Part 16 (1/2)

A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, ”This is a known ambush point.” It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey. Near dawn, Combs radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge ahead had been hit with explosives. ”We'll have to find another route, maybe through Baghdad,” Combs said with a sigh. An hour later he called to report that the convoy had adopted Plan C: ”The bridge at the secondary route is untenable, so we're going with a new route.”

Asked later about this enemy tactic, Col. Dana Pittard, the commander of the brigade that had replaced Col. Hogg's in Baqubah, said the attacks on the bridges had impressed him. ”The dropping of the bridges was very interesting, because it showed a regional or even a national level of organization.” The insurgents appeared to be sending information southward, communicating about routes being taken by U.S. forces, and then getting sufficient amounts of explosives to key bridges ahead of the convoys. One of Pittard's combat engineers noted that several hundred pounds of explosive material and a fair degree of expertise were required to destroy a span on the solidly built expressway bridges, which could support tank traffic.

The vehicles paused for two hours while alternatives were explored back at brigade headquarters. Finally, they proceeded into the s.h.i.+te Muslim heartland south of Baghdad, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The land was flat and hot, with farmers' fields dotted by palm groves. Above mud houses flew the black and green banners denoting s.h.i.+te Iraq. At 11:37, as the day grew sweltering, the convoy finally arrived at the Tigris. The bridge ahead was still standing. Over the radio came Combs's latest and most ominous message: ”When we get to the far side, I've got absolutely no clue where we are going.”

One mishap led to another. A Humvee driver, fatigued by the long haul and lulled by the warm weather, dozed off and rear-ended a truck, smas.h.i.+ng his headlights and puncturing his radiator. Trucks sitting and waiting for accidents to be resolved and bridges to be checked for explosives began to run low on fuel, necessitating a six-hour stop at the Skania Convoy Support Center, a kind of Fort Apache with gas pumps not far from the site of ancient Babylon. Hundreds of big civilian trucks supplying the U.S. military were lined up at the center, their Third World contractor drivers dozing in the shade. While the 1st Infantry Division troops waited to refuel, some watched a thunderstorm to the north that sent flashes of lightning across the entire Mesopotamian horizon. Others talked smack about how much they hated their ex-girlfriends.

At 11:00 p.m p.m. on Monday night, nearly twenty-four hours into the operation, the convoy arrived at a small town on the east bank of the Euphrates River. Groups of Iraqi men stood along the street, silently watching the vehicles pa.s.s, many of them with their arms crossed on their chests, their eyes glaring with hatred or wounded pride. ”No one waved, they just stood there looking at us,” commented PFC Steve Ratcliffe, a nineteen-year-old who worked at a grocery store in Sacramento until he enlisted in the Army, and now stood manning the big .50 caliber machine gun atop the sergeant major's Humvee.

As the last vehicles in the convoy crossed the river, a parachute flare shot up across the moonless night sky, then descended slowly, a white ball high to the right of the convoy. Fourhman tensed. Flares often were used by Iraqi fighters to signal comrades lying in wait for the approach of U.S. troops. A minute later, another one shot up. Then two orange flares arced up and slowly descended. Four minutes after the last flare, a flash of light and a huge noise hit the middle of the convoy. ”IEDs, IEDs,” Fourhman calmly but quickly said over the radio, reporting the improvised explosive devices. Red dots began zinging at the convoy from a dark grove on the left. Then there were other flashes and colors. ”RPG, RPG,” Fourhman radioed as rocket-propelled grenades flew in from the grove. He looked up at the .50 caliber and said, ”Ratcliffe, aim for the base of fire.” Ratcliffe and the driver-Spec. Sean Yebba, a twenty-two-year-old from near Boston- reacted calmly, doing their jobs. No one spoke unnecessarily. Ratcliffe swung the machine gun, searching for a target, his face illuminated only by the green glow of the night-vision scope atop his big weapon.

