Part 12 (1/2)

The U.S. Army vs. the principles of counterinsurgency In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. Army had worked hard, and had found some tactical successes. There is no question that the vast majority of the soldiers in the field had poured their hearts and souls into the effort. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders who had been sent to do a mission for which they were unprepared by an inst.i.tution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies.

It is striking how much of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in the late summer and fall of 2003 violated the basic tenets of such efforts. One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency is Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, written by retired French army Lt. Col. David Galula, who was born in Tunisia, raised in Morocco, and entered the French army in 1938. For the next two decades he received an advanced education in modern warfare. He served in World War II, studied Mao Zedong's guerrilla campaign in China in the late 1940s-and briefly was taken captive by the communists-and then spent eighteen months in Greece just as the civil war there ended. Finally, he fought the Algerian rebels in the late fifties. He wrote his book at Harvard University in 1963, and died four years later. In written by retired French army Lt. Col. David Galula, who was born in Tunisia, raised in Morocco, and entered the French army in 1938. For the next two decades he received an advanced education in modern warfare. He served in World War II, studied Mao Zedong's guerrilla campaign in China in the late 1940s-and briefly was taken captive by the communists-and then spent eighteen months in Greece just as the civil war there ended. Finally, he fought the Algerian rebels in the late fifties. He wrote his book at Harvard University in 1963, and died four years later. In Street Without Joy, Street Without Joy, a study of the French war in Indochina, military a.n.a.lyst Bernard Fall called Galula's book ”the best of them all.” a study of the French war in Indochina, military a.n.a.lyst Bernard Fall called Galula's book ”the best of them all.”

”Counterinsurgency Warfare is the primer and at the same time the bible” on the subject, agreed Terry Daly, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked with provincial reconnaissance units in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. ”It describes what an insurgency is, how it differs from conventional war, and the steps to take to defeat an insurgency on the ground.” is the primer and at the same time the bible” on the subject, agreed Terry Daly, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked with provincial reconnaissance units in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. ”It describes what an insurgency is, how it differs from conventional war, and the steps to take to defeat an insurgency on the ground.”

Yet in 2003-4 the book was almost unknown within the U.S. military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort in Iraq failed to heed- especially in 2003-4. Take, for example, the divided structure of command, with both military and civilian chiefs of the occupation. ”Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of single direction,” Galula admonished in his clear, simple style. ”A single boss must direct the operations from beginning to end.” What's more, he noted, that overseer must be a civilian, because military actions must always be subordinate to political goals. In Iraq, the U.S. presence was controlled by no one person, and the civilian and military efforts frequently were at odds. For a counterinsurgency military, Galula prescribed a radically different approach than the one taken by the Army in Iraq. He warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they hold out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. ”True, systematic large-scale operations, because of their very size, alleviate somewhat the intelligence and mobility deficiency of the counterinsurgent,” he wrote. ”Nevertheless, conventional operations by themselves have at best no more effect than a fly swatter.”

Galula did see one part of a country where a heavy military emphasis was required-its frontiers. ”The border areas are a permanent source of weakness for the counterinsurgent,” he cautioned. Yet the U.S. military neglected Iraq's frontiers for over a year, even though two neighboring nations-Iran and Syria- clearly were hostile to U.S. ambitions in the country and the region.

Galula also insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war. ”A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty; the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire.” The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as a good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and again in the battles in Fallujah.

One reason for that different tactical approach, of course, was the muddled strategic approach of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. Rather, Galula admonished, the people are the prize. ”The population ... becomes the objective for the coun-terinsurgent as it was for his enemy,” he wrote.

