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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 Glen Helberg

Combat Studies Institute Fort Leavenworth, Kansas UNCLASSIFIED

Abstract

MAJ Glen Helberg served as a scout platoon leader with the 187th Infantry in Bagram, Kandahar and Paktia Province, during 2002 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and as a company commander and brigade planner with the 25th Infantry Division (ID) in Baghdad, Iraq during 2007-2009 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In this December 2009 interview, MAJ Helberg discusses his unit's role in , a short mission in providing airfield security, and his deployment to Iraq and the vast difference in condition on the ground between Iraq and his early deployment to Afghanistan. MAJ Helberg concludes his interview with the observation, "The biggest thing I took away from this deployment and from a stability operations perspective is just looking at your area or your responsibilities as a systemic approach rather than a lot of things you have to fix or things that have to get done. More often than not that list of things is all interconnected. Finding the right place to apply your resources is absolutely critical and really multiplies your effects. Whether it is infrastructure repair or security force transition and training, those things are all interconnected in stability operations. Finding the right place to leverage that is definitely not something I'd ever really thought of before."

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Interview with MAJ Glen Helberg 7 December 2009

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 Glen Helberg (GH) on his experiences during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Today's date is 7 December 2009 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. When did you first find out that you would be deploying to Afghanistan? GH: We found out right around mid-December 2001. I guess it was just before Christmas. JF: So it was very shortly after 9/11? GH: Yes. JF: Where in Afghanistan did you serve? GH: I served in Kandahar, Bagram, and also out in Paktia Province during Operation Anaconda. I also served for a month in Pakistan as well. JF: So you moved around a lot? GH: Yes. JF: What is your background with the Army? GH: I've been in for 10 years and I've served in a variety of infantry leadership positions and staff positions. JF: Did you always want to be infantry? GH: I did. It seemed to me that if I was going to be in the Army I might as well be in the infantry and lead soldiers. JF: Back to your deployment to Afghanistan. This was very early and was probably the first deployment to Afghanistan. GH: It was the first conventional Army units into Afghanistan, yes. JF: So some of the procedures that are in place now were probably not in place then. Was there any kind of pre-deployment training? GH: No. As a matter of fact our battalion was prepping to go to the Multinational Force Observers (MFO) mission in the Sinai in September 2001. About a month after that, they notified us that a National Guard unit would be taking that and about a month later we were told we were going to Afghanistan. It was a pretty short turnaround from notification to deployment.

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JF: What is the MFO mission? GH: It's the observer mission in the Sinai. JF: So you didn't have any pre-deployment training. What unit were you assigned to for this deployment? GH: I was with 2nd Battalion, 187th Infantry, which is part of 3rd Brigade, . JF: What was your title? GH: I was a scout platoon leader. JF: As a scout platoon leader what were your major responsibilities? GH: We primarily serve as the reconnaissance element for the battalion. Throughout our time there we served in either that role of reconnaissance or early warning-type. JF: You said you served in multiple locations in Afghanistan. Where were you first deployed to? GH: Kandahar. JF: What did it look like when you got there? GH: It was fairly austere. There was a Marine unit that had just seized and secured it about a month before we got there. The day we got there we set up our own tents. There was nothing. JF: What about enemy contact? GH: It was sporadic. A day or two before we arrived there had been a fairly decent sized firefight with the Marine unit there. It was fairly sporadic throughout our time in Kandahar. Every couple of days you'd get some probing attacks. JF: About how long were you in Kandahar? GH: We were there for just over a month before we made our move. JF: Can you give me an idea of a typical day in Kandahar while you were there? GH: Our battalion had a defense mission so they literally had a defensive perimeter and fighting positions dug around the airfield. My platoon specifically had three teams outside the wire living and working with the Afghan militia forces. On a fairly normal day I'd get up and go to the morning update at battalion headquarters and then head out with my platoon sergeant to go out to our outposts (OPs) to resupply, check on and meet with the local Afghan militia guys. I'd come back in in the evening for the evening update and to get ready for the next day. JF: So you were outside the wire daily? GH: Yes.

