The most common helpers were SMAW gunners, commonly known among the Marines as assaultmen. Whereas a rifleman’s MOS was 0311, an assaultman was 0351. Each company had half a dozen two-man teams and they were worth their weight in gold. “The 0351s . . . were tasked with SMAW gunnery, explosive breaches, demolition of structures, and destruction of captured enemy weapons, and, in rare cases, unexploded ordnance,” Lieutenant Carin Calvin, who commanded several assaultmen in Lima Company’s Weapons Platoon, later wrote.
The SMAW itself was about two and a half feet long and weighed sixteen pounds. Many of the assaultmen strapped their tubes onto their backs and fought as riflemen until they were needed as rocketeers. On average, they fired about ten rockets per day. Before firing, the teams made sure to clear anyone standing behind them because the back-blast could be deadly. Commanders liked to put them on roofs where they could fire down onto buildings. Quite often, they aided the infantry not just by shooting known insurgent-held buildings but by punching entry holes (mouse holing) into structures the riflemen were about to assault. This gave them different entry points besides a window or door that might be covered by the enemy. It also could kill any insurgents who might be in the house. “We found that our assaultmen had to first fire a dual-purpose rocket in order to create a hole in the wall or building,” Lieutenant Calvin said. “This blast was immediately followed by an NE [thermobaric novel explosive] round that would incinerate the target or literally level the structure.” The Marines learned to fire sequential shots at the same spot, enhancing the overpressure and explosive power of the rockets and punching bigger holes into the buildings. In retrospect, the use of the SMAWs at Fallujah was rather similar to the way American soldiers used bazookas at Aachen.
Day by day, the Marine grunts arduously blasted and cleared their way through the Jolan and Queens, making increasingly free-handed use of every supporting weapon they could. “This was a grueling, on the ground, dirty, extended period of combat and manual labor,” Major Joe Winslow, a Marine historian who was with the grunts, commented. “Day after day of blocking off these city blocks, small houses, different types of neighborhoods, breaking down the door, pushing through the door, going upstairs, breaking down the windows, moving the furniture . . . in addition to being shot at . . . lance corporals, corporals and sergeants . . . extremely infantry intensive. I don’t care how many Scan Eagles you have or Predators [UAVs], or whatever, if you don’t have some Marine peering under that cabinet, it’s not gonna happen. They cleansed that city.” Besides killing nearly one thousand insurgents, the Marines found several torture houses (and even some live victims), dozens of weapons caches, and Zarqawi’s headquarters.18
Fighting to the Loose Ends
On November 16, after nearly a week of bloody fighting, Allawi’s Iraqi government declared Fallujah secured. Pure and simple, this was political posturing. It was true that coalition forces had advanced through the whole city and controlled most of it. But plenty of hard fighting lay ahead for the grunts as they turned north and back-cleared block after block of demolished buildings, where small groups of insurgents patiently waited to make their last stand. Allawi was eager to rebuild the city and open it up again to its residents. The American generals wanted to stoke the perception that they had won a quick victory. They and Allawi knew that, in the information age, the longer the battle appeared to drag on, the better the chance that world media outlets would portray it as a stalemate or even a defeat for the coalition. Actually, Allawi’s declaration was similar to the American tendency during the Pacific War to declare that islands were secured when much hard fighting remained to be done (Peleliu being an infamous example). The spirit of the announcement was usually correct—the enemy was defeated strategically—but many enemy holdouts remained in place to fight to the death, inflicting many casualties on the Americans. Indeed, the Japanese rarely if ever surrendered at the end of an island battle. Fallujah was like that, too. Unlike Aachen, there was no central enemy authority to declare surrender and lay down arms. The muj simply fought to the death or faded away. It was a fight not to the bitter end, but to the loose ends. In fact, the Americans did not even allow Fallujahns to return in any serious numbers to the city until December 23.
