* * *
That September, after fourteen months on the Joint Staff, I headed back to Fort Bragg. I hadn’t volunteered for Pentagon duty and was happy to leave. But understanding the politics, processes, and personalities in the Pentagon, and in the wider U.S. government, proved indispensible for my later service in Iraq and Afghanistan. What would have seemed unreasonable and ludicrous viewed only from downrange had logic and meaning because I knew the environment in Washington or the individuals involved. Similarly, knowing the secretary of defense, the chairman and vice-chairman of the the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other key players and—as important—having them know me would be essential when I was faced with sensitive operations easily misunderstood from afar.
All that said, when the time came, Annie and I loaded the car quickly and headed south. We were eager to come “home” to Fort Bragg, and I didn’t want to give anyone in D.C. a chance to change his or her mind.
Part Two
The eagerness of our search for firewood turned us all into botanists.
—George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
| CHAPTER 7 |
Through the Hourglass
October–November 2003
On a dry night in February 2004, I was likely standing less than a block from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I did not know he and I were that close, nor did the Army special operators who, in a darkened house half a block away, were nearer to him than I was. We were all in the northeastern Askari neighborhood of Fallujah, just south of where the city ended and emptied into sun-caked yellow dirt fields. This was the nicer area of town. The row houses, rectangular with flat rooftops, each stood back from the walled street, with small courtyards in front and dented, rusting metal gates. Constructed with low-grade concrete, the homes and walls were streaked and stained with ocher dust. Half a block away, I stood watch at the corner with Gabe, a major in the special operations task force I was commanding.* Through night-vision goggles, we watched the one courtyard gate that hung half open. Inside, Green operators quickly, deliberately cleared the house’s unlit rooms.
If Zarqawi was in fact there, he got away, we think by jumping out of a second-floor window. He would have dropped down into the alleyway around the corner from us, hidden by townhouses. It would have been hard to hear him land on the ground. There wasn’t debris for him to disturb, as the houses were still intact then. And, this being Iraq, unseen stray dogs yelped from all corners of the neighborhood. That would all change in a month, when a crowd at the opposite end of the city murdered four American private security contractors, stringing two of their charred bodies from the beams of the green trestle bridge that spanned the Euphrates. That display spurred the Bush administration to order two massive Marine operations, the second of which, in November of that year, would leave over twelve hundred dead insurgents and the city they had hunkered down in a hollowed shell.
Had Zarqawi’s stop at the townhouse that night been a visit for him to motivate his troops, he might have dressed in all black, his signature look. More likely he wore bland Iraqi garb, the type he donned before passing undetected through countless American checkpoints over the next two years. Regardless, he would have been unlikely to bump into anyone else on the street; everyone had retired behind their walls hours earlier and remained there even if our flashbang grenades and shouting woke them. Not once during the scores of raids I went on over the next four years in Iraq did I see anyone stir behind the darkened windows above a street, nor did curious onlookers ever appear on the streets. After decades of Saddam’s brutal control, Iraqis seemed to instinctively avoid anything that could bring attention to themselves during night operations by security forces. The process was one they knew well and feared.
Zarqawi was fitter that night than he was in the final months of his life, when he grew heavy and pale from staying indoors to avoid our surveillance. Between the uninterrupted barking, the darkness, and the empty streets, he could have slipped north over the railroad tracks into the open fields to wait us out. Or he could have turned the other way and disappeared into the denser city that sprawled beneath Fallujah’s motley minarets. Or he may not have been there at all.