“IF YOU ARE GOING THROUGH HELL, KEEP GOING!”

– Winston Churchill –

CHAPTER 9: GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE

AS I MOVED THROUGHOUT THE SECTOR OVER THE COMING days, I intermittently saw Lieutenant Toby Watson and his platoon slinging concrete barriers hoisted from a chain on a bucket loader or pushing dirt with bulldozers and bobcats. After three days, he came into my office.

“Done,” he said.

“What?” I asked, adding, “Toby, you look like hell.”

“Thank you, sir. And, done. Every position is rebuilt, and they can take a shitstorm,” he replied.

I do not have an engineering background, but I was pretty sure that a shitstorm was a very big blast.

“How in the hell did you get it done so fast? Have you slept?” I demanded.

“Sir, we’re good. The guys were amazing,” Toby assured me, brushing aside my question. I took that to mean no one in his platoon had slept more than four hours lately.

“Great job, Toby! You and the boys outdid yourselves. Get cleaned up and get some sleep. Tell me who needs a medal or a battalion coin,” I directed.

“Roger, sir, will do, once we secure OP Thumper for the next eight,” he replied and took off. Toby and his men had accomplished the re-engineering effort not only in record time but also in addition to their regularly assigned mission of securing OP Thumper underneath a bridge crossing the Euphrates River.

Not only had we received a change of mission, but we also had a change in leadership in the task force as well. Major Chuck Bergman moved up and became the XO when Major Dave Raugh arrived in early June to serve as the operations officer. Dave had spent the previous six months in Baghdad as a planner on the MNC-I staff and was in the unenviable position of joining a unit that had been together for over a year, and had been in heavy contact for the past three weeks. Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Dave followed his brother and sister to West Point, where he graduated with a degree in environmental science and systems engineering in 1993.203 Dave was a Command and General Staff College graduate as well as a graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies (two schools I was never selected to attend). He stepped right into the position and his contributions were evident in hours.

On 14 June 2006, the Ready First assumed responsibility for Ramadi from the 2/28th IN and immediately prepared for an offensive to take the city back from the AIF, with Colonel MacFarland assembling a force of over fifty-five-hundred soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines²⁰⁴ for the pivotal battle in the war. Under the cover of darkness on the night on 17 June, SEAL snipers and the Task Force Bandit mortar platoon infiltrated down the Euphrates Canal and set up positions to overwatch the largest operation into southern Ramadi in years. The Bandits launched out of the shell of ECP 3, now rebuilt and renamed COP Remagen. Charlie Rock and the 54th Engineers cleared the abandoned railroad bridge while Team Warrior, Bravo Company 1-36 Infantry, commanded by Captain Mike McCusker, and an Iraqi tank company following close behind. The Bandits attacked aggressively, with tanks and Bradleys racing over the bridge before the terrorists could react to this trespass into their territory. Quickly the Warriors seized a foothold less than a mile into the southwest corner of the city and began establishing COP Iron.

Simultaneously, Team Bulldog, Bravo Company 1-37 Armor, commanded by Captain Mike Bajema, attacked out of Camp Corregidor, swiftly advancing to a blocking position on the southeastern corner of town, and began establishing COP Spear. Before the enemy knew what was happening, two stout combat outposts took shape right in the middle of enemy held neighborhoods.²⁰⁵

Colonel MacFarland was wasting no time in implementing his strategy to isolate the heart of the city and take the fight to the enemy. Combat Outposts Iron and Spear cut off enemy infiltration routes from the south and immediately began providing security to the residents in a part of town that had been under Al Qaeda control for years. In the following days, Team Cobra, Charlie Company 1-37 AR assumed responsibility for COP Spear, freeing up the Bulldogs’ armored punch for the next phase of the operation. The initial push into Ramadi came at a cost, with Corporal Christopher Leon206 of the 2nd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company killed by an enemy sniper on 20 July while pulling security on the rooftop of COP Iron. In the following two days, Lance Corporal Nicholas Whyte,²⁰⁷ and Corporal Riley E. Baker, ²⁰⁸ both of Weapons Company, 3/8 Marines were killed in central Ramadi.

