“WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IN WAR IS VICTORY, NOT PROLONGED OPERATIONS.”
CHAPTER 6: RIP IN
ONE HUNDRED CONQUERORS WERE PACKED INTO THE HUGE C-17 carrying us on an hour-long flight to Al Taqaddum (TQ) Airbase. During the final five minutes, the pilots performed an intense, spiraling descent, corkscrewing the plane from cruising altitude to the tarmac as rapidly as possible to increase the difficulty for terrorists trying to shoot the plane from the sky, and giving us a rollercoaster-like feel as our stomachs rose into our chests.
The British had built TQ in the 1950s as an extension of the Habbaniyya airbase. Later, Saddam used it as a major hub for the Iraqi Air Force. Coalition air forces mercilessly bombed TQ during Desert Storm, but it was not until 2003 that the Americans came to stay. By 2006, the airbase was the logistic hub for Coalition forces in Anbar province and was the only way in or out of Ramadi aside from a MEDEVAC helicopter or a long and treacherous ground convoy through Baghdad.
We disembarked and headed to the terminal, awaiting the next leg of our trip. I stopped outside in the darkness on the hard-packed sand, waiting for the arrival of six UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters that would make the twenty-minute flight to Camp Ramadi. A silver, ten-foot high chain-link fence topped with three rolls of razor wire ran as far as the eye could see, illuminated by a line of yellowish lamps on twenty-five-foot poles. The sprawling base looked like any other military airfield in the world, with Blackhawk helicopters and Apache gunships jockeying around the runway before heading out on that night’s combat missions. The six sticks of eleven Task Force Conqueror soldiers lined up evenly down the flight line, ready to board the Blackhawks once the wheels touched down.
Unlike most peacetime missions, tonight we were loading hot, meaning the blades would still be turning as we received a safety briefing, walked in an orderly fashion to the aircraft, found our seats, and strapped in before takeoff. We wore our combat gear: Kevlar helmets with night vision goggles mounted, 70 pounds of body armor and ammo, M4 carbines slung around our necks, and M9 Beretta pistols in hip holsters. Also, we brought most of the worldly belongings we had in Kuwait. Personally, I had two large aviator flight bags, an extra-large rucksack, and a briefcase with my two Army computers. I looked like a well-armed tourist. The old Army adage, “A fool and his rucksack are soon parted”, had stuck in my head as I was packing, so I brought everything I thought I could possibly need with me instead of shipping it on the ground convoy.
We watched the helicopters taxi over to us as the ground crew gestured for us to get ready. The crew chief of the closest Blackhawk bounded off the helicopter as its wheels touched the ground, and began his condensed safety briefing, “Get the fuck on my aircraft! Get-the-fuck-on-my-aircraft-now!”
He repeated the briefing intensely, in case someone missed it the first few times. As I boarded the lead Blackhawk, I glanced to my left and saw the scene repeated all down the flight line. In seconds, the crew chief began tossing duffle bags into the cabin as the remaining ten of my soldiers scrambled aboard. A bag hit me on the side of my head as I fumbled with the seatbelt harness. The whine of the turbines grew louder, and I felt the wheels pull from the ground, and the aircraft take flight, heading towards the chain link fence separating the relative security of the well-lit flight line into the unknown dark Iraqi night sky.
As the nose of the aircraft cleared the fence line, the door gunners flipped down their night vision goggles and snapped their pintle-mounted M240 machine guns to the ready, scanning for targets hidden in the desert. I never did get my seatbelt fastened and had a duffle bag pressed against my head for the entire flight. At least, I got a seat; a couple of guys were laying on duffle bags in the middle of the dark cabin. In peacetime, the entire aviation chain of command would have been relieved on the spot for allowing an aircraft take off in such a state; apparently, here in Anbar, this was the way things were done. Pilots minimized the risk of mortar fire destroying their helicopters by spending as little time as humanly possible on the ground. Even before the wheels touched the small, primitive helipad of Camp Ramadi, the crew chief began yelling again over the whine of the turbine engines.
“Get the fuck off my aircraft. Get-the-fuck-off-my-aircraft-now!” Again, over and over, in an even more animated voice than before.
