An excellent Blog from an American Officer in Iraq.
IRAQ NOW ...... A Soldier Looks Right Back at the Media.
News and commentary directly from IRAQ by US Army Officer and writer ...... Jason Van Steenwyk
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Colonel David Hackworth, Post!
Colonel David Hackworth is to buzz-cutted infantry soldiers what Eric Clapton is to long-haired guitar slingers: a revered, admired, and much emulated living legend.
For those of you in the media-town cultural backwaters like Manhattan and San Francisco who don’t get to attend the cocktail parties and retirement fetes of the military cognoscenti in Kansas City, Kansas, Clarksville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Georgia, let me give you a little background: Hack, Americas most decorated living soldier, is a beloved and veteran infantry commander of the Korean and Vietnam wars. He’s also author of Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts and what is in my view the single best personal memoir of the Vietnam era: About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.
Both About Face and Vietnam Primer ought to be required reading for ROTC and service academy cadets. Heck, they’d make great reading for anyone aspiring to a management position anywhere in the civilian world.
Like just about all infantry officers, I’m a big Hack fan, myself. We're a cranky and idealistic bunch, anyway. So I winced when I saw this passage in a recent column from DefenseWatch:
Then I told him what I’d already heard from my sources – that “the general required two choppers because he and his staff had so much baggage.”
Now, General Romig and his entourage may have brought a lot of baggage. I don’t know. Hack only refers obliquely to one unattributed source. But here’s what I see as a grunt on the ground:
Nobody, and I mean nobody in the U.S. military travels alone in my neighborhood. And I’ve been out on the open road everywhere between Baghdad and Haditha dam. I’ve personally led scores of convoys along our main supply routes, and I can absolutely attest that no U.S. military vehicle travels alone around here. Further, I’ve never seen a U.S. helicopter ever travel around here without at least one, and very often three additional helicopters within sight.
The reasons for this are obvious. If a helicopter goes down, then another helicopter can pick up any passengers or crew and get them out of Dodge. Crews can also monitor each other’s blind spots for signs of ground fire.
I would have thought Hackworth—who claims to have helped to write the book on helicopter-borne counterinsurgency—would know this, too. When he was in command, did he send helicopters into combat alone?
But rather than give ground commanders the benefit of the doubt for not being idiots, Hack relies entirely on his usual, self-selected, anonymous, disgruntled "sources," allows for no corroboration of any kind, allows the reader no means of assessing the reliability of the source or his information, and makes the most sensational conclusion possible:
The general needed two helicopters because his entourage took too much baggage.
Nevermind that there's absolutely no evidence that the presence of a second helicopter contributed to the crash of the first.
Stop this logic train--I'm getting off right here.
We should absolutely be asking the tough questions. Why was the helicopter so low? And was this trip necessary?
We should be asking even tougher questions about why it was that two US troops could be caught out in the open in Mosul, without any supporting fires, to be dragged out of their vehicles and killed. The media seem to have let that one go really easily. I don't see anything from Hack on it yet, either, which surprises me.
But in this case, the column does a disservice to the aviation unit commander, to General Romig, and to those who lost their lives with him on that helicopter crash. It also does a disservice to the reputation and credibility of a great soldier.
Splash,
Out.
Jason
[LINK] posted by Jason Van Steenwyk : 07:48 EST, Thursday, December 04, 2003
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
The Battle of Samarra Continues
Long-time readers of this (not yet three-week-old) website will remember Leadership Lessons from Iraq I, in which I wrote, “First reports are almost always wrong.”
The recent engagement in Samarra is an excellent illustration of how incredibly difficult it is to collect and process information in the midst of what Clausewitz so rightly calls “The Fog of War.” And the media coverage of the battle is also an instructive example of how the media has become another front in a desperately fought war of ideas.
The first reports to the media came from the US Military, based on a report from the operations officer of the 1st Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment (1-66 AR), who claimed that U.S. Forces had killed 46 insurgents in the battle.*
Al Jazeera initially went with 46 kills in this article on its English-language website. (Sorry I can't post links right now...my 250 Baud-rate Internet connection is slower than usual, and I can't download web pages timed by a calendar!)
USA Today goes with 54 in its headline, but also cites Iraqi reports putting the toll at 8 dead and 80 wounded.
Note that the official report states that insurgents were using a mosque as a battle position. Al Jazeera makes no such mention, but does report that US troops had fired on workers leaving a factory. The official report makes no mention of a factory on the scene.
By the next morning, though, the New York Times had checked out the US Military’s claims and had done some independent reporting of its own. Good work. They followed the basic journalism principal of relying on their own reporting. They went to the local hospital and morgue, where Iraqi officials told them that only eight dead had been brought in—one of them an old woman.
Other than speculating that the enemy must have carried off his dead, the U.S. military has not yet been able to offer an explanation of the wide discrepancy in their estimated numbers. If the U.S killed so many guerillas, then where are all the bodies?
Nobody knows. Perhaps there's no answer. But why were the initial American estimates of enemy casualties so high?
The answer is this: American forces did not hold the field of battle. Their mission was not to take and hold ground, but to protect the currency exchange convoy. When the convoy withdrew, the American and Fijian security vehicles quite properly withdrew with it, leaving the battlefield to the enemy and to the local inhabitants.
Ergo, there was no way to survey the battlefield and accurately count the dead. The 1-66th conducted its BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) the only way it could—by interviewing its troops and getting their best estimates about how many people they hit. But if you have three people shooting at the same guy, and he goes down, you’re likely to have three people claiming the kill, and you’re likely to count him dead three times.
More importantly, though, if you don’t hold the field at the end of the fight, there’s no way for you to reality-check the accounts that are coming in from your troops. After all, their first reports are almost always wrong, too.
But if you do hold the field, you not only retain possession of the bodies of the dead, but you also retain possession of their weapons, as well. I’ve written on this page (In The Rhetoric of Body Counts) that it is dangerous to focus on the enemy’s body count (as the 1-66th and the media have done here, for lack of any choice.) It’s much better to focus on weapons captured. Body counts can be manipulated. Body counts are subject to confusion and to wishful thinking. Most insidiously, body counts provide commanders with a perverse incentive. Captured weapons, on the other hand, can be photographed, inventoried, serial numbered, and stored indefinately. Unlike corpses, there is never any confusing a combatant weapon with a non-combatant weapon.
Nevertheless, we are left with a Rashomon-like mystery in Sammara
There is simply no way to independently verify the US Military’s implication that all of the Iraqi dead—or even most of them--were actually combatants: a circumstance which Al Jazeera and anti-coalition propagandists are working overtime to exploit.
There’s been a change of venue, to be sure. The objective now is not to secure a convoy of Iraqi currency, but to secure the Iraqi public’s favorable perception of the truth. The battlefield is no longer the Samarra streets, but the airwaves all over the Muslim world. But the Battle of Samarra continues…
*(Actually, going through the report, I count 51 claimed kills, not 46. The author apparently missed one reported engagement in his hastily written tally.)
[LINK] posted by Jason Van Steenwyk : 06:13 EST, Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Ariyah
One day, as I was completing a routine transfer of a couple of truckloads of detainees to the MPs and intelligence debriefers at Al Asad, the intelligence chief told me they had been holding some people they wanted to release, but didn’t have anyway to get them back home. Could I give them a ride back to Ar Ramadi and drop them off downtown?
“Sure!”
So we completed the transfer, and I sent my guys back out to the main post for lunch, while I stayed behind and got ready to sign for the four detainees we were going to release, plus their personal property.
One of the guys they brought out was a slight man, about 45 years of age, hobbling on a cane. He was wearing only a pair of sandals and a dirty grey dishdash, a popular, light robe-like garment that buttons in the front and extends down to knee level.
His right calf was mangled and withered, and flopped around when he walked like it was tied to his knee by a string.
When he came into the room, the Army linguist attached to the intelligence unit there told him there was no evidence against him, we didn’t believe he was a threat, and he was going to be released—he was going home. The man broke down sobbing, and fell into the linguist’s arms and embraced him. He embraced everyone in the room, laughing and sobbing at the same time.
