Once Upon A Time In Iraq: Fallujah (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] 20 years ago the United States invaded Iraq but as Saddam Hussein's regime fell and the U.S declared victory major combat operations in Iraq have ended a violent Insurgency was taking root across the country it felt that we had tried the doors off a mental institution I mean what we didn't realize was the invasion wasn't the war the war was to come American forces would go on to confront the insurgents in what became the bloodiest battle of the war when I felt like we were surrounded there were shots coming from everywhere told by the Marines journalists and Iraqis who were there Target once upon a time in Iraq [Music] this program contains graphic imagery of War which may not be suitable for all audiences viewer discretion is advised foreign by the time I got the flu Joe you know I thought I'd seen it all thought I'd survived it all right no I mean God no um no no that was a whole different level of of violence [Music] Fallujah is 35 miles from Baghdad and by the spring of 2004 it was completely in the hands of uh the insurgents and Al Qaeda and it had become like a giant Car Bomb Factory they were just like making car bombs and like shipping them to Baghdad you know like like every day [Music] the story of falluja begins with four Blackwater contractors who are you know driving around Fallujah and they got ambushed the Iraqis gather around I'm just like having a party and they picked up what was left of their bodies and then they take them up to the bridge on the Euphrates and you know string them up [Music] it was like on television beamed around the world in the Iraqis are partying and they love it and they're making fools out of the Americans and they're hitting with their shoes and that was like you know that was like the end you know I mean it was what a what a freaking nightmare if our country shows any uncertainty or weakness in this decade the world will drift toward tragedy this is not going to happen on my watch it was November 2004. Bush won the election I almost immediately gave the order [Music] send the Marines into flusian like occupy Fallujah and destroy the Insurgency [Music] civilians mostly cleared out I mean certainly from what I witnessed it's very strange because usually when an army tax it wants to have surprise you're not going to announce when the attack begins with the Americans essentially did that they were like on the bullhorns we are going to attack the city will not be safe there's a good chance he will die if you stay [Music] foreign foreign foreign [Applause] martial arts [Music] yes why are we whispering [Music] huh [Music] oh you want to get me pictures too smile come on smile your own Canon camera Billy was born on November the 24th 1981. he just he sort of popped out I was in labor for 53 painful hours with Sabrina so this this one was like a cakewalk I was excited he was excited because it was a boy man always wants a boy carry on the namesake I say he's mom's favorite she'll say no but he was he was very outgoing very busy he always looked for adventure he was always pushing his limits he definitely wasn't College material you know he struggled in school and that would have been good for him you know to go into the Marines Miller was a great guy he was someone that can talk to you you know without the typical Marine yelling and calling an idiot you know you know I was really scrawny I was 130 pounds and I thought that I was just going to become tough I was one of the first people from my high school to joined the Marine Corps and it was really great [Applause] I was proud of the fact that this is what he wanted to do I was also very scared when he joined it was just a peaceful Little World it wasn't a peaceful little world anymore so yeah just over a week after 9 11 when he when he graduated from boot camp after he graduated and he left us he went to Spain he came home December 2003 and we surprised my parents Billy in that box no and I said yeah it's Billy in that box she said no mother I said did y'all buy me a dog or some animal because I don't want any animals no mother we didn't buy you any animals but you need to open it up now [Music] it was probably her best Christmas ever and her last Christmas at that time first Battalion 8th Marines took over an area called Camp Fallujah which was probably three miles outside the city Billy Miller was in the first Battalion at the Marines with us and Dexter filkins reported to my platoon also I remember thinking what are the New York Times here but it's an indicator something big was happening from a journalistic point of view war is kind of the The Human Condition s people have asked me before like were you addicted to the violence are we addicted to the adrenaline and like it's like no um not at all you know I just wanted to help other people understand what was happening so that they could make decisions about it was that time when you thought you had pushed it too far definitely um more than once I felt that influjah I definitely felt that influjah there was another reporter with him his name was Ashley Gilbertson actually it's like a kid he was like so young but he's immensely talented and uh really fearless and very enterprising so uh you know we got along really well working with Dexter was amazing there was almost nowhere that he wouldn't go and the same went for me no journalist likes to embed with military it's too confining you know imagine you're walking through an Iraqi Village and you're you know I'm a journalist I want to know what's going on inside people's heads in their hearts like what are you feeling over there um you are Rockies um and you're standing with a group of 19 year old Americans with giant guns um and you ask an Iraqi guy hey you know how's it going you're not going to get a real answer but what happened in Iraq was it became essentially impossible to work unless you embedded with the military for the simple reason that you would get killed if you could picture Young Buck Warriors we're very tribal and anybody who's not in our tribe is basically the enemy as far as we're concerned you know just to varying degrees sure enough when the Press starts showing up we didn't like them turns out they're sleeping in our Squad Bay with us and when I first saw Ashley he had one of those sleep things that covers your eyes like a sleep mask it's got long curly hair I was just like