Brooklyn, NY - Jacksonville, NC
A few days ago I got a phone call from Fallujah. A Lance Corporal whose unit I was embedded with was responding to an email I sent him. I had learned from the mother of another Marine that Battalion Landing Team 1/2, the unit he had been attached to on his last deployment, was about to re-deploy, and I wanted to catch up with him before he left. The lance corporal was already “in-country,”serving with a different regiment.
I asked him how things are in Fallujah. “Same shit,” he told me in the oddly matter-of-fact grunt tone I had become accustomed to in Iraq - the same grind he endured in Iskandariyah, a city south of Baghdad where he had been deployed eight months earlier. Patrols were encountering more IEDs and VBIEDs – improvised explosive devices and “vehicle-borne” bombs, he said.
“My vehicle got blown up. Three of my Marines got hurt pretty bad,” he added. I told him to stay safe, and then signed off.
The first time I interviewed the lance corporal, a cocky 19-year-old, he was prone to speaking his mind and to punctuating his remarks with well-timed splats of chewing tobacco spit. This time he didn’t tell me much. I’m a reporter, after all, thousands of miles away - and not in the shit with him.
The lance corporal’s terse report piqued my interest. I logged on and starting surfing websites, including the Defense Department’s site, Defenselink. In minutes I had filled the gap the lance corporal left with a pile of grim facts.
Regimental Combat Team – 8 (RCT 8), the unit he’s attached to now, is smack in the middle of a robust and resurgent resistance. October has been a particularly brutal month in the Fallujah area for the Marines - and presumably for the Iraqi civilians wedged between them and the resistance forces. Each time I log on to Defenselink there’s a new announcement of a Marine“KIA”(killed in action), either from RCT- 8 or from its parent unit, II Marine Expeditionary Force.
Sergeant Mark P. Adams, 24, a reservist from Morrisville, N.C., was killed during a combat operation in Saqlawiyah, a town just west of Fallujah, a little more than a week before my late October conversation with the lance corporal. Adams hugged his dad, Phillip Adams, so hard right before he left for Iraq, his father “thought his ribs were going to break,” Adams Sr. told Leah Friedman of The Raleigh News & Observer.
On October 21, days before the lance corporal and I talked, RCT-8 suffered one of its worst moments in its brief deployment (they arrived only in September). Three Marines and one sailor – Corporal Benny G. Cockerham III, 21, Captain Tyler B. Swisher, 35, Lance Corporal Kenneth J. Butler, 19, and US Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Christopher W. Thompson, 25 - were killed near al Amariyah when an IED was detonated near their vehicle. Corporal Seamus M. Davey, 25, was killed the same day near the town of Haqlaniyah, also in a roadside bomb attack. Five KIAs in a single day. The DoD offered no information on wounded – or on civilian casualties, if there were any.
“We’ve taken some casualties this month and every Marine and sailor knows that this enemy is trying to do everything possible to convince us they can survive—they cannot,” RCT- 8’s commanding officer, Colonel Dave Berger, wrote in a letter to families posted on the Web and dated October 24. “Overall, we are moving forward every week and will not allow the insurgents to set us back.”
But the insurgents continue to kill. Two more Marines from RCT-8 were blown up on October 27. Lance Cpl. Robert F. Eckfield Jr., 23, of Cleveland, Ohio, and Lance Cpl. Jared J. Kremm, 24, of Hauppage, N.Y., were killed by “indirect fire explosion in Saqlawiyah, Iraq,” the Pentagon reported in a typically terse announcement.
And again: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom,” said the next press release. “Sgt. Michael P. Hodshire, 25, of North Adams, Mich., died Oct. 30 of wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device during combat operations near Nasser Wa Salaam, Iraq on Oct. 29.”
Fallujah is a largely Sunni (and Wahabi) city about 40 miles west of Baghdad. It’s name has terrible resonance, both for US forces and for Iraqis who once lived in the now battered city, because of recent history as a battlefield.
Marines laid siege to Fallujah in April 2004 after five soldiers were killed along with four American military contractors, whose bodies were mutilated, then hung from a bridge. US commanders believed Fallujah was a base for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda in Iraq’s commander.
Civilians were allowed to leave the city – but only after combat started. After less than a week of heavy fighting with antioccupation Iraqi forces, US commanders declared a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations.” A week later the insurgents who had evaporated from the city silently flowed back in. A second round of fighting at the end of April further ravaged the city. Hundreds of civilians were killed, according to sources such as Iraq Body Count.