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JF: Were you involved at all with training the Afghans? GH: There was some limited training but they were really just local Afghans who picked up a rifle and said they wanted to help fight the Taliban. It wasn't a real organized military force. They didn't really start pushing the training of the Afghan military until later on in our deployment and we weren't really involved in that. JF: Did you deploy with interpreters? GH: No. JF: How did you deal with the local Afghans? GH: For the first couple of weeks we used hand and arm signals and pointed to pictures in books. Even the Afghanistan handbooks we had [didn't help] because not many -- JF: Was it Dari where you were? GH: It was Dari in the handbooks but everyone there spoke Pashtu so those were of minimal use. There was a lot of pointing and staring at each other. JF: Is that how it stayed? GH: After a couple of weeks we started getting some interpreters in. I honestly don't know how the process worked to get them there, but they were locals who had been hired to come in and work for us. JF: Is there any large mission or outstanding event from this month in Kandahar? GH: No. That was pretty much it; that security mission at the airfield. The battalion sent a company off to do sensitive site exploitation (SSE). They had thought they hit a high-value target (HVT) with a missile attack up in the mountains so they went up there to try and figure out what it was. JF: SSE? GH: They weren't sure if they found Bin Laden. They saw a tall guy in the Predator feed and fired a missile at him so they sent a company up there to try and collect forensic evidence to determine if it was him. We sent a small scout team up there but that was the most major thing of that month. JF: Is a SSE always a person of interest or can also it be some kind of -- GH: It can be a location. JF: Like a weapons cache? GH: Weapons cache, documents, records, computers; just about anything. JF: What were the circumstances surrounding your move out of Kandahar and where did you head?

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GH: We got notified that there was an upcoming mission and that we were going to be moving up to Bagram. We packed up, hopped on helicopters, and flew up to Bagram which is where we started the planning process for Operation Anaconda. JF: How long were you there? GH: We were there for four or five days prior to the operation and then for a couple of days after it. We used Bagram as the forward staging base to launch for Anaconda. JF: How much of that operation can you talk about? What was your role in the planning stage? GH: Planning-wise, as a platoon leader, I didn't have a real high-level involvement. I did help the battalion develop their scheme of maneuver and how my teams could support it. That's what we focused on. JF: For people who have never served in the military or never been in an infantry unit or platoon, can you paint a picture of what you guys were doing -- maybe on a mission or even on a daily basis? GH: At that time we were planning for Operation Anaconda and the platoon sergeant and I spent a lot of time up at the operations center poring over maps, working with the operations officer (S3) to try and determine where the best place to locate my reconnaissance and sniper teams were to support the battalion's scheme of maneuver. The soldiers spent a lot of time rehearsing. We thought there would be more civilians involved on the battlefield, so there was a lot of time spent trying to determine how to sort out civilians from Taliban and al-Qaeda guys who may be trying to sneak out. There was a lot of time spent rehashing how to search subjects. Our snipers spent as much time as they could on the range gathering their target data. That was really the focus for those couple of days. It was fairly high intensity, at least mentally. JF: I would think so. How did the operation itself go? GH: It was an interesting time. I had a team on the initial lift -- a reconnaissance team and a sniper team -- and we were to be out in front of the battalion, down in the valley to provide early warning for forces coming up out of the valley. Obviously things didn't go as planned during Anaconda. We spent nine days out there when we had planned on just two to three. There was quite a bit more enemy contact than was suspected. There was a lot of walking up and down the mountains and sitting through snow storms. It was a fairly interesting experience. JF: Did you guys run out of food and water? GH: Close. It was a few days before they could get the first resupply in to us because of the heavy enemy contact. We had just carried enough for the day because it was supposed to be a quick resupply and they were trying to limit the load we were carrying at that altitude. We got pretty low. JF: What about ammunition? GH: My teams didn't. With a small five-man element we absolutely sought to avoid contact, so we were fine on ammo. Some of the other platoons that were out there used up a lot of theirs. Most of my guys carried extra anyway, quite a bit extra.

