by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 06-17-2003


When it was time, they went to the war.

They had no choice in the matter, of course, since they were volunteer soldiers and sailors of the United States of America. In matters of war, they had no say about the policy. They were simply ordered to carry it out. And so they did.

They were told by their commander-in-chief what the American people were told and what the rest of the world was told. Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of Iraq, had large stocks of weapons of mass destruction. They were told that chemical and biological weapons were already in Saddam’s hands, while nuclear weapons were in an advanced stage of development. They were told that there was a firm link between Saddam and the terrorists of Al Qaeda who had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. They were told that Saddam’s Iraq was a clear and present danger to its neighbors and to the U.S.

For more than three months, UN arms inspectors had been looking for these horrific weapons without success. Now American and British soldiers would have to go find them and destroy them. Force would replace diplomacy. They would also get rid of Saddam Hussein for good.

In the months leading up to the war, as many thousands of American forces gathered in Kuwait and other countries in the region, about 65% of the American people firmly believed the premises. They believed Iraq was working with Al Qaeda. They believed in the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The war planners had done a brilliant job of preparing the domestic battlefield. All that remained was to pick a date.

For the soldiers, the quarrels and failures of diplomacy must have looked like a remote sideshow. In the end, the objections of France, Germany, Russia and other states would not matter to them. The endless technical debates in the United Nations would not matter. War was in the air, and the military would have to fight it.

They would fight it because that’s what soldiers do. The young men and women had volunteered to be professionals in the armed forces. They had been superbly trained. They all knew the roles they’d have to play. It didn’t matter whether they worked in the highly technical part of modern warfare, parked at computers far from the battlefield, or if they were foot soldiers in the infantry. They were part of the most powerful military machine in the history of the world, and if war came, they would fight it.

Who they were

They were young because soldiers are always young. The average soldier was in his or her early 20s. Almost none had experienced combat, and those who had were lifers now in their early 30s, most of them veterans of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

A superb Newsweek demographic breakdown showed in April that 81.1% of officers and 61.3% of the enlisted men were Caucasian. African-Americans made up 20% of enlisted soldiers on active duty, Latinos 9%, Asians 4%. These generally reflected the demographics of the larger American society. Education clearly established the differences between officers and enlisted ranks: 94.7% of officers were college graduates, compared with 3.5% of the enlisted personnel, but 99.1% of enlisted soldiers were high school graduates (probably the highest percentage in any American war). About 15% were women, with the Air Force employing the largest percentage (18%) and the Marine Corps the lowest (about 7%).

Most active-duty soldiers were single, without children (42%). But 38% were married with children and 14% were married without children. It could not have been easy for any of them to balance the roles of young parents with the overriding role of the warrior. Those tears we all saw when the surviving soldiers came home were as ancient as the moment in “The Odyssey” when the warrior Odysseus finally gets back to Penelope, his much-loved wife. The last act of every war is getting home. When I was a boy in 1945-46, I saw such scenes on the streets of my Brooklyn neighborhood, and once on the docks of the North River. We thought we’d never see such scenes again. Now they have become a ritual for every American generation.

Statistics, of course, can’t ever tell us anything about the human beings who went to the war. The television coverage, including the often extraordinary “real-time” bulletins from embedded reporters, seemed oddly antiseptic. There was, to begin with, very little blood.

We never saw soldiers after they’d been wounded or killed. We never saw much of the Iraqi soldiers the Americans had killed. Nor did we hear any of the glorious obscenity that soldiers adapt as a kind of emotional armor against the bloodier obscenities of war itself. The grinding nitty-gritty truth about this war must wait for the appearance of novels, memoirs, poetry written by the combatants or the correspondents who were there but could not say everything. That was true in other wars; it’s still true about this one.

The daily Centcom briefings from Doha in Qatar were usually abstracts of war, not war itself. As the briefers clerked the war, we didn’t ever get to see many soldiers up close, one at a time, people with dense private lives, simple ambitions, confused emotions. From the battlefields, we were given names. We heard conversations with soldiers. We saw their valor. We never got to know them.

