Where Men Win Glory Part 7

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Three companies from the First Battalion, Second Marine Regiment were involved in the battle for Nasiriyah on March 23: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. A few miles south of where Charlie Company was getting shot to pieces, the Marines in Alpha and Bravo companies were also fighting for their lives. Scattered around the Euphrates River Bridge and to the east of Ambush Alley, they were much too preoccupied with their own problems to give any thought to Charlie Company's predicament. Neither Alpha nor Bravo Company even knew where Charlie Company was, let alone that it was in serious trouble, because radio communications had completely broken down. Some radios had simply gone on the fritz, but the main source of the problem was that most of the Marines in Nasiriyah had never been in combat, and when bullets started cutting the air, almost everybody with a radio began frantically trying to talk at the same time. Several overexcited grunts inadvertently thumbed the "talk" b.u.t.tons on their microphones even when they weren't speaking-a phenomenon known as "hot miking" that instantly jammed the entire network, creating radio gridlock that persisted for hours.

Many of Bravo Company's vehicles, including the trac that served as Grabowski's mobile command post, remained stuck in the mud several blocks east of Ambush Alley. Grabowski had moved slightly farther north with a handful of tracs and Humvees that managed to avoid the quagmire, but the battalion air officer, Captain A. J. Greene, stayed behind in the now-immobile command post, which was receiving RPG and AK-47 fire from Iraqis on the surrounding rooftops. It was Greene's job to supervise the battalion's three forward air controllers, who were in turn responsible for using their special UHF radios to request air support from any helicopters or jets that might be in the vicinity, and then telling those aircraft what targets to hit with their guns, bombs, and missiles. Greene's radios, however, were working only intermittently.

The forward air controller a.s.signed to direct aircraft in support of Bravo Company was Captain Dennis Santare, who was inside a trac a couple of hundred yards north of Greene's mired vehicle. At approximately 1:20 p.m., Greene managed to get a brief call through to Santare, whose call sign was "Mouth." "Mouth, I need you to get on guard and get any air support you can," Greene said, and then his radio went dead for the rest of the day. The "guard" frequency to which Greene referred was a seldom-used channel set aside for emergencies; the fact that Greene had instructed Santare to use it to request air support suggested to Santare that Bravo Company's situation had turned dire.

Santare immediately got on his UHF radio, switched to the guard frequency, and transmitted, "On guard, on guard, on guard, this is Mouth in the vicinity of An Nasiriyah. We have troops in contact and need immediate air support." He received a callback from a pair of A-10 Warthogs that were pa.s.sing overhead en route from Kuwait's Al Jaber Air Base to Baghdad on a bombing run; the Warthogs immediately aborted their scheduled mission and began to circle above Nasiriyah, awaiting instructions from Santare regarding the enemy targets he wanted them to take out.

Santare was a skilled, conscientious air controller, but because he was unable to communicate with either Greene or Grabowski, he was forced to make some critical decisions on his own. Santare believed, correctly, that most of the enemy forces were positioned north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, and he worried that the Iraqis were sending down reinforcements from this area to attack Bravo Company. So he told the Warthogs to scan the area north of the ca.n.a.l and "tell me what you see."

The call signs of the Warthog pilots were "Gyrate 73" and "Gyrate 74." Gyrate 73 reported that he had spotted eight or nine enemy trucks ma.s.sing directly north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, validating Santare's fears about an imminent attack on Bravo Company. While they were observing these vehicles through binoculars from an alt.i.tude of fifteen thousand feet, the Warthog pilots saw two Marine Cobra attack helicopters fly near the area, after which one of the enemy trucks appeared to burst into flames, creating an immense plume of black smoke, leading the Warthog pilots to conclude that the vehicle had been hit by one of the Cobras.

Unbeknownst to the Warthog pilots or Santare, the burning "Iraqi truck" was actually Charlie Company's trac C211, which had just come to a stop north of the bridge after being hit with Iraqi RPGs. To the Warthog pilots, who believed the vehicle had been hit by American Cobras, the fact that it was burning seemed to confirm that it was Iraqi, and they used the column of smoke rising from C211 as a point of reference for attacking their targets. Before they fired a single shot or dropped any bombs, however, the Warthogs wanted to be absolutely sure that the vehicles they saw north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge were enemy forces, rather than American, so for the next fifteen minutes they conferred with Santare about the exact locations of the Marine positions.

According to the original battle plan, formulated before their vehicles had become bogged down in sewage, Bravo Company was supposed to lead the a.s.sault on the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, which caused Santare to mistakenly a.s.sume that Charlie Company was still behind Bravo Company, far to the south, probably mired in sludge somewhere as well. Santare checked with the Bravo Company commander, Captain Tim Newland, who confirmed that Bravo Company was "the lead trace" and that no Marines had advanced north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l. Santare therefore a.s.sured the Warthogs, repeatedly, that there were no American forces north of that easily recognizable waterway. "No one is north of the 38 grid," he told Gyrate 73. "There are no friendlies north of the ca.n.a.l." When the pilots then requested clearance to fire on the "Iraqi" vehicles, Santare told them they had permission to light up their targets. The time was approximately 1:40 p.m.

A few minutes before Santare cleared the Warthogs to attack the vehicles by the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, Charlie Company's commander, Captain Dan Wittnam, managed to get a brief, garbled call through to Grabowski, the commander of First Battalion, during which he said, "Charlie Company has seized the northern bridge...and we are halting." He also told Grabowski that one of his tracs had been hit and that he had casualties. Overjoyed that the 176 men in Wittnam's company had taken the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge and moved north of it so quickly, Grabowski slammed his fist down onto the hood of his Humvee in celebration and then radioed headquarters to tell his superiors the good news.