From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with the people. ”Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hards.h.i.+ps for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum,” Galula mandated. ”The units partic.i.p.ating in the operations should be thoroughly indoctrinated to that effect, the misdeeds punished severely and even publicly if this can serve to impress the population.” Even prisoners should be treated well, he added. He recommended this not on the grounds of morality but of military effectiveness: ”Demoralization of the enemy's forces is an important task. The most effective way to achieve it is by employing a policy of leniency toward the prisoners.” Fortunately for the U.S. effort, the insurgents frequently were even clumsier, abusing their own prisoners and alienating much of the international media.

Every indication is that the majority of U.S. troops did act well toward Iraqis most of the time. But the emphasis on the use of force, on powerful retaliation, and on protecting U.S. troops at all costs tended to push them toward harsh treatment, especially of detainees. Hundreds of small instances of abuse at bases across Iraq combined into a torrent that became the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Galula was hardly an outrider in counterinsurgency theory. Rather, his work amounts to an updating and refinement of methods British officers had developed during many decades of operations in India, Africa, China, and the Middle East. Sir Charles Gwynn, a British military educator, distilled those lessons in a 1939 textbook t.i.tled Imperial Policing, Imperial Policing, which prescribed four basic principles to govern the official response to an insurrection: Civil power must be in charge, civilian and military authorities must cooperate relentlessly, action must be firm and timely, but when force is required it should be used minimally. The U.S. effort in Iraq violated at least three of these rules for at least the first year of the occupation. which prescribed four basic principles to govern the official response to an insurrection: Civil power must be in charge, civilian and military authorities must cooperate relentlessly, action must be firm and timely, but when force is required it should be used minimally. The U.S. effort in Iraq violated at least three of these rules for at least the first year of the occupation.

c.u.mulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top. And so, again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to a.s.sert and rea.s.sert control in Fallujah, in Samarra, in Mosul.

It isn't clear why U.S. commanders seemed so flatly ignorant of how other counterinsurgencies had been conducted successfully. The main reason seems to be a repugnance, after the fall of Saigon, for dwelling on unconventional operations. But the cost of such willful ignorance was high. ”Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting,” Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment a year later.

Bremer vs. the world Back in Was.h.i.+ngton, frustration with Bremer was growing. ”He ignored my suggestions,” recalled Wolfowitz. ”He ignored Rumsfeld's instructions.”

One day late in 2003, while sailing in the Mediterranean, Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, the big software company, received a phone call from the Pentagon: Can we borrow General Kellogg, who had retired from the Joint Staff and gone to work for the software giant? Sure, Ellison replied.

The CPA was limping, staffed at 54 percent of its estimated requirement. And, Kellogg remembered, many of those were ”young, inexperienced, and didn't speak the language.” He went out to try to fix things, and especially to repair a relations.h.i.+p with the U.S. military that had turned ”adversarial.”

Early on, Kellogg set up a back channel to Rice's office in the White House, in part because Rice had asked him to provide ”ground truth,” he said, and partly because he soon came to believe that Bremer was misleading Was.h.i.+ngton on how much progress he was making. ”For example, Bremer would tell congressional delegations that there were one hundred thousand Iraqi security forces trained. I sent a back channel message to Wolfowitz and Rice saying, 'You're setting yourself up, this number isn't right, I am overseeing the training, and there are just ten thousand.' I also told them that electricity was much worse than they thought.”

Rumsfeld's response was to send out survey teams that could determine the facts on the ground. Bremer objected to the first team, and its trip was cancelled, Kellogg recalled. The second team was led by Maj. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an Army general fresh from working on training issues in Afghanistan. He reviewed the training of Iraqi police and military units and concluded that things weren't going well. U.S. commanders told members of the a.s.sessment team that ”the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces,” Bing West, a member of the team, noted in his account of U.S. military operations in Anbar province. The CPA was overseeing the training of the Iraqis while the U.S. military was trying to use those forces. To fix the program, Eikenberry decided, all training and employment of Iraqi forces should be consolidated under the U.S. military.

”You can't have disunity of command in the middle of a war,” said the briefing Eikenberry's team prepared for Bremer, according to West, who helped write it. ”We have split authority from responsibility.”

