The Team House - The Untold Story of Special Forces and the Iraqi Kurdish Resistance | Mark Grodvic | Ep. 371

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

This conversation delves into the experiences of Mark Grdovic, a member of the 10th Special Forces Group, during the Iraq War, particularly focusing on their operations with Kurdish forces. It covers the planning, execution, and challenges faced during the invasion, including the establishment of relationships with local forces, the importance of communication, and the dynamics of military strategy in a complex environment. Grab Mark's book here:⬇️https://www.amazon.com/Those-Who-Face-Death-Resistance/dp/1963781058https://www.markgrdovic.com/Today's sponsors GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 25% off sitewide! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Introduction to Special Forces and the Kurdish Resistance07:55 Planning for the Invasion of Iraq11:51 Establishing Relationships with Kurdish Forces16:06 Challenges of Communication and Coordination23:54 Infiltration and Initial Operations27:51 Operation Viking Hammer: The Assault Begins31:57 The Role of Air Support and Tactical Decisions35:56 Engagements with Enemy Forces39:54 The Dynamics of Kurdish Politics and Warfare43:56 The Aftermath of the Initial Assault01:07:21 The Kurdish Liberation and the Battle of Halabja01:10:07 Iran's Strategic Alliances and the Role of Terrorists01:11:32 Missed Opportunities: The Zarqawi Connection01:12:51 Challenges with Coalition Forces and Coordination01:17:04 The Complexities of Surrender and Iraqi Army Dynamics01:28:02 Restoring Order: The Role of Basic Services01:31:57 The Transition from Occupation to Governance01:38:33 Lessons Learned and Reflections on the OperationBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. This is episode 371 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. And our guest today is Mark Gertovich. He is the author of Those Who Face Death, the untold story of Special Forces and the Iraqi Kurdish Resistance. Those who face death, that's the translation of Peshmerga, right? Correct. Yeah. So this book tells the story. story of 10th Special Forces Group in northern Iraq during the invasion in 2003, going through a whole series of things, going after Ansar al-Sharia in the north, Operation Viking Hammer, to going after Saddam's Army and Kirk Cook and Salamania, all kinds of interesting stuff. I was telling you before the show, I feel like we've done probably close to a dozen interviews with different people who had different little roles on the ground in northern Iraq during

that time. But I felt like this book really kind of like brings it all together because you were the S3 for 10th Group. Third Battalion of 10th Group when this happened and you were in country, of course. So just to start it off, let's talk a little bit about your background in 10th group and leading us into your unit's background in Kurdistan already from the 1990s. Yeah, that's a great starting point. So I joined Special Forces and I was a 10th group or by trade. I was a 110 guy as a team. later. And then a few years later, I'd gone to the British Staff College. I'd been an instructor at the Q-Course, and I had the chance to come back to 10th Group, but the third battalion, Fort Carson. And I was telling you, I think, before, I got back to 10th Group probably three days before 9-11.

You know, so I didn't think it was going to be quite as action-packed as it was. 10th group has a history from the Gulf War where they didn't participate as an active unit in the Gulf War, but they did conduct operation and provide comfort in the North with the Kurdish refugee situation. And a very, very interesting mission, very, very dynamic. The first iteration of it in 91 was pretty chaotic, to say the least. And the guys did a great job. You know, they did an amazing job. They went into some really remote, hard places.

They linked up with some indigenous, you know, folks and dealt with really, really dramatic circumstances and resolved it to a great humanitarian issue. The United States then created the no-fly zone in the north, and we stayed on for several years providing QRF up there and C-SAR, if any, you know, allied aircraft got shot down in the conduct of enforcing the no-fly zone. And that culminated in 1996 when there was a coup against Saddam that, you know, arguably has CIA, some CI support behind it. And that's, you know, people will debate about that. Robert Bears. book is about it. And it went very, very badly. So Saddam was able to defeat the coup. So there's two

aspects to that. One, in 1981, the Kurds and the Shi and the South rose up at the end of the Gulf War, because they assumed that's what we were implying they should do. And it went very, very badly for both of them. Okay. So then again, 96, they rise up. And again, it goes very, very badly. And the Kurdish forces are largely slaughtered. The United States does an emergency withdrawal of all CIA and U.S. footprint in northern Iraq, the Kurds then sort of devolve, the two main Kurdish factions now devolve into a fighting match that turns into a civil war between them. So when it's 2001, 2002, and we're talking about going back into Iraq and linking back up with the Kurds, that baggage is there, that we've actually betrayed them three times, once in