On 26 June, the Currahees attacked out of Camp Corregidor and established COP Eagles Nest in the Maalab district near the Soccer Stadium, securing the eastern approaches to the city. Captain Bajema and his Bulldogs, having re-armed and re-fitted, attacked directly out of Camp Ramadi. Accompanied by an Iraqi tank company, they swiftly moved to secure the northern flank of COP Iron by constructing COP Falcon to control the key intersections of the western part of the city.²⁰⁹ This attack also came at a cost, with Corporal Terry M. Lisk²¹⁰ of Task Force Bandit killed by mortar fire at COP Falcon²¹¹ and injuring Private First Class Joshua Revak. The Bandits, the Currahees, and 3/8 Marines were now doing the heavy lifting in taking back the center of the city while the Regulars and the Conquerors fought their way through the northern and western approaches to Ramadi.

Accepting our “economy of force” role, but more than ready to get into the fight, the Conquerors settled into our battle rhythm. In addition to operating ten static checkpoints, we patrolled around the clock and conducted targeted raids, trying to operate with as much of a routine as possible in a combat zone. Soldiers knew the patrol schedule, and the guard duty roster, and a regular series of meetings within the task force and with the Ready First began.

Tam’eem, in particular, remained a hotbed of terrorist activity. Team Dealer held a nightly patrol meeting attended by all the leaders in the company. Lieutenant Kellen Blythe, the company fire-support officer, ran the company operations center with Staff Sergeant Michael Beaulieu, freeing up the executive officer, First Lieutenant David Powell, and first sergeant to conduct their duties. We augmented the companies with extra intelligence personnel from our parent brigade back in Kuwait. Although most of these personnel were Serbian linguists, they had received some cross training, had top-secret security clearances, and, more importantly, were smarter than hell. Sergeant Frank Linville was the intelligence sergeant for Team Dealer and worked, at least, eighteen-hour days for the entire deployment. No matter what time of the day or night I went into the Dealer command post, Linville was at his post.

The Dealers maintained a grueling pace. Each platoon pulled an eight-hour shift in sector every day. The platoon coming off shift had a company level “ready platoon” mission for the next four hours, prepared to go back out within 20 minutes in case the platoon currently patrolling in Tam’eem had a problem. Then they had eight hours off until they assumed the ready platoon mission again, four hours before going back out on patrol. Team Dealer’s nightly patrol meetings began paying dividends immediately. Platoon leaders and platoon sergeants were not briefing Captain Lancon; they were briefing each other. The junior leaders were comparing notes and recommending where the next operation would take place. The invaluable cross talk and sharing of information got the leaders and soldiers thinking strategically.212

At the task force-level, every platoon submitted a patrol report and briefed it to the Intelligence section. Lieutenant Charles Patterson was the Battlefield Intelligence Collection Officer (BIC) responsible for making sense of these reports and synthesizing them into a coherent picture of what was occurring in AO Conqueror. Patterson was born in New York City, moving to Greenville, NC when he was five years old. He credits his dad for steering him to join the military. After graduating from Wade Hampton High School in Greenville, in 2000 with his pick of colleges, Charles enrolled in the University of Michigan on an ROTC scholarship. Upon commissioning, he became an intelligence officer, and in Ramadi, he worked seemingly around the clock in the TOC, which by Army tradition is a soul-sucking place. He always kept his sense of humor and provided great insights into the evolving situation in Ramadi. Charles later told me that what struck him the most were the changes in the platoon leaders over the course of the deployment. At the start, they were regular happy-go-lucky lieutenants. By the end, they had transformed into battle-hardened combat leaders.²¹³

