by Bing West
“Die, bitches!” he yelled. “You wanna shoot at me? This ain’t no picnic!”
Hunched over the steering wheel, Lance Corporal Victor Didra was laughing at Moss when a man hopped out of the weeds, aiming an RPG directly at him. There was an immediate explosion and a cloud of dust—and Didra breathed again, thinking the insurgent had blown himself up. Then he glanced to his left and saw smoke where the grenade had burst. The man had missed from ten feet away.
Bouncing along at high speed, the Marines were shooting frantically in all directions. No one could hear over the whine of the engines and the roar of the guns. The Marines saw RPGs zipping past, felt concussions from near misses, sensed some hits, and dimly heard some grunts and screams. All were praying that no one fell out and no vehicle rolled over. Practically every tire had been hit, and strips of rubber were peeling off. If one Hummer stopped, they all stopped, and then it would be the Little Big Horn. It was a melee, both sides blazing away for ten minutes.
At one point Lance Corporal Charles Williams, shooting from Glover’s Humvee, counted nine RPG gunners out in the fields. The speeding Humvees were proving hard to hit. Not all of the excited RPG gunners missed, though. Private First Class Noah L. Boye, shooting from a highback, was hit by an RPG in his upper leg, ripping open a huge hole too large for pressure bandages. As the highback bounced along, the Marines frantically tried to stanch the flow of blood with a poncho liner. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Daniel Santiago, had told Boye more than once to stop playing his guitar at three in the morning, imitating Mötley Crüe and the Temptations, improvising weird lyrics, and enticing other Marines to join in. Life wasn’t, the platoon sergeant said, one long party. Boye would grin and tone it down—for about a week.
Once they hit the paved highway, Santiago screamed over the radio at the drivers to push faster on the bare rims. They had to get Boye to surgical. But no one could stanch the blood flowing from the terrible hole, and Boye died before they reached the aid station at the cloverleaf.
Nate Jensen, the foreign service officer assigned by the CPA to be on scene at Fallujah, was at the cloverleaf when Glover’s vehicles skidded in. The diplomat had driven to the aid station to collect evidence about foreign fighters and terrorists inside the city. Battalion 1/5 had found suicide vests, stashes of money, and foreign passports. A wounded Marine had a sniper’s bullet embedded in his armored vest. If it was foreign made, Jensen intended to show it to the Iraqi negotiators.
The Marines were smoldering at the costs of the “cease-fire” and resented the presence of a civilian who was part of the negotiations. Jensen understood their feelings and stayed off to one side as they pitched handfuls of spent brass and sopping bandages out of the vehicles.
Of the fifty-five Marines who went out, twenty-one were wounded. Seven had to be hospitalized. Lance Corporal Merado Alcaraz was wearing shatterproof glasses that saved his eyes when an RPG had exploded overhead, peppering his face. Shrapnel had grazed Glover’s face and scratched up his glasses, but his eyes too were fine. Glover sent to the rear three highbacks slippery with blood that needed to be washed down, along with several Marines who had to change out of their sticky cammies before the blood dried like a coat of paint.
While Glover was sorting things out, two amtracs were delivering supplies to a sniper position forward of Bravo Company’s lines, near the center of town. They took a wrong turn and bumped into a company-sized group of insurgents of all ages, from their teens to their fifties. The surprised insurgents reacted quickly, firing RPG rockets as the amtracs spun on their treads and raced east. A rocket punched through the armor of the rear trac, ripping a chunk out of the leg of the platoon commander, Lieutenant Christopher Ayers. The white-hot shell lodged in the engine, which burst into flames, trapping the crew chief, Corporal Kevin T. Kolm, a third-generation Marine. Kolm’s grandfather had fought on the island of Peleliu in World War II, and his father had fought in Vietnam.
The smoke-filled amtrac turned the wrong way, heading down what the Marines called Shithead Alley, a cluttered street leading west, deeper into the city. As the Marines desperately tried to extinguish the blaze and free Kolm, the crippled trac faltered to a halt. With the blaze spreading and dozens of insurgents running down the street to finish them off, the Marines on board poured out of the trac before its ammunition cooked off. They heard Kolm scream, but his hatch was locked, the flames were searing, and they had no way of prying the hot metal open.