When Eikenberry apprised Bremer of his plan to recommend the s.h.i.+ft, Kellogg recalled, ”Bremer just unloaded on him: 'It's not gonna happen, it's wrong, I'll go to the president on this, I'll go to Rumsfeld.'”

West had a more succinct summary: ”Bremer went bat s.h.i.+t.”

But what Bremer didn't know was that Eikenberry held his own trump card. And he played it, taking the recommendation to Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the region-and his close friend since the two were roommates in the West Point cla.s.s of 1973. They had remained close ever since, a fairly unusual duo in Army culture, quirky intellectuals in a peer group that is, as one former officer once noted, more inclined to read Ba.s.s Fis.h.i.+ng Ba.s.s Fis.h.i.+ng magazine than serious military history. Both hold advanced degrees from Harvard and speak non-Western languages-Abizaid, Arabic, and Eikenberry, Chinese. A few months later Eiken-berry's consolidation recommendation was implemented, with Petraeus sent back to Iraq to oversee all training of Iraqi security forces, from the army and the national guard to border patrol, interior security, and police. magazine than serious military history. Both hold advanced degrees from Harvard and speak non-Western languages-Abizaid, Arabic, and Eikenberry, Chinese. A few months later Eiken-berry's consolidation recommendation was implemented, with Petraeus sent back to Iraq to oversee all training of Iraqi security forces, from the army and the national guard to border patrol, interior security, and police.

Another member of Eikenberry's a.s.sessment team was Gary Anderson, the retired Marine colonel who had b.u.t.ted heads with Bremer in the summer of 2003 when he mentioned Vietnam. Anderson, anxious to see what was happening on the ground, had been sneaking out of the Green Zone to go on patrol with Iraqi security forces. On the foggy morning of January 18, 2004, he headed across the Tigris River to patrol Sadr City with a platoon of Iraqis. He heard a blast from across the city. A pickup truck loaded with half a ton of PE-4 plastic explosives topped with a cl.u.s.ter of 155 millimeter artillery sh.e.l.ls had exploded at a checkpoint at the main gate of the Green Zone, killing twenty and wounding sixty others. When Anderson got back to the zone, he learned that he had been presumed to be one of the victims. ”Everyone thought I was dead,” he said later.

Holshek loses PFC Bush Every soldier who served in Iraq seems to have one day-even one moment- that stands foremost in their memory. For Lt. Col. Holshek, it was December 19 at 9:45 in the morning, during the last month of his tour, a few weeks after he had persuaded Col. Hogg to modify the 4th Infantry Division's tactics in Baqubah.

PFC Charles Bush, Jr., was an older private, a thirty-four-year-old from Buffalo, New York, who was a cook but had been retrained to man the Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, atop a Humvee. He was doing just that on a supply run to the big U.S. base at Balad, about 40 miles to the northwest. As is so often the case in violent incidents, what happened next isn't clear. The small, fast-moving, three-vehicle convoy was west of the Tigris and nearing Balad when the driver of the Humvee thought he heard AK-47s firing. The Humvees were armored, which meant that the soldiers were largely protected from small-arms fire. But it also meant that they were nine hundred pounds heavier than the Humvees the drivers were accustomed to, with a higher center of gravity.

When the driver thought he heard shots, he began to drive evasively, accelerating and swinging the wheel in order to present a more difficult target to hit. Just as he did, a front wheel caught a deep pothole, and the combination of speed and momentum flipped the vehicle forward, over its front end. Bush, manning the hatch gun, was crushed.

The incident hit Holshek hard just as the end of his unit's tour was in sight. ”I was at the point of psychological exhaustion,” he said, looking back from a year later. ”All I wanted to do was get across the finish line, get my people home. I was beginning to doubt the mission, whether or not we were going to succeed. I was beginning to think about all the things we had done to work against ourselves- we had met the enemy, and he was us.”

