Call it overconfidence; call it arrogance, but none of the shortages I was experiencing five years ago this week really bothered me at the time. They were planted firmly in the back of my mind, but I think I was just too busy to worry about them. It’s only when I look back that I see how poorly planned and resourced the invasion of Iraq was from the start.
In fact, anyone who tells you the invasion of Iraq wasn’t rushed, wasn’t there. And along with the pressure to cross the border sooner rather than later, we had all kinds of shortages that placed us in more danger than if we’d been supplied correctly. Of course, I realize that troops will never have "enough," but some of this was simply inexcusable.
We were being ordered to hastily invade a country with too few troops and too little equipment. And this wasn’t your local National Guard unit, either. We’re talking about the 101st Airborne Division here.
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When we crossed the border from Kuwait, captured the city of Hillah, and took Baghdad, my personal body armor consisted of a single front plate for my Kevlar vest but no back plate. I should have had a front and back plate like I’d had in Afghanistan in 2002. Instead, my platoon only had four back plates--enough for each of my gunners. Everybody else had to go without. I was probably also wearing a defective helmet produced by Sioux Manufacturing--the company that sold the military 2.2 million substandard ones. Many of the first troops to cross the border (like us) had been issued those faulty helmets. That's me up there wearing my Kevlar vest with only one plate, with my defective Kevlar helmet, and holding a captured AK-47.
But while I didn’t have the proper body armor, I’ll show you what I did have. I’ll show you what we all had: We had protective suits that kept us safe from chemical and biological agents, as well as radioactive fallout. Below is a picture of me during the invasion wearing my suit.
We were all wearing them because we were absolutely certain that Saddam was going to "slime" us with something. President Bush, Colin Powell, and Senators like John McCain had convinced us.
In the end, the irony is that we were well-protected against yellow cake from Niger, aluminum tubes, and anthrax missiles, but not 18-year-olds with AK-47s.
One other thing we didn’t have was humvee armor. I know "up-armored" humvees are all the rage these days, but we didn't have those back in 2003. Why would we? Dick Cheney told us we'd be greeted as liberators, and John McCain told us the war was going to be easy. So when we crossed that border--with our civilian leadership apparently not having given much thought to what might happen once we did--this is the vehicle in which I rode:
Yes, that’s a vinyl door. And no, vinyl doesn’t offer much protection against bullets or rocket-propelled grenades. We were still using these trucks with vinyl doors in late 2003--after the insurgency had begun. In fact, I was attacked in October 2003 while riding in the open bed of a humvee with vinyl doors. I was never happy about this.
Another thing we were missing that we really could have used were the extra 200,000 people that General Shinseki suggested we take with us during the invasion. Unfortunately, guys like John McCain said we couldn’t wait. They had to get their war on. That’s why a lot of stuff got looted and burned down during the invasion--like the museum.
That picture on the right is one I took of looters driving a front-end loader full of stolen shit.
They were driving the other way and I didn’t have the time or the manpower to go chase them down and tell them to return it. Also, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because no one in my company spoke Arabic.
No one spoke Arabic because we didn’t invade with any translators in my unit. So when we captured our first city along the route to Baghdad, we couldn’t communicate with anyone who lived there. This is me standing with some happy, anti-Saddam, Iraqis during the first week of April 2003.
We had no idea what we were saying to each other. Loud voices and exaggerated hand motions sometimes helped a little.
We also found out pretty quickly that we didn’t have enough U.S. Army trucks to do the things we needed to do. That's because once we got into the cities, we realized that we had to split up our platoons across wide distances because there weren't enough of us. That was okay though, because it was always pretty easy to just take what you needed from the disbanded Iraqi Army.
Most of these problems were addressed in Iraq by 2004, however. So the purpose here isn’t to simply complain about being under-resourced. The point is to show that Americans have died in Iraq because the Bush administration was hell-bent on rushing to war against the better judgment of those who knew. And people shouldn't have to die because someone is in a hurry to start an unnecessary war.
Unfortunately, this is what you get when you elect people like George W. Bush and his neo-conservative friends into office. And this is what you'll get with a McCain administration.
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