On March 31, 2004, precisely two years before Captain McConnell and
his Kilo Company came home from their momentous tour in Haditha,
four American employees of a security firm called Blackwater were
ambushed and killed in Fallujah. Their corpses were hacked apart and
burned, and two of them were hung from a bridge amid celebrations on
the street. Images were beamed around the world. Judging correctly
that it could not leave the insult unanswered, the Bush administration,
after brief consideration of the options, decided on an all-out assault
against the city. That decision continues to stand as one of the worst
of the war, ranking only below the decision to disband the Iraqi Army
and the initial decision to invade. At the time, for those of us living
independently in Iraq outside of the American security zones, and with
some sense therefore of the mood on the streets, it demonstrated
once again the inability of officials to imagine the trouble that the
United States was in, and the astonishing insularity of Washington,
D.C.
The Marines knew better. They wanted to respond to the Blackwater
ambush by going after the individual killers, and then following through
with a well-crafted counter-insurgency campaign to stabilize and
mollify the city. But when they were overruled and ordered to do the
opposite—to mount an immediate full-frontal offensive—they set aside
their theories, and as professional soldiers they dutifully complied. It
was a disaster. Backed up by tanks and combat aircraft, the Marines
went into Fallujah dealing destruction, and quickly bogged down in
house-to-house fighting against a competent and determined foe. To
make matters worse, the showcase battalion of the new Iraqi Army
mutinied and refused to join the fight. The battle cost several dozen
American dead and many more wounded, and did immeasurable damage
to the prospects for American success. It turned into a humiliation for
the United States when, after four days of struggle, the Marines were
ordered by a nervous Washington to withdraw. Again they dutifully
complied. Afterward, the jubilant insurgents took full public control of
the city, and with the help of the foreign fighters turned it into a
fortified haven which U.S. forces did not dare to enter.
To get a feeling for Kilo Company and the killings in Haditha, it is
necessary to remember this. After the spring battle was lost, Fallujah
became an open challenge to the American presence in Iraq. There
were plenty of other challenges, and to speak only of Fallujah is grossly
to simplify the war. Still, Fallujah was the most obvious one, and the
United States, unless it was to quit and go home, had no choice but to
take the city back. Everyone knew it, on all sides, and for months the
antagonists prepared. Because of the fortifications and the expectation
of active resistance, there was no question this time of a patient
counter-insurgency campaign: the Marines were going to have to go in
and simply smash the city down. In November of 2004, they did just
that, with a force about 10,000 strong. Before attacking they gave the
city warning, and allowed an exodus to occur. Nearly the entire
population fled, including most of the insurgents, who spread into
Baghdad or up the Euphrates to carry on the rebellion, leaving behind,
however, a rear guard of perhaps 1,000 gunmen who, exceptionally,
wanted to make a stand. This was their mistake. The Marines attacked
with high explosives and heavy weapons. Over the 10 days it took to
move through Fallujah, and the following weeks of methodical
house-to-house clearing, they wrecked the city’s infrastructure,
damaged or destroyed 20,000 houses or more, and did the same to
dozens of schools and mosques. They were not crusaders. They did
not Christianize the place. They turned Fallujah into Stalingrad.
Many insurgents survived the initial assaults and emerged to contest
the Marines at close quarters, room to room and in the rubble. It is said
to have been the most intense battle by American forces since
Vietnam. The insurgents were trapped inside cordon upon cordon of
American troops, and they fought until death. For the Marines the rules
of engagement were necessarily loose. Rules of engagement are
standing orders that limit the targets of soldiers, defining the difference
between appropriate and inappropriate killing according to strategic
and tactical goals, and between legal and illegal killing according to
interpretations of international law. In Fallujah the rules allowed
Marines to kill anyone they believed to be dangerous, and others who
got in the way. In addition to those seen carrying weapons, in practice
this meant everyone in every structure from which hostile fire came,
and any military-age male seen moving toward the Marines or running
away. Obviously, the Marines were not allowed to kill wounded
prisoners, but in a televised case one of them did, and Marine Corps
justice averted its gaze.
The men of Kilo Company fought through the thick of Fallujah. Lance
Corporals Terrazas and Crossan, and most of the other men of future
Haditha note, ran the course from start to finish. Kilo Company lost
four Marines killed and at least 20 seriously wounded, and was involved
in the best-known close-quarters combat of the battle—a desperate
attempt to clear insurgents from the rooms of a house, which came to
be known as the Hell House fight. Toward the end of it, a New
York–based photographer named Lucian Read snapped an iconic picture
of a blood-drenched sergeant who had been shot seven times and
blasted with an enemy grenade, but who nonetheless was emerging on
foot from the house, holding a pistol in one hand, supported by a
Marine on each side. The photograph showed the Marines as they like
to be seen, and as some like to see themselves. There’s a lot to be
said for going to war with a photographer in tow, until something
happens that you would rather forget.
Fallujah was a victory for the Marine Corps, but a victory narrowly
defined. The reality is that a quarter-million people were forced from
their homes and, when they returned, were faced with a city in ruins,
surrounded by concertina wire and watched over by armed men in
towers. Marine general John Sattler, who had led the assault, claimed
that the insurgency had been broken. But as the seasons slid by in
2005, guerrillas slipped back into Fallujah, or sprang up from its ruins,
and they surged forward through all the other towns of Anbar,
including Haditha. Sattler was wrong, and embarrassingly so. Within
more contemplative circles of Marines, the battle of Fallujah became
less of a triumph than a warning. The consequences were not difficult
to discern. A hard-pressed combat officer once put it this way to me:
Yeah, we won Fallujah. But before that we made Fallujah. And
we definitely can’t afford to make another.
Rules of Engagement, in Vanity Fair (November 2006)
