Weekend Report [Mar 29, 2003]

Now a message from my soldier correspondent who must remain anonymous as he waits for his marching orders. It's a chilling preview of what's coming at the cataclysmic "Battle Of Baghdad."

NP

The urban fight takes place mostly at the small-unit level. It’s long, tedious, tiring, and often involves going literally door to door, never knowing what’s beyond the next hallway. Infantry “fire teams” of three to four men clear individual rooms, while platoons of six fire teams clear buildings. The majority of the men doing the shooting and door-kicking are junior soldiers, and so the battle is very tough for commanders to follow and support with what the army calls “combined arms assets”: artillery and attack helicopters.

It’s been my experience that the best thing I can do as a leader in such an environment is to find myself a nice secure spot where I can watch my teams go to work, and send reports on the radio. Because of the terrain, which is often littered with rubble, broken furniture, and everything else under the sun, one of the best things you can do is just stay out of the way. At the same time, while you may not be able to see everyone in your unit, you’d still better know where they are. In the 360-degree, three-dimensional battlefield, soldiers often get mis-oriented and end up firing back toward friendly units.

From the perspective of one man sitting in a room defending, it’s very easy to kill the first one or two men who charge through the doorway. You know you’re going to be killed eventually, the logic goes, but why not take out a few beforehand?

And urban terrain favors the home team. When we invade one of the large cities, the defenders will know their way around much better than we will. I’ve seen entire units get wiped out in training exercises before by enemy forces a tenth of their size – enemy forces that had seen the terrain and been in the buildings beforehand.

I had a fair number of friends who were involved in the firefight that became known as The Battle of Mogadishu. By most accounts, the battle was a defeat of American forces by Somali warlords. Osama bin Laden himself used this battle and the subsequent withdrawal of American forces from the region as evidence that Americans did not have the stomach for the ugly realities of sustained combat.

But Rangers and other Special Operations soldiers I’ve talked with who were in this battle describe a scene very similar to the one in both the book and film Black Hawk Down, with one notable exception.

“We killed a shitload of guys,” they say.

Indeed, some estimates have put the Somali body count upwards of 1,000 dead when compared to the American total of 18 Special Operations soldiers lost. Successive Somali assaults during the day and night of 3 and 4 October were cut down by the small band of besieged Rangers and their attack helicopters in the air.

One of my buddies confessed that “We would have killed a lot more if only we had more ammo and our night vision goggles.” Once the Rangers went on the defensive, things became very difficult for the Somalis.

These same men were faced with the gruesome realities of pregnant Somali women shielding the bodies of Somali militiamen from the Rangers’ fire. In such a case, it becomes very hard to limit civilian casualties, as almost every military leader I know would give the order to kill any “civilians” consciously entering the fight by shielding enemy combatants.

This leads me to my greatest fear regarding our current situation in Basra and, soon, Baghdad. My big fear is that the Iraqis will continue to dress in civilian clothes and assault American troops, as well as signal “surrender” with white flags before opening fire. I fear they’ll continue to disperse their combatants into civilian homes and thus decrease the allied ability to strike at exclusively military targets.

And of course, my stomach turns when I hear Saddam Hussein exhort women and children to flood the streets.This all bodes badly for the U.S. and Britain. If this ugliness persists, the civilian body count will rise dramatically. The average 18 year-old U.S. rifleman will begin shooting anything on the streets of Basra or Baghdad regardless of uniform and clothing, using the justification, “How was I supposed to know he/she was friendly? If he/she weren’t a combatant, then why was he/she on the streets?”

I’m not sure I could say anything to that. We have thousands of scared young men fighting in the streets of Iraq right now, and as time goes by and more of their buddies start to get shot and killed by guys in civilian clothes, the “rules of engagement” cards handed out at the beginning of the battle will go out the window. In the murkiness of urban combat, there's a lot of gray area. Civilian and combatant are hard to differentiate. To make matters worse, the Rangers who fought in Somalia were some of our best soldiers, trained to discriminate between civilians and combatants, while the regular army soldiers in Iraq right now haven't practiced urban warfare nearly as much as they should have.

The ugliness which lies ahead on the streets of Baghdad promises to be a cold cup of coffee to anyone who still clings to the notion of a sanitary, quick, painless war in the Persian Gulf.