7

 

 

“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”

But I suppose you’re not too keen on what we’ve now got to do, Glatigny. Afraid of getting your hands dirty, perhaps?

—JEAN LARTÉGUY, THE CENTURIONS

 

 

EVERYBODY NEAR THE Balad Canning Factory knew Fouzi Younis, but nobody knew where to find him. At least, nobody was willing to talk about it. Fouzi Younis was the sort of fellow who motivated his neighbors to remain silent. Indeed, he gruesomely silenced a few just to encourage the others to stay quiet. When he told Iraqis to shut up, they believed he meant it.

They did not believe the Americans meant anything they said. Oh, yes, the infidel riflemen possessed the mighty thirty-three-ton Bradley fighting vehicles with their all-seeing thermal sights, stout armor plate, churning treads, and deadly 25 mm cannon. Moreover, the men themselves were superbly fit, consistently alert, well trained in battle drills, and excellent marksmen. As one former Iraqi general put it: “The American soldiers are very disciplined. They fight like robots and engage and kill everything on the battlefield.” Well, not quite everything—with a very few very sick exceptions, the U.S. troops confined their work to armed opponents. There was no shortage of those around Balad, Iraq, in January of 2004. As for the tough Americans, they were spread pretty thin, and it didn’t seem like they’d stay long, maybe a few months or a few years. Fouzi Younis wasn’t going anywhere.

As a Sunni Arab, Younis benefited from plenty of local sympathy. The families around the canning plant were uniformly Sunni, and they looked after their own. Balad city proper was mostly Shia. The two Muslim sects distrusted each other, to say the least, and Saddam Hussein fanned those flames. He’d always favored his own bunch, the Sunni, who made up about 18 percent of the Iraqi populace. Under the Baathists, the majority Shia (60 percent) had always taken the pipe in the head. Now, with Saddam gone (captured on December 13, 2003), the Shia flexed their muscles, although not too much in Balad, a Shiite island of one hundred thousand surrounded by a million Sunni in the Salah ad Din Province. It was Saddam’s home turf. Indeed, he had been taken not far from Tikrit, sixty miles north. Shia Arabs trod lightly outside Balad. As well they should. The Sunni Arabs cared little for the fallen dictator. But they hated the Americans who had displaced the Sunni from power, shut down their military and civilian sinecures, and installed the hated sheruggis, the easterners, a reference to the strong Iranian influence on Shia Arabs. Fouzi Younis preferred killing Americans, but slaughtering Shia would do.

The Americans in Balad definitely wanted to nab Fouzi Younis but didn’t know how or where to find him. Although well trained and fully armed, the soldiers of the Second Battalion, Third Infantry were new to this area. They were on loan from a different U.S. Army brigade, destined to head way up north to Mosul, near the Kurdish territory. By taking over Balad for a few weeks, 2-3 Infantry freed up the experienced First Battalion, Eighth Infantry to go twenty-five miles north to clean up the restive city of Samarra. The 2-3 people were renters, not owners, and they had more pressing business in Mosul. So when an IED (improvised explosive device, a roadside bomb) blew up on December 18, 2003, and killed seven Iraqi police (IP), the temporary tenants needed some help to sort it out.

That help arrived on the afternoon of January 2, 2004. Company A, 1-8 Infantry rolled in aboard their dirty, banged-up Bradleys. Now they returned to their former compound in eastern Balad city. The small fort, surrounded by sandbags and dirt-filled wire-and-canvas Hesco containers, still hosted their affiliated engineers, Company B, Fourth Engineer Battalion. The relationship between the two companies was strong, built on eight-plus months of daily patrols and raids. The engineers had been assisting 2-3 Infantry. They were glad to see the return of their familiar teammates.

With Company A came two more scarred but ready Bradleys carrying the battalion tactical command element and the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman. The charismatic lieutenant colonel had a reputation, and he lived up to it. Eighteen years earlier, tall, broad-shouldered Nate Sassaman had quarterbacked the West Point football team to wins over Air Force and Navy and then on to its first-ever postseason victory against Michigan State in the 1985 Cherry Bowl in Pontiac, Michigan. It’s part of U.S. Military Academy lore that during World War II, Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall (himself a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute) said: “I have a secret and dangerous mission. Send me a West Point football player.” Nate Sassaman was just the kind of guy Marshall wanted.

 

Sassaman was very close to his soldiers. He was out with them constantly. He rode to the sound of the guns and led the way under fire. When Staff Sergeant Dale Panchot was killed by a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade that shattered his chest, Sassaman was right there. He was often the man dragging his wounded to safety and killing marauding insurgents. On all-night patrols, Sassaman walked with his squads. He got his hands dirty.

The battalion commander emphasized action to preempt hostile moves, and swift, immediate reactions to enemy attacks. Sassaman’s riflemen rounded up suspects by the dozens. When Sunni sheikhs threatened the battalion, Sassaman detained twenty of the elders and held them for weeks. The 1-8 Infantry ringed one recalcitrant Sunni village with barbed wire and systematically went through every hovel, removing weapons, arms, and tens of sullen Arab militiamen. Enemy mortar shots prompted return 120 mm mortar fires within a minute, followed by a thorough search of firing areas and all nearby structures. An IED explosion resulted in an immediate roundup of all adult male Iraqis in the area. A gunshot would be returned by accurate, aimed fire, plenty of it. In the words of the battalion S-3, Major Darron Wright, “In our eyes, nothing was too extreme. We were at war.” The battalion’s soldiers had an attitude, aggressive and uncompromising. They reflected the commander. Not every man loved the demanding lieutenant colonel. But they all recognized that in a fight, he’d be there.

Getting Fouzi Younis might well lead to a fight, a big one, so Sassaman arrived with his Company A. Captain Matt Cunningham, also a former West Point football player, although much younger than Sassaman, would lead his riflemen on the raid. Engineer Captain Eric Paliwoda, a hulking six-foot-six former West Point discus thrower, would command his men on their usual supporting tasks: blowing open locked doors and dealing with any IEDs. And fighting as infantry, of course—the engineers always stood ready for that eventuality.

