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

by Bing West

  At the strategic level, the Marines couldn’t control Ramadi by a strategy of attrition; only Iraqi government forces could reclaim Ramadi from the insurgents, and that, Kennedy believed, was a long-term proposition. There were more than thirty thousand young, disaffected Sunni males in the city. The police and National Guard had disappeared. The Marines had seen the police vehicles zipping around, driven by insurgents. Most police stations had been stripped of their equipment.

  To regain immediate control of Ramadi, the Americans would have to fight alone. As the flames of rebellion spread across the province, Kennedy was determined to put an end to the five-day uprising. On April 10, he moved to finish the fight, attacking into Sofia, three kilometers east of downtown where Echo Company had suffered serious losses. Working with the CIA and Special Forces, Kennedy had pinpointed ten upscale houses to be hit in a raid. In the pale light of dawn, Echo Company spread out and advanced on foot toward the houses.

  Sergeant Santiago’s sniper team was moving with Lt Valdez and the 1st Platoon across the open fields when a cow charged Corporal Chris Ferguson, who shot the unfortunate animal. Stanton and Santiago were laughing when rounds started snapping around them. They barged into the nearest building, an outhouse littered with piles of human feces around one small drainage hole. On the verge of vomiting, the two snipers tumbled back out, bullets zipping between them, and ran into the nearest house.

  Once inside, Santiago demanded that the fearful owner hand over the weapon every homeowner was allowed to keep. His own sniper rifle fired only one round at a time, but with the borrowed AK Santiago fired off a full magazine in the general direction of the nearest palm trees. The distinct snapping sound of the AK attracted return fire from half a dozen Marines in other houses. As bullets peppered the farmhouse, the farmer jumped in front of his children and yelled at Santiago to get out before he got them killed. After giving the children some candy, Santiago followed a hooting Stanton out the back door.

  Outside they rejoined Ferguson, who was firing at a man hiding behind a palm tree 150 meters away. Santiago told Ferguson and Stanton to bound forward fifty meters to the next berm while he provided covering fire. When they broke from cover, the Iraqi opened fire. Santiago sighted in—and his rifle jammed. The Iraqi missed, and in seconds an alarmed Stanton was lying behind the far berm.

  “You son of a bitch!” Stanton yelled. “You did that on purpose!”

  The three Marines then enveloped the lone Iraqi, who hadn’t budged, and let loose a barrage that mortally wounded the man and set the tree on fire.

  Farther to the west, Capt Royer was directing his platoons when his command group was taken under machine-gun fire from the south and the northeast. Caught by interlocking fires in a flat, open field, the Marines survived the first bursts by diving into a ditch. When Royer glanced up, a bullet hit his helmet, leaving him dazed but unharmed. Sergeant Kenneth Hassel dashed toward the nearest house, hoping to call mortars on the gun positions. Two streams of tracers seemed to converge on him, and he leaped back into the ditch, breaking his leg in two places. Wrapping Hassel’s leg in palm branches, the Marines dragged him along the ditch, as rounds bounced off the dirt inches above their heads.

  The ditch served as the local commode, and when the Marines slithered out from behind the protection of the large berm, their uniforms were black and they were gagging from the stink. They pulled Hassel across a canal in mud and water up to their waists and crawled into the courtyard of a farmhouse held by a squad from 2nd Platoon. Hassel refused morphine and kept his rifle, insisting he could fight.

  Around them were palm groves with clusters of two or three houses separated by small open fields and gardens. The Humvees were unable to cross the ditches, so the Marines were separated from their supporting fires. The insurgents, familiar with the neighborhood, were swarming in from all directions. There were Cobras overhead, but Royer didn’t want to call them in until he was sure where his Marines were, and most had gone to ground in different houses, fighting in squad-sized groups.

  The insurgents would dash forward until they were fifty or sixty meters away from a house, then apply aimed fire. They weren’t closing to finish the fight. Two snipers in Royer’s house, Lance Corporal Patrick Ashby and Corporal Samuel Topara, were on the roof, taking a steady toll of the insurgents who were darting through the palm groves in groups of four to six.

