April 11, 2003
We slept in the Jumhuriyah intersection again. I had a spot on the roof of the first sergeant’s M113 this time. In the morning, sitting on top of Ortiz’s 113, I began to see non-embedded press filtering through. I called out to some of them.
“Where you from?”
“New York Times”
“Oh yeah? Boston Herald.”
“You’re a reporter? You look like one of the GIs.”
I felt like one of the GIs at this point, though I was already unbeknownst to myself beginning the process of detachment. Biggest difference between them and me. I was never in anyone’s army. I didn’t have to stay here.
Some GIs were talking to a carload of American press at the barricade on Jaffa Street. One of them was Thannasis Cambanis of the Boston Globe.
“Jules Crittenden? There’s a car rental lady in Kuwait City who’s looking for you. She wants to know where your Pajero is!”
“What? I told that lady I was leaving it at the Hilton!”
It took me a while to realize that this was an old message, dating from the end of February, when I had been in Kuwait a month and had neglected to renew my rental deal. The Filipina rental lady had been buttonholing every reporter she could find in an effort to locate me. In that shot-up intersection in Baghdad, I actually spent about half an hour wondering whether I had a car rental problem back in Kuwait to deal with, and rummaged around in my gear to locate the crumpled return receipt the desk clerk at the Hilton had given me. This is how the world starts to reassert itself, when you’ve been away for a while in eat sleep need take kill die live.
Kuni was around somewhere. The City Desk had told he had come up with the Marines and was now staying in the Palestine. Kuni Takahashi was the Herald’s photographer I had come over to Kuwait with at the beginning of February, living and working with him in Kuwait for six weeks. When the Pentagon gave the Herald three embed slots — Army, Marines and Navy — our bosses back in Boston flipped a coin. City Desk got the Army. Photo Desk got the Marines. They let the Navy embed go.
Kuni’s English is far better than my Japanese, but he had a particular way of putting things, and he had the photo editors scratching their heads when he got to Baghdad and told them his next mission.
“I am looking for Jews in Baghdad.”
“Jews?” said Arthur at the Photo Desk. “What are you talking about? There aren’t any Jews in Baghdad.”
“No, no. Jews! I am looking for Jews!”
A little later that morning, he found me. One of the GIs found me sunning myself on the roof of the 113 and reported, “There’s some Japanese guy up there on the bridge asking for you.”
They had already let him through the wire and I met him halfway. Kuni and I grinned like idiots and gave each other a big back-slapping embrace. It was a warm reunion, though of course it quickly went downhill. I had always considered Kuni to be a highly talented and resourceful pain in the ass, and was honored that he thought the same of me.
Kuni had a story to tell. When we separated on March 11 in the parking lot of the Kuwait Hilton, his bus took him to an embed with a Marine tank battalion. But for the first five days of the war, the battalion commander refused to let him transmit his pictures. It was a violation of the embedding rules, which stated that we could always transmit, as long as we didn’t give away the plan. Kuni continued to badger the command staff, but was becoming increasingly frustrated. In fact, knowing Kuni, he must have been going out of his mind. Then circumstances took a fateful turn.
“At one place where we stopped, I saw a photographer I didn’t know. I said, ‘Where did you come from?’ He said he was unilateral. There was a convoy of Pajeros. I told him my problem and asked if they had room for me. He said yes. Now I had to decide, in 10 minutes. I decided there was no reason for me to stay, so I gathered all my equipment, and I told the lieutenant, ‘I am going. There is no reason for me to be here if you won’t let me transmit.’ “
Kuni was making a bold leap, on a more dangerous course than the one we were following. Unilaterals made up the majority of those journalists killed during the initial 21-day period of the invasion. But it was a move that would pay Kuni huge dividends and of more immediate importance, it gave him the sense of freedom he needed. Kuni had never liked the idea of embedding. It is ironic that his was the only case of blatant disregard for the embedding rules I heard about on the part of the military. Every other embed I have spoken to had a satisfactory if not a highly positive view of how the arrangement was handled.
