The good captain, p.35
The Good Captain, page 35
For weeks, the soldiers involved in the raid were grilled. Pulled from operations, they were subjected to many hours of interrogation and threatened with long prison sentences. Frightened, most eventually sought defense counsel. Early on, I brought Hara in. “Ken, what do you think?”
He set his jaw and said, “My guys are innocent. I’d bet my career on it.” I grimaced. “Brother, I think you just did.” My next step was to consult with Colonel Arnie Claudio, a close friend and the Corps provost marshal. Claudio had served for years in Colombia, fighting the drug war, and was well known for repeatedly risking his life as he roamed across Iraq with his beloved Military Police. “Let the investigation take its course,” he counseled. “When the final report is in, let me know.” A cloud descended over the unit, with rumors swirling that they had staged the operation to make off with the cash. There was a war on, and this was a distraction we didn’t need.
Some weeks later the report hit my desk. I read it with a sinking feeling. “We conclude that First Lieutenant Charles Neumann likely committed felony theft in the amount of $50,000. It is recommended that the command take appropriate action.” No witnesses or other pieces of evidence were cited. Neumann was duly “titled” (found by “a preponderance of the evidence” to have more likely than not committed the crime), appearing in law enforcement databases and losing his security clearance in the process. Facing court martial and imprisonment, the young officer was disconsolate.
I called Hara in. “What now, boss?” he asked. “I’ll go as far as I possibly can for my officer. We can’t let this stand. Let’s go see the general.” Taking Hara by the shoulder I said, “First off, I’m not going to charge the lieutenant. Someone else might, but not me. Let’s see what the provost marshal has to say.”
A few hours later, I sat with Arnie as he read the report. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take it from here.” Twenty-four hours later an expert CID investigative team consisting of a senior chief warrant officer and a sergeant major was in the air, headed for Baghdad. We soon found ourselves meeting with the Corps chief of staff, an irate brigadier. He’d heard about the team. Who did we think we were? Were we trying to cover for the culprit, or ourselves? As he ordered Claudio to turn off the investigation, the provost marshal spoke calmly and carefully. “Sir, this is an internal CID matter, and one we take very seriously. With all due respect, you don’t really have a vote here.”
Angrily, the general turned to the staff judge advocate, the senior legal officer for the corps, who nodded solemnly. Shortly afterwards, General Vines weighed in with his support. Within 48 hours, the CID team had located the cash in the bank account of the agent’s brother in the U.S. Shortly afterwards, the provost marshal general of the Army “un-titled” Neumann—something that had not happened, we were told, in years.
In the end, justice was done. As I pondered the outcome, my thoughts wandered, not to the CID agent—once in a great while, even the best organizations have a bad apple— but to the actors in this drama and their unshakable integrity. Neumann held his head high throughout the ordeal, maintaining his innocence and that of his soldiers to the end. Hara, who would go on to command the 29th Infantry Brigade and then serve as the adjutant general for Hawaii as a major general, found himself under heavy fire but risked his career and never wavered in defending his troopers. Claudio, the provost marshal, acted without hesitation and fearlessly to ensure that his organization lived up to its reputation for honesty and probity. His superiors acted swiftly to do the right thing.
Fortunately, the lieutenant returned home to be promoted and continues to serve honorably in the Guard today. As we put the case to bed, I found my faith in our Army strengthened, not weakened. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers, perfection is the ideal, but often we will fall short. When we do, our values and our leaders usually come to the fore. Most of the time, they choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.
Over time I grew to love the Guardsmen who served with us, but the 299th earned a special place in my heart. One of their affectations was the “Shaka” sign, a hand gesture of friendly intent often associated with surf culture, roughly translated as “hang loose.” Among their other duties, the famously casual Hawaiians provided a security platoon at the Al Faw palace and its many generals. On one particular day, I found myself summoned to meet Major General Webster. He was hot.
“Goddammit Colonel, I want you to get those National Guard types under control. I was down at the palace today and they all but flipped me off. I don’t think a simple hand salute is asking a lot. Get this fixed now!”
I knew exactly what he was talking about. Webster was an outstanding officer and general and would soon be a three-star. But he could be temperamental, and there was some context here. “General, the 299th guys mean no disrespect. They’re excellent soldiers. This is a cultural thing and just their way of showing friendship.”
Webster was having a hard day and wanted none of this. “Just get this fixed!”
That night I met with Hara, who grimaced. “This won’t go down well.” I commiserated with him but told him the order was firm, and to his credit he passed it along immediately. Two days later the Honolulu Advertiser ran a front-page story complaining about the Regular Army’s cultural insensitivity and poor treatment of the National Guard. The day after that, General Webster fielded a call from the office of Daniel Inouye, the senior senator from Hawaii and a one-armed, Medal of Honor recipient from World War II—informally referred to by the 299th as “the Shogun.”
Soon after, a very pleasant General Webster called. “Rich, I may have been a little hasty the other day. Please tell the boys I rescind the order, with my compliments.” Within minutes the Shaka was back, and if the stories are true, even Webster himself might have flashed it once or twice thereafter.
