They were like actors waiting for the curtain to rise on opening night or football players gathering in the locker room before the Super Bowl. Only this was not a performance or a game; it was life and death. After so much preparation and anticipation, they had reached a state of total impatience, a point at which facing imminent danger becomes more desirable than even one more minute of inconclusive, but safe, waiting. Rather than sit around much longer and contemplate their uncertain future, they wanted to take action and end the cursed anticipation, a common human emotion when facing danger. “Come on, what the hell are we waiting for, let’s get moving” was a common thought among the grunts. To make matters worse, a misty curtain of light rain began to descend.
The railroad tracks and embankment ringed this northern approach to the city. The Fallujah side of the embankment teemed with mines and IEDs, as did many of the first streets and buildings the Americans would attempt to capture. The initial stage of the Fallujah assault called for the engineers to breach this formidable belt of deadly obstacles (in stark contrast to the Gulf War, the breach would not be made this time by knife-wielding Marines on their hands and knees). Blowing an opening into Fallujah was dangerous work and the engineers needed a great deal of fire support to prevent the enemy from pinning them down among the IEDs, raking them with RPG and machine-gun fire. The grunts liked to razz combat engineers for being demolitions nerds but, in truth, as one infantry soldier indicated, they deeply respected them as “the intellectuals of the combat arms branches. They have a million crafty solutions to problems that would make us knuckle-dragging infantry types scratch our heads and pause.”
In the weeks leading up to Operation Al Fajr, the Americans, for political reasons, actually refrained from pasting Fallujah in the same way they had bombarded objectives in earlier wars (Guam, Peleliu, and Aachen, for instance). Every fire mission and air strike had to be approved at I MEF level or above. Because of this, some of the ground troops were concerned that they would pay a fearsome price in blood for the conniving of the politicians. By the time they were about to tear through the breach, though, the restraints were long gone. Artillery shells, fired from 155-millimeter self-propelled Paladin howitzers a few miles away, tore into houses. Plumes of smoke and dust billowed in the gathering darkness. Masonry flew everywhere. The air was filled with a low but steady rumble of detonating shells, so many that the ground seemed to be quaking. “The Air Force, Navy and Marines send waves of F-16 and F-18 fighter jets,” Staff Sergeant Bellavia wrote in a present-tense format. “They whistle over the city to drop laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The whomp-whomp of their detonations can be both heard and felt, even at this distance. Fallujah is smothered in bombs, shrouded in smoke. Buildings collapse. Mines detonate.”
In many instances, the bombs set off a chain reaction of explosions as lines of IEDs and car bombs cooked off. Attack helicopters swooped in and disgorged rockets and 30-millimeter shells anyplace that the pilots spotted enemy fire. Propeller-driven AC-130 gunships hummed overhead, unleashing their terrifying panoply of cannon and Gatling gun fire. Distinct lines of blue tracers slashed from these planes to the ground, creating a sight reminiscent of a light show. Tanks, Bradleys, AAVs, and other supporting vehicles shot up any building that overlooked the railroad tracks, adding to the pyrotechnics. “The results were exactly as we had hoped, creating massive casualties and chaos within the enemy ranks, disrupting their ability to defend against the breach,” Captain Paul Fowler, a tank company commander, said.
