My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  I learned later that the family was not immediately notified of the possibility of friendly fire. From the beginning, I assumed they would be notified of the ongoing investigation into the possibility of fratricide, but I believed final determination would not be publicly announced beyond the family until the investigation’s conclusions were final. From experience with how long investigations typically took, I knew that the investigation’s findings were likely to be complete after the planned memorial service.

  The initial phone call I made, and the message I transmitted, only days after Pat Tillman’s loss, reflected my intent to fully inform the multiple commands and commanders who would be involved in administrative matters associated with Corporal Tillman’s death.

  Concerns were raised over wording in the Silver Star narrative, which some found misleading as to the reason for Tillman’s death. Before this, I had seen Silver Star citations carefully framed and proudly hung on walls of homes I’d visited. In the citation, we thus sought to document what I believe was his heroism, without drawing official conclusions about friendly fire that were still premature. Any errors, which I should have caught, were not the result of any intention to misrepresent or mislead. I believed that the fact that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, a sad reality in every war, did not diminish either his service or his sacrifice.

  To this day, I am saddened by Ranger Tillman’s death, as I am for the loss of every service member I served with, and for the pain such losses cause each family.

  * * *

  I was back in Baghdad in late May when Scott Miller knocked on the plywood doorframe to my office. “Sir, I’ve got the Berg video,” he said, and handed me a DVD. Prior to this, there had been a spate of kidnappings. But Nicholas Berg had recently become the most infamous victim because of what was on the DVD Scott brought me. Berg was a twenty-six-year-old from Philadelphia who had come to Iraq to repair telephone towers, moving alone throughout the country that spring. He was kidnapped on April 10, as kidnappings started to occur more frequently that summer. By the time Scott came to my office, I had received reports that Berg had been executed on camera. Soldiers had found his body under an overpass in Baghdad, and the video of his execution had been uploaded to a jihadist website. As I loaded the DVD, Scott sat down across from me. He shook his head.

  “Sir, I don’t think he knew it was coming. As he was sitting in front of those guys, I don’t think he had a clue that he was going to be beheaded.”

  After weeks of intelligence updates and briefs from our hostage cell, I had come to know quite a bit about Nick Berg. So there was a flash of familiarity as his image came up on the screen. In the video, he appeared in an orange jumpsuit in front of five men clad in black, their heads covered. Intelligence sources told us the bulky man in the center was Zarqawi. After delivering a diatribe to the camera, he removed a long knife from the black folds of his shirt and tipped the shackled Berg over onto his side. His henchmen held Berg down until it was finished. Even though I knew the outcome, at the end of the video I had to consciously relax my clenched hands.

  By virtue of our close-quarters fight with Al Qaeda, our force began to see a lot of these videos. War drives strong emotions. American outrage over the Alamo produced the Texan victory at San Jacinto but also the brutal pursuit and killing of hundreds of Mexicans attempting to flee the defeat. During the Second World War, Fleet Admiral Halsey, one of only nine officers to ever wear five stars, placed a billboard in the entrance to one of his harbors in the Pacific that said, “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, KILL MORE JAPS!” Frustrated by the suicidal tactics of the insurgents in the Philippines, John Pershing, another man the United States eventually awarded five stars, buried the corpses of his Muslim enemies with pig carcasses. These and similar moments from our military’s past were on my mind as the enemy in Iraq appeared ever more sinister.

  I sought to emphasize in my force, and in myself, the necessary discipline to fight enemies whose very tactic was to instill terror and incite indignation. Maintaining our force’s moral compass was not a difficult concept to understand. Armies without discipline are mobs; killing without legal and moral grounds is murder. But after the first shot, the first bloody corpse, war is no longer theory. As we moved further from the theoretical, like every commander before me, I found it critical to maintain as much discipline over my emotions toward what we encountered, and the losses we suffered, as I could. I remembered Grant’s admission that he rarely visited his wounded in field hospitals because he felt seeing the cost of his decisions so starkly would prevent him from making the difficult decisions he believed were necessary. I found strength in Grant’s candor.

  In the end, Nick Berg’s murder and the experience in Fallujah that spring made us more resolute, more serious. Until late 2006 or 2007, Coalition leaders shied away from using the word “war” in our briefings and conversations. It was always “the problem” or “the situation” or “the conflict.” But after the events that spring, I began to tell my command group, and to repeat until I gave up command: “This is a war. And this war will have a winner, and it will have a loser. We are not here to fight the war on terror. We are here to win it.”

  * * *

  We were not winning when I met with John Abizaid on Friday, April 9, 2004. Historically, insurgencies had taken time to incubate, as anger evolved into coordinated resistance. The initial stages of their organization typically went unseen by governing powers. So it was on that Friday that, for the first time since the war began, the Sunni insurgency openly controlled terrain—parts or all of Fallujah—within the country.

  Restarting the Marines’ offensive on Fallujah was politically untenable. They would be forced to withdraw from the city limits. As they prepared to vacate the city, which they would do three weeks later, they searched for a stopgap measure. In the week before their formal exit, the Marines began to assemble a local security force, called the Fallujah Brigade. They chose a former Baathist general to command it, provided limited equipment, and filled the ranks with Iraqis, some from Fallujah. It was clear from its inception that the Brigade was a big risk. Few had any doubts the militia might switch sides en masse or be quickly overrun by the very insurgents and foreign fighters they were meant to police. But having some representation inside the city was better than nothing.

