No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

by Jim Proser

  Newbold queries General Myers if he is aware of the cap. Myers knows nothing about it and contacts General Franks at Central Command, who denies the existence of the order. Myers brings the issue to the attention of Secretary Rumsfeld, who not only denies that his office placed the restriction but also indicates that he never wanted one. Rumsfeld calls Franks and reminds him that Central Command can have whatever resources it needs.

  Moving past this command level snafu, Mattis runs into constant demands for more information that drains time and energy from his small staff. He refers to these demands as the “. . . insatiable need for information from higher headquarters.”38

  Commander Frick of the Twenty-Sixth MEU, Mattis’s backup force, describes the issue: “That is always going to be a headache, and until somebody can look over my shoulder inside the Pentagon to see what I’m doing, they want to see real time video. . . . Our mindset is like, ‘Let me do my job and let me go.’ . . . There is a dichotomy between the mindset of the warrior and the information age we live in.”39

  On top of this constant information drain, the slower-reacting US Army takes over tactical control of Task Force 58 from the Navy on November 30, as planned. Previously Admiral Moore, Mattis’s strong supporter, and his Navy staff tended to issue overall mission-type orders, allowing Mattis tactical control on the ground. Incoming Army lieutenant general Paul T. Mikolashek, the Combined Forces Land Component commander, has a different idea. Mikolashek begins to request more detailed information on a widening range of topics. As the Army staff grows into the hundreds, Mattis’s little band of thirty-two begins to strain under the burden of keeping them informed.

  One of Mattis’s key staff members, Lieutenant Colonel Broadmeadow, explains, “The same guy that yesterday used to do a range of things for you was now doing one thing and one thing only. So, all of a sudden, that one phone call that you could make to get things to happen now became three or four and you had to talk to different guys.”40

  At one point, Mikolashek’s crew requires Mattis to submit a concept of operations brief in advance of even small-scale operations, and then he questions the general when he fails to clear a small operation. Mattis will later recall, “I explained I didn’t generally ask permission to wipe my nose and that my intentions messages laid out clearly what operations I had coming up.”41

  Colonel Lethin is less diplomatic when he gets hold of one of the Army staff: “Look, Sir, there is one of me and there are 800 of you. I’ll talk to you, your deputy, and your current ops, but you guys really need to choose your questions wisely, because I’m [working] 22, 23 hours a day, and I can’t answer all of your action officer’s, all of your watch officer’s questions. I can answer your questions, but I can’t answer everyone else on your staff.”42

  By mid-December, as the pace of operations is increasing, Mattis’s Task Force 58 is spread across eight different operations centers, including Bahrain, the Peleliu, the Ramstein, Pasni, and Jacobabad airfields, the American Embassy in Kabul, and FOB Rhino. Mattis’s crew of thirty-two has managed to wrestle control back from the Army and is managing the logistics of the war. Colonel Broadmeadow explains, “It wasn’t like your normal logistics system, where you drop a requisition and things start to flow to you magically because of some supply system. It was guys on the phone, people on e-mail, working with their counterparts [in] the other agencies and making things happen on a personal level, as opposed to a systems perspective. So that became a big work-around right there—very, very dependent on personal relations as opposed to systems.”43

  On the ground, Mattis’s lightened logistics for fast maneuverability means that the Marines have to make up in determination what they lack in supplies. Snow covers the mountain peaks, and an occasional dusting reaches the rock-strewn Afghan plains where Lieutenant Fick’s Bravo Company is airlifted in to join light armored reconnaissance (LAR) and recon teams already in place. The command post tent is on a rocky rise overlooking a small river. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, this band of three hundred men will be the anvil to the war hammers that are pounding Kandahar and driving Taliban into their sector.

