Call Sign Chaos
Page 13
Dunford and I were joined by his lead battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Mundy. Setting up a map board next to my Humvee, I popped open a Coke and gauged the distances separating my three RCTs. Rounds were zipping high over our heads, machine guns were barking, shells were exploding to the front, and several buildings were on fire, the flames leaping high.
A squad of Marines, half walking and half trotting, brushed by us. Just another normal day for our young grunts. When the squad leader paused to survey the surroundings, I offered him water from a jerry can on my Humvee’s gypsy rack. He guzzled down a few swallows without taking his eyes off the enemy positions ahead. He wiped his mouth, patted me on the shoulder, and continued on. Absorbed in the fight, he had no idea that I was the division commander. Or if he did, it made no impression. He had a job to do.
We had the momentum. It was now a straight forty-five-mile shot to Baghdad. But Sam Mundy’s battalion needed a break. An infantry fight is like a marathon. Marines can push themselves without rest for eight or ten hours under fire. But then the fatigue factor, both mental and physical, will impact even the fittest troops and the unit will eventually start breaking down. That’s when the worst tactical and ethical mistakes can occur.
To exploit the opening we had found, I had to bring up reinforcements. Now within striking distance of Baghdad, I needed all hands fully in the fray. I called Kelly at division headquarters and told him to have RCTs 1 and 7 move up to our forward position. I knew it would take the RCTs a day to break contact and catch up. Ahead of us lay an intact Republican Guard armored division. I wanted to continue the attack before they could adapt their defense to our now clear attack vector.
“Overnight I’ll bring up my tank battalion to take the lead,” Dunford told me. “We’ll resume the attack at dawn.”
Classic Dunford. He assessed the pros and cons, reached a decision, and in two succinct sentences conveyed his plan.
* * *
—
I had my own hard decision to make. My deputy, John Kelly, was waiting for me when I got back to my headquarters that afternoon. RCT 7 was, as instructed, swiftly moving forward. John then explained that RCT 1 was again not pressing forward aggressively enough. Following the delay at Nasiriyah, I was already concerned. Now the overly cautious pace was persisting. Fighting was getting harder, and a third of my division was lagging. My mission to support 3ID, which was closing on Baghdad, was in jeopardy.
Because it is so hard to write about, relief of command is rarely mentioned. You know how hard dedicated officers have worked, and you know what the effect of relief will be, upon them, their families, and their troops. Often they are friends in every sense of the word. But I would be remiss if I did not address the necessity to relieve someone of command, because it is so fundamental to leadership. We learn most about ourselves when things go wrong.
While RCT 5 was crossing the Tigris, RCT 1 was to feint an assault against the Republican Guard division holding the city of Kut, farther to the east. With that division frozen, we would bypass it. Kelly saw that some Iraqi artillery pieces had been abandoned in place, soldiers were discarding their uniforms, and bands of males in civilian clothes and without weapons were streaming out of the city. The enemy appeared to have fallen apart. Yet RCT 1 hadn’t delivered a few short, hard jabs to hasten that disintegration and then swiftly shifted to join my main attack. I don’t have the words to describe the level of fatigue that engulfs any commander in combat; it is beyond anything I’ve experienced elsewhere. I wondered if the RCT 1 commander was exhausted past his limit.
I dispatched a helicopter, and a few hours later the RCT 1 commander entered my tent. He looked worn out and nervous.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Nasiriyah, Kut…Why aren’t you pressing harder? Why the hesitation?”
I wanted to see a flash of fire and ferocity of tone. I hoped he’d say something like “We’re just hitting our stride. In one more day, we’ll be there.”
Instead he expressed his heartfelt reluctance to lose any of his men by pushing at what might seem to be a reckless pace.
I was torn by his answer. I want officers to nurture a deep affection for their men, as I do—in my view, it’s fundamental to building the trust that glues an organization together. Your troops must be confident about how much you care about them before they can commit fully to a mission that could cost them their lives. I also understood how difficult it is to order men you’ve come to love into a fight that some won’t survive. But the mission must come first. Once you’re committed, hesitancy in battle can expose other units to failure. I needed all hands in the fight, sharing the burden equally.
