I served in the in the US Army for nearly 29 years. I served as an Active Duty soldier for nine years-and-a-day, and then in the Army Reserves for a bit over two years, before finally ending up with the South Carolina Army National Guard (aka "SCARNG") for over 17 years.
In those 28-plus years I had some interesting assignments and met some amazing and incredible people. Today, I want to talk about one those amazing people, a man I'll call Abdulla. I cannot know his status today, so I don't want to place him in a position of danger. You'll soon see why.
In 2004 I was sent to a school to train on the AH-64D Apache at Cecil Field, outside Jacksonville, Florida. A former Naval Air Station, the base had been turned over to civilian authority and a contractor had bid on the contract to train National Guard personnel on the "D Model." The 1st Battalion (Attack), 151st Aviation Regiment (aka "1/151 Aviation" or to the personnel of the unit "the battalion") was to be reequipped with the AH-64D and we had a group their to learn the finer points of a far more advanced helicopter. While there a VIP group came through that included the recently retired Army Aviation Branch Sergeant Major Edward P. Iannone, Jr., whom I had met just months before. He was then working for the Army Aviation & Missile Command, or "AMCOM." We struck up a conversation and I mentioned why we were at the school. Cryptically, he told me that those new, more advanced aircraft may be delayed.
Right after our group returned from Florida, 1/151 Aviation received warning orders to prepare for deployment to Iraq. Which we did. In Summer 2004, we moved to Ft. Bragg, NC, for training and soon were loading up for deployment to Iraq. In the meantime our commander had somehow finagled a favor and was able to have 14 of our 16 AH-64A helicopters painted into two-tone gray by the US Marines. It was absolutely scandalous in the eyes of the US Army, but the US Army was able to do nothing about it if it wanted the battalion in Iraq! And we deployed with gray aircraft. It was a highly successful experiment, so therefore it was rejected by the US Army.
Interestingly, while we chose the call sign "Ghostrider," the same used by no less than two other units in-theater, the insurgency would call us the Blue Dragons. It referenced the occasional appearance of the gray helicopters that would appear in a bluish tint in the right light. Our commander refused to adopt it.
We arrived in Kuwait where we unloaded the ships that had our equipment aboard and moved to the forward base in the Kuwaiti desert called Camp Buehring. I was assigned to the advance party and in early October we arrived at Qayyarrah West Airbase in northern Iraq to prepare the transition from the 10th Mountain Division's OH-58D Kiowa Warriors. Once the crown jewel of the Iraqi Air Force and called Saddam Air Base, the base had been essentially decimated by coalition forces during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, as well as Operation Iraqi Freedom. American forces had occupied it and termed it "Q-West" which was universally spoken as "Key West."
And it was here that I met Abdulla.
I was assigned by my battalion commander as the liaison for our local Iraqi workers. They were hired through a local Iraqi contractor who provided the US forces on the base with laborers who would handle minor repairs and maintenance efforts to keep the infrastructure that was slowly being repaired in working order. I would take a HMMWV (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle which is universally known as the "Humvee") and head to the main gate every morning to pick up "our" workers, who had spent a great deal of time avoiding the gaze of local insurgents on the way to work.
I learned much from them. After signing them in, I would distribute them to the battalion's individual company areas. The D Company contingent, which was my company, had five workers. They had a small building from which to work and I was immediately invited inside where tea was brewed and we discussed the days tasking and other "important" things. They were able to teach me enough Arabic that I was nearly conversational within five months, surprising myself greatly! And I helped them to improve their English.
Abdulla was the "straw boss" and clearly the senior member of the five. He and Ali (also not his name) carried themselves in a manner that reminded me of soldiers, which I would soon find our was a correct assumption. Ali had been a sergeant in the Iraqi Army. Abdulla was a retired infantry Sergeant Major, or likely referred to by their Anglophile army as a Warrant Officer 1 in that day. This meant Abdulla was the senior enlisted man in a battalion, with three companies of likely around 150-200 troops each.
During our time in Iraq we were engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom III (OIFIII). During this time Al Qaeda and other groups had decided to take on the US and the nascent Iraqi National Guard across Iraq. The ING had been reconstituted from the Iraqi Army and was being trained by coalition forces. While it had many good soldiers, their loyalty to the new regime was questionable and their training was not complete. This led the insurgents to attempt the takeover of the northern, non-Kurdish portion of the country. This included Mosul and the smaller town of Tal Afar. The insurgents were rightly afraid of the Kurdish militia known as Peshmerga and stayed away from most of the country east of Mosul. They were, though, killing and intimidating anyone they could reasonably identify as working with, for, or doing business with the coalition. Beheading and public displays were the preferred methods.
I grew to respect Abdulla. He was direct and honest. He was also a patriot. I would later discover that he had a tattoo of the Iraqi Army crest on his forearm. There's no doubt he had fought the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War. I felt real sorrow for him and Iraq. One morning during tea I could see he was agitated. During our conversation between the six of us one morning, Abdulla looked coldly and determinedly at me and startled me by saying, "You Americans just need to nuke the whole country of Iraq and start over."
I replied by saying that it would mean the death of him and his family. He didn't blink. "I know."
It was later that I learned of the tattoo. He always wore long-sleeved shirts. I had assumed that he did it due to the work we had hired him to do. But, the sleeves were there to hide the tattoo that was no longer on his arm. There was still some ink on the edges of a large scar where the tattoo had once been.
Abdulla was in charge of an infantry unit during the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, and the subsequent defense of Iraq's new 13th province. They were literally on the Kuwait-Saudi border looking at the forces arrayed against them after their conquest and the subsequent build-up of the allies of strange bedfellows who were lining up against Iraq. Abdulla's soldiers had worked steadily and efficiently to build bunkers and fighting positions that were planned and placed in such a way as to funnel allied armor and troops into kill zones of minefields and intense crossfire. It didn't work. The initial aerial Operation Desert Shield was soon pounding their carefully crafted defenses into dust and splinters. Abdulla did everything in his ability to keep his troops ready for the upcoming battle. But, they mutinied. They seized him and, taking a heated piece of metal, scorched the tattoo off his arm.
I still wonder how Abdulla, Ali, and the other four men I met and shared tea with are doing today. I hope for them a stable and prosperous Iraq devoid of mad strongmen and the gross corruption it entailed. Maybe someday, we can meet again, and sit for some tea.
