This is the first of two on-the-scene reports by VFW magazine senior editor Tim Dyhouse, who was in Iraq this past April. This was his third trip to the war zone.
http://www.vfw.org/index.cfm?fa=news.magDtl&dtl=1&mid=4160
Standing in a dusty plywood barracks at Camp Ramadi in April 2007, Marine Cpl. Thomas Nowicki tells a visitor why his buddies named a street after him. It was the site, he said, where he was badly wounded 2? years ago.
“Tommy Gun Street,” said the 22-year-old married father of one, located some two miles away in downtown Ramadi, was a hazardous place back then. But much like the city itself, he adds, it’s changed significantly.
The last time his Marine unit—2nd Bn., 5th Marines, 1st Marine Div.—had deployed to Ramadi, from September 2004 to March 2005, the city, capital of Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Anbar province, was known as the most dangerous place in Iraq. But as of mid-April 2007, only a few weeks into a seven-month tour, Nowicki, from Midlothian, Ill., said his unit had been involved in only two small-arms skirmishes.
The threat of daily firefights, constant mortar attacks and roadside bomb explosions has largely disappeared for the time being, he said. But as Nowicki and the other 2/5 Marines, about half of whom are veterans of the battalion’s first Ramadi tour, trained for the current deployment, they prepared for the worst. Their combat experiences the first time taught them that.
Nowicki’s memories are still fresh. He clearly remembers Dec. 3, 2004, the day he was wounded, shot down in the street—really more of an alleyway, he concedes—that bears his name. He adds that he killed the insurgent machine-gunner who tried to kill him.
As part of an eight-man foot patrol scouting for sniper positions about 6 a.m. that day, Nowicki described the morning as “uneventful.” The Marines were searching, he says, for a tall building with good sight lines of Ramadi’s streets in which to hide their four-man sniper team.
Suddenly, muzzle flashes grabbed his attention.
“I was the seventh man in our group,” he said. “We started taking heavy machine-gun fire from a two-story building. Then a car rounded a corner with about four insurgents firing AK-47s at us. They had us in a classic L-shaped ambush.”
Nowicki remembers glancing over his left shoulder precisely as a machine-gun round ripped completely through his left arm. The shot knocked his A-4 rifle from his hand, leaving him sprawled in the alley as subsequent rounds slammed into the wall behind him, the ricochets tearing holes into both his calves, his hip and his thigh.
“Sgt. Anderson [the Marine directly behind Nowicki] lit up the car with more than 100 rounds from his SAW (squad automatic weapon) and it took off,” Nowicki recalled. “The guy who was working me over must have thought he killed me because he changed his fire toward Anderson after I got knocked down. I switched to burst on my A-4 and took him out.”
Nowicki said his squad killed at least five insurgents that day. After the firefight, he remembers Anderson, who emerged unscathed, taking off his neck gaiter (cloth cover) and discovering a gunshot hole in it.
“He turned white as a ghost,” Nowicki said with a slight smile.
‘Welcome to Ramadi’
2/5 Marines recall that daily firefights were the norm when they arrived in September 2004.
“October got better,” recalled Nowicki, who now serves with HQ Plt., E Co., “but things got crazy again for five or six days in November when the fighting was heavy in Fallujah. Then it quieted down. The December firefight I was in and another one a couple weeks later were the last big ones of the initial deployment.”
The battalion lost 15 KIA during that tour of duty. After a month into their current tour, which began around April 1 for most of the battalion, only a handful of the Marines had experienced contact with the enemy.
“I haven’t fired a round since I’ve been here,” said Cpl. Aaron Autler of 2nd Plt., E Co. “By this time on our last tour, I think we already had four Marines killed.”
The battalion’s first KIA on the initial deployment, Pfc. Jason Poindexter, a 20-year-old Marine from San Angelo, Texas, never even got a chance to put his boots on the ground in the city.
On Sept. 12, 2004, as he was riding in a seven-ton truck in a convoy into the city from Camp Ramadi for the first time, a car bomb exploded next to his vehicle. Shrapnel from the blast hit Poindexter in the head, killing him instantly.
