On May 31, Sergeant First Class Steven Langmack was killed by small-arms fire while entering a fortified enemy position in Al Qaim, near the Syrian border. As a Ranger NCO, Steve had been the patrol leader for my command group, and we had enjoyed the comfortable relationship of longtime comrades. Steve’s wife was a strong lady who had operated an independent coffee stand on Fort Benning during our tour there. Annie attended Steve’s funeral at Arlington and that night sent me a note describing the stoic courage of his wife. Less than three weeks later, on June 17, Master Sergeants Mike McNulty and Bob Horrigan were killed, also in close-quarters combat with tenacious enemy fighters.
These deaths hit the unit like a shudder. Losing a McNulty, a Horrigan, or a Langmack meant losing a man who had been in the unit for a decade or more, where he had grown from a young soldier to a veteran one. Senior members had children who played on the same soccer teams; their wives were close friends. Bob Horrigan, for example, was a fixture in Green and in TF 714. He and his brother had been privates in my Ranger company back in 1986 and 1987, and I remembered the young, happy-go-lucky Horrigan twins with fondness. Bob had been in Green for years and had grown into one of its patriarchs. As an instructor of new operators, he had earned a special respect across the force and had a following of younger operators who looked up to him. He made beautiful custom hunting knives in his garage between deployments and had decided this tour would be his last. He was to retire the following spring.
These losses on the cusp of the major offensive made the upcoming danger very raw. If a man and an operator like Bob Horrigan can get killed, the unavoidable reasoning went, so can I.
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As the second Green squadron flowed in that July, we put them outside Al Qaim. A contingent of Rangers and SEALs joined them. Our push into that area of the upper Euphrates would not be the first time this stretch of desert had hosted bitter fighting. The landscape appeared largely unchanged from the summer of 1941, when then–Major General William Slim, the British general later famous for his operations in Burma, having worked up the valley, prepared to attack Vichy French forces ninety miles upriver. “Toward us flowed the winding Euphrates, broad, placid,” Slim wrote, while “on either side stretched, mile after mile, the desert, flat and featureless, a muddy brown.” In the summer of 2005, the area looked like a Nevada mining town, full of little brown buildings and a dusty, desolate horizon. Ten miles southeast of the city itself lay a big, defunct phosphate plant that abutted an industrial rail depot. We constructed a base around there, and the squadron set up shop inside the old, run-down factory. At this critical, tough post we installed one of our most talented commanders.
By the time we arrived that summer, Al Qaim and Husaybah, closer to the Syrian border, were nasty. Our Green teams, Rangers, and SEALs worked alongside the Marines from the 2nd Regimental Combat Team, ably commanded by then-Colonel Steve Davis, whose South Carolina–size bailiwick ran to the border area. Davis, one of the few Marines who had served previously on the TF 714 staff, shared our conviction that the foreign infiltration through the Al Qaim area was a major threat. The Marines had encountered wily, well-trained foreigners, and their Camp Gannon, in Husaybah, had suffered a deluge of bold attacks. That spring, while insurgents engaged in a diversionary gunfight, a dump truck bomb exploded at the camp entrance while a fire engine—driven by suicide bombers wearing Kevlar vests and protected by thick plated glass—sped in behind it and attempted to breach the gate. They were repulsed, thanks largely to the heroics of a Marine lance corporal.
As the Marines and TF 16 contested the area near the border, a seperate force of Marines worked their way east to west, fighting a hopscotch series of battles against insurgents up the Euphrates River valley. Our forces joined them.
If the black Al Qaeda flags that insurgents draped over the sides of compound walls or flew from rooftops weren’t evidence enough of how deeply entrenched Zarqawi sympathizers were in the upper corridor, the violence that ensued when we contested these areas proved it. The engagements were some of the largest since the initial invasion of 2003. And yet in the vast desert expanse far from Baghdad, they went mostly unnoticed by the American public. At a time when Iraq was supposed to be emerging as a secure and sovereign nation, western Anbar was exploding. Largely away from civilian populations, our forces waged bitter fights against confident AQI militants, periodically requiring thunderous bombing runs on isolated mud and cinderblock safe houses. The United States was meant to be rebuilding Iraq, but my old mentor Lieutenant General John Vines had to destroy five bridges along the Euphrates River to constrict the enemy’s lateral maneuvers.