by Robin Moore
Gaining Momentum
As the A-Teams and their Pesh fighters gained momentum toward Mosul, they began to witness General Mustafa’s sense of honor and morality firsthand. Initially, the Pesh were a well-mannered, disciplined bunch; but as they charged south and began sweeping through Iraqi towns and cities with intoxicating victory and liberation, there was the occasional report of KDP fighters looting or rioting.
When this occurred, it would usually happen in the very front ranks of the advancing Kurds, and when Mustafa arrived in town with his entourage, he would immediately take control of the situation and put a halt to any acts of revenge or pillage. For the Kurds who took part in the looting and rioting, it was revenge and a fair turn for what they had endured at the hands of Saddam and his regime. To Mustafa, it was no way to set an example or to treat others, even if they were the enemy Iraqi.
Mustafa dealt with the infractions severely. He would immediately have the offenders seized, arrested, and jailed. Through his long ordeal as a POW, Mustafa knew that he would not let his people sink down to the levels of the Iraqis who had oppressed them for so many years. He would lead his men by example.
According to the operators on the ground, the KDP treated their Iraqi prisoners very well, even as “brothers in arms,” to quote one Green Beret. The Kurds were observed being civil and even friendly to the captured Iraqi soldiers. Any Iraqi who came under arrest was treated with the same respect the Kurds felt they deserved, had the situation been reversed. The Kurds realized that many of Saddam’s soldiers were there only because they had no choice—they did not necessarily want to be there, and many wanted to be liberated from Saddam just as badly as the KDP wanted to be liberated. Camaraderie quickly developed, and it was a “good scene” to witness, according to some of the Green Berets who watched it unfold.
After taking the Debecka Gap, the Aski Kalak Bridge, and Ayn Sifni, 10th SFG and General Mustafa headed due south and liberated Mahkmur. According to SGM Tim Strong, the Iraqi Army was caught so off guard that pots of tea were still hot and steeping on their stoves when the Special Forces rolled into Mahkmur.
On April 8, the Green Berets moved again, this time to Altun Kupri and Dibs on the east, across the Great Zab river. The Green Berets pushed west, east, and south, taking one objective after another.
According to one Special Forces commander, seven to nine cities were liberated with General Mustafa over the course of one single day, April 9.
The usual tactic was the Green Berets’ fire support for the Pesh in the form of CAS and Javelin missiles. The Pesh would follow this up with an on-line infantry assault across the objective. The three 3rd SFG “Mobility ODAs” assigned to work with Task Force VIKING were outfitted with mounted, belt-fed MK-19 automatic 40mm grenade launchers, M-60 7.62mm GPMGs (General Purpose Machine Guns), and .50 caliber M2HB machine guns. These fast, armored weapons platforms quickly swept across the objectives and aided the combined Green Beret/Pesh forces with valuable fire support. These efforts, in no small way, contributed to a swift and purposeful war.
Apocalypse Now
Mosul, a city of over one million people, was liberated by a single Special Forces battalion. Their first nighttime drive into the chaos was later described by one SF leader who was there: “It was worse than Apocalypse Now, driving up the Mekong, with all the burning buildings and people. The city was on fire, there was looting … it was out of control.”
And chaos it was. There were firefights between property owners and looters on every street. An AC-130 Spectre gunship loomed overhead, able to provide precise and devastating fire support to the ODAs in downtown Mosul in literally an instant. The SF teams patrolled the city in what is known as “Force Projection,” showing the Iraqis that they were now in control.
While the scene may have appeared to be like Apocalypse Now to the U.S. troops, chaos was not at all new to Mosul. This third largest city in Iraq has been a center for twentieth-century revolt: major upheavals happened in 1920, 1963, and again in 1968. Crude oil was discovered after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its post–World War I division, and there has been much strife and controversy there ever since. Mosul is strategic economically, with significant oil storage and refinery facilities. It is also the major economic hub for northern Iraq.
