A Deadly Clash at Donkey Island

Unsettling Determination

While the Americans evacuated their casualties, the insurgents bandaged themselves so they could keep fighting, said soldiers who saw them or found them the next morning.

Fighters in white tunics and running shoes moved like ghosts over the battlefield, displaying tactics that the Americans said mirrored their own. They signaled with flashlights, bounded into position and crawled to try to evade the superior U.S. firepower.

Even when dozens of the fighters lay dead, Stark and his platoon mates discovered that their enemy possessed an unsettling determination. Making a final push toward the canal in his hobbled, bullet-pocked Humvee, Stark saw a wounded insurgent on the ground with a hand behind his back.

"Turn on your stomach!" Gilbertson, the gunner, yelled, intending to detain the man. But the insurgent hurled a grenade at the truck. The pin failed, and Gilbertson shot him with his machine gun.

The Humvee lurched forward, and Stark saw an insurgent curled in the fetal position but still moving. Wary after the grenade incident, Gilbertson recalled, he pulled out his 9mm pistol and shot the man, who then detonated his suicide vest. Flesh and ball bearings splattered the right side of Stark's Humvee, which was lifted off its wheels and thrown down, causing its third flat tire.

After that, the soldiers said, they decided to kill any wounded insurgents able to move. At 1:35 a.m., as a group of insurgents was evacuating casualties to tents to the north, Young ordered a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that had arrived on the scene to open fire. Eight insurgents and five civilians, three male and two female, were later found dead in two tents, the military said.

At 5:30 a.m., Nagelmeyer, the platoon leader, decided to clear the entire area. Earlier, he said, he had shot a wounded insurgent in the head. But this time, when an insurgent on the ground raised his hand in surrender, he hesitated.

"We made him take off his man dress and shimmy toward us," Nagelmeyer said. Then soldiers wrapped his wrists together using duct tape and dragged him into a Bradley. "All he would say was, 'Death to America in al-Anbar.' "

A Burst of Gunfire

In the searing heat later that morning, Sgt. 1st Class Raymond R. Buchan of the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, escorted a U.S. explosives team to disarm the suicide vests on the bodies littering the ground around Donkey Island.

Buchan, known for his many Iraqi friends, walked north to look at the Bedouin tents. Inside, he found two dead Bedouin women, whom he covered with a blanket. Returning along the road, he noticed a link of PKC machine gun bullets and bent to pick it up to give to the Iraqi police.

Just then, gunfire burst from behind a bush a few feet away. Buchan and the soldier next to him, Staff Sgt. Michael L. Ruoff Jr., 31, of Yosemite, Calif., collapsed.

"Contact front!" yelled Staff Sgt. Damaso Rosa, 28, of Lyndhurst, N.J., returning fire from near Buchan. A Navy SEAL medic said Ruoff was dead. Buchan, 33, of Johnstown, Pa., who had been shot in the left collarbone and jaw, died on the way to Ramadi.

'The Enemy Is Patient'

In the end, the battle of Donkey Island left 11 U.S. troops wounded and two dead, while an estimated 32 insurgents were killed. The heavy fighting between the Americans and the al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents had deep repercussions across Ramadi.

Iraqi police officers close to Buchan "lost it" when they heard of his death, Rosa said.

"I love Sergeant Buchan. When he died, all of the police cried," Col. Jabbar Hamid Ajaj said in his Ramadi office, plastered with posters he had made featuring Buchan.

At his mansion near the main U.S. base in Ramadi, Sattar, the tribal leader, was alarmed to learn that he had been the insurgents' prime target but took comfort in the U.S. tank stationed outside his home.

"If al-Qaeda gets away from the Awakening, they won't get away from the American forces," Sattar said. "We are allies," he added as he shared a tiny cup of bitter coffee with Lt. Col. Miciotto Johnson, commander of the 1-77. "I defend Col. Johnson, and Col. Johnson defends me."

U.S. commanders said the battle was a major defeat for al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents, showing how hard it is for them to operate in Anbar, where they face an increased U.S. troop presence and rejection by the Sunni population.

"Al-Qaeda is on its back foot," said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "They have largely lost Anbar province."

But U.S. officers in Ramadi say it is only a matter of time before al-Qaeda in Iraq strikes again.

"We're still expecting attacks similar to this one," said Maj. Andrew Wortham, the 1st Brigade Combat Team's intelligence officer in Ramadi.

Soldiers who fought in the battle say they feel extremely lucky to have happened upon the insurgents -- and to have survived. They're concerned that if U.S. forces leave, the insurgents will return and easily kill local police and officials. "I worry about pulling out of this area early. If we do, these guys are dead meat," Lauer said.

Spannagel, the scout leader, said the fighting revealed "a false sense of security that we'd won the battle in Ramadi."

In fact, he said, "this shows the enemy is patient. This is his land. He's got all the time in the world. . . . They're going to continue to fight in Anbar."