Lieutenant Ayers pulled himself halfway out of the top hatch, only to have his armored vest snag, pinning him to the burning chassis. Staff Sergeant Ismail Sagredo and Lance Corporal Abraham McCarver grabbed Ayers by the vest and pulled with all their might, ripping the Velcro strip from the vest and spilling Ayers into their arms. Propping him up between them, they hobbled into a nearby house and set up a hasty defense, with snipers on the roof and Marines peering out the windows on all sides.
Close behind, the insurgents didn’t stop to make a plan. They rushed toward the house, and Sagredo shot the first man who ran into the courtyard, hitting him in the head. Marine snipers on the roof shot down two more in the street. The other Iraqis fell back, ducking into alleys and running around the back of the house, searching for an uncovered approach. Although seven of the sixteen Marines were wounded, Ayers and Sagredo had set up a strong defense. Radio communications were sketchy, but they knew the battalion wouldn’t leave them out there for long.
The fire inside the amtrac continued to blaze, the flames feeding on the electric wiring, the aluminum sides melting slowly from the top. Occasionally the insurgents fired another RPG rocket into the trac, an instinctive gesture, saying, See what I’ve done. It pained Sagredo to think of Kolm’s body being pummeled, but there was nothing he could do until help arrived.
Back at Battalion 1/5’s ops center, 1/Lt Glover’s Quick Reaction platoon had guzzled down bottles of Gatorade, stocked up on ammo, and patched the bullet holes in the radiators and hydraulic lines. Glover had six vehicles and thirty-seven Marines ready to go when Maj Farnum told him to mount up and find the missing amtrac.
Supported by four tanks, Glover’s platoon cut west to where the fight had been reported. No one was there, no Marines, no insurgents, and no civilians—only a cluttered, empty street and courtyards with shuttered and locked gates. Upon climbing to a rooftop, a Marine sniper team saw a column of thick black smoke about a kilometer to the southwest. The Marines hopped back into their vehicles and headed that way.
At the next block the street narrowed and the column continued in single file, Marines walking beside every vehicle, Glover’s Humvee in the lead. Within a minute he saw two men in tracksuits with RPGs run out of an alley thirty meters away and fire. Both rockets missed. The Marines shot the men and dragged the bodies out of the way of the tank treads. The tankers buttoned up their hatches, and within seconds the street erupted, men leaning out windows and peeking around walls to shoot for two seconds, then duck away.
“I know you can hear me,” Glover yelled over his radio, set to the frequency of the tank commanders. “I can’t hear a word with all this shooting going on. I’ll guide you. We’re all around you, so don’t fire your main guns.”
It was shortly after six in the evening, and the buildings cast long shadows across the dirty street, making it difficult to spot the insurgents. The Marines were shooting in all directions, the tanks joining in with their coaxial machine guns.
Behind Glover, Cyparski was following in his gun truck. An RPG rocket skidded along the ground and lodged in a rear tire without exploding. The radiator and the gear hub each took two bullets, fragments from the side mirror grazed Cyparski’s face, a case of MREs in the rear compartment was shredded, and the exhaust pipe was peppered. The windshield was not even scratched. Sitting in the front passenger seat with the .50 cal hammering away above his head, Cyparski began to feel he was immune to the bullets cracking by.
Glover’s Humvee was wheezing, having taken two bullets in the windshiel
d and four in the radiator. While the driver, LCpl Williams, popped the hood to inspect the damage, Glover called Sgt Cyparski over to check their position. With bullets snapping by, Williams was stanching leaks in the radiator and Glover was poring over his map. Cyparski doubted the middle of the fire-swept street was the proper place to meet.
“Don’t worry,” Williams said as he slammed down the hood. “It’ll make it.”
