Hunting Down Saddam (12 page)

LTC Bennett and the others noted how incredible it was the Iraqi risked his life to warn us. It was a sign that the “welcome mat” was out for U.S. forces. But it was also a sign there would be resistance—a lot of it. It was not until months after President Bush declared an end to major hostilities in Iraq that anyone would know how fearsome and costly that resistance would be.

In the streets of An-Najaf the soldiers were guarded. They worried that the residents might try to attack. But as we crossed the road to talk to Shi'ia residents, I was welcomed and surrounded by smiling locals. I was asked for food and water, which the Army couldn't provide. It was hard to tell people we barely had enough water for ourselves. The Army promised that once the fighting stopped, they would help repair An-Najaf's water system to win the hearts of the people.

I asked the colonel on camera: “When will you get these people electricity and water?”

“Not our job right now,” he said. “Our goal is regime change; then we'll see.”

Off camera, the colonel said, “What the fuck was that all about. Why were you bothering me with that?”

But later, U.S. commanders would come to realize that making life return to some normal level in Iraq was critical to winning the long-term battle for Iraqi hearts and minds, and the U.S. government would have to make an investment of tens of billions of dollars in order to do so.

Highway to Hell

An Army commander told me it was going to be a demonstration mission, just a show of force not even worth watching. U.S. soldiers from the 101st, led by tanks from the 2-70 Armor unit, were to drive north from Kifil to distract Iraqi soldiers, while the 3rd Mechanized Division, east of us, would push toward Baghdad.

The plan was called a “fade,” or diversion, so that the Iraqi forces would concentrate on the 101st, while the 3rd ID hit them to the east. No one expected much resistance. They were wrong.

As the tanks pushed north of Kifil, just south of the town of Al-Hillah, Iraqi troops waited in ambush. As one tank commander described it, a “rain of rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire” hit the column.

U.S. forces returned the fire and soon artillery exchanges came into play; the big guns from both sides fired 105mm shells, leaving huge craters in the road where they fell. One soldier from the 101st died when he was struck by a bullet while on top of a tank.

A commander told me he hoped he would get a Silver Star from the heroics that day. There were plenty of heroics: the enemy fought hard, and several quick moves limited the U.S. death toll to one. But the next day I was able to talk to soldiers from the 2-70 Armor element. I was surprised at their description of the fight.

One major just shook his head, saying: “It was terrible, a bloodbath, no one wanted to be in that kind of fight.” Tanks were forced, he said, to “open up” on men running at them armed only with AK-47 assault rifles. “We had to shoot dozens and dozens, it was a bloody shooting gallery,” he said as he described the battle.

The 101st Airborne put the death toll on the Iraqi side at two to three hundred. The 2-70 Armor said it was more like one hundred. I wanted to see it for myself.

To get to the scene, I left the 101st and asked the 2-70 Armor to take me north. When we arrived, the carnage on that highway was unforgettable. Burned trees stood as eerie symbols of the death that enveloped everything on the road. There were dead animals that had been caught in the crossfire. The dead bodies of Iraqi soldiers hung out of trucks and jeeps, and were being eaten by insects.

What I will never forget is the smell of death. Many of the Iraqis were killed by tank fire as they fired from buildings. Their bodies remained in those buildings in the hot sun, and the smell hit me like a steamroller.

We witnessed the aftermath of a battle that was seen very differently by the soldiers who fought it. For some it was victory over an enemy. A battle fought and won with honor. But other soldiers told me, “This is not what we trained for.”

Tank commanders who spent their military careers preparing to fight enemy tanks had been forced to cut down an enemy who was driving cars, and in one case, a dump truck.

Make no mistake about it, those cars and trucks and the Iraqis inside them were a threat. They had weapons that threatened tanks, and they killed one American soldier. But it's just that the fight was one-sided, American forces were so easily outgunning the enemy. Some of the soldiers from the battle will never boast about the fight.

A commander from 2-70 Armor, who didn't hope for a Silver Star, later got one for that battle.