really you know it was this guy and why is he even here and you see Dexter Dexter looks like a frat boy who just woke up from the biggest party ever you know he just kind of just blown away look on his face all the time so we were all just like super judgy and like you know oh look at these guys you know I'm not talking to them standing on a train model of our battle space whenever like something changes or there's gonna be like a significant operation the military gets a briefing from a legal officer who will tell you essentially here are your Rules of Engagement which is to say here's when you can pull the trigger um here's when you can't and I had never been invited into one of those I think they brought us in because they thought we're going to be killing a lot of people so we're gonna want the reporters uh to kind of understand what the rules are here so normally Rules of Engagement would be don't shoot unless you're being shot at it's a general conflict rule of Engagement these ones were really different the rules were like dialed really far back like really loose you know guy picks up a cell phone you can kill him if you know you fire like one warning shot at a car if it doesn't if it doesn't stop coming at you you can kill you were able to engage anybody within the city because we were we had instructors civilians to get out of the city as long as you felt there was a threat you can engage how you doing how you doing soldiers how you doing sailors [Applause] come by okay and I'm gonna tell you one thing it is an honor for me to be able to serve with each and every one of you hard charges I mean I look out here and it's no different than when we took the damn War over Korea [Music] I'll go to Fallujah right now after hearing that speech I mean this stuff was uh it was motivating but it's disheartening the same time looking at it now and you know one part they don't show is oftentimes they start off with the speech and saying I want you to look to your brothers from you know the left and the right and behind you and realize that some of them aren't going to make it out of there and you don't really look right like it's part of a speech and you're just sitting there like okay yeah we get it and I just watched that video now and I can point out everyone that was killed and they were almost in every clip kick some butt all right you're always worried about your child but knowing that he's in a war zone is a different kind of worry but it's not a worry that you can at least I couldn't allow myself to overwhelm me being a police officer for 32 years you have to live every day at a time as you live it and you can't worry about it if you worry yourself it'll just wear you sick the order had come down to attack a trip carrier's doors opened we all got out and as we were assembling the Open Fire it was just like a symphony and then the the voices came over from the mosques which which were in Arabic come to the fight you know come defend the city and there were so many mosques and so many loudspeakers the intensity of their voices they were screaming into the loudspeakers um God is great God is great like come to the fight um they're here the Americans are here [Applause] I can see the tracers coming out okay they're shooting at us just kind of spraying machine gun fire at us you know and it felt a lot like I don't know if you've ever seen Star Wars where they're attacking the Death Star where they're flying through this trench and there's like laser guns just shooting at them all over the place it never looks or feels like what you imagine but in this case it looked remarkably like a movie I was on the ground and I was kind of looking up and I thought you know that looks like a bottle rocket you know it looks like a fireworks from Fourth of July and then from out of nowhere we hear these pops above our head and you look up and it's these shells that have exploded and it's a it's like an octopus and tentacles coming down from the sky [Music] this bright white light with a trail on it like a comet comes sailing in and then it explodes right above us and and these flaming sort of chunks of rock or coming off and and they were people were just scrambling and like trying not to get hit and and you know what the hell is that I got hit in the back in my pack and it just burned right through my pack uh it burned through my sleeping bag as I learned later it was phosphorus white phosphorus and those are our meaning American rounds I mean those were fired by American guys like at what for what uh at home like I had no idea we go from there still on this road like 200 meters into Fallujah we're right on the edge of the city and it's a big city and then they get to this road that they called phase line Cafe and it's this big East-West road that crosses Fallujah and just to get to that road it took them all morning hours and hours of fighting like every step of the way they have to fight spread out spoilers spread them out like you're running down the street and you can hear the bullets ricocheting around you like bouncing off the street coming up the concrete and then it stops and you you get up to this area the fire was coming from and there's the marine scout team up there and three dead insurgents on the road [Music] [Applause] [Music] first house we cleared was a little bit of chaos a lot of adrenaline rushing fortunately there was no uncertness in that house but it wasn't exactly how we planned there was a lot of people in there were congested and it's not how we do things but we wanted to make entry and Fallujah the safest place you can be is inside a cleared house and now we're in this house on a corner and they had to cross this road to get to the cultural what they were calling the cultural center this big like five-story four-story building on the other side of the street and so one of the lieutenants stands at the gate and says all right go first platoon go these 40 guys like stacked stream out and just run across this street and then it begins all of this gunfire starts a guy falls on the street it's Circle platoon goes out some guys dragged this guy out of the street and another guy gets dropped [Music] and then I'm with this last platoon sitting in the house and I remember seeing a Dexter like a really I don't know if I can do this like you're running straight into gunfire and I don't remember what he said but I remember them just shouting like the platoon go go go so I