Part 11 (1/2)
The south generally was quiet. But in early October there was a shootout between militias of two factions-one of them from the dominant s.h.i.+te group, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the single most powerful political figure in Iraq, and the other made up of followers of the upstart s.h.i.+te cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr. Lt. Col. Orlando was dispatched to investigate and ensure that curfews and other rules intended to curb violence were being followed. He was in a small patrol of three Humvees in the city near the compound of Mahmoud Ha.s.sani, a minor s.h.i.+te cleric, when he saw a large group of fighters lounging outside, their AK-47 a.s.sault rifles in hand. This was a violation of an understanding in the region about the amount of weaponry permitted to be displayed in public, Spain recalled-clerics were permitted bodyguards, but only in limited numbers.
Orlando got out of his Humvee and walked toward the fighters. ”Look, you've been told, you can only have two AK-47s out front,” he began saying, according to a subsequent Army inquiry.
One of the militiamen waved a hand at Orlando, signaling him and the two soldiers with him to lay down their weapons before coming closer. The Iraqi who was motioning swung his AK-47 upward, as if to fire. At that point, American soldiers said later, one of the Iraqis shot Orlando. One of Orlando's soldiers then shot that Iraqi. ”Then all h.e.l.l broke loose,” 1st Sgt. Troy Wallen later said. Wallen had been standing next to Orlando. What felt to him like a planned ambush then unfolded, as Iraqi fighters on rooftops and in alleys and storefronts opened fire on the three Humvees.
A nearby Army convoy responded to the soldiers' call for help and opened fire, an unusual action in that it involved at least four female Army soldiers. They were members of an MP unit and so not officially front-line ground combat troops, as are infantry, armor, and artillery units. Pvt. Teresa Broadwell, a twenty-year-old Texan who wanted to be a modern dancer, opened up with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, from her turret atop an Army truck. Pvt. Trade Sanchez, a thirty-year-old mother of four, began to follow suit but was. .h.i.t in the helmet by a bullet and then knocked out of her turret by a grenade. Her face was peppered with shrapnel. Sgt. Misty Frazier, a twenty-five-year-old combat medic, ran from one wounded soldier to the next. It was the first time she'd heard hostile fire close up. Spec. Corrie Jones, twenty-seven, arrived as the shooting ended.
Three soldiers were down at the end of the short, sharp fight, either wounded or dead: Orlando and two members of his battalion, Staff Sgt. Joseph Bellavia and Cpl. Sean Grilley. Seven Iraqis were dead.
Spain was asleep in his headquarters near the Baghdad airport when he heard a knocking at his door at 12:30 in the morning. ”Sir, I need you to wake up,” his executive officer shouted from the hallway. She knew that he slept in his underwear and with a loaded weapon near his hand. ”I need you to put down your pistol and put on your pants.” In the hallway she gave him the sketchy information they had: There had been a firelight, Orlando had been injured but was talking in the Humvee on the way to be medevaced, and was going to make it. At two she woke him again: Orlando and the two others were dead. All three.
Spain felt sure that report was wrong, and stayed up the rest of the night in his headquarters trying to figure out where the miscommunication had occurred. When instead the report was confirmed, he called the battalion's executive officer and told him he was temporarily in command of the unit. He called back to the commandant of the MP school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and arranged for a new battalion commander to be s.h.i.+pped out as soon as possible. He felt that he was in unknown territory. ”You train for a lot, but no one trains you to lose a battalion commander,” he said later.
At 8:30 in the morning, Gen. Sanchez called. The general, three ranks higher than Spain, cut immediately to the point. ”What intel did you have about Kar-bala?” Sanchez demanded, according to Spain.
”Sir, I don't know what you mean,” Spain responded, a bit perplexed. ”That's not an area in my control.”
”Don't say that,” Sanchez said. ”What intel did you have?”
”I don't know,” Spain said, growing alarmed at Sanchez's angry persistence. What did the general mean with this line of questioning?
”You come here in two hours and brief me on what intel you had,” Sanchez ordered.
At precisely ten-thirty Spain arrived at the Green Zone, walked past the Marine standing guard outside Sanchez's office, and stood before the general. Sanchez thrust a sheaf of papers into Spain's hands. Spain looked down, but as he began to read about the warning of violence in Karbala, Sanchez yanked them back. ”Did you know this?” Sanchez demanded.
Spain hadn't been able to read far enough to know precisely what was meant by ”this.” ”Sir, as far as I can tell, from what I could read, no, I didn't,” he said.
”That was your battalion,” Sanchez said. ”Why didn't you?”
