The result of all this was anger in Iraq over Fallujah. American policymakers, often troubled themselves by the pictures, did little to counter the Al Jazeera story line of U.S. barbarism. After a year of occupation, many Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni alike, were already boiling with bitterness against the Americans for a litany of problems, including chaotic violence, lack of electrical power, lack of potable water, nighttime raids against private homes by the Americans, and a slew of cultural tensions. The pictures from Fallujah made it seem as though the Americans were systematically destroying the city and its inhabitants, simply because of what had happened to their four contractors. Resentment morphed into abject hatred and hysteria, especially among those who had always opposed the U.S. invasion. One anti-American cleric, for instance, screeched on Al Jazeera that the Americans were modern-day Crusaders who intended to slaughter all Iraqis. “They are killing children!” he wailed. “They are trying to destroy everything! The people can see through all the American promises and lies!”
Even moderate Iraqis were outraged by what they saw on Al Jazeera. “My opinion of the Americans has changed,” one Shiite store owner in Basra told a journalist. “When [they] came, they talked about freedom and democracy. Now, the Americans are pushing their views by force.” Another middle-class man was so angered by the video he saw of Fallujah that he declared: “We came to hate the Americans for that. The Americans will hit any family. They just don’t care.” This was hardly the reality in Fallujah, but it became the perception among far too many Iraqis.
Consequently, as April unfolded, many of Iraq’s cities were on the verge of a total revolt against the Americans. Iraq was coming apart at the seams. Heavy fighting raged, not just in Fallujah but in Ramadi, the largest city in Al Anbar. Not only were the Sunnis rising up, but also some of the Shiites, particularly Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. In Najaf and the Sadr City section of Baghdad, his militiamen were fighting bloody pitched battles against the U.S. Army. The situation in Iraq was so bad, and the American control of the urban roads so shaky, that commanders worried about the possibility that their supply lines would soon be cut. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), a provisional body that Bremer’s CPA had devised to hasten the transition of Iraq from occupied country to a new sovereign democracy, was on the verge of dissolution. Several of the Council’s twenty-five members condemned the invasion of Fallujah and threatened to resign in protest. At least two members actually did resign. When the Americans attempted to legitimize the battle by sending Iraqi Army soldiers to help out, they mutinied. Nationwide, desertions among soldiers and policemen skyrocketed to 80 percent.
To top it all off, the political situation in the United States was also volatile, and in a presidential election year, no less. Antiwar sentiment was hardening. Governor Howard Dean, an avowed peace candidate, came close to winning the Democratic Party nomination before Senator John Kerry finally outpaced him. Kerry’s position on the war was ambiguous, but he was a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the conflict. He lambasted Bush for bungling the war and portrayed the war as a disaster. The Fallujah mess only added ammunition to Kerry’s arsenal. His candidacy reflected a significant component of the American electorate that had lost confidence in Bush’s leadership and viewed the war as a foolish, costly mistake, a bloody quagmire in the making. All of this threatened to severely damage Bush’s chances for reelection.
Under threat of this potential strategic meltdown, Bremer and Abizaid felt that they must halt the Fallujah operation or risk a massive political defeat in Iraq. On April 9, they ordered the Marines to hold in place. Mattis and his leathernecks were incensed. They yearned to finish the job of taking Fallujah. Instead, Bremer, Abizaid, and other American authorities began an on-again, off-again, dizzying series of negotiations with the IGC, local sheiks, Fallujah city fathers, insurgent groups, and any other Iraqis who seemed to offer the possibility of a favorable resolution to the situation.
The Marine grunts could not understand why the brass was restraining them. The infantrymen’s dangerous reality was quite distant from the back-and-forth political maneuvering that had come to dominate the Fallujah story, but what they did know disgusted them. One grunt expressed their prevailing sentiment with a contemptuous parody of the negotiations: “Hey, Sheik Butt Fuck, will you please, please, pretty please turn over those naughty little boys who slaughtered our people, burnt their bodies, and strung them up from that bridge?” Even more frustrating for the Marines, the negotiations took place against the backdrop of a supposed cease-fire, which existed only in name. Throughout April, plenty of fighting raged with much loss of life on both sides, but with no decisive result.