All Army headquarters hold meetings to update the commander. Some are functional; most are just theater. Over my years as an officer, the command and staff meeting became a BUB (battle update brief), then a CUB (Commander’s Update Brief), and then a BUA (Battle Update Assessment). No matter how the name changed, they all had the same purpose: getting the commander the information he needs to make decisions. Initially I had a daily battle update brief from the staff, but eventually, I started to wonder why. Was it simply because that is what commanders did? I came to realize the meetings were wasting my time and, more importantly, wasting my staff’s time, taking them away from work that might help win the war. For example, I loved my chaplain, Captain Artie Maxwell, but I realized I did not have to hear from him seven days a week. I needed to hear from him when there was a problem, or if he thought a soldier was struggling emotionally, but I needed these updates in private and not in front of the entire staff. It was the same with the signal officer, the logistics officer, and pretty much all of the staff. After a couple of months, I had my operations sergeant brief me when I woke up or was away from the operations center for an extended period and then I would huddle with my operations officer and my XO, to make sure we were in sync. We finally settled on a single weekly meeting with all the staff.

I never figured out the best format and timing for meetings. The staff officers tended to creep back into their garrison comfort zones: wake up early, exercise, eat breakfast, go to work, have a couple of meetings, eat lunch, work some more, eat dinner, work some more, go back to their room to play video games, watch movies, or else go back to the gym. This was the routine for six days a week. On Sundays, we would take a down day to do laundry, go to church, or just kick back and relax. The Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi population, in general, had a different schedule based on getting out of the heat of the day. They got up early, did whatever they had to do, took a nap in the afternoon, and then went back to work at night when it cooled off. Fridays and Saturdays were days off for the Iraqis. I spent hours most nights talking with the sheiks, often going to sleep at 0300, and then getting up for a 0800 meeting. That had to stop. The hours of the mess hall had to stop driving the meeting schedule.

I have always felt there is an inverse relationship between how many meetings a headquarters holds, and how much it produces. The Ready First held very few meetings. A bi-weekly planning meeting on Thursday nights and a weekly Monday morning voice over internet protocol (VOIP) commanders call was all that I was required to attend. For the commander’s call, I took great joy in sitting in my office with my feet up on the desk, wearing my tee shirt and boxers, drinking coffee, and smoking a cigar. Other than that, Colonel MacFarland left his subordinate commanders alone. The Ready First staff huddled throughout the week, with the most important being the nightly operations synchronization discussions conducted over the secret internet network, but even these were short because everyone was just too busy.

After one of the battle update briefs in late-June, Kris Stillings announced that the families of the two Iraqi officers that died in the ECP 3 suicide bombing attack would not get a pension or a death benefit from the Iraqi government. Their families were just out of luck. Kris asked anyone who wanted to help the Iraqi families to kick in a couple of bucks. He set his hat by the door and walked away. Each of the attendees passed by and threw in a wad of cash, enough that Kris collected over $2,000 that morning. I was amazed at the generosity and collective character of the men working for me.

Team Dealer was going door to door attempting to keep the enemy off balance. In order to move safely through Tam’eem, patrols would bound house to house. It was the safest way to move and allowed interaction with the local population. The locals were unwilling to talk to Coalition forces on the street out of fear of retribution, but in the safety of their homes, they had deniability to the charge of collaborating. Usually, they would give us the lowdown on what was going on in the neighborhood.

Placing an emphasis on limiting violence during training is one thing, but putting it into effect was another. It is a simple task for a battalion commander to design a training plan or issue orders from the safety of his office, but not so much for the nineteen-year-old Joe out walking patrol on a narrow street where the enemy may be hiding around the next corner or on the next rooftop. They were even harder for the 24-year-old squad leaders or the twenty-two-year-old lieutenants to implement and explain to their soldiers, with an unseen enemy trying to kill them every minute of every day. Captain Lou Lancon and First Sergeant David Shaw did a magnificent job of maintaining order and discipline in a unit that was losing its mid-leadership on an almost daily basis. Starting in Germany, Lancon and Shaw ensured that their soldiers understood the Rules of Engagement, putting them into practical terms the troops understood—which was no small feat. The American soldier has and will maintain the right of self-defense, and can use deadly force when there is an imminent threat to his personal safety. This required some keen, split-second judgment in a place like Tam’eem. Personally, I felt an imminent threat any time I entered the place. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I had to fight the impulse to slide the selector switch on my M4 off safe, past semi and on to burst. As First Sergeant Shaw and Captain Lancon asked the soldiers, “Are you threatened, or are you just scared?”

