Call Sign Chaos

by Jim Mattis

  As the ground commander on-scene, I knew what to do and how to do it. The generals above me agreed with my plan.

  But we were all overruled. I was unaware that Ambassador Bremer, in a teleconference with the White House, had argued that strong military action must be taken. General Sanchez, also on the line, described President Bush as angry and as having said that we had to be “tougher than hell.” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld later explained that he thought the United States had “to send a message that anyone who engaged in acts of terror would face the might of the U.S. military.”

  A battle inside a city would inflict horrendous damage on noncombatants. I had studied the 1968 Marine battle in Hue City, Vietnam, and didn’t want to go down that road. Plus, an all-out assault would unify the residents against us. In World War II, despite horrendous casualties in German cities, the more we bombed, the more unified the German population became. This was the most critical objection I and the generals above me raised, but to no avail. Our perspective was lost in the cacophony of intense emotions evoked by the grotesque front-page picture of a mob dancing around dangling corpses.

  General Conway reluctantly told me that I had to attack in force. I was to assault a city of twelve square miles, comprising hundreds of blocks of concrete houses containing 300,000 increasingly resentful residents and a dispersed host of armed enemy.

  Great nations don’t get angry; military action should be undertaken only to achieve specific strategic effects. In this case, we were in an extremely violent political campaign over ideas, and we were trying to treat the problem of Fallujah like a conventional war. I believed we had a more effective, sustainable approach for the situation we faced.

  But that was the order: Attack.

  * * *

  —

  I had made my objections clear. While some might urge a senior officer to resign his post in this circumstance, your troops cannot resign and go home. They will carry out that specific order regardless of whether you are still with them.

  Loyalty to your troops, to your superiors, and to your oath to obey orders from civilian authority matters most, even when there are a hundred reasons to disagree.

  “Right, let’s get on with it,” I said to my network of commanders.

  While normally a commander would have received a detailed order, in this case the assault order was only verbal. We had to attack and drive out the terrorists, gaining control of the city. We’d start by shepherding out of danger hundreds of thousands of recalcitrant civilians. We broadcast repeated warnings for all civilians to leave the city. As a quarter of a million people poured out, insurgents with freedom of movement were coming into the city.

  I made one strong statement up the chain of command: Once we assault, don’t stop us. Inside the city, we would be engaged in a full-scale brawl. When the battle was over, the city and the adjacent major highway would be open, and the terrorists would be dead.

  Again I had to reorient my Marines going in. I did so by reversing my standard “capture or kill” guidance to “kill or capture” those who fight you. I deliberately placed the verb kill before capture to make clear that this was close-quarters combat against a foe with the home-court advantage.

  Having only scant intelligence, we estimated the enemy force at somewhere between six hundred and two thousand hard-core fighters, reinforced by perhaps a thousand resentful locals, along with about twenty key leaders.

  I had no reserve and had to pull forces from other cities and the border posts, leaving only small detachments behind. Major General Marty Dempsey’s 1st Armored Division, which had been rotating back to Germany, was stopped in mid-stride, its units returned to Iraq to relieve pressure in my southern sector.

  I was fortunate to have Colonel John Toolan in command of the assault, a man who kept cool in the worst circumstances and responded to adversity with roguish irony.

  “You’re assaulting with only two battalions at the start,” I said.

  This meant he was initially attacking with only two thousand grunts to root out terrorists from among tens of thousands of concrete buildings, without knowing where the enemy was hiding.

  “Well, we don’t want to overdo it, sir,” he said.

  Seizing Fallujah was John’s fight. I focused on coordinating the activities of fourteen thousand American soldiers and Marines while meeting with dozens of tribal sheiks and carrying out CPA’s political and developmental programs. As for my responsibilities in the battle for Fallujah, I intended to stay close to the action without interfering in John’s fight.

  * * *

  —

  John attacked on April 4, sending one battalion in from the north and another from the south. The intent was to keep the insurgents off-balance and confused, jabbing from different directions to assess their fighting style and then moving quickly to overwhelm them. After our first pitched battle, I wanted the enemy to be convinced that they should never again seek to fight American Marines in close combat.

  Early that morning, Lieutenant Colonel Gregg Olson led his battalion into the city’s northern outskirts. He was astonished to see a dozen men, mostly unarmed, pushing a trailer truck across the highway to block the Marines while other insurgents opened fire from the flanks. To Olson, it seemed senseless. The Marines made short work of the enemy.

  The battle for Fallujah had begun.

  All day, the battle seesawed up and down the streets. Every few hours a group of five to ten young insurgents ran forward, eager to close on the Marines, meeting only death. At dusk, as the dogs began their nightly howling, bands of insurgents began slipping forward, groping for the Marine lines. The muezzins exhorted the remaining population to take to the streets in support of the “brave martyrs.”

  At the same time, a second battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Giles Kyser, was attacking from the south. Methodically, the squads advanced. From the rooftops, company commanders ensured that their platoons and squads stayed abreast, supporting one another. The Marines picked their way among rows of shabby repair shops, heaps of broken pipes, and junked cars. Visiting the assault units, my feet crunched on the broken shards of drug vials.

