Knife Fights Read online

  One night I received word that we had intercepted conversations about an attack on a bridge. I radioed out to Blackhawk, telling them that we had information that they might be facing an attack, and I ordered them to disperse their forces and increase their readiness. The intelligence was good. The next morning at sunrise a water truck came barreling through the access-control point under the bridge at speed. An alert turret gunner in a Humvee opened up with his .50 machine gun, killing the driver before he was able to detonate the explosives in his truck. A tracer bullet ignited some of them, but they burned out rather than exploding, catching the Humvee on fire and burning it to the ground. The suicide driver’s arm was handcuffed to the steering wheel of the truck, an encouragement to him not to bail out early. Good intelligence work combined with some great shooting by the Blackhawk trooper prevented what could have been a disastrous blow to the battalion. We nominated the gunner for a Silver Star medal for the valor he displayed.

  Unfortunately, AQI wasn’t giving up easily. It later targeted the bridge observation post with another car bomb, and this one was successful, killing three Blackhawk troopers at their most vulnerable moment during shift change, when they were exposed, away from the defenses that had shielded them from the earlier attack. (The AQI car bomb on the downtown Khalidiyah police station had also happened at shift change, for the same reason.) In the wake of these losses, we were ordered to collapse the Blackhawk position north of the river. Important as it was to enable access to the area north of the river, the price we were paying was too high to sustain. America was beginning to realize that the same point might be true across the broader theater of war in Iraq.

  Another body blow was imminent. Immediately after the memorial service for the Blackhawk soldiers killed defending the bridge, Captain Matt August and his first sergeant, James Hoffman, departed Camp Habbaniyah to conduct reconnaissance of the banks of the Euphrates. We had given Bulldog, our attached engineer company, primary responsibility for the ammunition depot north of Camp Habbaniyah. Bulldog had overseen the contracts paying Iraqi citizens to restore concertina wire fencing around the depot, manned the guard posts overwatching the perimeter, and coordinated with artillery units that were tasked with methodically hauling away or destroying the ammunition inside. In fact, I had spent a pleasant hour in the ammo depot with Major Paul Yingling, my friend from the West Point Sosh Department, one day when his unit was tasked with that mission. But by this point Bulldog had the ammo depot under control and had begun searching for ammunition and weapons caches in sector. The banks of the river had proven particularly fruitful search areas, and Bulldog was progressively squeezing the ability of the insurgents to acquire weapons and ammunition, particularly those required to build improvised explosive devices.

  But the war works in both directions. Somehow the insurgents had managed to slip an IED onto the main road in Khalidiyah, and Matt and his first sergeant didn’t see it. The resulting explosion killed them both as well as their driver and gutted Bulldog Company. Matt had been an extremely popular commander, and First Sergeant Hoffman was also very highly regarded. Matt, of the West Point Class of 1997, had married one of his classmates who was also serving in Iraq at the same time. We had sent him on important coordination missions to her unit more than once, ensuring that the convoy schedule required him to remain overnight at her location. Matt felt guilty about having the chance to see his wife when the rest of us couldn’t do the same, but we were pleased that someone in the task force got to do something pleasant every once in a while. Matt’s wife stayed in theater and continued to fight after his loss, just one of any number of female soldiers and officers who demonstrated their mettle in this long decade of war that brought women in uniform the opportunity to serve in combat, which their performance indicated they deserved.

  It wasn’t just soldiers who were paying the ultimate price. Because of the small size of the Army and a lack of proper preparation for the war and its aftermath, a number of responsibilities that would have fallen to soldiers in other wars were performed by contractors in this one. While the vast majority of contractors were good people performing a difficult task under extreme challenges, not all were well prepared for the roles they were assigned, or well supervised, particularly early in the war. As in so much else, the system had to learn how to best employ contractors on the battlefield of a counterinsurgency campaign. The war took a tragic turn when four Blackwater contractors in our neighboring town to the east, Fallujah, inadvertently drove into the wrong neighborhood and were killed in an insurgent attack, after which their bodies were desecrated and hung from an overpass.

