The night sky was filled with overflowing colors. Purple and green sparks led to furious flames on Fallujah’s lit tinderbox.
“This is real-life shit,” Aubrey McDade recalled. “This is really happening. These machine guns are going off. It’s not a simulation; it’s real gunfire.”
When the sun rose a few hours later, McDade knew he and other Marines from Company B, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, were in for a tough fight.
“It was game on,” he added.
While maneuvering through an alleyway in the city, McDade’s platoon was pinned down by intense enemy gunfire. Seconds after the first rounds hit, three Marines were injured, causing McDade, a machine-gun squad leader, to run toward the fight to deploy and direct Marines to suppress the enemy.
He ran across the alley, where a chaotic scene unfolded.
“Several Marines were hit,” he said. “One leg was hanging on by a piece of flesh as big as your wrist.”
Enemy .50-caliber machine-gun rounds smacked the wall behind McDade, which exploded into concrete shards that fell to the ground. McDade tended to two injured Marines and repeatedly ran back into harm’s way to get them to safety. Another was killed in action. But the fight was far from over.
“There wasn’t a house untouched by Bravo Company,” McDade said.
One Marine’s jawbone was blown completely off when he took a full grenade blast to the face while assaulting a house.
The monthlong battle culminated for McDade just before Christmas 2004. By February the following year, he was home at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
He wrestled with the lingering effects of war in the months and years after Fallujah.
“I struggled so bad,” he said. “I was having a physiological response every day.”
Memories of gunshots, improvised explosive devices, bloodshed and Marines crying for help filled his nights as he continuously sweated through sheets.
“It was like my body was in a trance, and I was forced to watch a movie I didn’t want to watch,” McDade recalled.
Mental health services were scant when he was assigned as a drill instructor at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. “Everyone was acting like it was normal,” he said.
To his surprise, the depot commander visited McDade and announced that he would be awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest award for valor on the battlefield for Marines and sailors.
McDade “showed total disregard for his own safety by moving across the alley and successfully extracting the first of three wounded Marines from the kill zone,” the award citation reads. “His quick thinking and aggressive actions were crucial in saving the lives of two of the three casualties.”
“You can’t do what Bravo Company 1/8 did without being a band of brothers, without loving each other,” he added. “Marines, we do what we’re supposed to do. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it; it’s what we trained for and what we’re going to do.”
Learn more about Fallujah: 20 Years Later at fallujahstories.org.