The Opening Gambit 59

DVIC DM-SD-04-09976

Manning their assault amphibian vehicle personnel (AAVP7AJ), Marines from Headquarters Company, Regimental Combat Team 1, assemble as a convoy at a dispersal area prior to crossing into Iraq.

Iraqi forces attack . . prematurely. . . . Commanders

are briefed, targets assigned. We are prepared to execute the quick start option or the base plan; 3d

MAW is ready to roll."203

Before long Conway received another order from

CFLCC establishing D-Day and H-Hour for 1800Z on

19 March, when the air war would start. Ground operations were to start two days later, on 21 March.204

Now everyone knew that war was hours away. The

word was passed that there was a high probability

of Iraqi missile strikes during the night of 19-20

March. Many Marines had their gas masks and chemical protective suits staged for a quick run to a shelter from their sleeping mats, but nothing happened

during the night.205

The I Marine Expeditionary Force's war started the

next day, 20 March, with an unexpected bang. At approximately 0725Z, there was a sound like that of a

low-flying jet, followed by an explosion that shook

the ground, and then by a tall gray-brown plume of

smoke, about 200 meters north of the perimeter of

Camp Commando. The very first effect was that it interrupted a staff meeting, General Conway and his

principal staff members were in a briefing tent near

the point of impact; they all dove under the tables.206* Other members of the I MEF staff wondered

if the plume was poison gas, and if it was a terrorist

attack, there had been no warning. Most reached for

their protective gear, and NBC monitors swung into

action. There was more than a little bit of confusion

as Marines tried to figure out where to go and what

to do. Many took shelter in the "Scud bunkers," the

inverted concrete culverts and sandbag concoctions,

but the combat operations center continued to operate. As many Marines sat jammed in the bunkers,

with gas masks on, the word was passed to go to the

highest NBC protective state (MOPP IV). Four Cobras were scrambled to scout for possible enemy attackers on the ground. By 0825Z it was clear what

had happened and the "all-clear" had been sounded,

but there were many more missile-raid alerts

throughout the day, announced by the siren/loudspeaker combination known as "the Giant Voice." By

'1 MEF Rear continued to function during the strike. As a result of

the attack, I MEF Forward accelerated its preparations to move

away from Camp Commando and, ultimately, into Iraq.
60 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond
one count, some 13 alerts had been sounded.207

By now CFLCC had received its answer from CentCorn and was free to attack into southern Iraq to secure the oil fields. Coalition Command passed the

order to its subordinate commands to attack at 1800Z

on 20 March, not on 21 March as CFLCC had ordered

earlier. 208 (In General Conway's words, on account of

"intel indicators that Iraqis had begun to destroy oil

infrastructure, I MEF attacked into Iraq early.") It was

around this time that General Mattis called Colonel

Joseph F. Dunford, the commander of the lead element, and asked him how soon he could attack.

Colonel Dunford asked for a few minutes to poll his

staff, but soon came back with the answer—four

hours. In fact, Regimental Combat Team 5 (RCT 5)

was ready to go in three hours, and that is what they

did.209

At 1512Z, I MEF released the execute order, and

on 20 March at 1742Z, which was 2042 local, RCT 5's

tanks crossed the border into Iraq in the dark, about

nine hours ahead of the last regularly scheduled time.

Instead of an attack at dawn, the regimental combat

team was attacking at night, a much more complicated evolution, especially for a large, reinforced formation that was going into combat as a team for the

*The missile was most likely a Seersucker antiship missile, which

literally flew under the air and missile defense radar, which is why

there was no warning before the attack. It is not clear whether the

warhead detonated; sources differ on this point. A Patriot antimissile battery brought down at least one other missile on 20

March. (I MEF Sitrep 191800Z to 201759ZMar03, copy in Reynolds

Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VA).

first time. It was quite an achievement. When his

troops crossed the border, General Mattis' official

comment was Tallyho!2lo*

It was only later that the Marines learned that during the night of 19-20 March, the United States had

begun the war by hitting select targets in Baghdad, an

unplanned bomb and missile strike at Saddam Hussein and his entourage, who, according to American

intelligence, were spending the night in a bunker at

a place called Dora Farms, a residential compound in

south Baghdad. The report turned out to be false; a

somewhat shaken Saddam Hussein soon appeared

on Iraqi television vowing defiance. What was clear

was that this was not an early start to the Coalition's

long-planned air war. The timing of the missile attack on Camp Commando on 20 March suggests that

the attack, and those that followed, was in retaliation

for the Dora Farms attack.

What Dora Farms and CFLCC's images of burning

oil wells did was breathe new life into the old debate about the separation between G-Day and A-Day.

The CFLCC request for permission to attack early

amounted to a request to reverse the order of G-Day

and A-Day. When CentCom granted CFLCC's request,

it was official: "rock and roll" for G-Day, wait one for

A-Day. That left the relationship between air strikes

*A related stimulus was an erroneous Central Intelligence Agency

report that the Iraqis had moved a brigade of T-72 tanks into place

near Safwan, just north of the border. This caused division to make

an additional shift in its plans to accommodate the heightened

threat of enemy armor. (I MEF sitrep 201800Z to 211759ZMar03,

copy in Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VA)

The Opening Gambit 61

DYIC DM-SD-04-10906

MarineMlAl Abrams main battle tanks with Company C, 1st Tank Battalion, lineup and prepare to meet the

enemy near Safwan Hill, Iraq, during the opening moves of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
and ground attacks within I MEF's own sector. It is

fair to ask whether there was to be any separation

between them, and the answer was, not much at all,

apparently for the same reasons. The Marines simply

liked synchronicity, whether the context was the Iraqi

theater as a whole or just the Marine battle space. As

D-Day approached, the plan was for the 3d Marine

Aircraft Wing, along with Marine artillery, to strike

some targets in zone hours before the infantry went

over the top. A variant of the plan called for even

greater simultaneity, with a "spike" of close air attacks during the first day of the ground war. In either case, the guiding principle was coordination

between wing and division, and everyone knew that.

Marines assigned to Battery I, 3d Battalion, 11th Marines, prepare to fire theirMl98 155mm howitzers against

the Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division and III Corps Artillery defending the Rumaylah oiields.

DVIC DM-SD-04-01580

62 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

JCCC 030305-M-2237F-O11

Veterans of combat missions over Afghanistan, two AV-8B Harriers from Marine Attack Squadron 542 taxi

past each other on the runway at Ahmed Al jaber Air Base, Kuwait, as they prepare for interdiction strikes

against pre-planned targets in Iraq.
The Opening Gambit 63

As General Amos had written on 19 March, the "synchronization of major muscle movements is complete.2hl*

On 19 March, the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing had

started attacking Safwan Hill, the high ground on the

border between Iraq and Kuwait, which was a great

observation point for the Iraqis, and was flying over

the 5th Marines when they crossed the border into

Iraq late on 20 March. On that day, the first full day

of war, the wing flew 259 missions, 24 in support of

CFACC, and 235 in support of I MEF, shifting its emphasis somewhat from generally "shaping" the battlefield to "preparing" specific objectives that division

was about to assault. The arrangement with Coalition

Forces Air Component Command was clearly working as the Marines intended. It is worth quoting the

dry language of the wing's command chronology to

get a sense of its activities on 20-21 March:

Maintained constant airborne CAS [close air

support] coverage in support of RCT 5

Maintained constant F/W [fixed-wing] FAC(A)

[forward air controller (Airborne)I coverage for

both RCT 5 and RCT 7, to enable interdiction of

enemy counterattack or reinforcing elements.

Conducted F/W counter fire in support of RCT

7 . . . Began . . . effort in earnest against Iraqi

2d echelon forces, focusing on enemy indirect

fire and SSM [missile] assets. . . . Shaping MEF

battle space . . . Focus on MRL [multiple rocket

launcher], artillery, and reinforcing armor in Al

Amarah and Basrah areas . . . Provided 8 F/W

sorties to conduct CAS in support of UK forces

engaged in Al Faw . . . Pushed . . . units forward to commence establishment of FARPs at

Safwan and Jalibah.212

The last item does not look particularly dramatic

on paper, but the words belie an impressive accomplishment. Ultimately, some 4,000 ground personnel

from the wing crossed the berm and, according to

plan, set up some 15 small air bases and support

points in Iraq. The concept was not new, but the

scale was, as was the speed and flexibility of execution.213 There were some dramatic, even heroic, moments for the support Marines who made it all

happen. One of the most memorable interviews any

field historian conducted during the war was that of

Gunnery Sergeant Melba L. Garza, the operations

*1st Marine Division planners considered the air war and shaping

in the I MEF area of operations to be two separate issues. For the

most part, the targets in the "shock and awe" air war were far from

that area of operations.

Photo courtesy of 15th MEU

With surrendered Iraqi soldiers near the port of Umm

Qasr at a safe distance, a machine gunner with Battalion Landing Team 2d Battalion, 1st Marines, carefully guards the prisoners before turning them over to

special handling teams.

chief of Marine Wing Support Squadron 271. She recounted, in a deadpan voice, her memories of traveling north in one of the long convoys of support

vehicles, which included a number of fuel tankers.

These slow-moving convoys stretched literally for

miles along the few highways through the desert.

When the convoy was ambushed by Iraqis on the

ground, there was not a great deal that any one individual, especially someone like an operations chief

armed with a 9mm pistol, could do about it except

hope that the accompanying Cobras would be able to

deal with the enemy, that is, until the Cobras ran low

on fuel and the support Marines decided to do some

"hot" refueling on the spot so that the Cobras could

stay in this particular fight until it was over. Refueling

is normally done in a controlled environment, after

the aircraft powers down. If time matters, it is all right

to refuel "hot," while the blades are still turning. But

there is no practice for refueling under fire. To say

the least, this group of Marines redefined the term

"hot. "214

Within about 11 hours of crossing the line of departure, RCT 5 had seized most of its initial objectives. This was largely because the division was so

well prepared and coordinated on many levels. A

look at fire support coordination from an artilleryman's perspective suggests only some of the complexities:

During . . . the "Opening Gambit," the opportunity for fire support coordination to break

down was at its greatest. Consider managing a

fire support coordination line shift, a battlefield

coordination line . . . shift, coordinated fire lines
64 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

• . . shifting up to seven times, opening and

closing multiple keypad variations of up to six

different kiliboxes [the map grids used to coordinate fires], coordinating numerous no-fire

areas . . and managing a restricted target list of

over 12,000 targets all within a matter of 12

hours. [At the same time there was coordination] . . . with a counterobservation post program of fire, breaching operations, three

regimental combat teams attacking at separate

times. . . . two counterbattery programs of fire,

one counterarmor program of fire, attacking

high-payoff targets of opportunity . . . a transfer of control between the division main

and division forward . . . and deteriorating

weather conditions.215

On the same day, 21 March, the rest of the Marine

division, as well as the British division, poured

through the breaches in the border installations between Kuwait and Iraq on their way north, while the

"official" air war, the "shock and awe" phase, finally

began over Baghdad with the obliteration of a carefully chosen set of targets. The world watched on live

television. This was certainly an impressive display

of precision targeting and pyrotechnics that lit the

night sky and offered one very fine photograph opportunity for the news services. Some of the resulting

photographs of Baghdad in flames will symbolize the

war for years to come. But it did not spark an uprising, and the regime did not collapse.216

Back in the south, there was sporadic fighting,

some of it sharp and deadly, which continued into 22

March, when RCT 7 engaged isolated pockets of resistance in the Marine area of operations. One of the

first Marines to be killed in Iraq died in one of these

firefights. He was Second Lieutenant Therrel S.