watched everybody go out and then just ran and like they say time slows down but it really it really does like you can feel every step that you're taking you can see everything taking place in slow motion around you I saw so many bodies and I saw so many marines go down but I never saw an insurgent like I never saw an Insurgent alive with a gun but there were ghosts they Blended in with this environment so perfectly oh yeah you got him hey he's wounded in between these two houses he's done our mission was to clear the city of insurgents it's not right to use the term Seek and Destroy but it was a full-on frontal assault into the city of Fallujah and you don't stop until everybody stops shooting [Music] when you have 8 000 of them moving into a town like that with all their Firepower it's a terrifying Force just a massive killing machine Target thank you foreign Republic an ism is [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign Masjid tonight [Music] foreign idea [Music] [Music] what language is [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] with the Marines for several days and we were getting shot at like every step of the way when she's not getting shot at it all changes when she's not getting shot out and don't run for the hills then you start building trust really quickly because they realize and I heard this from multiple different military units they think that the way we work as journalists is we have a template an idea of what they're doing and we are going out there to show how bad they are but once you cross the wire with them then they start saying ah okay like you're here to see how it really is and I think that as the war dragged on the Marines they realize nobody gave what they were doing in Iraq so we would come out and actually tell stories their stories I mean these guys were like in the thick of it terrified just like we were we'd been trained for it we have weapons to defend ourselves and body armor and you know that type of stuff those guys were just thrown right into it like go get them you know and go tell the story Ashley and I just it was so hard trying to file our stuff you know like I'm trying to write my story and Ashley is trying to file his pictures and I was always looking for electricity so I remember like the first day I don't know what I was thinking but I ran into the street because there was a car out there and uh you know pulled the lid up and tried to put my little battery Clips on the car battery I don't want to think about that because there were snipers everywhere I remember thinking like this dude is insane that is crazy like he's in the middle of like so many guys have just been shot on this exact Corner the insurgents are everywhere and Dex is out there trying to pull a car battery out of a burnt out of course the battery doesn't work because it's a bombed burnt out car but like it it was a classic Dexter like he will fail no matter what foreign I killed this deer in Centerville Texas and it was a real long shot 17 steps 17 steps yep why don't you go hunting anymore and fishing anymore like you used to I don't know it just doesn't do anything for me anymore and after Billy died I just lost a lot of get up and go this is a Corsican Ram Billy killed that one and Billy killed this one here really look at him again Billy foreign Town it looks like a movie set and so there's these very defined borders and then after those borders it's just desert and so we went from the top of the city all the way to the bottom one end to the other and we got to the we got to the end and like the street ended and then the desert started Fallujah is the city of mosques it's called the city of mosques and the insurgents knew that the Americans couldn't go into the mosque so they would use them to stage and attack the Marines because they knew they had more safety there than they did in a regular place so this mask just short of the Southern edge of Fallujah a tank fired a Shell through the minaret they apparently killed the Insurgent who was inside and I said I've got to go and see that I needed a photograph as evidence as a reporter to show that these masks were being used as staging grounds a picture of a dead Insurgent inside a minaret showed that without question these spaces were being violated and would therefore no longer protected by the Geneva Convention so we went to the captain and said hey man can you please you know radio everybody tell them that we're going to be running up the street to this mosque and just tell everyone not to shoot us this time Reed said no if you want to go it's time you've got to go with the squad because it's too dangerous out there and I said no I've got a policy again like this non-intervention policy where like stuff shouldn't happen on account of me so the captain said well you can't go and I said well I need the picture Dexter and I agreed to it that we would go with the squad I was chosen to lead a patrol along with my lieutenant out down to this minaret that was 400 meters away maybe they had this dead sniper in it what did you think about doing this job I was angry I did not want to do it in the first place because we were pretty much done with the city so for me it was like you know that one last Patrol thing and I'm just like I don't want to do this you know it's just so you could take a picture and all right if if that's the job and that's the mission then that's what I'll do but I I don't agree with this at all I remember the moment I thought maybe this isn't a good idea we were walking towards the minaret and you know Fallujah had been so violent so destructive smoke and ruin everywhere and we were walking in the middle rep for the first time in a week it was quiet it was nothing if you could picture you kind of enter a compound and the main mosque is kind of tier direct front and left the minaret is to your direct front and right and there's two groups of auxiliary buildings so we clear out these auxiliary buildings we clear out the mask and the last building left is the minaret so we're going to go clear the minaret see if we can get up and find this sniper dead sniper [Music] and when we got to the base of the minaret lance corporal Billy Miller was stacked at the door and he said hey Dominguez come stack on me stack means get behind me and let's go up there together Ashley Gilbertson was there and with his Australian voice he was trying to tell us hey you stayed back I'm just gonna go