On an April night a small white propeller aircraft descended out of the darkness about 115 miles northwest of Baghdad. The plane had been in the inventory for years but had never before been used for a clandestine infiltration. Now its two Echo Squadron pilots were a hundred miles behind enemy lines searching through their night vision goggles for a place to land. There was no airfield—not even a dirt strip—nearby. But they weren’t worried. Up ahead, on the only paved road for miles around, they spotted the glow of an infrared chemical light a 24th Special Tactics Squadron operator had placed where he wanted them to touch down. Aligning the aircraft with the thin black ribbon across the desert, the lead pilot lowered the plane until the wheels screeched on the tarmac and the aircraft came to a rest. Out stepped a lean, athletic man in his early forties. In Delta they called him “Panther” and he was arriving to take charge of a small task force with a big mission. That was nothing new for him. What was unusual was the makeup of his force. For the first time since the Panama invasion a U.S. special operations force was taking tanks into battle, and Pete Blaber was going to lead it.1
* * *
Although the U.S. military’s failures at Tora Bora and Anaconda meant Al Qaeda’s leadership and thousands of its fighters had escaped to Pakistan, it was clear to most in JSOC that the next phase of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” would not be a covert campaign against its enemies strategizing in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but an invasion of Iraq. The JSOC staff was discussing a potential role for the command in such an operation by the end of 2001. Real planning for it began shortly after Anaconda, when the staffers returned to Pope Air Force Base from Masirah, and, together with their Delta counterparts, were busy dusting off Desert Storm plans and after-action reports for reminders of lessons learned twelve years previously.2 Task Force Brown’s aircrews had little doubt where their next battles lay. “All of our training exercises, all of our scenarios were built off an Iraqi scenario” once the unit returned to Fort Campbell in December 2001, a Little Bird pilot said.
December 2002 found the JSOC staff in Qatar taking part in Internal Look, CENTCOM’s war game of an Iraq invasion.3 Within three months, Dailey had established his joint operations center at Arar, the same airfield JSOC used during Desert Storm. There, out of sight of the news media and never officially acknowledged, a substantial force was gathering. Not only did it include the usual color-coded elements that formed a JSOC task force, but also a significant contribution from the conventional Army: an infantry battalion from the 82nd Airborne Division, a Patriot air defense missile unit, and a High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, battery. (A truck-mounted version of the Army’s tracked Multiple Launch Rocket System, HIMARS could also fit on a Combat Talon. Its mobility made it an ideal fire support platform for a raiding force.) Together, the elements assembling fifty miles from the Iraqi border were called Task Force 20.4
Most of the 160th’s 1st Battalion was involved, other than those crews required to stay home and maintain the Bullet package of helicopters ready for a no-notice JSOC mission. “Those guys, they were hating life,” said a Little Bird pilot. “They thought they were going to miss all the action, that this was going to be a fight that was going to be over in a couple of months and they’d miss the war.”
Delta was to be the main special mission unit, having handed Afghanistan off to Team 6 by late 2002.5 The unit’s C Squadron, led by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Coultrup, was at Arar waiting for the action to start. But Delta commander Colonel Ron Russell had suffered a brain aneurysm while running around the airfield. With deputy commander Colonel Chuck Sellers back at Bragg, Dailey made Blaber, the unit’s operations officer, Delta’s acting commander in theater. Team 6’s Gold Team was also there.6
If Delta provided Task Force 20’s rapier, the Ranger Regiment provided its muscle. The Rangers were there in force because Dailey was planning the command’s pièce de résistance, an airborne seizure of Baghdad airport—a classic joint readiness-exercise-style mission for which the task force had conducted large-scale rehearsals at Forts Benning and Bragg prior to deployment. For JSOC’s other assigned mission—hunting for Iraq’s fabled weapons of mass destruction—Dailey’s preferred option was to keep his force at Arar and launch heliborne raids from there.
Blaber, unsurprisingly, disagreed. Just as he had with regard to Afghanistan, the Delta officer advocated putting forces on the ground in Iraq to “develop the situation.” Dailey and his more cautious staffers recoiled from this suggestion. Anxious about the risks that sending a raiding force into Iraq would entail, they had no interest in sending a small, lightly armed and armored task force into Iraq’s vast western desert. They would remind Delta operators eager to launch into Iraq of the case of Bravo Two Zero, the eight-man British SAS patrol in Desert Storm that was compromised, leading to the deaths of three operators and the capture of four others. To Delta, Dailey’s attitude was simple: You can’t operate behind enemy lines.
Blaber thought Dailey and his nervous staffers were overestimating the risks. “Guys, you’re fighting a past war again,” the Delta officer told them in a briefing at Arar, before listing five assets available to Delta in 2003 that were not available in 1991: precision-guided munitions in the form of the shoulder-launched Javelin antitank missile, which would allow operators to engage tanks from stand-off range, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs, which were “smart” bombs dropped by jets; small unmanned aerial vehicles a raiding party could launch to check for dangers over the next terrain feature; new, highly mobile trucks that carried generators and large quantities of fuel; trained dogs (with air-conditioned kennels) to help secure a perimeter; and battlefield interrogation teams to produce instantly actionable intelligence. Together these assets were “game-changers,” he told the staffers. Blaber’s men knew it. The operators were itching to roam across western Iraq. “We begged, borrowed, and begged some more just to get in,” a Delta source said.
Dailey threw Blaber a bone and agreed to let him send a small task force organized around Coultrup’s C Squadron across the border as part of the Scud-hunting mission that Central Command had given 5th Special Forces Group, which had set up shop at Jordan’s Prince Hassan Air Base, also known as H-5. In mid-March, Blaber, Coultrup, and Colonel Frank Kearney, who was still the operations director for JSOC and Task Force 20, flew there on covered aircraft from Arar to meet with 5th Group commander John Mulholland and his 1st Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Chris Haas, with whom Blaber had worked closely before and during Anaconda. British SAS and SBS elements also attended the meeting.
Dailey’s guidance to Blaber was clear: “You have one mission: find Scuds.” (Because Scuds could be used to fire chemical warheads, U.S. military personnel often used the word to refer not just to the missiles but Saddam’s WMD program.) But Blaber and his colleagues had other ideas. The acting Delta commander’s order to Coultrup was classic Blaber: “Develop the situation.” Despite Dailey’s expectation that Delta would limit itself to poking around missile sites in the western desert, Blaber had designed Coultrup’s force to go all the way to Baghdad.
