A cat ate the face of the corpse

Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got

Fallujah

Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding it like this?’ he mused. ‘Oh, man.’ Every window in the cinder-block house was shattered. A 155mm shell had blown a large hole through the roof. The front gate had been crushed by a Bradley fighting vehicle and every door kicked in. Bags and suitcases left by the fleeing family had been emptied, their contents strewn across the dining-room floor and mixed with empty packets from MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) boxes, the staple diet of the troops. Only two things hung on the bullet-pocked wall — a pink Barbie plate and a photograph of a mournful-looking man with a thick moustache.

Specialist Jesse Flannery, a hefty New Englander, flipped through a copy of an American Iron motorcycle magazine he had found in a cupboard and grumbled about how bad the MRE version of clam chowder was. In the next door room, the rest of 3rd Platoon of Alpha Company, known as the Terminators, frisbeed CDs at each other and joked about the platoon member who had lost a testicle to a piece of shrapnel.

There was a dispute about who had defecated in an iron bath outside and what disease he might have been afflicted with. Everyone reeked. ‘If you spilled 10 bottles of piss on me I’d probably smell better than I do now,’ said one soldier, with only slight exaggeration. ‘Probably some of the civilians will become insurgents because of what has happened,’ said Specialist Ohle, from Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. He had just been shooting stray dogs from the roof as a way of zeroing his M-16 rifle.