In the General's Black Hawk, Flying Over a Divided Iraq

January 11, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

ABU SAIDA, Iraq, Jan. 9 — Aboard a Black Hawk helicopter skimming nose down at 50 feet across a landscape of palm groves and semidesert north of Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez gazed out at lone shepherds and donkey carts and villagers staring back at the airborne flotilla hastening northward across Iraq's horizons.

Then the headset crackled, and General Sanchez, 52, from Rio Grande City, Tex., who commands the 38-nation coalition of allied forces in Iraq, summarized his thoughts in a way that encapsulated America's challenge here nine months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "They don't want us here, but they don't want us to leave, either," he said. "That's our dilemma; that's the problem we have to solve."

General Sanchez began life at the bottom of the American pyramid, going to work as a dry-cleaner's delivery boy at the age of 6 to augment welfare payments that supported his Mexican-American family in Rio Grande City, a few miles from the border that his paternal grandfather first crossed in the early 1900's. Now, addressing "the problem we have to solve," he is into his seventh month as commander of 125,000 American troops in Iraq, the most coveted and challenging field command for any American officer since the Vietnam War.

A month ago, General Sanchez's troops captured Mr. Hussein, the biggest moment in the occupation since the Iraqi dictator's statue was toppled in Baghdad on April 9. General Sanchez was in an Army medical clinic about three hours later when Mr. Hussein was brought in by helicopter, manacled and hooded, from his underground spider hole near Tikrit. That, General Sanchez said, with the quietness that is one of his trademarks, brought "a certain sense of accomplishment."

A day spent with General Sanchez on Friday, on a trip to this town about 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, to visit 90 men in a tank company of the Fourth Infantry Division, showed the patterns of light and dark that American troops endure everywhere across Iraq.

Here in Abu Saida, every rooftop is watched for insurgent spotters who infiltrate the town from the south and wait for a chance to launch a rocket-propelled grenade or a sniper attack. To get there, the general's Black Hawk took extra precautions, flying one day after another Black Hawk was brought down by rocket fire near Falluja. All 9 soldiers aboard the medical flight on Thursday were killed.

At Abu Saida, even the base the Americans have set up on the edge of, in an abandoned Iraqi police station, is called Forward Operating Base Comanche, with echoes of a fort in Indian country during the 19th-century expansion across the Great Plains.

The base commander, Capt. Ralph Overland, 28, from Phoenix, is on his second stint with Company C of the Third Battalion of the division's Second Brigade; he was seriously wounded by rifle bullets to his leg during a raid on an insurgent hideout in Abu Saida last summer.

Captain Overland is at once a soldier hunting the insurgents, and a sort of proxy mayor receiving petitions from scores of townspeople every day. The Americans are helping to rebuild schools and clinics and water-pumps and roads, helping to restore electricity, and training about 250 men to serve in the new American-backed Iraqi police force, and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. It is a difficult mix, captured in one of his exchanges with General Sanchez at a briefing before the general's walkabout.

"When you go out after the enemy, are you shooting to kill or capture?" General Sanchez asked at a briefing with American officers. Captain Overland replied: "If they have weapons, we shoot to kill, sir. We kill 'em." He repeated, "If they engage us, we kill them, sir."

The brigade commander, Col. David Hogg, 45, of Omaha, moved forward to emphasize the need for harsh soldiering to counter the hazards in Abu Saida, and General Sanchez nodded. "That's as it should be," the general said.

But he moved swiftly on to what he calls the key to American success here — on one hand, pushing back the insurgents, and relieving the pressures on Iraqis who are victims in far greater numbers than Americans of the insurgent attacks; on the other, showing the path to a better future for all Iraqis with practical improvements in everyday life. At Abu Saida, the American troops have spent $150,000 on improvements, and have approval to spend at least $535,000 more.

"It's about gaining and retaining the consent of the people," General Sanchez said to the officers who gathered in front of a satellite map of the Abu Saida area in the dim interior of the command post. "That's what we're here for, fighting a war, and building a nation."

Flight Over the Desert

The general spent the day on a walkabout among the troops and townspeople at the bazaar in Abu Saida and a stopover for a closed-doors briefing at the Second Brigade's headquarters on the desert floor outside Baquba, about 15 miles south of here. On the flights that day, his Black Hawk was flanked by two Apache attack helicopters bristling with Hellfire missiles on outriggers, their infrared sensors rotating in the nose for any sign of insurgents below.

Heading east out of Baghdad, then northeast, on a path calculated to lessen the risk of ground fire, the cluster of four helicopters flew over a landscape that is a monument to what American troops have accomplished, and failed to accomplish, in Iraq.

Below, stark in their ruins, stood the National Olympic Committee headquarters, used by Uday Saddam Hussein, the dictator's oldest son who was killed by American troops in July, as a center for torture, rape and murder; the complex of buildings that make up the General Security Directorate, command center for the most brutal of Mr. Hussein's secret police agencies, taken over now as an American base; and the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, obliterated in August and October by suicide bombers who succeeded in driving both organizations from Baghdad.

Other buildings visible from the helicopter were ministries and clinics and warehouses looted and burned when American troops failed to stop the rampage that followed the capture of Baghdad. This was the Iraq that General Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civilian administrator, inherited. Last summer was at the bottom of the American experience here, when Iraqis who cheered the toppling of Mr. Hussein's statue began to say they might have been better off if the Americans had never come.

Out into open country, the helicopter passed over villages bustling with commerce, booming here under the American occupation, even as most Iraqi men remain out of work; over fields of spring wheat; and over canals brimming with aquamarine water. General Sanchez, chatting on the headset with a fellow officer about their sons' college graduations in June, paused. On the helicopter's flank, workmen were stringing cables from utility towers, restoring electricity that collapsed during the April looting. "That's the first time I've seen that; that's great," he said.

A conversation with General Sanchez away from the pressures of his command suggests that much that informs his approach to the challenges here goes back to his childhood, growing up among the poorest of the poor in south Texas. His father, a welder, abandoned the family when he was still in elementary school; his mother worked as a hospital caretaker to support five children. The general, as a boy, commuted among odd jobs, helping to pay the family bills.

In time, General Sanchez became the first in his family ever to graduate from high school. While his older brother went to Vietnam with the Air Force, he won an R.O.T.C. scholarship to Texas A&I University in Kingsville, and went on to join the Army. He speaks without any trace of bitterness about his origins. "I guess I never realized then that I was that poor," he said in an interview before the trip to Abu Saida. "Pretty well everybody else in the Hispanic community was on welfare, too. We just thought we were fortunate because we were in America."

In Rio Grande City, high school counselors advised him to follow his father into welding, but General Sanchez said he learned as an R.O.T.C. cadet at school that the Army offered an escalator out of poverty. Still, his early Army career was a struggle at times, he said, as a Hispanic-American who had not been to West Point. "It was a totally different military then," he said. "It was the aftermath of Vietnam, and there was a lot of racial stuff within the ranks."

One year, as a lieutenant, a senior officer preparing his efficiency report told him that he would get 15 points less than fellow officers who were West Point graduates, General Sanchez said. "But I accepted that, and told myself, `I'll just have to work harder.' " Asked if any of the West Pointers in that officer group became generals, he paused to think, then replied, "I don't know of any others who made it to general officer. I think one of them made it to colonel."

An important chance in his more recent career came when he served as a deputy in Kosovo in the late 1990's to Gen. John P. Abizaid, now the chief of Central Command based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, with overall responsibility for the war in Iraq. General Sanchez arrived in Iraq after Mr. Hussein's overthrow as a major-general commanding the First Armored Division, responsible for the war in Baghdad. Within weeks, he was promoted lieutenant-general and given command of the American-led coalition of 38 nations.

