Grunts

by John C. McManus

  In fact, these were the first blows in a desperate fight to the death. Bellavia tasted blood in his mouth and throat. He swung his rifle like a baseball bat and caught the man full in the face. The bogeyman still had the presence of mind to kick the sergeant in the crotch. His M16 clattered onto the floor. Bellavia tried beating him with a small-arms protective insert (SAPI) plate from his body armor and then his Kevlar helmet, too. The two struggled back and forth, kicking, clawing “like caged dogs locked in a death match. We’ve become our base animal selves, with only survival instincts to keep us going. Which one of us has the stronger will to live?”

  Bellavia kept yelling in Arabic and English at the man to surrender, but to no avail. With his right finger, he gouged the man’s left eye and was “astonished to discover that the human eye is not so much a firm ball as a soft, pliable sack.” The gouging of an eye is highly unsettling to most all human beings, even a trained warrior like Bellavia. Even with his life on the line, and wearing Nomex gloves, he could not bring himself to plunge his finger deep into his enemy’s eye socket. He withdrew the finger. The man fired a pistol shot that just missed Bellavia’s head. “I thought . . . I’m done.” In that moment, he suddenly remembered that he was carrying a knife. “That knife was the only thing that was gonna make me live.” As he rose slightly to grab it from his belt, the man bit him in the crotch. Paroxysms of pain and rage coursed through Bellavia. At first he used the blunt end of the knife to batter the man’s gray-flecked hair, but still his teeth clenched into Bellavia’s crotch. “His breath was horrible, just stale, nasty breath.” The American could feel warm blood running down his leg but fortunately his vital parts were intact.

  At last, he locked the knife blade into place, rolled heavily onto the muj, and stabbed him under the collarbone. The man was crying, struggling and wailing. One of his hands kept beating Bellavia’s side but the blows steadily weakened when the knife nicked an artery. Bellavia heard a gurgling, liquid sound. Both of them were bathed in the warm arterial blood. Bellavia kept pumping the knife blade “like Satan’s version of CPR.” A powerful smell, much like rust, emanated from the blood.

  Bellavia saw fear and then resignation in the eyes of his enemy. “Please,” he said to the American. With tears of his own, Bellavia replied, “Surrender!” “No,” the man said with a smile on his face. With one last spasm of strength, he reached up with his right hand and caressed Bellavia’s face. “His hand runs gently from my cheek to my jaw, then falls to the floor. He takes a last ragged breath, and his eyes go dim, still staring into mine. Why did he touch me like that at the end? He was forgiving me.” The two enemies had shared a supremely ironic killer-and-victim intimacy, almost sexual in its intensity, that only they could understand. Bellavia was anything but exhilarated. He was exhausted from his postfight adrenaline crash, aching from his wounds, and wrung out from the awful experience of killing face-to-face, in an animal struggle. He lay still, shivering, cold, nauseous, coated with the dried blood of the man he had just stabbed to death.

  When, at last, he collected himself, grabbed his rifle, and left the room, he heard American voices downstairs. He stumbled into the hallway and almost bumped into another enemy fighter. In the confusion, the muj lost his AK-47. Bellavia fell on his rear end but held on to his M16. “The dregs of my body’s adrenaline supply shoots into my system.” He shot the man several times. The wounded muj dragged himself to the roof of the house and flung himself into the garden below. An unseen SAW gunner finished him off. Bellavia shuffled to a corner, sat down heavily, lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. As he contemplated what had just happened to him in this hell house, it occurred to him that today was his birthday. “I’ve had better birthdays,” he thought. The other grunts came upstairs and asked if he was okay. “Yeah, I’m good,” he replied bravely. He knew that was not true, though. In fact, he doubted he would ever be the same again.14

  Nor was the battle anywhere near finished for him and the other grunts. Task Force 2-2 Infantry pushed across Highway 10 and continued methodically clearing block after block of urban sprawl. “They would dismount and clear a building to the roof to get eyes into the next block, or the next intersection,” one officer remembered. “Then they’d move the Bradleys around to get some suppressive fire, bring the guys down off the roof, down into the next block, and then do it again.” Newell eventually had to use soldiers from the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop as dismounted infantrymen. In addition to local resistance, often these men and the everyday grunts fought face-to-face with foreign insurgents who had come to Fallujah from such countries as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan to martyr themselves.

