“DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.
CHAPTER 10: STEADY STATE
IN ADDITION TO OUR PREVIOUSLY ASSIGNED IRAQI SECURITY forces, we received control of an Iraqi army T-72 tank company from the 9th Iraqi Division. We partnered the Iraqi tanks with Team Comanche, assigning them Checkpoint 3 along Route Mobile. Each of these Soviet-built machines flew enormous Iraqi flags from the turrets, easily visible a mile away, making a forty-four-ton statement to the population that the Iraqi army was here to protect them. The Iraqis loved their tanks. Passersby would give them a smile and “thumbs up” every time they saw the T-72s. We also took the Iraqi tanks out on every large-scale mission, more for the message to the population than for their capability. Also, I have to admit that, for a tanker, it was pretty cool to command a company of the same vehicles that I had spent the past twenty-three years figuring out how to destroy.
Later that week, Team Dealer reported someone in the Yellow Apartments in 5 Kilo was signaling the crew of the Bradley defending OP Jones with a mirror. Although it was in the Iraqi army sector, Team Dealer sent a patrol to investigate. A man with a mirror ran out of the apartment building, furiously thanking them for coming to his rescue. He assured the patrol that the apartment complex was the headquarters for Al Qaeda in Ramadi and that we should arrest everyone in the building as terrorists. Somehow, I had imagined that all the Al Qaeda members were holed-up together in some Legion of Doom headquarters, so it made some sense. All we had to do was find their headquarters and round up the lot of them, solving all our problems. Frankly, I was a bit discouraged that it had already taken us three weeks to find the enemy’s headquarters. All we had to do now was raid the apartment building, arrest the entire terrorist network, and there would be peace in Ramadi by nightfall.
It should be a piece of cake.
Team Dealer searched the building from top to bottom and found nothing. Some of the apartments had wires and circuit boards lying around, but as most of the residents were engineering students at Al Anbar University, the wires in their apartments seemed reasonable. It was not that the residents of the Yellow Apartments were innocent, but we simply did not have enough evidence to arrest them. As Team Dealer cleared the objective, the Mirror Man ran up to a Dealer NCO begging that they take him away because otherwise the terrorists would kill him. Admittedly, he had a point: inviting the American Army into your building and accusing the other tenants of terrorism is not exactly neighborly behavior in any country in the world. Even if the occupants were not terrorists, the Mirror Man was certainly going to have a problem once Team Dealer left. The barrel of a gun solved problems in Ramadi, not the rule of law.
American soldiers have a very clear sense of right and wrong, and getting the Mirror Man out of there seemed like the right thing to do for the troops on the ground, so they told him to get in the back of the Bradley as they were departing. What is still unclear to me to this day is how the Mirror Man’s wife and four kids also got into the back of the Bradley. The explanation I received of them hopping into the vehicle as the back ramp was closing, ala Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom—defied the laws of physics, since the Bradley ramp closes from the bottom. However they got into the vehicle, the entire family was now at Camp Ramadi, and they became my problem.
The unofficial standing order throughout Iraq was to leave the Iraqi women alone. You had to have a pretty darn good reason to bring in an Iraqi woman. Unless she was Osama bin Laden’s girlfriend or had shot an American, Iraqi women got a pass from American forces. We had the interrogators debrief the Mirror Man while we tried to figure out what to do with him and his family.
I was sitting in my office when the phone rang.
“Tony, do you have Iraqi women and children on Camp Ramadi?” Colonel MacFarland asked, somewhat incredulously.
“Hey sir, I was just about to call you about that,” I replied. I really was going to call him. I just wanted to have my story straight before I told my boss how we screwed up.
“Get rid of them. You have until dark. There’s nothing good going to come of this,” he stated firmly.
Colonel MacFarland was absolutely right.
“Roger, sir. Got it,” I replied and hung up.
It was already close to sundown when Colonel MacFarland called. I understood his concerns and intent but took the broad view on my deadline pushing it until morning. There was a dusk to dawn curfew in Ramadi, and if we released the family at night, Coalition forces would likely shoot them for breaking curfew, I justified to myself. How hard could this be to figure out?