“So this was like a secret mission, but secret from our own people, because we knew we weren’t going to find any WMDs and we weren’t going to find any Scuds,” a Delta source said. New communications technology could reduce their vulnerability, he told the other commanders. Noting that they all carried Iridium satellite phones, Blaber suggested they type each other’s numbers into the speed dial. If one task force came under attack, its commander should immediately text the word “baseball” to the others, who would converge on the location, thus reducing the risk of having small elements operating independently in the desert. “We will become a swarm,” Blaber said.7
* * *
On the moonless night of March 19, TF Brown pilots fired the first rounds of the war against Iraq. Their targets were the scores of small buildings known as visual observation posts from which Iraqi forces monitored the western and southern borders with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Flying from Arar, a pair of DAPs headed northwest to destroy the posts facing Jordan, while ten Little Birds—eight AH-6s and two MH-6s—flew north and northeast to take out the posts along the Saudi border. The Little Birds were divided into “Black Swarm” teams. In tactics developed the previous year during exercises across the American Southwest and at Fort Knox, Kentucky, each MH-6 was teamed with four AH-6s, divided into two pairs. As they approached the border, the pairs would separate, one pair going into a holding pattern while the other attacked the border posts with the MH-6, which would spot targets with its forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor and use a laser designator to identify them for the AH-6s. (All Little Birds had been fitted with FLIR systems since returning from Afghanistan, but the AH-6 crews had removed theirs to allow the aircraft to carry more munitions.) Once the first pair of AH-6s had fired all their ammunition, the second pair would take over. The tactic was a variation on that used in Prime Chance, the 1987 operation against the Iranians in the Persian Gulf, with an important twist: each Little Bird team could call on a pair of Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft (better known as “Warthogs”) to take care of larger targets with Maverick missiles and 30mm cannon fire.
The rules of engagement allowed the pilots to target any Iraqi with a weapon. Firing sometimes from two or three miles away, the DAPs and Little Birds cut down dozens of people. Resistance was minimal and ineffective.8 An AH-6 pilot said his team took no return fire. “It was pretty much like shooting ducks in the water,” he said.
Friendly fire was perhaps a greater threat to the helicopter crews. Before the missions, TF Brown planners and crews were given maps overlaid with the paths of each cruise missile strike scheduled for that night, “so we didn’t fly into one,” said a pilot. The squiggly lines “looked like a jellyfish,” he said. But the maps were to ensure that the crews weren’t the ones getting stung. “We had to plan our flight routes around it because basically they’re flying at our altitude,” the pilot said. “You didn’t want to be in formation with one of those.”
As the DAPs and Little Birds were systematically destroying the visual observation posts and the first bombs were falling on Baghdad, a seventeen-vehicle column from Arar blasted a hole in the forty-foot berm marking the border and crossed into Iraq, the first U.S. ground force to do so. Inside the fifteen Pinzgauers and two SUVs (included for their low-vis characteristics) were about seventy-five personnel, including Delta’s entire C Squadron, led by Coultrup. Pete Blaber’s dream was alive. Task Force Green was in the fight.9
* * *
The flights targeting the visual observation posts marked the start of the U.S. invasion, but the aircrews were not the first JSOC personnel to cross the border. Prior to the invasion, a single U.S. intelligence operative—a former Delta operator still working for the unit—climbed into a black SUV in Amman, Jordan, and began the fifteen-hour drive to Baghdad, where he would become JSOC’s only nonofficial cover agent in the enemy capital.
Born and raised in Eastern Europe, the agent had high Slavic cheekbones and eyes that became slits when he smiled. He had moved to the United States as a teenager, joining the Army in the 1970s before being selected into Delta early enough to take part in Eagle Claw. An operator who served with him in the early 1980s recalled “a funny, outgoing guy” with a heavy accent. “He was so East European,” the operator said. “He slouched a little bit, he wasn’t real buff. But he ran—he was fast.” The East European remained in the Unit through the 1980s, joined Operational Support Troop in the early 1990s, then disappeared into the training, evaluation, and operational research (TEOR) department, where older NCOs went when they no longer wanted to put up with the rigors of being in an operational squadron. For that reason, other operators sometimes referred to TEOR as “travel everywhere or retire.” But the department, manned largely by personnel with technical and technological expertise, was responsible for supplying operators with one-of-a-kind gear, particularly for covert missions. “If you need a camera that can hide in a ‘rock’ or you need to have an attaché case rigged with a microphone on it,” you visit the department, said a Delta source. “They developed all kinds of cool breakthrough products, the foundation of which were always off-the-shelf technology.”
At some point the East European left the uniformed Army to become a nonofficial cover operative, or NOC (pronounced “knock”): an intelligence officer working under a cover identity as something other than a U.S. government employee (in the East European’s case, as a businessman). This is one of the most hazardous types of intelligence work, because the operative does not enjoy diplomatic immunity. The East European continued to report to Delta in his new role, but few of his old comrades knew about it. “This is totally compartmented at the Unit,” said a Delta source. The agent rarely, if ever, visited the compound. An operator who had served with him in the 1980s had no idea that he’d become a nonofficial cover operative. “I just made an assumption that he’d moved on,” the operator said.
For years he “lived his cover,” spending time in his native country, even returning there for medical treatment as well as to meet sources. He traveled globally, including weeks-long trips to Latin America, Iran, and Turkey to build his cover, in addition to Iraq, which he visited repeatedly in the 1990s to support Delta’s counter-proliferation mission, in particular the Unit’s role in the U.S. component of the United Nations inspections. “Everybody else who did the inspections had nothing even close to being that deep or protected,” said a Delta source.
The East European had his own case officer at Delta, an Army major, but the former Delta operator also had the authority to recruit and task agents himself. “Businessmen and people in the military were the people he was talking to,” a senior JSOC officer said. “He was trained sufficiently enough to make contact with folks, give them covert communications,” and teach them basic tradecraft such as how to perform dead drops and use the simple cameras he gave them. The East European never revealed his American background, even when recruiting his sources, the officer said. His agents never realized they had been recruited by an American.
After the September 11 attacks, intelligence and special operations officials wondered whether they were maximizing the opportunity the East European represented. “In late ’01 … there was a lot of discussion about … leveraging him more and better,” said an intelligence officer. “He was an asset that everybody realized may not have been leveraged in the most opportune ways.”
Already in his fifties when the United States invaded Iraq, the East European had a cover his native country helped maintain, even giving him access to its Baghdad embassy. “This was a rare program in 2001–2002,” the senior JSOC officer said. Nonetheless, the East European was one of about seven or eight nonofficial cover operatives JSOC and its special mission units were running in the first years after the September 11 attacks. These included at least two agents who went to Iran, the officer said: the East European, whose missions “were mostly designed to … look for opportunities to recruit [sources] in the Iranian military,” and an Iranian-born U.S. citizen working for the Army of Northern Virginia.
