“NO NATION WAS EVER DEFEATED UNTIL THE PEOPLE WERE WILLING TO ACCEPT DEFEAT.”

– George S. Patton –

CHAPTER 2: ROAD TO WAR

I WAS BORN IN OMAHA, NEBRASKA IN 1963, THE YOUNGEST OF five children. My father, Anthony J. Deane, was a sailor who fought throughout the Pacific in World War II. He was a witness to history as a crewmen aboard the USS Missouri when the Japanese surrendered in 1945. He was born in 1916 in Yonkers, New York, but when his mother died five years later, my grandfather shipped him and his two younger brothers to our ancestral home, the tiny farming village of Graughill, in County Mayo, Ireland, where the three young boys lived with their uncle. Picturesque and surrounded by rugged terrain, the village overlooked the ocean where the locals farmed and fished. When I was a child, my dad always talked about someday retiring to Ireland, but he never spoke much about his time growing up there. I gathered that life on a small farm in the Mayo countryside was hard. The house lacked electricity, and they burned peat to keep warm and to cook. My dad worked on the fishing boats with his uncle until he turned eighteen, joined the Merchant Marines, and headed out to sea, leaving Ireland forever. In November 1940, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, prior to the start of World War II, attaining the rank of Chief Petty Officer. When my dad retired from the Navy in 1962, he moved to Omaha to be near an aunt who helped raise him. Although this was intended as a temporary move, we ended up staying for good.

My mother, Catherine T. (Noone) Deane, was born and lived in Gorthmeer, the next village over, until she was eighteen. After a couple of years living in London, she immigrated to New York City in 1948, living with her sister and her family in the Bronx. Although my parents had lived in tiny farming villages less than ten miles away from each other, my mom had been a little girl when my dad left Ireland. It was not until my father was on leave in New York that they began dating. They married in 1953 and spent the next nine years having children and moving wherever the Navy sent them.

As part of a big Irish family, I had a great childhood growing up in Nebraska with my brother Pat and three sisters Mary, Norah, and Ann. My dad died when I was 13 years old, but despite not having a father, our family held together remarkably well. We had modest means, yet we never lacked the necessities. All of us worked part-time jobs during high school, learning lessons about self-reliance. Our parents stressed education and encouraged us to “make something” of ourselves. They were successful. Each of us graduated from college, and a couple of us have masters’ degrees, which is especially meaningful considering neither of our parents got past the sixth grade. In many ways, we lived and are living the American Dream.

I graduated from Papillion High School in Papillion, Nebraska in May 1981, where I played sports, was captain of the track team, and played the bass drum in the marching band. After high school, I spent a semester at Northwest Missouri State University where I tried making the track team as a walk-on. The coaches and I quickly reached the same conclusion: I was not as fast as I thought I was. At the end of the fall semester, I transferred to the University of Nebraska. Most of my high school friends were already Cornhuskers, so it was an easy decision. After working three minimum-wage food-service jobs over the summer of my freshman year, and still falling short of tuition money, I figured there had to be a better way to pay for school.

Many of my peers have inspiring tales explaining how they wanted to join the Army since childhood in order to be part of something bigger. Frankly, I joined for the college fund. Although I had thought briefly about going to the Naval Academy after high school, I never actually planned to join the military. I did not have a job in mind when I talked to the Army recruiter. My only requirement was not missing a semester of college. The recruiter told me that cavalry scout training started the Tuesday after my classes ended in the spring semester, and finished the Thursday before school started again in the fall. It fit the schedule and seemed like an interesting assignment.

Sold.

In September 1982, I enlisted in the United States Army Reserve. Between my sophomore and junior years at college, I attended basic training and cavalry training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the summer of 1983. Basic training was a great experience. I was outside all day, shooting different kinds of weapons, being part of a team. Cavalry scout training emphasizes thinking on the move, and I was good at it, making the commandant’s list upon graduation. I also began to understand what others meant when they talked about being part of something larger than you are.

My Army Reserve unit’s wartime mission upon activation was to conduct basic training. They planned to send me to drill sergeant school immediately upon returning from Fort Knox, but I was hesitant to accept. Drill sergeants were bigger than life characters; soldiers who knew everything, and I had just graduated from basic training and felt I didn’t know anything.

“Deane, you’re a college boy. You’ll figure it out,” was a common reassurance, but a small comfort.

Even though my father had a WWII veteran NCO’s distrust of officers, he had always wanted me to be a Navy officer. (My mom continued to tell me not to trust officers until after I became a lieutenant colonel.) At the time, I was unsure just what exactly officers did on a daily basis other than what I saw in movies. Interaction between the officers and the trainees was rare, although during one of the barracks inspections, the company executive officer, an obese first lieutenant, screamed at me, “You are an embarrassment to the uniform and have low personal standards!” That was because my can of Brasso brass polish had rust on the bottom. I figured this could not be that hard, and I would be getting my father’s ambition for me half-right if I became an Army officer. Fueled by little airplane liquor bottles on the flight home with Terry Jones, another Husker who lived on my dorm floor and was in my basic training company, we both decided to become officers.

On the first day of classes my junior year I signed up at the University of Nebraska ROTC Department as a cadet in both ROTC and in my Army Reserve unit. I enjoyed the work though looking back I was a marginal ROTC cadet at best. Getting up at 0600 hours for physical training every morning cut into staying out all night. Since I had already done all of the “Army stuff” we were learning in ROTC at basic training, the bulk of the instruction seemed easy to me. I thought my classmates took the program too seriously. Frankly, I drifted a bit in college and was not certain what I wanted to do with my life. My long-term goal had been to attend law school, but now I had found something that I liked. I was tired of school. Ronald Reagan was president, and it seemed to me that there was a 50-50 chance we would be at war with the Soviet Union soon enough. Law school could wait. The big battle for the free world was going to occur on the plains of Germany, and I wanted to be part of it. (At least until the nuclear weapons started dropping, which, by the way, if the movie The Day After was at all accurate, I was equally screwed between the German plains and Omaha, Nebraska.) I never intended to make the Army a career, but I thought it would be good for me to do at least one tour of active duty. So, late in my senior year, I applied.

