My Share of the Task (24 page)

“We need to turn up the heat on the enemy,” Abizaid said.

Steve briefed Abizaid on their plan to take out Big Ben. They would drop a bomb and move a ground assault force to be at the scene just after the initial explosion in order collect intelligence from the rubble, survey the aftermath, and arrest insurgents. The assault force would fly in on MH-6 helicopters, fast-roping from the highly agile Little Birds piloted by the Night Stalkers. A second group would drive in with the vehicles needed to leave the city, as there was no place to land the helicopters. Fighting in April had taught them to expect enemy fighters to mass rapidly around the objective, and surveillance now reflected fighters nearby. Remembering the bitter lessons of Mogadishu, where Green operators and Rangers had fought their way down congested streets without armored protection, Steve's team determined armored vehicles were essential.

“Good,” Abizaid said. “Hit them, watch them, then hit them again.” Turning to Conway and Mattis, he reiterated the point. “I want you to find some targets for Stan's guys to hit. We need to
get more aggressive here.”

Later that evening, as we planned the final tactical aspects of the raid, I got a phone call from Conway. Understandably reluctant to give the insurgents any propaganda ammunition, he didn't want to drop a bomb on the target because of the potential for civilian casualties. I called Steve just as his team was about to walk out to the darkened helipad to begin the assault. The armored vehicles, motors running, were lined up in battle order, vibrating in place and ready to roll. I explained that we couldn't bomb the site. It bothered me, as I was asking them to take on greater risk. Steve understood this, as did his men.

“Yep, okay, sir,” he said. “Let's do it.”

Instead of a precision-guided bomb, the rockets and machine guns on the helicopters carrying the Green teams could pummel the safe house before the teams dismounted and breached it. I communicated back to the Marines but received another caveat. There could be no tanks or other armored vehicles on the operation. The
Marines had promised the leadership of the Fallujah Brigade that U.S. forces would not enter the city. American armor would be too visible and would undermine what little standing the Fallujah Brigade held within the city. The armor would also undercut the bargaining position of the Marines, whose credibility among the various factions continued to tremble.

I didn't like it, and neither would Steve and his force, but I understood. I felt the value of denying the cache to Zarqawi and demonstrating Coalition strength warranted the political risks. But I appreciated that the Marines had to deal with the complex politics of Anbar and would absorb the reverberations of any operation. Such tensions would arise with varying degrees of urgency, and would be negotiated with varying degrees of effectiveness, on each of the thousands of operations TF 714 conducted over the next few years.

That night the calculus of whether to strike was a particularly thorny issue. From it I distilled an important lesson of leading TF 714 as our role expanded. I could have asked Abizaid to overrule the Marines in order to allow us to use armored vehicles for the operations, and he might have. He had clarified earlier that day to everyone in the room that he wanted TF 714 to hit the cache and that the Marines were to assist. But I also appreciated the Marines' position and felt that building our relationship was the more crucial objective. So I didn't go to Abizaid. It became standing guidance throughout the command, for teams coordinating with either conventional commanders or other intelligence partners: In most cases, the long-term relationship was more important than the immediate operation.

But by both following this rule and not canceling the raid, I was ratcheting up the potential risk to Steve's force, a move I wouldn't make without Steve's input. He and his operators had studied the situation in minute detail and had an instinctive feel for how things might play out. They knew the Jubail district, where the house was located, was a particularly dense harbor of extremists within the wider Fallujah stronghold. And they had spent days watching throngs of insurgents do calisthenics or man checkpoints throughout the city. They knew these fighters would quickly swarm Big Ben, making the roads dangerous gauntlets. When I told him of the restrictions on armored vehicles, Steve voted no. He couldn't send men in without armor to protect them on the way out. I agreed. The raid was off.

My exchange with Steve went as I felt it should have—and gave me a sense that my command style and my relationship with the force were taking shape. I knew that our units, and leaders like Steve, would not request assets like armor without good reason. It wasn't a question of courage, as members from the Green detachment outside the city had, around the time the Blackwater SUVs were ambushed, ventured into Fallujah alone in beat-up old Iraqi sedans that we bought and outfitted, surveying parts of the city simply inaccessible to American Humvees or even unmarked SUVs.

