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One
Martha Raddatz’s
book, The
Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, relates one battle in Iraq in 2004
and what it meant for soldiers and their families. She presents the story as
the television reporter she is: with an eye toward the images, and a real
appreciation of the human story. She is descriptive and detailed throughout,
and allows the individuals to present their stories with clarity. Most readers
will become teary on many of these pages. Here’s an excerpt, from the
beginning of Chapter 3, “Sunday at Sunrise,”
pp. 32-37:
Lieutenant Colonel
Gary Volesky hadn’t noticed the nearly full moon fading into the sand behind
him. He was walking briskly toward his headquarters, toward the rising sun,
which was just now sending faint sparks above the horizon. He had gotten up
even earlier than usual this morning, grabbed some chow, and then headed back
to the two-story sand-colored concrete building that was being set up to
serve both as an officers’ sleeping quarters and as his battalion’s Tactical
Operations Center, or TOC. Alongside it was an open concrete courtyard where
the soldiers had planted a basketball hoop. Volesky mounted the metal stairs
that ran up the outside of the building to the second floor.
In its
incomplete state, the operations center consisted of only a large, boxy room
whose walls were plastered with maps. In the center sat a single table
covered with radios and more maps.
This was
the day Volesky had been preparing for since the previous December. At 1800
hours, the 2-5 Cav—the battalion under Volesky’s command—would officially
take responsibility for Sadr
City. A
transfer-of-authority ceremony would be held in front of the headquarters,
with Volesky presiding as the officer set to take command.
Ceremony
notwithstanding, the authority transfer would be less than ideal. With the
battalion that had been responsible for Sadr City for the previous year, the
2-2 ACR (Armored Cavalry Regiment), having left about a month earlier, and the
unit that was to turn the area over to the 2-5 Cay that evening, the 1-2 ACR,
having filled in only temporarily, Volesky, in fact, already knew more about
Sadr City than many of the officers who were on their way out: He’d arrived
in Baghdad nearly a month earlier with an advance team of senior staff,
including his young intelligence officer, Captain Dylan Randazzo.
The 2-5
leadership team started having regular briefings on the situation in Sadr City
as soon as they arrived, but Volesky and Randazzo wanted to know more and had
made inquiries of their own. Each night the senior staff gathered to discuss
what they had learned that day about the environment in which they would be
operating and the challenges they were likely to face.
The more
they learned about Sadr City, the more they realized that they had been
deployed to a sprawling, critically important part of Baghdad that was in a state of flux. It no
longer appeared to be one of the safest places in Baghdad. Volesky had come to understand
that the 2-2 ACR had generally followed a hands-off policy in Sadr City.
That would not be his approach. He was determined to know more about what
was going on beneath the surface calm.
The new
commander would have to wait his turn, however. Until 1800 hours, he and his
men had essentially been guests of the 1-2 ACR, depending on them for
accommodations and communications support. He was getting his own operations
center set up, but he couldn’t do much more until he had full command
authority. He was looking forward to the transfer that evening for another
reason: The battalion flag-raising ceremony would be good for the morale of
the 2-5 soldiers who’d just arrived and didn’t yet feel at home in their new
post.
Even
though he was not yet officially in charge, Volesky was wasting no time
getting as many patrols into Sadr
City as possible.
Volesky was one of the most highly respected battalion commanders in the
U.S. Army—smart, even cerebral, but with a true warrior’s sensibilities. He
was completely loyal to his soldiers. They knew it, and they would follow him
anywhere.
Volesky
wanted to understand Sadr
City from within, to
conduct the most effective military operations possible. Arabic-language
training he had had years before added to his ability to get a sense of his
surroundings. His intelligence officer, Captain Randazzo, a small, wiry
Italian-American, was key to helping Volesky’s team know what they faced.
Volesky and Randazzo both had their suspicions that the year ahead in Sadr City
could prove to be far more difficult than the past year had been. After the
October 2003 ambush, during which a soldier was killed when scores of
insurgents ambushed a scout platoon, conditions had reportedly stabilized.
But in the past few days there had been a series of incidents inside and
outside Sadr City that suggested tensions were
rising again.
Captain
Denomy’s checkpoint confrontation during the Mahdi Army protest parade the
night before was especially troubling in this regard; it had gotten Randazzo
out of bed even earlier than usual in order to update his intelligence
analysis. He’d been steeping himself in the nuances of Sadr City
for several months, having begun even before the plans to send his battalion
there had been finalized, but the reports he had read about the district
were often contradictory and inconclusive. For much of 2003, in the aftermath
of the U.S. invasion, the
assumption had been that Sadr City was unlikely to represent much of a threat to U.S.
forces. Because of the grievous suffering of this Shiite district under Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials had expected the
population to be largely cooperative. If any Iraqis were to greet the
Americans warmly as “liberators,” surely Sadr City’s
population would be among them.
The
October 2003 ambush had therefore come as a surprise. Since they hadn’t yet
identified Shiite militants as a problem in Iraq,
the U.S.
leadership hadn’t established a plan of action to deal with such
confrontations. When order was quickly reestablished in Sadr City, U.S.
military operations had returned to a business-as-usual approach. American
commanders had continued to focus on Saddam Hussein loyalists—or former
regime elements (FREs), as the military called them-—and paid little
attention to the militants in Sadr City, and in any case, the place was
quiet again.
The
immediate future would depend largely on the actions and attitude of Moqtada
al-Sadr, and his Mahdi militia. A1-Sadr, Randazzo learned, was only a
middle-ranking Shia cleric, without the religious education or training to
interpret the Koran and issue edicts, or fatwas. His authority in Sadr City
derived only from his lineage. The 1999 assassination of his father, Mohammad
al-Sadr, and his defiance of Saddam Hussein, were the reasons “Saddam City”
had been renamed “Sadr
City” after Saddam
Hussein was removed from power.
In the
years following his father’s death, Moqtada al-Sadr had played brilliantly on
his image and reputation to develop his own base in Sadr City,
constantly expanding his power through a mixture of intimidation and
outreach. The political organization he developed in Sadr
City, known as the Sadr Bureau, soon
overshadowed all other local governmental and community institutions, but
beyond that U.S.
commanders knew little about its workings or importance, even after spending
nearly a year in Baghdad.
What mattered to the U.S.
military in the short run was that in the months following the October
ambush, al-Sadr was able to maintain order in Sadr City,
thereby permitting the overstretched American commanders to turn their
attention to more overtly troubled areas.
In January
2004, two months before his unit’s deployment, Dylan Randazzo had come to Iraq
to do advance reconnaissance of the area. He’d read all the reports about the
October ambush, which had been blamed on Moqtada al-Sadr loyalists, but the
2-2 ACR officers who briefed him insisted that the situation had calmed
considerably in the intervening months.
Randazzo
was somewhat reassured, and on his return to Fort
Hood, he reported that Sadr City
might not be quite as volatile as he had initially feared. But to be safe,
Randazzo drew up what he called a “worst-case scenario,” to be used as part
of the battalion’s preparation and training. It involved a platoon on patrol
finding itself suddenly isolated and under fire in the city, surrounded by
several hundred hostile insurgents, taking casualties, without
communications, and in need of rescue. For a peacekeeping mission,
Randazzo’s scenario seemed a bit far-fetched, but as an intelligence
officer, he had been trained to think in pessimistic terms.
Within
days of his arrival in early March 2004, Randazzo saw that his worst-case
planning had been time well spent. Moqtada al-Sadr was far more powerful and
much less predictable than Randazzo and his fellow officers had originally
believed. It was obvious that the Sadr Bureau had infiltrated every aspect of
life in Sadr City. Though informally organized, the
“Bureau” was the place to go for everything from jobs to building permits.
The Iraqi police force trained under the supervision of the Sadr Bureau, and
it was to Sadr loyalists that the police reported. The Bureau also oversaw
schools, community activities, and the distribution of social welfare
benefits. Whether or not al-Sadr commanded the respect and genuine loyalty
of the population was not clear. Anyone who spoke out publicly against him
faced severe punishment. Randazzo couldn’t help noticing that al-Sadr was
building a system of control in Sadr
City that was not
unlike that imposed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Sadr Bureau employed
section chiefs, who kept a close eye on the population in their areas of
responsibility, much as Saddam’s own spies had done during his rule.
Al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, clearly ruled the district.
In their
nightly meetings during those first weeks in March, Volesky, Randazzo, and
the other battalion officers shared their Sadr City
observations and insights, but the picture was maddeningly unclear. “In one
area it seemed as if the majority of the people responded very well to our
presence,” Randazzo wrote. “In other areas there was a feeling that some of
the people were more skeptical about us being there.” The 2-5 Cav was up
against the same problems facing the U.S.
military across much of Iraq:
a lack of knowledge about the true political situation and about the nature
of potential military threats, compounded by a critical shortage of human
intelligence from reliable informants on the ground.
To whatever
extent you’ve become numb to the reality of what the sacrifice of military
families has been in Iraq,
reading The
Long Road Home will make it all real. Keep in mind that this is the story
of a few soldiers and just one of many battles.
Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2007
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