CHAPTER 9
Welcome to the City!
DESERT STORM SIGNALED A REVOLUTION in warfare. From now on, wars would be fought at a distance with guided munitions, precision weaponry, and a full range of information-age technological weapons. America’s enemies would be cowed into submission by the sheer ubiquity and lethality of guided bomb units, cruise missiles, laser-guided munitions, and other high-tech millennium weaponry. Rather than depend upon a slow-moving, difficult-to-deploy mass army with its attendant fleets of vehicles, American decision makers concentrated on creating a smaller, lighter, more agile ground force. In the future, most of the fighting would be done by the planes and ships with assistance from a small retinue of highly trained Special Forces and SEAL ground pounders. Modern technology had apparently made the infantryman obsolete, a quaint relic of a pre-information-age past. At least that was the thinking among far too many in the defense establishment of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Donald Rumsfeld being the most infamous example). As was so often the case, though, Americans were preparing for the war they wished to fight rather than the one they were likely to fight. The whole mind-set reflected the longtime American dream that wars could be fought from a safe distance, scientifically, rapidly, decisively, and logically, with little political strife. It was a veritable echo chamber, eerily reminiscent of similar claims made in the wake of World War II about the supposed revolution wrought by nuclear weapons.
The problem was that in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States instead found itself enmeshed in counterinsurgent ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of the tremendous American technological and material advantage, a confusing stew of tenacious insurgent groups in both countries bedeviled America’s strategic aims of rolling back Islamic terrorism and creating stable democracies. “In the United States, we’ve become so accustomed to high-tech weaponry, so assured of our own power, that we’ve become blind to who actually does the fighting and dying . . . infantrymen . . . twenty-year-old men who hunt other men with rifles,” Owen West, a military commentator and former Marine officer, wrote, quite perceptively, as these wars raged. Indeed, these young volunteer riflemen of the early twenty-first century were bearing the brunt of both wars, serving multiple tours, patrolling endlessly, sacrificing more than those at home could ever begin to understand. The grunts of this so-called global war on terror were indispensable and, as usual, America did not have anywhere near enough of them.
This is not to say that American domination of the air, control of the seas, ubiquitous satellite imagery, and precision “shock and awe” weaponry were not important. They were all vital. But their techno-vangelist proponents had simply oversold the considerable merits of a good product. It was unfair to expect standoff weaponry to achieve anything more than limited strategic aims in Afghanistan and Iraq. A joint direct attack munition (JDAM), for instance, is an accurate and effective piece of aerial ordnance. These bombs can routinely hit targets with a margin of error under ten meters. But they cannot control ground or people; nor can they favorably influence popular opinion (indeed, the bomb’s impersonal destruction usually tends to spike anti-American sentiment). Only foot soldiers can patrol an area, secure its infrastructure, develop relationships with locals, and defeat a guerrilla enemy. And only ground troops, especially infantry, can secure cities.
The war in Iraq was a classic example of this axiom. In 2003, President George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s odious regime, eliminate any potential threat that Saddam might employ weapons of mass destruction (an infamously unfounded fear, as it turned out), and transform a traditionally volatile, dictatorial country into a stable democracy. These were ambitious goals, far more challenging than the simple mission of throwing Saddam out of the Kuwaiti desert in 1991. Yet war planners in 2003 unleashed their invasion with less than half the number of troops that Bush’s father had employed to win the 1991 desert war.
The twenty-first-century plan was to paralyze the Hussein regime with “shock and awe” guided bombs and cruise missiles while an armor-heavy ground force unleashed a lightning thrust through the desert to Baghdad. Their mission was to bypass the southern Iraqi cities, get to Baghdad, and decapitate the regime, before Saddam could recover and use the nukes and chemical weapons he did not really have. Once Saddam was gone, the country would then settle into a happily-ever-after coda with their American liberators. In the run-up to the war, Vice President Dick Cheney outlined this rosy scenario: “I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators,” he told one journalist. “The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.” Norman Schwarzkopf, the commanding general for Desert Storm, later said, “I . . . picked up vibes that . . . you’re going to have this massive strike with massive weaponry, and basically that’s going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that.”
Basically, that was the plan, and it grew from many generations of wrongheaded thinking in America about what war is, how wars are fought and won, and what they truly cost. The Bush administration invasion planners of 2003 sought to avoid urban combat because it tended to be so bloody, protracted, and destructive. Also, they avoided the cities because they knew they did not have anywhere near enough ground soldiers to secure them. So, invading columns bypassed much resistance that later morphed into a full-blown insurgency. Yet the cities were the center of gravity for the Iraqi population. Indeed, 70 percent of Iraq’s population lived in the cities. As a result, any invader who wished to control the country had to control those cities, not bypass them. Moreover, in an ominous harbinger, when the Americans in the spring of 2003 entered such cities as Nasiriyah and Baghdad, they found themselves involved in hard fighting.
What followed is, of course, well known. Some Iraqis, particularly Shiites and Kurds, did welcome the U.S.-led coalition as liberators. Others, especially Sunnis in Al Anbar province, were determined to resist the invasion. The coalition did overthrow Saddam’s government. In the months that followed, though, the occupiers, through spectacular incompetence and lack of cultural understanding, were overwhelmed by the job of creating a new Iraq. The Americans did not have anywhere near enough troops to secure the country and rebuild it. Multiple insurgent groups—Sunni and Shiite—sprouted from the resulting malevolent seeds of unemployment, looting, discontent, and disillusionment. The sad result, by 2004, was a full-blown guerrilla war against elusive insurgents who sniped at the Americans, ambushed them when they could, curried world opinion with Net-centric, media-savvy information-age propaganda, and inflicted devastating casualties upon them with the improvised explosive device (IED), the terrorist version of a standoff weapon (and a chillingly effective one at that).
By this time, the main arena of contest was, ironically, the cities. Day after day, American soldiers carried out an unglamorous struggle to control the roads and the urban sprawl in such places as Baghdad, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Bakuba, Samarra, Ramadi, and Fallujah. The sad reality was that there were nowhere near enough troops to do the job. The war had devolved into a messy, unpopular counterinsurgent struggle for the urban soul of Iraq. Indeed, by the spring of 2004, many of the cities, including Najaf, the Shiite slums of Sadr City in east Baghdad, and Fallujah, were pregnant with menace, teetering toward an explosion of violence. In April, when the powder keg blew, these cities turned into full-blown battlegrounds. Once again, the Americans had to relearn the unhappy lesson that urban combat is an infantryman’s game and that, technological advances notwithstanding, ground combat never goes out of style. The classic example was Fallujah.1
Vigilant Resolve?!
Since late April 2003, when American soldiers first entered Fallujah in substantial numbers, the town had bubbled with tension. This was a Sunni city with significant pro-Saddam sentiment. This was where imams controlled lucrative trading routes from Syria, where they dominated access to information and markets, and had done so for centuries. The people of Fallujah believed in their inherent superiority to their Shiite countrymen. They had dominated them for decades. The cruelty of Saddam’s regime had worked in the favor of Fallujahns, empowering them. The democracy-minded Americans were a threat to this old order. They were also culturally ignorant, heavy-handed in the use of their firepower and in their relations with locals.
By the summer and fall of 2003, this combustible situation had boiled over into outright violence between Sunni insurgents and troopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. In at least two instances, the Americans opened fire on unruly crowds, killing civilians. The locals simmered with anger over American firepower (notice how this U.S. strength had turned into a liability in an urban, information-age environment). When the 1st Marine Division, of Peleliu fame, took responsibility for Fallujah in early 2004, the leathernecks hoped to pacify the situation there by adopting a more benign approach than their Army colleagues. But the mood in the city was not receptive to rapprochement and the situation was only growing worse by the day. Fallujah teemed with weapons and guerrilla fighters. By and large, the city had become “no go” territory for the Americans. In this sense, Fallujah was indicative of an anti-American revolt that was bubbling among many of the Sunni tribes all over Al Anbar province.
Very simply put, a major confrontation was brewing. In times like this, a flash-point event can sometimes touch off a larger conflict. On March 31, insurgents in Fallujah ambushed four American private security contractors from Blackwater USA. As the contractors (all of them former military) drove on Highway 10, the main route through the heart of Fallujah, insurgents machine-gunned and grenaded their cars, killing them. A venomous crowd then dragged their bodies through the streets, set them ablaze, and hung the charred remains from a bridge that spanned the Euphrates River.
The Marines knew who was responsible for this barbarous attack and they were determined to round them up at a deliberate pace, rather than react with overwhelming force. “Iraqis would see harsh reprisal as an act of vengeance,” said Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the corps-sized I Marine Expeditionary Force, which was responsible for Al Anbar. His immediate subordinate, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, concurred. He had no desire to make any attempt to seize Fallujah. He knew that fighting for the city would be costly. He understood that he did not have the resources or manpower to rebuild the city whenever the fighting did end, much less pacify and care for a quarter million hostile Fallujahns. What’s more, any attack on Fallujah needed an Iraqi stamp of approval, and the shaky provisional government in Baghdad was hardly on board with the idea.
But American leaders, from Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head Paul Bremer to President Bush, found it impossible to ignore the disturbing pictures of the crowd and the burned bodies. The Fallujah attack was unique and visceral. Thus it had dramatic repercussions. Desecration of bodies is a major taboo in American culture. It had happened at Mogadishu in 1993, and Fallujah was an unwelcome reminder of this awful nightmare. In the view of Bush, Bremer, and Rumsfeld, the desecration represented a worldwide humiliation for the United States and a major challenge to the American presence in Iraq. So, the Fallujah attack could not go unpunished, mainly because of the power of the appalling images (notice the importance of information-age media in shaping strategic events). For these reasons, and out of sheer anger, Bremer and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, ordered, with Bush’s approval, the Marines to take Fallujah.
General Mattis may not have liked the order, but he was determined to carry it out. In early April, his Marines set up a cordon of nine checkpoints around the city to seal it off. Fallujah is wedged between the Euphrates to the west, a rail line to the north, and the desert to the south and east. The city only spans a few miles across, making it possible to cordon it off, even with the Marines’ limited manpower. Engineers built berms to discourage movement at the edges of the city. The Marines only allowed food, water, and medical supplies to enter Fallujah. In early 2004, the population was probably about 300,000 people. Sensing what was in the offing, many of the locals began to leave in cars and on foot. The Marines screened them and allowed military-age males to leave only if they were with families. “The city is surrounded,” one platoon leader at a checkpoint commented. “It’s an extended operation. We want to make a very precise approach to this. We want to get the guys we’re after. We don’t want to go in there with guns blazing.”
However, the pending attack, dubbed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was much more ambitious than that. Any attempt to take the city would require much in the way of blazing guns. The politicians and the brass provided very little strategic direction to Mattis beyond orders to take the town. Mattis filled the vacuum by laying out the objectives: apprehend the perpetrators and the many foreign fighters who had been massing in Fallujah for months, clear out all the heavy weapons, and reopen Highway 10 to American traffic. Four battalions, augmented by Army Delta Force and Special Forces soldiers, in all comprising about two thousand troops, would carry out the main assault, knifing into Fallujah from the northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeastern corners of town. The battalions comprised Regimental Combat Team 1, the modern incarnation of the old 1st Marine Regiment, with Colonel John Toolan, a reserved Brooklyn native of Irish heritage, in command. His ground troops could call upon support from AC-130 Spectre gunships, attack helicopters, unmanned aerial observation aircraft, and Air Force F-15s. As the assault proceeded, the Marines planned to inundate the city’s inhabitants with leaflets and loudspeaker pronunciations that emphasized the Americans’ strength and benevolent intentions. As one officer put it: “This is a flash bang strategy. Stun the bad guys with aggressive fire, then psyops [psychological operation] the shit out of them, always coming back to the theme of the inevitability of the superior tribe.”2
On the evening of April 4, after listening to a slew of fiery pep talks from their commanding officers, the Marines began their push into the city. Opposition consisted of about two thousand insurgents of varying quality and commitment. They were a mixture of Saddam loyalists, members of local tribes that opposed the American presence, youthful adventurers, former Iraqi Army soldiers, and hard-core jihadis, both local and foreign. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, RPK machine guns, mortars, and copious amounts of RPGs. Rather than one entity with one commander, they were a patchwork of insurgent organizations under the loose control of various leaders. The insurgents usually fought in teams of five to ten men. The Marines generally referred to them as “muj,” short for mujahideen, or holy warrior.
Fallujah’s narrow streets, sturdy buildings of brick, mortar, and concrete, and even many of its historic mosques comprised ideal fighting positions for these men. “Generally, all houses have an enclosed courtyard,” one Marine infantryman wrote. “Upon entry into the courtyard, there is an outhouse large enough for one man. Rooftops and a large first-story window overlook the courtyard. Most houses have windows that are barred and covered with blinds or cardboard, restricting visibility into the house. The exterior doors of the houses are both metal and wood.” Often the doors were protected by metal gates. Most of the structures were two stories and had only a couple of entry points. The rooms were “directly proportionate to the size of the house.” In some cases, cars and buses blocked the likely avenues of the American advance.
The first night featured many sharp clashes, but the fighting intensified after daylight on April 5. Clad in body armor, laden down with weapons, ammunition, and equipment, the infantry Marines arduously worked their way block by block, deeper into Fallujah. The enemy fighters mixed with noncombatants, creating a broiling, confusing mass of humanity. One group of Marines saw an RPG-toting man stand among a crowd of women and children, aim his weapon, fire, and then run. Reluctant to fire into the crowd, the Marines chased him but he disappeared into the urban jungle. This scenario repeated itself countless times. Quite often, the Marines took to the rooftops and traded shots with insurgents across the street, or a block or two away. The key for the grunts was to stay away from the streets and crossroads.
When clearing buildings, the Marines spread themselves into a staggered, linear stack formation, against an exterior wall, near a door or other entryway. In the recollection of one grunt, as the point man burst into the house, “each Marine in the stack looks to the Marines to his front, assesses the danger areas that are not covered, and then covers one of them.” They held their rifles erect, at their shoulders, ready to fire. Each man covered a corner of the room they were clearing. The key was to spend a minimum amount of time in “fatal funnels”—doorways, hallways, and other narrow spots where they were especially vulnerable to enemy fire. All too often, in this three-dimensional game of urban chicken, they came face-to-face with bewildered, frightened civilians. In most cases, the Marines did not speak Arabic and had no translators with them. They tried to tell the people to leave town, that the Marines were there to apprehend terrorists (or “Ali Babas” in local parlance), but communication was limited. Some of the people did leave. Others did not wish to leave their homes unprotected from the excesses of both sides. Most had no love for the Americans.
By midday on April 5, firefights were raging all over the city. “There was nothing fancy about this,” an embedded correspondent wrote. “This was the classic immemorial labor of infantry, little different from the way it had been practiced in Vietnam, World War II, and earlier back to the Greeks and Romans.” Lieutenant Christopher Ayres and a squad from Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines (1/5), cornered a sniper and dueled with him in an alleyway. The lieutenant, a Texan who had entered the Corps as an enlisted man, came face-to-face with the sniper. “We both emptied a magazine, but didn’t hit each other.” The insurgent’s AK rounds whizzed past Ayres and bounced off the alley walls. Chips from the wall nicked Ayres in the face. The sniper ran away, with Ayres’s squad and another group of Marines in hot pursuit. As they did so, they came under more fire from a house. An enemy riflemen shot one Marine in the throat and another in the thigh. Using the stack method, the Marines assaulted the enemy house with grenades and rifle fire. In the melee, they captured three enemy fighters who were carrying grenades and rifles. There were also two women and five children in the house, but somehow they did not get hurt.
In the kitchen, a stalwart guerrilla shot First Lieutenant Josh Palmer, hitting him three times in the side, killing him. One of Palmer’s squad leaders put a bullet through the insurgent’s head. When Ayres arrived in the kitchen, he recognized the dead man as the sniper he had dueled with in the alley. “When they were searching the dead guy, they pulled up his shirt and found a pull cord attached to a white canvas suicide vest packed with blocks of C-4 explosive,” Ayres said. “Thank God a Marine dropped the sniper dead in his tracks before he could pull the cord.” The Marines left the kitchen, rolled a grenade in there, and bolted from the house. The explosion detonated the man’s suicide vest, blowing him to bits and leaving a three-foot-long trench in the remnants of the kitchen floor.
Ayres and his cohorts were part of a battalion effort to sweep through the industrial sector of southeastern Fallujah. The shabby streets teemed with run-down factories, warehouses, garages, and junkyards. Faces covered by keffiyehs, insurgents darted from structure to structure, snapping off RPG shots, spraying wildly with their AKs. The RPGs exploded twice—once when the gunner pressed the trigger and then again when the warhead impacted against its target. “We all crouched up against a wall as bullets whizzed by,” Robert Kaplan, a leading military commentator who had embedded himself with Bravo Company, 1/5, recalled. “As the marines consolidated the position, the whistles turned to cracks and we stood up and relaxed a bit.” Through binoculars, they could see the enemy fighters some one hundred meters away. “Men armed with RPG launchers, wearing checkered keffiyehs around their faces, could be seen surrounded by women and children, taunting us. Only snipers tried to get shots off.”
A few blocks to the west, Lance Corporal Patrick Finnigan and his fire team from Charlie Company were in the middle of a whirlwind firefight with a dizzying array of muj fighters. “They had . . . sniper teams, machine gun teams, guys that were organized in four-man groups with Dragonovs [sniper rifles], RPGs,” he said. “They had homemade weapons too that would shoot rockets that were just obscenely big, but not very accurate.”
Finnigan was an Irish Catholic kid from suburban St. Louis who had joined the Corps after 9/11 for a complicated blend of reasons—patriotism, his parents’ impending divorce, and because his college career had stalled. He was a veteran of the initial invasion of Iraq the year before. Like most every other Marine in his outfit, he had heard about the mutilated Americans and he was excited to take Fallujah and destroy the insurgency there. “It was basically an all-day fire exchange with the enemy, pushing ’em back. That was pretty crazy. We were getting attacked from buildings, so we were taking positions behind . . . dirt mounds returning fire, doing fire and maneuver . . . and trying to close with them as much as we could.” At one point, an RPG streaked past him and hit a Humvee behind him. Small fragments sprayed him all over his body. Each of the hits felt like “somebody holding . . . some fire on your skin.” Corpsmen evacuated him to an aid station, where doctors gave him morphine and carefully picked out each fragment they could see. After the morphine wore off and the doctors had removed as many pieces as they could find, he returned to duty.
