No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

by Bing West

  “They understood us better,” Sheikh Khamis said. “They didn’t provoke the people like they are doing now. Using more force will not solve the problems here.”

  The commander of Drinkwine’s regiment disagreed with the sheikh.

  “Because there was an economy of force early on [during the summer of 2003], former regime loyalists, senior Baathists, and some extremists have created a safe haven,” Col Smith said. “What we’re seeing is a reaction to our increased activities.”

  The reaction quickly turned deadly. On November 2 two antiaircraft missiles were fired at a CH-47 Chinook helicopter flying over a cornfield outside Fallujah. In the ensuing crash fifteen Americans died and twenty were wounded. It was the heaviest death toll in a single action since the invasion of Iraq. The news touched off celebrations inside the city, where hatred laced the conversations, children refused candy, and American engineers dared not venture to repair clogged sewer mains and decrepit electric power generators.

  The initial reaction from the JTF in Baghdad was to order the 82nd to surround Fallujah and root out the insurgents and their arms caches, block by block. Smith and Drinkwine opposed the planned four-battalion operation, called Dodge City. They argued—in phrases the Marines would echo five months later—that such an attack would drive the youths of the city onto the side of the rebels.

  “This is not the way to go,” Drinkwine said. “If we overreact, we give legitimacy to what are now gangs.”

  Gen Abizaid, who flew in for an assessment, agreed. Instead of seizing the city block by block, he met with the sheikhs, demanding that they show leadership and stop the violence. There were as many attacks on the outskirts of Fallujah, where the sheikhs had power, as inside the city, where the clerics dominated. Under the current circumstances, he told them in Arabic, there can be no rebuilding, no contracts, no jobs, no progress toward a better future.

  In a separate meeting with the sheikhs Major General Charles H. Swannack, commander of the 82nd, was equally forceful. “I am not going to tolerate these attacks anymore,” he said. “I know the sheikhs have the ability to control their tribes.”

  The sheikhs protested that the 82nd didn’t appreciate the limits of their power. Threatening them would do no good. Improvement projects made no difference to the men with the guns. In the eyes of the sheikhs, power had shifted from them to the young clerics in Fallujah preaching that America was waging war against Islam and was bringing in Jews to rule Iraq. That message had inflamed the youth of the city, making it impossible for other clerics to retain a following if they preached moderation. In the mosques, the sermons called for the Americans to be driven out.

  “It’s a kind of religious belief that they should not accept occupation,” said Saadi Muhammad, a schoolteacher in Fallujah.

  A few days after the Chinook helicopter was shot down, an American soldier was killed near the city by an IED. In response, aircraft dropped thousand-pound bombs on suspected ambush sites and houses with arms caches. When mortar rounds were fired at 82nd positions, counterbattery radars traced the arc of the rounds to their point of origin, and 155mm howitzers fired in response. The fighting escalated through the fall.

  “I expect to get attacked every day—every single day,” Drinkwine said. “That may come in the form of a mortar attack, a drive-by shooting at the mayor’s office, a vehicle ambush, or a combination of all three.”

  MajGen Swannack approved a get-tough approach, called Operation Iron Hammer, a series of sweeps for weapons caches and raids to seize insurgent leaders. “This is war,” he said. “I am going to use a sledgehammer to crush a walnut.”

  It was a war the 82nd was fighting alone. Drinkwine’s nine-hundred-man battalion was fighting a guerrilla war in a city containing 43,000 potential insurgents. With Sheikh Jamal in jail, the imam who filled the void with the most inflammatory sermons was Abdullah Al Janabi, a saturnine, pinched-faced man in his early fifties. Ra’ad warned Drinkwine that Janabi was a fundamentalist who had fled arrest under Saddam; he was a nervous man, difficult to approach. When Drinkwine asked him to tone things down, Janabi launched into a diatribe about infidels, Shiites, and apostates, meaning anyone who cooperated with the Americans. He seemed to be daring Drinkwine to arrest him and provoke a riot.

