No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah Read online

  CONTENTS

  ____

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Major Characters

  Introduction

  Prologue Lynching at the Brooklyn Bridge

  PART I • COUNTERINSURGENCY, April 2003 to March 2004

  1. “What kind of people loot dirt?”

  2. A Broken Chain of Command

  3. “You work with the Americans, you die.”

  4. A Backwater Problem

  5. Valentine’s Day Massacre

  PART II • SIEGE, March to May 2004

  6. “They can’t do that to Americans.”

  7. Mutiny

  8. The Tipping Point

  9. Faint Echoes of Tet

  10. Farmers or Shooters?

  11. Avoiding the Perfect Storm

  12. Many Die, They Are Gone

  13. Easter with the Dark Side

  14. “You wanna shoot at me? This ain’t no picnic!”

  15. Fallujah: A Symptom of Success

  16. Two-Faced Sheikhs and Imams

  17. Lalafallujah

  18. Strategic Confusion

  19. The Jolan Graveyard

  20. A Deal with the Devil

  PART III • REVERSAL, May to October 2004

  21. The Bomb Factory

  22. “Keep the noise down.”

  23. All of This for Nothing?

  PART IV • ATTACK, November to December 2004

  24. The Watchdogs

  25. Merry-Go-Round at the Jolan

  26. Phase Line Henry

  27. The House from Hell

  28. Five Corporals

  Epilogue By Inches, Not Yards, January to May 2005

  Conclusion No True Glory

  Where Are They Now?

  Order of Battle for Operation Phantom Fury

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bing West

  Copyright Page

  Corporal Daniel Amaya, KIA (Killed In Action)

  Corporal Mitch Moorehead, WIA (Wounded In Action)

  Lance Corporal Toby Gray, KIA

  Corporal Carlos Perez-Gomez, WIA

  Corporal Timothy Connors

  Lance Corporal Abraham Simpson, KIA

  Corporals are the backbone of the infantry.

  Supposing you and I, escaping this battle,

  Would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal,

  So neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost

  nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory.

  But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us

  In their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,

  Let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.

  Homer, The Iliad

  To high officials given glory, from them much is expected.

  MAJOR CHARACTERS

  ____

  Abizaid—General (four stars) John P. Abizaid, U.S. Army, commanded CentCom, or Central Command, which included all U.S. forces in Iraq. He reported directly to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and spoke directly with President George W. Bush, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Ambassador Paul Bremer.

  Bremer—Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III was the president’s envoy to Iraq and director of the Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA. He was responsible for the policies, plans, and budget for the reconstruction of Iraq and its return to sovereignty. Bremer reported to the president through the secretary of defense.

  Conway—Lieutenant General (three stars) James T. Conway, USMC, commanded the I MEF or First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. I MEF consisted of an air wing, a logistics command, and a ground command—in this case the 1st Marine Division. Conway reported to Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Joint Task Force commander in Baghdad. Conway also spoke directly with Gen Abizaid. He rarely spoke with Bremer.

  Drinkwine—Lieutenant Colonel Brian M. Drinkwine commanded the paratrooper battalion in Fallujah from September through mid-March. He implemented the second extended American strategy for Fallujah.

  Janabi—Abdullah Al Janabi was a businessman and a fundamentalist Sunni cleric who emerged as the central insurgent leader in Fallujah. For over a year he also met with American military leaders in Fallujah, including General Mattis.

  Sanchez—Lieutenant General (three stars) Ricardo S. Sanchez commanded Joint Task Force 7 (JTF 7) in Baghdad. He directed all American and other Coalition forces in Iraq. Sanchez reported directly to Abizaid.

  Suleiman—Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman Al Marawi commanded a poorly trained Iraqi battalion in Fallujah. He was a strong, proud leader who believed Janabi was bringing destruction and death to the city.

