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HOUSE-TO-HOUSE, ROOM-TO-ROOM, and hand-to-hand, the Marines had
been fighting to take Fallujah for five days and about three hours
by mid-morning on November 13, 2004. First Sergeant Brad Kasal
recognized Sergeant Pruitt as he came out of a house three doors
up. Pruitt started walking down the street wounded, dazed, and in
pain. Kasal dragged Pruitt into an alley and began to administer
first aid. While Kasal worked on the wound, Pruitt told him there
had been a big firefight with a lot of bad guys, and there were
three wounded Marines still trapped inside. Calling another Marine
to take care of Pruitt, Kasal rounded up a handful of his men and
rushed into the house to rescue the wounded Marines. About 40
minutes later, Brad Kasal was carried out of the house and into the
pantheon of heroes of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Thirty-eight-year-old Brad Kasal (he pronounces it “castle”)
grew up on a farm in tiny Afton, Iowa. His dad, Gerald, ran the
farm while sharing boy-raising duties with Brad’s mom, Myrna.
Between Brad and his five brothers, Gerald and Myrna were busy
people. There weren’t a lot of in-town activities, so Brad grew up
doing chores, studying, and hunting and trapping for recreation. He
remembers walking the fields hunting pheasant with an old
hand-me-down 20-gauge shotgun. A wrestler and middle linebacker in
high school, he hung out with the athletic crowd and “with the
people who weren’t athletes but partied all the time.” Kasal was
everyone’s friend, so there wasn’t a lot of peer pressure. No
drugs, or any of the other serious problems teenagers fall prey
to.
When he graduated from high school in 1984, Kasal gravitated
toward the military. Most of his family were Army men, but he chose
the Marines, “because it’s the most challenging and I was more
impressed with the Marine recruiter. When he came in he talked
about hard work and discipline when the other recruiters were
preaching more about money, skills, and things like that. I was
more impressed by the history of the Marine Corps and I figured
that if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do the
hardest.”
For the next 20 years, Brad Kasal was a Marine infantryman. He
was wounded in the 1991 Gulf War, but Kasal wasn’t collecting
Purple Hearts. “I was able to shake it off and keep going… I
turned down a lot of injuries [that might have earned him medals].
I never really made big issues of them.” On 9-11, Brad Kasal was
First Sergeant of Kilo Company, Third Battalion, First Marine
Division: K-3-1 in Marine lingo. Soon enough, Kasal was at war in
Afghanistan. He declined to speak of what he did there. Much of
what the Marines did in Afghanistan remains classified.
Back in the States on Christmas leave in December 2002, Kasal
and his unit got word they’d be deploying to Kuwait. Kasal led the
170 enlisted men of K-3-1 aboard ship, setting sail for Kuwait on
January 17.
First to Fight
K-3-1 WAS ASSIGNED to Regimental Combat Team 1, which led the
invasion and moved north quickly to the city of An Nasiriyah. They
led the regiment into the city and into what was probably the
heaviest battle of the invasion. After a few days, K-3-1 pulled out
and headed north. Kasal remembers, “We had some wounded but no one
was seriously wounded. So everybody came out in pretty good shape.”
They entered Baghdad on April 6 or 7, and were on their way home by
May. Because they’d been deployed overseas for nearly a year, K-3-1
got one of the top spots on the list of homeward-bound Marines.
They didn’t get to stay home for long.
Some time in August or September 2003, Kasal’s unit got the word
they were headed back to Iraq. By that time he’d been in the
Marines for almost 20 years. He’d been in “just about every Middle
Eastern country” several times and had been in combat all too
often. He could have opted to stay home, but he volunteered to go
back to the fight. Why? “Because it’s important what we’re doing
over there. I’d served 20 years in the military to make a
difference. I’ve done other combat tours but in my 20 years this is
probably the most important one. I wasn’t going to miss it.” In
February, Kasal was assigned as First Sergeant of Weapons Company,
still part of K-3-1. He spent a lot of time in the field with his
new men, making sure they were ready for what they’d have to
face.
Fallujah
ABOUT 50 MILES WEST OF BAGHDAD, and once a city of over 250,000,
Fallujah was the insurgents’ biggest stronghold in Iraq. It was in
Fallujah, in December 2003, that the insurgents killed four
American security workers in an ambush, mutilated their bodies, and
hung them on a bridge for conveniently present television crews to
broadcast the atrocity. A few months later, by April 2004, the
Marines were making probing attacks into Fallujah.
Kasal’s Weapons Company was part of the Marine force that made
the stop-and-start attacks on insurgent positions in Fallujah for
months. “We did limited operations through August and September and
all through the whole summer and fall,” Kasal said. As the months
passed, the Marines were getting antsy: the fight was going to
happen, and they wanted to put it behind them. On November 8, the
Marines assaulted Fallujah and Kasal’s company led the way.
Kasal’s company breached the enemy defenses, assaulting and
capturing a critically located train station to pave the way for
the rest of the assault force. The Army’s 7th Cav swept through the
breach and began the street-to-street fight for, Kasal recalled,
about the first 13 blocks. Kasal’s company followed by the second
day, and again took a lead position.
They didn’t sleep, just catching naps when they could. They ate
when they could, and only dreamed of getting a shower and a good
night’s sleep. They were in combat, day after day and night after
night, but the Marines stuck to it. Kasal said his men, “Were
exhausted but with as busy as we were and with the danger the way
it was and the adrenaline kicking in everybody was holding up
pretty well.” They suffered casualties every day, on almost every
street. They were searching the one and two-story houses for
insurgents, avoiding booby traps and improvised explosive devices
as best they could. Kasal and his men got their first real night’s
sleep on November 12.
Kasal said, “It was their first good rest,” since the attack
began on the 8th. “On the 12th we hit the north part — what we
called ‘the Queens’ — which [was]… the most dangerous part [of
the city].” It was the most dangerous because the Marines’ feinting
attacks in the months before — all from the south — had drawn the
terrorists in that direction. They had fortified houses in
anticipation of an attack from the south, but the Marines came in
from the north. Kasal, with two of his Marines — Private First
Class Nicholl and Corporal Mitchell — had been in heavy
room-to-room fights on the 12th, and they expected more of the same
on the 13th. It was a cool November day, about 60 degrees and — as
on every Fallujah street — a sewer-like odor hung in the air.
They started the house-to-house fight again at about 7 a.m. Brad
Kasal’s war ended about four hours later…
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