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

by Bing West

  Despite these setbacks Drinkwine saw some signs of hope. Due to the intelligence task forces, he was having success with raids. LtCol Suleiman had emerged as a determined leader, unafraid of his fellow Baathists. In the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, mobsters posing as police had gunned down seven other criminals; a revolted citizenry then rose up and took back their city. Drinkwine was hoping the sheikhs would support Suleiman as their modern-day Eliot Ness.

  In late February the Fallujah Provisional Authority Commission met to appoint a new mayor, a man who had served in that post under the Saddam regime. The sheikhs then joined the new mayor in berating the Americans for arresting men suspected of participating in the massacre. Suleiman, some murmured, had violated Islamic law by searching the dead martyrs at the hospital.

  Drinkwine’s battalion was nearing the end of its seven-month deployment. With the city elders showing no backbone, Drinkwine revised his expectations about the future as he prepared to turn the city over to the Marines, who would replace his paratroopers. “None of this [armed resistance] was here when we got here,” he told a reporter in March. “And six months from now, when the Marines leave, they will have created much more. They will have captured and killed more of the enemy. But there will still be more out there that will pick up a gun and attack.”

  _____

  Handing Fallujah off to the Marines was not like handing the baton from one runner to the next. Each division brought its own style and ways of doing things. A year earlier the 1st Marine Division had feinted and slashed through six Iraqi divisions and, ignoring orders to slow down, had seized the eastern half of Baghdad weeks ahead of plan. The Marines had then spent several months restoring municipal services in a dozen relatively peaceful Shiite cities before returning to the States.

  In March that same Marine team was back in Iraq. Well seasoned after leading the 66,000 Marines from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003, Lieutenant General James T. Conway commanded the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, comprised of an air wing, a logistics support group, and an infantry division. Under Conway the 1st Marine Division was commanded by MajGen Mattis, who had a reputation for boldness and who constantly visited the frontlines to sense the rhythm of the battlefield. Like the 82nd, the 1st Marine Division would be spread across the sixteen thousand square kilometers of Anbar Province.

  Back at Camp Pendleton, Conway and Mattis had considered two courses of action for their return to Iraq. The first emphasized offensive operations—sweeps and raids. That approach could be successful—there was no lack of targets—and it would provide rewarding feedback to the troops. Over 50 percent of the eighteen thousand Marines in the division were veterans of the march up to Baghdad—they could handle combat. But there were hundreds of thousands of potential recruits for the insurgents in Anbar Province. Americans by themselves couldn’t win an insurgency.

  The second course of action, which they chose, emphasized showing respect for the population and training Iraqi soldiers. Retired Marines from the Combined Action Platoon (CAP) program in Vietnam were invited to Pendleton to share lessons learned about how to live with indigenous soldiers. In 113 Vietnamese villages individual Marine squads had lived for a year with the farmers, training them to fight as local militias. The CAPs had been singularly successful, liked both by the villagers and by the American squads.

  Mattis invited Arab experts to address his commanders, while the troops studied Arabic phrases and learned how to avoid giving offense. The Marine Corps Small Wars Manual, which describes how to quell an insurrection, was required reading. Legendary figures such as Chesty Puller and Smedley Butler, who had earned their reputations as leaders of local troops in remote barrios, were held up as examples. Frisbees, soccer balls, and teddy bears were packed in crates alongside combat gear.

  Journalists had passed along stories of rough treatment by American soldiers stationed in Ramadi and Fallujah—doors smashed in, cars banged aside by Bradleys, an us-versus-them attitude.

  “The enemy will try to manipulate you into hating all Iraqis,” Mattis wrote to his troops. “Do not allow the enemy that victory. With strong discipline, solid faith, unwavering alertness, and undiminished chivalry to the innocent, we will carry out this mission. Remember, I have added ‘First, Do No Harm’ to our passwords of ‘No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.’ ”

  The Marines would knock on doors, Mattis said, not kick the door down and put a boot on a man’s neck. There would be no bulldozing of houses or arrests of the relatives of insurgents. If shot at, no fusillade would be loosed in response. Mattis emphasized marksmanship—one shot, one kill. The hope was that restraint in attitude and firepower would lead to more toleration of U.S. troops and less toleration of the armed resistance. Arab newspaper accounts of the new training circulated in Anbar Province. Insurgent leaflets nicknamed the new troops awat, a sugary, soft cake that crumbles easily.

