Lieutenant Ackerman led his platoon with a level of disciplined violence that crushed the enemy and was critical to the company’s success.

On the back of an M1 Abrams tank there is a little telephone in a box tapped into the crew’s intercom; it’s called a grunt phone. I’ve never been as scared as I was the times I had to run to that grunt phone, bullet impacts dancing on the tank’s armor, their ricochets flashing like fistfuls of thrown pennies. I needed to get on the grunt phone to tell the tanks where to shoot. The tank crew would listen to music on their intercom, so if no one was talking you’d hear pop songs when you held the handset to your ear. The tankers I worked with liked Britney Spears. The squat crew chief, who looked like he was born to fit inside of a tank, told me that he played the music because it helped everyone in the tank stay “frosty.”

At 0400 on 10 November, the company crossed the line of departure on the north side of Falluja and attacked to seize the government complex in the heart of the city.

It is the Corps’ birthday. As we load the tracks, the Marines swap little pieces of M.R.E. cake and placed them gently in their mouths like priests placing communion wafers.

[A] heavy volume of enemy direct and indirect fire shattered the early morning calm ... the buildings to the south, east and west were teeming with insurgents.

I am on my stomach most of the day and each time I peek my head above the wall, I am convinced it’s going to get shot off. Second platoon is in the building next to ours. A friendly airstrike accidentally hits them. We hear them screaming on the radio as they call in their wounded, and it mixes with the sounds of our jets overhead.