by Trish Wood
You know, by the time I arrived in Iraq, I realized we weren’t going in after WMD. I was there as a cop, a fireman, a sewage-waste manager . . . everything but searching for WMD. I guess, in a sense, it is betrayal, but I think I’m pretty well-grounded. I’m not an angry individual, and I think people who are close to me would say just as much. I still want answers, and I think the thing that I really want from this is there to be lessons learned from what happened, how we ended up in Iraq.
If we look back to Vietnam, it is kind of cyclical. And I’d feel bad if I were a Vietnam veteran watching the Iraq war unfold. How do you apologize to them for making the same mistake? All I really want now is answers so we don’t make the same mistake again. I’m not angry . . . I just want some honesty.
CHAPTER 4
Nor Fear the
Dangers of the Day
In January of 2005, Iraqis defied the ongoing violence and cast ballots in their country’s first free elections in half a century. Purple fingers (the stain serving as confirmation of having voted) were raised high for the media and the image of the elderly Iraqi woman trudging ever onward toward the voting station despite the danger was a powerful symbol. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi called the vote “the first time the Iraqis will determine their destiny.” Unfortunately, that destiny looks a lot like an intractable low-level civil war. The voting results showed that Iraqis were heavily influenced by sectarian affiliations and religious differences, which suggested that Iraqis rejected the idea of a strong national government. This rejection made some sense after years of living under a dictator; however, it also left the Iraqis with a fractured national identity—a big problem in a country riddled with tribes, strong familial loyalties, and powerful religious tensions. Just a month later, a massive car bomb in Hilla, south of Baghdad, killed more than a hundred people. It was the worst bombing of its kind in the two years since the invasion. Iraq seemed to be dividing itself up, and for the boots on the ground it was becoming harder and harder to mark progress.
By now, some soldiers and marines were rotating through Iraq for a third tour, and for many, no matter what their feelings about the conflict itself, the open-ended commitment of American forces was getting old. GIs frequently weighed the odds and worried that their number would come up—and then worried that if it didn’t, a buddy would die instead. And always, they hoped that their comrades who had already died hadn’t died for nothing.
For the troops, the war was becoming surreal; it seemed their mission now was to protect themselves from the people they had “liberated”—and when they weren’t doing that, to protect the people they had liberated from each other.
“Walking through the graves”
SETH MOULTON
11TH MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT
MAY 2004-OCTOBER 2005
NAJAF
I always thought about joining the military and thought that it was important, especially by the time I was the same age as a lot of these guys—when I got to be nineteen or twenty years old and recognized that the people fighting our wars are really just guys like me. I went to Harvard and got my degree in 2001, but I did not do ROTC. I started training just after September 11th, but I had decided before then to join.
Harvard is something you try not to advertise in the Marine Corps, not because it’s not respected. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with a Harvard degree and there are probably a lot of people who think, This guy might be pretty smart, but what the hell does he know about leading a platoon or going into combat? and there are probably some truths to those concerns. It was certainly not something I tried to advertise, and I studied physics, which makes it even worse. But as I explained to the marines in my platoon, for me it was really just that I have tremendous respect for the kids who serve in the military, especially the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys in the infantry, and I really believe that college kids should do their part too. Once I had proven myself as a good platoon commander, the marines seemed quite proud to have a lieutenant who had a Harvard degree. I think they really liked that a lot, but in some ways it sets the bar for just being a good military leader a little bit higher. There is a stereotype out there that sometimes the really smart kids, your liberal Northeast kids who go to Ivy League schools, are kind of wimps, right?
I came back from Iraq the first time very, very positive about the whole war in general, about the potential for it all to work out, and then you start getting these negative reports in the media, but your initial reaction is, well, that’s just the media reporting the bad news. If you’re actually there you’d still see all the positive things going on.
On my second deployment we were not even expecting to go to Iraq, but by the time we left from San Diego, it was pretty clear priorities had shifted and we were going to be used in Iraq after all. We were on the USS Belleau Wood and—I don’t remember when—on the ship ride over the attention started to focus on Najaf. We did not understand very well at the time what was going on there. It certainly felt like we were coming into a situation which could go to either of two extremes or anywhere in between. I mean, we could either walk into a place that had been talked up a lot in the media but really wasn’t bad at all—
which quite frankly is what I expected—or we could walk into a place that could flare up and be as bad as it turned out to be. We certainly did not understand what we were getting into.
Before we got into Najaf, while were still in Kuwait, General Mattis came and spoke to us. It was not a good speech, but it was somewhat memorable. General Mattis was famous, really revered in the Marine Corps, for giving great, gung ho pep talks. And I had received more than my fair share during my first deployment, from him personally, but this time it really struck me how essentially worn out he seemed. It spoke to how the war was going and how things were getting frustrating over there and how the initial euphoria that I had experienced, we had all experienced in 2003, together with the Iraqis, had certainly passed. That would have been in July of 2004 and General Mattis had already been through the first Falluja assault. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I think he was really cautioning us. I think that he wasn’t just saying, “Hey, we’re going to go in there, we’re going to kick ass.” He was saying, “This is a tough fight and we’ve really got to be ready for it.” That was a new message to hear from General Mattis because he’s usually all about kicking ass. I kind of said, “Wow, things—things really have changed over here.”
