Corporal J’s House Cleaning Milspeak Home
 Based on an actual account as told to David Charles
 

This is J and here is an experience that will never be forgotten. I was a twenty-four year old Marine corporal from Tennessee and a fire team leader in Iraq at the time. I was over twenty when I came into the Marine Corps; so, I was older than most Marines in my position.

On a patrol in Fallujah, my four-man fire team and I are clearing houses, kicking down doors so to speak. We take a short break to breathe, to discuss lessons learned, and to regroup.

“Chas, you’ve got to stop tossing a grenade into the place as soon as we break the door,” I tell the lance corporal who normally takes point. The wiry nineteen-year old from Ohio is the quickest man on the team.

“But Corporal J,” Chas replies with too much of a whine for me, “that’s the way Corporal Goose taught me.” Chas looks over at the big, smiling, twenty-one-year old Mexican whose odd name we cut short to Goose.

“Yeah,” adds Goose, “that way no insurgents in there will shoot us when we go in.”

“I know that sounds pretty good, but it’s not the way we’re gonna do it,” I explain. I expend as much eye contact on Marty, a green, eighteen-year old redneck, as I do on Chas. “First, we have to account for them grenades and we’re not supposed to use them that way. You don’t know if there’s any insurgents in there or if there’s any innocents in there. Second, if you do kill an insurgent, he can’t give any information. The more enemy we can detain, the more information on weapons caches and enemy strongholds we can get. That saves some lives and catches the big ones.”

“I still don’t like goin’ in without clearing it with a grenade first,” Chas says.

“Look, you need a break from point. I’ll go in first on the next one.”

We pop the door on this house and I step one foot in. All hell breaks loose. When I enter the house I am immediately engaged by insurgents, so I break right. Reacting to the small arms fire inside, one of my knuckleheads yells “Frag out!” and lobs a fragmentation grenade into the doorway.

It was coming right at me; so, I bust down the tiny cramped hallway, through a flimsy door, and right into the arms of a surprised insurgent. We smack together so hard and with so much force that we both go horizontal and I land on his head and back. In the commotion not one of us can get to our rifles. I try to reach my M-9 pistol but can’t reach it because the insurgent is freaking out.

I have been practicing Martial arts since I was five years old. I go into Mushin, which means no mind, and all my training kicks in . . . eyes, breath, mobility. I don’t consciously process input and make decisions. That instinctive part of the brain just takes over and reacts as efficiently as humanly possible.

I jam my hands into his face and neck and tear into him all the way down to his wrists. I start at the top because that is all I can get my hands on with him under and low-down on my much larger body, which is pinning him to the floor. I squeeze what’s in my hands like kneading dough, starting at the top and working my way down. I squeeze and lift up my two hundred twenty pounds of muscle as I reach down lower and grab the next body part that shows under my lifting body. When his wrists clear, I grab them, pick him up, and slam him down on his face. I pull out a zip-tie and bind him without totally loosing control.

If I totally lost control I would kill him because he wanted to kill me, but it will be better if I don’t kill him. Once the insurgent gets to our interrogators, he’ll spill everything he knows.

It gets quiet and I look around. My fire team comes walking down the hall towards me. “Clear?” I ask.

“Clear,” Goose answers, “three insurgents, down for good.”

With the entire situation finished, we take a look at my detainee. He looks like a punching bag. My handprints are all over his face, neck and arms but he is zip-tied and we are all still alive.

Through everything, incapacitating the insurgent and capturing him is more gratifying to me than killing him would have been. All insurgents should face interrogators and jail time for what they’ve done. They don’t always give us a choice beyond kill or be killed; but if we have the opportunity to catch them, why should they get to die so quickly? They want to die. That is the easy way out for them and it doesn’t give us information we need.

My fire team didn’t have the opportunity to capture any of the other insurgents this time. Two went down in the grenade blast I narrowly avoided. I accept that. But the fire team gets to feeling pretty good when we turn the captured insurgent over to the interrogators. They’ll remember that when the next opportunity comes up.