94 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

While 1st Marine Division had been reducing the

Baghdad Division near Al Kut, the Army's 3d Infantry

Division, with the 101st Airborne Division in trace,

had continued its march up through the western

desert, reducing resistance in and around the cities of

Najaf, Karbala, and As Samawah. The relationship between these two divisions was not unlike the relationship between 1st Marine Division and Task Force

Tarawa, with the heavier force in the lead and the

lighter force securing the lines of communication. By

3 April, the 3d was on the outskirts of Baghdad,

ready to move on Saddam International Airport, soon

to be renamed Baghdad International Airport, or

"BIA.P," as it came to be known to most American

military personnel. (General McKiernan viewed the

airport as one of the enemy system's key nodes, both

as a symbol and as a useful piece of real estate; he

placed considerable emphasis on seizing it and planting his own flag on it.) On the same day, the Marine

division was once again on the march toward Baghdad, from the southeast. Along the way, the 5th

Marines fought one of the fiercest engagements of

the war on Route 6 near the town of Al Aziziyah.

The enemy was a mix of Republican Guard

troops, Saddam Fedayeen, and foreign "volunteer"

fighters from Syria, Egypt, and other Arab countries.

During the day, the division lost an M1A1 Abrams

tank to a mobility kill and three more to bad luck,

transmission problems and mud, making it one of the

worst days of the war for Marine armor. Nevertheless, there was no stopping the advancing Marines, or

the tank recovery teams, for that matter, which overcame significant obstacles to get the tanks off the battlefield and back to friendly lines.309

By 5 April, the 3d Infantry Division was ready to

launch the first of its "Thunder Runs" from the west,

its version of the "in-and-out" raids into Baghdad.

There was some hard fighting on the way in and out

of town. As usual the losses were disproportionate.

The Army lost one M1A1 Abrams, but the Iraqi losses

were far greater. At the same time, other units from

the 3d Division moved west and north to isolate

Baghdad.

One of the most amazing things about the "Thunder Runs" is that they, and subsequent forays into

Baghdad, were filmed by television crews and broadcast, in real time or near real time, almost as if they

were sporting events. But not everyone could watch.

The frontline commanders at the regimental level and

below did not have much information about what

was going on in the "outside" world, the world outside their regiment, perhaps their division; there was

a "digital divide" between them and their seniors in

the rear, where the amount of information available

was simply staggering. The more senior headquarters had a staff with a mind-numbing array of computers, televisions, telephones, and the like. The

CFLCC command center at Camp Doha, Kuwait,

looked something like mission control in Houston,

an amphitheater with enormous screens at the front

of the room and rows of desks with computer terminals and telephones. The I Marine Expeditionary

Force Main was in the "Bug," the somewhat less comprehensive but still very well connected portable

command post. Television sets tuned to news channels were ubiquitous at the higher headquarters, in

offices, mess halls, gymnasiums, and berthing spaces.

It was almost literally impossible to get away from

televised images of the war on the Cable News Network or on the Fox News Channel, whose embedded

reporters were popular both with military audiences

and with the troops themselves.310

On this, the "high" side of the digital divide, there

was, arguably, too much information available. It was

difficult to know which data stream to enter, how to

extract what was relevant, and how to combine

streams. Assessment played an important role in

managing data. At I MEF, the future operations section was charged with assessing progress toward

goals and laying out upcoming decision points. In

the vernacular, the calculus was here is where we

are, here is where we are trying to go, and here is

where we will have to make a decision about the

route we need to take in order to get there.311 At

CFLCC, General McKiernan and his chief of staff,

General Robert Blackman, had organized the staff by

function rather than by traditional Napoleonic section, and created the effects board in order to think

of the battle in terms of the effects they wanted to

have, rather than the objectives they wanted to seize.

Then they instituted the battle update assessment

(BUA) in place of the battle update brief (BUB). Virtually every day during the fight, either the commanding general or one of his principal staff officers

chaired this virtual staff meeting, which was an attempt to manage the data flow and distill it into a

useful form. Run by the CFLCC staff, it was conducted by secure video teleconference and included

as participants senior officers (usually flag rank) from

all of the major subordinate commands. Eschewing

the awkward-sounding acronym "BUB," General

McKiernan had opted for the more euphonious

"BUA" because he wanted to make the point that the

meeting was not about information as much as assessment. He described the battle update assessment

as an attempt to lay the foundation for "decision su-
Baghdad 95

Command in the Information Age

A t senior headquarters there has probably

nnever been so much incoming information as

there was during the Iraq War, whether it came

from official sources or from unofficial sources

such as Cable News Network or Fox News. Putting

more information into the hands of senior commanders looks, at first glance, like setting the conditions for micromanagement. But generally that

did not happen. First, most seniors seemed to exercise restraint the majority of the time. Lieutenant

General David D. McKiernan, for one, understood

he was there to shape the fight and then leave the

details up to subordinate commanders. Second,

even if he had wanted to micromanage, the pace

of operations generally outstripped the pace of information, especially of good information. General McKiernan commented that since first reports

were so often wrong, it was better not to act on

them. Finally, even if a higher headquarters had

good information and wanted to micromanage, it

was often difficult to do so, especially if the subordinate command was moving or was at or

below the digital divide. Communications with

mobile units or units in built-up areas were just

not that good.

Even routine management was difficult. The

staffs who tried to stay ahead of the curve and

"paper the war" often failed, at least between 20

March and 9 April. Events happened faster than

anyone could write old-fashioned operations orders, especially fragmentary orders, before they

were overtaken by events. One of the operations

officers at the 1st Marine Division, Lieutenant

Colonel Paul]. Kennedy, commented that the operations tempo was such that he could not wait

for the actual fragmentary orders, but found it possible to work off the preliminary warning orders

put out by I MEF.* This was even true at lower levels. At Regimental Combat Team 5, Colonel]oseph

F. Dunford found he could not control his command through any kind of systematic planning

process after the Opening Gambit.** Interestingly,

the special operations community appeared to

have an unusually long planning cycle, up to 96

hours, which did not make for happy customers at

I MEF. As one senior commander commented, "If

they cannot plan and execute any faster, we are

*LtCol Paul J. Kennedy intvw, 6Nov03 (MCHC, Quantico, VA).

**Col Joseph F. Dunford intvw, 17May03 (CAT, Studies and

Analysis Division, MCCDC).

going to have a lot of highly trained guys doing

flutter kicks in the rear during ops."* Along the

same lines, comments were made about the

process for generating Coalition Forces Air Component Command sorties being far too slow.

The result was more and more instances of

"healthy," straightforward command and control.

Imaginative commanders brought "new" products

on line to replace the older, barely manageable

processes that looked in many ways like a return

to the basics. Effects-based planning was one such

product. When it worked as intended, General

McKiernan's battle update assessment was another. Written or "audible," most operations orders

in Operation Iraqi Freedom were about desired effects and reflected the commander's intent. Speaking for division, the operations officer during

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Lieutenant Colonel

Clarke R. Lethin, made a pitch for communicating

that intent:

How many times have we seen commander's intent developed by the staff, lethargically reviewed by the commander, and then

delivered in a briefing without the least bit of

emotion? [By contrast,] the division fought by

[traditional] commander's intent-a statement of intent that reflected the commander's personality, intuition, sense of purpose,

and then [was] delivered to every Marine and

sailor in the division. **

Lethin could have been speaking for I MEF as

a whole. General James Conway and his subordinates made distinct efforts to communicate their

intent, in person, to the extent possible, to every

member of their commands. This was one reason

for their series of "go-to-war" speeches. They did

much the same after the force crossed the line of

departure. Although General Conway could have

commanded I MEF from Camp Commando in

Kuwait, he believed it was necessary to stay forward, to see for himself what was going on, and

to meet with his commanders face-to-face. He left

the staff work, and the increasingly time-consuming Coalition Forces Land Component Command

(CFLCC) battle update assessments, to others and,

as his forces advanced deeper into Iraq, moved

*Quoted in LtCol Mark M. TuB intvw, 18May03 (CAT, Studies

and Analysis Division, MCCDC).

**LtCol Clarke R. Lethin, "1st Marine Division and Operation

Iraqi Freedom," Marine COlps Gazette, Feb04, pp. 20, 22.
96 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Photo courtesy of 1st Marine Division

The typical forward combat operations center wasfully staffed with immediate access to both classified

and unclassified digital and analog communications.

the I MEF Forward command post first to Jalibah

on 24 March and then to An Numaniyah in early

April. Just before the assault on Baghdad, Conway

very nearly succeeded in his attempts to visit every

unit in 1st and 7th Marines, which were about to

engage in the difficult task of subduing the capital city. Almost like a commander in the u.s. Civil

War, he wanted to see, and be seen by, his

Marines before the battle.' In similar fashion, General James Mattis kept his finger on the pulse of

his division during the battle. He separated himself

from the "noise" of staff work and, in search of a

purer form of warfighting, set off on the battlefield

with a tiny retinue and a cell phone. He prosecuted the war as much through personal contact

with his commanders, either face-to-face or on the

telephone, as through staff channels.

Those who did not meet personally with General Mattis could read his intents messages that

were posted, sometimes daily, on the division Web

site on the SIPRnet for all with access to this classified network to see. These messages were short,

one or two pages long, and written in plain English, outlining the situation as Mattis and his staff

saw it and telling readers what the division intended to accomplish. The same was true of some

of the slides presented at the battle update assessments and posted on the CFLCC website; the

best slides were carefully drafted and approved by

the commander himself, containing "balloons"

clearly highlighting his intent. Many staff officers

'LtCol Williard A. Buhl intvw, 4Nov03 (MCHC, Quantico, VA).

began the day by reviewing what was posted on

the CFLCC website and those of higher, adjacent

and subordinate commands. One staff officer,

Colonel Ronald J. Johnson, Brigadier General

Richard F. atonski's operations officer, commented that posting information about Task Force

Tarawa on the web enabled I MEF to keep track

of the task force and simplified relations between

tl1e two commands.'

Transmitting products like the intents messages

and the battle update assessment slides, the SIPRnet web made this one of the most democratic

wars in the nation's history in the sense that if you

had access to a classified computer, as most staff

officers and commanders did, you could be empowered by information tl1at in the past was held

only by a few officers. The availability of information could make operations that much more efficient. Staffs with access to the same data could

plan and operate at the same time without going

through time-consuming coordination rituals.

Gone were the days when planners had to work

in isolation and then pushed products up their

stovepipes for their commanders to approve before the commanders passed it to their counterparts. This usually far outweighed the downside,

which was that now "an overeager command

could monitor every potential contingency and

plan for commitments that would never be leVied,

creating unnecessary confusion and fatigue.""

'Reynolds, Journal, entry for IJuly04.

"Fontenot, et aI., On POint, p. 11.
Baghdad 97

periority."It was to enable the commanders to make

decisions in the course of their duties after the assessment. He wanted to hear how the major subordinate commands assessed their current and future

situations, on the operational level of war, thinking

ahead at least 96 hours.312*

Both General McKiernan and General Blackman

thought the battle update assessment often fell far

short of the mark. Some briefers simply recited staggering laundry lists of events as opposed to concise,

conceptual summaries of how they saw the battle,

and were cut short by McKiernan or Blackman, once

with "No, no, no, no—just tell me what I need to

know." The various Service cultures were on display

during the assessment, with Army commands tending

to report in great detail, while the Marines reported

more concisely though not necessarily more conceptually, and the British Army seemed to want to report

as little as possible. As time went on, the presentations became longer, less conceptual, and more factual, perhaps because of the press of battle. Usually

run at 1000 or 1100 local every morning, the assessment could occupy a large chunk of a staff officer's

or even a commander's day, since it generated its

own set of pre-meetings and post-meetings, and

there were complicated slides to prepare on PowerPoint. Some commanders decided to delegate the

battle update assessment function to others and seldom appeared on the CFLCC screen.

