Part 8 (2/2)

Finance is a murkier area, but here too U.S. decisions appear to have unwittingly aided the enemy. Before and during the U.S. invasion, intelligence surveillance observed convoys of trucks and cars heading from Baghdad to Syria. At the time there was some speculation that these were carrying weapons of ma.s.s destruction or manuals and other technical knowledge related to their manufacture. In retrospect, it appears that many of those convoys actually were carrying top Baathists and their families, and their cash, gold, and other valuables, some of which later would be used to support the insurgency from outside the country. Yet about a year would pa.s.s before the U.S. military would launch a serious effort to gain control of Iraq's borders-a step that is a prerequisite to mounting an effective counterinsurgency campaign.

But it was in the third area, recruiting, that the U.S. effort inadvertently gave the insurgency its biggest boost. Finding new members is usually the most difficult of tasks for the insurgent cause, especially in its first growth, because it requires its members to expose themselves somewhat to the public and to the police. U.S. policies-both military and civilian-helped solve that problem. The de-Baathification order created a cla.s.s of disenfranchised, threatened leaders. (Also, the Baath Party likely was more comfortable with its fugitive status than many a deposed ruling party would have been. ”The Baathist Party was born in an insurgency and continued to operate like one,” even when in power, noted one Special Forces officer who served in Iraq. ”You joined a cell, and reported to the cell leader.”) But those leaders still needed rank-and-file members. The dissolution of the army gave them a manpower pool of tens of thousands of angry, unemployed soldiers. ”When we disbanded the Iraqi army, we created a significant part of the Iraqi insurgency,” said Col. Paul Hughes, who worked for Bremer on strategy issues. On top of that, the lack of U.S. drive and the sense of drift at the CPA gave the Baathists a much needed breather.

A professionally unprepared army The U.S. Army in Iraq-incorrect in its a.s.sumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy-completed the job of creating the insurgency. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through ”presence”-that is, soldiers demonstrating to the local population that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling. ”We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans,” said one Army general. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there DABing, for Driving Around Bosnia.

The flaw in this approach, wrote Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, was that after the public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, ”then the presence of troops ... becomes counterproductive.”

The U.S. military jargon for this was boots on the ground, or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers. For example, in May 2003, as the 1st Armored Division prepared to move from Kuwait to Baghdad, Col. Jackson Flake, the division chief of staff, said its task there would be to provide a safe and secure environment. To achieve that, he explained, ”We've got to conduct patrols to give these citizens a sense of security,” and also to work with civilian authorities to get the infrastructure up and running. A briefing by the division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be ”presence patrols.”

”Flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out,” Sanchez ordered one of his brigade commanders at a meeting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone later that May. And he wanted the troops to get out there on foot, he added: ”Mounted patrols tell me we are zipping through neighborhoods. I want American soldiers on the ground talking to people.... Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by.”

But what if this approach creates problems rather than solves them? In the spring and summer of 2003, few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the central-ity of Iraqi pride, and the humiliation Iraqi men felt to be occupied by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.

The push for intelligence U.S. commanders tended to blame their troubles, at least in public, on their lack of good intelligence about their foe. Who was the enemy? How many were there? What were their motivations? How did they operate? Where did their financing come from? Who controlled them? Were they independent cells or did they have a central control? What were their links to Saddam Hussein's regime? What was the relations.h.i.+p between former regime members and their old enemies in the fundamentalist Islamic groups? There were surprisingly few good answers to those questions, then or now.

More than most large organizations, the U.S. Army generally tries to confront and remedy its shortcomings. Newspapers, for example, rarely pause after covering major crises to figure out what they did right, what they did wrong, and what they should remember the next time they face a similar incident. The Army, to its credit, routinely tries to learn from such encounters, in part because of the lethality of mistakes in its line of work. It calls this the lessons learned process, and incorporates the efforts in its major training maneuvers. For example, after each major step in operations at the National Training Center, the Army's premier large unit training facility, commanders pause to critique their own moves. ”Observer-controllers” stand by to provide factual data and so ensure that the critique is more than just a barroom quarrel about who did their job best. This process even has its own office, the Center for Army Lessons Learned, or CALL, based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, an old cavalry post perched on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains.