For Sassaman, Eric Paliwoda was more than the engineer commander. All the firefights, the daily grind of 120-degree heat, the grime, the monotonous food, the week after week of eighteen-hour days, and the costs imposed by his own driving personality took a toll on Nate Sassaman. Killing people is corrosive, as is seeing your own killed. It eats at you. Most battalion commanders confide and let loose with their majors or their command sergeant majors. In 1-8 Infantry, that happened, but as time went on, Sassaman got more tired, and more frustrated. He pulled back into himself. The senior guys couldn’t reach him anymore. Sometimes, a battalion commander can relate to the colonel above him, the one who commands the brigade. That didn’t work for Sassaman. He had little in common with his brigade commander, a much more deliberate officer. Despite a fourteen-year age difference, the lieutenant colonel and the engineer captain hit it off. Paliwoda became Sassaman’s sounding board. The battalion commander summed it up: “Eric ended up being my closest friend in Iraq.” Indeed, big Eric Paliwoda was well known and well loved across 1-8 Infantry.

Now Paliwoda, Cunningham, and Sassaman each huddled with his men to plot a portion of the night’s raid. It had taken two weeks to finger Fouzi Younis. The IPs dead in the IED explosion had included the able deputy chief Lieutenant Colonel Nasser Hamid Ahmed. Popular and well-respected by the police and the Americans, Nasser ran his own string of local snitches. He had survived by having eyes and ears in and out of town. With Nasser dead, the other IPs fumbled some trying to figure out who did it. It had taken a couple of shakedowns and some squeezing and a few things the Americans probably did not want to know about to pin the tail on this donkey, Fouzi Younis and his ten followers. By January 2, the Iraqi police were pretty sure Younis and his men lived in the nondescript company apartments at the Balad Canning Factory south of the city. It was Sunni territory, badlands all the way.

Founded in 1974, the Balad cannery was a “state-owned enterprise,” which was a euphemism for a fake factory. For years, it had made tomato paste. But in Saddam’s latter days, it just fell into disuse. Workers gathered for Baathist-sponsored meetings or to get their minimal salaries and food rations. Baathist Iraq had three green stars on its flag, for unity, freedom, and socialism. Saddam’s boot guaranteed the first; the second was honored in the breach; but the third existed all over. We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us, as the joke went in the old Soviet Union. So, too, in Iraq. Plentiful oil money ensured a food basket and a fuel ration for every family, both suitably greased by bribes and side deals. As a rule, the Sunni got more than the Shiites. Baathists got more than non-Baathists. Saddam’s insiders got the most. By 2004, no tomato paste came out of Balad. But the thousand or so Sunni workers passed the days in their shabby government-built apartments, getting by on odd jobs and handouts from the Americans and their Iraqi collaborators. Evidently, spurred by Fouzi Younis, some had found other things to do.

The Iraqi police identified the apartments of Younis and his ten followers. At 11:00 p.m., the 1-8 Infantry planned to lock a cordon around the housing area. Then riflemen, engineers, and IPs would kick in the doors and drag out the targets. An Iraqi informant, his face hidden by a ski mask, would identify the men taken. It was an old drill to 1-8 Infantry. In their manhunts, the special operators in the Task Force increasingly used technical means, drones and electronic sniffers. But at the infantry battalion level in 2004, manhunting was done the old-fashioned way, methods familiar to the Roman legionaries in Jerusalem in A.D. 33. You got a source, rounded up the suspects, and pawed through them until you found the one you wanted.

These heavy-handed measures worried some in the U.S. chain of command. Blowing through houses made America no friends, and even in Sunni parts of Iraq, not everybody was an enemy (yet). Sassaman’s brigade commander quizzed a company commander before a December operation in Samarra: “How many are you planning on knocking on the door,” asked the colonel, “and how many are you planning on kicking in the door?” The captain replied, “Uh, we have been kicking in the doors . . . or following five pounds of C-4 [plastic explosives].” Caught in their nightshirts, surrounded by armed, armored Americans, Iraqis rarely fought back. The women wailed and the children cried. A lot of blankets got torn, and rows of crockery got broken. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

So the riflemen cleaned their weapons, the engineers assembled their breaching charges, and gatherings of officers and sergeants and their IP counterparts examined computer-printed overhead photographs and marked the key buildings. It should go just fine. And the source was certain he had Younis located. The enemy counted on 2-3 Infantry being confused, and it had been two weeks since Younis disappeared. It was unlikely Younis and his group realized that Sassaman’s people had come back for the raid.

It was about four thirty in the afternoon, six and a half hours to go, when—wham! The command post shook; dust sifted down. Wham! Wham!

“Incoming! incoming!” The Americans and the Iraqi police dropped to the floor. Those outside hit the dirt. Fourteen mortar rounds hit, one after another. If 1-8 Infantry had been running the area, the 120 mm mortars would already be firing back. Under 2-3 Infantry, nothing happened. Nate Sassaman immediately ordered his Bradley readied to go out and look for the enemy shooters. A platoon of Matt Cunningham’s Company A with some attached engineers were already out the gate.

As the shelling ceased and Sassaman ran toward his tracked vehicle, he saw men down in the open vehicle parking area. Four soldiers sat up, dazed, bloodied, cut up, but okay. But two didn’t move. His helmet and body armor rattling, Sassaman raced over to check on the casualties. One of the prostrate men was Eric Paliwoda.

The large man was wearing his flak jacket, but a hot splinter had gotten through. Blood seeped from under the Kevlar vest. Paliwoda wasn’t conscious. Sassaman tried to find and stop the bleeding until two medics shouldered him aside. Rank be damned, expertise counted more, and the lieutenant colonel deferred to them. He leaned close to Paliwoda: “Hang in there, man.” The medevac helicopter was already overhead. Sassaman mounted his Bradley and moved out, following Company A.