The Danger

The danger was ever present as we moved through Iraq. In Karbala, as we got ready to join a U.S. infantry patrol to clear pockets of resistance in the city, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) were fired at Bradley Fighting Vehicles just a few feet away from my position. The Bradleys returned fire with their 23mm cannons, and I watched as part of the front of a building crumbled before my eyes.

On patrol we often heard sniper fire along with the explosions. That particular day in Karbala, the temperature climbed to over 100°F. We marched with the patrol for six hours. It was almost unbearable. I wanted to drop my bulletproof vest and take off my helmet, but we all knew that just one stray bullet and we would wish we'd had it on. So, I drank as much water as I could and pressed onward.

In Karbala, we had just rounded a bend on the way to a command post, when tanks and soldiers opened fire on a house. The Army was pumping grenades into the front of the house, which was being used as a shelter for Iraqi paramilitaries. The intensity of American firepower was awesome. Soon, the house was burning, and Kiowa helicopters were called in to track the enemy on the rooftops.

Kiowas

The Kiowa is basically a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, packed with weapons like rockets and machine guns, and electronics that can spot and track enemy positions. They are scouts, though, and are not normally supposed to be the stars of the helicopter war. That's left to the Apache gunships.

Throughout the Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, though, we constantly saw the fast-moving, low-flying Kiowas flying over and taking the fight to the enemy. The Apaches were, in fact, grounded from night flying by the commander of the 101st. The Apaches often flew on the edges of cities, but because they proved so susceptible to small arms fire in the early stages of the war, rarely did they venture over the urban warfare environment.

We heard several commanders voice their disappointment that the Apaches wouldn't engage the enemy in urban fighting, all because a general had decided he didn't want to lose any more to ground fire.

The Kiowas flew directly over the enemy. Kiowa pilot LTC Stephen Schiller of 2-17 Cavalry, and his copilot CW4 Douglas Ford, told me that their helicopter had taken several bullets, including one that lodged directly under Schiller's seat. He still carries the bullet as a good luck charm.

We couldn't fly with the 101st's combat helicopters, but we did have them take one of our cameras along. We aired the video and spoke to enough pilots to realize that the Apaches didn't have a starring role in the war. The Kiowas won the part, and LTC Schiller received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Baghdad

Twenty miles outside Baghdad, the 101st was told to stop. COL Anderson expressed frustration with the mission planners back in their bunkers in Qatar, who couldn't keep up with the battle. Baghdad was being looted and burned, and we could have entered a day earlier than we did, but we had to spend the night at a former Iraqi missile base, waiting almost twenty-four hours before getting the green light to move forward.

Was there a pause in the war? Officially, the Pentagon said “No.” But in the prewar planning, sitting in Kuwait inside the 101st's Tactical Operations Center (TOC), we had heard about the “pause” over and over again. As U.S. forces approached Karbala Pass, the so-called “trigger point” where Saddam might use chemical or biological weapons, war plans had called for a twenty-four-hour pause, where Hussein would be given a final chance to step down and leave Iraq.

In the end, as we lingered on the edge of Baghdad, there
was
a pause. But because the war had happened so quickly, and Saddam might already be dead, that “last chance for Saddam” was never issued. But the pause was forced. One 101st Airborne officer confirmed that they “
had
to pause.”

The Coalition, and the 3rd ID (Mechanized) in particular, had pushed too fast too far, and were out of fuel and ammo. “We, the 101st, had to give them some of our artillery and other stocks so they could push forward. The pause was about resupply, and in the middle of it, sandstorms had swept across Iraq making any further progress impossible,” explained the Screaming Eagle officer.

But, in any event, there
was
a pause, and battle planners will have to admit one day that the supply lines got strung out, disorganized, and vulnerable to attack. That doesn't stop the campaign from being anything but a fast victory in anyone's mind, but it wasn't quite the ballet Washington had made it out to be.

When we got inside Baghdad, we saw huge crowds of looters on the road, pulling, pushing, dragging, and carrying everything they could from nearby factories and businesses. The 101st did nothing to discourage the looters. The initial decision was made to ignore civil disorder and concentrate on finding the enemy.