In the summer of 2003 CALL sent a team to Iraq to review intelligence-gathering efforts in Iraq. The team found a series of wide-ranging problems in using technology and in training and managing intelligence specialists. Younger officers and enlisted soldiers were unprepared for their a.s.signments, ”did not understand the targeting process,” and possessed ”very little to no a.n.a.lytical skills,” the CALL team found. It said that there were 69 ”tactical human intelligence” (HUMINT) teams working in Iraq, and that they should have been producing at least 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering a total average of 30. Overall, it said, the teams lacked ”guidance and focus.” They also were overwhelmed, and at least 15 more teams were needed. Nor did combat leaders understand how to use their intelligence specialists. ”HUMINT teams and MI [military intelligence] commanders who were frustrated at the misuse of HUMINT a.s.sets by maneuver commanders ... believed that combat arms officers did not understand the management and capabilities of HUMINT a.s.sets,” the report said. Also, operations across Iraq were impeded by the lack of competent interpreters; those they had were ”working to the point of burnout,” and also were being misused. ”We can no longer afford to send interpreters in 'support' of units to buy chickens and soft drinks.”

Other insiders noticed additional problems. The U.S. military intelligence apparatus tended to overfocus on the role of foreign fighters, a senior Army official later noted, because those fighters tended to use telephones, e-mail, and the Internet-and thus could be monitored by signals interception. So long sessions with top commanders would focus on the movements of four Saudi Arabian citizens while entire tribes in the Sunni Triangle were emerging unnoticed as centers of the insurgency. ”The real guys weren't using phones or the Internet,” he said. ”They were based on human relations.h.i.+ps,” and so operated below the radar screen of U.S. military intelligence.

In the late summer and early fall of 2003 top commanders launched an extraordinary push to improve the performance of the lackl.u.s.ter military intelligence operation in Iraq. ”Actionable intelligence is the key to countering the insurgency,” Gen. Abizaid said later, looking back at this time. ”All of us were looking for actionable intelligence that would lead us to unlock the leaders.h.i.+p of the insurgency.” He was especially frustrated that good information gathered at the battalion and brigade levels wasn't making it up the chain of command to the division and corps intelligence operations, where it could be ”brought into an overarching theater understanding of the problem.” What was the enemy? How was it organized, peopled, trained, and indoctrinated? What did it want, if anything, besides expelling the U.S. forces?

Militaries, like all big organizations, tend to do what they know how to do, rather than what they might need to do differently to address the situation they face. As French counterinsurgency expert Bernard Fall said in a 1964 speech to a U.S. military audience about flaws in the U.S. approach in Vietnam, ”Everybody likes to fight the war that he knows best; this is very obvious. But in Vietnam we fight a war that we don't 'know best.' The sooner this is realized the better it is going to be.”

It took many years for the Army to adjust in Vietnam, and it would take time-though less than in Vietnam-to do so in Iraq as well. ”When it is this huge, this heavy a conventional presence, you're going to get the inst.i.tutional response,” said one general, himself an unconventional thinker from the conventional side of the Army. ”They're going to do what they're trained to do.”

That unimaginative reaction is hardly a new phenomenon. Field Marshal Saxe, an innovative eighteenth-century French general, complained that ”very few men occupy themselves with the higher problems of war,” so that ”when they arrive at the command of armies they are totally ignorant, and, in default of knowing what should be done, they do what they know.” The U.S. mission in Iraq was overwhelmingly made up of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower profile, Special Forces troops, and in 2003 most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions.

”You had to do operations to drive intelligence,” said a senior military intelligence official who was in the middle of this drive. In retrospect, he said, ”We were not sophisticated or calibrated in our approach. You know the old saying, 'If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail'?”

In the late summer of 2003, senior U.S. commanders tried to counter the insurgency with indiscriminate cordon-and-sweep operations that involved detaining thousands of Iraqis. This involved ”grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not,” according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's operations by the Army inspector general's office. On top of that, Army commanders failed to ensure they had a system to process thousands of people. At first, prisoners were held on U.S. bases, but by late summer they were s.h.i.+pped to Abu Ghraib prison to be held by a small unit of demoralized MPs there. By the fall of 2003 this approach would swamp the system and undercut the aim of improving intelligence, because there weren't enough interrogators on hand to detect the genuine adversaries among the thousands of innocent or neutral Iraqis caught up in the sweeps.

It is important to bear in mind the lack of a coherent counterinsurgency strategy at the top. Had there been one, commanders likely wouldn't have used such self-defeating tactics. ”When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right,” said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. ”If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam.” For the first twenty months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there as well.

