by Jim Proser
Without chaos. Obsessed with detail and planning, Mattis demanded that all personal affairs be carefully considered and settled with time to spare. Deployment is always chaotic, with dozens of domestic details to arrange—vaccinations, houses to close up, cars to store, and farewell meals with friends and family. This was the first sharpening of the mindful, focused awareness Mattis knew his Marines would need for what was coming. From this point on, no one could afford the distraction of unsettled personal business.
Mattis continued, “Fight at every level as a combined-arms team.”25 Essentially, he meant, put the enemy in the dilemma of hiding from one weapon while being exposed to another. A rifleman and grenadier make up a combined-arms team, as do a mortar crew and a machine gunner, or a battalion and air cover. This was a fundamental dynamic of maneuver warfare—mobility and combined firepower.
“Aggressive NCO leadership is the key to victory” was Mattis’s next directive.26 Sergeants were generally the team leaders who got things done on the ground. Well trained and with long experience, they were a Recon grunt’s lighthouse in the fog of war. Their aggression, or lack of it, would determine the success of Mattis’s strategy. In the months to come, Colonel Dowdy would fail this standard of aggression at Nasariyah, with deadly consequences.
“Mistakes are forgivable,” Mattis continued, “but a lack of self-discipline will be met with zero tolerance.”27 In the general’s world, self-discipline included all the disciplines of men under arms: light discipline, noise discipline, sleep discipline, and fire discipline. A momentary lapse in any of these could prove fatal to men and mission. Again, the general was demanding and creating the mindset of success on which his life and the lives of everyone in the theater of operations would depend.
“Build confidence in your NBC equipment.”28 NBC meant nuclear, biological, and chemical.29 He paused for effect and added, “Expect to be slimed with chemicals.” Everyone in the room had seen pictures of Saddam’s mass murder of the Kurdish villagers of Halabja with sarin and VX gas. An extended moment of silence allowed the Marines time to process the fact that they were now committed to an unpredictable and extremely dangerous mission.
To emphasize the need for mental and physical preparation, the general pressed on: “Train to survive the first five days in combat.”30 He again called on his men’s powers of visualization to anticipate biological warfare in 120-degree desert heat, encased in heavy, unventilated MOPP suits. They also knew to expect the full force of Saddam’s attack immediately upon arrival in country. There would be no time for a learning curve.
“Finally, get your family ready to be without you.”31 The implications—this could mean both tour of duty separation and possible death—were clear. It meant putting personal affairs in order and emotionally steeling one’s self and family for the worst. Part of why the general was so revered among his Marines was his direct and plain language. If Marines were thinking it, they could count on Mattis saying it—even if it got him into trouble with his bosses, as it frequently did. He was telling them, clearly, to pay their life insurance premiums and write their final letters to loved ones now.
Finally, he told them that when it came to the privileges of rank, there would be none. No general would be allowed any more personal gear than the lowest infantry lance corporal, and that the comforts of home were banned. No cots, coffee makers, or electronic distractions like hand-held video games, CD players, or even satellite telephones were allowed. They were traveling light. In this battle, they would live and fight like the Spartan warriors of ancient Greece.
Once the full operational details of the new maneuver warfare were worked out and briefed to unit commanders, even experienced Marines like First Recon commander Ferrando were more than a little unsettled. “Major General Mattis’s plan went against all our training and doctrine,” Ferrando said, “but I can’t tell a general I don’t do windows.”32
As Mattis knew from his reading of Braddon’s The Siege, Iraq’s defenders would tie themselves to key water and land approaches to Baghdad. US intelligence confirmed that this was where the Iraqi IV Corps was dug in. Mattis planned to flank the IV Corps to the east and west by advancing along the Kurdish border to the east and up Highway 1 to the west. By quickly outmaneuvering IV Corps in this way, he would cut them off at Al Kut on the Tigris and prevent them from reinforcing Baghdad. At least, that was the plan.
