In November 2004 the Times journalist James Hider rode with US troops into the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. In this excerpt from his new book The Spiders of Allah he describes the ferocity of the fighting, a close encounter with an Iraqi militant and how he was hit by shrapnel
US Marines as they battled for control in Jolan. There were detonations coming from every direction and an almost constant thud of machinegun fire
There had been a tempest of Shakespearean proportions the night the Seventh Cavalry rumbled out of Camp Fallujah to take up their attack position in the quarry outside town. Lightning flashes skittered over the huge column of metal like a terrible premonition, before darkness once again enveloped the desert, heightening the senses to the ominous growl of tanks on the move. It was unlikely that anyone in Fallujah heard it though. The thunder in the sky was matched by the din of shells falling on the city as American artillery and fighter-bombers softened up the target. By dawn the quarry had become a vast parking lot quaking with lines of war machines, many of them still bearing scars from the battle of Najaf that summer. Stencilled on the barrels of the tanks were the names the crews had given them: Captain Chaos, Convicted Killer and Casa de Muerte.
Inside the quarry pit Lieutenant-Colonel Rainey had set up his khaki headquarters tent in a foot of dust that constantly settled on the expensive military computer gadgetry.
As zero hour approached that night the colonel gathered his officers and NCOs and delivered a brief pep talk. “No matter what you think about the Iraqi war or the Iraqi Government, this fight is one hundred per cent about terrorists, terrorists who want to come to your home and kill you,” he said. His rather ambiguous wording made me wonder exactly how he felt about this war that was costing so much and seemed to be going nowhere. It wasn’t exactly Henry V at Agincourt, but it carried the eternal message for soldiers about to go in to the fight – the enemy is evil and must be annihilated. The fact that many of those men waiting for combat in Fallujah were confused, angry tribesmen who had no idea where Fort Hood might be was neither here nor there at this point . . .We were finally in Fallujah. Our eyes were glued to the eerie green screen in the back of the Bradley that showed the vehicle commander and the gunner’s viewpoints. It was the ultimate in reality television – the smashed streets and explosions we saw on the luminous screen were right outside, the image about to collide with us at any moment. The Bradleys and tanks proceeded at a snail’s pace, shooting mounds of earth or debris to detonate any possible booby traps. As the column fanned out into town we could see the road ahead clearly, and gritted our teeth every time the vehicle rolled over to a mound that could have been a vast landmine . . . “There were too many IEDS [improvised explosive devices] to count,” Rainey told me later when we had time to catch up with him. Staring at the screen, however, we could make out nothing in the shifting light and dark greens. Then, around two o’clock in the morning, the column ground to a halt in a broad street lined by houses with high garden walls. There we idled for about 20 minutes, as far as I could tell, waiting for the disparate elements of our expeditionary force to regroup. Even in a 32-tonne fighting vehicle we started to feel vulnerable sitting in a city full of guerrillas who were intent on killing whoever dared to enter their stronghold.
We saw a man appear in the gateway of a walled yard, a pair of binoculars held up. We were at the tail end of the column and he was scanning the armoured vehicles ahead of us. The gunner had his sights trained on him but showed remarkable restraint in not opening fire, although the man was clearly picking a target. The Iraqi man ducked back inside the garden only to reemerge a few seconds later, the binoculars still in front of his face. Evidently he had not seen us in the dark and must have thought that the next vehicle in the column, which was some way ahead of us, was the tail of the advance. Once again he disappeared into the yard. The next time he reappeared he had a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder. He pointed it at the vehicle ahead. Perhaps our anxious driver revved the engine at that moment but the rocket man suddenly realised we were there, staring at him. Instantly, he swung the RPG round to face us. In the back of the Bradley, three journalists found themselves frozen, staring at the barrel of the rocket launcher.
“Kill him!” someone shouted. It may have been me, I don’t remember. Suddenly we were all shouting, “Shoot!” “Get him!” “What the f***. . .”
The Iraqi man wavered, perhaps overawed by the sheer surprise of finding a Bradley so close to him. He seemed about to duck back into his garden when the gunner fired the 25mm cannon. I was so transfixed by watching the Iraqi that I barely registered the noise. I just noticed the recoil of dust into the bowels of the Bradley where we sat, still staring at the screen. The man disappeared as the round exploded on the gatepost next to him. I had seen someone killed but all I could feel was an immense relief. So much for journalistic objectivity.