Childers of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, who was hit

In this war, many artillery missions, like counter-battery fire, were

largely computerized and completed in a matter of seconds.

when Iraqi fighters in a civilian pickup truck attacked

his unit in the oil fields. But by and large, the Marines

were pleasantly surprised by the relatively light resistance they encountered, which was much less than

they had expected or feared. The local Iraqi command, the 51st Mechanized Division, had ceased to

exist in any recognizable military form, and there

were already hundreds of apparent deserters in civilian clothes fleeing to the west on 21 March. While

some of the Iraqi wells near the border with Kuwait

burned brightly after being sabotaged by their owners, there were also instances of Iraqi oil company

employees waiting patiently for the Coalition forces

to arrive, after carefully following the instructions for

preventing sabotage in the CFLCC leaflets that rained

down from the sky. Overall, there was far less destruction to the oil infrastructure than many had

feared. That was the good news. The bad news was

that the oil infrastructure had not been maintained

for years and was in terrible shape. By the end of the

day, with most of I MEF's initial objectives having

been seized, the division was getting ready to turn

them over to the British. The official relief in place

occurred without incident on 22-23 March. When reporting the relief, division added the note that after

receiving information about possible Iraqi infiltrators

in American uniforms, General Mattis had "directed

all division Marines to remove their moustaches as

part of the . . . effort to distinguish Iraqi infiltrators."217

With the British now protecting its right flank, the

division could now turn west, moving in the same

direction as Task Force Tarawa, which had rolled

through the breach and crossed into Iraq on the early

morning of 21 March and moved toward the town of

Jalibah, paying special attention to Jalibah Air Base,

where I MEF was soon to place its forward headquarters, and the key terrain at the small city of An

Nasiriyah.

This was later touted at a Coalition Forces Land Component Command briefing attended by the author in late March.
Chapter 5

The Bridges of An Nasiriyah

The heart of An Nasiriyah is something like an island between two waterways, the Euphrates River on

one side, running roughly northwest to southeast,

and the Saddam Canal, which runs more or less parallel to the Euphrates on the other, eastern side of

the city. An Nasiriyah controls the bridges over both

river and canal that lead to Route 7, the main highway to the north through the center of southern Iraq.

Route 1, a more westerly highway to Baghdad,

passes within a few miles of An Nasiriyah but does

not come within the city limits. Apart from the fact

that if you approach from the desert, An Nasiriyah is

like an oasis with its palm trees and other greenery,

but the city has little to offer; pictures show an uninviting, Third World "sprawl of slums and industrial

compounds," with two to three-story concrete buildings set on a grid of bad roads and alleyways, many

strewn with garbage and raw sewage.218 The city was

all the more rundown because its largely Shia population was known to have opposed Saddam's rule,

and he repaid the favor by neglecting even its most

basic needs.

Task Force Tarawa's mission was to be the first

Marine unit at An Nasiriyah and to secure the bridge

over the Euphrates on Route 1, which lay a few kilometers west of the city. It had the follow-on mission

to "be prepared to" secure the bridges over the Euphrates and the Saddam Canal on the eastern edge of

the city, which the Marine division, especially Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT 1), would need to pass

over on its way north on Route 7 toward Al Kut. The

plan was for RCT 1 to more or less keep pace with

RCTs 5 and 7 as they moved up Route 1. In a sense

it was a straightforward mission, and it was one that

had been assigned to Task Force Tarawa before it arrived in Kuwait. Task force officers, down to the

company level, had performed map studies, war

games, and rehearsals for An Nasiriyah.219 That said

there was a difference between the East and West

Coast Marines, who had been visualizing the first

days of the war since the summer of 2002. By contrast, most Task Force Tarawa Marines did not begin

to focus in on the mission until December 2002, and

while the operational picture had come into progressively sharper focus as Ground Day approached,

there were still a lot of unknowns about An

Nasiriyah. One lingering question was just how "permissive" the city would be. The general assumption

was that the Marines would receive a friendly welcome from the townspeople, and at worst some light

resistance from Saddam loyalists. Certainly the U.S.

Army, which would pass through part of the area before the Marines, would find Out for sure.22°

On 22 March I MEF announced that within the

next 24 hours it wanted to secure the eastern crossing sites at An Nasiriyah and commence the forward

passage of lines by 1st Marine Division through Task

Force Tarawa.22' On 23 March, I MEF reported that it

had released its Fragmentary Order 0 17-03 that

tasked Task Force Tarawa with conducting a relief in

place with the 3d Infantry Division "at [the] Highway

1 Euphrates River crossing and attack to seize [the]

bridges east of An Nasiriyah ... [in order to] facilitate

the unimpeded continuation of the attack by 1st MarDiv to the north and northwest."222

It was a mission fraught with potential complications. Task Force Tarawa's western boundary was

with the Army, and the task force's first job was to relieve elements of the 3d Infantry Division that had

passed through the area on their way to the western

desert. Then, after seizing the bridges that passed

through the city, the task force would have to coordinate the forward passage of lines with RCT 1. These

missions are difficult enough in peacetime between

units that have trained together, let alone units from

two separate Services, Army and Marines, and two

separate chains-of-command, task force and division,

which literally had trouble getting on the same radio

frequency. There was a final complication: Marines,

many of them new to combat, not to mention the demands of combat in a city, were beginning to get

very tired. The burst of adrenaline that had carried

them across the border and into combat could not

keep all of the Marines on their feet forever, especially when everyone, from the force commander to

the private on the firing line, had to work and fight

in the hot, bulky NBC protective gear, usually with a

flak vest as the outer layer, in the desert heat. The

Marines were approaching a culminating point of

sorts, the end of the first phase of the battle for

Iraq.223

At An Nasiriyah, Task Force Tarawa was, briefly,
66 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

the de facto main effort, and the burden of winning

this particular fight fell on the shoulders of Brigadier

General Richard F. Natonski. He has been described

as a large man with a deliberate, confident bearing

who was shaped by his experiences as an expediDl Cartognphy Center/MPG 763294A1 (COO600) 4-03

tionary unit commander and as a senior staff officer

in the current operations section at CentCom as well

as in Plans, Policies, and Operations at Headquarters

Marine Corps. Senior members of Natonski's staff

liked working for him and even called him a "model
The Bridges ofAn Nasiriyah 67

DVIC DM-SD-05-04640

BGen Richard F Natonski, here speaking to a member of the media, urged the Marines of Task Force

Tarawa to press on and quickly seize and hold the

bridges in An Nasiriyah, to keep the enemy of] balance.

commanding general." An Nasiriyah was to be Task

Force Tarawa's first major challenge. Both Natonski

and many of his Marines knew it might be their only

time at center stage. He was determined to get it

right, even if that meant demanding sacrifices from

his line commanders.

When they met late on 22 March, General Natonski and the commander of RCT 2, Colonel Ronald L.

Bailey, focused on the I MEF order. Following up on

the I MEF fragmentary order, General Natonski

tasked Colonel Bailey, who commanded most of the

ground troops in the task force, with seizing both the

Route 1 and the Route 7 crossings on 23 March. This

was a departure from the original plan to begin by

seizing the Route 1 hridge to the west of the city, and

then move on the "eastern," or "city" bridges "on

order," which meant there would be a delay between

the two evolutions, a chance, however short, to finetune the planning for the next step. There was nothing new by way of intelligence about An Nasiriyah,

but Colonel Bailey was warned to expect small arms

fire. When he expressed some concerns, his troops

needed rest and his mechanized assets were low on

fuel, General Natonski told him it was important to

press on, the Marines would have to run on adrena224 Marines throughout the theater felt that the next

day, 23 March, started bad and never got any better.

Around daybreak, the U.S. Army's truck-borne 507th

Maintenance Company lost its way and blundered

into a bloody ambush in An Nasiriyah. One of the

members of the 507th was Private First Class Jessica

Lynch, who was wounded and captured by the Iraqis

and after being rescued went on to become a

celebrity of sorts. This helped set the stage for the

events that followed, as did the relief in place to the

west of the city between Task Force Tarawa, in particular Company C, 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, and the 3d Infantry Division. This

was accompanied by a boundary shift that put virtually all of An Nasiriyah in Marine battle space. The relief in place and the boundary shift were otherwise

unremarkable, despite occasional allegations to the

contrary.225

A few miles away, during the advance toward An

Nasiriyah from the southeast, at about the same time

as the 507th was ambushed, 1st Battalion, 2d

Marines, with tanks and a combined antiarmor team

in the lead, encountered small arms and mortar fire

while still well outside the city, a portent of more to

come. A short while later the Marines encountered a

few survivors from the 507th, which fed the hope

that there might be more survivors up ahead. This

possibility put added pressure on Colonel Bailey.

Mid-morning on 23 March, General Natonski flew

twice to the battlefield in his command Huey helicopter. When he looked down from the air, he did

not see the regimental combat team's troops where

he wanted them to be. His impression was that the

attack was not going quickly enough; what were they

waiting for? He ordered the Huey to land at Colonel

Bailey's forward command post, which was near a

railroad bridge outside the city limits, so that he could

urge him to move faster. On the first visit, the general

spoke both with Captain Troy K. King, USA, the commander of the 507th, who told him firsthand about

the ambush, and with Lieutenant Colonel Ricky L.

Grabowski, the commander of the lead battalion, 1st

Battalion, 2d Marines, in addition to Colonel Bailey

himself.226 General Natonski told Colonel Bailey and

Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski that he could see

nothing in their way, no enemy tanks or other mechanized assets, and that the force was relying on Task

Force Tarawa to seize the bridges and hold them

open. General Natonski believed that by moving fast,

the task force would keep the enemy off balance

and, ultimately, limit the number of friendly casualties. After talking to Colonel Bailey, General NatonReacting to a question about boundaries, LtGen David D. McKiernan commented that the events in An Nasiriyah did "not equate

to any seam or any joint problem. There were on-order boundaries

that were placed in effect both south and north of An Nasiriyah,

between V Corps and I MEF, which made sense [and] which were

triggered at the right time . . . I don't think the boundary shift could

have gone much better." (LtGen David D. McKiernan intyw,

30Jun03 lU.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C.])
68 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

DVIC DM-SD-05-04644

The bridge spanning the Euphrates River at An Nasiriiyah needed to be secured intact as it was on the vital main

supply route for Coalition forces moving north in Iraq.

ski flew to the I MEF command post at Jalibah, a few

minutes' flying time from An Nasiriyah, and briefed

General Conway on the situation. When he returned

to Bailey's position an hour later, Natonski repeated

his orders, which now contained the even more

forceful pronouncement, seemingly from Conway's

mouth, that Bailey was holding up the force.

Colonel Bailey did as he was told and made the

general's intent his own, despite personal reservations. This was, after all, a city that had not been thoroughly probed by reconnaissance in the recent past,

perhaps because of the expectations that the Iraqis

would be friendly. Similarly, there appears to have

been no plan to conduct preparatory artillery or air

attacks before the Marines entered the city limits,

even though air and artillery support were on call

An additional consideration BGen Richard Natonski mentioned

in a postwar interview was that the cluster of American forces

south of An Nasiriyah made an excellent target for Iraqi weapons

of mass destruction, a threat that was still very much on everyone's mind at the time. It is not clear whether he mentioned that

point to col Bailey on 23 March. (BGen Richard F. Natonski intvw,

26Mar04 [MCHC, Quantico, VAI)

To be sure, Marine reconnaissance elements close to the western bridge were working their way back toward Task Force

Tarawa, and U.S. Army Special Forces were operating in the area

on each side of the river, but this did not equate to a reconnaissance of the city itself. (Reynolds, Journal, entry for 1Jul04, recording a conversation with Task Force Tarawa's G-3; BGen Richard F.

