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

by Bing West

  To Crane, sniping was like fishing, requiring long hours of patience. The targets were a quarry, like fish. He tried not to think of them as men. One day at dusk he took fire from a house about three hundred yards away. The next day he watched the house for seven hours. In late afternoon an old man, assisted by a tall young man, slowly shuffled next door and returned with a loaf of bread. At the courtyard gate the old man continued inside while the young man paused to glance toward the house where Crane sat hidden behind sandbags. A few minutes later, as the shadows lengthened, the gate opened and the young man slipped out, AK in hand, and ducked behind a burnt-out car. Crane placed the reticule of his scope on the car. When the man peeked out, Crane fired. The man slipped forward into the street and lay still. A scream of pain or grief came from inside the house.

  Crane waited. A few minutes later the old man walked out, holding himself stiffly erect. Knowing he was in the line of fire but refusing to look toward Crane’s position, the old man shuffled to the body, grasped the dead man under the armpits, and step by step tugged the body back inside the gate. Crane watched and waited. A few minutes later the old man stepped into the open courtyard with a shovel and dug a grave.

  Of the ten men he had hit, Crane had not seen one knocked off his feet, as happened in the movies. When hit in the chest, most men flinched and staggered on for a few steps before sitting down and slouching over, or lying down and bleeding out. He had hit one man in the arm, then in the foot, and still he hobbled away. He shot him again in the jaw and the man stayed upright with three bullets in him, disappearing around a corner.

  Day by day the Marine snipers took a steady toll of the armed insurgents. At the Fallujah Liaison Center the city elders complained bitterly to sympathetic listeners from the Iraqi Governing Council. Both the city elders and the Baghdad delegation agreed that the American snipers were inhumane and must stop shooting.

  LtGen Conway, presiding over the U.S. delegation, disagreed. “I find it strange,” he said to one group, “that you object to our most discriminate weapon—a Marine firing three ounces of lead at a precise target. A sniper is any Marine with a rifle. I reject your demand, and I wonder who asked you to make it.”

  About one Marine in four had an M16 with a three-power scope, which increased kills at three and four hundred yards. The M40 sniper rifles with ten-power scopes reached out half a mile during the day. Inside the city were European as well as Arab aid workers and journalists sympathetic to the insurgents. Describing the fighting from the other side, a British journalist in Fallujah wrote that “it is the snipers the people of Fallujah fear more than anything else.”

  At night the 7.62mm machine gun with a thermal scope took over for the sniper rifle. The thermal was clunky, temperamental, and gobbled up batteries. It also was excellent at detecting a heat source a quarter of a mile away, meaning that no infiltrator could sneak close enough to pitch a grenade. Mangy packs of wild dogs scavenged in the dark, wriggling through the concertina wire and setting off trip flares. The Marines called them “sapper dogs.” The thermals picked them up easily, thus avoiding shooting at phantom attackers. When Iraqis did try to probe, they stood out clearly as black “hot spots.” When hit by a burst of bullets, a hot spot would gradually dim and fade out, at which time the machine-gunner would report another kill on the lines.

  Every day Red Crescent ambulances drove up to the lines to remove the corpses. During the first week in April, Marines shot the drivers of two ambulances carrying armed fighters. After that the ambulances stayed out of the fight and conducted only humanitarian missions, tending to the wounded and the dead, distributing food to the stubborn families living in no-man’s-land between the two sides.

  At a few places they left the dead where they had fallen. When Cpl Villalobos of Battalion 3/4 had shot up cars careening toward his position, one of the drivers lay out in the field where he had been shot, unattended. The body, black with flies, had swelled and split apart, the stink of rotting death wafting into the house where Villalobos and his squad lived. They doused the body with gasoline and tried to burn it, which only increased the mess—a dog carried off a roasted thigh.

  At a meeting at regiment, Captain Shannon Johnson, the company commander, requested flamethrowers. “That way, sir,” he explained to Col Toolan, “we clean up the mess in front of our lines and torch the hard points once the cease-fire is lifted.”

