by Trish Wood
CHAPTER 2
Bringing Them
America
The one thing that can be said for sure about the Iraq war is that many of the young American troops serving there were sincerely committed to helping the Iraqi people. At no time was their optimism about the outcome of the invasion higher than in spring and summer 2003.
The citizens of Baghdad and the Americans occupying their city had an understandably uneasy relationship, made tricky by shortages of basics like propane and electricity. Nevertheless, despite the relentless heat and the annoying gridlock caused by checkpoints and giant military convoys, friendships between Iraqis and Americans were made, and the prevailing attitude on both sides was one of hopeful tolerance. It was not uncommon to see uniformed Americans strolling the main streets and patronizing local tea shops and Internet cafés. Junior officers developed relationships with neighborhood big shots by accepting invitations to dinner in their homes. There were challenges and dangers, but there was some optimism.
But relations began to suffer after a long, hot summer of broken promises and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s slow pace in making legitimate improvements in the lives of the citizens outside what was known as the Green Zone, a cordoned-off section of Baghdad where the CPA had set up shop. An idealistic young captain watched as the locals in his sector grew restive over the garbage and sewage stacking up and cooking in the stifling streets. There were riots over badly planned public events like the dinar exchanges, and tempers flared at well-meaning young soldiers who were forced on the fly to take on responsibilities (such as running municipal services) that were way beyond their training and expertise.
An insurgency was taking shape, improvised explosive device confirmed its place in the war’s lexicon, and pressure to stop the erosion turned interrogations of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison into something nightmarish. The best efforts (correct) of American troops were being overtaken by top-down ineptitude that was already starting to define the Iraq war enterprise.
“They don’t have a security or reconstruction plan to implement”
ALAN KING
ARMY RESERVE
422ND CIVIL AFFAIRS BATTALION
3RD INFANTRY DIVISION
INVASION FORCE
DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PROVINCIAL OUTREACH (COALI TION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY)
BAGHDAD
MARCH 2003-JULY 2004
FOUR BRONZE STARS (TWO FOR VALOR, TWO FOR ACHIEVEMENT)
We were actually pre-positioned in Kuwait on the twenty-first of February, and then we moved forward with the 3rd Infantry Division and actually crossed over the border into Iraq on the twenty-first of March.
I was coordinating the civil issues; trying to make sure that there weren’t civilians on the battlefield was our biggest issue. We rolled into Najaf around the twenty-third of March. My unit became responsible for trying to work with the locals to get water supplies for the division. We were paused there because of the big sandstorm, and the civilians were running out of water, they were running out of food, and so they started coming out with white flags, crossing all over the division battlefield looking for these things, and it was my job to try to get them back into the villages. I went back to the tribal elder and said, “Look, you keep them in the villages, and I’ll get you the water that you need,” and I came up with a water-supply rotation, where every other day we were taking water to all the villages in our particular battle space.
About the third time I’d met with the village elder, I had my chemical suit on, and my gas mask on my hip, and a weapon on, and this guy asked me, “Is Saddam going to poison us?” I said, “No, no, we have to wear these things.” So I went back to the division commander, and I said, “Sir, I’m sending the wrong message by going out looking like this; it’s making the Iraqis more frightened.” After that, I was the only one in the division allowed to take off everything and go around the battlefield without having the chemical suit on.
We started getting a lot more respect because I was willing to take the same risks that the Iraqis had to take. I met probably hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis during that time, and there was only one individual that I met that just didn’t want us there. I used the Arab honor that when I’d go inside of the sheikh’s home or inside the village elder’s home, I’d say, I don’t need my weapon here, and I’d take off my weapon, and I’d walk around the village without a weapon. I never carried a weapon at that time. I never saw myself as being different from them. I was in their culture. And it was more important for me to understand and accept their culture than demand that they accept mine; and by me accepting their culture, they were more willing to ask about mine.
We stayed in Najaf until the sandstorms receded, about the second of April, and then the battle continued to move forward, and I went with the rest of the 3rd Infantry Division up the mid-Euphrates. By the 8th of April, we rolled into Baghdad Airport, and that night they came and told me that Saddam’s regime was going to fall and that tomorrow was a new day and we’ve got to start the reconstruction and stability operations. They asked me, “Where do we go from here?” It was Colonel Jack Sterling and Major General Buford Blount, the commanding general. They were questioning what came next because we were supposed to roll through Baghdad up to Mosul. That was the actual plan, and things collapsed so fast that we were stuck there doing stability operations. Sterling came up and said, “I just got off the phone with headquarters, and they don’t have a security or reconstruction plan to implement.”
In my personal prewar planning for my unit, when I asked for this phase of the reconstruction plan, I was told there was one, and I would get it when I needed it. But when the chief of staff, Colonel Sterling, came to me the night of the eighth of April and said, “You know, there’s no plan; you got to come up with something in twenty-four hours,” it was obvious either the plan didn’t exist, or it wasn’t available at that moment in time.
