Grunts (63 page)

He caught his glimpses of their grinning visages against his own muzzle flashes and the streaking lights of tracer rounds. Behind him, Fitts and the others scrambled out of the house. Bellavia’s SAW fire was so overwhelming that the insurgents had to duck or risk having their smiling heads blown off. “Get out there,” he thought. “Clear the room and juice these guys.” But it was as if his legs were cemented in place. He could not bring himself to walk up on them and kill them at point-blank range. He did not know why. Perhaps he was afraid of pushing his luck any further. Perhaps he was repelled by the idea of snuffing out their lives at handshake range. Regardless, when he ran out of ammo, he bolted from the house, enraged at himself for not finishing them off.

He found Fitts and several other men just beyond the garden, taking cover behind a wall. Bellavia was absolutely disgusted with himself. He paced around roaring and cursing. “There’s no escaping this: I cut and ran. When shit got hot, I ran. I’m an NCO. I’m supposed to lead by example.” He felt like a fraud and a coward. He had joined the Army, in part, to prove to himself that he was no such thing. Like any good sergeant, he felt a strong obligation to lead his soldiers. To him, running from an enemy-occupied house was not the way to do that. The insurgents were still spewing fire from that house. Near misses sparked on the pavement all around the Americans. “We’re all gonna die,” one frightened man said. “We’re not going to die!” Bellavia shouted back. “They’re gonna fucking die!” He was calming himself as much as he was calming the scared soldier.

A Bradley came up and raked the house with 25-millimeter and coaxial machine-gun fire. As much as the soldiers hoped that the supporting fire had killed the insurgents, most everyone, including Bellavia, understood that someone would have to go back into the house and kill them face-to-face. The sergeant knew that he had to lead the assault, even though he believed he would not survive. The very thought of it all frightened him to death, but it had to be done. “If I don’t go in,” he later wrote, “they’ll have won. How many times have we heard that American soldiers rely on firepower and technology because they lack courage?” From studying military history, he knew that America’s enemies always made the same claim. He was determined to disprove it.

Gathering several of his soldiers, he prepared to make a coordinated assault. All the while, he kept psyching himself up and projecting a fearless persona to his men by telling them “you were born for this moment . . . you were born to kill these evil motherfuckin’ terrorists . . . we’re gonna eat their flesh and send them to fucking Lucifer.” Every man believed that death waited in the house. Another squad leader, Staff Sergeant Scott Lawson, sidled up to Bellavia and told him: “I’m not going to let you go in there and die alone.” Bellavia was overwhelmed by the nobility of Lawson’s statement. Bellavia’s feeling of brotherhood for him was so powerful that he felt “closer to Lawson than to my own kin.” Here was a prime example of an enduring truth about American combat soldiers: they fight, die, and sacrifice for one another. For them, no other motivation to face danger is ever as powerful. “I just wasn’t gonna let him go in there by himself and die,” Lawson later said. “That night it was hectic, crazy. You lose your mind a little bit.”

After hurling some grenades, the squad crept through the courtyard, with Bellavia and Lawson in the lead. Michael Ware, an Australian reporter, was among them, observing everything. The Bradley fire had not killed the muj but it did force them to abandon the windows and take shelter in the house’s interior. It also punctured a water tank, coating the floor of the building with a quarter inch of dank water. Bellavia and Lawson entered the house and carefully moved along the foyer wall, toward the stairwell. The house stank of moldy water and rotting fish. They could hear the enemy fighters whispering in Arabic. Bellavia was carrying an M16A4 with a 203 grenade launcher attachment—not an ideal weapon for close-quarters battle (CQB) because of its size and weight. Lawson had a 9-millimeter pistol.

