VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

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01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 301 Viking Hammer (and the Ugly Baby) The meteoric, incisive Waltemeyer and silken-mannered Tovo were considered two of the brightest lights in the SF community. Tovo and Waltemeyer had met as lieutenants, gone through the Q course together seventeen years earlier, and served in 10th Group’s forward-based battalion in Germany. Their children were playmates and their families celebrated holidays together. The two men argued like brothers and stuck together like brothers. Tovo’s task was to capture the southern half of the sector centered on oil-rich Kirkuk with the help of the militia of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), while Waltemeyer was to capture the northern half around Mosul to the Turkish border with the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) militia. The Iraqi divisions were arrayed around those cities and along the “green line,” a diagonal north-south line through northeastern Iraq that marked the boundary of the autonomous Kurdish region. Task Force Viking would attack from the Kurdish zone using any ruses, feints, deception, and night movements that could turn their weaknesses into advantages. While preparing at Fort Carson, Waltemeyer’s men had calculated how many tanks and artillery pieces each ODA would have to destroy with the limited munitions they could carry. The ratios alarmed them, so Waltemeyer had them focus instead on variables they could control. He led them on a twenty-six-mile road march followed by a three-day combat skills test near Pike’s Peak, and those who performed best won the choice assignments in the war. At the behest of his sergeant major, Waltemeyer had returned to Fort Carson from Central Asia, where he had been leading a training program to help Georgia deal with the Chechen rebels who had infiltrated the Pankisi Gorge. His own inclination had been for him to just show up in Iraq and improvise—which was what they would have to do, anyway. “Not every situation has to be mastered with technology,” Waltemeyer advised the men in his battalion. A solid understanding of the people, terrain, and the politics was the best preparation for adaptation. He told them of his earlier 1991 tour in Iraq when he was a young cap- 301
01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 302 302 M asters of C haos tain leading an ODA in Operation Provide Comfort. The operation was launched to help the Kurds after Saddam Hussein destroyed 400,000 homes and the people had fled freezing into the mountains. Waltemeyer’s team had searched long and hard for the Kurdish refugee camp it was assigned to find, finally locating it wedged high in the 14,000-foot mountains, to escape both Iraqi and Turkish forces. The tribal leader had come forward and asked, “What message do you bring us from Haji Bush?” The twenty-something Special Forces captain had acted as the senior diplomat in that wilderness, enunciating U.S. policy and defusing his piece of a tense international standoff. However daunting the military challenge facing the Special Forces in northern Iraq, the outcome once again hinged on how well they managed the politics. Juggling the myriad competing interests would require major feats of realpolitik. The Kurd-Turk-Iraqi triangle contained some of the most heated and strongly held antipathies on earth. The Special Forces would have to lead the Kurds against the Iraqi army while restraining their secessionist impulses, because any move toward Kurdish independence would prompt Turkey to invade northern Iraq. The area bordering Iran also included a stew of obscure and sinister factions. One of them, a relatively new Islamic extremist group called Ansar al-Islam, was believed to be allied with Al Qaeda. It was occasionally supported by two other fundamentalist Kurdish splinter factions. Additionally, the Badr Corps, an armed band of fundamentalist Iraqi exiles, had infiltrated from Iran, and a group of armed Iranian exiles called the Mujahedeen e Khalq had moved into the region. To anticipate, parry, and neutralize all these factions would take the skills of a Bismarck. Tovo and Waltemeyer, the yin-yang battalion commanders, each sought to rise to the challenge in his own distinctive way. Time was the critical commodity needed to build a relationship with the Kurdish militias, assess their capabilities, and prepare for combat with them. An advance party of Special Forces had arrived several weeks before the main body of the task force, and a few before that. For their mission, Tovo and his men adopted the native dress of the shamag scarves and the ballooning brown pants that were the uniform of the Kurdish
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VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

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