One thing that distracted staff officers and commanders from assessment was the factual reporting

they believed they had to focus on, in part on account of pressure from higher headquarters. Many

military reporting procedures had not changed much

since World War II, Korea, or Vietnam—the battalion

reporting to the regiment to the division, and so forth,

a system that worked well enough when the front

was relatively static but did not work well when there

were multiple, simultaneous lines of operation. It was

difficult for units on the move to communicate, especially in built-up areas, because they were busy

with other tasks and because the technology often

let them down. The I MEF current operations officer,

Colonel Dennis Judge, commented that he always

knew where his forces were, no thanks to combat reporting, which, he said, "just was not there." Instead

he was able to rely on automated systems like the

"Blue Force Tracker," which did not require anyone

to stop what he or she was doing during combat op-

* The general procedure at FLC and other major commands was

for operational planning teams, or other groups of specialists

drawn from various disciplines, to study problems, propose solutions, and for senior officers to make decisions in small groups.

erations to write and send a report.3*

There were others whose job was to report in real

time and who had the technology to do so without

having to work through a military chain-ofcommand: the embedded journalists, whose work

appeared on the ever-present television screens. The

media had been "embedded" (this war's jargon for

"assigned") down to the battalion level for the duration of hostilities and had the ability to report directly

to their home offices, which in turn were able to rebroadcast their stories in very short order.3l4** What

often happened was that higher headquarters would

pick up a breaking story on the media and then go

back down the chain-of-command to get the official

reporting about it, which would painstakingly work

its way back up the chain and seemed often to be

wrong, at least initially. Some staff officers concluded

either that "first reports are always wrong" or that

they needed to browbeat their subordinates into

doing a better job of reporting. But the problem persisted throughout the campaign. As one CFLCC staff

officer quipped, "If you want information bad, you

will get bad information."

In early April, as events unfolded around Baghdad at dizzying speed, every commander desperately

wanted up-to-the minute information however he

could get it, whether from the television newsmen,

whose reporting was amazingly vivid and reasonably

accurate (on television you could literally hear and

see the tanks fire their main guns at Iraqis along the

main streets of Baghdad), from the battle update assessments, or even from the official spot and situation

reports, which were less timely and far less vivid but

a little more accurate.

In the absence of other guidance, the Marines operated in accordance with the next senior commander's intent, which remained simple and consistent:

encircle the capital and conduct raids. The I MEF staff

officers reported that their plans were to "continue

to establish the eastern outer cordon of Baghdad

and . . . [be prepared to] support further CFLCC missions... [in support of] regime removal."315 Since there

was little by way of amplifying instructions, they had

the leeway to exploit opportunities as they saw them.

During a conversation on 6 April, Colonel Steven

*The blue force tracker included a transponder that transmitted its

location and received the location of all other transponders on the

same system, displaying them on a small screen. Since it was not

line-of-sight but relied on satellites, it had clear advantages over

some "legacy" systems to identify friend and foe.

**By and large, the results of embedding were favorable all

around; the reporting had more depth than it otherwise might

have, and many journalists seemed more sympathetic to their subjects than they had been in previous conflicts.
Hummer of 7th Marines commented that CFLCC had

not issued orders telling the field how to conduct

raids, and he planned to do it his own way.316

On that day, the Army was still planning in-andout raids. On 7 April, the day of the second "Thunder Run," the 3d Infantry Division reported that it

controlled a zone from the international airport to

one of Saddam's palaces, with armor at all the main

intersections in between, but planned to pull back to

the airport. Soon the plan changed; the troopers believed they could hold their ground in downtown

Baghdad. This was fine with General McKiernan,

who endorsed the idea when General William Wallace told him about the situation. General McKiernan

made it plain that it was the corps commander's call;

this was a tactical decision, best left to the commander who was in contact with the enemy.317

While the Army was raiding into Baghdad, the

Marines were working to cross the last major obstacle on their way to Baghdad. That was the Diyala

River, located east of the city and flowing roughly

north to southeast into the Tigris. It had been briefed

as a minor obstacle with numerous fording sites.318

But this was definitely not the case for the Marines,

who found it a challenge iust to get close enough to

the river to take a look at it. Even with engineering

support, crossing did not look easy; the problem was

that the riverbanks were either steep, muddy, or

both, and the local roads were bad. On the afternoon

of 6 April, division reported with some frustration

that it had completed a reconnaissance of some 60

kilometers of the Diyala and had "found no viable

crossing."39 It had also encountered stiff resistance

in some places.

On 7 April, the frustration continued, preventing

forward movements, which may have been a blessing in disguise. General Mattis' comments for that

day, and the next, in the daily I MEF sitrep reflected

his concern that the logistical situation was "tenuous"

and that his command could be nearing a "logistical

culminating point," fairly grim words for a very "cando" commander. He concluded that he was determined to continue "all previous measures to lighten

the logistical burden in hopes of building up substantial stocks . . . for future operations," which included conserving artillery ammunition.32° On 8 April

he wrote that the division had only one "day of supply" of food and that it was so low on artillery am98 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

©The Boston Herald/Kuni Takahashi

Noncommissioned officers of the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines, urge their fellow Marines to cross the damaged

Diyala Bridge underfire on the southeast outskirts of Baghdad. The award-winning photograph was taken by

The Boston Herald staffphotographer, Kuni Takahashi.
munition it had decided to rely more heavily on the

air wing than on artillery for counterbattery and

preparatory fires.32' But on 8 April he was able to report that his regiments were all across the Diyala.

They had crossed using a variety of means—from seizing bridges, to building bridges, to swimming vehicles across. At two locations, the 8th Engineer

Support Battalion played a critical role, putting in assault bridging while under fire, something the Marine Corps had not done for decades. At one RCT 1

crossing site, Iraqi resistance had ebbed as the amphibious tractors entered the water. One of the Iraqi

prisoners of war explained why: "When we saw the

tanks floating across the river, we knew we could not

win against the Americans."322

After crossing the Diyala, 7th Marines had gone

on to conduct a raid on the Rashid military complex

on the outskirts of Baghdad, the ideal intermediate

objective, not quite in the city but a good platform for

attacks into it when the time was right. At the same

time, 5th Marines was attacking first to the north and

then to the west to extend the cordon around the

city.323* The cordon would not be fully complete

until 0215Z on 9 April, when the division reported

that RCT 5 had cut Highway 2, which ran to the

northwest out of Baghdad, and that it had elements

of the U.S. Army's V Corps in sight.

By now, most units in the division had shed their

chemical suits, the protective overalls in the "woodland" green pattern that contrasted with the desert

camouflage uniforms and constricted movement, not

to mention how hot they could make the Marine or

sailor inside. The general assumption had been that

Saddam would use chemical or biological agents outside but not within the Baghdad city limits. The

Marines had been on tenterhooks, waiting for the

According to West and Smith, Go! Hummer "forgot" to issue a

withdrawal plan for this raid. This is consistent with Hummer interview. The cordon would not be fully complete until 0215Z on

9 April, when the division reported that RCT 5 had cut Highway

2, which ran to the northwest out of Baghdad, and that it had elements of the U.S. Army's V Corps in sight. (West and Smith,

March Up, pp. 233-234: I MEF sitrep O8l800ZAprO3 to

O91759ZAprO3 [Copy in Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VAI).

Baghdad 99

DVIC DM-SD-04-01787

Engaging the enemy using a P7 amphibious assault vehicle, Marines assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th

Marines, attack an Iraqi sniper position near Baghdad.
seemingly inevitable report and enduring the almost

eerie absence of bad news. But it never came, and

the word was passed that since the Marines were

now at the city limits, commanders could make the

call on the right protective posture. For most Marines,

shedding the unwanted second skin was an incredibly liberating and energizing experience, energy that

General Mattis wanted them to use on the enemy in

Baghdad.324

For their part, the wing and the service support

group had continued to do incredible work, pushing

supplies to the front, especially through the airhead

at Qalat Sikar, which was south of Al Kut, and getting

ready to set up shop at another airfield, Salman Pak,

on the outskirts of Baghdad. The Marines soon had

the food and ammunition they needed, and the cordon around the city was nearly complete, CFLCC's

precondition for the next phase. In the words of the

command chronology: "By establishing a cordon, the

division had closed the door for the enemy's escape,

and opened the door to operations inside the city."325

Now all they needed was permission to proceed beyond their limit of advance.

By 1800Z on 8 April, I MEF was planning to conduct "armed reconnaissance in force into Baghdad"

on the next day, and division reported that it was

contemplating specific "offensive operations within

Baghdad iot [in order to] complete the removal of the

Regime." This was quite a change from the day before, when the focus had been on crossing the

Diyala.326 Finally, early on 9 April, the division received the go-ahead from General Conway to attack

its targets.327 A few hours later, the field historian at

force headquarters, Major Theodore R. McKeldin III,

noted that I MEF had been "cleared hot" by CFLCC

for the eastern part of the city.328 By the time McKeldin penned this note late in the morning, the regimental combat teams had started to move toward the

objectives that the division staff had so carefully selected. As one of the embedded reporters, Peter

Baker of The Washington Post, wrote, they were executing the plan for the day, which "was to keep

chipping away at. . . Saddam Hussein's power structure. The Marines would stab into Baghdad and seize

a paramilitary base, a secret police headquarters and

a presidential palace."329

No one was entirely sure what the day would

bring. At the morning staff meeting, General Conway

commented to his staff that he thought there would

be a "big fight" for Saddam's palaces.33° Division had

concluded that the threat from conventional forces

had been "nearly eliminated," that there would he lit100 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Photo courtesy of the 1st Marine Division

Marines from 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, on theirfirst patrol through a crowded community in Baghdad's Saddam City, were greeted by thousands of apprehensive Iraqis who lined the streets.
Baghdad 101

tie by way of centraiiy controlled, organized resistance. But there were reports of irreguiar formations.33' The regiments were ready to fight if they

had to. Soon many of the reports from the front

showed quite a different picture. Cable News Network was with 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, as it went

into the city, and Fox News was with 3d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to the northeast. Instead of fighters, both battalions encountered crowds

of jubilant Iraqis who welcomed their liberation. One

of the armored reconnaissance company commanders, Captain Brian B. Smalley, said later that it was

"like driving through Paris in 1944. "332

In his trailer at force headquarters, now at An Numaniyah, General Conway watched the dramatic television footage, some of it showing the poor Shia

neighborhood known as Saddam City (and later as

Sadr City), which the Marines had originally bypassed. The images impressed him so much that he

decided to approve Mattis' request, which had apparently percolated up from the regiments, simply to

advance in zone until they encountered opposition.

But his optimism was guarded: "Our intent was to

constrict the city using various key objectives as lily

pads to reduce the regime on the east side. What we

are seeing on TV is happening in some Shia neighborhoods. We cannot make the mistake to say that is

happening all over Baghdad. We still have a military

imperative to conduct operations to reduce

regime-related facilities."333

Conway discussed the issue with his Army counterparts at a midday video teleconference, and ultimately there was broad agreement on "a plan for a

decisive assault on the city" by the Marines and the

Army.334* This was the end of the various plans for a methodical advance to seize particular objectives, let

alone the plan for in-and-out raids. The division finally had a free hand in Baghdad.335'

The result was that RCT 7 happily assaulted

Gen Matcis commented later that the division had "full cooperation" from Gen Conway in his attack on Baghdad. Gen McKiernan

also permitted his subordinate commanders a wide range of latitude in tactical decisions.

"The 1st Marine Division command chronology mentions another

plan that was supposedly under consideration on 9 April at "higher

headquarters." This was for a second operational pause, to give the

centralized authority in Baghdad a chance to turn over the city

peacefully. The division and I MEF are said to have opposed the

plan on the grounds that there was no longer any such authority.

It is not clear how division learned of this plan. "Army planners

had anticipated that it could take weeks to reduce Baghdad

through . . . raids . . . , allowing more rime to bring forward military police, civil affairs, and other units required to keep order."

(lstMarDiv ComdC, Jun03 [GRC, Quantico, VA]; Atkinson, In the

Company of Soldiers, pp. 287-288)

Photo courtesy of the 1st Marine Division

Cpl Edward Chin of Company B, 1st Tank Battalion,

drapes an American flag over the head of a large

statue of Saddam Hussein in the Firdos Square traffic circle. It was quickly replaced with an Iraqifiag on

orders from above.

through its assigned area of operations, moving from

the southeast to the northwest on the north bank of

the Tigris. The list of sites they secured on that day

was impressive—the Ministry of Intelligence; the Ministry of Oil; Uday Hussein's offices, which were already burning when the Marines arrived; the Iraqi air

force headquarters, which had been destroyed; and

the Fedayeen headquarters, which was listed as "rubbled." At the end of the day, the division's plans were

just as ambitious as its accomplishments: "to have

made [the Marine] presence known in all of [our] city

zones by morning tomorrow [and] over the next few

days . . . allowing the local populace. . . to return to

some sense of normal life."336

Among the sites in the 7th Marines area of operations was Firdos Square in downtown Baghdad. It

was dominated by a six-meter-high statue of Saddam

Hussein with his right arm raised in a heroic gesture.