But Steve made a sophisticated call as a leader by calling off the assault. Missions—especially special-operations raids—can be whittled down through a back-and-forth of caveats and tweaks until a leader can find himself agreeing to a raid with manpower and protection levels that would have been unacceptable in the planning stages. Instead, Steve had a line in his head, and when it was crossed, he concluded the operation no longer made sense. For my part, I wanted subordinates to feel comfortable telling me no.

Still, Big Ben remained a potential fountain of weapons for a growing insurgency. So we persisted, negotiating to get approval for an air strike. Later that night, June 18, we were cleared to hit Big Ben with a precision weapon.

*   *   *

A
t 8:00
A.M.
local time on June 19, our bombing window opened. Hours before it did, screens at both the Fallujah and Baghdad operations centers had been focused on Big Ben. On the screen, the safe house revolved slowly as the Predator filming the scene circled in a tall gyre above the city. The strike aircraft flew its own circular pattern in the sky, over the empty desert, out of earshot of Big Ben's Jubail neighborhood. Eventually, the airpower coordinator in our Fallujah base relayed the order to the pilot, freeing him to engage. In minutes he would drop a precision-guided bomb through the roof of the house in the center of our screens. Now after 9:00
A.M.
, it was already approaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit on that street in Jubail, and the heat made the sky bright, cloudless. The safe house was quiet and unaware. The streets in front of it were empty.

As the plane sped toward Big Ben, I knew that our credibility as a force would be hugely shaped by the success or failure of this air strike. Beginning that summer, I constantly reiterated an equation to the force:

Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships

We were about to validate our competence.

In planning every air strike, we performed painstaking analysis to estimate the risk of possible noncombatant injuries or deaths. Computer-based algorithms calculated estimates for potential unintended civilian casualties. To provide the most informed analysis of the risk, these took into account the sizes and blast ranges of the explosives, the probability of their accuracy, a count of the number of civilians likely to be there at that exact time of the day, the structure and strength of the building, and the shrapnel it might produce. What this scientific rigor underscored was a deeply human desire within my force to avoid hurting innocents.

I was tense watching the safe house as the aircraft approached. I was confident about Big Ben, or we wouldn't be bombing it. We had watched it from the time the insurgents moved the weapons until that morning and had confirmation from the men detained as well a source inside the city. But perhaps they had moved the arms cache without our knowing, or civilians had slipped into the home unnoticed.

At 9:30
A.M.
, an hour and a half into the bombing window, the pilot reported his approach. We watched the screen. A few seconds later, we saw a white flash, which expanded and darkened to shades of gray and black as it became a thick cloud of dust and smoke. The house beneath it was leveled. But for one, two, three seconds nothing happened. We waited for the secondary explosions from the munitions. The smoke and dust blossom expanded and thinned. My stomach tightened. Faces around the JOC were clenched, watching the screen. The image seemed frozen.

And then munitions stored in the house started to cook off. Rockets flew through the air with sparkling tails, while smaller explosions bubbled up from the house. It was awkward to feel relief at seeing the secondary explosions, which might harm bystanders, but they meant we had hit the cache, not an innocent home. Backyard propane tanks or gas kitchen stoves could occasionally cause a single secondary explosion, but this was different. For the next twenty minutes, the arms cache, likely piled densely in the safe house, continued to burn off. Small arms shimmered and the bigger bomb-making materials, intended for car bombs or suicide vests, made larger thuds. There was no cheering, no joy, in the operations centers. But we had validated our techniques. And we were confident that we could replicate the process.

Because we were unable to put an assault force on the ground, we could not verify other results of the strike, beyond the obvious munitions cache. Sources inside Fallujah and signal intercepts indicated that roughly twenty people had died in the blast, almost all of them Tunisian foreign fighters killed when the house exploded and collapsed. Fallujans told newspapers that a noncombatant family had been killed. This was possible but hard to verify. Those same witnesses claimed we had dropped a second bomb, which we had not. They had likely
mistaken the initial explosions of the munitions cache. Reports of civilian casualties from inside Fallujah at the time often came from individuals hostile to the Coalition, and in later air strikes in Fallujah, we received reports of insurgents placing teddy bears and
dolls among the rubble before news photographers arrived.

