Late in the day Battalion 3/5 made another discovery at Jolan Park, a kilometer east of where Berg had been beheaded. The park was a large rectangle of grass flanked by a mosque and a row of middle-class houses. In the center of the park, untouched by any shells or explosions, were a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round with “United States” painted on the center pole in large English letters, embossed with blue and red stars. The corner house on the street next to the mosque looked like an average, modest two-floor dwelling. But when his troops called LtCol Malay over to look inside, the first thing that struck him was the stench of death. Inside the foyer the floor was hardened mud, with a narrow, dark corridor leading back to a rusty cell door. Inside a man in a tan, tattered dishdasha lay with his shriveled head thrust back in a paroxym of agony. Both his legs had been chopped off above the knees. Behind him a second cell door led to a room with another legless corpse twisted in agony, clearly visible in the light flooding through the cell window. The window faced the city street, and through the flimsy glass the screams had echoed through the park.
_____
At the eastern end of the city, Battalion 1/3 was pushing through the section where Battalion 3/4 and Killer McCoy had fought in April. The Marines came under heavy fire from the same house where Cpl Amaya had been killed. Corporal Peter Mason was hit by twelve bullets and knocked off his feet. But his armored vest saved him and he scrambled outside the courtyard. The Marines then backed off and pulverized the house. Insurgents streamed out the rear, where the 25mm fire from an LAV trapped them against a wall. Many were high on drugs. One man hobbled down the street on one leg, the other having been blown off. He made it half a block before collapsing. Over twenty-five bodies were found in the ruins, the largest number killed in a single house in the Fallujah battle.
By dusk on November 10, Battalion 1/3 had seized the Mujahereen Mosque north of Fran and halted to observe the Marine Corps birthday, an annual ritual observed at thousands of balls around the world. In a formal service steeped in tradition, Sergeant Major Michael Berg had the army psyops Humvees play the Marine Corps hymn over their loudspeakers while he cut a slice of pound cake from an MRE and presented it to the youngest Marine. As he did so, the insurgents fired a brace of RPGs.
“Shut those bastards up!” Berg yelled.
Over two hundred rifles and machine guns blazed away for several seconds.
“Cease fire!” Berg yelled.
The battlefield was silent.
“That’s more like it,” Berg said. “Continue with the ceremony.”
_____
Lieutenant Colonel Michael Ramos, 1/3’s battalion commander, had assigned a company from the 5th Iraqi Battalion to fight alongside each of 1/3’s rifle companies. Led by their American advisers and company-grade officers, the Iraqi soldiers took the lead in searching the mosques, where leaflets showed a Marine and a tank engulfed in flames, with the Arabic words “Fallujah—April turning point victory over the Americans.”
After dark on the tenth, the insurgents were lobbing RPG rounds and probing for weak spots in the Iraqi battalion’s defenses. The 2nd Company was holding a three-story building, but the soldiers were eating instead of standing guard. The frustrated company adviser, Master Sergeant Andreas Elesky, found himself alone on the roof, dropping grenades onto small groups of insurgents who were darting down a cramped alleyway, shooting at the roof and windows. Having gone sixty hours without sleep, Elesky found himself thinking,
What if I doze off?
An army Bradley roared by on the main road, gun chattering. A moment later a Humvee pulled up, and seconds later Major Andrew Milburn, sent from Quantico, Virginia, to analyze “lessons learned,” was kneeling next to Elesky. “Want an assistant?” Milburn said.
“Bring your own grenades?” Elesky asked.
“Six, plus fresh batteries and strobes to fix our pos,” Milburn said. “In case we want to call in something a bit heavier.”
Back at MEF headquarters, the word had gotten out that the advisers were understaffed. To lend a hand, staff officers from the MEF had slipped forward. Out on the lines, no one questioned majors who simply appeared and quietly obeyed the directions of sergeants.
26
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PHASE LINE HENRY
BY NOVEMBER 11 THE NORTHERN HALF of Fallujah had fallen days ahead of schedule, and Col Tucker, commanding RCT 7, had sent Lieutenant Colonel Peter Newell’s armored battalion, 2-2, south into the industrial sector and Queens. Hundreds of insurgents were hiding from the armor amid the thousands of houses. So Tucker ordered Battalion 1/8, holding the Government Center, to root them out. Lieutenant Colonel Gary Brandl, commanding the battalion, designated Alpha Company to lead off. All day on the tenth the company had exchanged fire with snipers and bands of gunmen hidden in two large apartment buildings one hundred meters away on the south side of Highway 10.