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JF: About how heavy were the loads you guys were carrying? GH: My rucksack was about 100 pounds. I weighed it just before we left. It had radios, food, water, ammunition, and cold weather gear. We wore our body armor and each of my guys carried about two basic loads of ammo so that was probably another 30 pounds. JF: How did you get to your position? GH: We flew in. JF: On helicopters? Did you have to jump? GH: No. No jump. We flew in, landed, and then we had about a one kilometer move into our position. JF: You ended up staying there for nine days? GH: Yes. JF: How did everybody handle that? How was morale? GH: The morale was actually pretty good. Most of the guys were happy to be off the airfield and actually felt like they were doing something a little more important. [Despite] the weather and the food and water they kept their motivation up pretty well. I was pretty happy with them. JF: How did you wrap up that part of Anaconda and get yourselves back to base? GH: As part of the division's scheme of maneuver they were going to pull out the rest of the U.S. Forces as the battle started winding down and they decided there weren't too many enemy left in the valley. That's when they kind of rolled us up into the north side of the valley and came in and extracted us by helicopter. The Canadians came in a couple of days later to finish clearing out the valley. JF: Where did you head after Bagram? GH: We went back to Bagram for a couple of days and then we hopped flights back to Kandahar. JF: How long did you stay in Kandahar this time? GH: I think it was about another month. By that time the Canadian battalion was on the ground and had taken over the defense mission. My guys actually went back out to the OPs outside the wire, where they had been with the Afghan militia guys. They resumed that mission for about another month. JF: What were the circumstances surrounding your next move? GH: We moved back up to Bagram to assume the security mission there. There were fairly austere forces in Afghanistan at that point so they were rotating units around the country, trying to spread the wealth a little bit. I don't know what everybody was doing but we picked up some of the security mission at Bagram for about another month.

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JF: Then what? GH: At that point my platoon split. Half the platoon went back to Kandahar with most of the battalion and myself and one of my teams went with one of the companies into Pakistan where we were doing an airfield security mission. JF: Can you talk about that a little bit? GH: Sure. It was a Pakistani airfield we were residing at. It had been the main hub of a lot of the air operations into Afghanistan and the U.S. Forces had actually been there for several months. Our first battalion to deploy went straight there and did that security mission for a while. There was a U.S. perimeter inside a Pakistani Army perimeter to make sure we had the kind of security we expected. By the time we got there it was about a company mission. I had one of my snipers out assisting with the perimeter mission and the reconnaissance team and I helped in the tactical operations center (TOC) with the command and control (C2). JF: I believe you said you also served in Paktia Province? GH: That was during Operation Anaconda. JF: I see. When you first arrived you said the conditions were pretty austere and enemy contact, depending on where you were, could be light or heavy but it sounds like it was mostly heavy. GH: Anaconda was. Around Kandahar I'd say it was sporadic at best. JF: Okay. Did the conditions improve at all while you were there? GH: Relative to when we first got there they did. JF: Give me a compare and contrast. GH: My first night in Afghanistan I slept in my sleeping bag in the dirt. It was moon dust and it rained that night and water was flowing under the tent flaps. I woke up and some of my stuff was floating. The ground was so hard that it didn't really absorb [the water]. By the time we left we were in tents and at least the sides were staked down. We were on cots. When we left six months later we were still sleeping on cots in tents with no floors. The unit coming in behind us was the corps headquarters and they had a little more money and a little bit higher standard of living. They were erecting tents with floors and walls as we were leaving. JF: What about enemy contact? Did that stay sporadic? GH: After that first month in Kandahar and other than Anaconda I think they were fairly well beaten by that point. They'd either gone to ground or scooted out of town by that point. JF: What would you say were some of the most difficult challenges to overcome on this deployment? I know you moved around a lot. GH: That in and of itself was one of the biggest things. As a young platoon leader in a light unit you don't have a lot of stuff. You're used to carrying everything you need on your back. As you're in country for a while and you keep getting more and more equipment, all of a sudden you're trying to move a whole lot of stuff that you, or at least I, wasn't used to moving. You had

Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 8 UNCLASSIFIED to keep track of it all and keep accountability of it and that certainly posed some issues. Being able to tailor what the platoon needed to take for each mission as you moved somewhere else and having equipment spread all over Afghanistan was a challenge. The other piece was combating boredom with the soldiers. We spent a lot of time just sitting or waiting, so I tried to develop ideas for training to keep them occupied and keep them busy but still keep them ready. That was a pretty significant challenge, especially when we didn't have a lot of ammo for training and we had limited [access] to the training ranges. You can't really get off the airfield to go do anything so you had to be creative in how you kept your guys ready and attentive. JF: What were some of the things you came up with? GH: There were some spots that I could get the snipers out to do some limited shooting on some ranges. We spent a lot of time doing new equipment training. With any new equipment that came into theater they'd have the contractors come to do some training. We'd send our guys over to see if they could get in on it; to see if they could learn about the new equipment. That actually paid pretty good dividends because then we could go back to the battalion and explain to them why this was a piece of equipment we needed and we were already trained on it so we could use it. Those were some of the biggest ones. There was a lot of time the guys honestly just spent cleaning equipment. The dirt over there is like talcum powder and it gets into everything. The guys would spend an hour or two every day cleaning their weapons and gear making sure it was ready to go. JF: You said the conditions were pretty austere. I'm guessing that the everyday amenities weren't really there. GH: Absolutely not. JF: No showers? GH: The showers came in about mid-February. JF: Did you use a bucket? GH: We used a bucket. There was a building on the airport grounds where it had some troughs. I think it had actually been a watering hole for livestock. There were some troughs with faucets and ice cold water. You'd line up and splash yourself off; a lot of baby wipes. Most of the creature comforts you were used to you'd have to have sent from home. Toothpaste, toilet paper, and baby wipes would all have to be sent from home. JF: I'm guessing communication back home was probably -- GH: Pretty limited, yeah. I think my first phone call home was just before Anaconda, so about a month and a half. JF: That must have been hard on your family. GH: It was fairly tough. My wife and I had only been married for a few months when I deployed. It was a challenge. JF: What about logistical support? Was it okay or was it still difficult at that time?

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GH: It was okay. We had everything we needed. By the time we left I think they had finally opened up an AAFES with very limited stuff so the guys could get their shaving cream and razors. As far as the Army logistics systems we had MREs, water, and ammo. JF: That's probably all they wanted to have right then. You said your soldiers' morale, all things considered, was pretty good? GH: Yes. I think at that point we were the only battalion in the Army, at least conventional unit, that felt like they were contributing to the war effort so early on. That was certainly a great source of pride for the soldiers and it really helped keep their motivation up. JF: Thinking over your entire time in Afghanistan, is there any one event that really sticks out? GH: I think Operation Anaconda will always be a watershed in my career for me. It was certainly the most intense operation that most of us had been in up to that point. It will really standout as the highlight of the deployment. JF: How many people were in the group you were with for Anaconda? GH: The platoon was 23. I went in on the first lift with a five-man recon element and I had a two-man sniper team attached to one of the infantry platoons. My other five-man team, with a sniper team, came in on the second lift about 15 hours later. JF: You said that because you were such a small group you were trying to stay out of enemy fire as much as possible. Were you able to accomplish that? GH: For the most part. We had a couple of sniper pot shots at us and we got caught in a mortar cross fire at one point. We were providing a guide for a rifle company from and we were leading them up to where the rest of the battalion was. We got kind of caught out in the open by some mortars, but other than that there was no sustained direct fire contact, at least with my element. My sniper team that was with one of the rifle platoons had a pretty decent fire fight for a little while. JF: Did everybody come back? GH: Yes, thankfully. JF: That's the best answer right there. Did you have a mentor or someone in a senior leadership position that really inspired you on this deployment? GH: It will sound strange coming from a platoon leader but it was the brigade commander, Colonel Wiercinski. JF: Why is that? GH: He was a tremendous leader. I don't know anyone in the brigade who didn't love working for him. He was a fantastic leader and could really inspire soldiers. He was confident and competent and really down to earth. As a lieutenant I could talk to him without feeling threatened or uncomfortable. He was just a tremendous leader. He was one of those guys that you would say, "Yes. I would absolutely go work for him again."

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JF: Would you say he is a role model for your leadership style? GH: Yes, I would say so. Absolutely. JF: At this early stage of the game were there any media in the area? GH: There were. Early on there were actually quite a few. There were a lot of media outlets trying to get in and most of them were getting into Kandahar. I think Fox News was there, MSNBC -- JF: Did you have any contact with them? GH: I went out with the battalion sergeant major one day. We took, I want to say, the MSNBC crew out and showed them the perimeter and we took them to our OP to show them what the soldiers were doing. There was a Soldier Magazine reporter that came down and actually went out with one of my teams for a couple of nights and stayed out with them. Sean Naylor from the Army Times was going to and did write a book about Operation Anaconda so I did an interview with him as well. JF: When did you fly back home? GH: We got home in July 2002. JF: I forgot to ask this earlier: where were you stationed out of at the time? GH: Fort Campbell, Kentucky. JF: Did you fly back to Fort Campbell? GH: Yes. JF: Is that where your family was? GH: My wife is actually in the military as well. She had been out at Fort Huachuca, Arizona while I was gone and had just gotten to the Washington, DC area when I got back. JF: Is there any particular observation or lesson learned from this deployment that we haven't talked about? GH: I think the biggest one, and I've tried to carry it with me, is the value of small unit tactics. Whatever is happening out there, no matter the size of the operation, the small units that are operating out there from team up to platoon level, are really where the mission is going to get accomplished. JF: Do you want to go ahead and talk about your deployment to Iraq? GH: Sure. JF: When did you find out you would be deploying to Iraq? GH: We had quite a bit more notice. We got the official word in May 2007.

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JF: When did you deploy? GH: December 2007. JF: Where did you serve? GH: In Iraq we were in northwest Baghdad. The battalion I was with was in Abu Ghraib. When I moved up to brigade staff I was in Taji. That whole area is northwest Baghdad. JF: What unit were you assigned to for this deployment? GH: I was with 2nd Brigade, 25th ID. JF: What was your role? GH: I served as a company commander and brigade planner. JF: What about pre-deployment training for this deployment? GH: Quite a bit more. Obviously there are the laundry lists of tasks that have to be accomplished before you can deploy and then we actually spent about a month and a half at the National Training Center (NTC). As a Stryker brigade in Hawaii there isn't a lot of room to train. We went to NTC about three weeks early to do a brigade field training exercise (FTX) before our rotation. JF: What pre-deployment training or educational elements would you say were the most valuable? GH: I think that the opportunity to work at NTC was probably the most valuable. It was the first time we'd really been able to get the company out, stretch our legs and work all our C2 systems. It's really difficult to do that in Hawaii. JF: Hardship duty. GH: It is tough but you get along [laughter]. JF: Was there any training you thought wasn't particularly helpful and that you could have spent your time doing other things? GH: I think there is so much training that you could do ahead of time that you'll never really get to all of it. JF: But it was all useful? GH: For the most part. I can't think of anything that stands out in my mind that I wish we hadn't focused on. JF: When you arrived in Baghdad what were your major responsibilities? GH: As a company commander I was responsible for a combat outpost (COP) just north of Abu Ghraib and it had about 200 people on it. I was responsible for the security of that and I had an area of responsibility (AOR) of about 130 square kilometers.

