by Bing West
In the courtyard, Cpl Connors washed out his mouth and wished he could brush his teeth, now filthy with gunpowder. Corporal Camillio Aragon saw a man crawling along the roof and brought him down with one burst. Connors squiggled sideways down the alley behind the house to a small window, stuck his rifle through bars, and got off a long burst, raking the room. Two or three AKs blazed back, and Connors crabbed out of the alley before they could get to the window and shoot down at him.
“It’s a fucking Nazi pillbox,” he said. “Those haj fucks are gonna die.”
He grabbed a one-pound stick of C-4, shoved in a ten-second fuse, and sneaked back to the front door, covered by Lovato. He popped smoke on the time fuse, fired a few rounds from his 9mm pistol, threw the C-4 down the corridor, and ran into the courtyard to his right. With Lovato and two other Marines, he took cover under the overhang of the adjacent house, about thirty feet away. The C-4 blew, but before they could react, an AK muzzle poked out of a hole in the roof next to their heads. Firing blindly, their attacker sprayed the wall a few feet above their heads.
Connors pulled another grenade from his web gear and lobbed it into the hole. It exploded, and a foot encased in a sneaker flew by them.
“All fucking right,” Connors said.
The rest of the platoon had pulled back to a large house about thirty feet to their right, and they were the only Marines in the open. Soon they were taking fire from two directions, poor shooters in houses not twenty feet away, but steadily improving. Spurts of dirt were continuously erupting in the open courtyard separating them from the large house.
“I’ll get some more grenades,” Lovato said, running across the courtyard.
Connors watched the bullets striking behind his friend’s feet and thought, “Boy, if he sees those, he’ll never come back. Lovato collected grenades from the other Marines, who were firing wherever they thought the insurgents were hiding, and popped back out the door. This time he did see the dirt puffs around him and dove into a trench next to the large building.
“You’re screwed, Connors!” Lovato yelled. “I can’t get the grenades to you.”
“They have pins in them, for God’s sake. Pitch them over!” Connors yelled. “How many do you have?”
“Oh. I forgot. I have three. I’ll throw you two.”
“What do you need one for?”
“You don’t like it, go get your own.”
Lovato threw over two grenades, and Connors scooped them up. With the Marines in the house providing heavy fire, Connors and his small group threw their grenades and dashed safely across the courtyard.
Inside the house, SSgt Pillsbury listened to their report.
“We need to get him back,” Connors said.
“I’ll take care of those assholes sniping at you,” Pillsbury said. “You know the situation. You get Desiato.”
Connors looked around. Everybody was edging forward. He whispered to Pillsbury: “All those grenades, C-four. I don’t want the young guys seeing Desiato when this is over. Just the squad leaders.”
“Agreed. The corporals go with Connors,” Pillsbury said. “The rest of you fall in on me. I’ll assign shooting posts.”
Corporals Lovato, Aragon, Donaghy, and Longenecker slipped out of the door behind Connors, moving by hand and arm signals, the roar of the M16s behind them deafening. Aragon slipped first back into the beige house and quickly ducked back out.
“Shit, the body’s gone,” he said. “They’ve taken Desiato.”
Forty minutes had gone by since they had last been inside the house, plenty of time for the defenders to slip down a back alley or tunnel.
Longenecker ducked inside for a second look and came back out.
“We’re fucked,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
It was their worst fear: a repeat of Mogadishu, the body of an American soldier stripped naked and dragged through the streets. Connors felt like vomiting. He called Pillsbury over his handheld, knowing Generals Sattler and Natonski would stop the whole operation and rip Fallujah apart brick by brick, looking for Desiato.
Pillsbury was aghast. “Check again, for God’s sake.”
Corporal Brad Donaghy went in for the third time, creeping farther down the corridor for a better look into the back bedroom. The others pressed behind him.
Donaghy backed up a few feet. “I see Desiato,” he murmured. “They’ve pulled him back to sucker us in. They’ve crossed his legs and put his arms at his sides. I don’t know whether they’re jerking with us or showing him respect.”
Just then an insurgent ran forward into the back room a few feet, fired a burst of AK rounds at an angle down the corridor, and leaped back before the Marines could return fire. Aragon and Longenecker pitched grenades into the room, and the firing stopped.
“Wasn’t Desiato a SAW gunner?” Donaghy said. “Well, I didn’t see any SAW.”
A SAW fired so fast it could cut a man in two.
“We gotta make sure they’re down,” Connors said, sidestepping toward the open bedroom door. Aragon drew his 9mm and followed on Connors’s shoulder. At the edge of the doorway Connors reached down and picked up a piece of cement.
“I’ll throw this in there and see if they shoot,” he said.
He threw the rock and nothing happened.
“I’ll shoot,” Aragon said, reaching over Connors’s shoulder and squeezing the trigger to his pistol.
Nothing happened. Aragon ejected a round, recocked, and reached around to shoot again. Blaaam. The SAW spewed two hundred rounds back at their faces. Connors and Aragon clung to each other and tried to push their heads inside the wall. The stream of bullets, looking like a long red rod of fire, flew by, burning Aragon’s cheek. Connors could feel the hot wind, and chips from the cement wall stung his face.
