“BETTER THE ARABS DO IT TOLERABLY THAN THAT YOU DO IT PERFECTLY.”
CHAPTER 11: IRAQI SECURITY FORCES
JUST BEFORE 0800 ON 4 JULY, TEAM COMANCHE FORMED A 360-degree defensive ring around the Bezia compound, and the police recruiting drive was ready to kick off. By moving the location from the glass factory to the Bezias, our personnel requirement dropped from three companies to just a couple of platoons, though I had to send the four vehicles from my security detail just so Comanche could meet the minimal requirements for securing the site. We would provide the outer security ring, with the on-site security the responsibility of a mixture of Iraqi policemen, Iraq Highway Patrolmen, and the Bezias’ people, who were more of a posse than an organized unit. At exactly 0800, not knowing what the day would bring, Captain Mike Schoenfeldt keyed the hand mike and called “set” over the task force command net.
Schoenfeldt had been in command of Team Comanche for just over a year. Born in rural southeast Kansas, he was now on his second tour in Iraq. Mike knew from the moment he saw a tank at the Neewollah Fair in Independence, Kansas when he was six years old that he wanted to be a tanker. After graduating from the University of Kansas, he became an armor officer stationed at Fort Hood, deploying twice to Kuwait prior to the war as part of Operation Desert Spring.235 Mike had accomplished many different missions in the Army, but pulling security around a sheik’s house awaiting an impending suicide bomber was a new one.
Members of the brigade’s Iraqi Security Force cell—led by Jim Lechner and Captain Travis Patriquin, augmented by the Conqueror staff, set up the various stations the recruits would rotate through to pass the screening. Frankly, the bar was low to get into the Iraqi police: present a valid identification for proof of age, pass a fingerprint check to verify the aspiring officer was not a known terrorist, complete a basic literacy test, and perform a physical fitness test that entailed running 20 yards down and back. Once the recruit met all four of those requirements, he was deemed qualified to attend the police academy in Jordan.
In addition to getting the necessary approvals at the brigade level to move the venue for the drive, Jim Lechner also coordinated with the Superfriends to offer a tidy signing bonus of $1,500 per man. The recruits received $500 on the spot for joining, another $500 upon graduation from the police academy, and a $500 after six months on the job. While the bonus was a nice gesture that would help with retention down the road, it was tribal pressure getting young men in line this morning, not the money.
With my security detail loaned out for the drive, I spent the morning at Camp Ramadi catching up on paperwork. During RIP, I had observed the recruiting drive at the glass factory with Mark Lovejoy, and it was a painful experience, with only a dozen or so potential recruits bothering to show up, and most of those unable to pass the minimal requirements. Despite Sheik Ahmad’s assurances that at least 500 men “willing to fight to the death in ridding Iraq of the scourge of Al Qaeda” would be coming, I was more measured in my expectations.
Throughout the morning, initial reports were good. A steady stream of volunteers had lined up and for the most part, they were passing the screening. In terms of getting young men to risk their lives protecting their city by joining the police, the sheiks were much better recruiters than any Coalition handbill. Mark Lovejoy’s comments on the motivation of young men joining the police during the January 2006 police recruiting drive rang true: they did it because the sheiks told them to do it.
Pulling security on a static checkpoint in 110-degree heat is a difficult mission. Staying vigilant for hours on end watching routine traffic pass by is simply mind numbing. The Humvees were air-conditioned, giving soldiers a break from the heat, but the tanks and Bradleys turned into convection ovens in the blistering sun, adding another 30 to 40 degrees to the ambient temperature. Specialist Jeremy Brown was in his fourth hour of standing in the gunner’s hatch of my Humvee, scanning the horizon outside the Bezia compound, looking for suspicious vehicles behind the trigger of his M240 machine gun, while Specialist Michael Rumpl sat behind the wheel reporting on the radio to the Team Comanche headquarters, providing periodic updates on the boredom.