Natonski intvw, 26Mar04 [MCHC, Quantico, VAI)

and became very active participants in the battle. Gobras flew above the advancing Marines, and the artillerymen of 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, were

following in trace of RCT 2's lead elements, ready to

emplace and process fire missions in very short

order. General Natonski later praised the battalion

for providing "invaluable" counter-battery fire during

the battle, in addition to responding for calls for fire

from Marines under attack. 227

After the first meeting ended and the three principals went their separate ways, Colonel Bailey had

second thoughts and wanted to talk to Lieutenant

Colonel Grabowski again. He wanted to be sure that

Grabowski had not left with the wrong impression—

Grabowski should proceed, but not at all costs. It was

the kind of thought that passes through a commander's mind as he sends his troops off to battle, especially on the first day. Bailey was a conscientious

officer with a reputation for taking care of his

Marines. But Grabowski was already out of reach,

moving into the attack, and it was too late to review

the bidding.228

It was now sometime before noon; after the fight,

Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski commented that it was

difficult to remember exactly what happened when,

given the intensity of the combat, which plays tricks

on a person's sense of time. The sun was high, the

day clear and hot. Two kilometers south of the Euphrates, the tanks detached to refuel, but the rest of
The Bridges of An Nasiriyah 69

Dl Cartography Center/MPG 763294A1 (C00600) 4-03

Grabowski's battalion continued over the river and

into the city. After the friendly tanks detached to refuel, Company B encountered enemy tanks, which

were engaged and destroyed by antiarmor Marines,

including a "Javelin" team. Company A secured the

far end of the eastern bridge over the Euphrates.

Then Company B, with the battalion command

group, crossed over the bridge and, looking for a

route around downtown An Nasiriyah, drove onto

apparently firm ground that turned out to be a kind
70 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

DVIC DM-SD-05-04643

Objective 2for Task Force Tarawa was the seizure of the bridge crossing the Saddam Canal. The road between

the two bridges in An Nasiriyah became known as "Ambush Alley," because of the intense enemy fire experienced by the Marines as they traversed the four kilometers of cityscape.

of tarry quicksand. One Marine, Corporal Jason J.

Polanco, was looking at the two tanks in front of him

that were running level with his own vehicle one second, and then, in the next, "just dropped inltol the

mud."229 Company B's plan to come up on the

southeastern flank of the bridge over the Saddam

Canal, and to support the assault on that bridge by

fire, was on hold.

With Company B stuck on its right to the east,

Company C forged ahead through four kilometers of

cityscape that became known as "Ambush Alley,"

coming under "intense machine gun, small arms, and

RPG fire" from a variety of combatants—a mix of regular soldiers and paramilitary fighters—almost all of

whom wore civilian clothes. Sometime after noon,

mindful of the pressure on the task force and the regimental combat team, Company C's commander,

Captain Daniel J. Wittnam, decided to keep moving

ahead. He appears to have made this particular decision more or less on his own, although it was definitely consistent with his battalion commander's

intent. Lieutenant Colonel Grabowski had effectively

This may have been Sobka, a geological phenomenon peculiar to

the Middle East, which was encountered elsewhere in Iraq and

mired other Marine vehicles. It may also just have been sewage,

with the top layer baked into a crust.

conveyed his determination to seize and hold the

bridges. Not only was Wittnam's the first Marine company over the Saddam Canal, but it was now out

ahead of the rest of the battalion, more exposed to

the enemy than anyone else.23°

Wittnam's company drove across the wide, flat

modern bridge; it looked as much like a stretch of

A humvee with a 7.62mm medium machine gun

races to aid fellow Marines engaged in afirefight in

An Nasiriyah. Mounted combined weapons teams

were formed from the heavy weapons company of the

infantry battalions.

jccc 030401-M-5977R-O1O
highway as a bridge, into what amounted to a kind

of fire sack. The weapons platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Lonnie O. Parker, remembered the feeling: "We

all came out of the door [of our amtrack], got ... sitThe Bridges ofAn Nasiriyah 71

uational awareness of where we were, where the

enemy was. They were located north of us, they

were located to the west of us, they were located to

the south of us, and they were located to the east of

The OtherAmbush on 23 March

A few hours after Wittnam's Marines drove

fiacross the bndge over the canal mto the

enemy fire sack, another group of Marines had a

similar experience in the desert north of the city.

The story begins late on the afternoon of 23 March.

One of division's Lockheed P-3 Orions, borrowed

from the U.S. avy, was flying high and slow

above the battlefield to scout the route up Highway 1, while light armored reconnaissance Marines

did the same on the ground. Although one of the

accompanying Cobra pilots who had been conducting low-level scouting for the armored reconnaissance Marines thought he had seen some signs

of enemy activity, the route seemed clear to division. General Mattis decided he wanted the

Marines to move even faster, and personally called

one of his armored reconnaissance commanders,

Lieutenant Colonel Herman S. Clardy III, of 3d Battalion, cadename "Wolfpack," to tell him to proceed up to the town of Hantush some distance up

the road. Clardy told his commanders to pull off

the road and gather around him for a five-minute

briefing and an order. Minutes later, the battalion

went "screaming north" into the gathering dusk,

well out ahead of any friendly formations and outside the artillery fan.

Captain Charles]. Blume, Clardy's fire support

coordinator, remembered in vivid terms what happened next:

We definitely could feel [that] we were getting well out in front of the division. We lost

communications with the DASC-A [the airborne direct air support coordinator] and it

was starting to get dark. ... We began to see

abandoned weapons and equipment strewn

along the highway. [We saw a] suspicious vehicle . . . to our front that [looked at] . . . u

and sped away.... We could all feel the hair

standing up on the backs of our necks. You

could tell something was about to happen.

What did happen next, at 16072 was burned

into the memory of one of the company commanders, Major Bruce Bell:

The Fedayeen had actually laid out a decent

"U"-shaped ambush spread over ... 500 meters on both sides of the road. . . . They

picked a tactically sound, defensively oriented bend in the highway ... to exploit

massed surprise ... fires on the lead units of

whoever fell into the trap. They also had assembled a column of approximately 10 tanks,

armored personnel carriers, and other various "technical" ... vehicles [mostly pickup

trucks with machine gun mounts] which they

positioned on the eastern flank of the ambush position, hoping to use a nOlth-south

jeep trail . . . to move down and flank units

caught in tl1e kill zone on the highway.

When the enemy opened fire, at first it was only

scattered tracers flying across the road, and then

there was a torrent of fire all up and down me

route of march. Some of the enemy appeared to be

massing for an attack. The Marines fired back, but

the enemy fire kept coming. The air officer tried to

reach Clardy over me radio, but could not. Someone, either the air officer or the communications

officer, called "Slingshot," me heart-stopping code

word in this war for "I am being overrun." The division later reported that me call came over the

Iridium cell phone, the official/unofficial alternate

communications system in this war, and that "3d

MAW immediately responded with 6 Harriers and 4

Cobras, followed shortly mereafter by a host of additional air assets." It was all over by 17412, the

remnants of a battalion-sized Iraqi unit left smoking

on the battlefield. The Marines, miraculously,

emerged from the fight wim one wounded in action and some battle scars on meir vehicles, but

were still able to continue moving up the road'

*IMEF sitrep 221800ZMar03 to 231759ZMar03 (Copy in

Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VA); IsrMarDiv

ComdC, Jan-Jun03 (GRC, Quantico, VA), sec 2, chap 5, pp. 5-8;

Maj Bruce BeU, e-mailstoauthor.1l-12Jul03 (Copies among

Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VA)
72 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

DVIC DM-SD-05-04642

A Marine surveys some of the damage done to the city

ofAn Nasiriyah after more than eight days offighting.

The heavy cost of the fighting impacted the lives of

both the populace and combatants for some time to

come.

us'°6 The Marines found themselves on a roadway

on the far side of the canal, surrounded by fields that

were lower than the roadway, which made them

good targets for the waiting Iraqi soldiers. They could

see the enemy scurrying in and around their fighting

positions and the plain concrete buildings that were

all some distance away on the other side of the fields

and the berms that helped to define the fields. Apparently emboldened by their success against the

507th, and now ready to fight the next wave of Arnericans, the Iraqis fired infantry weapons and, especially, mortars up to 120mm in caliber. Marines later

learned that the enemy's positions were primarily oriented to the north, in order to defend against an airborne attack that was never planned, let alone

executed. The enemy infantry showed no interest in

closing with the Marines and getting within easy

range of their small arms; they chose either to fire

from their foxholes or to dart out from a courtyard or

alleyway to fire off a few rounds. At least one Marine

small unit leader had to keep his hard-chargers from

rushing across the open fields at the enemy.232 InSSgt Lonnie 0. Parker remembered that the rocket propelled

grenade and small arms fire soon tapered off. (SSgt Lormie 0.

Parker intvw, 23Mar03 [MCHC, Quantico, VAI)

stead, the Marines used their own weapons against

the enemy and called in artillery; 1st Battalion, 10th

Marines' guns soon fired to good effect. Sadly, the

company's forward observer, First Lieutenant Frederick E. Pokorney, Jr., was killed while calling for fire.

But thanks in part to the enemy's poor marksmanship, and thanks in part to the Marines' good work,

the company was soon making some headway

against the enemy and consolidating its own position.

Captain Wittnam had seized an important objective, and he wanted to hold it until reinforced or relieved. Then, a U.S. Air Force Fairchild-Republic A-b

Warthog swooped by, circled, and lined up for a

strafing run on the Marines as they watched in horror. Although a jet, the Warthog is designed to fly low

for close air support missions and, with its depleted

uranium rounds, was known as a good tank buster.

It is usually a welcome sight on the battlefield and

had already done good work on 23 March against

other targets. But now it was bearing down on friendlies.

