Grunts_ Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq Part 9

So, for Bellavia, the moment of abject terror pa.s.sed quickly as he focused on his prey. He raised his M4 carbine and prepared to fire. Unlike many early-twenty-first-century American grunts, he had little interest in hunting. But he knew that hunters often emitted a quick noise to startle their prey into stopping short or turning toward the shooter. Sergeant Bellavia called out casually: "Hey." Sure enough, the insurgent stopped and looked at Bellavia, presenting a perfect target. The twenty-nine-year-old squad leader squeezed off two tracer bullets that streaked into the man's chest and shoulder. Both hits produced "a puff of smoke, like exhaust from a cigarette." As the wounded man stumbled around, his eyes bulged and he screamed in agony. "He howls, a long mewling, pain-wracked scream." Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts, a fellow squad leader, swung his shotgun into position atop Bellavia's helmet and laced the man with two slugs, tearing one of his arms off, knocking him down. A SAW gunner on the roof added several bullets that tore him up even more. When several of the machine gunner's bullets missed, they bounced up and down the street and off nearby houses. Then all was silence again.

A surge of adrenaline-laced excitement swept through Bellavia. He was so euphoric at killing the insurgent that he felt as if his vital organs were rearranging inside of him. His triumph instilled in him a keen sense of masculinity, as if he had now proven himself a better man than the insurgent. He felt powerful, almost invulnerable. He cupped his hand to his mouth and emitted an animal-like cry of victory: "You can't kill me! You hear me, f.u.c.kers? You will never kill me!" He was excited to be alive. He was also overcome with relief that he had what it took to kill another human being in such a personal fas.h.i.+on. "Combat distilled to its purest form is a test of manhood," he wrote. "In modern warfare, that man-to-man challenge is often hidden by modern technology-the splash of artillery fire can be random, a rocket or bomb or IED can be anonymous. Those things make combat a roll of the dice. But on this street and in these houses, it can be man-to-man. My skills against his. I caught him napping and he died."

In such instances, when soldiers kill face-to-face, euphoria can erode quickly into guilt over taking life. The perceptive Bellavia expected this contradiction and even welcomed it. "Combat is a descent into the darkest part of the human soul. A place where the most exalted n.o.bility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together. What a man finds there defines how he measures himself for the rest of his life. I embrace the battle. I welcome it into my soul." By doing so, he was probably trying to master the guilt that often leads to post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is, to a great extent, a product of guilt-survivor's guilt, guilt at not measuring up to one's self-image or the expectations of others in combat, most of all, guilt at having killed. Staff Sergeant Bellavia knew all the risks. Every bit a professional grunt, he was determined to overcome them.

As it turned out, the insurgent had been in the process of laying a horrifying trap for 2-2 Infantry. The battery he was carrying was meant to touch off a colossal amount of explosives that were packed into a house that the grunts were about to clear. "The whole thing was wired to blow," Bellavia recalled. "I've never seen that much C-4 [explosive] in my entire life. It looked like a log cabin, that's how many bricks were all taped together on the walls." Propane tanks and even a fuel tank from a jet aircraft were cleverly arranged among the whole deadly bouquet. When Bellavia had first spotted the insurgent, he had been heading for a nearby fighting hole. His mission, the soldiers soon understood, had been to wait for the platoon to enter the house and then touch the battery to wires leading away from the house, into the hole. The ensuing combination of flames and powerful explosives of this BCIED (building-contained improvised explosive device) would, most likely, have killed everyone in the platoon. With this chilling discovery, Bellavia and the others felt anything but guilt. They were pleased, and relieved, that they had killed the bearded man.

Creeped out by the thought that other BCIEDs might await them, the Ramrod grunts spent the rest of the night clearing houses. Their knees and elbows were already raw from sc.r.a.ping against rubble and gla.s.s. They encountered more b.o.o.by traps but none so elaborate as the notorious first BCIED. At each house they expected major resistance, and there were a few firefights, but most of the buildings were unoccupied. Newell's battalion was moving so quickly that they were already closing in on Highway 10. The speedy advance had a downside, though. As the pre-a.s.sault plan had envisioned, Newell's a.s.sault platoons were smas.h.i.+ng through the enemy's prepared defenses, disrupting their movements, and killing some of them. But there were no front lines and 2-2 Infantry was deeper into the city than the neighboring Marines. This meant that the insurgents were all around Newell's men, capable of popping up anywhere.

After sunrise, when the Americans no longer enjoyed the advantage of their night vision devices, the enemy fighters grew more aggressive. Sergeant Bellavia's squad was on a rooftop, looking south, when, from all around them, they heard a chorus of voices hollering to one another in Arabic. The voices trailed away and a single whistle blew. As the whistle tapered off, he and his men heard the sound of several dozen feet tromping through the dizzying warren of streets and alleys around them. "They're coming for us," Bellavia thought.

The squad's supporting Bradleys and tanks were, for the moment, occupied elsewhere. Although it would take them several minutes to work their way into position, around buildings and through streets, they could help if need be. The sergeant turned to his men: "We're not gonna bring any Brads up," he said to them. "We're gonna make them think they've trapped dismounts in the open without support. They're gonna rush us, and we'll f.u.c.king take them out. Hooah?" His grunts all replied with "Hooahs" of their own. In the early-twenty-first-century Army, this ubiquitous word had many meanings, ranging from "okay" to "gung ho" to "I agree" or even "I understand." The soldiers were arrayed in a firing line, covering every angle of approach, with SAWs, M4s, and M16s at the ready. Bellavia, ever the conscientious NCO, reminded his shooters to aim low and adjust high for maximum accuracy. The air was dusty and thick. Visibility was good. They could see for several blocks in every direction, although the sight revealed little more than the typical mishmash of drab, sandstone-colored buildings that characterized much of Fallujah.

The attacking insurgents soon ran into serious trouble. From the vantage point of a nearby house, Fitts's squad opened fire through windows and doors and slaughtered several of them. In the stunned aftermath, Fitts moved his people out of that house and linked up with Bellavia. All was quiet now. No one was in sight. The two sergeants estimated that somewhere out there was a force of about fifty or sixty mujahideen. They were desperately looking for the Americans but they did not know exactly where they were. They were probably spooked by the ambush Fitts had just sprung on them.

Suddenly, from about one hundred meters to the north (behind the line of the American advance), they heard a voice crying "Allah!" The grunts peered in that direction and saw a man in the middle of the street, aiming a machine gun, with an ammo belt wrapped around his arm, Rambo style. He was walking toward the Americans, chanting "Allah!" and mumbling to himself. "The muj are probing us," Bellavia wrote. "This lone fighter is a sacrificial lamb, baiting us to open fire and reveal our positions. It is a chilling way to employ a comrade." Still the courageous man kept coming. His tone was resolute, defiant and pa.s.sionate.

