by Bing West
“Can I take him out?” Lochard radioed.
“Sure,” Crutcher replied.
The vehicles stopped, and Lochard got out and shot the man just as an orange-colored pickup came around the corner. A burst from the Mark 19 sent the pickup crashing into a wall. The Marines were thinking the hunting was easy when RPGs and small-arms fire hit them from the east.
Crutcher called for instructions. “Continue south,” Kennedy radioed. “Guide on the heavy firing.”
The insurgents had dropped some palm trees across the streets, but the Humvees bumped around them, with the Marines moving in front of the vehicles, spraying the edges of the rooftops. Crutcher had no difficulty distinguishing the heavy banging of Bronzi’s .50 calibers over the cracks of the AKs and M16s. As Crutcher’s Mobile Assault Platoon gingerly reached Bronzi, the platoon from the Combat Outpost was linking up to cover Bronzi’s east flank.
With more than 120 Marines and nine mounted .50 calibers and Mark 19s, Bronzi picked up the pace, anxious to close with Joker 3-1. The terrain was dictating the nature of the battle. The Marines were fighting in the heart of the residential area, densely packed two- and three-story cement houses, laid out in a square grid, each block on average fifty meters wide and one hundred meters long, containing about thirty houses linked by cement walls as tall as a man. Each block was a small fortress, offering the insurgents two shooting opportunities—from the flat rooftops bordered by small retaining walls, and from the alleys outside the courtyard walls.
The Marines wanted to move up the long north-south axis of the city blocks, where they encountered less crossfire from the alleys and could employ the heavy weapons mounted on the Humvees. Both the .50 cal and the Mark 19 were fearsome weapons, yet neither could penetrate walls two feet thick. Still, the shock of the shells abrading the concrete, throwing up clouds of dust and sparks, unnerved most of the inexperienced insurgents and sent them scampering away. The Mark 19 was the favorite weapon for dusting off the roofs.
Corporal Jared McKenzie, a squad leader in MAP 3, estimated that insurgents on the roofs were popping up only fifty meters away, while those on the street, seeing the approaching vehicles, stayed several hundred meters away, darting out of alleys, firing from the hip. Sergeant Kenneth Conde, walking in front of McKenzie, suddenly spun around and dropped, blood spurting from his shoulder.
“Shit, you’re shot,” McKenzie said.
Conde stood up, fired down the street, and fell back down. As McKenzie ran up, Conde staggered back to his feet.
“Let’s get you out of here, man,” McKenzie said.
“I didn’t come here to get evaced,” Conde said. “It stings, that’s all.”
McKenzie sat Conde down beside an overstuffed Dumpster, while a corpsman bandaged his shoulder. They started on again, trailing the rest of the squad. When they crossed the next alley, three men with AKs were sneaking out and bumped into them. The first stopped and stared. McKenzie shot him in the face. The second backpedaled, hands held out in supplication. McKenzie shot him in the chest. The third turned and ran. McKenzie shot him in the back.
Gunny Crutcher walked by a house where a pile of shell casings had fallen from the roof onto the ground. He broke down the door and in the center of the room found an RPG on the floor and a man hiding behind a couch. In a bag the man had half a million dinars, about eight thousand dollars. Crutcher flex-cuffed the man and placed him in a Humvee alongside an Iraqi policeman who had been captured while firing at the Marines.
Sergeant Michael Williams saw an insurgent with an AK duck behind a new model car parked on Easy Street. Williams fired, the man fired back, and Williams sighted in, waiting for him to reappear. Instead, a woman in a black burka with a child clutching her hand walked out of an alley next to the car. Both Williams and the man behind the car yelled at her, and she stood still. The little girl tugged at her hand and led her back down the alley. The insurgent ran away, keeping the car between him and Williams.
Corporal McKenzie walked by a Marine squad peeking out of an alleyway, shortly after a flurry of RPG rockets had whizzed past.
“Let’s keep it moving,” McKenzie said.
Shaken by the near miss, the Marines didn’t respond, refusing to move. McKenzie shrugged and moved on. The Marines weren’t from his unit, so he wasn’t going to get on their case. They’d get it back together soon enough.
