Since the middle of April, he and his MEF staff had met several times with a team of Iraqis led by former Colonel Latif. A small man with a clipped white mustache, Latif, sixty-six, had been tending his banana trees in quiet retirement in Baghdad, when he had seen Rumsfeld on television discussing Fallujah. Latif contacted his old friend, former Major General Muhammad al Shawany, recently installed by the CIA as Iraq’s intelligence chief. Through the CIA Shawany arranged for Latif to meet Conway.
Latif’s pitch to Conway was simple: military-to-military relations based on shared professional ties, he stressed, could produce lasting stability. This was a matter for American and Iraqi military men, not politicians, to work out. Latif as a military man could reach out to the former military inside Fallujah.
Conway encouraged Latif, who seemed to have no hidden agenda, was anti-Saddam, and wanted the best for his country. In mid-April Latif met quietly with sheikhs from Fallujah, lauding the exploits of Marines in past battles, warning that Japanese on Iwo Jima and North Vietnamese in Hue City had learned the hard way not to tangle with Marines. This diplomatic touch, whether sincere or obsequious, flattered the listening Marines. How persuasive Latif would be with the insurgents was not clear, but he seemed to be a decent man. “He [Latif] is very well respected by the Iraqi general officers, you can just see the body language between them,” Conway later said. “He demonstrates a level of leadership.”
Latif brought in Major General Jasim Saleh and a few other former military officers living in Fallujah. When the joint patrols fizzled out, the MEF staff still had Latif’s proposal to consider. Provided the Marines turned the city over to them, Saleh and Latif promised to turn insurgents into a Fallujah Brigade that would guarantee peace. As for the National Guard and the police, the Fallujah Brigade would not accept them into their ranks. The brigade would be comprised of former soldiers and insurgents defending their homes, not hacks like Suleiman’s National Guard who pretended to fight in order to get a paycheck.
With former Baathists and generals in charge, the Sunnis would see they had a stake in the new Iraq. This would peel away support from the hard-core insurgents. Everything the Marines wanted they could have—provided they never entered the city.
Conway mulled the offer. He could not continue to tie down four battalions—half the division. He could not attack. Joint patrols had failed. Sanchez and Abizaid had offered no alternative. That left the vision proffered by Latif of using Iraqi generals, military men who seemed to share a sense of duty that transcended politics.
19
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THE JOLAN GRAVEYARD
ON APRIL 25, THE CONCEPT OF joint patrols, announced by the president the day before, was rejected by the Iraqis who were being asked to risk the lives of their families. While the senior officers at division and MEF mulled what to do, the battalions kept watch on the lines around Fallujah.
Echo Company of Battalion 2/1 held a superb defensive position along the roofs of the city block on the northwestern edge of Jolan District. To their left was a city dump, acres of stinking garbage moldering in the dust. On the right the 3rd Platoon occupied a stout brick schoolhouse. A large cemetery lay to their eastern front, row upon row of headstones and crypts extending for hundreds of meters. For three weeks the Marines had exchanged fire across the cemetery with insurgents who sneaked into abandoned houses, shot for a few minutes, then scooted back a few blocks and mingled with civilians on the streets. Every few days a patrol from Echo poked through the houses on the far side of the cemetery to flush out any lurking snipers.
The next patrol, led by Capt Zembiec, was scheduled to leave the lines at 0400 on April 26. During the night Slayer—the AC-130—had cut down a few gangs, and the usual mortar shells and AK rounds had splattered randomly around the company perimeter. In the quiet before dawn Zembiec led thirty-nine Marines east across the cemetery. He had with him the 2nd Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Dan Wagner, a Fire Support Team, and several Army special forces soldiers from Task Force 6-26. Zembiec had arranged to have two tanks standing by and had plotted locations for 81mm mortar strikes.
Once the patrol reached the far side of the cemetery, the usual confusion ensued as the point men scaled a six-foot courtyard wall and landed on the other side with thuds, clanks, and muffled curses. The fire team following behind paused, looked around, found an unlocked iron gate, and walked into the courtyard with no bruises. In the dark they set out trip flares and flash-bang grenades as warning devices, then entered two houses on a corner across the street from one another. The Marines searched from room to room, shining flashlights across empty walls, scaring each other as they burst through doorways. The commotion set the half-wild city dogs yapping and scampering down the empty street.