At the time Grabowski learned that Charlie Company was north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l, Santare was talking to the Warthog pilots from the hatch of a trac that was within a stone's throw of the battalion commander's Humvee. Because of the ongoing radio gridlock, however, Santare never received the news about Charlie Company's position, nor did he call Grabowski to let him know that Air Force jets were circling above the battlefield, about to commence their attack.

In order to communicate with the Warthogs, Santare had to stand in the hatch of his trac, exposed to enemy fire, and balance his bulky UHF radio on the vehicle's roof. Two miles south of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, he could catch occasional glimpses of the Warthogs, but couldn't see their targets, so he'd given the pilots permission to attack targets according to their own discretion within a well-defined geographic area-conditions designated Type 3 close air support, or Type 3 CAS.

Two weeks earlier, however, before the start of the war, Grabowski had issued a written order stating that forward air controllers could give aircraft clearance to attack only only if the controller was able to see both the aircraft and the target if the controller was able to see both the aircraft and the target with his own eyes with his own eyes, conditions known as Type 1 CAS. "We will not authorize Type 3 CAS," Grabowski decreed in the order, "unless approved by the Battalion Commander"-that is, by Grabowski himself. He issued the order specifically to prevent friendly-fire mishaps.

When he gave the Warthogs a green light to attack without first getting authorization from Grabowski, Santare was therefore in violation of the battalion commander's orders, and he knew it. As he later explained to the Friendly Fire Investigation Board convened to examine the incident, "Marines were in extremis extremis and I made a time-critical decision.... I...did not think there was time to find a clear channel to the Battalion Commander to explain the situation, then ask for approval for the fires.... Based on the information I had at the time, I believed my company was minutes away from the anvil of a mechanized ambush. I felt that if I did not act, Marines would die." and I made a time-critical decision.... I...did not think there was time to find a clear channel to the Battalion Commander to explain the situation, then ask for approval for the fires.... Based on the information I had at the time, I believed my company was minutes away from the anvil of a mechanized ambush. I felt that if I did not act, Marines would die."

Upon getting clearance from Santare to engage, Gyrate 74 rolled in hot on his first target, a pair of American tracs on the east side of the road just north of the column of smoke, and dropped two five-hundred-pound MK82 bombs on them. As soon as he let the bombs go, Gyrate 74 pulled off, allowing Gyrate 73 to sweep into position and drop a third bomb on some other tracs south of the smoke plume.

At the time, few, if any, of the Marines on the ground knew the Warthogs were overhead. According to a memorandum later issued by the Friendly Fire Investigation Board, "The board believes that Charlie Company Marines mistook the first 3 MK82LD bombs dropped by Gyrate flight as artillery fire." Although the evidence is not conclusive, a careful reading of the board's full report, augmented by independently published interviews with Charlie Company personnel, leaves little doubt that these first three bombs killed Chanawongse, Buesing, Jordan, and Pokorney and wounded four other Marines.

Over the next twenty or thirty minutes each Warthog made five pa.s.ses over the American vehicles, targeting them with a total of eight five-hundred-pound bombs and three Maverick missiles, as well as repeatedly strafing them with huge Gatling guns mounted in the nose of each airplane. Although the missiles ended up killing a greater number of Marines, it was these GAU-8/A Avenger cannons that induced the most panic and terror among the grunts. The Avenger is the largest, most powerful aircraft cannon in the American a.r.s.enal, and it fires bullets the size of Red Bull cans from seven spinning barrels. Milled from depleted uranium, the bullets are designed to pierce the steel armor on tanks, and are shot from the Warthogs' cannons at a rate of sixty-five rounds per second second. When the Warthogs aimed their guns at Charlie Company, the rounds tore through the tracs' aluminum armor as if they were made of paper. Many seconds after the bullets arrived came the screech of the furiously whirling barrels that delivered them.

It was the distinctive, terrifying noise of the Warthogs' spinning cannons that first alerted the Marines on the ground that they were being attacked by "friendlies," leaving them incredulous. That American aviators could mistake their ugly, utterly unique amtracs for Iraqi vehicles seemed impossible. In desperation the Marines shot off numerous red and green star-cl.u.s.ter flares. William Schaefer even pulled out a three-foot-by-five-foot American flag mounted on an aluminum pole and jammed it into a smoke launcher on the turret of trac C201 to make the Air Force pilots realize they were ma.s.sacring fellow Americans, but all these efforts were in vain.

After the Warthogs made approximately eight strafing and bombing runs on the Marines north of the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge, Santare, parked two miles to the south, came on the radio to congratulate the pilots for the effectiveness of their attack: "Hey, you're putting smiles on the guys' faces down here." And then he sent the Warthogs about a mile north to check out a suspected enemy compound.

By now the jets' five-hundred-pound bombs and uranium bullets had killed two more Marines: Private First Cla.s.s David Fribley and Corporal Randal Rosacker. But Gyrate 73 and Gyrate 74 hadn't finished. Finding nothing of interest on their flight north, the Warthogs returned, at which time they saw five tracs moving rapidly south toward the Saddam Ca.n.a.l Bridge. Believing that the machines were Iraqi trucks bound for Ambush Alley to attack Bravo Company, Gyrate 73 got on the radio and informed Santare, "Hey, you've got vehicles from the northern target sector...progressing into the city."

"Those vehicles must not get into the city," Santare replied. The five vehicles heading toward the bridge weren't Iraqi, however. They were American tracs packed with wounded Marines making a desperate run south to escape the kill zone and evacuate the injured before they bled to death. The first vehicle across the bridge was trac C208, commanded by Corporal Nick Elliott and driven by Lance Corporal Noel Trevino. In the rear troop compartment were boxes of mortar rounds and ten Marines, several of whom were badly wounded.