  When the firing began, Ashby had broken into a house and run to the roof. The family had rushed up after him, showing him religious pictures and a cross, fumbling with words to say that the insurgents would execute them as Christian traitors if he didn’t leave. So Ashby had run over to Royer’s house.

  Each time Ashby poked his head above the low wall on the roof, he heard snapping noises like the cracking of a whip. With Royer acting as spotter, he put a 203 round through the window of the nearest house, silencing fire from there. Then he resumed sighting in with his rifle, selecting an individual target, taking an aimed shot, ducking back down, wriggling along the roof, waiting a few minutes, and popping up to shoot again from a different place. Ashby noticed that many of his targets were dressed in black and were employing sound tactics. There had been talk about an Iraqi special forces unit in the area. Earlier that morning he had shot a man and recovered a German Mauser rifle with a telescopic scope. Whoever these insurgents were, they had had military training.

  Fifty meters southwest of Royer an Iraqi machine gun was firing, the gun set back inside a window and not affected by M16 rounds. The Marines fired an AT-4 rocket from inside their house—the reverberations shook the foundation—then rushed into the next house. From there they crawled forward, threw grenades into the next house, and stormed inside. They repeated this three times before destroying the machine gun. It took ninety minutes to move seventy meters and clear five houses in one small palm grove.

  A hundred meters to the south of Royer, the same sort of close-in fight was raging. Lance Corporal Sims and another sniper, Corporal Jose Ramirez, were on the roof, engaging small groups of insurgents who were lying down in the ditches about a hundred meters away. Whenever an Iraqi was hit, a woman would come out of a nearby house and drag him inside.

  Then the Iraqis started rushing forward, two and four at a time, not throwing grenades but trying to get close enough to aim in. An Iraqi would appear from behind a wall or on the top of a ditch, sight in, fire a burst, then duck down. Ramirez noticed that some Marines, seeing the Iraqis closing in, were firing wildly, a few not even bothering to aim, just sticking a rifle barrel over the wall and pulling the trigger.

  Trained as a sniper, Ramirez stayed low and sighted in wherever he had last seen an Iraqi shooter. Then he waited. Time and again a shooter reappeared at the same place—in the center of his sight picture. Despite his fear and his dry mouth, Ramirez was beginning to feel comfortable.

  He and Sims had a rhythm going. First one and then the other would fire an aimed burst, crawl to a different spot, and wait for another opening. Then Sims knelt up at the wrong moment, and a bullet hit him in the shoulder, penetrated his chest, and lodged in his back. Ramirez helped to carry him downstairs, where HM3 Sergio Guitterez tried to slow the internal bleeding.

  Corporal Jeffrey Andrade radioed to Royer. “We need a bird for Sims right now, goddammit, right now!”

  Listening to the reports of the close-in fighting, the ops center refused to allow a helicopter to land for a medevac for either Sims or Hassel, who were about a hundred meters apart. Colonel Connor, as in prior fights, came forward with the armored 113s. They couldn’t cross the irrigation canal, but they added heavy firepower. With Andrade screaming at everyone to help, four Marines carried Sims across the muddy ditch to the ambulance, where his pulse faded out. After fifteen minutes of CPR his pulse revived faintly. But the internal bleeding and the shock had taken too heavy a toll, and he eventually succumbed to his wounds.

  The four-hour fight that had swirled around Echo Company was like a thunderstorm that came without warning
and ended as suddenly as it began. The insurgents didn’t retreat gradually, leaving behind a rear guard; one moment they were there and the next they were gone, with children again out playing in the yards, cars driving by, taxis stopping, women hanging laundry, dogs barking, and cows and sheep being herded back into the fields. Corporal Stosh Modrow, a sniper, looked at the pastoral scene that minutes before had been a battlefield and shook his head in astonishment.

  Over the course of the fight, the four snipers attached to Echo Company from Battalion 2/7, all employing M-16s because the range was short and they wanted to fire bursts instead of single shots, had accounted for fifteen insurgents. In addition to the snipers, Echo Company had shot twenty or thirty others. Modrow knew that inside every house in sight were dead bodies, rolled in rugs or blankets, mourners waiting for the Marines to leave so they could bury the fallen. Iraqis attended to their dead immediately and with respect. A body left unattended offended their religious beliefs.

