War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  As the heat of summer beat down on the land between the rivers, the number and scale of the attacks increased dramatically. Several factors contributed to the escalating violence—and growing U.S. casualties:

  First, Iraq’s neighbors—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iran—were either unable or unwilling to stop hundreds of fanatical jihadists, inspired radical Islamic clerics and leaders of terror movements, from crossing into Iraq. Terrorists from these neighboring countries and others from Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Chechnya flooded into Iraq to join the jihad. By autumn 2003, they were effectively integrated into scores of disparate but deadly “cells” throughout the Sunni Triangle and incorporated into a significant number of Shi’ite communities.

  Second, senior members of Saddam’s now outlawed Baath Party had succeeded in fleeing to Syria with tens of millions in stolen funds. From there, they launched an organized effort to convince the Sunni minority in Iraq that Saddam was going to make a “comeback.” Messengers from Syria told Sunni sheikhs and imams that unless the Sunnis fought back against American-imposed democracy, they would soon be repressed by the Shi’ite majority.

  Third, Iraq’s abandoned ammunition depots, munitions storage facilities, and arms depositories provided a treasure trove of weapons and explosives for arming opponents and building improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

  On my first trip to Iraq, I had been with Lt. Col. “Pepper” Jackson’s 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment when they had captured Bayji and its enormous munitions depot. Now his battalion was providing security for USA Environmental—the contractor charged with the destruction of the site’s 300 million tons of ordnance. Their goal: to haul 100 tons per day out into the desert and destroy it in earth-shaking, ear-shattering controlled detonations. From more than a mile away, one such blast knocked my camera off its tripod.

  The work is difficult and dangerous. One of the EOD experts who had also worked in Kosovo, Ukraine, and Afghanistan said, “This is the most militarized place on the planet. At this rate, just cleaning up Bayji will take us five years. But it’s worth it. Once we’ve blown it up, the ‘bad guys’ can’t use it to kill anyone else.”

  He’s right. In the hands of suicidal terrorists bent on killing “infidels,” a stolen automobile or truck heavily loaded with explosives is a guided bomb, nearly as deadly as the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II.

  On 19 August 2003, a suicide terrorist driving an explosives-laden truck destroyed the UN headquarters building in Baghdad, killing twenty-four and wounding another hundred. Within weeks, the UN closed its offices in Iraq and fled the country. By October 2003, when the last UN officials departed, IEDs had become the number-one cause of casualties in Iraq.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #44

  4th ID HQ

  Tikrit, Iraq

  Saturday, 13 December 2003

  1730 Hours Local

  Each time I visited the headquarters of the 4th ID in Tikrit, General Ray Odierno—the division commander—or one of his subordinates would remind me that they had made it their mission to capture or kill Saddam Hussein. Though reports at the time suggested that the deposed dictator could be hiding anywhere from the suburbs of Baghdad to the outskirts of Damascus, the 4th ID soldiers were convinced that Saddam was still hiding out in the vicinity of his hometown.

  Odierno is a tough, tall, lean soldier. He had borne the frustration of getting his division into the fight with considerable grace—a quality that would be sorely tested when his own son was grievously wounded.

  On one occasion he took me into the G-2 spaces at his headquarters, where his intelligence staff explained the painstaking effort they were making to track down and double-check every piece of information that had been gleaned about Saddam. I made the observation that this was impressive work and inquired as to how much help the CIA was in this endeavor. A captain working nearby chuckled and replied, “CIA? We don’t get much of anything that’s useful from them. So we set this up just like we would in the NYPD, where I’m a homicide detective when I’m not wearing this uniform.”

  The 4th ID staff had set up a system for meticulously double-checking every informant debrief and insisted on carefully interrogating every captured terrorist. All of Saddam’s many relatives in the region were quietly reminded that there was a $25 million reward for the information leading to the capture of the dictator.

  As we left that afternoon, I wished Odierno a happy Thanksgiving. He thanked me and wished me the same, but added, “If you leave now, you’ll miss the capture.”

  I replied, “How soon?”

  “He’s here. I know he is,” Odierno replied. “He’s been right around here all along. It’s just a matter of days before we find him.”

  I should have stayed—because on 13 December, they did.

  As Ray Odierno predicted, it turned out to be a tip from a relative of one of Saddam’s guards that led to the former dictator’s capture. Armed with the information, 600 U.S. Army soldiers went to investigate a farm outside the hamlet of Ad Daw, just beyond the outskirts of Tikrit. There they found the former despot, bearded and filthy, cowering with a sidearm and $750,000 in U.S. currency in a hand-dug “rat-hole.” The man who had urged his followers to “fight to the death” put up no resistance and begged his captors not to shoot him.

  The troops were euphoric. SPC Michael Tillery, of the 4th Battalion, 42nd Field Artillery Regiment from Alexandria, Virginia, who participated in the raid, said, “All the work has paid off and that one step is finally over—finding Saddam.” Video of the tyrant being examined for lice by a U.S. Army doctor flashed around the world.

