House to House: A Tale of Modern War Read Online Free PDF Page A

bottom of the pipe. I hear him break the surface on the other side and exhale. Somebody hands him his weapon.
    Sergeant Hall goes next. He doesn’t hesitate, and I’m not surprised. I consider him one of the best soldiers in Alpha Company. He dips under the filth and pops back up on the far side of the pipe. The moonlight betrays Hall’s misery. He’s slick with sewage; the ochre slime drips from his Kevlar. John Ruiz sees his condition but doesn’t flinch. He ducks under the pipe and breaks the surface next to Hall a second later.
    I’m next. I close my eyes and hold my nose. Down into the filth I go, feeling my way under the pipe. Then I’m out the other side. Misa, Sucholas, and Sergeant Charles Knapp follow me.
    We continue along the trench, more concerned about watchdogs than gunfire. Finally, we come to a stretch of palm grove that seems to be free of hajji dogs. We crawl out of the sewage and move through the grove. By now, it is 0300, and the night’s chill has set in. Soaked to the bone, we start to shiver. I almost wish I was back in the shit trench. It was warmer.
    We creep to a barn about 350 meters from Ali’s main compound. The squad sweeps through it, hoping to find somebody to detain, but it’s empty. We maneuver toward the compound. Our job is to get within view of the place, to study its layout and defenses. If possible, battalion wants us to try and flush people from the compound. If they bolt in vehicles, we can call helicopters down to follow them and others will trap them with Bradleys. Taking down these guys on the road while they’re inside their cars will be easier than storming a fortified and defended compound.
    On our bellies, we snake forward, bodies still shivering from the cold night air. We’re just about to reach a good vantage point a hundred meters from the compound when the roar of engines shatters the stillness of the night. The cacophony grows deafening. Around us, the guard dogs howl with rage. I look over my shoulder in time to see a pair of Blackhawk helicopters thunder right over us. They hug the ground, then hover over the compound.
    I hear men shouting in Arabic. A shaft of light spears the night, then another. Ali’s guards are turning on searchlights. Soon the entire compound is ablaze, and the searchlights probe around us.
    The birds have inadvertently compromised our mission. Cursing, we pull back to the barn, then dash into the palm grove. Behind us, the compound is fully alerted now. The guard dogs growl. The searchlights snoop. We cannot stick around. The Blackhawks dip and slide overhead. Their spinning rotors blast the buildings with mini-hurricanes of wind and dust. What was silence is now total chaos.
    We hike the four kilometers back to our Brads without a word between us. This had been a perfect op until it was ruined by miscommunication with a pair of helo pilots. Stinking, frustrated, and ill-tempered, we mount up into our vehicles. We know this was our last shot at finding Ali. This mission is our swan song in the province.
    Our unit is set to head out to Fallujah, a city of about 350,000 in the restive Anbar Province, along the Euphrates River. Fallujah has been under total insurgent control since April, when Operation Vigilant Resolve, a Marine offensive planned in response to the ghastly and well-publicized hanging of four U.S. contractors, was canceled for political reasons. The jarheads just loved that. All they wanted to do was finish the insurgents off once and for all. Marines. They may all be double-barreled and single-helixed. They may just be the worst historical revisionists of all time. But at their core they are fiercely proud and spoil for an unfair fight. God love ’em all.
    In two days, Diyala’s miseries will be behind us—the IEDs on the local highway, the Mahdi militia around Muqdadiyah, and the house-to-house firefights downtown. We can’t yet know how much we’ll miss them. We are leaving the good life, and heading into the