Grunts (61 page)

For these grunts, like Staff Sergeant Bellavia and his squad, the fighting that unfolded in Fallujah was personal and visceral. Just before dawn on November 9, Bellavia and his people were in a house, scouting for any sign of the enemy. They were shrouded in a silence that struck the Buffalo native as incongruous because he could almost feel the presence of the jihadis. With nine months of combat experience in Iraq, he had developed that sixth sense about impending danger that often characterizes good NCOs. He decided to order one of his men, Private John Ruiz, to fire an 84-millimeter AT4 rocket at a propane tank on the next block. Hopefully this would provoke a response from any nearby insurgents. But, just as Ruiz was about to lean out the doorway to shoot, Sergeant Bellavia heard footsteps in the street. Someone was coming. By the sounds of his approaching footfalls, crunching off the shards of glass and rubble that blanketed the street, the person was heading straight for them. Bellavia peeked out and saw a man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. He was carrying a car battery, a common tool for setting off big IEDs. He was about fifty meters away and approaching quickly. “He’s got a big bushy, mountain-man beard and is covered with filth,” Bellavia wrote. “His clothes are smeared with gunk. His face is splotched with grime. He looks like a street person . . . just two eyeballs walking.”

A spasm of terror shot through Bellavia, nearly debilitating him. This was a typical self-preservation instinct in the presence of a live enemy. For most humans, the normal reaction to such mortal danger was to run away, but soldiers must be different, even counterintuitive. As a way to conquer fear, they are intensely trained to focus on specific tasks, especially in the face of such danger, so that fear will be forgotten or sublimated to the job at hand.

So, for Bellavia, the moment of abject terror passed quickly as he focused on his prey. He raised his M4 carbine and prepared to fire. Unlike many early-twenty-first-century American grunts, he had little interest in hunting. But he knew that hunters often emitted a quick noise to startle their prey into stopping short or turning toward the shooter. Sergeant Bellavia called out casually: “Hey.” Sure enough, the insurgent stopped and looked at Bellavia, presenting a perfect target. The twenty-nine-year-old squad leader squeezed off two tracer bullets that streaked into the man’s chest and shoulder. Both hits produced “a puff of smoke, like exhaust from a cigarette.” As the wounded man stumbled around, his eyes bulged and he screamed in agony. “He howls, a long mewling, pain-wracked scream.” Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts, a fellow squad leader, swung his shotgun into position atop Bellavia’s helmet and laced the man with two slugs, tearing one of his arms off, knocking him down. A SAW gunner on the roof added several bullets that tore him up even more. When several of the machine gunner’s bullets missed, they bounced up and down the street and off nearby houses. Then all was silence again.

A surge of adrenaline-laced excitement swept through Bellavia. He was so euphoric at killing the insurgent that he felt as if his vital organs were rearranging inside of him. His triumph instilled in him a keen sense of masculinity, as if he had now proven himself a better man than the insurgent. He felt powerful, almost invulnerable. He cupped his hand to his mouth and emitted an animal-like cry of victory: “You can’t kill me! You hear me, fuckers? You will never kill me!” He was excited to be alive. He was also overcome with relief that he had what it took to kill another human being in such a personal fashion. “Combat distilled to its purest form is a test of manhood,” he wrote. “In modern warfare, that man-to-man challenge is often hidden by modern technology—the splash of artillery fire can be random, a rocket or bomb or IED can be anonymous. Those things make combat a roll of the dice. But on this street and in these houses, it can be man-to-man. My skills against his. I caught him napping and he died.”

In such instances, when soldiers kill face-to-face, euphoria can erode quickly into guilt over taking life. The perceptive Bellavia expected this contradiction and even welcomed it. “Combat is a descent into the darkest part of the human soul. A place where the most exalted nobility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together. What a man finds there defines how he measures himself for the rest of his life. I embrace the battle. I welcome it into my soul.” By doing so, he was probably trying to master the guilt that often leads to post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is, to a great extent, a product of guilt—survivor’s guilt, guilt at not measuring up to one’s self-image or the expectations of others in combat, most of all, guilt at having killed. Staff Sergeant Bellavia knew all the risks. Every bit a professional grunt, he was determined to overcome them.

