Band of Brothers

By Matthew McAllester
Staff Correspondent

November 17, 2004

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- When the fighting began, the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was the tool that punched the hole in Fallujah.

That's what they were there for. The Army battalion's Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles destroy with an efficiency and ferocity unmatched by the limited firepower of the Marines, who have a comparatively small number of armored vehicles.

Staff Sgt. Carlos Santillana's squad of eight men arrived early on Tuesday morning, eight days ago, in the heart of the insurgent stronghold of Jolan, a neighborhood in the northwest of the city. His company, Apache, was ahead of schedule and so it took over a group of school buildings next to a small park. The plan was that the Marines would then catch up and start moving house to house, block by block, killing or capturing insurgents.

That evening, Santillana's men could be forgiven for thinking that someone, somewhere had it in for them.

By Saturday, only two of the eight were still standing. Five lay on stretchers and one was sheathed in a body bag.

"That's war," Santillana would say days later, his world clouded by sadness, no longer the quick-talking, wise-cracking dynamo he had been before the battle. "That's all I can say."

The battle of Fallujah was, on the face of it, a mismatch of historic proportions. History's largest military superpower was facing down a band of perhaps 2,000 nonuniformed insurgents whose most lethal weapons were homemade car bombs and armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades.

In spite of the enormous imbalance of force and the inevitable U.S. victory that ensued, the Americans suffered their own pain and their own losses. When the rules are that there are no rules, when an enemy uses its religious buildings as firing positions, when the insurgents have the home-team advantage in a tightly packed, urban environment unknown to the attackers, even soldiers from the most sophisticated military in the world will die. They knew that going in. The only question was: Who would it be?

From the start to the finish, the 2nd Battalion worked as a jackhammer. With one part of the city conquered, the battalion's tanks and Bradleys would move on to the next, heading south, sometimes steadily, sometimes in an aggressive rush.

People around the battalion knew about Santillana's guys. There were some characters who stood out. Sgt. Akram Abdelwahab -- "Abe" to everyone -- was the point man, the crazy one who would walk up to roadside bombs to examine their wiring. Spc. Stanley Goodin was tall, handsome and street-smart. And Sgt. Jose Velez was rotund, jocular and loved by all for his constant grin. An officer who knew them warned journalists who were beginning to befriend them to keep a distance. They pushed things to the limits, he said.

That was a backhanded compliment in Army terms. It implied bravery as well as risk-taking. And as they looked for trouble, trouble seemed to find them last week, as reported in earlier Newsday accounts.

First, the school buildings came under rocket attack that Tuesday; an armor-piercing rocket-propelled-grenade, or RPG, sliced through their Bradley on Friday morning, and an hour and a half later, the men had to hazard a storm of bullets to save a soldier whose left arm had been blasted off by another deadly RPG.

Three close calls, a punctured Bradley, an injured driver and still Santillana's men went out to the fight in the southwestern section of the city, known as Shuhada, the Martyrs' neighborhood.

Spc. Eric Watson couldn't drive because of the shrapnel in his body so Pfc. Ken Price, 20, of Renton, Wash., took over. Together with the other Bradleys and tanks, they headed south again.

"We had taken fire from a mosque earlier the previous day," Santillana said Monday, sitting in the twilight in the Iraqi home that Apache was temporarily occupying.

Slowly, in detail, he did what he's been doing involuntarily ever since Saturday morning: He reconstructed the events.

The eight men of Santillana's squad, plus Spc. Scott Cogil, searched the mosque and went out the back door, finding a flak jacket, a Kalashnikov, a hand grenade and ammunition under a car. It was like bait. Two squads, about 20 men, began searching more houses for more weapons and perhaps insurgents.

Soon they found both. In some houses, military-aged men huddled in rooms, not fighting back as the soldiers shot the locks off the doors. There were weapons there too. They detained the men and moved on to more houses, finding more weapons, more military-aged men.

Finally, Santillana's squad came to a two-story gray house. It looked suspicious. Perhaps it was just a feeling, perhaps it was because all the other homes around were smarter, more expensive-looking. So they threw a grenade over the wall into the courtyard and one into the house. Then they rushed in, with Abe, ever the point man, kicking the door down.

"Oh, —," Santillana heard Abe shout, and an instant later there was a huge burst of gunfire from inside the house, several weapons firing at once.

