Remember the Ramrods: An Army Brotherhood in War and Peace

Dedication

To Marilyn B. Bellavia, the toughest of all the Bellavias

In memory of William D. Bellavia and James D. Hornfischer

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note: The Ramrods

Map of Iraq

Preface: Fallujah, 2004

Medal of Honor Citation

Part I

Prologue: The Man in White

1. Stirring Demons

2. In the Welcome Home Shadows

3. The Shades of the Past

4. The Giant of Khailaniya

5. The Following-Orders Beatdown

6. The Relics of War

7. The Break-Glass-in-Case-of-War Sergeant

8. The Lie

9. Lie Autopsy

Part II

10. The Moment I Never Had

11. The Scrutinizers

12. Mail Call

13. A Sacred Promise

14. They Shall Fear Our Ferocity

15. Getting the Band Back Together

Part III

16. The Law of Unintended Consequences

17. On to D.C.

18. The Fatal Goodbye

19. The Fate Machine

20. Full-Court Press

21. Ramrod Reunion

22. Where Compassion Got You Killed

23. The Sons of Fallujah

24. The Commander in Chief

25. East Room to Fallujah

26. American Prayer

Appendix: Legacy

Acknowledgments

Photo Section

About the Author

Also by David Bellavia

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

The Ramrods

IN 2005, I RETURNED from war wanting only to go back to it. Preserving the peace found in American civilian life was the entire reason why we fought the War on Terror, but after I came home from Iraq, that peace felt unearned. I was safe in New York again, trying to get a job, provide for my family, and raise kids all while the people I loved the most were still carrying the battle to our enemies.

In this world of normalcy, the people who should have been in that innermost circle of my life—my children, my family—were almost strangers to me. I’d been a continent or more away for the majority of my son’s young life. I barely had time to experience fatherhood before I deployed overseas. I had a family of my own, but I didn’t know them. Rectifying that became the defining feature of my life for many years.

My real family was still overseas, scattered to different units and areas of operations. Fighting for us. Out there, with them, lay the meaning and purpose that defined my self-identity. I was a warrior. A Soldier. I was a kid from New York who learned about loyalty and love in a way the vast majority of Americans never do: in the heat of combat. In those horrific moments I saw the full power of the human spirit. I saw the strength of connection, the selflessness born from love so profound that giving your life so another might live was not exceptional. It was the unconscious reaction to seeing your own people in danger.

There was none of that at home in a civilian world where the vast majority of military-age males were not in uniform, despite the fact the nation had been attacked on September 11, 2001. The normalcy was disorienting enough—I mean, at times I wondered if my fellow Americans even realized a war was being fought on their behalf. That disorientation grew to a full divide when I saw young men bagging my groceries at the local supermarket. Healthy guys, the same age as the Soldiers in my squad, stuffing kale and cucumbers into sacks while making happy small talk with customers.

It was about then I developed what most veterans do: a sense of superiority over civilians.

That kid had never seen a friend die in combat. His tattoos weren’t marred by bullet holes or shrapnel scars. He’d never tested the measure of himself or pushed others to do the same. He’d never bonded with men willing to die for him, and him for them. He had not sacrificed. He never willingly deprived himself of sleep or security, or of the arms of his beloved. He’d certainly never tried to keep warm by climbing into a body bag and spooning with his brothers-in-arms.

This was the conceit I brought into my civilian life. The Army tested me every day. It forced me to overcome challenges I thought insurmountable. I conquered them, but not alone. There is nothing more powerful than being respected by men you yourself hold in the highest regard. It fosters confidence and strength. It makes you strive to be better, always better. Those insurmountable challenges were overcome every time. Each one reshaped me a little bit more into the man I was when I returned home.