  Violent skirmishes filled the days leading up to the Marines’ withdrawal. On April 26, a platoon entered the northwest district and linked up with a handful of Green members from our task force. They were there to teach the Marines how to use a new weapon. But soon insurgents found their position. As insurgents began arriving by the truckload outside the buildings, the Americans were in danger of being overrun. In the course of the assault, as insurgents unleashed on the buildings, a Green medic, Staff Sergeant Dan Briggs, ran six times across the bullet-swept street in order to administer care to wounded Marines in two separate buildings. Meanwhile, on the roof of one of these building, two Green operators and a small force of Marines fought off the encircling insurgents who fired from alleys and the windows and rooftops. As he covered the evacuation of the remaining force, one of the operators, Master Sergeant Don Hollenbaugh, found himself alone on the rooftop, shuffling from one spot, firing a few times, and moving to the next, in order to hold at bay what were estimated to be three hundred insurgents. For their exceptional courage, Briggs and Hollenbaugh were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the award for valor second only to the Medal of Honor, and Larry Boivin—wounded twice in the firefight, only to return to it each time—was awarded a Silver Star. They earned them. A few days later, the Marines withdrew from the city.

  At the end of May, less than a month after the Marines left the city to the Fallujah Brigade, Abizaid summoned me to meet with him, Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez, Ambassador Bremer, and the Marine commanders on the outskirts of Fallujah. Our task force already believed the city was, in all but a few pockets, a free zone for the insurgency. F
or some of the Sunni recruits, joining the Brigade was a way to make it past our checkpoints into the city in order to join the insurgent ranks. The remaining contingents of the Fallujah Brigade were no match when they contested the insurgency. Some guerrillas were battle hardened. All were high on the recent “defeat” of the Marines and heavily armed. Moreover, during this spring and summer of 2004, much of the Sunni insurgency took on a religious tone and logic that had previously been absent from the Baathist resistance. Iraqis increasingly joined the ranks of Zarqawi and began acting like his Salafists, who sold themselves as the vanguard of the resistance. The dye helping color the reservoir were foreign fighters, non-Iraqis sneaking into Iraq to volunteer as jihadists. They arrived emboldened by inflated tales of the brilliant resistance to the invaders in Fallujah. But for many, burning anger over the recent stories and images of degradation at Abu Ghraib had provoked them to come to Iraq and would fuel the fire for years to come. Fallujah became both symbol of, and command base for, the jihadist wing of the resistance, separate from and at times in conflict with the nationalistic insurgency. While the outcome of the jockeying among the insurgent factions was still murky, we had little doubt the Fallujah Brigade had withered within weeks of its inception.

  “The Fallujah Brigade is completely ineffective,” Jim Mattis said at the meeting. “They’re broken, probably beyond repair.”

  The meeting felt surreal, as we held it in a room inside Camp Fallujah, a base bristling with American military power. Just a short distance away sat an entire city, increasingly opaque and inaccessible and under the sway of insurgents. The agreements that established the Fallujah Brigade and the political sensitivities in the background prevented the Marines from setting foot inside the city. Abizaid made it clear we could not allow the situation stand.

  “We need to hit some targets,” he said, hitting the table with the edge of his hand. He was looking to us.

  To hit with precision within Fallujah, a city we had no ability to enter that summer, would draw on TF 714’s existing capabilities, and some not yet developed. Two incidents in particular reflected the changes. First, the actions of Briggs, Hollenbaugh, and Boivin alongside Marines reflected our growing relationship with conventional forces. Second, our employment of every piece of technology, combined with painstaking analysis, meant we could develop and strike targets with increasing speed and precision. By the fall of that year, when the Marines had forcefully recaptured Fallujah, TF 714 was a different force.

  The process began slowly and out of necessity. By early summer, our intelligence on Fallujah had been reduced to a trickle. The violent reprisals of the insurgents snuffed the few sources who lived there and made recruiting new ones almost impossible. But in the near term, we were at a loss for credible on-the-ground insights into how the city’s power vacuum was filling, and the enemy amassing there.

  Of most value was our increasingly sophisticated employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with the Predator being the most common version. These remotely piloted aircraft, equipped with video cameras on their underbellies to transmit live feeds back to the monitors in our Joint Operations Center (JOC), allowed us to watch locations or vehicles for extended periods. We had used UAVs before, but with uneven results. When I took command in 2003, for all of Iraq we normally had access to just one Predator, which we augmented with a helicopter we had outfitted with a camera on its fuselage.

  The control of the few UAVs that did exist that June was still an awkward process. The Air Force viewed UAVs as a strategic collection platform and was inclined to centrally manage them, which it could do given the limited number of systems. The technology allowed for Predators to be physically based, launched, and recovered in theater but piloted from distant bases, even from the United States. Downlinked video could be viewed and analyzed anywhere the correct equipment existed.