1971, once in 1991, and once in 1996. And they all have that memory. They are sort of in a fragile ceasefire between their fairly brutal civil war between themselves for about three years. So that's the environment that the CIA and we are getting back into. Let's talk a little bit so about how post-9-11, when was it that, you know, 10th group gets like kind of the warno? Because there's like the unofficial one and the official one, right? Yeah. Well, I can tell you, a member of the force, and I think everybody did this, seventh group, first group. When Afghanistan happened, everybody rationalized like, it should be us. Like, why are they sending? Why are they

sent in a fifth group? Clearly, it should be us. Everybody did that because we were all, you know, rightly so somewhat freaked out. And I'd say the first time I'd heard a hint of, hey, we're starting to plan for a contingency invasion. I don't know if we use the term invasion, was probably February of 2002. So, like, honestly, five months after 9-11. Now, there wasn't much detail planning from my perspective. I think there was at CENTCOM from like February to May. June of 2002 is where it started to get serious. Like June of 2002 was my first month as the S3 for third battalion. I had to go to CENTCOM for a planning conference. So now I was fully read on to what we were, what was being intended in the plan at that point. And I will also point out,

we also thought as I joke in the book, everyone was like, look, don't tell anybody, but it's probably in about 30 days, 60 days. We kept getting told, I got a friend on the staff, and it's going to happen next month. So we didn't know we'd have eight, nine months to plan. We thought we'd have 30 days to plan. And that just dragged on for the better part of, from June 2002 to February 2003. And this was around the time frame that you guys started shooting pilot teams in with the CIA. Yeah.

So it's a really important point to understand the story. the story because there's a potential that whether it's conventional forces or somebody else, you know, they heard about this success and they think that it's magic that if I link you up with indigenous forces in 24 hours, you can do all this great stuff. It's not what happened. The CIA reestablishes contact, I think it was June or July. And the CIA, if you're aware of it, they established specific teams, one for the north, one for the south, and one for the west. And they were called Nile, Sile, and Wilde, Northern Iraqi liaison element, southern Iraqi and Western Iraqulies and Illinois.

And they were supposed to develop the situation, if you will. Now, in the North, it's pretty easy because they had a strong relationship with the Kurdish factions because we were in Kurdish territory during when we were enforcing the no-fly zone. So they reestablished contact. They came out of country. They grabbed us and said, hey, that's the first time I met their guys. And they said, we'd like some guys to augment our team to go back into Northern Iraq. And the term we would use would be to create a pilot team.

we had actually detailed guys to the agency after 9-11 for probably the better part of the last 10 months. So when the agency was like, we would like some of your guys. We're like, well, gee, how about these five? Or six. Like we knew exactly who they wanted to work with that had a relationship. So it was super easy. So in October, they all went back into country. So October 2002, they put a physical team, you know, CIA, 10th group team on the ground.

in northern Iraq, starting to do that, you know, I'll call it that clandestine coordination. Was that Sam's team that went in? Yeah, Sam, Sam Fattis was, for lack of a bit of term, like the chief of base, let's say, the overall chief, and then he had two teams, one to work with each Kurdish faction. For the most part, Sam kind of migrated to the northern faction, which was the Kurdish Democratic Party or KDP, and the rest of his team worked with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which is the element I was with. So we kind of divided into the north and the southern teams. And there's a really funny story in your book that I wanted to ask you about that,

you know, while all this is going on with the pilot teams and the agency is starting to have a light footprint in northern Iraq, you guys are back at Fort Carson Planning. Tell us about the Kurds that show up at your base. Oh, my God, yeah. Yeah, as you're alluding to, yeah, there's a couple of, I slipped in a couple of anecdotes that are a little bit amusing in there. So when we were planning back at Fort Carson, particularly you got to appreciate in those days, like if someone told us we were doing classified planning, we weren't configured for that.