W hen morning finally came it shed a pale grey light over the blanched badlands that stretched north past the captured railway station. From the interior of the embattled city the low chug of machinegun fire and occasional whump of an explosion carried across the metallic sky. Cobra helicopters buzzed in, unleashing Hellfire missiles into unseen guerrilla positions. A convoy of marines, exhausted from the night fight around the railway depot, rolled out of the desert in open-backed Humvees and into the fray, dehydrated but excited to be alive and in a battle. I looked at their drawn young faces, many of them covered by blast goggles and khaki scarves against the night chill, while they rolled past in long lines to kill or die. As the last of the Marines disappeared hundreds of Iraqi government troops marched out of the desert behind them, out of step and in ill-fitting uniforms cast off by some other US client state. Their NCOs shouted at stragglers and the American soldiers I stood smoking with sniggered at the hapless jundis as they ran for cover and started firing potshots as soon as they heard gunfire . . .
The dawn lull did not last long. Major Tim Karcher, the giant, shaven-headed second-in-command who looked like Superman with alopecia, told us to get back in his Bradley. The column was moving out again to a hot spot in the heart of Jolan. The 2/7 [Second Battalion 7th Cavalry Regiment] had just taken control of a schoolhouse that the Mujahidin had barricaded and probably intended to use as a field headquarters. The surprise thrust of the army had forced them to abandon it but there was still heavy fighting. We rumbled down the central road of Jolan. After just one night of fighting it had already been transformed from Taleban Main Street into a US military highway, clogged with massive armoured vehicles and filled with the suffocating, sickly-sweet stench of fuel oil that they belched out in black clouds.
When the Bradley stopped and the rear hatch opened we jumped into the middle of a major firefight. There were detonations coming from every direction and an almost constant thud of machinegun fire. I could see no one in the street of concrete-stucco houses. Karcher led us at a doubled-up trot into the schoolhouse. The classrooms had been cleared and some of the desks piled up as barricades. We ran through a yard, then down a corridor before emerging into a small square dominated by a metal water tower. There was a cluster of Bradleys parked in the shade of the water tower, their cannon pointed outwards and looking for all the world like a circled wagon train. In their middle I found Rainey and his officers discussing the situation as their dismounted soldiers scanned the streets beyond the square. They seemed pleased with their progress and were making plans to set up their own forward base in the abandoned guerrilla position when suddenly I felt a burning sensation in my left arm.
I had a fleeting impression that someone had snuck up behind and whacked me over the arm with a red-hot poker, upon which I leapt into the middle of the commander’s huddle yelping, “S*** s*** s***!” When I put my right hand up to the left bicep I felt blood squirting out, the way milk squirts from a punctured carton.
“I’m hit, I’m hit,” I shouted to no one in particular, amazed by the realisation that I had actually been wounded. It did not hurt much beyond the searing burn but the physical shock had me shaking all over, a wave of nausea engulfing my entire body. I had never imagined that my limbs could feel sick, but that was how it felt.
A group of soldiers, aided by my colleague Matt McAllester, sat me down and someone shouted for the medic. Luckily there was one standing right next to me and he quickly applied a combat dressing to the bloody wound. Shaking and trying not to throw up as they stabbed an IV drip in my other forearm, I asked the medic if the shrapnel had cut the brachial artery. If so, I was in deep trouble.
“I dunno, I didn’t get to look real good,” he drawled. His bedside manner did not do much to reassure me but then I was not in a bed or anywhere near a hospital. As a civilian wounded in the middle of the battle, you somehow feel that you should be able to call time-out while you are evacuated. Unfortunately you cannot. Karcher came over and gallantly offered to take me in his Bradley to the first-aid station back at the quarry. I still had to run back to the vehicle however. The sounds of battle echoed all around as the medic trotted next to me, holding the IV bag.
I t was a jog from hell: my whole body trembled; every time I stumbled on broken bricks or skidded on smashed glass the IV needle in my arm threatened to rip itself free. The major drove me out of the city and back to the quarry, where the regiment’s bored medics were glad to have a Limey reporter to practise on. They cut out the pea-sized piece of shrapnel that was poking through my upper bicep, having drilled its way clean through my arm. They put it in a ziplock bag for me to keep as a souvenir. My trousers were streaked with blood and looked as though I had poured a pot of coffee down my leg. A friendly female medic took pity on me and gave me her spare pair of combat fatigues; she told me if I was American I would have just won a Purple Heart. They joked that the unit would send me one, despite me being British.