By and large, grunts like Finnigan were on their own during the push into the city. Their fire support came mainly from mortars as well as the Mark 19 grenade launchers, .50-caliber machine guns, and shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons (SMAW) from the battalion Weapons Company. Air support mainly consisted of Cobra helicopter gunships. The entire regimental combat team had only one company of M1A1 Abrams tanks from the Marine 1st Tank Battalion. They generally operated in pairs, helping the infantry wherever they were needed. Tank drivers sometimes had difficulty maneuvering their formidable beasts through the city. Tank commanders often had problems pinpointing the location of enemy fighters, even when taking fire from them. “It was very difficult to determine the direction, distance, and location of enemy rifle fire,” Captain Michael Skaggs, the tank company commander, later said. “These sounds echoed around buildings, and the enemy remained concealed within dark areas. For tankers, muzzle flashes and rifle firing signatures were difficult to locate unless they had a general location to look.” Usually, they were dependent upon the infantrymen to point out targets, often by firing rifle or machine-gun tracer rounds at the targeted building or street. At times, the tanks could be vulnerable to close-quarters enemy attacks if they did not have infantry support. For instance, Lance Corporal Finnigan was behind a mound, covering one tank that was close to a house, when he saw a teenager attempt to drop explosives down onto it from a rooftop. “It was only a hundred-meter, or two-hundred-meter . . . shot. I just put the triangle on the square and squeezed the trigger and he fell instantly.” The ensuing explosion collapsed the entire roof of the building, but the tank was unscathed.3
The fighting raged on like this for three more days, with the Americans inflicting serious punishment on both the insurgents and the infrastructure of Fallujah. Militarily, the Americans were winning. General Mattis estimated that he needed only two or three more days to take the entire city. Politically, though, the Americans were on the verge of a catastrophe because of the unfair perception in Iraq and elsewhere that the Americans were unleashing destruction with impunity. In general, they tried to launch air strikes as judiciously, and with as much precision, as possible. They attempted to limit the destruction wrought by tanks, mortars, and other weapons. They especially hoped to avoid shooting at mosques, but when they took fire from the mosques, they returned it. Those journalists who were embedded with Marine infantry units attested to American restraint, although they were not in a position to see what was going on beyond the Marine lines.
The sad fact was that it simply was not possible to assault a sizable city without killing innocent people and wrecking private property. “Civilian casualties are accepted as inevitable in high-tech, standoff warfare,” the military analyst and Marine combat veteran Bing West once wrote. “The infantryman does not stand off. The grunt must make instant, difficult choices in the heat of battle.” For the average Marine infantryman, it could be quite difficult to determine who was a noncombatant and who was not. Men of all ages sometimes took potshots with RPGs or rifles, discarded the weapons, and then melted into crowds or buildings. Unarmed people, especially teenagers, watched the Marines and relayed information to the insurgents in person or on cell phones. Even women sometimes gathered intelligence in this fashion. Other unarmed men hid in buildings, spoke with mobile mortar teams on cell phones, and called down fire on the Americans. For the Marine grunt, any Fallujahn who was capable of walking and talking could potentially be a threat. How could he know which Iraqi was simply talking to a friend on his phone and which was passing along information to insurgents on the next block? Needless to say, the environment was unforgiving.
As the fighting raged, General John Abizaid, the theater commander, claimed that the commanders at Fallujah had “attempted to protect civilians to the best of their ability. I think everybody knows that.” But everyone did not know or believe that. Quite the opposite was true, actually. Worldwide media reports teemed with claims that the Americans were wantonly killing large numbers of civilians in Fallujah. One New York Times report, filed from Baghdad, told of a wounded six-year-old boy whose parents had been killed by American bullets. The boy told the Timesreporter, Christine Hauser, of seeing his brothers crushed to death when their house collapsed under the weight of bombs. “Iraqis who have fled Falluja [sic] tell of random gunfire, dead and wounded lying in the streets, and ambulances being shot up,” Hauser wrote. A subsequent story, filed this time from Fallujah itself, reported one gravedigger’s claim that, in the town cemetery, “there are [two hundred fifty] people buried here from American strikes on houses. We have stacked the bodies one on top of the other.”
Arab media outlets, such as the notoriously anti-American TV network Al Jazeera, carried the most incendiary declarations of American-led destruction. As the fighting raged in Fallujah, the insurgents welcomed Al Jazeera reporter Ahmed Mansour and his film crew into the city. Mansour and his crew filmed many scenes of wounded Iraqis at Fallujah’s largest hospital. The images were awful—mutilated children, sobbing mothers, horribly wounded old people, blood-soaked beds, harried doctors and nurses, and dead bodies, including babies. The ghastly scenes ran continuously in a twenty-four-hour loop. The clear implication was that the Americans were wantonly killing and maiming. Hospital personnel claimed that the Americans had killed between six hundred and a thousand people. Because any Western journalist entering the insurgent-held portions of the city risked being kidnapped and beheaded, the Al Jazeera footage and claims comprised the main image of Fallujah before the world. Thus, the insurgents controlled the crucial realm of information, shaping world opinion—and more important, Iraqi public opinion—in their favor.
As with so much media reporting in the Internet age, the problem was lack of context. The visceral hospital scenes were horrifying to any decent human being. But the circumstances that caused this death and destruction were vague. Were these people deliberately targeted by the Americans? Had they actually been wounded and killed by American bombs, shells, or small arms? Or had the insurgents done the damage? Were the civilians perhaps caught in the middle of firefights raging between the two sides? Had they clearly indicated their status as noncombatants? The pictures answered none of these reasonable questions. They only stood as accusatory portraits, with no corroboration, against the Americans, for the human suffering they had allegedly caused. By this time, insurgent groups in Iraq were masters at controlling information, using the Internet to spread anti-American propaganda and shaping the world’s perception of the war in their favor.
The result of all this was anger in Iraq over Fallujah. American policymakers, often troubled themselves by the pictures, did little to counter the Al Jazeera story line of U.S. barbarism. After a year of occupation, many Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni alike, were already boiling with bitterness against the Americans for a litany of problems, including chaotic violence, lack of electrical power, lack of potable water, nighttime raids against private homes by the Americans, and a slew of cultural tensions. The pictures from Fallujah made it seem as though the Americans were systematically destroying the city and its inhabitants, simply because of what had happened to their four contractors. Resentment morphed into abject hatred and hysteria, especially among those who had always opposed the U.S. invasion. One anti-American cleric, for instance, screeched on Al Jazeera that the Americans were modern-day Crusaders who intended to slaughter all Iraqis. “They are killing children!” he wailed. “They are trying to destroy everything! The people can see through all the American promises and lies!”
Even moderate Iraqis were outraged by what they saw on Al Jazeera. “My opinion of the Americans has changed,” one Shiite store owner in Basra told a journalist. “When [they] came, they talked about freedom and democracy. Now, the Americans are pushing their views by force.” Another middle-class man was so angered by the video he saw of Fallujah that he declared: “We came to hate the Americans for that. The Americans will hit any family. They just don’t care.” This was hardly the reality in Fallujah, but it became the perception among far too many Iraqis.
Consequently, as April unfolded, many of Iraq’s cities were on the verge of a total revolt against the Americans. Iraq was coming apart at the seams. Heavy fighting raged, not just in Fallujah but in Ramadi, the largest city in Al Anbar. Not only were the Sunnis rising up, but also some of the Shiites, particularly Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. In Najaf and the Sadr City section of Baghdad, his militiamen were fighting bloody pitched battles against the U.S. Army. The situation in Iraq was so bad, and the American control of the urban roads so shaky, that commanders worried about the possibility that their supply lines would soon be cut. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), a provisional body that Bremer’s CPA had devised to hasten the transition of Iraq from occupied country to a new sovereign democracy, was on the verge of dissolution. Several of the Council’s twenty-five members condemned the invasion of Fallujah and threatened to resign in protest. At least two members actually did resign. When the Americans attempted to legitimize the battle by sending Iraqi Army soldiers to help out, they mutinied. Nationwide, desertions among soldiers and policemen skyrocketed to 80 percent.
To top it all off, the political situation in the United States was also volatile, and in a presidential election year, no less. Antiwar sentiment was hardening. Governor Howard Dean, an avowed peace candidate, came close to winning the Democratic Party nomination before Senator John Kerry finally outpaced him. Kerry’s position on the war was ambiguous, but he was a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the conflict. He lambasted Bush for bungling the war and portrayed the war as a disaster. The Fallujah mess only added ammunition to Kerry’s arsenal. His candidacy reflected a significant component of the American electorate that had lost confidence in Bush’s leadership and viewed the war as a foolish, costly mistake, a bloody quagmire in the making. All of this threatened to severely damage Bush’s chances for reelection.
Under threat of this potential strategic meltdown, Bremer and Abizaid felt that they must halt the Fallujah operation or risk a massive political defeat in Iraq. On April 9, they ordered the Marines to hold in place. Mattis and his leathernecks were incensed. They yearned to finish the job of taking Fallujah. Instead, Bremer, Abizaid, and other American authorities began an on-again, off-again, dizzying series of negotiations with the IGC, local sheiks, Fallujah city fathers, insurgent groups, and any other Iraqis who seemed to offer the possibility of a favorable resolution to the situation.
The Marine grunts could not understand why the brass was restraining them. The infantrymen’s dangerous reality was quite distant from the back-and-forth political maneuvering that had come to dominate the Fallujah story, but what they did know disgusted them. One grunt expressed their prevailing sentiment with a contemptuous parody of the negotiations: “Hey, Sheik Butt Fuck, will you please, please, pretty please turn over those naughty little boys who slaughtered our people, burnt their bodies, and strung them up from that bridge?” Even more frustrating for the Marines, the negotiations took place against the backdrop of a supposed cease-fire, which existed only in name. Throughout April, plenty of fighting raged with much loss of life on both sides, but with no decisive result.
In fact, the end of American offensive operations provided a major respite to the guerrillas. They now had plenty of time to rest, rearm, reinforce, and carry out deliberate, calculated attacks on the Marines, and on their own turf, no less. “The Muj inside the city . . . just dug in deeper, slabbing up their machine-gun bunkers and mortar pits with fresh concrete,” a Marine infantry platoon leader wrote. “They had plenty of food—most of it relief aid—and all the water in the river to drink.”4
Each day the Marines hoped and expected to receive the order to renew their attack. It never came. Instead of advancing block by block, working toward the finite objective of taking the city, the frustrated Marine grunts found themselves stalemated, holed up in buildings, trading shots with any insurgents who messed with them. Snipers did much of the fighting. The urban jungle was a paradise of targets for them. “It’s a sniper’s dream,” one of them said. As precision shooters, they were the perfect antidote in an urban setting to the excess of American firepower.
In a way, the snipers were also the ultimate manifestation of Marine Corps ethos. They were riflemen par excellence, masters at the art of precision killing. They embodied the notion that even in modern war, the individual fighter is still the ultimate weapon. This is the foundational philosophy of the Corps and it was on full display in Fallujah. In modern combat, snipers are the most personal of killers. They track, stalk, and spot their prey. They sometimes can see the expression on the faces of their victims—and even know something about their personal habits. This is rare in modern war, when soldiers shoot powerful weapons at their enemies but often do not know for sure if they ever hit or kill anyone. This is one reason why it is foolish and invasive to ask a combat soldier if he ever killed anyone. He probably does not know or, more likely, he does not want to know. If he has killed, then asking him that question is like asking him to reveal intimate secrets about himself, almost akin to demanding explicit details about his sex life.
Every sniper has to embrace an equilibrium in his attitude on killing or he simply cannot do the job. He has to avoid identifying or sympathizing with his victim too much, or he will be reluctant to kill him. On the other hand, he must guard against becoming drunk with the power of life and death, thirsting to kill anyone who enters his sights, regardless of whether that person is a threat or a valuable military target for the larger goal of fulfilling the mission. Striking the proper balance requires great strength of character and mental clarity. Each Marine sniper at Fallujah had to come to terms with becoming such a killer.
They set up in well-hidden positions on rooftops and near windows. They maintained a vigil, searching for insurgents day and night. Some of the shooters were graduates of the Marine scout sniper school’s rugged program. These craftsmen were often armed with M40A3 bolt-action rifles designed specifically for sniping. Other shooters were just good riflemen from infantry platoons. Lance Corporal Finnigan fit the latter category, although he had trained with the snipers on Okinawa for a few weeks before deploying to Iraq. Armed with an M16 that had an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) mounted on its sight rail, Finnegan was ensconced on a rooftop, along with a machine gunner and a Mark 19 grenadier. “We had a couple of sandbags,” he said. “We actually had a bunch of alternate positions, from different windows in the building. We had a chair set up.” The chair was positioned about ten feet from any window or hole so as to shield the barrel of the rifle and provide some cover for Finnigan. The ACOG allowed him to see for many hundreds of meters, deep into enemy territory.
His best friend and several other platoon mates had been killed on the first day of the offensive, so he was itching for some payback. The rules of engagement were flexible. Anyone who was armed or moving military supplies or even pointing their fingers at the Marine positions was a legitimate target. The negotiations notwithstanding, Fallujah remained a war zone. Round the clock, plenty of shooting raged back and forth all over the city, and Finnigan’s spot in a section of the city the Marines called Queens was no different. Periodically they got shelled by 120-millimeter mortars. They also took muj machine-gun and rifle fire.
Finnigan operated in twenty-minute shifts, giving his eyes plenty of time away from the gun sight to rest. “It’s not like you’re just sitting there behind the scope for hours at a time. That’s impossible. Your eye will get really tired. Everybody takes a turn.” Many times, he spotted insurgents on the move and opened fire. “Most of these idiots would just be walking . . . and they had no idea where we were and they would have their weapons and neat little uniforms on or whatever. They’d just be walking down the street having no idea they were about to enter a killing zone.” In all, he estimated that he killed fifteen of these armed men.
A couple dozen blocks to the north, in the Jolan district, Corporal Ethan Place, a trained scout sniper attached to the 2/1 Marines, was also hunting for targets. Like all scout snipers, he worked with a spotter, who helped him find targets, figure windage, and protect him from enemy snipers. Place and his partner spotted a group of insurgents rushing toward their positions, ducking through alleyways. The attackers would peek around a corner, launch an RPG in the Marines’ direction, and then scramble back out of sight. Place concentrated on one especially active corner. Sure enough, an insurgent with an RPG started around that corner. Place squeezed the trigger of his M40A3 and hit the man full in the shoulder. Unlike Hollywood movies, the round did not knock him off his feet. He simply crumpled, twitched, and fell. Another enemy fighter, wearing a black ski mask, glanced around the same corner. Place waited until the man moved into the open and then shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. In the next few hours, he killed several more. “They look up the street and don’t see anyone,” he said. “They can’t believe I can see them.” When a white car with three armed men approached at three hundred meters, he killed all three of them. Needless to say, the enemy attack went nowhere.
In subsequent days, he killed numerous guerrillas who were trying to drag away the dead bodies of their comrades. He personally shot and killed at least thirty-two insurgents. His spotter got several more. The streets in their range of vision were strewn with maggot-infested, swollen, stinking carcasses. There were so many flies feeding on the head of one body that it created the appearance of a full beard. At night dogs and cats tore at the corpses, sometimes eating all the way to the bone. The incessant howling and moaning of the animals provided an eerie sound track to the evening shadows. Overhead, AC-130s raked enemy-held buildings with cannon and Gatling gun fire. Psychological operations teams played heavy metal music by the likes of AC/DC and Drowning Pool. The muj countered with fiery anti-American rhetoric blared from the speakers of mosques: “America is bringing Jews from Israel and stealing Iraq’s oil. Women, take your children into the streets to aid the holy warriors. Bring them food, water, and weapons. Do not fear death. It is your duty to protect Islam.” The competing sounds symbolized this epic clash of cultures. The irreverent Marines dubbed this surreal environment “LaLa-Fallujah” after a popular rock festival.
For the muj, the Marine snipers were the most terrifying weapon of all. They seemed to be everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing. They meted out death so swiftly and so personally that they created great mental strain among the enemy fighters. They were so effective that Fallujah’s city elders and IGC negotiators began demanding their withdrawal as a precondition of any settlement in Fallujah. “I find it strange,” Lieutenant General Conway replied to one such demand, “that you object to our most discriminate weapon—a Marine firing three ounces of lead at a precise target. I reject your demand, and I wonder who asked you to make it.”5
But, by early May, that was about the only demand the Americans had rejected. By now, the Abu Ghraib scandal was in full bloom, only adding to the American strategic woes in Iraq. So, in spite of their obvious military successes in Fallujah, the Americans were now on such weak political footing that they agreed to a withdrawal. As a fig leaf to cover this obvious reversal, the Americans agreed to turn over the city’s security to the so-called Fallujah Brigade, a unit that was comprised mainly of former Iraqi soldiers and even some insurgents. The brigade would be armed and supported financially by the Americans. In exchange, they were to enforce a cease-fire and maintain peace in Fallujah. In reality, the Fallujah Brigade had no such capability, mainly because its members sympathized with, or were even part of, the insurgency. Turning over the city to them was tantamount to giving it to the guerrillas.
When the grunts heard the withdrawal order, they felt betrayed, bitter, and very angry. Many felt that they were being cheated out of a victory that they and their fallen brother Marines had earned. Thoroughly disgusted, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, a rifle platoon leader in Echo Company, 2/2 Marines, turned to a Time magazine reporter who had covered many wars and asked: “Does this remind you of another part of the world in the early 1970s?” The allusion to Vietnam was clear. Like every other Marine in his company, Lance Corporal Finnigan was peeved and frustrated by the order. “It was bullshit. It was a tough pill to swallow. It just wasn’t much fun to hear that.” Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for RCT-1, knew the realities in Fallujah as well as, or better than, any other American. His assessment was dead-on: “We’re letting the muj off the canvas. They’ll use Fallujah as a base to hit us.”