Now the East European was on one of his most dangerous missions. He was not alone on the long drive from Amman to Baghdad, but his companions “were unwitting,” the senior JSOC officer said. In other words, they were unaware that the vehicle in which they were riding was no ordinary SUV. The National Security Agency had outfitted it with a variety of hidden receivers that the agency’s technicians could remotely tune to survey cell phone and push-to-talk FM radio network traffic. This, in turn, enabled the NSA to focus on specific emitters. When they reached Baghdad, as directed, the East European parked it close to an Iraqi intelligence headquarters and left it there. Because the vehicle’s hidden receivers could collect with a lot more sensitivity than satellites or airborne collection systems, the NSA used them to tip and cue those other sensors. In addition, the receivers could capture a large chunk of the radio frequency spectrum in Baghdad and transmit it back to be unraveled at the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters. “We were desperate back in 2003” for information on the Iraqi leadership’s thinking and intentions, the senior JSOC officer said. The hope was that, for instance, the receivers would enable the NSA to figure out which frequencies senior Iraqi government officials’ personal security details were using. “If you were trying to establish every time that Saddam Hussein’s PSD [personal security detail] drove around Baghdad, this was a way of doing that,” he said. “The Iraqis were notoriously poor at opsec [operational security],” often not changing their frequencies for years, he said. But although the East European successfully positioned the vehicle and the technical side of the mission worked, the JSOC officer didn’t recall the effort producing “a lot of intel.”
“That was not really our op,” he said. “We were the delivery guys.”
After dropping the vehicle off, the East European’s task in Baghdad was to figure out and transmit Saddam’s location for targeting by U.S. air strikes. In several cases, he conducted what a former Pentagon special operations official called “a GPS walk-by,” strolling through Baghdad while wearing a Global Positioning System tracking device and pressing a button that transmitted his exact coordinates via satellite as he passed a potential target location. Such missions entailed enormous risk, not only from the Iraqi security services if the agent was compromised, but from the bombing campaign itself. Protecting him required careful, up-to-the-minute planning of the air strikes. One such strike was launched based on intelligence he provided, but Saddam was not at the targeted location.
The East European’s efforts were largely in vain. “He had not recruited any sources that were giving him the whereabouts of Saddam,” the senior JSOC officer said. A Delta source said the agent’s European background was not much help. “It would have been better if he had been an Arab American, because no matter what embassy you’re with, if you’re not an Iraqi, walking around in those days would be a death sentence,” he said, adding that the agent was able to provide JSOC task force leaders with little more than “environmentals”—general information about what they could expect in Baghdad. Once U.S. troops had occupied Baghdad, the East European drove back to Amman. “It’s perhaps another opportunity that wasn’t fully taken advantage of, but nothing really of substance came of it,” the Delta source said.
When the East European’s case officer moved to a job at the Defense Humint Service in the summer of 2004, and was not replaced, the East European followed him, according to an intelligence source. This represented a loss to Delta—“the guy was irreplaceable,” said a Delta source—and played into the larger issue over whether special mission units should run nonofficial cover agents. By the end of the decade, the CIA was spending between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion a year to maintain its officers’ cover, and senior Pentagon leaders were hugely frustrated at the Agency’s inability to deliver actionable intelligence in places like Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Even in the 1990s, putting operators undercover was “difficult … unless you’re lucky enough to have been born and raised in another country and have a credible missing part of your life,” a Delta source said. Because soldiers go on the Department of the Army Special Roster when they join Delta, essentially hiding them from the public, the East European fulfilled both requirements. “Then you need an ally who’s going to cover for you” and create a history for that missing part of the operator’s life, “which they did.” In the twenty-first century, creating that sort of deep “cover for status”—i.e., a plausible reason for an intelligence operative to repeatedly visit or live in certain countries—for JSOC personnel had become almost impossible “because it requires immersion and time,” the source said. “It’s just impossible to make that happen without all that other stuff in place.”
As for the vehicle packed with top secret antennae? “I want to say the vehicle was destroyed,” the senior JSOC officer said, but added that he could not be sure. “That vehicle was not exfil’d and we didn’t target it” for an air strike, he said.10
* * *
As per Dailey’s orders, Task Force Green’s first task was to check out a number of possible weapons of mass destruction and Scud sites in the west, before moving on to the Haditha Dam, a vast Soviet-designed structure on the Euphrates River 130 miles northwest of Baghdad that U.S. generals viewed as another potential WMD hiding place. Unlike his bosses, Blaber, who remained at Arar, was skeptical Saddam had stashed any WMD in remote sites in the western desert. The Delta officer thought it more likely the Iraqi strongman would keep such weapons, if he had them, closer to the seat of power in Baghdad. Another mission beckoned. In the weeks prior to the invasion, U.S. signals intelligence had intercepted an Iraqi general’s phone calls as he drove along Highway 12 to and from the Syrian border, raising the possibility that the general was reconnoitering an escape route for the regime’s leaders. Blaber ordered Coultrup to block the routes to Jordan and Syria in an effort to prevent Saddam, his sons, and other senior leaders from escaping the noose that the Coalition would soon tighten around Baghdad.11
For several days Task Force Green raised havoc in western Iraq, ambushing Iraqi military convoys and clearing suspected weapons of mass destruction sites, none of which held anything remotely suspicious.12 In the meantime, as the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marine Divisions raced toward Baghdad in the fastest military advance in history, it was becoming increasingly clear in Arar that the armored columns could take the airport without JSOC’s help. Despite Dailey’s desperate attempts to hold on to it, Task Force 20’s set-piece mission to seize the Iraqi capital’s airport was evaporating before his eyes. “He was jamming a marshmallow in a piggy bank there trying to get an airfield seizure mission,” said a Delta source. On March 23 the Rangers learned that the mission, which had been scheduled for the next day, was canceled. Attention now focused on Task Force Green, whose foray into Iraq Dailey had only grudgingly approved. “Suddenly it’s like this is the JSOC mission,” the Delta source said. Colonel Joe Votel, still in charge of the Ranger Regiment, which would have been the main force seizing the airport, found himself looking for a new mission. “Pete, I don’t have a mission. Is there anything my guys could do for you?” he asked Blaber. “How many guys are you talking about?” the Delta officer replied. “A whole regiment,” Votel said. “Yeah, we can use it!” was Blaber’s reply. Dailey quickly attached Votel’s 1st Battalion to Task Force Green.13
The Rangers were soon in the thick of the action, much of which involved seizing desert landing strips and military airfields. On the evening of March 24, 3rd Ranger Battalion’s C Company seized Objective Roadrunner, a desert landing strip near Al Qaim close to the Syrian border, in a parachute assault.14 The Rangers secured the strip while a small Delta element, supported by a pair each of MH-6s and AH-6s, operated from there, interdicting lines of communication. (Task Force Brown’s DAPs had finished their portion of the mission to destroy the visual observation posts on March 20, while the Black Swarm teams continued through March 23, pushing a little deeper into Iraq every night. From then on, Brown focused on supporting the Task Force 20 ground forces.)15
Task Force Green conducted raids on two airfields, H-2 and H-3, in western Iraq’s Anbar province, and 1st Ranger Battalion seized another pair of airfields, Sidewinder South and Sidewinder North. The latter missions began the night of March 23 when the battalion’s A Company plus a small battalion command element crossed into Iraq in newly fielded ground mobility vehicles (GMVs), driving twelve hours to a desert landing strip called Objective Coyote. The Rangers were fortunate to arrive in daylight, because the objective was strewn with unexploded ordnance. The company and battalion commanders were deep in the planning for the assault on Sidewinder South, which included the village of Nukhayb and a small military garrison as well as the airfield, when the dust storm that slowed the entire invasion hit on March 24. The Rangers at Coyote could do little other than seek shelter for two days. When the storm abated on the evening of March 26, the Rangers mounted up and drove thirty-five miles to the objective, which they cleared over the course of twelve hours, encountering little resistance.