Saddam Hussein’s “Arabization” Project had displaced large numbers of ethnic Kurds and Turkomen from their homes in Mosul, paying Arabs to move into the Kurds’ homes and take over their businesses while the rightful residents were herded and chased into refugee camps in the mountains. Although Mosul is not generally regarded by the Kurds as within their claimed areas, it is within close proximity to the green line, and rests just south of the 1970 Kurdish maximal demands.
This close proximity, according to military sources, has led to the Turkish rhetoric of “playing up” the Kurdish intent to occupy Mosul, an attempt by Turkey to keep Iraqi pressure on the Kurds. Turkey has long been fearful of an independent Kurd nation; Turkey is the nation with the most land to lose should the Kurds gain their independence.
10th SFG drove through Mosul, arriving at the city’s airfield at approximately 0100 hours. The next day the city was broken down into sectors by 10th Group’s battalion commander. Each ODA had its own sector, and they proceeded to tear down roadblocks, establish some peace, law, and order, and let the citizens of Mosul know that the Americans were there and the people of Mosul were now free.
On April 12, ODA 065 discovered a huge ASP (Ammo Storage Point), and determined that an eight-kilometer-square section of the city needed to be secured by them immediately, until follow-on units could arrive to replace them. They held security on the area until the next morning.
Two days later, 065 found an area in the Mosul Polymer/Carbon Production plant that may have been a BIO/CHEM/missile production facility. The plant was stocked with chemical suits and protective gear; one building reeked of ammonia, with various chemicals spilled on the floor.
The next day, a room with several dead pigeons on the floor was discovered in Mosul’s prison complex. Every situation had to be treated as contaminated; Coalition forces could not be too careful. This time, there was no evidence to substantiate the cause for concern. The pigeons probably didn’t die from exposure to or testing of a poisonous agent, but dead birds will always spark some anxiety. After all, canaries have been used by miners to detect carbon monoxide, and other natural gases, and are much more sensitive to the toxic effects of chemicals and gases.
Within four days, the 101st Airborne Division arrived in Mosul. The city was turned over to the Screaming Eagles on April 19, 2003, without the loss of a single Special Operator. “We were so lucky we didn’t lose anybody, and that’s what’s so amazing. We didn’t lose one single American. I mean, it’s not the jungles of Vietnam that you [Robin Moore] wrote about, but … war is war, and it doesn’t matter where you’re at,” recalled SGM Tim Strong.
“We were in our Range Rovers, we always had our ballistic armor on, and we basically took no shit. People got in our way; we got ’em off the road. Anything that was considered a threat, we neutralized. We didn’t fuck around.”
THE SCREAMING EAGLES
Hearts and Minds: An Author’s Note
On an early October morning, I climbed into a waiting Black Hawk helicopter for the two-and-a-half-hour flight from Baghdad to Mosul. I was with my long-time Green Beret friend and Iraq traveling companion, Russell Cummings, on our way to the headquarters of COL Joe Anderson and his “Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne.
The Baghdad outskirts flashed below me, miles and miles of crops and date palms growing in the Euphrates and Tigris fertile valley, helped along by a huge irrigation program. An hour out of Baghdad, we passed over Tikrit. Below us, we could see the palaces in the city of Saddam Hussein’s youth.
Huge rocks and endless sand covered the ground below—a veritable no-man’s-land of desolation. I thought of the Green Berets of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) who, a few months e
arlier, had landed in Bashir. They must have been discouraged at best, with their shot-up airplanes flying over such desolate territory.
I was certainly happy to be in a functional Black Hawk as we approached our landing at the helipad, owned presently by the 101st Airborne Division. You had to be a tiger in the air to survive this area, surrounded as it was by such inhospitable wasteland. Yet, as we settled into the helipad, I could see the grand palaces that defied the hardscrabble city surrounding them.
We landed in Mosul and were met by a delegation from the Strike Brigade and “Strike Six,” COL Joe Anderson. We were quickly whisked away with our impedimenta, and taken to the HQ of the 101st Airborne Division, a palace complex that had been looted by the Iraqis, and then made functional again by the 101st. Our first stop was the palace that had been acquired by the officers in charge of the Air Force contingent.