  In freezing temperatures, with the constant Afghan wind robbing whatever heat it finds, the Marines are dressed for the Egyptian desert where they were a few weeks ago on Operation Bright Star. They wear well-ventilated desert boots, light gloves, and thin jackets. Fick is warned by his second lieutenant, Jim Beal, not to touch his rifle in the morning without gloves on. Beal removes his glove and shows him a quarter-sized piece of missing skin where the cold stuck his palm to his rifle barrel.

  They are to move into position to stop any traffic on Highway 4, the pitted two-lane road snaking along the side of the river below. The rock pile they are on descends into a scree field of ankle-turning skull-sized rocks that stretches out over several miles toward the highway. The LAR and recon teams fire up their trucks for the move. Fick requests that his men offload some of the 175 pounds off their backs into the trucks. Request denied. The trucks are already fully loaded and will snap an axle with more weight. Fick requests that some of the recon Marines walk on foot with Bravo Company, so the trucks can instead hold some of the Bravo gear. Request denied. The battalion commander doesn’t want the companies to get mixed together.

  The battalion pulls out, and Bravo Company Marines earn the honored title of grunts as they pick their way across the teetering rocks like overburdened pack mules, faces sweating with strain even in the freezing wind. Fick writes, “I carried six mortar rounds in my pack, plus the radios and all their batteries. But most of the Marines carried even more.”44

  All of Fick’s men carry at least their own body weight. This is where the cost of lightened logistics is paid on the battlefield. But Fick explains why Mattis’s system works for Marines: “Strong men hauled heavy loads over rough ground. There was nothing relative about it—no second chances and no excuses. It was elemental and dangerous. It was exactly why I’d joined the Marines.”45

  2–6 December 2001—Highway 4, Thirty Miles South of Kandahar

  Fierce skirmishes flare up along Highway 4 south of Kandahar as the Taliban flee the pounding from allied airpower and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan national forces breaching the city defenses from the north and Gul Agha Shirzai, capturing Kandahar International Airport to the east. On the night of December 6, Mullah Omar and senior Taliban leadership flee the city and go into hiding. Taliban rule ends in Afghanistan. Mattis’s attention turns toward Osama.

  * * *

  The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television news programs in America make no mention of Mattis’s achievements. There is no mention of the deepest insertion of assault forces in Marine Corps history, the nearly flawless execution of one of the most difficult and complex operations in recent memory, done with a small staff of thirty-two Marines, and the toppling of a battle-hardened, numerically superior enemy force without one American casualty from enemy fire. Nor has anyone mentioned the historical precedent of a foreign power conquering Afghanistan and then having the good sense to leave the country in the hands of the Afghans.

  Like the capture of FOB Rhino in Operation Swift Freedom, Mattis’s achievements in Afghanistan are publicly nameless and will remain uncelebrated. But among those who served in Operation Enduring Freedom, Mattis’s performance is well noted. Over 2,200 servicemen and women will eventually die in Afghanistan over the coming years of war, but on Mattis’s watch nearly everyone comes home.

  Osama is tracked to the caves of Tora Bora (“Black Dust,” in Pashtun). A twelve-week assault takes the lives of nine Marines and injures dozens of others. Osama escapes to Pakistan, and suspicion falls on the ISI security forces of President Musharraf as the supporting culprits in the escape. Five months after 9/11, Mattis’s work is done. For a time, he owned a piece of Afghanistan; now he’s giving it back to the Afghans.

  As he packs up FOB Rhino for the return flight to the Peleliu, Mattis gets a call from his friend and champion Admiral Moore,
who tells him to enjoy his return trip and time back at Camp Pendleton, but warns him not to get too comfortable. He will have just enough time to get his Marines reloaded and recocked before they head back to Iraq for a second fight with Saddam Hussein. Mattis hasn’t been keeping up on policy developments in recent weeks, and is shocked. It is believed that he replies, “You’re shittin’ me.”

  10

  City of Mosques

  Fallujah’s the most morally bruising place in Iraq. It’s going to rock you when an IED goes off and there’s blood and shit all over you. Hold the line. Show the people respect. We’re here to win.

