As the insurgents fled, one flung a grenade in the Marines’ directions. It stopped rolling near Peralta. According to his ...

Jan Bender remembers the moment as if it were yesterday. Taking cover from insurgents, his fireteam had just assembled in the dark in front of a house in Fallujah, Iraq, when the Marines were ...

In the Second Battle of Fallujah that November, US forces, supported by a British battalion on the ground, bombarded the city for about six weeks. They used precision bombs, rockets, missiles, nearly ...

The so-called second battle of Fallujah — code-named Operation Phantom Fury — came seven months later. For several bloody weeks, the Marines went house-to-house in what has been called some of the ...

Editor’s note: For Veterans Day, PEOPLE is publishing a series of stories looking back at the service members and families affected by the two battles of Fallujah, in Iraq, in 2004 — combined, they ...