'Fortunately, the grenade didn't go off'

Two of his Marines were down.

The rest of his platoon was unable to reach them.

And so, Marine 1st Lt. Alfred Lee Butler IV and other Marines in his platoon ended up leaping rooftop to rooftop to rescue them.

Now, almost three years later, Butler said his most vivid memories of that day are of seeing his Marines down. He hoped they were still alive, but he had a “sinking feeling” that they were already dead.

It was Dec. 23, 2004, in Fallujah, and Butler commanded a mortar platoon with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. Now a captain at Camp Geiger, N.C., Butler would earn the Bronze Star with a “V” device for his actions that day.

Butler, 28, said he and his Marines were tasked with clearing out insurgents who had been bypassed during the fighting the month before or who had managed to sneak back into the city before U.S. troops could allow civilians back in.

While his Marines were clearing one building, insurgents tossed a hand grenade at four Marines, wounding three of them, said Butler, of Jacksonville, N.C.

The four Marines managed to make it outside to a second-floor patio, where one fell to the ground, mortally wounded, he said. Then an insurgent shot and killed a second Marine who was standing guard so his comrades could get away.

At the time, Butler did not know if the two Marines still on the second-floor patio were still alive, he said.

“All we know is they are upstairs and there is a lot of gunfire going on and we’ve got to go get them.”

So he took some Marines and ended up jumping onto the roof of the building with the insurgents. Once there, they started taking fire.

“You hear the crack,” Butler said. “You see the kind of puffs as they come off the cement walls as we were trying to make our way across.”

Butler and his Marines made it to the patio.

Insurgents tossed a grenade at them, so Butler and another Marine jumped on the two Marines.

“I didn’t know if they were dead or alive, (but) I knew enough if they took more injuries they probably wouldn’t live,” Butler said.

But the explosion they were awaiting never came.

“Fortunately, the grenade didn’t go off, because that would have been a bad day for everybody.”

Butler said he helped get the Marines from the patio to the roof and then onto the street.

In the process, other Marines in his platoon were wounded.

He said he still remembers the cries for a corpsman.

“Every time you heard that, you knew one of your Marines was hurt.”

By the time the insurgents had been cleared, three of Butler’s Marines were dead, including the two he helped recover from the patio, he said. Another dozen or so Marines were wounded.

But not Butler.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said. “Don’t ask me how that happened. One of those ‘a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right wouldn’t be here’ kind of things.”

Now Butler was faced with the task of writing the families of wounded and fallen Marines.

This hit close to home for Butler, whose father was one of the 241 servicemembers killed in 1983 when a terrorist destroyed the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

“[Having been] on the receiving end [makes it] that much harder, because you know what the families are going through,” he said.