Iraq in midsummer 2003 Paul Wolfowitz was worried about Iraq. Bremer didn't tell him much, so he worked the military channels relentlessly, with a Churchillian drive for information. ”There is no limit to the level of detail the depsecdef depsecdef requests,” an official at Central Command griped in an e-mail to a military lawyer on July 7, 2003. Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq that month to rally support. Privately, he may have been worried that Gary Anderson was right about a growing insurgency, but publicly he would argue that steady progress was being made. At lunch one day at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was inside the checkpoints of the Green Zone and had been turned into a CPA dormitory, the deputy defense secretary was relentlessly upbeat. He had with him a handpicked group of reporters and columnists, journalists whose articles had displayed a sympathy to his views, among them the requests,” an official at Central Command griped in an e-mail to a military lawyer on July 7, 2003. Wolfowitz traveled to Iraq that month to rally support. Privately, he may have been worried that Gary Anderson was right about a growing insurgency, but publicly he would argue that steady progress was being made. At lunch one day at the al Rasheed Hotel, which was inside the checkpoints of the Green Zone and had been turned into a CPA dormitory, the deputy defense secretary was relentlessly upbeat. He had with him a handpicked group of reporters and columnists, journalists whose articles had displayed a sympathy to his views, among them the Was.h.i.+ngton Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Jim Hoagland, the Post's Jim Hoagland, the Wall Street Journal's Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, and Paul Gigot, and Vanity Fairs Vanity Fairs Christopher Hitchens. ”The judicial system is functioning at a rudimentary level,” he began that hot July day. ”Neighborhood councils are stood up. The police force is at sixty percent of requirements.” He saw similarly good trends in education and medicine. ”It is pretty amazing,” he insisted as waiters brought more seltzer water. He was dismissive of the Middle Eastern-area experts who were warning that Iraq was in a dangerous position, and that security was deteriorating. ”The great majority seem astonis.h.i.+ngly pessimistic,” he said. Christopher Hitchens. ”The judicial system is functioning at a rudimentary level,” he began that hot July day. ”Neighborhood councils are stood up. The police force is at sixty percent of requirements.” He saw similarly good trends in education and medicine. ”It is pretty amazing,” he insisted as waiters brought more seltzer water. He was dismissive of the Middle Eastern-area experts who were warning that Iraq was in a dangerous position, and that security was deteriorating. ”The great majority seem astonis.h.i.+ngly pessimistic,” he said.

Abizaid, also at the lunch table, loyally supported his boss's views. ”The impatience of the press is always of some interest to me,” he said. ”The progress here is quite remarkable, actually.” Looking over the white tablecloth set with cande-labras to the buffet of lamb, rice, and vegetables at the end of the room, swaddled in the tight security of the Green Zone, it was almost possible for a moment to believe they were correct.

To a degree, Wolfowitz was reflecting what he was hearing from top commanders. Even in the Sunni Triangle, U.S. officers were surprisingly optimistic at the time. They weren't over the hump, but they were close, some said. After lunch Abizaid headed up the Tigris Valley in a swift Black Hawk helicopter, flying low and escorted by two Apache attack helicopters. Palm groves, vineyards, and gardens of eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes flashed by underneath his aircraft. At a meeting that afternoon in Tikrit, one brigade commander in the 4th Infantry Division rea.s.sured him, ”My read, sir, is we're on the tail end of this.”

”Our a.n.a.lysis says attacks are going down,” added another 4th ID commander.”Sir, he's getting weaker,” said a third officer. ”We're breaking his back.””The gloves are coming off”

The insurgency didn't begin with an announcement or a major event. Rather, it was like a change in the weather. ”In three towns that summer-Hit, Fallujah and Khaldiya-I would hear an Iraqi proverb repeated over and over as the occupation lurched on, violence of all kinds escalated, and more Iraqis were killed,” Anthony Shadid later wrote. ”'The mud is getting wetter,' people said. Things are getting worse, it meant.”

As the Iraqi mud moistened, the American gloves were removed. The U.S. military escalation occurred consciously. On August 4, 2003, U.S. authorities reopened the prison west of Baghdad called Abu Ghraib, which was notorious since it had been used to punish the enemies of Saddam Hussein. And at around two o'clock on the morning on August 14, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell at Sanchez's headquarters, sent out a memo to subordinate commands. ”The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees,” he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are sadly illuminating about the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period. They suggest that the U.S. military was moving in the direction of inst.i.tutionalized abuse.

Capt. Ponce stated that Col. Steve Boltz, the second highest ranking military intelligence officer in Iraq, ”has made it clear that we want these individuals broken”-intelligence jargon for getting someone to abandon his cover and relate the truth as he knows it. Ponce then went on to wave the b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt, a move that would raise eyebrows among some of his e-mail's recipients. ”Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks,” he wrote. So, Ponce ordered them, ”Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG AUG 03.” 03.”

Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. ”I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al Qaeda,” a soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating in western Iraq, responded just fourteen hours later, according to the time stamp on his e-mail. ”I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off.” With clinical precision, he recommended permitting ”open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches____ I also believe that this should be a minimum baseline.” He also re- ported that ”fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely.”

The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to ”low-voltage electrocution.”

But not everyone was so sanguine as those two units' operations. ”We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are,” cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. (The officer's name was deleted in official doc.u.ments released by the Army, as were those of other writers in this e-mail exchange.) ”It comes down to standards of right and wrong-something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient.” This officer also took issue with the reference to rising U.S. casualties. ”We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought-that is part of the very nature of war.... That in no way justifies letting go of our standards.... Casualties are part of war-if you cannot take casualties then you cannot engage in war. Period.” The ”bottom line,” he wrote emphatically in conclusion, was, ”We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.” His signature block ended with a reference to ”Psalm 24: 3-8,” which begins with the admonition, ”Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.” But this lucid and pa.s.sionate response was a voice in the wilderness. The major was arguing against embarking on a course that the Army had already chosen to take.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of all prisons in Iraq, was growing concerned about conditions at Abu Ghraib, she said later in a sworn statement. On August 16, insurgents mortared the prison, killing six Iraqi prisoners and wounding at least forty-seven others. At that point the prison held Iraqis brought in under the old regime or as criminals, but not suspected insurgents caught by U.S. raids. In the wake of that incident Karpinski went to see Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, Sanchez's deputy commander, to ask for help.

”They're prisoners, Janis,” Wojdakowski dismissively said to her, she later recounted. ”Did you lose any soldiers?”

”I could have,” she recalled telling him.

”They didn't care,” she said, according to her statement, in which she also said that ”Sanchez didn't care until two MI soldiers were killed” a month later.

In the following weeks and months, she added, ”the divisions kept giving us more prisoners. 'Well, increase capacity' Where would you like me to increase capacity?” The answer, she said, was ”'Cram some more tents into the compound.'”

About ten days later, the first suspected insurgents captured by the United States arrived at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski later recalled. It was the middle of the night when helicopters arrived carrying thirty-five of them. ”My battalion commander is calling me frantically, saying, 'Do you know anything about this? Why are we getting these people?'”

On August 31, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the detainee operation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 660 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members were held and interrogated, arrived in Iraq to help U.S. commanders improve their intelligence operation, or as his subsequent report put it, ”to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence.” His team of seventeen experts didn't always get a warm reception. ”There was a great deal of animosity on the part of the Abu Ghraib personnel,” a subsequent investigation by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay found.

One of the core conclusions Gen. Miller reached during his ten-day visit was that Abu Ghraib should be operated more like the prison he had run on Guantanamo, most notably by using the conditions of detention to soften up prisoners for questioning. ”[T]he detention operations function must act as an enabler for interrogation,” Miller stated in his own report, which bore the cla.s.sification ”secret/noforn,” meaning that it wasn't to be shared with foreign allies.

His recommendation failed to take into account the vast difference between the U.S. base on Cuba's eastern end-a secure and remote area, completely under U.S. military control-and the chaos that surrounded Abu Ghraib, perched in the no-man's-land between Baghdad and Fallujah, a combat zone profoundly hostile to the foreign military presence in its midst. What's more, the ratio of guards to prisoners at peaceful Guantanamo was about 1.4 to 1, while at Abu Ghraib, which was regularly being mortared, the guards were heavily outnumbered, with a ratio of about 1 for every 10 prisoners. As more detainees flooded in, the ratio worsened to 1 to 20, according to Karpinski.

Over the next several months, hundreds of raids were conducted and over ten thousand Iraqis were detained, many of them hauled away from their families in the middle of the night and held without any notification to those families for weeks. All told, in the first eighteen months of the occupation, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Iraqis would pa.s.s through U.S. detention facilities, according to a legal statement given by Gen. Sanchez.

By the end of September, Abu Ghraib held more than 3,500 prisoners. A month later that number had almost doubled-but there were still only 360 MPs to guard them, Karpinski said. The huge effort in the late summer and fall of 2003 led directly to the widespread abuses of prisoners that came to be known, far too narrowly, as ”the Abu Ghraib scandal.” Those thousands of prisoners eventually would overwhelm the undermanned, undertrained, underequipped, undersu-pervised, and incompetent Army Reserve unit running the prison. And the tactics used in the push for intelligence aided the insurgency it was aiming to crush by alienating large segments of the Iraqi population.