“We had only been operational for three days,” said Staff Sgt. Juan Carlos Guzman of 2nd Plt., E Co. “It led to a 2?-hour firefight. Every time we thought it was over they would come back at us.”
As attrition began to cleave 2/5’s ranks, new Marines joined the battalion to replace those who had been killed or sent home wounded. Staff Sgt. Stacey Judge, currently with 4th Plt., E Co., was one such replacement, joining the battalion in January 2005. He described arriving in the war zone as an “eye-opening” experience.
“These guys were a family and had lost buddies,” Judge recalled. “I had seen coverage of the war on TV like everybody else, but as a Marine I knew that it could be me there. I remember one day after I got here I was in the middle of the street and it hit me, ‘I’m in Ramadi.’ Right then I saw a flash on top of a building about 75 yards away. It was an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] that had been fired at an Army Psyops vehicle not too far from where I was standing. I remember thinking, ‘Welcome to Ramadi.’ I learned a lot from that.”
Nearly all of 2/5’s veterans of the initial deployment have stories of losing a friend. Cpl. Matthew Weisler, a 22-year-old husband and father from East Jordan, Mich., who serves with HQ Plt., F Co., remembers a buddy taking “three rounds to the neck standing about 10 feet away from me. The last time here, I shot off more rounds in a week than I probably will this whole deployment.”
Cpl. Michael Gonzalez of 3rd Plt., F Co., said he engaged in some 15 to 20 firefights in 2004-05, and “lost a couple friends.” But, like Weisler, he hadn’t fired his weapon through the first month of the current deployment.
Sgt. Alejandro Tejeda of H&S Company recalled that the last Marine killed on the first deployment, Lance Cpl. Richard Clifton, 19, of Milford, Del., died in a Feb. 3, 2005, mortar attack while “inside the wire,” or within the relative safety of Camp Ramadi, which Marines called “Junction City” back then.
Autler says the first time he left the wire in 2004, a good friend of his was killed: “The last time I fired enough rounds to last a lifetime. It’s crazy how much you appreciate the value of life after you’ve been here.”
More than 100 men in the battalion were wounded during the 2004-05 tour, and many, like Nowicki, chose to extend their Marine contracts when they found out earlier this year that the battalion was returning for another seven-month deployment.
“We’re all real close,” Nowicki explained. “We’re like a family. We all joined to fight in Iraq. We got the opportunity to come back to a city that we viewed as a success when we left in 2005. By then, we believed we had control of it.”
Controlling Ramadi, though, has proven elusive over the last four years. Fighting flared again on June 18, 2006, when the Army’s 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division (along with elements of the 8th Marines and 101st Airborne Division) mounted an offensive to drive jihadists out of the city.
It came at a steep cost. During a typical week last summer, a third to half of all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq occurred in Ramadi. According to statistics compiled by the independent, nonprofit Web site iCasualties.org, from June 18 to Dec. 31, 2006, 136 Marines, 63 soldiers and 11 sailors were killed in either Anbar province or in Ramadi itself.
‘People are Just Tired of the Fighting’
Now on their third tour in Iraq (the battalion also participated in the March 2003 invasion, where it fought through Baghdad and onto Samawah before coming home), 2/5 Marines say insurgents in Ramadi are keeping a low profile for now.
“We’ve faced the guys who want to fight, and we’ve defeated them,” battalion commander Lt. Col. Craig Kozeniesky said. “My Marines are seeing the results of their hard work for the first time.”
The battalion’s staff officers attribute the more peaceful Ramadi to two main changes: more Marines living in and patrolling downtown, and more cooperation from the citizens.
“The enemy had never seen 800 dismounted Marines in the city before,” said Capt. Jeff O’Donnell, the battalion’s operations officer. “The locals see our presence full time now. They’re more willing to talk to us. They feel safer.”
O’Donnell says the insurgents’ four-year murder and intimidation campaign, which killed “hundreds of people, including old ladies and children,” has backfired. Marines living downtown at the battalion’s eight outposts agree.
