Down the hall, Mitchell heard Nicoll yell, “I’m hit!” and 1/Sgt Kasal yell, “Get that goddamn cocksucker!”
“Is Nicoll okay?” Mitchell shouted. “Is he going to die?”
Sanchez felt his stomach turn over again. Nicoll was one of his best friends. He couldn’t die. This was all wrong. They had to get them out of there.
Mitchell told Sanchez to take care of Carlisle. Without a word he ran out of the room, hugging the wall as he sprinted for the bathroom. A grenade bounced and exploded behind him, and several AKs started firing. One round hit Mitchell’s rifle in the chamber. Another ricocheted off of his weapon and tore into his thigh—his third Purple Heart.
He skidded into the bathroom. Kasal lay on his side to let Mitchell attend to Nicoll in the cramped space. As the blood dripped from him, Kasal’s blood pressure fell and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he jerked back, he yelled at Nicoll to stay awake. Nicoll was nodding off for minutes at a time, then muttering that he was okay.
“Get him out,” Kasal said, “or he’ll bleed to death.”
Outside 1/Lt Grapes ran up to the house as Pruitt, Eldridge, Weemer, and Farmer were being helped into medevac Humvees. Over a handheld radio Grapes reached Mitchell.
“Find us another way out,” Mitchell said, “or to kill those fucks so we can walk out!”
Cpl Wolf, who had bandaged Mitchell’s arm in the fight the day before, pushed into the entryway next to Grapes and started shouting to Mitchell: “I got to get over there, man! You’re my boy! I’ve gotta come over there!”
Grapes and Wolf circled the house and found no other doors. The five windows had one-inch steel bars covering them.
“Where are they firing from?” Grapes asked Mitchell over the radio.
“There’s a ladderwell, and a skylight over the living room. At least one of them is on the roof!”
“All right,” Grapes told Wolf. “You get your team ready to pull them out. I’ll put shooters on the roof across the street to suppress those guys. Once I give you the signal, get in there and pull them out.”
Wolf agreed. While Wolf put together his rescue team, Grapes led a heavily armed squad onto the roof.
Sergeant Byron W. Norwood, who commanded a Humvee with a .50 caliber, entered the foyer with Wolf to see how he could bring the heavy gun to bear. Formerly a crew member on Col Toolan’s humvee, Norwood came from a small town in Texas. His sharp wit had reminded Toolan of New York City–type humor. Norwood poked his head around the doorway just as an insurgent let loose a burst. Rodriguez, guarding the door to the bedroom, saw Norwood peek into the main room and watched as his eyes suddenly grew wide. The bullet hit Norwood in the forehead, killing him instantly. Wolf was hit in the chest by the same burst and fell back unharmed, a bullet lodged in his armor vest.
Seeing the expression on Norwood’s face terrified Rodriguez.
I’m gonna be the next one shot,
he thought. Rodriguez asked Sanchez to relieve him in the doorway.
The Quick Reaction Force, a squad from Lieutenant John Jacobs’s 2nd Platoon, arrived on the scene. Within seconds Jacobs had his Marines maneuvering to bring fire on the insurgents.
On the nearby roof the Marines with Grapes poured fire toward the skylight. They were at the same height, though, and the bullets were passing over the heads of the insurgents. With the wounded inside, throwing grenades or bringing heavy weapons into play was out of the question. Wolf couldn’t push across the main room without better suppression.
Chandler and Severtsgard, trapped in the kitchen, thought they could batter their way through a padlocked metal panel leading to the entryway. After shooting and hammering at the panel for several minutes, they pried it open and squeezed through. Wolf laid down suppressing fire, and they staggered through the entryway and out into the courtyard.
Both were bleeding badly. Chandler was howling in pain, his leg twisted in a spiral fracture from hip to foot. Severtsgard slumped down against the courtyard wall, blood pouring from his fractured foot. Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum came to his aid. Tatum, who had the thickest pair of glasses in Kilo Company, offered to remove Severtsgard’s torn boot.
“Go to hell, you blind fuck! No way you are working on my foot!” Severtsgard yelled at his friend, getting to his feet and limping toward the nearest Humvee.
Grapes and Jacobs knelt by the wall to plan what to do next. Five Marines were trapped inside. Rifle fire wasn’t budging the insurgents hiding behind the cement wall on the catwalk above the main room, and Mark 19 fire or hand grenades would injure the trapped Marines.
“Flashbangs! The insurgents will think they’re grenades and duck,” Grapes said.
