Marines had promised: Confirmed with senior Marine official.
mistaken the initial explosions: “Several cars and nearby buildings were damaged by what witnesses described as two missiles, one of which appeared to have left a 20-foot crater.” Edmund Sanders, “U.S. Airstrike Kills 18 in Fallouja,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2004.
dolls among the rubble: Interview with senior military official.
“slogans and vowing revenge”: Sanders, “U.S. Airstrike Kills 18.”
and we bombed those: Interviews with task force members.
guesthouses and restaurants: In addition to open sources, locations of jihadists within Fallujah that summer come from interviews with military intelligence officials.
Brigade was no real challenge: Malkasian, Signaling Resolve, 448–49.
meetings in the backseat: Interview with task force member.
leaders to be his deputies: Hannah Allam, “Fallujah’s Real Boss: Omar the Electrician,” Seattle Times, November 22, 2004. Some, including the author of this article, suggest that Omar Hadid may even have been more powerful than Zarqawi within Fallujah. Hadid, a Fallujan and member of the Mujahideen Shura Council, was technically Zarqawi’s deputy in the city. While Zarqawi leveraged Hadid’s local appeal, he also aided Hadid by raising his profile from that of an electrician to that of a feared and famous jihadist.
truck that roved through town: Hamza Hendawi, “Fast Resembling an Islamic Mini-State, Fallujah May Be Glimpse of Iraq Future,” Associated Press, May 25, 2004.
CHAPTER 10: ENTREPRENEURS OF BATTLE
At the outstation: Interviews with task force members.
dropped him to the deck: Adam Nicolson, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Harper Collins, 2005), 255.
minutes later he was dead: Ibid., 254, 274.
“No Captain can do very wrong”: This memorandum was written on October 9, 1805, “a fortnight before the battle” (ibid., 45).
strategy with the French captains: Ibid.
“It takes a network”: This phrasing first appeared in 2001 in a monograph by John Arquilla, and the idea was one he and others had espoused before then.
“absolutely intoxicating in its intensity”: Richard Williams, quoted in Robert D. Kaplan, “Man Versus Afghanistan,” Atlantic, April 2010, 61.
between bin Laden and Zarqawi: The full reporting of Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi’s trip to Iraq that summer comes from Sami Yousafzai & Ron Moreau, “Terror Broker,” Newsweek, April 11, 2005.
unrestrained targeting of Shia Muslims: Lawrence Wright, “The Master Plan,” New Yorker, September 11, 2006.
challenge Al Qaeda’s leadership: Leah Farrall, “How Al Qaeda Works,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2011).
voluntarily sharing it with others: This point is made in Lamb and Munsing’s article about TF 16 in Iraq: “SOF Task Force personnel were directed to set the example by being first to give more information. They were told to ‘share until it hurts.’ As one commander explained it, ‘If you are sharing information to the degree where you think, “Holy cow, I am going to go to jail,” then you are in the right area of sharing.’ The point was to build trust, and information-sharing was the icebreaker.” Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, “Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation,” Strategic Perspectives (March 2011), 46.