The MAP squads had become used to the noise and confusion, the snaps and cracks of the bullets, the dull pops of the RPGs, followed by the explosions and showers of sparks. When they hit a rough spot, they called up a Mark 19 or .50 caliber to soften things up.
After fighting for about thirty minutes, Bronzi had moved about eight blocks and the M16 fire from Joker 3-1 was sounding only a few streets away. Behind him, he heard the growling of tracs. Colonel Buck Connor, Kennedy’s brigade commander, had been listening to the fight in his Tactical Operations Center, three kilometers outside town. He had radioed Kennedy, asking if he needed armored ambulances. Told yes, Connor grabbed two ambulances and two Bradleys and drove over to lend a hand. The twenty-ton Bradley, with a 25mm Bushmaster chain gun, could scrape down alleys too narrow for the Abrams tank. With the added firepower of the Bradleys, Bronzi hastened forward to find Joker 3-1.
_____
For the past half-hour, in their two separate houses, the riflemen of Joker 3-1 had held off several rushes. Rodriguez had posted Private First Class Peter Flom inside the courtyard gate. Twice an Iraqi had run up to the gate, and twice Flom had shot at point-blank range. Both men had hobbled away. Flom couldn’t believe it. Men were supposed to be blown away when a burst was fired into them, not wander away like they’d had too much to drink.
Insurgents kept popping up at different spots, plinking from roofs or darting out from around corners. They knew they had the two sections of the squad trapped and isolated from each other. Yet they didn’t close to finish the fight. They brought up an RPK machine gun and used it to pepper the courtyard wall where Hayes was holed up. The Marines were worried the machine-gunner would cover the dash forward of a suicide bomber strapped with explosives.
Hayes was down to the last of his nine magazines when he heard the whine of powerful engines and the unmistakable grinding sound of metal treads.
“Goddamn, that’s the sweetest sound I’ve ever heard,” he radioed to Rodriguez, farther up the block.
Seeing the armored column advancing toward them, the insurgents fell back and the firing ceased. Hayes ran out into the street, where Bronzi greeted him. Together they retrieved Hallal’s body. While the medics attended to the three wounded Marines, Bronzi reported to Kennedy, who had just arrived.
Seeing Col Connor and LtCol Kennedy conferring with Capt Bronzi, Gunny Crutcher was struck by how many officers were clustered around half a squad. “I think the commandant’s just around the corner,” he said.
Rodriguez was a block away, on the other side of an alley too narrow for the Bradleys. Bronzi sent McKenzie’s squad to aid Rodriguez. Colonel Connor dismounted and followed behind with the Brigade Command sergeant major, Ronald T. Riling, followed by his command humvee with a mounted .50 caliber machine gun. The insurgents had pulled back, and the firing had stopped.
From the corner house, Rodriguez waved at them, and soon the wounded were being taken care of. They retrieved the body of Langhorst outside the wall on the northwest corner. His SAW was gone, and he was covered with a blanket.
Joker 3-1 had lost two Marines.
“Hallal wasn’t locked on in garrison, but he loved the field. He was into sports. Wanted to be a broadcaster,” Rodriguez said. “Langhorst was bright, religious, saw God’s will in things. He ate a lot, too. He stayed at his post when I was getting the wounded inside, covering us. He was a Marine.”
After seeing to the evacuation of the casualties, at two in the afternoon Kennedy paused for a quick update. The ops center was roiling with activity. Over the past hour the ops officer, Major David Harrill, had tracked ten separate fir
efights, dispatched three medevacs, monitored the calls of the battalion and brigade commanders from the battlefield, and traced the movements of seven units. He had also directed five to knock out an RPK machine gun.
“My ops map looked like a kindergarten painting,” Harrill said, “lines zigzagging everywhere.”
Back at battalion headquarters, the word had spread that “the streets were on fire,” as black smoke poured from tires set ablaze up and down Route Michigan. The troops were clamoring to go to rescue, and the battalion executive officer, Major Mike Wylie, had to continuously clear the ops center of eager volunteers.
“Get the hell out of here!” Wylie said more than once. “Get back where you belong, goddammit. If I need you, I’ll call for you.”