Spain now began to understand where the general was going: He was going to blame Spain for the death of Orlando. ”Sir,” Spain said, ”your staff told me that that battalion was not under my control.”
”This was your battalion,” Sanchez repeated.
Spain was close to losing his temper with the senior U.S. commander in Iraq. ”Sir, if you are trying to make me feel any worse about losing a battalion commander, you can't,” he said. The colonel and the general glared at each other. It felt like several minutes, Spain said later, but probably was just thirty seconds. He felt that Sanchez was waiting for him to speak, but worried that if he tried to argue further he would overstep the boundaries of military courtesy, especially with a superior officer. ”I was smart enough to know that anything I could say would be wrong” in Sanchez's judgment, so he kept his mouth shut and stared into the general's eyes.
”Do you have anything to say?” Sanchez finally said.”No, sir,” Spain said.”Get out of my office and go visit your battalion,” Sanchez ordered.
It was the last one-on-one conversation Spain had with Sanchez in Iraq. He almost shuddered as he recounted the experience over a year later, in his southern Virginia home, having retired from the Army after leaving Iraq. ”Lieutenant General Sanchez never did tell me what I should have known about what was going on in Karbala,” he said. ”To me, it was my worst experience in Iraq. That was, without a doubt, the worst day.”
The Ramadan offensive Unjustified optimism would prove to be one of the enduring characteristics of the U.S. management of the war. As late as mid-October 2003, as violence was spiking, top U.S. commanders were sketching plans for a troop drawdown in the summer of 2004, cutting from 130,000 to perhaps 100,000 in the summer of 2004, and half that by the following year. (In fact, in December 2005, the level would instead be substantially higher, at 159,000.) At the same time, they hoped, Iraqi security forces would be taking responsibility for patrolling the cities while U.S. forces moved offstage, where they would play a less obtrusive role as a quick reaction force to rescue Iraqi units that got into trouble. This phased series of troop reductions was in ”the advanced stages of planning, but not yet approved” by Secretary Rumsfeld, a senior official said on October 17.
To others, that talk of troop cuts was unrealistic. ”There was this big emphasis on troop reductions,” said a civilian U.S. official who frequently interacted with the military at Green Zone meetings. ”They should have been doing a risk a.s.sessment. Instead, in that October period, CJTF-7 was focused on planning the troop rotation and the reductions that would follow. To me, it was pretty clear that security had not been achieved. They hadn't done an adequate mission a.n.a.lysis- they should have gone back upstairs and said, 'The insurgency is strong, and growing stronger, and the need to train Iraqi security forces is huge, and we need to beef up our forces to give them the s.p.a.ce to develop capacity.'”
On October 26, the night that the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, PFC Rachel Bosveld, a nineteen-year-old MP from Wisconsin in Spain's unit, was at the Abu Ghraib police station, in the town near the prison, west of Baghdad. ”A mortar came in, killed her, and blew the leg off another soldier,” Spain recalled. Her death was significant for two reasons. First, it was barely noted: In a departure from past wars, the loss of forty-eight female soldiers from 2003 through 2005 hardly caused a ripple in American society.
But in terms of the history of the Iraq war, Bosveld's death is significant because it-along with a rocket attack a few hours later on the hotel inside the Green Zone where Wolfowitz was staying-marked the beginning of the insurgency's Ramadan offensive. This was the first time since the invasion that the foe turned fully on U.S. forces, bringing the highest rate of American fatalities since the spring. At 6:10 on the morning of Sunday, October 26, at least six rockets struck the al Rasheed Hotel, the CPA lodging inside the Green Zone. Wolfowitz, who was staying there during a quick visit, was uninjured, but an Army officer on the floor below him was killed. The rocket barrage likely was intended to get Wolfowitz, as was the downing of a Black Hawk helicopter near Tikrit the day before, just after his visit there. The attacks were militarily insignificant but politically meaningful: The insurgents had been able to reach into the heavily protected Green Zone and threaten the life of a senior U.S. official who had been instrumental in the drive to war.
In another action the same day with political significance, one of Baghdad's three deputy mayors, Faris Abdul Razzaq a.s.sam, was a.s.sa.s.sinated by gunmen, who shot him in a cafe. The next morning, four police stations were bombed nearly simultaneously in Baghdad, some of them with trucks painted to look like police vehicles, each carrying one thousand pounds of plastic explosives. At a fifth station a bomb failed to detonate because the wire attaching it to the car battery had accidentally disconnected. The offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross also were hit, by a truck disguised as an ambulance. Altogether, more than thirty-five people were killed and hundreds wounded. ”It was a horrible day, with a lot of children dying,” said a former Special Forces soldier working on security issues in Iraq. ”I felt like the whole city was blowing up, and I was thinking about Mogadishu.”
