War Stories (47 page)

By midday, Uday and Qusay Hussein, whose names mean “wolf” and “snake” respectively in Iraqi Arabic, seemed to have lost any of the mystique and cunning of their animal namesakes. After being on the run for more than three months, they were now merely pathetic caricatures of themselves, cowering in a bathroom outside the bedroom they had shared for the past three weeks.

No one knows if they ever entertained the possibility of surrender. Most of those involved think not. They no doubt feared the Americans more than any international justice that might be meted out if they were captured. They were probably willing to take their chances if the UN took custody of them and tried them as war criminals. There would probably be a chance that they'd get off lightly.

Neither Saddam nor his two sons had made any visible or effective efforts to take command or control of the Iraqi army since the beginning of the war. The earliest coalition air attacks had decapitated their control of the troops in the field by destroying their communications. By the time entire regular army units and divisions of the Republican Guard began to surrender, Saddam and his sons had to see that there was no hope of waging any kind of credible response to the American and British invasion.

Since March 20, this family of evildoers seems to have been spending its time and effort evading capture by using the hoard of cash and jewels they had accumulated to pay for personal protection and eventual escape.

Uday is largely credited with having devised the scheme for recruiting foreigners to fight for his father, and there are reports that he grew increasingly desperate as the Republican Guard began to
desert. He apparently tried to stiffen the backbone of the regulars by using fedayeen execution squads, but that eventually failed as well, when the executioners themselves began to desert. Things got so bad that even his bodyguards were vacillating over the mission of protecting him. When things began to look really bleak, and the possibility that the Americans might capture them seemed imminent, Uday allegedly had nearly twenty of his bodyguards killed—they knew too much about him and his father's regime and couldn't be trusted not to divulge this information to the Americans should there be a war crimes trial.

Qusay was the head of the Amn Al Khass, Iraq's internal intelligence and security force. But in the end, he must have abdicated this responsibility, because at the house in Mosul, he had none of his special security troops to protect him, his son, or Uday.

Why did they have only one bodyguard? It may have been that the Iraqis could no longer stomach what the two evil brothers were doing to their country. Or perhaps the pair were simply so distrustful of their former troops that they actually felt safer without them. It's said that the reason Saddam didn't launch his air force to attack the invading American and British forces when they were moving north on the highways from Kuwait was that he was deathly afraid that his own pilots would turn on him, bomb his palaces, and try to kill him.

That is probably the same reason the two brothers were cowering in a bathroom on the second floor of a house in Mosul, alone except for a teenage boy and a single bodyguard.

Outside the house, Col. Joe Anderson, the American officer in charge of the 101st's “Strike Brigade” assigned to the operation, waited about forty-five minutes for the people inside the house to surrender. When there was no response, he decided to “prep” the place for another
attack by Task Force 20. His men opened fire with .50-caliber machine guns and rifle grenades. On the opposite side of the house, several Kiowa helicopter gunships hovered, firing rockets through the windows. The prep continued for nearly an hour. There was occasional gunfire from the house, letting Col. Anderson know that the occupants—at least some of them—were still alive.

About noon, the order was given to Task Force 20 to reenter the building in a second attempt to capture the brothers and bring them out alive. Once again, the special ops team was turned away by gunfire coming from upstairs, from behind the mattresses-and-bed-frame fortifications. The Task Force 20 soldiers fell back once more to consider other options.

Col. Anderson then decided that it was too dangerous to make another forcible entry attempt without additional “prep,” so he ordered additional firing into the windows and walls of the building. This time, in addition to the .50-caliber machine guns, grenades, and Kiowa gunship rockets, he ordered that ten TOW and AT-4 missiles be fired as well.

Half an hour later, the TF-20 team made a third try. This time the team entered the house unopposed. Upstairs, they found the bodies of Uday, Qusay, and a bodyguard, crumpled on the floor of the bathroom—all of them dead from multiple wounds. In the bedroom, under a bed, was Qusay's teenage son, also dead, the AK-47 that he had been firing lying beside him. Qusay “The Snake” and Uday “The Wolf” Hussein—ranked number two and three respectively on the Pentagon's “most wanted” list of Iraqis—were dead. U.S. and coalition forces had now captured or eliminated thirty-seven of the fifty-five “most wanted” Iraqis.

It was all over in less than four hours. A search of the home turned up a cache of about $100 million in U.S. dollars and Iraqi currency. Some days later, $30 million of that money—the $15 million bounty
on each of the Hussein brothers—was paid to the informant who led the Americans to their hiding place in Mosul.

The fact that Saddam has not yet been found dead or alive has some in CENTCOM convinced that those who know where he is probably already have more than $25 million in cash immediately available to them anyway. That is perhaps Saddam's only insurance policy for the moment—assuming he is still alive.

So the search continues for Saddam. But as one Special Forces soldier put it, “The world's a better place, because Uday and Qusay Hussein are in a place that makes today's 120 degrees in Baghdad feel like a summer breeze.”

The success of this operation was quickly obscured by protestations that “U.S. troops used excessive force,” and complaints that Uday and Qusay “should have been taken alive for their intelligence value,” and then “tried for their crimes.” But the fact that the endeavor succeeded is because Iraqi civilians felt safe in cooperating with U.S. authorities—something that was apparently missed or ignored by most commentators. Meanwhile, the young Americans in harm's way in Iraq wonder what it is they have to do to please the critics back home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

I
f pleasing the critics at home is going to be the measure of success for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines who fought Operation Iraqi Freedom, they may have to wait a very long time for the accolades they deserve. By October 2003, support for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq was higher among Iraqis than Americans.

