AGHDAD, Iraq, April 10 — The sandstorm lasted two days, sapping morale and twice turning the setting sun the color of blood. Lt. Col. Steven E. Landis called the slanting and choking sands "the wrath of Allah." Posted on 04/13/2003 12:33:33 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
AGHDAD, Iraq, April 10 — The sandstorm lasted two days, sapping morale and twice turning the setting sun the color of blood. Lt. Col. Steven E. Landis called the slanting and choking sands "the wrath of Allah."
Supplies of water and ammunition ran low in these first days of the war as Iraqi fighters launched unexpectedly fierce attacks on troops and supply lines that now stretched nearly 300 miles to the rear.
The Army's Third Infantry Division swept across the harsh, open deserts of southern Iraq in less than 72 hours, an advance that was called the longest mass movement of armor since World War II and was as breathtaking as it was grinding.
The vanguard of the division's First Brigade — about 5,000 soldiers with tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and howitzers — crossed the striking escarpment north of Najaf on March 23, the war's third day.
The brigade's officers always said they would pause there for a day or two, resting their soldiers and refitting their weapons for the last push to Baghdad. But they were still there nine days later. The troops, accompanied by a reporter, endured wild fluctuations between the day's heat and the night's chill, numbing tedium, growing frustration, rising fear and mounting casualties.
The rapid march that Capt. Adam J. Morrison had at first called "the cannonball run" threatened to become a crawl, if that.
A single shot to the head killed Specialist Gregory P. Sanders on March 24 as he stood beside his tank in the Najaf area. He was 19 and the brigade's first soldier to die. Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon died on the 28th when the Bradley he was in crashed into a ditch. He was 32.
Four more from the same company — Pfc. Michael R. Creighton Weldon, Specialist Michael E. Curtin, Pfc. Diego F. Rincon and Sgt. Eugene Williams — died a day later when a bomb in a taxi exploded at a checkpoint. None had turned 25 yet.
That was the day, March 29, when Maj. Morris T. Goins, a tall, easygoing North Carolinian who is the First Brigade's operations officer, swore.
"You ain't going to get there," he shouted at another officer, gesturing toward Baghdad, "if all you're worrying about is what's back there."
Those were the darkest days of the division's sweep across Iraq, when fear, anger and doubt cut into soldiers in the desert like the grit in the wind. In faraway places, which to the brigade's soldiers, meant places like Kuwait and Washington, commanders and commentators questioned the Pentagon's strategy, contemplated an "operational pause," and debated the semantics of words like "bogged down."
But where the desert meets the fertile crescent of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the division's mechanized forces remained largely intact, even if bloodied on its flanks by fedayeen fighters. The division needed only the order to move again.
That order came sometime before the moonless hours after midnight on April 2, when the brigade's armored forces began to move again. The renewed advance had been preceded by days of aerial bombardments of Iraqi forces guarding the southern approaches to Baghdad.
A little of the cool swagger of Major Goins, the brigade's operations officer, returned that day. He never seemed happier than when the division was moving.
"Thirty-six hours," he told a dozen soldiers from the brigade's mobile command post as they began to break camp in the desert at last. "Then we'll be in the history books forever."
Fighting the War
By the evening of the same day, April 2, the brigade had seized a bridge at the village of Yasin al Khudayr and crossed the Euphrates. The division's Second Brigade followed, veering to the east and attacked up Route 8, which leads to Baghdad.
Just 24 hours later, the First Brigade occupied what was then known as Saddam International Airport, only three miles from the center of Baghdad.
On the day before the war started, back in their desert camp in Kuwait, the brigade's commander, Col. William F. Grimsley, had outlined the brigade's attack plans: the sweep through featureless desert, the Euphrates crossing, the assault on the airport.
He was asked how long, honestly, he believed the war would last, a question he had left unanswered in his briefing.
"What day is it?" he replied. "Wednesday? I think a week from today, we'll be on the outskirts of Baghdad."
Such a claim seemed like wild hubris. But had it not been for the nine days in the desert north of the escarpment at the holy city of Najaf, he would have been right. In the end the war went more or less as foreseen, though much of what military commanders expected did not happen, and many unforeseen things did.