  Major General Jim Mattis, commanding the First Marine Division, which now had responsibility for Al Anbar Province, recommended a deliberate approach to gather intelligence on those responsible for these attacks, followed by raids to bring them to justice, but he was overruled. Washington demanded a full-on assault. Mattis complied with his orders, conducted a massive attack on Fallujah, and received the result he expected: a general uprising, not just of all Sunnis in Al Anbar, but also of the Shia in the rest of Iraq. The United States had, through its failures to understand culture and power dynamics in the Arab world, accomplished the seemingly impossible: it had united all of Iraq behind a common cause. Unfortunately, that common cause was killing Americans.

  Insurgents ambushed supply convoys and destroyed bridges. The ruling council of Iraq threatened to resign en masse, the few allies America had in the war effort expressed their dismay, and Washington called off the attack just as it was about to capture Fallujah from the insurgency. Mattis was livid, saying privately, “If you set out to take Vienna, TAKE [GERUND FORM OF EXPLETIVE THAT MARINES USE VERY FREQUNTLY] VIENNA.” This was the worst of all worlds. We had lost a number of soldiers and Marines without accomplishing our objective of controlling Fallujah and bringing to justice those who had desecrated the Blackwater contractors’ bodies. The makeshift solution—setting up an Iraqi governing council for Fallujah and forbidding American entry into the city proper—essentially yielded control of Fallujah to the insurgents, who celebrated their victory over the American occupiers by going on a killing rampage that cost us one of our most capable allies.

  Lieutenant Colonel Suleiman was the commander of the local Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) battalion. The ICDC was an attempt to exhume elements of the Iraqi Army that the United States had disbanded soon after the invasion. Within months, in an implicit acknowledgment that disestablishing the Iraqi Army had been a mistake, it was being rebuilt under the ICDC banner. The ICDC was in an impossible situation, reliant for training and equipping from the United States, and hated by much of the population for collaborating with what was increasingly seen as an occupying force. Equipping the ICDC was a continuous comedy of errors, as the United States scrambled to procure Soviet-built equipment that was familiar to the new Iraqi troops, many of whom had very recently been soldiers in the Iraqi Army that Paul Bremer’s order had disbanded. But even when drawing upon individuals with prior service, it takes a long time to build a unit that can function effectively, particularly in a situation where the soldiers generally have to hide their occupation from their neighbors.

  Inspecting ammunition with Iraqi Army officers in Khalidiyah in 2004.

  Colonel Suleiman was a natural fighter. He argued with me continually—he wanted more weapons, better weapons, more radios, and real combat vehicles rather than the Nissan pickup trucks we provided to the ICDC. For my part, I wanted actions from Suleiman: more checkpoints set up by his troops, more intelligence from his troops and the sources he developed, and for his troops to stay awake when they were on checkpoint. (I’m funny that way.) A genuine respect developed between the two of us—the respect of two professionals who didn’t always see things the same way but could understand each other’s perspective.

  Inspecting machine guns with Major Hussein of the Iraqi Army in 2004.

  Suleiman was crimping the style of the insurgents inside Fallujah. His IC
DC battalion controlled the western exit from Fallujah, and he was essentially keeping the insurgents from attacking us. Eventually, the insurgents grew tired of his unit protecting our flank, and they kidnapped one of his captains, holding him inside Fallujah, where Americans were forbidden to enter by terms of the peace treaty we’d signed ending the First Battle of Fallujah. They told Suleiman to come to a mosque to retrieve his captain, and he bravely did so. The insurgents beat him to death, documenting the beating on videotape and handing out CDs of his murder as a warning to other Iraqis not to cooperate with the Americans.