We piled out in a matter of seconds and walked quickly into the darkness on the edge of the helipad as the crew chief chucked equipment out of the aircraft, head down as if he was baling hay. The engines idled up and aircraft lifted for another sortie back to TQ. I found myself on a scavenger hunt on the pitch-black airfield, looking for my bags. It was a rather inauspicious start to the deployment, but we were finally at Camp Ramadi, ready to get into the fight. Captain Alden met us at the airfield and led us back to where the advance part had already set up shop.
Unfortunately, the next day a massive sandstorm grounded nearly all air traffic, forcing most of the soldiers of Task Force Conqueror and Task Force Regular to wait at TQ for the weather to lift. Except for an absolute medical emergency, transport helicopters in Ramadi never flew in the daylight, so ferrying in the sixteen-hundred troops was limited to night. A movement of this magnitude is difficult under normal conditions, but the bad weather made it even more of a challenge. Sandstorm or not, we had to assume responsibility for combat operations by 7 June. Eventually, we gave up on flying the soldiers in and instead packed them into the backs of Marine seven-ton trucks for a dangerous ground convoy to Camp Ramadi on 29 May, losing three precious days of transition time in the process.
Anbar province had been the domain of the United States Marine Corps since just after the invasion. Initially, a three-star Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) headquarters based in Fallujah and a two-star Marine Division headquarters in Ramadi provided leadership to the Coalition units in the province. In late 2005, these headquarters merged and for reasons that never quite passed the giggle test to me, took up residence in Fallujah and not Ramadi, in essence abandoning the provincial seat of government.
By May 2006, the MEF Headquarters was commanded by a two-star general with a large staff of colonels and lieutenant colonels who had the time and experience to expand the capacity of the Anbar provincial government. The 2/28th IN, on the other hand, was led a by a colonel with markedly fewer, less experienced lieutenant colonels and majors on his staff, with an around the clock violent tactical fight spread out over and an enormous area of operations. They simply did not have the time and resources to fight the daily battle in “the most dangerous city in the world” and at the same time build a functioning government. Additionally, the Iraqis understood rank and position very well, and the fact that a two-star general had departed, leaving a colonel in charge, sent a clear, if unintended, message to the population: Ramadi was just not that important to the Coalition. The MEF Headquarters maintained that their staff was supporting the provincial government from thirty miles away in Fallujah. Public perception and physical location mean a lot in combat, and the MEF Headquarters had distanced itself both physically and symbolically from the provincial government and the people of Ramadi.
Commanded by Colonel John Gronski, the 2/28th IN was composed of Army National Guard units mobilized from across the country and brought together for a train-up just prior to deployment. Due to manning shortfalls, or the lack of a specific skill set authorized within the Pennsylvania National Guard, the 2/28th IN, like every other Army National Guard unit deploying to Iraq, sent its personnel requirements to the National Guard Bureau in Washington, DC. The Bureau either sought volunteers or required other states to provide the necessary personnel as individual replacements or platoon-sized or higher units, inevitably creating a hodge-podge of units and soldiers fighting under the brigade headquarters’ guidon.
Colonel Gronski’s reputation as a commander and combat leader was outstanding. His soldiers loved him, and if only half of the FOB-lore about him was true, he was fearless. The 2/28th IN had been in a bloody, bitter and deadly battle for the past year, and, like most units in Iraq at the time, had responsibility for more area, more population, and more missions than it could possibly cover. Tactically, the 2/28th IN focused on holding the main supply routes open in and around Ramadi using a series of interlocking static checkpoints to observe the roads to minimize the IED threat to passing logistics convoys and giving themselves freedom of maneuver for their operations. They also developed strong personal relationships with Iraqi tribal leaders to the north and west of Ramadi, including Sheiks Ahmad and Sattar Bezia abu Risha. However, large swaths of their area of operations, especially in the heart of Ramadi, had not seen an American unit in months prior to our arrival.
The Army defines a Relief in Place as “a tactical enabling operation in which, by the direction of the higher authority, all or part of a unit is replaced in an area by the incoming unit,”183 which culminates into a Transition of Authority. The acronym for this process is RIP/TOA. Soldiers turned the acronym into a single word that becomes Army jargon: RIP. Done correctly, RIP ensures the seamless transfer of forces. Done incorrectly, it can lead to disaster.
