I dwell on that for a while, and ache with vulnerability. Life seems so perilous, so fragile now—I just don’t understand how he can die while I survive. For the first time since we entered the city, I am forced to recognize my own mortality. In doing so, I get a glimpse of what Fitts must have been going through all along.
Does Fitts face these thoughts every night? April 9 must still prey on him in the darkness. I’m sorry I ever ragged him about it.
The mortars fall. The man-eating dogs bay. The night never ends.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Better Homes and Gardens
Fallujah
November 10, 2004
Long before sunrise, we begin our third day in the city. As it got cold last night, the men tore down drapes and used them as blankets. Others wrapped themselves up like burritos in filthy area rugs. We passed the night on guard, shivering, anxious, and irritated.
I grab my gear and head out onto the roof to check on things. Two days into the battle, and already our boys are banged up. Gashes adorn every face. Our hands are skinned raw from climbing through the debris of all these ruined buildings. Between the putrefying corpses, the flies, and feral dogs, Fallujah teems with gut-liquefying bacteria. We can’t avoid the germs and the majority of the platoon has diarrhea. There were times yesterday that men were shitting while they shot. We’re filthy, bone-weary, bruised, and bleeding. Our joints ache, our muscles protest every move.
Today brings a new mission. The Marines have lagged behind us. Ware was right about that. A gap has opened between our right flank and their left one. The insurgents know it is there, and they exploit it to infiltrate our rear. Today, we will countermarch north and thoroughly clear the Askari District while we wait for the Marines to get forward.
Meno briefs us on Captain Sims’s plan for the day. We’ll go house to house, killing anyone we find and destroying the weapons and ammo we left untouched during our original push to Highway 10.
Just before dawn, the entire company gets on line and begins the drive north into yesterday’s stomping grounds. The cold night has left the streets slick with moisture. We slip and slide in our boots as we make our way up the street toward Objective Wolf again. As we countermarch with our Brads and tanks in support, I notice that the dogs follow behind us. When we stop to search a house, they stop as well. I emerge from one building and see a line of them in the street, their tails thumping expectantly on the asphalt. They’re waiting for us to provide them with their next meal.
The smell of death is all around us. Insurgent corpses rot in buildings and alleyways. We are under orders to double tap every insurgent we find, no matter what his condition. Yet some are already covered with moss and mold. They’re so far gone that even the dogs turn away from them. As we start to clear another block of houses, I spot an insurgent lying against a wall. I shoot him, and my bullets pop his bloated stomach like a balloon. The corpse lets out a long farting sound as the gas inside it escapes. I turn to Sucholas and say, “Excuse me. I’ve been fighting that back since Baghdad.”
“If I let one go like that,” Sucholas says, “you would scrape my intestines off the wall.”
Throughout the morning, we kick in so many doors that we lose count. Unlike the previous day, we take a deliberate approach to each dwelling. We assume they are all booby-trapped. We move with caution and do not touch anything unnecessarily. It doesn’t take us long to find all sorts of devilish traps: bras and panties covering booby-trapped hand grenades, cabinets wired with explosives, mortar rounds under sinks, land mines buried in front and backyards. We negotiate all these hazards and find hundreds of weapons in the process. Everything from World War II American M1 Garand rifles to the latest production SVD sniper rifles straight from Russian factories are left for us to find. We even discover an American Army field manual from 1941 with Arabic notes written in the margins.
It takes us hours to clear three blocks. Fitts and I decide that we could make better time if we split up. He takes one side of the street, my squad takes the other. The Brads stay close, ready to support either or both of us.
In one house, I find a beautiful Czech-made SKS Cold War–era rifle. The former owner had put a 75-round drum magazine on it and kept it in pristine condition. I pick it up and decide to keep it as a present to myself. Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. The SKS goes into Chad Ellis’s Bradley for safekeeping.
More houses. More arms caches. We find Iranian FAL rifles, German G3 assault weapons made by Heckler & Koch, shotguns, hunting rifles, and M16s. Fitts has a soldier in his squad named Matthew Woodbury who is a Guns & Ammo magazine savant. He’s read so much on rifles that he can tell the country of origin by the serial number on the weapon.
