“The general flanked the hajis from the south,” his crew chief, Gunnery Sergeant David Beall, said. “He sent me in on the north flank. We caught them in a crossfire. Then the general called in two Cobras and that ended it. We pulled out two or three dead Iraqis and one machine gun and took off down the road. He was running real late.”
When Mattis arrived at the MEF, he apologized for his delay.
“I was late getting here, General,” he said, “but give us twenty minutes and we’ll be ready to jump off.”
Battalion 3/4 was closing on the cloverleaf east of the city. Mattis was ready to squeeze the city from the east, south, and west.
“No,” Abizaid said. “Not for at least twenty-four hours. Then we’ll reassess.”
The four-star general flew out, leaving behind a group of smoldering Marines. When Mattis returned to his LAV, he said nothing to his crew or to the few embedded reporters who had been with the division for a month. This was highly unusual. It was his habit to explain to them what he had been doing in a meeting, make a few tactical observations, and take questions. The crew always gathered around. They were family and liked knowing what their leader was thinking. On the ninth, though, Mattis kept his distance. He was the general, keeping counsel only with himself.
The next day, April 10, the written order from the JTF to halt offensive operations reached Toolan’s regiment. Offensive operations were suspended, but deliberate operations could continue, meaning that the Marines could move forward reasonable distances to strengthen defensive positions. Sanchez was trying to give them as much maneuver space as possible.
In the States, President Bush delivered his weekly Saturday radio talk to the nation. “In Fallujah, Marines of Operation Vigilant Resolve are taking control of the city, block by block,” he said. “Our offensive will continue in the weeks ahead.”
The Marine commanders tried to understand the contradictory verbal and written orders they were receiving. How an offensive could take control of the city block by block when it had been ordered to halt was mystifying. As far as they could understand it, Sanchez believed the pause would continue for only a day. After that pause, the offensive could resume, as the president indicated on the radio. They cherished the hope that it would.
There hadn’t been a mutual cease-fire on April 9. The insurgents had opened fire whenever they had the advantage. Battalion 3/4 had taken mortar and rocket fire all night and on the morning of the tenth had edged into the first set of buildings on the northeastern side of Fallujah, while Battalions 2/1 and 1/5 remained in place. The Iraqi officials Hassani and Yawar—drove in from Baghdad, met with some Iraqis at the Government Center, and later held a press conference at the MEF headquarters outside the city. They told the press that the city was “devastated” and that the doctors who had accompanied them were “aghast” at the conditions.
“We want to put the good people of Fallujah in control of their city,” said Saif Rahman, a member of the negotiating team from the Governing Council.
The officials then hastily left for Baghdad, where council member Adnan Pachachi went on Arab and American television to deliver the lines he would repeat for the next two weeks.
“We consider the action carried out by U.S. forces as illegal and totally unacceptable,” he said. “It is a form of mass punishment.”
12
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MANY DIE, THEY ARE GONE
WHILE NEGOTIATIONS AND POSTURING ENSUED AT Fallujah, thirty miles to the west in Ramadi fighting raged for several days. On April 6, twelve Marines died battling the insurgents across the city and in the suburbs. The fighting had continued the next day, when the brigade staff ordered a psychological operations team into the city. On top of their Humvees the psyops crew had loudspeakers instead of machine guns, so LtCol Kennedy told Weapons Company to provide cover for the mission.
Linking up with the two psyops Humvees, a platoon commanded by First Lieutenant Lucas Wells walked slowly into the marketplace, with the speakers blaring in singsong Arabic,
“Thank you for pointing out the insurgents. Do not let them cause you fear.”
The Marines walked on both sides of the vehicles as hundreds of incredulous Iraqi men gathered about, hooting and shouting insults and making slicing gestures across their throats, showing the soles of their flip-flops and saluting with their middle fingers. Nearby minarets blared an appeal for blood for the jihad, drowning out the psyops message. The Marines handed out pamphlets that the Iraqis ripped up or rubbed across their asses and flung back. A few stones were thrown, then a few more. The Marines, as angry as the jeering mob, swung their rifles back and forth, daring someone to challenge them.
“This is not a success,” 1/Lt Wells radioed back to Capt Weiler.
“Okay, go north a click,” Weiler said. “That way it doesn’t look like we’re being run out of town. Let some cows hear the message, then come home.”
Walking north, the Marines bumped into a procession of unarmed men, many in white dishdashas, carrying a wooden coffin. The Marines stood to the side to let them pass. Hard stares were exchanged, neither side saying a word. When they reached the open stretch of road where the Head Hunter sniper team had fought on April 6, they knew they were in for it. No one was outside, and most of the livestock had been herded into the walled courtyards. They scanned the open fields, the pine trees, and the set-back houses, waiting for the attack. As usual, it began with scattered RPG rockets and AK and machine-gun fire, followed by an IED detonated too far away to do damage.
Wells called for a skirmish line to advance on the nearest large house, where they found only a frightened woman and three children hiding on the roof. In a nearby palm grove, a Marine saw movement at the top of a tree and let loose a burst from his Mark 19. Two men with AKs fell twenty feet to the ground. In the shrubs the Marines captured two other Iraqis wearing tree-climbing harnesses. As he walked back to the waiting Humvees, Lance Corporal Marshall Cummings was shot in the back, the bullet puncturing his lung. A man knelt up in the tall grass to see if he had hit anyone. The Marines put several Mark 19 slugs into his chest, placed Cummings in a Humvee, and drove back to base at breakneck speed through the thick downtown traffic, bumping cars out of the way. At the base Dr. Son stabilized Cummings, and a Blackhawk evacuated him.
Kennedy didn’t like concentrating patrols on the inner city; it left the initiative in the suburbs with the insurgents. In the attack on April 6, the core of the insurgents had come from outside the city. Historically, insurgents hid in the countryside and squeezed the government forces that were holding the cities. The flat land of Iraq provided no jungles or forests to hide in. Instead, the excellent road system enabled insurgents to live in safe areas, hide caches of arms inside a city, drive to assembly points, pick up the weapons, attack, and drive away. Sofia was the assembly area for the attacks inside Ramadi.
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.