run up there and take a quick picture I wanted to get the picture and just leave get out of there as soon as we could so that nothing happened before we went there uh Marine stopped me and said I I've got to go ahead and clear it so that was last call for William Miller he went up first he was followed by Christian Dominguez than me and Dexter was apparently behind me I didn't turn around to see [Music] itself the minaret was scary it was dark the stairs were creaky you know the bricks were it just seemed like the whole thing was going to fall apart anyway climbing and it's just the sound of rubble crunching concrete under our feet am I climbing there was a whole bunch of rubble on these stairs and it was such a confined area I mean it wasn't much wider than this chair and we're walking up there and the steps were pretty big and that Billy Miller was going up and he was almost a full step ahead of me and we kept tripping and he almost said something he almost said unjust as you start to get a little bit of light threw a hole in the wall from where the tank show went through and killed this insurgent and I'm thinking this is almost over get my picture and get out then there was a gunshot maybe multiple gunshots and I felt water all over me you know immediately I thought somebody released their rifle by accident and shot these camelbacks that they all wear it's like these backpacks filled with like little backpacks filled with water then I heard Dominguez screaming [Music] we basically walked into this guy's muzzle I saw a guy's hand laying down and he was laying down the stairs and we basically walked right into his gun he shot Miller in the face and then Miller's body kind of turned and then he shot at this point Miller kind of fell down and I was standing in just below Miller and the shots this guy was lighting up the wall shooting relentlessly and the Rocks were exploding in my face and it was so loud because of how confined the area was and then I just remember like all of us starting to run down these stairs and I remember falling and just rolling we rolled out of this minaret and I looked down at my camera and my hands and it wasn't water it was blood and brain and it was Billy like just all over me I actually was just like in a complete State of Shock uh he I just remember him sitting there uh kind of mumbling to himself uh his helmet was on crooked and he was just saying my fault my fault my fault my fault I couldn't breathe and Sam Williams was down there and he said Dominguez what happened and out of some I remember my hearing my voice was weird and saying Miller's dead and the look of confusion on his face like what everybody came running out of the building except Billy so obviously we were going back in to get him I don't care about that picture or anything at this point we've got to get Billy out of here we've got to get our wounded out of here [Applause] [Music] and it was a Relentless effort to go up there and retrieve Miller's body and take out the threat that was up there they tried to go up there a couple times um and on like the second or third time they were able to go up there and get his body out they dragged Billy out they put him under a stretcher and I remember thinking don't look you can't look he said you know please tell me he's not there please tell me please tell me please tell me he's not there I mean so it felt me to tell him that that he was I had stashed Dexter and Ashley in the mosque because it was the most secure building I tell the lieutenant okay we're getting out of here the mission's over we're going home I've got Billy's weapon in my hand and my weapon is slung so I Come Around the Corner into the mosque and I was like you're going to take this and hold it I said and when I count to three you and you are going to run out this door and stay right behind me and we ran down this street back to the foam base the second we started running machine gun open fire from insurgents behind us and at that point it felt like we were surrounded if there were shots coming from everywhere we had been there for a little bit too long and I remember our tactics not living up to what they should have been at that moment and we kind of lost a little bit of discipline and we made it back to the base nobody else was shot Sam told us that this is what happens in war that it wasn't our fault we went to the lieutenant I said well I'm sorry it's my fault I know he said yeah it's your fault and then I called my editor and said I have to get out of here [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] America okay Mustafa foreign [Music] [Music] to their patriarch President George H.W bush and now let future Generations understand the burden and the blessings of freedom it means that all the people in this country that don't understand what the men and women are dying for they need to understand it my son was one of the ones who didn't come back but in some ways he's better off because he doesn't have to live with the guilt that so many of them are living with because they did come back and their buddies didn't I know that Ashley has a lot of guilt but he was doing what he was supposed to do and Billy was doing his job he loved being a marine he really really did I waited so long I was so scared to call the Miller family I thought that they would be understandably really angry with me So eventually I called and saw them Lewis and Susie well absolutely beautiful like amazing people I mean I still love talking to Susie emailing with her calling her and I wish it was easier than it is but I feel like I owe her son [Music] thank you at the time we took over the city and we did what our mission told us to do on paper is a success [Music] for me it's difficult because I hold on to my friends and the ones that were killed in our memories and you look at back at the instability of what's going on in Fallujah I'll take my friends back [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you are [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] for more on this and other Frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org Frontline [Music] front lines once upon a time in Iraq Fallujah is available on Amazon Prime video thank you [Music]

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 1,574,712

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Id: 9qfratsEO_k

Length: 53min 24sec (3204 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023