This program contains graphic imagery of war, which may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
DEXTER FILKINS, The New York Times, 2000-11:
By the time I got to Fallujah, I thought I’d seen it all. I thought I’d survived it all.
JAMES BLUEMEL, Producer/Director:
Were you right?
DEXTER FILKINS:
[Laughs] No, no. I mean—God, no. No. No, that was a whole different level of violence.
Fallujah is 35 miles from Baghdad, and by the spring of 2004 it was completely in the hands of the insurgents and Al Qaeda and it had become like a giant car bomb factory. They were just making car bombs and shipping them to Baghdad, every day.
Fallujah
March 31, 2004
MALE IRAQI:
[Speaking Arabic] The mujahedeen attacked them with hand grenades. They dropped the grenades through the car windows. Two Americans died in each car.
DEXTER FILKINS:
The story of Fallujah begins with four Blackwater contractors who were driving around Fallujah, and they got ambushed. The Iraqis gather around and just, like, having a party. And they picked up what was left of their bodies and then they take them up to the bridge on the Euphrates and string them up.
It was on television, beamed around the world. The Iraqis are partying, and they love it, and they're making fools out of the Americans, and they're hitting them with their shoes. And that was like—that was the end. It was—what a frigging nightmare.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
If our country shows any uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This is not going to happen on my watch.
DEXTER FILKINS:
It was November 2004. Bush had won the election and almost immediately gave the order: Send the Marines in to Fallujah and occupy Fallujah and destroy the insurgency.
Civilians mostly cleared out, 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. Well, the Americans essentially did that. They were 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."
NIDHAL ABED, Fallujah resident:
[Speaking Arabic] The Americans threw down leaflets for us to read. They’d drop them at night from planes and we’d find them on the ground in the morning. They said, "If you can get out, then go."
The people who left had money, but we had nothing. They could afford cars and had places to go outside the city. We didn’t have relatives to go to, so we had to stay and ask for God’s mercy.
Mustafa, how can I describe him? He was my first child. He made my life beautiful. He was nearly 2 years old. He used to see the neighbor’s kids all had bikes. He would tell me, "Mom, I want a bike." But we were too poor to get him a bike.
I thought, it’s not long before he becomes a man and helps me out, goes to the market. It didn’t happen.
LEWIS MILLER:
Action.
SUSIE MILLER:
What do you want me to do? Model my dress?
Hawaii
1998
LEWIS MILLER:
Yeah.
SUSIE MILLER:
Like this?
LEWIS MILLER:
Yes. Why are we whispering?
SUSIE MILLER:
Billy’s still asleep. Billy! Did y'all have good naps? Huh? Oh, you want to get in the pictures, too? Smile!
LEWIS MILLER:
Come on, smile, you're on Candid Camera.
SUSIE MILLER:
Billy was born on Nov. 24, 1981. He just sort of popped out. I was in labor for 53 painful hours with Sabrina, so this one was like a cakewalk. I was excited. He was excited because it was a boy.
LEWIS MILLER:
[Laughs] Man always wants a boy. Carry on the namesake.
SABRINA MILLER:
I would say he's Mom’s favorite. She’ll say no, but he was.
He was very outgoing, very busy. He always looked for adventure. He was always pushing his limits.
He definitely wasn’t college material. He struggled in school, and that would have been good for him, to go into the Marines.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ, Lance Corporal, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines:
Miller was a great guy. He was someone that could talk to you without the typical Marine yelling and calling you an idiot.
I was really scrawny. I was 130 pounds 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.
SUSIE MILLER:
I was proud of the fact that this is what he wanted to do. I was also very scared. When he joined, it was just a peaceful little world. It was wasn’t a peaceful little world anymore just over a week after 9/11, when he graduated from boot camp.
SABRINA MILLER:
After he graduated and he left us, he went to Spain. He came home December 2003 and we surprised my parents.
SUSIE MILLER:
Is Billy in that box?
SABRINA MILLER:
No. It's what me and Billy got y'all for Christmas.
SUSIE MILLER:
And I said, "Is Billy in that box?" And 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."
SABRINA MILLER:
It probably was her best Christmas ever and her last Christmas with him.
October 2004
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
At that time, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines took over an area called Camp Fallujah. It was probably 3 miles outside the city. Billy Miller was in the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines with us, and Dexter Filkins reported to my platoon also. I remember thinking, why are The New York Times here? But it’s an indicator that something big was happening.
DEXTER FILKINS:
From a journalistic point of view war is kind of the human condition in extremis. People have asked me before, "Were you addicted to the violence?" Or, "Were you addicted to the adrenaline?" And it’s like, no, not at all. I just wanted to help other people understand what was happening so that they could make decisions about it.
