‘Last Big Battle’

The idea to seize two of Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces was hatched in a command field tent.

Unlike most battle plans in the war on Iraq, this one was not devised by the high command. Col. David Perkins and his staff at the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division created the plan Sunday morning during bull sessions in the shadow of a highway overpass.

It was risky.

Tanks and armor would be asked to sprint past thousands of Special Republican Guard troops straight into downtown Baghdad; seize the palaces, the Information Ministry and several key intersections; and hold them.

“The concept was to go in like a pit bull and get your jaws locked around a target, and then just don’t ever let go,” said the brigade’s intense executive officer, 41-year-old Lt. Col. Eric Wesley.

The boldness fit with the rapid, high-fire-power American tactics of the last two weeks. If the plan worked, there could be no doubt about the ability of American armor to do whatever it wanted in Baghdad.

Perkins passed the idea up the chain of command. He got back the approval he wanted.

By late Sunday afternoon, Perkins was briefing his staff in a fly-infested room inside an abandoned Iraqi military post on the city’s southern outskirts.

“This is the last big battle tomorrow, gentlemen,” Perkins said. “They said it would take five divisions to win this war.... But there’s no question now that we can really do it ourselves tomorrow.... We’ve got to seal the deal now.”

Maj. Joffery Watson, 36, a slight, studious intelligence officer, showed the staff “amber” and “red zones” on a satellite map. Amber zones were areas already secured. Red zones included broad swaths of central Baghdad, where the city’s wealthy elite and Baath Party officials were protected by Special Republican Guard troops.

The Iraqi unit was down to about 10,000 men, from 30,000 to 60,000 before the war, but planners had to assume that as Hussein’s elite vanguard, the loyalists would fight to the death. Their armor was largely destroyed, but they still had recoilless rifles, artillery, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide bombers.

“Their strength is that they are now so well dispersed,” Watson said. If 90% of them massed in one spot, he said, “we are in serious, serious trouble.”

All told, the American force would total about 100 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, and 1,000 combat soldiers.

A key to the plan was eliminating the regular troops and militiamen who had taken positions on highway overpasses. When a 3rd Infantry armored column rampaged through Baghdad on Saturday, the Iraqis rained grenades on the U.S. troops, damaging every one of the 29 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles.

The overpass mission fell to Lt. Col. Kenneth Gantt. The plan called for Gantt’s two batteries of six 155-mm artillery pieces to hit eight overpasses with “air burst” shells that explode in the air, killing fighters but sparing infrastructure.

“Basically,” Gantt said Sunday evening, “we’re going to force all those guys to keep their heads down till our guys get past those overpasses.”

Another important element was close air support, to be provided by F-15Es, F/A-18s and A-10 Warthog tank-killers. The American force would split up inside the city, with separate columns fighting their way to separate targets.

Special Forces units would join the columns, riding in white Toyota pickups dangerously similar to white pickups topped with heavy machine guns used by Iraqi paramilitaries. The difference, Perkins pointed out, was that the Special Forces vehicles would be distinguished by bright orange panels.

Perkins was worried about “friendly fire.” Nodding to the Special Forces soldiers in the back of the room -- three sunburned men with facial hair and baseball caps -- he told his staff: “Their vehicle is right outside. Go take a good look at it.”

As he addressed his men Sunday night, Perkins expressed irritation at Iraqi TV broadcasts. “They keep saying the U.S. is not at the airport, that we’re dying at a rate of thousands a day.”

He mentioned a town south of Baghdad that his brigade had taken a few days earlier. “The government said it would be the mother of all battles, that we’d be stuck there for months. It took us -- what -- like, minutes?”

The commanders laughed. They had been wearing nervous and anxious looks, bent over their briefing books, and the colonel’s crack broke the tension. Minutes later, Perkins mentioned the psychological and political significance of taking control of the Information Ministry.

“There’s no truth being told there, so we’re going to the back of the room where they give the news conferences and ask a couple questions -- and ask for validation for parking for 100 tanks,” he said.

His most important decision the next day, Perkins said, would be whether they had secured enough control to risk spending the night in Baghdad. It was important to make that statement -- “to say, hey, we’re here, we’re staying, and a bunch of American flags spent the whole night here,” he said.

Perkins said he would make that call late in the day. He wanted badly to stay. He feared the column might take heavy casualties if it tried to fight its way back south, after the Iraqis had time to regroup.

“This is not going to be an easy mission,” he said.

The commanders knew, as military men have always known, that some of the soldiers probably would not come back. They had lost a popular tank commander to a rocket-propelled grenade Saturday.

“This is [Hussein’s] last pocket of organized resistance,” Perkins said. “We get all that out of there, it’s all political maneuvering from here on out.”

He paused and stared at the floor. “Tomorrow is our last big fight,” he said. “It’s the base on which the future of this country is built.... Good luck, gentlemen.”

From the room came a shout: “Hu-ah!” -- the soldiers’ all-purpose greeting and response.

Perkins retreated to a back room, where a military chaplain conducted a Sunday Mass. The colonel and his men stood, heads bowed, as the chaplain prayed for them: “Help us to overcome war and hardship.... May almighty God bless you all.”

The men took Communion at a makeshift altar fashioned from a small table. Maj. Patrick Ratigan, a Catholic priest, gave absolution.

“The church has a special absolution in danger of death,” Ratigan said. “That’s so everyone will be in a state of grace to receive Communion.”

As darkness fell, the officers went to their bunks inside an old commercial building, and the tankers slept inside and on top of their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

They were up well before dawn. The column moved out at 5:30 a.m. Monday, right on schedule, into a dim sunrise.

Ten hours later, at the peak of Monday’s battle, Perkins stood calmly on a ramp leading to Hussein’s New Presidential Palace. The palace had been wrecked by American tanks and warplanes. Huge ribbons of reinforced concrete dangled from the structure. Inside, the spacious reception rooms were dark and choked with rubble.

Gantt sat relaxing in a chair at the palace. He was a pleased man. His artillery had arrived right on schedule. There had been virtually no Iraqi presence on the overpasses. The armored column passed safely.

“The whole operation went just like we planned it,” Gantt said. “Close in and kill -- that was the plan.”

Perkins stood on the deck, watching massive plumes of black smoke rise from several points on the horizon. In the garden, his men pulled up in armored vehicles packed with Iraqi prisoners of war. They were bedraggled men in shabby clothes. Their hands were bound with plastic cuffs, and their possessions were in plastic bags tied to their wrists.

Enormous explosions rattled what remained of the palace windows. Watching his medics treat wounded Iraqi fighters on the grass, the colonel mentioned that he had made his decision. He was spending the night in Hussein’s palace.