House to House: A Tale of Modern War (25 page)

I peek through the foyer doorway to their stairwell and make out two figures. They’re hunkered down behind a pair of three-foot-high concrete Jersey barriers with little more than their heads and shoulders exposed. They’ve created a veritable bunker smack in the middle of the house. One of the insurgents holds an AK-47 against each shoulder with the barrels resting on one barrier. The other mans a Russian belt-fed PKM machine gun perched atop the other barrier.

How on earth did they get those concrete barriers in there? They must weigh a half ton each. Eight men would be hard pressed to lift them.

The house is a prepared kill zone. They wanted us to clear it, and just waited to spring an ambush.

“Watch the roof, watch the fucking roof!” Knapp yells from outside in the courtyard.

I lean back into the foyer just as the wall explodes with sparks. Bullets crack and whine all around us again. Metcalf buckles and falls to the floor. “I’m hit! Oh fuck, I’m hit!” he screams, clutching his stomach.

From below the stairwell comes laughter, and mockery in broken English.
“Ohhhh, I’m heeet!”
one mimics. The comedian and his pal cackle. At the sound of their jeering, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Every man in the platoon reacts the same way. Eyes are saucers now. Panic is not far away.

Metcalf clutches his hands to his stomach. A bullet grazed him under his body armor. The others aren’t much better off. Hands are lacerated; knuckles are slick with grime and blood.

The two under the stairs open up again. The living room and foyer fill with dancing tracers. They sizzle and hiss and start little blazes in piles of refuse and paper lying on the floor in both rooms. The living-room wall, which provides our only cover from the stairwell bunker, starts to give way. The automatic fire blows bricks clear out of it. Other bricks jut out, still intact but knocked from their original position by the enemy bullets.

Three bricks pop out of the wall directly over Fitts’s head. A fissure furrows up the wall from floor to ceiling. We don’t have much time. When the wall gives way, my platoon will face a massacre.

Outside, machine gunner Jamison McDaniel lies prone in the courtyard. He is totally exposed to whomever is shooting out of the kitchen window. Bullets spark all around him. But the kid is an iceberg. Ignoring the bullets, he shoulders his 240 and tears off a blistering burst of return fire. It is an incongruous sight; McDaniel is nineteen but could pass as a middle schooler. The baby-faced gunner is just rocking on the 240. More bullets gouge the ground around him, but he stays on the trigger. His display of courage swells my heart. In the chaos of battle, the true strength of the human spirit will sometimes emerge. This is one of those moments.

In this duel of machine guns, hundreds of bullets fly back and forth. Sergeant Jose Rodriguez, Meno’s radio guy, gets hit. He goes down and cries for help. Lieutenant Meno grabs him by the arm and flings him into an outhouse at the back of the courtyard. For the moment, he is out of the fight.

McDaniel’s big machine gun has thoroughly redecorated the kitchen. It’s a pockmarked ruin. The counterfire proves too much for the insurgents, who break contact. Unaware he’s driven off the threat, McDaniel continues to hammer away. His bullets tear the cabinets apart, destroying dishes and glass. Some hit the common wall with the living room, knocking even more bricks loose. We can’t get him to stop.

From under the stairwell, the insurgents unleash a fresh volley at us. The living room is full of angry tracers again. Through the gloom I see Fitts. We’re on opposite sides of the enemy’s field of fire. He’s trapped. I’m not. Partially lit by the flickering fires burning around the room, he examines the bricks sticking out of the wall above his head. He lets out a frustrated sigh. Then he rolls his eyes right and locks on me.

“Hey, Bell,” he says, “Bro, I need you. I need you in a bad way.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The Power of Christ Compels You”

Fitts never shows fear. Even after he got shot three times in April, he displayed less concern than a civilian with a splinter in his thumb. That day, as he bled from both arms and a leg, he still kept his head about him, focusing on the mission before his serious wounds.

Now Fitts has that scrunched-up look he gets when the medics are about to give us our tetanus shots. It is the closest to fear I’ve ever seen in him. If I dwell on that look, I know it will unnerve me.

Should the rest of the platoon see it, it might be enough to push the boys over the edge. They’re on the border of panic already. The darkness, the smoke, and the reddish glow from the small piles of burning trash are macabre.

“I need you, bro,” Fitts says again.