In fact, the end of American offensive operations provided a major respite to the guerrillas. They now had plenty of time to rest, rearm, reinforce, and carry out deliberate, calculated attacks on the Marines, and on their own turf, no less. “The Muj inside the city . . . just dug in deeper, slabbing up their machine-gun bunkers and mortar pits with fresh concrete,” a Marine infantry platoon leader wrote. “They had plenty of food—most of it relief aid—and all the water in the river to drink.”4
Each day the Marines hoped and expected to receive the order to renew their attack. It never came. Instead of advancing block by block, working toward the finite objective of taking the city, the frustrated Marine grunts found themselves stalemated, holed up in buildings, trading shots with any insurgents who messed with them. Snipers did much of the fighting. The urban jungle was a paradise of targets for them. “It’s a sniper’s dream,” one of them said. As precision shooters, they were the perfect antidote in an urban setting to the excess of American firepower.
In a way, the snipers were also the ultimate manifestation of Marine Corps ethos. They were riflemen par excellence, masters at the art of precision killing. They embodied the notion that even in modern war, the individual fighter is still the ultimate weapon. This is the foundational philosophy of the Corps and it was on full display in Fallujah. In modern combat, snipers are the most personal of killers. They track, stalk, and spot their prey. They sometimes can see the expression on the faces of their victims—and even know something about their personal habits. This is rare in modern war, when soldiers shoot powerful weapons at their enemies but often do not know for sure if they ever hit or kill anyone. This is one reason why it is foolish and invasive to ask a combat soldier if he ever killed anyone. He probably does not know or, more likely, he does not want to know. If he has killed, then asking him that question is like asking him to reveal intimate secrets about himself, almost akin to demanding explicit details about his sex life.
Every sniper has to embrace an equilibrium in his attitude on killing or he simply cannot do the job. He has to avoid identifying or sympathizing with his victim too much, or he will be reluctant to kill him. On the other hand, he must guard against becoming drunk with the power of life and death, thirsting to kill anyone who enters his sights, regardless of whether that person is a threat or a valuable military target for the larger goal of fulfilling the mission. Striking the proper balance requires great strength of character and mental clarity. Each Marine sniper at Fallujah had to come to terms with becoming such a killer.
They set up in well-hidden positions on rooftops and near windows. They maintained a vigil, searching for insurgents day and night. Some of the shooters were graduates of the Marine scout sniper school’s rugged program. These craftsmen were often armed with M40A3 bolt-action rifles designed specifically for sniping. Other shooters were just good riflemen from infantry platoons. Lance Corporal Finnigan fit the latter category, although he had trained with the snipers on Okinawa for a few weeks before deploying to Iraq. Armed with an M16 that had an Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) mounted on its sight rail, Finnegan was ensconced on a rooftop, along with a machine gunner and a Mark 19 grenadier. “We had a couple of sandbags,” he said. “We actually had a bunch of alternate positions, from different windows in the building. We
had a chair set up.” The chair was positioned about ten feet from any window or hole so as to shield the barrel of the rifle and provide some cover for Finnigan. The ACOG allowed him to see for many hundreds of meters, deep into enemy territory.
His best friend and several other platoon mates had been killed on the first day of the offensive, so he was itching for some payback. The rules of engagement were flexible. Anyone who was armed or moving military supplies or even pointing their fingers at the Marine positions was a legitimate target. The negotiations notwithstanding, Fallujah remained a war zone. Round the clock, plenty of shooting raged back and forth all over the city, and Finnigan’s spot in a section of the city the Marines called Queens was no different. Periodically they got shelled by 120-millimeter mortars. They also took muj machine-gun and rifle fire.