One Company C Marine on the bridge, First Lieutenant Michael S. Seely, had been strafed by an A-b

before, in 1991, and he knew instantly what was happening:

I did not even have to look up, because I knew

exactly what that sound was. . . . I ran up and

found 2d Platoon scattered all around the area

there, but I grabbed their [radioman and] said,

"Put that damn thing on battalion Tac now!" I

got on battalion Tac immediately and started

calling, "Cease fire! Cease fire!" Timberwolf 6

[the battalion commander] came up, perfect[ly]

calm, and I started talking to him. He said,

"What do you got?" I said, "We [are] having

friendly air, [an] A-b strafing our pos." I do not

know the time that it took, but it was probably

a couple minutes later . . . I do not know, 10,

15, whatever—the A-b was still circling overhead.233

To make matters worse, the A-b, apparently

along with his wingman as the A-b was flying in a

two-plane section, made numerous deadly passes,

while the Marines on the ground tried every way possible to end what arguably became the most notorious friendly fire incident of the war. By

mid-afternoon each of the battalion's rifle companies

was, in the understated words of the Marine Coips

Gazette article about the fight, "decisively engaged

in non-mutually supporting positions" throughout the
The Bridges ofAn Nasiriyah 73

JCCC 030411-M-6910K-11O

Marines assigned to Combat Service Support Battalion

18 work to retrieve a destroyed P7 amphibious assault

vehicle following the fighting in An Nasirzyah.

city and only in sporadic touch with their battalion

commander, whose tactical radio nets have been described as "clogged."234 It was only later in the afternoon that the companies were able to support each

other, which is what Wittnam had been waiting for,

given his intent to hold the position until reinforcements could get to him. He estimated later that the

wait was between two and a half and three hours.235

He and his men had breathed an enormous collective

sigh of relief when a pair of Marine tanks rumbled

into their lines and suppressed the remaining Iraqi

opposition once and for all. There had been a couple of anxious moments when the Company C

Marines first heard tanks coming their way, and before they identified them as the friendly reinforcements they were hoping and waiting for.236

Exhausted, dirty, and bloody, they began to recover

from the first day of heavy fighting for I MEF in Iraq,

which cost the lives of 18 Marines. With some pride

and some sadness, Staff Sergeant Parker summed it

all up when he said it "was not supposed to be no really big conflict that day," but "we put up one hellacious of a fight. . . . [lit is really sad when it ends and

you lose the majority of your people not from enemy

fire but from friendly fire."237

Task Force Tarawa remained heavily engaged in

An Nasiriyah for eight more days, working to clear

the enemy from the route through the city. This included some bitter house-to-house fighting, defeating some one thousand enemy fighters massing for a

counterattack and, on 1 April, support for the mission to rescue that most famous of survivors of the

ambush of the 507th, Private First Class Lynch. The

field historian attached to Task Force Tarawa commented that 3d Battalion, 2d Marines, became "adept

at collecting front-line intelligence and following up

with what were termed 'House Calls' on the homes

of officials of the regime," which, in turn, led to further contacts and a growing hold on An Nasiriyah.238

Throughout this period there was good cooperation

with U.S. Army Special Forces, whose detachments

continued to operate alongside the task force and

produced actionable intelligence, which often led to

fire missions, air strikes, or raids like the Lynch rescue.239 It is worth noting one such attack, early on,

when Task Force Tarawa drove a band of Fedayeen

from a hospital that turned out to have a stockpile of

"200 AK-47... [riflesJ, 20,000 rounds of ammunition,

3,000 chemsuits and masks, a tank [!i. . . , 400 Iraqi

uniforms, and four U.S. Army uniforms."24° This was

one of the first concrete indications to the Coalition

that Iraq was one vast ammunition dump-cumarmory, which would pose a disposal problem on an

unimagined scale. Nevertheless, by early April,

Nasiriyah was taking its first tentative steps, under

Task Force Tarawa, toward post combat reconstruction, a few days ahead of the rest of Iraq.

Various controversies about 23 March were to continue for some time. There were questions, some of

which made more sense than others, about such

things as why the Marines did not bypass An

Nasiriyah or in general do a better job of fighting in

cities. 241 There were other questions about whether it

was right for Task Force Tarawa to push into An

Nasiriyah the way it did. Would it have made sense

to wait for the tanks moving with 1st Battalion, 2d

Marines, to refuel before advancing into the city? Or

to wait until the battlefield had been "shaped," that is,

why had not there been a more thorough reconnaissance before the Marines entered the city, or why

had not artillery and air struck Iraqi positions before

the Marines reached them? Did Captain Wittnam's decision to advance Company C by itself make sense?

There are answers, some more compelling than others, to all of the questions about 23 March. General

Natonski's pressure on RCT 2, and Captain Wittnam's

decision to push on and then hold on, may have

saved the day. One of the Iraqi commanders captured at An Nasiriyah commented that the fast tempo

of the American advance had made it impossible for

him to respond in time and that he had been

"shocked" at the aggressiveness of Marine small unit

This was representative of cooperation with various Special

Forces in the entire Marine area of operations, although Gen Matis and Gen conway eventually came to the conclusion that these

operators were better at some tasks than others. In particular, they

complained it could take them too long to plan a mission to take

advantage of a rapidly breaking situation.
74 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

DVIC DM-SD-04-01582

A Marine comes to the aid of injured and displaced Iraqi civilians caught in afirefight north ofAn Nasirzyah.

The civilians were later evacuated to the triage area of Regimental Combat Team I to receive medical treatment.

leaders. "He said that his fighters were very confident

initially . . . but became dispirited when the Marines

kept coming at them. "242*

From the CFLCC and I MEF point of view, it would

not have made sense to bypass An Nasiriyah. The

layout of the roads and bridges around the city made

it difficult to bypass. Not even assault bridging would

have helped. When RCT l's Colonel Joseph D.

Dowdy considered that option, he concluded it

would add days to the journey north. Even if the bypass option had made sense, the Marines would still

have had to find a way to deal with potential enemy

'There was supporting air on Station and artillery on call throughout the period; the issue is whether there was an adequate amount

of preparatory fire.

threats to their lines of communication from within

the city. Simply put, CFLCC forces needed to control

all of the routes in and around An Nasiriyah and had

had little choice but to go through the city. As General McKiernan put it: "Everybody had to go by An

Nasiriyah, in either corps' sector, because that was

the only place to cross the Euphrates. . . . It was just

the [nature of] the whole fight in the south. Our

enemy concentrated out of urban areas."243

Perhaps the most bitter controversy about An

Nasiriyah was in a class by itself, the controversy over

the "friendly fire" by the A-lOs, which led to a lengthy

investigation and, in April 2004, to the release by

Central Command of a 900-page report that concluded it was a Marine air officer who had cleared

the A-lOs to fire on any vehicles on the far side of the
The Bridges of An Nasiriyah 75

DVIC DM-SD-04-O1 589

A convoy of humvees from Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, with tube-launched, opticallytracked, wire-guided (TOW) missile launchers, makes its way north through the "mother of all sandstorms."

bridge over the canal. Located a few hundred yards

away with Company B, the officer apparently believed he was with the lead element of the battalion

and therefore no Marines were in front of him and

Company C did not have its own forward air controller. The report essentially invited the Marine

Corps to continue the investigation to determine

whether any disciplinary action should be taken

against that officer, which would perhaps prolong the

controversy. One observer has argued that it is unfair

to single out the air controller, since his actions followed, at least in part, from the actions of others in

his chain-of-command, and since it appears that

some of the battalion's communications nets failed at

crucial points.244 Many Marines found that line-ofsight communications inside the city limits was terrible.

The end result of the general confusion on 23

March and the attack by the A-b was not only the

painful casualty count but also a monumental traffic

jam that lasted through 24 March and into 25

March.245 The CentCom report stated that "eight of

the deaths were verified as the result of enemy fire;

of the remaining 10 Marines killed, investigators were

unable to determine the cause of death as the

Marines were also engaged in heavy fighting with the

enemy at the time of the incident. Of the 17

wounded, only one was conclusively . . . hit by

friendly fire."246 Behind the Marines in the fight at the

bridge and along "Ambush Alley" 30 kilometers of

vehicles waited. In addition to Task Force Tarawa's

vehicles, there were literally hundreds of vehicles belonging to RCT 1. It was still a particularly lucrative

target for the Iraqis. But not unlike his counterpart in

RCT 2, the commander of RCT 1, Colonel Dowdy,

was reluctant to try to squeeze his regiment through
76 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Ambush Alley. And behind Colonel Dowdy a seemingly endless convoy of supply trucks was waiting to

move north.247

This was the kind of evolution that attracted more

attention than most subordinate commanders want.

On 24 March there were a number of generals on

site: Task Force Tarawa's General Natonski; the assistant 1st Marine Division commander, Brigadier

General John F. Kelly, whom General Mattis tasked

with roaming the battlefield to help him maintain situational awareness; and General Conway, the I MEF

commander. Even a retired general was nearby,

Major General Ray L. Smith, traveling with the division to gather material for a book, The March

The kind of general who made it a point to see for

himself how the fight was going, Conway traveled

by helicopter from Jalibah, where I MEF Main was

by now well established, to An Nasiriyah. On the

way, he flew over what looked to him like a great

deal of Marine combat power stretched Out on the

road, and he remembered thinking, with growing

frustration, there should be no holding all of that

power back. This made him all the more determined

to deliver his message in no uncertain terms. After

landing, Conway spent more than an hour at Task

Force Tarawa's command post. Then he and General

Natonski drove forward in a "soft-skinned" humvee,

the vehicle that had replaced the jeep, through fires

so intense that three Marines around them were injured. According to one account, the two generals

talked matters over with Brigadier General Kelly and

Colonel Dowdy while AK-47 rounds snapped overhead. General Natonski remembered later the topics

discussed were whether the Marines could hold the

bridges and whether 1st Marines could pass through

Task Force Tarawa and over the bridges without

delay. Throughout, Conway's basic message was simple, find a way to get things moving again.248

Word spread wide about the fighting in An

Nasiriyah, along with reports and rumors of heavy

American casualties. Recordings of a disturbing Iraqi

The field historian on site noted "the traffic was really snarled

around an intersection of 2 major roads" to the south of An

Nasiriyah. This was almost certainly a reference to the point where

the road from the south branched, with one branch leading to An

Nasiriyah and the other to the western bridge, which meant the

traffic jam was miles long. (Col Reed R. Bonadonna, "Field History

Journal," entry for 23Mar03)

Gen Ray Smith and his coauthor, Bing West, recorded many interesting vignettes for posterity, including the mood of a young

infantryman on the line at An Nasiriyah who seemed to think that

events had slowed because of the number of generals there. It is

not clear whether the Marine knew that he was talking to a general.

television broadcast showing the killed and captured

soldiers made the rounds while corpsmen and doctors waited for the Marine wounded. There was a

perception that U.S. forces had suffered a setback

and that the war was not going according to plan,

especially among the "experts" on television with

their nonstop stream of commentary and free advice,

usually from thousands of miles away. They were

not, almost needless to say, making themselves popular with commanders in Iraq and Kuwait. Reflecting

the views of many, the field historian with Task Force

Tarawa wrote on 23 March that "[amy hopes we may

have had for an easy entry into An Nasiriyah, and

any larger hopes for a campaign as a series of capitulations, have ended today." The war could he

longer and harder than anyone had expected or

hoped.249

Underlying this new perception was the nature of

the fight at An Nasiriyah, which General McKiernan

characterized simply as "a damned tough urban

fight."25° It was that, and more. The general expectation had been that the Iraqi soldiers in the regular

army divisions stationed in the south of the country

would surrender in droves once the Coalition crossed

into Iraq, and that the population, at least in the

south, where there was a Shia majority hostile to Saddam Hussein's Sunni ruling class, would welcome the

Coalition as liberators. But the number of prisoners

had been measured in the hundreds, not the expected thousands. This did not mean that the Iraqi

Army was fighting hard. On the contrary, it seemed

to be simply melting away. What was more surprising was that the irregular forces, especially the

loosely organized Saddam Fedayeen, literally the

"men of sacrifice," soon to be renamed "regime death

squads" by Pentagon edict, were willing to stand and

fight. Typically in civilian clothes, they were hard to

pick out from innocent civilians, whom they were

often more than willing to use as human shields or to

sacrifice in other ways. There were also numerous

reports that they were willing to feign surrender and

then open fire on anyone who advanced to take

them prisoner.