JAMES BLUEMEL:
Was there a time when you thought you had pushed it too far?
DEXTER FILKINS:
Definitely. More than once. I felt that in Fallujah. I definitely felt that in Fallujah.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
There was another reporter with him whose name was Ashley Gilbertson.
DEXTER FILKINS:
Ashley’s like a kid. He was so young, but he's immensely talented and really fearless and very enterprising, so we got along really well.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON, Freelance photographer:
Working with Dexter was amazing. There was almost nowhere that he wouldn’t go, and the same went for me.
DEXTER FILKINS:
No journalist likes to embed with the military. It’s too confining. Imagine you’re walking through an Iraqi village, and 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?" And you're standing with a group of 19-year-old Americans with giant guns, and you ask an Iraqi guy, "Hey, how’s it going?" [Laughs] 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.
SAM WILLIAMS, Sergeant, 1st Battalion, 8th Marines:
If you could picture young buck warriors, we're very tribal, and anybody who's not in our tribe is basically the enemy, as far as we’re concerned, just to varying degrees.
Sure enough, when the press starts showing up, we didn’t like them. Turns out they were 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? [Laughs] Who is 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. [Laughs] 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."
MARINE CORPS LEGAL OFFICER:
What you see right here, I'm standing on a train model of our battle space.
DEXTER FILKINS:
Whenever something changes or there's going to be 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, and 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."
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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.
DEXTER FILKINS:
The rules were dialed really far back. Like, really loose. Guy picks up a cell phone, you can kill him. If you fire one warning shot at a car, if it doesn’t stop coming at you, you can kill.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
You were able to engage anybody within the city because we had instructed civilians to get out of the city. As long as you felt there was a threat, you can engage.
MARINE CAPTAIN:
Hey, Devil Dogs, how you doing?
MARINES:
[In unison] Yeah!
MARINE CAPTAIN:
How you doing, soldiers?
MARINES:
[In unison] Yeah!
MARINE CAPTAIN:
How you doing, sailors?
MARINES:
[In unison] Yeah!
MARINE CAPTAIN:
This is a whole can of whoop-butt, all combined, OK? And I'm going to tell you one thing. It is an honor for me to be able to serve with each and every one of you hard-chargers. I mean, I look out here and there's no difference than when we took the damn war over in Korea. We raised the flag at Iwo Jima. It’s no difference.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
I’ll go to Fallujah right now after hearing that speech. This stuff was—it was motivating. But it’s disheartening at the same time, looking at it now. And one part they don’t show is oftentimes they start off with the speech saying, "I want you to look to your brothers from the left and the right and behind you and realize 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, 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.
MARINE CAPTAIN:
Kick some butt, all right?
MARINES:
[In unison] Yes, sir!
SUSIE MILLER:
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.
LEWIS MILLER:
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.
November 2004
DEXTER FILKINS:
The order had come down to attack. A troop carrier's doors opened, we all got out and as we were assembling, they opened fire. It was just like a symphony.
And then the voices came over from the mosques, which were in Arabic: "Come to fight. 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. "God is great, God is great. Come to the fight. They're here. The Americans are here.”
SAM WILLIAMS:
I could see the tracers coming out. They're shooting at us, just kind of spraying machine gun fire at us. And it felt a lot like—I don’t know if you've ever seen "Star Wars," where they're attacking the Death Star, where they're flying through this trench and there’s laser guns just shooting at them from all over the place.
DEXTER FILKINS:
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. It looks like a fireworks from 4th of July. [Laughs]
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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.
DEXTER FILKINS:
This bright white light with a trail on it, like a comet, comes sailing in and then it explodes right above us. And these flaming sort of chunks of rock were coming off, and they were—people were just scrambling and trying not to get hit. 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. Those were fired by American guys. At what, for what, at whom, I had no idea.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
We go from there, still on this road, like 200 meters into Fallujah. We’re right on the edge of the city, and 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. Every step of the way, they had to fight.
MARINE:
Spread out, [inaudible]! Spread 'em out!
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
You’re running down the street and you can hear the bullets ricocheting around you, bouncing off the street, coming off the concrete.
And then it stops, and you get up to this area that the fire was coming from and there’s a Marine scout team up there and three dead insurgents on the road.
MARINE:
Grenade!
MARINE:
Holy—Get down!
MARINE:
Whoo yeah!
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
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 that’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.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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 center—this big five-story, four-story 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, stacked, stream out and run across this street, and then it begins.