  By the fourth day of the assault, I had one more battalion to give John. Together we visited a battalion ops center a block back from the front lines. The fighting spirit of the troops was infectious. Seizing rooftops, we held the high ground. Our snipers, joined by every SEAL sniper who had heard there was a fight, turned the streets into kill zones beyond a distance of 700 yards. The enemy was being driven back, block by block, street by street.

  * * *

  —

  Fallujah quickly became a spark in a keg of gunpowder. Heavier fighting was exploding across Iraq. Adjacent to my headquarters, fighting broke out in Ramadi.

  At one point in Ramadi, I walked up behind a squad in a furious firefight with insurgents farther down the street. When I inanely asked, “Hey, guys, what’s going on?” the squad leader dropped his rifle from his shoulder and smiled.

  “We’re taking the fun out of fundamentalism, sir!”

  I laughed. When you have tightly knit squads, fire superiority, and troops keeping their sense of humor, the fight is in good hands.

  Each day, I drove back and forth between Ramadi and Fallujah, and I often flew by helicopter hundreds of miles across my far-flung command. The fighting in Fallujah raged, with piles of insurgent bodies heaped at intersections because there wasn’t enough room at the city morgue. Toolan and I understood the insurgents’ style. They had no formal, hierarchical military structure, with a commander and sub-commanders. Rather, they were gangs organized around mosques, neighborhoods, and local leaders. Knowing the streets and alleys as they did, they were able to engage in a running battle, but not a mutually supporting, coordinated fight. They could bloody us, but they could not hold out against the Marine assault.

&n
bsp; In the second week of the fight, I brought in a fourth battalion to reinforce John Toolan’s attack from the south. We were losing Marines, but John had the insurgents in a vise and was squeezing hard. Our intelligence assets identified desperate insurgent leaders who didn’t know which way to turn, their demands for ammo resupply growing increasingly strident.

  I was now confident that the fight would be over within a few days. Having learned from Tora Bora to overreport if necessary, I was keeping my seniors abreast. My aim was for a speedy recovery, removing rubble, reestablishing sewage disposal, increasing electric power, and restoring a sense of normalcy as swiftly as possible. I was contracting for garbage trucks and bulldozers to come in from Baghdad.

  The reporters embedded with our platoons had freedom to report what they were seeing, and they were accurate. However, inside enemy lines, there were Al Jazeera reporters and local stringers for international media sympathetic to the terrorists. A stringer would leave the city and drive the forty miles to Baghdad. From there, the “news” from Fallujah, plus video and still pictures, was picked up by news bureaus around the globe. The vast majority of news organizations did not have reporters on the ground, so the enemy’s propaganda dominated the news cycle.

  The coalition had no effective response to the propaganda. Images of dead babies that would cause a rock to cry and assertions of agonizing civilian losses caused even our allies to voice strong objections.

  By constant repetition, the false allegations acquired plausibility. Although damage and death in the city were real, that damage was not difficult for policymakers to anticipate when ordering us to attack the city. Most noncombatants had fled the area, but not all. I was reporting our increasing progress, but that truth was submerged beneath enemy propaganda. In Baghdad, London, and Washington, the battle seemed endlessly destructive. I had lance corporals who could better express the nobility of our methods than U.S. government spokespeople in Washington.

  The UN envoy in Baghdad expressed dismay. “You have also seen on the television screens,” he told The Guardian of London, “images of yet another mosque which had taken a direct hit. Reports today of attacks from and on a mosque are a source of shock.” I later learned that he was threatening to pull the UN out of Iraq if the assault continued. The Iraqi Governing Council, composed of Sunni and Shiite politicians, insisted to Ambassador Bremer that he stop the attack or they would resign. “Continuing military operations in Fallujah,” Bremer wrote in his memoir, “would result in the collapse of the entire political process.” Bremer called Generals Abizaid and Sanchez into his office. He had decided to halt the offensive.

  After a heated discussion, General Sanchez called Jim Conway, telling him to stop offensive operations by noon on April 9. Bremer intended to announce his decision over Iraqi radio and television before the end of the Friday services in the mosques. We had lost the information war.

  The President’s envoy had argued first for an assault I believed was reckless, and now, with my troops in house-to-house fighting and close to victory, he had succeeded in halting the assault. I didn’t see the order to halt coming. At the top level, there was loose, uninformed speculation that the attack might take weeks. My judgment, that we were close to crushing an enemy now in disarray, was not solicited.

  General Abizaid flew to MEF headquarters, outside Fallujah, to convey the order. I immediately headed for the meeting to find out what they were thinking. But on my way, we encountered a Marine patrol under fire. Working together with helicopter gunships and the patrol, we took out the enemy position. But I had lost time and arrived at the meeting late, sweaty and disheveled, passing a few journalists in the corridor. General Abizaid interrupted the meeting, courteously asking for my input as the division commander.

  “First we’re ordered to attack, and now we’re ordered to halt,” I said. “If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.”

