"I’ll never forget them" - Marine awarded Bronze Star for actions during pivotal OIF

[Vulture6]

‘I’ll never forget them’
Marine awarded Bronze Star for actions during pivotal OIF battle
By Devon Hubbard Sorlie
Soundings Staff


Then-Lt. Col. Rickey Grabowski addressed members of Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, Regimental Combat Team-2, Task Force Tarawa, I Marine Expeditionary Force prior to the March 23, 2003 firefight in An Nasiriyah, Iraq. Eighteen members of that company would die while opening up a supply route for the 10,000 Marines following behind them.

Col. Rickey Grabowski wears the Bronze Star for a lance corporal who finally had the time to join the Marines at age 32. He wears it for a smart-aleck corporal from Chicago who couldn’t stay out of trouble. He wears it for 16 other men who fought with him on March 23, 2003 in the Iraq city of An Nasiriyah. He wears it for them because they can’t — they died during one of the fiercest battles of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

And he’ll never forget them.

“There’s not an hour in the day that goes by that I don’t see or think about the 18 we lost,” Grabowski, 48, said a few days after his Jan. 20 ceremony at the Joint Forces Command’s Joint Warfighting Center in Suffolk where he was awarded the Bronze Star and promoted to colonel. “I knew most of those young men.”

The lance corporal from Chicago spent so much time in the brig that separation paperwork had begun. Yet when he heard the unit might be sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, the lance corporal came up to Grabowski and stated he wasn’t going to be left behind.

“I told him if we took him, and he did well, we would throw out all of the bad paperwork,” Grabowski said. “He was one of the first to die from Charlie Company.”

His oldest lance corporal was a poster child for the Marines, Grabowski recalled. One night while in theater, Lance Corporal Williams was standing watch at midnight when Grabowski finished up with his shower.
Wearing only his boots, a towel, flak jacket, helmet and carrying his weapon, Grabowski approached the guard post only to realize he had forgotten the password challenge.

“I was running up to my perimeter when I heard ‘halt, who is there?’ I told him I was the battalion commander. When I couldn’t answer the password riddle, he told me to come up real slow so he could identify him. With a big grin on his face, he told me he’d let me through this time,” Grabowski chuckled at the memory.

He took the opportunity to chat with this older lance corporal, learning he had always wanted to become a Marine, and finally took the opportunity after 9/11.

Then Grabowski’s voice turned somber. “We lost him that day, too, as they were bringing casualties in. That is what has changed me forever. You can’t stop thinking about those guys.”

Grabowski doesn’t spend much time second guessing decisions made that day.

“I don’t regret anything we did on the 23rd,” he said. “Our business is a real ugly profession. We get the call and we take pride in that, but it does leave scars. We accept them and learn from them. But you also cherish them (the Marines) and worship them and hope to make peace with them and move on.”

Right after receiving the Bronze Star, Grabowski was promoted to colonel. His father, Melvin Grabowski, pinned the eagle rank to his son’s uniform, which nearly brought both men to tears. His father served in Vietnam as an Army Chinook pilot, and spent 39 years in active-duty, reserves and the National Guard.

“I got my moral compass from my mother, but my tenacity and perseverance from my father,” Grabowski explained. “Both my grandfathers served in World War II, and my father was in Vietnam.
None of them ever got anything more than a pat on the back and some campaign ribbons and medals and they didn’t ask for anything else. Here I am getting a Bronze Star for nothing more than what any of them had done. It was a very proud moment for me and for him to pin that O6 on my collar.”

Two days later, Grabowski was still answering the phone as “Lieutenant Colonel.”

“I haven’t gotten used to that,” he laughed as he made the correction to “colonel.”

Go in hard and fast
It was a hot and dusty day on March 23, 2003. The 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, Regimental Combat Team-2, Task Force Tarawa, I Marine Expeditionary Force, was encamped 10 kilometers (about six miles) from the Iraqi city of An Nasiriyah. It was just the third day of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the 1,200 Marines, under the command of then-Lt. Col. Grabowski, faced uncharted territory. This was the city where U.S. forces stopped during the first Gulf War in 1991. American troops had never been further north in Iraq.

For Grabowski’s troops to advance into the city, with its population of more than 500,000, they would need to secure two bridges, both major strategic crossing points of the Euphrates River, south and then north of the city.

Col. Ronald Bailey, the commanding officer of Grabowski’s Regimental Combat Team 2, stood with Grabowski on the road while bombs, mortars and live fire fell around them. With 10,000 Marines behind them, it was up to Grabowski’s unit to open up and secure the road.

“Rick, we’ve got to push,” Bailey recalled for those gathered at the ceremony. “And without hesitation, he told me ‘Got it, sir, we’ll make it happen.’”

After Bailey ordered Grabowski forward into An Nasiriyah, “I never thought I would see him again,” he said.

Grabowski was known for his attention to detail and logistics. But even he couldn’t plan for what happened next.

“The best laid plans are useless after leaving the line of departure,” Grabowski said.

Not in the plans
Grabowski’s gunnery sergeant that day was Jason Doran, who is now retired and living in Dallas.