“Alright, alright…alright,” I reply, stalling for time as I try to get my brain in gear long enough to think of a way out of this mess. My mind starts ticking off options.

Obviously, we can’t call in an air strike. We have no way to call it, and air-to-surface bombs would smoke the whole compound, including us. Same with an artillery fire mission. A tank or a Bradley would be of no use now, not as long as we’re stuck inside the house.

This ambush is the product of study, 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.

I thought we were ready for everything. We’re not ready for this.

Over in the far corner of the living room, Misa stirs. He pulls out a grenade.

“Frag out. Frag out,” he shouts.

This mortifies Fitts. “No,” he hisses. Misa freezes. Fitts continues, “They’ll bowl that bitch right back at us. You’ve got no idea where they’re at.”

Misa is undeterred. He peers around the doorway and reports, “I see them…I see where they’re at.”

Sergeant Hugh Hall sees Ware and Yuri and tells them, “Get behind something, man!”

“Is anyone hit?” Doc Abernathy calls from outside.

“Lemme frag out,” Misa will not let this go.

Fitts will have none of it. “You don’t know how many fucking dudes are in here. Don’t frag out. Put it away.” Misa abandons the grenade idea.

Another flurry of bullets laces the living room. The tracers cleave the smoky air, sending tendrils spinning off into the darkness and briefly clearing the air in the doorway.

I risk a look into the stairwell room. In the fire’s crimson glow, I spot one of the insurgents. He’s crouched behind the Jersey barriers holding an AK in each hand. He’s grinning like a fiend, and I notice his perfectly straight, white teeth.

How the fuck is that possible? We’ve got field dentists, a health plan, and all the trappings of modern medicine, and our teeth
look like caramel popcorn. Apparently, these cocksuckers don’t like Red Man.

I duck back into the foyer. Misa’s aborted plan gives me an idea. A few days before we assaulted Fallujah, Staff Sergeant Hector Diaz, our supply NCO, traded some shit with Special Forces to get me a flash-bang grenade. It has a two-second fuse, and will stun anyone who is unfortunate enough to be around when it goes off. I could throw it and stun the insurgents long enough for everyone to escape. I mull this over while fingering the flash-bang’s cylindrical tube. It looks like an oversized roll of Kodak film. I’ve never used one of these things before, and that gives me pause. If I fuck up, I could flash out the entire platoon and incapacitate myself and my own men. That’s a pretty big risk. I abandon the flash-bang idea.

I’m running out of ideas. We can’t flank them. They’re covering the outside of the house, and the back door opens into the stairwell room five feet from the Jersey barriers. Getting around behind them is not an option.

The enemy designed this trap to force us into a head-on, stand-up fight. Okay then, we’ll play their game.

I peek around the wall into the living room. Metcalf remains on the ground, checking himself and his wound. Clouds of smoke now obscure most of their details, but from their postures I can tell who’s who. I know everything about these men, and I can tell they aren’t far from reaching a breaking point.

I know there’s only one option, exactly what the fuckers under the stairs want.

“Give me a 240 gunner and a SAW,” I shout.

Ohle slides me his SAW and I immediately suppress the corner of the room without looking. The bolt locks back. I am out of ammo.

“Give me another weapon system. I need another SAW and a fucking 240,” I scream in frustration.

“Get a fucking 240 up here, man,” Hall screams outside.

A second later, McDaniel flies into the foyer through the front door. Simultaneously, I make eye contact with Specialist Mathieu. At thirty-seven, his body has taken a pounding in Iraq, and he has to work twice as hard to keep up with his eighteen-year-old peers. After 9/11, he left a good job as a medical technician at a major hospital to join the Army. That move dumped him in a significantly lower tax bracket, a fact that caused a strain on his family and eventual divorce from his wife. His patriotism cost him his family.

We are his family now. Through the gloom and smoke I can read his features, I can see his divot chin that makes him look a bit like John Travolta. He’s ready to do whatever I need. Across the living room, he waits for my order.

“Mathieu, toss me your SAW.”

He holds out his hands as I fling my M4 across the kill zone to him. My rifle has no night optics, just the three-power telescopic sight that I got from Pratt. It’s useless for night fighting and close-quarters combat. The SAW is the weapon for this fight.

