“EVERYONE HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE MOUTH.”
CHAPTER 7: TOA
COLONEL MACFARLAND HELD AN OVERVIEW BRIEFING AT THE Ready First headquarters to present his campaign plan for the coming months in the afternoon of Tribble’s memorial service. The building itself was a typical broken-down, dirt-brown stucco Iraqi building. Camp Ramadi was a former Iraqi military camp, rumored to have housed POWs from the Iran-Iraq war. The Ready First conference room had once been an interior courtyard of the building, now roofed over with plywood. In the middle of the room stood a primitive wooden table built by what I imagined were good tankers, but not very good carpenters. A three-foot concrete overhang rimmed the walls of the conference room. As we sat and waited for the briefing to begin, we began the typical butt sniffing and backslapping between commanders and staff.
I knew very few of the twenty or so officers assembled in the room. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Walrath from Task Force Regular and I had taken command in Baumholder together, shared the train-up in Germany, bunked in the same five-man room in Kuwait with the other battalion commanders of 2/1 AD, and had gotten to know each other pretty well over the past year. I had met Ron Clark from Task Force Currahee once in Kuwait and spent a couple of days with him in March during our reconnaissance mission to Ramadi. Lieutenant Colonel V. J. Tedesco from Task Force Bandit and I had spent a week together at Fort Knox, Kentucky in the Armor Pre-Command Course fifteen months prior. I had never met Lieutenant Colonel Joe Harrington from 3rd Battalion, 2nd Artillery Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Schroter from the 501st Forward Support Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Allen Watson from the 16th Engineer Battalion or Lieutenant Colonel Steve Neary from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. Nor had I met any of the brigade staff officers. In the Army, things get done as much on personal relationships as they do by virtue of duty position, so it helps to know with whom you are dealing, and I knew very few of them.
I didn’t know Colonel MacFarland very well either. He had also attended the Armor Pre-Command Course at Fort Knox, but it never occurred to either of us that we would serve together in the future. He was a colonel taking brigade command and I was a lieutenant colonel taking battalion command, so we did not run in the same social circles. MacFarland was tall and lanky and looked like he could be one of my cousins back in Ireland. Introverted with a dry wit that was lost on some, he looked five years younger than I did, even though he was five years older. A native of Canajoharie, New York, he saw his options coming out of high school as becoming a dairy farmer or applying to West Point. His father was an insurance salesman and an armor officer in the National Guard, and his grandfather was a West Point graduate as well as a World War II veteran.188 After West Point, MacFarland commissioned as an Armor Officer and served in armor and cavalry assignments in Europe and the States. He was a veteran of Desert Storm as well as having deployed to Bosnia and Macedonia.
As we settled into the gray metal folding chairs surrounding the conference table, Colonel MacFarland began the briefing by telling us the MEF Commander had given him the mission to “Fix Ramadi but don’t make it like Fallujah.”
Someone said aloud and in a tone of disbelief, “That’s it? That’s the guidance?”
In my mind, the MEF Commander might as well have slapped Colonel MacFarland on the ass and said, “Go get ‘em tiger.”
Colonel MacFarland looked up, shot a glance of displeasure, shrugged his shoulders, and continued outlining his plan to take back Ramadi. Minutes into the briefing, six mortar rounds exploded in rapid succession, rattling the conference room. I always felt that leaders should not be first to run for cover when fired upon, but neither should they be the last. To my surprise, the briefing continued with Colonel MacFarland not missing a beat. I continued taking notes as if nothing had happened, wondering why no one was taking cover while covertly sliding my chair back ever so slightly against the wall and under the concrete overhang. The overhang did not provide the same protection as being under the table, but it was better than nothing in case another round of mortar fire landed. Minutes later, the conference room rattled again as counter-fire artillery from two 155 mm self-propelled howitzers attempted to kill the enemy mortar team.
