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  Advance Praise for House to House

  “House to House is a charged and honestly stark view down the rifle-sights of an infantryman during a crucial period in Iraq. Bellavia is our man with boots on the ground. To read this book is to know intimately the daily grind and danger of men at war.”

  —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

  “House to House is a terrifically realistic account of the hardest kind of combat known to man. Staff Sergeant Bellavia puts you right there with his men as they see it. This is a must read.”

  —Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin, USMC (Ret.), author of Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper

  “Bellavia is the legend from Iraq. He went house-to-house in Fallujah killing the terrorists—alone! MUST reading for all grunts.”

  —Bing West, author of No True Glory

  “House to House is a rare and gripping account of frontline combat. While many who contemplate the nature of war focus on technological change, Bellavia’s account reveals the continuities of close combat. Bellavia illuminates the human, psychological, emotional, and sensory experience of combat at the level of leadership that wins battles—the infantry squad leader. Bellavia’s story unfolds in a compelling narrative that helps readers understand what it is like to be in battle and what it is like to be a soldier.”

  —Colonel H. R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty

  FREE PRESS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2007 by David Bellavia

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bellavia, David.

  House to house: an epic memoir of war / David Bellavia with John Bruning.

  p. cm.

  1. Iraq War, 2003–Personal narratives, American. 2. Bellavia, David. I. Bruning, John R. II. Title.

  DS79.76.B4465 2007

  956.7044'3092—dc22

  [B] 2007010697

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7184-1

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-7184-1

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For the Ramrods of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment

  Noli Me Tangere

  “Do Not Touch Me”

  Contents

  Prologue: The Coffins of Muqdadiyah

  Chapter 1 In the Shit

  Chapter 2 Beyond Redemption

  Chapter 3 The Measure of a Man

  Chapter 4 Land Rush

  Chapter 5 Machines of Loving Grace

  Chapter 6 The First Angel

  Chapter 7 Battle Madness

  Chapter 8 Doorways

  Chapter 9 Dorothy’s Oz Gate

  Chapter 10 Shadows and Wraiths

  Chapter 11 Rooftop Alamo

  Chapter 12 The Stay Puft Marshmallow Cock

  Chapter 13 Where Feral Dogs Feed

  Chapter 14 Better Homes and Gardens

  Chapter 15 “The Power of Christ Compels You”

  Chapter 16 The Failed Test of Manhood

  Chapter 17 A Soldier’s Prayer

  Chapter 18 Man-to-Man

  Chapter 19 Blood Oath

  Chapter 20 The Last Caress

  Chapter 21 A Smoke on Borrowed Time

  Chapter 22 Nut to Butt in Body Bags

  Epilogue: Broken Promises

  Appendix

  Brief Glossary of Terms

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Insert

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. Events, actions, experiences, and their consequences have been faithfully retold as I remembered them and based on interviews with a number of the participants. Events to which I was not an eyewitness have been recounted based on documented accounts and interviews. Every event within the book took place, but a few have been reordered or combined for narrative clarity. Conversations presented in dialogue form have been re-created from my memory of them but are not intended to represent a word-for-word documentation; rather, they are intended to invoke the essence of what was said.

  HOUSE TO HOUSE

  PROLOGUE

  The Coffins of Muqdadiyah

  April 9, 2004

  Diyala Province, Iraq

  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.

  That was three weeks ago. We’re veterans now, proud that we can stomach such sights and still carry out our job. It is this misery that defines us, gives us our identity. It also cleaves infantrymen apart from everyone else in uniform. Some call it arrogance. So be it. We call it pride since we believe fervently in what we are doing.

  “Check it out,” calls Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts. He points to a Humvee rolling up the highway toward our battlefield.

  The two of us pause and watch the rig approach. Fitts is a Mississippian with a gravelly voice and intense eyes. We’re so close that long ago I learned to tell every entertaining story from his life in more detail than he can, and he can do the same with mine.

 
The Humvee screeches to a stop a short distance from us. In the right seat sits a clean-cut major. With his tiny, wire-rimmed glasses, he looks like an accountant in Kevlar. He’s so clean that I doubt he’s more than a few hours removed from his last shower. I can’t even remember when I last had one. We’ve been making do with whore’s baths—baby wipes to the armpits and private parts—since running water is a luxury not bestowed upon the infantry.