  The process of seizing buildings was exhausting and deadly. Alpha Company lost its commander, Captain Sean Sims, and its executive officer, First Lieutenant Edward Iwan. Sims was shot at point-blank range by a hidden insurgent inside of a building he thought was clear. Iwan took a direct hit from an RPG as he stood in the turret of his Bradley during a major insurgent counterattack. The warhead embedded in his abdomen, nearly severed him in two, but did not explode. Dr. Dewitt’s aid station was close to the fighting, maybe about a kilometer away. She did everything she could to save him, and even got him to the operating table at Camp Fallujah, but he died there. As Iwan lay dying and unconscious, Lieutenant Commander Ron Camarda, a chaplain, sang hymns to the young lieutenant. “I was singing ‘O Holy Night’ when he shed a most awesome and beautiful tear.” Camarda believed that the tear came from Iwan’s sadness at his imminent death and the profound love he felt for his soon-to-be-grieving family.

  According to Task Force 2-2’s after action report, “The speed and shock effect of the task force attack south cornered the insurgents into their last strongholds in the southern corners of the city and prevented them from reorganizing or developing a coherent defensive plan. These fighters fell back to prepared defensive positions, including spider holes, underground tunnels connecting basements of houses, IEDs along roads, houses rigged with explosives, and defensive positions on rooftops.” Newell’s formidable force steadily battered them to death. In the meantime, the Marines were also fighting house to house.15

  Door to Door with 3/1 Marines in the Jolan and Queens

  Young and cocky, they were the unit descendants of the men who had fought at the Point and among the terrible Umurbrogol caves on Peleliu. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they were products of America’s postindustrial, information-age culture. They loved video games, guy movies, reality TV shows, porn, and glam magazines like FHM and Maxim. They called one another “dude” and “dog.” Even officers and sergeants routinely employed these ubiquitous monikers when talking to their young Marines. They were tech savvy and very bright, though they could sometimes be ignorant of grammatical niceties and basic geography. Modern American entertainment culture was so powerfully ingrained in them that they generally referred to their enemies as the “bad guys” and themselves as the “good guys,” as if the Iraq War was merely a giant action film. Many of them coated themselves with tattoos. Their music was a blend of country, hard rock, and rap. They no longer referred to their NCOs as “Sarge.” They called them “Sar’nt,” as if saying the full title might absorb too much time and energy. Their officers used words like “battlespace” instead of “battlefield” and “challenge” instead of “problem.” Like their World War II ancestors, the grunts smoked cigarettes in distressingly high numbers. But, unlike the Old Corps Marines, they knew all about the dangers of smoking and still did it. Even more commonly, they dipped snuff, mainly as a means to combat exhaustion, the favorite brands being Skoal and Copenhagen.

  In some ways, they were societal anomalies. In the midst of postfeminist America, they were unapologetically macho and homophobic. Paragons of physical fitness, they fought for a country with a serious obesity problem. They swore so creatively and with such frequency that polite conversation with a civilian could be a greater challenge for some of them than the boot camp they had all endured and
mastered. To put it mildly, they were politically incorrect and proud of it. Like almost all infantrymen, they were irreverent on the outside, reverent on the inside. They were a fascinating blend of hard-bitten cynicism and tenacious idealism.

  They had more in common with their 3/1 Marine predecessors than otherwise. As with the 3/1 Marines at Peleliu, they loathed their enemies and everything they stood for, but respected their fanatical courage. Their weapons were different from the World War II Marines’, but their spirit was the same. They were grunts to the core—lean, aggressive, sour but good-hearted. They were among the finest light infantrymen in the world. Their competence and skill underscored the generally unappreciated reality that not just anyone can become an infantryman. “There is a certain amount of natural talent that can’t be created,” one Marine officer wrote. “When that talent is there it can be nurtured, but it can’t be created where it doesn’t exist.” A rifle platoon leader added his opinion that “there are probably few jobs in the Marine Corps . . . that are more challenging than being an infantry squad leader.”

