The Great Divide
It was six a.m. as we rolled into Hit. The streets were empty except for trash and charred cars, the one- and two-story storefronts closed up. Among the Arabic business signs and crookedly hung banners was graffiti sprayed in English: DEATH TO MARINES. U.S. LEAVE OR DIE. To our left, the city sloped down and then rose along a hillside. Mosques pierced the skyline. Now acutely vigilant, Herlihy kept the gun pivoting, left to right and back again. In the desert, death comes from below; in tight city streets like this, it could come from anywhere.
Two and a half hours after we left Asad, we arrived at Firm Base 1 in downtown Hit, a four-story building that was formerly a teacher’s college. The Marines had erected concrete barriers around the perimeter and lined the approaching streets with old AAV treads that served as speed bumps. The windows of the building were boarded shut and covered with sandbags; machine-gunners’ nests were visible at each of the four corners of the roof. A 10-foot-high wall of sandbags protected the building’s foundation.
Captain John Cordone, leader of Det Four’s six-man Team One, greeted me inside. “Tim told us to expect you,” he said. “He wants me to send him an e-mail to let him know you’re here.” Cordone is a 30-something graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Judging from his physique, at Annapolis he spent as much time with the weights as he did with the books. After graduating, Cordone chose to go directly into the Corps rather than pursue a mechanical engineering grad scholarship to M.I.T. He served a year over his obligatory five in the Corps and then joined the reserves. In his civilian life, he works for a D.C.-based military contractor doing telecommunications work for the Department of Defense.
With an hour to kill before meeting with the sheikhs and imams, Cordone led me to the CAG office inside Firm Base 1. In the poorly lit cinderblock box with a couch, a cot and his desk, we mixed packets of Gatorade into water bottles and talked.
“We’re not losing.” Cordone said this matter-of-factly, no pause, no stammer. He was certain. Like so many of us, Cordone draws parallels with the Vietnam War, except that for him, Vietnam was lost “in the press and the hearts and minds of America,” not in the jungles of Asia, and that’s the greatest risk here. “We can’t pull out. Withdrawal is not the answer. CAG is critical to giving the Iraqis a sense of ownership and hope. Hit has about 50,000 people; if there are 500 insurgents here, and that’s probably a high estimate, that’s one percent of the population. The Marines are here for that one percent — to kill them, to capture them. CAG, the six-man team I have, is here for the other 99 percent.”
CAG’s mission to win over the Sunnis in Hit and throughout Anbar is essential to forming and sustaining a free Iraqi nation and allowing the U.S. to ultimately withdraw. The Sunnis comprise the smallest of the country’s three political blocks, and they believe that the new government has been stacked to empower and enrich the Shia, in oil-rich southern Iraq, and the Kurds, who control the northern oil fields. If the Sunnis abandon hope in the democratic process, civil war will be inevitable.
