by Bing West
“Get down, you idiots!” Funke yelled. “Get the hell down! You’re under fire. What the hell’s the matter with you? Use your weapons!”
On the roof, Villalobos’s excited fire team now had a commanding view of the nearby streets, the garbage-strewn field, and the mosque on the far side. They were the battalion’s point, the fire team farthest into the city. On a roof about two hundred meters away, three insurgents were firing an RPK machine gun, the barrel resting on a low retaining wall. Villalobos and his men lay down behind their own retaining wall, aimed in, and fired back. One Iraqi staggered as if hit, and the other two picked up the machine gun and followed him off the roof.
Villalobos poked his head up and glanced around. On the far side of the field, a blue car had swung around the corner and was speeding toward them, the driver having no idea the Marines were on the roof. Villalobos couldn’t believe his luck.
When the car was almost below them, the three Marines popped up, firing down at point-blank range. The car’s windshield shattered, and the hood sprang open as the car hit the side of the house. Iraqis with AKs strapped to their bodies tumbled over each other to get out. Four sank to the ground within several feet of the smoking car. A fifth didn’t make it out. The driver, a large man wearing Adidas sneakers, leaped out and sprinted several meters into the field as Villalobos shot him in the back.
No sooner had the Marines changed magazines than a dusty white car swerved around the same far corner and barreled toward them. The Marines looked at each other—a twofer. Suddenly the driver saw them, and the car skidded to a halt. The driver sprinted away, running too fast for the Marines to shoot him and leaving his companions to their fate. A man with an AK stepped out of the rear door and shouted after the driver. Villalobos rested his M16 on the low wall and shot him. Two more Iraqis popped out of the car and ran away before the Marines could aim in. In less than a minute the three Marines had killed eight men.
A block to the rear McCoy was moving up with the command group, monitoring the various radio nets. An electronic intelligence team was providing a running commentary on the Iraqi cell phones they were intercepting.
“They don’t know which way to go,” the intelligence section chief said. “They’re saying, ‘They’re all over the place!’ They’re having trouble in all sectors. Sounds like one-five’s opened up with tanks. They’re panicking. They’re losing it.”
The insurgents were feeling the vise closing.
Major Kevin Norton, the 3/4 operations officer, told McCoy that the cell phone intercepts suggested a breakdown in command.
“The muj are saying the Marines are attacking from all directions,” he said. “They’re panicking. We can roll them up.”
“Is that just your judgment?” McCoy asked.
“Negative,” Norton said. “Solid progress in every sector.”
McCoy’s company commanders sensed they had momentum. There is a rhythm to battle, and the squads knew how the insurgents were fighting. The fight resembled the one in Ramadi. The insurgents were falling back, running into the fires of the gun trucks facing down the north-south boulevards.
Every house could be turned into a pillbox—Cpl Amaya had died at such a hard point. But the insurgents weren’t systematically defending that way. The Marines didn’t have to clear every house; it was more important to keep abreast and sweep every alley and courtyard. If other hard points lay ahead, the Marines would call up tanks. If their main guns didn’t level a house, it could be marked and bypassed.
As far as McCoy was concerned, Fallujah was about to be brought to heel. McCoy called Lieutenant Colonel Sparky Renforth, the regimental operations officer.
“Sparky,” he said, “we’ve reached the eighty-nine Easting. We are prepared to continue the attack. I’ll have the Hidra mosque inside an hour.”
The insurgents were jabbering over their cell phones, aimlessly dodging around the back streets of the Jolan in trucks and taxis, unsure whether to head south to meet Byrne and 1/5, or to head east to defend against McCoy. India Company had two vehicles and a half-dozen bodies strewn in front of them, clear fields of observation, and mutually reinforcing fires. All they had to do was advance the infantry with tanks westward, while on their right flank the gun trucks leapfrogged along, covering the streets that ran north-south.
McCoy believed the Jolan could be squeezed and popped like a pus head.
“B.P., that is a negative,” Col Renforth said. “The division does not have permission to advance. You will hold firm at the eight-nine easting.”
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On Easter Sunday, after Daniel Amaya, Toby Gray, and Oscar Jimenez had died, Hassani appeared on Al Jazeera to make an announcement.