Three hours later, in the dark, the riflemen returned. They had found a dug-in mortar base plate in an open dusty field, but no firing tube, no ammunition, and no insurgents. As the column motored back to the small base, the radio call came. “Eagle Six [Sassaman], this is Eagle X-Ray [the battalion command post]. We have some bad news, over.” Paliwoda was dead.

 

Sassaman did not take it well. When he got back to the compound, he exploded. He stripped off his Kevlar vest, sweaty and streaked with blood—Paliwoda’s blood—and kicked it. He cursed the 2-3 Infantry commander, who stood there mute and took it. What else could he do? Sassaman raged and roared, a strong, emotional man racked with grief. As Darron Wright put it, “He reached his breaking point.”

It happens thus in every war. Thousands of years ago, the rage of Achilles led to the climax of Homer’s Iliad. When the Trojan Hector killed Achilles’s friend Patroclus, the Greek warrior sought out Hector, slew him, and tied the Trojan’s body to his chariot. Achilles then dragged Hector’s corpse through the dust around the walls of Troy. Even among the cruel Greeks in a much more primitive age, this was over the top. Yet rage can do that to a soldier. And it did it to Nate Sassaman. Achilles sought his own personal revenge. Sassaman knew better, and he backed off. But certain of his loyal 1-8 Infantry myrmidons got the word, and they did not.

The raid went off late, at two in the morning. Fouzi Younis was nowhere to be found. His family allowed that they had heard of him but of course stated that they had no idea of his location. Eight men were detained. Two fought back—odd, that—and were killed by U.S. gunfire. Some of the myrmidons might have evened up the score already.

By midday, Nate Sassaman, Darron Wright, Matt Cunningham, and all of the tactical command post and Company A moved out for Samarra. Operations there had not let up during the raid interlude. People knew about the mortar attack, Paliwoda’s death, and the severe wounding of Staff Sergeant Todd Moyer. Captain Todd Brown’s Company B patrolled aboard their Bradleys, moving slowly along Power Line Road, on the southern boundary of Samarra. Rifle squads walked forward to each intersection, then brought up the vehicles. You cover, I move; a common tactic.

Just after noon, the enemy chose to spice things up. A blue car halted about two hundred yards away from the company, right near the long line of one-story storefronts that flanked Power Line Road. A man shouldering an RPG launcher jumped out. How the guerrillas loved that thing! It featured in many of their recruiting photos and videos, maybe because it seemed to offer some hope against the American armored fleet. Each RPG made two sounds in rapid succession: the sharp, flat pop of its rocket motor, and the duller, louder blast of its warhead striking home. Todd Brown and his men heard two RPGs go off. The rounds zipped by—you can see them—and kept going. Back a block in the column, mounted in his tracked vehicle, Brown watched the grenades pass by. He couldn’t see the shooter.

Staff Sergeant Ashton Legendre could see just fine and immediately returned fire. The 25 mm chugged its rhythmic bursts, the high-explosive incendiary rounds tearing into the car. The blue sedan lit up, dirty black smoke rising. Two other nearby cars, uninvolved but too close for Legendre to avoid, were also pummeled. The RPG shooter was cut to pieces, as were his four partners. Some of the nasty little exploding shells whizzed into the backs of small shops, tearing strips out of the concrete and scattering the wares. The incendiaries started some small fires in the buildings. Iraqi civilians ran away or ducked behind cover. They had learned all too well what to do.

Todd Brown had heard 104 RPGs before these two. He knew what to do also. Another of 1-8 Infantry’s tough young West Pointers (and former first captain, the top-ranked military cadet in his class), Brown ordered up another rifle platoon to reinforce the Americans returning fire at the intersection and to block enemy escape. After giving that direction, he took off his combat-vehicle-crewman helmet with the built-in headphones, grabbed his Kevlar dome, a backpack radio, and his M-4 carbine, and loped out the back ramp of his Bradley. He had to get to the fight, to join his riflemen and Bradleys near the RPG engagement.

As usual, Nate Sassaman was on his way too. He and Darron Wright and their security team got there after the shooting stopped. Legendre’s well-placed return fire had put paid to the enemy. When Sassaman arrived, Brown’s riflemen had secured the intersection and were busy questioning Iraqi bystanders. Iraqi police showed up to assist. One of the insurgents was still alive, although just barely. Sassaman’s medic tried to keep him that way, but the man died. The locals helped to douse the fires. Many Iraqis stared at the three shredded automobiles and the sprawled dead. As things settled down, a few Iraqi elders came forward. They alleged that two uninvolved civilians had died in the firefight.

Maybe they had. The enemy wore civilian clothes. Most of the Sunni locals sympathized fully with the bad guys, so who was truly clean in Samarra? Brown summarized: “We did hit two innocent bystanders but smoked the RPG team—that is how it goes in the city fight. What are you going to do, not shoot back?” The myrmidons shot back.

 

In Matt Cunningham’s Company A, one platoon did more than shoot back. The night after the Balad raid, in the wake of Paliwoda’s death, well aware of the ongoing fighting in town, First Lieutenant Jack Saville, Staff Sergeant Tracy Perkins, and their platoon were patrolling northern Samarra. The curfew descended at 11:00. All Iraqis had to be inside. Anyone outside could be detained or, if he or she acted at all off, shot dead.

Around midnight, the Americans stopped a beat-up white truck. It carried two male cousins, Marwan and Zaydoon Fadil, both in their twenties. The truck had no weapons, just some plumbing fixtures in the cargo bed. What were these two guys doing out after curfew?

The U.S. riflemen at first waved at the Iraqis to go on home. Then the platoon sergeant motioned them to hold up. He told his men to get the Iraqis out. That done, he had the soldiers put plastic flex cuffs on each of them. Perkins turned to the lieutenant. “Somebody is going to get wet tonight,” he said.