Even so, the insurgents unleashed a disconcerting amount of RPG, machine-gun, and mortar fire as the engineers rolled their D9 armored bulldozers and other vehicles up to the embankment. Bullets sparked off the dozers and up-armored Humvees. There was so much rifle fire coming from the buildings that it reminded Colonel Shupp of camera flashes at a big sporting event. “The whole city was lit up with those flashbulbs, but the flashbulbs were actually small-arms fire coming against our forces.” The bullets smashed into the embankment and whizzed past vehicles. Many of the Americans were observing the city through night vision goggles, but the light of so many flashes and explosions almost made those devices useless. “There were red streaks which were RPGs coming from the city and going over our trucks [Humvees],” Lance Corporal Sven Mozdiez recalled. He and the Marines around him saw a three-man RPG team huddle together in a hole as they got set to fire. Their weapon malfunctioned, emitting a flash out of the back but not the rocket. The surprised muj stared at one another for a long moment. A Marine Mark 19 gunner spotted them and showered their hole with 40-millimeter grenades, killing them all. Mozdiez saw another fighter lean over the third-story railing of one house and spray his AK-47 in the direction of the Americans. “We got a bead on him and Lance Corporal [Kevin] Weyrauch fired a TOW missile in that level of the building and we didn’t receive any more fire from that position. The problem was taken care of.”10
To forge their respective breaches, the engineers employed mine-clearing line charges (MICLIC, or “mick lick”), a weapon that had worked well in the Gulf War. The MICLICs were anything but elaborate. Each one was nothing more than a one-hundred-meter-long rope adorned with about one thousand pounds of C-4 explosive affixed to the rope in clumps. A trailerlike vehicle with a hydraulic launcher propelled the rope deep within the minefield. “When detonated, anything surrounding the MICLIC gets vaporized,” one soldier explained. “What the explosions don’t destroy, the concussion waves finish off.” The MICLIC would basically set off a chain reaction of mine and IED detonations, clearing paths three meters wide and one hundred meters long through the obstacle belt. In this case, the explosions would also punch holes through the embankment and railroad tracks.
When the engineers were finally ready, they radioed all the units with the message to button up inside their vehicles. Then they blew their MICLICs. Multiple explosions detonated. Roiling orange balls of flame lit up the night. A massive concussion wave shook vehicles. Debris flew in every direction. A chain reaction of sympathetic detonations touched off as IEDs and mines exploded. “There were at least five daisy-chained IEDs that went off,” Major Lisa Dewitt, the battalion surgeon for 2-2 Infantry, recalled. “When that big boom occurred, there was a collective celebratory shouting and cheering, like somebody scored a touchdown.” The engineers then marked the new breach lanes with chem lights and special tape.
In a few spots, the Marines experienced difficulty in getting across the tracks and exploiting the breach lanes, mainly because of equipment problems. RCT-1, for instance, was delayed for several hours because one of its engineer vehicles tipped over. For the most part, though, the advance through the breach lanes was rapid as tanks, Bradleys, armored bulldozers, and AAVs began rumbling into the gaps. The crew of one Bradley had painted the nickname “Bada Bing!” on their Bradley in honor of the strip club in The Sopranos.
The soldiers of Lieutenant Colonel Newell’s Task Force 2-2 Infantry were leading the way for RCT-7. They were the first Americans to enter the newly created lanes and head straight for the muzzles of insurgents, who had weathered the bombardment by hunkering down in sturdy buildings. Newell had arranged for the Big Red One’s 3rd Brigade Reconnaissance Troop to cover his vulnerable lead vehicles as they negotiated their way through the narrow lanes. East of the city, on high ground at a crossroads known as the cloverleaf, Bradleys, tanks, and Humvees equipped with special long-range surveillance equipment (known as L-RAS) kept the insurgents at bay with devastatingly accurate fire. “Their whole job in life was to get in position where they could see deep into the city, behind where we were moving,” Newell said. “[They] pretty much destroyed a platoon’s worth of insurgents right at the breach point. You couldn’t move within a hundred meters of that thing without somebody in Recon Troop shooting you.”
The L-RAS resembled a square box. Mounted atop a Humvee, its thermal laser could identify enemy fighters several kilometers into the city. Once an enemy was identified, a sold
ier would simply push a button to target the insurgent. “Hit the laser button and it’ll give you a ten-digit grid and direction—basically everything you need for a perfect call for fire to take them out,” Staff Sergeant Jimmy Amyett, a section leader in the troop, recalled. “And the whole time they have no idea you’re watching them.” They called down accurate artillery and mortar fire. They also shot enemy fighters with a blend of 25-millimeter and machine-gun fire.