We were replacing Lieutenant Colonel Mark Lovejoy’s 1-172nd AR, a Vermont National Guard tank battalion also composed of companies and soldiers from all over the nation. Headquartered on Camp Ramadi, Mark’s battalion consisted of four maneuver companies and an area of operations roughly the size of Connecticut, with numerous towns, villages, and tribal boundaries. Their area of operations was larger than any battalion, active duty or National Guard, could effectively control. Task Force Conqueror and Task Force Regular split their area of operations, with the Regulars moving into the palatial Camp Blue Diamond, assuming responsibility for everything east and north of the Euphrates River while we assumed responsibility for everything west of the river and the Euphrates Canal. By splitting the area of operations, each of the task forces was able to focus on a smaller area and specific problem set, a luxury that Lovejoy and his men simply did not have. The downside of the additional task force was that the Bandits of 1-37 AR received the 1-172nd AR’s established and functioning headquarters, requiring us to build a new headquarters from scratch, while in contact. Initially, we set up shop in a tin-roofed building with holes from mortar rounds in the eaves and a hand painted sign outside that said “Machine Gun Joe’s.”
My reaction when I first saw the place? Hell no!
This former unit lounge, complete with pool table and a Ms. Pac-Man machine, served as a combined TOC, logistics hub, office space, and sleeping quarters for the task force staff, but it was inadequate for any of these functions. Within days, we gained access to the former sleeping quarters of a maintenance company that had just redeployed to the States, converting it to our operations center. The entire time we were in Machine Gun Joe’s I was terrified that a terrorist mortar round was going to kill my entire staff.
Upon arriving in Ramadi, Task Force Conqueror was attached to the Ready First Combat Team, meaning that the Ready First could employ us tactically as they saw fit while the brigade headquarters in Kuwait retained control of administrative requirements such as promotions, evaluations, and authority for non-judicial punishment. The same was true of the companies in my task force as well; other battalion commanders would evaluate three of my five company commanders, and I evaluated the tank company commander across the Euphrates in Task Force Regular as well as another in Baghdad.
Commanded by Colonel Sean MacFarland, the Ready First had spent the previous four months in Tal Afar. Thanks to a concerted effort to isolate the city and secure the population the year prior by Colonel H.R. McMaster and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR), it was one of the few bright spots in Iraq. Upon relieving the 3rd ACR in mid-February 2006, the Ready First built on that success, making Tal Afar one of the most peaceful cities in Iraq.
The Ready First immediately realigned the company-level forces across the brigade, sending Alpha Company 2-6 Infantry to Task Force Regular. Losing a company that we had trained with for the past year was something I knew was a possibility, but like a heart attack or a car accident, I never thought it would happen to me. Although we gave up a known and valued quantity, in a fit of tactical alliteration, we gained two additional company teams, Charlie Company 1-6 Infantry, and Charlie Company 1-37 Armor. Task Force Conqueror now consisted of the headquarters company, two mechanized infantry companies, two tank companies, and an engineering company. Aside from only a one in four chance of my guys getting it right when I told them to get me the Charlie Company Commander, things were going as well as they could be. I had the most combat power of any of the task forces in Ramadi, and I felt that we were ready for anything.
The 1-172nd AR was a well-organized unit that had refined its processes over the past year in combat, so we adopted almost all of them. Lieutenant Colonel Lovejoy and I spent nearly the entire twelve days together attending briefings, inspecting static positions, and meeting the few Iraqi government and civilian leaders who were willing to work with the Coalition. My chance to pick his brain for insights had a time limit, and I felt I had to get as much information as I could before he left Iraq. Mark Lovejoy was an outstanding combat leader, providing me the invaluable advice that could only come from someone who had lived through the experience. He did an excellent job explaining the complex issues I would face, but I did not yet have the context to understand everything he said. I could read reports or look at fixed positions all day long and never gain an understanding of how or why the situation was devolving. Mark’s insights were spot-on, but it was difficult for me to understand how things had changed, not just during his year, but since the start of the war three years prior, and for that matter the dozen years before that. Events would occur in the coming months, and I would realize, “Oh, so that was what Mark was talking about.” I felt as if I was walking into the middle of a mystery movie and had to figure out the plot.
