No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

by Bing West

  The Bradley crew had indicated that the wounded Marines were to the northeast. But Smith’s force was being hit by machine-gun fire from the east. The twenty-year-old corporal wasn’t going to advance with his flank exposed. Within shouting range he had eighteen men from Weapons, 2nd and 3rd Platoons. It didn’t matter what unit they were from; as the acting platoon sergeant, he had the authority and Royer had given him the mission.

  Smith led them east, moving by bounds, pinching in on a house about four hundred meters away thought to be the source of the automatic fire. But it was hard to tell. The weapon was set back inside a window, not showing any muzzle flashes, and the noise of outgoing and incoming fire was constant. Smith’s men ran from one low wall to another, skirting open fields, searching each house they passed so as not to leave an enemy in their rear.

  Not that they had any idea who the enemy were. Everyone was in civilian clothes. Some of the dead bodies they passed had on two sets of civilian clothes, dirty shirts and pants, some in flip-flops, most in sneakers. Inside the houses some women said ali babas had come that morning and told them to stay inside, promising that many Americans were going to die. These ali babas were “outsiders” with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces.

  As Smith moved his riflemen forward, cars and taxis were coming and going. In the flat terrain, the Marines could see men several hundred meters away hopping in and out of vehicles. With all the shooting, a sensible civilian did not stroll or drive around. Still, they couldn’t shoot every man they saw outdoors. The Marines felt they were chasing ghosts.

  With his flank secure, Smith headed toward the T near Checkpoint 338, where SSgt Walker had driven an hour before. The Marines who had taken cover in the shed heard shouts in English, and the volume of fire pelting the shed petered out. When an Iraqi ran by the window, a Marine leaned out and shot him in the side of the head. Otey and the others then tumbled out the door, flopped down along a wall, and began shooting up at the roofs.

  The ambushers were fleeing. Cars were driving up behind the line of shops, and doors were slamming. Corporal Waechter’s squad cautiously advanced, joined by Smith. They saw Walker’s Humvee up ahead, all four tires deflated, its machine gun canted skyward.

  Waechter reached the vehicle first. “They’re all dead!” he shouted.

  Smith walked forward at the center of a line of skirmishers. He saw three Marine bodies lying in the back of the Humvee amid besotted sandbags and the brown plastic of MREs. Nearby an Iraqi in a blue shirt and a green camouflage-cloth armored vest lay facedown in his own blood, his head half blown off. Several meters from the Humvee another Iraqi lay on his back, barefoot, his flip-flops a few feet away, a white strip of pudgy belly showing between his blood-soaked blue shirt and brown trousers. A hand grenade lay near his outstretched arm, and he groaned as the skirmish line approached. The Marines killed him, put the grenade in a ditch, and moved on, prodding two bodies sprawled next to an orange and white taxi with shredded tires.

  The battleground was eerily clean. The weapons and armored vests of the dead Marines had been taken, and no AKs or RPGs were lying around. On the rooftops even the brass of the ejected rounds had been collected and removed. All that remained were hundreds of cigarette stubs. Smith thought the ambushers must have lain there for hours, obeying a commander who had carefully picked his spot and patiently waited.

  Smith set up a defensive perimeter and called forward a Humvee and a seven-ton truck. When the Combat Outpost was alerted that seven dead and five wounded were coming in, back in the rear Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Craig and Sergeant Damien Coan yelled for reinforcements, although they had received no orders to do so. “Saddle up! Echo, grab your gear!” Coan shouted. “We’re going out!”

  The Combat Outpost was little more than a large warehouse with a cement floor and a large center bay for parking vehicles indoors. With the electricity out and dusk nearing, to catch the light the medical team had set up in the doorway at the northern end, nearest the helipad. After the seven-ton pulled in and the bodies were respectfully unloaded, the floor became slippery with blood. Marines in full battle gear were sliding and pushing at each other as they clambered to board the truck. In the deepening shadows, it took Coan a few seconds to make out what the commotion was all about. A fight was under way for the seats in the back of the seven-ton. There was room for only ten additional riflemen, and there were too many volunteers. Coan had to leave some back. When Craig and Coan drove out, having “forgotten” to inform anyone that they were joining the fight, they left behind a dozen bitter faces.