Civilians and warriors alike got it wrong. We combat veterans aren’t better than anyone: we just think we are. That kid bagging groceries? I assumed he’d had a soft life, had never been in danger, and had never known privation. But those assumptions could have been way off the mark. Maybe he was working a third job to put himself through school. Maybe he quit school to take a shit job after his mother got sick. His sense of connection and loyalty to her trumped everything else in his life. Maybe he knew hunger, had lived on the streets as a child of homelessness, where constant danger was just a part of life. Who was I to assume he hadn’t known sacrifice, hadn’t shown devotion to someone or something he loved? Most of all, who was I to assume he’d never even tried to serve in the military and had been medically disqualified or medically retired?

My own assumptions, I learned, cleaved the divide even wider. The conceit I felt? It didn’t affect him; it only isolated me more and made life at home that much more disorienting. And lonely.

There was another factor to that gulf between protector and protected that I had not understood until I returned home and tucked my uniforms away in my father’s barn. The Army transformed me from boy to man by crushing adolescence. The boy is slayed through Basic Training. The man emerges on graduation day. Every branch of the military does this now with both men and women. The childishness within us, the immaturity to handle adversity, the dependence we had even in our teens on our parents and family—all that is destroyed and our warriors are rebuilt by the system to be capable, responsible, and dependable.

There is no similar process in civilian life. Our universities seem to breed perpetual adolescents.

Seventy-five years before, the Greatest Generation rallied together to defeat two of the greatest—and most evil—empires in history, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. Fully a third of America’s military-age males spent the War on Terror fighting it on their Xboxes in Mom’s basement. No job. Not enrolled in classes. A generation living at home, letting Mom do their laundry as they played at clearing rooms with their cyber friends.

The first time I read those statistics, the divide between the warrior I was and the civilian world felt like a chasm. There was no redemptive arc in my own head on this one. There was no possible scenario, no backstory to match the ones for our grocery bagger that could ever justify in my head wasting the treasure of life on video games while not bothering to better yourself. I lived with tenacious ghosts riding my shoulder every day who reminded me of the enormous gift it was to be still breathing. I thought about them constantly, juxtaposing their lives against those squandering theirs here at home. It always made me angry. Unless we Americans accomplish with our time what they willingly gave up in theirs, the sacrifice of blood in Iraq and Afghanistan will have no meaning. I have tried to honor them by living for them, making something of value out of my existence here at home. I thought everyone felt that way. If you listen to Memorial Day speeches, we give lip service to that ideal. The reality? I kept returning to that statistic: one-third of a generation parked on Mom’s couch. That reality left me trending toward bitter.

My greatest regret has always been leaving the service I so dearly loved. I tried to make it work at home, but the pull of the battlefield was too strong. Out there, I had meaning and purpose. You live on a ragged edge of danger that forces you to confront your own mortality. Every breath becomes euphoric. You exist in a different emotional framework. In rural western New York, life’s color was drained away by a million little nicks. You stress over bills and taxes, a car that’s become unreliable. The house needs siding, the floors in the kitchen need to be redone. All the logistical headaches of modern life take center stage and start to define your life.

Out there, on the battlefield, none of that shit matters. None of it. The complexities vanish, and everything boils down to this: can you measure up? When you do, you feel like a rock star. Nothing—no drug in the world—can compare to that moment of self-discovery. For me, self-discovery in combat convinced me the essence of life distills down to one thing: proving to yourself why you are needed in the fight.

I returned to combat in the summer of 2006 as a civilian war correspondent. I went again a few years later. I quickly discovered it was not the same. It wasn’t the battlefield that gave me meaning, it was the men around me who did. Being there for them. I missed my tribe, not the combat I endured with them. That was the hole in my heart I felt open on the day I took off the uniform. It grew larger every year I was away from the Ramrods, the Soldiers I served with in Task Force 2-2 Infantry.

The Ramrods were part of the legendary 1st Infantry Division. Movies have been made on the Big Red One for its actions on D-Day and through Europe during World War II. The Fighting First fought in nearly every major American battle of World War I; it saw combat for five years in Vietnam before being forward deployed to Germany to face the Warsaw Pact/Soviet threat during the final decades of the Cold War. The Big Red One is the backbone of the American infantry. These days, it is sometimes overshadowed by the airborne divisions in the popular press. The 1st Infantry Division, with the Ramrods at the tip of the spear, has won every battle it has fought since 1918.