MacFarland informed us that we would be moving off the FOB and constructing a series of company-sized combat outposts ringing Ramadi from west to east. Initially, Task Force Conqueror would be the main effort, first constructing a combat outpost (COP) to deny the enemy the access routes from the southwest of Ramadi and then building another COP in Tam’eem to secure the western approaches to the city. At the same time, Task Force Currahee and the 3/8 Marines would begin pushing out of their positions, constructing COPS to seal the northern and eastern approaches to the city, while Task Force Regular was to secure the tribal area north of the Euphrates River. Once the conditions were set, Task Force Bandit would attack into southern Ramadi, an area firmly under terrorist control for the past couple of years, and begin securing the city. Colonel MacFarland’s plan offered a dramatic and aggressive shift in tactics from what the 2/28th IN, or any other brigade in Iraq, was doing at the time.
MacFarland’s plan also called for the Ready First to retain control of a “swing force” of three maneuver companies and the engineers of Charlie Rock to rotate between the task forces so that he could surge the combat power required for construction of the combat outposts. By moving off the forward operating bases and into smaller COPs, the brigade could provide security to the population and isolate the terrorists. By switching the main effort between the task forces, Colonel MacFarland could keep the enemy from predicting the location of the brigade’s next major operation.
Task Force Conqueror was assuming responsibility for the cities of Tam’eem, 5 Kilo, the area around Al Anbar University and a number of other small towns and villages throughout the tribal region of Zangora. It was still an enormous area of operations, encompassing over two thousand square miles, roughly the size of Delaware. It extended in theory from the Saudi Arabia/Iraqi border in the south to Lake Thar-Thar in the north, to somewhere east of the city of Hit, though I have no idea because I never went out there. With the team we had assembled, I felt it was manageable. As the meeting was ending, a staff officer walked in and gave Colonel MacFarland a note that the mortar attack minutes earlier killed two soldiers from the 46th Engineer Battalion, Corporal Andy Anderson189 and Sergeant Carlos Pernell,190 and wounded three others. MacFarland asked everyone to say a prayer, and after a moment, we all rose in unison, saluted while sounding off with “Ready First,” and went back to work.
As Chuck Bergman and I walked out of the brigade headquarters, we could see the smoldering remnants of the building that only minutes earlier Parnell and Anderson had been working on. I was starting to understand what exactly Mark Lovejoy was trying to tell me about the dangers of Ramadi. Every place in the city was dangerous, even the middle of the camp.
We walked back to the Conqueror TOC and met with the staff, relaying to them what Colonel MacFarland had laid out and what I wanted them to do to get ready to execute our upcoming operations before officially assuming responsibility in the morning. Although it would still be another week until the Ready First completed its RIP with the 2/28th ID, I knew that Colonel MacFarland wanted to start offensive operations as soon as the transition was complete. There remained a mountain of administrative work to complete before we took over. Although I had a great staff, I wanted to do one final check with them while I had still the time.
I also wanted to walk around the Task Force Conqueror area to see for myself how the soldiers were living. Earlier I had demanded that all the soldiers in the task force live in buildings with concrete roofs. Other units had soldiers living in tents and plywood Seahuts, and I may have had too much faith in the Iraqi building code, but I knew that mortar rounds could easily penetrate a tin roof, a canvas tent, or a plywood one. Initially, we had only one female in Task Force Conqueror, a mechanic attached to us from the forward support battalion, so assigning living space was easy. Most of the sleeping areas were 20-foot by 40-foot open bays where each soldier over time managed to appropriate either plywood or camouflage netting to carve out a cocoon of privacy. We packed the soldiers into the buildings, but it was better cramped than killed by mortar fire. I was always worried about a fire sweeping through the barracks, but we had plenty fire extinguishers and a group of men whom I trusted daily with life and death decisions, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and trusted they would not burn themselves up.
