House to House: A Tale of Modern War (23 page)

Cantrell points at my uniform and says, “You got to get another top, Sergeant Bell. That one is about filthied, wouldn’t you say?”

I look down at myself. My desert uniform top is smeared with Pratt’s dried blood, dirt, and grime. “I don’t know, Sarge, I think this has got a couple more days.”

Cantrell looks me in the eyes, “First Sergeant Smith told me that Ramrod Seven was killed at the breach.”

There. It’s out. My Sergeant Major is dead.

Fitts looks at my uniform and says, “Sarge, I can’t get this dude to shower at Normandy. He ain’t touching shit while we’re out here.”

Fitts is trying to distract me. I keep my expression blank.

I fucking loved that man.

“Try to keep cleaner,” Cantrell adds. I nod.

He was bulletproof. How could he get killed?

Cantrell dismisses me. The ramp drops, and Fitts and I jump out into the street.

“Look, Bell, try and get some sleep. We got three hours,” Fitts says.

I nod. I don’t trust myself to speak. We walk into the house in silence, and I go find a place to lie down.

The muj start to mortar us. I lie in the dark, listening to the explosions around us as I try to fall asleep. I cannot shut off my brain. I am physically exhausted and desperately need to get some rest, but my mind won’t allow it.

Somewhere in the night, the feral dogs snarl and growl between mortar volleys. They’re fighting over another morsel of food. Human meat. I try not to listen.

Faulkenburg’s dead.

The Iraqis helped to load him into an M113 medevac track right after he got shot. The track raced him to our battalion aid station at the cloverleaf east of Fallujah, but it was too late. He died before he fell into the street. The bullet exited out the top of his head. He never had a chance.

Our larger-than-life father figure is dead.

Minutes after Faulkenburg’s body reached the aid station, a flood of wounded IIF soldiers arrived. Seventeen of them survived their wounds, but three did not. Had it not been for Steve Faulkenburg’s last act of bravery, many more would have joined them.

Faulkenburg was our first Angel, the first American to die by enemy fire in the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Was Faulkenburg’s body the one I saw in the street last night at the breach? Was he among the dead I saw the Iraqis cover up
and carry away? Did I witness his last moments and not even realize it?

That thought leaves me stricken with grief. I know now is not the time to mourn. We have a battle to win, and I must repress the pain to be able to do my job. My mind torments me with images of Faulkenburg in that street. At times like these, a good imagination becomes your worst enemy.

If they can kill Sergeant Major Faulkenburg, how have I survived? He was so much more skilled than I, so much more experienced than almost every other soldier out here. Is this more about luck than skill? If it is, we’re all only one bullet away from Faulkenburg’s undeserved fate.

I dwell on that for a while, and ache with vulnerability. Life seems so perilous, so fragile now—I just don’t understand how he can die while I survive. For the first time since we entered the city, I am forced to recognize my own mortality. In doing so, I get a glimpse of what Fitts must have been going through all along.

Does Fitts face these thoughts every night? April 9 must still prey on him in the darkness. I’m sorry I ever ragged him about it.

The mortars fall. The man-eating dogs bay. The night never ends.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Better Homes and Gardens

Fallujah

November 10, 2004

Long before sunrise, we begin our third day in the city. As it got cold last night, the men tore down drapes and used them as blankets. Others wrapped themselves up like burritos in filthy area rugs. We passed the night on guard, shivering, anxious, and irritated.

I grab my gear and head out onto the roof to check on things. Two days into the battle, and already our boys are banged up. Gashes adorn every face. Our hands are skinned raw from climbing through the debris of all these ruined buildings. Between the putrefying corpses, the flies, and feral dogs, Fallujah teems with gut-liquefying bacteria. We can’t avoid the germs and the majority of the platoon has diarrhea. There were times yesterday that men were shitting while they shot. We’re filthy, bone-weary, bruised, and bleeding. Our joints ache, our muscles protest every move.

Today brings a new mission. The Marines have lagged behind us. Ware was right about that. A gap has opened between our right flank and their left one. The insurgents know it is there, and they exploit it to infiltrate our rear. Today, we will countermarch north and thoroughly clear the Askari District while we wait for the Marines to get forward.

