The nature of the work

This article from Kirk Semple and the New York Times describes the tough work being done in Steel Curtain. It describes the action that killed Lance Cpl. Sorensen, the first Marine killed in Steel Curtain. It is gritty, frightening work. You never know what exactly is waiting for you behind a door, in the next house. This is the work that soldiers and Marines do.

As the day’s operation began, Third Platoon’s first squad assembled in a yard and then, in file, entered the house through a side door, each man moving in a slight crouch, rifle shouldered, eyes sighting down the barrel into the semi-darkness of the interior. There were several rooms and a staircase leading up. The marines branched off in two’s, each pair taking a room. Three others climbed to the second floor.

On the ground floor, Lance Cpl. Ryan J. Sorensen and Sgt. Jorge Ruiz, the squad leader, came to a locked steel door. Corporal Sorensen struck the lock with an axe. As the door gave way, he pitched forward, Lieutenant Cox said later, straight into a burst of automatic rifle fire. Sergeant Ruiz and the marines on the ground floor reflexively fell back through the front and side doors, yelling: "Marine down! Marine down!"
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From the cover of an interior wall, Lieutenant Cox fired his M-16 rifle blindly around the corner toward the rear room. But his bullets were met with bullets. He emptied one magazine of ammunition, reloaded, began firing again and then dashed for the front door, firing his rifle one-handed behind his back, he said, "to make noise" and provide his own covering fire for his escape.

The three marines who had gone upstairs — Lance Cpl. Travis Fox, Pfc. Jason Alexander and Pfc. Daniel Barnes — were now trapped by whoever was downstairs. They scrambled into positions giving them a view of the top of the staircase. Outside, the marines who had pulled back sought anxiously to regroup and counterattack, governed by their code of honor never to leave a fellow marine behind.
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About 11 a.m., five minutes after First Squad first entered the house, there was an explosion inside. Corporal Fox, one of the three marines still on the second floor, said later that he thought a gunman had tossed a grenade up the stairs. The blast was followed by automatic weapons fire, which included a burst from Private Barnes’s light machine gun, called a SAW. Moments later, marines on a rooftop across the street spotted someone poke his head out a door leading to a front balcony, and they opened fire. Cpl. Lucien Lafreniere and Lance Cpl. Jonathan Dunn, who were on a balcony across the street, later said they had both hit the man many times. The gunman disappeared through the doorway, but the shooting didn’t stop. Marines on a neighboring rooftop, as well as machine-gunners on an armored vehicle and a Humvee, joined in the wild fusillade. "As soon as marines hear gunfire," Lieutenant Cox later explained, "it’s contagious."
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Corporal Sorensen was the first marine to die in the sweep. His death was devastating to Third Platoon, and no more so than to the members of his squad, who have since found themselves grappling with feelings of sadness, anger and guilt. It still keeps Lieutenant Cox awake at night, he says, as his mind replays events and ponders what he could have done differently to save his marine.

But grieving has little place on the battlefield, Sergeant McCurry said, and the mission must go on.

Indeed, several minutes after the house was finally declared “cleared” that Sunday, Captain Carabine received a warning about car bombs in the city. Just then, a huge explosion sounded somewhere to the east, in the direction India Company had already begun to move.

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linked to Don Surber's open post