The nicest feature of Camp Ramadi was the row of white single-wide trailers equipped with porcelain toilets and hot showers. These alone made living on the camp bearable. There was a small PX selling everything from candy bars to flat screen color televisions. As at Camp Buehring, a soldier could pre-order a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle that would be waiting for him upon his return to the States. There was a barbershop, a Haji mart that sold bootlegged DVDs, ”Cuban” cigars and Arab trinkets, and Morale Welfare and Recreation facilities that provided free internet access, phone banks, a fully equipped gym, and a laundry that had your clothes back clean and folded in three days. As a point of reference, during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the laundry had been a trash bag and a five-gallon water can on the side of your vehicle. Aside from the daily mortar attacks and the choking dust, life on Camp Ramadi was not bad—it was certainly better than living off a combat vehicle during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.
Each of the company teams had a day room with couches and a big screen TV. There were ten stations of the Armed Forces Television Network piped into all of the buildings, so the soldiers could watch sports from the States, or last season’s television shows. The companies set up a small bar that sold snacks, near beers and sodas. Usually, the guy with whom no one felt safe going on patrol operated it. In addition, the mess hall was serving four meals a day.
Iraq, like Kuwait, Afghanistan, and the rest of theater, abided by General Order 1, which was a five-page list of restricted activities that included drinking alcohol, gambling, and possessing pornography.191 This is in contrast to old war movies where a couple of Joes were setting up a moonshine still, and another bunch of guys shooting craps. Those days were long gone. This was the same set of rules from Desert Storm, but very different from the height of the Cold War when the Army allowed two beers at lunch and strippers performed in the officers’ club.
Figure 9. A view of Camp Ramadi. In the foreground is a unit motorpool. The single story wood roofed buildings are Seahuts, and in the multi-storied building in background are barracks. Click on the photo for bonus features.
The old days may have been a bit too wild, but the new restrictions simply ignored human nature. Trying to ensure that every soldier abstained from booze, watching porn, or participating in a March Madness pool was a lot of work. While I am sure that some soldiers were getting booze in the mail, we did not have one incident of a soldier being drunk, on duty or off, or of using drugs during the deployment. As for the porn, I interpreted the Army’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy to include pornography. As long as it was out of sight, I was not about to go looking for it. With that, my work getting the soldiers situated was complete. Command Sergeant Major Delgado and the first sergeants would have to figure it out from here.
I went to sleep about 0200 hours that night. Within an hour, the runner from the TOC was again pounding on my door. The terrorists had launched another catastrophic attack on Team Dealer in Tam’eem. Fifteen artillery rounds detonated directly below a Humvee, instantly killing First Lieutenant Scott Love and Private First Class Nick Crombie. The men of Team Dealer reacted immediately to the blast, evacuating the casualties and securing the site. Sergeant Jason Welsh and Specialist Gilberto Correz-Ruiz were evacuated to Charlie Med and then onto Balad. The fifth passenger in the vehicle, a locally contracted Iraqi translator, or “terp,” walked away unscratched and upon returning to Camp Ramadi, immediately quit along with his brother.
First Lieutenant Scott Love was a graduate of Florida State University with a degree in film production, enlisting in the Army in 1999 as an Arabic linguist before attending officer candidate school. Everyone who met Scott instantly took a liking to him. In my mind, he was the best platoon leader in the task force.192 Private First Class Nick Crombie was a nineteen-year-old medic who had joined us in Kuwait and immediately gained the respect of the non-commissioned officers in the medic platoon as well as the Task Force Conqueror Surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel John Farr. Ten minutes after meeting Crombie, Dr. John Farr was in my office telling me that Crombie needed to go to medical school on the Army’s dime once we got back.193
Mark Lovejoy once told me you never lose your slackers. At the time, I thought he was just overly sentimental for the losses his unit suffered. With the loss of Tribble, Love and Crombie, once again Mark’s words proved prophetic.
We sent the Recovery QRF to bring back the destroyed Humvee, unwilling to give the enemy a propaganda victory by letting them take photos or videos of damaged U.S. equipment. The terrorists were very good at issuing press releases complete with video of masked men jumping up and down on destroyed American vehicles, and the Western media was more than willing to broadcast the terrorists’ public relations campaign in prime time as further evidence of the failings of the U.S. military in Iraq.