Over the course of the next hour, several of my captains felt compelled to come into my office and earnestly tell me about a similar situation that occurred to them on the last deployment. Each had a different example though they all ended with the same punchline:
“Sir, the same thing happened to us last time and…”
“We kept the guy, the wife, and kids, there was a huge riot, and bunches of people were killed.”
“We kept the guy and sent the wife and kids back, and there was a huge riot and bunches of people were killed.”
“We sent the guy, the wife, and kids back and then there was a huge riot and bunches of people were killed.”
Obviously, I preferred to find a solution that did not involve “a huge riot with bunches of people killed” in the retelling. I thought back on the pre-deployment training, and then it dawned on me. I needed to figure out what tribe the Mirror Man belonged to, and then send him back to his sheik with our deepest apologies. Make it an Iraqi problem. Brilliant on my part! High fives all around.
A half hour later, the call came back from the detention center informing me that the Mirror Man was a Yazidi. I had to Google Yazidi just to figure out that this was a small Christian religious sect whose members predominately live in northern Iraq. Yazidi believes in God and the Peacock Angel. However, most Iraqis thought the Yazidi worshiped Satan and that killing them all at the first opportunity would be a good thing. The bottom line was that I was not going to find a sheik to take him off my hands.
I had one last card to play: the Special Operations guys and the “Other Government Agencies” (OGA) who lived in a corner of Camp Ramadi called the Shark Base. All of them went only by their first names. Since we were mere conventional forces, we dubbed the residents of Shark Base the Superfriends, and I took to calling Shark Base the “Hall of Justice.” The SEALs of Team 3, brilliantly led by Navy Lieutenant Commander Jocko Willink, were great teammates and did whatever it took to accomplish the mission. The SEALs had their own intelligence section that was phenomenal, including one Navy lieutenant named Bay, who had been in Ramadi since the invasion in 2003.
The OGA came from any number of lettered intelligence agencies from across the United States Government. Before meeting them, I imagined them wearing tailored Savile Row tuxedos and drinking martinis—shaken, not stirred, but instead, they looked more like career civil servants. The first group of OGA guys could not have been more helpful or professional. All of them went the extra mile in working with the staff and me on getting our hands around the situation we were facing. Somehow, they always had un-melted chocolate bars, something that impressed me since the PX’s Hershey bars were always malformed and an unnatural off-white color. After one meeting, they gave me an entire box of Twix candy bars. I was ecstatic until halfway back to the TOC I realized they were trying to honey trap me with a box of chocolate. I gave the candy bars to the TOC crew, though not until I had pocketed a couple for myself.
I had met one of the Superfriends a couple of days earlier. As is common, he ended our conversation with, “Whatever you need, just ask.”
Most military leaders say this rhetorically, like “have a nice day,” but I was out of options. I called him on the phone and reminded him of his offer.
“Sure thing. Anything. What do you need?” he asked.
“$300 and set of wheels.”
After a pause, he said, “Hey, eh, er… I think the phone is breaking up, can you say that again?”
“You heard me man, $300 and a car.” I then proceeded to explain the situation. Since I was a new guy, I think he felt sorry for me.
“Hey not exactly what I was thinking when I made the offer, but OK,” he finally agreed.
“I know, but thanks. I owe you one,” I told him.
By the time we got the vehicle and the cash, the sun was starting to rise. Lou Lancon walked into my office and told me the family was gone. I asked Lou if there were any problems.
“Yeah, the car was a five-speed, and he couldn’t drive a stick,” he explained.
“You’re kidding, right? What did you do?” I asked.
“I had the terp show him how to shift and told him to get the hell out of here. Last I saw him he was heading to Baghdad driving fifteen miles-an-hour in first gear. He should be there by dark unless he blows the engine.”