Bellavia, like most of the Americans, was contemptuous of the enemy's fanaticism and cruelty, but he could not help but respect the insurgent's valor and belief in his cause, odious though the sergeant believed that cause to be. Bellavia's ambivalence was quite similar to the way Marines had felt about their j.a.panese enemies at Guam and Peleliu. When the machine-gun-wielding man got too close for comfort, Sergeant Bellavia ordered his machine gunners to open fire. Their staccato bursts spewed bullets into the pavement around the man. He looked right up at the Americans and roared at them in a tone that quaked with rage. Just as he opened fire, the machine-gun bullets tore through his legs like a saw. "White bone exposed, the insurgent collapses onto his severed legs," Bellavia recalled. "He screams in agony, but refuses to give up the fight. Blood pools around him in the street." Still the man leaned on his trigger. His rounds smashed into the American-held building with dull thuds. Another American burst engulfed him. "The insurgent is ripped apart. Chunks of flesh spray across the road."

He had done his job, though. Within a minute, the Americans began taking intense machine-gun, rifle, and RPG fire. "The enemy is. .h.i.tting us with everything he has," Bellavia wrote. "Our wall becomes torn and pitted along the west and north sides. Figures dart between buildings and race across the street below." Some of them were in and around the houses across the street, no more than thirty meters away. In the recollection of one witness, they wore "tracksuit pants and the uniforms of the Iraqi National Guard." The Americans laced into them with everything at their disposal. The heavy cyclic bursts of machine guns melded crazily with the semiautomatic, throaty cracking of rifles. Plumes of smoke rose from the feed trays of the SAWs. Empty bra.s.s casings tinkled onto the ledge of the roof and spilled downward into the street or onto the rooftop. A fragment from a tracer round hit Sergeant Warren Misa in the face. Bellavia fished it out. Misa was okay but his face was swollen and infected where the fragment had burrowed into the skin.

The two sides screamed and cursed at each other. One of the Americans stood up, shouted "fire in the hole!" and fired an AT4 rocket at an insurgent taking cover behind a gate below. Someone let out a whoop, like a child exulting over fireworks. The gate exploded. Two machine gunners followed with several bursts, killing the enemy shooter. An RPG exploded just below the ledge, shaking the entire roof with concussion. Many others streaked by, "flying left and right, impacting buildings," in the recollection of one soldier. The firefight was evolving into a standoff. At this rate, though, the Americans risked losing fire superiority to the more numerous insurgents.

Fitts and Bellavia decided to play the mech infantryman's ace in the hole. One of them got on the radio and called up a Bradley commanded by Staff Sergeant Cory Brown, a man nicknamed "Grizzly Bear" by his platoon mates because of his personal courage. The two rifle sergeants asked Brown to attack alone down the insurgent-held street. The intrepid Bradley commander readily accepted the challenge. "The Bradley rolls forward down the street and straight into the insurgents," Bellavia recalled. "At first, they're astonished the Brad is counterattacking by itself. But they quickly swarm the Brad with tracers. RPGs strike the road around it." The Bradley responded with a steady barrage of 25-millimeter. The abrupt sonic booming of the rounds slashed the air as the sh.e.l.ls smashed into rooftops, windows, asphalt, and, most likely, people. Each round evoked miniwaves of shock and a.s.saulted eardrums.

An IED exploded near Brown's Bradley, obscuring it in dust and smoke. The mujahideen thought they had crippled the Brad. A group of them rushed down the street, trying to close the distance to Brown's vehicle, destroy it at intimate range, and kill the three crewmen. On the rooftop, the grunts had a perfect view of the enemy's movements (thus personifying the military term "overwatch"). Several of them had M203 grenade launchers attached to their rifles. They dropped 40-millimeter grenades among the enemy, pinning them down while the riflemen and machine gunners scythed them with bullets. A few went down and did not get up. Others scrambled for cover.

Brown's Bradley rolled warily in reverse down the street, back toward the friendly support of Bellavia's group. An enemy RPG team materialized next to a cistern and snapped off a shot. The warhead exploded next to Brown's battered and scarred Bradley but did no major damage. In response, Staff Sergeant Brown raised his TOW box and unleashed the fury of this fearsome weapon upon them. "When it comes to urban fighting," Bellavia commented, "a TOW is a gift from the Pentagon G.o.ds." The TOW hurtled down the street and exploded next to the cistern, killing the RPG men. Bellavia saw other enemy survivors making a run for it. "Our guns cut down seven of them. [One] insurgent runs out of his sandals before Ruiz shoots him in the belly. Our men cheer wildly and shout taunts."

The longer the battle raged, the more it favored the Americans. With the insurgent locations pinpointed, the dismounts began to work closely with tanks and Bradleys, devastating the enemy with coordinated fire. Once pinned down, it was hard for them to escape. The Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, still fighting from the cloverleaf outside of town, added still more Bradley, tank, machine-gun, and sniper fire, killing even more enemy. The muj could not hope to succeed against this effective blend of armored firepower and quality dismounted infantrymen. "We . . . scored a significant victory," Bellavia said. "We suffered only one slightly wounded and killed many, many bad guys. We withstood a multidirectional attack for over three and a half hours."12 Under the weight of this combined arms power, 2-2 Infantry kept advancing swiftly. In one instance, they spotted large numbers of armed insurgents moving into a mosque that was located in neighboring Marines' area of responsibility. The soldiers radioed the Marines and asked for permission to fire artillery at the mosque. Since 1/8's rifle companies were still a considerable distance from the mosque, they finally a.s.sented after about an hour's worth of cautious conversations about the political wisdom of sh.e.l.ling such a holy site. Firing from Camp Fallujah several miles away, Paladin 155-millimeter howitzer crews unleashed a staggered pair of twenty-round barrages right onto the mosque and its surrounding area. "Some hit the building and some hit just south of it," Lieutenant Neil Prakash, a tank commander who helped call in the rounds, later said, "but every explosion went off, and it was like a volcano: three to five guys shot up like they'd come out of a geyser." Prakash's tank was near Highway 10, a couple thousand meters from the mosque. In his turret, he leaned forward and gazed at the flying bodies through his commander's sight. He had done much of the spotting for the artillerymen. Now he surveyed the gruesome results of his competence as bodies flew in every direction. "They were perfectly still, not waving or fanning their arms or anything. They were already dead as they were going airborne and blossoming out. I was looking at this place and it was just smoldering. There are very few times that I've ever felt sorry for the enemy, but this time they just got slaughtered."

Back at the cloverleaf, one of the reconnaissance scouts peered through his L-RAS and saw a round impact "on the left side of the building and I saw three bodies fly into the air. It was awesome." Several of the Americans saw bodies. .h.i.t the ground and bounce two stories into the air. Some bounced as high as five stories. "It was the most insane, surreal thing I'd ever seen, just watching these bodies fly," one of them said. "They looked like dolls." They may have looked like dolls, but they were flesh-and-blood men, destroyed with ruthless finality by modern firepower. It was the essence of the violent horror that characterizes modern war.

