My Share of the Task(85)
At 9:30 A.M., an hour and a half into the bombing window, the pilot reported his approach. We watched the screen. A few seconds later, we saw a white flash, which expanded and darkened to shades of gray and black as it became a thick cloud of dust and smoke. The house beneath it was leveled. But for one, two, three seconds nothing happened. We waited for the secondary explosions from the munitions. The smoke and dust blossom expanded and thinned. My stomach tightened. Faces around the JOC were clenched, watching the screen. The image seemed frozen.
And then munitions stored in the house started to cook off. Rockets flew through the air with sparkling tails, while smaller explosions bubbled up from the house. It was awkward to feel relief at seeing the secondary explosions, which might harm bystanders, but they meant we had hit the cache, not an innocent home. Backyard propane tanks or gas kitchen stoves could occasionally cause a single secondary explosion, but this was different. For the next twenty minutes, the arms cache, likely piled densely in the safe house, continued to burn off. Small arms shimmered and the bigger bomb-making materials, intended for car bombs or suicide vests, made larger thuds. There was no cheering, no joy, in the operations centers. But we had validated our techniques. And we were confident that we could replicate the process.
Because we were unable to put an assault force on the ground, we could not verify other results of the strike, beyond the obvious munitions cache. Sources inside Fallujah and signal intercepts indicated that roughly twenty people had died in the blast, almost all of them Tunisian foreign fighters killed when the house exploded and collapsed. Fallujans told newspapers that a noncombatant family had been killed. This was possible but hard to verify. Those same witnesses claimed we had dropped a second bomb, which we had not. They had likely mistaken the initial explosions of the munitions cache. Reports of civilian casualties from inside Fallujah at the time often came from individuals hostile to the Coalition, and in later air strikes in Fallujah, we received reports of insurgents placing teddy bears and dolls among the rubble before news photographers arrived.
With the rubble still smoking, we saw a crowd congregate in the street outside Big Ben. Hundreds of Fallujans, reported the Los Angeles Times, rushed to the site, “chanting anti-American slogans and vowing revenge.” Despite the clear importance of the strike, it was a reminder that the term “surgical strike” is often poorly used. Even with a sharp scalpel, a surgeon has to break the skin and cut through live tissue. There is chance of infection. And sutures close a wound only imperfectly until the skin fuses. Strikes like Big Ben had to be seriously considered for their costs as well as their benefits.
Still, given the carnage Zarqawi’s forces had been inflicting on innocent Iraqis and his group’s growing toll on Coalition forces, I was satisfied.
A couple of weeks later, at the end of June, Steve’s squadron rotated out of Iraq. They copied all of the imagery and video onto a hard drive for the next squadron, so that their replacements would not be starting from scratch. Later we institutionalized and expanded these principles: Squadrons that rotated home continued to monitor operations, watch feeds, and listen to video teleconferences (VTCs) at their stateside bases. Operators trained and studied with analysts on top of honing their tactical and operational edge against an ever more hardened enemy. Our men and women might not have been in Iraq or Afghanistan, but we expected their focus to be, and we relied on their skill set expanding and diversifying.
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Over the course of the next four months, we worked to refine our ability to find, monitor, and map targets. As our intelligence stores accrued and our coordination improved, we started, as Abizaid had implored us to do, hitting them, watching them, and hitting them again. Where the city dispersed into empty fields on its southern edge, we watched insurgents hold physical training formations, and we bombed those. We watched the circles where the insurgents sat when they would gather for ceremonial meals of lamb in the compound courtyards just prior to suicide bombing missions. And we bombed those. We saw this patchwork of movement from our eyes in the clouds and rounded out the picture with increasing human and signals intelligence. It was a tense education, because we knew the cost of a mistake. Each strike was a test of our force, and we treated each like one.