Each task force also had the Iraqi security force units in their area of operations under their “operational control”, for lack of a better term. In our case, the 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, 7th Iraqi Infantry Division (1/1/7 IA), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa, was a straight leg infantry battalion formed as part of the new Iraqi army after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. Headquartered on a remote part of Camp Ramadi called Camp Defender, the Iraqi army operated independently in the town of 5 Kilo and operated two combat outposts: ECP 3 along the Euphrates Canal, and Check Point 293 on Route Michigan, two miles west of Camp Ramadi. The Iraqi Highway Patrol Station, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hameed, occupied a location about five miles from Camp Ramadi adjacent to Route Mobile in Zangora. The al Horea Iraqi police station led by Lieutenant Colonel Fallah was located in the town of 5 Kilo, not more than half a mile from the front gate of Camp Ramadi.
Fortunately, the Iraqi security forces had advisor teams assigned to assist in developing them. Lieutenant Colonel Kris Stillings led a team of United States Marines advising and mentoring the Iraqi army battalion. There was a single civilian contractor advising the Iraqi Highway Patrol station, and a platoon of Army military police (MPs) advising the Iraqi police in the al Horea station. Frankly, at the time, I could not have cared less about the Iraqi security forces. I was commanding the largest battalion task force in Ramadi, one that was leading the brigade’s attack in taking back the city. I did not think we needed the Iraqis, and in fact, I considered them a distraction. That perception would change quickly in the coming weeks.
Mark Lovejoy had brilliantly augmented the Iraqi army advisor team with non-commissioned officers and medics from his unit, and he coached me to do the same thing. However, the command relationship between the advisor teams and the tactical commanders seemed to me to violate the principle of unity of command.184 Command and control of the advisor teams did not run through the task force or brigade chain of command, but instead through the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraqi (MNSTC-I), a three-star administrative headquarters in Baghdad. All across Iraq, it was up to the advisor team chiefs and the task force commanders to figure out a way to work together. Some units, like the 1-172 AR, embraced the advisor teams and worked exceptionally well with them, even across service lines. Other units simply did not.185 Not only did some advisor teams go unsupported, but the relationship also allowed commanders like me to walk away from their responsibility for training the Iraqis. Though training the Iraqi security forces was part of my mission statement, I thought I had pawned off that responsibility to the advisor teams.
Initially, I felt sorry for the advisors living with the Iraqis. Since the time I was a young lieutenant, the mantra of, “Always treat your attachments better than your own men,” was drilled into me. We did not hesitate to take Kris Stillings and his team in as part of the Conqueror family. We provided logistical support, shared our intelligence, and kept them abreast of our operations.
Nevertheless, taking NCOs and medics from Task Force Conqueror and putting them on the advisor team seemed like a terrible idea, and a waste of skill and talent. Lovejoy continually assured me that augmenting the advisors was the right thing to do, but while I trusted his judgment, I was hesitant to assign any of my soldiers to the advisor team. The Ready First would be taking a different approach in securing Ramadi than the 2/28th IN had, and I felt I would need everyone for the upcoming fight. Finally, Stillings cornered me outside of my office after a meeting and put it to me bluntly, “You give me ten guys, and I’ll give you three hundred.”
Figure 7. Advisor Team at the end of the deployment. Bottom row Left to Right: SGT Ascher, SFC Moise, SFC Davis, Major Mayhan, LTC Stillings, CSM Callen. Back Row: SGT Herrera, CPT Lucht, SSG Petersen CPL Appler, LT Rice, SSG Krill, SSG Rinehart, SFC Folks, Gunnery Davis, CPL Garza, SSG Hernandez, CPT Sanford. 19 October 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
I could not argue with that kind of logic. Reluctantly, I ordered the NCOs and medics to augment the advisor team. A commander sometimes makes a decision and regrets it immediately. This was now the case and remained so for the following weeks until I came to realize that it might well have been the best decision I had made in my career. With the additional soldiers, the advisor team could meet the twin goals of developing staff skills within the Iraqi headquarters, and increasing their tactical proficiency by accompanying the Iraqi companies on every mission when they went out on patrol. Kris Stillings now had the resources he needed to accomplish his mission, which would ultimately lead to me accomplishing mine.