C208 was followed by C201 and then C206. As the tracs sped across the bridge at forty miles per hour, Gyrate 74 strafed them with his cannon, hitting all three but failing to stop them. He therefore flew back around and fired a Maverick missile at the lead vehicle, but it overshot C208 and detonated harmlessly beyond.

Although most of the men of Charlie Company understood by now they had been strafed by one or more American A-10 jets, they still didn't realize that the Warthogs were also targeting them with five-hundred-pound bombs and Maverick anti-tank missiles. After Gyrate 74's missile just missed C208, Gyrate 73 rolled into attack position, got a lock on the same trac, and let his first Maverick go. When C208 was about 150 yards past the bridge, the missile struck the left side of the trac's troop compartment and detonated.

Trac C201, driven by Edward Castleberry, was fifty feet behind C208 when the missile hit. "I saw a white flash and the trac flew a foot and a half off the ground," he testified to the investigating board. "The side blew out. Everyone in the back blew out of it." Blood spattered Castleberry's windscreen. Body parts were hurled in all directions. Castleberry swerved right to avoid hitting the flaming sh.e.l.l of C208, then swerved back left to try to keep the trac on the road, but the steering wouldn't respond. During Gyrate 74's strafing run, the vehicle's transmission oil cooler had been hit with a 30-millimeter uranium round and the hydraulic fluid leaked out, causing the trac to crash into a telephone pole in front of a two-story cinder-block home. As the Marines scrambled out of the wrecked vehicle and ran inside the building for cover, Iraqis started shooting at them from across the street.

When Castleberry had driven past the burning wreckage of C208, he was certain all twelve men inside must be dead. Ten of them were.* But there was an aluminum bulkhead between the troop compartment and the front part of the trac where Elliott and Trevino had been sitting, and it shielded them from the worst of the missile's blast. Trevino had been temporarily blinded. Elliott's lungs had been seared, his face was badly burned, and shrapnel had torn a large chunk from his right leg. Both men were still alive, however. They crawled out of the flaming vehicle as boxes of ammunition inside it began detonating from the intense heat, got to their feet, and helped each other stagger seventy yards down Ambush Alley to the house where the Marines from C201 had taken refuge. But there was an aluminum bulkhead between the troop compartment and the front part of the trac where Elliott and Trevino had been sitting, and it shielded them from the worst of the missile's blast. Trevino had been temporarily blinded. Elliott's lungs had been seared, his face was badly burned, and shrapnel had torn a large chunk from his right leg. Both men were still alive, however. They crawled out of the flaming vehicle as boxes of ammunition inside it began detonating from the intense heat, got to their feet, and helped each other stagger seventy yards down Ambush Alley to the house where the Marines from C201 had taken refuge.

Gyrate 74, meanwhile, had wheeled around for another run at the vehicles and targeted trac C206, which had followed C201 across the bridge and was now 250 yards south of Saddam Ca.n.a.l, speeding down Ambush Alley. Bearing down from the northwest, the pilot locked his remaining missile on C206. "Fired the Maverick on that one," Gyrate 74 testified, "and it hit and destroyed the vehicle."

The missile detonated as it clipped the back of the trac, blowing open its six-foot-by-five-foot rear ramp and causing a section of the roof to drop into the troop compartment where two wounded Marines were slumped, Sergeant Michael Bitz and Lance Corporal Thomas Sloc.u.m. The explosion set the trac on fire and killed at least one of these men, but didn't actually destroy the vehicle, or even stop it. As a C206 crewman later testified, "We got hit with something hard which killed Sergeant Bitz. The trac kept moving and stopped right before the south bridge."

With its rear ramp dragging on the pavement, throwing off sparks, and black smoke billowing from its wide-open back end, C206 kept limping forward until it was at the southern end of Ambush Alley, where it finally sputtered to a halt not far from where the Marines of Alpha Company were engaged in an intense firefight of their own just north of the Euphrates River. As soon as the trac stopped moving, Iraqi fighters targeted it with RPGs and machine gun fire. Ignoring the incoming rounds, grunts from Alpha Company rushed to the destroyed vehicle and frantically began pulling dazed survivors from the wreckage, saving six men, but they were too late to do anything for Bitz and Sloc.u.m.

After seeing their missiles. .h.i.t C208 and C206, both Warthogs continued to circle north of Saddam Ca.n.a.l, searching for more targets. Spying an undamaged vehicle parked on the east side of the road, Gyrate 73 locked on to C204 and was within moments of firing his last Maverick when he heard Santare shout into the radio, "Check fire!"

The pilot aborted his attack, pulled up, and asked, "What's going on?"

Santare replied, "Hey, we think we might have had a Blue on Blue, some guys up by the river, but we're not sure. No one really knows."

Lieutenant Michael Seely, it turned out, had finally gotten a radio call through to Grabowski. When Seely, the veteran Marine who'd survived being strafed by an Air Force Warthog twelve years earlier, realized the same nightmare was recurring, he hurried to find a functioning radio, punched in the battalion commander's frequency, and started calling, "Check fire! Check fire! Check fire!" According to Seely, "Soon after that, within a couple of minutes I'm sure-seemed like forever-the friendly fire did cease."

Not long after the Warthogs halted their attack and departed for their base in Kuwait, two of the Abrams tanks that had been diverted to rescue the survivors of the Lynch convoy finally showed up, quickly tipping the advantage to Charlie Company. By sunset the firefight was over, and the Marines held both of the Nasiriyah bridges they'd been told to seize-but at a cost of eighteen dead Marines, at least seventeen of whom were killed by friendly fire. Another seventeen Marines from Charlie Company were wounded, some gravely.

