But striking inside Fallujah was complicated by the strong political forces swirling around the city. On June 18, I flew to the Marines’ nearby base to meet with Abizaid, Mattis, and his immediate boss, Lieutenant General Jim Conway, commanding the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. Steve, Wayne, and a TF 16 officer named John Christian joined me. Abizaid was frustrated with the situation in Fallujah. Intuition told him to prevent it from becoming an internal safe haven for the insurgency.
“We need to turn up the heat on the enemy,” Abizaid said.
Steve briefed Abizaid on their plan to take out Big Ben. They would drop a bomb and move a ground assault force to be at the scene just after the initial explosion in order collect intelligence from the rubble, survey the aftermath, and arrest insurgents. The assault force would fly in on MH-6 helicopters, fast-roping from the highly agile Little Birds piloted by the Night Stalkers. A second group would drive in with the vehicles needed to leave the city, as there was no place to land the helicopters. Fighting in April had taught them to expect enemy fighters to mass rapidly around the objective, and surveillance now reflected fighters nearby. Remembering the bitter lessons of Mogadishu, where Green operators and Rangers had fought their way down congested streets without armored protection, Steve’s team determined armored vehicles were essential.
“Good,” Abizaid said. “Hit them, watch them, then hit them again.” Turning to Conway and Mattis, he reiterated the point. “I want you to find some targets for Stan’s guys to hit. We need to get more aggressive here.”
Later that evening, as we planned the final tactical aspects of the raid, I got a phone call from Conway. Understandably reluctant to give the insurgents any propaganda ammunition, he didn’t want to drop a bomb on the target because of the potential for civilian casualties. I called Steve just as his team was about to walk out to the darkened helipad to begin the assault. The armored vehicles, motors running, were lined up in battle order, vibrating in place and ready to roll. I explained that we couldn’t bomb the site. It bothered me, as I was asking them to take on greater risk. Steve understood this, as did his men.
“Yep, okay, sir,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
Instead of a precision-guided bomb, the rockets and machine guns on the helicopters carrying the Green teams could pummel the safe house before the teams dismounted and breached it. I communicated back to the Marines but received another caveat. There could be no tanks or other armored vehicles on the operation. The Marines had promised the leadership of the Fallujah Brigade that U.S. forces would not enter the city. American armor would be too visible and would undermine what little standing the Fallujah Brigade held within the city. The armor would also undercut the bargaining position of the Marines, whose credibility among the various factions continued to tremble.
I didn’t like it, and neither would Steve and his force, but I understood. I felt the value of denying the cache to Zarqawi and demonstrating Coalition strength warranted the political risks. But I appreciated that the Marines had to deal with the complex politics of Anbar and would absorb the reverberations of any operation. Such tensions would arise with varying degrees of urgency, and would be negotiated with varying degrees of effectiveness, on each of the thousands of operations TF 714 conducted over the next few years.
That night the calculus of whether to strike was a particularly thorny issue. From it I distilled an important lesson of leading TF 714 as our role expanded. I could have asked Abizaid to overrule the Marines in order to allow us to use armored vehicles for the operations, and he might have. He had clarified earlier that day to everyone in the room that he wanted TF 714 to hit the cache and that the Marines were to assist. But I also appreciated the Marines’ position and felt that building our relationship was the more crucial objective. So I didn’t go to Abizaid. It became standing guidance throughout the command, for teams coordinating with either conventional commanders or other intelligence partners: In most cases, the long-term relationship was more important than the immediate operation.