With the first smudges of light, the ululating, high-pitched call for morning prayers echoed from a minaret two blocks to the north. Marine sentries at the company position on the west side of the cemetery warned that men with weapons were running out of the mosque. Leaving a security detail behind in the two houses, Zembiec led a patrol north three hundred meters to the mosque.
After a long search turned up only a few AK rounds, in the dawn light the Marines returned to the two houses—neat, two-story tan-colored cement dwellings with flat, walled roofs and wide terraces off the upstairs bedrooms. Set slightly back from the street and shaded by a few palm trees, the houses would not look out of place in southern Florida. About half the Marines went with Zembiec into the house on the southern corner of a paved street that ran east into the city. Wagner took the others into the house directly across the street on the northern side. The western sides of both houses could be clearly seen from the company defenses across the cemetery. On the east, the houses were hugged by dozens of buildings, extending block after block, a maze of courtyards and walls. After posting guards outside, the Marines inside the houses rummaged through their daypacks for oranges, crackers, and jalapeño cheese. For a day patrol they had come light on food and heavy on water and ammunition, with three hundred rounds for each M16 and fourteen hundred rounds for each SAW.
One moment they were sitting in the living rooms and kitchens drinking water and munching on bread. The next moment bullets were pelting the outside walls like wind-driven rain. Salvos of dozens of RPG rockets were sailing by, hitting the telephone wires and palm trees, exploding with crumbling sounds in puffs of black smoke. The Marines were hit from the houses right next door, from adjoining courtyards and from farther down the street to the east. The insurgents hit both houses at once with a volume of fire that sounded like a radial saw, dozens of automatic weapons simultaneously tearing through magazines, the faces of the two houses peeling away in streams of gray dust, bullets pelting the cement surfaces and thwacking off at a thousand angles.
Out on the street the four Marines on guard flopped down and fired back. No one was firing at them, and they couldn’t see any targets to shoot, so they threw rounds downrange at what they thought were likely firing positions. Lance Corporal Jeremiah Anderson lay prone outside Wagner’s house and watched RPG rockets explode high in the trees. Seeing flashes from an alley to the east, he fired burst after burst in that direction.
In the first few moments it seemed to be raining rocket-propelled grenades, some streaking straight in like bullets, and others fired from adjoining streets, plunging down like mortar shells. In Zembiec’s house on the south side, Private First Class Bernard Boykin counted six rocket hits against the outside wall next to the window he was guarding. In the north house, Lance Corporal John Sleight felt the floor shudder a bit as a rocket struck. While lacking the wallop to push through the cement walls, the RPGs burst loose thousands of cement chips that could lacerate and flay human flesh.
Lt Wagner quickly organized a two-tier defense. In the kitchen he stationed an SAW and an M203 gunner, while on the roof he sent in a machine-gun team and a sniper. The RPGs were now exploding on the outside walls as the insurgents aimed for the open windows. “Board ’em up!” Wagner yelled.
The Marines piled tables, couches, and drawers against the windows, leaving only small cracks to fire out. Sergeant John Neary peeked through a firing hole and saw a man in the open window next door, not fifteen feet away, loading an RPG. The man’s face filled the red aim point in Neary’s optical scope. When Neary squeezed the trigger, the man’s face burst apart and the scope flared in a pink mist, causing Neary to flinch.
The Marines had a big problem. While they had been diverted at the mosque, hundreds of insurgents had sneaked through the back alleys and into the houses next door. Major Bellon, the intelligence officer for the regiment, had listened to radio intercepts suggesting the insurgents had organized a mobile reserve that moved in buses and trucks. Now, at nine in the morning the UAV hovering over the city was sending to regiment a live video feed of taxis and pickup trucks scurrying northwest into the Jolan District, where the battle was raging.
Wagner, a native of southern California, had loved visiting his relatives in central Pennsylvania, because the backyards were large enough for him to play baseball, his favorite sport. Now he was desperately wishing for a yard big enough to separate his Marines from the insurgents who had sneaked in next door, so close a man could leap from one roof to the next. The insurgents next door were leaning out the windows and over the low walls of the roof, firing wildly at point-blank range.
