Imperial Life in the Emerald City

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

  “Get in the vehicle!” Swope screamed to his men. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  As soon as Bourquin closed his door, a rocket-propelled grenade smacked against it. Normally that would have been enough to kill him and perhaps a few others in the Humvee, but the RPG lacked an armor-piercing tip. It exploded harmlessly against the steel-reinforced exterior. Bourquin wasn’t sure what was going on. Oh, shit, he thought. I’m gonna die.

  As Swope’s Humvee accelerated and closed in on the three other vehicles ahead of him, he figured they were out of danger. But Route Delta, which had been unobstructed a few hours earlier, now was strewn with tin cans, iron bars, and large rocks. Farther down, refrigerators, car axles, wooden cabinets, and entire sidewalk kiosks had been dragged into the road. Tires and piles of trash had been set alight, cutting down visibility to a few hundred feet.

  When they reached the debris, the shooting resumed. But instead of a few snipers, bullets and RPGs were raining down from almost every building along the road. To Swope, it felt as if the whole slum were firing at them. Although they were at opposite ends of the column, he and Aguero came to the same conclusion: There was no way to take these guys on. The platoon had to run the Mad Max gauntlet and get out of there.

  For almost everyone in the platoon, it was their first time in combat. And it felt, at moments, like a video game. Most of the RPGs missed the vehicles, landing with loud but harmless explosions on the road. The bullets hitting the Humvees clanged against the armor like stones. Yee-haw, thought Fisk, who was sitting behind Aguero. We’re finally getting to do what we’re paid for.

  His thrill ended a few seconds later. As soon as his lead vehicle crossed the next intersection, Sergeant Yihjyh Chen, the fifty-caliber roof gunner, collapsed in his turret. A bullet had entered his chest from the side, just above the top of his flak vest. Chen, a thirty-one-year-old from the Pacific island of Saipan, lost consciousness almost immediately and began bleeding from his mouth. Fisk tried to see where Chen was hit, but he couldn’t find a wound. He tried to check Chen’s pulse and felt nothing. Fisk pushed Chen’s body onto the lap of the other passenger in the back of the Humvee—an Iraqi interpreter named Salam who had first-aid training—before climbing into the turret to take over the fifty-cal.

  “Why the fuck are we still on the road?” Specialist Jonathan Riddell, the driver, shouted to no one in particular as he tried to swerve around the obstacles. “We need to get out of here.”

  Aguero screamed into the radio. “We have contact! We have contact!”

  Because both of the Humvee’s rearview mirrors had been shot off, Riddell and Aguero couldn’t tell how far behind the other three vehicles were. They tried asking Fisk, but he couldn’t hear them over the thunderclaps of the fifty-caliber. Aguero told Riddell to stop. Then they opened their doors for a quick glance. As bullets hit the inside panel of Aguero’s door, sending chunks of black foam flying into the air, he looked back and didn’t see a single Humvee.

  “You gotta turn around,” he told Riddell.

  Riddell looked at him incredulously. You want me to go back? That’s crazy. But it was an order. He pulled a wide left turn and began driving down the sidewalk, knocking over wooden stalls used to sell vegetables. After a block, Riddell ran into a clump of razor wire. Unwilling to wait for him to extricate the vehicle, Aguero jumped out and ran to the other three Humvees.

  “Let’s go,” Aguero screamed at Staff Sergeant Trevor Davis, the driver of the second Humvee.

  “My Humvee won’t move.” Davis gunned the engine for emphasis, and a large cloud of dark smoke wafted from under the hood. The vehicle behind Davis had the same problem. Humvees two and three had been shot too many times and had driven over too much debris.

  Sitting in Humvee three, Sergeant Justin Bellamy, a twenty-two-year-old from Warsaw, Indiana, prepared for the worst. This is it, he thought. We’re gonna die.