Within a few days, another sad milestone had been pa.s.sed: More U.S. troops had died in combat since May 1, when President Bush had declared major combat operations finished, than during the spring invasion. In an odd echo of his ”Bring 'em on” comment in July, Bush-who was meeting with Bremer in the Oval Office-interpreted the insurgency's escalation as a sign of progress. ”The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react,” Bush said, Bremer at his side. ”The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can't stand the thought of a free society.” (This prompted an officer to send off a reporter heading to Iraq with the warning, ”Be careful, or you might become another sign of progress.”) ”There are a lot of wonderful things that have happened since July,” Bremer added. Sure, he said, there had been some ”rough days.” But ”the good days outnumber the bad days. And that's the thing we need to keep in perspective.”
Insurgent attacks grew both more numerous and more sophisticated during Ramadan 2003. In the summer there had been about ten to fifteen attacks on U.S. soldiers a day. By mid-October, that had doubled to twenty to thirty-five a day. By mid-November, as the Ramadan offensive was in full swing, they were peaking at forty-five a day. Also, for the first time, the insurgents began having success attacking aircraft. In late October, in an apparent attempt to target Wolfowitz while he was visiting, a UH-60 Black Hawk was brought down by insurgent fire; no one was killed. In early November a CH-47 Chinook was downed west of Baghdad, killing sixteen soldiers. A few days later another Black Hawk was. .h.i.t near Tikrit, killing six. Later in the month two Black Hawks collided over Mosul as one tried to evade ground fire, killing seventeen soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.
Also, attempts to down less vulnerable fixed-wing aircraft were stepped up, with missile and rocket launches at flights at the Baghdad airport. None was successful, but one came extraordinarily close, with a surface-to-air missile's destroying an engine on the left wing of a big DHL Airbus 300 cargo jet as it took off on November 21. Attacks in Baghdad also continued, with a series of rockets launched from donkey-pulled carts at the Oil Ministry and at the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, which were full of American contractors and reporters.
Publicly, U.S. commanders kept a ”steady as she goes” att.i.tude. ”We think the insurgency is waning,” Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, who now was an a.s.sistant commander of the 1st Armored Division, told reporters in Baghdad on November 7. ”The ones who continue to fight are losing their support.” Hertling had been skeptical about some aspects of the invasion a year earlier, when he was on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But now he was in combat, losing soldiers, and was determined to make their sacrifices worthwhile. ”The majority of soldiers feel we are making progress every day, and we are beyond the hardest part,” he said, speaking at Freedom Rest, his division's rest-and-recreation outpost in a former Iraqi officers' club in the Green Zone, where soldiers were sent for a few days of sleeping on hotel-quality sheets, sitting by the swimming pool, and generally pretending they weren't in Iraq.
But behind the scenes there was concern among commanders. In just two weeks, some sixty American soldiers had died. As the Ramadan offensive intensified, worry grew that the enemy would attempt to stage a spectacular series of attacks on Eid, the holiday that ends the holy month. ”We believed there would be an Eid al-Fitr culmination, so it was a ramp-up to stop that,” Swannack said later. In Anbar province, ”we got their attention.”
There was a new edge of toughness to the public comments of American officials at this time. On November 11, Rumsfeld, defining the situation quite differently than he had in June, told a television interviewer, ”We're in a low-intensity war that needs to be won, and we intend to win it.”
The same day, Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad, ”We're going to get pretty tough. And that's what's necessary to defeat this enemy. And we're definitely not shy about doing that when it's required, and we will do that in a precise, intel-driven mode.”
The next day both sides made major moves. A car bomb hit the Italian military headquarters in southern Iraq, killing eighteen Italians and eight Iraqis. It was the deadliest attack on a coalition partner of the U.S.-led occupation. It was also the greatest loss of life suffered by the Italian military since World War II.
On the U.S. side, the 1st Armored Division launched an operation in Baghdad called Iron Hammer that involved twenty-six artillery and mortar attacks and twenty-seven missions by strike aircraft. AC-130 guns.h.i.+ps, which carry machine guns and a 105 millimeter cannon, began flying nightly missions over Baghdad. To curb the IED attacks, soldiers were ordered to shoot to kill anyone seen digging holes alongside roads at night. In Baqubah, Lt. Col. Mark Young, commander of a battalion in the 4th Infantry Division, said that more tonnage of munitions was used by his unit than ever before in Iraq. ”This is to demonstrate one more time that we have significant firepower and can use it at our discretion,” he said. To any American familiar with one of the most basic concepts of counterinsurgency campaigns-that they succeed when a minimum of firepower is employed-that was a troubling statement.
