Читать книгу Fallujah Awakens - Bill Ardolino - Страница 13

The Marines could have used some help over the previous few months. Alpha Company of 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment took over its area of operations on the Fallujah peninsula on October 7, 2006. It did so with resolve, but only limited direction—a missive to improve security and somehow snuff out the local franchise of Iraq’s resilient insurgency.¹

Alpha 1/24 is a Marine Reserve infantry unit based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was filled out for this tour by augments from the 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines from Indiana, Missouri, and Tennessee and a smattering of active duty volunteers and Navy corpsmen from across the United States. Its ranks were generally dominated by working- and middle-class young men from the Midwest and a significant minority of hardy Jacksonians from the South. The vast majority attended school or worked civilian jobs, but had joined the Marine Reserves looking for something extra.

For some it was the chance to proudly serve their country or continue a family tradition. Many sought action and adventure, and more than a few wanted to be a part of something that officially minted them as mentally and physically tough. Others had drifted through life before grabbing on to the disciplined structure of the Marine Corps for direction. Some were the sons of immigrants who wanted to pay back the United States for the opportunities afforded their families. A few admitted to being lured into the Corps after falling for the Dress Blue uniform as a kid. One man signed up on a whim, after stopping for Chinese food next to a recruiting station in an airport.

Some of the Marines had previously been on active duty and felt a little out of place in the civilian world, and some needed the extra money that came with two days a month of Reserve duty or the combat pay of deployment. Regardless of the reason, all who volunteered for the Marine Corps shared the perception that they were part of the best, toughest branch of the U.S. armed forces.² This reputation, and the ambitious people it attracted, helped define the attitude and quality of Marine Corps recruits. Many proudly believed in a description of the Corps as “America’s shock troops.” This pride was reinforced by a pervasive, particular culture in the expeditionary service branch. In contrast, Marines thought of the Army as a bloated, pampered institution with more room for hard warriors and soft office workers to coexist without cross-pollinating values. The Marine Corps was smaller and leaner. From the truck drivers derisively nicknamed POGs (pronounced “pogue,” persons other than grunts) to the elite Recon warriors, every Marine was somehow touched by an insular culture of macho one-upsmanship and reinforcement of their idealized values: “Every Marine a rifleman.” “No better friend, no worse enemy.” “Always Faithful” (Semper Fidelis).

There also was an attitude that any given Marine unit would “get shit done.” Army units might vary from stellar to awful in the motivation department. To hear Marine grunts tell it, most members of the “blue-side” Navy and all of the Air Force would have issues if they missed a hot meal. But the odds of coming across a pack of hard, motivated men in any group of Marines were a lot better, if admittedly not assured. That said, the Corps also had no shortage of sarcastic generation-Y commentary lampooning the “moto” (stereotypically motivated) ways of true-believing contemporaries and certain squared-away, cigar-chomping superiors appearing to endlessly audition for a recruiting poster. One need not look far for some wise-ass junior Marine poking fun at officers or his fellows’ “Oo-rah” mentality, a mockery usually accomplished with a burst of creative profanity. And the unofficial Marine motto of “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome”—a legitimate educational device in a service that relied on hand-me-down equipment from the Army—could be expanded to “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome and Bitch about It the Whole Time.”³ Careful observers weren’t fooled by the cynicism, however.

Many Marines could be disillusioned by the infamously soul-killing military bureaucracy or by the political machinations of careerist non-commissioned officers (NCOs) or officers. For them, the superficial idealism was gone. If one scratched a Marine with the most cynical strut, underneath was often a romantic. Most were men who yearned for meaning, and for many, the Corps met that need, whether via a belief in the institution, the development of rare friendships under duress, or the satisfying knowledge that they were going places and doing things that most modern, soft Americans just didn’t have the stomach for.⁴

In the macho hierarchy of the Marines, the men of Alpha 1/24 might fall somewhere around the middle of the pack. In their favor, they were infantrymen; the infantry was the military occupation specialty of those who sought spartan hardship and danger as features. They were Reservists, however, a status that sometimes garnered eye rolls and patronizing comments from active duty Marines, who questioned the tactical proficiency and aggressiveness of “weekend warriors.”⁵