We rolled into Najaf and essentially the army that was there told us, “Najaf is peaceful. We train the Iraqi National Guard. We work a little bit with the police. But there’s no open fighting or anything else and things are relatively stable. Oh, by the way, there is this three-thousand-man militia force that occupies the center of the city, a mile south of the base.”
It sounds ridiculous but that’s essentially what we were told. “We just don’t go there and they don’t come out, they control the center of the city and we just don’t get involved with them.” That is what they said. You’re getting a biased opinion because there’s a little bit of marine-versus-army rivalry there but there’s no question that the army had established the status quo, which the marines thought was completely unacceptable. The militia, it turns out, is Moqtada al Sadr’s folks, known as the Mehdi army and also as the Moqtada Militia.
This is significant because Najaf is the most important city in Shia Islam. I am not a religious scholar on this, but I’ve been told Najaf is even more important to Shiites than Mecca. So, essentially you have a very, very important city and its significance revolves around the mosque at the center of the city, which is the old city, and this is the part that the militia controls. There’s this big gold-domed mosque there that is an incredibly important religious site. We knew that it would be the kind of place we would not be able to bomb or shoot at. That’s a very, very significant fact to us. It was called the Imam Ali Shrine.
Moqtada is a really young firebrand cleric. His dad was famous and he complet
ely rode his dad’s coattails to power. Dad stood up against Saddam and I think was killed by Saddam, but the dad was a very, very respected figure. Moqtada is not that smart, not that talented, but had somehow, because of his name or whatever, garnered a following.
We got to Najaf and spent the first couple of days driving around the city and getting briefed essentially by the army, who, until we got there, were in charge of the place, and there were a couple of significant events that happened during those first few days. I was on a convoy with marines and some army guys driving through the city and I remember coming to this place with a bunch of rocks across the road, like a little roadblock. I remember thinking, That’s kind of strange.
So the army lieutenant just drove around the rocks and down this street, which is a totally natural thing to do. We’re looking out the window and there are all these guys with AKs and even some RPGs, which is a little strange. And it turns out that this was right near Sadr’s house. These were his militia guys who had blocked off the road and under the status quo that the army had established we are not supposed to be driving by here. Both sides were in total shock and maybe if we had another ten seconds to think about what was going on it would have been a massive firefight. But it wasn’t. Shortly thereafter, another platoon of marines went out there and drove by the same place and that time they did get shot at.
When my marine unit showed up in Najaf we had a plan—or at least the outline of one—that we would spend the first few months in Najaf working very closely with the Iraqi National Guard and training them up. Then a few months into that, we would mount some sort of offensive or at least a clearing operation through the cemetery and through the old city to uproot the militia. The Iraqis would be leading the effort because by that time we would have them trained up. I didn’t think that the coming battle, the one we planned on fighting in a few months, would be all that bad. But within two days of us arriving there was shooting going on in the city, so our presence there really stirred the beehive and, as a result, changed the plan.
The insurgency is not popular with the general citizenry and I think the word on the street was, “OK, you guys, your days are numbered because the marines are here, and look, the shooting has already started.” So the militia decided to take a little bit more offensive stance and launched a series of attacks against some of the police stations downtown. We’d get all suited up to go down and bail out the Iraqi police and potentially get in a real fight with the militia and then things would quiet down, and this happened at least a handful of times in those few days.
Then one morning it totally boiled over. We went down there again to the same police station that was right downtown and was always getting attacked and this time there was a full-scale attack under way. My company was the first to go and we drove down from the Iraqi National Guard base and as we headed into the center of the city, toward the old city, we were hearing a lot of gunfire. We got out of our vehicles, and as we’re patrolling toward the fighting we could hear the mortars and see the smoke. It reminded me of what I’d always expected to find in twenty-first-century warfare, because you had citizens milling about and a lot of them running away while we were running in. People would come up to us on the street and say, “Watch out, there’s guys on the rooftops,” kind of encouraging us to go and take care of the problem. There were no American camera crews there, but there were some Arabic ones, I believe. So it was a very complex warfare situation that involved all these civilians and media all coming together and that’s what we were walking into.
We got down to the main traffic circle, right on the border of the old city, which is what the militia completely controlled. And it has become the front line where the fighting has started. The Cobra attack helicopters had gotten there before us and had already taken out some sniper positions on the top floor of one of these buildings, and there were a couple of buildings that were in flames and just riddled with shell holes. There were mortars coming in, people running about.
