The Enemy in the Wind

(A Mudville eighth anniversary special...)

The media's first chance to declare American defeat in the Iraq war came only a few days after the launch of the March, 2003 invasion:

Jim Wilkinson didn't like the secrecy. "I'm taking a beating out there," he said, pointing toward the press center. "They're filing stories that we've lost the war."

"Good," I said. "We couldn't ask for a better deception."

"Damn, general," Jim said. "We should tell them something."

As you might guess from that excerpt, reality and reporting had already diverged. The Enemy in the Wind (first published here in March, 2009) tells the story behind the story of the most effective exploitation of weather in warfare since the D-Day landings.

Anyone who has been to Iraq for any significant amount of time has pictures like this one:

The sun near its zenith, obscured by dust. That's one of mine, one of several. As is this one:

If you spend any time reading milblogs at all you've seen it before. No one can resist posting pictures of their first dust storm, they are mind boggling, and the photos hardly do them justice.

Such photos were less familiar in 2003. But we knew they were coming:

A powerful storm is likely to pummel military forces in and around Iraq with blinding sand and choking dust starting on Monday night, meteorologists predict.

The dust storm would probably be nearly twice as strong as the one that grounded helicopters and limited troop movements in Kuwait on Wednesday, the forecasters said.

General Tommy Franks:

Just as I was checking the latest message traffic before turning in, Gene Renuart was called away from the war room. He returned a few minutes later. "General, we're getting an update on the weather."

It was the most ominous weather forecast I had ever sat through. A strong cold front would cut across the region like a giant scythe, bringing gales from the west-southwest, thunderstorms and blowing dust -- a classic shamal sandstorm.

The young officer reporting on the video link from combined air operations command in Saudi Arabia added: "We'll see the wind increase around 1800 local tomorrow, sir. It will be peaking out with 50-knot gusts by late tomorrow night. The dust load will be major. Our models call for zero-zero conditions."

Zero visibility. Zero ceiling.

"And how long will this storm last?" "Current models call for 72 hours of marginal conditions, sir."

Down the table someone muttered, "The mother of all sandstorms." Nobody laughed.

Still, some apparently didn't get the memo.

Petraeus watched as Exxon quickly receded until it had been swallowed by the desert expanse.
<...>
"I'm really proud of what we've done at Exxon, the fact that they did it as effectively as they did. That's an achievement," he said. "I really do think this thing is overstretched. But to be fair, they didn't expect this kind of resistance. " Referring to Colonel Greg Gass, who commanded the Apaches scheduled to attack the Medina Division's 14th Brigade that night, Petraeus added, "Destiny Six may have that same look in his eyes as some of those guys you write about in the early days of the North Africa campaign."

I barely had time to wonder what he was talking about - wasn't the 3rd Infantry Division more than half way to Baghdad? Why should Gass be unsettled just because the 11th Regiment had lost a couple of helicopters the previous night? - when the fair weather abruptly vanished. Dust thickened and within five minutes the helicopter seemed wrapped in cotton batting. The pilots slowed down, picking their way.

At 11:30, Petraeus radioed the D-Main at New Jersey, using his call sign, Eagle Six. "Get hold of Destiny and Thunder," - his two aviation brigades - "and tell them not to launch any more aircraft west. The winds are picking up and conditions are marginal."

Peering out the left window, I thought his description was generous. The sun floated above us like a gold lozenge in the haze, but the world below had become vague and opaque. An occasional smear of green drifted past, only to be swallowed by the relentless brown.
<...>
At 11:45, the chief pilot, Marc Daniels, told Petraeus over the intercom that we had reached the point of no return. The Blackhawk had sixty-five minutes of fuel remaining. Shell lay thirty-three minutes ahead at our current pace. If we were to return to Exxon, - flying into the wind - we had to do it right now. Petraeus wiped the window again, and advised the crew to push on.

"Roger. Bad enough to scare, but not bad enough to make yourself turn around," Daniels said with remarkable sangfroid. Visibility now was perhaps a couple of hundred feet. Daniels climbed to three hundred feet, following an azimuth and relying on instruments. The door gunners, Sergeants Christopher Marchand and Patrick Croff, leaned out of the bay, watching for other helicopters, as well as uncharted hills and power lines. I tried to block out an insistent image of the Blackhawk cartwheeling across the desert in a cataclysm of broken blades and burning fuel. My palms were moist and my pulse had quickened. Petraeus was very quiet, and I wondered if he felt as unsettled as I did. From his seat in the forward bay, Fivecoat fiddled with the Blue Force Tracker screen, which showed our position relative to Exxon and Shell.

More radio reports came over the corps network. At Rams, visibility was under a quarter mile. A protracted gunfight had occurred at Nasiriyah, the Euphrates River city not far from Exxon and about two hundred miles south of Baghdad. Iraqi forces had ambushed the 507th Maintenance Company, a support unit traveling by convoy at the rear of the 3rd Division. At least fifteen soldiers were missing - among them, as we later learned, Private First Class Jessica Lynch. Survivors reportedly had taken refuge at Tallil air base, where they were said to be "looking for their parent unit." Three Iraqi artillery pieces had been spotted in Nasiriyah "250 meters from a children's hospital. " We heard Wallace ask for grid coordinates. After plotting them on a map, the corps commander advised, "That is a legitimate target. Use as precise a munition as possible."
<...>
Visibility had dropped to fifty feet. Petraeus wiped his window.The pilots eased Warlord 457 up and down, climbing when they glimpsed ground through the blowing dust, then easing back down when the ground vanished.

At 12:23 P.M. I spied a rectangular patch of green, then another and another. Tents. Vehicles, FARP Shell. I felt a sweeping sense of salvation, and gratitude to our crew as the pilots settled the helicopter into the first available spot. The thin sand crust gave way beneath the wheels and the helicopter lurched sharply to the right. The engines died as we scurried out into the warm wind...

"That may have been the worst flight I ever had," Petraeus told me. He smiled.

Warlord 457 was among the few helicopters to get through to Shell this afternoon. More than a dozen others had been forced down by the weather, and two more made emergency landings after running low on fuel. Blackhawks and Chinooks littered the southern desert... Several helicopters sling-loading equipment had been caught by high winds, and the pendular effect had threatened to bring them down. A couple managed to set their loads onto the desert floor, but one crew had simply cut loose a large crate of Apache spare parts. No one knew where the container was, or whether any of the equipment had survived the two-thousand-foot fall.

"The next good weather is sixty hours from now," Fivecoat reported.

"We're not doing an air assault for at least seventy-two hours," Petraeus said. "Call Exxon and tell them not to launch anything else out of there."

Part two is here.