Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
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