![]() Historian Richard Lowry, who interviewed nearly 200 veterans of the Iraq battle, likens it to "a thousand SWAT teams going through the city, clearing criminals out." The so-called second battle of Falluja - code-named Operation Phantom Fury - came seven months later.įor several bloody weeks, the Marines went house-to-house in what has been called some of the heaviest urban combat involving the Corps since the Battle of Hue City, Vietnam, in 1968. The fighting there began in April 2004 after four security contractors from Blackwater USA were killed and the desecrated bodies of two were hung from a bridge. In the annals of the Marine Corps, the battle for Falluja looms large. Photograph: Stefan Zaklin /EPA Photograph: Stefan Zaklin/EPA US soldiers return to their barracks at a military base outside Falluja, Iraq in 2004. that it becomes turned into the 'lost cause,' the Vietnam War syndrome." Falluja: the battle that made a warrior a warrior And that is the battle that really made a warrior a warrior. It's just for us as Americans, because we've elevated that battle to such high standards. ![]() "For the new generation, it's because everybody keeps mentioning it. they always say, 'Oh, I was in Falluja,'" says the Purple Heart recipient, who left the military as a staff sergeant in 2006 and is now an assistant professor of history at Valley Forge Military Academy & College in Wayne, Pennsylvania. "If you watch 'NCIS' or anything that has a Marine. Now a military historian, Catagnus feels the battle has taken on an almost disproportionate importance in the American mind. "But this is part of this long war, and this is just another fight, another battle in this long struggle against terrorism and oppression."įormer scout sniper Earl J Catagnus Jr fought and bled in the taking of that ancient city on the banks of the Euphrates River. "I'm very disappointed right now, very frustrated," says retired Marine Col Mike Shupp, who commanded the regimental combat team that secured the city in late 2004. ![]() And they don't see the reversal as permanent. The brutal house-to-house battle to tame the Iraqi insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad cemented its place in US military history.īut while many are disheartened at Falluja's recent fall to Islamist forces, others try to place it in the context of Iraq's history of internal struggle since the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. The 2004 image of two charred American bodies hanging from a bridge as a jubilant crowd pelted them with shoes seared the city's name into the American psyche. ![]()
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