April 7, 2003
Yesterday I received an email from Omar Fadhil, who has been reading this series. He said he is enjoying it and wanted to thank me for my “bravery.” I feel very small receiving that kind of praise from someone like Omar, so I’ll dedicate what little I have to offer today to Omar and his brother Mohammed, who have to be brave every day of their lives, because they are Baghdadis. This one is about their city:
April 7, 2003
Wolford told me much later he was praying when he fell asleep after midnight that night, and praying when he woke up before dawn.
“I had never done that before,” Wolford said.
Around 4 a.m., I woke to the high-pitched whine of the Abrams tanks’ turbine engines firing up on the road nearby. I was lying on the bare steel grate at the bottom of the empty bustle rack on the side of the dead Bradley. I was immediately depressed. The Assassins were going to lead 2nd Brigade’s assault on the palaces in Baghdad, and they were going without me.
“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m going.”
I ran up to the road, found the CO’s tank and climbed up on the deck. Wolford was up in his hatch, giving last-minute orders over the radio to his platoon leaders.
“I need to go today, Capt. Wolford,” I said. “Where can I ride?”
“You’re in the 113,” Wolford said. The armored personnel carrier was right behind his tank. I jumped down, walked around and saw LT and Pasto through the 113’s open rear hatch. I told them Wolford wanted me in there. I needed to go get my gear. They said I’d better hurry.
I ran back to the Bradley, grabbed my sat phone, my helmet, my body armor, my 3-liter Camelbak and a notebook and a couple of pens. I told Smitty and Baxter and Sgt. Will I was going. They slapped my back, called me a lucky bastard and said good luck.
LTC deCamp had said we’d hold the palaces for five hours and pull out, just to make the point. Maybe we’d stay overnight. I didn’t want to jam the crowded M113 with my gear, so the inverters, the chargers, the laptop and all my personal gear I kept in a small backpack stayed behind.
DeCamp had also said something about Col. Perkins wanting to get parking validation for 80 tanks in downtown Baghdad. I laughed at the joke, not fully getting the point. The undeniable presence of American tanks in downtown Baghdad was Perkins’ idea to undercut the Baathist regime’s propaganda in front of the international press and signal that Saddam was done. I hadn’t been watching TV, and knew nothing about Baghdad Bob.
More than at any point in this endeavor, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I was too far down my own personal wormhole, too detached from higher command and unaware of the unorthodox plan was being precipitously brought together at higher levels to seize Baghdad. I just knew we were going in. All the way up from Kuwait, Wolford and his tankers had said we wouldn’t be going into Baghdad. The tanks would sit outside and the infantry would go in to do the street fighting. Tanks were too vulnerable in the close confines of cities. I didn’t believe this would be the case, opining that the lesson of Mogadishu was that you needed armored support and Baghdad had a lot of big, tank-friendly boulevards. I thought the tanks would go in to support the infantry, holding intersections while the infantry went block-to-block.
The tankers were right, in that armor doctrine was on their side. I was right about the big boulevards. Perkins was taking the whole thing a step farther, convinced he could do it as a predominantly armor operation, striking directly at the center of gravity. He got the higher command to agree. What would play out over the next three days has been described as the pivotal battle of the initial three-week invasion, a bold gambit that may have brought the Baathist regime down weeks and hundreds of lives ahead of schedule. It was the historic taking of a defended capital city by lightning armored assault, with infantry in the supporting role. The plan was still coming together on April 6, and was presented that night to the company commanders who would carry it out the following morning.
“The night of the 6th, I thought LTC deCamp had lost his fucking mind when he told us the plan,” Wolford told me later.
As the column prepared to roll at dawn on April 7, Sgt. Dan Howison, the track commander in the 113, manned the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the rim of his hatch. He pointed out where his M-16 rifle was hanging next to me.
“You know how to use that?” he said.
“Yeah. They gave me a run through.”
“It’s there if you want it.”
“Thanks. I will if you need me.”
My notes that morning begin: “0530 departure awaiting formation of column. 0546 rolling toward Baghdad in Psyops 113. Thin skinned metal coffin.”
The boxy Vietnam-era M113 had inch-thick metal alloy sides, which would stop small caliber bullets and shrapnel, but would be worthless against RPGs, recoilless rifles or anything heavier.