On the spot, I relieved the RCT commander, a noble and capable officer who in past posts had performed superbly. But when the zeal of a commander flags, you must make a change. Sometimes you order them into their sleeping bag, and rest restores them. In this case I believed that rest alone would not work. In good conscience, he was reluctant to follow my intent, which involved speed as the top priority. You cannot order someone to abandon a spiritual burden they’re wrestling with. Fear of losing his Marines, coupled with his tremendous fatigue, cost the division an officer I admire greatly to this day.
This was the first relief in combat of a regimental commander in this fight, and it was front-page news the next day. You can imagine what it felt like to be that colonel, his family, or his admirers. While I was criticized by some whom I respect, their disapproval didn’t make me question my decision.
To take command of RCT 1, I gave up my operations officer, Colonel John Toolan. In the midst of this campaign, he had the leadership savvy to swiftly earn the respect of five thousand troops who didn’t know him, bringing their power fully into the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Clarke Lethin stepped up as operations officer and my division staff didn’t miss a beat.
* * *
—
On April 4, RCT 5 attacked toward Baghdad. Elements of an Iraqi division, dug in on both sides of the narrow road, fired Sagger missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, PKM machine guns, and AKs. Hidden in culverts, Iraqi soldiers disabled a tank just as Colonel Dunford was driving by. Stopping to help, he and his crew engaged in a furious exchange of fire with Iraqi soldiers. When an ambulance sped up, the driver was shot in the hand. With the enemy routed, Dunford proceeded toward Baghdad, his driver steering with his head out the window because bullets had shattered the windshield. Over the radio, Dunford heard that First Lieutenant Brian McPhillips, a graduate of his own high school, had just been killed a few hundred yards to his front.
A few hours later, energetic First Sergeant Edward Smith was killed. Two days earlier, while I was talking with Dunford, Sergeant Smith had been standing a few feet away, smiling at us as he puffed on a cigar. I had joked that he wasn’t supposed to deploy with us. He had put in his retirement papers and was about to start a second career on the Anaheim police force. But he put off his retirement to stay with his rifle company, where he knew his experience was needed. Such were the men I served alongside.
The last obstacle between us and Baghdad was the steep-banked Diyala River. I sent RCT 5 to the north, looking for a fording point. Moving to the front was RCT 7, commanded by Colonel Steve Hummer. We had served together in the 1980s, and I knew he was a deliberate planner who was both an aggressive battle leader and a father figure to his men. To get into Baghdad, his RCT had to get across the half-demolished Diyala Bridge, which led directly into the city. When I drove up on the morning of April 6, I passed a line of Abrams tanks and hundreds of Marines, engineers, and assault infantry crouching along the side of the road, ready to sprint forward into Baghdad. The approach to the bridge was unnaturally quiet, all eyes and guns trained on the many apartment buildings and a copse of palm trees on the far shore.
A steady wind and explosions had scattered the detritus of war—torn awnings, wrecked cars, dead cats, overturned ch
airs, slinking dogs, a few stiff corpses, rattling tin cans, odd bits of clothing and papers swirling about, mud and filth underfoot. At the edge of the bridge, Steve was crouched beside a wrecked one-room brick building with sagging sandbags.
The bridge had a gaping hole in the middle. Again I saw the Marine Corps watchwords—improvise, adapt, and overcome—in action as Marines dragged up lumber. We would break into a city of seven million by sending Marines in single file across a plank.
A short artillery barrage was called on the far bank. At the same time, our intelligence assets warned us that an Iraqi general was calling a fire mission against us. Seconds later, the ground shuddered slightly, followed by the thunderclap of a heavy shell exploding nearby. Several yards behind us, Corporal Jesus Martin Antonio Medellin and Lance Corporal Andrew Aviles lay dead. Aviles was eighteen and the youngest Marine to die in the invasion, a patriot who had given up an academic scholarship in order to serve. My teenage grunts were more men than some guys I’ve met who were twice their age.
