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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 Chris Haggard

Combat Studies Institute Fort Leavenworth, UNCLASSIFIED

Abstract

MAJ Chris Haggard served as the battalion fire direction officer (FDO) with 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored cavalry Regiment (ACR) in Anbar Province, during 2003 and as executive officer (XO) and commander with a military transition team (MiTT) in East Baghdad, Iraq during 2007 and 2008, both in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In this November 2011 interview, MAJ Haggard discusses various Field Artillery (FA) duty positions and missions, the importance of his prior enlisted service, and the challenges and rewards of working on a MiTT. MAJ Haggard concludes his interview with the observation, "I love what I do in the Army. I think it's extremely important work that I'm doing, and that there will be times that it's frustrating, but as my instructors here at Intermediate Level Education (ILE) say, "Sometimes you just have to shut up and color." Decisions are made at echelons above my level that I may not fully understand, but those decisions are made for a reason and I am not a policy maker. I am a policy executioner."

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Interview with MAJ Chris Haggard 8 November 2011

JF: My name is Jenna Fike (JF) and I'm with the Operational Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I'm interviewing MAJ Chris Haggard (CH) on his experiences during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Today's date is 8 November 2011 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time that 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 that you're not able to answer. Before we talk about your deployments, could you give a brief history of your background with the Army? CH: Sure. I joined the Army on 3 September 1998 as an enlisted 11M, that's a Mechanized Infantryman. I attended Basic Training and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Benning, Georgia. My first duty assignment after Basic Training was with the operations section (G3) of I Corps at Fort Lewis, Washington. I have 20 months of enlisted time before I applied to and was accepted to Officer Candidate School (OCS) back at Fort Benning. When I was selected for OCS, I was branched into the Field Artillery (FA). My first assignment after attending FA Officer's Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was with 1st Battalion, 15th Field Artillery Regiment at Camp Casey, South Korea. It was a unique experience in Korea. It seems like Murphy follows me wherever I go; that one year in Korea was the coldest winter with the most snow since 1950, and I actually cannot stand being cold. I got a unique nickname, my first nickname in Korea was Cold Feet. I got a second nickname later during the monsoon season when I managed to sink my fire support team vehicle (FSTV) in Casey Creek. My fire support platoon was rolling out of the motor pool to go to a field training exercise with the rest of the battalion, and to exit the motor pool, the tracked vehicles had to go down into Casey Creek, go down the creek about 200 meters and then come out of the creek on the other side to get on the tank trail. During the monsoon season, Casey Creek was subject to flash floods. There were six to eight foot flood control berms along Casey Creek, and as I entered the creek, I got mired in the mud underneath the bridge that we had to cross under. As I was getting out of that eddy, I managed to get back onto the water crossing and a flash flood managed to swipe my FSTV off of the low water crossing and as we say, we were off to the races. The FSTV managed to swim very well until it started taking on water. We were 500 or 600 meters downstream when we had to beach the FSTV against a flood control berm because the water was so high we could not safely cross underneath a pedestrian footbridge crossing the creek. Being broadside to the current, that was when the FSTV started taking on water. Water was going into the track commander's hatch and came out the driver's hatch, completely submerging the FSTV. To add insult to injury, the recovery operations officer in charge was the second highest-ranking officer in the American Army on the Korean Peninsula, the Assistant Division Commander for Support. Because of that incident, a new safety briefing was instituted in 2nd Infantry Division (ID). That's how the Monsoon Safety Briefing came into being for American forces in Korea.