  Unlike surveillance of larger or more static targets, TF 714 missions normally required constant surveillance of people or moving vehicles, often looking to identify subtle movements or specific mannerisms. TF 714 teams would direct the Predator to look at a building or follow a car—usually a white sedan in a country where white sedans were ubiquitous.

  It was a fascinating situation in which new, emerging technologies made dispersed operations possible, but our processes had not yet figured out how to effectively leverage them. We quickly recognized the need to fully integrate every available intelligence source, both operationally and psychologically, into our force and spent the next few years perfecting approaches that would do that. Ultimately, we used a combination of liaisons, constant communication, and eventually the formation of SOF Predator units, to create the close partnership needed.

  As wartime often does, the challenge had moved two of Green’s key leaders in the country to act. Lieutenant Colonel Steve was the commander of the Green squadron in Iraq, based in Baghdad.* Also in Baghdad, then-Major Wayne Barefoot was acting as the intelligence chief for the Iraq country task force, TF 16. Steve had come to Green directly from the conventional Army—not through the Rangers or Green Berets. He retained more of a regular-army style in his appearance and command than some of his peers but he earned respect in Green through consistent performance and later commanded the unit. Wayne came to the command from tracking Islamic extremist groups in the Philippines. He was one of a very small group of analysts who, in January, had told me with confidence not only that Zarqawi was in Iraq, but that they saw signs of an incipient, violent jihadist network taking root there. At the time, many of their peers disputed that analysis.

  During May and June 2004, the final two months of their three-month rotation, Steve and Wayne sought to meld the sometimes-divided spheres of intelligence and operations. With Fallujah inaccessible, Steve required his operators to take turns sitting alongside Wayne’s analysts, watching the Predator feeds on uninterrupted twenty-four-hour shifts. He required the operators to keep a logbook, tracking vehicles, houses, and routes in order to accrue a picture of life within the city. We began to develop what became known as “pattern-of-life” analyses that followed the targets’ habits as they undertook their daily routines.

  In addition to producing detailed maps of enemy movement in the city, these shifts introduced a number of important intangibles into our force. Operators, the Brahmins within TF 714, developed deep respect for the intelligence professionals. They became better operators by learning to think like analysts and by acquiring vast knowledge about the enemy. Both analysts and operators increasingly owned the mission, which in turn increased activity on the ground by moving targeting decisions down the ranks.

  Some operators relished immersing themselves in the intelligence grist. Others resented the added work, as handling the tactical aspects of raids was difficult enough. But by tweaking behavior we were trying to transform attitude: Instead of waiting passively to receive a targeting assignment, we wanted them actively helping the analysts to find targets. To win, all of us would need to be knee deep in the fight, all of the time.

  * * *

  Unexpectedly, that process accelerated in mid-June, thanks to the work of one of the operators’ most dedicated partners. Jimmy D., a Green imagery analyst who later retired as a sergeant major, had become a fixture in the tactical operations center. “Jimmy D., what you got?” was the jaunty refrain when entering the operations room—which he rarely left. Near the end of his squadron’s tour, Jimmy D. in fact had something very promising.

  After reviewing recorded video from the previous few days, Jimmy noted that a tractor had blocked off the entrance to one stretch of street in Fallujah, keeping all foot and vehicle traffic away. When he checked the imagery from a few days earlier, there was no tractor. So through the pilots thousands of miles away, he directed the Predator back to that area for a live shot. He started looking up and down that road and at one end saw a group of men in the process of loading and unloading two trucks, with scrunched cabs and long f
latbeds, parked outside one of the houses. After a few minutes of unloading carpets, the men began carrying suspicious crates from the house to the flatbeds, covered in canvas. Then came armloads of AK-47 rifles and munitions. At some point, a second truck at the site, still loaded, lurched to life. We followed it through the streets, out of Fallujah, east on Highway 10, and once it was southwest of Baghdad, we intercepted it on the ground. As suspected, it was packed full of all kinds of munitions—rockets, machine guns, grenade launchers, and raw explosives for car bombs. We flew the UAV back to the city and the blocked-off section of the street, where we watched men continue to hurriedly load material into trucks and then get into cars, both of which subsequently moved down through Fallujah in a convoy, passing through the commercial strip where the insurgents had laid their March 31 ambush. Eventually they entered a suburb on the southwest edge of the city and stopped in front a concrete-and-block house. The location became a potential target for us—Objective Big Ben.

  The intercepted truck had been driven by two men, with a thirteen-year-old along for the ride, likely to help them avoid suspicion at checkpoints. The men professed to be hired help and under questioning confirmed the others they had just left were moving the arms cache to a new house. They described the neighborhood, which matched the area around the new house. With this, we had a viable target—and an urgent one. The insurgents in Fallujah had commandeered many of the city’s garages and warehouses to set up “factories” for the car bombs that they would dispatch to Baghdad’s bazaars and Sadr City.

  It was only through intense persistence, and some luck, that Jimmy D. had found this load of unexploded weapons. The insurgents might disperse the cache over the next day or two, and with only two sets of eyes periodically on the city—our Predator and the outfitted helicopter—we could easily lose them in the urban maze. We had to move quickly.