Secret Armies Of The Night

Nearly everyone at U.S. central command agreed that the sprawling Faw oil-refining and -shipping facility on Iraq's southeastern coast was a must-seize first-night target in the war on Baghdad--almost as important as killing Saddam Hussein. Capture it early, went the thinking, and the next Iraqi government at least had a chance of getting back on its feet. Ignore it, and Saddam might blow up the facility, flooding the nearby Persian Gulf with crude, compromising Iraq's economy and shutting down critical water-desalination plants all along the Arabian Peninsula.

But veined and dotted with pipes and pumps and meters, Faw was also a delicate target, easily damaged by wayward ordnance or sabotage. So, on the first night of the war, when others were trying to destroy Iraqi targets, the men of the Naval Special Warfare Task Group were trying to save one. Large, specially equipped Pave Low helicopters flew dark, low and fast toward the refinery from just over the Kuwait border. Dispersing on arrival, the choppers simultaneously dropped five separate teams of 20 Navy SEAL commandos each at five "key nodes" around the huge complex. Their orders: hold each target until relieved by 1,000 Royal Marines. It was a mission for which the SEALs, along with elements of the U.S. and Royal air forces, had been training for weeks. The goal was to make sure that the battle took, as one commando later put it in the jargon that comes with its own camouflage, only "one cycle of darkness."

U.S. special forces, a fabled but mostly misunderstood arm of the U.S. military, didn't win the war in Iraq. But America's secret army, deployed in greater numbers than ever before and working for the first time with the support of the entire chain of command, did as much as the pilots, tankers and artillery to shorten the war. And now, as the U.S. finds itself in a deepening struggle to root out stubborn pockets of resistance and track down Saddam, the Pentagon's most specialized units are again playing outsize roles. Last week Army special forces, along with troops from the 101st Airborne and 4th Infantry divisions, launched a series of raids on a variety of strongholds north and west of Baghdad, killing dozens in a pro-Saddam movement that one Marine colonel in Baghdad told TIME was becoming "more and more organized and military-like."

Nearly seven weeks after President Bush declared that the war with Iraq was over, the conflict has entered a spooky twilight phase when some days and hours can feel just as intense as those during the original invasion. But the postwar assault on Saddam's die-hards is just the latest mission for the secret commandos who are increasingly seen as the soldiers best suited for the U.S.'s continuing contest with a highly unconventional enemy in Iraq and around the globe. Special forces "have been a huge combat multiplier in this joint campaign to topple this regime," declares Army Lieut. General David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "Their effects were felt before D-day and are still felt today."