Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
saw a distant Muñoz and Kopera get up off the deck and do “the chicken little dance” as they ran through incoming bullets to the safety of the concrete outhouse. Zofchak and Inman watched bursts of dirt spring into the air maybe a dozen feet away. The loud crumple of an explosion washed over the pair of Marines. An RPG had overshot them and landed nearby. O’Connor saw the rocket explode near the two men, front and to the left of him, as he took cover behind a mound of dirt.15 Zofchak and Inman looked at each other incredulously, momentarily stunned by the sudden explosion. Zofchak’s surprise mutated to anger. The corporal took to a knee and oriented himself south toward the attackers, looking for a target through a tangle of reeds that lined the canal.16 “Hey, Tyink! Tyink!” Inman yelled to Cpl. Andrew Tyink, the man ahead of him in the column. For some reason, the prone Marine, another augment, this one from the company’s intelligence cell, didn’t answer. Tyink raised his weapon and started firing off rounds at a target.17
Zofchak shouldered his rifle and scanned for the source of the fire through his advanced combat optical gunsight. He spotted movement on the top floor of a low building maybe twenty degrees to the left of the mosque. He thought he saw a man briefly profiled above the low wall bordering the roof. The corporal fired off a quick couplet of rounds toward the target to try and suppress any attackers.18 “What are you firing at?” yelled Inman from his newfound cover behind a narrow tree alongside the ditch. The trunk’s three- or four-foot radius had barely obscured his body. Bits of foliage fell as bullets whipped through the cattails covering the trench. Inman soon thought he gained “positive identification” (PID) of a target, and he fired back as well.19
Zofchak looked for the rest of his team. LCpl. Scott Serr had been near the head of the southern column when the gunfire erupted and quickly crouched behind one of the brick ovens found in the backyard of many residences.20 Others had sprinted or were now sprinting forward for the cover of the nearest house at the back of the village.21 After getting his bearings behind the oven, Serr moved inside one of the houses to look for a concealed angle of return fire.
Zofchak soon made out muzzle flashes next to the mosque, raised his weapon and fired maybe three to five rounds. He then pulled out a 40-mm grenade from his ammunition harness and loaded it into the M-203 launcher slung under the barrel of his rifle.22 He shot two grenades at the structure. After gaining PID and “going trigger happy,” Zofchak, Inman, and O’Connor executed a bounding leapfrog movement toward the rest of their team behind the house, using the cover of the trees and a raised berm next to the ditch.23
Still behind the outhouse, Kopera could not see Zofchak and his team, who were closer to the attackers. He suspected the raised profile of the canal’s berm and cattails must have screened them from the clear view of the insurgents as well. He failed to raise them on his radio, but soon heard the high-pitched, nearer banging of their M-16s mingle with the throaty chatter of RPKs and AK-47s. The pressure on Kopera’s position lessened as some of the insurgents shifted their fire to the other group of Marines. Another RPG whooshed and exploded to his southeast.24
Whoomp! His second team had started slinging grenades onto the insurgent position. Kopera again peeked at the enemy. He thought he glimpsed tiny figures crawling to their feet, running, and then dropping over the opposite side of the lower roof of a building. Two “40 mike-mikes” (grenades) had sealed it. The attackers seemed to be retreating. Kopera moved his group southeast to consolidate the squad. Sporadic outgoing fire continued as they moved toward the other Marines. The firefight only lasted a couple of minutes at most, but to some it felt like ten, to others about one. It “was one of those things that could have been two seconds or twenty minutes,” O’Connor said, recalling how adrenaline had warped his sense of time.25
Kopera had allowed himself a brief moment of pride in his Marines’ performance. Zofchak’s team had taken initiative, quickly grabbing cover and gaining “fire superiority” by dousing the enemy with bullets and grenades. The appraisal was brief, however. Kopera’s mind returned quickly to the task at hand. He felt alert, but fought a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. At least one RPG had landed close to his second team, and someone on his side of the formation had speculated that a Marine had been injured.26 The squad leader had been unable to raise them on the walkie-talkie, but once the squad was consolidated, he was relieved to discover that everyone was OK.27
The Marines had been surprised, with several of them caught in the open. More than a hundred rounds had hit within feet, even inches, of Kopera and Muñoz. At least one of the exploded RPGs had flung its cloud of shrapnel just a few meters from Zofchak and Inman. None of the Americans were injured, but one of the Marines told the others that he had seen the attackers “pulling wounded with them” when they retreated.28 The squad leader had little time to bask in relief or contemplate the vagaries of fate. He successfully radioed Lt. Jerome Greco back at the patrol base, reporting that the enemy had broken contact, and his Marines were moving in pursuit along the main road.29
A kilometer and a half away at the patrol base, Greco was concerned but pleased with the performance of his squad leader. Kopera already had proven himself in garrison and under fire. Somewhat of a “profane intellectual,” the lanky sergeant was reliably sarcastic but turned serious when it came time to run his teams. Having now experienced what sounded like his first sustained contact (relatively speaking), the sergeant was calmly telling his platoon leader what he planned to do, rather than asking for instructions. Greco liked the initiative. His sergeant was getting after it.30
The Americans didn’t know it at the time, but intelligence sources later revealed that one of at least six insurgents had been wounded, and another, a member of the Abu Yousseff subtribe largely based in an area south of the village, had been killed by the Marines’ return fire. The dead attacker’s compatriots had withdrawn to remove his body and lick their wounds. Islamic tradition stresses that the dead receive a proper, ritual burial as soon as possible. Muslim fighters and even noncombatants strive to fulfill this sacred mandate, snatching up and carting off bodies in the middle of terrible fighting. Some Americans grudgingly admired their opponents’ efficiency at recovering the dead, a cultural sensibility that resembled their own ethos of “leave no man behind.”31
Occurring after the Marines had barely been in country for a month, this engagement was a first for most of them in its immediacy and duration.32 The insurgents had learned painful lessons from the all-out frontal melees waged against the U.S. military during the early phases of the war. Blood-soaked blankets filled with dead insurgents had been stacked in grim piles in front of the mosques of Fallujah and Ramadi during the battles of 2004.33 Most serious rebels were either clever or dead, and the smarter ones had adapted by shunning stand-up fights in favor of more tentative guerrilla tactics.
By late 2006, the peninsula’s insurgents were usually engaging Kopera’s men from at least two hundred yards out, if not more, and would then pull back immediately after the initial volley. Marines called it the “shoot and scoot.” This attack in the field had been mildly sustained and had been launched from little more than a football field away, causing Kopera to speculate that either they had run across a particularly brave group of jihadists or the sudden appearance of the Marines had surprised them.34
Before issuing orders, Kopera instructed his squad members to quickly brief him on what they had seen and to check their ammunition and equipment. His team would head south, along the main road splitting the village, for a direct assault toward the mosque and the lower row of buildings in front of it that may have housed some of the attackers.35 Zofchak’s team was to move along behind the backyards of the homes on the eastern side of the road and commandeer a house to the side of the mosque. The position offered fields of fire that would cut off the enemy’s escape if the main assault drove them to flee toward the network of irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the fields. Zofchak’s team would serve as an anvil for Kopera’s hammer. The Marines moved out.36
Zofchak’s route offered the better cover and was supposed to get his team into position faster than the other team, but it also involved crossing two seemingly small irrigation creeks. Unfortunately for the Marines, the roughly three-foot-wide