A few hours later, sometime after midnight, at the end of a series of raids on suspected insurgents in Balad, another soldier in the same company, Staff Sgt. Shane Werst, led an Iraqi into his home, allegedly struck him about ten times, then shot him at least six times with his M-4 carbine.
"I can"t help but feeling like I was part of an execution," PFC Nathan Stewart, the other soldier who was there, later testified. The facts of the matter aren"t in dispute. Werst then pulled out a handgun, fired it into a wall, and told Stewart to smear the dead man"s fingerprints on it. Charged months later with murder, Werst testified that he acted in self-defense, saying that the Iraqi had lunged for a weapon. Werst said he had planted the handgun on the dead man because "I was second-guessing myself." He was acquitted by a military jury.
In another raid at about this time, Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Tracy Perkins, the platoon sergeant for Alpha Company"s 1st platoon, had a murky encounter with an Iraqi identified by Army intelligence as one of ten suspects in recent mortar and IED attacks in Balad. He told investigators that the man-"Target No. 1," according to a statement by Perkins-had a pistol in his hand. "I fired a controlled pair [of shots] and the man still continued to raise the weapon," Perkins wrote. "Then I fired a third shot into the man"s head and killed him."
Cunningham, the company commander, stated that multiple informants had said the man was a former Baath Party official who was head of an insurgent cell responsible for four bombings.
An Army inquiry found the facts of the matter somewhat less clear, largely because of conflicting and incomplete statements. "After interviewing the majority of individuals present that night," the investigator reported, "it is apparent that all individuals are quite confused in determining the exact facts." It recommended that no action be taken against Perkins.
But Perkins and others were later brought up on a variety of charges related to the bridge incident. Perkins was convicted early in 2005, just after the first anniversary of the event, on two counts of aggravated a.s.sault, obstruction of justice, and a.s.sault consummated by battery. A few months later, Saville pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of justice, dereliction of duty, and aggravated a.s.sault and battery, and under his plea agreement was sentenced to a total of forty-five days in jail. (Prosecutors had a relatively weak case because they were unable to produce a body that was clearly that of the victim.) The young officer said he was pleased by the outcome because it allowed him to remain in the Army.
An Army lawyer recommended that Cunningham be charged with solicitation of murder, involuntary manslaughter, and other offenses. But after Werst"s acquittal the Army decided against prosecuting him, and he left the Army in June 2005.
Saville said that he had had discussions with Sa.s.saman about how to mislead Army investigators. Despite that, Sa.s.saman received only a written admonishment. "On 7 January 2004, you were briefed ... that soldiers of the 1st platoon pushed two Iraqi men into the Tigris River causing one of them to drown," Odierno wrote. "You ordered them to deny that the men were pushed into the river and to say that they were dropped off at the side of the road. Your conduct was wrongful, criminal and will not be tolerated."
Sa.s.saman remained in command of the battalion for months, an outcome that shocked Poirier, his fellow battalion commander. "When you have a battalion commander who leads his staff in rehearsing a story about a murder-and he"s still in command?" Poirier said in April 2005, shortly after he retired from the Army. "That"s not right."
Sa.s.saman left the Army at about the same time that Poirier did. He made his departure defiantly, taking a swipe on his way out at Maj. Gen. Odierno, whose division was headquartered in one of Saddam Hussein"s former palaces in Tikrit. "If I were to do it all over again, I would do the exact same thing, and I"ve thought about this long and hard," he testified. "I was taught in the Army to win, and I was trying to win all the way, and I just disagreed-deeply disagreed- with my superior commanders on the actions that they thought should be taken with these individuals [charged in the Tigris bridge case]. And you have to understand, the legal community, my senior commanders, were not fighting in the streets of Samarra. They were living in a palace in Tikrit. So they lacked some of the situational awareness that I had and that the soldiers had on the ground." His bitter bottom line: "Big Army should be ashamed of itself in a lot of ways____________ Mistakes were made at every single level. Let me just leave it at that."
Poirier said he remained generally much impressed by Odierno-but not in this instance. "My experience with 4 ID was a good one," he said. "You make mistakes. And we didn"t have a lot of experience in operating in a Muslim state that had been run by a crazy man." His conclusion on the bridge case, he said, was "I love Odierno, but he granted immunity to the battalion commander and company commander, and gave them letters of reprimand." Generally, he said, "there were some people in 4 ID who were out of control. But I think Odierno"s leadership was very sound. His failures, if that"s what you want to call them, came from trusting his subordinates."
A senior U.S. intelligence official was less charitable. He thought Odierno intentionally turned a blind eye to certain brutalities: "He"s a good guy. But he would say to his colonels, "I don"t want to hear the bad s.h.i.t.""
Maj. Gen. Odierno, who by 2005 had been promoted to be the military a.s.sistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at first agreed to be interviewed for this book, but later cancelled the interview. Then, when a copy of this section of the book was sent to him, along with an invitation for comment, he wrote back, "That is clearly not even close to a complete picture of what happened nor my intent throughout nor with an understanding of the overall strategy of the division______ This is unfair to the soldiers and leaders of the division."