On top of all the violence and our efforts to establish security in an Al Qaeda stronghold, constant little ankle biter situations like the Mirror Man and his family made claims on my time. I probably could have made the Mirror Man someone on the staff’s problem, but I was genuinely concerned that I could have a riot on my hands in the morning. It is impossible to disprove a negative, but that is a lot of what a counterinsurgency fight consists of, preventing calamities from starting; or once they start, stopping them before they get out of hand. Decisions in a fight like this revolve around two simple questions: Can I? and Should I? Can I legally fire a Hellfire missile into an orphanage from which we are taking sporadic small arms fire while there are three international news film crews standing outside filming? Absolutely, by the rules of armed conflict! Should I? Almost certainly not.
We continued working out the details of the police recruiting drive with both Bezia brothers while we fought in Tam’eem, 5 Kilo, and Zangora. Lieutenant Colonel William “Butch” Graham, who was still in Kuwait with the remainder of the Call Forward Force, assigned Captain Justin Augustine to augment the task force staff with an engineer officer for planning. We welcomed Augustine’s arrival both for providing expertise to the staff and for freeing Lieutenant Watson to lead his platoon. Toby was doing a great job, but I was wearing him out by having him serve as both a platoon leader and as the staff engineer.
The soldiers of Charlie Rock were constantly on the go. By the end of the deployment, they had constructed nine combat outposts, including two in AO Conqueror, in addition to building the Police Station in Tway and reconstructing two other police stations destroyed by suicide bombers. Captain John Hiltz, First Sergeant Jerry Bailey and the all the troops of Charlie Rock remained unflappable under fire, building combat outposts in the worst areas in Ramadi while enduring sniping from the AIF determined to keep the installations from being built.
John Hiltz grew up playing army in the woods behind his house in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. He thought about joining the Air Force upon graduating from Chelmsford High School in 1994, but since he wore glasses, pursuing a career as a pilot was out of the question. As John was walking out of the Air Force ROTC recruiter’s office, he saw a tri-fold handout for the Army ROTC Program. He had always wanted to join the military and thought the Army would impress his future wife’s dad, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant.
In 1998, Hiltz graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a degree in civil engineering and commissioned onto active duty in the Engineer Corps. As a lieutenant, Hiltz deployed to Bosnia in 2000 and 2001. As he pointed out to me, “It was an interesting experience being handed a loaded weapon and then told to be a good ambassador for America.” John already had a tour in Iraq working on the 1st Armored Division (1AD) staff and then the 2nd Brigade, 1AD Staff.225 Of my five company commanders in Kuwait, John was the one perpetually in the doghouse, yet by the time we left Ramadi, John had done more to win the war than any other company commander in theater.
The prohibition on giving Iraqi security forces equipment paid for with money designated for use by U.S. forces seemed ridiculous, but it turned out to be true. American units could provide necessary military equipment to the Iraqis, but the purchases came through another procurement system, and no one really understood how it worked. Kris Stillings had a plan to fix the living conditions for the Iraqis at the checkpoint, but could not get the necessary equipment. Fortunately, Brigadier General Robert Neller had recently spoken to the task force leadership about the importance of the mission we were undertaking. As Neller walked out of the conference room, he turned and stuck a finger in my chest. “Get the Iraqi army going! Get them whatever they need, but get them into the fight.”
While I was pretty sure that rebuilding OP 293 and providing decent living conditions for the Iraqi army was not specifically what Neller intended, I took the broad view of his comments and was not about to ask for clarification. Over the years, I learned that once you can add, “The general wants…” to the start of any request, no matter how bizarre, no one stands in your way. I had all I needed. Also, based on the events of the past two weeks, I was fairly sure that I would be either dead or seriously wounded in a matter of days, so administrative regulations or the results of my annual evaluation report were not an issue. It was a quite a liberating feeling.
Captain Hiltz had Charlie Rock convert shipping containers into Iraqi sleeping quarters when his engineers were not busy constructing combat outposts. The design was simple: three long wooden shelves served as bunk beds running the length of the 20-foot container, with a two-foot wide walkway down the side. The Iraqis would sleep side-by-side, parallel to the doors. While far from luxurious, the boxy spaces had air-conditioning and 18 inches of overhead cover to stop mortar rounds. Although I thought the makeshift barracks looked like the sleeping arrangements at the Buchenwald concentration camp, Hiltz seemed to think they more closely resembled the hold of the slave ship in the movie Amistad. Despite their austerity, the Iraqis beamed with pride at their protected, air-conditioned sleeping space and clearly appreciated someone paying attention to their needs.