The truth is, combat is transformative, its effects largely permanent. It makes us manically aware of our own mortality. It makes us hyperconscious of our surroundings. Some dwell on actions they regret, others on actions they regret not taking. I fell into the latter category. It changed us in fundamental ways that we didn’t even realize for years after the last bullet cracked overhead. We all tried not to let it change us. Some of us deluded ourselves into thinking we’d succeeded.

For almost fifteen years, I often felt like a foreigner in my own country. This book chronicles my true journey home, which took place long after I set foot in New York after the war was over. It is the story of how I found my tribe again at last, and how we all had struggled as to make sense of life here in the United States after the intensity of the relationships and experiences we shared in Iraq.

We said our goodbyes in 2005 after the hell of combat. The Army blew us across the world. Some, like me, came home. Others, like Colin Fitts, became eternal Soldiers, fighting in deployment after deployment until their bodies could take it no more. We went our separate ways and largely lost touch with each other. Life evolved. We married. We divorced. We had kids. We heard of friends who took their own lives and others who had dropped off the grid. The vast majority of us tried to carve out a version of the American dream. It all seemed hollow, incomplete. Anticlimactic. No matter how much we accomplished, we couldn’t help but wonder if we peaked in our twenties. After all, nothing here at home compared to the connections and emotions we felt together back then. It was like living on the backside of a drug high.

Then, in June 2019, for the first time since those close-quarters firefights in the Middle East, forty of us reunited in Washington, D.C. The brotherhood we rekindled in those short days together helped all of us heal. This is the story of that bond, and how my tribe survived together through war and peace to ultimately save each other one more time.

Map of Iraq

Preface

Fallujah, 2004

WHEN THE UNITED STATES launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was a twenty-seven-year-old noncommissioned officer serving with Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment, or 2-2 as we were called. In November 2002, most of the battalion deployed to Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission that kept us out of the initial invasion of Iraq. As American forces drove on to Baghdad, we remained in the Balkans, a legacy force designed to protect the local population from further 1990s-style Serbian ethnic cleansing that had killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Kosovars.

We were in the backwater, frustrated and afraid that we missed this next phase of the War on Terror, just as we had missed out on Afghanistan in 2001–02. When the fighting seemed to end after only a few weeks, it felt like we had not earned our keep. History had passed us by, and the chance to avenge the 9/11 attacks as a generation was something we thought would never be given to us.

By the time we returned to our home garrison in Vilseck, Germany, in June 2003, a growing insurgency against the American-led Coalition was taking shape. In the eastern districts of Baghdad and in the southern part of Iraq, Shia militias, each led by powerful, demagogic imams, formed right under the noses of the overstretched occupation authorities. Meanwhile, in the Sunni-dominated western region known as Anbar Province, Al Qaeda established a foothold among the tribes there. Foreign volunteers—religious extremists for the most part—trickled into Anbar to fight the Americans under the Al Qaeda banner.

The war hadn’t ended with the fall of Baghdad after all.

Task Force 2-2 deployed into Iraq during a short lull in the growing insurgency in February 2004. The Army sent us to Diyala Province, a tumultuous region north of Baghdad along the Iranian border where both elements of the insurgency converged. Some of the Sunni in the area supported Al Qaeda in Iraq, while the Shia opposed to the Coalition found easy sources of supply across the Iranian border.*

About a month after we arrived, four Blackwater military contractors guarding a food convoy outside the Anbar Province city of Fallujah were ambushed, killed, and mutilated by insurgent forces. Local onlookers cheered their deaths and strung their bodies up on a bridge into the city. The incident foretold the start of two simultaneous uprisings that destabilized the Coalition’s tenuous hold on Iraq.