The 3d Battalion, 4th Marines, rolled into the square

late in the day on 9 April. A crowd quickly gathered.

Given the proximity of the local haven for journalists,

the Palestine Hotel, there seemed to be as many foreign reporters as Iraqi citizens in the crowd. An Army

psychological operations team attached to the

Marines arrived and announced over a loudspeaker

in Arabic that the Marines had decided the statue

should come down. Millions around the world were

able to watch the events in real time on Cable News

Network and other television networks. A Marine

named Corporal Edward Chin, of Company B, 1st

Tank Battalion, climbed onto a derrick that extended

from his M88 tank retriever. He reached up and

placed an American flag over Saddam's face. Some of
102 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

the Iraqis said, "No, we want an Iraqi flag," and,

within one or two minutes, Chin took the flag down

and replaced it with an Iraqi flag. Next a stout rope

was fitted around the statue, and then to a cable on

the tank retriever. When the tank retriever pulled, the

statue came down, slowly, as the metal bent and Saddam slipped off the pedestal. The crowd rushed forward, swarming over the fallen statue. One group of

Iraqis dragged its head to an unknown but no doubt

unpleasant fate.337

There are a few arresting images in every war, and

the toppling of the Saddam statue was one of them

for the Iraq War. It was not exactly what the high

command wanted. Generals Tommy Franks and

McKiernan, each at his own headquarters, had been

watching the scene unfold on television, and when

the American flag went over Saddam's face, Franks

picked up the telephone to call McKiernan, who did

not need to be told why his boss was calling. Even

before General Franks could say anything, General

McKiernan said, "We are already on it."338 As commanders from General Franks to General Mattis had

told their troops over and over again, this was not a

war of American conquest, but of Iraqi liberation.

The flag that mattered was not the American flag; it

was the Iraqi flag, flown alone, in sites no longer

dominated by statues and murals of Saddam Hussein.

Nevertheless, the Saddam statue's fall marked a turning point; the end of Phase III seemed to be in sight,

even though there would still be some hard fighting.

While the statue had been coming down, Marines

a few blocks away had been exchanging fire with

regime loyalists, and the next day, 10 April, was no

better. On the contrary, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines,

spent the better part of the day securing two objectives, Saddam's Almilyah Palace, one of many

A Marine provides cover with his 5.56mm M16A2 assault rifle, with attached M203 40mm grenade launcher,

as his squad from Company C, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines moves through the grounds of one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. OVIC DM-SD-04-12213
Baghdad 103

Phase IV in Baghdad

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher C. Conlin, commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 7th Marines,

wrote a vivid account of the quick and dramatic

hift from Phase III to Phase IV on the streets of

Baghdad:

Within minutes of our seizure of the capital,

one of my lieutenants was presented with

the rapidly expiring body of an Iraqi who

had been pried from a vehicle accident seconds before. He was not a war casualty, but

a simple victim of a "routine" incident. The

fact that the locals brought him to us as he

was in his final death spasms was their uneqUivocal realization that the normal procedure, going to the hospital or calling the

police, was gone. This episode was duplicated throughout our zone with geometrically increasing frequency. Frantic locals ran

up to tell us phones were out, doctors reported hospitals being looted, and that the

water was off. They were desperate to know

where they should dump the trash, could

they use cell phones, or was it OK to drive to

their father's house in Mosul? They approached us to arrest a strange man with a

gun lurking in their neighborhood. We were

throughout the capital and the country, and Imam

Abu Hanifah Mosque. First they had to drive through

a hail of rocket-propelled grenades and "a torrent of

heavy machine gun and small arms fire," and then,

perhaps the ultimate nightmare, they got lost and had

to make a V-turn while under fire. If you think it is

bad enough to drive in an unfamiliar city in the Middle East, imagine what it is like to do so with people

shooting at you. The Marines were encountering foreign "jihadis," Islamic fundamentalist paramilitary

fighters. The mosque was a target because it had

been the location of what someone called an "Elvis

sighting," Saddam Hussein was said to have entered

the mosque, and the Marines were told to secure the

perimeter to keep anyone from entering or leaving.

The report turned out to be false, but the jihadis still

fought with determination. By the end of the day,

RCT 5 reported it had lost one Marine killed in action

and 42 wounded, along with two tank mobility kills,

another unusually bad day for tanks in this war. The

commander of RCT 5, Colonel Dunford, remembered

approached by alleged sheiks who demanded to [see] "his Excellency the General"

about their tribe's loyalty to Mr. Bush.... On

and on the requests came. All being diligently received and somehow answered by

our young squad leaders and platoon leaders. We too were in transition. Having overwhelmed organized resistance, we were hot

on the trail of Saddam's ... Fedayeen....

Our aggressive small unit leaders were able

to hit them in their homes and offices in ever

quickening succession. We created hunterkiller teams on the fly, sending our very talented Humint Exploitation Teams ... PsyOps

and Civil Affairs ... Teams down to the platoon level . . . Companies worked huge

urban sectors usually rotating platoons to

achieve a 24/7 battle rhythm. The effect was

dramatic .... Within a week of liberation,

the markets were open again, ... many were

going back to work, there was a new police

force reorganizing neighborhoods were organizing ... Lessons Learned: ... Press flesh,

kiss the babies, and kill the enemy.'

'Col Christopher C. Conlin, "What do you do for an encore?"

Marine Corps Gazette. Sep04, pp. 74-80.

10 April as both the worst and the best day of the

war. It seemed like the worst day while his regiment

was heavily engaged in downtown Baghdad. His fear

was that there would be many more days of heavy

fighting. But it turned into the best day when his 1st

Battalion reported that the situation was well in hand

and that after the fight it was encountering crowds

of cheering people, some eight or nine deep, shouting in broken English, "Good, good, Mister!~339

The fighting tapered off rapidly, the regime's "last

stand~ in Baghdad turned out to be so short that it

was anticlimactic. There was no sign of Saddam.

Some thought (erroneously, as it turned out) he

could be lying under the rubble of a restaurant in the

Mansour district that had been struck by smart bombs

on 8 April. His government had simply evaporated.

The civil servants, including "Baghdad Bob,~ the infamous spokesman who kept predicting on television that Coalition forces were on the brink of

annihilation, had simply stopped coming to work.

Very soon looters took over the city. If the focus on
9 and 10 April had been on crowds who were literally applauding the collapse of the Saddam regime,

it quickly shifted to those who were taking advantage of the situation. The television news broadcast

one scene after another of Iraqis, young and old, carrying away anything that was not bolted down from

government offices, from official residences, from

army bases, even from schools and hospitals. Particularly upsetting for some westerners was the apparent looting of the antiquities museum, a repository

of ancient and irreplaceable treasures.

The extent of the looting, and what to do about it,

certainly seemed to catch the Coalition by surprise.

The basic outlines of OPlan 1003V did not extend far

beyond the goals of securing the oil fields, removing

the regime, and finding weapons of mass destruction;

there had been a great deal of detailed planning, and

rehearsals, for Phase III, but the post combat Phase

IV had, by comparison, been virtually neglected. If

Phase III had been the favorite son, Phase IV was the

redheaded stepchild and now he was acting out.34°

When asked about the looting, American officials

were low-key, On 9 April, Secretary of Defense

Rumsfeld downplayed the problem, as did Generals

Conway and Mattis and other senior Coalition commanders. They implied that the Iraqi people had

earned the right to profit at the expense of their dictatorial government, and that there was, in any case,

only so much the U.S. forces could do, given their

limited numbers. General Conway said, "Does it

bother me . . . that I see people taking an office chair

or the guts of a refrigerator or an air conditioner? Not

really, . . . at least [noti at this point. . . . [lit is got to

be the pent-up frustration they've experienced for the

better part of their lives."341 General Mattis offered the

uncharacteristically mild observation that the Coalition was "in that kind of never-never land right now

we're not in full control [yet], so you're in that

transition period."342

By the next day, the Coalition forces were shifting

their approach and trying to address the problem as

best they could with the limited resources at their disposal. Early on the morning of 10 April, a pedestrian

suicide bomber blew himself up and injured five

men from 5th Marines. The incident caught General

Conway's attention. He called it "a sobering reminder

104 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

ovic DMSD-O4-O89O4

Armed with M16A2 assault rifles and 81mm shoulder-launched anti-armor rocket launchers, Ma rifles from

Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, clear the streets of Iraqi resistance block-by-block on their way to securing the Presidential Palace.
Baghdad 105

• . . that much work remains to be done." The

Marines "must.., quickly transition to Phase IV Stage

B civil-military/humanitarian assistance operations to

stabilize the situation and demonstrate our resolve to

the newly liberated . . . people" of Iraq. The

theme at the I MEF's morning staff meeting was that

the Marines needed to switch from a combat role to

a stabilizing role. For that reason, Marines were ordered to take steps to control the looting, which included the protection of International Red Cross

facilities by 7th Marines.343 On the same day, 7th

Marines took the initiative to establish a civil military

operations center in the centrally located Palestine

Hotel. The other regiments followed suit in short

order, reaching out to local leaders and generally establishing useful contacts in the interests of restoring

some semblance of order and basic municipal services. The division's artillery regiment, 11th Marines,

played its part. Realizing he was unlikely to need

much more artillery support, General Mattis took the

unusual step of turning the division civil military operations center over to 11th Marines and assigning

the artillerymen their own sector of Baghdad along

with the infantry regiments.344 Late in the day, he was

feeling upbeat about the situation: "The city in our

zone is. . . [almost] entirely in USMC hands. While it

will remain a dangerous place for days to come, the

local populace is wholly supportive of our efforts and

active patrolling will impose our will. . . . We will

calm the situation and. . . build on the goodwill we

have experienced to date."345

That Baghdad was still a dangerous place was an

understatement. The Marines faced a number of

daunting tasks from turning the lights back on to explosive ordnance disposal. One problem was, in the

words of the division's command chronology, it

seemed that "virtually every block" in Baghdad had

its own weapons cache. Some of these caches were

enormous, "containing every conceivable type of

weapon and ammunition, to include tanks, mortars,

artillery pieces, and even. . . surface-to-surface rockOn the march up to Baghdad, Army and MaLCdr Bryan Schumacher, left, and HM Zachary Rowe, of the Regimental Aid Station, 5th Marines, render medical assistance to a wounded Iraqi civilian in the northern Baghdad suburbs. DVIC DM-SD-04-03523
106 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

rifle units had, like Task Force Tarawa in An

Nasiriyah, found weapons caches throughout the

country, often in schools, hospitals, and mosques, to

say nothing of the enormous ammunition supply

points that covered acres and acres of ground. In the

convoluted logic of the Saddam regime, it was only

fitting that the capital itself be lavishly supplied and

ready for a drawn-out fight. Although Iraqi intentions

remained unclear, the discoveries suggested that the

regime had been getting ready to back up its threat

that the Coalition would face a people in arms, or

some kind of guerrilla war, if it invaded Iraq.347

Well to the south of Baghdad, Task Force Tarawa

had already been conducting Phase IV operations

over a vast stretch of country with its approximately

13,000 Marines and sailors. When it expanded its

battle space to the north, it became responsible for

providing security along the major supply routes,

Routes 1 and 7, which meant it had to occupy or

neutralize threats in the area. This was in addition

to remaining responsible for An Nasiriyah, where

Tarawa Marines continued to make notable strides

in eliminating enemy resistance and establishing city

government. The city of Ad Diwaniyah astride Route

1 posed a typical challenge, which the Marines met

in ways that were becoming typical. ]n early April,

various kinds of enemy formations continued to

pose a threat to convoys passing through. While cordoning off the city, Tarawa made good use of its operational Detachment-Alpha, a U.S. Army Special

Forces unit that cultivated the population and gathered actionable intelligence. This in turn led to attacks on specific targets with precision munitions.

Similarly, in the nearby city of Al I-lamsha, information gathered by special operations forces led to a

strike against the Ba'ath Party that caused the death

of the local Ba'athist leader and was followed by a

successful revolt by the local citizenry.

In much the same way, Task Force Tarawa prosecuted attacks against enemy forces in several other

cities along Route 7, the other major supply route.

