They were christened the Magnificent B*stards, yet they were warriors without a war.
Kept stateside after 9/11 and left floating in the Pacific during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the thousand men of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines were told they were benchwarmers in an era of combat.
America sent 21,000 other Marines to sweep across southern Iraq in March and April and achieve the longest sustained overland advance in Corps history as they drove toward the capital of Baghdad – and glory.
Two months later, George Bush rode a Navy jet to a cinematic touchdown on an aircraft carrier off San Diego and declared the war all but over.
But when war exploded less than a year later, the B*stard battalion found itself at the center of metastasizing attacks and violence across Iraq, fighting in the provincial capital of Ramadi.
During that Ramadi combat and throughout seven months of deployment, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines suffered among the highest casualties of any other battalion: in all, 30 percent of 2/4’s nearly 1,000 troops – or 289 Marines and sailors – were killed or wounded.
The battalion’s hardest-hit company, Echo, had a casualty rate of 45 percent.
Yet much of the world’s attention at that moment would be focused on an assault by several thousand other Marines on the smaller city of Fallujah, and what happened in Ramadi was nearly lost to history. James Mattis, Marine commander and later secretary of defense, would one day testify before Congress that Ramadi was ‘one of the toughest fights the Marine Corps has fought since Vietnam’.
George Bush rode a Navy jet to a cinematic touchdown on an aircraft carrier off San Diego and declared the war all but over
In all, 30 percent of 2/4’s nearly 1,000 troops – or 289 Marines and sailors – were killed or wounded during the combat in Ramadi
It was on the battlefields of Ramadi where traumatic brain injury from bomb blasts and post-traumatic stress disorder began afflicting troops in large numbers.
And the American military was utterly unprepared. Apart from a battalion chaplain making rounds, there were almost no uniformed therapists to counsel Marines troubled by any number of torments – the emotional trauma of heavy combat, the loss of close friends, the guilt of surviving, the toll of taking lives, and the ambiguity of a war with blurred distinctions between friend and foe where what constituted victory was a moral conundrum.
A Pentagon policy to fully embrace and promote mental health care was still years away.
Nor did military medicine in 2004 understand the complexities of traumatic brain injury, particularly when it came to blast wave exposure and how that differs from a blow to the head. And it would be years before research showed that TBI, PTSD, and depression could be inextricably linked, with the injury from a bomb blast aggravating the emotional disorder from the experience of war.
It would, again, be years before scientists understood that simply being near an explosion, even in the absence of shrapnel wounds or loss of consciousness, could cause neural impairment.
Too many Marines who survived Ramadi would later succumb to the scourge of suicide, the rising occurrence of which – across America’s military and veteran population – would shock the nation for years to come. Headlines would scream that 20 to 22 veterans were killing themselves every day. (VA methodology behind the numbers, it later turned out, was flawed and the actual rate was closer to 16 per day, still far higher than nonveteran suicides.)
When the real war in Iraq started in 2004, the American military was not even up to the task of providing adequate vehicle armor to guard against what was quickly becoming the enemy’s weapon of choice – the roadside bomb, or IED (improvised explosive device), which debuted at scale on the streets where the Magnificent B*stards waged combat.
Still, many Marines took shoddy protective measures of bolted-on sheets of metal in stride, in the tradition that the Corps always had to do more with less.
Much of the world’s attention would be focused on the assault on Fallujah, and what happened in Ramadi was nearly lost to history
The B*stards’ new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kennedy, was charged with not just rebuilding leadership, but dealing with the wide-scale hemorrhaging of enlisted Marines who were now up for transfer
Matthew Milczark’s suicide on the eve of going to war, was seen as a bad omen among his fellow Marines
Indeed, when they finally returned from their duties in the Pacific to prepare for battle in Ramadi, their new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kennedy, was charged with not just rebuilding leadership, but dealing with the wide-scale hemorrhaging of enlisted Marines who were now up for transfer.
The machine for making Marines kicked into high gear. In the space of three months, the battalion received a series of ‘boot drops’ – arriving batches of newly minted Marines just out of boot camp and the Corps School of Infantry.
As ranks were replenished, 40 percent of the battalion’s junior enlisted infantry-men were brand spanking new, 229 in all, an unusually high influx at such a late hour.
Almost half showed up in January, a few weeks before the battalion would head to Kuwait and then on to Iraq.
