Knife Fights

by John A. Nagl

  When we did succeed in a raid, we’d bring the detainees back to Habbaniyah for interrogations conducted by our First Cavalry Division intelligence detachment. Our best asset in this part of the fight was John McCary, a young specialist with very good Arabic skills. A musician and linguist, he’d majored in French at Vassar but then enlisted in the Army after September 11 and volunteered for Arabic training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. His instructor there nicknamed McCary “the Sponge” for his incredible absorptive capacity, and John put those skills to good use, helping us understand the local power structure, relationships among the local people, and the shape of the insurgent networks we were fighting. McCary and I spent significant time together as I worked to draw out what he’d learned and let him know what gaps we were trying to fill in our intelligence picture of the battlefield.

  John McCary (center) with another counterintelligence officer in Iraq.

  John’s Arabic continued to improve in no small part because of the relationship he developed with our best interpreter, a Jordanian American named Frank Nasrawi. Frank ran a liquor store in Houston before the invasion of Iraq but volunteered for service as a cleared interpreter—one with a security clearance, like McCary, but in Frank’s case with the enormous advantage of being a native Arabic speaker. Frank, known as “Abu Edward” (the father of Edward), gave me my nickname of “Abu Jack” and was easily able to determine when an Iraqi was lying and when he was telling the truth, who knew more than they were saying, and whom we could trust. He could and often did take over negotiations with local Iraqi politicians or IP leaders, a trait I bemusedly permitted but that on at least one occasion perturbed Jeff Swisher mightily, leading to words that I would not have used with a strategic asset like Frank. He was in many ways the face of the task force to the people who mattered in Khalidiyah, and he became an enormously popular interlocutor from whom I learned a great deal. I took great pride when locals began publicly calling me Abu Jack—at Abu Edward’s instigation, no doubt, but still a worthwhile step in humanizing our occupation in my eyes.

  It was a complicated war, infinitely more difficult than Desert Storm had been, when we simply shot the tanks and troops who weren’t wearing the same uniforms that we were wearing. Now we struggled mightily to find our enemy, who killed us from the shadows even as we struggled to build political and military entities that could earn the trust and support of the Iraqi people. As part of this effort, we tried to encourage economic development and the provision of social services through the allocation of Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds for rebuilding schools and medical clinics. Integrating and prioritizing all these tasks was far and away the most difficult thing I’d ever done, leading me to conclude that while Desert Storm had provided an undergraduate education in warfare, this was graduate school, and I was failing.

  We also waged an information operations campaign to attempt to persuade the people to side with us against the insurgents, even though the insurgents could slip into their homes and kill them and the worst we would do was take them away for weeks or months of detention. This was just another verse of the perpetual song that gives the more ruthless insurgents many advantages against a force that supports the rule of law. This imbalance is most pronounced early in a counterinsurgency campaign, before the occupying force has built many local forces, learned the intricacies of local language, culture, and power structures, and adapted its organization, training, and equipment for the demands of the fight it faces, which is only rarely the fight it was preparing for when the call came. We were a classic case of this story, paralleling the British Army in Malaya and the U.S. Army in Vietnam. All of us had much to learn about a kind of war that was as new to them as it was to Task Force 1-34 Armor when we received notice to deploy to a war that was completely unlike the one we were ready to fight and win.

  Unfortunately, when an army is unprepared to fight a war, much of the price of learning is paid by young soldiers and officers. In our task force, the platoon leaders paid a disproportionately high price. I had been taught at West Point that lieutenants, who lead patrols from the front, had suffered the heaviest losses in Vietnam, and it was mostly lieutenants and young soldiers that we lost in Al Anbar as well.

  Early on, it was the lieutenants of Cobra Company who paid in blood. Their tanks had been replaced with up-armored Humvees, so Cobra was given missions across the Euphrates River, a task that required crossing one of two bridges in sector—almost always the German-constructed reinforced-concrete bridge in the center of town. One way in, one way out, all easily watched by hundreds of pairs of eyes from dozens upon dozens of vantage points. It was Lieutenant Matt Homa who paid the price first, a Cobra platoon leader who just missed being killed by an IED that tore open his chest but missed his heart by an inch. We were extremely fortunate that our battalion surgeon happened to be an honest-to-God open-heart cutter who knew exactly what to do to stabilize Matt and keep him alive.

  We weren’t as lucky the next time. Todd Bryant was an irrepressible member of the West Point Class of 2002, the class that had heard President George W. Bush telegraph the invasion of Iraq at its graduation ceremony in Michie Stadium with the words “You came to West Point in a time of peace, but you graduate in a time of war.” I had liked Todd immediately upon his arrival at the battalion, and one Friday night at Fort Riley, while I was still serving as the battalion executive officer and he had been tagged as staff duty officer for the weekend, I gave him an unusual mission. I had just returned from a route reconnaissance examining the highway from Fort Riley to Topeka’s airfield, from which we were on call to be prepared to fly out tanks in case of a post–September 11 emergency. (Yes, you can fly tanks on Air Force C-5 cargo planes, but only one at a time.) I’d been struck on my recon by the number of drinking establishments along the route from Riley to Topeka, and I was now struck by Todd’s downcast demeanor; responding to my inquiry, he told me that he was missing Jen, his new bride, who was away for a few weeks. Inspired, I saw a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

  “Todd, I have a dangerous and important mission for you. I need you to personally conduct a route reconnaissance between here and the Topeka airfield, with particular attention to establishments that may dispense alcohol and serve as tempting emergency rest stop locations for troops traveling the route. I want your assessment of which establishments represent the most serious threat to the morals and discipline of the units of this task force. This is a dangerous mission; you will be accompanied by a wingman at all times when conducting this reconnaissance. Do you accept this mission, understanding the risks involved?”