While they were stopped, LCpl Didra drove his gun truck forward to resupply Glover with four cans of ammo. Not wanting his truck to be riddled, Didra then reversed at high speed. The rear door flung open, and Sergeant Louie Osborne was catapulted into the street, his helmet, rifle, ammunition, pack, and everything else in the backseat tumbling all over the macadam. The firing ceased momentarily as the insurgents as well as the Marines watched the furious sergeant grab for his rifle and Kevlar, screaming at Didra to come back. The firing resumed as Osborne hopped back in.
Old oil barrels filled with junk stood at the corners of some alleys, and when the tanks rolled by, the insurgents loosed volleys of RPG rockets, using the barrels as their reference markers. The rocket-propelled grenades had no effect on the tanks, which kept rolling despite taking repeated hits. The tanks were knocking down small palm trees and power lines, and the Marines kept a wary eye out for hot wires as they jogged along.
Two blocks to the east, Maj Farnum, the ops officer for 1/5, stood on a roof with the forward air controller, who directed two Air Force F-15s—call sign RO-MO—to make repeated gun runs several blocks to the west. As Glover radioed back the coordinates of his lead trace, Farnum relayed the data to the FAC, who adjusted the next gun run.
It took Glover twenty minutes to reach the intersection where the amtrac was blazing. Sagredo’s Marines, down to two magazines per man, waved them forward, and Glover distributed boxes of ammunition. Sagredo was furious about the repeated RPG hits on the burning trac. Glover called up the tanks, deploying them in a wagon wheel at the intersection. Most of the RPG shots were coming from a gray stone house on the far side of the intersection. Floor by floor, room by room, the main guns of the tanks demolished the house.
After the first dozen tank rounds, the battlefield quieted as the insurgents dispersed. The wounded were placed in the Humvees, and the Marines walked slowly back to their lines, a tank towing the smoldering amtrac and the body of Kevin T. Kolm, a third-generation corporal of Marines.
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As if to confirm that the offensive was about to resume, that night the special operations forces showed up at the regimental ops center, buoying the Marines’ hopes. The spec ops could roam where they wished in country, so when they came to visit, it meant they had heard something was about to break.
Computers had replaced the banks of radios in ops centers, greatly reducing the squawking and hissing noises that gave ulcers to past generations of staff officers. Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for Regimental Combat Team 1, was hunched over his computer screen squinting when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up at a tall soldier in a gray jumpsuit, flanked by a stocky younger man.
“My name is Jamie, and this is Will,” the soldier said politely, with a southern drawl. “The way we see it, there’s going to be a lot of killing soon in that city. We’d like to help organize that.”
Bellon knew “Jamie” was a lieutenant colonel and “Will” was a captain who had played on the West Point football team—they were the leaders of the “Z Squad” that had hunted down Saddam. Now they were after fresh prey, the terrorist Zarqawi. Will inserted his flash stick into the computer and showed Bellon pictures of a street near city hall, then zoomed in on a house with a walled patio and proceeded to walk Bellon through the front door, down a hallway, and into a large room with banks of electrical panels on the walls. There, Will said, is where we need to insert “certain” devices.
“We can’t install your gizmos, Colonel,” Bellon said. “That requires too much finesse. Marines think a hammer is high tech. We’ll electrocute ourselves.”
“Okay, we’ll install them. Just get us in there.”
“I can lay on a diversion and insert you,” Bellon said. “But l have to check with Colonel Toolan about getting you out.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll take three battalions,” Bellon said.
Bellon didn’t like sounding negative in front of such professionals, but hundreds of armed young Iraqi men would rush forward to engage any raid force. The insurgents had taken casualties but not enough to dampen their enthusiasm for a common cause tinged with adventure and danger. Whatever the fissures among the foreign terrorists, the Wahhabi clerics, the Baathist politicians, and the former generals and colonels, they were all determined to resist the Americans. Fallujah was as unified as Berlin in 1944 and Hanoi in 1968. Sending in the Z Squad meant alerting the entire regiment to stand by for a donnybrook.
“We’ll never get permission from higher, sir,” Bellon said. “Once you’re in, we’d have to take the city to get you out.”