  In the States, press articles suggested that the Marines were implicitly criticizing army tactics, a charge both Conway and Mattis denied. “We are learning from what the army has done,” Conway said. “We will achieve the level of fire superiority necessary to take care of each situation. But we need to be discerning in our fires to make sure we don’t create enemies in the process.”

  Despite the efforts to deny it, Army and Marines did have different approaches. The Marines operated on lean budgets with less equipment, emphasizing marksmanship and aggressive small-unit leadership. Because they constantly deployed from ships onto foreign shores, they instinctively sought out the local leaders to work out the ground rules. They intended to interact as amicably with the Sunnis as they had with the Shiites.

  Every new unit thinks it can do a better job than the one before. Many of the departing paratroopers believed the Marines were too optimistic, while many of the Marines believed the paratroopers had been too quick to shoot. The Sunnis weren’t the Shiites, however, and Fallujah wasn’t Karbala, where a year earlier the Shiite city council had tried to elect the Marine battalion commander as mayor. The 82nd hadn’t found the Sunnis willing to bond. The paratroopers had had a grueling tour, greeted by scowls, explosive devices, and Fallujans who complained of random return fire when an American was fired upon, but remained silent when insurgents killed their fellow Iraqis.

  The commander of the 82nd held a press conference as the division’s tour came to an end. Unlike Drinkwine’s soldiers, he believed the war against the insurgents was largely won. The Marines, in his judgment, would face only low-level opposition.

  “I’m discounting a very serious insurgency ongoing here [in Anbar Province] right now,” MajGen Charles Swannack told reporters, “because of these factors—successfully taking away the leaders of the insurgency, the funding and the facilitation of the insurgency. Now it’s more low-level individuals who still have a gripe against coalition forces that attack us.”

  The CPA senior diplomat in Anbar, Keith Mines, was also leaving in March. In contrast to the general, his final report was stinging.

  “Development of the security forces is a failure difficult to comprehend,” he wrote. “Ten months into the operation there is not a single properly trained and equipped Iraqi security officer in the entire Al Anbar province. There are over 10,000 police and civil defense officers on the rolls, but none have received anything more than ad hoc training and rudimentary equipment.”

  In his view, the province was too vast to be controlled by one division, either the 82nd or the Marines. Worse, Mines wrote, not a single Iraqi police officer in Anbar had had more than three weeks of training, and the National Guard units were completely ineffective. Security depended entirely on the American soldiers; yet their presence inflamed Sunni nationalism.

  After seven months in the city, LtCol Drinkwine too was reserved. His battalion had suffered ninety-four killed and wounded in seven months. He saw in the Valentine’s Day Massacre a “marriage of convenience” between the clever Baathist leadership and the religious extremists. The people listened more
to the imams than to the sheikhs, and his list of radical clerics was growing. At the top he placed Janabi and three others, but he had not apprehended a single one of them. The insurgents had begun to kill their fellow townspeople, who weren’t fighting back.

  The Marines thought they could work with the Iraqi soldiers, but Drinkwine had found only one leader with gumption—Suleiman—and he stayed in his compound on the peninsula. Drinkwine doubted that the Marines could stop the IEDs and random gunfights. They were the work of the footsoldiers in the insurgency, and Fallujah could produce thousands of them.

  “I think the Marines will enjoy working in Fallujah,” he said. “But they’ll be bloodied.”

  PART II

  ____

  SIEGE

  ____

  March to May 2004

  6

  ____

  “THEY CAN’T DO THAT TO AMERICANS.”