Leaving a small element at Nukhayb, A Company returned to Coyote, where a C-17 landed on the night of March 27, disgorging 1st Battalion’s C Company and a Humvee-mounted 82nd Airborne Division antitank company. With one platoon remaining at Coyote, C Company moved to Nukhayb to relieve the remaining A Company elements, who then assaulted Sidewinder North, at the village of Mudaysis on the night of March 29, supported by a 120mm mortar section, AH-6 gunships, and A-10 ground attack jets. They again encountered little resistance and after destroying weapons and munitions caches returned to Arar via Coyote.16
Task Force Brown, 2nd Ranger Battalion, and Team 6’s Gold Team got a much hotter reception when they raided the Al Qadisiyah Research Center, otherwise known as Objective Beaver, on the night of March 26. Located on the southern shore of the man-made lake north of the Haditha Dam, the research center was a suspected biological and chemical weapons facility. The raid was a classic JSOC set-piece operation: Rangers from 2nd Battalion’s B Company landed in four MH-60K Black Hawks and established four blocking positions, isolating the facility. Two MH-47E Chinooks delivered the Gold Team assaulters next to the target building, while a pair each of DAPs and AH-6s provided fire support, as did two MH-6s used as Gold Team sniper platforms. Another two Chinooks would be close by, prepared to infil an immediate reaction force.
After refueling and picking up four Gold Team snipers, the Little Birds launched from Roadrunner, which was only thirty-five miles from Al Qadisiyah. The larger Task Force Brown aircraft flew straight from Arar, refueling in midair, before dividing into two groups. The Chinooks and Black Hawks flew through a hail of bullets as they converged on the target, while the DAPs attacked the town’s power station two and a half miles away, in the process setting the oil in the transformers aflame. “It looked like a nuclear bomb went off,” said an MH-6 pilot.
Fierce resistance, including armor-piercing rounds, met the assault force at the research center. The Chinook and Black Hawk door gunners responded with devastating minigun fire, and AH-6 pilot CW4 John Meehan expertly put a rocket through the front door of the government building from which much of the firing was emanating, suppressing the threat instantly. The Rangers’ luck held until the fourth Black Hawk landed at its assigned blocking position. A bullet flew into the cabin and hit a Ranger in the back, passing through his chest before getting stuck in his body armor. With a crew chief and a Gold Team SEAL fighting to keep the Ranger alive, the pilots took off and made a beeline back to Roadrunner, where a C-130 equipped as a flying operating theater was waiting with a surgical team.
As the second of the two Chinooks carrying the main assault force landed, gunfire peppered the aircraft, striking a crew chief above his jaw. The Chinook crew dropped the ramp and the assaulters stormed off. The pilots took off immediately with two soldiers working furiously on their critically wounded colleague stretched out on the floor. In the middle of the flight the crew chief stopped breathing, necessitating five minutes of CPR before he recovered. The helicopter landed beside the flying operating theater at Roadrunner and the crew chief joined the wounded Ranger in surgery. Both soldiers survived, thanks to the calmness and lifesaving skills of their colleagues.
Back at Al Qadisiyah, the assaulters combed the research facility for forty-five minutes, looking in vain for WMD. The Little Birds and DAPs circled overhead, the MH-6s’ snipers picking off individual targets while the other aircraft used chain gun and rocket fire to destroy threatening vehicles. After less than an hour on the objective, the assault force and the Rangers departed on the Chinooks and Black Hawks, returning to Arar after stopping to refuel at Roadrunner.17
The next night, March 27, it was 1st Ranger Battalion’s A Company’s turn to conduct a parachute assault. This time, the objective was the military airfield known as H-1, or, to the Rangers, Objective Serpent. Three C-17s’ worth of Rangers dropped onto the target, but, other than antiaircraft fire that forced the transport pilots to take evasive action en route the Rangers met no opposition. They did, however, suffer almost a dozen injured landing on the rocky ground.18 The airfield was now available to stage other missions across western Iraq. Blaber just happened to have one in mind.
