House to House

Tactical doctrine stresses that urban combat operations are conducted only when required and that built-up areas are isolated and bypassed rather than risking a costly, time-consuming operation in this difficult environment. Adherence to these precepts, though valid, is becoming increasingly difficult as urban sprawl changes the face of the battlefield. 

- FM 90-10, Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain (MOUT)



Staff Sergeant David Bellavia’s memoir brackets his participation in the Second Battle of Fallujah as part of A 2/2, First Infantry Division (“The Big Red One”). Operation Al-Fajr would prove to be the most intense urban combat Americans had experienced for a couple wars (The Delta/Rangers ill-fated mission in Mogadishu occurred as part of a “peacekeeping” operation between Gulf Wars One and Two). It was also a relatively unique battle, in that the opposing force was entirely made up of insurgents. And an estimated 70-90% of the city’s civilian population had evacuated beforehand, reducing the risk of collateral damage.

Bellavia was a squad leader in the mechanized infantry. Most of the time his platoon enjoyed the immediate support of the Bradleys they rode in on. Occasionally an Abrams lent a helping hand. At no point in this narrative did commanders on the ground call in close air support once inside the city. Only once did they call in indirect fire.

With co-author John R. Bruning, Bellavia tells his story in an easy-to-read manner. He doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrific mutilation, explosive diarrhea, or other minutia of combat that reinforce (for the umpteenth time) Sherman’s prognosis that war is hell. Both Bellavia and another soldier suffer wounds to the family jewels—one by improvised shrapnel; one by the teeth of an insurgent during a hand-to hand fight to the death.

That encounter, by the way, was the climax of an almost single-handed house-clearing action during Operation Phantom Fury, for which the author was awarded the Silver Star. For Bellavia this John Wayning was not only necessary to eliminate a threat to his platoon; it was also a form of redemption. This was his second foray into that house. The first time he froze up and failed to finish off the insurgents under the stairs who made entering the house a suicidal proposition.

Perhaps this portion of Bellavia’s story is symbolic of the war itself: Gulf War Two took place, according to some pundits, because Bush’s daddy didn’t finish the job when he had the chance during Gulf War One.

Clearing this one house takes up a few chapters in the book and is a white-knuckled read. The author greased four insurgents during this action, and the last one turned out to be a regular Rasputin. Bellavia’s attempts to kill him devolved into the ridiculous. Reading it was even more uncomfortable than watching the prolonged death of the KGB agent in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain.

Even with virtually no civilians to worry about, there were plenty of other obstacles. Like insurgents wearing American battle dress while humping car batteries through the streets, ready to touch off entire city blocks, wired to blow, when the coalition forces moved in. Entire buildings had been turned into bombs in a city that was essentially one huge, well-prepared ambush.

Then there were the Marines. After causing a logjam during the initial assault by using the breach point assigned to Bellavia’s battalion (2nd of the 2nd), then falling behind in the advance to Highway Ten, exposing 2/2’s right flank, they finally catch up to engage in some friendly fire. At one point they call in illumination that perfectly silhouettes Bellavia’s unit as they prepare to clear a house, then open fire on them.

These kinds of SNAFUs are not uncommon during an engagement, but most marines will insist it’s always Army dogs who commit them. I once had a marine brag to me about how his unit allegedly confiscated the weapons and ammo of some 10th Mountain grunts. The reason? Somebody in the 10th locked-and-loaded during a “firefight” in Haiti while still behind the forward lines. Sounds rather disproportionate, considering events like the one Bellavia described. I don’t know how much, if any, of this is true, but it pretty well sums up how history gets written when marines are involved.

Bellavia’s buddy, Fitts, launches into an angry monologue about Marine Corps historic revisionism at one point, and how you’d never even know the US Army fought in the Pacific campaign from reading popular history. His grandfather, wounded on Okinawa, makes the subject somewhat personal for him. Wherever Fitts is now, I hope he has no Internet access, because his prophesy was fulfilled: the Marines alone took Fallujah, according to superficial Google research. You have to dig a bit deeper to find the whole truth, which most people probably won’t do.

Nonetheless, the author is careful not to rag on Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children (unlike when the boot is on the other foot), and gives credit where it’s due. He commends them for their devastating unity of fire, for instance. (And having been on the receiving end of it, I suppose he is as much an expert on this as any other living soul.)

Just as Bellavia wasn’t afraid to share grotesque or embarrassing episodes, neither does he shy away from waxing sentimental from time to time. Some of these detours into his own psychology I could have done without, but one toward the end struck a chord with me. He describes how, after leaving the military, he goes back to the Sandbox as a journalist and catches up with his old unit, and Fitts, in Kuwait. There he engages in a bull session.

“…For one brief moment I felt like I was one of them again. He and I talked about the old days. Of course, he had to show everyone his scars from April 9. But as we reminisced, I realized I’d probably never see Fitts again. He’s made the Army his home and career. 

