by Nathan Hodge
CHAPTER 3
“Beat ’em Up and Go Home”
As the UH-60 Black Hawk skimmed low over the desert of southern Iraq, I noticed the “fun-o-meter” patch the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Ryan Newman, had fixed to back of his flight helmet: ARE WE HAVING FUN YET OR WHAT?
It was late March 2003 when I flew into Iraq in the passenger compartment of Newman’s helicopter, perched on a carton of field rations. I was one of several hundred journalists the U.S. Defense Department had invited to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein and hunt for weapons of mass destruction. It was a master stroke of public relations. My embed assignment was with the Sixth Battalion, 101st Aviation, part of the 101st Airborne Division. Six Bat was a “general support” aviation unit: basically, a battlefield taxi service. This aircraft was delivering Meals-Ready-to-Eat and water destined for a Pathfinder infantry unit. I was a piece of spare cargo, and things were off to a rough start. The night before the battalion crossed north into Iraq, its staging base in Camp Udairi, Kuwait, saw a real missile attack. Startled from their cots by a deafening crack, soldiers donned gas masks and climbed back in their sleeping bags. The all-clear sounded soon after over the camp loudspeakers.
It was friendly fire. As it turned out, we had heard the impact of a U.S. Patriot missile smacking into a Royal Air Force GR4A Tornado fighter. The missile battery failed to pick up the aircraft’s IFF (identification friend or foe) beacon, an electronic signal that is supposed to prevent fratricide.1 Both crew members were killed. Word of the incident spread quickly, but although it occurred within earshot, I did not learn the full details until I heard about it from the BBC (a young company commander, better prepared than I, had remembered to pack a shortwave radio). My pessimism deepened when I learned of a grenade attack the previous night in neighboring Camp Pennsylvania. A U.S. soldier, Sergeant Hasan Akbar, had lobbed some grenades in a 101st Airborne command tent. The attack claimed the lives of two officers, and several others were injured.* To me, at least, it didn’t seem an auspicious day to be going into a combat zone.
Captain Dana Bult, a signals officer, was designated as my escort. I had been bounced from several helicopter flight manifests like a piece of excess baggage; the night before we were to leave, Bult informed me that she had a spot for me on board her aircraft. I reported to her tent about an hour before the next wave of helicopters was scheduled to take off. She was talking distractedly on a field telephone; I waited outside. As it happened, her husband had been staying in the tent where the grenade attack took place. By sheer luck, he had been in the shower at the time of the attack. A military operator had connected her with her in-laws so she could tell them he was all right. After hanging up the handset, she grabbed her rucksack and hauled it to a waiting Humvee. She was perfectly collected. We headed to the flight line.
Bult’s attitude—businesslike, intent, focused on the task at hand—was reassuring. In the weeks I had spent in Kuwait, waiting for the war to begin, most of the soldiers in the battalion had been preoccupied with military chores: assembling their equipment, spray-painting helicopter blades to protect them from erosion, practicing “dust landings” in the desert sands of the Udairi range. There was little time for introspection. To unwind at night, soldiers passed around DVDs to watch on portable video players. Black Hawk Down was a particular favorite.
Shortly after Six Bat’s arrival in Kuwait, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Fields, had given the soldiers a short pep talk. Fields had fought in the first Gulf War; he was with the “ready brigade” that airlifted helicopters to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, as part of a quick-reaction force assembled to defend the kingdom’s oilfields from Saddam Hussein. “We’re ten times more prepared than we were last time,” he said.
The buildup in Kuwait had been under way for months, and Fields was confident of a successful reprise of Desert Storm. Chief Warrant Officer Shawn Mertens, another Black Hawk pilot, summarized the confidence in what was supposed to be a conventional military mission to defeat the Iraqi army and unseat Saddam Hussein. “We’re supposed to beat ’em up and go home,” he told me.