The first occurred in Fallujah, which had become the nexus of Al Qaeda’s operations in Anbar Province. The Marines and 82nd Airborne Division troops in the area had largely stayed out of the city (located about forty miles west of Baghdad), but after the Blackwater Bridge killings, they launched an offensive on April 5, 2004, to clear the insurgents from the area. In what was known as Operation Vigilant Resolve, the Marines and paratroops pushed into Fallujah and quickly found themselves in an urban hellscape where every doorway and window posed a threat. By now, some of the leading terrorist commanders in Iraq, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ahmad Hashim Abd al-Isawi (who had planned the Blackwater Bridge ambush), used Fallujah as their headquarters. Some thirty-five hundred terrorists rallied around them, outnumbering the two thousand American troops fighting block by block to clear the city.

Consideration for the civilian population, outrage at the offensive by the gestational new Iraqi government, and fierce resistance that inflicted heavy casualties on the Coalition forces all combined to bring Vigilant Resolve to an end in late April 2004. A cease-fire was arranged. The insurgents buried their dead at the soccer stadium, which became known as Martyrs Cemetery, and the situation in Fallujah festered through the rest of the year.

At the same time, the Shia militias rose up against the Coalition in Baghdad, Diyala, and the southern provinces. Areas that had once been safe for American forces suddenly became ambush corridors. Fighting raged in Sadr City, an enormous Shia slum in eastern Baghdad, even after the cease-fire took effect in Fallujah. In Diyala, Task Force 2-2 fought pitched battles through the spring in and around the largest cities in the area until the militias finally went to ground in June and the fighting ebbed.

Shia militias, led by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, rose up against the Coalition a second time. Eastern Baghdad turned into a free-fire zone again, and hundreds of American troops were killed or wounded in ambushes and urban fighting. The holy southern city of Najaf became the focal point of the Shia insurgency that August, and a massive battle for the city unfolded. Alpha Company, Task Force 2-2 was sent to Najaf in April to take the fight to the Mahdi Army, led by Sadr. A cease-fire was concluded before hostilities broke out in the spring. That lull lasted until August 2004, when Marines and elements of the 1st Cavalry Division, supported by National Guard troops from Arkansas and Oregon, assaulted into Najaf, surrounding Muqtada al-Sadr’s fighters, who were operating out of the Ali Imam Shrine, one of the most holy sites in the Middle East.

By then, we’d been in so many firefights in the cities in Diyala Province that Task Force 2-2 probably had more urban warfare experience than nearly any other unit in the U.S. Army at that time. When things spun out of control in Fallujah that fall, it was not surprising that the Coalition leadership selected 2-2 to be part of the offensive to clear the city.

Through the summer and fall, U.S. forces had largely left Fallujah alone, content to stay on the city’s outskirts and not make any serious effort to patrol, police, or occupy it. This strategy kept American losses down, but the Iraqi Coalition efforts to regain control of the city without our help failed completely. What had been a hub for Al Qaeda grew into a lawless, fortified terrorist stronghold in the heart of the most important Iraqi province. From Fallujah, at least a dozen different terror groups launched attacks against Americans throughout Anbar. They laid roadside bombs and executed ambushes of our vehicle patrols. They mortared our bases in the area and mercilessly killed Iraqi police officers and security units trying to establish order.

The non-loss of the First Battle of Fallujah in the spring encouraged a new wave of foreign volunteers to make their way to the city and rally behind the jihad, or Islamic holy war. They went about fortifying this city of about three hundred thousand, all while Coalition forces largely stood on the sidelines, watching it happen. With the first free election in Iraq’s history scheduled for January 2005, and the terrorist all-star team in Fallujah readying to stop it, the situation came to a boiling point that fall. American intelligence estimated there were some five thousand insurgents using the city as their fortified lair, preparing to unleash absolute chaos on election day in January.

The decision was made to clear Fallujah, setting the stage for the largest battle of the Global War on Terror.