These cities were Al Hayy, Qalat Sikar, and Ash Shatrah. Another city that more or less liberated itself

was Al Amarah, where elements of the task force

had gone to eliminate the 10th Armored Division

from 8 to 12 April in the "Battle of the Icons." In midApril, after the British expanded their zone to the

north and took charge in Amarah, Task Force

Tarawa shifted its focus to the cities of An Numiniyah and Al Kut. The task force placed a battalion of infantry in An Numaniyah, where I MEF main

had set up an interim command post, and set up its

own headquarters on the airfield at Al Kut in hardened aircraft shelters that were mercifully cool, a

brief respite from the heat but not from the high

tempo of operations.348
Chapter 8

No Smell of Saltwater: North to Tikrit, South to Ad Diwaniyah

The expeditionary force's focus had always been

on Baghdad. The events of 9 and 10 April signaled

the end of the combat operation that most Marines

had expected to conduct. Those with longer memories remembered that before the war began, Coalition

Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) had

gamed a scenario for securing the oil fields around

the city of Kirkuk from the south, instead of the north

or the east, and that the I MEF had written a branch

plan for Kirkuk.

Some 150 miles north of Baghdad, Kirkuk was the

oil capital of the north. The surrounding oil fields were

comparable in significance to the southern oil fields

and represented an objective far too important to ignore. There had been various plans for the Army to secure the area, especially by introducing the 4th

Infantry Division through Turkey. But if that proved

impossible, other CFLCC troops might have to advance from the south. After the war, General James

Conway remembered being asked by CFLCC if the

Marines could take on the mission if necessary, and he

answered that it could be done, if necessary. The force

was not looking for yet another mission at the end of

its supply tether but would take it on if tasked. When

asked on 9 April by a journalist about ordering the

Marines to advance to the north, General Conway

commented: "That would be tough for us. We are a

long way from our sea base. As Marines, [if] we do not

smell saltwater . . . that makes us a little uneasy. That

said, our logisticians, . . . augmented by our lain wing,

have done a magnificent job. . . . To take [it] . . another couple [of] hundred miles would be extremely

difficult. It's difficult right now—that would be extremely difficult. But it might be something that we

have to ask our people to do."349 A few days later, during a staff meeting, Conway made the sensible comment: "We are not putting our hand in the air for that

[wel have enough [to do] already."35°

Coalition Forces Land Component Command's prewar questions meant it was not a complete surprise

when the issue came up again and occupied General

Conway and his staff on 10 April. The expeditionary

force issued a verbal order to division to "be prepared

to" proceed to Kirkuk, and to force service support

group and wing to be prepared to support the attack.

The guidance was to focus on the objective and to

avoid being sidetracked by enemy formations along

the way.35'

General James Mattis had already been thinking

about the north. Amazingly, he had recently gone on

record as being "prepared to continue the attack to

Kirkuk. . . and secure the. . . oil field." This was on

8 April, the day when it was worried about running

Out of ammunition while it was finishing the struggle

to get across the Diyala River, just before what would

be, for many of its Marines, the fight of a lifetime in

Baghdad.35' Even though division had apparently long

had a contingency plan on the shelf for an attack to

the north, this was just about as far forward as anyone

could, or did, lean in his fighting hole during Operation Iraqi Freedom.353

The 1st Marine Division then announced that it

could "collapse" its cordon around Baghdad and form

a task force, to be known as "Tripoli," after another

Marine march across desert sands, that of Lieutenant

Presley O'Bannon to Derna in 1805, to conduct the

operation. The assistant division commander,

Brigadier General John F. Kelly, would command,

using the nucleus of the division's forward command

post.354

Preparations intensified on 11 April. The I Marine

Expeditionary Force issued a formal warning order for

the continuation of the attack to Kirkuk. Mattis decided on the composition of the force. it would be

the division's three light armored reconnaissance battalions: 1st, 2d, and 3d; 5th Battalion, 11th Marines;

and Company G, 2d Battalion, 23d Marines. This

would amount to the equivalent of a reinforced armored reconnaissance regiment. Logistics would roll

with the task force, which would have a dedicated

combat service support element; but some resupply

would have to come from the wing, which pitched in

with plans to establish forward arming and refueling

points as the task force moved north and secured suitable pieces of terrain. Cargo helicopters and C-130

Hercules cargo haulers, the workhorse of choice for

many missions in Iraq, would deliver supplies to the

arming and refueling points. By this point in the campaign most acknowledged that the Marine KC-130s,

many of them piloted by reservists, were ideal for the

distances and the loads in Iraq; General James Amos

was to call them "the queen of the prom" in a postwar
108 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Map byW Stephen Hill

interview.355 For its part, the division staff went so far that had been set in motion before 10 April. Kurdish

as to analyze the makeup of the oil fields, build ob- forces, advised by U.S. Army Special Forces teams,

jective folders, and recommend schemes of maneu- seized the oil fields. As of 1800Z on 10 April, Coalition

ver to General Kelly. Forces Air Component Command stopped bombing

The I MEF plan for Kirkuk was overtaken by events the city of Kirkuk, because organized enemy resist-
No Smell of Saltwater 109

The Other Prisoner ofWar Rescue Operation

Some of the most high-profile storie of the war

were about American prisoners of war, especially the rescue of Army Private First Clas Je ica

Lynch, who had been captured early in the fighting around An asiriyah and later became omething of a media figure in the United State . On the

night of 1-2 April, Ta k Force Tarawa had facilitated her rescue. But the re cue at Samarra was as

memorable if not as celebrated. It was a victory

for the Marine traits of getting out meeting the

Iraqis, and taking calculated risks. On 13 April,

human intelligence exploitation team 3, led by Fi.rst

Lieutenant athan M. Boaz, entered the city, and

an Iraqi policeman approached with information

about U.S. prisoners. To pinpoint the location without compromising the source, the exploitation

team's chief, Staff Sergeant Randy Meyer, gave the

policeman a global positioning system receiver and

told him how to use it to record the location of the

Americans, which the policeman did. Even though

he was under pressure to continue on to Tikrit, 3d

Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Herman S. Clardy III,

decided on his own that the information was reliable enough to act on, and that trying to re cue

the prisoners was worth the time. Armored reconnaissance scouts and exploitation team member

proceeded to storm the house pinpointed by the

informer and, without firing a shot, freed the seven

grateful soldiers-two pilots and five members of

Jessica Lynch's unit, who had also been captured

ance was crumbling. On 11 April, the city was in Kurdish hands. By late afternoon on the same day, CFLCC

changed the Marines' target to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, which was only about 100 miles

north of Baghdad. General Conway commented to his

staff by way of explanation that the Marines "were the

best force available now to do thi.s."356

Tikrit was assessed by various intelligence elements

as a logical place for the regime to make a last stand;

the division framed the operation as an attack to deny

the enemy safe haven and to prevent the escape of

high-value targets. The enemy forces that the division

expected to encounter were one or two brigades of

the Special Republican Guard and a few hundred

paramilitary fighters. The general assumption was that

the paramilitaries would fight but that the uniformed

soldiers would not.

DVIC DM-SD-04-07386

LCpl Curney Russell and Cpl Christopher Castro

from 3d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion

prOVide a steady arm for rescued prisoner ofwar,

u.s. Army Spec Shoshana johnson of tbe 507th

Maintenance Battalion, as she and other repatriated prisoners are led from a Marine KC-130 aircraft at Kuwait City.

in An asiriyah on 22 March. One of the pilots

later described the re cue on television in vivid

terms, cheerfully recounting that he had never before been so glad to see a group of men who

looked like hollow-eyed killers coming to get him.

The news of their release was immediately briefed

throughout the theater, and the prisoners were

whisked to the rear.*

*In addition to the division command chronology, see LtCol

Herman S. Clardy III, email to author, 28Apr04 (Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VA).

The change may have been frustrating to some

forces and division planners, but overall it was a positive development, since it was relatively easy to substitute Tikrit for Kirkuk, and Tikrit was closer to

Baghdad; the supply tether would not have to stretch

as far. In General Mattis' words: "The division is

stretched, but not to the breaking point, with stabilization ops in Baghdad [and] TF Tripoli focused on

Tikrit. We are green on logistics, but will require

a new estimate of supportability if ordered to the

Kirkuk or Mosul area."357

What General Conway called "the final attack" officially began on the afternoon of 12 April, at 1255Z,

to be precise and proceeded rapidly up-country. It

was, in a sense, a quintessential Operation Iraqi Freedom operation. It was short-fused and had a commander who stressed the need for speed. He
110 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

task-organized in a matter of hours, making good use

of two weapons systems that also seemed to have

been made for a place like Iraq, eight-wheeled light

armored vehicles and Cobra helicopter gunships. "It

was," the command chronology recalled, "comforting

[to have] the Cobra escort. They were masters at rooting around the enemy's potential hiding spots and

building our situational awareness around every corner. . . . We gained a deep respect for the Cobra pilots during the war."358 The wing's airborne forward

air controller complemented the work of the Cobras

and kept in touch with a section of Harrier jets that

were dedicated to the task force. When this piece of

division-wing coordination was reported to I MEF, the

word was that if anyone opened fire on the Marines,

he would not live to regret it.359

After leaving its assembly area, Task Force Tripoli

passed first through friendly territory, with Iraqis lining the roads to wave and shouting greetings like

"Good, good!" In Samarra, a city between Baghdad

and Tikrit, there was a happy event when the 3d Light

Armored Reconnaissance Battalion found and freed

seven American prisoners of war on 13 April. Then,

closer to Tikrit, the locals became less friendly and in

some cases downright hostile. There were even more

murals, portraits, and statues of Saddam here than in

other parts of the country, where they were certainly

plentiful enough, but the Marines noticed only a few

had been defaced. Both on 13 and 14 April, there was

"minimal contact" with enemy formations, occasional

firefights, some of them intense, on the way to the objective.

"Minimal contact" is the kind of phrase that senior

commands put in situation reports. To the Marine on

the ground who is risking his life during one of the

few firefights of the day, it certainly does not seem

"minimal," and the division's command chronology

contains vivid descriptions of fights with Fedayeen in
No Smell of Saltwater 111

and around Tikrit. Even by the Iraqi standard, which

seemed to call for every school and mosque to be

filled with munitions, there was a great deal of military

hardware in the area. The Marines of 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, for example, passed

through a "large area [south of Tikritl ... with multiple revetments that contained enemy vehicles" and

then called in air strikes on the vehicles before proceeding on to a crossroads where they took a number

of rocket propelled grenade rounds, one of which

struck the tailpipe of a light armored vehicle. The

Marines returned fire, destroying two trucks and

killing five of the enemy. Once inside the city, the

Marines found massive amounts of ordnance, including a compound with 30 warehouses of weapons and

a cache at a hospital containing literally thousands of

AK-47 rifles. The division concluded that "the amount

of ordnance found in our sector is overwhelming and

will require months of dedicated lift to remove it

all. "360

By 15 April, fighting had tapered off, and Task

Force Tripoli found itself the de facto source of power

in Tikrit. The question was how to use that power to

address the bewildering array of problems that the city

faced. The existing power structure, the tribal sheikhs,

approached the task force, outlined the situation as

they saw it, and wanted to establish a leadership

council. Brigadier General John Kelly was reluctant to

deal with the sheikhs, who were hardly a democratic

body and had done business with Saddam Hussein. In

the end, he decided that the sheikhs represented as

good an interim local government as any and met

with them on 15 April to lay out his view of the situation. He repeated a number of basic themes: the

Marines would take responsibility for the security of

the area; the locals would help the Marines hunt down

any remaining foreign fighters or Saddam loyalists;

MSgt David Livingston from Marine Wing Support

Squadron 271 supervises a KC-130 Hercules offload

offuel at aforward arming and refueling point.

DVIC DM-SD-05-05193

and, finally, the sheikhs would bear much of the responsibility for restoring power, water, food, and medical services. All of this was easier said than done; the

15 April meeting was simply the beginning of a

process that entailed numerous meetings between the

sheikhs on the one hand and General Kelly on the

other, as men conditioned by long-simmering feuds

and unaccustomed to democracy took their first tentative steps away from a dictatorship that had dominated their lives for 30 years. A by-product of the

good relations between General Kelly and the sheikhs

was their assistance in the peaceful "liberation" of the

city of Bayji about 25 miles north of Tikrit.