"We were shooting everywhere," Santillana said Tuesday. "Sergeant Abe came crawling out the door, he was just covered in blood."

Santillana told another of the men to grab Abe and get him out of there. The soldier did so, but as he was pulling Abe out by the collar straps he "half spun around." Shot in the shoulder, the soldier nevertheless grabbed Abe again and kept pulling.

Another soldier threw a grenade into the house. All the time, Santillana said, Velez stood shooting into the house.

Two grenades came back out at the men, injuring another two.

"Velez still stood," Santillana said, "pumping away ... Velez moved back out into the street, shooting into the house. He told us to go."

It was chaotic. Different members of the squad were now wounded, some lying on top of each other, some still standing and fighting, others diving for cover. Now there was another insurgent shooting from behind them.

Cogil was taking cover and looked at Velez, who had finished the rounds in his magazine.

"I need to reload," he called out, Cogil recalled.

The next time Cogil and Santillana, from their different positions, looked at Velez, he was facedown on the ground, motionless.

Santillana has no memory of it, but he's been told that all that time he was yelling into his radio for help from the nearby Bradleys and tanks. It took them only minutes to arrive.

"This all happened in less than three or four minutes," Santillana said. "It was just a mad minute of hell."

Two Bradleys came along the street. Soon there were seven there and four tanks. They unleashed their full might on the two houses where the insurgents were.

Santillana, Cogil and the others who could walk dragged their wounded friends into the backs of the two Bradleys. Cogil didn't know if the guy he'd spent 19 1/2 hours sitting next to the previous day was dead or alive. "Velez is a heavy dude," he said. "I didn't know if he was just knocked out."

As they were loading up the casualties, another grenade thrown by the insurgents injured yet another member of the squad. There was a lot of blood and a lot of bleeding in the two Bradleys as they charged north through Fallujah to the 2nd Battalion's temporary base just north of the city at an old plaster works.

There, the battalion's medical team stabilized the living. Abe was bleeding profusely from the artery on the inside of his thigh. The day before, after racing back safely from the rescue mission, he had sat in the back of the quiet Bradley and said, "It's not my time."

It still wasn't. It was Jose Velez's time.

For more than 10 days, a Newsday reporter had spent many hours with the men of Santillana's squad. They traveled in the Bradleys of 1st Platoon, Apache Company.

While Abrams tanks cannot carry extra troops, Bradleys can fit six infantrymen in a rear compartment so small you can't sit up straight inside and have to negotiate complicated leg-room formations with the two men beside you and the three on the opposite bench. It's a little like being crammed inside the same hot, smelly astronaut's suit with five other unwashed people while "Hajis" -- as the Iraqis are nicknamed -- outside try to kill you all. That creates a certain intimacy.

There's no room in there for irritating your fellow passengers, so you make friends quickly. Everything becomes a joke. It's a sin to take a ribbing to heart -- every soldier seems to be a target for teasing in his own individual way. Only the imminent threat of death ever seems to alter that must-laugh credo.

Velez took up more room than any of the other seven guys in the squad. Abe once painted a flat pebble with a picture of a face, a pistol and a belt with the words "Fat kid" and gave it to Velez. In the back of a Bradley on Thursday night and Friday morning, Velez laughed every time anyone made a joke about his weight. He genuinely seemed to sense the affection in the teases, laughing as he tucked into an unheated, foul-smelling piece of processed chicken.

He sat in the center of the left-side bench, with Cogil to his left and Abe to his right. During the night, the three of them managed to fall asleep at moments. Suddenly young-looking as they slept, Cogil and Abe slumped on Velez's big frame.

Told, when they woke up, that they had looked like babes in the wood, Abe said: "It's great, it's like having a big pillow to lie on."

As ever, Velez grinned what Santillana Monday called "that big —-eating grin."

Each soldier dresses slightly differently from any other. Velez had thick, unbecoming spectacles, what Santillana called his "birth-control glasses." He wore a wedding ring. His earplugs, to protect his ears from the blasts around him, were kept on strings to prevent them getting lost. Under his helmet he wore a beige "flight sock," a thin, ski-mask-type covering that keeps soldiers warm at night. And when Velez felt like opting out of the conversation or the rattling of the Bradley, he would plug in the earphones from his personal stereo and listen to bands such as Linkin Park.

