Grunts (62 page)

The longer the battle raged, the more it favored the Americans. With the insurgent locations pinpointed, the dismounts began to work closely with tanks and Bradleys, devastating the enemy with coordinated fire. Once pinned down, it was hard for them to escape. The Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, still fighting from the cloverleaf outside of town, added still more Bradley, tank, machine-gun, and sniper fire, killing even more enemy. The muj could not hope to succeed against this effective blend of armored firepower and quality dismounted infantrymen. “We . . . scored a significant victory,” Bellavia said. “We suffered only one slightly wounded and killed many, many bad guys. We withstood a multidirectional attack for over three and a half hours.”
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Under the weight of this combined arms power, 2-2 Infantry kept advancing swiftly. In one instance, they spotted large numbers of armed insurgents moving into a mosque that was located in neighboring ⅛ Marines’ area of responsibility. The soldiers radioed the Marines and asked for permission to fire artillery at the mosque. Since 1/8’s rifle companies were still a considerable distance from the mosque, they finally assented after about an hour’s worth of cautious conversations about the political wisdom of shelling such a holy site. Firing from Camp Fallujah several miles away, Paladin 155-millimeter howitzer crews unleashed a staggered pair of twenty-round barrages right onto the mosque and its surrounding area. “Some hit the building and some hit just south of it,” Lieutenant Neil Prakash, a tank commander who helped call in the rounds, later said, “but every explosion went off, and it was like a volcano: three to five guys shot up like they’d come out of a geyser.” Prakash’s tank was near Highway 10, a couple thousand meters from the mosque. In his turret, he leaned forward and gazed at the flying bodies through his commander’s sight. He had done much of the spotting for the artillerymen. Now he surveyed the gruesome results of his competence as bodies flew in every direction. “They were perfectly still, not waving or fanning their arms or anything. They were already dead as they were going airborne and blossoming out. I was looking at this place and it was just smoldering. There are very few times that I’ve ever felt sorry for the enemy, but this time they just got slaughtered.”

Back at the cloverleaf, one of the reconnaissance scouts peered through his L-RAS and saw a round impact “on the left side of the building and I saw three bodies fly into the air. It was awesome.” Several of the Americans saw bodies hit the ground and bounce two stories into the air. Some bounced as high as five stories. “It was the most insane, surreal thing I’d ever seen, just watching these bodies fly,” one of them said. “They looked like dolls.” They may have looked like dolls, but they were flesh-and-blood men, destroyed with ruthless finality by modern firepower. It was the essence of the violent horror that characterizes modern war.

As the shells exploded against and in the mosque, survivors poured outside in hopes of escaping. “[They] were stumbling out, coughing from the smoke,” Captain Chris Boggiano of the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop recalled. A fresh barrage landed among them, blowing some to pieces. Arms, heads, and pieces of flesh flew in all directions. Lieutenant Prakash watched one enemy fighter emerge “out of the gray smoke, and he’s holding his stomach, dragging his AK by the sling, and he’s gagging and retching; and just then . . . ten more rounds landed right on top of his head.” The shelling killed between forty and seventy insurgents, including one of Zarqawi’s top lieutenants.

By late afternoon on November 9, 2-2 Infantry had secured Highway 10. Many of the 2-2 grunts yearned to continue their advance and keep the enemy in disarray. They wanted to push across the highway and clear the industrial areas of south Fallujah. But they were too far ahead of the Marines to do that, so they paused at Highway 10. To some of the soldiers, the Marines seemed slow and deliberate, too preoccupied with clearing every last building before continuing the advance. “You could see the differences in how we fight,” Major Eric Krivda, the XO of 2-2, said. “We’d do whatever we could to drop [a] building first” with tanks and Bradleys. “The last possible resort is we send an infantry squad in to clean up the remnants.” Captain Fowler, an Army tanker, even claimed that the pause allowed the insurgents “to move back behind our lines. We ended up forcing them out again, but we don’t like to pay for the same ground twice.” Some of the Marines, conversely, thought the Army was moving so fast because they were simply riding around in armored vehicles, shooting at targets and moving on, without dismounting and truly eliminating resistance.