Bellavia was peering through his night vision goggles, looking for the insurgents. Then, confusion reigned as shooting broke out. Bullets whizzed past Bellavia, so close he could almost feel the wind of one as it snapped past his helmet. Others tore chunks from the walls. The fire tapered off and the insurgents began chanting
“Alahu Akbar”
(God is great) over and over, in a frightened tone, almost as if calming themselves. Through the haze, Sergeant Bellavia could see them now, and they were still behind the barriers. One of them looked very young. He bent down to prep an RPG. The other one had a neatly trimmed beard and was wielding a machine gun. Behind them, propane tanks lay in piles. Bellavia was praying to himself now. He tried to clear his mind but again all he could think was “The Power of Christ compels you!” He screamed that aloud, brought his weapon to his shoulder, and rushed toward them. “Close-quarters combat is instinctual, fought on the most basic and animalistic level of the human brain,” he wrote. “Body language, eye contact, the inflection of voice can turn a fight in a heartbeat.” The younger insurgent looked up in surprise. His eyes met Bellavia’s and, with venomous emphasis, he spat out the word “Jew!” Bellavia put a round into his chest and his pelvis. The jihadi spun around, fell down, and his blood poured into the water, spreading red pools outward from the dead form. The other man ran for the kitchen. Bellavia and Lawson shot at him and scored several hits, as evidenced by his intense moaning, but he kept returning fire from the kitchen. Lawson ran out of ammo. Outside, soldiers were screaming in confusion. Some thought Bellavia had been wounded or killed.

At this point, for Bellavia, the battle became a one-man struggle. Chaos ensued as, throughout the dark house, he engaged in a personal duel to the death with the insurgents. In two instances, he had to shoot them multiple times before they died. Many times, he yelled at them in Arabic to surrender. One of them responded with taunts. “I will kill you and take your dog collar,” he said. “Mommy will never find your body. I’ll cut your head off.” For the American, the creepy voice was unnerving to the point of sheer panic, but he suppressed his natural fear and kept fighting. He stalked one wounded insurgent up the stairs onto the upper floor. He and the man had awkwardly exchanged shots in a bedroom, stumbling around an armoire where the bearded man had been hiding. This fighter had a thick beard, he was middle-aged, and he stank to high heaven. Bellavia thought of him as the bogeyman because he looked so bedraggled and had emerged from the armoire, like something out of a child’s nightmare of monsters in the closet.

As Sergeant Bellavia ascended the wet stairs in search of the enemy fighter, images of his wife and son kept flashing through his mind. In his mind’s eye, he saw a casualty notification team coming to the door of his home. He imagined his wife as a widow, his son growing up with no father. He saw his own tombstone. He was filled with a strange combination of fury and regret. Like nearly every infantry soldier, he was torn between an obligation to his actual family and his military family. He loved them both with an intensity that was hard to describe. Both of them needed him badly. Right now, in this horrible place, though, his military brothers needed him more.

Near the top of the stairs, he slipped on a pool of blood and fell forward a bit. At that exact moment, the bogeyman opened fire. The bullet whizzed overhead, right where Bellavia’s head would have been if he had not slipped. A chance incident, a slip of one mere foot, had saved his life and left him always to wonder why. The sergeant straightened up and sputtered: “You’re gonna fucking die, dude.” He shot and missed. In the muzzle flash, Bellavia could see fear in the eyes of his enemy. The man fled to a room. The New Yorker found him, threw a grenade in there, and wounded him again. Just as Bellavia was about to open fire and finish him off, he noticed propane tanks and a smoky fire burning up a mattress in one corner of the room. Bellavia could smell natural gas. Concerned that one of his tracer rounds might touch off an explosion, he held his fire. “I step forward and slam the barrel of my rifle down on his head. He grunts and suddenly swings his AK up. Its barrel slams into my jaw and I feel a tooth break.” Bellavia’s father was a dentist and all the squad leader could think of right now was how angry his dad would be that he had cracked a tooth. “These are the irrational thoughts that come into your mind at this moment,” he later said.

In fact, these were the first blows in a desperate fight to the death. Bellavia tasted blood in his mouth and throat. He swung his rifle like a baseball bat and caught the man full in the face. The bogeyman still had the presence of mind to kick the sergeant in the crotch. His M16 clattered onto the floor. Bellavia tried beating him with a small-arms protective insert (SAPI) plate from his body armor and then his Kevlar helmet, too. The two struggled back and forth, kicking, clawing “like caged dogs locked in a death match. We’ve become our base animal selves, with only survival instincts to keep us going. Which one of us has the stronger will to live?”