“If it [the cease-fire] sticks,” he said, implying he had the authority to speak for the U.S. military, “there will be a phased withdrawal from the city.”
14
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“YOU WANNA SHOOT AT ME? THIS AIN’T NO PICNIC!”
AS THE UNILATERAL CEASE-FIRE DRAGGED on, Mattis was concerned that the vacillation at high levels was encouraging the fighting to spread at the tactical level. Each day the cease-fire was extended another day. Hassani was forever on the brink of making a real breakthrough with mysterious agents of the insurgency. And every day the Arab press pointed to the grisly siege of Fallujah. Between April 6 and 13, the CPA documented thirty-four stories on Al Jazeera that hyped, misreported, or distorted battlefield events. Rumsfeld called the TV reports “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.”
For the insurgents, the strategic propaganda, fueled by sermons in the Sunni mosques, was effective. Men and boys with AKs were climbing into pickups in every village and hamlet around Fallujah and driving out to the main highways, there to join gangs from other tribes. Former officers came forward, suggesting rudimentary tactics and good spots for ambush. Humvee and tractor trailers were hit, and Iraqis rushed out onto the highway to set the crippled vehicles on fire.
“It’s an emotional uprising,” Col Dunford said. “Call it a jihad if you want. It’s a spirit, a feeling. It’s emotion-based, so it doesn’t have staying power. We have to get after it and not let it grow.”
Mattis set out to break that spirit. Since 3/4 was forbidden to advance farther into Fallujah, the division commander gave them another quick mission. The town of Karma, six miles northeast of Fallujah, had fallen to the insurgents. The police and the National Guard had abandoned the town, and the insurgents were blocking Route Chicago, which ran toward Baghdad. McCoy was told to reconnoiter in force.
He left with Kilo Company at four in the morning of April 13, hoping to be inside the town before the insurgents got up for breakfast. On the outskirts of town, however, the insurgents had blocked the highway with a dozen cement Jersey barriers. Kilo Company was stuck, not knowing how to get around them.
Slayer, the Air Force AC-130 gunship, was circling overhead in the dark.
“Need a burn?” the pilot asked Captain Vincent Delpidio, Kilo’s forward air control officer.
“We could use some help.”
“Follow the dancing ball,” the pilot said, turning on the plane’s massive infrared searchlight.
On the ground, the drivers of the light armored vehicles leading Kilo Company adjusted their night-vision goggles and focused in on the searchlight. Behind them a dozen Humvees fell in line. As the circle of light moved off the blocked highway and through the back alleys, twisting and turning among repair shops, hulks of old cars, and stunted palm trees, the drivers followed it. Some of the turns were so tight, the LAVs scraped against the walls of shops.
They emerged on the other side of the barricade shortly before dawn and drove slowly up the empty road. With the first smudges of light, the LAVs started taking small-arms fire from a grove of palm trees on the other side of a narrow bridge. McCoy deployed his force on both sides of the highway, and the Marines fanned out, searching through the palm trees and tall grass for some deep irrigation ditch or cow path not covered by fire. Th
ey found none. Whenever a Marine stood or ran to a new position, half a dozen AKs unloaded at him.
A kilometer up the road on the right was a mosque with a minaret that provided a clear view of the advancing Marines. Soon Iraqi men were pouring out of the town on the far side of the mosque. Some wore black ninja outfits, others dishdashas, most civilian trousers and long-sleeved shirts. Only a few were wearing kaffiyehs. Soon there were more than a hundred of them, dodging about in groups of five to ten, hanging back a respectful distance of four to five hundred meters from the Marine weapons, firing AKs and RPKs in long bursts and lofting volleys of RPG rockets.
The LAVs with their 25mm chain guns and ten-power optics were providing most of the return fire. But the insurgents were crouching low alongside a row of cement houses with the usual high courtyard walls. The LAVs weren’t doing much damage, and with mortar rounds crunching in, they had to shift positions constantly. The result was an enormous volume of fire exchanged with few casualties inflicted. Neither side was offering an easy target.
On the left side of the road a few hundred meters to the north was a water-pumping station with the usual assortment of jutting pipelines, holding tanks, and low-slung buildings. On the right side a long wall enclosed an abandoned military post, with the mosque on the far side. It took the Marines two hours to gain sufficient fire superiority to reach the pumping station and the post. Once they did, their fields of fire opened up. Squads shot at the various houses half a kilometer away; thousands of bullets chipped the cement walls and raised small columns of dust.
