No True Glory (48 page)

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.

In the courtyard, Cpl Connors washed out his mouth and wished he could brush his teeth, now filthy with gunpowder. Corporal Camillio Aragon saw a man crawling along the roof and brought him down with one burst. Connors squiggled sideways down the alley behind the house to a small window, stuck his rifle through bars, and got off a long burst, raking the room. Two or three AKs blazed back, and Connors crabbed out of the alley before they could get to the window and shoot down at him.

“It’s a fucking Nazi pillbox,” he said. “Those haj fucks are gonna die.”

He grabbed a one-pound stick of C-4, shoved in a ten-second fuse, and sneaked back to the front door, covered by Lovato. He popped smoke on the time fuse, fired a few rounds from his 9mm pistol, threw the C-4 down the corridor, and ran into the courtyard to his right. With Lovato and two other Marines, he took cover under the overhang of the adjacent house, about thirty feet away. The C-4 blew, but before they could react, an AK muzzle poked out of a hole in the roof next to their heads. Firing blindly, their attacker sprayed the wall a few feet above their heads.

Connors pulled another grenade from his web gear and lobbed it into the hole. It exploded, and a foot encased in a sneaker flew by them.

“All fucking right,” Connors said.

The rest of the platoon had pulled back to a large house about thirty feet to their right, and they were the only Marines in the open. Soon they were taking fire from two directions, poor shooters in houses not twenty feet away, but steadily improving. Spurts of dirt were continuously erupting in the open courtyard separating them from the large house.

“I’ll get some more grenades,” Lovato said, running across the courtyard.

Connors watched the bullets striking behind his friend’s feet and thought,
“Boy, if he sees those, he’ll never come back.
Lovato collected grenades from the other Marines, who were firing wherever they thought the insurgents were hiding, and popped back out the door. This time he did see the dirt puffs around him and dove into a trench next to the large building.

“You’re screwed, Connors!” Lovato yelled. “I can’t get the grenades to you.”

“They have pins in them, for God’s sake. Pitch them over!” Connors yelled. “How many do you have?”

“Oh. I forgot. I have three. I’ll throw you two.”

“What do you need one for?”

“You don’t like it, go get your own.”

Lovato threw over two grenades, and Connors scooped them up. With the Marines in the house providing heavy fire, Connors and his small group threw their grenades and dashed safely across the courtyard.

Inside the house, SSgt Pillsbury listened to their report.

“We need to get him back,” Connors said.

“I’ll take care of those assholes sniping at you,” Pillsbury said. “You know the situation. You get Desiato.”

Connors looked around. Everybody was edging forward. He whispered to Pillsbury: “All those grenades, C-four. I don’t want the young guys seeing Desiato when this is over. Just the squad leaders.”

“Agreed. The corporals go with Connors,” Pillsbury said. “The rest of you fall in on me. I’ll assign shooting posts.”

Corporals Lovato, Aragon, Donaghy, and Longenecker slipped out of the door behind Connors, moving by hand and arm signals, the roar of the M16s behind them deafening. Aragon slipped first back into the beige house and quickly ducked back out.

“Shit, the body’s gone,” he said. “They’ve taken Desiato.”

Forty minutes had gone by since they had last been inside the house, plenty of time for the defenders to slip down a back alley or tunnel.

Longenecker ducked inside for a second look and came back out.

“We’re fucked,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

It was their worst fear: a repeat of Mogadishu, the body of an American soldier stripped naked and dragged through the streets. Connors felt like vomiting. He called Pillsbury over his handheld, knowing Generals Sattler and Natonski would stop the whole operation and rip Fallujah apart brick by brick, looking for Desiato.

Pillsbury was aghast. “Check again, for God’s sake.”

Corporal Brad Donaghy went in for the third time, creeping farther down the corridor for a better look into the back bedroom. The others pressed behind him.

Donaghy backed up a few feet. “I see Desiato,” he murmured. “They’ve pulled him back to sucker us in. They’ve crossed his legs and put his arms at his sides. I don’t know whether they’re jerking with us or showing him respect.”

Just then an insurgent ran forward into the back room a few feet, fired a burst of AK rounds at an angle down the corridor, and leaped back before the Marines could return fire. Aragon and Longenecker pitched grenades into the room, and the firing stopped.

“Wasn’t Desiato a SAW gunner?” Donaghy said. “Well, I didn’t see any SAW.”

A SAW fired so fast it could cut a man in two.

“We gotta make sure they’re down,” Connors said, sidestepping toward the open bedroom door. Aragon drew his 9mm and followed on Connors’s shoulder. At the edge of the doorway Connors reached down and picked up a piece of cement.

“I’ll throw this in there and see if they shoot,” he said.

He threw the rock and nothing happened.

“I’ll shoot,” Aragon said, reaching over Connors’s shoulder and squeezing the trigger to his pistol.

Nothing happened. Aragon ejected a round, recocked, and reached around to shoot again.
Blaaam.
The SAW spewed two hundred rounds back at their faces. Connors and Aragon clung to each other and tried to push their heads inside the wall. The stream of bullets, looking like a long red rod of fire, flew by, burning Aragon’s cheek. Connors could feel the hot wind, and chips from the cement wall stung his face.

They both tumbled back along the corridor to the opening to the next-door room, bumping into Lovato, who was furiously pulling the pin on a grenade.

“Frag out!” Lovato yelled.

The grenade struck the doorway and bounced back, hitting Connors on his foot. Connors launched himself into the room, the grenade exploding while he was in the air. He landed hard, the wind knocked out of him, groggy, unable to breathe or see for a few seconds. He tried his arms and legs, then wiggled his hands and toes. All were attached and working. He lay alone in the room, keeping his pistol trained on the doorway, worried that the insurgents next door would rush in. After a while he could hear the voices in his radio ear clip.