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

by Bing West

  Both were bleeding badly. Chandler was howling in pain, his leg twisted in a spiral fracture from hip to foot. Severtsgard slumped down against the courtyard wall, blood pouring from his fractured foot. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum came to his aid. Tatum, who had the thickest pair of glasses in Kilo Company, offered to remove Severtsgard’s torn boot.

  “Go to hell, you blind fuck! No way you are working on my foot!” Severtsgard yelled at his friend, getting to his feet and limping toward the nearest Humvee.

  Grapes and Jacobs knelt by the wall to plan what to do next. Five Marines were trapped inside. Rifle fire wasn’t budging the insurgents hiding behind the cement wall on the catwalk above the main room, and Mark 19 fire or hand grenades would injure the trapped Marines.

  “Flashbangs! The insurgents will think they’re grenades and duck,” Grapes said.

  Jacobs led his men to the entryway, flipped in two flashbangs, and rushed in firing. The insurgents immediately returned fire. Stalemate.

  Back outside Grapes, Crossan, and Private Justin Boswood crept up to a bedroom window in the back of the house. Grapes and Boswood took turns with a sledgehammer, hammering at the steel bars. Grapes could hear his wounded Marines wailing in pain inside. He could hear Mitchell yelling, “Get us the fuck out of here!” After smashing and smashing, they pried two bars slightly apart. They stripped off their armor and gear and squeezed through. Marines handed their weapons to them.

  Boswood pulled a dead insurgent’s body out of the doorway, the blood from his skull covering the floor. Grapes slid on his back into the main room, his sights fixed on the skylight above. Boswood knelt over Grapes’s chest, covering the stairs.

  Grapes, Jacobs, and Sanchez at last had the catwalk in a three-cornered crossfire.

  “Ready?” Grapes yelled. “Fire!”

  From three angles the Marines fired up at the crosswalk, forcing the insurgents to duck behind the wall.

  Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Jonathon Schaffer sprinted across the kill zone, grabbed Kasal, and dragged him back to the entryway. Then they ran back and brought out Nicoll. Then Mitchell.

  That left Sanchez, Rodriguez, and Carlisle in the back bedroom down the hall. The Marines could either continue running the gauntlet across the main room or get through the bars over the bedroom window. Corporal Richard Gonzalez, a demolitions expert known as the “mad bomber,” suggested blowing the bars off the window.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” Sergeant Jose Nazario yelled. “You’ll fucking kill them! Don’t blow it!”

  Corporal Eric Jensen came running up with a long chain that was looped around the bars. Jensen hooked the chain to a Humvee and pulled out the bars. Sanchez and Rodriguez put Carlisle on a makeshift stretcher and passed out his limp body.

  With all the wounded out of the house, Grapes linked up with Mitchell. “Now we let Gonzalez do his work,” Grapes said.

  The Marines peppered the house with fire and hooted and hollered as if they were still inside while Gonzalez prepared a twenty-pound satchel charge—sufficient to blow down two houses. Gonzalez crept inside the house and placed the satchel on top of a dead insurgent’s body. A few seconds later he ran outside.

  “Fifteen seconds!”

  They ducked for cover. The house exploded in a huge flash of red, followed by chunks of concrete thudding down as a vast cloud of dust. A pink mist mixed with the dust and gunpowder in the air. Grapes was happy to see it.

  The Marines waited several minutes, then moved forward into the dusty rubble. They saw two bodies lying among the slabs. As they drew closer, they noticed one of them move.

  “They’re still alive!”

  An arm flicked limply forward, and a grenade tumbled toward the Marines. They turned and ran for cover. Sanchez saw Grapes and Crossan racing by him. I’m too slow! I’m fucked! he thought. The grenade went off, injuring no one.

  Seven Marines climbed back up the rubble and fired two hundred rounds into the two insurgents. Among the detritus, 1/Lt Grapes found a woolen winter skullcap with bright colors, the kind worn by fighters in Chechnya. He kicked it into the dirt.