In the back of a Bradley, talk takes dozens of different turns during a night and day. Each topic seems to be allotted a certain time -- perhaps half an hour, perhaps 10 minutes.

On Friday morning, Abe decided he was going to post a photograph of Velez on a gay personals Web site and see how many responses Velez would get. Then the men all discussed the popular site Hotornot.com, on which some of them had posted pictures -- the happily married Velez not among them. One boasted about his high ratings on the site, which allows viewers to judge the looks of random strangers.

The patter was quick, the private language of siblings.

On Friday, Nov. 5, a few days before the battle began in Fallujah, Santillana was running his men through a routine they had been through hundreds of times: storming buildings. White tape representing the walls of a house with a narrow corridor down the center lay among the pebbles in an exercise area of a huge military base just outside Fallujah.

Santillana wanted to keep his guys sharp, so he put them through drill after drill. The more automatic their reactions and responses, the better chance they would have of staying alive when the real thing happened. They'd been through it all before, kicking down doors in the southern city of Najaf during a battle in August, but Fallujah promised to be more dangerous. The fighters there were expected to be more professional, better prepared, more committed to fighting to the death than the ragtag Shia militia the soldiers had fought in Najaf.

After the drills the men gathered round and chatted. Abe, a father of two from Spartanburg, S.C., had been home on compassionate leave when Najaf had happened. His marriage was failing, he said. He was the squad's point man, the one who always led the way, the one who seemed to have no fear. More than any of them, he was relishing the coming fight.

"I want some," he said. "'S'all good."

Santillana, 24, of Abilene, Texas, talked about his wife, who had studied psychology and gave him free therapy on the phone. He spoke of his acceptance of death, his unease with the necessity of killing.

Velez was quiet and smiling.

Abe lay on a stretcher on Saturday morning in the shade provided by the medical tent, a buddy holding a cigarette to his quivering lips. The corn-flour-fine dust of the desert north of Fallujah puffed in the breeze around him.

His right knee was bound up, his left hand deformed perhaps for life, a doctor said, and for once Abdelwahab, just when he had proved his courage beyond doubt, wasn't playing the hero.

"I ain't gonna lie to you, buddy," he said, looking up from his stretcher. "It hurts like a —."

Cogil looked down at the man whose life he had just helped save. And at another three soldiers from the same squad, all lying on stretchers in the shade, waiting for the helicopters to arrive. One had his head propped up on his helmet, sobbing quietly as a buddy held his head, pressing his forehead against the injured man's. Spc. Benny Alicea lay silent, staring at the sky. Goodin was laughing and grinning a bit manically, calling out about how he was going to have ice cream, his left knee now holding several pieces of metal.

Usually wise-cracking, riffing on any theme he could grab in his fluid, hilarious, Southern story-telling way, the squad's leader walked with a stoop of grief. Santillana looked pale as he bent down to talk with his old friend Abe.

"What's up, brother?" he asked.

Abdelwahab managed a wobbly grin and gave a brief description of what had happened in a house in Fallujah barely an hour before.

"I shot that — in the head, though," was the way he finished the short account.

Cogil walked past them all and pulled aside the dark khaki flap to the aid tent, which had been deliberately closed so other soldiers could not see what was inside.

On a raised cot to the right lay a black body bag. Cogil is 20 years old. He's from Rantoul, Ill. With the calm of an elderly surgeon who has seen it all before, his face showing nothing but gentleness, he moved to the side of the bag and unzipped it all the way.

Inside lay the body of Sgt. Jose Velez, 23, still in his uniform. His usually wide eyes were narrowed to frozen slits, his frequent and broad grin now just a slim parting of the lips.

Cogil pulled down Velez's shirt and looked at the bullet wound below his friend's neck. He examined it closely but briefly.

"Is that what got him?" he asked another medic.

Yes was the answer.

"Thank you," Cogil said, zipping up the bag.

He walked out into the November sunshine.

"I wanted to make sure that's what it was, that there was no chance," he said. "I put him on the bottom [of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle when the troops withdrew from the scene of the tragedy]. All I could do was hold his hand. Just pray the whole way back. Just worked on Sergeant Abe 'cause I could see he was bleeding all the way down his pants."

Cogil took a can of Coke.

Then he walked over to talk privately with the battalion's chaplain, Capt. Jonathan Fowler. Finally, his face changed. Cogil bowed his head, and his face crumpled into tears.

