Pink Mist and Hamburger Meat a Warrior’s Tale

The Green Zone wasn’t for Richardson, though. Too much comfort for a seasoned combat veteran, apparently. A white tablecloth and valet parking doesn’t work for a guy who just wants to eat a steak. “I felt out of place,” he said, shrugging. “They have swimming pools there, and lots of civilians. I saw a lot of brand new boots.

“My boots have blood and shit on them. I guess I just didn’t really fit in there.”

At this point we had talked for hours. It wasn’t until he described “Hell Night,” though, that I felt like I had gotten just a tiny feel for what he’d been through.

In the dead of night his unit entered Ramadi’s open-air market district – the souq – for the very first time since they were stationed in the city. During the day, the souq is normally packed with shoppers, but in the early morning hours, the place is deserted. Earlier that night, Richardson’s team had already been hit in two IED strikes elsewhere in the city. One blew the entire back end of an armored Humvee off, requiring a wrecker to come out and retrieve it. Two of its occupants were seriously injured and Richardson’s team had to pick up two more marines from another unit to replace them.

“The souq is like a maze, and we got lost pretty fast,” Richardson said. “It’s dark, and the streets are too narrow to turn around. There are no street signs.”

As he continued talking I could envision the four Humvees feeling their way along in the dark, passed deserted wooden shop stalls and empty produce stands – all viewed through the eerie green light of night vision goggles. A few lonely stars and clotheslines looking on overhead, and apart from the rumble of four diesel engines, deafening quiet.
Eventually the patrol finally found their way out of the marketplace.

“We punched out onto a side street that dumped into a T intersection. Vehicle one got hit with a massive IED when they made a left at that intersection, which disabled the vehicle,” he said.

The ambush had been sprung at that point, and insurgents delivered savage small arms and machine gun fire from surrounding rooftops. A rocket-propelled grenade fired a second too early skidded off the hood of Richardson’s vehicle and exploded into a nearby electronics store.

The other three vehicles pulled up and around to support the damaged Humvee, and a major shootout ensued.

“We hit back hard with the Mark 19 grenade launcher and our Gulf 240 medium machine gun. We killed a few of them on the roof and quickly got the upper hand in the firefight,” he recalled. “They put up a fight, though, and there were bullets flying in all directions. They use green tracers and ours are red, and through the night vision goggles it looked like a scene from Star Wars.”

Despite being on the receiving end of a well-planned ambush, none of his team received so much as a scratch. It seemed so unlikely that I asked him to repeat the sequence of events and confirm the absence of casualties.

“No, we didn’t have any casualties in that firefight,” he asserted. “When we stormed the building, Corp. Greewall shot a couple more of them, too. When two insurgents ran across an open area to try and get to an exit he hit them both with an automatic burst. He had this intuition for stuff like that, and he was just sitting there covering the stairwell, waiting for them to make a run for it. He had a lot of confirmed kills.”

“What do people look like when they get hit with the grenade launcher? Or the machine gun?” I finally asked, unable to resist the temptation. I had wondered the whole time, and I finally had to know.

“Is it anything like the movies? Nothing at all like the movies?”

He seemed amused by my question, but answered it easily as though he’d been asked before. “Deaths are like snowflakes. No two are the same,” he informed me.

“There usually isn’t much drama and screaming like the movies,” the TV action hero continued.

“Just a lot of pink mist and hamburger meat.”

~ Matt Kokenes