Nine dull, distant thuds in rapid succession broke the still of an otherwise quiet morning. Specialist Brown rapidly scanned his sector, looking for the source of the explosions, or a renegade dump truck heading for the compound, but saw nothing out of order. Leaning down through the gunner’s hatch Brown called to Rumpl, asking if he had seen anything. Before Rumpl could answer, a blinding flash of white light and simultaneous shockwave rocked the vehicle, knocking Brown to the floor. Immediately, a second mortar round exploded just on the other side of Rumpl’s door, rocking the vehicle a second time. Sergeant First Class Roberts sprang from his vehicle and raced towards Rumpl and Brown, thinking the vehicle had sustained a direct hit through the gunner’s hatch. The third round did score a direct hit on the hood of the Humvee occupied by Specialist Jemison. In a matter of seconds, the other six mortar rounds exploded, shattering the windshields on two Comanche vehicles and causing minor damage to the buildings inside the Bezia compound.236
When the report of the mortar attack reached the TOC, I scratched up a couple of vehicles and rushed to the Bezia compound, expecting to find a scene of mayhem similar to the bombing of ECP 3, with men wailing and giving excuses as to why the recruits had run away. Instead, Sheiks Ahmad and Sattar waited for me with broad smiles, warm hugs, and man-kisses as soon as my vehicle stopped inside their compound. Behind them, the recruiting drive continued as if nothing had happened.
“Ah, Colonel Deane, I am glad you could make it,” Ahmad greeted me.
I asked him if his family was all right, and explained that I would understand if he wanted to stop the recruiting drive. In my mind, it was one thing for a man to battle Al Qaeda; it was quite another thing to expose one’s wife and children to the fight. Both sheiks looked at me with puzzled looks on their faces. “Why would we stop?” Ahmad asked. “Allah made the mortars miss.”
Captain Mike Schoenfeldt was inside the building monitoring the recruiting process. “Mike, what the hell happened?” I asked.
“The mortars came in. They all ducked. No one got hurt, and after a couple of minutes, they got back in line,” he explained calmly.
“What the hell?” I could only shake my head.
“Inshallah, sir. In-sha-la,” Mike replied with a shrug. “Allah willed it.”
The mortars did hit four of our vehicles, including two of four in my security detachment, but there were no visible injuries to either soldiers or Iraqis so that I would call that a win. At that moment, I began looking at the Bezias quite differently. Here were two brothers who were risking their lives and the lives of their wives and children by standing up to Al Qaeda. Although we kept a Reaganesque “trust but verify” relationship with all of the sheiks, my trust and confidence in the brothers went up considerably.
Later that afternoon, Rumpl and Brown made their way back out to the recruiting drive in a new Humvee. I asked them how they were doing, and both said “fine.” They recounted the story of the mortar attack as we waited for the recruiting drive to the end. By now, enough time had passed so they could laugh about it.
Specialist Jeremy Brown grew up an Army brat, living all around the world. He graduated from Killeen High School, just outside of Fort Hood, Texas in 1994, and went into construction. After a few years, he started his trucking company. Being a small businessman in central Texas worked well for Brown until the attacks of 9/11. His father was in the Army, along with most of the friends he grew up with, so when President Bush told the military to “get ready,” he took that as his cue to enlist as a cavalry scout despite being over 30 years old. Years later, Brown was medically retired from the Army with a Traumatic Brain Injury that today he thinks was a result of the mortar attack.237
Across the task force, unless a soldier was bleeding, he went right back out on patrol. It was months into the deployment before we even began sending blast victims to the medics for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) screening. We just did not know any better at the time, and we are still years behind on the treatment of TBI and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Treatment for these types of injuries includes drug therapy, but most veterans also return home with some physical injury, either a Purple Heart-worthy wound directly related to combat or bad backs and trick knees from carrying the equipment. Doctors liberally prescribe pain medications to treat these physical ailments. I believe there have been insufficient studies on the combination of the two drug therapies. Anecdotally, I have seen too many soldiers given a bag full of painkillers, anti-psychotic drugs, and sleeping pills and told to take them as needed. Add in some hard liquor self-medication and the results are predictable and, all too often, tragic.