The convoy kept moving. ”I have one wounded,” came a soft, anonymous voice over the radio. About a mile farther down the road, the convoy halted to tend three wounded soldiers and repair a fuel truck hit by the bomb.

At 12:06, a call came over the radio to Fourhman. ”Duke 7, birds five mikes out,” meaning that the medical evacuation helicopter and the Apache guns.h.i.+p escorting it would arrive in five minutes. ”Duke 7,” Capt. Combs called again. ”As soon as the bird lifts off, I want to get the h.e.l.l out of here.” The UH-60 Black Hawk medevac helicopter arrived with its lights out, nearby but detectable only by the sounds of its rotors and engine. A wounded soldier was lifted out; he later died.

Before getting back on the road, the soldiers conducted a head count. A driver, a civilian employed by Kellogg Brown & Root, was missing. The convoy couldn't leave without him. The soldiers stood and waited, stretching their legs on the north side of the Humvees, away from the side where the shooting in the ambush had originated. Worried by the delay in resuming movement, Fourhman radioed Combs to advise looking for the missing Brown & Root driver aboard the mede-vac helicopter. The aviation unit reported back that it had taken no uninvited pa.s.sengers. Two hours later, when the aviators were again asked to check the helicopter, they found the man still hiding in it, cowering. ”Let's get out of here,” the sergeant major said with a sigh. ”I don't like this neighborhood.”

Four hours later, out in the desert west of the Euphrates, some of the big trucks in the convoy became mired in fresh mud, the result of the storms the troops had watched while ga.s.sing up. It was 2:00 p.m p.m. Tuesday when the exhausted convoy finally arrived at Forward Operating Base Duke, about 12 miles to the northwest of Najaf, out in the empty desert. A primitive Army camp with few amenities, it looked and felt like home to the exhausted men in the convoy.

Over the next several days, Iraqi fighters repeatedly brought home the message that the nature of the war had changed. In another ambush near Najaf, a group of fighters suspected to be part of Sadr's militia let a group of six U.S. armored vehicles pa.s.s their position, then placed obstacles across the highway behind them, cutting off their line of retreat. The armored vehicles were forced to move forward across a bridge. While they were on it and approaching a police checkpoint, Iraqi fighters, some of them wearing police uniforms, began firing on them.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, insurgents began dynamiting highway overpa.s.ses. Though they did not destroy the spans, they succeeded in slowing traffic, depriving U.S. supply convoys of their best defense against ambushes-speed. It is far easier to use roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades against a truck mired in traffic than it is to hit one moving at 60 mph.

Some insurgents also developed shockingly good methods of infiltration. When one group of fighters was captured at about this time, its members possessed identification cards that allowed them full access to U.S. military bases, recalled Kalev Sepp, the retired Special Forces officer who was an adviser on U.S. strategy in Iraq. They ”even had a photograph of themselves posing with a U.S. brigade commander,” he noted.

. . . and U.S. troops learn as well Before deploying to Iraq, Capt. Timothy Powledge thought that the best way to counter roadside bombs would be to aggressively pursue the person who triggered the blast. But after serving in Iraq for five months as commander of a company in the 3rd Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, he concluded that ”hunting down the triggerman after the detonation is nearly impossible.” His battalion, operating in western Iraq, was the target of 137 bomb attacks from March to July 2004, and didn't catch one bomber after the fact. What worked, he said, was awareness-having the same unit operate in the same area repeatedly, so it recognized anything out of place. To a far lesser degree, lying in wait at likely spots for bombs to be planted also worked. His unit conducted four hundred such ”counter IED ambushes” and killed, captured, or disrupted likely bombers six times.

Commanders also were learning. Brig. Gen. Martin Dempsey, Sanchez's successor as the commander of the 1st Armored Division, later said that his unit had reacted far differently to Sadr's uprising than it might have a year earlier. ”We had a different understanding of the things that make you successful. A year earlier we might have been too imprecise and heavy-handed.”