As we got underway, Pasto pointed up and yelled over the track’s roar, asking whether we wanted to open the big overhead crew hatch. We nodded. It was better to see it coming than to be trapped below in that metal box if we got hit. Better to be able to breathe.
We stood up in the hazy gray dawn. There were a few Iraqis visible in doorways of houses and buildings interspersed among commercial yards and industrial buildings in the outskirts, watching us pass. Iraqi civilians never seemed to be intimidated by the sudden onslaught of a massive foreign armored force. That may be why so many of them died. They didn’t seem to recognize the American soldiers were actually shooting at their vehicles when the warning shots were fired and they kept coming on. They ignored warnings to stay away from firefights, apparently assuming those amplified Arabic messages must be meant for someone else, not them. A few days hence I would see Iraqi looters look both ways when they emerged from alleys to dash across streets where the traffic consisted of machine-gun bullets and RPGs. It amazed me. I expected to find a people cowed by 35 years of brutal dictatorship. As we passed them on this ride into Baghdad, some of these Iraqis waved. We waved back.
I was up for the first time in a column on the move, out of the dark, deafening confines of a track’s rear compartment, getting a look around. We passed a big mural of a pious Saddam in Arab dress. An abandoned pair of soldier’s boots by the side of the road. Orange American traffic cones directed us down a single lane of the highway for a distance of several hundred feet where the Iraqis had laid out dozens of landmines, each covered with a small pile of dirt. Maybe they figured that would fool someone. Combat engineers had come ahead and cleared a lane for us during the night.
“Contact at big traffic circle with the Saddam-in-fedora-shooting-rifle mural,” I scrawled in my notebook. “.50s fire into industrial area, barricaded with barrels. Tracers crisscross the street. Fire erupts. We duck passing an ammo truck cook off.”
The shock waves from the main gun blasts were rolling over us now, bodily slamming into us.
“Exactly one small Lada-type car in a dowdy suburb,” I wrote. We were looking across a large open area, like a vast parking lot, down the streets of this neighborhood. “Despite heavy gunfire on highway, people walking several blocks down, on side street.”
“Abandoned AAA guns on sides of road. Shooting the shit out of roadside bunkers. Forlorn pair old BMPs (Iraqi armored vehicles) by road, burned out, looking silly. Dead Iraqis on median strip of clover leaf. Burned Abrams nearby.”
It was the one that had been abandoned during the Thunder Run two days earlier.
“Abandoned mortar position by road. 0637 still in residential/light industrial. Place looks like shit. All dirt. Even the Saddam murals look shitty. 0641 disabled Abrams unclear what damage.”
Howison, on the .50, was shooting up all kinds of stuff. He yelled over to Kauffeld and Pasto, “Anything behind cheesecloth needs to be destroyed.” He was talking about the threat of snipers hidden behind lace curtains or anything that might obscure them.
“So the filthy plastic greenhouses get it, pots of flowers,” my notes say. It was interesting to read later David Zucchino’s account in his book, Thunder Run, of the fedayeen who were hiding in there, who got it right through the pots, as described by the greenhouse owner who stayed to protect his property and lay on the floor in terror.
“0648, RPG fires high over rooftop left, overhead. LT and RJ turn under overpasses to make sure we’re not hit from behind. Saddam in Panama hat, looking like Juan Valdez. 0654 scattered rain drops. 0655 first nice looking thing is a heavily mosaic’d mosque, blue, aqua & gold … 0656 first sign of little shops. Nicer townhouse area with gardens, dead man lying in burning vehicle.
“0705, close hatch. Everyone has to button up, taking a lot of fire,” my notes say. It was Wolford’s order.
“No firing to the left now unless you’re in heavy contact. No firing to the left,” I heard Wolford saying on the radio. Task Force 1-64, Rogue, which had been leading us, had split off to take a parallel roadway about a kilometer or so to the west, headed for the parade ground and the big crossed-swords Iran War monument.
“We’ve got to pick it up a notch,” Wolford said. As the vehicles lunged forward, we popped back up in the crew hatch, figuring the button-up order had expired. My notes mark 0718, “Crossed swords of Iranian War Memorial,” visible about a kilometer away to the left.
“OK, we have contact to my right,” radioed Lustig, with Red Platoon in the lead just ahead of us. We heard a main gun go off, saw it belch out fire into a wooded area and felt the shock wave.
“Assassin Six, Red Four,” Lustig said, addressing Wolford. “Destroyed one BMP.”
“Hey Red Two, there’s an RPG team right down the road by that picnic table!” Wolford said. Heavy gunfire broke out ahead as we approached the July 14th monument, at the traffic circle in front of the palace district’s gates, where large concrete planters, burning vehicles and sandbagged gun emplacements blocked the way.
“Assassin Six, this is Red Four. We’ll have to get a plow up there to clear a path,” Lustig said.
One of the White Platoon tanks, equipped with a heavy mine-clearing plow, was called forward. Then we rolled toward the gate, where flames and black smoke were swirling around the destroyed remains of several vehicles and gun emplacements. The bodies of several Iraqi soldiers were lying in the road, partially blackened and slumped in puddles of their own blood, legs, arms and heads skewed all wrong from the force of the tank fire. The massive gateway to the palace district looked like a concrete Arc d’Triomphe. Its heavy wrought-iron gates, emblazoned with the Baath Party’s fascist-looking eagle crest, were twisted and hanging off the concrete pillars where the lead tank had smashed through them.
We rolled into the palace complex, down a broad avenue lined with hedges and walls, with palaces and government buildings, one after another, behind them. The column halted on the boulevard outside the gates of a massive Versailles-like palace, topped with four gargantuan, identical busts of Saddam in an Arabesque war helmet. We stared dumbly at them.
“Arrogant fuck, huh?” I said to Pasto, who was staring too and just raised his eyebrows behind his wraparound shades. The big Saddam heads held our attention only briefly, however, as fire now came from the left side of the road, up and down the column. Wolford told everyone by radio to engage left, and the tanks turned their turrets.
“They’re all in these ditches,” Howison said over the track’s intercom.
I turned around to look toward the roadside hedges and the ditches under them as the tanks opened fire. I realized I was looking straight into the faces of three Iraqi soldiers. They were no more than 30 feet away, staring back at us from the shadows under the hedge, where they lay in the shallow ditch.
“There’s three of the fuckers right there,” I shouted at Howison.
“Where are the fuckers?” Howison said, turning in his hatch.
“The fuckers are right there,” I said, pointing.
“There?” he said, firing a burst with the .50. He couldn’t quite see through the foliage and shadows from his position several feet ahead of me.
“No, a little more to the left,” I said. He fired another burst.
I saw one man’s body shudder as the large caliber bullets ripped him up, and saw the life go out of his face like a shock, eyes bulging and closing, mouth thrown open, as though he had been caught in mid-retch. He was middle-aged, in uniform, and looked like an officer. The next man was rising up behind the first man’s body. I told Howison, and Howison cut him down.
“There’s another fucker over there,” I told him. Pasto and the LT were up and firing their rifles now. The guy kept looking around from behind the metal-capped concrete utility housing he was hiding behind, as their bullets plinked off.
“He’s still moving,” I told Howison. Howison opened up with the 50. We didn’t see that guy again.
“You’d think the fuckers would at least learn to play dead,” Howison said.
When it quieted down on the boulevard, Wolford ordered his tank platoons to begin clearing the surrounding streets and palace grounds. The 113 followed Wolford and the Red tanks as they busted through the metal gates of one of the palaces. The heavy armored vehicles clanked through rose gardens, past ornamental ponds and a playground. White ducks in one pond swam away from us in alarm.
“Everyone gets a bath tonight,” Wolford said.
We rolled past Arabesque chalets and ornate bathhouses, and a grand palace down by the river, with the houses of Baath party officials in little walled compounds all around and more greenery and trees and grass and flowers than any of us had seen in months. I saw Lustig ahead, looking intent as always, his hands on his .50, as ACHTUNG BABY turned down a little lane lined with exotic shrubs.
The awareness that we had taken just Saddam’s seat of power began to hit me as we rolled through the gardens. The resistance that was only moderate at best appeared to have evaporated and we might now actually own this place.
We rolled along a river road.
“Shit, that’s the Sheraton over there,” Howison said. It was a tall modern-looking hotel with a large red sign, “Sheraton Ishtar” clearly visible next to another tall building which I later learned was the Palestine Hotel. I’ve seen footage taken by foreign news cameramen on top of the Palestine, who filmed us as we rolled along the river road that day. I didn’t see them up there. If we had, black figures on a tall building pointing black tubular devices at us, the tankers probably would have shot at them.
“Assassin Six, this is Gold Four,” came a call from the platoon of mechanized infantry that was now attached to the tank company. “We’re about to send dismounts down to clear the beach.”
“Gold Four, go ahead,” Wolford said. He later described the scene on the beach along the Tigris as “Iwo Jima.” There was a destroyed Iraqi helicopter down there, a lot of trucks, dugout positions and when Gold was done, a lot of bodies.
There was a sound of .50 caliber fire, and I heard Lt. Middleton say to Wolford, “Assassin Six, this is Red One. You engaging?”
“Yeah, one 40-foot-tall dismount, looked a lot like Saddam.”
We circled back to the boulevard. When the column halted, Pasto and I got out and pissed by the track. I bummed a smoke from one of the Air Force guys in their 113. My nerves, subdued all morning, began to wake up and I felt jangled.
We were in Baghdad. Everyone was OK. We had not even been hit. Black smoke billowed overhead and fire sounded in the neighborhood, but here we were in a quiet lull. I kept a close eye on the hedges across the street nonetheless. Then Pasto and I took pictures of each other by the 113 with his camera. He has a silly grin in his. I had a silly grin, too. I told myself, “Important to look normal,” and told Pasto to take another one, so I’d have a picture of myself on this historic morning in Baghdad that didn’t look like Howdy-Doody. “Normal,” when I see that photo now, looks like something between shock and psycho.
Shortly afterward, maybe 9 a.m., the Psyops track was ordered back to sit with Cyclone Company at theJuly 14th circle, where the tankers were destroying pickup trucks coming over the bridge that didn’t stop for warning shots. RJ got out his CD of Psyops messages, and cranked up the loudspeakers, which began issuing monotonous warnings in Arabic, audible up to a half a mile away.
“ATTENTION IRAQI CITIZENS. COALITION FORCES DO NOT WISH TO HARM YOU. FOR YOUR SAFETY, STAY OFF THE BRIDGE. IF YOU DO NOT, YOU MAY BE KILLED OR INJURED.”
No shit. Pickup trucks kept coming over the July 14th Bridge, ignoring the even more obvious message that was being broadcast by the .50s and half a dozen smoking hulks on the roadway ahead of them. Then each would get its own tank round, exploding into a fireball that killed the occupants instantly and gutted the vehicles.
Around 1130, a car came racing out of the haze from the southwest, up Kindi Street, the road that had brought us here. The driver, ignoring the initial warning bursts, flew through the subsequent hammering of the .50s. We were lounging idly on top of the 113 at the time, eating MREs, and looked up at the noise.
“Oh shit!” said the LT.
“That is a fucking suicide bomber,” I said. He was coming right at us. He was doing at least 40 mph, but it looked like 100, even though like a car crash, it seemed to be happening in slow motion. We sat frozen, watching it coming at us for what seemed like a long time, unable to do anything about it.
Finally the Abrams tank guarding that approach got its shot off. The gunner had to turn his turret nearly sideways to do it. The main gun round hit the car’s rear quarter. The car veered into the sidewalk along the palm-dotted park and burst into flames. The driver, amazingly still alive, bailed out and took cover behind the car. Everyone was hammering the wreckage with their .50s now, but the driver, lying behind the engine block and the frame of the burning car, survived this.
“Hey, he’s got his hands up. He’s surrendering,” Pasto said. Howison started yelling into the radio to everyone to stop firing. It took a minute or so, but finally they stopped. One of the engineers’ 113s clanked over to secure the prisoner. I jumped down and walked over to have a look as the medics’ track rolled up.
The middle-aged, heavyset man was lying on his back on the sidewalk, the medics checking him out, when I got there. His face was black with soot from the burning tire he had taken cover behind, his legs lacerated by shrapnel, and he was looking around at us with alarm. The car was still burning and I was mildly concerned that it might explode, but decided to ignore that, figuring the tank round would have taken care of that issue. This was not a suicide bomber, but it wasn’t clear who or what he was. There was a pistol lying on the pavement, amid a lot of papers and several ID cards. I pointed those out to the sergeant who was running the scene. We gathered them up and thumbed through them. They were all in Arabic. He could have been anything from an Iraqi intelligence chief to a guy with a liquor store downtown.
