Grunts (64 page)

According to Task Force 2-2’s after action report, “The speed and shock effect of the task force attack south cornered the insurgents into their last strongholds in the southern corners of the city and prevented them from reorganizing or developing a coherent defensive plan. These fighters fell back to prepared defensive positions, including spider holes, underground tunnels connecting basements of houses, IEDs along roads, houses rigged with explosives, and defensive positions on rooftops.” Newell’s formidable force steadily battered them to death. In the meantime, the Marines were also fighting house to house.
¹⁵

Door to Door with 3/1 Marines in the Jolan and Queens

Young and cocky, they were the unit descendants of the men who had fought at the Point and among the terrible Umurbrogol caves on Peleliu. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they were products of America’s postindustrial, information-age culture. They loved video games, guy movies, reality TV shows, porn, and glam magazines like
FHM
and
Maxim
. They called one another “dude” and “dog.” Even officers and sergeants routinely employed these ubiquitous monikers when talking to their young Marines. They were tech savvy and very bright, though they could sometimes be ignorant of grammatical niceties and basic geography. Modern American entertainment culture was so powerfully ingrained in them that they generally referred to their enemies as the “bad guys” and themselves as the “good guys,” as if the Iraq War was merely a giant action film. Many of them coated themselves with tattoos. Their music was a blend of country, hard rock, and rap. They no longer referred to their NCOs as “Sarge.” They called them “Sar’nt,” as if saying the full title might absorb too much time and energy. Their officers used words like “battlespace” instead of “battlefield” and “challenge” instead of “problem.” Like their World War II ancestors, the grunts smoked cigarettes in distressingly high numbers. But, unlike the Old Corps Marines, they knew all about the dangers of smoking and still did it. Even more commonly, they dipped snuff, mainly as a means to combat exhaustion, the favorite brands being Skoal and Copenhagen.

In some ways, they were societal anomalies. In the midst of postfeminist America, they were unapologetically macho and homophobic. Paragons of physical fitness, they fought for a country with a serious obesity problem. They swore so creatively and with such frequency that polite conversation with a civilian could be a greater challenge for some of them than the boot camp they had all endured and mastered. To put it mildly, they were politically incorrect and proud of it. Like almost all infantrymen, they were irreverent on the outside, reverent on the inside. They were a fascinating blend of hard-bitten cynicism and tenacious idealism.

They had more in common with their 3/1 Marine predecessors than otherwise. As with the 3/1 Marines at Peleliu, they loathed their enemies and everything they stood for, but respected their fanatical courage. Their weapons were different from the World War II Marines’, but their spirit was the same. They were grunts to the core—lean, aggressive, sour but good-hearted. They were among the finest light infantrymen in the world. Their competence and skill underscored the generally unappreciated reality that not just anyone can become an infantryman. “There is a certain amount of natural talent that can’t be created,” one Marine officer wrote. “When that talent is there it can be nurtured, but it can’t be created where it doesn’t exist.” A rifle platoon leader added his opinion that “there are probably few jobs in the Marine Corps . . . that are more challenging than being an infantry squad leader.”

In western Fallujah their job was to go door to door, cleaning out every building, in the Jolan and Queens, a pair of terrorist strongholds. “Clearing buildings is combat at its most primitive,” one embedded civilian historian wrote. “The fighting is up close and personal, not the pushbutton warfare that many Americans hear about and see on television.” This meant ending the lives of other human beings with a staggering degree of personal violence and trauma. “You’re just acutely aware of what war is about,” Major Joe Winslow, a Marine combat historian with 3/1, later said, “finding and violently killing other people as best you can and you’re exposed to the results of that . . . Marines being killed or injured, dead enemy body parts, bodies stuck everywhere, just death in general. It’s very earth shattering.” In fact, American intelligence officers believed that the Jolan was where many of the most hardcore insurgents, including Zarqawi’s crew, were headquartered. The area was also known for its narrow streets and dense, sturdy structures.

