by Bing West
During the next six hours, the platoon searched fifty-four houses without a fight. They found a handful of civilians in six houses and all waved white flags when they heard the platoon approaching. With scant civilians in the city, the usual tactic was to throw grenades over the courtyard wall, blow the lock on the metal gate, rush a four-man fire team into the courtyard, and shout and bang on the windows and door to the house to draw fire. There weren’t enough explosives to blast an entrance in the side of thousands of buildings. If nothing happened, then the most risky step followed: smashing through the doors and searching room by room down narrow, gloomy corridors.
Most of the insurgents, though, preferred to fight in groups, firing from inside and around buildings then falling back. Time and again an insurgent running across a street would be hit and fall. Almost invariably his comrades would dash out to drag away his body, a feat that impressed the Marines.
_____
Natonski had assigned an Iraqi battalion of about four hundred soldiers to each regiment. Not trained for urban combat, they moved behind the lead American units. During the night of November 8, the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Intervention Force, which had mutinied on the way to Fallujah in April, trailed behind 2-2 and moved into a schoolhouse in the northeastern section of the city. The 2nd Battalion was assisted by a team of six American advisers.
As the sun came up, the schoolhouse came under fire from all directions from several groups of insurgents, some only a few doors away. Crouching in the street, Army Staff Sergeant Trevor Candellin peered through the twenty-four-power sniper scope he had personally bought and mounted on his M4 carbine. Three hundred meters down the street he saw a man in a black tracksuit with a red bandanna around his neck shooting RPGs up at an angle, so that they would arc down like mortar shells. Resting his M4 on the hood of a Humvee, Candellin aimed in and shot his first insurgent.
Excited, he turned to Army Staff Sergeant Todd Cornell, hoping to be congratulated. Instead, Cornell was peering through the window of the house next to them, pointing to a stack of Iraqi uniforms and boots. They had stumbled onto a safe house where the insurgents intended to change into the uniforms of National Guard soldiers and infiltrate the American lines. While Candellin ran across the street to inform the senior adviser, Army Major Fred Miller, Cornell moved up the block with Iraqi Lieutenant Hida and five jundis, the advisers’ term for the Iraqi soldiers. Coming under fire from a yellow house in the middle of the block, the platoon climbed to the roof of the house next door and jumped over a small wall onto the yellow house. Below them three insurgents with rifles ran out the front door and were shot down.
In the center of the gravel roof there was a small covered entrance to a stairwell. A dozen cement steps led down to a landing. From there another half-dozen steps set at a right angle led down to the dark, unfinished ground floor. Hearing men yelling in Arabic, Cornell rolled a grenade down the steps.
A few seconds after the grenade went off, firing erupted from downstairs and from adjoining roofs. As he scrambled for cover, Cornell tripped and fell backward, his 9mm pistol flying from his hand. The Iraqi soldiers had ducked behind a small wall, and Cornell lay on his side near the entrance to the stairwell, trying to catch his breath and figure out his next move. Suddenly an Iraqi man appeared in the doorway three feet away, clutching an AK. Seeing Cornell’s pistol in front of him, he snatched it up as Cornell lurched forward. Before the Iraqi soldiers could do anything, the man shot Cornell in the face, killing him instantly. Lieutenant Hida fired back with his AK, and the man toppled down the stairs.
Not knowing what to do next, the six Iraqi soldiers hopped over to the next roof, ran down the outside stairs, and retreated to the schoolhouse half a block away. The fight around the schoolhouse was still going on, and Candellin was ducking from one spot to another, aiming in, shooting, and moving. The Iraqi soldiers and their lieutenant kept trying to get his attention, and he kept gesturing at them to take up firing positions. Finally Lt Hida sliced a finger across his neck, saying, “Army, army,” and shaking his head. Candellin frantically looked around the schoolyard for Cornell. Not seeing him, he turned back to Hida, who pointed down the block at the yellow house.