Soldiers call the process of transitioning a “Left Seat/Right Seat Ride.” Soldiers of the incoming unit observe the outgoing unit’s actions for a couple of days, figuratively sitting in the “passenger” seat, until at the halfway point, the incoming unit takes charge and gets in the “driver’s seat” with the outgoing unit’s leadership looking over their shoulder as a safety net. First platoons would transition over the course of a week, then a few days later company/teams would transition, and finally the battalion task force transitioned at the end of two weeks. Our scheduled transition was only for an abbreviated twelve days, and now the sandstorm cost us three of them. Each day was hectic with meetings, briefings, mandatory Rules of Engagement and counter-IED training events, and terrain orientation patrols in Tam’eem, 5 Kilo and Zangora as everyone tried to absorb three years’ worth of information from his counterpart.
The city itself was a mix of multi-storied, flat-roofed tan buildings, large Soviet-style apartment blocks, commercial streets lined with small shops, and single-family homes with eight-foot stone privacy walls and a ten-foot wide sheet-metal gate allowing vehicles to enter and exit a small courtyard. A few large industrial areas ringed the city as well, but the violence and lack of electricity had led to the shuttering of factory doors by the time we arrived. Under Saddam’s rule, the Iraqi army’s Field Artillery School had been located in Ramadi, and the area became a favorite retirement spot for Iraqi army officers, with the dictator often buying the loyalty of senior officers by giving them plots of land around town. Twelve years of United Nations imposed economic sanctions and then three years of bitter fighting had taken its toll on the city’s infrastructure, the local government and the population. Iraqi schools taught students that the suffering and hardship was America’s fault, not Saddam’s.
Figure 8. Looking at the market in Tam’eem. Click on the photo for bonus features.
During my first days in the country, I went to bed physically and mentally exhausted. On the evening of 2 June, I decided to turn in early, knowing the next day was going to be another grind. Just after 2300 hours, I left the operations center and went to my room/office next door to go to sleep. The task force was still in the right seat, so I felt confident that the soldiers of the task force were safe, although they were out on patrol with the 1-172 AR. Not that my being awake would have been any benefit for the soldiers out on patrol, but it made me feel better personally to be awake when soldiers were in harm’s way.
Thirty minutes later, a runner from the operations center was pounding frantically on the black metal door to my office. The terrorists had attacked a Team Dealer patrol with an IED and small arms fire in Tam’eem. The blast overturned the vehicle, instantly killing Specialist Brett Tribble186 and very seriously wounding Sergeant Thomas Davis, Private First Class Adam Hailey, and Private First Class Gabriel Moreno. Sergeant First Class Michael Harris raced to the scene, loading the wounded into the back of his Bradley, and tearing through the night to get the injured soldiers to the expert medical team at Charlie Med. Once stabilized, Davis, Hailey, and Moreno were Medevac’d to the field hospital in Balad. Although evacuating multiple causalities was a daily occurrence for units in Ramadi, for us, this was our first of many.
Tribble’s loss was shocking to me personally. I was never under any illusions that I was going to bring everyone back, but I certainly did not expect to start losing soldiers before our assuming official control. During the task force’s previous 15-month deployment to Baghdad in 2004, it lost three soldiers. I had expected that I could similarly keep casualties to a minimum through intense training back in Germany and Kuwait.
Specialist Brett Tribble was a quiet kid in one of the platoons of Team Dealer. By all accounts, he was a good soldier who had found a home in the Army after some troubled teenage years.187 He liked being in uniform and had planned to reenlist in the coming days. Tribble was normally one of the dismounts, infantrymen who rode in the back of the Humvee or Bradley and only got out of the vehicle when there was trouble. Tonight he had volunteered to man the M240 machine gun atop the Humvee, exposing himself to direct enemy fire so he could be closer to the action if needed. He was that kind of man.
There were over seven hundred fifty soldiers in Task Force Conqueror throughout our train-up and our time in Kuwait, and now the number was closer to twelve-hundred. Some of the soldiers I knew very well from training events, seeing them around the task force area, or through their appearing before me for non-judicial punishment, which oddly enough is where I picked two of the stalwarts of my security detachment. I knew all of the soldiers in the task force by sight and could usually get their company right, and was even about seventy-five percent correct on their platoon. That said, I had probably only talked to Tribble once or twice in the previous twelve months. At the time of his death, I had to wrack my brain to picture his face, something that I found terribly unsettling. Regardless of how well you knew the man, the death or injury of each soldier takes a toll on a commander. At the same time, as a commander, you cannot allow yourself to show your personal grief.
