I returned to the SAR and continued to work until Steve came by and we walked over together with Mike Flynn. The low sun darkened the compound’s dun walls and pathways and turned the dust-choked horizon and stray clouds orange.
At the screening facility, they had placed the bodies of Abd al-Rahman and Zarqawi in one of the exploitation rooms. Two guards outside the door let Steve and me in. Inside, Zarqawi and Abd al-Rahman had been laid on separate tarps spread on the cement floor. The room was empty except for two other operators. I walked over to the edge of the tarp and looked down. Killed by overpressure, Zarqawi’s skin was unbroken. Even in death he looked stunningly like the figure we had seen weeks earlier in a propaganda video—soft and ashen.
It had been two and a half years since that first night in Fallujah, when we thought he leaped out the window. It seemed a long time ago. Since then, the war had twice ripped through that city. Zarqawi had gone from an important but stock jihadist operative slipping through our fingers to the most feared, active, deadly, and controversial Al Qaeda leader. We were only a few meters from my command center, and even closer to the small wooden hut where my command sergeant major and I had lived for most of the past two years—working toward this moment.
I looked at one of the operators, Luke,* kneeling on the other side of the body. I watched him as he quietly examined equipment captured in the operation. His chiseled face was drawn tight in focus as he sifted the material, his fingers smudging the film of dust on the phones and computers. His curly hair was still damp and matted with sweat—he had been a member of the assault force that had gone out to Hibhib and brought back the body. I had first served with him a decade earlier, when he was a staff sergeant squad leader in the Rangers. He was now about thirty-eight and a sergeant major in Green with almost five years of combat experience since 9/11. In a few hours, he would go back out into the night for another raid.
As our eyes met and we exchanged nods of recognition, respect, and friendship, I thought about what he saw when he looked at me. I’d been a forty-year-old Ranger battalion commander when we’d first met at Fort Lewis. I had technically still been a one-star general when I had joined him and his comrades in this fight in October 2003. Now, two months short of my fifty-second birthday, I wore the three stars of a lieutenant general and commanded a deployed force that had grown from a few hundred to many thousands on multiple continents, backed up by an even bigger structure in the United States. What had been impressive but rudimentary was now a relentless counterterrorist machine. In a honeycomb of rooms adjacent to the room in which I stood, teams of analysts pored through material recovered from the house in which Zarqawi was killed. In the hangar next door, screens were showing the first of the raids going out against the Arcadia targets. Similar processes were under way in ten different nodes worldwide.
I looked back at the body. Seeing him as a man, I couldn’t exult in his death. Nor did I wring my hands. I took satisfaction, standing there, knowing that this work, our work, was necessary. Tonight, it had moved us closer to being finished.
“What do you think, Luke?” I asked the operator.
“Oh, that’s him, sir,” he said.
I nodded.
With Steve, I returned to my office to phone George Casey. I had called him prior to the strike, and he now knew we were waiting on the FBI to run the fingerprints back in the States. Until it did, we could not definitively say it was Zarqawi. But we’d shared this fight together for two years and I told him what I thought.
“Sir, I’ve seen the body, and I think it’s him.”
“How sure are you?” he asked.
“I’m sure, sir,” I said, my voice cracking from fatigue or emotion.