The acting Delta commander’s analysis told him the Iraqi defense of Baghdad hinged on four critical locations where, according to U.S. intelligence maps, Saddam had concentrated his forces: Haditha; the area around his hometown of Tikrit, ninety-five miles northwest of Baghdad, and the neighboring town of Baiji thirty miles farther up Highway 1; Ramadi, about sixty miles west of Baghdad; and Baghdad’s southern approaches. He likened these to four fence posts, and said that pulling down one post would cause the fence to collapse. Blaber thought the northwestern fence post—Haditha Dam—was the most vulnerable to attack by his forces. It was isolated and surrounded by flat, empty terrain. If Task Force Green could rip that post out, he thought, the Iraqis would believe they were surrounded and the other posts would collapse. “Let me take the fence posts down,” he told Kearney, Task Force 20’s operations director. “If I can pull down this corner post I can pull the whole thing apart.” Kearney agreed.19
But before Task Force 20 could focus on Haditha, it had a high-profile rescue to conduct. Iraqi forces had captured six U.S. soldiers when they ambushed the 507th Maintenance Company’s small, disoriented convoy in Nasiriyah March 23. (Eleven U.S. soldiers died in the firefight.) One of the six soldiers captured was Private First Class Jessica Lynch, a nineteen-year-old from West Virginia. The Iraqis held her separately from the others. In late March, an Iraqi lawyer informed Marine elements and a Special Forces A-team in Nasiriyah that Lynch was being held in the city’s main hospital, where his wife was a nurse. Once the lawyer presented photographs proving this, Task Force 20 went into high gear planning a rescue. A joint operations center was established at Tallil air base, about twelve miles southwest of Nasiriyah. The task force expected a heavy fight as the headquarters of the local Saddam Fedayeen, a militia fiercely loyal to Hussein, was in the hospital basement. For two days staff worked around the clock to put together a plan that involved Rangers, Marines, Task Force Brown, Team 6, Delta, and the Army of Northern Virginia. The rescue force would total 488 personnel. Two Ranger colonels were running the show: Frank Kearney, JSOC’s operations officer, who was in charge of planning the rescue, and Joe Votel, the regiment commander, who led the mission. Team 6’s Gold Team had the lead role. The task force persuaded the Iraqi lawyer to return to the hospital and covertly film the route from the facility’s main front door up the stairs to Lynch’s room. He dropped that film off with Marines, who passed it back to Task Force 20. The SEALs assigned to go straight to her room studied the video intently so they knew every step they’d have to take once inside the hospital.
At 1 A.M. April 1, the first phase of the rescue began with Marines launching a diversionary attack south of the Euphrates, which dissects Nasiriyah. (The hospital was on the north side of the river.) The Marines also cut the city’s power. The hospital’s generators quickly switched on, making the building easily visible in the surrounding darkness. Then the assault force flew in. First came four Little Bird gunships, which encountered no Iraqi opposition but plenty of friendly fire from the Marine diversion. Then a pair of MH-6s with three Gold Team assaulters on each pod landed inside the hospital compound, right in front of the main door. The assaulters stormed into the hospital, with one thought: get to Lynch’s room before any harm could befall her. An MH-60K Black Hawk inserted Gold Team snipers on the roof. Another landed with a medical team. There weren’t enough TF Brown helicopters for all the missions, so Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters flew in the Rangers—2nd Battalion, augmented by A Company, 1st Battalion—whose mission was to isolate and secure the objective. The Marines deposited the Rangers some distance from the hospital, forcing them to move on foot to their positions, a movement they referred to as the “Mogadishu Mile” in reference to the grueling run Rangers and Delta operators made at the end of the October 1993 battle in Somalia. A combined ground assault force that included Gold Team operators in six-wheel-drive Pandur armored vehicles, Ranger GMVs, and Marine tanks approached from the north. Overhead, an AC-130 circled.
The expected resistance failed to materialize because the Fedayeen had vacated their positions shortly before the raid. But not knowing this, the Team 6 operators were taking no chances. When they burst into Lynch’s room she screamed from fright because SEALs were blasting locks off other doors in the corridor with shotguns to make sure no Fedayeen were hiding behind them. “She’s freaking out because she thinks we’re there to kill her,” said a Team 6 operator. To calm her, the SEAL element leader removed his U.S. flag Velcro patch and gave it to her. “We’re Americans,” he said. “We’re here to take you home.”
When the assaulters made the radio call with the code word that meant they had found Lynch safe and sound, a cheer went up in the JOC. The operators quickly got Lynch on the waiting Black Hawk, which flew her straight to Tallil, from where a plane took her to Kuwait.
Back at the hospital, workers led the operators to the morgue, where they found the bodies of two of Lynch’s less fortunate colleagues. Locals said more Americans were buried in shallow graves in the soccer field next to the hospital. The Rangers investigated and found this to be true. “It was basically just dirt thrown over them, limbs still sticking up out of the ground,” said a Task Force 20 planner. With no shovels, the Rangers had to dig the corpses out with their hands, a process that lengthened the mission far beyond what planners had anticipated. By daylight they had uncovered a total of nine bodies, all victims of the ambush of the 507th. (Marines rescued the remaining prisoners April 13 in Samarra.) The Rangers put the bodies on their vehicles and returned to Tallil. “The Rangers came back from that just beat down hard,” said the planner. “That was a tough one for them.”20
* * *
While the Task Force 20 staff wrestled with the Lynch rescue, Task Force Green was at H-1, preparing to assault the Haditha Dam about fifty-five miles to the northeast. The tactical approach would be a reprise of that used by Juliet Team in Anaconda: a night movement on all-terrain vehicles. The force was extraordinarily small considering the size of the enemy force guarding the target—just nine ATVs, each carrying no more than two operators.21 Defending the dam were four Iraqi armor companies with roughly forty-four T-55 tanks and BMP-1 armored personnel carriers, an infantry company of about 120 troops, an estimated fourteen South African GHN-45 155mm howitzers, numerous mortars, several truck-mounted Roland air defense missile launchers, and scores of antiaircraft guns. Another 6,000 Iraqi troops were less than twenty miles away.22 It was a target straight out of a JRX scenario, except in the JRX it would be half of JSOC assaulting the objective. Coultrup was sending fewer than twenty operators.
But the assault force’s small size proved an asset, as did the ATVs’ super-quiet mufflers and their drivers’ night vision goggles, which enabled the Delta operators to penetrate the Iraqi lines unheard and unseen. As Blaber monitored their progress using Blue Force Tracker, a system that used GPS signals sent from the ATVs to create an icon for each vehicle on his computer screen, the operators used laser designators to mark targets for the attack jets overhead. As had been the case in Afghanistan, the use of special operators to “lase” targets for U.S. airpower proved a powerful combination. A mix of laser-guided bombs and satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs destroyed twenty-three armored vehicles, seventeen ZSU 23mm air defense guns, plus a collection of trucks and some buildings. The operators withdrew as quietly as they had arrived, and then returned for a similar performance the following night.