Despite our first casualties, the mission continued with the next day passing uneventfully. By uneventfully, I mean that we had seven enemy contacts but suffered no soldiers wounded or killed. The attack on ECP 3 happened the following day, and by sundown, we had turned over control of the burnt out shell of the control point to the Bandits.
After nightfall, I went with Mark Lovejoy and some of his staff officers to Sheik Ahmad Bezia abu Risha’s house. Sheik Ahmad would be in my sphere of influence (SOI), along with two other sheiks in Zangora. Military leaders partnered with local leaders willing to cooperate with the Coalition. An SOI could be an elected official, an Iraqi security force leader, a sheik, imam, or a local businessman. By assigning these citizens to individual military leaders, U.S. forces were able to stay on message and keep the locals from gaining too much wasta—Arabic for “street cred”—by having the ear of too senior a U.S. commander versus his station in Iraqi society.
Sheik Ahmad lived in a large walled compound a mile northwest of Camp Ramadi along Route Mobile in the tribal area of Zangora. Three men in dingy traditional Arab robes stood guard at the entrance, two on the ground behind a grey, chest-high rock wall and the third in an elevated position above the guard post, each carrying an AK-47, and unlike anyone in Tam’eem, they were smiling and waving as we approached their position. There was a similar checkpoint on the other side of the compound.
Inside stood two very nice houses, a number of outbuildings, a large garage/shop area, and a standalone cinderblock meeting room called a dywania in Arabic. Palm trees dotted the grounds, and all of the buildings were brightly painted and by far the nicest I had seen. Both homes were palatial, more like mansions than even the larger homes within Tam’eem. A salmon-colored stucco house belonged to Sheik Ahmad; the other house, of gleaming white, was his brother’s, Sheik Sattar. According to FOB-lore, Sattar built his house to resemble the White House, with a fifteen-foot tall ornate door centered on decorative Doric columns. A wide plaza lay between the houses, which included a fountain spraying water to give it the final touch of elegance. The whole place stood in marked contrast to the battle-scarred city just a mile away.
Pre-deployment training stressed the building of personal relationships between U.S. forces and local leaders. Transferring relationships was the same as transferring responsibility for the government-owned property. Someone had to own it and be responsible for it at all times. Mark Lovejoy owned the relationship with the sheiks, but now it was time for him to say goodbye and to pass the responsibility to me. Although Mark was providing me the opportunity to build my relationship with the sheiks, I frankly did not see what good would come of befriending any of the locals, but it was another task on the RIP checklist to complete.
Sheik Ahmad met us in front of his house as the Humvees came to a stop. After exchanging a warm greeting, Mark introduced me. I shook his hand and said exactly what I learned in training, “A salaam alaykum,” (the Muslim greeting of “peace be with you”) and then continued in English, “I look forward to working with you for a peaceful and prosperous Iraq.”
“Frickin’ nailed it!” I thought. In my mind, I already had all I needed to know in dealing with the Iraqis.
Sheik Ahmad was a likeable enough guy, playing the part of the poor sheik very well. He blended into the background more than anything. I soon realized that he was sandbagging us, and he was a lot more sophisticated than he let on. Ahmad invited us into his house. His living room was full of certificates of appreciation, unit coins, and other trinkets of thanks from Americans passing through Ramadi over the previous three years. The television was showing B-roll footage of American tanks and Bradleys on heavy equipment transports moving on a highway. The screen then switched to an Arab newscaster with a map next to his head, showing a big arrow starting in Kuwait and ending at a yellow explosion symbol directly over Ramadi. Although it was all in Arabic, it was clear that we were the lead story on the Arab news.
“Are you from the unit sent from Kuwait for the big attack on Ramadi?” Sheik Ahmad asked, pointing at the television.
“Er…no?” I replied, somewhat surprised by the question.
While not a hundred percent certain, I believe that Ahmad saw through my elaborate cover story. I also realized that our secret movement was not a secret anymore, which explained the truckloads of civilians moving out of town I witnessed earlier in the day. We spent that evening sitting on overstuffed couches, drinking orange sodas, chai tea and eating cellophane wrapped snacks that looked suspiciously like something from a Little Debbie’s box. After a few hours of pleasantries, it was time for us to head back to camp. The ride back was uneventful, but I still thought I had just wasted an evening. By the time I returned, Captain Lou Lancon and the men of Team Dealer had taken charge of Tam’eem.