Orders stated that those detained after curfew were to go to the U.S. base. But Perkins, Saville, and the platoon chose not to follow that direction. Soldiers pushed the cuffed prisoners into the back of a Bradley. The ramp closed with a clank.

When it opened again, the Fadil cousins were prodded out into the chilly January night. The Bradley was stopped right near the bank of the Tigris River. It was about forty-five degrees or so, pretty cold for Iraq. Armed Americans escorted the pair to the base of a big dam that also served as a bridge. The water was a few feet deep and looked calm. A soldier cut off the hard plastic cuffs. The Americans pointed to the water and leveled their rifles. The message didn’t require translation: Get in.

The Iraqis struggled, to no avail. They tried begging. No luck there, they saw. The black rifle muzzles pointed right at them. They both waded into the cold water. The Americans drove away.

 

In the ensuing rounds of investigations, hearings, testimony, and courts-martial, the truth, or a generally accepted version, came out. Marwan survived. Zaydoon drowned. Perkins and Saville had resorted to this method before to teach a lesson, they said. As Specialist Ralph Logan put it later, “It was like giving someone a swirly.” He meant that it resembled the high-school bully’s tactic of sticking someone’s head in a toilet and flushing just to let him know who was boss. It was a way to demonstrate the pecking order, to show the Fadil cousins who ran Samarra.

The rumor mill cranked up immediately. The Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (CID), the Army’s detectives, got involved as early as January 4. Perkins and Saville at first clammed up, claiming nothing had happened. When Matt Cunningham told Sassaman about it on January 7, the battalion commander told him and Saville, “Don’t say anything about the water.” Exhausted, heartsick, and frustrated, Sassaman spoke hastily. Paliwoda’s dried blood was still on his flak vest. The battalion commander had shot and killed enemies and sent his own soldiers to their deaths. To make a big deal about this thing, maybe just a couple of Iraqis lying to get a compensation payment, well, he just could not do it. Sassaman backed his men. Much later, his division commander, Major General Raymond T. Odierno, told him, “You just wanted to be one of the boys.” Not wanted to be—he was. In the band of brothers that was 1-8 Infantry, Sassaman and his men, his faithful myrmidons, were one and the same.

Within days of the incident, under CID questioning, Ralph Logan and some others talked. They admitted that they had put the two in the water but said both got out fine. When the Fadil family produced a body two weeks later, the American soldiers became adamant. Nobody drowned. Nobody died. It was just a nonlethal punishment. The Iraqis never permitted an autopsy, so no definite proof existed that Zaydoon perished. Iraqis had been known to fake deaths to get U.S. compensation money or even to conceal the survival of a terrorist-cell leader. Still, it became quite clear that something bad had happened that cold night at the Tigris River. Although it was not yet public knowledge, the U.S. senior generals already knew of a very ugly October 2003 incident at Abu Ghraib regarding detainees. The 1-8 Infantry case got attention all the way up to the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad. Soon enough, the American press got wind of it.

Perkins and Saville went to courts-martial, were convicted, and served short prison sentences. Five others, including Sassaman and Cunningham, received nonjudicial punishment under article 15, mostly for concealing evidence or obstructing the investigation. For the lieutenant colonel and the captain, the proceedings finished them off in a professional sense. Both left the Army.

It is easy to sit in a climate-controlled room and wag your finger at Sassaman, Cunningham, Saville, and Perkins. One of the perils of fighting alongside your soldiers, of leading from the front, is that you climb aboard a potentially deadly emotional roller coaster. In the era of Achilles, that was well understood and accepted. Yet even that Greek hero, blinded by his volcanic sorrow, went too far. In 2004, few got it, even those in uniform. Not enough senior people were out on the ground, seeing the elephant. The war in Iraq happened at a thousand tiny crossroads, in a thousand flyblown villages, frequently at night, in searing heat or drenching cold rain, and was often over in a few random minutes. As for any civilians trying to empathize, well, forget it. Of the few citizens who sought to understand, too many saw Sassaman and his soldiers as ill-used victims, pathetic dupes of some neoconservative conspiracy hatched in the wood-paneled conference rooms of the White House, Halliburton, and Enron. The problem wasn’t just that 1-8 Infantry crossed a dark, twisted line, as they surely did. Confronted with the same messy, dangerous situations in other villages, in other battalions, a great many American soldiers found themselves balancing precariously along that same grim line.

 

That line looked pretty faint and hazy in Samarra and Balad, but it wasn’t all that clear back in Baghdad, let alone Washington. Nate Sassaman hadn’t just wandered into trouble. His commanders put him there, and wanted him to stay. The great liberation had gone awry within months. It all came down to the usual question: Who was the enemy? Around bad areas, as 1-8 Infantry discovered, the answer was only too simple: everybody.

It may well have seemed that way. There were gradations, of course. The Sunni Arabs in the center and west, 18 percent of the population, clearly backed what they liked to call the honorable resistance. The Kurdish north, about 20 percent, went with the Americans strongly, as did the trace elements, such as the fire-worshipping Zoroastrian Yezidi, the Turkmen, and the Assyrian Christians. The Shia majority of 60 percent, concentrated in the south, tolerated the Americans but chafed as the occupation persisted over the years; Iranian-backed anti-American militias reared up now and then, with bloody results. As a whole, neither Sunni nor Shia Arabs wanted large numbers of infidel outsiders in their towns. Both cut deals of convenience, the Shia more often than the Sunni. But regardless of sect, Iraqi Arabs wanted to run their own country their way, even if that didn’t exactly correspond to the fondest hopes of the United States. Winning over a majority of twenty-seven million Iraqi people to U.S. goals was no easy proposition.

Along with the sullen, unhappy general public, none too thrilled by thousands of foreign troops in their midst, there were active enemies. Like Iraqi Arabs as a whole, the bad guys came in two basic flavors, Sunni and Shia. Estimates of hostile strength ranged up to sixteen thousand. They were a quarrelsome, shadowy bunch, burrowed deep into the civilian populace.

