Part 29 (2/2)

The Marines brought in a FAC (forward air controller), to call in air support against the insurgents. The fellow they sent over was a Marine aviator, a pilot, working on a ground rotation. He tried a few times to vector in air attacks, but the requests were always denied higher up the chain of command.

At the time, I was told that there had been so much devastation in the city that they didn't want any more collateral damage. I don't see how blowing up a bunch of weeds and muck would make Fallujah look any worse than it already did, but then I'm just a SEAL and obviously don't understand those sorts of complicated issues.

Anyway, the pilot himself was a good guy. He didn't act stuck up or high and mighty; you'd never know he was an officer. We all liked him and respected him. And just to show there were no hard feelings, we let him get on the rifle every so often and look around. He never got off any shots.

Besides the FAC, the Marines sent a heavy-weapons squad, more snipers, and then mortarmen. The mortarmen brought some white phosphorous sh.e.l.ls with them, and they tried launching those in an attempt to burn down the brush. Unfortunately, the sh.e.l.ls would only set small pieces of the marsh on fire-they'd burn a bit, then fizzle and go out because it was so wet.

Our next try was throwing thermite grenades. A thermite grenade is an incendiary device that burns at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit and can go through a quarter-inch of steel in a few seconds. We went down to the river and hauled them across.

That didn't work, either, so we started making our own homegrown concoctions. Between the Marine sniper detail and the mortarmen, there was a great deal of creative brainpower focused on that marsh. Of all the plans, one of my personal favorites involved the creative use of the shaped ”cheese” charges the mortarmen typically carried. (The cheese is used to propel mortar rounds. Distance can be adjusted by varying the amount of cheese used to fire the projectile.) We'd shove some cheese in a tube, add a bunch of det cord, some diesel, and add a time fuse. Then we'd heave the contraption across the river and see what happened.

We got some pretty flashes, but nothing we came up with worked real well.

If only we'd had a flamethrower ...

The marsh remained a ”target rich environment” filled with insurgents. I must have gotten eighteen or nineteen myself that week; the rest of the guys brought the total up to the area of thirty or more.

The river seemed to hold a special fascination for bad guys. While we were trying various ways to burn down the marsh, they were attempting all sorts of ways to get across.

The most bizarre involved beach b.a.l.l.s.

BEACH b.a.l.l.s AND LONG SHOTS

I was watching from the roof one afternoon when a group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.)

Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach b.a.l.l.s.

I couldn't really believe what I was seeing-they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach b.a.l.l.s to keep them afloat, they began paddling across.

It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn't necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. h.e.l.l, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements.

I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three b.a.l.l.s.

Snap.

I shot beach ball number two.

It was kind of fun.

h.e.l.l-it was a lot of fun. The insurgents were fighting among themselves, their ingenious plan to kill Americans now turned against them.

”Y'all gotta see this,” I told the Marines as I shot beach ball number three.

They came over to the side of the roof and watched as the insurgents fought among themselves for the last beach ball. The ones who couldn't grab on promptly sank and drowned.

I watched them fight for a while longer, then shot the last ball. The Marines put the rest of the insurgents out of their misery.

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