Muhammad, a schoolteacher in Fallujah.
A few days after the Chinook helicopter was shot down, an American soldier was killed near the city by an IED. In response, aircraft dropped thousand-pound bombs on suspected ambush sites and houses with arms caches. When mortar rounds were fired at 82nd positions, counterbattery radars traced the arc of the rounds to their point of origin, and 155mm howitzers fired in response. The fighting escalated through the fall.
“I expect to get attacked every day—every single day,” Drinkwine said. “That may come in the form of a mortar attack, a drive-by shooting at the mayor’s office, a vehicle ambush, or a combination of all three.”
MajGen Swannack approved a get-tough approach, called Operation Iron Hammer, a series of sweeps for weapons caches and raids to seize insurgent leaders. “This is war,” he said. “I am going to use a sledgehammer to crush a walnut.”
It was a war the 82nd was fighting alone. Drinkwine’s nine-hundred-man battalion was fighting a guerrilla war in a city containing 43,000 potential insurgents. With Sheikh Jamal in jail, the imam who filled the void with the most inflammatory sermons was Abdullah Al Janabi, a saturnine, pinched-faced man in his early fifties. Ra’ad warned Drinkwine that Janabi was a fundamentalist who had fled arrest under Saddam; he was a nervous man, difficult to approach. When Drinkwine asked him to tone things down, Janabi launched into a diatribe about infidels, Shiites, and apostates, meaning anyone who cooperated with the Americans. He seemed to be daring Drinkwine to arrest him and provoke a riot.
Drinkwine drove back to his base by the artificial lake east of the city and wrote Janabi a letter, warning that he would be arrested if he continued with seditious sermons. Knowing his mosque near the Government Center was probably bugged and his apprehension imminent, Janabi temporarily left the city.
The paratroopers didn’t know who supported them in the city. During the day they patrolled the outer highways and drove through town in shows of force, searching vehicles at random. At night they conducted raids. It was their favorite tactic: they would drive with night-vision goggles, roar down a street in the pitch black with the lights out, scale a courtyard wall, then rush through the front door and up the steps into the sleeping quarters; sometimes a masked informer would point someone out or shake his head no.
Specialist Dudin said that the people called them the bou-bous . “In the States we say watch out for the boogeyman,” Dudin said. “In Iraq a mother will say to her kids, ‘Stop doing that, or the bou-bou monster will get you.’ We were the bou-bous.”
In early November, the raid that was most satisfying to the paratroopers occurred when they entered a house and found nothing incriminating. The occupants, however, pointed to a house across the street. Rushing over, the soldiers found a man crouched over a computer monitor in his downstairs study. Open on the screen was a sketch of a sophisticated IED. They arrested Brigadier General Al Mahadaai, Ph.D., aka the Rocket Man, the top trainer and supplier of the IED teams and the man believed responsible for Sgt Johnson’s death.
The city elders protested vehemently against the increased use of force, the raids, and the bursts of gunfire whenever an IED exploded, arguing that it was driving the people to the side of the insurgents. MajGen Swannack did release several women, who were being held because they were relatives of insurgents. But that was one of his few concessions. The get-tough policy seemed to be showing results. By mid-November attacks by explosive devices had decreased from two to one per day.
A month later the relentless American campaign to hunt down the top Baathists reached its zenith when television networks broadcast the pictures of a disheveled Saddam Hussein with his mouth open, meekly submitting to a medical exam by his American
A few days after the Chinook helicopter was shot down, an American soldier was killed near the city by an IED. In response, aircraft dropped thousand-pound bombs on suspected ambush sites and houses with arms caches. When mortar rounds were fired at 82nd positions, counterbattery radars traced the arc of the rounds to their point of origin, and 155mm howitzers fired in response. The fighting escalated through the fall.
“I expect to get attacked every day—every single day,” Drinkwine said. “That may come in the form of a mortar attack, a drive-by shooting at the mayor’s office, a vehicle ambush, or a combination of all three.”
MajGen Swannack approved a get-tough approach, called Operation Iron Hammer, a series of sweeps for weapons caches and raids to seize insurgent leaders. “This is war,” he said. “I am going to use a sledgehammer to crush a walnut.”
It was a war the 82nd was fighting alone. Drinkwine’s nine-hundred-man battalion was fighting a guerrilla war in a city containing 43,000 potential insurgents. With Sheikh Jamal in jail, the imam who filled the void with the most inflammatory sermons was Abdullah Al Janabi, a saturnine, pinched-faced man in his early fifties. Ra’ad warned Drinkwine that Janabi was a fundamentalist who had fled arrest under Saddam; he was a nervous man, difficult to approach. When Drinkwine asked him to tone things down, Janabi launched into a diatribe about infidels, Shiites, and apostates, meaning anyone who cooperated with the Americans. He seemed to be daring Drinkwine to arrest him and provoke a riot.
Drinkwine drove back to his base by the artificial lake east of the city and wrote Janabi a letter, warning that he would be arrested if he continued with seditious sermons. Knowing his mosque near the Government Center was probably bugged and his apprehension imminent, Janabi temporarily left the city.
The paratroopers didn’t know who supported them in the city. During the day they patrolled the outer highways and drove through town in shows of force, searching vehicles at random. At night they conducted raids. It was their favorite tactic: they would drive with night-vision goggles, roar down a street in the pitch black with the lights out, scale a courtyard wall, then rush through the front door and up the steps into the sleeping quarters; sometimes a masked informer would point someone out or shake his head no.
Specialist Dudin said that the people called them the bou-bous . “In the States we say watch out for the boogeyman,” Dudin said. “In Iraq a mother will say to her kids, ‘Stop doing that, or the bou-bou monster will get you.’ We were the bou-bous.”
In early November, the raid that was most satisfying to the paratroopers occurred when they entered a house and found nothing incriminating. The occupants, however, pointed to a house across the street. Rushing over, the soldiers found a man crouched over a computer monitor in his downstairs study. Open on the screen was a sketch of a sophisticated IED. They arrested Brigadier General Al Mahadaai, Ph.D., aka the Rocket Man, the top trainer and supplier of the IED teams and the man believed responsible for Sgt Johnson’s death.
The city elders protested vehemently against the increased use of force, the raids, and the bursts of gunfire whenever an IED exploded, arguing that it was driving the people to the side of the insurgents. MajGen Swannack did release several women, who were being held because they were relatives of insurgents. But that was one of his few concessions. The get-tough policy seemed to be showing results. By mid-November attacks by explosive devices had decreased from two to one per day.
A month later the relentless American campaign to hunt down the top Baathists reached its zenith when television networks broadcast the pictures of a disheveled Saddam Hussein with his mouth open, meekly submitting to a medical exam by his American
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