Late in the afternoon, 200 young Iraqi men beaming with pride and waving excitedly to the gathered Iraqis and Americans alike stood in the cargo beds of desert-sand-colored eight-ton cargo trucks, knowing the dangers they faced and the risks to their families. Watching the impressive sight of the trucks pulling out of the courtyard of the compound, I felt a glimmer of hope for the future of Ramadi. While Sheik Ahmad had fallen short of the 500 recruits he promised, he had doubled the size of the Ramadi police force in one day’s work. Despite my four shot up Humvees, I counted this as a good day.
Figure 13. First police recruiting drive at the Abu Risha compound. From Left: Sterling Jensen, Jabori (an interpreter), MP Captain Scott Liefker who was wounded a month later in a suicide bombing at the Jazeera Police station, Ricky (an interpreter), Sheik Ahmad Bezia abu Risha, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Deane. 4 July 2006. Courtesy Sterling Jensen. Click on the photo for bonus features.
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The new police recruits would pay dividends in two months when they returned from training, but for now, Ramadi remained a hotbed of terrorist’s attacks. Colonel MacFarland continued to orchestrate the plan that he had laid out less than a month earlier in the headquarters conference room. The brigade had finally received additional Iraqi army forces, but these performed with mixed results. The first Iraqi infantry battalion simply melted away over the course of a week due to violence and the austere conditions, but the replacement battalion showed up ready to fight. Now, Coalition forces actively patrolled in neighborhoods that weeks earlier were firmly under AIF control. Block by block, the patrols conducted census operations, trying to win the trust of the population.
On 6 July 2006, 3/8 Marines led a clearing operation at Ramadi General Hospital. The largest hospital in western Iraq, Ramadi General was a modern seven-story, two-hundred-fifty-bed facility that looked exactly like the building on the opening credits of the soap opera General Hospital. Depending on the reports you believed, Ramadi General Hospital was:
1) A field hospital for terrorists.
2) A headquarters for Al Qaeda operations in Ramadi.
3) A torture chamber for Al Qaeda.
4) A bomb-making facility.
5) A sniper’s nest.
6) A place of peace where the American oppressors unduly increased the suffering of the people of Ramadi by forcing their way into the facility.
I believed it was a combination of the first five. The operation went off without a hitch, with the Marines finding a dozen or so IED triggering devices in a tiled ceiling in one of the offices.238 The enemy knew that hospitals, mosques and schools were off limits to Coalition personnel, and routinely used them as armories and meeting halls. Al Qaeda used its control of the hospital as a bullet point in the propaganda campaign, claiming it was evidence proving who was really in charge in Ramadi.
To prevent the enemy from reoccupying the hospital, the Ready First opened an Iraqi police station in the neighborhood. Now, with the hospital back under Coalition control, we had denied the enemy a valuable asset and provided the people of Ramadi with an actual facility they could use for medical treatment although chronic shortages of medicine, doctors, and equipment remained. The hospital, unimpeded by Al Qaeda or other AIF forces, began treating patients for the rest the Ready First’s tour in Ramadi.
Task Force Conqueror continued census operations leading to targeted raids based on intelligence—usually gained through previous census operations—and attempted to engage with the leadership of Al Anbar University, as well as working with the sheiks on police recruiting. The enemy fought back furiously, placing more IEDs throughout the streets of Tam’eem as they attempted to keep us from reaching the population and gaining their trust. The route clearance patrols conducted by the 54th Engineers, Task Force Dagger, were critical to our being able to move through town. Every night, these men moved slowly along the main routes, searching for and disarming IEDs. They actively hunted the source of the biggest killer of Americans in Iraq, an incredibly dangerous mission. Dagger supported the entire Ready First, and we only had use of this valuable asset a few hours during the night, a couple of times each week.