The Dealers had a “truth first” policy in dealing with the locals. When a patrol entered a residence, they asked the man of the house if he had any weapons. If he produced the weapons and had a weapon’s card, he could keep them. If he said no and a search of the house found weapons, the patrol confiscated them. “But I have a weapon’s card so that I can keep my weapon!” the Iraqi complained whenever this happened.

“Shoulda told the truth, huh?” was the response from the men of Team Dealer.

Initially, we found loads of artillery rounds and detonators in the living rooms of the houses we entered during our searches, demonstrating that the enemy did not expect aggressive patrolling in the community, nor did not respect us enough to bother to hide the explosives. Over time, the terrorists adapted to our methods and started hiding their IED caches away from their homes. We were having enough of an effect that they at least had to work a little bit harder to plant an IED. Soon word of the house searches got out and our “find” rate tapered off. The platoons in Task Force Conqueror never knew what they would find when they went through the door of an Iraqi building. Sometimes they would catch hard-core terrorists with IEDs, other times; it was just a family sitting around the kitchen table, or a man acting suspiciously, hiding a thumb-drive full of porn.

............

One evening in mid-June as I was returning from checking on static locations along Route Mobile and Route Michigan, I decided to pay an unannounced call on Sheik Ahmad Bezia abu Risha. Although building relationships with the locals by drinking tea with a sheik was on the list of things to do, it seemed like a huge waste of time, and I had not prioritized it very high. The Abu Risha tribe was a sub-tribe of the Dulaimi tribe, the largest tribe in Anbar province. The Sunni community knew the Bezia’s grandfather, Sheik Ftikhan bin Abdul Hamid Abu Risha, as one of the early leaders of the revolt against the British. His father named him abu Risha--literally “the father of nests”--due to his eyelashes being so long at birth that a bird’s nest could fit in them. In 1918, the Dulaimi tribe was tacitly on the side of the British, but Ftikhan, a former Ottoman army officer, fought both the British and later the French in an Iraqi-Syrian border town named Deir az-Zur, reportedly taking down the French flag hoisting a Syrian flag over the town in 1920. Sheikh Suleiman--the sheik of sheiks of the Dulaimi Tribe--threatened all of the sub-sheiks with reprisals if they continued resisting the Europeans. Undaunted, Sheik Ftikhan continued fighting the colonial powers until the establishment of the Iraqi Monarchy in 1921, although he participated in a coup against British-emplaced Regent Abdullah, earning himself, his family, and his tribe the reputation of being independent, and on the right side of history.214

Mark Lovejoy had built a fantastic relationship with Ahmad and his brother Sheik Sattar over the past year, but I was not part of that. The conventional wisdom of the time held that the quiet and reserved Sheik Ahmad was the head of the Abu Risha tribe and the brains of the operation, while his outgoing younger brother, Sheik Sattar, was more involved in running the family business (a construction company in Jordan) than he was in tribal affairs. What always puzzled me was that both Ahmad and Sattar held the title of sheik. I figured there should only be one, kind of like there can only be one king. I always thought Sheik Sattar should have had another title, more like “prince” or something, but again I deferred to Colonel MacFarland’s maxim of “leaving the Arab stuff to the Arabs.”

