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One blast takes 14 Marines’ lives
Star news services
BROOK PARK, Ohio — Grief and anger enveloped this town Wednesday as families and residents awaited answers after learning that 14 Marine reservists had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
The Marines were assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, which has its headquarters in this Cleveland suburb. Two days earlier, five others from the battalion were killed while on sniper duty.
Wednesday’s attack was the deadliest single roadside bombing since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.
The Marines were killed in western Iraq as they were on their way to retake an area that had been cleared of insurgents at least once before. Their lightly armored amphibious assault vehicle was blown apart by the insurgent-laid roadside bomb.
Pentagon officials said they knew few details of the explosion. Officials in Washington said they didn’t know whether the explosion was caused by a mine or by an improvised explosive device, jury-rigged from castoff munitions. The devices have become the No. 1 cause of death for American troops in Iraq.
The sorrow in Brook Park, which has a population of 21,000 people, was painfully clear among the customers sipping their morning coffee at the counter of a doughnut shop down the street from the battalion’s headquarters.
Nearly everyone said they knew someone connected to the battalion.
“You never know who it could be. It could be your best friend. It could be your husband. It could be anyone from here,” Eleanor Matelski, 69, said as she angrily tore up a paper cup that had held her coffee.
“Tell Bush to get our soldiers out of there now before any more of our soldiers die. This is getting to be ridiculous,” she said.
A few steps away, near the gates of the battalion headquarters, residents piled red roses, American flags, handwritten notes of condolences and white crosses for the victims.
A photo of a smiling Lance Cpl. Jeff Boskovitch, 25, in a broad-brimmed hat and desert fatigues looked out from a glass vase filled with black-eyed Susans. Boskovitch, a member of the scout sniper team killed Monday, was to be married next year.
Words of gratitude came from survivors of other battles.
“Thank you Marines for defending my freedom,” a card read. It was signed, “An Old Vietnam War Vet.”
A bald eagle on a silk flag waved over the row of flowers and a teddy bear with the inscription: “America owes you a HUGE debt of gratitude.”
Men and women approached the shrine in cars decorated with yellow ribbons and stickers that proclaimed to the world: “My son fights for your freedom.”
Military officials initially said that all six Marines killed Monday were from the Ohio-based unit, but the Pentagon announced Wednesday that Lance Cpl. Roger D. Castleberry Jr., 26, of Austin, Texas, was attached to a Texas-based battalion.
Names of the Marines killed Wednesday were not immediately released, but nine came from a smaller Columbus-based company of the battalion, said Master Sgt. Stephen Walter, a spokesman for the company. The battalion was activated in January and went to Iraq in March.
The risk that the same geographical area will suffer multiple casualties has been heightened in Iraq because reserve troops train and fight together — unlike in Vietnam, which was fought largely by active-duty troops who were replaced by individual soldiers from around the nation.
The battalion has units in Brook Park; Columbus; Akron; Moundsville, W.Va.; and Buffalo, N.Y. The West Virginia unit said it had none of the casualties.
Wednesday’s explosion, in western Anbar province near Iraq’s border with Syria, underscored two realities American forces face as they attempt to quell insurgents.
First, U.S. troops continue to face ever more powerful roadside explosives that have defied U.S. countermeasures. In the past two weeks, at least 31 U.S. soldiers and Marines died in roadside bombings. These included explosions that struck Humvees that had additional armor and Bradley fighting vehicles, which are more heavily armored than the assault vehicle the Marines were riding in Wednesday.
Second, insurgents remain a potent force in western Iraq despite at least five battalion-sized operations launched since May to quell Iraq’s increasingly bloody insurgency.
“Just because you take a town doesn’t mean it will stay quiet,” said Marine Col. Stephen Davis, commander of the Marine Regimental Combat Team overseeing western Anbar.
President Bush, speaking in Texas, called the deaths of the Marines a “grim reminder’” that America is still at war.
Marines in Iraq expressed frustration.
“We roll into a town, we clear it out, we deem it clear,” said Staff Sgt. John Allnut, 36, of Washington, D.C. “But you know that the second you leave, within hours or days, there’s going to be activity, or they’re going to go back in there.”
Wednesday’s attack occurred near the town of Haditha. It was the second fatal attack on Marines near Haditha this week. On Monday, six Marines on foot patrol in the area were killed after they came under small-arms fire.
The Marines’ civilian interpreter also was killed in Wednesday’s attack. A 15th Marine escaped, reportedly scrambling from beneath the vehicle’s wreckage.
Officials in Washington acknowledged that the Marines were riding in a vehicle designed 40 years ago for a different kind of warfare: the beach assaults the Marines made famous at Iwo Jima and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II.
The AAVP7A1 “armored assault amphibious fully-tracked landing vehicle” is essentially a modern variant of the WWII model, designed to carry troops from ship to shore and for use in land operations, according to a Marine Corps fact sheet. It travels at about 6 mph through surf and sand and can cruise at about 20 mph on land.
But those kinds of missions were “combined-arms” assaults, backed by heavy amounts of air, ship and artillery support, said Daniel Goure, a military analyst at The Lexington Institute, a policy group based in Alexandria, Va.
The vehicle wasn’t designed to engage in the kind of day-to-day patrolling of insurgent-controlled territory that the Marines are doing in western Iraq. During the initial assault into Iraq, many of the vehicles broke down on the long drive to Baghdad and had to be towed by other vehicles.
“It is very lightly armored. It is underpowered. It is essentially a big boat on land, and that makes it vulnerable,” said Goure. “It was never intended for these kind of missions. It was never designed for the kind of beating it has been getting.”
While many lawmakers have been clamoring for the Pentagon to add more armor to vehicles in Iraq to counter bombs, Goure said the issue isn’t that simple.
“There are not enough main battle tanks in the world to equip the forces in Iraq,” he said. “There is no way to equip these forces to withstand a direct hit from a 1,000- to 2,000-pound IED.”
Insurgents have proved adept in recent days in attacking far more heavily armored vehicles. In the past two weeks, at least 31 U.S. soldiers and Marines have died in roadside bombings. At least three of the bombings that killed soldiers involved armored Humvees, including two incidents that killed eight members of the Georgia National Guard’s 48th Combat Brigade Task Force.
Five soldiers were killed in two separate incidents involving Bradley fighting vehicles, the military’s most heavily armored infantry carrier.