On the night of 8 July, Team Dealer and Task Force Dagger conducted a route clearance patrol in Tam’eem, almost directly across from Camp Ramadi, and very near the site where Scott Love and Nick Crombie died a month prior. A platoon of dismounted infantry moved building to building clearing the flanks as the tanks and Bradleys interspersed with Task Force Dagger’s mine resistant Huskie, Buffalo, and Cougar vehicles, crept at a snail’s pace, with soldiers interrogating every pothole and piece of debris on the street. We had done everything we could to mitigate the risk in this textbook route clearance patrol. The only asset we lacked was a Predator drone, and we only had Predator support on a “Troops in Contact” call.
Shortly before midnight, a massive IED exploded underneath the second vehicle in the convoy, a mine-resistant Cougar. The blast drove a manhole cover through the bottom of the vehicle, cutting it in half, instantly killing Staff Sergeant Omar Flores,239 Specialist Troy Linden,240 and Specialist Joseph Micks.241 A fourth, grievously wounded soldier, Sergeant Al’kaila Floyd,242 would die from his wounds three days later.243 Also severely injured was Staff Sergeant John Noel of Charlie Rock, who was riding along learning how to conduct a route clearance patrol.
It was one of the worst days of the deployment: four men dead and one severely injured in a matter of seconds. The attack on Task Force Dagger occurred in AO Conqueror, and I was ultimately responsible. I met the casualties at Charlie Med when they arrived while we sent out the recovery quick reaction force to bring the vehicles back and grieved for the loss along with the 54th Engineers.
In the peacetime Army, officers become convinced that if they do everything right in battle, the result will be minimal casualties. The Army has a proven methodology for training management, execution of training, and an after action review process following every training event. During these reviews, a leader establishes an open dialogue among all of the participants to determine a connection between a shortfall in either the planning or preparation and a failure during the execution of the mission. What I never fully realized is that sometimes the enemy gets lucky or is just better than we are that particular day and that we will have soldiers die even though they are doing everything right. The Vietnam veterans used to say that the enemy gets a vote, but as a Desert Storm veteran, I had never really understood that until now.
On 10 July, I had a scheduled meeting with the leadership of Al Anbar University. Two hours before the meeting, Team Dealer sent a patrol to secure my route into the university. While observing the route, they identified a man planting an IED near the entrance to the university. Had the terrorists at Al Anbar University planned an IED ambush for my patrol? Who knows? Probably. The terrorists knew that Americans were going to pass through a certain area at a certain time, so it made sense for them to try to attack us. In their view of a perfect world, not only would they kill some Americans, they would get video footage of us firing at students on the university campus so they could use that for their propaganda campaign.
The university was a modern facility located just south of Tam’eem. Mark Lovejoy had told me that the sentiment at the university was strongly anti-Coalition. His men had conducted a raid on the campus months prior, and there was a tremendous amount of political blowback from both the Iraqis and the American headquarters in Baghdad. His men had left the place alone after that. Initially, I thought if we just went down there and talked with the university leadership, and perhaps threw some money around, maybe we could reach some understanding. In the days before the meeting, I checked every intelligence report I could find concerning the university, but could not find much background information.
The classified intelligence reports did not seem to tell the whole story. Allegedly, the campus was the informal headquarters of the mujahedeen in Ramadi and was fast becoming a hotbed for Al Qaeda activity as well. I Googled Al Anbar University from my unclassified computer and was surprised at what I found in the open press. Coalition forces thoroughly searched the campus at the start of the war, suspecting it of being a storage site for weapons of mass destruction. At least five open source articles described airstrikes or battalion sized raids on the campus dating back to 2003. By my count, terrorists had murdered at least three university presidents in the past couple of years. I also found a professor who graduated from the University of Nebraska the same year I had, but I was hesitant to ask for him, fearing that he would be beaten or killed for talking to the Coalition.