I had been to the Bezia compound twice during RIP with Mark Lovejoy, receiving a warm welcome both times. The brothers even threw a going away party for Lovejoy and his staff as they prepared to leave Ramadi. Sheik Ahmad seemed genuinely supportive of the Coalition forces, and his family had paid a price in doing so: the terrorists had murdered his father and two of his brothers in the previous three years. I did not want to meet with any Iraqis, sheiks or not. I could only communicate with them with through my translator, Dragon, and I felt that I had nothing to say to them. Listening to gripes about how we were not adequately protecting them seemed like a waste of time. Why they were letting terrorists tear their country apart was beyond me. At the time, I did not recognize the opportunities inherent in communicating with the locals, but since meeting with SOIs was a requirement, I did it.

One of the most effective parts of our pre-deployment preparation had been training in bi-lateral negotiations taught by Colonel (Ret.) Ed McCarthy. McCarthy had taught most of the Army leadership negotiation training at some point over the previous fifteen years. The lesson learned from him was that we could not simply roll into someone’s house and talk business. We had to build the relationship first. Also, a leader needed to have a plan going into the meeting and know the intended result. Mark Lovejoy had maintained a great relationship with the Bezias, but he was gone. The Bezias trusted Dragon, my interpreter, but I was the one in charge, not Dragon. I had to foster my relationship with the brothers, even though I was still undecided about what I wanted to get out of it, aside from their help in recruiting Iraqi police. I still felt shuffling papers at my headquarters was a better use of my time than drinking chai tea with a tribal leader.

I knew from our two earlier meetings that Sheik Ahmad would carp incessantly about the poor security situation in Ramadi, and would follow up his complaints by asking for guns so that he and his men could rid the province of Al Qaeda. I would have to tell him that we were not going to arm the tribes and that his people needed to come forward and support the government. Maybe, if we were lucky, we would get some intelligence from Sheik Ahmad, but more often than not, these morsels went something like, “Three bad men in a Silver Opel sedan drove through Zangora last week. Why didn’t you arrest them?”

Then we would both sit there and be polite, drinking tea or orange sodas for hours, complaining about the desperate situation in Ramadi, each of us thinking the other was incapable of getting anything accomplished. This was not how I wanted to spend my evenings.

“If you would just arm the tribes, our troubles would be over,” Sheik Ahmad consistently assured me.

Arming the Iraqi tribes was against both U.S. policy, and a terrible idea. The last thing Ramadi needed was more groups of unidentified armed men rolling through the streets and meting out justice. Eventually, they would end up turning on the Coalition, either when U.S. forces mistook them for AIF and inadvertently killed some of them, or even worse, the armed tribesmen would try to overthrow the elected government. Our mandate was to establish the rule of law, and an armed tribesman is at best a vigilante, at worst a building block for an aspiring warlord.

All across Iraq, Coalition forces conducted monthly Iraqi police recruiting drives; placing placards on market walls or and notices in local media announcing that on a certain day at a specific location, volunteers could join the Iraqi police. In Ramadi, the traditional location of the recruiting drive was an abandoned soft drink bottling plant adjacent to Camp Ramadi commonly known as the glass factory. Since the glass factory was in AO Conqueror, we were responsible for providing security for the site, a mission that the 1-172nd AR had been assigned under the 2/28th IN, and one that, despite my best efforts, I could not avoid.

The Soviet influence was evident throughout Ramadi, from state-owned industries to Eastern European-style apartment blocks. The state-owned glass factory utilized state of the art 1950s communist technology. It was inefficient at bottling soft drinks but effective at employing Iraqis, being the largest employer in town before 2003. As FOB-lore had it, somewhere along the line, an American battalion commander became convinced the AIF were signaling his departure from Camp Ramadi by using the glass factory’s smokestacks in an attempt to target him personally. One day, he led his security team into the factory and forced the Iraqi workers to shut down the plant without going through the equipment’s cool-down procedures. Molten glass hardened on the machines’ fittings, and no Iraqi ever worked there again. Since it was a government-owned industry, the unemployed workers still received half of their pay, which provided them a modest income to support their families, while allowing them plenty of time to attack Americans. By June 2006, the abandoned glass factory was a part-time Iraqi police recruiting center and an occasional enemy staging area for attacks on Camp Ramadi.

