Coop mission "Operation Exodus" difficulties broken.

Me and a buddy were trying to play Co-op finally last night. For some reason, regardless of our respective skills in single player and online, we were absolute garbage at this level. ಠ_ಠ

BUT, we tried switching to easy and it plain doesn't work. There were MORE enemies, took MORE shots to kill them, ammo counter was turned off, health indicator turned off, and our health did not regenerate. Also, even though the description of easy specifically mentions friendly fire is off, it was on, verified by me killing my partner(duh).

This is on xbox, is anyone else having an issue? Google wasn't returning any help on this problem. We'd like to play the rest of the co-op levels, but this missions is just plain kicking our ass.