As the Marines left, their supposed Fallujah Brigade “allies” jeered and glared at them. Some turned and pantomimed defecating in the direction of the Americans. Others jubilantly waved Saddam-era flags. “They [Americans] told us to change our uniforms,” one of them told a reporter, “but we refused. We are not with the Americans. We are Iraqi fighters.” Another brigade member said of the Americans: “They lost. They should leave.” One of the insurgents crowed that “this is a great victory for the people of Iraq. The mujahideen and the Falluja [sic] Brigade are brothers.” Many of the Fallujahns agreed. A triumphal mood permeated much of the city. Armed men in pickup trucks honked their horns in celebration. Groups of men and teenagers stood together cheering on street corners. “We believe God saved our city,” one of them said. “And we believe they [Americans] learned a lesson . . . not to mess with Fallujah.” Storefronts featured signs with such pronunciations as “We have defeated the devil Marines!” and “Jihad has triumphed!”
They were wrong, though. They had not defeated the Americans. The Americans had defeated themselves. Their self-imposed reversal was the result of their strategic fecklessness, their vacillating political and military leadership, their cultural ignorance, and, most of all, their fatal willingness to allow the enemy to shape world opinion in an information age. For a nation that pioneered the concept of mass media, the American inability to competently tell their own side of the Fallujah story and thus counter the endless drumbeat of insurgent propaganda was both stunning and unacceptable. The sad result was an artificial defeat and a city thrown to the metaphorical wolves.
At Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the Americans carried out 150 air strikes that destroyed 75 buildings with about a hundred tons of explosives—hardly an excessive onslaught. The number of dead civilians ranged between 270, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and somewhere just north of 600, according to Al Jazeera. Insurgent losses have never been pinpointed but they were probably well into the hundreds (of course, part of the problem in calculating the casualties is figuring out who was truly a noncombatant and who was not). The Americans lost 27 killed and over 100 wounded, essentially for no tangible results. Fallujah in the spring of 2004 could not have contrasted more sharply with Aachen in 1944, when American soldiers fought an urban battle with no political constraints and no world condemnation. At Fallujah, politics and popular perception shaped everything. In the end, the Americans lacked the strategic clarity and force of leadership to attain their objectives. Rarely has an operation been more poorly named than Vigilant Resolve in April 2004.6
Timing Is Everything: Back to the Malignant City in November
Fallujah grew much worse as 2004 unfolded. As many of the Marines had feared after the cease-fire settlement back in the spring, Fallujah’s various insurgent groups solidified their hold on the city. They used it as a sanctuary and a launching point for attacks on the Americans in Al Anbar. Practically every day, they attacked the Americans with a vexing mix of IEDs, Vehicle Borne IEDs (VBIEDs), suicide bombings, mortars, rockets, and shootings. The Americans responded with raids, targeted air strikes, cordon and searches. The casualties piled up on both sides. In Fallujah, there were, according to Marine intelligence sources, seventeen separate insurgent groups and about a dozen important leaders, the most notorious of whom was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who headed up al-Qaeda in Iraq. Together they co-opted the traditional influence of local tribes in Fallujah.
Like a tumor, the power of these terrorist gangs metastasized into a malignant growth on the Iraqi body politic. Even as Al Anbar burned with resistance to the Americans and the new Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) the Americans had created in June, Fallujah stood out as a no-go area of special defiance. It was essentially a city-state of its own, a hostile challenge to a fledgling, Shiite-controlled Iraqi government that was struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, especially Al Anbar Sunnis.
By summer’s end, local imams and guerrilla leaders, many of whom were foreigners, had imposed hard-line Islamic strictures (known as sharia law) on the city. Operating from one of the city’s numerous mosques, a ruling council known as the Mujahideen Shura enforced this radical interpretation of Islam, sometimes with harsh punishment. This witch’s brew of local insurgents, sheiks, imams, and foreign terrorists imposed a Hobbesian sort of gang rule on Fallujahns. Alcohol of any kind was forbidden. Anyone caught selling it or consuming it was flogged or spat upon. Western-style haircuts, CDs, music, and magazines were all forbidden, sometimes on the threat of death.
The terrorists often watched the American bases throughout Anbar and took note of which locals worked there. When they left work, the insurgents would abduct them, take them to their strongholds in Fallujah, and kill them. “Summary executions inside Fallujah happen with sobering frequency,” Bellon, newly promoted to lieutenant colonel, wrote in the fall. “We have been witness to the scene on a number of occasions.” He was still serving as RCT-1’s intelligence officer. Thanks to camera-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) circling over Fallujah, he sometimes saw these murders happen in real time. “Three men are taken from the trunk of a car and are made to walk into a ditch, where they are shot. Bodies are found in the Euphrates without heads washed downstream from Fallujah.”
The most gruesome murders were the beheadings that went on in various torture chambers the terrorists established among Fallujah’s many anonymous blocks of houses. The most infamous example was Zarqawi’s beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American hostage, on May 7. In Berg’s case, and in many others, the killers broadcast their grisly handiwork to the rest of the world via the Internet and Al Jazeera. In another instance, hooded terrorists stood before a camera and forced a kneeling man to confess that he had helped the Americans. They then cut his head off. Chanting and praying, they plopped the bloody severed head back onto the victim’s torso. The editor of this particular execution video interspersed the beheading with Al Jazeera images of American air strikes and the women and children who had allegedly been killed as a result of them.
“I don’t think we could overstate . . . the presence of that city as a sanctuary for terrorists, criminal groups, Muslim extremists, [and] indigenous members of various resistance groups,” Lieutenant Colonel Willie Buhl, commander of 3/1 Marines, told a historian in October. “The presence of that sanctuary has done more to impede the progress we’re trying to make here than anything else I can think of.” He was especially distressed by how easy it was for Zarqawi and other thugs in Fallujah to “pull on historic ties and bring the tribe leaders and hold them accountable, coerce them, to intimidate them.”
In many cases, the imams, who were supposed to act as moral leaders in the community, eagerly abetted the work of the terrorists and profited from their dominance. “The imams use the mosques to gain control over ignorant people,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon said. “They preach hate, and that’s not a religion. I keep the book on these guys. Most of them are criminals. They own the real estate, they send out thugs to shake down the truck drivers doing the run to Jordan, they fence the stolen cars and organize the kidnappings. They get a cut of every hijacked truck. They could teach Al Capone how to extort a city. They use young, gullible jihadists as their pawns.” It was as if Fallujah was now run by an especially malevolent combination of Cosa Nostra and the Taliban.7
Basically, the situation was intolerable. In January of 2005, Iraqis were supposed to go to the polls to elect a permanent government. Continued status quo in Fallujah could threaten the legitimacy and security of those elections. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his interim government in Baghdad spent much of 2004 ignoring Fallujah and then attempting to negotiate some sort of peace settlement with the city fathers. By the fall, though, Allawi knew that he could no longer allow the insurgents to flourish there. If he did, he would steadily lose face, and power, with the Iraqi people.
American leaders, military and political, knew by the fall that the withdrawal from Fallujah had been a terrible mistake. They knew they must take the city, and they now understood that timing was everything in this regard. Learning from their mistakes, the Americans spent much of the fall cultivating a suitable political environment for the violent urban battle they were planning. They lined up the support of Allawi and his allies. They arranged for reliable Iraqi troops to participate in the assault. They established checkpoints outside the city in order to control access in and out of Fallujah. To avoid potential supply problems, they secured all the roads around the city. Utilizing a nice blend of aerial photographs, local informant reports, and reconnaissance patrols, they gathered a wealth of good information on the insurgents, their methods, their weaponry, their defenses, and their whereabouts.
They estimated that the city was defended by about two to three thousand fighters of varying quality and commitment. About a quarter of these men were hard-core foreign fighters who had come to Iraq for a showdown with the American infidels. On satellite and UAV surveillance photographs, the Americans even assigned a number to every one of Fallujah’s thirty-nine thousand buildings. Perhaps most important of all, they were much more aggressive, and effective, at dealing with Fallujah’s noncombatant population and shaping popular perceptions of their intentions. “We had public affairs, civil affairs, and IO [Information Operations] all sitting down at the same table, working through the themes, to make sure we were getting the effect that we wanted,” Lieutenant General John Sattler, who had succeeded General Conway as commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF), said.
In September and October, American and Iraqi officials repeatedly urged the city’s civilian population to leave town before the impending battle. “We . . . used radio messages, some of which were generic to Al Anbar province, but a lot of them were targeted to the people of Fallujah,” Major Andy Dietz, an Army information operations officer attached to RCT-1, later said. “We would do loudspeaker broadcasts from the periphery of the city, especially on Fridays doing counter-mosque messages. We would pass out handbills in places we knew people were transiting into the city.” The Americans also dropped leaflets blaming the guerrillas for Fallujah’s sickly economic state. “We would . . . tell the people of Fallujah that you would have had a water treatment plant this month except that your city is full of insurgents,” said Major General Richard Natonski, who had taken over command of 1st Marine Division when Mattis was promoted in August.
In addition to explaining how terrorist control of Fallujah was hurting them, the leaflets outlined the American rules of engagement in the coming battle. Because of the threat of VBIEDs and SVBIEDs (suicide car bombers), all vehicles would be considered hostile, as would anyone with a weapon. The leaflets and other announcements communicated an air of inevitability about the notion of Fallujah’s return to coalition control. “[We] let the people in Fallujah know we’re coming,” Colonel Craig Tucker, commander of RCT-7, said. “We’re not telling you when we’re coming, but we’re coming. And they left. And what you had left in there was those guys who were gonna fight you.”
The insurgents still enjoyed some popular support among the people, but many months of repression had taken its toll, ebbing the anti-American euphoria of the spring. Most Fallujahns had no wish to fight alongside the jihadis or to take their chances of avoiding American bombs and bullets. They voted with their feet. As of early November, almost 90 percent of the population had left the city, thus creating an isolated urban battlefield in which the Americans could liberally use their massive firepower. They had essentially emptied the city in anticipation of turning it into a battlefield, an unprecedented feat in modern military history. The exodus did have a downside, though. Some of the terrorists, including Zarqawi, escaped from Fallujah. They evaded the American checkpoints by blending in with the crowds.
By November, whether President Bush won or lost his election contest with Senator Kerry, he had decided to take Fallujah. When he defeated Kerry on November 2, the victory only added that much more urgency to the impending offensive, as well as a more stable political environment for Allawi’s government. The prime minister declared a state of emergency in Iraq and, on November 7, after one last failed attempt at negotiations with Fallujah’s leaders, he ordered the assault to commence. In a strategic sense, this dotted the last political i’s and crossed the final t’s. Of course, this did not necessarily mean that politics were no longer a factor. The Americans initially dubbed the assault Operation Phantom Fury but Allawi renamed it Operation Al Fajr (The Dawn), a moniker he felt was less vengeful and more appropriate to the circumstances.8
The Breach
The insurgents may have been cruel, but they were smart and determined. They spent months fortifying Fallujah and its approaches. American intelligence analysts identified 306 separate strongpoints throughout the city. The mujahideen used half of Fallujah’s seventy-two mosques for military purposes. They lined the streets with car bombs. Other cars and pickup trucks blocked the roads and entry points to the town. They placed IEDs in every imaginable spot—houses, curbs, manhole covers, telephone poles, and any other likely American transit point. They wired up entire buildings with hundreds of pounds of explosives. They dug holes, trenches, and house-to-house tunnels to create good fighting positions and escape routes for themselves. “Fallujah is a city designed for siege warfare,” a sergeant said. “From the studs to the minarets, every goddamned building is a fortress. The houses are minibunkers with ramparts and firing slits cut into every rooftop. Every road into the city is strong-pointed, mined, and blocked with captured Texas barriers [full of dirt].”
The jihadis used bulldozers to build a ring of mined berms around the city, especially to the north along a five-foot-high railroad embankment (quite similar, actually, to the railroad that bordered Aachen). In the days leading up to the American assault, the most dedicated foreign fighters stationed themselves on the outer edges of Fallujah, in the upper floors of multistory buildings, in ideal position to launch RPGs, call down mortar fire, or snipe at the Americans. In some spots, the insurgents stacked tall heaps of tires in the streets. American commanders feared that when the attack began, the enemy would set fire to the tires, similar to what Mohammed Aidid’s militiamen had done at Mogadishu in 1993, to create clouds of black smoke that could negate the effectiveness of UAVs and other supporting aircraft. By now, the number of enemy fighters in Fallujah ranged between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred men (estimates vary). Overall, it is fair to say that their defenses in November were far more elaborate and formidable than they had been in April.
Fortunately, so was the American battle plan. By and large, this plan was the brainchild of Generals Sattler and Natonski. As the corps-level commander of I MEF, Sattler concentrated on cutting off Fallujah from the outside world. He borrowed a brigade-sized combat team from the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division to secure every external approach to Fallujah. A battalion from the British Army’s Black Watch regiment also assisted in this mission. Natonski, the division commander, focused on taking the city itself. He pulled a bait and switch on the enemy. Through a series of raids and feints, he led them to believe that the main assault was coming from the south and east of Fallujah. They deployed many of their fighters to those areas, all the while “in a heightened state of paranoia and anxiety,” according to General Natonski. Cell phone intercepts confirmed their great confusion. The fact that the Americans had previously cut off the city’s power supply only added to the disarray.
In reality, Natonski’s main punch was coming from the exact opposite direction. The night before the main assault on Fallujah began, he sent the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion and its American advisors to capture the Fallujah General Hospital on a peninsula west of the Euphrates. During the April fighting, the insurgents had masterfully used the hospital to trumpet their claims that the Americans were butchering civilians. This time, they did not get that chance. The commandos took the hospital easily. Marine reinforcements from the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and a company of soldiers from the Army’s 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry, quickly seized the Euphrates bridges, including the infamous “Brooklyn Bridge,” where angry fanatics had hung the burned remains of the contractors back in the spring. Securing the hospital and bridges had the extra benefit of confusing the insurgents even more. It convinced some of their commanders that the American assault was coming from the west, across the bridges, and they moved more people to cover that approach. But the main attack was coming from the north. Throughout the day on November 8, Natonski and his staff moved two regimental-sized combat teams, RCT-1 and RCT-7, into position, mainly by vehicles.
RCT-1, of course, was the modern descendant of the 1st Marine Regiment of Chesty Puller and Peleliu fame. RCT-7 equated to Herman Hanneken’s 7th Marine Regiment, which had also fought on that terrible island in 1944. RCT-1, under Colonel Michael Shupp, consisted of three infantry battalions: 1/5 and 3/1 Marines and the Army’s Task Force 2-7 Cavalry (a mechanized infantry battalion). Colonel Craig Tucker’s RCT-7 was similar. He had 1/8 and 1/3 Marines, along with Task Force 2-2 Infantry of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. Both regimental combat teams were augmented with tanks, engineers, psyops, medics, forward air controllers, artillerymen, Navy SEAL sniper teams, and other special operators.
Army-Marine relations had come a long way since the Peleliu days. Whereas in 1944 General Rupertus was loath to even share the same battlefield with the Army, in 2004 at Fallujah Marines and soldiers served together in the same regimental-sized units, effectively fighting side by side. In fact, General Sattler specifically requested, and received from his superiors in Baghdad, the two Army mechanized infantry battalions for the Fallujah assault.
Although rivalry still existed, soldiers and Marines generally had deep respect for their counterparts as professional warriors. Some of their officers had even been through the same training schools at Fort Benning, Fort Leavenworth, and other posts. In essence, the two ground combat services were melding their own unique institutional strengths together for this battle. Both 2-7 Cavalry and 2-2 Infantry as mechanized units possessed Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Abrams tanks, and other armored vehicles that were ideally suited to a politically neutral urban environment. Their armor provided vital protection for their grunts against enemy IEDs, car bombs, mortars, and small arms. Plus, the vehicles lent perfect fire support for them when they were clearing buildings. The Marine battalions had the usual blend of Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs), Armored Amphibious Vehicles (AAVs), and Humvees, along with a passel of Mark 19s, TOW missile launchers, .50-caliber machine guns and SMAWs, but they were basically composed of light infantry. The Marine grunts would be needed to clear buildings—only infantry could do that—but they needed protection and fire support from the vehicles and heavy weapons.
So the Army’s job was to act as a wedge-busting force, leading the way into and through Fallujah. They were to smash through enemy defenses, blow up strongpoints, maintain the momentum of a steady advance, and force the insurgents to choose between retreat and destruction. At the same time, the Army grunts would take buildings under the protective snouts of the Bradleys and Abramses. Even more than the Army, the job of the Marines was to go block by block, clearing every room, killing the muj at close quarters. They would advance both adjacent to and in the wake of the Army.
Aside from the bait and switch, there was nothing fancy about Natonski’s battle plan. Both regimental combat teams were to push straight into Fallujah and clear it from north to south, block by block, until they reached the desert that bordered the southern edges of the town. RCT-1 would capture the western part of the city. RCT-7 would take the eastern section. Behind the American advance, several battalions from the newly formed Iraqi Army would back-clear buildings, find hidden weapons caches, and interrogate prisoners and noncombatants alike. Their role was to solidify their fledgling government’s control of Fallujah once the Americans cleared the city of insurgents. In all, General Natonski had about twelve thousand troops, of which half were earmarked for the actual assault on Fallujah. Air support would consist of helicopter gunships, Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter jets, along with AC-130s (now appropriately code-named Basher) and UAVs.9
By late afternoon on November 8, as the encroaching shadows of the coming evening lengthened, both regimental combat teams were in position north of Fallujah. Amid the seemingly endless desert landscape, hundreds of vehicles were stretched out “like long trails of ants,” in the recollection of one NCO. The soldiers and Marines had spent the day going through the usual military hurry-up-and-wait routine. As in April, they also heard many pep talks from their officers and senior NCOs. “This is as pure a fight of good versus evil as we’ll probably see in our lifetime,” Lieutenant Colonel Pete Newell, commander of 2-2 Infantry, told his soldiers, a few of whom were female medics and intelligence specialists. Newell’s experienced and universally respected command sergeant major, Steve Faulkenberg, told the soldiers, in a voice that was uncharacteristically dripping with emotion: “I could not be more proud of you if you were my own kids.” After hearing Colonel Shupp deliver a similarly moving speech, Marine Private Andrew Stokes recalled “getting chills, being all motivated. I made peace with God in case I died.” Thousands of others did the same. They tried, though, not to dwell on the unpleasant reality that death or serious wounds might beckon for them in Fallujah.
Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, a history-conscious rifle squad leader in Alpha Company, 2-2 Infantry, was determined to remember every detail of the coming battle. He peered at the many vehicles around him and at the battered city he and his men would soon attempt to take. “This is the moment we’ve trained for since we were raw recruits,” he thought. “I’ve got to be able to tell my grandkids someday. I need to be able to tell them what this day meant to all of us.” Like an electrical current, a ripple of eager anticipation pulsed through the troops. “It was something to see,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon later wrote. “You could just feel the intensity in the Marines and Soldiers. It was all business.” The troops were excited, on edge, nearing a fever pitch as they waited tensely for the word to attack.
They were like actors waiting for the curtain to rise on opening night or football players gathering in the locker room before the Super Bowl. Only this was not a performance or a game; it was life and death. After so much preparation and anticipation, they had reached a state of total impatience, a point at which facing imminent danger becomes more desirable than even one more minute of inconclusive, but safe, waiting. Rather than sit around much longer and contemplate their uncertain future, they wanted to take action and end the cursed anticipation, a common human emotion when facing danger. “Come on, what the hell are we waiting for, let’s get moving” was a common thought among the grunts. To make matters worse, a misty curtain of light rain began to descend.
The railroad tracks and embankment ringed this northern approach to the city. The Fallujah side of the embankment teemed with mines and IEDs, as did many of the first streets and buildings the Americans would attempt to capture. The initial stage of the Fallujah assault called for the engineers to breach this formidable belt of deadly obstacles (in stark contrast to the Gulf War, the breach would not be made this time by knife-wielding Marines on their hands and knees). Blowing an opening into Fallujah was dangerous work and the engineers needed a great deal of fire support to prevent the enemy from pinning them down among the IEDs, raking them with RPG and machine-gun fire. The grunts liked to razz combat engineers for being demolitions nerds but, in truth, as one infantry soldier indicated, they deeply respected them as “the intellectuals of the combat arms branches. They have a million crafty solutions to problems that would make us knuckle-dragging infantry types scratch our heads and pause.”
In the weeks leading up to Operation Al Fajr, the Americans, for political reasons, actually refrained from pasting Fallujah in the same way they had bombarded objectives in earlier wars (Guam, Peleliu, and Aachen, for instance). Every fire mission and air strike had to be approved at I MEF level or above. Because of this, some of the ground troops were concerned that they would pay a fearsome price in blood for the conniving of the politicians. By the time they were about to tear through the breach, though, the restraints were long gone. Artillery shells, fired from 155-millimeter self-propelled Paladin howitzers a few miles away, tore into houses. Plumes of smoke and dust billowed in the gathering darkness. Masonry flew everywhere. The air was filled with a low but steady rumble of detonating shells, so many that the ground seemed to be quaking. “The Air Force, Navy and Marines send waves of F-16 and F-18 fighter jets,” Staff Sergeant Bellavia wrote in a present-tense format. “They whistle over the city to drop laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The whomp-whomp of their detonations can be both heard and felt, even at this distance. Fallujah is smothered in bombs, shrouded in smoke. Buildings collapse. Mines detonate.”
In many instances, the bombs set off a chain reaction of explosions as lines of IEDs and car bombs cooked off. Attack helicopters swooped in and disgorged rockets and 30-millimeter shells anyplace that the pilots spotted enemy fire. Propeller-driven AC-130 gunships hummed overhead, unleashing their terrifying panoply of cannon and Gatling gun fire. Distinct lines of blue tracers slashed from these planes to the ground, creating a sight reminiscent of a light show. Tanks, Bradleys, AAVs, and other supporting vehicles shot up any building that overlooked the railroad tracks, adding to the pyrotechnics. “The results were exactly as we had hoped, creating massive casualties and chaos within the enemy ranks, disrupting their ability to defend against the breach,” Captain Paul Fowler, a tank company commander, said.
Even so, the insurgents unleashed a disconcerting amount of RPG, machine-gun, and mortar fire as the engineers rolled their D9 armored bulldozers and other vehicles up to the embankment. Bullets sparked off the dozers and up-armored Humvees. There was so much rifle fire coming from the buildings that it reminded Colonel Shupp of camera flashes at a big sporting event. “The whole city was lit up with those flashbulbs, but the flashbulbs were actually small-arms fire coming against our forces.” The bullets smashed into the embankment and whizzed past vehicles. Many of the Americans were observing the city through night vision goggles, but the light of so many flashes and explosions almost made those devices useless. “There were red streaks which were RPGs coming from the city and going over our trucks [Humvees],” Lance Corporal Sven Mozdiez recalled. He and the Marines around him saw a three-man RPG team huddle together in a hole as they got set to fire. Their weapon malfunctioned, emitting a flash out of the back but not the rocket. The surprised muj stared at one another for a long moment. A Marine Mark 19 gunner spotted them and showered their hole with 40-millimeter grenades, killing them all. Mozdiez saw another fighter lean over the third-story railing of one house and spray his AK-47 in the direction of the Americans. “We got a bead on him and Lance Corporal [Kevin] Weyrauch fired a TOW missile in that level of the building and we didn’t receive any more fire from that position. The problem was taken care of.”10
To forge their respective breaches, the engineers employed mine-clearing line charges (MICLIC, or “mick lick”), a weapon that had worked well in the Gulf War. The MICLICs were anything but elaborate. Each one was nothing more than a one-hundred-meter-long rope adorned with about one thousand pounds of C-4 explosive affixed to the rope in clumps. A trailerlike vehicle with a hydraulic launcher propelled the rope deep within the minefield. “When detonated, anything surrounding the MICLIC gets vaporized,” one soldier explained. “What the explosions don’t destroy, the concussion waves finish off.” The MICLIC would basically set off a chain reaction of mine and IED detonations, clearing paths three meters wide and one hundred meters long through the obstacle belt. In this case, the explosions would also punch holes through the embankment and railroad tracks.
When the engineers were finally ready, they radioed all the units with the message to button up inside their vehicles. Then they blew their MICLICs. Multiple explosions detonated. Roiling orange balls of flame lit up the night. A massive concussion wave shook vehicles. Debris flew in every direction. A chain reaction of sympathetic detonations touched off as IEDs and mines exploded. “There were at least five daisy-chained IEDs that went off,” Major Lisa Dewitt, the battalion surgeon for 2-2 Infantry, recalled. “When that big boom occurred, there was a collective celebratory shouting and cheering, like somebody scored a touchdown.” The engineers then marked the new breach lanes with chem lights and special tape.
In a few spots, the Marines experienced difficulty in getting across the tracks and exploiting the breach lanes, mainly because of equipment problems. RCT-1, for instance, was delayed for several hours because one of its engineer vehicles tipped over. For the most part, though, the advance through the breach lanes was rapid as tanks, Bradleys, armored bulldozers, and AAVs began rumbling into the gaps. The crew of one Bradley had painted the nickname “Bada Bing!” on their Bradley in honor of the strip club in The Sopranos.
The soldiers of Lieutenant Colonel Newell’s Task Force 2-2 Infantry were leading the way for RCT-7. They were the first Americans to enter the newly created lanes and head straight for the muzzles of insurgents, who had weathered the bombardment by hunkering down in sturdy buildings. Newell had arranged for the Big Red One’s 3rd Brigade Reconnaissance Troop to cover his vulnerable lead vehicles as they negotiated their way through the narrow lanes. East of the city, on high ground at a crossroads known as the cloverleaf, Bradleys, tanks, and Humvees equipped with special long-range surveillance equipment (known as L-RAS) kept the insurgents at bay with devastatingly accurate fire. “Their whole job in life was to get in position where they could see deep into the city, behind where we were moving,” Newell said. “[They] pretty much destroyed a platoon’s worth of insurgents right at the breach point. You couldn’t move within a hundred meters of that thing without somebody in Recon Troop shooting you.”
The L-RAS resembled a square box. Mounted atop a Humvee, its thermal laser could identify enemy fighters several kilometers into the city. Once an enemy was identified, a soldier would simply push a button to target the insurgent. “Hit the laser button and it’ll give you a ten-digit grid and direction—basically everything you need for a perfect call for fire to take them out,” Staff Sergeant Jimmy Amyett, a section leader in the troop, recalled. “And the whole time they have no idea you’re watching them.” They called down accurate artillery and mortar fire. They also shot enemy fighters with a blend of 25-millimeter and machine-gun fire.
In the meantime, Newell’s Bradleys, accompanied by escorting tanks, gingerly rolled through their slender lanes. Staff Sergeant Bellavia was packed inside one of the Bradleys with his rifle squad. They were laden down with M16A4 rifles, M4 carbines, M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machine guns, grenades, shotguns, body armor, Kevlar helmets, and a variety of other weapons and pieces of equipment. They were hot, sweaty, and generally uncomfortable. The air was stale, leaden with body odor and foul exhalations. “Our asses grow sore,” he wrote. “When we try to reposition ourselves, we squash our balls.” The sergeant and his men could hear mortar shells exploding outside, uncomfortably close to their track. They also heard the booming of friendly artillery shells and Abrams main guns. The Bradley started and stopped several times, nearly driving them crazy with anticipation. At last, the driver gunned the engine. “As our Brad works up to its top speed, we’re thrown around like bowling pins. My head cracks against the bulkhead, then I’m thrown against the ramp. Gear starts flying around us. Outside, the explosions grow in volume and intensity.” Some of the explosions were from nearby IEDs.
Bellavia was sitting in the very rear of the Bradley, near the ramp. He leaned forward and looked through the periscope viewer and saw tracer rounds sailing past his own vehicle and nearby Bradleys. The world outside was little more than a blur of muffled explosions, smoke, and swirl. He could see well enough, though, to spot the engineer’s chem lights and tape. A few seconds later, the track was through the breach lane, and with several tanks and other Bradleys it began rolling toward the city. RPGs streaked out of the urban haze. One scored a direct hit on the turret of the platoon sergeant’s Bradley. “Fire scorches its flanks as the vehicle lurches forward,” Bellavia remembered. “Seconds later, it runs across an IED, which explodes with such force that the entire back end of the Bradley leaves the desert floor.”
The resilient Bradley crashed back down and kept going. Then, a second later, Bellavia’s Bradley hit an IED. “A shattering blast engulfs us. The back end of our Bradley is thrown upward. Dust and smoke spiral around us. I choke and gag and try to scream for my guys.” The compartment was full of smoke and dust. Temporarily deafened and disoriented by acoustic trauma, Bellavia could not hear or see his men. All he could hear was a high-pitched buzz, although he was aware that the vehicle gunner was firing the 25-millimeter chain gun. He screamed at his men to tap his knee if they were okay. One by one, they did so. As the seconds passed, his body recovered from the shock of the explosion and his senses returned. The battered but intact Bradley kept rolling.
Finally, they reached the edge of the city and dismounted. As Bellavia descended the ramp, he felt like he was setting foot on Omaha Beach. “My stomach’s in a knot. I feel like my grandfather in World War II, like I’m literally living in a historical moment.” Instead of running into a wall of fire, he and his soldiers took cover behind their vehicle, flipped their night vision goggles into place, and, for the first time, studied Fallujah from close range. “All around us, the darkness is broken by fires of all sizes and shapes. Buildings blaze. Rubble smolders. Debris burns in the streets. Houses have been cleaved in two, as if some sadistic giant had performed architectural vivisection on the entire neighborhood. Floors and rooms have been laid bare, exposed by the ravages of the night’s shelling. Furniture is thrown haphazardly about. Smashed desks, burned-out sofas, faceless TVs lay in heaps within these demolished homes.”
Bellavia noticed globs of white phosphorous clinging to the ground around the buildings like “manna from hell. It reminds me of the burning liquid metal of Terminator 2.” The artillerymen had employed the white phosphorous to spark building fires and force the insurgents into the streets, where high-explosive rounds would engulf them in shrapnel. Other than the fires and the intermittent but considerable booming of tank guns, all was silent. Bellavia’s squad was surprised at the relative tranquillity. Under the watchful snouts of their vehicles, they maneuvered, with one fire team of four soldiers covering the other, into the nearest buildings.
All up and down the northern edges of Fallujah, the Americans were filtering through their breach lanes into the city. Just as the heavily mechanized 2-2 Infantry led the way for Tucker’s RCT-7, Colonel Shupp chose 2-7 Cavalry to go in first for RCT-1. “We [had] two lanes open,” Shupp said, “so now 2-7 [was] into the city and fighting, destroying everything on the route that could be a possible IED. Basher . . . above us [was] firing into everything that they possibly could, attacking the enemy on strongholds for a possible IED . . . [and] VBIED cars that could have been on the routes . . . and . . . getting big secondary explosions off them.” Each of the explosions detonated an IED or car bomb that could have caused many grunt casualties.
In the wake of the heavy mechanized forces, the Marine light infantry units rolled through in AAVs and Humvees accompanied by psyops teams blaring Richard Wagner’s famous symphony epic “Ride of the Valkyries.” The Marine grunts dismounted, against surprisingly light resistance, and seeped into the first ruined blocks of drab, wrecked, sand-colored structures. The situation was one of controlled chaos. Units were mixed up or dumped into the wrong spots. Grunts eyeballed windows and doorways for hidden insurgents. The light of fires and flares created weird shadows that bounced off buildings and streets. The well-trained infantrymen knew to avoid standing in open areas so they gravitated to the buildings. “We ran as fast as we could,” Sergeant Shawn Gianforte recalled. “To my surprise we made it through the breach with very little resistance at all. We went in one building and got set up and let everyone figure out where we were.” All around him, hundreds of Marines and soldiers were doing the same thing.
The mujahideen had spent five months building a fortified barrier that, in the end, held up the Americans for five hours—at the most. By 0200 on November 9, both of General Natonski’s regimental combat teams were through the breach and into Fallujah. The preliminaries were over. The fight for the city was on.11
2-2 Infantry and the Wedge
They were nicknamed “Ramrods” but they were more like sledgehammers. Their proud lineage spanned nearly two hundred years of American military history. Soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Regiment had once fought in such legendary battles as Gettysburg, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge. At Fallujah, they were the embodiment of mech infantry. Their job was to blast their way through the enemy’s cleverly placed strongpoints, dash down the streets, seize Highway 10 (now known to the Americans as Phase Line Fran), force the insurgents to displace from the cover of their fortified houses, and then either annihilate them with the synchronized firepower of several dozen armored vehicles or push them into the not-so-welcoming arms of Marine light infantrymen. General Sattler opined that they were “critical to quickly slicing through the insurgents’ defenses and disrupting their ability to conduct coordinated counterattacks.” As Lieutenant Colonel Newell succinctly put it, “a Bradley and a tank can take an RPG shot in the face and keep moving and still fight. A dismounted infantry squad cannot.”
Because of this simple reality of urban combat, it simply made good sense for 2-2 Infantry to take the lead in Fallujah. “The plan before we put any dismounts on the ground or in the buildings,” one NCO recalled, “was to use our 120s on the Abrams or our 25-millimeters on the Bradleys” to shoot up any house that might contain enemy fighters. The battalion was the perfect blend of armor and firepower. Because the city was almost completely free of noncombatants, they could spew out death and destruction with impunity. “My goal . . . [was] not to clear every single building,” Newell said. “The job was to break up any organized resistance. Any platoon-sized resistance . . . destroy it, break it up so that it couldn’t function . . . use speed and firepower to get through the northern part of the city as rapidly as possible.”
His mission, basically, was to take the enemy’s heaviest punches and, in return, grind the insurgents up with the many weapons at his disposal. He had to do this with only half of his battalion. Newell’s outfit only came to Fallujah a few days before Operation Al Fajr. Their main area of operations in Iraq was a portion of Diyala province, north of Baghdad. Participation in Fallujah did not relieve Newell of responsibility for Diyala. This absurd situation, “a royal pain in the ass” in his recollection, was a symptom of America’s paucity of ground troops in Iraq. This, of course, was a by-product of the shock and awe techno-vangelism of those who had launched the war. Like it or not, though, Newell had to leave behind two of his rifle companies. At Fallujah, his attack force consisted of two main components—a tank company on loan from another unit and his own Alpha Company. In all, Newell’s task force had only about 450 soldiers, most of whom were not dismounted trigger pullers. Even Alpha, the battalion’s main infantry assault force, had only about fifty or sixty dismounts to perform the nasty business of clearing buildings and thus do the worst of the fighting. These lonely riflemen and machine gunners represented the sharp tip of a very long spear.
For these grunts, like Staff Sergeant Bellavia and his squad, the fighting that unfolded in Fallujah was personal and visceral. Just before dawn on November 9, Bellavia and his people were in a house, scouting for any sign of the enemy. They were shrouded in a silence that struck the Buffalo native as incongruous because he could almost feel the presence of the jihadis. With nine months of combat experience in Iraq, he had developed that sixth sense about impending danger that often characterizes good NCOs. He decided to order one of his men, Private John Ruiz, to fire an 84-millimeter AT4 rocket at a propane tank on the next block. Hopefully this would provoke a response from any nearby insurgents. But, just as Ruiz was about to lean out the doorway to shoot, Sergeant Bellavia heard footsteps in the street. Someone was coming. By the sounds of his approaching footfalls, crunching off the shards of glass and rubble that blanketed the street, the person was heading straight for them. Bellavia peeked out and saw a man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. He was carrying a car battery, a common tool for setting off big IEDs. He was about fifty meters away and approaching quickly. “He’s got a big bushy, mountain-man beard and is covered with filth,” Bellavia wrote. “His clothes are smeared with gunk. His face is splotched with grime. He looks like a street person . . . just two eyeballs walking.”