A month later, his tour of duty over and command of the unit transferred to his successor in a quick, middle-of-the-night ceremony at an airport in Kuwait, Holshek flew back to the United States. His first stop, even before seeing his own family, was Buffalo, where he visited PFC Bush's father-and delivered a case of Molson's beer to pay off a Super Bowl bet he had lost with Bush. It was his final act as a battalion commander. ”I know what the cost is when you don't do this right,” he said.

THE DESCENT INTO ABUSE.

SUMMER TO WINTER 2003.

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[image]V^/borne that was headquartered in Mosul, was told one evening late in 2003 by his intelligence officer that soldiers at their detention center had reported that one of their Iraqi prisoners had a broken jaw. As such incidents go, it was routine, similar to dozens of others that occurred across Iraq during the first phase of the American occupation. Yet a warning bell went off in Anderson's head. ”I was suspicious,” he said later. When people fall down, they sustain a broken nose or a cut chin, but jawbones are broken by a blow. ”They said he fell.”

What's more, news of the incident came just after the 101st had suffered its worst month ever of casualties while in Iraq, losing twenty-five soldiers in November, and Anderson knew his soldiers wanted payback. ”Guys get p.i.s.sed when they see their buddies blown away,” he said. He understood the emotion but felt strongly that it shouldn't be expressed through illegal or immoral acts. He ordered an informal inquiry, which soon turned into a formal investigation. On December 19, the investigation board concluded that the injury was caused either by the Iraqi's being struck or caused to fall. In either case, the harm was ”the result of intentional acts by coalition forces.”

The soldier directly involved was issued a letter of reprimand, but that was the least of the consequences. The investigation had uncovered a host of other problems. ”The detainees were being systematically and intentionally mistreated,” one investigator wrote.

”I saw the chief throw them down, put his knee in his neck and back, and grind them into the floor,” one witness stated. ”He would use a bullhorn and yell at them in Arabic and play heavy metal music extremely loud; they got so scared they would urinate on themselves. He was very aggressive and rough with detainees.” Prisoners also were made to exercise until they couldn't stand, and then were doused in cold water. Some were made to wear sandbags on their heads on which were written ”IED,” signifying to soldiers-incorrectly in most cases, it appears-that their wearer had been caught trying to bomb U.S. troops.

Most important, investigators reported, the brigade detention center was being run by a military intelligence battalion untrained for the job. They knew how to interrogate prisoners, not how to guard and house them. Anderson and his commander, Petraeus, reacted with alacrity. Control of the detention facility was transferred ”almost instantly” from the military intelligence battalion to a military police unit that knew how to manage prisoners, Anderson said. Latrines were moved closer to the holding area, to minimize the chances that prisoners would ”trip” while being escorted. Fences were erected so detainees could move outside the building while still being controlled. Floodlights were installed. Also, the word went out across the division that abuse wouldn't be tolerated. ”Tone is very important,” Petraeus said much later. ”People say this is a squad leaders' war. But what generals can do is set tone.” In addition, to ensure a layer of oversight, Petraeus reached out to the Red Cross and to local religious, political, and civic leaders, inviting them to inspect the lOlst's detention facilities often, to talk to prisoners, and to bring any problems to his attention.

In the next two months there was only one case of possible abuse detected, Anderson noted, and that was an ambiguous situation. In his view, the quick reaction to the broken jaw incident was characteristic of the division's style. ”We were constantly a.s.sessing our operations-were we doing it right, going after the right people, having the effects we wanted to have?” Anderson said. ”Dealing with detainees was just part of this.”

Communicating with violence In historical terms, the lOlst's broken jaw incident was minor, hardly worth remembering but for the swift and effective response of its leaders. Other divisions posted far different records of abuse than the 101st. It wasn't that soldiers were ordered to be cruel, it is that acts of cruelty were tolerated in some units, to the point that one officer in the 82nd Airborne, Capt. Ian Fishback, would later charge that it was systematic.

