House to House

by David Bellavia

  A half hour shy of midnight, we move out again. We’re weary and our pace lags. The break has flushed the adrenaline out of our systems. The rebound from a combat-induced adrenaline rush is almost as bad as a hangover.

  We cross the street and reach a nine-foot wall untouched by bullets or Bradleys. Behind it is a house also left unscathed. The gate, which is just wide enough for a car, stands partly open. The platoon files through it and enters an open courtyard. Four decorative brick columns, each about a man and a half in width, dot the courtyard. They are the only cover between the front door and the nine-foot wall.

  I enter behind Fitts and his squad. Some rich Ba’athist must have owned this house. It is square-shaped, with a pillboxlike second story that opens onto a balcony overlooking the garden. The front door is to our left. Two windows into a living room take up the center, flanked by a barred window into a kitchen at the far right.

  To the right is a beautifully landscaped garden with palm and date trees. A series of hedges winds around their trunks. It’s a pretty nice pad, ripe for Better Homes and Gardens: Fallujah Edition. The front door is ornate. We’ve been kicking in doors all over Iraq since February; I’ve long since become a door connoisseur. I can tell which ones are flimsy, which ones are thick, and which ones are so secure they will require our man-beast, Sergeant Hall, to demolish.

  This door is a composite of sheet metal and steel with a beautiful glass partition inlaid in the middle. I am surprised that a thing of such beauty could survive the carnage we’ve delivered to the neighborhood.

  In a neighborhood that values siege-warfare architecture, whoever built this place knew what he was doing. It’s a micro-fortress, a perfect summer getaway for a drug cartel. It’s going to be a bitch to clear.

  We secure the courtyard. Fitts moves to the front door. I follow and take up a position next to a window. I look inside and see nothing unusual. My instincts aren’t tingling, which leads me to believe this place is empty like all the other ones on the block. The men aren’t overly concerned either. They spread out in the courtyard and wait for orders.

  Fitts stands by the door and waits for his squad to join him. When nobody follows, he gets riled. He waits by the door, and I know he’s starting to boil. His mouth bulges with a huge wad of Copenhagen that he cadged off somebody earlier in the evening.

  He spits a wad of chaw, then bellows in a tired and horse rasp, “I don’t care what squad you’re in, get in the motherfucking stack ASAP.”

  Behind us, the men stir. Misa reaches the door first. The tracer fragment in his cheek has festered overnight and now looks like a giant, burned and bloody boil. It’s still oozing black liquid.

  Ohle follows Misa and lines up behind him, single file. The Fallujah grime has not been kind to his face either. Beyond the cuts we all have, Ohle’s got whiteheads poking through the dirt encrusted on his face. Metcalf gets behind Ohle. Ruiz limps up to the door with Maxfield. Fitts now has his stack. He moves to the rear of it so he can watch the men as they go inside. Misa will lead the way.

  Hall prepares to kick in the door, but finds it unlocked. Disappointed, he opens it the old-fashioned way, and Misa charges inside, with the rest of the men still in single file, close behind. Seconds later, most of the platoon, minus Lawson’s weapons squad and Lieutenant Meno, follows in the entry team’s wake.

  I stay outside and keep my eyes on the adjoining living room through a window. This way, I can get eyes on the rooms the rest of the platoon is about to clear. If an enemy is lurking inside, I can put rounds into the bad guys before the men are exposed.

  Through the window, I can see the platoon’s SureFire lights bouncing off the walls and ceilings as the men start clearing the room. They don’t need me covering now, so I move toward the front door to join up with them.

  Inside the house, Misa and Ohle lead the entry team through a foyer and into the living room. There’s a closed door on the far wall. Ohle brazenly throws it open.

  An instant later, red tracers stripe the darkness around Ohle. He doesn’t flinch at the surprise gunfire. Instead, he swings his SAW to his shoulder, flips the safety off, and unloads a burst. It’s no use. Unable to see the enemy, Ohle is going to die if he stays in that doorway. Misa grabs him from behind and pulls him out of the line of fire. Ohle’s finger remains tight on the trigger, and his SAW unleashes a rainbow of tracers into the next room and up into the ceiling of the living room as he spins out of balance in Misa’s grasp.

