My Share of the Task(84)

                But by both following this rule and not canceling the raid, I was ratcheting up the potential risk to Steve’s force, a move I wouldn’t make without Steve’s input. He and his operators had studied the situation in minute detail and had an instinctive feel for how things might play out. They knew the Jubail district, where the house was located, was a particularly dense harbor of extremists within the wider Fallujah stronghold. And they had spent days watching throngs of insurgents do calisthenics or man checkpoints throughout the city. They knew these fighters would quickly swarm Big Ben, making the roads dangerous gauntlets. When I told him of the restrictions on armored vehicles, Steve voted no. He couldn’t send men in without armor to protect them on the way out. I agreed. The raid was off.

                My exchange with Steve went as I felt it should have—and gave me a sense that my command style and my relationship with the force were taking shape. I knew that our units, and leaders like Steve, would not request assets like armor without good reason. It wasn’t a question of courage, as members from the Green detachment outside the city had, around the time the Blackwater SUVs were ambushed, ventured into Fallujah alone in beat-up old Iraqi sedans that we bought and outfitted, surveying parts of the city simply inaccessible to American Humvees or even unmarked SUVs.

                But Steve made a sophisticated call as a leader by calling off the assault. Missions—especially special-operations raids—can be whittled down through a back-and-forth of caveats and tweaks until a leader can find himself agreeing to a raid with manpower and protection levels that would have been unacceptable in the planning stages. Instead, Steve had a line in his head, and when it was crossed, he concluded the operation no longer made sense. For my part, I wanted subordinates to feel comfortable telling me no.

                Still, Big Ben remained a potential fountain of weapons for a growing insurgency. So we persisted, negotiating to get approval for an air strike. Later that night, June 18, we were cleared to hit Big Ben with a precision weapon.


* * *

                At 8:00 A.M. local time on June 19, our bombing window opened. Hours before it did, screens at both the Fallujah and Baghdad operations centers had been focused on Big Ben. On the screen, the safe house revolved slowly as the Predator filming the scene circled in a tall gyre above the city. The strike aircraft flew its own circular pattern in the sky, over the empty desert, out of earshot of Big Ben’s Jubail neighborhood. Eventually, the airpower coordinator in our Fallujah base relayed the order to the pilot, freeing him to engage. In minutes he would drop a precision-guided bomb through the roof of the house in the center of our screens. Now after 9:00 A.M., it was already approaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit on that street in Jubail, and the heat made the sky bright, cloudless. The safe house was quiet and unaware. The streets in front of it were empty.

                As the plane sped toward Big Ben, I knew that our credibility as a force would be hugely shaped by the success or failure of this air strike. Beginning that summer, I constantly reiterated an equation to the force:

                Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships

                We were about to validate our competence.

                In planning every air strike, we performed painstaking analysis to estimate the risk of possible noncombatant injuries or deaths. Computer-based algorithms calculated estimates for potential unintended civilian casualties. To provide the most informed analysis of the risk, these took into account the sizes and blast ranges of the explosives, the probability of their accuracy, a count of the number of civilians likely to be there at that exact time of the day, the structure and strength of the building, and the shrapnel it might produce. What this scientific rigor underscored was a deeply human desire within my force to avoid hurting innocents.

                I was tense watching the safe house as the aircraft approached. I was confident about Big Ben, or we wouldn’t be bombing it. We had watched it from the time the insurgents moved the weapons until that morning and had confirmation from the men detained as well a source inside the city. But perhaps they had moved the arms cache without our knowing, or civilians had slipped into the home unnoticed.