Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  As interesting as Camp Habbaniyah was from an archaeological standpoint, we didn’t have a lot of time to admire the oleanders. It had been occupied by an engineer company and a tank company from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was stretched across all of Al Anbar as a result of the low troop numbers Secretary Rumsfeld had insisted upon while planning the initial invasion. The area was a security vacuum due to the lack of forces, a refuge for what we were then calling “former regime loyalists” (the word insurgent was forbidden in official traffic) and foreign fighters. The local economy had catered to the Habbaniyah and TQ airfields, and the surrounding communities had a large population of military and ex-military personnel. The cities also sit along the major roads from Jordan and Syria into Baghdad and had been known for smuggling activities for more than one hundred years. Lots of weapons, lots of former military personnel, and an entire Sunni population known for lawlessness and furious about yielding power to Iraq’s Shia majority—welcome to Al Anbar!

  The guys from Third ACR were ready to hand over this mess as quickly as possible. Having been shot up repeatedly in Khalidiyah, they essentially didn’t go there anymore but did sporadically patrol the ammo dump. There were too few of them and too much of Iraq, with too many insurgents to go around. We brought a lieutenant colonel, two majors, and two sergeants major to the initial brief by Chris Kennedy, the Third ACR major in charge of the ad hoc miniature battalion. His bosses were in other parts of Anbar conducting similar hand-offs as the U.S. Army adapted to the fact that it needed more forces in Iraq than it had originally planned. The insurgents may have heard about the briefing schedule, but more likely they were just thrilled to have many more targets to shoot at, as they mortared the initial transition brief Chris provided to us. Welcome to Habbaniyah!

  After a couple of days on the ground conducting “right seat rides” with the Third ACR troops to learn as much as we could about our area of operations while they were still sitting next to us and close enough to ask questions, we took responsibility for the sector on September 25, 2003. Our initial notification that we were going to deploy to Iraq during the middle of a simulated tank fight had come exactly two months earlier, on July 25. It’s hard to imagine shifting direction more rapidly than we had, moving faster or farther, or being much more poorly prepared for the intensive counterinsurgency fight that was waiting for us.

  We immediately began patrolling to get to know the area for which we were responsible. It was huge—thirty-five kilometers north to south and fifty kilometers east to west. The Euphrates River was in the middle of the sector, with only one bridge that would support armored vehicles and another pontoon bridge that could take Humvees in a pinch. The enemy quickly demonstrated that he was willing to fight us for freedom of maneuver, and almost every patrol received enemy contact. One of our First Cavalry Division mech infantry lieutenants was a bullet magnet, getting scratches from RPG fragments or bullets pretty much daily. We stopped putting him in for Purple Hearts after a couple of hits, as it wasn’t worth the paperwork and he, amazingly, never got badly hurt. We told him that he’d have to bleed a lot more than he had to that point to get another medal, remembering the two-stitch rule that had kept Jeff Ingram from getting one in the initial invasion.

  Unfortunately, other guys were getting hurt a lot worse. Our first casualty in sector came on September 29, when a soldier from the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, Staff Sergeant Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an IED attack in our sector. Delta Troop of the Fourth Cavalry Regiment was a Humvee-mounted brigade unit riding in vehicles with flat bottoms that absorbed the full impact of explosions. The IED was perfectly buried under the road, three daisy-chained 152mm rounds wired together and command detonated via a wire link. The IED initiated an ambush that then included someone firing a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, at the Humvees. I happened to be sharing a ride around the big unguarded Taquaddum Airfield ammunition dump with Captain Ben Miller on his tank at the time of the attack, and we drove to the scene, Ben in the loader’s hatch. A long firefight with insurgents ensued that made the front page of The New York Times the next morning. It almost included killing the members of a television crew who were filming from the roof of a building—from a distance, a television camera can look an awful lot like a shoulder-fired RPG. The nonevent was a chilling lesson in how this battlefield would differ from the one I remembered in Desert Storm, which had been essentially free of civilians. In this fight, they were everywhere.