  I was repeating Napoleon’s outburst to his field marshal who had hesitated to seize that city. I expected my frontline commanders to speak frankly to me, and I did the same to my seniors.

  Silence followed. The several dozen officers and NCOs in the room were looking at the floor or gazing into middle space. All recognized that no one in that room, regardless of rank, could change the political decision. There wasn’t anything more to say. Although we were on the brink of at least a tactical success, we were stopped dead in our tracks.

  I had launched the assault emphasizing only one point: that I not be stopped. You don’t order your men to attack and risk death, and then go wobbly, stopping the attack and allowing the enemy to resupply and to recover his fighting spirit. He will be tougher when he next fights you, and your troops could understandably lose confidence in your leadership.

  * * *

  —

  On April 10, Iraqi politicians from Baghdad drove into Fallujah to negotiate with the insurgents, who slapped one dignitary, jerked the tie of a second, and kicked a third in the ass. When the official party scurried back to the capital, I hoped that was the end of that harebrained idea. We had only agreed to a twenty-four-hour pause, and it was expiring without anything to show for it.

  I tried to think of how to persuade the policymakers to my point of view about what we had to do. My political liaison was Stuart E. “Stu” Jones, a shrewd diplomat as calm under fire as a Marine, who reported to Ambassador Bremer. He, too, knew the insurgents were playing for time. But after the twenty-four-hour deadline passed, it was extended by Bremer. I knew that the underlying motivations of the policymakers were not malicious. Indeed, they wanted to do the best thing. But they had no grasp of the tactical opportunity or peril that their decision to assault the city now presented. They were spinning in a circle, without a strategic compass to keep them pointed in a consistent direction.

  The next day—Easter Sunday—I secured permission to straighten out our lines. The resultant movements of our battalions caused the insurgents to come unglued. Our intelligence assets identified frantic communications. Overhead surveillance showed trucks and taxis scurrying around, but no signs of a coherent defense. A battalion commander, Bryan McCoy, immediately grasped that we had an opening and called the operations center.

  “We’re prepared to continue the attack,” he said. “I’ll have the Hidra mosque inside an hour.”

  Between informants and other intelligence, we had identified Hidra as the enemy’s command-and-control center in the core of the city, from which they tried to organize their defense. Once our troops seized Hidra, organized resistance would be impossible. The terrorists would be forced to try to get out of the now surrounded city if they didn’t want to die there. Once again, though, word came down: Do not advance.

  * * *

  —

  For the next several weeks, we traded shots across fixed lines. The insurgents, now reassured that the Marines were not on the attack, were shooting at them from immediately adjacent concrete houses. During the day, no one on either side moved in the open.

  Zarqawi was directing his terrorists while producing video pieces to give to Al Jazeera. We had intelligence placing him in the Jolan market, west of the Hidra mosque. That mosque was controlled by the mullah Abdullah al-Janabi. Fearing a popular backlash, the Iraqi Governing Council tried through CPA to prevent us from capturing or killing Janabi. He set the tone for dozens of other mullahs. The longer we were stopped, the more resistance became a community obligation.

  Every day, John Toolan and I separately made the rounds, checking in with the platoons. By mid-April, whenever a corporal, captain, or colonel asked me when we would attack, I just said, “Hold the line. Our time will come.” I knew that a policy of keeping us frozen in place was not a strategy; the status quo could not last forever. Believing that the assault would eventually resume, we were quietly reinforcing the barbed wire and earthen berms fully cutting off the city. I was determined that
there would be no escape for the terrorists. Fallujah would be their graveyard.

  The stiff backbone of our senior NCOs and the animating energy of junior officers and NCOs helped our teams stick together, focused on the mission.

  After being halted on Easter Sunday, I was directed to negotiate at a neutral site a half-mile east of the city, with safe passage guaranteed for the opposition. There, I met with a revolving cast of characters—cunning Iraqi politicians from Baghdad, bewildered civil servants from Fallujah, self-important imams, and fearful sheiks. The true terrorist leaders never appeared. I was shuttling back and forth from Ramadi in my light armored vehicle. On the way, my detail was, like everyone else, hit by IEDs and small arms. There were reports that Janabi was trying to knock me off. I didn’t blame him for trying, given that I was trying to do the same to him.

  I was issued no written terms of reference for the negotiations. At night, I discussed with my boss, Jim Conway, different ideas about what I might propose the next day. We held firmly to the principle that our Marines must be given access to the entire city. On the civilian side, the unflappable diplomat Stu Jones counseled me well, but he had no authority to propose negotiating terms.

  The negotiations proved fruitless. The front men would arrive and turn over a few rusty old weapons, as if that proved their sincerity. They would sip tea, talk sonorously for hours, claim that more weapons would be collected, promise us access to the city, and leave. We were being played. Every night, I went over the growing list of our casualties. John Toolan wanted to throw down the gauntlet and say, “That’s the end; we’re coming for you tomorrow.”

  In one of the more contentious discussions, a sheik demanded to know when we were leaving.