  28

  ____

  FIVE CORPORALS

  AS GRAPES AND THE 3RD PLATOON battled the foreign fighters in the house from hell, other jihadists were burrowing in across southern Fallujah. India Company, just east of Kilo, was running into the same badgerlike resistance. The previous day India had fought for hours at a mosque with a blue-and-white-striped minaret. The mosque was built like a fort, with a dirt market square to its front and a row of one-story drab repair shops on the far side of the square. Ammunition caches inside the shops were cooking off, dust from the tank shells filled the air, and the insurgents were firing from inside positions, with few muzzle flashes showing. It took India Company three hours to smash down the mosque wall, drop the minaret, and storm the mosque, finding ten insurgents dead and five severely wounded. India pushed on in the attack, leaving behind the wounded insurgents.

  On the thirteenth, Captain Brett Clark led India on a sweep back toward the mosque, again engaging jihadists in scattered houses. The 1st and 2nd Force Recon companies had sent to the battalions teams trained in Close Quarters Battle. At many hard spots a CQB team was asked to conduct the assault. There was no embarrassment in the asking. The clearing and reclearing was affecting some of the lance corporals, and the CQB Marines were the experts. But the toll on the recon teams was heavy.

  When the Marines smashed into one small house, a band of jihadists opened fire; the bullets ripped through a closed door and hit one Marine. A man with a chest rig ran at the Marines as they entered. Though hit repeatedly, he staggered forward and blew himself up, killing Lance Corporal Justin D. McLeese. The Marines dragged out McLeese’s body and blew the house apart.

  Expecting contact at any minute, the Marines of India Company retraced the route of yesterday’s attack. When they reached the mosque where they had fought so bitterly the day before, they entered warily. An embedded television journalist began filming the scene. Lying on the dirt floor were the dead and wounded insurgents from the previous day’s fight.

  A Marine who had been wounded the day before pointed his rifle at a wounded insurgent. “He’s fucking faking he’s dead! He’s faking!” the Marine yelled, and shot the man in the head.

  Blood splattered against the wall as the man’s legs twitched.

  “Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.

  The TV journalist sent the video back to the press pool for worldwide distribution.

  _____

  On the fourteenth, the battalions again searched house by house. North of Highway 10, Battalion 3/5 was continuing with its squeegee tactics. Kilo Company was moving through an upper-class neighborhood of three-story houses landscaped with palm trees, grass, and flowered shrubbery. In one attractive house Lance Corporal George J. Payton climbed up a wide stairway and paused on the landing, then opened the door to his left.

  A burst of automatic fire tore into his left leg, practically severing it, and he fell to the ground. Lance Corporal Kip Yeager scrambled forward, firing a full magazine from his M16 into the room. As Lance Corporal Mason Fisher fired over his shoulder, Yeager pulled back Payton, who was dying. A half-dozen Marines crouched around him on the stairs, trying to stanch the bleeding. Fisher threw a grenade into the room, and Yeager heard a clunk! as it came back out and bounced down the stairs.

  Yeager stooped, caught it on the second bounce, flipped it into the room, waited for the explosion, and then went back in firing. Two insurgents were down on the floor. Another tumbled out of a closet. Yeager shot him. As Lance Corporal Phillip Miska burst into the dust-filled room, an insurgent lying behind the door fumbled for a grenade. With Miska in the line of fire, Yeager leaped on the man, drew his Gurkha knife, and plunged it into the insurgent’s neck.

  _____

  In the afternoon of the fourteenth, Battalion 3/5 smashed through the twisted labyrinth of the Jolan souk, whose paved alleyways we
re lined with hundreds of shops protected by padlocked gratings or roll-down metal shutters that the Marines tore off like the tops of beer cans. Air strikes had split open the sides of buildings, exposing demolished rooms and sagging roofs. Telephone poles lay snapped, with hundreds of sheared lines dangling like the webs of giant crazed spiders. It looked like a savage tornado had roared through the downtown district, smashing everything in its path, pausing capriciously to rip some buildings apart brick by brick before moving on.

  In souks throughout the Middle East, centuries-old guilds specializing in leather goods, rugs, and jewelry clustered in different alleys. In the Jolan, LtCol Malay saw the same business tidiness and free-market enterprise, with different goods arranged in different alleys. Some alleys offered AKs, while others sold RPGs, IEDs, or mortars. Some shops stocked small-arms munitions, while the upscale shops specialized in spare parts for heavy-caliber weapons. There was even an alley for antiaircraft guns. In six days the battalion executive officer, Major Todd Desgrosseilliers, had inventoried for destruction more than a hundred thousand weapons and large-caliber shells.

