April 6, 2003
It was almost exactly a year after the fact that I met Larry Gwin. Joe Galloway had steered me toward him, when I told Joe I wanted to talk to local veterans of the Ia Drang battles for the 40th anniversary. In those days I basically just wanted to talk to combat veterans, people who knew about it. Larry, formerly of Alpha Co., 2/7 Cav, had 45 combat assaults behind him, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, and had lived through a couple of the worst days in US military history. He was an investment lawyer downtown, and we met in the kind of place investment lawyers have lunch. When we had eaten and talked and raised a glass to those not present as Larry always sees to it that we do, we walked out into the sunlight. That’s when Larry said, “So, you’ve seen the elephant.”
I knew what he was talking about. It’s an old pioneer thing the Vietnam vets picked up on. “Seeing the elephant” is what happens when you realize the enormity of what you have undertaken and realize its potential to crush you without it even knowing or giving a damn that it has just done that. I’m nowhere near Larry’s class in pretty much anything, but I thought about the towering black thing that blocked out the Iraqi sun that day a year earlier, and I said, “Yeah, I think I know that elephant.” Â
On the morning of April 6, 2003, I sat typing at my laptop inside one of the armored vehicles, its ramp lowered. The rear hatch framed the Mesopotamian farmland waking up outside more or less as it probably has most days for the last 6,000 years. It was peaceful. In the farmyards across the fields, there were roosters crowing, sheep baaing and dogs barking, having forgotten all the fire we laid down around here a couple of days earlier. Or maybe crowing, baaing and barking about it still. There were a couple of men in dishdashas over there, out for a stretch, staring at us. Â
I was writing something about Michael Kelly when one of the GIs came over to talk. The GIs never quite figured out that typing and talking are mutually exclusive activities. I was in the middle of writing about how Kelly and I had talked about our kids, and I was getting emotional thinking about it. I told the soldier, “Sorry, I’m having a bad moment here. A friend of mine is dead.” He said he was sorry about that and walked away.Â
Shortly after that, we got the word that we would attack Baghdad the next morning. We didn’t entirely believe it. But the fire-support Bradley was ordered to go to the brigade’s assembly area to pick up a Psyops soldier who would ride with us, so we packed up to go do that. Some big things had been going on while we were on our road march of destruction through the Fertile Crescent south of Baghdad the last couple of days. Task Force Rogue, 1-64 Armor, our sister battalion, had made the first Thunder Run the day before, arcing through southern Baghdad to Baghdad International Airport under heavy fire.
When we pulled up in the assembly area, I uncranked the rear hatch and told the LT I was going to see what I could find out. The first person I ran into was a 4-64 staff officer who told me David Bloom was dead. The NBC newsman had collapsed and died just a few hours earlier. The theory was Bloom had been too close to a main gun going off the day before and got a concussion. I had no trouble believing that. I was taken aback, but before I had time to absorb this information, I ran into LTC deCamp. I asked what he could tell me about the next day’s assault. He confirmed what we had heard. We were going into Baghdad at dawn. Maybe just for the day, maybe overnight. We were going to take the palaces, just to make the point. Col. Perkins, the brigade commander, wanted parking validation for 80 tanks in downtown Baghdad.
I laughed at the joke. DeCamp made these remarks as we walked over to the maintenance area to have a look at some of the 1-64 tanks that made the run the day before. I asked him about Bloom and the concussion theory, and he said no, it was natural causes. Some kind of heart attack or something. That was harder to believe. There were old guys in their 50s and 60s among the press out here. There were heavy guys. Bloom, only 39, had appeared to be in good shape and full of energy. We later learned it was a blood clot, probably caused by being cramped up for hours on end in his track, as we all were.
DeCamp left me with one of the 1-64 sergeants, who gave me a tour of their tanks. The 1-64 tanks had been badly shot up. One of their men had been killed, and one Abrams tank caught fire when an RPG hit the engine compartment and cut a fuel line. They had to abandon it and put a tank round through the turret to render it useless. These tanks had gouges and holes all over their armor – hits that would have killed us in the Bradley. One gouge, two inches deep in the heavy steel hull of an Abrams tank, would have been a big hole right through the Bradley.
I processed all of this as I walked back to the Bradley.
On the bus ride out to the desert camps on March 11, less than a month before, I had been sitting behind David Bloom.
“What do you think, Dave,” IÂ said then. “Is this the cool bus or the geek bus?”
“This is definitely the cool bus,” Bloom said. “This bus is going to 2nd Brigade. Whatever action there is, 2nd Brigade will definitely be in it. Trust me.”
Then Kelly tapped me on the shoulder, and we talked about Boston and baseball and our kids.
Getting killed was part of the deal. We all knew that. Risking everything was the price of admission to this incomparable assignment. It had been an abstract, something that charged up the atmosphere and made it that much more worthwhile. It was something that happened to other people I didn’t know, the ITN team outside Basra and an Australian up in Kurdistan. Now it had happened to these two. I had been sitting between them when we started this less than a month ago. Now I was sitting between two dead men.
Walking through the dusty camp, I began doing the mental math of combat superstition, literally counting off threes in my head. Every three I knew. Third man on the match gets it. Third time’s a charm. Things happen in threes. Two close calls in the past week – Hindiyah and the ambush in the woods — plus Baghdad in the morning makes three. Third hostile zone assignment, after Kashmir and Kosovo. Was there another K up there in Baghdad I didn’t know about? Yeah, though I didn’t know it. We were driving up Kindi Street to Karkh. Three strikes and you’re out.
It sounds ridiculous now. I figured out soon enough that none of it added up to anything.
It was the thought of Bloom’s and Kelly’s children that choked me up as I walked among the tents and armored vehicles, all the purposeful activity of the assembly area, under a bright Iraqi sky that seemed to have gone dark. We were the ones who had made this deal, but the kids were the ones who were stuck with it. Their kids were just finding out that Daddy would not be coming home. I realized that I was about to do the same thing to my own kids. I had a black hole in my heart at the thought of it, and a weight like an elephant’s foot on my chest. Because there was no real question about what I was going to do.
At dawn the next day, the Assassin tanks would lead the assault on Saddam’s palaces in the heart of Baghdad. That was where the Iraqis would try to trap us in the streets and slaughter us like the mob slaughtered the GIs in Mogadishu. The Americans would prevail, but for the first ones going in, it would be bad.
Smitty, Baxter, Sgt. Will, the LT and the others had no choice in the matter. They had to go. If they went and died, I would not be glad to have stayed back and lived. That would mean having to look at my face in the mirror every day and know I had done that.
There was also the issue of the assignment, the privilege of riding with the lead element in the taking of Baghdad. The idea of not going on that ride was unimaginable. It was what life held for me. It was what everything had been building up to. I decided that I was supposed to die in Baghdad. I thought about the fact that I might not get to file from there, but that didn’t really matter anymore. I had done the math and determined that I was dead already. It just hadn’t happened yet.
It was instructive when I learned, several days later, that to second-guess one’s options in a place like this was pointless anyway. Two reporters, Christian Liebig and Julio Anguito Parrado, chose to not to ride with the brigade that day. They told their editors by satellite phone that it was too dangerous. When we went in at dawn on the seventh, they stayed back in the brigade’s assembly area. That is where an Iraqi anti-tank missile found them, as they left the brigade TOC to transmit the news to the world that the Americans had taken the palaces, not wanting to be beaten by those of us who had gone in with the assault. The missile hit as they were setting up their sat phones on the hood of a Humvee. The blast killed three soldiers and injured at least 18 others.
But to consider yourself dead already is a liberating thing. It lets you push aside unnecessary concerns and focus on the business at hand. My sense of shock over Bloom and Kelly’s deaths began to lift. I pushed aside my deep sense of depression and guilt that I might leave my own children fatherless. I decided I was not going to call my wife and children, or my editors back in Boston. I was moving away from that world. My wife already knew what to tell our children: “This is how you live your life, doing the most that you can do, standing up for what you believe in.” I had spoken to them the night before. There was nothing I could tell them now that would make a difference.
I grabbed a case of bottled water from a stack outside the battalion HQ tent. One of the staff officers saw me and came out, yelling at me to put it back. I had tried to be polite as a guest here, but I ignored him and kept walking. We had been drinking foul-tasting water from the 500-gallon water buffalo for the past week, and we would need this where we were going.
The Bradley would be carrying a Psyops soldier who would play pre-recorded Arabic messages from loudspeakers mounted on top of the armored vehicle. When I got back, the Bradley crew was watching as a Psyops team sergeant addressed three or four of his men. He asked who wanted to go to Baghdad. Nobody said anything. Then a slightly built guy with wraparound shades said quietly, “I’ll go.” That was R.J. Pasto.
Our focus for the remainder of the day was on what we would need in the morning. It came down to a few basics.