  Coan’s seven-ton reached the ambush site shortly after Royer and Cogan, having fought their way across the irrigated fields, arrived. Cogan had approached from the west, warily circling around a few grenades booby-trapped on trees and finding Layfield’s body behind the row of stores along the side of the road. Cogan picked up an abandoned RPK machine gun and waited while his men followed blood trails that led nowhere, indicating cars had picked up the insurgent wounded and dead.

  Iraqis civilians swarmed outside moments after the firing ceased and set about their daily routine tasks. Eight Marines had died at the T and the ambushers had disappeared, replaced by men walking or driving by, not in itself unusual in a crowded suburb. Royer thought, Are they farmers or shooters? Smoldering with anger, he set about consolidating his men.

  It was after dusk before the last vehicles left the Sofia. The insurgents, who rarely fought at night, had dispersed. In eight hours the fight had rolled across twelve kilometers of roads and fields. Colonel Connor and his Bradleys returned to brigade headquarters. Kennedy was out on his feet. The exhausted Marines went back to Hurricane Point and the Combat Outpost to clean weapons, resupply, and sleep. In the ops center Maj Harrill, past trying to make sense of the firefights scrawled like spaghetti across his map, sent a terse summary to division. The NCOs attended to the administration and casualty reports, while the officers visited the wounded and planned the next day’s operations.

  The insurgents had planned the offensive and brought in fighters to respond to Battalion 2/4’s ever-expanding foot patrols. No Arab and few Western reporters were present. Had the Government Center been overrun, as the police station in Fallujah had been in February, or had 2/4 pulled back, the political consequences would have been dire. As it was, Kennedy had swung back with both fists, and the insurgents had pulled back. As in Tet of 1968, the initial press stories focused on the American casualties. “12 Marines Killed” was the headline policy-makers and politicians read on the morning of April 7. The press coverage of the Ramadi battle repeated the number of American lives lost, not that the insurgents had failed in their planned offensive.

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  AVOIDING THE PERFECT STORM

  WHILE THE INTENSE FIGHTING IN RAMADI on April 6 was going on, Battalion 1/5 had consolidated its lines in southern Fallujah. Bravo and Alpha Companies had pushed west two kilometers to Phase Line Violet, a four-lane avenue running north-south. To the north of Alpha, Weapons Company was holding the south side of Highway 10, having hauled .50 cals and Mark 19s to the roofs and backed their Humvees inside walled courtyards to avoid the ever-present RPGs. Battalion 1/5 had seized the industrial quadrant of Fallujah—about 25 percent of the city’s geography.

  The insurgents held the north side of Highway 10 and the west side of Violet. Most wore kaffiyehs, T-shirts or long-sleeved shirts, trousers, and flip-flops or running shoes. Some were dressed in black ninja outfits, and a few were wearing the blue shirts of police officers or the brown utilities of the Iraqi National Guard. Phase Line Violet (later called Phase Line Henry) marked the main line resistance of the insurgents. Once LtCol Byrne was given the signal, the two companies would surge across the avenue, break the defense, and turn north into the Jolan.

  On April 7 LtGen Conway and MajGen Mattis drove west from the industrial section with their guest, General Michael Hagee, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, who was visiting from Washington. The Marines call
ed these visits “windshield tours” and paid them no heed. Senior officers were expected to be forward. If someone took a bullet through the windshield, that was considered part of the job. It was important to Conway that the commandant get a firsthand understanding of the messy fighting.

  As the ground commander, Mattis had no illusions about the possibility of defeating the insurgents by attacking through the city. Without Iraqi forces to take over, many of the insurgents would simply pose as civilians and bide their time. The best outcome of the attack upon Fallujah was to duplicate the outcome at Ramadi, where LtCol Kennedy held the main highway, protected the Government Center, and patrolled wherever he wished.

