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

by Bing West

  Challenging the Americans to a stand-up fight for control of the provincial capital had been a disaster.

  13

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  EASTER WITH THE DARK SIDE

  ON APRIL 11, 2004, THE CITY of Ramadi returned to its normal restive self. The marketplace was packed with sullen men. Bradleys controlled the highways, and Battalion 2/4 resumed its daily patrols inside the city. By force of arms, the Americans had imposed an uneasy quiet.

  Not so in the sister city of Fallujah. On the third day of the “cease-fire,” the insurgents were probing the Marine lines and firing whenever they saw an opportunity. On the Coalition side, negotiating channels were proliferating. The MEF was working with Ambassador Richard H. Jones, a seasoned diplomat reporting directly to Bremer. Another ambassador from the CPA, Ronald L. Schlicher was conducting separate talks. Catherine Dale, political adviser to the JTF, was exploring options for LtGen Sanchez. Even the translators for the American generals were palavering with Iraqis claiming to know one insurgent gang or another. Everyone, it seemed, was negotiating with someone else.

  Most bizarre of all, that morning several trucks loaded with food and young Iraqis pulled up to the cloverleaf east of Fallujah. The excited men—Shiite militia from Sadr’s Mahdi Army and Sunnis recruited from mosques in Baghdad—claimed that an American lieutenant colonel had authorized them to bring aid to their suffering brothers there. A flabbergasted Col Toolan called the lieutenant colonel in Baghdad. The colonel, working at CPA headquarters, explained that he had sent the men to help. Armed Marines turned the trucks around before the men could join the insurgents. Toolan told the colonel to send no more such help.

  On the Iraqi side, the alliances swirling among a dozen different teams of negotiators were equally confusing. Hassani emerged as a favorite of the Marines, but it wasn’t clear how much influence he—or any other negotiator—had with the insurgents, who were operating through layers of middlemen.

  On the insurgent side, Janabi was back in town. He had fled in November, tipped off that Drinkwine was about to raid his mosque. When some sheikhs plotted revenge for the Valentine’s Day Massacre, he quickly disappeared again. On his first trip into Fallujah on April 10, Hassani met with Janabi’s representative, but the conversation went nowhere. The next day, an IGC negotiator from an upper-class, old-school Sunni clan assured Major Dave Bellon, the intelligence officer for Regimental Combat Team 1, that he knew how to deal with his brother Sunnis. The Iraqi drove into the city for his first meeting, where he was knocked down, spat upon, kicked in the ass, and thrown back into his car. Before he sped off to Baghdad, he complained to Bellon about the “wild element” in town. Bellon, who had reports that the insurgents were mocking the negotiators behind their backs, told him he was lucky to escape with his life.

  The role of the Marines during the cease-fire negotiations was not spelled out in writing. Once Abizaid and Bremer had jointly agreed to negotiate, it wasn’t clear what was military or CPA responsibility. On the eleventh, Conway invited the CPA representative for Fallujah, Nate Jensen, to a meeting where the MEF staff was discussing the creation of a local military force led by former senior army officers. Jensen advised against it, saying their loyalties could not be trusted.

  “You’re a civilian,” Colonel J. C. Coleman, the MEF chief of staff, said. “Let me explain something to you. When you plant the flag, those in the military rally to the colors.”

  Affronted, Jensen pointed to the American flag behind Coleman’s desk. “Those are my colors, goddammit,” Jensen said. “And I know what I’m talking about.”

  After Conway defused the confrontation, Jensen dismissed the idea of enlisting senior Iraqi officers as a trial balloon that had burst. Obviously, bringing back Baathists would be a momentous policy decision that required CPA and White House leadership. In the absence of a single viceroy for Fallujah, though, it was easy to confuse military and political responsibilities in negotiations.

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  While the MEF was conducting the negotiations for the Marines, Mattis as the ground commander was preparing to seize Fallujah as soon as the cease-fire lifted. Toolan, as regimental commander, was the battlefield commander for the battalions on the lines. But since the regiment’s headquarters was next door to the MEF ops center just outside Fallujah, Toolan was frequently pulled into the negotiations. That didn’t deflect him, though, from keeping first things first.