Candellin grabbed Miller and they ran up the street, gesturing at the Iraqi soldiers to follow. When none did, they posted up on both sides of the front door of the yellow house and burst in firing. Hearing them approach, the insurgents had run up the stairs leading to the roof. They were now firing down the stairwell.
Standing directly beneath the stairs and looking at the body of an insurgent crumbled on the landing, with bullets zinging around, Miller turned to Candellin. “I’ll suppress,” he said. “You throw your grenade up there.”
“I’m not stepping out and getting shot. Besides, it’ll bounce back down. Here,” Candellin said, handing the grenade to his boss, “you throw it.”
Conceding the point, Miller agreed that throwing the grenade was a dumb idea. Instead, he radioed for help. Led by Lt Hida, eight Iraqi soldiers ran from the schoolhouse, climbed to the top of a nearby house, and began firing at the insurgents on the roof above the two advisers. Battalion 2/2 sent a tank to help them. As it rumbled up the street, three insurgents burst out of the shrubbery and were cut down. Taking fire from all directions, the insurgents pulled back. Together, the advisers and the Iraqi soldiers carried SSgt Cornell’s body back to the schoolhouse.
_____
All day the infantry had dog-trotted across the wide streets and poked down the side alleys, weighted down by seventy pounds of armor and ammo. The night brought little rest for the keyed-up grunts. Most hadn’t slept for forty hours, and once they were set in platoon defenses inside large houses, the night chill crept into their sweat-soaked cammies. The seven-tons and amtracs pulled up, dropping off food and ammo. Some grabbed the right packs and unrolled their sleeping bags; others scrounged around the houses for blankets and cushions. Most sat shivering in the cold as the insurgents continued to lob mortars and RPGs in unpredictable directions. From the mosques came the usual incessant chants and exhortations for glorious death. The washing-machine racket of Basher echoed up and down the streets, punctuated by successive blasts.
Inspired by the musical shenanigans of Byrne and McCoy last April (the Lalafallujah), the army psyops crews roamed around in their Humvees, filling the streets with the sounds of men and women screaming, or cats fighting, or Guns ’n’ Roses. The top chiller was the deep, sinister laugh of the monster in the movie Predator, played in low bass at one hundred decibels, echoing off the pavement. After one round of demonic laughter, the fire team on outpost half a block to the front of Lima Company, 3/1, called the company commander, Captain Brian Heatherman. “Sharkman six, that’s not funny anymore. You keep that shit up, and we’re coming back in.” Heatherman sent his executive officer out to reassure them.
After midnight the battlefield quieted. The insurgents, out of adrena-line, dispersed to their safe houses to sleep. Both sides were exhausted. Even with their night-vision goggles, the Marines were loath to search room by room in the dark, because NVGs deprived them of depth perception, resulting in tripping over stairs and shooting at the wrong angle into rooms.
Urban fighting tended to be a daylight affair.
_____
On the morning of November 10, the 229th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, Natonski knew he had the insurgents reeling. All battalions continued to attack south.
Of the ten battalions in the fight, 3/5 was the only one with the mission of clearing building by building from the first day. Lieutenant Colonel Pat Malay, commanding 3/5, called his battalion’s tactic the “squeegee” effect. The other battalions had pushed quickly through, in effect rubbing the dirtiest spots off the window. It was up to 3/5 to apply a thorough wiping.
Malay set the rhythm his battalion would follow for the next ten days. He placed three companies abreast with two tanks per company on the main streets, slightly in advance. Humvees and amtracs used the narrower
side streets, moving behind. As light came up, the insurgents stirred and bullets snapped over the roof where Malay and his small staff crouched, watching the companies deploy. Volleys of artillery shells and mortar rounds were called against distant intersections and buildings to drive the insurgents off the streets and roofs.
Each platoon was assigned two blocks, a squad working each side of the first block, while the third squad took half of the second. Each set of houses inside a courtyard wall took about twenty minutes to clear, with one fire team staying outside to provide cover while two others entered and searched. Upon receiving fire from a house, the line held up while tanks moved forward, sending shell after shell into the house. When the AK fire stopped after ten or twenty shells had pierced the building, the Marines advanced, pulled out the crushed bodies, and walked on.