The tragedy was caused by a cla.s.sic snafu-which is a particularly apt acronym. Originally coined by soldiers in the 1940s, it stands for "situation normal: all f.u.c.ked up." Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort.

* The missile killed Lance Corporal Thomas A. Blair, Private First Cla.s.s Tamario D. Burkett, Lance Corporal Donald J. Cline Jr., Corporal Jose A. Garibay, Private Jonathan L. Gifford, Corporal Jorge A. Gonzalez, Private Nolen R. Hutchings, Lance Corporal Patrick R. Nixon, Sergeant Brendon Reiss, and Lance Corporal Michael J. Williams. The missile killed Lance Corporal Thomas A. Blair, Private First Cla.s.s Tamario D. Burkett, Lance Corporal Donald J. Cline Jr., Corporal Jose A. Garibay, Private Jonathan L. Gifford, Corporal Jorge A. Gonzalez, Private Nolen R. Hutchings, Lance Corporal Patrick R. Nixon, Sergeant Brendon Reiss, and Lance Corporal Michael J. Williams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

On March 28, 2003, General Tommy Franks ordered an inquiry into what caused the casualties in Nasiriyah, as was required by Department of Defense regulations for all incidents of friendly fire. By doing so, Franks enabled the Army's information managers to reply to questions from reporters with their standard gambit: earnest a.s.surances that a thorough investigation was under way, and until it was completed, it would be irresponsible to speculate or comment further.

The investigation, headed by the Air Force general William F. Hodgkins, was completed exactly one year after it was convened. Like most friendly-fire investigations, it was done more or less according to regulations, but with no enthusiasm for determining what really happened, or who should be held accountable. Important eyewitnesses were never interviewed. Video shot from the c.o.c.kpits of the A-10 Warthogs recorded every second of the attack, but the videotapes went missing soon after the incident.

The pilots known as Gyrate 73 and Gyrate 74 each held the rank of major in the Twenty-third Air Expeditionary Wing, Pennsylvania Air National Guard. Both men had watched the tapes with intelligence officers after returning to their base.

Gyrate 73 then turned his tape over to the officer who debriefed him, and the tape vanished, never to be seen again. After watching his tape, Gyrate 74 explained, "I asked Intel, 'Can I keep this and turn it in later? I'd like to look at this tape later on.'" He was allowed to take it, whereupon he "mistakenly" inserted the tape into the c.o.c.kpit video camera and recorded over it, erasing it. The two most crucial pieces of evidence were thereby destroyed. n.o.body ever made any real effort to determine what actually happened to the tapes, and no one was disciplined in any way for the loss of this key evidence.

Despite the destruction of the c.o.c.kpit tapes and other shortcomings of the investigation, the available facts clearly indicate that at least seventeen of the deaths were the result of fratricide. When General Hodgkins's investigating board released its report, however, it refused to acknowledge that any of the deaths were attributable to friendly fire. On March 29, 2004, in a press release announcing the completion of the investigation, U.S. Central Command summarized the board's conclusions thus: A total of 18 Marines were killed and 17 were wounded. Eight of the deaths were verified as the result of enemy fire; of the remaining 10 Marines killed, investigators were unable to determine the cause of death as the Marines were also engaged in heavy fighting with the enemy at the time of the incident.Of the 17 wounded, only one was conclusively determined to have been hit by friendly fire. Three Marines were wounded while inside vehicles that received both friendly and hostile fire, and the exact sequence and source of their injuries could not be determined.

The brazenness of the board's dishonesty was breathtaking. But mendacity of this sort, it turns out, is common in such inquiries. When the military convenes a friendly-fire investigation board, the organization responsible for the incident is called upon to investigate itself, so there are powerful incentives, both inst.i.tutional and personal, to a.s.sign minimal blame. Although the investigating body typically goes elaborately through the motions of unearthing the facts, seldom is the truth pursued with the zeal demonstrated by, say, the National Transportation Safety Board when it investigates commercial aviation disasters. Military investigations of friendly-fire incidents have a well-doc.u.mented history of obscuring the truth more often than revealing it.

If fratricide is an untoward but inevitable aspect of warfare, so, too, is the tendency by military commanders to sweep such tragedies under the rug. It's part of a larger pattern: the temptation among generals and politicians to control how the press portrays their military campaigns, which all too often leads them to misrepresent the truth in order to bolster public support for the war of the moment. The fact that the United States has used misinformation to promote the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not terribly surprising, therefore. What is alarming is the scale and sophistication of these recent propaganda efforts, and the unabashedness of their executors. The Bush administration took the ruthless stratagems developed by Karl Rove to impugn its political opponents-stratagems that relied heavily on managing public perception by means of deceit-and used them to promote the Global War on Terror, a name that was itself deliberately intended to help sell the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In October 2001, the Department of Defense established the clandestine Office of Strategic Influence specifically to dupe international news organizations into running false stories that would build support for war. When the New York Times New York Times revealed the existence of this program in February 2002, public clamor forced Donald Rumsfeld to officially kill it. But in November of that year he admitted during a press briefing, without apology, that he had killed it in name only: revealed the existence of this program in February 2002, public clamor forced Donald Rumsfeld to officially kill it. But in November of that year he admitted during a press briefing, without apology, that he had killed it in name only: And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And "Oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said, "Fine. If you want to savage this thing, fine: I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done." And I have.