The hard work of the advisors and the engineers paid off when on 29 June an Al Qaeda suicide bomber in a Chevy Suburban filled with artillery rounds attacked the checkpoint. We had recently installed additional Texas barriers and blast shields made from bulletproof Humvee glass to protect the personnel at the inspection site. The suicide bomber detonated his vehicle bomb, slightly injuring one Iraqi soldier in the blast. Lieutenant Colonel Stillings had just completed a dismounted patrol with the Iraqis and was observing the checkpoint’s operation from behind a blast shield when the vehicle detonated. Although Stillings was blown through the air by the concussion, he walked away relatively unscathed. The only fatality was the bomber.
I was with my security detachment passing through Tam’eem when the blast occurred and immediately sped towards OP 293. Lieutenant Dan Cross, a tank platoon leader in team Comanche and his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Michael May, were the first to arrive at the scene. Frankly, up to that point, I did not have much faith in Lieutenant Cross. He had done an OK job during the train up and in Kuwait, but I had my doubts about keeping him in his platoon. As we neared the OP, Cross’ voice came across the task force radio net. He was calm, collected, and clearly in charge, reporting that his platoon was setting up security while he laid out a plan for the QRF’s arrival, and coordinating for air support. I had my patrol pull over and just listened to the radio traffic while Cross took charge of the situation. Then I called Sergeant First Class Roberts on our internal frequency and told him to head back to Camp Ramadi. Dan had it under control and did not need any help from me. Cross was yet another of the young leaders who rose to the occasion in Ramadi.
The next day I saw Kris Stillings outside the task force TOC and asked him how he was doing. “EARS HURT, MAN, BUT I AM OK!” Kris answered.
Kris then continued in a more conversational tone, “The biggest problem is volume, but I‘ve gotten pretty good at figuring out how to control the volume with my throat, and I can tell by the expression on the person I’m talking to if I’m too loud,” he added.
“Kris. What had the hell? You gotta go to the Docs!” I said, amazed he was not already at Charlie Med, or Medevac’d to Balad or Germany for that matter.
“I’m good, man, I’m good,” he responded.
Later that evening, we received word that Corporal Ryan J. Clark226 from Charlie Rock died from the wounds he suffered two weeks earlier. Although Charlie Rock was temporarily detached from the Task Force, they were still part of the family.
Team Dealer was taking the fight to the enemy in Tam’eem around the clock, enduring anywhere from five to ten IED or small arms attacks daily. We had been judicious in our use of violence in response to these attacks, and in the detaining of military aged males (MAMs) and were beginning to see slight slivers of hope in reaching the community. Still, most of the encouraging signs continued to come from the tribal areas just outside of town.
The term MAM would become politically incorrect in a matter of weeks and banished from all official reports, but it was pretty clear who was attacking us: young Iraqi men between sixteen and forty. Some units in Iraq went on MAM roundups, arresting everyone that “looked suspicious” (meaning Iraqi males between sixteen and forty years old). We made a conscious decision against that. Throughout the first three weeks in June, we brought in 65-suspected terrorists and had enough evidence to send 36 of them to extended stays in Abu Ghraib prison. The rest we thanked for their cooperation and sent on their way; something that would have never happened during Saddam’s regime. Hitting .553 the first half of your rookie season will get you some All-Star buzz, so I figured we were doing okay.