In a subsequent interview, Odierno mounted a strenuous defense of his division"s performance. He said the preceding description of the 4th Infantry Division makes it appear that "all we did was kill people wantonly and abuse prisoners. In my opinion, that"s totally false." Odierno said that he had made detainee operations a major focus of his command after it became clear in the summer of 2003 that the division would have to hold prisoners. He had held a "summit" with his commanders on detainee operations late that summer, and during the division"s year in Iraq issued seventeen separate orders relating to detainees. "That"s what bothers me about this" discussion of the 4th ID. "I spent so much time on this. It was important to me that we did this right." He also said that no one had ever asked him for comment for the various Army reports that singled out the 4th ID for the abuse of Iraqi captives.
He said that while his division "came in very hard across the AO [area of operations]" in the fall of 2003, he thought those raids were targeted precisely and helped develop the intelligence that had led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Most notable was the fact that after his division spent a year in the northern part of the Sunni Triangle that area remained largely quiet, even as Mosul and Anbar province exploded. And, he added, despite being attacked more than other divisions, fewer soldiers in his were lost.
Odierno"s self-defense shouldn"t be dismissed lightly, especially in the collection of intelligence, which clearly worked in the apprehension of Saddam. Yet there is little evidence that his division"s unusually aggressive stance was particularly successful. Samarra especially continued to be a trouble spot for the U.S.
effort, and the insurgency remained robust and active in much of the rest of the area where the 4th ID operated.
But perhaps the best way to judge the 4th ID was that the division succeeding his chose a sharply different course of operations. Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division (which took over from the 4th ID in the spring of 2004), declined to discuss the operations of the 4th ID but emphasized that in his own unit "from day one" that it was essential "to treat people with dignity," even captured insurgents. As Petraeus had done in the north, Batiste established a detailed set of procedures for his jails and brought in sheikhs and imams to inspect his facilities. "I told commanders they would be responsible for everything that happened in them," Batiste said. "They all conformed to the Geneva Conventions, to the rule of law, and to my sense of what was right from the way I was brought up." And like Petraeus, he had only one notable instance of abuse, and that happened not in a detention facility but when a sergeant appears to have had a nervous breakdown during field operations.
Inside Abu Ghraib One day in the spring of 2004, Maj. Gen. James Mattis was walking out of a mess hall in al Asad, in western Iraq, when he saw a knot of his troops intently hunched over a television, watching a cable news show. Marines weren"t usually so attentive to current events. "What"s going on?" Mattis asked. It was, he learned, the revelations about Abu Ghraib, along with sickening photos of cruelty and humiliation.
A nineteen-year-old lance corporal glanced up from the television and told the general, "Some a.s.sholes have just lost the war for us."
The detainee abuses that would resonate most took place not out in the divisions operating in the provinces, but on the outskirts of the capital, in the Abu Ghraib prison. All of the Army"s problems in Iraq in 2003-poor planning, clumsy leadership, strategic confusion, counterproductive tactics, undermanning, being overly reactive-came together in the treatment of prisoners, a wide-ranging scandal that eventually was summarized in the phrase "Abu Ghraib," after the big prison west of Baghdad where many prisoners wound up, and where some were tortured.
There was never supposed to be a problem with detainees, because there weren"t supposed to be any, at least in U.S. hands. The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops. It was not to be. "As the need for actionable intelligence arose, the realization dawned [among U.S. commanders] that pre-war planning had not included planning for detainee operations," a subsequent Army report noted. And so a series of steps were taken that ultimately would lead to a scandal that would shake the Army and tarnish the U.S. effort in Iraq. As Gen. Mattis put it a year later, "When you lose the moral high ground, you lose it all."
The mess at Abu Ghraib arguably began on October 1, 2003, when Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II and Spec. Charles Graner, Jr., arrived there as part of the advance party for the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from rural Cresaptown, Maryland, in the Appalachian foothills. They were part of a larger, troubled unit that until September had been based in southern Iraq. Many had deployed to the country that spring to handle the flood of enemy POWs that war planners had expected but that had never materialized. Their mission completed, they had expected-like many other soldiers in Iraq that spring-to go home sooner rather than later. Instead, the reservists were a.s.signed a new mission. Someone had to run the Iraqi prison system, and in the absence of an Iraqi government, they were handed the job. Their morale plummeted, an official Army inquiry later found. Some began exaggerating medical complaints, such as back pains, to get evacuated out of the country, their brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Karpinski, later complained. In mid-October the 372nd took responsibility, from a Nevada-based MP unit, for Tiers 1A and IB, the permanent, concrete-walled part of the prison. Called One Alpha, or the hard site, by the soldiers, this was the cell block where interrogations took place and where detainees believed to possess useful information were kept. Other prisoners, deemed to be of less intelligence value, lived in tents in an open area.
Just how poorly prisoners had been treated during the summer, before the 372nd MPs arrived, is a matter of dispute. Some had been kept naked and handcuffed to bars, and others were made to wear women"s underwear on their heads, according to Frederick"s statement. What is not in question is that once Graner and Frederick took control of the night shift on Tier 1A, they wasted little time in going on a rampage of abuse. "I took it to another level," Frederick said in a sworn statement given much later to Army investigators.