Meanwhile, out on the streets of Tikrit, the Marines

dealt with such challenges as a panicky crowd of citizens who wanted to cross over a bridge that had

been weakened during the war; a group of vigilantes

who established their own checkpoints outside the

city, apparently to harass people they did not like; and

marauding Kurds, the ethnic minority who had suffered at the hands of Saddam's regime and were not

inclined to treat the citizens of Tikrit gently. The

Marines' aggressive patrolling, typically by dismounted

infantry without flak vests and in soft covers, along

with their commonsense solutions to problems, restored more than a small semblance of order to the

city within a few days.

Between 19 and 21 April, Task Force Tripoli conducted a relief in place with the Army's 4th Infantry

Division and prepared to rejoin the main body of 1st

Marine Division. The 4th Infantry Division had spent

the war en route first to Turkey, where it had been

unable to land, and then to Iraq through Kuwait. Although major combat operations had ended, this division characterized its move north to the zone it

would occupy as an "attack," which led to some unfortunate incidents. On 19 April, the Marine division

complained about U.S. Army Apache helicopters entering Marine battle space "without permission or

clearance to engage," and then firing at abandoned

enemy armor located between the 2d and 3d Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalions. The 4th Infantry Division also seemed intent on treating the Tikritis as

hostile, which distressed the Marines, who had gone

to some lengths to establish good relations with the locals. General Mattis himself noticed that like the 3d

Infantry Division, the 4th had a lot of armored vehicles and only a limited number of dismounts and went

on record with a prediction that "the lack of Army dismounts is creating a void in personal contact and public perception. . . . Our forces need to project

confidence in the security environment we have created. That is best exemplified in light, mobile forces in
112 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

contact with the local citizenry sans helmets and flak

jackets and without armored vehicles. If we cannot

engender friendship and confidence in the local security environment, we cannot set the conditions for

good order integral to a return to civil control."6'

General Mattis' comment applied not only to Tikrit

but also to Baghdad. While Task Force Tripoli was securing Tikrit and preparing for a relief in place with

4th Infantry Division, three regiments of the division

had been consolidating their gains in Baghdad and

getting ready to turn their zones over to 3d Infantry

Division in accordance with the plan for the occupation of Iraq. The civil-military operations center run

by the artillerymen of the 11th Marines, continued to

find stopgap solutions for the many problems they

faced; with remarkably little assistance or guidance

from anyone, it had established cells for police, fire,

electricity, water, and medical care, and the instant experts worked their issues as best they could. The operations center appointed an interim police chief and

opened an Iraqi police academy. It facilitated and coordinated the work of nongovernmental organizations

like CARE, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and the

World Food Program. Meanwhile, Out Ofl the streets,

the regimental combat teams maintained checkpoints

to control movement in their sectors, which they

moved often to frustrate any attempts to target them.

The division took some additional steps such as delivering public safety messages, in the hope of controlling the rampant looting and widespread crime that

had broken Out when the regime collapsed and left a

power vacuum in Baghdad. Since this was something

no one had really planned for except in the most general terms, there had been an ad hoc quality about

the guidance from CFLCC and I MEF about looting

and crime that seemed to boil down to "stop it if you

can" and left it up to the units in contact to come up

with workable solutions.362

Even though there was only so much the Marines

could do in the few days between the collapse of the

regime and their scheduled departure from Baghdad,

they appear to have made some progress. One Marine, Major Jason L. Morris, of 3d Battalion, 5th

Marines, observed that the eastern half of Baghdad

seemed to have returned to something like normalcy

within 10 days of the fall of the Saddam statue on Firdos Square. Morris attributed this to the division's approach, which he characterized as relatively low

impact. Even in the days immediately after 9 April,

Marines allowed the local citizens to go about their

business so long as they did not interfere with Marine

business. There was certainly an active Marine presence in the streets, especially by dismounted inovic DM-SD-04-16619

Marines assigned to the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion encamp below one of Saddam

Hussein 'spalaces in Tikrit the Iraqi president's hometown.

fantrymen, but he did not think they gave the city the

feel of being under martial law. He supported General

Mattis' argument that infantrymen are better suited for

patrolling a city than armored vehicles.363

As impressive as its beginnings were, no one will

ever know how effective the division's occupation of

Baghdad would have been in the long run. By 15

April, if not before, the division staff had begun to

prepare for a turnover to the 3d Infantry 1)ivision, with

the assistance of the Army's 358th Civil Affairs

Brigade's Deliberate Assessment Team. I)etailed staff

work and command interaction followed at various

levels, more or less spontaneously, "without written

orders, instructions, or doctrine of any kind," to quote

the division's command chronology.364 The actual relief in place in Baghdad occurred between 18 and 20

April, another eventful day. While elements of the division moved south to Ad Diwaniyah, where it relieved the Army's 82d Airborne Division and

established a new headquarters, I MEF convened a

combined Phase IV and retrograde-reconstitutionregeneration conference at its dusty field headquarters in An Numaniyah.

Phase III, the war from the line of departure in

Kuwait to the enemy center of gravity in Baghdad,

had gone by in the blink of an eye, a remarkable performance by any standard. But there had been a cost.

For the Marines, the casualties were on the order of 75

killed in action and 300 wounded. Even if statistics did

not lessen the heartbreak of loss for each man who

died, the numbers were far smaller than had been

feared, which was something to be thankful for.365 The

Marines honored their dead and wounded and prepared for the next phase of the operation.
Chapter 9

The Other War in the North: Marines in Kurdistan and Mosul

Task Force Tripoli was not the only Marine command that operated north of Baghdad, which included great stretches of territory that fell under Joint

Special Operations Task Force North, commanded by

Colonel Charles T. Cleveland, USA. Cleveland, who

had apparently been in Iraqi Kurdistan for months,

reported not to Coalition Forces Land Component

Command (CFLCC) but to Coalition Forces Special

Operations Command, another CentCom dependency. Using various kinds of paramilitary forces, he

ran the war in the northeast corner of Iraq, responsible for its defense from the Iraqi Army and for preparations to secure the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk and

their surroundings. He had, in a sense, taken on the

mission that had been assigned to the 4th Infantry

Division, to put pressure on Baghdad from the north,

or at least to manage the situation in the north in

order to prevent any surprises that might undermine

the offensive in the south. To do this he had at his

disposal a U.S. Special Forces Group, made up of

three Special Forces battalions, and Kurdish formations as well as Coalition airpower in general support. There was a U.S. Air Force contingent with

some air and ground assets complementing the Special Forces, and Colonel Cleveland could also request

sorties from Coalition Forces Air Component Command. As for the Kurdish fighters, there were some

70,000 of them, grouped into two militias identified

with the two main Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic

Party, which were now cooperating against the common enemy but had in the past sometimes turned on

each other, exhibiting some of the less attractive aspects of a warlike culture. The Special Forces had

been working with these fighters for at least a few

months 366

There was another group working in the north

that did not come under Cleveland but cooperated

with his command. It was the handful of Marines

known as the Military Coordination and Liaison Command, led by Major General Henry P. Osman, the

commanding general of II Marine Expeditionary

Force from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, another

one of the low-key but very effective generals who

left their mark on Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Military Coordination and Liaison Command

Photo courtesy of Field History Branch

MajGen Henry P. Osman, a graduate of Old Dominion University, was commissioned in 1969. Over the

ensuing years, he commanded a rifle platoon and

company in Vietnam, a 1st Marine Division infantry

battalion, and served in numerous staff assignments

before assuming command of H Marine Expeditionary Force in August 2002.

had a complicated history. In the fall of 2002, General Osman had watched Brigadier General Richard

Natonski and 2d Marine Expeditionary Brigade's

preparations to join I MEF in Kuwait for the attack

from the south. This was neither unexpected nor a

particular hardship to II MEF; since the end of the

Cold War, and the shift in focus away from the North

Atlantic, II MEF had served largely as a force provider

for other theaters. The 2d Marine Expeditionary

Brigade was by design a detachable module of II

MEF. General Natonski himself was the deputy expeditionary force commander, as well as the commander of the brigade. Similarly, many of his officers

were dual-hatted, with both force and brigade functions. The deployment of the brigade meant the force

staff had only a small residual capability, but it was

still a capability that could be put to good use in the
114 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

CentCom theater. General Osman believed that II

MEF could field a small joint task force and told

Headquarters Marine Corps as much.367 What happened next was a dialogue between II MEF and

Headquarters Marine Corps over the potential uses

of II MEF's staff, animated at least in part by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James L.

Jones' continuing interest in northern Iraq, especially

the northeast corner of the country with its large Kurdish minority.

In 1991, in the wake of Operation Desert Storm,

there had been a humanitarian crisis in northern Iraq

following Saddam Hussein's brutal suppression of a

Kurdish revolt. After a delay, President George H.W.

Bush had directed the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. European Command to conduct an operation to provide humanitarian assistance to the tens of thousands

of Kurds who, in the aftermath of the revolt, had become refugees in their own homeland. The result

had been Operation Provide Comfort, a multinational

effort that had lasted for about four months and created the basis for de facto Kurdish autonomy for the

next decade. Iraqi troops stayed out of Kurdish territory, part of the northern no-fly zone enforced by

Operation Northern Watch. That said, in 2002 there

were up to 12 Iraqi divisions north of Baghdad, at

various stages of readiness, grouped in I coips and V

Corps. A number of them were assessed as capable

of advancing into Kurdistan. Both the Iraqis and the

Kurds actively manned and patrolled the "Green

Line" that divided their spheres of control.368

The Commandant had been the 24th MEU (SOC)

commander during Provide Comfort, and he had not

forgotten the experience. Now, in late 2002, as he

prepared to step down as Commandant and take up

the responsibilities of Supreme Allied Commander,

Europe, he wanted to do what he could to support

CentCom in the coming war against Iraq. One of his

agenda items was to explore the need for another

such mission with Marine participation.369 Would the

CFLCC attack from the south lead to another humanitarian crisis in the north? If so, it would involve

Turkey, a NATO ally. Southern Turkey was the obvious location to stage the mission. This was therefore

a matter that the Supreme Allied Commander, like his

predecessor 13 years earlier, needed to consider. The

border between Iraq and Turkey was also the border

between CentCom and European Command; anything that happened in northern Iraq would affect

both commands. General Osman and the II MEF staff

were natural candidates for a military-political mission to the region, and after he had more or less volunteered his services, Osman discussed the

contingency with General Jones in November and

December 2002. He also met twice with General Anthony Zinni, another veteran of Operation Provide

Comfort, who, while at Central Command, had spent

much of his time traveling around the region practicing military-political diplomacy.370 By late January

2003, after 2d Marine Expeditionary Brigade had left

Camp Lejeune, General Osman was in touch with the

senior Marine in U.S. European Command, Marine

Forces Europe commander, Lieutenant General Martin R. Berndt, about standing up a joint task force to

coordinate Phase IV, that is, post combat, operations

in northern Iraq. To consider, first, how to staff the

joint task force and, second, how it should operate,

II MEF had created an operational planning team.37'

On 17 February 2003, General Osman and a few

of his principal staff officers flew to the European

Command headquarters at Stuttgart, Germany, to cliscuss the potential operation with military planners at

Marine Forces Europe, which is part of European

Command. Next they visited Ankara, Turkey, for

meetings with subject matter experts at the American

embassy and the Turkish General Staff. To put it

mildly, the Turks had no enthusiasm for a mission to

help the Kurds, especially one operating out of

southern Turkey, and did not offer much by way of

help or encouragement. Since they wanted to keep

their own Kurdish minority in check, the last thing

the Turks wanted was for the Iraqi Kurds to assert

themselves. The Turks and the Kurds had a long tradition of enmity, and the United States had to strike

a delicate balance between using the Kurds against

the Iraqis and not upsetting Turkish sensibilities. This

was one of the reasons why the United States could

not use the Kurdish militias as proxies in the quite

the same way it had used Afghan militias in late 2001

and early 2002. Throughout the operation, as General

Osman and his officers encountered strong, even visceral, anti-Kurdish sentiments among the Turkish officers they met, they made it part of their mission to

do what they could to keep such sentiments in

check. It did not help that General Osman had a typically Turkish surname but was not of Turkish descent, leading his Turkish contacts first to imagine

that they were speaking to a compatriot, and then to

disappointment when they were disabused of that

notion.

General Osman's small group went on to Camp

Doha, Kuwait, to meet with General David McKiernan and his staff, whom they found to be, understandably, preoccupied with other matters and not

able to devote much attention to northern Iraq. The

group's last stop was CentCom headquarters at Doha,
The Other War in the North 115

Qattar, where there were more discouraging meetings. A down-to-earth son of Georgia who called it

like he saw it, Colonel Robert L. Hayes III, the I MEF

operations officer, remembered thinking that no one

really seemed to want the mission to happen. He

himself was beginning to question its utility, especially since his mission analysis showed that the conditions that had called forth Operation Provide

Comfort in 1991 simply did not exist in 2003. There

did not appear to be an impending humanitarian crisis; on the contrary, this time the Kurds appeared to

be well prepared for any such eventuality. The joke

among members of the staff was that this task force

without a mission should be known as "JTF JDK," for

"just do not know." Someone even went to the length

of ordering coffee cups with an official-looking 'JTF

JDK" logo.

Virtually at the last minute, during a meeting with

General John P. Abizaid, USA, the deputy commander of CentCom forward and another veteran of

Operation Provide Comfort, the mission was saved.

General Abizaid analyzed the current situation from

another angle and came to the conclusion that the

presence of the right American flag officer would definitely be value added. That officer's mission would

be to preserve the status quo during combat operations, in effect, to help secure the northern flank, and

not just to prepare for humanitarian assistance after

the war. The officer would work to keep the Kurds

(and the other minorities) in check, which in turn

would keep the Turks from intervening "to protect

their equities," a distinct possibility if the Kurds

seized Kirkuk, the medium-sized city that was the

key to the northern oil fields, and Mosul, its larger

neighbor to the north, with a population of more

than 1.5 million that many senior Ba'athists called

home. Even without the Turkish factor, there were

so many different groups with ancient conflicts

against one another that the region was a powder

keg. The Turkish threat to intervene if the Kurds "got

Out of hand" was the match that could have set it

aflame. With this vision, General Abizaid played the

leading role in converting the European Command

initiative into a CentCom mission and became the

mission manager to whom Osman reported, on an

almost daily basis. General Abizaid told General

Osman that the best place for the Military Coordination and Liaison Command was in northern Iraq, not

southern Turkey.372

Even though Kurdish Iraq was more or less autonomous and enjoyed the protection of its own

forces, this was still enemy territory. Getting ready to

operate in Saddam's backyard during the war made

matters more interesting and it called for a lot of creative preparations. Leaving roughly 30 members of

his staff in Stuttgart, General Osman decided to enter

Iraq with only a handful of Marines, a total of six.

Through a portable communications suite, they

would "reach back" for support to Stuttgart from

members of the II MEF staff who had deployed to

European Command, and rely largely on the Kurds

and U.S. Special Forces for situational awareness, security, and other forms of support. They acquired a

mix of civilian sports utility vehicles and one pickup

truck, a Ford F-350, through a mix of open purchase

and barter with the U.S. Air Force. They planned to

travel in uniform, with a mix of light weapons. Everyone on the tiny staff had more than one job. Colonel

Keith A. Lawless, for example, was not only the intelligence officer (his normal job), but also the political adviser and a bodyguard armed with an M4

assault rifle. Colonel Lawless' colorful operations

chief, Master Gunnery Sergeant Richard C. McPherson, doubled as an interpreter in addition to his normal duties, and as driver and bodyguard. Born in

Jamaica to Scots-Lebanese parents, McPherson had

served a number of tours in the Middle East and was

an accomplished Arabist.373

Just getting the approvals to travel through Turkey,

and then to cross the Turkish border into Iraq, was

no simple matter—requiring at one point the personal intervention of General Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, with the Turkish high

command. Finally, on 23 March the small task force

made it out of Turkey and found itself very much

alone on the Iraqi side of the deserted border crossing, until two heavily armed U.S. Army Special Forces

noncommissioned officers appeared, seemingly out

of nowhere, to serve as escorts and advisers. They

made no secret of their initial lack of enthusiasm for

the newcomers who were taking them away from

their primary duties of training the Kurds and helping them to kill Iraqis. But, like others in Joint Special Operations Task Force North, they soon

discovered that General Osman's group was lowmaintenance and that its work could complement

that of the Special Forces.374

Within two hours of crossing the border, Osman's

work started in earnest. At a town called Dahok near

the Green Line, he stopped to meet General Babekir

al-Zibari, the senior KDP military leader in the region,

whom General Osman came to appreciate as "a great

warrior and a great . . . patriot."375 Babekir's troops,

and those of other Kurdish organizations, were

known generically as the "Peshmerga," literally,

"those who face death." The average Peshmerga
116 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

fighter looked like a cross between a mountain man

and a horseman, but there was little doubt about his

motivation or his fighting ability. Peshmerga groups

ranged from loosely organized militia to semiprofessional paramilitaries, with about 45,000 loyal to the

Kurdish Democratic Party and some 20,000 answering to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Over the course of a meeting that lasted many

hours and included an elaborate lunch, General

Babekir talked about his appreciation for what the

United States was doing in the region, and especially

for the work of the U.S. Special Forces, with whom

he had a strong ongoing relationship. He said he was

eager to do more, which was his way of saying he

wanted to cross the Green Line and fight the Iraqis.

In what was to become a familiar refrain, General

Osman counseled patience, explaining the instability that Kurdish action could unleash, given Turkish

sensibilities. General Babekir took this on board and

asked if General Osman could do anything about the

Iraqi artillery on the other side of the Green Line that

could range Dahok. Osman made no specific promises but said he would see what he could do. By

chance, a few hours later a heavy Coalition air raid

was made on the Iraqi lines, and General Osman's

penny stock with the Kurds increased in value a hundred fold. The result was, in the words of the mission's communications officer, Lieutenant Colonel

James E. Bacchus, "effervescence" from the Kurds,

who felt they had been abandoned by the Americans

in the past. Perhaps this time it would be different.376

General Osman and his party went on to the town

of Salaheddin, where they stayed in a guesthouse belonging to the Kurdish Democratic Party, the somewhat more westernized, and larger, of the two

Kurdish political parties. The next day, 24 March,

General Osman held a press conference, there being

a large contingent of media in Salaheddin, during

which he explained the Military Coordination and Liaison Command's mission in general terms, outlining

such functions as "the deconfliction of military activities," synchronizing humanitarian assistance, and

"the maintenance of stability."377 Reports of the conference described the liaison command as a "special

military command to protect northern Iraq and satisfy

Turkish security concerns along the Turkey-Iraq border," and especially to "dissuade Turkey from sending troops to northern Iraq."378 The presence of a

two-star Marine general had clearly caught the attention of the players on the field and demonstrated that

the United States wanted to make sure the game was

played by its rules. It also contributed to the "information operations" against the Iraqis, who had to be

asking themselves what a senior American officer

was doing in Kurdistan, was he paving the way for a

larger force? General Osman did nothing to discourage this speculation, especially when he reached out

to the Iraqi generals on the Green Line, passing a

very direct written message from General Tommy R.

Franks: "Decide now. I, General Franks, will help

you destroy Saddam's regime, or I will destroy

you. "379 The next few days saw a round of seemingly endless meetings with a bewildering array of local

groups, from the routine, such as coordination with

Joint Special Operations Task Force North, to the

conventional, such as meetings with the Kurdish

Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, to the exotic, such as with the Iraqi Turkomen

Front, representing the Turkish minority in the region, and the Supreme Council of Iraqi Revolutionaries, an anti-Saddam group supported by Iran. Most

of the time General Osman drove long distances to

meet the local politicians and functionaries, choosing to meet them on their own turf rather than summoning them to his headquarters; he wanted to avoid

the appearance of seeming like an imperial envoy.

This entailed some risk of attack on the road from

Iraqi operatives, who were said to have targeted the

general for assassination. Although sometimes accompanied by a small Kurdish security detail, along

with one or two U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers,

force protection for the small group was mostly a

matter of not making its destination known until the

last minute and then traveling at breakneck speed on

bad roads. In the end, the general told his drivers to

slow down; he said he would rather die from a sucking chest wound than from the seemingly inevitable

car crash. Once they arrived at a home or office,

there were elaborate rituals of courtesy to follow,

which typically meant drinking a lot of tea and eating large quantities of unusual food. Some of the

food was easily identifiable, like roast lamb and rice,

two local staples. But there were also unusual foods,

like one that a member of the mission could only describe in his notes as a "strange veggie." This routine,

and General Osman's personal style, which was characterized by patience, politeness, and persistence, enabled him to build relationships with virtually all of

these groups. Although Osman did not supplant

Colonel Cleveland, he became something like the

senior adviser to call in order to discuss a plan, or

the honest broker who could keep the peace between warring factions.

The value of these relationships emerged as the

Iraqi regime collapsed at the end of the first week in
The Other War in the North 117

April, and the Iraqi soldiers in the north either surrendered or simply changed into civilian clothes and

went home, like thousands of their comrades

throughout the country. One result of the collapse

was a power vacuum in Kirkuk and Mosul that some

Kurds wanted to fill. There had been substantial Kurdish minorities in both of these Iraqi cities, and many

Kurds had lost property when Saddam Hussein had

"Arabized" the region. Understandably, the Kurds

wanted to protect and assert their interests in both

cities, while the Turks wanted to make sure the

Kurds did not turn them into centers of Kurdish

power. Apart from its interest in removing vestiges

of the former regime, especially in the "loyalist" city

of Mosul, and stabilizing the region, the United States

was as dedicated to protecting the oil fields around

Kirkuk as it was to protecting the southern oil fields

around Basrah. With its blue-collar outlook, Kirkuk

reminded General Osman of a frontier oil town,

while Mosul seemed to be more developed and sophisticated, even attractive in parts.

The Kurds became increasingly anxious as rioting

and looting spread through Mosul, where there were

few Coalition troops in evidence. In Kirkuk, the Kurdish Democratic Party and its Peshmerga took the initiative to fill the vacuum. Its leader, Jalal Talibani,

literally moved into city hall. His Patriotic Union rival,

Massoud Barzani, immediately complained to General Osman that Talibani had broken the rules and

expanded his sphere of influence at Barzani's expense. Barzani claimed to be losing ground because

he had listened to General Osman's pleas for restraint. Osman's response was to drive to Kirkuk on

12 April, through a kind of no-man's land, and find

Talibani, whose reaction on seeing the general was to

try to embrace him in order to celebrate the day the

Kurds had returned to Kirkuk. Within seconds Talibani saw that the general did not share his mood.

The two stepped into the former mayor's office,

where General Osman told Talibani in no uncertain

terms why he and his forces had to leave Kirkuk. If

they stayed, the result could be Turkish intervention,

and a war within a war. This was no idle threat; there

were Turkish liaison officers and a few Turkish special forces soldiers on the ground pursuing their own,

crosscutting interests. Talibani, who spoke good English and wore western-style clothes, reluctantly came

around to the general's point of view and agreed to

withdraw himself and his troops from Kirkuk. Even

General Osman's staff was impressed with this result,

remarking, "Gee, Sir, you threw Talibani out of

town."38°

The townspeople of Kirkuk had seemed to be faPhoto courtesy of Field History Branch

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, center,

talks with Massoud Barzani, left, president of the Kurdish Democratic Party, in Salahuddin, Iraq, during

meetings with Kurdish party leaders.

vorably disposed to the Coalition and eager to return

to a peacetime routine. At first they had not known

what to make of the unusual group of Marines driving into town in black sport utility vehicles. But when

they had realized they were looking at Americans,

they had started to applaud. Mosul, by contrast, felt

hostile, not unlike Tikrit. The locals appeared glum,

and there were Iraqi flags flying everywhere, even

from mosques. It did not help that Peshmerga elements were active in the city, which inflamed tensions between Iraqis and Kurds. While the city was

quieter on 13 April than it had been the day before,

General Osman agreed with task force officers that

pockets of unrest were still apparent and that the

United States needed to increase its military footprint

as quickly as possible.381

As if on cue, the 26th MEU (SOC) appeared over

the horizon. It was the only readily available, uncommitted force in the area and was still in the

Mediterranean, under the cognizance of Sixth Fleet,

which meant it was ultimately under the command of

General Jones. It had been natural for him, a Marine

with an interest in northern Iraq, to discuss and plan

its employment with CentCom. General Jones had always been a keen proponent of putting a Marine airground task force into northern Iraq, and a Marine

expeditionary unit fit the bill.382 Commanded by

Colonel Andrew P. Frick, the 26th MEU was another

unit that had had an incredible existence, so different

from most peacetime expeditionary units that simply

went from one landing exercise to another until their

time was up. The 26th MEU had flown from expeditionary shipping into Afghanistan the year before in

what was viewed at the time as validation of the Marine doctrine and was now about to launch a new
118 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

long-distance operation over semihostile territory.383

Part of the Marine expeditionary unit soon flew by

Lockheed KC-130 Hercules aircraft from Naval Air

Station, Souda Bay, on the island of Crete, to northern Iraq, a distance of some 975 nautical miles, while

its air combat element, Marine Medium Helicopter

Squadron 264 (HMM-264), self-deployed from the

USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) in the eastern Mediterranean

to fly nearly 500 nautical miles into Iraq, possibly a

new record. The unit historian, Captain Arnaldo L.

