HE SO BAD HE IN THE HIST’RY BOOK, HIST’RY BOOK:

Doubt and Death on Drive to Baghdad (STEVEN LEE MYERS, April 13, 2003, NY Times)

The rapid march that Capt. Adam J. Morrison had at first called "the cannonball run" threatened to become a crawl, if that.

A single shot to the head killed Specialist Gregory P. Sanders on March 24 as he stood beside his tank in the Najaf area. He was 19 and the brigade's first soldier to die. Sgt. Roderic A. Solomon died on the 28th when the Bradley he was in crashed into a ditch. He was 32.

Four more from the same company — Pfc. Michael R. Creighton Weldon, Specialist Michael E. Curtin, Pfc. Diego F. Rincon and Sgt. Eugene Williams — died a day later when a bomb in a taxi exploded at a checkpoint. None had turned 25 yet.

That was the day, March 29, when Maj. Morris T. Goins, a tall, easygoing North Carolinian who is the First Brigade's operations officer, swore.

"You ain't going to get there," he shouted at another officer, gesturing toward Baghdad, "if all you're worrying about is what's back there."

Those were the darkest days of the division's sweep across Iraq, when fear, anger and doubt cut into soldiers in the desert like the grit in the wind. In faraway places, which to the brigade's soldiers, meant places like Kuwait and Washington, commanders and commentators questioned the Pentagon's strategy, contemplated an "operational pause," and debated the semantics of words like "bogged down."

But where the desert meets the fertile crescent of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the division's mechanized forces remained largely intact, even if bloodied on its flanks by fedayeen fighters. The division needed only the order to move again.

That order came sometime before the moonless hours after midnight on April 2, when the brigade's armored forces began to move again. The renewed advance had been preceded by days of aerial bombardments of Iraqi forces guarding the southern approaches to Baghdad.

A little of the cool swagger of Major Goins, the brigade's operations officer, returned that day. He never seemed happier than when the division was moving.

"Thirty-six hours," he told a dozen soldiers from the brigade's mobile command post as they began to break camp in the desert at last. "Then we'll be in the history books forever."

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2003 1:32 PM