Pink Mist and Hamburger Meat a Warrior’s Tale

“There’s no bigger rush than a firefight. It’s addictive.”

Richardson’s unit was later moved from Fallujah, where he had been stationed immediately after the well-publicized battle that pacified the city, to the new Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi.

“Ramadi was like the wild West,” he continued as rain began to tumble off the umbrella overhead.  “I was in a Mobile Assault Platoon and we went to some of the worst areas in town.

Places that the Iraqi army wouldn’t even patrol. We had hostile contact with the enemy almost daily.”

One afternoon, his team had just finished searching some houses suspected of insurgent activity, and were loading into the trucks to head back to base. One of his men noticed that an Iraqi civilian on a moped, who had already passed their patrol twice, was coming by a third time. This was another common tactic used by insurgents to spot and signal the position of American forces to each other.

“Right as one of my guys yelled, ‘He pointed!’ two insurgents popped out from an alleyway about a block up the street and started spraying AK-47 fire in our direction,” Richardson recalled. “One of them held the trigger down too soon, and started shooting into the ground as he pointed his rifle towards me.
“You could see a rooster tail of dirt churn up in the air.”

“How close did he come to hitting me?” he repeated, glancing around before nodding toward a staircase a few feet away.  “I don’t know. From here to those steps maybe?”

“Is there a standard Marine Corps protocol in a situation like that?” I asked. “Automatic burst? Two in the chest, one in the head?”

“We tried to conserve ammo whenever possible. I think I popped him like eight times,” he said, squinting upward to remember the number.

“How’d it feel to kill someone for the first time?” I asked.

“I’ll go with the standard Marine response,” Richardson said, smiling while finishing off the can of Monster. “The biggest impact I felt was the recoil from my rifle.”
It had begun to rain steadily and some of the people on the patio had called it quits and gone inside. Richardson glanced down at his iPhone as big drops began to wet the back of his shirt.

“Yeah, it’s them or me in that situation,” he added. “I lost nine close friends over there. We rolled hard in 3rd platoon Bravo, and we were known for that. The Iraqis respect strength.”
Later that summer, he and his team were asked to check out a print shop suspected of producing anti-American posters and fliers that had been appearing around Ramadi. While Marines from one of the trucks in his patrol began searching a suspicious vehicle in the street, Richardson and his commanding officer entered the shop.

“The middle of a busy road is an extremely dangerous place to conduct a search like that,” he explained. “You’re out in the open, really exposed, and if you stop for longer than 10 minutes, there’s going to be trouble.” He asked one of the men from his Humvee to help the others finish up the search quickly so they could move to a safer position with better cover.

“I had only been inside for a couple of minutes when I heard the shot. Single shots are bad news. I’d much rather hear an automatic burst than a single shot.

“ Single shots usually mean a sniper.”

Richardson returned to find Lance Corp. Nick Whyte, the man from his unit he had asked to help search the vehicle, on the ground with a gunshot wound through the base of the skull.

“Nick Whyte was a good guy. He was a good friend of mine. A sniper with some talent and probably a Russian-made Dragunov rifle got a good shot in from at least 500 meters away.

“Nick was a direct subordinate following my orders when he died. That was hard.”

The persistent rainstorm had finally driven everyone else from the patio, and it seemed like a good time for us to call it a night. Our shirts were getting wet, and the action hero seemed to have tired of talking about Iraq.

Richardson did have more to say, though, and we picked up our conversation a week later at his kitchen table. While he continued his story, I scrolled through his photos from Iraq. There were a lot of fresh-faced kids in the desert sporting rifles and grenade launchers, posing in front of tanks and Humvees.  There was a shot of a tank enshrouded in a sandstorm. The handful of video clips featured everything from firefights to practical jokes. All of them were set to the deafening hum of perpetually running diesel engines.

“I went to the Green Zone once,” Richardson said.

When Whyte died, Richardson was sent to the well-publicized Green Zone to get away from Ramadi for a while and decompress.

“They flew me and a buddy there in a British Puma helicopter at night,” he recounted. “We were flying fast and low – just scraping above the rooftops – and the door gunner was trading fire with insurgents on the ground pretty much the whole way. I could hear rounds hitting the bottom of the helicopter, and it was sketchy. We had this sort of friendly rivalry with the Brits, and I remember the gunner yelling something like, ‘Don’t get nervous on me, Yank!’”