  Aguero contemplated packing all nineteen men into the two working Humvees, but there was no way everyone would fit. It would be suicidal, he concluded, to drive down the road with people on the hood and roof. They had to get off the street and take cover somewhere. Swope got on the radio to request guidance from the tactical operations center. Could he ditch the two broken vehicles? Affirmative.

  As bullets continued to fly, Aguero told half the platoon to strip off the radios and weapons systems from the two disabled Humvees. The rest of the soldiers and the other two vehicles sped down the nearest alley. About a hundred yards in, they spotted a three-story building poking up from a landscape of two-story ones. Tactical advantage, Aguero concluded. He ordered the soldiers to charge inside. Staff Sergeant Darcy Robinson blew open the door with a shotgun and a half dozen men followed him in. They rounded up the occupants and shoved them in one room. Another room turned into a casualty collection point. Chen’s lifeless body was dragged in there along with Staff Sergeant Stanley Haubert, who had been hit with shrapnel and was bleeding from his mouth. The machine guns stripped from the disabled Humvees were hauled up to the roof, where half the platoon had set up a defensive position. The others stayed in the alley, where the two working Humvees shielded them as they guarded against a ground assault.

  Before long, the attackers converged on both ends of the alley, firing their AK-47s wildly and launching RPGs at the Humvees. The soldiers opened up with their machine guns, mowing down dozens of attackers. That was a retarded move on their part, Swope thought. Another wave of gunmen tried to approach from the roofs of neighboring buildings. The machine guns did the trick again.

  As the standoff dragged on, the attackers began varying their tactics. Young children were sent into the alley to act as spotters for snipers. Hand grenades were heaved from parallel streets. One bounced off Aguero’s Kevlar helmet and hit a wall, sending shrapnel slicing into one side of his body, from his ear to his foot. He limped off to the casualty room.

  Through it all, Swope remained in his Humvee, manning the radio, which wasn’t portable. When they had left the base that morning, nobody thought they would need one.

  Back at the base, Lieutenant Colonel Volesky formally assumed command of the Sadr City area from the First Armored Division at 6:00 p.m. He had planned to hold a ceremony to unfurl his battalion’s flag. By 6:15, as Swope and Aguero were running for cover into the alley, Volesky put the proceedings on hold and scrambled reinforcements. Within twenty minutes, two QRFs—quick-reaction forces—of ten armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles apiece, one of which included Volesky, rumbled out of Forward Operating Base Eagle toward Route Delta.

  With the rescue squad on the way, Swope had to explain where the platoon was. But he couldn’t pinpoint the alley on a map with any certainty. On the roof, Sergeants Robinson and Bourquin fired off smoke grenades to draw the attention of two OH-58 Kiowa Warrior observation helicopters overhead, but the smoke from the burning tires obscured the signal.

  The two QRFs ran into trouble minutes after leaving the base. One of the units was besieged by hundreds of attackers along Route Silver, a street perpendicular to Delta. Four soldiers from that QRF were killed in the fighting and more than a dozen were injured, forcing the unit to turn back. The other QRF, the one with Volesky, also ran into an ambush as it attempted to approach Route Delta, which led them to double back and approach from another route. But once they finally made it onto Delta, where attackers had lined the road for two miles, they had no idea where to find the platoon.

  From his Humvee, Swope saw the Bradleys rumble past on Delta. And then he saw them head back in the other direction. He tried to radio them, but the channel was jammed with calls for help from the other QRF. Hey, we’re here, he wanted to shout toward the road. But they wouldn’t have been able to hear him.

  Watching the Bradleys drive away, Fisk said wryly, “The guys back at the FOB”—the forward operating base—“would have kicked ass to be here.” At Fort Hood, the soldiers had wondered if they would be eligible for the army’s combat infantryman badge. Earning one require
d participating in some bang-bang. After repelling the first wave of attackers, Riddell turned to his platoon mates and announced, “I think we got it.”

  With the two QRFs unable to rescue the platoon, the army’s heaviest armor was summoned: seven M1A2 Abrams battle tanks from the First Armored’s Crusader Company. The sixty-eight-ton tanks, powered by a jet engine and equipped with a 120-millimeter main gun, were impervious to small-arms fire and even RPGs. But they still needed to know where the platoon was.

  On the roof, Robinson and Bourquin were getting desperate. It was 9:00 p.m. and dark. They had been under siege for almost three hours. They were out of smoke grenades, and ammunition was running low. The bright orange reflective panel they had placed on the roof was useless now that the sun was down. They had tried lighting some discarded shoes they had found, but the flame wasn’t bright enough. Finally, Robinson walked up to Bourquin and ripped off the sleeves of his buddy’s desert camouflage uniform. He told Bourquin to do the same to him. Then they torched the fabric. The Kiowas spotted them.

  But there still was the problem of getting the information to the tanks. In the alley, Swope saw the first tank roll by. Then the second. Oh shit, he thought. They’re going to miss us. And the third. The fourth. We’re toast. The fifth. The sixth. We’re here for the night.

  The seventh tank got word from the choppers to stop at the entrance to the alley. The tank crew summoned others in the column. They loaded up everyone from the platoon and brought them back to the base.

  Late that night, Volesky tallied up his losses. Eight soldiers were dead, including Casey Sheehan, whose mother, Cindy, would later become a prominent antiwar activist. At least fifty were wounded. He estimated that more than four thousand Iraqi militiamen had been involved in the uprising.

  As he sat in the operations center, dipping snuff and spitting into a Styrofoam cup, he wondered what had gone wrong. He was certain that the attackers belonged to al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. But they were far stronger and better armed than his intelligence reports had indicated. Why, he asked himself, was there not better information about these guys? We went into this without a plan, he concluded, and now we’ve got a big problem.

  Over the next few days, the scope of the crisis became even more alarming to the generals commanding military operations in Iraq. Not only had al-Sadr’s militiamen seized every police station and government building in Sadr City, they had also unleashed a fierce rebellion across Shiite-dominated central and southern Iraq. The entire cities of Najaf, Kufa, Kut, and Karbala were in their hands. Within hours, the Mahdi Army overran elements of a Polish-led multinational military unit entrusted by the Pentagon to control that region. Black-clad militiamen swaggered in front of a gold-domed Shiite shrine. They set up checkpoints and roadblocks and proclaimed that they were the new sheriffs in town.

  The American military had stumbled into the sort of perilous urban combat that top commanders had tried so diligently to avoid since the start of the war. At the same time, the commanders found themselves in the middle of a two-front conflict: the bloody Sunni insurgency to the north and west of the capital, which American troops had tried for months to quell but could not, was compounded by a Shiite revolt to the south and east. Baghdad was more thoroughly cut off than it was during the American invasion a year earlier. Every major road out of the capital was shaded red—meaning it was a no-go route—on the military’s daily threat report.

  The Mahdi Army didn’t limit its attack to American forces. They also set upon Iraqi police stations in Sadr City. When the militiamen converged on the Rafidain police station, officers inside the blue-walled building sprang into action. They grabbed their possessions and ran home.

  “To shoot those people would have been wrong,” Sergeant Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consisted of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt, told me later. “If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him.”

  The collapse of police and civil-defense units across Iraq in the face of al-Sadr’s uprising stunned CPA officials. A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq’s new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help the marines fight insurgents in the streets of Fallujah. Both events revealed fundamental problems with the CPA’s strategy to build up the Iraqi police force and to create a new army after Bremer’s fateful order to disband the old one. The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform—a problem that the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the Mahdi Army rebellion. Of the nearly ninety thousand police on duty at the time of the rebellion, more than sixty-five thousand had not received any training.

  Another major mistake, Iraqi and American officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a forty-thousand-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half of the 140 officers had handguns. There were just ten AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot, and two radios in the control room. No one had body armor, save for a few guards at the front door who wore American military vests.