The memorial service for Specialist Tribble occurred on the morning of 6 June in an antiseptic white room just off the main dining room of the mess hall. Bright florescent lighting augmented the sunlight pouring through windows onto rows of white folding chairs. Tribble’s remains were already flying back to his family in the States, having left on a “hero flight” two nights before. All we had to symbolize his presence was a bayoneted M4 rifle with a Kevlar helmet on top, planted muzzle-down into a two-foot-cubed wooden box filled with sand. Tribble’s dog tags hung from the pistol grip of the weapon and a grainy eight-and-one-half by eleven-inch picture of the fallen soldier standing on a three-foot high brown table beside the monument.
I have never liked attending memorial services. Before coming to Ramadi, I had never buried a soldier under my command—there had been no deadly training accidents, no traffic fatalities, or anything else. I understand the purpose of these ceremonies, and they do bring closure to a unit when a soldier dies, but they were always too emotional for me, even if I had never met the soldier. This was new ground for me, and that ground was hard.
The memorial services were all structured the same, yet each was uniquely different. Today Captain Artie Maxwell, the task force chaplain, said a few words to start the service, and then it was my turn to speak, where I told the crowd that Tribble died a hero’s death while serving his country, and reminding those of us left that we needed to honor his memory. Next Captain Lou Lancon, told us a little about the outstanding soldier that he was. After Lou spoke, a couple of Tribble’s NCOs came to the podium talked about the man himself. The lights dimmed and we watched a slide show with pictures of Tribble in Baumholder and from earlier in the deployment, either in training or mugging with his pals. Next, a soldier from the support battalion sang a gut-wrenching original song written in Tribble’s honor. First Sergeant David Shaw then stood at the far end of the front row and in his booming voice called the roll.
“Jones.”
“Here, first sergeant,” Jones replied in a firm voice.
“Smith.”
“Here, first sergeant.”
“Johnson.”
“Here, first sergeant.”
Then First Sergeant called out, “Tribble.”
Silence.
This time a little louder, “Specialist TRIBBLE.”
Silence.
Then, in Shaw’s firmest command voice, “SPECIALIST BRETT L. TRIBBLE.”
Still silence.
After a moment, the crack of M4 fire broke the silence, causing everyone in the room to flinch. The seven-man honor guard led by Sergeant First Class Roberts and composed of members of the PSD was poised just outside the room. Then, in unison, they fired two more salvos, completing the 21-gun salute befitting a hero’s falling.
After another brief beat of silence, a bugler slowly, somberly played Taps.
Artie said a final prayer to keep us safe in battle, then by row, the attendees center-faced and filed to the middle to pay our last respects. Command Sergeant Major Ramon Delgado and I walked to the rifle and photo. We knelt, said our prayers, stood, saluted, left a battalion coin, and walked towards the door. Command Sergeant Major Delgado stopped and stayed to talk with the troops as they filed out. I put on my Oakley sunglasses and kept walking; leaving the receiving line to Captain Lancon, First Sergeant Shaw, and the Sergeant Major. Grieving was for the soldiers in the unit, not for me. Once outside, I went around to the back of the mess hall where no one could see me, smoked a cigarette and cried. Once I composed myself, I returned to my office and took a nap. After each of the memorial ceremonies, I had a splitting headache and a nauseating feeling in my stomach that only a nap could make go away.
I then called Specialist Tribble’s parents. I would end up making a call like this eight times for the soldiers assigned to the task force. I did not call the parents of the nine soldiers attached to the task force we lost, thinking that would just confuse them by getting calls from two lieutenant colonels who said their son was in their unit. To me, this was the most difficult part of the command. Calling the parents of a young man whose life your country and his family entrusted to you, and who was now dead was an excruciating experience.
The response from all the families was the same. They inevitably thanked me for taking the time from my busy day to call. They would ask if we needed anything, and promised to send it right away. It seemed that all of these grieving parents had just sent a care package to their son. They made sure to tell me that when it arrived in the mail, it was all right if we opened it and shared the cookies with the guys in his platoon. No parent ever rebuked me. No parent ever blamed me for the death of his or her son. After each call, I would hang up and stare at the phone.
The fact that there were kind, compassionate people who thought of others at the time of their devastating personal tragedy helped me keep my faith in humanity.