Unfortunately, the Army rejected my application for active duty based on my lackluster performance in ROTC and my marginal grades. I seemed to be the only one impressed that I took twenty-two hours of summer school classes my senior year in order to graduate nearly on time. In fact, one of the majors in the ROTC department called me into his office and told me that while he admired my patriotism by wanting to serve in the Army, there was just no place in the regular Army for me. (He retired as a major, but who holds a grudge all these years?) It was not until days before graduation that my ROTC professor, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Snyder, a grizzled Vietnam veteran with nine purple hearts called me into his office and told me, “Deane, you’re not nearly the dumbass I thought you were.”

Not exactly the validation I was looking for, but I took it.

I attended the Armor Basic Course as a reserve officer in October 1985. By the time I graduated in March 1986, I was close enough to the top of my class to be eligible for one of the two slots that each class had for active duty. I received orders to report to the First Infantry Division (Forward) near Stuttgart, Federal Republic of Germany, no later than 1 April 1986.

Germany during the Cold War was an exciting place. Four days after my arrival, a bomb planted by Libyan agents in the La Belle discotheque in Berlin targeting off-duty U.S. service members exploded, killing two Americans and a Turkish national, and injuring two hundred-thirty others.10 Ten days later, President Reagan retaliated by bombing Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya, killing Muammar Gaddafi’s adopted daughter along with dozens of Libyan soldiers and civilians.11 During my first months in Germany, I served as officer of the guard for the soldiers protecting the installation and the housing area.

Every unit in Germany trained to defeat a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. We were ready to roll out of the gate on two hours’ notice to assume defensive positions near the Fulda Gap on the Inner German Border. Everyone had to be available twenty-four hours a day, a very restrictive requirement in the days before cell phones. Our M60A3 and then M1IP tanks sat under armed guard in the motor pool with wartime service ammunition on board. We constantly prepared for combat, spending nearly two hundred days a year in the field, routinely training at Grafenwoehr, Hohenfels, or conducting maneuvers through the small towns of Germany. While it was enjoyable to hop off my tank and run into a Germany bakery or butcher for a sandwich, the fact that we had the critical mission of protecting Western Europe was always in the back of my mind. During my three years in Germany, I was lucky enough to be a platoon leader, an assistant logistics officer on the battalion staff, a tank company executive officer, and the headquarters company executive officer.

During a majority of my tour, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Sutherland was the battalion commander. Colonel Sutherland was a Vietnam vet and a fantastic leader who left an impression on me that would last through my career. He was a scratch golfer and played halfback on the officer flag football team—not because he was the colonel and wanted the limelight, but because he was the best halfback.

With all the time in the field, and the requirement to go to war with two hours’ notice, recovery after an exercise was central to every platoon leader’s life. Units had three days to have everything cleaned, fixed, repacked, and ready to go. Platoons would spend hours on the wash rack cleaning the outside of the tank, with the next two days spent meticulously scrubbing the inside of the vehicles with buckets and scrub brushes. By the time we were finished, you could eat off the floor of the turret. The culmination of the recovery was the inspection by the battalion commander. For the inspection, the standard called for the tank to be spotless, with all the sundry equipment laid out by a diagram on the tank’s tarp, three steps in front of the armored vehicle, with the crew standing at attention and awaiting the commander’s arrival. The previous commander had the reputation of being a flamer, someone who would scream and shout for the smallest deficiencies. It became a contest of wills to see if we could pass his inspection. In the end, it became a bit of a game, and his yelling turned into white noise.

Sutherland was different. He understood that displays of temper did not help. He was not there to inspect vehicles and equipment; he was there to inspect the standards to which the leaders held their subordinates. He kept his voice level, but his head shake and “I’m disappointed”—these were shots to the heart that made everyone work harder.

In June 1987, I went on a USO trip to Spain. On the next to last day of the trip, I saw the most beautiful woman in the world, Debora Puccini, who was also on vacation. Debora’s childhood could be no more different from mine. She was an only child who lived with her parents in a small apartment in the heart of Florence, Italy, attended Catholic School, rode a Vespa and went to the disco with her friends. She was a nurse at the seven-hundred-year old Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, one of the oldest hospitals still in use in Italy; the same hospital where Leonardo Da Vinci had practiced medicine. We fell in love at first sight. She spoke only a little English, and I spoke some broken Spanish, but somehow we were able to communicate. A long distance romance ensued over the following months from Stuttgart to Florence, consisting of letters, incredibly expensive long distance phone calls, and overnight train trips.

Debora’s parents were skeptical about her heading to Germany to be with an American soldier, but eventually they relented. On the last morning of Debora’s first visit to Germany, the phone rang and I heard “Lariat Advance,” the code letting us know that an alert was in progress and that the clock was ticking for us to get the tanks moving. I told her that I had to go, but that it was unlikely we were really at war with the Soviets. It was probably just a drill, and I promised to try to get back in time to take her to the train station for her return trip to Florence. I also told her that someday the phone would ring, that it would not be a drill, and that I would have to go to war for real. I wanted to be up front about what her life would be like if she chose to spend it with a soldier. She said she understood. At the two-hour mark, just before the tanks were to roll out of the gate, we received the word to stand-down. Had the tanks busted the gate, I would have been gone for at least the entire day, leaving Debora to fend for herself. Luckily, I was able to slip away and get her to the train station with just minutes to spare.