Saturday was a nasty day in Copperas Cove, Texas: Unseasonably cold and drizzly, the clouds hanging over the Army town of 25,000 like bad news.

At 6:50 a.m., Tracy Rainey's phone rang. She was awake already, thanks to the effervescence of the family's Labrador that doesn't know what Saturdays are. The voice on the end of the line was that of the rear detachment commander, the officer who acts as the commander of the 2nd Battalion at Fort Hood when Tracy Rainey's husband, Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, is away. At that moment, Rainey was in his command tent at the plaster factory north of Fallujah.

There's been a casualty in the battalion, the rear detachment officer told Tracy Rainey.

At 7:20 a.m., he rang again. The soldier has a wife, he said, and she lives in town.

Tracy Rainey knew then that it would be a very hard day.

At about 2 p.m. she was sitting in her husband's black pickup truck in the parking lot of a two-story, reddish-brown apartment building in town. An Army chaplain and a sergeant who works as an official notification officer went in to the ground floor apartment first and broke the news to Nickie Velez, 23, that her husband, Jose, had been killed in action in Iraq. There are strict limitations on what notification officers can say to a deceased soldier's next-of-kin -- it's just the basic facts -- but they are allowed to tell them that members of the family readiness group are outside and ready to come in to provide support. Nickie Velez wanted to see her friends.

Tracy Rainey did not know Nickie Velez but two other wives there did, so they went in first. The commander's wife popped in awhile later to see if she was needed. Jose Velez's widow was on the couch, her friends holding her as she wept.

Nickie Velez is trying to be strong. That's what her husband asked of her, "no matter what happened," she said Monday, speaking from Texas. She sobbed into the phone.

"He was a wonderful man," she said. "He was brave."

She spoke in short sentences. They had been high school sweethearts in Lubbock, Texas, she said. They met when they were both 16, and they had been married for two years.

"He was there for me whenever I needed him," she said. "He was always doing things for me. He took care of me."

In phone calls, he had asked her often how his "other baby was doing." He meant his motorcycle, which he adored second to his wife. He even wanted to buy a kid's motorcycle so he and a buddy who lived nearby could race around the block.

"He was a big kid," his wife said.

Nickie Velez had her own questions. She wanted to hear about her husband in his last days.

Carlos Santillana was lonely. With Price in the seat of a Bradley, he had been the last man standing from his squad when the shooting was over on Saturday morning. On Monday evening, he sat on an upturned cinder block on the front porch of Apache company's temporary base.

"I only got one guy [Price] left from my squad, everybody else is gone. You turn to your left, you turn to the right ... I sit in the back of a Bradley and it's no one I'm used to working with."

He does know them, his new squad, from the platoon; but it's not the team he'd helped to mold into a close-knit unit, a tiny fraternity with its shared jokes and intimacies.

"Under the present circumstances," he said, "I think I'm doing all right."

Immediately after his soldiers had been flown away in two helicopters on Saturday morning, Santillana felt lost.

"Sat by myself, cried a lot," he said, his thin face newly pale, his liquid talk lost for now. "It's just ... uh ... kinda ... replayed over and over ... what happened, in my head. And it scares the — out of me every time I think about it. All I did was to ask the chaplain to pray with me, pray for Sgt. Velez, pray for his wife, that she finds peace somewhere. It's not going to be easy. It's never easy."

Rainey ordered him to take a day off but Santillana was then back to work, back to the streets of Fallujah. He's sleeping badly, keeps waking up at night. He's sick of explaining to people what happened. He's just glad the whole platoon didn't walk into that building.

He was worried for his injured guys, excited that two of them would soon be returning to duty. And by Tuesday, Alicea and Sgt. Travis Bristol were back, reconstituting half the squad.

Velez won't be coming back, though. And Santillana has that knowledge written all over his taut face.

On Saturday morning, after he had tended to Abe and the other injured men, he asked someone a question he thinks he already knew the answer to. He'd been pushing it to the back of his mind.

"Where's Velez?"

"Sergeant, come here," the other soldier said.

"He didn't need to tell me anything else," Santillana said Monday. "I didn't feel myself drop to the floor."

He made his way to the body bag.

"I didn't open the bag. I basically knelt down beside it," he said. "I think I said I was sorry a hundred times."

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