Knife Fights Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN A. NAGL

  Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

  PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  First published by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by John A. Nagl

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  Photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise indicated.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17635-5

  FRONTMATTER MAPS BY JEFFREY L. WARD

  Version_1

  In Memoriam

  AL ANBAR, IRAQ 2003–4

  PFC Jeremiah D. Smith

  1LT Todd J. Bryant

  SPC Joseph Lister

  SGT Jarrod Black

  SGT Uday Singh

  SFC Gregory B. Hicks

  SPC William R. Sturges

  SPC Jason K. Chappell

  SGT Randy S. Rosenberg

  CPT Matthew J. August

  1SG James T. Hoffman

  SGT Daniel M. Shepherd

  1LT Neil A. Santoriello

  2LT Brian D. Smith

  PFC Brandon Davis

  PFC Cleston Raney

  SPC Michael Karr

  SGT Sean Mitchell

  1LT Doyle Hufstedler

  SPC Roger G. Ling

  2LT Jeffrey C. Graham

  SSG Sean G. Landrus

  SGT Travis A. Moothart

  Ghost Stories

  I have put them away

  kept them inside

  the ghosts of the lieutenants

  and the Captain

  and the First Sergeant

  their bodies torn by shrapnel

  or a sniper’s bullet

  or gone

  just gone

  into hundreds of shards of flesh

  the size of my still living hand

  but they have been standing watch over my dreams

  and now they will not go away.

  If you have been to war

  if you have held a microphone in your hand

  begging for MEDEVAC

  with the blood of your friends on your hands

  pouring out your soul over the airwaves

  to keep your friends from becoming ghosts

  from joining the shades in an unholy company

  of men who have given

  limbs and eyes and hearts—

  If you have held that bloody hand mike

  then you will never forget that day

  that day when time stopped and life stopped

  and never really started again

  no matter how hard you try

  to make the ghosts go away.

  Here, bullet.

  Here.

  Take me.

  So that I can join the ghosts

  so that my company will again be complete

  armless legless eyeless

  a company of memories

  a company of shades.

  Take me again to the land of the Two Rivers

  where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet

  where the elephant grass grows man-high

  in the irrigation canals.

  We will return to the warren of Baghdad streets

  where the women wail

  and the children beg

  and Bulldog Six will issue commands and

  Apache Red One will take point and

  Bulldog White One will grin again

  that wonderful grin he had

  full of joy

  back when he still had a face.

  We will join the company of ghosts

  who were our enemies

  who waited for us in alleys and in canals

  who wore sandals and man-dresses

  and spoke in a language we could not understand

  and fought for reasons we could not understand

  but they fought well

  these men we turned to ghosts.

  They fought us

  and we fought them

  and now we are all together

  what is left of us

  in the halflight shadows inside my head

  where I see ghosts

  ghosts

  that will no longer leave me.

  Adapted from the author’s review of Brian Turner’s Here Bullet*

  Contents

  Also by John A. Nagl

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1. Ghostriders in the Storm

  2. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: A Counterinsurgent at Oxford and West Point

  3. Back to Iraq: Al Anbar 2003–2004

  4. The First Washington Fight: Iraq

  5. Clear, Hold, and Build

  6. Proof of Concept: Iraq 2007–2008

  7. The Second Washington Fight: Afghanistan

  8. Counterinsurgency Revisited: Learning from Our Mistakes

  Epilogue. Good-bye to All That

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  Preface

  This is a book about modern wars and how they affect the lives of young men and women. It is a tale of wars that needed to be fought and wars that were not necessary but that happened nonetheless, at enormous cost in blood and treasure. It is also an intellectual coming-of-age story, that of both the author and the institution to which he devoted most of his adult life, the American military. It is a book about counterinsurgency and its journey from the far periphery of U.S. military doctrine to its center, for better and, some would argue, for worse. It is also, then, a book about America’s role in the world, and specifically about when and how we use military force abroad in the name of national security.

  The book largely takes the form of a memoir, which feels somewhat self-indulgent to me—I was very much more shaped by than shaper of the events this book relates. But my hope is that following the arc of my own learning curve will be the easiest way for a reader to understand the broader story of the American military’s radical adaptation to a world of threats very different from those involving nuclear weapons and Soviet tanks massed at the Fulda Gap that I studied at West Point a generation ago. Following that arc will also help to explain why, after decades of responsibility for the lives of American soldiers, I have recently shouldered the responsibility to prepare another generation of young men for a life of service far from the battlefield, in the classrooms and on the playing fields of friendly strife as the ninth headmaster of The Haverford School.

  The U.S. military changed quickly after 9/11—not quickly enough from the perspective of those we lost and had injured, but quickly indeed by the standards of very large, hierarchical institutions. Some say the military in fact has changed too quickly, embracing counterinsurgency with a fervor that has had unforeseen negative consequences. I do not take that view. This book is not a pep rally, not a victory lap around counterinsurgency’s successes in Iraq, and certainly not in Afghanistan, where they have been thinner on the ground. But as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liked to say, the right question is often �
��Compared to what?” Any intellectually serious reckoning with America’s post-9/11 wars has to contend with what the alternatives were once the decision to invade Iraq had been too hastily made and too poorly implemented. In the wake of mistakes there are sometimes no good choices; in both Iraq and Afghanistan, counterinsurgency was the least bad option available.

  I had the rare opportunity to be involved in both the theory and the practice of war, helping write doctrine and also living with the consequences of implementing doctrine in the field as an officer responsible for the lives of America’s sons and daughters. The bulk of my combat experience was in Iraq, and Iraq is central to the story this book tells. But the shadow of Afghanistan hangs over all of it, even the Iraq story.

  The first post-9/11 consequence of the American military’s pre-9/11 focus on large, conventional combat operations wasn’t the failure to see the Iraq War for what it was. First there was the Afghan campaign of the fall of 2001, a campaign conceived of and initiated by the CIA because the American military had no plan on the shelf that spoke to such a situation. The Afghan campaign’s initial success at scattering America’s enemies allowed us to make the mistake of immediately pivoting to Iraq, sinking us into the morass of two ground wars in Asia when one would have been more than enough.

  Focusing on Iraq meant taking our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and Pakistan, allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup and gain strength, blinding us to the true nature of the situation there until it was almost too late.

  If Iraq was the midterm, Afghanistan is the final exam. It’s a lot harder than the midterm. And while we eked out a passing grade on the midterm, after a horrible start, the final grade remains in doubt, an incomplete. We’re unlikely to know the answer for some years to come, but the Afghan end state is important for the future of the region and for America’s place in the world—a world that is likely to be roiled by insurgency and counterinsurgency for decades to come.

  The story begins in a very different place and time, a time when the Soviet Union had just been tossed into the dustbin of history, its internal contradictions rendered unbearable after its own painful war in Afghanistan. America stood unchallenged as the world’s only superpower for the first time in history, but Saddam Hussein had misread American determination to enforce the international security regime it had created in the wake of the Second World War. For the first time since Vietnam, the United States deployed the full weight of American power abroad. It was a heady and unsettling time for a young man who had studied war but never seen it.

  1.

  Ghostriders in the Storm

  When do you want to meet the men, Lieutenant?” The Puerto Rican accent was always thick, but it got thicker when he was mad. We’d goad him on purpose, pretending not to be able to understand him, until Sergeant Claudio got so frustrated that he’d throw his hat onto the hot sand and stomp off spouting unintelligible Puerto Rican expletives. It never got old.

  But that came later, after I’d met the men. “Um, now, I guess,” was my answer, sounding a bit more like the soft graduate student of international relations I’d recently been and less like the gruff, hardened first lieutenant of armor I hoped to project to my troops.

  I’d just left Oxford in the summer of 1990. After allowing me to read books and drink warm English beer for two years, the Army had ordered me to remedial tank training at Fort Knox before an assignment to Fort Hood, Texas, the largest army post in the free world. While in Kentucky, I took the opportunity to invite my British girlfriend on her first trip to the States, but our planned leisurely drive across the country was cut short by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. President Hussein clearly didn’t realize that the mighty Lieutenant Nagl had earned his master’s degree and been assigned to the storied First Cavalry Division; had Saddam possessed better intelligence, none of this might have happened.

  Susi ended up spending a week in Fort Hood’s appropriately named Poxon House during the annual summer cricket invasion as I prepared for deployment as a combat replacement. She carefully picked up the crickets that came under the door, trying to keep their legs attached as she returned them to their friends outside, but cricket legs are surprisingly poorly connected to their abdomens. Her failures staggered in endless, helpless circles outside our door, wounded veterans of an invasion that didn’t have to happen. An alternative strategy was a thick kill zone of Raid sprayed outside the hotel door mantel, designed to deter invasion of the homeland. This chemical warfare only ensured that the survivors who made it through the kill zone into the objective of our hotel room died slowly and noisily during the night.

  I hoped that the experience of the crickets was not an omen as I sweated through the bedsheets after a series of predeployment immunizations and packed my own chemical gear for deployment. My job would be to replace the first tank platoon leader in the First Cavalry Division’s second “Blackjack” brigade to meet an untimely end.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait for bullets to start flying to get my chance. A young officer facing severe personal difficulties decided, on the very October day that he led his platoon from the port of Dammam into the Saudi desert as part of Operation Desert Shield, that tanking wasn’t going to be his thing. Stuff got real for him when the tank treads first met the sand. I could have kissed the guy, but the Army wasn’t amused. It made him the assistant division post exchange officer and then sentenced him to take a boat back to Texas with the tanks after the war. I got four tanks of my own, along with Sergeant Pablo Claudio and fourteen other tankers—the “Red Aces,” which I thought was a pretty cool name. The tank company of which we were a part was also well named; for reasons that are lost to history, Alpha Company, First Battalion, 32nd Armor, was known for its radio call sign “Ghostriders.”

  The soldiers of Ghostriders’ Red Platoon were sprawled against and on top of a tank when Claudio and I walked up, and they stayed comfortable when he introduced me. The First Cav was operating under field conditions, dispensing with salutes and other parade-ground niceties. When a soldier did salute an officer in the field, he invariably said “Sniper check, sir!” Smart officers learned to render salutes first so that any snipers in the area would shoot the soldier instead. This passes for humor in a combat zone.

  There were no snipers in the area, or at least none who made their presence felt as the sun went down behind Claudio’s tank and I introduced myself to the men. All was well until I asked if there were any questions. Every platoon in the Army has one smart-aleck specialist. Mine said that yes, he had a question: had I been told that I was getting the worst platoon in the battalion, or in the entire brigade?

  Years of West Point honor code training kicked in, and I answered truthfully, “They said this was the worst platoon in the brigade.” I let that sink in for a second, then added with as much hope as conviction, “And that just changed.”

  Thus ended the welcome session. A little bit of bravado is a good thing for any tank officer to have, but it’s especially useful when taking command of a dispirited unit on the verge of combat. We headed off to the Tent, General Purpose–Medium (GP Medium, for short) that would be home for the next few months, Sergeant Claudio and I walking behind the tankers.

  They were a motley crew. My wingman was a very large African- American staff sergeant, Sergeant Harrison, known for his rule breaking in garrison and his extraordinary ability in the field. He had been hurt by the battalion commander’s quip that he should be stored in a glass case engraved with the phrase “Break glass in case of war.” It was hard to imagine a more competent tanker to have on your wing, and I would rely heavily on Sergeant Harrison as I learned my trade over the next six months. He was known by his call sign as “Red Deuce” or simply “Deuce.”

  Claudio’s wingman was Sergeant Jim Kebble, a graduate of the Army’s notoriously difficult tank master gunner course. He knew more about the M1 Abrams than anyone in the company, including the mechanics. Sergeant Kebble was pretty gross even among tankers
, who regularly appear in coveralls encrusted with grease and hydraulic fluid. Claudio and I would sometimes have to order him to take a tanker shower from a five-gallon water can suspended from his tank’s gun tube. Sergeant Kebble was Red Three, Claudio’s wingman, and also served as the company’s master gunner in charge of gunnery training exercises.

  Each tank had a four-man crew: the tank commander, an officer or senior sergeant; the gunner, generally a junior sergeant, who controlled the weapons systems; the loader, who fed the main gun with fifty-pound shells in seconds, over and over again in a firefight; and the driver, isolated in the hull rather than in the turret, who kept the tank running and pointed in the right direction. My own gunner was Sergeant Ted Shoemaker, a thirteen-year Army veteran from West Virginia who had been reduced in rank, or “busted,” when his then-wife was found to be dealing drugs from their military quarters in Germany. “Shoe” had been oblivious to her double life but was punished regardless because his battalion commander felt that he should have known what his wife was doing when he wasn’t around.

  It was a tough break for Shoe but a bonus for me, as he would otherwise have had a tank of his own instead of then being sentenced to teach a new lieutenant the ropes. Sergeant Shoemaker was close to Specialist Jud Davis, our driver, another good old boy from Kentucky. John “Mac” McAllister, our loader, was wiry, strong, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer. We would become a crew over the next six months, able to do amazing things with our tank. Just as well—amazing things would need doing. Shoe inked an ace of spades on my combat vehicle crewman helmet, which I proudly display in the only remaining photograph of our crew.