Original subtitles

There was an SUV full of four Blackwater contractors who were,

you know, driving around Fallujah.

And they got ambushed.

SHOUTING AND CHEERING

The Iraqis gathered round, just like having a party.

SHOUTING CAR HORNS BLARING

Then they picked up what was left of the bodies and they take 'em

up to the bridge on the Euphrates and, you know, string 'em up.

It was like on television, beamed around the world

and the Iraqis are partying, and they love it

and they're making fools out of the Americans,

they're hitting them with their shoes.

And that was like... That was like the end, you know.

I mean, it was, what a frigging nightmare.

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended...

It had been a year since George Bush had claimed the Iraq war was won.

..and our allies have prevailed.

But the story was far from over.

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein,

the old regime lost its grip on power...

..but it was not about to give up without a fight.

Terrorists and regime remnants have been attacking our forces

and our forces have been going in and killing them.

America found itself struggling to keep control

as a violent insurgency took hold across the country.

And there was worse to come.

NEWS REPORT: London's morning papers

are calling it a torture scandal, shocking pictures...

Another bad news day for America in the Arab world.

The battle to win hearts and minds had failed.

The US Army was feeling the strain.

I wanted to ask about the convoy campaign and to find out...

HE BREATHES HEAVILY

..if you can confirm that yest...

Get him out of the room, it's really embarrassing.

The politicians have had their say about the Iraq war.

I was going to start off tonight telling some self-deprecating jokes,

then I couldn't think of any mistakes I had made to be

self-deprecating about.

In this series, civilians, journalists

and soldiers tell their personal stories of the 2003 invasion

and how the years of chaos that followed changed the world for ever.

Who said that thing, was it Churchill?

Said the thing, like you never feel so alive...

..as when you are being shot at or when you're...

Something like that, such bullshit.

You know, call me or Dexter what you want,

but going into risky situations and inviting danger,

like almost inviting danger,

certainly wasn't some, like, thrill-seeking mission.

There were moments where both of us were scared shitless, erm,

and that wasn't the point of the work.

It was to try to find a story that we felt compelled that needed

to be told.

Ashley Gilbertson came to Iraq as a freelance photographer

at the start of the war.

After a photograph he took of an American soldier

in one of Saddam's palaces was published in Time magazine,

he began working with Dexter Filkins,

a journalist attached to the New York Times.

Working with Dexter was amazing.

There was almost nowhere that he wouldn't go

and the same went for me.

What gets me out of bed in the morning and what makes me continue

to work is this absolute fury that I have that things are wrong.

You know, he was like a kid. He was like so young.

Erm, you know, I thought, huh, you know.

But he's immensely talented and really fearless

and very enterprising so we got along really well.

In moments of extreme chaos, a bomb would go off,

gunfire,

I think my blood pressure goes down, not up,

and I think very, very clearly about what I need to do.

Was there a time when you thought you had pushed it too far?

Definitely. Erm,

more than once, erm, I felt that.

I felt that in Fallujah.

I definitely felt that in Fallujah.

There's so much that happened there,

like I've got 2,500 pictures or something from that week.

I barely remember taking any of them.

Up until November 2004, I'd been able to cover Iraq

as somebody else's war, but in Fallujah,

it turned into not just a war that I was covering,

it turned into something that I was involved in.

I am here today because another man died.

A year into the war, Fallujah, 40 miles outside Baghdad,

was a hotbed of anti-American insurgency.

Fallujah was bad, like from the beginning.

It just like wasn't a nice place to go if you were American.

It had become like a giant car bomb factory.

They were just like making car bombs and shipping them to Baghdad,

you know, like every day.

Go, go home! Go, go home!

The place was a powder keg.

Whether you were being robbed, whether you were being held up by

armed bandits, whether somebody was trying to kidnap you,

whether they were trying to kill you,

or they were trying to get under your car to do who knows what.

In Fallujah, the Americans were no longer just facing

a home-grown Iraqi resistance.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

Since the war began, foreign Islamic extremists had begun

entering Iraq, bringing with them a jihadist mentality.

Led by a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,

they would organise themselves into Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Zarqawi was a bloodthirsty psychopath

but, man, he knew had to run a group like Al-Qaeda.

He set up this kind of a perfect organism.

Very few people who were in Al-Qaeda

knew other people who were in Al-Qaeda.

You could kill individual parts of it,

but the rest of it would just continue.