As the weeks flew by, we began to experience chronic problems with the special operations forces (SOF) resident at VBC. These came in two flavors. Army Special Forces (“Green Berets”) were originally formed in the 1950s to train and lead indigenous forces behind enemy lines. In 2005 the Army had fully 15 battalions of these troops, plus another six in the reserves. These reported only to the four-star theater commander. Army Rangers, select SEAL units, and the Army’s Special Mission Units stood at the top of the heap as America’s most elite military formations. Their sole business was “direct action,” essentially hunting, killing or capturing enemy “high value targets.” They reported only to the CENTCOM commander in Tampa.
Since the 1980s and the formation of U.S. Special Operations Command, SOF had become stovepiped, walled off from the rest of the force. As a result, we rarely saw, trained with, or interacted with their community in peacetime. What we did experience was a constant skimming of our quality NCOs, painfully eroding the conventional Army. (As a battalion commander in the 82nd Airborne, I lost 16 NCOs in a single year to Special Forces, a crippling blow.) Understandably, relations between the two communities were cool at best. They now began to crater altogether.
The high-end units mostly operated out of BIAP or Balad, an hour north of Baghdad, and we saw little of them. A Green Beret battalion, however, was headquartered at the Radwaniyah Palace, a lavish complex with lush green lawns, air-conditioned villas and swimming pools wrested from Saddam’s forces during the invasion. Given their special status, they were exempt from many of the inconveniences visited on conventional units. They did not man towers, provide QRFs, attend force protection meetings or conform to the uniform standards required of everyone else. Unlike our soldiers, who pulled repetitive year-long deployments, the Green Berets rotated every six months. Much to our annoyance, Dragon Brigade was required to provide a round-the-clock guard force at Radwaniyah, seriously depleting our limited manpower.
Several incidents highlighted the nature of the problem. In one case, Special Forces officers in civilian clothes and driving a civilian vehicle were fired upon at one of our checkpoints after refusing to stop. In another, one of their vehicles was searched and found to contain beer, scotch, and whiskey in large amounts—a serious violation of “General Order Number 1” banning all alcohol consumption throughout Iraq. On one Saturday morning, several hundred Iraqi males rioted at ECP1 after being turned away from a recruiting session for the Iraqi commandos run by the SF battalion. The Green Berets dispersed the crowd with “flash bang” stun grenades and warning shots. In the absence of any coordination with us, the 80-man guard force at the checkpoint assumed the worst and we barely avoided a major “green on green” friendly fire disaster with our own Special Forces.
The worst was yet to come. In late May of 2005, I was called to the phone by a staff officer from 3ID. One of their brigadiers informed me that a SOF unit would be conducting a raid early the following morning in my battlespace. I needed to have a reaction force standing by in case they ran into trouble, and ready my aid stations to receive casualties.
I remonstrated. “Sir, with all due respect, I’ve seen this movie before. I’m not doing anything unless there is proper planning and coordination beforehand. What unit is carrying out the mission? Who is the target? How am I supposed to link up, under fire, at night, without exchanging call signs and frequencies? We should be better than this.” A moment later the division commander came on the line. “Rich, this is way above your pay grade and mine. Get your guys ready. Out here.”
The next morning at 0400, a SOF element kicked in the door and arrested Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political party and former president of the since-dissolved U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council. Hamid was well known to us: pro-American, he was one of a very few senior Sunni politicians calling for a peaceful political solution to ward off an impending civil war. Taken into detention along with his sons, his arrest provoked a storm of media attention, landing on the front page of the Washington Post. The White House was not pleased. As happened so often, U.S. SOF had been hoodwinked into targeting Hamid by his political opponents. Even cursory coordination would have avoided this public relations disaster.
In keeping with the best traditions of the Army, I was called to the palace and arraigned by an irate general. “You’re the battlespace owner here. You are responsible. You’re not doing your job!” Jumping to my feet, I responded hotly. “No sir, you’ve got it backwards. I tried to stop this mission and was given direct orders to shut up and color. You let these cowboys run around in our areas with no supervision and no coordination, and when things go south you go after the local commander. Who’s not doing their job?”
The general wasn’t going to take this from a colonel, and he began to shout and threaten. Clearly, some major heat had descended on the Corps from Starfleet level. The general raved on for some time. When he paused for breath, I interjected. “Sir, this isn’t getting us anywhere. I’d like to see the three-star, right now.”
As I expected, my belligerent general backed down. “He’s too busy for this stuff. You just remember what I said. Now get back to work.” I walked back to my compound in suppressed fury. I hoped that matters would improve. But for many years after, the refusal of U.S. SOF to integrate and coordinate in both Iraq and Afghanistan seriously compromised our strategy and our operations. I would see this play out again and again in my career.
One hot morning, as I adjusted the headphones under my helmet, I heard my driver, Private First Class Wooliford, chatting over the vehicle intercom with the trail vehicle. “Looks like this will be a long one, guys … the Old Man is packing three cigars today!” Over time, my wily driver had figured out that we tended to stay out as long as my cigars lasted! Every day, he would remind me of the peacetime regulation against smoking in military vehicles—before offering me a light.
