Remembering Fallujah Part 2: Preparing for a Battle against Evil

Note: This post was originally published to DVIDS in Nov., 2014, ten years after the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Chaplain Ric Brown has the most remarkable set of photos on his Facebook page. In several, he is holding hands with Soldiers perched in their armored vehicles, praying.

One photo shows a Soldier with his head down, whether in reverence to the Almighty or fear of the scene of carnage he is about to drive into, is unclear. But Brown is there, comforting him. He says he doesn’t know who took these photos, or even that anyone was taking them. Someone passed the photos along anonymously several years later.

But those boys needed the prayers.

And the fight in Fallujah had to be waged. As distant as that episode now seems, the strategic goals of the Iraq War hung in the balance in Fallujah a decade ago. According to a report conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, by July of 2004, Fallujah was infested with insurgents, and U.S. officials worried that it represented the coalition‘s defeat and the insurgents’ victory.

The city had become a symbol of the insurgency, as well as a tactical center for information operations, training, and manufacture of improvised explosive devices. It was an exporter of terror to the entire…