Surviving Fallujah

For almost a week prior to the U.S. assault on Fallujah, Spc. John Bandy, a lanky, introspective twenty-three-year-old infantryman from West Little Rock, Arkansas, sat in a borrowed hooch on the outskirts of the city. He was nine months into a yearlong tour in Iraq with the Army's First Infantry Division, Task Force 2/2. Most of that time he'd spent in and around the 2/2's base, in the Sunni-dominated town of Muqdadiyah, eighty-five miles northeast of Baghdad. Muqdadiyah was relatively quiet, at least by Iraq standards. It had its share of mortar attacks and roadside bombings, as well as insurgents who attacked from the shadows. But with the exception of one two-day firefight back in April, there had been no real battles, nothing intensely dramatic, nothing Bandy could describe as "war." After a while, Bandy's platoon, which had lost no soldiers, began to feel untouchable. "Like we're winning," one of his buddies said.

Fallujah would be unlike anything U.S. troops in Iraq had experienced thus far: a straightforward battle between the Americans and more than 3,000 heavily armed enemy fighters. Bandy's commander, Lt. Col. Peter Newell, called Fallujah "as pure a fight of good vs. evil as we will probably face in our lifetime." Sitting there, day after day, Bandy was scared shitless.

Bandy loves the infantry but is hardly the stereotypical soldier. He spends more time playing Neil Young tunes on his acoustic guitar than playing Halo with his buddies, and he's the kind of guy you could easily imagine sitting in a college lecture hall somewhere — which in fact is where he'd been, preparing to study pre-law at the University of Arkansas before dropping out to join the Army in March 2002. He enlisted because he was broke and bored with school. After two years in the military, he describes the act of soldiering as being a "robot." Still, Bandy is one of the best soldiers in Alpha Company's First Platoon. One team leader, Sgt. Scott Bentley, says he wishes he had a squad full of Bandys.

Everything he'd ever done in the military, Bandy realized — the training missions and live-fire exercises, the patrols, raids and firefights his platoon had been in all across Iraq — had led him here to Camp Fallujah, the Marine base that would serve as the staging ground for the assault. Weird things happen to your head at times like these. Bandy ran through every disaster scenario he could think of, every "what if." He checked his gear. He tried to stop himself from throwing up. To calm down, he thought of something his squad leader always said about combat: "As long as you have bullets, you'll be fine."

By November 8th, when the 5,000 or so U.S. troops positioned outside Fallujah finally got the go-ahead, the mission had become a Shakespearean drama in Bandy's head, the culmination of his entire life, the enactment of his destiny — and it was going to be tragic.

About that he would be right, but not in the way he predicted.