The atmosphere of official lawlessness in some Army units is significant for several reasons. It demeaned all those involved. It usually was militarily ineffective and counterproductive. And it tarnished the image of the United States and its military. When a policeman abuses or tortures a suspect, it inevitably diminishes the officer's humanity, wrote French army Capt. Pierre-Henri Simon, who was a prisoner of the Germans during World War II and, a decade later, a critic of his country's behavior during the Algerian revolution. But when a soldier uses abuse or torture, Simon argued, it is worse, because ”it is here that the honor of the nation becomes engaged.”

Much of the initial mistreatment of Iraqis by American troops seemed to be the result of soldiers' not being trained or mentally prepared for the mission. Faced with looting and unable to speak the language of the people they were trying to police, many soldiers flailed, using force ineffectively or brutally. ”It is not uncommon to hear American soldiers explain that the only thing the Iraqis understand is 'force,'” Army Reserve Maj. Christopher Varhola, an anthropologist who traveled widely in Iraq, later noted. ”For the most part, however, the people saying this do not speak Arabic and have had little or no interaction with Iraqis.”

”Take them out hack and heat the f.u.c.k out of them”

An incident involving the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment captures the Army's predicament during the summer of 2003. It was the finest fighting force in the world for conventional combat, but it was ill-prepared for the irregular war in which it found itself. In this sense, abusive soldiers sometimes were victims of the Army's lack of preparation. One officer in the 2nd ACR, which was a.s.signed to eastern Baghdad in the summer of 2003, recalled to an Army investigator that when he brought looters back to his base, a commander there ”told my sergeant that he didn't want them here. Then he told my platoon sergeant to 'take them out back and beat the f.u.c.k out of them'”-an account supported by other soldiers.

(The battery commander, whose name was redacted from doc.u.ments released to the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] under the Freedom of Information Act, responded to investigators, ”I have never seriously told anyone to do that________ Even if I had said that, the NCO should never have thought I meant it.”) Shocked, the sergeant went back outside and told his soldiers what the senior officer had said. ”I told my squad leaders what Bulldog 6 told me to do with all the looters,” the sergeant continued in a written statement. ”I told them we are NOT going to do that.” American soldiers were better than that, in his view. But, still wanting to make a point to the looters, he ordered that they be taken to the base's front gate, stripped naked, and set loose. He was trying to do the right thing, but he had violated the rules governing the treatment of detainees-an offense for which he was later charged.

The lack of preparation was also reflected in an incident involving soldiers in the 1st Armored Division. On the fly, they had devised a method of discriminating among the Iraqis they detained for looting: Those who when captured stared back at their captors were considered likely to loot again, but those who cried in fear were deemed to be deterred. On June 20, 2003, a lieutenant told soldiers to move a looter out of a truck. The officer was going to make him cry. ”I was standing at the front of our truck when I saw [the name deleted] put the guy on his knees and put a gun to the back of his head,” a soldier said in a sworn statement. ”Then he bent down and said something to the guy. I did not hear because I was too far away. Then I saw him stand up ... and shoot. The barrel of the weapon was just high enough to miss the guy.” The officer claimed in a statement that he fired his weapon to scare away a feral dog, but six soldiers testified that they hadn't seen any such animal.

Two nights later, a sergeant in the same platoon followed suit. This second incident occurred when an Iraqi man and his two teenage sons were detained for looting. The sergeant radioed his lieutenant, who asked, ”Are they crying yet?” The sergeant then told the father he was going to shoot one of the boys, according to an Army investigator's report. Which one will it be, he asked?

”No, please shoot me, don't shoot my sons,” the man responded, as would most fathers. The sergeant repeated the question twice, according to another soldier's affidavit. Then he walked one of the boys around to the far side of a truck, where they couldn't be seen, and fired his pistol by the boy's head. The three were then let go.

