We landed in the evening near the phosphate plant outside Al Qaim and met with the squadron inside the run-down factory they used as a base. The commander at Al Qaim, Lieutenant Colonel Trevor, had a small work space, not much bigger than a storage closet, in the shabby, trailerlike building that adjoined one end of the factory.* I sat down with him there before meeting with the rest of his men. I had known Trevor a long time. He had served as a Ranger captain for me. He had lost his wife to sickness a few years earlier. Then, as on this night, I had been proud of—and steeled by—his determined strength. I let the door close and looked him in the eye.
“How are you, Trevor?”
“Sir, I’m good,” he said. We were speaking quietly.
“Well, how are the guys?”
“I think they’re all right, sir,” he said. “But they’re beat up.”
That same day, Sergeant First Class Kolath, who had been flown to Germany after the mine attack there in Husaybah, had died from his wounds. Loss was compounded by the stress of combat. Getting hit by an IED is unnerving. There is no enemy to fight back against. It strikes and brings a few moments of chaos and noise, but in the silence afterward there is no enemy to engage, no contest where each side has a chance.
We met with the operators in a small room in the compound. I’d known many of them for years. For a few it was the first time we had met. I began by offering my sincere condolences for their losses. They knew how I felt, but I wanted them to hear it directly. Losing comrades is hard, and I didn’t patronize fellow professionals by telling them that. I rarely prepared remarks beforehand and for small groups never did. On the ride out I had thought through key points I want to make, but now I mostly tried to understand the tenor inside the room.
“Listen,” I said, “this really hurts. But let me tell you what would make these hurt even more: if it is all in vain. Now I am not fucking around. I am here with you, not just physically here, but I am completely committed to this thing. We can beat these bastards, and we’re going to.” Victory could not offset the terrible price already paid—a price that would increase as the fight expanded. But losing would make the pain unbearable.
I explained how the nighttime raids they were running in that corner of the war were vital to TF 714’s mission and to the larger strategy. “Let me tell you what your brothers up in Mosul are doing,” I said, building out a wider view of the fighting that summer. I told them what we were seeing in Baghdad and east of them in the rest of Anbar. I shared what I thought George Casey was thinking, based on my most recent conversations with him.
Within a couple of months, by October, we were able to see real evidence of the strategic impact I hoped would materialize when I explained it to the operators in Al Qaim that day. We had no way of scientifically proving the effect of the push out west, but the trends were promising. By August, the Coalition believed suicide attacks accounted for a decreasing proportion of the car bombings. According to the National Combating Terrorism Center, in July 2005, before the campaign, 51 suicide attacks killed 277 people and wounded 751 in Iraq. In September, nearly 40 such attacks killed 431, and wounded a similar number. November saw 11 attacks that killed 270. In December, 10 incidents killed 97 people.
In October, Chris Faris, the command sergeant major of Green whom I regarded as the unit’s elder, weighed in with his assessment. In one of our routine strategy sessions, he said, “The western Euphrates push was the right thing to do. I was worried it wouldn’t work, but it did.” Our successes out west solidified a significant shift in how we, as a force, regarded ourselves. Previously content to conduct periodic point assaults, the western Euphrates campaign gave us a larger sense of possibility—and responsibility.
Although we did not fully appreciate it that summer or fall, the hot contest over Al Qaim became about more than tamping the foreign-fighter pipeline. There in the dusty border juncture, the first sparks for a much larger, more definitive strategic shift flashed. In addition to fighting the Marines and our TF 16 operators, Al Qaeda found itself facing a third enemy: the Albu Mahal tribe, many of whom not long before had fought with the insurgency against the Coalition. The tribe turned, joined the Americans, and rose against Al Qaeda for a number of reasons. In part, they found themselves on the losing end of an alliance between AQI and another tribe.