The Iraqi policemen were incredibly relieved to see us. Their police station had not been taken over by militia, but it was being attacked. There was gunfire and everything all around and rounds constantly snapping by overhead or impacting around us. It got pretty intense, and it was certainly worse than anything I had seen during the whole initial invasion.
People were getting hit. I would say overall throughout the whole day we were incredibly lucky. I mean, when you consider the number of mortars that were fired by the militia during that time, we took relatively few casualties, but there were guys getting hit, and in that sense it was pretty bad too.
The Iraqi police were fighting alongside us, and they were pretty bewildered and undertrained and maybe not supermotivated. But they’re the guys who we are there to support. It’s not supposed to be just the Americans versus the militia. The Iraqis are there as well. I was proud of that at first. I still want Iraq to succeed and it was great to see the Iraqis standing up and literally fighting by our side.
The Iraqis would get very easily flustered, though. There was one point when one or two of the Iraqis got hit and were wounded and it really, really crushed morale. They were not calm, shall we say? They didn’t just take it and get the guy medical attention and sort of carry on. It really hit them pretty hard.
For me, even during the entire push to Baghdad, nothing compared to this fight in Najaf, and that was a huge thing in my mind. I was definitely thinking about that. I’m thinking I had come back feeling so positive about the future and here I am, the first week back in Iraq on my second tour and I’m seeing worse combat than I had seen during the quote-unquote war.
So at this point this other company of marines came in. They essentially relieved us from our position and they took over for us at the police station. The commanders got together and made the decision that our original plan was off the table. Forget waiting a few months until the Iraqis are trained, the fight is going now. We’ve got to see it through and finish it.
Now we are really, really worn out. We are short on water. We’re short on food. We’re short on ammunition and we are all expecting a break. But the battalion commander comes in and talks a little bit with some of his majors or whatever and later they said we are going to the cemetery.
We did not know at this point if the cemetery was full of militia hiding out in camps or whether it was just a place they kept some mortars. But after the full day of fighting at the police station, the prospect of going into the cemetery right then and there was pretty daunting. We knew the cemetery was big, but we had absolutely no appreciation for what it was really like. In fact, in retrospect it’s pretty shocking that we weren’t given some basic intelligence on what it would be like to just take a step into there.
I knew it wasn’t a New England cemetery like where I grew up. There were tombstones all on top of each other. In any ten-foot-square area in this cemetery, there are a hundred places for these guys to hide. You are literally walking over and through the graves and there are mausoleums, little rooms, and lots of sort of cellars that you walk down into. For a militia, it was a perfect defensive position. They can hide everywhere and shoot at you. They can shoot at you from any direction. They can just all of a sudden pop out of some tunnel or some tomb and shoot. For all we knew, they could be shooting from right in front of us—
fighting us one moment and then pop up behind us the next. Just simply walking twenty feet, you had to climb over walls and walk up and over these tombstones. Despite the obvious danger, even just physically moving through the cemetery was very difficult.
It is gigantic, and we also didn’t appreciate that. Remember, this is about three in the afternoon and there aren’t that many hours of daylight left. The place was getting torn up and destroyed by mortars and everything else, and sometimes you would step on a tomb that a mortar had landed on, so you were essentially kind of walking on bones and stuff. It was a little strange. I wasn’t freaked out by it, but it was definitely a little nasty. It was in the
middle of a freaking war with rounds flying every which way, and on a scale of things, falling into someone’s tomb was more of a pain in the ass than anything else because you got your foot caught or something. War is always chaotic, but this was particularly so. Everyone is real tired and really hurting for water. It is very difficult to communicate because our radios are running out of batteries. We are climbing up and down all of these tombstones and it’s very difficult to control the platoon because we can’t see everyone. There are four platoons all lined up, but now we are losing the tanks that were with us because the roads are too narrow for them. They could only come in fifty feet. For infantry guys it’s always great to have tanks by your side when you are fighting, but the tanks couldn’t go any further.
Now we’re climbing up and down all over these tombstones. It’s very, very difficult to control the platoon because we can’t see everyone and it’s so difficult to communicate because of the radios. Then we just started taking fire and there are bullets impacting around us and it’s very difficult because we couldn’t see anyone shooting at us. They were hiding behind the tombstones and an insurgent could be just three feet in front of you and be completely hidden. There are mortars impacting around us. Not only was this incredibly difficult but all of a sudden, here we’re only a hundred meters in and we’re already getting surrounded. There was a sense that we could be overrun at any time.
A big figure in this battle was our chaplain, Father Shaughnessy, a Catholic priest from Worcester, Massachusetts. He is a big Irish guy with a thick Worcester accent. We all really got along with him well—
the guys could tell he wouldn’t mind throwing back a few beers. He was in the cemetery with us, constantly walking up and down the lines, encouraging the marines, completely unfazed by the rockets and mortars and everything else. He was exactly like the chaplain you see in the World War II movies. He absolutely was.