Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
with a great smile, [who] knew that he wanted to serve his country.” Witteveen’s squad leader at the time of his death, Sgt. Michael Moose, spoke haltingly with emotion as he described the circumstances and aftermath of the explosion five years later.
VanSlyke was killed by a sniper on February 28, 2007, while manning one of the entry control points that monitored traffic into the city. According to one Marine, he had enough time to say “I’ve been shot” and “I can’t feel my legs” before slipping into unconsciousness. VanSlyke had always been friendly with Fallujans who passed through his checkpoint, so much so that some regular passersby expressed condolences to the Marines when they learned of his death.
Neal was killed by a buried roadside bomb during a night convoy on January 19, 2007. He was a popular Marine, and his platoon took the death hard. The corporal’s home unit hadn’t been slated to deploy to Iraq, but Neal volunteered to go when his good friend LCpl. Matthew Teesdale was ordered to Fallujah. The night Neal was killed, Teesdale “just crumpled, fell to his knees and started crying,” according to Cpl. Elijah Villanueva, another member of the squad. Neal was so well liked that four Marines later named their children after him to honor his memory. After the corporal’s death, it was difficult for some American troops to accept the fact that the people they were trying to help had failed to warn them of the bomb or had possibly even sheltered the men who attacked the convoy. Years later, Villanueva commented on how it affected his deployment.
The guys who put that IED in the road lived in a village that we had been … bringing water, school supplies, asking them if they needed help. We were doing the right things for them, and that’s how they repaid us. We were trying to do the whole “No worse enemy, no better friend” thing. The guys used to tease me sometimes because I would carry extra stuff for kids—teddy bears, candy, whatever. [After Neal’s death] was the first time I actually felt bad about it…. It changed the way I felt about the country and what we were doing … how I wanted to act while I was there. After that night I stopped carrying that extra stuff, I just did the mission, did the job and stopped doing anything else. I didn’t go out of my way to be anybody’s friend. I didn’t become a monster or anything, I just wasn’t interested. It was the worst kind of reminder that you’re not at home, you’re not safe, you can’t trust anybody. I know there are good people [in Fallujah], but I went from being open to completely closed.
Some Marines hardened their hearts to the Iraqis after their comrades were wounded or killed. Others had arrived in Fallujah with an aggressive attitude and a closed mind, and they stayed that way. Still others showed great compassion, and they were able to keep an open mind in the bewildering ethical and emotional environment inherent to fighting an insurgency. In the end, despite many tragic errors and challenges, the Marines maintained enough professionalism to cement a key alliance that improved security.
This fundamental test in Iraq offers an important lesson for future small-unit leaders tasked with fighting an insurgency. Beyond the dictates of strategy, tactics, and logistics, and platitudinous ideals about protecting civilians, key questions loom: How do leaders instill enough restraint in young Marines and soldiers to have success in a frustrating, asymmetric conflict? How do squad leaders, platoon leaders, and company commanders compel troops to exhibit the requisite patience and professionalism in political and media environments that are unprecedented in the history of warfare? In meeting this critical challenge, individual personalities and decisions matter. I hope this book conveys how these factors shaped the history of Fallujah.
1
DARK
MAP 1
The Fallujah PeninsulaOn the walk to the meeting, Maj. Dan Whisnant thought about what he would say to the sheikh. “What will he ask for?” he wondered. “What are we prepared to give?”1 Accompanying Whisnant to the midnight parley were an Iraqi interpreter nicknamed “Caesar,” a military intelligence Marine, and five well-armed infantrymen. The small party was leaving the security of their base for one of the sheikh’s houses a few hundred meters outside the wire.
A crescent moon and a quilt of bright desert stars barely illuminated a wall of twelve-foot concrete barriers and sharp rings of razor wire that guarded the eastern face of the American compound. The men picked their way through a maze of lower barriers crisscrossing a section of road running through the entrance, the serpentine configuration preventing suicide car bombers from penetrating their lines. A young Marine manning an M-240 machine gun atop a wooden observation tower silently watched as a member of Whisnant’s detail held up a coil of the edged wire and replaced it behind them after all had exited the gap. The group turned sharply left along a grass and gravel path hugging the fence line running due south. They moved in silence broken by an occasional softly spoken command, the crunch of boots, and the rustle of weapons and body armor.2
It was a chilly evening on December 26, 2006. From Forward Operating Base Black, Whisnant commanded a company of Marines in charge of the rural peninsula south of the famously restive city of Fallujah. He and his men were tasked with leaving an eighty-square-kilometer area at the heart of Iraq’s violent insurgency in better shape than they had found it. About three months into their tour, Whisnant’s Marines had detained and killed some of the enemy, lost some of their own, and made fitful progress. But the clock was ticking on their six-month deployment.
Whisnant believed that the key to beating the area’s resilient insurgency was information. His men needed to win the cooperation of the people, or at the least alienate them less than the rebels did. To this end, he prioritized getting to know the locals. His men were ordered to be respectful and follow sensible rules of engagement to minimize civilian casualties in their frequent battles with insurgents. Regardless of conscientious doctrine and careful execution, it was exasperating, uncertain work. The population of the area of operations (AO) had proven apathetic, uncooperative at best, and enthusiastically deadly at their worst. The major couldn’t discount the possibility that his Marines were wasting their time.3 The visit to the sheikh might produce a breakthrough.
It would be Whisnant’s first chance to negotiate in secret with one of the sheikhs of the Albu Issa, an old and quarrelsome tribe that effectively administered the Fallujah peninsula and represented a large share of the citizenry within the city.4 Then again, the late night conference might wind up in the familiar fashion of more public meetings with tribal leaders: sweet tea and cigarettes, flowery Arabic rhetoric, inexhaustible complaints, and ethereal promises of cooperation that would evaporate with the morning sun. Whisnant cautiously hoped for the best.
Intelligence documents were murky, but hinted that the man they would meet, Sheikh Aifan Sadoun Aifan al-Issawi, might have ties to the insurgency. One of the Iraqi’s older brothers had certainly funded it, and Aifan himself might have even fought the Marines. The sheikh had even claimed to have been shot by Americans, under unclear circumstances, before being jailed for a time in the Abu Ghraib prison.5 A dodgy past wasn’t, however, a disqualifying concern for negotiations with the Marines. Many proud military-age men in Fallujah had supported “the resistance against the occupiers” in one way or another during the early years of the war. The “City of Mosques” had been a town filled with and surrounded by barely governable hard cases long before Iraq’s Ottoman era, and the citizenry’s characteristic independence along with a series of unfortunate events had bred rebellion that arguably rivaled soccer and prayer as local pastimes after the U.S.-led invasion.6 The only things that might make Sheikh Aifan stand out in this regard