The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The biggest threat to the success of the U.S. mission was the al Qaeda car bomb attacks against Iraqi civilians, which made it seem to many Iraqis as if the Americans couldn’t provide security and that the militias was the only hope. But the biggest threat to the soldiers carrying out that mission was the roadside bombs, especially the highly lethal explosively formed penetrators, or “EFP”s. Also, an increasing number of convoys were being attacked, and American officials worried that enemy fighters were receiving Iranian training in the new tactics used in those attacks.

  There seemed no limit to the forms of violence. American troops operating a new outpost in Diyala Province befriended a donkey that hung around, giving it food and water. Then “the insurgents assassinated him,” said Spec. Josiah Hollopeter. “That really irritated me.”

  THE BATTLE OF TARMIYAH

  As the new American outposts proliferated, they did appear to draw some of al Qaeda’s firepower away from civilians. The more remote stations were especially enticing. For example, according to Col. David Sutherland, as sectarian killings and kidnappings declined in the late winter and spring of 2007 by about 70 percent in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops increased by the same amount.

  One of the most spectacular attacks was launched against 38 soldiers manning an isolated American outpost in the town of Tarmiyah, just north of Baghdad. The town of about 40,000 actually had been relatively calm until the summer of 2006, when it was destabilized by ethnic cleansing in the capital that sent thousands of Sunnis fleeing there. Al Qaeda’s power in the town grew, and in December it ordered the Iraqi police there to leave—which they promptly did. The 1st Cavalry Division then established an outpost in the abandoned police station. In mid-February it was being manned by members of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. It was the northernmost position in the division, poking into an area that had been a relative safe haven for Sunni insurgents.

  At precisely 7 A.M. a rocket-propelled grenade detonated on the corner of the small outpost, followed by some AK-47 fire. Lt. Shawn Jokinen, who had gone to sleep two hours earlier, jolted awake in his cot. Staff Sgt. Jesus Colon, the sergeant of the guard, shouted that they were under attack. Jokinen ran to the front door of his barracks with his M-4 carbine and saw a small white “bongo” truck crash through the sliding blue front gate and roar straight toward him. He emptied the M-4’s magazine into the windshield, causing the truck to swerve slightly away from the entrance, but before the driver died he detonated about 1,500 pounds of Ukrainian-made military-grade explosives, sending bits of concrete and glass sailing through the compound. “The explosion threw me against a wall and I got covered with debris,” Jokinen remembered. The blast dug a crater twenty feet wide and six feet deep, shattered every window in the compound and the surrounding area, and dropped the front wall of the compound.

  The battle that followed resembled the movie Zulu, in which a small detachment of British soldiers fends off thousands of African warriors. At first the dust was so thick that no one could see or breathe. “Everything was black, then brown,” said Staff Sgt. James Copeland. He took a knee until he could get some air. Several soldiers were covered in rubble. Those not covered pulled their buddies out, then grabbed their weapons, helmets, and body armor, and ran upstairs to the roof. Some would fight for hours in their boxer shorts. Two medics began treating those with life-threatening wounds. “The rest of us wrapped up each other,” Jokinen said. Copeland told the injured they were needed to shoot if they could, then grabbed a wounded soldier’s M-249 light machine gun and ran to the roof, where he realized that his gear was buried and that he didn’t have a helmet.

  Lt. Cory Wallace, D Company’s executive officer, had been walking out of the compound’s command post, where he had been processing six members of an alleged al Qaeda sniper cell nabbed in an overnight raid, when the blast hurled him into a wall. The compound’s 500-gallon fuel tank exploded into a fireball, knocking him out and killing Sgt. Colon. He regained consciousness and scurried back into the command post, where he saw Pfc. Pao Vang trying to stop blood squirting from a laceration on his neck. Wallace looked outside. “I noticed the front half of our barracks were destroyed. Several soldiers were staggering out of their patrol base. They were covered with dust and blood. I was still a little dazed from the blast so it took me awhile to notice that the enemy was throwing hand grenades and improvised mortar rounds over the walls.” Black smoke joined the dust and grenades in the air.

