Searching streets, tension and confusion
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- On the second day of the ground battle for this insurgent stronghold, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle commanded by Lieutenant Eric Gregory whisked its crew of infantrymen to a house where they were to set up an observation post.
It seemed that a young man had recently been living there. The family's possessions and a woman's clothes were strewn across the floor, but a T-shirt and jeans were freshly hung to dry in the window. A telephone sat on the floor next to an address book.
The team kept watch over the empty streets as air strikes nearby sent clouds of smoke into the sky. Marines in Humvees went door to door checking nearby houses.
It got so calm that some of the soldiers lay down on the family couches to sleep for the first time in 30 hours.
Suddenly a barrage of machine-gun fire erupted. Bullets clanked against the metal-paneled walls of the house.
"It's the IIF!" a soldier shouted, using the call sign for the Iraqi Intervention Forces, who were supposed to fight alongside the Americans. "They're shooting at us."
The night before, the soldiers had waited hours for the Iraqi Intervention Forces to join them and take the lead in searching a school and a mosque, tasks assigned to Iraqi troops for political reasons. The Iraqi buses could not navigate the insurgents' concrete barriers, which the American tanks had easily avoided or run over. So the Iraqis had crossed into the city on foot.
These Iraqi soldiers were fleeing small arms fire from insurgents that was strafing both sides of the road as they approached.
Sergeant Richard Harkleroad waved his unit's flag to signal the Iraqis not to shoot, to no avail.
Finally, the Iraqis drove on, but not before many of the American soldiers took cover. Bullets had smashed the television and shredded a miniature Koran.
Sergeant Sam Kilpatrick, a combat cameraman, swore the Iraqis were looking right at him and the Bradley parked in front of the observation post when they opened fire.
"That crap was deliberate," he said.
It was one more example of long-standing tensions between American forces and Iraqis whom they are training to take over their security role.
US forces often complain that the Iraqis are incompetent or allied with insurgents.
In Fallujah, winning the peace for the US and Iraqi governments will depend on whether Iraqi forces can quickly take and keep control.
"You train them, you give them weapons. Maybe their heart was never really in it. Maybe they had ulterior motives," Kilpatrick said.
The Bradley commanded by Gregory had labored through the first night of the assault, lurching through dark city streets as the radio crackled warnings of small arms fire or rocket-propelled grenades.
The Bradley was part of an armored unit from the First Infantry Division, which spearheaded the advance into the Hay-al-Askari section of northeast Fallujah.
Wedged in the back, their cramped bodies aching, the five infantrymen could hear their gunner's bursts of cannonfire and the crack of roadside bombs going off a block away as the armored platoon went after pockets of insurgents. A Boston Globe reporter joined the soldiers in the Bradley.
The men slept through the long silences while they awaited each new task, their heads tipped backward in their heavy helmets. Finally, they rolled north out of Fallujah at dawn for a brief break, 12 hours after they had punched into the city, and were relieved to learn there had been no one killed or wounded in their platoon.
But as a pink sun rose above the clouds over the desert plain where US vehicles were lined up, they also heard about Iraqi casualties they had been unable to see from inside the vehicle that first night.
The platoon of Bradleys and tanks had killed about a dozen Iraqis, said Gregory. At one point, he said that with no other way to maneuver, his driver had to run over a dead body.
Harkleroad didn't want to get too confident, even though the insurgents hadn't mounted the massive resistance they expected.
"His strength comes when the sun rises," he said, referring to the enemy.
The soldiers grabbed Gatorade and muffins and rolled back into Fallujah, penetrating much farther this time, to a hospital near the town center that the United States believes was an insurgent planning center.
As they approached, they heard troops over the radio saying they had taken RPG fire from the hospital.
Then they heard it, half a dozen loud claps in a row.
"Request permission to return fire to the hospital," a voice said over the radio.
The hatch opened and the team dashed to a house. Inside, windows were smashed. A thick layer of dust lay over the kitchen. A jar of blue plastic roses stood atop the refrigerator.
There were wedding photos of a mustachioed man and his bride, posters of the mosque in Mecca, and a child's notebook titled "I love my school."
Had the family fled insurgents, or US bombs? The soldiers had little time to wonder.
They popped a smoke grenade to cover their tracks as they climbed a flight of outdoor steps to the roof of the house, just across an empty square from the hospital.
Tank crews fired heavy machine guns at the Al-Janabi Hospital, and 120-mm tank rounds slammed into an adjacent house, the blasts shaking the windows of the house under the soldiers' feet.
But as soon as it began, another unit took their place and the platoon's part in the battle was over. They moved on to another house, where they encountered the Iraqi forces' gunfire.
As the sun set behind the smoke from the American bombardment, the team was keeping an eye on an insurgent sniper down an alley from the house. Shots were being fired at a Marine vehicle trying to clear cement barriers from the road, and the platoon's tanks headed out to a new fight.
"My money's on the tanks," said Harkleroad.