  The JTF instruction called for a suspension of offensive operations, verbally amplified by Abizaid to mean twenty-four or so hours. That timeframe had expired, and Battalion 3/4 was being hit by mortars at the cloverleaf east of the city. Conway, Mattis, and Toolan agreed that 3/4 shouldn’t sit out in the open and get pounded, and the JTF didn’t object to strengthening 3/4’s position.

  On Easter Sunday morning, April 11, Battalion 3/4 resumed the attack. Kilo Company moved forward into East Manhattan, a neighborhood used as a launching pad for attacks along Highway 10. With three platoons on line, Kilo began searching the rows of sand-colored houses.

  There were about twenty to thirty houses on each block, most enclosed by courtyard walls. One or two squads took each block, posting a four-man fire team for outside security, while another team used a loop of det-cord to blow the locks on the gates. A half-dozen Marines with the assault element would rush inside a courtyard and stack themselves against the wall of the house. If there was no shooting, they broke down the door and swarmed in, covering each other as they searched the rooms for weapons. If there were outside stairs or if they could jump from roof to roof, they would clear down floor by floor. In about every fifth house, the Marines found a family, generally huddled together in the center room. The Marines warned them to stay inside and moved on.

  It took about twenty minutes to clear each cluster of houses. After two hours, the company had advanced no more than two blocks inside the city when the insurgents started to drive up, jammed four to six to a car, AKs and RPGs sticking out the windows. Lieutenant Colonel Bryan P. McCoy had posted snipers on the roofs, but they caught only glimpses of the cars scooting down the back alleys. Video from the UAVs overhead showed vehicles speeding east toward 3/4 and south toward 1/5, indicating the insurgents thought 3/4 might be feinting.

  As in Ramadi, the Marines were quickly engaged by gangs of insurgents who knew the back streets and fell back before they were trapped. The insurgents darted into houses and fired from open windows, staying well back so the muzzle flashes would not be seen. Many wore black warm-up suits with AK-47 magazine chest pouches, sneakers, and red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs. From alleys several blocks away, rocket-propelled grenades arced in and exploded randomly. The insurgents fired from one row of houses for a few seconds, then ran out the back to another position, never pausing for long or getting too close to the advancing Marines.

  The battalion gunner, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Coughlin, was angered at seeing so many fleeing targets escape. “Shoot faster, with both eyes open, damn it!” Coughlin yelled.

  The insurgents seemed to be using the same old “shoot and scoot” tactic, but then a squad from the 3rd Platoon approached a house at the end of a narrow alley. After the Marines kicked in the gate, a burst of fire from an AK drove them back. Using the wall as cover, they sneaked up and pitched grenades, dashing forward after the blasts. An AK burst cut down Corporal Smith as he stepped into the courtyard. He was dragged back and evacuated by a Humvee.

  Corporal Daniel R. Amaya regrouped his squad. A veteran of the march up to Baghdad, he had extended his time in the battalion because he didn’t want his squad returning without him. The risible Amaya entertained his squad by improvising lyrics to wacky pop tunes like “Stacy’s Mom.” Crouched outside the courtyard, Amaya called for a shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon, or SMAW. The SMAW looked like a World War II bazooka and fired a thirty-pound thermobaric rocket that created a tremendous overpressure to crumble rooms from the inside. The rocket zipped through the window and detonated in a cloud of dust.
For good measure, two more grenades were pitched into the room.

  The Marines poised to rush inside. Amaya saw that the Marine in the lead didn’t have a flashlight attached to the barrel of his M16.

  “You can’t see in a dark room, man!” Amaya said. “Move back. I’ll go in first.”

  With that he swung inside, followed by his men. The front room where the SMAW round had detonated was empty. M16 at the ready, Amaya eased down a narrow corridor to the rear of the house, the other Marines in single file behind him. He stepped into a small room at the rear and flashed the light attached to his rifle around the room.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” he yelled. “It’s a trap. Out! Out!”

  There was a long burst of AK and M16 fire, all mixed up, and Amaya staggered out and collapsed, fatally shot in the neck.