  Wallace shouted to Pfc. James Byington, who had picked himself up from the ground, to call the battalion headquarters for help. “Byington informed me that the radios were not working,” the XO recalled. It turned out that the compound’s generator had been knocked out. Wallace told Vang, who had a shard of glass protruding from the side of his head, to fix the generator. Vang tried to do it while under direct fire from a nearby building but couldn’t, so said he would find batteries for the radio. They were buried under some rubble, so Vang dug with one hand to find them, the other pressed against his neck wound, which was spraying blood every time he moved.

  At some point—Wallace remembers it was 90 minutes, but battalion records say far sooner—Wallace was able to transmit a situation report to his headquarters. “Once the radios were functional, I called battalion and informed them that our patrol base was under heavy attack and that our company had multiple wounded with one KIA,” he said.

  One of the soldiers on the roof yelled down to him, “Sir, don’t let battalion pull us out, we’re going to hold this motherfucker!” There was no fear of running out of ammunition, because the platoon sergeants wisely had insisted that the unit keep on hand about three times the daily requirement. On top of that, soldiers had themselves prepared “Armageddon Boxes”—extra ammunition and some water for unexpected emergencies—and kept them in their Humvees. “The only problem was our ammo holding area was located on the second floor of the barracks,” Wallace said. “Soldiers kept sprinting down an exposed staircase, filling up sleeping bags with extra ammo, and running back up to their fighting position on the roof.” Copeland ran from soldier to soldier on the roof, distributing ammunition and assigning sectors of fire.

  The radio was in the command post, so Wallace couldn’t see outside to guide the AH-64 Apache attack helicopters appearing overhead toward their targets. He had Vang assemble a portable Harris PRC-117 radio and take it to the roof, where Staff Sgt. Freddie Housey, a veteran of the capture of Baghdad in 2003, directed the air counterattack. One of the Apaches was hit and pulled away with one of its pilots wounded and his flight suit on fire. Other helicopters conducted devastating strafing runs with their 30-millimeter cannons.

  Lt. Col. Scott Efflandt, the battalion commander, had been eating breakfast 12 miles away at his headquarters at Taji when he felt the concussion of the explosion and then, moments later, heard the boom. He checked with his tactical operations center, or TOC, but was told there was nothing to report, so assumed it was artillery fire involving another unit. He didn’t know then that soldiers from his D Company were fighting for their lives.

  Wallace reported in a few minutes later. Efflandt raced to his TOC. As he arrived, he recalled, “the streaming video from the UAV [drone reconnaissance aircraft] came online and our hearts skipped a beat.” He called Wallace, found him “in charge and unflappable,” and told him help was on the way.

  At around 8 A.M., a unit of Stryker armored vehicles from the 2nd Infantry Division came to the rescue. One of the Strykers backed up to a hole the blast had made in the compound wall, dropped its ramp, and loaded the six most severely wounded D Company soldiers. Another unit arrived and secured a landing zone, or LZ, for medical evacuation helicopters. Wallace realized his compound wouldn’t be overrun, and he would survive the day. “With our litter-urgent soldiers medevac’d and armored vehicles occupying a perimeter around the patrol base, I knew the enemy was beaten,” he said.

  But the battle wasn�
�t over. “As we headed to the LZ I still heard small-arms fire, friendly and enemy,” said Copeland. “The LZ was hot with the Stryker and air assets still firing as we were moved to the bird and continued as we flew away.”

  Efflandt, a working-class son of Rock Island, Illinois, who had gone on to teach at West Point, got to Tarmiyah later in the morning. “When we entered the town, I was stunned. It was as if we were in the wrong place, as everything looked different—battle-damaged buildings, debris everywhere downtown, no people out and about. Arriving at the patrol base I was aghast.”