A spasm of terror shot through Bellavia, nearly debilitating him. This was a typical self-preservation instinct in the presence of a live enemy. For most humans, the normal reaction to such mortal danger was to run away, but soldiers must be different, even counterintuitive. As a way to conquer fear, they are intensely trained to focus on specific tasks, especially in the face of such danger, so that fear will be forgotten or sublimated to the job at hand.
So, for Bellavia, the moment of abject terror passed quickly as he focused on his prey. He raised his M4 carbine and prepared to fire. Unlike many early-twenty-first-century American grunts, he had little interest in hunting. But he knew that hunters often emitted a quick noise to startle their prey into stopping short or turning toward the shooter. Sergeant Bellavia called out casually: “Hey.” Sure enough, the insurgent stopped and looked at Bellavia, presenting a perfect target. The twenty-nine-year-old squad leader squeezed off two tracer bullets that streaked into the man’s chest and shoulder. Both hits produced “a puff of smoke, like exhaust from a cigarette.” As the wounded man stumbled around, his eyes bulged and he screamed in agony. “He howls, a long mewling, pain-wracked scream.” Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts, a fellow squad leader, swung his shotgun into position atop Bellavia’s helmet and laced the man with two slugs, tearing one of his arms off, knocking him down. A SAW gunner on the roof added several bullets that tore him up even more. When several of the machine gunner’s bullets missed, they bounced up and down the street and off nearby houses. Then all was silence again.
A surge of adrenaline-laced excitement swept through Bellavia. He was so euphoric at killing the insurgent that he felt as if his vital organs were rearranging inside of him. His triumph instilled in him a keen sense of masculinity, as if he had now proven himself a better man than the insurgent. He felt powerful, almost invulnerable. He cupped his hand to his mouth and emitted an animal-like cry of victory: “You can’t kill me! You hear me, fuckers? You will never kill me!” He was excited to be alive. He was also overcome with relief that he had what it took to kill another human being in such a personal fashion. “Combat distilled to its purest form is a test of manhood,” he wrote. “In modern warfare, that man-to-man challenge is often hidden by modern technology—the splash of artillery fire can be random, a rocket or bomb or IED can be anonymous. Those things make combat a roll of the dice. But on this street and in these houses, it can be man-to-man. My skills against his. I caught him napping and he died.”
In such instances, when soldiers kill face-to-face, euphoria can erode quickly into guilt over taking life. The perceptive Bellavia expected this contradiction and even welcomed it. “Combat is a descent into the darkest part of the human soul. A place where the most exalted nobility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together. What a man finds there defines how he measures himself for the rest of his life. I embrace the battle. I welcome it into my soul.” By doing so, he was probably trying to master the guilt that often leads to post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is, to a great extent, a product of guilt—survivor’s guilt, guilt at not measuring up to one’s self-image or the expectations of others in combat, most of all, guilt at having killed. Staff Sergeant Bellavia knew all the risks. Every bit a professional grunt, he was determined to overcome them.
As it turned out, the insurgent had been in the process of laying a horrifying trap for 2-2 Infantry. The battery he was carrying was meant to touch off a colossal amount of explosives that were packed into a house that the grunts were about to clear. “The whole thing was wired to blow,” Bellavia recalled. “I’ve never seen that much C-4 [explosive] in my entire life. It looked like a log cabin, that’s how many bricks were all taped together on the walls.” Propane tanks and even a fuel tank from a jet aircraft were cleverly arranged among the whole deadly bouquet. When Bellavia had first spotted the insurgent, he had been heading for a nearby fighting hole. His mission, the soldiers soon understood, had been to wait for the platoon to enter the house and then touch the battery to wires leading away from the house, into the hole. The ensuing combination of flames and powerful explosives of this BCIED (building-contained improvised explosive device) would, most likely, have killed everyone in the platoon. With this chilling discovery, Bellavia and the others felt anything but guilt. They were pleased, and relieved, that they had killed the bearded man.
Creeped out by the thought that other BCIEDs might await them, the Ramrod grunts spent the rest of the night clearing houses. Their knees and elbows were already raw from scraping against rubble and glass. They encountered more booby traps but none so elaborate as the notorious first BCIED. At each house they expected major resistance, and there were a few firefights, but most of the buildings were unoccupied. Newell’s battalion was moving so quickly that they were already closing in on Highway 10. The speedy advance had a downside, though. As the pre-assault plan had envisioned, Newell’s assault platoons were smashing through the enemy’s prepared defenses, disrupting their movements, and killing some of them. But there were no front lines and 2-2 Infantry was deeper into the city than the neighboring Marines. This meant that the insurgents were all around Newell’s men, capable of popping up anywhere.
After sunrise, when the Americans no longer enjoyed the advantage of their night vision devices, the enemy fighters grew more aggressive. Sergeant Bellavia’s squad was on a rooftop, looking south, when, from all around them, they heard a chorus of voices hollering to one another in Arabic. The voices trailed away and a single whistle blew. As the whistle tapered off, he and his men heard the sound of several dozen feet tromping through the dizzying warren of streets and alleys around them. “They’re coming for us,” Bellavia thought.
The squad’s supporting Bradleys and tanks were, for the moment, occupied elsewhere. Although it would take them several minutes to work their way into position, around buildings and through streets, they could help if need be. The sergeant turned to his men: “We’re not gonna bring any Brads up,” he said to them. “We’re gonna make them think they’ve trapped dismounts in the open without support. They’re gonna rush us, and we’ll fucking take them out. Hooah?” His grunts all replied with “Hooahs” of their own. In the early-twenty-first-century Army, this ubiquitous word had many meanings, ranging from “okay” to “gung ho” to “I agree” or even “I understand.” The soldiers were arrayed in a firing line, covering every angle of approach, with SAWs, M4s, and M16s at the ready. Bellavia, ever the conscientious NCO, reminded his shooters to aim low and adjust high for maximum accuracy. The air was dusty and thick. Visibility was good. They could see for several blocks in every direction, although the sight revealed little more than the typical mishmash of drab, sandstone-colored buildings that characterized much of Fallujah.
The attacking insurgents soon ran into serious trouble. From the vantage point of a nearby house, Fitts’s squad opened fire through windows and doors and slaughtered several of them. In the stunned aftermath, Fitts moved his people out of that house and linked up with Bellavia. All was quiet now. No one was in sight. The two sergeants estimated that somewhere out there was a force of about fifty or sixty mujahideen. They were desperately looking for the Americans but they did not know exactly where they were. They were probably spooked by the ambush Fitts had just sprung on them.
Suddenly, from about one hundred meters to the north (behind the line of the American advance), they heard a voice crying “Allah!” The grunts peered in that direction and saw a man in the middle of the street, aiming a machine gun, with an ammo belt wrapped around his arm, Rambo style. He was walking toward the Americans, chanting “Allah!” and mumbling to himself. “The muj are probing us,” Bellavia wrote. “This lone fighter is a sacrificial lamb, baiting us to open fire and reveal our positions. It is a chilling way to employ a comrade.” Still the courageous man kept coming. His tone was resolute, defiant and passionate.
Bellavia, like most of the Americans, was contemptuous of the enemy’s fanaticism and cruelty, but he could not help but respect the insurgent’s valor and belief in his cause, odious though the sergeant believed that cause to be. Bellavia’s ambivalence was quite similar to the way Marines had felt about their Japanese enemies at Guam and Peleliu. When the machine-gun-wielding man got too close for comfort, Sergeant Bellavia ordered his machine gunners to open fire. Their staccato bursts spewed bullets into the pavement around the man. He looked right up at the Americans and roared at them in a tone that quaked with rage. Just as he opened fire, the machine-gun bullets tore through his legs like a saw. “White bone exposed, the insurgent collapses onto his severed legs,” Bellavia recalled. “He screams in agony, but refuses to give up the fight. Blood pools around him in the street.” Still the man leaned on his trigger. His rounds smashed into the American-held building with dull thuds. Another American burst engulfed him. “The insurgent is ripped apart. Chunks of flesh spray across the road.”
He had done his job, though. Within a minute, the Americans began taking intense machine-gun, rifle, and RPG fire. “The enemy is hitting us with everything he has,” Bellavia wrote. “Our wall becomes torn and pitted along the west and north sides. Figures dart between buildings and race across the street below.” Some of them were in and around the houses across the street, no more than thirty meters away. In the recollection of one witness, they wore “tracksuit pants and the uniforms of the Iraqi National Guard.” The Americans laced into them with everything at their disposal. The heavy cyclic bursts of machine guns melded crazily with the semiautomatic, throaty cracking of rifles. Plumes of smoke rose from the feed trays of the SAWs. Empty brass casings tinkled onto the ledge of the roof and spilled downward into the street or onto the rooftop. A fragment from a tracer round hit Sergeant Warren Misa in the face. Bellavia fished it out. Misa was okay but his face was swollen and infected where the fragment had burrowed into the skin.
The two sides screamed and cursed at each other. One of the Americans stood up, shouted “fire in the hole!” and fired an AT4 rocket at an insurgent taking cover behind a gate below. Someone let out a whoop, like a child exulting over fireworks. The gate exploded. Two machine gunners followed with several bursts, killing the enemy shooter. An RPG exploded just below the ledge, shaking the entire roof with concussion. Many others streaked by, “flying left and right, impacting buildings,” in the recollection of one soldier. The firefight was evolving into a standoff. At this rate, though, the Americans risked losing fire superiority to the more numerous insurgents.
Fitts and Bellavia decided to play the mech infantryman’s ace in the hole. One of them got on the radio and called up a Bradley commanded by Staff Sergeant Cory Brown, a man nicknamed “Grizzly Bear” by his platoon mates because of his personal courage. The two rifle sergeants asked Brown to attack alone down the insurgent-held street. The intrepid Bradley commander readily accepted the challenge. “The Bradley rolls forward down the street and straight into the insurgents,” Bellavia recalled. “At first, they’re astonished the Brad is counterattacking by itself. But they quickly swarm the Brad with tracers. RPGs strike the road around it.” The Bradley responded with a steady barrage of 25-millimeter. The abrupt sonic booming of the rounds slashed the air as the shells smashed into rooftops, windows, asphalt, and, most likely, people. Each round evoked miniwaves of shock and assaulted eardrums.
An IED exploded near Brown’s Bradley, obscuring it in dust and smoke. The mujahideen thought they had crippled the Brad. A group of them rushed down the street, trying to close the distance to Brown’s vehicle, destroy it at intimate range, and kill the three crewmen. On the rooftop, the grunts had a perfect view of the enemy’s movements (thus personifying the military term “overwatch”). Several of them had M203 grenade launchers attached to their rifles. They dropped 40-millimeter grenades among the enemy, pinning them down while the riflemen and machine gunners scythed them with bullets. A few went down and did not get up. Others scrambled for cover.
Brown’s Bradley rolled warily in reverse down the street, back toward the friendly support of Bellavia’s group. An enemy RPG team materialized next to a cistern and snapped off a shot. The warhead exploded next to Brown’s battered and scarred Bradley but did no major damage. In response, Staff Sergeant Brown raised his TOW box and unleashed the fury of this fearsome weapon upon them. “When it comes to urban fighting,” Bellavia commented, “a TOW is a gift from the Pentagon gods.” The TOW hurtled down the street and exploded next to the cistern, killing the RPG men. Bellavia saw other enemy survivors making a run for it. “Our guns cut down seven of them. [One] insurgent runs out of his sandals before Ruiz shoots him in the belly. Our men cheer wildly and shout taunts.”
The longer the battle raged, the more it favored the Americans. With the insurgent locations pinpointed, the dismounts began to work closely with tanks and Bradleys, devastating the enemy with coordinated fire. Once pinned down, it was hard for them to escape. The Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, still fighting from the cloverleaf outside of town, added still more Bradley, tank, machine-gun, and sniper fire, killing even more enemy. The muj could not hope to succeed against this effective blend of armored firepower and quality dismounted infantrymen. “We . . . scored a significant victory,” Bellavia said. “We suffered only one slightly wounded and killed many, many bad guys. We withstood a multidirectional attack for over three and a half hours.”12
Under the weight of this combined arms power, 2-2 Infantry kept advancing swiftly. In one instance, they spotted large numbers of armed insurgents moving into a mosque that was located in neighboring ⅛ Marines’ area of responsibility. The soldiers radioed the Marines and asked for permission to fire artillery at the mosque. Since 1/8’s rifle companies were still a considerable distance from the mosque, they finally assented after about an hour’s worth of cautious conversations about the political wisdom of shelling such a holy site. Firing from Camp Fallujah several miles away, Paladin 155-millimeter howitzer crews unleashed a staggered pair of twenty-round barrages right onto the mosque and its surrounding area. “Some hit the building and some hit just south of it,” Lieutenant Neil Prakash, a tank commander who helped call in the rounds, later said, “but every explosion went off, and it was like a volcano: three to five guys shot up like they’d come out of a geyser.” Prakash’s tank was near Highway 10, a couple thousand meters from the mosque. In his turret, he leaned forward and gazed at the flying bodies through his commander’s sight. He had done much of the spotting for the artillerymen. Now he surveyed the gruesome results of his competence as bodies flew in every direction. “They were perfectly still, not waving or fanning their arms or anything. They were already dead as they were going airborne and blossoming out. I was looking at this place and it was just smoldering. There are very few times that I’ve ever felt sorry for the enemy, but this time they just got slaughtered.”
Back at the cloverleaf, one of the reconnaissance scouts peered through his L-RAS and saw a round impact “on the left side of the building and I saw three bodies fly into the air. It was awesome.” Several of the Americans saw bodies hit the ground and bounce two stories into the air. Some bounced as high as five stories. “It was the most insane, surreal thing I’d ever seen, just watching these bodies fly,” one of them said. “They looked like dolls.” They may have looked like dolls, but they were flesh-and-blood men, destroyed with ruthless finality by modern firepower. It was the essence of the violent horror that characterizes modern war.
As the shells exploded against and in the mosque, survivors poured outside in hopes of escaping. “[They] were stumbling out, coughing from the smoke,” Captain Chris Boggiano of the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop recalled. A fresh barrage landed among them, blowing some to pieces. Arms, heads, and pieces of flesh flew in all directions. Lieutenant Prakash watched one enemy fighter emerge “out of the gray smoke, and he’s holding his stomach, dragging his AK by the sling, and he’s gagging and retching; and just then . . . ten more rounds landed right on top of his head.” The shelling killed between forty and seventy insurgents, including one of Zarqawi’s top lieutenants.
By late afternoon on November 9, 2-2 Infantry had secured Highway 10. Many of the 2-2 grunts yearned to continue their advance and keep the enemy in disarray. They wanted to push across the highway and clear the industrial areas of south Fallujah. But they were too far ahead of the Marines to do that, so they paused at Highway 10. To some of the soldiers, the Marines seemed slow and deliberate, too preoccupied with clearing every last building before continuing the advance. “You could see the differences in how we fight,” Major Eric Krivda, the XO of 2-2, said. “We’d do whatever we could to drop [a] building first” with tanks and Bradleys. “The last possible resort is we send an infantry squad in to clean up the remnants.” Captain Fowler, an Army tanker, even claimed that the pause allowed the insurgents “to move back behind our lines. We ended up forcing them out again, but we don’t like to pay for the same ground twice.” Some of the Marines, conversely, thought the Army was moving so fast because they were simply riding around in armored vehicles, shooting at targets and moving on, without dismounting and truly eliminating resistance.
Both perceptions were wrong. For the most part, the battle was unfolding according to plan. In a figurative sense, the Army was shattering the enemy’s wall; the Marines were cleaning up the rubble. Each and every building did have to be cleared or the insurgents would infiltrate back into them. Marine light infantry and the Iraqi battalions were best suited for that time-consuming, exhausting task. By the same token, the Army’s mechanized capability was ideal for urban fire support and mobility, so it was not the least bit surprising that Lieutenant Colonel Newell’s 2-2 Infantry moved faster than the Marines. Newell’s small number of dismounts, and not any deficiency on the part of the Marines, meant that 2-2 would have to do much back-clearing of areas the unit had already traversed. “We do have some disadvantages in not having lots of dismounted infantry,” Newell said, “so that’s why . . . there needs to be a balanced organization. It’s a complementary relationship.” At Fallujah, the concept of melding Marine light infantry dexterity with Army mechanized brawn worked very well, and with an amazing minimum of friendly fire problems.
Thus, Newell’s grunts began clearing buildings on either side of Highway 10 “to destroy pockets of enemy resistance bypassed during the attack south,” the unit after action report said. By now, hungry packs of stray dogs and cats had learned to follow the Americans as they assaulted the buildings, because they left behind so many bodies in their wake. One soldier witnessed a cat eat the lips off a dead insurgent. Sergeant Bellavia saw several hungry dogs feeding on the remains of a dead enemy fighter. “The dogs gnaw and tear at his flesh. One comes up, his snout smeared in gore. My stomach flutters.” In some cases, the animals ate all the way through to the bone.
Covered by Abramses and Bradleys, the Army grunts kicked in so many doors, cleared so many houses, dodged so many booby traps, and destroyed so many weapons caches that they lost count. Time after time, the grunts lined up in a stack, on either side of a doorway, hugging the wall, each man orienting his weapon to cover a different sector, each wondering to himself if he was about to enter a BCIED or a house full of jihadis. The skin of the grunts was peppered with nicks and cuts. Their eyes were rimmed with dark circles. They stank of dust, cordite, stale MRE crumbs, body odor, and soiled underwear. The sweaty T-shirts that hugged their irritated skin had given many of them prickly heat. They were irritable and surly. They were coated with the disgust and cynicism of infantrymen in combat.
