by Bing West
With the air of a neutral translator, the policeman, Mehlik, explained to the imam that the search was inevitable, not a request. The Marines were in and out in less than two minutes. The Iraqi men stood in a row at a distance, all their mustachioed faces showing anger. Several asked permission to go home to be with their wives and families before the Americans swept through the neighborhood.
At dusk the sweaty Marines stopped, ate their MREs, and slept in the dust in a rocky, furrowed field. They awakened at four to begin another sweep and decided to start with the largest house in the neighborhood, a tasteful brick edifice with wrap-around balconies and black marble on either side of the doorway. As they drove up, the platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Lirette, spotted a man running out the back.
Corporal Carroll, Vesterman’s third squad leader, ran around the house and came back, holding by the elbow a large bearded man in a mud-speckled white dishdasha. Within seconds, screaming women and crying children streamed out of the house and ran to his side. Complaining volubly, the man handed a laminated ID card to the interpreter, Mehlik.
“He is a sheikh,” Mehlik said. “The head man. Very rich.”
“I don’t care,” Lirette said. “He ran when he saw us. He’s hiding something. He’s busted.”
“He ran because he was afraid,” Mehlik said. “You should let him go. His card is signed by an American colonel.”
Cpl Carroll and his squad stood watching the encounter, waiting for orders.
“You don’t tell me nothing. This is my decision,” Lirette said to Mehlik. “This dude’s going back, and that’s the end of it.”
Prior to joining the platoon, Lirette had been a drill instructor. While 2/Lt Vesterman was the tactical leader of the platoon, Lirette, a man of firm views, was the disciplinarian and the voice of enlisted authority. He wasn’t about to have his leadership questioned. Vesterman backed up his platoon sergeant.
The sheikh was flex-cuffed and pulled into a truck, leaving behind the shrieking women. SSgt Lirette and Mehlik walked to the idling Humvees, neither looking at the other.
The platoon moved on to the next neighborhood, which was a slum, with no indoor plumbing, puddles of sewage on the streets, ramshackle huts, and goats and pigs wandering among the run-down houses. In a pile of soiled hay next to a pigsty, the Marines found a long wooden ammunition box stamped in English with a lot number and the date, 1991. A fire team leader said it proved insurgents lived there.
“All it proves is that this farmer is a pack rat,” Lirette said. “I’ve seen lots of them in the States, too.”
Lirette stood in the center of a rubbish-strewn dirt street, directing the squads. A bearded old man wearing a red kaffiyeh and a soiled brown dishdasha hesitantly approached him. They tried to communicate in pantomime, the old man gesturing as if he were giving orders. Exasperated, Lirette shook his head.
Overcoming his pique, Mehlik stepped forward. The old man, he explained, was the local sheikh. He was asking if Lirette would please go through him if he wanted to search. This time Mehlik didn’t tell the staff sergeant what to do. He stated the request and, like the indigent sheikh, waited for a response.
“Carroll, get your squad over here!” Lirette yelled. “Listen up!”
The Marines gathered around, and the sheikh, pleased with the chance to show off, began a long, rambling discourse. At first Mehlik tried to translate every sentence for Lirette, but he soon gave up and ticked off the main points.
“He says the bad people are in Fallujah. Everyone knows that. Maybe a car or two came through here, but that was days ago. The Americans are rich, but Baghdad is keeping all the money. His people are poor. Look at the water. He wants to know when you fix things.”
Warm pita bread was served. Lirette smiled, chewed, listened, and nodded while Vesterman sat in his Humvee tending to the radio. When the sheikh offered to share a chicken meal, Lirette politely declined, a large smile on his face.
“Make up some nice excuse. Tell him we have to go,” he told Mehlik. “We’re not eating their food. They’re poor enough as it is. Thank him for us.” Lirette couldn’t help adding, “See, I’m not so bad at this diplomatic stuff.”
Mehlik shook his head and offered a wry smile.
As the Marines were climbing into the trucks, the HET team drove by, returning the wealthy sheikh to his house, his hands free of the plastic handcuffs.