  The Marines dragged him outside and around the courtyard wall. The company commander, Captain Tim Walker, came forward with a tank that fired six 120mm shells point-blank into the house. But even after absorbing repeated hits, the house didn’t collapse. Every few minutes the pop! pop! pop! of AKs challenged the Marines.

  Deciding there had to be an underground bunker, Walker called for a D-9 monster bulldozer to crush the house, but no dozer was available. On the roof of the house was a cistern of fuel for heating and cooking. The Marines shot a hole in the cistern and waited until the fuel poured down and collected in a large pool in the corridor where Amaya had been shot. They then pitched in incendiary grenades and burned the defenders to death, listening impassively to the screams.

  While Kilo was reducing the hard point, Lima Company was advancing six blocks to the north, joined by the 36th Iraqi National Guard Battalion. With U.S. Army Special Forces advisers encouraging them, the Iraqi soldiers were kicking in doors, rushing inside, hastily clearing, and holding their own alongside the Marines. Glad to see Marines all around them, the Iraqis offered to go first and search each mosque as they advanced.

  McCoy was pushing east with two rifle companies abreast, the pace quickening as the Marines found their battle rhythm. McCoy sent India Company and gun trucks from Weapons Company east through the garbage dumps outside the northern edge of the city. They had an easy time of it at first, advancing west for over a kilometer and getting far out in front of the companies in the city. The Humvees with their .50 calibers and ten-power optical sights leapfrogged along the wide avenues that ran north-south, cutting down insurgents as they fell back into the city.

  When India Company reached the train station outside the city, resistance stiffened, and RPG, machine-gun, and AK fire erupted from the city streets three hundred meters to the south. The first unit to reach the railhead was a pair of gun trucks commanded by Sergeant Winston Molina. As he maneuvered forward among the thousands of people fleeing the city, he saw a group of men milling around outside a small compound belonging to the 505th Iraqi National Guard Battalion. Approaching cautiously, he saw that they had stacked more than a hundred AK rifles neatly along the wall. Some soldiers were hastily changing from their National Guard uniforms into civilian clothes. The soldiers explained that their officers had fled and they too were leaving.

  Molina was flummoxed. The men had a good defensive position and were well armed. Yet they were deserting under fire. He angrily leveled his .50 cal at the men, placed them on the ground, and flex-cuffed them, about fifty in all. Seeing the commotion, an interpreter hastened over and questioned the men. He then explained that the soldiers refused to fight “against their Fallujah brothers” but didn’t want their “brothers” to steal their weapons. It was an American fight. All they wanted to do was go home.

  Molina radioed for instructions, reporting that the 505th Iraqi Battalion had disintegrated. The Iraqi police and National Guard were to be ignored, he was told; they weren’t hostile. LtCol Suleiman still had some of his 506th Iraqi Battalion in his compound west of the city. But he too was staying out of the fight. Inside the city, the police had folded.

  Exasperated, Molina ordered the men cut loose and turned his attention back to the battle. The firing had increased as India Company took up positions along the railroad tracks. Molina yelled at several Marines to aim in rather than poke their rifles over a wall and spray the area without looking.

  Lining the approaches to the station were several searchlight towers, easily fifty feet in the air. Lance Corporal Toby Gray and Lance Corporal Stone were ordered to climb a tower and take out any snipers. Rifles over their shoulders, they climbed awkwardly up the rungs, which looked like giant staples welded onto the pole. Stone and Gray hadn’t been on the searchlight platform five minutes when machine-gun bullets began ricocheting off the steel pole. Gray yelled down for supporting fires, and Marines fired frantically. Molina, using a monocular to try to spot the machine gun, yelled, “Calm down! Calm down!”

  But they all knew the situation was dire. Up on the tower platform there was no place to hide. A bullet struck Stone’s armored vest like a closed fist, and he staggered back. He was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. “We gotta get off here, man!” he yelled. “We gotta get down.”

  Gray grabbed Stone and threw him down on the platform, lying on top of him, pinning him down. “Stay down. We’re too exposed!” Gray shouted. “Stay down, damn it!”

