After I finished speaking in the backyard, I met individually with some of the men I knew well. I said good-bye and flew back to Balad, while the operators gathered inside the villa. There they lifted on their equipment—the thick canvas of the shoulder straps softened from years of use, the helmet padding carrying permanent indents—and went back out into the dark.
| CHAPTER 14 |
Networked
June 2006–June 2008
On June 5, 2006, two days before Zarqawi was killed, I went to Ramadi to go on a raid with the Rangers stationed there. I’d been there many times before, but Ramadi was now the worst city in Iraq. The Coalition and Iraqi government had largely ceded the city to the insurgency. Only one hundred policemen showed up for daily work in a city of four hundred thousand—and most holed up in their stations. A stoic company of Marines held the only ground there—a patch of buildings at the city center surrounded on all sides by neighborhoods where insurgents operated undisturbed. Absent a significant population of Shia they could target, the insurgents focused on the Americans, and our conventional-force casualty rates there were extraordinarily high.
The next twelve months would be the most difficult we faced in our long war in Iraq, yet TF 714 was more capable than ever to contribute to the fight. Because I was so focused on the task, I was happy I’d been extended for a fourth year in command. But I knew that meant Annie had been extended for a fourth year alone.
While Iraq was our main effort and highest priority, TF 714’s role in what was then called the war on terror continued to mature and expand. I had the additional influence that came with my third star, and we had resources, from ISR aircraft to interrogators, that I’d only dreamed of in 2004. Across the embattled region, we continued to build a network that spanned more than two dozen countries at one point, with nodes ranging from full task forces capable of combat operations to single operators or intelligence analysts embedded in embassies.
While only two years earlier, in the summer of 2004, hitting the single Big Ben safe house in Fallujah had consumed most of our bandwidth, any given day during these final two years of command consisted of managing counterterrorist operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; engaging with VIP visitors to the task forces; strategically coordinating in theater, including visits to Baghdad to meet with General Casey and his replacement, General Petraeus; and holding VTCs with D.C. to continue stoking our interagency partnerships. In spite of our breadth, if we still had real problems to confront, it wasn’t due to a lack of communication.
As I moved more frequently and more widely, I was naturally drawn to areas where we faced particularly tough fights or challenges. I aimed to assess invariably complex situations and to simply demonstrate my commitment. That summer, this led me to Ramadi. Although I went to Ramadi to show my support to a captain who, true to our decentralized culture, had made an on-the-spot decision suited to his situation, I encountered there a vision for part of TF 714’s role in the next stage of the Iraq war.
Our operations in Ramadi fell to a company of Rangers led by then-Captain Doug P., operating under a commander of a TF 714 SEAL squadron who had charge of Anbar. Unlike a few years earlier, having Green operators, SEALs, and Rangers integrated so seamlessly was becoming commonplace.
On the day I’d accompany his force on an operation in Ramadi, I met Doug and some of the Rangers at their base, called “Shark Base,” before we went out. At their outpost, on the southern edge of the Euphrates, fumes from garbage and sewage, stewing in the 120-degree sunlight, drifted across the compound, which existed under a permanent haze of suspended dust. It was hard to find a clean mouthful of air. From their location north of the city, they had been running raids into areas the conventional commander had told Doug were off limits as enemy territory.
But the enemy quickly learned and left the city at night. The Rangers were breaching the correct houses, only to wade through the dark rooms and find empty cots. So Doug decided to start running daytime operations into the city. Rolling in broad daylight into the city across the main bridge leading in from the northwest, the Rangers quickly learned contact was inevitable. The only question being how nasty the firefight would be as they fought their way into insurgent strongholds. AQI seeded the few roads the Ranger convoys could use with IEDs, and time and again as they left the wire, a Stryker in the line would disappear in a fount of dust and black smoke. As the Rangers aggressively prosecuted operations, casualties mounted.