Eventually, my three-year tour in Germany was ending, and I was due to rotate back to the States. It was time to either propose marriage or lose Debora forever. Although we had seen each other face-to-face for only twenty-two days over the past year, I knew it was the right thing to do. I went to Florence to ask her parents, Marco and Mirella Puccini, for their daughter’s hand in marriage. Although they did not speak a word of English, Mirella communicated with me by feeding me more than I have ever eaten in my life. Lunch was wine, antipasto, salad, lasagna, pork chops with potatoes and vegetables, fruit tray, cake, and espresso. Having grown up in an Irish-American home, I knew that it would be rude to turn down any food Mirella put in front of me. I also wanted to get on her good side by asking for seconds on everything. I kept this up until I was about to burst. I found out later that there were a couple of other courses ready, but Debora and her parents were afraid I was going to pass out at the table in a food-induced coma. Despite this, I still passed the test.

We were married in Florence, Italy, in November 1988, celebrating a military wedding in the Chiesa di San Frediano e Cestello, a seventeenth-century Catholic church along the Arno River, with all the battalion’s lieutenants in their dress blues, and Debora’s family and friends in the finest Italian fashions. By now, I was really beginning to enjoy Army life. I still did not intend on making it a career, but I had a new wife and, based on my experience in Germany, I thought that one more tour in the States would let me achieve my career goal of becoming a company commander. After that, I would ease myself out of the Army. I still had to attend a six-month school at Fort Knox before signing in at my next duty station, but that was part of the adventure. In the end, Debora moved from Florence, Italy, to Stuttgart, Germany, to Radcliff, Kentucky, to Hinesville, Georgia, in less than nine months. She worked through the culture shock and was my biggest supporter through it all—and remains so to this day.

We arrived in Hinesville in September 1989, and I reported to the 24th Infantry Division. Within a few days, I began three weeks of airborne training at Fort Benning, leaving a pregnant Debora and an overactive golden retriever puppy named Fiamma (Italian for Flame, the international name of golden retrievers) to fend for themselves in a run-down rental townhouse. Our home had more than its share of what the locals call “Palmetto bugs,” and Nebraskans called “big cockroaches.”

Sitting in my room at Fort Benning after a day of training, I heard an unexpected knock on the door. I was stunned to see Debora standing there.

“The hurricane is coming,” she told me. Hurricane Hugo was bearing down on the east coast, and Debora had taken heed of the warnings. She packed the dog into the car, drove across Georgia to Fort Benning, kenneled Fiamma, and located the officer’s quarters at Airborne School. There she was, without the help of a cell phone or a GPS. I was in awe of the inner strength and resourcefulness my wife had displayed, as Hugo devastated the coast in what was at the time the costliest hurricane in American history.

A month later, I deployed to Egypt as part of a training exercise and missed my first wedding anniversary. In March 1990, we bought our first house and in April, Debora gave birth to our first daughter, Allison. We were beginning our life as an Army family.

............

For centuries, Arab geographers used the word al’Iraq to describe the plains surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In the West, this area was better known as Mesopotamia—Greek for the land between two rivers. Mesopotamia has a vivid, vibrant, and violent history, with many of humanity’s firsts originating there: the domestication of animals, the first cities, the first evidence of writing, the first set of written laws, and the brewing of beer all occurred thousands of years before Christ. Great empires ruled Mesopotamia, only to see their rule collapse and a new conqueror take over. Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, and Parthians claimed some or all of the lands as part of their succession of empires—until six centuries after the time of Christ when Islam was born.

Muslims believe that in 610, the Angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad in Mecca—modern-day Saudi Arabia—bringing him a message from God. Muhammad transcribed the revelations into the Quran. In 613, Muhammad began the public preaching of Islam—submission to God—a new religion incorporating Jewish and Christian traditions, and covering all aspects of life, including property ownership, divorce, and trade. The people of Mecca rejected his preaching, and by 622, Muhammad and his followers fled to Medina out of fear for their lives. Once safely there, the religion began to spread, and Muhammad built an army. By 629, he conquered Mecca, consolidated his power, and continued to spread the religion across the Middle East and North Africa.12

Upon his death in 632, a division erupted between the followers of Muhammed’s confidant, Abu Bakr—Ahl al-Sunna—the people of the tradition, and those thinking leadership should pass to a member of his bloodline, Ali—shi’atu Ali—the partisans of Ali. Abu Bakr won out and became the first caliph. The next two caliphs were murdered. War erupted when Ali became the fourth caliph in 656, and he died in battle in 661 near Kufa. Rule of the Muslim world passed to the Sunnis headquartered in Damascus, and in 680, soldiers killed Ali’s son Hussein in Karbala, on the Euphrates River, after he refused to swear allegiance to the new caliph. Within 40 years, the Muslim empire would extend as far as Spain.13

The Shia take a more literal interpretation the Quran, especially when it comes to the succession from the Prophet Mohamad and the end of the world. They consider Ali their first Imam, and by 873, the 11th imam died leaving the Shia leaderless. The 12th imam—Mahdi—went into hiding, and the faithful believe he will not return until the time of great confusion when Jesus returns to earth, kills the anti-Christ in Damascus, and Muslims defeat his army of Jews. Then God will reveal the true meaning of the Quran, spread Islam across the world in a time of peace and prosperity until the sun rises in the west, marking the End of Days.¹⁴ In 1501, Ismail I established the Safavid dynasty in Persia, declaring Shiism the state religion and making it the center of religious learning for the Shia. Years of suspicion and fighting between the Shia Persians in Iran and the Sunni Arab Ottomans followed.

The Sunni sixth caliph, al-Mansur, built the city of Baghdad starting in 762 as his new capital. The city flourished as Islam spread from Spain to India, becoming the heart of learning, science, medicine, and the arts in the Islamic world, and lasting nearly five hundred years.¹⁵ In 1248, the Mongols sacked the city, ending the Abbasid Empire. In 1534, the Ottomans took control of Baghdad, and it remained a backwater of the empire for centuries.