Most people I talk to believe that this disparity is the consequence of four factors: the deluge of media reports in the United States that focus only on the bad news; the Blame America First crowd in Hollywood; our “love affair” with the United Nations; and a barrage of hateful, partisan political invective aimed at our commander in chief that has caught military personnel in the crossfire.

Many who are still in Iraq wonder what kind of reception they will receive when they arrive in America. Some of them shudder at the prospect of a “welcome” like the one their fathers got when they returned from Vietnam. One young Marine wrote, “I hope they don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like they did with Vietnam.”

He's far too young to remember Vietnam. But he knows the “they” of whom he writes. After just a week back in the United States from spending ten months in Kuwait and Iraq, he concluded, “We won the war. But whether we stay the course to win the peace won't be decided
in Baghdad, Basra, or Mosul. That's going to be determined on our television screens, newspapers, and in the corridors of power of Washington. I sure hope we don't leave it up to the media, Hollywood, the UN, or overly ambitious politicians.”

With the exception of those cited in the introduction, nearly everyone agrees that embedding broadcast and print reporters in military units was a good idea. But it's not really new. Ernie Pyle, Cyril O'Brien, Jeremiah O'Leary, and Edward R. Morrow were all embedded war correspondents, reporting on the units and individuals with whom they lived during World War II. But they had advantages that many in the news business today lack: they came to the task with open minds and filed their reports with objective editors and news directors.

Part of the problem is in the way contemporary “well-trained journalists” see things around them. Since I'm not a “well-trained journalist,” I decided that when I had an option, I would report on things that are interesting to the American people—such as “Who are these folks taking our kids into battle?” So for my first report, as the Marines were making final preparations for war, I filed a profile piece on a Marine gunnery sergeant teaching young Marines how to use the .50-caliber machine gun in combat. As I finished transmitting the piece to FOX News Channel, a well-known and respected reporter for another network, also embedded with a Marine helicopter squadron, sent in a profile piece of his own: “Do U.S. Pilots Use Drugs?” He wanted the American people to know that pilots flying sixteen to twenty hours a day occasionally take Dexedrine for alertness and sleeping pills to help them get necessary rest. That they have been doing so since World War II and with the supervision of medical doctors was somehow irrelevant to his story.

Later, while we were deep in Iraq, a very brave cameraman for CNN complained to me, “I'm shooting the same stuff you are, Colonel, but my stuff isn't getting on the air.” I doubt he meant technical difficulties with his satellite transmissions.

Just before we reached Baghdad, another colleague, grousing about the TVs at CENTCOM, V Corps, and I-MEF always being tuned to FOX News Channel, observed, “And you don't even bother to interview the generals who are running this war.”

“Right,” I replied. “I interview the people who are fighting this war.”

There is nothing wrong with interviewing generals or colonels, but there are a whole lot more PFCs and lance corporals than there are generals. In modern war reporting, with live satellite feeds from battlefields, the American people are much more interested in knowing how their kids are doing than whether some grumpy general got enough bran flakes for breakfast. Besides, it's been my experience that officers are so concerned about saying the wrong thing that they won't say anything. A PFC, on the other hand, will offer the unvarnished truth.

Shortly after the capture of Baghdad, my friend and FOX News Channel colleague Brit Hume, managing editor and Washington, D.C., bureau chief, addressed the war coverage in a speech at Hillsdale College. He quoted ABC's Ted Koppel as saying, “I'm very cynical, and I remain very cynical, about the reasons for getting into this war.”

“Cynical?” Hume asked. “We journalists pride ourselves, and properly so, on being skeptical. That's our job. But I have always thought a cynic is a bad thing to be. A cynic, as I understand the term, means someone who interprets others' actions as coming from the worst motives. It's a knee-jerk way of thinking. A cynic, it is said, understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. So I don't understand why Ted Koppel would say with such pride and ferocity—he said it more than once—that he is a cynic. But I think he speaks for many in the media, and I think it's a very deep problem.”

Addressing the issue of “bad news,” Hume acknowledged that “bad stuff tends to be exceptional in our world. Reporters have a natural instinct, therefore, to look for the negative.” Pointing to the way that many in the media depicted the foreign fedayeen fighters as a
serious threat to coalition forces, he observed, “Only this could explain their belief that the fedayeen—by shooting at our troops' flanks and attacking our supply convoys—posed a serious threat. I remember when that story came out, and I thought to myself that it just didn't seem sensible that the fedayeen were militarily significant. They were riding around in pickup trucks with machine guns, for heaven's sake! And it turned out, contrary to all the stories, that they weren't a serious threat, and that they succeeded only in getting themselves killed by the hundreds.”

Unfortunately, there has been no shortage of negative, Bush-bashing newsmen. Today they point to the “never-ending stream of U.S. casualties” and talk of a “quagmire”—first on the heels of the initial operational pause, then in the aftermath of the war. It can only be hoped that their prognostications about the peace are as accurate as their discouraging forecasts before the fighting started.