“We were pulled over to the side of the road,” Doran recalled. “Then we saw this Army convoy roll by. We wondered why they were there, but we figured they knew what they were doing.”

That wasn’t the case. A lost Army 507th Maintenance Company had taken a wrong turn not only once, but twice, and instead of trailing behind the Marines, they were suddenly lumbering forward of them through the unsecured city of An Nasiriyah.

The Army convoy managed to get through the city with some Iraqi troops even waving at them as they rolled north. But once they were out of the city, it became apparent they were on the wrong route. Cutting west to the proper route wasn’t possible due to mud and deep sand.

The impassable terrain forced them back into the city, and by now, less friendly Iraqi soldiers were firing upon the convoy.

With massive 5-ton vehicles running out of fuel, unable to quickly turn around, or becoming disabled, the 18-vehicle convoy with 33 soldiers was separated into three groups. Two of the more agile vehicles sped south through the city, running into Grabowski’s Marines still 10 kilometers from An Nasiriyah.

The Marines immediately sent a group north to rescue the remainder of the 507th.

“There’s an unwritten rule in the military — Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force or Coast Guard — leave no one behind,” Grabowski said.

Three miles south of the city, they found another group of five vehicles with soldiers in a firefight. Providing a “steel curtain” of protection with their own armored vehicles, the Marines rescued 10 soldiers.

Further north, the remaining group of 10 vehicles with 17 soldiers became disabled as they encountered increasing fire from the enemy.

Pvt. Jessica Lynch was a passenger in one of the vehicles. After her vehicle crashed, she was taken to an An Nasiriyah hospital as a prisoner. She would be the only survivor of that third group.

For 17 hours, elements of Grabowski’s Marines battled the Fedayeen and Iraqi troops until they claimed control of the city.

But the battle was costly. Eighteen Marines lost their lives keeping the north-south route nicknamed “Ambush Alley” open as a supply route for the I Marine Expeditionary Force.

Despite Grabowski’s careful planning, once the 507th got hit, “we started losing logistics,” Doran said.

On March 31, eight days after the battle began, a Special Operations Force rescued Lynch from her hospital bed. Grabowski provided a tank platoon to support that mission.

“We were surrounded for a week, but all of that logistics planning carried us that 10 percent further,” Doran said. “The Navy corpsmen were taking bandages off the dead to put on other wounded Marines. NCOs (non-commissioned officer) were grabbing Marines to try and pull everything back together.”

Doran received a Silver Star for his actions in that battle when he and some members of his Alpha Company went back into battle to look for three missing Marines. They found two, who had been cleaned by Iraqi nationals and given a Muslim burial. It took longer to find the third body, which had been dragged through town by Iraqi troops.

When the last of the bodies were recovered, Doran was struck by how much their deaths affected Grabowski.

“That showed he really cared about his Marines,” Doran added.

The battle, once of the fiercest during OIF, has garnered its Marines two Silver Stars, two Navy Crosses and numerous Bronze Stars.

After an Iraqi brigadier colonel turned himself over to the Americans, he explained many of the Iraqi army had already defected prior to the arrival of the Marines. But when the 507th Maintenance Company wandered into the city, the Iraqis didn’t know the distinction between the Army and Marines.

“They came in pretty slow and didn’t fight back,” Grabowski said the Iraqi colonel told them. “They thought that was the military might of the United States.”

For his decisiveness and devotion to duty during that battle, as well as the rescue of members of the 507th Maintenance Company, Grabowski was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor.

“I’m humbled and honored,” Grabowski said during the ceremony, which also promoted him to the rank of colonel. “I did nothing more than anyone else would have done. An Nasiriyah was not a battle won by individual Marines. We all wear this medal today to honor them.”

Grabowski was inspired by the bravery exhibited by his senior enlisted, many of whom were there to share the day with their former commanding officer. He told of a moment when during heavy machine gun fire over his Humvee, the hatch of the vehicle was stuck. Grabowski finally kicked open the door, falling onto his knees. He looked up and while fire was still going over him, he could see 1st Sgt. Dave Parker walking over by a 3-foot berm, calming his men.

“I thought here I was, down on my knees, while Parker was walking around,” he said. “That brought me back to my feet.”

When Doran was awarded the Silver Star, Grabowski made sure it wasn’t just mailed to him.

“He arranged for a ceremony and he flew to Dallas to pin the medal on me. That’s how he is,” Doran said. “Who am I to him? I’m just one guy, retired, but he cared enough to come out.”

Sgt. Maj. Charles Arrick said Grabowski was calm in the middle of combat and showed a great deal of concern about his Marines.

“He was considered by the Marines as a very fair leader. He made my job very easy because he wanted to hear from me,” Arrick said.

“Because of his leadership style, we worked as a team. It’s been great working with him.”

The modest Grabowski was clearly uncomfortable being tapped with words like courageous.

“Courage is easy when you’ve got the Spartans who were with me that day.” Grabowski said. “Those were some of the hardest days of our lives. The 23rd changed our lives forever.”

[USMC Chuter]

Semper Fi. Well deserved, and worn with humility.