A Tale of the US Military (Chapter 3)
Your Conscience
Fallujah GI - 'I Got My Kills...I Just Love My Job'
By Toby Harnden in Fallujah
The Telegraph - UK
11-11-2004
'I got my kills ... I just love my job'
Observations of American soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division taskforce
avenging their fallen comrades as battle begins
After seven months in Iraq's Sunni triangle, for many American soldiers
the opportunity to avenge dead friends by taking a life was a moment of
sheer exhilaration.
As they approached their "holding position", from where hours later they
would advance into the city, they picked off insurgents on the rooftops
and in windows.
"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering
through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS)
mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees.
"Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres.
I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons."
Capt Kirk Mayfield, commander of the Phantoms, called for fire from his
task force's mortar team.
But Sgt Anyett didn't want to wait.
"Dude, give me the sniper rifle.
I can take them out -
I'm from Alabama."
Two minutes tick by. "They're moving deep," shouted Sgt Anyett with
disappointment.
A dozen loud booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down
on the co-ordinates the sergeant had given.
"Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing. Building's gone.
I got my kills,
I'm coming down.
I just love my job."
Phantom Troop had rolled out of Camp Fallujah, the main US military
base, shortly before 4am.
All morning they took fire from the Al-Askari district in Fallujah's
north-east, their target for the invasion proper.
The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept
along rooftops and poked their heads out of windows.
Even when they were more than a mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop
had their eyes on them.
Lt Jack Farley, a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes
with the Phantoms.
"You guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said.
"It's like a video game.
We've taken small arms fire here all day.
It just sounds like popcorn going off."
Another marine stepped forward and began to fire an M4 rifle at the
city. "He's a reservist for the San Diego police.
He wants a piece of the action, too".
A Phantom Abrams tank moved up the road running along the high ground.
Its barrel, stencilled with the words "Ali Baba under 3 Thieves"
swivelled towards the city and then fired a 120mm round at a house where
two men with AK-47s had been pinpointed.
"Ain't nobody moving now," shouted a soldier as the dust cleared.
"He rocked that guy's world."
One of Phantom's sniper teams laid down fire into the city with a
Barrett .50 calibre rifle and a Remington 700.
A suspected truck bomb was riddled with bullets, the crack of the
Barrett echoing through the mainly deserted section of the city.
The insurgents fired 60mm mortars back, one of them wounding a soldier.
There were 25mm rounds from Phantom's Bradley fighting vehicles,
barrages from Paladin howitzers back at Camp Fallujah and bursts of fire
from .50 calibre machineguns.
One by one, the howitzers used by the insurgents were destroyed.
"Everybody's curious," grinned Sgt Anyett as he waited for a sniper with
a Russian-made Dragonov to show his face one last, fatal time. A bullet
zinged by.
Dusk fell and 7pm, "A hour", the appointed hour to move into the city,
approached.
The soldiers of Phantom all reflected.
"Given the choice, I would never have wanted to fire a gun," said Cpl
Chris Merrell, 21, manning a machine gun mounted on a Humvee.
"But it didn't work out that way. I'd like a thousand boring missions
rather than one interesting one."
On his wrist was a black bracelet bearing the name of a sergeant from
Phantom Troop. "This is a buddy of mine that died," he said. "Pretty
much everyone in the unit has one."
One fear playing on the mind of the task force was that of "friendly
fire", also kn own as "blue on blue".
"Any urban fight is confusing," Lt Col Newell, the force's commander,
told his troops before the battle. "The biggest threat out there is not
them, but us."
His officers said that the plan to invade Fallujah involved months of
detailed planning and elaborate "feints" designed to draw the insurgents
out into the open
and fool them into thinking the offensive would come from another side
of the city.
"They're probably thinking that we'll come in from the east," said Capt
Natalie Friel, an intelligence officer with task force, before the
battle. But the actual plan involves penetrating the city from the north
and sweeping south.
"I don't think they know what's coming. They have no idea of the
magnitude," she said.
"But their defences are pretty circular. They're prepared for any kind
of direction. They've got strong points on all four corners of the
city."
The aim was to push the insurgents south, killing as many as possible,
before swinging west. They would then be driven into the Euphrates.
ï Tony Blair's problems over Iraq deepened still further last night when
one of his most respected former advisers suggested the entire conflict
had been illegal.
Sir Stephen Wall, who was head of the European Secretariat in the
Cabinet Office, said:
"We allowed our judgment of the dire consequences of inaction to allow
us to depart from the rule of law."
Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited
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