So, at Fallujah, the grunts hardly noticed the political machinations of Allawi and their own military superiors. For them, the daily grind of clearing buildings and risking their lives remained unchanged. As far as they were concerned, as long as someone was still shooting at them, then the battle was not over. Most of the infantry units spent the rest of November and even parts of December sweeping through the city, methodically destroying any remaining resistance. “It was really about having a tremendous amount of physical stamina,” Winslow, the Marine historian, asserted. “Somebody’s gotta go up every flight of stairs, gotta go through every steel gate and gotta break down every single door, gotta open up every roof in every alley.” Most of the time, they found nothing. Sometimes they fought it out with hidden insurgents. Almost always, they killed them. At times, they lost some of their own. In all, during November and December, they cleared close to twenty thousand buildings, often two or three times apiece. Often, when they cleared a building, they spray-painted an X on it. They were supported by 540 air strikes and over fourteen thousand mortar and artillery shells. They found over six hundred separate weapons caches, including several car bomb factories. They killed at least two thousand insurgents and captured another twelve hundred.
In total, the Americans lost 95 killed and 560 wounded over the two months. The Iraqi Army lost 11 killed and 43 wounded. The assaulting force of 6,000 troops, then, suffered an 11 percent casualty rate. Of course, some wounded soldiers and Marines did not report their injuries, so the rates were probably even higher. As always, the rifle companies—especially the Marines—suffered the most. The first sergeant of Kilo Company, 3/1 Marines, said his unit awarded eighty-four Purple Hearts, including thirty-two to Marines who were wounded badly enough to require evacuation to the States. This represented a casualty rate of over 45 percent. From November 8 to 25, the two Army battalions lost five soldiers killed. During the same time, 46 Marines from the four assaulting battalions were killed. The 3/1 lost 19 killed, the most of any battalion in the battle. Throughout 2004, 151 Americans were killed in and around Fallujah and another 1,000 wounded.
The survivors were grateful to have lived, but forever marked by their experiences. Staff Sergeant Bellavia vividly recalled, near the end of the battle, how physically wrecked he and his squad members were after many days of intense urban combat. In his recollection, he and his unshaven buddies were “ragged outlines of what we had once been . . . our uniforms . . . covered in dried gore, blood, grime, concrete dust, and smoke stains. All of us [had] brown slicks of diarrhea pasting our pants to our backsides . . . we were so sick that some of us [could] hardly walk.” The physical toll generally faded with proper rest, food, and hygiene. The mental toll was more enduring. Some had trouble dealing with the trauma of having seen their friends die. Others were bothered by having had to kill, sometimes in very personal fashion, a common by-product of war for infantry grunts. Their struggle for peace was just beginning.
The city was also profoundly damaged. By most estimates, about 60 percent of the buildings were destroyed, not to mention the infrastructure of sewers, telephone wires, and the like. Lance Corporal Boswood, like nearly everyone else, was awestruck at the destruction. “This city was just in shambles, telephone wires just hanging everywhere, houses blown up, cars, huge craters, everything.” After the battle, one general stood among the ruins and took in the overwhelming sight of overturned cars, half-crumbled homes, sagging roofs, cratered streets, shattered telephone poles, demolished storefronts, and simply muttered to himself in awe: “Holy shit.”
Upon returning home, many of the residents were heartbroken at the destruction and bitter at the Americans for doing it. “There was no food, no water, no electricity—just the smell of gunpowder,” one Jolan
resident said. “This is the American way of democracy?” Another man, a shopkeeper, bitingly said: “The resistance didn’t destroy houses. They didn’t harm people.” The former point was valid. The latter claim was laughably false. “You never want to destroy someone’s city like this,” Staff Sergeant Bellavia said, “but this was the only way to eliminate those fanatics.” Almost all of the Americans would have agreed and eventually some Fallujahns, too. Even before the fighting was finished, Army engineers and Navy Seabees were busy rebuilding. The Americans subsequently pumped millions of dollars into Fallujah (the Iraqi government’s contributions were minor and feckless). The reconstruction effort would take years. The elections of January 2005 took place more or less unhindered, although only a few Fallujahns and Anbaris participated.