We went to one of Saddam's palaces near the International Airport. We videotaped looters taking toilets, chandeliers, window frames—anything they could pry loose and fit into a car or truck, or carry on their backs. Again, the 101st decided that civil disorder was outside of their mission. It would be several days until the order came to start clamping down on looters.

In Baghdad, the 101st's lead element claimed a water treatment facility as its new temporary headquarters. Every few days we had taken over schools or factories or slept out in sand dunes; now it was a water plant. It had the first real toilet that we had seen in weeks—no small luxury!

At night in the outskirts of Baghdad, the shooting never seemed to stop. You went to sleep hearing it. I sometimes awakened to explosions coming very close. These sounds remained in my dreams for weeks after I left war-torn Iraq.

Several days into our stay, our compound was fired upon. I was getting ready to go on air—live, with a group of soldiers who had been ambushed the day before, when suddenly automatic machine gun fire sounded over the wall.

Our interview was off. The soldiers began returning fire over the wall at Iraqi gunmen, who shot at the American forces. Incredibly, the fight wasn't about control of the city; the Iraqi gunmen were involved in a rent dispute. The lawlessness of Baghdad had landed on our doorstep.

The embed process was not perfect. It was, at times, a select but limited window on the war. But it's important to stress again that we were never censored or stopped from reporting. And all of those small windows from embeds add up to a very big picture, a picture called the Iraq War. It is a picture that without the existence of embeds would never have been provided to the American public.

101st LTC Darcy Horner told me that before the war, when he heard reporters were coming to sleep and eat and live with the military, he responded, “Well, why don't we just invite enemy soldiers into our bases, too?”

In the end, he saw the media wasn't the enemy after all.

A young captain from the Strike Brigade turned to me after a day of patrols and fighting in Karbala, and said, “Dana, it's been an honor to have you with us.” I was surprised. In the first days of the embeds, the soldiers told me they didn't like the media. Now, after weeks of living together and weeks of facing the same dangers, they had come to see us as friends.

When I told the Strike Brigade I intended to leave them and Iraq, no less than a dozen soldiers told me they couldn't believe I was leaving. We had become their link to the outside world, and the outside world's link to the soldiers' well-being. Their families could know where they were and that they were okay, by watching the news.

The embeds were, and are, the Army's greatest engagement. Units and soldiers showed how great they could be. Reporters were allowed to slip away from the PAOs (Public Affairs Officers) and get one-on-one with American soldiers, who were well trained and well intentioned.

After seven weeks of being embedded with the 101, I had to admit I felt honored to have had a ringside seat, as gallant and courageous young American soldiers went to war.

I left Iraq and the 101st at the end of April 2003. Soldiers were talking of “mopping-up operations.” The worst was over, or so they thought. The 101st was moved north, to the city of Mosul. In comparison to the fighting, Mosul seemed at first like it would be a cakewalk.

Broke-down Palace

[
ROBIN MOORE
]

“This is another type of warfare.

New in its intensity; ancient in its origin.

War by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins.

War by ambush, instead of by combat.

By infiltration, instead of aggression.

Seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy, instead of engaging him.”

—J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY

The 101st Airborne Division (AASLT) entered Mosul on April 22, 2003. The 10th Special Forces Group (A), about a battalion strong, left when the Screaming Eagles arrived, and they pulled out of the area quickly. There was tremendous looting after the collapse of the security forces in Mosul, and one of the early challenges that the 101st had was to reestablish the shattered security.

“It was a fairly chaotic situation when we got here,” said MG David Petraeus, the 101st's commanding officer.

There had been a riot in Mosul a few days before the 101st arrived. Close to a dozen Iraqi civilians were killed in the riot, after the riot apparently threatened part of the battalion-sized USMC unit that was also here. The riot moved toward the airfield the Marines were guarding, and they felt the airfield was being threatened. Once their duties of securing the airfield were over, the Marines were redeployed back to their ship in the Mediterranean Ocean, and the 101st Airborne took over the AO.