It is now widely understood that the administration presented fraudulent evidence as fact in order to create public support for invading Iraq in advance of the war. Much less attention has been paid to the administration's use of misinformation on an even grander scale to promote the war in the years following the invasion. In January 2003, the White House created the Office of Global Communications, a $200 million program to manipulate public opinion about the coming war, and installed Jim Wilkinson to oversee its operations in the Persian Gulf. According to an article by James Bamford in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration's covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in "military deception"-defined as "presenting false information, images, or statements."

"Never before in history," Bamford observed, "had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world's perception of a war."

March 23, 2003, the fourth day of the Iraq War, had not been propitious for the "Coalition of the Willing"-the disingenuous slogan advanced by the White House to suggest that the invasion had broad international support. Between the Marine casualties and the eleven Army soldiers from Jessica Lynch's convoy who were lost, twenty-nine members of the American military died in Nasiriyah. Another six, including Lynch, were taken captive. Before the day was out, Baghdad television began broadcasting footage of a smiling Iraqi displaying the bodies of four soldiers from Lynch's convoy, twisting the face of one American grotesquely toward the camera in order to show off the wound where the victim had been shot between the eyes.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) endeavored to squelch as much of the bad news as it could, and to a remarkable degree it succeeded. Initially the news media made no mention of deaths from friendly fire in Nasiriyah. The scant information about the battle that was released, moreover, was so distorted that it bore little relation to reality. During CENT-COM's daily news briefing on the evening of March 23, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks blamed the stunning losses suffered by the Marines on the perfidy of Iraqis: "As coalition forces continued their attack north of An Nasiriyah, they encountered forces showing every sign of surrender. As our forces moved to receive this surrender in an honorable way, they were attacked and sustained casualties."

Although this statement was a deliberate fabrication, on the following day a number of American media outlets presented it as fact, as Jim Wilkinson had no doubt intended. On March 24, for example, the a.s.sociated Press and Fox News reported, Marines [in Nasiriyah] encountered Iraqi troops who appeared to be surrendering. Instead, they attacked. The Americans triumphed, knocking out eight tanks, some antiaircraft batteries, some artillery and infantry, [General John] Abizaid said. But victory came at a cost: as many as nine dead and an undisclosed number of wounded.

A Hartford, Connecticut, television station, NBC 30, broadcast an interview with Amanda Jordan, the widow of Staff Sergeant Phillip Jordan, who was killed by a bomb dropped from an American Warthog. Having been led to believe that her husband was dead because the enemy had feigned surrender, she lashed out at the Iraqis. "There are rules of war," Mrs. Jordan said angrily, "and those rules were broken.... They're saying he was killed in action, but for me it's really murder." A calamitous fiasco that might have undercut the public's enthusiasm for the war was thus transformed into an opportunity to fan the flames of hatred against Saddam and his forces.

In his opening remarks at a Pentagon press briefing on March 25, Rumsfeld continued to pitch the fraudulent story about Iraqis pretending to surrender: In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their brutality and their disregard for the laws of war....

The regime has committed acts of treachery on the battlefield, dressing their forces as liberated civilians and sending soldiers out waving white flags and feigning surrender, with the goal of drawing coalition forces into the ambushes.

By offering such propaganda to credulous reporters, Wilkinson's Office of Global Communications succeeded in forestalling news reports about friendly fire and other disturbing aspects of the battle for Nasiriyah, but the city remained beyond the control of American forces. Thousands of enemy fighters were still moving freely through the streets, and Fedayeen guerrillas continued to skirmish with Marines who were securing the two bridges they had captured at such great cost. As the week dragged on, the Coalition of the Willing suffered further discouraging setbacks, and the bad news became harder and harder to contain.

Reports came to light that in the early hours of March 23, a Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 jet bomber had been shot down by a Patriot missile fired in error by the U.S. Army, killing the airplane's British pilot and his navigator.

On the night of March 24, an Abrams tank plunged off a bridge into the Euphrates River on the west side of Nasiriyah, drowning Staff Sergeant Donald May, Lance Corporal Patrick O'Day, and Private First Cla.s.s Francisco Martinez-Flores.

On March 26, a firefight broke out at the intersection where Lynch's convoy had made its fateful wrong turn three days earlier. In the ensuing confusion, one Marine unit attacked another Marine unit, wounding thirty-seven Americans, some critically, and two of their Kuwaiti interpreters.

On March 27, a U.S. Air Force Warthog mistakenly attacked a British convoy of Scimitar light tanks outside Basra, seventy-five miles southeast of Nasiriyah, even though one of the tanks was displaying a Union Jack and all of the vehicles were marked with fluorescent orange panels intended to identify them as coalition forces. During the American jet's two strafing runs, uranium rounds fired from its nose cannon pierced the armor on two of the tanks, and they exploded into flames. One soldier was killed, and three were seriously injured. In this instance, because the wounded soldiers were British, Wilkinson wasn't able to muzzle them. Quoted in the British press, one of the furious victims accused the American pilot of being a "cowboy" who'd "gone out on a jolly" and showed "no regard for human life."

By the end of the week, the White House was desperate for some good news to feed to the swarm of journalists who gathered for daily press briefings at CENTCOM's media headquarters in Doha, Qatar. And then Jessica Lynch turned up, as if in answer to Wilkinson's prayers.

Several Iraqis, including Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, had contacted American military personnel to report that Lynch was being held at Saddam Hussein General Hospital. Iraqi Army and Fedayeen fighters were still operating out of the hospital, but as American forces gained control throughout Nasiriyah, the Iraqi military presence at the facility rapidly diminished. By the end of March, the last of the Iraqi combatants had vanished from the hospital and fled the city.