As the sh.e.l.ls exploded against and in the mosque, survivors poured outside in hopes of escaping. "[They] were stumbling out, coughing from the smoke," Captain Chris Boggiano of the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop recalled. A fresh barrage landed among them, blowing some to pieces. Arms, heads, and pieces of flesh flew in all directions. Lieutenant Prakash watched one enemy fighter emerge "out of the gray smoke, and he's holding his stomach, dragging his AK by the sling, and he's gagging and retching; and just then . . . ten more rounds landed right on top of his head." The sh.e.l.ling killed between forty and seventy insurgents, including one of Zarqawi's top lieutenants.

By late afternoon on November 9, 2-2 Infantry had secured Highway 10. Many of the 2-2 grunts yearned to continue their advance and keep the enemy in disarray. They wanted to push across the highway and clear the industrial areas of south Fallujah. But they were too far ahead of the Marines to do that, so they paused at Highway 10. To some of the soldiers, the Marines seemed slow and deliberate, too preoccupied with clearing every last building before continuing the advance. "You could see the differences in how we fight," Major Eric Krivda, the XO of 2-2, said. "We'd do whatever we could to drop [a] building first" with tanks and Bradleys. "The last possible resort is we send an infantry squad in to clean up the remnants." Captain Fowler, an Army tanker, even claimed that the pause allowed the insurgents "to move back behind our lines. We ended up forcing them out again, but we don't like to pay for the same ground twice." Some of the Marines, conversely, thought the Army was moving so fast because they were simply riding around in armored vehicles, shooting at targets and moving on, without dismounting and truly eliminating resistance.

Both perceptions were wrong. For the most part, the battle was unfolding according to plan. In a figurative sense, the Army was shattering the enemy's wall; the Marines were cleaning up the rubble. Each and every building did have to be cleared or the insurgents would infiltrate back into them. Marine light infantry and the Iraqi battalions were best suited for that time-consuming, exhausting task. By the same token, the Army's mechanized capability was ideal for urban fire support and mobility, so it was not the least bit surprising that Lieutenant Colonel Newell's 2-2 Infantry moved faster than the Marines. Newell's small number of dismounts, and not any deficiency on the part of the Marines, meant that 2-2 would have to do much back-clearing of areas the unit had already traversed. "We do have some disadvantages in not having lots of dismounted infantry," Newell said, "so that's why . . . there needs to be a balanced organization. It's a complementary relations.h.i.+p." At Fallujah, the concept of melding Marine light infantry dexterity with Army mechanized brawn worked very well, and with an amazing minimum of friendly fire problems.

Thus, Newell's grunts began clearing buildings on either side of Highway 10 "to destroy pockets of enemy resistance bypa.s.sed during the attack south," the unit after action report said. By now, hungry packs of stray dogs and cats had learned to follow the Americans as they a.s.saulted the buildings, because they left behind so many bodies in their wake. One soldier witnessed a cat eat the lips off a dead insurgent. Sergeant Bellavia saw several hungry dogs feeding on the remains of a dead enemy fighter. "The dogs gnaw and tear at his flesh. One comes up, his snout smeared in gore. My stomach flutters." In some cases, the animals ate all the way through to the bone.

Covered by Abramses and Bradleys, the Army grunts kicked in so many doors, cleared so many houses, dodged so many b.o.o.by traps, and destroyed so many weapons caches that they lost count. Time after time, the grunts lined up in a stack, on either side of a doorway, hugging the wall, each man orienting his weapon to cover a different sector, each wondering to himself if he was about to enter a BCIED or a house full of jihadis. The skin of the grunts was peppered with nicks and cuts. Their eyes were rimmed with dark circles. They stank of dust, cordite, stale MRE crumbs, body odor, and soiled underwear. The sweaty T-s.h.i.+rts that hugged their irritated skin had given many of them p.r.i.c.kly heat. They were irritable and surly. They were coated with the disgust and cynicism of infantrymen in combat.

Firefights erupted on various blocks. The Americans annihilated anyone in their path. On one street, an enemy machine gunner opened up on a group of Americans just as they rammed through the door of the house he was defending. He wounded three of them before the grunts pulled back and a Mark 19 gunner blew the enemy gunner to pieces. Sergeant Bellavia came upon another muj gunner lying in rubble alongside his weapon. The sergeant and one of his team leaders opened fire. "I hit him twice in the back and hear his lungs expel a sudden rush of air. Was it a death rattle? I'm not sure." A pool of sticky, dark red blood engulfed the fighter. The other soldier shot him in the head. Bellavia nudged his legs apart and kicked him in the groin, just to make sure he wasn't playing possum. The sergeant's boot sank deep into his leg cavity and he realized that the man had no s.c.r.o.t.u.m or p.e.n.i.s left. Needless to say, the man was very dead.13 A few minutes later, as the clock neared midnight and the men were on the verge of exhaustion, the platoon a.s.saulted a handsome two-story square-shaped home. Behind the house was a nice courtyard garden. Bellavia figured that the house and garden must have belonged to someone with money. He knew that this was the Askari District, where many of Saddam's military officers had lived.

The lead soldiers found the front door unlocked. In the stack, there were men from both Bellavia's squad and Fitts's. With Sergeant Misa in the lead, they surged into the dark front room of the house. The only illumination came from the SureFire flashlights they had fastened onto their rifles. Beams of light bounced along the walls and corners as each soldier cleared his respective sector. Bellavia was outside, in the courtyard, watching this through a window when, all of a sudden, he heard shooting and a lot of it. He rushed inside, just in time to see tracers ricocheting off the floor and walls. There were so many that, to Bellavia, it looked like someone had thrown a telephone pole on top of a big campfire, sending embers flying in all directions. The tracers sizzled and hissed. They touched off little fires in piles of garbage and papers strewn about the house.

The shots were snapping off quickly, fast and desperate. The noise was deafening. Confusion reigned supreme. At first the sergeant thought his men were shooting at nothing so he screamed at them to cease fire. But, in reality, they were in heavy contact, pinned down in the living room by withering fire from well-hidden insurgents. The term "pinned down" is, in essence, a slice of military vernacular that means the enemy fire is so accurate, so deadly, so thick that any movement can bring instant death.

Two jihadis were hunkered down in the middle of the house, near a central stairwell, with well-sighted fields of fire into the living room and the foyer of the house. The truly amazing thing was that, with hundreds of bullets buzzing around, no one on either side had gotten hit yet. Bellavia chanced a look through the foyer doorway and saw the two muj shooting from behind "a pair of three-foot-high concrete Jersey barriers with little more than their heads and shoulders exposed. One of the insurgents holds an AK-47 against each shoulder with the barrels resting on one barrier. The other man has a Russian belt-fed PKM machine gun perched atop the other barrier." Fitts and several other soldiers were pinned down opposite the doorway, on the other side of the living room.

