Grunts (69 page)

One of the IEDs—a double-stacked land mine—claimed the life of Private First Class Kenny Rojas. Another terrible concoction, consisting of a mine and several 155-millimeter artillery shells, killed Specialist Joshua Kynoch, a Bradley driver. Seven other soldiers from the battalion were killed in the course of the year. Sergeant Daniel Torres and Staff Sergeant Steven Bayow of Bravo Company were the first two soldiers to lose their lives. In early February, they were riding in the back of an open-topped Humvee as it left FOB Summerall in Bayji. Almost immediately they ran into an IED. The explosion killed both of them instantly. In May a fanatic drove a car bomb into a Bravo Company Humvee, flipping it over three times, killing Private First Class Travis Anderson and wounding four others. Another car bomb killed Sergeant Carl Morgain, a Pennsylvania National Guardsman attached to the battalion. That same month, an IED that was concealed underneath a tire exploded and killed Delta Company’s Private Wesley Riggs as he was pulling the tire off the road. In August and September, respectively, IEDs killed Lieutenant David Giaimo and Sergeant Kurtis Arcala. In many cases, the Cottonbalers, through good intelligence work and targeted raids, apprehended the killers.
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This was satisfying but it was also reactive. The core of the battalion’s mission was not really to kill terrorists; it was to prevent their existence. Mirroring the overall American strategy in 2005, 2-7 Infantry attempted to do that by turning over security responsibilities to the new Iraqi Army and the local police. “I came here with a very myopic focus [that] success equals the defeat of the bad guys through shooting bullets,” Lieutenant Colonel Wood said in late October. He came to find out that the mission was much more complex than a situation where they could “kill enough terrorists and then peace was gonna break out.” The goal was not just security, but also economic growth. “The insurgents will be defeated through economic, government and military means. We are trying to provide an environment that would allow [Iraqis] to create a system to self-govern.”

To do this, he and his soldiers had to reach out not just to local government leaders but to the local tribes. To a great extent, the foundation of Iraqi society is built upon family honor and long-standing tribal loyalties, especially in midsized cities like Tikrit. Many of the tribes even predate Islam. In Tikrit, the al-Duri, Jumalee, al-Jabouri, al-Nassiri, and Albu-Ajeel tribes are preeminent. The tribal leaders, known as sheiks, hold great power and influence.

In 2003, when the Americans first occupied Iraq, they naively expected to co-opt the tribes, especially in the Sunni areas, to create a federal democracy. By 2005, they had come to understand the error of their ways. Army commanders now knew that stability in Iraq could only come through the tribes. Fortunately for the Cottonbalers, the previous unit in their AO, the 18th Infantry, had enjoyed reasonably good relations with the tribal sheiks, and this established a nice foundation for the 7th. Wood and his officers spent much of their time meeting with the sheiks, often eating lavish meals of rice, flat bread, lamb, and pastries, drinking chai tea, discussing a myriad of issues. In his recollection, the typical topics included “assisting the local government in accomplishing tasks . . . assisting in the building of local infrastructure . . . [and] generally helping the local population with every task they need help with, i.e. school, hospitals, businesses.”

They learned patience. Iraqis do not value punctuality or time management in the same way as Americans. In their culture, directness is impolite, a stark contrast with American norms. Even in business meetings, it is customary to engage in many minutes of idle conversation before getting to the issue at hand. The Americans learned to filter out much of what they heard. Any tip-off or insider information about the identity and location of a terrorist had to be thoroughly vetted. Too often, the Iraqis simply denounced people whom they did not like, people who owed them money, or people with whom they had long-standing feuds.

For the Cottonbalers, every meeting and every meal was an unglamorous exercise in diplomacy and restraint. Lieutenant Colonel Wood spent significant amounts of his time dispensing aid to the sheiks and their key power brokers, while encouraging them to help him with security. He also sometimes had to smooth over the angry feelings that resulted from accidental killings, even though, in most instances, the Cottonbalers did not do the shooting. Too often, supply convoys that regularly drove through Tikrit shot at any perceived threat. “I was more afraid of them than anything,” Specialist Dan Driss, a member of the battalion mortar platoon, commented. “They would shoot at anything.” Wood defused the angry feelings that eventuated from such killings by talking with the sheiks and the affected family members. Following local custom, he usually paid $2,500 to the aggrieved parties. This blood debt would then relieve the family members, and their tribal allies, of their honor-bound duty to avenge the death of their loved one.

