UNCLASSIFIED

A project of the Combat Studies Institute, the Operational Leadership Experiences interview collection archives firsthand, multi-service accounts from military personnel who planned, participated in and supported operations in the Global War on Terrorism.

Interview with MAJ Susan Arnold

Combat Studies Institute Fort Leavenworth, Kansas UNCLASSIFIED

Abstract

As officer in charge of the Main in Iraq from March to May 2003, Susan Arnold – a JAG officer – was involved with targeting and rules of engagement issues during the major combat phase of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. After sharing her firsthand insights into the murderous pre-invasion grenade attack perpetrated against 101st officers, she discusses her responsibilities during the drive north and how they changed dramatically once the division arrived in Mosul. Indeed, from May until August, Arnold served as the 101st’s liaison officer initially to the northern Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA-North), which then became a branch of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA- North). From here, she had remarkable visibility on the disorganization that characterized the coalition’s early reconstruction efforts – the details of which she shares quite fully and candidly. Involved with Kurdish-Arab land disputes, the wheat harvest, propane availability and judicial assessments among many other post-invasion issues, Arnold relates how inadequate funding, severe personnel and equipment shortages, communication problems and an over- centralization that “put its thumb down on every good idea we had” resulted in a rocky transition into stability and support operations, causing her frustration level to be “very high.” “Arabs are very relationship driven people,” Arnold explained, “and when you get a rapport going and then get the rug pulled out from under you to some extent, that’s not helpful. In fact, that was a complaint I heard. Under Saddam, it used to be that everything had to go through Baghdad. And so when we got up and running in the north and then Baghdad starts vetoing things we’re doing, it seems like the old way of doing business – and that’s not helpful either.”

Turabian: Arnold, Major Susan. 2006. Interview by Operational Leadership Experiences Project team with Combat Studies Institute, digital recording, 25 January. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. [Digital recording stored on CD-ROM at Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.]

MLA: Arnold, Susan. Personal recorded interview. 25 January 2006. [Digital recording done by Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, KS, in possession of Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, KS].

APA: Arnold, Susan. (2006). Personal interview with the author on January 25, 2006 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. [Digital recording done by Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, KS, in possession of Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, KS].

Government Printing Office: Transcript. Interview of Susan Arnold, Jan. 25, 2006; Operational Leadership Experiences Project/Combat Studies Institute; Records of the Combined Arms Research Library; Fort Leavenworth, KS. [Online version on MONTH DATE, YEAR, at http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm]. UNCLASSIFIED

Interview with MAJ Susan Arnold 25 January 2006

JM: My name is John McCool (JM) and I’m with the Operational Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I’m interviewing Major Susan Arnold (SA) on her experiences during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). Today’s date is 25 January 2006 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we’re entering classified territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information. And if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you’re not able to answer. All right, Major Arnold, could you please start off by giving me a brief sketch of your military career, sort of beginning of time to the present, and then we’ll focus in on OIF?

SA: Sure. I was an ROTC product out of Berkeley. I was originally a Signal Corps officer, did that for about four years, and then I applied for the Army Funded Legal Education Program (FLEP) and was accepted. At the time, they took like 10 people a year and paid for law school, so I went to law school from ’94 to ’97. After I graduated from law school, I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, went to the grad course, and eventually was assigned to D.C. in early 2003. I then joined the 101st Airborne Division as part of the division was already in Kuwait prepping for the war. My OIF experience is with the 101st.

JM: What were the circumstances surrounding your service in support of OIF? What kind of preparations did you make, when did you receive your deployment order?

SA: I was part of the plus-up. I was in D.C. and my husband was due to be a battalion commander in the summer of ’03. We were both going to arrive in June of ’03 for service at Fort Campbell. As the war drums started beating, General David Petraeus tried to get in all his incoming battalion commanders and my husband was one of them. We both knew General Petraeus from the 82nd so we both asked to go. My boss at the Office of the Judge Advocate General said okay. In February of ’03, we found out we were both going and, in Army terms, I kind of became a division ready force (DRF) 9 while my husband was a DRF 1. He launched out to Fort Campbell and I took care of cleaning up the house, taking the pets to my parent’s house, and he was gone to Kuwait by the time I got to Fort Campbell in late February. Eight days later, I was on the ground in Kuwait. So, I wasn’t with the division for any of the train-up.

JM: What was your idea of what your mission was going to be, how you were going to support OIF?

SA: I really didn’t know. My biggest fear was that I was going to be left behind to be a rear detachment and thankfully that didn’t happen. And then Richard Hatch, who was the staff judge advocate (SJA) for the 101st and then later rejoined General Petraeus in Iraq for Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I), he said he wanted me with him at the division main headquarters. I had been the chief of operational law with the 82nd for a time while I was there and I was a brigade trial counsel with the 82nd, so I had a fair bit of

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 3 UNCLASSIFIED operational law experience in a training sense. I knew that once we got over there, JAGs tend to get involved in everything. And I don’t mean like warfighting, trigger pulling, but all types of bizarre crap: American citizens showing up at the wire, misconduct – everything. Things happen, and some you can anticipate and then other stuff is just other stuff.

JM: Like the 101st soldier who threw the grenade into the command tent. Did you have any involvement with that particular case?

SA: Yes. I happened to be on duty. Let me back up first. I went to D-main, we set up in Kuwait at Camp New Jersey in anticipation of going across, and we were a 24-hour full-on D-main operation. In fact, my husband and quite a bit of the 101st had already crossed the border.

JM: What battalion did he command?

SA: He eventually commanded 2nd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment (2-187), but at first he was with the division assault command post. The assault command post was already across. We were getting ready to pack up and go and it was like 0200 and we get the word of a grenade attack – and then I found out that somebody had admitted it. I heard over tactical satellite (TACSAT) so I called up criminal investigative division (CID) and got hold of Mike Graziano who was the chief CID investigator. I let him know that somebody had already made some statements; and from an evidence point of view, when somebody has already made some statements that sets off a lot of bells as to whether they’ve been advised of their rights and stuff like that. So I wanted to make sure CID knew that so they did the right things when they went to talk to him. Aside from coordinating witness travel, that was about it. But when it happened, we thought the enemy had come over the berm. In Kuwait, the base camps are about six miles in circumference so everything is really spread out, and for good reason: if a SCUD missile comes in, they’re not going to kill everybody in the camp. There were a couple JAGs asleep in this giant tent pod; they were the only ones in this tent; and so I ran over there to tell them to wake up and go where there were more people. And then we found out it was that rat bastard [Sergeant Hasan Akbar] and wasn’t actually the enemy. If you ever want a story, Rick Atkinson from the Washington Post was embedded with us and he did a story. I’ve never read anything that was so good. It captured the mood so well.