In the meantime, Newell’s Bradleys, accompanied by escorting tanks, gingerly rolled through their slender lanes. Staff Sergeant Bellavia was packed inside one of the Bradleys with his rifle squad. They were laden down with M16A4 rifles, M4 carbines, M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machine guns, grenades, shotguns, body armor, Kevlar helmets, and a variety of other weapons and pieces of equipment. They were hot, sweaty, and generally uncomfortable. The air was stale, leaden with body odor and foul exhalations. “Our asses grow sore,” he wrote. “When we try to reposition ourselves, we squash our balls.” The sergeant and his men could hear mortar shells exploding outside, uncomfortably close to their track. They also heard the booming of friendly artillery shells and Abrams main guns. The Bradley started and stopped several times, nearly driving them crazy with anticipation. At last, the driver gunned the engine. “As our Brad works up to its top speed, we’re thrown around like bowling pins. My head cracks against the bulkhead, then I’m thrown against the ramp. Gear starts flying around us. Outside, the explosions grow in volume and intensity.” Some of the explosions were from nearby IEDs.
Bellavia was sitting in the very rear of the Bradley, near the ramp. He leaned forward and looked through the periscope viewer and saw tracer rounds sailing past his own vehicle and nearby Bradleys. The world outside was little more than a blur of muffled explosions, smoke, and swirl. He could see well enough, though, to spot the engineer’s chem lights and tape. A few seconds later, the track was through the breach lane, and with several tanks and other Bradleys it began rolling toward the city. RPGs streaked out of the urban haze. One scored a direct hit on the turret of the platoon sergeant’s Bradley. “Fire scorches its flanks as the vehicle lurches forward,” Bellavia remembered. “Seconds later, it runs across an IED, which explodes with such force that the entire back end of the Bradley leaves the desert floor.”
The resilient Bradley crashed back down and kept going. Then, a second later, Bellavia’s Bradley hit an IED. “A shattering blast engulfs us. The back end of our Bradley is thrown upward. Dust and smoke spiral around us. I choke and gag and try to scream for my guys.” The compartment was full of smoke and dust. Temporarily deafened and disoriented by acoustic trauma, Bellavia could not hear or see his men. All he could hear was a high-pitched buzz, although he was aware that the vehicle gunner was firing the 25-millimeter chain gun. He screamed at his men to tap his knee if they were okay. One by one, they did so. As the seconds passed, his body recovered from the shock of the explosion and his senses returned. The battered but intact Bradley kept rolling.
Finally, they reached the edge of the city and dismounted. As Bellavia descended the ramp, he felt like he was setting foot on Omaha Beach. “My stomach’s in a knot. I feel like my grandfather in World War II, like I’m literally living in a historical moment.” Instead of running into a wall of fire, he and his soldiers took cover behind their vehicle, flipped their night vision goggles into place, and, for the first time, studied Fallujah from close range. “All around us, the darkness is broken by fires of all sizes and shapes. Buildings blaze. Rubble smolders. Debris burns in the streets. Houses have been cleaved in two, as if some sadistic giant had performed architectural vivisection on the entire neighborhood. Floors and rooms have been laid bare, exposed by the ravages of the night’s shelling. Furniture is thrown haphazardly about. Smashed desks, burned-out sofas, faceless TVs lay in heaps within these demolished homes.”
Bellavia noticed globs of white phosphorous clinging to the ground around the buildings like “manna from hell. It reminds me of the burning liquid metal of Terminator 2.” The artillerymen had employed the white phosphorous to spark building fires and force the insurgents into the streets, where high-explosive rounds would engulf them in shrapnel. Other than the fires and the intermittent but considerable booming of tank guns, all was silent. Bellavia’s squad was surprised at the relative tranquillity. Under the watchful snouts of their vehicles, they maneuvered, with one fire team of four soldiers covering the other, into the nearest buildings.
All up and down the northern edges of Fallujah, the Americans were filtering through their breach lanes into the city. Just as the heavily mechanized 2-2 Infantry led the way for Tucker’s RCT-7, Colonel Shupp chose 2-7 Cavalry to go in first for RCT-1. “We [had] two lanes open,” Shupp said, “so now 2-7 [was] into the city and fighting, destroying everything on the route that could be a possible IED. Basher . . . above us [was] firing into everything that they possibly could, attacking the enemy on strongholds for a possible IED . . . [and] VBIED cars that could have been on the routes . . . and . . . getting big secondary explosions off them.” Each of the explosions detonated an IED or car bomb that could have caused many grunt casualties.
