In hidden spots, a tenacious foe

FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Staff Sergeant Jason Laser's unit was letting loose with everything it had against a single rebel holed up in a house in the southern part of this city. Tanks were firing shells, and US soldiers were strafing the building with machine-gun fire to get at the insurgent.

"He shot an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] down the stairs at us. We threw everything we had at this guy, and he was still coming at us," Laser recalled yesterday, a few hours after the clash. Finally, an Army bulldozer knocked the house down. But the fighter still managed to run away.

It was another firefight on the fourth day of the American assault against the rebel stronghold, and the insurgents were putting up their most tenacious resistance as US and Iraqi forces pursued them through a bleak landscape of bombed-out cinder block factories and houses reminiscent of the movie "Blade Runner."

Laser was being treated at a field hospital on the outskirts of Fallujah after a bullet struck him in the chest -- hitting the bulletproof Kevlar plate in his flak jacket. He said he was hit as his team assaulted another house shortly after the failed attempt to catch the lone fighter.

At the second site, about eight to 10 fighters were resisting the Americans, and one of them, wearing a bandanna and a short beard, fired the shot that hit Laser. The bullet knocked him down, and he was nicked on the neck and finger, but not seriously wounded.

Laser said he saw the bodies of three insurgents during his patrol.

Another armored platoon from the Army's First Infantry Division killed four rebels during the day's skirmishes. Its Bradley Fighting Vehicle moved from assignment to assignment, clearing out insurgents hiding in the wrecked buildings.

"Do they think they're going to accomplish something, or are they just sitting in these positions waiting to die?" wondered Specialist Todd Taylor.

A Globe reporter traveling with the platoon saw the eerie landscape through a six-inch slit in a Bradley's hull. It was a city in which almost nothing was moving and not a soul ventured out onto the streets. At one point, a dog wandered through the rubble.

As insurgents were located, they were hit with tank fire, artillery rounds, and airstrikes.

In one particularly ferocious attack yesterday, a group of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles opened fire simultaneously against a suspected target in a single overwhelming barrage, crumpling a building.

There was no indication how long Operation Dawn, as the operation in Fallujah is known, would go on. The US armored vehicles were able to move relatively freely up and down the major streets and moved south of Highway 10, which bisects the city east to west. The US forces entered Fallujah on Monday from the west and northeast, and their initial operations were north of the highway.

There were reports that the insurgents had held some civilians against their will.

At the medical station, Major Lisa DeWitt, a doctor, said Iraqis who had been rounded up by the Americans told of being held and tortured by Iraqi resistance fighters. DeWitt said she believed the Iraqis' accounts in part because of the nature of their injuries.

The Bradley and its squad of infantrymen took part in operations that included checking out shops behind corrugated doors, and many contained abandoned weapons left by insurgents who had hidden there.

One wall was covered with graffiti supporting Hamas, the anti-Israeli Palestinian group.

Gunfire from the US patrols rattled constantly. Much of it took the form of reconnaissance, to see whether the firing would roust rebels hiding in the area -- or set off any booby traps laid by the insurgents.

The US forces felt more free to fire in this manner in the industrial areas of the city, but as they moved into residential districts they were ordered to restrain their fire.

Some of the rebel tactics were ingenious. At one site, rebels had set up a machine gun position apparently designed to draw attention away from another fighting position that could have unleashed deadly fire. But both were deserted when the Bradley arrived.