Both perceptions were wrong. For the most part, the battle was unfolding according to plan. In a figurative sense, the Army was shattering the enemy’s wall; the Marines were cleaning up the rubble. Each and every building did have to be cleared or the insurgents would infiltrate back into them. Marine light infantry and the Iraqi battalions were best suited for that time-consuming, exhausting task. By the same token, the Army’s mechanized capability was ideal for urban fire support and mobility, so it was not the least bit surprising that Lieutenant Colonel Newell’s 2-2 Infantry moved faster than the Marines. Newell’s small number of dismounts, and not any deficiency on the part of the Marines, meant that 2-2 would have to do much back-clearing of areas the unit had already traversed. “We do have some disadvantages in not having lots of dismounted infantry,” Newell said, “so that’s why . . . there needs to be a balanced organization. It’s a complementary relationship.” At Fallujah, the concept of melding Marine light infantry dexterity with Army mechanized brawn worked very well, and with an amazing minimum of friendly fire problems.

Thus, Newell’s grunts began clearing buildings on either side of Highway 10 “to destroy pockets of enemy resistance bypassed during the attack south,” the unit after action report said. By now, hungry packs of stray dogs and cats had learned to follow the Americans as they assaulted the buildings, because they left behind so many bodies in their wake. One soldier witnessed a cat eat the lips off a dead insurgent. Sergeant Bellavia saw several hungry dogs feeding on the remains of a dead enemy fighter. “The dogs gnaw and tear at his flesh. One comes up, his snout smeared in gore. My stomach flutters.” In some cases, the animals ate all the way through to the bone.

Covered by Abramses and Bradleys, the Army grunts kicked in so many doors, cleared so many houses, dodged so many booby traps, and destroyed so many weapons caches that they lost count. Time after time, the grunts lined up in a stack, on either side of a doorway, hugging the wall, each man orienting his weapon to cover a different sector, each wondering to himself if he was about to enter a BCIED or a house full of jihadis. The skin of the grunts was peppered with nicks and cuts. Their eyes were rimmed with dark circles. They stank of dust, cordite, stale MRE crumbs, body odor, and soiled underwear. The sweaty T-shirts that hugged their irritated skin had given many of them prickly heat. They were irritable and surly. They were coated with the disgust and cynicism of infantrymen in combat.

Firefights erupted on various blocks. The Americans annihilated anyone in their path. On one street, an enemy machine gunner opened up on a group of Americans just as they rammed through the door of the house he was defending. He wounded three of them before the grunts pulled back and a Mark 19 gunner blew the enemy gunner to pieces. Sergeant Bellavia came upon another muj gunner lying in rubble alongside his weapon. The sergeant and one of his team leaders opened fire. “I hit him twice in the back and hear his lungs expel a sudden rush of air. Was it a death rattle? I’m not sure.” A pool of sticky, dark red blood engulfed the fighter. The other soldier shot him in the head. Bellavia nudged his legs apart and kicked him in the groin, just to make sure he wasn’t playing possum. The sergeant’s boot sank deep into his leg cavity and he realized that the man had no scrotum or penis left. Needless to say, the man was very dead.
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A few minutes later, as the clock neared midnight and the men were on the verge of exhaustion, the platoon assaulted a handsome two-story square-shaped home. Behind the house was a nice courtyard garden. Bellavia figured that the house and garden must have belonged to someone with money. He knew that this was the Askari District, where many of Saddam’s military officers had lived.

The lead soldiers found the front door unlocked. In the stack, there were men from both Bellavia’s squad and Fitts’s. With Sergeant Misa in the lead, they surged into the dark front room of the house. The only illumination came from the SureFire flashlights they had fastened onto their rifles. Beams of light bounced along the walls and corners as each soldier cleared his respective sector. Bellavia was outside, in the courtyard, watching this through a window when, all of a sudden, he heard shooting and a lot of it. He rushed inside, just in time to see tracers ricocheting off the floor and walls. There were so many that, to Bellavia, it looked like someone had thrown a telephone pole on top of a big campfire, sending embers flying in all directions. The tracers sizzled and hissed. They touched off little fires in piles of garbage and papers strewn about the house.

