Melinda Liu, John barry and Michael Hirsh Newsweek

They were sent to fight for their country. But some GIs didn’t have all they needed to protect themselves.
The inaugural mission of the 1st Cavalry’s 2d Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment was, in its humble way, a bid for hearts and minds. It was to safely dispose of Iraqi sewage. Having arrived in Iraq in late March, a 19-man patrol from the battalion, travelling in four Humvees, had just finished escorting three Iraqi “honey wagons” on their rounds in the grim slum of Sadr City, where vendors stash eggs and chickens in bamboo crates next to puddles of viscous black mud. (“You’re lucky if it’s mud,” joked one US officer.) Suddenly the street became “a 300-metre-long kill zone,” recalls platoon leader Sgt. Shane Aguero, courtesy of gunmen from the Mahdi militia of Shiite rebel Muqtada Al Sadr. The Humvees swerved and ran onto sidewalks, rolling on the rims of flat tires, as gunmen kept up the barrage of bullets. Sgt. Yihjyh (Eddie) Chen, gunner in the lead vehicle, was shot dead. Another soldier was hit and began bleeding from the mouth.
And their trouble was just beginning. Two of the Humvees became disabled. Aguero yelled at one driver to gun the engine to get his Humvee moving. The engine fell out. As they’d been drilled to do, the soldiers set out to strip the disabled vehicles of sensitive items and to “zee off the radio” – to see that codes and equipment don’t fall into enemy hands. When another group got ambushed nearby, an enemy round came through the Humvee’s right rear door – through retrofitted panels that the soldiers had been told would repel AK-47 rounds. Miraculously, none of the three people inside were hit. Then a third Humvee sputtered to a halt: debris had pierced the fuel tank. “It just wouldn’t start; we coasted the last 50 yards out of the kill zone,” said its driver, Spc. Dee Foster. At last an armoured Bradley fighting vehicle arrived, and its steel ramp opened to scoop him and his buddies to safety.
For the Bush administration it has been a mantra, one the president intones repeatedly: America’s troops will get whatever they need to do the job. But as Iraq’s liberation has turned into a daily grind of low-intensity combat – and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grudgingly raises troop levels – many soldiers who are there say the Pentagon is failing to protect them with the best technology America has to offer. Especially tanks, Bradleys and other heavy vehicles, even in some cases body armour. That has been the tragic lesson of April, a month in which a record 115 US soldiers have died so far and 879 others have been wounded, 560 of them fairly seriously. Those numbers greatly exceed the tallies in the combat-heavy weeks of the invasion last spring. And the impact of those deaths was felt more fully last week when blogger Russ Kick, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, won the release of photos showing coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Soldiers in Iraq complain that Washington has been too slow to acknowledge that the Iraqi insurgency consists of more than “dead-enders.” And even at the Pentagon many officers say Rumsfeld and his brass have been too reluctant to modify their long-term plans for a lighter military. On the battlefield, that has translated into a lack of armour. Perhaps the most telling example: a year ago the Pentagon had more than 400 main battle tanks in Iraq; as of recently, a senior Defence official told Newsweek, there was barely a brigade’s worth of operational tanks still there. (A brigade usually has about 70 tanks.)
In continuing adherence to the Army’s “light is better” doctrine, even units recently rotated to Iraq have left most of their armour behind. These include the I Marine Expeditionary Force, which has paid dearly for that decision with an astonishing 30 percent-plus casualties (45 killed, more than 300 wounded) in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi. The Army’s 1st Cavalry Division – which includes the unit in Sadr City – left five of every six of its tanks at home, and five of every six Bradleys.
A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that many US deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to an unofficial study by a defence consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks.
To be continued
Last update on: 2-5-2004