  Drinkwine drove back to his base by the artificial lake east of the city and wrote Janabi a letter, warning that he would be arrested if he continued with seditious sermons. Knowing his mosque near the Government Center was probably bugged and his apprehension imminent, Janabi temporarily left the city.

  The paratroopers didn’t know who supported them in the city. During the day they patrolled the outer highways and drove through town in shows of force, searching vehicles at random. At night they conducted raids. It was their favorite tactic: they would drive with night-vision goggles, roar down a street in the pitch black with the lights out, scale a courtyard wall, then rush through the front door and up the steps into the sleeping quarters; sometimes a masked informer would point someone out or shake his head no.

  Specialist Dudin said that the people called them the bou-bous. “In the States we say watch out for the boogeyman,” Dudin said. “In Iraq a mother will say to her kids, ‘Stop doing that, or the bou-bou monster will get you.’ We were the bou-bous.”

  In early November, the raid that was most satisfying to the paratroopers occurred when they entered a house and found nothing incriminating. The occupants, however, pointed to a house across the street. Rushing over, the soldiers found a man crouched over a computer monitor in his downstairs study. Open on the screen was a sketch of a sophisticated IED. They arrested Brigadier General Al Mahadaai, Ph.D., aka the Rocket Man, the top trainer and supplier of the IED teams and the man believed responsible for Sgt Johnson’s death.

  The city elders protested vehemently against the increased use of force, the raids, and the bursts of gunfire whenever an IED exploded, arguing that it was driving the people to the side of the insurgents. MajGen Swannack did release several women, who were being held because they were relatives of insurgents. But that was one of his few concessions. The get-tough policy seemed to be showing results. By mid-November attacks by explosive devices had decreased from two to one per day.

  A month later the relentless American campaign to hunt down the top Baathists reached its zenith when television networks broadcast the pictures of a disheveled Saddam Hussein with his mouth open, meekly submitting to a medical exam by his American captors. To many Iraqis, Saddam had been the devil who could not be killed. His capture removed the fear that he would again seize power and wreak revenge on his enemies, as he had after the Gulf War in 1991.

  In Fallujah, however, the hope for a dwindling in the insurgent spirit was quickly extinguished. While Baghdad celebrated Saddam’s capture, Fallujah rioted. Supporters of the old regime stormed the Government Center, firing AKs in the air and shouting that the fight against the American occupiers would continue. A company of paratroopers in Bradleys and Humvees responded, RPG rockets bounced off several of the vehicles, and one Iraqi was killed.

  A few weeks later a visitor to an elementary school in the city asked about American soldiers. “We must resist them!” the children shouted. “We must force them to leave, with bombs, with explosives! I am ready to fight now!”

  Inside the insurgent movement the fundamentalist clerics in the city were competing with the former regime elements who had previously dominated them. Saddam’s ignominious capture had shifted the balance of power toward the jihadists without weakening the intensity of the insurgency.

  As December drew to a close, the minimum force Drinkwine would send into Fallujah was a platoon mounted in six vehicles, and they could not stay in any one place for more than half an hour before the insurgents would sneak up and fire at them. Iraqi National Guardsmen wouldn’t be available until midwinter. In the meantime, if the police accompanied the paratroopers, they could warn them about suspicious characters. The police wouldn’t have to fight; the paratroopers
would take it from there.

  The police refused to help.

  “We tell them, no, we can’t do that,” a police captain said. “The mujahedeen would say we are collaborators. You work with the Americans, you die.”

  4

  ____

  A BACKWATER PROBLEM

  AS THE SEASON OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS began, the Democratic Party increased its criticisms of Bush’s Iraqi policies. Since the president had declared major hostilities at an end, 344 Americans had died in Iraq. With the presidential election ten months away, two Democratic candidates—retired general Wesley Clark and Massachusetts senator John Kerry—were emphasizing their military records to give weight to their criticisms, while a third, former governor Howard Dean, was running on an antiwar platform.

