Hunting Down Saddam (21 page)

“Understand the difference between those two? Winning the peace is putting these people to work; getting them money that they can support their families with, so that they're too damn tired at night to pick up a gun and go out and attack the Coalition forces.

“And then when they get their second and third paycheck, and they will have fed their family, their wife is like, ‘Hey, Amman, don't fuck this up.' They want to keep this paycheck coming in. That's what we've got to do to win this war, get them to earn money and support their families; something they haven't been able to do in thirty years.

“Iraqis must be convinced to do the right thing. Try rewarding correct behavior and taking away items or choices for bad behavior. There is a lot of commonality between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. There were a lot of lessons learned there that could be applied here. Convoys need to be covered and ambushes need to be stopped before they occur. All of the gasoline that is imported, around a thousand trucks a day, is all being brought in by Coalition forces. A convoy without air cover is a beautiful target to an insurgent.”

The New Iraqi Army

Two new military units have been placed on the border between Iraq and Iran to stop the flow of terrorists into the country. New Iraqi Army units are being trained to perform border security. This army is a battalion-sized unit of former Iraqi soldiers. Former Ba'ath Party loyalists are screened before they are allowed to join, but they are accepted if they want the job and are willing to work with Coalition forces.

The screening was accomplished by a combination of HUMINT (Human Intelligence) and cross-checking of names and information in counterintelligence databases. Questions most important in screening include, but are not limited to: Was the candidate a card-carrying member of the Ba'ath Party? Was the candidate involved in the black market or the drug trade? What was the former position the person held, and did they fit into the mold of an extreme Saddam loyalist?

According to a private-sector trainer, most towns in Iraq are “clannish,” where everybody knows everybody else's business. This makes it simple in most cases to find out whether a potential recruit was “a good guy or a bad guy.”

Part of the funding for the New Iraq Army, border guards, and other projects comes from Saddam Hussein's assets, which were frozen, captured, and “held in escrow,” so to speak, after the Coalition invasion, and paid out by the government of Iraq. Money in the Mosul region that used to belong to Saddam has also been put into several hundred schools, playgrounds, youth centers, and a nearby health care facility that treats three hundred people per week.

LETTERS FROM TIKRIT

The Lion's Den: An Author's Note

At the end of our visit with the 101st Airborne in Mosul, Russell Cummings and I headed down to Tikrit, the home territory of Saddam Hussein. Our Black Hawk helicopter landed at the Ironhorse Drop Zone, which was nothing more than a large concrete circle stuck in the middle of a radius of some two thousand feet or more, and surrounded by the city of Tikrit.

Russell and I had been invited to spend some time in Tikrit as the guest of Mark Vargas and KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root) at their headquarters in Tikrit, named Camp Speicher after the Navy officer who was shot down in that area during Operation DESERT STORM, and remains Missing in Action. Camp Speicher is a two-square-mile area fenced in and guarded closely by both American and Iraqi guard duty troopers.

The Black Hawk quickly dropped us off and departed to its next destination. With all the shootings in the area we were naturally apprehensive, and the short wait seemed much longer than it actually was. Finally, two welcoming female PAO (Public Affairs Office) officers arrived to collect us in an SUV, which was reputedly armor plated. As I put myself into the front seat of the SUV, I thought of my old friend, COL Nick Rowe, who was in a “hardened” SUV when he was shot dead by a communist assassin in the Philippines. I wondered if our SUV had the same degree of hardening as Nick's car, and rather hoped it had more.

This was truly Saddam territory. We could feel it in the air, as we drove through Tikrit on our first-day tour given by the gracious PAOs. After the tour we were taken to our lodging for the first night: the palace known as “The Ladies Palace,” where Saddam's two sons purportedly kept their girlfriends. Like all of Saddam's palaces, it was beautiful and lacked nothing in the area of decorations. It was here that I first noticed Saddam's initials on walls, corners, and ceilings. (See a photograph of a typical circular initialed emblem in the photo section.)

The Ivy Division

The Fourth Infantry Division (Mechanized
) is also known as the Ivy Division. “Ivy” is a play on words for the Roman numeral IV; also, ivy is a symbol of strength and tenacity—this is also the distinctive symbol on the Division's shoulder patch. The 4th ID's Area of Operations was Saddam Hussein's stronghold—the riverside city of Tikrit (located at the end of the arrow).
Courtesy: CIA World Factbook 2003

Everything was luxurious; marble adorned the walls and floors. All opulent except for one dreadfully lacking area: the latrines. In typical Middle Eastern fashion, the toilets consisted of a hole in the marble floor—the architectural term for toilets of this type being “Asian” toilets. I was very glad I only had to spend one night there as, at the age of seventy-eight, squatting over a hole in the floor left much to be desired!

Mark Vargas is an old friend from the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The last time I had seen him prior to my visit to Iraq had been during my book tour for
The Hunt for Bin Laden
, in March 2003, when we had dinner together after a Chapter 38 meeting at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Mark, with twinkling brown eyes, a wide warm smile, dark hair, and a walrus mustache, is a man of six foot five inches of solid muscle.

Mark went out of his way to show us the layout of the KBR camp. They had their own heliport and many amenities, but what amazed me the most within the camp's enclosure was the makeshift nine-hole golf course, built by a 4th ID medical unit.