Tribal society was prevalent in the rural areas of Iraq, but not in the city. Team Comanche’s area of Zangora was not as violent as Tam’eem was, but had a more complex social situation. Comanche was also undermanned, with a tank platoon, the battalion scout platoon, and the battalion mortar platoon fighting as infantry and augmented with tankers from throughout the headquarters company. In Zangora, it was important to know who the tribal leaders were and who the most important man in each village was. That said, Zangora still could be a very dangerous place. On the afternoon of 2 July, terrorists attacked a Team Comanche patrol with a double-stacked land mine, severely injuring Staff Sergeant Joe Sielski and Sergeant Chad Rozanski, and wounding Specialist Henry Brady. Rushing to the aid of the two wounded NCOs, the platoon sergeant, Master Sergeant Mike Morton, suffered injuries as well.
Staff Sergeant Sielski was a great leader and family man. He had only been back from Afghanistan for a couple of months when he arrived in Baumholder just before our deploying. I told him that I needed him to go with us due to the shortage of leadership in the mortar platoon. Although he could have stayed back, Sielski volunteered to deploy without hesitation.
Sergeant Rozanski was a 19-year-old artilleryman working in the TOC as a fire support sergeant. He had been a sergeant for only a few weeks and had volunteered to round out the mortar platoon, which was desperately short on leaders. Two weeks earlier, Rozanski was watching his wife’s high school graduation while back on R&R back in the States. As they carried Rozanski into Charlie Med, he was yelling at the top of his lungs, “Conquer or Die!” and sounding off with his name, rank and social security number, demanding “Get me some ice, my ass is burning.” Although his injury ultimately cost him both of his legs, Rozanski would not be defeated. He was laughing and joking until the medics sedated him and wheeled him into surgery.
The mortar platoon had only five of the ten NCOs it was authorized at the start of the deployment and did not have a platoon leader. This single IED attack injured three of the four stalwart NCOs in the platoon, landing them back in the Landsthul Regional Medical Center in Germany within hours. Just like that, I had one platoon without leadership, and I could not afford to take them out of the fight—not even for a day.
The next senior NCO in the platoon was Staff Sergeant David Gilmer. Despite being just 23 years old and having been a staff sergeant for only a month, Gilmer was going to have to step up and become the platoon sergeant. Born and raised in Danville, PA, Gilmer played trumpet in the high school band. As a junior in high school, he volunteered to play Taps for the funerals of local veterans. There, the old vets befriended him, and he gained respect for them. Upon graduation, he knew he wanted to serve in the military, and he knew that he needed some direction in his life, so he enlisted.
Gilmer was back at camp when the IED hit. He met the casualties at Charlie MED, and secured their personal equipment and retrieved their “go bags” with toiletries and underwear before they were Medevac’d. Making the solitary walk back to the barracks, the gravity of the situation hit him. Gilmer found a quiet place between two shipping containers and sorted through what was coming in the next days and the responsibilities thrust upon him. He then got up, dusted himself off and went back to lead his men.227
Staff Sergeant Gilmer was a great young leader, and I felt he could step up as a platoon sergeant, but I knew we needed more than one man to lead the platoon. Back in Kuwait, I had pulled the platoon leader, Matt Van Durme, out of the platoon upon his promotion to captain. I believed captains needed to be staff officers, not platoon leaders, so I had Matt working in the task force operations section. Now I told him to drop what he was doing, go down to his old platoon, and get them back into the fight. Within days, I would get Lieutenant Tim Connors back from R&R to take over as a platoon leader, but until then Matt needed to take charge. Captain Van Durme and Staff Sergeant Gilmer went back out on patrol the next day, setting a great example of combat leadership. A few days later Connors returned from R & R, and both he and Gilmer did a magnificent job leading the mortar platoon for the remainder of the deployment.