  In western Fallujah their job was to go door to door, cleaning out every building, in the Jolan and Queens, a pair of terrorist strongholds. “Clearing buildings is combat at its most primitive,” one embedded civilian historian wrote. “The fighting is up close and personal, not the pushbutton warfare that many Americans hear about and see on television.” This meant ending the lives of other human beings with a staggering degree of personal violence and trauma. “You’re just acutely aware of what war is about,” Major Joe Winslow, a Marine combat historian with 3/1, later said, “finding and violently killing other people as best you can and you’re exposed to the results of that . . . Marines being killed or injured, dead enemy body parts, bodies stuck everywhere, just death in general. It’s very earth shattering.” In fact, American intelligence officers believed that the Jolan was where many of the most hardcore insurgents, including Zarqawi’s crew, were headquartered. The area was also known for its narrow streets and dense, sturdy structures.

  As with 2-2 Infantry in eastern Fallujah, in this western section of town the Army’s 2-7 Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey, led the way through the breach as an armored fist. They cleared the streets of IEDs and VBIEDS. They destroyed RPG and machine-gun teams. Their grunts cleared plenty of buildings. More than that, though, the sheer force of their tanks and Bradleys shocked the enemy into immobility. “The 3/1’s mission was to flow behind 2-7 after they entered the city . . . and start clearing the enemy right behind the penetration,” Colonel Shupp, commander of RCT-1, later said. “I can’t tell you how happy we were with Jim Rainey and 2-7. These guys are fighters. They’re the best soldiers I’ve ever seen in my life.” Lieutenant Colonel Buhl, 3/1’s commander, was grateful for the armored screen that the tanks and Brads provided his Marines. “I’m very thankful for everything 2-7 did for us. I’m impressed with that battalion. They were a seasoned battalion. They really . . . attacked, aggressively. Their leaders were squared away.”

  In the wake of this powerful wedge, covered by the watchful eyes of Marine and SEAL snipers, Buhl’s rifle companies plunged into the close-packed jungle of sandstone-colored buildings. They were aided by satellite photographs and even some real-time images from UAVs flying overhead. The drone of their engines became a constant sound track. At ten thousand feet, fighter jets loitered, waiting to help. The supporting fire of artillery and mortar crews was readily available. But it was up to the grunts to clear the buildings. In general, they carried about forty or fifty pounds of gear, consisting of fresh magazines for their rifles, water, grenades, body armor (IBA), Kevlar helmets, weapons, and assorted specialty items like bolt cutters, shotguns, or sledgehammers.

  Most of the city blocks were about two hundred meters long, with an average of one hundred structures on each block. A house might contain nothing or it might teem with jihadis looking to martyr themselves. “It would seem that the first block was always clear,” Lance Corporal Dustin Turpen of Lima Company said, “and they let us think there was nobody there, and we started to get complacent. After you kick fifty doors in, and there’s nobody there, it starts to become normal. It’s like the fiftieth house you clear that day, and you’re just trying to get it done, and that’s when the shit happens.” As Turpen indicated, the job of assaulting the buildings was up close and personal, a high-stakes jumble of kicking in doors, rushing through rooms. The repetitiveness was mind-numbing. There was a definite Russian roulette feel to it. Danger could come from any direction in the urban morass. “You have to cover everywhere,” First Sergeant Brad Kasal of Weapons Company said. “You had a guy pointing [his weapon] in the front, a guy pointing high, guys covering high in other directions, a guy covering the rear. The fire can come from anywhere . . . up high, low, down in a sewer . . . a window.”

