The days and weeks passed by, and as advisor training drew closer and closer, MSgt. Norvin Deleonguerrero became a frequent presence in my office. Slated as the team’s senior enlisted Marine and logistics chief, he had taken charge of the personnel roundup for our team and began keeping me informed about new Marines reporting aboard. Originally from Saipan, and with a short, powerful build, Deleon—as we tended to refer to him for brevity’s sake—drew from an impressive bank of experience, including previous tours as a Marine security guard and drill instructor. With his expertise and quiet but professional demeanor he was exactly the kind of Marine officers wanted assigned to them: someone whose role behind the scenes is so important that his absence from his routine duties hurts. Deleonguerrero was also a big fan of 1980s rock music, and on a regular basis he tended to casually flash the rock band sign with his thumb and index and little fingers extended. He never seemed to get spun up about anything; his most common display of anger or frustration was a casual uttering of “What is this fucked-up trash?”
My office phone rang frequently with calls from a captain named Todd Hanna, a logistics officer who had departed the service just two years earlier. He had deployed to Iraq in 2005 with an infantry battalion before entering the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), that pool of reserve Marines whose recall prior to 2001 was an anomaly. Like thousands of others in 2007, Hanna had been summoned to active duty for deployment to Iraq, and he had striven to find a meaningful job for his year of active service. His name had been passed to me by another officer on the division staff, and the minute I heard there was a captain who was not only willing, but actually wanted, to be on a transition team, I jumped at the opportunity to welcome him aboard as my logistics advisor and, later, my team deputy. A tall, prematurely graying Texan from Austin, he was a polished and highly intelligent graduate of the University of Texas. His age and late entry into the Corps gave many people the impression that he had served as a prior-enlisted Marine, and his maturity made him an asset to the team. He brought with him genuine experience from the business world, and in time I would come to realize that he was associated with more famous and important people than anyone I had ever known. A subject-matter expert in logistics and an ultraprofessional, he was a natural fit as my second-in-command. Hanna’s phone calls became more and more common, and he routinely asked me what was required to get him to the division and on the team as soon as possible. I wondered what his rush was, and it wasn’t until later that I learned he feared the possibility of getting snatched up to fill a different billet than the one for which he had volunteered. His fears weren’t unfounded; when he checked into the reserve mobilization center aboard Camp Pendleton a personnel officer had attempted to reassign him to the headquarters staff of a deploying regiment.
I also began to field calls from a young first lieutenant named Andrew Grubb. A short, tough-talking native of New Jersey, his personality matched his Italian heritage. He sported an indestructible, continuous five-o’clock shadow that gave the appearance of rarely shaving, and he walked with an ambling gait and shoulders squared off as if he was always looking for a fight. He had led a rifle platoon in combat operations in Ramadi during the previous year’s force surge, and he came highly recommended from his command. A creative thinker who often devised irregular, unconventional, yet effective solutions to problems, he had dedicated himself to training and preparing for selection to the fledgling Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC). Bringing several Marines with him from his battalion, Grubb would be joining the team as my headquarters company advisor and training officer. Like Hanna, his phone calls came regularly, and he began appearing unannounced in my office. Grubb’s Marines needed additional training before reporting to the advisor course, and the brusque, matter-of-fact way in which he made his demands rubbed me the wrong way. I began to wonder how my relationship with this young officer would pan out. As a company commander I had often been at odds with my lieutenants, and the last thing I wanted to relive was a power struggle between me and the officers on the team. It wasn’t until later that I learned Grubb’s battalion—like many others providing personnel for transition teams—had been reluctant to allow its Marines to go until the last possible minute. His pleas for me to arrange training for his Marines had been a futile effort to get them released from their parent command as soon as possible.
With the addition of my training assistant, an intense, pensive captain named Jason Flynn who had also volunteered to join me for the deployment, the core of my team had been formed. Advisor training was next. I forgot about my petty career complaints and the stifling atmosphere of staff life, and instead began to focus on what my job as an advisor would entail. Unfortunately, learning exactly what it was that we were supposed to do during our upcoming deployment would prove to be far more elusive than I had imagined.
Chapter 2
Contractors
As I climb off the helicopter that has ferried me deep into Iraq, one of the first sights that greet me is the throng of contractors. They are everywhere, and they come in all shapes and sizes, all walks of life, and all nationalities. They are overweight, middle-aged men. They are young women sporting cell-phone earpieces and conspicuously unmmilitary clothing. And they are third-country nationals, or TCNs—mostly Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans. They provide instruction on new communications systems. They troubleshoot satellite links. They manage the legions of contracted interpreters. They also make food, cut hair, man the desks at Internet cafés, and do laundry (with a pride rarely seen anywhere in the United States).
