My Share of the Task (31 page)

These deaths hit the unit like a shudder. Losing a McNulty, a Horrigan, or a Langmack meant losing a man who had been in the unit for a decade or more, where he had grown from a young soldier to a veteran one. Senior members had children who played on the same soccer teams; their wives were close friends. Bob Horrigan, for example, was a fixture in Green and in TF 714. He and his brother had been privates in my Ranger company back in 1986 and 1987, and I remembered the young, happy-go-lucky Horrigan twins with fondness. Bob had been in Green for years and had grown into one of its patriarchs. As an instructor of new operators, he had earned a special respect across the force and had a following of younger operators who looked up to him. He made beautiful custom hunting knives in his garage between deployments and had decided this tour would be his last. He was to retire the following spring.

These losses on the cusp of the major offensive made the upcoming danger very raw.
If a man and an operator like Bob Horrigan can get killed
, the unavoidable reasoning went,
so can I.

*   *   *

A
s the second Green squadron flowed in that July, we put them outside Al Qaim. A contingent of Rangers and SEALs joined them. Our push into that area of the upper Euphrates would not be the first time this stretch of desert had hosted bitter fighting. The landscape appeared largely unchanged from the summer of 1941, when then–Major General William Slim, the British general later famous for his operations in Burma, having worked up the valley, prepared to attack Vichy French forces ninety miles upriver. “Toward us flowed the winding Euphrates, broad, placid,” Slim wrote, while “on either side stretched, mile after mile, the desert, flat and
featureless, a muddy brown.” In the summer of 2005, the area looked like a Nevada mining town, full of little brown buildings and a dusty, desolate horizon. Ten miles southeast of the city itself lay a big, defunct phosphate plant that abutted an industrial rail depot. We constructed a base around there, and the squadron set up shop inside the old, run-down factory. At this critical, tough post we installed one of our most talented commanders.

By the time we arrived that summer, Al Qaim and Husaybah, closer to the Syrian border, were nasty. Our Green teams, Rangers, and SEALs worked alongside the Marines from the 2nd Regimental Combat Team, ably commanded by then-Colonel Steve Davis, whose
South Carolina–size bailiwick ran to the border area. Davis, one of the few Marines who had served previously on the TF 714 staff, shared our conviction that the foreign infiltration through the Al Qaim area was a major threat. The Marines had encountered wily, well-trained foreigners, and their Camp Gannon, in Husaybah, had suffered a deluge of bold attacks. That spring, while insurgents engaged in a diversionary gunfight, a dump truck bomb exploded at the camp entrance while a fire engine—driven by suicide bombers wearing Kevlar vests and protected by thick plated glass—sped in behind it and
attempted to breach the gate. They were repulsed, thanks largely to the heroics of a
Marine lance corporal.

As the Marines and TF 16 contested the area near the border, a seperate force of Marines worked their way east to west, fighting a hopscotch series of battles against insurgents up the Euphrates River valley. Our forces joined them.

If the black Al Qaeda flags that insurgents draped over the sides of compound walls or flew from rooftops weren't evidence enough of how deeply entrenched Zarqawi sympathizers were in the upper corridor, the violence that ensued when we contested these areas proved it. The engagements were some of the largest since the initial invasion of 2003. And yet in the vast desert expanse far from Baghdad, they went mostly unnoticed by the American public. At a time when Iraq was supposed to be emerging as a secure and sovereign nation, western Anbar was exploding. Largely away from civilian populations, our forces waged bitter fights against confident AQI militants, periodically requiring thunderous bombing runs on isolated mud and cinderblock safe houses. The United States was meant to be rebuilding Iraq, but my old mentor Lieutenant General John Vines had to destroy five bridges along the Euphrates River to constrict the enemy's lateral maneuvers.