Colon, noted that the "HMM-264 self deployment into

Iraq was the farthest a MEU (SOC) ACE [aviation

combat element] had ever flown. Prior to that flight,

HMM-365 had flown the farthest with 380 nautical

miles into Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom."384 The route flown on 12 and 13

April skirted the Turkish/Syrian border and led to a

U.S.-run expeditionary airfield at Irbil, in northern

Iraq, .where the Marine expeditionary unit came

under the tactical control of Joint Special Operations

Task Force North. Although they welcomed the arrival of the expeditionary unit, General Osman and

the Military Coordination and Liaison Command had

no command relationship with the unit.385

The 26th MEU had been briefed for a mission to

establish security checkpoints to prevent high-value

targets, mostly senior Ba'athists, from trying to escape

to Syria. One officer, First Lieutenant Sunny-James M.

Risler, later recalled he had not known what to expect on arrival in Iraq; he was under the impression

that he and his men needed to be ready to fight their

way off the aircraft. But once they landed in Irbil, the

Marines found that joint task force had the situation

very well in hand; not only was the airfield secure,

but there was a base camp complete with a good

chow hall!386

The only problem was that they were not going to

stay long in Irhil. Soon after landing, Colonel Cleveland asked the Marines if they could take on a new

mission—provide a stabilizing presence in Mosul.

Both the battalion commander at the airhead, Lieutenant Colonel David K. Hough, and Colonel Frick

were ready to adapt and respond, which pleased

Colonel Cleveland, who was said to have been frustrated at times by other Services' lack of responsiveness. So, within a short period of time, the leading

elements of 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, went on to

Mosul without even having had a chance to find a

good map of the place, let alone to plan. Over the

next few days, the expeditionary unit flowed the rest

of its assets to Mosul and established a presence

around the local airport.

On the morning of 15 April, the 1st Battalion, 8th

Marines, was involved in an incident that could have

A 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit explosive ordnance team, along with a security detailfrom 1st Battalion, 8th

Marines, move in to search the remains of a demolished building near the ailport in Mosul, Iraq.

Photo courtesy of Field FTistory Branch
The Other War in the North 119

occurred almost anywhere in Iraq during this period.

Tasked to conduct security operations for a regional

coordination center in downtown Mosul, Company

B drove to the government building, the former

Ba'ath Party headquarters, along with civil affairs and

Special Forces personnel. An angry crowd near the

building became progressively angrier after a loudspeaker mounted on an ambulance began to broadcast a message in Arabic and a supposed

"peacemaker" spoke to the crowd. It turned out that

the crowd was angry because they believed that certain Iraqis who had benefited from Saddam's rule

were to remain in power under the American occupation. Since none of the Americans at the governate

that day spoke Arabic, they did not know what the

problem was until much later. Some members of the

crowd tried to punch at the Marines and to spit on

them. Others tried to get close and, in the words of

Sergeant Bryan L. Gilstrap, reach "into their pockets."387

The tension was palpable for the Marines, who

were still getting adjusted to being in Iraq, to say

nothing of a mission that was neither full-blown combat nor peacekeeping. True to their training, Marines

checked the compound, manned the perimeter, and,

according to Captain Colon, reacted to the first

rounds that were fired at them by firing over the

heads of the crowd. Sergeant Gilstrap, who was the

scout-sniper team leader, remembered seeing an

Iraqi raise an AK-47 rifle to a firing position, which

made him a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. Gilstrap fired at, and hit, his target. This

was followed by an intense firefight as the Marines

and the crowd fired at each other. Sergeant Gilstrap

said it was like the scene in the movie Rules of Engagement that showed Marines defending a U.S. Embassy in the Middle East against a mix of

demonstrators and shooters (the movie raised questions about how much force the defenders were auTwo Iraqi teenage boys are unfazed by the presence of

a Marine from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit,

who is providing security at the Ibn Sina Teaching

Hospital in Mosul.

jccc 030420-F-5789F-005

thorized, or entitled, to use). At some point a number of armed men tried to breach the perimeter and

were killed or wounded by the Marines. As the unit's

command chronology noted, the "crowd dispersed

only after fixed-wing aircraft, coordinated through

JSOTF-N, made low-flying passes over the area."

There were no Marine casualties.3

Lieutenant Colonel Hough, the battalion commander, decided to keep his Marines at the site

overnight, and the company spent the night improving its positions. The next day, the hostile sniping

started back up. The Marines used a CH-46E helicopter as a counter sniper platform, with some success. But later in the day, Iraqi fighters began

preparing to fire rocket-propelled grenades and

crew-served weapons against the Marines from urban

high ground. After consulting with his Army Special

Forces counterpart, Colonel Frick decided to withdraw Company B. Given the force ratios and the general hostility in Mosul, it made sense to leave the

exposed position at the government building. After

dark, Company A and Special Forces soldiers ran a

convoy of trucks into the site to return Company B to

friendly lines. Although the evolution occurred without further incident, officers in the expeditionary unit

operations section commented that they would have

felt more comfortable running light armored vehicles

or amphibious assault vehicles into the heart of town,

which they had not brought with them into Iraq.389

Capt Arnaldo Colon reported seven confirmed kills. The New York

Times reported that on 15 and 16 April there were 17 Iraqis killed

and 39 wounded but does not specifically state that all of these casualties were from firefights at the government building. The command chronology does not state a precise number, only that

"several Iraqis were killed or wounded." After the firefight there

were allegations that the Marines had overreacted, that is, that their

response had not been proportional to the threat. At Col Frick's behest, 26th MEU's staff judge advocate, Maj Ian D. Brasure, conducted an informal investigation to determine if there needed to

be a more formal investigation of the allegations. After talking to

participants in the firefight, he came to the conclusion that that

would not be necessary. (Capt Arnaldo L. Colon, ed., "U.S. Marines

in Northern Iraq: A Certain Force," n.d. [Filed with 26th MEU(SOC)

ComdC, Jan-Jun03, GRC, Quantico, VA]; 26th MEU(SoC) ComdC,

Jan-JunO3; Maj Ian D. Brasure telephone conversation with author,

17May04)

According to Gen Osman, who was apparently recording information that had been passed to him: "Col Frick decided to abandon the RCC [Ba'ath Party headquarters] that had been occupied

based on suggestions by several local leaders. Late yesterday, the

Marines guarding the RCC spotted several men establishing a machine gun position and carrying an R1'G in a building situated

about 200 meters from the RCC. In light of the firefight from the

previous day and what appeared to be an upcoming fight, it was

decided a more secure location was in order." (Gen H. P. Osman

sitrep to Gen J. P. Abizaid, 7AprO3,tCopy in Reynolds Working Papers, MCHC, Quantico, VAJ)
120 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

JCCC 030423 -A-71 70X-001

Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division arrive at

Mosul Airport on 23 April, relieving Marines of the

26th Marine Expeditionary Unit of security and stability operations in northern Iraq.

For the remainder of its time in Mosul, which

lasted until it was relieved by the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) in late April, the 26th MEU conducted a variety of security missions in and around

Mosul, none quite so dramatic as the first, but still

important and useful. The expeditionary unit also put

its aviation assets to use for the mutual benefit of the

Marines and the Army Special Forces. This was especially true of the Marine KC-130 at the unit's disposal, which again proved their flexibility and their

worth. On 23 April elements of the 101st began relieving the Marines at the airfield, and the 26th MEU

began the process of disengaging and redeploying.

By 2 May, its redeployment to Souda Bay was complete. Colonel Frick's view, in retrospect, was that the

unit (like the coordination and liaison command) had

successfully bought time for the Coalition—a stopgap force that had helped to restore some semblance

of law and order in a difficult operating environ390* As the 101st took over from the Joint Special operations Task Force, the Military Coordination and Liaison Command contributed its insights on the

situation. General Osman spent a good part of 22

April with the incoming commander, Major General

David H. Petraeus, explaining his work and passing

"Col John P. Holden, deputy chief of plans for Sixth Fleet, stated

that the reason for redeploying the 26th MEU after such a short period of time was that Coalition Forces Land Component Command

decided that with the 101st Airborne Division on site, there was no

longer any need for the Marines. (Col John P. Holden intvw,

9Jun03 IMCHC, Quantico, VAI)

on his views on recent developments in northern

Iraq. In particular, Osman described Mosul as "different than any other city in Iraq" with its "feeling of

having been defeated vs. liberated." He believed a

strong United States presence was needed to enable

key leadership to "feel comfortable enough to come

forward." He concluded that as soon as the new leadership was able to establish itself, "we wilt want to remove the United States presence quickly."391 General

Osman conducted similar briefs with, among others,

the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, Major

General Raymond Odierno, and representatives of

the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Some members of General Osman's staff

thought the office was better prepared for a reprise

of Operation Provide Comfort than for the situation

that northern Iraq actually faced. Since its chief, retired Lieutenant General Jay M. Garner USA (Retired),

was yet another veteran of that operation, this was

understandable. Once he had conducted out-briefs

with all of these officers, General Osman determined

his mission was at an end and had arrangements

made for his group to fly home.

What was the significance of General Osman's

mission? What did the Military Coordination and Liaison Command contribute with some measure of

success to a situation that was already being handled

by the U.S. Army Special Forces? Arguably, the presence of a general officer freed the Special Forces

from having to focus so heavily on day-to-day political relationships, thereby enabling them to focus

more on the military side of things. At the same time,

the command accomplished its own mission. General Osman did not win a war. The coordination and

liaison command did not receive or return fire, although it came close on some days. But it did help

to prevent a small war, and it did contribute to the

success of Operation Iraqi Freedom as surely as if it

had maneuvered a Marine air-ground task force over

northern Iraq.392*

The Military Coordination and Liaison Command evokes the utility of the kind of engagement that was practiced so well by officers like Gen Zinni when he traveled around the CentCom area of

operations to establish relationships with local leaders. The military historians Murray and Scales have argued that this is the next

level the U.S. military needs to reach. Just as the Marine Corps and

its sister Services learned how to operate lighter and faster between 1991 and 2003, there is now a need to learn how to be attuned to the cultural contexts in which they operate, refining the

ability to find and manipulate "non-kinetic," social or political,

pressure points, which can often eliminate the need for "kinetic,"

or traditional military, interventions.
Chapter 10

A Marriage of Convenience:

Cooperation Between I MEF and the British Division

Like the war in the north, the war in southeast Iraq

had some of the character of a private war. It was

conducted by some 16,000 colorful fighters who had

been fighting small wars for centuries, did things

their own way, got along famously with Marines, and

even spoke English.

The habitual relationships were there. British and

American forces had been cooperating in the Persian

Gulf since Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Their air

forces jointly enforced the no-fly zones. After September 2001 there had been British liaison officers at

CentCom and joint operations in Afghanistan. Some

senior American and British decision makers already

knew one another, which made planning that much

easier, and there were a number of established joint

procedures. The shared knowledge of the area, and

of each other's procedures and personalities, made it

easier for the British to succeed even though it was

very late in the day when they started appearing in

Kuwait in significant numbers to join I MEF.

Some of the unknowns about British participation

were resolved only during the combat phase. The

threshold issue was whether the British would fight

alongside the Americans at all. Although the British

prime minister, Tony Blair, proved to be a staunch

ally before, during, and after the war, he faced a

good deal of political opposition to his Iraq policy at

home. This introduced an element of doubt, almost

up to the last minute before G-Day, as to whether

the British government would be able to order its

troops into battle.