He kind of turned this thing loose, this perfect organism,

on Iraq and it was just a gigantic killing machine.

By November 2004,

al-Zarqawi had taken control of the city of Fallujah.

For the Americans,

an Al-Qaeda base just 40 miles from Baghdad was a propaganda disaster.

If our country shows any uncertainty or weakness

in this decade, the world will drift towards tragedy.

This is not going to happen on my watch.

CHEERING

Buoyed up by an election victory,

the Bush administration began making preparations

for a full frontal attack on Fallujah.

Civilians mostly cleared out,

I mean, certainly from what I witnessed.

It's very strange because usually when an army attacks,

it wants to have surprise.

You're not going to announce when the attack begins.

The Americans essentially did that.

They were like, on the bullhorns, we are going to attack.

The city will not be safe.

There's a good chance you will die if you stay.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN ARABIC

BOYS SHOUT

TRANSLATION:

Nidhal Abed, a young wife and mother,

was one of 50,000 citizens who didn't leave Fallujah.

Like many other working-class families, hers was too poor to go.

CHEERING

Action!

What do you want me to do?

..admire my dress? Yeah.

Do you like my dress? Yes.

Why are we whispering?

Billy's still asleep.

Billy!

Did you have a good night? Huh?

Oh. Oh, you want to get in the pictures too?

Smile. Come on, smile.

You're on candid camera.

Billy was born on November the 24th, 1981.

He just sort of popped out.

I was in labour for 53 painful hours with Sabrina

so this one was like a cakewalk.

I was excited. He was excited because it was a boy.

A man always wants a boy, carry on the namesake.

I think he's Mom's favourite. She'll say no, but...he was.

Hi!

He was very outgoing, very busy.

He always looked for adventure.

He was always pushing his limits.

He definitely wasn't college material.

You know, he struggled in school

and that would have been good for him, you know,

to go into the Marines.

Miller was a great guy.

He was someone that could talk to you without the typical marine

yelling and calling you an idiot, you know.

Christian Dominguez joined the same company of Marines as Billy Miller.

I was really scrawny.

I was 130lbs and I thought that I was just going to become tough.

I was one of the first people from my high school

to join the Marine Corps and it was really great.

MILITARY MUSIC PLAYS

APPLAUSE

I was proud of the fact that this was what he wanted to do.

I was also very scared.

When he joined, it was just a peaceful little world.

It wasn't a peaceful little world any more so... Yeah.

..just over a week after 9/11 when he graduated from Boot Camp.

After he graduated and he left us, he went to Spain.

He came home December 2003 and we surprised my parents.

Is Billy in that box? No.

And I said, "Is Billy in that box?"

She said, "No, Mother."

I said, "Did y'all buy me a dog or some animal

"because I don't want any animals?"

"No, Mother, we didn't buy you any animals

"but you need to open it up now."

SHE SQUEALS HAPPILY

It was probably her best Christmas ever and her last Christmas...

..with him.

In October 2004, Billy Miller

and Christian Dominguez were deployed with

the 1/8 Marine Battalion,

just outside Fallujah, to prepare for the assault on the city.

Accompanying them would be Ashley Gilbertson and Dexter Filkins,

representing the New York Times.

No journalist likes to embed with military, it's too confining.

You know, imagine you're walking through an Iraqi village.

You know, I'm a journalist,

I want to know what's going on inside people's heads,

in their hearts, like what are you feeling over there, you Iraqis?

Um, and you're standing with a group

of 19-year-old Americans with giant guns.

And you ask an Iraqi guy, "Hey," you know, "How's it going?"

You're not going to get a real answer.

But what happened in Iraq was it became essentially impossible

to work unless you embedded with the military

for the simple reason that you would get killed.

If you could picture young buck warriors, we're very tribal.

And anybody's who's not in our tribe is basically the enemy

as far as we're concerned, you know, just to varying degrees.

Sam Williams was Sergeant of 1/8 Bravo Company.

Sure enough, when the press starts showing up, we didn't like 'em.

Turns out they're sleeping in our squad bay with us.

And when I first saw Ashley, he had one of those...

..sleep things that covers your eyes, like a sleep mask?

He's got long curly hair.

I was just, like, "Really?"

You know, "Who's this guy, and why is he even here?"

And you see Dexter, Dexter looks like a frat boy

who just woke up from the biggest party ever, you know?

