March 9, 2004
THE VIEW FROM BED:
The Long, Blinding Road to War: Unexpected Challenges Tested Petraeus in Iraq (Rick Atkinson, March 7, 2004, Washington Post)
After taking command of the 101st during the summer of 2002, [Maj. Gen. David H.] Petraeus had been preoccupied with 1003 Victor, code name for the U.S. military's secret plan for conquering Iraq. But because of the political and diplomatic byplay in Washington over the winter, the 101st did not receive a formal deployment order until Feb. 6, 2003.The commander's immediate challenge was not the conquest of Baghdad, but rather how to get 5,000 vehicles, 1,500 shipping containers, 17,000 soldiers and more than 200 helicopters to Kuwait by mid-March, in time for any attack on Iraq. Deployment occurred in three immensely complex phases: from Fort Campbell to Jacksonville, Fla.; Jacksonville to Kuwait City; and Kuwait City to a battle assembly area. Army logisticians called the phases fort to port, then port to port, then port to foxhole.
In one conversation in early March, as the 101st began to flood into Kuwait, Petraeus had rattled through the events of the past few weeks. To haul equipment from Fort Campbell to Jacksonville required 1,400 rail cars. The CSX rail-freight company had promised four 30-car trains each day, but as the deployment began, only three a day, on average, had arrived. "I had a conference call with the president of CSX at 11 one night," Petraeus said. "He was on the phone with some of his executives and I was trying to explain to him why it was absolutely critical that we get to the port as quickly as possible. The ships were going to be there on certain dates. There was no margin for error. As I was telling him this, he interrupted me, twice."
"Did you lose your temper?" I asked.
"No, but I told him he was contributing to the diminished combat effectiveness of my division. There was a long silence on the other end. He fixed it."
(A spokesman for CSX noted last week that the company ultimately moved 1,900 rail cars out of Fort Campbell during a two-week period in February 2003, and was applauded by Army officials for "timely assistance.")
One challenge led to others. Several hundred stevedores hired in Jacksonville insisted on long lunch breaks and hourly pauses. The military, never tolerant of goldbricking, fired them and used soldiers and nonunion supervisors to load the ships. When Washington delayed the deployment order, which among other things provided the authorization needed to pay for moving the division, Petraeus concocted an elaborate training exercise that happened to take 112 helicopters to Jacksonville; mechanics there removed the rotor blades and shrink-wrapped the fuselages in protective plastic for eventual loading onto the ships. "As an infantryman, I used to be no more interested in logistics than what you could stuff in a rucksack," he told me. "Now I know that, although the tactics aren't easy, they're relatively simple when compared to the logistics."
Petraeus had described these events with an intriguing blend of urgency and irony. Clearly he was entranced by the problem-solving nature of high command. "I find this as intellectually challenging as anything I've ever done, including graduate school and working for the chairman," he told me at Camp New Jersey in north-central Kuwait, the division command post before the war began. "It's keenly interesting and complex, and trying to understand it is usually a lot of fun. A division is a system of systems, and pulling it together is hugely complicated."
Now those cerebral musings would be tested by fire. In the days after the war began on March 20, with an effort to kill Hussein through a barrage of cruise missiles and smart bombs, the 101st had finally amassed enough combat power in Kuwait to follow the 3rd Infantry Division up the western flank of the Euphrates valley.
Petraeus's first task was to build at least two forward refueling bases so that the division's 72 AH-64 Apache helicopters could attack Iraqi defenses on the southern and western approaches to Baghdad, helping clear a path for the 3rd ID and then the rest of the 101st. A pair of Apache battalions could drink more than 60,000 gallons of fuel in a single night's attack; the Army calculated that it would burn 40 million gallons in three weeks of combat, an amount equivalent to the gasoline consumed by all Allied armies combined during the four years of World War I.
As the hour drew nearer for lunging into Iraq, I wondered what the world looked like through the commanding general's eyes. Trying to parse his moods and actions had become an intriguing exercise, although he sometimes signaled his moods by tilting his extended hand up or down.
"Everyone has the full range of emotions," he once noted. "It's just a question of how fast you get there." He was cautious and private, and his formal statements to reporters or television cameras had a stilted, calculated tone. Off-stage, he could be tart, funny and occasionally cynical, suggesting at one point that the expatriate Iraqi resistance in London was "trying to fax Saddam to death."
Occasionally he ruminated on how to strike the balance between oversight and meddling. "You think you're being inspirational," he mused after we visited his 3rd Brigade as it coiled near the border on March 21, "but most of the time you're just getting in their way." Clearly he retained a visceral awareness that 17,000 lives were in his hands, and that no occasion could be more solemn or profound for a commander than ordering young soldiers into harm's way.
"What will be required right now is a little bit of tactical patience, particularly on my part," he told me.
I knew that Petraeus, by virtue of his intellect and long experience at the elbow of senior generals, was a nuanced thinker. "A certain degree of intellectual humility is a good thing," he said. "There aren't always a helluva lot of absolutely right answers out there."
What had struck me more forcefully than Petraeus's subtle mind, however, was his description of a recent electronic war game in which an exceptionally robust "enemy" had inflicted substantial casualties on U.S. forces. "Yet at the end of the day the board is swept clean. You start over and send the electrons into battle again," Petraeus said. "In this" -- and he gestured to the little world we were about to leave behind in Kuwait -- "it's real, and real people will die."
General Petraeus is the central figure in Mr. Atkinson's new book, In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat in Iraq, based on his experiences as an embedded reporter in last year's war, which Steve Martinovich at Enter Stage Right recommends. Mr. Atkinson has already written an account of the first Gulf War, Crusade, and won a Pulitzer last year for An Army at Dawn, the first volume in his projected trilogy on the
American infantry in WWII.
MORE:
-THE MAKING OF A COMBAT GENERAL : 'A Very Tough Place': Shifting Sands and Shifting Plans: Commander of 101st Finds Rhythm of Battle (Rick Atkinson, March 8, 2004, Washington Post)
- THE MAKING OF A COMBAT GENERAL : 'Now Comes the Hard Part': After Chaos in the Capital, Losses Climbed (Rick Atkinson, March 9, 2004, Washington Post)