“OUR GOAL IS NOT THE VICTORY OF MIGHT, BUT THE VINDICATION OF RIGHT.”
CHAPTER 21: OPERATION DEALER
WE KNEW THAT THE TWAY POLICE STATION WAS EFFECTIVE because within a week, jihadists were trying to blow the place up with an explosives-laden vehicle every couple of days. Fortunately, the policemen manning the station were incredibly effective in detonating suicide bombers at a distance. They were locals who knew who belonged in the area, and when they saw a vehicle that did not belong in the area, they took action.
While we were making headway in getting the Iraqis into the fight, we had also stretched ourselves thin. We had to cover COP Crab with a makeshift advisor team led by Jason Craw, OP Thumper with Iraqi Policemen, CP 293 with Kris Stilling’s advisor team, and the Al Horea Police station with its MP advisor team, as well as the Iraqi Highway Patrol Station. Every day, a platoon support convoy resupplied the Iraqi army and police positions. We did everything we could think of to make sure they had a chance to be successful, from having the medic platoon teaching first aid, to Chuck Bergman encouraging them to use the port-a-potties correctly and stop using the urinal as a hand washing station.
By now, only three groups in our AO still resisted Sheik Sattar and the Anbar Awakening Council: Al Qaeda sympathizers, some of the sheiks in Jordan who were financially profiting from their relationship with MEF Headquarters, and a small cabal of staff officers on the MEF Headquarters staff closely tied to the Jordanian sheiks. Prior to the first police recruiting drive in July, we had done a lot of digging into the background of the Bezias, and before the Awakening meeting with Colonel MacFarland we went into high gear checking on Sheik Sattar in particular. All the intelligence pointed to the entire Bezia family having a history of support for the Coalition from day one, and there was nothing in any file that we could find that implicated Sheik Sattar in anything terror related.
A small element of the MEF Headquarters—who only weeks before assessed that Anbar was lost and then leaked the report to the media—was adamant that we should not be dealing with Sheik Sattar. They believed that Sattar was a criminal, and the Anbar Awakening Council was a distraction to their true work of getting the sheiks in Jordan on board supporting the Coalition. Immediately after the Anbar Awakening Council’s pronouncement, the MEF Headquarters began generating reports that Sattar was a smuggler and a thief. The sources for the reports were unnamed, but to me appeared to be the sheiks in Jordan, who were dealing directly with the MEF Headquarters, and I am certain were paid handsomely for their efforts.
The one charge against Sheik Sattar that may have had credence was that he was a smuggler. Smuggling is the family business in Anbar province. The Iraqis have been smuggling since before the days of Marco Polo, so why would they change now? As long as they avoided smuggling arms for Al Qaeda, I did not care where the locals bought consumer goods. Joe Kennedy had been a smuggler, and both my Italian wife and I had a picture of his son on our walls growing up. While I am not apologizing for Sheik Sattar’s alleged transgressions, as Colonel MacFarland often quoted Oscar Wilde, “Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.”
A few of the ideas coming out of the MEF Headquarters on how to deal with the sheiks exemplified how divergent our views were. Once I received an email asking me to identify the second most important sheik behind Sattar. Was that important information? Now that the people of Ramadi were coming together, were we going to start sowing the seeds of discontent by trying to play them against each other? Another email from the MEF staff recommended giving the tribes their own area of operations so they could show us what they could do. I remember sitting at my desk after midnight yelling at the computer screen when I read the email. The very idea seemed preposterous to me: we wanted to work with the locals, not hang them out to dry.
In hindsight, I must admit that I was wrong in my initial suspicions that select members of the MEF Headquarters staff were AIF at a minimum, if not card-carrying Al Qaeda operatives. However, at the time, I firmly believed that to be a distinct possibility. They fought us on every initiative we suggested. The struggle we had throughout the deployment was to gain a common understanding between higher and lower levels of command, which meant getting the higher-level staff officers to take a chance on something new that would benefit the operation. This is something that I failed to do. While I believe I did a good job of keeping Colonel MacFarland abreast of what we were doing, in retrospect I’m not sure that all of his staff and my staff had the same understanding of the situation. By the time our recommendations reached MEF Headquarters, their rejection was immediate.