A round grazed Private First Cla.s.s Jim Metcalf, one of the SAW gunners, right under his body armor. He stumbled and cried out: "I'm hit!" The Americans heard the insurgents laughing above the din, mocking Metcalf, taunting him: I'm heeet!! I'm heeet!! At the same time shards of gla.s.s and debris practically filled the air. One of the soldiers took some fragments to the eyes and hollered: "My face! My eyes!" The insurgents laughed some more and wailed in mock distress: At the same time shards of gla.s.s and debris practically filled the air. One of the soldiers took some fragments to the eyes and hollered: "My face! My eyes!" The insurgents laughed some more and wailed in mock distress: Ohhhhh, my feeece! My eyes! Ohhhhh, my feeece! My eyes! The sound of their voices made the hair on Bellavia's neck stand up. It was as if they were questioning the manhood of the Americans. The sergeant was filled with rage and fear, and it is safe to say the others were, too. As a leader, he tried to remain calm enough to consider what to do. He realized that, with several men pinned down inside the house, the supporting fire of tanks, Bradleys, artillery, and close air support were all useless. The enemy had designed their fighting position for just this type of close encounter. "This ambush is the product of study," he wrote, "an enemy who has thoroughly a.n.a.lyzed 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." The sound of their voices made the hair on Bellavia's neck stand up. It was as if they were questioning the manhood of the Americans. The sergeant was filled with rage and fear, and it is safe to say the others were, too. As a leader, he tried to remain calm enough to consider what to do. He realized that, with several men pinned down inside the house, the supporting fire of tanks, Bradleys, artillery, and close air support were all useless. The enemy had designed their fighting position for just this type of close encounter. "This ambush is the product of study," he wrote, "an enemy who has thoroughly a.n.a.lyzed 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."

This was exactly the sort of mano a mano situation that, according to the techno-vangelists, was supposed to be a relic of the past, but it was all too real and, in Fallujah, all too common. The two sides would fight to the finish with whatever weapons they had at their disposal. Wits, presence of mind, and valor counted for much in this terrifying environment. Here, weapons were the tools of fighting spirit.

Bellavia was in the best position to lean into the foyer and open fire on the insurgent position. This would put him squarely into a fatal funnel but it had to be done if Fitts and the other men were to have any chance to escape the house. Bellavia loved Fitts like a brother. The two men had been through nine months of combat together. Their feelings of brotherhood, combined with the squad leader's heavy sense of responsibility, extended to every man inside the house. Bellavia dreaded the idea of exposing himself in the fatal funnel, but he knew he must do it.

Hollering back and forth, he and the others worked out a plan. When Bellavia stepped into the doorway and opened up with his SAW, the others would vacate the house-quickly. The New Yorker readied the SAW. He was still enraged, yelling insults back and forth with the muj. His breathing was jagged and nervous. His palms were sweating. A thousand thoughts raced through his intelligent brain, but a line from The Exorcist The Exorcist came to dominate: "The power of Christ compels you!" As a somewhat religious man, he was fascinated that this, of all things, would come to him during such a moment of peril. Perhaps it was because he equated his struggle against the insurgents to the movie priest's epic battle with demons. He muttered a short prayer, stood up, and opened fire at the stairwell: "Go! Go! Go! Get out!" he screamed. came to dominate: "The power of Christ compels you!" As a somewhat religious man, he was fascinated that this, of all things, would come to him during such a moment of peril. Perhaps it was because he equated his struggle against the insurgents to the movie priest's epic battle with demons. He muttered a short prayer, stood up, and opened fire at the stairwell: "Go! Go! Go! Get out!" he screamed.

Sergeant Bellavia stood in the doorway and pointed his weapon at the Jersey barriers. The SAW can fire over seven hundred rounds per minute and Bellavia had a full drum of two hundred 5.56-millimeter bullets to cook off. As he leaned on the trigger, the insurgents did the same. "Bullets bash into the wall to my left. The doorframe splinters. Tracers hiss this way and that, bouncing off the bricks and ceiling. Bullets slam into the Jersey barriers and penetrate to their hard foam centers. Hunks of foam pop out of the holes I've made and cartwheel across the room. I can see their faces and they're angry but they're smiling; they look completely evil."

He caught his glimpses of their grinning visages against his own muzzle flashes and the streaking lights of tracer rounds. Behind him, Fitts and the others scrambled out of the house. Bellavia's SAW fire was so overwhelming that the insurgents had to duck or risk having their smiling heads blown off. "Get out there," he thought. "Clear the room and juice these guys." But it was as if his legs were cemented in place. He could not bring himself to walk up on them and kill them at point-blank range. He did not know why. Perhaps he was afraid of pus.h.i.+ng his luck any further. Perhaps he was repelled by the idea of snuffing out their lives at handshake range. Regardless, when he ran out of ammo, he bolted from the house, enraged at himself for not finis.h.i.+ng them off.

He found Fitts and several other men just beyond the garden, taking cover behind a wall. Bellavia was absolutely disgusted with himself. He paced around roaring and cursing. "There's no escaping this: I cut and ran. When s.h.i.+t got hot, I ran. I'm an NCO. I'm supposed to lead by example." He felt like a fraud and a coward. He had joined the Army, in part, to prove to himself that he was no such thing. Like any good sergeant, he felt a strong obligation to lead his soldiers. To him, running from an enemy-occupied house was not the way to do that. The insurgents were still spewing fire from that house. Near misses sparked on the pavement all around the Americans. "We're all gonna die," one frightened man said. "We're not going to die!" Bellavia shouted back. "They're gonna f.u.c.king die!" He was calming himself as much as he was calming the scared soldier.

A Bradley came up and raked the house with 25-millimeter and coaxial machine-gun fire. As much as the soldiers hoped that the supporting fire had killed the insurgents, most everyone, including Bellavia, understood that someone would have to go back into the house and kill them face-to-face. The sergeant knew that he had to lead the a.s.sault, even though he believed he would not survive. The very thought of it all frightened him to death, but it had to be done. "If I don't go in," he later wrote, "they'll have won. How many times have we heard that American soldiers rely on firepower and technology because they lack courage?" From studying military history, he knew that America's enemies always made the same claim. He was determined to disprove it.

Gathering several of his soldiers, he prepared to make a coordinated a.s.sault. All the while, he kept psyching himself up and projecting a fearless persona to his men by telling them "you were born for this moment . . . you were born to kill these evil motherf.u.c.kin' terrorists . . . we're gonna eat their flesh and send them to f.u.c.king Lucifer." Every man believed that death waited in the house. Another squad leader, Staff Sergeant Scott Lawson, sidled up to Bellavia and told him: "I'm not going to let you go in there and die alone." Bellavia was overwhelmed by the n.o.bility of Lawson's statement. Bellavia's feeling of brotherhood for him was so powerful that he felt "closer to Lawson than to my own kin." Here was a prime example of an enduring truth about American combat soldiers: they fight, die, and sacrifice for one another. For them, no other motivation to face danger is ever as powerful. "I just wasn't gonna let him go in there by himself and die," Lawson later said. "That night it was hectic, crazy. You lose your mind a little bit."

