The American Veterans Center’s Ninth Annual Conference was held from November 9-11, 2006. Exactly two years earlier, United States soldiers and Marines were locked in a brutal struggle with enemy insurgents for the Iraqi city of Fallujah. When the history of Iraqi Freedom is written, the second Battle of Fallujah—Operation Phantom Fury—will go down as the iconic battle of the war. Fallujah had become a magnet for Iraqi insurgents and foreign jihadists, eager to make martyrs of themselves, all while killing as many Americans as they could.

By the time the battle began on November 7, 2004, the city’s citizens had all but fled. Remaining were several thousand of the most fanatical jihadists in Iraq. They were fearless, vicious fighters, who had come to die. Many of them were high on drugs—liquid adrenaline, amphetamines, heroin, and 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, also known as “Agent Buzz”, a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This made the enemy fighters nearly impervious to pain, and able to fight on after sustaining wounds that would have taken down a normal man.

There were an estimated 39,000 buildings with 400,000 rooms in Fallujah, and it was the grim task of the American soldiers and Marines to root out the insurgents block by block, house by house, and room by room. They advanced through streets booby trapped with mines and improvised explosive devices, and faced an enemy as lethal as any our military has ever known.

At the November conference, four distinguished veterans of Operation Phantom Fury gathered to share their experiences. We are printing the transcript of this panel to demonstrate to our readers that the valor and heroism of the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy and Iwo Jima, who survived the bitter cold at the Chosin Reservoir, and who battled in the streets of Hue City lives on in the current generation of United States soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

Participating in the panel were former Army SSgt. David Bellavia, who single-handedly took out a house full of insurgents, for which he was subsequently nominated for the Medal of Honor and awarded the Silver Star, as well as former Marine Sgt. Timothy Connors, recipient of the Silver Star and veteran of twelve house fights in Fallujah—believed to be the most of any American serviceman. Also participating were Sgt. Matthew Ragan, a Marine Battalion Senior Intelligence Analyst and Sgt. Jeremy LaForce, veteran of 1st Battalion 8th Marines in Fallujah and currently NCO in charge of the Grounds Element at Marine Barracks in Washington, DC. The panel was moderated by American Veterans Center President James C. Roberts.

Jim Roberts: Sgt. Connors, can you begin by describing the preparations you made for the battle itself?

Timothy Connors: When we started I was stationed at Al-Asad air base and we were just doing counter-mortar ops going back and forth in the desert and outside cities. We really weren’t allowed inside cities at that time, and were just trying to stop mortar attacks on the base when we got the call that we were going to go into Fallujah. So everyone I was with was very excited. It’s an honor to fight; it’s an honor to be a part of something like this. For all of us to be together, to be as close as we were, and be able to do something, and actually know we are making some kind of difference was huge for us.

We went to Camp Fallujah where we trained every day for about a week until it was time to go in. The day of the actual invasion of the city we sat outside the city a few miles, and I watched in awe of the power we unloaded—missiles, air strikes, artillery rounds. The actual power that our country has prior to men going in is unbelievable. We all sat there in complete awe—you need to see it to believe it. The first wave went in and pushed probably about a block or two in, and then we ended up pushing past them to the Government Center.

David Bellavia: I was an Army Infantry squad leader at the time. I think there was a preconceived notion about the war in Iraq, leading up to it, that it was going to be a sterile war, with something like General Schwarzkopf with a laser pointer, showing bombs that blow up and you don’t really see the aftermath of it. When you look at a fight like Fallujah, you can train all day and all night to enter and clear a room, but training only gets you so far. It’s something you really can’t prepare for. You can train for the fundamentals over and over again but until you get into that first house fight, I think pretty much all that training goes out the window. It becomes a survival instinct. And one of the things this enemy has constantly taken for granted is the fight of this generation of Americans. I was really honored and privileged to fight with warriors from the Marine Corps and the 2/7 Infantry, in be what will truly be regarded as my generation’s Normandy. So when you see the absolute lethality, the professionalism of the United States military—Air Force, Navy Corpsmen, United States Marines, and Army infantry going toward one objective, at one time, it is incredible. For all of the brothers and sisters we lost that entire year, we knew that that the capital of all evil in Iraq was Fallujah. So we all had a staked interest in taking it out. I echo what Sgt. Connors said. It was a privilege to be a part of that offensive.