Speaking about An Nasiriyah, General Conway

said that I MEF was facing "hard little knots of Fedayeen."25' General McKiernan characterized the

enemy as "a combination of several different sources,

Fedayeen, Special RG, some military, regular army

that. . . took off their uniforms. . . but it was a pretty

determined enemy."252 General Mattis spoke for

many when he declared that the Fedayeen "lack any

kind of courage. They literally hide behind women

and children, holding them in their houses as they
The Bridges of An Nasiriyah 77

fire . . . They really lack manhood. They are violating every sense of decency. They are as worthless an

example of men as we have ever fought."253 General

Amos was equally outraged, commenting later that

An Nasiriyah was a turning point for him: "When the

Saddam Fedayeen came down and. . . were picking

off our Marines, they became, in my mind, cannibals.

And my whole perspective on how we were going to

fight this war changed."254

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that An

Nasiriyah was a turning point for many, if not most,

Marines. Not only was it the first heavy dose of combat for the Marines, but many things did not go as

planned or hoped. The enemy was different than expected, more tenacious and committed, and he was

having a certain degree of success. For him An

Nasiriyah was a target-rich environment and a large

number of Marines needed to pass through a relatively small area. For the Marines it came at a time

when many were close to exhaustion, and the battle

saw its share of misjudgments, mistakes, and bad

luck. All things considered, it is not surprising that

there was congestion and confusion, and that the

pace slowed.

What is just as obvious is that no one in I MEF

gave way under the pressure and that the Marines

quickly recovered from the first day of battle in An

Nasiriyah. It did not change the force's focus or slow

operations for more than a day. On the contrary,

there was a hardening of resolve among many

Marines. For his part, General Conway did not lose

his focus. He consistently pushed division and wing

to move north in order to defeat the Republican

Guard's Baghdad and Al Nida Divisions, which lay

on I MEF's route to Baghdad, while General Natonski and Tarawa dealt with the Fedayeen and other

threats in the south.

Even though the firefights, sometimes heavy, continued in An Nasiriyah for a few days, RCT 1 had

pushed through the eastern part of the city and

started up Route 7 by the afternoon of 25 March.

General Mattis' intent was for RCT 1 to move quickly

to the north, in the direction of Al Kut, in order to fix

the Baghdad Division in place in the center of the

country long enough for him to get the rest of the

1st Marine Division behind the enemy division, while

blocking any Iraqi forces that might attack the

Marines from the east. He did not want the Iraqi infantry to be able to fall back into Baghdad.255

Although the fighting in An Nasiriyah did not slow

the division by much more than 12 hours, the

weather did succeed where the enemy had failed.

On the night of 24-25 March, the "mother of all sandstorms" moved into the theater, with high winds stirring up massive clouds of sand and slowing operations to a crawl. General Usher, the 1st Force Service

Support Group commander, called it the worst sandstorm in 20 years.256 In the words of the division's

command chronology, "Marines choked on the dust

and visibility was reduced to almost nothing. Soon, it

was blowing so hard that it was difficult to breathe

outside."257 Most air was grounded, leaving fire support to artillery and mortars. But some pilots braved

the weather anyway. On 25 March, a field historian

watched "a breathtaking performance by two Hueys

• . . trying to deliver ammo. They flew straight up the

road at about the level of the telephone lines. Between the wind and the prop wash, visibility must

have been less than zero. . . . [Tihe last I saw of them,

they were flying [away] into the dust clouds."258 Like

the Huey pilots, Colonel Steven Hummer of the 7th

Marines was not ready to let the weather stop him or

his regiment. He himself became a ground guide,

personally leading his Marines north in the storm,

with "connecting files" behind him, Marines walking

between vehicles, literally holding on to the one in

front and the one in back, guiding them slowly forward. But finally it was too much even for Colonel

Hummer, and he stopped his Marines for the night,

putting them in a defensive posture.259 Hunkering

down for the night did not necessarily mean the

Marines were safe. In one of the tragic, incomprehensible accidents that occur during wartime, the executive officer of 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, Major

Kevin G. Nave, was killed by an earthmover while

he was sleeping during the dust storm. A few miles

to the southeast atJalibah, the force was trying to operate out of the "Bug," its expensive custom-made

air-conditioned canvas command post. But on the

25th, the lights were flickering on and off and the

canvas was flapping vigorously. Marine expeditionary force officers were worried that the Bug

would literally blow away, and they took the precaution of passing control back to the rear at Camp

Commando for a day.26°

The sandstorm was followed by thunderstorms,

which cleared the air somewhat but created mud,

both on the ground and in the air. More than one

Marine commented that when the thunderstorm hit,

it seemed like it was raining mud; the rain hit the

dust suspended in the air and drove it to the ground

in wet, heavy drops. Many division Marines went to

sleep in sand and woke up in mud on 26 March. For

at least a day after the storm, there was a massive

cloud of sand over Kuwait, which limited visibility,

continued to keep many aircraft on the ground, and
78 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

made it seem that the sun was shining through a

dense, bright yellow filter.261

The Washington Post reported that now, in the

wake of An Nasiriyah and the sandstorm, "some senior U.S. military officers" were convinced that the war

would last for months and would require "considerably more combat power." The United States had

kicked in the door, and the house had not collapsed;

on the contrary, it seemed to be holding up fairly

well in some ways.262 General McKiernan was concerned not so much about the situation as about

what his commanders might be thinking: "The going

was a little tough. The Fedayeen. . . and the urban

defenses were something we were going to have to

deal with. The weather was bad, and we had extended our supply lines." As a result, he felt the need

to fly up to see the V Corps commander, Lieutenant

General William S. Wallace, to look him in the eye

and to "know that we both saw the way ahead,"

which was Baghdad.263
Chapter 6

Toward the Enemy Center of Gravity:

Ad Diwaniyah, Al Kut, and the Pause

Even before the storm had completely passed,

Regimental Combat Teams 5 and 7 resumed their

progress up Route 1, the northwest-southeast axis

running to Baghdad, which was by turns a new fourlane highway and a roadbed under construction. On

the way, they faced roadside ambushes by a variety

of enemy formations that had prepared positions

alongside the highway. An incident on 25 March that

would ultimately mean a Navy Cross Medal for First

Lieutenant Brian R. Chontosh conveys a clear sense

of the nature of the fighting. In the early morning

hours of the day, Lieutenant Chontosh, an energetic,

down-to-earth bodybuilder, who started his career in

the Marine Corps on the enlisted side of the house

and still shaved his head, was in the lead vehicle of

his combined antiarmor platoon, behind four M1A1

Abrams tanks as 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, pushed

north toward Ad Diwaniyah, a city some 100 miles

south of Baghdad that had been the home of a large

Iraqi Army garrison before the war. Suddenly the

enemy, described as a mix of irregular and conventional forces, sprang an ambush from the berms on

both sides of the highway. The enemy fire struck one

of the platoon's vehicles, killing one Marine and

wounding another. Lieutenant Chontosh wanted to

move the platoon Out of the kill zone, which was difficult because there were vehicles both in front of

him and behind him. Noticing a break in the berm,

he directed his driver to head through it and into a

trench filled with enemy soldiers. Once in the trench,

Lieutenant Chontosh jumped out, engaging the

enemy with an M16 rifle and then with a 9mm pistol

until he ran out of ammunition. Then, in the words

of the summary of action for his award:

[H]e . .

. grabbed an enemy AK-47 [rifle] and

A convoy of Marines with Regimental Combat Team 5, watched over by scout helicopters, traverses the desert

of central Iraq. The combat team had moved hundreds of miles and confronted countless ambushes in thefirst

two weeks of operations in Iraq. Photo courtesy of Defend America
80 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

continued to engage enemy soldiers as he continued the attack to clear the trench. . . . When

the AK-47 was out of ammo he grabbed another and continued to engage [thel enemy

both in and out of the trench under heavy

enemy fire. A Marine following him found an

enemy RPG [rocket propelled grenadel and

gave it to Lieutenant Chontosh who. . . used it

to engage a group of enemy soldiers, eliminating the . . . threat . . . His aggressive, violent

action. . . undoubtedly saved the lives of many

Marines along Highway 1 that day.264

Between 26 and 28 March, RCT 5 proceeded to

crush Fedaycen opposition in and around Ad Diwaniyah. Even before the fighting had ended in Ad

Diwaniyah, one of RCT 5's battalions seized the airfield at Hantush after what has been described as "a

fierce firefight." Hantush was some 15 miles to the

north of Ad Diwaniyah, located on Highway 27, an

east-west axis that General Mattis intended to use in

the coming days to approach Baghdad from the east.

In the meantime, RCT 1 was fighting its way up

Route 7 through towns and villages to the junction

•with Route 17, which was at roughly the same latitude as the city of Al Amarah, not far from the border with Iran, the home of the Iraqi 10th Armored

Division, which was another potential threat, from

the southeast, to Marines advancing on Baghdad.

The 1st Marine Division was moving ahead despite the increasing distance from its base in Kuwait.

General Mattis had been prepared to rely on organic

supplies for a few days; he later said that the 1st

Marines, when they crossed the river at An Nasiriyah,

fully expected to cut their supply lines "and just

break loose and head north," relying on emergency

resupply by air when necessary, hence the interest

in Hantush airfield, and not having to worry about

protecting their supply lines back to the rear.265 This

was a reflection of General Mattis' "logistics lite" philosophy he had been inculcating in all of his troops

for months, and of the benefits of General Usher's

reorganization, the 1st Force Service Support Group

having created a direct support structure for the division, especially the combat service support companies designed to move with the regiments. As

stated in the division's command chronology, the reorganization "provided [for a] ... shared situation

awareness . . . [which enabled FSSG to] proactively

calculate logistical needs and have them out the door
Toward the Enemy Center of Gravity 81

before the customer even registered a request."266 Although statistics are lacking, this approach most

likely helped to reduce the demand for consumables

and, perhaps as important, contributed to an expeditionary mentality that made his Marines believe

they could go the extra mile without extra supplies.

On a larger scale, the Marine Corps supply system

had generally kept up, even though it was stretched.

As the deputy Force Service Support Group commander, Colonel John L. Sweeney, commented on 24

March, "the plan is evolving" successfully; there had

been "no operational pause due to logistics" because

of "what those lance corporals are doing out there."267

In the daily I MEF situation report for the next day,

General Conway reflected satisfaction with the

group's efforts to date, especially the hose reel system it had laid from Kuwait to Jalibah, a distance of

some 70 miles, in order to deliver fuel. The Force

Service Support Group Marines had accomplished

this feat in less than half the projected time.268

There can be little doubt that it had been a challenge to get supplies from the beach to the forward

Transportation Support Group vehicles loaded with

ammunition, meals ready to eat, fuel, and water are

staged for a convoy north. The 1st Force Service Support Group supported all logistics for the Marine expeditionary force in Iraq.