For four hours Corporal Timothy Connors and his squad from 2nd Platoon had been firing from prone positions along the lip of the roof on the mayor’s office. There was a low retaining wall in front of them, and they wiggled from spot to spot, popping up, aiming in with their ACOGs, snapping off a burst at a window in an apartment building, and crawling away as a return hail of bullets peppered the wall. Occasionally they yelled to one another “RPG!” and sneaked a look at the red, spiraling glow spinning toward them. Not one Marine had been hit, and they were giggling and laughing at the insanity of knowing death was zipping and cracking by or exploding against the concrete to their front. Once Connors stole a glance and was sprayed by chips of cement as bullets hit the wall under his chin.
The platoon commander, Lieutenant Ryan Hunt, called for air to strike the apartment across the street. The sixty-pound hatch on an amtrac had slammed down earlier that day on Hunt’s fingers, almost severing them. But he refused to leave the battle. After the forward air controller called in the target, the Marines huddled along the wall to watch. They saw the plane pass overhead and the bomb release. Cool. Then the bomb plunged toward them. Connors heard Hunt screaming “Abort! Abort!” and turned his head to see the lieutenant gripping the handset, blood spurting from white bone, all flesh torn away. Hunt seemed oblivious to the pain.
The five-hundred-pound bomb smacked into the courtyard next to the building and rammed through the macadam with a heavy thud. Connors held his breath, tucked into the fetal position. Nothing happened. Thank God, a dud.
Booom!
The shock wave was so powerful, the Marines never heard the explosion. Connors looked up to see a vertical geyser of dirt and chunks of cement rocketing straight into the air, hanging, defying gravity, then pausing and falling back down. He could plainly see parts of the street plunging toward his head. He tucked his rifle under him and squatted down, trying to draw his legs under his armored vest and thrusting his helmet forward so that it banged against the helmet of the Marine next to him. They pushed their bodies toward each other, hoping the Kevlar and the heavy plates on the backs of their armored vests would absorb the blows. They were buffeted and thrown off balance by the rain of rocks and stones, but they considered themselves lucky when it ended and they saw a slab of concrete as long as a man lying next to them.
“Brown’s arm is a mess!” a corpsman yelled. “Desiato’s down. Medevac!”
Lance Corporal Travis R. Desiato was lying on his back inside a window, knocked out by the blast. After a few minutes he groggily stumbled to his feet, refusing to be evacuated. Staff Sergeant Richard Pillsbury, the platoon sergeant, rushed over to Hunt.
“Hummer’s out back for Brown, sir,” he said. “Time for you to go.”
Hunt shook his head.
“I’m not arguing with you, sir,” Pillsbury said. “Colonel Brandl’s here. I’ll get him if I have to. Doc says you’ll lose your fingers if you stay.”
The firing on the roof above them had increased. Connors was lying on the lip next to a Force Recon sniper team. Through a mousehole he saw a flash from a window and poked the spotter next to him.
“See that?”
The spotter squinted at the target, rolled onto his back, and checked his grenade launcher. Then he nodded at Connors, rolled over, knelt up, fired at an angle, and ducked back down. A half-dozen Marines edged up the wall and watched the black dot arc out and down, exploding inside the target window. The Marines cheered and laughed. It was like watching a hole-in-one shot at the golf course.
Two floors down, LtCol Brandl sized up the firefight. He had brought the battalion surgeon forward to the Government Center, determined to have medical aid as close to the frontlines as possible. In the past two days, he had lost ten killed and over seventy wounded and was struggling to wall off his emotions. He told himself,
I’m the leader and this is the battle. Get it done. Focus on the mission.
Getting it done meant crossing the main highway and keeping the pressure on.
I wish I had flame,
Brandl thought. Instead, he had Basher lurking overhead and the Marines owned the night. That was the time to move.
“This is where they’re making their stand,” he said to Captain Aaron Cunningham, the Alpha Company commander. “Get a foothold behind those apartments after it’s dark, then proceed down Henry and roll them up.”
