My Share of the Task(82)

                During May and June 2004, the final two months of their three-month rotation, Steve and Wayne sought to meld the sometimes-divided spheres of intelligence and operations. With Fallujah inaccessible, Steve required his operators to take turns sitting alongside Wayne’s analysts, watching the Predator feeds on uninterrupted twenty-four-hour shifts. He required the operators to keep a logbook, tracking vehicles, houses, and routes in order to accrue a picture of life within the city. We began to develop what became known as “pattern-of-life” analyses that followed the targets’ habits as they undertook their daily routines.

                In addition to producing detailed maps of enemy movement in the city, these shifts introduced a number of important intangibles into our force. Operators, the Brahmins within TF 714, developed deep respect for the intelligence professionals. They became better operators by learning to think like analysts and by acquiring vast knowledge about the enemy. Both analysts and operators increasingly owned the mission, which in turn increased activity on the ground by moving targeting decisions down the ranks.

                Some operators relished immersing themselves in the intelligence grist. Others resented the added work, as handling the tactical aspects of raids was difficult enough. But by tweaking behavior we were trying to transform attitude: Instead of waiting passively to receive a targeting assignment, we wanted them actively helping the analysts to find targets. To win, all of us would need to be knee deep in the fight, all of the time.


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                Unexpectedly, that process accelerated in mid-June, thanks to the work of one of the operators’ most dedicated partners. Jimmy D., a Green imagery analyst who later retired as a sergeant major, had become a fixture in the tactical operations center. “Jimmy D., what you got?” was the jaunty refrain when entering the operations room—which he rarely left. Near the end of his squadron’s tour, Jimmy D. in fact had something very promising.

                After reviewing recorded video from the previous few days, Jimmy noted that a tractor had blocked off the entrance to one stretch of street in Fallujah, keeping all foot and vehicle traffic away. When he checked the imagery from a few days earlier, there was no tractor. So through the pilots thousands of miles away, he directed the Predator back to that area for a live shot. He started looking up and down that road and at one end saw a group of men in the process of loading and unloading two trucks, with scrunched cabs and long flatbeds, parked outside one of the houses. After a few minutes of unloading carpets, the men began carrying suspicious crates from the house to the flatbeds, covered in canvas. Then came armloads of AK-47 rifles and munitions. At some point, a second truck at the site, still loaded, lurched to life. We followed it through the streets, out of Fallujah, east on Highway 10, and once it was southwest of Baghdad, we intercepted it on the ground. As suspected, it was packed full of all kinds of munitions—rockets, machine guns, grenade launchers, and raw explosives for car bombs. We flew the UAV back to the city and the blocked-off section of the street, where we watched men continue to hurriedly load material into trucks and then get into cars, both of which subsequently moved down through Fallujah in a convoy, passing through the commercial strip where the insurgents had laid their March 31 ambush. Eventually they entered a suburb on the southwest edge of the city and stopped in front a concrete-and-block house. The location became a potential target for us—Objective Big Ben.

                The intercepted truck had been driven by two men, with a thirteen-year-old along for the ride, likely to help them avoid suspicion at checkpoints. The men professed to be hired help and under questioning confirmed the others they had just left were moving the arms cache to a new house. They described the neighborhood, which matched the area around the new house. With this, we had a viable target—and an urgent one. The insurgents in Fallujah had commandeered many of the city’s garages and warehouses to set up “factories” for the car bombs that they would dispatch to Baghdad’s bazaars and Sadr City.

                It was only through intense persistence, and some luck, that Jimmy D. had found this load of unexploded weapons. The insurgents might disperse the cache over the next day or two, and with only two sets of eyes periodically on the city—our Predator and the outfitted helicopter—we could easily lose them in the urban maze. We had to move quickly.