The checkered relationship explained a lot of the unwillingness to support the Coalition and exemplified one of the serious problems in the RIP process, what the Army calls knowledge management. This is a pyramid built upon four levels, consisting of data, information, knowledge, and understanding. Units pass mountains of factual detail along during RIP, exchanging external hard drives filled with enough gigabytes of data to power Marty McFly’s DeLorean, detailing the technical specifics of each attack in the AO.
An entry might read: Attacks against Coalition patrols use command detonated IED with speaker wire linked to five to seven 152-millimeter artillery rounds.
Units pass a fair amount of information as well: Al Qaeda is our biggest threat, but numerical majorities of the attacks are by groups that we consider the mujahedeen.
Units pass some knowledge as well, but that is as dependent upon the incoming unit to listen as it is on the outgoing unit to provide it: The mujahedeen joined with Al Qaeda after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the security situation has gotten progressively worse since then.
The most significant breakdown occurs when units attempt to pass along a true understanding of the situation. Outgoing commanders tend to relay current information, not the history of how the situation developed into its current state. Some incoming commanders may think they have a better way of conducting operations, so they discount what the old unit says. Others are overwhelmed with the amount of raw data before them, as well as the adjustment to a new environment. Whatever the cause, new units can absorb the data, information, and often the knowledge from their predecessors, but they rarely make it to understanding.
While Al Qaeda is irreconcilable, there exists an opportunity to reach out to the mujahedeen despite the perceived Shia bias in Coalition policies and a lack of an effective central or local government. The Sunnis are open to dealing with the Coalition due to their disenchantment with Al Qaeda’s heavy-handed tactics, implementation of Sharia law and their prohibition on smoking during Ramadan. We had opportunities just after the invasion, after the capture of Saddam, and during the elections in December 2005 and we missed them. Here are the ten things to look for among the population to see if a new opportunity will arise and here are the local contacts to work on them with.
Commanders at all levels speak frankly to each other during RIP about the current state of affairs. Rarely accomplished is the passing of the understanding of how things became the way they are. What were the issues that the departing unit faced when it first arrived and what did it do to fix them? What were the important issues to the commanders two or three years prior? These are the hard questions no one asks; yet finding these answers is the only way to understand the motivations behind the lingering mistrust or even hatred of the population. We tend to believe that the Iraqis have a great sense of history, and compared to Americans, this is true. Unfortunately, a majority of the history the Iraqis referenced occurred since the end of Desert Storm, and a good part of that since the start of the American occupation in 2003. The fact that the current commander does not know what happened eighteen months prior while that experience is common knowledge to everyone in town was not an Iraqi problem. That responsibility rested squarely on our shoulders.
I had the staff try to find all the previous units’ RIP briefings going back to the start of the war, seeking background information on how the situation in Ramadi had changed over time. Unfortunately, with all the transitions between units, briefings had been lost, hard drives damaged, and files discarded. The information we sought was either not available, stored in an unusable format, or not specific enough to be of real use. Too often, I either had to rely on my translator Dragon, who had been in Ramadi for two years, or use Google to find news articles to gain some understanding of the situation.
Understanding the Coalition’s history with the university changed my approach in dealing with the institution’s leadership. Simply talking to them was not going to un-ring the bell of the past three years. They had no reason to trust me. I was either going to have to earn that trust, or arrest them all, and clearly the latter would playing right into the AIF propaganda campaign. I hoped the academics could be a moderate Iraqi voice entering the conversation. It was admittedly a slim hope, but one of the few we had at the time.