Just west of the Government Center the highway split into a Y, with each broad avenue leading to a bridge across the Euphrates. A cluster of restaurants and shops called the “pizza slice” occupied the center strip at the fork in the Y. Captain Cunningham told Lieutenant Elliot Ackerman to gain a foothold in the pizza slice for the company.
As a young boy, Ackerman had decided he wanted to be a Marine, although there was no Marine heritage in his family. At Tufts College he had joined Marine Corps ROTC and volunteered for extra training courses every summer to bolster his chances of being selected by the infantry branch. Before leading his platoon across Highway 10, Ackerman asked Basher to work over the building he had marked as his objective. Basher obliged with a barrage of 105mm shells.
At three in the morning Ackerman trotted across the highway with the forty-six men of 1st Platoon. Not a shot was fired. The pizza slice was empty. Basher had done such a thorough job that the building the platoon was to hold had collapsed. So Ackerman decided to push on south in the dark. The platoon crossed the avenue called Fran, chose at random a four-story building, broke open the door, and took up positions at the windows on each floor.
At first light the Marines saw that they had taken up lodging behind enemy lines. On both sides of their building, insurgents were slipping forward in bands of four and six. Wearing civilian clothes, most had on either black trousers or a black shirt, with a chest rig for their AK magazines. They were unaware of the Marines until the M16s opened up, hitting three or four before the others ducked into the surrounding buildings. With his ACOG three-power scope, Corporal Ramon Bajarano sighted in on a man standing in the middle of the street, not knowing which way to run. Using the window ledge as a rest for his M16, Bajarano shot the man in the chest, swung his rifle slightly to the right, and shot a second man smashing in the door to an apartment.
The insurgents scattered for cover, then converged on the platoon. Within minutes the fighting fell into a pattern. The platoon held a stout building with open ground on all sides, which made a frontal assault suicidal. Instead, enemy snipers, RPG teams, and machine-gunners were running from floor to floor and across the roofs of the adjoining buildings, looking for angles to shoot down. They stayed away from the front of the windows and bobbed up and down along the low rooftop walls, trying not to expose themselves for more than a few seconds.
The Marines tried to pick out a window or a corner of a building where an insurgent was hiding and smother it with fire. The shooters on both sides were like experienced boxers, jabbing and weaving, never leaving themselves open. The Marines punched mouseholes in the walls and threw up barricades in front of their machine guns, shifting from room to room every ten minutes.
One insurgent sniper had a fine field of view from a window that looked down on the platoon’s building. Every few minutes a well-aimed round drove a Marine back from his firing position.
“I can nail that bastard,” Corporal Dylan Rokos said. Rokos was an assault squad leader, an expert in blowing breaches in walls and employing the SMAW. He ducked outside with his gunner and climbed onto the roof of the carport to sight in on the sniper’s window. With bullets flicking by, the SMAW team set up. Rokos tapped the gunner to take the shot. Just as the rocket was fired, Rokos looked around, saw a Marine crouching in the backblast area, and dove backward, knocking the Marine clear. No one was seriously injured.
Ackerman had gone up on the roof to call in artillery. The air sounded full of invisible hornets and bees buzzing and snapping, the
cracks!
of the AKs sounding distant and remote, almost disconnected from the bullets whizzing by. The platoon commander was amazed to see SMAW team after SMAW team repeat what Rokos had done—breaking from cover, kneeling in the street, taking a shot, and then ducking back inside.
With his GPS, Ackerman had an exact fix on his position and called 81s and 155s on the buildings to the west. The red tracers from the platoon’s machine guns marked targets for the main guns of two tanks. Sometimes air joined in, hitting buildings two hundred meters south. But tires were burning up and down the main streets, and a brisk westerly wind mixed the smoke and the dust of the battle, obscuring target observation.
Most of the firing was at suspected locations inside buildings. With rifles resting on chairs and windowsills, both sides could hit any target they could fix. Insurgents ventured outside only to sprint across openings. It was rare to see a man for more than two or three seconds.
The platoon had the upper hand, with ample supporting arms and clear fields of fire. No Marine had been killed. Capt Cunningham was satisfied to let Ackerman fight from his redoubt while the company attacked on an axis one hundred meters to the west. That would relieve the pressure and they could join up later.