_____
Colonel Tucker next set his sights on an apartment complex called the Two Towers, twenty kilometers to the east. The towers were home to more than a thousand families of Republican Guard officers—whitewashed three-story apartments with air-conditioning, balconies, windows, satellite TVs, medical care, playgrounds, a beautiful mosque, a park, private schools, and a swimming pool. On the roofs were a maze of radio and television antennas and small satellite dishes. Dominating the skyline were a narrow, graceful blue-domed minaret and a huge, saucer-shaped cement water tower. The Two Towers was a minicity, an enclave of privilege.
The Republican Guard made sure the Two Towers had no military target that would tempt the Americans to strike. During the coalition’s attack in March–April of 2003, not one tank or artillery piece had been permitted inside the compound, not one communications building or headquarters. No incidents occurred near the housing complex, no shootings, no abductions, no IEDs.
Tucker heard from agent reports and communications intercepts that a hundred or more former soldiers knew his task force was on the move and were talking about making a stand at the towers. Tucker doubted they would actually stay and fight, but he deployed prudently.
He sent his light armored vehicles ahead to cut off the roads leading into the towers. Then in a night move Vesterman’s platoon joined the rest of Fox Company in setting up a picket line around the towers. With Carroll’s squad at point, the company snaked its way through farmlands a few hundred meters outside the walls of the towers, listening to music from the apartments and shielding their eyes from the bright streetlights. At four in the morning, Vesterman’s Marines lay shivering in the filthy straw of a farmyard where the thick mud had been churned up by the hooves of water buffalo and pigs. Inside the farmhouse a dog was barking furiously.
While Fox Company kept guard around the towers, Col Tucker met with Lieutenant Colonel Phil Skuta, who commanded Battalion 2/7, for a final adjustment of plans. Tucker ran an efficient, Spartan command post consisting of a few open-sided tents and multiple communications feeds. Through a new marvel called Smart-T, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Vuckovich, the regimental operations officer, had data and voice links with the ops officers at 2/7 and the LAR battalion. They routinely exchanged briefs, intelligence summaries, orders, and map overlays, calling back and forth to iron out details.
Not a shot had been fired from the towers, and enemy chatter over cell phones had ceased. Emissaries were telling Tucker that the Iraqi National Guard were waiting to escort the Marines through town, as though on inspection. It appeared there would be no fight.
“Okay, Phil,” Tucker said. “If there’s not going to be any shooting, let’s adjust.”
Once they modified their plan, Tucker and Skuta drove into the Two Towers. To enter the town, Captain John Kelly, the Echo Company commander, was assigned point. He walked up the clean main street leading to the mosque, looking relaxed and nonbelligerent. Behind him strode hundreds of wary Marines. Small groups of boys and young men gathered on the sidewalks to stare, some of the little ones smiling, the rest showing no emotion. Kelly stopped at the National Guard headquarters next to the large mosque and asked the commander if he had seen any insurgents.
“No terrorists come here,” Lieutenant Razeed Zouad Kadem said. “If they do, we kill them.”
“Where are your records?” Kelly asked.
“No records. We kill the terrorists. We don’t turn them over to anyone.”
Kelly cocked an eyebrow. “You have no weapons.”
“Marines took them. We need them back to kill the terrorists.”<
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Kelly shook his head. With the National Guard deserting across Anbar, the Marines had seized armories before the weapons disappeared. Tired of the lies, Kelly walked on.
The battalion translator, Abu Yusef, remained behind to chat. Abu Yusef was a common Iraqi name, like John Smith. Yusef’s real name was Gilbert Jacob, and he was fifty-seven, from Modesto, California. For the first twenty-seven years of his life he had lived in Iraq. With his distinct Baghdad accent, mustache, stubble beard, and scruffy kaffiyeh, he was plain old Yusef, translating for the stupid Americans for good pay.
“Isn’t it great what the brave martyrs are doing in Fallujah?” Lt Kadem said.
Gilbert agreed and excused himself. He walked over to the hospital to meet LtCol Skuta, passing by a banner that read, “The committee receives the brave heroes of Fallujah.” Skuta was inspecting the clean hospital, which had only a few patients.
