The driver stepped on the accelerator, committing to a dash for the bridge. Kryszewski leaned out and fired his M4 rifle as they drove past rows of heavy machine guns, most of them idle and unmanned.
Two trucks from the convoy followed, guns firing. The trucks reached the bridge, continued into it, and soon were over the river, driving at high speed. Looking down at the murky water, Kryszewski wondered if they had interrupted a Republican Guard breakfast. Maybe that was why the Iraqis were not behind all of their machine guns.
As the lead trucks pulled away, the rest of the convoy stopped short. The Special Forces were split—most of their trucks on the west side of the river, three on the east. Iraqi soldiers were between them.
Kryszewski put down his rifle and picked up his map.
We need a place to regroup, he thought.
He worried about bolting too far and driving into another Iraqi unit. We can’t keep going north.
Empty white pickup trucks were parked along the road, undamaged. Kryszewski deduced what this meant: An Iraqi force had filled in around the bridge since the 3rd Infantry Division’s soldiers crossed. The American trucks sped on, past a gas station, until beyond machine-gun range from the bridge.
They stopped at the median. We can’t keep moving forward, Kryszewski thought.
On the opposite side, the company commander ordered the soldiers remaining with him to rejoin the trucks on the far side. They would not leave their peers to fight alone.
They rushed the bridge, weapons firing, drawing fire themselves, and reached the span. They all made it, Kryszewski thought. He counted them as they pulled up and spotted the forward air controller, who was trying to reach aircraft on the radio.
The company commander ordered the trucks to turn onto a farmer’s field and form a perimeter. The Iraqi soldiers were regrouping with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The Americans’ .50-caliber machine guns gave them a degree of stand-off—unless armor arrived.
The forward air controller called for aircraft. Kryszewski heard him reach a B-52 overhead. It was not equipped for close air support, and could not help. Later he reached a pair of A-10s, formidable ground-support aircraft. But they were low on fuel and left. The teams used satellite phones and radios but could not find a ground unit nearby. The closest friendly units on their side of the river were on the outskirts of Baghdad, roughly 45 miles away. The Special Forces convoy was on its own.
Kryszewski heard more news. An Iraqi armored unit was heading toward Musayyib from the north. The teams conferred. Their first thought had been to hold their ground until another American unit could reach them. They understood now that no unit would be reaching them soon, and that they could not fight off an attack from Republican Guard tanks. The soldiers relayed information: Fourteen armored vehicles en route.
The Americans had only light-skinned trucks and machine guns on turrets—no match for what was coming. There’s no way we’re prepared to fight armored vehicles, Kryszewski thought. There’s no way we’re going to survive that.
But where to go? A soldier offered a suggestion. The road to al-Kaed Bridge remained open. The soldiers could always head back toward Karbala and Najaf. “They’ll never expect us to go through a second time,” he said.
The suggestion could have been a joke. It was not. It was a better option than waiting to die in the field. Their commander agreed. Their best chance was to attack back the way they came, straight into the Iraqis behind them, rather than wait for the tanks. They took a few minutes to prepare. They strapped on flak jackets and helmets and redistributed ammunition so every truck had an equal supply. The forward air controller explained their plan to the circling A-10s.
Kryszewski’s truck would go first. He was unaware of the air support plan. He was studying the map, pinpointing the spot on the south side of the bridge where he would call for a turn, if he made it that far.
The commander said it was time.
Kryszewski’s vehicle took the lead. It rumbled off the field and onto the asphalt, then turned toward the gas station and bridge. As the lead truck, it had to drive slowly to allow the other trucks to pull onto the highway. Kryszewski felt an almost unbearable tension. They were telegraphing their move. The company commander held them back until all the trucks were in formation and could attack as a unit with concentrated machine-gun fire.
The last truck reached the road. They were all in line facing the bridge.
The commander gave the order.
The driver stepped on the accelerator. The lead truck, with Kryszewski in the right front seat, started to move. Above him the turret gunner opened fire.
