Free Republic

JARAMI, Iraq, May 10 -- Screaming "Allahu Akbar'' to the end, the foreign fighters lay on their backs in a narrow crawl space under a house and blasted their machine guns up through the concrete floor with bullets designed to penetrate tanks. They fired at U.S. Marines, driving back wave after wave as the Americans tried to retrieve a fallen comrade. Through Sunday night and into Monday morning, the foreign fighters battled on, their screaming voices gradually fading to just one. In the end, it took five Marine assaults, grenades, a tank firing bunker-busting artillery rounds, 500-pound bombs unleashed by...

Capt. Christopher Ieva comes from a military family. His grandfather won a Bronze Star in World War II and his father served during Vietnam. Throughout his boyhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and then North Jersey, Ieva wanted to be a Marine. On May 8, Ieva found himself leading a Marine assault in western Iraq. U.S. forces were in the midst of Operation Matador, an effort to clean out the insurgent safe havens in the towns along the Iraqi-Syrian border. Ieva and his men were to help bridge the Euphrates River and attack insurgent strongholds to the north. But as they got...

"These Marines are great. America ought to be very proud of its Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen; they're doing great work out here." So Marine Col. Stephen Davis, the commander of Regimental Combat Team 2 (RCT-2), told me once we had a chance to talk near al Qaim, Iraq. Davis is in charge of Operation Matador, an effort to bring law and order to the bulk of Iraq's vast, western al Anbar province, which makes up one-third of the country. What these Marines are doing now near the Syrian border is what they did months ago in Fallujah, and the...