As successful as Green’s forays had been, however, Blaber was now thinking bigger. The Delta officer realized the little task force lacked the manpower to seize and hold the dam, so he asked for a Ranger battalion to take over at Haditha. But Blaber wanted more than that, much more. He envisioned a force that in addition to sealing the escape routes to Syria and Jordan could rampage up and down Highway 1 north of Baghdad in an effort to convince the Iraqis that a large armored force was approaching the capital from the northwest. Blaber suggested the force could also start to build a human intelligence network in Iraq, a recognition that the Coalition’s intelligence picture was sorely lacking. He knew his small band of marauders would need to grow in order to fulfill his vision, so in addition to the Ranger battalion he requested another Delta squadron to deploy with Pinzgauers to join Task Force Green. Then he added the kicker: he wanted a tank company as well.23
The request was extremely unorthodox. With the exception of the Panama invasion in 1989, since World War II special operators had rarely worked closely with armored forces.24 Kearney, Dailey’s director of operations, was in favor, and even Dailey was “partially amenable,” according to one party to the discussions, because he was under pressure to demonstrate some value from his highly resourced task force. Blaber played two of his aces: the persuasive talents of his trusted sidekick from Anaconda, Jim Reese, who was a liaison in the Kuwait headquarters of Army Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the conventional ground force commander; and the high regard in which Tommy Franks had held Blaber since Anaconda. “Dailey was against it, everyone was against it, but Jimmy got McKiernan and McKiernan only had to say one thing to Franks and he was all over it,” said a Delta source. Frustrated with his conventional commanders, whose attack had temporarily stalled, the CENTCOM commander was eager to reward initiative and had enthused over TF Green’s Haditha raids. Sure enough, Blaber got everything he asked for. Delta’s B squadron scrambled at Fort Bragg and, within hours, was on two C-17s winging its way direct to a desert landing strip in Iraq.
Meanwhile, on March 31 in Samawah in south-central Iraq, Captain Shane Celeen, commander of C Company, 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Regiment, from Fort Riley, Kansas, received an order he was not expecting. He was to leave a platoon with the infantry battalion task force to which he was attached, load his remaining tanks on transporters, and move with all due haste south to Tallil Air Base, from where C-17s would fly his tanks north to H-1. There he was to link up with Task Force Green. When the promised transporters failed to show, Celeen ordered his company to move out under its own power. Five hours later, they reached Tallil. Celeen flew up to H-1 first to brief the special operators on his company’s capabilities and requirements. Because a C-17 can only carry one M1A1 Abrams tank, it took fifteen sorties over three days to deliver Celeen’s ten tanks, three M113 armored personnel carriers, five trucks, one Humvee, and one fire support vehicle. Once at H-1, they acquired a new name: Team Tank. Within two hours, they were on the road again, en route to Mission Support Site Grizzly, the temporary home between Haditha and Tikrit where Blaber’s expanded task force was assembling.25
As Celeen began the fruitless wait for the tank transporters, a 140-man, seventeen-vehicle column organized around 3rd Ranger Battalion’s B Company was approaching the fifty-seven-meter-high, almost six-mile-long Haditha Dam complex. It was before dawn on April 1.
The Rangers’ mission was to secure the dam to ensure the Iraqi regime didn’t destroy it or otherwise use it to create a flood downriver. After shooting a handful of armed guards who failed to immediately surrender—the only initial resistance—they began clearing the administrative building at the dam’s western end. Other than the discovery of twenty-five civilian workers, this was uneventful. But the Iraqi soldiers’ courage seemed to rise with the sun. Iraqis on the western side of the river began firing RPGs. A Ranger sniper on the dam put his rifle sight to his eye and saw three men who had unwisely chosen a propane tank as cover. When the man clearly holding an RPG stood in front of the tank, at a range of 900 meters, the Ranger staff sergeant pulled the trigger. His first round sliced through the targeted gunner and continued into the propane tank, igniting it and instantly killing the other two men.
Next a truck full of armed men came hurtling toward the Rangers on a road that ran along the top of the dam. A GMV .50 cal machine gunner fired several hundred rounds into the vehicle, stopping it and killing five of its occupants. The others dismounted and engaged the Rangers in an hour-long firefight, at the end of which three Iraqis were dead, five had surrendered, and three who were seriously wounded had jumped over the side of the dam and come to rest 100 meters down a steep embankment. On the scene was 3rd Battalion Command Sergeant Major Greg “Ironhead” Birch, who had been Delta’s A Squadron command sergeant major at Tora Bora. He and Sergeant First Class Jeffery Duncan, B Company’s 2nd Platoon sergeant, knew the wounded Iraqis were certain to die unless the Rangers rescued them. Birch was wearing a brace on each leg after breaking his left ankle and fracturing his right tibia six weeks previously in a jump at Fort Bragg, but that didn’t prevent him from joining Duncan in a 100-meter sprint down the slope to the stricken Iraqis, while under heavy fire from a ZSU antiaircraft gun to the south. By the time the pair reached the Iraqis, two had died. After providing the surviving Iraqi first aid, the two Rangers carried him back up the slope, still under fire. But despite the Rangers’ best efforts, he died from his wounds shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the actions of Birch and Duncan earned each a Silver Star.
The other two platoons also saw action during those first hours of April 1. The twenty-seven men of C Company’s 3rd Platoon took their objective, the hydroelectric power station on the dam’s southwest side, after a brief fight in which the only Ranger casualty was a vehicle mechanic with a gunshot wound to his toe. B Company’s 1st Platoon was the last in the order of movement. Its mission was to establish a blocking position on a hilltop on the southwestern approach to the dam. The platoon’s soldiers were surprised to find an entire military facility that hadn’t appeared on their maps. Consisting of a dozen buildings, it appeared to be an antiaircraft training headquarters. Judging by the half-cooked eggs on a stove, its soldiers had abandoned it at the first sound of gunfire. But 1st Platoon had little time to investigate. Enemy mortar fire was soon falling on the hilltop as scores of fighters poured out of Haditha village to the south, occupying prepared positions from which they began firing at the Rangers. In response 1st Platoon used its ground mobility vehicles’ heavy machine guns and Mark 19 40mm grenade launchers to keep the Iraqi fighters’ heads down while calling in close air support from two AH-6s. The Little Bird gunships rained .50 cal, minigun, and rocket fire on the Iraqis, destroying the mortar sites, killing an unknown number of Iraqi fighters, and igniting a natural gas pipeline that burned for several days. As they had during the first missions in Afghanistan, the Little Bird pilots also engaged the enemy from the cockpit with their M4 rifles. After a lethal half hour, the vicious combination of AH-6 and Ranger fire broke the Iraqi counterattack as the sun was rising.
Believing the Little Birds had taken care of the mortars that had been firing at them, 1st Platoon’s Rangers were surprised to be taken under mortar fire again shortly thereafter. Then they noticed telltale puffs of white smoke coming from a small island about 2,000 meters away in the massive lake to the dam’s north. A single Javelin antitank missile ended that threat.