  In the case of the Iraqi army, the problem wasn’t equipment or training but esprit de corps. Bremer and his first security adviser, Walt Slocombe, had outsourced the training of new soldiers to a contractor. Upon graduation from the contractor-run boot camp, the new soldiers were assigned to U.S. Army units, headed by American officers they had never met. When those officers asked the Iraqis to fight, there was no rapport, no bond of trust forged through training, no reason why the Iraqis should put their lives on the line for a foreign army. In other nations, American Special Forces soldiers trained units and then deployed with them, a system that always seemed to work. But in Iraq, there weren’t enough American soldiers to do that.

  “The Americans misunderstood us,” said Major Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the Rafidain station. “We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them.”

  Bremer’s move to close the newspaper was a profound miscalculation. When he ordered the shutdown of al-Hawza, there was no comprehensive backup strategy for military action in case al-Sadr and his militia chose to fight back. There was no advance warning provided to soldiers in al-Sadr strongholds such as Sadr City. There was no coordination with senior army commanders. Attempts by the U.S. military to regain control of areas seized by the Mahdi Army resulted in two months of ferocious ground combat that was more intense than anything American troops had encountered during the year-old occupation or even the initial invasion of Iraq.

  Bremer chose to pursue al-Sadr at the same time tensions were boiling over in Fallujah, a Sunni-dominated city west of Baghdad. Two days before the newspaper closure, American marines killed fifteen Iraqis during a raid. Later that week, on March 31, four American security contractors were murdered by a mob. The contractors’ mutilated bodies were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

  Bremer vowed that the deaths of the contractors would “not go unpunished.” But there was little agreement among the Americans on the response. The marines wanted to wait until they could identify the culprits and then mount operations to apprehend them. “We felt… that we ought to probably let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge,” Lieutenant General James Conway, the top marine commander in Iraq, told me later. At the time, he said as much to his boss, Lieutenant General Sanchez, who passed it up the chain of command to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers conveyed Conway’s position to Donald Rumsfeld.

  But back in Washington, the desire for revenge was overwhelming. On April 1, the day after the attack, Rumsfeld and General Abizaid went to the White House to plot a response with President Bush and his national security team. Rumsfeld didn’t share Conway’s position with the president. Instead, the defense sec
retary presented a plan to mount “a specific and overwhelming attack” to seize Fallujah. Bush approved it on the spot.

  Sanchez would later tell Conway and his aides that “the president knows this is going to be bloody. He accepts that.” But at the April 1 meeting, according to a White House official involved in the discussions, Rumsfeld said that an attack on Fallujah “was something they could do with a relatively low risk of civilian casualties.”

  On April 4, the same day Swope’s platoon was attacked in Sadr City, two thousand marines converged on Fallujah. The following day, they began attacking—and encountered stiff resistance. Insurgents hiding in homes and mosques unleashed gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. Five marines died that first day, as did an untold number of insurgents and civilians. The next day, the insurgents employed an anti-aircraft gun to fire on American helicopters. The Americans responded with an escalating barrage of bombs, mortars, and gunfire, killing more insurgents and civilians. It was never clear how many civilians died, but it didn’t really matter. Al-Jazeera and other Arab television stations broadcast breathless reports of large-scale civilian deaths in the city.

  Rumsfeld and other proponents of a massive attack had believed that the threat of force would lead residents of Fallujah to hand over the contractors’ killers. If not, they believed the insurgents could be targeted with “smart bombs” and other munitions in surgical operations. But instead of giving up the insurgents, many residents rallied around them. And it wasn’t just in Fallujah. People in other cities, including Shiites who used to regard Fallujah’s residents as the hillbillies of Iraq, rushed to donate blood and money. And Sunnis in Fallujah and other Sunni-dominated cities in central Iraq, who had deemed al-Sadr a troublemaker, began to laud him as a hero. Each side was drawing strength from the other.