Firefights erupted on various blocks. The Americans annihilated anyone in their path. On one street, an enemy machine gunner opened up on a group of Americans just as they rammed through the door of the house he was defending. He wounded three of them before the grunts pulled back and a Mark 19 gunner blew the enemy gunner to pieces. Sergeant Bellavia came upon another muj gunner lying in rubble alongside his weapon. The sergeant and one of his team leaders opened fire. “I hit him twice in the back and hear his lungs expel a sudden rush of air. Was it a death rattle? I’m not sure.” A pool of sticky, dark red blood engulfed the fighter. The other soldier shot him in the head. Bellavia nudged his legs apart and kicked him in the groin, just to make sure he wasn’t playing possum. The sergeant’s boot sank deep into his leg cavity and he realized that the man had no scrotum or penis left. Needless to say, the man was very dead.13
A few minutes later, as the clock neared midnight and the men were on the verge of exhaustion, the platoon assaulted a handsome two-story square-shaped home. Behind the house was a nice courtyard garden. Bellavia figured that the house and garden must have belonged to someone with money. He knew that this was the Askari District, where many of Saddam’s military officers had lived.
The lead soldiers found the front door unlocked. In the stack, there were men from both Bellavia’s squad and Fitts’s. With Sergeant Misa in the lead, they surged into the dark front room of the house. The only illumination came from the SureFire flashlights they had fastened onto their rifles. Beams of light bounced along the walls and corners as each soldier cleared his respective sector. Bellavia was outside, in the courtyard, watching this through a window when, all of a sudden, he heard shooting and a lot of it. He rushed inside, just in time to see tracers ricocheting off the floor and walls. There were so many that, to Bellavia, it looked like someone had thrown a telephone pole on top of a big campfire, sending embers flying in all directions. The tracers sizzled and hissed. They touched off little fires in piles of garbage and papers strewn about the house.
The shots were snapping off quickly, fast and desperate. The noise was deafening. Confusion reigned supreme. At first the sergeant thought his men were shooting at nothing so he screamed at them to cease fire. But, in reality, they were in heavy contact, pinned down in the living room by withering fire from well-hidden insurgents. The term “pinned down” is, in essence, a slice of military vernacular that means the enemy fire is so accurate, so deadly, so thick that any movement can bring instant death.
Two jihadis were hunkered down in the middle of the house, near a central stairwell, with well-sighted fields of fire into the living room and the foyer of the house. The truly amazing thing was that, with hundreds of bullets buzzing around, no one on either side had gotten hit yet. Bellavia chanced a look through the foyer doorway and saw the two muj shooting from behind “a pair of three-foot-high concrete Jersey barriers with little more than their heads and shoulders exposed. One of the insurgents holds an AK-47 against each shoulder with the barrels resting on one barrier. The other man has a Russian belt-fed PKM machine gun perched atop the other barrier.” Fitts and several other soldiers were pinned down opposite the doorway, on the other side of the living room.
A round grazed Private First Class Jim Metcalf, one of the SAW gunners, right under his body armor. He stumbled and cried out: “I’m hit!” The Americans heard the insurgents laughing above the din, mocking Metcalf, taunting him: I’m heeet!! At the same time shards of glass and debris practically filled the air. One of the soldiers took some fragments to the eyes and hollered: “My face! My eyes!” The insurgents laughed some more and wailed in mock distress: Ohhhhh, my feeece! My eyes! The sound of their voices made the hair on Bellavia’s neck stand up. It was as if they were questioning the manhood of the Americans. The sergeant was filled with rage and fear, and it is safe to say the others were, too. As a leader, he tried to remain calm enough to consider what to do. He realized that, with several men pinned down inside the house, the supporting fire of tanks, Bradleys, artillery, and close air support were all useless. The enemy had designed their fighting position for just this type of close encounter. “This ambush is the product of study,” he wrote, “an enemy who has thoroughly analyzed our strengths and weaknesses. They’ve created a fighting position that negates our advantages of firepower and mobility. All we can do is fight them at point-blank range with the weapons in our hands.”
This was exactly the sort of mano a mano situation that, according to the techno-vangelists, was supposed to be a relic of the past, but it was all too real and, in Fallujah, all too common. The two sides would fight to the finish with whatever weapons they had at their disposal. Wits, presence of mind, and valor counted for much in this terrifying environment. Here, weapons were the tools of fighting spirit.
Bellavia was in the best position to lean into the foyer and open fire on the insurgent position. This would put him squarely into a fatal funnel but it had to be done if Fitts and the other men were to have any chance to escape the house. Bellavia loved Fitts like a brother. The two men had been through nine months of combat together. Their feelings of brotherhood, combined with the squad leader’s heavy sense of responsibility, extended to every man inside the house. Bellavia dreaded the idea of exposing himself in the fatal funnel, but he knew he must do it.
Hollering back and forth, he and the others worked out a plan. When Bellavia stepped into the doorway and opened up with his SAW, the others would vacate the house—quickly. The New Yorker readied the SAW. He was still enraged, yelling insults back and forth with the muj. His breathing was jagged and nervous. His palms were sweating. A thousand thoughts raced through his intelligent brain, but a line from The Exorcist came to dominate: “The power of Christ compels you!” As a somewhat religious man, he was fascinated that this, of all things, would come to him during such a moment of peril. Perhaps it was because he equated his struggle against the insurgents to the movie priest’s epic battle with demons. He muttered a short prayer, stood up, and opened fire at the stairwell: “Go! Go! Go! Get out!” he screamed.
Sergeant Bellavia stood in the doorway and pointed his weapon at the Jersey barriers. The SAW can fire over seven hundred rounds per minute and Bellavia had a full drum of two hundred 5.56-millimeter bullets to cook off. As he leaned on the trigger, the insurgents did the same. “Bullets bash into the wall to my left. The doorframe splinters. Tracers hiss this way and that, bouncing off the bricks and ceiling. Bullets slam into the Jersey barriers and penetrate to their hard foam centers. Hunks of foam pop out of the holes I’ve made and cartwheel across the room. I can see their faces and they’re angry but they’re smiling; they look completely evil.”
He caught his glimpses of their grinning visages against his own muzzle flashes and the streaking lights of tracer rounds. Behind him, Fitts and the others scrambled out of the house. Bellavia’s SAW fire was so overwhelming that the insurgents had to duck or risk having their smiling heads blown off. “Get out there,” he thought. “Clear the room and juice these guys.” But it was as if his legs were cemented in place. He could not bring himself to walk up on them and kill them at point-blank range. He did not know why. Perhaps he was afraid of pushing his luck any further. Perhaps he was repelled by the idea of snuffing out their lives at handshake range. Regardless, when he ran out of ammo, he bolted from the house, enraged at himself for not finishing them off.
He found Fitts and several other men just beyond the garden, taking cover behind a wall. Bellavia was absolutely disgusted with himself. He paced around roaring and cursing. “There’s no escaping this: I cut and ran. When shit got hot, I ran. I’m an NCO. I’m supposed to lead by example.” He felt like a fraud and a coward. He had joined the Army, in part, to prove to himself that he was no such thing. Like any good sergeant, he felt a strong obligation to lead his soldiers. To him, running from an enemy-occupied house was not the way to do that. The insurgents were still spewing fire from that house. Near misses sparked on the pavement all around the Americans. “We’re all gonna die,” one frightened man said. “We’re not going to die!” Bellavia shouted back. “They’re gonna fucking die!” He was calming himself as much as he was calming the scared soldier.
A Bradley came up and raked the house with 25-millimeter and coaxial machine-gun fire. As much as the soldiers hoped that the supporting fire had killed the insurgents, most everyone, including Bellavia, understood that someone would have to go back into the house and kill them face-to-face. The sergeant knew that he had to lead the assault, even though he believed he would not survive. The very thought of it all frightened him to death, but it had to be done. “If I don’t go in,” he later wrote, “they’ll have won. How many times have we heard that American soldiers rely on firepower and technology because they lack courage?” From studying military history, he knew that America’s enemies always made the same claim. He was determined to disprove it.
Gathering several of his soldiers, he prepared to make a coordinated assault. All the while, he kept psyching himself up and projecting a fearless persona to his men by telling them “you were born for this moment . . . you were born to kill these evil motherfuckin’ terrorists . . . we’re gonna eat their flesh and send them to fucking Lucifer.” Every man believed that death waited in the house. Another squad leader, Staff Sergeant Scott Lawson, sidled up to Bellavia and told him: “I’m not going to let you go in there and die alone.” Bellavia was overwhelmed by the nobility of Lawson’s statement. Bellavia’s feeling of brotherhood for him was so powerful that he felt “closer to Lawson than to my own kin.” Here was a prime example of an enduring truth about American combat soldiers: they fight, die, and sacrifice for one another. For them, no other motivation to face danger is ever as powerful. “I just wasn’t gonna let him go in there by himself and die,” Lawson later said. “That night it was hectic, crazy. You lose your mind a little bit.”
After hurling some grenades, the squad crept through the courtyard, with Bellavia and Lawson in the lead. Michael Ware, an Australian reporter, was among them, observing everything. The Bradley fire had not killed the muj but it did force them to abandon the windows and take shelter in the house’s interior. It also punctured a water tank, coating the floor of the building with a quarter inch of dank water. Bellavia and Lawson entered the house and carefully moved along the foyer wall, toward the stairwell. The house stank of moldy water and rotting fish. They could hear the enemy fighters whispering in Arabic. Bellavia was carrying an M16A4 with a 203 grenade launcher attachment—not an ideal weapon for close-quarters battle (CQB) because of its size and weight. Lawson had a 9-millimeter pistol.
Bellavia was peering through his night vision goggles, looking for the insurgents. Then, confusion reigned as shooting broke out. Bullets whizzed past Bellavia, so close he could almost feel the wind of one as it snapped past his helmet. Others tore chunks from the walls. The fire tapered off and the insurgents began chanting “Alahu Akbar” (God is great) over and over, in a frightened tone, almost as if calming themselves. Through the haze, Sergeant Bellavia could see them now, and they were still behind the barriers. One of them looked very young. He bent down to prep an RPG. The other one had a neatly trimmed beard and was wielding a machine gun. Behind them, propane tanks lay in piles. Bellavia was praying to himself now. He tried to clear his mind but again all he could think was “The Power of Christ compels you!” He screamed that aloud, brought his weapon to his shoulder, and rushed toward them. “Close-quarters combat is instinctual, fought on the most basic and animalistic level of the human brain,” he wrote. “Body language, eye contact, the inflection of voice can turn a fight in a heartbeat.” The younger insurgent looked up in surprise. His eyes met Bellavia’s and, with venomous emphasis, he spat out the word “Jew!” Bellavia put a round into his chest and his pelvis. The jihadi spun around, fell down, and his blood poured into the water, spreading red pools outward from the dead form. The other man ran for the kitchen. Bellavia and Lawson shot at him and scored several hits, as evidenced by his intense moaning, but he kept returning fire from the kitchen. Lawson ran out of ammo. Outside, soldiers were screaming in confusion. Some thought Bellavia had been wounded or killed.
At this point, for Bellavia, the battle became a one-man struggle. Chaos ensued as, throughout the dark house, he engaged in a personal duel to the death with the insurgents. In two instances, he had to shoot them multiple times before they died. Many times, he yelled at them in Arabic to surrender. One of them responded with taunts. “I will kill you and take your dog collar,” he said. “Mommy will never find your body. I’ll cut your head off.” For the American, the creepy voice was unnerving to the point of sheer panic, but he suppressed his natural fear and kept fighting. He stalked one wounded insurgent up the stairs onto the upper floor. He and the man had awkwardly exchanged shots in a bedroom, stumbling around an armoire where the bearded man had been hiding. This fighter had a thick beard, he was middle-aged, and he stank to high heaven. Bellavia thought of him as the bogeyman because he looked so bedraggled and had emerged from the armoire, like something out of a child’s nightmare of monsters in the closet.
As Sergeant Bellavia ascended the wet stairs in search of the enemy fighter, images of his wife and son kept flashing through his mind. In his mind’s eye, he saw a casualty notification team coming to the door of his home. He imagined his wife as a widow, his son growing up with no father. He saw his own tombstone. He was filled with a strange combination of fury and regret. Like nearly every infantry soldier, he was torn between an obligation to his actual family and his military family. He loved them both with an intensity that was hard to describe. Both of them needed him badly. Right now, in this horrible place, though, his military brothers needed him more.
Near the top of the stairs, he slipped on a pool of blood and fell forward a bit. At that exact moment, the bogeyman opened fire. The bullet whizzed overhead, right where Bellavia’s head would have been if he had not slipped. A chance incident, a slip of one mere foot, had saved his life and left him always to wonder why. The sergeant straightened up and sputtered: “You’re gonna fucking die, dude.” He shot and missed. In the muzzle flash, Bellavia could see fear in the eyes of his enemy. The man fled to a room. The New Yorker found him, threw a grenade in there, and wounded him again. Just as Bellavia was about to open fire and finish him off, he noticed propane tanks and a smoky fire burning up a mattress in one corner of the room. Bellavia could smell natural gas. Concerned that one of his tracer rounds might touch off an explosion, he held his fire. “I step forward and slam the barrel of my rifle down on his head. He grunts and suddenly swings his AK up. Its barrel slams into my jaw and I feel a tooth break.” Bellavia’s father was a dentist and all the squad leader could think of right now was how angry his dad would be that he had cracked a tooth. “These are the irrational thoughts that come into your mind at this moment,” he later said.
In fact, these were the first blows in a desperate fight to the death. Bellavia tasted blood in his mouth and throat. He swung his rifle like a baseball bat and caught the man full in the face. The bogeyman still had the presence of mind to kick the sergeant in the crotch. His M16 clattered onto the floor. Bellavia tried beating him with a small-arms protective insert (SAPI) plate from his body armor and then his Kevlar helmet, too. The two struggled back and forth, kicking, clawing “like caged dogs locked in a death match. We’ve become our base animal selves, with only survival instincts to keep us going. Which one of us has the stronger will to live?”
Bellavia kept yelling in Arabic and English at the man to surrender, but to no avail. With his right finger, he gouged the man’s left eye and was “astonished to discover that the human eye is not so much a firm ball as a soft, pliable sack.” The gouging of an eye is highly unsettling to most all human beings, even a trained warrior like Bellavia. Even with his life on the line, and wearing Nomex gloves, he could not bring himself to plunge his finger deep into his enemy’s eye socket. He withdrew the finger. The man fired a pistol shot that just missed Bellavia’s head. “I thought . . . I’m done.” In that moment, he suddenly remembered that he was carrying a knife. “That knife was the only thing that was gonna make me live.” As he rose slightly to grab it from his belt, the man bit him in the crotch. Paroxysms of pain and rage coursed through Bellavia. At first he used the blunt end of the knife to batter the man’s gray-flecked hair, but still his teeth clenched into Bellavia’s crotch. “His breath was horrible, just stale, nasty breath.” The American could feel warm blood running down his leg but fortunately his vital parts were intact.
At last, he locked the knife blade into place, rolled heavily onto the muj, and stabbed him under the collarbone. The man was crying, struggling and wailing. One of his hands kept beating Bellavia’s side but the blows steadily weakened when the knife nicked an artery. Bellavia heard a gurgling, liquid sound. Both of them were bathed in the warm arterial blood. Bellavia kept pumping the knife blade “like Satan’s version of CPR.” A powerful smell, much like rust, emanated from the blood.
Bellavia saw fear and then resignation in the eyes of his enemy. “Please,” he said to the American. With tears of his own, Bellavia replied, “Surrender!” “No,” the man said with a smile on his face. With one last spasm of strength, he reached up with his right hand and caressed Bellavia’s face. “His hand runs gently from my cheek to my jaw, then falls to the floor. He takes a last ragged breath, and his eyes go dim, still staring into mine. Why did he touch me like that at the end? He was forgiving me.” The two enemies had shared a supremely ironic killer-and-victim intimacy, almost sexual in its intensity, that only they could understand. Bellavia was anything but exhilarated. He was exhausted from his postfight adrenaline crash, aching from his wounds, and wrung out from the awful experience of killing face-to-face, in an animal struggle. He lay still, shivering, cold, nauseous, coated with the dried blood of the man he had just stabbed to death.
When, at last, he collected himself, grabbed his rifle, and left the room, he heard American voices downstairs. He stumbled into the hallway and almost bumped into another enemy fighter. In the confusion, the muj lost his AK-47. Bellavia fell on his rear end but held on to his M16. “The dregs of my body’s adrenaline supply shoots into my system.” He shot the man several times. The wounded muj dragged himself to the roof of the house and flung himself into the garden below. An unseen SAW gunner finished him off. Bellavia shuffled to a corner, sat down heavily, lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. As he contemplated what had just happened to him in this hell house, it occurred to him that today was his birthday. “I’ve had better birthdays,” he thought. The other grunts came upstairs and asked if he was okay. “Yeah, I’m good,” he replied bravely. He knew that was not true, though. In fact, he doubted he would ever be the same again.14
Nor was the battle anywhere near finished for him and the other grunts. Task Force 2-2 Infantry pushed across Highway 10 and continued methodically clearing block after block of urban sprawl. “They would dismount and clear a building to the roof to get eyes into the next block, or the next intersection,” one officer remembered. “Then they’d move the Bradleys around to get some suppressive fire, bring the guys down off the roof, down into the next block, and then do it again.” Newell eventually had to use soldiers from the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop as dismounted infantrymen. In addition to local resistance, often these men and the everyday grunts fought face-to-face with foreign insurgents who had come to Fallujah from such countries as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan to martyr themselves.
The process of seizing buildings was exhausting and deadly. Alpha Company lost its commander, Captain Sean Sims, and its executive officer, First Lieutenant Edward Iwan. Sims was shot at point-blank range by a hidden insurgent inside of a building he thought was clear. Iwan took a direct hit from an RPG as he stood in the turret of his Bradley during a major insurgent counterattack. The warhead embedded in his abdomen, nearly severed him in two, but did not explode. Dr. Dewitt’s aid station was close to the fighting, maybe about a kilometer away. She did everything she could to save him, and even got him to the operating table at Camp Fallujah, but he died there. As Iwan lay dying and unconscious, Lieutenant Commander Ron Camarda, a chaplain, sang hymns to the young lieutenant. “I was singing ‘O Holy Night’ when he shed a most awesome and beautiful tear.” Camarda believed that the tear came from Iwan’s sadness at his imminent death and the profound love he felt for his soon-to-be-grieving family.