  Mattis—Major General (two stars) James N. Mattis commanded the twenty-two thousand Marines of the 1st Marine Division. He reported directly to Conway. Mattis was the ground commander at the April battle for Fallujah. He rarely spoke with Abizaid, Sanchez, or Bremer.

  Rumsfeld—Secretary of Defense Donald R. Rumsfeld was responsible for defense policy worldwide and, after approval by the president, for authorizing Gen Abizaid to carry out major operations. Abizaid in turn would authorize Sanchez, who would authorize Conway, who would direct Mattis to take command of the ground battle. Rumsfeld spoke directly with President Bush, Gen Myers, Gen Abizaid, and Ambassador Bremer. He would occasionally talk with Sanchez but rarely with Conway or Mattis.

  Toolan—Colonel John Toolan commanded Regimental Combat Team 1, usually numbering four battalions and about six thousand Marines. He was the tactical commander for the April battle of Fallujah and the Marine who met daily with the Iraqis, especially Suleiman. He implemented the third extended American strategy for Fallujah.

  Wesley—Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley was the executive officer of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. During the summer of 2003 he assisted in designing and implementing the first extended American strategy for Fallujah.

  INTRODUCTION

  ____

  THE OBSCURE, HARDSCRABBLE INDUSTRIAL city of Fallujah erupted into the major battle of the Iraqi insurgency, involving fifteen thousand combatants and claiming 153 American and thousands of Iraqi lives. Fallujah provides a cautionary tale about mixing the combustible ingredients of battle and politics. This book describes how it came to do so and why.

  The twenty-month struggle for Fallujah had four phases. The first phase began immediately after American forces toppled Saddam Hussein from power in April 2003. That act also toppled the five million Sunnis who had long dominated the twenty million Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. In the aftermath many Sunnis refused to believe they had been removed from power. These former regime elements joined forces with radical Islamic fundamentalists to attack the Americans. Fallujah quickly emerged as a center of the insurgency.

  During the summer and fall of 2003, four separate American units in Fallujah applied the classic doctrine for fighting insurgents: namely, they tried to win the hearts and minds of the people who were providing the sea of support in which the insurgents swam. The Americans, though, had little money to spend on economic development; they lacked support from Iraqi leaders; and they responded to attacks with overwhelming firepower, all of which, despite their good intentions, caused resentment.

  The second phase began in March 2004, when four American contractors were killed and their bodies mutilated in broad daylight in the heart of the city. The United States Marines were ordered to seize the city, but then
, due to international outrage over televised reportage of the assault, were told to stop. For six weeks the Marines engaged in fierce but inconclusive siege warfare.

  In the third phase the city was handed over to former Iraqi generals who claimed they could restore order. The Sunnis of Fallujah, the generals explained, were a good people who wanted to be left alone to live under their own leaders. But instead of proclaiming peace, Fallujah promptly began exporting murder. The insurgents who controlled the city ignored the hapless generals, while the arch-terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi set up headquarters and dispatched suicide bombers to other cities. Fallujah appeared on nightly news reports to resemble the lair of the monster Grendel, a city of whippings, kidnappings, and beheadings.

  In the fourth phase, in the fall of 2004, the Marines were again ordered to seize Fallujah. Hundreds of foreign fighters, drawn to Iraq to fight the infidel invader, awaited them. The Marines—America’s shock troops—responded with a full measure of force. The jihadists decided to fight from inside the houses, so once the battle was over, Fallujah’s residents returned to a wrecked city.

  The extended battle brought to the fore the complex tenacity of the insurgency, the absence of Iraqi leadership, the miscalculations in senior American planning, and the fortitude of the American infantryman.