The torture of detainees was first recorded photographically on October 17, according to the time stamp from one of the digital cameras the MPs used. "Graner was a picture person, he loved taking pictures," Frederick said in his confessional declaration. "Graner took pictures all the time." (Indeed, according to Frederick"s sworn statement, Graner went so far as to have Frederick photograph him while he was being f.e.l.l.a.t.ed in a prison supply room by PFC Lynndie England, another member of the unit, who had become Graner"s girlfriend. In one photo, England is giving the thumbs-up she would later use in photos of detainee abuse.) The October 17 photo showed a man stripped naked and handcuffed to his cell door. The next day an Iraqi man was photographed handcuffed to a cot with women"s underwear draped over his head. About a week later-official accounts differ on the precise date-PFC England posed holding a dog"s leash that had at the other end a naked detainee, nicknamed Gus by the MPs. On October 25, naked Iraqi men with their hands cuffed and legs shackled were piled on their backs like cordwood. Adel Nakhla, a civilian working as a translator on contract, said in a statement later that "they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by ensuring that the bottom guy"s p.e.n.i.s will touch the guy on top"s b.u.t.t."
In the following nights, detainees were kept naked, with some forced to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in front of female soldiers. On November 4 a detainee was hooded and placed on a box, and had wires attached to him that he was told would electrocute him if he stepped off the box. On the same night a CIA detainee died in custody on Tier IB, having been beaten by the Navy SEALs who had captured him. One detainee later described to Army investigators being made to "bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing unconsciousness." He also said he had been sodomized with a stick. Investigators found it "highly probable" that his allegations were accurate.
Many if not all of these acts were violations of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and of civilian noncombatants. Most notably, Article 3 of the 1949 convention stated that people being detained shall be treated humanely, without "outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The abuses occurred not only because of the failings of those who committed them, but because of the lack of supervision and leadership by their superiors. One reason for this was that everyone was overworked, taking twelve-hour shifts in a hostile environment, frequently for seven days a week. Yet good officers know their soldiers, and part of that is knowing who to keep an eye on. They also enforce discipline, so other soldiers understand that the unit has standards all its members are responsible for. Yet here leaders didn"t supervise or lead, and other soldiers lacked the discipline to stop the s.a.d.i.s.tic acts, or at least to report them.
Abu Ghraib was falling apart. Even in a nation sinking into chaos, the prison stood out as particularly troubled. It was regularly being sh.e.l.led by mortars. Prisoners were routinely escaping-no one knows exactly how many, but at least three dozen. On November 5, during the night shift"s watch, several fled Tier 1A. Two days later another detainee went missing. The next day five or six left. "Note: No power. No water. Prison in state of lockdown," a soldier wrote in the One Alpha log on November 17,2003.
Army teams with working dogs arrived at the prison on November 20, and were used to abuse prisoners four days later, the day an MP was shot with a smuggled pistol. Using dogs to scare prisoners was called the doggie dance, according to Frederick.
On November 24 the prisoners rioted, resulting in the shooting deaths of nine and injuries to nine U.S. troops. A subsequent Army report concluded: Contributing factors were lack of comprehensive training of guards, poor or nonexistent SOPs [standard operating procedures], no formal guard-mount conducted prior to shift, no rehearsals or ongoing training, the mix of less than lethal rounds with lethal rounds in weapons, no AARs [after-action reviews] being conducted after incidents, ROE [rules of engagement] not posted and not understood, overcrowding, uniforms not standardized, and poor communications between the command and soldiers.
But to Karpinski, the female MP general overseeing detention operations in Iraq, that catalog of missteps merely reflected the lack of support she was getting from her superiors. A few months later she would be blamed by the Army as the seniormost officer to have made grave mistakes in handling Abu Ghraib. She would argue in her own defense that she had worked to call attention to her problems and had sought help from the top commanders in Iraq, generally in vain.
In November, as the Ramadan offensive surged, the 82nd Airborne"s commanding general, Swannack, came to see Karpinski. The eastern boundary of his division"s area of operations ran up against Abu Ghraib, and he wanted to know about her security arrangements. "What platforms do you have?" he asked her. He was asking a basic commander"s question: Do you have Humvees? Armored Humvees? Bradley fighting vehicles? How do your soldiers investigate enemy movement, or respond to attacks? "None, sir," Karpinski responded.
"What weapons do you have?" Swannack asked.
"Just M-16s, SAWs," she said, referring to the Army"s basic rifle and the light machine gun known as a squad automatic weapon. These were the most basic arms a unit could have, but nothing that any platoon leader would want as his only tools available for combat. Such light weaponry was useless, for example, against mortar attacks, which could be fired from miles away, and which needed mortars or artillery pieces for an adequate response, as well as a sophisticated counterbattery radar system to detect the point of origin of the enemy fire. His own troops worked constantly to hone their response time on mortar fire, eventually getting it down to one hundred seconds. One night they were able to hit back in just that amount of time, and the next day a patrol found a 60 millimeter mortar tube on the far bank of the Euphrates, and three dead men at a nearby hospital.
Swannack appeared almost incredulous at the inability of Karpinski"s troops to respond in a similar fashion, she recalled in an interview. "What do you have for force protection?" he asked.
"An armored division that doesn"t want to help me," she said, referring to the 1st AD, which operated just to her east, in and around Baghdad. He also was stunned that her sentries did not respond to hostile fire from the villages adjacent to the prison. Nor did they conduct patrols through those areas. That amounted to an invitation to the insurgents to launch attacks.