We improvise ways to blow up all the stuff we find. Sometimes, we blow it in place with C-4, other times we use the Bradleys to crush mortar tubes, rocket launchers, and rifles. It is very dangerous work. The ordnance is unstable, frequently old, and improperly maintained. At one point, we pull about a dozen rocket-propelled grenades out of a house and load them into a car. Since we’re supposed to blow up every automobile we find, this seems like a good way to kill two birds with one stone. We add some mortar shells and stand back. Staff Sergeant Jamie McDaniel’s Brad rolls up. In the turret is his Nigerian-born gunner, Sergeant Olakunle Delalu. He is an electrical engineering graduate of Columbia University who joined the army to get American citizenship. Delalu takes aim at the car and unloads on it with a TOW missile. An eyeblink later, the car vaporizes into a ball of flame.
We move on to the next house and find a truck in the driveway. We load it full of the weapons and ammo we find inside the dwelling, then touch it off with an incendiary grenade. The grenade melts the front part of the truck and sets fire to some nearby barrels of gasoline and oil. Soon, the flames spread and four houses catch fire. In one of them, the fire touches off another weapons cache and the subsequent explosion bounces me into a wall.
Later, I wire a pile of grenades, RPGs, and 107mm rockets up to several bricks of C-4. Living with combat engineers for over eight months, we had learned just about every way to blow explosive ordnance imaginable. Yet after I lit the fuse, nothing happened. I creep back to the house and peer inside. Smoke obscures my view. I start to tremble, and I wonder if this is the cautionary story my young soldiers will tell once they become drill sergeants back home. “This is how my squad leader blew himself up in Fallujah….”
I step inside the house and find that the blast caps had come loose. I carry the ordnance to the doorway and leave it there in a big pile. A Brad shoots it up, but the rockets fail to explode. Pissed off now, I drag the stuff over to a nearby bomb crater. I put the C-4 among the rockets again and ask Cory Brown to shoot the entire mess. His gunner laces the cache with HE shells. Nothing happens. He switches to armor piercing, and as soon as the first round hits the cache, the entire pile explodes. Rocket-propelled grenades suddenly sizzle out of the flames. Several tear into the houses across the street and explode. Others fly off in all directions, which sends my squad diving for cover.
When the explosions cease, I hear screaming. A rocket went right into the house Fitts and his men are clearing across the street. Fitts limps out into the courtyard and shouts at me, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m out of blasting caps for the C-4. Are you guys okay?”
“Dude, you almost killed my fucking squad, man. No, we are not okay.”
I try to apologize, but Fitts is pissed. The work continues.
All day long, we play with fate as we discover and destroy all these enemy stockpiles. It is dangerous work. I feel like a juvenile delinquent turned loose on a devastated city. Somehow, we manage to avoid blowing anyone up, but it isn’t for lack of trying. It is simply luck.
As dusk settles over us, we ache. Backs, arms, calves are tight and sore. We’ve cleared so many houses, it has all blended together into one long day of door-kicking and cache-blowing. We have yet to see a single live insurgent.
&nb
sp; At one point, we stumble across a small cache of about fifteen rocket-propelled grenades. As we debate how to dispose of them, Cantrell calls us on the radio. Lieutenant Iwan needs help. He’s run into contact a few blocks to the south. With Sims tied up with First Platoon about four hundred meters up the road, the platoon sergeant tells us to take care of the RPGs. I want to take them with us, but he nixes that idea. I offer to shoot them off with a launcher. He tells me we don’t have time. We need to get to Iwan.
I give up and head for my track. Just as I get inside, I hear Knapp screaming at Cantrell on the radio. Cantrell’s ordered him to blow the RPGs up with a thermite grenade.
“Sarge,” Knapp rails at me, “I am not letting my guys blow up RPGs that way. It is fucking stupid.”
I get on the radio and tell Cantrell his idea stinks and I won’t risk my men to do it.
“Well, then you do it, hero. I don’t give a fuck who does it. If you don’t have the nuts, make one of your boys do it. Get someone to do it. Just blow these fuckers up.”