Holsbek vs. Hogg in Baqubah Lt. Col. Holshek, the civil affairs officer in Baqubah, was growing increasingly frustrated with att.i.tudes like that, especially when he saw them displayed by his commander, the aggressive Col. Hogg. One day during a briefing in November, Holshek took the unusual step of challenging Hogg with a question. ”Sir, what is the battles.p.a.ce?” he asked.
For a tough combat commander like Hogg, the answer was self-evident: In conventional war, it usually is wherever you are fighting the enemy. ”His answer was, basically, 'the bad guys,'” Holshek recalled.
”Sir, wrong answer,” said Holshek, who with his shaved head looks a bit like a young Telly Savalas. Holshek was in a pushy New York mood that day, prodding Hogg to recognize that this wasn't a conventional war, it was something else altogether, and it needed to be fought as such. ”In counterinsurgency,” Holshek remembered telling the colonel, ”the battles.p.a.ce isn't physical, it's psychological. The battle is for the people.”
Killing people really wasn't the point, he continued. ”Bottom line is, you can kill every bad guy, and there will be two more tomorrow-until you start focusing on their support, active or pa.s.sive, in the resident population.” Holshek was saying that the Iraqi people were the prize in this fight, not the playing field. Here he was introducing Hogg to cla.s.sic counterinsurgency doctrine, which holds that the objective is first to gain control of the population, and then win their support. What's more, he said, moving out onto even thinner ice with his boss, ”your actions are having second- and third-order effects that will kill your soldiers down the road. I'm not selling Girl Scout cookies” (in other words, this isn't just so we can be nicer; this is so we can win). ”I am here to keep your soldiers from getting killed.” Hogg's tactics could wind up doing just that. He asked his commander to imagine himself the head of a household in an Iraqi village. ”Two o'clock in the morning, your door bursts open. A bunch of infantry guys burst into the private s.p.a.ce of the house-in a society where family honor is the most important thing-and you lay the man down, and put the plastic cuffs on? And then we say, 'Oops, wrong home?' In this society, the guy has no other choice but to seek rest.i.tution. He will do that by placing a roadside bomb for one hundred dollars, because his family honor has been compromised, to put it mildly.” Simply to restore his own self-respect, the Iraqi would then have to go out and take a shot at American forces.
Another tactic Holshek argued against was the use of 155 millimeter high-explosive artillery fire to respond to mortar attacks on the base. ”Sir, I'm not a maneuver guy,” he recalled saying, ”but the best way to respond to mortar fire is with boots on the ground-presence patrolling, work with the Iraqi cops, get the intel. Find out where it is, lie in ambush on the guy's two or three known firing points, and get the guy.”
Hogg didn't say much during this lecture from a subordinate, or after it, but Holshek believed he absorbed it. Then, two weeks later, Hogg convened his operations officer, his information operations officer (actually an artillery officer detailed to handle that task), and Holshek, and said, ”You guys need to fix this.”
In the following weeks, the brigade's operations began to change. ”He started to evolve,” Holshek recalled. ”He started to s.h.i.+ft operations, started using my CA [civil affairs] teams more effectively.” Hogg began to understand that when you make a mistake, you apologize, explain how it occurred, and give the householder one hundred dollars. ”We had much better integration of CA with the maneuver units. We had CA on raids.”
The wrong doors continued to be smashed on occasion, but when they were, Holshek would issue a letter that stated, ”We are sorry for the intrusion, we are trying to help here, and it is a difficult business, and we sometimes make mistakes. If you have information that would help us, we would be grateful.” The cash equivalent in dinars of one hundred dollars would accompany the note. Those gestures of regret didn't really win over Iraqis, Holshek recalled later, but he said he thought they did tend to tamp down anger, and so curtail acts of revenge.
Maj. Wilson, the historian and 101st planner, later concluded that much of the firing on U.S. troops in the summer and fall of 2003 consisted of honor shots, intended not so much to kill Americans as to restore Iraqi honor. ”Honor and pride lie at the center of tribal society,” he wrote. In a society where honor equals power, and power ensures survival, the restoration of damaged honor can be a matter of urgency. But that didn't mean that Iraqis insulted by American troops necessarily felt they had to respond lethally, Wilson reflected. ”Honor that is lost or taken must be returned by the offender, through ritualistic truce sessions, else it will be taken back through force of arms.” In Iraq this sometimes was expressed in ways similar to the American Indian practice of counting coup, in which damaging the enemy wasn't as important as demonstrating that one could. So, Wilson observed, an Iraqi would take a wild shot with a rocket-propelled grenade, or fire randomly into the air as a U.S. patrol pa.s.sed. ”Often the act of taking a stand against the 'subject of dishonor' is enough to restore the honor to the family or tribe,” whether or not the attack actually injured someone, he wrote. ”Some of the attacks that we originally saw as 'poor marksmans.h.i.+p' likely were intentional misses by attackers pro-progress and pro-U.S., but honor-bound to avenge a perceived wrong that U.S. forces at the time did not know how to appropriately resolve.” But U.S. troops a.s.sumed simply that the Iraqis were bad shots.