That night, the Rangers cleared the wing of offices on the dam’s east side, but at dawn April 2 they had to repulse a determined attack by several groups of roughly a dozen men each. Iraqi mortars resumed their harassment of the Ranger positions, along with the first of more than 350 heavy artillery rounds the Rangers would endure over the next several days. Later that evening an Iraqi force used dead space and RPGs to pin 2nd Platoon down, before A-10 attack aircraft again came to the Rangers’ aid with a couple of well-placed 1,000-pound bombs. The artillery fire peaked April 3 with a barrage that seriously wounded a Ranger specialist, who was soon evacuated to H-1 on a Task Force Brown Chinook that landed on the dam to pick him up in the midst of the bombardment. He was one of four Rangers wounded during the battle. But the worst fighting at Haditha Dam was over. Team Tank’s April 6 arrival sealed the victory, allowing the Rangers to turn their attention to making sure the dam continued to function.26
No Rangers were killed at the dam, but their A Company colleagues manning a checkpoint eleven miles to the southwest were not so lucky. On April 3, a man drove a car up to the checkpoint and stopped. A pregnant woman got out and yelled that she needed help. It was a trick. As several Rangers stepped forward, the car exploded, killing Captain Russ Rippetoe, the company’s fire support officer; Staff Sergeant Nino Livaudais, a squad leader; and Specialist Ryan Long, a rifleman. Two other Rangers were badly wounded. The woman and the driver also died, making the attack one of the first suicide bombings of the Iraq War.27
* * *
Meanwhile, in the week since the cancellation of the Baghdad airport mission, Dailey had been scrambling, looking for new set-piece missions for his task force. He had retained his interest in tactical missions that he believed would have a disproportionate effect on the enemy’s will to fight. But as in the opening stages of the Afghan war, this led him to order assaults on targets suspected to be empty, so the raids could be filmed for propaganda purposes. Such a mission was planned for the night of April 2, when Dailey intended to launch a Gold Team air assault against an unoccupied palace that had belonged to Saddam Hussein. But this time his prioritization of such missions would be shown up in the worst possible light.
As Task Force Green maneuvered north from Haditha, it had attracted the attention of about 100 Fedayeen acting as a quick reaction element for the regime’s forces in Tikrit and Baiji. On April 2, as TF Green hunkered down in a sand-dune-encircled hide site, the Fedayeen attacked, driving toward Coultrup’s small force in SUVs and pickup trucks supported by mortar fire. The Delta operators destroyed the first two SUVs with Javelin missiles, then took cover behind a ridge as the Fedayeen called up reinforcements. A vicious firefight ensued in which two Delta operators were wounded: one was hit by a bullet that broke his jaw; the other—Master Sergeant George “Andy” Fernandez, who had only joined Delta in November—was struck just under his body armor. Fernandez was critically wounded and bleeding heavily. Coultrup called Arar, urgently requesting a medevac flight.
Back in the joint operations center full of squawking radios and wall-mounted plasma screens, Blaber and Delta Command Sergeant Major Iggy Balderas were in constant contact with the C Squadron commander. Task Force Brown had Chinooks on alert and ready to fly the mission. Balderas immediately asked them to conduct the medevac. He didn’t really have to request their assistance. “The pilots were begging to fly it,” said a Delta source. “They knew someone was dying.” But the 160th’s strict crew rest regulations meant that if the Chinooks flew the medevac, they would be unavailable for that night’s raid, so Dailey would not allow them to fly to the aid of Fernandez. Instead, to the intense frustration of the Delta men, other crews were woken after only three hours’ sleep, and other helicopters prepped for the mission. The U.S. military often described the first sixty minutes after a soldier was seriously wounded as “the golden hour,” meaning that if the military could get that soldier to trauma care during that period, his chances of survival exponentially improved. It took the backup crews forty-five minutes to launch.
The flight that finally took off from Arar included two MH-60K Black Hawks for the medevac mission and two direct action penetrators to protect them and provide fire support to the beleaguered ground force. Pushing their aircraft to the limit, the pilots flew most of the ninety-minute flight at fifty feet above the desert. When they arrived over Task Force Green’s position, the pilot of the trail DAP was surprised to see Delta operators on the defensive, taking cover behind the ridge. The DAPs spent the next fifty-five minutes hammering the Fedayeen with their chain guns and rockets. Shortly after the helicopters showed up, two A-10s appeared on the scene. One dropped a 500-pound air-burst bomb on a group of Fedayeen in a ravine. By the time the DAPs’ fuel levels compelled them to leave, virtually all the militants were dead.
The Kilos had landed as close to the Delta operators as possible, but Coultrup told the pilots to reposition the aircraft at a safer landing zone. As soon as they did, the operators drove their casualties over. The Task Force Green member shot in the face came aboard one helicopter, but the crews were dismayed to see operators also carrying a stretcher on which lay a body covered with an American flag. Fernandez had bled to death. He was the first Delta operator killed in action since Mogadishu.
That night the Black Hawks that Dailey had kept at Arar flew the SEALs on the raid against the empty palace. A combat camera crew filmed the mission and the tape was flown to a psychological operations unit in Kuwait. It was never used.28
* * *
Over the course of several days in the first week of April, Blaber’s expanded task force coalesced at Grizzly, an ideal home for a band of marauders operating behind enemy lines. A collection of one-story modern buildings at the base of a deep wadi but just a few hundred meters from the highway connecting Haditha and Baiji, it had been a secret weapons testing facility prior to the U.S. invasion. The special operators had done their homework and knew from Iraqi contacts that the site was a restricted area. “That was part of what would make it so perfect for us,” a Delta source said. “Iraqis were used to not going out there.” The force gathering at Grizzly included Delta’s B and C squadrons; 1st Ranger Battalion; Team Tank; and a pair each of AH-6 and MH-6 Little Birds. As soon as Blaber alighted from the Echo Squadron plane that landed on the road in the middle of the night, he took personal charge of the cohort and gave it a new name, borrowed from the teenage gang that fought the invading Soviet military in the movie Red Dawn: Task Force Wolverine.29
Resting up during the day, the Wolverines would sally forth at night to reconnoiter, harass, and destroy. But not long after Blaber arrived, they endured two harrowing events during an otherwise successful attack on the huge K-2 airfield near Baiji the night of April 8/9.
