No True Glory (11 page)

The RPG was just as simple but even more destructive: a slim tube with a grenade attached to the end of the barrel, a simple trigger mecha-nism, open iron sights, and a short stock. Any teenager could shoot the weapon without training or thinking. You could point it in the air and lob it like a mortar, or you could aim directly at a vehicle or a person. When the grenade hit a building, chips of cement flew like darts in all directions.

With sound weapons, a vast pool of recruits, and a rallying cry of defending the city against the infidel invaders, the insurgent leaders in Fallujah were in a strong position. As Toolan and Mattis expected, the city elders did not stand up to them. No mob leaders were delivered on April 4 as the Marines worked long into a cold, dust-filled night to string concertina wire, set in barricades, direct streams of fleeing civilians into tents, and move the rifle companies into position.

7
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MUTINY

ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 4, LtCol Olson led a column of trucks, amphibious vehicles, and Humvees toward an apartment complex on the northwestern outskirts of Fallujah. The undefended complex would provide Battalion 2/1 with a launch point to probe the defenses of the Jolan District.

“People are holding rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and they are prepared to use them if Americans enter their neighborhoods,” said Qais Halawi, a local sheikh.

As Olson pulled up with his lead unit, he was astonished to see a dozen men, most of them unarmed, pushing a trailer truck across the highway to block the Marines, while other insurgents opened fire from the flanks. To Olson, it seemed senseless. The Marines made short work of the flimsy ambush and proceeded to the apartment complex.

Accompanying 2/1 was a company from the 36th Iraqi Battalion from Baghdad. Most were Kurdish soldiers who wasted no time in ordering the apartment residents to pack and get out, giving each family $200. Olson sent Golf Company to hold the peninsula at the western end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Echo and Fox spread out along the trash heaps north of the city. A train station with loading platforms, low-slung buildings, and abandoned rolling stock sat about three hundred meters north of the city. As Fox was crossing the rail tracks, insurgents from inside the city launched a barrage of automatic fire and RPGs, killing Corporal Tyler Fey. The battle for Fallujah had begun.

On the morning of April 5, Stoddard led Fox Company past a mosque and cemetery on the edge of town and down narrow streets lined with three-story houses and apartment buildings. At first swarms of children ran out, gesturing as though holding pistols in their tiny fingers, shouting
bang! bang!
The streets quickly emptied, and from alleys and roofs AKs started chattering. The insurgents moved in gangs of five to ten men, rushing forward and firing wildly before dodging down alleys. Empty buses and cars blocked intersections to stop the tanks that advanced with the infantry. Mortar shells were exploding, some disconcertingly close, others distant echoes. It was hard, tiresome work for the Marines in their heavy body armor, and after a few hours Olson sent Capt Zembiec and Echo forward to pitch in. All day the battle seesawed up and down streets of the Jolan District.

When LtCol Olson discussed sending Zembiec a kilometer to the east to conduct a frontal attack parallel to Fox, Zembiec and Stoddard demurred. The insurgents were showing too much moxie. Every few hours a group of five to ten young Iraqis ran forward, eager to close on the Marines, who killed them on every charge. Zembiec didn’t understand why they persisted in running to their deaths. He was sure, though, that if he advanced with Echo on a separate axis, his Marines would be swarmed from all sides.

Instead of continuing into the tangle of buildings in the Jolan, Stoddard cleared a block of two-story houses that fronted on a cemetery, providing an unobstructed field of fire to the east. Zembiec pulled in on Stoddard’s north flank, and the two companies began fortifying the roofs.

At dusk on April 5, as the dogs began their nightly howling, rockets landed in the complex where Olson had set up the battalion ops center, about three hundred meters behind Echo Company. Around ten o’clock bands of insurgents began slipping forward, staying in the shadows of the buildings, groping for the Marine lines. Circling over the city was Slayer, an Air Force C-130 loaded with infrared scopes, two 20mm Gatling guns, and a 105mm howitzer firing fifty-pound shells. The four engines of the powerful aircraft sounded like a thousand hammers beating on steel pots, and what became routine nightly radio chats began.

“Oprah, this is Slayer One. About one hundred meters south of your strobe I see a group of about twenty in a courtyard. Want me to take them out?” The Air Force officers in the AC-130 were informal and low-key.