Tim Connors graduated from high school in Belmont, New York, and then proceeded to Saint Bonaventure for his undergraduate degree, followed by studies at LaSalle for a Master’s in Psychology. Connors always wanted to join the military, but he found himself pursuing a civilian career instead. Along the way, he enlisted in the Navy Reserves, and in September 2001, his unit was part of the Ground Zero rescue/recovery mission. Standing amidst the devastation, Connors saw the nation under attack first hand and knew it was time to apply for active duty. He branch-transferred to the Active Army and was the oldest member of his OCS class, needing an age waiver just to get in. Now almost thirty-five-years-old, Lieutenant Connors started the deployment as a tank platoon leader attached to Team Dealer in Tam’eem. Moving to the Mortar Platoon meant both a change in mission and a change in the area of operations. In Tam’eem, his job was to keep the main roads clear of IEDs and kill the AIF trying to plant them. Now he was moving to the tribal area of Zangora where his new assignment would mean engaging with the population.228
Despite defending against numerous daily attacks against the company/teams, and conducting raids to capture known terrorists, we still had to focus on our mission of developing the Iraqi security forces. Either Pat Fagan or I met every day with Sheik Ahmad and Sheik Sattar to plan for the upcoming police recruiting drive. The Bezias in their elegant homes were always gracious hosts. As soon as we sat down, Sheik Sattar or Sheik Ahmad would holler something in Arabic and then a disheveled man would run in with the drinks and snacks on a silver platter. I spent hours in the evening talking with the two brothers about the security situation in Ramadi, and the overall problems with the community. Through these lengthy discussions, I was able to get a broader understanding of the problems facing the city, and practical feedback on the problems with past police recruiting drives.
I learned that during previous efforts, police recruits arrived at the glass factory on Wednesday for screening and induction, and then had to report again on Friday to ship out for training. Terrorists were intimidating the recruits as soon as they returned home, so the few that did sign-on never returned. My guess is the AIF watched the recruiting sites, more than likely from the minaret of the mosque directly across the street from the glass factory, and took note of who was volunteering. Almost certainly, there were also enemy sympathizers in the police force itself. Alternatively, it is possible that the recruits bragged in their villages that they were joining the police, and thus invited the attacks against themselves.
In the end, the specific reason of why the recruits failed to ship out made no difference. We knew that despite the danger to themselves and their families, they had mustered up the courage to show up initially to join the police. In effect, we were forcing recruits to report twice to join the police. To me, the answer was simple: Only ask them to be brave once. If we could screen and transfer the recruits on the same day, we could solve the intimidation problem.
I went to the Ready First’s Deputy Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Lechner, who was the officer in charge of developing Iraqi security forces for the Ready First. Lechner grew up in Rochester, New York. Although he came from a Kodak family, not a military family, Jim had always wanted to be a soldier. He attended college at the Citadel and chose to become an infantry officer. Jim was wounded while serving with the Ranger Battalion in the Battle of Mogadishu, spent numerous follow-on tours with the Special Operations Command, and had already done an advisor tour in Iraq.229 He was a bulldog who knew how to get things done. Second only to fighting the enemy, Lechner enjoyed fighting bureaucracy. He immediately liked the idea of having the Iraqis host the recruiting drive, but we both knew that we were going to get pushback from the MEF Headquarters since (1) we were going to change their standard operating procedure for the induction of Iraqi police recruits, and (2) it might appear that we were arming the tribes. I firmly believed the MEF Headquarters’ biggest sticking point was the former rather than the latter. Jim Lechner told me, “I got it,” and that was good enough for me. I took him at face value that he could get then necessary approvals because he was that kind of officer. With his word, I had no worries about checking up on mission accomplishment.
Despite this being the Year of the Police, in Ramadi, there had been no more than two dozen recruits a month since February 2006. It was time to start looking for new ways of doing business since the old ones were not working. I thought we were in Iraq to win, not to manage a timetable for withdrawal. We were following orders by recruiting police officers. We were just using a different technique since the current plan was not working. I guess the MEF thought our methods were unsound.
I knew I had to find time to meet with the sheiks, but time is the one asset a commander always lacks. I would usually go out into sector in the morning and come back about four in the afternoon to meet with the staff and walk through the company areas, checking on their preparation for the evening missions. Ninety-nine percent of our missions were platoon-level patrols, and micromanaging a platoon was a waste of my time. The company commanders could handle the platoons, and the TOC crew could handle any situation at the task force level. If worse came to worse, I was only a radio call away. At about 2100 as the patrols were leaving, I would head to the Bezias. I would try to get back from the sheiks’ house by 0100 so I could see the detainees in our detention center, then doing paperwork prior to going to bed. Over the coming days and weeks, I made repeated visits to the Bezia compound building the relationship and monitoring the police recruiting efforts.