In the middle of the assault, a Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment Humvee darted in front of the tanks without warning. Under fire, a tank crew mistook the Humvee for an enemy vehicle and destroyed it with a 120mm main gun round, killing the detachment’s 24th STS combat controller, Staff Sergeant Scott Sather. He was the first airman to die in the Iraq War.30
Shortly thereafter, Celeen, the Team Tank commander, was maneuvering through a wheat field in support of the attack when his tank dropped into a forty-foot hole, flipping as it fell to land on its turret. Relatively unscathed except for the loader, who almost lost a hand, the four-man crew was nonetheless in a nightmarishly claustrophobic plight: every way out of the tank was blocked by the sandy earth. While Celeen and his gunner provided first aid to the loader, driver Private First Class Christopher Bake struggled out of his hatch and used his hands to dig his way through the sand. He eventually emerged, to the relief of other Team Tank soldiers who had arrived to guard the site. Celeen and the gunner passed the injured loader through Bake’s tunnel and then used it to escape. The tank was declared a total loss.31
* * *
A week of successful marauding north of Baghdad gave Blaber and Coultrup confidence that they could conduct a show of force mission on the outskirts of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s fiercely loyal hometown. On the evening of April 11, Blaber gathered the 100 or so men at Grizzly who would be going out that night. He reminded them that their mission was not to seize terrain or destroy a specific objective, but rather it was to fool the Iraqi forces in Tikrit into believing that a large U.S. armored formation surrounded them. Blaber had no intention of getting sucked into a fight in the town itself. “We want to get close enough to the enemy that they can see us, but we don’t want to get decisively engaged,” he told them, according to his book, The Mission, the Men, and Me. “Keep your back to the desert at all times.”
The Wolverines emerged from their lair into a cold, moonless night. Leading the way across the desert were a dozen Pinzgauers and SUVs. The vehicles approached Highway 1, the eight-lane freeway that separated Tikrit from the desert, and crept under a massive cloverleaf intersection. At a given code word, the five Team Tank M1A1s still in working order after ten grueling days of desert warfare moved forward and took up positions on the cloverleaf ramps overlooking the town. At the sight of the tanks, Tikrit burst into angry life, muzzle flashes of all calibers lighting up the night. The Wolverines replied in kind. The tanks’ main guns were far more powerful and accurate than anything the Iraqis might throw at them, but there were many more Saddam loyalists in Tikrit than there were Wolverines in Iraq, let alone on the cloverleaf. The volume of Iraqi fire grew steadily.
Wire had become wrapped around the treads of one of Celeen’s tanks, preventing it from moving. Five Delta operators ran out from their cover, each heading for a different tank to help select targets, steady the crews’ nerves, and, in the case of the immobilized tank, try to untangle the wire. Monitoring the battle from Grizzly, Blaber directed Task Force Brown gunships about 100 miles away to move to Coultrup’s location. The C Squadron commander reported an estimated 500 enemy gunmen armed with heavy weapons and RPGs. He could see rooftop bunkers and dug-in fighting positions in the barricaded streets. It was as if the Tikritis were just daring the Wolverines to come and fight them on their home turf. Coultrup, the Mogadishu veteran who knew firsthand what can happen to a JSOC task force outnumbered and cut off in an urban fight, recommended pulling back as soon as he could get his entangled tank moving. Blaber agreed and told him to withdraw to Grizzly as soon as possible.
Suddenly, Dailey came on the radio. He was still at Arar, but had been monitoring the Wolverine radio traffic. “Negative, negative, negative,” he said, in a transmission monitored by every member of Task Force Wolverine, including those fighting for their lives at that moment. “You are not to pull out of that city. I want you to keep moving forward into the city and destroy the enemy.” Blaber would later speculate that Dailey wanted his troops to engage in a “thunder run” through Tikrit similar to those that 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade had made through Baghdad in the previous several days. After reminding the JSOC commander that the Wolverines were on a “show of force” mission and repeating the gravity of the situation they were already in, Blaber told Dailey he’d already ordered Coultrup to pull back into the desert.
The JSOC commander was silent, but moments later Blaber’s secure satellite phone rang. It was Votel, the Ranger Regiment commander and Dailey’s second in command at Arar, trying to persuade Blaber to change his mind. Blaber just repeated the arguments he’d made to Dailey and hung up. Votel called back, this time with a warning, clearly based on his knowledge of how Dailey was thinking. “If you don’t … move through that city, your … future as a commander might be affected,” he told Blaber. The acting Delta commander was unmoved. “Pull back to the desert as ordered,” he told Coultrup. In a second Dailey was on the radio again. “What did you say?” he yelled, furious. “You listen to me, I told you to—” At that point, Dailey’s radio shorted out. The general ripped off his headset, flung it down, and stomped out of the JOC.
After freeing the entangled tank, the relieved Wolverines followed Blaber’s order and withdrew to Grizzly with no casualties.32
* * *
The Wolverines spent the next ten days conducting a variety of missions: searching in vain for Scott Speicher, the Navy pilot shot down during the first Gulf War; checking out a suspected WMD facility that turned out to be a barbecue pit; and conducting a series of raids around Baiji. The task force also captured five of Saddam’s bodyguards, several Iraqi government ministers, and the Iraqi air force chief of staff, while never missing an opportunity to spread the false story that they were the advance guard of a multi-divisional attack from the west.33
Dailey’s preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction became a factor whenever the Wolverines or another Task Force 20 element passed through the massive arms storage areas often located close to Iraq’s military airfields. At H-2 airfield, for instance, there were eighty-eight aircraft-hangar-size magazines, each stuffed with crates of munitions from floor to ceiling. “I need a thorough check of each of those to make sure there’s no WMDs in them,” Dailey told TF Wolverine. “What do you mean by ‘thorough’?” came the reply. “Go through every box,” Dailey said. “Okay, roger, we’re just finishing up right now actually,” said a Delta operator, no doubt shaking his head wryly.
“These generals were consumed [with the thought] that there were WMDs laying around,” a Delta source commented. “Logic said, ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’ Nobody stores the object of their desire, the family jewels, in a place that they can’t control.”
One mission in which Dailey showed no interest was assigning anyone to guard those arms depots. When the operators had moved on, they would sometimes arrange for Predator drones to stay behind and watch in case enemy fighters were using them as hide sites. What the Predators showed instead was that Iraqis were looting the depots. “It was like watching ants raid a picnic basket,” said a Delta source. When Blaber reported this to Dailey, with a proposal that Task Force 20 use its troops on loan from the 82nd Airborne Division to guard the storage sites, the general rebuffed the suggestion. That was a job for the conventional Army, not his task force, he said. “But they’re not here, we’re the only ones up here,” Blaber reminded him, to no avail. Task Force 20 left those arms depots wide open, a decision that placed thousands of U.S. soldiers at risk. “It was all those artillery rounds that ended up being IEDs,” said a Delta source, in reference to improvised explosive devices—the homemade bombs insurgents later used to kill and maim American soldiers. “That’s where they came from.”34
It was a threat with which JSOC’s operators would soon become familiar.