There might as well have been an unwelcome mat at the front gate of the university when we arrived. Maybe that was what the IED was supposed to be? The campus of Al Anbar University looked like it could be a small university in the American Southwest, comprised of modern multi-story buildings. An impressive angular archway towered over the main entrance to campus. Even though the men and women there dressed in western clothing, not robes or burkas, the vibe on campus was definitely anti-Coalition. Frankly, with all that had happened in Ramadi over the past 16 years, I could not blame them. As we parked our Humvees in front of the university president’s office, passersby universally looked at us with disdain and hostility.
A sign in English declaring a partnership between the University of Oklahoma and Al Anbar University caught my eye outside of the science building. Having grown up a Husker and graduating from the University of Nebraska, this collaborating between OU and Al Anbar University further fueled my suspicions about the Sooners, dating back to the Barry Switzer era.
The meeting with the university leadership did not go well. The university president was an older, frail man wearing a collared dress shirt and slacks. He looked more like an academic than a terrorist kingpin. He was nervous in demeanor and terse in his conversation. He refused to speak privately with me in his office. I felt he wanted an Iraqi witness in case the terrorists accused him of collaborating with the Coalition. It was impossible for me to tell if he was an active leader of the insurgency, or just scared for his life.
The man who identified himself as the university’s security chief looked more like a thug than an academic. He assured us the campus was free of terrorists and that the Coalition’s presence was unnecessary. The university president asked me why we killed one of the gardeners this morning. I showed him the pictures of the IED making material next to the body and asked why the gardener was in the middle of a road planting a bomb. The meeting went downhill after that.
During the frustrating discussions, I became convinced that we had to do something about the university sooner rather than later. I told the president I would hold him personally accountable for events around the campus. I was not certain what good that would do, but it made me feel like I was, at least, doing something. In the end, however, I came off sounding like Dean Wormer putting him on “double secret probation.”
On the way back from the university, we swung through Zangora and stopped at the Bezia compound. The brothers had mentioned that they knew other sheiks from across the river who wanted to meet with Coalition forces to discuss police recruiting. I was happy to help facilitate linking these sheiks and Lieutenant Colonel Dan Walrath at the brothers’ homes. Although we had a meeting scheduled for the next evening, I wanted to confirm the date and time. Over the past weeks, I had come to understand that building the relationship with the Bezias was tremendously important and the more time I spent with them, the better. I also wanted to thank them for the great turn out at the police recruiting event the week prior and check on what they were doing to get even more recruits for the next drive. I would spend a lot of my personal time over the coming months cultivating the relationship with Sheiks Ahmad and Sattar, and the more time we spent together, the more they produced.
I worked closely with Dan Walrath in dealing with the tribes, as well as keeping the Ready First informed of what actions we were taking. Dan was making good progress in the tribal areas north of Ramadi as well. Each of us had our SOIs, and I was careful not to make a promise to one of Dan’s SOIs that he would have to fulfill. The Iraqis were astute businessmen, and they would happily play one group of Americans off against another for the best deal they could get, so we had to ensure that we coordinated across the brigade in dealing with the tribal leaders. For me, the best way to do that was to limit the number of people and organizations that dealt with the Bezias. Captain Pat Fagan or I would be at every meeting with them, especially if outside organizations were also present.
I came to rely on Lieutenant Sean Frerking to help me prepare for my meetings with the sheiks. Sean had been a tank platoon leader in Baghdad with Bravo Company 1-35 AR when the task force received two new lieutenants. Sean was the longest serving platoon leader in the battalion and was nearing a promotion to captain. I brought Sean back to Kuwait right before we received orders to move to Ramadi. He did a little of everything on the task force staff, helping run the detention facility, working on civil affairs projects, and keeping minutes of the meetings with the sheiks so we could report the results up the chain of command.
