by Jim Proser
Mattis smiled and accepted his press muzzle in good humor. “It looks like you and me are going to get along just fine.”12
1030 Hours—9 April 2003—Saddam City, Baghdad
Mattis stands outside his LAV, consulting his low-tech paper map of the city, held in place by spring clips on a piece of poster board. Osowski and Cook write battalion objectives on Post-it notes with markers and paste them on the general’s map. The three regimental sectors of East Baghdad, the areas the RCTs are responsible for, are outlined by colored marker lines.
RCT-7’s sector is outlined in bright blue and stretches all the way from the southeast to the northwest of the city. In that sector are eighteen numbered squares, each marking an objective, with six objectives assigned to each of RCT-7’s three battalions—the 1/7, 3/7, and 3/4.
Colonel Conlin’s 1/7 has already captured the Atomic Energy Commission, only half a mile away, and the other battalions, instead of meeting Republican Guard or fedayeen fighters, are rolling on their objectives past crowds of jubilant Iraqis eight or nine deep, waving and shouting, “Good! Good! Mister!” Captain Brian Smalley said later, “It was like driving through Paris in 1944.”13
In the Bug, now moved up to Numaniyah, I MEF commander General James Conway watches CNN’s live feed of the happy conquest of Saddam City. Mattis is on the satellite phone with Conway, requesting to scrap the plan and push his advance until they run into somebody who wants to fight. Conway is cautious; he can’t be sure the same happy reception is happening all over the city. The plan is to seize critical locations of power in a coordinated degradation of Saddam’s control. He’s going to check in with the Army.14
Mattis hangs up and doesn’t bother to inform his field commanders of the boss’s hesitancy. He lets them continue to operate under Mattis’s well-known intent—advance, attack, and advance. Base Plate McCoy’s 3/4 Marines roll into Firdos Square in downtown Baghdad. The square is dominated by a six-meter-high statue of Saddam Hussein lifting his right arm in a gesture of benevolent greeting. The nearby Palestine Hotel empties dozens of foreign journalists into the square, who join the crowds of cheering, liberated Iraqis.
The psyops (psychological operations) team attached to Base Plate’s unit announces over loudspeaker in Arabic that the Marines have decided the statue of Saddam should come down. A cheer goes up from the crowd, and Iraqis begin to clap in unison.
As Mattis studiously notates his map with a marker in the hot sun while fending off the aggressive ghetto-bred flies of Saddam City, all of his bosses—including Generals James Conway, David McKiernan, and Tommy Franks; President George Bush, standing next to General Colin Powell in the Oval Office; the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and the US Congress—watch in air-conditioned awe as CNN broadcasts twenty-year-old Marine corporal Edward Chin climbing out on the derrick arm of his M-88 tank retriever and laying an American flag over the face of Saddam’s statue. The Iraqi crowd shouts, “No, we want an Iraqi flag.” Chin hears the crowd, waves, and climbs down. He gets an Iraqi flag and climbs back up the derrick with the new flag and a length of stout rope prepared with a hangman’s noose. He replaces the American flag with the Iraqi flag and loops the noose around Saddam’s neck. His tank retriever pulls, and Saddam keels over slowly, breaks at the ankles, and slips off his pedestal. The crowd cheers and rushes forward, swarming over the statue. They begin cutting off Saddam’s head.15
By radio, Mattis gets the news that Adhamiyah Palace is now captured. According to the reports, the palace is lavishly decorated, furnished with a king-size waterbed and well stocked with liquor. A CNN reporter asks Mattis if he thinks Saddam is still giving orders. Mattis replies, “When you take over his country and drink his liquor, it doesn’t much matter.”16
Phase IV, the occupation of Iraq, begins immediately. Lieutenant Colonel Conlin, while patrolling in his sector near Firdos Square, is presented with a dying man injured in a car accident. The normal Iraqi civil procedure of taking the man to a hospital or calling the police is apparently forgotten. It is now the Americans’ problem. Soon after, frantic Iraqis run to the Marines explaining their phone service is out and the hospital is being looted. The water is off, and what about trash collection? Is it okay to use their cell phones?
