The Ambush
Survivors crawled out of the house under fire, unable to take the fatally wounded Marine with them. In the back of the house, Marines spotted two men running out. They fired. The two -- whose thick curly hair, olive skin and delicate features indicated they were not Iraqis, Marines said -- died at the back door, still holding their weapons.
Thinking the barrage had come from the two men they had just killed, the Marines reentered the walled compound. Sgt. Dennis Woullard, a Marine reservist on the Biloxi, Miss., police force, dragged out the first fallen Marine.
Farther inside, other Marines searched the house. One reached for the door of a storage closet under a stairwell. "As soon as he touches the door, the machine gun fires and cuts him down," Hurley said.
The Marines retreated, unable to bring their wounded colleague with them. Another wave went in to try to retrieve him, not realizing he was already beyond help. Machine-gun fire drove them out.
The Marines began to suspect that the insurgents were firing from a bunker somewhere in the house, Hurley said. They called in a tank, as other armored vehicles ferried the wounded away for evacuation by helicopter.
The tank fired, one round hitting a propane tank inside the compound and engulfing part of the house in a ball of orange flame. Tank cannon fired seven rounds in all, some of them meant to destroy bunkers.
'Pure Evil'
The Marines went in a fourth time. Bullets, and one chanting voice, met them.
"Nobody should have survived" the tank assault, Hurley later said in amazement.
"The whole scene, it was just pure evil inside the house," said Woullard, who came out of the first foray into the house with a frayed helmet and bruised temple from one machine-gun round and a pierced water bag on his back from another.
"I've never seen anything like this in my life," said Woullard, who fought at Nasiriyah in the first days of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. "It was an all-out ambush."
The insurgents' armor-piercing bullets were penetrating the house's interior and external walls and the outer walls of the compound, some smacking into walls across the street.
Hurley and other Marines, still under fire, were able to get to the body of the second fallen Marine through the holes that the tank had blown in the house but could not pull it past steel reinforcing bars that jutted from the collapsed walls.