As it turned out, the insurgent had been in the process of laying a horrifying trap for 2-2 Infantry. The battery he was carrying was meant to touch off a colossal amount of explosives that were packed into a house that the grunts were about to clear. “The whole thing was wired to blow,” Bellavia recalled. “I’ve never seen that much C-4 [explosive] in my entire life. It looked like a log cabin, that’s how many bricks were all taped together on the walls.” Propane tanks and even a fuel tank from a jet aircraft were cleverly arranged among the whole deadly bouquet. When Bellavia had first spotted the insurgent, he had been heading for a nearby fighting hole. His mission, the soldiers soon understood, had been to wait for the platoon to enter the house and then touch the battery to wires leading away from the house, into the hole. The ensuing combination of flames and powerful explosives of this BCIED (building-contained improvised explosive device) would, most likely, have killed everyone in the platoon. With this chilling discovery, Bellavia and the others felt anything but guilt. They were pleased, and relieved, that they had killed the bearded man.

Creeped out by the thought that other BCIEDs might await them, the Ramrod grunts spent the rest of the night clearing houses. Their knees and elbows were already raw from scraping against rubble and glass. They encountered more booby traps but none so elaborate as the notorious first BCIED. At each house they expected major resistance, and there were a few firefights, but most of the buildings were unoccupied. Newell’s battalion was moving so quickly that they were already closing in on Highway 10. The speedy advance had a downside, though. As the pre-assault plan had envisioned, Newell’s assault platoons were smashing through the enemy’s prepared defenses, disrupting their movements, and killing some of them. But there were no front lines and 2-2 Infantry was deeper into the city than the neighboring Marines. This meant that the insurgents were all around Newell’s men, capable of popping up anywhere.

After sunrise, when the Americans no longer enjoyed the advantage of their night vision devices, the enemy fighters grew more aggressive. Sergeant Bellavia’s squad was on a rooftop, looking south, when, from all around them, they heard a chorus of voices hollering to one another in Arabic. The voices trailed away and a single whistle blew. As the whistle tapered off, he and his men heard the sound of several dozen feet tromping through the dizzying warren of streets and alleys around them. “They’re coming for us,” Bellavia thought.

The squad’s supporting Bradleys and tanks were, for the moment, occupied elsewhere. Although it would take them several minutes to work their way into position, around buildings and through streets, they could help if need be. The sergeant turned to his men: “We’re not gonna bring any Brads up,” he said to them. “We’re gonna make them think they’ve trapped dismounts in the open without support. They’re gonna rush us, and we’ll fucking take them out. Hooah?” His grunts all replied with “Hooahs” of their own. In the early-twenty-first-century Army, this ubiquitous word had many meanings, ranging from “okay” to “gung ho” to “I agree” or even “I understand.” The soldiers were arrayed in a firing line, covering every angle of approach, with SAWs, M4s, and M16s at the ready. Bellavia, ever the conscientious NCO, reminded his shooters to aim low and adjust high for maximum accuracy. The air was dusty and thick. Visibility was good. They could see for several blocks in every direction, although the sight revealed little more than the typical mishmash of drab, sandstone-colored buildings that characterized much of Fallujah.

The attacking insurgents soon ran into serious trouble. From the vantage point of a nearby house, Fitts’s squad opened fire through windows and doors and slaughtered several of them. In the stunned aftermath, Fitts moved his people out of that house and linked up with Bellavia. All was quiet now. No one was in sight. The two sergeants estimated that somewhere out there was a force of about fifty or sixty mujahideen. They were desperately looking for the Americans but they did not know exactly where they were. They were probably spooked by the ambush Fitts had just sprung on them.

Suddenly, from about one hundred meters to the north (behind the line of the American advance), they heard a voice crying “Allah!” The grunts peered in that direction and saw a man in the middle of the street, aiming a machine gun, with an ammo belt wrapped around his arm, Rambo style. He was walking toward the Americans, chanting “Allah!” and mumbling to himself. “The muj are probing us,” Bellavia wrote. “This lone fighter is a sacrificial lamb, baiting us to open fire and reveal our positions. It is a chilling way to employ a comrade.” Still the courageous man kept coming. His tone was resolute, defiant and passionate.

