Posted on 03/08/2004 11:37:17 AM PST by neverdem
Commander of 101st Finds Rhythm of Battle
Second of three articles
We crossed the border into Iraq at 9:55 a.m. on Monday, March 24, 2003, in Warlord 457, the Black Hawk helicopter of Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. At 90 knots and from an altitude of 70 feet, the landscape was flat and vast, a great brown pan stippled with tufted grass. Bedouins waved from their tents, closely watched by our flinty-eyed door gunners.
Severe weather was closing fast, and Petraeus wanted to reach Forward Operating Base Shell -- the 101st assault command post near Najaf -- before the storm arrived. After a brief stop south of Nasiriyah at a desert refueling point dubbed Exxon, we reboarded and headed north for the final 80-minute flight.
Petraeus seemed pensive. A murderous grenade attack in Kuwait early Sunday morning, allegedly by a disaffected sergeant, had wounded 16 of his soldiers, two of them fatally, just hours before the division's 1st Brigade began streaming into Iraq. Earlier that day, a deep strike near Karbala by the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment had turned sour, with two $20 million AH-64 Apaches lost and 28 others so riddled by Iraqi gunfire that the aircraft averaged 15 to 20 bullet holes each.
From the commander's seat in the right rear of Warlord 457, Petraeus looked across to where I sat fumbling, as usual, with the complicated seat harness. "This is not only going to take determination," he said over the intercom, "but sheer determination."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Even now, they have to suggest poor morale and can't admit that the a*hole was a Muslim sympathizer of Saddam.
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