According to Task Force 2-2’s after action report, “The speed and shock effect of the task force attack south cornered the insurgents into their last strongholds in the southern corners of the city and prevented them from reorganizing or developing a coherent defensive plan. These fighters fell back to prepared defensive positions, including spider holes, underground tunnels connecting basements of houses, IEDs along roads, houses rigged with explosives, and defensive positions on rooftops.” Newell’s formidable force steadily battered them to death. In the meantime, the Marines were also fighting house to house.15
Door to Door with 3/1 Marines in the Jolan and Queens
Young and cocky, they were the unit descendants of the men who had fought at the Point and among the terrible Umurbrogol caves on Peleliu. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they were products of America’s postindustrial, information-age culture. They loved video games, guy movies, reality TV shows, porn, and glam magazines like FHM and Maxim. They called one another “dude” and “dog.” Even officers and sergeants routinely employed these ubiquitous monikers when talking to their young Marines. They were tech savvy and very bright, though they could sometimes be ignorant of grammatical niceties and basic geography. Modern American entertainment culture was so powerfully ingrained in them that they generally referred to their enemies as the “bad guys” and themselves as the “good guys,” as if the Iraq War was merely a giant action film. Many of them coated themselves with tattoos. Their music was a blend of country, hard rock, and rap. They no longer referred to their NCOs as “Sarge.” They called them “Sar’nt,” as if saying the full title might absorb too much time and energy. Their officers used words like “battlespace” instead of “battlefield” and “challenge” instead of “problem.” Like their World War II ancestors, the grunts smoked cigarettes in distressingly high numbers. But, unlike the Old Corps Marines, they knew all about the dangers of smoking and still did it. Even more commonly, they dipped snuff, mainly as a means to combat exhaustion, the favorite brands being Skoal and Copenhagen.
In some ways, they were societal anomalies. In the midst of postfeminist America, they were unapologetically macho and homophobic. Paragons of physical fitness, they fought for a country with a serious obesity problem. They swore so creatively and with such frequency that polite conversation with a civilian could be a greater challenge for some of them than the boot camp they had all endured and mastered. To put it mildly, they were politically incorrect and proud of it. Like almost all infantrymen, they were irreverent on the outside, reverent on the inside. They were a fascinating blend of hard-bitten cynicism and tenacious idealism.
They had more in common with their 3/1 Marine predecessors than otherwise. As with the 3/1 Marines at Peleliu, they loathed their enemies and everything they stood for, but respected their fanatical courage. Their weapons were different from the World War II Marines’, but their spirit was the same. They were grunts to the core—lean, aggressive, sour but good-hearted. They were among the finest light infantrymen in the world. Their competence and skill underscored the generally unappreciated reality that not just anyone can become an infantryman. “There is a certain amount of natural talent that can’t be created,” one Marine officer wrote. “When that talent is there it can be nurtured, but it can’t be created where it doesn’t exist.” A rifle platoon leader added his opinion that “there are probably few jobs in the Marine Corps . . . that are more challenging than being an infantry squad leader.”
In western Fallujah their job was to go door to door, cleaning out every building, in the Jolan and Queens, a pair of terrorist strongholds. “Clearing buildings is combat at its most primitive,” one embedded civilian historian wrote. “The fighting is up close and personal, not the pushbutton warfare that many Americans hear about and see on television.” This meant ending the lives of other human beings with a staggering degree of personal violence and trauma. “You’re just acutely aware of what war is about,” Major Joe Winslow, a Marine combat historian with 3/1, later said, “finding and violently killing other people as best you can and you’re exposed to the results of that . . . Marines being killed or injured, dead enemy body parts, bodies stuck everywhere, just death in general. It’s very earth shattering.” In fact, American intelligence officers believed that the Jolan was where many of the most hardcore insurgents, including Zarqawi’s crew, were headquartered. The area was also known for its narrow streets and dense, sturdy structures.
As with 2-2 Infantry in eastern Fallujah, in this western section of town the Army’s 2-7 Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey, led the way through the breach as an armored fist. They cleared the streets of IEDs and VBIEDS. They destroyed RPG and machine-gun teams. Their grunts cleared plenty of buildings. More than that, though, the sheer force of their tanks and Bradleys shocked the enemy into immobility. “The 3/1’s mission was to flow behind 2-7 after they entered the city . . . and start clearing the enemy right behind the penetration,” Colonel Shupp, commander of RCT-1, later said. “I can’t tell you how happy we were with Jim Rainey and 2-7. These guys are fighters. They’re the best soldiers I’ve ever seen in my life.” Lieutenant Colonel Buhl, 3/1’s commander, was grateful for the armored screen that the tanks and Brads provided his Marines. “I’m very thankful for everything 2-7 did for us. I’m impressed with that battalion. They were a seasoned battalion. They really . . . attacked, aggressively. Their leaders were squared away.”
In the wake of this powerful wedge, covered by the watchful eyes of Marine and SEAL snipers, Buhl’s rifle companies plunged into the close-packed jungle of sandstone-colored buildings. They were aided by satellite photographs and even some real-time images from UAVs flying overhead. The drone of their engines became a constant sound track. At ten thousand feet, fighter jets loitered, waiting to help. The supporting fire of artillery and mortar crews was readily available. But it was up to the grunts to clear the buildings. In general, they carried about forty or fifty pounds of gear, consisting of fresh magazines for their rifles, water, grenades, body armor (IBA), Kevlar helmets, weapons, and assorted specialty items like bolt cutters, shotguns, or sledgehammers.
Most of the city blocks were about two hundred meters long, with an average of one hundred structures on each block. A house might contain nothing or it might teem with jihadis looking to martyr themselves. “It would seem that the first block was always clear,” Lance Corporal Dustin Turpen of Lima Company said, “and they let us think there was nobody there, and we started to get complacent. After you kick fifty doors in, and there’s nobody there, it starts to become normal. It’s like the fiftieth house you clear that day, and you’re just trying to get it done, and that’s when the shit happens.” As Turpen indicated, the job of assaulting the buildings was up close and personal, a high-stakes jumble of kicking in doors, rushing through rooms. The repetitiveness was mind-numbing. There was a definite Russian roulette feel to it. Danger could come from any direction in the urban morass. “You have to cover everywhere,” First Sergeant Brad Kasal of Weapons Company said. “You had a guy pointing [his weapon] in the front, a guy pointing high, guys covering high in other directions, a guy covering the rear. The fire can come from anywhere . . . up high, low, down in a sewer . . . a window.”
Each fire team and squad had to perfect a distinct choreography and chemistry, with a man covering each sector, reacting instantly to the person next to him, covering his every movement, proceeding as smoothly as possible into the dark interior of the building. They draped their rifles over their armored vests, always orienting them forward, braced expertly against their shoulders, ready to shoot. Every man’s rifle was secured with a three-point sling, preventing slippage off the shoulder. Each room presented the possibility of close contact and a personal fight to the death. “I’m the assault team, so I’m always the first one in the house,” Corporal Matthew Spencer, a fire team leader in Kilo Company, told a historian. “Once we’re in the stack, we’re all ready to go. We can read off each other. Most of the time the door is straight in front. We’ll go in . . . and from there, you take your immediate danger areas and your doorways and we’re pretty much split from there and we don’t really see each other until we meet up in a bigger room or we’re coming out.”
Corporal Francis Wolf, a squad leader in the same company, always ordered his Marines to shoot up the house first and then assault. “And once we enter the house, just basically, hard, fast, intense . . . frag every room you can . . . sometimes two to three depending on the room.” They found that grenades were not all that effective because the rooms offered so much furniture and debris for cover. Moreover, the insurgents often anticipated that the Marines would use grenades, so they stacked mattresses and tables near windows and doors to absorb grenade fragments. So, Wolf and his people killed almost exclusively with rifles. “The SAW is not very maneuverable inside of a house. The only time we’ll ever use a SAW in a house is if we have to clear by fire. If we know that there’s insurgents in the rooms, we’ll poke the SAW around the corner and lay . . . a one-hundred-round burst and just light the room up.” Most of the time, though, they killed the enemy fighters with multiple aimed shots from their M16s. Frequently, through the smoke and dust, they watched the life ebb from the eyes of their enemies. With firefights taking place in such small rooms, the grunts were inundated with the acrid stench of cordite and gunpowder, to the point where they could taste it in their mouths.
Often it took many shots to kill a jihadi because they were under the influence of adrenaline, cocaine, amphetamines, or other drugs that gave them extra staying power. “The terrorists just wouldn’t die unless you removed their brains from their skulls,” one grunt NCO said. Houses, streets, and rubble were riddled with spent needles and drug paraphernalia. One mujahideen took a shot to the face, point-blank, and stab wounds to the chest but kept fighting. “His brains were out on the floor,” Corporal Bill Sojda recalled. “A normal person would have died with a bullet in their head and multiple stab wounds.” So, even grievously wounded insurgents could present a deadly threat. “I know of several instances where near-dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon wrote. “It was a fight to the finish.”
The Americans did take prisoners, but in this unforgiving, stressful environment they were usually inclined to shoot anyone who offered any semblance of a threat (they were especially leery of suicide bombers). In one well-known instance, when the Marines took a mosque after heavy fighting, they encountered a badly wounded insurgent. One of the riflemen thought that the man was a threat and he shot him to death, right in front of a camera-toting reporter. The graphic footage was beamed to the world, generating controversy and even an official investigation of the shooter’s actions. The brutal reality was that every encounter with the enemy portended imminent death. Life-and-death decisions had to be made in a split second. “There is no one technique for house clearing,” another squad leader said. “Sometimes I’ll be noisy to draw fire, sometimes I’ll sneak in. I’ll climb over a roof and come down the stairs, or feint at the front door and enter through the kitchen. Training gives you the basics. After that, you have to adapt.” The most important thing was to avoid being predictable.16
Regardless of how professionally the squads assaulted buildings, the job was time-consuming and very dangerous. The goal of the jihadis was to lure the Marines inside the buildings, where they could inflict casualties on them at close range. All too often, the insurgents intended to die and simply wanted to take as many Marines with them as they could. This was especially true in the heart of the Jolan and Queens, where many foreign terrorists made their last stand. “Their discipline throughout the battle still amazes me,” Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Hackett of Lima Company said. “They just sat in the house and waited, kind of like spiders; they waited for the perfect shot, our faces or necks, since our body armor and Kevlars . . . protected our bodies.”
With distressing frequency, they would hole up within a house chosen for its excellent fields of fire on every avenue of approach and also for its sturdy interior. They covered every window and door. “They knew what we were doing,” another NCO said. “They studied our tactics, sitting there, waiting to kill us before they died.” When the Marines plowed inside, the muj opened fire from point-blank range. Then the Marines would find themselves trapped inside the house, usually with some of their own men dead or wounded, involved in a room-to-room fight to the death. Supporting weapons were often no help in these situations because the Americans obviously could not blow up houses where Marines were trapped. The focus then changed from clearing the house to extracting the casualties. Most modern American infantrymen are taught to avoid open streets during urban combat. But when Marines got pinned down inside buildings, the streets outside, ironically, became the safe spots, the very place where Marines sought to make their escape.
Hackett’s Lima Company had several such incidents. In one instance, a squad assaulted an auto repair shop, right into the waiting muzzle of an RPK machine gun in an adjacent room that covered the door. The squad leader was the lead man. He quickly ducked away and shouted “Get the fuck out!” to his guys, but it was too late. Several of them were already piling inside. The enemy gunner unleashed a stream of bullets, one of which caught Lance Corporal Nicholas Larson in the jugular vein, killing him. As Larson’s blood poured out onto the floor, several others fought back with grenades and rifles, but they were pinned down. “I’ve never seen so much blood in my life,” one of them recalled. In an effort to distract the machine gunner long enough for his buddies to beat a hasty exit from the repair shop, Private First Class Nathan Wood charged the enemy gunner’s room, hurling a grenade inside and spraying it with his M16. The machine gun killed him, too. The other Marines threw grenades at the room and dodged a hail of bullets to exit the shop.
They summoned a SMAW gunner to blow up the shop, even though the dead bodies of their comrades were inside. The shoulder-launched SMAW fires an 83-millimeter rocket and can puncture eight feet of concrete. It creates massive overpressure capable of collapsing a building and crushing a person. The room where the rocket explodes can heat up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The gunner pumped two rockets into the shop, turning it into jumbled rubble. As it turned out, there were three mujahideen inside. Not only did they survive the SMAW rounds, but they kept fighting, even though they were wounded and pinned in place by rubble. The Marines had to kill them with point-blank rifle shots before they could recover the bodies of their dead friends.
Another time Lima Company’s 1st Platoon ran into a well-hidden group of hard-core Chechen insurgents who were just waiting to ambush them. One squad had three men wounded inside of a building, fighting room to room against the disciplined Chechens. They managed to get their wounded Marines out. Another squad was approaching an adjacent building. The squad leader, Sergeant James “Bennie” Conner, cautiously skulked into the courtyard, making it as far as a window on the house’s southern side. Several yards away, behind the courtyard wall, Lance Corporal Michael Hanks was covering him. Conner chanced a peek into the window and came face-to-face with a man who looked like “Yasser Arafat in his younger days . . . red towel on his head . . . dirty, dark-green coat on.” The man had several rifles and two RPGs arranged around himself. He and Conner both opened fire. Neither had a very good angle to shoot the other, but Conner got hit in the arm. Enraged, the twenty-seven-year-old sergeant emptied an entire magazine into the window. “I’m hit, dude,” Conner told Hanks. “I got to come by the window, so cover me.” Hanks replied, “Okay, dude.”
Hanks lunged forward. Behind him, taking cover behind the wall, was Patrick O’Donnell, a civilian historian who had embedded himself with the platoon. He thought about following Hanks into the courtyard. At that moment, though, a presence told him: “Don’t go any farther, you aren’t trained to clear a house.” An instant later, he heard a long burst of RPK machine-gun fire and then someone screamed that Hanks was dead. Machine-gun bullets had torn into his face. “Michael Hanks’s bloody head was lying next to my boot,” O’Donnell wrote. “There were still a lot of bullets flying, but for a second everyone stopped. The moment seemed to last for an eternity.” The platoon leader, Lieutenant Jeffrey Sommers, ordered everyone to pull back. “They started . . . firing and throwing grenades at the house. Since I thought there was a tiny chance that Hanks was still alive, I grabbed the back of his flak jacket and started dragging him to the rear. A Marine came to help me. I was dragging Hanks with my right arm. Hanks’s lifeless body weighed a ton.” The blood of the fallen Marine soaked the historian’s boots and the incident marked him for life, hardening his resolve to tell the story of such valorous men. “When you’re in the middle of this, it all becomes so personal,” he later said. The 1st Platoon alone suffered thirty-five casualties, including four dead.
In another telling incident, three Kilo Company Marines were trapped inside of a house that was defended by several insurgents (probably Chechens). First Sergeant Kasal of Weapons Company and seven other Marines heard what was going on and came to the rescue. Kasal had once served as first sergeant of Kilo. He was determined to do all in his power to save the three Marines. “All I could think about was three of our own getting captured by the bad guys and beheaded . . . on TV.” Kasal and the others burst into the house and began methodically clearing it. They found one wounded Marine and two dead insurgents. The walls of the house were smeared with the crimson red blood of the mujahideen.
As the other Marines fanned out to clear each room, Kasal noticed one open room near a staircase and two adjoining rooms. He told two Marines to cover the staircase. Then he told Private First Class Alexander Nicoll to cover him as he cleared the room. Kasal did not just charge through the doorway. The first sergeant had twenty years of infantry experience. He knew that the most effective way to enter a potentially hostile room was to “pie” it. In other words, he stood in the doorway and visually inspected each part of the dark room in slices. This technique focused his eyes, steadied his weapon, and minimized his exposure to anyone in the room. The knowledge saved his life. Just as he looked to the near wall, he saw a crouching man, at handshake distance, with an AK-47. As the man raised the weapon, Kasal backed up and shouted “Bad guy!” to Nicoll, who was standing right behind the first sergeant. Just then the jihadi fired a burst that barely missed Kasal. He could feel the sonic whoosh of the bullets as they flew past his chest. “I placed my weapon over the top of his rifle and stuck my barrel straight into his chest and pulled the trigger. I emptied 8 to 10 rounds into his chest before he went down.” Even then the man was still moving, so Kasal fired two more bullets into his head. His body collapsed in the doorway.
Kasal and Nicoll did not know that the two Marines they had posted at the stairwell were no longer there. There were insurgents all over the house and they had gone off to fight them. Meanwhile, a muj snuck down the stairwell and opened up on Kasal and Nicoll from behind. Bullets tore into Kasal’s right leg. Nicoll caught a round in his left leg. Kasal painfully crawled, dragging his right leg behind him, around the dead man’s body, into the room. Then he came back for Nicoll and pulled him in as well. He did all this under fire, as rounds impacted around the two Marines. They were both bleeding badly, pinned down inside of the room. Both of them were carrying a pressure dressing, designed to stanch the flow of blood from open wounds. Kasal decided to use both dressings on Nicoll, “so that at least one of us could live,” the first sergeant later said. “I was bleedin’ pretty bad by this time. Blood was spurting out of my leg. I was kind of getting weak and starting to lose consciousness.” Even so, when the insurgent snuck close to the door and pitched a grenade to a spot about four feet from them, Kasal pushed Nicoll down and draped his body over him, shielding him from the blast. “In all honesty, I thought I was going to bleed to death from severe wounds and lack of medical treatment anyway.” The NCO figured if he himself was going to die, he might as well save Nicoll’s life. The grenade sent hot fragments into Kasal’s legs, buttocks, and lower back, “causing my head to spin and my ears to feel like they had just burst.” His gear absorbed much of the blast, though, and many of the fragments went upward.
