Inside the ops center Marines stopped what they were doing and clustered behind the screens. A minute went by. On the screen the four dark spots bobbed back and forth in the shadow of the warehouse. A ball of black abruptly plumed outward from the edge of the building, sending huge black chunks of concrete flying. Another black ball, then another and another enveloped the dark spots crouched along the side of the building.
Basher, an air force AC-130 four-engine aircraft, had illuminated the ambushers with its huge infrared spotlight and was pounding them with 105mm artillery shells, each round packing fifty pounds of high explosives. Gray smoke rose from the scene.
“Watch for leakers,” Neumann said. “There’s one now, heading north. Stay with him.”
A black spot had broken out of the smoke. Against the background of the macadam on the street, the man’s silhouette stood out plainly. He was running with the speed of a sprinter.
“Ten to one he’s headed for the nearest mosque,” Neumann said.
“Same as always,” Lieutenant Jerry Parchman said as he watched the runner climb over a wall. “He’s made it.”
The insurgents knew the rule: once they reached a mosque, they were safe. While Basher moved on to another target, the Pioneer UAV circled the building to assess the battle damage. A large door in the back slid open, and two men ran around the side and quickly returned, dragging a body. The Marines watched as this was repeated a few times.
“Are they carrying a heavy weapon or a guy’s leg?” a Marine asked.
“Don’t know. I confirm four down,” Lt Parchman said. “Mark this as a safe house. We’ll come back later to reassess.”
The Pioneer flew on for a look along the river’s edge. It looked like a boxy model aircraft you could buy from a local hobby shop, assemble in the garage, strap to the roof of the SUV, and haul to the nearest park for a day of fun with the kids. With radio-controlled landings and takeoffs, the Pioneer provided a stable platform for its optical day and FLIR cameras. In four months at Fallujah, VMU-1 had flown more than four hundred sorties with only two malfunctions (and several UAVs returning with bullet holes). Flying at under a hundred miles an hour, the Pioneer could loiter over Fallujah for a few hours at a time; its annoying noise announced its presence, but it was usually not detectable visually at several thousand feet.
Surveillance by UAVs has been going on for decades, and both the Israelis and Americans had employed UAVs occasionally for real-time target acquisition. What made VMU-1 and similar units in Iraq different in 2004 was that acquisition became routine at the lowest tactical level. The insurgents had no place to hide. When they came out of doors, they were seen, tracked, and attacked—day after day since May, when the Fallujah Brigade had taken over.
Several times the Watchdogs had seen a pickup suddenly swerve into an empty lot; the occupants would jump out, set up a long tube, fire a few rockets, and scurry off before a response attack could be launched. “We followed one pickup after it fired some rockets,” Staff Sergeant Francisco Tataje, the intelligence chief, said. “It swung up onto the main highway, and we had it intercepted. The driver had perfect ID. No incriminating stuff. So we gave the interrogation team a copy of our video. The team called back to say the guy confessed after they told him the route he had taken.”
The Watchdogs had followed one pickup from a mosque to a highway outside town, where three men with their arms bound were pushed into a ditch and shot. The pickup then drove back to a house, and the Watchdogs added it to their list of “safe houses,” tagged for later bombing. After each safe house was struck, they would watch dozens of men converge on the ruins, take bodies to the hospital to the west across the river, and from there drive to the Cemetery of Martyrs, where long trenches awaited the dead.
_____
With the western peninsula and the hospital secure, on November 8 the battalions moved into their attack positions a few kilometers north of the railroad tracks. Preparatory fires during the day were lit. The division had more than two hundred targets confirmed by reliable sources such as the Watchdogs. But the military coalition at the Baghdad level, fearing adverse press coverage and collateral damage, approved strikes on fewer than twenty targets. Concerned about their own casualties, more than a few Marines were angered by the approval process.
Additional strikes were permitted upon positive sightings of the enemy. The Watchdogs were assigned to Queens, the four-kilometer-square district to the south of Highway 10. Long the lair of criminal gangs, terrorists, and foreign jihadists, Queens was a jumble of four thousand drab cement two-story houses, many half-finished, and dirt roads, with scant vegetation. For most of the day the UAV team had watched groups of three to five men run from one house to another, offering no chance for a fire mission. In midafternoon, though, the daytime optical camera on the Pioneer picked up a series of quick red flashes from a mosque courtyard.
