So on that dusty night in February 2004, while we were disappointed to have missed him, the bloody consequences of our failure were not immediately apparent. On that night, Zarqawi was not yet Iraq’s bane.
* * *
Had we picked up Zarqawi that evening, the recent history of special operations might have been very different. The raid launched into Fallujah was part of a nascent campaign waged by TF 714. Although TF 714’s fight was much wider than Iraq, our role and reputation grew more than anything as a result of our close-quarters fight against Zarqawi and his branch of Al Qaeda. This is a story about how an organization of units and people that began in the wake of Desert One in 1980 radically transformed to fight a new threat. Our transformation also pushed me to grow from an operational commander, where I was most comfortable, to a strategic-level leader. This was not preordained, nor did those with whom I worked always welcome it. But by the time of that raid, I had come to see that for us to succeed, I could not simply command TF 714. I would have to be a part of a new vision of how America had to fight modern wars.
From their creation in the 1970s and 1980s, special operations units were an impressive collection of talent. A chain of visionary leaders forged them into the most effective force of its kind, one that had proven its value repeatedly in its first twenty years. But the escalating war on terror in the aftermath of September 11 compelled the relatively small hostage-rescue and counterterrorist force to adapt to new, more ominous threats. TF 714 needed to become a more complex organization with unprecedented capability, and we needed to employ that on a daily—and nightly—basis, year after year.
The change was historic. The organization I rejoined in 2003 was fresh off impressive operations in the invasions of Afghanistan and, more recently, Iraq. But it was only the kernel of the force I was to depart in 2008. To transform ourselves from a traditional military unit into a network, we changed how we were organized and how we made decisions; we grew a new culture within proud and idiosyncratic communities; we continually added partners. In 2003 our “product” was our “shooters”—our ensemble of tactically unmatched strike forces. By the end, in the months when Iraq’s fate would be decided, TF 714’s formidable offering was its network—its ability to gel diverse talents into an organic unit that gathered information swiftly and acted accordingly.
TF 714’s reinvention and success were neither straightforward nor inevitable. There were numerous failures. I made countless mistakes. And we evolved in response to the distinct historical moment in which we found ourselves. Ultimately, this chapter in military history is a story about the professionalism, creativity, and unwavering courage of those with whom I served. The TF 714 operators’ rare stamina and commitment to hunt and fight night after night, month after month, year after year was essential to our effort. But such effort would take an immense toll on these men and women.
* * *
I did not arrive with a vision for changing TF 714 when I took over the special operations command whose members formed the core of the task force on Monday, October 6, 2003, at the command’s nondescript compound at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Though this Fort Bragg-based command and the forward-deployed TF 714 were not the same entity, the command provided the predominance of the task force’s members and leadership. Starting that day, I would be commander of both. The ceremony was held in the parachute-packing facility. For security reasons, the number of outside guests was limited, and Annie was my only family member to attend. The room was quiet and empty but for the small gathering of us on a dais and an audience in metal folding chairs. Silky, pine-colored parachutes, waiting to be folded, draped the walls like deflated balloons. It lacked the pageantry of a normal army change-of-command ceremony conducted on a sunny parade ground. But the small, muted event reflected the low-key nature and quiet professionalism that were TF 714’s hallmarks.
I was excited, but I harbored doubts. Although I had served in special operations for much of the previous eighteen years, I was from the Rangers and had never served in either of the other units—“Green” (the Army’s elite commando unit) and “Blue” (the Navy SEAL special mission unit)—considered the crown jewels of the command and of TF 714. The week before, my thick in-box of paperwork had included the unit’s most recent Command Climate Survey, which tabulated a consistent complaint about the command: “Too many Rangers.” But it was not surprising, as Rangers, long viewed as the junior varsity of TF 714, continued to struggle in this small world to be recognized as equals of the more specialized forces they were increasingly serving alongside. This did little to bolster my confidence.
I was more worried, though, about rejoining the force at this particular time. I had deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, but to my chagrin I had been stuck in the halls of the Pentagon for the invasion of Iraq the previous spring. I had missed the operations that helped topple the Taliban and later Saddam, which most people within the military probably judged TF 714’s greatest accomplishments to that point. Like any soldier who joined a unit after a major engagement, I felt I carried the stigma of not having been on hand for the trial by fire. But I tried not to worry about something I could not control.
Instead, as I sat on the stage, I looked at Annie. After I had left the Pentagon three weeks earlier, she and I had flown to Denver, rented a car, and spent twelve days in late September driving around Wyoming, hiking and sightseeing. In the years ahead, at dawn each day when I would retire to my room in Afghanistan or Iraq for a few hours of sleep, I would spend a few moments staring at pictures from this trip—Annie in hiking shorts and baseball cap, suntanned and smiling. The photographs, taped to walls between my combat gear hanging on hooks, promised sunny days after dark nights of war. From the front row of folding chairs at the ceremony, Annie caught my gaze. As she often did at public events when she could sense my thoughts, she mouthed the words “I love you.” So began what turned out to be the longest, most difficult, and most rewarding job I ever had.
* * *
When I returned with Annie to Fort Bragg, we came “home.” It was the fourth time we had lived there. But the feeling on base had changed. I had been at Bragg for the first year after 9/11, watched the increased security, and I had been among the first from the base to deploy. Now, as America finished its second year in Afghanistan and its sixth month in Iraq, the base was resigned to increased deployments. Thus far, casualties had been limited, and few anticipated they would rise significantly. But disturbingly, our effort, named the Global War on Terror, had no clear end in sight.
A few days after assuming command, I made a trip to Tampa, Florida, to see Generals Doug Brown, who led SOCOM, and John Abizaid, who had left the Joint Staff and was now commander of CENTCOM. I’d known Doug since the late 1980s when, as a Ranger company commander and then operations officer, I worked with him in his role as a special-operations aviator in the Night Stalkers, the aviation unit created from the Iranian rescue-mission effort. Our relationship was entering its second decade when several months earlier Doug called me, not long after he was selected to command SOCOM. He asked if I would take TF 714 that October. The phone call was an uncomfortable moment. Part of me had been hoping to command the 82nd Airborne Division, and I thought I might have been out of the special operations world for too long to be welcomed back by its purist circles.
“Sir, isn’t there a more logical choice than me?”
“There might be, Stan,” Doug responded. “But I want you to command the task force.”
I told my old friend I would be honored.
Now, in Tampa, I sat down with John Abizaid for his guidance, but also to get his approval of a technical but important tweak in our command relationship. Overseeing operations from North Africa to Asia, including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John had what was then the most challenging job in the U.S. military. When I took over, TF 714 was commanded by a two-star, but one of its two one-star deputies was constantly in Iraq, running the da
y-to-day special operations there. Naturally, CENTCOM would be tempted to work directly with that deputy, rather than through me. But I wanted John to agree that I would be the commander of all my forces in his theater. No matter my location, I would be his single point of contact and of responsibility. It may seem an arcane point of military hierarchy, but intuitively I believed the unprecedented campaign TF 714 was faced, across a wide geographic area would demand as much unity and consistency in leadership as possible. I also sensed that my relationships with senior leaders and my physical presence downrange would enhance TF 714’s freedom of action, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain. On paper we had a wide legal berth; but the degree to which we could maneuver when the risks were high and costly would actually depend on the trust and confidence of those whose approval we sought.
Like almost all my meetings with John, this one was friendly, informal, and often irreverently funny. We would laugh at the absurdities of military life, and his trademark relentless, dry sarcasm moved like an undertow through the conversation. After our years together in the 82nd and on the Joint Staff, we had formed a bond. As we got to serious business, he expressed his concern with the situation in eastern Afghanistan, where some of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership had recently been reported. I agreed to conduct a major operation in the area. Significantly, he agreed to change the way he viewed my role. As my boss in the 82nd ten years earlier, John had liked to communicate with me personally, not through our staffs. So my proposal for direct interaction suited his style.
“Okay, Stan,” he said. “But if I call, I’ve gotta be able to reach you. If I call and can’t get you, the deal’s off.”
It was vintage Abizaid: friendly and unwaveringly demanding. As I looked at him, now with four stars on the lapel of his sand and brown desert fatigues, I pictured the ragged, sun-bleached Oakland Athletics baseball hat he used to wear on the weekends at Fort Bragg a few years earlier. He had the demeanor and temper of an experienced, wry baseball manager. He was supportive but unsentimental and wouldn’t hesitate to go to the bullpen if I stopped throwing strikes.
While I had enjoyed other jobs, I loved command. I had been in a command position for ten of the previous twenty-six years. But each new position was initially daunting. As I suspect many leaders feel, I was never sure if I could command at that next level until I actually assumed the job. I remembered how Douglas Southall Freeman, in Lee’s Lieutenants, had described Lee’s challenges in determining which brigade commanders could actually handle the wider responsibilities of a division or corps. The most aggressive brigade commanders often lacked the intangible qualities required for more senior leadership. Of course I wondered about myself.
As the demands of the positions differed, and as I grew in age and experience, I found that I had changed as a leader. I learned to ask myself two questions: First, what must the organization I command do and be? And second, how can I best command to achieve that? Experience taught me that many factors would shape my “command style,” and it would be some time before I settled into it.
* * *
During the first weeks of command, I visited Green. Like our headquarters, Green’s compound was based at Fort Bragg, in a separate corner of the base. And yet the true distance between TF 714 and this subordinate unit was much greater than the ten-minute drive. At that time, someone on the TF 714 staff would not feel welcome just dropping by the Green compound, or that of the SEALs or those of other units, if he wasn’t himself a member. Many within these organizations viewed any higher headquarters as an unnecessary appendage.
The same qualities that made the units I now commanded so valuable also made them aloof. Although envisioned as a “team of teams,” in many ways TF 714 was more a “tribe of tribes.” The volunteerism at the heart of each unit, the unwavering standards, the rigorous selection processes, all gave them unmatched competence and cohesion. But in many instances that same tribalism made them insular.
Early on I saw each of TF 714’s subordinate units pushing their capabilities with competitive energy that needed only periodic direction from me. But I would need a much more nuanced understanding of these idiosyncratic bands to be an effective commander. While I had grown up in the Rangers and worked with the other units off and on in the 1990s, I knew they had changed in subtle ways. In time, I came to know more intimately each unit’s amazing talents, internal politics, and weaknesses.
Green was the most influential of the units. Created from the vision of General Edward “Shy” Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, in the late 1970s, it was an unprecedented organization, one modeled on the British Special Air Service. The force was a collection of experienced commissioned and noncommissioned officers forged into teams that specialized in surgical, direct-action missions, like hostage rescue and pinpoint assaults.
The magic of “the unit,” as they referred to it, was its people. Most new members came from the Rangers and Green Berets, but some came directly from the Army’s conventional units. An extraordinarily rigorous selection process tested each applicant’s fitness, intelligence, courage, and mental balance. The process was so good at selecting for certain characteristics that the operators shared many traits. They tended to be hyperfit, opinionated, iconoclastic, fearless, intelligent, type A problem solvers who thrived without guidance. They affected nonchalance around garrison and between missions. But beneath the beards and civilian T-shirts were to-the-core military professionals. I often joked that if I had inspected their bureaus, I’d have found their underwear neatly folded. As one veteran operator told me, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” They couldn’t help themselves.
Enlisted men weren’t eligible to attempt admission until they were sergeants, but once in, most stayed until retirement. This embedded the unit with an unprecedented level of expertise and talent. In a conventional army brigade, there were about five sergeants major—the highest enlisted rank—and over two thousand young privates. In Green, a brigade-size organization, there were sixty-three sergeants major and no privates. Given the seniority of the force, rank was less important, and operators earned credibility through performance. Because few ever left the unit, joining Green, meant taking on a separate career altogether. Its members forsook traditional career advancement upon entering, as the small unit had only so many command spots. While few ever left the unit voluntarily, membership was always provisional—and could be revoked if an operator were to go slack.
During its early years, Green gained a reputation as an old boys’ club and a refuge for the cowboys of the Army. Even later, some saw them as prima donnas, too long pickled in the privileges and esteem that came to the finest military unit in the world. When I worked in special operations in the early 1990s, I considered Green an effective—but also arrogant—organization.
Entering the Green compound was always a bit intimidating, seemingly by design. But the commander, then-Colonel Bennet Sacolick, and the command sergeant major, Jody Nacy, welcomed me warmly. We moved to one of the larger conference rooms, where I found myself standing in front of a collection of operators. Many were fresh from combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I was the new commanding general, just out of the safe halls of the Pentagon. I scanned the faces of the fifty or sixty operators there that day as they sat in rows of chairs in front of me. I quickly realized that I knew many of them from their earlier service in the Rangers. Familiar faces were reassuring. But though many were old comrades, they had graduated to a higher level. We no longer shared the same haircut, and they were not as young as they had been when I first served with them. I needed to recalibrate our relationship.
These men were older—the average age on any operation was often at least thirty-five—but they were immaculately fit. A paunch triggered scorn. Their maturity and experience when molded together in small teams made them extraordinarily effective. During the previous decades, when most of America had enjoyed peaceful lives, they had repeate
dly deployed. Many in the folding chairs had fought as Green operators or as Rangers in Mogadishu, some in Panama. More recently they had done quiet work in the Balkans before being thrust into the war on terror. Their hard-wrought intuition would deepen in the years to come.
Unlike many young, untested soldiers, the men in the seats did not think they were bulletproof. They had built up lives beyond mere soldiering. Nearly all were married and had children. Often their children were not infants but teenagers growing into adults while their fathers fought overseas. In the years ahead, more than one would have a child fighting in the same war, elsewhere in the country. I would have the wrenching duty to write a letter of sympathy to a veteran operator and his wife, a couple I’d known for years, when their only son was killed serving in the fight as a young paratrooper.
That day, I wondered what the members of the unit saw in me. As always, their demeanor betrayed nothing. They appeared patient and attentive but not obsequious. I saw none of the slouching that signaled disinterest or disdain. As usual, I hadn’t prepared a speech; I wanted to get their attention and dispel any feeling that the wars we faced were nearly over or that TF 714 could limit its role. Instead, we needed to display unconventional adaptability.
My Share of the Task Page 15
