8/30/2023 0 Comments Phantom furyHe remembers reaching up to feel goggles, wax and blood. “Zig zag, back and forth, and the next thing I know everything went white,” Chapman said. He was in too close of quarters to shoot the TOW missile - the back blast would kill everyone - but he used the sight to search windows and scan the street. “A single shot usually meant sniper.”Ĭhapman didn’t know where the sniper was, so he couldn’t return fire. He remembers someone getting shot before him: An Iraqi National Guardsmen had been hit in the stomach area. The last time he had looked at his watch it was 4:34 p.m. He was shot two days into the battle: Nov. To get to the toilet you had to walk on arm rests and crawl over gear.” The aisles of the airplane were pretty packed. “We packed in - a bunch of gear with you. The Marines had flown over to Kuwait on a commercial flight. Erick Dickey, were D9 operators attached to 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. Thaddeus Dymczenski along with Lance Cpl. I knew we were going to be going to Iraq.”Ĭpl. “I was as mentally prepared as I could be,” Chapman said. contractors were dragged from their vehicles through the streets of Fallujah and eventually hung over a bridge. The 24-year-old, who had joined the Corps after trying college and had celebrated his 21st birthday in boot camp, remembers the news from the first battle of Fallujah. He had gone on the deployment knowing it could get bad. He had the best seat in the house, he said, “and the only form of air-conditioning you can get.” Yet, Chapman had been shot from about 300-400 meters away by a rifle that should have killed him at twice that distance, he said.Ĭhapman liked sitting on the top of the truck. It wasn’t confirmed, but the alleged blonde-haired, blue-eyed sniper was apparently a Chechen mercenary, likely a paid-for professional fighter among the al-Qaida-led insurgents. The 0352 TOW gunner had been medically evacuated out of Iraq after getting shot above his left eye. Ryan Chapman was on convalescent leave and sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with his immediate family. Nearly 7,000 miles away in Lawrence, Kansas, Lance Cpl. “It was a complete feeling of gratitude, of thankfulness for making it through.” Overly accurate Chechen snipers utilizing Iranian G3 clones over the Draganov sniper system seemed to be commonplace on the battlefield of Fallujah.From their safe spot with seven-layers of bulletproof glass, it was often hard to watch the wreckage happening around them.īut that Thanksgiving Day, Berge knew that the Marines had the city under control. forces in the ensuing battle to kill them. They were often times hopped up on pain killers and had pre-applied tourniquets on their limbs.Ĭhechens could be easily distinguished by their lighter skin tone, lighter hair color, advanced equipment, Chechen literature and terrorist manuals they carried and by the amount of casualties they inflicted on U.S. These rifles were often times recovered from dead Chechen foreign fighters who were also equipped with modern tactical vest, body armor and optics. The markings were unique and very rarely encountered but were most certainly those of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Also recovered were several unlicensed Iranian copies of the G3 rifle. The compact size of the retractable stock version MP5 encountered enabled troops to conduct close quarters battle with a combat proven weapons system without telegraphing the longer barrel of the M16A4 rifles they were issued past doorways and also gave them a fully automatic capability as opposed to the standard 3-round burst. As most firepower recovered from the enemy was placed in massive piles and destroyed, troops often times adopted them for personal use utilizing issued 9x19mm cartridges from their Berretta M9 (Model 92) to fill the magazines. These firearms were found on several dead insurgents not possessing identification so it remains unclear if they were operatives from Iran or simply utilizing weaponry left over from the Iran-Iraq war. Rarely encountered yet relished when they were confiscated were unlicensed Iranian copies of the MP5 submachine gun.
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