Chapter 18
Eye-opening Reality
The threat posed by IEDs—which until our arrival in the Al Qa’im region seemed to be on the path to extinction—had again resumed a slow, steady climb. The incidents continued to be isolated mostly to a winding stretch of road north of the Euphrates River, well out of 3rd Battalion’s area of responsibility, but we followed the reports with interest and concern nonetheless. IEDs had also been found in and around Husaybah and Karabilah, and while those areas were technically the responsibility of the Iraqi Police, they were ones in which we frequently traveled. But no Coalition forces had been killed in the region since the Outlanders had been there, and I hoped our luck would continue to hold out.
Although the business of dealing with the IED threat was a deadly serious one, incidents occurred that were laced with black humor. On one occasion a patrol from the Marine task force discovered the site of an IED detonation during the course of a routine patrol. The earth was blackened and pockmarked where the bomb had exploded, and as the Marines conducted a postblast analysis of the site they discovered the disassociated remains of the person who had been emplacing it. During the arming process the device had detonated prematurely, blowing the perpetrator to kingdom come. The Marines saw it for what it was: one less jackass to deal with. On another occasion a patrol discovered the remains of a civilian truck that had triggered an IED along the side of a road. The truck had been ferrying a load of sheep, and the subsequent blast had littered the road with the singed, blackened husks of the animals. The driver was nowhere to be found, and the Marines assumed he had beat feet once he saw his livelihood get blown sky-high.
The honeymoon of no Marine casualties ended abruptly on 30 March when our COC received a report that a police transition team (PTT) had been hit by an IED in Fallujah. Although Fallujah was in a different AO far to our east, we followed the details with dread. Casualties had been reported, including one that had been classified as “urgent-surgical.” Hard experience had taught me what that meant, but since no names were released it became just another faceless casualty somewhere in Iraq.
Or so we thought. Several days later Ashley forwarded me an e-mail from the Key Volunteer Network (KVN) in Camp Pendleton announcing that Maj. William Hall had been killed in action. He and his team had attended the Phoenix Academy with us, and we were stunned to hear of his death. It was a sober reminder for the team that our operating environment was not yet secure, despite all indications to the contrary. It gave us cause to review our SOPs and remind each other to wear our PPE whenever we were outside the wire. Beyond that it was a matter of luck.
One day as Captain Hanna and I sat around the MWR hut he turned to me and spoke.
“Sir, I’ve got an idea.”
“Oh shit,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Here it comes.”
He knew I was joking. In a short period of time Hanna had earned my admiration and complete trust. Captain Flynn had been my operations officer and deputy during our predeployment training, and it had been clear that Hanna routinely subordinated himself and deferred to Flynn’s advice and control of the team. But with Flynn gone—the result of a last-minute inability to deploy with us—Hanna had embraced his role not only as my principal logistician but also as the team’s second-in-command. His maturity and ingenuity astounded me. He understood the balancing act a deputy must walk: how to carry out the team leader’s intent without overstepping his boundaries. He continued.
“We’ve been trying to convince the IAs to have staff meetings,” he began. “Why don’t we show them what one of our staff meetings looks like? We can use the upcoming move to the new facility as an opportunity to demonstrate our planning and staff coordination process.”
It was a brilliant suggestion, and in the week building up to 3 April the team focused on preparing a brief to be presented to me in front of the 3rd Battalion staff and Lieutenant Colonel Ayad. During the meeting each of the team’s staff principals would brief me on courses of action that laid out different plans to move the team from COP South to the new brigade facility next to the phosphate plant. They would describe potential friction points and suggest ways to avoid them. They would also provide staff estimates for such considerations as force protection, command and control, and the amount of containers and rolling stock necessary to transport the team and its equipment. In the end I would decide which course of action to implement, and the plan would be set in motion.
But we had more planned than a simple staff brief. We rehearsed it the day prior, injecting a certain degree of theater. After identifying the areas in which the battalion staff was weak, we created scenarios we hoped would be a model for the Iraqis and that would inspire them to emulate our techniques. With the drama rehearsed beforehand the show we put on was entertaining. As the brief progressed I focused on staff coordination and engagement with higher headquarters.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Grubb said as he briefed the security plan. “We have a couple of concerns about force protection. We are unsure what plan to implement based on a lack of knowledge of current enemy tactics.”
“Well, have you gotten with the S-2 to match your plan with current enemy TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures]?” I answered.
“No, sir,” he answered, faking sheepishness. “Not yet.”
“Then do it,” I said, pretending to chide him. “You guys have got to start coordinating and talking with each other.”
Captain Hanna continued the act.
“Sir, we are getting a lot of push-back from the task force about transportation and lift,” he began. “They won’t commit to the numbers and types we need.”
“Look,” I said, feigning irritation. “You tell them it’s their responsibility as a higher headquarters to support us. If they keep stonewalling you, let me know and I’ll address it with their commander.”
It was all a charade, but Lieutenant Colonel Ayad was impressed at the work my staff had presented to me. I hoped the rest of the Iraqi staff had bought our performance. More important, I hoped the 3rd Battalion officers would adopt some of our team’s “best practices” and implement them into their own staff work. The IAs tended to imitate our actions, whether it was the way we wore our gear or carried ourselves and our weapons. Why should it be any different with our staff techniques?
But the initial high of the team’s performance soon gave way to the reality of 3rd Battalion’s situation. Despite the detailed briefing we had provided, the IA staff took no action to plan the upcoming move. No official order to move had been issued by 28th Brigade. Before that happened the battalion staff was content to do nothing until they were compelled to do so. The lack of initiative demonstrated by the IA staff was unsettling. Even scarier, 3rd Battalion was supposedly the best unit in the brigade. Ayad knew it, and he seemed concerned only with maintaining that image even at the risk of everything else. Privately the IA officers grumbled that Ayad had probably earned his appointment only through his political and tribal ties, and some feared that Ayad would systematically replace everyone on his staff with officers who would be nothing more than yes-men totally dedicated to him. It was not an unfounded fear. In my dealings with Ayad I learned that, to him, disagreement meant that a subordinate was either incompetent or could not be trusted. It violated what a battalion commander of mine had once told his staff: “It’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to be disagreeable.” But that was an American notion, and I was not with an American military unit. I had to keep reminding myself of that reality.
The regional security meeting (RSM) was a bimonthly roundtable discussion that rotated from location to location. Attended by the district leadership of Al Qa’im, the meeting was headed by Al Qa’im’s mayor, and the principals at each gathering included the Marine task force commander, the 28th Brigade commander, all of the brigade’s battalion commanders, the district Iraqi Police chief, the local head of the Department of Border Enforcement (DBE), and other cats and dogs. The attendance by the military, police, an
d border transition teams, along with the bloated PSD detachments for the Iraqi leaders, made each meeting a crowded affair. The most anticipated aspect of every security meeting was the lavish meal provided at the end.
On 7 April the MiTT team accompanied Ayad to the RSM at the Ramanah IP station just north of the Euphrates River. The landscape around Ramanah was a stark contrast to what we were used to at COP South. The featureless desert that characterized our region south of the river was replaced by lush green crops and indigenous vegetation as soon as we crossed the sloping, girdered bridge that spanned the river. The area around Ramanah was more heavily populated than that around our camp, and we were not accustomed to the numerous buildings and throngs of Iraqis walking the streets. The locals stared; some waved. Children chased after our Humvees, holding out their hands and yelling, “Mistah, mistah! Give me one pen!” No matter how often it occurred, I could never understand the Iraqi children’s obsession with writing implements.
In classic Iraqi fashion the meeting itself quickly devolved into an endless parade of self-platitudes and lip service to the need to cooperate. The long conference table brimmed with senior Iraqi officers, each staring suspiciously at the others while anticipating his turn to speak. Each officer’s comments—mostly centered on his own curriculum vitae—mirrored the others: The security situation is getting better. We must work together. We must continue to coordinate with each other. They were saying what they were expected to say, but by the meeting’s close they were no closer to resolutions regarding how to coordinate than they had been when they walked through the door.
The picture painted of the Al Qa’im region during the assembly seemed a rosy one, yet listening to Ayad each evening I began to assume the complete opposite. He didn’t trust the police force, insisting to me that they were corrupt, inept, and more than likely behind most of the criminal activity occurring in and around Karabilah and Husaybah. He believed that the locals also didn’t trust the IPs, and his conclusions about the efficacy of the IPs led him to insist that his battalion should resume operating in the cities and restore order.
The IPs in fact were inexperienced, and corruption and criminal activity were rampant within their organization. But we also knew that if 3rd Battalion continued to shoehorn itself into the cities and do the police force’s job, the IPs would never rise to the occasion. The Iraqi soldiers knew the cities best and the open desert the least. They were more comfortable operating in the city, and because that was where all the enemy activity was occurring, that was where they wanted to be. It was the exact opposite of the direction given by the 7th Division and 28th Brigade commanders, but Ayad and his S-2 continued to plan operations in the cities regardless. My recommendations to the contrary were summarily disregarded, and I saw dark clouds forming on the horizon. A continued IA presence in the cities could eventually lead to a turf war between the army and the police, and it would only be a matter of time before some sort of showdown erupted.
For the Outlanders the regional security meeting was not without an upside. We had been cautioned about the kids who lived in Ramanah. Among the task force Marines they were known as the “Children of the Corn” (a moniker taken from a Stephen King story). Disregarding the warning, we packed candy and toys that had been sent from home, and once the meeting concluded the team members braced themselves against our Humvees for the onslaught. The children came first in ones and twos, curious, testing us and our reaction to their presence. Then suddenly they came out of the woodwork, and before we knew it we were surrounded. Once the Marines began handing out the gifts the children mobbed each other for every last bit they could grab. The scene depressed me and seemed to give me some sort of hope at the same time. They were impoverished, their ratty clothes hanging from withered frames as they reached out to us with rail-thin arms and open hands. But they trusted us enough to walk right up to us, and I thought, If we can make them happy with just candy and toys, maybe there is hope for our mission here. I continued to ponder this as we made the long convoy back to COP South, wondering if their amity toward us would last. Perhaps this generation of Iraqis would not grow up hating the Americans like the previous one did.
Despite my constant efforts at relationship building with Ayad, he continued to hold me at arm’s length when it came to information sharing. On the evening of 8 April the two of us had discussed conducting a small community-relations project on the Jibab peninsula in 1st Company’s AO. A local widow and her children needed basic supplies, and Ayad wanted to visit the family and help out. It was a fantastic idea. Such a mission would increase the army’s standing among the locals. And there was always the hope that they would in turn offer valuable tips or information that 3rd Battalion could use in the area. My team was alerted, and Lieutenant Bates led the planning effort for the convoy to the peninsula the following day. The Marines were awake bright and early on 9 April, ready to head out with Ayad and his team. But after several hours of waiting around in confusion we received word that Ayad had inexplicably canceled the mission.
It was just one more concrete example of Ayad’s lack of planning and general hot-and-cold style of doing things, and already I had grown exhausted with it. I was further irritated when I learned that he had met with the local police chief later in the day without telling me or inviting me to attend. My feelings of aggravation peaked when Mason told me that Ayad had mentioned a plan to investigate the site of a suspected weapons cache the following day. It infuriated me that Ayad had told his plans to an interpreter and not me.
“Why the hell is he telling you this shit and not me?” I grilled Mason.
He attempted to downplay the situation.
“He just told me because I ran into him walking around the camp,” he answered, trying to calm me down before we went to see Ayad. Mason held in his arms two cases of Rip It—a heavily caffeinated soft drink the team kept around its camp that were highly sought after by the IAs—and I motioned to them.
“What are you doing with those?” I asked.
Mason shrugged his shoulders awkwardly.
“I promised Ayad I would bring him some of these.”
“Goddammit, Mason,” I growled. “Why the hell are you giving him shit when he won’t even tell me what the hell is going on around here?”
“Sir, you have to understand this culture,” he began. “It’s all about give-and-take. If we give these to him, he’ll warm up eventually.”
“Where does it end, Mason?” I asked. “What’s next? Televisions? Stereos? Computers? I don’t care if that’s their culture . . . I don’t roll like that.”
To a certain extent Mason had a point. We had only been there just over a month, and if two cases of soft drinks meant Ayad would open up to me, then I figured it to be a fair trade. But it didn’t lessen my ire at the situation as a whole, and so when we delivered the drinks that night I was in a foul mood. I tried to hide my feelings, but I failed miserably. During our meeting I didn’t talk much, and I when I did my questions were direct and business oriented. There were none of the perfunctory questions I was used to asking, inquiries such as how he and his family were doing. Uncomfortable with the tension in the room that my sullen mood was creating, Ayad began fidgeting in his chair, and he quickly told me about his planned operation the following day.
Over time his lack of trust and confidence in the battalion’s S-2 section had led Ayad to develop and maintain his own personal network of human intelligence sources, the identities of whom only he knew. He claimed his sources were investigating a suspected cache of rocket launchers somewhere on the Jibab peninsula, and if the information turned out to be accurate he wanted to go check it out for himself as part of our scheduled trip to 1st and 2nd companies the following day. Armed with that information I excused myself to plan the MiTT’s portion of the mission. It was not how I was accustomed to writing operations orders. Normally there was a significant amount of information from higher headquarters to process and translate into the order, but with such a lack
of information offered by Ayad I was forced to improvise. It became what one of my lieutenants in Delta Company had once referred to as a “five-paragraph suggestion.”
We were quickly learning that this was the way we had to do things as advisors. When it came to operating with the Iraqis, we would never be able to count on having enough information to make an educated decision. In many cases we would simply have to wing it.
Chapter 19
Jibab Peninsula
We sit around Major Muthafer’s office at 1st Company, drinking chai, smoking cigarettes, and shooting the shit for over an hour. I begin to get restless when suddenly Lieutenant Colonel Ayad’s S-2 scouts stride into the office. They are dressed in civilian attire—“under cover”—but with their pistols hanging from leather shoulder holsters they look more like self-important thugs than scouts. They tell the battalion commander that they are confirming the location of the weapons cache, and thirty minutes later Ayad’s cell phone rings. He turns to me and says through my interpreter, “They found it,” before moving swiftly out of the office and into his waiting Ford F-350. His three-vehicle PSD speeds off across the Jibab peninsula, leaving us in the dust. It takes the Marines longer to don our gear, fire up the vehicles and radios, and charge our weapons, and so we quickly fall behind the battalion commander’s convoy. Ayad is crazy, I think. Speeding off cross-country like that in his pickup trucks. They won’t last a second if he hits an IED.
Our movement on the peninsula’s trails is further hampered by the load my Humvee is towing. We have left BP Okinawa in such a hurry that we forget to unhook the trailer, and it bounces around the trails crazily, threatening to break free and strike out on its own. Before long our two vehicles are lost along the tree-lined banks of the Euphrates, and Ayad’s trucks are nowhere to be found. The locals stare at us, knowing we are lost, and suddenly things don’t look good. When they know you’re lost, they know they can hit you. Just as I make the decision to return to Okinawa we spot the three IA vehicles in the distance and move quickly to link up with them.
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