Bellavia kept yelling in Arabic and English at the man to surrender, but to no avail. With his right finger, he gouged the man’s left eye and was “astonished to discover that the human eye is not so much a firm ball as a soft, pliable sack.” The gouging of an eye is highly unsettling to most all human beings, even a trained warrior like Bellavia. Even with his life on the line, and wearing Nomex gloves, he could not bring himself to plunge his finger deep into his enemy’s eye socket. He withdrew the finger. The man fired a pistol shot that just missed Bellavia’s head. “I thought . . . I’m done.” In that moment, he suddenly remembered that he was carrying a knife. “That knife was the only thing that was gonna make me live.” As he rose slightly to grab it from his belt, the man bit him in the crotch. Paroxysms of pain and rage coursed through Bellavia. At first he used the blunt end of the knife to batter the man’s gray-flecked hair, but still his teeth clenched into Bellavia’s crotch. “His breath was horrible, just stale, nasty breath.” The American could feel warm blood running down his leg but fortunately his vital parts were intact.

At last, he locked the knife blade into place, rolled heavily onto the muj, and stabbed him under the collarbone. The man was crying, struggling and wailing. One of his hands kept beating Bellavia’s side but the blows steadily weakened when the knife nicked an artery. Bellavia heard a gurgling, liquid sound. Both of them were bathed in the warm arterial blood. Bellavia kept pumping the knife blade “like Satan’s version of CPR.” A powerful smell, much like rust, emanated from the blood.

Bellavia saw fear and then resignation in the eyes of his enemy. “Please,” he said to the American. With tears of his own, Bellavia replied, “Surrender!” “No,” the man said with a smile on his face. With one last spasm of strength, he reached up with his right hand and caressed Bellavia’s face. “His hand runs gently from my cheek to my jaw, then falls to the floor. He takes a last ragged breath, and his eyes go dim, still staring into mine. Why did he touch me like that at the end? He was forgiving me.” The two enemies had shared a supremely ironic killer-and-victim intimacy, almost sexual in its intensity, that only they could understand. Bellavia was anything but exhilarated. He was exhausted from his postfight adrenaline crash, aching from his wounds, and wrung out from the awful experience of killing face-to-face, in an animal struggle. He lay still, shivering, cold, nauseous, coated with the dried blood of the man he had just stabbed to death.

When, at last, he collected himself, grabbed his rifle, and left the room, he heard American voices downstairs. He stumbled into the hallway and almost bumped into another enemy fighter. In the confusion, the muj lost his AK-47. Bellavia fell on his rear end but held on to his M16. “The dregs of my body’s adrenaline supply shoots into my system.” He shot the man several times. The wounded muj dragged himself to the roof of the house and flung himself into the garden below. An unseen SAW gunner finished him off. Bellavia shuffled to a corner, sat down heavily, lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. As he contemplated what had just happened to him in this hell house, it occurred to him that today was his birthday. “I’ve had better birthdays,” he thought. The other grunts came upstairs and asked if he was okay. “Yeah, I’m good,” he replied bravely. He knew that was not true, though. In fact, he doubted he would ever be the same again.
¹⁴

Nor was the battle anywhere near finished for him and the other grunts. Task Force 2-2 Infantry pushed across Highway 10 and continued methodically clearing block after block of urban sprawl. “They would dismount and clear a building to the roof to get eyes into the next block, or the next intersection,” one officer remembered. “Then they’d move the Bradleys around to get some suppressive fire, bring the guys down off the roof, down into the next block, and then do it again.” Newell eventually had to use soldiers from the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop as dismounted infantrymen. In addition to local resistance, often these men and the everyday grunts fought face-to-face with foreign insurgents who had come to Fallujah from such countries as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sudan to martyr themselves.

The process of seizing buildings was exhausting and deadly. Alpha Company lost its commander, Captain Sean Sims, and its executive officer, First Lieutenant Edward Iwan. Sims was shot at point-blank range by a hidden insurgent inside of a building he thought was clear. Iwan took a direct hit from an RPG as he stood in the turret of his Bradley during a major insurgent counterattack. The warhead embedded in his abdomen, nearly severed him in two, but did not explode. Dr. Dewitt’s aid station was close to the fighting, maybe about a kilometer away. She did everything she could to save him, and even got him to the operating table at Camp Fallujah, but he died there. As Iwan lay dying and unconscious, Lieutenant Commander Ron Camarda, a chaplain, sang hymns to the young lieutenant. “I was singing ‘O Holy Night’ when he shed a most awesome and beautiful tear.” Camarda believed that the tear came from Iwan’s sadness at his imminent death and the profound love he felt for his soon-to-be-grieving family.