“You know, there’s a good chance that the Coalition will be gone in little more than a year,” I began, citing a series of news articles I had recently read. “We’ve got to set the conditions to prepare for that eventuality. Explain to me what your battalion’s working relationship was with the previous MiTT team.”
The Outlanders team photo. Back row, left to right: Sgt. Olanza Frazier, Cpl. Daniel Fry, LCpl. Travis Wardle, Sgt. Mark Hoffmier. Front row, left to right: SSgt. Clarence Wolf, Sgt. Theo Bowers, 1st Lt. Joseph Davidoski, Capt. Jason Rehm, MSgt. Norvin Deleonguerrero, Maj. Seth Folsom, Capt. Todd Hanna, 1st Lt. Matt Bates, 1st Lt. Andrew Grubb, SSgt. Shaun Leek, HN1 Emiliano
Captain Hassan (left) from 3rd Company briefs First Lieutenant Bates (2nd from right) and Big Mo during the cordon-and-search operation at Al Gab’aa.
Lieutenant Colonel Ayad (center) briefs officers and soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 28th Brigade at COP South. (Photo courtesy of Joe Davidoski)
First Lieutenant Davidoski (center) discusses cache-site discoveries with soldiers from 1st Company during a sweep of Jibab peninsula.
First Lieutenant Grubb (center, standing) supervises 3rd Battalion soldiers during a long-awaited machine-gun shoot.
Captain Hanna greets local children during a community-relations visit by 3rd Battalion to Jibab peninsula.
Outlander Marines observe while 3rd Battalion soldiers conduct a local security operation in the desert south of Al Qa’im.
Lieutenant Colonel Ayad and Major Folsom pause for a picture in downtown Husaybah.
Sergeant Hoffmier relaxes with a friend. (Photo courtesy of Theo Bowers)
Local leaders from Al Qa’im meet during a regional security meeting conducted at Border Fort 5.
He paused, fondly staring off into space, as if remembering a distant dream.
“We worked hand-in-hand with the old MiTT team,” he said. “Whenever they had difficulties—whenever we had difficulties—we solved each other’s problems. We didn’t involve the brigade; we solved our problems ourselves.”
“Give me an example.”
“Whenever we needed spare parts for our Humvees, the MiTT would get them for us,” he told me. “We planned operations together. The MiTT wasn’t concerned about the IPs. Whenever there was a mission, the MiTT would get in their Humvees and go with us.”
In other words, I thought sarcastically, you are used to getting what you want from the Americans. Armed with the information he had offered—and being careful not to be critical of the last MiTT team—I reiterated what I had said the previous night.
“My team’s focus is not on conducting routine operations with your junood,” I told him matter-of-factly. “We are past that. Your companies are capable of conducting routine patrols and operations without us. Instead, my focus is to assist and guide you and your staff in leveraging Iraqi army support for your operations.” I remembered what Donald Rumsfeld had once said, and although it had provoked nearly the entire U.S. Army when he had said it, I paraphrased his words to Ayad. “It’s important that Third Battalion learn how to fight and sustain itself with the army it has, not the army it wishes it had.” Then I remembered a fitting line from the movie Jerry Maguire. “You’ve got to help me to help you,” I said.
Once I had listed my main points I made sure to apply the appropriate degree of ego stroking and professional compliments. Although we had engaged in a cordial discussion, Ayad’s demeanor had changed by the end, and I left his office unsure of how he felt or whether he would take my advice and counsel for how it was meant: as constructive criticism aimed at making him a better commander and his battalion a better unit. No matter how he felt, however, I was confident in my decision to finally drop the boom on him. It had been a long time coming, and it was time that someone brought him back to reality.
As Mason and I walked back across the camp to our compound and discussed the meeting with Ayad, he stopped in his tracks and turned to me.
“Ah, it’s all becoming clear to me now,” he said, as if a light had suddenly come on in his head. “You know what the IAs are saying about you, right?”
“No, Mason. I don’t speak Arabic, remember?”