Gunners behind them fired, too, on their flanks, trying to force their foes’ heads down. Kryszewski’s truck reached the gas station and hissed past.
An A-10 passed low on a strafing run. Kryszewski felt an explosion behind him. A tractor trailer was pulling onto the road between the convoy and the bridge. It was a fuel truck. At first Kryszewski thought it was a roadblock. There was no way to get around it, at least not at high speed, because of ditches beside the road.
The American machine guns were firing. The truck’s driver pulled over and allowed them to pass.
The soldiers’ world was a mixed cacophony of gunfire: the heavy thump of the weapon just above each driver; similar thumps from the other trucks; the snapping and cracking of incoming Kalashnikov bullets; the booming of Iraqi PK machine-gun fire; and, high overheard, the occasional ripping roar of the A-10s’ rotary cannon. It sounded like a mechanical scream.
The Humvees reached the bridge. Its defenders had spread debris on the road, trying to create obstacles. The Iraqis on the far side were ready.
Kryszewski saw them but tuned much of the firefight out. He was preoccupied. If they made it across, he would have to spot the correct turn and call it out. And then there would be one more gauntlet, running for the edge of the city, where the fighters they faced could take flanking shots from behind walls or from alleys. A disabled vehicle would mean they would have to stop and fight around their wounded.
His truck cleared the bridge and was hit with bursts of fire. A grenade landed on the ground in front of the grille and exploded. A bullet struck a fuel can inside the truck. It began to leak. The driver weaved past obstacles. The turret gunner kept firing. A rocket-propelled grenade hit a backpack hanging on the Humvee’s side. The backpack acted like armor, causing the grenade to explode outside the truck and catching much of the armor-piercing blast.
Behind them, the other trucks were still driving through gunfire. Kryszewski watched the road.
Don’t fuck up, he thought. Don’t fuck up.
He barely saw the Euphrates as they passed over it. It was a green blur. He was almost detached. He had to get the intersection right.
He saw it and called it out.
The truck lurched and made the turn.
The lead Humvee rushed through town with the sound of gunfire behind it, with other trucks following. They were in the last straightaway.
Rocket-propelled grenades flew past. Bullets crisscrossed and cracked by in the air. Kryszewski tossed out HC smoke grenades, thinking they would create a screen between the Iraqis and the convoy. His idea backfired. The air of Musayyib held a morning chill. The smoke cooled and settled over the road, forcing the drivers to slow down.
Bullets kept coming. One truck was hit in the steering column, a brake line, and the cooling system. It was leaking fluids. A shoulder-fired AT-4 antitank rocket on the roof of the last truck was struck by another bullet, causing the rocket to fire unexpectedly. Its backblast knocked the turret gunner to the truck bed.
The convoy cleared Musayyib and passed out of range. Eighteen years in the Army, Kryszewski had survived his first gunfight. One of the Humvees was riding on rims. None of the American soldiers had been struck. The convoy headed slowly toward the prisoner-of-war camp they had left earlier in the morning.
Well south of the bridge, they found Americans from the main invasion
force milling about. Kryszewski pulled into a compound where infantry soldiers were resting. The Special Forces convoy was a spectacle unto itself—a string of damaged vehicles, cluttered with spent cartridges, carrying sweaty soldiers back from a narrow escape.
The teams got out to collect themselves, and spotted another unit preparing to drive toward al-Kaed Bridge. It was a support unit, pulling trailers, clearly not expecting a fight. The team scrambled to warn them. As the convoy passed by, Kryszewski ran into a field, arms waving, shouting. The convoy stopped.
Kryszewski jogged up to a lieutenant sitting in one of the trucks’ right front seat. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“We’re trying to go north,” the lieutenant answered.
“You don’t want to do that,” he said.