Swannack looked at Karpinski. She remembered him slapping her on the back and saying, "Well, Sanchez really f.u.c.ked you." (Asked about that, Swannack recalled commenting in a slightly less charged way. He believed he said "something like "CJTF-7 was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g you by not giving you sufficient a.s.sets to do this job."") He got into his Black Hawk and flew off. But that night he made sure that a mortar platoon from the 82nd was on her western flank, and two days later he a.s.signed an infantry company to patrol in that area to keep insurgents away from the prison.
In December, at the next monthly meeting of commanding generals in Iraq, Karpinski recalled, she confronted Odierno. "Look, sir, your mobile interrogation teams need to do a better job," and not keep dumping thousands of unscreened Iraqis on her facility.
"I don"t have the f.u.c.king time to do it," Odierno responded dismissively. "Tell Wojdakowski to get you more facilities," referring to Sanchez"s deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, who handled a lot of dull but important issues such as logistics and other support functions. Odierno"s riposte was a cla.s.sic combat commander"s response, and captures the unequal nature of the exchange. He was an active-duty two-star general, the commander of an armored division, one of the Army"s premier units. He was the youngest division commander in the Army. And he was physically imposing, six foot five inches tall and weighing 250 pounds, with a bulletlike shaved head. Everyone around him knew he was destined for three or four stars, and might be chief of staff of the Army one day. She was smaller, a woman, a reservist one-star general, the commander of support troops. In Army terms, that meant her job was to solve his problems, not add to them.
But Karpinski stuck to her guns, according to her account. In a previous confrontation, she"d found that if she weathered his initial bl.u.s.tery response, she could get through to him. She told him that the torrent of detainees, many of them shipped by his outfit, was swamping her operation at Abu Ghraib.
Odierno relented a bit. "Tell me more," he said. "What kind of numbers would you like?"
She said she needed more discrimination in who was shipped to her. "He said he would look into it, and he did," she said in 2005, "but they [Odierno"s 4th ID] were still worst offenders." (Asked about this account, Odierno insisted it never happened. "That"s bulls.h.i.t," he said. "I never talked to her about detainees," except for one instance of dealing with an anti-Iranian militia.) On Christmas Day she went out to Abu Ghraib to check on the state of the operation. The staff there told her, a bit chagrined, that they were over capacity, and just the night before had turned away a shipment of seven prisoners sent down from northern Iraq by Petraeus"s 101st Airborne Division. They actually had told the incoming flight to put the Iraqis back on the helicopter and take them away. That worried Karpinski. "I knew Petraeus wouldn"t be happy," she recalled. So instead of waiting to be hauled in to explain what was going on, she went to see Wojdakowski. Standing six foot four inches tall, Wojdakowski had played basketball at West Point under Bob Knight, and had gone on to a career in which he specialized in infantry training.
He told her not to worry about all the detainees coming in, she recounted. He got angry. He put down his pen and looked her straight in the eye. "I don"t care if we"re holding fifteen thousand innocent Iraqis, we"re winning the war," he told her, she later said in a sworn statement to Army investigators.
"No, sir, you are not," she responded. "Not inside my wire, you are not winning, you are making enemies. You"re making enemies out of every one of those people you"re holding without a reason.... This isn"t a fair carriage of justice. This isn"t dignity and respect. This isn"t the road ahead you are allegedly preaching all the time. This is smoke and mirrors, a facade of security in Baghdad. There is no such thing."
Wojdakowski didn"t respond to requests for an interview.
The Army turns over a rock at Abu Ghraib On January 12, Karpinski was on a mission near the Iranian border, sent there by Gen. Sanchez, when she checked her e-mail on the military"s SIPRNET, its secure internal Internet system. She saw one from the head of the Army"s Criminal Investigation Division-its internal FBI. Curious, she opened it first, and read two short sentences notifying her that her unit was being investigated for prisoner abuse. It isn"t clear what had sparked that inquiry.
The next day, Spec. Joseph Darby put photographs of the abuse occurring in cell block One Alpha into a plain envelope and slipped them under the door of the CID investigators. They looked at them, then accelerated their inquiry into hyperdrive. Just after midnight on January 14, Capt. Donald Reese, the thirty-nine-year-old commander of one of Karpinski"s subordinate units, the 372nd Military Police Company, was awakened and told that his battalion commander wanted to see him. After he had dressed and arrived at the unit headquarters, he was greeted by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Paul Arthur, an official from the Army"s CID. "We have to do an investigation on your soldiers," he was told, according to a statement he gave later. "We believe they"re involved in some alleged abuse."
Two hours later, Reese, who in civilian life was a salesman from New Stanton, Pennsylvania, knocked on the door of Frederick, the sergeant who was chief of the night shift on One Alpha. "Freddy, CID is here, and they want to talk to you," Reese said. Arthur and other CID agents seized Frederick"s weapons and computer and interrogated him until 4:00 a.m a.m. Frederick claimed in a statement that he had questioned some of the practices in the prison, but that "the answer I got was this is how Military Intelligence wants it."
A few days later Karpinski met with Sanchez in his office at Camp Victory, the ornate set of palaces Saddam had built in a series of artificial lakes just east of Baghdad airport. It was their second one-on-one meeting during her time in Iraq. It was a curt meeting, held at nine at night-extremely late for officers whose days begin at dawn. "He was insulted by my presence-that"s what he communicated to me," she recalled later, after consulting her daily journal.
"Do you know what this is going to do to my Army?" Sanchez said, she recalled. He issued a formal letter of admonishment to her. This established for the official Army record that her performance was markedly below expectation.