Although the blast site was less than a half-mile away from the front gate of Camp Ramadi as the crow flies, Tam’eem had no real landmarks, street signs or house numbers. We were also limited on the routes we could take due to the ever-present danger from IEDs. Reading a 1:50,000-scale military map in the countryside is a simple skill to learn and with a little practice, you can become an expert rather quickly. Reading a military map in a city is difficult no matter how experienced you are. The recovery quick reaction force became lost while attempting to link up with the Team Dealer patrol. We had no idea if there were more IEDs planted in that area, or if the attack on the Team Dealer patrol was a precursor to a coordinated attack on all of our patrols. An F-16 responding to our initial Troops in Contact call offered to turn on an infrared spotlight to guide the convoy to the blast site. After a few frantic moments, they found their way to the scene and the recovery team brought the destroyed vehicle back to Camp Ramadi.
As we formed up for the Transfer of Authority ceremony at 0700 hours on the morning of 7 June, I was not nearly as optimistic as I had been 48 hours earlier. We had three soldiers dead, six very seriously injured and two more wounded in action before our even taking over. Compounding our problems, we no longer had enough terps for all the platoons, so we could not speak directly with the locals at a time when we were leading the brigade into what we fully expected to be a pivotal battle in the war.
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Following the somber Transfer of Authority ceremony, my staff and I shuffled back to our offices, while Mark Lovejoy and his men moved to await their helicopter ride for their well-deserved trip back to the States. They had fought valiantly for the past year and had made some progress, but the wear and tear of combat had taken its toll, and they were understandably eager to go home. For us, this was not a time for celebration. Captain John Hiltz and First Lieutenant Toby Watson, both of Charlie Rock, were waiting outside my office to brief me on why the suicide bomber’s attack on ECP 3 was so successful.
Captain Hiltz knew as well as anyone what it took to defend a static site, having spent a majority of the previous deployment assessing the effects of suicide bomber attacks in the Green Zone.194 To my untrained eye, it seemed the position should have been able to withstand the blast, but the engineers determined that the Texas barriers surrounding the structure were improperly positioned, allowing the explosion’s fireball to jump over the walls and ignite the camouflage netting, fueling the fire that burned the position to the ground. Based on that troubling information, John and Toby assessed all of our ten static positions, determining that everyone needed reinforcing to keep soldiers safe.
Not the news I needed to hear.
“When do you want them rebuilt by?” Toby asked.
Without thinking, I said what came to my mind, “Before the next suicide bomber.”
Toby’s shoulders sank ever so slightly. Those five words had just put thousands of man-hours of work on the backs of the engineer platoon. I could also see that both officers understood the situation and knew the risk for everyone in the task force. Hiltz straightened up, saluted, said, “Conquer or Die!” and they both moved out.
Toby Watson, like all of the platoon leaders in the task force, was on his first tour in Iraq. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, as a teen when his mother accepted a position as a Professor of Special Education at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Graduating from Lincoln Southeast High school and heading to the University of Richmond on a baseball scholarship, Toby did not intend to join the Army. After a couple of years and a couple of injuries, however, his baseball career faltered. He saw ROTC as a way to pay for college and became part of a team, signing his contract on 10 September 2001. A couple of days later, the ROTC cadre gave him the opportunity to back out of his commitment in light of the 9/11 attacks. Watson knew the nation was at war and decided to stay with it. A self-described terrible cadet, he barely skated by until one of the ROTC captains called him in and told him to straighten up, or he would end up flipping burgers at McDonalds. Toby heeded the warning and started to apply himself in school and ROTC.195
After the “goat rope” (a military term for a terrible situation—see SNAFU) involving the Recovery QRF reaching the blast site the previous evening, we held a quick after action review of what happened. This review is a formalized process where participants involved in a training exercise or a combat mission openly discuss what went well to sustain the positive aspects of the operation, and identify what went wrong to prevent repeating mistakes. The Army has been using this process for years, and most soldiers are very candid during these sessions. As in most operations, there was not a single event, but a combination of factors contributing to the QRF getting lost the previous evening. These included miscommunication about how many 1-172nd AR personnel would accompany the quick reaction force for the mission, a shortage of Blue Force Trackers (a military version of a slick GPS) to aid the navigation of the patrol vehicles making the recovery mission, and a lack of familiarity with the terrain by the personnel on the quick reaction force.
