knowing there'd be a rescue attempt, would lie in wait. That way they had a bigger target.
Thinking of that, I decided not to give the Iraqis the chance to do the same thing.
Back behind us, maybe another three hundred or four hundred meters, was a berm that I had identified. We moved out and did a retrograde operation across to the other side of the berm. I wanted to put some cover between the Iraqi force and the helicopters when they landed, to prevent the Iraqis from stepping up.
Because the helicopters were flying low, we couldn't talk directly to them. We had to talk through the F-16 that was above us, and he would relay to the helicopter. The F-16 guy came through: 'Give me your exact location so that the birds can pick you up.' I turned to the weapons sergeant, who had the GPS, to get a reading. But when he pulled it out, it turned out that it was ruined. It had gotten busted up when he had fallen during the fight.
In my mind, I was seeing these guys coming in and getting the shit shot out of them. But then I remembered that that old PRC-90 radio had a beacon on it. So I said, 'Can they pick up that beacon?'
They said, 'Well, turn it on.'
Buzzsaw kicked on that beacon, and within a few minutes we heard the
And it wasn't until then that it struck me that we were very fortunate. We had had an Iraqi company on top of us, and we had been able to get out of there. It was a tribute to the Special Forces A Team, and to the training that we had gone through.
Later, it struck me exactly what had happened to us and what we had done. I'm sure that battle is still on the minds of those people in that village today. One thing that personally satisfies me is that somewhere there are some kids, probably teenagers now, who are leading productive lives and don't know how close they came, just a decision away, to being shot.
Just before we got ahold of these F-16s, two of the guys, DeGroff and Dan Kostrzebski, one one side of the ditch, one on the other, turned around and waved good-bye to each other. It was like: This is it, we're not going to get out of here.
And one of the things that struck me at the time, and particularly later— one of the gravest responsibilities of a ground commander — is that you are responsible for the lives of men, both losing them and taking them. Losing your own and taking from the enemy.
It's a grave responsibility, and I remember thinking, 'We're gonna get overrun here, and if we do, I hope I'm one of the first guys that you're taking out, because I'm not gonna be able to stand it, fighting in this ditch and watching my guys die in front of me.' But thankfully it never got to that.
XIV
THE FACE OF THE FUTURE
C
One of the proudest moments of my tenure as Commander in Chief of USSOCOM occurred during the spring and early summer of 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War. It was called Operation PROVIDE COMFORT. Within a few short weeks, special operations forces, allied with many other wonderful organizations, saved thousands of lives. Our Special Operations troops used their soldier and special operator skills to bring peace, order, and stability instead of war, destruction, and violent change. In the end, the better part of an entire population of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, all of whom had been dispossessed from their homes, were able to return to their farms, towns, and villages.
These people were Muslims, but that is only marginally important. These people were people.
The story of how they were saved is important for all the reasons mentioned above. But it is also important for reasons that are more immediately relevant. In the war against terrorism, any Special Forces troops ordered into countries to root out terrorists and their bases will need the exact skills and training that stood them in such good stead in PROVIDE COMFORT. They will need to gain the trust, respect, and support of some significant part of the local population. They'll need the locals to help them, and the locals will have to be shown that the SF teams are necessary to their own future well-being.
The difference between peacetime and wartime operations is always radical, and yet the similarities are greatly enlightening.
It will happen again and again: Our special forces will have to shoot at people at night and shake their hands in friendship the next day.
REBELLION
As the Gulf War came to an end in the winter of 1991, Saddam Hussein faced rebellions in both his south and his north — continuations of deep-and long-running conflicts. Though President Bush gave these rebellions verbal support, actual American aid was limited.
In the south, Shiite Muslim groups, long at odds with the regime and the country's Sunni majority, rebelled, with Iranian help. Mutinying Iraqi army units and the Shiite majority in several southern towns formed the backbone of the revolt, which began in Nasiriyeh on March 2, 1991, and reached its peak around March 7, when Shiite groups controlled Basra, Amara, Kut, Hilleh, Karbala, Najaf, and Samawa. By then, Saddam had already organized a counterattack, reassembling Republican Guard units that had escaped the coalition onslaught in Kuwait. By March 16, the tide had decidedly turned against the rebels; a week later, the revolt had all but ended.
While Saddam's attention was in the south, in northern Iraq the Kurds renewed their own rebellion. For generations the long-oppressed Kurdish tribes had considered their homeland to include parts of southern Turkey, northwest Iran, and northeastern Syria, as well as northern Iraq — Kurdistan. In the 1980s, they rebelled to make this homeland a reality. In a brutal counterattack, Saddam's forces used nerve gas and defoliants, together with more 'conventional' forms of massacre, to suppress this attempt at self-determination.
The always-fractious Kurds were too splintered among tribal and political groups to present a common front against the Iraqi leader, but continued oppression brought the different groups together, and the allied campaign against Iraq provided them with another opportunity to assert their independence. On March 4, 1991, a rebellion by the Kurdish Democratic Party under Masud Barzani liberated the Kurdish town of Ranya in northern Iraq, igniting a freedom movement across the region. On March 11, the major Kurdish factions met in Beirut under the banner of the Joint Action Committee of Iraqi Opposition to discuss a coordinated rebellion. On March 14, a day after the conference ended, 100,000 members of the Fursan — a Kurdish-manned Iraqi army auxiliary in northern Iraq — rebelled. In a series of firelights with regular units, the Kurds captured a dozen major towns and a hundred-mile arc of territory. By March 21, the insurgents controlled the provinces of Suleimaniya, Arbil, and Dahuk — the so-called Autonomous Region of Kurdistan. They also controlled much of Tamim and its capital city of Kirkuk, a region with considerable oil resources. The rebel guerrilla forces called themselves 'Pesh Mergas,' or 'those who stand in the face of death.'
Just as in the south, Saddam reorganized his army and his civilian administration and launched a drive to regain control. Backed by helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, Iraqi armored and infantry units struck Kirkuk on March 28. Lacking heavy firepower and air cover, the Pesh Merga fell back in disarray.
It was the beginning of a rout. Civilians and guerrillas alike rushed into the snow-covered northern mountains, sometimes taking nothing with them but the clothes on their back. The roads north were jammed with buses, trucks, tractors hauling trailers, donkey carts, and people on foot. Earlier Iraqi actions against the Kurds had resulted in widespread atrocities; the civilians didn't stick around to see if history would repeat itself. Somewhere between half a million and one and a half million Kurds — a little less than half the prewar population — fled toward the Turkish and Iranian borders.
By April 6, the rebellion had been completely crushed, but the exodus continued. Thousands of Kurds died