  Right here we have the dichotomy that defines our military. We all wear the same uniform, but we might as well be from two different armies. We’re the frontline bullet-chewers. This officer embodies all that we despise about the other half. He is scrubbed; we are filthy. His skin has rarely seen the sun. We are sunburned and leathery. He is well fed and a bit on the pudgy side. Most of our platoon has lost over ten pounds since getting to Diyala. Maybe that’s because when we get a chance to eat, the appetite doesn’t stick around long. Our mess hall is an abandoned Iraqi morgue.

  “Boys,” the major says, “Go tell your sergeant that Quarter Cav is here!” The major obviously thinks he has a flair for drama. He doesn’t realize that he’s just insulted both of us. Fitts and I are both staff sergeants; our rank insignia are not easily missed. Fitts turns bright red.

  In our world, the world of the infantry, this major is a wannabe. He sits safe behind the wire, but tries to act the part of a combat leader. Most of the time we must simply suffer fools like him as we go about our business.

  I’m prepared to do just that. Fitts, on the other hand, has no inner censor. He’s allergic to bullshit and fears nobody. He’s made plenty of enemies in our battalion for this, but you have to admire a man who reacts with pure honesty to every situation and never, not once, considers the consequences to his career. It has cost him, too. Several times he has lost rank, but he always earns his stripes back.

  Fitts nods to the major and shouts across the road to his A Team leader, “Hey, Sergeant Misa! The Quarter Cav is here. What’s that? You don’t give a fucking shit either? Well, that makes two of us, two hundred-fifty thousand if you count the whole sector.”

  My jaw drops. Fitts has just emasculated a major the same way he would a private. I wait for the fallout.

  The major stammers, pushes his glasses up on his nose, turns to his driver and says, “Move on.”

  The Humvee speeds up the highway for the safety of Forward Operating Base Normandy. The fact that we are willing to submit ourselves to filthy conditions and brutal fighting sometimes gives us a free pass with the other half of the army. It is the one card that saves our asses from charges of insubordination.

  Sergeant Warren Misa steps over a rag-dolled Iraqi corpse and approaches Fitts. A muscular, Cebu-born Filipino who grew up in Cincinnati, Misa is the only man I’ve ever met who speaks Tagalog with an Ohio accent. We can barely understand him.

  “Sergeant Fitts?”

  “Yeah, Misa?”

  “They are trying to get you on the radio. There’s trouble in Muqdadiyah again.”

  We head for our Bradley Fighting Vehicles and pile inside. The interiors of these armored troop carriers are like mobile ovens in the Iraqi heat. In our fifty pounds of full battle rattle—Kevlar, body armor, ammo, weapon, water, and night vision—we sweat pounds off on every drive. It makes us long for the less terminal heat of the FOB outhouses.

  The Brads lurch forward, leaving the shattered checkpoint in their dust. A short ride later, we reach downtown Muqdadiyah. It was here the day before that our platoon saw the heaviest fighting of its short combat career.

  “Holy shit,” comes the voice of our platoon sergeant, James Cantrell, over the Bradley’s internal speaker. I peer out the viewing port and gasp.

  We’re surrounded by coffins.

  Fresh wooden ones line both sides of the street. In places they’re piled two and three high. Nearby, an old man stoops over two boards as he swings a hammer. I realize he’s building a coffin lid. More lids lie scattered on the street around him, blocking our path ahead.

  Cantrell orders us to dismount. Our vehicle’s ramp flops down and clangs onto the street. We sprint out into the brutal morning sun. Buildings still smolder. A battle-damaged house has already been gutted by men wielding sledge hammers. All around us, interspersed among the coffins, women cry and children stare into space. Old men, survivors of Saddam’s reign of violence, the war with Iran, and Gulf War I, regard us with hollowed eyes.

  We slowly make our way past the house we used as our casualty collection point the day before. Stacked out front are three caskets. I wonder if one of them houses the teenaged kid I had to shoot.

  In the middle of yesterday’s fight, my squad reached a gated and walled house. Sergeant Hugh Hall, our platoon’s stocky, door-crushing bruiser, smashed the gate and led the way into a courtyard. Just as we got inside, the face of the house suddenly exploded. A chunk of spinning concrete slammed into Hall and sent the rest of us flying for cover. A sudden barrage followed as three Bradley armored vehicles opened up with their 25-millimeter Bushmaster cannons in response to the explosion of the enemy rocket. As the high-explosive rounds tore up the area outside of the house, the din was so intense I could hardly hear.

  Over the radio, I made out Cantrell yelling—“Bellavia, give me a fucking SITREP.” Cantrell’s voice is the only thing that can rise above the cacophony of a firefight. He has a real gift there.