  His ICDC battalion, predictably, dissolved. The weapons, equipment, trucks, radios, and ammunition that Suleiman had argued for, and that I had fought to get him, were captured by the insurgents and moved inside Fallujah, equipping the insurgents for the fight that they knew would eventually come. It did, after our departure from sector and just a few days after the American presidential election in November. The fight was absolutely necessary by that point to remove the tumor that Fallujah had become for all of Iraq—and it was made more difficult because of the weapons and equipment that we had provided to Suleiman and that his battalion had in turn given to the insurgents after his murder. The whole situation, of course, could have been avoided had General Mattis been listened to during the immediate aftermath of the Blackwater killings. Unfortunately, Mattis’s sage advice had not been welcome in Washington at that point and would not be until the cumulative impact of mistakes made—on the ground in Iraq, certainly, but more critically in Washington—nearly led to the war being lost.

  The ICDC took up a lot of my time, but another priority remained the police. The new police chief whom Khalidiyah received, after its second postinvasion one was killed during our transfer of authority with the Third ACR, was Brigadier General Ishmael, a former Iraqi Army officer who, like me, had experience in Desert Storm. We once did the math and found that his division had not been far from the Iraqi division that my First Cavalry Division had attacked on the opening day of the ground war. Like many veterans of long-ago wars, even those who served on opposite sides, we became friends. Veterans, even if they once tried to kill each other, have more in common with each other—and often, some of the most intense and important moments in their lives—than they do with many of their own countrymen who have not fought.

  Ishmael was not at the police station the day the car bomber killed so many of his policeman, but he did spend a great deal of time in the office after we rebuilt it. He would occasionally come to Camp Habbaniyah for meetings, and I would frequently travel to his office, at least once for a feast that included roast chicken and the gift that keeps on giving. Immodium AD is a must for anyone practicing counterinsurgency; diarrhea is part of the job. Ishmael would provide information on insurgents only when there were no other Iraqis, including his own police majors, within earshot. This was yet one more indication of how dangerous his job was. Another came when an IED exploded on him in his own driveway—a strong suggestion that he did not control the town as well as he claimed. Ishmael was not badly hurt, although his driver was. And then came the fighting in Fallujah.

  During that fight after the Blackwater contractors were killed, I received multiple credible reports that Ishmael was providing arms and ammunition to the insurgents fighting inside Fallujah. Although I believed the reports, I decided to do nothing at all about them. I knew that Ishmael had taken repeated risks to his own life and to the lives of his family in support of the American occupation, including surviving the recent IED strike. I concluded that if in fact he was providing material support to the insurgency inside Fallujah, he had to do so to remain in office and survive. I had no one with whom to replace him—I didn’t trust any of his majors, in part because he didn’t—and the stuff he was providing to the insurgents frankly wasn’t that good. They got far better material when Suleiman’s ICDC battalion collapsed and everything it owned poured into Fallujah. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Fallujah Brigade, which the United States created after the first Battle of Fallujah and officially provided with weapons and equipment, also donated its weapons and equipment to the insurgency. It was a hell of a way to fight a war, but not historically unique by any means. Mao remarked that the government forces opposing him were his armory, and the Vietcong acquired many of their weapons from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam that was opposing them. Still, it was a painful moment in my relationship with Ishmael.

  In addition to Suleiman’s dissolving the ICDC battalion on the eastern approach to Khalidiyah from Fallujah, we were working to stand up another battalion inside Khalidiyah proper. My interlocutor in this case was Major Hussein, a tall, handsome Sunni with presence and some flair. We had established a contract to rebuild dilapidated Iraqi Army barracks not far from the center of Khalidiyah for his forces, but the barracks were blown up as they were nearing completion. We provided more funds and rebuilding commenced, only to have the barracks again destroyed as the work was nearing its end. By this point, I understood what was going on and called Hussein into Camp Habbaniyah for a discussion.

  “It is a sad day,” I began. “The insurgents have again destroyed the barracks we were building for your brave soldiers so that they could protect the good people of Khalidiyah. If only I could find a contractor who could provide security for his work, so that we could push the insurgents out of Khalidiyah once and for all.”