They were the youngest of men with almost no life experience, rushing headlong into a violent and uncertain future. In a few cases, as their Marine brethren would learn from private barrack conversations, that included some who had never had sex. And tragically, as it turned out, never would.
Their story has largely been untold – as has the legacy that still haunts them 20 years on.
A bad omen
Tragedy would strike the battalion even before they reached Iraq. It involved one of the new boots, Matthew Milczark, homecoming king from Kettle River, Minnesota.
On a trip to one of the camp’s shower trailers, Milczark was spotted pocketing an electric shaver left behind by a soldier.
Milczark’s platoon sergeant from Echo Company, Damien Coan, called Milczark out in front of the entire platoon for a severe dressing-down.
He ordered the young Marine to stand guard duty all night and draft an essay about integrity.
It was a common punishment handed down by a senior enlisted officer, the kind of justice dispensed almost daily in the US military. But this time, on the eve of going to war, something went terribly wrong.
They were the youngest of men with almost no life experience, rushing headlong into a violent and uncertain future
On the battlefields of Ramadi, traumatic brain injury from bomb blasts and post-traumatic stress disorder began afflicting troops in large numbers
The next morning, March 8, a female service member came running out of the chapel screaming. There was blood splattered on the inside of the tent ceiling and a dead Marine on the floor. Milczark had shot himself with his M16.
The teenager had left a note behind. ‘I compromised my integrity for the price of a $25 razor. I fear that where we’re going, I won’t be trusted.’
The incident was a shattering experience for Echo Company. Word quickly spread through the rest of the battalion.
For his fellow Marines, the implication of the suicide was simple: it had to be a bad omen for what lay ahead.
Kill shots
Years after the battle, Chris MacIntosh’s memories would carry him back to that day he was trapped in a carport on the outskirts of Ramadi. Back to the kill shots he fired. And the tears would flow.
The recollections sometimes came to him when he was alone, soaking in a tub of lukewarm water in his lake house home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Flickering images always unspooled the same awful story: men with AK-47s charging around a corner, intent on killing him and a comrade Marine.
Crouched beside him was a 19-year-old private first class barely out of high school and basic training.
He and MacIntosh had raced into the courtyard of this house, fully aware that at least a half a dozen or more enemy gunmen were steps behind.
The bitter battle for Ramadi was, according to James Mattis, ‘one of the toughest fights the Marine Corps has fought since Vietnam’
Years after the battle, Chris MacIntosh’s memories would carry him back to that day he was trapped in a carport on the outskirts of Ramadi
The two had slipped around a corner into the carport and, at the front of a parked sedan, rifles at the ready, were suddenly prepared to make a last stand.
So the bodies piled up. First one, then two, then three, tumbling down in the carport, a dark red pool of blood oozing across the concrete floor. MacIntosh and the private were firing almost point-blank.
A fourth fighter emerged, a man with a dark and angry look as if pissed as hell about whatever was going on.
He pulled up short at the entrance, but the Marines shot him down, too. Then MacIntosh, for good measure, put a bullet in each man’s head to guard against a wounded enemy pulling a trigger or the pin on a hidden grenade.
Kill shots.
Days after the battle, he felt pride in his ability to do what was necessary. He’d proven himself a Marine: the consummate clear-headed warrior who could kill when the time came. No better friend, no worse enemy.
It was a stark contrast to MacIntosh’s cultivated reputation as platoon class clown, the skinny goofball who drove officers nuts until they realized he had a gift for boosting morale when his fellow Marines were most in need.
But those nights – years after Ramadi – MacIntosh soaked and wept, that unfettered spirit was gone. In its place was an ethereal web of harrowing, existential questions that stoked doubts.
What was that all about? Who exactly was the enemy? How could I have been granted such godlike power? And why does it feel, in the end, that I killed a bunch of people in their own backyard who were just defending their homes?
‘I did a horrible thing’
Grainy footage from an overhead security camera shows a middle-aged man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, unsteady from too many drinks, slowly turning to grasp the back of a restaurant chair with both hands.
The images are from the DarSalam Iraqi restaurant in Portland, Oregon, in April of 2017. The man in the hooded sweatshirt is 40-year-old Marine sergeant major Damien Rodriguez, veteran of four combat deployments and recipient of the Bronze Star for valor during vicious fighting in Ramadi 13 years before.
The video would bring his decorated military career to an end.