  As were IEDs. I’d had my first up-close and personal interaction with one the previous day, when the task force was conducting Operation Netscape, designed to saturate the sector with all available forces and challenge the insurgents for control of the countryside. I pulled into a position in my Humvee, not yet equipped with even hillbilly armor, and saw a telltale wire next to the road. I cut it with my Leatherman, a pocket tool beloved of tankers, then followed the wire trail to a 152mm artillery shell partially buried beside the road. We didn’t have an explosive ordnance detachment (EOD) team assigned to the task force, so I had one of Ben’s tanks detonate the round with a burst from a coaxial machine gun. Unlike the weapons aboard Humvees or even Bradley fighting vehicles, the coaxial machine gun on an M1 is stabilized with gyroscopes and aimed with assistance from a laser rangefinder, making it a very accurate weapon. The fact that the machine gun and crew firing it are protected behind heavy armor is also a plus. Machine guns would become our default method of detonating surface-laid IEDs during the many times we found them without EOD teams in the neighborhood—another technique we hadn’t been taught back home. We were making it up as we went along, largely on our own.

  We also got better at counterbattery fires, targeting the mad mortarman who occasionally dropped mortar rounds on Camp Habbaniyah as he had during our turnover brief with the Third ACR, generally with little effect. It was a big post and we were spread out pretty widely, and his firing technique was not the best. We worked to further disrupt his aim by regularly firing 155mm artillery shells back at him, when he chose not to fire from positions in close proximity to civilian Iraqi homes. We followed each counterbattery fire with a visit to the firing location, and on one occasion were able to learn from civilians in the neighborhood the identity and home of the mortarman. We visited, finding a weapons cache in the house and the mortarman at home, and sent him off to detention, first at Camp Ramadi, where the brigade was based, and eventually on to the bigger prison at Abu Ghraib. Life was a little better when the mad mortarman was gone, although his ecological niche was later filled by a rocket man we never could catch. He fired from farther away, using rockets with a longer range and from behind the cover provided by the Euphrates River. Although we never took significant casualties from indirect fire on Camp Habbaniyah, our brigade counterparts in Ramadi were more closely packed together and less fortunate. A number were killed by rocket and mortar fire over the course of the year.

  The capture of the mad mortarman illustrated a classic principle of counterinsurgency that I recognized from my studies of the subject: to defeat an insurgency, the counterinsurgent must be able to identify the enemy. As any beat cop in a tough neighborhood in Washington, D.C., will tell you, that’s tough to do. Even the people who don’t support the insurgency are likely to be more afraid of reprisals for “snitching” to the authorities than they are of the effects of insurgent-initiated violence in their neighborhood. Police use saturation patrolling and anonymous tip lines to gather the information they need to get the gang leaders off the streets, but even when they speak the same language as the enemy, the process takes a long time and a lot of work—and the gangs rarely target the police directly, knowing how much hell that would bring down on their heads. How much more difficult, then, to gather the intelligence when the authorities speak a different language and are unfamiliar with local customs and patterns of life, and when the insurgents intentionally target the counterinsurgents—often with the active support of the local people, as was the case in Al Anbar
in 2003, still simmering over hatred of the Shia regime that was in the process of being installed in Baghdad.

  Counterinsurgency theory suggests that to overcome these challenges, the key is the creation of local forces that have the support of the population—local army and police forces. This eminently sensible plan of action had been supported by Colonel Jeff Ingram, who had been working to put together just such a local security force from a former Iraqi Army unit in his sector of Baghdad when Ambassador Paul Bremer issued the instruction that disbanded the Iraqi Army forever. Understanding the strategic implications of the disastrous decision, General Petraeus had raised concerns to Bremer to try to get him to overturn the ruling, but to no avail, until some five weeks after the army was disbanded, when he told Bremer’s key assistant in Baghdad that “CPA’s policies are killing our troopers.”