  PROLOGUE

  ____

  LYNCHING AT THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE

  THE WEDNESDAY-MORNING TRAFFIC IN FALLUJAH was its usual blue-smoke and horn-blaring self. The sidewalks were packed with unemployed men in scruffy dishdashas or old work trousers and faded shirts, many smoking and most lounging around, with no money, no job, and no prospects. The assassins drove west down the four-lane highway, cluttered with old cars carelessly double-parked, beeping their horn, waving their AK automatic rifles, and gesturing to other drivers to get out of the way. The truck stopped in the middle of the street, and half a dozen men jumped out, some with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces, others not caring who identified them. One man threw a grenade down the street; the small explosion did not injure anyone but succeeded in driving the onlookers to cover.

  “Americans coming!” a man shouted. “Get out of here!”

  The gunmen ran to the side of the street and hid in the doorways to the small shops.

  _____

  Around noon Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry was ambling down the main corridor in the 1st Marine Division headquarters in western Iraq, inquiring about the latest situation reports. The division commander, Major General James N. Mattis—“Mad Dog Mattis” to his grunts—ran a small headquarters staff, all of whom knew one another. It was a slow news day, and Perry was looking for a story.

  “There’s a garble from a Humvee crew reporting heavy smoke in downtown Fallujah,” a lance corporal told him. “Here we go again.”

  Fallujah lay thirty miles to the east of the division headquarters. Perry didn’t want to waste a day pursuing a hunch, so he stepped outside, flipped open his cell phone, and dialed Los Angeles. Maybe the home office had picked up something. An officer walking by overheard Perry describing the situation in Fallujah and called a regiment of Marines stationed a mile outside the city.

  “Ed, the lance corporal rumor net has a reporter here spun up about your favorite city,” the officer said. “You got anything?”

  Fluent in Arabic, Captain Ed Sullivan was the regiment’s liaison officer with the city. He had heard nothing. He checked with the operations center next door.

  “Is Fallujah acting up again?” he asked.

  “Negative. All quiet,” the watch officer replied.

  Sullivan walked back to his office, where a sergeant at the adjoining desk was pointing at his computer.

  “Reuters is running a story that vehicles were hit downtown.”

  Sullivan went back into the ops center.

  “Something’s happening. I’ll call the mayor and the police chief. Can we get a UAV launched?”

  The ops center was showing no Marine vehicles on patrol in the city. An unmanned aerial vehicle could be flying over the city in twenty minutes, quicker than an armored patrol could be assembled and dispatched. Sullivan picked up the phone to reach the mayor.

  Back at division headquarters, Perry told the division staff that his L.A. office had confirmed the story on the wire. He immediately asked to go to Fallujah, making a mental note to plug into the lance corporal net wherever he traveled.

  At the same time the chief of staff of the division, Colonel Joseph F. Dunford, received a call from the division’s higher headquarters, the Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF). “Baghdad has reports of Americans killed in Fallujah,” the MEF officer said. “What are you getting?”

  Dunford walked from his tiny office into the operations center, where video from a UAV was tracking a mob swarming around two smoking vehicles; the red flames from the burning tires stood out vividly. The UAV circled slowly, its telephoto camera zooming in on a mob beating inert bodies, the sticks repeatedly rising and falling. On an adjoining screen a satellite TV feed showed Iraqi men and boys stomping a body that was charred black and shriveled by the flames.

  To Dunford, the scene didn’t make sense. No Marine unit was reported in the city. Besides, it was a court-martial offense to travel with fewer than four vehicles. Those twisted corpses couldn’t be Americans.

  _____

  Without informing the Marines in advance, four American contractors escorting a supply run had taken a shortcut through Fallujah, the most dangerous city in Iraq. They were driving in two Mitsubishi Pajero sport utility vehicles on the main thoroughfare, Highway 10. Even in morning traffic it would take only twenty minutes for them to pass through town. The four were members of the North Carolina–based Blackwater Security Consulting company. They were capable men. Scott Helvenston, a former SEAL, had participated in the four-hundred-mile endurance race called the Raid Gaulouise. Jerry Zovko, who was fluent in five languages, had served in the 82nd Airborne Division. Michael Teague had won the bronze star in Afghanistan. Wesley Batalona had served both as a paratrooper and as a Ranger.

