“I need you to do whatever the customer wants,” I said.
There were some stunned looks in the seats at this. Indeed, the veterans’ reaction was similar to my own when I had initially bristled at the term “customer” twenty years earlier. It had been in 1985, through the headsets of a helicopter being flown by a veteran Night Stalker named Steel. Being called a customer put me off. It felt too much like business, too transactional—not how warriors should think of their comrades. I soon came to see that the Night Stalkers’ constant use of the term was a skillful way of reminding themselves that they existed to support and enable the forces—the customers—whom they flew. The culture that formed around this word was one of the Night Stalkers’ great strengths.
In the end, I think they got my point. I sensed a serious curiosity about how I would command and where I would take TF 714. T. E. Lawrence, who himself wrangled and led tribes during World War I, wrote that they “could be swung on an idea as on a cord: for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements.” These strong-willed, opinionated operators were far from servants, but they shared a fundamental quality with Lawrence’s tribes: If there were a worthy mission—an idea they could come to believe in—they committed to it unlike anything I had yet seen in my military career.
Indeed, in time I came to see that the older faces of these Green operators and the SEALs were leathery but not grizzled. They were not hardened, cynical soldiers for pay who floated from one battlefield to the next, without regard for the cause for which they employed their skills. In fact, they were often more outwardly patriotic than many other soldiers I’d served with, quick to hang American flags on the walls of their barracks and headquarters. Believing in our cause, and in their leaders, was critically important to them.
After I answered questions, our meeting ended, and I left the conference room and walked down the long, sunlit hallway to the front of the compound. Spaced along one wall were glass-encased displays a couple feet deep and a few feet wide. Each documented one of the unit’s significant operations or missions. Dusty guns, equipment, maps, and photos rested behind blurbs about each accomplishment.
In the years ahead, they would have reason to install more displays.
* * *
Before arriving at my new command, I’d communicated to the TF 714 staff that as soon as practical I wanted to take a trip to the region where our forces were operating, a theater that included Iraq and Afghanistan and stretched from the Mediterranean to the end of the porous Durand Line. We programmed about ten days for the trip. Several key leaders accompanied me, including my J2, or intelligence officer, Colonel Brian Keller, a former Ranger whom I’d known and trusted for years. Brian was soon to move on from TF 714 to another command in a few months, and would eventually be promoted to brigadier general, so I wanted to leverage his experience and expertise before I lost him.
The other half of the key J2-J3 dynamic was my operations officer, Colonel T.T. He and I had worked together as Ranger captains in the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1987–89. I had recognized his talent, but we were both intensely focused young officers, maybe a bit too much alike, and our relationship was initially strained. As we both advanced in rank and experience, so too did my appreciation for T.T.’s qualities—his amazing vision, unwavering loyalty, and personal courage—and we developed a deep friendship. T.T. subsequently joined Green, but in 1995 he agreed to return to the Rangers as my deputy at the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Now, eight years later, I was again benefiting from his experience and unshakable values.
The TF 714 senior enlisted adviser was Command Sergeant Major C. W. Thompson, a laconic former rodeo rider turned soldier, and a trusted friend. My aide-de-camp was air force major Dave Tabor, a young, humorously sarcastic, but veteran MH-53 helicopter pilot who’d flown initial operations in Afghanistan in 2001. Also on the trip was the deputy commander of Green, then–Lieutenant Colonel Austin “Scott” Miller. Bennet, Scott’s boss, had wisely dispatched him with me on this first trip both to keep an eye on me and to begin shaping my perceptions of his unit. Scott did the latter superbly and would become a key figure in the years ahead.
Those four, along with my communicator, navy petty officer Vic Kouw, formed the core of the command team. Starting that fall, for 60 percent of any given day, I would be close enough to literally reach out and touch any of these men (or their successors). The command team would grow in size and evolve with personalities in the years ahead. We would share countless hours on every type of aircraft and would struggle together to shape the command. The bonds would grow deep.