Just kind of this blown-away look on his face all the time.

So we were all just, like, super judgy,

and like, "Look at these guys. I'm not talking to them."

You see right here, I'm standing on a model of our battle space.

Whenever, like, something changes

or there's gonna be, like, a significant operation,

the military gets a briefing from a legal officer

who will tell you, essentially, "Here are your rules of engagement,"

which is to say, "Here's when you can pull the trigger.

"Here's when you can't." And...

..I had never been invited into one of those.

I think they brought us in because they thought,

"We're going to be killing a lot of people,

"so we're going to want the reporters

"to kind of understand what the rules are here."

So normally rules of engagement

would be, "Don't shoot unless you're being shot at."

That's a general conflict rule of engagement.

These ones were really different.

The rules were like...

..dialled really far back. Like, really loose, you know?

Guy picks up a cellphone, you can kill him.

If, you know, if you fire one warning shot at a car,

if it doesn't stop coming at you...

..you can kill.

The expectation was, and I think it was correct,

"We're going in to attack

"and anybody who resists us is going to be an enemy.

"It's not going to be a civilian, because the civilians are gone."

Hey, how you doing?

THEY SHOUT

How you doing, soldiers?

THEY SHOUT

How you doing, sailors?

THEY SHOUT

RECORDING: This is a whole can of whoop-butt, all combined, OK?

And I'm going to tell you one thing. It is an honour

for me to be able to serve with each and every one of you hard chargers.

I mean, I look out here and it's no different than when we took...

..the damn war over in Korea.

We raised the flag in Iwo Jima. It's no different.

I'd go to Fallujah right now after hearing that speech.

I mean, this stuff was... It was motivating.

But it's disheartening, at the same time, looking at it now.

And, you know, one part they don't show is,

oftentimes they start off with the speech and saying,

"I want you to look to your brothers

"to the left and the right, and behind you, and realise that

"some of them aren't going to make it out of there."

And you don't really look, right?

Like, it's part of a speech,

and you're just sitting there like, "OK, yeah, we get it."

And I just watch that video now and I can point out

everyone that was killed.

And they were almost in every clip.

Kick some butt. All right?

THEY SHOUT

You're always worried about your child,

but knowing that he's in a war zone

is a different kind of worry.

But it's not a worry that you can...

At least, I couldn't allow, myself, to overwhelm me.

Being a police officer for 32 years,

you have to live every day at a time, as you live it.

And you can't worry about it.

If you worry yourself, it'll just worry you sick.

After a month of waiting, on the 7th of November, 2004,

1/8 Bravo Company were given the order to move into Fallujah.

As we were assembling, they opened fire.

GUNFIRE

It was just...like a symphony.

Then the voices came over from the mosques, which were...

..in Arabic, "Come to the fight." You know, "Come. Defend the city."

And there were so many mosques and so many loudspeakers,

the intensity of their voices -

they were screaming into the loudspeakers.

Um, "God is great, God is great," like, "Come to the fight."

Um, "They're here. The Americans are here."

OVERLAPPING VOICES

I could see the tracers coming out.

OK. They're shooting at us,

just kind of spraying machine-gun fire at us.

You know, and it felt a lot like, if you've ever seen Star Wars,

where they're attacking the Death Star,

where they're flying through this trench

and there's, like, laser guns just shooting at them

from all over the place.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

It never looks or feels like what you imagine.

But in this case, it looked remarkably like a movie.

I was on the ground and I was kind of looking up

and I thought, you know, "That looks like a bottle rocket."

You know, it looks like fireworks from 4th of July.

And then from out of nowhere...

..we hear these pops above our head.

And you look up, and it's these shells that have exploded,

and it's like an octopus and tentacles coming down from the sky.

This bright white light,

with a trail on it, like a comet,

comes sailing in and then it explodes right above us.

And... And these flaming sort of chunks of rock

were coming off, and they were...

People were just scrambling and, like, trying not to get hit,

and, you know, "What the hell is that?"

I got hit in the back, in my pack,

and it just burned right through my pack.

It burned through my sleeping bag.

As I learned later, it was phosphorous, white phosphorous,

and those are our - meaning American - rounds.

I mean, those were fired by American guys.

Like, at what? For what?

Uh, at whom? Like, I had no idea.

We go from there,

still on this road, like, 200 metres into Fallujah.