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JF: You were the instigator of the Monsoon Safety Briefing. CH: I personally, first-hand contributed to the improved safety of all Soldiers in the Korean Peninsula during monsoon season. JF: You're infamous. How many Soldiers are on the vehicle? CH: We had seven Soldiers in the vehicle; four Soldiers assigned to the company FST, then there are two Soldiers for each platoon to act as forward observers and radio telephone operators (RTOs). We were not at full-strength, but almost full-strength. JF: I'm glad everybody got out. CH: The only casualty suffered during the incident was one duffle bag. JF: And a little bit of your pride. [Laughs] CH: I had a Polish science teacher in middle school who said, "If you cannot laugh at yourself, you cannot laugh at anything else." It was a humbling experience, but it did lead to a lot of jokes and I've got a very thick skin. JF: There's something to be said for that. You mentioned that when you went in enlisted you were Infantry, was that by choice? CH: Yes, it was. JF: What precipitated the switch to Field Artillery, was that also by choice? CH: FA was actually my third choice. When you fill out an application for OCS, you list your top ten branch assignments. Being Infantry and wanting to be outside in the open and not desk bound, which is counter-intuitive to going to OCS, I wanted to join the Infantry. On my OCS application, Infantry was number one, Armor was number two, and Field Artillery was number three. I am not bitter about not being Infantry, being Artillery has been a vastly broadening experience for me. I think I have had many experiences and opportunities that an Infantry officer might not appreciate. JF: How do you feel that your prior enlisted time has helped you as an officer? CH: Being a single, lower-enlisted Soldier prior to becoming an officer, has given me a certain perspective. There are things that I experienced as a Soldier, things that I had to do as enlisted, that I do not ask my Soldiers to do now, because I did not agree with them when I was enlisted. I try to keep my experience in mind from the enlisted perspective when I provide guidance to my Soldiers now. JF: Do you think that that's invaluable? CH: That is extremely invaluable. Officers come from very different and unique backgrounds, not only their commissioning source, be it West Point, Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), or OCS, and the experiences that those cadets or candidates have coming up through their commissioning sources form their personality and their leadership style. It goes back further than that to how they were raised by their parents and really what part of the country they

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 4 UNCLASSIFIED came from, the society they grew up in, with the morals and the ethics and the values that their parents and families imparted on them, the values they absorb from the environment and the society they grew up in. Being prior enlisted does provide a unique viewpoint for officers, whether it's a staff officer responsible for a staff section, or a commander responsible for a unit. JF: Do you think that it's important to have those many different perspectives, to have prior enlisted officers but also to have officers who were not prior enlisted? Or do you think that it would be not a bad idea if most officers had some enlisted time as well? CH: With the things that the Army is asked to do today in a very complex, ambiguous environment, I think the more varied experience base that you have to draw from is more important than insisting that all officers have some sort of enlisted experience. That is just a small component of leadership from an organizational standpoint. The West Point officers, the ROTC officers, and officers who have come through OCS from their enlisted all bring in different viewpoints, different experiences, different thought processes that enable an organization to better understand and frame a complex, ambiguous problem. JF: I would agree with that. Thank you for going through all that. It's interesting to hear the different perspectives, because you do hear different stories from prior enlisted officers. How many deployments have you been on since we started operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? CH: I have had two operational deployments. The first was in 2003. We deployed in April and I came back early in November to attend the Captain's Career Course. My second deployment was from November 2007 to December 2008. Both deployments were to Iraq; in 2003 I was with 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) operating in Anbar Province. We bounced from Fallujah to Ramadi, back to Fallujah and then out to Al Asad. In my second deployment, I was with 3rd Squadron, 89th Cavalry, assigned to 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division out of and we deployed to East Baghdad, where I was the executive officer (XO) and then the eventual commander for a military transition team (MiTT), advising first an Iraqi Army (IA) battalion and then an Iraqi National Police (INP) battalion. Towards the end, we combined with another MiTT to mentor an INP brigade. JF: If it's okay with you, why don't we go ahead and talk about both a little bit, and then you mentioned you had some company command time afterwards back in garrison and I would like to talk about that as well. This first deployment in April 2003? CH: We were in what I believe to be the second wave after 3rd ID's Thunder Run into Baghdad. The main supply routes (MSRs) were still very immature and there were still abandoned vehicles on the route. We did not receive any fire during our movement from Kuwait into Al-Taqaddum Air Field, which was northwest of Fallujah. Once we arrived into Fallujah, we were partnered with a Military Police (MP) battalion conducting operations in and around Fallujah. By this time, we would have been conducting security and stability operations, pretty much decisive operations were complete. We did receive some fire. My section was reinforcing Eagle Troop, 2nd Squadron, 3rd ACR at the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Fallujah when I believe two unknown Iraqis threw grenades over the wall into the courtyard where we had parked our vehicles. Six of my Soldiers were wounded during that incident, all of them were eventually returned to duty. That was the closest direct engagement that I was involved in on my first deployment.

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JF: Okay. CH: Actually, let me continue with that. A few weeks later, I was moved back over to the squadron headquarters when the squadron split the tactical command post (TAC) from the tactical operations center (TOC) to conduct split operations, and I was one of the battle captains in the TAC. While monitoring the operations I got the brilliant idea -- that I foolishly recommended to the squadron operations officer (S3) who ran it up the flagpole to the squadron commander -- of instituting a liaison officer between the mayor of Fallujah and the squadron commander, to better facilitate synchronization and cooperation between the civil governance of Iraq and the military unit conducting support and stability operations in Fallujah. Since it was my brilliant idea, I was the officer that was tagged to do that, and I, along with the squadron personnel officer (S1) who was a Middle Eastern affairs major and fluent in Arabic, became what we called a government support team in Fallujah. From that experience, CPT Mitchell and I co-authored an article that was published in the Armor Journal on our experiences with a very fledgling attempt at civil-military support operations. JF: Which was in some ways kind of before its time and didn't really hit its stride until in some cases years later. CH: Within my small world at the time, I believe, it was maybe not the first attempt at it, but it was something I came up with on my own. I had not heard of it being done anywhere prior to that. What we did in Fallujah in 2003, from my viewpoint, was a brand-new concept. JF: You hadn't heard of this being done before, where did you come up with the idea and how did you implement it? CH: The origin of the idea is fairly elusive. I came up with the idea because we were operating in an urban environment. From my viewpoint, we were not going to spend 10 years in Iraq, so we had to partner with the local government and the civil administration of Fallujah in this case and get them standing on their feet, become involved in their operations to enable their ability to effectively govern and administrate themselves. Basically, I was attempting to set conditions for termination of military operations in Fallujah. JF: It would have been nice if that had happened then. CH: Which is something that we talk about now in 2011, but I don't think we had an exit strategy in 2003. JF: I don't think so, either. You said that you left a bit early to go to the Captain's Career Course in November 2003; did you maintain as this liaison officer until that time? CH: No. 2nd Squadron bounced around quite a bit, and that was during our second six-week tour in Fallujah. We started in Fallujah, moved to Ramadi, then came back to Fallujah. Then the squadron went out to Al Asad Air Base and consolidated with the rest of the regiment in the far western portion of Anbar Province. We were covering the border crossing sites between Syria and Jordan, and when I re-deployed, it was MAJ Mitchell by this time and he was continuing the government support team concept out at -- I can't remember if it was Rutba or Hit -- one of the smaller towns out in western Anbar Province. MAJ Mitchell continued working with the mayor and the local government. I have no idea what the long-term results of that work were.