  The capture of Saddam in mid-December gave the president a temporary bump up to a 60 percent approval rating for his handling of Iraq, but in January 2004 that rating settled back to 50 percent, not a reassuring number for someone facing reelection.

  After the war, when the looting began, essential services failed, and attacks upon Americans grew, the tone of the press reports changed from congratulatory to discontented. The bonds, however, between the journalists in the field and the soldiers remained a constant. IED explosions, like shipwrecks, made news, and the sympathy that the journalists harbored for the American soldiers sharpened the edge to stories describing American sacrifices for Iraqis who did not appear to be grateful or to be fighting for their own liberty. Conversely, the mainstream American press expressed no sympathy for the insurgents’ methods or goals, not wanting to see Iraq fall apart and become a breeding ground for terrorists. With the stakes too high for failure, the press focused on how long the fighting would go on and when Iraqi forces would begin to replace Americans.

  At the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld was not satisfied with the pace of the Iraqi training or with the clarity of the security assessments. The toughest area was Anbar Province, west of Baghdad and home of Fallujah and other hard Sunni cities. The Euphrates River sliced at a northwest angle across Anbar Province into Syria, 200 miles to the west. Most of Anbar’s tribal inhabitants lived in a string of nine cities along the river. Anbar, with two million restive Sunnis and no wealth or political influence, received little attention from the CPA or Iraqi civilian officials in Baghdad. Anbar was Indian Country, best handled by American military.

  Despite the obvious insurgency in Anbar, at the beginning of the year General Sanchez was offering an upbeat assessment. “We’ve made significant progress in Anbar Province. Iraqis have gotten tired of the violence and are cooperating,” he said. “They want to get on with living their lives.”

  Senior officials at the Pentagon weren’t so sure about such cooperation, and Wolfowitz was tired of haggling at long distance over minuscule budget matters. A deputy secretary of defense and a lieutenant general on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not have to send cables to the CPA asking for money to buy trucks or machine guns for the National Guard, as happened on more than one occasion.

  Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz decided to conduct an outside review under CentCom’s auspices. In mid-January Major General Karl Eikenberry, an army officer with a reputation for intellectual rigor, arrived in Baghdad with an assessment team. He and his team listened to briefings by the CPA and JTF staffs working in the shambles of the tasteless palace inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone. Each day a thousand Americans left their tiny air-conditioned trailers, lined up for breakfast cafeteria-style, then drifted off to their plywood cubicles to spend a twelve-hour day in front of computer screens. Most never ventured out of the sixty-acre compound, spending tours of three to six months as secure and as isolated as they would have been in any prison in the United States.

  The assessment team members visited eighteen American battalions. The battalion commanders were not satisfied with the pace or direction of the training of Iraqi security forces. With the exception of the British down south in Basra, all were disturbed by the fact that the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces.

  At the same time, the CPA was structuring an army that was intended to play a very small role inside Iraq’s borders. Given the military’s depredations during the Saddam era, an army was not to be trusted. The CPA strategy envisioned a peacetime state—starting at an indefinite time two to five years in the future—when the Iraqi police would provide internal stability. It was up to the JTF to bring Iraq to that state of relative normalcy, after which the American forces would pull back to cantonments and the Iraqi security forces would take over.

  The Iraqi Army would be based to the north and east, facing mainly toward the Iranian border. Ambassador Bremer had prepared for Congress a budget that allocated $2 billion for the new Iraqi Army to protect the external borders and $75 million for the National Guard to protect the police inside the borders. Per man, the cost was $50,000 for an Iraqi Army soldier for border defense and $3,400 for a National Guard soldier for defeating the insurgents.

  This division of labor and resources did not make sense to planners in the Pentagon. “We had the wrong design for that army,” Secretary Wolfowitz said.

  The CentCom planners had told the study members that “it is not our desire to use the Iraqi Army internally.” The Eikenberry study disagreed, concluding that “we don’t have the luxury of an Iraqi Army not involved in defeating the insurgency.” The key to the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq lay “in building up the Iraqis,” not in pursuing offensive operations.