Battlefield circulation was usually uneventful, but not always. Midway through the deployment, the Louisiana Guard battalion rotated out and was replaced by an artillery battalion from the 101st Air Assault Division (the 2nd Battalion, 5th Field Artillery), out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Used as provisional infantry, the battalion was responsible for the western portion of the VBC perimeter, out to a north-south canal about 2km beyond the perimeter wall. As my TAC rolled towards the canal one afternoon, we heard a tremendous boom, followed by a torrent of radio chatter. Picking up speed we raced to the scene, to find a mounted patrol of four 101st vehicles clustered near the canal, led by a second lieutenant platoon leader.
His lead vehicle had struck an IED, which took off the entire front of the HMMWV and badly injured all three occupants. Two could not move and were being treated by the platoon medic. The young officer, somewhat in shock, was attempting to call in a medevac while his platoon sergeant, his jaw wrapped in a field dressing drenched and dripping with blood, worked to position the remaining three trucks for all around defense. A thousand yards away, three Iraq males stood on the roof of a building surveying the scene, one through binoculars.
As we rolled up, I dismounted and approached the lieutenant. At once I could see that my presence only added to his distress at a difficult time. As gently as I could I said, “Lieutenant, I have four gun trucks with me. You’re in charge. Where do you want them?” My sergeant major conferred with the platoon sergeant, who refused to be evacuated although he was quite badly hurt with a fractured jaw and concussion. Barely able to speak, the blood-stained NCO sank to a knee and pointed to the Iraqis in the distance. Zacheus trained four .50 cals on them and appointed a squad leader to take over and prep a landing zone for the medevac chopper, now appearing in the distance. Soon after the helo landed to evacuate the wounded, while the lieutenant and his battered sergeant returned to base with their remaining vehicles. We stayed on the scene until the battalion QRF and recovery assets arrived. Later, as always, a team from CEXC—the Combat Exploitation Cell tasked to analyze IED sites—showed up to do the forensics.
At this stage of the war our medical understanding of traumatic brain injury was limited. Soldiers involved in IED attacks would normally be checked out for symptoms, but if all seemed okay, they might be back on the road in two to three days. In some cases, soldiers might experience multiple IED events on the same tour. Eventually military medicine became aware that the blast wave could cause permanent damage not immediately apparent, and soldiers exposed to IED attacks would be restricted to inside the wire or sent home.
In a similar way our understanding of how to use tourniquets to stop blood loss evolved during the war. Early on, military physicians feared that overuse or misuse of tourniquets might lead to needless loss of limbs, and only trained combat medics were authorized to employ them. With time we learned that rapid medical evacuation was almost always possible, and that death from massive blood loss was a much greater threat. As a consequence, everyone from general to private was issued an Israeli-made tourniquet, as well as pressure dressings, and trained to use them. These simple measures saved countless lives.
These kinds of details were a constant reminder of the danger that enveloped us. In a painful and poignant incident, we experienced the loss of four of our interpreters or “terps” in a single day. All four were local nationals, Christian women who spoke excellent English and worked inside the wire to help us communicate with our many Iraqi counterparts. For cultural reasons, they declined to live in the base camp, preferring to stay with their parents in Baghdad and commuting to work each day in the same vehicle. Knowing the danger, we entreated them to let us protect them, but always they politely declined. On one fateful day, as their car idled in the queue to enter VBC, it was struck by a suicide bomber and all four were killed instantly. The message was clear: work for the Americans and you’ll be targeted. We felt genuine grief for these courageous young women and their families, and rage at the cowards who regularly murdered the innocent in the name of religion. An old Vietnam expression now began to gain currency, overheard on radio nets, in the mess halls and motor pools and troop billets—“Get some.”
Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan know well that civilian contractors have become omnipresent and indispensable to the war effort, but we found them a double-edged sword. There was almost literally nothing they couldn’t do, but they charged the government accordingly. (The biggest, Kellogg, Brown, and Root or “KBR,” collected a $48M “annual performance bonus” from the U.S. government in Iraq for 2005 alone; its revenues ran into the billions.) In theater, they were often represented by recently retired generals, whose personal relationships with current generals—often their former subordinates—gave them real leverage.
This reality was driven home to me forcefully one day when a KBR representative appeared uninvited in my office. A standing requirement for all contractors was to provide security guards to overwatch the third country nationals or “TCNs” that made up much of their work force. TCNs were cheaper and worked under conditions no American or European would accept. We knew that TCN vetting was hit or miss, and we worried constantly that terrorists might infiltrate the contractor work force and strike from the inside—hence our caution. Now, KBR had decided they had had enough. Their representative demanded that we “waive the requirement.”
I politely declined, explaining our rationale. In a huff, the KBR messenger, a retired colonel, stormed out of my office. A few hours later, I was summoned to the palace by the chief of staff, who had just been visited by KBR’s senior official in Iraq, a recently retired three-star. “I don’t know what’s going on down there in Task Force Dragon, but you need to stop picking fights with the contractors. We need them and this isn’t helpful. Whatever they’re asking, just give it to them and stop bringing me problems.”