Jacobs led his men to the entryway, flipped in two flashbangs, and rushed in firing. The insurgents immediately returned fire. Stalemate.
Back outside Grapes, Crossan, and Private Justin Boswood crept up to a bedroom window in the back of the house. Grapes and Boswood took turns with a sledgehammer, hammering at the steel bars. Grapes could hear his wounded Marines wailing in pain inside. He could hear Mitchell yelling, “Get us the fuck out of here!” After smashing and smashing, they pried two bars slightly apart. They stripped off their armor and gear and squeezed through. Marines handed their weapons to them.
Boswood pulled a dead insurgent’s body out of the doorway, the blood from his skull covering the floor. Grapes slid on his back into the main room, his sights fixed on the skylight above. Boswood knelt over Grapes’s chest, covering the stairs.
Grapes, Jacobs, and Sanchez at last had the catwalk in a three-cornered crossfire.
“Ready?” Grapes yelled. “Fire!”
From three angles the Marines fired up at the crosswalk, forcing the insurgents to duck behind the wall.
Lance Corporals Christopher Marquez and Jonathon Schaffer sprinted across the kill zone, grabbed Kasal, and dragged him back to the entryway. Then they ran back and brought out Nicoll. Then Mitchell.
That left Sanchez, Rodriguez, and Carlisle in the back bedroom down the hall. The Marines could either continue running the gauntlet across the main room or get through the bars over the bedroom window. Corporal Richard Gonzalez, a demolitions expert known as the “mad bomber,” suggested blowing the bars off the window.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Sergeant Jose Nazario yelled. “You’ll fucking kill them! Don’t blow it!”
Corporal Eric Jensen came running up with a long chain that was looped around the bars. Jensen hooked the chain to a Humvee and pulled out the bars. Sanchez and Rodriguez put Carlisle on a makeshift stretcher and passed out his limp body.
With all the wounded out of the house, Grapes linked up with Mitchell. “Now we let Gonzalez do his work,” Grapes said.
The Marines peppered the house with fire and hooted and hollered as if they were still inside while Gonzalez prepared a twenty-pound satchel charge—sufficient to blow down two houses. Gonzalez crept inside the house and placed the satchel on top of a dead insurgent’s body. A few seconds later he ran outside.
“Fifteen seconds!”
They ducked for cover. The house exploded in a huge flash of red, followed by chunks of concrete thudding down as a vast cloud of dust. A pink mist mixed with the dust and gunpowder in the air. Grapes was happy to see it.
The Marines waited several minutes, then moved forward into the dusty rubble. They saw two bodies lying among the slabs. As they drew closer, they noticed one of them move.
“They’re still alive!”
An arm flicked limply forward, and a grenade tumbled toward the Marines. They turned and ran for cover. Sanchez saw Grapes and Crossan racing by him.
I’m too slow! I’m fucked!
he thought. The grenade went off, injuring no one.
Seven Marines climbed back up the rubble and fired two hundred rounds into the two insurgents. Among the detritus, 1/Lt Grapes found a woolen winter skullcap with bright colors, the kind worn by fighters in Chechnya. He kicked it into the dirt.
28
____
FIVE CORPORALS
AS GRAPES AND THE 3RD PLATOON battled the foreign fighters in the house from hell, other jihadists were burrowing in across southern Fallujah. India Company, just east of Kilo, was running into the same badgerlike resistance. The previous day India had fought for hours at a mosque with a blue-and-white-striped minaret. The mosque was built like a fort, with a dirt market square to its front and a row of one-story drab repair shops on the far side of the square. Ammunition caches inside the shops were cooking off, dust from the tank shells filled the air, and the insurgents were firing from inside positions, with few muzzle flashes showing. It took India Company three hours to smash down the mosque wall, drop the minaret, and storm the mosque, finding ten insurgents dead and five severely wounded. India pushed on in the attack, leaving behind the wounded insurgents.
On the thirteenth, Captain Brett Clark led India on a sweep back toward the mosque, again engaging jihadists in scattered houses. The 1st and 2nd Force Recon companies had sent to the battalions teams trained in Close Quarters Battle. At many hard spots a CQB team was asked to conduct the assault. There was no embarrassment in the asking. The clearing and reclearing was affecting some of the lance corporals, and the CQB Marines were the experts. But the toll on the recon teams was heavy.
When the Marines smashed into one small house, a band of jihadists opened fire; the bullets ripped through a closed door and hit one Marine. A man with a chest rig ran at the Marines as they entered. Though hit repeatedly, he staggered forward and blew himself up, killing Lance Corporal Justin D. McLeese. The Marines dragged out McLeese’s body and blew the house apart.