Meno briefs us on Captain Sims’s plan for the day. We’ll go house to house, killing anyone we find and destroying the weapons and ammo we left untouched during our original push to Highway 10.

Just before dawn, the entire company gets on line and begins the drive north into yesterday’s stomping grounds. The cold night has left the streets slick with moisture. We slip and slide in our boots as we make our way up the street toward Objective Wolf again. As we countermarch with our Brads and tanks in support, I notice that the dogs follow behind us. When we stop to search a house, they stop as well. I emerge from one building and see a line of them in the street, their tails thumping expectantly on the asphalt. They’re waiting for us to provide them with their next meal.

The smell of death is all around us. Insurgent corpses rot in buildings and alleyways. We are under orders to double tap every insurgent we find, no matter what his condition. Yet some are already covered with moss and mold. They’re so far gone that even the dogs turn away from them. As we start to clear another block of houses, I spot an insurgent lying against a wall. I shoot him, and my bullets pop his bloated stomach like a balloon. The corpse lets out a long farting sound as the gas inside it escapes. I turn to Sucholas and say, “Excuse me. I’ve been fighting that back since Baghdad.”

“If I let one go like that,” Sucholas says, “you would scrape my intestines off the wall.”

Throughout the morning, we kick in so many doors that we lose count. Unlike the previous day, we take a deliberate approach to each dwelling. We assume they are all booby-trapped. We move with caution and do not touch anything unnecessarily. It doesn’t take us long to find all sorts of devilish traps: bras and panties covering booby-trapped hand grenades, cabinets wired with explosives, mortar rounds under sinks, land mines buried in front and backyards. We negotiate all these hazards and find hundreds of weapons in the process. Everything from World War II American M1 Garand rifles to the latest production SVD sniper rifles straight from Russian factories are left for us to find. We even discover an American Army field manual from 1941 with Arabic notes written in the margins.

It takes us hours to clear three blocks. Fitts and I decide that we could make better time if we split up. He takes one side of the street, my squad takes the other. The Brads stay close, ready to support either or both of us.

In one house, I find a beautiful Czech-made SKS Cold War–era rifle. The former owner had put a 75-round drum magazine on it and kept it in pristine condition. I pick it up and decide to keep it as a present to myself. Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. The SKS goes into Chad Ellis’s Bradley for safekeeping.

More houses. More arms caches. We find Iranian FAL rifles, German G3 assault weapons made by Heckler & Koch, shotguns, hunting rifles, and M16s. Fitts has a soldier in his squad named Matthew Woodbury who is a
Guns & Ammo
magazine savant. He’s read so much on rifles that he can tell the country of origin by the serial number on the weapon.

We improvise ways to blow up all the stuff we find. Sometimes, we blow it in place with C-4, other times we use the Bradleys to crush mortar tubes, rocket launchers, and rifles. It is very dangerous work. The ordnance is unstable, frequently old, and improperly maintained. At one point, we pull about a dozen rocket-propelled grenades out of a house and load them into a car. Since we’re supposed to blow up every automobile we find, this seems like a good way to kill two birds with one stone. We add some mortar shells and stand back. Staff Sergeant Jamie McDaniel’s Brad rolls up. In the turret is his Nigerian-born gunner, Sergeant Olakunle Delalu. He is an electrical engineering graduate of Columbia University who joined the army to get American citizenship. Delalu takes aim at the car and unloads on it with a TOW missile. An eyeblink later, the car vaporizes into a ball of flame.

We move on to the next house and find a truck in the driveway. We load it full of the weapons and ammo we find inside the dwelling, then touch it off with an incendiary grenade. The grenade melts the front part of the truck and sets fire to some nearby barrels of gasoline and oil. Soon, the flames spread and four houses catch fire. In one of them, the fire touches off another weapons cache and the subsequent explosion bounces me into a wall.

Later, I wire a pile of grenades, RPGs, and 107mm rockets up to several bricks of C-4. Living with combat engineers for over eight months, we had learned just about every way to blow explosive ordnance imaginable. Yet after I lit the fuse, nothing happened. I creep back to the house and peer inside. Smoke obscures my view. I start to tremble, and I wonder if this is the cautionary story my young soldiers will tell once they become drill sergeants back home. “This is how my squad leader blew himself up in Fallujah….”