  The contractors crept along in the dense traffic, passing on their right the main police station and the walled compound of the city council, formerly the headquarters for the Baath Party. The Government Center in midtown was the final landmark where the contractors could have turned back, had any Iraqi policeman waved them down. No Iraqi, though, raised a hand to warn them.

  Minutes later, emerging from the doorways of shops, insurgents dashed into the street and sprayed both vehicles. (Some claimed an Iraqi police pickup had been leading the SUVs and had sped away at the last minute.) With no armor plating on the vehicles, the four men inside were riddled with bullets. They had had no chance to fire back.

  The firing ceased, the shooters drove off, and a crowd of men and boys approached. When an American with bullet wounds in his chest staggered out and fell to the ground, he was kicked, stomped, stabbed, and butchered. A boy ran up with a can of gasoline, doused the SUVs, and struck a match. The black smoke pointed like a finger up into the sky, attracting a swelling crowd.

  Egged on by older men, boys dragged the smoldering corpses onto the pavement and beat the charred flesh with their flip-flops to show that Americans were scum under the soles of their shoes. A body was ripped apart, and a leg attached to a rope was tossed over a power line above the highway.

  Colonel Dunford reached General Mattis, who was out in the field, by radio. “A mob in Fallujah has killed some American contractors. It looks like a scene from Somalia,” Dunford said. “Baghdad wants us to go in.”

  “What’s your take?” Mattis asked.

  “The contractors are dead,” Dunford said. “If we go in to get their bodies, we’ll have to kill hundreds, including kids. Captain Sullivan says the police chief promises to return the bodies. I recommend we stay out.”

  “Where does the MEF stand?”

  “General Conway thinks we should let the mob exhaust itself,” Dunford said. General James T. Con
way commanded the Marine Expeditionary Force. He was Mattis’s direct boss.

  “That’s it, then,” Mattis said. “Rushing in makes no sense.”

  The macabre carnival in Fallujah continued all day, the crowds spurring on one another, shouting, “Viva mujahedeen! Long live the resistance!” Two of the charred corpses were dragged behind a car through the souk, past rows of small shops and hundreds of cheering men, to the green trestle bridge that the Americans called the Brooklyn Bridge. There the mob hung the bodies from an overhead girder, two black lumps dangling at the end of ropes.

  Crowds in the souk and along the highway were swept up in the murderous atmosphere. No police tried to restore order; no fire truck put out the flames smoldering around the SUVs; no ambulance came for the bodies. When two Iraqi nurses tried to take the bodies to a hospital, they were told to leave or be shot. At dusk the remains of three bodies were dumped in a cart pulled by a gray donkey for a final triumphal haul down Highway 10. Men and boys followed the cart yelling shwaretek, meaning “Americans, you’ve lost your nerve.”

  Technicolor video of the ghoulish scenes, taped by the UAV, was played at the division, at the MEF, at higher headquarters in Baghdad, and at ops centers in Washington. Frustration and anger built hour by hour. In Fallujah crowds proud to show their handiwork greeted Iraqi photographers. Graphic footage was sold to the networks in Baghdad and broadcast worldwide. The next day’s front-page photos were stunning: young men smiling and waving as if their soccer team had won a championship match, while behind them dangled the blackened corpses of Americans.

  _____

  From the division’s point of view, the lynching was a tragedy, not least because it could have been avoided. The four Americans lost were added to the list of dozens killed in the past year in the Fallujah area. Conway, Mattis, Dunford—all had seen the maimed and the burned. They focused on the issues, not the emotions. War took its capricious daily toll. If you couldn’t absorb casualties and keep the mission foremost in your mind, you were in the wrong business. Sending an armored force downtown amid rampaging men and boys would have meant inviting more killing, more agony, and more screams for revenge. There were no lives left to be saved: the war had claimed four more victims.