“Connors, Connors! My God, I think I killed him!” Lovato was yelling. “Answer me, for God’s sake, answer me!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Connors said over the radio, “but get me the fuck out of this room right now!”
Longenecker threw covering fire down the right-hand side of the corridor as Connors crawled down the left side. After he fired three rounds, Longenecker stopped shooting.
“I’ll supply all the fucking rounds you’ll ever need!” Connors screamed.
Longenecker resumed firing, and Connors stumbled out into the bright sunlight of the courtyard.
Aragon poked around in the garbage and pulled out a broken mirror. Smashing off a corner, he taped it to a stick. “We’ll poke it around a corner and see where they are,” he said.
Connors and Aragon went back down the corridor to try their invention. It fell apart on the first try. So they each threw another grenade into the quiet bedroom and backed out of the corridor.
“Let’s check with the staff sergeant,” Connors said. “We don’t have enough firepower.”
Once inside the large house, the five corporals became uncomfortable from all the stares from their Marines. Aragon asked for a SMAW, and they went up on the roof. The sniper fire had ceased, and Aragon drew aim on the back part of the bedroom, fifty feet away across the courtyard. The rocket struck a little to the left, gouging out a corner of the house but not creating a line of sight into the bedroom. The pillbox remained intact.
Pillsbury called for tank support, and the corporals went down to keep careful watch, determined that Desiato’s body was going home and nowhere else. When the tank rolled up with the hatches shut, the gunners sprayed the walls and windows with .50 caliber, then backed into the front of the house, trying to collapse it.
Connors ran forward and banged on the side of the tank with his pistol. When the hatch opened, he vigorously shook his head no—they weren’t going to bury Desiato. He couldn’t make himself heard over the tank engine, so in pantomine he showed that he wanted the main gun to fire where he directed. He then calculated the angles, pointed his pistol at the front of the house, and fired two bullets, one high and one low, to the left of the doorway. The tanker nodded and backed off, while the five corporals took cover.
BAANG!
The first jarring round slammed through the high side of the house exactly where Connors had shot.
BAANG!
Again, dead on, this time through the lower side. The pillbox was breached. The five Marines ran up, three to the main door, one to each hole, rifles aimed in. As the dust settled, through both holes they could see into the back bedroom. Donaghy saw movement, yelled
Oogaf!
(Stop!), and put one round in a man’s head. Having moved down the corridor, Longenecker peeked around the corner as an insurgent darted out to fire. Longenecker dropped to one knee and put three rounds into the man’s chest. Connors, Aragon, and Lovato rushed forward and flooded the room, firing into every corner, emptying magazines into every crumpled figure they could see.
Through the acrid smoke they counted six insurgents sprawled inside the tiny room, one flattened against the back wall under the window, three sagging along the back wall, and two lying on top of one another in a corner. All wore dark shirts and pants and sneakers. They had backpacks, AK magazine vests, money, binoculars, grenades, AKs, and a Dragunov sniper rifle with a telescope. The oldest—the one with the thick black beard who had thrown the grenade at Connors—looked to be in his late forties. The others were in their twenties or late teens, except for the youngest. He was about twelve or thirteen.
The five corporals—in Homer’s words,
deadly men in the strong encounters—
had finished their mission. They took a stretcher, covered LCpl Desiato with blankets, and carried the body from the pillbox back to the platoon position to await transportation to Massachusetts.
_____
That afternoon the television networks showed the video of the Marine shooting the wounded insurgent inside the mosque. Al Jazeera played the clip every hour. The terrorists had provided a video of the execution of Margaret Hassan, but Al Jazeera refused to air it, knowing that would provoke outrage against the insurgents. Instead, Al Jazeera posted side by side a photo of Hassan and a picture of the Marine aiming his rifle, suggesting they were the twin sides of terror.
_____
Zarqawi and his terrorists had used Fallujah as their sanctuary for six months. The man was the face of evil, cunning and calculating. His suicide bombings had driven the United Nations from Iraq, slaughtered hundreds of Shiites, killed dozens of Americans, and inspired extremists to follow his example. Several times the special forces thought they had him trapped, but he continued to escape.