PART II
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Bad Hand
In the spring of 2003, with Iraq’s ruling party and military forces destroyed and Saddam Hussein a fugitive, President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. Though he acknowledged much work remained, the priority was to create the governing institutions of an independent state and to recruit and train new Iraqi security forces. Signs were mixed. Hussein was captured by American forces late in 2003, but violence and sectarian strife were rising, and Iraq’s unsecured stockpiles of conventional weapons provided fuel for more violence. Occupation was met with armed resistance from many quarters. American casualties were rising, as was the far greater toll on Iraqi civilians. The American force was still green—led by generals and younger troops with limited, if any, combat experience. By mid-2004, the United States was eager to transfer power from the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government, which would hold elections and draft a constitution. The Afghan war had fallen from the news. The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, were unknown.
THREE
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THE ONE YOU HEAR ALREADY MISSED
Sergeant First Class Leo Kryszewski and the Rocket Attacks
“I have a bad feeling about it.”
JUNE 16, 2004
Balad, Iraq
Leo Kryszewski heard the occasional explosions, the familiar crack and crunch of ordnance impacting around the base. He paid the noises little mind. They were infrequent and not especially close, he was busy with work, and there was nothing he could do about them in any event.
It was June 2004 at Logistics Support Area Anaconda, the Army’s name for the former Al-Bakr Air Base at Balad, a city about fifty miles north of Baghdad near the Tigris River. Kryszewski was starting his third overseas tour since 2001, and in a new phase of his career. After leaving Iraq in the fall of 2003, he returned to Fort Campbell to be transferred to the Fifth Special Forces Group staff to help supervise the Special Actions cell, which organized classified activities in the Middle East. The position required him to work in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF,I which was akin to working in a vault where classified information is discussed and stored. His life became busy with meetings and hours at computer terminals, a sharp shift from his years in the field. He was ambivalent about the routine and missed being on a team. Sometimes he longed for the intensity and small-unit self-reliance he had known.
The rest of the Fifth Group headquarters was due to leave its stateside offices at Fort Campbell soon and begin a tour in Iraq. Kryszewski had flown to Balad ahead of the staff to finish erecting a special operations headquarters for the Middle East.
All around him were signs of construction. The United States had predicted a swift victory in Iraq. Now it was settling in for a long stay. Anaconda was among the busiest centers in an expanding constellation of American military installations in Iraq—a hub for air support, medical care, logistics, Special Forces operations, and conventional ground troops. It was steadily becoming denser, with new buildings, barriers, shipping containers, antennas, and tents. This high state of activity, and its growing population of troops, made it a rich target.
Insurgent groups had risen after the invasion, and those around Balad sensed Anaconda’s importance and were harassing the place. Among their tactics were mortar and rocket attacks, a campaign fueled by the seemingly bottomless stores of abandoned munitions they had inherited from Iraq’s military. The United States failed to secure its enemies’ weapons as it routed Iraq’s conventional forces the year before. The weapons available for irregular warfare in the aftermath included troves of unused rockets, grenades, artillery shells, and mortar projectiles. Scrappers and scavengers stole them and moved them on black markets, from which armed groups claimed many of them. Beyond Anaconda’s blast walls, bands of fighters were roaming the fields, hiding in canals and groves, and lining up high-explosive shots. Now and then the rockets they fired rushed in unpredictably and exploded. There would be lulls, sometimes for days. Then they would start again.
Usually the incoming fire failed to harm anyone. The munitions struck runways and open ground, jarring those on duty, waking troops from sleep, but rarely causing harm. But on occasion the weapons wounded the base’s occupants. A few times they killed. They were a feature of a changed war, exposing American vulnerabilities and putting the base on edge. It seemed only a matter of time before the next lethal event.
To reduce the number of attacks, an ornate game of move-countermove took shape. The military’s explosive ordnance disposal teams and ammunition specialists roamed the country to destroy munitions that had left state custody. Ground units patrolled near old bunkers to thwart thieves feeding the black-market trade. The Army brought counter-battery radar systems to the theater. By recording the trajectories of incoming munitions, the equipment could calculate a projectile’s path in reverse and determine possible firing points; American artillery and mortar struck these sites with ordnance. Drones and attack helicopters were assigned to the effort, along with ground troops who rushed out gates after attacks and sometimes made arrests.