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JF: You were the land owner? GH: Yes. JF: Can you give me an idea of a typical day or was there no such thing? GH: Such as it was [laughter]. There were a lot of days that felt like Groundhog Day, but we usually would get up in the morning and go out on patrol. We'd have meetings with sheiks, local leaders, government officials, and police chiefs and go out into the village to see how things were going. JF: You were still going out on patrol? GH: Every day. JF: It sounds like you had quite a bit of contact with the local populace. GH: Yes. JF: How was your interpreter support for this deployment? GH: The interpreter support was a lot better. I had about 10 interpreters. JF: When you first arrived, what was your view of the situation? How did it look on the ground? GH: I was actually surprised at how secure and stable things were. It was right on the tail of the surge and there was a lot of hope. It was kind of surprising actually. JF: It must have been a huge contrast between this and your deployment to Afghanistan just in terms of the situation on the ground and the mission even. GH: That it was. It's hard to compare the two because they were at such different points in the [conflict]. I would guess that the folks who were first into Iraq had a more similar experience to ours in Afghanistan. What I experienced in Iraq is probably much more similar to the day-to-day operations in Afghanistan now. JF: What were some of the difficult challenges for this deployment? GH: Again, keeping the soldiers motivated, especially when there's not a lot of contact. It's a lot of stability operations and going out and trying to work projects and water and learn about agriculture; things our soldiers just aren't comfortable with or trained in. Keeping them focused and knowing that contact is right around the corner and not getting lulled into a sense of normalcy or an overly secure feeling. Certainly operating on a COP, myself, out there as a battlespace owner and having this base that was my responsibility was something that felt like a large step up in responsibility from day-to-day operations of a company commander back in garrison. It certainly added a new wrinkle into things. JF: Have you had a job in the past that prepared you for that?

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GH: No; well, that's not entirely true. As strange as it sounds, even working at the staff officer level and the level of detail you have to focus on and administrative matters -- things you would never think about -- are now on your plate when you're out there. You have to cycle guys through leave and maintain security on the COP or something needs to happen, but I'd never experienced it before and I'd have to work through the problem. I don't think any of my experiences really directly related to it but they were all really good training for it. JF: How was the threat level? GH: Relative to what it had been in that area a year earlier, it was very low. The Abu Ghraib area had been an absolutely lethal area a year prior. Having said that, there were still improvised explosive devices (IEDs) out there and we still had several catastrophic hits, but compared to what units ahead of us had been through in that area, it was very minimal. JF: You were responsible for considerably more people on this deployment. Did you guys suffer casualties? GH: No killed in action (KIA), thankfully, but we did have several wounded and three that ended up being evacuated from theater because their wounds. JF: But you brought everybody home. GH: Yes. JF: That's a good thing. I'm guessing that logistical support was probably a little bit better. GH: It was absolutely amazing. I'm still astounded at the difference in quality of life and logistical support between the first deployment and this one. JF: Hard side buildings, full communication? GH: We had an old farm house that we turned into a command post (CP). The rest of the buildings on the COP were tents. We contracted out to local Iraqis to come in and build really nice tents with electricity and flooring and doors. It was pretty good quality of life for the soldiers out there. JF: How was communication? GH: It was fantastic. I had two computers at my desk. I was never out of contact with anybody. JF: Where was your wife while you were on this deployment? GH: She was there as well. She actually started out at Camp Taji while I was down at Abu Ghraib. She was a company commander as well and when she came out she moved down to where my battalion was. I came out of command and moved up to Camp Taji. JF: Were you guys able to see each other overseas at all? GH: About once a month; better than most people. JF: Did you work with coalition forces at all during this deployment?