Assigning fixes to the problem was relatively easy. The safety net provided by the 1-172nd AR was now gone, and it was completely on us to man the QRF. Problem solved. Moving the Blue Force Trackers to meet the equipment shortfall, then training the operators how to use them before they went to bed that night was also easy enough. Familiarizing to the terrain was the only hard one. Sending anyone out of the gate was inherently dangerous, especially when it involved dispatching medics and mechanics on a reconnaissance mission. By now, it was painfully clear that no one would get a free pass, even to support troops orientating to the terrain. On the other hand, I could not allow a repeat of the previous night’s fiasco. I ordered that all four quick reaction forces re-orient themselves to the terrain in Tam’eem and Zangora. I expected some contact, but I figured at worse one of the patrols would receive small arms fire. Chuck Bergman developed a plan to conduct familiarization patrols on the major routes throughout AO Conqueror and we sent them out.
Every patrol hit an IED. Every single one.
Luckily, there were no serious injuries in the attacks, but a couple of vehicles suffered severe damage, and the lone female in the task force was among the first to receive her combat action badge. The enemy wanted to punch us in the face at the start of the deployment in order to get us to either overreact or hunker down on the FOB and become risk adverse, or both.
I quickly realized I needed a system to mitigate the risk for every patrol leaving the gate, so I required the members of each patrol to conduct a Composite Risk Assessment, which was an assessment of both the safety and tactical risk to the unit. To me, it was invaluable in making leaders and soldiers appreciate what could kill them, mainly IEDs, snipers, and small arms fire. To mitigate the risk to soldiers, we had the maintenance platoon working around the clock welding frames for bulletproof glass around the turrets of the Humvees to limit the gunners’ exposure to small arms and sniper fire. Our task force Electronic Warfare Officer, Lieutenant Mathias Vorachek, a brilliant Navy nuclear engineer—whose technical explanations I frankly hardly understood—ensured our counter-IED jamming systems were operational, and personally did a complete investigation of every IED attack. We even added additional unauthorized armor plating to the bottom of the Bradleys to give the crew more protection from deep buried IEDs. We implemented every technical solution we could think of trying to protect soldiers, but in the end, the only way to keep soldiers safe from IEDs is to get the locals to quit planting them.
It was easy to trust my U.S. team commanders from Kuwait to accomplish any mission assigned since they had proven themselves repeatedly in training. Credibility is like a bank account, and they had a large amount saved up. For the two new company/teams, I had to make a leap of faith. I did not know the captains personally, but their task force commanders said they were effective commanders, so that was good enough for me. I also felt they did not need me following their patrols in sector acting as a super-platoon leader. Leaders at all levels complain about being micro-managed from their higher headquarters, until they do it to their subordinates when of course they are just “checking on the troops.”
Trusting the Iraqi security forces required an even greater leap of faith, one I was not ready to make. I needed to spend some time with them figuring out the depths of their problems, learning what we could do to help before we got down to business when the Ready First took charge the next week. The following morning I dedicated my attention to the Iraqi security forces.
To put it succinctly, the Iraqi police were in horrible shape all across Iraq and especially in Ramadi. Despite Ambassador Zalmay Khalil declaring 2006 as the “Year of the Iraqi Police” in December 2005,196 there were only two active police stations in Ramadi: the al Horea police station in 5 Kilo and the main police station located in central Ramadi. Between the two stations, there were only two-hundred police officers total reporting for duty in a city of over four-hundred-thousand people.