Over the previous five months, all the Iraqi police recruiting drives in Ramadi had been dismal failures, bringing in a dozen recruits a month at best. This had not always been the case. In January 2006, the 2/28th IN held a wildly successful recruiting drive at the glass factory. Over a thousand young Iraqi men turned out to join the Iraqi police as part of a concerted effort led by cleric Sheik Dr. Muhammad Mahmud Latif Al-Fahadawi, the leader of one of the most violent Sunni rejectionist groups in Anbar, the 1920s Brigade, and the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Anbar. He was a former associate of al-Zarqawi, attacking anyone they considered collaborating with the Iraqi government or Coalition forces until the two had a falling out in the spring of 2005 when the Al Qaeda leader demanded his absolute subservience. Latif rejected the demand, feeling that he was the rightful leader of resistance forces in Anbar and calling for Islamic groups and tribes to unite with a common voice against the U.S. occupation. He wanted an independent democratic government elected by the people and not organized by a foreign occupation.215 Latif felt that with Al Qaeda gone, the Americans’ excuse to be in Iraq would be gone as well, thereby solving both of his problems.

The police recruiting drive continued for three days, until on 5 January 2006, a foreign fighter posing as a police recruit attempted to get in line at the recruiting site. Bruno, a military working dog, signaled the alert on the terrorist’s suicide vest, causing the jihadist to detonate his bomb prematurely. Despite the early warning, the blast was devastating, killing Sergeant Adam L. Cann,216 the dog’s handler, and Lieutenant Colonel Michael McLaughlin,²¹⁷ a beloved 2/28th IN brigade staff officer, as well as wounding two other soldiers, Specialist Adam Brown and Mathew Gibson,²¹⁸ and two other dogs.²¹⁹ For the Iraqi recruits, the toll was much higher, with thirty-eight killed and another eighty wounded.²²⁰ Lovejoy described to me the carnage and devastation in the blast’s aftermath. What struck me when he relayed the story was that after evacuating the dead and wounded, the survivors got back in line to join the Iraqi police.

“So why did the Iraqis stick around after the attack?” I asked him.

“Because their sheiks told them to,” he told me.

I filed that piece of information away for later.

Latif’s Iraqi-only rebellion against Al Qaeda was short-lived. Recognizing the threat to their base of power represented by a band of rebel sheiks, the terrorists immediately took action. As the Anbar Awakening sheiks later relayed to me, the sheiks of Latif’s faction were to meet Al Anbar Governor Mamoon at the Saddam Mosque in central Ramadi a few days after the suicide bombing. Mamoon was responsible for providing security for the event when Al Qaeda gunmen busted into the mosque with guns blazing. The erupting shootout wounded a couple of the anti-Al Qaeda sheiks and dispersed the rest.

In the following days, Al Qaeda went on a killing spree reminiscent of the baptism scene in The Godfather; Sheik al-Fahadawi, Sheik al-Mukhli, Barzani, Moe Greene, Philip Tattaglia, Strachi . . . the list went on. At the time, the II MEF Headquarters attributed it to “Red on Red” violence (red being the color of the enemy) and assumed an internal power struggle within Al Qaeda had broken out; when in fact, it was, in fact, Red on Green violence (green representing the color of the local population/security forces.) Al Qaeda was systematically killing anyone opposed to its bloody reign of terror. The II MEF Headquarters let the killing play out; oblivious to the opportunity to split the mujahedeen from Al Qaeda was slipping away right below their noses. Within days, the anti-Al Qaeda sheiks were either dead or hiding in Jordan. As the Anbar Awakening sheiks later told me, they felt Governor Mamoon had set them up.