  Stone struggled for a few seconds as bullets zinged off the platform, then felt a wetness in his face. Gray was lying on him, still now, blood gushing from his neck. Stone screamed and yelled. At the base of the tower, Molina and twenty other Marines redoubled their fire. The Iraqi machine gun went silent, and the Marines talked Stone down. When he reached the ground, he was trembling and covered with blood. They gave him a shot of morphine, noting that he had an ugly welt on his left tricep and a bruise over his heart where the armored vest had saved his life.

  Above them, high up on the platform, Gray lay facedown, his blood dripping down into the dust. Molina took a bodybag from his Humvee and joined two other Marines for the climb. Once they were exposed on the pole, the Iraqis started shooting again; the pings and whangs against the steel made Molina wince. They tugged and hauled at Gray’s body and began the slow, awkward descent. Several times a rifle or a helmet or the body got hung up on the climbing rungs. Each time a Marine grabbed tight to a rung with one hand and worked free the jam, hoping the Iraqis would continue to miss.

  No one was hit during the ten-minute descent. When they got off the pole, an amtrac was waiting to transport Stone and the body of LCpl Gray to the medical aid station at the cloverleaf. From there a Humvee drove Stone to the battalion rear, where he sat in cammies soaked with Gray’s blood, mumbling through the morphine that Gray had saved him but he hadn’t saved Gray.

  Corporal Graham Golden, the tough machine-gunner on McCoy’s personal crew, walked over to him.

  “Here, put these on. I stink too much to use them,” he said, handing over his second pair of cammies. “Throw those away and get back to your platoon. That’s what Gray would want.”

  Gray had been a favorite of LtCol McCoy, one of “my baby-wipe killers,” as he referred to Marines too young to be served in a bar. At the Marine Corps Ball in Las Vegas the previous November, eighteen-year-old Gray had received the piece of cake given to the youngest Marine.

  A few feet away, inside the plywood building where 3/4 had a few laptops and military telephones to keep track of personnel and logistics, Major Andrew Petrucci, the battalion’s executive officer, was recording yet another fatality. Battalion 3/4 had rushed to Fallujah, leaving First Lieutenant Oscar Jimenez to organize a field train and follow with all their gear. Jimenez, a family man, had made the march up to Baghdad with the battalion, and Petrucci had full confidence that he would handle the seventy-kilometer logistics move on Easter Sunday without a hiccup. But after one wrong turn on a back road and a sudden ambush, Jimenez was now dead.

  Easter Sunday was proving costly for 3/4, but the unit had momentum. From the northwestern corner of Fallujah, Capt Zembiec and the Marines of Battalion 2/1 could see Sgt
Molina’s gun trucks under the searchlight towers at the railroad station. Battalion 3/4 had a gun truck pointed down every main street, and each time the insurgents tried to cross a street, a machine gun or Mark 19 opened fire. Lima Company could attack from the station and block the center of the city. Byrne had Battalion 1/5 ready to pounce on the insurgents south of Highway 10, while McCoy had Kilo and India, with 36th Iraqi National Guard units, moving through East Manhattan.

  India was in the lead now, several blocks inside the city, heading west with Lieutenant Drew Lee’s platoon out in front. Lee was finding it hard to keep two squads abreast of each other. Inside the thick-walled houses, the handheld radios of the Marines worked only intermittently, and the squads were picking up the pace on their own, sensing the insurgents were falling back. As Lee approached a line of houses separated by a field from a large mosque, bullets rattled off the concrete. Lance Corporal Robert Villalobos dodged around Lee and led his fire team to a roof to see where the firing was coming from. Not able to see anything, he took a running start and leaped the three feet onto the next roof, followed by his men.

  Down on the street, Lee thought they were going to break their necks.

  “Goddammit, knock that shit off!” he yelled.

  Villalobos pretended not to hear his lieutenant. His team had reached the roof of the outside building, with a clear field of fire toward the mosque. A brick wall ran down the center of the roof, and they had to stand on tiptoe to see over it. They could hear bullets occasionally chipping at the other side of the wall. Lance Corporal Ricardo Hernandez heaved his bulk at the wall, and it tumbled down.

  Their squad leader, Sergeant Timothy Funke, was down on the street with Lee. At the sound of the tumbling bricks, he looked up.