Karpinski wanted to offer some suggestions on how to handle the situation. It was a bad misreading of Sanchez"s mood. "Sir, I"ve been in the Middle East for years, and I have a good relationship with the press here," she began. She offered to have a statement issued in Arabic that would "put this all on my shoulders."
She had even thought about how to release some of the digital images of torture. Her notion was to get out ahead of this mess. "We can choose a couple of photographs, and at least-"
Sanchez cut her off, she recalled. "Absolutely not," he told her. The Army wasn"t going to let those photos out. "There"s not going to be any contact between you and the press," he added, according to notes she made in her journal that night.
A series of official investigations ultimately would hang the criminal blame for Abu Ghraib on a group of low-ranking soldiers, and the military responsibility on Brig. Gen. Karpinski. The military establishment was unsympathetic. "She felt herself a victim, and she propagated a negativity that permeated throughout the BDE," or brigade, Air Force Col. Henry Nelson, a psychiatrist involved in the investigation, concluded.
It was a tragic moment for a military with a long and proud heritage of treating its prisoners better than most-especially one that had come to Iraq thinking of itself as a liberation force, again solidly in the American tradition. During the Revolutionary War, the historian David Hackett Fischer noted, Gen. George Washington had "often reminded his men that they were an army of liberty and freedom, and that the rights of humanity for which they were fighting should extend even to their enemies." This compa.s.sion toward prisoners was extended by Washington expressly in the face of the cruel British handling of American captives. Washington ordered Lt. Col. Samuel Blachley Webb, in a pa.s.sage quoted by Fischer, "Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren." The United States Army was a long way from home in Iraq.
PART III.
THE LONG TERM."THE ARMY OF THE EUPHRATES".
TAKES STOCK.
WINTER 2003-4.
In Iraq the U.S. Army encountered two of its recent nightmares. The tactical opposition that developed was what it had feared it would find seven years earlier in Bosnia: heavily armed factional fighters using AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and land mines to attack U.S. troops, and then blending in with the population, frequently in urban environments. Meanwhile, its strategic position painfully resembled that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, when the Red Army, after quickly taking the country, found itself mired and suffering increasing casualties. Ironically, when the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan twenty-two years after the Red Army, it was extremely conscious of the quagmire the Soviets had found there and took great pains to avoid replicating it. Instead of going in big and heavy and conventional, it went into Afghanistan fast, small, and innovative, combining soldiers on horses with B-52s in the air, using satellite signals from s.p.a.ce to guide smart bombs to their unwitting targets. It was in Iraq that the Americans unconsciously repeated some of the Soviet errors in Afghanistan. They went in big, with lots of conventional forces and a tendency to rely on armored vehicles when possible. They confused swift entry with victory. They built big bases and reacted clumsily to insurgent attacks, using tactics that sometimes alienated the population. An Army built to execute swift, crushing operations designed around heavy armor instead found itself enmeshed in a slow-moving, close-up war of small arms.
It was a situation that defeated many of the technological advantages wielded by the U.S. military. After years of talking about its information superiority, the Army suddenly was in an inferior position. It didn"t speak the language, it didn"t understand the culture, it didn"t know much about its enemy, and it seemed all too often to be the last one to know what was going on. One of the warning signs of attack, for example, was when a crowd of Iraqi civilians suddenly vanished. U.S. military bases and movements were easy to observe, while those of its enemy were largely unknown. The American military lacked a sufficient number of interpreters, but knew that some of those it did employ were in league with the enemy. "It would be better if our working a.s.sumption was more modestly one of our own information inferiority," observed British Maj. Gen. Bailey.
As defense a.n.a.lyst Andrew Krepinevich put it, a world-cla.s.s sprinter was being forced to run a marathon.
Lessons learned "the hard way "
By the end of 2003, the Army was recognizing that it was locked in its first protracted ground combat since the Vietnam War. As they prepared that winter to leave Iraq and turn over the mission to other units, in what would be one of the biggest troop rotations in the history of the U.S. military, the seasoned soldiers who had served there for a year sought to pa.s.s on their hard-won knowledge to their successors, in e-mails, in essays, in PowerPoint presentations, and in rambling memoirs posted on Web sites or sent to rear detachments. It was an account far more personal than those offered by the media and generally grimmer than the official statements that painted a picture of steady progress. Taken together, these gritty doc.u.ments told a story of an unexpectedly hard small war punctuated by casualties that haunted the writers. At the same time, they showed how a well-trained, professional force adjusted to complex ground combat in a harsh climate and alien culture, relearning some timeless lessons of warfare and discovering a few new ones.
"We had to learn the hard way," Capt. Daniel Morgan, an infantry company commander in the 101st Airborne Division, wrote in an essay that rocketed around military e-mail circles. Morgan"s essay was popular for two reasons: It was unusually well written, and it was relentlessly specific. One of the most striking lessons the 1992 graduate of Georgetown University pa.s.sed on: Every soldier in the unit should carry a tourniquet of sufficient length to cut off the gush of blood from major leg wounds. "Trust me," he wrote, "it saved four of my soldiers" lives." Morgan also emphasized to incoming soldiers that they needed to be ready to kill quickly yet precisely. "If an enemy opens fire with an AK-47 aimlessly, which most of these people do, you should be able to calmly place the red dot reticule of your M-68 optic device on his chest and kill him with one shot," he admonished. "If you do this, the rest will run and probably not come back." And while patrolling, if you see an Iraqi notice you and then make a cellular phone call, change your planned route, and especially avoid the next major intersection, where an ambush may be a.s.sembling.