“Slayer One, this is Oprah,” Captain Michael Martino, a forward air controller with Echo, replied. “We’d appreciate it.”

The ensuing burst of 20mm fire had a low, ripping sound, like a chain saw cutting through hard wood.

“This is Slayer One. Scratch that group. We’ll make another pass over your sector. If we don’t see anyone else, we’ll swing over to War Hammer.”

Three kilometers to the south Battalion 1/5—call sign War Hammer—was conducting a night attack. Col Toolan wanted to squeeze the insurgents between 2/1 in the northwest and 1/5 advancing from the southeast. To clear the southeast industrial sector, Lieutenant Colonel Brennan T. Byrne had taken advantage of night-vision goggles to move his battalion forward at three in the morning. The Marines picked their way among rows of shabby repair shops, heaps of broken pipes and junked cars. While the command group set up in a four-story soft drink factory, Bravo and Alpha Companies pushed up to the south side of Highway 10, directly across from where Zembiec had fought a few days earlier in East Manhattan.

In the predawn Col Toolan drove up in a Humvee, attracting a brace of rocket-propelled grenades. While the Marines assaulted the attackers, Toolan compared notes with Byrne, who was convinced the insurgents slept in their houses north of the industrial zone, got up, had breakfast, met their buddies, and hailed a cab to the battlefield.

Sure enough, Bravo and Alpha spent the day of April 5 shooting at insurgents clustered at a mosque on the north side of Highway 10. The insurgents were firing mortars and RPGs, scampering in and out of courtyards to let loose bursts of AK fire, knowing enough not to bunch up. As Zembiec had noticed a few days before, some of the civilians treated war as a spectator sport, standing on street corners to watch the Marines. Sergeant Tim Cyparski saw a man with an RPG standing amid several families; the children were laughing and the women were hiding their faces in their veils, peeking out at the action. The insurgent hastily fired the RPG, scattering the crowd and hitting a nearby house. A minute later the crowd gathered around the inept gunner, treating him like a rock star. Unable to take a shot, the Marines ran toward the man, who nimbly dodged among some parked cars and disappeared. The Marines walked on, waving at the small crowds to get off the street. As if in response, the insurgents too waved at the women and children to get back inside.

While the fighting was going on, LtCol Byrne had Weapons Company systematically clearing the filthy industrial buildings, knocking down false walls and hauling out dozens of machine guns, RPG launchers, and rockets welded from scrap piping. The soldiers found over a ton of TNT and black powder for IEDs. Major Peter Farnum, 1/5’s operations officer, estimated that there were enough weapons and ammunition for a battalion.

By the afternoon of April 6, Toolan concluded he had exchanged enough jabs with the insurgents to understand their fighting style. They had no formal, hierarchical military structure with a commander and subcommanders. Rather, they were gangs organized around mosques, neighborhoods, and local leaders. Knowing the streets and alleys, they were fighting a running battle, instead of setting up a fixed defense inside a row of houses.

Toolan didn’t need massive firepower—he needed more infantry. Byrne had momentum. By adding a battalion on Byrne’s right flank, Toolan could push the insurgents northwest into the Jolan and crush them against Olson’s lines. He spoke with Gen Mattis, who said he had two battalions moving in, one American and one Iraqi.

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All the American generals—Abizaid, Sanchez, Conway, and Mattis—wanted to put an Iraqi face on the fight at Fallujah. The Iraqis with Battalion 2/1 were commandos, but they couldn’t stay in the city for the long term. So the 2nd Iraqi Battalion of the new Iraqi Army, based north of Baghdad, was ordered to proceed to Fallujah.

After graduating from boot camp in October, the seven hundred soldiers in the battalion had received some additional training from the 1st Armored Division. But when a team of American advisers arrived in March, they found that the Iraqi soldiers had decided political freedom meant the end of discipline. When Staff Sergeant Andrew Garcia, one of the new advisers, told an Iraqi soldier to clean up the barracks, the man replied, “I refuse to pick up trash. I am now free.”

Garcia was speechless. Nothing had prepared him for a pompous private. A few weeks earlier the husky sergeant had been serving as a drill instructor at Parris Island. In SSgt Garcia’s universe, dogs didn’t talk, and neither did privates. The advisers held an emergency meeting and agreed it was time to reestablish the natural order of the military world.