The insurgents weren’t backing off. They knew the LAVs, now firing short bursts to conserve their dwindling ammunition, were the heaviest firepower the Marines had, and that was not enough to dislodge them. Taxis and cars were making their usual drop-off runs, the drivers careful to keep a wall or a house between themselves and the LAVs.
McCoy was striding about, exhorting and correcting, trying to find the key to breaking the resistance, ignoring the bullets snapping around. A few steps away Sergeant Major David Howell was glaring at him and muttering, “Goddammit, sir.” Howell had cautioned McCoy before, and the battalion commander had agreed that he had to be careful. Now he was doing it again. Sooner or later he was going to get clipped.
A jump-qualified recon Marine, Howell was happiest in the field, competing in ultramarathons and backcountry alpine skiing races. Twice divorced, the Marine Corps was his life. Behind his back his crew called him “Uncle Dave,” an oxymoron that reflected deeper feelings. When angered, Howell looked like a mean bulldog.
McCoy didn’t want to be the brunt of that scowl. “See what you can do to relieve pressure on the left flank,” he told his sergeant major.
Howell drove cautiously over to the pumping station, where Marines were lying behind palm trees and piles of loose pipes, exchanging fire with insurgents among the cement houses to the north. Through his binoculars Howell could make out the fresh dirt of a trench line behind a row of toppled palm trees. The Marines were staying flat, warning him about a sniper and pointing at a two-story house with a balcony leading back to an open alcove. The sniper, tucked back somewhere inside the alcove, had already hit one Marine in the shoulder.
“They’re hard to kill!” Private Jason Bruseno yelled. “Like hunting cockroaches in the day.”
“Goddamned Groundhog Day. Diyala all over again,” Howell muttered, referring to a fight the battalion had waged a year ago almost to the day.
Howell eased his unarmored Humvee forward, trying to keep behind the trees, and pointed out the house to his Mark 19 gunner, Lance Corporal Ryan Kennelly.
“Kennelly, can you hit that?” Howell asked.
Kennelly squinted through a pair of binoculars called Viper, which gave the azimuth and a laser read of the distance to a target.
“Five hundred and fifty meters,” he said. “I’m on it, Sergeant Major.”
The gunner placed fifty rounds of 40mm explosive shells into the small alcove, and that was the last the Marines heard from that sniper. Howell nodded.
Over on the right flank, McCoy’s crew was engaged. The radio operator in McCoy’s unarmored Humvee, Corporal Brian Hemmelgarn, was responsible for five radios and the Blue Force Tracker, a GPS-equipped computer that tracked the location of all similarly equipped vehicles. Taking care of his radios came first, and when two bullets struck the Humvee’s hood, Hemmelgarn had pulled in to defilade in a culvert.
“No way we’re ducking down, man,” said Cpl Golden, the machine-gunner standing on a small platform behind the driver. “Get me back up there.”
Golden’s grandfather had been a machine-gunner with 3/4 in Korea, and his father had been a machine-gunner with 3/4 in Vietnam, where he was twice wounded. A linebacker with a 3.5 GPA at the University of Arkansas, Golden had dropped out of college and enlisted after 9/11. On the machine-gun range he had scored 94 out of 100, the high score in the battalion, and now he had a chance to live up to the family tradition. The driver, Corporal Tom Conroy, wasn’t about to argue with the huge corporal, so he reversed and pulled up slope enough for Golden bring his machine gun to bear. Over the next few hours, Golden put three thousand rounds downrange, a fair day’s shooting.
By noon the Obstacles Clearing Detachment had shoved the massive Jersey barriers off the highway, allowing two tanks to come forward to join the battle. In the next few hours the tanks burned through thousands of rounds, while RPGs burst around them and occasionally bounced off them.
The din of the battle was a constant roar, and McCoy was thinking it would never subside when “Jason,” a senior special forces NCO, came up to him. Jason was advising a platoon from the 36th National Guard Battalion, attached to 3/4. The Iraqi platoon had just cleared two buildings and captured an insurgent who had talked immediately.
