No True Glory (42 page)

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As the sun came up on November 9, the fighting began with a rhythm that became common to all the battalions. There were two types of enemy, the jihadist isolationists and the Main Guard. The jihadists hid in back rooms, prepared to fight to the death. In contrast, the Main Guard possessed more military training and employed a mobile defense. Once there was enough morning light to see, the Main Guard insurgents dashed forward up the alleys in small groups, darting out into the streets to launch RPG rounds while others used the cement buildings as pillboxes.

The initial mortar barrages by the insurgents on November 9 were disconcertingly accurate. As the shells walked systematically down the streets, the Marines hastily shot the locks off courtyard doors and broke into houses to find shelter. To drive the mortar crews away from their tubes, the Marines called in their own artillery and mortar fires two hundred to four hundred meters to the front.

As Battalion 1/8 advanced, mortar rounds walked up the street to greet them. The Charlie Company commander, Captain Bo Bethay, radioed to the fire support center.

“Turn it off!” he shouted angrily. “That’s too damn close!”

“We’re not firing!” Captain Steve Kahn yelled back. “We’re not that inaccurate!”

Under cover of the mortar barrage, a group of insurgents rushed toward a tank, only to be driven back by a hail of bullets from the Marine riflemen. One insurgent didn’t seek cover. He stood in the street, a bulky vest over his blue work shirt, looking around as though confused. Then he blew himself up, disappearing in a huge black cloud. The Marines ducked as the shock wave hit them. They were lying prone when the red wet mist floated down and gobs of flesh fell on them like large rain drops.

The first day, with set geographical objectives to reach, most battalions weren’t systematically searching each house, and every company encountered the challenge of the random, close-quarters firefight.

There were no telltale signs signaling which house held jihadist isolationists. The first platoon of Lima Company, 3/1, had searched two dozen houses and found no one. At nine in the morning, entering a house through a hole blown in the south side of the wall, suddenly there were grenades rolling across the floor and AK fire from all sides. The explosions kicked up clouds of dust, making it impossible to see the locations of the hidden insurgents. Two Marines fell, mortally wounded. Dragging their comrades outside, the squad backed off while Lance Corporal Evin Marla, who looked barely heavier than the SMAW rocket he was carrying, fired a thermobaric round through a window at a range of fifteen feet. When the insurgents continued to fire, the squad sneaked up to three windows, pitched in grenades, sprayed the inside with hundreds of rounds, then burst through the door and killed the last remaining defender. The platoon dragged five bodies out of the wreckage, smashed their weapons and proceeded down the street.

During the next six hours, the platoon searched fifty-four houses without a fight. They found a handful of civilians in six houses and all waved white flags when they heard the platoon approaching. With scant civilians in the city, the usual tactic was to throw grenades over the courtyard wall, blow the lock on the metal gate, rush a four-man fire team into the courtyard, and shout and bang on the windows and door to the house to draw fire. There weren’t enough explosives to blast an entrance in the side of thousands of buildings. If nothing happened, then the most risky step followed: smashing through the doors and searching room by room down narrow, gloomy corridors.

Most of the insurgents, though, preferred to fight in groups, firing from inside and around buildings then falling back. Time and again an insurgent running across a street would be hit and fall. Almost invariably his comrades would dash out to drag away his body, a feat that impressed the Marines.

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Natonski had assigned an Iraqi battalion of about four hundred soldiers to each regiment. Not trained for urban combat, they moved behind the lead American units. During the night of November 8, the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Intervention Force, which had mutinied on the way to Fallujah in April, trailed behind 2-2 and moved into a schoolhouse in the northeastern section of the city. The 2nd Battalion was assisted by a team of six American advisers.

As the sun came up, the schoolhouse came under fire from all directions from several groups of insurgents, some only a few doors away. Crouching in the street, Army Staff Sergeant Trevor Candellin peered through the twenty-four-power sniper scope he had personally bought and mounted on his M4 carbine. Three hundred meters down the street he saw a man in a black tracksuit with a red bandanna around his neck shooting RPGs up at an angle, so that they would arc down like mortar shells. Resting his M4 on the hood of a Humvee, Candellin aimed in and shot his first insurgent.

