House to House: A Tale of Modern War (16 page)

The platoon assembles on top of the building, and Lawson sets up our heavy guns. Now we can clear the neighborhood by jumping from house to house. Instead of going in through the front doors, we can drop into them. Coming in from above surely will surprise anyone inside. It has its difficulties, as we encounter bricked-up stairwells or other obstacles on our way down. In some houses, the windows are sealed and the insurgents have built serpentine pathways out of barriers and bricks. They’re designed to funnel us into a trap, but in every case, they lead to empty fighting positions. The bad guys have melted away from us. It leaves us puzzled.

Toward the end of the block, we reach a house that is separated from the others in the neighborhood. It looks like about a four-foot jump across to the roof’s parapet. I go first and fling myself at the far side.

Instead of just a foot or two, I fall about ten. I slam down into the second floor of the house. For a moment, I think I’ve broken my back. I can’t move. Everything aches. Ruiz and Santos suddenly crash down next to me.

I look up. The roof is gone. We’ve jumped into the house itself. That we didn’t break a bone is flat-out miraculous.

“Look! This is from artillery,” somebody says.

“Bullshit,” I reply, “This was done with sledgehammers.” I point to the scrapes and scuffs along the wall where the roof had been. There are no shrapnel marks on the walls. The muj knocked this roof out themselves, which only means one thing: they expected us to move atop the buildings. This was another of their booby traps. And we thought we were outsmarting them.

They seem to be one step ahead of us. But where the fuck are they?

We pick ourselves up and get the rest of the platoon down into the house. After we clear it we work our way up to the next rooftop. We cross to another house. This one has a pillbox-shaped room with thick walls sitting in the center of the roof. It is our entryway to the building below.

Knapp gets his squad to the door of the pillbox. Sucholas and my B Team are ready behind him. Fitts’s guys wait nearby. They’re just about to go inside when something causes me to rush at a window to the left of the door. The men stop and stare at me. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but something’s spurring me forward. I jump through the window.

As I jump, Knapp finds a wire partially concealed under the door.

Inside the house, I start to move to the door. Before I can take a full step, I see a trip wire. It runs across the door and up along the doorjamb. Dangling from the wire is an orange-red pineapple grenade the size of a Nerf football. The pin is missing and the spoon is held on by the wire. If we open the door, the spoon will fly off and detonate the grenade in our faces.

“Knapp!” I shout.

He comes over and peers through the window.

“Check this shit out,” I tell him.

He fingers the trip wire and sighs. “You know what? I’ve told my guys not to check for booby traps. This is high-intensity MOUT.” Military Operations in Urban Terrain. “We’re looking for bad guys. We don’t have time for precision MOUT.”

“No, you’re right we don’t. We could have dudes in the house ready to kill us. We’ve got to be ready for them, not heads-down searching for trip wires.”

Knapp nods. We’ve got a serious tactical dilemma on our hands. If we’re to treat each house as if it is booby trapped, we’ll go in cautiously. In house-clearing, confidence and quickness are absolutely vital. If we hesitate, if we methodically search for booby traps, we hand the initiative to any insurgents who may be in the house. We’ll get lit the fuck up. Moving swiftly and decisively from room to room is the only way to surprise the enemy and minimize our exposure to their fire.

So far, we haven’t seen anyone inside these houses. Yet if we continue to move this quickly, we’re likely to trip a booby trap. Right now, I can’t see how we’re going to get through this without anyone getting hurt. Either we move fast and hit a trip wire, or we move slowly and get shot at.

“Okay, Knapp, let’s keep this to ourselves.”

“Yeah, alright. We don’t wanna fucking freak the guys out even more than they already are. I don’t want them going into houses with this shit at the back of their heads.”

Knapp pulls out a pair of wire cutters and snips the grenade off. The spoon flies and the thing begins to hiss. I grab it and shout, “Frag out!”

On the roof, everyone ducks. I throw the grenade over the nearest wall. A second later, it explodes with a muffled
Phoompt!

Fitts comes up to me, “Hey, Bell, you coulda given me some warning that you were gonna do that.”

“Work with me here, Sarge. It wasn’t planned.”

We finish clearing the house, then move into the street. This block is done. We load into the Brads and head south. Sergeant Jim’s tank moves first. He rumbles up the street, swings west, and gives us flank security.

As Jim swings a block or so over from our route, a lone gunman slips into the street and unleashes a volley from his AK.