JCCC 030401-M-6910K-034

bases of the Force Service Support Group, which

quickly sprang up in Iraq behind the advancing

Marines at places like Jalibah and Ad Diwaniyah. It

turned out that the Army's 377th Theater Support

Command had not been able to meet all the needs of

both I MEF and V Corps as originally hoped; the

377th was a relatively late arrival in theater, its headquarters not "closing" until March 2003. Partly because of this and partly because of the challenges the

campaign would pose for any command planning to

move men and equipment over such a long distance,

logistics remained a concern for General McKiernan

throughout the campaign, and there were some

trade-offs. The main effort, V Corps, was typically

supplied first, and the Marines were sometimes left to

their own devices, Under Brigadier General Lehnert,

the "wholesale" Marine Logistics Command had done

what it could to bridge the gap between the 377th

and the "retail" service support group and, in general, to meet I MEF's needs. After its arrival in country in December 2002, it had worked wonders in its

nearly featureless stretch of Kuwaiti desert now

known as Tactical Assembly Area Fox, turning it into

a vast logistics base. The general and his Marines

often had to improvise, which they learned to do

well. For example, the logistics command had to contract for 300-tractor-trailers driven by third-country

nationals, many of whom were to drive hundreds of

miles into Iraq under dangerous conditions, and then

find ways to motivate them to continue working

under near-combat conditions. One solution was to

award "eagle, globe, and anchor" emblems to the

more intrepid drivers. As the Marines moved north, I

MEF kept asking the logistics command to keep

pace, which it did by, in General Lehnert's words:

"using every transportations means available including Marine Corps tactical trucks, Army line haul, contracted third country national . . . vehicles, C-130 .

air deliveiy, and rotary-wing aircraft."269 After the war,

General Lehnert concluded that he did not "know

how much further we could have gone as the culminating point kept moving north. . . . We had every

truck and every driver on the road to the limit of their

ability. . . . We were always in a surge mode." There

were some notable shortages, especially of spare

parts, and there was no reserve.270

What the Marine Logistics Command delivered to

the 1st Force Service Support Group, the group

pushed forward to its frontline customers. General

Usher said it was sometimes a matter of "brute force

logistics." Despite all the group's careful preparations,

sometimes it came down to Marines muscling their

way through a problem. When the system was
82 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

stressed, the general added, "[I]t was not pretty. It

was not elegant. It was just sheer adrenaline."z71 This

was especially true as the Marine division sprinted

toward Baghdad:

[Resupply] was accomplished by the integrated,

rapid distribution of fuel, water, rations, and

ammunition to the nearest SA [support area] or

RRP [repair replenishment point] to the fight,

moved by [FSSG] assets ... and in some cases

[by] the MLC, at distances farther than anyone

had imagined prior to the beginning of the war.

At the height of the action, more than 250,000

gallons of fuel were moved on a daily basis

from as far south as SA Coyote [in Kuwait] to as

far north as SA Chesty at the An Numaniyah

Airfield, stretching more than 300 miles over

improved and unimproved highways [in the

The Missile Attack on CFLCC

Marines and soldiers were increasingly becoming aware of the fact that thi wa a war Without defined front lines and rear area. Threats could

come from any quarter, when least xpected. But

one week into the war. the rear area especially in

Kuwait, seemed fairly safe and the mood at Camp

Doha was, if not exactly relaxed, at least moving

into a smootl1 wartime routine. During tl1e first few

days of the war, everyone at Doha had worn their

chemical suits and carried their ga rna k . now the

soldiers and Marine had the suits and the gas

masks with them but were not wearing them.

CFLCC's battle update asses ment, which was "the"

daily brief in the ultramodern command center, on

27 March, was no exception. It was chaired by

General McKiernan, dressed as u ual in hi freshly

starched desel1 battle dress uniform. The staff was

moving crisply through it agenda wh n the alarm

came from one of the air defen e liai on officers:

"Lightning, lightning, lightning!" wluch meant that

an Iraqi missile launch had been detected and that

the target was Kuwait. Evelyone in the large amplutheater paused to put on their ga mask, wluch

would have offered some protection in case of a

chemical or biological strike, but none against tl1e

effects of high explosives. With lu gas mask in

place General McKiernan went back to work,

peaking through its moutl1piece, hi voice calm

and only slightly garbled. A few econd later there

were two deep detonation nearby, and then a

third and maybe a foUM detonation, the sounds

of two outgoing Patriot nussiles and of at least one

Patriot striking the incoming mi ile. Bits of debris

rained down on Doha as the Giant Voice for once,

late, sounded the alarm. In the battle update assessment the gas masks tayed on for a few more

nUnutes while experts tested for the effects of special weapons. Then it was back to bu iness as

usual, as if notl1ing had happened. But someming

had happened. The incid ot was captured on

Cable Tews 1 etwork (to be sh wn after the war

in a documentalY on CFLCC' "\1 ar Room") and

was analyzed and chewed over among the men

and women at Doha for a few days. One German

artillery officer, attached to C/]TF-CM, claimed to

have learned from a good ource that the Iraqi missiles fired at Kuwait had not b en fired by a fire direction center; instead, the Iraqi were using a form

of dead reckoning, calculating the distance and direction to a well-known taraet like Doha, and simply cranking in tl1e right numb 1\. If so, they had

done an excellent job. The computer at me Patriot

missile battery showed mat tl1e trajectOIy of the

missile, probably an "Ababil" missile, was such mat

it would have struck tl1e command c nter it elf or

me building next door, which could have Wiped

out the CFLCC command group. That was not quite

the end of it. In this war, neim I' CFLCC nor any

otl1er headquarters, especially in the rear was a

place where anyone showed much emotion of any

kind. Maybe it was all th technology mat made

emotion seem out of place. Mo t soldiers and

Marines were bone-tired, stretched close to their

linUts by impossibly long and stre sful days. On me

staffs, some never forgot that what mey did, or did

not do could mean life or death for omeone a few

hundred miles away and pu hed themselves even

harder. But few ever eemed particularly happy or

sad, except for me time when a few days later, during another battle update assessment, tl1e officers in

tl1e command center offered the Patriot "nussileers"

a spontaneous round of applause.*

*MajGen Robert R. Blackman intvW, 31May03 (MCHC, Quantico, VA); Reynold , Journal, entries for 27Mar-8Apr03; Cr

Presents, "Inside the War Room" (Atlanta, GA: Cl DVD, 2003);

Maj Robert K. Casey intvW, 27Apr03 (MCHC, Quantico, VA);

Fontenot, er al., On Point, p. 98; Franks, American Soldier, pp.

506-507.
face of]. . . the unconventional threat along the

MSRs [main supply routesl.272

The bottom line is that despite some serious challenges, the Marines of the group and the logistics

command consistently managed to keep supply

ahead of demand on the battlefield and thereby enabled operational success.

That helps to explain why, for many Marines,

what happened next was as unexpected as many of

the other challenges in this campaign, CFLCC ordered

a halt in the march toward Baghdad. According to

the I MEF situation report for 27 March, it received a

CFLCC order to halt the attack north and focus on securing its lines of communication. The force in turn

passed the order to division. General Mattis "did not

want the pause. Nothing was holding us up." Moreover, he believed that his troops, especially 5th

Marines in Hantush, were in an exposed position,

and he did not want to leave them in what amounted

to a holding pattern. As a result, he felt constrained

to give "one of the toughest orders [hel ... ever had

to give to an assault battalion that had taken ground

[andl lost men doing it." He told them to withdraw

to a more defensible position, which they did despite

their infantryman's "So, now what do they want us to

do?" reaction to an order that didn't make sense to

them. 273

Underlying the order were CFLCC concerns about

resupply, which had apparently percolated up from

V Corps; during the sandstorm, some Army units had

nearly exhausted their supplies. The obvious corollary was now, with the Fedayeen threat, who would

protect the force's ever-longer supply lines—the

long, dusty, slow-moving convoys from Kuwait to the

front lines? There may be some validity to the argument that this thinking had its roots in the various

prewar discussions about a lengthy "operational

pause" between the opening phase of the war and

the fight for Baghdad in order to build up supplies

and reinforcements. After the war, some Marine operators talked about a link between the prewar discussions and the wartime pause.274 While I MEF

consistently opposed a lengthy operational pause

and division opposed any kind of a pause, General

Conway opted for the middle ground: a brief pause

for I MEF to catch its breath, not to mention staying

in synch with the Army corps on his flank, which

A related issue was that Mattis wanted the Iraqis to continue to

think he intended to come at Baghdad from Route 1. If they focused on Hantush, they might realize he was planning a lateral

move before threatening the capital from the east.

Toward the Enemy Center of Gravity 83

DVIC DM-SD-04-06145

Cpl Alvin Hicks of Marine Wing Support Squadron 373's bulk fuel section refuels an AH-1 W Cobra helicopter

gunship from the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing's forward refueling point onJalibah Air Base, Iraq.
84 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

DVIC DM-SD-05-04645

An aerial view of the base camp Task Force Tarawa established near An Nasiriyah in preparation Jbr the attack toward the Iraqi capitalfollowing the pause.

was, after all, still the main effort. On 25 March, for

example, he had discussed the situation with his staff,

saying that the enemy attacks "will effect... our CSS

convoys. These huge long supply lines are a problem. . . . Rear area security continues to increase in

importance. . . . You might need to look at pulling

combat power in order to secure the key areas.275*

One of the threshold issues was just how long the

pause would last, and what effect it would have on

the plan. On 28 March, General McKiernan flew from

his headquarters in Kuwait to Jalibah, because he

wanted to meet face-to-face with his two corps commanders, Generals Conway and Wallace, to discuss

the situation and its implications for the upcoming

attack on Baghdad, the next phase of the war. For

General McKiernan, two enemy centers of gravity

were now Baghdad and the Iraqi paramilitary forces,

which could impede further progress to the north.

Accounts of the conference vary somewhat, but

*The Marine general speaking Out against the pause was Gen Mattis. Gen Conway also discussed the issue during an interview for

the History Channel series on the Iraq War (released in 2003), saying he had welcomed the opportunity to do some consolidating

and resupplying. The Washington Post reported a video teleconference on 25 March among Gens McKiernan, Wallace, and Conway, with McKiernan soliciting recommendations, Wallace

expressing concerns, and Conway wanting to continue on to

Baghdad. There is a lengthy discussion of the "pause" in West

and Smith, March up, which conveys a picture of hard-charging

Marines being held back because the Army was worried about its

supply lines. (Rick Atkinson, Peter Baker, and Thomas E. Ricks,

"Confused Start, Decisive End," The Washington Post, 13Apr03, p.

A-i; Bing West and MajGen Ray L. Smith, The March Up [New

York, NY: Putnam, 20031, pp. 73, 84)

there is general agreement that both commanders

talked about the threats they wanted to address before moving closer to Baghdad.276 Wallace said he

needed time to position his corps. Conway mentioned what sounded like tasks he wanted to accomplish before the attack on Baghdad: I MEF was

committed to "a systematic reduction of the had guys

in An Nasiriyah," a reference to the ongoing fight for

that city to secure I MEF's rear; the British division

needed to execute some "pinpoint armor strikes,"

that is, raids into Basrah. Referring to RCT 1, he commented that "Joe Dowdy was in a 270-degree fight"

on Highway 7 as his command made its way north

through the heart of the country, occasionally encountering stiff resistance. General Conway later remembered making the case for a pause of

approximately three days.

The upshot of the conference was a relatively

open-ended decision by McKiernan for both I MEF

and V Corps to "take time to clean up ... before we

commit. . . to the Baghdad fight, because once we

commit to the Baghdad fight, we cannot stop."277

There would be a pause, a chance for securing the

rear areas and for supplies to catch up, which, if all

went well, would be relatively short, no more than

"several days." It would not be a lengthy operational

pause to wait for heavy reinforcements, and it would

not keep CFLCC from the main event. When he

spoke to his staff later on the same day, General Conway downplayed the pause and stressed that the

focus remained on Baghdad.278

As the operational pause began, I MEF shifted its
uer of Gravity 85

Photo courtesy of CFLCC

LtGen James T Conway, left, and MajGen James N. Mattis discuss preparationsfor the final phase ofthe war.