“The people are just tired of the fighting,” said Capt. Ian Brooks, commanding officer of Fox Company. “They’re so tired of it they’re willing to help us help them. More life has come back here in the last month than in the last four years.”
Brooks, as part of the battalion’s command element, arrived in early March 2007 for the current deployment. Soon after, he was wounded in an ambush downtown some “200 meters outside friendly lines.”
By the middle of April, while traveling in a convoy near Ramadi’s infamous Government Center, which houses the city’s and Anbar’s provincial governments and had been a favorite target of enemy snipers, he said the change was dramatic.
“You couldn’t do this a month ago,” he said. “You’d get shot at.”
Statistics provided by the Army’s 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, which controls U.S. operations in Ramadi, bear this out. They showed that weekly attacks on U.S. forces had dropped from 136 at the end of January 2007 to 21 at the beginning of April 2007.
During the height of fighting in the city last summer, some 334 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks occurred during the month of July. By March 2007, that number had dropped to 67. Monthly mortar attacks during the same period dropped from 129 to 31. At the same time, the number of weapons caches found increased from 11 in July 2006 to 60 in March 2007.
‘You Appreciate the Value of Life’
It’s a trend VFW magazine witnessed firsthand while accompanying 2/5 units in Ramadi earlier this year. On April 15, the battalion participated in Operation Kangaroo to drive insurgents out of southern Ramadi. The large operation included U.S. Army, Marine and Navy units, along with Iraqi army soldiers and policemen, working at various points in and around the city.
For its part, 2/5’s Echo Company, led by Capt. William Weber, cleared a peninsula on Lake Habbinayah southeast of the city. Inserted by CH-46 helicopters, Echo Company fanned out on the peninsula searching for enemy combatants and weapons caches in the town of al Angur, known to be a safe haven for terrorists.
During a previous tour, Army units working the area had apprehended about 50 insurgents—including the bodyguard of the “No. 3 bad guy in Anbar,” according to Marines. But for Echo Company, Operation Kangaroo passed with no firefights, no IED attacks and no significant contact with the enemy.
The biggest news of the day for Capt. Weber and his Marines was the confiscation of a relatively small weapons cache, a small amount of U.S. and Iraqi money and apprehension of the two “military-aged” males at one house, with the younger of the two testing positive for gunpowder residue on his hands.
Echo Company’s part of the operation, expected to last about 18 hours, was wrapped up in about 12. Several Marines were convinced the locals had been tipped off about the upcoming operation and any “high-value individuals” had moved on.
Overall, for Echo Company the operation became more of a goodwill tour than a combat mission. The Marines set up a supply point in the town that distributed food, water and toys to local residents.
As the Marines waited for helicopters to extract them from the peninsula, a Navy corpsman treated a little boy’s infected foot, while Capt. Weber traded two apples to the boy’s mother for some of her homemade bread. It was quite a change for those Marines who had been to Ramadi in 2004-05, some of whom believe the current calm is only a temporary lull.
“The enemy has to try something dramatic to regain their credibility with the locals,” Capt. Brooks said.
In the meantime, 2/5 Marines will rely on training that has taught them “when to fight, but also when not to fight,” according to battalion executive officer Maj. Daniel Healey.
“We have exceptionally talented Marines, from sergeants on down,” he said. “They’ve been able to adapt to a different Ramadi.”
E-mail tdyhouse@vfw.org
Part II: 2/5 Marines conduct raids, patrols and humanitarian missions from outposts in downtown Ramadi. Also, some of the battalion’s Marines explain why they joined the Corps.
Sidebar: 1st Marine Division Traces History Back 96 Years
The 1st Marine Division—the oldest, largest and most decorated division in Marine Corps history—traces its roots back to March 8, 1911. That’s when its 1st Marine Regiment was formed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Another of its regiments, the 5th Marines, was created in 1914 and participated in 15 major engagements in WWI, including Belleau Wood, Chateau and St. Mihiel. During the war, the 5th and 6th Marine regiments formed the 4th Brigade, which lost 2,461 killed and 9,520 wounded.