Granted, there is always friction between higher and lower headquarters, and by doctrine, communications flow from higher to lower,335 but the lower headquarters has a responsibility to keep the higher headquarters informed and to help them make correct decisions as well. When I was a combat training center observer/controller, commanders often complained that their higher headquarters “didn’t get it.” I told them, “The higher headquarters is always screwed up. If you don’t believe me, just ask your subordinates.”
One of the main reasons causing the divergent views between the Ready First and MEF Headquarters regarding dealing with the sheiks was our reporting process. Every time anyone from Task Force Conqueror met with Sheik Sattar or any of our SOIs, there was a written record of the meeting filed within the task force headquarters and sent to the Ready First, and then presumably onto the MEF Headquarters. Based on the outcome of the meeting I would personally follow up with Dan Walrath, Jim Lechner, or Colonel MacFarland. The problem was that none of the intelligence personnel up the chain of command read these reports. Instead, they focused on the draft intelligence information reports (DIIRs), which were coming mainly from the human intelligence teams or technical sources of intelligence. The Intel guys did not consider feedback from meeting with the Sheiks to be real intelligence—despite that these meetings were our only insight to what community leaders were thinking.
To the locals, the sheiks who ran to Jordan had given up their vote in the future of Anbar. Much like a church raffle, the winner needed to be present. Sheik Sattar was literally the last man standing who was willing to take on Al Qaeda. In 2009, I attended a conference on the Anbar Awakening where one of the attendees, who had been intimately involved in meeting with the Jordan sheiks, declared, “The sheiks told us how they wanted to stay in Anbar, but their people begged them to leave Iraq and go to Jordan for safety.”
“And you believed them?” I thought; astounded that he could make that claim with a straight face. What were the sheiks in Jordan going to say? Certainly not the truth, which to me lay along the lines of, “I am a big coward, so I ran to Jordan. Please continue to give me money, preferably dollars, but Euros will do in a pinch.”
Sheik Sattar had gone from tribal middle-management to the role of head sheik of the Anbar Awakening movement literally overnight. At the start, he had not even been the leader of his tribe, as he was junior to his brother Sheik Ahmad, but a number of sheiks had gotten together and voted Sattar as the head of the Anbar Awakening Council. That was good enough for me.
Sheik Sattar stood up to Al Qaeda in a visible and vocal way, and he did it daily. He had the ear of the Americans due to his ability to produce police recruits, an attribute no one else had displayed. Furthermore, he accepted the rule of law and was willing to let the Iraqi police be a powerful tool in the fight against the AIF. He saw the benefit of having the men in the tribes receive honorable jobs protecting their people, and was pragmatic enough to recognize that there was no way in hell the U.S. was simply going to hand over weapons so he could arm his tribes.
The MEF Headquarters, on the other hand, found itself in a “false choice” situation, an all too common trap during a counterinsurgency. They felt it was going to be either Governor Mamoon or the Anbar Awakening Council, that there could be no middle ground. The MEF Headquarters backed Governor Mamoon for some understandable reasons.
First, he was the duly elected Governor of Anbar Province, and our mission required us to assist the Iraqis in establishing a government. Mamoon was the face—and the only face—of the provincial government. The Anbar government center was in shambles after months of seemingly daily terrorist attacks; no one aside from Governor Mamoon showed up for work, and it took a Marine infantry company to get him there. Without him, there was nothing to show after three and a half years work.
Second, the MEF Headquarters’ staff could not dismiss Governor Mamoon, even if they had wanted to. Although the Anbar Awakening Council adamantly maintained that the basis for their actions lay within the Iraqi Constitution, I fully agreed that the MEF Headquarters could not insert itself into what may have become the first landmark case for the Iraqi Supreme Court.
A third factor existed as well: the Marines had blood invested in Governor Mamoon, since the company guarding him had taken a number of casualties over the previous months.
While I could understand the MEF’s arguments, they were invalid.
I personally met Governor Mamoon only a couple of times and did not have a high opinion of him. My first impression had been that he was a grease ball in a cheap suit with a sweaty handshake. One of my good friends, Dr. Will Lovely, currently a professor of international business and strategy at Northeastern University, and a widely sought after guest lecturer for Army units deploying to combat, served as a State Department Official on the Anbar Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2005. Dr. Lovely worked closely with Governor Mamoon and assured me that while he too had some reservations about Mamoon, the Governor was well intentioned. Even by giving Mamoon the benefit of the doubt that he was a loyal public servant who stepped up to help his fledgling nation establish a democracy, he was ineffective as governor and his key constituency, the tribes, believed him to be a member of Al Qaeda. One of the sheiks once told me the Governor was from his tribe, and we could have him. They did not want him back.
