A rough one in Ramadi
On April 6, 2004, 12 Marines were killed and many more wounded when insurgents launched a series of coordinated attacks in Ramadi. It would be a long day for Lt. Donovan Campbell '97 and the 1st Platoon of Golf Company.

[Published in the March 2005 edition of The Continuum, the alumni magazine of Cistercian Prep School in Irving, Texas.]

By David Stewart
As he wiped the sleep from his eyes on the morning of April 6, 2004, 1st Lt. Donovan Campbell ’97 tried to absorb the startling news. Marines from Golf Company’s 3rd Platoon had been ambushed in the center of Ramadi. One Marine was already dead. Another needed to be evacuated. Campbell’s 1st platoon was designated as the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) this mild spring day, and in a matter of minutes they launched into the center of the city.
Campbell and his men had little time to reflect on the one to two hours of sleep they’d had since beginning a security assignment the previous morning. By radio Campbell was learning more about the plight of the 3rd Platoon. Two squads (24-26 men) were holed up in some houses. Isolated and besieged by hundreds of insurgents, the Marines were trying to weather intense enemy fire from small arms, machine guns, and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs). The Marines were running low on ammunition.
This news only added to Campbell’s urgency, but as he and his men neared the center of the city they hit heavy enemy resistance at a major thoroughfare named (ironically) Easy Street. Still five or six blocks from the 3rd Platoon’s position, Campbell was anxious to find a way to fight through. He stuck his head out from around the corner. A barrage of machine gun fire immediately obliterated the wall.
“My face was peppered with the debris,” Campbell remembered, “and my Marines returned fire from right next to my head. I went deaf in my right ear for a while.”
“It was pretty hairy when we reached Easy Street,” commented Corporal Christopher Bowen, 3rd squad leader of the 1st platoon. “This was by far the most intense fire fight we had seen.”
Up until April 6, Ramadi had been considered a fairly tame assignment, despite its location on the main road from Baghdad to Jordan (a major pipeline for the insurgents). But on April 6, Ramadi exploded with violence as insurgents executed their most well coordinated, and deadliest, attack of the occupation. In all, 12 Marines would lose their lives that day. In the months since April 6, more Marines have died in Ramadi than in any other Iraqi city.
“Most platoon commanders would have positioned themselves within the platoon,” Bowen explained. “But Lt. Campbell is the kind of leader who wants to be there when the initial contact is made, so he leads from the front. He always says that if something is going to happen, he’d rather it happen to him than to his guys.”
With bullets and mortar flying from virtually all angles, Campbell maneuvered his teams to cover for one another as they slowly closed in on the enemy along Easy Street.
“Two grenades landed a couple of feet away from me,” Campbell said, “and I scrambled for cover around a street corner. Those same grenades failed to explode and my squad leader picked them up and threw them away so we could continue to advance.
“About that time,” Campbell recalled, “Weapons Company arrived and delivered heavy firepower onto the rooftops of the buildings where the enemy was positioned with their machine guns surrounding us.”
“At times it was strange,” he reflected. “I felt detached, just an automaton doing my job. I had no time to worry about my safety or about the danger of the situation — I had my hands full just trying to make sure that I knew where all my men were and trying to decide what they needed to do next.
“Then for a brief moment it would hit me that literally hundreds of people were firing small arms, machine guns, and RPGs at us, and that we were fighting through them all. Then the automaton would take over again and I would return to focusing on the task at hand.”
Campbell led his men to follow Weapons Company but was struck by “seeing Marines in front of us doubling over and collapsing as they were hit by enemy fire.”
Once across Easy Street, an incensed Campbell fought even more fiercely to allow the remaining members of the squad and elements of Weapons Company to continue their advance toward the stranded 3rd Platoon.
“I had no idea what was going on half of the time,” Campbell said, “hundreds of people were trying to kill me and my men, and the situation was changing every second, forcing me to make hundreds of life-and-death decisions on the spur of the moment.” Decisions like whether to leave a Marine’s body for follow-on forces to pick up, whether to employ a signal flare so that the isolated 3rd Platoon could pinpoint the 1st Platoon’s location, and what to do with the body of another dead Marine.
The fighting would go on but Campbell’s deft leadership had already helped to provide the breakthrough that turned the tide, allowing the wounded of the 3rd Platoon to be rescued and scattering the insurgents.
“We fought for over 10 hours,” Campbell said. “I don’t know what time it was when we returned to the base, only that I was tired as hell from the combat and from not having slept for over 48 hours.”
In official reports on the action that day, Campbell was praised for his “steadfast leadership, disregard for his own safety, superb employment of his Marines and their firepower, decisiveness, and presence of mind [that] resulted in zero casualties to his Platoon and significant losses to the enemy in extremely difficult terrain.”
Campbell earned the Bronze Star with the Combat Distinguishing Device for his service in Ramadi on April 6, 2004. But he did not earn a day off.
Campbell and the remainder of Golf Company would spend another six months combatting the most dangerous insurgent attacks in Iraq before returning to Camp Pendleton, CA, in September.
Their secret to survival: Campbell had required each member of his platoon to learn the 23rd Psalm during training in California.
Once in Iraq, the platoon prayed the Psalm before each mission. Even when time was short, the men refused to conduct missions, no matter how urgent, without praying first. Golf Company’s 1st Platoon became known as the “praying platoon.”