Mertens neatly described the operating assumption at the time. The United States was going to war in Iraq for a host of reasons: intelligence speculation about the regime’s ties to terrorists, a desire to upend the regional political order, unfinished business from the 1990–91 Gulf War. The campaign was largely billed as a hunt for weapons of mass destruction, although Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps inadvertently, let slip in a May 2003 magazine interview that the case for war was built around that selling point “for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy.”2
But as much as Saddam was an odious tyrant, he presided over a functioning state. The ruling Ba’athist Party—a thugocracy, really—held power through an ugly combination of patronage, repression, and political murder. Saddam’s malignant cult of personality was the state’s official ideology. The economy was a wreck: The state was the largest employer, and the country’s infrastructure had suffered through years of neglect, underinvestment, and sanctions. The disastrous UN-backed Oil-for-Food program had only created more opportunities for those with ties to the corrupt regime to enrich themselves. The U.S. invasion would destroy the regime, but a new system would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The 101st Airborne Division had detailed terrain maps, access to up-to-the minute satellite pictures, and signal intercepts from the Iraqi military’s communications systems. But its familiarity with the cultural terrain it was about to occupy was marginal. Back at Fort Campbell, the public affairs office, the division’s media-relations shop, had printed up a short handbook called A Soldier’s Guide to Iraq. It was rudimentary at best, and a section on cultural considerations was particularly comical. It depicted “the Arab” as a sort of B-movie villain: Arabs are crafty, feckless, preoccupied with honor and shame. A few excerpts:
To show politeness when asked a yes or no question, the Arab will always answer yes, whether true or not. A flat “no” is a signal that you want to end the relationship. The polite way for an Arab to say “no” is to say, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Arabs, by American standards, are reluctant to accept responsibility. They will accept shared responsibility, but if responsibility is accepted and something goes wrong, the Arab is dishonored.
The Arab approach to time is much slower and relaxed. If God wills things to happen, they will, so why rush. Relationships are more important than accomplishing an act.
An Arab sees friendships with anyone outside the family as meaning, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”
The handbook also offered a few pointers for dealing with the press. Some tips were practical (“Don’t lie”); others encouraged spin (“Do not provide the enemy with propaganda material by complaining about things”). It had few specifics on Iraqi, as distinct from Arab, culture, although page 8 also featured a small map that crudely outlined “dissident areas” (predominately Shia and Kurdish). It gave no hint of the ethnic and sectarian conflict the invasion would inadvertently ignite.
Prior to the division’s departure to Kuwait from Fort Campbell, I watched a briefing by a young Civil Affairs major on Iraq. It was embarrassingly brief. The takeaway: Iraq had three major groups, Shia and Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds up north. They didn’t always get along. The Shia and the Kurds will probably be friendly, because they were oppressed by Saddam. And don’t eat with your left hand; Arabs consider that unclean. He glossed over a slide on arts, monuments, and national archives (“There’s a lot of stuff here,” he said), and he was stumped by a basic question on the distances between Baghdad and the borders of Syria and Turkey.
An Army lawyer also gave an overview of “ROE,” the rules of engagement on the battlefield. Soldiers received two “ROE cards”: a green one for “pre- and post-hostilities” (in preparation for the invasion and after
victory, respectively) and an orange one titled “ROE during hostilities.” The orange ROE cards outlined the basic rules for engaging enemy forces and also gave instructions for dealing with civilians. Rule 1: “You may stop civilians and check their identities, search for weapons and seize any found. Detain civilians when necessary to accomplish your mission or for your own safety. Use the Four S’s when dealing with civilians demonstrating some form of hostile intent.”
The Four S’s were a simple formula for using “graduated force” against civilians: “1. SHOUT verbal warning to halt; 2. SHOW weapon and intent to use it; 3. SHOVE use non-lethal physical force; 4. SHOOT to eliminate the threat. Fire only aimed shots. Stop firing when the threat is neutralized.” These guidelines were to be followed whenever troops set up a roadblock or a security perimeter in Iraqi towns and cities. A series of bullet points on the back of the card outlined a few possible scenarios, like a civilian deliberately driving a vehicle at friendly forces (response: shoot to eliminate the threat) or a young civilian woman pointing out to the enemy the location where friendly troops were concealed (response: shoot to eliminate the threat).
