Even before this event—and the two subsequent loud, dusty, bitter urban battles fought in the city—gave the name “Fallujah” a sinister if vague ring to Americans, the place had been tinder under the American occupation. I had visited a few times that spring and knew the city of 285,000 was a religious place. Once an ancient nexus of trade routes, it was now a tough trucker town and a smuggling hub. But it was also deeply conservative and proud of its moniker “city of mosques,” boasting 133 of them. Industrial compounds just north of the city had produced chemical weapons for Saddam, drawing the suspicion of the U.N. inspectors.
By the time I arrived in Baghdad on Monday, April 5, Marine battalions had breached Fallujah’s outer rim, entering all four quadrants of the city in the opening stage of what became known as the First Battle of Fallujah. They began their assault at 1:00 A.M., having cordoned the city the night before. Others have well documented the grinding, costly battles for Fallujah, waged largely by the Marines. But unknown to most, the events there shaped TF 714 and changed our story, as we accepted an expanded role in the fight. Even then I didn’t know the city would take center stage—and that events there would alter the course of the war. Nor did I fully understand the conditions in the city that would vault Zarqawi and his network, in turn spurring our force’s evolution to contain the jihadists’ violent expansion.
The city that would host this first clash between TF 714 and Al Qaeda in Iraq had a long, combustible history. To limit resistance to his control in Fallujah, Saddam established a system of patronage with the Sunni tribesmen of the town, frequently recruiting his government officials from the city, which was home to many military officers. Many of these Baathists returned to Fallujah after their army was disbanded in May 2003, seeding the city with disgruntled, trained military men. The city’s complex social mixture, relatively inert under Saddam, grew more combustible due to American actions.
The 82nd Airborne was responsible for the city following the fall of Saddam in April 2003, but the population quickly turned against them. In truth, the people may never have been theirs to win. Rumors—like that suggesting that the paratroopers’ night-vision goggles allowed them to see through the garments of Fallujah’s women—increased distrust and hostility. On April 28, 2003, soon after the U.S. invasion, a crowd of about 150 Fallujans marched on a school the 82nd had occupied, demanding the paratroopers vacate. Reports differ as to what provoked the violent clash that followed. According to the 82nd, they returned fire after being shot at by youths in the crowd. Fallujans claimed the crowd had no guns and called it an atrocity. In the end, seventeen Iraqis were dead and another seventy-five injured. They remembered that the Americans offered no apology, no monetary compensation even as a gesture. Fallujans would refer to the shooting as “the massacre” for years afterward, and although the Marines who took over from the 82nd sought to dispense money for the damages, many of the proud Fallujans rejected it.
A year later, during the final week of March 2004, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was set to take over all of Anbar. In the weeks leading up to the transfer, Fallujah had become increasingly hostile. In addition to the unsuccessful night raid described in the previous chapter, I had gone to the city several other times to meet with 82nd Airborne leadership. Stretched thin, the 82nd ran only limited patrols through the city. On February 12, General Abizaid had gone with the division commander to visit a new Iraqi army unit organized in Fallujah. As John and the Iraqi boss of the unit chatted in Arabic, rocket-propelled grenades hit their compound, fired by insurgents from nearby rooftops. John left calm and unscathed, but two days later the same compound was hit again. In a sophisticated assault, fifty insurgents spread across the city and attacked that Iraqi army compound to prevent its soldiers from coming to the rescue of the much less fortified mayor’s office and police station, which another group of insurgents was striking. They freed eighty-seven prisoners and killed at least twenty Iraqi policemen. As insurgents gained a foothold in Fallujah, they used it as a base of operations. From there, earlier that March, Sunni insurgents had dispatched the suicide bombers to Karbala and Baghdad for the attacks on the Ashura procession. Later that spring, a jihadist tape surfaced. “If John Abizaid escaped our swords this time,” said the speaker, believed to be Zarqawi, “we will be lying in wait for him.”