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JF: You came back, went to the Captain's Career Course, and there were four years before you deployed again. CH: After the Captain's Career Course, I was assigned to Fort Polk, Louisiana, where the Army was transforming 2nd ACR Light into the 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT) of the 10th Mountain Division. The first year or so at Fort Polk, I was assigned to 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery as the battalion fire direction officer (FDO) with a specific task to transform a three by six separate M198 towed Howitzer organization into a 2x8 M119 towed Howitzer battalion. We were pretty much taking three 155mm batteries, with no battalion headquarters structure and squishing all that into a fires battalion with a headquarters and headquarters battery into 105mm Howitzer batteries. That took up the first year or so I was at Fort Polk, trying to obtain the new equipment, train the battalion on the new equipment, and to configure all of the ancillary things. For example, going from 155mm artillery to 105mm artillery, the only thing ammunition-wise that transferred were the fuses. We had no projectiles, so I had to talk with the Strategic Army Corps (US Army) (STRAC) people to figure out what a two by eight, 105mm Howitzer battalion should have allocated as their day-to-day training ammunition. JF: What was your technical duty position at this time? CH: Battalion FDO, which is pretty much the assistant to the assistant S3. I was responsible for the technical and tactical fire direction for the battalion. JF: So it actually was your job to make sure you had the correct training ammunition and everything you needed. CH: Yes, the battalion FDO is typically the battalion ammunition officer as well. JF: Field Artillery uses a little bit different terminology than other branches, isn't that right? CH: Sometimes. There is no FDO equivalent in the other branches. JF: There wouldn't need to be. You said that took up about the first year; is this group you deployed with? CH: I did not deploy with 5-25, that was the 2nd Brigade that I deployed with. That deployment was pretty much all of 2008. From the battalion FDO position, I was selected to command the headquarters and headquarters company (HHC) of the Brigade Special Troops Battalion (BSTB). That is a double O Alpha authorized duty position, it's combat arms, non-branch specific and that was a unique and extremely broadening experience. The HHC of the BSTB at the time contained 398 Soldiers composed of 52 different military occupational specialties (MOSs). I had all the way from the battalion commander, who was an Engineer officer, down to the private who was a cook, a refueler, mechanic and everything in between. The BSTB does not have a forward support company (FSC) from the brigade support battalion as the other maneuver battalions do. We still had a legacy support platoon -- everything, cooks, mechanics, supply personnel, transportation personnel, refuelers, everything. Being in the BSTB, which had the Engineer company, the MP company, and the Signal/Network company, I had the mechanics in my support platoon that supported those three other companies. Not only did I have to manage high- mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles (HMMWVs) and heavy expanded mobility tactical trucks (HEMTTs) and other wheeled vehicles that I'm used to, but I also had to take care of

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 7 UNCLASSIFIED engineering equipment and other special equipment in the Signal company and the Military Intelligence (MI) company. Of course, we had a maintenance tech and a motor sergeant who handled the details, but I was still responsible for managing the maintenance contact teams that came out of my support platoon to support the other companies in the battalion. Within my own immediate command and control, I had the MP platoon that supported the brigade, and I also had an eight-man Chemical reconnaissance section that was also in support of the brigade. As an Artillery officer, I had to learn the six core competencies for the MPs, and then I also had to learn a lot more about the Chemical Corps than I ever knew as a battery Chemical officers. I can do decontamination and masking procedures, stuff they teach in basic training, but as far as a detailed chemical reconnaissance, that was graduate-level work for me. I was responsible for training and managing a chemical reconnaissance section in the MP platoon. It was a very steep learning curve for me coming into such a large and varied company command. JF: What did you attack first? How did you go about all of this learning that you had to do? CH: A lot of reading. I'll never forget one of the comments that my MP platoon leader made to me as I was getting closer to my change of command ceremony after 18 months of command. He said, "You know sir, we really did not like you as a company commander because we could never bullshit you. Every time we told you we had to do something, you always knew we were trying to pull a fast one on you." JF: How did you know? CH: A lot of it was just understanding their core competencies, and working closely with them. The platoon sergeant and the squad leaders were all extremely competent non-commissioned officers (NCOs), and my first sergeant was an MP. I was cheating in the background. It's just listening to your subordinates, weighing what they tell you with what you have read for yourself and the guidance you're getting from your higher headquarters, and mixing all that together and coming up with a common-sense approach to training and employment of any particular asset. During one time, I even had an Engineer platoon attached to my company for six weeks. Trying to wrap my arms around them was a very similar approach. I didn't know anything about 21Bs. Just listening to your subordinates, educating yourself, and combining the guidance you get from headquarters with common sense will usually give you a close enough to good answer. JF: It sounds like knowing what you don't know and being willing to look for that information is the best approach. CH: Yes, it is. The first step is the most difficult -- trying to know what you don't know. Knowing what questions to ask; if you don't know what you don't know, how do you know how to educate yourself? It's like a blind man in a dark room trying to listen for a mouse in the middle of a rock concert. JF: But at least you know that there are things you don't know, so you think, "I have to start figuring this out. There's stuff I don't know." Some people will never admit that they don't know things. At least you started in the right place. You said that this was in garrison.

