A routine patrol and a deadly explosion

~ Editor's note: Associated Press correspondent Todd Pitman was embedded for three weeks with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment in Ramadi, Iraq.

RAMADI, Iraq -- Marine Capt. Andrew Del Gaudio walked down the battered staircase, past the dusty American flag strung from a wire fence in the hall, past the windows crammed with sandbags that obscured daylight and the world outside.

In the ground-floor corridor of Government Center, Marines rested on cots and worn sofas, some smoking in silence as they waited to head out on a mission. The building complex houses the office of the Iraqi governor of Anbar province, and is such a magnet for insurgent attack it shakes with incoming mortar rounds or rockets just about every day.

Stepping outside wrapped in his flak jacket -- not even the compound's inner courtyards are safe -- Del Gaudio punched a number into a small blue satellite telephone that only worked in the open air.

The 6-foot-2-inch, 220-pound Marine's eyes were strained. His cheeks flushed.

The signal bounced skyward, then down into America, joining worlds 6,000 miles apart for a few precious minutes.

In Jacksonville, N.C., it was early Sunday morning, April 2.

His wife, Nicole, mother of his nearly 20-month-old daughter, was on the line.

"We had a real bad day," the 30-year-old native of New York City's Bronx borough said, recounting the conversation. "I had to do something ... and ended up getting hurt. But I'm all right. That's why I was calling, to tell you I'm all right."

Del Gaudio had been hit in his right forefinger by shrapnel. His fingers had been burned from touching smoldering flesh.

Regulations obligate Marine authorities to call family in the event of injury. The same rules prohibited Del Gaudio from saying that hours earlier he had helped pull his dead friends out of the burning wreckage of a Humvee, under fire.

"Look, if I had my way, I never would have told you about this, but they're going to call and tell you anyway. I didn't want you to worry," Del Gaudio said.

Worry -- he knew she would.

Before he hung up, a .50-caliber heavy machine gun began pumping rounds from a sandbagged post on the roof.

It was outgoing fire. Boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom.

Somewhere outside, insurgents were running among a maze of buildings ripped apart by rocket-fire, spraying automatic weapons bursts at Government Center, a virtual military bunker.

"I've got to go," Del Gaudio said. "I love you."

Never any easier

Nearly four weeks earlier, some 1,000 troops from the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment said goodbye to wives and friends, parents and children.

The troops were heading to Iraq, most of them for a second tour.

As buses came to take them to the airport, some savored every last second. Some took that one last kiss. Some were eager to get going.

"At some point you've got to cut the tie there, you gotta go. It never makes it any easier," Del Gaudio said.

He didn't want to linger. He had to get Kilo Company moving.

In the crowd was Cpl. Scott J. Procopio, a 20-year-old machine-gunner from Saugus, Mass. An avid weightlifter, Procopio had married his longtime sweetheart six months before. He liked to work with his hands, and later built a broad wooden bench that stood outside his platoon's living quarters in Ramadi.

There was Lance Cpl. Yun Y. Kim, a 20-year-old rifleman from Atlanta. The son of a Korean national, he was a first generation American, fond of expensive clothes and the latest cell phones, his friends said.

There was Geovani Padilla-Aleman, a 20-year-old medic from South Gate, Calif. The Mexican-born sailor had been attached to Kilo Company a few months before. Known for his sense of humor, his comrades called him a "chow-hog" who gulped military rations "down to the packets of gum."

Then there was Staff Sgt. Eric A. McIntosh, "Mac," a good-natured 29-year-old infantry leader from Trafford, Pa. He had joined the Marines a few months after graduating high school in suburban Pittsburgh and was making a career of it. Missions had already taken him to Haiti, Japan and Iraq.

In the base parking lot, Del Gaudio came upon McIntosh holding his wife in his arms.

"He said, 'Aw, hey sir, she's leaving right now,'" Del Gaudio recalled. "I said, 'It's cool if she wants to hang out, it's not a big deal.' But he said: 'I've got to get ready to do this, too. I've got to get the boys ready to go. She's going to work, and I don't want to hold her up.'"

The Marines were pumped up -- they had spent the last half year in training for their second Iraq tour, practicing marksmanship, keeping fit, studying first aid, weapons systems, the rules of war.

But there was anxiety, too.

It seemed as if they'd just returned from their last tour, a seven-month mission that ended in August.

Then, they had been spread out between Fallujah and the outskirts of Baghdad. This time, they were headed to Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, a city of 400,000 people along the Euphrates River: Tall palm trees. Ornate columned villas. It was the heart of the Sunni Triangle and the insurgency.

There was, many would say later, no more dangerous city in the world.

"Everybody knew what they were getting themselves into," Del Gaudio said. "Regardless of where you go, there's always that same level of angst that's associated with it. A combat deployment is a combat deployment. We knew what it was going to be."

The families left behind knew that, too, and somehow grew to accept it.

"My wife," Del Gaudio said, recounting his story at Government Center, "she knows I wouldn't trade this for the world."

Don't stand still

The Marines touched down in Iraq at the tail end of winter: nights could be cold, but days quickly heated up.

Kilo Company was assigned to an all-male Marine base called Hurricane Point, a sand-filled sprawl on the western edge of Ramadi.

It wasn't much, but it would do.

