Last of three articles
Shortly after noon on Friday, April 11, 2003, we drove into a Pepsi bottling plant along Highway 8 in Baghdad's southern suburbs. Now converted into a U.S. Army command post, the plant's offices had been ransacked, but a photo remained on the wall showing the presumptive plant manager with former president Saddam Hussein's son Uday, whose pompadour and open-necked shirt gave him the greasy look of a lounge-singing extortionist. The floors were littered with bottle caps and Viceroy butts and a crushed box of Al Reem Luxury Dates.
Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, settled into a chair at a table in the courtyard. So far, the division's helicopter assault and occupation of the southern quarter of the capital had gone smoothly, although one colonel told Petraeus that "these are not the cheering crowds" the division had encountered farther south. After more than 10 days spent subduing the Shiite cities of Najaf, Karbala and Hilla, the 101st had been ordered to Baghdad to help the 3rd Infantry Division and U.S. Marines take over the city.
Petraeus studied a map, consulted briefly with his subordinates and climbed back into his Humvee. As we left the compound, an officer was negotiating with an Iraqi cabdriver who claimed his taxi had been destroyed by 3rd Division gunfire. "He'd like reparations. Three thousand dollars for his car," the officer told Petraeus. "Or 47 million dinars, if you have it handy."
A double archway over Highway 8 signaled our entrance into the city, where the looting was underway in earnest. Scores, and then hundreds, and finally thousands swarmed through the industrial parks fronting the highway; a few carried truce flags, but most were too intent on pilferage to worry about gunplay.
Men, women and children wheeled, dragged, carried and drove away booty, converting side streets into shopping aisles. Three men, waving gaily, each rolled a 55-gallon drum past the Humvee. A man in a green skullcap pushed a three-wheeled handcart piled high with copper wire; two little boys helped him negotiate the street curb.
Propane tanks and pipes, school desks and trash dumpsters, lamps and ladders -- it all swept past us in a great river of loot. At the Alalaf Marble and Granite Co., a mob hoisted a generator into a truck bed, while others cavorted through the Al-Aamawhi Dairy and the Economy Bank for Finance and Investment, where the metal window grills had been smashed. A Chevrolet Caprice trundled past with nine new tires, still wrapped in brown paper, lashed to the roof and trunk. Crowds swarmed over bulldozers and a Caterpillar steam shovel in a parking lot, evidently trying to hot-wire the heavy equipment. A young man emerged rolling an enormous truck tire.
"What in the world would you do with that?" Petraeus murmured.
Just hours after Saddam Hussein's statue had toppled in Firdos Square in an image broadcast around the world, the liberation of Iraq had become the plundering of Baghdad.
Petraeus was scouting sites for the division headquarters, and we pulled into the compound of a company that made firefighting equipment and safety helmets. A tank round had punched through the administration building's portico, and smoke boiled from a warehouse. Dozens of red extinguishers lay scattered across the parking lot. Capt. David G. Fivecoat, the general's aide, flipped off the safety of his M-4 rifle, shooed away a few looters, and poked around a smoky office suite before returning to the Humvee. "This looks like it could be too much of a fixer-upper, sir," he said.
"Yeah," Petraeus agreed, "it's a money pit." I wondered whether the same could be said of the entire country. Fivecoat subsequently recorded the inevitable course of the pilferage: "First, they removed the furniture; then the doors, windows and light fixtures; then banisters, light switches and wires; and then, finally, they would take the building down, brick by brick."
Later in the day Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- asserting that "freedom's untidy" -- would deny that looting was widespread. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase." The Pentagon press corps laughed, but the reality on the ground was different: an abrupt transition to anarchy that threatened disaster not only for Iraq but also for the United States. The cultural losses alone were staggering, including arson or grand larceny at the Religious Endowment Library, the Central Library of Baghdad University and 18 galleries of the National Museum.
If it was dispiriting to see a nation's heritage despoiled, the stripping of Iraq's industrial, commercial and bureaucratic infrastructure was simply catastrophic. Clearly, it would take years and billions of dollars to set things right. How Iraqis would view U.S. authority in the face of such disorder was difficult to imagine.
Avoiding 'the O-word'
The military had barely enough troops to wage war, much less to simultaneously put a country bigger than Montana into protective custody. Civil stability was ad hoc. A planning cell formed in December by V Corps -- the senior U.S. Army headquarters involved in the Iraq campaign -- had drafted plans for postwar Iraq. But few senior officers believed that the only warfighting corps stationed outside the United States -- normally the headquarters was in Germany -- would remain in Iraq for more than six months. "The intent is not to have a long-term occupation," the senior V Corps lawyer had declared in mid-March. Officers even avoided uttering what they referred to as "the O-word."