After hurling some grenades, the squad crept through the courtyard, with Bellavia and Lawson in the lead. Michael Ware, an Australian reporter, was among them, observing everything. The Bradley fire had not killed the muj but it did force them to abandon the windows and take shelter in the house's interior. It also punctured a water tank, coating the floor of the building with a quarter inch of dank water. Bellavia and Lawson entered the house and carefully moved along the foyer wall, toward the stairwell. The house stank of moldy water and rotting fish. They could hear the enemy fighters whispering in Arabic. Bellavia was carrying an M16A4 with a 203 grenade launcher attachment-not an ideal weapon for close-quarters battle (CQB) because of its size and weight. Lawson had a 9-millimeter pistol.

Bellavia was peering through his night vision goggles, looking for the insurgents. Then, confusion reigned as shooting broke out. Bullets whizzed past Bellavia, so close he could almost feel the wind of one as it snapped past his helmet. Others tore chunks from the walls. The fire tapered off and the insurgents began chanting "Alahu Akbar" "Alahu Akbar" (G.o.d is great) over and over, in a frightened tone, almost as if calming themselves. Through the haze, Sergeant Bellavia could see them now, and they were still behind the barriers. One of them looked very young. He bent down to prep an RPG. The other one had a neatly trimmed beard and was wielding a machine gun. Behind them, propane tanks lay in piles. Bellavia was praying to himself now. He tried to clear his mind but again all he could think was "The Power of Christ compels you!" He screamed that aloud, brought his weapon to his shoulder, and rushed toward them. "Close-quarters combat is instinctual, fought on the most basic and animalistic level of the human brain," he wrote. "Body language, eye contact, the inflection of voice can turn a fight in a heartbeat." The younger insurgent looked up in surprise. His eyes met Bellavia's and, with venomous emphasis, he spat out the word "Jew!" Bellavia put a round into his chest and his pelvis. The jihadi spun around, fell down, and his blood poured into the water, spreading red pools outward from the dead form. The other man ran for the kitchen. Bellavia and Lawson shot at him and scored several hits, as evidenced by his intense moaning, but he kept returning fire from the kitchen. Lawson ran out of ammo. Outside, soldiers were screaming in confusion. Some thought Bellavia had been wounded or killed. (G.o.d is great) over and over, in a frightened tone, almost as if calming themselves. Through the haze, Sergeant Bellavia could see them now, and they were still behind the barriers. One of them looked very young. He bent down to prep an RPG. The other one had a neatly trimmed beard and was wielding a machine gun. Behind them, propane tanks lay in piles. Bellavia was praying to himself now. He tried to clear his mind but again all he could think was "The Power of Christ compels you!" He screamed that aloud, brought his weapon to his shoulder, and rushed toward them. "Close-quarters combat is instinctual, fought on the most basic and animalistic level of the human brain," he wrote. "Body language, eye contact, the inflection of voice can turn a fight in a heartbeat." The younger insurgent looked up in surprise. His eyes met Bellavia's and, with venomous emphasis, he spat out the word "Jew!" Bellavia put a round into his chest and his pelvis. The jihadi spun around, fell down, and his blood poured into the water, spreading red pools outward from the dead form. The other man ran for the kitchen. Bellavia and Lawson shot at him and scored several hits, as evidenced by his intense moaning, but he kept returning fire from the kitchen. Lawson ran out of ammo. Outside, soldiers were screaming in confusion. Some thought Bellavia had been wounded or killed.

At this point, for Bellavia, the battle became a one-man struggle. Chaos ensued as, throughout the dark house, he engaged in a personal duel to the death with the insurgents. In two instances, he had to shoot them multiple times before they died. Many times, he yelled at them in Arabic to surrender. One of them responded with taunts. "I will kill you and take your dog collar," he said. "Mommy will never find your body. I'll cut your head off." For the American, the creepy voice was unnerving to the point of sheer panic, but he suppressed his natural fear and kept fighting. He stalked one wounded insurgent up the stairs onto the upper floor. He and the man had awkwardly exchanged shots in a bedroom, stumbling around an armoire where the bearded man had been hiding. This fighter had a thick beard, he was middle-aged, and he stank to high heaven. Bellavia thought of him as the bogeyman because he looked so bedraggled and had emerged from the armoire, like something out of a child's nightmare of monsters in the closet.

As Sergeant Bellavia ascended the wet stairs in search of the enemy fighter, images of his wife and son kept flas.h.i.+ng through his mind. In his mind's eye, he saw a casualty notification team coming to the door of his home. He imagined his wife as a widow, his son growing up with no father. He saw his own tombstone. He was filled with a strange combination of fury and regret. Like nearly every infantry soldier, he was torn between an obligation to his actual family and his military family. He loved them both with an intensity that was hard to describe. Both of them needed him badly. Right now, in this horrible place, though, his military brothers needed him more.

Near the top of the stairs, he slipped on a pool of blood and fell forward a bit. At that exact moment, the bogeyman opened fire. The bullet whizzed overhead, right where Bellavia's head would have been if he had not slipped. A chance incident, a slip of one mere foot, had saved his life and left him always to wonder why. The sergeant straightened up and sputtered: "You're gonna f.u.c.king die, dude." He shot and missed. In the muzzle flash, Bellavia could see fear in the eyes of his enemy. The man fled to a room. The New Yorker found him, threw a grenade in there, and wounded him again. Just as Bellavia was about to open fire and finish him off, he noticed propane tanks and a smoky fire burning up a mattress in one corner of the room. Bellavia could smell natural gas. Concerned that one of his tracer rounds might touch off an explosion, he held his fire. "I step forward and slam the barrel of my rifle down on his head. He grunts and suddenly swings his AK up. Its barrel slams into my jaw and I feel a tooth break." Bellavia's father was a dentist and all the squad leader could think of right now was how angry his dad would be that he had cracked a tooth. "These are the irrational thoughts that come into your mind at this moment," he later said.

In fact, these were the first blows in a desperate fight to the death. Bellavia tasted blood in his mouth and throat. He swung his rifle like a baseball bat and caught the man full in the face. The bogeyman still had the presence of mind to kick the sergeant in the crotch. His M16 clattered onto the floor. Bellavia tried beating him with a small-arms protective insert (SAPI) plate from his body armor and then his Kevlar helmet, too. The two struggled back and forth, kicking, clawing "like caged dogs locked in a death match. We've become our base animal selves, with only survival instincts to keep us going. Which one of us has the stronger will to live?"

