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It has been three days and nights since my convoy left Camp New York in Northern Kuwait for the long drive to Baghdad. Despite all the talk of digitized communications in the U.S. Army, it seems that all the new gizmos have gone to the fighting brigades (see BW Online, 3/20/03, "The Wired War Has Arrived"). Here in the 3rd Infantry Division's (3ID) logistics arm, information flow has been frustratingly slow and ineffective.
Our convoy has spent much of the time looking for units that had gone missing and pulling stranded vehicles out of the sand. The Humvee I'm traveling in doesn't even have an FM radio (we had to hand it over to the division Chaplain). We can communicate with other vehicles only within a few hundred yards using a handheld device that's not much more than a glorified walkie-talkie. Shortwave broadcasts from the BBC and updates from my editors back in New York have been my only source of intelligence of events elsewhere on the battlefield.
Now we're stopped for 24 hours or more, about halfway to Baghdad, and I've been able to get a clearer picture of the situation. Despite all the pre-war bravado I heard in daily briefings, clearly this isn't going to be a cakewalk all the way to Baghdad (see BW Online, 3/24/03, "Chest-Thumping Time for Saddam"). What's more, I think some of what has gone wrong stems directly from overconfidence, if not downright hubris, on the part of generals and privates alike.
TREMENDOUS SHOW. I'm speaking directly from experience here. Just a day ago, on Mar. 23, our convoy was stopped on the outskirts of Al Samawah. You could hear heavy artillery fire booming to the east, and every few minutes a rat-at-tat followed by a loud moaning noise of A-10 fighters bombing the city. Blackhawks, Kiowas, and Apache helicopters were flying sorties back and forth.
Suddenly a huge fireball exploded, prompting cheers and whoops from the soldiers watching the spectacle. A direct hit on a munitions dump that sent an enormous black column of smoke into the desert's morning sky. America's superior firepower was putting on a tremendous show, and the crowd loved it.
Then things started getting lax. Off came flak jackets and Kevlar helmets, off came shirts. Men started posing for photos with the pillar of smoke in the background, muscles flexed, guts sucked in. Turret gunners sunned themselves on top of tanks. Things were starting to feel more like a tailgate party than a wartime convoy.
"War is sexy," squealed one female private named Dawn, with a fresh daub of lipstick and perfectly tweezed eyebrows. Lieutenant David Buehler, a serious and even-mannered 25-year-old who shares driving responsibilities for our Humvee, seemed to be the only one concerned that we were letting our guard down too much, too soon.
THE ENEMY'S VOTE. He wasn't mistaken. A few hours behind us, a supply convoy for the 3ID was ambushed by irregular Iraqi troops at Al Nasariya, and up to 10 soldiers were captured, some killed. Another convoy behind us received direct artillery fire. Two American soldiers were injured. Had the attacks come earlier, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been Dawn, or David. It could have been me.
I realized that the official assurances by the military that journalists would not be put at risk were premised on assumptions that the war would go as planned. But as a major in the 3ID told me: "The enemy always has a vote." He added in acknowledgement: "There has been arrogance at all levels."
More to the point, meticulous planning and superior firepower are of little use against guerrilla warfare. America learned that in Vietnam more than 30 years ago. And while Iraq doesn't risk becoming a repeat of that decade-long miasma, I think soldiers here on the ground have underestimated how fiercely the Iraqis would defend their native soil. "The surprising thing is the resolve and tenacity of the enemy," Major William Gillespie of D-REAR command told me.
HARDLY SECURE. It was also Major Gillespie who told me that he had pried an AK-47 loose from the "rigor mortis fingers of an Iraqi." The guerrilla was wearing a black leather jacket over his army uniform and driving a white pickup truck. In the back were two rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The Iraqi had attacked troops less than a kilometer from where we are now setting up camp.
This happened in an an area supposedly cleared and secured by a fighting brigade more than 24 hours ago. He also told me that prisoners of war tried to fire on Military Police before soldiers had a chance to disarm them. Fortunately, the shots went wide. But on the field of battle, euphoria is giving way to the unsettling realization that the march to Baghdad is going to take longer -- and be bloodier -- than we thought.
Balfour, now on the road to Baghdad, is normally a BusinessWeek reporter based in Hong Kong Edited by Rose Brady
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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