Tactics: force vs. effectiveness Counterproductive tactics, like the ones Holshek confronted Hogg about, were all too common in the U.S. military in 2003, and well into 2004. ”Heard a horror story this afternoon,” Marine Col. T. X. Hammes wrote in his diary one evening.
They had been taking sniper fire from a building for six nights. So that day, they send a civic action team to the high-rise building it came from and they ordered everyone to evacuate because the building was going to be destroyed. That night, two AC-130s pumped rounds into it until it was reduced to rubble. Made lots of friends that way. Suggestion that perhaps they should set an ambush and either kill or capture the sniper since he is being so predictable but that idea was rejected. We had to demonstrate our firepower to these people.
It wasn't the big headline-grabbing mistakes that undercut the U.S. effort as much as the daily, routine operations of U.S. troops not trained for counterinsurgency. A study by the Center for Army Lessons Learned warned especially against the practice of taking hostages.
Tactics such as detaining the family members of anti-Coalition forces, destroying the houses of captured suspects, destroying the houses of captured suspects without judicial due process, and shooting at Iraqi vehicles that attempt to pa.s.s Coalition vehicles on major highways may bestow short-term tactical advantages. However, these advantages should be weighed against Iraqi sentiments and the long-term disadvantages a.s.sociated with the image this creates. It is a practice in some U.S. U.S. units to detain family members of anti-Coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members. units to detain family members of anti-Coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members.
These tactics led in the wrong direction. T. E. Lawrence, the British adviser to Arab guerrillas during World War I, once denned tactics as ”the means toward the strategic goal, the steps of its staircase.” The tactics that many U.S. commanders used in Iraq in 2003 led away from the strategic goal of winning the political support of the Iraqi people.
Ultimately, eighty-two U.S. troops died in November 2003, making it the worst month of the war up to that point. The Ramadan offensive wore on Teddy Spain. On November 9, a convoy of his MPs came under small arms attack in Baghdad. Sgt. Nicholas Tomko, a twenty-four-year-old reserve MP from Pittsburgh, was killed. The loss was on Spain's mind when he watched Fox News that evening. ”It talked about Michael Jackson, and about Martha Stewart, and so on,” he recalled, ”and about fifteen minutes into it, they said, 'Oh, and yeah, we lost a soldier in Baghdad today.'” He also was upset by fellow commanders who ”talked about losing soldiers like they'd talk about losing a weapon.”
No, Spain thought. ”This is forever.” He walked over to his computer and began to write, trying to translate his pain into words. ”These heroes left wives, husbands, children and other loved ones behind,” he wrote. ”They all had great plans for the future, but none of them had planned on dying in combat. These soldiers will never see their children graduate from high school, will never attend their weddings, will never coach their Little League baseball teams.” In the following weeks, as warplanes droned overhead at night, Spain returned to this doc.u.ment, adding to it during his quiet times before sleep. He would put it aside sometimes, then remember it on other bad days and open it again, and hone it. He was determined to tell the world about these losses, make them felt, have them remembered.
The Bush administration moves to plan B Privately that fall, Bush administration officials were more worried than they let on in public. Officials at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department began the week of September 8 puzzling over an op-ed piece by Bremer that had appeared in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post that Monday morning. According to some accounts the article blindsided Bush administration officials back in Was.h.i.+ngton. In it Bremer laid out a plan for a lengthy, seven-step roadmap to end the U.S. occupation. It actually boiled down to three major goals, in order: First, a const.i.tution would be written and ratified by Iraqis. Next would come a national election. Only after that would the U.S. occupation authority be dissolved. that Monday morning. According to some accounts the article blindsided Bush administration officials back in Was.h.i.+ngton. In it Bremer laid out a plan for a lengthy, seven-step roadmap to end the U.S. occupation. It actually boiled down to three major goals, in order: First, a const.i.tution would be written and ratified by Iraqis. Next would come a national election. Only after that would the U.S. occupation authority be dissolved.