On November 16, a kilometer east of where Connors had fought, the armored battalion 2-2 had trapped two dozen insurgents in a large walled compound. When the insurgents had held out despite repeated poundings from the Abrams tanks, LtCol Newell, the 2-2 commander, called in air strikes, reducing the complex building by building.
Amid the smoldering wreckage, Newell’s soldiers found underground tunnels, shattered body parts, computers, passports, and letters from Zarqawi. An Arabic sign on one wall read “Al Qaeda Organization.” Inside a factory for making bombs, a Ford Explorer rigged with explosives sat on the assembly line.
The demolishment of the Zarqawi complex signaled the termination of major combat inside the city. Zarqawi confirmed the defeat by posting an audiotape on the Internet, condemning the Sunni clerical establishment for abandoning his cause in Fallujah.
“You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy,” he said.
While his base of operations had been eliminated, Zarqawi himself remained at large.
_____
The battle began on November 7, and the Iraqi government declared the city secured on November 13. But as Malay and the other battalions applied squeegee tactics to a larger and larger area, American casualties continued for weeks.
The rationale for stopping the attack in April was a perception that the damage being done was too great. In the month of April, 150 air strikes had destroyed 75 to 100 buildings. In November the damage was vastly greater. There were 540 air strikes and 14,000 artillery and mortar shells fired, as well as 2,500 tank main gun rounds. Eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s 39,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. In the November attack 70 Americans were killed and 609 wounded.
During the twenty-month struggle for Fallujah, 151 Americans had died and more than a thousand were wounded.
In late November a high-ranking American general from Baghdad drove through the city, looking carefully to the left and to the right. After several minutes he told the driver to stop. He got out and looked up and down the devastated street, at the drooping telephone poles, gutted storefronts, heaps of concrete, twisted skeletons of burnt-out cars, demolished roofs, and sagging walls.
“Holy shit,” he said.
EPILOGUE
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BY INCHES, NOT YARDS
____
January to May 2005
IN JANUARY 2005 THE IRAQIS WENT to the polls to elect a National Assembly charged with forming a government and writing a constitution. Over 60 percent of the eligible voters nationwide went to the polls, an impressive turnout and a significant success for the supporters of democracy. In the Sunni areas, though, the turnout was less than 8 percent. Sunni leaders and clerics urged a boycott that was obeyed.
The residents slowly returned to a devastated Fallujah. Marines and Iraqi soldiers patrolled the streets and the periphery. Iraqi males of mili-tary age were fingerprinted, given retina scans, and issued identification cards. The few vehicles allowed in were rigorously searched. There were scant instances of IEDs or gunfire. Fallujah was the safest town in Iraq, albeit the most heavily guarded. Jobs were scarce, as was potable water and electricity. Fallujah was resolved by locking down the city behind barbed wire—not a model for other cities.
In Ramadi, the situation was unchanged from the summer. Battalion 2/4 had been replaced by Battalion 2/5. “Progress is going to be gained by inches, not yards,” the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Randy Newman, said.
In Ramadi there was no identifiable fundamentalist leader like Janabi. Instead, a loose collection of insurgent gangs cajoled and intimidated, controlling the marketplace, the back streets, and the behavior of the people. In response to threats, the entire police force had walked off the job before the January elections. Scarcely anyone voted. In Ramadi, in the third year of the insurgency, it was still predominantly the Americans against the Sunni insurgents operating inside a Sunni city.
As for Fallujah, by the spring of 2005 it had reverted to a nondescript industrial city with no distinguishing characteristics. The insurgency inside the city had been quashed, but at a great price.
The insurgency in Iraq as a whole, however, had not been defeated. Sunni leadership was unrepentant about the past repression of Shiites and unreconciled to being a numerical minority in a democracy. On April 26, 2005, one year after Zembiec’s fierce house-to-house fight at the Jolan cemetery, Gen Myers held a press conference at the Pentagon: “Their [the insurgents’] capability is about where it was a year ago,” he said.