The half-completed mosque looked like a small soccer stadium, surrounded by an oval-shaped courtyard wall several stories high and an empty interior court. In the center of the court a single mortar tube pointed north toward Camp Fallujah, which included the command centers of the MEF and RCT 1. Every ten minutes or so the Watchdogs watched three insurgents sprint from a large house a few hundred meters north of the mosque and disappear under the eaves of the wall. Seconds later, one by one, they dashed out, dropped a shell down the tube, and madly sprinted back to the house.
After six mortar rounds had exploded inside the huge Camp Fallujah, Major Kelly Ramshur, the Watchdogs’ mission commander, took a phone call from the regimental fires section, which was assigning targets to firing units. “Air’s not available,” Ramshur said to his ten-man crew clustered around the two video displays and four computer monitors. “Arty has the target.”
This brought a murmur of disapproval from the crew. Artillery was an area-fire weapon, most useful against troops in the open and not intended for point targets.
The crosshairs on the Pioneer’s optical camera centered on the mortar tube and a ten-digit grid that appeared on the screen. The coordinates were typed and sent to the firing battery. The crew waited for several minutes, saying little, as the Pioneer circled several thousand feet above, camera locked on the black mortar tube.
When Kelly said, “Shot out,” they craned forward to watch as a large gray puff popped up a football field outside the mosque. The crew measured the miss distance and typed in,
Add one hundred, right fifty.
Three minutes later a large cloud of dirt erupted inside the courtyard. Among several cries of
All right!
the next command typed in was
Fire for effect
. A few minutes later two bright orange flashes lit up the courtyard, with a third about a hundred meters to the south. When the smoke cleared, the tube was still standing. The crew called for another volley. Same result—close but not effective. No secondary explosions. No visible damage to the tube.
During the ensuing lull the three insurgents again ran from the house to the mosque wall, picked up shells, dropped them down the tube, and ran back to the house.
The Watchdogs exchanged admiring exclamations. “They’re hanging in there.”
“You wouldn’t catch me playing dodge with 155s.”
“Suckers are dead meat if they guess wrong when the next volley is.”
“We’re getting a Predator,” Neumann said.
The Predator UAV, which carried a Hellfire missile, was controlled by air force pilots following its video feeds back in Nevada. A few weeks earlier the Watchdogs had directed a Predator onto a pickup with a machine gun. The Predator and Pioneer crews used e-mail chat over nine thousand miles to align their UAVs.
Televised football games are controlled by a producer who cuts the video feeds so that the audience can see the play from different angles. That sort of instant replay wasn’t yet available on the battlefield. The bandwidth required to exchange battlefield imagery was enormous; it would be a few more years before the Watchdogs in Fallujah and the Predator crew in Nevada could see each other’s video. In the interim the crews updated each other by e-mail.
As Neumann sent updated coordinates to direct the Predator, the regiment became impatient. More mortar shells were exploding inside the camp.
“Break, break,” Neumann said. “Regiment has shifted the mission from Predator to Profane. Stand by for a talk on.”
Profane was the call sign for two Marine AV-8B jets hovering at nineteen thousand feet above the city. The Watchdogs would use voice and data to talk to the forward air controller airborne (FACA), who would line up the jets for the attack. In the meantime the insurgents had made another round-trip sprint. At least twelve rounds had struck Camp Fallujah.
“What do you think, guys?” asked Neumann. “Hit the tube or the house?”
“House!” came back the chorus.
The two-story cement house where the insurgents were hiding between rounds had a dome roof, a large courtyard with an outside wall, and an overhang at the front door, where a sentry was posted. The Watchdogs had counted more than twelve men entering or leaving the house.
Once Profane had locked on the mosque, Neumann talked the FACA on. “Do you see the mosque? Okay, the target is the first house north of the vacant lot on the northeast corner. Wait—it’s where that truck is. Got it?”
A truck had pulled up and five men had walked inside, carrying something in their arms. Three dogs had trotted up.
“Suppertime,” Sergeant Roneil Sampson, an imagery analyst, said. “Domino’s delivery.”