War has the feel of epic history, even lived from within the confines of one unit. For the soldiers of the Third Infantry Division's First Brigade, the awareness of being part of something vast was accompanied by the inescapable fact of viewing the conflict through the narrow prism of immediate, personal experience.
"I could see more of this war on television," Pfc. Steven L. Jones said one day, driving in a Humvee through the deserts of southern Iraq during the brigade's first long march to Najaf.
For a soldier like Private Jones, it was the difference between playing in a football game, and watching it from the stands or on television. For him, there were no replays, no graphics, no commentaries.
It is said that the desert distorts perspective. So does a war in it, reducing one to the most basic physical sensations: hunger and thirst, exhaustion and tedium, sweat and filth, fear and an almost immeasurable relief at having survived the terrifying whiz of bullets and the crack of mortars and shells.
Soldiers defecated squatting in the desert, slept in armored vests where they could, ate rations full of grit and sand, rode in rattling tracked vehicles, jostled by the ruts dug by those that passed before. Infantry soldiers rode inside stifling, windowless Bradleys, oblivious to everything they passed until the hatch opened again.
Some soldiers carried short-wave radios tuned to the BBC or Voice of America, but most of them, even the senior officers, had only the vaguest idea of what was happening even a few miles from them. Where were the marines? What was happening in Baghdad? Was Saddam Hussein dead?
"Can I ask you a question?" Pfc. William T. Montgomery, a laconic medic, asked the day after the taxi bomb at the checkpoint near Najaf. "What do people back home know about this?" It was a question repeated over and over.
The private's armored ambulance was at the checkpoint when the bomb exploded. The force of the blast killed the four instantly, as well as the taxi's driver, apparently a suicide bomber, and a man passing on a bicycle.
There was nothing for the medics to do that day but to collect human remains, some flung 60 feet away. Private Montgomery was concerned that the grim deaths of the four had already become national news back home. "They were soldiers, comrades, friends, just like everybody else," he said.
"I wish they just knew where we are and what we're doing. Not this," Private Montgomery said of the families back home.
Committed to Liberation
"This land has witnessed the march of many armies," the First Brigade's chief of chaplains, Maj. Mark B. Nordstrom, told its commanders as they sat beneath a tent awning on April 1, the afternoon before the final push to Baghdad.
Each commander's briefing ended this way, with a sort of sermon followed by a prayer. On this day, he cited Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, the Persians.
"But this land has never seen an army march to liberate its people," he added. It was this that members of the Third Division's First Brigade believed with a passion from the outset: theirs was above all a mission of liberation.
The major is a minister with a Mennonite church, one with a pacifist theology. Back home, he is based in Georgia; he goes to church conferences in uniform. He stands out, he says. Here in Iraq, he betrays an almost giddy awe at the biblical history that surrounds him.
The Third Infantry Division's assault carried him past the places he knew from Sunday School: Ur and Babylon and Kifl, where Ezekiel preached to the Jews in captivity and where the First Brigade's soldiers fought for four days against waves of Iraqi fighters, killing hundreds of them.
Throughout the march north across the desert, the human toll of war was evident, at the border outposts, in the streets of the village of Kifl, along the banks of the Euphrates, in bunkers along canals, and finally at the airport west of Baghdad.
The corpses of scores of Iraqis lay in the sun, twisted, starting to rot. Some were in uniform; some were not. Most of the dead were young men, no older than the soldiers who killed them. Many were burned beyond recognition in vehicles destroyed by American air and artillery bombardments.
For the soldiers of the First Brigade, most of them in their early 20's, it was their first experience of killing, their first encounter with death on such a scale. Some showed revulsion, a sense of unease, and concern about what their families at home might think. Others simply gawked, apparently impassive. A few became physically sick.
The chaplain counseled many of them, and recalled the ancient land over which they marched. "We're sleeping under the same stars as Abraham," he said at one point when the battle of Kifl subsided. Out there, under those stars, he found solace in the story of Daniel, who served his God under the king, Nebuchadnezzer.
"Daniel is one of my favorite books," he said. "For me, he was a model of duty under the most trying circumstances."