Bellavia kept yelling in Arabic and English at the man to surrender, but to no avail. With his right finger, he gouged the man's left eye and was "astonished to discover that the human eye is not so much a firm ball as a soft, pliable sack." The gouging of an eye is highly unsettling to most all human beings, even a trained warrior like Bellavia. Even with his life on the line, and wearing Nomex gloves, he could not bring himself to plunge his finger deep into his enemy's eye socket. He withdrew the finger. The man fired a pistol shot that just missed Bellavia's head. "I thought . . . I'm done." In that moment, he suddenly remembered that he was carrying a knife. "That knife was the only thing that was gonna make me live." As he rose slightly to grab it from his belt, the man bit him in the crotch. Paroxysms of pain and rage coursed through Bellavia. At first he used the blunt end of the knife to batter the man's gray-flecked hair, but still his teeth clenched into Bellavia's crotch. "His breath was horrible, just stale, nasty breath." The American could feel warm blood running down his leg but fortunately his vital parts were intact.

At last, he locked the knife blade into place, rolled heavily onto the muj, and stabbed him under the collarbone. The man was crying, struggling and wailing. One of his hands kept beating Bellavia's side but the blows steadily weakened when the knife nicked an artery. Bellavia heard a gurgling, liquid sound. Both of them were bathed in the warm arterial blood. Bellavia kept pumping the knife blade "like Satan's version of CPR." A powerful smell, much like rust, emanated from the blood.

Bellavia saw fear and then resignation in the eyes of his enemy. "Please," he said to the American. With tears of his own, Bellavia replied, "Surrender!" "No," the man said with a smile on his face. With one last spasm of strength, he reached up with his right hand and caressed Bellavia's face. "His hand runs gently from my cheek to my jaw, then falls to the floor. He takes a last ragged breath, and his eyes go dim, still staring into mine. Why did he touch me like that at the end? He was forgiving me." The two enemies had shared a supremely ironic killer-and-victim intimacy, almost s.e.xual in its intensity, that only they could understand. Bellavia was anything but exhilarated. He was exhausted from his postfight adrenaline crash, aching from his wounds, and wrung out from the awful experience of killing face-to-face, in an animal struggle. He lay still, s.h.i.+vering, cold, nauseous, coated with the dried blood of the man he had just stabbed to death.

When, at last, he collected himself, grabbed his rifle, and left the room, he heard American voices downstairs. He stumbled into the hallway and almost b.u.mped into another enemy fighter. In the confusion, the muj lost his AK-47. Bellavia fell on his rear end but held on to his M16. "The dregs of my body's adrenaline supply shoots into my system." He shot the man several times. The wounded muj dragged himself to the roof of the house and flung himself into the garden below. An unseen SAW gunner finished him off. Bellavia shuffled to a corner, sat down heavily, lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. As he contemplated what had just happened to him in this h.e.l.l house, it occurred to him that today was his birthday. "I've had better birthdays," he thought. The other grunts came upstairs and asked if he was okay. "Yeah, I'm good," he replied bravely. He knew that was not true, though. In fact, he doubted he would ever be the same again.14 Nor was the battle anywhere near finished for him and the other grunts. Task Force 2-2 Infantry pushed across Highway 10 and continued methodically clearing block after block of urban sprawl. "They would dismount and clear a building to the roof to get eyes into the next block, or the next intersection," one officer remembered. "Then they'd move the Bradleys around to get some suppressive fire, bring the guys down off the roof, down into the next block, and then do it again." Newell eventually had to use soldiers from the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop as dismounted infantrymen. In addition to local resistance, often these men and the everyday grunts fought face-to-face with foreign insurgents who had come to Fallujah from such countries as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan to martyr themselves.

The process of seizing buildings was exhausting and deadly. Alpha Company lost its commander, Captain Sean Sims, and its executive officer, First Lieutenant Edward Iwan. Sims was shot at point-blank range by a hidden insurgent inside of a building he thought was clear. Iwan took a direct hit from an RPG as he stood in the turret of his Bradley during a major insurgent counterattack. The warhead embedded in his abdomen, nearly severed him in two, but did not explode. Dr. Dewitt's aid station was close to the fighting, maybe about a kilometer away. She did everything she could to save him, and even got him to the operating table at Camp Fallujah, but he died there. As Iwan lay dying and unconscious, Lieutenant Commander Ron Camarda, a chaplain, sang hymns to the young lieutenant. "I was singing 'O Holy Night' when he shed a most awesome and beautiful tear." Camarda believed that the tear came from Iwan's sadness at his imminent death and the profound love he felt for his soon-to-be-grieving family.

According to Task Force 2-2's after action report, "The speed and shock effect of the task force attack south cornered the insurgents into their last strongholds in the southern corners of the city and prevented them from reorganizing or developing a coherent defensive plan. These fighters fell back to prepared defensive positions, including spider holes, underground tunnels connecting bas.e.m.e.nts of houses, IEDs along roads, houses rigged with explosives, and defensive positions on rooftops." Newell's formidable force steadily battered them to death. In the meantime, the Marines were also fighting house to house.15 Door to Door with 3/1 Marines in the Jolan and Queens.

Young and c.o.c.ky, they were the unit descendants of the men who had fought at the Point and among the terrible Umurbrogol caves on Peleliu. Born in the 1970s and 1980s, they were products of America's postindustrial, information-age culture. They loved video games, guy movies, reality TV shows, p.o.r.n, and glam magazines like FHM FHM and and Maxim Maxim. They called one another "dude" and "dog." Even officers and sergeants routinely employed these ubiquitous monikers when talking to their young Marines. They were tech savvy and very bright, though they could sometimes be ignorant of grammatical niceties and basic geography. Modern American entertainment culture was so powerfully ingrained in them that they generally referred to their enemies as the "bad guys" and themselves as the "good guys," as if the Iraq War was merely a giant action film. Many of them coated themselves with tattoos. Their music was a blend of country, hard rock, and rap. They no longer referred to their NCOs as "Sarge." They called them "Sar'nt," as if saying the full t.i.tle might absorb too much time and energy. Their officers used words like "battles.p.a.ce" instead of "battlefield" and "challenge" instead of "problem." Like their World War II ancestors, the grunts smoked cigarettes in distressingly high numbers. But, unlike the Old Corps Marines, they knew all about the dangers of smoking and still did it. Even more commonly, they dipped snuff, mainly as a means to combat exhaustion, the favorite brands being Skoal and Copenhagen.

In some ways, they were societal anomalies. In the midst of postfeminist America, they were unapologetically macho and h.o.m.ophobic. Paragons of physical fitness, they fought for a country with a serious obesity problem. They swore so creatively and with such frequency that polite conversation with a civilian could be a greater challenge for some of them than the boot camp they had all endured and mastered. To put it mildly, they were politically incorrect and proud of it. Like almost all infantrymen, they were irreverent on the outside, reverent on the inside. They were a fascinating blend of hard-bitten cynicism and tenacious idealism.