They both tumbled back along the corridor to the opening to the next-door room, bumping into Lovato, who was furiously pulling the pin on a grenade.
“Frag out!” Lovato yelled.
The grenade struck the doorway and bounced back, hitting Connors on his foot. Connors launched himself into the room, the grenade exploding while he was in the air. He landed hard, the wind knocked out of him, groggy, unable to breathe or see for a few seconds. He tried his arms and legs, then wiggled his hands and toes. All were attached and working. He lay alone in the room, keeping his pistol trained on the doorway, worried that the insurgents next door would rush in. After a while he could hear the voices in his radio ear clip.
“Connors, Connors! My God, I think I killed him!” Lovato was yelling. “Answer me, for God’s sake, answer me!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Connors said over the radio, “but get me the fuck out of this room right now!”
Longenecker threw covering fire down the right-hand side of the corridor as Connors crawled down the left side. After he fired three rounds, Longenecker stopped shooting.
“I’ll supply all the fucking rounds you’ll ever need!” Connors screamed.
Longenecker resumed firing, and Connors stumbled out into the bright sunlight of the courtyard.
Aragon poked around in the garbage and pulled out a broken mirror. Smashing off a corner, he taped it to a stick. “We’ll poke it around a corner and see where they are,” he said.
Connors and Aragon went back down the corridor to try their invention. It fell apart on the first try. So they each threw another grenade into the quiet bedroom and backed out of the corridor.
“Let’s check with the staff sergeant,” Connors said. “We don’t have enough firepower.”
Once inside the large house, the five corporals became uncomfortable from all the stares from their Marines. Aragon asked for a SMAW, and they went up on the roof. The sniper fire had ceased, and Aragon drew aim on the back part of the bedroom, fifty feet away across the courtyard. The rocket struck a little to the left, gouging out a corner of the house but not creating a line of sight into the bedroom. The pillbox remained intact.
Pillsbury called for tank supp
ort, and the corporals went down to keep careful watch, determined that Desiato’s body was going home and nowhere else. When the tank rolled up with the hatches shut, the gunners sprayed the walls and windows with .50 caliber, then backed into the front of the house, trying to collapse it.
Connors ran forward and banged on the side of the tank with his pistol. When the hatch opened, he vigorously shook his head no—they weren’t going to bury Desiato. He couldn’t make himself heard over the tank engine, so in pantomine he showed that he wanted the main gun to fire where he directed. He then calculated the angles, pointed his pistol at the front of the house, and fired two bullets, one high and one low, to the left of the doorway. The tanker nodded and backed off, while the five corporals took cover.
BAANG! The first jarring round slammed through the high side of the house exactly where Connors had shot. BAANG! Again, dead on, this time through the lower side. The pillbox was breached. The five Marines ran up, three to the main door, one to each hole, rifles aimed in. As the dust settled, through both holes they could see into the back bedroom. Donaghy saw movement, yelled Oogaf! (Stop!), and put one round in a man’s head. Having moved down the corridor, Longenecker peeked around the corner as an insurgent darted out to fire. Longenecker dropped to one knee and put three rounds into the man’s chest. Connors, Aragon, and Lovato rushed forward and flooded the room, firing into every corner, emptying magazines into every crumpled figure they could see.
Through the acrid smoke they counted six insurgents sprawled inside the tiny room, one flattened against the back wall under the window, three sagging along the back wall, and two lying on top of one another in a corner. All wore dark shirts and pants and sneakers. They had backpacks, AK magazine vests, money, binoculars, grenades, AKs, and a Dragunov sniper rifle with a telescope. The oldest—the one with the thick black beard who had thrown the grenade at Connors—looked to be in his late forties. The others were in their twenties or late teens, except for the youngest. He was about twelve or thirteen.
The five corporals—in Homer’s words, deadly men in the strong encounters—had finished their mission. They took a stretcher, covered LCpl Desiato with blankets, and carried the body from the pillbox back to the platoon position to await transportation to Massachusetts.
_____
That afternoon the television networks showed the video of the Marine shooting the wounded insurgent inside the mosque. Al Jazeera played the clip every hour. The terrorists had provided a video of the execution of Margaret Hassan, but Al Jazeera refused to air it, knowing that would provoke outrage against the insurgents. Instead, Al Jazeera posted side by side a photo of Hassan and a picture of the Marine aiming his rifle, suggesting they were the twin sides of terror.
_____
Zarqawi and his terrorists had used Fallujah as their sanctuary for six months. The man was the face of evil, cunning and calculating. His suicide bombings had driven the United Nations from Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of Shiites, killed dozens of Americans, and inspired extremists to follow his example. Several times the special forces thought they had him trapped, but he continued to escape.
On November 16, a kilometer east of where Connors had fought, the armored battalion 2-2 had trapped two dozen insurgents in a large walled compound. When the insurgents had held out despite repeated poundings from the Abrams tanks, LtCol Newell, the 2-2 commander, called in air strikes, reducing the complex building by building.