Before the attack on the contractors, I spoke with then–Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, about his plans for handling Fallujah and the other hot spot down the road, Ramadi. Our conversation was the first time we had spoken. For the bitter fight he was heading into in Anbar, he would need both of his personalities—Mad Dog Mattis, commander of the lethal Devil Dogs, and the cerebral student of people and ideas who had an anthropologist’s curiosity and appreciation of nuance. Backed by the specter of the former, he would lead with the latter.
“We’re planning to do this differently,” he said. “I want us to take off the Kevlar helmets.” He talked about engaging the population. “We’re going to go in on foot and fan out in small patrols across the city.”
His intent was to establish a more continuous, more visible presence among the residents, and in the short time before they deployed, Jim tried to give one platoon in each battalion additional language and cultural training. He even arranged for help from the Los Angeles Police Department. The Marines grew mustaches as a small but resonant gesture of cultural assimilation and amity toward the Iraqis. At the time, I knew there was a plan for his Marines to wear dark green forest camouflage print and shiny black boots for the first part of their rotation. The uniform choice was meant to differentiate them in the eyes of the Fallujans from the 82nd, who had worn beige and brown desert fatigues. Neither of us thought simply being in soft caps would win Fallujah. But Mattis, early on, understood that perceptions were at least as important as any tactical gains.
As they assumed control of the city that March, the Marines began to carry out Mattis’s approach, starting with foot patrols. Against determined insurgents, this was dangerous. On Thursday, March 25, in the same Askari neighborhood with row houses that I had walked through a few weeks earlier, insurgents killed one Marine and wounded two more with homemade bombs. The Marines returned to the neighborhood the next day, eventually taking control of the cloverleaf to its east. Our TF 16 forces worked closely with the Marines, gathering intelligence and running pinpoint raids while the Marines provided a steady presence. On the night of March 24, one of our Green convoys was ambushed outside of town. In the massive ensuing firefight, with operators using vehicles as cover, one of the detainees got away. A week later, the American contractors drove into this rising simmer.
It was the beginning of a difficult chapter in the Iraq war. For the first few days after the March 31 ambush on the Blackwater convoy, the attack did not appear to derail the Marines’ plan for clearing the city of insurgents. Mattis’s troops focused on retrieving the remains of the contractors, which they did with the help of the local police chief in Fallujah. The Coalition collected intelligence on the crowd and ringleaders and would have enlisted our help in plucking them from the city. From Afghanistan, I waited and watched. But Washington wanted to answer the murder and mutilation of the security contractors, and rapidly secure the city. The Marines bitterly disagreed, wanting to manage Fallujah on their terms, not as a rushed reaction to the insurgents’ baiting. They were overruled. General Mattis was ordered to attack the city within seventy-two hours. Helmets would go on and stay on.
The commander of our Fallujah-based team decided to seed Marine platoons with Green operators, in ones and twos. These dispersed teams were not only valuable for their experience but also better connected to one another and to the command center in Fallujah than many of the Marine platoons with which they found themselves. Our technology, combined with the agility and experience of the operators, allowed us to gain a quick, robust picture of what they found inside Fallujah. I became addicted to this ground-
level reporting for the rest of the war.
Shuttling between my headquarters in Baghdad and outposts in Fallujah and nearby Ramadi, I did not find the teams’ reports encouraging. The Marines faced significant but yet unspecified resistance shortly after entering the city limits. We knew Fallujah hosted nationalistic Sunni insurgents seeking to expel the Americans and win political and economic privileges in the Shia-dominated new Iraq. More modestly, these Iraqis were fighting to preserve their pride. We also knew that Fallujah was a nexus for tribal criminal networks, making for a glut of arms and money. Most troubling were the Salafist jihadists in the mix. The same trading routes that now made Fallujah a smuggling nexus for refrigerators and cars had imprinted the city with the ideology of the fundamentalists who had sacked Karbala in 1802. Fallujah sat along the corridors that connected the wellspring of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia with the region’s other great cities—Mosul, Aleppo, and Amman. Much of Anbar was insular, but Fallujah’s sympathetic mosques and history as a place of transit lured a trickle of foreign jihadist volunteers.