  Unfortunately, jubilation at the capture was not universal. European critics decried the “humiliation” of videotaping a “former head of state” being examined in such an “inhumane” way. Others speculated that Saddam would now be tortured to divulge the whereabouts of his weapons of mass destruction.

  In the United States, Howard Dean, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared, “The capture of Saddam has not made America safer.”

  Yet in the month after Hussein’s capture, attacks against coalition forces in Iraq dropped 22 percent. U.S. military officers said that the decline in attacks was proof that Saddam’s capture dampened resistance to the American presence in Iraq.

  Howard Dean wasn’t the only one with a peculiar perception of Iraqi reality. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts charged that the war was a lie “cooked up” in Texas. And just two days after Paul Bremer proclaimed, “We got him,” Representative Jim McDermott of Washington accused President Bush of manipulating Saddam’s capture for political purposes. McDermott told a Seattle radio audience that U.S. troops could have captured Saddam “a long time ago if they wanted.”

  Clinton-era secretary of state Madeleine Albright seemed to follow the same line of reasoning. She asserted to Morton Kondracke of FOX News: “Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?”

  Media coverage of Saddam’s capture has been as surreal as the conspiracy theorists’ conjectures. After watching jubilant Iraqis celebrating Saddam’s capture, ABC anchor Peter Jennings saw only sadness and morosely concluded, “There’s not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment.” Jennings added that life for Iraqi citizens is “very chaotic . . . beset by violence . . . [and] not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power.”

  The anchors and talking heads pondered Saddam’s situation. CBS’s Leslie Stahl taunted Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld about torturing Saddam. “Would we deprive him of sleep? Would we make it very cold where he is, or very hot? Are there any restrictions on the way we treat him to get him to cooperate more than he has been?”

  NBC’s Katie Couric said Saddam’s capture was only “symbolic.” She’d be proved hopelessly wrong less than twenty-four hours later, as the 1st Armored Division, acting on intelligen
ce secured during Saddam’s capture, rounded up three former Iraqi generals suspected of supporting the terrorist resistance in Iraq.

  In keeping with the mainstream media’s axiom that no good deed shall go unpunished, CBS’s Dan Rather described the Iraqi people as worse off than they had been under Saddam. Introducing a report by Kimberly Dozier in Baghdad, Rather proclaimed that the “result is a population fearful, frustrated, angry, and heavily armed.”

  Dozier went on to report, “Day or night, these are some of the most dangerous streets on Earth. Desperation drives murder and theft. Iraqis have traded fear of the despot for fear of their fellow man, and U.S. troops seem powerless to protect them.”

  Newsweek compared Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to “Baghdad Bob” for saying that things were not as bad as the press painted them. New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described President Bush as “a gun-slinging cowboy knocking over international treaties and bent on controlling the world’s oil, if not the entire world.”

  All of this twisted, mind-numbing negativism overlooked Saddam’s horrific record:

  1. Responsibility for two wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands

  2. Raping, torturing, robbing, starving and murdering his own people

  3. Using weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors and countrymen

  4. Attempting to assassinate an American president

  5. Training and supporting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, Muslim Brotherhood, and Abu Nidal terrorists who killed Americans

  Even the most committed followers of Osama bin Laden have to wonder if their bearded leader who wants them to die for his cause would ignominiously surrender—like Saddam did—to save his own skin, or appeal to the mercy of the International Criminal Court to avoid a death sentence.

  Finally, the loopy leftist rhetoric in the aftermath of Saddam’s capture ignored the extraordinary courage, training, persistence, and discipline of the American soldiers who pursued and caught the Butcher of Baghdad. It’s too bad, because they deserve a lot more credit than they are getting.

  During our second trip to northern Iraq, an incident occurred that convinced me Griff Jenkins could no longer serve as my combat cameraman and field producer. It was just after dark in Bayji and we were doing a live feed to Tony Snow’s Sunday morning broadcast on FOX News Channel when an enemy mortar round impacted about twenty yards away. Though we were unscathed, the concussion of the explosion was enough to knock our little satellite transponder off the top of a nearby Humvee. Viewers saw a flash and then nothing but fuzz on their screens.

  Griff quickly reset the satellite equipment and reestablished the link with Washington. Within minutes, we were back on the air and it was clear that no one had been hurt. But afterward, it occurred to me that for Griff’s wife, Kathleen, and little daughter, Madeline, those had to be several very anxious minutes. He had already come through some very close calls during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Several times I’d had to consider how I was going to explain to them how their husband and father had been killed.

  It’s always hard to break up a team—particularly a good one. Griff had been my producer and friend on radio and then TV for more than five years. He is a gifted photographer and cameraman. Technically, he is without peer. When I told him that I wanted him to take a producer position that was opening at the FOX News bureau in Washington, he strenuously objected to being reassigned. But I was equally unwilling to keep putting him at risk on frequent trips into combat zones. Thankfully, the management at FOX agreed and Griff became the producer for Tony Snow’s radio show.