Amid the smoldering wreckage, Newell’s soldiers found underground tunnels, shattered body parts, computers, passports, and letters from Zarqawi. An Arabic sign on one wall read “Al Qaeda Organization.” Inside a factory for making bombs, a Ford Explorer rigged with explosives sat on the assembly line.
The demolishment of the Zarqawi complex signaled the termination of major combat inside the city. Zarqawi confirmed the defeat by posting an audiotape on the Internet, condemning the Sunni clerical establishment for abandoning his cause in Fallujah.
“You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy,” he said.
While his base of operations had been eliminated, Zarqawi himself remained at large.
_____
The battle began on November 7, and the Iraqi government declared the city secured on November 13. But as Malay and the other battalions applied squeegee tactics to a larger and larger area, American casualties continued for weeks.
The rationale for stopping the attack in April was a perception that the damage being done was too great. In the month of April, 150 air strikes had destroyed 75 to 100 buildings. In November the damage was vastly greater. There were 540 air strikes and 14,000 artillery and mortar shells fired, as well as 2,500 tank main gun rounds. Eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s 39,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the November attack 70 Americans were killed and 609 wounded.
During the twenty-month struggle for Fallujah, 151 Americans had died and more than a thousand were wounded.
In late November a high-ranking American general from Baghdad drove through the city, looking carefully to the left and to the right. After several minutes he told the driver to stop. He got out and looked up and down the devastated street, at the drooping telephone poles, gutted storefronts, heaps of concrete, twisted skeletons of burnt-out cars, demolished roofs, and sagging walls.
“Holy shit,” he said.
EPILOGUE
____
BY INCHES, NOT YARDS
____
January to May 2005
IN JANUARY 2005 THE IRAQIS WENT to the polls to elect a National Assembly charged with forming a government and writing a constitution. Over 60 percent of the eligible voters nationwide went to the polls, an impressive turnout and a significant success for the supporters of democracy. In the Sunni areas, though, the turnout was less than 8 percent. Sunni leaders and clerics urged a boycott that was obeyed.
The residents slowly returned to a devastated Fallujah. Marines and Iraqi soldiers patrolled the streets and the periphery. Iraqi males of mili-tary age were fingerprinted, given retina scans, and issued identification cards. The few vehicles allowed in were rigorously searched. There were scant instances of IEDs or gunfire. Fallujah was the safest town in Iraq, albeit the most heavily guarded. Jobs were scarce, as was potable water and electricity. Fallujah was resolved by locking down the city behind barbed wire—not a model for other cities.
In Ramadi, the situation was unchanged from the summer. Battalion 2/4 had been replaced by Battalion 2/5. “Progress is going to be gained by inches, not yards,” the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Randy Newman, said.
In Ramadi there was no identifiable fundamentalist leader like Janabi. Instead, a loose collection of insurgent gangs cajoled and intimidated, controlling the marketplace, the back streets, and the behavior of the people. In response to threats, the entire police force had walked off the job before the January elections. Scarcely anyone voted. In Ramadi, in the third year of the insurgency, it was still predominantly the Americans against the Sunni insurgents operating inside a Sunni city.
As for Fallujah, by the spring of 2005 it had reverted to a nondescript industrial city with no distinguishing characteristics. The insurgency inside the city had been quashed, but at a great price.
The insurgency in Iraq as a whole, however, had not been defeated. Sunni leadership was unrepentant about the past repression of Shiites and unreconciled to being a numerical minority in a democracy. On April 26, 2005, one year after Zembiec’s fierce house-to-house fight at the Jolan cemetery, Gen Myers held a press conference at the Pentagon: “Their [the insurgents’] capability is about where it was a year ago,” he said.
The American forces had held the line against the insurgents, but only the Iraqis themselves could quell the insurrection. The two Iraqi battalions in the November battle in Fallujah had acquitted themselves well, and their American advisers were proud. They were bothered, though, that the Iraqi soldiers going on leave changed into civilian clothes and hitched r
ides in buses and cars. None dared wear a uniform off duty. The insurgents had lost their Sunni sanctuary in Fallujah, but they hadn’t lost their ability to intimidate.
The insurgency would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.
CONCLUSION
____
NO TRUE GLORY
AFTER THE BATTLE IN THE HOUSE from hell, Sgt Byron Norwood’s body was returned to the small town of Pflugerville, Texas. Col Toolan delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Later the Norwoods wrote a letter to President Bush expressing Byron’s pride in serving his country. The president invited them to attend the State of the Union address, during which he singled them out for thanks. The twenty-month battle for Fallujah had reached from the house from hell to the White House.
The singular lesson from Fallujah is clear: when you send our soldiers into battle, let them finish the fight. Ordering the Marines to attack, then calling them off, then dithering, then sending them back in constituted a flawed set of strategic decisions. American soldiers are not political bargaining chips. They fight for one another, for winning the battle, and for their country’s cause.
There were two separate chains of command in Iraq. Ambassador Bremer had authority for determining the country’s policy and the budget, but he did not direct the operations of the American military. General Abizaid had responsibility for security, but he did not direct the development of the Iraqi force to replace the American military. This separation of authority from responsibility constituted a grave systemic flaw.