As I gathered in bits and pieces, he had been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s secret police some years ago. It was they who had destroyed his knee. They had made him stretch his leg out between two blocks, and then they smashed it with a sledgehammer. He had thought prison was prison was prison, and assumed that Americans would treat him the same way as Saddam did. So when he found out he was to be released again, it overwhelmed him.
I signed for him and his wallet, as well as for three other men, and asked through the interpreter where in Ar Ramadi they wanted to be dropped off. The police station downtown was fine, so we instructed them that when we got there, we’d cut the plastic cuffs one at a time, and they were to simply walk away from the trucks and they were free. When the trucks and crews came back from their lunch break, we loaded everyone up and rolled.
An hour and a half later, we pulled in front of the police station. I pushed an M249 machine gunner out front, and another to the rear of the convoy for security, and then we lowered the tailgate on the truck and released them, one at a time.
The man on the cane was last. We helped him off the truck, I handed him his wallet, and told him one of the very few Arabic words I know: “Ariyah!” “Freedom!”
“Thank you, America! Yes, Ariyah! Good friend! Friend! Bush good! Thank you, friend! America friend!”
He was all smiles as he embraced me, the guard, and the truck driver, we wished him salaam aleichem, and he stepped out into the road, hailed a taxi, waved to us, got in, and sped away.
[LINK] posted by Jason Van Steenwyk : 05:49 EST
Monday, December 01, 2003
Rank Ignorance: The New York Times Blows It
It seems America's so-called "Newspaper of Record" doesn't have any veterans around the editorial desk, either. If they did, someone could have saved Maureen Dowd from this frightening display of subject matter ignorance:
There are those who say Mr. Bush should have emulated Rudy Giuliani's empathetic leadership after 9/11, or Dad's in the first gulf war, and attended some of the funerals of the 379 Americans killed in Iraq. Or one. Maybe the one for Specialist Darryl Dent, the 21-year-old National Guard officer from Washington who died outside Baghdad in late August when a bomb struck his truck while he was delivering mail to troops.
As any high school Junior ROTC student or any recruit in the first week of basic training knows, a Specialist is not an officer. A specialist is the fourth grade of the enlisted ranks, between a private first class and a sergeant.
Kudos to the International Herald Tribune, though, who spotted the error and corrected it.
Editors, see how keeping a couple of vets around on your fact checking or editorial staff can make you look smarter?
If the New York Times is serious about newsroom diversity--and apparently they were serious enough to keep Jayson Blair on the payroll for months after he should have been canned--then how many veterans does the New York Times have in its newsroom?
Well, you can ask the Times itself, by writing to letters@nytimes.com, or faxing to 212-556-3622.
Tell 'em IraqNow sent ya. (wink)
[LINK] posted by Jason Van Steenwyk : 07:08 EST, Monday, December 01, 2003
The Case of the RPG Road Runner
Well, this actually happened in August, but it's a story of a pretty typical interaction between coalition troops and the local Iraqi population, so thought I’d post this little vignette, anyway. Plus, after two media stories in a row, I think it's time to break things up with a (cringe) "war story," if you will.
Anyway, one day toward the end of August, I happened to have been leading a small convoy of four vehicles and about 20 men through the countryside along the Euphrates River valley. (If you’re following along on your maps, it was about a mile east of the town of Hit.)
We came up behind a rickety, rusty, gray Peugot pickup truck (yes, a Peugot!) traveling in the same direction we were, albeit about 20 mph slower and laboring under a full load of cargo in the rear of the truck. As I passed the truck in the lead vehicle, though, I could see that the blanket covering the boxes in the back was starting to come off, revealing stacks of military green wooden crates, about 1 x 1 x 4, complete with bright orange "EXPLOSIVE" stickers.
"Slow down, some," I told the driver. Let's see if this guy passes us again. I want to be sure I saw what I think I saw."
So we slowed down, some, but he didn’t pass us. We slowed down some more, and still he didn’t pass us. We slowed down some more, and still he didn’t pass us, so I told the driver to speed up again, until the whole convoy had crossed over a rise and around a bend.
Once we were out of sight of the Peugot, on the reverse slope of a gentle hill, I said "I'm gonna stop that truck." I called the rear vehicle on the radio and told them “we’re stopping that truck. Take rear security,” and ordered the driver to stop the vehicle on the side of the road. The rest of the convoy followed suit. The other guys in the humvee with me all jumped out and set up an impromptu traffic control point--the SAW gunner pulled security to our 12 o'clock, and the other guys and I waited for the Peugot, which sure enough came trucking along about 20 seconds later. So we stepped in front of it, leveling our rifles at the driver, and waived him to the side of the road to stop as well. We pulled the doors open, and directed the driver and passengers out of the truck--there were two adult males, one adolescent around 15 or 16, and a boy of about 10. We separated them, so they couldn't cook up a story between them, searched them, and had them kneel by the side of the road.
I had one NCO take charge of the searching and securing of the Iraqis, another took a few guys to start searching the vehicle, and I went around to make sure we had our own security out in all directions, just in case. We were out in a large open area, 500 meters across a soccer field from the town. We were attracting some spectators, which I wasn't thrilled about. About 20 or 30 people started walking across the field toward us. I had the guys try to wave them away. You never know who's cousin you're messing with around here.
I WAS thrilled with what it appeared we had on the vehicle, though. We pulled the blanket away to reveal 40 crates for Rocket Propelled Grenade Launchers (RPG-7s) The cab was clear of weapons, and we started opening the crates, one by one.
I was disappointed to find them all empty.
I tried communicating with the oldest of the detainees, and he was making hammering motions with his hands--I guessed something about a carpenter, but unfortunately there aren't nearly enough interpreters to go around. Without the weapons, there's no contraband, and nothing to put them away on, but I definitely wanted to know where they got the crates from. So I ordered the guys to cuff them (except for the boy) and loaded them on one of my 5 ton trucks with as many of the crates as we could fit, and started hollering a one-minute countdown.
The crowd across the soccer field was building and I wanted to get out of there as fast as we could.
A Kiowa helicopter, patrolling the road, had spotted the commotion by now, and was circling overhead, though I didn't have radio contact with it yet. I set one guy to writing the frequency out in the dirt around the trucks, big enough for the chopper crew to see.
Finally we got everyone loaded up and started rolling again. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes. I was very happy to get out of there. We took them up to the prisoner processing facility at Al Asad Air Base, where I knew some Arab interpreters.
The first thing I did upon arrival was take the boy off the truck and keep him out of sight of the adults. I figured with the youngster out of sight and get a lot more cooperation a lot faster that way. Doctrinally, you segregate detainees by age and rank, anyway. So I had one guy sit with him and we gave him some Skittles out of an MRE.
The boy didn't know much English, but he knew "scared" and he knew "father," and motioned that he wanted to be with his dad. I had to tell him "not yet, soon," and felt like an unbelievable ass.
Turned out all the other guys we picked up had the same story--they bought the empty crates in Baghdad for 20 dollars for their brother, a carpenter, so he could use the wood to make furniture.
"Ummm, were you surprised when American troops stopped you?"
"No, we understood because American troops are afraid of RPGs."
"Oh."
Nevertheless, after talking to these guys was clear now that these people were no threat. They were just a family driving around with a very stupid cargo. We told them they were very lucky to be alive. A lot of gunners would have just opened up on a cargo like that. But finally I said, "Ok, we're going back down that same road this afternoon. We can take you with us and drop you off anywhere you want. Do you have family in Hit or any other towns between here and Ramadi?"
No, they didn't, so we said we'd just drop them off where we picked them up, and we hoped their truck was still there.
It wasn't. Probably didn't last five minutes.
They really wanted to keep the RPG crates, so we wrote out a note in English explaining things, so they wouldn't get arrested again, and helped them unload their crates.
So we pulled away from a family outside of Hit standing by the side of the road with 40 RPG crates, trying to hitch a ride home.
Life is tough on Iraqis. It's tougher if you're stupid. It's tougher still if you're an Iraqi stupid enough to drive down a main supply route crawling with Coalition traffic with your pickup truck loaded with RPG crates.
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