As I drove away, Marines were running in single file across that construction plank into Baghdad. Farther downstream, Dunford’s RCT 5 searched for another crossing of the Diyala so we could cut off Baghdad from the north and link up with 3ID. Colonel John Toolan was bringing a reenergized RCT 1 into the fight. Without pause, his troops swiftly crossed the Diyala in hard-used amphibious vehicles, an incongruous sight hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.
Within five hours, we had battalions from two regiments inside the city. On his side of the city, Buff Blount’s “thunder runs” of armored columns were wreaking havoc on the Iraqi defenses. To our amusement, Iraqi commanders sent out panicky warnings that American tanks were “swimming across the river.”
Inside the city, I caught up with one of John Toolan’s battalions and watched a squad attacking the enemy.
The squad leader shouted to his men, “Don’t fire at the second-story apartment on the right. The bastard’s got women and children in there. Keep moving. We’ll come back and kill him.”
I turned around and walked away. I knew my touchstone of “No better friend, no worse enemy” was in play, and I sent a smile of thanks to General Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the Roman soldier who, two thousand years ago, had those words inscribed on his tombstone and passed it on to me.
Packed in among civilian evacuees fleeing the city were the remnants of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard, many now wearing civilian clothes. Our aircraft didn’t attack the entangled columns. Against light resistance at a few strongpoints, our regiments were moving swiftly across eastern Baghdad. General Jim Amos, hearing that we were running short of food, gathered the air wing’s MREs into helicopters, which then flew low over Marines in the city, kicking out boxes of chow. The infantry was dashing forward, knowing the Iraqi Army had given up the fight. In Firdos Square, at the request of rejoicing Iraqis, my Marines tore down a large statue of Saddam.
Lieutenant McPhillips, First Sergeant Smith, Corporal Medellin, Lance Corporal Aviles…Death doesn’t care about your age or rank. At the front, we’re all together, shoulder to shoulder. We nod or grin at one another. As the commanding general, you concentrate on outsmarting and outmaneuvering the enemy. But you cannot outmaneuver the odds. No matter how ferociously you study, plot, and attack, some of your brave young troops will die. You try your best to make that number as small as possible. But you can never drive it to zero.
“It is not the young man who misses the days he does not know,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. “It is the living who bear the pain of those missed days.”
Of course, few of us are as stoic as Aurelius. We seek a reason for their sacrifice and live with our sorrow, knowing they did not die without accomplishment. They knew I had confidence in them, and they never failed to carry out their mission, ethically and efficiently. I would happily storm hell in the company of those troops.
By the time we set up my headquarters in Baghdad, Joe Dunford had encircled the city from the north, linking up with Buff Blount’s 3rd Infantry Division.
There was still rough fighting; at a mosque in the center of town, one of our battalions took eighty-one casualties in one night. When I drove to the scene, the Marines were still in the fight, and I could see reporters holding plasma bags over wounded Marines being treated by our corpsmen. But we had toppled the Saddam regime. Baghdad was the only objective the high command had given to 3ID and the 1st Marine Division. We could have gotten there faster but for the unfortunate pause we could not prevent. Due to the terrain and our maneuvering, the Blue Diamond had already covered more than four hundred miles over seventeen days, and it wasn’t over yet.
* * *
—
From the very start, the Iraqi Army was a tall, dead tree. On the outside, its thick bark appeared tough. Once we cut into it, it was clear that the tree had been hollowed out by a lack of morale, leadership, and belief in itself.
Saddam had fled Baghdad. Washington and CENTCOM wanted a swift search of his hometown of Tikrit. I was asked how long it would take to dispatch a force over a hundred miles north and seize the city. “Tomorrow,” I said. Less than twenty-four hours later, John Kelly was on his way with a 3,500-man task force.
