February 16, 2005
No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy
Part 1
by Craig Bernthal
Private Papers

I spent the weekend of the Iraqi election in Huntington Beach, talking to my nephew, Tim Tardif. The last time I’d seen Tim was just before the invasion of Iraq. On a Thursday afternoon in January, 2003, I got a call from my sister, Cathy, saying that Tim, a Lance Corporal, was soon to leave for Iraq with the Marines, and that he and his fiancé, Alisha, had decided to get married that Saturday. Cathy and her husband Gil were flying out from Annapolis. Could we make it? My wife and I drove down from Fresno the next day. Alisha and her mother, Corliss, had set a logistical milestone in getting the ceremony and celebration together virtually overnight. Tim, who had bulked out of his dress uniform with weight lifting, borrowed a bigger one from a buddy. A few days later Tim was on a charter jet for Kuwait.

Although I didn’t see a lot of Tim while he was growing up, since my sister and I usually lived on opposite sides of the continent, during those times when we did get together, I was always impressed by Tim’s calm and gentleness. He seemed to look out at the world from a deep reservoir of benevolence—not the kind of personality I’d necessarily associate with the Marines. But another side of Tim’s character was a love of physical challenge and contact sports. He played football and rugby in high school, became an Eagle Scout, and joined the Marines in an early entry program when he was only a junior in high school. In his senior year, Tim kept up with sports and school, but in addition, he and other high school students in the program did physical training with their recruiter. Shortly after he graduated, Tim went to boot camp a very fit and motivated recruit.

By the time Tim went to Iraq he was already a veteran of Afghanistan, where he’d seen action as a SAW (squad automatic weapon) gunner. He’d experienced combat. He’d seen people die. He’d been part of ambushes and had killed people himself. “I liked firing a SAW,” he told me, with a grin. But Tim wanted to be a sniper, a member of his battalion’s STA (Surveillance and Target Acquisition) platoon. Tim was in the 2/5, the second battalion of the fifth regimental combat team, 1st Marine Division, a legendary outfit, even by Marine standards. Tim wanted to be the best in the best battalion, and to him that meant being a scout/sniper. When they returned from Afghanistan, Tim and 69 other Marines went through the three-day hellacious sniper indoctrination but only eight qualified, and Tim was one. After that came more Marine education: sniper school, jump school, and diving school.

On March 21, 2003, Tim packed himself into an amtrack along with 17 other infantrymen and their gear (it’s designed to hold 12) and headed for the Rumaylah oil fields, where the 2/5 not only helped secure the oil heads but participated in the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.  The 2/5 saw action on the way to Baghdad and was heavily involved in the fighting around Baghdad University, the only time during the invasion that Tim actually got the chance to do some sniping. Mainly, Tim functioned as the 2nd Squad Leader of the 1st Platoon, Gulf Company.

            On April 12, Tim’s platoon headed north of Baghdad toward the village of Al Tarmiyah, on a recon mission to see if the bridge there could support the vehicles that would follow as the 2/5 went north to Samarra. They rode in three amtracks. Coming to the bridge, two amtracks crossed and took up positions on the far side of the bridge near Al Tarmiyah while Tim’s stopped on the other side. Lt. Mauer, commanding the platoon, was in one of the lead amtracks. (“He was awesome,” Tim said. “We were blessed to have him.”) The Marines got out of their amtracks. Some were on security, some stretching their legs, some eating chow. However, a mixture of fedayeen, Republican Guard, and retreating troops had combined in the village to set up an ambush. It began when they fired two RPGs at the Marines. One RPG scored a direct hit on the left amtrack, killing the .50 caliber machine gunner on top and wounding the driver. Enemy gunners in a line of buildings 200 yards away opened up on the Marines. The enemy firing line flanked the Marines on both sides: “They set it up really nice . . . they had a nice cone of fire,” Tim relates, and the Marines were at the tip of the cone. 1st Platoon began to return fire. Tim’s squad was back with the rear amtrack: “I’m like, aw shit, we need to get across there and help these guys out.”