Excited, he turned to Army Staff Sergeant Todd Cornell, hoping to be congratulated. Instead, Cornell was peering through the window of the house next to them, pointing to a stack of Iraqi uniforms and boots. They had stumbled onto a safe house where the insurgents intended to change into the uniforms of National Guard soldiers and infiltrate the American lines. While Candellin ran across the street to inform the senior adviser, Army Major Fred Miller, Cornell moved up the block with Iraqi Lieutenant Hida and five
jundis,
the advisers’ term for the Iraqi soldiers. Coming under fire from a yellow house in the middle of the block, the platoon climbed to the roof of the house next door and jumped over a small wall onto the yellow house. Below them three insurgents with rifles ran out the front door and were shot down.

In the center of the gravel roof there was a small covered entrance to a stairwell. A dozen cement steps led down to a landing. From there another half-dozen steps set at a right angle led down to the dark, unfinished ground floor. Hearing men yelling in Arabic, Cornell rolled a grenade down the steps.

A few seconds after the grenade went off, firing erupted from downstairs and from adjoining roofs. As he scrambled for cover, Cornell tripped and fell backward, his 9mm pistol flying from his hand. The Iraqi soldiers had ducked behind a small wall, and Cornell lay on his side near the entrance to the stairwell, trying to catch his breath and figure out his next move. Suddenly an Iraqi man appeared in the doorway three feet away, clutching an AK. Seeing Cornell’s pistol in front of him, he snatched it up as Cornell lurched forward. Before the Iraqi soldiers could do anything, the man shot Cornell in the face, killing him instantly. Lieutenant Hida fired back with his AK, and the man toppled down the stairs.

Not knowing what to do next, the six Iraqi soldiers hopped over to the next roof, ran down the outside stairs, and retreated to the schoolhouse half a block away. The fight around the schoolhouse was still going on, and Candellin was ducking from one spot to another, aiming in, shooting, and moving. The Iraqi soldiers and their lieutenant kept trying to get his attention, and he kept gesturing at them to take up firing positions. Finally Lt Hida sliced a finger across his neck, saying, “Army, army,” and shaking his head. Candellin frantically looked around the schoolyard for Cornell. Not seeing him, he turned back to Hida, who pointed down the block at the yellow house.

Candellin grabbed Miller and they ran up the street, gesturing at the Iraqi soldiers to follow. When none did, they posted up on both sides of the front door of the yellow house and burst in firing. Hearing them approach, the insurgents had run up the stairs leading to the roof. They were now firing down the stairwell.

Standing directly beneath the stairs and looking at the body of an insurgent crumbled on the landing, with bullets zinging around, Miller turned to Candellin. “I’ll suppress,” he said. “You throw your grenade up there.”

“I’m not stepping out and getting shot. Besides, it’ll bounce back down. Here,” Candellin said, handing the grenade to his boss, “you throw it.”

Conceding the point, Miller agreed that throwing the grenade was a dumb idea. Instead, he radioed for help. Led by Lt Hida, eight Iraqi soldiers ran from the schoolhouse, climbed to the top of a nearby house, and began firing at the insurgents on the roof above the two advisers. Battalion 2/2 sent a tank to help them. As it rumbled up the street, three insurgents burst out of the shrubbery and were cut down. Taking fire from all directions, the insurgents pulled back. Together, the advisers and the Iraqi soldiers carried SSgt Cornell’s body back to the schoolhouse.

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All day the infantry had dog-trotted across the wide streets and poked down the side alleys, weighted down by seventy pounds of armor and ammo. The night brought little rest for the keyed-up grunts. Most hadn’t slept for forty hours, and once they were set in platoon defenses inside large houses, the night chill crept into their sweat-soaked cammies. The seven-tons and amtracs pulled up, dropping off food and ammo. Some grabbed the right packs and unrolled their sleeping bags; others scrounged around the houses for blankets and cushions. Most sat shivering in the cold as the insurgents continued to lob mortars and RPGs in unpredictable directions. From the mosques came the usual incessant chants and exhortations for glorious death. The washing-machine racket of Basher echoed up and down the streets, punctuated by successive blasts.