The Ottoman Empire gained varying degrees of control of the land during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, establishing three provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, as a bulwark against the Persians to the east. Many Sunnis joined the Ottoman military and served in the government, at the exclusion of other religious and ethnic groups, especially the Shia, who had religious ties to Iran. In October 1914, the Ottomans, former British allies, joined with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungry. In order to protect their interests in the Persian Gulf, the British landed troops in Faw within weeks, and secured Basra by the end of November.¹⁶ By April, the British controlled all of Basra province and were marching toward Baghdad. A secret society of Arab nationalists—al-’Ahd—within the Ottoman Army took the opportunity to desert, eventually joining the army of the Hashemite Sharif Husain of Mecca—leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans based on a pledge of independence by the British.17

An Ottoman counter-attack stopped the British advance in November 1915. That same month, France, England, and Russia began secret negotiations to divvy up the lands under Ottoman control in the Middle East after the war, resulting in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement.¹⁸ The British eventually took Baghdad in March 1917, and Kirkuk in late summer of 1918. Initially bureaucrats from the Indian Office administered the region, implementing Anglo-Indian civil and penal codes, changing the currency to the Rupee, and bringing in Indians to serve in the police force.¹⁹ By October 1918, the Ottomans sued for peace, surrendering their garrisons in Mesopotamia to the British. The British marched on Mosul and demanded its surrender as well. Although the Ottomans protested that Mosul was not part of Mesopotamia, they relented and retreated to the northern border of the province. The British now controlled the land that we know today as Iraq.²⁰

The Sharif Husain of Mecca’s son, Faisal, led the army of al-’Ahd into Damascus as part of the Allies in 1918 and soon declared an independent Arab state.²¹ An uproar ensued in London and among Arab nationalists, when division of land outlined in the Sykes-Picot Agreement became known, forcing Britain to rethink its direct rule of the new territories. In I920, Faisal became king of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, though his reign was short lived. The French did not recognize the kingdom and within months expelled Faisal, sending him into exile.²² The newly formed League of Nations then placed the former Central Powers colonial holding under mandates until they were ready for independent governance under the Treaty of Sevres. This treaty initially promised the Kurds independence—but the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne extinguished that dream. Iraqis revolted at the prospect of being under British rule, with Sunni and Shia uniting against the British.²³ In response to the uprising, British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill called for a conference in Cairo in March 1921 to chart a way ahead, resulting in a monarchy with British advisors serving throughout the government and military.

After a national election in August 1921 in which Faisal received 97 percent of the vote²⁴ —the first of many flawed elections in Iraq—King Faisal I assumed the throne of the Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration. A Hashemite, who grew up in Istanbul, King Faisal I realized he needed to reach out to all Iraqis to govern. He allowed Shia to serve in high-ranking positions within the government, established a parliament, and granted tribal leaders large land grants, although the military was comprised mainly of Sunni officers loyal to Faisal from the days of the al-’Ahd.25 The British, keenly aware of the growing sense of Arab nationalism and the population’s dislike of a European ruler, formalized its role in Iraq with a treaty for the relationship to appear equal.²⁶

King Faisal I’s reign was tumultuous. He did oversee the writing of a constitution, a series of elections, and the transition to the first Arab land under a mandate to gain its independence, but ethnic differences—especially with the Kurds, Assyrians, and Shia—festered, and political intrigue rose as Iraq attempted to form a national identity. In 1932, Iraq joined the League of Nations and gained its independence, although the British still played a part in its internal politics.

In 1933, the small Assyrian community in Northern Iraq threatened to establish its own nation. Arab Iraqis resented the Assyrians for religious and ethnic reasons as well as their deep ties to the British. The Assyrians formed the bulk of the Levies, a British-officered military unit that had distinguished itself during the First World War and that was currently protecting the RAF Bases in Habbaniyya and Shu’aiba. The Iraqi army, along with Kurdish tribesmen, crushed the revolt,²⁷ giving the army a national prominence and foreshadowing its role in dealing with internal revolts.

King Faisal died unexpectedly in October 1933, and his 21-year-old son, Ghazi, assumed the throne. While not the politician his father was, Ghazi I was an Arab nationalist, and much more in-tune with the younger generation of Iraqi military officers. He voiced anti-British sentiments, criticizing their actions across the Middle East and specifically in Palestine. He was also among the first to make a case that Kuwait was part of Iraq.²⁸ Tribal unrest by the Shia and the Kurds, led by Mustafa Barzani, marked his reign, as well as a series of military coups aimed at the prime ministers, not the monarchy itself. In April 1939, King Ghazi I died in an alcohol-induced car crash, leaving his three-year-old son, Faisal II as king, with Ghazi’s brother-in-law Prince Abd al-IIah serving as regent.²⁹

Abd al-IIah’s reign was contentious as well. He was much more pro-British than Ghazi I, and the younger Arab nationalist army officers disliked him and his policies. A series of military coups followed, firmly entrenching the Iraqi army into Iraqi politics, including a 1941 coup that deposed the monarchy and forced the British to intervene militarily to restore it. The British occupied Iraq from 1941 to the end of World War II, allowing only pro-British Iraqi politicians to serve in the government. Following the war, restrictions were relaxed and opposition parties formed. Rioting erupted when Iraq and Britain renegotiated their treaty in 1947. Iraq embroiled itself in the pan-Arab cause, sending troops to Palestine in 1948.30 Arab nationalists, communists, and intellectuals cried for reforms, including calls for the nationalization of the oil industry, leading to nation-wide riots in 1952. Abd al-IIah declared martial law and the army backed the police to keep the population in check, and the monarchy in power. ³¹