The sense of freedom that Kuni achieved was somewhat illusory, however. While he could file whenever and whatever he wanted, he quickly discovered that he and his fellow unilaterals were reliant on the U.S. military for everything. Food, fuel, water. Kuni’s convoy of rental 4X4s fell in with a column of more agreeable Marines. LTC McCoy of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment accommodated the unilateral camp-followers with daily briefings and allowed them to come along on operations. The unilaterals traded sat phone time with the Marines for water, gas and MREs, bartering time on the phone with loved ones back home for these essentials. They followed the column through blinding dust storms and endless night drives, squinting to make out the unlit vehicles and narrowly avoiding collisions repeatedly. Based on my own limited experience of driving blind in a convoy’s dust in broad daylight back in the Kuwaiti desert, I couldn’t imagine how it was possible to do it at night under blackout conditions. Kuni, who I know to be ridiculously brave and understated, said his turns behind the wheel were utterly terrifying. The Marines themselves had night vision and infrared blinkers their thermals could pick up. Eventually, the Marines agreed to hang glow-sticks off the back of their tracks so the unilateral drivers would have something to focus on.
“You get any good pictures?” I asked Kuni.
“Yeah. I got one picture a couple days ago of the Marines crossing the last bridge into Baghdad. It ran on the front page of the Washington Post,” Kuni said. “Very big.”
He got a few others, as well. But if you want to see that picture today, just go to just about any Washington Post online Iraq article. Kuni’s picture is the billboard for their “Eyes on the War” Iraq photo feature. Two Marine NCOs shouting “Go, Go!” as jarheads do what jarheads do, push forward under fire. Kuni got that picture the same way he got all his great Iraq and Liberia combat shots. He didn’t give a damn about anything but what was in his frame.
Kuni would end up winning the Associated Press Best News Photo of the Year and other awards for that picture. He should have won a Pulitzer, but was bypassed in that competition. Shock and Awe were out of fashion by then. It is one of the best photos of Americans in combat I know about.
Our catching up done, I immediately got on Kuni’s nerves that morning in Baghdad by asking him to take pictures of Lustig, Wolford and several other key players in A Company. Kuni griped about it, saying he didn’t think these would run and he wasn’t interested in taking portraits. But he did it, and the pictures did run in the Herald a couple of days later, to my petty satisfaction. Kuni hated being asked to take any picture simply to illustrate a reporter’s copy, being a purist who believed in shooting images for their inherent visual strength. Reporters were marginally useful to him, to be tolerated when they helped him get into position for a shot, but generally just a nuisance.
Kuni and I always bickered like the kids in the back seat on a long family vacation. But after Iraq, after he left the Boston Herald and returned to Baghdad with the Chicago Tribune, he sent me a couple of nice “wish you were here” emails. Absence had made the heart grow fonder. He told me I had “balls” and even though I was a big pain in the ass I brought a spirit to my work he found lacking in other reporters. I was highly flattered to hear this from someone of Kuni’s courage and professional caliber. I felt the same way about him. None the less, I wrote back, it’s a good thing we aren’t working together. We would end up killing each other.
My friends the Assassins provided Kuni with something moderately interesting to shoot that morning. In front of the tall red Planning Ministry building at the foot of the Jumhuriyah bridge was a big statue of Saddam … Saddam in the fedora, firing the rifle in the air. This rendition of the theme stood 30 feet high on its pedestal and had a cartoonish quality, looking like a cross between Col. Sanders and Teddy Roosevelt, with Ronald McDonald shoes. When warm Coke from the stocks in the palaces was distributed among the GIs — an unbelieveable luxury that we savored — we threw the empties at this colossus to see who could smash one of the thick old-fashioned glass Coke bottles against Saddam’s face. It was harder than it looked.
This Saddam had watched over the pitched battle here on April 8, suffering no visible damage while the lovely sculpture of Arab women at the well in the park across the street was badly blasted. Yet another injustice. Capt. Wolford decided that this must not stand.