  _____

  While Echo was fighting, Mobile Assault Platoon 1 led by Lieutenant Dan Crawford set up on the main road. A few minutes later three Bradleys pulled up alongside Crawford’s Humvees and opened fire with their 25mm chain guns. Several hundred meters out in the fields, a dozen women and children cowered in a courtyard as bands of red tracers streamed by them. The children were clinging to the women, some of whom were holding their hands to their ears, as if blocking out the sound would stop the shooting.

  With no radio communication to the vehicles, Crawford popped a red star flare and the Bradleys stopped firing. Sgt Santiago led a fire team across the field and shooed the petrified women and children inside. Seeing Americans in the open, two men with AKs rushed out of a clump of palm trees and were cut down by a Mark 19 gunner. Santiago searched the house behind the dead men and flex-cuffed six men hiding in a back room. The fire team found a rifle, shotgun shells, two bayonets, four pairs of binoculars, four cell phones, a stun stick, and a videotape labeled in English, Killing in a Small Town. Crawford chewed out the embarrassed Bradley crews and positioned them on his flank. By then the fight had turned farther east and they saw no action for the rest of the day.

  _____

  Having heard Echo’s repeated demands for an urgent medevac, Kennedy had driven forward to determine why a helicopter couldn’t land. When he arrived, he saw that Capt Royer had the situation well in hand.

  Accompanied by Capt Weiler and Lt Dobb’s platoon in seven Humvees, Kennedy continued northeast a kilometer hoping to cut off the fleeing insurgents. As they drove forward, an occasional Iraqi would shoot a few rounds from a palm grove or pop out from behind a wall, fire, and disappear among the houses. Weiler thought that, unlike the combatants on April 6, this group was professional, with no part-timers pitching in.

  Kennedy headed north, walking with Weiler behind Dobb’s platoon, which had fanned out to search the houses alongside the road. The insurgents could pop up anywhere. Only a kilometer back, Sgt McKnight had seen three men in black dishdashas hiding in the shrubs, aiming in with AKs. The bullets barely missed the driver, and the Humvee skidded to a stop. The shooters fled, and McKnight led six Marines on line across the field in pursuit. The Iraqis threw their weapons away and broke into a full sprint. Weighted down with their armor and gear, the Marines fell far behind but plodded after them. About ten minutes later they came to a house in the middle of a field and closed on it by bounds, receiving no fire. Inside were three men, two in white dishdashas and one sweating in a tan jogging suit, muddy at the knees. They flex-cuffed the three and led them outside, where they saw an unarmed man running across the next field. They chased him for over a kilometer before giving up and returning to their Humvee with their three prisoners.

  With Weiler behind him, Dobb had moved up the street barely a hundred meters when an RPG rocket wobbled by him so slowly that it looked like someone had thrown it. Weiler guessed the shooter would try another shot and told SSgt Garcia to aim in at the next corner. When the rocketeer stepped out a second time, Garcia shot him in the chest. He dropped the RPG and stumbled away.

  Garcia ran to the rocket launcher, which was smoking and making a hissing sound. The rocket had misfired, sticking to the muzzle. Garcia gingerly placed the launcher in a ditch and looked around for the shooter. Following a blood trail, he entered a house and found a man wrapped in a blanket, pretending to be asleep, blood dripping from his chest. He was flex-cuffed and put in a highback Humvee holding seven other detainees. He later died of his wounds.

  Dobb deployed a squad on each side of the road to search the houses as they walked northeast toward the Euphrates, a kilometer away. There was a short firefight about every hundred meters, two or three insurgents letting loose a burst of AK fire, then running north, dodging among the houses along the road. The Marines found a few dead and several wounded; the 5.56mm bullets from the M16s left small holes in the torsos. Those still alive were put in the highback humvee and attended to by HM Contreras, who injected morphine into the four most grievously wounded. Several of the wounded gestured at Contreras to kill them.