But some units continued to use heavy-handed tactics. In May, two DIA interrogators filed complaints against the Special Operations team with which they were working. One said that he saw prisoners arriving at a detention facility in Baghdad with burn marks on their backs. (A June 2004 memo from Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the director of the DIA, that summarized the charges doesn't indicate how those burns were suffered, but most likely they resulted from the practice of tying prisoners across the hot hoods of Humvees.) The other stated that on May 9, 2004, he had witnessed U.S. personnel taking hostage the wife of a suspected Iraqi terrorist in Tarmiya in order to compel the husband to turn himself in. ”During my initial screening of the occupants of the target house, I determined that the wife could provide no actionable intelligence leading to the arrest of her husband,” he wrote in a secret memorandum to his superiors. ”Despite my protest, the raid team leader detained her anyway.” The woman was released two days later.

On May 24, the CPA filed a memorandum to the State Department on a recent meeting in Samarra, where the 4th Infantry Division had been busy. ”Sheik Nahid Faraj told the council that while no one wanted to admit it, the situation in Samarra was a direct result of Coalition Forces excesses over the past year,” the cable stated. The CPA's interpretation of this critique was that the sheikhs were warning that U.S. military actions were eroding their authority, and that if the military's overly aggressive tactics continued, the sheikhs would lose control of their people.

On June 2, 2004, the CPA reported to State that ”the security situation in Baghdad is a serious concern.” It said that insurgents were operating in the western part of the city, that Sadr's militias were moving in the east, and that criminals were active across the city.

The spring battles end inconclusively Both the s.h.i.+te uprising and the first battle of Fallujah ended indeterminately. With Sadr, the U.S. military arrived at a negotiated solution in which he stopped his militia's attacks and U.S. forces stopped trying to ”kill or capture” him, and a murder charge against him was ignored.

Col. Alan King was asked by his boss at CPA to write out talking points for a meeting with Sadr's deputies to arrange a cease-fire. King listed several issues for discussion, but the main one was an offer that U.S. forces would pull back from the streets of Sadr City and stay mainly on their bases near the area. ”That was the crux-climb down from a military confrontation,” said King. His thinking was that after a stand-down, the U.S. authorities would instead try to use the tribal leaders to confront Sadr. But King was taken by surprise. Without his knowledge, his boss pa.s.sed his paper to Bremer, who in turn gave it to Sanchez, who then turned it over to the commander of the 1st Armored Division, Martin Dempsey.

The next day King's phone rang. ”Alan?” said a voice, which King quickly recognized as that of Dempsey, under whom he had served for a period after the 3rd ID left Iraq.

”Yes, sir,” said King.

”You motherf.u.c.ker!” Dempsey said, his voice intense with anger, King recalled. ”If you ever tell me what to do with my division again, I will cut your f.u.c.king nuts off.” Then he hung up. After that, King avoided Dempsey. But under a deal reached on May 27, both Sadr and the Americans withdrew their forces from Najaf and the nearby town of Kufa. Despite weeks of insistence by U.S. officials that his militias give up their weapons, ”Sadr was not required to surrender or disarm, though the CPA would not admit this publicly,” noted Larry Diamond, the former CPA official. U.S. forces later that summer would go back into Najaf and clean out the Sadr militia there, but Sadr's forces would remain in Sadr City and launch an average of more than one hundred attacks a week in August and September. They also began establis.h.i.+ng a major presence in Basra and some other southern cities. Sadr also established an alliance of sorts with former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. Of the six major deputies to Sadr who had been arrested, four eventually were released.

Meanwhile, in Fallujah, with the Marines withdrawn and the Fallujah Brigade fallen apart, the Sunni insurgents and their foreign allies were digging in. They spent months building dirt berms, sniper positions, fighting bunkers, and roadblocks. Fallujah effectively became a huge, city-sized, anti-American fortress.