Mathieu hurls the SAW right into my arms. The damn thing weighs over twenty pounds loaded, but he threw it as if it were a toy.

“Sarge,” he calls to me, “it’s loaded with 200 in the drum.”

“Sweet.”

Two hundred 5.56mm bullets. Should be enough.

Fitts watches the exchange with intensity. “What’re you doing? What’re you doing?” he asks.

“Dude, on me,” I reply. “Pull out. Australian Peel and pull out. On me. Everyone go but Misa. Misa, you stay. Last man. So I know.”

“I’m last man. I’m last man,” Misa echoes.

I hear firing outside. Tracers blast through the kitchen window, blowing out the glass and shredding the iron bars beyond. There’s a third insurgent in the kitchen, and he pours machine-gun fire into Lawson’s weapons squad covering the outside of the house from the courtyard.

Six feet from the kitchen window, Swanson throws himself behind one of the courtyard’s decorative columns. A blizzard of metal and glass fragments scythe his face and arms. He slumps against the pillar, drops his M240 machine gun and throws his hands to his face. A cone of fire just misses Sergeant Hugh Hall, who falls to the ground as rounds whiz and impact all around him.

“My face! My eyes! Goddamnit!” Swanson is in misery.

“You alright man? You look hit.” Mick Ware is holding up Swanson.

“I’m good. I’m good. Where’s my weapon? Give me my weapon.”

Swanson is far from good. His eyes are almost swollen shut, and his face drips blood from numerous wounds. The rest of the men look spent. They’ve got fresh gashes crisscrossing older cuts and scrapes. Each of these new injuries bleeds freely. Their faces are smoke-stained and bloody. Some pause to pick glass and metal fragments out of each other’s faces. Blood splatters the street. Doc Abernathy moves from man to man, gauzing and taping wounds. This is a huge cluster fuck.

“I got fucking shrapnel all across my fucking back,” shouts Hall.

Hall has had enough. He can’t tell what is going on inside the house.

“Hey, who the FUCK is shooting, man?”

“It’s someone in there,” yells Flannery from inside the house.

“It’s the fucking hajjis inside.” Knapp is equally frustrated and helpless to do anything from where he is pinned down.

“My fucking face. Christ.” Swanson is rolling on the ground.

“DOC! DOC!” Lawson screams for Abernathy.

The fuckers under the stairs find this hilarious. Their hellish laughter echoes through the house. They mock us once more,
“Ohhhh, my feece, my feece!”

“Hey, you hear that shit? They are fucking with our injured. They are FUCKING WITH OUR INJURED,” I scream over to Fitts.

“Hey, Sarge, fuck them.”

“No man. FUCK THEM. FUCK THESE FAGGOTS. Listen to ’em fucking with us.”

“Hey motherfucker, I don’t give a shit about them. You need to focus on this shit here,” Fitts screams back to me.

“Nah, FUCK YOU!” I shout back at the insurgents. They say something in return, but I don’t understand it. “Huh, bitch? You wanna fuck with us? You fucking bitch.
Kelp.
” Dog. I am starting to flip out and Fitts sees this.

“Let’s just stop. Hold on.” Fitts is trying to calm me down. He looks over at his guys and says, “We’re going to get the fuck out.”

“Roger that,” somebody replies.

Misa’s getting anxious. “Ready. You ready?” he calls to me.

“Hold the fuck on,” I reply, my voice hoarse and raspy. I feel everyone’s eyes on me. In two lifetimes I could never feel so much pressure.

Chastised, Misa replies, “Whenever you’re ready, Sarge.”

I know I have to move, but my nerves are jangling and my mind races furiously. A thousand thoughts tumble at once through my mind. They get jammed up, piling on top of each other so that all I get are unintelligible fragments. My palms are slick with sweat. I’ve got to breathe. I’ve got to relax and get ready for what I must do.

The power of Christ compels you.

What? Of all the thoughts to get through the logjam in my brain, this one pops out of nowhere. Just before going to Fallujah, I had watched the latest version of
The Exorcist.
Now that memorable line from the movie—the mantra of the priests as they battle Satan—sticks in my head like a bad song lyric. Well, if this is to be my dying thought, at least it’s not some vapid Madison Avenue marketing slogan. My brain could have picked “Drop the chalupa.”