JM: When did you actually cross the berm?

SA: We stayed put because of the duststorm. We were going to go around the 22nd of March, but the duststorm came up. Colonel Thomas Schoenbeck, the chief of staff, made the decision to stay put and his thinking was, “If the sandstorm hits while we’re halfway unpacked, everything is going to be exposed to the elements and everything would be ruined.” So he decided we would just sit there and wait it out, which we did. I think we crossed at the end of March; we did a two-day convoy and ended up right outside of An Najaf about 10 kilometers on a plateau. We were the northernmost division element – which is like complete doctrine on its head, because it’s supposed to be the CAV and then the infantry. The D-main is supposed to be well into the battlespace, but it was just going that fast.

JM: What were some of your responsibilities during this major combat phase?

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 4 UNCLASSIFIED

SA: Targeting. Looking at the rules of engagement (ROE). The had put a lot of buildings and structures on restricted fire areas (RFAs) or no-fire areas (NFAs) – and it’s not a Geneva Conventions requirement. For example, schools were one of the biggest things. As a matter of politics, we said we weren’t going to target schools. Well, there’s no Geneva protection for a school per se; it’s not like a church or a hospital. Obviously there are little children in there, but the building itself as a structure is not a protected target any more than a house or what have you. You want to minimize collateral damage. As we got into Najaf and Karbala, because our close air support (CAS) was so effective, the Iraqi military were not in barracks and, instead, were taking up space in schools and things like that. So that was a lot of my job, just kind of clearing targets. There was actually a woman that showed up outside the wire, outside some brigade headquarters, claiming she was a citizen and she had a baby who was a citizen. So we ran around with our hair on fire, trying to figure out what in the world to do with this woman for a couple days. Targeting was probably the biggest issue; and frankly, at the division level for a JAG in a major combat operation, there isn’t all that much to do, because it’s the guys who are on the mortar tubes: they know what the ROE is. Or it’s like echelons above reality, like the secretary of defense (SECDEF) or the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander who’s going to clear something. Your ordinary fight-the-bad-guys is pretty well spelled out. The 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment went into Najaf and got shot up pretty badly. There were civilians with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) on rooftops; and the reports back were that they were literally holding the hand of their son or daughter, with an RPG in the other hand. Americans are good people and they don’t shoot little kids. So a lot of the issues were, “I didn’t know if I could shoot or not.” I was like, “Well, unfortunately, you could shoot. There’s nothing unlawful about that.” That’s an issue beyond the law. There’s nothing unlawful about it, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to feel rotten about it.

JM: Were there any structures that were always off limits? For example, if they were pumping .50 cals at you from a mosque, could you shoot back?

SA: Mosques, as cultural and religious property, are further up on the hierarchy and the ROE limited going into mosques. All the mosques were NFAs. As an example, in Najaf the tomb of Mohammad’s nephew – the tomb of Ali – if we had fired a round in there, it would have been so bad. But as a matter of law, if you’re taking fire from there and you need to use self-defense, yes, I can make a very strong legal argument that that is proper. But whether that’s a good idea is a whole different thing. So we had to adjust the ROE as we went between law and good idea. Likewise are schools. If the military was staying on their bases doing what we expected them to do, then it’s a good idea not to target the schools. But when you’ve got a school structure that’s full of Iraqi soldiers, well it looks a lot like a barracks so blow it up. So that’s where you have to keep the common sense thing going. The JAG is really kind of there for advice. I told someone one time that you want the chaplain and the JAG bored, because the chaplain gets involved when there’s been a ton of casualties and the JAG gets involved when something is just going really wrong. Hospitals are actually protected targets. The Geneva Conventions require that you warn the hospital if you’re going to target it. That didn’t really come up, but those are things we get concerned about because the Geneva Conventions did definitely apply up there. For the first bit, we were in a convoy for two days. We worked our ass off putting the tactical operations center (TOC) up. We had a TOC that was as big as this building and everybody was pitching in putting it up. With the 101st, they have an assault command post, the division main and the division rear. We did this kind of hybrid thing where they would strip all the really

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 5 UNCLASSIFIED important people out of the D-main, move them forward, and they called that Eagle Forward. These guys in Eagle Forward had it made from a practical point of view, because they’d fall in on the assault command post guys. So the assault command post guys were the ones who dug all the fox holes, did all the hard work, and then the Eagle Forward guys would show up and stay with them while we’d move the TOC – which took a couple days. Then the Eagle Forward guys would come back to D-main and they’re like, “Oh look, this place is awesome. Where’s my chow?” Honestly, I did a lot of physical labor for the first four or five days. We stayed in Najaf for about 12 days and then we got up to Baghdad. We occupied an abandoned weapons factory in southern Baghdad. There were AK-47s by the truckload in this place, mortars, and all their stuff.

JM: This was stuff that was abandoned by the Iraqis?

SA: Yes, but it really was a factory. It was really creepy when we first got there because there were plates of uneaten food, family pictures. It definitely had that kind of “Scooby Doo” quality to it. Going back to An Najaf, one of the more interesting things I did: when 2nd Brigade cleared Karbala, they found a prison and there were allegations of war crimes. So we were obviously interested in gathering up any evidence of war crimes. So I went in the convoy with Colonel Hatch and the division chaplain, and we found prisoner files they had tried burn before they left, and so they were kind of charred. Very gruesome. A lot of pictures of dead people and you don’t know how they died. There were a lot of people around, and that was my first real encounter in Iraq with Iraqis. We got to An Najaf via this one lane pipeline road that was very slow going. So when we got to Karbala to look at this prison, we found there were a couple people that were leading interpreters through. One guy had a broken arm that had been set very badly. It was a grotesque looking thing and he had been very recently beaten. The thing that was odd was that, in these rooms, there were hooks in the ceiling and they told us how the hooks were for torturing people. Well, it could be evidence, but it also could be a hook where they hung a light. It could be innocuous or it could be very sinister. But this place was perfect if you were shooting a third-world jail scene for a movie. All the hair on the back of your neck would stand up the whole time you were in there. I was walking down the stairs into the basement with the chaplain. The looting had already taken place and people were looking for their family members who had gone in there and never come back out. There was so much debris on the stairwell that I felt like I might slip and actually slide down. The division chaplain and I were right next to each other going down these stairs, and he looks at me and says, “This place is just evil.” And somehow, when the division chaplain says that, your spook factor goes way high. We didn’t find any corpses or anything like that, but there were some bad things that had happened in that jail and that was another thing that immediately got our attention. Ryan Chilcote was there embedded and he did a story from that prison.