The al Horea police station was a well-defended compound nestled in a residential neighborhood on the eastern end of 5 Kilo. I spoke at length with the station chief, Lieutenant Colonel Fallah, and the American military police lieutenant and his platoon serving as the police advisor team training the Iraqis. Unlike the Iraqi army advisors under Kris Stillings, we did not have a good relationship with the MP platoon and had zero operational control over them.
The few Iraqi police officers reporting for duty were in uniform and looked professional enough, although I never saw more than twenty of them at the same time. As a rule, the Iraqi police only left the police station after much prompting from the advisor team, wearing black ski masks in the blistering heat to hide their identities. I found this strange at first, thinking they must be a bunch of cowards.
Lieutenant Colonel Fallah came across as a professional officer who wanted to do a good job. He was a probably only a few years older than me, but the creases of a hard life showed on his face. From outward appearances, the police station seemed fine. The police officers were well equipped and appeared to be paying attention in training. The problem was they were not accomplishing anything. As our four-vehicle patrol left the al Horea station, I remember thinking that the police were not in that bad of shape; they just needed a whole lot more of them before they would be of any help in securing Ramadi.
The Iraqi army battalion at checkpoint 293 was only slightly better off than the Iraqi police station. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa, and most of his officers were Sunnis who had been professional soldiers in the Iraqi army during Saddam’s régime. The soldiers of the battalion were predominately Shias from Baghdad who enlisted into the new Iraqi army shortly after the fall of Saddam. I personally never witnessed any sectarian tension between the two groups, which gave me hope for the future of Iraq. They seemed to get along all right, although the occasional picture of Madhi Army leader and Shia cleric (and ticking time bomb) Muqtada al-Sadr in the Iraqi soldiers’ living areas always gave me the creeps.
Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa was trying to make his battalion an effective combat unit, but his biggest challenge was the unit’s crippling absent-without-leave (AWOL) problem. Overall, they only had 300 of the 851 personnel authorized on a good day. The same Iraqi army company operating out of ECP 3 during the 4 June suicide bombing had endured an even more devastating attack at OP 293 a month prior. Due to casualties and AWOLs, this particular company had shrunk to eighteen soldiers present for duty of the one hundred seventy authorized.
Figure 10. The Iraqi Police are preparing to head out on patrol from OP 293 with the Police Advisor team members. The Iraqis are covering their faces in sweltering heat to hide their identities to protect their families. Click on the photo for bonus features.
There was not one specific cause for Iraqi soldiers going AWOL. Partly it was the result of daily exposure to the extreme violence in Ramadi. Partly it was the men’s horrible living conditions and lack of resources such as consistent pay or food. Partly it was because there were no repercussions for going AWOL—no one was going to arrest an absent Iraqi soldier and send him back to his unit. Finally, they had to endure a savage murder and intimidation campaign that threatened them in Ramadi and every time they went home on leave. In early June 2006, a Shia death squad beheaded one of the Iraqi company first sergeants in front of his family while he was on leave at his home in Baghdad. This particular murder had a chilling effect on all the Iraqi soldiers, further fueling the AWOL problem.
Compounding the personnel problem was the Iraqi army’s leave policy. The policy was simple, unchangeable and infuriating. An Iraqi soldier spent three weeks on duty and then, by the company, had one week off. The Iraqi banking system was in shambles, and there was no such thing as direct deposit. The soldiers’ pay came in the form of a wad of cash, and they needed the time off to return home and give their family the money. No matter the operational need, the Iraqis were going on leave when the time came. This meant one of the four infantry companies in the Iraqi army battalion was on leave at any given time. The Iraqi soldiers took their money and headed to Baghdad to spend a week with their families (or, for all I knew, their Mahdi Army death squad).
It was common knowledge that the Iraqi army had problems paying its soldiers. While conspiracy theories abounded on the reasons for this situation, the bottom line was that development of a logistical system for the Iraqi army lagged far behind the development of combat forces. The focus at the highest levels of the U.S. and the Iraqi army was getting Iraqi infantry soldiers into the fight. The rest of the skills needed to run an army would catch up later.