I was patched up and taken back in a Humvee ambulance to the Combat Support Hospital – Cash – in Camp Fallujah. An X-ray showed that the shrapnel, most likely a shard of rocket-propelled grenade, had missed the bone, arteries and elbow joint. I was very lucky: I would be left only with two very small scars, an entry and an exit wound, like permanent mosquito bites.
Inside the quarry pit Lieutenant-Colonel Rainey had set up his khaki headquarters tent in a foot of dust that constantly settled on the expensive military computer gadgetry.
As zero hour approached that night the colonel gathered his officers and NCOs and delivered a brief pep talk. “No matter what you think about the Iraqi war or the Iraqi Government, this fight is one hundred per cent about terrorists, terrorists who want to come to your home and kill you,” he said. His rather ambiguous wording made me wonder exactly how he felt about this war that was costing so much and seemed to be going nowhere. It wasn’t exactly Henry V at Agincourt, but it carried the eternal message for soldiers about to go in to the fight – the enemy is evil and must be annihilated. The fact that many of those men waiting for combat in Fallujah were confused, angry tribesmen who had no idea where Fort Hood might be was neither here nor there at this point . . .We were finally in Fallujah. Our eyes were glued to the eerie green screen in the back of the Bradley that showed the vehicle commander and the gunner’s viewpoints. It was the ultimate in reality television – the smashed streets and explosions we saw on the luminous screen were right outside, the image about to collide with us at any moment. The Bradleys and tanks proceeded at a snail’s pace, shooting mounds of earth or debris to detonate any possible booby traps. As the column fanned out into town we could see the road ahead clearly, and gritted our teeth every time the vehicle rolled over to a mound that could have been a vast landmine . . . “There were too many IEDS [improvised explosive devices] to count,” Rainey told me later when we had time to catch up with him. Staring at the screen, however, we could make out nothing in the shifting light and dark greens. Then, around two o’clock in the morning, the column ground to a halt in a broad street lined by houses with high garden walls. There we idled for about 20 minutes, as far as I could tell, waiting for the disparate elements of our expeditionary force to regroup. Even in a 32-tonne fighting vehicle we started to feel vulnerable sitting in a city full of guerrillas who were intent on killing whoever dared to enter their stronghold.
We saw a man appear in the gateway of a walled yard, a pair of binoculars held up. We were at the tail end of the column and he was scanning the armoured vehicles ahead of us. The gunner had his sights trained on him but showed remarkable restraint in not opening fire, although the man was clearly picking a target. The Iraqi man ducked back inside the garden only to reemerge a few seconds later, the binoculars still in front of his face. Evidently he had not seen us in the dark and must have thought that the next vehicle in the column, which was some way ahead of us, was the tail of the advance. Once again he disappeared into the yard. The next time he reappeared he had a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder. He pointed it at the vehicle ahead. Perhaps our anxious driver revved the engine at that moment but the rocket man suddenly realised we were there, staring at him. Instantly, he swung the RPG round to face us. In the back of the Bradley, three journalists found themselves frozen, staring at the barrel of the rocket launcher.
“Kill him!” someone shouted. It may have been me, I don’t remember. Suddenly we were all shouting, “Shoot!” “Get him!” “What the f***. . .”
The Iraqi man wavered, perhaps overawed by the sheer surprise of finding a Bradley so close to him. He seemed about to duck back into his garden when the gunner fired the 25mm cannon. I was so transfixed by watching the Iraqi that I barely registered the noise. I just noticed the recoil of dust into the bowels of the Bradley where we sat, still staring at the screen. The man disappeared as the round exploded on the gatepost next to him. I had seen someone killed but all I could feel was an immense relief. So much for journalistic objectivity.
W hen morning finally came it shed a pale grey light over the blanched badlands that stretched north past the captured railway station. From the interior of the embattled city the low chug of machinegun fire and occasional whump of an explosion carried across the metallic sky. Cobra helicopters buzzed in, unleashing Hellfire missiles into unseen guerrilla positions. A convoy of marines, exhausted from the night fight around the railway depot, rolled out of the desert in open-backed Humvees and into the fray, dehydrated but excited to be alive and in a battle. I looked at their drawn young faces, many of them covered by blast goggles and khaki scarves against the night chill, while they rolled past in long lines to kill or die. As the last of the Marines disappeared hundreds of Iraqi government troops marched out of the desert behind them, out of step and in ill-fitting uniforms cast off by some other US client state. Their NCOs shouted at stragglers and the American soldiers I stood smoking with sniggered at the hapless jundis as they ran for cover and started firing potshots as soon as they heard gunfire . . .