During these meetings, Arab men constantly arrived and departed from Sheik Ahmad’s house. Their mood was always jovial, and the sheiks seemed genuinely glad to see Americans. Ahmad continued to complain how the terrorists were taking over, insisting that if we would just arm the tribes, everything would be fine. That talk quickly went nowhere. The sheiks had been dealing with Americans for years, so they knew how to treat us better than we knew how to treat them, but we were learning. Once I sat back in my chair and accidently showed the bottom of my boots to the collective group of ten Iraqis. From our pre-deployment training, I knew that showing the soles of your shoes to an Iraqi was a sign of disrespect that you would make an enemy for life if you committed such a faux pas. When I realized what I had done, I sprang up straight in my chair and firmly planted my boots on the floor. As I was telling Dragon to start apologizing for me, the room broke into laughter.
Befuddled, I turned to Dragon and whispered, “What do I do now?”
“I see you paid attention well in your training,” said Sheik Ahmad, still laughing. Ahmad, Sattar, and their Arab friends continued to be amused at my expense as they talked over each other.
“We know you are an American, and you mean no insult by showing the bottom of your shoes. If you were an Iraqi, then it would be a different story,” Sheik Ahmad continued through Dragon. This was my first experience dealing with tribal leaders in a combat zone, but I was probably the hundredth American officer to sit in the Bezia’s living room over the past three years. They had more cross-cultural experience than I did, something I had to take into account as we proceeded.
It was clear to me that they were trying to get us to do their bidding just as we were trying to get them to do ours. The problem was the Iraqis have been selling carpets for a long time and were much better at it than we were. They were good at playing to the Americans. Before our arrival, Sheik Ahmad built a petting zoo outside his house where he kept quite a few animals, including a camel, since newly arrived Americans wanted to see camels when they came to Iraq, and there were very few around Ramadi. The Bezias even went as far as to put in a western toilet in the bathroom, instead of the more common Roman toilet/hole in the floor that was in every other Iraqi building I had entered. Thankfully they kept the man-love Thursday stuff out of my sight, and I never had to sit through a feast of freshly slaughtered goat in my honor.
When I met with the sheiks, I always took off my helmet and body armor to show that I put my personal safety in their hands. Bedouin culture requires the host to protect his guests. While I was betting on tribal hospitality, I also hedged my bet by keeping Specialist Darnell Jemison and Specialist Tommy Ladell, the two biggest men in the task force, nearby.
Specialist Jemison was six-foot-five and a barrel-chested mountain of a man who looked just flat-out intimidating. Jemison was from Buffalo, NY and joined the Army to learn to drive trucks.230 Now he was part of a personal security detail mingling with tribal leaders in the most dangerous city in the world. Specialist Ladell was a wiry six-foot-four, one hundred ninety-five pounds, and looked like a light heavyweight boxing champion. Ladell graduated from Eastern Hills High School in Fort Worth Texas in May 2001 and joined the Army to be a cavalry scout right after 9/11, wanting to make a difference.231 Together, they stood right outside the room, armed to the teeth, with Sergeant First Class Roberts, another ten men, and four Humvees with machine guns parked outside the house.
Figure 12. Specialists Darnell Jemison and Tommy Ladell ready to go out on Patrol. 12 August 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
Over time, I started to figure out how to play the game as well. I learned to drink chai tea, and kind of missed it when I left. When I first met with the Bezias, I would refuse Sheik Sattar’s offers of cigarettes. As a rule, U.S. Army officers should never accept gifts from subordinates and accepting Sattar’s cigarettes kind of fell into the same category in my mind. Besides, I could easily get cigarettes at Camp Ramadi, and I had not seen a 7-11 around Zangora where he or his buddies could buy a pack of smokes. After a couple of weeks, however, I figured out that according to status in Iraqi society, the guy with the lower social standing offered cigarettes to senior guys as a sign of respect, with the junior guy also pulling out a lighter and offering a light. I realized that it was not a matter of availability of cigarettes or a sign of wealth, but a mark of status based on who did the offering and who accepted the gift. Soon enough I was smoking Sattar’s cigarettes and having him light them for me, especially when other sheiks were around. Status was important to the Iraqis, and I had to show them that I was the big dog in the room in the language of their culture, not mine.