* * *
On Highway 8, twelve miles south of Nasariyah, the convoy has been stalled for hours. Sergeant Colbert, whom the men call Iceman for his cool head under fire, listens glumly to the BBC news on his smuggled shortwave radio. It seems Dowdy’s Task Force Tarawa, leading the convoy, has found Saddam’s army directly in front of them, inside Nasariyah. The BBC reports heavy fighting, with Americans being captured and significant casualties among the Marines. His platoon gathers around Colbert as he sits in the Humvee, silently taking in the news.
Three hours pass with no further news and no movement. Finally, Lieutentant Fick receives orders from Colonel Ferrando. Fick calls in the leaders of Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie for a briefing at his Humvee: “In approximately one hour, we are going to bust north to the bridge at the Euphrates. Change in the ROE [rules of engagement]—anyone with a weapon is declared hostile. If it’s a woman walking away from you with a weapon on her back, shoot her. If there is an armed Iraqi out there, shoot him. I don’t care if you hit him with a forty-millimeter grenade in the chest.”33
Apparently, aggressive NCO leadership, one of Mattis’s essential directives for success, is in short supply at Nasariyah. Eighteen Marines are dead; four Marines and US Army personnel—including, as widely reported, Army private Jessica Lynch—are missing; and seventy Marines are wounded, some pinned down inside the city. Confidence in Mattis’s maneuver warfare plan is shaken. The risk-averse “Clinton Generals” are on comms from Washington to his jump command post, now parked just a mile south of Nasariyah. They want answers.
Mattis has driven—in and out of traffic, overland and on the highway—three hours from Basra. He has now been on duty thirty-six hours, receiving intel, advising commanders, and issuing orders, catching the occasional catnap in his seat in the hot LAV as it rolls north from Basra. The general is wide awake now, and at the end of his patience with the situation in Nasariyah. Osowski hears him lose it with Dowdy: “If you’re taking fire from a building, you level the fucking building!”
From their position, the jump platoon can see shell impacts in the city and hear small-arms fire. Mattis makes his decision. He gets on comms back to Brigadier General John Kelly at division command post. Colonel John Toolan should get prepared to take over command of Task Force Tarawa.
* * *
Fick and First Recon are rolling toward the firefight inside Nasariyah. Fick is receiving intel on how to get into the city, but no one can tell him how to get out again, carrying wounded Marines. The only thing he knows for sure—tonight’s objective is Ambush Alley.
Mattis pulls out, leaving the battle for Nasariyah to First Recon and RCT-1. His rolling command post skirts Nasariyah to the west and then heads north toward a new front line. Dunford has charged ahead after securing the gas and oil separation plant near Basra in the south, and his 5th Marines are now engaged in heavy fighting and taking casualties just north of the ancient city of Ur, below a critical Euphrates River bridge. Mattis’s platoon rolls toward the fight through the dark, empty desert. Occasionally a SCUD missile flashes through the night sky, seeking the Marines at the front lines ahead of them.
Inside the LAV it’s quiet, just the humming of tires on pavement. Even Osowski has stopped talking. The young man slumps in his seat, asleep and off duty for the moment. Mattis lets him sleep. The general’s mind is elsewhere, inside Nasariyah, where First Recon, his “cocky, obnoxious bastards,” young men like Fick who have lived and fought beside him for years, are about to get “lit up.” On his orders, they will be driving straight into a kill zone prepared for them by Saddam Hussein. They
will be taking direct fire as they fight to rescue wounded fellow Marines. They are his tribe, and some of them are nearly family. On his orders, a few more of their names are about to be added to the butcher’s bill.
2
No Worse Enemy
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
—Lieutenant General Jim Mattis to his Marines, Operation Iraqi Freedom
0100 Hours—22 March 2003—Near Ur, Iraq
The five vehicles of General Mattis’s jump command post pull off the blacktop of Highway 7 into the desert sand. They are close enough to the fighting to hear the small-arms fire and Saddam’s SCUD missiles exploding near Joe Dunford’s Fifth Marines, less than a half mile ahead. Mattis and his personal company of twenty-one men are now close to 40 hours without sleep, except for occasional catnaps inside the rolling command post. Mattis calls a halt and orders a rest break for his crew, enforcing the sleep discipline that is proving to be crucial in the campaign. They park their vehicles diagonally to the pavement, a few feet apart, “herringboned” to provide protection from incoming fire for the men, who will sleep between and under the vehicles, and quick access to the road when they move out.
