Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  Perhaps the most grievous was the decision to completely disband the Iraqi Army without telling its members how they would be looked after or what the plans were to construct a new army (other than seven infantry battalions, a total force of some 5,000 troops). In fact, at the time many American officers were working with Iraqi Army veterans to negotiate their help in maintaining security. There weren’t nearly enough Americans to police the streets, and there certainly weren’t enough Arabic translators to handle the degree of interaction with the population that would be required. Jeff Ingram, whose tanks had made it to Baghdad and who was now responsible for securing a sector of the city that far exceeded his grasp, was meeting daily with an Iraqi major general who told Jeff that he had an entire Iraqi division of some 10,000 troops standing by to provide security on the streets. All Jeff had to do was pay them. General Petraeus was also meeting with senior Iraqi officers in northern Iraq to try to garner their support for the new Iraq and had already run a caucus election to select an interim provincial council and governor in Sunni-dominated Nineveh Province.

  An order came down from Bremer that the Iraqi Army would be disbanded. General Petraeus traveled to Baghdad to protest the decision when he heard of it, able to predict the results, but there was no chance of overturning this decision, made somewhere between the Pentagon office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith and Ambassador Bremer. (Each blames the other in his memoirs.) When Jeff informed the Iraqi general of this decision, the astonished Iraqi general informed him, “This means that I will be fighting you tomorrow.” Jeff acknowledged the possibility, then the two officers gravely saluted each other. Although his sector had been quiet to that point, attacks on Jeff’s troops began the next morning.

  The story was repeated on a broader scale everywhere in Iraq. An insurgency developed, composed largely of Sunnis, Saddam Hussein’s favorites who had held most of the government positions in prewar Iraq despite being a minority of the Iraqi population. They were also a majority of the senior military, rendered unemployed by the CPA’s decision. A large group of organized, angry men who knew how to use weapons that were literally lying loose in the unsecured ammunitions bunkers of what had fairly recently been the world’s fourth-largest army now had no job and no prospects for one, and they took their anger out on the people they believed responsible for this disaster.

  The three Pentagon mistakes—not providing enough American troops to secure all the conventional weapons that littered postwar Iraq, preventing the use of Iraqi troops to assist in that effort and secure the population, and putting all the people who knew where the weapons were and how to use them in a permanently subordinate and unemployed status—were a perfect recipe for an insurgency. Counterinsurgency literature suggests that the insurgent begins with nothing but a cause. If the Department of Defense had been trying to set the conditions for irregular war, it could hardly have done better than giving every Sunni in Iraq a reason to fight against the new regime and free access to the weapons required for that fight.

  While we watched these events with interest from Fort Riley, 1-34 Armor was focused on another kind of war, and I was learning a new job as (finally!) the operations officer, or S3, of 1-34 Armor. The three was responsible for planning and tracking the execution of operations, leading a staff section that generally included a captain and a few lieutenants as well as a sergeant major, an operations sergeant, and a dozen or so soldiers. The S3 was the senior staff officer; staff captains were in charge of personnel (S1), intelligence (S2), logistics (S4), and maintenance (the battalion motor officer). Although I’d been offered the job of executive officer at the brigade level, I really wanted more time in a battalion and a tank of my own, and I was also attracted by the chance to continue to work closely with the Centurions’ operations sergeant major, a crusty and very capable tanker named Sheldon Parks who knew how to swing a hammer. Sergeant Major Parks and his senior noncommissioned officer brothers and sisters across the Army are a national treasure with their decades of experience in making things happen. Sheldon called me “Little Brother” and became my best friend in the battalion.

  Even as the insurgency caught fire in Iraq, we were preparing for a repeat of Operation Desert Storm—an NTC rotation against the dreaded OPFOR, perhaps again augmented by the Nanooks who continued to haunt my dreams at that point. (They’ve since been replaced by even more menacing opponents who punish my mistakes more permanently.) We were, in fact, conducting a simulated brigade meeting engagement against another tank unit on NTC terrain in August 2003 when, just before 1-34 was committed to strike the fictional enemy in the flank (what enemy in their right mind would attack U.S. tank units in 2003?), the radio call of “ENDEX” (end of exercise) came across the net.

  This was highly unusual. It was early in our NTC train-up; our units were being simulated in a computer; and only the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Swisher, and I were aboard our actual tanks. The exercise represented millions of dollars of training resources that were being jerked to a halt just before the climax of the event. Battalion commanders were ordered to report to a classified briefing room inside the simulation center. Jeff, a West Point graduate three years senior to me and a veteran of the NTC’s opposing forces, a physically small but incredibly tactically proficient armor officer, departed without saying much, as was his wont. Jeff was the very best of the Army of the 1990s, intensely focused on conventional combat proficiency.