Tim’s amtrack “buttoned-up” and rolled across the bridge with its exposed machine gunner blazing away at the buildings in Al Tarmiyah with machine gun and grenade launcher. Tim could hear rounds impacting on the armor from the right side. As the amtrack took position on the right flank, it was nearly hit by an RPG that blew down a power line. Tim’s squad got out of the amtrack, formed a firing line, and began shooting into the buildings. They had no cover. His squad was “kissing the ground.”

A built-up road with thick tall grass on either side ran between the village and the Marines. Tim attempted to contact Lt. Mauer for instructions, but was unable to get through to him on the radio, probably because Mauer was attempting to call in a fire mission. “It was real chaotic.” So Tim settled on a course of action himself. He could see muzzle flashes on his right where the Marines were receiving fire from the roofs of two houses. The Marine philosophy of dealing with ambushes is to “assault through them.” “Assaulting through” involves a leap-frog maneuver in which half the Marines in a squad lay down fire while the other half advances. Tim led his squad in an attack on the buildings to his right. He and Corporal Marco Martinez advanced through the grass and Tim crossed the road with his M-16 on semi-automatic, looking for a position to set up the squad’s SMAW (shoulder-fired multi-purpose assault weapon—the Marine version of an RPG launcher).

“There were about five hadjis in the grass. I saw them right away and was able to get, like, three of ‘em. Another guy was hunkered down in the grass. Martinez was able to see him, but it was already too late, he had lobbed a grenade.” The grenade hit Tim in the leg, bounced off, rolled down the berm and exploded, knocking Tim to the ground. Marco Martinez shot the grenade thrower and another man as they fled through the grass. Tim was wounded in the right leg by the shrapnel. (“It felt like a hot iron.”) Marines in his squad applied a pressure bandage, and then he got up and continued to lead his squad, which engaged in house to house fighting.

They used the SMAW on four houses, blowing a hole in the wall of each and then entering through that hole to flush out the fedayeen inside. “There were about sixteen in each house. They were pretty organized. We’d go in and they’d rush out the back. I sent a fire team behind the back of the houses to shoot them as they came out. That worked pretty well. We got a lot of kills that way.”

The battle reached a crisis for Tim’s squad in the fourth house. The fedayeen fled out of the back of the house as usual, but this time they went into a bunker, 20 yards from the house, and the back door fire team was only able to hit a few of them. Tim’s group rushed the bunker. One of the Marines was shot, his spine severed, and he hit the ground between the house and the bunker. The fire team with Tim fell back to the house and laid enough fire on the bunker to keep the fedayeen from “spraying” the downed man, who was clearly bleeding to death.

At this point Marco Martinez earned the Navy Cross. He saw that the fedayeen had dropped an RPG launcher and two rounds. There it lay, between the house and the bunker. While the Marines poured fire onto the bunker, he ran out of the house to get the launcher and took cover behind a palm tree. The trouble at first was that he couldn’t figure out how to fire it—he hadn’t been trained to shoot an Iraqi RPG launcher. He took off all the safeties and inserted a RPG, but it just slid out the tube. (You have to imagine him doing this, out in no man’s land, with machine gun fire going off around him, trying to “get skinny” behind a palm tree.) This situation lasted about fifteen minutes. Finally, he realized, he had to twist the RPG in the launch tube to get it to catch. He fired on the bunker from fifteen yards and demolished it, getting partly caught in the blast himself.

Tim called up the amtrack and the Marines loaded in their wounded brother. Using the amtrack’s radio, he was finally able to contact his lieutenant, who told him to fall back, since he’d called in a “jackhammer” mission: fixed-winged aircraft were coming in to blast the area. Tim led his squad in a fighting withdrawal (“bound and back”) and then collapsed from his wounds. “I thought I was going to make it, but I got all dizzy and everything.” A blood transfusion in a helicopter saved his life. For his actions, Tim later received a Silver Star.

You might think this would have ended Tim’s tour of duty in Iraq, but it didn’t.