With the rubble still smoking, we saw a crowd congregate in the street outside Big Ben. Hundreds of Fallujans, reported the
Los Angeles Times
, rushed to the site, “chanting anti-American
slogans and vowing revenge.” Despite the clear importance of the strike, it was a reminder that the term “surgical strike” is often poorly used. Even with a sharp scalpel, a surgeon has to break the skin and cut through live tissue. There is chance of infection. And sutures close a wound only imperfectly until the skin fuses. Strikes like Big Ben had to be seriously considered for their costs as well as their benefits.

Still, given the carnage Zarqawi's forces had been inflicting on innocent Iraqis and his group's growing toll on Coalition forces, I was satisfied.

A couple of weeks later, at the end of June, Steve's squadron rotated out of Iraq. They copied all of the imagery and video onto a hard drive for the next squadron, so that their replacements would not be starting from scratch. Later we institutionalized and expanded these principles: Squadrons that rotated home continued to monitor operations, watch feeds, and listen to video teleconferences (VTCs) at their stateside bases. Operators trained and studied with analysts on top of honing their tactical and operational edge against an ever more hardened enemy. Our men and women might not have been in Iraq or Afghanistan, but we expected their focus to be, and we relied on their skill set expanding and diversifying.

*   *   *

O
ver the course of the next four months, we worked to refine our ability to find, monitor, and map targets. As our intelligence stores accrued and our coordination improved, we started, as Abizaid had implored us to do, hitting them, watching them, and hitting them again. Where the city dispersed into empty fields on its southern edge, we watched insurgents hold physical training formations,
and we bombed those. We watched the circles where the insurgents sat when they would gather for ceremonial meals of lamb in the compound courtyards just prior to suicide bombing missions. And we bombed those. We saw this patchwork of movement from our eyes in the clouds and rounded out the picture with increasing human and signals intelligence. It was a tense education, because we knew the cost of a mistake. Each strike was a test of our force, and we treated each like one.

The mosaic we constructed was revealing. Through June, internal wrangling among insurgent groups and personalities yielded no single dominant force; instead, powerful families maintained control throughout parts of the nicer northwest section of Fallujah, while foreign fighters rooted themselves in the southern parts of the city. Civilians largely fled the commercial parts of the southeast, where jihadi-Salafi volunteers took up in
guesthouses and restaurants. At the time we struck Big Ben on June 19, the already moribund Fallujah
Brigade was no real challenge to Zarqawi's rising influence. By the end of July, while some of the city's blocks remained parceled, Zarqawi's foreign-backed jihadists had largely wrested control of the resistance away from the Sunni nationalist insurgency.

Although we could never fix him in Fallujah definitively enough to support a strike, sources described the kabuki Zarqawi performed. A chauffeur would drive him through the city's bazaars and commercial districts, and he would hold
meetings in the backseat of his car between stop and start points. We believed that for most of the summer Zarqawi operated north of Fallujah, pulling strings within the city while staying outside the area under our scope. He deftly managed alliances and eventually co-opted local insurgent celebrity
leaders to be his deputies. On some level, I admired Zarqawi's cunning.

The Jordanian and his supporters professed a desire to make Iraq the seat of a resuscitated caliphate, governed by the puritan formulation of Islamic law. The parts of the city they controlled offered a chance to try out this draconian rule. They shut down hair salons and movie theaters. They forbade Western clothing. Weeks before our air strike, the jihadists had flogged liquor sellers, displaying them half naked in the back of a
truck that roved through town. We watched them line up “spies” on their knees and shoot them in the back of their skulls. One video surfaced that showed members of Zarqawi's network burning Iraqi policemen alive. After the coalition wrested the city back the following November, forces found crude torture chambers, where these jihadists had brought frightened Shia or Iraqi policemen kidnapped in Baghdad or the south. Zarqawi's troops—through their cruelty, fanaticism, and glut of resources—emerged as the strongest group. And he was still ascendant.