Mitchell had made it to the bathroom, but he found both Kasal and Nicoll grievously injured.
The Marine Corps, which trains especially for this kind of warfare, hadn’t actually fought like this since the Battle of Hue in Vietnam. “As a result, things around - all across Iraq - began to deteriorate,” West, the author of “No True Glory,” a gritty front-line account that includes the first blow-by-blow description of the Hell House fight, told VICE News.Īs the war stretched into its second year, Washington’s plan to take Baghdad with columns of tanks had given way to grueling house-to-house fighting. service members lose their lives in that city, more than 600 service members wounded in action, and about 2,000 insurgents killed.īing West, an author and former Marine who embedded with Marine units during the battles, believes the delay enabled the violence to spread - and was perhaps a missed opportunity to find the leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would go on to found ISIS before being killed in a U.S. didn’t crack down on Fallujah’s insurgency again until November, a month that saw 82 U.S. By summer, military officials believed its leader was based in Fallujah but said the intelligence wasn’t strong enough to justify a second assault. The fighting in Fallujah was bookended by two battles, the first in April 2004. Drones didn’t become an alternative to troop deployments until the Obama administration, when their use in targeted strikes proliferated. Photo by Lucian Read.Īnd at a granular level, what Marines experienced in the Hell House represents a visceral style of combat that policy-makers have sought to avoid during the era of drone warfare. The Hell House veterans’ brutal accounts stand as a cautionary tale for how quickly wars can devolve, and a reminder of the hollowness of the Bush administration’s prediction that American troops would be greeted in Iraq as liberators.Ī jihadist fighter inside the Hell House. Fighters from around the region began streaming into Iraq, turning the country into a battleground where Islamic militants could vie for power among themselves and take on the United States. had invaded only the year before, but American service members were now facing an organized insurgency. Fallujah represented a shift in the Iraq War the U.S. military’s nine-month saga in Fallujah.įifteen years after the beginning of the battle of Fallujah, VICE News spoke with survivors of the Hell House.
13, 2004, in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah call the building where they fought for their lives the “Hell House.” The battle has become legendary within the Marine Corps, and the intensity of the fight made it a defining episode of the U.S.
The Marines who survived the events of Nov.
Mitchell’s arm is bandaged from a gunshot wound the day before. Mitchell, second from right, prepares to charge into the kill zone.
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