I look around in the Bradley. My men are staring at me, waiting for my next move. They’re wondering if I’ll make them do this crazy stunt.
Fuck it.
I take a thermite grenade and walk over to the bag of RPGs. The Brads get on line, ready to roll out to help Iwan as soon as I’m done. The Bradley commanders get low in their turrets. The ramps close. The men are safe inside.
I put the RPGs into a tub sitting amid the ruins of another house. I look back at Cantrell’s Brad and give him the coldest scowl I can manage. “No, Sarge,” I say with a raw and raspy voice, “You see this. You watch what happens.”
I’m feeling like a martyr. I pull out the incendiary grenade and hold it over the rockets. I pull the pin and white phosphorus spews out like a Diet Coke with a Mentos in it. I’ve hardly let go of it when the WP burns through one of the RPGs. The rocket touches off and skates off into the neighborhood. It explodes a short distance away. I start running for the Brads even as more rockets sizzle out of the tub.
I’ve lost my fucking mind.
Ahead, a Brad starts to move down the road. A rocket whirs overhead and blows up in a nearby building. The Brad’s ramp drops. Another explosion rocks the ground. I reach the ramp and jump in. I’m safe with my brotherhood now, but I am fucking pissed.
We roll north. The aches, the exhaustion, the pain, scrapes, and spastic shits mean nothing to us. We are infantry. The killing is all.
As we countermarch north, Lieutenant Iwan leads a search and attack mission against the enemy cell he’s located. The enemy is about a dozen strong. They are aggressive and disciplined. Iwan’s Bradley tries to knock them down with its cannon. In the heat of the fight, the cannon malfunctions, leaving Iwan’s track with only its single coaxial machine gun. The insurgents slip away, disappearing into a block of upscale homes in the battalion’s rear.
One gutsy insurgent with a bandolier of linked machine-gun rounds slung across his chest becomes separated from the rest of his cell. He takes refuge in a house about four hundred meters north of his buddies. Iwan calls in the battalion scout platoon to dig him out of the house. Three scouts go in through the front door.
As they open the door they are met by a torrent of bullets meted out by a crew-served machine gun. Staff Sergeant Jason Laser goes down, hit in the chest. A second one, Sergeant Andy Karnes, tries to help his wounded comrade, but he gets shot in the side. The machine gunner is unrelenting. A third scout suffers a grazing wound to the stomach.
Sergeant J. C. Matteson spots another insurgent who is about to enter the back door to the house. From the turret of a Humvee, Matteson blows the enemy to bits with a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher.
Captain Sims reaches the scene just as the insurgent machine gunner starts shouting out the window, “Fuck America!” He moves from room to room in the house to avoid all the fire Sims directs on him.
When bullets don’t work, Sims calls up a bulldozer. As it rumbles toward the house, the insurgent peppers it with bullets. Though surrounded by the better part of a mech infantry company, this man will not give up.
While Sims handles the lone gunman, Iwan and Lieutenant Meno huddle up outside a house our platoon has just cleared half a kilometer away. Iwan tells Meno that tracking down the rest of the cell will be our job. If the other guys are half as committed as the one Sims faces, it’ll be one hell of a fight.
Meno outlines a plan. He wants the platoon’s Bradleys to cordon off the neighborhood. With a track on every corner, and a tank in support, we will search each house one by one.
Iwan approves the plan, climbs into his Bradley, and moves south to help set up the cordon.
House by house, we start to clear the block. We kick in doors, sweep through rooms, and try to maintain our situational awareness. Despite the threat, it is hard not to get a little complacent from the repetition. We’ve cleared too many buildings since starting out this morning.
In one house, we find rockets and ammunition. In another, we stumble across a cache of American helmets and old Kevlar flak jackets.
The big Abrams tanks clank forward and roar and rumble, leaving buildings in flaming ruins. We follow in their paths, peering into the hollowed, burning shells. Smoke coils out over the rooftops. We’re destroying the best neighborhood in town.
I watch a Bradley and an Abrams open up on a house. A 120mm round explodes inside while the Bradley’s cannon shells streak through the wreckage, eventually falling hundreds of meters away.