Lessons of Past Battles
Historically, Colonel Grimsley said before the war began, there have been three routes taken by armies marching on Iraq: one from the west (Alexander and the British in 1941) and two from the south, along the Tigris and along the Euphrates (the Persians, the British in 1899 and again in World War I).
The division, led by the First Brigade, would attack along the Euphrates, but with a crucial difference. It would sweep past, but not conquer, the cities along the way: Nassiriya, Samawa, Najaf and Karbala.
"We don't want to go to the cities," Colonel Grimsely said. Of Najaf, he added, "It's sacred ground."
The Pentagon had concluded that the predominantly Shiite populations would rise up against Mr. Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, a decision that was second-guessed as fighters began attacking the rear on the second and third days of the war after the division's main force had already moved north.
Cowed by years of oppression, bitter over America's abandonment of them after the first gulf war in 1991, and in some cases ambivalent over the invasion itself, the Shiites did not rise up as some officials in Washington had expected.
"We didn't realize what the situations would be in the cities," the division's commander, Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, said on March 26, acknowledging that the fighting had slowed his advance.
The Third Infantry Division was the Army's main armored force in the battle, bolstered with additional forces to more than 20,000 soldiers, with more than 250 M1A1 tanks, more than 280 Bradley armored fighting vehicles and more than 150 helicopters and helicopter gunships.
It is a blunt force, at its best when it maneuvers through open terrain, destroying enemy tanks or artillery batteries or bunkers more than a mile away. The division's weapons and its soldiers were not intended to clear fighters out of the densely populated warrens of villages and towns.
In an interview inside a newly occupied office at the international airport near Baghdad this week, Brig. Gen. Lloyd B. Austin, the division's assistant commander, described the war as a combination of World War II, Vietnam and the first 1991 war against Iraq, after Saddam Hussein's decision to invade Kuwait.
It was like World War II, he said, in the movement of forces and supplies; like Vietnam in the tenacity and tactics of irregular forces and like the Persian Gulf war in the technological orchestration between weapons on the ground, in the air and in space.
General Austin said the resistance was adamant, yet the Iraqis "never had a significant impact." He also made a point about American technology, saying it overcame the problems of blinding sandstorms that reduced visibility to a few feet.
With satellites and sensors able to see Iraqi troops and weapons through the maelstrom, aircraft and artillery batteries continued to destroy Iraq's army, including the bulk of the six Republican Guard divisions on the outer rings of Baghdad.
By the time the First Brigade resumed its advance on Baghdad, the divisions had been virtually annihilated.
Ambushes and Snipers
One thing that can be said about the brigade's intelligence analysts: they are ready to learn from mistakes. Sgt. Jennifer M. Raichle, one of them, put it this way: "I try to decide what's going to happen, see what happens the next day, and then decide again," she said.
The intelligence briefings, especially at the outset, evoked an apocalyptic array of threats that lay ahead: dug-in troops, trenches of fire, a flood unleashed by a breach in the dam west of Karbala, convulsion-inducing nerve agents, chemical weapons that blister the skin and sear the lungs.
In the end, most never materialized.
It was the gas that evoked an inexorable fear. On the morning of March 28, Air Force jets bombed an oil depot south of Karbala, sending a huge plume of black smoke into the air. It drifted in the gentle southern wind toward the First Brigade's desert camp. Sensors on a specially outfitted armored vehicle registered traces of a nerve agent.
Since the war began on March 19, the brigade's soldiers had worn the pants and coat of their protective suits. A horn blared, telling them now to put on their gas masks and hoods, the rubber gloves and boots that were always to be kept at hand.
"There's a bird flying around us," a soldier, unidentifiable inside the protective suit, shouted in a sort of panicked relief.
What kind of bird? He held his hands together and flapped them. "A living one," he said, seeing in the survival of this creature what the world's most sophisticated sensors would confirm later: it was a false reading.
For Capt. Andrew J. Valles, the brigade's officer for civil-military affairs, even a false alarm was enough to confirm his decision to quit the Army this summer. "I said if I ever did this in an actual emergency," he said, pulling off his suit, "I'd get out. That's it."