We had a rare opportunity to unite the populace behind the government. Dr. Lovely stressed the importance of finding ways to help the formal government establish a level of legitimacy in the eyes of its people. Legitimacy, he concluded, is linked to trust. When faced with a problem, to what degree do the people turn to the formal government authorities as opposed to the illegitimate informal authorities such as Al Qaeda or the Taliban? Dr. Lovely described this concept with the analogy of the linking of God and Man’s hands in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
Despite our progress, the MEF Headquarters continued sending reports explaining why we should not be dealing with Sattar. Finally, nearly a month after the Anbar Awakening started, we arranged a meeting between one of the MEF Headquarters deputy commanders and Sheik Sattar, on 4 October. The meeting went terribly. Sheik Sattar was ready to move ahead in dealing with the Coalition, but the MEF leadership was not interested in dealing with the Awakening. In my opinion, they treated him like a child.
After the meeting, I took the MEF deputy commander to the newly built Tway police station, perhaps the most galvanizing symbol of U.S. commitment to the citizens of Anbar to date. He took me aside and lectured, “Sheik Sattar is a criminal,” he declared sternly. “You should arrest him!”
I had enough and blurted out my reply. “I ain’t fucking arresting him. You go fucking arrest him. He’s the best shot we got.”
Why he did not relieve me on the spot, I will never know. Instead, I got an additional lecture on how I did not see the big picture.
To me, this illustrated the larger problem: The MEF Headquarters was unable to chart a way to victory. Across the U.S. government and the military, in particular, it seemed that victory had become a dirty word and no one wanted to use it. It seemed self-evident to me, and I think to the great majority of soldiers in Iraq that, if we were risking our lives fighting a war, then we should be there to win. It seemed to me that the MEF Headquarters was fighting not to lose. I understood the political pressure they were under, both in Baghdad and in Washington, but what we had been doing previously in Iraq simply was not working, and it was time for some new thinking. We were not arming the tribes. Instead, we were using the tribal leaders to connect the population to a government that had not earned their trust. Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” The Anbar Awakening Council was the Iraqi example of that statement in action. The men could join the police, protect their families and property, have a say in their governance, and demand that their government do something for them. The rule of law would be in effect, and for the first time in any of their lives, the government of Iraq would be responsive to the people.
While the political infighting between the Anbar Awakening Council, the Governor of Al Anbar, the MEF Headquarters, and the Iraqi government in Baghdad continued, and demanded much of my attention, my main job was commanding an armored task force with a mission to secure a city, and we had unfinished business before our time in Ramadi ended. We needed to build a COP in Tam’eem, and we needed to set our replacements up for success. Bear Johnson and I were heading to COP Crab at Al Anbar University when we witnessed a massive IED strike targeting a Bradley near the White Apartments in Tam’eem. Instinctively, I told Rumpl to turn onto the side road so we could assist if there were injured. Unfortunately, Sergeant First Class Roberts, in the lead vehicle, had already passed the turn, and now my vehicle was leading. As we neared the White Apartments, we saw two young Iraqi men turn around and start quickly walking the other way. As we got closer, they ran into a bakery. In retrospect, I was probably getting a little ahead of myself chasing down triggermen in the middle of town. The Humvees secured the corners of the building, and I called on our internal frequency that we were going to clear the structure.
The fault in the plan was that the security detail never practiced entering a building as a unit. As I was exiting my vehicle, I somewhat came to my senses, realizing that I really should not be the first guy through the door. I dogged it running to the entrance of the bakery, scanning the rooftops for additional terrorists. As I got to the wall, I looked around to see who else was going to be in the four-man stack and realized I was by myself. I pointed at the only other vehicle I could see and motioned for the vehicle commander to get over to my position. I continued scanning to make sure the enemy was not sneaking up on our position. As I turned back to my left, I realized that it was now Lieutenant Colonel Johnston and me on the wall. If having one task force commander in a four-man stack is a bad thing, having two is exponentially worse. Fortunately, Sergeant Roberts caught up with us, and we followed him, Ladell and Jemison into the bakery without incident. We searched the building and found nothing, and turned the situation over to the Team Dealer Patrol in Tam’eem. Luckily, the IED had missed the Bradley.