“The Old Breed,” as the division is known, was formally established aboard the battleship USS Texas on Feb. 1, 1941. Some 18 months later during the first major U.S. offensive of WWII, the division participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal, earning its first of three (also awarded for action on Peleliu and Okinawa) Presidential Unit Citations (PUCs) of the war.
During WWII, the 1st Marine Division sustained the most combat deaths of any U.S. Army or Marine division in the Pacific Theater with 3,470 KIA and 14,438 WIA.
The division landed at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950, earning another PUC, its first of three for the Korean War. The second was for its “attack in the opposite direction” as it fought its way out of the Chosin Reservoir area. Battles from April to September 1951 earned the 1st Marine Division its third PUC of the war and sixth overall. Total division casualties during the Korean War were 4,004 KIA and 25,864 WIA.
In 1965, the division’s 7th Marines participated in the first major U.S. ground operation in Vietnam. In 1966, the division established its headquarters first at Chu Lai and later at Da Nang, conducting 44 operations in I Corps from October 1966 to May 1967, which earned the division its seventh PUC. Its eighth PUC was awarded for battles between Sept. 16, 1967 and Oct. 31, 1968. From 1965 to 1969, the 1st Marine Division sustained more than 6,000 KIA, nearly half of all Marine fatalities in Vietnam.
In 1990, the 1st Marine Division defended Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield and participated in 100 hours of combat between Feb. 24-27 in Kuwait during 1991’s Persian Gulf War. Eight of the division’s Marines were killed in the war.
From December 1992 to April 27, 1993, battalions from the division’s 7th and 11th (Artillery) regiments deployed to Somalia in Operation Restore Hope. Two Marines were KIA and nine WIA, along with one Navy corpsman killed during the division’s participation.
The division earned its ninth PUC for its part in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, conducting the deepest penetrating ground operation in Marine Corps history. It redeployed to Iraq in February 2004 and again in 2006. As of May 26, 2007, the 1st Marine Division had sustained 341 deaths in Iraq.
Since WWI, 87 “Old Breed” vets have beenStory and photos by Tim Dyhouse
This is the first of two on-the-scene reports by VFW magazine senior editor Tim Dyhouse, who was in Iraq this past April. This was his third trip to the war zone.
Standing in a dusty plywood barracks at Camp Ramadi in April 2007, Marine Cpl. Thomas Nowicki tells a visitor why his buddies named a street after him. It was the site, he said, where he was badly wounded 2? years ago.
“Tommy Gun Street,” said the 22-year-old married father of one, located some two miles away in downtown Ramadi, was a hazardous place back then. But much like the city itself, he adds, it’s changed significantly.
The last time his Marine unit—2nd Bn., 5th Marines, 1st Marine Div.—had deployed to Ramadi, from September 2004 to March 2005, the city, capital of Iraq’s Sunni-dominated Anbar province, was known as the most dangerous place in Iraq. But as of mid-April 2007, only a few weeks into a seven-month tour, Nowicki, from Midlothian, Ill., said his unit had been involved in only two small-arms skirmishes.
The threat of daily firefights, constant mortar attacks and roadside bomb explosions has largely disappeared for the time being, he said. But as Nowicki and the other 2/5 Marines, about half of whom are veterans of the battalion’s first Ramadi tour, trained for the current deployment, they prepared for the worst. Their combat experiences the first time taught them that.
Nowicki’s memories are still fresh. He clearly remembers Dec. 3, 2004, the day he was wounded, shot down in the street—really more of an alleyway, he concedes—that bears his name. He adds that he killed the insurgent machine-
gunner who tried to kill him.
As part of an eight-man foot patrol scouting for sniper positions about 6 a.m. that day, Nowicki described the morning as “uneventful.” The Marines were searching, he says, for a tall building with good sight lines of Ramadi’s streets in which to hide their four-man sniper team.
Suddenly, muzzle flashes grabbed his attention.
“I was the seventh man in our group,” he said. “We started taking heavy machine-gun fire from a two-story building. Then a car rounded a corner with about four insurgents firing AK-47s at us. They had us in a classic L-shaped ambush.”