  Confused and dazed, I initially failed to respond. Cantrell didn’t like this. “BELLAVIA, ARE YOU FUCKING OKAY?”

  I finally found the wherewithal to respond. All I had heard was the Bradley fire, so I finally screamed back, “Stop shooting! You’re hitting our location.”

  “Hey asshole, that wasn’t us. That was a fucking RPG,” Cantrell’s voice booms through the radio. “And here comes another.”

  The top of a large palm tree in the courtyard suddenly exploded overhead. Cantrell and the other Bradleys immediately returned fire. Bits of wood and burned leaves rained down on us. Hall, already covered with concrete dust, dirt, and blood, blurted out, “Would they kill that muthafucka already?”

  “Get inside and take the roof,” I holler over our Bradley’s fire.

  The men moved for the door. As they forced their way inside, I peered around the corner and caught sight of a gunman on a nearby rooftop. I studied him for a moment, unsure whose side he was on. He could be a friendly local. We’d seen them before shooting at the black-clad Mahdi militiamen who infiltrated this part of the city earlier in the fight. Not everyone with a rifle was an enemy.

  The gunman on the roof was a teenaged boy, maybe sixteen years old. I could see him scanning for targets, his back to me. He held an AK-47 without a stock. Was he just a stupid kid trying to protect his family? Was he one of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite fanatics? I kept my eyes on him and prayed he’d put the AK down and just get back inside his own house. I didn’t want to shoot him.

  He turned and saw me, and I could see the terror on his sweat-streaked face. I put him in my sights just as he adjusted his AK against his shoulder. I had beaten him on the draw. My own rifle was snug in my shoulder, the sight resting on him. The kid stood no chance. My weapon just needed a flick of the safety and a butterfly’s kiss of pressure on the trigger.

  Please don’t do this. You don’t need to die.

  The AK went to full ready-up. Was he aiming at me? I couldn’t be sure, but the barrel was trained at my level. Do I shoot? Do I risk not shooting? Was he silently trying to save me from some unseen threat? I didn’t know. I had to make a decision.

  Please forgive me for this.

  I pulled my trigger. The kid’s chin fell to his chest, and a guttural moan escaped his lips. I fired again, missed, then pulled the trigger one more time. The bullet tore his jaw and ear off. Sergeant Hall came up alongside me, saw the AK and the boy, and finished him with four shots to his chest. He slumped against the low rooftop wall.

  “Thanks, dude. I lost my zero,” I said to Hall, explaining that my rifle sights were off-line, though t
hat was the last thing going through my mind.

  Now a day later on a street surrounded by coffins and mourning families, their grief is too much for us to witness. These poor people had been caught in the middle, abused by the fanatics who chose to fight us. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militiamen are the foot soldiers of the Shia uprising. They’re the ones who have created this chaos in Muqdadiyah. They use innocent people’s homes and businesses as fighting positions and ambush points.

  The angst-filled scenes on the street cannot compare to what we find inside these battle-scarred houses. Yesterday, my squad kicked in one door and stumbled right into a woman wearing a blood-soaked apron. She was sitting on the floor, howling with grief. She looked to be in her mid-forties and had Shia tattoos on her face. When she saw us, she stood and grasped Specialist Piotr Sucholas by the shoulders and gave him a kiss on his cheek. Then she turned and laid her head on Sergeant Hall’s chest, as if to touch his heart.

  I stepped forward and said in broken Arabic “La tah khaf madrua? Am ree kee tabeeb. Weina mujahadeen kelp?” Do not be afraid. Injured? American doctor. Where are the mujahadeen dogs?

  She bent and kissed my wedding ring. “Baby madrua. Baby madrua.” The despair in her voice was washed away by the sound of a little girl’s laughter. When the giggling child came in from the kitchen and clutched her mother’s leg, we immediately realized she had Down’s syndrome. I was struck by the beauty of this child. Specialist Pedro Contreras, whose heart was always the biggest in our platoon, knelt by her side and gave her a butterscotch candy. Contreras loved Iraqi kids. He had a six-year-old nephew back home, and seeing these little ones made him ache for the boy.

  We didn’t see the injured baby at first—we still had a job to do. I moved upstairs, searching for an insurgent who had been shooting at our Bradleys. Halfway up, I discovered a smear of blood on the steps. Then I found a tuft of human hair. Another step up, I saw a tiny leg.