“It was a bittersweet thought. There are never happy endings in the Army. There is no closure, not with friends or enemies.”

In reflections like this one, I’m right there with Bellavia. I suspect a lot of us are, regardless of what branch we served in.

For those who didn’t fight in the Second Battle of Fallujah but have an interest in the subject, a good place to start might be at grunt’s eye view, with this book.



This might be my last review of books in the military/war spectrum for a while here on the Two-Fisted Blog. From here on out, I'll be diverting most such reviews to Hot Extract, where myself and some other vets have already begun posting articles.

The Infantry, the Infantry, With the Dirt Behind the Ears...

You'll never stop the infantry in a hundred million years...

At any given time, I'm in the process of reading 5-20 different books.

Simultaneously.

Now granted, some of them may take years to finish; some of them months; some of them weeks (the ones I need to write reviews for are priority). Well, here's one of them. I bought House to House by David Bellavia for my Kindle a while back, for no particular reason other than I was curious about conventional combat in Gulf War II and this memoir about the battle for Fallujah seemed like it might enlighten me. (Obviously I bought it when I wasn't swamped, like now.)

It sat on my cyber-shelf for quite a while, collecting dust, but then I began working on the sequel to Hell and Gone. The sequel has some house-clearing action, and my own limited MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) experience is probably as outdated as the technology... and, well, heck, everything else my creaky old civilian self remembers. Now where can I find some reference material on this subject? Why, right here in my Kindle! Sha-zam!

Just in case I've fooled some of you into thinking I have half a brain, let me confess that I began my military service as an E-1 in the Airborne Infantry. I volunteered for it. In fact, once my ASVAB results came back, the recruiter told me I could choose any MOS the Army had--you know, all those nifty ones in the commercials that have plenty of overlap into civilian occupations.

Nope. Not me. I wanted a dead-end slot in the one MOS with absolutely no civilian application: Grunt.

Strip away all the extra alphanumeric characters from my MOS and what I am is an old 11B. Eleven-Bush. Eleven-Bulletstopper. I was trained to get there by parachute, but once I got there, I was a ground-pounder. Line doggie. Light infantry, baby. Hoo-wah! Woof, woof! Ui, ui, ui, aaaaah-uhhhrrrrr! We like it, we love it, we want more of it, blood makes the grass grow greener!

Ahem. Yeah, okay, I was stupid. If I had the youth and health (and inclination) to join the military today, I guarantee I'd do everything different.

But ya know what? I'm kinda' proud I did what I did, too. And so, while reading the prologue of Bellavia's book, he struck a chord with me. He was a leg, and mech, at that; but I couldn't help but feel some cross-generational solidarity with him when I read this:

Dust cakes our faces, invades our sinuses, and stings our eyes. The heat bakes the moisture from us with utter relentlessness. Our body temperatures hover at a hundred and three. Our ears ring. On the edge of heat exhaustion, we get dizzy as our stomachs heave. 

We have the spastic shits, with stabs of pain as our guts liquefy thanks to the menagerie of local bacteria. Inside our base's filthy outhouses, swarms of flies crawl over us. Without ventilation, those outhouses are furnaces, pungent with the acrid smell of well-cooked urine.

All this, and we get shot at, too.

Welcome to the infantry. This is our day, our job. It sucks, and we hate it, but we endure for two reasons. First, there is nobility and purpose in our lives. We are America's warrior class. We protect; we avenge. Second, every moment in the infantry is a test. If we measure up to the worst days, such as this one, it proves we stand a breed apart from all other men.

Where we work, there are no cubicles. There are no break rooms. Ties are foreign objects; we commute in armored fighting vehicles.

Our workplace is not some sterile office or humming factory. It is a stretch of desolate highway in a vast and empty land. A guard tower burns in the background. Shattered bodies litter the ground around us. Vacant corpse eyes, bulging and horror-struck, stare back at us.

The stench of burned flesh is thick in our nostrils. This was once an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) checkpoint, designed to regulate traffic in and out of Muqdadiyah, one of the key cities in the Diyala Province. Thanks to a surprise attack launched earlier in the morning, it is nothing more than a funeral pyre. We arrived too late to help, and our earnest but untrained allies died horribly as the insurgents swept over them. One Iraqi soldier took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). All that's left of him are his boots and soggy piles of bloody meat splattered around the guard tower.

This is our workplace. We began to acclimate to such horrors right after arriving in the country. 

While on our second patrol in Iraq, a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me. 

As for the rest of the book, I'll see how it shapes up. And for all you other grunts who might find this blog post, young and old, Army or Marines, Airborne or Air-Assault, straight leg or mechanized, Gulf War II, Gulf War I, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Korea...and everything in between, I salute you as a brother.

You can take a man out of the infantry, but it's hard to take the infantry out of the man.