The rules seemed to encourage the assumption that civilians were potentially hostile, not potentially friendly. At the top of both cards, in boldface type, was the prime directive: NOTHING IN THESE RULES PROHIBITS YOU FROM EXERCISING YOUR INHERENT RIGHT TO DEFEND YOURSELF AND OTHER ALLIED FORCES. The U.S. military’s preoccupation with what it called “force protection” would have serious consequences. And the forces the invasion would unleash—sectarian conflict from within, a new front for international jihad—would create the conditions for a deadly internal war.
The 101st Airborne reached the outskirts of Najaf in early April 2003. It was the division’s first real encounter with the Iraqi population; it also served as a test of how Iraq’s Shia community would receive the Army—as liberators or as occupiers. For Shia believers, Najaf was a holy place. It housed the shrine of Imam Ali, considered by Shia to be the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhammad; after Mecca and Medina, it was the third most important site for Shia pilgrims. Standing atop a Humvee outside the gates of the city, Army Major General David Petraeus turned to his boss, the commander of V Corps, Lieutenant General William Wallace. “There sure are a lot more civilians on the battlefield in this particular scenario than there were at the NTC or at JRTC,” he said.
Petraeus was referring to the Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Those two “dirt” training facilities were where the Army conducted its full-dress rehearsals for war. A month-long stay “in the box” at NTC or JRTC was the closest you could get to combat without real shooting. At Fort Irwin, Army units would play a sophisticated version of laser tag against an OPFOR (“opposing force”) that was usually configured like a Soviet armored formation. For maximum realism, the OPFOR even had a fleet of Warsaw Pact equipment—tanks, helicopters, armored personnel carriers.* It was practice for the type of conventional, tank-on-tank engagement the Cold War military had always prepared to fight: the Soviets crashing through the Fulda Gap in West Germany. What the Army called “COBs”—civilians on the battlefield—were notably absent from the NTC war games. Now, Army commanders were very rapidly learning that civilians were not just an unexpected obstacle that could be easily circumvented.
On April 3, a delegation of soldiers of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne entered the city to pay a visit to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shia imam. As the soldiers approached the Shrine of Ali, a large crowd of Shia men began to assemble; they quickly blocked the streets near the shrine. Rumors swirled that the foreign soldiers would try to enter the Shrine of Ali, or that they would detain Sistani. As the crowd grew, someone began to pitch stones at the American soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes, commander of the Second Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, decided on a show of restraint. He ordered his soldiers to drop to one knee and point their weapons to the ground. “We’re going to withdraw out of this situation and let them defuse it themselves,” he said through a bullhorn. “All vehicles turn around.”3
A CNN reporter on the scene said Hughes’s decision to call off the visit and avoid a confrontation prevented U.S. troops from making enemies of the civilians in Najaf. But the gesture actually had been proposed by Kadhim Al-Waeli, an Iraqi exile employed as a cultural scout and advisor to the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne. He was the one who suggested that U.S. soldiers drop to one knee to show respect as they approached the Shrine of Ali. A violent confrontation was averted by a suggestion from a native-born Iraqi; this was broadcast on CNN and Al-Jazeera.4
“I’m your Google. You don’t have to go to Google, just ask me,” Al-Waeli had told Hughes. “I’m not a genius, but I was born in Iraq. I know that culture, I know the people.” That sort of advice was indispensable—and it was in extremely short supply. The Army had envisioned the creation of a three-thousand-strong force that would be charged with interpreting for coalition forces, acting as cultural guides, and helping handle refugees. The Iraqi volunteers, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, were supposed to act as senior cultural advisors, giving commanders insights into Iraqi attitudes and customs and helping smooth interactions with ordinary Iraqis.5
It was a good idea in theory. But in practice, the creation of the Free Iraqi Forces was a fiasco: Only a very small number of Iraqi exiles actually stepped forward to volunteer, and even fewer were prepared to deploy in time for the fighting. Many of those who did show up for training were not in particularly good shape.6 Few had combat experience. The Army quickly had to lower its expectations. Even an otherwise glowing Pentagon news story about Task Force Warrior, the Army’s program for training the exiles at Taszar Air Base, Hungary, acknowledged that trainers had to dumb down the curriculum. A caustic e-mail by a major assigned to Task Force Warrior was passed around within the military community: “Never in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces have so many done so much for so few,” he observed.7 The program in Hungary produced only a few dozen graduates in time to join the war.