JM: Were you dealing with any detainee issues at this time? Were they rounding people up?

SA: They were. Has anyone talked to you about that whole capitulation nonsense yet?

JM: About teaching them how to surrender?

SA: Yes, and we were going to bypass them and all that stuff.

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 6 UNCLASSIFIED

JM: They were supposed to all form up and turn in their weapons.

SA: Somewhere I still have one of those capitulation cards. All I could think about was that someone was going to kill these people. It’s not that they didn’t want to surrender – although I think there were some units who didn’t want to fight. But if you’re an Iraqi -

JM: There is a difference between not wanting to fight and being willing to surrender.

SA: Right, and wanting to live to go back to your family. I can only imagine, with the Fedayeen running around, what would have happened if they had actually complied with our little written instructions. In Karbala, they were still clearing out the Fedayeen and the people weren’t as friendly as they were a couple days later as we were getting into Baghdad with waves and the smiles. It was a little tense at the jail in the sense of how group excitement can go one way or the other, but we didn’t have a tremendous number of detainees. There was still a fight going on, people were getting sniped at and stuff, but it wasn’t regular army units at that point. I think this was about the 9th or 10th of April.

JM: Yeah, the “thunder runs” had already happened on 5 and 7 April.

SA: Right. 3rd Infantry Division (ID) was up there. I want to say we got in with the D-main around the 12th or 13th.

JM: Once you got into Baghdad, did your responsibilities change at all?

SA: No, I was still D-main night shift. I worked 12-hour shifts. Getting back to me and Colonel Hatch, he wanted me in the D-main and it was basically the two of us. There were these giant bleachers and every staff group had a table and a little seat to sit in – the SJA, division surgeon, chaplain, whatever. And so he was there for the 12 hours during the day and I worked at night. In Baghdad, the responsibilities didn’t change and we weren’t there very long, maybe a week. I know I was in Baghdad for Palm Sunday, because it was so desolate and the weapons factory we occupied had palm trees in it. So I went to church on Palm Sunday and we actually got palms. I thought that was pretty cool. I was there for Palm Sunday and for Easter Sunday, and I left the day after Easter to go up to Mosul.

JM: Was Mosul where you spent the rest of your deployment?

SA: Absolutely.

JM: What was the period of time you were up there?

SA: I got into Mosul the day after Easter and I was on the Eagle Forward this time because Colonel Hatch wanted to drive. He hadn’t driven at all and I had told him how interesting it was to drive – plus my husband was in the assault command post too. So I flew up to Mosul in a CH-47 and, as I was getting off the helicopter, Colonel Ricky Gibbs, the G3, said to me, “You’re going to be the liaison officer (LNO) to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA).” I said, “ORHA?” So I stayed in Mosul for about a week and then got sent to the northern office of ORHA, which had a hotel that was just south of the town of Saladin. I

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 7 UNCLASSIFIED lived up there from the end of April to the end of June. I moved back down to Mosul when OHRA did – and by then it was called the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). I lived in two different places in Mosul and stayed with the CPA until the end of August. I came back to the United States for a JAG class, because I was going to be the chief of justice and they only offer the class once a year. So I came home for 10 days, went back, and when I got back to Mosul I became the chief of justice and moved to the D-rear, to the airfield, and just did strictly JAG criminal law, Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for soldiers. I still did some stuff, like going up and talking to the Kurdistan Women’s Union. Everybody had at least some kind of civil affairs (CA) role, and I had a lot of background in that as well. The CPA days were the most interesting because we traveled all over the place and met with all kinds of Iraqis and Kurds.

JM: Once you found out what ORHA was, what were going to be your responsibilities? What were they doing at this time, what was their mission?

SA: Well, my first mission was to try and find out what they were doing. Nobody could tell me, and that was the first bad sign. I went on the non-secure internet protocol router network (NIPRNET) and did a search. I had heard vaguely about it, about General Jay Garner; and we had some access to news, to CNN, but they did all the flashy stuff. It’s not sexy rebuilding a country. So I went on and found a press release on DefenseLink by an unnamed Department of Defense (DOD) official. And you know, this was so indicative of how fouled up this all was. I was trying to find out who works for whom, what are their responsibilities. Nobody on the ground could tell me until I found this Special Forces (SF) CA guy named Jim Buillon – what a great American. He had some slide packet that kind of talked about a civil assistance pillar, a humanitarian assistance pillar, and they were going to have all these different pillars. He had been working with 10th Special Forces Group, which was up in Mosul, and there was a sergeant major I met who said, “I can take you to where they’re staying.” At that time, they were in this Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) guest house up in Saladin, so I went up there with the CA battalion commander and we finally met these guys. They were a great group of people who tried really hard. That said, there was no organization. General Petraeus is somebody who understands what needs to be done. He had been in Bosnia, he’s somebody who wants results – and he wanted money. Mosul was very different. When we got to Mosul, there was looting for sure, but it wasn’t the free for all that was happening down in the south. They were ready to move on. They wanted to elect the city council; they had locals who were declaring themselves in charge. He immediately sat down the city leaders and started figuring out where they were going to go from there. We needed projects and we needed to figure out how we were going to feed these people. Even when I first started, I said, “How are we going to get money for these guys?” So my job was to get money to get them to do their job, to try and pressure them. We were hearing about Bechtel. They did almost nothing in our region. That was a compete waste of money, in my opinion. For the big stuff – the engineering stuff, Um Qasr maybe. But if they had figured out the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) faster, we could have gotten so much more done and without the layer of European and American management that Bechtel had that cost a fortune. It was kind of quasi-legal. I knew General Petraeus from the 82nd; we actually used to sky dive together. So he knows me and I think he felt I could do okay up there in that environment. But they had no communication; they had Hotmail accounts they used to link back – and I wish I were kidding you. Eventually they got centcom.mil email addresses, but trust me, they had hotmail addresses: [email protected].