Early in the push, the close-quarters engagements quickly gave us a deeper understanding of the enemy. We began to see the structures and relationships that allowed AQI to nest so thoroughly into this stretch through Anbar. AQI had purchased some of the safe houses it used, but it really relied on an archipelago of guesthouses run by sympathetic or permissive villages and tribes. When insurgents fled, they scaled fences using carefully placed but otherwise innocuous-looking piles of junk against the back walls. As they scattered into villages, they relied on what John Christian aptly termed a biblical system, using Old Testament–era techniques—sympathizers left small markings on the lintels of their compounds, for example—invisible at first to our technology and untrained foreign eyes.

When we did encounter insurgents willing to make a stand, the fight was different from most of what we had experienced in Iraq to date. As a hostage-rescue and strategic-raid force, our inclination was to do deliberate, intelligence-driven planning, then conduct fast point assaults—landing helicopters on roofs and fast-roping into compounds. These were high-risk tactics based on knowing more than the enemy, achieving absolute surprise, and having forces that, pound for pound, were always superior to the enemy ranks.

That approach had largely worked, but by the summer of 2005 our adversaries had wisened up and hardened into a different foe. AQI leaders, even midlevel ones, began wearing suicide vests constantly, usually sleeping in them so that if our men breached their doors and headed toward their cots, they could light themselves off in the darkness. They lay traps, setting up makeshift pillboxes in the slits between staircases and rigging the walls of compounds with explosives. Whole units of foreign fighters barricaded themselves in basements, firing up through the floorboards or at the ankles of operators. We adapted, landing helicopters kilometers away, walking to the targets, cordoning the areas and methodically working our way through them. Although the fighting was bitter, some of our operators felt a certain relief that, for once, the insurgents were out in the open, not melting into cities or hiding among civilians.

Not since Fallujah had we seen AQI fighters defend houses or hold and retain terrain. Their actions out west seemed to signal that they possessed new resolve and increasing confidence. We needed to break both.

*   *   *

B
y August, the costs of the surge I had feared were realized. On Thursday, August 25, 2005, a pressure-plate triple-stacked antitank mine hit a convoy of our men in Husaybah, between the Syrian border and Al Qaim. Green operators Master Sergeant Ivica Jerak and Sergeant First Class Trevor John Diesing, and Ranger Corporal Timothy M. Shea were killed. A fourth operator, Sergeant First Class Obediah Kolath, was critically wounded in the blast and
flown to Germany. Others in the troop were badly wounded. All were professional soldiers, volunteers for their elite units, and fully cognizant of the risks. But it left us all with the ominous feeling that our losses would mount.

Before dawn on Sunday, August 28, as I prepared to fly out to visit this team at their outpost, I wrote an e-mail to Annie that captured the challenge I faced as their commander: “
A lot of emotion attached, naturally, but we need to maintain absolute focus right now.”

On the helicopter ride, I thought about something T. E. Lawrence had written in
Seven Pillars
of Wisdom
, a book I've revisited countless times. Writing about his own fight in the desert, not far from where these Rangers and operators had fallen in Iraq, he reflected on the fragility of the tribes in the face of heavy fighting: “
Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals. An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widened out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.”

Writing about World War I, Lawrence had experienced a very different theater from that in Europe, where men died en masse—hamlets lost an entire brood of boys and men to a few minutes of shelling in wet, gas-filled trenches. There, commanders risked seeing their men not as men but as mere numbers in the columns of a War Office ledger. But the tribes Lawrence corralled and led were constituted so thickly, with such interwoven histories and personal ties, that the loss of one member sent fissures through them. Our forces, more tribes than modern military units, were the same way to me.

We landed in the evening near the phosphate plant outside Al Qaim and met with the squadron inside the run-down factory they used as a base. The commander at Al Qaim, Lieutenant Colonel Trevor, had a small work space, not much bigger than a storage closet, in the shabby, trailerlike building that adjoined one end of the factory.
*
I sat down with him there before meeting with the rest of his men. I had known Trevor a long time. He had served as a Ranger captain for me. He had lost his wife to sickness a few years earlier. Then, as on this night, I had been proud of—and steeled by—his determined strength. I let the door close and looked him in the eye.

“How are you, Trevor?”

