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Just after midnight on Oct. 31, the men of Bravo Company are huddling for a final pep talk. Tips of cigarettes, stoked by an unusually chill wind, glow in near pitch darkness as two dozen jeep engines roar nearby. Soon the troops will swoop down on a house in Fallujah's northern outskirts, where a Baathist named Taha and 30 comrades are holding a meeting, allegedly to plan roadside bombings. "Go out and grab Taha," says the company commander, Capt. Matthew Mobley. "He's gonna have a helluva treat for Halloween." Then the battalion's chaplain asks the men to join him in a short prayer. "Lord, there are bad guys out there," he says, bowing his head. "Just help us kill 'em."
"Don't get yourself killed" is the basic principle of action these days in Fallujah. Six months after President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations, 119 U.S. troops have been shot dead or blown up in a grinding guerrilla war. And the shadowy insurgency seems to be centered on this Baathist stronghold 40 miles west of Baghdad. Yet gathering hard intelligence about the resistance is a huge challenge for U.S. troops in a town where anti-American sentiment remains intense, and where those who cooperate become targets themselves. Last week a car bomb exploded a few yards from Fallujah's main police station, killing six people. Then Fallujah's mayor, who has good relations with U.S. occupiers, survived the latest of several attempts on his life when his office was bombed.
Tonight, however, the Americans may have caught a rare break. An informant has passed word about Taha's clandestine meeting, and Bravo Company plans to take him by surprise. The soldiers have extra motivation. The battalion took its first fatality just a week ago: Staff Sgt. Paul J. Johnson, 29, of Alpha Company, died instantly when an improvised explosive device blew up beside his jeep. The troops now refer to Iraqis as "Hajjis"--in the Arab world, this is a term of respect for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but within Bravo Company, it's meant as an epithet.
A half hour after midnight the men climb into their jeeps and speed down the darkened Baghdad expressway toward Fallujah with headlights off. The soldiers' hands tighten around their M-4 light machine guns, fitted with laser scopes and grenade launchers. Two Bradley tanks stand guard at a "cloverleaf" intersection that is a notorious ambush point. The troops peer through their night-vision goggles and sweep their rifles toward an overpass where Iraqi guerrillas sometimes lie in wait. "No Hajjis tonight," mutters one. Then they turn off the highway and roll down a dirt road toward their target--the illuminated villas of businessmen and former Baath Party officials.
Peering over the wall of Taha's house, one sergeant relays word that no cars are in the courtyard--the hoped-for meeting has apparently been canceled. But Taha may still be inside. As a Black Hawk helicopter hovers overhead, the troops kick in the gate and swarm inside the house. Moments later, they subdue a plump man with fleshy cheeks and a small mustache. Terrified women and children are led outside into the cold. Taha kneels on the floor of his kitchen, hands flex-cuffed behind his back, muttering protest as the soldiers ransack his cabinets and closets. "Shut your mouth!" says one young specialist, prodding the suspect with his gun barrel. "Bad Hajji!"
The soldiers find a mortar tube, a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher and two Kalashnikovs--confirmation, they say, that Taha was part of the resistance. "Sergeant Johnson's wife is going to see your face on TV," another soldier taunts the manacled prisoner, sliding a burlap bag over his face and wrapping duct tape tightly around his mouth.
As the troops march Taha into the back of a truck, a second platoon spies the inhabitants of an adjacent house attempting to flee, and places them under arrest. In a salon decorated with porcelain teacups and framed portraits of long-bearded Sunni clerics, they find five Kalashnikovs, RPGs, bags of large-caliber ammunition--and enough switches, wires, remote controls and detonators to build a dozen bomb triggers. Sgt. Khaled Dudin, a Palestinian-American attached to Bravo as an interpreter, sifts with mounting excitement through scattered files and documents: snapshots of the homeowner, Shaker Mahmoud Hussein, alongside Saddam; a resume detailing his career as a frogman and captain in the Iraqi Special Forces; copies of a militant Sunni Muslim magazine called Al Jihad, and an official letter from Saddam thanking him for his work building the Al Samoud middle-range missile. "The guy's a big shot," Dudin says. The men have accidentally snared a top electrical engineer on Saddam's prized guided-missile system--who, it appears, has been recruited to build sophisticated bomb triggers.
Back in camp at dawn, Bravo Company's mood is euphoric. There's a sense that they've netted one of Fallujah's big fish and possibly dealt the insurgency a serious blow. Yet the unplanned arrest also raises questions: Why, after six months in Fallujah, did nobody in military intelligence know that an architect of Saddam's missile systems was continuing to operate freely in his home? Why had he never been named as a suspect? Hussein's arrest was a momentary triumph--but also a reminder of how much can go on right under the Americans' noses.