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 the house and I remember saying to Dexter, "I really—I don’t know if I can do this." You’re running straight into gunfire. And I don’t remember what he said, but I remember them just shouting, "Third platoon, go, go, go!" So I watched everybody go out and then just ran. And they say time slows down, but it really does. 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. I never saw an insurgent alive with a gun. They were ghosts. They blended in with this environment so perfectly.
MARINE:
Where is it?
MARINE:
Where they at?
MARINE:
They're shooting from in there.
MARINE:
Ah, f---!
MARINE:
He's hit.
MARINE:
F---!
MARINE:
Is he inside? Watch out!
MARINE:
Hey, you got him?
MARINE:
Hey, he’s wounded in between these two houses.
MARINE:
He’s done.
MARINE:
Hold on, there's another one!
SAM WILLIAMS:
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.
DEXTER FILKINS:
When you have 8,000 of them moving into a town like that with all their firepower, it’s a terrifying force. Just a massive killing machine.
MARINE:
Target!
NIDHAL ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] About a week before they invaded Fallujah, the American army dropped the worst of the worst on us. Not just on Al Qaeda, but on the innocent people. When we went to look for the bodies of our relatives, we found them crushed and flattened.
As soon as sunset prayer was called, everyone would stay at home. In our village, the toilets are outside. So as soon as that prayer was called, we couldn’t use the toilet. We’d have to hold it in until morning.
We really suffered. We couldn’t sit or sleep properly. Or even eat properly. We were sitting with our kids, afraid of being attacked any moment.
I was with Mustafa. He was very young. He couldn’t understand. When there was bombing he’d shake. He’d run and cling to me or my mother. He didn’t know what was going on. That was before he was injured.
AHMED ABED, Nidhal’s husband:
[Speaking Arabic] I will always remember the day Mustafa and his mother were injured. It was during Ramadan. Mustafa was ill.
NIDHAL ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] Mustafa was sick with a fever. I was carrying him home. The call for evening prayer began. Everyone was indoors, breaking the fast. The next thing I know, Mustafa is next to me with his guts in the dirt. I realized my arm was cut open and my hip was hanging by a piece of flesh. Mustafa was on the ground, with his guts hanging out, shouting, "Mama!" I was the only one in the street.
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] When I was at the mosque, I heard a big explosion. We saw everyone running. I saw a guy who had taken off his shirt to carry a baby. Even from a distance I could tell it was my son Mustafa.
NIDHAL ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] The doctor said he couldn’t operate on Mustafa and we should prepare to say goodbye. He said I was in better condition. A doctor came and said that Mustafa and I had to be in separate rooms. I kept asking, "Have you sewn his guts in?" But it wasn’t just his guts. It was his leg, his testicle, his rear.
Then we started getting bombed. We were running from one room to another. The doors and walls were collapsing on top of us.
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] The American army and the Iraqi army came to the hospital. We were inside the hospital and they entered. There were gun battles all around us.
They saw Mustafa’s condition. It was just four days after he was hurt and he was in a bad way, on a drip and having blood transfusions. So they told us to stay and not to come out.
After the doctors did the operations they didn’t reassure me. They said it was up to God whether he lived or died.
DEXTER FILKINS:
Ashley and I were in Fallujah with the Marines for several days, and we were getting shot at every step of the way.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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 realize, 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’re 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, they realized nobody gave a s--- what they were doing in Iraq. So we would come out and actually tell stories, their stories.
SAM WILLIAMS:
I mean, these guys were in the thick of it, terrified just like we were. We’d been trained for it; we have weapons to defend ourselves and body armor and that type of stuff. Those guys were just thrown right into it, like, "Go get 'em. Go tell the story."
DEXTER FILKINS:
Ashley and I just—It was so hard trying to file our stuff. 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 pulled the lid up and tried put my little battery clips on the car battery. I don’t want to think about that, because there were snipers everywhere.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
I remember thinking, "This dude is insane." That is crazy. He’s in the middle of—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, because it’s a f------ bombed, burnt-out car. [Laughs] It was a classic Dexter. He will file no matter what.
Texas
LEWIS MILLER:
When I was 13 years old, I killed this deer in Centerville, Texas, and it was a real long shot—17 steps. Seventeen steps.
SUSIE MILLER:
Why don’t you go hunting anymore and fishing anymore like you used to?
LEWIS MILLER:
I don’t know. It just doesn’t do anything for me anymore. And after Billy died, I just lost a lot of get-up-and-go.
This is a Corsican ram. Billy killed that one. And Billy killed this one here.
November 15, 2004
DEXTER FILKINS:
Fallujah's this weird town. It looks like a movie set, and so 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 the street ended and then the desert started.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
Fallujah is a 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 because 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 radio everybody and tell them that we're going to be running up the street to this mosque and just tell everyone not to shoot us."