  Bremer had not, however, banned the creation of Iraqi police units, and there were skeleton police organizations throughout much of Iraq, including in Khalidiyah. Predictably, they became a prime target for insurgents. The Khalidiyah police chief at the time of the invasion in March 2003 had been killed not long afterward, and his replacement was also killed just as Task Force 1-34 was taking over sector from the Third ACR, his bullet-riddled body left in the town square next to the police station. It took a brave man to openly serve as a policeman in Khalidiyah in the fall of 2003, but all the counterinsurgency literature I’d read focused on the importance of police as the closest force to the population, the key to gathering intelligence on insurgent identities and locations and protecting the people from insurgent reprisals.

  So it was very early on in our tenure that I gave Ben Miller the task to visit the police station and conduct a joint patrol with the Iraqi Police. Just before staff call that evening, Ben walked up to me wearing his fireproof Nomex tanker’s garb, bathed in sweat, and reported, “Sir, I failed.”

  “Excuse me, Ben?”

  “Sir, you told me to go on a joint patrol with the Iraqi Police. We tried, but the clowns were too fast for us. We couldn’t catch them.”

  I had clearly sent a boy to do a man’s job. I told Ben that I would join him for a joint patrol with our local police the next day; after eight years of reading the books, I was ready to perform the basic counterinsurgency task of establishing a good relationship with the local security force. How hard could it be?

  Pretty hard, as it turned out. In fact, this would become a theme. All the things I’d read about that were required to succeed in counterinsurgency were a lot harder than they’d seemed in the books, including the one I’d written. In this case, as soon as we pulled up next to the police station, the police started to skedaddle in all directions, exactly like—there’s no way to avoid the simile—cockroaches when you flip the light on in the middle of the night. But Ben Miller, no fool despite the grief I’d given him for being one the night before at staff call, was ready for them. He’d told two of his fastest soldiers to strip off their body armor and, carrying only their rifles, pin down a couple of the Iraqi Police, or IPs. They succeeded, and Ben led me to a dingy corner of the police station, where the two oldest IPs on the planet, freshly awakened from their midafternoon nap, were clearly less than thrilled about the rare opportunity to go on patrol with U.S. forces. A dialogue ensued, conducted via interpreter.

  “Good afternoon. I’m Major Nagl, the operations officer of Task Force 1-34 Armor, responsible for security in this sector. We’d like you to go on patrol with us today and teach us something about Khalidiyah.”

  I didn’t really need the translator to understand their response. Clearly, it was impossible for them to go on patrol with us. Their feet hurt, they needed permission from their boss, who was sadly unavailable at present (having run away faster than they had been able to), this was all highly unusual, their weapons weren’t clean . . .

  “I’m sorry, guys, you’re coming.”

  “No.”

  I was starting to get angry. This was their town, and conducting patrols of it was clearly police business. I picked up an AK-47 that was leaning in the corner and pressed it into the hands of the slightly less ancient policeman. “You’re going.”

  “No.”

  My M4 was suddenly pointed at his chest. “You’re going, buddy.” There had been nothing about this in any of the books I’d read at Oxford, but adrenaline took over, and the two IPs ended up walking along with us at gunpoint every step of the way through a town that was clearly curious to see so many Americans on their streets in the company of two visibly frightened Iraqi cops. It wasn’t until that night, as I tried to understand what had happened, that I finally figured out what the IPs had been so scared of. After our joint foot patrol, we continued to patrol the main drag of Khalidiyah with tanks and Bradleys, but the back streets were again insurgent territory. We’d controlled the streets as long as we stood on them, but after we left, it was as if we’d never been there. It was like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water and hoping that you’d made a lasting impression. The insurgents owned the night, and there was every chance that the IPs who’d been frog-marched in front of our patrol were going to be visited by the insurgents after dark. Our rifles in their backs were a life insurance policy for those guys. They could tell the masked insurgents who would appear in their concrete-block homes later that night that they were cooperating with the Americans only because we’d promised to kill them if they didn’t.