  Corporal Amaya had been one of Johnson’s squad leaders. If jihadists were going to barricade themselves in houses to kill Americans before dying, better to burn them out than send in a Marine.

  “You know I can’t make that kind of decision,” Toolan said.

  There was no reprimand in his tone. Strong requests were not unusual from aggressive fighters. The translators said the Iraqis called McCoy’s battalion the “Black Plague.” The Marines liked the image that they were one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but the Iraqis were referring to their fear of disease from the blackened corpses in front of the battalion lines. Before jumping off in the attack, McCoy had the habit of gathering his troops and playing at full blast “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.” In 1804 Andrew Jackson’s musketeers had advanced to drum rolls composed by Beethoven; in 2004 Marines attacked under the blare of hard rock composed by Eminem.

  Each battalion had its idiosyncrasies. Byrne’s Battalion 2/1—more partial to blasting Jimi Hendrix at 110 decibels—had been the first to persuade the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare teams to initiate scatological warfare. Platoons in 1/5 competed to dream up the filthiest insults for the translators to scream over the loudspeakers. When enraged Iraqis rushed from a mosque blindly firing their AKs, the Marines shot them down.

  The tactic of insult-and-shoot spread along the lines. Soon the Marines were mocking the city as “Lalafallujah” (after the popular stateside concert Lollapalooza) and cranking out “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns ’n’ Roses and “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC. Not to be outdone, the mullahs responded with loudspeakers hooked to generators, trying to drown out Eminem with prayers, chants of Allahu akbar, and Arabic music. Every night discordant sound washed over the lines.

  _____

  And every night images of civilian casualties were transmitted worldwide via satellite and across the Internet. Western TV networks pooled video from Fallujah, including film from the Arab cameramen with the insurgents. Predictably, the pictures stressed destruction. Al Jazeera was unrelenting in depicting the deaths of civilians.

  In three weeks of fighting, eighty-two buildings and two mosques had been bombed. The average number of air strikes per day was four. Massive civilian casualties, however, became the accepted storyline. The Coalition made no institutional effort to rebut each false report or to conduct systematic assessments. Given the imagery from the UAVs and from every air strike, records were certainly available to inform the press. In the absence of such data, however, Al Jazeera shaped the story.

  _____

  During the third week in April, Ambassador Richard H. Jones, Bremer’s experienced deputy at the CPA, chaired four sessions at the Fallujah Liaison Center to resolve the siege. Every day Iraqis in civilian clothes, robes, and kaffiyehs thronged into the FLC to meet with American diplomats and generals. Every day the Iraqis promised to curtail the violence. Every day rusted and broken weapons were turned in as symbols of progress while the violence continued. As for expelling the terrorists, the negotiators denied they existed. Foreign fighters, they said, were a myth and an excuse to punish the city. At one point Nate Jensen counted thirteen negotiating groups—five American and eight Iraqi teams. Rarely did the meetings have a written agenda.

  Having survived by cunning under Saddam, the Iraqis were shrewd at sorting out which American colonels reported to which generals and which verbal assurances sounded most promising. Determined to prevent a Marine attack, the Iraqis pushed for concessions and argued the insurgents’ case with the doggedness of top-flight defense lawyers. Conway, a genial and courteous man, became so angry i
n one meeting that he pounded the table. In another session, a front man for Janabi insisted that Mattis agree to forty-five written demands. Mattis responded by walking out.

  “The Iraqis have never won a battle,” Mattis quipped to Jensen, “or lost a negotiation.”

  Whenever the Americans appeared at the end of their tether, Hassani, in the role of interlocutor, called a halt for the day, assuring both sides that tomorrow would be better. Hassani’s pleasing personality and laid-back California style were soothing, but the basis for such assurances was opaque. No insurgent leader sat at the negotiating table. Hoping they would play a mediating role, Bremer agreed to release from prison Sheikh Barakat and the imam mufti Sheikh Jamal, whom Drinkwine had arrested for sedition in November. Once freed, however, Barakat disappeared and Jamal played no significant role in the negotiations.