As the day wears on, the transition from urban warfighting into civil administration begins to overwhelm his battalion commanders and trickles up to Mattis’s attention. There are tribal chiefs asking to meet “His Excellency, the General,” and wanting to swear their allegiance to President George Bush. Mattis repeats his commander’s intent for his field commanders. He wants to win over the Iraqis, not conquer them. He doesn’t want to leave “. . . a heavy boot print or the sense of oppression . . . if everywhere you looked you saw a Marine. . . . If we need more people, I want to enlist the Iraqis [for] . . . our common cause.”17
Mattis is counting on the Iraqi police and army to gradually take over security and deliver services, but he has prepared his combat battalions to govern seven specific regions of the country in the interim by reinforcing the battalions with teams trained to deal with occupation issues. These teams might include a governate support team, a psyops team, a human intelligence exploitation team, civil affairs elements, and perhaps engineers or Seabee units. Combat battalions of five to seven hundred Marines will each be responsible for one of seven governates of southern Iraq over an area three times the size of the state of Virginia. Because of their limited manpower, battalion commanders will have to rely heavily on nongovernment organizations and local tribes to maintain security and provide essential services.
In the southern city of Basra, British general Brims, a single, career military man with the same vast experience in the realities of occupation that Mattis has, is finding a similar situation as he moves his troops through the city. He encounters Iraqis in the Old Town quarter who clearly demonstrate the expectations of Iraq’s Shia minority. British paratroopers dismount from their tanks and armored personnel carriers and patrol briefly through the Old Town, guns up, helmets strapped tight. Encountering only welcoming Shia citizens, they retreat to their vehicles and begin to withdraw. The Shia crowds who had just welcomed them start throwing rocks and cursing. One of the battle group commanders, a veteran of Northern Ireland, immediately recognizes what is happening. He orders a halt. He orders his men to get out of their vehicles, stow their weapons, replace their helmets with berets, and mingle with the angry crowd. Instantly the rock throwing ends, and the Shia smile and clap their hands for the troops. They happily welcome their new governors, but they are not going to accept being abandoned.
In Baghdad, the first wave of looters, hundreds of men, women, and children, rushes into government buildings near Marine positions, swiping whatever they can carry—metal desks, plastic chairs, computer keyboards, lamp fixtures, wastebaskets, and empty picture frames. As soon as they are back out on the street, they happily approach the Marines, offering their loot for sale. It is one big swap meet and block party, celebrating the end of decades of torment.
In Saddam City, Mattis moves his forward command base into an abandoned medical clinic as night falls on the mostly triumphant first day of occupation. The clinic has an office and a few patient beds. First watch is set, and the general’s platoon open their MREs as chatter over the net gradually dies down, with situation reports trickling in of several casualties from sporadic fighting in different parts of the city.
In the command post, Mattis enjoys a moment of relief with his “battle family,” Osowski, Duff, and Cook. The men trade stories they’ve heard over comms of looting and dancing in the streets, and ask why they are bunking in a run-down clinic while other units are enjoying Saddam’s palaces—one lucky grunt is even reportedly sleeping on Saddam’s king-size waterbed. The general seems to relax a bit over their little victory dinner of freeze-dried meat and vegetables, but the relief is short-lived. The burden of responsibility for thirty million Iraqi citizens descends almost immediately.
Under the Geneva Conven
tion, Mattis is now directly responsible, with his superiors, for the lives and well-being of all Iraqi citizens. In particular, Mattis will answer for the treatment of the nine million Shia who live in the south, which he has just rampaged through. Pentagon planners estimated that it would take him fifty-five days to reach Baghdad after launching from Kuwait, a task Mattis completed in seventeen. The Pentagon planners have also neglected to tell him exactly how to deal with the mess they’ve helped him create.
4
Beyond Baghdad
Q: What do you see as the skill set and temperament that are really important for a Marine?
Mattis: Under its rather Prussian exterior, we expect people who are very curious. They have got to have a curiosity about life that will carry them beyond any kind of institutional learning.
The Marines enjoy having people who are somewhat mavericks, frankly. They protect them and they find many times that that sort of independent thinking is a big help to our Corps and its mission . . .