The purpose of this first trip was to begin to establish my relationship with those TF 714 forces that were currently deployed and, also important, to see the situation in each location and to assess our requirements for the future. Although I had served in Afghanistan in 2002, I had not been to Iraq, and I knew my view from the Joint Staff had been distant and incomplete. As always, I wanted to see the battlefield for myself.
* * *
Like most things in Iraq that looked stable and orderly from a distance, the Republican Guard palace in Baghdad was, upon closer inspection, a mess. The American-led coalition had turned the palace into its headquarters following the March invasion, and on Friday, October 24, 2003, it was the first stop on my first trip as TF 714 commander to the theater in which my forces were most heavily deployed. The palace lay deep within the Green Zone, the four square miles staked out as a sanctuary for coalition civilians and military forces on the western bank of the Tigris River, which bisects Baghdad. With Dave Tabor, we drove from BIAP west of the city along a road that the Coalition then called Route Irish. The drive was uneventful, the roadway not yet the notorious shooting gallery it would become a few months later. As we approached the Green Zone, over the tops of the palms that lined the driveway to the palace we could see the outlines of the huge busts of Saddam that perched on the facade. In each, the deposed dictator—whom we had yet to capture—was refigured as a vintage Arab warrior. His cold, jowly face peered down from within a pith helmet and kaffiyeh, apparently worn by the Iraqis who rose against the Ottomans. Iraqi cranes hired by the Coalition had not yet ripped the busts from their perches, and the palace had largely survived the initial bombardment of Baghdad in the opening hours of the war. On the outside, its beige outer walls conveyed an air of order and calm. Inside was a different story.
Over the summer, the initial postinvasion elation of April and confidence of May had quickly muddied, turning to growing unease in June. By August, nervousness tempered the halls and offices of the Pentagon. Data foretold more unrest and more violence that autumn. But there remained a hope, if only a halfhearted one, that if we could just find Saddam and get the lights on in Baghdad, the country would straighten itself out.
Following the March invasion, the Bush administration had eventually assigned Ambassador L. Paul Bremer to reconstruct Iraq after its rapid defeat and the collapse of Saddam’s regime. As the head of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Bremer was responsible for governing the country with the objective of rapid transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The CPA had been using the palace as its headquarters for five months, but inside it felt like confused entropy.
The whole coterie of professionals, soldiers, contractors, and wide-eyed “augmentees”—some of them twentysomething political operatives—seemed as if they had either arrived just hours earlier or they were about to be overrun by the proverbial barbarians beyond the gate. Boxes of documents lined some hallways. Those working in the palace had partitioned the cavernous Italian-marble rooms into offices using plywood. Some sat at imitation Louis XIV chairs and desks—with gilded, curved legs and turquoise cushions—left behind by the Iraqis. Many on the staff looked aimless. I was amused by those who wore what I called their “adventure clothing”—hiking
boots, earth-tone cargo pants, and Orvis shirts with multiple Velcro pockets purchased with the allowance many had been given to stock up for their tour.
That day I was there to meet Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, one of the newest three-star generals in the Army and the top military commander in Iraq. I had met Sanchez a few years earlier, and this time, in his Baghdad office, we shared a courteous rapport. In desert fatigues, he looked out from big rectangular eyeglasses.
“Your guys are doing what we need them to do,” he said.
But he left it at that. He did not slap a map down on the coffee table and explain what he was trying to accomplish and how our forces could help. His reticence was natural. TF 714’s relevance to Sanchez was probably unclear. At that moment, we were tasked with capturing or killing the high-value former Baathist leaders—a set known colloquially as “the deck of cards” after the Pentagon had printed packs of playing cards with the grainy photographs and names of the top Baathists and distributed them to soldiers before they rolled across the Kuwaiti border.
The previous summer, our units had been key in the fight that killed Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, but we had not yet captured Saddam himself, the ace of spades. Sanchez had a lot to worry about in the fall of 2003, and I sensed that he did not know whether I would just be another of the countless visitors who appeared on his calendar every few months, or whether I was committed to becoming a real partner. We never got much beyond pleasantries, and I had no sense of the big direction of the war. Elsewhere in the palace, I met with the chief of staff of the CPA and second-highest ranking civilian in Iraq, Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy. I explained to him what TF 714 was.