In the wake of the heavy mechanized forces, the Marine light infantry units rolled through in AAVs and Humvees accompanied by psyops teams blaring Richard Wagner’s famous symphony epic “Ride of the Valkyries.” The Marine grunts dismounted, against surprisingly light resistance, and seeped into the first ruined blocks of drab, wrecked, sand-colored structures. The situation was one of controlled chaos. Units were mixed up or dumped into the wrong spots. Grunts eyeballed windows and doorways for hidden insurgents. The light of fires and flares created weird shadows that bounced off buildings and streets. The well-trained infantrymen knew to avoid standing in open areas so they gravitated to the buildings. “We ran as fast as we could,” Sergeant Shawn Gianforte recalled. “To my surprise we made it through the breach with very little resistance at all. We went in one building and got set up and let everyone figure out where we were.” All around him, hundreds of Marines and soldiers were doing the same thing.
The mujahideen had spent five months building a fortified barrier that, in the end, held up the Americans for five hours—at the most. By 0200 on November 9, both of General Natonski’s regimental combat teams were through the breach and into Fallujah. The preliminaries were over. The fight for the city was on.11
2-2 Infantry and the Wedge
They were nicknamed “Ramrods” but they were more like sledgehammers. Their proud lineage spanned nearly two hundred years of American military history. Soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Regiment had once fought in such legendary battles as Gettysburg, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge. At Fallujah, they were the embodiment of mech infantry. Their job was to blast their way through the enemy’s cleverly placed strongpoints, dash down the streets, seize Highway 10 (now known to the Americans as Phase Line Fran), force the insurgents to displace from the cover of their fortified houses, and then either annihilate them with the synchronized firepower of several dozen armored vehicles or push them into the not-so-welcoming arms of Marine light infantrymen. General Sattler opined that they were “critical to quickly slicing through the insurgents’ defenses and disrupting their ability to conduct coordinated counterattacks.” As Lieutenant Colonel Newell succinctly put it, “a Bradley and a tank can take an RPG shot in the face and keep moving and still fight. A dismounted infantry squad cannot.”
Because of this simple reality of urban combat, it simply made good sense for 2-2 Infantry to take the lead in Fallujah. “The plan before we put any dismounts on the ground or in the buildings,” one NCO recalled, “was to use our 120s on the Abrams or our 25-millimeters on the Bradleys” to shoot up any house that might contain enemy fighters. The battalion was the perfect blend of armor and firepower. Because the city was almost completely free of noncombatants, they could spew out death and destruction with impunity. “My goal . . . [was] not to clear every single building,” Newell said
. “The job was to break up any organized resistance. Any platoon-sized resistance . . . destroy it, break it up so that it couldn’t function . . . use speed and firepower to get through the northern part of the city as rapidly as possible.”
His mission, basically, was to take the enemy’s heaviest punches and, in return, grind the insurgents up with the many weapons at his disposal. He had to do this with only half of his battalion. Newell’s outfit only came to Fallujah a few days before Operation Al Fajr. Their main area of operations in Iraq was a portion of Diyala province, north of Baghdad. Participation in Fallujah did not relieve Newell of responsibility for Diyala. This absurd situation, “a royal pain in the ass” in his recollection, was a symptom of America’s paucity of ground troops in Iraq. This, of course, was a by-product of the shock and awe techno-vangelism of those who had launched the war. Like it or not, though, Newell had to leave behind two of his rifle companies. At Fallujah, his attack force consisted of two main components—a tank company on loan from another unit and his own Alpha Company. In all, Newell’s task force had only about 450 soldiers, most of whom were not dismounted trigger pullers. Even Alpha, the battalion’s main infantry assault force, had only about fifty or sixty dismounts to perform the nasty business of clearing buildings and thus do the worst of the fighting. These lonely riflemen and machine gunners represented the sharp tip of a very long spear.
Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Page 46