By noon, after the battalion had found seven large caches of munitions, Kilo Company came under sustained fire from an apartment, with muzzle flashes winking in a dozen windows. The company responded with a mortar barrage to clear the roofs, joined by direct tank fire against the windows. The insurgents fell back to a two-story house, where they called out, “Mister, mister, help us! Family! Family!” The Marines rolled up the tanks and flattened the building.
By one in the afternoon 3/5 was pushing through an area along the river called the Palm Grove. Major Bellon had provided RCT 1 with a photomap of Fallujah showing 108 target houses. The Palm Grove was among his top ten. One of the ringleaders in the mutilations of the four American contractors owned a large house in the Grove, as did two brothers known as insurgent leaders.
Corporal Michael Hibbert was leading his squad toward an opening in the wall of what appeared to be a warehouse. Sniper fire had stopped ten minutes earlier, and Hibbert suspected the insurgents had fled into the bulrushes along the riverbank. In the drainage ditch surrounding the wall, Hibbert saw three artillery shells lying on their sides, rigged to wires. After engineers cut the wires, Hibbert blew a hole in the side of the building and his squad swarmed into a large bay, loaded with RPGs and 122mm rockets.
In a smaller side room with a safe against the wall, Hibbert heard a noise. The Marines dragged the safe aside and followed a hidden passageway into a fetid crawl space, where an Iraqi was chained hand and foot. He was the taxi driver for two French journalists captured in August. The journalists had protested that they and their government opposed the war. After negotiating with the French government, the terrorists had taken the journalists out of Fallujah to be eventually released. They had chained the taxi driver and left him to starve to death.
Hibbert continued his search. The third door he kicked in led to a film studio with the green and black flag of Zarqawi’s terrorist gang, Al Ansar, on the wall and black blood on the floor where Nicholas Berg had been decapitated in May. On a table was a glass of water with ice in it. In the next room were two computers, klieg lights, a CD burner, two video cameras, VHS tapes, a television, a VCR, and a recording schedule typed in English. The schedule included what time a prisoner was to be brought out and washed up, when his confession had to be taped, when the execution should be done, how long it would take to digitize the video and make copies, and when to leave Fallujah in order to deliver the tape to the Al Jazeera studio in Baghdad to be shown on prime time.
Late in the day Battalion 3/5 made another discovery at Jolan Park, a kilometer east of where Berg had been beheaded. The park was a large rectangle of grass flanked by a mosque and a row of middle-class houses. In the center of the park, untouched by any shells or explosions, were a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round with “United States” painted on the center pole in large English letters, embossed with blue and red stars. The corner house on the street next to the mosque looked like an average, modest two-floor dwelling. But when his troops called LtCol Malay over to look inside, the first thing that struck him was the stench of death. Inside the foyer the floor was hardened mud, with a narrow, dark corridor leading back to a rusty cell door. Inside a man in a tan, tattered dishdasha lay with his shriveled head thrust back in a paroxym of agony. Both his legs had been chopped off above the knees. Behind him a second cell door led to a room with another legless corpse twisted in agony, clearly visible in the light flooding through the cell window. The window faced the city street, and through the flimsy glass the screams had echoed through the park.
_____
At the eastern end of the city, Battalion 1/3 was pushing through the section where Battalion 3/4 and Killer McCoy had fought in April. The Marines came under heavy fire from the same house where Cpl Amaya had been killed. Corporal Peter Mason was hit by twelve bullets and knocked off his feet. But his armored vest saved him and he scrambled outside the courtyard. The Marines then backed off and pulverized the house. Insurgents streamed out the rear, where the 25mm fire from an LAV trapped them against a wall. Many were high on drugs. One man hobbled down the street on one leg, the other having been blown off. He made it half a block before collapsing. Over twenty-five bodies were found in the ruins, the largest number killed in a single house in the Fallujah battle.