The usual group of Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) greeted us. They had managed to set up their offices in the finest areas of the most luxurious palace available. We were introduced to the various commanders of the Mosul units, after which we were taken by MG (Major General) David Petraeus to a briefing on the Screaming Eagles and their activities as they tried to create order from a greatly disordered city. I’m afraid that I, having Parkinson’s and the dry irritable eyes that accompany this affliction, had to close my eyes for a few minutes of the briefing. I assure the reader (and the general) that I not only absorbed every word of the briefing, but made sure to include them in the following pages.
After his presentation, we took our leave of the general, and walked to the HQ palace where COL Joe Anderson was waiting for us. I immediately felt a kinship with the colonel. We discussed some of his group’s exploits over the past three months since the Screaming Eagles had invaded Iraq from Kuwait via the outskirts of Basra.
The most recent newsworthy event of the war at that time was claimed by Anderson’s brigade, when only months before, they had located and dispatched the two sons and a grandson of Saddam Hussein in Mosul.
Before the briefing, CSM (Captain Sergeant Major) Jerry Lee Wilson introduced himself to me. He was obviously close friends with the colonel; much more so than the ordinary bond of an NCO and his commander.
In the course of getting to know each other, COL Anderson showed me some photographs of himself and his activities since his arrival in Mosul. There were videotapes taken from the inside of the cars and humvees that they drove around in.
“Weren’t you afraid of getting shot at by the pro-Saddam Iraqis and their Al Qaeda friends?” I asked.
“No,” the command sergeant major answered. “We kept our eyes open and were prepared to shoot our way out if we had to.”
It didn’t surprise me that the troops weren’t particularly worried about the terrorists in the area. I noticed that almost every soldier I met in Iraq wore a black bulletproof vest in addition to their camouflage flak jackets, and they usually carried an M16A2 assault rifle, frequently with a 40mm M203 barrel mounted underneath for firing grenades. I, too, had taken to wearing the black bulletproof vest as a matter of course, although civilians were not allowed to carry machine guns. My particular vest had been loaned to me by my friend COL Bob Morris; it was the same one he wore when traveling in foreign countries where the population was suspect.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening talking to “Smokin’ Joe” Anderson, as he was known by his friends. Listening to his war experiences, fighting his way up from Basra to Mosul for four weeks, I was completely fascinated with the baldheaded colonel. We both decided that if a movie were made of the war, the perfect actor to play the part of him would be Yul Brynner. Unfortunately, Brynner had died in 1985 from cancer, caused by smoking.
I had hoped that perhaps “Smokin’ Joe” would invite Russell and me to go out with him on his nightly foray looking for the bad guys. He said he had just received some information about two terrorists and their Iraqi friend who were in the area and were going to be causing trouble that night.
However, COL Anderson did not ask me to go with him on this trip for the obvious reason that I was carrying a cane, and my Parkinson’s could have thrown me off balance, thereby endangering the whole operation. Looking at it from Joe’s point of view, I could see why he would not want a seventy-eight-year-old parkinsonian to be sitting in a humvee with him if he got into a firefight with a few pro-Saddam insurgents or the Al Qaeda. We were later informed that at about 0400 hours, Anderson and his soldiers had indeed found, engaged, and shot the Al Qaeda and Hussein loyalists.
After I had returned to the United States, it was with great sadness that I picked up a newspaper and learned that CSM Jerry Lee Wilson had been assassinated by a group of terrorists who cornered his jeep and sprayed him with AK-47 fire. The newspapers said that the bodies had been dragged from their vehicle and desecrated by anti-American Iraqis.
When I asked Joe about this by e-mail, he assured me that was not the true story. The attack had taken place unexpectedly and the terrorists who had fired the shots had killed him but then had immediately disappeared. To this day, I do not know the whole truth of the matter. It has brought to light the great effort of the military to suggest to the American public, through the press, that the soldiers in Iraq were winning the hearts and minds of the people there. More importantly, they tried to show that the local residents did not appreciate the work of a few terrorists. This entire “hearts and minds” subject, which I had dealt with in Vietnam on two visits, was something everybody talked about, but had not really seen too often—just as the terrorists had emerged from nowhere to kill Jerry Lee, the Viet Cong had struck and disappeared back into the indigenous population in Vietnam. Many of us in Vietnam and in other terrorist areas agree that “if you get them by the balls, their hearts and minds will surely follow.”