“Sir, I'm good,” he said. We were speaking quietly.

“Well, how are the guys?”

“I think they're all right, sir,” he said. “But they're beat up.”

That same day, Sergeant First Class Kolath, who had been flown to Germany after the mine attack there in Husaybah, had died from his wounds. Loss was compounded by the stress of combat. Getting hit by an IED is unnerving. There is no enemy to fight back against. It strikes and brings a few moments of chaos and noise, but in the silence afterward there is no enemy to engage, no contest where each side has a chance.

We met with the operators in a small room in the compound. I'd known many of them for years. For a few it was the first time we had met. I began by offering my sincere condolences for their losses. They knew how I felt, but I wanted them to hear it directly. Losing comrades is hard, and I didn't patronize fellow professionals by telling them that. I rarely prepared remarks beforehand and for small groups never did. On the ride out I had thought through key points I want to make, but now I mostly tried to understand the tenor inside the room.

“Listen,” I said, “this really hurts. But let me tell you what would make these hurt even more: if it is all in vain. Now I am not fucking around. I am here with you, not just physically here, but I am completely committed to this thing. We can beat these bastards, and we're going to.” Victory could not offset the terrible price already paid—a price that would increase as the fight expanded. But losing would make the pain unbearable.

I explained how the nighttime raids they were running in that corner of the war were vital to TF 714's mission and to the larger strategy. “Let me tell you what your brothers up in Mosul are doing,” I said, building out a wider view of the fighting that summer. I told them what we were seeing in Baghdad and east of them in the rest of Anbar. I shared what I thought George Casey was thinking, based on my most recent conversations with him.

Within a couple of months, by October, we were able to see real evidence of the strategic impact I hoped would materialize when I explained it to the operators in Al Qaim that day. We had no way of scientifically proving the effect of the push out west, but the trends were promising. By August, the Coalition believed suicide attacks accounted for a decreasing
proportion of the car bombings. According to the National Combating Terrorism Center, in July 2005, before the campaign, 51 suicide attacks killed 277 people and wounded 751 in Iraq. In September, nearly 40 such attacks killed 431, and wounded a similar number. November saw 11 attacks that killed 270. In December,
10 incidents killed 97 people.

In October, Chris Faris, the command sergeant major of Green whom I regarded as the unit's elder, weighed in with his assessment. In one of our routine strategy sessions, he said, “The western Euphrates push was the right thing to do. I was worried it wouldn't work, but it did.” Our successes out west solidified a significant shift in how we, as a force, regarded ourselves. Previously content to conduct periodic point assaults, the western Euphrates campaign gave us a larger sense of possibility—and responsibility.

Although we did not fully appreciate it that summer or fall, the hot contest over Al Qaim became about more than tamping the foreign-fighter pipeline. There in the dusty border juncture, the first sparks for a much larger, more definitive strategic shift flashed. In addition to fighting the Marines and our TF 16 operators, Al Qaeda found itself facing a third enemy: the Albu Mahal tribe, many of whom not long before
had fought with the insurgency against the Coalition. The tribe turned, joined the Americans, and rose against Al Qaeda for a number of reasons. In part, they found themselves on the losing end of an alliance between
AQI and another tribe.

But also, by all accounts, the Albu Mahal's was a reaction to the tyranny and barbarism that ran amok when AQI governed anything bigger than a city block. Al Qaeda degraded the tribal structures and overtook smuggling and other criminal sources of wealth. It forced intermarriages between its foreign men and Iraqi girls. Reports from the mini emirates AQI established, like the one in Baqubah north of Baghdad, reported that they punished grocers who kept tomatoes alongside cucumbers in the same stall—as the vegetables' shape suggested male and
female body parts commingling. Sunnis throughout Anbar were having similar reactions to Al Qaeda's mix of the infantile and the sadistic. Al Qaeda shifted in the eyes of many Sunnis from protectors to parasites. As it did, many Sunnis realized that they had made a nasty Faustian bargain by accepting the jihadists. If they resisted, Al Qaeda brutally forced them into submission.