  The entire episode was a learning experience for me. I had led Marines in combat—and I’ve spent a considerable time part of my life with and around warriors. Over the years, I’d written painful “next of kin” letters and met with anguished family members when those I’d served with were killed in training or combat.

  It’s hard enough to have to send such a missive to the families of soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines who are slain serving their county in uniform. But it’s quite another to contemplate having to deliver such a message to the mother of a young child whose civilian father got killed covering the combatants.

  I resolved that in the future, my field producers and cameramen would have to be either bachelors or those whose children were grown, and that’s the way it has been since. Though we now show up in places like Iraq and Afghanistan like a troup of “grumpy old men,” at least my conscience is a little less burdened.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #45

  2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division

  Ramadi, Iraq

  Friday, 16 April 2004

  1130 Hours Local

  Last week was the bloodiest week in Iraq in over a year. U.S. Marines and soldiers have been heavily engaged in Fallujah and Ramadi by heavy gunfire and RPG attacks while searching for the terrorists who killed and desecrated the bodies of four American contractors in Fallujah on 31 March. In Najaf, U.S. Army and Marine units are trying to quell an uprising of radical Shi’ites led by Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, a fanatical cleric. So far this month, twenty-one U.S. Marines have been killed and sixty-five more have been wounded.

  And while Christian Galdabini—my new cameraman—and I cover the “Magnificent Bastards” here in Ramadi and the units surrounding Fallujah, we’re being treated to news reports of Senator Ted Kennedy unleashing a verbal carpet-bombing on the president of the United States. Kennedy, whose own integrity and judgment have been called into question on numerous occasions throughout his career, used a forum at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank, to charge the Bush administration with “creat(ing) the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon.” Kennedy accused the president of breaking “the basic bond of trust with the American people,” and said that Iraq is “George Bush’s Vietnam.”

  Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia also equated Iraq with Vietnam: “Surely, I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam in this development. Surely this administration recognizes that increasing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq will only suck us deeper, deeper into the maelstrom, into the quicksand of violence that has become the hallmark of that unfortunate, miserable country.”

  What is truly unfortunate is that those hearing this pessimistic rhetoric are the radical terrorists who are emboldened by it. But also listening are the young American fighting men we are with, and it’s disheartening to those who are able to see the news—either on our little satellite transceiver or on television monitors in some of the larger mess halls and recreation facilities around the country.

  Before arriving here, the Marines we are with spent months in predeployment training at Camp Pendleton in California. They had permitted us to cover their specialized training for operating in and around civilian populations—and now we rejoined them to document how they put the tactics, techniques and procedures they mastered into practice. Lt. Col. Paul Kennedy, the battalion commander, in an on-camera interview, described the fighting as “tough.”

  This week during a prime-time White House news conference, President Bush used the same word to describe the recent fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah. It is tough—war always is. During my first forty hours on the ground this time, anti-Iraqi forces haven’t stopped shooting at the Marines, making it more difficult to get around.

  But it’s also evident that the troops we’re with—from the 1st Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, California, and the Army’s 1st Brigade from Fort Riley, Kansas—are indeed “performing brilliantly,” as the president said in his remarks. But the troops we interview express it somewhat differently. “The fighting has been intense, but we’ve been kicking butt everywhere we go,” said a Marine sergeant when we put him on the air.

  Lt. Col. Kennedy makes it clear that he knows his mission. He tells his company commanders to “hunt down” the terrorists who are infiltrating the provincial capital and reminds them that their enemy “can’t stand up to a Marine unit in a gunfight. The
y aren’t as well trained, lack fire discipline, and aren’t in shape. If you have to . . . send out invitations. Watch out for the IEDs and when they show themselves, shoot straight. Use only the force you need to eliminate the threat. Avoid civilian casualties and keep your comms up. And remember the Division motto: ‘No greater friend—no worse enemy.’ Let them figure out which one they want you to be.”

  Shortly after arriving in Ramadi, his young Marines had suffered six killed and eighteen wounded. But this morning’s firefight produces four enemy dead, nine detainees, and sixteen weapons captured—and two wounded Marines. Among the enemy dead and captured were foreign terrorists and a handful of local Baathist loyalists.

  One of those detained in the operation was a young Iraqi who had been wounded in an earlier engagement with U.S. troops. He had been treated in a hospital and was recuperating in the home of a “friend” when U.S. Marines, with the cooperation of Iraqis in the neighborhood, knocked on the door and took him into custody.

  “One more terrorist off the street and one less bad guy who, later on, could have injured a Marine, sailor, or soldier,” was how the squad leader put it.

  Many of these Marines and Navy medical corpsmen are on a second tour in Iraq. More than a few were only home for five or six months before they turned around, put on their flak jackets and helmets, and returned to Iraq. I asked one, a Marine corporal who had enlisted the day after the September 11, 2001, attacks, why he had volunteered to come back. His answer: “Because we have a job to do that we didn’t finish the first time. In this war on terror, you don’t want to play any more ‘home games.’ We need to play ‘on the road’—and beat them here.” Unfortunately, these aren’t sentiments anyone is likely to see in the mainstream media.