  Todd brightened immediately, drawing himself up to attention and rendering a crisp salute. “Sir, I will perform this mission to the best of my ability, knowing full well the dangers that confront me.”

  “Roger, lieutenant. Execute.” It was about a week later that Todd and Matt Homa reported to my office with a PowerPoint presentation that far exceeded my expectations, rating each establishment along the route (I seem to recall more than a dozen) that might present a moral hazard to task force troops. The presentation was lost during the deployment, fighting, and redeployment, but the criteria Todd and Matt chose by which to rank the relative advantages and dangers of each establishment were very inventive, truly a credit to the long history of the U.S. Cavalry. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the task became semilegendary among the lieutenants of the battalion, several others of whom conducted their own research to test Todd and Matt’s data and conclusions in what was likely a significant boost to the register receipts of some of the entertainment institutions I’d noticed along the road to Topeka.

  Todd was killed early on the morning of October 31, 2003, the first member of his West Point class to fall in combat: an IED detonated directly under his seat while he was conducting a patrol along the northern side of the Euphrates River. His loss was jarring to the whole unit and to all those who loved him, including me. Todd had b
een a very popular officer who came to the Task Force Tactical Operations Center just to seek me out for political discussions. A Reagan Republican, he was a strong defender of the George W. Bush administration, which made for stimulating arguments.

  Bill Murphy, Jr., later wrote a wonderful book about Todd and some of his classmates, titled In a Time of War, which featured Todd as the main character. Reading the book years later, I found it hard to believe that Todd was killed less than halfway through the book, even though I’d heard the explosion that killed him. Many scholars of British literature speculate that William Shakespeare killed Mercutio off early in Romeo and Juliet because Mercutio was far more interesting than the drip Romeo and was taking over the story. In many ways, Todd was our battalion’s Mercutio, quick with a sword and a quip, young and strong and full of promise. His loss was hard for us, for his family, and for his young widow as well, but it would not be our last.

  An important part of any counterinsurgency fight—arguably the most important—is conducting information operations in support of the friendly government and against the insurgents, directed at audiences both in country and back home. Although Jeff Swisher had handled the press during the fight in which Staff Sergeant Cutchall was killed, after that appearance he generally delegated working with the U.S. press to me. I became used to the routine of spending an hour talking with American reporters at our front gate, earning lots of props from my friends for using the word nefarious in one interview to describe the enemy we were fighting. I thought little, then, of the request in December from brigade to talk with Peter Maass of The New York Times Magazine until Maass showed up not only with a photographer but also with a sleeping bag and a backpack. I told him that he traveled pretty heavy for a one-hour interview, and Peter replied that he was planning to spend a few weeks with us. That required a call to brigade for instructions. They confirmed that The New York Times would be embedding in our unit, and shadowing me, for some time to come.

  Peter had discovered Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, still languishing on the Amazon.com rankings at around a million, and thought it would be interesting to talk with the author, especially when he discovered that the author was currently deployed in Al Anbar fighting his first counterinsurgency campaign. To Peter’s greeting that it was an honor to meet an expert on counterinsurgency, I replied that I thought I’d known something about COIN until I started trying to do it myself.

  Peter was with the task force for an interesting few weeks, including the Sunday morning when Saddam Hussein was captured by the Fourth Infantry Division. Important as that day was for soldiers throughout Iraq, for Task Force 1-34, that Sunday was the day Al Qaeda in Iraq car-bombed the police station downtown. The bomb killed thirty-four policemen during the morning shift change and two little girls who were innocent bystanders. After the debacle of our joint patrol at the point of my M4, the IPs had gradually begun working with us more freely, happily going on joint patrols without the encouragement of an M4 barrel in their back and occasionally even providing useful information. Although the evidence of a car bombing was incontrovertible—the car bomb’s engine block was thrown fifty feet inside the police station—the angry crowd that quickly gathered at the site of the attack became convinced that the explosion was the result of an American attack helicopter that had coincidentally overflown the area at about the time of the attack.

  Iraqis bury their dead quickly, given the country’s heat and lack of electricity for refrigeration and the Muslim instruction to return the fallen to the earth within twenty-four hours, and the funeral procession that afternoon at the graveyard next to the police station quickly turned into a near-riot. I was still conducting postincident cleanup at the police station, taking pictures and quite literally picking up pieces of Iraqi policemen, when Ben Miller suggested that it might be a good time to go someplace safer. With our route back to Camp Habbaniyah blocked by the crowd, I retreated to Forward Operating Base Killeen, a site we’d set up to have a permanent presence downtown with oversight of the bridge and some views across the river to the spot where Todd had been killed. The platoon manning Killeen let us in and then drew concertina wire back across the gate, separating the Americans from the angry crowd of Iraqis who glared at us but eventually spilled away. It was something of a metaphor for the American occupation—two groups of people who wanted the same thing, the Americans to leave and the Iraqis to take over their own country, but who were separated by a cultural chasm that couldn’t be bridged at that time.