Frerking was older than the average lieutenant and was a rare mix of Texas redneck and ultraliberal. He had an opinion about most things and was not afraid to share it. As a child, Sean’s family moved around a lot due to his father’s work. Ultimately, he graduated from Richardson High School in Dallas, Texas in May 1987, and headed to Texas A&M. Over the next seven years, Sean worked through a couple of different majors, quite a few minors, and an extensive study abroad. He landed a position on the school newspaper and completed his degree in journalism in 1994 with well over two-hundred credit hours to show for it. After college, Sean started working at the local College Station newspaper, first as the crime reporter, and then covering A&M football. As Sean was getting married, he realized that the reporter job was more of an extension of college than a grownup job. Sean’s grandfather had been a World War II pilot, and Sean had always thought about serving his country, and with his new found responsibility, this seemed like as good a time as any to join up. He enlisted because he wanted to see what a soldier’s life was like before leading them. He became an Arabic translator and served throughout the Middle East until entering OCS two days before the initial attack into Iraq in March 2003.244
Although we had been in the sector for over a month, we still did not have a good handle on who the key players were in the community, nor who was behind the violence in Tam’eem. We did have a “top ten most wanted list” of high-value targets (HVTs) that the 1-172 AR had left us. At the top of the list were two terrorists, Abu Katab and Mullah Katan, the number one and two leaders of Al Qaeda in Al Anbar. We chased them as the “Fugitive” chased the one-armed man. We had pictures of them in orange prison jumpsuits from when Coalition forces had previously detained and released both men. Other than that, we really did not know who was attacking us.
Recidivism was a problem in Iraq. Every Iraqi seemed to have at least four fake IDs: one with a Sunni name, in case Al Qaeda stopped them; one with a Shia name in case a Shia death squad stopped them; one with a fake name in case the Coalition stopped them; and one with their real name so they could pick up their government check. Without a fingerprint, it was almost impossible to figure out an Iraqi’s true identity. The biometrics database of fingerprints and DNA was still in its infancy, so we could never really tell whom we captured until he arrived at the task force detention facility. When we did send terrorists to prison, too often even the guiltiest detainees were back on the streets a couple of months later. The soldiers called it the “catch and release program.”
I spent a lot of time the first month trying to figure out how to capture the HVTs on the top ten list. Turns out, I had the entire perspective of how to catch terrorists completely wrong. At first, I thought we were looking for the Viet Cong: A faceless enemy living in the jungle (desert in this case) wearing black pajamas and attacking Americans. The conventional wisdom was if we could just get the leaders and maybe the next couple of knuckleheads on the top ten list, then the violence would stop, and peace would break out. Every unit across Iraq from the Multi-National Corps Iraq headquarters to the third platoon had a top ten list.
Killing or capturing the leadership of the insurgency would help a little, but not to the extent that one would think. Every company commander in the Army thinks he can do a better job of commanding a battalion (or brigade or division) than his current commander. Terrorists are the same. Killing or capturing the enemy commanders may lead to a slight decrease in organizational capability, but it certainly does not stop the violence.
Over time, I came to realize that we were not looking for a shadowy Viet Cong-like enemy, but instead looking for someone more like Michael Collins, the legendary Irish rebel leader. Collins lived openly in downtown Dublin, wore a suit every day, and calmly rode his bicycle down the street waving to British Army soldiers as he passed while masterminding the 1919 guerrilla war for Irish independence. His plan focused initially on separating the predominately-Catholic Royal Irish Constabulary (police) from the Irish population by propaganda, murder and intimidation, thus rendering the local police ineffective. Without a force to maintain the peace, the English brought in additional British military and paramilitary forces. This incensed the local population, leading to the rejection of the Crown’s authority, a marked increase in violence, and the ultimate victory for the Irish Republican forces.245
I always wondered how many times I passed one of our most wanted HVTs or a terrorist on the street or in a car and I never noticed him. In the end, we only got one of our top ten HVTs, and that was only after we inadvertently killed him in an “escalation of force” incident that went sideways. To me, our focus had to be on who was attacking us now, and we were wasting organizational energy trying to find the rest.
Sheik Sattar later told me that he had known both Abu Katab and Mullah Katan while growing up in Ramadi. They were petty criminals during the Saddam regime, not mastermind Islamic terrorists. The residents of Ramadi considered both of them punks and lowlifes, but now their status in society was elevated simply because the Coalition was after them.