Like Morgan"s, many of the commentaries that were composed around this time had a tone of no-nonsense urgency. This was no longer a discreet, peacetime military that liked to pretend it could achieve "zero defects." "There was too much c.r.a.p I saw over there that guys just don"t understand, and it meant soldiers" lives," Capt. John Wrann, a 4th Infantry Division engineer, wrote in an essay that was posted on www.CompanyCommand.com, which began as a private Web site by and for junior Army officers, but became sponsored by the Army and received an unusual kind of semiofficial status. Much of what his soldiers were called upon to do were actions for which they hadn"t been trained, Wrann said. "They will have to write a new book for this when it"s all over."
As a whole the soldiers" commentaries tended to portray a harsh picture of Iraq and its people. Capt. Ken Braeger, a company commander in the 4th Infantry Division, headquartered in Tikrit, deep in the Sunni Triangle, stated that newcomers should "understand ... that most of the people here want us dead, they hate us and everything we stand for, and will take any opportunity to cause us harm."
Officers in Iraq said the doc.u.ments tended to be useful, especially because they were more attuned to current conditions there than official publications. One officer based at Balad noted that after reading Morgan"s essay he made adjustments in a convoy he was planning at that moment for an operation in the Sunni Triangle. "Our troops are in down and dirty fights in the streets of the Fal-lujahs of this country, and mostly the Army still trains for the Big Fight," he said in an interview. "So we definitely need these informal debriefs."
Five subjects dominated the new veterans" discussions: the innovative nature of the foe, the need to update tactics and equipment, ways to keep troops alert and, again and again, how to run a safe convoy. And then, less as a lesson than as a warning, there was the impact of casualties.
The writers also repeatedly expressed a growing respect for their adversaries. "The enemy is getting smarter," Braeger wrote in his November 2003 essay. "He watches us and makes adjustments accordingly." This new respect also surfaced in an official Marine summary that said, "The enemy is clever and should not be underestimated. Commanders that [sic] [sic] are ignoring or wishing away enemy capabilities and lethality are sustaining casualties." are ignoring or wishing away enemy capabilities and lethality are sustaining casualties."
To a surprising degree, the lessons learned summaries focused on how to operate a military convoy safely. In 2003 highway overpa.s.ses became the Iraqi equivalent of ambush points on jungle trails during the Vietnam War. The developing wisdom was always to move toward them with caution, and then swerve from lane to lane at the last minute. Some studies also recommended that a gun truck-that is, a big vehicle with a mounted .50 caliber heavy machine gun-speed ahead of the convoy and train that gun on the bridge while the convoy pa.s.sed under it.
Capt. Robert McCormick of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment found that in eastern Baghdad "the vehicles that seemed to come under attack were that of soft skin and did not have any weapons noticeable or present." A more official military study warned that to be defensible, convoys should consist of at least five vehicles. The most vulnerable convoys were small ones of three or four vehicles, especially those in which rifles were not held visible and at the ready. "Smaller convoys cannot produce enough firepower to fend off attacks or deal with casualties," it said.
"When possible, travel in large convoys," cautioned Maj. Eric Estep, who was based at the big supply depot at Balad, the destination of dozens of convoys every day. His PowerPoint presentation of a study of insurgent tactics against convoys also noted that they tended to attack the last vehicle. To counter this, he and others recommended putting heavy firepower there. The need for this aggressive posture was repeated often. "It is true that the "meaner" and more prepared you look that you can return immediate fire, the more likely they"ll think twice about attacking," wrote Wrann.
By contrast, Braeger reported, some National Guard troops were so slovenly that they invited attack: "We"ve noticed the convoys that get hit more often are ones with soldiers out of uniform-the Guard guys usually travel in flak vest and t-shirt-and do not pull security when they stop."
A Marine summary of Army lessons noted that in the lead truck in a convoy, the driver and gunner tended to be too busy with their tasks to adequately scan the ground for roadside bombs. It recommended that a third soldier, equipped with binoculars and night-vision goggles, be posted in that vehicle-and be trained and ready to take over the machine gun should the gunner be hit. In another extraordinarily specific convoy lesson, Morgan trained his driver to take wide right turns in major intersections because, he explained, "[o]n turns, most IEDs, if not all, are placed on the inside turn."
But several commanders warned in their reports that one thing worried them even more than roadside bombings or convoy attacks: complacency among their troops. "Complacency is the no. 1 killer of soldiers," reported Lt. Jessica Murphy, an MP officer. "This is the one that bites most units." She said that even units being shot at can start treating missions as routine. To keep an edge, Capt. Paul Evange-lista, commander of an engineer company in the 10th Mountain Division, sought to make sure that all soldiers went on missions outside the base-that is, beyond "the wire." (Support troops, such as mechanics, cooks, and clerks, tended not to leave their bases, with some hardly going outside them during a one-year tour.) The inevitability of casualties and the need to train for them was a recurring theme. Wrann said that the image that would remain with him was watching a burly platoon sergeant cup the head of his wounded medic and quietly tell him that his left arm was gone. His grim message to the incoming troops: "It"s real, and the cost is real. Guys get hurt and guys die."