  Hussein looked genuinely surprised. “Why, my brother is a contractor. If he received the contract, my troops could protect his work, and then we could protect Khalidiyah.”

  “Praise Allah!” I sang. “It is truly a great day for Khalidiyah. Bring your brother to me, and we will build a suitable barracks for your good men so that they can keep the people safe.”

  The mafia has nothing on Iraqis, but this time the barracks were not blown up, and Hussein’s troops eventually moved into the rebuilt barracks. I’m confident that his kids will also be able to afford the tuition at Harvard on what we paid for rebuilding the barracks three times, but at least we got something for our money. And security did improve slightly, even as Khalidiyah remained a dangerous place. On one inspection visit of the barracks site, my truck rolled over an Italian land mine planted on the road median. Fortunately, the insurgents who planted it had not armed it properly, and the mine didn’t detonate.

  There were other close calls as well. During one late-night raid on a high-value target, we were just building up speed on the main road in Khalidiyah after pulling out of the airfield gate when a rocket-propelled grenade passed in front of my windshield, missing it by inches. Dragon Six, commander of the brigade scout troop, who was sitting in an overwatch position providing security for our operation, sent a radio call reporting that I had been hit. I was too overcome by the close call to correct him immediately but did manage to choke out after a long minute that I was still alive but had been forced to drop off the net to attend to a personal hygiene issue. Not literally true, but funny, and sometimes—as when an RPG has just missed your truck—you need to break proper radio protocol.

  Unfortunately, the insurgents did not always miss. One episode in particular showed us both how far we had come and how far we had to go. Insurgents had somehow managed to wire a 152mm artillery round behind a guardrail on the southeastern side of the main bridge across the Euphrates River, putting it at the perfect height to inflict maximum damage. IEDs buried in the ground have much of their explosive force absorbed by dirt, but one suspended eighteen inches above the road would kill everyone within twenty-five meters. Whoever detonated this one timed the explosion perfectly, killing Second Lieutenant Jeff Graham, his radioman Roger Ling, one of our Arabic interpreters, and an Iraqi policeman who was participating in the patrol. When I arrived at the scene, the wounded were still being evacuated, and we had begun a cordon and search to gather information on the attack. Despite the loss of one of his colleagues, another IP who had been on the patrol was participating in the cordon. He was on the team and was not afraid to de
monstrate this fact even in front of much of the population of Khalidiyah.

  Jeff was a popular lieutenant, the son of an Army officer, as were many of the officers serving in Iraq. Since the Vietnam War, serving in the military has become something of a family business. Young men and women who grow up on military bases following their parents’ careers often choose to attend a service academy or go to college on a Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship, and the West Point alumni magazine, Assembly, was full of photographs of impromptu family reunions in combat zones. General Ray Odierno, who spent many years in Iraq and later became chief of staff of the Army, has a son named Tony who lost an arm while serving as a lieutenant in Iraq and now works for the New York Yankees. General Petraeus’s son was later to serve as an infantry platoon leader in a tough area of Afghanistan while Petraeus was the overall commander there. Tragically, the Grahams lost not only Jeff, to combat, but also their other son, Kevin, to suicide. Jeff’s father, Mark, remained in uniform, serving the nation despite the horrible price his family paid during the Iraq War.

  Jeff had been in Cobra Company, which appeared to be the hard-luck unit for platoon leaders, but the cruel hand of the insurgents took officers from other units as well. One loss that struck close to home was that of Doyle Hufstedler from the Bulldogs, our engineer company. Doyle and I had developed considerable rapport with each other, often talking about fatherhood since I was a recent dad and he was about to become one. He asked me to preside over his promotion from second to first lieutenant, a task I was honored to perform. I sent Doyle on a mission that took him over the bridge to clear Route Michigan for a supply convoy that was coming through, and a huge IED completely destroyed his armored personnel carrier. Responding to the attack, I found his helmet, with the sonogram of a baby he would never hold in his arms still inside the Kevlar. We lost every soldier in that vehicle and redoubled our efforts against AQI north of the river.