My Share of the Task(113)
“I’d like to capture him, Mr. President,” I responded.
“Why don’t we just kill ’im?” the president said quickly, flatly. Nervous laughter in the room gave way to a few beats of silence. I assumed his comment referred to Zarqawi.
It was a fair question, neither theatrical nor simplistic. He had been watching American men and women die to stop Zarqawi’s effort to incite civil war and tear down the new Iraqi government. On one level, to risk losing more of our people trying to capture a man who led a psychopathic campaign of violence seemed illogical and almost immoral.
“Well, Mr. President,” I said, “to be honest, I really want to talk to him. He knows things we want to know.”
No raid force ever went on a mission under my command with orders not to capture a target if he tried to surrender. We were not death squads. But my calculus was not about Zarqawi’s well-being. I told the president that our nightly operations to gather the intelligence allowed us to understand, and ultimately to dismantle, his network. I felt a living Zarqawi might be a decisive source of intelligence, and that was worth the risks.
“Yeah, I’ve got it,” he said, nodding. He smiled. “Good point.”
The meeting concluded. Our mission hadn’t changed, and Zarqawi remained a major part of it. The hunt would require us to be increasingly sophisticated in how we operated. We had to negotiate a difficult, at times contentious, balance between maintaining as much pressure and preventing as many immediate threats as possible by continuing to hammer Zarqawi’s network and conducting deliberate, painstaking target development. I was confident we could do it, but this would be long and bloody.
I spoke briefly with Secretary Rumsfeld, then headed north to rejoin my commanders at Gettysburg.
* * *
When I was a boy, my father, recently returned from combat in Vietnam, brought my brother and me to Gettysburg. At the time, I thought of the confusion and violence that had violated Gettysburg’s serenity a century earlier. July 1, 1863, had been a difficult day of fighting for union forces, as they resisted Lee’s army, then converging from the north and west. By the early evening, the union had fallen back through the town to defensive positions on nearby Cemetery Ridge.
For more than two years the Army of the Potomac had fought hard, and it was maturing into a seasoned force, but success eluded it. Earlier that day, Brigadier General John Buford had led his cavalry division in a brilliant delaying action, buying time for hard-marching infantry units to concentrate. But by nightfall, Confederates pressed aggressively through the town for what appeared to be another Lee victory. The next night the union commanders met in a small farmhouse behind Cemetery Ridge with George Meade, the army’s new commander. They decided to stand and fight a battle that many in the crowded, smoke-filled room thought might decide the war.
By the summer of 2005, TF 714, like the Army of the Potomac, was a seasoned force, but the situation in Iraq looked grim. And I’d gathered my leaders at Gettysburg to ensure we were united in our strategy for the way ahead.
On June 25, 2005, I had traveled from Fort Bragg to Austin, Texas, for Bob Horrigan’s funeral. I flew in a military plane with Bennet Sacolick and about forty of Bob’s Green brethren. As we sat in the pews of St. Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Austin that morning, the sound of bagpipes swelling through the stone arches and ceilings, men from Green were arriving in Iraq as part of our surge into the upper reaches of the Euphrates, where Bob had been killed.
In the early months of 2005, as jihadists heeded bin Laden’s call to seize the opportunity to fight with Zarqawi, in one aspect I began to think of Iraq as the Gettysburg of the war on terror. When John Buford decided to dismount his men and fight the Confederate forces he encountered outside of town, he committed the union Army to fighting the decisive battle of that war in tiny Gettysburg.