“Where are the patients?” Skuta asked.
“Not many get sick here,” a doctor said.
“They moved the wounded irahibeen before we got here,” Gilbert murmured. “They forgot to take down the Welcome Home banner outside.”
Skuta and Gilbert left the hospital and walked to the mosque to meet the imam. Gilbert occasionally translated the graffiti sprayed on the sides of buildings: “That one says ‘Death to Americans.’ The larger one says ‘Yes to Saddam,’ with Saddam scratched out, so now it reads ‘Yes to Islam.’ ”
As they walked, Gilbert listened to the imam on a loudspeaker urging the people to turn their backs on the Americans. Gilbert thought the man was stupid or arrogant or both. The imam, in black turban and full beard, met them in the courtyard and launched into a diatribe. Skuta knew that the imam, Sheikh Shawket, could at any moment call thousands of women and children into the streets for a bloody riot. He wasn’t about to provoke chaos. Instead, he asked the imam to point out what needed fixing in town. The imam agreed, and they strolled along the street, each accomplishing his purpose. The imam was showing that the Americans had to come to him, and Skuta was avoiding a messy confrontation. As the imam stated his demands, Skuta took notes.
Confiding in Abu Yusef, the imam said, “Even if this man gives us equipment, I won’t shake his hand.”
Gilbert heard the hate in his voice and smiled, nodding his head in agreement.
Skuta was adding up the imam’s demands. “This is a lot of stuff,” he said. “I can’t order generators for every apartment building. The sheikh will have to meet with the big colonel. I’ll call and see if he’s available.”
After calling Col Tucker, Skuta escorted the imam to a waiting helicopter. There his hands were flex-cuffed behind his back. The imam Sheikh Shawket was the top name on the high-value target list for Two Towers. For weeks he had urged his followers to join their brothers fighting in Fallujah. The CIA had his sermons, dozens of hours of rants, on tape. Gilbert took satisfaction in watching the trembling imam placed on the helicopter. After ten months in Anbar Province, he was tired of what he called “two-faced sheikhs and imams.”
“The sheikhs know who is attacking us, and they won’t tell us,” he said. “To deceive us makes them heroes. Self-interest can put some Baathists on our side, but not extremists like Shawket. Wahhabis want to kill Americans. It’s that simple. As long as we Americans are alone fighting this war, the Iraqi people will slowly turn against us. Iraq needs a strong Iraqi leader, not an American.”
Tucker told Skuta to pull his battalion out before the population could organize a protest against the imam’s arrest. As Skuta’s battalion left, civilian traffic began moving on the main highway for the first time in weeks, a sure sign the insurgents had pulled back.
_____
There were four major battles in April. The first was Ramadi, provoked by the insurgents. The second was Fallujah. The third was the defeat of Sadr’s militia down south in Najaf. And the fourth was the sweep by Task Force Ripper that clamped a lid on the uprising sweeping like a prairie fire toward Baghdad.
Moving constantly for a week, Tucker’s LAVs and dismounted platoons had swept hundreds of kilometers of highways, roads, and farm fields and searched thousands of houses. It was one thing for four or five young men to jam themselves into an old rattling Datsun, RPGs and AKs akimbo, and drive parallel to a major highway, looking to shoot at a supply truck. The excitement fizzled when they saw Tucker’s juggernaut rolling forward.
17
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LALAFALLUJAH
ON APRIL 9 GEN ABIZAID AND Ambassador Bremer had declared a unilateral twenty-four-hour cease-fire inside Fallujah. Two days later—Easter Sunday—Battalions 1/5 and 3/4, buffeting the insurgents from two directions, sensed they could break the resistance, only to be ordered to halt. When Gen Myers visited Iraq on April 15, the Marines had expected the green light, but again nothing had happened. Every few days the rifle companies were told to get ready to go. Each time the alert proved to be a wishful rumor.