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GH: Other than Iraqi, which I guess technically don't really count as coalition forces, it was very minimal. We had some coalition special operations missions into our AO. Very minimal. JF: Do any events stand out from this deployment? GH: I guess the transition from the Sons of Iraq (SOI) from U.S. control over to Iraqi government control was a fairly watershed event for the whole Iraq War. JF: What was your involvement in that? GH: At that point I was a planner up at brigade, but I was the reconciliation planner so the SOI piece was really my responsibility at the brigade level. The other thing was the provincial election in January. I was fairly involved in that as a planner. Those two really stand out as fairly watershed events for the situation in Iraq. JF: Did the successful execution of those events make you feel like what we'd done was worthwhile? GH: It did. I guess in my mind I never really debated it; well, I'd debated it, but I'd already kind of decided it was worthwhile. Seeing that and seeing the difference between what the unit before us had experienced in that area and the things we were doing there were night and day. While they were literally fighting to secure ground, we spent millions repairing the electrical grid in the area or bringing water to the canals. You'd see water in the canals and a sheik would tell you, "There hasn't been water in that canal for 20 years. Thank you." If there was any doubt in my mind of whether we were doing good for the people there, it was absolutely erased. JF: How did it look when you left? GH: It was very, very stable and there was minimal contact across the whole brigade's area. The Iraqi forces were in the lead and we'd gone through the security agreement implementation. The Iraqi forces were in the lead and we were supporting them when we left. JF: So did you basically do a handoff to Iraqi forces? GH: Instead of us being out doing all the patrolling and missions and trying to bring Iraqi forces along, it was them doing it and we were there to assist them. It wasn't necessarily a handoff per se, but more of a transition of leadership in the area. JF: Did an American unit come in to relieve you when you redeployed? GH: Yes. JF: How was that handoff? GH: It went pretty well. It was a National Guard unit, which has its own unique set of challenges. Those guys have a tough row to hoe. There were some hiccups but it was a like unit -- Stryker brigade to Stryker brigade -- which really helped. We took the area from a heavy brigade which doesn't match up really well when you start talking about battlespace. Different numbers of companies and all. JF: I didn't ask you when you arrived how the handoff from the departing unit went?

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GH: It also went pretty well. They were part of the surge forces and were on their fifteenth month and were ready to go. JF: Had things calmed down in the area by the time you arrived? GH: They had but there were still some scars there from the tough fight they'd had early on. I think they had a hard time adjusting from what they experienced early on to the end. It was a good time to transition to a new unit that brought a different perspective to things. There are challenges in transitioning from a heavy brigade to a Stryker brigade; different numbers of battalions and different numbers of companies. When you start divvying up battlespace, where they would have four companies owning four pieces of ground, now we only had three. We had to do some redistributing and meet with new leaders. I took over two companies' worth of battlespace so I had to do a handoff with two different company commanders. One was out on a COP and the other was back on the FOB. There were definitely some challenges. JF: Is there any particular observation or lesson learned from this deployment that we haven't talked about? GH: The biggest thing I took away from this deployment and from a stability operations perspective is just looking at your area or your responsibilities as a systemic approach rather than a lot of things you have to fix or things that have to get done. More often than not that list of things is all interconnected. Finding the right place to apply your resources is absolutely critical and really multiplies your effects. Whether it is infrastructure repair or security force transition and training, those things are all interconnected in stability operations. Finding the right place to leverage that is definitely not something I'd ever really thought of before. JF: When did you get home? GH: I got home in March of this year. JF: Where were you stationed out of at that time? GH: Hawaii. JF: That's right. You said Hawaii. GH: Yep. JF: And then you came here. Do you have any closing observations or anything else you'd like to add? GH: No. Not unless you have any other questions to ask. JF: No. Thank you very much.

END OF INTERVIEW Transcribed by Jennifer Vedder

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