I learned later a plan had been drawn up by the State Department, sort of a government-in-a-box. Never was any of it implemented. At some point the State Department’s plan must have been rejected by the Defense Department, by Rumsfeld’s office. But there was a plan. There was a plan. Tom Warwick out of the State Department had the Future of Iraq Project, but we never got it. So they told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad.
I was very fortunate, because I had mentors that were military governors in World War II, and I spent countless hours listening to stories over and over again about what they did, and it paid off. Over the next hours and days, we needed to focus on four things: we needed to focus on public safety, getting the police and fire departments back up and running; we needed to get the public health back up, the hospitals and clinics; we needed to get the public utilities, the water and electricity, back on; and we needed to get public administration back to work so that we can figure out where everybody else is. I recommended that first night that we call everybody back to work, regardless of who they were or what they were. We needed people who could help run the government, people who knew how to do it. We don’t know how to run the government, and we didn’t have the troops on the ground to reestablish governmental functions and provide security too.
Being a member of the ruling Baath Party is like being a member of any political party. You had bad guys that did criminal things that were Baathist, sure, but the Baath Party was a political organization. We called Nazis back to work after World War II because they knew how to run the government. I told General Blount that first night, “Sir, if we call them back to work, we’ll at least know where the bad guys are at.” The finance minister was arrested on his way back to work. He was number twenty-six in the deck of “bad guy” cards. There was a lot of discussion, and I don’t think everyone agreed, but the decision was made because we had to do something, and we obviously didn’t have the resources available to us to not do that.
And for the first thirteen days our plan worked. We had ninety-seven hosp
itals that were up and operating; we had five thousand police officers back to work; we had fourteen hundred firemen back to work; the electricity had been turned back on; and we had at least identified the shortfalls within the infrastructure. The electrical power infrastructure was bad before we got there, so when it was turned back on, the power was intermittent because it just could not operate properly. When you drove around Baghdad, you could see that everyone had their own generators anyway. They had these huge personal generators that everyone on the street tapped into.
People in those early days were ecstatic. I was on the streets during the looting, and people would cheer me. I mean, they’d drop couches and yell, “Go, America!” And the press would ask me when I came back why I didn’t do anything to stop the looting. Well, I had eight guys with me, and there were at least six thousand of them. I didn’t think I could outshoot them, and I didn’t want to cause more problems than we already had. We already had civil disturbances, so why make it worse? I found that at this point, the people were happy to help; people wanted to help, and the sheikhs were very honest. They said, “Look, you came here as a liberator; you’re our guests.” I already understood what the meaning of guest was. It meant that they had to provide some type of protection.
At the same time, when the sheikhs would come to me, I would try to give them advice on how as a tribal leader they could help us get the government reconstructed. The sheikhs had an unbelievable networking system that existed among five and a half million people. It was like yelling down the street of a small village. I could go down to the Assassin’s Gate in the Green Zone and say, “I want this person here tomorrow”—say, someone from the Olympic Committee—and the next day he would show up. My God! It was unbelievable. I would ask the sheikhs, and the people would show up. I had a lot of hope back then. I did. The Iraqi people also had hope.
So people came back to work, and then ORHA showed up, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which came out of Donald Rumsfeld’s office. One night I said, “Look, here’s what we’ve done in your section.” And the guy from ORHA said, “We want you to stop. We want you to let everyone go.” I said, “I don’t understand. We’re accomplishing things, and if you stop it, everything goes back to a minus. For godsakes, don’t do that.” But they wanted to stop the ball we got rolling. I never understood the reason. They just didn’t like what we had done.
If we could turn back the clock and do anything differently, it would have been to not let the military go. Ambassador Bremer showed up and disbanded the military, and he also let the top four levels of Baathists go. When we did that, and when we disbanded the military, those two events changed the direction of the war’s aftermath.
I would meet with the former military leaders and advise them on where I understood the country was going, what plans we were putting in place. There were, I think, thirty-four generals around the day that disbanding the military was announced, and I remember this senior individual, the equivalent of a three-star general, saying to me, “How can you do this to our country? How can you say you were going to liberate us? We had units that fought you when you came, but most of us went home.”
You know a nation is not a nation unless it can defend itself, and so when we took away the military, we took away the national identity of that country. As long as the military existed, well, the government would always be concerned about a coup d’état or whatever; but it still had the ability to defend itself against foreign enemies. We could have reduced it through attrition; we could have reduced it through forced retirements; we could have done a lot of things without just saying, “It’s over. Let’s start from scratch.”
During the Falluja battle, one sheikh told me, “You told five hundred thousand men who were trained to kill people and break things to go become productive members in a society that had 70-plus percent unemployment, and I’d say they’re being pretty productive right now.”
