Grunts (59 page)

In addition to explaining how terrorist control of Fallujah was hurting them, the leaflets outlined the American rules of engagement in the coming battle. Because of the threat of VBIEDs and SVBIEDs (suicide car bombers), all vehicles would be considered hostile, as would anyone with a weapon. The leaflets and other announcements communicated an air of inevitability about the notion of Fallujah’s return to coalition control. “[We] let the people in Fallujah know we’re coming,” Colonel Craig Tucker, commander of RCT-7, said. “We’re not telling you when we’re coming, but we’re coming. And they left. And what you had left in there was those guys who were gonna fight you.”

The insurgents still enjoyed some popular support among the people, but many months of repression had taken its toll, ebbing the anti-American euphoria of the spring. Most Fallujahns had no wish to fight alongside the jihadis or to take their chances of avoiding American bombs and bullets. They voted with their feet. As of early November, almost 90 percent of the population had left the city, thus creating an isolated urban battlefield in which the Americans could liberally use their massive firepower. They had essentially emptied the city in anticipation of turning it into a battlefield, an unprecedented feat in modern military history. The exodus did have a downside, though. Some of the terrorists, including Zarqawi, escaped from Fallujah. They evaded the American checkpoints by blending in with the crowds.

By November, whether President Bush won or lost his election contest with Senator Kerry, he had decided to take Fallujah. When he defeated Kerry on November 2, the victory only added that much more urgency to the impending offensive, as well as a more stable political environment for Allawi’s government. The prime minister declared a state of emergency in Iraq and, on November 7, after one last failed attempt at negotiations with Fallujah’s leaders, he ordered the assault to commence. In a strategic sense, this dotted the last political i’s and crossed the final t’s. Of course, this did not necessarily mean that politics were no longer a factor. The Americans initially dubbed the assault Operation Phantom Fury but Allawi renamed it Operation Al Fajr (The Dawn), a moniker he felt was less vengeful and more appropriate to the circumstances.
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The Breach

The insurgents may have been cruel, but they were smart and determined. They spent months fortifying Fallujah and its approaches. American intelligence analysts identified 306 separate strongpoints throughout the city. The mujahideen used half of Fallujah’s seventy-two mosques for military purposes. They lined the streets with car bombs. Other cars and pickup trucks blocked the roads and entry points to the town. They placed IEDs in every imaginable spot—houses, curbs, manhole covers, telephone poles, and any other likely American transit point. They wired up entire buildings with hundreds of pounds of explosives. They dug holes, trenches, and house-to-house tunnels to create good fighting positions and escape routes for themselves. “Fallujah is a city designed for siege warfare,” a sergeant said. “From the studs to the minarets, every goddamned building is a fortress. The houses are minibunkers with ramparts and firing slits cut into every rooftop. Every road into the city is strong-pointed, mined, and blocked with captured Texas barriers [full of dirt].”

The jihadis used bulldozers to build a ring of mined berms around the city, especially to the north along a five-foot-high railroad embankment (quite similar, actually, to the railroad that bordered Aachen). In the days leading up to the American assault, the most dedicated foreign fighters stationed themselves on the outer edges of Fallujah, in the upper floors of multistory buildings, in ideal position to launch RPGs, call down mortar fire, or snipe at the Americans. In some spots, the insurgents stacked tall heaps of tires in the streets. American commanders feared that when the attack began, the enemy would set fire to the tires, similar to what Mohammed Aidid’s militiamen had done at Mogadishu in 1993, to create clouds of black smoke that could negate the effectiveness of UAVs and other supporting aircraft. By now, the number of enemy fighters in Fallujah ranged between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred men (estimates vary). Overall, it is fair to say that their defenses in November were far more elaborate and formidable than they had been in April.

Fortunately, so was the American battle plan. By and large, this plan was the brainchild of Generals Sattler and Natonski. As the corps-level commander of I MEF, Sattler concentrated on cutting off Fallujah from the outside world. He borrowed a brigade-sized combat team from the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division to secure every external approach to Fallujah. A battalion from the British Army’s Black Watch regiment also assisted in this mission. Natonski, the division commander, focused on taking the city itself. He pulled a bait and switch on the enemy. Through a series of raids and feints, he led them to believe that the main assault was coming from the south and east of Fallujah. They deployed many of their fighters to those areas, all the while “in a heightened state of paranoia and anxiety,” according to General Natonski. Cell phone intercepts confirmed their great confusion. The fact that the Americans had previously cut off the city’s power supply only added to the disarray.