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 8 UNCLASSIFIED

JM: So were they actually even looking for or expecting you?

SA: We found them. It was a complete shock to me that they were looking for an LNO. Given how we found ORHA – “Hey, Jim knows a sergeant major who knows where they are” – I don’t think they asked for me. I think General Petraeus recognized that he needed a mole to find out what was going on. And I was very clear the whole time I was up there that I worked for the 101st. Eventually, 4th ID got on board and sent a liaison up there, and we would have weekly meetings once the money started rolling in. But I know he said, “General Ray Odierno is busy with other stuff. He’s not interested in administering CERP.” He changed his mind later, but for that week, I was like, “I’ll take all his money. I got it, because I’ve got this list of 25 things that we need done; we’ll take the money.” And that’s what I saw my role as, just always advocating the 101st. I’d do read-ahead packets. General Wayne Downing came up there at one point. We were trying to get food and fuel and I did a brief for him on what the issues were in Mosul that needed to get fixed. Honestly, I don’t know why he was up there or what his role was, but I knew reputations. He was a four-star general and a pretty important guy, “Here you go sir. Take this. We need propane.” I remember going on a foot patrol with General Downing, a little dog-and-pony show in Mosul. We’re wandering around the streets and it was pretty calm – especially in May. Our soldiers were going to street vendors and buying stuff like flat bread and roasted chicken. They were armed and they had their battle rattle on, but it was different. The first guy in charge of ORHA-North was Major General (Retired) Bruce Moore and his interpreter was a Kurd who was from Fairfax, Virginia. This guy had been sent to a prison outside of Irbil by Saddam, but was out now and spoke both Kurdish and Arabic, so he was a pretty valuable member of the staff. Well, people were shouting at this little entourage of old white men in civilian clothes – maybe they’re important, because they have a personal security detachment (PSD), an infantry squad protecting them. Anyway, I asked the interpreter what they were saying and he said, “They’re asking where their propane is.” That was so indicative of what was going on. All they wanted to do was to cook their freakin’ dinner. I can understand that. Well, General Moore just didn’t want to get involved in getting propane and I was pretty disappointed. I was like, “Come on, doesn’t this seem like an ORHA function? People are hungry.”

JM: It was, after all, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

SA: Yeah, I mean seriously. He was a very nice man, but I don’t know if his heart was in the job. I remember at one point he sent an email somewhere in Baghdad, and I don’t know if it was to General Garner or who it was. But I remember he came back and he said, “Well, I’ve done all I can do. I sent an email.” I was thinking, “Man, is that the limit of what you can do? It seems like you should be able to do more that that.” Eventually, the 101st fixed it and started working on the flow of propane. I don’t know if ORHA did a tremendous amount for that. You have to understand that the staff up there was very small. There was a deputy – a guy named Colonel Dick Nabb who was a retired O-6. He was a hero to the Kurds. He had stayed there for two years during Operation Provide Comfort, and he eventually took over. General Moore left in June when Garner left, and Colonel Nabb stayed on. He really cracked the whip, got the energy level up a little higher, and that’s why they moved down Mosul, which is what they needed to do the entire time. I think there were maybe 15 people on the staff.

JM: How big an area of operations (AO) were they responsible for?

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 9 UNCLASSIFIED

SA: Seven provinces. They had the three Kurdish provinces – and the Kurds were very good at running their own government, but there were still a lot of issues.

JM: Did you have any Kurdish-Arabic issues?

SA: Oh, yeah, tons. Here’s another thing. You talk about false starts. We had these visitors – these retired ambassadors that came in on fact-finding missions. There’s a guy named George Ward and he wrote a piece in the New York Times. His whole thing was the Kurd-Arab land dispute and he had this proposal from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). And of course, as a JAG, that’s sort of getting close to home. How are we going to do this? What sort of judicial processes are we going to have for this? He had a great plan on paper, but it was never implemented. Everything’s related. In the north, outside of Mosul in this area here, there’s no oil. The people in the outlying areas grow wheat and barley. They’re farmers and all the useable land is planted. Well, the Kurds had retaken some of the land that was theirs, but you had Arab farmers who had planted the crops. Down in Makhmur, the 1st Brigade – Colonel Ben Hodges and the local sheiks and Kurds – worked out an agreement where there would be profit sharing between the Arabs who had toiled on the land and the Kurds, whose land everybody recognized it was. Here was this infantry guy just doing his best and he had a JAG with him. So, yes, they had these seven provinces and some people were like, “The three Kurd ones don’t count.” Well, they certainly were more capable of self-government, but there were still a lot of issues. When you travel on this road from Mosul to Irbil and you cross the Green Line, it was orderly, there were satellite dishes everywhere, and I remember the first thing I saw was a soccer team with uniforms. You go from this absolute chaos to these young men – some are in green shirts, some are in blue shirts. There are police working. The satellite dishes were one of the most phenomenal things because Saddam wouldn’t let you have access to anything. The Kurds have their faults but they’re not scared of their own people, so you can have a satellite TV because they don’t care what you watch.

JM: What were you able to accomplish up there and what could you have accomplished if you had had X, Y, or Z?

SA: I think I was able to always keep the 101st issues on the forefront, by publicizing them and by pointing out some of the wrinkles – the lack of funding and things like that – and just pushed for that responsiveness. One of the biggest problems ORHA and CPA faced was that there was no process. If you’re going to have this reconstruction, how’s this reconstruction going to happen? I understand they didn’t anticipate the looting, but it happened, so at that point in time I would have expected some smart folks down in Baghdad to say, “Okay, look. We’ve got a crisis on our hands. There was this looting and we need to reconstruct things all across this country.” As an aside, I only went to the CPA headquarters in Baghdad twice and it was a whole different world; it was like going to Crystal City. Anyway, eventually that happened and eventually they got a product review board and some other things; but it was months after it needed to happen – and those months in 2003 was a window of opportunity that I think we fell out of. I think part of the reason why the 101st and General Petraeus were so successful was that he personally invested himself into that city at all levels. We had some very good relationships with moderate Arabs and Kurds who were willing to go forward. Again, that just takes personal investment and sitting down and listening to people and being reasonable. I think the de-Ba’athification – that absolute order that the top four layers of the

