In the Gray Area

by Seth W. B. Folsom

  As I walked through the camp back to the MiTT compound, the quiet darkness was interrupted by spotlights and whistles. Soldiers spilled from their huts, sprinting to the guard towers and makeshift bunkers that dotted the camp’s berm. The drill was already under way.

  The entire episode had left a bad taste in my mouth about the Navy SEALs operating in our AO. They had always had a reputation for being cowboys, something Lieutenant Grubb corroborated based on his experience working with them in Ramadi the previous year. Their recklessness and failure to coordinate their movement through 3rd Battalion’s AO had not only endangered their own lives and the lives of 2nd Company’s soldiers, it had also threatened to disrupt relations between the Coalition and the Iraqi army. I wondered how many more incidents like that the IAs would be able to endure before they began shooting at anything that went bump in the night, and I prayed that the SEALs’ error would be the last of the close calls between the Americans and the Iraqis.

  Chapter 24

  Gifts and Free Lunches

  Weeks passed. The weather, which until recently had been pleasant, suddenly made the transition from spring to summer, and with it came the blistering winds and searing heat that radiated from a sun that boiled daily in the afternoon sky. We baked in our Kevlar gear and body armor, and the cabins of our Humvees turned into infernos. Marines returned from convoys drenched in sweat, their tan flight suits sticking to them and bleached white with salt. I thought of a variation of a line from Kipling: Only mad dogs and Englishmen go outside during the Iraqi summer. We surely weren’t English . . . so there could only be one other explanation.

  The Outlanders began to languish in the isolation of COP South, and Captain Hanna commented one day that our existence in the camp had begun to mirror the monotony of shipboard life. Between the heat and the boredom, the Marines occupied themselves by reading, exercising, and watching movies. A lot of movies. The days seemed to blend together, yet we continued to conduct our daily meetings both within the team and with our Iraqi counterparts. Occasionally the Marines would spin up for last-minute missions announced by the Iraqis, but more often than not the operations were either canceled or produced nothing of value. Despite COP South’s size, it became cramped, and the team grew frustrated with the situation as a whole and with each other. Indifference and listlessness took hold, and it was a daily challenge to keep them motivated.

  And I had just about had it with Lieutenant Colonel Ayad. On the evening of 22 May I went with Mason to visit my counterpart one last time before he left for his mujaas the next day. But when we arrived at his hut the sentry informed us that he had already departed. Irritated that Ayad had once again left without telling me, I stormed off back toward my hut. Issues had needed to be resolved before he left, and now I would have to wait another ten days before I could discuss them with him.

  “This is fucking bullshit, Mason,” I vented. “If my relationship with Ayad is ever going to progress he has got to start telling me more and trusting me with more information. That includes telling me when he’s leaving.”

  Something in my words ignited a flame that had been smoldering in Mason, and he let loose a long, angry tirade about what it was we were doing there and the world as he saw it.

  “What do you want to accomplish here?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What exactly do you want to happen with the IAs?”

  “Well,” I said, “what do you think? I want them to start doing things on their own so the Americans can get the hell out of here.”

  “Listen,” he said. “If you want to make things work with Ayad then you have to work the way they do. It’s all give-and-take here.”

  “Yeah, it’s ‘give-and-take,’ all right,” I replied. “We give, and they take.”

  “Well, if you help them out, they’ll help you out.”

  “In other words, if I want the IAs to get anything accomplished I need to give them things.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mason, that’s total bullshit,” I said, gritting my teeth. “That’s not my fucking job.”

  “Well, what is your job, then?”

  “It’s to train, coach, mentor, and advise them,” I said, rattling off the only thing that anyone from higher headquarters had given me that even closely resembled a mission statement. “My mission sure as hell isn’t to give them the fucking gifts they’ve been asking me for.”

  “But that’s the way it’s done in this culture.”

