Eyewitness Fallujah (part II)

Had the insurgents fled knowing the US was coming?

Absolutely. I think that there is no question that the majority of the forces had left. The mysterious Mr Al-Zarqawi for instance was nowhere to be found although they believe that they found his headquarters in the south of the city and certainly some of the footage that came from that particular operation tended to indicate that this might have been true.



The places that we went into which the Americans claim to be arms caches and weapons dumps and things like that ... I've seen a lot of weapons in a lot of places, all over the world, all my life and I have to say that these were not large concentrations of weapons. You would have a few mortar bombs, you would have a couple of bags of anti-aircraft rounds, but you wouldn't see any weapons to fire them or heavy machine gun rounds or AK-47 ammunition, sometimes 122mm rockets, those sort of things, you know, two's and three's here and there, in places. And certainly a lot of it in such bad condition that I would suspect that a preponderance of their material had been moved out of the place a long time before this attack took place.

Did it get dangerous for you at times? Was it ever

Yeah, whenever you're in a combat situation it is hairy. There is no way to avoid that. If there is just one bullet that is zinging through the air at 11300 feet per second it is dangerous and there were a lot of rounds. Whether they were friendly rounds from a unit that was just off to your right that was firing across you because they'd seen something moving in the wrong direction, that makes it dangerous. Obviously when you are proceeding down a road of unknown provenance and you are walking in a line with a number of marines, that is dangerous. Even if you're inside the vehicle, it's dangerous.



In fact one of the most lethal dangers was not necessarily from small arms fire actually on the ground, what was most dangerous were mortars and rockets which were being lobbed into the city from outside by insurgents beyond the operational limits, and of course these things can be shot from anywhere up to 15-20 kilometres away to fall completely untargeted into the area of operation and a large number of the casualties taken by the unit that we were with actually happened because of this. Nobody targeted these people, they just happened to be standing in the wrong place when something went bang.

One bit footage showed an air strike being called

Well, that is one of the reasons why they flagged this up beforehand, to try and get people to leave. And I think that they were pretty effective in doing that. One can understand why a member of the family might be left behind to stop looting etc. if they couldn't take all of their worldly possessions out of their houses and those individuals as I've said, were likely to come to grief.



Based on the idea of force protection, in other words not allowing any of your people to get taken out, the best way to prosecute this kind of war is to lay down as much fire as possible to basically either kill or suppress any fire coming back from the insurgents before you then move through an area to search and secure the area and certainly there were moments when at the beginning of an attack in the morning on the baseline, waiting for the lines to advance to start moving forward, every single weapon would open up for, you know, sort of 3 or 4 minutes at a time and they would just take out anything in the distance.



There were occasions when after a firefight had taken place and before they were sure an area was secure they sent two tanks down a particular road, one had its turret one side and the other had it's turret to the other side, and the commander said "I'm just making sure they put one shell into every house they go past". So the American forces in Fallujah "destroyed Fallujah in order to save it", that's how they would explain it. Every single building I would vouch, if it had been not destroyed then was certainly seriously damaged.

What was morale like?

I did not meet a marine on the ground in the unit at the enlisted or NCO level who had not said that they would be leaving the armed forces after this particular engagement. Not so much I think from the point of view of disagreement with the politics of the situation but rather the fact that they had not expected when they signed up in the marines to actually have their asses on the line as they found themselves to be. One of the problems with western armies these days is that you sign up to the army thinking that you're going to get a career and a pension and various pay-outs etc.. But in fact you get thrust into a war situation, a lot of people are dying around you and that's not what you signed up to the army for and so most people basically after two tours have said, "enough's enough, I'm outta here".



Politically, people were pretty benign basically, they were not involved in politics. They said "we are soldiers, this is the job we have been sent in to do and we do it. The thing we signed up to do was to obey and so we're obeying".



By and large, they were very happy with the Republican victory in the elections. They were not so happy the day after the election, when instead of the pay rises that they'd been getting for the last 4 years they suddenly only got a three per cent pay rise this year. Interesting that it was released the day after the election. So there was some mumbling about that, but by and large, apart from the older senior NCO's who are black, the rest of the marines seemed pretty much to be Republican. Those guys (the black NCO's) were democrats, and they'd say (conspiratorially) "hey listen, whatever you do, don't tell anybody else, but we're Democrats, we're the only Democrats on the base".

Was there any humour, compassion...pity?

I didn't see any humour compassion or pity involved with dealing with Iraqis. Certainly there's a lot of humour in dealing with each other and the marines have a patois, a way of speaking, which is extremely amusing and certainly some of the things that they do in their sort of downtime we found quite bizarre, like sitting in a guard vehicle when they were off guard duty watching "South Park", a very bizarre American cartoon series on a DVD player powered by the batteries of the armoured personnel carrier. I suppose this is just a cultural thing, but they were not involved in compassion for the enemy in any way but there was huge compassion obviously for their own mates and for their own injured. When casualties are heard they were very involved in that.



They did have what I found a slightly bizarre complete horror of anybody filming their comrades when they were wounded or killed, which, having been a soldier, I found very difficult. If anyone had wanted to take photographs of my mates I would have said "go ahead, tell the world what's going on", but these guys were very keen we did not film them although it was perfectly legal within the terms of the embed for us to do that so long as we didn't identify people or release their names before next of kin had been notified.

What will the battle of Fallujah's legacy be?

You must understand that the high command and politicians said that "what we're going to do is liberate Fallujah and give it back to the Fallujans". I think that the Fallujans will be even more determinedly anti a. the government and b. coalition forces than they were previously to that because their property and their tenuous lifestyle had been deeply threatened or destroyed by this operation. I think what you'll find the assault on Fallujah did was broaden the insurrection, not necessarily in terms of getting people who lived in other places to become more angry about the occupation, I don't think that's possible at the moment - there's a level of disagreement with the occupation that cannot be improved upon - but what it did was disperse a lot of people who were actively involved in the insurgency to other places and I think that as we've seen recently the number of incidents as we progress towards the elections of which of course the assault on Fallujah was the start of the pacification process for those elections. What has happened is that the number of incidents has risen dramatically as a result of displacing the insurgents from Fallujah into other parts of the country as far north as Mosul, which is some 4 hours drive away.

Does it require a military or political solution?

There is never a military solution to anything like this. I have been involved in a guerilla war in which the side I was on lost and the other side is that I've been to other people's guerilla wars and have seen that there is never a military solution to guerilla war. There is only ever talking at the end. Discussion, diplomacy and through that you come to a resolution and the only way to resolve the issue is to include the parties and sometimes that means you have to have the most radical ends of the two spectrums opposing each other come together and eventually when you get those two radical ends together to talk that's the only time you find peace. It's happened everywhere, from Lebanon to South Africa to Northern Ireland and it's only when you get the radicals together to talk ... they'll never find common ground but if the populace gets tired enough of the war it will force the radical ends to talk and once the radical ends talk you then have peace. There is no military solution.

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