Jerome Greco, a first lieutenant and commander of Alpha Company’s 3rd Platoon, came to reject this stereotype. An active duty Marine who had volunteered to augment 1/24’s shortage of officers, he had plenty of experience to render judgment. Greco had previously deployed to Afghanistan as well as Iraq, and had led a rifle platoon during the brutal Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004. Often considered the most difficult of the few set-piece battles during the war, Operation Phantom Fury—also known as al-Fajr (the Dawn) in Arabic—was one of the few engagements to penetrate the American consciousness, through dramatic, extensive media coverage of the campaign. By the time the city was taken, and average Americans’ disinterest in news from Iraq had resumed, Phantom Fury had shaped a cadre of young officers like Greco into experienced veterans with an understanding of combat.

As he began to work with his men on their new deployment, Greco discarded the idea that his Reservists were inferior. He came to believe that active duty and Reserve units each had unique advantages. For one, the slight defensiveness about their status seemed to drive his men from 1/24 and 3/24 to excel. They had something to prove to him. In addition, their varying experiences in civilian employment gave some a skill set that let them more naturally adapt to counterinsurgency, which could resemble social work and police duty as much as it required closing with and killing the enemy. A Reservist’s advantages were also evident in the company leadership. Greco speculated that Maj. Dan Whisnant’s experience as a civilian sales manager granted an intellectual flexibility that helped him juggle demands from higher command and work with difficult local sources from a different culture.

It also didn’t hurt to have a major as a company commander, a slot usually filled by a captain. Reserve units often had more-senior officers filling traditional billets, and the gold oak leaves gave Whisnant more influence when he dealt with higher command. Combined with the major’s background in Marine intelligence from a previous deployment to Iraq, these traits set the tone for Alpha Company’s initial, ambitious, and nominally successful efforts to take a crack at counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN).⁶

The doctrine of COIN comes from a school of military thought that is conceptually simple but achingly complex to execute. The strategy has no shortage of clever slogans to describe it in academic circles filled with professional officers and military studies geeks. It’s been likened to “playing three-dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you,” and it sometimes exemplifies the idea of the “three-block war,” a pithy description of modern conflict coined by Gen. Charles Krulak in a 1997 speech. Then commandant of the Marine Corps, Krulak was attempting to describe “fourth-generation warfare,” which is often carried out in an urban battlefield, by outlining its various demands beyond destroying the enemy. In a conflict like the Iraq War, soldiers and Marines may be called on to wage classic combat on the first block, conduct peacekeeping operations on the next, and deliver humanitarian aid to a third within a matter of hours or even minutes. Some analysts later insisted the “three-block war” analogy was insufficient for describing modern conflict; it needed a few more missions, on a few more blocks.⁷

The complexities of counterinsurgency can be distilled to an even simpler shorthand, however: In COIN, the people are the prize. Insurgencies rely on the ability to blend into, intimidate, and utilize civilian populations. According to the theory, if one can protect the population, kill the “right” people, and provide alternatives more attractive than fighting the government, the rebellion will lose popular support and deprive its fighters of their natural camouflage and freedom of movement. The insurgency will wither on the vine. Easy in theory, hard to execute.⁸

In this type of struggle, information is at least as important as military proficiency. Unfortunately for Alpha Company, it arrived on Fallujah’s peninsula with almost none of this vital currency in the bank account. Whisnant quickly directed his platoons to learn about the residents in their area of operations (AO). This effort took the form of security patrols and census operations, so the company was reorganized according to the mission. Marine companies are typically composed of four platoons, each with about thirty-six men split into three squads. Usually, three of these platoons fulfill the role of light infantry, while the fourth is a weapons platoon, dedicated to bring mortars, rockets, and medium machine guns to bear in conventional battles. The operations on the peninsula, however, called for each platoon to be capable of independent operation. Thus Weapons Platoon, which had been assigned to operate from FOB Gold, a forward operating base about a kilometer away from FOB Black, was retasked primarily as light infantry with the option of fulfilling its traditional role as needed.⁹