We're right on the edge of the city, and it's... It's a big city.

And then they get to this road that they called Phase Line Cathy,

and it's this big east-west road that crosses Fallujah.

And just to get to that road,

it took them all morning.

Hours and hours of fighting.

Like, every step of the way, they had to fight.

Spread out, squallers! Spread them out!

Like, you're running down the street,

and you can hear the bullets ricocheting around you, like,

bouncing off the street, coming off the concrete.

GUNFIRE, BULLETS RICOCHET

And then it stops.

And you get up to this area that the fire was coming from,

and there's the Marine Scout team up there

and three dead insurgents on the road.

Whoo, yeah!

EXPLOSION

The first house we cleared was a little bit of chaos.

A lot of adrenaline rushing.

Fortunately there was no insurgents in that house.

But it wasn't exactly how we planned. There was a lot of people

in there, we were congested, and it's not how we do things.

But we wanted to make entry, and...

..in Fallujah, the safest place you can be is inside a cleared house.

And now we're in this house on a corner

and we had to cross this road to get to the cultural,

what they were calling the cultural centre -

this big, like, five-storey, four-storey building

on the other side of the street.

And so one of the lieutenants stands at the gate and says,

"All right, go. First platoon go."

And these 40 guys like,

stacked, stream out and just run across this street

and then it begins.

GUNFIRE

All of this gunfire starts.

A guy falls on the street.

Second platoon goes out.

Some guys drag this guy out of the street...

..and another guy gets dropped.

And then I'm with this last platoon sitting in this house

and I remember saying to Dexter, like, "I really...

"I don't know if I can do this."

Like, you're running straight into gunfire.

And I don't remember what he said, but...

I remember them just shouting, like, "Third platoon, go, go, go!"

so I watched everybody go out and then just ran.

And they say time slows down, but it really, it really does.

Like, you can feel every step that you're taking.

You can see everything taking place in slow motion around you.

I saw so many bodies and I saw so many marines go down,

but I never saw an insurgent.

Like, I never saw an insurgent alive, with a gun.

They were ghosts.

GUNSHOT

They blended in with this environment so perfectly.

GUNFIRE

Where is it?

It's coming from in there.

Aah!

Is he inside?

GUNFIRE

Watch out!

GUNFIRE

You got him!

GUNSHOTS

Hey! He's wounded, in between these two houses.

GUNSHOT

He's done.

Hold on, I got one!

Our mission was to clear the city of insurgents.

It's not right to use the term seek and destroy, but...

..it was a full-on frontal assault,

into the city of Fallujah,

and you don't stop until everybody stops shooting.

EXPLOSION

When you have 8,000 of them

moving into a town like that with all their firepower,

it's a terrifying, uh, force.

I mean, 50 marines is a terrifying force.

8,000 is just a massive killing machine.

Target!

TRANSLATION:

EXPLOSION

For a few long days, Ashley and Dexter moved with 1/8 Company

as they pushed deep into Fallujah,

clearing houses and coming under sustained attack.

GUNFIRE

Once you start getting shot at, it all changes.

Once you start getting shot at and don't run for the hills,

then you start building trust really quickly.

Because they realise...

And I heard this from multiple different military units -

they think that the way we work as journalists,

is we have a template, an idea of what they're doing,

and we are going out there to show how bad they are.

But once you cross the wire with them,

then they start saying, "Ah, OK.

"You're here to see how it really is."

And I think that as the war dragged on,

the marines, and, like, the grunts,

these door-kickers, the trigger pullers,

they realised nobody gave a shit what they were doing in Iraq.

So we would come out and actually tell stories, their stories.

Well, it turns out Dex and Ash held their ground pretty well.

They kept themselves out of as much trouble as they could

and the times where they got themselves into trouble

we were there to help them,

and it was never really a burden on us to have them there.

I mean, these guys were, like, in the thick of it,

terrified just like we were.

We'd been trained for it.

We have weapons to defend ourselves

and body armour and that type of stuff.

Those guys were just... thrown right into it,

like, "Go get 'em." You know? "Go tell the story."

Ashley and I just... It was so hard trying to file our stuff, you know,

like, I'm trying to write my story

and Ashley is trying to file his pictures,

and I was always looking for electricity.

And so I remember, it was like the first day,

I don't know what I was thinking, but I ran into the street

because there was a car out there, and, you know, pulled the lid up

and tried to put my little battery clips on the car battery.

