Photo courtesy of Peter Mansoor
Army Col. Peter Mansoor, third from left, poses with his Personal Security Detachment team in September 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq.Moments after the suicide bombing, the man's face remained oddly intact, just underneath a swaying palm tree. A soldier shooed away a dog that attempted to run off with a foot, still attached to its ankle bone but nothing else. The unknowing dog saw a toy, perhaps a meal, but Army Col. Peter Mansoor saw something else: a typical day in Baghdad, Iraq.
It was an almost routine affair for Mansoor during the grisly affairs of reshaping and rebuilding an embattled Iraq during his first stint in Iraq, as commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division from June 2003 to July 2004. Mansoor's career path is intriguing, a path that has led to the half-Palestinian former Army officer's rollercoaster ride of a livelihood the past three decades.
In his long and winding career, Mansoor graduated at the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy, earned his master's and doctoral degrees at Ohio State, commanded a unit of 3,500 soldiers and worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw all Iraq forces. Mansoor, now retired from the army, is back at OSU as the General Raymond Mason Chair of Military History, where he hopes, after 26 years of crisscrossing the world, to settle down and retire as a Buckeye. He is author of the upcoming book "Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq" and will have a book signing at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7 at Barnes & Noble at 1598 High St. A turbulent start
Peter Mansoor and his unit, known as the Ready First Combat Team, began their Iraq tour on June 5, 2003, nearly two months after the fall of Baghdad. A month earlier, President George W. Bush announced an end to major combat operations with a large sign reading "Mission Accomplished" prominently displayed behind him. From the moment Ready First assumed control of their area, however, it was clear that combat in Iraq had just begun. Mansoor's brigade was responsible for the districts of Rusafa and Adhamiya in central and northeast Baghdad, a 75-square-mile area home to 2.1 million Iraqis.
At first, insurgents were few and far between; the problem plaguing the streets of Baghdad was common criminals. The gangs prowling the streets were not necessarily ideologically opposed to the coalition's presence; rather, they saw Mansoor's soldiers as rivals, as a better-armed gang.
"Combating crimes of that nature really entails good police work, and there was a severe shortage of police in Baghdad following the collapse of the Ba'athist regime," Mansoor said, referring to the disbanded Ba'ath party of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In time, the common criminal gangs dispersed, but unfortunately for Ready First, a new breed of criminals became much more of a problem: insurgents.
"We saw the growth of the insurgency begin in our area in July with a couple of attacks but most forcefully during the Ramadan period [in October and November], an offensive that we beat back pretty handily," Mansoor said.
The growth of the insurgency was not expected by civilian leaders. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, made what Mansoor believes to be ill-thought decisions early in the war that later wrought significant consequences for coalition forces. Crucial decisions, such as deBa'athification and the disbanding of the Iraqi army, were made against many military leaders' wishes.
"I never saw Paul Bremer in my time. If you read his memoirs, it's pretty clear that there was not a lot of consideration given to these momentous decisions," Mansoor said. "I think there was a sense that the war was won and whatever we did was going to be OK. Those two decisions early on in the way we handled the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraq, I really think set the conditions for the insurgency, which perhaps would have begun anyway but I don't think would have grown anywhere near as powerful as it ultimately did," he said.
Although Mansoor was frustrated with some of these decisions, he realized his role as a professional military officer. "It wasn't my job to agonize over and criticize decisions once they were made," he said. "My job is to carry out orders and do what I need to do with the tools that I've been given to accomplish my mission."
Another day, another problem
Officials made decisions which Mansoor believes hindered him and his troops' mission. Early in the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces, I think, is far from the mark," a notion Mansoor dismisses.
"After the fall of Baghdad there weren't enough troops to secure the ammunition dumps, there weren't enough troops to secure the Iraqi people in all places; indeed there were areas of Iraq where even a year after we had gone into the country had still not seen an American soldier," he said. The train of thought about small troop presence stemmed from the idea put forth by Rumsfeld that American forces of the future should be light and mobile, and troop numbers weren't necessarily a determinant of combat effectiveness.
"I think it represented on his part a fundamental misreading of Iraq in the wake of the Ba'athist regime," Mansoor said. A number of pre-existing factors put Mansoor and his troops at a disadvantage, but three weeks into his command, an unexpected development arose. Improvised explosive devices, a cheap but deadly weapon, would help equalize the insurgents' chances against the coalition forces and change the way the war was fought.
This new tactic, in which insurgents placed remote-controlled explosives around roads and bridges where coalition vehicles traveled, was a strategic surprise to Mansoor and other military officers. Although he said the tactic was adapted to quickly, IEDs were, and still are, a menace to troops.
"These fairly cheap weapons can destroy million dollar pieces of equipment and the soldiers inside them," Mansoor said. Although the devices were a lethal nuisance, the resilience of his soldiers amazed him.
"A lot of soldiers have paid the ultimate price in Iraq and most of them due to IEDs, and yet they continue to roll out the gates, they continue to patrol the streets and they continue to do what they need to do to accomplish the mission," he said.
Innocent deaths and uncertainty
Civilian deaths are nearly unavoidable in war, but the effects of such deaths on Mansoor's soldiers left an indelible mark in their minds. In July 2003, shortly after the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons, many Iraqis fired their guns into the air, a common celebration in Iraqi culture. A few American soldiers on patrol in a dark alley, however, had not heard the news and thought a man firing into the air was shooting at them. They fired at the man, missing him but killing his young daughter, who was standing next to the man and hidden from the soldiers' sight. Mansoor writes openly about such deaths in his book.
"I tried to be critical of my own actions and those in my brigade and talk not just about the good that we did, but what we did wrong as well, and I think killing innocent civilians, it's hard to eliminate it in war, especially the kind of wars we're fighting," he said. "Some of them were pretty tough circumstances, entire families destroyed by our actions. You just have to deal with it and go on and try to learn from it."
The deaths left a scar on Mansoor's soldiers.
"Some of them were psychologically traumatized. I think we're only beginning to understand the level of psychological wounding that some of our soldiers have suffered given their service over there," Mansoor said.
Tom Knox can be reached at knox.105@osu.edu.
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