A small, wooden chow hall served scrambled egg and pancake breakfasts, hot dinners of meat and gravy, and sandwiches in between. There was a gym. There were trailers with shower cubicles and sinks. There were palm trees.

There was a lot of dirt and a lot of dust, and sandbags that were still being piled ever higher.

Most Marines slept on bunks in large rooms that housed whole units together.

Kilo Company's HQ was inside a single-story palace guesthouse from the Saddam Hussein era, but much of its work was downtown, a couple of miles away, in the bombed-out zone around Government Center.

Ramadi is a city where Marines don't stand still for long. When foot patrols go out, they usually go running, for fear of getting shot.

When Marines left the base, they went prepared to fight, and usually did. They wore protective goggles and extra side armor plates. They carried pistols, M-16s, M-4 carbines, anti-tank rockets, ammunition and grenades -- and used them all.

Some parts of town seemed normal: souks, mosques, water towers, villas, busy streets, children walking to school.

Other parts did not. Whole buildings had been gutted and blackened by rockets and automatic weapons fire. Every pockmark had a story to tell: of past battles, of people who huddled or fought or died.

The Marines had enormous firepower, but their enemy was hard to see. The insurgents melted into the population -- there one second, gone the next.

The local people, they couldn't trust. On raids through residential districts, they found bomb-making materials, weapons and ammunition, sometimes even their own satellite maps and protective goggles that had somehow wound up in insurgent hands.

"When you see things like that you ask yourself, 'Why do they hate me so much?'" said 2nd Lt. Brian Wilson, a 24-year-old platoon commander from Columbia, S.C. "If everybody in Ramadi was nice to us, we'd be nice to everybody. It's not like we're these warmongers that just want to come shoot, kill, rape, pillage -- not even. We just want to come here and help, do what we're asked to do, and go home to our families -- just like they do."

In their command center in Hurricane Point, Marines tracked insurgent activity by the minute, pinning colored tacks on a satellite map on the wall that marked suspected roadside bomb sites and suspected enemy snipers. Sometimes there was so much activity, they joked they were running out of tacks.

They knew the streets only by the names they'd given them: Ice Cream. Racetrack. Sunset. Broadway. Some roads were seeded with so many bombs they tried to avoid them.

They planned raids, patrols, ambushes. They wanted the insurgents to come out. They wanted to pick a fight.

Kilo Company's three platoons were rotated endlessly through a nonstop cycle of war: They would spend five days in Government Center, fending off daily attacks from rooftop machine-gun nests, even as the governor received guests and planned reconstruction projects in his office below.

They would spend days in another outpost up the road, then head back to the relative safety of Hurricane Point, where they had hot showers and meals, but were dispatched on daily foot patrols that nearly always came under fire.

Some complained. Some joked. But they believed they were doing the right thing and they believed in the mission: supporting a fledgling Iraqi democracy, training Iraqi forces to take over the fight, battling terrorism in its heart.

They didn't have time to watch television and they lived beyond politics, far from the debate over the war back home. Their loyalty was to each other, and their primary goals simple: keep each other alive and leave no man behind.

Rest? That was something they'd do when they got home.

'Nothing to worry about'

On Sunday, April 2, Kilo Company's 3rd Platoon was up before dawn.

There was a heavy downpour -- for some troops the first rain they had ever seen in Iraq.

Del Gaudio and McIntosh shared a sink that morning in one of the trailer showers. They shaved, talked about their wives, about what they would do when they got back home.

The day's mission was to be a patrol on wheels. The objective: "provide atmospherics, take a look at the population, take a look at what was going on the area, looking for the enemy," Del Gaudio said. "That's basically what it was, basically what it turned out to be."

They studied the route in detail, checked for roadside bombs. "Nothing to worry about," said Wilson, the platoon commander.

After the briefing, McIntosh gave a thumbs up, smiled, and said, "Hey sir, I got that. We can do that," Del Gaudio recalled.

When dawn broke, the rain eased, leaving a gray sky and slick roads full of puddles.

As six Humvees idled, Marines threw on flak jackets, tightened helmet straps, checked weapons.

The convoy began to move, one Marine leading each vehicle to the gate on foot -- a safety measure to slow traffic inside the base.

They paused at a row of sand-filled barriers, clicked off the safety switches on their weapons, then rolled out of Hurricane Point and into the city.

The streets were deserted, but that was normal for the hour: It was just before 7 a.m.

Then, 15 minutes into the patrol, the convoy ran into something that wasn't on their maps -- a barrier consisting of a wall of some sort, with cars parked in the road.

They weren't surprised. Sometimes, what looked like a street on the map turned out to be an impassable alley.

They turned around and drove off-course for a few blocks, checking in with each other by radio.

From the last vehicle, McIntosh -- his call sign was Alpha 3 -- acknowledged the change of course.

"Roger, we got the rear," Del Gaudio recalled him saying.

As the convoy rounded a corner, some heard a loud pop. It didn't sound like much -- they were cocooned inside armored Humvees fitted with thick bulletproof glass.

A block behind them, there had been a tremendous explosion.

Del Gaudio looked back and saw debris flying onto the main road. His vehicle commander, Cpl. Jason Hunt, a 24-year-old from Wellsville, N.Y., saw what he thought was a body cartwheeling through the air.

Across the radios, there was a call: "Is everybody all right?"

There was no response from Alpha 3.

Coming Monday: Carnage on a street and a battle to protect the dead.