There really was nothing more I could do about this, so I went upstairs and spent the rest of the evening with Marilyn and the twins. Saturday morning I met with General Pace and took a few phone calls, but otherwise I took the weekend off. For the next few nights the Iraqis continued to launch anywhere from six to ten missiles at their neighbors. The Kuwaitis didn’t seem to care, since none even came close to hitting anything but a few camels in the desert. The Turks were really pissed by it all, especially when a second hit an apartment building on the outskirts of Adana. The Israelis continued to stew, but held their fire. Even the Saudis managed to catch one, in their desert near Riyadh, though nobody could understand why they had been targeted.
That first battle in the Azwya Valley had been the worst of the fighting, so far. We were beginning to hear the phrase ‘Kurdish Coalition’ in the media, and it wasn’t a phrase we had coined. Helicopter gunships began trickling into the theater from Europe, although the necessary support was lagging badly. The airhead at Erbil was dangerously overcrowded and the Kurds began using nearby roads and flat terrain as secondary airstrips. The Turks were restricting their participation to fighter and close air support; while the Kurds were properly appreciative, there was just too much bad history to allow Turkish ground troops into Kurdistan. The 82nd and the Rangers were forming a defensive line and the Republican Guard seemed to be gearing up for an assault, but with American troops in the line and close air support overhead, they were being handed a bloody nose every time they got rambunctious. Even so, the infantry was being chewed on. The momentum in the war had shifted from the Iraqis, to a stalemate. Meanwhile, behind them, the rest of Iraq was being systematically trashed by the Navy and Air Force. When this war was over, whoever was left alive was going to spend the next generation rebuilding.
If I had one complaint about Bush 41 in the Gulf War it was that he had allowed public opinion to influence how the war ended. After four days of rampaging practically at will through Iraqi armored formations, he had called for a truce after 100 hours. The fact was that public horror at the carnage they saw televised from ‘The Highway of Death’ was a major factor in the truce, and it allowed over 70,000 Iraqi troops and their equipment to escape into southern Iraq, including large elements of the Republican Guard. One more day and he could have destroyed any remaining Guard units and put a massive crimp in Hussein’s personal power base. The Republican Guard was separate from the regular army, with a different chain of command and superior equipment, pay, and privileges. After the Gulf War ended, they formed the foundation he rebuilt his power on. When the time came, I wanted to cripple the Republican Guard beyond reconstruction.
Whether I would be allowed to do that was questionable. So far public opinion was almost uniformly favorable. The use of chemical weapons and the horrifying casualties which were coming to light had solidified American and international disgust with Saddam Hussein. The American casualties during the gas attacks, and our subsequent response had my personal approval ratings back into the 80s, the highest it had been since 9-11. I could afford to trade some of that approval for a definitive end to the Hussein regime.
Part of that approval was the fact that after almost a week into the war the press was beginning to show up. Unlike the Gulf War, when the Pentagon instituted formal procedures to embed reporters with military units during the six months of run-up to combat, this mess had come up too fast. We didn’t have the time to brainwash the reporters properly ahead of time. Now they were just showing up on their own, flying commercial into Adana and Aleppo and Tabriz and then making their way across the border into Kurdistan. There were even some managing to make their way to Erbil on commercial flights chartered to bring in air freight supporting the troops.
That didn’t always work out so well for the reporters. MSNBC managed to send a crew into a town northwest of Kirkuk that had been shelled with mustard gas. They got all sorts of ghastly footage of dead bodies on the ground, but in doing so managed to contaminate themselves. Since mustard gas is an oily and persistent agent and doesn’t manifest symptoms for up to 24 hours after contact, they managed to get back to Erbil before breaking out in hideous pus filled blisters that caused screaming agony and blindness and necessitated immediate hospitalization. Ooops!
I think my lowest moment during the war occurred Monday night the 20th. We were barely a week into the conflict, and only a few days after the battle in the Azwya Valley. That night Richard Engel, NBC’s famous war correspondent, was on the air, after managing to make his way into the war zone. The man must have a death wish, I thought to myself, since he made a living going to places everybody else wanted to leave! Regardless, Brian Williams announced that in an exclusive report, Engel was broadcasting from the battlefield where American paratroopers had first made contact with the Republican Guard. Marilyn and I had finished dinner and were sitting there with the mutt, having a drink.
“When the first members of the 82nd Airborne landed at the airport in Erbil, the local Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were a bit skeptical. They had been on the border facing the Iraqi army for many years, and that border has never been a peaceful place. Who were these fancy new soldiers, and what were they going to do in Kurdistan, those were the questions on everybody’s minds. As a way to introduce themselves to the Kurds, one of the 82nd’s officers showed the Kurds a picture of President Buckman, from when he was in the 82nd, when he received his Bronze Star.”
The picture Marilyn had framed with my citation flashed on the screen. When I was in Congress I had only used it a few times in my first campaign against Andy Stewart, but during the Vice Presidential campaign it had been dragged out repeatedly by the national campaign. I grimaced as it came on the screen.
“The photo was simply meant to show the Kurds that President Buckman was with them in spirit, but whether it was because of poor translation or the fevered hope of the Kurds facing a genocidal enemy, it became much more! Within days a myth had swept through the Kurdish Peshmerga, a myth of the American warrior President who had sent his personal paratrooper army to Kurdistan, soldiers who had never retreated or been defeated. Hard pressed Kurdish soldiers talked of nothing less.
Here in the remote Azwya Valley, the 82nd Airborne’s soldiers had to live up to a reputation beyond anything they had ever imagined. I have been asked not to give the names of the soldiers or their unit designation, but it was a battalion of paratroopers who were sent to this remote valley to try to hold off an armored assault while the rest of the division landed and was able to form up. They were only sent to delay, and then were expected to make a fighting withdrawal.
When this battalion of soldiers arrived here, they managed to set up a defensive line, and were then attacked by the Republican Guard. Outnumbered three to one, and facing tanks and armored personnel carriers, they fought a desperate battle with the support of the Kurdish Peshmerga. One captain, on realizing they wouldn’t be able to withdraw after all, told his men they had to ‘Die hard’, and a sergeant put it more poetically. He told his troops that their rank in hell depended on how many of the enemy they took with them, so they had to take as many as they could. Sadly, both that captain and that sergeant are now casualties. The price these men paid is dear. One in four of the soldiers who arrived here is either dead or wounded, but they held their positions and the Republican Guard was forced to retreat.