Moreover, Army planners had anticipated that it could take weeks to subdue Baghdad through a series of raids launched from five firebases outside the city, allowing more time to bring forward military police, civil affairs and other units required to keep order. Even with the Baath Party leadership routed, most rank-and-file bureaucrats were expected to remain on the job to safeguard facilities and to keep essential services running. "The security of industry, of power plants, of water plants, was a big issue that we really hadn't dealt with," Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the V Corps commander, later told me. "There was an assumption that all of us made that there would be some fiber of the infrastructure, and some fiber of the federal government remaining when the regime left."
Instead, he said, "the whole damned place closed down." Parts of Baghdad already had been bereft of utilities for more than a week.
As we swung south again, spent shell casings carpeted Highway 8, glittering in the sunlight near the cloverleaf the Army called Objective Curley. Three Iraqis in dishdasha robes exhumed a body with a shovel and a blanket. Graffiti on a wall west of the highway read: "No Love U.S.A." Someone had crossed out "No" and scratched "Yes."
"I don't think the speed of the collapse of Baghdad was anticipated," Petraeus said soberly as the looters swarmed around the Humvee. "This is really enervating. It doesn't have the excitement of bombing Najaf."
At 3:45 p.m. we pulled into a chicken-processing plant a few hundred yards west of Highway 8. Petraeus eyed the plant as a potential site for the division headquarters, until the odor of decaying poultry persuaded him to reconsider. Rubber stamps and ledger books lined the desks in the executive offices on the second floor, where glass cases displayed the company's products -- Potato Kuba and Chicken Nuggets seemed particularly successful lines. A Republican Guard uniform was neatly folded in a desk drawer of the corner office, where a coaster on the blotter advertised, "Bates Motel -- Universal Studios." Reprieved chickens pecked about the courtyard outside, tentatively enjoying their liberation.
Wallace showed up in a convoy a few minutes later. He had taken up smoking again, and he lit a Marlboro as Petraeus smoothed the map on the Humvee hood. "I talked to the chief of station," the corps commander said, referring to the senior CIA officer. Agents were trying to enlist Iraqis to help stabilize central Baghdad, but it was hard to know where to start imposing order on the chaos. Just clearing bodies from the airport would take days. Army engineers had dug more than a hundred graves on the southern edge of Objective Lions, as the airport was called, each six feet deep, eight feet long, and facing Mecca.
"Getting water and power and sewage back on in this city is going to be a monumental job," a V Corps major said. "We've been trying to find Iraqi civil authorities who ran the utilities, but without much success." Iraqi troops continued to shed their uniforms and melt into the population. In one memorable encounter, five soldiers had stripped completely before surrendering to a U.S. tank company at a location subsequently known as the "Five Naked Guys Checkpoint."
Yet they were among only 7,000 Iraqi prisoners of war, less than 10 percent of the number captured during the Persian Gulf War. Certainly the Iraqi military was feeble, even compared to the weak force that fought in 1991. The troops were poorly trained -- most had fired little, if any, ammunition in the past year -- and their marksmanship had been abysmal, with repeated instances of Iraqi infantry and artillery missing close-range shots. Poorly prepared, they also were excessively led: an army of a half-million reportedly included 11,000 generals and 14,000 colonels. (The U.S. Army, about the same size, had roughly 300 generals and 3,500 colonels.) But all of those soldiers, at all ranks, had gone somewhere, and it was impossible to know whether it was to await the flowering of a democratic Iraq or to join a well-armed insurgency.
Petraeus pointed to a spot on the map near the Tigris River. "This one here will be interesting," he said.
Wallace peered through his sunglasses. "That's the power plant?"
"Yes, sir. That's the power plant."
Wallace pursed his lips. He put a gloved finger on the plant site.
"Yesterday they seemed to be taking everything they could carry," the major said. "Today it seems to be mostly vehicles they're stealing."
"Actually," I said, "they're still pretty undiscriminating."
Wallace lit another cigarette.
Claiming an arms plant
Petraeus decided to locate his headquarters in the Al Qadisiyah State Establishment, a munitions plant near the intersection of Highway 8 and Highway 1. We drove through a metal gate adorned with passages from the Koran. A large tile portrait of Hussein -- in uniform, with a red sash and a sword -- had been riddled with bullets. The warm air bore a scent of eucalyptus from gum trees lining the street. Unopened mail on the gatehouse counter included correspondence from Al-Breamq Commercial Agencies Ltd. and various bills that would never be paid. On the facade of a seven-story office building that soldiers had dubbed "The Hotel," the hands of a large clock were frozen at 25 minutes past seven.
Petraeus turned to me and smiled. With perfect ironic pitch, he said, "And the guns fell silent."
