by Jim Mattis
Suppose gas pressure had built up, resulting in a severe explosion? In that tragic case, I still would have fully supported Captain Lacroix. Why? Because he had reviewed the situation smartly, weighed the risk factors against what he knew—and acted swiftly in accord with my intent. To expect success every time is wishful thinking, but we should default to supporting commanders who move boldly against the enemy. This time things worked out—thanks to Lacroix and his men. When things go wrong, a leader must stand by those who made the decision under extreme pressure and with incomplete information. Initiative and audacity must be supported, whether or not successful.
During the afternoon of March 21, while we were in contact with the enemy, the British division smoothly relieved us and turned northeast toward the city of Basra. A relief under fire seems easy on paper, but only to those who have never done it. The well-led British allowed the 7th Marines to turn west and rejoin my division’s main effort to protect the 3rd Infantry Division’s right flank. So far, so good.
* * *
—
Battlefields are unforgiving of mistakes. On the third day of the attack, the 1st Regimental Combat Team (RCT 1) was to turn directly north across the Euphrates River at the city of Nasiriyah, while RCTs 5 and 7 bypassed the city to the west and then turned north. I MEF had dispatched a brigade from the 2nd Marine Division, called Task Force Tarawa, to lead the way and hold open the two bridges at Nasiriyah. RCT 1 would pass through Tarawa’s lines across both bridges before proceeding north. This meant that thousands of military vehicles under two chains of command—TF Tarawa and Blue Diamond—would converge on this choke point where the enemy intended to fight.
I had learned that passing one unit through another when in contact with the enemy is a supremely difficult job. It is a tactic to be avoided whenever possible, especially in channelized terrain, such as congested city streets and where you are confined to bridges. Units get jumbled, the enemy often takes advantage, and there is usually hell to pay.
In the early-morning hours of March 23, an Army logistics convoy got lost, wandered into Nasiriyah, and was torn apart by Iraqi forces. Pushing forward to help, Marines from Tarawa briefly seized both bridges. In the ensuing fight, a misdirected A-10 aircraft accidentally destroyed friendly vehicles, killing Marines. Amid the confused melee, the Marines in TF Tarawa pulled back. This forced the thousand vehicles of RCT 1 to stop and wait in a two-mile column behind Tarawa’s lines.
While RCTs 5 and 7 had continued on their separate route up the unfinished highway, I sent my Boston Irish deputy, Brigadier General John Kelly, to urge the RCT 1 commander to pass through Tarawa and press forward. We couldn’t allow the enemy to dig in and gain confidence, as my right flank was increasingly exposed. John reached the city at night, passing the smoldering Army trucks.
The commander of RCT 1 was hesitant to press forward into Tarawa’s zone while their troops were in contact with the enemy. Estimating we had suffered ten to eighteen killed, Kelly cut through the anxieties.
“Get moving,” he told the RCT commander. “I’ll help in any way. But it’s your regiment, and you have to push through.”
Over the next several hours, John reiterated my order in increasingly strong terms. Still more delays. After a sixteen-hour halt, RCT 1 finally moved through Nasiriyah, sustaining only one man wounded. On one level, I empathized with the RCT commander. A passage of lines, with one unit moving through another while under fire, was a tough challenge. Adding to that, because of Tarawa’s late arrival in theater, the passage had to be undertaken without a rehearsal. Anticipatory leadership at the senior level had failed to grasp the challenge of mixing units in urban terrain.
On another level, I was disturbed that RCT 1 had not accelerated through. The core of my commander’s intent had made speed the driving force for the division. As Rommel once wrote, “A commander must accustom his staff to a high tempo from the outset, and continually keep them up to it.” While RCT 1 was delayed, Buff’s division and mine had received orders to attack all the way to Baghdad. The combined operations of the British division’s attack into Basra and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing were currently holding in place four bypassed Iraqi divisions. But RCT 1 had to keep moving in order to cover our right flank, in case those divisions chose to move against our advance on Baghdad.
