“I made them sit down but I wasn’t kicking them in the face. I’m sure their zip ties were a little too tight, but I wasn’t going to beat them up. I also wasn’t going to make them any more comfortable than Geneva Convention required,” says Ayala dryly.
While Ayala earned a Purple Heart for the rooftop explosion, it was an incident two weeks earlier that had begun his true initiation into what kind of bloody carnage the insurgents were capable of inflicting on the world’s most powerful army.
It was October 31, 2005. Halloween. Ayala’s unit had just arrived in Iraq in the middle of the month. The standard procedure was to go on patrols with the unit they would be replacing until they were familiar with their area of operations. This night they’d be on their own for the first time. The mission was a route clearing, to make sure the roads leading into and out of the base were clear of roadside bombs. Three or four miles southwest of Baghdad they found one—or it found them.
“The truck that got hit was second in convoy,” Ayala says, recalling the incident. “I was out in front looking for wires and then heard a really loud blast. A cloud of smoke covered everything. I could see the front of our truck, but nothing behind it. I thought the whole convoy had been blown.”
Ayala ran into the smoke plume, finding behind it a Hieronymus Bosch–like scene of hellfire, anguish and destruction. As the smoke cleared it revealed mangled, smoldering metal and dead and dying comrades. The men were from Alpha Company, same as Ayala’s, but a different platoon. The first man Ayala saw was a private missing a leg at midthigh and had been spurting bright red blood from his femoral artery, a bleeding emergency that could end in death within just four minutes. A medic had already applied a tourniquet, so Ayala began a head-to-toe check for secondary injuries, examining the private for contusions, hidden punctures, broken bones, anything that could further compromise his chances of survival. Ayala had so much adrenaline pumping he thought his hands might have been shaking had he not needed them to help the soldier. While the private seemed stable for the moment, the condition wouldn’t last. He would die from internal injuries while waiting to be evacuated.
Nearby, another private, the turret gunner of the Humvee that took the full blast of the roadside bomb, was already dead, and a first sergeant would die of his wounds while in the medevac helicopter heading for a CSH, or combat support hospital. But the casualty that affected Ayala the most is actually someone he knew, a specialist from the same part of East Texas where he grew up. The soldier had both of his legs blown off by the explosion. By the time Ayala reached him, the medic had already sedated the soldier with morphine.
“There wasn’t much I could do,” says Ayala. “I just held his hand and reassured him we got the birds on the way.” The soldier, Ayala would learn later, died from his injuries. Just two weeks into his Iraq tour and Ayala had already had his first combat baptism by blood and fire. He thought that if it had been a firefight it would’ve been okay, but this was different. They were fighting an enemy who wreaked deadly havoc without being seen. How could you fight someone like that? Ayala didn’t sleep that night.
“I just sat in my bunk,” he says, replaying the aftermath of the attack. “I thought to myself, It will be a miracle if the rest of us make it out of this [the war] intact. I was worried that it was all going to be like this.”
He was anxious and jumpy as the weeks went on, every time he went out on patrol.
“I just had to suck it up and do what I was doing. IEDs and small-arms fire kept me on my toes.”
What increased Ayala’s anxiety was the fact that aside from the other soldiers in his unit, there were few people he felt he could talk to about what he had already seen in Iraq. Neither his girlfriend nor his brother, a Marine at that time, seemed to understand when he tried to explain what was going on inside his head. And he didn’t want to worry his parents by sharing details about how members of his own company were already being killed in the first month of his deployment.
Christine McDaniels wasn’t ready to be a mother. She was young, just seventeen and still in high school. When her son, Michael, was born, she did what she thought was right for everyone involved. She immediately gave him up for adoption. Bob and Pam Ayala were told that it wasn’t likely they’d be able to have children of their own, so they were eager to adopt. Michael would be their first. They would eventually adopt four children as well as having one boy of their own. Bob was a successful contemporary Christian music singer/songwriter who had lost his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa when he was just twenty years old. Despite his handicap, he made a solid living touring churches and revivals around the country and appearing on albums for the rapture-influenced Christian music band Last Days Ministries. Michael Ayala was brought up as an Evangelical Christian, being homeschooled, marching in Christian pro-life rallies with his family and even accompanying his adopted father on guitar during some of the worship services. But since Bob was often on the road, Ayala grew closer to his adopted mother.