Month after month, year after year, most of the opposition stemmed from Sunni Arabs, those who rejected the American occupation and the consequent Shia-dominated government. Across Iraq’s eighteen provinces, the consistent hostile action germinated in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar, At Tamimi (the Kirkuk area), Baghdad, Diyala, Ninewah, and Salah ad Din, and it sometimes spilled over into Babil south of Baghdad city. Sunni rejectionists made up most of the attackers going after Americans like the 1-8 Infantry. A man like Fouzi Younis was typical of this element.

In the aftermath of Saddam’s initial departure from Baghdad in April 2003, hopeful U.S. intelligence officers opined that “former regime elements” made up the bulk of the Sunni resistance. Units received multiple sets of playing cards embossed with Baathist biggies, the enemy brain trust conveniently depicted on a deck of fifty-two cards, to help soldiers recognize the men if they saw them. Saddam, of course, was the ace of spades. Though the SOF diligently played 52-pickup throughout 2003, that didn’t curtail attacks against U.S. forces and their allies. True, most of the Sunni opposition had lived well under Saddam. Many had served in the old Iraqi army, the Republican Guard, or the Baathist ranks. But the deposed dictator, bouncing from one hiding place to another, did not direct or sustain them. When his sons Uday and Qusay died under attack in Mosul in July of 2003 and then Saddam himself got fished up out of his spiderhole in December of that year, the various Sunni insurgent networks slowed down not a whit. They didn’t work for Saddam. They barely worked with each other.

Sunni Arabs did have one ally, although not by choice. Cooperating with the Sunni and sheltering under their wings was a more virulent threat, the rapidly coalescing cells of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), a 2.0 model franchise headed by the implacable Jordanian firebrand Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The average Sunni cells laid IEDs, fired RPGs and rifles, and shot mortars and rockets. Zarqawi’s AQI followed the Osama bin Laden template and developed periodic spectacular attacks. They brought in foreign fighters, not many, but enough to stage mass-casualty suicide car bombings, an AQI specialty. Zarqawi was happy to slay Americans and other Coalition members but was even more interested in slaying Shiites, whom he considered apostates and thus not true followers of Islam. Zarqawi longed to ignite a major Sunni-Shia conflict, bigger and bloodier than the one already percolating. Iraq’s very name meant “the shore, the edge, the split point”—geographic (desert to mountain, marked by the two great rivers), ethnic (Arab to Persian), and religious (Sunni to Shia). Zarqawi intended to crack the country wide open.

The Sunni guerrillas and the AQI were ever present. The other kind of enemy, the Shia militants, came and went. They responded to the wildly anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a sometime tool and full-time recipient of Iranian largess. When he got excited, the militias did too. Shiite areas usually tolerated the Americans, not out of love, but because the U.S. backed the Shia-dominated government that had emerged in Baghdad by mid-2004. Whenever Sadr called, though, the streets filled up in Shiite areas of Baghdad and the southern cities of Karbala, Al Kut, and Najaf. The British in Shiite Basrah tangled regularly with Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM, the Mahdi army, named for the great Shia hope, an avenging messiah who would supposedly arise to end time and save the devout). Iranian Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) and intelligence-service agents stirred the pot steadily and kept up a flow of weapons, money, and expertise. Over time, with Iranian help, JAM and its offshoots proved quite difficult opponents.

Had the Americans simply pulled out in the summer of 2003, Iraq would likely have collapsed into an even more brutal civil war than it did. Backed by Iran, with the Baathist superstructure destroyed by the American-led invasion, the Shia would probably have prevailed, and the Sunni would have knuckled under, fled, or been exterminated. The already autonomous Kurds looked to go their own way, tied loosely, if at all, to the authorities in Baghdad. Even with the Americans staying in Iraq for eight and a half years, this is essentially how it played out. Maybe that unsatisfying yet realistic result was adequate, an outcome acceptable as good enough. In the summer of 2003, though, it wasn’t good enough. The U.S. wanted more, a democratic republic in Mesopotamia that backed America, particularly when it came to hunting down terrorists. President Bush had said as much on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1. That high-flown objective put Nate Sassaman and the 1-8 Infantry in a very bad place by January of 2004. They weren’t alone.

 

Despite well-articulated public aspirations to establish a Jeffersonian government on the Tigris, the United States took a while to reorganize its war effort. The ill-planned phase four arrived right on schedule. In the absence of rehearsed, agreed-upon arrangements in country, improvisations arose. The first almost scuttled the entire enterprise. It had to do with the most basic military consideration: Who was in charge?

Almost from the start of planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom, General Tommy Franks and his USCENTCOM staff assumed the follow-on headquarters structure to have two levels above the various combat divisions. On top would be a civilian strategic headquarters, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), under retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a Vietnam veteran who also oversaw the Provide Comfort relief effort in Kurdistan in 1991. ORHA prepared to go in, get the Iraqi army and police back to work, and put the Iraqis in charge of their country. “Coordinating”—a vague idea, not proper command authority—with Garner’s ORHA was Lieutenant General Scott Wallace’s Fifth Corps headquarters. Under Fifth Corps, U.S. troops would act as a shield while the Iraqis got back on their feet. Franks guessed the entire thing would take a few months, six at the most. It would be like the aftermath of Desert Storm, some cleanup and a U.S. withdrawal, perhaps with a follow-on advisory effort. The old Northern Watch/Southern Watch air policing was over, of course. What better leader to run all that than Jay Garner, who had done it well in the Kurdish north in 1991?

Iraqis made themselves available to take over. Characters like the oily Ahmed Chalabi, his cousin and fellow Western expatriate Ayad Allawi, former Iranian “guest” Ibrahim al-Jafaari, and another prior resident of Iran, Nouri al-Maliki, all hovered on the periphery, only too ready. Each of these men and his supporters were viewed by Sunni Arab Iraqis as pure sheruggis, Persian pawns, and, worse, U.S. collaborators. It would have been news to Iran and the United States that they were backing the same team. Well, Bush said you were either with us or against us. Little did he realize that in Iraq, a good number of Shiite leaders checked both boxes.