On 24 May 1953, Faisal II assumed the throne, although Prince Abd al-IIah still had enormous influence over his eighteen-year-old nephew, and Iraq. In 1955, Iraq entered into the Baghdad Pact, an agreement with pro-western Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan for mutual defense. This infuriated Arab nationalists who wanted nothing to do with the West—especially Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser who wanted no ties to the West. Nasser signed a pact with the Soviet Union and brought the cold war to the Middle East.³² When the Suez Crisis erupted in 1956, the pro-western Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa’id, the longtime power behind the throne, condemned France, Britain, and Israel’s attack; he again declared martial law to prevent widespread rioting by Arab nationalists. ³³ On 1 February 1957, Egypt and Syria entered into the United Arab Republic, linking the two countries politically and militarily. In reaction, Iraq and Jordan entered into a federation to prevent the overthrow of the two monarchies, with the thought of adding Kuwait to the pact later.³⁴ In March 1958, Nuri al-Sa’id returned as prime minister, after having stepped down less than a year earlier. In the interim, two other prime ministers had held the position in his absence. Nuri brought in a representative government from all communities in Iraq: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd.³⁵ At the same time, a group of young Iraqi army officers was plotting a military coup. On 14 July, the conspirators saw their opportunity when Nuri ordered two Iraqi brigades to Jordan due to a growing crisis in Lebanon. The units had to pass by Baghdad. A battalion led by Colonel Abd al-Salam Arif seized control of government buildings in Baghdad while a brigade commanded by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim waited outside the city as reinforcements. By day’s end, Faisal II and most of the Iraqi Royal Family laid dead in the Palace courtyard, machine-gunned to death by the Iraqi army. The next day, a rebel recognized Prime Minster Nuri walking down the street trying to escape and shot him in the head. That night, rioters dragged the body of Prince Abd al-IIah through the streets, ending the Hashemite Dynasty.³⁶

Qasim, the son of an Arab Sunni father and a Shia Kurd mother, became prime minister; Arif, the deputy prime minister. Qasim saw a broader vision of a united Iraq. He attempted to institute an “Iraq first” policy of national unity and institutional reforms in land, education, economics, and politics. He also built relationships with the Soviet Union, after the West pulled back following the coup. Soon Arif was in prison, and discord was brewing in all factions of Iraq, leading to some secret societies that were all planning to overthrow the government. A number of failed coup attempts followed. One Ba’athist led attempt included among its conspirators a young Saddam Hussein—who managed to escape to Syria. Qasim also renewed calls for the return of Kuwait upon its independence in 1961. When the Arab League admitted Kuwait, Iraq withdrew and recalled its ambassadors from countries that recognized the new nation, including the United States. In February 1963, a military coup involving some officers aligned with the resurgent Baath party captured, tried, and summarily executed Qasim.37

The Ba’athists took power, although their reign was short lived. Arif became president of Iraq and was appointed as field marshal of the army, but the secret Council of the Revolutionary Command held the real power. A period of Arab nationalism, socialist reforms, and civilian control of the military ensued, leading to closer ties to the greater Ba’ath party in Syria and beyond. A Christian led the larger Ba’ath party, which upset many Arab nationalists, and civilian control of the military upset the officer corps. When the Iraqi Ba’athist leaders returned from a meeting in Damascus, the Revolutionary Council arrested and exiled them to Spain. Rioting in the streets erupted, and the military again stepped in while Arif consolidated power.³⁸

Arif also tried to modernize Iraq, instituting reforms and adopting a new constitution. He also built relations with Egypt and by September 1964, Iraq hosted over five thousand Egyptian troops, mainly to prevent a Ba’athist coup. During this period, yet another Kurdish independence movement occurred, led again by Barzani. The resulting cease-fire agreement gave the Kurds the greatest amount of autonomy to date. When Arif died in a helicopter crash in April 1966, the promise of Kurdish autonomy died with it. Within days, the Revolutionary Council elected his brother, Abd al-Rahman Arif president, and the military regained control.³⁹

Nationally and internationally, the perception of Al-Rahman as a weak leader was prevalent, and soon conspiracies to overthrow the government began to form. On 17 July 1968, the Ba’athists, aided by members of the army, moved. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became prime minister and commander in chief of the armed forces, with Saddam Hussein as his deputy. The Ba’athists learned from their failed run at governance in 1963, and immediately consolidated power through a series of military purges, show trials, public executions, assassinations, and the outlawing of opposing political parties. Bakr was the face of the party, but Saddam controlled the security apparatus—a series of informants and henchmen based on family and tribal ties to his and Bakr’s hometown of Tikrit. In 1971, a longstanding territorial dispute over the Shatt al-Arab—a 160-mile river at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—erupted again. Tensions between Iraq and Iran were at an all-time high, as Iran was also supplying Kurdish Peshmerga rebels under the command of Barzani. Although the Ba’athist were in negotiations with the Kurds over autonomy, an open war raged in the north. Barzani could not accept Baghdad’s terms of autonomy, and Shia clerics denounced the war. Secretly, Iraq and Iran were in talks over the waterway. The agreement ceded Iraqi control over the river in exchange for Iran halting support for the Kurds. Without Iranian support, the Kurds were doomed, and tens of thousands escaped into Iran. The Kurdish faction splintered, with Jabal Talabani breaking away from the Kurdistan Democratic Party and forming the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.40

In mid-July 1979, Prime Minister Bakr suddenly announced his resignation, and hours later Saddam Hussein became president. Within days, Saddam called a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council and announced to a televised audience that he had uncovered a coup attempt backed by the Syrians. Saddam smoked a cigar and occasionally feigned tears during the reading of the names of the alleged conspirators, who were actually just rivals, threats to his power, or enemies. Then Saddam’s henchmen led the guilty away for trial, torture, and execution.⁴¹