This time Reed said, "No. If you want to go, this time you got to go with a squad, because it's too dangerous out there." And I said, "No." I've got a policy against—like this nonintervention policy where 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." So Dexter and I agreed to it, that we would go with a squad.
SAM WILLIAMS:
I was chosen to lead a patrol, along with my lieutenant, out down to this minaret that was 400 meters away, maybe, that had this dead sniper in it.
JAMES BLUEMEL:
What did you think about doing this job?
SAM WILLIAMS:
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 was like, "I don’t want to do this. Just so he could take a picture?" 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.
DEXTER FILKINS:
I remember the moment I thought maybe this isn’t a good idea. We were walking towards the minaret, and Fallujah had been so violent, so destructive, smoke and ruin everywhere, and we were walking to the minaret, for the first time in a week, it was quiet. There was nothing.
SAM WILLIAMS:
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.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
And when we got to the base of the minaret, Lance Cpl. 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."
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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 Cpl. 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.
DEXTER FILKINS:
Itself, the minaret was scary. It was dark, the stairs were creaky, the bricks were—It just seemed like the whole thing was going to fall apart anyway.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
We're climbing, and it's just the sound of rubble and crunching concrete under our feet when we're climbing.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
There was a whole bunch of rubble on these stairs, and 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, "S---."
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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, and I felt water all over me. Immediately I thought, s---, somebody released their rifle by accident and shot these CamelBaks that they all wear—it’s like these backpacks, little backpacks filled with water. Then I heard Dominguez screaming.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
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.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
And then I just remember 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, just all over me.
DEXTER FILKINS:
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."
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
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?"
SAM WILLIAMS:
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 got to get Billy out of here. We’ve got to get our wounded out of here.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
And it was a relentless effort to go up there and retrieve Miller’s body and take out the threat that was up there. [Deep sigh] They tried to go up there a couple times, and on the second or third time they were able to go up there and get his body out.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
They dragged Billy out, they put him onto a stretcher and I remember thinking, don’t look. You can’t look.
DEXTER FILKINS:
He said, "Please tell me he’s not dead. Please tell me, please tell me. Please tell me he’s not dead." And so it fell me to tell him that he was.
SAM WILLIAMS:
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 going to take this and hold it, and when I count to three you and you are going to run out this door and stay right behind me."
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
And at that point it 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.
ASHLEY GILBERTSON:
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." And he said, "Yeah, it's your fault." [Cries] And then I called my editor and said, "I have to get out of here."
Oregon
2008
MUSTAFA ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] Bush hit me.
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] What did he hit you with?
MUSTAFA ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] With a stick.
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] Did he hit you alone?
MUSTAFA ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] No. Me and Mama.
Some 700 civilians died in the attack on Fallujah.
A U.S. charity paid for Mustafa to receive medical care in Oregon.
MUSTAFA ABED:
Taxi! Taxi! Bye-bye!
FEMALE HOSPITAL STAFF:
Get ready now. Get ready. You'd better get ready. Get ready, now, here it comes. This is a [inaudible].
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] I hated the American army at the time because they were responsible for what happened to Mustafa and my wife.
FEMALE HOSPITAL STAFF:
OK, so, can you ask Mustafa to watch me?
AHMED ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] But when I went to America and saw how much they were helping Mustafa, I saw they were good people and I liked them.
MUSTAFA ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] I am healthy. More than healthy. Everyone has faith in life, so that’s what gives me strength. I believe in God and in life.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
A private graveside service happening now with the closest of family as they bid their final farewell to their patriarch, President George H.W. Bush. And now—
SUSIE MILLER:
"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 who 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 GILBERTSON:
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 and Susie were absolutely beautiful. Amazing people. I mean, I still love talking to Susie, emailing 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 involving U.S. Marines since the Vietnam War.
Billy Miller was one of 82 service members who died clearing Al Qaeda from the city.
CHRISTIAN DOMINGUEZ:
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, 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, I’ll take my friends back.
In 2014, ISIS took control of Fallujah.
They would occupy the city for more than two years.
NIDHAL ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] We thought we were rid of the Americans. But then ISIS came. And this had a big impact on our lives. It took us backward. The world moves forward while Iraq goes backward.
MUSTAFA ABED:
[Speaking Arabic] According to my family, Fallujah used to be a beautiful place in their youth. But all I could ever see was destruction.
I want to tell anyone listening, my dream is for wars to stop. My wish is for nothing bad to happen
to people in the world.
In 2016, ISIS was driven out of Fallujah.
Mustafa and his family are back in Fallujah building a new home.
They hope to buy a shop for him to run.