  Visiting a police station on the bridge over the Euphrates in 2004.

  In fact, despite all our tanks and artillery and helicopters, the insurgents had an advantage: the people were far more scared of them than they were of us, and for good reason. We wouldn’t kill them, certainly not on purpose, but the insurgents would, and regularly did, often slowly, and sometimes in front of their families. It was a challenge understood by everyone who had faced guerrilla enemies at least since Napoleon’s opponents coined the word for “little war” two hundred years earlier: the counterinsurgent has to defend everywhere, all the time, while the insurgent can choose his target and his time, always slipping away to fight another day if the conditions aren’t exactly right. And because the counterinsurgent is a visitor, working against the clock of declining local and domestic willingness to put up with the costs of the campaign, time is his enemy. An old counterinsurgency aphorism teaches that the insurgent is winning if he isn’t losing, but the counterinsurgent is losing if he isn’t winning, and this was another bitter lesson that was starting to make a lot more sense than it had when I’d first read it in the hallowed halls of Oxford’s Codrington Library.

  The strategic offensive for the counterinsurgent is building local security forces like the IPs who in time will take over most of the responsibility for security themselves, but the tactical offensive is conducting targeted kill/capture missions against identified insurgents. And the strategic offensive (building local forces) isn’t possible until sufficient progress has been made in the tactical offensive (improving security by going after the insurgents). Counterinsurgents used to practice a different technique. When the Romans confronted a rebellious province, they would first build a road to it, then methodically slaughter the men and boys in sector, sell the women and children into slavery, and salt the fields so that nothing would grow. It was an effective counterinsurgency technique—the Romans rarely had to pacify a given province more than once in a century, and pacifying one province in this manner had a significant demonstration effect on the neighboring ones; but this technique was obviously not a viable option in an era ruled by CNN and the Geneva Convention. The Romans bypassed the requirement for gaining intelligence on specific insurgents by assuming everyone was an insurgent. We, on the other hand, worked hard to target the specific insurgent fish swimming in the sea of the people.

  Intelligence came in a number of ways—from local sources who walked up to the front gate, from people whose homes we visited in the company of an interpreter, and increasingly over time, from a police force that grew more confident
that we were staying around to push back against the insurgent control of Khalidiyah and the surrounding villages. We were not permitted to use our Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) monies to pay for information; that funding was intended to be put to use cleaning streets and otherwise providing employment for the Iraqi population. I always kept a napkin in my pocket in case someone was willing to provide information; if I dropped it and they picked it up, they could be paid for trash removal. Regulations are supposed to help win the war, not keep you from winning it.

  However legally or illegally information was obtained, correlating the products of these disparate sources was enormously difficult, and it was all but impossible to determine which sources were pursuing their own agenda, perhaps because of a land dispute or family feud, and which were genuine. It was also hard, even when we believed we knew the name of the individual who was planting IEDs along the main road in Khalidiyah, to figure out where he lived. Houses didn’t have numbers, and even well-intentioned Iraqi people struggled to understand the photographic maps we used in an attempt to pick the insurgent’s home.

  This led to some significant frustration. After many days of work correlating intelligence sources and attempting to identify the right house, we’d pull together a raid, almost always early in the morning. Preraid preparations had the aspect of preparing for playing in a football game, working out plays, rehearsing contingencies, then finally suiting up in helmet and pads to conduct a strike that was rarely met with violence but just as rarely turned out to be the right house. More than once the rudely awakened man of the house led us down the street himself a few doors to point out the one that belonged to the person we were looking for. Of course, by this point, with tanks idling on the street and long minutes having elapsed, our target was long gone. The good news was that we now did know where he lived, we hoped, and could return to visit later—but insurgents rarely returned for months to a house they knew we were keeping an eye on, if they ever did.