The Green teams reported throughout that week, with some amazement, that fighters had seemingly come out of the woodwork. What disgust Iraqis may have had after seeing their countrymen string up corpses was quickly replaced, a few days later, by a smarting sense of solidarity with the embattled Fallujans. For some Iraqis, the invasion of Fallujah was the American occupation in its ugliest form: they viewed the Marines as acting out of revenge, carrying out collective punishment against many innocents for the crimes of a guilty few.
The perception that Americans were committing widespread atrocities quickly spread, largely through the Arab TV networks that reported significantly inflated civilian casualty figures. There were TV reports of injured civilians in Fallujah even before the attack began, and the networks played stock footage from other battles. Al Jazeera reported that U.S. artillery shells had hit mosques or wiped out whole families of twenty-five, and American newspapers repeated these claims. In reality, the Marines did not shoot any artillery during the entire first battle of Fallujah, using only precision weapons from aircraft. But the rumor resonated.
This feeling was so profound that it brought Sunni and Shia Iraqis together in a momentary period of sympathy and cooperation. Shiites in Baghdad reportedly sent money to the city and took food from their pantries and medicine from their own cabinets to donate. They urged their own brothers and sons to fight while taking in Sunni refugees. Shiite leaders solicited blood donations for Fallujah. Of course, the short spasm of cross-sectarian unity didn’t endure.
Political pressure mounted on the Coalition, which had done little to compete with enemy propaganda, to stop the offensive in Fallujah. The U.N.’s representative to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to quit. British prime minister Tony Blair implored President Bush to cease the assault. Most vitally, the Iraqi Governing Council, the interim body of Iraqis working with the CPA until Iraq regained sovereignty at the end of June 2004, threatened to disband if the assault did not desist. Its dissolution would have been potentially fatal to a new Iraq. So Bush ordered the assault stopped.
At the time, I was aware of only part of this political maneuvering, so I was surprised to receive a call from Mattis informing me that Washington had halted the assault. I was largely to blame for my own confusion. I had established too few links with the Marine command—a mistake I worked hard not to repeat. Beginning with the Marines, I began sending liaisons to as many units and commands as I could. Those liaisons fed back information, and we quickly set up fusion cells to combine and compare intelligence. Before Fallujah, coordination had been an important but tangential component of TF 714’s effort. Now I learned it was central to our effectiveness.
On Friday, April 9, 2004, John Abizaid flew to Iraq and then out to the Marines’ Camp Fallujah. John had come to tell the Marines in person to cancel the entire offensive, knowing they would be irate. I would join him out in Fallujah later that day, the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Things were meant to be going well. Instead, it was arguably the worst day for the Coalition since the invasion had begun, with Sunni and Shia extremists making gains. The Sunni insurgency had won a tactical draw in Fallujah: for them, a triumph of legendary proportions.
The war was not going well elsewhere. Much of the rest of Iraq was erupting. Even with Fallujah teetering, the CPA had, the previous week, chosen to confront Muqtada al-Sadr, the thuggish thirty-year-old son and nephew of a prestigious Shia cleric assassinated by Saddam. Bremer shut down al-Hawza, Sadr’s mouthpiece newspaper, and arrested one of his top aides. In response, Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia rose up in the streets of its Shia strongholds—Najaf, Karbala, Kufa. In Sadr City—the Shia “neighborhood” of Baghdad, home to 2.5 million people and recently renamed from “Saddam City” in honor of Muqtada’s martyred father—JAM attacked soldiers from the 1st Armored Division, commanded by then–Major General Marty Dempsey. By the time I met with Abizaid on Friday, Sadr City was in full revolt. That day, Dempsey’s soldiers in Baghdad read his letter to them, explaining that their yearlong tours would be extended another three months to continue fighting Sadr’s militia. His men had fought too hard, Marty wrote to them, to allow “one thug to replace another.”