  Two hundred meters west of the souk lay the Euphrates and the narrow green trestle bridge dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge. In late afternoon, when Malay walked onto the bridge, the trestles stood etched against a beautiful sunset. It looked like a scene from The Bridges of Madison County. After mutilating the Americans last March, the mob had written in white paint an Arabic verse on the north trestle. It read: Fallujah—Graveyard of the Americans.

  Twenty feet away, on the south trestle in thick black paint, a Marine had printed a reply. It read:

  THIS IS FOR THE AMERICANS OF BLACKWATER

  MURDERED HERE IN 2004.

  SEMPER FIDELIS, 3/5 DARK HORSE

  FUCK YOU

  LtCol Malay squinted at the hand-scrawled note. “Paint over that last line,” he said. “Leave the rest.”

  Malay knew how his Marines felt. That afternoon they had found a female corpse dumped on a street, arms and legs cut off, entrails eviscerated. A later check determined that it was not Margaret Hassan, the English-born director of CARE who had lived in Iraq for two decades caring for the sick and the infirm. Kidnapped from Baghdad four weeks earlier, she had been shown on television tearfully begging Prime Minister Blair to withdraw the British troops before she was executed. The Marines were unable to identity the mutilated female corpse. Like the hacked-up bodies in the torture house next to the merry-go-round at Jolan Park, the woman was laid to rest in a grave under the name “unknown.”

  By the afternoon of the fourteenth, the Marines had occupied all of the city, from the railroad station in the north to the one-story dwellings in the south.

  _____

  On the morning of the fifteenth, Battalion 1/3 continued to search in the eastern section. In one sharp firefight inside a house, Sergeant Rafael Peralta was shot in the head and fell to the ground. As the other Marines sought cover in the room, the insurgents lobbed a grenade into their midst. Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and rolled on top of it, smothering the explosion. He was recommended for the Medal of Honor. His valor was a credit to Battalion 1/3, which lost fifty killed in Iraq.

  South of Highway 10, the remnants of the insurgents had several more blocks of houses to hide in. LtCol Buhl with Battalion 3/1 and LtCol Brandl with Battalion 1/8 linked up and put four companies abreast to finish the job, using squeegee tactics to search every house.

  By mid-morning on November 15, Battalion 1/8 was methodically clearing the last rows of half-finished cement houses in the south. The previous afternoon, Alpha Company had searched a hundred dwellings, finding several “muj” houses with drapes across the windows and blankets and drugs in the center rooms. In one house, a dog lay in the kitchen with a butcher knife in its side, a crude way of stopping its barking.

  Alpha had captured about twenty Saudis, Egyptians, and Syrians, and Capt Cunningham warned his platoons to be especially careful; the final diehards had no place to run. The platoons had only a few more blocks to clear before they reached the open fields. It was a poor section, the least attractive land in Fallujah, prone to flooding and plagued by mosquitoes. From the telephone poles dangled only a few wires. A house was lucky to have enough current for a few lights, and cooking was done with propane. Many homes were half finished, with piles of sand and bricks scattered about. None of the roads were paved, and most of the houses were simple cement squares with four or five downstairs rooms and a stairway to the roof, for sleeping in the open in the hot weather. They were built of thick brick and concrete and enclosed by stout walls of cinder block and cement. Heavy metal grates or iron bars covered all the windows. Most houses were laid out with fronts facing on a dirt road, but in some sections there was no order, with houses facing in different directions, some catty-corner to each other and not connected to any road.

  Second Platoon was clearing a disorderly section of twenty houses when the Marines came under fire from three sides. The insurgents were shooting from the corners of houses and from windows on the street level. Sgt Pillsbury, who had taken over after Lt Hunt was medevaced with crushed fingers a few days earlier, scarcely had to say a word to get the platoon moving. His three squad leaders had come up through the ranks and been together in the battalion for three years. Within minutes the squads had flanked the insurgents, who fled from the block of houses and took up firing positions behind an earthen berm on the far side of the dirt street. Realizing their sudden good fortune, the entire platoon charged forward, climbed to the roofs of two adjacent houses, and poured fire down on the hapless enemy, quickly killing ten.