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CH: Yes. JF: I don't know if mission is the right word, but what was the mission of this company? What were they doing? CH: Well, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain was kind of put in a unique situation. This was 2004 and 2005, when the Army was experimenting with the three-year life-cycle process, and to a greater extent it is still maintaining that with the Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) process. However, 4th Brigade was piecemealed by battalion between Iraq and Afghanistan. We had to send a brigade-sized command element and a brigade-sized support element to Afghanistan, simultaneously sending a convoy security package made up of our reinforced Reconnaissance, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RISTA) squadron to Iraq. That reset us into a five-year cycle which culminated in our brigade deployment to East Baghdad in November of 2007. The focus up until the time we got piecemealed out was deployment to Iraq. We were conducting our theater-specific individual required training tasks and getting the basics, common task training done. We were going through short-range marksmanship, close quarters marksmanship, convoy security, preparing for the mission rehearsal exercise, which we did go through while I was in company command. We did fairly well during that exercise. Knowing that my cooks would not be employed as cooks in theater -- we had contract cooks at the time -- they were re-trained as Infantrymen. During our Situational Training Exercise (STX), the brigade commander did not know that the infantry squad leader I had was in fact a cook. He was that good at Infantry tasks. The MP platoon pretty much received accolades from the observer controllers (OCs) at Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) for creating and running one of the best detention facilities that they had seen to that point in any rotation. Again, that was just a lot of self-learning. Detention facilities are run by a different MOS than combat MPs, so not only did they have to learn how to create, organize and run a detention facility, but as a company commander, I had to learn that as well. And oh by the way, we were inspected by the Red Cross to ensure that we met international standards, which fortunately we did. It was a lot of learning and a lot of work, but looking back on it, it wasn't hard work. It was a lot of common sense stuff, and sharing the learning across myself, my higher headquarters, and my subordinate leaders. The platoon leaders, platoon sergeant, first sergeant and the squad leaders really made a very effective team that shared a lot of the knowledge and created a very successful outcome. JF: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as if you're saying that you were expecting to deploy. CH: We were. JF: You were preparing for deployment; what happened? CH: That is when the brigade was piecemealed. JF: Do you have any understanding as to why that happened? CH: The whole purpose of modularity was to take a brigade-sized element; the lowest echelon that would be self-sustaining and self-deployable would be the brigade element, the BCT. It would be able to deploy and plug into any higher headquarters and perform its mission. That kind of got messed up, to put it mildly.

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JF: The technical term, right? [Laughs] CH: Extremely technical. I am not sure what the reasons were; it was echelons above my concern. The Engineer company minus that one platoon that I took administrative control (ADCON) of, the RISTA squadron reinforced, the deployment support brigade (DSB) and the brigade HHC deployed individually to two different countries. I don't know why, but that pretty much reset us in the deployment cycle. JF: The fact that you were piecemealed and parts of your group were deployed, doesn't that sort of bolster the argument that a piece should be able to deploy, or were you all supposed to go? CH: We were all supposed to go; individual battalions are not designed to be self-sustaining. JF: Okay; so this actually flew in the face of the whole point of modularity. CH: Yes. JF: Interesting. What kind of challenges did that present for you? Instead of all of you deploying, you now have to deploy one battalion. How did you handle that? CH: For me personally, it didn't affect me at all with the exception of my maintenance contact team that had a relationship with Alpha Company, the Engineers. They deployed and a certain number of my other support platoon member deployed in support of Alpha Company's deployment. For me personally, it didn't affect me; for the company it had extremely minimal effects. I deployed not even 20 people. JF: Did they still fall under you? Did you have to keep track of them, or did they go to another unit and they were responsible for their support? CH: The maintenance contact team, they were attached to Alpha Company for operational control (OPCON), so they were taken off my personnel report and placed on Alpha Company's personnel report. Same thing with the other members of the support platoon, they were all OPCON'd to Alpha Company commander and placed on his personnel report. JF: They got all the support they needed and you no longer had to -- CH: Right. JF: That was what I was concerned about; a lot of times you hear about people or groups deployment who don't know who they belong to, so support doesn't always come through the way it needs to. CH: Once Alpha Company got into theater, that could have been a headache for the Alpha Company commander, but for my personnel, the personnel that I gave Alpha Company to support his mission, that was not a headache for me because those personnel now belonged to him, and he had responsibility for them. JF: Okay. When did this happen? CH: That was in 2006.

