Reflections on Al-Anbar Province

Three years ago today, the Marine Corps infantry unit I was with, Charlie Company, Reinforced, Task Force 1-23, was tasked with collecting prisoners for questioning regarding the roadside bomb that killed two of our own in a small neighborhood northwest of the al-Anbar city of Hit, just upriver of Ramadi. At daybreak I dismounted from a Humvee with my fire-team and walked at the very front of a 140-Marine, company-sized column formation. The objective was a two-story house that had been the suspected vantagepoint of the bomb’s triggerman. We walked easily along as though it was a routine patrol but when we reached the objective we blitzed in and went to work.

The enemy got busy at once that day, blasting us with a roadside bomb that rattled our gourds but detonated ineffectually next to one of the tanks providing our security. Lance Cpl. Herring, hearing an intermittent buzzing noise at his feet, discovered four remaining bombs connected together that had happily failed to detonate because it was raining steadily by then.

A while later the bad guys walked mortars in on our position, hammered away at us with machine guns and made our six-hour wait for the Marine explosive ordnance disposal unit rather tense. Thankfully, we were able to suppress the enemy mortar fire. Enemy machine gun fire, while loud and persistent, seemed to be coming from quite a distance away and was inaccurate or at least not aimed near where I stood chatting with a few other corporals and sergeants, miserably shivering and smoking cigarettes that I was trying in vain to keep dry.

The now-deceased, formerly bloodthirsty terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi once said his little raggedy band of terrorists, which he called Tahwid and Jihad when I was in Iraq and then later changed to al-Qaida in Iraq, had "destroyed the myth of the Marine Corps." Like many bloodthirsty psychopaths, he was badly deluded, of course, and now al-Anbar Province seems on the cusp of being added to a long list of illustrious victories for the American military in general and the U.S. Marine Corps specifically.

Incidentally, the myth of Zarqawi as anything other than a prolific psychopath was destroyed by a video released by the Army a few months before his death that showed him in the desert sporting New Balance tennis shoes (which are all made in the USA) and fumbling ineptly with an M-249 light machine gun.

While the proverbial corpulent lady has admittedly not yet sung, as they say, things at the present time are looking so good for the overall Marine Corps objective in al-Anbar Province that the commandant has announced the Marines will turn over military and police control of al-Anbar in March. That is three years after the unit I was in left the country, four years after the Marines were first charged with pacifying al-Anbar Province, and not a moment too soon.

Reflecting on things in al-Anbar, I remember the doom and gloom about the American mission in the news at the time — before, during and after our deployment to Iraq. To listen to it and read it every day, one would have thought Zarqawi had been right on the money. As it has turned out, however, this is clearly not so.

Why have the Americans prevailed in Anbar? The answer is a dynamic one with many moving parts and one that reveals the flexibility of the U.S. Marine Corps and the Navy, Army and Air Force personnel who supported the mission there. Restraint, which is a concept Marines have had to work really hard on since the days of Tarawa and Hue City, won the day in al-Anbar. We were mortared every other day on average by enemy insurgents, but our mortar men rarely fired back. The victory in al-Anbar should resound sweetly in the soul of every American service member who ever served in the province, particularly those who acted with self-restraint in the face of frustrating and maddening situations.

Also, Marine Civil Action Platoons trained and lived 24/7 with Iraqi police and army recruits while infantrymen gritted their teeth and smiled and waved more often than they thought possible, and all the while a general sense of discipline prevailed, especially when it was time to do the shooting. We prevailed because of extraordinary intelligence and logistical support, excellent leadership, a clear focus, and a regard for the Iraqi residents’ input, even while those residents were extremely hostile.

By way of example, a few weeks before our Jan. 21 battle that cold morning in northwest Hit, we in second platoon provided security for a Marine civil affairs outfit that was assessing the needs of the local water treatment plant for the city when we were mortared by insurgents. We charged through the mortar barrage (twice, don’t ask) and swept through the northwest part of the city.

In the neighborhoods, scores of men had gathered in the streets in front of their houses and we patrolled past them as they scowled. I yelled some fighting words in English but calmed down after a bit and began smiling and greeting them as I walked by, saying "Peace be with you" in Arabic.

Those men must have thought we were crazy running through a mortar barrage and crazier still not to have shot up the neighborhood. Instead, we showed restraint. Since we didn’t find anyone to fight, we didn’t fire a shot and just walked on back to base, a little angry but unhurt besides having our bells rung a bit.

Perhaps most of all, I think persistence won the day in al-Anbar. Americans are a people of instantaneousness — we want our burgers in three minutes and our wars won in three days. Thankfully, some of the politicians in Washington seem to have learned lessons from Vietnam and are actually allowing the military leadership to guide policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. These leaders told us the mission would take time and patience, so we did what they told us to do and trusted their leadership, even while the media (with a few exceptions, notably Dan Murphy and the Christian Science Monitor) cried that the American mission there was doomed. Well la dee da, they were wrong.

Semper Fidelis.

Ben Christensen served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantryman in the al-Anbar Province of Iraq between August 27, 2004 and March 27, 2005. He currently teaches English at Los Fresnos High School. He can be reached at oltexan76@yahoo.com.