The American forces had held the line against the insurgents, but only the Iraqis themselves could quell the insurrection. The two Iraqi battalions in the November battle in Fallujah had acquitted themselves well, and their American advisers were proud. They were bothered, though, that the Iraqi soldiers going on leave changed into civilian clothes and hitched rides in buses and cars. None dared wear a uniform off duty. The insurgents had lost their Sunni sanctuary in Fallujah, but they hadn’t lost their ability to intimidate.
The insurgency would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.
CONCLUSION
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NO TRUE GLORY
AFTER THE BATTLE IN THE HOUSE from hell, Sgt Byron Norwood’s body was returned to the small town of Pflugerville, Texas. Col Toolan delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Later the Norwoods wrote a letter to President Bush expressing Byron’s pride in serving his country. The president invited them to attend the State of the Union address, during which he singled them out for thanks. The twenty-month battle for Fallujah had reached from the house from hell to the White House.
The singular lesson from Fallujah is clear: when you send our soldiers into battle, let them finish the fight. Ordering the Marines to attack, then calling them off, then dithering, then sending them back in constituted a flawed set of strategic decisions. American soldiers are not political bargaining chips. They fight for one another, for winning the battle, and for their country’s cause.
There were two separate chains of command in Iraq. Ambassador Bremer had authority for determining the country’s policy and the budget, but he did not direct the operations of the American military. General Abizaid had responsibility for security, but he did not direct the development of the Iraqi force to replace the American military. This separation of authority from responsibility constituted a grave systemic flaw.
The responsibility for making critical decisions concerning Fallujah bounced back and forth between the military and the civilians. After the mutilation of the four contractors in Fallujah in April 2004, the White House and high officials reacted emotionally by ordering a full attack on the city. Gen Abizaid was key in making that decision, with Bremer in support. When Iraqi officials reacted with equal emotion against it, Bremer recommended to the White House a cease-fire rather than risk the resignation of Iraqi officials. The Marine option was to finish the battle rather than risk turning Fallujah into an enemy sanctuary. Abizaid concurred with Bremer, not with the Marines. With both field commanders (Bremer and Abizaid) in agreement, the Marine option was closed out and was not presented to President Bush.
As the unilateral cease-fire dragged on, the stream of advice flowing into the White House from multiple sources—Abizaid, Bremer, Sanchez, Blackwill, Blair, and others—resulted in countermands and caused confusion down the ranks. In late April, with Abizaid and Bremer unwilling to seize the city, the Marines turned it over to the Fallujah Brigade. That political decision should have involved the civilian diplomats, but the military chain of command excluded them.
In war, authority and responsibility should reside in the same organization. Iraq required one unified civilian-military staff reporting to a single commander who would be held responsible for all key decisions.
Our military lacked clarity of mission. Some American divisions were pursuing offensive operations, while others were trying to invigorate municipal services and select Iraqi leaders. In July 2003 CentCom announced it was fighting an insurgency. Yet a year was wasted during which American forces could have trained and selected Iraqi military leaders. The dissolution of the Iraqi Army and the failure to develop quickly a replacement security force were the principal shortfalls attendant to the liberation of Iraq.
For these lapses, the generals were as responsible as the civilians. The CPA had the authority to develop the security force—and CentCom had firmly supported the creation of the CPA. When Bremer dissolved the Iraqi military, the Central Command did not object. While having the authority to create a new army, the hastily assembled CPA staff lacked the expertise to do so. The CPA, though, did have diplomats whose negotiating skills were essential to developing a new Iraqi government. The separate military and civilian staffs needed to be pulled together.
The high command, both civilian and military, interfered too much in Fallujah and knew too little. Twice Abizaid overruled his own field commanders, by first ordering them to attack and then ordering them to stop a week later. The televideo was used too often as a substitute for written staff work, while those with critical information, like the division commander Mattis, were not included in those conferences—despite the new technologies. The solipsism that too frequently infects high commands has no place on a battlefield.