“We treated them like recruits, green as June grass,” Garcia said. “We rolled them out at zero five hundred for physical training, then spent the day drilling in infantry basics. We got in their faces, we screamed, the usual routine, gave them back their self-respect a little at a time. They learned to pick up trash.”

When Mattis requested Iraqi troops, the advisers believed the 2nd Battalion was ready. The senior adviser, Major David Lane, flew by helicopter to Toolan’s headquarters. Lane assured the regimental staff that his Iraqis could perform simple duties like traffic control and organizing the thousands of civilians fleeing the city. While Lane coordinated with the regiment, the 2nd Battalion packed up. On April 5, the Iraqi soldiers and nine American advisers set out on the five-hour drive south, escorted by four U.S. Army Humvees.

After leaving camp, the convoy initially made good time because few civilian cars were on the highways. Fighting was flaring up everywhere. Sunni insurgents were battling in Fallujah, while in the slums of Baghdad the Shiite militia loyal to Sadr were rioting. Television stations were showing skirmishes and mobs in a dozen cities and villages. As thousands of unemployed men gathered in marketplaces and murmured to one another, the general atmosphere of unrest and tension spread.

On the northern outskirts of Baghdad, the highway narrowed to four lanes. Cars were parked haphazardly, forcing the military vehicles to proceed at a crawl in single file. The scruffy shops and two-story storefronts on both sides of the road were crowded with men who stared unsmilingly at the Iraqi soldiers. The Iraqi officers acted nervous, yelling at the restive onlookers to get out of the way and let the convoy pass.

To the unease of the American advisers, who were sitting in pairs in separate trucks, the convoy stopped while the driver of the lead Humvee shouted at a trucker to stop blocking the way. Men started running into the street, rolling out barrels and rocks. In the fourth truck back in line, Garcia yelled over his handheld radio, “Go around that truck! Drive up the median! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

It was too late. Rifle fire crackled from the rooftops of the stores, and the crowd broke and ran, ducking behind the shops and darting down alleys. Acting without orders, several Iraqi troops leaped down from their open-back trucks and fired wildly. More soldiers joined them. More firing. Garcia saw small groups of men gathering at the ends of the alleys, AKs and RPGs in hand. Soon the insurgents crawled forward on the flat rooftops and stuck their rifle muzzles over the edge, firing wild bursts. The Iraqi soldiers were equally undisciplined, spraying bullets every which way. There were no apparent leaders on either side, only clusters of young men blazing away. Crowds were swarming in, like hordes of mosquitoes.

Garcia thought the situation absurd yet deadly. “Cease fire! Get back in the trucks!” he yelled. “Cease fire! Move, move!”

Strung out over a mile of road and entangled with civilian traffic, the convoy broke down. The company-grade Iraqi officers were looking around helplessly, unable to take action, awaiting orders from above. Up and down the line Marine NCOs were yelling at the soldiers, pulling them back to the trucks, screaming at everyone to mount up and get the hell out of there.

The senior adviser, Major Chris Davis, was riding in the sixth truck in line. When all movement stalled and the firing began to pick up, Davis ran forward to the first truck. There he found the Iraqi battalion commander, the nephew of a powerful sheikh, arguing with a gathering crowd.
This is crazy,
Davis thought—
you never stop a convoy in a kill zone, let alone debate with the natives.
The battalion interpreters had fled, but it took only a few seconds for Davis to understand from the gestures and rants that the crowd wanted the American advisers handed over. The battalion commander was shaking his head no, vigorously debating the point.

Davis grabbed his shoulder: “Let’s go, let’s go!”

The battalion commander looked around as if seeing the wild scene for the first time. While he was arguing with one group, only a few hundred meters down the street a gun battle was raging. When he hopped into his Humvee, the Iraqi soldiers climbed back into the trucks and the convoy moved slowly forward.

When the firing had started, the driver of Garcia’s truck had leaped down and run away. Garcia saw the other trucks leaving. The cracks of the AK rounds were getting closer to his truck. Ejected shells jingled on the pavement around him as Iraqis on the roof above his head fired blindly. Garcia saw Staff Sergeant Johnny McKnight a block away, trying to organize a base of fire.

“Get up there!” Garcia yelled, pointing at the abandoned truck. “You drive! The hajis will get back in when they see we’re leaving. We’re not staying here!”