At a follow-up meeting at Sheik Ahmad’s house a couple of days later, I came better prepared. I brought along Captain Pat Fagan, the Task Force Civil Affairs officer. Fagan was a brilliant young officer who seemed capable of accomplishing anything. Growing up in Atlanta, he graduated from Georgetown in 2002. Pat’s father was a Navy pilot, and both of his grandfathers had served in the Navy as well. Pat’s previous deployment to Baghdad had been as a scout platoon leader, and later he served as the brigade headquarters’ representative to the fledgling District Advisory Councils (DAC), the first grass roots effort at democracy after the fall of the Saddam Regime. The DACs attempted to have local neighborhoods work to solve the problems of self-governance. Pat had experience in dealing with the Iraqis and it would soon pay off.221

During this meeting, we proposed to Sheik Ahmad that if he wanted to fight Al Qaeda, then he needed to get his men to join the police. I promised him that if he could deliver 500 police recruits, then I would build him a police station in the tribal area at a point of his choosing. At the time, there were only two-hundred Iraqi police officers reporting for duty daily in Ramadi. I figured that although they were tribesmen, once they were in the legitimate Iraqi security forces, the newly minted police would be under the command of an appointed government official rather than a sheik.

Reaching out to Sheik Ahmad seemed no different to me from reaching out to community leaders when attempting to recruit minority members for police departments in large American cities. We saw police recruiting as a win on many levels. First, young Iraqi men would get jobs that paid well and would assist in the economic recovery of the region. Second, Iraqi society held police officers in high esteem, unlike farmers or trash-collectors—the two jobs the Coalition were currently offering as part of the economic reconstruction program. Third, they would be part of the Iraqi government, and at some level tied to the success of the government. Fourth, the Iraqis would be solving their own problems, and pulling their own triggers when necessary. It would be a win/win situation. I also had absolutely no hope that Sheik Ahmad could come up with five-hundred recruits.

The other proposal that I put to Sheik Ahmad was to hold the recruiting drive in the tribal area, which I confess I offered for selfish reasons. Securing the glass factory site meant abandoning my fixed positions for a day and a half and giving the AIF free rein. We would give up any small progress made in the previous couple of weeks and, ultimately, have to fight our way back into Tam’eem, clearing IEDs over every inch of road. I figured the tribesmen knew everyone by face, so they could tell a lot easier than we could who was a legitimate police recruit and who was a foreign fighter trying to sneak in a suicide bomb. It would require fewer forces by me to support the recruiting drive and increase security for the prospective recruits.

It was another win-win situation.

Surprisingly Sheik Ahmad agreed to my proposals and more importantly, he volunteered to host the recruiting drive at his home. I was ecstatic. We decided to conduct the drive in early July, giving both of us time to make the necessary preparations. Ahmad had to find the recruits, and I had to convince my chain of command that having the police recruiting drive at a sheik’s house was a good idea. Both of us would struggle to live up to our end of the deal.

Another part of Ed McCarthy’s training was never, ever, make a promise you cannot keep, or you will lose your credibility. Obviously, I was not the honor graduate of the training. I certainly did not have the authority to authorize the construction of a police station, but I felt confident that Sheik Ahmad would never find five hundred recruits. I was also certain that if he somehow pulled it off, my higher headquarters would herald the 250 percent increase in the police force as a great success, building the station built with no questions asked.

I was wrong on both accounts.

Despite the long-term benefits of recruiting Iraqi police, we still had a deadly daily fight across AO Conqueror and the Ready First as well. On 17 June, terrorists attacked a Charlie Rock patrol with an IED in Ramadi, killing Specialist Robert L. Jones222 and Sergeant Reyes Ramirez,²²³ and seriously injuring Corporal Ryan J. Clark. The enemy had begun adding accelerants to the IEDs, causing the vehicles to erupt in flames following the initial explosion. Making time to plan for future success could not come at the cost of lives here and now.