Nowicki remembers glancing over his left shoulder precisely as a machine-gun round ripped completely through his left arm. The shot knocked his A-4 rifle from his hand, leaving him sprawled in the alley as subsequent rounds slammed into the wall behind him, the ricochets tearing holes into both his calves, his hip and his thigh.
“Sgt. Anderson [the Marine directly behind Nowicki] lit up the car with more than 100 rounds from his SAW (squad automatic weapon) and it took off,” Nowicki recalled. “The guy who was working me over must have thought he killed me because he changed his fire toward Anderson after I got knocked down. I switched to burst on my A-4 and took him out.”
Nowicki said his squad killed at least five insurgents that day. After the firefight, he remembers Anderson, who emerged unscathed, taking off his neck gaiter (cloth cover) and discovering a gunshot hole in it.
“He turned white as a ghost,” Nowicki said with a slight smile.
‘Welcome to Ramadi’
2/5 Marines recall that daily firefights were the norm when they arrived in September 2004.
“October got better,” recalled Nowicki, who now serves with HQ Plt., E Co., “but things got crazy again for five or six days in November when the fighting was heavy in Fallujah. Then it quieted down. The December firefight I was in and another one a couple weeks later were the last big ones of the initial deployment.”
The battalion lost 15 KIA during that tour of duty. After a month into their current tour, which began around April 1 for most of the battalion, only a handful of the Marines had experienced contact with the enemy.
“I haven’t fired a round since I’ve been here,” said Cpl. Aaron Autler of 2nd Plt., E Co. “By this time on our last tour, I think we already had four Marines killed.”
The battalion’s first KIA on the initial deployment, Pfc. Jason Poindexter, a 20-year-old Marine from San Angelo, Texas, never even got a chance to put his boots on the ground in the city.
On Sept. 12, 2004, as he was riding in a seven-ton truck in a convoy into the city from Camp Ramadi for the first time, a car bomb exploded next to his vehicle. Shrapnel from the blast hit Poindexter in the head, killing him instantly.
“We had only been operational for three days,” said Staff Sgt. Juan Carlos Guzman of 2nd Plt., E Co. “It led to a 2?-hour firefight. Every time we thought it was over they would come back at us.”
As attrition began to cleave 2/5’s ranks, new Marines joined the battalion to replace those who had been killed or sent home wounded. Staff Sgt. Stacey Judge, currently with 4th Plt., E Co., was one such replacement, joining the battalion in January 2005. He described arriving in the war zone as an “eye-opening” experience.
“These guys were a family and had lost buddies,” Judge recalled. “I had seen coverage of the war on TV like everybody else, but as a Marine I knew that it could be me there. I remember one day after I got here I was in the middle of the street and it hit me, ‘I’m in Ramadi.’ Right then I saw a flash on top of a building about 75 yards away. It was an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] that had been fired at an Army Psyops vehicle not too far from where I was standing. I remember thinking, ‘Welcome to Ramadi.’ I learned a lot from that.”
Nearly all of 2/5’s veterans of the initial deployment have stories of losing a friend. Cpl. Matthew Weisler, a 22-year-old husband and father from East Jordan, Mich., who serves with HQ Plt., F Co., remembers a buddy taking “three rounds to the neck standing about 10 feet away from me. The last time here, I shot off more rounds in a week than I probably will this whole deployment.”
Cpl. Michael Gonzalez of 3rd Plt., F Co., said he engaged in some 15 to 20 firefights in 2004-05, and “lost a couple friends.” But, like Weisler, he hadn’t fired his weapon through the first month of the current deployment.
Sgt. Alejandro Tejeda of H&S Company recalled that the last Marine killed on the first deployment, Lance Cpl. Richard Clifton, 19, of Milford, Del., died in a Feb. 3, 2005, mortar attack while “inside the wire,” or within the relative safety of Camp Ramadi, which Marines called “Junction City” back then.
Autler says the first time he left the wire in 2004, a good friend of his was killed: “The last time I fired enough rounds to last a lifetime. It’s crazy how much you appreciate the value of life after you’ve been here.”