The shots were snapping off quickly, fast and desperate. The noise was deafening. Confusion reigned supreme. At first the sergeant thought his men were shooting at nothing so he screamed at them to cease fire. But, in reality, they were in heavy contact, pinned down in the living room by withering fire from well-hidden insurgents. The term “pinned down” is, in essence, a slice of military vernacular that means the enemy fire is so accurate, so deadly, so thick that any movement can bring instant death.

Two jihadis were hunkered down in the middle of the house, near a central stairwell, with well-sighted fields of fire into the living room and the foyer of the house. The truly amazing thing was that, with hundreds of bullets buzzing around, no one on either side had gotten hit yet. Bellavia chanced a look through the foyer doorway and saw the two muj shooting from behind “a pair of three-foot-high concrete Jersey barriers with little more than their heads and shoulders exposed. One of the insurgents holds an AK-47 against each shoulder with the barrels resting on one barrier. The other man has a Russian belt-fed PKM machine gun perched atop the other barrier.” Fitts and several other soldiers were pinned down opposite the doorway, on the other side of the living room.

A round grazed Private First Class Jim Metcalf, one of the SAW gunners, right under his body armor. He stumbled and cried out: “I’m hit!” The Americans heard the insurgents laughing above the din, mocking Metcalf, taunting him:
I’m heeet!!
At the same time shards of glass and debris practically filled the air. One of the soldiers took some fragments to the eyes and hollered: “My face! My eyes!” The insurgents laughed some more and wailed in mock distress:
Ohhhhh, my feeece! My eyes!
The sound of their voices made the hair on Bellavia’s neck stand up. It was as if they were questioning the manhood of the Americans. The sergeant was filled with rage and fear, and it is safe to say the others were, too. As a leader, he tried to remain calm enough to consider what to do. He realized that, with several men pinned down inside the house, the supporting fire of tanks, Bradleys, artillery, and close air support were all useless. The enemy had designed their fighting position for just this type of close encounter. “This ambush is the product of study,” he wrote, “an enemy who has thoroughly analyzed our strengths and weaknesses. They’ve created a fighting position that negates our advantages of firepower and mobility. All we can do is fight them at point-blank range with the weapons in our hands.”

This was exactly the sort of mano a mano situation that, according to the techno-vangelists, was supposed to be a relic of the past, but it was all too real and, in Fallujah, all too common. The two sides would fight to the finish with whatever weapons they had at their disposal. Wits, presence of mind, and valor counted for much in this terrifying environment. Here, weapons were the tools of fighting spirit.

Bellavia was in the best position to lean into the foyer and open fire on the insurgent position. This would put him squarely into a fatal funnel but it had to be done if Fitts and the other men were to have any chance to escape the house. Bellavia loved Fitts like a brother. The two men had been through nine months of combat together. Their feelings of brotherhood, combined with the squad leader’s heavy sense of responsibility, extended to every man inside the house. Bellavia dreaded the idea of exposing himself in the fatal funnel, but he knew he must do it.

Hollering back and forth, he and the others worked out a plan. When Bellavia stepped into the doorway and opened up with his SAW, the others would vacate the house—quickly. The New Yorker readied the SAW. He was still enraged, yelling insults back and forth with the muj. His breathing was jagged and nervous. His palms were sweating. A thousand thoughts raced through his intelligent brain, but a line from
The Exorcist
came to dominate: “The power of Christ compels you!” As a somewhat religious man, he was fascinated that this, of all things, would come to him during such a moment of peril. Perhaps it was because he equated his struggle against the insurgents to the movie priest’s epic battle with demons. He muttered a short prayer, stood up, and opened fire at the stairwell: “Go! Go! Go! Get out!” he screamed.

Sergeant Bellavia stood in the doorway and pointed his weapon at the Jersey barriers. The SAW can fire over seven hundred rounds per minute and Bellavia had a full drum of two hundred 5.56-millimeter bullets to cook off. As he leaned on the trigger, the insurgents did the same. “Bullets bash into the wall to my left. The doorframe splinters. Tracers hiss this way and that, bouncing off the bricks and ceiling. Bullets slam into the Jersey barriers and penetrate to their hard foam centers. Hunks of foam pop out of the holes I’ve made and cartwheel across the room. I can see their faces and they’re angry but they’re smiling; they look completely evil.”