The fight raged up and down the streets. Bronzi had with him fourteen squads from Golf and Weapons Companies, each supported by a Humvee with a heavy gun. Sometimes the insurgents were in front of them, often on their flanks, and sometimes in their rear. They had hidden caches of weapons and munitions, running swiftly to a house or mosque, shooting, and running on.
Bronzi worked out a grid, assigning about one block per squad, and they moved east using cross streets as boundaries, careful to keep on line. The insurgents had been fighting since ten in the morning, and they lacked the conditioning of the Marines. Despite cases of bottled water in the Humvees, twenty-one Marines were treated for heat exhaustion by Dr. Kenneth Son, the battalion staff physician. The figure was probably far higher among the insurgents. By early afternoon, Kennedy and Bronzi sensed they had the insurgents beaten in the downtown area. It was a matter of keeping up the pressure, encouraging their tired Marines to sweep block after block and search house after house, not letting up.
Harrill radioed Kennedy that Echo Company was heavily engaged east of the city, with Weapons Company sending reinforcements. The battle was like a forest fire that seems to be contained, only to have the flames arc across the trees and set off another blaze. At the peak of the fighting the dispersed Marine units—three hundred riflemen in all—were engaging hundreds of insurgents in ten separate firefights.
Around two in the afternoon, Col Dunford had called to say that CIA sources were reporting that a hundred insurgents had massed south of the Government Center and that three mosques were calling for jihad. Kennedy called back, wryly commenting that he had confirmed the CIA sources. Dunford wished Kennedy good luck and turned his attention to Fallujah.
Kennedy focused on Echo Company in the suburbs east of Ramadi, where the battle was suddenly escalating.
9
____
FAINT ECHOES OF TET
THE FIGHTING ERUPTING ACROSS IRAQ ON April 6 threatened to become politically explosive back in the United States. When the multinational force proved incapable of coping with Sadr’s militia south of Baghdad, the Joint Task Force had to employ the 1st Armored Division, which had been packing up to return to the States. With no uncommitted reserves left in Iraq, American newspapers were speculating about the need for additional troops. Sending more troops from the States would touch off a divisive political debate and evoke scathing criticism from the Democratic presidential contenders. There were faint echoes of Vietnam. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s reelection hopes had imploded when the military asked for additional troops to be sent to Vietnam.
It was well known in military circles that the 82nd Airborne Division had been stretched too thin across Anbar Province. Now the 1st Marine Division, having concentrated four battalions against Fallujah, was covering the same area with fewer forces. Across the breadth of Anbar, the rash of attacks was spreading, with Ramadi suddenly at the epicenter.
To the south, the 1st Armored Division had sent one task force to Najaf on April 4 to pry the holy city loose from Sadr’s militia. “We will attack to destroy the Mahdi Army,” BrigGen Kimmitt said.
But there was never a consensus, then or later, among the CPA, JTF, and Iraqi officials to finish off Sadr and his “army.” In contradiction of Kimmitt, Pentagon officials were telling the press that military commanders would move “gingerly” against Sadr to marginalize him. The CPA’s intent was to whittle down Sadr’s power base without making him a martyr. Ambassador Bremer had urged the JTF to undertake “Lincoln’s anaconda strategy,” a reference to the multiyear strategy to squeeze the Confederacy by slow attrition. Similarly, the Mahdi Army would be driven from city after city and slowly whittled down.
To drive out Sadr’s militia, the JTF had extended Major General Martin E. Dempsey’s 1st Armored Division for another ninety days. Half the division’s vehicles and helicopters were already in Kuwait; redeploying them required the largest cargo airlift of the war, an effort compared to the Red Ball Express in World War II. Dempsey’s lines of communication—roughly, the road networks used daily—had expanded from 500 to 25,000 square miles, a fifty-fold increase that required ten new forward operating bases, while his track vehicles were averaging a hundred miles per day. Commanders told the press they might send more forces to Iraq if the situation worsened. Another task force from the division was moving to take back the city of Kut, where the CPA staff had pulled out under fire.