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JF: And you maintained in command for how long after? CH: I came out of command in October of 2006. JF: You didn't deploy; did you continue training? CH: We continued training. An Army unit is never idle. We had other requirements to fill, and we continued doing whatever training that we deemed necessary according to our anticipated mission supporting our core tasks. We continued marching on. JF: Was there disappointment, or relief, or maybe a little bit of both that you didn't deploy? CH: There was a lot of angst in 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division for various reasons that I particularly do not wish to get into. JF: Okay, no problem. Is there anything else from this part of career that you'd like to talk about? Anything I should have asked you? Maybe what you took out of it from a leadership perspective? CH: Probably the most valuable thing that I got out of it was how to be a tough but fair leader; how to create an effective organizational team, not only horizontally with my fellow company commanders and the captains on the staff, but also vertically with my platoon leaders and my platoon sergeants and squad leaders. Out of 398 personnel assigned to the company, only four others were Artillery. I've done their job before and I knew exactly what their job was. It was the other 394 personnel I had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Learning from your subordinates is extremely important, especially when you have an organization as large and as varied as that. Another compliment that I got came after my command time; it was from one of the staff officers in the S2 shop, and she mentioned, "You know, we didn't necessarily like you because you were so hard on us. You laid the standard out, you kept us to that standard, and you demanded that we meet that standard; but we always knew that it was the right thing to do and that you were fair." JF: You held yourself to the same or a higher standard. CH: I do not agree with any other standard but THE standard. You'll see a lot of other leaders say that the physical training (PT) standard for this unit is 240 points. Okay, that is not a standard that is a goal. In the there is only one standard, which is 180 points on the PT test. Commanders can add to but cannot take away from regulations. Increasing the PT standard is adding to the regulations, it is making a regulation more stringent, and in my opinion that should never be done. JF: In 2007, you had another deployment to Iraq, and you said this was on a MiTT? CH: Right. JF: How did that come up? CH: This was a time in Iraq when we were attempting to expand the capability and the ability of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). The Army had a program for transition teams in place already that went to , to be trained and deployed to Iraq to mentor the various ISF, whether it

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 11 UNCLASSIFIED was the Iraqi Police (IP), the INP, the IA, or the Iraqi Border Patrol (IBP). When 4th Brigade deployed, there were not enough transition teams to match with all of the ISF battalions that were there. 3rd Squadron, 89th Cavalry, 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division was ordered to create a transition team out of hide. I was the squadron fire support officer (FSO) at the time, so my NCO and I were tasked to be the fires advisors on the transition team. The squadron S3 was tagged to be the transition team commander. I became the commander because he was promoted to the brigade team and I took over the battalion team. That's how that came about. It was just filling a gap. JF: A lot of times the MiTTs are pulled together from a diverse group of people and then sort of stuck underneath a unit, or sometimes they're not underneath anybody at all; this doesn't sound like that's what happened to you. CH: We were extremely fortunate in that event. All of the team members came from within the squadron, we had all worked with each other before, and we were very familiar with what was going on. The only difference was that as a transition team, we were not working directly for 3- 89. We were working for 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry, which was within 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain. We were still within the brigade, but we were not working for our parent squadron. We were working for a sister battalion. There was a little bit of a transition process between going from the cavalry squadron to the infantry battalion, but it was extremely minor. For myself, in the five years I was in 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain, I was in four out of five battalions. It was order of the day for me. JF: It certainly sounds like it was a better situation than many of these transition teams. What was the mission of this particular team? CH: Our mission was to train and advise initially an IA battalion. Due to certain brigade boundaries being drawn on the map, we transferred from the IA battalion to an INP battalion, which brought us back under the umbrella of our parent brigade. There were some pretty unique leadership experiences that led to that decision being made. 1-31 IA lived on what was Forward Operating Base (FOB) Hope, just to the northeast of Sadr City. They lived south of -- I can never remember the name of that MSR. They lived right off of first base of Sadr City, but their area of responsibility was Sadr City. As a transition team living on the same joint security station with that IA battalion, and being under the operational control of 2nd ACR, we were living in another brigade's battle space and working in 2nd ACR's battle space. The squadron commander from 2nd ACR would not allow his units to travel outside the brigade boundaries unless a route clearance package cleared the route first. Well, when you're talking about 500 meters of road, that really didn't make a whole lot of sense, but because that was his rule, we could not leave the FOB. JF: Which meant you really couldn't do your job. CH: Which meant we couldn't do our job. No one would deploy a route clearance package to clear 500 meters of road so that a 20-man transition team could follow their IA battalion out to do a mission.