The remaining weeks of April and the beginning of May saw Iraq further unravel. Route Tampa—the main artery running supplies from Kuwait into Baghdad—was effectively shut down as insurgents lit up roadside bombs and blew out bridges and trucks stopped moving. I continued to jog beside the taxiway on the runway at our airport base, but it had a surreal feel as I watched insurgents’ 107-mm and 240-mm rockets land in the airport infield, blowing craters in the grass. Running was neither bravado nor lunacy. The rockets were inaccurate, and our nearby headquarters was an unfortified building, so running in the open air was no more dangerous than sitting at the computer terminal. But sucking in the sour, metallic smell of the explosives that lingered in the dry midday air was an irritating reminder that things were not going well.
On April 23, as we focused on the deterioration in Iraq, I flew from Baghdad down to Qatar, where I met with John Abizaid at his forward headquarters. We discussed the situation and TF 714’s potential contribution. While there, Craig Nixon—the Ranger regimental commander, at the time in charge of all TF 714 forces in Afghanistan—called me from Bagram with news that a Ranger had been killed in a firefight near the village of Sperah in the southeast part of the country. I passed the sad news to John as we talked. Later that day Craig called again with an update: the Ranger lost was Pat Tillman, the professional football player whose enlistment in the Army after 9/11 had been widely reported. I hadn’t met Ranger Tillman, but the loss of any soldier was significant. Craig informed me that standard notification and other administrative processes were under way. He also informed me that the chain of command would be recommending Tillman for a Silver Star award for valor, based on his actions while maneuvering against enemy forces. At that time, most soldiers killed in action were recommended for an award, typically the Bronze Star. We followed what was then standard practice to process the award as quickly as possible so that it could be presented to the family at the memorial service.
As I’d previously planned, the next day I flew with the Command Team to Bagram. In addition to ongoing operational activities, Craig briefed me on the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death. He described a late afternoon/early evening firefight in broken terrain in which Tillman had been fatally hit by small arms fire. He continued that although further investigation was required, he had concluded that Tillman was likely killed by friendly fire from fellow Rangers. He drew out the engagement on an easel and we discussed how it likely occurred. After the discussion, as I would have for any suspected incident of fratricide, I called SOCOM headquarters at Tampa to relay a tentative conclusion of friendly fire. General Brown was out, so I passed the information to his deputy, then–Vice Admiral Eric Olson.
In the discussion with Craig about the incident, I asked about the Silver Star. Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Bailey, commander of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, said he felt that although friendly fire was suspected, Tillman’s actions—maneuvering against what the Rangers at the moment believed were enemy forces ambushing the column of Tillman’s fellow Rangers—warranted the recognition. I agreed, and a short time later approved a citation that had originated within the Ranger Regiment.
A few days later I was told that a high-profile memorial service in San Jose was planned for Corporal Tillman. I had already passed the assessment of the potential that he had been killed by friendly fire to SOCOM, and advised them that an investigation of that possibility was under way. But because I became aware of the memorial service, I decided to send a direct message to emphasize to Generals Abizaid and Brown that friendly fire was the likely cause of death. The message was classified secret, as all my official communications were required to be. I also sent the message to Lieutenant General Phil Kensinger at U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the administrative headquarters responsible for handling actions surrounding the death of members of Army Special Operations Forces like the Rangers.
In the years that followed, controversy arose and continued over the circumstances of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire and his family’s notification. Five investigations were conducted and accusations of intentional deception, cover-up, and exploitation of Corporal Tillman’s death for political purposes were propagated. Sadly, truth and trust were lost in the process. Genuine concerns over slow and incomplete communication with the family increasingly became mixed with suspicions of intentional misconduct.
As the TF 714 commander in operational control of the Rangers, but not tasked with administrative communication with the family, I had an incomplete view of all that transpired. But in Afghanistan I watched the Rangers deal with the loss of a comrade, and I saw nothing but genuine efforts to take care of a fallen Ranger and his family in ways that reflected the deep values of the force.
My Share of the Task Page 20