Authors: Charles W. Sasser
“We can go in there and take over positions from the 101
st
Airborne, hole up, and get shot at for the next year,” he had said, “or we can attack where these guys live. In doing this, we have to be realistic. We are going to take losses. This is probably the last time we're all going to be here together.”
Now, at Camp Striker, Infanti made it even plainer that his 4/31
st
soldiers were not going to sit out the tour with their thumbs up their asses. They were going to take the fight to the enemy as soon as they settled in.
“The bad guys are
out there
. We have to go
out there
and live with them while we kick ass. Once we get started, we're not backing off. We have to prove to the people that we're here with them as long as they need us. This is your land now,” he told his soldiers. “You defend it, you protect it, you bring peace to the people.”
In previous wars, you were on
this
side of the line. You shot anything or anybody out there on the
other
side of the line. In that respect, the modern soldier was not so different from the one of a century ago or, for that matter, from the Roman Centurion in first-century Judea. Today's ground pounder could readily identify with the American 1
st
Cavalry in Vietnam's Ia Drang valley, with the “Big Red One” slogging through Italy during World War II, or even with General Washington's troops crossing the Delaware. It was the foot soldier's task to find, fix, and kill the enemy while avoiding having the same thing done to him.
Things in this war, however, didn't seem all that simple. Rather than clarifying things, the new Rules of Engagement (ROE) left the Joes confused and uncertain, afraid that if they made a mistake and shot at the wrong time they might be charged with murder after the fact by people far removed from the reality of what things were really like.
“It's a question of proportionality of return fires if the enemy initiates contact with you,” was how ROE classes went at Fort Drum. “If, on the other hand, you initiate the contact, the question you must consider concerns the collateral damage you may inflict.”
Huh?
Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery broke it down for his Second Platoon. “That means you can't go around shooting up everybody. If some asshole takes a shot at you from a house, that doesn't necessarily mean you can blow it up or burn it down. Say a dozen ragheads use innocent civilians as a shield and open fire on us, we don't blast back and take the chance of harming innocent citizens.”
“So what do we do? Let the fuckers kill us?”
“To win this war, we have to win hearts and minds,” ROE instructors
stressed. “We're dedicated to liberating the Iraqi people, not killing them. We accomplish that through kindness and understanding.”
“And,” someone added, “a 5.56 round through the head.”
“That's a bad attitude to go over there with, soldier.”
“You still haven't told us what we're supposed to doâlet 'em kill us while we play nicey-nice?”
During the battle handoff and transition phase, Lt. Colonel Infanti's 809-member task force composed of his 4
th
Battalion, elements from the Iraqi Army, and small detachments from other U.S. units moved in with the 101
st
to occupy the FOBs at Mahmudiyah and at Yusufiyah, where Infanti would establish Battalion Headquarters before stretching out to build what would become the first Coalition presence in parts of The Triangle of Death.
FOB Yusufiyah consisted of a pair of large concrete-block buildings surrounded by ten-foot-tall cement blast walls and razor wire. An electrical fire had gutted one of the buildings earlier that year, forcing some soldiers and activities into large GP tents out in the yard. The surrounding terrain was mostly flat, desert-looking, with a few date palms growing along the banks of numerous canals. The town of Yusufiyah began outside the walls with a scattering of businesses and residences along a single thoroughfare.
FOB Mahmudiyah was similar to the one at Yusufiyah, except it enclosed more ground, the walls were higher, and a Bradley fighting vehicle blocked the gate. Iraqi flags, not American ones, flew over both bases and would fly over all new positions. After all, this
was
Iraq and not U.S. territory.
At first, things were relatively quiet, about like two fighters checking each other out from their corners before the bell rang. Here and there, hate-filled stares and graffti splashed in red paint on a wallâ
DOWN TO USA
âreminded the newcomers of the danger seething beneath the surface. The Joes were already apprehensive not only about the danger but also about what might be required of them and whether or not they could measure up to it. To that was added cultural shock. The “fertile crescent” was not nearly as fertile as GIs on their first combat tour to Iraq imagined it to be.