Saddam Hussein now controlled Iraq, and a cult of personality began. Official documents referred to him as the necessary leader,⁴² and he began comparing himself to the great Mesopotamian rulers. He went as far as constructing a family history that traced his lineage back to Ali.⁴³ Saddam saw himself as the emerging leader of the Arab world, hosting a series of summits resulting in the Arab Charter in Baghdad, a document that was more a show of Iraqi leadership than of substance.⁴⁴ He also cracked down on the Kurds and the Shia. Following a failed assassination attempt on Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Saddam made membership in the Shia Dawa party punishable by death and ordered the arrest and execution of revered Shia cleric Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and his sister.45

Saddam also saw the emerging threat to his power from the newly installed Shia theocracy in Iran. Calls for the overthrow of Saddam’s secular regime emanated from Tehran, and Iranian support for the Kurds began anew. In response, Saddam began expelling “Persian Shia”, and calling for a unified Arab vision of Iraq. He also saw the Tehran government as weak and internationally isolated after the taking of American hostages in November 1979. After a pair of failed coup attempts on the Iranian regime, Saddam decided to act. He renounced the agreement of the Shatt al-Arab, and after a few skirmishes, invaded Iran on 23 September 1980, starting an eight-year war of attrition.⁴⁶

The Iran-Iraq war was costly both in lives and in dollars; known for human wave attacks by the Iranians and the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis. Despite being a static war for years, neither side would back down. It had become a battle of wills between two men, with Ayatollah Khomeini rejecting Iraqi peace offerings, and Saddam personally shooting any Iraqi who offered them.

The West and the Arab states generally supported Saddam with loans, military equipment, and intelligence, as well as an arms embargo against Iran—that the United States broke in the infamous “Iran/Contra Scandal.” In response to Iranian attacks on commercial ships passing in international waters, the U.S. authorized the reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers, and the Navy began patrolling the Persian Gulf.⁴⁷

As the war with Iran was winding down, Saddam’s forces, led by Ali Hassan al-Majid—“Chemical Ali”—set upon the systematic destruction of the Kurdish people in Iraq for suspected collaboration with Iran. Anfal—the Spoils—named after the eighth sura of the Koran—was a program (1987-1989) of summary executions and mass disappearance of as many as 182,000 people, including large numbers of women and children, and the wholesale destruction of some two thousand Kurdish villages.⁴⁸ Chemical Ali ordered his commanders to “to carry out random bombardments, using artillery, helicopters, and aircraft, at all times of the day or night, to kill the largest number of persons present in these prohibited zones.” He further went on to order that “all persons captured in those villages shall be detained and interrogated by the security services, and those between the ages of fifteen and seventy shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them, of which we should be duly notified.” Ali also authorized the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, the first time any country had used chemical weapons on its own people on the battlefield. Saddam interned the surviving Kurds for months on end in conditions of extreme deprivation, only to return them home to razed villages.49

At the war’s end in August 1988, with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, the territory remained the same as it had been at the start of the war, and Iraq was in debt to the tune of $40-$50 billion owed to the West, and a like amount to Arab states, namely Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.⁵⁰ Saddam wanted the Kuwaitis and the Saudis to consider the debt a grant for stopping the Persians, and to limit oil production so the worldwide crude oil prices would rise. He felt the Kuwaitis, in particular, were manipulating oil prices to their benefit, and Iraq’s loss, as well as stealing Iraqi oil by drilling sideways into the Rumelia oil fields. During an Arab League meeting in Baghdad in May 1990, Saddam equated their actions as a “kind of war against Iraq.”⁵¹ Saddam assumed if he invaded Kuwait, there would be a measured reaction on the part of Arab nations, and the West would follow the Arabs’ lead. He planned to use Kuwait as a bargaining chip to gain even further concessions from his Gulf neighbors.⁵²

On 31, July 1990, Kuwaiti and Iraqi officials met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for what the Kuwaitis thought was the opening round of negotiations over the Iraqi demands.⁵³ On the morning of 2 August, Baghdad Radio announced a coup led by junior officers with mixed Kuwaiti-Iraqi heritage who had asked for Iraqi military assistance, as Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait City. The Kuwaiti royal family along with an estimated three hundred thousand subjects escaped to Saudi Arabia just ahead of the Iraqi onslaught. The Royal Family took to the airwaves themselves, urging Kuwaitis to resist the invaders.⁵⁴ The next day, the United Nations passed a Security Council resolution condemning the invasion, and by 6 August, Security Council Resolution 660 was in place, freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and setting in motion a trade embargo that would last for over thirty-one years. Within days, Iraq dropped the façade of a coup, and Saddam declared Kuwait the 19th province of Iraq.

............

On 7 August 1990, twenty thousand of my best friends in the 24th Infantry Division, plus a like number of buddies in the 82nd Airborne Division, and eventually over five hundred thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were alerted to deploy to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to stop Saddam’s aggression. As the assistant operations officer in the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor, I was in charge of tracking the movement of the battalion’s equipment. We loaded our vehicles and gear onto train cars at Fort Stewart, then onto Navy Fast Sealift Ships in the port of Savannah. The next two weeks were agonizing for Debora and me. Rumors abounded on our exact departure date, and initially, when I left for work in the morning I never knew if I was coming home for dinner or getting on a plane to Saudi Arabia. At one point Debora told me, “I wish you would just leave and get it over with.”