Expecting contact at any minute, the Marines of India Company retraced the route of yesterday’s attack. When they reached the mosque where they had fought so bitterly the day before, they entered warily. An embedded television journalist began filming the scene. Lying on the dirt floor were the dead and wounded insurgents from the previous day’s fight.
A Marine who had been wounded the day before pointed his rifle at a wounded insurgent. “He’s fucking faking he’s dead! He’s faking!” the Marine yelled, and shot the man in the head.
Blood splattered against the wall as the man’s legs twitched.
“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.
The TV journalist sent the video back to the press pool for worldwide distribution.
_____
On the fourteenth, the battalions again searched house by house. North of Highway 10, Battalion 3/5 was continuing with its squeegee tactics. Kilo Company was moving through an upper-class neighborhood of three-story houses landscaped with palm trees, grass, and flowered shrubbery. In one attractive house Lance Corporal George J. Payton climbed up a wide stairway and paused on the landing, then opened the door to his left.
A burst of automatic fire tore into his left leg, practically severing it, and he fell to the ground. Lance Corporal Kip Yeager scrambled forward, firing a full magazine from his M16 into the room. As Lance Corporal Mason Fisher fired over his shoulder, Yeager pulled back Payton, who was dying. A half-dozen Marines crouched around him on the stairs, trying to stanch the bleeding. Fisher threw a grenade into the room, and Yeager heard a
clunk!
as it came back out and bounced down the stairs.
Yeager stooped, caught it on the second bounce, flipped it into the room, waited for the explosion, and then went back in firing. Two insurgents were down on the floor. Another tumbled out of a closet. Yeager shot him. As Lance Corporal Phillip Miska burst into the dust-filled room, an insurgent lying behind the door fumbled for a grenade. With Miska in the line of fire, Yeager leaped on the man, drew his Gurkha knife, and plunged it into the insurgent’s neck.
_____
In the afternoon of the fourteenth, Battalion 3/5 smashed through the twisted labyrinth of the Jolan souk, whose paved alleyways were lined with hundreds of shops protected by padlocked gratings or roll-down metal shutters that the Marines tore off like the tops of beer cans. Air strikes had split open the sides of buildings, exposing demolished rooms and sagging roofs. Telephone poles lay snapped, with hundreds of sheared lines dangling like the webs of giant crazed spiders. It looked like a savage tornado had roared through the downtown district, smashing everything in its path, pausing capriciously to rip some buildings apart brick by brick before moving on.
In souks throughout the Middle East, centuries-old guilds specializing in leather goods, rugs, and jewelry clustered in different alleys. In the Jolan, LtCol Malay saw the same business tidiness and free-market enterprise, with different goods arranged in different alleys. Some alleys offered AKs, while others sold RPGs, IEDs, or mortars. Some shops stocked small-arms munitions, while the upscale shops specialized in spare parts for heavy-caliber weapons. There was even an alley for antiaircraft guns. In six days the battalion executive officer, Major Todd Desgrosseilliers, had inventoried for destruction more than a hundred thousand weapons and large-caliber shells.
Two hundred meters west of the souk lay the Euphrates and the narrow green trestle bridge dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge. In late afternoon, when Malay walked onto the bridge, the trestles stood etched against a beautiful sunset. It looked like a scene from
The Bridges of Madison County.
After mutilating the Americans last March, the mob had written in white paint an Arabic verse on the north trestle. It read:
Fallujah—Graveyard of the Americans.
Twenty feet away, on the south trestle in thick black paint, a Marine had printed a reply. It read:
THIS IS FOR THE AMERICANS OF BLACKWATER
MURDERED HERE IN 2004.
SEMPER FIDELIS, 3/5 DARK HORSE
FUCK YOU
LtCol Malay squinted at the hand-scrawled note. “Paint over that last line,” he said. “Leave the rest.”
Malay knew how his Marines felt. That afternoon they had found a female corpse dumped on a street, arms and legs cut off, entrails eviscerated. A later check determined that it was not Margaret Hassan, the English-born director of CARE who had lived in Iraq for two decades caring for the sick and the infirm. Kidnapped from Baghdad four weeks earlier, she had been shown on television tearfully begging Prime Minister Blair to withdraw the British troops before she was executed. The Marines were unable to identity the mutilated female corpse. Like the hacked-up bodies in the torture house next to the merry-go-round at Jolan Park, the woman was laid to rest in a grave under the name “unknown.”