The Coalition announced that all civilians needed to evacuate Fallujah. Checkpoints ringed the city to ensure that no other insurgents got in to join the coming battle. In the weeks before November, tens of thousands of civilians left their homes. Fallujah became a terrorist playground, and with the Coalition intending to enter and clear the city, finally addressing this problem once and for all, the insurgents redoubled their work to further fortify their positions. They studded every major road and highway into the city with thousands of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They booby-trapped buildings with explosives and propane tanks. They dug tunnels between fighting positions established inside thick-walled structures, and cached ammunition, medical supplies, food, and water on nearly every block. To minimize the American advantages of firepower and close air support, they built fortified kill zones inside buildings, hidden from aerial surveillance. They had studied our tactics and knew that once we entered the city, we would send troops to clear every structure.

This was a uniquely American approach to fighting in a city, designed to minimize the damage to it. The Russians, when they fought their own urban battle in Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, used firepower to crush that city’s defenders. They flattened almost every building with artillery and air attacks before sending in tanks and armored infantry, which used direct-fire high explosives to add to the destruction. By the time the battle was over, Grozny had been ground to rubble.

America’s kinder, gentler approach to urban warfare meant the onus of victory fell on the shoulders of the infantry, fighting dismounted from house to house. It meant we were willing to trade higher American casualties in return for minimizing the damage to the city. Ultimately, much of Fallujah was destroyed anyway.

The offensive to clear Fallujah began on November 7, 2004. Our company from Task Force 2-2 formed one of the spearheads that penetrated the city’s perimeter defenses, secured breaching points, and pushed from north to south into the eastern end of Fallujah. The fighting was unlike anything we had ever experienced. We faced snipers, mortar fire, hidden bombs, and booby traps. The cityscape was already torn up from the first battle and subsequent barrages of Coalition artillery fire, and moving among the ruins left us cut up, bruised, and coated in concrete dust.

The deeper we pushed into the city, the wider a gap opened between us and our Marine colleagues, who had struggled at their breaching points because they lacked heavy armored support. Insurgents detected the gap and saw opportunity. They infiltrated behind us and launched counterattacks we repelled in furious rooftop firefights. For two days, we battled the enemy nonstop, day and night without respite or sleep. Then we had to turn around and advance north, doubling back over the hard-won ground we’d gained to clear our rear of those enemy infiltrators.

On the night of November 10, 2004, after an exhausting day of clearing building after building, destroying caches we’d found and enduring more enemy attacks, we came to a low-slung, fortified house in the Askari, or Soldier’s, District. This was a neighborhood where Saddam Hussein’s ruling elite built lavish homes. Each was like a mini-fortress, with stout outer walls, reinforced gates, and heavy front doors. The homes themselves were built of rebar and concrete, with rabbit warrens of hallways, rooms, and stairwells within them. They were perfect strongpoints for the terrorists.

It was my twenty-ninth birthday, making me one of the oldest members of my platoon. Instead of candles on a cake, the night was filled with red tracers and star shells lighting the city in a hellish glow. The acoustics in the city played havoc with our ears. Explosions and gunfire rattled around us, their sound waves bouncing off the buildings in such crazy ways we could never be exactly sure of their point of origin. Ultimately, it sounded like we were surrounded by dozens of firefights unfolding simultaneously as other platoons and companies ran into ambushes or were counterattacked by the enemy.

Dazed, weary, hungry, our mouths dry, our faces caked with grime, our platoon stacked up to clear this upscale house in the darkness of our third night in the city. We were all on edge, growling at each other, stressed, scared, full of rage at our predicament. This was the toughest moment of Soldiering any of us had endured to that point. It was a testament to the strength of our bonds with each other that we were still combat capable. We’d already lost our beloved battalion sergeant major during the first hours of the battle, and in the days to come we would lose even more of our leadership. Some units would have become combat ineffective after the seventy-two hours of fighting we’d gone through. Even though we were at the edge of our endurance, we still had fight left in us.