The area around us suddenly erupts with grenades and machine-gun fire. Those shells landed near some Marines, who have finally reached our area. It is about time they get online with us.
Then again, it is a mixed blessing to have them around. They don’t take kindly to the 25mm incoming. Their response sends us diving for cover behind our tracks as .50-caliber machine-gun fire stitches across our street. Rodriguez gets on the radio. The Marines are not apologetic. We are told that they will return any and all incoming fire, friendly or otherwise.
Not long after, the Marines send a barrage of parachute flares and star clusters over our heads. They are supposed to be moving south parallel to us, on a line some three hundred meters to the west. The coordination needs work. They send up flares at the slightest hint of contact and bathe our neighborhood in brilliant white light. This is the last thing we want. We’re fine operating in the dark; we all have night-vision goggles. But the Marines issue them only to their leadership. We own the night; the Marines rent it.
We move to another house and prepare to clear it. A star shell bursts overhead, leaving us perfectly backlit for the enemy. The sudden bloom of light washes out our night vision. For a critical moment, we’re exposed and blind. And then they send us scrambling as they commence shooting at our movement underneath their flares. Fucking Marines.
As much as I love to point out their Semper Fi-diocy, I am awed by their cohesive fire. When one Marine fires, so does his entire platoon. Their fire superiority is humbling, as I grab earth to avoid its death. Roll-playing for even two minutes as an insurgent is too long against a platoon or company of Marines. No matter what, you gotta respect that.
We continue on to the next house as the friendly star-shell barrage continues. When we get inside, my squad finds piles of IVs, gauze, and fluid bags. We press on to the next house. This one holds two sets of desert GI boots tucked away in one room. Some of the men find eight complete Iraqi National Guard uniforms.
Four hours later, we are beyond exhausted. I look over at Fitts. His limp is more pronounced.
Knapp spots something ahead in the street. Through the darkness, we see a man lying in the road, a Russian machine gun next to him. Knapp and I open fire. I hit him twice in the back and hear his lungs expel a sudden rush of air. Was it a death rattle? I’m not sure. Knapp puts a round right through his head, and that finishes the job.
We approach the insurgent. He lies on his stomach in a thick pool of his own blood. He must have been hit by
a cannon shell from a passing Bradley as he hid inside one of the nearby houses. In his dying moments, he crawled into the street, still dragging his weapon and ammunition. Belts of 7.62mm rounds lie accordioned around him.
It is our job to make sure each insurgent is really dead and not just playing possum. We’re supposed to kick apart their legs, then give them a hard boot in the crotch. If they don’t flinch, they’re dead, and we can search them for booby traps and intel.
I try to kick this insurgent’s legs apart, but one is almost entirely gone and the other one is little more than tattered pink flesh and gore. When I try to kick his balls, my boot sinks into his leg cavity. It dawns on me that the guy has no nut sack left.
“Dude,” I wonder aloud, “What do you do when the guy has no legs? That wasn’t covered in training.”
I draw my knife and poke tentatively at his back. I probably should have just buried the blade in him, but I’ve never used a knife in combat before, and I’m not sure how to do it. I poke at him a couple more times, embarrassed by my lack of skill.
Lawson pulls out a larger knife and slams it home into the guy’s back. He looks over at me shaking his head.
“What a day, huh?”
It is obvious that this insurgent is dead. I lift his head up, and Knapp sweeps underneath him. “Clear,” he says, and I let the dead man sag back to the pavement. We spike his weapon and leave him for the dogs.
What a day? No shit. Happy birthday.
We continue down the street. Rubble clogs the way, and we struggle through blocks of masonry, bricks, and chunks of concrete that the tracks have left in their wake. I hear a curse. Ruiz has fallen and turned his ankle. It starts to swell inside his boot.
We move inside a nearby house so our medic can treat Ruiz. Meanwhile, the men break out their MREs and wolf down a few bites. It is the first meal we’ve eaten all day. Some of the men grab quick catnaps. Fitts and I catch hell from Cantrell, who is in a track on the left side of the cordon. He badgers us over the radio for situation reports. It is deeply irritating. We lie and tell him we’re still clearing houses.
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