  The study recommended shifting from the CPA to CentCom control over the budgets and policies of the Iraqi Army and police. Training of the army had already migrated to CentCom, and it made sense to consolidate the various security functions under one manager. The Eikenberry study advocated unity of command, collocating budgetary authority, held by the CPA, with operational responsibility, held by CentCom. After hearing a spirited rejoinder from the CPA about disruptions to existing programs, Rumsfeld worked out an agreement whereby control over the Iraqi Army passed to CentCom, while the CPA retained control over the police.

  In Fallujah and elsewhere Iraqi police with scant training and old, thuggish habits struggled on. The CPA wanted to bring in European advisers, as had been done in Bosnia, but few volunteered, and none for Fallujah. The 82nd rated all forty-nine police stations in its area of operations as noneffective. The CPA had provided 92 of the 318 police vehicles requested by the 82nd, 274 of the 1,445 radios, plus sixty pistols and a three-week training course for a thousand officers.

  Month after month Gen Swannack asked the CPA for the equipment. Swannack believed his requests were hampered by “bureaucrats” who remained in Iraq only for a few months, leaving before they had made good on their promises. “My comments fell on deaf ears,” he said.

  The 82nd complained that the CPA retained tight control from Baghdad but failed to deliver. While illustrating the lack of communication between the CPA and the JTF, the charge did not do justice to the thicket of regulations surrounding the CPA. Congress had tied money for Iraqi forces to a labyrinth of peacetime restrictions. Some members of Congress urged the CPA to cut through the bottlenecks, while others blamed Bremer for hasty decisions that seemed to result in waste. Many in the CPA pointed to the layers of congressional restrictions placed upon purchases, slowing expenditures to a dribble.

  “Every major project had to go to Washington for a budget review, then over to Congress for authorization. Any change over two percent among dozens of programs had to go back to congressional committees for approval,” Lieutenant General Jeffrey Oster, the CPA chief of staff, said. “The congressional process for releasing money was a maze.”

  Rather than have local seamstresses sew uniforms for the Iraqis, competitive bids had to be taken on the American market, causing delays of months. Vehicles purchased for the Iraqi police had to be advertised and competed for in the United States, when a five-hour drive over the border into Jordan yielded trucks
at a fraction of the cost (an option several battalion commanders quietly chose).

  Inside the administration, friction and backbiting arose about the causes of the slow expenditure of funds. The deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, directly blamed the CPA for not spending the authorized money. “We have little complaint about congressional restrictions on [Iraqi] spending,” he told a congressional committee. “CPA moved more gingerly than they should have.”

  Bremer was damned if he rapidly spent the money and damned if he didn’t.

  _____

  At the tip of the spear in the most dangerous city in Iraq, LtCol Drinkwine didn’t care about the high-level issues of assigning blame or about billion-dollar budgets. His concerns were the lack of equipment for the police, the daily attacks on his troops, and sorting out which city leaders were secretly supporting the insurgents.

  Drinkwine began 2004 by coordinating with the special operations forces to search the souk next to the Brooklyn Bridge at the western end of the city, an area the police refused to patrol. The souk consisted of hundreds of one-story boutique shops jammed side by side in a maze of twisting alleyways in the oldest section of the city, called the Jolan District. The insurgents boasted that the Jolan was invulnerable; the tangle of streets provided them with hundreds of back alleys through which to escape and circle back to swarm over any invading force of Americans.

  The Special Operations Command came to Drinkwine with an unorthodox solution that he supported enthusiastically. On the morning of January 2 the souk was jammed with people and cars, the smoke from faulty exhaust pipes obscuring the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few hundred meters down the street to the west. Drinkwine had two companies poised for a quick raid. Two Delta soldiers were in the souk marking the target shops. None of the hundreds of Iraqi men wandering down the cluttered side streets challenged the crazed man in a filthy dishdasha who hobbled from shop to shop, peering at the weapons for sale and mumbling to himself.