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JF: So something had to be done. CH: It was absolutely amazing that this wasn't caught sooner; common sense is not so common sometimes. What happened was, my team was re-tasked to partner with an INP battalion which worked in 4th Brigade's area of operations (AO), which is where we were living. I could take my team anywhere I wanted to because I was operating within my own parent brigade's battle space. JF: So you're now advising an INP battalion; how did you find their level of proficiency when you first started working with them? CH: There is a huge cultural component that must be understood to effectively operate with another culture. Technically and tactically speaking, they're on par with any other military unit out there. They do things quite differently that the American Army would never consider doing, but it worked for them. A lot of the officers and senior NCOs in the INP battalion I worked with were veterans of the Iran-, so they had a whole hell of a lot more combat experience than I did. From that standpoint, operationally speaking, they were more than capable of conducting their mission. They just went about it a totally different way. Their issues stemmed from their sustainment. This is something that I probably will never understand. We supplied them with Chevrolet pickup trucks to conduct their missions, but if we did provide them some sort of maintenance support plan or major end item replacement plan, I did not know about it. Getting spare parts to fix the vehicles as they became damaged or even just to conduct routine services was a very difficult process, and if a vehicle became a battle damage loss, getting a replacement vehicle was next to impossible. The one time we were successful, it took eight months to get a replacement vehicle for these guys. Nine times out of ten, the way to purchase spare parts was to use the transition team fund, which was money provided to fill shortfalls within the ISF sustainment system. The way that money was handled did not create any incentive for the Iraqis to fix their own problems. The attitude was, why should they beat their heads against a brick wall to get their own sustainment system to work when the Americans would just give them money? That was a challenge. JF: Were you expected to address that issue? CH: I was ordered to give them the money. JF: You weren't supposed to try to wean them off the American aid system. That must have been somewhat frustrating. CH: How do you negotiate from a position of weakness? JF: You don't, you capitulate. It sounds like you had a significant number of challenges; did you have successes at the same time? CH: We did, we did. We conducted our fair share of patrols, we confiscated our fair share of weapons, and we captured our fair share of suspects. We became decisively engaged once by a numerically superior force in which the Iraqi battalion commander was wounded and we managed to tactically win that engagement, but we did have to break contact, return to the FOB, reconstitute, and complete the mission the next day. The fact that we were able to break contact, recover the damaged vehicles, evacuate the wounded personnel, and successfully complete the