"Though n.o.body likes to think about it, you have to train to take casualties," admonished Maj. James Williams, the executive officer of an MP battalion. "You have to practice things like evacuating people from a disabled vehicle, establishing security, treating the wounded, and calling for medevac." In addition, he advised, units should drill for their leaders being wounded, forcing others to take on the jobs of commanding, navigating, and communicating with headquarters.
Capt. Rich Smith, commander of an infantry company in the 101st Airborne, cautioned fellow officers in his posting to be ready for moments such as one that stayed with him, of covering the body of Cpl. Evan Ashcraft, whom he had known for years and who was in a patrol that was ambushed in the desert about 185 miles north of Baghdad on July 24, 2003. Two other soldiers were also killed in the attack. "I never knew how hard command could be until I lost those guys," Smith wrote.
The Army in America: support, regret, and dissent Back home, Army families also were finding it a very different war. Technology gave it an extraordinary immediacy, with cable TV and e-mail bringing the front lines nearer the kitchen table. One survey by a professor at West Point found that 95 percent of Army soldiers in Iraq used e-mail, and two thirds said they used it three times a week. The speed of communication sometimes was vexing: At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division, almost every wife seemed to have gotten a predawn call from a friend telling her to turn on the television because the crawl on the bottom of the cable news screen was reporting that a soldier had been killed in the region of Iraq where her husband was posted.
To squelch rumors sparked by such reports, the Army had each unit"s Family Readiness Group, an unpaid support organization of spouses, quickly transmit information on events in Iraq. "When something happens, the phone tree lights up, so you"re not sitting there watching TV trying to figure out if your husband is hurt," said Kristin Jackson, whose husband was a mechanic in the 101st Airborne. Support groups like the one to which she belonged were created in response to problems encountered during the 1991 Gulf War, when the Army-going to war with a heavily married force, in contrast to the Vietnam War-was caught flat-footed by the need to look out for soldiers" families. In response, the Army built a robust network of family supports, ranging from day care to counseling to legal help to instruction in Army life, household finance, and coping with stress.
Despite such aids, most of the basics of war remained unchanged. There was still a chilling fear when the phone rang in the middle of the night. Mothers saw the stress in their children. At Ringgold Elementary School, the school closest to the front gates of Fort Campbell, Amanda Hicks, a teacher whose husband was a pilot in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, said she and her colleagues had found their students notably fragile while their parents-mainly fathers-were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. "I have got the teariest cla.s.s this year," said Debbie Sanders, a kindergarten teacher. "They just cry all the time."
It was also a war being fought by a professional, volunteer military, and so affecting a relatively small percentage of the American population. Even though they felt somewhat supported by their nonmilitary countrymen, the spouses did not feel particularly well understood by them, even by their own extended families. Many wives said that their own parents and siblings back home didn"t "get it." "I would talk to my parents" back home in Texas, said Marisela Martinez, wife of a 4th Infantry Division sergeant who was deployed to the Sunni Triangle in 2003^1. "But they don"t know what we"re going through. I try to explain to my dad what I"m going through, and he"d say, "Well, you signed up for this.""
With the community of wives living on and around Army bases offering an attractive alternative, this generation broke with the long-established pattern of the wife"s returning home to her parents for the duration of a husband"s deployment. "We have become a sorority of separation," said Anne Torza, wife of an Apache attack-helicopter pilot in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, "and I wouldn"t give up my sisters for anything. You know that "band of brothers"? We"re a band of sisters."
When Col. Spain came home to the United States in the winter of 2004, he realized that many Americans, including some of his colleagues in uniform, had no idea what the troops in Iraq were going through. He read over the letter he had been writing since the death of Sgt. Tomko. He decided to share it with about forty fellow soldiers, most of them officers in the MP corps. "As part of my personal healing process, I felt the need to put down some thoughts on command in combat, having just returned from a year in Iraq," he wrote in an introductory note he sent by e-mail on the morning of February 11.
Those of you that are either current or retired soldiers and have lost soldiers in combat will understand. those of you that are currently soldiers and have not experienced this i i pray you will not ever have to. those of you that have never served in combat need to understand that this is what it is really all about. pray you will not ever have to. those of you that have never served in combat need to understand that this is what it is really all about. it it is not glorious. war is ugly and forever changes you. feel free to forward this to anyone you wish. is not glorious. war is ugly and forever changes you. feel free to forward this to anyone you wish. if if it enlightens one person on the horrors of war it will have served its purpose. it enlightens one person on the horrors of war it will have served its purpose.
He felt he had done his duty in his year of command in Iraq, Spain wrote, and accomplished all missions given him. But he wanted the costs-physical and spiritual-to be understood. "I failed to bring every soldier back home alive," he wrote. "I accept full responsibility for that and will have to live with this fact the rest of my life." He then listed the thirteen soldiers he had lost, beginning with Spec. Narson Sullivan, who had killed himself in April 2003, to Lt. Col. Kim Orlando and PFC Rachel Bosveld and Sgt. Nicholas Tomko, and finally to Spec. Todd Bates, a twenty-year-old from Bellaire, Ohio, who drowned in December 2003 while trying to rescue another soldier who had fallen into the Tigris River. But Spain had not turned against the war. He emphatically wrote, "We must continue the fight so the heroes listed above will not have died in vain."