I am certain that the decision to build the Iraqi infantry battalions first and allow the logistics systems to catch up was proposed on a PowerPoint slide showcasing fonts beautiful enough to make Johannes Guttenberg himself blush, adorned with colors from the PowerPoint custom tab that only the boldest of strategic planners in Baghdad dared to use. On the ground, though, the plan made no sense. The Iraqi army depended completely on the Coalition for logistics, hindering its development as an effective fighting force and fueling the AWOL problem. It was difficult for Iraqi army leaders to take ownership of the situation when they relied on the Coalition to provide them with almost everything. Whether it was for economic or idealistic reasons, Iraqi men had joined the Iraqi army, and we were making it easy for them to walk away.
The Coalition built OP 293 to interdict the seemingly endless supply of arms and ammunition flowing from Syria, fueling the violence throughout Anbar and in Baghdad. The checkpoint looked like a highway toll station in the States, but instead of a Department of Transportation office building sat an Iraqi army combat outpost surrounded by concrete barriers. The OP had three inspection lanes for automobiles and trucks, and an inspection area for dump truck loads. Due to the Iraqi army personnel shortages, the vehicle inspection checkpoint was only open a few hours a day. The remainder of the time, vehicles could freely pass without inspection. During the limited hours the checkpoint was open, there were plenty of side roads allowing smugglers an easy bypass. To the best of my knowledge, we never found anything during the vehicle inspections, but they must have been having some effect since Al Qaeda attacked OP 293 with suicide bombers on a monthly basis. During Kris Stillings’ RIP into Ramadi, a mortar attack preceded a seven-ton dump truck crashing through the wall of OP 293. Marine Captain Brian Letendre197 and Army Sergeant Joseph Proctor198 sprang into action, running toward the vehicle, firing their M4s; attempting to kill the suicide bomber before he could detonate his payload. Tragically, the driver was able to hit the switch, killing both men instantly, and very seriously injuring Captain Wayland White. Oddly, these attacks would quickly become one of our measures of an outpost’s effectiveness: Was the enemy making a concerted effort to blow it up because it viewed the outpost as a threat?
While its tactical significance was always a bit of a mystery to me, what OP 293 provided was an excellent jumping off point for the Iraqi army’s three-times-daily dismounted patrols into 5 Kilo. The plan was for the Iraqi army to have one company on leave, one training in Camp Ramadi, one conducting tactical operations in southern Tam’eem out of ECP 3, and one conducting tactical operations out of OP 293. The companies rotated on a weekly basis, allowing the Iraqi battalion to conduct offensive operations while simultaneously making each unit better through additional training. I saw a silver lining to the destruction of ECP 3, thinking that we would have even more Iraqis to push into 5 Kilo and possibly even into Tam’eem.
When I arrived at OP 293, it was in terrible shape. There was trash piled everywhere and only a rudimentary concrete patch over the ten-foot hole the dump truck created a month earlier. Iraqi soldiers were half-naked, sleeping on broken cots in 110-degree heat, under a twenty-foot high desert shade. Months of mortar attacks allowed rays of light to stream through baseball-sized holes in the roof. The American advisors had converted a 20-foot shipping containers into a TOC, complete with maps and FM radios, and another into a sleeping area. Both were hardwired with electricity provided by a 40-kilowatt generator, air conditioned, and protected from indirect fire by 18-inches of sandbags. It was not palatial living, but was much nicer than anything I lived in during Desert Shield or Desert Storm, and a hell of a lot better than how the Iraqis lived 50-feet away.
What struck me were the human feces that were everywhere. I mean everywhere.
I grabbed one of the NCOs from the advisor team, asking, “Sarge, why is there shit all over the place?”
“Sir, they just shit everywhere. I keep getting on their NCOs and officers to get them to knock it off, but they don’t do anything about it. They got no standards,” he replied.