The dawn lull did not last long. Major Tim Karcher, the giant, shaven-headed second-in-command who looked like Superman with alopecia, told us to get back in his Bradley. The column was moving out again to a hot spot in the heart of Jolan. The 2/7 [Second Battalion 7th Cavalry Regiment] had just taken control of a schoolhouse that the Mujahidin had barricaded and probably intended to use as a field headquarters. The surprise thrust of the army had forced them to abandon it but there was still heavy fighting. We rumbled down the central road of Jolan. After just one night of fighting it had already been transformed from Taleban Main Street into a US military highway, clogged with massive armoured vehicles and filled with the suffocating, sickly-sweet stench of fuel oil that they belched out in black clouds.
When the Bradley stopped and the rear hatch opened we jumped into the middle of a major firefight. There were detonations coming from every direction and an almost constant thud of machinegun fire. I could see no one in the street of concrete-stucco houses. Karcher led us at a doubled-up trot into the schoolhouse. The classrooms had been cleared and some of the desks piled up as barricades. We ran through a yard, then down a corridor before emerging into a small square dominated by a metal water tower. There was a cluster of Bradleys parked in the shade of the water tower, their cannon pointed outwards and looking for all the world like a circled wagon train. In their middle I found Rainey and his officers discussing the situation as their dismounted soldiers scanned the streets beyond the square. They seemed pleased with their progress and were making plans to set up their own forward base in the abandoned guerrilla position when suddenly I felt a burning sensation in my left arm.
I had a fleeting impression that someone had snuck up behind and whacked me over the arm with a red-hot poker, upon which I leapt into the middle of the commander’s huddle yelping, “S*** s*** s***!” When I put my right hand up to the left bicep I felt blood squirting out, the way milk squirts from a punctured carton.
“I’m hit, I’m hit,” I shouted to no one in particular, amazed by the realisation that I had actually been wounded. It did not hurt much beyond the searing burn but the physical shock had me shaking all over, a wave of nausea engulfing my entire body. I had never imagined that my limbs could feel sick, but that was how it felt.
A group of soldiers, aided by my colleague Matt McAllester, sat me down and someone shouted for the medic. Luckily there was one standing right next to me and he quickly applied a combat dressing to the bloody wound. Shaking and trying not to throw up as they stabbed an IV drip in my other forearm, I asked the medic if the shrapnel had cut the brachial artery. If so, I was in deep trouble.
“I dunno, I didn’t get to look real good,” he drawled. His bedside manner did not do much to reassure me but then I was not in a bed or anywhere near a hospital. As a civilian wounded in the middle of the battle, you somehow feel that you should be able to call time-out while you are evacuated. Unfortunately you cannot. Karcher came over and gallantly offered to take me in his Bradley to the first-aid station back at the quarry. I still had to run back to the vehicle however. The sounds of battle echoed all around as the medic trotted next to me, holding the IV bag.
I t was a jog from hell: my whole body trembled; every time I stumbled on broken bricks or skidded on smashed glass the IV needle in my arm threatened to rip itself free. The major drove me out of the city and back to the quarry, where the regiment’s bored medics were glad to have a Limey reporter to practise on. They cut out the pea-sized piece of shrapnel that was poking through my upper bicep, having drilled its way clean through my arm. They put it in a ziplock bag for me to keep as a souvenir. My trousers were streaked with blood and looked as though I had poured a pot of coffee down my leg. A friendly female medic took pity on me and gave me her spare pair of combat fatigues; she told me if I was American I would have just won a Purple Heart. They joked that the unit would send me one, despite me being British.
I was patched up and taken back in a Humvee ambulance to the Combat Support Hospital – Cash – in Camp Fallujah. An X-ray showed that the shrapnel, most likely a shard of rocket-propelled grenade, had missed the bone, arteries and elbow joint. I was very lucky: I would be left only with two very small scars, an entry and an exit wound, like permanent mosquito bites.