Inspired by the musical shenanigans of Byrne and McCoy last April (the Lalafallujah), the army psyops crews roamed around in their Humvees, filling the streets with the sounds of men and women screaming, or cats fighting, or Guns ’n’ Roses. The top chiller was the deep, sinister laugh of the monster in the movie
Predator,
played in low bass at one hundred decibels, echoing off the pavement. After one round of demonic laughter, the fire team on outpost half a block to the front of Lima Company, 3/1, called the company commander, Captain Brian Heatherman. “Sharkman six, that’s not funny anymore. You keep that shit up, and we’re coming back in.” Heatherman sent his executive officer out to reassure them.

After midnight the battlefield quieted. The insurgents, out of adrena-line, dispersed to their safe houses to sleep. Both sides were exhausted. Even with their night-vision goggles, the Marines were loath to search room by room in the dark, because NVGs deprived them of depth perception, resulting in tripping over stairs and shooting at the wrong angle into rooms.

Urban fighting tended to be a daylight affair.

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On the morning of November 10, the 229th birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, Natonski knew he had the insurgents reeling. All battalions continued to attack south.

Of the ten battalions in the fight, 3/5 was the only one with the mission of clearing building by building from the first day. Lieutenant Colonel Pat Malay, commanding 3/5, called his battalion’s tactic the “squeegee” effect. The other battalions had pushed quickly through, in effect rubbing the dirtiest spots off the window. It was up to 3/5 to apply a thorough wiping.

Malay set the rhythm his battalion would follow for the next ten days. He placed three companies abreast with two tanks per company on the main streets, slightly in advance. Humvees and amtracs used the narrower side streets, moving behind. As light came up, the insurgents stirred and bullets snapped over the roof where Malay and his small staff crouched, watching the companies deploy. Volleys of artillery shells and mortar rounds were called against distant intersections and buildings to drive the insurgents off the streets and roofs.

Each platoon was assigned two blocks, a squad working each side of the first block, while the third squad took half of the second. Each set of houses inside a courtyard wall took about twenty minutes to clear, with one fire team staying outside to provide cover while two others entered and searched. Upon receiving fire from a house, the line held up while tanks moved forward, sending shell after shell into the house. When the AK fire stopped after ten or twenty shells had pierced the building, the Marines advanced, pulled out the crushed bodies, and walked on.

By noon, after the battalion had found seven large caches of munitions, Kilo Company came under sustained fire from an apartment, with muzzle flashes winking in a dozen windows. The company responded with a mortar barrage to clear the roofs, joined by direct tank fire against the windows. The insurgents fell back to a two-story house, where they called out, “Mister, mister, help us! Family! Family!” The Marines rolled up the tanks and flattened the building.

By one in the afternoon 3/5 was pushing through an area along the river called the Palm Grove. Major Bellon had provided RCT 1 with a photomap of Fallujah showing 108 target houses. The Palm Grove was among his top ten. One of the ringleaders in the mutilations of the four American contractors owned a large house in the Grove, as did two brothers known as insurgent leaders.

Corporal Michael Hibbert was leading his squad toward an opening in the wall of what appeared to be a warehouse. Sniper fire had stopped ten minutes earlier, and Hibbert suspected the insurgents had fled into the bulrushes along the riverbank. In the drainage ditch surrounding the wall, Hibbert saw three artillery shells lying on their sides, rigged to wires. After engineers cut the wires, Hibbert blew a hole in the side of the building and his squad swarmed into a large bay, loaded with RPGs and 122mm rockets.

In a smaller side room with a safe against the wall, Hibbert heard a noise. The Marines dragged the safe aside and followed a hidden passageway into a fetid crawl space, where an Iraqi was chained hand and foot. He was the taxi driver for two French journalists captured in August. The journalists had protested that they and their government opposed the war. After negotiating with the French government, the terrorists had taken the journalists out of Fallujah to be eventually released. They had chained the taxi driver and left him to starve to death.

Hibbert continued his search. The third door he kicked in led to a film studio with the green and black flag of Zarqawi’s terrorist gang, Al Ansar, on the wall and black blood on the floor where Nicholas Berg had been decapitated in May. On a table was a glass of water with ice in it. In the next room were two computers, klieg lights, a CD burner, two video cameras, VHS tapes, a television, a VCR, and a recording schedule typed in English. The schedule included what time a prisoner was to be brought out and washed up, when his confession had to be taped, when the execution should be done, how long it would take to digitize the video and make copies, and when to leave Fallujah in order to deliver the tape to the Al Jazeera studio in Baghdad to be shown on prime time.