Iraq: Welcome to Ramadi
This post is part of a series leading up to the 5 year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq on Thursday. It was written by Pat Dollard for Maxim magazine. He blogs at www.patdollard.com.
Dollard says of the invasion of Iraq: “I could give two fucks about WMDs. There were much more important reasons to topple Saddam—terrorism being one of them. The root causes of terrorism are the lack of capitalism, the lack of democracy, and the lack of modern education. What has stood in the way of those things has primarily been the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. We just got one of them out of the way.”
When I arrived in Ramadi in November 2005, it was clear that Satan had punched a hole in the Earth’s surface, plopped down his throne, and set up shop. IED craters vastly outnumbered traffic signs. Giant chunks of twisted concrete and metal seemed to literally grow out of the ground everywhere you looked. The whole place looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had been given an unlimited supply of cash and meth. I had requested a posting at Camp Hurricane Point, the Marines’ forward operating base, located at the westernmost tip of Ramadi on the bank of the Euphrates River.
I asked the corporal signing me into Camp Hurricane Point the same question I used whenever I went to a new combat outpost: “How often do y’all get mortared?” “Three or four times a week,” he replied. “All our roofs are tin.” He was wrong. The mortars came every day. Not to say that the marines patrolling Ramadi didn’t give as good as they got. They blasted the shit out of everything in sight. The amount of firefights staggered my mind. Daily life consisted of running patrols in Humvees or on foot, hunting insurgents, raiding suspected IED workshops, and dodging sniper fire. On my first night back in Iraq, I rode along for Operation Shank, a sweeping raid of southern Ramadi with the express goal of killing Al Qaeda terrorists linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As I filmed from the back of a Humvee, I said to myself, “Thirty-six hours ago I was in Beverly fucking Hills.”
After roughly six months spent in Iraqi hot spots, my number finally came up on February 18, 2006. As I rode along packed into the back left seat of the lead Humvee a little before midnight, insurgents ambushed the fourth vehicle in our convoy. The Humvees came to a halt while the marines tried to assess casualties and kill every enemy in sight. Cpl. Matthew Conley, riding shotgun in my Humvee could not raise the marines taking fire on the radio, so he got out of our vehicle to join the battle. As he stepped away, an insurgent on a rooftop above triggered a massive IED buried beneath the street. Conley died instantly. The concussion mortally wounded 2nd Lt. Almar Fitzgerald, the marine sitting six inches away from me in the backseat. I was thrown 30 feet out of the vehicle, my camera recording every second. As small-arms fire popped and RPGs came shrieking in, the marines laid down a deadly hail of lead. I crawled back to the Humvee, picking up my camera along the way. The firefight lasted an hour before our attackers fled or died. The marines stormed the house where the insurgents had lain in wait for us. On the roof I stood in the very spot from which a man had detonated the bomb that killed Conley and Fitzgerald and left my legs filled with shrapnel.
As physically fucked up as Ramadi had become, something very different was happening psychologically. The people were over the insurgency. The rest of Iraq was moving on, and the terrorists knew it. After the invasion, the vast majority of Iraq embraced the obviously positive change that fate had brought to the land. Ramadi, however, always belligerent, full of a history of rebelling against any outside authority and full of Sunni Baathists who had it made in the shade under Saddam, went gunning for the coalition and the new government from day one. The marines set up an anonymous tip line, and the calls flooded in. They got so much intel, busted so many insurgents, dug up so many weapons caches, that the insurgents freaked out and blew up the phone lines from Ramadi to the Syrian border. The sheiks, the local leaders who once supported the insurgency, finally engaged in talks with us and gave the nod for the population to start cooperating. The police department began recruiting new members. An Al Qaeda suicide bomber blew up the first 100 recruits in line. I was there. It was hell. When I left Iraq last April, Ramadi was the last great holdout in Iraq. Today it remains the last stronghold of the terrorists. Once the war ends in Ramadi, the war will end in Iraq.
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