9/11..a Day of Reflection

I love being an American, for about a gazillion generic and personal reasons.

My "little" brother, Sgt. Anderson, is finishing up his 3rd deployment as a Marine...he's in Iraq. Here's a news article passed onto us by his wife a while back. There's so much I don't know and don't realize about war, nor will I ever. I think it's better that way. Regardless, I'm awfully proud of and unspeakably grateful for Brad and so many others like him.

Ramadi: A Tale of Two Cities

This is the first of two on-the-scene reports by VFW magazine senior editor Tim Dyhouse, who was in Iraq this past April. This was his third trip to the war zone.

Standing in a dusty plywood barracks at Camp Ramadi in April 2007, Marine Cpl. Thomas Nowicki tells a visitor why his buddies named a street after him. It was the site, he said, where he was badly wounded 2? years ago.

"Tommy Gun Street," said the 22-year-old married father of one, located some two miles away in downtown Ramadi, was a hazardous place back then. But much like the city itself, he adds, it's changed significantly.

The last time his Marine unit—2nd Bn., 5th Marines, 1st Marine Div.—had deployed to Ramadi, from September 2004 to March 2005, the city, capital of Iraq's Sunni-dominated Anbar province, was known as the most dangerous place in Iraq. But as of mid-April 2007, only a few weeks into a seven-month tour, Nowicki, from Midlothian, Ill., said his unit had been involved in only two small-arms skirmishes.

The threat of daily firefights, constant mortar attacks and roadside bomb explosions has largely disappeared for the time being, he said. But as Nowicki and the other 2/5 Marines, about half of whom are veterans of the battalion's first Ramadi tour, trained for the current deployment, they prepared for the worst. Their combat experiences the first time taught them that.

Nowicki's memories are still fresh. He clearly remembers Dec. 3, 2004, the day he was wounded, shot down in the street—really more of an alleyway, he concedes—that bears his name. He adds that he killed the insurgent machine-gunner who tried to kill him.

As part of an eight-man foot patrol scouting for sniper positions about 6 a.m. that day, Nowicki described the morning as "uneventful." The Marines were searching, he says, for a tall building with good sight lines of Ramadi's streets in which to hide their four-man sniper team.

Suddenly, muzzle flashes grabbed his attention.

"I was the seventh man in our group," he said. "We started taking heavy machine-gun fire from a two-story building. Then a car rounded a corner with about four insurgents firing AK-47s at us. They had us in a classic L-shaped ambush."

Nowicki remembers glancing over his left shoulder precisely as a machine-gun round ripped completely through his left arm. The shot knocked his A-4 rifle from his hand, leaving him sprawled in the alley as subsequent rounds slammed into the wall behind him, the ricochets tearing holes into both his calves, his hip and his thigh.

"Sgt. Anderson [the Marine directly behind Nowicki] lit up the car with more than 100 rounds from his SAW (squad automatic weapon) and it took off," Nowicki recalled. "The guy who was working me over must have thought he killed me because he changed his fire toward Anderson after I got knocked down. I switched to burst on my A-4 and took him out."

Nowicki said his squad killed at least five insurgents that day. After the firefight, he remembers Anderson, who emerged unscathed, taking off his neck gaiter (cloth cover) and discovering a gunshot hole in it.

"He turned white as a ghost," Nowicki said with a slight smile.

'Welcome to Ramadi'