Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
witness told the Marines that he had seen the ambush party—five young men who weren’t from the village. The attackers had fled the buildings around the mosque in two cars, traveling south. Kopera thought the man seemed genuinely agitated by outsiders picking gunfights with Marines in the middle of his village; he probably didn’t want Americans to blame his neighbors and come down hard on anyone.50 The Iraqi’s stooped shoulders and wrinkled face also conferred that elderly aura of just not giving a damn. He seemed to disregard the possible consequences of feeding actionable information to the Americans. Kopera bought the man’s story.51
Widely dispersed and moving briskly, his men soon arrived at their target, the al-Shahid mosque. The small, single-story building whose name translates as the “witness” or the “martyr,” was surrounded by a low wall and a southern border of trees that blocked the view of an open field behind it. The simple concrete edifice was covered with stucco and a fading coat of light peach paint. On the roof was a small square turret crowned with speakers.52
The team had taken no gunfire during their movement toward the building. It seemed that the insurgents had fled. The sergeant consolidated his squad a second time and consulted with Zofchak when he reached the mosque. Members of the squad thought that the insurgents might have been shooting from behind the low wall that edged the roof and from the reeds in a field next to the building.53 But standard operating procedure stipulated that unless taking direct fire from a holy site, Americans couldn’t set foot on the grounds, much less search the interior. Procedure also dictated calling headquarters and asking for Muslims from an Iraqi Army unit to come to the village and case the structure. That might take hours, however, and the Marines did not trust the Iraqi Army units anyway.54
Zofchak’s blood was up, and he wanted his prey, which might be hiding, or dead, inside the mosque. His thought process consisted of an equation involving three parts adrenaline, plus three parts “We need to investigate,” minus four parts “Shit, we can’t go in there, otherwise our ass is grass.” He did the math and concluded, “I don’t care if it’s a mosque, I want to go.”55 Kopera wrestled briefly with what to do. He weighed the politics but ultimately decided he didn’t have time to call for an Iraqi unit if he was going to find any trace of the insurgents. “Fuck it, I’m jumping,” said the sergeant.56
Without informing his platoon leader, Kopera opted to split the difference by climbing the mosque’s exterior staircase to look for shell casings on the roof, thus avoiding setting foot inside the building itself. He leapt over the courtyard wall and bounded up the stone stairs, but found no rebels or remnants of their presence on the roof. At the top, Kopera peeked through an upper window to verify that no attackers were hiding inside. He scampered back to the ground. The Marines found a few bullet casings on a road by the mosque, but it looked like the locals had already mostly picked the scene clean of brass, and the ambushers had made their getaway.57
Kopera formulated a new plan and informed Greco: His squad would move south to the abandoned house of a wealthy sheikh that stood on the well-traveled intersection of Water Tower and Main Street. They would run a roadblock along the heavily trafficked thoroughfare and, with any luck, catch the insurgents if they were dumb enough to move back through the area.58 First Squad formed up and moved out along the front yards lining the road, ready to duck quickly behind the courtyard walls if they were engaged a second time.
They approached the sheikh’s white, tan, and peach house, a large, lavish structure surrounded by a high elliptical wall on three sides and a thick row of hedges on one. The wall of the front courtyard was split by a wide, sloping driveway, and the roof was blessed with the standard low wall, which gave great cover while Marines capitalized on panoramic views from the unusually high third story. The residence resembled a mix between a small fortress and one of the stylized theme restaurants that dot the fancier strip malls of south Florida and California.59
Kopera ordered the majority of his squad and the Navy corpsman into the house to begin overwatch and get a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a general purpose machine gun capable of laying down a steady wall of suppressive fire, set up on the roof. Meanwhile, Kopera, Inman, and Serr moved to initiate a “snap vehicle control point” at the intersection.
Almost immediately, a sedan with three young men drove toward their position from the southwest.60 The Marines snapped up their weapons and “drew down on them.” The car and its occupants matched the old man’s general description of the attackers—sedan filled with young males. Kopera waved at the car to stop and looked at the men, searching their faces for signs of aggression. No visible weapons, and something in their manner clicked with the sergeant. He made an instinctive decision that they were of no immediate threat. Such snap judgment calls about who might be trying to hurt you, and over life or death itself, were played out millions of times across Iraq as coalition forces struggled to find the balance between self-preservation and sparing the innocent. Outcomes were varied, and sometimes tragic.
Despite having been terrifyingly ambushed less than twenty minutes before, now conducting a hunt for his attackers, and seeing a car whose make, color, and occupants roughly matched a witness’s description of the insurgents, Kopera made the accurate call and eased off the trigger. He cautiously moved to search and speak with the young men. When the Iraqis exited the car, however, Inman didn’t like their attitude. To him they seemed too jovial, almost taunting, as the Marines searched the vehicle and found nothing. The trunk was empty but fresh grass and soil were scattered about it. Something about that and the men’s cocky demeanor struck Inman as “not right.” But a hunch was insufficient evidence. The men had no weapons, explosives, or other contraband.61 Serr disagreed with Inman’s take on the situation. He thought Inman was “still pissed” about the previous firefight and therefore took the Iraqis’ casual attitude as a threat or perhaps a sign that they “knew something we didn’t.” Serr’s instincts told him the men had no knowledge of the shooting.
Meanwhile, O’Connor and another Marine had sprinted toward the back of the house to clear it and set up a rear watch and field of fire, as others cleared the structure. LCpl. Steven Auton moved toward the front of the house. The dark-haired lance corporal was a compactly built “tough kid” described by one Marine as “a little ball of fuck you up.” According to some of his squad mates, Auton showed little regard for authority in peacetime and made a lousy “garrison Marine,” but his aggression made him a good “combat Marine.” Auton was not the type of guy one would choose to conduct a gentle detainee interrogation, according to Serr, but once someone won his respect—a rare occurrence—his loyalty was absolute. He was “the type of guy who would punch a sergeant major in the face for you.”62
Auton jogged over to the staircase leading up to the front porch of the house. As he reached it, all hell broke loose, again.63 The familiar growl of an RPK erupted from a surprisingly close position less than a hundred yards away, somewhere to the southeast.64 Rounds cracked the ground and cement around the SAW gunner, who barely had time to dive under the staircase. O’Connor saw bullets landing “literally inches from him” as the stairs were riddled with impacts.65 O’Connor let off a couple of long bursts from his SAW to quickly “get something going” because Auton “was in a bad spot.”66 Someone yelled at the Marines to “get in the house,” where they could set up a field of fire from the roof. O’Connor recalls telling LCpl. Jeff McAlinden “let’s get in the house,” but as they moved toward the porch, he saw “a line of [bullet] impacts between us and the front door along the outside wall” and thought better of the idea.67 He could tell from the angle that the fire was emanating from a field catty-corner to the home. The SAW gunner recalls shooting back with a series of “short five-to-eight round bursts” while McAlinden started returning fire with his M-16, as little bits of concrete knocked loose from the incoming bullets “landed on [their] heads.”68
Muñoz recalls moving toward the residence with Tyink, Zofchak, and LCpl. Brandon McCarty when they suddenly came under fire. Muñoz was in the road in front of the circular wall when bullets