I sought to emphasize in my force, and in myself, the necessary discipline to fight enemies whose very tactic was to instill terror and incite indignation. Maintaining our force’s moral compass was not a difficult concept to understand. Armies without discipline are mobs; killing without legal and moral grounds is murder. But after the first shot, the first bloody corpse, war is no longer theory. As we moved further from the theoretical, like every commander before me, I found it critical to maintain as much discipline over my emotions toward what we encountered, and the losses we suffered, as I could. I remembered Grant’s admission that he rarely visited his wounded in field hospitals because he felt seeing the cost of his decisions so starkly would prevent him from making the difficult decisions he believed were necessary. I found strength in Grant’s candor.
In the end, Nick Berg’s murder and the experience in Fallujah that spring made us more resolute, more serious. Until late 2006 or 2007, Coalition leaders shied away from using the word “war” in our briefings and conversations. It was always “the problem” or “the situation” or “the conflict.” But after the events that spring, I began to tell my command group, and to repeat until I gave up command: “This is a war. And this war will have a winner, and it will have a loser. We are not here to fight the war on terror. We are here to win it.”
* * *
We were not winning when I met with John Abizaid on Friday, April 9, 2004. Historically, insurgencies had taken time to incubate, as anger evolved into coordinated resistance. The initial stages of their organization typically went unseen by governing powers. So it was on that Friday that, for the first time since the war began, the Sunni insurgency openly controlled terrain—parts or all of Fallujah—within the country.
Restarting the Marines’ offensive on Fallujah was politically untenable. They would be forced to withdraw from the city limits. As they prepared to vacate the city, which they would do three weeks later, they searched for a stopgap measure. In the week before their formal exit, the Marines began to assemble a local security force, called the Fallujah Brigade. They chose a former Baathist general to command it, provided limited equipment, and filled the ranks with Iraqis, some from Fallujah. It was clear from its inception that the Brigade was a big risk. Few had any doubts the militia might switch sides en masse or be quickly overrun by the very insurgents and foreign fighters they were meant to police. But having some representation inside the city was better than nothing.
Violent skirmishes filled the days leading up to the Marines’ withdrawal. On April 26, a platoon entered the northwest district and linked up with a handful of Green members from our task force. They were there to teach the Marines how to use a new weapon. But soon insurgents found their position. As insurgents began arriving by the truckload outside the buildings, the Americans were in danger of being overrun. In the course of the assault, as insurgents unleashed on the buildings, a Green medic, Staff Sergeant Dan Briggs, ran six times across the bullet-swept street in order to administer care to wounded Marines in two separate buildings. Meanwhile, on the roof of one of these building, two Green operators and a small force of Marines fought off the encircling insurgents who fired from alleys and the windows and rooftops. As he covered the evacuation of the remaining force, one of the operators, Master Sergeant Don Hollenbaugh, found himself alone on the rooftop, shuffling from one spot, firing a few times, and moving to the next, in order to hold at bay what were estimated to be three hundred insurgents. For their exceptional courage, Briggs and Hollenbaugh were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the award for valor second only to the Medal of Honor, and Larry Boivin—wounded twice in the firefight, only to return to it each time—was awarded a Silver Star. They earned them. A few days later, the Marines withdrew from the city.
At the end of May, less than a month after the Marines left the city to the Fallujah Brigade, Abizaid summoned me to meet with him, Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez, Ambassador Bremer, and the Marine commanders on the outskirts of Fallujah. Our task force already believed the city was, in all but a few pockets, a free zone for the insurgency. For some of the Sunni recruits, joining the Brigade was a way to make it past our checkpoints into the city in order to join the insurgent ranks. The remaining contingents of the Fallujah Brigade were no match when they contested the insurgency. Some guerrillas were battle hardened. All were high on the recent “defeat” of the Marines and heavily armed. Moreover, during this spring and summer of 2004, much of the Sunni insurgency took on a religious tone and logic that had previously been absent from the Baathist resistance. Iraqis increasingly joined the ranks of Zarqawi and began acting like his Salafists, who sold themselves as the vanguard of the resistance. The dye helping color the reservoir were foreign fighters, non-Iraqis sneaking into Iraq to volunteer as jihadists. They arrived emboldened by inflated tales of the brilliant resistance to the invaders in Fallujah. But for many, burning anger over the recent stories and images of degradation at Abu Ghraib had provoked them to come to Iraq and would fuel the fire for years to come. Fallujah became both symbol of, and command base for, the jihadist wing of the resistance, separate from and at times in conflict with the nationalistic insurgency. While the outcome of the jockeying among the insurgent factions was still murky, we had little doubt the Fallujah Brigade had withered within weeks of its inception.