  I was pretty sure I knew what was going on. We were going to be sent to help pacify an Iraq that was beginning to blaze with insurgency. When Jeff returned, he tersely confirmed that that was, in fact, the case. Our brigade, some 3,000 soldiers organized into two tank battalions, a mechanized infantry battalion, an engineer battalion, an artillery battalion, and a support battalion, was being sent to reinforce Al Anbar Province, Iraq’s Wild West. Overwhelmingly Sunni, overwhelmingly angry at the turn of events that had Iraq’s Shiite majority suddenly holding political power, and completely dedicated to overturning this outcome, Anbar was the hottest part of Iraq both literally and figuratively. Imagine America’s Mountain West reacting to a French occupation of the United States. All of Al Anbar at this point, an area roughly the size of North Carolina, was currently occupied by the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR), a reinforced but nonetheless overstretched brigade-size unit that was already absorbing heavy casualties. The Third ACR would be replaced by elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, which was grumpy about being largely passed over for a role in the initial invasion of Iraq. A planned airborne operation to seize Baghdad Airport was canceled, and a single brigade of the 82nd followed the Third Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division on the road to Baghdad, a bitter pill for a unit used to being first. Our First Brigade of the First Infantry Division would provide the paratroopers with some heavy metal support.

  But we would not be able to provide as much as we would have liked to give them. Still operating under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s order to cut deployments to the bone, the Pentagon was trying to present the lightest footprint possible, so that only one of our three tank companies would deploy with tanks. The other two would be Humvee-mounted “dragoons,” and Jeff Swisher and I would leave our tanks at Fort Riley as well. Picking which of our three tank companies would deploy with all its heavy metal was pretty easy. Apache Company, led by Captain Ben Miller, was the best of the three, and Ben was a natural leader with easy competence and, it would turn out, enormous courage under fire. But Bandit and Cobra were not happy about the decision, and both would deeply miss their beloved tanks over the year to come.

  Plans firmed up quickly. The rest of the brigade would station itself in Ramadi, provincial capital of Al Anbar and the seat of government, while 1-34 would be detached, an independent task force responsible for the troubled town of Khalidiyah, midway between Ramadi and Fallujah, which would be occupied by a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. Khalidiyah was a very tough town of 30,000. All we could find out abo
ut it on the Internet was that it had been the location of an attack on the Third ACR units that were stretched thinly across Al Anbar, and that the Khalidiyah police chief had been killed by insurgents. The new police chief of Khalidiyah would become an important person in the lives of all of us, although he would not be the replacement chief who was serving there as we were deploying. That second chief would also be killed, horribly, his body left in the town square riddled with bullets on our first day in the town. Being a police chief in Al Anbar was not a good long-term career choice in 2003.

  Having our battalion detached from the brigade had its advantages and disadvantages. The brigade commander clearly thought highly of Jeff in choosing him for this independent mission, and he gave Task Force 1-34 an engineer company, an artillery section with its own radar and two 155mm cannons, and a light infantry company that had been detached from the First Cavalry Division, the unit with which I’d fought in Desert Storm, to provide more soldiers for our mission. We also received some intelligence assets from the First Cav, a psychological operations team with the ability to print leaflets and broadcast messages to the Iraqi population in Arabic and, on and off, a special forces team. We were loaded for bear.

  However, there were disadvantages to being detached from the brigade as well. Khalidiyah was a particularly violent town, even in a province that was full of tough towns. Starkly provincial, it resisted control from Ramadi even in the best of times, and these were not the best of times. We also had to handle all aspects of base camp operations, from manning guard posts to protect against enemy infiltration of our lines to conducting our own intelligence synthesis and analysis, with the limited assets of a battalion staff that would already be stretched. The experience would challenge all of us, but especially Jeff, who could bear enormous weight but was uncomfortable sharing the emotional stresses of command with anyone else. We were in for what would prove to be a very long year.

  The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that we were completely unprepared for the war we were about to fight. Our soldiers were tankers, trained and equipped to close with and destroy other enemy armored units. We had to learn to wage war against an insurgency rather than against the enemy tank units we had been designed to confront in open warfare. We had had no training in developing an intelligence portfolio on individual insurgents, conducting security patrols to derive local intelligence, developing local governing councils, training and equipping local police forces, conducting raids to capture or kill high-value targets . . . the list could go on for days.

  Marty Leners, now the brigade operations officer, and his assistant Captain Nick Ayers developed a hasty counterinsurgency lane training event that confronted our platoon leaders with many of the challenges we expected they would face on the ground west of Baghdad. (Nick, captain of the West Point debate team as a cadet, would himself return to West Point as a Sosh p a few years later.) We rotated our tank platoons through the training lanes on the few scout Humvees we had available, to give them a taste of the bitter fruit they would be eating—but there was no time available for higher-level staff training on the defeat of an insurgency, and no one to conduct it even if there had been time available. The Army hadn’t updated its counterinsurgency field manual since the Vietnam War, and I had had no official Army training on counterinsurgency during my four years at West Point and twelve years in the active Army. My Oxford studies had been academic, in every sense of that word; I knew what we would have to do in theory but had never done it in practice, not even in an exercise. Neither had anyone else in the unit. We would have to learn as we went, making many mistakes along the way.