The Iraqi staff at the hospital treated Lynch well, according to doctors and nurses interviewed by the British newspaper the Guardian Guardian. Dr. Harith al-Houssona, one of the physicians who supervised her care, said that hospital personnel even donated two pints of their own blood to give her. On March 30, al-Houssona actually put Lynch in an ambulance and instructed the driver to drop her off at a nearby American military checkpoint, but Marines shot at the ambulance as it approached, forcing it to turn around and take Lynch back to the Iraqi hospital.

By that time preparations to rescue Lynch were already under way. Approximately a thousand troops had been mobilized, including a contingent from Task Force 20, the most elite Special Operations commandos in the world, and infantrymen from the Second Ranger Battalion. As Pat and Kevin Tillman got ready for the mission, its ma.s.sive scale-unlike anything they'd seen since arriving in the Persian Gulf-puzzled them. "We leave tomorrow," Pat wrote in his journal on March 30. "This mission will be a P.O.W. rescue, a woman named Jessica Lynch. As awful as I feel for the fear she must face, and admire the courage I'm sure she is showing, I do believe this to be a big Public Relations stunt. Do not mistake me, I wish everyone in trouble to be rescued, but sending this many folks in for a [single low-ranking soldier] screams of media blitz. In any case, I'm glad to be able to do my part and I hope we bring her home safe."

CENTCOM can't be faulted for committing so many troops to the operation. Information provided by the CIA and military intelligence had been extremely unreliable. A week earlier the Marines had been a.s.sured that taking the Nasiriyah bridges would be no big deal, only to find themselves in a desperate battle with a large number of very motivated enemy fighters. But Pat's suspicions about the Lynch rescue were well founded. The resources devoted to the mission were astonishing by any measure, and had been put in place primarily to ensure that it would be a public relations jackpot for those promoting the war. At least seven other American servicemen and servicewomen were also being held captive in Iraq at that time, including five soldiers from Lynch's convoy; yet almost nothing at all was being done to find and rescue these less marketable prisoners of war.

After the Rangers were initially told that the mission to rescue Lynch would take place on March 31, it was pushed back twenty-four hours. Congressman Henry Waxman later alleged that Wilkinson delayed the mission to allow a Special Operations video crew to shoot the rescue for the news media. Although these allegations have not been substantiated, there is no question that Wilkinson was intimately involved with planning the mission, or that it was expertly doc.u.mented by a combat camera crew from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group included solely for that purpose.

When it finally got under way, the rescue was flawlessly executed. Although the rescue team was targeted with small-arms fire as it approached the hospital in six helicopters, the shooting was light and no aircraft were hit. Ten minutes after the Special Operations team landed, they'd retrieved Lynch, carried her out of the hospital, and loaded her into a waiting Black Hawk. As soon as the helicopter was safely in the air, the first person to be notified was Wilkinson, followed immediately thereafter by CENTCOM media wrangler General Vincent Brooks, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Within three hours, a five-minute video of the rescue, carefully edited for dramatic effect, was made available to television correspondents and print reporters in Qatar, who were summoned to the Doha media center in the wee hours of the morning to receive the good news.

Having provided reporters with spurious intelligence reports to hype the story and ensure that Lynch's saga would blow the socks off the folks back home, Wilkinson was eager to get his product into the hands of consumers at the earliest opportunity. The sooner "Saving Private Lynch" was on the front page of newspapers, the covers of magazines, and the evening news, the sooner the recent spate of depressing events would be relegated to the shadows.

Over the weeks and months that followed, the scheme played out just as Wilkinson hoped it would. More than six hundred stories about Lynch appeared in all manner of media, including a rushed-into-print book that debuted at number one on the New York Times New York Times nonfiction best-seller list and a made-for-television movie, nonfiction best-seller list and a made-for-television movie, Saving Jessica Lynch Saving Jessica Lynch, scheduled to attract the largest possible audience during an important network sweeps month. Eventually Wilkinson's rendering of Lynch's ordeal was exposed as propaganda, but by then it had already accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: covering up the truth in order to maintain support for the president's policies. To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U.S. Marines were killed by U.S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War.

The Jessica Lynch hoax worked so well, in fact, that the White House would recycle the same tactic thirteen months later, almost move for move, when it was confronted with another series of potentially disastrous revelations. Just as before, a fict.i.tious story about a valiant American soldier would be fed to the media in order to divert attention from a rash of disquieting news. On this occasion, however, the soldier cast as the hero of the fable would be a professional football player whose sense of duty had inspired him to enlist in the Rangers after 9/11.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

On April 9, 2003, seven days after Jessica Lynch was flown to safety, Pat and Kevin Tillman were helicoptered to Baghdad International Airport with their Ranger cohort, where they took up residence in a cavernous aircraft hangar. As they arrived, Marines were attaching a cable to a forty-foot statue of Saddam Hussein in Al-Firdos Square, twelve miles away in the center of Baghdad, preparing to pull it down for a gaggle of photographers and television crews who had flocked to the scene to record the symbolic moment for posterity. A few hours earlier, the capital had officially fallen to American forces. A few hours later, an orgy of unrestrained looting would commence throughout the city and continue for many days.

The Tillmans remained in Baghdad for the next five weeks. Despite the turmoil erupting all around them, their stay was relatively uneventful. Pat fired his weapon only once, on April 21. "Don't get too excited or upset," he wrote in his journal, "they were only warning shots to keep a couple of cars from getting closer and no harm was done."

Their duties allowed plenty of time for conversation. "Pat and Kevin were always talking," recalls Russell Baer, a young Ranger who grew up in Livermore, California, thirty-five miles north of New Almaden. "They spent as much time together as they possibly could. They seemed to have an incredibly rare bond." The Tillman brothers welcomed anyone to join their conversations, however. "Pat was nonjudgmental," Baer emphasizes. "He was interested even in the most idiotic person in the group. He genuinely wanted to find out what they were about. He would challenge them to explain themselves, and some of them would maintain their idiocy and bring nothing to the table, but Pat would always start out by giving them the benefit of the doubt.

"I was friends with Kevin before I was friends with Pat," says Baer, a well-read autodidact with eclectic taste. "I was reading Noam Chomsky's Propaganda and the Public Mind Propaganda and the Public Mind and Plato's and Plato's Republic Republic. Kevin had read stuff by both these writers-he'd been a philosophy major in college. So we got into a discussion about literature, which led to further conversations that included Pat. It was great. I finally had people I could talk to.

"Pat was a serious listener. He was one of the first people who really challenged my ideas: 'Do you really believe that? Why? Don't accept everything you read. You should question it all, take what makes sense, and throw away the rest.' He was constantly asking, 'Did you ever consider this? What about that?' He changed the way I thought."

During his stint in the Army, Pat had no trouble establishing meaningful friendships with individuals who didn't share his opinions about politics or religion-which was fortunate, because this described many of the people he encountered while in uniform. An important friend he met during Operation Iraqi Freedom was a Navy SEAL named Steve White whose political orientation was much further to the right than Pat's. But White was bright, mature, and fearless, and he had reached the pinnacle of a demanding, consequential profession; in the world of Special Ops, White was the equivalent of an All-Pro cornerback in the NFL. Pat was drawn to him immediately, and the attraction was mutual.

The first time White invited Pat and Kevin to the SEALs' quarters for coffee, Pat noted in his journal, "For about an hour and a half we bullshat with ten or so of the baddest men on earth.... Absolute f.u.c.king champions." A couple of days later he wrote, "Last night we again hit the SEALs' tent for coffee and conversation.... Steve and I yakked for hours on home, Tahoe, our wives, good eating, all the things I think about constantly. I can't tell you how nice it's been to have these guys around.... [They] make all the s.h.i.t we've gone through worthwhile. They are exactly the type of guys we looked forward to meeting when we decided to join." Thereafter, Pat and Kevin sought out the SEALs for conversation (and, once or twice, an illicit shot of rum) whenever circ.u.mstances allowed.

When Pat and Kevin went out on patrols from their base at the airport, both of them found the city to be fascinating and exotic. But after a few weeks of kicking down doors, arresting ordinary Iraqis for questioning, and searching for nonexistent WMD,* the pointlessness and boredom began to grind them down, especially Pat. Then, on the night of April 2930, four Delta Force operators were shot while on a mission to capture a "high-value target," and Pat helped carry one of the wounded soldiers in from the medevac helicopter to receive treatment. "The man I was carrying had been shot in the abdomen," he wrote. "At this point in the game I was quite surprised to see anyone shot.... The danger seemed minimal. It goes to show you never know." the pointlessness and boredom began to grind them down, especially Pat. Then, on the night of April 2930, four Delta Force operators were shot while on a mission to capture a "high-value target," and Pat helped carry one of the wounded soldiers in from the medevac helicopter to receive treatment. "The man I was carrying had been shot in the abdomen," he wrote. "At this point in the game I was quite surprised to see anyone shot.... The danger seemed minimal. It goes to show you never know."

A day later, from the deck of an aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego, beneath a giant banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush announced "the end of major combat operations in Iraq."

Pat's journal entries expressed growing frustration. He admitted to bouts of depression, as well as disillusionment with some of his superiors: "We've had leaders telling guys to shoot innocent people only to be ignored by privates with cooler heads.... It seems their battlefield sense is less than ideal. Given the stress of a situation, I absolutely will listen to my instincts before diving headfirst into any half-baked scheme of theirs. Perhaps this is not the 'military right,' however these past couple of months have suggested it's necessary."

During their free time, Pat, Kevin, Russell Baer, and Jade Lane, the platoon radio operator, sometimes discussed the geopolitical ramifications of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which increasingly struck them as an imperial folly that was doing long-term damage to U.S. interests. For soldiers to openly criticize the war was exceedingly rare at the time. A Gallup poll conducted in May 2003 indicated that 79 percent of Americans believed the Iraq war was "justified"; among members of the military, support for the war probably exceeded 95 percent. For the Tillman brothers to denounce the war while on active duty in Iraq would no doubt have struck many Americans as treasonous. But Pat and Kevin had been raised to speak their minds, so speak they did.

The Tillman brothers lamented how easy it had been for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to bully Secretary of State Colin Powell, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of the American people into endorsing the invasion of Iraq. But Pat and Kevin were not particularly surprised. Their paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were serving in the Navy at Pearl Harbor during the devastating j.a.panese attack of 1941. Their maternal grandfather had experienced combat as a Marine in the Korean War. One of their uncles had enlisted in the Marines upon graduating from high school and had been stationed in Okinawa during the war in Vietnam. Dannie Tillman had been a history major in college, and when her sons were growing up, family discussions often turned to military history.

Pat and Kevin were familiar with the words of Hermann Goring, Hitler's Reichsmarschall Reichsmarschall, who in 1946, shortly before he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, notoriously observed: Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

If anything, Pat was probably even less pleased than Kevin to find himself partic.i.p.ating in the invasion of Iraq. Although both brothers were opposed to the war, Kevin was single and not yet on a career path when they enlisted, while Pat had walked away from both a devoted wife and an uncommonly satisfying job in order to help defeat those responsible for 9/11. He ached constantly for Marie. A homebody at heart who was half the world away from the home she had made for him, he felt the distance between them acutely. It's apparent from his journal that Pat was extremely unhappy to be serving in Iraq, and that throughout his tour of duty there he relied on Kevin for emotional support in a way that he never had before.