They had more in common with their 3/1 Marine predecessors than otherwise. As with the 3/1 Marines at Peleliu, they loathed their enemies and everything they stood for, but respected their fanatical courage. Their weapons were different from the World War II Marines', but their spirit was the same. They were grunts to the core-lean, aggressive, sour but good-hearted. They were among the finest light infantrymen in the world. Their competence and skill underscored the generally unappreciated reality that not just anyone can become an infantryman. "There is a certain amount of natural talent that can't be created," one Marine officer wrote. "When that talent is there it can be nurtured, but it can't be created where it doesn't exist." A rifle platoon leader added his opinion that "there are probably few jobs in the Marine Corps . . . that are more challenging than being an infantry squad leader."

In western Fallujah their job was to go door to door, cleaning out every building, in the Jolan and Queens, a pair of terrorist strongholds. "Clearing buildings is combat at its most primitive," one embedded civilian historian wrote. "The fighting is up close and personal, not the pushb.u.t.ton warfare that many Americans hear about and see on television." This meant ending the lives of other human beings with a staggering degree of personal violence and trauma. "You're just acutely aware of what war is about," Major Joe Winslow, a Marine combat historian with 3/1, later said, "finding and violently killing other people as best you can and you're exposed to the results of that . . . Marines being killed or injured, dead enemy body parts, bodies stuck everywhere, just death in general. It's very earth shattering." In fact, American intelligence officers believed that the Jolan was where many of the most hardcore insurgents, including Zarqawi's crew, were headquartered. The area was also known for its narrow streets and dense, st.u.r.dy structures.

As with 2-2 Infantry in eastern Fallujah, in this western section of town the Army's 2-7 Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey, led the way through the breach as an armored fist. They cleared the streets of IEDs and VBIEDS. They destroyed RPG and machine-gun teams. Their grunts cleared plenty of buildings. More than that, though, the sheer force of their tanks and Bradleys shocked the enemy into immobility. "The 3/1's mission was to flow behind 2-7 after they entered the city . . . and start clearing the enemy right behind the penetration," Colonel Shupp, commander of RCT-1, later said. "I can't tell you how happy we were with Jim Rainey and 2-7. These guys are fighters. They're the best soldiers I've ever seen in my life." Lieutenant Colonel Buhl, 3/1's commander, was grateful for the armored screen that the tanks and Brads provided his Marines. "I'm very thankful for everything 2-7 did for us. I'm impressed with that battalion. They were a seasoned battalion. They really . . . attacked, aggressively. Their leaders were squared away."

In the wake of this powerful wedge, covered by the watchful eyes of Marine and SEAL snipers, Buhl's rifle companies plunged into the close-packed jungle of sandstone-colored buildings. They were aided by satellite photographs and even some real-time images from UAVs flying overhead. The drone of their engines became a constant sound track. At ten thousand feet, fighter jets loitered, waiting to help. The supporting fire of artillery and mortar crews was readily available. But it was up to the grunts to clear the buildings. In general, they carried about forty or fifty pounds of gear, consisting of fresh magazines for their rifles, water, grenades, body armor (IBA), Kevlar helmets, weapons, and a.s.sorted specialty items like bolt cutters, shotguns, or sledgehammers.

Most of the city blocks were about two hundred meters long, with an average of one hundred structures on each block. A house might contain nothing or it might teem with jihadis looking to martyr themselves. "It would seem that the first block was always clear," Lance Corporal Dustin Turpen of Lima Company said, "and they let us think there was n.o.body there, and we started to get complacent. After you kick fifty doors in, and there's n.o.body there, it starts to become normal. It's like the fiftieth house you clear that day, and you're just trying to get it done, and that's when the s.h.i.+t happens." As Turpen indicated, the job of a.s.saulting the buildings was up close and personal, a high-stakes jumble of kicking in doors, rus.h.i.+ng through rooms. The repet.i.tiveness was mind-numbing. There was a definite Russian roulette feel to it. Danger could come from any direction in the urban mora.s.s. "You have to cover everywhere," First Sergeant Brad Kasal of Weapons Company said. "You had a guy pointing [his weapon] in the front, a guy pointing high, guys covering high in other directions, a guy covering the rear. The fire can come from anywhere . . . up high, low, down in a sewer . . . a window."

Each fire team and squad had to perfect a distinct ch.o.r.eography and chemistry, with a man covering each sector, reacting instantly to the person next to him, covering his every movement, proceeding as smoothly as possible into the dark interior of the building. They draped their rifles over their armored vests, always orienting them forward, braced expertly against their shoulders, ready to shoot. Every man's rifle was secured with a three-point sling, preventing slippage off the shoulder. Each room presented the possibility of close contact and a personal fight to the death. "I'm the a.s.sault team, so I'm always the first one in the house," Corporal Matthew Spencer, a fire team leader in Kilo Company, told a historian. "Once we're in the stack, we're all ready to go. We can read off each other. Most of the time the door is straight in front. We'll go in . . . and from there, you take your immediate danger areas and your doorways and we're pretty much split from there and we don't really see each other until we meet up in a bigger room or we're coming out."

Corporal Francis Wolf, a squad leader in the same company, always ordered his Marines to shoot up the house first and then a.s.sault. "And once we enter the house, just basically, hard, fast, intense . . . frag every room you can . . . sometimes two to three depending on the room." They found that grenades were not all that effective because the rooms offered so much furniture and debris for cover. Moreover, the insurgents often antic.i.p.ated that the Marines would use grenades, so they stacked mattresses and tables near windows and doors to absorb grenade fragments. So, Wolf and his people killed almost exclusively with rifles. "The SAW is not very maneuverable inside of a house. The only time we'll ever use a SAW in a house is if we have to clear by fire. If we know that there's insurgents in the rooms, we'll poke the SAW around the corner and lay . . . a one-hundred-round burst and just light the room up." Most of the time, though, they killed the enemy fighters with multiple aimed shots from their M16s. Frequently, through the smoke and dust, they watched the life ebb from the eyes of their enemies. With firefights taking place in such small rooms, the grunts were inundated with the acrid stench of cordite and gunpowder, to the point where they could taste it in their mouths.

Often it took many shots to kill a jihadi because they were under the influence of adrenaline, cocaine, amphetamines, or other drugs that gave them extra staying power. "The terrorists just wouldn't die unless you removed their brains from their skulls," one grunt NCO said. Houses, streets, and rubble were riddled with spent needles and drug paraphernalia. One mujahideen took a shot to the face, point-blank, and stab wounds to the chest but kept fighting. "His brains were out on the floor," Corporal Bill Sojda recalled. "A normal person would have died with a bullet in their head and multiple stab wounds." So, even grievously wounded insurgents could present a deadly threat. "I know of several instances where near-dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid," Lieutenant Colonel Bellon wrote. "It was a fight to the finish."