  • • •

  Although the S3 is responsible for maneuvers within a unit’s area of operations, getting the tanks and trucks to the fight is the job of the executive officer, a job I had gratefully turned over to Dave Indermuehle, a big armor officer who was completely imperturbable. Dave honchoed the process of loading our equipment onto railroad cars for the trip to the port of Houston, where they would be driven aboard ships for the transatlantic voyage. Our vehicles now included fourteen up-armored Humvees, given to us as a replacement for Cobra Company’s tanks, and fourteen slick Humvees without armor, serving in place of Bandit’s tanks.

  The Army didn’t have enough up-armored Humvees to go around, the legacy of a long-standing internal fight within the Army’s Armor force, which believed strongly that only tracked vehicles, like tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, should be armored. The few armored Humvees the Army did have had been acquired by the military police branch. They were not really designed as fighting vehicles; although a .50 machine gun or a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher was mounted on top of the truck, it could be fired only by almost completely exposing the gunner to hostile fire. The vehicles themselves were also not ideal for the kind of fight we were joining, as they had flat bottoms that absorbed the impact of explosions underneath the vehicle rather than V-shaped hulls that would direct shock waves around it.

  It would take many long years before these shortcomings were remedied—and it took explicit direction from Secretary of Defense Gates to get the services to do what should have been done much earlier. Eventually the Army would procure the right vehicles for the war we were fighting, rather than the war we had planned to fight, but in the meantime we were forced to rely on homemade hillbilly armor welded onto many of the trucks, including mine, Jeff’s, and Dave’s, and stand in line for bolt-on factory-built armor packages. The command group received theirs last, in August 2004, after eleven months of operating in Al Anbar without any armor save the makeshift systems our welder had managed to fabricate from scrap metal, with sandbags on the floor to absorb some of the impact of mine strikes or improvised explosive device (IED) detonations. It was something you tried not to think about when rolling out on a mission.

  We hadn’t even had time to install hillbilly armor on our three before our vehicles were due to be tied down on the trains to the port. Tankers are good at loading their vehicles aboard railcars, even though (and perhaps precisely because) the tank treads actually hang off either side of the railcar because the tank is so wide. Loading Humvees, by comparison, is a piece of cake, and almost before we knew it, we were saying good-bye to our families and getting on airplanes out of Topeka.

  Good-byes are hard. Jack, of course, at not quite age two, didn’t know what was happening, but it was difficult to say good-bye to Susi. We hadn’t been married during Desert Storm even though I’d renewed my standing marriage proposal before she’d left cricket-infested Fort Hood, hoping that a potential life insurance payout would sweeten the deal; to her credit, she’d been offended by the suggestion. Like that deployment, this one was for an indeterminate period of time; unlike the last one, this time I would look forward to Susi’s e-mails rather than her letters. E-mails at least arrived in good order and in the right order, although they didn’t allow her to make the little sketches with which she’d illustrated her letters in the last war we’d done together. We would also get weekly phone calls this time, which were a godsend.

  The tankers of the Centurions landed in Kuwait a few days before the ship carrying our equipment arrived—the Army is really, really good at moving big things around the globe—and spent the time getting acclimated to the heat and the time zone. Getting the stuff off the boat was still XO business, so Dave handled that while I worked with Marty Leners to plan the convoys that would take us across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq (again, in the case of Jeff and me and a number of our senior noncommissioned officers, including Sheldon Parks, who wore the combat patches of Desert Storm divisions on our right shoulders). The mess hall had novelty chocolate-dipped ice cream cones that I found irresistible, and some of the guys ended up calling my convoy the Ice Cream Cone Convoy after I gave them firm instructions to eat their ice cream cones while they were still available in Kuwait, as I correctly guessed that they would be harder to come by once we arrived in Iraq.

  The Ice Cream Cone Convoy was a bear, wi
th dozens of vehicles and two overnight stops along the way before we finally came over a hill and saw Khalidiyah for the first time. After several days on a road that had eventually become little more than a dirt path, it literally looked like an oasis. The town was built along the Euphrates River, with lush palm trees and elephant grass along the banks and with irrigation ditches bringing water to the desert. It may have had 30,000 souls, with another 30,000 scattered across the farmlands between Ramadi, the provincial capital, to the west and Fallujah to the east.

  We would set up camp in a former British Royal Air Force base named Habbaniyah just to the east of Khalidiyah. The palm-tree-lined avenues, roundabouts, and even a theater and an outdoor movie screen provided a great picture of what the British occupation of Iraq must have looked like in the 1930s. The hedgerows of oleanders planted by our predecessors remained to shield the avenues of our base camp like British briars. (Habbaniyah means “oleander” in Arabic.)

  Habbaniyah’s airfield, now in disrepair like the rest of the post, had been designed for propeller planes and could not handle jet aircraft, so the Iraqi Air Force had built a larger air base on a hill south of the post that they called Taqquadam Airfield, or TQ. It had been one of the most important Iraqi Air Force bases before the war and became a major U.S. logistics and air base for all of Al Anbar province. TQ featured MiG fighters that the Iraqis had buried in sand so that they wouldn’t be targeted by U.S. planes. Of course, they also would never fly again because of the sand in the electronics and hydraulics. Between TQ and Habbaniyah was a huge ammunition dump with dozens and dozens of bunkers full of weaponry, all unguarded and free for the taking—an insurgent’s Walmart with no check-out lanes.