  When the firing ceased, Pillsbury yelled for them to shift west a block to make room for Bravo Company, which was pinching in from the east. Corporal Eubaldo Lovato signaled to his first squad, and they led off, moving to their right to search the next batch of half-finished brick and cement houses. Corporal Connors was half a block behind them with his third squad when he heard a burst of AK firing, the crump! of a grenade, and the yell “Corpsman up!”

  He ran through the soft sand and dirt toward the next row of houses. In front of him was a beige one-story house with bars on the three windows in front. The house was wedged between two similar cement homes, with scarcely enough room for a man to squeeze between one house and the next. Two Marines were dragging a third out of the beige house. None appeared to be injured.

  “Let me go!”

  “Shut up, Doc. You’re not going back in.”

  Cpl Lovato had a firm grip on the web gear of Corpsman Julian Mask.

  “Desiato is down. Those fuckers kept shooting him,” Lovato said, spitting out the foul-tasting black grime from the Composition B powder of a grenade. “There is a serious amount of guys in that room.”

  “He’s down hard,” Corporal Lonnie Longenecker said. “He’s gone.”

  LCpl Desiato, who had been in Connors’s squad for a year, had been assigned to guard the gear at the base when the battalion left for the Fallujah fight. He had begged Connors to get him into the action.

  “I enlisted to fight, not to watch gear,” Desiato said.

  Connors had finagled Desiato a slot in Lovato’s squad. Now he was down, and Connors felt responsible. He looked at the house. There was a large barred window to the right where the main room would be, a small entry door, and a smaller barred window to the left. There were not more than three or four rooms, no second story, and no apparent fields of fire for a defender.

  “I’m checking it out,” he said.

  At twenty-one, Connors was the most experienced squad leader. Captain Cunningham, while he had been short of officers and senior NCOs back in the States, had made him the acting platoon commander for several weeks. Connors had been in eleven gunfights inside houses.

  He ran to the doorway and peeked in. Inside, the floor was hard-packed dirt, and there were no interior doors, no fixtures, and no furniture. It was an empty shell of bricks and mortar with the smell of fresh construction, months away
from completion. To his right, the main room was empty. To his left, a dirt corridor led past a room and through an open door to a back bedroom. Lying against the bedroom wall in plain sight was Desiato’s body.

  With Longenecker, his fire team leader, one step behind him, Desiato had stepped into that small, dark room, swung his rifle to the left, and was slammed up against the wall by a hail of bullets. He slid down the wall, face and torso toward the assailants who were still firing. Bullets continued to strike him in the face, the armored vest, and the legs. The bullets had pinned his body against the wall, the SAW lying by his side.

  Connors could plainly see Desiato’s wounds and knew he was dead.

  LCpl Brown entered and stood behind Connors, peering over his shoulder.

  “Before we do a thing,” Connors said, “we have to be sure he’s dead. Can you confirm he’s dead?”

  Brown looked at the body lying in the kill zone a few feet away, the wounds all too clear.

  “He’s dead,” Brown said.

  “All right,” Connors said, “let’s get him out of there.”

  Desiato was so close, lying just inside the room. The insurgents hadn’t said a word or made a sound. With a quick lunge Connors could grab his web gear, give a tug, and have the body back in the corridor. He eased his shoulder into the foyer.

  A hail of AK fire ripped past his face as he flung his body back.

  “SAW! Give me a SAW!” Connors screamed.

  He turned back into the foyer, letting fly two hundred rounds down the corridor into the back room. He waited, the barrel smoking. No sounds, no return fire.

  “Get out,” he said over his shoulder, spooning a grenade.

  He took out the pin and let the spoon spin loose. He milked the grenade for the count of one!, pulled his arm back for an underhand lob, looked down the corridor, and locked eyes with a man with wild black hair and a full beard, his arm also back. The two grenades sailed past each other as Connors shouted “Grenade!” and pushed Brown behind him into the room to his left. They went down in a tangle as both grenades went off, filling Connors’s ears with that ringing sensation, mouth instantly dry, teeth black and grimy, an acrid and burning taste in his mouth. The dirt and dust particles filled the room, blocking out all sight. The two Marines got to their knees and staggered out the foyer door to their left.