First Lt. Rob Lehner led 1st Platoon. Like Whisnant, Lehner was a “mustang.” He had started his career as an enlisted Marine before his recent promotion to the officer ranks. Company officers and staff NCOs offered generally positive reviews of Lehner’s leadership and the resulting performance of his platoon. He was slower to undertake the aggressive intelligence gathering and subsequent operations against the insurgency embraced by two of his peers, but eventually “got up to speed” as the deployment progressed.¹⁰

The 2nd Platoon was led by GySgt. Brian Ivers. An Australian who had already served two tours in Iraq, Ivers drew criticism, especially from officers and senior NCOs, for hesitating to throw his men into their mission. Some officers speculated that “Gunny Dingo” lacked the initiative instilled in prospective lieutenants during Officer Candidate School. Others gossiped that he was gun-shy after his previous tours. Some Marines, however, especially those under his command, claimed to know the real deal: Ivers was highly competent, even aggressive in combat, but he simply didn’t buy into the mission. According to them, the Gunny had lost some men on previous deployments, and he didn’t believe in losing more while wandering around like bait, waiting to get shot at.¹¹

While all four platoons conducted similar missions and had their share of good and not-so-good officers, NCOs and grunts, 3rd Platoon and Weapons Platoon soon proved themselves company standouts. Led by a pair of ambitious hard chargers—1st Lieutenant Greco at the helm of 3rd and Capt. Jeremy Hoffmann at Weapons—each worked a preternaturally punishing schedule of ambushes, roadblocks, “census ops,” and security patrols. Greco was tall, athletic, and had the rough features of a boxer, while Hoffmann was diminutive and youthful-looking and had a higher voice. The pair, however, had a lot in common, including elite educational backgrounds—Greco had attended Dartmouth, Hoffmann the Naval Academy—knowledge of counterinsurgency doctrine, and, above all, aggressiveness. Both men epitomized the Alpha male personality of a Marine officer, and as a consequence, brutally drove their men to “get after it.” Some of the lance corporals grumbled bitter jokes about Greco and Hoffmann running a competition to kick more ass and to impress superiors on the backs of their men. The rivalry was reflected in the pair’s occasionally brusque interactions at planning sessions. Greco, nicknamed “Greco Fury” for his intensity during volleyball matches prior to deployment, caught wind of the “dueling platoon commanders” scuttlebutt, and told his men it was ridiculous. The enlisted Marines under Greco’s and Hoffmann’s command didn’t consider their leaders’ competition reckless. Most had no doubt that the pair would have worked them like mules anyway, regardless of any officers’ pissing contest. But the young Marines also didn’t quite buy Greco’s denial, mostly because they had their own rivalries with enlisted counterparts in the sister platoons. Some exchanges were typical:

“How long were you pussies on long ops? We were out for weeks.”

“Hey, we just walked 28 fucking clicks today…. How far did you go on that patrol?”¹²

Ongoing critiques of Greco were also mitigated by the fact that he worked as hard as his men did. He impressed his squad leaders by regularly joining them on patrols and sometimes exposing himself to dangerous situations in place of others. In one case, Greco took point on a foot expedition to find an IED known to be buried in a certain area. The lieutenant found the wires of the hidden bomb while scratching in the dirt with his Leatherman tool and could have been killed by an alert insurgent manning its trigger. Enlisted and NCO ranks always subject officers to harsh appraisal, but actions like these earn valuable credibility.¹³

Hoffmann was commonly regarded, and often critiqued, as something of a merciless hard-ass. The captain was also considered smart and hardworking, and he was an enthusiastic student of counterinsurgency. He repeatedly stressed two goals to his men, the latter explaining why he worked them so hard: First, their success was contingent on getting to know, respect, and protect the people in their area. Second, they would deny the insurgents any rest or safe haven on the peninsula, even if his Marines had to walk fifteen miles a day to do it.¹⁴

