My Share of the Task (22 page)

The Green teams reported throughout that week, with some amazement, that fighters had seemingly come out of the woodwork. What disgust Iraqis may have had after seeing their countrymen string up corpses was quickly replaced, a few days later, by a smarting sense of solidarity with the embattled Fallujans. For some Iraqis, the invasion of Fallujah was the American occupation in its ugliest form: they viewed the Marines as acting out of revenge, carrying out collective punishment against many innocents for the crimes of a guilty few.

The perception that Americans were committing widespread atrocities quickly spread, largely through the Arab TV networks that reported significantly inflated civilian casualty figures. There were TV reports of injured civilians in Fallujah
even before the attack began, and the networks played stock footage from other battles. Al Jazeera reported that U.S. artillery shells had hit mosques or wiped out whole families of twenty-five, and American
newspapers repeated these claims. In reality, the Marines
did not shoot any artillery during the entire first battle of Fallujah, using only precision weapons from aircraft. But the rumor resonated.

This feeling was so profound that it brought Sunni and Shia Iraqis together in a
momentary period of sympathy and cooperation. Shiites in Baghdad reportedly sent money to the city and took food from their pantries and medicine from their own cabinets to donate. They urged their own brothers and sons to fight while taking in Sunni refugees. Shiite leaders solicited
blood donations for Fallujah. Of course, the short spasm of cross-sectarian unity didn't endure.

Political pressure mounted on the Coalition, which had done little to compete with enemy propaganda, to
stop the offensive in Fallujah. The U.N.'s representative to Iraq,
Lakhdar Brahimi, threatened to quit. British prime minister Tony Blair implored President Bush to cease the assault. Most vitally, the Iraqi Governing Council, the interim body of Iraqis working with the CPA until Iraq regained sovereignty at the end of June 2004, threatened to disband if the assault did not desist. Its dissolution would have been
potentially fatal to a new Iraq. So
Bush ordered the assault stopped.

At the time, I was aware of only part of this political maneuvering, so I was surprised to receive a call from Mattis informing me that Washington had halted the assault. I was largely to blame for my own confusion. I had established too few links with the Marine command—a mistake I worked hard not to repeat. Beginning with the Marines, I began sending liaisons to as many units and commands as I could. Those liaisons fed back information, and we quickly set up fusion cells to combine and compare intelligence. Before Fallujah, coordination had been an important but tangential component of TF 714's effort. Now I learned it was central to our effectiveness.

On Friday, April 9, 2004, John Abizaid flew to Iraq and then out to
the Marines' Camp Fallujah. John had come to tell the Marines in person to cancel the entire offensive,
knowing they would be irate. I would join him out in Fallujah later that day, the one-year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Things were meant to be going well. Instead, it was arguably the worst day for the Coalition since the invasion had begun, with Sunni and Shia extremists making gains. The Sunni insurgency had won a tactical draw in Fallujah: for them, a triumph of legendary proportions.

The war was not going well elsewhere. Much of the rest of Iraq was erupting. Even with Fallujah teetering, the CPA had, the previous week, chosen to confront Muqtada al-Sadr, the thuggish thirty-year-old son and nephew of a prestigious Shia cleric assassinated by Saddam. Bremer shut down
al-Hawza
, Sadr's mouthpiece newspaper, and arrested
one of his top aides. In response, Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) militia rose up in the streets of its Shia strongholds—Najaf, Karbala, Kufa. In Sadr City—the Shia “neighborhood” of Baghdad, home to 2.5 million people and recently renamed from “Saddam City”
in honor of Muqtada's martyred father—JAM attacked soldiers from the 1st Armored Division, commanded by then–Major General Marty Dempsey. By the time I met with Abizaid on Friday, Sadr City was in full revolt. That day, Dempsey's soldiers in Baghdad read his letter to them, explaining that their yearlong tours would be extended another three months to
continue fighting Sadr's militia. His men had fought too hard, Marty wrote to them, to allow “
one thug to replace another.”

