This day started at about 8 a.m., when the marines left the building where they had been sleeping and headed south toward Highway 10, which runs from east to west and roughly bisects the town. At the corner of Highway 10 and Thurthar, the street they were moving along, was a headquarters building for the Iraqi National Guard that had been taken over by insurgents.
Almost immediately, they came under fire from a sniper in the minaret of a mosque just south of them. Someone in a three-story residential building farther down the street also opened up. The marines made 50-yard dashes and dived for cover, but one of them was cut down, killed on the spot. It was unclear what direction the fatal bullet had come from.
"I don't know who it was," Lt. Steven Berch, leader of the fallen marine's platoon, said of the attacker, "but he was very well trained."
After two hours of bombardment, the sniper at that mosque ceased firing. But just around the corner at the famous blue-domed Khulafah Al Rashid mosque, another sniper was pinning down marines, and airstrikes were called in on it, too. The issue of striking at mosques is so sensitive in the Arab world that the American military later issued a statement saying that the strike on the Khulafah mosque was unavoidable and that precision munitions merely knocked down a minaret.
By noon, the marines had worked their way down to the national guard building, still taking fire from the sniper, or snipers, on the other side of Main Street. Inside was a sign in Arabic that said: "Long live the mujahedeen." Soon the marines had spray-painted another sign over it: "Long live the muj killers."
But for the next five hours, they could not kill whoever was running from window to window and firing at them from the other side of Main Street, despite the expenditure of enormous amounts of ammunition.
"We're not able to see the muzzle flashes," said Capt. Read Omohundro, the company commander. "As a result," he said, "we end up expending a lot of ammunition trying to get the snipers."
At one point, they thought that they had a bead on someone running back and forth between the two buildings. Then Capt. Christopher Spears exclaimed: "He's on a bike!"
And somehow, through a volley of gunfire, whoever it was got away.
At 5 p.m., the marines finally crossed Highway 10 and searched the smoking remains of the two buildings. At 5:30 p.m., a sniper opened up on them.