Chris Straub, a retired Army officer and former member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff with extensive experience working with Iraqi exile groups, blamed the relatively low pay—Free Iraqi Forces were paid one thousand dollars a month—for the poor turnout. The U.S. government did not want it to look as if it was raising a force of mercenaries, but Iraqi exiles could make much more money working as interpreters for Titan, the firm that held the main linguistics contract for the Army. “We [the U.S. government] were competing against ourselves,” Straub later observed. Straub had been hired as a Pentagon contractor to recruit Iraqis for the Free Iraqi Forces from half a dozen exile groups that qualified for U.S. assistance under the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. Free Iraqi Forces were supposed to provide an Iraqi face for the U.S.-led invasion, but Straub said the names of most volunteers were provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi opposition group led by the exile politician and neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi. “A lot of them didn’t show up,” Straub said. “Lots of them were old.” But Straub believed that the program, despite its faults, paid dividends. He later told me, “In my mind [the Najaf incident] paid for the program.”
In Najaf, the 101st Airborne Division also discovered that it would have to take on some distinctly nonmilitary missions: restoring essential services for the besieged city. Temperatures in early April were already rising into the nineties, and the city was running short of potable water. The unit shipped in a thousand gallons of water for local residents in neighborhoods occupied by the First Brigade, and made plans to deliver diesel fuel to restart a pumping station that had been out of service for several days.8 Even as the U.S. military delivered a swift, overwhelming defeat, another kind of war was taking shape. And those small hearts-and-minds victories could not alter perceptions in the Arab world that the United States was an occupier.
The march to Baghdad continued at whiplash pace. Soldiers and Marines on the ground would quickly learn that civilians were the defining feature on this new terrain. Days after the 101st Airborne Division’s uneasy first encounter with the residents of Najaf, Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick, a platoon leader with the Marine Corps’s First Reconnaissance Battalion, was ordered to scout the Iraqi military airfield at Qalat Sukkar, an air base that would be used as a staging point for the final assault on Baghdad. As they approached the chain-link fence surrounding the airfield, a message came over the radio network from company headquarters. “All personnel on the airfield are declared hostile.”9
Fick paused, and prepared to override the order. He wanted his unit to stick to the established rules of engagement. He then changed his mind, trusting that the order might save Marines’ lives by giving them crucial seconds to respond to an ambush or attack. As the Marines moved forward, Fick heard a short burst of gunfire, and a snatch of radio traffic: Something about men with weapons, and possible muzzle flashes. Not long after, Fick’s Marines were approached by a small group of villagers pulling two bundles. The Marines unwrapped the blankets: The villagers were carrying two young boys hit by the Marine gunfire. One boy had a bullet wound in the leg; the other was punched through by four bullets. “In horror, I thought back to our assault on the airfield a few hours before,” Fick later wrote. “The pieces fell into place. Those weren’t rifles we had seen but shepherds’ canes, not muzzle flashes but the sun reflecting on a windshield. The running camels belonged to those boys. We’d shot two children.”10
As the platoon pushed farther through Muwaffiqiya, the Marines shot a civilian who had failed to stop at a traffic checkpoint. It was a classic “escalation of force” scenario. As they pushed farther north, Fick ordered one of his Marines to commit a small act of vandalism. They cut down an octagonal traffic sign with the word stop written in Arabic. It would be perfect, he thought, for their traffic checkpoints. It might even save a life.11