The Associated Press (AP), FOX News, Reuters, and other news agencies had reporters embedded with troops at many of the sites, and even with the Special Forces. War is won with information as well as fighting, and the war could not be won if the Iraqi people and the rest of the world, particularly the Arab world, could not see the “ground truth” firsthand.
In October 2003, at the Sheraton in Baghdad, I met Dana Lewis, who had been in Iraq previously, reporting for NBC TV, and later, for FOX News. Dana had been an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne, from before the time they crossed the Kuwaiti border until they had entered Baghdad. Dana was great friends with COL Anderson, and told me much about the Strike Brigade and his journey with them into Iraq. We exchanged contact information, and kept in touch after I returned to the States. Dana has kept me abreast of the continuing situation in Iraq, and is still there as of the date of this book’s publication.
Back Stateside, I asked for Dana’s view of the story—the war as seen through his eyes. Part of what follows in the next section is Dana Lewis’s “War Diary,” which documented his experience and tells the stories of the Screaming Eagles in Iraq better than anyone else could hope to. Dana rolled all the way into Baghdad with the 101st, witnessing the events from the military side, but through civilian eyes. Here is his story, re-created from the pages of his daily journal and written interviews.
The Beginning
[DANA LEWIS]
We had just finished a week of chemical/biological training, and another week of battlefield survival skills. The instructors had gone so far as to suggest Iraq may be too dangerous, but somehow it really didn’t register with me. I had covered wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the Middle East. It didn’t register until my producer delivered my Army-style dog tags.
“Dana Lewis; NBC; blood type and allergy to penicillin.”
The thing was—there were two of those tags to wear around my neck.
“Why two?” I had asked.
“Well, one stays with your body, and the other is for Army records if you die,” she said.
I never went to Iraq to die.
I had promised my wife and family that I was a survivor, and
would come home. But everyone knew the risks were real; the chances of getting wounded were extremely high. What I know is that every dangerous assignment always seems worse when you’re thinking about going. I kept telling myself, “Once you’re on the ground, Dana, you feel your way, you feel your feet on the ground and it’s not so scary or difficult.”
I thought this time I was kidding myself. It was scarier and more difficult than anything I had ever done.
The Screaming Eagles
The 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) was commanded by MG David Petraeus. Known as “the Screaming Eagles,” they performed two of the longest air assault missions in history as they fought their way up the gut of Iraq during Operation DESERT EAGLE II, making their way through Baghdad, and ending up in the city of Mosul, where they took over the northern city from Task Force VIKING’s Green Berets. Courtesy: CIA World Factbook 2003
Kuwait
COL Joe Anderson is the commander of Strike Brigade, the second of three brigades of the Screaming Eagles, 101st Airborne, based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He’s known to those around him as “Smokin’ Joe.” When asked, Joe explained to me, “That [moniker] started as a boxer at West Point and continued as a LT and CPT because of my fitness, aggressiveness, and personality. As a Ranger Company Commander, I led the Joint Special Operations Task Force main effort in [Operation] JUST CAUSE (B Co, 2-75 Ranger Regiment). [Operation JUST CAUSE was the invasion of Panama, which deposed Manuel Noriega in December 1989.]
“We combat airborne assaulted onto Rio Hato to fight the Macho de Monte Company (Panamanian Rangers) and a motorized company. Both of these companies were loyal to Noriega and responded to the coup in the fall of ’89—that is why they were the main objective for the invasion. We then moved downtown to secure the U.S. Embassy and then took control of the town and area of Alcalde Diaz. I was one of six Bronze Star recipients for the 2nd Ranger Battalion—those medals weren’t given out like they were for DESERT STORM or OEF/OIF.”