April 12-15 and after, 2003
The next few days begin to merge in my memory, as I began my perambulations around the palace district. I found LTC deCamp outside the Big Head palace, walking up the marble stairs of his grand entranceway. The command tracks and a couple of tanks were parked between the fountain and the pillars, under the noses of Saddam’s four oversized bronze tributes to himself.
“Nice setup,” I said.
“You gotta love this. This is like Patton in that German palace at the end of World War II,” deCamp said. He led the way up to his operations room, where he had his maps and paperwork spread out on Saddam’s big conference table, with staff officers and clerks in Saddam’s big ornate chairs at a couple of other desks and tables around the room.
I asked what the plan was, and deCamp said he expected his battalion would be pulling out in a matter of weeks. We definitely weren’t go on to Tikrit.
“Don’t report this, but frankly, at this point, we aren’t battle ready,” he said. Half the tanks were either broken down or plagued with problems such as Lustig’s immobile turret.
I told him if that was the case, I’d hang on for a few days to see how things developed, but I probably was going to be getting out of here soon.
One of Saddam’s gold-plated AK 47s was lying on the big table, along with a gold-plated Walther PPK handgun. DeCamp said he was going to have them shipped back to decorate his battalion HQ back at Fort Stewart. I was reminded of the 82nd Airborne’s museum at Fort Bragg where the collection includes a very nice bronze bust of Hitler with a bullet hole through his head, and a massive silver 18th century punch bowl inscribed with the arms of an old German regiment. At some point in the 1970s, the 82nd offered to give it back to that regiment’s veterans association, but the German vets told the 82nd, thanks, you keep it, it’s yours now.
“You seen the gun house?” deCamp said. I hadn’t. He asked Maj. Mark Rasins to take me over there. It was a bungalow on the western edge of the palace district.
There were several soldiers guarding it. Inside, we were literally walking on weapons that were piled a foot or more deep throughout the house.
“This is where he kept all the stuff he bribed people with, presents and stuff. A gunman’s dream,” Rasins said as he waded through the arsenal. “This is not your ordinary cache.”
There were old Arab flintlock jezails, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were ornate Arabic swords and massive broadswords that looked like something Conan the Barbarian would like — the kind of thing sold late at night on cable TV. There were elaborately engraved Winchester repeaters and shotguns of every description. And then there were the stacks and stacks of more ordinary Russian, Austrian and American rifles, Israeli burp guns, etc. There was a gold-plated Mauser bolt-action rifle. Dozens of brand-new Baretta 9 mils had already been looted before the soldiers got there, and the boxes were lying in the street out front.
I finally had a cold-water shower one morning in a small kitchen annex on the grounds of the palace where the company was billeted. I lit up the darkened bathroom with my mini-Maglite and tiptoed around broken glass, but managed to soap up and wash away a lot of the dirt I had accumulated since my last frigid dousing in the Kuwaiti desert nearly a month ago, not counting that whore bath a couple of weeks prior. After that, I walked around all morning with a silly grin on my face.
“Look at Critter. Critter’s clean,” said Sgt. Castillo, who was sitting with a group of mechanics and tankers.
“I’ve stripped off my protective layer of dirt,” I said.
The GIs were trading rumors. The 101st was coming to relieve them. The 4th Infantry Division was on its way. One soldier heard they’d be out of there in two weeks, on buses back to Doha, the big base in Kuwait. Another said it would be three weeks. Another said, forget it, we’ve got two more months here.
The hazards were not entirely gone. There had been two unsuccessful suicide-bomb attempts on military roadblocks and we heard regular shooting and explosions around the city. We would listen to try to detect what kind of weapon was being fired, how close, and whether it was the cook-off of a weapons cache being burned, exuberant Arabs firing into the air, or soldiers warning off a fast-approaching vehicle or engaging a holdout. The bodies were mostly gone, though I’d passed a blackened half a human lying on the pavement up a side street the day before. It was just a head and a chest, charcoaled, and didn’t even smell. I’d pick up a whiff from the hedges now and then.
Beyond the palaces and heavily bombed government buildings were the tree-lined streets and upscale homes of Iraq’s erstwhile privileged classes, the Baathist officials who were allowed to live around Saddam. The neighborhoods were dotted with makeshift fighting positions and the camps of the soldiers who had occupied them, with abandoned uniforms and weaponry lying around. I walked through some of the buildings and houses, some smashed up and ransacked, others as they were when the occupants had departed. It was a ghost town. I saw not a single soul and heard nothing but the sporadic gunfire from beyond the walls of this enclave. I tried some doors. None of these people were coming back, but it was creepy, walking through their abandoned homes, the end of their dreams and their way of life, such as they had been. Like an archaeological site of a historic perversion of very recent vintage. There was nothing ostensibly evil about the place. For that you had to know something about these people. That they had lived in fear, at the whim of cruel and capricious leaders, and they inflicted fear and suffering on those below them. There were playgrounds and toys. Some portraits and personal items remained, amid the gaudy, cheaply constructed furniture. They were good family men. Corrupt, brutal opportunists near the top of a system that murdered, tortured, raped and robbed other people’s sons and daughters without pity. Palaces excluded, few of these homes were anything special. But I had seen how most of the people lived in Iraq, and this was luxury.