Damien Rodriguez had been awarded the Bronze Star for valor during vicious fighting in Ramadi before his downfall
Gregg Zoroya (left), author of Unremitting, which is published June 17
When Rodriguez arrived at the restaurant with a friend, a retired Marine, the two had already been drinking. They took a table where Rodriguez stared at scenes of the Iraqi countryside on the restaurant walls, glaring at employees, refusing to order food, loud and abusive.
‘F*ck your food. F*ck your restaurant,’ witnesses heard him say. ‘I have killed your people.’
When a waiter told Rodriguez to be respectful, the video shows the Marine, now on his feet, turning to grab the chair. He pauses as if to steady himself, and then, leading with his left hip, he swings the chair so hard that he not only knocks down the waiter but loses his balance and goes sprawling to the floor.
He comes up swinging, and a clutch of people restrain him.
The arrest that followed drew national headlines as prosecutors weighed whether to send Rodriguez to prison for a hate crime or consider leniency for a combat veteran that considerable evidence showed was afflicted with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
A defense lawyer offered health records proving Rodriguez’s self-denied struggle with flashbacks and alcohol. Among the searing images from Ramadi haunting him was the fly-covered corpse of a Marine he found, another 19-year-old, who had been shot through the head.
Rodriguez had documented in a report how the young man was so terrified at the moment of death that he’d pissed his pants
Prosecutors struck an agreement calling for probation and a fine, but no prison.
‘I did a horrible thing,’ Rodriguez said, apologizing in court to victims of his crime. ‘The incident that took place in your restaurant breaks my heart. That is not the man and Marine I am.’
Some days are better than others
Buck Connor knows the medication he takes to quell tremors from Parkinson’s disease is no cure. It buys the retired Army colonel, who lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Atlanta, a few temperate hours where he feels closest to normal.
Some days are better than others. But the brain disorder is never going to improve.
Ramadi is the reason for it.
In 2004, Connor commanded 1st Brigade of the Big Red One – the Army’s vaunted 1st Infantry Division, the oldest continuously operated division in American history, organized in 1917.
In a twist dictated by war’s exigencies, the Magnificent B*stards were attached to the Army 1st Brigade, led by Connor, and given the job of securing Ramadi.
With his headquarters on the edge of Ramadi, Connor frequently ventured into the city and into combat with his security detail, sometimes fighting on foot with a pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun loaded alternately with buckshot and slugs.
Always with his distinctive bright yellow leather gloves.
Eight times his command column was attacked by roadside bombs. The worst of it was May 26.
Connor’s Humvee was third in a five-vehicle convoy heading out of town at 40 miles per hour when buried plastic explosives and a 155mm artillery shell were detonated almost underneath where he was sitting.
Buck Connor’s Humvee was third in a five-vehicle convoy when buried plastic explosives and a 155mm artillery shell were detonated almost underneath where he was sitting
Buck Connor being treated after one of the roadside bombs in Ramadi – six years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s
The enemy’s weapon of choice – the roadside bomb, or IED (improvised explosive device) – debuted at scale on the streets where the Magnificent B*stards waged combat
Soldiers in the vehicle behind saw debris fly 200 feet into the air as the explosion appeared to engulf the colonel’s Humvee. But much of the shrapnel went the wrong direction. Connor seemed at first largely unscathed.
The windshield blew out, and the Humvee was filled with dust and the smell of cordite as it rolled to a stop.
Connor, who was 44 at the time, felt an enormous pressure on his chest and body when the bomb went off, and lost consciousness. He collapsed after being pulled from the vehicle.
When he came out of his haze, an Army doctor tried to quiz him. Connor said he was fine and then passed out, regaining consciousness in an Army aid station.
He refused to be evacuated to a higher level of medical care for a brain scan. Instead, with the help of a compliant brigade surgeon, Connor continued attending staff briefings, hiding his dizziness or vomiting until he left the meetings. All of it was strong signs of traumatic brain injury.
Two months later, on July 14, Connor was riding in a fully armored Humvee when a bomb exploded in the heart of Ramadi.
Again, he seemed unharmed, then took two steps from the Humvee and collapsed.
Connor remained in command until the brigade went home.
Six years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a disorder to which scientists have drawn a direct line from traumatic brain injury.
Excerpted from Unremitting: The Marine ‘Bastard’ Battalion and the Savage Battle that Marked the True Start of America’s War in Iraq. Copyright © 2025 Gregg Zoroya. Published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company, June 17. Available for pre order now. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