Everything inside of the Bradley had to come out to make room for Pasto’s electronics. All the ammo, MRE cases, rucksacks, cots and other gear was coming out of the steel bustle racks on the sides of the vehicle. This was on Wolford’s order. If the gear in the bustle racks caught fire, it would force us out into the street. We were to leave whatever we didn’t need in a pile under a tarp, to be brought forward later, all of our backpacks and duffle bags and other unnecessary gear. Then we began loading ammo, food and water back into the Bradley, now cramped with Pasto’s heavy duty amplifiers. Everyone was pretty quiet, except Smitty, who was being bounced to make room for Pasto and Pasto’s gear. Smitty was pissed off about it.
“I don’t wanna stay back!” Smitty said.
“Smitty,” I said. “We’re gonna get fucking killed. You get to live. Be happy.”
“If y’all gonna get killed, I wanna get killed with you,” Smitty said.
I became concerned we weren’t loading up enough of what we needed. I brought up Mogadishu.Â
“What didn’t they have at Mogadishu? Ammo and water.” No reason to feel stupid later, wishing we had more and could go a little farther, make it a little better. I counted three cases of 7.62 ammo for the co-ax inside the Bradley, and asked Sgt. Will if he wanted more. He said he thought three would be OK.
“I’m the one who has to sit on it,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m happy to sit on more.”
We packed in more. When we were done, Baxter started up the Bradley to drive up onto the road where the Assassins column was forming to sit for the night. He shifted the Bradley into gear to move forward.
Nothing happened.
Baxter swore and tried again, but nothing happened. The Bradley sat immobile, her engine rumbling normally but her transmission silent, not even screeching or whining. Baxter tried several more times. Still nothing. The Bradley had carried us hundreds of miles across the desert, through heavy fire in the Euphrates Valley. We had lived in her and on her, and everything about her was familiar. Now, she refused to move. She didn’t want to go to Baghdad.
Some mechanics were called over and began examining the vehicle’s innards. The LT went off to discuss the matter with Wolford. He came back some time later to report that he and Pasto were going to make the ride in an M113. There was no mention of me, and for some reason I assumed this meant there was no room for me. Room in the tracks was at a premium. Now Baxter, Sgt. Will and I were as pissed off and depressed as Smitty, who felt a little better that if he couldn’t go, at least we’d be staying back with him.
Pasto’s electronics and loudspeakers were shifted over to the 113. The mechanics worked on the track all night, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I’m told Wolford directed a real barnburning harangue at his officers and NCOs that night, to fire them up for the morning’s assault. I missed it.
A photog I know who has experience once said, “These things happen for a reason.”
But when I climbed into the empty bustle rack on the side of the dead Bradley to catch some sleep on the cold metal grating around midnight, I was in a black mood. I remember thinking, “So this was how I get to live. ” I remember how unhappy I was about it.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:09 am on Friday, April 6, 2007
7 Responses to “April 6, 2003”
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April 6th, 2007 at 1:40 am
April 6, 2003
April 6, 2003 Critter Crittenden It was almost exactly a year after the fact that I met Larry Gwin. Joe Galloway had steered me toward him, when I told Joe I wanted to talk to local veterans of the Ia
April 6th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.06
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April 6th, 2007 at 5:46 am
[...] Crittenden published a great, fascinating and well written post about what happened in Iraq, back in 2003. April 6, to be precise. I’ll give you the first [...]
April 6th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Web Reconnaissance for 04/06/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
April 6th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Jules, sometimes things do happen for a reason. It sucks, but it’s true.
April 6th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Jules-this is really good stuff. Now, I’ve got a theory about that expression “seeing the elephant” and-just because you were foolish enough to grant me comment privileges here-now I’m going to bore everyone who reads this with that theory.
I first saw that term in a book about the civil war (it might have been Co. ‘Aytch, but I’m not sure) and the note said that it was an expression meaning something like “gone to see the show” or some such. But because my alter ego is an academic nerd I got to thinking about it and I was somehow reminded of the old saying about the blind men trying to describe an elephant (see this poem for explanation) and variously describing his leg or trunk or tail. Anyway, my theory is that just like the blind men you can watch war movies, read books or listen to war stories, but until you go into combat yourself and had the experience of someone actually trying to kill you-you haven’t seen the elephant.
Anyway, it’s one big damn ugly elephant.
April 6th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Jules,
You ask the question that most everyone does. Why me? Why do I get to survive?
To my mind, it’s something we don’t get the answer to on this side of the Styx. I’ve asked myself that question many many times. Usually I can shrug it off, toss it back into the box it crawled out of and beat the lid down, file it away for another day. Sometimes, though, it crawls out and, before you know it, you find yourself too deep in the discussion, the recollections, to easily get out of the conversation. That’s when I call up my buddy Evan Williams, and we debate the matter for awhile.
After that, it’s usually a lot easier to get to sleep.
Respects,