“They have a nickname for your team,” he said, lowering his voice and looking around cautiously. “They call you ‘pussies’ because you don’t go out on daily patrols with them. They don’t think you all are as aggressive as the last team was.”
“Whatever, Mason,” I said, waving it away with my hand. “That’s not our job. Besides, I don’t have anything to prove to those motherfuckers. Neither does any of my team. Running outside the wire with the junood on some half-baked plan based on questionable or nonexistent intel isn’t my idea of good headwork. It’s more like suicide. I’m not gonna risk my Marines’ lives just because the junood don’t think we’re aggressive enough.”
I walked into the MWR hut and sat down next to several Marines watching a movie. As usual, they asked me their nightly question.
“How’s Ayad?”
I relayed Mason’s revelation to those around me.
“Well, apparently the IAs don’t think we’re aggressive enough,” I said sarcastically. “Their nickname for us is ‘pussies.’”
“What?” they all shouted.
“What a bunch of fucking bullshit,” someone commented.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “Who cares what they think.”
“Pussies, huh?” Captain Hanna commented dryly, his deadpan humor breaking the tension. “What does it say about you when you’re too afraid to shoot a pistol in front of the Marines?”
The Marines all laughed, but one thing was certain: the honeymoon between 3rd Battalion and the Outlanders was over. Despite the fact that I had the moral support of Gridley and his staff, I anticipated a shift in my team’s relationship with the staff of 3rd Battalion. They now knew that the Marines weren’t there to give them a free lunch. Whether they took our advice and applied it would remain to be seen.
I remembered something my wife—herself a professional consultant who specialized in organizational change management—had told me one night after I groused to her over the Internet about my predicament: The MiTT team was really nothing more than a military consulting team. We could advise and recommend changes until we were blue in the face, but unless there was buy-in or sponsorship from higher headquarters nothing would ever change. And yet, like consultants, one other thing was true: In the end it didn’t matter if the Iraqis took our advice or not. We got paid either way.
Chapter 22
Uglat il Bushab
Captain Hussein is the ineffectual intelligence officer for 3rd Battalion, but he becomes the acting S-3 officer while Captain Al’aa is gone on leave. Hussein has been planning an operation in the battalion’s southern battlespace for several days, and after several weather delays he decides finally to launch the mission. The MiTT forms two vehicle crews, plans its portion of the mission, and prepares its equipment for the coming operation. The day the mission is supposed to launch the Marines wait for the IAs at the rendezvous point for more than an hour. The Iraqis’ lethargy starts the operation on a sour note—I have been awake all night on duty and am not impressed.
The IAs have planned for two companies to conduct a search-and-clear operation in two areas: Uglat il Bushab to the southeast and Um Tinah to the south. Hussein tells us that once they have picked up their source we will travel to Camp Al Qa’im and then head southeast to Uglat il Bushab. Once the first objective has been cleared we will move on to Um Tinah. He claims that they have received intelligence reports that insurgents are outfitting a truck to be used as a VBIED. We know that it is not really intelligence; it is merely a tip, but we hold our tongues. Everything is relative here.
As the convoy nears Camp Al Qa’im the IAs turn south prematurely and the long line of trucks and Humvees begins paralleling an abandoned rail line. We continue on this course for ten kilometers, then the lead vehicle turns off the road and leads the convoy out into the o
pen desert along an old goat trail. The column weaves back and forth for several hours, venturing deeper and deeper into the southern desert, stopping only when the smaller trucks become mired in the powdery dust blanketing the route. My Humvee brings up the rear, and because our Blue Force Tracker is not working properly Capt. Jason Rehm manipulates a Global Positioning System (GPS) in the turret. He calls out grid coordinates every five minutes, keeping us abreast of our location on the map. At one point Rehm rattles off a grid and Doc Rabor and I check our maps.
“Tell me that grid again,” I say to Rehm through my headset.
He repeats the numbers, and Doc taps me on my shoulder
“Um, sir?” Doc says, confused. He has just realized the same thing I have.