“No rough stuff, the guy started jabbering on his own!” Jason shouted in McCoy’s ear. “The muj headquarters is that mosque to your front. The imam is on our bad guy list.”
All morning the Marines had seen armed Iraqis dodging in and out of the wall surrounding the mosque.
“I’m taking it down,” McCoy said.
McCoy turned the target over to Capt Delpidio and the FAC talked to an F-16 loitering overhead. Delpidio marked the friendly lines with flares and had the pilot make a practice run from southwest to northeast. When that went well, the pilot swung around and made a second pass. With eyes on the F-16 and sure of its alignment, Delpidio said, “Cleared hot,” and the pilot dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs, knocking down the minaret and collapsing half of the main building.
After the usual several moments of shock that follow a successful bomb run, the insurgents resumed firing. McCoy wasn’t sure what effect the strike on the mosque had had on their leadership. Running low on ammunition, he pulled his Marines back, and the insurgents made no effort to follow. McCoy radioed to Col Toolan that he estimated about a hundred insurgents had been killed or wounded, and more still held the town of Karma.
Toolan told 3/4 to return to the lines in northeastern Fallujah. He had heard enough to recommend to Mattis that the surrounding suburbs, to include Karma, be swept by another regiment. Toolan’s regiment needed to focus on Fallujah.
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Battalion 3/4 wasn’t the only unit heavily engaged on April 13. At about one in the morning, a special operations CH-53 “Pave Low” helicopter on a secret mission was hit on the outskirts of Fallujah and went down in a controlled crash, landing southeast of 1/5’s lines. LtCol Byrne had organized his Weapons Company into mounted Mobile Assault Platoons to respond to emergencies. Byrne tapped a MAP commanded by 1/Lt Josh Glover to go to the aid of the downed helicopter. Glover had an easy rapport with his Marines and an instinct for navigation, a useful talent for a Quick Reaction Force. Glover—radio call sign Red Cloud—headed out with fifty-five Marines packed into nine Humvees.
After driving ten kilometers, the Hummers turned off the paved road and cut across farm fields, guided by the infrared spotlight
from a circling AC-130. They reached the crash site after another special operations helicopter had evacuated the downed crew. The CH-53 lay crumbled in a wheat field, the front canopy smashed, the nose of a rocket-propelled grenade stuck through the windshield. The left pilot seat was smeared with blood. The Marines recovered some sensitive items—crypto gear, a tan knapsack, and a transmitter—and settled into a defensive perimeter for the night, with the AC-130 hovering above them.
In the morning mortar rounds started dropping in while many of the Marines were still sleeping. With shells bursting around them, the platoon drove hastily away with three wounded. In the sandy soil of wheat fields in spring blossom, the wheels of the Humvees were spinning out. To avoid bogging down, the drivers chose to speed along the tops of the irrigation ditches, where cows and water buffalo had packed down the mud.
As they jounced along, they were easy targets and began taking small-arms fire from the fields. A burst struck the radio in Sgt Cyparski’s lead gun truck, and not knowing which way to go, he turned south instead of west. Under fire from both sides, the column headed in the wrong direction, braking to a halt at a small pond. Glover got them turned around, handing Cyparski a Garmin GPS showing the route to get out.
Cyparski led them back through the gauntlet a second time. The insurgents had gathered by the dozens during the night, drawn like a magnet to the downed helicopter, the symbol of a triumph over America. This was the fourth chopper to have been brought down in the Fallujah area. As the vehicles drove past them, the insurgents fired, some standing up and spraying from the hip, some shooting RPGs, others staying hidden in the wheat fields, firing at the sound of the trucks.
Cyparski, in the lead with the .50 caliber on his truck, pounded through seven hundred rounds. Behind him the next gun truck in line ripped off a thousand rounds of 7.62mm machine-gun bullets. Then came the five highback Humvees, with Marines sitting on center benches facing outboard and firing their M16s. Two gun trucks brought up the rear. When the Mark 19 jammed in the last gun truck, Corporal Christopher Moss-Warrington and his crew unhooked the gun and replaced it with a .50 cal in under thirty seconds. The gun was barely operational when Moss saw two Iraqis firing at him from behind a dumptruck. He put thirty shells through the cab, hitting both men crouched on the other side.