We were unaware as we walked around the wreck, that within 50 feet of us the overgrown park was full of bunkers that were full of Iraqi soldiers. Amid the debris that had been blown out of the car, I spotted a couple of packs of cigarettes lying around the car as well as some loose ones, some of them scorched. I gathered them up, asked these soldiers who smoked, and shared them with a sergeant who heard me and poked his head up out of his 113.
We had all been out for at least a day or so and the sarge and I lit up immediately. These were the local ones in the pale blue pack: “Sumer,” as in ancient Sumeria. And that’s more or less what they tasted like. Ancient Sumeria. Like they were laced with patchouli oil. We both made faces. Now we knew why every Republican Guard office and wardroom we had gone into smelled like this. We smoked them anyway.
Shortly afterward, the soldiers discover a small bunker complex among some trees by the palace gates on the other side of the square. About 15 Iraqis were pulled out of there, zip-tied and marched off. The dirt bunkers, with ratty campsites around them, just looked like piles of dirt and litter, well camouflaged in Baghdad, even at the gates of Saddam’s ornate palaces.
“I never thought I’d be sitting here in Baghdad,” Pasto said. It had an air of unreality about it. I hadn’t expected to find myself relaxing on top of the 113, eating MREs and calmly smoking Iraqi cigarettes this morning. There was a heavy haze, like a fog off the Tigris that never quite lifted that day, and a low overcast. We had expected to be heavily engaged in street fighting and taking losses by now, and it wasn’t happening. There was regular gunfire from the south and the west, but we were unaware of the intensity of the fighting that was going on there, as the Iraqis tried to sever our thin lifeline. Our armored column had punched through concentric rings of fedayeen, who were now attacking the units holding key intersections.
Zucchino reports that virtually all of the brigade’s reserves were tapped. Some units holding the route open south of us went dangerously low on ammo, and were only rescued by a daring under-fire resupply by fuel and ammo trucks. Several soldiers were killed and wounded in the bitter daylong fighting there in which as many as 250 fedayeen and jihadis were killed. Up by the palaces, we were bemused and little giddy in our island of relative calm.
When the Iraqi prisoners were marched off, barefoot with their boots in plastic bags they held in their hands ziptied behind them, we went through the cheap gym bags they left behind in their dirt holes, and picked up some other less distasteful brands of cigarettes. We were back in smokes. I gave Leal the 113 driver a pack of Sumers. I kept a pack of Sumers and another of the less bad ones for myself.
The destruction of trucks coming over the bridge tapered off after a track was dispatched to shove several of the scorched steel hulks in a line across the roadway to form a barricade. We could still hear a lot of gunfire in several directions, but none of it was in our vicinity and we ignored it. By early afternoon, we were getting comfortable in the intersection by the big melodramatic July 14th memorial – a bronze statue depicting one Iraqi soldier slumped dead, two looking forward heroically, and a fourth looking back to call his comrades forward. We were lounging on top of the 113 when more AK fire sounded down by the bridge. We looked over. The flash of an RPG cut a bright arc from the base of the bridge toward us, passing 20 or 30 feet in front of the 113. We let out a collective “Oh shit!” and all dove down the crew hatch at once. More RPGs and automatic weapons fire followed.
The tanks answered with heavy fire machine gun fire, and started working over the parkland by the bridge, where figures could be seen moving around in the haze. The firing stopped, and one of the ranking prisoners taken earlier was brought forward to yell through the fence that it was over, time to give it up. A few of the Iraqis in the bunkers began showing white cloths. The infantry went in to bring them out.
Our 113 clanked into the park to help round them up. Three came walking out of the trees toward us, their hands already zip-tied behind their backs, dispatched by the GIs to walk themselves out to the street. They stopped and said something in Arabic, opening and closing their mouths like fish to make their point, unable to gesture with bound hands. I dug into a box of bottled water in the 113’s bustle rack and poured some into each man’s mouth.
“Shokran, shokran,” they said — thank you — and moved on. I left the 113 and walked in among the palms, where some infantrymen were going hole to hole. There seemed to be dozens of spider holes and bunkers, and I eyeballed each one I passed.
