Before the attack on the contractors, I spoke with then–Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, about his plans for handling Fallujah and the other hot spot down the road, Ramadi. Our conversation was the first time we had spoken. For the bitter fight he was heading into in Anbar, he would need both of his personalities—Mad Dog Mattis, commander of the lethal Devil Dogs, and the cerebral student of people and ideas who had an anthropologist’s curiosity and appreciation of nuance. Backed by the specter of the former, he would lead with the latter.
“We’re planning to do this differently,” he said. “I want us to take off the Kevlar helmets.” He talked about engaging the population. “We’re going to go in on foot and fan out in small patrols across the city.”
His intent was to establish a more continuous, more visible presence among the residents, and in the short time before they deployed, Jim tried to give one platoon in each battalion additional language and cultural training. He even arranged for help from the Los Angeles Police Department. The Marines grew mustaches as a small but resonant gesture of cultural assimilation and amity toward the Iraqis. At the time, I knew there was a plan for his Marines to wear dark green forest camouflage print and shiny black boots for the first part of their rotation. The uniform choice was meant to differentiate them in the eyes of the Fallujans from the 82nd, who had worn beige and brown desert fatigues. Neither of us thought simply being in soft caps would win Fallujah. But Mattis, early on, understood that perceptions were at least as important as any tactical gains.
As they assumed control of the city that March, the Marines began to carry out Mattis’s approach, starting with foot patrols. Against determined insurgents, this was dangerous. On Thursday, March 25, in the same Askari neighborhood with row houses that I had walked through a few weeks earlier, insurgents killed one Marine and wounded two more with homemade bombs. The Marines returned to the neighborhood the next day, eventually taking control of the cloverleaf to its east. Our TF 16 forces worked closely with the Marines, gathering intelligence and running pinpoint raids while the Marines provided a steady presence. On the night of March 24, one of our Green convoys was ambushed outside of town. In the massive ensuing firefight, with operators using vehicles as cover, one of the detainees got away. A week later, the American contractors drove into this rising simmer.
It was the beginning of a difficult chapter in the Iraq war. For the first few days after the March 31 ambush on the Blackwater convoy, the attack did not appear to derail the Marines’ plan for clearing the city of insurgents. Mattis’s troops focused on retrieving the remains of the contractors, which they did with the help of the local police chief in Fallujah. The Coalition collected intelligence on the crowd and ringleaders and would have enlisted our help in plucking them from the city. From Afghanistan, I waited and watched. But Washington wanted to answer the murder and mutilation of the security contractors, and rapidly secure the city. The Marines bitterly disagreed, wanting to manage Fallujah on their terms, not as a rushed reaction to the insurgents’ baiting. They were overruled. General Mattis was ordered to attack the city within seventy-two hours. Helmets would go on and stay on.
The commander of our Fallujah-based team decided to seed Marine platoons with Green operators, in ones and twos. These dispersed teams were not only valuable for their experience but also better connected to one another and to the command center in Fallujah than many of the Marine platoons with which they found themselves. Our technology, combined with the agility and experience of the operators, allowed us to gain a quick, robust picture of what they found inside Fallujah. I became addicted to this ground-level reporting for the rest of the war.
Shuttling between my headquarters in Baghdad and outposts in Fallujah and nearby Ramadi, I did not find the teams’ reports encouraging. The Marines faced significant but yet unspecified resistance shortly after entering the city limits. We knew Fallujah hosted nationalistic Sunni insurgents seeking to expel the Americans and win political and economic privileges in the Shia-dominated new Iraq. More modestly, these Iraqis were fighting to preserve their pride. We also knew that Fallujah was a nexus for tribal criminal networks, making for a glut of arms and money. Most troubling were the Salafist jihadists in the mix. The same trading routes that now made Fallujah a smuggling nexus for refrigerators and cars had imprinted the city with the ideology of the fundamentalists who had sacked Karbala in 1802. Fallujah sat along the corridors that connected the wellspring of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia with the region’s other great cities—Mosul, Aleppo, and Amman. Much of Anbar was insular, but Fallujah’s sympathetic mosques and history as a place of transit lured a trickle of foreign jihadist volunteers.