We do know the soldiers came from all over the country, many from small towns, many from the South, with its long military traditions. An examination of the lists of American dead shows some of the hometowns: Layton, Utah, and Troy, Ala., Cedar Key, Fla., and Temperance, Mich., Dresden, Tenn., and Hinesville, Ga., Barnwell, and Centerville, Md., Comfort, Tex., and Boiling Springs, S.C. The geography of their roots is typical, not unusual.

They must have been drawn, one way or another, by the possibility of moving out into the great wide world. Or by a simple testosterone-charged sense of adventure. Or a chance to live a life with some larger meaning, escaping the isolation of the self, becoming part of a team, part of a nation. After Sept. 11, patriotism must have urged some of them into the services. Others were surely drawn by the opportunity to learn skills that would give them solid careers after discharge. A handful might have had darker motivations, for the armed forces of any nation also draw the rare psychopath, attracted by the prospect of killing strangers. Both Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and accused D.C. sniper John Muhammad served in the first Gulf War.

Almost certainly, the immediate goal was not money. An Army private with one year’s service is paid $15,480 a year. If the soldier goes into combat, there’s an additional $150 a month in the envelope. In a time when 9 million Americans are jobless, this is better than unemployment checks, but certainly not a way to get rich, or even into the middle class. If a soldier is killed, his or her heirs get $250,000 in life insurance, plus a $60,000 “death gratuity,” a kind of ultimate tip for services rendered. Dependent spouses of those killed receive $948 a month, and each child $247. These salaries and benefits make the current American armed forces the best-paid in our history. But they hold no attraction to many younger Americans who have a wider range of career options.

There are always much simpler motives for entering the armed forces. We should never forget that these are essentially kids, unshaped, immature, naïve about life. If they love someone who does not love them back, one option is to join the Army and leave town. Across all human history, one human experience has almost always helped the young to grow up faster than any other: war.

The runup

The American armies took their time before going to war. After long, often bitter debate at the UN, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 on Nov. 8, which stated that Saddam faced “serious consequences” if he did not rid himself of weapons of mass destruction.

The word “war” was not used, but that’s what the Americans and their British ally meant by serious consequences. The Bush administration began preparations for war. By Jan. 18, the U.S. had 85,000 troops on the ground in the Persian Gulf.

To be sure, there was already some fighting taking place in Iraq. For years, the Americans and British had been routinely bombing the country. The southern no-fly zone took a constant pounding, with the Americans destroying radar installations and anti-aircraft positions almost faster than they were built. For many pilots, this was a form of target practice. But if there was to be a true war — one leading to the destruction of the enemy forces and the toppling of the enemy leadership — then soldiers would have to go in on the ground, crossing the southern no-fly zone. In the end, Iraq would have to be taken with infantry.

While Hans Blix and his inspectors searched in vain for weapons of mass destruction (in the late stages using American intelligence about possible locations), the American forces kept coming to the borders of Iraq. A low-key veteran of Vietnam, Gen. Tommy Franks, was the commander of what would be called Operation Iraqi Freedom (Jay Leno said they rejected Operation Iraqi Liberation because the initials were OIL). On Jan. 14, President Bush said, “I’m sick and tired of games and deceptions.” By the time that Secretary of State Powell delivered his “smoking gun” speech at the UN on Feb. 5, making the case for military action, there were about 125,000 U.S. troops in the gulf. A week later, the number was 150,000.

There was some dim hope that the buildup was part of a gigantic bluff, a show of force intended to intimidate Saddam into resigning. Such a resignation, followed by swift departure, would thus ward off a war that would harm thousands of Saddam’s people and many American and British soldiers, while infuriating the Muslim world and much of Europe. The show of massive force would replace old-fashioned 19th century gunboat diplomacy with 21st century gunship diplomacy. That hope was encouraged on March 1, when Iraq started destroying its Al Samoud 2 missiles, meeting a deadline set by Blix and the UN inspectors. In the view of the Bush administration, this was too little and too late. If the Blix team could not find the weapons of mass destruction, then soldiers would. This show of force was no bluff.