I don't want to think about that,

cos there were snipers everywhere.

I remember thinking, like, "This dude is insane. That is crazy."

Like, he's in the middle of...

Like, so many guys have just been shot on this exact corner.

The insurgents are everywhere.

And Dexter's out there

trying to pull a car battery out of a burnt-out car.

Of course the battery doesn't work.

Cos it's a fucking bombed, burnt-out car.

But it...

It was classic Dexter.

Like, he will file, no matter what.

GUNFIRE

I remember one night I decided to sleep on the roof

and a couple of hours later I woke up

because there was something hot on my neck.

I tried to brush it off and then it was hot in my hands,

and it's brass casings.

There was... While I was sleeping,

a machine-gunner had come up above me.

Somehow I'd slept through this machine-gun automatic fire.

So, then, like, I stretch, I wake up,

like, "OK, I gotta get out, gotta go, gotta work."

And then I'm like, "Shit. My sleeping bag is wet.

"Some asshole must have spilt water on me."

No. I had also pissed myself in my sleep.

And I get out of my sleeping bag, I was wearing blue jeans.

And I had this, like, huge wet patch on my jeans and like...

Why I'm embarrassed in front of all these marines, I don't know -

I shouldn't give a shit. But I did. I was so embarrassed.

So I went downstairs.

"Morning, lads."

Kept going downstairs to see what they were doing,

like, what are they shooting at?

And they've got these guys

with no shirts on, who are coming in off the street.

And the sun is rising.

And it was in that moment that I shot the only picture

of the Iraq war that I think

even comes close to being a successful picture.

Like, I regard the work that I did in Iraq as a total failure.

People look at all my Iraq pictures like, "Wow, looks like a movie" -

like, fuck you.

Or fuck me. I failed.

If you think that my work looks like a movie,

it means that you're disassociating

from the reality that is in those pictures.

But this one picture that I made in that moment

while I was trying to dry piss off my jeans so I wasn't embarrassed...

..is the only time that I think that I inched towards

understanding how we fight.

Which was what my intention was

in spending that much time with angry men with guns.

It's called The University Of Jihad, Motherfucker.

Cos when the guys were detained,

the marine said, "What are you doing here?

And the detainee said, "We're here studying."

And the marine said, "Yeah, University of Jihad, Motherfucker."

A couple of days goes by,

and, like, I settle into some rubble on another night, next to Dexter.

And I say, "Goodnight," and he says. "Goodnight.

"Don't piss yourself."

Smart arse.

SHELL FIRE

EXPLOSION

TRANSLATION:

Many local men fled Fallujah,

but Nidhal's husband Ahmed decided to stay with her and their son.

EXPLOSION

CHILD CRYING

EXPLOSION

GUNSHOT

When I was 13 years old, I killed this deer

in Centerville, Texas, and it was a real long shot.

17 steps.

17 steps!

Why don't you go hunting any more

and fishing any more like you used to?

I don't know. It just doesn't do anything for me any more.

And after Billy died, I just lost a lot of, um...

..get up and go.

This is a Corsican ram.

Billy killed that one.

And Billy killed this one here.

Look here, Billy.

Look at it again. Billy.

GIRL LAUGHS

By the 15th of November, 2004,

just a week after entering Fallujah,

Bravo Company had almost finished the first part of their mission.

Fallujah's this weird town. It looks like a movie set.

And there's these very defined borders

and then after those borders, it's just desert.

So, we went from the top of the city all the way to the bottom,

one end to the other, and we got to the end,

and, like, the street ended and then the desert started.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

Fallujah is the City of Mosques. It's called the City of Mosques.

And the insurgents knew that the Americans

couldn't go into the mosque

so they would use them to stage and attack the marines

cos they knew that they had more safety there

than they did in a regular place.

So this mosque just short of the southern edge of Fallujah -

a tank fired a shell through the minaret.

And they apparently killed the insurgent who was inside,

and I said, "I've got to go and see that."

I needed...a photograph as evidence, as a reporter,

to show that these mosques were being used as staging grounds.

A picture of a dead insurgent inside a minaret

showed that without question...

..these spaces were being violated

and were therefore no longer protected by the Geneva Convention.

So we went to the Captain and said, "Hey, man, can you please,"

you know, "radio everybody and tell them

"that we're gonna be running up the street to this mosque

"and just tell everyone not to shoot us."