In reality, Natonski’s main punch was coming from the exact opposite direction. The night before the main assault on Fallujah began, he sent the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion and its American advisors to capture the Fallujah General Hospital on a peninsula west of the Euphrates. During the April fighting, the insurgents had masterfully used the hospital to trumpet their claims that the Americans were butchering civilians. This time, they did not get that chance. The commandos took the hospital easily. Marine reinforcements from the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion and a company of soldiers from the Army’s 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry, quickly seized the Euphrates bridges, including the infamous “Brooklyn Bridge,” where angry fanatics had hung the burned remains of the contractors back in the spring. Securing the hospital and bridges had the extra benefit of confusing the insurgents even more. It convinced some of their commanders that the American assault was coming from the west, across the bridges, and they moved more people to cover that approach. But the main attack was coming from the north. Throughout the day on November 8, Natonski and his staff moved two regimental-sized combat teams, RCT-1 and RCT-7, into position, mainly by vehicles.

RCT-1, of course, was the modern descendant of the 1st Marine Regiment of Chesty Puller and Peleliu fame. RCT-7 equated to Herman Hanneken’s 7th Marine Regiment, which had also fought on that terrible island in 1944. RCT-1, under Colonel Michael Shupp, consisted of three infantry battalions: 1/5 and 3/1 Marines and the Army’s Task Force 2-7 Cavalry (a mechanized infantry battalion). Colonel Craig Tucker’s RCT-7 was similar. He had 1/8 and 1/3 Marines, along with Task Force 2-2 Infantry of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. Both regimental combat teams were augmented with tanks, engineers, psyops, medics, forward air controllers, artillerymen, Navy SEAL sniper teams, and other special operators.

Army-Marine relations had come a long way since the Peleliu days. Whereas in 1944 General Rupertus was loath to even share the same battlefield with the Army, in 2004 at Fallujah Marines and soldiers served together in the same regimental-sized units, effectively fighting side by side. In fact, General Sattler specifically requested, and received from his superiors in Baghdad, the two Army mechanized infantry battalions for the Fallujah assault.

Although rivalry still existed, soldiers and Marines generally had deep respect for their counterparts as professional warriors. Some of their officers had even been through the same training schools at Fort Benning, Fort Leavenworth, and other posts. In essence, the two ground combat services were melding their own unique institutional strengths together for this battle. Both 2-7 Cavalry and 2-2 Infantry as mechanized units possessed Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Abrams tanks, and other armored vehicles that were ideally suited to a politically neutral urban environment. Their armor provided vital protection for their grunts against enemy IEDs, car bombs, mortars, and small arms. Plus, the vehicles lent perfect fire support for them when they were clearing buildings. The Marine battalions had the usual blend of Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs), Armored Amphibious Vehicles (AAVs), and Humvees, along with a passel of Mark 19s, TOW missile launchers, .50-caliber machine guns and SMAWs, but they were basically composed of light infantry. The Marine grunts would be needed to clear buildings—only infantry could do that—but they needed protection and fire support from the vehicles and heavy weapons.

So the Army’s job was to act as a wedge-busting force, leading the way into and through Fallujah. They were to smash through enemy defenses, blow up strongpoints, maintain the momentum of a steady advance, and force the insurgents to choose between retreat and destruction. At the same time, the Army grunts would take buildings under the protective snouts of the Bradleys and Abramses. Even more than the Army, the job of the Marines was to go block by block, clearing every room, killing the muj at close quarters. They would advance both adjacent to and in the wake of the Army.