Mattis is on secure radio to Dunford, who reports taking heavy fire up ahead as the general’s men pile out of the vehicles and stretch. They listen to the battle raging just down the road for a moment while Sergeant Major Juan Duff assesses the wisdom of parking this close to the fight. SCUD missiles are notoriously inaccurate, and his men are well within range. Weighing the risk of bombardment against the advantage of more reliable radio communications this close to the front, and knowing Mattis’s disdain for timid Marines, Duff shows his decision by grabbing his sleeping bag, which is lashed to the top of the LAV. The others follow their sergeant.
They pull their sleeping gear, a box of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), and their field toilet off the various vehicles. Field toilets are not issued by the Marine Corps. When they exist at all, they are improvised out of grenade boxes or other packing crates. But this particular field toilet, the improvised excretive device used by everyone in Mattis’s jump platoon, is a small triumph of Marine Corps engineering and adaptation: a flimsy plastic outdoor garden chair with a hole punched in the seat and a toilet seat stolen from a Kuwaiti portable construction site toilet duct-taped around the hole. To use it, you dig a hole in the ground and line up the hole in the chair with the hole in the ground. It is a point of pride in the unit and a combat luxury fit for their commanding general.
Two Marines are assigned to take the first watch. They are tasked with scanning 360 degrees of their perimeter for hostile activity while monitoring communications over the radios. The others dig their shallow sleeping holes, called ranger graves, between or under the vehicles. Long after the others have turned in for the night, Mattis climbs out, gets his sleeping bag, finds a spot among his men within earshot of the radios, and digs his own ranger grave. Constant chatter from the stack of radios in the LAV mixes with gunfire, jet engines overhead, the whoosh and earth-shaking boom of SCUDs, and the whopping of Cobra attack helicopters. Mattis loosens his bootlaces, gets into his bag. On this particular night, perhaps he reads his copy of Meditations by red-lensed penlight under the cover of his bag.
Marcus Aurelius, a Roman general, emperor, and the author of Meditations, may have spoken down through the ages to his modern counterpart lying quietly under the stars in the Iraqi desert through passages like this: “Let these be the objects of your ordinary meditation: to consider what manner of men both in soul and body we ought to be, whenever death shall surprise us: the shortness of this our mortal life: the immense vastness of the time that has been before, and will be after us: the frailty of every worldly material object: all these things to consider, and see clearly in themselves, all disguise being removed and taken away. Again, consider the causes of all things: the proper ends and references of all actions: what pain is in itself; what pleasure, what death: what fame or honour . . .”1
Soon the general is asleep, in spite of the Marine artillery that has begun to “fire for effect”—the military term for zeroed-in, concentrated bombardment. It slaughters hundreds of Iraqi soldiers just down the road, trembling the ground underneath the general’s untroubled, sleeping head.
* * *
Before dawn, the Marines have circled their vehicles in a perimeter around the I MEF forward command post, a few collapsible tables loaded with radios and laptop computers. The platoon is putting up a nylon canopy over the tables. Mattis works alongside the other men, draping the sides of the canopy to protect the equipment from the fine desert dust. Osowski offers to take over the menial task from the general, to which he receives a quick “Nah.”
At 0900 hours, the word comes down: Dowdy is still stuck in Nasariyah. Casualties are now over eighty killed and wounded, with captured US Army private Jessica Lynch and seven other Army truck drivers still missing. Every television news program in the world is broadcasting the story of Lynch, Saddam’s star prisoner of war, the petite blond small-town girl from rural West Virginia. It is a public relations dream for Saddam2 that cuts through the heartland of America, and a public relations nightmare for Mattis. Calls from the Pentagon flood into the central command base, the Bug, which has been moved up from Kuwait to the Jalibah airfield, eighty miles inside Iraq and 40 miles south of the problem at Nasariyah. Mattis calls his assistant division commander, John Kelly, and tells him to fly to Nasariyah now and get the attack moving again.