”It was a closed city” said Capt. Stephen Winslow, a Marine historian who spent much of 2004 in or around Fallujah. ”They owned it.”

That outcome deepened the ill will between some Army and Marine officers. When the 82nd was in Fallujah and eastern al Anbar in 2003-4, said Gen. Swannack, its commander, it operated with precision, attacking small groups. But after that, he said, ”Fallujah became a quagmire,” because the large-scale operation conducted by the Marines had worked to ”alienate the population.” But that a.s.sessment seems unfair-after all, Mattis had gone in with a plan to engage the population, only to be overruled and ordered to launch an aggressive attack.

Journalism under siege Life for reporters in Iraq became even more constrained in the spring of 2004. It was journalism under siege, with hotels being mortared and every trip out of them risky, made in armored SUVs and wearing body armor. Reporting trips became dashes to the Green Zone or to the front gates of U.S. military bases, where bombings were always a threat. One American newspaper had to move its reporters after men in their neighborhood were heard saying, ”We are looking for the Jewish journalists.” An Australian journalist was kidnapped from the steps of his hotel, but released after he persuaded his captors that his coverage was anti-occupation, which they confirmed by Googling him. At night reporters traded tales of ”shark attacks”-ambushes by gunmen driving fast BMW sedans on the highways.

The world of reporters narrowed steadily in late 2003 and early 2004, recalled Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Baghdad bureau chief. He kept a map in his hotel room in which he crossed off roads as ”no-go zones.” First to go off-limits were the roads south of Baghdad, with Highway 8, the road to Hillah, becoming known as ”the highway of death.” One afternoon he pa.s.sed several cars there that had been shot up. The next day he learned that seventeen people had been killed along that stretch just before he came through it. Then a CNN crew was shot up on that road. Next to be lost was the road west to Fallujah, then the road north to Tikrit and Mosul. Finally even the airport road-the path to escape from Iraq-became a kind of gauntlet. By late March, parts of the city of Baghdad itself began to be crossed off as too dangerous. Security became so bad that even the short drive across the city to the Green Zone carried risks that made reporters wonder whether it was worth it just to listen to officials-some of whom themselves rarely ventured out of the zone-talk in press conferences about the steady progress being made. ”The whole world of foreign correspondence changed in Iraq,” Chandrasekaran said. ”We started out like other reporters-go out, report, do a day trip, come back, write the story. By the end, I wasn't going anywhere much. Sometimes press conferences in the Green Zone. And also bringing Iraqis to the hotel. And an awful lot of reporting by remote control, sending out Iraqis to report on a bombing, and giving them questions to ask.” Baghdad bureau chief. He kept a map in his hotel room in which he crossed off roads as ”no-go zones.” First to go off-limits were the roads south of Baghdad, with Highway 8, the road to Hillah, becoming known as ”the highway of death.” One afternoon he pa.s.sed several cars there that had been shot up. The next day he learned that seventeen people had been killed along that stretch just before he came through it. Then a CNN crew was shot up on that road. Next to be lost was the road west to Fallujah, then the road north to Tikrit and Mosul. Finally even the airport road-the path to escape from Iraq-became a kind of gauntlet. By late March, parts of the city of Baghdad itself began to be crossed off as too dangerous. Security became so bad that even the short drive across the city to the Green Zone carried risks that made reporters wonder whether it was worth it just to listen to officials-some of whom themselves rarely ventured out of the zone-talk in press conferences about the steady progress being made. ”The whole world of foreign correspondence changed in Iraq,” Chandrasekaran said. ”We started out like other reporters-go out, report, do a day trip, come back, write the story. By the end, I wasn't going anywhere much. Sometimes press conferences in the Green Zone. And also bringing Iraqis to the hotel. And an awful lot of reporting by remote control, sending out Iraqis to report on a bombing, and giving them questions to ask.”

