rose to an ominous pitch. The climate in Ramadi, which had seemed calm only days before, suddenly made us feel like a lone outpost on the edge of civilization. Ninety percent of the Iraqis who walked past the house Sierra Bravo used as its base scowled openly at us, and the two Iraqis employed by the team—an interpreter and a cook—got so nervous that they couldn’t sleep.
I wondered why we didn’t just evacuate until the battle for Fallujah ended, but Paul took his orders from the Pentagon, and that meant staying put. In a matter of hours, one-third of the population of Fallujah fled the city. The insurgents who remained were armed with RPGs, heavy machine guns, mortars, and antiaircraft cannons. Once American forces attacked Fallujah in earnest, all Central Iraq exploded into chaos. The Mahdi army declared itself and began attacking Coalition targets, and in Ramadi, a full-on Sunni rebellion sparked to fire. As chaos erupted around us, Paul moved the German engineer out of his private house and in with the protective team. Paul’s sources told him that many Iraqi national police officers had turned on the Coalition and he shouldn’t look to anyone in a police uniform for aid. With no other option, we hunkered down to wait out the fighting.
The Ramadi insurgents had a different idea. They’d known about the Sierra Bravo house for months, and they had no intention of giving us a pass. At two p.m. on April 8, a hundred Iraqi men gathered in the street in front of our house, and half of them carried either Kalashnikovs or American M4s donated by the Iraqi police. Inside the house, we had eight ShieldCorp contractors, two Iraqis (the cook and the interpreter, both males), the German VIP, and me—the embedded journalist. By Paul’s calculations, we had enough food and water to last three days and enough ammunition for about the same, depending on the intensity of any assault. If the insurgents brought up mortars or antiaircraft guns, of course, the equation would change radically.
Paul’s biggest regret was that our team’s Mamba had not been on site when the rebellion broke out. It was being serviced in Baghdad, which was two hours away on a good day. By the time Paul called Team Sierra Alpha to rescue us in the other Mamba, the insurgents had sealed off our section of Ramadi with roadblocks. A call to the Joint Task Force brought a similar answer and some free advice: Keep your heads down until we take Fallujah. Then we’ll escort you back to the Green Zone. The army didn’t seem to realize that regaining control of Fallujah might take more than a few days. (In the end it took six months.)
The first shots near our house went off around 4:00 p.m. It was sporadic fire, directed skyward, but it rattled the hell out of me. Paul ordered his men to hold fire. Ten minutes later, the first clips were emptied against the windows and front wall of our house. Concentrated bursts chipped away huge chunks of brick and stone and shredded the plywood that Paul’s men had used to barricade the windows. Paul was on the first floor with me. He shouted that everyone’s guns were “cleared hot,” but they should still hold their fire to the last possible moment. The ShieldCorp guys had cut gun ports in the plywood with a jigsaw, and they’d posted their three best snipers on the roof of the two-story house. But all obeyed Paul’s order and silently watched the insurgents blast the face of the building without letup. As the walls shuddered around me, I realized that unless a JSOC team dropped out of the sky in a couple of Black Hawks, this was the Alamo.
When Paul finally shouted the order to return fire, the Iraqis in the street began dropping three and four at a time. There’s nothing quite like watching the effect of automatic rifles in the hands of skilled soldiers with good fire discipline. Team Sierra Bravo cleared that street in less than two minutes. The problem—as we all knew—was that the Iraqis had virtually unlimited replacements in Ramadi, while we had none. We couldn’t even replenish our ammunition. I wasn’t firing, of course, but I was absolutely part of the group. We were going to live or die together.
After the street emptied out, Paul called a quick conference in the kitchen. So far as he knew, we had no hope of rescue. Sierra Alpha couldn’t