Up until February of ’04, I had no problems meeting with insurgents, because I kept my word, and that’s why I never worried about them killing me. Things happened to me, but they were indirect. I wasn’t targeted until after February 6th, when a terrorist with a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on his head came in and surrendered, and we made a deal. But certain individuals reneged on that deal. I mean, they didn’t do what they said they would do; the leadership of CJTF 7 didn’t do what they said they would do. They didn’t keep my promises. They tricked him, or they tricked me. Then they accidentally let him out of Abu Ghraib a month later, and after that I was a target. I was actually pulled out of some meetings at the last second, and I found out later that if I had shown up, the plan was that they were going to behead me; there was credible evidence they were going to behead me.
Two weeks after this betrayal, I received a handwritten note from another guy that had a bounty on his head, and he said, I saw what you did for Mr. Rasheed, and I’ll take my chances; thanks anyway. I never got another surrender after that. And I averaged one or two a month up until that time. You know, at least one or two a month. We made an agreement that we would do certain things, and we didn’t do those certain things. It got so bad that later in June, I was supposed to meet with some insurgents, and it was discovered they were going to blow up a building, and they pulled me off the meeting at the last second, but they blew up the building just as I was about to show up.
Those events were scary, but the low point for me came one day when I had come back in off a mission and walked back into my office at CPA. I had made contact with a guy to come in and surrender and called him back from Egypt, and he had shown up five minutes after I had found out that Mark Bibby had been killed. Mark was the heart and soul of my unit and so full of life. He was a young soldier who had been on active duty, gotten out, and then joined the reserves. Almost immediately, he was called up to go to Iraq. Mark was very dear to me, and he was everything. He was the spirit and the soul of the unit, and he never had a bad day. But they came in and told me he was killed. I walked out, and I said, “I can’t arrest you today, Ra’ad. Come back next week this time. I’m too busy today to arrest you,” and I kept walking down the hall. When they came in and gave me the first report, they had told me that four soldiers had been wounded. They told me Omar, the translator, had been killed, but they did not know the status of Mark Bibby. In my mind, I had to put everything in order. I knew the status of each person. I knew what I needed to do for each person. I knew that I had to go identify Omar, and I knew I had to go visit these other four in the hospital. I didn’t know what I needed to do with Mark Bibby, and I had to get that in my mind.
But contradictory reports kept coming in. He had been medevaced. He had been killed. He wasn’t killed. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere. I just lost it. I said, you know, “Damn it. I want you all to get out and get me the fucking reports, and don’t come back in here until it’s right.” They came back, and they told me Mark was killed, and I remember going out and identifying him and also identifying Omar, our translator. Then we went back and found Damone Garner, who had been with Bibby when he died. He actually held him in his arms when he died.
Two weeks before, Mark had told me, “Sir, all these other people are going out and getting shot and blown up. People are getting killed left and right—similar units like ours, civil affairs units. Nobody’s touched our unit; can you believe that? Can you believe how good our unit is?” I said, “Mark, I’m pretty superstitious when it comes to that. Let’s not talk about that until we get back home. We’ll be home in a few weeks; don’t worry about it.” They were on their way to do a public health assessment of a water treatment plant down in Baghdad, down near Sadr City, and an IED blew them up.
The clearest thing I remember of the whole war was the night that I learned Mark was killed. I went and laid on top of my Humvee, and I couldn’t sleep that night, so I remember looking up at the stars and thinking that I had never realized how many there were. There were no other lights; there was nothing,
and it was pitch-black, with just the desert and the stars. Mark was a good kid. He was a really good kid. That night I was just thinking, Where did things go wrong? Here we were doing our damndest to help these folks, to do everything we could to help them. Since the day we arrived, everybody was busting their butts to help them. And then they killed Mark.
At Mark’s memorial service, hundreds and hundreds of people showed up, including Iraqis, and the sheikhs all paid their respects. They all came and gave their condolences. Before the sun went down that night, the sheikhs came to us and told us who did it, which said more about what we had done, I think, than anything else in the war. A Special Forces team went down there on the twenty-eighth of August, and they took them down. Five guys. They took them down, and they arrested them.
I was upset by it, but Mark’s death didn’t change my approach to dealing with the guys in Iraq that we call the enemy. You have to bring them in and look them straight in the eye and negotiate with them. This will piss a lot of people off, but you have to talk to them as if they are equals and respect the culture, and in the rural areas respect the tribes. I went in and identified as quickly as possible those individuals that were considered influential, and pretty soon the word spread, and people showed up from all over. There’s a hierarchy of tribes, and there’s hundreds and hundreds of tribes. I wasn’t arrogant. I didn’t try to impress upon them my values, but I accepted theirs. When I went to their home, I followed all their customs. I didn’t walk in with my boots on. I didn’t have an expectation that they would serve me any different than they would another guest. I listened to them, and I took their advice, and I, especially in the early days, I’d listen to the sheikhs a lot and tried to implement as many of their plans as I possibly could, because it was in line with what their culture would accept. I was friends with many of them and friends with some to this day.