* * *
—
By March 25, RCT 1 had picked up speed and the whole force was surging forward. Then a massive sandstorm swept in. Thunder and lightning were followed by seventy-mile-per-hour winds that swept up the sand, mixed it with rain and hail, and dumped tons of this blinding mess on our invasion force. The world turned a strange orange color. Wet and filthy, the Blue Diamond pressed on.
Now more than 130 miles inside Iraq, the enemy was starting to fight harder. A leading light armored reconnaissance battalion was engaged in a sharp fight, to which I directed every element of our air support. We continued to advance.
Every Marine lived and fought alongside others in his small team. For months, showers would be a distant memory. From general to private, we had no privacy, swapped for our favorite MREs and slept in holes next to our vehicles. Job, not rank, determined every Marine’s family. I was reminded of a pithy sentiment Field Marshal Slim wrote in World War II:
“As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.”
With my small team of two dozen, I was always on the move. My communicator, Sergeant Ryan Woolwort, ensured that I was never out of touch, which was no small matter with the division spread out. Corporal Yaniv Newman, my driver and map reader par excellence, stayed in constant touch with our headquarters, ensuring that I knew the real-time locations of my RCTs and of the enemy. My aide from Afghanistan, Lieutenant Warren Cook, knew me so well that he could convey my intent when I was busy checking another unit. Having learned a lesson during Operation Desert Storm, where, because I was dead tired, I allowed my own battalion to drive into an ambush in the open desert, I would not allow a unit duty officer to awaken a commander who was catching some rest.
Lying in the dust, breathing it, and constantly cleaning out weapons and radios became second nature to every Marine. Some of the men were suffering through “the crud,” the result of dust particles clogging the membranes of the lungs, causing them to cough and hack up wads of yellow mucus. Many Marines wrapped bandannas around their faces. It did little good. Because stubble prevented a gas mask from sealing, and we believed the Iraqis possessed chemical weapons, the troops shaved daily. It was odd to see all those clean-shaven faces caked with dirt around their eyes.
Every day during the attack, my fast-moving staff would turn my hurried updates from the leading edge of our units into succinct mission orders to the assault unit commanders. Halfway to Baghdad, I began seeing words like “whilst RCT 5 engages…” When I asked, “Where did this ‘whilst’ stuff come from?” Clarke Lethin explained that the UK liaison officer embedded in our operations shop wrote the best orders, and he was the author.
This was an outgrowth of my policy of embedding outside liaison officers in my staff. I didn’t want them listening in and reporting back to their units. Rather, by being inside our staffs and our processes, they would necessarily have a better look at our intentions and tempo, and thus be able to keep the units they represented better informed than they would if they were simply sitting, odd man out, in the back of the briefing room, removed from the give-and-take of sorting out how we were assessing and reacting to situations.
I knew that foreign units send some of their best officers when given the opportunity and that outside liaison officers, employed well, brought further strength to our operations. So “whilst” I continued to spend my time forward
to sense how operations were trending at the front, my now multinational operations staff transmitted my intent more clearly to my tens of thousands of U.S. Marines.
On March 27, as part of our deception plan, we executed a major feint. Colonel Joe Dunford’s RCT 5 drove ahead and seized the Hantush airfield, a smooth, well-paved strip of Highway 1. From there, the highway ran straight toward the city, so it was heavily defended. One glance at a map would convince the Iraqi high command that my division was seeking to link up with Buff Buford’s division. This made military sense. Our combined force would then fall on Baghdad from the south like a sledgehammer.
Actually, our intent was the opposite. My intelligence officers had identified a flaw in the enemy’s artillery coverage. RCT 5 would advance only a few dozen miles. When the Iraqis responded to block us, RCT 5 would pivot back to the northeast, crossing the Tigris through a gap left uncovered by Iraqi artillery. My division would then turn, assaulting Baghdad from the west while Buff’s division attacked from the south. My maneuver required all three of my RCTs attacking in concert.
