Shifting Sands and Shifting Plans

Commander of 101st Finds Rhythm of Battle

Second of three articles

We crossed the border into Iraq at 9:55 a.m. on Monday, March 24, 2003, in Warlord 457, the Black Hawk helicopter of Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. At 90 knots and from an altitude of 70 feet, the landscape was flat and vast, a great brown pan stippled with tufted grass. Bedouins waved from their tents, closely watched by our flinty-eyed door gunners.

Severe weather was closing fast, and Petraeus wanted to reach Forward Operating Base Shell -- the 101st assault command post near Najaf -- before the storm arrived. After a brief stop south of Nasiriyah at a desert refueling point dubbed Exxon, we reboarded and headed north for the final 80-minute flight.

Petraeus seemed pensive. A murderous grenade attack in Kuwait early Sunday morning, allegedly by a disaffected sergeant, had wounded 16 of his soldiers, two of them fatally, just hours before the division's 1st Brigade began streaming into Iraq. Earlier that day, a deep strike near Karbala by the 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment had turned sour, with two $20 million AH-64 Apaches lost and 28 others so riddled by Iraqi gunfire that the aircraft averaged 15 to 20 bullet holes each.

From the commander's seat in the right rear of Warlord 457, Petraeus looked across to where I sat fumbling, as usual, with the complicated seat harness. "This is not only going to take determination," he said over the intercom, "but sheer determination."

"That's the best kind," I replied, affecting a phony buoyancy.

"I do think this thing is overstretched," he said. "But to be fair, they didn't expect this kind of resistance."

I barely had time to wonder what he was talking about -- wasn't the 3rd Infantry Division more than halfway to Baghdad? -- when the fair weather abruptly vanished. Dust thickened, and within five minutes the helicopter seemed wrapped in cotton batting. The pilots slowed down, picking their way.

At 11:30, Petraeus radioed the division main headquarters at Camp New Jersey in Kuwait, using his call sign, Eagle Six. "Get hold of Destiny and Thunder" -- his two aviation brigades -- "and tell them not to launch any more aircraft west. The winds are picking up and conditions are marginal."

Peering out the left rear window, I thought his description was generous. The sun floated above us like a gold lozenge in the haze, but the world below had become vague and opaque. An occasional smear of green drifted past, only to be swallowed by the relentless brown.

"Eagle Six, this is Victory Six." The serene voice of Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander of V Corps and Petraeus's superior, came through my headset. Wallace was already at the V Corps advance command post, north of Shell at Objective Rams, a few miles from Najaf. "We will not conduct a mission tonight," he said, referring to a planned deep attack by 101st Apaches. Search-and-rescue teams were hunting two Apache pilots missing from the 11th Regiment's mission the previous night. "Other things," Wallace said, had also intruded on the Army's best-laid plans.

"Victory Six, Eagle Six," Petraeus answered. "Roger. High winds are forecast."