That key point became subsumed in a greater transition, one that surprised most of the senior uniformed Americans. Ten days after Bush’s speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III took charge of a new strategic headquarters, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). After less than three weeks in country, Garner’s ORHA was no more. Bremer was in charge. In the ambassador’s words, “I had the requisite skills and experience for that position.” He did not speak Arabic, although he had served in Kabul, Afghanistan, from 1966 to 1968, which was something. His most notable assignment had been as ambassador to the Netherlands from 1983 to 1986. Bremer enjoyed close connections to the Bush White House. Now he was the president’s man in Baghdad.

He acted decisively. Within days, Bremer issued CPA General Order Numbers 1 and 2, dissolving the Baath Party and all its social groups, the entire Iraqi army, air force, and navy, the assorted intelligence services, the Saddam-era militias, and the Republican Guard. None of this was coordinated with the U.S. military; indeed, Franks’s plan had always counted on the Iraqi military to keep order. De-Baathification was announced as a fait accompli. It guaranteed Sunni outrage.

Bremer defended the measure as essential to convince Iraqis, especially the Kurds and Shiites, that times had changed for good. Of course, while many Baathists and military officers were Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds also held such party membership. So did a wide variety of minor officials in education, commerce, and local government. Bremer argued that it was similar to removing Nazis in postwar Germany. That was true, except for three problems: bad as they were, Baathists weren’t Nazis; Iraqis definitely were not Germans; and the war in Iraq wasn’t over.

With Bremer’s arrival, Fifth Corps also changed command. Newly promoted Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez stepped up from command of the First Armored Division to take over Fifth Corps in its expanded role as Combined Joint Task Force 7, a new military operational headquarters directed to coordinate—that slippery word again—with Bremer’s CPA. Bremer wasn’t officially in charge, and Sanchez didn’t officially report to him. Given Bremer’s assertive personality, that would not be a pleasant setup.

There had been another option, the one that most expected. Franks could have chosen to leave the Combined Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) headquarters under Lieutenant General David McKiernan. An experienced three-star general, McKiernan had just run the Army/Marine offensive that took Baghdad. His headquarters featured numerous handpicked senior officers with a lot of combat time, a “dream team,” in the words of General Jack Keane, the Army vice chief of staff. But Tommy Franks did not think the Iraq deployment would last long. McKiernan’s CFLCC might well have business in another area of the region, such as Iran or Syria. Afghanistan continued to bubble. The dream team moved on, preparing for a game that never came.

Keane spoke bluntly at the time. “Let me get this right,” he said. “We are going to take the last arriving division commander, who just got here a couple weeks ago, and put him in charge of the war in Iraq. That is what we are going to do?” It was.

The forty-nine-year-old Sanchez might have been the youngest lieutenant general in the Army, but he was not unqualified. A tank battalion commander in Desert Storm, a key joint staff officer in U.S. Southern Command, and a general officer commanding in the Balkans, Sanchez had just deployed his First Armored Division into Iraq. Dealing with Jerry Bremer looked to be difficult, but Sanchez had seen worse. He took over for what many, including General Tommy Franks, told him would be a speedy drawdown and departure.

Franks would not be around to see how his prediction played out. Wrung out after the Afghan and Iraq campaigns, he retired. General John Abizaid took over U.S. Central Command. A Lebanese American West Pointer and infantry officer, Abizaid spoke Arabic. He led his Ranger company on the combat jump into Grenada in 1983, served as a United Nations observer in Lebanon in the middle of the 1980s, and then commanded the U.S. paratrooper battalion that served in Kurdistan during Operation Provide Comfort in 1991. When Abizaid commanded the First Infantry Division in Germany from 1999 to 2001, one of his brigadier general deputies was Ric Sanchez. Sanchez referred to Abizaid as “my friend and superior officer.” The men were close, and together they would see this thing through in Iraq.

In later years, many heaped scorn on Sanchez and Bremer. The self-assured diplomat and the prickly three-star got along poorly at best, although both men tried hard to work together. Bremer overpromised and underdelivered. Many complained that he just could not figure out how to get the Iraqis to run their own country. For his part, Sanchez found himself acting from day to day, trying to set the right standards and get out with his troops. He got shot at more than most at his level, and that mattered to the people under him. Sanchez was both the operational Fifth Corps commander and the strategic CJTF-7 commander, each of which was a full-time job. Neither was done very well. Critics referred to a lost year.

Maybe they were right. But it is difficult to see how different personalities might have changed that year much. Replace Bremer with Henry Kissinger and Sanchez with Dwight Eisenhower, cancel the de-Baathification orders, and the stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn’t run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going.

John Abizaid saw this hard truth early on. It explained why he was not in a hurry to dump Ric Sanchez. The USCENTCOM commander recognized the intractable nature of the problem. He was among the first to refer to the situation in Iraq as “a classical guerrilla-type campaign,” and he chose the words carefully. With that in mind, Abizaid went to the next logical step. The Americans could not defeat the Iraq insurgency. They could at best assist the Iraqis. “I believe in my heart of hearts,” Abizaid said, “that the Iraqis must win this battle with our help.”

 

Defining the size, scope, and nature of that help took about a year. Far from being “lost,” for the Americans in Iraq, the twelve months after Saddam’s fall became a steady struggle to define the problem and put solutions in place. It all happened in the face of growing enemy resistance and consequent Clausewitzian friction. By the end of that stretch, things were set for a long-term campaign.

Strategic decisions came first. With the Lincoln speech and Bremer’s appointment, the U.S. committed to a lengthy effort in Iraq. That required a decision on how long individuals should remain in country. The Army went with a year. The Marines chose seven months at battalion level and twelve months for higher headquarters. The Air Force, Navy, and SOF used four to six months. But the question arose: Should they go one by one or by unit rotations?