  We’d suspected an Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) presence in our sector for a long time, but the car bomb attack was incontrovertible evidence that someone far more capable than the local Sunni insurgents was fighting against us. The local insurgents topped out at the technological limit of burying South African 152mm artillery rounds under the roads and had no capability to train or employ suicide car bombers. The police station bombing targeted a strategic objective and was designed to drive a wedge between us and the Iraqi Police, whose growing cooperation promised to make it harder and perhaps impossible for AQI to operate in our sector. Worse, there would be more AQI attacks coming, like this one, likely filmed for their propaganda value. A filmed attack could be used to recruit more suicide bombers not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Welcome to the war against AQI.

  Peter Maass got a good picture of the confusion inherent in a counterinsurgency campaign. I took him along when I attended a memorial service for one of our soldiers, held in Ramadi the day after the car bomb on the police station and the capture of Saddam Hussein. On the trip from Ramadi back to Habbaniyah, we ran into an angry crowd of Iraqis, the largest I had ever seen, protesting Saddam’s capture. Jeff Swisher’s Humvee got hung up on the median as we attempted to maneuver around the disturbance, and we were not in a good place. I asked Peter if he had seen the movie Black Hawk Down, in which a small group of Americans gets ambushed by a crowd in Somalia. Jeff’s driver managed to free the Humvee, and we made it back to base camp safely, although the trail .50 gunner in our convoy opened up on the way out of the area when he saw an Iraqi aim an AK-47 in our direction.

  Peter’s editors in New York must have liked the story, because in early January The New York Times got back in touch requesting a photo shoot. They sent a photographer out to Habbaniyah from Baghdad expressly to get a shot of me—a ridiculous risk/reward calculation in my eyes—and I paid for the decision. Jeff just shook his head when he saw me posing in front of my Humvee, but Ben Miller walked by singing “I Feel Pretty.” The shot they ended up using on the cover of the magazine had me in front of a map of sector, with my face half in shadow. Peter titled his article “Professor Nagl’s War.” The reaction from my friends was immediate and powerful—if it was my war, I needed to turn this thing around, and fast. I also caught some flak for referring to the Iraqi people as “clowns” for their limited map-reading skills, a phrase I had adopted from Ben Miller that occasioned some debate in the pages of the Times.

  One of Peter’s turns of phrase was, I thought, particularly apt. Describing my transition from student of counterinsurgency to practitioner, Peter compared me to a paleontologist who suddenly had the chance to observe live dinosaurs. “But Nagl can’t simply stand around and take notes. He is responsible, with the rest of his battalion, for taming an insurgency, which is as difficult as teaching dinosaurs to dance.”2

  The New York Times Magazine piece would attract a great deal of attention, including more journalists who stopped by Khalidiyah for visits over the course of 2004. One of the most interesting was Greg Jaffe of The Wall Street Journal, who, like Peter Maass, came to stay for an extended visit. I encouraged him to write a profile of John McCary, in an effort to draw attention to the pressing national need for more Arabic speakers. They remained my most closely guarded resource throughout our deployment, and for the next several years, I would continue to emphasize the importance of the Pentagon doing a better job providing talented, trustworthy interpreters.


  It was at around this time that I received an e-mail from Newt Gingrich, who had read Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam at the suggestion of H. R. McMaster, a remarkable Army officer whose heroism at the Battle of 73 Easting in Desert Storm had been followed by the publication of his doctoral thesis on Vietnam. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam was a scathing indictment of the senior leadership of the U.S. military during Vietnam. H. R. had testified before Congress and gotten to know then-Speaker Gingrich, who had a longstanding interest in things military and asked H. R. what he should read about counterinsurgency. After taking H. R.’s reading suggestion, Speaker Gingrich sent a note in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, telling me that it was a matter of national security that my book be published in paperback, an option that Praeger did not then provide, and asking for my permission to make that happen. Focused on other things, and a bit overwhelmed by attention from a former Speaker of the House, I quickly provided my assent and thanks and returned to the war.

  In addition to Forward Operating Base Killeen on the south side of the Euphrates, the base camp to which I had retreated after the car bombing of the police station, we had established a position directly under the bridge on the north side of the river. It was manned by Blackhawk, our Humvee-mounted infantry company from the First Cavalry Division. Between Killeen and the Blackhawk position under the bridge, we were guaranteed protected access to the area of operations north of the Euphrates, where we were convinced AQI had established a base camp of its own. Todd Bryant had been killed because we did not control the bridge and the routes immediately around it, but Killeen and FOB Blackhawk allowed us to fight for that terrain. Our defensive positions and the freedom of maneuver they gave us guaranteed continued attention to both locations from the enemy.