Eventually we received a deployment schedule, and by 22 August the entire 2nd Brigade, 24th Infantry Division was shipped twenty miles up the road to Hunter Army Airfield and locked inside a compound surrounded by a chain link fence. Inside the barrier, a party atmosphere prevailed with portable floodlights illuminating a buffet line provided by local restaurants, with local bands providing entertainment around the clock. Wives and girlfriends figured out our secure location and rushed to the airfield. They pressed against the fence in an attempt to see their soldier one last time, with many marriage proposals occurring through the metal holes. We would sleep for a couple of hours, get up and eat some bar-bque, listen to the band, then go back to sleep. After a while, it was hard to tell if it was day or night. On 24 August 2006, we lined up alphabetically, received a gallon jug of water, a green Army pocket Bible, and a plastic sack full of sandwiches. Then we marched aboard a commercial 747 jumbo jet diverted from the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet. Storing our helmets, flack vests, and personal weapons in the overhead bins, we settled in for the eighteen-hour flight. The flight crew could not have been more accommodating, offering us all the soda and pretzels we could possibly consume. The flight attendants were all volunteers, and most of them had flown a similar route back and forth to Vietnam two decades prior.

The French authorities refused to let three hundred fifty well-armed Americans into Charles de Gaulle Airport when we stopped to refuel. Instead, they directed the plane to a remote end of an unused runway and forced us to disembark the plane.

The flight commander, an infantry battalion commander from another unit, addressed the assembled group on a chilly gray, drizzly French morning. “Men, we have no idea what we are going to find when we land, but we better be ready for anything. Front leaning rest position. Move!” he barked.

Puzzled, we hit the ground ready to do pushups and immediately found ourselves wrist deep in rabbit poop. Actually, not rabbit poop, but hare poop—really big hare poop, as it quickly became clear that end of the runway was a French hare habitat.

“This is stupid! What the hell are we doing?” erupted from indignant soldiers up and down the formation.

The senior NCOs and officers immediately tried restoring order. “Shut the hell up. Do what you’re told!” they ordered, loudly and repeatedly.

Once the formation quieted down and commenced doing pushups, the NCOs and officers filled in the back of the formation and whispered, “This is stupid! What the hell are we doing?”

Re-boarding the plane, we still had another six hours of soda and peanuts until we landed in Riyadh. Ninety minutes before landing, the voice of the push-up ordering plane commander boomed over the intercom, “Men, we need to be able to hit the ground ready to fight. To do this, we must hydrate! Everyone will finish their gallon of water before landing.”

In theory, this made a lot of sense. In practice, what goes in must come out, and the plane’s holding tanks are only so big. Even the most visionary of aerospace engineers never contemplated three hundred fifty passengers all having to pee a gallon of water at the same time. By the time we landed, the toilets were overflowing and running down the aisle. My good friend, Captain Mike Foley, who would command the first tank company to enter Iraq, turned to me and predicted dryly, “We’re all going to die.”

It was after midnight when we stepped foot on Saudi soil. Foley and I bolted from the group to find a bathroom, as the engine roar of two F-15 Eagles rocketing down the runway broke the still of the night. We watched transfixed as the blue flames of the afterburners launched into the night sky. Once they were out of sight, we looked at each other and knew everything would turn out okay.

The 24th ID was the first armored unit to arrive in Saudi Arabia, and my battalion was part of the lead brigade. We arrived in the Port of Dammam days before our equipment. Saddam’s intentions on invading Saudi Arabia were unknown, and we were defenseless. The only relief from the blazing sun lay under desert shades—twenty-foot high tin-roofed structures with no sides spaced alongside the dock. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all the same: a brown paper sack containing a box of mango juice, an apple, an orange, and a hot dog bun filled with some kind of pate’ which our leaders assured us was not camel meat. Their denials only served to erode their credibility. The food situation did not improve for another week until the MREs arrived, sparking a celebration among the troops that rivaled VJ Day. A couple of weeks after that, the T-Rations arrived, although for some reason my battalion had chicken cacciatore for breakfast and dinner for the next six weeks.

There was a collective sigh of relief when the tracks of the first Abrams rolled down the USNS Capella’s ramp and onto the concrete of the port. It took a couple of days to offload, and then the battalion moved to assembly areas deep in the Saudi Desert. The tank companies formed the outer perimeter of a two-mile-wide desert laager, with the battalion headquarters and support elements vehicles in the middle. The battalion was prepared to head straight into combat, not sit in the desert. We had left our tents back in Georgia, and spent the next four months living in our vehicles, sleeping on cots under the stars, burning our shit in cut down fifty-five-gallon drums, and eating T-Rations twice a day with an MRE for lunch. For entertainment, soldiers would read the Army Common Tasks Manual or race to see who could put on their chemical protective suit the fastest. Just to fight boredom, tank crew members would write each other letters daily so they would have something at mail call.

Dear Loader,

It was a hot day today. We pulled maintenance for a couple of hours and then broke for lunch. I had a pork patty MRE. It was good. We cleaned weapons in the afternoon.

I got a letter at mail call. It was a good day.

Sincerely,

Driver

When we arrived in Saudi Arabia, I was serving as the assistant operations officer. Our battalion XO was a great officer who ran himself ragged trying to prop-up the battalion commander, who was clearly in over his head. In early December, a new executive officer, Major Willis Lee arrived. Lee was a tremendous leader in his own right and served as a mentor and role model to me throughout my career. At the time, most of the officers in the battalion were reading Catch 22, and collectively decided that Major Lee was actually Major DeCoverley reincarnated. After a couple of days, I was standing outside the TOC at midnight, smoking a cigarette. Major Lee walked up to me, clearly frustrated.

“Is everyone in this unit screwed up?” he asked, sounding defeated.

“I thought it was me,” I replied and walked off.

Two days later, at 0800 on 10 Dec 1990, following our two-hour long daily update to the battalion commander, most of the captains and senior NCOs on the battalion staff were told to report outside the commander’s tent. Major Lee held a three-by-five card in-hand and called off the names in order. I was last. One by one, the men in front of me entered the tent and moments later exited.