I came upon a small, very ornate palace that had obviously been hit by a cruise missile. Large parts of it were lying across the driveway and on the lawn. A thick black glass door was now in pieces on the floor. Lying among the shards was a heavy cast-brass profile of Saddam that had once adorned the door. I picked the black glass off the back of it and put Saddam’s head in my pocket.
On the 14th, I said my goodbyes. I caught a ride to another palace where 2nd Brigade had its headquarters, a mile or so south of July 14th Square. GIs were camped all over the lawn. There was no ride to the airport until the next morning, so I was told to go set up with half a dozen Fox TV reporters, producers and engineers. It was like a gypsy camp. The Fox guys had been pillaging Uday Hussein’s palace, and had a collection of Uday’s multi-colored disco outfits hanging neatly on a line strung between two palm trees. Purple and red tiger stripes, clown-like polka dots, shimmering rainbow sharkskin.
“How do you like my looting jacket?” an Australian cameraman said, modeling one of the outlandish outfits. A chipmunk-faced American engineer was so pleased with his leopard-spot suit that he never took it off. He eyed my Saddam painting covetously and asked if I would consider a trade.
“What’ve you got?” I said.
He began rolling out paintings like a rug merchant. One heavy metal Barbarella scene and Arabesque abstract after another, at least a dozen of them, all tattered by shrapnel from the cruise missiles that had turned Uday’s palace inside out. I declined the trade. I later learned he was the one who blubbered and gave Customs my name when they busted him for lying to them about his looting, and asked who else was coming through with stuff.
I spent the afternoon lounging with the Fox guys and their hired British security man in the shade of the palms, trading stories. Someone passed around a collection of snapshots from Uday’s palace. A lot of Uday shots: at parties, giving out athletic awards, and the most fun, comparing muscles with nervous looking men in their underwear. As the sun began to go down, I went to see if I could scrounge some MREs in a big tent a few palms over. Some GIs had set it up like a Bedouin sheik’s desert retreat, with layers of Oriental rugs spread on the lawn for a floor, their platoon sergeant slouched like a third-string nabob in a gilded chair, his lower-ranking retainers in various positions of repose and readiness around him.
“You want som real food?” the sergeant said magnanimously. He cast his hand in the direction of the brigade mess, which was serving dinner 100 yards away through the palms. I dined that night on actual roast chicken, spaghetti and salad and potatoes and cole slaw. The salad in particular was unbelievable. I slept on the hood a Humvee under a big moon, my last night under the Iraqi sky.
The following morning, a convoy formed up to take a number of us out to Baghdad International Airport. We lounged in a wrecked terminal there till nightfall waiting to climb aboard a military transport plane.
More embeds showed up during the day. Nooch, the Chicago Tribune shooter, put in an appearance. He was scouring the airport for his stuff, but feared it was all lost. He had some story about the Humvee he had been riding in being blown up by a mine when he was not in it. Scott Nelson from Getty Images and a couple of others I recognized from Kuwait City showed up. A Belgian tried to get himself on the flight manifest, but once he told them he was non-embedded, the military handlers told him he needed to find his own way out the way he had come in.
It was dark when they finally led us out onto the tarmac, lined us up and marched us up the ramp of a C-130. We strapped ourselves into seats made of webbing along the bulkheads and popped in earplugs for the deafening, no-frills flight. The C-130’s engines never stopped, and when the cavernous plane took off, it climbed steeply and spat out flares to thwart any heat-seeking missiles. We rumbled high over the desert it had taken us days to cross a month earlier. I dozed a little, and shouted a little small talk over the engine roar with Fox’s Greg Kelly.
An hour or so later, we were on the ground again in Kuwait, and the C-130’s rear ramp dropped to deposit us at an airbase in the middle of the desert. We had called ahead, and a column of luxury SUVs from several four-star hotels were waiting for us at the gates, polite Pakistani chauffeurs in black suits hefting our dirt-encrusted gear for us. Suddenly we were out of the desert, on one of Kuwait’s modern highways, surrounded by late-model Mercedes and BMWs, passing rows of new white stucco townhouses. Bright street lights, lit-up stores and colorful neon signs.
I spent about an hour in the shower at the Sheraton that night. The bed felt strange, and it was true what they say, it’s hard to get comfortable in bedding that soft. I thought about my friends, the GIs back in Baghdad. We figured they would be out in a couple of weeks, but they were sent on to Habaniyah and Falluja instead. Most of them would not be home until September.
