Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
sight, so he let them do most of the shooting.79
Through his scope, Serr saw “four or five … men with guns” in the yard of a house catty-corner to the building the Marines had moved to secure; he shot maybe twenty rounds at them.80 Inman, taking no chances, quickly burned through two magazines shooting at the enemy.81 Once the Americans at the car heard covering fire from their teammates near the house, they took the opportunity to jump into a roadside ditch for better cover. The young Iraqis from the car joined them.82
For Kopera, time slowed during a gunfight. He had seen a few Marines panic when they were shot at, losing their minds in an instant. Some got angry and yelled. He and many others just responded. The sergeant explains that he never encountered a feeling he identified as “fear” during a battle; he never felt the instinct to flee, and he never got particularly excited. He just acted. Only after an engagement, after his adrenaline had surged and crashed, would thoughts of what had just happened or almost happened suffuse him with excitement and dread.83
The Marines on and around the sheikh’s house could see their attackers firing from inside and around a couple of smaller homes no more than about 100 meters away. Over several minutes as the firefight progressed, the insurgents initially “held their ground,” but then moved to break contact. They tried to escape through a field of thigh-high green crops behind the houses. Two of the Iraqis were cut down before their companions managed to retreat through the series of irrigation ditches that split the field.84 Subsequent intelligence reports identified one of the dead as a local man whose family lived in the modest house next to the scene of the original ambush in front of the al-Shahid mosque.85
The gunfire tapered off. This second exchange had probably lasted two to five minutes, though again, no one could tell for sure.86 Within seconds of the stillness, the Americans on the roof heard women screaming and wailing.87 Another sedan generally matching the description of the insurgent getaway vehicle could be seen rolling toward the Marines. Kopera quickly glimpsed at one of the men from the first car sitting among the weeds in the ditch. He had a panicked look on his face. The Marine then refocused on the new vehicle.88
As the car slowly approached the Marines, Kopera recalls seeing two men in their fifties or early sixties waving their arms from the front seat, trying to communicate with the Americans. Kopera motioned them forward. He briskly moved toward the car. Peering inside, the sergeant saw four middle-aged and elderly men with agitated looks on their faces and a barely conscious woman in her early thirties lying across the back seat.89 She was wailing, in pain.90 A small bloodstain across the front of her dark abaya marked a wound in her upper chest.
There was no interpreter available, but the sergeant could tell that the Iraqis wanted permission to drive her to the local hospital. Kopera didn’t think that she would make it without first being stabilized.91 He yelled for Muñoz and directed the driver to move the car up the driveway to the front porch of the house. The sergeant had Inman round up the men they had initially stopped at the checkpoint and motioned that they were free to go. Their faces filled with relief as they jumped in their car and sped south.92 Kopera ordered all the Marines into the house to plan their next moves.93 “I’m tired of getting shot at,” Kopera said matter-of-factly to Zofchak.94
From inside the house, Muñoz heard the call that “somebody is shot.”95 The Puma rushed outside, meeting the car as it drove up to the porch. The Iraqi men left the vehicle and opened the door of the beat-up old sedan, giving the medic access to assess the patient. He saw a slightly heavyset woman slumped but conscious in the backseat. Her breathing was labored as a Marine and the corpsman helped her out of the vehicle and walked her up the stairs and into the house.96
They sat her gently on the off-white marble floor, and Muñoz began a culturally delicate attempt to assess her wounds while allowing her to retain her modesty. He incrementally uncovered small swaths of her layered dress to probe for entrance and exit wounds. She didn’t object, realizing he was a “doctor” trying to help her. There was a small entrance wound in her left upper chest below the clavicle, with a slightly larger exit wound through her back.97
The woman’s dress was soaked with blood. It wasn’t life-threatening, arterial bleeding, but instead pulsed steadily from her body.98 The woman’s breathing was ragged. A lot of chest wounds eventually result in a collapsed lung, but Muñoz knew that this was not an immediate threat as “she had good lung sounds” and she wasn’t rapidly “decompensating.” The corpsman cut off a portion of her clothing to access the wound and applied an occlusive dressing and a trauma dressing over that to prevent air from entering the space around her lung and crushing it.99 He secured the elastic bandages with duct tape and continued to check her airway and pulse. Muñoz didn’t think the woman would die anytime soon, but she would have little chance of surviving the day without more sophisticated medical attention, including insertion of a chest tube to prevent her chest from collapsing in on itself.100
The woman’s male relatives realized he was a medic and quietly observed her treatment. They stood in the living room, concerned and watching, occasionally murmuring to each other in Arabic. In the distance, the Marines could hear the high, mournful wailing of a group of women who had gathered in a nearby house to lament the shooting.101 The men in the room looked upset but didn’t panic. Once they had judged the Marines’ intentions as being helpful, they relinquished control to the will of God (albeit through the Americans) to help her.102
A couple of Marines sat on a half-circular staircase and smoked a cigarette as they watched Muñoz at work. Inman looked at Zofchak, who stood nearby.103 “She’s bleeding a lot,” he said. “Yeah. She’s bleeding, a lot,” repeated Zofchak.104 The injured woman occasionally moaned but she had otherwise become quiet. Inman was impressed with how she handled the injury. “Man, she’s a little bad-ass,” he said to another Marine.105
Muñoz offered his assessment to Kopera that she was “stable,” but she “would die without better treatment.”106 Serr recalls that the corpsman was “really firm” as he made his case. The squad leader paused for a second. “We have to get her out of here,” decided Kopera, radioing his intentions to Lt. Greco: No U.S. casualties; one critical civilian casualty; calling a medevac or casevac.107
He then tried to raise an on-call medical helicopter on the predetermined frequency, but couldn’t get through to the pilot. He later found out that the frequencies, which were regularly changed, had been incorrectly set up to transmit as text.108 The helicopter’s crew could hear him, but he couldn’t hear them. The sergeant called back to Greco and asked his lieutenant to direct the bird to his location. Marines weren’t required to evacuate civilians to U.S. care unless they had been directly injured by Americans. Kopera was unsure how the woman had been shot; her entrance wound did not reveal the guilty round to be a 5.56 mm used by the Marines or the 7.62 employed by insurgents. The insurgents had started shooting at the Marines from a field behind and to the side of her house, and several women had been standing in the yard, almost directly in the middle of a withering crossfire.109
Kopera’s training had instructed him to prioritize the care of Marines, and after that treat both wounded civilians and insurgents as they would their own. He didn’t know how well others took that directive to heart, but making the attempt to save the woman was an instinctive decision. She would certainly die from her wound otherwise. If the slow ground travel through multiple checkpoints didn’t kill her, he thought the conditions at the local hospital most likely would.110 Evacuating her was not, however, without risk. A helicopter might make an attractive target for the group or groups of insurgents undoubtedly still lurking in the area, and the roads, sometimes used as landing zones for the helos, were studded with IEDs. The last thing anyone wanted was for his Marines to get killed evacuating a civilian or for a helicopter to take a catastrophic hit. Back at the patrol base, Lieutenant Greco deferred to Kopera’s call.111
The Marines in Kopera’s squad prepared to execute the order. Some supported the decision, but others