This seemed like kind of strange answer to me. I knew from talking to my friends who had previously deployed to Iraq that there were distinct cultural differences that existed when it came to going to the bathroom, but no culture could condone just shitting on the ground, not even the Iraqis.
“Sarge, where are they supposed to shit?” I asked.
“What?” he replied, apparently surprised by the question.
“Where’s the Iraqi latrine? Where the hell are they supposed to poop at?” I asked.
“The fuck, sir?” he replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“Why are they living under a desert shade and not in buildings or shipping vans like ya’ll?” I asked.
“Regs sir, we’ve been trying to get them a decent place to live, but you can’t spend U.S. money on the Iraqi army. They got different kinds of money for that,” he replied.
“Different kinds of money” is the answer bureaucrats at a higher headquarters give in order to get rid of a soldier who is trying to do his job. Sadly, even in a war zone, bureaucrats find their way in, a fact best demonstrated by the wearing of the yellow reflective belts on forward operating bases in Baghdad.
Lighting my cigar and shaking my head, I asked rhetorically, “Hell man, they’re not getting paid, sweating their asses off out in the heat when they’re not getting shot at, and don’t have a decent place to shit. How long do you think our guys would stick around if we were living like this?”
“Ya’ gotta point, sir. You got a point,” he replied, and then looked blankly at me to make sure I understood that it was my problem to fix, not his.
Well played on his part. Well played.
A few minutes later, the front steel gate of the position slid back, allowing Colonel MacFarland and his five-vehicle security detail entry into the compound. I was still trying to get a read on Colonel MacFarland. He struck me as someone who would be great to drink a beer with, but now was not time or place for social pleasantries or beer for that matter. We both had our hands full with trying to assume responsibility for an extremely dangerous area.
It is never a good thing when your boss shows up five minutes after you realize you are in a terrible situation, especially in combat. Colonel MacFarland offered his condolences again for the loss of Scott Love and Nick Crombie. I am almost certain that he had never met either Scott Love or Nick Crombie, but it was evident that he deeply felt the loss of two soldiers under his command.
My experiences in Kuwait conditioned me to justify the smallest of actions to my brigade commander. I began giving Colonel MacFarland a detailed briefing on my task force’s tactical laydown. He quickly figured out what I was doing, stopping me after thirty seconds.
“Tony, I don’t know you, but the Army has made you a battalion commander, so you have my unwavering trust. Do what you need to do, tell me when you need help, but other than that, command your task force. You do not have to tell me your every move. I have already commanded a battalion and don’t want to command yours. I have my own set of problems.”
His comments caught me flat-footed. In five sentences, Colonel MacFarland had displayed more combat leadership than I had experienced from my battalion commander in Desert Storm, or my brigade commander during the previous six months in Kuwait combined. Here was a senior Army officer who trusted his subordinates at face value. It was a refreshing change.
Colonel MacFarland proceeded to tell me that the brigade plan had changed when an airstrike killed Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, near Baghdad the day prior. MacFarland decided to exploit the loss of Al Qaeda leadership and attack directly into Ramadi without waiting for us to secure the western side of the city. Task Force Conqueror would revert to an Economy of Force199 mission, meaning that we were losing two company teams and Charlie Rock, nearly two-thirds of our combat power, while keeping the same area of operations. He told me to get the three companies over to the Bandits as soon as possible.
“Hold what you got. Do what you can,” MacFarland told me. To execute his plan, Task Force Conqueror needed to secure Tam’eem, 5 Kilo, and Zangora. His expectations for us accomplishing any more than that with the forces we had, had not been not very high. I completely understood his guidance, but I knew immediately that this was not going to be a good deal for the task force. I attempted to explain that I needed to hold onto more of my combat forces, but I quickly saw that argument was going nowhere. Not wanting to be a labeled a sniveler on the first day, I gave it up. Colonel MacFarland told me he would leave us the two companies that we trained with in Kuwait, as well as Lieutenant Toby Watson’s engineer platoon, but that was the best he could do.
I saluted, told Colonel MacFarland “Conquer or Die!” and moved out.