Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
mushy bottoms of thick sticky mud.37 The men grunted or yelled in surprise as they plunged into the ditches, thrashing and churning their legs across the grasping bottom. At least one of the Marines lost his footing and went under. Inman became angry when his cigarettes got soaked.38 “Fucking Zofchak,” several muttered in disapproval of their leader’s navigational decision.39 Some seventy-five meters that should have taken less than a minute to travel took several. After emerging from the steep bank of the second channel and finding firm footing, the five muddy Marines hustled for their destination—a tan, two-story house that offered fields of fire over the likely escape routes from the mosque.
The team lined up in a wet “stack” in front of a door before rushing inside the house. The wet clomp of boots was met by high-pitched screams from the women and children inside—three little girls between the ages of four and eleven, three middle-aged women, and two elderly women, the latter of whom wore conservative black robes and head coverings. The Marines fanned out past them and throughout the house to look for threats. Some of the Iraqis cried or screamed as they were herded into the house’s main room. The muzzles came down. The weathered, older women, whom the Russian American Zofchak referred to as “babushkas,” moved forward. The eldest female quietly confronted the invaders with a look that was at once confused, scared, and resigned.40 The Marines tried to calm the kids because “they were freaking out.”41
Zofchak attempted to communicate with calming hand gestures and stilted Arabic. “Ali Baba [bad guys]?” The older babushka looked at him, shook her head, and said, “Laa Ali Baba. Laa Ali Baba” (No Ali Baba). Zofchak felt bad for kicking in their door and frightening them, but didn’t give it a lot of thought. They needed this house, and that was that. Eventually the civilians quieted to a state of wary alarm. With the residence secured, one of the Marines was assigned to watch over the women and children clustered in the main room while the rest of the team deployed around the property. The kids were “glued to the women’s hips.” The women remained standing and quietly murmured to each other as they kept an eye on the wet, dirty Americans.42
Nearby, Kopera’s team of Marines had been rushing in accordion-like bounds across the front yards of homes lining the road during their move to the mosque. A group of two would run from the safety of one residence to the next under the cover of the others’ poised weapons. Along the way, half the team was put on a rooftop for lookout, while the other Marines quickly bounced in and out of the low tan and gray residences, conducting cursory searches and asking the occupants about the insurgents.43
Most of the local men were typically out and about at mid-morning. The Marines encountered a smattering of old folks; women of varying ages cooking, folding laundry, or doing yard work; and children sitting inside waiting out the gunfire. Reactions to battles in the community varied, but to the Americans, Iraqis could be a strange bunch.44 When firefights broke out, as long as the bullets weren’t directed at them, many families would ignore it or move inside, but then quickly return to hanging clothes or performing whatever chores had been interrupted by the sounds of explosions or rifles. Many were used to this: Whatever God willed—insh’allah.45
Whether it was bravery, Arab world fatalism, or something else that drove the Iraqis to carry on, Kopera admired and sympathized with them. His men tried to show respect in their dealings with the locals and executed what he thought of as well-considered rules of engagement and detainee-handling procedures. But no amount of good intentions and careful execution could blunt the terror of war and the disruption to their way of life, perhaps especially for Iraq’s politically displaced Sunni minority. Kopera thought Americans should try to imagine how they would feel if a super-power invaded the United States and dismantled the government, directly or indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of fellow citizens.
Complicating matters were the tragedies, abuses, mistakes, and public relations disasters since the 2003 invasion that had consumed the local consciousness. The stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the confused shooting of Iraqis during a protest outside the Fallujah Government Center on April 28, 2003, and other terrible stories were told and retold, often with embellishment, while the Americans’ acts of kindness and attempts to establish security were little acknowledged, poorly understood, or overlooked. It seemed that the good the Marines and others tried to do had little chance of competing for a place in the narrative.
On top of that, the tempo of rougher operations, including raids and mass detentions of military-age males, had been especially high in the early years of the war, as the U.S. military reacted forcefully to the growing insurgency. If an American unit had treated locals with disrespect, and some had, it made Kopera’s job exponentially harder. This was especially true in the context of a tribal society that demanded restitution, or revenge, for an insult. The challenges could be depressing, but they were simply the products of culture and human nature. These were facts Kopera understood, even as he struggled with them.
Kopera had come to respect Iraqis’ way of life, even to admire them. The heritage of the Middle East dates back thousands of years, he mused, and there was a decency in most Iraqis’ personal standards and civility, even to invaders. Kopera could go to a restaurant as a paying customer back in the States and find the hospitality worse than what he experienced after forcing himself into the house of a surprised Iraqi, abruptly face-to-face with Marines bristling with helmets, armor, antennae and weapons. If only he could somehow show other Americans what was happening in Iraq. Let them walk in Iraqi shoes for a minute, and they might want to help these people too.
Fallujan tribal society is based on the concepts of shame and honor. Everyone must live by a code. As a Marine, the thirty-year-old Kopera understood the idea. He had joined the Corps while attending community college in 2000. An avid painter, he had dropped out of art school after deciding he didn’t want to try to make a living as an artist, opting instead for a more practical associate’s degree in auto repair technology. He ran into a military recruiter while drifting through a couple of courses and living week to week on his modest income working a few shifts at a restaurant. Patriotism was part of it, sure. But he also didn’t really have a plan and craved direction, something military life offered in abundance. Kopera chose the Marine Corps, figuring that if he was going to take such a drastic step as joining the armed services, he might as well go with the toughest branch. He also liked the Marine Corps ideals. It demanded high standards of physical fitness, training, and personal discipline, and the challenge of achieving something noble and difficult appealed to him. Kopera wanted his own code.
Six years in the Marines had mostly validated his choice. Yeah, it was tough, and there were occasional disappointments. One of them was that some of Alpha Company’s Marines had opted out of the tour in Fallujah after a short-lived order stipulated that Reservists who had already deployed in support of Iraq or Afghanistan could not be forced to deploy again. His battalion had already conducted a quiet rotation in a combat zone, pulling security on a Special Forces base in Djibouti. Although the majority of the men from Alpha Company 1/24 had embarked on this subsequent, far more dangerous trip to Iraq, about twenty-five Marines had taken advantage of the decree and declined deployment. Kopera was shocked that the government would let members of the service “cop out like that,” go back to college or do whatever they pleased. “When you join the armed services, you swear an oath to serve a time commitment and do your job, regardless of personal” preference, he thought. For someone to voluntarily sit back and watch fellow Marines go off to a combat zone—“with some of them almost certainly coming back in a pine box”—was anathema to Kopera.46 The great whys and hows of the invasion of Iraq hovered distantly outside of his job description, which at the moment simply consisted of finding and killing the insurgents who had just tried to kill him.47
Many of the locals Kopera interviewed on the way to the mosque were less than helpful. In most of the eight or nine houses they briefly searched during roughly twenty minutes, the eldest woman would come forward to meet them, answer questions, and then shadow the Marines as they quickly peeked inside her house to look for insurgents, bullet casings, weapons, or blood trails.48 Almost none of the civilians testified to having seen much