Lessons Learned In Combat

[jtb0311]

Semper Fi.

[Safetyhit]

Thanks for not only your sacrifice, but also your courage to share this story as well. A very worthy and humbling read.

If I may Paul, I will reluctantly add one more mistake to your list. I do this very reluctantly in fact, but since this is a thread meant to teach I will try to add something relevant in that regard. Please don't take this comment in a negative way, as I do not want to give that impression. I have a great deal of respect for you, your actions that fateful day and your ongoing courage today.

You stated that you shot the first of the two about 15 times during an adrenaline filled moment while watching his body react to the impacts. While understandable under the circumstances perhaps, it still caused you to reload sooner than you should have had to. Who knows what the outcome might have been should you have hit the first guy with a couple and then quickly moved on to the next target.

So, maybe add a degree of fire discipline to the mix here as well. It would seem to apply based upon your exact wording.

Again, with all due genuine respect.

[ICANHITHIMMAN]

Paul

Great write up. I lived in that city for a year in a safe house with my team in 2007-2008 the surge.

Not a pretty woman in sight thats what I remember anyhow.

[RetreatHell]

Yeah you're right, I didn't need to shoot the guy 15+ times. But like I stated, my adrenaline was maxed out and I just kept pumping round after round into his body. I can't say enough just how intense it was seeing my bullets impact that Fedayeen fighter from that range. Like I said, it was the first time I'd engaged and had actually seen my bullets impact a dude, knowing that they were mine and no one else's rounds hitting the cocksucker.

To be honest there is another reason, more psychological, that I blasted the mother****er so many times, but I'm not going to get into it here in a public forum for personal reasons, the main one being that what I say here is basically public record and I don't want shit to come back and bite me in the ass someday, if you know what I'm getting at... there's some things I only talk about with my fellow warriors when I'm conversing with them face to face.

But on the subject of fire discipline overall, yes I think it's something that should be gone over during training. I was there during the invasion, so no one had gone there to war before us that could give us true-life intel on how many rounds you should fire into a human target in order to kill them.

Coming out of Marine boot camp, we all thought we were ****ing snipers and said stupid shit like, "One shot, one kill!" and the like. Well, that's all good and well if you just so happen to be in the perfect scenario where you pop a dude in his face in the sweet spot and his lights go out instantly and for good, but when you're in combat and you shoot a bad guy in the chest and he doesn't even seem fazed because he's doped up and just shot himself up with epinephrine before picking a fight with you, then it becomes, "One shot, one... of ****! Two shots, three shots, 6 shots.... damn, six shots, one kill!? **** me, he was a tough little bastard!"

We didn't know the Fedayeen we were fighting that day were doped up until afterwards (I was told months afterwards, when I talked to my boys on the phone one day when I was in the VA hospital). But we certainly knew that something was odd about the fact that their bodies could take so much punishment (usually) before they would finally stop fighting and shooting back at us and were dead for good. My buddy got a head shot on a guy and had to pop him in the head again before he finally went down and quit shooting at him (he was using one of the "experimental" ACOG RCOs on an M16A4, so he could actually see the shot placement on the guy's head in his optic).

Also, even if I had shot the first guy only 5-8 times, as opposed to 15 times, then fired those 5 or 6 rounds at the other guy who stepped out of the doorway of the bunker to engage me, hit him once just how I did, and had 5-8 rounds left in my magazine(I know that round count doesn't add up to 28 here, but I'm not sure what the exact amount was of rounds fired anyways, it's all a "general" and "best" guess resulting from my memory of the actual numbers), I most likely still would've done a reload like I did, how I did and where I did, because I would've known my magazine was getting really low by that point. I'm pretty sure of this because I had been pretty conscious of my ammo count throughout the gunfight. I had actually taken time about 1 hour into the fight, during a lull in firing, to pull out a bandolier of ammo and reload/top off all 6 of my issued mags (looking back on it, it's hard to believe I only carried 6 mags on me, which equals a pathetic grand total of 168 rounds).

Bottom line, if I would've been good to go with my speed reloads, had been looking down range while I was reloading, had my weapon up in my workspace, not worried about retaining an empty mag during such an intense moment (i.e. wrong time, wrong place to retain an empty mag), and had not been standing bladed in the typical known-distance range qualifying Standing position and had instead been standing squared up with my plates facing the target/threat, then I would've been good to go and would've been able to shoot that guy to shit whenever he got back up on his feet and came back out of the bunker.