  Jumping back to the window I can see Ohle’s bullets arcing into the ceiling of the living room. They ricochet crazily in all directions. More tracers bounce around, fired by the insurgents in the next room. Unsure of what’s going on, I run through the front door. Just as I get inside, a rash of gunfire tears into the foyer. Overhead, a chandelier explodes in a shower of glass and metal. I throw myself against the wall between the foyer and the living room.

  I’m totally confused. I assume Fitts and his men are reconning by fire, but it’s gotten a little out of control. Our own tracers are boomeranging around our heads, sending chips of plaster, brick, and concrete spinning through the room.

  “Cease fucking fire! What are you doing?” I yell. My voice is rough and sandpapery. After all the excitement of the mosque fight the day before, my vocal chords are shot. My words come rasping out. I sound like Demi Moore.

  “CEASE FUCKING FIRE,” Sergeant Hall echoes my command.

  A hoarse voice rises from the living room, “NO! Don’t cease fire! Continue to fucking fire!”

  “They’re shooting at us,” Ohle yells back. He is unable to move.

  The shooting continues. Tracers tic-tac-toe through the foyer and living room, zipping off the walls, ceiling, and cement floor. We’re in a beehive.

  I need to get a handle on the situation. I shout again, “Cease fucking fire! What are we shooting at?”

  I look through the door leading into the living room and see the platoon pinned against one wall. Ohle, Misa, Fitts, and the rest of the men are bleeding from dozens of wounds caused by the flying chunks of concrete and masonry. What is going on?

  Fitts sees me. “Hey, Bell,” he says, “Why don’t you tell the fuckers on the other side of this wall to cease fire?”

  Oh my God. We’re in contact. It dawns on me just how precarious our position is now. Fitts watches the light go on in my head and nods at me. “Yeah, bro.”

  The bulk of our two squads are trapped inside the living room. The insurgents are dug into positions in a central stairwell, just inside one door off the foyer and with a clear shot through another door to the living room, the door that Ohle opened. They can shoot through that doorway and kill anyone making a run for the foyer, since our guys are behind the far wall of the living room. They have a bowling-alley-wide field of fire into the living room, and a pie-shaped one into the foyer. They have plenty of ammunition and are not afraid to use it.

  I peek through the foyer doorway to their stairwell and make out two figures. They’re hunkered down behind a pair of three-foot-high concrete Jersey barriers with little more than their heads and shoulders exposed. They’ve created a veritable bunker smack in the middle of the house. One of the insurgents holds an AK-47 against each shoulder with the barrels resting on one barrier. The other mans a Russian belt-fed PKM machine gun perched atop the other barrier.

  How on earth did they get those concrete barriers in there? They must weigh a half ton each. Eight men would be hard pressed to lift them.

  The house is a prepared kill zone. They wanted us to clear it, and just waited to spring an ambush.

  “Watch the roof, watch the fucking roof!” Knapp yells from outside in the courtyard.

  I lean back into the foyer just as the wall explodes with sparks. Bullets crack and whine all around us again. Metcalf buckles and falls to the floor. “I’m hit! Oh fuck, I’m hit!” he screams, clutching his stomach.

  From below the stairwell comes laughter, and mockery in broken English. “Ohhhh, I’m heeet!” one m
imics. The comedian and his pal cackle. At the sound of their jeering, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Every man in the platoon reacts the same way. Eyes are saucers now. Panic is not far away.

  Metcalf clutches his hands to his stomach. A bullet grazed him under his body armor. The others aren’t much better off. Hands are lacerated; knuckles are slick with grime and blood.

  The two under the stairs open up again. The living room and foyer fill with dancing tracers. They sizzle and hiss and start little blazes in piles of refuse and paper lying on the floor in both rooms. The living-room wall, which provides our only cover from the stairwell bunker, starts to give way. The automatic fire blows bricks clear out of it. Other bricks jut out, still intact but knocked from their original position by the enemy bullets.

  Three bricks pop out of the wall directly over Fitts’s head. A fissure furrows up the wall from floor to ceiling. We don’t have much time. When the wall gives way, my platoon will face a massacre.