  THE 82ND WAS TURNING ANBAR PROVINCE over to the Marines in the last week in March 2004. Prior to that the commanders spent several days together. The 2nd Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment, or Battalion 2/1, was assigned to Fallujah. The commander, Lieutenant Colonel Gregg Olson, was a tall, bespectacled man known, like Drinkwine, for being thoughtful and analytical.

  On March 18, Drinkwine and Olson drove to the Government Center to meet with the city elders. While the officers palavered with the sheikhs, paratroopers and Marines kept guard on the roof. At midday Army First Sergeant Roger Parker sent up fresh troops to change the watch.

  In the midst of the turnover, no one heard the faint plunk! of a mortar round leaving the tube. The shell hit dead center on the roof, spraying the backs and legs of dozens of paratroopers and Marines. It was the first round fired from a makeshift location—a one-in-a-thousand shot.

  Captain Doug Zembiec, commanding Echo Company of Battalion 2/1, was kneeling on the roof when he heard a sharp crack! and turned to see a cloud of black smoke and dust, with soldiers and Marines screaming. In the courtyard 1/Sgt Parker heard the yelling: “We got wounded up here!”

  Parker radioed for the four-vehicle evacuation team on the edge of town to come forward. Marines and soldiers were running up the stairs. Four more shells exploded harmlessly inside the perimeter. Two rocket-propelled grenades sailed over the compound, killing two Iraqi civilians standing on a side street. Small-arms fire broke out and quickly escalated. Everybody seemed to be shooting wildly.

  “Cease fire!” Zembiec screamed. “Cease fire! I don’t want to hear one goddamn round unless you have eyes on target!”

  The shooting stopped as abruptly as it had started, and everyone turned to helping the wounded down the stairs. Parker was supervising the triage, making sure the most serious wounds were treated first. He saw Private First Class Dimitry Todeleski carry down one paratrooper, then go back for another. When he turned to climb up the stairs a third time, his legs buckled, and he sat down heavily.

  “I’m tired, First Sergeant,” Todeleski said. “I feel wore out.”

  Parker looked at the blood seeping into the cement around the PFC.

  “You’re not tired, Todeleski,” Parker said. “Stay there and let the medics patch you up. You’ve done enough for the day.”

  One shell had peppered eighteen paratroopers and seventeen Marines. No one was killed, but four soldiers required evacuation to the States. One hundred and eleven pieces of shrapnel were pulled out of one soldier. As the paratroopers withdrew, the Marines formed an honor guard, a gesture Drinkwine’s paratroopers appreciated.

  “That was a wild first day,” Zembiec said, “I mean, what kind of a town tries to kill the town council?”

  On March 24, the 82nd formally handed over authority to the MEF; the ceremony outside Fallujah was briefly interrupted as helicopters evacuated two Marines wounded near the city. That night a special operations squad returning from a mission was attacked on Highway 10 in eastern Fallujah, with two wounded. The next day a convoy was ambushed at the same place and a Marine was killed, bringing to twenty-six the number of attacks in March in Fallujah.

  That ended Conway’s patience. “I ordered my division commander to take action,” he said. “I wanted the route through the city made safe for military traffic.”

  Two rifle companies from Battalion 2/1 got the job. Zembiec, a bundle of energy who had been a wrestler at the Naval Academy, led Echo Company. On his right flank Captain Kyle Stoddard, whose shaved head and cut physique made him look like Mr. Clean, led Fox Company. With six Humvees with .50 caliber machine guns and Mark 19s that fired streams of small 40mm grenades, Stoddard and Zembiec led their Marines north from Highway 10 into East Manhattan where many former army officers lived. The Marines moved cautiously through the upscale neighborhood—straight paved roads lined with walled courtyards holding imposing cement houses and scraggly palm trees. Not accustomed to seeing Americans on foot, Iraqis left their houses to gawk. At each burst of firing, they fluttered away, then flocked forward again, curiosity overcoming common sense.