The US military then turned over the city to an ad-hoc Iraqi paramilitary, the Fallujah Protective Army (renamed the Fallujah Brigade). Unfortunately, the group later showed a deadly propensity for shooting at Americans.
“The Fallujah brigade didn't work,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted to reporters at a September 24 briefing. US commanders “tried, and they're sorry,” he said. THEY'RE sorry, Secretary Rumsfeld said, not I or we but "they". The Fallujah Brigade, a dismal experiment, was disbanded quietly by the US in September.
And that was that – for Secretary Rumsfeld, though not for the then-senior Marine commander in Iraq. Lieutenant General James T. Conway told reporters months later that the April assault on Fallujah may very well have made the area worse, more hostile and more dangerous. On top of that, Conway told the reporters he hadn’t supported the assault, but he went ahead with it anyway. "We follow our orders. We had our say, and we understood the rationale. We saluted smartly and went about the attack." That is what Marines do. Semper Fidelis.
Washington's decision to halt the assault after less than a week frustrated Conway, he said, and other always-faithful Marine commanders on the ground in Iraq. "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand the consequences of that, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of that,” said Conway, blending candor with caution. “Once you commit to do that, you have to stay committed."
The perilous status quo settled over the city again. Fallujah became “a major guerrilla base used to plan and launch insurgent attacks,” according to Steven Metz and Raymond Millen, writing in the Spring 2005 issue of Parameters, the US Army War College’s journal. “By the summer, it was fully controlled by an array of resistance groups which coordinated their actions through a Council of Mujahideen.
Fallujah - the same city US forces bombed relentlessly in the fall of 2004 when insurgent activity escalated to particularly deadly – and embarrassing - levels. Operation al-Fajr/Phantom Fury, a ground assault, followed the air attack.
"When we win this fight -- and we will win -- there will be nowhere left for the insurgents to hide," US commander General John Abizaid said in November. "We will fight them until there are none of them left to fight." US forces cut off water and electricity to the city. Though aimed at insurgent fighters, the move drove out roughly 200,000 citizens. Combat decimated Fallujah.
“Public buildings, mosques and residences were subjected to assault by air and ground forces,” US Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), an M.D., and Dr. Richard Rapport wrote in The Seattle Post Intelligencer in January 2005.
“Public buildings, mosques and residences were subjected to assault by air and ground forces,” Mc Dermott and Rapport wrote in their withering piece. “The city now lies in ruins, largely depopulated, but still occupied by U.S. forces. Convoys sent by the Iraqi Red Crescent to aid the remaining population have been turned back. Diseases brought on by bad water are spreading in Fallujah and the surrounding refugee camps."
"The means of attack employed against Fallujah are illegal and cannot be justified by any conceivable ends. In particular, the targeting of medical facilities and denial of clean water are serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Continuation of these practices will soon confirm what many already suspect: that the United States of America believes it is above the law.”
The cost in human life and property may have been high – too high for many observers of US actions and tactics - but US commanders cautiously declared victory.“Based on some of the records that we've been able -- and ledgers we've been able to uncover, we feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency and we have taken away this safe haven,” Lt. General John Sattler, commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force, announced a few days later.But the battle for Fallujah wasn’t over – at least as far as the elusive insurgents were concerned. Again, they proved to be terribly resilient.
“Transformed into a police state after last winter's siege, this should be the safest city in all of Iraq,” Edward Wong wrote of Fallujah in the July 15, 2005 New York Times. “Thousands of American and Iraqi troops live in crumbling buildings here and patrol streets laced with concertina wire. Any Iraqi entering the city must show a badge and undergo a search at one of six checkpoints. There is a 10 p.m. curfew.”
Fallujah and the surrounding area, the focus of the US military’s best efforts to crush the resistance and build Iraqi democracy, is once again beset by violent antioccupation forces. Reconstruction programs have started, but they are hindered by insurgent attacks and intimidation. Marines hunker down at Camp Fallujah and launch patrols into the dangerous streets and alleys, hunting an enemy that engages them at will, then melts away. It’s a Sisyphean task, and the Pentagon hasn’t yet figured out what to do next, with strategy or tactics. So the Marines of RCT –8 fill the breach and Fallujans endure.
ENDS