I arrived with some prejudice about the uneven and often unserious national resolve to make hard decisions in the months after the invasion. Many agencies were at fault for that, but the atmosphere in the palace added to my doubts about the CPA. Certainly many smart people worked hard to overcome great odds that summer and fall. But seven months of spotty progress had left many cynical. Policies kept them cloistered behind the palace walls, where they often worked alongside unqualified volunteers whose tour lengths were far too short to gain adequate, let alone advanced, understanding of the complexities of Iraq. The CPA ordered fundamental challenges—that would affect the lives of Iraqis and the Americans fighting among them—to be tackled by spectacularly unqualified people, like a twenty-five-year-old with no financial credentials responsible for rebuilding the stock market. I left the palace that day thinking, Holy shit.
The next morning, October 25, I helicoptered with Dave Tabor and Scott Miller to Mosul, 250 miles upstream of Baghdad on the Tigris. The second-largest city in Iraq, with some 1.8 million people, Mosul was the responsibility of then–Major General David Petraeus. His 101st Airborne Division had fought up from Kuwait through southern Iraq and into Baghdad, at which point they had been moved north. The city sat where the Arab and Kurdish regions met uneasily, with the Sunni Arabs predominantly in the traditional city center south and west of the Tigris and the Kurds in suburbs to the northeast.
In a former palace overlooking the city, Dave Petraeus was full of energy, as always. His office was a huge, marble-floored room turned into a warrior’s den by the combat gear hanging on hooks and the cot he slept on, covered with the camouflage poncho liner issued to every soldier. Dave and I had shared an early fascination with irregular wars and the counterinsurgents who had fought them in Indochina and Algeria. As effectively as any commander at the time, Dave had read the situation in his area of Iraq, recognized the tremendous threat of instability, and moved rapidly to seize the fleeting opportunity to forestall it. He made early progress by spending energy and money on economic and political development. His force established governing councils, opened schools, and corralled, equipped, and dispatched a local Iraqi security force. But when the twenty thousand soldiers of the 101st turned over Mosul to an American unit only a fraction of their size the following January, the insurgents soon destroyed what calm Dave’s force had been able to win.
TF 714 had a small detachment working in Mosul in conjunction with Dave’s division, and we enjoyed his strong support. Still, when I reviewed with our team how they ran targeting missions periodically, based on the trickle of tips and intercepts they were able to scrape up in the early days, I was convinced they were having limited effect. In October 2003, Saddam and his network of former regime members remained our primary focus, but at this point the picture we could draw was very rudimentary. Rare bits of intelligence came from the task force headquarters in Baghdad or from the other outposts throughout the province. They were working hard to understand the people who lived in the big city down the hill from their compound and were accomplishing as much as a team of sixteen could. But they were largely cut off from the rest of our force. I thanked them for their work and went to the helicopter pad feeling that despite their talent and dedication, the team’s isolation limited their ability to contribute effectively. The price of that isolation was made clear on the airlift down to Tikrit.
As we flew single file in two Black Hawks, our helicopter suddenly took a sharp, aggressive turn, banking hard off course. We tilted sideways, bringing the desert rushing below us into view through the open side doors. As we circled up and back, the pilots said over the headsets that the helicopter behind us had been shot down, clipped by a rocket-propelled grenade. Thankfully, before leaving for Mosul, I had left my key TF 714 staff behind in Baghdad to draw up a campaign plan for the upcoming operation in Afghanistan that John Abizaid had requested. Therefore, the second of our two UH-60s, originally meant to be full of the planning staff, was empty except for the crew. It was further fortunate that the craft did not instantly explode when hit. We landed near where it had made a hard landing, unloaded all of the crew, and took off as the downed helo burned, hissing and popping as each piece exploded off. One of the pilots, with a leg wound already bandaged, joined our helicopter. In the air, I asked him how he was.