By the third week in April, the three battalions (2/1, 1/5, and 3/4) had settled into the routine of trench warfare, confined to cement houses instead of dirt trenches. Each platoon occupied a house, using the ground floor for storing supplies. The second door was for sleeping; the Marines lay side by side, each with his rucksack at the head of his tiny space, the floors strewn with blankets, comforters, and sleeping bags. They carefully stacked the belongings in the houses in corners, often covering them with sheets to keep off the dust. After First Sergeant William Skiles of Golf Company yelled at one squad when incoming rounds broke some dishes, the china in some houses was stacked out of the line of fire. When not on duty, the Marines lay propped up on their sleeping bags, reading Playboy, Men’s Journal, Sports Illustrated, and Motor Trend. Meals were MREs, with an occasional run to Camp Fallujah to pick up vats of hot meals. The third floor leading to the roof housed the unit leaders, radio operators, and ops center. On the open roof sandbags stacked atop the low walls provided protection for the snipers and machine-gunners.
During the day the Marines moved cautiously. The insurgents had some decent snipers hiding among the maze of rooftops, waiting hour after hour, shooting once or twice a day. Mortar attacks were common, day and night. Sometimes the shells dropped in with disturbing accuracy; other times they missed by a city block. Whenever a Cobra gunship flew over the city, it attracted a fusillade of machine-gun fire and RPG rockets, a few detonating in the air, most exploding on roofs and streets. Every Cobra returned to base with numerous bullet holes.
Fallujah after dark was a cacophony of sounds: dogs yapping and howling, explosions near and far, bursts of small-arms fire, the annoying whine of the Predator UAV and the rumble of Slayer overhead, and high-pitched calls from the minarets to evening prayers. Each night the translators attached to every rifle company—Iraqi Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, and Iraqi Americans—climbed to the roofs and listened to the imams preaching over loudspeakers. The same message was broadcast from most minarets: America is bringing in 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. After a few nights, when asked what the imams were yelling, the translators, bored by the repetition, simply said, “Stealing oil, bringing in Jews, protect Islam. The usual stuff. Same old, same old.”
It was old, and all the more powerful for its historical roots. Islamic Holy Law, or sharia, stressed that the community or state and the religion were inseparable from each other. The religion conferred legitimacy upon the community, while the community protected the religion. In Fallujah the power of the imams was impressive as they nightly exhorted the people, and the longer the siege dragged on, the more the resistance became a community obligation.
LtCol Olson and Capt Zembiec watched through binoculars as boys about ten years old lugged mortar shells across a road. On the roof with them were a Delta Force sniper with a .50 caliber rifle and a Marine corporal with the standard .308 sniper rifle.
They sat in separate sandbagged shelters, peering out through mouse holes. Zembiec called them “cooperative carnivores.” They waited all day, hoping that a grown-up insurgent would grow impatient and walk out to take one of the mortar shells from a boy. None did.
From Zembiec’s roof, through his ten-power sniper scope Corporal Ethan Place could see for a thousand meters down a wide street leading into the Jolan District. Place had been an accomplished hunter before qualifying as a sniper.
“I’ve popped a few at four and five hundred yards, but it’s at six hundred that they get stubborn,” he said. “They look up the street and don’t see anyone. They can’t believe I can see them.”
Place had used a laser range-finder to select aim points on either side of the street at six and eight hundred yards from his position. When a man with a rifle sprinted across the street, he fired at an aim point and the insurgent ran into the bullet. In three weeks Place had shot thirty men.
There was a sniper team on every fourth house held by the Marines, and each day they killed ten or twenty insurgents. Working to the east with Battalion 3/4, Sergeant Sean Crane did not have one long avenue to fire down, as did Cpl Place. Instead, he employed traditional sniper tactics and shifted from spot to spot. The day after Cpl Amaya was killed, Crane staked out the house where the defenders had been burned to death and in the late afternoon saw three Iraqis with AKs sneak around a corner. From three hundred yards away he squeezed off four rounds in fifteen seconds, hitting all three. The next day, as refugees continued to pour out of the city, he noticed insurgents in groups of two and three crossing the streets behind the women and children. They walked casually, AKs close to their sides, trying to blend in. Over the course of six hours Crane shot five before the others learned to sprint, not walk, across streets.