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Ba’ath party were unemployable – was a mistake. I think disbanding the military was a huge mistake. They had so much turnover of personnel in ORHA and CPA. People would be up there for two or three months and then they’d go home, because they were all on special taskings. Colonel Dick Nabb is somebody who is a lifelong friend and whom I admire very much, but he could only do so much. The headquarters for ORHA and CPA-North was a conference room in a hotel that was about this big. There was a chief of staff’s desk. There was a table. There were four or five computers and we shared them all. It was small. And actually, we found out that Garner was out and Paul Bremer was in off the Internet. Nobody called up and told us. Now, whether somebody called and told General Moore, I don’t know. But the action officers – the lieutenant colonels, majors, the State Department people – were like, “What?” It was just unbelievable. Garner apparently told General Moore, “Get the military guys out of there. Everything’s changed,” and General Moore left without a replacement. Two of the military guys left at that point in time as well, also without replacements. Then eventually, the staff just whittled down to almost nothing. I think as far as me saying, “Man, I did this,” to some extent, I’m not sure what we accomplished. We were trying to do so many things simultaneously. We were building border guard stations. You go down to Baghdad and there’s all this fresh blood from Washington preaching on how we have to reconstruct the country and I’m like, “Yeah, I know. It’s August. I got it and I’ve been asking.” I sent an email to the Ministry of Interior representative asking where we were going to get funding for the border guard stations. My husband’s battalion was out in Sinjar and his brigade was over in Tall Afar, so he had a lot to do with these border guard stations. Then we had long range surveillance (LRS) outside of Sulaymaniyah and they were trying to shore up border guard stations too. We’re talking about the borders with Iran and Syria, so we really wanted to get a handle on this and this Ministry of Interior guy – some dude from Washington – was like, “That’s a good question. I’m trying to work out that answer myself.” “Yeah, I know it’s a good question. I’ve been asking it for weeks!” Needless to say, my frustration level was high and a lot of it we just made up as we went.

JM: So you wouldn’t say there was any evidence of a reconstruction plan per se?

SA: I didn’t see it.

JM: Just a huge collection of ad hoc initiatives?

SA: Yes, and nobody really knew what the limitations of IOM were or some of the non- governmental organizations (NGOs). In the beginning, we had a law and order problem so we were arresting people. Saddam, as you recall, released all the prisoners in Iraq. Some were political prisoners but some were just old-fashioned criminals, so there was that element out there also. 2nd Brigade was in urban Mosul – a city of 1.8 million people – and they’re trying to maintain law and order. They created these makeshift jails since we didn’t have cops on duty yet, and they’re needing to feed all these people. So I asked Lieutenant Colonel William Butcher – who was one of the colonels who bugged out when General Moore and General Garner left – “We need money to buy food and water for the folks over at the detention facility.” And it was like, everybody looked at each other and didn’t know where to get this money. Then they said, “Well, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a subsidiary called the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI),” and this was hailed as the way to get quick money. They were the ones that were really set up to get money approved right away. The problem

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 11 UNCLASSIFIED was, nobody knew where they were and nobody knew how to get a hold of them. There were no cell phones. There were some satellite phones, but you have to be pointing the antenna at the satellite. They’re okay for outgoing calls, but they’re pretty sketchy for incoming calls – and oh by the way, you need the phone number of the person you’re trying to call. Imagine that! Well, eventually, these two guys from OTI show up: young kids, probably right out of college. Good guys, but they’re just bouncing around the country and they don’t work for the military, and they don’t work for ORHA either. So I line up this proposal and quote their own memo back to them: “Look, this is what you said in your information paper. We need food, we need police uniforms, police radios, and we need to get the police back to work right away. This is our highest priority – and we’d like to do an Internet café for the university.” So they take it and say, “Okay, we’ll let you know.” As it turned out, OTI is prohibited from funding any sort of police activity whatsoever. These two knuckleheads, when they’re sitting there looking at me, don’t tell me that. So what do they do? They take the university Internet project, which was just some kind of afterthought. I mean, yes it was important; but it was obviously not as important as getting food for the inmates. So my frustration level was high. In ORHA, they couldn’t tell you how things were going to happen. I suspect that our commanders did some creative funding, but what could they do? I don’t know how they actually paid for things, but I don’t care, honestly. Eventually the money did start coming in.

JM: Do you have a sense of how much time passed before you really thought someone had a handle on the reconstruction effort?

SA: Late summer of ’03, if that.

JM: So at least three months?

SA: Yes. General Petraeus deserves the credit because he understood this CERP thing.

JM: Those were mostly small-scale projects, weren’t they?

SA: He had CERP of up to a $1,000,000 and, as a two-star general, he had approval authority for up to $100,000. Some of it was probably a windfall because the money we got initially was the money from the wall at Uday and Qusay’s house. We weren’t spending American money, so we didn’t have to follow American law. Bidding, and all those things that work fine here in the United States, don’t work there. If you’re in Makhmur – which is a highly disputed area between the Kurds and Arabs – and you’re in a Kurd neighborhood, you don’t hire an Arab guy to dig a well. Or like my husband out in Sinjar or in Baiji. Sinjar is a Kurd-Yazidi town. Baiji is very much an Arab town. If you want to dig a well, there’s like one guy in Sinjar who has a truck that can dig wells, so guess who gets hired? And you sure as hell don’t bring someone all the way from Mosul, who nobody knows, and give them money and give them a living. The commanders on the ground understood that they had to sprinkle it around a little bit. And I don’t mean that in any kind of corrupt way; I just mean that it’s not all equal over there, people are very entrenched, and you need to pay attention to those things.

JM: How successful do you think these efforts were vis-à-vis the civilian population? Were they feeling the same frustration? I would assume they were, but what was your impression of how they felt during this time?