. . . And in that regard, there is nothing new, really, under the sun. You can always find a history book somewhere that can guide you. So there is a strong bent toward intellectual rigor and a historical appreciation of where we’re at today.
Obviously physical fitness. Marines are expected to be at the top of their game.
And then there’s another aspect, whether you call it spiritual or emotional or psychological, where you actually see your attitude as a weapon when you go into tough times that transmits down through your ranks. So it’s a combination of the mental, the physical and the spiritual or as Confucius would put it, body, mind and spirit.
—“Conversations with History,” interview by Harry Kreisler, moderator, University of California TV, June 5, 2014
5 May 2003—Operation Iraqi Freedom 1—Ba’quba, Iraq
Now, in Baghdad, Mattis sees that his northern flank is exposed. Osowski reminds him that the Forty-First Armored Brigade of the Al Nida Division is less than an hour north of the city. Al Nida losses on the Route 6 ambush have not been enough to seriously degrade them. They are still in force and still have senior command guidance. Mattis’s order to attack goes out over the net: “At fourteen hundred Zulu, First Recon Battalion will attack north to Ba’quba, locating and identifying enemy forces in order to help the division develop its situation. Be prepared to engage targets of opportunity. We’ll link up with LAR at the zero-zero northing and then continue up to the three-zero northing.”1
It may seem to Mattis that Pentagon war planners who expect to turn over control of Baghdad to Iraqis in June, just sixty days away, are dreaming. Reporters from every newspaper and network in the world now buzz around Mattis thicker than the flies from Saddam City. “War is a human endeavor,” he tells Defense News. “It’s a social problem and we have to have rather modest expectations . . . no war is over until the enemy says it is. We may think it’s over, we may declare it over but in fact the enemy gets a vote.”2
The vote is definitely out, since no Iraqi senior commanders are in custody. Like Baghdad Bob, the broadcaster who once assured listeners that coalition forces were being destroyed in every battle but is now silent, Iraqi leaders are also now silent but still somewhere close by, unless they have been smuggled across a border. US commanders issue a deck of playing cards with the pictures, names, and titles of fifty-two Iraqi leaders on them. In addition to the search for Saddam’s inexplicably missing WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), coalition forces are now engaged in nationwide manhunts, as well as civil administration.
Combat troops are being transitioned to playing the role of traffic cops and small-town detectives among people who can’t speak English and are sometimes engaged in generations-long vendettas against their neighbors. This is the first sustained test of the troops actually implementing Mattis’s commander’s intent. It will also reveal whether or not the troops can execute the tactics learned from Los Angeles police detectives in Iraq.
Directly counter to Mattis’s commander’s intent among his Marines, US Army units to the west and north of Baghdad have been rounding up whole villages to look for the faces on the playing cards. To make matters worse, they don’t even have a system to process the thousands of people they detain. At first, prisoners are held in barbed wire holding pens or soccer stadiums. Soon they will be shipped to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, lighting the fuse of the insurgency.
In Ad Diwaniyah, ninety-five miles south of Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Mundy, commander of Mattis’s 3/5 Marine battalion, meets Brigadier General Fuad Hani Faris, a wounded Iraqi veteran. As Faris disclosed in a survey done by Marine civil teams, he moved to Ad Diwaniyah so his wife could be among her large family. Mundy greets Faris with the respect due a general, a husband, and a grandfather. In return, General Faris happily welcomes Mundy and his Marines, who replace the combat-oriented Seventy-Fifth Army Rangers. The Rangers have been patrolling the city in armored vehicles, behind machine guns and mirrored sunglasses, before disappearing back into their secure encampment. Together Faris and Mundy begin to help transition the people of Ad Diwaniyah from war to peace and from dictatorship to the beginnings of liberty.
Because Marines love to rename places to honor their history, the 3/5 headquarters company moves into the administration building of Ad Qadisiyah University and calls it Camp Edson, in honor of the legendary Edson’s Raiders of World War II. The 3/5, also known as the Postal Marines, deliver mail to the First Marine Division as part of their regular duty. While they are administrating and rebuilding Ad Diwaniyah, the Postal Marines will also handle about five- to eight thousand cubic feet of mail per day manually.