Among the low points since then was the loss of 81 American soldiers killed by insurgent attacks in November. The high point, unquestionably, was the capture of Mr. Hussein on Dec. 13. General Sanchez, following the operation from a military compound at Baghdad airport, said he and other officers approached the operation that night as routine, because American troops had been close to Mr. Hussein "many times" before, without snaring him. "It was one more time," he said.

General Sanchez said a radio call from Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, brought news that Mr. Hussein had been captured. "General Odierno said, `Sir, I think we've got Saddam, now we're looking for his tattoo,' ' General Sanchez recalled.

The tattoo proved inconclusive, since the Americans found not a tattoo but a surgical scar where a tattoo appeared to have been removed. By then, General Sanchez said, he had ordered all communications within the American command shut down, to stop any leaks before the capture could be confirmed.

Then, the general flew to another American military facility and waited for Mr. Hussein to be brought in. "It seemed like forever," he said. After three hours, he found himself standing in a military clinic watching Mr. Hussein being processed. "As I stood and watched him, it was a feeling of disbelief, that a man could be as evil as Saddam was and reduced to that," he said. "Along with that, there was certain sense of accomplishment at what our soldiers had achieved."

Mr. Hussein, he said, was "talkative" in the clinic, but General Sanchez chose to say nothing. "I'm not sure he even knew who I was, since I had my flak jacket on, and that covered my name," the general said. "I felt that it was inappropriate for me as the senior officer in the country to engage in a discussion."

Meeting G.I.'s and Iraqis

As the sun went down in Abu Saida, General Sanchez set off for a walk about the town. The town lies on the eastern edge of the Sunni Triangle that runs north and west of Baghdad, and is the center for 90 percent of all attacks on American troops. But unlike most settlements nearby, Abu Saida has a large Shiite Muslim majority.

Captain Overland, briefing General Sanchez, said most of the insurgents who have attacked American forces were Sunni Muslim groups from farther south.

Outside the American headquarters, General Sanchez clambered on a tank to chat with crewmen who, like others in the American garrison at Abu Saida, have been retrained as infantrymen for patrols, firefights and other duties around the town. As he kibitzed with the crewmen, one, Hector Quijada, 20, from the Bronx, stepped forward and spoke in Spanish. The two men, the general and the specialist, then spoke quietly for several minutes.

Afterwards, Mr. Quijada, speaking in a fractured English, said he and his family had migrated to the United States four years ago, settling in New York, where his father worked in a plastics factory. What he wanted the general to know, he said, was that he was a hero among Mexican-Americans, and among Mr. Quijada's friends in his hometown of Cancún. "I told him that the people of Mexico always talk about General Sanchez, everybody gets excited about him."

With the muezzin a nearby mosque calling the faithful to evening prayers, General Sanchez set off to walk through the town.

After unholstering his pistol for the start of the walk, the general quickly put it back again, and set out slowly moving past kebab stands, generator repair shops and bazaar stalls piled high with oranges and lentils and spring onions. People in the street watched, uncertain who the visitor was. A few applauded. "America good!" they said.

At the end of the main street, a man in a black cloak and a kaffiyeh, the red checked headdress favored by many rural people in Iraq, stepped forward speaking a pidgin English. "Mister!" he said. "I want talk to you, mister!" The man was Muhammad Hussein, 60-year-old retired headmaster of a local primary school, and he launched into a litany of Abu Saida's expectations of America: More money for schools and clinics; the repair of roads torn up by tanks; an improvement in his pension of about 1 U.S. cent a month.

Then Mr. Hussein paused, in the gathering darkness, and asked courteously who the American visitor was. "We don't know you, sir," he said.

"My name is General Sanchez, and I have come to Abu Saida to say hello," the general replied. Mr. Hussein seemed momentarily taken aback, then pressed ahead. "Then you take me to Baghdad, I talk to you in Baghdad, I want to speak only to you, we settle problems of Iraq," Mr. Hussein said.

General Sanchez, anxious bodyguards urging him to move on, replied, "I'm not sure I could take you in my helicopter, that's against regulations." Mr. Hussein, smiling broadly, shook the general's hand, and the American party moved on.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company