  Confined to the long narrow streets, the Marines passed boys on bikes, men standing on street corners with cell phones in their hands, taxis scurrying by, and black kites flying over distant intersections. The people began slamming shut the gates to their compounds and retreating indoors. The Marines started taking intermittent fire, one or two men stepping into the street a few hundred meters away, shooting from the hip and quickly dodging behind cover. The insurgents were poor shots, firing wildly and hoping to get lucky.

  Seeing a man crouched on a roof talking on a cell phone, a Marine sniper shot him. A crowd quickly gathered, screaming that the man had meant no harm. The man’s brother sat on a curbside, sobbing. Iraqis grabbed the Marines by their sleeves, gesturing they should leave as a crowd gathered to carry the body to a mosque. The Marines left, and a few blocks farther on insurgents fired a volley of RPGs at them. An Iraqi cameraman poked his head around the corner to see the reaction of the Marines. He died when a bullet struck him in the head.

  All day the company probed the northeastern sector, encountering sporadic opposition, a burst of fire here, an RPG rocket there, then a lull of fifteen minutes, then another burst of fire. In midafternoon a dozen bullets ricocheted off the wall next to Stoddard. When he looked around, he had no idea where his attacker was.

  The insurgents ran in and out of courtyards, hoping to get off a shot before they were seen. A car would screech across the street several blocks away, men leaning out the windows and firing wildly. The Marines controlled only the street they stood on, while on the next street a gang lurked in ambush.

  At dusk the mortar rounds started dropping and the firing increased. It was dark when Zembiec and Stoddard withdrew their two companies, having lost one Marine. They hoped the residents would say to the insurgents, We don’t want trouble—start a fight somewhere else.

  Initial reports, however, suggested the opposite. Radio intercepts indicated several wounded fighters were taken to the hospital. Iraqi medical workers warned Western journalists to stay away from the hospitals because the grieving families were armed and seeking revenge. The response to the sweep was not resentment of the insurgents. Instead, it was defiance of the Americans.

  _____

  For the next few days, to avoid inflaming the situation, the Marines concentrated on patrolling the edges of the city, while opening negotiations with LtCol Suleiman to conduct joint operations. But on March 31, less than a week later, the four American contractors from Blackwater Security drove down Highway 10 and were ambushed in the heart of the town. Watching TV in a mess hall outside Fallujah, Capt Zembiec said, “They can’t do that to Americans!”

  Over 2,500 years ago in The Iliad, Homer laid down the basic rule of war. Achilles knew that it was wrong to drag behind his chariot the body of his arch-enemy Hector. Mutilation would have signaled that the vanquished deserved no dignity and that the victor was bound by no rules. To dismember Hector would have been to treat all Trojans as animals, without rights, and someday another tribe wou
ld treat Greeks in that manner. Unless soldiers abided by rules, Homer told us, civilization could not progress.

  But no matter what the moral proscription was, murderous mobs would commit outrages, as witness the lynchings in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. LtGen Conway regretted the deaths of the four errant American contractors. The MEF had the photos, names, and addresses of the perpetrators and was determined to arrest or kill them. The Marines, though, planned nothing dramatic or sudden. In Fallujah they had seven months to gain control of two miles of homes, apartment buildings, storefronts, boulevards, and alleys. After a week of skirmishes, the division had adjusted its expectations, taking into account the depth of the xenophobia, the influence of the extremist clerics, and the smoldering resentments of American firepower.

  “The best we can hope for in Fallujah is not to lose. Not to have an emotional jihad uprising because of something we do or to let it foster as an insurgent base,” said Col Dunford, the division’s chief of staff. “Americans will never be welcome there.”

  The division wanted to reduce the insurgency to a tolerable level of violence, install capable Iraqi security forces, and restore Fallujah to its rightful place as an obscure backwater far from the headlines. After that, the local police and soldiers could fight it out with the extremists for the next decade.

  Washington, however, thought that was the wrong approach. The mutilation was no longer a battlefield crime but a symbol of America’s humiliation and a challenge to the American occupation.