Looking around at any of a number of forward operating bases (FOBs) throughout Iraq, I realize that the contractors often seem to outnumber the frontline combat troops. The Americans among them roam the FOBs clad in some unwritten, universal dress code of contractors: polo shirts, hiking boots, and cargo trousers. I analyze the necessary services they provide, and I wonder how any war in the past was ever won without them.
But then I think about the war I entered five years ago, and I try to remember if I ever saw any contractors back then at the beginning. All I can remember is filthy, sweating Marines and sailors to my left and right. There was no chow hall staffed by TCNs subcontracted by Kellogg Brown & Root. Instead, we dined on meals ready to eat (MREs), if any were available from the overtaxed supply lines, and when we couldn’t eat we chainsmoked cigarettes and chewed tobacco to suppress our hunger. No Internet cafés were strategically placed along the highway to Baghdad, nor were any phones available to call loved ones after returning from patrols. If you were lucky you befriended an embedded journalist who occasionally let you use his satellite phone. If you were unlucky—like me—the only reason you got to call home was to deal with the aftermath of one of your Marines having been killed.
Walking around one FOB I notice a sign advertising step aerobics for all interested parties on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At another FOB the TCN at the gym makes me show my identification card and sign in. I have no cause to complain; he is following the rules he has been forced to memorize. But then a rear-echelon first sergeant brusquely informs one of my Marines that his physical training uniform does not conform to the gym’s standards. As the offending Marine storms away, pissed off at the pogue first sergeant and the contractor and whoever wrote the rules, I remember that there was no gym when we invaded this country. The only exercise for me was pulling apart the heavy feeder assembly of my LAV’s (light armored vehicle’s) main gun, or changing a tire shredded from the razorlike splinters of artillery shrapnel that littered the highways, or lifting onto a stretcher the heavy deadweight of one of my wounded Marines. I didn’t gain muscle back then—I lost it. It melted off my body from the sauna of my chemical suit like butter in a frying pan. One day I looked in a mirror and didn’t recognize the filthy, emaciated stranger staring back at me.
One of our contracted interpreters mouths off to my Marines and refuses to participate in the daily grunt work that the team doesn’t even seem to think abou
t anymore. When I order him to participate with the team, he casually informs me that he is not a Marine. And then I realize that no, he is not a Marine, and that simple fact angers me that much more, because I realize he is not here in Iraq for the same reasons my Marines are. He is not here because of a calling to serve his country. He is not here to rebuild and return security to the country that we leveled five years ago. He is not here because he knows his fellow Marines are sacrificing themselves and he in turn wants to sacrifice himself as well. He is here in Iraq for one simple reason, the same reason why most of the other contractors have made their way to Iraq: money. He gets paid more than most of my Marines, and suddenly I am glad that my pay is a pittance, because I know that one thing I am not is a mercenary.
But then, frustrated by what I see transpiring around me, I log in to the Internet, turn on the webcam, and suddenly my wife and two daughters are looking at me, and I am looking at them. My daughters are sprouting like weeds while I am gone, but because of the contracted Internet service I can watch them grow in my absence. I think back to the time five years ago when the only picture I had of my wife was a wrinkled, sweat-stained snapshot that I had laminated to protect it from the elements. But now I don’t need that picture to remind me of her—I can see her beauty and hear her laugh in real time as I chat on the Internet. I see my family, I talk to them, and then I thank God for the contractors who provide the Internet and the satellite dishes.
I realize for the hundredth time that this is not the conflict I lost myself in half a decade ago. It is, literally, a different war. And, despite my frequent distaste for the contractors, despite my frustration at the self-licking ice cream cones that the FOBs have become, I realize that we could not fight and win this new Long War without the contractors. They sustain the force, they elevate morale, they free Marines to fight. They serve a purpose, and my experience here would be very different without them.
My thoughts turn to a future war that we may fight, and I wonder if the contractors will be there for that one as well. I wonder if my Marines and I have grown too accustomed to their presence and the services they provide. I wonder if my Marines will be able to fight again as we did five years ago—shivering in the mud-rain of a desert aajaaz (sandstorm), not showering for weeks on end, subsisting on survival rations, nicotine, and caffeine, cut off from all communications with family. But then I watch my men return from a patrol outside the wire. I study their faces, dirty and burned from the desert sun. My eyes follow them as they shoulder their gear back to their huts and begin to clean their weapons. They are smiling. Their jokes and gestures confirm their love for hardship; through their actions they demonstrate that they have not grown too soft. I realize that the Marines will continue to fight with or without the contractors. But, more important, I realize that they will continue to win. They are, after all, Marines.
Chapter 3
Training
The headquarters building for I MEF’s Advisor Training Group (ATG) was a rundown shell of a building overlooking Camp Pendleton’s placid Del Mar boat basin. Dubbed “the crack house,” the ATG headquarters came to represent to us in the early days of our training everything that was wrong with the Marine Corps advisor program. During the course of our six-week training regimen—and again during countless briefs throughout our deployment—we would hear that the advisor mission had become the main effort of the American strategy in Iraq. But one look at the bare, cracked concrete floors, the shoddy furniture, the putrid restrooms, and the broken-down drinking fountains that spewed water unsafe for human consumption told us otherwise. The advisor mission, at least in Camp Pendleton, California, was an afterthought. Classes packed with advisor trainees were being pushed through at a seemingly unsustainable rate, and the substandard working conditions of ATG’s headquarters indicated to us that while our mission may have been important, it was perhaps not important enough to rate decent instructional facilities.
But we had become the main effort, or so we were told on numerous occasions during our first days at ATG’s Advisor Training Course. Packed tightly into a rundown classroom and seated around folding tables, the Marines on my new team eyed each other like dogs preparing to mark their territory. As always, I dreaded this first day of school, one that was sure to be marked by Marines warily observing each other, seeking weak links in the chain, scoping out the alpha males in the pack, assessing the competition for who would be top dog. During our first break I jumped at the opportunity to gather the team and give them my welcome-aboard brief. Prior to meeting them I had carefully crafted my presentation and rehearsed what I would say. Hard experience had taught me that my first impression with my Marines would be the lasting one, and in preparing my brief I had sought to avoid the pitfalls that had so often nearly sunk me as a company commander. As I stood in front of the team, their cold eyes and vacant stares challenged me. Impress me, they seemed to say. Tell me something I’ve never heard an officer say before. So I did just that.
“I’ll be completely honest with you,” I said, leaning casually against a lectern. “I didn’t volunteer for this mission. Like many of you—or most of you—I was ‘voluntold.’”
As I continued, several of the Marines looked at each other with raised eyebrows. I knew I had taken a chance by admitting that fact to them up front. The possibility existed that I would set the wrong tone for the team or would be perceived as a whiner, someone who didn’t want to be there. But the alternative was equally precarious. The Marines would be able to sniff out a fraud in a heartbeat. Any attempt to convince them that I had eagerly volunteered to be an advisor would be shrouded in insincerity, and they would pick up on it immediately. So I told the truth, and doing so set me free. Something in that simple statement enabled me to cross a threshold I had never before been able to traverse. In finding complete honesty and candor within myself I was able to express it to my men. It wasn’t honesty in the sense of simply telling my Marines the truth, but rather a newly discovered ability to reveal myself wholly to my team. I had always been taught that an officer must be a great poker player—a great actor. He must be able to appear angry when he is not, and happy when he is anything but. And perhaps that was true, but no longer was it so for me. I had spent my career hiding my true self from my Marines, and I had grown tired of it. As a company commander my inability to convey my true feelings for my men, my unwillingness to openly grieve after the death of one of my Marines, and my compartmentalization of my emotions for so long had nearly crippled me after my return from the war, and I had resolved not to let it happen again. I doubted my ability to negotiate another patch of dark ice like the kind that had blocked my path in 2003 and 2004, and I likewise doubted my family’s ability to suffer through it again. And so, with that simple statement, I set the tone for my transition team. My briefing was short, and I ended it with some basic guidance. Anything else would have been superfluous.
“Gents, transition teams are based on the Special Forces advisor team model. For a team to work properly, it requires everyone to know everyone else’s job, it requires flexibility, and it requires teamwork. Everyone works on this team; there’s no room for anything else. Our job requires us to be able to operate on our own with little guidance. You have a lot of responsibility ahead of you; exercise it, make sound and timely decisions and recommendations, and be accountable for your actions. If you want to be part of this elite unit, if you want to be treated as the elite, I will expect you to act and make decisions accordingly.”
The die was cast. With our training under way, I waited patiently to see how the team would progress. It wasn’t long before I began to like what I saw.
Advisor training alternated between the fascinating and the mundane, between brief episodes of valuable instruction and worthless tall tales spun by our instructors. The majority of the ATG staff had served as advisors earlier in the war during a period in which MiTT teams were responsible less for transition than they were for basic training and shepherding of the new Iraqi army i
nto combat. It was common for instructors to regale us with accounts of leading Iraqi soldiers into firefights with insurgents and dodging improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and indirect fire barrages in places like Fallujah, Ramadi, and Al Qa’im. The stories were interesting, but in the greater scheme of things not exactly helpful. In fact, the storytelling, combined with several blocks of specialized, contracted instruction (including a close-combat shooting course), created a false impression of the atmosphere in Iraq into which we would be entering.
In the Gray Area Page 2
