallas and was known to Mustang simply as “Hamza,” directed their truck’s gunner from the backseat. “They are shooting from behind the trees at ten o’clock, about three hundred meters away,” Hamza instructed. The return fire neutralized the attack, and when air support arrived and started dropping bombs, the Taliban withdrew to the desert. There were no injuries for Mustang, only adrenaline.
They had stayed much of May in town, their days spent running checkpoints and dodging sniper fire and their nights in a compound they shared with Bravo. No one had expected the Taliban to maintain this kind of resistance, and driving them out was a deliberate process. The last enemy foothold was a command center called the Jugroom Fort on the south end of town, about a mile and a half east of the Helmand River. British Royal Marines had tried to take it sixteen months earlier in a botched mission that resulted in a friendly-fire death and headlines in the UK. Some Brits on the nearby forward operating base, FOB Dwyer, had warned the Marines that taking the fort would require at least a week. The May 29 firefight was the final push for Garmsir, and the objective was Jugroom.
Mustang had rolled out at ten o’clock the night before, intending to get behind the Taliban and cut off their retreat when Charlie attacked from the front in the morning. But complications developed almost immediately. Charlie found a huge IED in the road to the fort and would not be able to attack in the morning. Mustang started to move to their blocking position anyway, but their Humvees got stuck in the soft desert sand, and it took six hours to free them. The element of surprise was lost. When Mustang finally rolled into position at four-thirty, the Taliban were waiting.
They threw everything they had at the platoon. Branson took a couple trucks into a compound to set up communications. The rest of the platoon took positions outside, and some of the guys dismounted to fire their guns from nearby wadis, shallow irrigation ditches running through the landscape. The enemy was located a football field away, across an expanse of tomato and cucumber gardens. A few Marines uprooted trees with chains attached to their Humvees to open up firing lines.
For Mustang, the toe-to-toe slugfest was thrilling. Sergeant Dennis Ray, a 27-year-old who grew up near Fort Worth and now commanded Mustang’s 81 mm mortars, had never before fired live rounds in battle. But with bullets bouncing at his feet and RPGs flying close enough overhead that he felt them before he heard them, Ray scooted across the compound rooftops under heavy fire to locate targets and radio their positions to his mortar crews. According to Branson, who later recommended him for decoration, Ray was crucial in suppressing enemy RPG teams. Ray would later say simply, “It all went by pretty quick.”
Quick in the way only intense combat can. The barrage lasted another three hours after Gooch got hit, but between Ray’s mortarmen and well-placed air strikes, the Taliban broke down. At about lunchtime, the enemy fire stopped, and the smell of sulfur settled over the quieting fields. Of the estimated forty-plus insurgents encountered, at least thirty had been killed, and most of the rest sifted back into the desert, presumably southward to camps on the other side of the nearby Pakistani border. When Charlie Company stormed Jugroom a day later, it met with only the scattered resistance of a few desperate holdouts. The Marines now owned Garmsir, and the second and third legs of the “clear, hold, and build” model of counterinsurgency could begin.
But before Mustang could chew over their accomplishment, another consideration popped into everyone’s mind. Thoughts of Gooch’s fate had been an unaffordable luxury during the fighting. Now that it was done, he was the only thought. The takeaway was that training and execution were only part of the equation in combat. Luck was a component of equal importance. There could be no accounting for luck.
And somehow, in the battle for Jugroom, that was a good thing. The RPG that had hit Gooch’s turret hadn’t exploded. The bloody mess he’d been left in was caused by flying glass from his gun shield. Ballistic-strength Oakleys had saved his eyes, and none of the shards had hit his major blood vessels. He’d even survived an attack on his caz-evac; the armored vehicle that carried him away to the waiting helicopter had two back tires shot out. He would rejoin the platoon when they returned to FOB Dwyer.
Branson said that the men he commanded in Ramadi had been known as God’s Platoon. “We had four or five guys who got pretty fucked-up,” he explained. “But no one was killed.” He could only pray for similar grace with Mustang.
Mustang
I hooked up with Mustang one week after the Jugroom fight. They were staying in a compound they called Big House, the exact spot from which the Taliban had ambushed the platoon when they first arrived in Garmsir. Like the rest of the area, it was a collection of mud structures with dirt floors and no electricity. The buildings spread around a large courtyard, and the Humvees that weren’t being used for fire watch—at sentry positions on the perimeter—were parked inside. Individual bug tents were scattered on the ground with each Marine’s body armor, backpack, and weapon piled next to them. Thatch-roofed goat stalls and rabbit pens lined one side, and on the other a long breezeway with wide arches opened into a series of rooms.
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