The operational pace was brutal: up to twenty hours a day (on missions), six and a half days a week, for months, with little downtime. All four platoons divided their time between “short ops,” within walking distance of their forward operating base (FOB), and “long ops.” Short ops usually consisted of foot patrols, running overwatch on the main supply routes to prevent emplacement of bombs, launching targeted raids, and serving as a quick reaction force (QRF) to assist any Marines in trouble. On long ops, a platoon would travel far afield of the FOB, setting up a temporary patrol base in whatever commandeered local structure had the requisite defensive capabilities. Each of a platoon’s three squads would then rotate through a schedule of conducting patrols, manning ad hoc checkpoints, protecting the patrol base, and sleeping on cement floors, a respite that seldom exceeded four or five hours at a time. Census ops became the cornerstone of Whisnant’s information-gathering campaign during the longer outings. Marines would project into a village and introduce themselves, asking civilians a half dozen mostly fruitless questions about who and where the bad guys were.¹⁵

Sgt. Christopher Dockter quickly grew frustrated by the question-and-answer sessions with local villagers although by most accounts he was a patient man. The leader of 3rd Platoon’s 2nd Squad, Dockter had been dubbed “Manbearpig,” after the chimerical beast from the show South Park. The unflattering nickname, along with a second one, “Lunchbox,” were his men’s tribute to the dark-eyed squad leader’s hairy girth. The laconic Tennessean took it in stride. Dockter was a volunteer who had requested deployment to watch over younger augments from his home unit of Reservists with 3/24, and he knew that few Marines could expect to escape deployment without a rude nickname or two.

The newly married twenty-six-year-old’s easygoing nature permeated his management style. Only rarely did Dockter yell, barking at his guys when he had no time to baby the naturally unruly nineteen- and twenty-year-old PFCs and lance corporals. Usually he would ignore his men’s endless complaints about whatever facet of the “colossal suck” of being in Iraq had drawn their ire. After all, according to him, “Marines ain’t happy unless they’re bitching.”

Sometimes, however, Dockter took the time to outline the rationale behind orders when the youngsters bucked, because enlisteds often gripe due to being kept in the dark. The most common response offered by a lance corporal when asked why he was doing something was a blank stare followed by, “Because Gunny told me.” Dockter found that by occasionally explaining important things to them, he could get the men to quiet down and perform even the most difficult or boring tasks with workmanlike efficiency.¹⁶

Indeed, the sergeant’s unusual patience, along with requisite tactical proficiency, made him a well-liked squad leader in the company. But even this southerner’s laid-back temperament was sorely tested by a legion of Fallujan farmers in the early months of the company’s deployment. His interviews with them often resembled an exotically exasperating rendition of Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” comedy routine.¹⁷

Greco would direct Dockter’s squad to move into a village and go from house to house, knocking on doors like heavily armed vacuum cleaner salesmen. They would conduct a light search of the residence, followed by an interview. Dockter took pictures of all military-age males, and then he would launch into a prepared set of questions, sometimes with the aid of an interpreter, other times without one. A typical interview might go as follows:

“What is your name?”

—So far, so good. This typically yielded names.

“Who lives here? Who exactly is in your family?”

—Complete answers to this question were hit or miss.

“Do you need anything? What can we do to help?”

—Local residents had no problem offering up a list of complaints about the economy, infrastructure, and especially security.

“If you want us to help you with security, you need to tell me who Ali Baba [Marine slang for “the bad guy”] is. Do you know anyone bad in the area? Who’s bad?”

—Here the interview would hit the wall.

“Do you know anyone putting bombs in the area or fighting Americans?”

—The answer to this question was usually, “No one bad lives around here, the bad guys are all from [insert random village or city].”

If Dockter got lucky, he would be entertained by garnishment with a fanciful story. The sergeant would then try to reason:

“We want to make things safer for you, but we can’t help you unless you help us.”

