These moments were motivation enough for much of our force, so in concluding remarks, I would summarize some of what I had heard and try to connect it to our bigger goals. We didn’t have time to drive this with emotions, to huff and puff. We needed constant, demanding, driven vigilance and professionalism. I tried to build that up a few sentences at a time through forceful but even tones. Do your job. People’s lives are on the line. Thanks, as always, for all you are doing.
* * *
The O&I ended in the early evening, and preparations for battle filled the rest of the day. Although we conducted a few operations before sunset, as night fell, the operations centers hummed with serious, focused activity. Soon the rumble of helicopters and aircraft, some throaty, some a high whine, bounced across the darkened gravel and off the cement walls and barriers of our compound. The sound grew in layers, building like a chorus singing a round, as one set of rotors, propellers, or jet engines came alive, joined the cacophony, and then departed the airfield. Gradually, the chorus dissipated until silence returned to the darkened base. Elsewhere across Iraq and on bases in Afghanistan, smaller outbreaks of mechanical sound cut into the night.
On some nights I walked to the dark tarmac, took a seat in a helicopter, and joined the raids. On other nights, I sat on the back bench of the operations center, watching the screens and listening to radio traffic and updates read aloud to the room from the operations log. After the initial assaults were called in, I often went to the gym for a second workout—exactly thirty-two minutes on the treadmill—and then returned to headquarters until light broke and the teams headed back from the targets.
When the dry heat of a new day began to creep in, supplanting the relative cool of the desert night, I retired to my hooch. Propped in my bunk, I’d read for bit, often waking to find myself nodding over pages I couldn’t remember. Above my side table, Annie smiled at me from the photographs tacked to the wall. It had now been a year since I had taken command, deployed forward for most of it. As a captain in Korea, during our first long separation, I had ended each night by writing her a letter. Now I went to bed each night knowing that in the morning I would have an e-mail from Annie and a few minutes to reply before the day’s activities gained momentum.
* * *
These developments, during the second half of 2004, laid the essential framework for a machine that would become larger, better synchronized, and smarter in the years ahead.
As we grew our network, solidified the relationships that bound it, and committed ourselves even more to the fight in Iraq, our enemy did the same. On December 16, Osama bin Laden issued a long audiotape, much of it a detailed screed against his homeland’s leaders. But in imploring action, he turned to the more vulnerable front next door, in Iraq. A year earlier, he had “urged” young Muslims to wage jihad there. He now took a direct, almost scolding tone: “Mujahideen . . . you scare the enemy but they do not scare you, and you are well aware that the burning issues of the umma today are the jihads in Palestine and in Iraq. So be very sure to help them, be sure to know that there is a rare and golden opportunity today to make Americans bleed in Iraq, in economic, human, and psychological terms. So don’t waste this opportunity and regret it afterwards.”
Eleven days later, amid the Christmas news lull in America, Al Jazeera broadcast an abridgment of another audiotape. In addition to warning Iraqis not to participate in their forthcoming January parliamentary elections, bin Laden named Zarqawi the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi’s men, he added, needed as much as two hundred thousand euros a week to maintain their good work.
The year ended with the highest-profile terrorist leader doing more than channeling recruits and donations to that year’s most violent. By knighting Zarqawi and elevating his fight, bin Laden had tied his own fate, and his organization’s, to the success of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now the most crucial front in the global jihadist movement. Al Qaeda staked its vision—of American humiliation, jihadist victory, and a resuscitated caliphate—on that new front.