Fallujah Awakens. Bill Ardolino
society, this insult demanded redress or invited revenge.28
The question that nagged at the Marines was whether they were making more progress than any damage caused by their presence. It was hard to say whether their efforts were diminishing or fanning the peninsula’s insurgency, especially since they had been getting shot at and blown up almost since their first day in country.29 This violence, coupled with the seeming apathy of local civilians, made it feel like they were starting at zero. It was hard for some Americans to fathom how they could make things much worse.
Of everything that confronted Greco on this deployment, the volume of attacks was the biggest surprise of his new command. He thought he had seen the worst possible violence during the brutal urban house clearing of Operation Phantom Fury, but this tour on Fallujah’s southern peninsula had its own twists on war. His men were getting engaged regularly by small arms and mortars, and the roads were studded with hidden bombs. The IED booby traps were the biggest threat to his Marines, showcasing the irrepressible and deadly creativity of the insurgents who wanted to kill them.30
On October 25, Alpha Company lost its first Marines. LCpl. Jonathan Thornsberry and Sgt. Tommy Gilbert of Greco’s 1st Squad were killed instantly when their Humvee drove over an IED. A massive artillery shell had been buried in the middle of the road and rigged with small, bulbous trigger mechanisms nicknamed “Christmas lights.” LCpl. Brad Bueno was blown twenty feet from the Humvee’s turret and was medevaced with a broken leg.
Thornsberry had been a dependable “good country boy” from Tennessee.31 He had always made it a point to look after his fellow Marines’ comfort and constantly bragged about his young daughter. Gilbert was a twenty-four-year-old raised in middle-class Illinois. He liked to go out drinking with his buddies, but would sit quietly in a corner, sipping a Jameson’s whiskey and reading a newspaper while his friends raised hell around him. Gilbert would just smile and shake his head occasionally or stop what he was doing to drag them out of whatever trouble required his undivided attention. The company took their deaths hard.32 These losses happened only three weeks into the deployment, and there would surely be more casualties to come.33 The Marines grieved, but moved on with their work.
From day one, seeking out this violence was a component of attempts to defeat the enemy. The routine was simple: leave the FOB or ad hoc patrol base; get attacked while conducting a mission; fix, counterattack, and kill the enemy. Some reactive posture was inevitable when fighting an insurgency. It was dangerous work.34
3
Sgt. David Kopera’s men moved in zigzag formation through a lush field on the edge of Albu Aifan village. Barely midmorning on November 4, 2006, the strong Fallujan sun warmed the dry ground and desert air. Sweat ran down the men’s torsos under heavy armor and equipment, applying a fresh coat of grimy ochre stain to their faded brown Kevlar vests. The Marines had good dispersion but little cover among the leafy green shoots that brushed their shins and stood in uneven clumps atop grayish-brown sandy soil.
Kopera had deployed his undermanned squad—those who remained after the loss of Tommy Gilbert, Jonathan Thornsberry, and Brad Bueno on October 25—into two staggered columns. Ruben “Doc” Muñoz, the medical corpsman, trailed about fifteen feet behind the squad leader. Kopera’s team methodically approached the backyards of a cluster of muted tan, concrete-block houses lining a main road. Cpl. Matthew Zofchak’s second team traveled along the edge of the field, parallel with them, less than one hundred meters to the southeast.1 As the Marines moved along, they saw a robed woman and a teenage girl harvesting a crop along a deep irrigation ditch.2 Nearly twenty meters from the village, Kopera’s world erupted.
Incoming bullets rent the air with cracks; the muffled sound of rounds churning the ground around him mixed with the stuttering of at least two RPK light machine guns and the chatter of AK-47s.3 The crackling boom of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) echoed from somewhere to the left.4 The rounds were landing so close that Kopera knew they were shooting right at him. Exposed in the open field, he had to move. The sergeant sprinted to a concrete outhouse in the backyard of the nearest house.5
When the shooting began, Doc Muñoz had been looking at the ground in order to carefully choose his footing in the field’s sinking, uneven soil. His worries about twisting an ankle evaporated when he saw the powdery dirt begin to hop, and the air around his ears exploded with the familiar sound of flying metal shredding the sound barrier. Ahead, he saw small puffs silhouette Kopera as the rounds landed. It was obvious to him that they were targeting his team leader, who had a prominent radio antennae jutting skyward from his back. “God! That’s close!” Muñoz later recalled thinking.6
The corpsman hit the ground hard, crawling for cover behind a small berm that rose less than a foot above the rest of the field. He raised his weapon to return fire and willed himself small as bullets zipped around him. He saw Kopera make a play for the outhouse. “Shit, that’s a better idea,” he thought. “I have to get the hell out of here…. My luck is going to run out.” Adrenaline surged through his body, lifting him off the ground and into a pell-mell sprint for safety as rounds slapped around him. He leaped behind the outhouse, joining Kopera with a thud as the ceramic plate in his carrying vest smacked the concrete wall.7 In the first few seconds of the engagement, it seemed like hundreds of rounds had hit in a terrifyingly close cluster around the two men. Even though it was clear the attackers knew how to shoot better than most of the others the Marines had run into, they somehow had missed. The insurgents maintained their fire, with bullets chipping the concrete structures in front of the pair.8
Kopera tried to get a handle on the situation. The members of his squad that he could see had found good cover behind a house. He then tried to figure out where the fire was coming from. About 125 or 150 meters to the southwest stood a group of low buildings fronting a single-story peach-colored mosque. Peeking around the outhouse, Kopera spotted muzzle flashes above the low walls bordering the roof of one or two of the buildings.9 “The fire is coming from that side,” he told Muñoz, pointing. After unsuccessfully trying to raise his other team on the radio, Kopera and the corpsman started returning fire.10
Before “the shit hit the fan,” Cpl. Matthew Zofchak had been walking along the raised berm of the wide irrigation ditch bordering the field. His team was moving to the right of the watery trench in a staggered southwest-northeast column spread out over ninety meters. Only Sgt. Caleb Inman, an artilleryman and truck driver who had volunteered to augment the undermanned infantry squad on this patrol, was close to Zofchak.11 Although Inman had already served a 2004 tour in Fallujah, non-infantry augments were always assigned to a team leader, who would closely watch their performance. Zofchak drew the assignment. They were walking in tandem, less than ten meters apart, while LCpl. Eddie O’Connor, the squad’s lone machine gunner, pulled “tail-end Charlie” at the rear of the formation.12 Zofchak took advantage of Inman’s proximity, joking that the twenty-five-year-old Texan was a “damned POG [person other than grunt].” Then the crack of small-arms fire pierced the air.13
MAP 2
Zofchak and the others hit the ground as rounds began landing near them. The woman and