  The outpost was destroyed. It may have been defendable but it was uninhabitable. Efflandt decided to stay and fight it out, requesting immediate delivery of a big logistics package, including thousands of tons of concrete barriers. He issued orders to take over a school building 200 meters north of the destroyed outpost and get a new patrol base up and running by sundown. “It sent a message to the insurgents that we would not be defeated and we weren’t going anywhere,” recalled Maj. Robert Rodriguez, the battalion’s executive officer. “It was a tactical decision with strategic implications.” Leading from the front, Efflandt spent the next 24 hours in the new post commanding the operation to retake the town. He had in mind Odierno’s dictum that any land taken would not be given up.

  When the fight was over, of the 38 soldiers who had been in the outpost, 2 were dead and 29 others had been wounded. Those who weren’t hospitalized moved back to their battalion headquarters at the big base at Taji, a few miles to the southwest. The next morning Wallace woke up and went to eat. “I didn’t realize what had happened until I walked out of the chow hall,” he said. “For some reason, that was the best breakfast I had ever tasted in my life.”

  But other feelings from the fight lingered. Looking back on it now from the United States, Wallace said, “I feel guilty. I keep thinking there were a hundred things I could have done to prevent it.” He is scheduled to return to Iraq in November of 2009.

  When Efflandt left the battalion in 2008, his officers memorialized his command tour in Iraq with a print of Gen. Meade at Gettysburg titled Stand and Fight It Out. Sporadic fighting would continue in Tarmiyah through that year, at one point leading to a friendly fire shootout between American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and police, killing 6 of the Iraqis.

  BLACK THURSDAY

  As the surge intensified, with the majority of the additional brigades in country, the situation actually worsened. Thursday, April 12, stands as perhaps the toughest day of this period. The previous day, news had broken in Washington that three retired generals had turned town the job of coordinating Iraq policy for the White House. It was a stunning vote of lack of confidence in the new strategy in Iraq. One of those who refused the job, retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan, explained his decision by saying, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going. So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.’ ”

  On the same day, Defense Secretary Gates announced that all soldiers in Iraq, as well as those on their way, would serve 15 months there, rather than the one-year tour that had been the norm. Soldiers now had to tell their families to revise those homecoming plans, many of which involved long-planned trips to see family members or vacations at resorts. As the news spread among troops in Iraq, their reaction was expectable. “It flat out sucks, that’s the only way I can think to describe it,” said Pvt. Jeremy Perkins, a member of an engineering battalion in Baqubah.

  On the morning of April 12 itself, a truck bomb dropped part of a key Baghdad river crossing, the Sarafiya bridge, dumping cars into the Tigris and killing 11 people. This appeared to be the first step in a campaign to prevent Shiite death squads from crossing the river into west Baghdad, or perhaps to limit the mobility of U.S. and Iraqi reinforcements. Several other bombs would hit major bridges in the following weeks. It was one more way to pull apart the carcass of a once-great city.

  That afternoon, a bomber managed to get past multiple checkpoints, bomb-sniffing dogs, and body searches, and into the Green Zone building where parliament was meeting, killing a member and seven other people.

  Back in Washington on the same day, Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pronounced the surge doomed. The next day, Friday the 13th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “I believe myself . . . that this war is lost. . . . The surge is not accomplishing anything.” Even some supporters of the war were beginning to talk about what “Plan C” might look like. Would it be, one hawk asked, a fallback to the core missions of attacking al Qaeda, protecting the embassy and providing air cover and other support to Iraqi forces?

  The bad news seemed relentless. On April 14, a car bombing at the entrance to the main bus station in the Shiite holy city of Karbala killed 32. Four days later, bombings in mainly Shiite areas of Baghdad killed more than 150.

  The assaults against new outposts continued. On April 24, a U.S. patrol base in an old schoolhouse in Sadah, near Baqubah, came under complex attack, with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from several directions. As the soldiers on the roof of the base returned fire, they saw two explosives-laden dump trucks coming at them. The drivers couldn’t be shot because they were cocooned in steel, with only a slit to see through. The first, carrying 1,500 pounds of explosives, blew up outside the gate, leveling the obstacles leading up to it. The second one barreled through the breach just made and detonated 2,000 pounds, collapsing a building. All told, 9 U.S. soldiers were killed, all of them from the 82nd Airborne Division; 20 more were wounded. “It was the worst day of my life, to have to literally dig with your hands and carry your kids out,” recalled Col. Sutherland, commander of the 1st Cavalry brigade to which the 82nd Airborne unit was attached. “That was extremely hard.” The Islamic State of Iraq, a group affiliated with al Qaeda, boasted in a subsequent statement that it had sent “two knights” to attack “the Crusader American base.”