In April 2004, John Burns, a veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times, New York Times, was kidnapped south of Baghdad along with his photographer. ”We were taken hostage for twelve hours and driven out into the desert, blindfolded, and put at some risk,” he said in a television interview. He also was shown the knife that he was told would be used to kill him. was kidnapped south of Baghdad along with his photographer. ”We were taken hostage for twelve hours and driven out into the desert, blindfolded, and put at some risk,” he said in a television interview. He also was shown the knife that he was told would be used to kill him.

A few months later, Farnaz Fa.s.sihi, a Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal reporter based in Baghdad, sent out her usual periodical update to family and friends. It had been a rough time for Western journalists in Iraq, the thirty-one-year-old Iranian-born, American-educated reporter wrote in her e-mail. ”Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest,” her two-and-a-half-page missive began. ”I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't.” reporter based in Baghdad, sent out her usual periodical update to family and friends. It had been a rough time for Western journalists in Iraq, the thirty-one-year-old Iranian-born, American-educated reporter wrote in her e-mail. ”Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest,” her two-and-a-half-page missive began. ”I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't.”

But she wasn't simply frustrated; she was growing angry with the official American portrayal of the situation. ”Despite President Bush's rosy a.s.sessments, Iraq remains a disaster,” she wrote, ”... a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.” It was a ”raging barbaric guerrilla war.” Moreover, journalists recently had been subjected to special targeting for abduction. She came away from a U.S. emba.s.sy cautionary briefing even more alarmed. ”We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing,” she reported. ”Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to al Qaeda.”

More than the daily reports of car bombings, which had a sameness to them, Fa.s.sihi's letter captured the feeling of being a Westerner in Baghdad at the time. Reporters who received it forwarded it to each other, and soon it was being posted on Web sites. Some in the military pointed to the letter as evidence of a media bias, especially because of its criticism of President Bush, but that was tempered somewhat by the fact that Fa.s.sihi wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, the most conservative major American newspaper. Lt. Jonathan Morgenstein, an unusually liberal Marine specializing in civil affairs, recommended to friends back home that they read her account, calling it ”a laser-sharp portrayal of the reality of Iraq today.” the most conservative major American newspaper. Lt. Jonathan Morgenstein, an unusually liberal Marine specializing in civil affairs, recommended to friends back home that they read her account, calling it ”a laser-sharp portrayal of the reality of Iraq today.”

The U.S. military itself also presented somewhat of a threat to reporters. Approaching a checkpoint was always worrisome, with rifles and machine guns pointed at approaching cars by troops not inclined to take the chance of letting a suicide bomber get too close. Nor was checkpoint duty pleasant for soldiers: They were given three seconds in which to act against a suspicious vehicle, with the first shot fired into the pavement in front of the car, the second into the grille, and the third at the driver. ”We told them, you don't have the right not to shoot,” recalled Lt. Gen. John Sattler, a commander of the Marines in western Iraq. ”It's not about you. You are being trusted by everybody behind you. You are the single point of failure.”

But it was even harder for those on the other end of the rifle barrel. Not only were reporters handled with great suspicion, they were sometimes singled out as especially threatening to the security of U.S. troops. For example, U.S. government officials were taught in an official 2004 CPA briefing on bomb threats that the ”presence of news crews may be an indicator” of an imminent bomb attack. ”Bomber does not want his picture taken, but he loves to have his dirty work on film,” the briefing explained.

The odd result of the deterioration in security was that the harder it became to collect information, the easier it was for the Bush administration to a.s.sert that steady progress was made in Iraq but that cowed reporters simply weren't seeing it.

Winning tactically, losing strategically ?