Captain Fagan was the front man working with the sheiks, while Captains Nick Franklin, Kali Kalicharan and Matt Alden worked feverishly preparing for the recruiting drive over the coming days. Personally, I tried to meet with Ahmad a couple of times a week, often having to excuse myself from his living room to answer a radio call concerning Troops in Contact—usually in Tam’eem. While meeting with the sheiks was important, keeping the Task Force Conqueror soldiers safe remained my top priority.

In combat, commanders are never working on a single issue; they work dozens of problems at a time. Enemy contact, submitting awards for soldier heroism, writing evaluations for subordinates, arranging police recruiting, daughter failed a math test, how to defeat the latest enemy IED tactics, figuring out why Zangora seems peaceful and Tam’eem so violent, who will be the next scout platoon leader, why the hell did Nebraska hire Callahan as head coach, a soldier back in Baumholder was arrested on his first night in Germany, can I trust Sheik Ahmad, when am I going to be able to go on R&R, what should I do about Al Anbar University? All these problems constantly bumped around in my head. Luckily, I had an excellent team supporting me, helping to solve most of the problems; and my company commanders were doing great things.

One problem that I urgently needed to fix was getting the soldiers out of ACUs and into fire-resistant nomex uniforms. Only the tankers and Bradley crewmen were authorized nomex, but with the enemy now adding accelerants in the IEDs, everyone riding in a vehicle was at risk. We requested the flame resistant uniforms, but since the table of authorization did not authorize issuing every soldier multiple sets of nomex, someone up the chain of command denied our requests. I went to Chief Grover, who knew how to work the warrant officer mafia better than anyone I had met in my career.

“Chief, I want everyone in the task force to have three sets of nomex,” I told him tersely.

“Damn, sir, I’m not the S4,” Chief complained. “How in hell am I supposed to…?”

“Chief, don’t wanna hear your shit. Just get them,” I cut him off.

“Damn it, sir,” Grover replied.

I had learned as a lieutenant not to give orders that end in “I don’t care how you do it,” especially to a scrounger like Chief Grover, but having soldiers disfigured or killed because a table of authorization did not permit them the right equipment seemed criminal to me. That afternoon I came off patrol to find a forty-foot shipping container filled with tan-colored Marine aviator flight suits sitting in my parking spot in the dusty courtyard of the battalion headquarters. This was not the Army-green nomex I was looking for, but it was close enough.

The next day, I immediately started getting pushback from one of the senior NCOs—a man who never left the FOB—griping about how soldiers should not be wearing Marine uniforms. I feared he was going to go around my back and try and get the brigade command sergeant major involved. The Ready First’s Command Sergeant Major, Frank Graham, seemed like a common sense soldier, but I did not know him well at the time and was not about to take a chance of him getting Colonel MacFarland’s ear and prohibiting the wearing of non-Army issued uniforms without all the facts. (It turned out that Frank Graham was a fantastic combat leader and would have come up with the right answer.) In any event, I hopped into my FOB-cruiser, a broken down white Toyota pickup truck with a brown racing stripe that Mark Lovejoy left me as he was leaving the country, and sped to the brigade headquarters, sporting my stylish new tan flight suit.

“Tony, when exactly did you become a Marine pilot?” Colonel MacFarland asked, intrigued by my fashion statement.

“Sir, I will give my life for my country, but I am not getting my balls burned off,” I replied.

“Hmm,” was all he said, which gave me my opening.

I proceeded to lay out the issue with the accelerants and explained how the flight suits would mitigate the threat. Colonel MacFarland personally worked with the MEF assistant division commander, Brigadier General Robert Neller and the Marines supplied the brigade with thousands of flame retardant uniforms.224 A couple of days later, I saw Colonel MacFarland in a set of tan nomex as well. Always the professional, his had a nameplate filled out according to Army regulations, unlike mine that simply displayed a black oak leaf and my call sign, “Conqueror 6.”