  One day in April, a senior non-commissioned officer in the 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division allegedly led some soldiers in the execution of four Iraqi detainees. According to preliminary testimony by other soldiers, 1st Sgt. John Hatley, the top sergeant in the battalion’s A Company, had four blindfolded and handcuffed Iraqis kneel by a canal. They had been captured after what Stars & Stripes, the official U.S. military newspaper, termed “a brief exchange of fire” and a search that turned up “heavy weapons,” which in Iraq usually means mortars or rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Hatley told his men that if they passed along the Iraqis to a detention facility, they simply would be released, testified Pfc. Joshua Hartson. The Iraqis then were shot and their blindfolds and handcuffs were removed. “We then pushed the bodies into the canal and left,” Sgt. Michael Leahy wrote in a statement given to Army investigators. Back at Combat Outpost Angry Dragon, Hatley gathered his troops and ordered them not to discuss the incident. He also told some soldiers to burn the blindfolds and the handcuffs, which were plastic, and to clean out the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in which the detainees had been moved. The incident only came to light in January 2008. Criminal proceedings began months later. Hatley, Leahy, and a third soldier eventually were charged with committing premeditated murder. At the time of publication of this book, they had not gone to trial, while two other soldiers pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

  At 4:40 on the morning of May 12, insurgents ambushed an American unit in the “Triangle of Death” area southwest of Baghdad, first bombing it and then raking the survivors with gunfire. Five soldiers died and another three were abducted, with two of the bodies discovered finally a year later. Nine more soldiers were killed on May 23. Another 10 died on the 28th, which was Memorial Day, most of them in an incident in which an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter was shot down north of Baqubah and the mission sent to respond to the crash was hit by big two roadside bombs.

  Senator Gordon Smith, the Oregon Republican who had come out against the war
so vigorously the previous December, traveled to Iraq in May. He believed his emotional speech on the floor of the Senate had helped push Bush toward the surge. A White House aide, he recalled, had told him, “We recognized with your speech that not only were we losing the war, we were losing the Republicans we needed.” But after touring the country and talking to Petraeus, he was no more optimistic. After he and Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, left Petraeus’s office, they were strapping into their seats in a Black Hawk helicopter for the short flight back to the Baghdad airport. “So what do you think?” Smith said to Hatch.

  “We could lose this thing,” Hatch glumly replied.

  On June 25, a wave of bombings hit Iraqi allies of the U.S. effort. Two car bombs targeted the police station in the refinery town of Bayji, killing 30. Another attack killed 8 policemen in Hilla. But the most politically significant incident of the day was a suicide attack on a group of Anbar Awakening sheikhs meeting at the Mansour Hotel, just a short walk from the northern entrance to the Green Zone. Six of the tribal leaders were killed, as well as 6 other people.

  The last of the surge brigades and their support troops finished arriving in June, elevating the U.S. troop level in Iraq to 156,000—plus another 180,000 contractors performing functions that once were done by soldiers. (Most of these were cleaners, cooks, and so on, but about 20,000 were private security guards.) By July it was beginning to look to many that the surge was failing, adding to pressure to move to a withdrawal plan. The most precious commodity Petraeus and Odierno had was time. “Everything takes time,” noted Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who was commanding the 3rd Infantry Division in the belt south of Baghdad. “And everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take.”

  A growing chorus of voices was saying they had run out of time. Retired Gen. Sir Michael Rose, one of the most prominent British officers of recent years, called on the Americans to “admit defeat” and bring the troops home. Senator Smith predicted that “a dozen Republican senators . . . will be with me in September.” And a poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans thought the surge would not help restore civil order to Baghdad. Tom Donnelly remained a strong supporter of the surge that he had helped design, but conceded “it’s the eleventh hour and the fifty-fourth minute.”