Jim’s main gun fires. A few seconds later, the speaker in the back of our Bradley crackles. “Oh my God. That was fucking horrible, man.”

Jim replies, “Hey! That guy had an AK. He was shooting at me. He shouldn’t do that.”

Suddenly, our Bradley commander, Staff Sergeant Cory Brown, cuts into the chatter. “VAN! We’ve got a van!”

Sure enough, the enemy has sent a van loaded with explosives. Specialist Shane Gossard, Brown’s gunner, swings his turret and spots the van as it closes on us. Gossard is generally considered the best Bradley gunner in the brigade. Outside the turret, he’s a gentle soul who plays guitar and sings. In the turret, he’s a true killer.

He takes careful aim and triggers a steady stream of cannon rounds directly into the vehicle. It explodes with fiery intensity. Another threat eliminated.

Minutes later, we run into IED-laced Hesco sandbags. Gossard lights three of them up. The secondary explosions rock our tracks.

“Hey, I got a hot spot on the thermal,” Gossard whispers over the intercom. We can barely hear him through the speaker, but he’s clearly excited.

“And he’s got a buddy.”

The 25mm bucks twice. The Brad vibrates from the recoil.

“Nice shot!” somebody calls.

Two more bad guys down.

We fight our way south through another block. At the other end, we hook up with Jim’s tank. Together, we convoy through the next neighborhood.

Someone yells, “RPG!” A rocket sears the darkness and strikes Jim’s tank. A splash of flame streaks across its flank.

Jim’s gunner, Sergeant Denny Taijeron, swings the big Abrams turret left. A split-second later, the 120mm booms. The entire front of a nearby building collapses. Just after he hits the building with the 120mm shell, a number of insurgents break cover. Taijeron switches to his .50-caliber gun. We can hear it barking even over the din of our engine. A second later it falls silent. The muj do not escape. We keep rolling.

“I got T-barriers,” Taijeron calls out next. Jim tells him to fire.

BOOM!

“Barriers clear.”

Alpha Company grinds south to our next major objective, the Imam al Shafi Mosque. It is the command and control center, and supply base, for the majority of the insurgents in the Soldier’s District. It is the heart of their defenses here, and we’re going to tear it out.

CHAPTER NINE

Dorothy’s Oz Gate

The night is surreal and confusing. Overhead, AC-130 gunships circle like vultures, picking targets and flaying them with their fearsome armament. The surround-sound echoes of gunfire, mortars, and artillery play tricks on our ears. In the empty city, every sound is magnified, every noise bounces from building to building to create a cacophony of battle with no point of origin. It is combat in a vacuum, a gigantic mishmash of sound and fire that leaves us unable to distinguish who is shooting or from where.

The cityscape suits a Godzilla movie. Heaps of bricks block the streets. Downed power lines drape the rubble. Houses are ripped and crushed. Storefronts are smashed and broken. Inside these shops, little remains but splintered shelves and furniture. The darkness is relieved only by dozens of small fires smoldering in the ruins. The horizon glows reddish-orange. Fallujah is in its death agony.

The night’s work leaves us bathed in sweat, which the predawn breeze quickly chills. Our uniforms are slick. We ache and shiver. Clearing houses, we stumble across a cache of Vietnam-era Starlight scopes, off-the-shelf night-vision gear, and American uniforms and medical supplies. By now, we’ve all got nicks and cuts on our hands, arms and faces; our pant legs are torn or burned. The urban environment is a constant physical challenge for us. Every step brings the danger of a fall among rubble. Broken glass coats each ruin like ice crumbles on new fallen snow. Our boots crunch it underfoot, but when we slip, our hands break our fall and end up studded with shards of glass. We pick them out as best we can and keep going.

We find a rhythm. We’re not supposed to clear every house and pull out every weapon or cache of supplies we find. That would take us days. This is a hunt. We look for bad guys and move on. Sergeant Jim and his Abrams tank prove vital to our speedy advance. He uses his main gun to blow holes in buildings, which we use as entry points. This is much safer than constantly rolling the dice and kicking doors down. The 120mm gun is so powerful that it blows holes in three or sometimes four houses at once. The firepower of this svelte sixty-eight-ton monster allows us to move through each block on a fresh path, avoiding the funnels and kill zones the insurgents have so meticulously laid out for us.