  After pulling over at an intersection, standing near Gen Hagee, Mattis watched as one insurgent group after another fired a few AK rounds and then ducked into the Al Kubaysi Mosque south of Highway 10. Exasperated, he turned to Maj Farnum and said, “If those assholes keep it up, put a TOW [antitank missile] through the front door.”

  The insurgents persisted in firing from inside the mosque’s courtyard, so the Marines put a Hellfire missile and a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb into the wall. When they went forward a half-hour later, they found no bodies, the Iraqis having carried off the casualties. At least four journalists embedded with the battalion accurately reported the story in their respective papers. All reported that the Marines had taken continuous fire from the mosque. The clear video shots of the air attacks, of course, made good television footage in the States. Al Jazeera reported twenty-six civilians had died. The lead press story on April 7 was that a mosque had been struck.

  At division headquarters outside Ramadi, Dunford was conferring with the CPA diplomats, who warned that images of the fighting were causing political chaos in Baghdad. Dunford said the MEF had been alerted that the attack might be stopped. The CPA diplomats sent an e-mail to Bremer urging that the attack continue.

  On April 7, President Bush was at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, having left Washington for a long Easter weekend. The news was somber for the commander-in-chief. The headlines led with the Marine losses at Ramadi, the most costly ground engagement in a single day since the fall of Baghdad, followed by an air strike against a mosque in Fallujah. Fights were raging in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad, Kut, and Najaf, where American soldiers were attacking Sadr’s militia. The tone of the stories was apprehensive, lending an air of “what’s going to happen next?” with U.S. forces in Iraq stretched thin.

  In Washington, a policy fight under the klieg lights of the television networks was brewing: a parade of witnesses were testifying before the 9/11 Commission that was aggressively investigating whether the administration had ignored warnings about the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon.

  The president began a round of calls with his national security advisers and foreign leaders. On the international front, Bush won renewed pledges of support from Italy, El Salvador, and Poland. But Spain had already declared its troops were pulling out, and the Ukrainian troops, who had been driven out of Kut on April 6, had shaky support from a citizenry back home that was fed up with a corrupt government.

  The president spoke with Prime Minister Tony Blair against a background of reports that the departing British envoy in Baghdad, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, had objected to Bremer’s decision-making style and general approach to the Iraqis. The tension went both ways, with Sanchez disturbed by British military high-handedness in Basra and the CPA concerned about separate British channels of communication with Iran.

  The British leaders believed the attack on Fallujah was creating more insurgents among the residents of the city. “The lid of the pressure cooker has come off,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC radio a few days later. “It is plainly the fact today that there are larger numbers of people, and they are people on the ground, Iraqis, not foreign fighters, who are engaged in this insurgency.”

  A decade earlier, as political pressures mounted against throwing Saddam out of Kuwait by force, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had famously advised President George H. W. Bush, “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.” This time the advice from the British was to halt the attack.

  Unlike the British, pundits writing in major American newspapers on April 7 argued for continuing with the attack in Fallujah. “There has to be a strong response or else this will encourage more of this,” said Andrew Krepinevich, the director of a Washington think tank.

  “This is a turning point. We have been challenged,” retired Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, a noted military author, said. “If we back off on this thing, we are sending a strong signal that the Americans will not be able to control the situation. Most of the Iraqis are sitting on the fence waiting to see which side is going to win. If the tide starts to turn, you will get a mob reaction.”

  _____

  The president spent part of the day gauging the reactions and soliciting judgments about Fallujah, including a televideo briefing from Bremer. Usually the national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, collected inputs about Iraq from three sources—her deputy for Iraq, Ambassador Blackwill; Ambassador Bremer; and Secretary Rumsfeld. It wasn’t always that neatly divided, though. The secure video teleconference, or “sivits,” had emerged as a twenty-first-century staple of senior government officials, permitting advisers thousands of miles apart to pop up on different quadrants of a video screen to discuss important matters. The sivits had the advantage of immediate, corporeal interaction and the disadvantage of shaping decisions without coordinated staff papers.