  “Okay, so if I want Ayad to be a better battalion commander, then I need to give him all the shit he’s been asking me for the last couple of weeks? Eye-pro [eye protection; i.e., ballistic glasses or goggles]? Combat boots? Concertina wire? Bullshit! He only wants that stuff for himself; he doesn’t want it for his soldiers.”

  “You’re being too inflexible,” he chided. “You are a career military officer. You can only see things in black and white. You have to be able to see the gray.”

  “Watch what you’re saying,” I warned. “Just because I’ve made the Marine Corps a career doesn’t mean that I’m a fucking stooge. That has no bearing on how I think about this.”

  “Regardless, you are never going to see any results if you don’t bend the rules and understand Ayad’s motivations. If you can’t do that, then you are better off just letting the IAs do their own thing and you do yours.”

  It was a disconcerting conversation, but it forced me to reflect on what we had been doing and, more important, on my own questionable abilities as an advisor. While it was true that the guidance I had received from both the Marine task force and the brigade MiTT early in our deployment was to reduce 3rd Battalion’s reliance on the Coalition—to begin cutting the apron strings—my own personality and perspective had also played heavily in my performance. In the previous weeks and months I had come to understand the old Iraqi army culture—and Iraqi culture as a whole—and I had also grown to despise it. It was a culture of bribes, of mistrust, of entitlement, of “What’s in it for me?”

  The Americans had invaded Iraq and subsequently shattered the government and military apparatus. It was true that it had become our obligation to rebuild what we had destroyed. But as I reviewed all that the United States had accomplished in the previous five years—all that we had given the Iraqi army and done for it—I realized that the time for us to leave was fast approaching. The MiTT teams previously assigned to 3rd Battalion had done their jobs, yes, but in a way they had also set up my team for failure. When we finally reached the point that we had—the point at which it was time to cut off the Iraqi army and force it to do its own work—the IAs were instead unwilling to accept the fact that the Americans would eventually leave. They simply refused to believe that we would stop giving them things.

  During our time at ATG the instructors had stressed the importance of operating “in the gray area.” When Ayad departed for leave and I suddenly found myself with more time to ponder the situation, I realized that I was not cut out to be an advisor. A trainer, yes. Had Ayad and his staff been willing and eager to embrace the vast knowledge and experience my team brought to the table, then I would have excelled. But Ayad was rooted in the old ways, and he was largely uninterested in what I had to offer. If giving him gifts—if continuing to drag out 3rd Battalion’s reliance on the Americans—was operating in the gray area, then I was unable to do it, and perhaps unsuited for the job. I had been trained to lead men, to take decisive action, to do the right thing. I was brought up to award achievement and effort, not laziness and complacency. As I saw it, my mission was to teach 3rd Battalion to fish so they could eat for life, not to give them a fish so they could eat for just one night. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that the officers of 3rd Battalion didn’t want to learn to fish. They only wanted their dinner served to them each evening.

  And while it was true that the battalion staff as a whole had difficulty adapting to our recommendations, the critical barrier to progress within the unit was Lieu
tenant Colonel Ayad himself. More and more it became evident that his leadership was the obstacle preventing the battalion from advancing further. The Marines had made notable progress with several members of the battalion staff. Lieutenant Ski had continued to develop the S-2’s intelligence-collection capability, and Lieutenant Bates had likewise developed the S-3’s planning and coordination skills. Perhaps most significantly, Captain Hanna had reduced the S-4’s (the battalion logistics officer’s) reliance on us for fuel and spare parts. But Ayad still controlled his staff with an iron fist. He made every decision within the battalion and neither encouraged nor allowed initiative among his junior officers. They despised him. And while I knew that it wasn’t necessary for subordinates to like their boss, I also knew that when enmity becomes an obstacle to progress there is something seriously wrong. Command climate was not just some touchyfeely concept limited to the American military culture. If subordinate leaders in any unit feel that they cannot approach their commander with problems—or tactfully disagree—then the unit becomes paralyzed. I had known numerous commanders who had been relieved from their duties because of command-climate problems. Hell, if someone had surveyed the Marines of Delta Company before the war began I probably would have been relieved from my post as a company commander for the very same reason.

  The 3rd Battalion staff was comprised of many young officers who had developed a different outlook and way of doing things, yet they were unable to proceed with their ideas without fear of reprisal by Ayad. He was content with his centralized command of the battalion, and because he had been told again and again that 3rd Battalion was the best in the brigade he was unwilling to do anything different that might possibly ruin his reputation. Accordingly, the battalion looked good on paper, the camp looked good, but as a whole—beneath the surface—it was dysfunctional and festering.

  Lieutenant Colonel Ayad returned from leave on 2 June, and he brought with him a surprise: his eight-year-old son, Iha’ab. At first I thought the boy was only there for a brief visit—perhaps a day or so—but I quickly learned that he would be there with us at COP South for Ayad’s entire twenty-day work cycle.

  “Um, why, sadie?” I asked, perplexed.

  “He wouldn’t let me leave home without my bringing him along,” Ayad replied, beaming.

  I was somewhat annoyed. An army camp in the middle of nowhere brimming with weapons and heavy equipment didn’t seem the ideal place for a young boy to be running around unsupervised. More than that, however, I was chafed because I had planned to launch a campaign of tough love with Ayad. At Mason’s recommendation the team had planned to host an evening feast for the 3rd Battalion staff. We would make a trip into Husaybah and buy all the fixings at the souq, then cook it all up for the IAs. According to our plan, following the meal each staff principal from the team would sit down with his IA counterpart and lay down the law, essentially telling them Okay, we have demonstrated our hospitality and fed you; now it’s time to talk business. My intent with Ayad would be similar, to say, Here are my goals. And now I want to hear what your goals are in the remaining three months the MiTT is with 3rd Battalion. Every other time I had attempted to elicit an answer to that question he had snubbed me or simply changed the subject. I hoped to force his hand by feeding him and his staff. It was a long shot, but I had nothing to lose.

  But Iha’ab’s presence hindered my plans and made it difficult to conduct business during my evening meetings with Ayad. I had prepared a laundry list of problems that had occurred in his absence, but with his son constantly sitting there it became next to impossible to raise the subject. Ayad clearly doted on his boy, and with Iha’ab constantly in the office his father preferred to talk about his son rather than the business of his battalion. Not wanting to be deterred, I stuck to the plan and invited Ayad and his staff to the feast, and the Marines began making preparations in anticipation. By that point Ayad had fully demonstrated his flakiness to me, and so I reminded him of the event each night in the week leading up to the feast. As fate would have it, the night before the team’s trip into Husaybah to buy the food Ayad received a call during our meeting. After a few minutes he hung up the phone and looked at me nervously.

  “What’s up, sadie?” I asked.

  “The brigade commander just invited me to dine with the old brigade commander tomorrow night.” He didn’t specifically ask me to cancel the meal, but his eyes did, so I called it off.

  How convenient, I thought wryly, thinking back to the “phone calls” that had resulted in him speeding away from the ordnance-cache find and removing himself from the MiTT team’s marksmanship training. I wonder if he always gets a call whenever he’s nervous about something.

  One evening a week later, as I prepared to leave my meeting with Ayad, he spoke privately to Mason for several minutes. It wasn’t the first time he had done it, and it typically meant that he was asking Mason to ask me for something. I had learned to ignore it. Over time Ayad had asked for a host of things for himself, the most outrageous having been a request for me to buy him a hunting rifle from America. I had balked at the suggestion.

  “No, sadie,” I had said, shaking my head. “I can’t do that for you.”

  “But the last MiTT team bought a hunting rifle for the old battalion commander,” he had protested.

  This was an outright lie. The previous team had given many things to the officers of 3rd Battalion, but surely they hadn’t obtained a high-powered rifle for the battalion commander.