The attacks kept coming. The sheer quantity of unsecured ordnance left from Iraq’s vanquished military meant that belated efforts to collect it could not keep pace. And the attackers adapted, increasing their own battlefield longevity, too. Armed groups learned to rig rockets with timers so their weapons fired only after those who had aimed them were safely away when return fire struck or patrols arrived. They also fired from positions near civilians’ homes, apparently hoping that the American rules of engagement would restrict troops on Balad from striking back.
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This bloody match was not part of Kryszewski’s writ. He had no time to worry about problems he could not solve. There’s nothing I can do about these rockets coming in, he thought. No sense giving yourself an ulcer. When it’s your time, it’s your time.
His first tour in Iraq, which began with a forward reconnaissance for a conventional desert invasion, had ended in an entirely different fashion. His Special Forces team had moved to Baghdad and taken up residence in a mansion formerly owned by a relative of Saddam Hussein. The team was on hand as the city was looted. Their instructions allowed the soldiers to use violence in self-defense but otherwise not to intervene. Kryszewski agreed with the decision. These people have been oppressed so much, he thought. They’re just venting. Soon the mood in the capital calmed. In the spring and into the summer of 2003, after President Bush had given a speech before a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major combat operations, Kryszewski’s team—ODA 572—roamed the streets in seeming safety, focused on meeting the various armed factions and getting Baghdad functioning again.
Kryszewski considered it typical postwar work. Often the security conditions were not bad. The soldiers mingled openly with Iraqis. They ate in Baghdad’s restaurants and shopped in its stores. He had access to the classified briefings and a well-developed sense of skepticism. He knew the situation was not entirely clear, and saw indicators of trouble. But the sign
s had not cohered into a picture of escalating war, much less irreversible war. At a high-level meeting with a Shiite cleric, his team was delivered a blunt message. The cleric said that for now the Shia were going to watch and assess the country’s developments and the Americans’ actions, and that if they became unhappy, then a new war would start. But this was not entirely an ominous sign. The Americans and their potential foes were talking. The United States had set up a provisional authority. A new constitution was to be drafted, from which a new government might rise and be given the country’s reins. Scattered violence clouded the summer of 2003. But there was still time, Kryszewski thought, for the political situation to improve.
The pictured darkened on August 19 when a truck bomb exploded beside the Canal Hotel, destroying the main office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq. The bomb killed at least twenty-two people, including the UN’s special representative to the country. Kryszewski heard the explosion. His team rushed to the scene. He understood the cunning behind the targeting. The UN had just opened its assistance mission. Bombing those who might provide aid was a means to choke off services and donated goods and reduce outsider influence in a nation reorganizing itself. Three days later a bomb exploded near a police checkpoint outside the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. The UN soon began a large-scale withdrawal of its staff.
The Special Forces reacted. Two ODAs were organized into a strike force, and when the intelligence implicated a terror cell in Ramadi in the attack that killed the special representative, Special Forces soldiers were sent to raid where the cell was believed to be hiding. They hit the building before dawn on September 12 and immediately faced a fight. Two senior members—Sergeant First Class William M. Bennett and Master Sergeant Kevin N. Morehead—were killed. Both were well-known Special Forces veterans. Like Kryszewski, both had served in Afghanistan after 9/11. Bennett, a medic, had been with the team that captured John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. He had given Lindh first aid. They had been in Iraq since the start of the war and were due home soon. Morehead’s team had already left Iraq; he had volunteered to stay behind to orient the soldiers who replaced his team. They were the first two Fifth Group fatalities in Iraq, and their deaths were a jolt—another sign that the post-invasion period was tilting away from a chance at reconstruction and peace.
The Fighters Page 7