Mundy and Faris form one of the first civil-military operations in postinvasion Iraq, while fighting continues in the northern part of the country, around Baghdad. Because Mattis stressed to his commanders the importance of tending to the postwar needs of Iraqi children first, Mundy assigns Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 7 to begin work with local contractors rebuilding 18 schools in the city. Further orders from Mattis direct all Marines to grow their mustaches to look more like the locals, to remove their sunglasses, and to wave and make eye contact as they patrol on foot, not in armored vehicles. Because Ad Diwaniyah’s children are taken care of first, the Marines begin to receive wide support in the city as they go on to rebuild the courthouse, a jail, and a police station.
The 3/5 continues to provide security, including arresting looters and rebuilding infrastructure, as General Faris organizes a new Ad Diwaniyah police force, relieving Mundy and his Marines of some of that difficult civil responsibility. By July 4, Mundy and Faris will be celebrating America’s Independence Day together by grilling hot dogs on the campus of the reopened Ad Qadisiyah University.
10 April 2003—The White House, Washington, DC
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell are concerned about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. Still convinced that he may have access to undiscovered stockpiles of poison gas and possibly radioactive dirty bombs, they access back channels to push for the seizure and search of his hometown of Tikrit. With a population of just 30,000, Tikrit is also the tribal base of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, and so is a primarily political rather than military target. Also, it seems the Kurds have crossed the border when they heard that Baghdad collapsed and are holding Iraqi territory near Tikrit, a second political reason to seize the city. The US Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, operating north of Baghdad, has plans to take the city in about ten days, but apparently Washington can’t wait that long. I MEF commander Conway gets an “unofficial” call from Washington, asking whether they can take care of this problem. Conway assures his bosses the Marines will get it done. He hangs up and calls Mattis.
0100 Hours—April 12, 2003—First Marine Division Forward Command Post—Baghdad
Although Tikrit is 93 miles north of the Marines’ area of operation, it is now on Mattis’s growing task list. Mattis and his second-in-command, Brigadier General John Kelly
, review intelligence reports that indicate about two thousand paramilitaries and elements of the Republican Guards’ Adnan Division are in the city. The two commanders watch video from unmanned aerial vehicles that show abandoned military equipment in the city. Mattis turns to Kelly, says a few words, and Tikrit is suddenly at the top of Kelly’s task list.
Kelly saddles up with a task force of three thousand Marines and six hundred vehicles from the First, Second, and Third LAR Battalions, Golf Company from battalion 2/23, artillery battalion 5/11, SEAL team 3, engineers, and a combat support element. They have four days’ worth of supplies. He’s not taking any Abrams tanks; they take too much fuel and would have limited use in the small streets of the city. The Third Marine Air Wing will be his tanks in the sky for heavy fire support. They call the group Task Force Tripoli.
The objective is to seize Tikrit, prevent the escape of any organized military units, and find the ace of spades—Saddam Hussein. Reporters are all over Kelly as the task force moves out. They want to know what the operation is, where he’s headed, and why.
Kelly says only, “We want all jihad fighters to come here. That way we can kill them all before they get bus tickets to New York City.”3
Mattis travels with his jump platoon to the hours-long daily meeting with Baghdad’s city leaders and Pentagon planners in the Palestine Hotel. General Jay Garner of the Pentagon’s Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) generally leads the discussions for the coalition, so Mattis is reduced from battlefield commander to a silent clerk taking notes. Every day more leaders show up with more complaints, requests, and inquiries, some of which go onto Mattis’s now endless task list.
Doubtless he envies the uncomplicated assignment of Kelly, riding into battle in the footsteps of Alexander the Great in 331 BC toward the epic Battle of Arbela near Tikrit. There, Alexander defeated the much larger army of Darius, the king of Persia, a victory that crushed the Persian Empire and began the enduring dominance of the West over the Middle East and Asia. Kelly is also making history as he extends the Marine expedition to nearly 450 miles, from the Persian Gulf to Tikrit. It is the longest sustained march in Marine history.