On the Hunt
How to Wake Up Washington and Win the War on Terror
Chapter 1
RIGHT IN FRONT OF US
Riding at thirty-five miles an hour on a behemoth that can kill from more than two miles away, wind and sand in your face, diesel fumes in your nose, men yelling in your ear on a radio, bad guys dying on the side of the road, you are exhausted—you haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and when you do sleep, it will be in a hole you dig—but absolutely elated, knowing you and your brave men are finally doing what you have been trained to do for so many years.
All this was going through Colonel Dave Perkins’s mind as he led his brigade of tanks and mechanized infantry across the Iraqi desert in March 2003. His soldiers were performing perfectly. His unit was ahead of the plan. He was a warrior god doing what he does best.
Perkins got his 5,000-man unit to a spot outside of Baghdad where his superiors wanted him to stop and wait. They wanted him to be a “good colonel” and ask permission before he entered the capital. He could have sat back, waited for permission, and spent days as a sitting duck ...
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