Inst.i.tutionally, the Army was seeking to understand and adjust to its new and unexpected circ.u.mstances. It was trying to become more expeditionary, or quickly deployable. It was changing the structure of its combat units, emphasizing brigade combat teams over larger, less flexible divisions. It also reversed decades of practice and decided to try having soldiers stationed at one base for much of their careers, to ease the stress on families and increase cohesion in units. Even so, Iraq was placing huge strains on the Army. "Deeply concerned with all that I"m hearing," one retired Army general wrote after meeting with Army generals home from tours of duty. In private conversations, he said, the returning commanders were "full of angst" and telling him, "Phase IV was a disaster and soldiers are paying the price for some of the most egregious miscalculations and mistakes perpetuated there." Among the problems were "lack of leadership, an inability to understand Arab culture at the most fundamental level, squandering resources, an inability to break through the bureaucracy to get money and effort dispersed, amateurs playing at reconstruction rather than understanding that the will of the people is the true center of gravity in this campaign."
Notably, this list of complaints found little fault with the front-line soldier but much with top officers and the civilian officials leading them. In this respect, the U.S. military in Iraq looked a bit like the British army in World War I, a force so poorly led that German generals mocked it as "lions led by donkeys." Looking back at the winter of 2003^1, one active-duty general said, "Tactically, we were fine. Operationally, usually we were okay. Strategically-we were a basket case."
In some quiet but significant ways, the Army was moving into intellectual opposition to the Bush administration. The Army War College, the service"s premier educational inst.i.tution, became a leading center of dissent during the occupation period, with its a.n.a.lysts issuing scathing reviews. Containment of Iraq had worked, while the Bush administration"s approach hadn"t, argued a study written by Jeffrey Record and published by the War College"s Strategic Studies Inst.i.tute. He argued that a war of choice had been launched that had distracted the U.S. military and government from a war of necessity in Afghanistan and elsewhere that already was under way. "Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein"s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat," Record wrote.
This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored crucial differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further a.s.sault by an undeterrable al Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] but rather a detour from it.
The unexpectedly difficult occupation, Record added, had "stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point." This was not some politician or pundit offering that a.s.sessment but an official publication of the U.S. Army.
The uneven morale of U.S. troops There were indeed worrisome signs of trouble in the U.S. military in Iraq in the fall and winter of 2003-4. During the fall the Bush administration launched an antimedia campaign that argued that the situation was better than journalists were portraying it. Troop morale was good, President Bush said in early October, and life in Iraq is "a lot better than you probably think. Just ask people who have been there."
A few days later Stars & Stripes, Stars & Stripes, the military"s own newspaper, did just that. The Pentagon-managed publication displayed unusual journalistic courage by coming back at the commander in chief with the results of its survey of U.S. troops then in Iraq. Using its embedded reporters to distribute questionnaires to 1,935 troops at several dozen U.S. bases in Iraq, the military"s own newspaper, did just that. The Pentagon-managed publication displayed unusual journalistic courage by coming back at the commander in chief with the results of its survey of U.S. troops then in Iraq. Using its embedded reporters to distribute questionnaires to 1,935 troops at several dozen U.S. bases in Iraq, Stars & Stripes Stars & Stripes found that 49 percent of those responding described their unit"s morale as low. Many soldiers also described their training as insufficient. found that 49 percent of those responding described their unit"s morale as low. Many soldiers also described their training as insufficient.
A subsequent, more scientific survey by the Army"s own experts from Walter Reed hospital confirmed those findings. There was widespread unhappiness among soldiers in Iraq, especially in the National Guard and Reserve units. In the Walter Reed survey, taken in the late summer and early fall of 2003,72 percent of soldiers-both active duty and Guard and Reserve-reported that morale in their unit was low. Like Stars & Stripes, Stars & Stripes, the Army showed true professionalism in having the intellectual honesty to release the data to the public-even if some of its most startling findings were tucked away deep in thick annexes to a report. The survey also found a surprising degree of unhappiness with battalion commanders, with nearly 75 percent of soldiers saying that leadership at that level was poor. This finding was a shock, because the Army doesn"t give command of a battalion to inferior officers, especially in combat. A third survey, of twelve hundred deployed soldiers from the Illinois Army National Guard, found that "the majority of soldiers feel they are poorly informed, inadequately cared for, and that train the Army showed true professionalism in having the intellectual honesty to release the data to the public-even if some of its most startling findings were tucked away deep in thick annexes to a report. The survey also found a surprising degree of unhappiness with battalion commanders, with nearly 75 percent of soldiers saying that leadership at that level was poor. This finding was a shock, because the Army doesn"t give command of a battalion to inferior officers, especially in combat. A third survey, of twelve hundred deployed soldiers from the Illinois Army National Guard, found that "the majority of soldiers feel they are poorly informed, inadequately cared for, and that train ing in their units is boring and unorganized," according to a summary by Brig. Gen. Charles Fleming, the deputy commander of the Illinois Guard.
Holshek was one battalion commander who experienced the disgruntlement with leaders firsthand. In September, not long after his battalion was told that its time in Iraq would be extended by several months, he reported to the chief of civil affairs that the unit was in trouble. "Mission/endstate uncertainty has seriously eroded morale-news of extension has exacerbated this," he wrote in a PowerPoint briefing for his superiors. "Ability to maintain mission focus deteriorating." He reported that there had been six major disciplinary charges brought in the previous month.