  Each fire team and squad had to perfect a distinct choreography and chemistry, with a man covering each sector, reacting instantly to the person next to him, covering his every movement, proceeding as smoothly as possible into the dark interior of the building. They draped their rifles over their armored vests, always orienting them forward, braced expertly against their shoulders, ready to shoot. Every man’s rifle was secured with a three-point sling, preventing slippage off the shoulder. Each room presented the possibility of close contact and a personal fight to the death. “I’m the assault team, so I’m always the first one in the house,” Corporal Matthew Spencer, a fire team leader in Kilo Company, told a historian. “Once we’re in the stack, we’re all ready to go. We can read off each other. Most of the time the door is straight in front. We’ll go in . . . and from there, you take your immediate danger areas and your doorways and we’re pretty much split from there and we don’t really see each other until we meet up in a bigger room or we’re coming out.”

  Corporal Francis Wolf, a squad leader in the same company, always ordered his Marines to shoot up the house first and then assault. “And once we enter the house, just basically, hard, fast, intense . . . frag every room you can . . . sometimes two to three depending on the room.” They found that grenades were not all that effective because the rooms offered so much furniture and debris for cover. Moreover, the insurgents often anticipated that the Marines would use grenades, so they stacked mattresses and tables near windows and doors to absorb grenade fragments. So, Wolf and his people killed almost exclusively with rifles. “The SAW is not very maneuverable inside of a house. The only time we’ll ever use a SAW in a house is if we have to clear by fire. If we know that there’s insurgents in the rooms, we’ll poke the SAW around the corner and lay . . . a one-hundred-round burst and just light the room up.” Most of the time, though, they killed the enemy fighters with multiple aimed shots from their M16s. Frequently, through the smoke and dust, they watched the life ebb from the eyes of their enemies. With firefights taking place in such small rooms, the grunts were inundated with the acrid stench of cordite and gunpowder, to the point where they could taste it in their mouths.

  Often it took many shots to kill a jihadi because they were under the influence of adrenaline, cocaine, amphetamines, or other drugs that gave them extra staying power. “The terrorists just wouldn’t die unless you removed their brains from their skulls,” one grunt NCO said. Houses, streets, and rubble were riddled with spent needles and drug paraphernalia. One mujahideen took a shot to the face, point-blank, and stab wounds to the chest but kept fighting. “His brains were out on the floor,” Corporal Bill Sojda recalled. “A normal person would have died with a bullet in their head and multiple stab wounds.” So, even grievously wounded insurgents could present a deadly threat. “I know of several instances where near-dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon wrote. “It was a fight to the finish.”

  The Americans did take prisoners, but in this unforgiving, stressful environment they were usually inclined to shoot anyone who offered any semblance of a threat (they were especial
ly leery of suicide bombers). In one well-known instance, when the Marines took a mosque after heavy fighting, they encountered a badly wounded insurgent. One of the riflemen thought that the man was a threat and he shot him to death, right in front of a camera-toting reporter. The graphic footage was beamed to the world, generating controversy and even an official investigation of the shooter’s actions. The brutal reality was that every encounter with the enemy portended imminent death. Life-and-death decisions had to be made in a split second. “There is no one technique for house clearing,” another squad leader said. “Sometimes I’ll be noisy to draw fire, sometimes I’ll sneak in. I’ll climb over a roof and come down the stairs, or feint at the front door and enter through the kitchen. Training gives you the basics. After that, you have to adapt.” The most important thing was to avoid being predictable.16

  Regardless of how professionally the squads assaulted buildings, the job was time-consuming and very dangerous. The goal of the jihadis was to lure the Marines inside the buildings, where they could inflict casualties on them at close range. All too often, the insurgents intended to die and simply wanted to take as many Marines with them as they could. This was especially true in the heart of the Jolan and Queens, where many foreign terrorists made their last stand. “Their discipline throughout the battle still amazes me,” Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Hackett of Lima Company said. “They just sat in the house and waited, kind of like spiders; they waited for the perfect shot, our faces or necks, since our body armor and Kevlars . . . protected our bodies.”