  “Sadie,” I had said, bluntly, “sorry, but that’s just plain illegal for me to do, no matter how you cut it.”

  As Mason and I walked back to our camp I asked him what Ayad had just requested.

  “He asked me to buy him a laptop computer,” he answered, nonchalantly. Ayad seemed to have learned his lesson about asking for such things from me.

  “You’re not gonna do it, are you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll help him pick one out, he’ll give me the money, and I’ll order it for him.”

  “Jesus, Mason,” I said. “Why? We’re not supposed to do that.”

  “He needs a new computer so he can communicate with his family in Ramadi, and he has no way to get one.”

  “Well, fine,” I said, disapproval tingeing my voice. “I can’t stop you from doing it. But I think it’s the wrong thing to do.”

  The pressure from the battalion for us to give them things was unrelenting. But as much as I wanted to simply cut them off from all Coalition support—to force them to sink or swim—we still occasionally found ourselves in the position where we felt compelled to provide them mission-supporting items. In one instance, Master Sergeant Deleon procured two three-hundredgallon fuel-storage tanks for Vera Cruz and Okinawa. The Navy Seabees at Camp Al Qa’im had been planning to discard them, and Deleon had rightly figured it was better to give them to the IAs than see them get thrown away.

  In another case, Captain Hanna had managed to provide the battalion with a bevy of spare Humvee parts. He had arranged to bring two IA Humvees and their crews to Camp Al Qa’im for maintenance training with the mechanics from the Marine task force. While the junood pointed out all the broken components on their vehicles, the Marines taught the IAs how to repair each problem (at the same time supplying the parts). It was a loophole in the system we chose to exploit. Rather than insist that 3rd Battalion induct its Humvees into the Iraqi army maintenance cycle—a complex, protracted process that inevitably resulted in the vehicles returning with more wrong than before they were inducted—we chose to help them out with the task force’s time, expertise, and copious spare parts. Hanna’s initiative was a windfall for 3rd Battalion. Their Humvees were older models that required many parts that were different from those in our newer M1114s, and once the Marine mechanics had finished they offered the IAs all of their older spare parts that didn’t fit the M1114s. Grinning from ear to ear, the junood loaded their two vehicles to the brim with the spare parts, and they were treated like returning heroes back at COP
South.

  It was hardly a triumph for us, but what it did was provide the Outlanders a significant degree of leverage with 3rd Battalion. As I met with Ayad that night I made sure he understood the great pains we had gone to in procuring the fuel tanks and the spare parts. It was an exaggeration, of course. But he didn’t know that, and the supplies we had provided became money in the bank for us—an act we could reference if and when we needed assistance, or, more likely, if we really wanted the IAs to do something. Bribing them with deliveries of tangible items like the storage tanks and parts turned my stomach, but to a certain extent Mason had been correct: sometimes it took doing things the Iraqi way to get anything accomplished there.

  I finally achieved a minor moral victory, however, on 13 June. The previous night, after my conversation with Ayad about items we had supplied his battalion, I shifted gears into a discussion about the future. The Marine task force in Al Qa’im had begun to transition into “overwatch,” whereby principal responsibility for security in the region would become the responsibility of the ISF, and the task force would largely remain in reserve in case an emergency arose. The switch to overwatch would not only affect the ISF in and around Al Qa’im. The Outlanders relied on the task force for supplies and maintenance support, and the pending movement would drastically affect its ability to support us. That in turn would translate into reduced support for the IAs. As I explained all this to Ayad, I raised a difficult question.

  “How will 3rd Battalion function and support itself without the Coalition to rely on?” I asked.

  He nodded, contemplating my question, and although he quickly changed the subject I could see the wheels turning inside his head. He was at least as concerned about the issue as I was.

  The following day the IA 7th Division’s commanding officer, General Abdullah, visited 3rd Battalion with the brigade commander and both of their entourages. As the mob of officers crowded into Ayad’s office and began the ritual of chai and cigarettes, Ayad spoke.