In World War II, the rule had been to send units, then backfill casualties with single replacements. Once in theater, you stayed until the war ended. Korea began with units on an open-ended timeline, then shifted completely to individual fillers on one-year tours. Vietnam followed suit. The fixed individual tour, one man or woman at a time, is the basic U.S. military assignment method, aligning neatly with personal enlistment contracts and service obligations. About a twelfth of a unit departs every month, with some upticks or drops over the year. While the method is beloved of military personnel officers, as moving people one at a time offers maximum flexibility to meet immediate service needs, schooling standards, and promotion gates, the use of individual replacements makes a mockery of team training, unit cohesion, and close ties between leaders and led. Individual assignments treat people like interchangeable parts, widgets or screws to be shuffled from drawer to drawer. In combat under this system, new guys showed up one at a time, and often got shot all too quickly. That was bad enough. For units in contact with the enemy, it was worse. Paper strengths remained high, yet beneath that serene number was a constant churn, what Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair called “the invisible horde of people going here and there but never seemingly arriving.” It led to the constant need for retraining; discipline challenges among officers, sergeants, and junior enlisted people who didn’t know each other well; and more casualties. Individual replacement was supremely efficient—every man in the right place, every place with the right man—and crudely ineffective.

The Vietnam veterans running the U.S. military in 2003 wanted no part of it. In Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, the military started the campaigns by turning off the personnel system (an indictment there, to be sure). The official terms were stop-loss, which suspended discharges, and stop-move, which locked people into their units. Battalions trained, deployed, and returned together. The Navy and Marines had used this method for years for fleet rotations. Pushed by the constant requirements of Northern Watch and Southern Watch, the Air Force followed suit with their air expeditionary forces. The British, who had relied on battalion swap-outs for decades in their imperial and post-imperial days, swore by it. In the summer of 2003, facing a lengthy Iraq counterinsurgency, the U.S. Army bit the bullet. One-year unit rotations became the rule.

A few hiccups marred the transition. The pushy personnel types insisted on changing out a good number of Army battalion commanders, as well as some one-star generals, in May and June. That explained why Lieutenant Colonel Nate Sassaman took over 1-8 Infantry in theater on June 17, 2003. At Army headquarters, uncompromising General Jack Keane put a stop to that. Unit rotations would be the standard. Stop-loss and stop-move became the norm. Once alerted to deploy, units would stay together until they came home. It permitted the Army in particular to sustain a long war.

That long war demanded more troops in order to swap out every year. In the summer of 2003, the U.S. Army had four divisions in Iraq: the 101st Airborne Division up north, the Fourth Infantry Division (Sassaman’s outfit) in the center, the Eighty-Second Airborne Division out west, and the First Armored Division in Baghdad. The Tenth Mountain Division was in Afghanistan, and the Second Infantry Division in Korea. That used six of the ten regular Army divisions, an unsustainable number. Come the spring of 2004, the Army planned to swap out three divisions in Iraq. The Marines would handle the fourth, heading into Anbar Province to supplant the Eighty-Second Airborne. Another Army division would go into Afghanistan, and the Second Infantry Division had to stay in Korea to deter the threats from the Communist north. So four Army divisions a year had to rotate, maybe for a decade. This arithmetic argued strongly for bringing in the U.S. reserves and drumming up some more allies. Both efforts bore fruit.

Former Air National Guardsman George W. Bush emulated his Army National Guardsman predecessor Harry S. Truman in the Korean War. Both presidents wisely called up the Guard and Reserve. Although their wars proved immensely unpopular, by bringing in men and women from every county in America, the presidents guaranteed those in uniform support month after month. American citizens may turn on a faulty policy, and most eventually do. But they won’t turn on their neighbors. In contrast, President Lyndon B. Johnson did not call up the reserves during the Vietnam War, and the resulting defeat blew back on the veterans of that war and all of America. In the Vietnam War, activating the reserves probably wouldn’t have brought victory, but not doing so helped ensure loss of public support and final failure.

In addition, unlike Lyndon Johnson, who tried halfheartedly to bring a few “other flags” into Vietnam, but very much in the spirit of Truman in 1950 and his own father in 1990–91, Bush sought and employed many foreign contingents. This demonstrated hard work by Secretary of State Colin Powell and the diplomats, nudged as necessary by Bush’s personal appeals. Eventually, thirty-seven countries sent troops. The British, Koreans, and Poles headed multinational divisions and contributed multiple brigades. Other brigades came from Georgia, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Ukraine. Battalions were sent from Albania, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Romania, and Thailand. Companies joined from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Latvia, Macedonia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Slovakia, and Tonga. Platoons arrived from Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova. NATO eventually contributed a small military training mission in Baghdad. The United States supplied a lot of equipment and support for the smaller participants, but those countries came, and most stayed for a good stretch. About 24,000 Coalition troops served in addition to an average of 130,000 U.S. personnel in 2004. In later days, pundits carped that the Bush administration didn’t create a real coalition in Iraq. Canada, France, and Germany loudly stayed out. Those who came, though, held areas in the south and north and so freed up the Americans to tackle the embattled Sunni heartland.

 

The winter of 2003 was a tough one for Nate Sassaman’s battalion and the Iraqis around them. Across the country, however, the clammy, rainy months appeared to indicate that maybe, just maybe, things were settling down. Saddam Hussein sat in confinement. The number of attacks dropped in the Sunni regions. The Shia militias were behaving. In his memoirs, Lieutenant General Ric Sanchez refers to this period as “a window of opportunity lost.” He must have seen something, but few others noticed. After a few more Iraqi winters, it would become obvious that the enemy just fought less in the cold months.

The opposition remained maddeningly opaque. Intelligence people scratched their heads. A January 25, 2004, count of detainees totaled 9,754. Casualty estimates ran to at least that number. So, essentially, the U.S. and its partners had captured and killed the entire insurgency. Yet the bad guys were still out there.