  —Mattis’s address to Marines arriving in Fallujah

  Mattis and his Marines take a victory-lap cruise to Australia on their way home from Afghanistan for well-earned rest and recreation. Unlike Desert Storm, there are no blazing headlines of triumph and no ticker-tape parades waiting for them at home. Osama has gotten away, and America’s thirst for vengeance is now more urgent than ever.

  Probably the last place in the world Mattis and his men want to be is in a parade of any kind or in their dress blues in front of a droning politician basking in the reflected honor of their achievements. Their sense of accomplishment and pride in their performance is more than enough to keep their spirits high. The admiration of pogs (the disdainful abbreviation for “people other than grunts,” pronounced with a long o) doesn’t mean a lot. Being a veteran of Afghanistan is like being a member of a small, private adventurer’s club.

  Like many, Mattis’s thoughts on the long voyage may have turned to relationships at home. In recent years he has been keeping company with Barbara, a striking blond photographer with a particular interest in Marine subjects. She comes from a family who operates hotels in the San Diego area near Camp Pendleton. She is a quiet, restful presence who complements Jim Mattis’s studious side. They are often seen together at private dinners, and occasionally at Marine events.1

  The heads-up from Admiral Moore that Mattis will be shipping out again, very soon, for a second match with Saddam Hussein catches the fifty-two-year-old general off guard. Since returning to a field command for Operation Bright Star, he’s missed the final touches added to the Bush Doctrine, which now include CIA director George Tenet’s “Threat Matrix”2 of eighty separate operations. The global war against Osama and Saddam is in high gear. Osama is checked for the moment, and Saddam is next on the list. But this time, unlike Operation Desert Storm ten years earlier, Mattis is not a sheriff delivering an eviction notice from Kuwait; he is an executioner fulfilling a death warrant.

  0848 Hours—1 May 2003—USS Abraham Lincoln, Off the Coast of San Diego, California

  Speaking from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the United States’ most advanced aircraft carriers, President Bush declares that major combat operations are over in Iraq. Two months earlier, Mattis planned and led the march up to capture Baghdad and extended that march to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. After the longest insertion of forces in Marine Corps history in Afghanistan, the march in Iraq set another record for the longest sustained overland march in Corps history. President Bush explains:

  We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous.

  Our mission continues. . . . The War on Terror continues, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.

  Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.3

  The difficult work left to do in Iraq is about to get much more difficult in the backwater industrial city of Fallujah. Once a thriving center of Sunni Ba’athist dominance under Saddam, it is now an impoverished ghetto, seething with resentment against the conquering Americans and their allies. Deposing their leader Saddam as if he were a petulant, nearly defenseless child is one level of insult; to then summarily disband their army of professionals with the stroke of a pen, without thought of how they will then make a living in Iraq’s destroyed economy, is an entirely new and intolerable slap in the face.

  The five million Sunnis favored under Saddam’s reign are used to ruling over their twenty million Shiite and Kurd countrymen. They are used to prestige, power, and deference. They are used to giving orders and having them obeyed. But now they are little more than lowly tribesmen again, pariahs and often targets in the hundreds of revenge killings that happen every day.

  As President Bush speaks of the work left to do in Iraq, Saddam’s men are seeking a new leader. In Fallujah, Abdullah al-Janabi, a businessman and fundamentalist cleric, is emerging among the Sunnis.4 Janabi begins to bring together the fractured tribes to negotiate with US Army commanders in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad during their transition from power.