As with 2-2 Infantry in eastern Fallujah, in this western section of town the Army’s 2-7 Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey, led the way through the breach as an armored fist. They cleared the streets of IEDs and VBIEDS. They destroyed RPG and machine-gun teams. Their grunts cleared plenty of buildings. More than that, though, the sheer force of their tanks and Bradleys shocked the enemy into immobility. “The 3/1’s mission was to flow behind 2-7 after they entered the city . . . and start clearing the enemy right behind the penetration,” Colonel Shupp, commander of RCT-1, later said. “I can’t tell you how happy we were with Jim Rainey and 2-7. These guys are fighters. They’re the best soldiers I’ve ever seen in my life.” Lieutenant Colonel Buhl, 3/1’s commander, was grateful for the armored screen that the tanks and Brads provided his Marines. “I’m very thankful for everything 2-7 did for us. I’m impressed with that battalion. They were a seasoned battalion. They really . . . attacked, aggressively. Their leaders were squared away.”

In the wake of this powerful wedge, covered by the watchful eyes of Marine and SEAL snipers, Buhl’s rifle companies plunged into the close-packed jungle of sandstone-colored buildings. They were aided by satellite photographs and even some real-time images from UAVs flying overhead. The drone of their engines became a constant sound track. At ten thousand feet, fighter jets loitered, waiting to help. The supporting fire of artillery and mortar crews was readily available. But it was up to the grunts to clear the buildings. In general, they carried about forty or fifty pounds of gear, consisting of fresh magazines for their rifles, water, grenades, body armor (IBA), Kevlar helmets, weapons, and assorted specialty items like bolt cutters, shotguns, or sledgehammers.

Most of the city blocks were about two hundred meters long, with an average of one hundred structures on each block. A house might contain nothing or it might teem with jihadis looking to martyr themselves. “It would seem that the first block was always clear,” Lance Corporal Dustin Turpen of Lima Company said, “and they let us think there was nobody there, and we started to get complacent. After you kick fifty doors in, and there’s nobody there, it starts to become normal. It’s like the fiftieth house you clear that day, and you’re just trying to get it done, and that’s when the shit happens.” As Turpen indicated, the job of assaulting the buildings was up close and personal, a high-stakes jumble of kicking in doors, rushing through rooms. The repetitiveness was mind-numbing. There was a definite Russian roulette feel to it. Danger could come from any direction in the urban morass. “You have to cover everywhere,” First Sergeant Brad Kasal of Weapons Company said. “You had a guy pointing [his weapon] in the front, a guy pointing high, guys covering high in other directions, a guy covering the rear. The fire can come from anywhere . . . up high, low, down in a sewer . . . a window.”

Each fire team and squad had to perfect a distinct choreography and chemistry, with a man covering each sector, reacting instantly to the person next to him, covering his every movement, proceeding as smoothly as possible into the dark interior of the building. They draped their rifles over their armored vests, always orienting them forward, braced expertly against their shoulders, ready to shoot. Every man’s rifle was secured with a three-point sling, preventing slippage off the shoulder. Each room presented the possibility of close contact and a personal fight to the death. “I’m the assault team, so I’m always the first one in the house,” Corporal Matthew Spencer, a fire team leader in Kilo Company, told a historian. “Once we’re in the stack, we’re all ready to go. We can read off each other. Most of the time the door is straight in front. We’ll go in . . . and from there, you take your immediate danger areas and your doorways and we’re pretty much split from there and we don’t really see each other until we meet up in a bigger room or we’re coming out.”

Corporal Francis Wolf, a squad leader in the same company, always ordered his Marines to shoot up the house first and then assault. “And once we enter the house, just basically, hard, fast, intense . . . frag every room you can . . . sometimes two to three depending on the room.” They found that grenades were not all that effective because the rooms offered so much furniture and debris for cover. Moreover, the insurgents often anticipated that the Marines would use grenades, so they stacked mattresses and tables near windows and doors to absorb grenade fragments. So, Wolf and his people killed almost exclusively with rifles. “The SAW is not very maneuverable inside of a house. The only time we’ll ever use a SAW in a house is if we have to clear by fire. If we know that there’s insurgents in the rooms, we’ll poke the SAW around the corner and lay . . . a one-hundred-round burst and just light the room up.” Most of the time, though, they killed the enemy fighters with multiple aimed shots from their M16s. Frequently, through the smoke and dust, they watched the life ebb from the eyes of their enemies. With firefights taking place in such small rooms, the grunts were inundated with the acrid stench of cordite and gunpowder, to the point where they could taste it in their mouths.

Often it took many shots to kill a jihadi because they were under the influence of adrenaline, cocaine, amphetamines, or other drugs that gave them extra staying power. “The terrorists just wouldn’t die unless you removed their brains from their skulls,” one grunt NCO said. Houses, streets, and rubble were riddled with spent needles and drug paraphernalia. One mujahideen took a shot to the face, point-blank, and stab wounds to the chest but kept fighting. “His brains were out on the floor,” Corporal Bill Sojda recalled. “A normal person would have died with a bullet in their head and multiple stab wounds.” So, even grievously wounded insurgents could present a deadly threat. “I know of several instances where near-dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon wrote. “It was a fight to the finish.”

The Americans did take prisoners, but in this unforgiving, stressful environment they were usually inclined to shoot anyone who offered any semblance of a threat (they were especially leery of suicide bombers). In one well-known instance, when the Marines took a mosque after heavy fighting, they encountered a badly wounded insurgent. One of the riflemen thought that the man was a threat and he shot him to death, right in front of a camera-toting reporter. The graphic footage was beamed to the world, generating controversy and even an official investigation of the shooter’s actions. The brutal reality was that every encounter with the enemy portended imminent death. Life-and-death decisions had to be made in a split second. “There is no one technique for house clearing,” another squad leader said. “Sometimes I’ll be noisy to draw fire, sometimes I’ll sneak in. I’ll climb over a roof and come down the stairs, or feint at the front door and enter through the kitchen. Training gives you the basics. After that, you have to adapt.” The most important thing was to avoid being predictable.
¹⁶

Regardless of how professionally the squads assaulted buildings, the job was time-consuming and very dangerous. The goal of the jihadis was to lure the Marines inside the buildings, where they could inflict casualties on them at close range. All too often, the insurgents intended to die and simply wanted to take as many Marines with them as they could. This was especially true in the heart of the Jolan and Queens, where many foreign terrorists made their last stand. “Their discipline throughout the battle still amazes me,” Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Hackett of Lima Company said. “They just sat in the house and waited, kind of like spiders; they waited for the perfect shot, our faces or necks, since our body armor and Kevlars . . . protected our bodies.”

With distressing frequency, they would hole up within a house chosen for its excellent fields of fire on every avenue of approach and also for its sturdy interior. They covered every window and door. “They knew what we were doing,” another NCO said. “They studied our tactics, sitting there, waiting to kill us before they died.” When the Marines plowed inside, the muj opened fire from point-blank range. Then the Marines would find themselves trapped inside the house, usually with some of their own men dead or wounded, involved in a room-to-room fight to the death. Supporting weapons were often no help in these situations because the Americans obviously could not blow up houses where Marines were trapped. The focus then changed from clearing the house to extracting the casualties. Most modern American infantrymen are taught to avoid open streets during urban combat. But when Marines got pinned down inside buildings, the streets outside, ironically, became the safe spots, the very place where Marines sought to make their escape.

Hackett’s Lima Company had several such incidents. In one instance, a squad assaulted an auto repair shop, right into the waiting muzzle of an RPK machine gun in an adjacent room that covered the door. The squad leader was the lead man. He quickly ducked away and shouted “Get the fuck out!” to his guys, but it was too late. Several of them were already piling inside. The enemy gunner unleashed a stream of bullets, one of which caught Lance Corporal Nicholas Larson in the jugular vein, killing him. As Larson’s blood poured out onto the floor, several others fought back with grenades and rifles, but they were pinned down. “I’ve never seen so much blood in my life,” one of them recalled. In an effort to distract the machine gunner long enough for his buddies to beat a hasty exit from the repair shop, Private First Class Nathan Wood charged the enemy gunner’s room, hurling a grenade inside and spraying it with his M16. The machine gun killed him, too. The other Marines threw grenades at the room and dodged a hail of bullets to exit the shop.