”Boss, we're losing,” a young major told Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, one of the top U.S. generals in Iraq, after the rough month of April. Others were arriving at similar conclusions. When Col. Paul Hughes returned home from Iraq that spring to serve out his time until retirement in a post at the National Defense University, he decided to take a public stand on the conduct of the war. ”Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically,” he told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Was.h.i.+ngton Post, knowing that these types of on-the-record remarks from an active-duty officer who had served in Baghdad would appear prominently in the newspaper. ”I lost my brother in Vietnam,” he said, in explaining his decision to go public. ”I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. knowing that these types of on-the-record remarks from an active-duty officer who had served in Baghdad would appear prominently in the newspaper. ”I lost my brother in Vietnam,” he said, in explaining his decision to go public. ”I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again.

Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in.”

One Army general predicted the Army would start falling apart in the spring of 2005, while another one said flatly it was time for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to go. ”I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion,” he said. ”Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD refused to listen or adhere to military advice.”

Was the United States in fact losing in Iraq? That was the question posed in May 2004 to Chuck Swannack, who had spent much of the previous year in western Iraq. ”I think, strategically, we are,” he said. ”I think, operationally, maybe we are. But tactically, we are not.”

In the spring of 2004, Swannack recounted in a later interview, ”three things went wrong in Iraq.” First, he said, was the Abu Ghraib scandal, ”a tactical miscue by seven or eight people that had strategic consequences.” Hard on its heels was the Marine Corps's siege of Fallujah, a move he argued broadly alienated the Sunni population. Third, the confrontation with Moqtadr al-Sadr similarly estranged much of the s.h.i.+te population. The United States had indeed dug itself a deep hole, and it wasn't clear that it knew how to climb out of it.

When Army mine expert Paul Arcangeli returned to Iraq late in 2004, having been away since the previous summer, ”it bore no resemblance to the country I was in” a year earlier, he said. In the summer of 2003 he had freedom to leave the Green Zone as he pleased. ”The difference between now and then is incredible,” he said at the end of 2004. ”They're driving 60 miles an hour through the Green Zone, combat style. It feels like they are no longer masters of their domain. They really do not rule the country.”

There was no good military solution, he said. ”I don't want to say we've lost, but everything we do helps us lose. More patrols-bad. Less patrols-bad. How do we get out of it? I don't know.” The American people also were beginning to worry. In late May 2004, the majority of people surveyed by the Was.h.i.+ngton Post/ Was.h.i.+ngton Post/ABC poll said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. It was the first time that the majority of respondents in that poll felt that way.

Gen. Zinni came to a similar conclusion. ”I have seen this movie,” he said in April 2004. ”It was called Vietnam.”

THE PRICE PAID.

t the end of its first twelve months in Iraq the Army began to confront the ii fact that it had suffered its first significant setback since the Vietnam War: The security situation had worsened, essential services were still not restored, and Iraqi faith in the American occupiers was dwindling. Some three hundred thousand U.S. troops had served there. The invasion force, and then the first rotation of the occupation, had gone home-the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. They had been replaced by the 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, the Marines, and a grab bag of National Guard and Reserve units, all thrown into missions for which those backup forces hadn't been designed. And it was increasingly clear that the units that had gone back to the United States would be coming back for a second tour. The Army had little to show for its time in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad but eight hundred dead and five thousand wounded. It was a shaken inst.i.tution, losing good people and provoking others to question it as it hadn't been in decades. fact that it had suffered its first significant setback since the Vietnam War: The security situation had worsened, essential services were still not restored, and Iraqi faith in the American occupiers was dwindling. Some three hundred thousand U.S. troops had served there. The invasion force, and then the first rotation of the occupation, had gone home-the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Division, the 1st Armored Division, and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. They had been replaced by the 1st Infantry Division, the 1st Cavalry Division, the Marines, and a grab bag of National Guard and Reserve units, all thrown into missions for which those backup forces hadn't been designed. And it was increasingly clear that the units that had gone back to the United States would be coming back for a second tour. The Army had little to show for its time in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad but eight hundred dead and five thousand wounded. It was a shaken inst.i.tution, losing good people and provoking others to question it as it hadn't been in decades.

The death of a ”star man”