The company’s M88 tank hauler was brought up. The mechanics attached a long section of chain around the statue, and backed up. The chain broke, whipping back and narrowly missing the M88 driver’s head where he was up in his hatch. So they tried again with a couple more lengths of chain. The driver dropped down this time, and Saddam slowly toppled off his pedestal. A cheer went up from the onlooking G.I.s and Iraqis.
“Evil, evil!” an Iraqi youth shouted in English, pointing at the downed Saddam. Another picked up a chunk of concrete and pounded Saddam’s head with it. GIs and Iraqis climbed up on his body for pictures. Kuni shot all this, though he wasn’t much impressed, as he had been there for the big Saddam-toppling over in Firdas Square a couple of days earlier. You know, the one on CNN, when the Marines liberated Baghdad.
But if there wasn’t much for Kuni, there was something there for me. A man identified by his friends as an Iraqi political prisoner, released by other Iraqi civilians Thursday after the guards had fled, stood back from the excitement, looking on. It was easy to believe he was what they said he was. He was pale, almost ashen gray in color, and visibly stunned by what was happening around him. Uncertain in speech and edgy after three months of imprisonment that he said included beatings and electric-shock torture.
“This is like a dream,” the young man said in Arabic as an English-speaking friend translated. “I can’t believe that Saddam is gone. I thought I was going to be killed … I can’t believe Saddam’s head will be disappeared.”
That day, 4-64’s units pulled back into the palace complex and gave the Iraqis free reign of the intersections. The battalion was a combat unit, focused on fighting Iraqi and Syrian holdouts, and neither trained nor equipped to take on the civil administration of the country, LTC deCamp said when I asked him about it. He said the issue of how and when to bring in a short-term civil peacekeeping force was being discussed at the 3rd Infantry Division headquarters.
“We really didn’t want to get into the middle of policing up who’s good and who’s bad,” deCamp said. The 3rd ID’s after-action report months later would single this issue out as an area in which it was let down by higher command, as it was directed to carry out combat operations without any preparation for the aftermath.
At that time we still had no clue about what was to come, that chaos would drag out and that within two months, a deadly insurgency would emerge. But among the many Iraqis welcoming the Americans, I had already encountered a couple of voices of dissent.
“The people are losing their minds,” said Abdul Monaam, until a few days earlier an Agriculture Ministry manager. I met him up at the wire on the Jumhuriyah Bridge.
“Everything stolen and burning. The people are angry. Anger at old government. Anger at this all you see. I am very sad about this. What American army is doing? Not doing anything, not light, not water, not human,” Monaam said.
Gesturing at the war damage all around, he said, “No man can be happy with this. Happy to change the Iraqis to animals, to thief? Any Iraqi must be sad in this.”
Yeah, OK. I took notes and didn’t argue with him, but I was thinking about what an animal and a thief his old boss was, and wondered who made the Iraqis like this. Us who showed up four days ago?
Down in the intersection, some of the soldiers reflected on what they had seen.
“There are so many good people in Iraq,” said Sgt. Gibson. “There are just a few assholes who make it bad for all of them. Some many people came through here thanking me. One woman fell down and tried to kiss my boots. I said, ‘No, don’t do that.’”
He gestured at the rubble of the buildings around the intersection.
“This wasn’t our doing. This was their doing,” Gibson said about the Republican Guard and fedayeen who resisted the American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.
We were billeted in a small but palatial administrative building. It appeared to have been headquarters for some kind of security unit, and included a wardroom with a pool table, couches and a lot of bad art. That’s where I got my Saddam, which later became world-famous. As the tankers poured into the building and began setting up their folding cots in actual rooms under a roof, I took out the Navy dive knife I had strapped to my body armor and cut a painting out of its frame. Saddam, lounging in a Bedouin tent in the desert, with his cousin Mahmoud al-Tikriti by him, listening intently to a tribal chieftain. It wasn’t as bad as most Saddams and looked like it had some political significance. Saddam listening to his people. Saddam the wise. Look, this important guy and Saddam are paying attention to each other, only that guy’s up on his knees and Saddam’s laying back on his ass. Someone had scratched Saddam’s face with a key, but not so bad. That painting gained worldwide notoriety a week or so later when I was pulled over by U.S. Customs and became the international poster boy for Iraqi looting over, of all things, a Saddam painting. I rolled it up. I was going to have Saddam on the wall of the oak-paneled library in my dotage, to refer to while telling lies over brandy and cigars.