Out of the blue, I was ordered to halt my division dead in its tracks. I was stunned. We were strung out with fifteen thousand of my men directly downwind of any chemical attacks. General Franks, CENTCOM commander, later wrote that his operations director had told him that “the Marines are tangling with more Fedayeen on Highways 1 and 7. The log [logistic] tails just aren’t catching up to the maneuver units.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. And I knew my boss, General Conway, held no such concerns. Beginning at Nasiriyah, fervent civilian supporters of Saddam, called fedayeen, had joined the fight. But their effect was minimal. Our biggest challenge was avoiding civilian casualties, because the fedayeen were firing at us from among the populace. We dealt with them as irritants—fire practice, nothing more. When a fighter popped out firing wildly, a Marine turret gunner would take him out and the troops would roll on. In my division’s wake, the logistics convoys—every Marine a rifleman—kept pace.
A reporter asked me about the fedayeen threat. I gave a straight answer.
“They lack manhood,” I said. “Fighting from among women and children, they’re as worthless an example of men as we’ve ever fought.”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld later wrote, “General James Conway, commanding general of I MEF, and General William Wallace of the Army’s V Corps ordered a seventy-two-hour pause to resupply their troops. I understood the reason for the pause, given the logistical challenges.”
The secretary had received bad information. My boss, General Conway, was first perplexed, then furious, when ordered to halt. Neither General Conway nor I had any concerns about running out of supplies. He had insisted to higher headquarters, “The Marines are ready for the push to Baghdad.” There was no reason to pause across the whole front. You never know an enemy until you fight him, but by now we knew we faced an enemy unable to mount a serious defense. This was our opportunity to exploit and charge on, increasing mental and physical pressure on the enemy. We should accelerate the tempo, confounding our foe with cascading disasters and utterly shattering his cohesion.
Conway’s arguments were of no avail. Somehow at higher headquarters the fedayeen had been elevated to an operational threat. To this day, I do not know how such an exaggerated perception gained enough traction to stop us.
Uncertainty runs riot if you don’t keep cool. From my liaison officers and my talks with Buff, I knew that his division was moving swiftly abreast of mine. I’d seen this before, the disconnect between frontline thinking and higher staffs’ more remote assessments. I’d always found first reports to be half wrong and half incorrect. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but digital technologies can falsely encourage remote staffs to believe they possess a God’s-eye view of combat. Digital technologies do not dissipate confusion; the fog of war can actually thicken when misinformation is instantly amplified.
The order to halt the entire ground attack came at the worst possible moment. Two-thirds of my division was strung out, unable to disperse into the soft marshland on either side.
I could not leave the 5th Marines forward at Hantush. The Iraqis knew we had taken the runway. Even a cursory glance showed the road behind them leading northeast across the Tigris. The risk that the Iraqis would deduce my feint and recognize the gap in their artillery coverage increased by the hour. I called Joe Dunford.
“Joe, we’ve been ordered to halt,” I said. “If you stay out in front, the Iraqis will figure out our plan. I have to pull you back.”
Joe could see that as well as I. He had the gift of synthesis; he could coolly evaluate the larger picture. Joe reminded me of Emperor Justinian, consistently reaching fair conclusions and able to summarize a complex situation in a few words.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll turn my Marines around.”
Trust. That’s what held us together. I knew General Conway had argued as hard as he could against stopping our offensive. Joe knew I had considered every option before deciding he had to pull back. Similarly, Joe’s battalion commanders knew he was competent. Whatever the cause of the retreat, the Marines from top to bottom knew it wasn’t due to unsound reasoning by their immediate leaders. The more trust there is inside a unit, the more strain that unit can withstand without a lot of discussion.
To throw off the enemy, Joe issued some unencrypted and jittery radio instructions, indicating that his troops had encountered too much opposition. We intended the enemy to intercept and be deceived by these messages. Then RCT 5 pulled back.
It was the hardest decision I made on the march to Baghdad. You sharpen your Marines to a razor’s edge. You commit them, knowing some will die. The enemy couldn’t stop us, but I had to pull my troops back. Then I remembered that in the Korean War, this division had been surrounded six to one and fought its way through freezing mountains. I thought to myself, This isn’t that tough. If they could get through that, I would figure a way out of this. I was determined that this operational mistake wouldn’t cost my men their lives. Never think that you’re impotent. Choose how you respond.
WE HAD CAPTURED SEVERAL Iraqi Army generals on the first day of fighting outside Basra, and they warned that Saddam would attack us with chemical weapons as we approached the Tigris River, just as he had threatened to do to his own army, were it ever to turn on him. Stuck in this maddeningly vulnerable position, I considered designating RCT 5 as a “reconnaissance regiment” in order to send Colonel Joe Dunford’s Marines on a “reconnaissance” to seize the critical bridges across the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River before the enemy could destroy them. My boss, Jim Conway, chuckled and observed that it was stretching even poetic license to imagine that CENTCOM would accept a “reconnaissance” that comprised a third of my entire division.
Instead of stewing, Conway told us to “throw elbows” to keep the enemy off-balance. We did so with probing attacks all along our forty-five-mile front. When I was touring RCT 1’s zone, I came upon an engineer reading a book when his platoon should have been hard at work. I took him aside—praise in public, criticize in private—before ripping into him. I told him to get off his ass and do his job. I had repeatedly emphasized speed—information passing, response to orders, movement, and resupply. But leadership can’t depend on emails or written words. Leaders are not potted plants, and at all levels they must be constantly out at the critical points doing whatever is required to keep their teams energized, especially when everyone is exhausted.
Operational tempo is a state of mind. I’ve always tried to be hard on issues but not on spirits. Yet I needed unity of commitment, from every commander down through the youngest sailor and Marine. Once across the Tigris, my spread-out division could face two Republican Guard divisions. I needed the entire division on the same tempo. We had to be all in, all the time.
* * *
—
&nbs
p; At one point during the pause, I was sitting with a squad that was understandably uneasy about remaining in one place for so long. One Marine asked what we’d do if hit by chemicals. For these assault troops, there was something uniquely malicious about fighting on a battlefield where the very air is poisoned.
“Just like we’ve trained,” I said. “Fight for twenty-four hours ‘dirty’ in your suits and kill those sons of bitches. Then we’ll get you decontaminated, with fresh gear, and you’ll go back into the fight.” I wanted them to know they would live to fight another day and should press the fight, chemicals or no chemicals. They got it. As we prepared to cross the Tigris, they zipped tight their chemical suits. Their quiet individual determination will always stay with me.
On the third day, the imposed halt was finally lifted and we eagerly resumed the attack. My troops were smiling and flashing thumbs-up as they rolled by. I was relieved we were on the move. RCT 5 swiftly seized the Hantush highway strip again. Our air wing commander, General Jim Amos, flew in to cut through the time-consuming process of declaring the strip operational. Within hours, KC-130s began landing, off-loading bladders filled with 88,000 gallons of fuel. Water and ammo flowed in and the wounded were flown out.
Unleashed, RCT 5 stormed over the Saddam Canal. The Marines overran the dug-in Iraqi troops hastily sent forward. Because of our feint, the Iraqi generals had recognized too late the gap in their artillery fans that my intel guys had found. Seizing the Tigris River Bridge intact, Joe Dunford turned his RCT west. Destination: Baghdad. Now the enemy could see our attack route.
The next day, I hustled to catch up with Dunford. Corporal Newman hastily parked us in a culvert adjacent to the regimental commander, and I hopped out. Iraqi military trucks were burning alongside the road. Marines, sweating in their chemical suits, were bounding forward. To the front, mortar shells were dropping around a redbrick building held by a rear guard fighting to hold us back.