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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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.”