Bellavia, like most of the Americans, was contemptuous of the enemy’s fanaticism and cruelty, but he could not help but respect the insurgent’s valor and belief in his cause, odious though the sergeant believed that cause to be. Bellavia’s ambivalence was quite similar to the way Marines had felt about their Japanese enemies at Guam and Peleliu. When the machine-gun-wielding man got too close for comfort, Sergeant Bellavia ordered his machine gunners to open fire. Their staccato bursts spewed bullets into the pavement around the man. He looked right up at the Americans and roared at them in a tone that quaked with rage. Just as he opened fire, the machine-gun bullets tore through his legs like a saw. “White bone exposed, the insurgent collapses onto his severed legs,” Bellavia recalled. “He screams in agony, but refuses to give up the fight. Blood pools around him in the street.” Still the man leaned on his trigger. His rounds smashed into the American-held building with dull thuds. Another American burst engulfed him. “The insurgent is ripped apart. Chunks of flesh spray across the road.”

He had done his job, though. Within a minute, the Americans began taking intense machine-gun, rifle, and RPG fire. “The enemy is hitting us with everything he has,” Bellavia wrote. “Our wall becomes torn and pitted along the west and north sides. Figures dart between buildings and race across the street below.” Some of them were in and around the houses across the street, no more than thirty meters away. In the recollection of one witness, they wore “tracksuit pants and the uniforms of the Iraqi National Guard.” The Americans laced into them with everything at their disposal. The heavy cyclic bursts of machine guns melded crazily with the semiautomatic, throaty cracking of rifles. Plumes of smoke rose from the feed trays of the SAWs. Empty brass casings tinkled onto the ledge of the roof and spilled downward into the street or onto the rooftop. A fragment from a tracer round hit Sergeant Warren Misa in the face. Bellavia fished it out. Misa was okay but his face was swollen and infected where the fragment had burrowed into the skin.

The two sides screamed and cursed at each other. One of the Americans stood up, shouted “fire in the hole!” and fired an AT4 rocket at an insurgent taking cover behind a gate below. Someone let out a whoop, like a child exulting over fireworks. The gate exploded. Two machine gunners followed with several bursts, killing the enemy shooter. An RPG exploded just below the ledge, shaking the entire roof with concussion. Many others streaked by, “flying left and right, impacting buildings,” in the recollection of one soldier. The firefight was evolving into a standoff. At this rate, though, the Americans risked losing fire superiority to the more numerous insurgents.

Fitts and Bellavia decided to play the mech infantryman’s ace in the hole. One of them got on the radio and called up a Bradley commanded by Staff Sergeant Cory Brown, a man nicknamed “Grizzly Bear” by his platoon mates because of his personal courage. The two rifle sergeants asked Brown to attack alone down the insurgent-held street. The intrepid Bradley commander readily accepted the challenge. “The Bradley rolls forward down the street and straight into the insurgents,” Bellavia recalled. “At first, they’re astonished the Brad is counterattacking by itself. But they quickly swarm the Brad with tracers. RPGs strike the road around it.” The Bradley responded with a steady barrage of 25-millimeter. The abrupt sonic booming of the rounds slashed the air as the shells smashed into rooftops, windows, asphalt, and, most likely, people. Each round evoked miniwaves of shock and assaulted eardrums.

An IED exploded near Brown’s Bradley, obscuring it in dust and smoke. The mujahideen thought they had crippled the Brad. A group of them rushed down the street, trying to close the distance to Brown’s vehicle, destroy it at intimate range, and kill the three crewmen. On the rooftop, the grunts had a perfect view of the enemy’s movements (thus personifying the military term “overwatch”). Several of them had M203 grenade launchers attached to their rifles. They dropped 40-millimeter grenades among the enemy, pinning them down while the riflemen and machine gunners scythed them with bullets. A few went down and did not get up. Others scrambled for cover.

Brown’s Bradley rolled warily in reverse down the street, back toward the friendly support of Bellavia’s group. An enemy RPG team materialized next to a cistern and snapped off a shot. The warhead exploded next to Brown’s battered and scarred Bradley but did no major damage. In response, Staff Sergeant Brown raised his TOW box and unleashed the fury of this fearsome weapon upon them. “When it comes to urban fighting,” Bellavia commented, “a TOW is a gift from the Pentagon gods.” The TOW hurtled down the street and exploded next to the cistern, killing the RPG men. Bellavia saw other enemy survivors making a run for it. “Our guns cut down seven of them. [One] insurgent runs out of his sandals before Ruiz shoots him in the belly. Our men cheer wildly and shout taunts.”