Our platoon swept into the house, clearing the entryway foyer, then moving into another room deeper inside. That’s when the enemy sprang their ambush. Armed with AKs and a belt-fed machine gun, they opened fire at us from a makeshift bunker. Bullets poured through a doorway between most of the platoon and the only exit route available.

In such moments, I learned that it is instinctive to do whatever it takes to save the people you love. Our platoon was my family. I’d been lost, struggling to find my way before I joined the Army. When I landed in 2-2, I finally felt like I’d found my purpose and the people I was meant to be with, to serve with, and to protect.

What followed inside that room-to-room kill zone on November 10, 2004, would change all of our lives forever.

Medal of Honor Citation

Staff Sergeant David G. Bellavia distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty on November 10, 2004, while serving as a squad leader in support of Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, Iraq. While clearing a house, a squad from Staff Sergeant Bellavia’s platoon became trapped within a room by intense enemy fire coming from a fortified position under the stairs leading to the second floor. Recognizing the immediate severity of the situation, and with disregard for his own safety, Staff Sergeant Bellavia retrieved an automatic weapon and entered the doorway of the house to engage the insurgents. With enemy rounds impacting around him, Staff Sergeant Bellavia fired at the enemy position at a cyclic rate, providing covering fire that allowed the squad to break contact and exit the house. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle was brought forward to suppress the enemy; however, due to high walls surrounding the house, it could not fire directly at the enemy position. Staff Sergeant Bellavia then re-entered the house and again came under intense enemy fire. He observed an enemy insurgent preparing to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at his platoon. Recognizing the grave danger the grenade posed to his fellow soldiers, Staff Sergeant Bellavia assaulted the enemy position, killing one insurgent and wounding another who ran to a different part of the house. Staff Sergeant Bellavia, realizing he had an un-cleared, darkened room to his back, moved to clear it. As he entered, an insurgent came down the stairs firing at him. Simultaneously, the previously wounded insurgent reemerged and engaged Staff Sergeant Bellavia. Staff Sergeant Bellavia, entering further into the darkened room, returned fire and eliminated both insurgents. Staff Sergeant Bellavia then received enemy fire from another insurgent emerging from a closet in the darkened room. Exchanging gunfire, Staff Sergeant Bellavia pursued the enemy up the stairs and eliminated him. Now on the second floor, Staff Sergeant Bellavia moved to a door that opened onto the roof. At this point, a fifth insurgent leapt from the third floor roof onto the second-floor roof. Staff Sergeant Bellavia engaged the insurgent through a window, wounding him in the back and legs, and caused him to fall off the roof. Acting on instinct to save the members of his platoon from an imminent threat, Staff Sergeant Bellavia ultimately cleared an entire enemy-filled house, destroyed four insurgents, and badly wounded a fifth. Staff Sergeant Bellavia’s bravery, complete disregard for his own safety, and unselfish and courageous actions are in keeping with the finest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Army.

*

Part I

Prologue

The Man in White

AL ALI — DIYALA PROVINCE, IRAQ

JANUARY 2005

THE TOWN SEEMED EMPTY. Shuttered windows, closed shops, and no movement on its dirt streets gave it a creepy end-of-the-world sort of vibe.

Al Ali. A village with a wagon-wheel downtown. A large, open center public square. The rest of the population lived in the rural farmland spokes.

Foreign influence swayed the people of this region. They hated Americans. We started reciprocating the feeling in May 2004 after someone in an adjacent village sniped Staff Sergeant Joe Garyantes, one of our tank commanders, right out of his turret. That had happened just south of Al Ali, in a town called Dali Abas.

Losing an NCO as strong and steady as Garyantes was a blow we all took personally. He would have battled any enemy face-to-face if given the chance. Instead, he died from a bullet none of us had even seen fired. His death showed us the impersonal sterility of this peculiar battlefield. It also showed us the cowardice of the enemy—men who would supplicate to our faces, then snipe us from behind if given the opportunity. It made us alert, distrustful, and rage-filled. And for me, I grew to despise snipers. On our side or theirs.