“Some people believe the Garden of Eden was located in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley,” observed PFC William “Big Willy” Hendrickson, twenty, who wanted to go on to college after he left the service and eventually teach history. “Can you believe it? We've invaded the Garden of Eden!”
Houses in the towns and villages belonging to the common people were mainly mud brick and cinderblock built low to the ground, tan or brown and rendered otherwise almost colorless by the scouring effects of sand and desert winds. The squalid structures contained little furniture and sometimes almost no food. Family members of all ages and sexes slept in single rooms on thin blankets spread on the floor, or on the rooftops when the night heat of summer became unbearable.
Running water was for the most part a luxury enjoyed by few, especially in the more rural villages and communities. Stripped-down Russian tanks sat jacked up on blocks in vacant lots, the Iraqi version of hillbilly pickup trucks in the Ozarks. Trash and garbage filled the yards and choked off streets. Raw sewage filled the air with the pungent odors of human refuse and decay. In the open-air marketsâand every community had oneâpiles of skinned and boiled sheep heads attracted swarms of greenhead flies. Plucked dead chickens and skinned goat carcasses hanging from racks drew even more flies.
“How do you suppose they cook that stuff?” PFC Alfredo “Chiva” Lares wondered. He was a solidly built Latino from California who wanted to be a cop when he got out of the army.
“Nasty fucking stuff, ain't it?” his buddy PFC Robert Pool said. “Maybe they season it with flies.”
Most of the Iraqi men wore Western clothing accessorized by dingy red-and-white
shemaghs,
the multipurpose headscarf adopted by Middle Eastern males. Children up to a certain age went bare-headed. Women were less than stylish in form-concealing robes, mostly black, with their heads and often their faces covered.
“Some of the young Iraqi girls are real hotties, but they grow up into old hags,” soldiers of the 101
st
sagely advised their replacements.
PFC Byron Fouty was doubtful. “How can you tell the hotties from the hags, what with all the bed sheets they're wearing?”
People traveled by foot almost everywhere they went; nearly everything they needed was within walking distance. Cows, geese, donkeys, hairy goats, sheep, and children wandered about, rooting through trash and the occasional abandoned Toyota. Women and girls sometimes stood begging on the flat tops of their houses with their palms up and extended.
“Come on down here, honey,” soldiers muttered to themselves. “We'll treat you right.”
Polar Bear commanders and senior NCOs at all levels, from Brigade down to platoons, met with their 101
st
counterparts during the transition, picked their brains, sat in on war council briefings and conducted “left seat-right seat” operations in which incoming and outgoing peers pulled missions together before transferring command authority from one to the other. The relieved unit passed down voluminous briefing books, maps, operating procedures, patrol routes, and other essential intelligence, along with a set of fully functional bases in which vital preparations like security walls, food services, and blast-resistant barracks had largely been completed.
Inevitably, a lot of valuable information was lost whenever a new unit replaced a veteran one. Although some commanders made concerted efforts to preserve intelligence relating to local insurgent groups and pass it on, what usually happened was that incoming officers and analysts ended up developing their own leads and sources. It was like inventing the wheel all over again. There was just too much information to be digested in a short time.
One afternoon, Sergeant Ronnie Montgomery and his counterpart linked up with a four-vehicle route reconnaissance and familiarization patrol from Yusufiyah to the Jurf Sukr Bridge. Much of the road to the Euphrates was dirt or gravel before it reached the bridge and turned into the bleached macadam designated as Route Malibu by army planners. Malibu Road curved alongside the river from roughly south toward the north.
Montgomery had expected the Euphrates to be a great waterway like the Mississippi or the Nile. Instead, it was rather narrow, often shallow, muddy, and so slow moving in many places that it was practically stagnant. How could such a sorry excuse for a river have ever spawned “the cradle of civilization”?
The little convoy stopped at the bridge. Malibu Road had earned a sinister reputation for itself.
“This is as far as we go,” Montgomery's counterpart announced. “We get blown up every time we go thereâso we stopped going.”