Kelly already spoke to Dowdy the night before, while Mattis was traveling north toward Joe Dunford’s lines. Thomas Ricks reports on the exchange in his book The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today:
“Are you attacking?” he asked.
“Yes,” Dowdy said, “but we’re still shaping”—meaning he was using artillery and maneuvering to find the Iraqi weak spots before attacking. Apparently, Mattis’s directive that shaping was to take a distant back seat to lightning-fast advance was not being followed.
“Why don’t you drive through to Al Kut?” Kelly questioned.
Dowdy said he had reports of Iraqi minefields along that route and didn’t want to run another gauntlet like Nasariyah. He was the commander in place, he insisted, and best equipped to decide how and when to attack.
Kelly called Dowdy again at two o’clock in the morning, just after Mattis had checked in with Kelly about the situation. Kelly lit into Dowdy: “What’s wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong,” Dowdy replied.
“I don’t want to hear any excuses.”
“They’re not excuses. I’m the commander on the ground.”3
Kelly told Dowdy that he was tired of the First Regiment “sitting on its ass,” and he was going to recommend that Dowdy be relieved of his command. “Maybe General Mattis won’t do it,” he said. “Maybe he’ll decide he can get along with a regiment that isn’t worth a shit. But that’s what I’m going to recommend.”4
The following day, Kelly does just that. He hangs up with Mattis, grabs his flak jacket and helmet, exits the Bug, and sees his helicopter pilot across the airfield. He turns his index finger in a circular “go” signal above his head. Turbines whine as the chopper’s rotors spin up to speed.
In thirty minutes, Kelly has landed at Dowdy’s position. They hop in Dowdy’s Humvee and drive up to the current front line—the causeway of the eastern bridge over the Euphrates. AK-47 rounds zip overhead from across the river, telling them they are close enough. They get out of the Humvee and move behind it for cover. Lieutenant General James T. Conway, I MEF commander for the entire Middle East, Mattis’s boss, and the highest-ranking officer in the region, rolls up to them in an armored vehicle. Conway’s appearance tells them that the situation across the river is now critical. Soon Brigadier General Richard Natonski, commanding Task Force Tarawa, and Colonel Ronald Bailey, commanding the Second Marine Regiment, a component of Task Force Tarawa, are all there to see th
e situation for themselves.
Retired Marine captain Bing West traveling in the Marine column in an unarmored Nissan Pathfinder sport utility vehicle with retired Marine major general Ray L. Smith, reports on the action in their book The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the United States Marines:
What they saw was the fire from the 155mm artillery batteries pounding the city with volley after volley. Cobra gunships were raking the tree lines on the far bank. Two Marines had just been wounded on the southern embankment. The 2nd Marines had taken heavy casualties at the northern bridge and in the middle of the route through the city.5
Bullets whiz past and rattle the palm tree fronds overhead. The bullets spit dust where they hit the tree trunks. Two Marines get hit near the commanders. Over two hundred Marines lying on and near the riverbank around them return fire. The commanders have to shout over the noise.
The commanders know that Alpha Company of Colonel Bailey’s Second Marine Regiment is pinned down inside the city and taking heavy fire. Saddam’s quagmire claims its first tactical victims by bogging down Alpha’s vehicles in the tar and mud. Bravo and Charlie Companies have made it through and according to last radio reports hold the bridge over the Saddam Canal on the north side of the city. Charlie Company reports are being lost in the sporadic radio communication.
Conway, without knowing exactly how many or what kind of forces are waiting for them inside the city, takes just moments to assess the situation and set the strategy—get control of the main route and forget about using the eastern and western avenues through the city. Secure the center of the city, the main thoroughfare and the buildings on either side. Once secured, this will protect the column’s flanks. No more delays.