Pat hadn't sacrificed so much in order to sit on the sidelines of a misguided war that he believed was abetting the enemies of the United States. Paradoxically, though, it's obvious from his diary that some portion of his unhappiness derived from the fact that he hadn't experienced combat yet, and concluded that he probably wouldn't before leaving Baghdad. Part of his rationale for becoming a Ranger was to join the fight. In addition to feeling a responsibility to help with the dirty work, he wanted to know firsthand what it was like to have people trying their best to kill him, and perhaps be required to kill in turn. His feelings about war in general, and this war in particular, were shaped by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride. He was therefore more than a little ambivalent about going home without a CIB: the Combat Infantryman Badge-a miniature silver rifle mounted on a two-inch rectangle of blue enamel framed with a silver oak wreath, awarded to infantrymen who'd engaged in combat.

Despite the dark frame of mind evident in a number of his Baghdad journal entries, on May 2 Pat wrote, "You know, I have to admit, some of these kids are getting to me. I find myself thinking of things I can do to help their future. As p.i.s.sed off as I can be with this place, there are some very good people, especially some of these kids. Whether I like it or not, I have a soft spot for some of these little brats."

Pat observed May 4, his first wedding anniversary, by writing a message to his wife: Happy Anniversary my love!!! A year ago today Marie made me the luckiest man alive, and what have I done in return? Schemed up the most absurd way to drastically s.h.i.t-can our, until recently, perfect existence. Here I sit in a tent, at Baghdad International Airport, surrounded by kids, half the earth away from where I belong on our anniversary. Unbelievable. This last year has been s.h.i.t, no doubt, Marie. However in this last year I've grown to love & admire you to a point that only trial and suffering can bring about. This madness has brought out such amazing strength and character in you. Of course this was always there, but this last year has given me the opportunity to see just how amazing, how tough you really are.

For weeks the Rangers had been hearing rumors that they would be packing up and heading home "any day now." Finally it appeared as though their departure from Iraq might actually be at hand. On May 12, Pat wrote, "Lots of good news.... Should (of course with the usually skepticism) head home the 15th. Already the wheels are in motion, packing has begun, and excitement is in the air.... A bunch of EPWs (Enemy Prisoners of War) escaped from across the street today. Twenty escaped while four have already been caught. Nub and I are rooting for the other sixteen. Sometimes it's hard not to cheer for the underdog. (P.S.-These are not military POWs, but civilians they're holding for info.)"

Pat's journal entry for May 15 consisted of two short lines: "We are leaving at 0300 tomorrow. Thank f.u.c.king G.o.d." Three days later he and Kevin were sitting in the USO lounge at Frankfurt Airport, waiting to board a flight for the United States. Pat reflected: All in all I suppose this was a solid experience, if for no other reason than we're coming home safe.... We did not fight, or find ourselves in any life altering situations.... Perhaps in time this whole experience will seem larger than it does now, more exciting. I admit it was not what I expected of "going to war," but who knows what to expect. I remember my rookie year [in the NFL], a reporter asking about my feelings on going to the playoffs. He mentioned that many players will spend a whole career without being fortunate enough to go. For me, in my first year, I guess I just expected to go every year, though it turned out not to be the case. Perhaps this will ring true here.... This could possibly be our first and only taste of combat (limited as it was). But then again, with that "cowboy" at the helm, I wouldn't bet on it.

Pat's stint in Iraq wasn't only difficult for Pat; it was hard on Marie as well. "They were gone for two and a half months," she says, "and for most of that time there was no communication between us at all. He wasn't able to call me until the very end, right before they came home, so I had no idea what was going on. We had just moved to Washington State, and I hadn't started working yet. I knew no one. I just sat inside and watched the media coverage of the war on TV all day long. They'd report that another helicopter had been shot down, and I'd wonder if that was Pat and Kevin. I don't even really remember how I got through that period. It was awful."

For Pat to be reunited with Marie on May 19 was an enormous relief. Life was good again. In July, when the Army granted Pat and Kevin a two-week leave, the three of them went to Lake Tahoe and kicked back with their high-school friends from Almaden, just like they had done so many times before the Tillman brothers enlisted.

Upon their return to Fort Lewis, Pat and Kevin began preparing for the rigors of Ranger School, a punishing sixty-one-day trial that every noog must endure in order to earn his "tab": a small cloth patch embroidered with the word "Ranger," which is affixed to the upper left shoulder of his uniform. Until a Ranger is "tabbed," he is not considered a full-fledged member of the brotherhood, cannot be promoted beyond the rank of private first cla.s.s, and will be routinely subjected to degrading work a.s.signments at the whim of tabbed superiors just to remind him that he is a p.i.s.sant, unworthy of respect.

"Tabbed guys go out of their way to f.u.c.k with the new guys," explains Sergeant Mel Ward, who would become one of the Rangers Pat considered a friend. "They order them to clean toilets, do push-ups. You hear stories of noogs locked in their lockers over the weekend with nothing but a two-quart canteen. When a tabbed Ranger would smoke Pat, he would do what he was supposed to, but you could tell it was really burning him up. Because it was pointless and unnecessary."

"You have to put up with a lot of asinine stuff in the Army," Jade Lane agrees. "And Pat didn't like it. Some twenty-year-old would tell him to do something stupid, like shine your boots, then scuff them up, and then shine them again. That kind of c.r.a.p he was not into. And he would let them know. Like, he'd say, 'Look, I'll shine my boots, but I'm not gonna scuff 'em up and shine 'em again, because that's just r.e.t.a.r.ded.' And people in the Army don't like being talked to like that. You're supposed to do what you're told. So he would get in trouble sometimes. They'd bring him into the office, write him up for counseling."