Most of the unit, those not on sentry duty, slept inside the four-story administrative palace that night, delighted to be within four walls. I didn’t like the lingering patchouli smell of the “Sumer” butts in there or the rotten bastard feel of the place, so I unfolded a stretcher from Ortiz’s track. I prefered to sleep under the sky as I had all along, recognizing I wouldn’t be doing that much longer. There was sporadic gunfire all night.
Topics: Uncategorized, Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:53 am on Wednesday, April 11, 2007
19 Responses to “April 11, 2003”
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April 11th, 2007 at 1:36 am
God, those effing Pajeros. I loathed dealing with the Kuwaiti rental agencies (even through the US Army), but loved the air conditioning. Soooooo much better than hummers!
And that looting…….I don’t think that we’ve could have done much more than protect key points, even if there was a decent plan for occupying Iraq. There was way too much built up anger and resentment. From what I heard and read, that looting was as much revenge as it was wealth redistribution.
BTW, I don’t recall……did Customs confiscate that painting? If so, too bad!
April 11th, 2007 at 1:55 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.11
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 11th, 2007 at 1:55 am
April 11, 2003
April 11, 2003 Critter Crittenden We slept in the Jumhuriyah intersection again. I had a spot on the roof of the first sergeant’s M113 this time. In the morning, sitting on top of Ortiz’s 113, I began to see non-embedded
April 11th, 2007 at 4:09 am
Who was it said the most dangerous time during a war was at the beginning and at the end? Chaos rules at both times.
April 11th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I’m curious, Jules: In the entire time you were in Iraq, did you ever see any American troops outfitted to take precautions against chemical, biological or radioactive weapons?
Real Jeff says: “I don’t think that we’ve could have done much more than protect key points, even if there was a decent plan for occupying Iraq.”
True enough, but at a minimum, we should have secured the munitions depots and the Baghdad Museum.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:09 am
You need to pay attention better, corndog.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:10 am
“MOPP 4! MOPP 4! Let’s go!” Baxter shouted.
“True enough, but at a minimum, we should have secured the munitions depots and the Baghdad Museum.”
The Museum and other small points, yes (although the looting of the Baghdad Museum was not as bad as originally reported, thanks to the actions of the curators).
The munition depots? Hussein stockpiled HUGE amounts of munitions in multiple depots. I don’t recall the exact figures, but he had been buying ammo of all sorts since the Iran-Iraq war, almost non-stop. We are talking perimeters of miles in length, virtually undefendable. Hussein controlled them by terrorizing the Iraqi population into submission, so stealing munitions for IEDs was not the threat it is today.
In some places, it would be easier to bury the stockpiles and cap them with concrete than try to blow them all up. Those were the plans when I was in the sandbox.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Crap, I screwed up the bolding! Hope this doesn’t deplete your fonts budget, Jules.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Be gentle, JeffS. Gen. Cornelius Dogg has earned his armchair. Many were the Monday mornings I was astonished by the skill of his quarterbacking.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:16 am
You depleted my fonts!?! Damn your eyes!
… what the heck is font depletion anyway.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Sorry, I missed the MOPP, MOPP segment in all the, um, excitement.
JeffS,
Not sure the point you’re making. Are you saying that the munitions dumps could not have been secured against intruders? Is that possible? If so, doesn’t it totally undercut the Rumsfeld Doctrine? Looks to me like it does, but then again, it’s Monday morning.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Are you saying that the munitions dumps could not have been secured against intruders?
Yes.
Is that possible?
Is what possible? Not securing miles of nearly open desert? Or securing miles of nearly open desert? Sounds like you need coffee.
(A gentle hint: Fences work best with honest people.)
If so, doesn’t it totally undercut the Rumsfeld Doctrine?
Not when I was in the sandbox. Of course, it does look different from the armchair, doesn’t it?
Looks to me like it does, but then again, it’s Monday morning.