  On the American side, there were too many negotiators with authority. Ambassadors Jones, Bremer, and Blackwill were well-seasoned diplomats, trained to advance America’s interests by outwitting foreign leaders. The three leading generals—Abizaid, Sanchez, and Conway—were managers of violence. Each had a distinct personality. Abizaid was thoughtful and even-handed in his deliberations; Sanchez focused on operations, preferring to leave political-military matters to others; Conway was courteous and fair. Despite their different styles, however, the three generals shared the trait of leadership. Everything they did was based on teamwork and on achieving the objective at the least cost to their men.

  If diplomats played poker, generals played bridge. A diplomat can zig and zag to outwit or win over his opponent; a general must calculate each move to fit the capabilities and concerns of his troops. Where a diplomat might urge a nimble strategy of fight and talk, a general would think long and hard before he started his men down one track and then switched to another. Jones and Blackwill had years of experience in negotiations in the Middle East, but the area of operations belonged to the military and the MEF. Without a clear written agenda, goals, and deadlines, the roles of the diplomats and generals in the negotiations became confused.

  The ambiguity about negotiating roles reflected the diverse chains of command and communication channels. Conway made the decisions for the Marines, with Mattis in an off-again/on-again supporting role. Mattis’s headquarters was outside Ramadi, and Conway was outside Fallujah. Abizaid was operating from Qatar and Tampa. Bremer and Sanchez were in Baghdad. Abizaid was talking to Rumsfeld and Rice; Bremer was talking to Rumsfeld and Rice; and Blackwill was talking to Rice.

  At the same time Conway was secretly meeting with former Iraqi generals. Their titular head was Muhammad Latif, a colonel in the intelligence branch who had been imprisoned for seven years by Saddam. Only the MEF staff knew the details of this negotiating channel. The American diplomats were not informed. The Sunni generals claimed they could exert authority over most of the fighters in Fallujah and restore order—provided the Americans turned control of the city over to them. Conway was intrigued by the proposal and impressed by their sincerity.

  The Iraqi Governing Council had achieved nothing in its negotiations. On April 19, Hassani grandly announced to the press that the insurgents were turning in their heavy weapons. Calling the weapons “junk,” Mattis met the next day with Conway, arguing strongly for permission to attack.

  “My civilian masters in Baghdad believe I’m a dumb, bloodthirsty grunt,” Mattis said. “But I know what l have to do, and l sleep well at night.”

  Openly dismissive of the credentials of the negotiators, Rumsfeld was urging Abizaid to resume the attack. On April 21 a frustrated Conway told the press that an attack was “days, not weeks, away.” MEF staff officers added that they “desperately wanted to avoid a bloody urban siege.” After speaking with Abizaid on April 21, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed the attack was scheduled to commence in a few days. Abizaid had pushed back hard, though, arguing with Rumsfeld on several occasions that massive force at this late juncture would inflame the Sunni region and should be considered only as a last resort.

  On April 23, Bremer warned that “if these [insurgent] bands do not surrender their military weapons and instead continue to use them against Iraqi and Coalition forces, major hostilities could resume on short notice.” That afternoon, as JTF commander, Sanchez sent the MEF a warning order to be prepared to resume offensive operations.

  At the same time, all parties were aware that the president wanted options, not a full-scale attack. So they agreed to meet at the MEF on the twenty-fourth to discuss the situation.

  _____

  The twenty-fourth was a typically hot April day, moderated by a steady wind. On the street outside the walled compound of the MEF, parking was crowded as diplomats, generals, and Iraqis from the Governing Council convened to discuss the next steps.

  When Bremer came to the meeting, he was managing two crises: Sadr in the south and Fallujah in the west. The 1st Armored Division had trapped Sadr in Najaf. In return for pulling back his followers, Sadr was working out terms that permitted himself to go free. The Sadr crisis looked to be about over, with a messy but not disastrous ending.