With the arrival of Task Force Steel Tiger, we now had the opportunity to surge forces and build a combat outpost in Tam’eem. The operation required Prime Minister Maliki’s approval. While we waited, we conducted a reconnaissance mission seeking the right location. Selection of an outpost site is the most important part of building one. It had to be in a position to control the neighborhood, and equally as important, it had to be defensible. The surrounding buildings could not look down into the combat outpost, and there had to be good fields of fire so the enemy could not sneak up on the place. Looking at satellite imagery is a good starting point, but there is nothing like standing on the ground you have to defend. We wanted the new COP to be close to both the Blue Mosque, which we had raided earlier in the summer, and to the White Apartments, which was the largest concentration of population in the city, as well as a traditional terrorist attack point. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, Major Raugh, Captain Hiltz, Captain Scott Snyder—soon to be the Charlie Rock commander—Captain Matt Graham and I went into Tam’eem with a Team Dealer patrol on a census mission to try to minimize suspicion of our intentions. There was one clear-cut choice for the combat outpost, a four-story house on the main street of Tam’eem. We moved to the house and the men of Team Dealer busted in the door and secured the building. I am not sure if the Iraqis understood rank, but they did not seem too surprised when two lieutenant colonels, a major, and a handful of captains showed up in their house. Bear Johnson, John Hiltz and I went with the team to secure the roof. Excellent observation, clear fields of fire and the other buildings around it could not look into the building’s courtyard. It was a perfect site for a combat outpost.
As John Hiltz and I high-fived each other as we came down the stairs and got ready to leave, I noticed that the house was spartan, even by Ramadi standards. There was little furniture, bare walls, and it was very dark inside with a bunch of half-naked kids running around. As we turned into the living room, there was a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall, with a rosary around it, and a candle burning underneath.
“I think I cannot do it,” I said to John.
“Me either,” he replied.
“Sarge, have you ever seen any shit like this?” I asked the squad leader,
“Sir, you managed to hit the only Christian house I’ve seen, and I’ve been in a lot,” he replied.
“Ok, let’s go, next stop,” I said, not exactly sure where the next stop was located. Knowing that these people would have no place to go if we evicted them, we had to pick another house. Hiltz pulled out his satellite photography and quickly looked for a suitable alternative.
The squad leader was none too happy. Undoubtedly, First Sergeant Shaw had assured him that if anything happened to me, it would cost him his ass and the longer I stuck around, the more likely it was that something bad would happen. In addition, no one really wants the task force commander hanging around for a moment longer than necessary. Hiltz looked at his imagery, and we repeated the raid on a suitable house across the street, which apparently belonged to a wealthy Arab businessman, judging by the furnishings. Finally, the plan was set; all we needed now was final approval from Baghdad and for the rest of Task Force Steel Tiger to arrive.
The combat outposts constructed by the other four task forces throughout Ramadi had proven to have a great effect in protecting and gaining the trust of the population as the Ready First continued to kill, capture, and displace the terrorists. Some of them fled east to the rural areas near Haditha; others went to an abandoned Desert Storm-era United Nations Refugee Camp twenty miles south of Ramadi; but seemingly a majority headed west into Tam’eem. While large parts of Ramadi continued to grow safer, Tam’eem became more dangerous by the day.
October sixth was a Friday, and Fridays were always bad days for the men of Dealer in Tam’eem. Apparently, on Fridays, the terrorists slept late, went to the mosques for the midafternoon call to prayer and made pre-combat checks, then got fired-up and readied to get on with the jihad. In the late afternoon, I departed COP Crab at Al Anbar University, having seen that the checkpoint and the Iraqi MPs were doing fine under the leadership of Captain Craw. I knew that Al Qaeda continued to intimidate the people of Ramadi into keeping their kids out of school, but Colonel MacFarland and I were in complete agreement about not backing down and removing the checkpoint. In addition, we had scored some propaganda success of our own by using the Al Qaeda threats as a tool against them. We publicly labeled the terrorists cowards for attacking children and claimed with good justification that they did not care about the future of Al Anbar since they actively blocked the education of the children.