The Task Force stayed at it. The SOF continued to refine their manhunting but still spent a lot of time waiting for actionable intelligence. They nailed Saddam and continued to tick through the deck of prominent Baathist figures. But it was slow and uncertain work. They just could not find the hostile leadership. Few of those in American custody were big fish. Zarqawi and his crew moved freely through the Sunni villages.

The American Special Forces and the British, among others, suggested a solution that had always worked in counterinsurgencies. Nate Sassaman relied on it at the Balad Canning Factory: Get Iraqi partners with you out on patrol. Build a new Iraqi army. Revitalize the Iraqi police. That effort began top down from Bremer’s CPA in Baghdad, and bottom up in the various Coalition battalions. The CPA approach promised success in ten years; it was like hand-tooling a hundred Ferraris when the field wanted a hundred thousand Yugos. But the grassroots version out in the units started to get some response. This was what Abizaid had meant by the Iraqis winning it for themselves with U.S. help.

Iraqis on the ground could help sift the bad guys from the good. Massive roundups just didn’t work, except to inspire more young Sunni Arab men to join the insurgency. The detention camps already contained enough pipe swingers, bomb planters, and pop shooters. The SOF teams and the conventional battalions all understood that they had to find the key hostiles, the spiders at the center of the network webs. Those spiders hid well.

Dealing with daily IEDs and a steady string of killed and wounded, small units grew impatient. Any attack began to generate prisoners, guys swept up in the reaction. If the enemy engaged the Americans, Iraqi males were taken. Some were questioned and released. Many were not. The population at the Baghdad Central Confinement Facility at Abu Ghraib rose steadily. In January 2004, during a relatively quiet week, an average of eighty detainees a day arrived. It overwhelmed the MP guards and swamped the MI interrogators.

The captive Iraqis proved anything but docile. They fashioned shanks and shivs from scrap metal, strong-armed cooperative prisoners, defiled their spaces with feces, spat at guards, flung human waste at the MPs, and twisted, bit, and bucked during cell transfers. Escapes were attempted. The leaders among the prisoners, often portraying themselves as low-level nobodies, insisted on continued resistance behind bars. A good number of detainees supported such actions. The military police had to endure all of this and limit their responses to the denial of privileges and solitary confinement.

At Abu Ghraib, several prisoners mixed it up with guards on October 18, 2003, led by a detainee with a smuggled pistol. A few of the MPs chose their own countermeasure, not unlike the 1-8 Infantry soldiers at the Tigris River. That night, five enlisted MPs pulled twelve Iraqi prisoners from their cells. They stripped the captives naked and then piled them in sexually humiliating positions. A week or so later, the same guards put a hooded man on a box with fake electrodes clipped on his fingers; the prisoner was told the wires were real, and if he stepped off the box, he’d be electrocuted. Three days later, the same MPs again stripped prisoners and put them in sexually embarrassing poses. This incident also involved K-9 police dogs. A trio of military intelligence soldiers participated. These abuses were not linked to any interrogation. The soldiers later explained that they were teaching the Iraqis a lesson, the same reason offered by the soldiers in 1-8 Infantry. The MPs, however, took a lot of pictures.

By January 14, 2004, Sanchez and Abizaid knew about it. They informed Secretary Rumsfeld and immediately initiated a series of investigations. The casual cruelty and gross poor judgment demonstrated by those involved in the incident particularly frustrated Sanchez, who had spent a lot of his personal time at Abu Ghraib and on detainee matters in general. Much later, when the story and the graphic photos broke in the press on April 28, 2004, confused critics—some not so confused but going down the trail for their own reasons—conflated the misconduct at the prison with the Bush administration’s description of prisoners as “unlawful combatants” and rumors of terrorist captives spirited away to be tortured in unaccountable “black sites.” It became accepted among many that the U.S. routinely tortured detainees, rivaling the severe methods of French paratroopers in the 1956–57 Battle of Algiers. The Arab Street ate it up, pointing to the photos as proof beyond doubt of infidel perfidy. It definitely didn’t help the Americans’ cause that Abu Ghraib was a notorious Saddam-era prison, which allowed opponents to tar U.S. soldiers with that brush too. A few dumb young MPs inflicted a lot of damage to the U.S., an egregious “own goal,” as soccer enthusiasts might say.

To counter all the hyperventilation about torture, some perspective is in order. The U.S. military did not torture anyone. None of the subjects of the Abu Ghraib photos were killed or injured, although they were certainly denied basic human dignity. Interrogating a detainee requires some manipulation of his environment, and that can be done without denying a captive food, rest, or hygiene. To a civilian, being awakened at odd hours, having a leashed dog bark at you, being bombarded with loud noise, or enduring harsh white lighting might seem very threatening, as indeed these approaches are meant to feel to a detainee. But they are not torture. Much standard military training includes these same sensations. The CIA apparently has some different rules, but even they very rarely apply any enhanced interrogation techniques, none that are life-threatening. There have been crimes dealing with detainees, as at Abu Ghraib. We must be careful in ascribing criminality to the mere acts of detention and interrogation. Sadly enough, it all traced back to too much loose talk about unlawful combatants. At the outset, Vietnam veteran Colin Powell had warned the senior Bush people to be careful about all matters dealing with prisoners, but as in so many other strategic aspects, he was ignored. After Abu Ghraib, Bush and Rumsfeld belatedly adopted Powell’s view. Orders went out: treat detainees as standard prisoners of war, no more and no less.

Abu Ghraib festered beneath the radar as the squads of investigators came and went during the chill Iraqi winter. The Americans, the British, and the other Coalition troops, now side by side with some new Iraqi partners, manned checkpoints and patrolled. At night, they raided. In later years, the American intelligence community in Iraq would look back and choose January through March 2004 as the benchmark months, “as good as it gets,” in assessing hostile activity. In Vietnam, the metric of choice was the infamous body count, the number of dead Communists. In Iraq, while bodies were counted, the favored statistic became enemy attacks. Those averaged about twenty a day in the first three months of 2004. T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruellest month.” In Iraq, his words rang true.