It’s Wednesday morning. Have another cup of coffee, and then go out and buy a calendar. May I suggest this one?
April 11th, 2007 at 11:08 am
There were (and still are in some cases) hundreds, if not thousands of places around the country where munitions from the Iran/Iraq war are scattered around the country. Artillery firing positions that the Iraqis apparently abandoned and never made any efforts to try and secure. It was amazing to see what was either left unsecured or just buried, the vast majority of which could be easily converted to IEDs. I’ve seen EOD blow up well over 100 anti-aircraft shells at one time, all from one village, buried under just a few feet of dirt.
In a year my ambulance made dozens of trips out with EOD to destroy UXOs (not including dozens of others for IEDs). The entire place is lousy with explosives.
April 11th, 2007 at 11:34 am
CavMedic, I saw the regular reports on the EOD efforts, both military and contractor. It’s a job that will take years to clean up. The amount of munitions Hussein stockpiled is simply staggering.
April 11th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Shorter JeffS:
“Must…think (gasp)(strain)…must use my brain.. big job, requires a lot of people, not enough troops, Rumsfeld doctrine calls for few soldiers, much equipment, (gasp)(strain), this must mean… (ugh)(hm)… oh, forget it, I’ll just call Corndog a moron. So much easier.”
April 11th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Not for the munition depots, corndog. The plan there was to destroy the munitions or bury them. I had some minor involvement in the munitions problem, by the way, so it’s not like I’m pulling talking points out of my ass (unlike some people who comment here).
More to the point, we were not discussing the troop build up and re-equipping them. Which I was there for also, by the way, so kindly take your conflating, condescending ignorance and stuff it up your oubliette.
April 11th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Fellers,
And don’t forget, when discussing the extent of the munitions there, that we are talking about an area the size of California. That still takes time.
For goodness sakes, French EOD groups are STILL finding stuff left over from WWI, let alone UXB’s from WWII. There are literally hundreds of chemical shells dug up each year in France, and farmers there still get blowen up on a rtegular basis, so it’s not like Iraq is an isolated example.
Respects,
April 11th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
“Not for the munition depots, corndog. The plan there was to destroy the munitions or bury them.”
Dude. The al Qaqaa depot (remember that one?) had 380 tons of ultra high explosives, and it was secured in 10 bunkers. It was on the list of locations to be secured, but after the invasion, while we installed security around the Oil Ministry, no one bothered with al qaqaa. Result? Much of the explosives were looted. Are you trying to tell me it made no difference that this happened? Are you trying to tell me this couldn’t have been prevented?
September 19th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
corndog:
You like to throw around terms and concepts like you think you actually have a clue.
“The Rumsfeld Doctrine” that you so love to puke out your worthless suckhole like it actually has significance refers to using troop levels that actually existed and could be logistically supported, as different from the magic wand wishes of those who’s heads were still working around the numbers prior to the “Peace Dividend” or other asshats who confuse the total number of US military personnel with those specifically useful to an actual deployment specifically for a land war.
As in all things actually functional, logistics logistics logistics is the primary limiter on force deployment.
And as to your line of absolutely ignorant and generally intellectually inbred reasoning on the munitions.
Listen up numbnuts. The depots were secured as best as could be secured under the constraints of a real life maneuver battle during the invasion phase and security was increased significantly afterwards.
Most of what has been used by your friends in the insurgency against the government of Iraq and the Coalition Forces comes from positions abandoned by Saddamites as their army was collapsing and/or were prepositioned by Saddamite loyalists to supply an uprising/insurrection after the forces collapsed.
There have actually been some incidences of intrusion and theft by your friends in the murder/death cult from established munitions dumps. These things are unfortunately par for the course in a chaotic environment. Such is life when dealing with actual reality. You demonstrate your “reality” of being nothing more than the degenerate snark driven bullcrap of those who suck up and swallow every tidbit and morsel of enemy propaganda as divine truth.
And as to your pathetic mewling about the museum, that was looted of anything of value long before Coalition Forces entered Baghdad.
Keep running your suck. Keep reminding us what side of the firing line you’re on.