As we were moving in our four-vehicle patrol along Route Jolie from Al Anbar University, the command net crackled with a contact report from Team Dealer.
“Bradley hit by RPG.”
The enemy in Tam’eem were good at many things, but shooting RPGs was not one of them. This was only the second vehicle in the task force hit by an RPG in almost five months and turned out to be a lucky shot, with the round hitting the fuel tank in the upper back corner of the armored infantry carrier. A foot either up or to the left and the missile would have passed harmlessly, but instead, Sergeant First Class Harris’s Bradley was now burning. Our patrol was nearby, so we turned into Tam’eem so I could see the situation for myself.
Task Force Bandit suffered a similar, but much worse, situation in mid-July when terrorists attacked an M1A1 tank with an IED, catching the vehicle on fire. The tank burned for hours, and it required a major Ready First-level effort to recover the vehicle. I wanted no part of that.
Our vehicles pulled to a stop at the outer cordon around the burning Bradley. We were about a thousand yards into the city, with enough surrounding rooftops to make us an easy target for a concerted enemy attack. I hopped out of the vehicle with Specialist Ladell at my side and ran up the street to find Harris.
“Where do you want my guys, and how bad is it?” I asked.
“What?” He seemed surprised by my question.
“Where do you want my trucks, and what can we do with the Bradley? You’re in charge, right?” I pressed.
It took Harris a second to figure out that he did not really need to report to me, that he just needed to keep doing what he was doing.
“The tracks are on. Don’t know if the engine works. I think we got the fire out, but there’s no way to drive it, sir,” he replied.
I always carried extra fire extinguishers in my vehicle, a lesson I learned in Desert Storm when the battalion’s operations officer’s tank caught fire and his crew was unprepared. Rumpl hopped out with an extinguisher and helped put out the fire, while the rest of the security detail and I helped secure the site. I knew we were sitting ducks, and my guess was that the RPG shooter was rounding up his buddies to get their jihad on some more.
I told Sergeant Harris. “Hook it up and drag it off before we get surrounded. It’s time to get the hell out of here.”
“Sounds good. Conquer or Die,” he replied, and took off to make it happen.
Sergeant First Class Michael Harris was the best platoon sergeant in the task force, which is saying a lot due to the talented group of platoon sergeants that we had. He had a nose for the ball, and his platoon could find the enemy with the best of them. Harris had wanted to join the Army since he was a little boy when he found his father’s basic training memory book—like a yearbook, but from basic training—in a box in the basement of the family’s house in northern Pennsylvania. Harris joined the Infantry after graduating from Pen-Argyle High School in 1990. The Army then proceeded to send him to almost every trouble spot in the world over the next sixteen years, deploying to Desert Storm, Intrinsic Action, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the first trip to Iraq.336 Harris was seemingly either at the center of every major engagement in Tam’eem or rolling out of the barracks with the quick reaction force.
After a minute or two, a second Bradley pulled up, hooked up the tow bar to the disabled vehicle, and they both pulled off for the two-mile drive back to Camp Ramadi, taking along the two wounded crewmen, Corporal Andrew Erhart and Specialist Cory Bruebaker. The rest of the Team Dealer patrol mounted up and pulled away, while the security detachment and I headed towards our original destination, the Al Horea police station, to check on the reconstruction efforts there. We had only traveled a mile when we heard the radio call informing us that terrorists attacked one of the vehicles leaving the scene of the Bradley attack, and that it was bad. We immediately turned around and raced to the scene of what turned out to be an IED attack, barely two blocks from the RPG strike against Harris’s Bradley.
As we arrived, Sergeant Matthew Penland, Sergeant David Enstad, Specialist Shane Zitkovich, Specialist Chen Stervil, and Private Second Class Christopher Williams were already into the back of a Bradley and rolling toward Charlie Med. Sergeant Penland had a traumatic amputation of his left leg and Specialist Zitkovich lost his spleen. The security detachment stayed and helped pull security with the men of Team Dealer until Chief Grover arrived with the recovery quick reaction force. It had been a terrible thirty minutes with seven soldiers wounded, two of them with life-changing injuries, and two vehicles destroyed.
“Ya’ll check for secondary devices?” Grover yelled to one of the Team Dealer NCOs as he jumped out of his up-armored Humvee.
“Not really, Chief,” he replied
“Why the fuck not? You know better than that. Who the fuck’s in charge here?” Grover barked, his southern twang rising in volume by the second.
“I am, Chief,” I announced.
“Shit, Sir, didn’t see you there,” Grover responded, backing down his tone just enough as to not to be insubordinate
“Well, Chief, we’re kinda fucked if there’s another one because I’ve been here for thirty minutes and haven’t been blown up yet,” I told him.
“Well, I would have been here sooner if the knuckleheads in Dealer wouldn’t have sent a burning Bradley into my motor pool,” Chief shot back.
“Yeah, Chief, that’s on me too,” I had to admit.
Chief Grover was one of my confidants, and we had a great personal relationship. His tone changed immediately, and he asked in all seriousness, “What in the fuck are you doing?”
“You have no idea how bad a day it’s been. Let’s get the hell out of here.” I said.
“Roger that!” he replied.
Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, the airflow through the hatches of the damaged Bradley had re-ignited the fire so that it was blazing again about the time it reached the Conqueror motor pool. Thankfully, the Dealer mechanics got the fire out without anyone getting hurt, a situation that seemed all too typical for a day in Ramadi. There were no good choices, just less bad ones. Should we tow a vehicle to Camp Ramadi where there was the danger of the fire re-igniting and secondary ammunition explosions injuring U.S. personnel, or sit in the streets of Tam’eem waiting for the vehicle to burn to the ground, all the while giving the enemy the opportunity to kill us? Even the choice we made as we pulled off the initial site of the Bradley attack had potential life-or-death consequences: My four-vehicle patrol went to the left; Staff Sergeant Penland’s went to the right. It could easily have been the other way around.
As we started to hook up the damaged Humvee for recovery, a call came from the operations center asking us to look for Sergeant Penland’s leg for possible reattachment. Chief Grover and I looked at each other grimly and then eyeballed the destroyed Humvee. Grover dove in and grabbed what remained of the shattered limb. We finished hooking up the Humvee and made it back to Camp Ramadi without further incident. Unfortunately, there was not enough of the leg left to reattach.
............
Colonel MacFarland made good on his promise of additional forces for Tam’eem. A platoon of tanks from Alpha Company 1-35 AR rejoined Task Force Conqueror from Task Force Regular after almost a year, and a platoon of combat engineers from the Currahees joined us as well. We put the tank platoon on static defensive positions controlling the main routes of Tam’eem. On their third day in sector, a terrorist managed to drop a grenade down the hatch of one of the M1A1 tanks, killing Private First Class Shane Austin,337 and wounding Specialist Edward Traveras and Sergeant Anthony Eka. Austin had been one of the few replacements over the past ten months, joining the Regulars in Kuwait. I had only met him a couple of days prior, when his platoon arrived at Camp Ramadi.
Although we had oriented and briefed the platoon before entering the sector, they had spent the past five months working in a very rural area with Task Force Regular, where their standard operating procedure was to keep the tank hatches open for observation. The enemy in Tam’eem lurked everywhere and seized the slightest opportunity to attack, often with devastating results. We could not get the combat outpost established in Tam’eem soon enough, even as we engaged with the Anbar Awakening Council.
The next day, Task Force Regular conducted a large-scale clearing operation in the Jazeera region north of Ramadi to suppress any potential enemy activity. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Walrath had an impromptu meeting with some Awaking Council members. In Dan’s assessment, “The dam has broken and the tribes were getting on board,” both with the Anbar Awakening council and police recruiting. Although the tribal areas were siding with the Coalition, the AIF still controlled large pockets of within the city of Ramadi. That night, Sergeant Julian M Arechaga,338 Private First Class Shelby J. Feniello,339 and Lance Corporal Jon E. Bowman340 of Charlie Company 1/6 Marine died when terrorists detonated an IED next to their Humvee as they were moving to support another group of Marines pinned down by enemy fire.341
Undaunted by the reports coming from the tribal areas, the MEF Headquarters continued to produce reports stating we should not support Sheik Sattar and the Anbar Awakening Committee. Finally, on 10 October, we coordinated a meeting between Governor Mamoon, Sheik Sattar, and the MEF leadership. The MEF Headquarters decided it was not wise for the Commanding General to attend, so they chose to send the same assistant division commander who had met Sheik Sattar before, as well as their political staff, which included a U.S. State Department representative.
I met Sheik Sattar at his house to escort him onto Camp Ramadi, and was surprised to find at least another twenty Arab men, many of them unknown to me, in Sheik Sattar’s living room. Some were tribal leaders from across Anbar, some were businessmen, and all of them hoped to attend the meeting. I figured what the hell, the more the merrier, and told them to mount-up. The whole crowd packed into three Toyota SUVs for the short ride to Camp Ramadi.
The meeting was in a large room in a remote area of camp normally used for recreational events. Unlike Arab meetings where attendees sat in chairs in a circle, tonight the attendees sat around a large conference table with Governor Mamoon at the head, the MEF staff to his left and Sheik Sattar his right. Awakening members filled in around the table, while the remaining military members sat in the back. In what one senior leader in attendance best described as ham-handed, the MEF leadership attempted to steer the Anbar Awakening Council members into supporting the Governor. The Awakening members around the table objected to the proposals in what resembled an angry town hall meeting. At first, Mamoon attempted to defend his positions, but after thirty minutes, he gave up and just nodded a lot, agreeing with the Council members. As the meeting was ending, Governor Mamoon spoke, “I promise things will get better, but I need your help,” he told the gathered council members.
By deferring the last word to Sheik Sattar, the Governor also sent a signal to the Anbar Awakening Council that he knew where he stood. Finally, the moment for which I was waiting. Sheik Sattar began to speak with both the MEF leadership and the Governor in attendance. In a quiet, calm and clear voice, Sheik Sattar began to sum up the grievances of the Anbar Awakening Council and chart a new path for Ramadi. The Arabs were in rapt attention, hanging on his every word. The leaders of the community and the elected officials were in a meeting, and we had facilitated. Adam and God’s hands are about to touch! Now it was on the locals to work it out. Our work was about to get easy.
Unexpectedly, the MEF State Department official stood and began speaking in Arabic. I was dumbfounded. The meeting that we had been working weeks to pull together to get the Iraqis to solve their own problems was now about to be derailed by a State Department guy. As he proceeded to speak, I kept looking to Dragon, to tell me what he was saying. Dragon was struggling to hear since we were in the back of the room. The Anbar Awakening Council member sitting next to me turned to me and said in English, “What is he saying?”
I turned to him and said, “I don’t know, I thought he was speaking Arabic.”
A quizzical look came over the man’s face and then he just shook his head and sat back. The State Department guy then switched back to English, only further confusing those in attendance.
The demand from the MEF leadership was trust between the tribes and the Governor, and if the tribes produced three concrete steps the governor could take to prove his determination to make Ramadi a better place, then we then would be well on our way to making things better.
Immediately the meeting adjourned, and I escorted the council members back to Sheik Sattar’s house. Every one of them was irate, and I quickly realized that this would be a long night. It would take more than three cups of tea to turn this frown upside down.
Nevertheless, after an hour or so of hyperbole, Sheik Sattar came up with three steps for the Governor to take:
1. Governor Mamoon should go on television and denounce terrorism, terrorists, and Al Qaeda.
2. Governor Mamoon should quit the Islamic Party and join the Anbar Awakening Council.
3. Governor Mamoon should go on television, put his hand on Koran and swear allegiance to the people of Al Anbar.
Mamoon never did any of these things.
Before leaving Sheik Sattar’s house, I took him aside and told him “I won’t be seeing you for a couple of days, we are clearing out Tam’eem.”
“Tam’eem is a bad place,” he argued, trying to change my mind. “Once there are enough policemen, then we will do it alone.”
“It has to be done now,” I told him.
Sheik Sattar stood up a little straighter, tapped his chrome-plated pistol. “What time and where do I need to be?” he asked.
“We’re good on this one,” I told him. “But I’ll bring you along next time.”
“Inshallah,” he replied. “Inshallah.”
With the arrival of Task Force Steel Tiger, we now had the opportunity to surge our forces into Tam’eem. Frankly, after the past few months, we all wanted to clear Tam’eem out before we left. Although the Steel Tigers would not begin the RIP for another four days, we would use them to hold all of the static checkpoints in our sector for seventy-two hours. The Steel Tigers were up for doing whatever it took to get into the fight, even if it meant jumping into the deep end of the pool.
Charlie Rock, Alpha Company 1-35 AR from Task Force Regular, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa’s Iraqi Battalion, another undermanned Iraqi infantry battalion, the Iraqi T-72 company, the Iraqi police from both the 5 Kilo and Tway stations, reinforced Task Force Conqueror. Our mission was to clear out the middle of Tam’eem and establish a combat outpost. The plan would be to roll in unannounced, both to gain the element of surprise and to ensure the enemy would not have the chance to booby-trap the house, and then have the civil affairs group remove the residents with whatever they could carry. Although the Coalition would reimburse them for the use of their house, it was still a raw deal for the evicted family. This being the first operation with the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police, I wanted to keep things simple. Starting from the combat outpost and working out, each unit had a sector to clear, while the police controlled traffic on the outer perimeter of town. While we were working together, the three elements did not have true interoperability, so we tried to keep the units separated to prevent fratricide. We conducted a sand table rehearsal in the parking lot of the Task Force Conqueror headquarters on a twenty-foot x forty-foot terrain model the day before the operation.
Figure 36. Sand table rehearsal prior to Operation Dealer. From Left First Sergeant David Shaw, Command Sergeant Major Ramon Delgado, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Deane, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa, interpreter, two members of the T-72 advisor team, Captain Sean Whitmore, Captain Matt Graham, and Captain Mike Schoenfeldt. Click on the photo for bonus features.
Just after midnight on 12 October, a route clearance patrol from the 54th engineers began moving slowly down Route Spears, clearing a path to the objective. At 0400, the lead company moved out of Camp Ramadi to secure the site, followed by the engineers and the Iraqis. We had the benefit of the curfew in keeping people and vehicles off the street as we entered Tam’eem. The civil affairs group escorted the family living in the house to a new location, and the engineers of Charlie Rock—now under the command of Captain Scott Snyder—immediately started putting up barriers around the building for blast protection.
Figure 37. Task Force Conqueror soldiers breech a steel gate in preparation for a house search during Operation Dealer. 12 October 2006. Courtesy Corporal Trenton Elijah Harris. Click on the photo for bonus features.
After watching the seizing of the initial combat outpost location, I began following Team Comanche as it cleared houses to the east. I was in my Humvee listening to the radio traffic coming into the operations center as each company reported buildings clear. The TOC kept a running tab on the progress of the searches; ensuring one element did not become isolated. As we pulled up behind Captain Alden’s parked Humvee, I looked out my window and saw a blast hole with artillery rounds in it. I told Rumpl to move one hundred yards up the road, then got out and ran to tell the gunner to move out until the EOD teams cleared it. He said “Roger,” and put out the radio call for the section to move while I went back to my vehicle to call the TOC. As I was waiting for an estimated time of arrival for the EOD team, I heard a rap on my window. It was First Sergeant Bolmer holding the wires and an artillery round. He was yelling through my Humvee door, “It’s gone off. We’re good. Keep going. We need to keep pushing.”
“Bolmer, are you fucking nuts?” I asked in astonishment.
“No sir, we’re good. We need to keep pushing.”
“Bolmer, shouldn’t you have had EOD clear that?”
“Well, yeah, probably. But it had already gone off,” he answered, somewhat sheepishly.
The next day when I saw Bolmer in Camp Ramadi, I told him that I should have relieved him on the spot for digging into a blast hole. Bolmer just laughed and agreed.
On this operation, Team Comanche uncovered a vehicle-bomb factory, as well as a huge cache of arms and ammunition in a half-built home alongside the Euphrates Canal. There were so many weapons and mortar rounds buried in the dirt floor that the EOD personnel deemed it unsafe to remove the ammunition and simply blew the building. The subsequent blast broke windows in a two-block radius.
Equally significant, the Iraqi security forces had stepped up in a big way. The Iraqi army teams had found a couple of smaller weapons caches, while, for the first time, we got the Iraqi police into the fight by having them provide an outer cordon and check cars going in and out of Tam’eem. We had our first U.S. Army, Iraqi army, and Iraqi police combined operation in Ramadi.
Most important of all, we suffered no injuries, which made it a fantastic day in Ramadi.
Figure 38. Haul of weapons found in an abandoned house in Tam’eem during Operation Dealer. 12 October 2006. Click on the photo for bonus features.