While the CPA in the field appreciated Dempsey’s soldiers, there was scant cooperation or even civility between the military and the CPA planners in Baghdad. In an effort to bring the CPA and JTF staffs closer together, LtGen Sanchez and Ambassador Bremer shared a briefing room inside the palace in the Green Zone. Usually, though, Bremer’s staff was briefed at seven in the morning and Sanchez’s staff half an hour later.
With the CPA team driven out of Kut by Sadr’s gangs and in desperate shape elsewhere, Bremer’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Oster, asked for a briefing from the JTF about its next steps.
“That’s military business,” a colonel told Oster, “not to be shared with the CPA. LtGen Sanchez doesn’t work for the ambassador.”
Oster, a retired Marine lieutenant general, was outraged by such bureaucratic folderol. He went to Sanchez’s chief of staff, Major General Joseph Weber, who readily agreed to share information in the future. The incident, though, indicated how difficult it was for the CPA and the JTF to form a common strategy in the midst of battle.
The CPA civilians and all Iraqis were relying on the press to inform them about the military situation. Reports about the fighting came from two major sources—Western journalists, principally American, and the Arab press. The two dominant Arab satellite networks were Al Arabiya, based in Dubai, and Al Jazeera, based in Qatar. In addition to reaching hundreds of millions of Arabs, their reportage was more trusted by Iraqis than was the U.S.-funded channel called Al Iraqiya, based in Baghdad. About 25 percent of Iraqis—the more wealthy and influential—had access to satellite reception, and by a five-to-one margin they preferred Jazeera to Iraqiya. Jazeera was financed by the emir of Qatar and Arabiya by a Saudi sheikh.
Both networks had learned not to bite the hands that fed them. Criticism of the autocracies in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere had resulted in the closure of offices and the withdrawal of advertising revenues. Diatribes about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the American occupation of Iraq were the two staples of their coverage that received wide approval among Arab governments.
In September both networks had been barred from reporting in Iraq for two weeks because they were tipped to attacks on convoys and filmed the events without warning authorities. In November, when Arabiya aired a taped message from Saddam Hussein urging attacks upon Americans, Bremer responded by approving another temporary suspension of the network. A few days later Secretary Rumsfeld accused both Arabiya and Jazeera of cooperating with insurgents by continuing to videotape attacks on American troops. The complaints did not change the tone of Jazeera’s reportage.
In April the insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his crew into Fallujah, where they filmed scenes from the hospital. Hour after hour, day after day in the first week in April, the airwaves were fill
ed with pictures of the dead, the bleeding, and the maimed. The Arab media were calling the resistance an intifada, linking the insurgent fighting against the Americans to the Palestinian uprising against the Israelis. The sound bites featured the wails of the mourners, the sobs and screams of mothers, and the frenzied shouts and harried faces of blood-bespotted doctors and nurses. No one with a breath of compassion could watch Arab TV and not feel anguish. Most poignant were the pictures Jazeera ran of babies, one after another after another, all calm, frail, and pitiful in the repose of death. Where, how, or when they died was not attributed. The viewer assumed all the infants were killed by the Marines in Fallujah. The baby pictures would bring tears from a rock.
In Baghdad mullahs in Shiite mosques called on the faithful to donate blood and food for Fallujah, while residents in Sunni neighborhoods lauded the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr for rebelling. The clerics in Baghdad urged protests in the streets as calls for jihad rippled across the city.
Fallujah became the rallying point for anti-Coalition anger. Among Iraqis, vehement shouts of support for besieged Fallujah released simmering resentments about power outages, day-long lines for propane and gasoline, drive-by shootings, and random, dreaded suicide car bombings. Pent-up anger burst forth about foreign occupiers who shot at cars at vehicle checkpoints, rammed their armored vehicles through thick traffic, and ransacked homes at three in the morning. Iraqi men from all walks of life—students, laborers, doctors, policemen, shop owners—flocked to the mosques to exchange passionate denunciations of the infidel occupiers.
Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were unrelenting in broadcasting the plight of the civilians in Fallujah, while the Internet amplified the message of Marine callousness and sped protests around the world on a minute-by-minute basis. On the Google search engine, during the month of April, the word Fallujah leaped from 700 to 175,000 stories, many highly critical of the Marines. Quantity had a spurious quality of its own, resulting in an erroneous certitude based on the sheer volume of repetition.