Trust me, I've had plenty of time to "What if?" the hell out of that day in that backyard, but ever since I've begun training and have learned all that I have in these carbine courses (still have a shit-ton more to learn though), the above scenario is the one I keep coming back to nowadays.

Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to read my post and for putting the amount of thought into it that you did. Thanks also for pointing out the fire discipline issue, I'm glad you did.

Take care and Semper Fi,

-Paul

Thanks for not only your sacrifice, but also your courage to share this story as well. A very worthy and humbling read.

If I may Paul, I will reluctantly add one more mistake to your list. I do this very reluctantly in fact, but since this is a thread meant to teach I will try to add something relevant in that regard. Please don't take this comment in a negative way, as I do not want to give that impression. I have a great deal of respect for you, your actions that fateful day and your ongoing courage today.

You stated that you shot the first of the two about 15 times during an adrenaline filled moment while watching his body react to the impacts. While understandable under the circumstances perhaps, it still caused you to reload sooner than you should have had to. Who knows what the outcome might have been should you have hit the first guy with a couple and then quickly moved on to the next target.

So, maybe add a degree of fire discipline to the mix here as well. It would seem to apply based upon your exact wording.

Again, with all due genuine respect.

[RetreatHell]

Paul

Great write up. I lived in that city for a year in a safe house with my team in 2007-2008 the surge.

Not a pretty woman in sight thats what I remember anyhow.

Thanks brother! Yeah, I only saw a small number of good looking females when I was deployed there. But not all of them count because some of them were all veiled-up, so it was hard to tell if the girl was actually hot or not based on just looking at her eyes and/or a few other facial features.

There are a shitload of unibrows grown in Iraq, though!

Semper Fi,

-Paul

[SIMPLYDYNAMIC]

Ya but when you take the veils off.........

[warpigM-4]

Paul ,Thank you for your Post and for your service .I have a Friend that was in Somalia and also talked of the enemy Being doped up,and taking many rounds before they stop coming.It seems we are hearing more and more of the enemy using drugs to get the courage they need to fight.

The old "two to the chest and One to the head" drilled into my head during basic May need Updated. I so Need to Get the Money up for a Carbine class .

[mechtech1]

Great AAR; wish that all the service branches had taken a better look at Urban tactical operations years ago. I know that if I had suggested it in my unit, it would of been laughed off as "Army" training and never happened.
Our training was limited to qual on the range once a year. Not even enough to really be familar with the weapon.

Keep up the hard work of transistion to civilian, and be proud of the time you spent in service to our nation.

You might look into doing lectures to LE and visiting with the troops in the guard and reserve in your local area. Your experiences would be life saving for many of them.

Scott Lawson
MSgt. USAF, Retired

[Cobra66]

Paul,

Your story is a reality check for everyone in the military or law enforcement who thinks that their basic and advanced training makes them prepared for reality. Thank you for the time you took to write it and although it probably sounds hollow to you, thank you to your service to our country! Those photos of you fighting from the wheelchair are a testimonial to the fact that you are 100 times the man that I am. God Bless You.

The truly sad fact of your story is that it was your leadership that failed you. I will be so bold as to say it was your upper leadership who were more responsible for your injury that the Hajji who shot you. Why? He was doing his job, They Weren't I spent 12 years in the Army as an officer and it was an endless source of frustration that the entire realm of weapon skills to most of the upper leadership boiled down to the simple act of qualification. In the end, they didn't care if you scored marksman or expert (as if, like you said, that was any real indicator of combat marksmanship skills) or how many times you had to recycle (I had one BN CDR who you could guarantee would need to be recycled at least twice per qual), as long as they could check the box marked qualified, in their minds they were good to go. The few "shooters" in the units were never given as much time as needed to conduct really good train up to qualification. SART (Small Arms Readiness Training Teams - I think the acronym has changed) did the best they could, but even they were limited to a 15 minute class prior to qualification. Of course to the upper leadership, EEO and retention classes were much more important that training their tankers and scouts to survive in combat. In fact, weapons qual was always rushed and assigned to Officers and NCOs that would move the troops through the qualification and not to the ones that would insure a quality product. It was always assumed (by those smart enough to realize that basic rifle/pistol marksmanship was a joke) that the soldiers would get the needed training pre-mobilization. Sadly, in your case and in thousands of others, this did not happen. What is truly sad is that you were a hard charging Infantry Marine and your leadership obviously had the same mindset as mine did. I can only imagine what it is like in a Combat Support unit.

[telecustom]

Paul,

Just read your article in the new issue of SWAT. Great article. I hope you are able to reach out to even more people and share your hard fought wisdom.

Keep out the good work. Airborne.