It took thirty or forty minutes for other Marines to rescue the men who had originally been trapped and then turn their attention to extracting Kasal and Nicoll. As several Marines, including Lance Corporal Justin Boswood, unleashed a wall of covering fire, Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Dan Schaeffer ran in and pulled the first sergeant and Nicoll from the house. “The whole house was just shaking with 5.56 rounds, just SAWs going off with a two-hundred-round burst and the [M]16s as fast as you could pull the trigger,” Boswood said. The Marines blew up the house with a satchel charge of explosives and, in Boswood’s recollection, “a door was about one hundred feet in the air . . . and pink mist was underneath the door.” Even amid this destruction, the muj were not all dead. From the rubble, one of them tried to pitch a grenade at the Marines. They pumped hundreds of rounds into his remains. Nicoll survived but lost his left leg. Kasal lost 60 percent of his blood and endured over twenty surgeries, but he kept his leg. One Marine was killed in the house and eleven others wounded. Several men were decorated for their part in this “Hell House” fight, including a Navy Cross for Kasal.17
As the battle unfolded, the Marines learned to avoid such costly encounters and make better use of supporting arms, regardless of how much damage they did to Fallujah. “Our young men are trained to run through walls,” Lieutenant Colonel Buhl said, “so we had to teach them that when you got bad guys in a house, not to just send in people.” As at Peleliu, too often the first inclination of tough young Marines was to close with and kill the enemy wherever they found them, regardless of whether it was advantageous to do so. Buhl and many of his junior officers and NCOs told their Marines, “The minute you get in contact [with a fortified house] back away, cordon, coordinate, and drop it.” When the casualty numbers began piling up, the grunts were only too happy to comply.
This meant using combined arms. At Aachen, combined arms teams had been vital to American success. The same was true at Fallujah. Marine battalions like 3/1 were dominated by light infantrymen, but they enjoyed the support of a marvelous array of effective weapons and learned to use them quite well. “I believe that the . . . greatest . . . combat power of a Marine infantry battalion is tied to its employment of combined arms,” Buhl commented. “In an [urban] fight . . . combined arms is everything . . . tanks . . . bulldozers . . . engineers . . . indirect fire . . . aviation fire.” Artillery and mortar crewmen laid down a curtain of fire ahead of the attacking infantry squads.
Most of the time the rifle companies were also supported by a nice array of vehicles, including machine-gun-toting AAVs, plus Humvees equipped with Mark 19s, .50-caliber machine guns, or TOWs. The Mark 19s and .50 cals were capable of tearing chunks out of buildings. The TOWs, of course, could collapse them altogether or, at the very least, punch entry holes into them for the riflemen.
The grunts especially loved working with tanks. Buhl’s battalion was supported by one company from the Marine 2nd Tank Battalion, plus whatever assistance 2-7 Cavalry could provide. “It was like going on an evening stroll in a dangerous neighborhood with a Tyrannosaurus Rex,” one Marine wrote. In addition to its 120-millimeter main gun, each Abrams had a coaxial machine gun and a .50 caliber. RPGs could damage the optics, the treads, or set fire to the carrying racks on the tank’s turret, but they could not penetrate its thick Cobham armor. Nor could the vast majority of IEDs do much damage to them. So, the Abrams truly was like an impervious dinosaur, or at least the baddest kid on the urban combat block. In one instance, a tank was moving down an alleyway with some grunts. Standing in his turret, the tank commander peered over a wall just in time to see insurgents pitch grenades over it. The grenades exploded harmlessly against his armor, shielding the grunts. His driver swiveled the tank back and forth, smashing the walls, and then his gunner unloaded on the insurgents with his machine guns, shredding them.
Four tanks supported each company. “We used the tanks a great deal in terms of prepping buildings before we’d go in with Marines on the ground,” Lieutenant Timothy Strabbing, a platoon leader in India Company, recalled. “We’d have a tank supported by an AAV and two vehicles behind [it]” as they moved warily down each street. The infantrymen positioned themselves alongside or behind the tanks. The grunts could point out targets for their tanker comrades by simply opening fire or talking into the phone on the rear of the Abrams. But they had to avoid standing directly behind the powerful turbine engine because it generated so much heat and such a high-pitched whining noise.
Because Fallujah was almost entirely empty of civilians, the tankers made liberal use of their considerable firepower, spraying rounds wherever the infantry might need them. “I fired twenty-five to forty-one hundred twenty-millimeter rounds each day,” Master Gunnery Sergeant Ishmael Castillo, a tank commander, said. “Every tank did.” In Fallujah, Castillo and his fellow tank crewmen shot approximately twenty-five hundred main-gun rounds at targets within one hundred feet. The concussive effect (not to mention the blast and shrapnel) of each shot was immense. When the Abrams fired its main-gun round, anyone standing near it risked being knocked down, knocked out, or deafened. It was like standing in the middle of a thunder-clap. It physically hurt to be anywhere near an Abrams when it fired its main gun. For obvious reasons, the insurgents usually tried to avoid confrontations with the tanks, but many of them failed. Tank shells dismembered them, shredded their limbs, collapsed buildings onto them, and, in a few cases, disintegrated them.
Close air support was available in large quantities for the Marines. Each company had an actual fighter pilot attached as a forward air controller. In some cases, they called in strike missions from their own squadron buddies. The Marine grunts especially liked their own F/A-18 Hornet two-seaters, Harriers, and Air Force F-16Cs. According to Captain Pete Gallogly, the 3/1’s air officer during the battle, the battalion called upon “91 laser-guided 500-pound bombs and 35 GPS 500-pound bombs. We dropped two 1,000-pound GPS bombs on a large complex—they flattened it. We dropped 10 laser Mavericks, called in 119 AC-130 strikes, 21 Hellfires [missiles], 4 TOWs, and 9 fixed-wing strafing attacks.”
The infantrymen especially loved the AC-130 Bashers. “I’d fuck that plane if it was a woman,” one of them said. In fact, at least one of the AC-130s was commanded by a woman. Few Marines knew that, but among those who did, heartsick rumors circulated that she was sultry and beautiful. This, of course, only added to the black widow mystique of the plane. The jihadis were absolutely terrified of it. Several prisoners testified to that fact. “They really feared Basher, because the aircraft flew at night and was basically invisible to them,” one Marine officer later commented. “They could hear ’em [flying], and they could hear . . . when they fired.” The muj called the plane “the Finger of God” because of the accurate, withering line of tracers that, in darkness, looked like a vengeful finger pointing to the ground.
Basher’s infrared optics allowed the crew to see almost any night movement in Fallujah. Night after night, they flew circles above the Marine infantry positions, killing any insurgents who dared move in their direction with a combination of 105-millimeter howitzer fire and 20-millimeter Gatling gun fire. This afforded the Marines night security, allowing them to rest, and it limited jihadi movement, a real asset because, throughout the battle, insurgents tended to re-infiltrate areas the Americans had previously cleared. When Basher fired, it sounded as though the air above was literally being torn apart like a flimsy piece of cloth. For the grunts, nights in Fallujah were chilly and creepy. Psyops teams roamed around, playing hard-core rock songs such as “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, along with the sound of crying babies, the meowing of cats, and even the menacing laugh of the beast in the movie Predator. Amid this phantasmagorical environment, Basher was always a comforting sound.
Engineers tagged along with the infantrymen, playing a vital role. They used a combination of C-4 explosives, satchel charges, and old-fashioned bangalore torpedoes. They threw or placed their goodies into windows and doors, or alongside insurgent-held buildings. In one typical case, a young engineer hurled a bangalore through an open window. The ensuing explosion literally lifted the building off the ground. The grunts rushed forward, only to find, in the recollection of one man, “a terrorist’s bloody arm sticking up in the rubble almost like it was reaching for the sky.” Another time a bangalore collapsed the front of a house, touched off a fire and burned several mujahideen to death as they frantically tried to escape. “We realized that demo was the way to go,” Lieutenant Jeffrey Sommers declared. “Rockets and bangs go where we shouldn’t.”
The engineers also made extensive use of armored D9 bulldozers, which were equipped with large blades and bulletproof glass. They were resistant to small arms, RPGs, and even IEDs. Throughout the Jolan and Queens, the loud clatter of their engines, accompanied by beeping as they raised their blades, could be heard. Time and again, the Marine engineers used the dozers to clear rubble and crumble fortified buildings on top of their defenders. “The D9 would come up and . . . would just start pushing stuff over, and if they ran out, they got shot,” Gunnery Sergeant Duanne Walters, an engineer, recalled. “If they stayed inside . . . the house dropped on ’em.” Lieutenant Strabbing saw one insurgent perch atop a balcony and fire his AK-47 on full automatic point-blank at a D9. Like some sort of impervious monster, the dozer kept demolishing the house. A tank then pumped a shell inside. The lethal combination “annulated [sic] the house and the area that individual was in with rubble and that was that.” Another time, Lance Corporal Justin Boswood’s fire team pulled back from a strongly held house and watched in delight as a D9 “pushed over the gate to the courtyard and then . . . went through and just started leveling [it]. None of the insurgents ran out of there. [It] was pretty cool just thinking that the last thing they heard was the methodical beep [of] a dozer.”
The most common helpers were SMAW gunners, commonly known among the Marines as assaultmen. Whereas a rifleman’s MOS was 0311, an assaultman was 0351. Each company had half a dozen two-man teams and they were worth their weight in gold. “The 0351s . . . were tasked with SMAW gunnery, explosive breaches, demolition of structures, and destruction of captured enemy weapons, and, in rare cases, unexploded ordnance,” Lieutenant Carin Calvin, who commanded several assaultmen in Lima Company’s Weapons Platoon, later wrote.
The SMAW itself was about two and a half feet long and weighed sixteen pounds. Many of the assaultmen strapped their tubes onto their backs and fought as riflemen until they were needed as rocketeers. On average, they fired about ten rockets per day. Before firing, the teams made sure to clear anyone standing behind them because the back-blast could be deadly. Commanders liked to put them on roofs where they could fire down onto buildings. Quite often, they aided the infantry not just by shooting known insurgent-held buildings but by punching entry holes (mouse holing) into structures the riflemen were about to assault. This gave them different entry points besides a window or door that might be covered by the enemy. It also could kill any insurgents who might be in the house. “We found that our assaultmen had to first fire a dual-purpose rocket in order to create a hole in the wall or building,” Lieutenant Calvin said. “This blast was immediately followed by an NE [thermobaric novel explosive] round that would incinerate the target or literally level the structure.” The Marines learned to fire sequential shots at the same spot, enhancing the overpressure and explosive power of the rockets and punching bigger holes into the buildings. In retrospect, the use of the SMAWs at Fallujah was rather similar to the way American soldiers used bazookas at Aachen.
Day by day, the Marine grunts arduously blasted and cleared their way through the Jolan and Queens, making increasingly free-handed use of every supporting weapon they could. “This was a grueling, on the ground, dirty, extended period of combat and manual labor,” Major Joe Winslow, a Marine historian who was with the grunts, commented. “Day after day of blocking off these city blocks, small houses, different types of neighborhoods, breaking down the door, pushing through the door, going upstairs, breaking down the windows, moving the furniture . . . in addition to being shot at . . . lance corporals, corporals and sergeants . . . extremely infantry intensive. I don’t care how many Scan Eagles you have or Predators [UAVs], or whatever, if you don’t have some Marine peering under that cabinet, it’s not gonna happen. They cleansed that city.” Besides killing nearly one thousand insurgents, the Marines found several torture houses (and even some live victims), dozens of weapons caches, and Zarqawi’s headquarters.18
Fighting to the Loose Ends
On November 16, after nearly a week of bloody fighting, Allawi’s Iraqi government declared Fallujah secured. Pure and simple, this was political posturing. It was true that coalition forces had advanced through the whole city and controlled most of it. But plenty of hard fighting lay ahead for the grunts as they turned north and back-cleared block after block of demolished buildings, where small groups of insurgents patiently waited to make their last stand. Allawi was eager to rebuild the city and open it up again to its residents. The American generals wanted to stoke the perception that they had won a quick victory. They and Allawi knew that, in the information age, the longer the battle appeared to drag on, the better the chance that world media outlets would portray it as a stalemate or even a defeat for the coalition. Actually, Allawi’s declaration was similar to the American tendency during the Pacific War to declare that islands were secured when much hard fighting remained to be done (Peleliu being an infamous example). The spirit of the announcement was usually correct—the enemy was defeated strategically—but many enemy holdouts remained in place to fight to the death, inflicting many casualties on the Americans. Indeed, the Japanese rarely if ever surrendered at the end of an island battle. Fallujah was like that, too. Unlike Aachen, there was no central enemy authority to declare surrender and lay down arms. The muj simply fought to the death or faded away. It was a fight not to the bitter end, but to the loose ends. In fact, the Americans did not even allow Fallujahns to return in any serious numbers to the city until December 23.
So, at Fallujah, the grunts hardly noticed the political machinations of Allawi and their own military superiors. For them, the daily grind of clearing buildings and risking their lives remained unchanged. As far as they were concerned, as long as someone was still shooting at them, then the battle was not over. Most of the infantry units spent the rest of November and even parts of December sweeping through the city, methodically destroying any remaining resistance. “It was really about having a tremendous amount of physical stamina,” Winslow, the Marine historian, asserted. “Somebody’s gotta go up every flight of stairs, gotta go through every steel gate and gotta break down every single door, gotta open up every roof in every alley.” Most of the time, they found nothing. Sometimes they fought it out with hidden insurgents. Almost always, they killed them. At times, they lost some of their own. In all, during November and December, they cleared close to twenty thousand buildings, often two or three times apiece. Often, when they cleared a building, they spray-painted an X on it. They were supported by 540 air strikes and over fourteen thousand mortar and artillery shells. They found over six hundred separate weapons caches, including several car bomb factories. They killed at least two thousand insurgents and captured another twelve hundred.
In total, the Americans lost 95 killed and 560 wounded over the two months. The Iraqi Army lost 11 killed and 43 wounded. The assaulting force of 6,000 troops, then, suffered an 11 percent casualty rate. Of course, some wounded soldiers and Marines did not report their injuries, so the rates were probably even higher. As always, the rifle companies—especially the Marines—suffered the most. The first sergeant of Kilo Company, 3/1 Marines, said his unit awarded eighty-four Purple Hearts, including thirty-two to Marines who were wounded badly enough to require evacuation to the States. This represented a casualty rate of over 45 percent. From November 8 to 25, the two Army battalions lost five soldiers killed. During the same time, 46 Marines from the four assaulting battalions were killed. The 3/1 lost 19 killed, the most of any battalion in the battle. Throughout 2004, 151 Americans were killed in and around Fallujah and another 1,000 wounded.
The survivors were grateful to have lived, but forever marked by their experiences. Staff Sergeant Bellavia vividly recalled, near the end of the battle, how physically wrecked he and his squad members were after many days of intense urban combat. In his recollection, he and his unshaven buddies were “ragged outlines of what we had once been . . . our uniforms . . . covered in dried gore, blood, grime, concrete dust, and smoke stains. All of us [had] brown slicks of diarrhea pasting our pants to our backsides . . . we were so sick that some of us [could] hardly walk.” The physical toll generally faded with proper rest, food, and hygiene. The mental toll was more enduring. Some had trouble dealing with the trauma of having seen their friends die. Others were bothered by having had to kill, sometimes in very personal fashion, a common by-product of war for infantry grunts. Their struggle for peace was just beginning.
The city was also profoundly damaged. By most estimates, about 60 percent of the buildings were destroyed, not to mention the infrastructure of sewers, telephone wires, and the like. Lance Corporal Boswood, like nearly everyone else, was awestruck at the destruction. “This city was just in shambles, telephone wires just hanging everywhere, houses blown up, cars, huge craters, everything.” After the battle, one general stood among the ruins and took in the overwhelming sight of overturned cars, half-crumbled homes, sagging roofs, cratered streets, shattered telephone poles, demolished storefronts, and simply muttered to himself in awe: “Holy shit.”
Upon returning home, many of the residents were heartbroken at the destruction and bitter at the Americans for doing it. “There was no food, no water, no electricity—just the smell of gunpowder,” one Jolan resident said. “This is the American way of democracy?” Another man, a shopkeeper, bitingly said: “The resistance didn’t destroy houses. They didn’t harm people.” The former point was valid. The latter claim was laughably false. “You never want to destroy someone’s city like this,” Staff Sergeant Bellavia said, “but this was the only way to eliminate those fanatics.” Almost all of the Americans would have agreed and eventually some Fallujahns, too. Even before the fighting was finished, Army engineers and Navy Seabees were busy rebuilding. The Americans subsequently pumped millions of dollars into Fallujah (the Iraqi government’s contributions were minor and feckless). The reconstruction effort would take years. The elections of January 2005 took place more or less unhindered, although only a few Fallujahns and Anbaris participated.
After the battle, Lieutenant General Sattler claimed that “we have . . . broken the back of the insurgency.” He was wrong. Fallujah did not come close to ending the insurgency in Iraq. The war would rage on for many more years. Those insurgents who escaped Fallujah often relocated to Ramadi and other spots in Al Anbar to cause much more trouble in the months and years to come. Nor did the fighting in and around Fallujah completely cease. To be sure, the Americans had absolutely eliminated it as a terrorist sanctuary, but IED bombings, sniping, and firefights were all too common by 2006, even though the Americans found and killed Zarqawi that year. Only after the Anbar Awakening, when the Sunni tribes finally turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and cast their lot with the Americans, did Fallujah calm down for the long haul. The Battle of Fallujah was merely a small step in the direction of the Awakening, not the cause of it.
Hamstrung by their own mistaken preconceptions of modern war, buffeted by world opinion, the Americans had eventually prevailed in an urban setting, but at great political and military cost. As one military commentator adeptly put it, “The Battle of Fallujah was not a defeat, but we cannot afford many more victories like it.” In the end, the battle was a brilliant combined arms and interservice operation, one that featured incredible valor at the grunt level. The performance of the infantry soldiers and Marines was among the best in American military history. Unlike Aachen, though, Fallujah was only a partial strategic victory for the United States. The controversial Iraq War would grind on, demanding many more sacrifices from the grunts.19