Through a contract with the Army Material Command, KBR is tasked to provide logistical service and support to the 4th Infantry Division base camps. This support encompasses Forward Operating Bases Speicher (Tikrit North), Ironhorse (Tikrit Palace), Warhorse (Baqubah), Packhorse (Tikrit South), Bayonet (Kirkuk), Lancer (Bayji), Pacesetter (Samarra), Lion Base (North Balad), and Kirkush.

To ensure that the U.S. military receives effective, efficient, and timely support, KBR employees live and work side by side with the U.S. military at all 4th ID camps. Support for the 4th ID includes operations and maintenance for dining facilities, refuse service, housing, housing operations and maintenance, latrine and shower services, laundry services, heavy equipment support, horizontal and vertical lift services, and morale welfare and recreation services. At Camp Speicher convoys are formed, stocked with supplies of clothes, food, and gasoline for the military, and sent to places like Mosul in the north or Baghdad, one hundred miles farther south with many hours of driving through notorious “ambush alleys.” Some of these alleys were as long as seven miles and were under constant surveillance by the enemy.

In the late afternoon of our final day at Camp Speicher, Russell Cummings and I went out with a group of 4th ID medical personnel to take what medicine was available and offer assistance, supplies, and equipment to the local people. Russell had been a medic and a captain in the Green Berets. He helped give medical assistance to a woman with a broken leg and to other locals including children who had cuts, bumps, and other wounds that otherwise wouldn't have been taken care of.

There was typically a great reluctance to “officially” use any medical people or supplies from the U.S. government, unless, as sometimes happened, a local citizen was shot by American forces or hurt by American construction or military action. What we witnessed was one of many strictly volunteer efforts by the medically trained Americans.

An Arabic-speaking lieutenant colonel and an Egyptian-American officer who were with us spent much of the time talking to the people we visited. Later, I discovered that the lieutenant colonel who had been conversing with the locals held a meeting back at Camp Speicher. It transpired that the locals had known Saddam's family and his closest associates for many years. Some of them, apparently, had almost daily contact with family members who were in Mosul to the north, which was also a seat of Saddam's personal power. The lieutenant colonel and the Egyptian-American officer seemed to have drawn information from many of the people they had been treating. It turned out that I had been witnessing a HUMINT (Human Intelligence) effort to find out where Saddam might be hidden. This proved to me, once again, the value of compassionate services to the local population who, to a significant extent, contributed to the capture of Saddam Hussein as well as many of his supporters.

During my time in Tikrit, I spent time with both KBR and members of the 4th ID stationed there. LTC Steve Russell was the commander of Task Force 1-22 INF, a battalion of the 4th ID. The 4th ID was a relative latecomer to the war in Iraq. Units such as the Special Forces and the Screaming Eagles had seemingly fought most of the fight and captured much of the battlefield glory. As time would tell, however, the 4th ID would, with the capture of Saddam Hussein, become an icon in their own right.

During the course of my interviews, I found that LTC Russell had kept a moving chronicle of the 4th ID's efforts in Iraq. The excerpts that follow are from descriptive letters written by LTC Russell, spanning from June 20th to Christmas, 2003. They outline the missions, problems, and uncertainty facing soldiers tasked with fighting a war against pro-Saddam insurgents in the Ba'athist stronghold of Tikrit, Iraq. Tikrit had always been Saddam's “home,” and it was near here that he was finally captured.

I came into possession of the letters when LTC Russell said good bye, as we left Tikrit. He handed Cummings and me a wealth of information on his unit and their purpose in Iraq. “I hope everything we've done for you here will be of some assistance in your new book,” I recall the young and energetic lieutenant colonel saying. Only when I had arrived back home, and put the floppy disk that LTC Russell gave me into my computer, did I realize that his letters would be such a monumental credit to himself, his troops, and the United States of America.

Not long before, Chris Thompson, my project co-coordinator, heard a radio interview with the father of a soldier killed in Iraq. The father had expressed his dismay with the lack of detail from the Department of Defense when they told him that his son had been killed in action. No other insight into the matter was given, other than he had a certain amount of time to alert the rest of the family before the news was released to the press. The father did not want the first word of his son's demise to be heard by anyone in the family on the television, so he braced himself and began making phone calls before the story and his son's name aired.

Wondering how his son had spent his last moments on earth, the father came across some rather grisly footage on an Al-Jazeera Web site, in which his son's humvee, which had been ambushed by insurgents, was shown in blazing color. The father lamented the fact that the only bit of closure he had received was not from the Army, but from Arab television.

As we delved into LTC Russell's letters, we realized that much of what the letters contained were what the families of fallen soldiers needed for closure. We preferred they get it from their unit commander rather than from Al-Jazeera. LTC Russell wrote (about his letters), “I also have been thinking that the letters have become something more than just my personal assessments. Perhaps they can be used to tell our great soldiers' stories as we as a nation try to assimilate all that this last year has entailed. I have only meant them to convey what we have lived here and to serve the memory of those we have lost.” In his own voice, LTC Russell brings the stories to life. They have been gently altered for the purposes of protecting the lieutenant colonel's family and privacy, allowing a bit of literary license for context, but without altering the facts, details, or overall content and voice.

The Widow's Tears

Her heart has stopped; she cannot breathe

At the letter she never wanted to receive

She all but crumbled to the floor

At the minister and officers at her door

The officer says “I'm sorry, Ma'am”

As he hands her the telegram

The world now no longer makes any sense

With the delivery from the Department of Defense

Sympathy on their faces clearly shows

But none of them knowing the pain she knows