  That left Fallujah. Bremer believed the mood in the White House was not to take the city, and he felt he had allies for this point of view. Abizaid had sided with Rumsfeld in recommending a full-scale attack at the beginning of April; by the third week in April, Bremer believed Abizaid agreed that to recommence the attack would be a political blunder. The president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Massoud Barzani, was publicly complaining that the United States “has only itself for blame for the military deadlock in Najaf and Fallujah because it allowed its troops to change from an army of liberation to an army of occupation.” Feeding on its own negativity and reinforced by daily press attention, the Iraqi Governing Council was continuing its complaints about the American military while remaining silent about Sadr’s militia and the Sunni insurgents.

  The Americans lacked support for an attack from both the Iraqis and the British. Although LtGen Sanchez preferred employing massive force, he had been warning Conway that White House support was slipping away. Conway understood: a full-scale attack would not be authorized.

  The diplomats and generals were walking a fine line, in trying to reach agreement with the Iraqi negotiators to bring stability to Fallujah, using the threat of an attack as leverage, while knowing it was an empty threat.

  _____

  One hundred feet away from the generals and diplomats, in the regi-mental ops center, Col Toolan was planning the final attack. Early that morning the buzz had zipped through the battalions: the JTF and the MEF, fed up with weeks of lies, had reauthorized the offensive.

  From around the periphery of the city the Marine battalion staffs arrived in small clusters of Humvees and LAVs, dismounting outside the walls of the MEF, striding in tight groups through the makeshift plywood door into the alcove of the stone mansion that served as the regi-mental HQ, draping their ceramic armor vests and Kevlar helmets over the wooden racks that lined the wall outside the conference room. Several carried M4 carbines or M16s, while others wore pistols on their hips or in shoulder holsters. It was like a meeting of knights in the fifteenth century—large, purposeful men neatly arraying their armor before sitting down at the banquet table to discuss the business of making war.

  The mood was upbeat, with many smiles exchanged. The dickering was over. It was time to finish the task. They stood talking until Col Toolan strode in; then they took seats around a long, square table with a huge photomap of Fallujah on the wall.

  “Gentlemen,” Toolan said, “the commanding general is planning a division attack against Fallujah. RCT 7 will block and clear around the outskirts. RCT 1 as the Main Effort will take the city.”

  The regimental intelligence officer, Maj Bellon, gave the first briefing. ODA had identified seventeen enemy groups in the city, he said, with grandiose names like Allah’s Army and Battalion of God. A “battalion” numbered twenty to forty fighters. All together there were about five hundr
ed hard-core fighters and a thousand part-timers. Some were assigned to city blocks, while others scooted around in small, orange-striped Nissan pickups. The insurgents didn’t employ standard infantry tactics such as interlocking fields of fire along fixed defensive lines. Instead, they tended to swarm forward.

  Once the blood started flowing, Bellon believed many of the part-timers would stash their weapons and melt away. The hard core not killed on the streets would retreat to the safe houses where they ate and slept. There might be twenty to forty fortified houses like the one where Cpl Amaya was killed. Each house was an isolated pillbox, vulnerable to a tank gun or a laser-guided bomb. The danger came when those inside held their fire until the Marines were inside.

  Toolan turned next to his ops officer, LtCol Renforth, for the scheme of maneuver. Square and stocky with a shaven head, Renforth looked imposing, like a wrestler or a bodyguard. The battalions appreciated that Renforth didn’t demand nitpicking reports. Renforth had started his career by enlisting as a sailor and was surprised when chosen to go to the navy prep school in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Back in the early 1980s, he had seen himself as a rough-and-ready good old boy from Arkansas. At prep school he proved his rough manners by throwing a chair and a fellow student out a dorm window. His section leader gave him a scathing dressing-down for embarrassing his parents and disgracing himself. The section leader wasn’t going to foist him off on someone else and send him back to a ship. Instead, Renforth spent every Saturday and Sunday for the next twelve weeks in “special study,” meaning he was confined to base for three months. He grew to love the discipline of mathematics, graduated from the Naval Academy, and earned a commission in the Marine Corps. The name of the section leader: Jim Mattis.

  In the ops center an electronic map tracked the positions of all friendly units. Below the map each new situation report was displayed in large type, with space for comments to be entered. Forty laptops tied together the staff sections. For a month Renforth had been studying the photomap and watching patterns develop from the sitreps and from visiting the battalions on the line.