Corporal Richard Koci led his four-man machine-gun team up the outside stairs to the roof, with AK rounds bouncing off the cement of the steps. They dashed to the low wall next to the house occupied by the insurgents and hammered out a mousehole for the barrel of their machine gun. From nearby roofs, dozens of gunmen blazed away at them. Koci fired at the adjacent roof, hearing screams of pain and the screech of orders.
In city fights, protection means staying behind a cement wall. Shooters dart out, fire a burst from the hip, and duck back again, or they lie flat on a roof, stick the barrel over the low wall, and pull the trigger. So much hot metal flies downrange that sooner or later someone gets hit. The house next door to Wagner’s group had a slightly higher roof, and the insurgents were lobbing down grenades. Eventually one found the range, wounding all four Marines around the gun. Lance Corporal Zackory Fincannon went down with severe wounds to his shoulder and arm. Koci grabbed Fincannon and the four staggered down the stairs and into the safety of the kitchen.
Not all Marines fought with equal skill or ferocity. One was reluctant to fire his rifle, and Wagner set him to collecting and redistributing ammunition. Most fought with a “battle buddy” in teams of two, encouraging and helping each other. And some were exceptional warriors. The bull in Wagner’s platoon was Lance Corporal Carlos Gomez-Perez, a heavily muscled fireplug of a man who responded instantly in battle.
“What do you want me to do?” Gomez shouted at Wagner above the roar of the battle.
“Get up on the roof and throw grenades!” Wagner yelled back. “Don’t let them get on top of us!”
Gomez’s family had emigrated from Mexico in the early 1990s, and he had struggled to learn English. When he had returned from his first tour in Iraq, he plodded through the paperwork and qualified for citizenship. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger swore him in at Camp Pendleton.
Gomez led a fire team up the outside stairs. They all knew the risk: on the roof bullets were cracking by. The Marines could hear them, snapping and hissing, some high, some low. They crouched, sprinted to the wall, and put out a fire caused by a Molotov cocktail, kicking clear of the flames a belt of 40mm grenade rounds. They threw down the stairs the damaged 240 Golf machine gun, a Mark 40 sniper rifle, and a PRC-119 radio. Then they crouched behind the low wall and hurled grenades up at the insurgents hiding on the adjacent roof.
On the street below, insurgents were arcing RPG rockets and dropping mortar rounds, trying to hit the four SAW gunners lying flat and covering the corner approaches to the two houses. A blast from an RPG rocked Lance Corporal John Paul Flores, and as he shook off the concussion, he felt wet, as though he had been in a shower. He stumbled into the north house and limped up the stairs to the kitchen.
“Sir,” he said to Wagner, “I’m shot, I’m shot.”
Flores was bleeding from his right arm and leg. Corpsman Benjamin Liotta hurried over but after one glance concluded he couldn’t extract a piece of metal protruding from Flores’s leg.
“It’s a scratch,” Liotta said. “It’ll heal itself.”
“I’m bleeding out,” Flores said. “At least stop the bleeding.”
“Flores, you’re nuts,” Wagner said, desperate not to lose the firepower of the SAW. “Get back out there and kill someone.”
Flores limped down the stairs, passing his friend Lance Corporal Juan Sanchez.
“Dog,” Sanchez said, “you’re not going home. So conserve ammo. Long day coming.”
“Fuck,” Flores said, hobbling back outside.
A machine gun was hammering away from the east, RPG rockets were streaking by, grenades were exploding, and AK rounds cracked and snapped through the air. The SAW gunners were lying prone against the corners of the courtyard wall, and the bullets were snapping well above their heads. The insurgents seemed as intent at chipping away at the cement walls as at finding individual targets. Flores ripped through a two-hundred-round drum, momentarily reducing the amount of incoming fire. As he switched out the overheated barrel on the SAW, Capt Zembiec sprinted across the street and into the house.
“Can you hold?” Zembiec asked Wagner. “I’m calling for tanks and eighty-ones.”
“We’re good as long as I have the roof covered,” Wagner said. “Fincannon’s arm is really messed up. We need to evac him now.”
“How many wounded you got?”
“Six, eight, I don’t know. Liotta keeps patching them up and sending them outside. Fincannon’s really hurting, though.”