On that same day (March 1), the American war strategy was disrupted when the Turkish parliament failed to approve a resolution that would have allowed 60,000 American troops to open a northern front from Turkey. The Americans basically wanted that front to protect Iraq’s northern oil fields, but after sustained private bargaining (most of it about money), Turkey denied access to the allied forces. In Washington, there was much annoyance (and some rage) over the decision by Turkey, which is a democracy. But nothing much changed. The troops bound for Turkey were diverted to other places. There were now 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. was going to war.

To help save British Prime Minister Tony Blair from a revolt within his own Labor Party, the Americans agreed to go back to the UN for a second resolution. They got nowhere, because of the opposition of France, Germany and Russia and a lack of support from such traditional allies as Canada and Mexico. On March 16, the Americans urged Blix to remove his weapons inspectors from Iraq, and Blix ended his assignment.

Finally, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, the second UN resolution was withdrawn, and Bush gave Saddam an ultimatum: Leave Iraq within 48 hours or else.

The next day, Saddam sent word that he wasn’t leaving. On March 19, at 9:33 p.m. Eastern Time (5:33 a.m. on March 20 in Iraq) the war began.

From ships in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Americans launched 40 Tomahawk missiles at “leadership targets” in Baghdad, while F-117A stealth bombers dropped at least two bunker-buster bombs on palaces and government buildings where Saddam might have been hiding.

This was not the widely predicted campaign of shock and awe, where more than 6,000 targets would be hit. This was the curtain raiser, involving surgical strikes at the Iraq leadership. The intention was to decapitate the regime. It might be years before the world learns how these attacks were experienced on the ground. But it appeared that Saddam survived.

Three weeks of war

There was never any doubt about who would win the war. The most powerful nation in history could not lose to a 25th-rate nation whose armed forces were half what they were in 1991, poorly paid and fed, few of them strongly motivated. State terror does not often create good soldiers. In addition, Iraq had never recovered from the wide destruction caused by the 1991 war; UN sanctions had taken a terrible toll on civilians, too. As noted, Iraqi air defenses were pathetic (the Iraqi Air Force did not fly a single sortie) so the Americans and British ruled the skies. A few Iraqi missiles were flung toward Kuwait in the early days of the conflict, but most were intercepted by Patriot missiles. Unlike 1991, there was no Iraqi attack on Israel.

And yet it was understandable, as American and British soldiers moved north from Kuwait over the sand berm into Iraq, for each of them to feel a sense of dread. The fear was driven by the possible use of those weapons of mass destruction. Most soldiers, and their commanders, believed that if Saddam did have chemical weapons — sarin, tabun, mustard gas — he would almost surely use them. This prospect (as the literature of World War I tells us) is as unsettling psychologically as it is physically. A rifleman can shoot at an enemy soldier with a sense that survival is possible. It’s futile to shoot at gas.

In those early days, the foot soldiers — closely observed by the embedded reporters — were constantly changing into the clumsy man-in-the-moon suits that were part of their gear. The chemo suits were clumsy, and they were hot for men and women already carrying 50-pound packs. Soldiers and correspondents whipped on masks, made muffled jokes, waited for the all-clear to sound and moved on. Within a week, those images were gone. It became clear that if the Iraqis did have chemical weapons, they were not going to use them.

It also became clear that not all Iraqi forces would cut and run. The British faced determined Iraqi fighters in Basra, and there was even fiercer resistance around Nassiriya. Other Iraqis would fight hard in Najaf, the holy city where Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had spent 13 formative years. There were some ferocious firefights. But the Americans were racing so hard for Baghdad that they were forced to pause March 22-23 to allow supply lines to catch up. They were killing many Iraqis, particularly from the air, where heavy aerial bombardments were turning Iraqi soldiers into casualties.

But the Americans were suffering casualties too. On March 23, in the confusion, fear, even panic of war, an Army maintenance company from the 3rd Infantry Division took a wrong turn near the Euphrates River not far from Nassiriya. At least four were killed and buried in shallow graves, the rest captured, including 19-year-old Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

She eventually would become a symbol of the war, but her rescue (on April 1) continues to be a source of debate and argument. There was also much outrage over the showing of five captured American soldiers on Al Jazeera TV, all clearly scared.