  Accompanying the platoon was an army detachment of female soldiers, assigned to deal with Iraqi women in case any needed to be searched. With one brief fight after another breaking out, Weiler grew concerned they would be hit. “There’s some Bradleys down the road,” he told them. “Maybe it’s better if I call one forward, and you can ride buttoned up with them.”

  “No thank you, sir,” came the reply from the soldiers. “This is the shit!”

  Taking this as a compliment, Weiler told them to continue on with Dobb’s platoon. The rows of houses petered out near the river, giving way to grain fields occasionally washed by floods. Amid the waist-high wheat stalks and grass, Sergeant Joseph Lagdon flushed four insurgents, who leaped to their feet and fled. Lagdon shot down three and rushed forward, Weiler at his heels. Lying on his stomach, a dying Iraqi emptied his full thirty-round magazine into the dirt, sending Weiler diving over a pile of rocks.

  Picking himself up, Weiler saw they had come to the bank of the Euphrates. One isolated house stood on the bank. Inside the Marines found boxes of medical supplies, many of them labeled UNICEF. The owner of the house said he was a nurse, and the occupants, three men and seven women, said they hadn’t seen any insurgents. One had a gunshot wound in his arm, the result, he said, of a stray bullet.

  It was after four in the afternoon. They had reached the river, the firing had stopped, and to their south Echo’s fight was over. Weiler had seventeen detainees and eight dead bodies. Weiler marveled at how quickly the citizens of Ramadi swept clean the battlefields. Fighters, passersby, and neighborhood women alike repeatedly risked their lives in the midst of battle to carry off the dead. Spent brass was plucked from the dirt, round by round; Weiler figured there must be a market for it somewhere. When the firing stopped, shattered vehicles were scavenged and pushed off into the fields, while the blood was washed from the road.

  To Weiler it seemed odd. Every empty lot overflowed with heaps of garbage; human feces filled the ditches; green plastic grocery bags flapped from trees across the landscape. The scattered detritus in most neighborhoods reflected communal neglect. Yet the people instinctively tidied up after the insurgents as if they were their own rather than intimidating outsiders.

  Knowing the bodies would be properly attended, Weiler left them by the side of the road and sent the detainees back to brigade headquarters. With the Marines were three local interpreters, two of whom never suggested that anybody was an insurgent. Weiler believed they assured their neighbors they weren’t really helping the Americans. They wanted to keep their jobs and stay alive—if they were lucky. When the third translator thought someone was an insurgent, he would whisper to a Marine when they were alone.

  April 10 was the first time Weiler had seen the three translators offer a joint opinion. “Many, many die,” they said, “they are gone. They don’t want to fight you anymore.”

  _____

  The Iraqis
who fought in the five-day battle for Ramadi were a mixture of committed insurgents, semibelievers, or “Minutemen,” and the emotional tagalongs who grabbed a weapon, ran alongside the Marines from the safe distance of a block, then exuberantly trotted home. Not all fired a weapon; most rushed around, yelling to one another, brandishing weapons, returning to their homes sweaty and excited, later in coffeehouses and on street corners feverishly exchanging stories of near-misses with death.

  However ill trained and foolish many of them were, there were thousands on that battlefield, and history is replete with instances of armed rebellions that swelled like a tidal wave and swept all before it, as happened in Tehran in 1978 and in Baghdad in 1959. The Marines’ successful battle for Ramadi prevented a serious setback in public perception. Had Kennedy’s battalion backed off or been forced into negotiations, Ramadi—the twin sister of Fallujah—would have whirled out of control.

  The fight ended on the evening of April 10. Battalion 2/4 had suffered sixteen killed and more than one hundred wounded. After the five-day battle, the local hospitals were filled and the graveyards were extended. The insurgents’ spirit had been broken in the Sofia District that day, when they had had to leave behind their dead and the swift-moving Marines had collected the bodies, dumped them by the roadside, and rolled on, looking for the next fight. The insurgents could draw comfort from the refusal of the Iraqi police and National Guard to join in. But Al Jazeera hadn’t been on scene, and no Iraqis had hastened forth from Baghdad to threaten the dissolution of the new republic if the Americans continued to attack.