—The response was usually polite smiles, shrugs, and no dice.¹⁸

After a couple of weeks of frustrating census ops and near-daily contact with insurgents slinging mortars, bombs, and small-arms fire, LCpl. Alan Webster would become the first Marine in the platoon to be wounded. A sniper shot him just above the knee, shattering his leg and stealing vital muscle. It was an injury that would initiate a years-long odyssey of surgeries and rehabilitation in the young man’s quest to regain full mobility.¹⁹ In response to the shooting, an angry Greco ordered his men to start confiscating all the weapons in the area of the attack, a move that contradicted the usual regulations allowing each family to keep one rifle to guard their home. During the confiscations, some of the exchanges became contentious. A middle-aged farmer argued animatedly as Dockter took his AK-47: “He asked ‘How am I supposed to defend myself and my family?’” said an interpreter, distilling the agitated flurry of Arabic. “Tell him that when he starts using it to fight Ali Baba, we’ll give it back,” responded Dockter.

This generated one of the more original reactions the sergeant encountered in his conversations with the locals. The sun-wizened resident of the Albu Aifan village looked stunned as he listened to the interpreter’s translation. He turned toward Dockter with a face that seemed to indicate that the idea had never occurred to him.²⁰ In retrospect, the farmer probably never thought the Marines would let him fight Ali Baba without shooting or imprisoning him for brandishing his rifle outside his house. And in a few months, it would be Dockter’s turn to be shocked, as he and his men handed these weapons back, and provided additional ones, to the people of the village.²¹

Some American-Iraqi miscommunication was inevitable. Arabic speakers have unique linguistic traditions. Carefully crafted metaphors and eloquence are often intimately tied to an individual’s identity, though expression widely varies with a speaker’s background and education. Arabic’s lyrical phonetics and grammar can make even everyday conversation resemble poetry, with exaggerations and allusions popularly exemplified by Saddam Hussein’s exhortation to fight the “Mother of all Battles” during the Persian Gulf War. These flourishes and stretches, coupled with what often seems like a winding, circular path toward a point, do not always translate well into English, especially into the American “dialect” spoken by military men, who value plain answers to blunt questions. To many Arabic speakers, the rhetorical journey is sometimes the point. These cultural differences can result in poor communication and misunderstanding, depending on the sensitivities of the Arabic and English speakers, and the skill of their interpreter.²²

Alpha Company’s interviews were usually hampered by something a lot simpler and more powerful than linguistics, however: the survival instinct. The lack of helpful information from everyday citizens was intentional. While the population included some hard-core insurgents and many more casual rebels for hire, the majority of residents were generally neutral noncombatants. Many of them had soured on rooting for the splintered insurgency against the invaders, and even a few rare souls were inclined to support the Iraqi security forces or deal with the Americans. But with the exception of hardened criminals and radical fighters, first and foremost, most Fallujans were intimidated survivalists.

Some of the hard-core insurgents—most of whom were local men between the ages of sixteen and forty along with a minority of foreign fighters—had a penchant for shocking criminality and barbarism. If a collaborator with the Americans was lucky, his or her discovery meant violent death by a simple explosion or a bullet to the head. Often, the punishment was more gruesome. Beheading, dismemberment, torture with drills or acid, or being burned alive were some of the brutalities that potentially awaited those caught cooperating with the infidels—anything to make the point. Innocent family members, including children, could be targets.

The Americans could come through a house for a few minutes and ask their questions, but after they left, who would be there to protect anyone who cooperated? Even if a tip led to the arrest of a local criminal, there was no guarantee that “Ali Baba” wouldn’t be released from prison in as little as a few months or a year. And when the bad guys came back, they came back hard, exacting revenge on as many people as necessary to be satisfied that the rat had been killed, and others had learned the lesson. Given a choice between a potentially torturous death and helping Americans who didn’t stick around to protect anyone, it wasn’t much of a choice at all.²³