Soldiers bustled about organizing the bivouac: stringing wire, sweeping up debris, aiming satellite dishes. Some three dozen buildings dotted the compound where Iraqi workers once had assembled mortars and small arms. "Think Safety," a placard in one workshop urged, in English. "Every Thing Has Its Place." Hundreds of AK-47s were stacked on workbenches and the floor, along with spare barrels, stocks, sights and bayonets. Blue work shirts hung from pegs, and in an open shed outside stood a long line of lathes, presses and machine tools: Pittler, Hitachi, Kellenberger, Weisser Heilbronn.
Another warehouse was crammed with RPG-7s, and several hundred wooden crates, labeled "Product 663 Al Qadisiyah State," contained cloth carriers for rocket-propelled grenade rounds. Some doors had been splintered by rampaging 3rd Division soldiers -- "I think their blood was up when they went through here," Petraeus said -- but a small glass tank still contained a pair of live if undernourished goldfish. A display case in The Hotel showed off Al Qadisiyah's finest wares, including a silver-plated AK-47, dart guns and RPG night sights. It was said that an Al Qadisiyah assault rifle could be bought on the street for 150,000 dinars, or $83.
A small soccer field, with the goals still netted, abutted two rifle ranges and a rambling garden abloom with roses, snapdragons and pansies. A plastic press made pistol grips, and a large repair shop was full of twin-barreled ZU-23-2 antiaircraft guns. Another sign urged: "Think Quality."
We made our way back toward the front gate. "Still some fighting and killing left, but I think the war is ending," Petraeus said. "Now comes the hard part."
'Roller-coaster experience'
The division's stay in Baghdad was brief. In late April, after I had returned to Washington, the 101st decamped for Mosul, 230 miles north, where the unit remained the principal occupation force in northern Iraq for the next 10 months. In addition to being a combat commander -- 101st soldiers last fall were attacked six to 10 times a day -- Petraeus became viceroy of a vast sector that extended from the Syrian border in the west to Kurdish lands in the north and east.
His tenure was notable for extensive and often innovative efforts to revive civic life in northern Iraq. Soldiers from the 101st organized local elections; trained 20,000 police and security officers; helped the Iraqis negotiate oil-for-electricity deals with Syria and Turkey; encouraged international trade; and spent $57 million in underwriting more than 5,000 projects, from refurbishing 500 schools, dozens of medical clinics and Mosul University to planting trees, fixing roads and rebuilding other infrastructure.
They also trapped and killed Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, last summer in a smoking volley of TOW missiles. Posters in the 101st barracks asked, "What have you done to win Iraqi hearts and minds today?"
Whether it was enough remained to be seen. After several months of relative peace, Mosul and the surrounding region were wracked with insurgent attacks, which ebbed in mid-winter, then surged again with suicide bombings in early February that killed numerous Iraqi policemen and more than 50 Kurds. The worst night occurred on Nov. 15, when 17 troops from the 101st died after two Black Hawk helicopters collided over Mosul, due at least in part to ground fire.
"Nothing prepares a commander for the loss of 17 soldiers in one night," Petraeus wrote me in an e-mail shortly afterward. The division's casualties in Iraq totaled 69 dead -- including non-battle fatalities -- and 489 wounded. A vast majority of the deaths and injuries occurred after the move into northern Iraq. "I think I've mentioned to you before that division command in combat is a roller-coaster experience, with real highs and real lows," Petraeus also wrote me from Mosul in late November. In January he added, "It's been a long, tough year, and I am older in more ways than just age."
Petraeus continued to reflect on the art of command, and he would tell the West Point class of 2004 three months before their graduation: "In virtually everything, except for going through the chow line, you need to lead from the front. . . . Think what your actions say to your soldiers. They don't want someone too cool for school. Especially in combat, they want a serious, focused, competent leader."
Just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 14, a charter jet touched down on the airfield at Fort Campbell, bringing one of the last contingents of 101st soldiers back to Kentucky after nearly a year's deployment. Petraeus was among them. The troops formed in neat ranks on the tarmac, then marched into a hangar. Hundreds of friends and family members roared with delight from the bleachers.
Petraeus stood at attention, a broad grin on his face. Then, in a ceremony known as uncasing the colors, he helped his sergeant major remove the protective cover from the division flag, signifying the unit's return home. A thick skein of battle ribbons drooped from the flag staff, commemorating the 101st Airborne Division's participation in campaigns ranging from Normandy to Vietnam to the Persian Gulf War. In his rumbling baritone, Petraeus led his soldiers in a chorus of the division song. "We have a rendezvous with destiny," they sang.
Our strength and courage strike the spark
That will always make men free.
