Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino

      MAP 3

      Zofchak tried to establish the locations of his team and the source of the fire but couldn’t immediately figure out “where the hell” it was “coming from.” Gaining situational awareness under fire can be difficult, even for experienced combatants. The snapping air and impacts of bullets told the Americans that a heavy volume of machine-gun fire was aimed at them. The directional echo of the firearms and the path of landing bullets can orient an observer only to the general source of the attack; there’s not much else to go on in the first few seconds.⁷⁰ In an instant, the body floods with adrenaline, and time seems to slow down or speed up. Some people feel numb, undergoing a vaguely out-of-body experience as their senses become selectively sluggish and sharp at the same time. And there is fear. It’s not the slow, creeping variety felt when anticipating hidden roadside bombs from the seat of a Humvee, rather a stabbing terror that promptly gives way to something else, or sticks around and incapacitates.

      With Marines, their training usually kicks in, making the first, crucial order of business to discern the source of the incoming rounds and to quickly return a large volume of fire to subdue the ambush and eliminate the attacker’s advantage—that is, “suppressing them to gain fire superiority.” The problem is that the men shooting at you already know where you are and are suppressing you. And doing what needs to be done to obtain eyes on a position in a firefight—exposing oneself, even a little bit—might mean catching a bullet. Even wildly aimed machine-gun fire is unforgiving.

      Muñoz crouched behind the courtyard wall and watched as Zofchak twice shifted from the cover of the outhouse to find the enemy’s position. “That’s pretty crazy,” the corpsman thought. Zofchak spotted muzzle flashes at two houses merely seventy-five to a hundred meters southeast, along Water Tower Road. He focused on flames he recalled blinking in the window of one of the houses. The corporal popped from cover, shot at the insurgents, looked around or yelled to someone, stuck his neck and shoulders out, and shot again.⁷¹

      Tyink was next to Zofchak behind the outhouse, his legs still sprawled in front of him after an urgent slide for cover. According to Zofchak, Tyink was momentarily frozen. He had a distracted look on his face. Zofchak glanced at him, thinking, “What the fuck are you doing?” and then returned to shooting at the insurgents. At the renewed gunfire, Zofchak recalls that Tyink seemed to shake himself from his open-eyed slumber. He too raised his weapon and started peeling off rounds toward the attackers.⁷²

      During a lull in incoming fire at the front porch, Auton escaped the space under the stairs and ran into the house. O’Connor and McAlinden followed “maybe twenty or thirty seconds behind him, at most,” according to O’Connor. When the two men entered the house, Auton was nowhere to be seen, and they later surmised that he had gone “straight to the roof.” The two following Marines rapidly cleared the large house room by room to make sure no one was hiding in the building. By the time they made it to the top, Auton had set up a field of fire.⁷³

      From his spot behind the courtyard wall, Muñoz looked for something to shoot at and watched Zofchak for clues to get PID of a target. He admired the team leader’s calm.⁷⁴ Muñoz tended to be pretty calm himself. In the social hierarchy of Alpha Company, most everybody seemed to like the quiet Navy man, who rotated in and out of the three squads as one of the platoon’s two overworked medical corpsmen.

      The amiable Colombian American was known as “the Puma.” Their platoon sergeant had coined the nickname on an earlier deployment to Iraq in 2005. Some claimed that comparing the short corpsman to a jungle cat was a play on his South American heritage, but others speculated it might be because of his graceful movements or the way he “pounced” on injured men to render treatment. Whatever the actual etymology, the serene Muñoz merely smiled when he heard “The Puma” and an accompanying Rawrrawarrr!—a stream of terrible, throat-cracking impressions of a cat’s roar. He had also been christened with the ethnically incorrect handle of “Ruben the Cuban,” which played on his Hispanic lineage and the bottomless cups of strong Cuban coffee he drank and shared with the Marines.

      Muñoz was no “shit talker,” but he had to occasionally bare his teeth in the never-ending cycle of abuse that Marines and corpsmen heap on one another. While some guys flung endless volumes of crap at the wall and hoped that some of the insults stuck, the Puma would quietly observe or endure “beaner” jokes with a slight smile, waiting for an opportunity. When the right moment presented itself, he would strike, slipping a rhetorical knife through an attacker’s ribs in the form of a quiet insult, often followed by everyone bursting into laughter. His low-key put-downs gained authority from his selective use of them. Most of the Marines liked the chubby-cheeked corpsman, but more important, they respected him as possibly the best medic in the company. The thirty-five-year-old had seasoned himself as a first responder in his eleven years as an EMS technician and then as a fireman in Miami, Florida. He inspired confidence when the Marines witnessed him leap into action when people were injured. Assessed one man, “The Puma was unflappable.”⁷⁵

      For four years before leaving the service in 1995, Muñoz had been an active duty Navy man on the ship-based—“blue side”—of the corpsman hierarchy. After the September 11 attacks, he volunteered to resume his work as a Navy medic, but on the “green side”—Marine infantry. He wanted to do his part, and serving with the Marines guaranteed him a crack at the combat he had missed during the Persian Gulf War. Muñoz wanted to test his skills in action.⁷⁶ He was getting plenty of that now, being shot at by a machine gunner for the second time in a day. He projected calm, but incoming bullets imbue anyone with great turmoil.

      Firefights happen impossibly fast and generate a jumble of conflicting emotions. For Muñoz, there was excitement; there was piercing fear. He was sure that everyone was scared to some extent, but there was an unspoken, often successful struggle among the Marines not to show it. You had to display confidence to avoid making your buddies think you might crack up and fail to do your job. In the end, the fear of letting down friends and looking weak before alpha male competitors tended to eclipse the stark terror of being shot at.⁷⁷

      At the sheikh’s house, everyone, according to Muñoz, seemed to keep things cool as they returned fire on the insurgents. He perceived the men they were fighting that day as acting professionally as well. In the first ambush, the insurgents had set up impressive fields of fire and then successfully retreated, only to position themselves to surprise the Marines a second time. Maybe these guys knew what they were doing. Muñoz waited for the call to treat any wounded.