Even assuming that London would give the word

to fight, there were still other significant unknowns.

One was where the bulk of the British forces would

attack from. Until December 2002, there were the

plans to introduce most of the British from the north,

that is, from Turkey, alongside the U.S. Army's 4th

Infantry Division. According to testimony given to the

British House of Commons: "In the very early planning, the Americans had decided to attack only from

the south. . . . Militarily it made more sense to . . . attack on two axes, because there was going to be congestion. That was suggested to the Americans, who

seized it with both hands, and that is why there was

thought . . . of putting an axis through Turkey."393

The truth is a little more nuanced. General David

McKiernan, for one, commented in December 2002

that he had "always wanted a supporting attack out

of the north that makes Saddam Hussein. . . look in

two directions at large conventional forces."394

If a British division had attacked from the north,

the British contribution to I MEF would probably

have been nothing more than the Royal Marine unit

earmarked for an amphibious operation against the

peninsula in the southeastern corner of Iraq.* Always

considered a piece of key terrain, Al Faw was an obvious choice for an amphibious assault of some sort.

It faced Kuwait across a bay, making it a perfect

launching pad for short-range missiles against Kuwait

City or Coalition forces packed into the desert camps

north of the Kuwaiti capital. It also straddled two important waterways, the channel to Iraq's only deepwater port, Umm Qasr, and the Shatt al Arab, which

ran between the Persian Gulf and the "capital" of

southern Iraq, Basrah.

By late December 2002, in the face of continued

Turkish intransigence, the British had begun to explore "the southern option."395 That was the month

when there were preliminary talks between General

James Conway and the senior British Army liaison officer at Coalition Forces Land Component Command

(CFLCC), Brigadier General Albert E. Whitley, which

helped to lay the groundwork for British cooperation

with I MEF. Around the same time, British military officers were attending various CentCom conferences

and exercises like Internal Look, but they were there

only as observers, not as participants.96'"

By early January 2003, I MEF and British planners

were working hard to make up for lost time. Switchwas always planned that the Royal Marine commandos would

operate in the south." As the British Marine commander, Brigadier

Jim Dutton, explained: "It was going to be ... just one commando

unit, in conjunction with the SEs." (House of comnions, Lessons

of Iraq, Vol. 1, p. 44)

'At senior levels, British and American officials held increasingly

detailed discussions about Iraq from the summer of 2002 onward.

It appears there was a continuum, a series of lesser decision

points, rather than one or two decisive conferences or agreements.

(House of commons, Lessons of Iraq, v. 1, pp. 32, 34)
ing from the northern to the southern option meant

the British would have to change their force mix. Instead of a predominantly armor, mechanized package, suitable for traveling and fighting over long

distances, it now made sense to put together a lighter

package, especially since there might be more fighting in the built-up areas of Umm Qasr and Basrah. So

the British division, whose formal title was 1 (United

Kingdom) Armored Division, evolved into a hybrid of

forces, the more or less independent units from various commands and regions being roughly comparable to Marine regimental combat teams: 16 Air

Assault Brigade, 3 Commando Brigade, and 7 Armored Brigade (the only one that was an organic part

of the division). The Commando Brigade was the

parent unit of the battalion-sized Royal Marine commando that had been aimed at Al Faw; it was now reinforced by another Royal Marine commando, but

since it was still short of its full complement, the resulting gap was ultimately filled by the 15th Marine

Expedition Unit.

The headquarters elements arrived in theater first,

and, aware that CentCom was planning to be ready

to fight sometime in March, did a remarkable job of

orchestrating the surge of forces into Kuwait, running

them through the CFLCC reception, staging, and integration process and establishing not only internal

but also external command and control mechanisms.

The man who made this happen was Major General

Robin V. Brims, the division's commanding general,

who was tall, thin, articulate, approachable, and full

of energy. A career officer who had been commissioned into the light infantry and subsequently served

in Germany, Northern Ireland, and the Balkans, he

was the kind of soldier Americans did not meet every

day. There was a trace of old-school eccentricity in

his official biography, which described him as "single, a cricket fanatic, Newcastle United supporter,

and outdoor enthusiast whose specialty area is bonfires."397 It was a trait that made him all the more attractive to Marines, whose values sometimes seem to

be from another era. In this he was not unlike General James Mattis, with whom he was to forge a good

working relationship.398

Quick to visualize the desired outcome, General

Brims put his stamp on the division, issuing his "GOC

[General Officer Commandingi Directive 1" on 3 February 2003:

We are TaCom CG I MEF. We create tactical effects to enable decisive delivery of his plans.

We are integrating with HQ I MEF and its subordinate formations. Whilst we have been planning within I MEF for barely a month, much of

I MEF has been planning, even conducting scenario related training, for many months. . . . We

have identified five critical elements of 1 (UK)

Armd Div's AO upon which we need to have

an effect:

122 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

Photo courtesy of ccc

Coalition senior commanders, including LtGen David A. McKiernan and MajGen Robin V. Brims, commander

of the 1 (UK) Armored Division, conduct final planning for the seizure of the southern Iraqi city of Basrah.

a. Iraq's Armed Forces

b. Irregular forces working against the Coalition

c. Oilfield infrastructure

d. UMM QASR

e. BASRAH...
A Marriage of Convenience 123

We must also establish all our personal and

electronic connectivities and processes with

HQ I MEF. Our force is designed to be supported by I MEF deep assets. We must establish the techniques for delivering this in a

timely, effective, and safe manner.

We are maneuvrists. We must grasp opportunities to deliver our missions with minimum kinetic force. Iraq must still exist after the conflict

as a sovereign state, stable and able to defend

itself. . . . We shall probably be the first Coalition forces to implement Phase IV. We can set

the pace.399

Despite their late arrival, the British received a

warm welcome from I MEF. To review the bidding,

I MEF could now assign some of its missions to the

British and would not be stretched as thinly as it

would otherwise have been. It could even ratchet the

tempo of operations up still higher. With respect to

the "Opening Gambit," I MEF decided not to change

the carefully rehearsed plans to seize the oil fields in

the first few days of the war. The planners considered the late date, and the extensive rehearsals that

1st Marine Division had already conducted, and decided it made more sense to leave well enough

alone. The Marine division would still seize the objectives, but the British units, following close behind,

would take over the security mission soon after the

initial assault. Similarly, 15th MEU, operating under

British control, would seize Umm Qasr but then turn

the city over to the British and revert to U.S. Marine

control.40°

The Marines were so pleased with the presence

and the potential of the British that by early March,

they had decided to expand their area of operations

by a further 250 kilometers to the north. According to

the British division's war diary, written in somewhat

formal English, "it was envisaged that after the execution of the initial Base Plan, which sees the division

seizing the Al Faw Peninsula, subsequent operations

would involve a push north by a brigade to the vicinity of Al Kut and Al Amarah. This would be conducted in parallel with 1st MarDiv and TF Tarawa to

secure and screen the eastern Flank. The origins of

this increased role apparently came from a mutually

registered desire at all levels to maximize the full potential of the division's combat power."40'

General Conway remembered later that one of the

deciding factors in the distribution and timing of tasks

was the amount of equipment available to the British

as G-Day approached. The deployment phase was

completed by 18 March, but the division was not

ready to cross the line of departure. Quite simply, the

U.S. Marines had more at their disposal, while the

British would not be fully equipped until after the

war had begun.402 It was, as the British parliamentary

report concluded, a "close run thing."403

By G-Day the division itself was combat ready;

that is, ready for what in American terms was a running start, even though some of its units were not

ready. It could carry out the missions that were to

occur on the first days of the war, and would have to

continue to prepare for the missions that were to

occur after the initial battles. General Brims explained: "Sometimes you have to be positive ... you

are dealt a hand of cards. . . you would like to have

52 cards in the deck. . . . But, in this case, we had actually declared readiness with 46 cards."404 His subordinate, Brigadier Graham J. Binns, the commander

of 7 Armored Brigade, was not quite so sanguine,

saying he "felt that we were carrying a lot of risk. The

mood was one that we were not ready. . . that the

soldiers . . . were not properly equipped."405 But

throughout the process there was a great deal of creativity and adaptation that made the British ready to

cross into Iraq on 20 March.

The synergy that developed between the British

division and I MEF between January and March 2003

certainly eased the joint preparations for combat.

Over the years, the U.S. Marines had nourished a relationship with the Royal Marines, while the British

Army had tended to forge its relations with other

armies on the continent, and the Royal Air Force had

cooperated with the U.S. Air Force in the Persian

Gulf, all good preparation for fighting as part of a

Coalition. It was something new for U.S. Marines and

the British Army to work closely together, but it did

not take either side long to discover the common

ground. The two forces had similar cultures, traditionally oriented to "small wars," independent operations, and mission orders. The leaders' personalities

meshed, not only between those of the same rank, as

in the good relationship between Generals Mattis and

Brims, but also between superior and subordinate.

General Conway's command style sat very well with

General Brims, who said that throughout his association with the Marines, he consistently felt empowered and never constrained.406

The process was strengthened by the exchange of

liaison officers who actively interpreted their charters. The head of the U.S. liaison team to the British

headquarters was Colonel Thomas C. Latsko, who

embedded most of his Marines in the U.K. division's

operations section, where they became active par-
124 Basrah, Baghdad and Beyond

JCCC 030604-M-8658H-015

Before heading the liaison team with the British

headquarters, Texas-native and Miami University of

Ohio graduate, Col Thomas C. Latsko, had served as

operations officer, 3d ANGLICO, battalion maintenance officer, 4th Tank Battalion, and as an advisor

to the 1st Naval Construction Regiment.

ticipants in planning and operations. The Marines

found that the British division was far more map-centric than any American command. Battle updates

took place around the "bird table," a large table covered with maps and overlays for what looked to

American eyes like World War II briefings. No one

used PowerPoint software. The demeanor of the

British officers around the table seemed informal,

even casual; for example, there was little apparent

consciousness of rank, and first names were used

freely. But there could be little doubt about their professionalism. Units, and individuals, typically reported only what the next higher echelon needed to

know. Briefers were held to time limits. Most British

officers had a strong ability to visualize the situation,

enter into creative and occasionally pointed debate

about possible courses of action, and issue clear mission orders, which were far less detailed than American operations orders but, like most Coalition orders

in this war, focused first on the desired effect, as opposed to simply directing a particular action.407

Marines working with subordinate British commands

made similar observations, saying they found British

briefs to be straightforward, person-to-person, and

not cluttered with detail—overall, a "nice change of

pace. "408 Colonel Latsko and his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel

Edward J. Quinonez, made it their business to bring

the British command-and-control system closer to the

American one, and holding school at the British command center, introduced their new comrades in arms

to various computerized American systems. By the

end of the fighting in Iraq, the two systems were literally operating side by side, and British and American staff officers could work both at the same time to

mutual benefit, although the gap between them, at

least in terms of hardware, remained significant and

was the subject of a British lessons-learned article.409

One significant technological issue was SIPRnet connectivity. This internet channel was arguably the primary means of communication for U.S. forces in this

war. Without access to SIPRnet, the British often felt

at a loss, and liaison officers had to develop workarounds.41°

Alongside Colonel Latsko's officers in operations

was a U.S. Marine air support element, which was

able to provide the rapid response and coordination

of close air support that is the function of the Marine

direct air support control center. The air support element operated mostly Out of the British combat operations and information center, built around the

"bird table," but also sent its Marines down to the

two British brigades that wanted their services. There

they joined forces with Reserve Marines from the 1st

and 3d Air-Naval Gunfire Liaison Companies (1st and

3d ANGLICOs), small numbers of whom had been

deployed to the British division and immediately integrated into its training cycle. Recognizing their usefulness in joint and combined operations, General

Jones had wisely brought the air and naval gunfire liaison companies back on line during his tenure as

Commandant. This was proof of concept.411 The 7 Armored Brigade had made a point of getting its air and

naval gunfire liaison Marines to participate in training

on British simulators in Germany, where they also

made a point of exploring local drinking establishments together. As British officer Lieutenant Colonel

Nicholas D. Ashmore commented, if shedding blood

is the best way to build comradeship, drinking together is the second best.412 The officers of 7 Armored viewed Marine air as the great "get out of jail"

card, but thought that air and naval gunfire liaison

companies alone would be enough and passed up

an opportunity to have its own air support element,

a decision it came to regret once its sister brigades