Two hours before sunup, we reach the mosque. It sits square in the middle of a block of residential homes. This is the nexus of the Askari or Soldier’s District. The neighborhood is imposing. Every house has a huge, thick outer wall and metal gates. Balconies built like square castle turrets overhang the interior courtyards, providing excellent spots from which to cover the outer walls. It looks like the entire neighborhood was designed by siege architects.

Yet we encounter no enemy fighters. Reaching our first major objective inside the city proves anticlimactic.

The platoon moves to the mosque’s front gate. The walls around it are at least ten feet high. Broken glass is embedded on the parapet—a very effective alternative to barbed wire. The gate itself is thick solid steel and stands over ten feet tall. We’ve got to get through it in order to clear the mosque.

Overhead, an A-10 thunders past us with its unique “
brrrrrbbrrrrrrrrrbbb
” sounding 30mm cannons. It strafes a target to the south and pulls up.

Hall is our door-crushing expert. Part of Fitts’s squad, Hall is not very tall, but he’s built like a human battering ram with thick, muscular shoulders and a low center of gravity. I call him over. He takes one look at the gate and says, “I ain’t fucking breaking that thing, Sarge. No way.”

I turn to Fitts, “I’m gonna blow this bitch with C-4.”

Fitts nods his head and pulls the platoon back out of the blast range. I take a block of C-4 and stick it into the gate. A few seconds later, I finish wiring it. It blows up, but when the smoke clears, the gate looks virtually undamaged.

What next?

“Let’s use a Bangalore torpedo,” Santos suggests. These are World War II–era engineer tools designed to blow barricades and obstacles. Essentially, the Bangalore is an explosive charge mounted on a pipe, or in this case a fence picket. We wedge one against the gate, set the fuse, and move away.

Boom! The gate withstands this assault as well.

“Unfuckingbelievable,” I mutter.

Fitts tells Knapp and Misa to lob some grenades over the wall, just in case there’s anyone waiting for us on the other side. The two go to work, pitching frags into the mosque’s inner courtyard.

I have a better idea. I tell Ruiz, “Prep an AT4.” I turn to Fitts, “Hey, bro, keep everyone back.”

“What? What are you doing, Bell?” he asks.

“We’re going to shoot the gate with an AT4.”

Everyone backs up. “Ruiz,” I say, “can you hit the locking mechanism?”

“I can try, Sarge.”

“Do it.”

Ruiz takes aim from almost point-blank range. He triggers the AT4. With an enormous flash and roar, the rocket arrows forward into the gate.

The smoke clears. The gate still stands.

“Ruiz, you stupid motherfucker, how the hell did you miss the goddamned door? It’s five fucking feet away, dude!”

“I swear I thought I hit it, Sergeant Bell.”

I turn around and walk to the gate. Sure enough, Ruiz scored a direct hit on the locking mechanism. In fact, his 84mm rocket went straight through the keyhole. A scorched, perfectly symmetrical hole has been blown right through it. Yet the gate refuses to give.

Stymied by a fucking hajji gate. Are you kidding me?

Santos sticks a Claymore mine on the hinge. It blows, but again the gate withstands the blast.

“Santos: get the Javelin.”

“Fuck this, man,” Fitts says. He wants no part of the big FGM-148 antitank missile. Those suckers are more than five inches in diameter.

Jim’s voice comes over the radio. He’s been listening to updates on our conundrum. “Hey, Sergeant Bell, you need to peel that wall back.”

“Well,” I reply, “that would be the best solution.”

We normally don’t use our Brads as battering rams. It is too easy to damage them, and if they go down, we lose a key casualty producer. But this time we’re going to need a Brad.

The nearest one is Lieutenant Meno’s. Meno has dismounted to join up with us, leaving the track in the hands of Sergeant Chad Ellis, a five foot seven, bulldog-framed gunner. Ellis has been in Third Platoon since 2001 and has personified the face and attitude of our family, known affectionately as the Third Herd.

He’s a solid NCO and excellent Bradley gunner, but he’s not used to commanding a track. His driver, Specialist Gregory Marcoot, is relatively new as well. Not an optimum situation, but we call him forward anyway.

Jim’s tank rumbles up to us and edges over to one side of the street to let Ellis pass him. Acting as Marcoot’s eyes and pulling security is tough to do simultaneously in a Bradley. As the Brad edges forward, Ellis traverses his turret away from Jim’s tank. The barrel of his gun collides with the side of the mosque with a dull thud. Ellis reacts to the impact and Marcoot slams the Bradley into the back deck of Staff Sergeant Jim’s tank.