http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usnews/20041120/ts_usnews/destroyingittosaveit&cid=926&ncid=1473FALLUJAH, IRAQ--Once the sky stopped raining fire and the smoke from the tank cannons vanished, it was time to pick up the pieces. But where to start? What had been houses were now piles of brick and glass, demolished by 500-pound bombs. Whole city blocks were leveled, the rubble and mangled carcasses of cars pushed to the sides of the streets by the force of Abrams tanks. In crushing the Sunni insurgents who had laid claim to the streets, U.S. and Iraqi forces left Fallujah looking like a city ripped asunder by a hurricane. "It's in bad shape. I don't know what they have to come back to," said Sgt. 1st Class John Ryan of the 1st Infantry's Division Task Force 2-2, which flanked U.S. marines on the eastern side of the city during the fighting.
As muted sounds of gunfire crackled in the city last week, Ryan, along with the soldiers of Alpha Company, took shelter in a damaged house. Picking through debris, a soldier wondered out loud, "What is this place? Hell." In an upstairs bedroom, the unit's Iraqi translator took a ballpoint pen and wrote on a closet door in small, neat Arabic: "We're sorry about the destruction of this house and all the houses of this town. We came here to make peace and bring safety."
Bringing safety to restive Iraqi cities is an increasingly costly exercise for U.S. forces stretched thin by their pursuit of insurgents across the Sunni triangle. Even as Fallujah was declared "secure" (although not "safe"), the military deployed troops to counter insurgents in the cities of Mosul and Baquba. Rooting out a thousand or so insurgents in Fallujah required American commanders to commit some 10,000 troops, reinforced by punishing air power. The Army's 1st Infantry Division, lacking the number of soldiers necessary to search every house, employed its tanks, blasting heavy cannon rounds in answer to snipers' gun-and mortar fire to minimize time--and U.S. casualties. "You never want to destroy someone's city like this. These people have worked hard for what they have," said Staff Sgt. David Bellavia, of Task Force 2-2's Alpha Company. "But this was the only way to eliminate those fanatics."
Hit or miss. While some houses survived with little damage, whole swaths of the city were made virtually unlivable. On the eastern side of Fallujah, which suffered some of the heaviest fighting, the front of one house looked as if it had been sliced off with a bread knife. The upstairs bedroom remained intact, a small vase of plastic roses sitting undisturbed above a perfectly made bed while the guts of the house spilled into the front yard, burying a man caked with blood and dust.
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