Faithful readers may remember I’ve said this column isn’t the place to go for the latest coronavirus news. You’ve seen the news. Most of it is pretty bad. These are very difficult times.
My friend Cpl. Nick Jeffries is no stranger to difficult times. With two Marine combat tours in Iraq and plenty of heavy combat in Fallujah under his belt, he knows darkness and uncertainty. During his second Iraq deployment, Jeffries commanded a squad of 10 Marines and one Navy corpsman.
On most security patrols, Jeffries ran his four-vehicle convoy from the lead truck, with one of his team leaders in the Humvee at the back of the column, but, one day, he flipped the order. On that day, while the convoy was driving through an open, rural area on the outskirts of Fallujah, an IED exploded in front of the lead Humvee.
“All hell broke loose,” Jeffries told me.
The enemy instantly opened up with small-arms fire from two trucks in a field on the convoy’s left side. Jeffries’s squad was caught in every serviceman’s worst nightmare: an ambush. The standard procedure for reacting to an ambush is to turn and charge the enemy, but a big canal separated Jeffries’s Marines from the insurgents. So, the soldiers shot back with M16s as Jeffries sprinted forward, under fire, to check on his guys in the disabled lead Humvee.
Fearing the worst, Jeffries allowed himself an instant of relief when he found Lance Cpls. Wood and Ramos alive and not bleeding. While “Doc,” the Navy corpsman, assessed them for further injuries, Jeffries radioed for a quick reaction force backup. Stationed four miles away, the force would take an eternal 10 minutes to reach the scene. Jeffries’s Marines continued to shoot back.
“I don’t know that we thought it was a bad position,” Jeffries told me. “Just f— them! Kill ’em!”
While most of the Iraqi army men who’d been riding with the Marines in the patrol cowered in the back of the Humvees, one notable exception was Sabah, an Iraqi soldier who was Jeffries’s go-to Iraqi. He’d learned English by watching American movies and was better than most interpreters. “I knew he’d have my back if we went into a house,” Jeffries told me. Sabah had been in the exploded Humvee and was a little shaken up but otherwise ready for action.
Then, the situation got worse. While working with Wood and Ramos, “Doc” shot back through the Humvee’s window. His M16 jammed, so he picked up Wood’s. Because Wood’s rifle was equipped with a different scope, “Doc” misjudged the height of his barrel when shooting and accidentally fired inside the Humvee. A ricochet wounded Sabah in the hand. Shrapnel produced superficial wounds in Wood and Ramos.
And still, the Marines couldn’t charge the enemy due to the canal. “There was no feeling, only thought,” Jeffries told me. “In the Marines, they trained you to kill people.” Had there been time or the inclination to think, the situation might have seemed hopeless.
Then, the quick reaction force Humvees rolled in, unleashing hell with a .50 cal machine gun and a fully automatic grenade launcher. “They made extremely quick work of the ambush.”
Later, after the quick reaction force transported the wounded to a hospital and a tow truck hauled the disabled Humvee away, Jeffries led the three remaining vehicles around to survey the area. The enemy had removed all insurgent bodies, leaving behind a blood-soaked field beneath the Marines’ boots. In the end, all of Jeffries’s men made it home.
My friends, we’re not in anything like combat, but we do face difficult times. We’ve been ambushed by this virus, and, like Jeffries’s Marines, we will never give up. We are Americans. Together, we will beat this pandemic.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