The capture ofBaghdad would not mean an end to hostilities but a shift to a post-warphase.

focus somewhat, attacking pockets of resistance in

its area of operations while keeping its eye on the

ultimate goal. Fragmentary Order 040-03 outlined the

missions of defeating "paramilitary forces in zone [in

order tol protect MEF lines of communication and set

conditions for continued attacks north to defeat the

Baghdad and AI Nida [Republican Guard] divisions. "279 General Conway and his staff seem to have

made it a point even to avoid the word "pause"; they

preferred to talk about "throwing elbows" in a different direction. When on Saturday, 29 March, the

general qUipped, "Enjoy your Saturday night, kick

back and relax, and we will tell you when the war

starts back up again," he did not intend for anyone to

take him seriously280 Nor did he want anyone to

think I MEF had shifted to conducting counter guerrilla operations. In his view, I MEF was simply "recocking" for the next phase: attacking pockets of

enemy resistance, shoring up logistics bases, bUilding

air bases, giving the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing time to

conduct the "shaping" operations that had not been

possible earlier. As General Conway remarked on 30

The Battle of the Icons

The 3d Marine Aircraft Wing's "kinetic" and

"non-kinetic" effects, shorthand for bombs and

leaflets, on the Iraqi 10th Armored Division were

so powerful that it was soon little more than an

icon on U.S. computer screens. I Marine Expeditionary Force had monitored the situation and was

satisfied that the 10th was no longer a threat, but

the icons worried higher headquarters, perhaps

even someone at the Pentagon, and the order

eventually came down from CFLCC for I MEF to

"neutralize" that division. And so, in early April,

General Conway directed General atonski to either capture or destroy its remnants. Task Force

Tarawa put together a smaller task force from 1st

Battalion, 2d Marines, and the 24th MEU (SOC),

which advanced some 300 kilometers across Iraq in

short order, no small feat in itself, and, though prepared for heavy fighting, found nothing but cheering crowds when they drove into the flat, dusty

town of AI Amarah on the Tigris. The attack

spanned 8-10 April.'

'Col Jeffrey Acosta, "OIF Field History Journal," 2003, entry for

20May03 (MCHC, Quantico, VA); 2d MEB ComdC, Jan-Jun03

(GRC, QuantiCO, VA); Michael Wilson, "Two Marine Battalions

Turn to Confront the Remnants of a Lurking Iraqi Division," The

New York Times, 8Apr03, p. B-8.
86 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

May, "while we were stationary [on the ground], we

were in fact attacking with our air," putting out 300

to 320 sorties per day on the enemy.28' The Baghdad Division, arrayed around Al Kut, received constant pressure from the wing, as did the 10th

Armored Division to the south in the vicinity of Al

Amarah. Both were ultimately degraded virtually to

the point of ineffectiveness by the air attacks.

The 1st Marine Division did not hide its impatience to move on toward Baghdad. Again and again,

in its formal and informal communications, it spread

the message that it was "anxious to resume the attack . . . [because] the best way to secure our locs

[lines of communication] is to rapidly move n[orthl to

collapse the regime."282 General Mattis himself

penned the comment on 29 March that he was "convinced that the enemy situation is such that we could

cross the Tigris and destroy the Baghdad Division

without interference from the 10th Armored Division

within the next 72 hours."283 General Conway was

only slightly less forward-leaning, reporting on 30

March that "the conditions for attacking north are

rapidly being set and should be in place within 2-3

days." It was his view that I MEF had nearly all the

supplies it needed to move forward, and he was

hearing that after the continuous air attacks, the

enemy simply was not there in large numbers.284

On 30 March, General Mattis flew to Jalibah to

meet with General Conway and outline his plan for

getting things moving again. General Mattis found

that he was preaching to the choir, I MEF planners

being just as eager as he was. General Conway

In the forward command post afew miles south ofAd

Diwaniyah, MajGen James N. Mattis, left, meets with

the commanding general of the 3d Marine Aircraft

Wing, MajGen James F Amos, to discuss air support

for the upcoming offensive.

Photo courtesy of col charles J. Quilter II

agreed that the security situation would allow the division to proceed with its plan for a limited objective

attack across the Tigris to isolate Al Kut, which in

turn would open up a number of further options for

both the 1st Marine Division and I MEF. This was true

even though Conway believed that Saddam would

order an attack by weapons of mass destruction once

the Marines reached Al Kut. Chemical warfare "attack

likely when attacks on Baghdad resume" were the

words of I MEF's situation report for 28 March. "Trigger depends on U.S. success against . . . forces [in

the vicinity of] Al Kut."285

The I MEF plans were not just about the 1st Marine Division. Task Force Tarawa's status was especially important, since once An Nasiriyah was secure

the task force was to "expand its battle space to the

north" along Routes 1 and 7 to guard the division's

rear as it moved farther north. Between 1 and 6 April,

Tarawa focused RCT 2 on this task while continuing

its increasingly successful "three block war" in An

Nasiriyah—that is, the mix of combat patrols and civil

affairs work that was required after the major battles

had been fought. Task Force Tarawa had been augmented by 15th MEU (SOC) and 2d Battalion, 25th

Marines, which assumed joint responsibility for An

Nasiriyah, freeing RCT 2 to operate to the north.286

During the preparations for the final phase of the

war, the 1st Marine Division and the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing continued to place a premium on face-toface meetings. The meeting between Generals Amos

and Mattis on 31 March is representative. On that

morning, General Amos, the former fighter pilot, flew

himself and a few members of his staff in a CH-46E

Sea Knight helicopter from Kuwait to the division's

forward command post alongside Highway 1, a few

miles south of Ad Diwaniyah in the center of southern Iraq. Even though the visibility was still poor, and

the desert below largely featureless for long stretches,

the general flew at about 100 feet on account of the

surface-to-air missile threat. It was an exhausting sixhour round trip.

General Mattis met the helicopter when it landed

and walked his guests to the command post, which

was little more than a few tents and camouflage netting. He began by praising the wing for its support,

especially for flying unmanned aerial reconnaissance

vehicles for the division. This was like having a small

television camera in the sky to scout the terrain iust

ahead, which, together with the high-flying Navy P3 Orions that General Mattis had arranged for, delivered an excellent picture of the battlefield. The

generals then discussed the upcoming offensive, with

General Mattis describing his plan and asking for
Toward the Enemy Center of Gravity 87

Photo courtesy of CFLCC

A burning Iraqi T55 tank, destroyed by the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines, sits along Highway 27 north ofAn Numaniyah, the site of an enemy military compound.

more support from the wing. Two issues stood out:

one was bridging the canals and rivers that stood between the division and Baghdad; the other was resupply. Since the 1st Service Support Group's

convoys had to drive literally hundreds of miles to

reach the front, the obvious alternative was for the

wing to airlift supplies when shortages loomed.

After two hours of talks, General Amos and his

staff flew up to Hantush to personally evaluate the

suitability of a field-expedient "highway airstrip" for

Marine cargo planes. General Mattis, who was immensely grateful for the wing's support and his good

relationship with General Amos, quipped later that

General Amos showed "more bravery than good

judgment" when he flew himself on to Hantush. They

"approached by circling over a large date palm grove

[which later turned out to have contained enemy

fightersl. . . and landed on the superhighway which

was lined with [the] vehicles of the 5th Marines," who

had moved back into the area a few hours earlier.

Amos found the 8,000-foot runway suitable for his

pilots even though it was little more than a four-lane

highway from which the Marines had recently removed the centerline traffic dividers.287 That night,

flights of heavily loaded KC-130s Hercules aircraft

landed at Hantush using night-vision goggles. The division later described Hantush as a "critical logistics

hub" for the final push north. Finally, before returning to his headquarters in Kuwait, General Amos

stopped briefly at I MEF's forward command post in

Jalibah to touch base with General Conway.288

Writing about the meeting, one of the officers in

General Amos's party, field historian Colonel Charles

J. Quilter II, observed how much things had changed

since Desert Storm, especially in terms of communications between the actuals: "There was the twice

daily . . . video teleconference. They also talked on

the phone a lot. That really struck me. Compared to

Desert Storm. . . they talked far more than their predecessors [in that conflict]. . . . [Theyl often talked late

[into the night] about. . . the latest developments

and what kind of air support the division would need

the next day. . . . They were called the 'Talking Jims'

by their staffs."289

The expeditionary force resumed the offensive to

the north on 1 April. With RCT 7 following in trace,

RCT 5 advanced northeast along Route 27, seizing a

bridge over the Saddam Canal, a continuation of the

north-south waterway the Marines had encountered

near An Nasiriyah. The next day, RCT 5 seized two

crossings over the Tigris, putting it astride a major

route that ran between Baghdad and the city of Al

Kut, where the British had suffered a disastrous defeat against the Turks in 1916 during World War I.

This enabled the division to complete the destruction, in the vicinity of Al Kut, of the Baghdad Division, which RCT 1 had fixed in place by advancing

from the south, thereby putting it at the mercy of RCT

7 advancing from the northwest. The division history

records 3 April as the day RCT 7 destroyed the enemy

division's two western brigades.290

General Mattis made a point of keeping his troops
88 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

from actually going into the city of Al Kut; he did not

want to become bogged down in urban combat, and

he did not want to assume the responsibility for governing the city, which he could incur under the "Law

of War" if he entered the city limits. When he was

content that the enemy was surrounded, largely combat ineffective and unlikely to attack, he left Al Kut to

its own devices, posting a recon battalion outside the

town to make sure the Iraqi commander did not "get

brave."291 The division was now free to turn its attention to Baghdad.

It was in the wake of this attack that General Mattis, in a move that attracted considerable attention

and stirred some controversy, relieved Colonel

Dowdy as the commanding officer of 1st Marines and

replaced him with his operations officer, Colonel

John A. Toolan. (Generals Conway and Mattis discussed the relief before it occurred.) Colonel Dowdy,

a well-respected Marine who placed a premium on

the well-being of his Marines, apparently fell victim

to the general's overriding quest for speed. The division spokesman said, simply, "It was a decision

based on operating tempo." On 4 April, in a tent at

the division's command post, there was a difficult

meeting between General Mattis and his assistant division commander, Brigadier General Kelly, on the

one hand, and Colonel Dowdy on the other. Dowdy

stood on the record of his Marines, who had been

fighting their way up-country and getting the job

done, perhaps not as quickly as Mattis and Kelly

wanted. According to Dowdy's account of the meeting, Mattis told the colonel he was being relieved and

asked him to empty his sidearm and turn over his

ammunition, which Dowdy said would not be necessary. Before long, Dowdy was on a helicopter to

Kuwait. A considerate man not given to undermining

his brother officers, Colonel Toolan had not known

what was coming but obeyed the order to replace

Dowdy. When he arrived at the regiment, he let it be

known that he would carry on where his predecessor had left off, that the regiment was bigger than

any one man. Colonel Dowdy could not have agreed

more, posting a message on an internet website saying he remained loyal to the division and its leaders.

He spent the rest of the war serving as an aerial observer in one of the P-3s flying over the battlefield.292
Chapter 7

Baghdad: Going Down Fast, Going Down Final

The mantra had always been, Baghdad is the

enemy's center of gravity; the purpose of the campaign is to remove the regime, the means to that end

is capturing Baghdad. It was where Saddam's power

resided, both symbolically and otherwise. CentCom

and its subordinates were consistent in their assumption that Saddam had to defend the capital.