“What happened?” the dwindling dozen of us whispered to each officer or NCO as he came out of the tent.

“The son-of-a-bitch fired me,” was the reply from each.

I thought I had been doing a good job up to that point. As unit movement officer during our transport over, we were one of the few units to have all our equipment arrive on time. General Colin Powell even awarded me an Army Commendation Medal for my effort. I believed “Relief for Cause” in combat is about the worst thing that could happen to an Army officer, and I am not sure I could have endured the humiliation. I resolved to myself I was not going to take this lying down. I would fight for my job!

As I entered the tent, the battalion commander smiled and told me, “Tony, you are now the S4.”

“Sir, this is bullshit! I’ve been busting my ass,” I replied.

“No, no, you’re not getting fired. You’re now a primary staff officer. This is a promotion of sorts. I need a good logistics officer. I need you to get shit for the battalion.” he said.

“You sure this is a good thing?” I asked, somewhat thrown off my game, but still ready to fight.

“Yes.” he replied.

“Really?” I asked again. It was only then sinking into me that becoming the logistics officer was not the same as getting fired.

This went on for a couple of minutes until he finally told me, “Get the fuck out and get to work.”

Under President George H. W. Bush, the United States would assemble a United Nation-backed coalition including military forces from twenty-five countries over the coming months.55 By the end of December, my battalion along with the rest of the division moved to the western edge of the Saudi/Iraq border. I was in charge of the Administrative Logistics Operations Center (ALOC), where the supply sergeants, cooks, medics, and the rest of the logistics tail for the battalion lived and worked. Luckily for me, my counterpart in our sister battalion, Captain Dave Cogdall who had been on the job for a month showed me the ropes and how to get my hands on the one item that was in the shortest supply in the division—sticky acetate for the maps. While we prepared for war, there were still hopes that President Bush could achieve a peaceful settlement right up to the 15 January deadline.

At dawn on 17 January 1991, I was sleeping on a stretcher in the cargo compartment of my Humvee when Staff Sergeant Cecil Gaskins woke me up exclaiming, “The war’s started!” I looked up from under the tarp to see a grayish sky filled with the contrails of planes heading back after the nights’ bombing missions in Iraq. The air campaign targeting Saddam’s air force, air defenses, and strategic targets in Iraq and Kuwait had commenced. The punishment from the sky continued for five weeks until 24 February, when Coalition forces launched the ground assault to liberate Kuwait.

During the previous five months, our battalion had wasted away its potential training time. On the second day of the attack, as part of the 24th Infantry Division’s famous Left Hook, our battalion was ordered to sweep the airfield at Jalibah, Iraq, from the south while our two sister battalions laid a base of fire to the west. I was in charge of sixty assorted vehicles including cargo trucks, recovery vehicles, Humvees, and the Battalion Aid Station. We were still heading east when I stopped my formation behind the last terrain feature before the airfield. I had all the vehicles point outward, forming a 360-degree perimeter around the Aid Station, which I ordered to set up and prepare to receive casualties.

Ahead of us, the battalion’s combat vehicles crested the hill in a column formation and attempted to come online and turn to the north at the same time. The line of forty-four Abrams tanks skewed too far to the west. Instead of engaging the enemy on the airfield, they inadvertently fired into the flank company of our sister battalion, killing two soldiers and wounding nine.⁵⁶ Combat journalist David Turnley captured an iconic photograph of Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz crying after learning that his friend Andy Alanis laid dead in a body bag next to him on board a Blackhawk helicopter.

Figure 3. Friendly Fire: Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz reacts as he realizes that the body of Private Andy Alaniz lies next to him aboard a Medevac helicopter during Operation Desert Strom. Corporal Mike Tsangarakis also pictured. 28 February 1991. Courtesy David Turnley. Click on the photo for bonus features.

For the next fourteen years, I kept a copy of that photo in my office desk drawer as a visible reminder of what happens to untrained units. For years, I would ask myself daily what I could have done to prevent the fratricide. At the time, I had zero input into the conduct of tactical operations, but I was still a leader in the unit, and I always had a nagging feeling that I should have been able to do something to prevent it from happening. Upon returning from Desert Storm, I swore to myself that if I ever had the opportunity to command a battalion, my unit would train every minute possible before entering combat.

We captured hundreds of Iraqis during Desert Storm; they were glad to see us, and they were clearly ready to get rid of Saddam. Most of the Iraqi prisoners were looking forward to going to America to work on the farms like German and Italian POWs did during World War II. They sat in the back of the deuce-and-a-half trucks, repeating Saddam’s name and spitting on the ground. Then they would hold up their index fingers, smile, and say “Georgebooossh number one! Georgebooossh number one!”

After one hundred hours, the war was over. Thanks in large part to the leadership Major Willis Lee provided from his second-in-command position, the battalion managed to get through the remainder of the deployment with only one soldier wounded. The liberation of Kuwait was complete, and the Iraqi military was in shambles. The Iraqi air force and navy ceased to exist, thirty-seven of forty-three Iraqi army divisions were combat ineffective, and over sixty thousand Iraqi troops had surrendered. American losses were exponentially lower than pre-war predictions; with 148 U.S. service members losing their lives.57 Our division commander, Major General Barry McCaffrey, summed it up best, “Iraq went from having the fifth largest army in the world, to the second largest army in Iraq.”

On 10 March, we received orders to be out of Iraq in twenty-four hours and began a grueling road march to the port of Dammam for redeployment back to the States. Within two weeks, I was marching across the parade field of Fort Stewart, Georgia. Once dismissed, the cheering crowd swarmed from the stands, loved ones frantically trying to find their soldiers. One of my fondest memories was standing on the field looking for my family, when Debora with eleven-month-old Allison on her hip, came crashing into me with her welcoming embrace. For a moment, I was afraid we would crush our daughter.

I was happy to be home.