Finnigan operated in twenty-minute shifts, giving his eyes plenty of time away from the gun sight to rest. “It’s not like you’re just sitting there behind the scope for hours at a time. That’s impossible. Your eye will get really tired. Everybody takes a turn.” Many times, he spotted insurgents on the move and opened fire. “Most of these idiots would just be walking . . . and they had no idea where we were and they would have their weapons and neat little uniforms on or whatever. They’d just be walking down the street having no idea they were about to enter a killing zone.” In all, he estimated that he killed fifteen of these armed men.
A couple dozen blocks to the north, in the Jolan district, Corporal Ethan Place, a trained scout sniper attached to the 2/1 Marines, was also hunting for targets. Like all scout snipers, he worked with a spotter, who helped him find targets, figure windage, and protect him from enemy snipers. Place and his partner spotted a group of insurgents rushing toward their positions, ducking through alleyways. The attackers would peek around a corner, launch an RPG in the Marines’ direction, and then scramble back out of sight. Place concentrated on one especially active corner. Sure enough, an insurgent with an RPG started around that corner. Place squeezed the trigger of his M40A3 and hit the man full in the shoulder. Unlike Hollywood movies, the round did not knock him off his feet. He simply crumpled, twitched, and fell. Another enemy fighter, wearing a black ski mask, glanced around the same corner. Place waited until the man moved into the open and then shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. In the next few hours, he killed several more. “They look up the street and don’t see anyone,” he said. “They can’t believe I can see them.” When a white car with three armed men approached at three hundred meters, he killed all three of them. Needless to say, the enemy attack went nowhere.
In subsequent days, he killed numerous guerrillas who were trying to drag away the dead bodies of their comrades. He personally shot and killed at least thirty-two insurgents. His spotter got several more. The streets in their range of vision were strewn with maggot-infested, swollen, stinking carcasses. There were so many flies feeding on the head of one body that it created the appearance of a full beard. At night dogs and cats tore at the corpses, sometimes eating all the way to the bone. The incessant howling and moaning of the animals provided an eerie sound track to the evening shadows. Overhead, AC-130s raked enemy-held buildings with cannon and Gatling gun fire. Psychological operations teams played heavy metal music by the likes of AC/DC and Drowning Pool. The muj countered with fiery anti-American rhetoric blared from the speakers of mosques: “America is bringing Jews from Israel and stealing Iraq’s oil. Women, take your children into the streets to aid the holy warriors. Bring them food, water, and weapons. Do not fear death. It is your duty to protect Islam.” The competing sounds symbolized this epic clash of cultures. The irreverent Marines dubbed this surreal environment “LaLa-Fallujah” after a popular rock festival.
For the muj, the Marine snipers were the most terrifying weapon of all. They seemed to be everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing. They meted out death so swiftly and so personally that they created great mental strain among the enemy fighters. They were so effective that Fallujah’s city elders and IGC negotiators began demanding their withdrawal as a precondition of any settlement in Fallujah. “I find it strange,” Lieutenant General Conway replied to one such demand, “that you object to our most discriminate weapon—a Marine firing three ounces of lead at a precise target. I reject your demand, and I wonder who asked you to make it.”5
But, by early May, that was about the only demand the Americans had rejected. By now, the Abu Ghraib scandal was in full bloom, only adding to the American strategic woes in Iraq. So, in spite of their obvious military successes in Fallujah, the Americans were now on such weak political footing that they agreed to a withdrawal. As a fig leaf to cover this obvious reversal, the Americans agreed to turn over the city’s security to the so-called Fallujah Brigade, a unit that was comprised mainly of former Iraqi soldiers and even some insurgents. The brigade would be armed and supported financially by the Americans. In exchange, they were to enforce a cease-fire and maintain peace in Fallujah. In reality, the Fallujah Brigade had no such capability, mainly because its members sympathized with, or were even part of, the insurgency. Turning over the city to them was tantamount to giving it to the guerrillas.