  But the monster of jihad, instead of having a stake driven through its heart in Afghanistan and then Iraq, pursues Mattis into the Sunni Triangle.5 An enthusiastic young Jordanian murderer who ran a training camp in Afghanistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, follows Mattis to Iraq and forms Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, or al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).6 Osama has been grooming Zarqawi for years to advance their dream of a caliphate empire by terrorizing Western and Arab civilians with gruesome soft-target attacks, public hostage beheadings, and improvised suicide weapons. Zarkawi is given the title Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers7 and uses his skills to escalate the nascent insurgency against US troops into a Shia-Sunni civil war. He quickly earns the celebratory title Sheik of the Slaughterers.8

  * * *

  In Camp Pendleton, California, Brigadier General Mattis rests and rearms the twenty-two thousand Marines of his First Division after their historic five-hundred-mile march from Kuwait City to Tikrit, Iraq, in seventeen days of sustained combat. It is never far from his mind that the grunts, the front-line lance corporals and sergeants, are the ones who do the hardest and most dangerous work. To honor them and assign proper credit, Mattis uses some of his time between deployments to elevate the small and visually unimpressive Combat Action Ribbon (CAR) to honor the warriors who truly did the fighting. Under Mattis’s new rules, a Marine or sailor must “receive and return fire” or participate directly in ground combat to earn a CAR.

  Instead of handing out the ribbons as participation trophies for all support and rear echelon personnel as before, field commanders must now identify the specific combat action when fire was exchanged. The process can take months and now includes close scrutiny by fighters who were “in the shit.” Possession of this small decoration, largely unrecognized by civilians, becomes extremely meaningful to Marines.

  28 September 2003—Camp Pendleton, California

  The last elements of the First Marine Division, Mattis’s original combat battalion, the 1/7, finally return to Camp Pendleton from Operation Iraqi Freedom. On the last plane with the 1/7 is their current commander, Colonel Joe Dunford. Dunford and the 1/7 have been home for just over a week, enough time to unpack and visit with some of their family members, when Dunford “[gets] the word” from Mattis. He assembles the 1/7 and tells them, “Okay gang, we’re going back for OIF II.”9

  The verbal response from the gathered Marines was not recorded, but some suggest it was a muffled, collective “Fuck.” Orders were orders, and Dunford’s 1/7 now has theirs. While Dunford offers a colorless summing-up of his unit’s response to a local reporter—“So, we immediately went into preparation for it”10—the men save their more colorful comments for the One More That’s It bar in nearby Oceanside.

  They will not be preparing for the type of campaign they have just fought, a lightning-fast, overland rout that propelled them with tanks, artillery, and air cover through the open terrain of the relatively friendly southern provinces. The battlefield that awaits them now in the Sunni Triangle is very different.

  Mattis makes certain that every Marine knows the critical differences in the situation they are stepping into. Colonel Clarke Lethin, Mattis’s chief of op
erations since Afghanistan, explains, “The general talked to every Marine in the division at least three times, usually in battalion size. He wanted to talk them through, and image them through, the issues they would face. He wanted to talk about morality on the battlefield, how to go through an ambush one day and have your buddy blown up, and then face Iraqis the next day.”11

  Over the course of the meetings, Mattis circulates more than one thousand pages of reading material, much of it pulled from his own personal library, in three separate emails. The selections range from ancient texts to recent news articles and contain the general’s personal commentary on many of the items. It is perhaps the most extensive briefing in the five-thousand-year history of armed conflict. It may have also been the most concise graduate course in insurgency warfare ever created. Thomas Ricks in his book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq 2003–2005, writes, “Battalion commanders were required to certify in writing that their subordinates had read and understood the material.”12 No one who followed Mattis into the battlefields of Anbar Province could say they hadn’t been told what to expect or what was expected of them.

  Ricks continues, quoting Mattis’s email:

  “While learning from experience is good, learning from others’ experiences is even better,”13 Mattis wrote in his introductory comment. Again and again the theme of the readings was that Iraq could be frustrating, difficult, and complex, and that leaders needed to prepare their troops for that environment. The articles called for maintaining discipline, honing skills, and having faith in each other—and warned of what can go wrong when soldiers lose hold of those fundamentals.14

  Ricks writes that among the news articles in Mattis’s first batch of material, the general commented on a recent article about the charges against Lieutenant Colonel Allen West, a US Army battalion commander who fired his .45 sidearm next to a detainee’s ear during an interrogation: