Chosen Soldier

by Dick Couch

  We rolled back into the Special Forces compound shortly after daylight with twelve detainees. The little task group was after four targeted individuals—insurgents known by name with an active history of violence, intimidation, insurgent support, and IED activity. We got three of them. The others were brought out because they had multiple weapons, explosives, or documents in their houses that tied them with insurgent activity. Bringing out detainees, even documented insurgents, is not a grab-and-go business. Each detainee and his house has to be searched, and the results of that search documented. Each detainee’s personal documents are taken from him and put in a ziplock-type bag and hung around his neck. He is then cuffed and blindfolded, and placed in one of the vehicles.

  The marines were tasked with finding and capturing the head insurgent hiding in this village. Their job proved to be easier, or harder, depending on your perspective. Their target eluded them initially, but the insurgent leader and five of his bodyguards ran into one of the Marine security elements. They made the mistake of trying to fight it out with them. The marines killed all six, and cut off the head of the insurgent snake in this area. One marine was slightly wounded. When the ODA got this report later in the morning, the men were happy for the marines, and maybe even a little bit jealous.

  The marshaling and management of the detainees was an operation unto itself. It took time and attention to detail, and had to be done properly in order to document the conditions of their detention so these insurgents could be dealt with appropriately. Their capture, detention, documentation, interviews, and transport had the makings of a crime-scene investigation as much as a combat operation. Each was given a quick medical examination by the team medics to ensure he was fit for transport. Most of the communication with the detainees was through interpreters. Two of these interpreters were permanently assigned to this ODA, and two others were brought along from the AOB for this operation. Two were U.S. citizens, one a local Iraqi national, and one an Iraqi national living in the United States awaiting citizenship. All were civilians, and all were under contract with the Department of Defense.

  “I grew up in Basra and I came to the United States about six years ago,” one of them told me. “I live in East Lansing [Michigan] and I’m a crane operator, but soon I will be an American citizen.” Before I could ask how it was to be back, he told me. “I love Iraq and I love Iraqis. They are a good people, and they deserve justice. These insurgents, they deserve justice as well—swift justice. I hate them for what they are doing to my country—my country, Iraq, and my country, America.” He went on to tell me how we should be handling detainees, and it was quite a bit different than the criminal-apprehension, chain-of-custody, civil-liberty-awareness treatment that I observed. I had watched him during the operation and during the field interrogations. He was conscientious and passionate—a great asset to the team. On my way out of Iraq, I met him in Balad. He was heading for the U.S. consulate in Germany to finalize his citizenship.

  While the team bent to the tedious task of processing the detainees, I was able to spend a few minutes with the Civil Affairs team and their team leader, a Civil Affairs major. “We’re here to assist ODA and to do what we can for the locals, both to build confidence in the new government in Baghdad and to make the people a little more trusting of us.” He showed me a list of their civil-affairs goals within their area of operations.

  Water filtration project

  Electrical system refurbishment

  Village cleanup and sanitation

  Road repairs

  Improvements to the local clinics

  Water main/pipe repairs

  Humanitarian assistance—books, soccer balls and nets, classroom supplies and support

  The ODA tried to spend as much time out on humanitarian missions as it did on combat/combat support missions. “One way or the other,” the detachment leader told me, “there’s a lot to do, and we stay busy.” The afternoon following the operation, we made the run back to Al Asad. Our Iraqi army scouts element and their Humvees stayed behind, and we made the journey with three Humvees, one of them in tow. There was a mechanical problem with one of the ODA’s vehicles and we had to tow it back to Al Asad for maintenance. Also part of the convoy was an armored LMTV Army truck that carried our twelve detainees. Like the Humvees, there was a ring turret atop the truck cab with a Special Forces sergeant camped behind a .50-caliber heavy machine gun.

  I was able to spend time with two other ODAs during my time in Iraq. One of them was also located at the AOB. This team had, in the words of one of the detachment members, “drawn the short straw,” and had to stay with the AOB. They occasionally ran their own operations, but for the most part they supported and augmented the other AOB ODAs. The other ODA I visited in western Iraq also lived in a deserted Iraqi army barracks with minimal services and the steady din of a generator in their little compound. They were colocated with a battalion of marines and a battalion of the Iraqi army, both charged with keeping critical infrastructures safe from insurgent activity.

  Again, I sortied from Al Asad with a small Humvee convoy of Green Berets from the advanced operating base. We made this dash and came back in a single day. The trip focused on current intelligence requirements and medical issues. The team we visited was briefed by AOB personnel on updated procedures for operational intelligence collection, and we brought along a dentist to do some extractions for Iraqi army soldiers working with the ODA. For some of the Iraqis, it was their first visit to a real dentist. They came into the treatment room, which was the ODA medic’s small makeshift dispensary, eyes wide with apprehension. The dentist, on loan from the 10th Special Forces Group, lay his first patient down on a wooden bench and went to work, a novocaine hypodermic in one hand and a flashlight in the other. That’s when I left. I don’t do well at the dentist’s office at home, let alone a stone-floored, plywood-sided storage closet in western Iraq.

  There were two former X-Rays on this team, both solid performers according to their team sergeant, who went out of his way to praise the new men. Both had interesting backgrounds, but one of them I would have to file in the unique category, or perhaps the uniquely suited category. He was a Brigham Young University graduate, and his two-year Mormon mission to South America had served to refine an ability he seemed to have with languages. Prior to this rotation, he could speak Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, and Tagalog—the latter from Special Forces Language Training. Now, with three and a half months in Iraq, he was getting pretty good at Arabic.

  “I do well when I can control the conversation, like when I interview a detainee and can ask the questions—I know, to some degree, how he might answer. When someone questions me, or it’s a fast-moving conversation, I have to ask them to slow down. But I’m getting better every day.”

  “It must be nice,” I observed, having been a poor student of languages, “to have a knack for languages.”

  “It’s not a knack,” he informed me evenly. “It’s commitment. Anyone can learn a foreign language if they want to. It takes a genuine desire to learn and the discipline to practice. And you have to go out of your way to find and practice with native speakers. The second language is easier than the first, and they get easier each time, but you have to make a personal commitment to learn the language.” So much for my two years of Spanish and my inability to do little more than order a cerveza por favor.

  The run back to Al Asad was hot, dusty, and uneventful. The following day, I was scheduled to visit another ODA near the Syrian border. This particular ODA was having a great deal of operational success and was considered one of the premier Special Forces detachments in Iraq. But the helo was delayed until late in the day and would not return until the following evening, too late for me to make the return connection back to Balad. That night, after the AOB contingent had left, I got to talking with one of the warrant officers at the AOB and learned that his sport was judo.

  “There was a guy I met in the Q-Course,” I told him, “who was a black belt an
d professional martial artist. You might know him; his name is Tom Kendall.”

  “Tom Kendall!” the warrant blurted. “He’s here at Al Asad.” Moments later we were in one of the AOB’s battered Land Rovers and headed across the base for the compound. As the reader may recall, I met then Specialist (now Staff Sergeant) Kendall in Phase I during selection and was able to track him pretty much through Phase IV. He was now assigned to a special SF unit, one normally reserved for experienced soldiers, but Kendall had been an exceptional performer throughout the Q-Course. He was, as I was to learn, the only first-rotation 18 X-Ray to be assigned to this special team. We found him working out at the base gym. I hadn’t seen him in over a year. It was like visiting one of your sons on the job a year out of college. The open, easygoing face was the same, but I’d never seen him with hair—no beard, but lots of hair.

  “So, tell me, what’s been happening to you since I last saw you?”

  “Spanish language school, SERE training, and then to my group. Because of my team’s mission, I got a priority slot for the Special Forces Advanced Reconnaissance, Target Analysis, and Exploitation Course. Our team has only been here a short while, and we’ve spent a lot of time in Baghdad, training the Iraqi counterterror units. We’ve been up here at Al Asad for some direct-action work, but most of the targets that would fit our force seem to be going to other units. So we’re headed back to Baghdad in a few days, back to training the Iraqis.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “For the most part.” Kendall had always struck me as someone who wanted to take whatever he was doing to the next level and then some. I could see he was a little frustrated. “If things don’t pick up this rotation,” he said with an easy grin, “then maybe they will on the next one.” I’d heard this from others in Special Forces. They were obligated to operate in battle spaces controlled by conventional-force commanders, which meant they often felt underutilized. But that’s the nature of this kind of warrior, as much as it is the nature of any conventional-force restrictions.

  “Think this is something you might want to do for a career?”

  “I don’t know,” he said seriously. “I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude. My daughter starts kindergarten about the time I have to make that decision. For me, that’s a big factor. We’ll see when the time comes—maybe yes, maybe no.” I wished him a safe tour, and we headed back across the base to the AOB compound.

  The only other familiar face I saw on my journey was a senior commo sergeant on of the teams who was a cadre sergeant at Camp Mackall during my Phase IV. Time permitting, I’d have liked to have visited other teams. As it was, the next day I was on a C-130 back to Balad. I had a full day and night at Balad—time enough for me to bang out most of this epilogue and undergo two mortar attacks, one of them landing a round just outside the Balad special operations compound. Cheap at twice the price: I got to go on an operation with a Special Forces ODA, and I got to visit with Tom Kendall. Then it was a C-17 from Balad to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the long trip back to Idaho. I arrived home tired, thankful, and feeling very, very blessed. Few special operators of my generation are afforded a chance to revisit their trade and to be with young warriors in the current fight. Thank you, Special Forces, for allowing me this opportunity.

  This is the time in a book when I get to remove my careful-observer cap and take a few minutes to make a personal observation—on this war and the current business of special operations. And this strictly as I see it. The U.S. Army and the U.S. Army Special Operations Command have monitored me pretty closely during this effort. There was never a hint of censorship regarding my work, but they were engaged and read the text carefully. When they made a suggestion, it was just that, and usually in the interest of accuracy or specific information they would like to see omitted in the interest of training future Green Berets. For the most part, I honored those suggestions. So let me now say, for the record, that the following is my take on the current fight, the role of special operations in this fight, and, by extension, our current force structure. These are strictly my opinions.

  Semantics and words seem to play a big role in this conflict. First, the global war on terror, and the acronym GWOT that we see everywhere. It’s very misleading. Terror, or terrorism, is a tactic, and just one of the tactics used by al-Qaeda and their allies in this war. Given that we’re the good guys, the bad guys in this fight are the insurgents. So perhaps the global war on insurgency (or insurgents) would be a better phrase. And yet, while insurgency is a better word, it’s still a tactic. We may not be fighting terror per se, but we’re certainly up to our armpits in an insurgency. And is it really global? Sure, they attacked us in Washington and New York, and continue these attacks in western Europe, but their homeland is the Islamic world. Due to the nature of our open society, the insurgents can move about and even operate in our world, but because they’ve skillfully packaged their cause in an Islamic wrapper, the Islamic world is their base. If we can find a way to beat them there, then we’ll win. And just who are “they”—these insurgents who use terrorism and promote insurgency? I’ve used the term “Islamists” and even “fundamentalists.” Extremists, in the context of Islam, is a far better word. I wouldn’t like to think that all of Islam is our enemy, but I do believe we are fighting Islamic extremists, and the prize in this conflict is the leadership of the Islamic world—oh, yes, and control of all those oil and natural gas reserves that happen to be in the Islamic world. We think it should come to a vote—some form of political/economic/universal consent of the people. This means a secular approach to governance, and some form of government with the consent of the governed. They, the extremists, think it should be their version of God’s law, with themselves and their extreme clerics in charge. Unfortunately, because their tactics are terror and information, they’ve made this fight come across as a Crusaders-and-Arabs issue, painting coalition forces in a role of the invader/occupier. And that’s why we have a whole lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on combat deployment.

  There are various layers of reality in this struggle. There is the reality of what is taking place on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq—the “ground truth,” as the Army likes to call it; there is the war as portrayed by the Western media; and there is the war as an element or chess piece in our political process. Regarding the American media, it is through their eyes that most of us perceive this war. I wish they would be as helpful to us in our fight as Al Jazeera is to the other side, but that’s not how a free press operates, nor should it be. Does the media have a liberal bias? Possibly—even probably. But the driving force of our media coverage, which is dominated by television, is viewership—the ratings. We are a nation that has a fascination with violence, graphic video footage, and what might broadly be called, I’m sorry to say, dysfunction. We consume the stuff, and much of our media coverage is consumer driven. The war is no exception. Therefore, a suicide bombing in Baghdad, especially if there is some graphic video to go with it, is far more newsworthy than the civil-affairs projects of a Special Forces ODA in western Iraq.

  Politically, well, this conflict has become a they-said, he-lied, we-should-have exercise in partisan politics. Bottom line, through executive leadership and congressional approval, this nation went to war. We invaded Iraq. That war, which we initiated, has become a nasty, protracted insurgency. Americans tend not to like lengthy military engagements; the insurgents know this, and even count on it. Few of the chosen soldiers I spoke with in Iraq saw this fight in political terms. They were too focused on training Iraqis, and trying to find and target insurgents. They did, however, wonder if their nation had the stomach to see this one through. They get CNN on satellite, even at the remote ODA locations.

  “You watch news of the war on TV,” a detachment sergeant told me, “and it’s unlike anything we see here on a day-to-day basis. You also see the approval polls for the war, and it makes you wonder. I don’t care how we got here—we’re here. And we have to stay here and help these
people until they can do it on their own. For the nation, it’s pulling out. For us, it’s leaving behind friends you’ve promised to stand alongside until the job’s done.”

  So much for the media and the political dimension. What’s really happening over there? Are we winning? Can we win? This war, like all wars, will take time, treasury, lives, and national will. Do we have enough of these elements to see this one through to a successful or an acceptable resolution? I get asked these questions a lot, especially after I returned from Iraq.

  Ten days in Iraq is not enough to see it all, but it was enough to dramatically raise my concerns. Quite frankly, I’m worried. We have lives at risk, and that may not change for a while; I flew with two flag-draped coffins on a leg of my trip back home. The casualties are a trickle compared to what they were or could be, but a single death in Afghanistan or Iraq is still an item on the nightly news. And more than a news item if that death is in your community or your family. The fact that this death is matched daily by the more than forty Americans killed on our highways by drunk drivers does not lessen my concern for this single fallen warrior. It does, however, speak to this war in terms of the current media consciousness. This war is costing a lot of money, but as compared to our gross national product and what we spent in the Cold War, including Vietnam, it’s not all that much. Time and national will may well be the deciding factors. We are an impatient culture and an impatient electorate. Dedicated, skillful insurgents think in terms of decades. To use a sports analogy, we think in terms of athletic seasons, and politically, in election cycles. Militarily, we have problems. I recall a comment of Secretary Rumsfeld’s a few years back: “You have to go to war with the Army you have.” He’s right, and we did. That said, the composition of our armed forces is wholly unsuited to fight this war. What’s really sad, for me, is that this is not unlike our experience in the Vietnam War—or the Vietnam Insurgency. To quote that great American, Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”