Early in the push, the close-quarters engagements quickly gave us a deeper understanding of the enemy. We began to see the structures and relationships that allowed AQI to nest so thoroughly into this stretch through Anbar. AQI had purchased some of the safe houses it used, but it really relied on an archipelago of guesthouses run by sympathetic or permissive villages and tribes. When insurgents fled, they scaled fences using carefully placed but otherwise innocuous-looking piles of junk against the back walls. As they scattered into villages, they relied on what John Christian aptly termed a biblical system, using Old Testament–era techniques—sympathizers left small markings on the lintels of their compounds, for example—invisible at first to our technology and untrained foreign eyes.
When we did encounter insurgents willing to make a stand, the fight was different from most of what we had experienced in Iraq to date. As a hostage-rescue and strategic-raid force, our inclination was to do deliberate, intelligence-driven planning, then conduct fast point assaults—landing helicopters on roofs and fast-roping into compounds. These were high-risk tactics based on knowing more than the enemy, achieving absolute surprise, and having forces that, pound for pound, were always superior to the enemy ranks.
That approach had largely worked, but by the summer of 2005 our adversaries had wisened up and hardened into a different foe. AQI leaders, even midlevel ones, began wearing suicide vests constantly, usually sleeping in them so that if our men breached their doors and headed toward their cots, they could light themselves off in the darkness. They lay traps, setting up makeshift pillboxes in the slits between staircases and rigging the walls of compounds with explosives. Whole units of foreign fighters barricaded themselves in basements, firing up through the floorboards or at the ankles of operators. We adapted, landing helicopters kilometers away, walking to the targets, cordoning the areas and methodically working our way through them. Although the fighting was bitter, some of our operators felt a certain relief that, for once, the insurgents were out in the open, not melting into cities or hiding among civilians.
Not since Fallujah had we seen AQI fighters defend houses or hold and retain terrain. Their actions out west seemed to signal that they possessed new resolve and increasing confidence. We needed to break both.
* * *
By August, the costs of the surge I had feared were realized. On Thursday, August 25, 2005, a pressure-plate triple-stacked antitank mine hit a convoy of our men in Husaybah, between the Syrian border and Al Qaim. Green operators Master Sergeant Ivica Jerak and Sergeant First Class Trevor John Diesing, and Ranger Corporal Timothy M. Shea were killed. A fourth operator, Sergeant First Class Obediah Kolath, was critically wounded in the blast and flown to Germany. Others in the troop were badly wounded. All were professional soldiers, volunteers for their elite units, and fully cognizant of the risks. But it left us all with the ominous feeling that our losses would mount.
Before dawn on Sunday, August 28, as I prepared to fly out to visit this team at their outpost, I wrote an e-mail to Annie that captured the challenge I faced as their commander: “A lot of emotion attached, naturally, but we need to maintain absolute focus right now.”
On the helicopter ride, I thought about something T. E. Lawrence had written in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book I’ve revisited countless times. Writing about his own fight in the desert, not far from where these Rangers and operators had fallen in Iraq, he reflected on the fragility of the tribes in the face of heavy fighting: “Governments saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals. An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widened out therefrom. We could not afford casualties.”
Writing about World War I, Lawrence had experienced a very different theater from that in Europe, where men died en masse—hamlets lost an entire brood of boys and men to a few minutes of shelling in wet, gas-filled trenches. There, commanders risked seeing their men not as men but as mere numbers in the columns of a War Office ledger. But the tribes Lawrence corralled and led were constituted so thickly, with such interwoven histories and personal ties, that the loss of one member sent fissures through them. Our forces, more tribes than modern military units, were the same way to me.