When the grunts heard the withdrawal order, they felt betrayed, bitter, and very angry. Many felt that they were being cheated out of a victory that they and their fallen brother Marines had earned. Thoroughly disgusted, Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, a rifle platoon leader in Echo Company, 2/2 Marines, turned to a Time magazine reporter who had covered many wars and asked: “Does this remind you of another part of the world in the early 1970s?” The allusion to Vietnam was clear. Like every other Marine in his company, Lance Corporal Finnigan was peeved and frustrated by the order. “It was bullshit. It was a tough pill to swallow. It just wasn’t much fun to hear that.” Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for RCT-1, knew the realities in Fallujah as well as, or better than, any other American. His assessment was dead-on: “We’re letting the muj off the canvas. They’ll use Fallujah as a base to hit us.”
As the Marines left, their supposed Fallujah Brigade “allies” jeered and glared at them. Some turned and pantomimed defecating in the direction of the Americans. Others jubilantly waved Saddam-era flags. “They [Americans] told us to change our uniforms,” one of them told a reporter, “but we refused. We are not with the Americans. We are Iraqi fighters.” Another brigade member said of the Americans: “They lost. They should leave.” One of the insurgents crowed that “this is a great victory for the people of Iraq. The mujahideen and the Falluja [sic] Brigade are brothers.” Many of the Fallujahns agreed. A triumphal mood permeated much of the city. Armed men in pickup trucks honked their horns in celebration. Groups of men and teenagers stood together cheering on street corners. “We believe God saved our city,” one of them said. “And we believe they [Americans] learned a lesson . . . not to mess with Fallujah.” Storefronts featured signs with such pronunciations as “We have defeated the devil Marines!” and “Jihad has triumphed!”
They were wrong, though. They had not defeated the Americans. The Americans had defeated themselves. Their self-imposed reversal was the result of their strategic fecklessness, their vacillating political and military leadership, their cultural ignorance, and, most of all, their fatal willingness to allow the enemy to shape world opinion in an information age. For a nation that pioneered the concept of mass media, the American inability to competently tell their own side of the Fallujah story and thus counter the endless drumbeat of insurgent propaganda was both stunning and unacceptable. The sad result was an artificial defeat and a city thrown to the metaphorical wolves.
At Fallujah in the spring of 2004, the Americans carried out 150 air strikes that destroyed 75 buildings with about a hundred tons of explosives—hardly an excessive onslaught. The number of dead civilians ranged between 270, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, and somewhere just north of 600, according to Al Jazeera. Insurgent losses have never been pinpointed but they were probably well into the hundreds (
of course, part of the problem in calculating the casualties is figuring out who was truly a noncombatant and who was not). The Americans lost 27 killed and over 100 wounded, essentially for no tangible results. Fallujah in the spring of 2004 could not have contrasted more sharply with Aachen in 1944, when American soldiers fought an urban battle with no political constraints and no world condemnation. At Fallujah, politics and popular perception shaped everything. In the end, the Americans lacked the strategic clarity and force of leadership to attain their objectives. Rarely has an operation been more poorly named than Vigilant Resolve in April 2004.6
Timing Is Everything: Back to the Malignant City in November
Fallujah grew much worse as 2004 unfolded. As many of the Marines had feared after the cease-fire settlement back in the spring, Fallujah’s various insurgent groups solidified their hold on the city. They used it as a sanctuary and a launching point for attacks on the Americans in Al Anbar. Practically every day, they attacked the Americans with a vexing mix of IEDs, Vehicle Borne IEDs (VBIEDs), suicide bombings, mortars, rockets, and shootings. The Americans responded with raids, targeted air strikes, cordon and searches. The casualties piled up on both sides. In Fallujah, there were, according to Marine intelligence sources, seventeen separate insurgent groups and about a dozen important leaders, the most notorious of whom was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who headed up al-Qaeda in Iraq. Together they co-opted the traditional influence of local tribes in Fallujah.
Like a tumor, the power of these terrorist gangs metastasized into a malignant growth on the Iraqi body politic. Even as Al Anbar burned with resistance to the Americans and the new Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) the Americans had created in June, Fallujah stood out as a no-go area of special defiance. It was essentially a city-state of its own, a hostile challenge to a fledgling, Shiite-controlled Iraqi government that was struggling for legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, especially Al Anbar Sunnis.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 44