  Outside, machine gunner Jamison McDaniel lies prone in the courtyard. He is totally exposed to whomever is shooting out of the kitchen window. Bullets spark all around him. But the kid is an iceberg. Ignoring the bullets, he shoulders his 240 and tears off a blistering burst of return fire. It is an incongruous sight; McDaniel is nineteen but could pass as a middle schooler. The baby-faced gunner is just rocking on the 240. More bullets gouge the ground around him, but he stays on the trigger. His display of courage swells my heart. In the chaos of battle, the true strength of the human spirit will sometimes emerge. This is one of those moments.

  In this duel of machine guns, hundreds of bullets fly back and forth. Sergeant Jose Rodriguez, Meno’s radio guy, gets hit. He goes down and cries for help. Lieutenant Meno grabs him by the arm and flings him into an outhouse at the back of the courtyard. For the moment, he is out of the fight.

  McDaniel’s big machine gun has thoroughly redecorated the kitchen. It’s a pockmarked ruin. The counterfire proves too much for the insurgents, who break contact. Unaware he’s driven off the threat, McDaniel continues to hammer away. His bullets tear the cabinets apart, destroying dishes and glass. Some hit the common wall with the living room, knocking even more bricks loose. We can’t get him to stop.

  From under the stairwell, the insurgents unleash a fresh volley at us. The living room is full of angry tracers again. Through the gloom I see Fitts. We’re on opposite sides of the enemy’s field of fire. He’s trapped. I’m not. Partially lit by the flickering fires burning around the room, he examines the bricks sticking out of the wall above his head. He lets out a frustrated sigh. Then he rolls his eyes right and locks on me.

  “Hey, Bell,” he says, “Bro, I need you. I need you in a bad way.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “The Power of Christ Compels You”

  Fitts never shows fear. Even after he got shot three times in April, he displayed less concern than a civilian with a splinter in his thumb. That day, as he bled from both arms and a leg, he still kept his head about him, focusing on the mission before his serious wounds.

  Now Fitts has that scrunched-up look he gets when the medics are about to give us our tetanus shots. It is the closest to fear I’ve ever seen in him. If I dwell on that look, I know it will unnerve me.

  Should the rest of the platoon see it, it might be enough to push the boys over the edge. They’re on the border of panic already. The darkness, the smoke, and the reddish glow from the small piles of burning trash are macabre.

  “I need you, bro,” Fitts says again.

  “Alright, alright…alright,” I reply, stalling for time as I try to get my brain in gear long enough to think of a way out of this mess. My mind starts ticking off options.

  Obviously, we can’t call in an air strike. We have no way to call it, and air-to-surface bombs would smoke the whole compound, including us. Same with an artillery fire mission. A tank or a Bradley would be of no use now, not as long as we’re stuck inside the house.

  This ambush is the product of study, an enemy who has thoroughly analyzed our strengths and weaknesses. They’ve created a fighting position that negates our advantages of firepower and mobility. All we can do is fight them at point-blank range with the weapons in our hands.

  I thought we were ready for everything. We’re not ready for this.

  Over in the far corner of the living room, Misa stirs. He pulls out a grenade.

  “Frag out. Frag out,” he shouts.

  This mortifies Fitts. “No,” he hisses. Misa freezes. Fitts continues, “They’ll bowl that bitch right back at us. You’ve got no idea where they’re at.”

  Misa is undeterred. He peers around the doorway and reports, “I see them…I see where they’re at.”

  Sergeant Hugh Hall sees Ware and Yuri and tells them, “Get behind something, man!”

  “Is anyone hit?” Doc Abernathy calls from outside.

  “Lemme frag out,” Misa will not let this go.

  Fitts will have none of it. “You don’t know how many fucking dudes are in here. Don’t frag out. Put it away.” Misa abandons the grenade idea.

  Another flurry of bullets laces the living room. The tracers cleave the smoky air, sending tendrils spinning off into the darkness and briefly clearing the air in the doorway.