Maj. John M. Altman, the brigade's ranking intelligence officer, said it was his job to imagine worst cases for his commanders. Before the war started, he warned of the irregular fighters with Mr. Hussein's Baath Party and two militia groups, Saddam Fedayeen and Al Quds.
But he, like many more senior than him, failed to anticipate the tactics thrown at them: ambushes and sniping, fighters dressed in civilian clothes, suicidal assaults by soldiers against tanks and suicide bombings.
"I hate to see these guys impaling themselves on us," Colonel Grimsley said. "It's the most troubling part of this whole thing."
At the same time, though, he acknowledged their effects. "I can't help but give the guy credit," he said of the enemy on March 26. "He has figured out how to stop us."
Sgt. Harold L. English, a squad leader with the brigade's Second Battalion of the Seventh Infantry, had his own theory for the resistance, having fought in the first war against Iraq 12 years ago.
Then, he said, the American forces struggled to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait. This time, he said, "It's a big difference. When you're defending your homeland, maybe you fight a little harder."
Colonel Grimsley said Hussein loyalists had terrorized the population. By one report, unconfirmed, 40 people were executed in public in Najaf to force the others to fight.
By March 28, the first doubts about the Pentagon's strategy had built to a crescendo in Washington. Colonel Grimsley reacted dismissively. "You're only bogged down when you've lost the ability to do things on your own initiative," he said that day. "We ain't there yet."
A new urgency emerged after the taxi bombing on the 29th, the tightening of restrictions at checkpoints and the first unforeseen consequences of the new rules. On March 31, soldiers from the division's Second Brigade, having taken over the blockade of Najaf from the First Brigade, opened fire on a minivan that failed to heed warnings to stop along Route 9, north of Najaf. Seven women and children died.
The Army has lots of acronyms. One is Frago, short for fragmentary order, or a change in the main attack plan.
That Monday, a new Frago came, ordering the First Brigade to prepare to break camp and move north. It said the move could begin within four days.
But it came well before then. Instead of waiting, still more Fragos came and the brigade surged across the desert on April 1, positioning its full force south of the Karbala Gap — a name that evoked a dread nearly as deep as that of chemical weapons.
For a year, Capt. Joseph A. Simmons, the brigade's assistant intelligence officer, said, commanders had studied the gap, a narrow neck of desert between the reservoir called Razazah and the city itself. It was here that the brigade expected to encounter the Republican Guard divisions, to endure the pounding of artillery and rockets, to risk chemical or biological attack.
Captain Simmons said he had acted in seven simulated attacks on Karbala, war games on computers and table tops, first in Germany and then in Kuwait. Every time, the captain lost. "I died here, like, seven times," he said, when the real attack was over.
The division's Second Brigade struck to the south of Karbala along Route 9 in the morning of April 2. It was a feint meant to hide the thrust through the gap and it appeared to work, since what was left of Iraq's Republican Guard were on the road between Baghdad and Karbala. The First Brigade encountered only pockets of troops.
By nightfall, the First Brigade had seized the bridge over the Euphrates, despite Iraqi efforts to cripple it with explosives. The Second Brigade crossed the next morning.
General Blount expressed impatience with the pace. "They're coming over at two miles an hour," he told Colonel Grimsley. "They need to be rolling across."
There would be no pauses now. Within hours, the Second Brigade had seized a large swath of territory at the intersection of Routes 1 and 8, south of Baghdad.
General Austin said that the remnants of the Medina Division of the Republican Guard were caught from behind as they faced south, toward Karbala, in what he described as the decisive battle of the war.
"We absolutely decimated what was left of Medina," he said.
By the night of April 3, the First Brigade reached the airport, its main objective when the war began. The human cost had risen. As of today, the division had announced the deaths of 29 soldiers, 21 of them in the fighting around Baghdad.
Ahead lies the uncertain question of establishing order after the collapse of Mr. Hussein's rule, but the weight of that effort, Colonel Grimsley said, would be carried by troops now on the way to replace his.
Today the mobile kitchen, called an M-Kit, arrived at the airport maintenance hangar that is now the brigade's headquarters, meaning the resumption of hot meals.
"You know the war is over," Major Goins said, "when the M-Kit arrives."
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