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

mother of all city battles.
     
    I lean back against the Bradley’s bulkhead, my uniform still wet. My boys shiver violently from the cold. A few wipe their faces with rags. Piotr Sucholas, my new Bravo Team Leader, sits next me, weapon between his legs, barrel touching the Brad’s floorboards. I half expect for him to start riffing on the evils of President Bush again. Sucholas is our platoon liberal. He fell in love with Michael Moore after watching a bootlegged DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fortunately, his flaky suspicions that President Bush is out to conquer the world don’t have the least effect on his willingness to do battle. When the shooting starts, he thinks only of killing the other guys and saving his men. That’s why I love Piotr Sucholas.
    Now he sits quietly next to me. The news that we are going to Fallujah has made everyone introspective. Sucholas has ice water for blood. In a fight, he is utterly calm, but even he is uneasy at the thought of what we will soon face.
    The Brads carry us back to base. We pile out and head for our isolated, three-story barracks building. From where we live, it’s a twenty-five minute walk just to reach a telephone. The battalion operations center is over a kilometer away. Even the former Iraqi Army morgue that serves as our chow hall is half a kilometer from us.
    Our uniforms are filthy. Cleaning them is no easy chore. We have a couple of Iraqi washing machines, but we currently don’t have electricity in our building. We’ll have to do our wash by hand. Fitts and I order the men to round up as many spray bottles of Simple Green cleaner as they can find. We have no running water either, so the shower room on the first floor of our barracks serves mainly as a storage area.
    In the darkness, we peel off our filthy uniforms and get to work. Soon, we’re all freezing cold and shaking uncontrollably as we scrub our uniforms and wash them with bottled water. When they’re as clean as we can manage, we take bottled-water showers and lather up with the leftover Simple Green. The muck of the sewage trench dribbles off us as the frigid water hits our bodies. It takes us until dawn to smell semihuman again.
    Once my squad is squared away, I collapse into my cot in hopes of a quick catnap. Sleep does not come easily, despite my fatigue. My mind refuses to shut off.
    Fallujah.
    When I first learned we will be redeployed to Fallujah, I pumped my fist and shouted with excitement. Finally. We’d been stuck in the backwater of the war, chasing shitheads like Ayub Ali across palm and dale without luck. We’d missed out on the Battle of Najaf in August that wiped hundreds of Mahdi militiamen and crippled al-Sadr’s street army—at least for the moment. Perhaps now we’ll have a chance to take part in something truly decisive. My adrenaline is already flowing.
     
    Later that morning, we head out of the barracks to blow up our own equipment. Intelligence reports tell us that the defenders of Fallujah, who may number as many as three thousand Sunni and foreign fighters, are heavily armed—with our own weapons. Aside from the standard AK-47s, PKM machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades, the Sunnis and foreign fighters in the city have acquired American weapons, body armor, uniforms, and Kevlar helmets. They’ve also used stolen Texas barriers to fortify the roads leading into Fallujah. Texas barriers are five-ton, reinforced concrete barricades that will hamper the movements of our vehicles.
    We’re not sure how to destroy Texas barriers, and we’ve never faced our own defenses and weapons before. John Ruiz, who has written the message “fuck you” on his knuckles in honor of our Fallujah vacation, wondered aloud during one meeting if our SAWs can penetrate our own body armor.
    Today, we will find out. Our Brads deliver us to our firing range, just outside the wire. Usually, we shoot at pop-up targets, human silhouettes that allow us to hone our marksmanship and zero our weapons,