And this time Reed said, "No.

"If you wanna go, this time you gotta go with the squad

"because it's too dangerous out there."

And I said, "No, I've got a policy against...

"like, this non-intervention policy

"where, like, stuff shouldn't happen on account of me."

So, the Captain said, "Well, you can't go."

And I said, "Well, I need the picture."

Dexter and I agreed to it.

That we would go with the squad.

I was chosen to lead a patrol, along with my Lieutenant,

out down to this minaret that was 400m away, maybe,

that had this dead sniper in it.

What did you think about doing this job? I was angry.

I did not want to do it in the first place,

because we were pretty much done with the city,

so for me it was like that one last patrol thing

and I'm just like, "I don't want to do this," you know,

just so he could take a picture?

You know, all right, if that's the job and that's the mission

then that's what I'll do, but I don't agree with this at all.

WHISTLES

I remember the moment I thought, "Maybe this isn't a good idea."

We were walking towards the minaret.

And, you know, Fallujah had been so violent,

so destructive,

smoke and ruin everywhere.

And we were walking to the minaret.

And for the first time in a week. it was quiet.

There was nothing.

If you could picture, you kind of enter a compound

and the main mosque is kind of to your direct front and left.

The minaret is to your direct front and right.

And there's two groups of auxiliary buildings.

So we clear out these auxiliary buildings,

we clear out the mosque...

And the last building left is the minaret,

so we're going to go clear the minaret,

see if we can get up and find this sniper, dead sniper.

And when we got to the base of the minaret,

Lance Corporal Billy Miller was stacked at the door.

And he said, "Hey, Dominguez, come stack on me."

Stack means "get behind me and let's go up there together."

Ashley Gilbertson was there

and with his Australian voice he was trying to tell us,

"Hey, you stay back, I'm just going to go run up there

"and take a quick picture."

I wanted to get the picture and just leave.

Get out of there as soon as we could so that nothing happened.

Before we went there, a marine stopped me

and said, "I've got to go ahead and clear it."

So...that was Lance Corporal William Miller.

He went up first.

He was followed by Christian Dominguez,

then me,

and Dexter was apparently behind me. I didn't turn around to see.

Itself, the minaret was scary.

It was dark, the stairs were creaky,

you know, the bricks were...

It just seemed like the whole thing was going to fall apart anyway.

We're climbing and it's just the sound of rubble,

like crunching concrete under our feet when we're climbing.

There was a whole bunch of rubble on these stairs,

like, it was such a confined area.

I mean, it wasn't much wider than this chair.

And we're walking up there and...

The steps were pretty big in that Billy Miller was going up

and he was almost a full step ahead of me.

And we kept tripping,

and he almost said something. He almost said...

"Shit."

And just as you start to get a little bit of light

through a hole in the wall,

from where the tank shell went through and killed this insurgent...

..and I'm thinking, "This is almost over. Get my picture and get out."

Then there was a gunshot.

Maybe multiple gunshots.

GUNSHOT

And I felt water all over me.

You know, immediately I thought, shit, somebody released their rifle

by accident and shot these CamelBaks that they all wear,

it's like these little backpacks filled with water.

Then I heard Dominguez screaming.

We basically walked into this guy's muzzle.

I saw a guy's hand laying down,

and he was laying down the stairs

and we basically walked right into his gun.

He shot Miller in the face...

..and then Miller's body kind of turned and then he shot.

And at this point Miller kind of fell down

and I was standing just below Miller

and the shots.... This guy was lighting up the wall,

shooting relentlessly,

and the rocks were exploding in my face,

and it was so loud because of how confined the area was.

And then I just remember, like,

all of us starting to run down these stairs.

And I remember falling

and just rolling.

We rolled out of this minaret...

..and I looked down at my camera

and my hands...

..and it wasn't water.

It was blood, and brain, and...

It was Billy, like, just...

..all over me.

Ashley was just, like, in a complete state of shock.

He... I just remember him sitting there kind of mumbling to himself.

His helmet was on crooked and he was just saying,

"My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault, my fault..."

I couldn't breathe.

And Sam Williams was down there,

and he said, "Dominguez, what happened?"

And out of some... I remember hearing my voice was weird,

and saying, "Miller's dead,"

and the look of confusion on his face, like, "What?"

SHOUTING

Everybody came running out of the building.

Except Billy.