While he had stationed relatively weak regular army

divisions in the south, Saddam had kept his best

forces around Baghdad, the Republican Guard and

the Special Republican Guard. The thinking was still

that the Iraqis would set up concentric rings of defense around Baghdad. Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) maps showed a ring

around Baghdad and an area labeled the "Red Zone."

The deeper the U.S. forces penetrated into the Red

Zone, which took in Al Kut in the east and Karbala

in the west, the tougher the fight would become.

Supported by fanatic militiamen, retreating Iraqi

forces would make their last stand in and around the

capital.5 The Red Zone also was where Saddam Hussein was most likely to order the use of weapons of

mass destruction, especially if the fight went badly

for him and he had little or nothing left to lose by

way of international support. He would, presumably,

prefer to stop the Coalition with the weapons outside his capital. But with Saddam Hussein, who could

be sure what the plan was?

Since Baghdad was the one city that CFLCC could

not bypass, the question, as early as the summer of

2002, was how best to attack it and turn the nightmares, if not into pleasant dreams, at least into tolerable slices of reality. The V Corps and CFLCC

planners, including Colonel Kevin Benson, the plans

officer who had solid relations with I MEF planners,

5There might even be scenes like that portrayed in the movie

Blaclthawk Down, about U.S. soldiers mired in a fight in 1993 in

downtown Mogadishu, where U.S. technology was hard put to

overcome paramilitary fighters in a warren of alleyways and ruined buildings. It was the kind of place where helicopters became

vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades fired by young men and

little boys, and elite troops lost their way and their lives. The vivid

images from that movie, based on the gripping and carefully researched book by journalist Mark Bowden, were familiar to virtually every American soldier and Marine in the Iraq War. Those

images were the stuff of nightmares for planners and command- ers.

took the approach described as "systems-based planning," which had grown Out of the work of some

very good military theorists at the Army's School of

Advanced Military Studies, the Marine Corps University, and the Warfighting Laboratory at Marine Corps

Combat Development Command in Quantico. Soon

these theorists engaged I MEF planners, who made a

contribution of their own, and learned an approach

that the Marines could adapt to fit their plans. The

idea was to think of a city as a system or, better yet,

as a system of systems. On the one hand were the

systems used by the regime to control the city, the

other kind of "power points" such as the police and

the military or the government-run media, not to

mention symbols of power such as palaces. On the

other hand were the systems that made the city run—

water, electricity, and transportation. There was of

course some overlap between the two categories. An

airport, for example, could fit into two or three categories. By analyzing a city, planners could map the

relationships between systems and identify the "key

nodes." These could be attacked with precisionguided weapons from the air or with raids on the

ground. Then there would be no need for costly

house-to-house, block-to-block fighting, let alone the

wholesale destruction of the infrastructure, which the

Coalition wanted to preserve for the postwar

phase 293

To turn theory into practice, conferences and seminars on urban warfare were held in late 2002, like

the ones at CFLCC in Kuwait in December.294 The

Army, and CFLCC, came to favor a concept of operations with two basic steps. The first was encircling

and isolating Baghdad. This would prevent reinforcements from entering the city and keep prominent members of the regime, especially Saddam

Hussein and his sons, from escaping. The second

step was to establish bases outside the city limits and

then conduct "in and out" armored raids to attrite the

enemy. Supported by attack helicopters, with fixedwing support on station nearby, the raiders would

identify points of resistance, hit them "hard and

quick," then get out or simply advance along a particular axis and destroy whatever opposition presented itself. In December 2002 General David

McKiernan summed up the plan as one to "isolate
90 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Photo courtesy of Defend America

LtGen James T. Conway, left, Col Steven A. Hummer, center, the 7th Marines' commanding officer and Col Larry

K. Brown, operations officer for IMarine Expeditionary Force, meet to discuss the Baghdad offensive.

Baghdad, establish an outer cordon which controls

movement in and out of the city, and then a series of

forward operating bases. . . to. . . attack. . . specific

targets in the city [and return to base,] . . . or [to] seize

and secure specific targets." The process, which

could be lengthy, would continue until the enemy

was too weak to oppose an occupation.295*

The CFLCC plan made sense for a force made up

of mechanized infantry; the 3d Infantry Division, for

example, had many tactical vehicles at its disposal,

but surprisingly few "dismounts"—1,200 to 1,600—

infantrymen who were trained to fight on foot. Baghdad was an open city in the sense of having broad

boulevards leading in and out of town that were not

too bad for armor. This made for an exception to the

Army's doctrinal reluctance to use heavy armor in

urban areas. The Army had tried the concept on a

limited scale in the city of Najaf on the way to Baghdad, and the results were not inconsistent with the

British example in Basrah. From their base at the air-

*Rick Atkinson in his book, In the Company of Soldiers, notes that

this was a departure from the Army's reluctance to commit armor

to an urban area and he also notes Gen Wallace's preference for

staying out of the cities and defeating the Iraqi Army and the

regime on other ground. This was obviously a minority opinion.

Some Army planners believed the in-and-out raids could take

weeks. (Atkinson, In the Company of Soldiers, pp. 185-186, 218,

287-288)

port outside the city, the UK division was staging

carefully planned raids against specific targets. Intelligence collection on the streets of Basrah drove

some of the targeting, a modus operandi that the

British had learned the hard way in Northern Ireland

over the preceding thirty years. Compared to the

Americans, the British tended to use less armor and

more infantry, and to drop off snipers and spotters

when the main body withdrew. By early April, they

appeared to be enjoying a modicum of success.296

Their success was contrasted with perceptions of Marine problems in An Nasiriyah. The comparison was

not apt, as the goals of the two operations were different. The Marines needed to go into An Nasiriyah

to get to the other side of the river in a hurry, while

the British goal was to secure Basrah when the time

was right. But at least for some, the perception was

there. Planners at various Army, Marine, and joint

headquarters were aware of what was happening in

Basrah, and while it is impossible to pinpoint an instance when anyone copied a particular British tactic, the British approach seemed to confirm some of

what the planners had been saying about urban tactics.297

The 1st Marine Division concept was different

both from the CFLCC/Army concept and from the

British concept, not surprisingly, since it was a more

traditional infantry division, with some 6,000 rifle-
Baghdad 91

men. As early as 1999, the Corps' Warfighting Laboratory had used division forces to run the "Urban

Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment," exploring some of the problems Marines would face in

cities in the 21st century. In California, in December

2002, division had conducted its own seminars and

training on urban warfare, spending three days talking about how it would fight in Baghdad. Among the

attendees were representatives of the Warfighting

Laboratory, Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics

Squadron (the Marine equivalent of the legendary

Navy's "Top Gun" School), I MEF, and the 3d Marine

Aircraft Wing. The seminar was followed by an

"Urban Combined Arms Exercise" at the abandoned

airbase at Victorville. The exercise ran two battalions

through the kinds of challenges they might face in
ful piece of real estate.

Baghdad, including "militias competing for power on

the streets, the breakdown of civilian authority, unruly crowds at food distribution centers, car bombs,

and snipers hiding in crowds."298 The upshot was that

division did not like the idea of seizing objectives,

giving them up, and then having to seize them again

later. "Withdrawals from portions of the city after

seizing raid objectives would embolden the enemy

and lessen the 'dominating effect' the division wanted

to portray to the enemy and to the international

media." Moreover, "identifying important targets by

raiding and then abandoning them would give the

Iraqi fighters the opportunity to reoccupy, mine,

booby trap, or preplan fires."299 In a postwar interview, General James Mattis said: "We were not eager

to set up. . . bases around the. . . city and raid into

it and back out at any point."300

The division staff followed its commander's thinking about raids. First Mattis directed his intelligence

officers to prepare a list of target packages, worthy

objectives in the eastern half of the city, which

ranged from military installations to media centers to

government offices that could be raided or seized

and held. The list kept on growing. As the list grew,

it seemed to make less and less sense to think of the

operation in terms of "in-and-out" raids. Why seize

one site and then give it up only to return the next

day to seize a nearby site? Ultimately, the division

began to consider breaking the city into zones and

assigning them to the maneuver regiments, and even

This was not only division policy, but it was also the conviction

of at least one regimental commander, Col Steven Hummer of 7th

Marines, who did not want to withdraw from hard-won gains. (Col

Steven A. Hummer intvw, 13Feb04 IMCHC, Quantico, VA])

to its artillery regiment, 11th Marines.301

What the division or I MEF thought about how to

run the urban fight did not matter as much as what

two other commands thought about the city. After

all, CFLCC had long since "assigned" Baghdad to the

Army's V Corps to avoid the problems that came with

having two corps-level commands responsible for the

same objective.302 In late 2002 it seemed that V Corps

would be able to split the city between the 3d and

4th Mechanized Infantry Divisions while the Marines

helped to maintain the cordon around it. But then

after the Turks refused to allow the 4th to pass

through their country into Iraq, CFLCC had considered using Marine units in place of that division. One

proposal was to put one or more Marine regimental

combat teams under V Corps' tactical control. A version of this proposal surfaced in a CFLCC draft of the

order for Baghdad as late as 25 March. This did not

sit well with Marine planners, who argued that a Marine regiment did not have the kind of robust communications suite needed to communicate with a

corps-level headquarters, and that the best way to

employ Marines was as a Marine air-ground task

force. Even without a boundary shift, that is, even if

Baghdad proper were the province of the Army, and

the Marines stayed outside the city limits, an intact

air-ground task force could support V Corps more effectively, especially if given some latitude to control

its own operations. "How to fight the MAGTF" was

one lesson that seemed to be on the curriculum every

semester.303

General McKiernan gave fair consideration to

General James Conway's arguments but did not come

to a final decision about Baghdad before G-I)ay.

92 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Photo courtesy of CFLCC

The air traffic tower of Saddam InternationalAüport, soon to be renamed Baghdad International, looms over

the terminal. The Coalition placed considerable emphasis on seizing the ai1port both as a symbol and a use-
Baghdad 93

McKiernan had approved a branch plan to bring

forces into Baghdad from both I MEF and V Corps if

it made sense to do so.304 Earlier, he had said, "[hf

there is a decision. . . about introducing I MEF forces

into Baghdad . . . I will establish the boundary

[which] would logically be . . . the Tigris." The assumption was clearly that I MEF would come from

the east and V Corps from the west.305 In the words

of Marine planners, even after "the battle [for Iraq]

began, the issue continued to evolve, and, as the

Coalition neared Baghdad, the decision was made to

[ap] portion the city along the Tigris River," assigning

the eastern half of the city to the Marines.306

It appears that General McKiernan made that decision in early April when the "Baghdad fight" was finally taking shape, and he was ready to predict that

the regime was "going doing fast, going down final."

By 3 April, his staff had issued CFLCC Fragmentary

Order 124, which delineated the boundary between I

MEF and V Corps. This would, McKiernan emphasized, be a "coordinated two-direction attack with I

MEF attacking to seize [an intermediate objective] . and then beginning to work into Baghdad from the

southeast. "307

Was it a last-minute decision, one that had to be

made earlier than expected? The watchword for the

campaign had always been speed. Few had thought

that CFLCC troops would be on the outskirts of Baghdad in early April. Even a forward-leaning officer like

General James Amos thought it would take some 55

days just to get to Baghdad.308 Did the quick tempo

outstrip prewar plans or, more precisely, the planning process? This was an issue that General McKiernan had been thinking about for months. He had

a base plan, one with branches, designed to allow

him the flexibility to change circumstances that no

one could predict in advance. In that sense, everything was going according to plan.