On the way to Tikrit, a local policeman told Lieutenant Nathan Boaz, a platoon commander, that American prisoners were being held in a nearby house. Boaz handed him a GPS, instructing him to click the button as he walked past the house. Half an hour later, the policeman returned the GPS, with the location marked. Boaz took his Marines, burst into the house, and freed seven American soldiers who’d been taken prisoner at Nasiriyah. This demonstrated the initiative I expected of my Marine small-unit leaders.
Kelly’s task force did not find Saddam as it advanced to Tikrit and beyond. After Tikrit was in John’s hands, I flew up to see him, and together we went for a swim in the muddy waters of the Tigris. After weeks on the move without a shower, both of us thought we could see the water turning an even darker brown as we scrubbed off layers of grime.
The march up was over, with my division spread over half of Baghdad and my forward elements 150 miles north, closer to the Mediterranean than to the Persian Gulf, where we had started.
* * *
—
In Baghdad, the people were pouring into the streets. Complete nonviolent chaos reigned. Government buildings were ransacked, stripped clean of everything of value, down to the last copper wire. In a sprawling metropolis of more than seven million, there were no police, no services, and no local authority. We hadn’t enough troops to prevent widespread looting, other than at some government buildings, but even those had largely been overrun before our arrival on the scene and stripped bare.
Reinforced, the 3rd Infantry Division now held the western half of Baghdad, and the Blue Diamond held the east. We received no clear orders, but thanks to General Hagee’s post-combat plan, my artillery units were ready to step in and swiftly provide or start repairing city services, augmented by the Marine reserve specialists I had embedded with them.
In June, the Blue Diamond was ordered into Shiite southern Iraq. I sent home the tanks, artillery tubes, and my four regimental headquarters, flattening my organization to ten battalions, all answering directly to division. Within a month, the battalion commanders were acting as de facto mayors, working with local officials, restoring electric power and water, opening schools, recruiting police, paying government salaries, and settling disputes.
In the holy city of Najaf, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conlin established a working relationship with the Shiite mullahs by restoring electricity and removing the mayor, who was stealing contractor funds. The anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr conspired with Shiite elements to build his political influence there. Each Friday, he bused in from Baghdad thousands of his militia to listen to his fiery sermons. He then unleashed them into the streets to protest our presence. One day, with the temperature near 115 degrees an
d Marines holding the crowd in check with fixed bayonets, Conlin patiently listened to the angry crowd, hurling invective. In the sweltering heat, our division chaplain, Father Bill Devine, gathered several sailors and Marines. They waded into the surly crowd, handing out bottles of cold water. It’s hard on a blistering hot day to attack someone giving you water. Once they had shared their complaints, the crowd dispersed. Through such efforts, we kept a shaky peace across our zone.
Alerted that Sadr intended to hold a huge Friday demonstration in Najaf, I told my logistics officers to go to Baghdad and contract with every bus company we could find, to take their buses out of town for a few days. As a result, Sadr’s sermon had few Baghdad attendees, and again we kept the peace without using bayonets. Conlin’s popularity soared. When it was time for him to leave, as a gesture of thanks, the leading mullahs invited him to a prominent mosque for afternoon tea. In the city of Karbala, fifty miles to the north, the town council tried to elect Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lopez as the mayor, so that he and his Marines, contractors, and funds could not leave. I watched as our troops adapted. My purpose was to find common cause, work to keep the peace, and avoid antagonisms for one more month, one more week, one more day. Don’t let it go wrong.
From British officers I learned a lot during this time. I adopted their approach of showing no triumphalism—we had come to liberate, not dominate. We did not push our way around.
I believed the environment in my zone provided a basis for building sound local governance structure. Still, we received no helpful guidance from above. President Bush had appointed former ambassador Paul Bremer as his presidential envoy and director of what came to be called the Coalition Provisional Authority, making him the most powerful American in Iraq. Bremer and his large CPA staff worked in a palace alongside Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and his staff. Sanchez commanded Joint Task Force 7, which included all coalition military units in Iraq. JTF 7 was responsible for security. However, the CPA retained the authority and funding to design and organize a new democratic government. In this complex managerial environment, Bremer and his CPA played a key role in all dimensions.