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SA: Especially in May and June, I felt like the people were really willing to work and to try – and Mosul is very much a Sunni area. Uday and Qusay met their maker up there. It wasn’t like the Kurd areas that were very pro-American. There were some people that you definitely had to win over, and they were willing to be a little bit patient. But some of the things they really wanted to see progress on. Another thing too, General Petraeus orchestrated this election. It happened on the 5th of May, and it was probably one of the most phenomenal things I’ve witnessed in my life. When I say he invested himself in that personally, I mean it. On that same tour with General Downing, we went to the old city hall – and this was maybe the 1st of May. There was this giant long table and General Petraeus was on one end, my boss, Colonel Hatch, was on the other end; there was a lieutenant taking notes; and the rest were some 40 locals and an interpreter. General Petraeus allowed them to set the rules for who was going to run for the city council. It had to be somebody whose grandfather was born in Mosul, had to be from a distinguished family. But he didn’t say everybody has to be this, that or the other. He allowed them to have Arab tribes within the city, Arab tribes out of the city, the Christians got so many seats, the Kurds got so many seats, the Yazidis got so many seats, and the Turkmen got so many seats. As we went into the election on the 5th, General Moore – the ORHA guy – wouldn’t go to the elections. He didn’t want to be seen at the elections. He said it was General Petraeus’ show. I was thinking, “Geez, they’re trying to stand up a government. It seems like you should be there.” Colonel Butcher, Major Steve Johnson and some of us functionaries went down there. You didn’t know if it was going to end in a fistfight, a gunfight, a brawl or what, so it was a risky proposition in a way; but it turned out fine and the people got along. There was even a glitch during the voting and it was like, “Oh shit, they’re going to think we’re fixing the election.” But the Arabs and the Kurds worked out the problem amongst themselves, and it was just a misunderstanding. They had kind of come to this consensus that the mayor should be an Arab but the deputy mayor should be a Kurd, and the locals were deciding that. Well, the voting went differently than they expected, so they fixed it. They still counted the ballots but it was like a procedural thing and that was huge. If we could have just capitalized on that initial spirit, it would have been great. I think things stayed relatively calm in Mosul for a little while after that, but a lot of it was about the money and working out budgets with people, the local governments. I knew Iraq was a dictatorship, but one of the things I hadn’t anticipated was that the country was socialist. So if you had a job, everything came from the government. There was no transparency. There was no accountability.

JM: And once the Americans took over, now it was our responsibility to give them a job.

SA: Right.

JM: It’s like replacing one job giver with another, and if we’re not able to do that –

SA: Right. We didn’t start paying the former Iraqi military until August, and those guys were pissed off. There was a riot in June, the day General Moore left. It was the first unrest in Mosul and it was a riot at city hall of former military guys. I don’t think anybody got killed, but there was definitely gunfire and trucks overturned and fire. And you know, it was kind of indicative of ORHA’s “exit stage left.” There’s all this chaos going on; and whereas General Moore was very hesitant to get involved, I told Colonel Nabb about it and he got immediately involved and it was really a sea change up at ORHA. He didn’t care whose cage he rattled. He was trying to get something done and wasn’t afraid of ruffling feathers, so he was more effective.

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JM: In an ideal world, how could this transition from Phase III to Phase IV been more effectively or efficiently conducted?

SA: As a former signal officer, part of the problem was just communication. When I first got up there, they had one Inmarsat satellite phone, they had some Thuraya phones, and they had a commercial satellite dish. I was shocked that they didn’t have a mobile subscriber equipment (MSE) battalion attached to them with military phones so it could be secure. They had no secure comms. None. The Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF) was up there and they sent a liaison, but that guy was only up there until early May and he had secure internet protocol router (SIPR) Inmarsat, but the CPA/ORHA had nothing.

JM: Except their Hotmail accounts.

SA: Right, but nobody talked secure. So if they had had MSE, it would have been encrypted. Even if you only had one phone, at least you’d be able to talk to people and be linked to the military. They will tell you that they were prepared for refugees and looting and stuff like that. But with what, your Hotmail account, with your 15 people? That’s why, after being there, I just don’t buy it. If what they thought was going to happen had happened, I have no idea how they would have managed.

JM: Dealing with tens of thousands of refugees.

SA: Yeah, with 15 of you? And the NGOs, some of them were fantastic and some of them were quite lethargic. The UN, UNICEF – those guys were worthless. Peace Winds Japan was awesome. Save the Children and CARE were great too. But you learn quickly who’s just a talker and who has nice letterhead. The UN, when they moved into Mosul, were much more concerned with painting the building they had moved into rather than actually getting anything done. Of course they painted it blue and white and then the rabble-rousers said they were puppets of Israel, so they promptly got RPG’d and then they left.

JM: Was ORHA/CPA working at cross-purposes with the military?

SA: Well, I was relaying everything, so the ORHA-North office was very in tune with what the 101st and 4th ID was doing – and part of it was because they had liaisons. But I don’t know if they had liaisons in the early days. I took my job as a mole very seriously and I was emailing General Petraeus and the G3 directly. In fact, when I saw that General Moore was very concerned with how he was going to get out of the country, I made sure General Petraeus knew. I was like, “Look, this guy is looking to leave. He’s looking to bug out.” I thought that was something General Petraeus really needed to know. As opposed to ORHA-style where you’d hear it on the news or you’d go to a meeting and it was like, “It happened three days ago.” General Petraeus was doing all these initiatives up in Mosul, like engaging the university professors. Well, the problem was that once CPA stood up, it was probably more efficient with Bremer; so as things started to hit stride in the fall, they started to undo a lot of these initiatives and sought to nationalize things. So where we had these relationships – and the university professors was a key thing. Yes, some of them were at that level where you weren’t supposed to be in the Ba’ath Party, but they were fence-sitters. That was the center of gravity. And when you make a sweeping proposition that these guys can’t keep their jobs, it didn’t seem like anyone

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 14 UNCLASSIFIED was thinking strategically. Not only do you disenfranchise this intellectual piece – and sometimes insurgencies use intellectuals quite well – but also they’re an example that young people at the university are following. This was a huge university, and it wasn’t some diploma mill: it was academic, the people were educated, and the students there were watching what was happening to their professors. Arabs are very relationship driven people, and when you get some stature with them, get a rapport going, and then you get the rug pulled out from under you to some extent, that’s not helpful. In fact, that was a complaint I heard. Under Saddam, it used to be that everything had to go through Baghdad. And so when we got up and running in the north and then Baghdad starts vetoing things we’re doing, well, it seems like the old way of doing business – and that’s not helpful either.

JM: You mentioned that you had spoken to a Kurdish women’s organization. How did they relate to you as a female soldier?

SA: Oh, they thought it was cool.