As we were doing our best to figure out whom we were fighting, the locals in Zangora were beginning to take responsibility for their own security. A Team Comanche patrol encountered an armed checkpoint set up by the local villagers. They spoke with the Iraqis operating the checkpoint and asked them what they were doing. The men stated they were protecting their village from “foreigners.” I remember being apprehensive at this discovery. While self-protection was good, I was worried that it would lead to militias and ultimately a warlord. The last thing I wanted was an emerging tribal military force. I still did not have a good understanding of the social dynamics, and I feared that the locals were forming militias, instead of keying in on the good news that the citizens were banding together for self-protection. In any event, since the checkpoint was in a small village in an isolated area of Zangora, I let the checkpoint stay.
It took me a couple of months to understand what the word foreigner meant to the locals. I would hear the word and think of a Yemeni, a Syrian, or a Saudi coming into Iraq to strap on a suicide vest and get his jihad on. To the locals, the word foreigner meant anyone not from that area. A foreigner could be a man from the next village, the next street, or even a cousin they did not like. Iraqis rarely killed themselves in suicide bombings. Most of the suicide bombers we found were actual foreign fighters, predominately Yemini. While the leaders of the groups fighting us were Al Qaeda zealots, the rank and file were in the mujahedeen and simply wanted U.S. forces out of Iraq so they could get on with their lives, not to be part of a global jihad against the Great Satan.
In retrospect, things were getting better. Team Dealer had received two new platoon leaders, Second Lieutenants Perfecto Sanchez, and Mike Lettiere, and they were beginning to get a handle on the situation in Tam’eem. Within a week of taking over his platoon, Lieutenant Sanchez led his men as they discovered a major terrorist cache that we had been seeking for months. We knew the terrorists were using an area known with the codename “chicken coop,” to cache weapons and ammunition, we just did not know the location. Apparently, every resident of Tam’eem knew where the area was located. The Iraqis used the traditional street and neighborhood names while Coalition troops used the names from our operational graphics. This was another example where just asking the local cops would have paid huge dividends.
When Perfecto reported to the Task Force headquarters, I remember thinking that the kid was going to be a general someday, typically not the first reaction anyone has when meeting a second lieutenant. Perfecto was born in Harlem and raised by his grandmother, who stressed both curiosity and responsibility. Growing up, he showed a lot of potential, but he was just not applying it to his life. His high school track coach, John Dammon, pulled Sanchez aside one day and gave him a pamphlet on West Point. He was smart enough to realize that opportunity was presenting itself and that sticking around Harlem would only diminish his chance to make something of himself. After graduating from Newtown High School in 2001, Perfecto headed to West Point. During his sophomore year, he again found himself just skating by, dangerously close to expulsion. This time, his TAC officer gave him two choices: get serious or get out. Perfecto decided that if he was going to be in the Army, he was going to be in it all the way. He requested an assignment to the infantry and became an Airborne Ranger before reporting to Germany.
Figure 14. Team Dealer Lieutenants Mike Lettiere, Perfecto Sanchez, and Ian Blackstone with Kellen Blythe in the background. Click on the photo for bonus features.
Now Perfecto was taking over a platoon that had lost its platoon leader during the first days in Ramadi and had been in sustained combat for weeks. Prior to talking to his platoon for the first time, he was naturally apprehensive, worried about whether the soldiers would accept him and follow him in combat. After all, they were doing just fine before he showed up. When Sanchez addressed his men, he told them that it was a privilege for him to lead the platoon and that it was a privilege for all of them to represent their nation. He went on to say they were all in Iraq to make a difference, and that they were going to leave Iraq proud of what they accomplished, and, more importantly, proud of their actions.246
Perfecto was one of the dozens of young leaders that performed at a stellar level in the most dangerous city in the world.