Survivors Club Exclusive
September 16, 2009

Before December 23, 2004, I never heard of anyone surviving a point-blank grenade blast, let alone four of them in one day. But that is exactly what happened my squad of marines during a four hour firefight during the Battle of Fallujah.

The battle was all but over, and our weapon’s company had been brought into the city to help search for weapons, ammunition and booby traps. Once we cleared the city, the coalition planned to let civilians back into their homes.

We searched hundreds of buildings. We found thousands of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of weapons and plenty of explosives—but no insurgents. That changed on December 23rd when our command sent us into the Askari District, Fallujah’s affluent northeast section where most of the city’s wealthy Sunni had built homes.

While clearing a large, well-built house, part of our platoon ran into a force of at least thirty insurgents on the dwelling’s second floor. A furious, room-to-room firefight erupted, trapping three of our men upstairs.

My squad rushed into the house to join the fight. As we entered, a lieutenant threw an M67 fragmentation grenade up the stairs toward the second floor. It bounced off the stairwell landing and came bouncing back down at us.

The M67 has a five second fuse and a lethal radius of five meters. It can inflict casualties up to fifteen meters away. I was lead man in the stack, ready to charge up the stairs when the frag exploded less than four meters away. The rest of my squad was even closer.

The blast deafened me, and I felt shrapnel scythe through the air all around me. Miraculously, I suffered no wounds. Neither did the rest of the squad.

We reassembled and raced upstairs into machine gun fire. The insurgents on the second floor threw a home-made grenade at us. It exploded a matter of feet from my head and blew me down the stairs. Several of my platoon mates suffered wounds, but we stayed in the fight and returned the favor. We began pitching grenades into the insurgent-held rooms. One after another, I side armed the M67’s, hoping to knock out an enemy belt-fed machine gun that kept us pinned down on the stairwell.

Seeing one of my frags land in the bedroom through the growing cloud of smoke, an insurgent kicked it straight back at us. The M67 skidded across the floor to explode a meter away from me. The blast catapulted me into two other marines, and we crashed down onto the stairwell landing. Once again, we had somehow managed to survive, though most of us had been hit with shrapnel.

The fight continued for hours. We paused only when we ran low on ammo, or one of our men got hit. Finally, burnt, bloody and suffering from heat exhaustion, we entered the house one final time.

As we reached the top of the stairs, machine gun fire swept over us. Several insurgents charged us through the smoke. We drove them back. They threw another home-made grenade at us. I ducked just before it. Once again, it knocked us off the top set of stairs, leaving us dazed.

I lay on the landing, feeling ethereal, drifting away. I saw my grandmother’s face, and I thought I was dying. Then, our battalion executive officer, Major (now Lt. Colonel) Todd Desgrossielles, shook me back to consciousness and dragged me out of the house. As he pulled me across the front lawn, he paused long enough to throw one more frag grenade threw the second floor balcony door.

For months after, bits of grenade shrapnel would leach out of our skins. Every morning, we’d awake to find them glittering in our cots. Nevertheless, never had I seen such courage and devotion in my men than that day. We lost three fine men, whom I will never forget. We gained an unbreakable bond, forged in a battle that by all odds, should have been my last.