I step inside the house and find that the blast caps had come loose. I carry the ordnance to the doorway and leave it there in a big pile. A Brad shoots it up, but the rockets fail to explode. Pissed off now, I drag the stuff over to a nearby bomb crater. I put the C-4 among the rockets again and ask Cory Brown to shoot the entire mess. His gunner laces the cache with HE shells. Nothing happens. He switches to armor piercing, and as soon as the first round hits the cache, the entire pile explodes. Rocket-propelled grenades suddenly sizzle out of the flames. Several tear into the houses across the street and explode. Others fly off in all directions, which sends my squad diving for cover.

When the explosions cease, I hear screaming. A rocket went right into the house Fitts and his men are clearing across the street. Fitts limps out into the courtyard and shouts at me, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m out of blasting caps for the C-4. Are you guys okay?”

“Dude, you almost killed my fucking squad, man. No, we are not okay.”

I try to apologize, but Fitts is pissed. The work continues.

All day long, we play with fate as we discover and destroy all these enemy stockpiles. It is dangerous work. I feel like a juvenile delinquent turned loose on a devastated city. Somehow, we manage to avoid blowing anyone up, but it isn’t for lack of trying. It is simply luck.

As dusk settles over us, we ache. Backs, arms, calves are tight and sore. We’ve cleared so many houses, it has all blended together into one long day of door-kicking and cache-blowing. We have yet to see a single live insurgent.

At one point, we stumble across a small cache of about fifteen rocket-propelled grenades. As we debate how to dispose of them, Cantrell calls us on the radio. Lieutenant Iwan needs help. He’s run into contact a few blocks to the south. With Sims tied up with First Platoon about four hundred meters up the road, the platoon sergeant tells us to take care of the RPGs. I want to take them with us, but he nixes that idea. I offer to shoot them off with a launcher. He tells me we don’t have time. We need to get to Iwan.

I give up and head for my track. Just as I get inside, I hear Knapp screaming at Cantrell on the radio. Cantrell’s ordered him to blow the RPGs up with a thermite grenade.

“Sarge,” Knapp rails at me, “I am not letting my guys blow up RPGs that way. It is fucking stupid.”

I get on the radio and tell Cantrell his idea stinks and I won’t risk my men to do it.

“Well, then you do it, hero. I don’t give a fuck who does it. If you don’t have the nuts, make one of your boys do it. Get someone to do it. Just blow these fuckers up.”

I look around in the Bradley. My men are staring at me, waiting for my next move. They’re wondering if I’ll make them do this crazy stunt.

Fuck it.

I take a thermite grenade and walk over to the bag of RPGs. The Brads get on line, ready to roll out to help Iwan as soon as I’m done. The Bradley commanders get low in their turrets. The ramps close. The men are safe inside.

I put the RPGs into a tub sitting amid the ruins of another house. I look back at Cantrell’s Brad and give him the coldest scowl I can manage. “No, Sarge,” I say with a raw and raspy voice, “You see this. You watch what happens.”

I’m feeling like a martyr. I pull out the incendiary grenade and hold it over the rockets. I pull the pin and white phosphorus spews out like a Diet Coke with a Mentos in it. I’ve hardly let go of it when the WP burns through one of the RPGs. The rocket touches off and skates off into the neighborhood. It explodes a short distance away. I start running for the Brads even as more rockets sizzle out of the tub.

I’ve lost my fucking mind.

Ahead, a Brad starts to move down the road. A rocket whirs overhead and blows up in a nearby building. The Brad’s ramp drops. Another explosion rocks the ground. I reach the ramp and jump in. I’m safe with my brotherhood now, but I am fucking pissed.

We roll north. The aches, the exhaustion, the pain, scrapes, and spastic shits mean nothing to us. We are infantry. The killing is all.

As we countermarch north, Lieutenant Iwan leads a search and attack mission against the enemy cell he’s located. The enemy is about a dozen strong. They are aggressive and disciplined. Iwan’s Bradley tries to knock them down with its cannon. In the heat of the fight, the cannon malfunctions, leaving Iwan’s track with only its single coaxial machine gun. The insurgents slip away, disappearing into a block of upscale homes in the battalion’s rear.