I had been back in New England for nearly three months, as long as I had been gone, when Baxter called in mid-July. He had been stabbed in the leg during a scuffle in Baghdad shortly after I left, but he was OK and was not evacuated. Then, when they moved the brigade up to the Fallujah area a month or so later, Baxter, Smitty and Sgt. Will were running a patrol in a Humvee when they were hit by an RPG. Smitty and Sgt. Will were OK, but Baxter got it in the leg and came home with a limp.
“So you got two Purple Hearts, huh?” I said.
“I didn’t exactly want either of them,” Baxter said.
He had only been home a couple of weeks, said he was having trouble sleeping at night. He was also getting into arguments with clerks at convenience stores. I told him all that was normal, just take it slow.
I ran into Kuni one morning on City Hall Plaza in downtown Boston when we were both assigned to cover the same event.
“I miss the smell of gunpowder,” Kuni said, a little theatrically. We began plotting the first of several return bids.
When I ran into other suburban dads around town, they’d say things like, “You must be glad to be back.”
I’d smile and say, “Yeah.” People don’t need to know where you’d rather be, and pretty much don’t want to hear about it. They definitely didn’t want to hear about some of the people who came to visit on a regular basis, and where my thoughts took me.
It was good to be home that summer, to give my kids gifts like a day at the beach with their dad. But I told my buddy Mike Kirsch, a CBS Miami reporter who would know what I meant, that I was losing the power of being dead already, and I hated it. Each day home was sapping me of its strength, and I felt misplaced in this most familiar of places. I was waiting for this peaceful life to regain its weight. It took a very long time.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:45 am on Thursday, April 12, 2007
10 Responses to “April 12-15 and after, 2003”
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April 12th, 2007 at 2:21 am
It took a very long time.
It does, doesn’t it? And I wasn’t even in serious combat.
Thanks for sharing your memories, Jules. Be sure to take it slow.
April 12th, 2007 at 2:28 am
April 12-15 and after, 2003
April 12-15 and after, 2003Jules Crittenden The next few days begin to merge in my memory, as I began my perambulations around the palace district. I found deCamp outside the Big Head palace, walking up the marble stairs of his
April 12th, 2007 at 2:34 am
Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.12
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 12th, 2007 at 2:38 am
It took a very long time.Hell, man, about all I did was shovel shit in Saigon and it even took me a very long time. Welcome home, Jules. And Real_Jeff.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:45 am
After almost 2 years in Viet Nam, I found life in the states to be dull, dull, dull. It took a while to go from ducking when I heard a sudden loud noise to merely flinching. I used to go into a kind of fugue state at the sound of a chopper — too long at aid stations. The oddest part was when I would react like that in public and I would look up to see some guy with a slight smile and recognition in his eyes. I wouldn’t trade it all for anything.
Thanks for sharing, Jules.
April 12th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Jules,
It’s amazing how fast the transition occurs, doesn’t it? One day you are in uniform, and the next, you are in a whole new world, with a whole new set of priorities.
People bitch and complain about the most trivial damned things. Masny times my wife will hear somthing someone says, and see me turn to glare at them, or start to open my mouth, and I’ll feel the claws of death on my arm as she firmly starts to lead me away, trying to change the conversation.
Sigh…..
Salty Dog, I can still tell the sound of a Huey from any other chopper. I get a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, like I’ve just done through some portal or somthing. The other thing is the smell of hot OD green canvas, like the cover on a deuce & a-half, or the big field tents. I get a whiff of that and I’m in a whole ‘nuther world, it all just comes rushing back. It’s funny how that works. Same with the Allison turbo-props of the P-3’s I had so many hours in. I hear them and I instantly know what type of aircraft is overhead.
Respects,
April 12th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Jules, how about doing an Old Dog a favor, assuming you read this and have
everyone’s email addresses like I think you do? Would you let Salty Dog know the
webmaster at Old War Dogs would really, really like to talk to him? My address, bill.faith@gmail.com, is also easy to
find on the site.
In the early ’90’s I made the mistake of moving into a motel right across TX
Hwy 10 from the Bell Helicopter plant. Did you know you can still have flashbacks after 20 years?
Salty Dog, Tim: Welcome home. Thank you for your service.
April 12th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
An Alphabetical Index Of Today’s Posts
2007.04.12 Dem Perfidy // Islamism Delenda Est Roundup 2007.04.12 Duke Non-rape Roundup 2007.04.12 Politics Roundup April 12-15 and after, 2003 Bill’s Nibbles // Open Post — 2007.04.12 Caution: This blog purchases civility offsets — Take 2 If I die …
April 12th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
There you go, SDog and Tim, old home week.
April 13th, 2007 at 1:49 am
For me it’s the smells….and the dark…..
not in a bad way really. It’s just kinda strange when a musty canvas smell gives you more of a rush than a car wreck.