As we were meeting, events in Iraq were altering the course of the war and TF 714’s relationship to it. On the day the conference began, then-Colonel Bennet Sacolick, the commander of Green, called from Baghdad. He needed to stay in Iraq, he explained, because four American contractors had been ambushed and killed in Fallujah, which was then beginning to tremor with widespread violence.
When I had made the decision the previous fall to hold the April commanders’ conference at Bagram, our main focus had been in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where the primary Al Qaeda threat was amassed. The events in the weeks that followed the contractors’ killing would change all that. The grisly images from the Fallujah attack—and the convulsive violence they augured—soon made the purse bombs and chicly dressed Algerian terrorists from The Battle of Algiers seem quaint.
| CHAPTER 9 |
Big Ben
April–June 2004
In early April 2004, the meltdown in Fallujah cut short my stay in Afghanistan. Until that time, my command group and I had largely flown around theater on scheduled conventional military flights. Now we summoned one of our MC-130 special operations aircraft in the middle of the night. Listening to the throaty rumble of the planes’ engines across the darkened tarmac, I was anxious to get to Iraq. I sensed that the tenor of the war had changed and that a critical point in the fight against Al Qaeda was waiting for us there.
A week earlier, a very public horror show in Iraq had prevented Bennet Sacolick from attending our commanders’ conference in Afghanistan. The previous Wednesday, three trucks with empty flatbeds had driven down Highway 10 into Fallujah, en route to the American base west of the city to pick up kitchen equipment. This was more dangerous than it sounds. Four American contractors, working for the private security firm Blackwater, split between two unarmored Mitsubishi Pajeros, escorted the trucks. At the entrance to the city, a group of Iraqi national guardsmen joined the convoy. The vehicles were stopped at a checkpoint on the east side of the city and apprised of the Marines’ assessment of the dangerous situation. But they continued on. Already, insurgents had planned an ambush. That morning, shop owners along the route had reportedly shuttered their storefronts and terrified residents hid indoors, while the insurgents had prepared the emptied street for the assault.
The American convoy drove along the main road through Fallujah. It continued past the corner where, weeks earlier, our TF 714 vehicles had taken a right into the residential neighborhood where we had searched houses, looking for Zarqawi, and found glaring faces. Once into the denser commercial center of town, the contractors entered the kill zone. The cars in front of the second American SUV halted, boxing it in. Insurgents rushed toward the car from the sidewalks, firing AK-47s, perforating the Pajero’s red doors and windows. With the pop of gunfire behind them, the lead SUV tried to maneuver, accelerating, then leaping the raised median. But insurgents were quickly only feet away from the vehicle’s windows, raking the car with bullets. They fired until the Pajero slammed into another car and juddered to a stop, its driver slumped over. The four Americans died in their seats.
With camcorders rolling, a crowd rushed to the cars and set them ablaze. When the flames subsided they dragged the bodies onto the pavement. They beat the corpses with sticks until they fell apart and trailed the bodies, or parts of them, behind cars. A maroon sedan honked playfully as the crowd—which reportedly included Iraqi police, children, and women—circled around the back bumper and shouted, “Fallujah is the cemetery of the Americans!” Paper fliers saying the same had been printed and distributed to the crowd to hold up in front of news cameramen. The crowd and cars moved to the southwest edge of town, where they tied the charred remains of two Americans to the beams of the green trestle Old Bridge. Men and young boys climbed the supports in order to reach out with sticks and shoes to hit the blackened, deformed corpses swaying over a crowd assembled and chanting below. One Baghdadi told the Los Angeles Times “with disbelief” that in Fallujah he saw “adolescent boys . . . carrying pieces of charred human flesh on sticks ‘as if they were lollipops.’”