“Well, we’re here with our people,” Jamie said. “Mind if we give you a hand?”
Bellon readily agreed. The Z Squad was the military equivalent of the NFL pro-bowl team. Bellon gave Jamie a seat next to him to work out how the Task Force 6-26 snipers, breachers, and assault teams would be spread among the Marine companies.
“We’ll support whatever raid you want,” Bellon assured Jamie, “as soon as the cease-fire is lifted.”
15
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FALLUJAH: A SYMPTOM OF SUCCESS
IN THE FIVE DAYS SINCE GENERAL Abizaid and Ambassador Bremer had declared the unilateral “cease-fire,” the battles along the lines in Fallujah had continued. The fighting had settled into a pattern of skirmishes, flare-ups, and rest periods.
The Coalition had lost the initiative in the fighting as well as in the negotiating. Each day at the Fallujah Liaison Center, two kilometers east of the city, the Iraqis and Americans crowded into a small, bare conference room and sat around a long wooden table, sipping cold bottled water and eating oranges. The Iraqis never tired of talking, issuing long litanies of complaints, making passionate promises of stability, and stoutly denying the presence of foreign fighters. The Fallujans were good people, fighting to protect their city. If the Americans would stop firing and pull out, all would be well. It was never clear, though, who spoke for the fighters. Those with the power of the guns remained shadowy figures, never mentioned by name.
Day after day different groups of negotiators met. Sometimes Ambassador Richard H. Jones represented the CPA. Other times the meetings were at a lower level between Stu Jones and the current mayor of Fallujah, Ibrahim al Juraissey. Flocked by somber sheikhs in fulsome beards and flowing robes, Juraissey, Fallujah’s third mayor in ten months, was full of assurances that all Iraqis wanted peace, and laments over the destruction done by the Marines. MajGen Weber on occasion represented the JTF at the negotiating table. LtGen Conway sometimes attended and often sent a deputy. When he did attend, he chaired the meeting.
At the same time, one hundred kilometers to the southeast, MajGen Dempsey and the 1st Armored Division had trapped the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his followers inside the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Frantic negotiations were under way on that front as well. The Sunni rebels trapped in Fallujah and the Shiite rebels trapped in Najaf desperately needed negotiations to prevent their destruction.
MajGen Mattis usually didn’t attend the interminable meetings. Each day he was out with his troops, stopping here and there for a few minutes, keeping his finger on the pulse of morale and fighting conditions. He knew what the troops were saying: Let us finish the job.
Marines were dying, and the terrorists in Fallujah had beheaded an Italian and were holding hostage five Japanese, three Turks, and an American named Nicholas Berg. The Marines were frozen in place while the insurgents consolidated their position inside the city and escalated their tactics of defiance.
On April 14 Mat
tis stopped by Battalion 3/4’s lines, telling McCoy to expect an order to resume the attack within a day or two. “I don’t forecast this stalemate will go on for long,” he said.
That they would be permitted to finish the fight was the prevailing belief throughout the division. The battalions, caught up in fighting and dying each day, assumed the senior leadership saw the world the way they did. If you played patty-cake with the insurgents, they would cut your hand off. Seize the city first, then talk to them when they were supplicants.
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had grown increasingly uneasy about the “temporary” cease-fire that dragged on without a cutoff date. The longer the delay, the more the political pressures were building to call off the attack altogether. In their view, getting on with the attack was imperative.
The power of a secretary of defense resided in shaping the longer-term direction of the military, not in directing ongoing operations. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin overrode a request for tanks submitted by the commander of U.S. forces in Somalia. Later, an American raid force was trapped in a vicious firefight without tank support and took heavy casualties. Aspin was fired for having imposed his judgment over that of the operational commander.
Concerning Fallujah, Rumsfeld urged Abizaid to take action, but issuing a direct order would be imprudent. Bremer and Abizaid were the field commanders calling the shots. As long they agreed with one another to continue the “cease-fire” and the negotiations, that would be the course pursued.