Meanwhile, great blinding sandstorms began sweeping across the battlefield, stalling the American advance about 100 miles from Baghdad. The local fighting turned fiercer, with Americans suffering some of their heaviest casualties of the war, while killing hundreds of Iraqi soldiers. On March 29, the first suicide bomber struck, killing four American soldiers by blowing up a taxi at a checkpoint, a portent of what might be coming. Still, the forward momentum seemed unstoppable.

On April 3, American tanks reached the outskirts of Baghdad. They captured the Saddam Hussein International Airport and prepared to enter the heart of the capital city of 5 million citizens, many of whom were filling the roads as refugees. Around the airport and its suburbs, Iraqi soldiers fought back with mortar and rifle fire but succeeded only in dying.

At the same time, more than 700 American sorties were pulverizing the remaining Republican Guard units, supposedly the elite of Saddam’s soldiers. And on April 6, coming from two directions, the Americans entered the heart of Baghdad in force. Fears of house-to-house fighting evaporated as relieved Iraqi soldiers melted into the crowds. American soldiers began to secure the Oil Ministry and posed for photographs in presidential palaces.

On TV, the young soldiers looked older now, after only three weeks of combat, ferocious weather and the grinding dirtiness that comes with every war. They had been (as soldiers say) blooded. It was not possible to see them clearly in much of the TV coverage, but in still photographs you could study the change. They had acquired the kind of sorrow that you see in all soldiers. It’s the abiding sorrow that you can find in the eyes of Gen. Tommy Franks or in photographs of commanders from Dwight Eisenhower to Vo Nguyen Giap. They had been soldiers, and had sent young soldiers to fight and die. There is no more terrible duty.

On April 7, acting on a tip from a CIA source, a fierce attack was launched on a restaurant in the Al-Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad where Saddam and a few cohorts were believed to be meeting. The restaurant was turned into a 30-foot-deep crater by Tomahawk missiles and four 2,000-pound bunker-busters dropped from a B-1 bomber. When the smoke settled, at least 13 Iraqis were dead, but there was no proof that Saddam was among them. All over the city, Iraqis and American soldiers were assaulting his image in posters, paintings and monuments, the wretched legacy of so many tyrannies. They just could not find the tyrant.

An April 9, Baghdad fell. That day, the giant statue of Saddam was pulled from its pedestal, with Marine Cpl. Edward Chin of Brooklyn looping the decisive chain around the tyrant’s bronze neck. Among the witnesses were many photographers and a smaller crowd of Iraqis. Elsewhere in the city, thousands of Iraqis were too busy looting to cheer their own liberation. But the war was over in Baghdad. Or so it seemed.

Casualties of war

The young soldiers would see terrible things, as the buried crimes of Saddam’s regime began to emerge from the Iraqi earth. First dozens, then hundreds, then possibly thousands of human remains were found buried in mass graves. Some skulls had been perforated by bullets. Some arms were detached from bodies, as if hammered by back hoes and bulldozers. The skulls were frozen in ghastly grins as if they had received one final confirmation of the sickness of the Baathist regime.

In a way, the shreds of clothing were even more chilling. All flesh had rotted away, providing a brief harvest for worms. But there, clinging to a rib cage, was a bright blue shirt. There was a pair of scuffed shoes. Cheap polyester trousers were bunched around smashed femurs. The clothes told us that these were human beings who had once walked the streets of Iraqi cities and had the bad luck to run up against evil.

For many soldiers (and correspondents), the remains of the slaughtered probably justified the mission. So did the torture chambers in the dank cellars of remote buildings. So did the sickening gangster kitsch of the presidential palaces, in such demented contrast to the places where so many Iraqis were taken to die. The young soldiers had never seen anything like this in Layton, Utah, or Troy, Ala., or Dresden, Tenn.

Very few people have ever seen such evidence of human cruelty anywhere, outside of the regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. They are scenes that can leave marks for a lifetime.