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 13 UNCLASSIFIED mission the next day was difficult from the standpoint of convincing them to go out in the face of imminent danger and really do their job. This mission was a combat logistics patrol, taking supplies from the INP battalion headquarters to a company that was co-located with another American company in a different area. Teaching the Iraqi battalion that they were responsible for supporting their subordinate units regardless of where they were and what lay in between, getting them to do that took some coaxing, but in the end it turned out to be a very successful experience. JF: You had mentioned that the first obstacle was getting past some of the cultural differences. CH: This is an issue that I've been struggling with ever since we first went into Iraq. It's something that's been talked about, but I don't think it has been put into place. How do you solve an Eastern problem with a Western solution without creating more problems? Is it our mission, or is it in American interests, to enable a political system that respects the individual rights of its citizens and maintains its sovereignty and autonomy, right to govern itself as it sees fit within the commonly accepted bounds of international diplomacy? Or, is it our mission to turn every single government into an American-style democracy? JF: That's a big question, and one that a MiTT shouldn't be expected to know the answer to. CH: There are four elements of national power: diplomatic, information, military, and economic. It has increasingly become the military's role to create diplomatic solutions. There are times when that works, but those are usually exceptions to the rule. JF: Were you struggling with this even as you were doing this mission? CH: Yes I was, because I was being told to do certain things by my higher American headquarters that the Iraqi battalion commander didn't necessarily want to do. Here's a really good case in point. We were doing a multi-national patrol; the ISF, the INP, and the IA partnered with the American Army were conducting a cordon-and-search of a certain area, and COL Salah, my INP battalion commander got a tip from one of his informants on a target that he'd been looking for. In the middle of this operation, he took his entire unit and went zipping down the highway. I didn't know where he was going. I had communications with him, but they didn't work for a very specific reason. I didn't know where he was going, so my guys jumped in their trucks and went tearing down the road after him. All of a sudden we came to an invisible line on the map: the brigade boundary. It was not his brigade boundary, so he went zipping right past it; I couldn't follow, so I had to stop. The American battalion commander saw what was going on, and he got on the radio -- American radios work for a very specific reason -- jumping down my throat wanting to know what the heck I was doing, what the heck COL Salah was doing, where he was going, all this kind of crap. "Sir, I have no idea where he's going or what he's doing. All I know is, he's outside the brigade boundary and I can't follow him." I was sitting there at the brigade boundary and about two hours later he came back. "Dude, where'd you go? What's going on?" "Oh, I got a tip on the cell phone and I went to check it out." "You can't do that! We're conducting an operation over here, and you have responsibilities here." JF: He took off in the middle of an unrelated operation? CH: Yes.

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JF: He got a call and just acted on it. CH: That's right. JF: To him that was completely reasonable. CH: He was operating within the bounds of the guidance he got from his brigade commander. JF: The thing you're struggling with is, was he necessarily wrong? You couldn't follow him, but -- CH: He had no responsibility to report his actions to me or to the Americans. JF: But you have a responsibility to report your actions to higher authorities. CH: He would get phone calls in the middle of the night, get his company together, and go conduct a patrol and I wouldn't find out about it until the next day when I went over to talk with him. "Look what we did last night." "Great! But you didn't tell me." JF: But isn't that eventually what we want, for them to do their own thing? CH: Yes, it is. JF: That's what you're struggling with, because you still have reporting requirements yourself, you still have things that you have to do. CH: Yes. He was being extremely proactive and very effective, but the Americans had absolutely no control over it. JF: And they weren't okay with that, despite the fact that we're supposed to be okay with that; that's the whole point of what we're doing. And there's the crux of the matter; I can see where that frustration would come in. So, how did you thread that needle, how did you walk that line? CH: Pretty much took a lot of ass-chewings until the American battalion commander got tired of chewing my ass. JF: [Laughs] Well, maybe that's what you were there to do. It sounds as if this was an enlightening if frustrating experience for you. CH: It was. JF: What did you take out of it personally? CH: That I love the Army, I love what I do in the Army. I think it's extremely important work that I'm doing, and that there will be times that it's frustrating, but as my instructors here at Intermediate Level Education (ILE) say, "Sometimes you just have to shut up and color." Decisions are made at echelons above my level that I may not fully understand, but those decisions are made for a reason and I am not a policy maker. I am a policy executioner. JF: I think that's a great place to stop. Is there anything I didn't ask you? Any observation or lesson learned you want to highlight?

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CH: I think that pretty much covers everything. If any of my former battalion or brigade commanders listen to this, I might get a phone call. JF: I'm confident that you can handle that. Thank you very much for your time today, and thank you for your service. CH: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcribed by Jenna Fike

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