War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by Oliver L. North and FOX News Network, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  North, Oliver.

  War stories : Operation Iraqi Freedom / Oliver L. North.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-59698-696-1 (eBook)

  1. Iraq War, 2003. 2. Iraq War, 2003—Television and the war. 3. Television broadcasting of news—United States. I. Title. DS79.76 .N67 2003

  956.7044’3—dc22

  2003024431

  Published in the United States by

  Regnery Publishing, Inc.

  An Eagle Publishing Company

  One Massachusetts Avenue, NW

  Washington, DC 20001

  First paperback edition published 2005

  Visit us at www.regnery.com

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. Write to Director of Special Sales, Regnery Publishing, Inc., One Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001, for information on discounts and terms or call (202)216-0600.

  For Betsy, Who waited and prayed once again – and this time got to watch

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE: The Land Between the Rivers

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION: Reality Television

  ONE: The Road to Hell

  TWO: Sitzkrieg!

  THREE: Good to Go

  FOUR: Helicopter Down!

  FIVE: Running the Gauntlet on Bloody Sunday

  SIX: MOASS

  SEVEN: What Quagmire?

  EIGHT: Of Rivers and Rescues

  NINE: Closing In

  TEN: Fallen Idols

  ELEVEN: You Can Run but You Can’t Hide

  TWELVE: You’re in the Army Now

  THIRTEEN: Aftermath

  FOURTEEN: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

  FIFTEEN: The Rocky Road to Democracy

  GLOSSARY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Whoever said “No man is the whole of himself. His friends are the rest of him,” had it just about right when it comes to projects like this book. It couldn’t have been done, to paraphrase the Beatles, without “a lot of help from my friends.”

  Most important to this book has been the support and encouragement of my best friend, Betsy, who once again managed to hold everything together at home as I went off to yet another war. While I hung around with heroes in Iraq and then buried myself in writing about them, she prayed for my safe return, planned a wedding for daughter Sarah and husband Martin, helped daughter Tait and husband Tom when Elizabeth St. Claire was born, did the same for son Stuart and his wife Ellen when James Stuart arrived, and still found time to attend every equestrian event in which daughter Dornin competed.

  This book would never have happened had Roger Ailes, Jack Abernethy, Dianne Brandi, Kevin Magee, and John Moody at FOX News not sent me to cover the heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom—and then decided to team with Regnery Publishing to chronicle their courage in this work. As he has for so many years, my colleague, collaborator, and friend Joe Musser helped organize this narrative and turned my military shorthand and jargon into comprehensible English.

  Griff Jenkins, my field producer, cameraman, and friend, was by my side throughout our assignment in Iraq, requiring the understanding and patience of his wife, Kathleen, and two-year-old daughter, Madeline, who spent months without her daddy. They missed him, but I got to witness his competence, perseverance, and bravery.

  Our incomparable FOX News team also deserves special thanks for making this project possible. In New York, senior producer Pamela Browne and our War Stories staff had to reschedule two months of production for our series, then rush to turn out the TV special on Operation Iraqi Freedom included with this book. In Kuwait, Don Fair and Gary Gastelu built a bureau from scratch; they and their team never failed us in the field. My colleagues Greg Kelly and Rick Leventhal, friends and fellow “embeds,” managed to shoot some of the most dramatic war footage ever recorded. Brian Knoblock’s foreign desk staff and Sharri Berg’s technical team made sure that what we shot made it on the air for the world to see.

  At Williams & Connolly, Bob Barnett and Kathleen Ryan had the vision to see how this collaboration between FOX News and Regnery Publishing could work, and made it happen.

  Regnery president and publisher Marji Ross, my incredibly patient editor Miriam Moore, and art director Amanda Elliott had to bear the stress of being unable to reach me as deadlines approached and passed—and still managed to get this tribute to these young American heroes into print. Regnery’s marketing and promotion guru Stephanie Marshall succeeded in getting this work out to booksellers so that the American people could see and read just how good these soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines really are.

  This is, after all, a book about them. Lt. Col. Jerry Driscoll, the CO of HMM-268, and Col. Joe Dunford, the commander of RCT-5, are two of the bravest men and finest Marines I’ve ever met. Lt. Col. Larry “Pepper” Jackson, CO of 3rd Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment is a great soldier. My sincere thanks to them and their valiant warriors who got us home in one piece. The men and women of the 1st Marine Division, the 3rd Marine Air Wing and the Army’s 4th Infantry Division let us live with and follow them from late February through late April 2003 in pursuit of the most up-to-the-minute, and inspiring war stories—theirs.

  Semper Fidelis,

  Oliver L. North

  PROLOGUE

  THE LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS

  In one of our last broadcasts prior to leaving Iraq, I was asked by my friend Sean Hannity to predict what Baghdad will be like in a few years. “A thriving economy and a robust democracy in three years—if we stay the course,” I replied.

  What gives me the confidence to make such a bold forecast? The history of the place. The land between the rivers has been home to risk-takers and innovators for at least five millenia. From the Mesopotamian merchant who carved the first written word into a clay tablet; to Hammurabi’s code and the foundation for our concept of laws; to Abraham and Sarah, parents of the world’s three monotheistic religions; all the way to Saddam Hussein—and his removal from power by an invading army; all part of the history of the land we now call Iraq.

  Understanding who the Iraqi people are—and who they aren’t—is essential to comprehending the victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Herewith then, an epilogue that is in reality prologue for all that has happened since: a short history of the land between the rivers. It is this history that gives me hope for a better future.

  Ancient Eden

  Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

  5000 B.C. to the twentieth century

  Viewing Iraq today, the land along and between the Tigris and Euphrates seems an improbable place for the start of civilization. A few hundred miles north of where the two rivers merge, treacherous mountains rise to snow-covered peaks more than ten thousand feet high. Less than fifty miles west and south of the fertile land that lines the rivers are stark, unforgiving deserts. To the east, inhospitable malarial swamps and marshes make travel and navigation all but impossible. />
  Yet, if archaeologists are correct, this is the place where it all began at least five millennia ago. Here, an ancient Sumerian first carved written words onto clay tablets with a stylus. In the verdant terrain close to these riverbanks, seasonal planting of crops, animal husbandry, astronomy, irrigation, wheeled transportation, metallurgy, stringed musical instruments, pharmacology, masonry, ceramic engineering, brewing, algebraic mathematics, and warehousing of harvests were all invented or begun by the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian founders of Mesopotamian culture.

  The place, also described as the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, is thought to be near the site of present-day Al Qurnah, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet to form the Shatt al Arab waterway, less than fifty miles north of modern-day Basra.

  Abraham and Sarah, the patriarch and matriarch of the world’s three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are widely believed to have begun their long journey west to Canaan from the ancient city of Ur, on the west bank of the Euphrates, around 1850 B.C. Less than a century later, a Babylonian king named Hammurabi, the world’s first emperor, decreed a code, prescribing punishments for infractions of his edicts that were less harsh than the practices of his day, but draconian in modern-day eyes. His code—and the determination that the law should apply equally to all—is the foundation of the whole Western legal system.

  In 586 B.C., another Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, descended on Jerusalem with his army, torching the city of David, leveling the temple, and driving the people of Israel into bondage in that same space between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Some believe that Jewish slaves, during their seventy-year Babylonian exile, built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, acclaimed as the second wonder of the ancient world, with irrigation canals, terraces, and bridges over the Euphrates. A towering ziggurat in the center of the city, which came to be known as the Tower of Babel, was probably erected to honor the Babylonian god Baal.

  Less than 250 years later, Babylon fell to the Medes and Persians under Cyrus the Just. He dispatched the Israelites back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple, thus earning favorable mention in the Old Testament even though he worshiped the Babylonian god Marduk.

  Next came the Greeks. In 331 B.C., Alexander and his disciplined army of Macedonians seized the city-state between the rivers on the way to Persia. Eight years later the young king returned only to die—from poison, some say—in Nebuchadnezzar’s crumbling palace.

  For the next half-millennium the land through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow was ruled by a succession of invaders—Romans, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanids—all seeking dominion over the region. All brought their own tongues and religions, yet by the end of the sixth century, Christianity was probably practiced by more people in Mesopotamia than any other faith. But then came Islam.

  According to many of his biographers, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad was an orphan raised by a grandfather and then an uncle near Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia. Consigned to life as a camel herder, the young man was fortunate to marry a wealthy widow. One day, at the age of forty, he returned from meditating alone on Mount Hira with a message from the angel Gabriel.

  Proclaimed as a prophet by many in Mecca, Muhammad began to preach that there was only one God, and admonished his tribal, nomadic, Bedouin countrymen to reject idolatry and greed and to submit to the will of Allah. Thus, Islam, meaning “submission to God,” the world’s third major monotheistic religion, began. By 630 A.D., Muhammad was in effect the political and spiritual leader of an Islamic state that encompassed most of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. When he died on June 8, 632, his successor, Abu Bakr, was appointed caliph. He resolved to spread Islamic theology, with its message of equality and strict rules for behavior, throughout the world by force of arms.

  Two years later, a poorly armed but zealous Islamic army was on the attack against Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia throughout the area that we now call the Middle East. In 637, at the small town of Qadisiyah on the west bank of the Euphrates, ten thousand Islamic warriors defeated a force of eighty thousand Persians. The land between the rivers would thereafter have no god but Allah.

  The new rulers of Islamic Mesopotamia encouraged Bedouins from Arabia to move their herds of cattle, goats, and camels to the fertile river plains. They did so in a series of massive migrations, displacing the previous occupiers and destroying much of the ancient art and cultural treasures that had accumulated in the area.

  History wasn’t finished with the land between the rivers. The great schism in Islam that divided the religion between the Sunni and Shia sects was also played out here.

  In 656 A.D., a bitter dispute over the leadership of the religion started by Muhammad broke out in the small town of Kufa, on the west bank of the Euphrates, about forty miles south of ancient Babylon. Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and the first convert to Islam, was named caliph that year, and took up residence in Kufa in an attempt to avoid the enmity of other Islamic leaders in Medina and Damascus. It didn’t work.

  As Ali made his way home from prayers one night in the late summer of 661, an assassin felled the unsuspecting holy man. Nineteen years later, Ali’s son, Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, claimed the mantle of Islamic leadership as a familial right of succession. The rulers of the Islamic empire in Damascus rejected Hussein’s claim and his accusations that they were using their power to amass great personal wealth while the people suffered.

  In 680, Hussein and seventy-two of his family members and followers were confronted just west of the Euphrates, at Karbala, by four thousand soldiers dispatched from Damascus by the ruling Islamic elite. Hussein and all of his entourage, including women and children, were slaughtered. The severed head of the grandson of the prophet Muhammad was delivered to Damascus by horseback. Since that day, Islam has been divided between Sunni Muslims—supporters of consensual leadership—and the Shi’ite followers of Ali and Hussein.

  Despite the internal split and three successive Mongol invasions, Islam continued to spread. By 1553, a century after the Ottoman Turks captured the Orthodox Catholic capital of Constantinople and changed its name to Istanbul, the Arabic language and the Muslim religion were both being taught and practiced in Asia Minor, the Balkans, the periphery of the Caucasus, northern and east-coastal Africa, southern Spain, and throughout what we now call the Middle East.

  As Europe foundered through the Dark Ages, flourished during the Middle Ages, and began its Renaissance, Sunni sultans in Istanbul, espousing a pan-Islamic ideology, attempted to unify their dynastic holdings through religion, language, education, and common law. Where appeals to common philosophy failed, military coercion was employed—a strategy that prompted repeated bloody uprisings in Shi’ite controlled areas of Mesopotamia and Persia.

  If not for corruption, costly military suppression of dissenters, and forays of European colonialism, the Ottoman Empire might still exist; and the country known as Iraq might never have arisen had the “Young Turks” who seized control in Istanbul in 1908 not chosen the wrong side in World War I. Infatuated by the Kaiser’s militarism and feeling threatened by Orthodox Russia to the east, they opted to join the Central Powers in hopes that the alliance would help check both the czar’s ambitions in Persia and British and French colonial expansion in the Middle East and Africa.

  It was a costly mistake. The Young Turks found themselves having to contend with rebellions fomented by Shi’ite religious activists and Arab nationalists seeking independence from Istanbul while simultaneously trying to protect their fraying empire from the Triple Entente.

  Though threatened from the outside and weakened by internal dissent, the Turks still fought back. In January 1916, conscripts recruited throughout the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, including Mesopotamia, inflicted a devastating defeat on British troops at Gallipoli. While London was still reeling from the collapse of the Dardanelles campaign, a British expeditionary force attempting to advance from Basra to Baghdad was cut to pieces. On April 26, 1916, more than
thirteen thousand starving British troops surrendered after enduring a 140-day siege at Al Kut, on the banks of the Tigris.

  But these bloody victories were fleeting. Eleven months after the disaster at Al Kut, British troops occupied Baghdad, and when the “war to end all wars” finally ended, in 1918, so was the Ottoman Empire. In the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, and British and French forces and civil administrators moved into Arab capitals to take over as “trustees” under the aegis of the League of Nations. British army regiments occupied Basra on the Shatt al Arab, and Royal Engineers started building roads, railways, and canals to Baghdad and beyond.

  What the British could not build was a firewall against the glowing embers of Arab nationalism and the Shia-Sunni animus that they had helped to foment during the world war. T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, had played to both and had wooed Arab Bedouins to revolt against Ottoman rule with pledges of postwar self-determination. But neither Lawrence nor any of the other advocates for local sovereignty could deliver. By January 18, 1919, when the victors sat down in public at the Palace of Versailles, British and French mapmakers were already secretly redrawing the boundaries of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Palestine and Mesopotamian Mandates. In accord with the secretly concluded Sykes-Picot Agreement, all of these would be administered not by those who populated these lands but by British and French civil and military officers.

  In the land between the two rivers this was a formula for disaster. On June 2, 1920, in a taste of things to come, Sunni nationalists in Baghdad and Shi’ite religious leaders in the south decided that as much as they hated each other, they hated the British occupiers even more. The ensuing jihad against British rule took nine months to suppress—at a cost of more than 2,200 British casualties and forty million pounds sterling.