In a couple of instances, Lieutenant Colonel Wood had to smooth over some serious cultural problems relating to gender. On one raid, a Special Forces team detained their female informant at her own request. “My life is not safe here,” she told the team. “Take me somewhere and secure me.” They did so without any assistance from the Iraqi Army or female U.S. soldiers. This was completely unacceptable in the local culture. The erroneous word spread among the Iraqis, particularly the soldiers, that the Americans had abducted and violated her. It took many weeks to dispense with that falsehood.

Another time, Lieutenant Lane Melton’s infantry platoon was supposed to set up an OP atop the roof of a male dormitory at the local college but mistakenly established their OP on the roof of the female dormitory a block away. The next morning, when they saw quite a few young women emerging from their building, they discovered their mistake and quickly left. “But the word went out immediately that U.S. soldiers were inside the female dorm doing who knows what,” Lieutenant Colonel Wood said. “We [brought] in key leaders and put out our version of the truth as quickly as we could. The perception was what was tough. For five months we fought the rumors of U.S. soldiers . . . routinely going up there and violating women. It was a onetime thing but we fought the rumor the whole year.” Wood even made regular appearances on local radio to debunk such rumors and shape public perceptions as positively as he could.

Some of the sheiks could not be trusted. “There was always bias in everything,” Lieutenant Corcoran commented. “You couldn’t take anything they said . . . at any sort of face value.” Some were playing a double game, maintaining ties with insurgent groups and the Americans. A few were funding insurgents or had family members involved in cells. Arresting these veiled enemies usually caused more trouble than it solved. Few of the sheiks were indomitable allies. That simply was not the culture of the place. The tribes’ loyalties were to themselves, not any outsider, whether that was the government in Baghdad, Americans from the other side of the world, or al-Qaeda, for that matter.
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For the Cottonbalers, the crux of their plan to turn over the security and economic growth of Tikrit to the Iraqis revolved around the Iraqi Army and the police (collectively called Iraqi Security Forces or ISF by the Americans). Among the many bad decisions the Americans had made in 2003, the disbanding of Iraq’s army was one of the worst. It eroded the security of the country and dumped many thousands of disaffected, militarily trained, unemployed, angry Iraqi young men into circulation. Realizing what a colossal screwup this had been, the Americans had since re-created the Iraqi Army and, by 2005, as the war grew more unpopular in America, they invested most of their hopes in turning the war over to this new security force. Thus, the soldiers of 2-7 Infantry spent much time and effort training Iraqi soldiers and assisting the local police with security. Wood established a Military Assistance Transition Team (MITT), parceling out his soldiers to work on a daily basis with the Iraqi Army. The Americans also launched a public information campaign to support this transition effort. They broadcast radio messages, handed out leaflets, and even rented billboards to post glossy ads featuring images of dedicated, professional soldiers and policemen.

Compared with the overall poor quality of the army and the police in Iraq at that time, the Cottonbalers were fortunate to work with soldiers and policemen who were at least reasonably proficient and reliable. The soldiers were mostly Sunnis from the province. They wore desert camouflage utilities (DCUs), helmets, boots, and a range of military equipment. Many had military experience in Saddam’s army, especially the officers. The Iraqis had little regard for NCOs (a major reason why Saddam’s army had been weak), so the Americans emphasized the importance of sergeants and tried to build an NCO corps essentially from scratch. “They tried,” Staff Sergeant Kenneth Hayes, an MITT team member, said of the soldiers he assisted. “There’s some clowns and then there’s some good soldiers actually trying to do the right thing. There was a dropout rate. We’d lose guys. But most guys were trying to do the right thing.” In characteristic American fashion, few of the U.S. soldiers knew the local language, culture, or customs. They communicated with their charges through interpreters or they would speak to the Iraqi soldiers who knew some English. As was typical in Iraq, corruption could be a real problem. One time, for example, the Americans supplied their counterparts with brand-new AK-47 rifles, only to find out that the Iraqi commander had stolen the rifles from his men so that he could sell or give them to his family members and fellow tribesmen.

Over time, the corruption ebbed a bit and the army units got better. Eventually, after much intensive training from the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers ran their own operations without all that much assistance except for logistical support. “It was nice to have them because they did a lot of raids . . . that were in farmlands so we didn’t have to worry about getting anybody in our company to go out there and do it,” Sergeant First Class Michael Deliberti of Charlie Company said. “Then they started taking MSR [main supply route] OP [outpost] for us.” The sergeant’s company commander, Captain Jason Freidt, felt that “a lot of ’em not only built confidence in themselves but the population developed confidence in them as well.” Captain Kelvin Swint, who headed up a MITT team and worked every day with the Iraqi soldiers, believed that “they were committed to cleaning up that area.” Throughout 2005, the Cottonbalers’ Iraqi Army partners conducted multiple operations and even assumed responsibility for the security of one FOB. This did not necessarily represent victory, but it was a step in the right direction.

The blue-shirted police, of course, were local men and not as well trained, well armed, or reliable. In some ways they were more important than the Army, though. The soldiers represented outside, American-sponsored authority, mainly at the province level since few of the Sunni soldiers had any love for the Baghdad government. Like the Americans, the Iraqi Army could, of course, enhance security wherever the soldiers went, but their influence was still limited because most were not from the areas where they operated. The police, as local men with the same tribal and family ties as everyone else, represented the best hope for stability. They were of mixed quality because some were insurgents, had ties with insurgents, were ambivalent about the situation, or, most commonly, they were frightened of reprisals. “When I first got to Owja,” Captain Freidt said of the section of Tikrit that his company patrolled, “the only police station I had, guys would be doing guard outside and they would be wearing ski masks. None of the policemen wanted anybody else to know that they were part of the Iraqi Security Forces.”

The situation did get steadily better, but the police and the soldiers were always prime targets for the insurgents, especially in off-duty hours. The insurgents, of course, were confined by no rules of war and virtually no human decency. Like mafiosi, they would hunt down the off-duty ISF members and their families and kill them. In one attack, an Iraqi Army officer’s brother got his legs blown off, and, in the memory of a Cottonbaler sergeant, “all he [the brother] was doing was coming outside to go to the hospital ’cos his wife was pregnant.” A terrorist walked up to another off-duty staff officer and pumped nine bullets into him. Insurgents killed the wife and brother of one police chief.

In fact, while most of the IEDs were meant for the Americans, the majority of car bombs and suicide bombings were directed at the police or the Army because they represented such a mortal threat to the predominance of insurgent groups in Tikrit. Throughout the spring and summer, the bombings happened with terrifying frequency. “At one point we had one going off every three days,” Lieutenant Colonel Wood recalled. These bombs killed three hundred civilians and inflicted one hundred casualties on the Iraqi police and soldiers. The most infamous such bombing took place on February 24 at a police station the Americans thought of as the best in the whole province. A car bomb took the lives of ten policemen at the station and wounded several others. Another time, insurgents detonated a car bomb in a crowd next to a police station, killing thirty-one people and wounding eighty-one more. The aftermath was truly horrible. “The ambulances were cramming as many wounded and dead as they could hold,” Lieutenant Jon Godwin wrote. “The air was so thick in some areas with fumes of burnt rubber and fuel mixed with the smell of burnt human flesh it was suffocating. Several bodies were still on the ground and had been covered with burkas. The surrounding businesses and apartments had the windows blown out of them. After the fire trucks had put out the flames, the water had mixed with the puddles of blood and turned gutters into small streams tinted red.” Another time, at the site of a suicide bombing, he saw the remains of four victims who looked as though they had been petrified in ashes, similar, he thought, to those who died in the volcano at Pompeii, Italy. Charged with gathering forensic evidence, he “found the bomber’s face a block from the explosion and I collected it into a garbage bag.” An Iraqi policeman then led him to a spot where the rest of the bomber’s head was lying grotesquely in a blob. “Even though I didn’t make any actual contact with the remains, I think I used a whole bottle of hand sanitizer after the incident.”