JM: I’ll bet, going around packing an M9.

SA: Actually I had secured an M4 while I was over there. I did a couple things with Kurdish groups. I met a guy who’s now one of the ministers of the KDP, a guy named Falah Mustafa. I met him in Saladin very early on at a dinner at this guy’s house and he said to me, “I’m a university teacher up at the University of Saladin in Irbil and I’d like you to come and talk to my students. I have men and women in my class and I especially want the women to see that they can have opportunities. I want them to have this experience of talking to Americans.” So I went twice to his class, one time with Major Johnson. We talked to these students who were majoring in education and all spoke English. I found out later that he had gone to the JFK School of Government at Harvard and came back to Kurdistan. He’s a wonderful man. So we get in front of this class and there were about 30 people in there, early 20s. It was interesting because some of the women were dressed Western with their hair completely down – modest long sleeves and stuff, but very fashionable, nice looking clothes. Then you had some wearing the hijab, very traditional. I knew it was an English class and was kind of expecting some very basic questions, but then the first guy gets up and asks, “Don’t you believe that the debt Iraq has incurred under Saddam’s regime is an unfair hindrance to us as we look towards the future? And shouldn’t that debt be forgiven, just as a matter of policy?” I was like, “Okay. This must be the advanced class.” And they put us on the spot: “Do you support an independent Kurdistan?” You’re wearing the American flag and so you had to be careful of how you worded your answers, but it was a great experience and I did that a couple times. When I was back down in Mosul around November or December, we traveled up to Dahuk and the women’s union had a conference up there. Another female JAG and I were asked by this civil affairs guy to come and talk, and I was happy to do it again. That was actually covered by the Kurdish TV station too, so I got to be a celebrity. That was very satisfying and rewarding. I personally found it very easy to like the Kurds. They have a lot going for them. I met a lot of Arabs as well that I considered friends. Another other thing I did while I was there – and here’s another initiative quashed by Baghdad. There were two Reserve JAGs – Jerry Teresinski and Nick Scott – who were attached to the 101st. We started working with the local attorneys. We had the Mosul Office of Judicial Operations, dubbed MOJO, and we tried find out what their legal system was all about, trying to get some integrity into the system. Jerry really was the driving force behind

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 15 UNCLASSIFIED this. He started a court-appointed attorney program (CAP) where Iraqis would actually have representation in the investigative courts and actually have some human rights. So I helped him with that, but just on the periphery. I went to the training meetings and such, but he deserves all the credit for that. Somewhere around December, the head of the CAP was assassinated and immediately somebody stepped up and volunteered to take his place. Jerry and I would talk and say, “When you were in law school, how many people would volunteer for a job that someone else was just assassinated doing?” There were a lot of good folks who were really trying against some pretty horrendous odds to make positive things happen. I’m sure that program is gone now. We got a lot of flak from Baghdad. They didn’t want to pay the judges; they didn’t want to pay the attorneys. They seemed to put their thumb down on every good idea we had. So we paid them out of CERP, and we ended up making due with CERP on a lot of things. We paid the border guards out of CERP. They should have been on the central Baghdad payroll. So CERP was great, but sometimes it was drained because it had to make up for shortfalls out of Baghdad. The CAP program and the May election were probably two of the coolest things I witnessed over there. This kind of democratic spirit was so great. I remember they announced this one guy who had successfully pled his client down from a murder charge to a manslaughter charge, and everybody was applauding him. In a way, it was a little weird because he got the guy off, but the concepts were so foreign to them. They would ask us, “Can I ask questions of the witnesses?” So this was a revolution.

JM: Were you providing any legal support during this time? Were you actually being a JAG?

SA: We were liaising with the locals. Do you mean being involved with courts martial of our own soldiers?

JM: Well, were you performing an informal legal advisor function whenever you had the opportunity?

SA: Sure, especially with the locals. Go to the courthouses, try to rebuild it, see what they needed. We especially talked to the really old guys who remembered what it was like before Saddam, because you want to build a system that’s familiar to them, that they will have ownership of, just maybe without the corruption. There were a lot of educated people in the north. A lot of the attorneys spoke English. They were familiar with reading people their rights because of bootlegged movies, which was pretty funny.

JM: Were there any major lessons learned that you took from your experiences, either personally or that you think the Army learned or perhaps should learn from the time you were over there?

SA: Even though we want to distance ourselves from CA and nation building and stuff like that, I think Army officers are pretty damn adept at it. The lessons I learned were that you have to get out there and see with your own eyes and ears, get to know the people and listen to them, and not try to impose the American way on them. You want to set tones but recognize that it’s not my way or the highway. I definitely learned that lesson myself, and I think a lot of others did as well. There were some who were mechanics and probably never left the forward operating bases (FOBs), but a lot of us got involved in things that were far, far away from our areas of expertise. But if you approached it with fairness and were willing to engage with the

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 16 UNCLASSIFIED people, it worked out well. For example, I got very involved in the harvest – what do I know about the harvest? And you know, that was another tension with Baghdad: the reluctance to set the price for wheat. I would go to the Green Zone and it reminded me of being in Crystal City in D.C. That place is bureaucrat heaven. It’s filled with GS-10s and GS-11s. Everybody’s got their little coffee cup with the little saying on it; they’ve all got their lunch pails. Well, the CPA palace in Baghdad is very similar to Crystal City. And when you were up in Mosul in the civil- military operations center (CMOC), which is where the CPA office was, it was full of Iraqis. This is where the Iraqis went to discuss their claims and problems, so it was impossible to forget you were in Iraq when you were there. But when you go down to the Green Zone and the CPA palace, it was easy to forget you were in Iraq, and I think that was a terrible thing. Anyway, when we were trying to figure out the wheat price, obviously we were going to need to get the money from somewhere. General Benjamin Freakley was working on this at the time, and there was a guy in the CPA, the Ministry of Interior, whose own little rice bowl was, “We need to teach these Iraqi people to grow wheat to an international standard.” Well, of the wheat they grew, only about five percent was actually acceptable for sale because it got this fungus on it; it’s called “smutty grain.” Basically what Saddam would do, because it’s socialism, was to buy this wheat and then go dump it in a ditch. But the people who had grown the wheat were able to sustain their family for the next year because they had been paid for the harvest. And so this guy down in Baghdad was like, “Now’s the time to change things.” And I’m like, “Not the time. I understand your point, but we need to give them the tools to wean them away from it, because these people are going to starve without this money for the harvest.” So that was one of those things: you’re safe and sound in Baghdad; you can propose these things and have a little PowerPoint slideshow to show what a good idea it is; but tens of thousands of people are not going to have any money for an entire year because of your brilliant idea, nimrod. You have to get out there and learn what the real issues are. You’ve got to be realistic in your expectations of people’s abilities to change and you’ve got to give them the tools. Expectation management. The Iraqis had very high expectations of what we were going to do for them –

JM: And a window of patience that eventually closed.

SA: Right, and people would tell you, “You put a man on the moon. You can do anything you want.” And there’s some truth in that. You can’t tell some Iraqi on the street, “Well, it’s an election year and Congress didn’t appropriate this money.” They don’t care. “That’s your problem. You fix it. You invaded us.”

JM: Have you give any thought as to why this was not anticipated?

SA: I have and I don’t know. Did we plan for the best case scenario, the most unlikely one but the one we hoped for? I think the military at first had enough people on the ground. I don’t think CPA had anything even close. The infantry guys, my husband included, might disagree with me because he had a gigantic area. But it seemed as far as keeping security – and I don’t mean the law and order piece – it seemed we could have gotten the police back to work much faster if we had had the money to pay them. We were kind of coaxing people back to work. They wanted to work to feed their families.

JM: As maybe a capstone question – is there anything you have taken from your experiences that you feel has contributed to your personal or professional development in a positive way?

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Are there any leadership examples, positive or negative, that you’ve seen that you think have benefited you?

SA: For the rest of my life, that year is going to be the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me. I mean, I might very well go back, or go to Afghanistan or something like that, but you learn so much so fast when you’re in a real world environment and you’ve just got to be able to absorb and incorporate those lessons. You learn to push back in the right environment. I’m very much a team player, but in that kind of environment you have to stand up and say, “No, we have to stop this.” You have to push, and I definitely did that up at CPA and demanded some responses, throwing a “sir” in there every now and again. You also need to support initiative on the part of your subordinates as best as you can, because people really are trying in good faith. I think the curriculum here at the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) – all the cultural awareness and things like that – you need some of that; but you also really need to remember what your mom and your grandma told you: God gave you two ears, two eyes and one mouth for a reason. You need to absorb and figure out what people are all about. You don’t have to embrace them. I mean, I’m not buying retirement property in Iraq, but at the same time –

JM: And you probably wouldn’t want to be tried there if you were accused of a crime either.

SA: Yeah, exactly. God knows, as a woman, it’s not exactly my dream spot. But at the same time you need to understand that their society works differently. There was this retired judge from Florida who was sent by CPA to conduct some survey and he had this task force that nothing came out of. We already had JAGs who had gone to every courthouse in this province – we already did this. But CPA had this guy and he had this checklist, so he would go around and basically say things like, “Confess all your sins with the Ba’ath Party. Have you ever been in the Ba’ath Party? Did you ever do this? Did you ever do that?” First off, no way were they going to answer these, but he had allotted only 30 minutes per interview with these guys. I was like, “You’re not even going to be drinking tea by that point. These people don’t have the same sense of urgency that we do. They’re not Americans. You’re going to have to sit down and drink tea. You’re going to –”

JM: And that’s if they show up on time to begin with.

SA: Oh yeah, and that’s a whole other story. That’s very true. Anyway, this guy was like, “I’m just going to tell them I’m in a hurry.” “Well, golly gee, we should have thought of that!” He may be in a hurry, but they’re not. So he was there for 10 days and then he was gone.

JM: Was this like a swan song for retiring Department of the Army civilians or something?

SA: No, he was a judge from Florida. My impression was that he was somebody who would do it. They had advertised and he said he would do it. I shudder to think how much money that old coot got paid to do that – and frankly, he screwed a lot of things up. We were having this initial briefing and I brought two JAGs up from Irbil so they could give him a lay down of what we already knew. We had a British Foreign Service officer, Dr. Lianne Saunders, and she sat in on this too. She was like, “When you go to the courthouse in Makhmur, for example, you need to just stay away from the whole Kurd/Arab land issue.” And he looked up and said, “Oh, is there any issue?” You just wanted to put your head on the table, because we thought he was

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 18 UNCLASSIFIED going to go and muck it up. Both sides will plead their case to you and they are looking for a promise or something. You have to be very careful about not promising, not representing the United States government.

JM: Are there any other issues you’d like to bring up? Any other points you’d like to make?

SA: Well, after August, my role shifted completely and we did do courts martial and focused on that, but that’s really off the topic of CPA and everything. It was interesting to do courts martial in theater.

JM: What kind of crimes were you seeing? What were the majority of courts martial for? Was there a particular problem you were seeing?

SA: There were groups of criminals. Since you had to have a two-vehicle convoy, there were a lot of co-criminals. For example, alcohol was frequently involved – which was forbidden and criminally illegal. Back in June, we had some guys that decided to get drunk and go look for souvenirs. Well, what they did was burglarize some Iraqi houses. They were crawling over the walls, stealing from Iraqis at gunpoint.

JM: With their American flag patches on?

SA: Oh yeah. So of course they got caught, they got court-martialed, and they each went to jail for a couple years each. We also had a guy who was a capital “A” alcoholic who was making his own wine, and you just can’t have that. He made it out of rotten fruit. But you could buy alcohol easily in Iraq. For one, there’s Christians who are good on drinking; and the Kurds are not as averse to alcohol. My husband said out in his area, there was a little mud shack and somebody had painted on it in English, “Store for Buying Beer.” So, yeah, it was available.

JM: Were there any epidemic type things that you were seeing on a regular basis?

SA: No, we only had 15 total and we brought a couple cases home. We had that carjacking of that vehicle that got some press. I actually tried that case back in the United States, and for various reasons it was delayed. Things like war trophy smuggling. As a parting shot as a JAG, when you’re there for a year, it’s very important to do discipline in theater and not just send it home. It’s a pain, it’s a huge investment, you need a jury and you need a judge – and he came from Germany; he was flying circuit. But it’s very important for the troops and for the commanders to have that being done.

JM: Thanks so much for your time, and thanks for your service too. It’s greatly appreciated.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcribed by Jennifer Vedder, 31 March 2006

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