Many soldiers were troubled by such behavior. In this case, a soldier from another unit stated, ”I reported the incident to my platoon sergeant and told him that I didn't want to work with these guys again.”

The strategic confusion about why the United States was in Iraq, such as the Bush administration's insistence that the war was part of the counterattack against al Qaeda-style terrorism and so was somehow a response to the 9/11 attacks, may have led some American soldiers to treat ordinary Iraqis as if they were terrorists. Some indeed were. But many-certainly the majority of those raided and detained-were just average Iraqis, not necessarily sympathetic to the U.S. presence but not actually taking up arms against it, at least before they were humiliated or incarcerated.

The 3rd ACR in western Iraq Asia Times ran an extraordinary account of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's war, which was off the beaten track in western Iraq, far from most reporters, who tended to focus their work nearer Baghdad, especially as traveling the roads of central Iraq grew increasingly hazardous. ran an extraordinary account of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's war, which was off the beaten track in western Iraq, far from most reporters, who tended to focus their work nearer Baghdad, especially as traveling the roads of central Iraq grew increasingly hazardous.

Lt. Col. Gregory Reilly, the commander of the regiment's 1st squadron, seemed to understand the nature of the war he was fighting. ”I have to be very careful because what I do can have the opposite reaction from the intention,” he told the magazine's Nir Rosen. But the 3rd ACR troops observed by Rosen during his two weeks with the unit in late September and early October 2003 didn't seem to him to translate that understanding into action. One raid began with a tank breaking down the stone wall of a house. Teams charged over the rubble and through the hole in the wall, breaking down a door with a sledgehammer and taking prisoners. None of the men detained in the first house was on the target list, but they were held anyway, Rosen reported. ”House after house meets the same fate,” he wrote. ”Some homes only have women in them; they, too, are ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers.” He continued: Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic ”zip ties” sit in the back of the truck for hours without water.... By daylight the whole town can see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket are stopped at gunpoint, ordered to ”shut the f.u.c.k up” as their basket's contents are tossed out and they are questioned about the location of a suspect. The soldier guarding them speaks of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. ”If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared,” he explains. An Iraqi policeman drives by in a white sport utility vehicle clearly marked ”Police.” He, too, is stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid is complete. From a list of 34 names, Apache [the troop, the cavalry branch's equivalent of a company] brings in about 16 positively identified men, along with another 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 0830, Apache is done, and starts driving back to base. As the main element departs, the psychological-operations vehicle blasts AC/DC rock music through the neighborhood streets. ”It's good for morale after such a long mission,” Captain Brown [Justin Brown, Apache's commander] says. utility vehicle clearly marked ”Police.” He, too, is stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid is complete. From a list of 34 names, Apache [the troop, the cavalry branch's equivalent of a company] brings in about 16 positively identified men, along with another 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 0830, Apache is done, and starts driving back to base. As the main element departs, the psychological-operations vehicle blasts AC/DC rock music through the neighborhood streets. ”It's good for morale after such a long mission,” Captain Brown [Justin Brown, Apache's commander] says.

Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them-not knowing that the t.i.tles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam. The Crimes of Saddam. ”The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and a.s.sumed they were proof of guilt,” Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. ”Oh s.h.i.+t,” said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained ”was the wrong Ayoub.” ”The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and a.s.sumed they were proof of guilt,” Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. ”Oh s.h.i.+t,” said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained ”was the wrong Ayoub.”

The Army was understandably dismayed by Rosen's reporting. ”I am devastated by the content of your article regarding my squadron,” Lt. Col. Reilly wrote to the young reporter after the article appeared. The message conveyed, he said, was that ”this unit has no respect for the Iraqi people and we are nothing but a bunch of hoodlums______ It is really too bad, we are trying hard to do the right things here and make a difference and now the reputation of my squadron is completely destroyed.” Looking back on the article nearly two years later, during his second tour, Reilly said that the unit didn't dwell much on it.