“Cleared hot,” Neumann said.
Word had spread about the insurgent mortar crew that wouldn’t quit, and over two dozen Marines were squeezed into the small ops center, murmuring back and forth. The GBU, a guided bomb unit, was less than a minute from impact.
“I like dogs. Get out of there, dogs.”
“Stay in there, muj. You’re almost in paradise. Don’t leave now. Don’t leave.”
The courtyard door opened, and a man walked to the truck and slowly drove away.
“Boot muj sent out to get the Coke. Luckiest bastard on the planet.”
Both video screens suddenly flashed a bright white, as if a fuse had blown. There was a collective
Damn!
from the watching Marines. The center of the roof was now a huge black hole.
“That’s a shack,” Neumann said. “That’s what I call a shack! Scratch a dozen muj.”
“I feel sorry for the dogs,” someone said.
_____
Several mortars and rocket positions inside the city were firing at the American units massed to the north. As the Watchdogs were destroying the mortar crew, two CH-46 helicopters were transporting the first casualties from the insurgent fires to the Shock-Trauma Platoon at the Taqaddum base outside Fallujah. STP provided immediate stabilization for the wounded and decided who should be sent to what hospitals. When the casualties were carried off in the birds, Colonel John Dietrich, who supervised the helicopters, drove over from the flight line to see if additional help was needed. Inside a large tent three men and four women in brown T-shirts, short white hospital gowns, and green disposable surgical gloves were tending to three soldiers lying on stretchers. One medic was collecting a heap of ripped or cut cammies lying on the floor, while another mopped away the blood. With IV tubes protruding from the blankets, the soldiers lay quietly, two with their eyes closed, the third looking at the tent ceiling.
A nurse took Dietrich aside. “Any fatalities?” Dietrich asked.
“No, sir,” she said. “We had one amputee above the knee. We just moved him out.”
Due to the armored vests and immediate medical care, in Iraq there were eleven wounded for each death, almost twice the survival rate of past wars. Once at the STP, the chances that the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen would keep a soldier alive were 95 percent. At Taqaddum, one surgical team worked for thirteen hours to save the life of one Marine.
“And we took a pound of shrapnel out of the soldier behind you. Colonel,” the nurse said. “He’s going out next. He should be fine. We’re giving this to him as a souvenir.” She held up a twisted black piece of metal the size of a man’s fist.
“How was the movement in? Comm working?” Dietrich said. “Dust under control? Anything I can do from my end?”
A reservist who in civilian life was a FedEx pilot, Dietrich wanted to ensure that his CH-46 helicopters, which entered Marine service in 1966, were performing well.
“They’re fine. We—”
Bam, bam, bam.
The tent shook as three rockets slammed in. In one quick motion the nurses grabbed the ends of each stretcher and placed the wounded on the floor, bending over to shelter them. Dietrich ran out to check on the helicopters. He returned a few minutes later.
“Flight line’s okay,” he said. “Chapel may have taken a hit, though. Good job with the wounded. It’s going to be a busy week.”
25
____
MERRY-GO-ROUND AT THE JOLAN
THE MAJOR GROUND ASSAULT BEGAN AFTER dark on November 8 with the blinding flashes and monstrous claps of tank rounds, artillery shells, and mortar rounds, all bursting in blooms of lava red, while Basher hovered above the apex of the shells and pounded away. The insurgents responded with an unaimed barrage of rockets and mortars that traced arcs of red sparks across the night sky. It was raining intermittently, with a cold wind gusting from the east. Throughout the city the few residents remaining huddled behind thick cement walls.
The composite army-Marine-Iraqi division surged forward and swept south. The intent was to overwhelm the enemy. Six battalions attacking at night through three cuts in the berms on a three-mile front required meticulous coordination. General Natonski by nature was an upbeat, can-do leader, and this assault required all his confidence in the dozens of lieutenants and staff sergeants leading the platoons and running the company Fire Support Teams. Vectored at a wrong angle, any one of more than five hundred heavy weapons would inflict substantial casualties on a friendly unit. Natonski ran the risks of a night attack because the critical point of vulnerability occurred when the battalions were tightly packed along the line of departure. In the dark the insurgents could not concentrate aimed fires.