So obviously we were going back in to get him.

I don't care about that picture or anything at this point -

we've gotta get Billy out of here.

We've gotta get our wounded out of here.

GUNFIRE

And it was a relentless effort to go up there

and retrieve Miller's body and take out the threat that was up there.

SHELL FIRE

They tried to go up there a couple of times.

And on like the second or third time

they were able to go up there and get his body out.

They dragged Billy out.

They put him onto a stretcher.

And I remember thinking...

"Don't look.

"Because what you see will...

"What you see, you did, and what you see will...

"You can't look."

So I turned around and looked.

He said, you know, "Please tell me he's not dead, please tell me,

"please tell me, please tell me he's not dead."

And so it fell to me to tell him that he was.

I had stashed Dexter and Ashley in the mosque

because it was the most secure building.

I tell the Lieutenant, "OK, we're getting out of here.

"The mission's over. We're going home."

I've got Billy's weapon in my hand and my weapon is slung,

so I come around the corner into the mosque,

and I was like, "You're gonna take this and hold it,"

I said, "And when I count to three

"you and you are gonna run out this door and stay right behind me."

GUNFIRE

And we ran down the street back to the firm base.

The second we started running,

a machine-gun opened fire from insurgents behind us.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

And at that point I felt like we were surrounded.

There were shots coming from everywhere.

We had been there for a little bit too long.

And...I remember our tactics

not living up to what they should have been at that moment

and we kind of lost a little bit of discipline.

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

We made it back to the base. Nobody else was shot.

Sam...

..told us....

..that this is what happens in war.

That it wasn't our fault.

We went to the Lieutenant.

I said, "I'm sorry, it's my fault, I know."

He said, "Yeah, it's your fault."

CRYING: And then I called my editor and said,

"I have to get out of here."

TRANSLATION:

According to the UN, around 600 civilians

died in the attack on Fallujah.

Mustafa was one of the lucky ones.

He was among ten children identified by a US NGO

who paid for them to come and live in America for a few months

so that they could receive treatment for their injuries.

Get ready! You better get ready!

Get ready, here it comes.

Whoa!

TRANSLATION:

OK, so can you ask Mustafa to watch me?

NIDHAL TRANSLATES

MUSTAFA LAUGHS

NEWSREADER: A private graveside service happening now

with the closest of family

as they bid their final farewell to their patriarch,

President George HW Bush.

"Let future generations understand

"the burden and the blessings of freedom."

It means that all the people in this country that don't understand

what the men and women are dying for - they need to understand it.

My son was one of the ones that didn't come back.

But in some ways...

..he's better off,

because he doesn't have to live with the guilt

that so many of them are living with,

because they did come back and their buddies didn't.

I know that Ashley has a lot of guilt.

But...he was doing what he was supposed to do,

and Billy was doing his job.

He loved being a Marine. He really, really did.

ASHLEY: I waited so long. I was so scared to call the Miller family.

I thought that they would be, understandably,

really angry with me.

So eventually I called and saw them.

Lewis...

SWALLOWS

and Susie...

...were absolutely beautiful. Like...

..amazing people.

I mean, I still love talking to Susie.

E-mailing with her, calling her.

And I wish it was easier than it is, but I feel like...

..I owe her...

..her son.

Fallujah was the deadliest battle the Marines had fought

since the Vietnam war.

Billy was one of 71 servicemen

who died in clearing the city of Al-Qaeda.

At the time we took over the city

and we did what our mission told us to do.

On paper, it's a success.

For me?

It's difficult.

Looking back, you know, 14, 15 years now,

it's difficult for me to define that,

because I hold on to my friends

and the ones that were killed in our memories.

And you look back at the instability

of what's going on in Fallujah now...

I'll take my friends back.

Ten years after the Americans

had declared the city free of insurgents,

Fallujah would once again fall into the hands of Islamic extremists,

when ISIS took over huge areas of Northern Iraq.

For the next 18 months,

Mustafa and his family lived through another occupation.

TRANSLATION:

MUSTAFA:

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

CHEERING

The door opens. The first thought that came to my mind

was, "Holy shit, it's Saddam. It's actually him."

TRANSLATION:

There was rumours that the Americans asked Saddam,

"How much time do you need to make the situation in Iraq better?"

He said, "I will need one hour.

"45 minutes to shave,

"and 15 minutes to say my speech on TV."

He could do it.