We might never know what other marks the brief war put on the men and women who did the hardest fighting. It did not last long enough to develop its own culture, its version of Willie and Joe cartoons, its special jokes, unseen valor, unexpected gallantry. We don’t even know what music they heard. But many were wounded without bleeding. I still remember a photograph from the early days of the fighting. It showed a U.S. medic, about 30, somewhat overweight, wearing glasses, forlornly comforting an Iraqi girl of 8 or 9, a child who had lost her entire family. His simple human grief was impossible to disguise. He, too, was a kind of casualty.

We do know that the war essentially ended April 19, one month after it started. The military victory was overwhelming, as it was certain to be. But on the ground, among the foot soldiers, the war had been a daily struggle for survival. The soldiers did what they were trained to do: kill strangers, while avoiding being killed themselves. This is never a normal human activity. They did, as the cliché goes, what they had to do, and for many of them, their luck stopped running forever.

And so we know that 97 Americans were killed in combat. Another 74 were killed in accidents. Two were killed by friendly fire, and two were fragged by an American soldier who is waiting trial on murder charges.

There were 11 deaths among soldiers from New York State, among them four from New York City. The total for the tristate area was 15. The British lost 36. As I write, Americans are still dying in Iraq, victims of ambush or terror. If the occupation lasts for years (as some predict), there will be many other American deaths in Iraq. Just by being there, the young soldiers are at risk. Few can have many illusions about the glory of war. Few soldiers do.

“I am tired and sick of war,” said William Tecumseh Sherman, who had marched through the South and burned Atlanta in the worst war in American history. “Its glory is all moonshine. ...”

We may never know how many American soldiers faltered in the midst of fierce fighting, but some surely did, as soldiers have done in all wars. We surely will never know how many ate their fear and moved forward. Those are experiences that soldiers carry with them for the rest of their lives. In my limited experience in the company of soldiers, there is very little fear in the midst of actual combat.

Fighting soldiers are too busy for fear. The fear builds before a firefight. It comes sweeping back when the fight is over, in moments of isolation, in jangled dreams. For many, it never goes away.

But soldiers carry with them very special memories. Life will never again be lived as intensely as it is lived in a combat zone. The most mundane events can seem charged with value and meaning: lighting a cigarette, peeing in the dark, making someone laugh with a joke. A few even become what were called in Vietnam “war lovers.” They are happy at war. In war, they can leave behind PTA meetings and the struggle with crab grass and traffic tickets and parking spots. In war, they can share the rough camaraderie of the determined group, in which the stakes are literally matters of life and death. There is nothing else like it anywhere.

“War is dangerous,” wrote Karl von Clausewitz, the great 19th century Prussian theoretician of war. “So dangerous that no one who has not taken part in it can conceive of what it was like.”

Because of that terrible danger, most soldiers develop a kind of respect, too, for the soldiers they are killing. In Vietnam, fresh American soldiers often called their Viet Cong opponents Charlie. By the end of their tours, they called that enemy soldier Mr. Charles.

This was a mark of respect for the tenacity of the enemy as soldiers, but also a small recognition of common humanity. If soldiers stay long enough at a war, if they rifle the pockets of the dead enemy and find pictures of their wives and lovers and children, if they discover scented letters, they recognize the enemy dead as versions of themselves. That adds to the sorrow in their eyes, and the many confusions of memory.

A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker was hardly a war lover, but during World War II he did brilliant reporting from North Africa, Great Britain, the North Atlantic and his beloved France. In a collection of those war pieces published years later, he wrote in his introduction: “I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.”

The soldiers who fought (and are still fighting) in Iraq are too young for reunions. Their war was too small for grand monuments, a small war fit only for private tombstones. Now it seems certain that the survivors won’t have victory parades either, at least not soon, because the Geneva conventions state that a declaration of victory must lead to the release of enemy prisoners. The American commanders are not yet ready for such an event. In what might turn out to be an American parenthesis in Iraq’s long, sad history, the young soldiers are still in harm’s way.

But even as the debate rages over the necessity of the war, and the chaos of the occupation, those soldiers must be honored. They were — and are — more than arrows on a televised chart. They were — and are — more than numbers on a list of casualties. They were — and are — our own people, young and valiant, doing a nasty job in a bad time. We must salute them.

Elizabeth O'Brien contributed research to this story.