  Rice was in Washington preparing to testify before the 9/11 Commission. Richard Clarke, a civil servant who had coordinated counterterrorism activities at the NSC, had endorsed Senator Kerry for president and charged that Dr. Rice had ignored his pre-9/11 warnings about a terrorist attack. Clarke had testified a week earlier before the 9/11 Commission, and reporters had portrayed him as a twenty-first-century Paul Revere, the bureaucrat who valiantly tried to awaken a somnambulant administration. Rice was due to testify the next day, and the press was building up the event as round two of a momentous intellectual boxing match. The 9/11 commissioners were an impressive group of former government officials and politicians, knowledgeable and aggressive. The stakes for Dr. Rice were high—her reputation, her career, and the administration’s credibility. The next day’s hearing demanded her careful preparation.

  By dealing directly via sivits with Abizaid and Bremer, the president was hearing first-hand the judgments of the two separate and coequal chains of command he had established. The battle for Fallujah had become equally a military matter and a political matter.

  Both Bremer and the president’s deputy assistant for Iraq, Ambassador Blackwill, were under intense pressure in Baghdad. Blackwill was pulling together an interim government to take power when Iraq regained sovereignty in June. He was also dealing with the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, who had been sent by the UN to help in the transition to sovereignty. Brahimi hadn’t established an easy rapport with the Ayatollah Sistani, the reclusive Shiite religious leader, and an old photo of Brahimi smoking a cigar with a beaming Saddam had circulated over the Internet, further complicating his dealings with the Shiites. Brahimi’s daughter was engaged to the son of King Abdullah of Jordan. Both men were prominent Sunnis—eighteen of the twenty-one Arab countries in the Middle East were ruled by Sunni leaders—who objected strongly to the attack on the Sunni city of Fallujah. Brahimi insisted that a compromise had to be negotiated in Fallujah.

  At the same time Bremer was trying to assure the Sunnis of equitable treatment while balancing the demands of a Shiite majority aroused and confused by Sadr’s rebellion. Hourly television depictions of American forces destroying Fallujah and cutting down Sadr’s Shiite militia in Najaf and East Baghdad were rallying widespread sympathy and forging common bonds among Shiites and Sunnis.

  The Iraqi Governing Council was comprised of twenty-four Iraqis who had opposed Saddam. None were military men; they had no experience or yardstic
k to put the fighting in perspective. In response to the attack on Fallujah, one member of the council had suspended his membership, and four others threatened to quit. Bremer faced a revolt inside the very Iraqi Governing Council that he had hand-picked.

  One misstep, and the ambassadors would find themselves in the perfect political storm, defied by the Iraqi Governing Council, by the UN representative, and by Sunnis and Shiites alike. On April 7 Bremer and Blackwill, the two top diplomats in Iraq, saw the situation the same way. “If the top [of the Governing Councils] blows off,” a senior diplomat said, “that is a huge political defeat for the Coalition and for what we’re trying to do in Iraq. Advancing the sovereignty of Iraq is the key, not seizing one city.”

  The Fallujah battle as portrayed on Arab TV threatened to collapse months of sensitive negotiations and leave America ruling Iraq without Iraqi partners. The diplomats were under the impression that it would take ten days to seize the city. They did not know Mattis was moving a third battalion into position to finish the fight in a few days. The message via sivits to the White House was succinct and to the point:

  “Sir, we have a growing political problem,” Bremer told the president.

  _____

  While the president was mulling the political situation, at the fighting level Col Toolan was aligning his final pieces on the Fallujah chessboard. A year earlier the American military had charged up two narrow corridors and pounced on Saddam’s headquarters in Baghdad. That strategy, called Maneuver Warfare, employed speed and maneuver to strike the enemy’s “center of gravity” (Baghdad) and deliver a quick knockout rather than to slog forward relying on firepower and attrition. There were theories for applying Maneuver Warfare to urban combat: for instance, conducting raids against the houses of known insurgent leaders, or sending a column of tanks directly into the Jolan District to break the center of resistance. Toolan rejected these theories as quick fixes sure to fizzle.