The remaining weeks of April and the beginning of May saw Iraq further unravel. Route Tampa—the main artery running supplies from Kuwait into Baghdad—was effectively shut down as insurgents lit up roadside bombs and blew out bridges and
trucks stopped moving. I continued to jog beside the taxiway on the runway at our airport base, but it had a surreal feel as I watched insurgents' 107-mm and 240-mm rockets land in the airport infield, blowing craters in the grass. Running was neither bravado nor lunacy. The rockets were inaccurate, and our nearby headquarters was an unfortified building, so running in the open air was no more dangerous than sitting at the computer terminal. But sucking in the sour, metallic smell of the explosives that lingered in the dry midday air was an irritating reminder that things were not going well.

On April 23, as we focused on the deterioration in Iraq, I flew from Baghdad down to Qatar, where I met with John Abizaid at his forward headquarters. We discussed the situation and TF 714's potential contribution. While there, Craig Nixon—the Ranger regimental commander, at the time in charge of all TF 714 forces in Afghanistan—called me from Bagram with news that a Ranger had been killed in a firefight near the village of Sperah in the southeast part of the country. I passed the sad news to John as we talked. Later that day Craig called again with an update: the Ranger lost was Pat Tillman, the professional football player whose enlistment in the Army after 9/11 had been widely reported. I hadn't met Ranger Tillman, but the loss of any soldier was significant. Craig informed me that standard notification and other administrative processes were under way. He also informed me that the chain of command would be recommending Tillman for a Silver Star award for valor, based on his actions while maneuvering against enemy forces. At that time, most soldiers killed in action were recommended for an award, typically the Bronze Star. We followed what was then standard practice to process the award as quickly as possible so that it could be presented to the family at the memorial service.

As I'd previously planned, the next day I flew with the Command Team to Bagram. In addition to ongoing operational activities, Craig briefed me on the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death. He described a late afternoon/early evening firefight in broken terrain in which Tillman had been fatally hit by small arms fire. He continued that although further investigation was required, he had concluded that Tillman was likely killed by friendly fire from fellow Rangers. He drew out the engagement on an easel and we discussed how it likely occurred. After the discussion, as I would have for any suspected incident of fratricide, I called SOCOM headquarters at Tampa to relay a tentative conclusion of friendly fire. General Brown was out, so I passed the information to his deputy, then–Vice Admiral Eric Olson.

In the discussion with Craig about the incident, I asked about the Silver Star. Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Bailey, commander of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, said he felt that although friendly fire was suspected, Tillman's actions—maneuvering against what the Rangers at the moment believed were enemy forces ambushing the column of Tillman's fellow Rangers—warranted the recognition. I agreed, and a short time later approved a citation that had originated within the Ranger Regiment.

A few days later I was told that a high-profile memorial service in San Jose was planned for Corporal Tillman. I had already passed the assessment of the potential that he had been killed by friendly fire to SOCOM, and advised them that an investigation of that possibility was under way. But because I became aware of the memorial service, I decided to send a direct message to emphasize to Generals Abizaid and Brown that friendly fire was the likely cause of death. The message was classified secret, as all my official communications were required to be. I also sent the message to Lieutenant General Phil Kensinger at U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the administrative headquarters responsible for handling actions surrounding the death of members of Army Special Operations Forces like the Rangers.

In the years that followed, controversy arose and continued over the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death by friendly fire and his family's notification. Five investigations were conducted and accusations of intentional deception, cover-up, and exploitation of Corporal Tillman's death for political purposes were propagated. Sadly, truth and trust were lost in the process. Genuine concerns over slow and incomplete communication with the family increasingly became mixed with suspicions of intentional misconduct.

As the TF 714 commander in operational control of the Rangers, but not tasked with administrative communication with the family, I had an incomplete view of all that transpired. But in Afghanistan I watched the Rangers deal with the loss of a comrade, and I saw nothing but genuine efforts to take care of a fallen Ranger and his family in ways that reflected the deep values of the force.