More than 100 men in the battalion were wounded during the 2004-05 tour, and many, like Nowicki, chose to extend their Marine contracts when they found out earlier this year that the battalion was returning for another seven-month deployment.
“We’re all real close,” Nowicki explained. “We’re like a family. We all joined to fight in Iraq. We got the opportunity to come back to a city that we viewed as a success when we left in 2005. By then, we believed we had control of it.”
Controlling Ramadi, though, has proven elusive over the last four years. Fighting flared again on June 18, 2006, when the Army’s 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division (along with elements of the 8th Marines and 101st Airborne Division) mounted an offensive to drive jihadists out of the city.
It came at a steep cost. During a typical week last summer, a third to half of all U.S. combat deaths in Iraq occurred in Ramadi. According to statistics compiled by the independent, nonprofit Web site iCasualties.org, from June 18 to Dec. 31, 2006, 136 Marines, 63 soldiers and 11 sailors were killed in either Anbar province or in Ramadi itself.
‘People are Just Tired of the Fighting’
Now on their third tour in Iraq (the battalion also participated in the March 2003 invasion, where it fought through Baghdad and onto Samawah before coming home), 2/5 Marines say insurgents in Ramadi are keeping a low profile for now.
“We’ve faced the guys who want to fight, and we’ve defeated them,” battalion commander Lt. Col. Craig Kozeniesky said. “My Marines are seeing the results of their hard work for the first time.”
The battalion’s staff officers attribute the more peaceful Ramadi to two main changes: more Marines living in and patrolling downtown, and more cooperation from the citizens.
“The enemy had never seen 800 dismounted Marines in the city before,” said Capt. Jeff O’Donnell, the battalion’s operations officer. “The locals see our presence full time now. They’re more willing to talk to us. They feel safer.”
O’Donnell says the insurgents’ four-year murder and intimidation campaign, which killed “hundreds of people, including old ladies and children,” has backfired. Marines living downtown at the battalion’s eight outposts agree.
“The people are just tired of the fighting,” said Capt. Ian Brooks, commanding officer of Fox Company. “They’re so tired of it they’re willing to help us help them. More life has come back here in the last month than in the last four years.”
Brooks, as part of the battalion’s command element, arrived in early March 2007 for the current deployment. Soon after, he was wounded in an ambush downtown some “200 meters outside friendly lines.”
By the middle of April, while traveling in a convoy near Ramadi’s infamous Government Center, which houses the city’s and Anbar’s provincial governments and had been a favorite target of enemy snipers, he said the change was dramatic.
“You couldn’t do this a month ago,” he said. “You’d get shot at.”
Statistics provided by the Army’s 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, which controls U.S. operations in Ramadi, bear this out. They showed that weekly attacks on U.S. forces had dropped from 136 at the end of January 2007 to 21 at the beginning of April 2007.
During the height of fighting in the city last summer, some 334 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks occurred during the month of July. By March 2007, that number had dropped to 67. Monthly mortar attacks during the same period dropped from 129 to 31. At the same time, the number of weapons caches found increased from 11 in July 2006 to 60 in March 2007.
‘You Appreciate the Value of Life’
It’s a trend VFW magazine witnessed firsthand while accompanying 2/5 units in Ramadi earlier this year. On April 15, the battalion participated in Operation Kangaroo to drive insurgents out of southern Ramadi. The large operation included U.S. Army, Marine and Navy units, along with Iraqi army soldiers and policemen, working at various points in and around the city.
For its part, 2/5’s Echo Company, led by Capt. William Weber, cleared a peninsula on Lake Habbinayah southeast of the city. Inserted by CH-46 helicopters, Echo Company fanned out on the peninsula searching for enemy combatants and weapons caches in the town of al Angur, known to be a safe haven for terrorists.
During a previous tour, Army units working the area had apprehended about 50 insurgents—including the bodyguard of the “No. 3 bad guy in Anbar,” according to Marines. But for Echo Company, Operation Kangaroo passed with no firefights, no IED attacks and no significant contact with the enemy.