A good sniper is nearly impossible to combat, especially in the terrain around Al Ali. There were a million places to build a hide among the civilians and their meager dwellings. The best Soldiers in the world cannot see everywhere at once, cannot maintain a hyperalert posture for days on end while out on patrol. Even if we could, snipers are so well concealed and far away, spotting their hides requires binos—or pure luck.

Garyantes’s death left us feeling powerless. We realized that at any moment, an enemy secure and far away could anonymously kill us. Thinking about it made us paranoid, especially around Al Ali, which in May 2004 was crawling with insurgents living among the populace. We’d done three patrols after Garyantes’s death in support of our sister company from 1-63 Armor. Each time, unseen assailants ambushed us.

Today, in the brutal Diyala heat, our platoon patrolled into Al Ali after our Bradley Fighting Vehicles—basically armored infantry taxis with a turreted 25mm machine cannon—dropped us off about a kilometer outside of town. We walked up the main road out in the open, as if daring the enemy to oppose us. We moved past palm groves that once served as ambush hides for the insurgents, then broke out into open ground with an occasional farmer’s hovel. Finally, we reached the town’s little open core. Walled in a circle leading into shops and homes, Al Ali represented the very insecure Iraqi culture that lived in a perpetual state of paranoia under the Ba’athist regime. This town, like the Iraqi people, was ready at any time for an attack from their own government under Saddam Hussein. A few squalid houses, most made of concrete, were followed by its tiny commercial district built around the village square.

We stood in the middle of the square now, rifles in hand, fingers just outside the trigger guards, alert and scanning the rooftops and alleys. It wasn’t a matter of if in this area of Diyala, but when. The thick vegetation made this more akin to South Vietnam than the open desert terrain of the Middle East. And in that vegetation, anything can hide. The enemy used this to their advantage.

For the last year, a strange mix of Shia militias, Sunnis allied with Al Qaeda in Iraq, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and blue-eyed foreign fighters lurked in these palm groves, watched us from windows, and lay in ambush on rooftop redoubts.

Captain Doug Walter, our new company commander, gave exactly two shits about the enemy’s affiliation or intent. He walked to the center of the town square, looked around at the dilapidated shops that lined this bit of communal space, then took a knee. He was here to meet the locals and let them know that the boys of Fallujah were back in town and itching for a fight, too.

Captain Walter dubbed this mission, plus a series of patrols in all the villages outside of Muqdadiyah proper, Operation Welcome Home. While the Ramrods were away, the insurgents came out to play. For two months, they launched crazy-brave assaults on the American and Iraqi National Guard units that covered for us while we took part in the Battle of Fallujah. When we came back to Diyala Province in December, the place had gone full Wild West. It was dispiriting—by the time we left in October, we’d beaten the enemy down. The place was actually getting quiet.

Not anymore. A few mornings after we returned from Anbar Province in December 2004, the enemy assaulted our forward operating base. I spent the firefight in a T-shirt and boxers, no boots, in a guard tower manning a machine gun as we poured lead at them. The Army National Guard unit that was occupying that tower didn’t even complain about Fitts, Lawson, Brown, and myself just helping ourselves to their weapon systems and ammunition. The Soldiers stood back, with not even a question as to who we were or who gave us the authority to take over their mission. That is what came with our new Fallujah street credit.

Now, we were under time pressure to get the situation under control again. Iraq’s first free election was only a couple of weeks away, and our command feared the enemy would attack polling centers and murder hundreds of civilians if we didn’t handle business quickly.

Captain Walter studied the nearby shops, noting the bullet-scarred walls and blackened facades where rockets had impacted in previous fights. If those warning signs made an impression on him, he didn’t show it. Not surprising; the man always seemed fearless.