I learned later that the family was not immediately notified of the possibility of friendly fire. From the beginning, I assumed they would be notified of the ongoing investigation into the possibility of fratricide, but I believed final determination would not be publicly announced beyond the family until the investigation's conclusions were final. From experience with how long investigations typically took, I knew that the investigation's findings were likely to be complete after the planned memorial service.

The initial phone call I made, and the message I transmitted, only days after Pat Tillman's loss, reflected my intent to fully inform the multiple commands and commanders who would be involved in administrative matters associated with Corporal Tillman's death.

Concerns were raised over wording in the Silver Star narrative, which some found misleading as to the reason for Tillman's death. Before this, I had seen Silver Star citations carefully framed and proudly hung on walls of homes I'd visited. In the citation, we thus sought to document what I believe was his heroism, without drawing official conclusions about friendly fire that were still premature. Any errors, which I should have caught, were not the result of any intention to misrepresent or mislead. I believed that the fact that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, a sad reality in every war, did not diminish either his service or his sacrifice.

To this day, I am saddened by Ranger Tillman's death, as I am for the loss of every service member I served with, and for the pain such losses cause each family.

*   *   *

I
was back in Baghdad in late May when Scott Miller knocked on the plywood doorframe to my office. “Sir, I've got the Berg video,” he said, and handed me a DVD. Prior to this, there had been a spate of kidnappings. But Nicholas Berg had recently become the most infamous victim because of what was on the DVD Scott brought me. Berg was a twenty-six-year-old from Philadelphia who had come to Iraq to repair telephone towers, moving alone throughout the country that spring. He was kidnapped on April 10,
as kidnappings started to occur
more frequently that summer. By the time Scott came to my office, I had received reports that Berg had been executed on camera. Soldiers had found his body under an overpass in Baghdad, and the video of his execution had been uploaded to a jihadist website. As I loaded the DVD, Scott sat down across from me. He shook his head.

“Sir, I don't think he knew it was coming. As he was sitting in front of those guys, I don't think he had a clue that he was going to be beheaded.”

After weeks of intelligence updates and briefs from our hostage cell, I had come to know quite a bit about Nick Berg. So there was a flash of familiarity as his image came up on the screen. In the video, he appeared in an orange jumpsuit in front of five men clad in black, their heads covered. Intelligence sources told us the bulky man in the center was Zarqawi. After delivering a diatribe to the camera, he removed a long knife from the black folds of his shirt and tipped the shackled Berg over onto his side. His henchmen held Berg down until it was finished. Even though I knew the outcome, at the end of the video I had to consciously relax my clenched hands.

By virtue of our close-quarters fight with Al Qaeda, our force began to see a lot of these videos. War drives strong emotions. American outrage over the Alamo produced the Texan victory at San Jacinto but also the brutal pursuit and killing of hundreds of Mexicans attempting to flee the defeat. During the Second World War, Fleet Admiral Halsey, one of only nine officers to ever wear five stars, placed a billboard in the entrance to one of his harbors in the Pacific that said, “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, KILL MORE JAPS!” Frustrated by the suicidal tactics of the insurgents in the Philippines, John Pershing, another man the United States eventually awarded five stars, buried the corpses of his Muslim
enemies with pig carcasses. These and similar moments from our military's past were on my mind as the enemy in Iraq appeared ever more sinister.

I sought to emphasize in my force, and in myself, the necessary discipline to fight enemies whose very tactic was to instill terror and incite indignation. Maintaining our force's moral compass was not a difficult concept to understand. Armies without discipline are mobs; killing without legal and moral grounds is murder. But after the first shot, the first bloody corpse, war is no longer theory. As we moved further from the theoretical, like every commander before me, I found it critical to maintain as much discipline over my emotions toward what we encountered, and the losses we suffered, as I could. I remembered Grant's admission that he rarely visited his wounded in field hospitals because he felt seeing the cost of his decisions so starkly would prevent him from making the difficult decisions he believed were necessary. I found strength in Grant's candor.