“I’m pissed off, sir,” he said through the headset. “Goddamn it.” He leaned over, looking back at the smoke. “They shot down my helicopter.” I smiled, and after a few moments he continued. “Sir, you don’t remember me, but I was a Ranger in 2nd Rangers for you.” I hadn’t recognized him in his flight suit and helmet. We reminisced, and I was reminded how small our special-operations world was. And I was reminded of the resilience of its ranks.
As we continued to Tikrit, I turned my thoughts to our enemy. I tried to picture the man who had bravely shot at us and what had brought him out to the desert to do so. He would have needed a certain level of commitment to stand in open ground, in broad daylight, and take a potshot at two heavily armed Coalition helicopters. Surely, in that area of Iraq and at that time, he was Sunni. But what motivated him? With the accuracy of his rocket, was he a disenfranchised Baathist soldier? Or was he younger and more devout than his Baathist counterparts, taking orders from Ansar al-Sunnah, an Al Qaeda–allied jihadist group with a presence in that region? Contrary to the administration’s official line, the attack did not, to me, smack of desperation. It seemed to signal, “Game on.”
On landing on the hard-caked helipad, we moved to another of Saddam’s mansions, which then–Major General Ray Odierno was using for his headquarters. Ray and I had grown close at the Naval War College. His son Tony, now an infantry lieutenant, had babysat Sam often, and we had shared more than a few beers after weekly Hash House Harrier runs. Now he commanded the 4th Infantry Division, a brigade of which my father had led in Vietnam before serving as its chief of staff. Ray met us in the colorful, cavernous foyer. He knew we had lost a helo but not any men.
“Stan.” He reached his big hand out, his baritone filling the high-ceilinged room and echoing off the chamber’s hard marble walls and floor. “Heard you had an exciting trip in.”
Ray was responsible for Tikrit, the northernmost of the three cities that, with Ramadi out west and Baghda
d in the center, formed the Sunni triangle, where the insurgency would rage. He described the situation as serious. Tikrit was Saddam’s hometown, and he was thought to be hiding within its limits. High-level Iraqi officers had returned to the surrounding province, a Sunni stronghold, after the invasion. Some journalists concluded that Ray had failed where Dave succeeded. Cerebral Dave fought with money and good governance, the story went, while Ray, the bald, towering lineman, was blunt and brute and alienated the population with huge sweeps and arrests. Reality was less clear cut. Ray’s physical presence belied a nuanced approach to the complexity he was encountering. Tikrit was different terrain from Mosul, and both cities would host bitter fighting in the years ahead. Like Dave, Ray appreciated the work of our small team that was linked up with him. But I quickly saw our main obstacle. Without real-time links to an effective TF 714 network, the team’s good relations with their 4th Infantry Division hosts wouldn’t mean much.
Like the team in Mosul, the force in Tikrit largely toiled away on its own, with inadequate support or guidance. Like the wider Coalition effort, TF 714 suffered without a common strategy or a network to prosecute one. This was most glaring in the way we handled raw intelligence, a significant amount of which came out of the raids that the TF 714 operators conducted throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. On each mission they found documents and electronics, as well as people who knew names and plans that we wanted to know. But human error, insufficient technology, and organizational strictures limited our ability to use this intelligence to mount the next raid. The sole intelligence analyst in Mosul or Tikrit was unable to digest the information brought back in dumps by the operators to the outstations in the early hours of the morning. The teams were ill equipped to question suspected insurgents they found on the targets or detained briefly at their forward bases. And they could not easily seek assistance from Baghdad. We considered our communications robust for a small element, but we quickly found them inadequate for sending and receiving the vast amounts of classified information to and from Baghdad fast enough to make it relevant to targeting. Single e-mail messages went rapidly, but modern intelligence depended upon large volumes of data—scanned images of maps or documents, videos found on computers and camcorders—which required significant bandwidth. Without the ability to share these quickly, we were hamstrung.
My Share of the Task Page 16