Adam Banotai was a 21-year-old sergeant and squad leader in the Marine Corps during the 2004 invasion of Falluja, a restive insurgent-held city in Iraq. His unit — which had seven of 17 men wounded by shrapnel or bullets in the first days of the invasion — seized control of the government center early in the campaign.

So when Sunni insurgents, some with allegiances to Al Qaeda, retook the city this month and raised their black insurgent flag over buildings where he and his men fought, he was transfixed, disbelieving and appalled.

“I texted a couple of friends,” said Mr. Banotai, now a firefighter and registered nurse in Pennsylvania. “Everyone was in disbelief.”

“I don’t think anyone had the grand illusion that Falluja or Ramadi was going to turn into Disneyland, but none of us thought it was going to fall back to a jihadist insurgency,” he said. “It made me sick to my stomach to have that thrown in our face, everything we fought for so blatantly taken away.”

The bloody mission to wrest Falluja from insurgents in November 2004 meant more to the Marines than almost any other battle in the 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many consider it the corps’ biggest and most iconic fight since Vietnam, with nearly 100 Marines and soldiers killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

For many veterans of that battle — most now working in jobs long removed from combat — watching insurgents running roughshod through the streets they once fought to secure, often in brutal close-quarters combat, has shaken their faith in what their mission achieved.

Some now blame President Obama for not pushing harder to keep some troops in Iraq to maintain the stability. Others express anger at George W. Bush for getting them into a war that they now view as dubious in purpose and even more doubtful in its accomplishments. But either way, the fall of the city to insurgents has set off within the tight-knit community of active and former Marines a wrenching reassessment of a battle that in many ways defined their role in the war.

“This is just the beginning of the reckoning and accounting,” said Kael Weston, a former State Department political adviser who worked with the Marines for nearly three years in Falluja and the surrounding Anbar Province, and later with Marines in Afghanistan.

Mr. Weston, who is now writing a book but remains in close contact with scores of the men he served with, said Marines across the globe had been frenetically sharing their feelings about the new battle for Falluja via email, text and Facebook.

“The news went viral in the worst way,” he said. “This has been a gut punch to the morale of the Marine Corps and painful for a lot of families who are saying, ‘I thought my son died for a reason.’ ”

Ryan Sparks was a platoon commander during a seven-month Falluja deployment in which three men were killed and 57 wounded in his 90-man unit. Now about to take a job in Manhattan after recently leaving the Marines, Mr. Sparks, 39, said many of the younger Falluja veterans are angry “because we lost so many Marines, and it feels like they were sacrificed for nothing.”

Yet even among older officers who seem less surprised by the turn of events, Mr. Sparks said, “It hurts to think that it isn’t as important to Americans as it was to us while it was happening.”

He likens Falluja to Khe Sanh, the bloody 1968 battle where Americans triumphed only to abandon the base months later, though he did not disagree with the 2011 troop pullout and does not believe that American troops should be sent back in.

“This makes the analogy complete,” he said.

Among the few things that kept 19-year-old Pfc. James Cathcart going during his second combat tour was flirting with female Marines who would come through his base in Falluja after their job searching Iraqi women at a nearby checkpoint. Yet that memory — of one woman in particular — haunts him: Mr. Cathcart’s platoon rushed to respond to an attack in June 2005 to find the truck ferrying the women to their base engulfed in flames from a car bomb.

“I wanted to get with that girl, and then the next day I was seeing pieces of her all over the side of the road,” said Mr. Cathcart, now 28, who says he was discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder and is now unemployed in Colorado.

He said that the fall of Falluja might finally bring home to the public what he says he and many comrades had long believed about the war. “Lives were wasted, and now everyone back home sees that,” he said. “It was irresponsible to send us over there with no plan, and now to just give it all away.”

Across the Marine Corps, officers are struggling to respond to calls from wounded veterans and parents of Marines killed in Anbar about recent events in Falluja.

“There is a rising drumbeat of anxiety/angst among our Marines concerning the state of Falluja/Ramadi today,” one senior active duty officer wrote as part of an email chain circulating among Marine officers discussing how to respond to the inquiries they were receiving from Marines and their families about Falluja. The officer cited what he called the Marines’ success in helping foster the Awakening movement — where local tribesmen turned against jihadists and partnered with American forces — and said that “without these victories, we might still be there today.”

The officer added: “What the Iraqi forces lost in the last month, four years after transition, is not a reflection of Marine efforts. If it is a reflection of anything, it is the nature of the Iraqi social fabric and long-suppressed civil discord.”

One of the last things Matthew Brown, a 20-year-old lance corporal when he was wounded the third day of the invasion, remembers about Falluja was seeing Mr. Banotai help load him into a vehicle. Given last rites because he lost so much blood after a sniper shot him in the leg, he awoke a week later at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and began the long process of learning to walk again, which he now does with a cane. Seeing pictures this week of insurgent-held Falluja, he said, was “nauseating.”

“It’s just like, wow, thanks for dragging up all these memories I tried to forget that were controlling my life,” said Mr. Brown, 29, who now lives in Fayetteville, N.C. “For a while I lived out of a bottle trying to shut the memories off.”

Though he would not send troops back, Mr. Weston, the former State Department official, said it was “almost immoral for us to say, ‘It’s all up to them now, we’re out of there.’ ” He noted that a man whom he had worked with in Falluja recently sent him an email describing the return of Abdullah al-Janabi, an insurgent leader before the Marines invaded.

“We are looking for help,” the man wrote on Jan. 1. Mr. Weston has not heard from his friend since Saturday. 

Source:The New York Times