The Fourth Star (25 page)

He’d spent only three days in country, but he was already convinced most of the civilians in the Green Zone were fooling themselves about what it was really like outside the walls: “Bremer is a mini-Rumsfeld. He is quoting statistics, as he nears the end of his stay, that make him look good and are not based in reality—‘unemployment in Baghdad is 11 percent.’ Give me a break,” he jotted in his journal. “CPA is more than dysfunctional, enough said.” He noted as well that Bremer had ordered the closing of
Al Hawza
, a newspaper published by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery anti-U.S. cleric. The paper had recently published an editorial with the headline “Bremer Follows the Steps of Saddam.” Within hours of the closure, hundreds of Sadr’s followers were protesting in the streets near the newspaper’s offices. “The decision to shut down the
Al H
newspaper will prove to be a big mistake,” Chiarelli predicted. His instincts about the mood in the capital were right.

The first reports came in a little before seven o’clock in the evening. An American patrol escorting sewage trucks in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City had been ambushed. The patrol consisted of nineteen men, along with a translator, in four Humvees. Two of their vehicles already had been
knocked out by the enemy gunfire. The embattled platoon had sought refuge in a house down a side street and was still taking fire. Chiarelli was at the division headquarters near the Baghdad airport when he got word of the attack. “Sir, there’s at least one kid in bad shape, and his platoon is still pinned down,” Colonel Robert Abrams reported over the radio. Abrams was already on his way to Forward Operating Base War Eagle, the American outpost on the outskirts of Sadr City.

It had only been a few days since Bremer had shuttered
Al Hawza
, the tiny Baghdad newspaper loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The United States followed that move by arresting one of the firebrand cleric’s top deputies. Most commanders considered Sadr, the son of a martyred Shiite cleric, to be little more than a street thug who had used his father’s name to build a following in east Baghdad’s slums. His impoverished supporters weren’t willing to die for him in large numbers, U.S. intelligence reports insisted. The reports were wrong.

“Terrorize your enemy,” Sadr proclaimed following the newspaper closure and the arrest of his aide. “God will reward you well for what pleases him. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their violations.” In Sadr City, hundreds of armed men, many dressed in black with green scarves wrapped around their heads, stormed police stations and piled trash at intersections to block patrols. Ragtag police and army units deserted en masse. When he heard about the spreading anarchy, Chiarelli could have jumped in his Black Hawk and flown the ten miles to the city’s east side, where the firefight was unfolding. But he stifled the urge. From everything he could tell, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Volesky, the battalion commander at War Eagle, was on top of it. He didn’t need a two-star general showing up to interfere. Nor was Chiarelli in a position to start issuing orders anyway. His soldiers were deployed all over Baghdad, but he wasn’t scheduled to take formal command for another two weeks. Until then, the 1st Cav reported to the outgoing commander, Major General Marty Dempsey of the 1st Armored Division. The temporary arrangement meant that Chiarelli’s soldiers, the troopers he had spent months training, were fighting for their lives only a few miles away, but he could only monitor the battles over the radio.

So he sat or paced in his headquarters, a tangle of nerves. The incoming reports provided only sketchy information. When the radio went quiet, Chiarelli left his air-conditioned tent to grab a quick smoke, a habit he had reacquired since arriving in Iraq. He knew that his staff was taking its cues from him, and tried to keep his composure. He told them not to keep pestering the battalion for updates; the battalion didn’t need headquarters making their lives more difficult. Walking outside, Chiarelli called Dempsey by cell phone. “I know my guys are in good hands with you, Marty,” he said.

But in Sadr City the rescue was failing. Minutes after the first call for help, three convoys of Humvees and trucks sped out of War Eagle. As soon as they entered Sadr City black-clad fighters crouched on rooftops unleashed a torrent of fire that tore through their unarmored vehicles, forcing them all to turn back. In one instance sixteen soldiers traveling in an open-bed truck had been cut to ribbons. One was dead and all the rest were wounded. Colonel Abrams called Chiarelli from War Eagle and gave him a preliminary casualty count, warning that the numbers were going to rise. Start sending dustoff helicopters for the wounded, the colonel advised, and keep them coming. At War Eagle’s makeshift aid station casualties were everywhere, some on stretchers and some on bare ground.

Out in the city a rescue effort consisting of seven tanks broke through to the stranded soldiers. Of the original nineteen soldiers who had been ambushed, seven were wounded and one was dead. Seven rescuers were killed and more than sixty were wounded, most by shrapnel and bullets that tore through their vehicles. About 500 Sadr supporters died during the two-hour fight.

That night, as the casualty toll was still climbing, Chiarelli stepped outside his headquarters tent, his eyes welling in the dark. He thought about the families who would shortly be notified that their sons and husbands were dead. He thought about Beth, who, as the wife of the division commander, had the difficult job of doing what she could to ease the pain of those families. And he thought about his mission. No one had imagined his men would be in full-scale battles on the streets of Baghdad. There had been only one major attack on U.S. troops in Sadr City the previous year.
What was happening? “You didn’t expect to be in that kind of fight,” he recalled.