Even so, the men of Alpha 1/24 were angry and frustrated when a buried roadside bomb made from two massive 155-mm howitzer shells exploded in the midst of one of their convoys, and a dozen or so locals living yards away would swear that they knew nothing about who had laid the elaborate trap.²⁴ Greco tried to mitigate his Marines’ frustration by telling them to “put [themselves] in the [Iraqis’] shoes” and to imagine what they had been through in the past three years. Above all, most civilians merely wanted to survive, and helping Americans had proven to be a terrible survival strategy.²⁵

The most useful information gleaned from the early census ops were names, which fed a database designed to track and identify insurgents and their families, distinguishing them from the rest of the population. Though the database failed to yield quick results, it would pay dividends down the road.²⁶

To compensate for the scarcity of local support and the slow pace of the census ops, Alpha Company also launched an offensive relying on aggressive “paper shuffling.” Whisnant and his platoon commanders combed through old intelligence reports filed by “human intelligence exploitation teams” that on earlier deployments had run sources and “targeting packages” against “high value individuals” in the area. This wasn’t standard operating procedure for all units; there was sometimes a disconnect between the archived work of the intelligence specialists and units running ops on the ground. Whisnant’s background as an intel officer, however, and the utter lack of local cooperation naturally led him to grasp at the reports; Hoffmann and Greco immediately recognized their value and enthusiastically joined the effort. The officers would comb the old reports to find names and locations of identified insurgents and propose and execute raids to snatch a suspect or simply knock on a man’s door to ask questions.

The success of these efforts without local help was measurable, but limited. In the early months of Alpha Company’s deployment, only one or two of every ten raids led to the detention of a legitimate insurgent or to actionable intelligence.²⁷ And while some, though not all, of the Marines attempted to show respect for the occupants of targeted houses, tossing someone’s home with a no-knock raid in the dead of night inevitably angered civilians. In a tribal society, this insult demanded redress or invited revenge.²⁸

The question that nagged at the Marines was whether they were making more progress than any damage caused by their presence. It was hard to say whether their efforts were diminishing or fanning the peninsula’s insurgency, especially since they had been getting shot at and blown up almost since their first day in country.²⁹ This violence, coupled with the seeming apathy of local civilians, made it feel like they were starting at zero. It was hard for some Americans to fathom how they could make things much worse.

Of everything that confronted Greco on this deployment, the volume of attacks was the biggest surprise of his new command. He thought he had seen the worst possible violence during the brutal urban house clearing of Operation Phantom Fury, but this tour on Fallujah’s southern peninsula had its own twists on war. His men were getting engaged regularly by small arms and mortars, and the roads were studded with hidden bombs. The IED booby traps were the biggest threat to his Marines, showcasing the irrepressible and deadly creativity of the insurgents who wanted to kill them.³⁰

On October 25, Alpha Company lost its first Marines. LCpl. Jonathan Thornsberry and Sgt. Tommy Gilbert of Greco’s 1st Squad were killed instantly when their Humvee drove over an IED. A massive artillery shell had been buried in the middle of the road and rigged with small, bulbous trigger mechanisms nicknamed “Christmas lights.” LCpl. Brad Bueno was blown twenty feet from the Humvee’s turret and was medevaced with a broken leg.

Thornsberry had been a dependable “good country boy” from Tennessee.³¹ He had always made it a point to look after his fellow Marines’ comfort and constantly bragged about his young daughter. Gilbert was a twenty-four-year-old raised in middle-class Illinois. He liked to go out drinking with his buddies, but would sit quietly in a corner, sipping a Jameson’s whiskey and reading a newspaper while his friends raised hell around him. Gilbert would just smile and shake his head occasionally or stop what he was doing to drag them out of whatever trouble required his undivided attention. The company took their deaths hard.³² These losses happened only three weeks into the deployment, and there would surely be more casualties to come.³³ The Marines grieved, but moved on with their work.

From day one, seeking out this violence was a component of attempts to defeat the enemy. The routine was simple: leave the FOB or ad hoc patrol base; get attacked while conducting a mission; fix, counterattack, and kill the enemy. Some reactive posture was inevitable when fighting an insurgency. It was dangerous work.³⁴