Aside from the bait and switch, there was nothing fancy about Natonski’s battle plan. Both regimental combat teams were to push straight into Fallujah and clear it from north to south, block by block, until they reached the desert that bordered the southern edges of the town. RCT-1 would capture the western part of the city. RCT-7 would take the eastern section. Behind the American advance, several battalions from the newly formed Iraqi Army would back-clear buildings, find hidden weapons caches, and interrogate prisoners and noncombatants alike. Their role was to solidify their fledgling government’s control of Fallujah once the Americans cleared the city of insurgents. In all, General Natonski had about twelve thousand troops, of which half were earmarked for the actual assault on Fallujah. Air support would consist of helicopter gunships, Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter jets, along with AC-130s (now appropriately code-named Basher) and UAVs.
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By late afternoon on November 8, as the encroaching shadows of the coming evening lengthened, both regimental combat teams were in position north of Fallujah. Amid the seemingly endless desert landscape, hundreds of vehicles were stretched out “like long trails of ants,” in the recollection of one NCO. The soldiers and Marines had spent the day going through the usual military hurry-up-and-wait routine. As in April, they also heard many pep talks from their officers and senior NCOs. “This is as pure a fight of good versus evil as we’ll probably see in our lifetime,” Lieutenant Colonel Pete Newell, commander of 2-2 Infantry, told his soldiers, a few of whom were female medics and intelligence specialists. Newell’s experienced and universally respected command sergeant major, Steve Faulkenberg, told the soldiers, in a voice that was uncharacteristically dripping with emotion: “I could not be more proud of you if you were my own kids.” After hearing Colonel Shupp deliver a similarly moving speech, Marine Private Andrew Stokes recalled “getting chills, being all motivated. I made peace with God in case I died.” Thousands of others did the same. They tried, though, not to dwell on the unpleasant reality that death or serious wounds might beckon for them in Fallujah.

Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, a history-conscious rifle squad leader in Alpha Company, 2-2 Infantry, was determined to remember every detail of the coming battle. He peered at the many vehicles around him and at the battered city he and his men would soon attempt to take. “This is the moment we’ve trained for since we were raw recruits,” he thought. “I’ve got to be able to tell my grandkids someday. I need to be able to tell them what this day meant to all of us.” Like an electrical current, a ripple of eager anticipation pulsed through the troops. “It was something to see,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellon later wrote. “You could just feel the intensity in the Marines and Soldiers. It was all business.” The troops were excited, on edge, nearing a fever pitch as they waited tensely for the word to attack.

They were like actors waiting for the curtain to rise on opening night or football players gathering in the locker room before the Super Bowl. Only this was not a performance or a game; it was life and death. After so much preparation and anticipation, they had reached a state of total impatience, a point at which facing imminent danger becomes more desirable than even one more minute of inconclusive, but safe, waiting. Rather than sit around much longer and contemplate their uncertain future, they wanted to take action and end the cursed anticipation, a common human emotion when facing danger. “Come on, what the hell are we waiting for, let’s get moving” was a common thought among the grunts. To make matters worse, a misty curtain of light rain began to descend.

The railroad tracks and embankment ringed this northern approach to the city. The Fallujah side of the embankment teemed with mines and IEDs, as did many of the first streets and buildings the Americans would attempt to capture. The initial stage of the Fallujah assault called for the engineers to breach this formidable belt of deadly obstacles (in stark contrast to the Gulf War, the breach would not be made this time by knife-wielding Marines on their hands and knees). Blowing an opening into Fallujah was dangerous work and the engineers needed a great deal of fire support to prevent the enemy from pinning them down among the IEDs, raking them with RPG and machine-gun fire. The grunts liked to razz combat engineers for being demolitions nerds but, in truth, as one infantry soldier indicated, they deeply respected them as “the intellectuals of the combat arms branches. They have a million crafty solutions to problems that would make us knuckle-dragging infantry types scratch our heads and pause.”

In the weeks leading up to Operation Al Fajr, the Americans, for political reasons, actually refrained from pasting Fallujah in the same way they had bombarded objectives in earlier wars (Guam, Peleliu, and Aachen, for instance). Every fire mission and air strike had to be approved at I MEF level or above. Because of this, some of the ground troops were concerned that they would pay a fearsome price in blood for the conniving of the politicians. By the time they were about to tear through the breach, though, the restraints were long gone. Artillery shells, fired from 155-millimeter self-propelled Paladin howitzers a few miles away, tore into houses. Plumes of smoke and dust billowed in the gathering darkness. Masonry flew everywhere. The air was filled with a low but steady rumble of detonating shells, so many that the ground seemed to be quaking. “The Air Force, Navy and Marines send waves of F-16 and F-18 fighter jets,” Staff Sergeant Bellavia wrote in a present-tense format. “They whistle over the city to drop laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The
whomp-whomp
of their detonations can be both heard and felt, even at this distance. Fallujah is smothered in bombs, shrouded in smoke. Buildings collapse. Mines detonate.”