The Americans did take prisoners, but in this unforgiving, stressful environment they were usually inclined to shoot anyone who offered any semblance of a threat (they were especially leery of suicide bombers). In one well-known instance, when the Marines took a mosque after heavy fighting, they encountered a badly wounded insurgent. One of the riflemen thought that the man was a threat and he shot him to death, right in front of a camera-toting reporter. The graphic footage was beamed to the world, generating controversy and even an official investigation of the shooter's actions. The brutal reality was that every encounter with the enemy portended imminent death. Life-and-death decisions had to be made in a split second. "There is no one technique for house clearing," another squad leader said. "Sometimes I'll be noisy to draw fire, sometimes I'll sneak in. I'll climb over a roof and come down the stairs, or feint at the front door and enter through the kitchen. Training gives you the basics. After that, you have to adapt." The most important thing was to avoid being predictable.16 Regardless of how professionally the squads a.s.saulted buildings, the job was time-consuming and very dangerous. The goal of the jihadis was to lure the Marines inside the buildings, where they could inflict casualties on them at close range. All too often, the insurgents intended to die and simply wanted to take as many Marines with them as they could. This was especially true in the heart of the Jolan and Queens, where many foreign terrorists made their last stand. "Their discipline throughout the battle still amazes me," Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Hackett of Lima Company said. "They just sat in the house and waited, kind of like spiders; they waited for the perfect shot, our faces or necks, since our body armor and Kevlars . . . protected our bodies."

With distressing frequency, they would hole up within a house chosen for its excellent fields of fire on every avenue of approach and also for its st.u.r.dy interior. They covered every window and door. "They knew what we were doing," another NCO said. "They studied our tactics, sitting there, waiting to kill us before they died." When the Marines plowed inside, the muj opened fire from point-blank range. Then the Marines would find themselves trapped inside the house, usually with some of their own men dead or wounded, involved in a room-to-room fight to the death. Supporting weapons were often no help in these situations because the Americans obviously could not blow up houses where Marines were trapped. The focus then changed from clearing the house to extracting the casualties. Most modern American infantrymen are taught to avoid open streets during urban combat. But when Marines got pinned down inside buildings, the streets outside, ironically, became the safe spots, the very place where Marines sought to make their escape.

Hackett's Lima Company had several such incidents. In one instance, a squad a.s.saulted an auto repair shop, right into the waiting muzzle of an RPK machine gun in an adjacent room that covered the door. The squad leader was the lead man. He quickly ducked away and shouted "Get the f.u.c.k out!" to his guys, but it was too late. Several of them were already piling inside. The enemy gunner unleashed a stream of bullets, one of which caught Lance Corporal Nicholas Larson in the jugular vein, killing him. As Larson's blood poured out onto the floor, several others fought back with grenades and rifles, but they were pinned down. "I've never seen so much blood in my life," one of them recalled. In an effort to distract the machine gunner long enough for his buddies to beat a hasty exit from the repair shop, Private First Cla.s.s Nathan Wood charged the enemy gunner's room, hurling a grenade inside and spraying it with his M16. The machine gun killed him, too. The other Marines threw grenades at the room and dodged a hail of bullets to exit the shop.

They summoned a SMAW gunner to blow up the shop, even though the dead bodies of their comrades were inside. The shoulder-launched SMAW fires an 83-millimeter rocket and can puncture eight feet of concrete. It creates ma.s.sive overpressure capable of collapsing a building and crus.h.i.+ng a person. The room where the rocket explodes can heat up to fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The gunner pumped two rockets into the shop, turning it into jumbled rubble. As it turned out, there were three mujahideen inside. Not only did they survive the SMAW rounds, but they kept fighting, even though they were wounded and pinned in place by rubble. The Marines had to kill them with point-blank rifle shots before they could recover the bodies of their dead friends.

Another time Lima Company's 1st Platoon ran into a well-hidden group of hard-core Chechen insurgents who were just waiting to ambush them. One squad had three men wounded inside of a building, fighting room to room against the disciplined Chechens. They managed to get their wounded Marines out. Another squad was approaching an adjacent building. The squad leader, Sergeant James "Bennie" Conner, cautiously skulked into the courtyard, making it as far as a window on the house's southern side. Several yards away, behind the courtyard wall, Lance Corporal Michael Hanks was covering him. Conner chanced a peek into the window and came face-to-face with a man who looked like "Ya.s.ser Arafat in his younger days . . . red towel on his head . . . dirty, dark-green coat on." The man had several rifles and two RPGs arranged around himself. He and Conner both opened fire. Neither had a very good angle to shoot the other, but Conner got hit in the arm. Enraged, the twenty-seven-year-old sergeant emptied an entire magazine into the window. "I'm hit, dude," Conner told Hanks. "I got to come by the window, so cover me." Hanks replied, "Okay, dude."

Hanks lunged forward. Behind him, taking cover behind the wall, was Patrick O'Donnell, a civilian historian who had embedded himself with the platoon. He thought about following Hanks into the courtyard. At that moment, though, a presence told him: "Don't go any farther, you aren't trained to clear a house." An instant later, he heard a long burst of RPK machine-gun fire and then someone screamed that Hanks was dead. Machine-gun bullets had torn into his face. "Michael Hanks's b.l.o.o.d.y head was lying next to my boot," O'Donnell wrote. "There were still a lot of bullets flying, but for a second everyone stopped. The moment seemed to last for an eternity." The platoon leader, Lieutenant Jeffrey Sommers, ordered everyone to pull back. "They started . . . firing and throwing grenades at the house. Since I thought there was a tiny chance that Hanks was still alive, I grabbed the back of his flak jacket and started dragging him to the rear. A Marine came to help me. I was dragging Hanks with my right arm. Hanks's lifeless body weighed a ton." The blood of the fallen Marine soaked the historian's boots and the incident marked him for life, hardening his resolve to tell the story of such valorous men. "When you're in the middle of this, it all becomes so personal," he later said. The 1st Platoon alone suffered thirty-five casualties, including four dead.

In another telling incident, three Kilo Company Marines were trapped inside of a house that was defended by several insurgents (probably Chechens). First Sergeant Kasal of Weapons Company and seven other Marines heard what was going on and came to the rescue. Kasal had once served as first sergeant of Kilo. He was determined to do all in his power to save the three Marines. "All I could think about was three of our own getting captured by the bad guys and beheaded . . . on TV." Kasal and the others burst into the house and began methodically clearing it. They found one wounded Marine and two dead insurgents. The walls of the house were smeared with the crimson red blood of the mujahideen.

As the other Marines fanned out to clear each room, Kasal noticed one open room near a staircase and two adjoining rooms. He told two Marines to cover the staircase. Then he told Private First Cla.s.s Alexander Nicoll to cover him as he cleared the room. Kasal did not just charge through the