After the battle, Lieutenant General Sattler claimed that “we have . . . broken the back of the insurgency.” He was wrong. Fallujah did not come close to ending the insurgency in Iraq. The war would rage on for many more years. Those insurgents who escaped Fallujah often relocated to Ramadi and other spots in Al Anbar to cause much more trouble in the months and years to come. Nor did the fighting in and around Fallujah completely cease. To be sure, the Americans had absolutely eliminated it as a terrorist sanctuary, but IED bombings, sniping, and firefights were all too common by 2006, even though the Americans found and killed Zarqawi that year. Only after the Anbar Awakening, when the Sunni tribes finally turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and cast their lot with the Americans, did Fallujah calm down for the long haul. The Battle of Fallujah was merely a small step in the direction of the Awakening, not the cause of it.
Hamstrung by their own mistaken preconceptions of modern war, buffeted by world opinion, the Americans had eventually prevailed in an urban setting, but at great political and military cost. As one military commentator adeptly put it, “The Battle of Fallujah was not a defeat, but we cannot afford many more victories like it.” In the end, the battle was a brilliant combined arms and interservice operation, one that featured incredible valor at the grunt level. The performance of the infantry soldiers and Marines was among the best in American military history. Unlike Aachen, though, Fallujah was only a partial strategic victory for the United States. The controversial Iraq War would grind on, demanding many more sacrifices from the grunts.19
CHAPTER 10
“Watch Out for IEDs!” Twenty-First-Century Counterinsurgent Warfare Through the Eyes of One Infantry Regiment in Iraq
Shock and Flaw
FALLUJAH WAS NOT TYPICAL. THROUGHOUT Operation Al Fajr and even to some extent during the fighting in April, the grunts were free to employ a wide variety of weapons whenever they felt threatened. The November fighting, of course, took place within an empty city, a unique circumstance that could obviously not be replicated with any degree of regularity. Far more commonly infantry grunts in Iraqi cities had to be more restrained. Amid the crowded streets and densely occupied buildings of the typical Iraqi city, infantry soldiers could hardly shoot first and ask questions later. Although danger could lurk anywhere in such an urban morass, the Americans had to be very careful about unleashing their firepower, even when that meant assuming more risk themselves.
Intellectually, every soldier knew that shooting up buildings, cars, and the inevitable innocent bystanders would derail their mission in Iraq, even if they also killed bona fide terrorists. This knowledge, though, did nothing to dampen the immense frustration, fear, and stress of struggling each day against an unseen enemy who dealt out impersonal death and destruction, then blended in with the population. Such is the nature of counterinsurgent warfare. Less is often more, but it is also incredibly hard on the soldiers. They must fight by a clearly defined set of rules against enemies who follow no rules or moral laws whatsoever.
In Iraq, by 2005, the Americans were deeply enmeshed in this kind of desperate, deadly counterinsurgent war. They often felt, and acted, as though they were grappling with phantoms in a pitch-dark room. In spite of Fallujah and the successful January 2005 elections, the insurgency was growing stronger and the American death toll was rising in Iraq. Commanders were finding that they had nowhere near enough troops, particularly of the infantry variety, to maintain stability in their areas of operation. “The lack of Army dismounts . . . is creating a void in personal contact and public perception of our civil-military ops,” one general stated. Somehow, a ragged ensemble of third-world insurgents was withstanding the might of the world’s leading military power.
The soldiers were now paying a steep price for the catastrophically wrong ideas their leaders had embraced about war. The flawed 2003 Rumsfeldian vision of a shock-and-awe, techno-rich, lightning-fast war in Iraq had given way to an unglamorous, complex, politically controversial, troop-intensive guerrilla slog in 2005. “In struggles of this type there are seldom suitable targets for massive air strikes,” one military commentator wrote. “Ground forces geared and equipped for large-scale war are notoriously ineffective against guerrillas. Militarily such forces cannot bring their might to bear, and their efforts are all too likely to injure and alienate indigenous populations and thus lose an equally important political battle.”