The old prison was growing so crowded that the original purpose of detaining insurgents was being undercut by the sheer number being held. Col. Teeples, who commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is smaller than a division and lacked its own seasoned interrogators, said later in sworn testimony, ”Several times when we had detainees,... they were really bad guys, and we'd try to get them moved to Abu Ghraib, [but] there was no room.”

During this crucial period, the U.S. military seemed more concerned about its own well-being than about Iraqis, said Lt. Col. Holshek, who during the summer of 2003 was based at Tallil air base in southern Iraq. ”We had all this hardware, all these riches at hand, yet we didn't do anything to help,” he said of that time. An extraordinary part of the U.S. military effort was devoted to providing for itself, with a huge push to build showers, mess halls, and coffee bars, and to install amenities such as satellite television and Internet cafes. ”At Tallil there were eleven thousand people, hundreds of millions of dollars being spent, and not a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing being done for the people downtown, so we looked like an occupation power. And we were-we behaved like one. The message we were sending was, we didn't care much about the Iraqis, because we didn't do what we needed to do on things like electricity. And we also looked incompetent.”

War comes calling Lt. Brendan O'Hern, a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, found out he was at war in a very hard way, in a short action on a scorching hot summer day in Baghdad when his unit was guarding a weapons amnesty collection point. ”It was 120 degrees out and there was no relief from the sun,” he wrote in a memoir posted on companycommand.com, a semiofficial Web site for younger Army leaders.

At about 3:00 p.m p.m., a volley of rocket-propelled grenades flew at his unit from a nearby house, leaving their signature trail of blue-gray smoke. Several soldiers were blown into the air. One of the rockets, still burning, lodged in a leg of Cpl. Hilario Bermanis, and another soldier pulled it out with his bare hands. Another hit Spec. Gavin Neighbor, a twenty-year-old from Somerset, Ohio, who having finished his guard turn was resting in a nearby bus.

Back at their base, ”[e]veryone was in complete shock as we had no injuries prior to all this, over almost three months of combat ops, including some pretty heavy stuff in the early days of the war,” O'Hern wrote. It turned worse when his company commander told him a few hours later that Spec. Neighbor was dead. ”I was blown away,” he recalled. He gathered his men and told them the news. ”We just stood there together for a long time, with guys crying or in shock. Neighbor was honestly one of the best soldiers in the platoon, if not the best. He really meant a lot to everyone, and guys took it pretty hard.”

O'Hern told the soldiers to make sure to talk to work through their grief, rather than to try to ignore it. Over the next couple of days he found that conversing with them when they were alone worked best. ”We'd talk about whatever felt right, whether it was joking about the two guys or talking about what people did during and after the attack, or just something to distract the guy,” he wrote.

But O'Hern neglected himself. ”I tried to be hard and be the rock the guys could lean on.” But he later decided that that was the wrong approach, because he wound up feeling ”a tremendous amount of guilt,” and he plunged into a severe depression. ”I did not really eat or sleep for six or seven days, but just lay around blaming myself in private and focusing on the platoon, outwardly,” he wrote. ”Eventually I hit a very low point and realized I'd better get some help or I would be in trouble.” A talk with Neighbor's squad leader helped, especially because it developed that the other man was having a similarly difficult time.

O'Hern learned from the grim experience. ”Up until that day, what we did was little more than a live-action video game,” he concluded. After it, ”[e]very move I make, every plan that I put together, is now scrutinized from every angle. I have realized that I must be prepared at all times, and that the attack will come when I least expect it. There is a voice inside that senses when something's not right, and I am steadily training myself to always listen to it.”

Later that summer, Lt. Col. Poirier, the MP battalion commander who had been in Fallujah and then moved to Tikrit, had his own wake-up call from the insurgency. It came at about eleven o'clock at night, when he was convoying back up to Tikrit-about a three-hour Humvee drive from Baghdad-after a ”useless” meeting at Camp Victory, near the Baghdad airport, on police issues. He had been noticing flares arcing in the sky to the west of the highway, and was beginning to suspect that someone was tracking his convoy's movement. A bit south of Samarra, he was out of radio range from his headquarters, so the issue was up to him, as the commander.

”I was trying to figure out a plan-go west?-when all h.e.l.l broke loose- mortars, machine guns, RPGs,” he recalled. One deadly RPG cut diagonally through the cab of his Humvee, pa.s.sing before his face and behind his driver's head. Two thoughts immediately pa.s.sed through his mind. First was, ”Oh, s.h.i.+t, we got caught flat-footed. The next thought was, If I survive this, I will hunt down every guy doing this.”

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