When Ayala was fifteen, Bob moved the family from Texas to New Hampshire to take a job as a worship coordinator at Grace Fellowship Church. The young Ayala missed Texas but wasn’t going to let the move derail his plans. As a high school junior he joined the New Hampshire National Guard in an early-enlistment program that would allow him to finish school before beginning active duty. As a senior he trained with them. After completing high school in 2004 he went straight to basic training. Ayala knew what he wanted, infantry, but not the mechanized divisions. Tanks and Bradleys weren’t his style. He was going airborne. After basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia, he was sent to Fort Campbell in Kentucky to become part of the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles, renowned for their bravery and high casualty rate during their World War II D-Day parachute drop behind German lines in occupied France. In October 2005, Michael Ayala would be in Iraq with the history-making division.
When Ayala reached the blue Bongo truck he felt sick to his stomach. The front end was lodged in the tree and black engine smoke and white radiator steam mixed in a hissing gas double helix. In a moment of cognitive dissonance, Ayala couldn’t believe it was all real. The men they had just shot weren’t Iraqi insurgents. They were fellow American soldiers. But how did this happen? It’s the thing soldiers dread most in the heat of battle: accidentally killing your own men. In formal military parlance it was called a “blue on blue” incident, or the weirdly ironic “friendly fire,” but for those in the middle of it, this kind of situation was also referred to by another commonly used military expression, FUBAR, “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
The men they had fired on were now either dead or wounded. The one who had slipped from the Bongo truck trying to escape, a lieutenant and the platoon leader, was lying in a ditch on the side of the road. Three others were still in the bed of the truck, an Iraqi interpreter who had been grazed by a round from Ayala’s unit, a radio operator whose left arm had been shredded by another and the unit’s own medic, hit in the leg by a ricochet.
“The medic was screaming at us,” Ayala says, “ ‘What the hell were you guys doing,’ while still hobbling around trying to treat the other two men even though he was wounded too.” But as Ayala approached the door to the truck’s cab, the medic’s voice became distant in Ayala’s mind, almost as if he was shouting from the inside of a thickly insulated room. Ayala’s hand reached for the passenger-side door handle and pulled it open. Inside there was blood splattered everywhere, but the two men were still sitting upright in their seats. They were dead, riddled with high-caliber rounds. Despite the fact that their faces had sunk into the indentations in their skulls, Ayala recognized them as two sergeants he’d seen around almost every day back at Camp Striker, Sergeant Adam Crain, the driver, and Staff Sergeant Phillip Nardone (their names have been changed to protect the privacy of their families) in the passenger seat. Despite his shock, Ayala knew there was nothing he could do for the men and he moved on to the survivors he could help. The medic from Ayala’s unit was already tending to the lieutenant who had tried to take cover in the ditch. He was the only member of the group who had not been hit by the “friendly fire.” He had been shot earlier during an engagement with insurgents, the very firefight the men in the speeding blue Bongo truck were trying to flee. He had been struck by a rifle round from an AK-47 that entered above his body armor through his upper left shoulder and exited his back. In the process, it collapsed his lung, a life-threatening emergency if not treated immediately. With plastic and tape, the medic fashioned a rectangular occlusive dressing, sealed over three ends with one side left open. This field dressing keeps outside air from being pulled into the lung cavity by forming an airtight seal when the officer breathes in but also allows air to escape when he exhales. Ayala spiked an IV bag filled with water and saline while the medic inserted a needle in the man’s arm.
After treating the lieutenant, Ayala and the medic moved down their triage line, next applying a tourniquet to the arm of the linebacker-sized radio operator whose very bulk may have helped him to survive his wounds. They patched up the medic’s leg and finally put a bandage where a bullet had grazed the head of the interpreter. When the soldier who had manned the M249 SAW in Ayala’s convoy learned what had happened he began to vomit. The .50 cal gunner wept. Their days of service in these or other wars, no matter how remarkable, no matter how brave