I came upon a big dugout, a deep hole in the ground with timbers and dirt over the top. Some very young-looking infantrymen were standing around the edge, pointing their rifles down the hole, yelling at the Iraqis inside to get the fuck out. The Iraqis didn’t want to, and it was getting a little tense. One of the GIs announced that if the motherfuckers didn’t start coming out soon, he’d toss a grenade down. The very nervous but very earnest Special Republican Guard soldier at the bunker’s door just kept shaking his head, speaking urgently in Arabic and gesturing into the darkness behind him. I said, “Let me talk to him,” and gave him a “salaamu aleikum” with the traditional forehead-to-chest hand gesture. He gave me an “aleikum salaam” back. “Peace be with you” seemed like a good start, and through some combination of words and signs we managed to establish that they had a wounded guy down there, and they were worried about him. I told the GIs this, and then conveyed to the Iraqi that it was OK, we have a doctor, your friend will be OK, bring him out.
So the Iraqis carried their friend out, and the medics got to work on him. He had a .50 caliber round through his ankle. It was a mess and hugely swollen, and he was going into shock. There was a little more tension as the first guy insisted on hovering over his wounded friend and wouldn’t get the fuck down on the ground like the GIs kept telling him to. The GIs were getting testy again. I had a relationship with him, so I told him his friend was going to be OK, but he really needed to get the fuck down. He did it. An Iraqi who was already on his knees and elbows was kissing his small military-issue Koran and mumbling prayers. Nearby lay one of their friends, not 20 minutes dead, face down in the dirt and already swarming with flies.
As the prisoners were patted down and zip-tied, I pulled out my notebook and asked one of the GIs some question about the situation in order to get a quote, telling him I was a reporter.
“You’re a reporter? I thought you were some kind of officer,” he said.
I snorted. “What kind of officer do I look like?”
I had a buzz cut, body armor and khaki fatigues on. No sidearm, rifle or insignia of any sort. But I was older and had butted in on their situation like I knew what I was doing, which I suppose is typical officer behavior.
“I don’t know, I figured you were one of the Marines or something,” the GI said. He was referring to the Marine forward observers who were riding with this Army column to direct Marine and Navy air power.
“I won’t tell the Marines you said that,” I told him.
So the GIs had let me interfere because they thought I was an officer, and maybe the Iraqis did what I told them for the same reason. The ability to communicate with only a few words in common, picked up over many years of having to do that, also may have helped prevent some ugliness.
There was more fire from the July 14th bridge beside us, and a tank rumbled forward to fire under the bridge. We saw that tank’s work a couple of days later when we rolled under there ourselves. A burned-out truck with a nasty-looking half-burned corpse lying on the pavement beside it, his gut swollen near the bursting point by the time we saw him.
After the removal of Iraqi prisoners from the park, the 113 pulled back into the July 14th Square and there was some brief AK fire very close. We scanned the outer wall of the palace complex beside us, with heavy vegetation and trees over the top of the wall, wondering if some sniper had crawled up in there. But nothing more happened and a little later, with a growing sense of confidence, we began prowling through the nearby outlying buildings of the palace complex. From there and the bunkers in the park we picked up things like bayonets and helmets and badges the Iraqis had left behind. Howison got himself an AK 47. I found a bayonet lying in the front seat of a khaki Chevy pickup with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it.
In the course of the day, there in the July 14th intersection, I ran into Geoff Mohan of the L.A. Times, who was attached to Cyclone. He jumped out of a Bradley that pulled up nearby. There was a bedraggled-looking guy walking around the intersection who introduced himself as Dave Zucchino, also of the L.A. Times. He would later write the definitive book on this day’s action. Zucchino explained that he had been with the 101st Airborne until a few days earlier, when the truck he was riding in dumped him and 20 grunts into a canal. Everyone lived, but Zucchino lost all his gear. He had made his way to Baghdad International Airport, where he saw the 2nd Brigade tanks arriving at the end of the first Thunder Run two days earlier. Sensing that this was a promising unit, he hitched a ride with them back to 2nd Brigade’s assembly area, where he linked up with Mohan and was now sharing his equipment.
A convoy of fuel and ammo trucks, running through heavy fire and stopping to resupply the units holding the heavily contested intersections on the route up from the assembly area, finally made to us around dusk. The 113 rolled back into the palace complex to fuel up, and I ran into Wolford there. We walked among the ditches and bunkers along the boulevard, where there were a number of bodies and a lot of weapons and crates of RPG rounds lying around. I looked for the bodies of the men I had targeted for Howison to kill, but couldn’t find the spot. Wolford explained that the Iraqi defenses were not in fact as grossly inadequate as they appeared or ultimately proved to be. He showed how they had good interlocking fields of fire set up across a big open field, facing west, the direction from which they had apparently expected American infantry to approach. But it hadn’t worked out that way, and they were ill-prepared for us to do what we did, which was to show up with tanks, blast through their pals at the front gate and come right up the boulevard behind them.