  I risk a look into the stairwell room. In the fire’s crimson glow, I spot one of the insurgents. He’s crouched behind the Jersey barriers holding an AK in each hand. He’s grinning like a fiend, and I notice his perfectly straight, white teeth.

  How the fuck is that possible? We’ve got field dentists, a health plan, and all the trappings of modern medicine, and our teeth look like caramel popcorn. Apparently, these cocksuckers don’t like Red Man.

  I duck back into the foyer. Misa’s aborted plan gives me an idea. A few days before we assaulted Fallujah, Staff Sergeant Hector Diaz, our supply NCO, traded some shit with Special Forces to get me a flash-bang grenade. It has a two-second fuse, and will stun anyone who is unfortunate enough to be around when it goes off. I could throw it and stun the insurgents long enough for everyone to escape. I mull this over while fingering the flash-bang’s cylindrical tube. It looks like an oversized roll of Kodak film. I’ve never used one of these things before, and that gives me pause. If I fuck up, I could flash out the entire platoon and incapacitate myself and my own men. That’s a pretty big risk. I abandon the flash-bang idea.

  I’m running out of ideas. We can’t flank them. They’re covering the outside of the house, and the back door opens into the stairwell room five feet from the Jersey barriers. Getting around behind them is not an option.

  The enemy designed this trap to force us into a head-on, stand-up fight. Okay then, we’ll play their game.

  I peek around the wall into the living room. Metcalf remains on the ground, checking himself and his wound. Clouds of smoke now obscure most of their details, but from their postures I can tell who’s who. I know everything about these men, and I can tell they aren’t far from reaching a breaking point.

  I know there’s only one option, exactly what the fuckers under the stairs want.

  “Give me a 240 gunner and a SAW,” I shout.

  Ohle slides me his SAW and I immediately suppress the corner of the room without looking. The bolt locks back. I am out of ammo.

  “Give me another weapon system. I need another SAW and a fucking 240,” I scream in frustration.

  “Get a fucking 240 up here, man,” Hall screams outside.

  A second later, McDaniel flies into the foyer through the front door. Simultaneously, I make eye contact with Specialist Mathieu. At thirty-seven, his body has taken a pounding in Iraq, and he has to work twice as hard to keep up with his eighteen-year-old peers. After 9/11, he left a good job as a medical technician at a major hospital to join the Army. That move dumped him in a significantly lower tax bracket, a fact that caused a strain on his family and eventual divorce from his wife. His patriotism cost him his family.

  We are his family now. Through the glo
om and smoke I can read his features, I can see his divot chin that makes him look a bit like John Travolta. He’s ready to do whatever I need. Across the living room, he waits for my order.

  “Mathieu, toss me your SAW.”

  He holds out his hands as I fling my M4 across the kill zone to him. My rifle has no night optics, just the three-power telescopic sight that I got from Pratt. It’s useless for night fighting and close-quarters combat. The SAW is the weapon for this fight.

  Mathieu hurls the SAW right into my arms. The damn thing weighs over twenty pounds loaded, but he threw it as if it were a toy.

  “Sarge,” he calls to me, “it’s loaded with 200 in the drum.”

  “Sweet.”

  Two hundred 5.56mm bullets. Should be enough.

  Fitts watches the exchange with intensity. “What’re you doing? What’re you doing?” he asks.

  “Dude, on me,” I reply. “Pull out. Australian Peel and pull out. On me. Everyone go but Misa. Misa, you stay. Last man. So I know.”

  “I’m last man. I’m last man,” Misa echoes.

  I hear firing outside. Tracers blast through the kitchen window, blowing out the glass and shredding the iron bars beyond. There’s a third insurgent in the kitchen, and he pours machine-gun fire into Lawson’s weapons squad covering the outside of the house from the courtyard.

  Six feet from the kitchen window, Swanson throws himself behind one of the courtyard’s decorative columns. A blizzard of metal and glass fragments scythe his face and arms. He slumps against the pillar, drops his M240 machine gun and throws his hands to his face. A cone of fire just misses Sergeant Hugh Hall, who falls to the ground as rounds whiz and impact all around him.

  “My face! My eyes! Goddamnit!” Swanson is in misery.