SAN DIEGO — Shirley Parrello knows that her youngest boy believed in his mission in Iraq. But as she watches Iraqi government forces try to retake the hard-won city of Fallujah from al-Qaeda-linked fighters, she can’t help wondering whether it was worth Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Parrello’s sacrifice.
“I’m starting to feel that his death was in vain,” said the West Milford, N.J., woman of her 19-year-old son, who died in an explosion Jan. 1, 2005. “I’m hoping that I’m wrong. But things aren’t looking good over there right now.”
The 2004 image of two charred American bodies hanging from a bridge as a jubilant crowd pelted them with shoes seared the city’s name into the American psyche. The brutal house-to-house battle to tame the Iraqi insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad cemented its place in U.S. military history.
Although many are disheartened at Fallujah’s recent fall to Islamist forces, others try to place it in the context of Iraq’s history of internal struggle since the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. They don’t see the reversal as permanent.
“I’m very disappointed right now, very frustrated,” said retired Marine Col. Mike Shupp, who commanded the regimental combat team that secured the city in late 2004. “But this is part of this long war, and this is just another fight, another battle in this long struggle against terrorism and oppression.”
Former scout sniper Earl J. Catagnus Jr. fought and bled in the taking of that ancient city on the banks of the Euphrates River. Now a military historian, Catagnus said he thinks the battle has taken on an almost disproportionate importance in the American mind.
“If you watch ‘NCIS’ or anything that has a Marine, … they always say, ‘Oh, I was in Fallujah,’ ” said Catagnus, a Purple Heart recipient, who left the military as a staff sergeant in 2006 and is now an assistant professor of history at Valley Forge Military Academy & College in Wayne, Pa. “For the new generation, it’s because everybody keeps mentioning it. And that is the battle that really made a warrior a warrior.”
In the annals of the Marine Corps, the battle for Fallujah looms large.
The fighting began in April 2004 after four security contractors from Blackwater USA were killed and the desecrated bodies of two were hung from a bridge. The so-called second battle of Fallujah, code-named Operation Phantom Fury, came seven months later.
For several bloody weeks, the Marines went house-to-house in what has been called some of the heaviest urban combat involving the Corps since the Battle of Hue City, Vietnam, in 1968.
About 100 Americans died and another 1,000 were wounded during the major fighting there, said historian Richard Lowry, adding that it’s difficult to overstate Fallujah’s importance in the Iraq war.
That is why the al-Qaeda takeover is such a bitter disappointment for many.
Former Marine Lance Cpl. Garrett Anderson’s unit lost 51 members in the city. When he considers whether the fighting was in vain, it turns his stomach.
“As a war fighter and Marine veteran of that battle, I feel that our job was to destroy our enemy. That was accomplished at the time and is why our dead will never be in vain. We won the day and the battle,” said the 28-year-old, who now studies filmmaking in Portland, Ore.