Walter had once been a barrel-chested physical specimen. He played baseball at West Point, crushed Ranger School, and smoked men fifteen years his junior on company runs back in Germany. He could outrun, outgun, and out-endure every other man in the battalion. We worshipped him.*

That was Germany, a year and a lifetime ago. He looked frail now, his body wasted by an intestinal disease that robbed him of the strength we marveled at when he commanded our company back in Europe. He dropped to under 130 pounds before we left for Iraq almost a year before, which forced him to give up command of Alpha Company. His best friend, Captain Sean Sims, took his place.

In recent months, Walter had regained some of his lost weight, but he was far from healthy.

Sir, I said quietly.

He wiped sweat off his brow and looked back at me, eyes squinting from the sun. What you got, Sergeant Bellavia?

We came here on foot. And we’re leaving here on foot. I am all about whatever you want. Just know this is gonna be a gunfight very soon.

Walter reached into a pocket and pulled out a map. As he unfolded it, he said, We’re not going anywhere, boys. Not moving.

I made eye contact with my best friend, Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts. Maybe five nine, he seemed ten feet tall and larger than life. Quick with a quip and quicker on the draw with the combat shotgun he hefted in every fight, Fitts was a man born without a filter. That made him among the most honest humans I’ve ever met. It also got him in constant trouble. If somebody was screwing up, he’d tell them. Didn’t matter the rank.

Fitts was also a brawler whose southern sense of honor was easily offended. It made him prone to throw the first punch. He also brooked no stupidity. Five months earlier, an Iraqi cop thought it would be funny to point his weapon at one of Fitts’s soldiers and track him as he walked by. Fitts gave him exactly one warning with his shotgun at the ready. When the idiot didn’t heed it, our Mississippian pulled off his Kevlar helmet and beat the Iraqi unconscious. When the cop’s supervisor protested, he, too, received Fitts’s sense of frontier southern justice.

Command frowned on the fact that this police supervisor had happened to be the deputy chief of police of Muqdadiyah. Those little subtextual points of contention meant nothing to Fittsy. Both cops were left in need of an endodontist when all was said and done. Somehow, Fitts avoided the wrath of our own chain of command.

For a change.

There in the middle of Al Ali, I watched Fitts approach me, the slight hitch in his walk a reminder that we almost lost him the previous spring. In April 2004, he’d been shot three times, by three different insurgents firing three different weapon systems. He could have stayed home and rehabbed his wounds. Instead, he returned to us in the summer, half healed.

You ready for this shit, bro? I don’t think standing around here is a good idea.

It’s Captain Walter, I said simply. Fitts stared at me for a beat, so I added, Look, I am whatever he tells me to be. And today, it looks like we’re gonna be infantrymen.

I can do infantry today, Fitts drawled.

We both loved Walter. We’d served under him for two years before Iraq. We admired his attitude—hard-nosed and aggressive. Walter didn’t want to pick a fight, but if one came to him he would smother the enemy with firepower. Today, though, he sure seemed like he was challenging the enemy to hit us.

You insurgent jerks have the stones for this? Bring it. I have no plans for three more months.

Two months after fighting the biggest battle of the War on Terror, the Ramrods of Alpha Company, Task Force 2-2 walked with swagger. We’d survived the worst the enemy could dish out and kicked their teeth out in return.

Not that they didn’t get licks of their own in, too. We lost Captain Sean Sims during a point-blank gun duel fought in a kitchen of an abandoned house. We lost our executive officer Lieutenant Edward Iwan to a rocket-propelled grenade. We lost our battalion command sergeant major, Steven Faulkenburg, a father figure to all us sergeants in 2-2 Infantry. Staff Sergeant James J.C. Matteson, a scout from our battalion task force, was also killed in Fallujah.

We never stopped fighting. We stowed our grief and flung ourselves at the enemy, killing with pent-up fury. They gave no quarter, and we asked for none. When we saw them, rushing us, bounding from building to building in the dead of night, we gunned them down. We dug them out of buildings, battled them room to room, captured and destroyed their arms caches and bomb factories.

Doug Walter returned to Alpha Company after