The biggest news of the day for Capt. Weber and his Marines was the confiscation of a relatively small weapons cache, a small amount of U.S. and Iraqi money and apprehension of the two “military-aged” males at one house, with the younger of the two testing positive for gunpowder residue on his hands.
Echo Company’s part of the operation, expected to last about 18 hours, was wrapped up in about 12. Several Marines were convinced the locals had been tipped off about the upcoming operation and any “high-value individuals” had moved on.
Overall, for Echo Company the operation became more of a goodwill tour than a combat mission. The Marines set up a supply point in the town that distributed food, water and toys to local residents.
As the Marines waited for helicopters to extract them from the peninsula, a Navy corpsman treated a little boy’s infected foot, while Capt. Weber traded two apples to the boy’s mother for some of her homemade bread. It was quite a change for those Marines who had been to Ramadi in 2004-05, some of whom believe the current calm is only a temporary lull.
“The enemy has to try something dramatic to regain their credibility with the locals,” Capt. Brooks said.
In the meantime, 2/5 Marines will rely on training that has taught them “when to fight, but also when not to fight,” according to battalion executive officer Maj. Daniel Healey.
“We have exceptionally talented Marines, from sergeants on down,” he said. “They’ve been able to adapt to a different Ramadi.”
E-mail tdyhouse@vfw.org
Part II: 2/5 Marines conduct raids, patrols and humanitarian missions from outposts in downtown Ramadi. Also, some of the battalion’s Marines explain why they joined the Corps.
Sidebar: 1st Marine Division Traces History Back 96 Years
The 1st Marine Division—the oldest, largest and most decorated division in Marine Corps history—traces its roots back to March 8, 1911. That’s when its 1st Marine Regiment was formed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Another of its regiments, the 5th Marines, was created in 1914 and participated in 15 major engagements in WWI, including Belleau Wood, Chateau and St. Mihiel. During the war, the 5th and 6th Marine regiments formed the 4th Brigade, which lost 2,461 killed and 9,520 wounded.
“The Old Breed,” as the division is known, was formally established aboard the battleship USS Texas on Feb. 1, 1941. Some 18 months later during the first major U.S. offensive of WWII, the division participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal, earning its first of three (also awarded for action on Peleliu and Okinawa) Presidential Unit Citations (PUCs) of the war.
During WWII, the 1st Marine Division sustained the most combat deaths of any U.S. Army or Marine division in the Pacific Theater with 3,470 KIA and 14,438 WIA.
The division landed at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950, earning another PUC, its first of three for the Korean War. The second was for its “attack in the opposite direction” as it fought its way out of the Chosin Reservoir area. Battles from April to September 1951 earned the 1st Marine Division its third PUC of the war and sixth overall. Total division casualties during the Korean War were 4,004 KIA and 25,864 WIA.
In 1965, the division’s 7th Marines participated in the first major U.S. ground operation in Vietnam. In 1966, the division established its headquarters first at Chu Lai and later at Da Nang, conducting 44 operations in I Corps from October 1966 to May 1967, which earned the division its seventh PUC. Its eighth PUC was awarded for battles between Sept. 16, 1967 and Oct. 31, 1968. From 1965 to 1969, the 1st Marine Division sustained more than 6,000 KIA, nearly half of all Marine fatalities in Vietnam.
In 1990, the 1st Marine Division defended Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Shield and participated in 100 hours of combat between Feb. 24-27 in Kuwait during 1991’s Persian Gulf War. Eight of the division’s Marines were killed in the war.
From December 1992 to April 27, 1993, battalions from the division’s 7th and 11th (Artillery) regiments deployed to Somalia in Operation Restore Hope. Two Marines were KIA and nine WIA, along with one Navy corpsman killed during the division’s participation.
The division earned its ninth PUC for its part in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, conducting the deepest penetrating ground operation in Marine Corps history. It redeployed to Iraq in February 2004 and again in 2006. As of May 26, 2007, the 1st Marine Division had sustained 341 deaths in Iraq.
Since WWI, 87 “Old Breed” vets have been awarded the Medal of Honor, the last in Iraq.