By dusk on November 10, Battalion 1/3 had seized the Mujahereen Mosque north of Fran and halted to observe the Marine Corps birthday, an annual ritual observed at thousands of balls around the world. In a formal service steeped in tradition, Sergeant Major Michael Berg had the army psyops Humvees play the Marine Corps hymn over their loudspeakers while he cut a slice of pound cake from an MRE and presented it to the youngest Marine. As he did so, the insurgents fired a brace of RPGs.
“Shut those bastards up!” Berg yelled.
Over two hundred rifles and machine guns blazed away for several seconds.
“Cease fire!” Berg yelled.
The battlefield was silent.
“That’s more like it,” Berg said. “Continue with the ceremony.”
_____
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Ramos, 1/3’s battalion commander, had assigned a company from the 5th Iraqi Battalion to fight alongside each of 1/3’s rifle companies. Led by their American advisers and company-grade officers, the Iraqi soldiers took the lead in searching the mosques, where leaflets showed a Marine and a tank engulfed in flames, with the Arabic words “Fallujah—April turning point victory over the Americans.”
After dark on the tenth, the insurgents were lobbing RPG rounds and probing for weak spots in the Iraqi battalion’s defenses. The 2nd Company was holding a three-story building, but the soldiers were eating instead of standing guard. The frustrated company adviser, Master Sergeant Andreas Elesky, found himself alone on the roof, dropping grenades onto small groups of insurgents who were darting down a cramped alleyway, shooting at the roof and windows. Having gone sixty hours without sleep, Elesky found himself thinking, What if I doze off?
An army Bradley roared by on the main road, gun chattering. A moment later a Humvee pulled up, and seconds later Major Andrew Milburn, sent from Quantico, Virginia, to analyze “lessons learned,” was kneeling next to Elesky. “Want an assistant?” Milburn said.
“Bring your own grenades?” Elesky asked.
“Six, plus fresh batteries and strobes to fix our pos,” Milburn said. “In case we want to call in something a bit heavier.”
Back at MEF headquarters, the word had gotten out that the advisers were understaffed. To lend a hand, staff officers from the MEF had slipped forward. Out on the lines, no one questioned majors who simply appeared and quietly obeyed the directions of sergeants.
26
____
PHASE LINE HENRY
BY NOVEMBER 11 THE NORTHERN HALF of Fallujah had fallen days ahead of schedule, and Col Tucker, commanding RCT 7, had sent Lieutenant Colonel Peter Newell’s armored battalion, 2-2, south into the industrial sector and Queens. Hundreds of insurgents were hiding from the armor amid the thousands of houses. So Tucker ordered Battalion 1/8, holding the Government Center, to root them out. Lieutenant Colonel Gary Brandl, commanding the battalion, designated Alpha Company to lead off. All day on
the tenth the company had exchanged fire with snipers and bands of gunmen hidden in two large apartment buildings one hundred meters away on the south side of Highway 10.
For four hours Corporal Timothy Connors and his squad from 2nd Platoon had been firing from prone positions along the lip of the roof on the mayor’s office. There was a low retaining wall in front of them, and they wiggled from spot to spot, popping up, aiming in with their ACOGs, snapping off a burst at a window in an apartment building, and crawling away as a return hail of bullets peppered the wall. Occasionally they yelled to one another “RPG!” and sneaked a look at the red, spiraling glow spinning toward them. Not one Marine had been hit, and they were giggling and laughing at the insanity of knowing death was zipping and cracking by or exploding against the concrete to their front. Once Connors stole a glance and was sprayed by chips of cement as bullets hit the wall under his chin.
The platoon commander, Lieutenant Ryan Hunt, called for air to strike the apartment across the street. The sixty-pound hatch on an amtrac had slammed down earlier that day on Hunt’s fingers, almost severing them. But he refused to leave the battle. After the forward air controller called in the target, the Marines huddled along the wall to watch. They saw the plane pass overhead and the bomb release. Cool. Then the bomb plunged toward them. Connors heard Hunt screaming “Abort! Abort!” and turned his head to see the lieutenant gripping the handset, blood spurting from white bone, all flesh torn away. Hunt seemed oblivious to the pain.