A Mission Unknown
WES BRYANT
August 2014
I’d had a few short weeks in Bahrain, weeks that felt a lot longer with the frustration that came with a career ground warfighter suddenly being forced to battle political bureaucracy and senior military staffers in order to advocate for our guys on the ground in Baghdad.
While I was in Bahrain, my close friend and teammate Dennis had been working alongside Vern as the senior enlisted JTAC at the CRF. Since hitting the ground in Baghdad, Dennis had gotten our JTACs tasked out with their assigned Special Forces teams spread throughout Baghdad and Erbil, he’d established relationships with the CRF chain of command, and he’d been managing our JTACs in Iraq and their missions. He was also vital in helping me field the ROE change proposals to the staffs in Baghdad both at the CRF and at General Pittard’s JOC at the embassy.
My work at the JSOTF-GCC in Bahrain was done. I’d helped set the stage for close air support operations in Iraq, helped establish the command and control infrastructure necessary to utilize it, and gotten the change in the ROE for close air support pushed through. It was time for me to move on. My chain of command thought I’d be far better utilized on the ground in Baghdad versus continuing with the senior staff in Bahrain, and I wholeheartedly agreed. Even with the good things I’d done from Bahrain, I was growing a bit stir crazy.
Dennis was tasked back to the States to help prep our home station JTACs for what we thought might turn out to be a full-on special operations ground mission in Iraq, and I was slated to replace him at the newly designated SOTF-I. (The CRF became re-designated the Special Operations Task Force-Iraq once CENTCOM and Washington realized that the mission in Iraq was no longer merely a “crisis response” but was turning into a sustained operation.)
I hoped I could hold a candle to the work Dennis had done, he was one of the best and most experienced JTACs in our career field. Soon I caught a “grey tail,” a small civilian plane reserved specifically for transporting special operations personnel—we always had our perks—from Bahrain to Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. From there I hopped onto a C-130 and infilled into Baghdad.
As soon as I hit the ground, Dennis met me with a man-hug. We caught up in-person in the way you can never really do over the phone. Then we packed my gear into a black, up-armored SUV and he drove us around the base complex to give me the lay of the land as I soaked in sites that I hadn’t seen in half a decade.
BIAP was a shell of what it had been years back when thousands of U.S. troops lived on the then-giant military base complex. In the years since, the only people who’d remained were employees and contractors of the U.S. State Department. The State Department held a large headquarters on the former base known as the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, or BDSC (pronounced “bed-sey”).
The place felt like a ghost town in comparison to the memories I’d had of traveling through and working there years back during Operations Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn. Still, the State Department had maintained the bare necessity infrastructure. There was a decent chow hall and a small exchange where we could get hygiene items, snacks and the like. To my delight, even the old Green Beans coffee shop was still operating—a staple of American bases during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although, it was only open certain hours and was in pretty bad disrepair compared to its “glory days” with all the U.S. dollars flowing through.
The SOTF-I (formerly known as the CRF) had commandeered some old troop barracks—single-room CHUs or “containerized housing units” strewn about the base—most of which had remained empty since the withdrawal. The entire complex was a bit post-apocalyptic looking. Dennis had managed to make his CHU at least comfortable by rummaging through some long-abandoned rooms to find a desk, chair, wall lockers, and the cleanest, newest mattress he could scavenge. As soon as I got the chance, I’d do the same and get lucky in finding a working mini-fridge.
I was relieved to be on the ground in Baghdad and in the fight—whatever that fight was going to end up being. I finally felt I was exactly back where I should be. Dennis and I grabbed a bite to eat at the State Department chow hall before he took me to the operations center where I’d be taking his place as the lead enlisted JTAC and fires NCO.
The SOTF-I was set up on the west side of BIAP on what had once been known as Sather Air Base back in the days of the Iraq war. It was named after Combat Control JTAC Scott Sather, the first enlisted Airman of the Iraq War to be killed-in-action. Sather was killed by direct enemy fire in the first weeks of the war while on a high-profile special operations mission to oust Saddam Hussein’s military regime. 1 Later I would find it fitting that our airstrike campaign against ISIS in central Iraq was born out of that place.
The SOTF-I headquarters was established in a single-story half-concrete/half-glass building situated right off the airfield known as the Glass House. It was a stately grey building topped with a blue-green dome with intricate glass mosaics, and with glass-encased walls that were surrounded by huge concrete barriers to protect from ISIS rocket and mortar attacks.
Before the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003, the Glass House had been Saddam’s personal military airport terminal and VIP lounge. Ironically, it was there in 2011 that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta gave a grandiose speech for the ceremony that marked the formal end to the Iraq War and full withdrawal of American combat troops.2 There we were again in the summer of 2014—all but starting over and with an entirely new enemy.
As far as our mission went, apart from the earlier combat assessments of the Iraqi military, there was a whole lot of waiting around for orders and gearing-up for operations that never materialized. From Tampa, the Special Operations Command Central constantly directed our teams to prep for missions based on proposals they had submitted to Washington and were anticipating approval on but that were shot down time and again. On countless occasions, our Special Forces teams sat on the BIAP airfield for hours fully kitted-up, armed, and ready to push out for a planned mission only to eventually be stood down.
There just was no palate in Washington for combat operations in Iraq. Despite that, Major General Mike Nagata, the SOCCENT commander, continued to work adamantly to gain the authorization to execute his proposed “advise, assist, and accompany” mission. The plan—known as “Triple-A”—would enable our special operations teams to advise the Iraqis in the planning of their combat operations against ISIS, assist them during operations, and accompany them in the fight on the ground. In short: it would enable our teams to fight alongside the Iraqis and the Kurds against ISIS.
Major General Nagata and his staff deemed Triple-A as the most effective method by which the U.S. could quickly quell the threat of ISIS. They briefed the merits of the mission in Washington several times. In fact, during one of our daily SOCCENT video teleconferences, General Nagata directed his staff to reduce the Triple-A mission briefing slides down to “one slide, with no acronyms and a lot of pictures.” He clarified that the people he’d be briefing were mostly younger congressional staffers with absolutely no military experience or operational understanding. With such disconnect between those of us carrying out the mission and those back in Washington guiding it, small wonder we had such frustrations.
Despite all Nagata’s efforts, Washington and the president wouldn’t have any of it. The mission in Iraq remained solely to advise and assist—we were not to accompany ground forces in offensive operations against ISIS nor to conduct any airstrikes in support of the Iraqis.
We were also tasked to create plans for NEO (noncombatant evacuation operations) to evacuate all State Department personnel and American citizens from BIAP and the U.S. Embassy.3 Our Special Tactics assault zone reconnaissance team surveyed Iraq’s airfields for the best options, while we worked on the details of the evacuation plan at the task force. NEO was “Plan B” to be triggered if ISIS mounted an attack on the Baghdad region. U.S. military forces would evacuate last. It definitely wasn’t in our nature to run away from a fight—so we all hoped NEO wasn’t going to be the intent from Washington.
All of us knee-deep on the ground in the Iraq crisis were standing by for some kind of clear intent from the Obama administration and our senior military leadership. But, day after day, we didn’t know whether we were going to continue in some semblance of a war effort, evacuate the embassy, or just pack it up and go home. We were incredibly confused, angry, and frustrated.
What exactly are we doing here?
What is the mission? The desired end-state?
No one seemed to know the answers to those questions.4 All we knew, for sure, was that we were to hold in-place and take absolutely no part in forward combat operations. Sure, we had a tasking to advise and assist the Iraqi forces in their counterassault operations against ISIS. But the scope of that mission was loosely defined, really. And the Iraqis, quite honestly, seemed to have little motivation to fight.5
Dennis and I took a few short days to finish our handover of responsibilities—days during which we spent a lot of time venting about our frustrations with the mission. We both felt that our special operations task force was just not doing enough. One afternoon, as we waited in the task force operations center for the C-130 that would start Dennis on his journey back to the States, we spent our last few minutes talking about our ideas on the way ahead for the mission.
I turned to Dennis, and with matter-of-fact determination said, “Mark my words, man…I’ll be controlling strikes against ISIS within a couple weeks.”
If my closest friends knew one thing about me it was that, for better or worse, I always had a way of doing exactly what I thought should happen despite what anyone—especially my superiors—said.
Dennis returned a sly, knowing smile that broke into a laugh as he patted me on the shoulder. “I have no doubt about that, Wes…no doubt.”
1 “Scott D. Sather,” Veteran Tributes, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.veterantributes.org/TributeDetail.php?recordID=2308.
2 Thom Shanker, Michael S. Schmidt, and Robert F. Worth, “In Baghdad, Panetta Leads Uneasy Moment of Closure,” The New York Times, December 15, 2011, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/world/middleeast/panetta-in-baghdad-for-iraq-military-handover-ceremony.html.
3 Ibrahim Khalil, “URGENT – U.S. Embassy prepares evacuation plans,” Iraq News, June 12, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/urgent-u-s-embassy-prepares-evacuation-plans/.
4 Julie Pace and Lara Jakes, “U.S. troops move into position for Iraq security mission,” PBS, June 17, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-troops-take-position-iraq-security-mission.
5 Kenneth Katzman et al., “Iraq Crisis and U.S. Policy,” Homeland Security Digital Library, July 3, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=755842.