The Assassins and 4-64 battalion HQ were camping in the Big Head palace and its grounds, with Red Platoon out in the boulevard pulling security. I mulled where the best place would be for action, and considered the July 14th Square, with the bridge leading directly to it from the still-unsecured east side of the Tigris, the most likely avenue for counterattack. So I stayed with the 113 when it drove back to the square to sit with Cyclone again. The 113 also remained the only vehicle with space available for me, and it didn’t make sense to leave it.
Because I had left my laptop behind, I wrote my daily dispatch longhand in a yellow Iraqi composition book that Pasto gave me, with a picture of Saddam on the cover. It showed Saddam writing at a desk, so the user would get the idea, I suppose. He was everywhere, doing everything. Alternately smiling, stern, thoughtful, or being cool – like that really stupid mural on the side of a small palace guesthouse that showed Saddam standing on a snowy slope in a fur coat, Karakul hat and mirrored shades, getting ready to go skiing. You could see how the Iraqis must have been coerced into a love-hate relationship with him. Some form of Stockholm syndrome. We found it alternately comical, annoying and disturbing, all this Saddam worship imposed everyone, everywhere.
“The whole thing makes me glad we’re here kicking his ass,” the LT said about the never-ending Saddamfest. “It’s like something you read in books. It’s like 1984, Big Brother.”
I called in my report by sat phone. My wife had heard that two reporters with the 3rd ID were killed that morning and called the newsroom in a panic. City Editor Mike Bello told her I was on the other line. He told me Tom Ashbrook wanted to interview me for his public radio show, so I called there and described the day’s action.
That night, in pitch darkness, I relieved myself in a flower bed at the base of the big July 14th statue, preferring not to wander in the dark over to the vacated but still unsecured bunker complexes in the park. We all picked out places on the 113 to sleep. Howison and Pasto slept on top, where there were a couple of flat places. The LT took the padded bench inside. The steel floor and the other bench were covered with Pasto’s electronics. Leal slept in his driver’s seat. Because I had no gear, Howison gave me a squirt of toothpaste on my finger so I could brush my teeth and Leal lent me his sleeping bag, insisting he was fine with a poncho liner. I spread it over me on the 113’s lowered ramp, big and flat. I was out in the open, but worried more that the local rats or dogs would be attracted to my feet than I worried about enemy fire. They smelled pretty bad now and had a couple of sores. Then I heard what sounded like incoming artillery explosions walking in our direction. I mulled what to do about that. I was entirely exposed on the lowered ramp in the middle of the square. I considered sleeping in the concrete gutter or on the sidewalk between the track and the statute’s pedestal for the cover it would offer. But I didn’t want to find out what might be running around down there, especially with all these bodies lying around. Eventually I decided it wasn’t incoming artillery but outgoing tank fire down two different roads, and figured screw it. I dropped off to a dead sleep.
April 7, 2003
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:45 am on Saturday, April 7, 2007
5 Responses to “April 7, 2003”
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April 7th, 2007 at 2:49 am
April 7, 2003
April 7, 2003Critter Crittenden Yesterday I received an email from Omar Fadhil, who has been reading this series. He said he is enjoying it and wanted to thank me for my “bravery.” I feel very small receiving that kind of
April 7th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.07
Please feel free to use this post for comments and trackbacks not related to other posts on the site. If you leave a trackback your post must include a link to this one and, as always, comments claiming the sun
April 7th, 2007 at 4:33 am
Jules, didn’t they teach in school that it is unethical for you to so obviously be on the side of white hats? Walter and Dan must be shaking their heads at you.
Thanks, by the way.
April 7th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
The Fadhil family, is very brave in word and deed. In fact, I expect to see that family name as President of Iraq, one day. Guys, (and Gals) just remember us little people when you are at the pinnacle…:).
Oh, Jules, you ain’t to bad either on the brave word and deed thingy, either.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
“To consider yourself dead already is a liberating thing”
Yes, it’s like a big weight is removed and you can move and think much better.
Strange how the mind works.
Thanks for your recollections and your writing it down and sharing it.
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA