Armed with Their Teeth

By Jim Lacey; Simon Robinson; Alex Perry; Terry McCarthy

NAJAF JIM LACEY

It may have been the most unusual directive of Gulf War II. "Soldiers of 2nd Battalion," ordered Lieut. Colonel Chris Hughes. "Smile!" With that, infantrymen of the 101st Airborne Division, armed to the teeth, began flashing their choppers at a crowd that had grown restless as the soldiers approached the mosque at the Tomb of Ali in Najaf, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites. The tactic helped win over a crowd that had more questions than answers. Were the soldiers going to storm the mosque, as some agitators were shouting? Were they liberators? Or conquerors? Were they really going to kill Saddam Hussein this time?

Najaf's civilians watched with hope and concern last week as the 101st made repeated incursions into the city, rooting out the remnants of regular and irregular Iraqi forces. After four days of cautiously advancing--sometimes fighting house to house, sometimes guided by civilians who pointed out the positions of Saddam's men--the Division's 1st Brigade gained control of the area on Wednesday. The following day Najaf had the feel of a liberated city. Smiling citizens crowded every street around the American positions. There was a constant stream of people willing to give information and loudly condemn Saddam. American soldiers who a day before had been in close combat were now basking in the cheers and applause, their arms tired from returning friendly waves.

There were women and children in the crowds, but only the men did any talking. They would say the word Saddam and spit. Or run up to U.S. soldiers and shout "George Bush good." Said Sergeant Reuben Rivera: "The American people, particularly the movie stars against us being here, need to see this. These people need us. Look how happy they are." The locals at last seemed convinced that Saddam could not reach back and hurt them, as had happened after Gulf War I. "All they ask is, When will the Americans kill Saddam?" said a Kuwaiti translator traveling with the 101st. "They say it over and over, as if I did not hear them. I tell them that the Americans will kill him and not to worry."

But the euphoria was almost lost over the mosque incident. It began when the local imam, who had spent 20 years under house arrest until the city fell and his captors fled, asked American soldiers to protect him and the mosque. He neglected to explain this, however, to the crowds outside. As the soldiers of Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, who had formed a tight perimeter on the street, began heading toward the mosque, citizens started shouting and moving forward. With rabble rousers (later identified by Iraqis as Baath Party members) shouting, "The Americans are storming the mosque," the crowd began to chant and shake their fists. That's when Hughes made his move. Grabbing a microphone he calmly announced over a loudspeaker, "Second Battalion soldiers, take a knee and point your weapons at the ground." Seconds later every one of the men was on a knee, and not a single weapon was pointing at the crowd. Then he gave the smile order.

It worked. Hughes kept his men like that for about five minutes and then returned to the microphone. "Soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, we are going to stand up and then walk slowly back to base. You will not point any guns at the crowd, and you will smile at everyone." A minute later the Smilin' Second was walking away from the mosque, and the Iraqis began intermingling with them, patting them on the back and giving them thumbs-up signs again.

By midday, however, citizens began to raise more pressing concerns. People stopped praising Bush and began asking for water. The brigade brought in 1,000 gallons, but that wasn't enough to meet the need. U.S. military engineers, meanwhile, set to work to restore power and the water supply. But the people still seemed overjoyed, if thirsty. The biggest problem U.S. soldiers faced was keeping the crowds away from them as they tried to patrol the streets.

The Americans were further encouraged when a group of local Shi'ites said they wanted to join the fight against Saddam. Both sides agreed to convene at the city center, and tanks were sent to secure the area. The site, it turned out, was dwarfed by a giant statue of Saddam on horseback. Lieut. Colonel Ben Hodges, the brigade commander, got an idea. After confirming that the statue really was of Saddam, he had engineers wrap the base with explosives. Then he waited.

A few hours later about 30 Shi'ite fighters arrived. They were wearing new military vests and carrying Russian-made weapons. Not an army, said a special-forces soldier, though he added, "It's a start. Tomorrow we will have 10 times this number." The Shi'ite leader, who did not wish to be identified, was beaming as he approached the U.S. troops. He told the soldiers how he hated Saddam and how all the people in Najaf hated Saddam. He went to great pains to make clear that his was a self-financed outfit, independent of the U.S. army. Asked the name of his group, he replied, "The Coalition for Iraqi National Unity." U.S. commanders tried to tell him which sectors his men should avoid, fearing cases of mistaken identity. But it became apparent that the leader was in no mood to discuss technical details, and was more interested in making sure everyone understood that there was now an uprising against Saddam--and that he was leading it.

The Shi'ite leader accepted the honor of detonating the explosives ringing Saddam's statue. With a thunderous blast Najaf's most visible symbol of Saddam's regime toppled in a heap of twisted metal. People ran from the side streets cheering and climbing over the wreckage, enjoying the giddiness of the moment. One Iraqi approached Brigadier General Benjamin Freakley, assistant commander of the 101st Airborne. "Kill Saddam," he said, and spat on the ground. Then he added, "Now we can have satellite TV."

Into the Fire with Warrior McCoy KUT SIMON ROBINSON

Having carefully brushed his teeth, checked his ammunition and then looked over a map with his men, U.S. Marine Lieut. Colonel Bryan P. McCoy, 40, announces the day's activity as if he were running a fishing club. "We're going chumming," he announces. "We're going to throw some bait into the water and see if the sharks will come out."

The sharks are an estimated 3,000 Iraqi soldiers in Diwaniyah, a city of 300,000 people 75 miles southeast of Baghdad, where the 1991 southern Shi'ite rebellion against Saddam Hussein first started.

The Marines are the bait. Why bring the enemy out in the open so far from Baghdad? McCoy's battalion is waiting farther back in order to clear out pockets of resistance and secure supply lines. "We want to keep the enemy on their heels," he says. So as the rest of the 7th Marine Regiment pushes north toward the capital, 3/4 Battalion plans to pick a fight at the rear of the convoy. "It's just a good opportunity to kill these guys," McCoy says. "I don't say that with a lot of bravado, but we're here to break their will. I don't want to sit on our asses all day with the enemy just over there."

As a rooster announces daylight, battalion vehicles line up along the highway, pointing in every direction so as not to give away the point of attack. Then the tanks, amphibious tractors and humvees head west toward the outskirts of Diwaniyah. The chum is now in the water, and the Iraqis rise immediately to take it, pinging the Marine armor with small-arms fire. A tank crewman answers, firing his coaxial machine gun into an enemy bunker. Over the radio comes a play-by-play: "Yeah baby," says a voice. "He just ate coax for breakfast," says another. But the sharks were already on hand, and in numbers, when the Marines arrived, and they seemed to fill up the palm-studded field in front of the Americans. McCoy calls for artillery support as his soldiers fire TOW missiles.

The Marines are now spilling out of amtracs and charging at the Iraqis. The idea is to push the infantry out quickly enough to stop the enemy from establishing bases of fire. It's a tactic McCoy deployed successfully just days ago in a battle at nearby Afak and one that defines him as a commander. "Go in there as if you own the place," he says later. That sense of supremacy now takes the form of artillery shells that are pounding Iraqi positions. Another TOW missile hits a large building, which sheds dust as if someone had beaten it with a stick.

The Marines reach the edge of town, and more Iraqis surrender. An old man strips off his jacket and waddles toward a Marine position in a dirty white singlet. "There are militia on every corner in the city," he says, unfolding a now familiar story in the Shi'ite south. "They tell us to fight or they will kill our children. They say if we are captured, the U.S. will tie us up and leave us in the desert, and when Saddam returns, he will kill us."

McCoy and his humvee team--a driver, a gunner, a radio operator and a TIME correspondent--drive across a scrub-filled field and stop on a small dirt patch between two bunkers. McCoy jumps out and shoots into the bunker on his side of the humvee. His gunner takes the other. Both turn out to be empty. But McCoy's aggressiveness is classic Marine, and the men like it. "He's the first one into battle and the last one out," says a Marine. "He's not like other battalion commanders sitting in their humvees at the back." And McCoy clearly revels in being a warrior. "I'm in my happy place," he says.

The tank company pushes through the field, flushing out the enemy and destroying two "technicals"--white pickups, one with an antiaircraft gun and one with a machine gun mounted in the back. The tanks hold the east of the city, while infantry pushes up from the south toward the tanks. The 3/4 Battalion skirts the city's edge. The Marines don't want to be drawn into street fighting, and it appears that dozens of Iraqi soldiers managed to withdraw into the city. Still, the chumming gambit is a success for the Marines. They have killed 92 Iraqis and taken 44 prisoners, and not one Marine has been injured. Says McCoy: "Let's quit pussyfooting and call it what it is. It's murder, it's slaughter, it's clubbing baby harp seals."

The next time could be different, though, and McCoy knows it: "As casual as we talk about it, taking human life is not to be taken lightly. Without getting all heavy and syrupy about it, it's a big deal. Sooner or later they're going to get one of us, or two of us, or five of us or more. It's just not our time yet. But odds are it's going to happen."

Two days later, in fact. Fresh from battle, McCoy's unit reverses course and heads east, crossing the Tigris over a bridge captured earlier. We pass under the gates of Kut and into the town. To the north of the road is open ground, dotted by a few houses. To the south, a large palm grove, thick with grass.

Suddenly, gunfire rings out. "Baynes, Baynes, three o'clock," shouts McCoy to the gunner atop his humvee. Small-arms fire pesters the convoy from the palm grove and buildings to the southeast. An RPG round hits the side of an armored vehicle. The Marines pour out of their amtracs and charge into the grove, driving forward, taking bunkers, hiding behind berms. A Marine goes down, a kid, a bullet through his stomach. Bullets fly over the hood of McCoy's humvee. For a few minutes this grove seems like the hottest place on earth. There are smoke and explosions and bullets and cries.

And then it is over. The Marines push through, destroying weapons, capturing prisoners. An injured Iraqi soldier is dragged up to the road, his right leg twisted at the knee so that his foot faces backward. Another lies down next to me. "Don't kill me," he says in English. "Please, I can't fight. My arm, don't twist it left or right. It's broken." The Marines have destroyed 10 tanks and 14 antiaircraft guns and killed 78 Iraqis. As the Marines withdraw from town, thousands of Iraqi civilians, mostly men, are waiting at the gates to go in, as if they were working in a factory, taking over for the death shift.

The Marines have suffered one dead and three wounded. By the scorecard of battle, that's a huge victory, but "all that's not worth a Marine's life," says McCoy. "These are my boys. They did it for me. I went to the injured, and they said, 'We got them, sir.' They're still thinking of approval even then. They're good kids. Only they're not kids anymore."

Lamenting a Civilian Casualty KARBALA ALEX PERRY

No matter how many times they played it over afterward, the soldiers all agreed that the farmers had it coming. Even with razor wire across the road, four Bradley fighting vehicles, and 12 soldiers leveling M-16s and M-4s, their dump truck kept rolling toward the checkpoint. Even with Sergeant George Lewis waving it down. Even with a first, then a second warning shot.

So when the truck was maybe 100 feet away and still approaching, Red Platoon opened up. Six or seven men shot a continuous M-16 volley of warning shots into the air for three or four seconds, then some fired at the truck, and Lewis launched a .203 grenade at the right front tire. "Now they got the message," said Sergeant Robert Jones. The truck stopped, the driver slammed into reverse and, attempting a wild U-turn, careered into a ditch. The doors on both sides popped open, and three men leaped out and sprinted away.

Charlie Rock Company's First Sergeant William Mitchell and Red Platoon gingerly approached the cab. Out of that hail of fire, a single shot had shattered the bottom of the windshield, and another had passed through the passenger window. The engine was still running. A soldier rounded the open door and jumped back. "We got a KIA," he shouted, meaning killed in action. "How do you know he's KIA?" Mitchell asked. "Well, look at him," said the soldier.

The Iraqi man was lying across the cab with his feet hanging out the passenger-side door, his head snapped back, a diamond-shaped entry wound just below his right eye; the fourth finger on his right hand had been shot off, and there was a large patch of blood under his right arm. Judging from the empty truck and the bundles of onions and garlic in the nearby fields, the soldiers figured he was a farmer collecting vegetables to sell in Karbala, the Shi'ite city on the horizon that the checkpoint was meant to seal off.

Private First Class Damon Young, a good-looking 25-year-old from Idaho, said he was sure it was his round that hit the windshield. "That was me then," he said. "I probably killed him." Lewis asked, to no one in particular, "Why do they make you do that? They don't want to f___ing listen, goddammit." Young paused. "It's just stupid to have to shoot people who are not armed," he said. "This language barrier really sucks."

America promises freedom for the Iraqi people, but the price so far has been a regrettable number of civilian casualties--the best guess is 600 dead and 4,500 injured--and a rapidly expanding gulf of mistrust between civilians and U.S. forces on the ground. Language is just the first problem--there's not a single frontline soldier outside the special forces who speaks Arabic. "You try signing 'I give you freedom and democracy within the paramount parameters of my own security,'" sighed a lieutenant at a checkpoint last week.

At the core of the civilian casualty crisis is the decision by Iraqi forces to decline both of the two options coalition war planners are offering them: surrender or obliteration. Instead, those Iraqis still fighting have, according to an American officer, "turned matador," changing into civilian clothes, sidestepping the full might of advancing forces only to reappear later to inflict cut after cut in the Americans' flanks with guerrilla strikes on convoys or suicide bomb attacks. In this atmosphere every civilian is suspect, and the longer the conflict lasts and the more innocents that are sacrificed, the less welcome the Americans may be. The recent suicide bombing, in which four 3rd Infantrymen were killed, swiftly followed by the 3rd Infantry Division's killing of seven women and children at a checkpoint, was the perfect one-two for Saddam Hussein's desperate endgame.

Before the conflict started, combat trainers stressed the priority of avoiding civilian casualties. But that changed with the first guerrilla-style attacks. On Day 2, the order came to assume all Iraqis were hostile unless proved otherwise--an assumption that many of these young soldiers had made anyway. Since receiving their new instructions, the soldiers have dropped their message of liberation for one of mistrust and irresistible force. Checkpoint squads have arrested hundreds of Iraqis who are unable to communicate their reasons for traveling, while detaining others carrying AK-47s as "terrorists," even though Iraqis carry AKs the way Texans do handguns.

To a man, it seems, the U.S. soldiers are unhappy about their rising civilian kills. And many are smart enough to realize that every death backs up Saddam's claim and the Arab world's suspicion that they are occupiers and conquerors, not liberators. "They didn't do anything wrong," said Mitchell of his men. "But it bothers me to hell that the guy is innocent."

Mitchell argues that according to U.S. rules of engagement, the soldiers carried out their primary mission: "to eliminate the threat." Iraqis, however, are following a different set of compulsions. A few hours after the killing, Major Dean Shultis reported that his battalion had collected 69 prisoners of war over the previous 24 hours. He said he had tried to warn the Iraqis that approaching American checkpoints now was dangerous. They're not listening. "We're hungry," replied a prisoner. "And we're not going to stop coming."

Enveloped in Smoke and Fear BASRA TERRY MCCARTHY

The fear that hangs over Basra is as thick and evil-smelling as the canopy of black smoke reaching across the sky from the burning oil trenches around the city. "In Basra everything is horrible for us," says Osamah Ijam, 23, a medical student who left town on Friday morning. "We see our future burning."

Others tell of a city where bands of young Fedayeen Saddam militia patrol in white trucks, shooting anyone who defies them. Residents talk of their fears of anarchy and looting and of the terror at the sounds of mortars, rockets and gunfire that crack day and night across this city of 1.3 million. Underneath it all is the unfathomable, almost irrational fear that Saddam Hussein could still survive this war and return to wreak terrible vengeance on anyone who turns against his regime, as he did after U.S. forces left in 1991.

Tahsin, 26, a laborer, has just left the city by foot after the arrest of his brother, whom he saw militiamen beat down with the butts of their guns. Working off his fear, Tahsin says vehemently, "They are shooting people who are saying anything against them, and you don't know who they are because they are all dressed like civilians." He says the Baath Party members and militia fighters use civilians' houses as refuges. And some have mounted mortars on the backs of pickups that can move quickly after firing. The British are wary about returning fire into civilian areas.

In the past 24 hours, the frontline British checkpoint has advanced to about a mile inside Basra's southern border. Standing behind several Challenger II tanks and a Warrior APC are Captain James Moulton and soldiers of his company of Irish Guards. They check those coming down the road for weapons and then hand them leaflets promising that this time, the coalition forces will stay as long as it takes--and asking for assistance in pinpointing the enemy. "Now they are getting more used to us Brits being around," says Moulton. "A lot more people are offering information about the situation inside Basra and where the Fedayeen positions are." But still the British are cautious, advancing little more than half a mile a day into the city.

Yet the fear is palpable even 5 miles south of Basra in the town of Zubayr, which the British captured earlier in the week. The director of the hospital there, Dr. Abdul Hussein, points to the two holes made by an antitank round as it passed straight through the walls of his office while he stood there. What he is afraid to admit--and a local resident and a British medical officer later confirm--is that the militia had been using his hospital as a base to fire on the British forces.

The militia are gone from Zubayr, but Dr. Hussein is apprehensive about a breakdown in security in the town. "It is very unsafe," he says. "There is no police force, no administrative apparatus of any kind." The British have instituted a 7 p.m. curfew but have few spare troops to patrol the streets. During the day, the town appears to be getting back to normal, with foodstuffs appearing in the market. But normality has its limits.

In a tea shop the talk among the men is about the need for the Americans and British to supply water and electricity for the town as soon as possible. Suddenly a middle-aged man in a checked shirt elbows his way in and announces his support for the regime. "If Saddam is going to fall, there are thousands of Saddams to replace him," he declares. Then he reaches down with his hand and smears some dust from the floor with his fingers. "Foreigners are not worthy to step on even a single speck of sand of Iraq." Then the men, who only seconds before had been happily bantering with foreign journalists, suddenly turn hostile and unwelcoming, afraid to be viewed as being friendly with the infidels.