Many Americans officers made a big deal of the Arabs smoking cigarettes. When offered a cigarette, they would give the poor Arab a lecture on the evils of smoking when all he was doing was trying to be polite. Think of it this way: if a man comes to my house and I offer him a drink, and he turns it down, fine, I respect his position. If he gives me a thirty-minute lecture on the evils of alcohol, he is not getting a return invitation. Figuring out Iraqi culture was not that hard once I made the leap that it was not American culture. A little empathy goes a long way.
We had now entered the phase of the operation known as “Steady State.” The soldiers knew what to expect when they went on patrol, and the staff was working diligently to solve the problems we faced. Although the daily fight was extremely violent, even in the relatively peaceful Zangora—exemplified by a patrol led by Lieutenant Tim Connors on the western edge of 5 Kilo that was attacked by a 68 mm SPAM-V rocket remotely fired out of a piece of PVC tubing232 —we were getting better at interdicting the AIF before they attacked us.
On 3 July, F Troop was conducting operations in the villages south of Tam’eem when they discovered a Chevy Suburban with eighty pounds of TNT, 25 blasting caps, and 35 pressure plate triggers. Later that day, Team Dealer detained three bomb makers in Tam’eem, while the Iraqi army battalion and Team Comanche searched the Yellow Apartments in 5 Kilo and detained four terrorist bomb makers on whom we had actionable intelligence. It seemed that maybe the Mirror Man had been correct, after all. We were starting to make progress across AO Conqueror. We were finding bombs and bomb-makers before they attacked, and the Iraqi army was joining the fight.
The reason that steady-state operations is a misnomer is that nothing remains steady. The enemy was constantly developing new tactics, the mood of the community changed based on events, leaders go on R&R or become casualties, or get moved to new assignments. The latter affected us directly as Captain Lou Lancon departed in order to take command of Headquarters Company, 2-6 Infantry. Originally scheduled to leave at the end of May, his change of command inventory was almost complete in Kuwait, and his wife had already been farewelled by both the company and task force’s Family Readiness Group back in Baumholder. Lou had performed brilliantly as the Team Dealer commander, but his time in command was over.
After the change of command ceremony, Lou went back to his room to relax. His flight to Baghdad was the next day, so he was going to watch a few movies and enjoy the free time that had escaped him over the past month. He put a DVD into his laptop and watched the opening scene of the first film. Eighteen hours later, he awoke to a soldier kicking his bunk and telling him to get ready. His flight was now only a couple of hours away. Onboard the helicopter to TQ, one of the Iraqi terps was also rotating out. He thanked Lou for the work the Dealers had accomplished in Tam’eem, telling him that they had really made a difference in less than a month. The people of Tam’eem were now beginning to trust the Coalition.233
Captain Matt Graham assumed command of Team Dealer. It is always difficult taking over command in combat, but Matt would prove equal to the task. Growing up an Army brat, the son of an engineer colonel and a Department of Defense schoolteacher who met in Okinawa and married in Germany, Matt moved around the world with his dad, eventually calling Midwest City, Oklahoma home. His dad told him he would pay for two years of college, and that he would be on his own after that. Matt’s older brother was already at West Point, so he applied to the Air Force Academy and started school in the summer of 2000. After a couple of years, Matt realized that what he wanted to do was lead men in combat, not support pilots, so upon graduation, he transferred to the Army.234 Matt was on his first combat tour when he took command of Team Dealer. He had been on the 2/1 AD brigade staff while we were in Kuwait, so he was a bit of an unknown quantity to me. Although he was in the unenviable position of taking over from a beloved company commander while in combat, he would perform magnificently over the coming months.