Interview with MAJ Glen Helberg
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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 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, Afghanistan 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 Operation Anaconda, a short mission in Pakistan 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." UNCLASSIFIED 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. Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 3 UNCLASSIFIED 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, 101st Airborne Division. 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. Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 4 UNCLASSIFIED 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? Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 5 UNCLASSIFIED 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.