“What the hell,” I say, thinking aloud. “We’ve run all the way off our map sheet.” We are in no-man’s-land, and I hope the second MiTT vehicle’s BFT is still working.
The column finally rolls to a halt, and from atop a bluff on which Hussein has positioned us he dispatches 3rd and 4th companies to a small hamlet in the valley below.
Our team’s plan is to colocate ourselves with Hussein so we can observe his mobile COC in the field and observe how he battle-tracks the operation while it is under way. But the minute Hussein deploys the companies to the village the notion of a COC as we know it goes out the window. Hussein yells to the two companies on his Motorola radio, and the radio net explodes into chaos. Officers scream orders back and forth to each other in the valley, and Hussein shouts and gesticulates from his position on the bluff. After a few minutes he orders the two companies to displace to another village farther south.
As Hussein prepares to move his own Humvee and travel with the companies I assess the situation into which we have gotten ourselves. We are off the map—both literally and figuratively—and we have already burned a quarter tank of fuel just getting here. Hussein has no coherent plan, and his “source” has taken us much farther into the frontier than originally briefed. If something goes wrong I doubt we will be able to get Coalition support in a timely manner, and with Hussein’s vague mission statement I have no idea what we will roll into if we accompany him farther south. I tell Hussein my team will wait on the bluff, hoping he will take the hint and change his plan. Instead, he makes no argument and speeds off to find his companies. My confidence in Hussein’s abilities disintegrates, and the team remains in place for three hours while we monitor the pandemonium on the radio net and casually watch the Iraqi vehicles spin around the basin in confused circles like a lost circus procession.
When the IAs complete their operation down south they drive past the Outlanders without stopping, as if they have forgotten about us. The Marines curse as they quickly disassemble the SATCOM relay, and we jump in our vehicles to catch up to the IA convoy.
The aimless driving through the desert continues, and we eventually learn that Hussein still plans to conduct the second half of the operation at Um Tinah. Unsure how long our fuel and patience can both hold out, I make the call for the MiTT team to split away from the IA convoy and return to COP South through the wasteland on our own. I know we will get grief from the IAs once we eventually see them again, and we are likely to lose face for not completing the mission with them. I don’t care. Hussein has not put the appropriate degree of work into his planning, and the mission has become a complete waste of time.
The Marines are all frustrated because we have been prodding the IA to focus less on the cities and more on the southern desert. They have finally taken our advice, but their poor mission planning and execution yields nothing. For them it becomes an opportunity to say to us, See, we told you there is nothing going on down there! Regardless, we resolve to insist on more detailed planning and premission briefing for future operations to avoid the same carnival-like demonstration again.
If this is how they plan all of their operations, I think, it’s a wonder they haven’t been completely wiped off the map by the enemy by now. And again I remember that we are not seeking the Marine Corps solution, only a solution that works for the Iraqis. But even in that regard they still have a long way to go. And as I review the operation during our dusty trek back through the desert I realize that we too have a long way to go before we will succeed in our mission as advisors.
Chapter 23
Fear and Paranoia
In the last weeks of April the Iraqi army offensive against the Shiite militias in Basra weighed heavily on everyone’s mind. I read with interest reports about Marine MiTT teams—including some officers I had known for years—in the fight with their counterpart battalions from 26th Brigade and the Iraqi 1st Quick Reaction Force (QRF) Division, and it was a daily challenge for me to hide my disappointment from my Marines.
When I left Iraq in 2003 I had grown tired of war in a very short time, and I wanted nothing further to do with it. But now, half a decade later, I had pushed the horrible realities of combat into the recesses of my mind, and the old spark of longing had fully ignited my desire to return to action, however foolish and irresponsible such cravings were.
The Outlanders felt it too, and keeping them motivated and focused on their jobs as advisors was a challenge for me. While more than half of the team members had deployed to Iraq before, only a handful of the Marines had actually experienced combat. To the uninitiated among the team, the offensive in Basra seemed a cruel joke, one that reminded them each day of the stagnation and inaction 3rd Battalion was suffering. When a call went out from the 7th IA Division MiTT team requiring personnel augmentation for 26th Brigade’s advisor force in Basra, hands went up all over COP South. I couldn’t blame the men for their enthusiasm, and after I had made the decision to submit the names of LCpl. Travis Wardle and Cpl. Daniel Fry as volunteers for the reassignment, I summoned both Marines to my hut to speak to them in private.
Wardle and Fry, the team’s two most junior Marines, came from very different backgrounds. Wardle, a towheaded, angel-faced youth from Utah, was the epitome of squeaky-clean. He was an atypical lance corporal, always observing everything and measuring his words carefully before speaking. He had earned the nickname “Trashcan Man” for his frequent trips to the burn pit and his love of fire. Corporal Fry, on the other hand, hailed from Georgia, and he was known for his deep, leisurely southern drawl and bizarre sense of humor. He bore a striking resemblance to a character named McLovin from a movie called Superbad, and once everyone on the team had seen it the name stuck.
Both men were exactly the kind of junior Marines I had hoped for when the team initially formed, and I selfishly didn’t want to give them up for the mission in Basra. But they wanted their chance to see the elephant of combat for themselves, and I knew there was nothing I could do to extinguish that yearning. I had been in their shoes at one point in my life, wanting my chance to experience combat and prove my worth. And so, rather than attempt to dissuade them, I simply made sure both Marines knew what they were getting themselves into. They were unfazed by my warnings, and in the end I agreed to support and endorse their request to redeploy to Basra. As luck would have it they were not needed; the personnel requirement was filled by Marines from the brigade MiTT team. I broke the news to both Wardle and Fry, and the disappointment on their faces was palpable.
“Don’t worry,” I said, paraphrasing my father’s words from years earlier. “Stay in long enough and you’ll get your chance to get shot at one day.”
On 24 April the battalion’s mujaas cycle—which had been delayed because of the events in Basra—resumed, and Iraqi soldiers and officers excitedly ran back and forth throughout the camp, waiting for the leave convoy that would take them home. I visited Lieutenant Colonel Ayad one last time before he departed for his own leave, and I was surprised to find Lieutenant Colonel Sabah, the 28th Brigade logistics officer, hanging out in his brown dishdasha in Ayad’s office. I hated it whenever Sabah came to COP South. An angry man, Sabah was a rabble-rouser who constantly planted seeds of discord that got Ayad spun up every time the two men w
ere together. He had been a colonel or a brigadier general in the old regime, and when he joined the new Iraqi army he was demoted to major (probably because of his affiliation with the Baath Party and the old regime). The demotion had embittered him, and his stump speech always included a litany of justifications about why he should still be a full colonel. He hated the government in Baghdad, and on more than one occasion I had listened to him opine that the members of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet should all be “removed” or deported to Iran. In several instances, upon leaving a meeting at which Sabah had been present, I wondered to myself, Did he just openly suggest that a military coup is the best solution to Iraq’s political problems?
I found Ayad sitting there with Sabah, chain-smoking cigarettes and clearly agitated. Ayad only smoked on two occasions: when he was stressed out, and when Sabah was around. As soon as I joined the two officers Ayad immediately launched into a tirade about the IPs. Earlier in the day an IP patrol car had collided with an IA vehicle in Husaybah, and during the ensuing argument the IP officers had drawn their weapons on the IA soldiers. Fortunately the incident didn’t escalate any further, but it became fuel for Ayad to vent his spleen once more about the police force.
“They’re nothing more than gangs with uniforms!” he spit out, dragging heavily on his cigarette. “Or worse, militia. They are unprofessional. They are inept. They are affiliated with criminals, and they are a danger to the security situation in Al Qa’im.”
“Well, Jesus, sadie,” I said, hoping for solutions to the problem rather than just complaints. “What do you think should be done?”
In the Gray Area Page 15