The stunned Americans—in political and military circles—were ill prepared for this most human of conflicts. This was particularly true of the Army, upon which the greatest burden of the war rested (as usual). Although the service had a long tradition of fighting, and mostly winning, guerrilla wars, the Army had de-emphasized counterinsurgency studies after the painful experience of Vietnam. The Special Operations School at Fort Bragg had even thrown away its counterinsurgency files after Vietnam, an act that was roughly analogous to a group of attending physicians throwing away all case history information on a disease that had just claimed the life of a beloved patient. The Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, along with most every Army development school, offered few if any courses on irregular war. The Army prepared itself to fight conventional wars against similarly structured adversaries. Reflecting the outlook of American policymakers, the Army was preparing for the war it wanted to fight rather than the one it might fight. The 1991 Gulf War only exacerbated the yawning gap in counterinsurgency studies. So, by the Iraq War, the armed forces as a whole were poorly prepared to fight a war against insurgents. “The only way to fill the void was through a career of serious self-guided study in military history,” wrote Colonel Peter Mansoor, a brigade commander with a Ph.D. in military history from Ohio State. “The alternative was to fill body bags while the enemy provided lessons on the battlefield.”
And, tragically, the body bags were being filled, largely because of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Through hard experience, most of the insurgents had learned to shy away from pitched battles with the Americans. Instead they sowed the roads and alleys of Iraq with IEDs. Simple and lethal, an IED was often nothing more than a mortar or artillery shell hidden among roadside debris, dead animals, or dug into a spot alongside or even under the road. Sometimes they were pressure-detonated. More often, a triggerman waited for the Americans to enter a kill zone and then detonated the IED by wire or the electrical signals generated by such mundane items as a cell phone or garage door opener. At times the IEDs were wired up to propane tanks. When the IEDs’ ordnance exploded, the propane ignited, along with the targeted vehicle’s fuel tank, badly burning the victims. IEDs ranged from crude and easily spotted grenades or mortar shells to elaborately prepared traps with daisy-chained artillery shells or hundreds of pounds of explosives capable of destroying a Bradley or even an Abrams tank.
For insurgents, IEDs were perfect standoff weapons, inflicting death on the Americans from a safe distance, impeding their mobility, and eroding their morale and resolve. Insurgents in Iraq used IEDs in much the same way the Viet Cong had used booby traps in Vietnam, but with even greater effect. Whereas 20 percent of American casualties in Vietnam were caused by mines and booby traps, in Iraq IEDs were responsible for more than 50 percent of American deaths by 2006.
“They [Americans] are not going to defeat me with technology,” one insurgent told a journalist around this time. “If they want to get rid of me, they have to kill me and everyone like me.” Car bombs and suicide bombers (called VBIEDs and SVBIEDs by American soldiers) only added to the bloody harvest.
All of these frightening weapons were indicative of two undeniable facts. First, there was considerable opposition to the American presence in Iraq. To a distressing extent, insurgent groups reflected the murderous anger and frustration of substantial numbers of Iraqis, or at least their willingness to tolerate such shadow warriors in their midst. Second, they represented the latest illustration of human will in war. They showed that human beings themselves are the ultimate weapons, not machines, no matter how clever, technologically advanced, or useful those machines may be. How, for example, could any machine possibly negate a suicide bomber who was determined to blow himself up because he believes that this was the path to paradise?
Opponents of the American occupation understood that they could not hope to defeat the Americans in a conventional fight, so they adapted, using their own standoff weapons, negating American technological and material advantages. Using the Internet and mass media, they waged information-age political war. Their targets were not just the American soldiers who traversed the roads each day. In a larger sense, they were targeting the will of the American people to continue this faraway war in the face of rising casualty numbers. Day by day, the guerrillas were demonstrating anew one of history’s great lessons, summed up perfectly by Adrian Lewis: “War is ultimately a human endeavor. War is more than killing. And the only thing that technology will ever do is make the act of killing more efficient. Technology alone will never stop a determined enemy. The human brain and the human spirit are the greatest weapons on the Earth.” Indeed they are, and the experiences of one American infantry outfit, circa 2005, illustrate that vital lesson quite well.1
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