Montgomery got out of his hummer, fired up a cigarette, and stood looking up the road. Built into a bed from the surrounding lowlands, it didn't strike the sergeant as particularly ominous, not in the full light of day. But thick groves of date palms, eucalyptus trees, and patches of reeds higher than a man's head lined either side of the road where there were no farm houses. Shifting patterns of shadow might easily conceal killers waiting for troops to venture into their domain.
“We'll drive any road in Iraq,” said the 101
st
sergeant, squinting into the forbidden lands, “but when we're called to drive Malibu, we're scared. You will never control that road. If you try, all of you will die.”
When he was a kid growing up in New Mexico, PFC Sammy Rhodes used to lie on the summer banks of a pond and watch the dragonflies quick-dart here and there, hovering sometimes above a lily pad or sprig of water weed sticking up above the surface. They were long-bodied, slender little insects with wings that beat so fast they blurred silver. Black Hawk helicopters reminded him of giant dragonflies, only darker with guns and rockets.
The two choppers on the pad at Jusufiyah turned over their engines. Blades curving toward the ground from their own weight began to build up centrifugal force and straighten out. Red-and-green running lights winked on and off in the darkness; they would black out once the aircraft lifted off and reached altitude, remain blacked out until the two birds had airlifted Delta Company's First Platoon onto the outskirts of Kharghouli Village. For most of the men, tonight's would be their first combat mission.
They were nervous about it, as well as curious. They smoked cigarettes, the butts winking like fireflies as they sucked on them, brightening and illuminating the tension in young faces. Mostly they were quiet now, waiting. Platoon Leader Lieutenant Allen Vargo and Platoon Sergeant Charles Burke were all over the field, working with squad and section leaders to get everything lined out, make sure the loading order was a go.
“Stand by!” Specialist Alexander Jimenez shouted above the roar of turning rotors. One of the platoon's two section leaders, Jimenez, twenty-five, was a muscle-building Latino from Michigan and, now on his third combat tour in Iraq, the platoon's saltiest vet. The guy never seemed to lose his sense of humor, no matter what. He could even tell jokes in Arabic, a language he had taught himself during previous deployments.
“Stand by. Don't worry, children.
Papacito
will take care of his babies. I even change diapers.”
According to the operations order, bad guys were infiltrating through Khargouli and Rushdi Mulla to Baghdad, back and forth from across the river and out of Anbar. All over the AO, 4
th
Battalion companies were engaged in similar air assaults in first efforts to cut off the movement avenues, or at least put a kink in them preparatory to establishing company FOBs and patrol bases.
Second Platoon's helicopters had already lifted off into the night sky and disappeared with a movement of shadows and a rush of rotor wind. That meant First Platoon was next. As soon as both elements were on the ground again, First Platoon would set up its anvil on one side of the village against which Second Platoon would smash any enemy combatants it happened to run out when it swept through the settlement searching for weapons caches and rolling up or shooting suspected terrorists. S-2 (Intelligence) had provided the commanders of each element with a list naming high-value targets believed to be working in the area.
What the night was really about, everyone supposed, was to let the locals know there was a new sheriff in town. The Polar Bear could be nice, or the Polar Bear could be hard-assed. Peace and freedom began with superior firepower.
Word came down. The troops of First Platoon began to load, shuffing toward the waiting birds. Jimenez had once proposed, not altogether facetiously, that every GI be issued a personal squire to help him get in and out of vehicles, much like those who accompanied armored knights of old to hoist them into their saddles.
“And yours will probably be named what? Sancho Panza?” Jimenez' buddy, Specialist Shaun Gopaul, joked back.
It took the modern American soldier in Iraq longer to get ready for combat than any previous GI in history. A doughboy in World War I or a dogface in World War II or Korea drew on a pair of fatigues or woolens, buckled on his webgear, put on his “steel pot,” picked up his Springfield or M-1 Garand, and he was ready to go out and fight. A grunt in Vietnam sometimes donned a flak jacket. But it wasn't until the end of the twentieth
century that the military became more concerned with the protection of individual soldiers on the battlefield. A Joe in Iraq sometimes wore or lugged around as much as 150 pounds of “battle rattle.” With that kind of weight, the infantry
had
to become mechanized. Units weren't about to go foot slogging over the Italian Alps or marching all the way across Germany.