He went back inside and placed a call to General Eric Shinseki, the retired former chief of the Army who had been belittled by Bush administration officials for suggesting that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. Shinseki had been one of Chiarelli’s mentors and as much as anybody was responsible for his rise to command of the 1st Cavalry Division. No one was at Shinseki’s home back in the States, so he left a message, his voice choking up on the answering machine. “Sir, I just wanted to tell you we got into a really hard fight. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

At seven the next morning Chiarelli choppered out with Dempsey to War Eagle. He stopped in first to see Volesky. “We’ll make it through,” Chiarelli said, embracing his battalion commander. Then he headed off alone to the aid station. Mounds of bloodied uniforms and boots were still piled outside. The badly wounded had been evacuated hours earlier, but dozens more with less serious injuries were still laid out on stretchers. The sight of bloodied soldiers was not something Chiarelli had ever experienced before. He walked down the rows of prostrate men, telling them they had performed heroically and handing out coins with the 1st Cav insignia on them. He didn’t want to be the general who flew in after the action and gave out trinkets, but there was not much more he could do. One of the wounded, a young enlisted soldier, looked up at Chiarelli. “Sir, why didn’t we bring our tanks?” he asked. Chiarelli had no answer that would suffice. He wanted to tell the soldier that he had fought with the Army to bring some armored vehicles. But even those few tanks were still in transit, not scheduled to arrive in Baghdad for a couple of more weeks. “We didn’t know,” he finally told the soldier. “We didn’t know.”

He didn’t get around to recording his thoughts about the battle until four days later: “Rough couple of days. Sunday night we lost 7 soldiers (+1 from 1AD),” he wrote, using an abbreviation for the 1st Armored Division. In his leather-bound notebook, he copied out the names of the dead soldiers.

The memories of the April 4 battle stayed with him—the powerless
feeling as he sat in his headquarters while his men fought and bled on the streets, the inevitable second-guessing about whether he had done everything he should have to prepare them. “1AD was in command,” he wrote in his diary. “Nevertheless, I would not have done anything different.” There was one thing, though: a day after the battle, Chiarelli drafted a sharp request to bring over the rest of his armor from Texas. When the Pentagon failed to respond, he kept pestering his superiors. “Our request for additional tanks and Bradley’s is not going over well. No one will call me,” he wrote in an e-mail at one point. “What I find concerning is the number of people outside Iraq who are arguing against our request without giving us the benefit of the doubt.”

Sometimes it seemed as if the whole of the U.S. military had decided the war was over, while his men were fighting block-by-block battles. Every day helicopters marked with red crosses would land at the Combat Support Hospital in the Green Zone, carrying the wounded. Around this time, in a move to reduce personnel, the Army medical team had been cut in half in Baghdad. That meant fewer doctors to treat wounded 1st Cav soldiers. At the Green Zone hospital, he jotted bitterly in his journal, “they have 21 beds and of those 17 are filled by Iraqi prisoners.”

In the late afternoons he often walked over to the hospital to visit his soldiers in the recovery wards. He began carrying index cards in his breast pocket with the names, hometowns, and parents’ names of every soldier in his division killed in action, a stack that grew and grew during his year in Iraq, eventually numbering 168. He went to all of their memorial services, and when he had a spare few minutes, he’d study the cards.

The fighting, which began in early March in Sadr City, quickly spread across a wide arc south and west of Baghdad. Needing more troops to handle the uprising, General Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, canceled the departure of the 1st Armored Division and wheeled its troops south of Baghdad to reclaim the Shiite-dominated towns where Sadr’s supporters had seized police stations and government buildings. Meanwhile, an even bloodier battle was going on with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, where the Bush administration had ordered the Marines to storm the city in response to the brutal murder of four American contractors there. Abizaid had argued for postponing the moves against Sadr until after the Fallujah attack.
“I am not sure we should be going on two different fronts in this environment,” he told Sanchez, who disagreed. In a decision that proved disastrous, Abizaid backed his field commander.

Only days into the Fallujah assault President Bush suspended it after Sunnis in the fledgling governing council threatened to quit. Abizaid, who was in Baghdad at the time, disagreed with the decision, arguing that it would embolden Muslim extremists. But it wasn’t his call. He told Bremer and Sanchez that he would deliver the president’s order in person.

On April 9 his helicopter touched down amid an insurgent mortar barrage at the U.S. base on the outskirts of Fallujah. Inside the headquarters building, the Marines launched into an update that lasted only a few seconds before Abizaid stopped it, telling them that a decision had been made to halt operations. One seat in the room, reserved for the division commander leading the attack, was empty. Major General James Mattis, a smart and fierce officer who went by the radio call sign “Chaos,” had been out visiting his troops when his convoy was ambushed. He strode into the headquarters about thirty minutes late, his pants spattered with the blood of his wounded driver. When Abizaid delivered the bad news he exploded. Mattis had been reluctant to launch the assault initially, asking for more time to pick off the enemy with snipers and build contacts in the city, but had been overruled. Now he believed his Marines were only days from taking the city. “If you are going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna,” he snarled at Abizaid, updating a famous quote from Napoleon Bonaparte.

Abizaid knew what it was like to be in a firefight and lose troops, and he’d expected that Mattis would be upset. But the Marine’s fury caught him off guard. Part of him wanted to tell Mattis that he’d argued strongly for giving the Marines time to finish the assault and that the president had overruled him. He resisted the urge. He listened to his subordinate general yell, then nodded and walked away without a word. Once the civilians had made their decision, Abizaid believed it was his job to execute it as if it were his own.

At Sanchez’s headquarters the mood was grim. “We had accomplished the seemingly impossible task of uniting everybody in the country against us,” recalled Colonel Casey Haskins, a member of Sanchez’s staff. Mortar attacks into the Green Zone suddenly came in daily barrages, and attacks
on supply convoys headed north from Kuwait soared. One day in early April, eighty trucks were lost. In the dining halls, the once-plentiful array of choices dwindled. By mid-April, the hot breakfast entrée was sliced hot dogs. Lunch consisted of Meals Ready-to-Eat, the packaged rations issued to soldiers in combat. Hoping to quash rumors about possible evacuations, Bremer had an aide reassure the CPA staff that plenty of supplies had been stockpiled. But the briefing only stoked rumors of a possible evacuation. A worried Spike Stephenson quietly began putting together a contingency plan for getting his staff out of the country.