We didn't really have real dedicated skiff space. So we're doing our planning myself and my sort of counterpart warrant officer, Jay Klein, are drawing graphics on a map of northern Iraq. It's probably about the size of this couch. We're literally on our knees. And all of a sudden we look up and there's two guys standing in the same. in the doorway and the door's propped open with a cinder block. And they're standing in the doorway and I look up and they immediately hit me with like a British style salute.

They're like, sir, reporting for duty. And Jay grabs something else and throws it over the map. And he's like, I don't think they, and he whispered it. I don't think they saw it. And one of the guys saluting goes, ah, my hometown, Kirk Cook. And I whispered to him. I was like, I think they saw it. So we quickly determine like, who are you guys?

and they introduced themselves. They're both Kurdish gentlemen. They made a pilgrimage to Fort Carson. This was their pilgrimage after 9-11 to report for duty. They were people that either worked as an interpreter or some other service during the provide comfort years. And this is, I can't remember if I said this in a book, this is actually really nuts. You're like, well, how did they find us? They all had like, for lack of a bit of term, pay stubs or like coordination documents with the last, team leader in northern Iraq for the evacuation in 96 was Captain Pat Roberson. So they were looking for Captain Pat Roberson. Captain Pat Roberson, who literally just retired as a major general a few months ago, was now Major Pat Roberson, one of our company commanders. So, you know, I don't, the crazy thing is I don't know how they got onto Fort Carson. But then I know when they got onto Fort Carson,

they must have been wandering around and like, where is the 10th Special Forces Group and some helpful America was like, oh, it's behind that burn over there. Just walk to it. They walk to it. They get to the group headquarters and they asked, you know, who's doing the secret planning? And someone's like, see that door over there propped up with the cinder block? There's guys in there that can help you out. And like, thank you, sir. Yeah. And for what it's worth, those two gentlemen were gold mines. They did turn out to be spectacular, I'm going to say patriots, for lack of a bit of term. Because, like, it's all funny to talk about, but like, these are literally two Iraqi gentlemen. Kurdish descent that made their way to us on their own dime are reporting for duty to go back

into Iraq. And I don't know if people can appreciate how seriously dangerous that is for them, more so than me. Like it's dangerous for me. It's complete suicide for them if this goes badly. And they were, I think we only actually probably brought like five interpreters for the entire battalion. Wow. And they were all people like that that made their way to us voluntarily. So tell us about, you know, a little bit more in depth about putting the guys into the isolation facility, PMT. You and Ken Tovo had it, I mean, I remember you mentioned in the book how the teams often aren't given enough time to do PMT.

Yeah. And you guys, I've tried to alert them as early as possible and get them. Of the entire story, this is one of the pieces personally I'm most proud of, you know, as one of my responsibilities. So for the listeners of men, I know, Ken Tovo, now retired Lieutenant General Tovo, formerly Lieutenant Colonel Tovo was the battalion commander at the time. I was his operations officer. and fortunately we have very similar analytical styles of how we approach problems and we just got along

like seamlessly. The planning was very screwed up as planning always is, particularly in the real world. Like, you know, there's sometimes where it might sound like I'm throwing stones. Like the planning wasn't very good. It's always going to be that way. You have to be able to adapt to it to a degree. Sincom was overwhelmed. And that could sound like I'm criticizing, but I also do respect Afghanistan is going on.

And as I mentioned, look, there's various versions of the Iraq invasion as they're arguing how to do it. Should we go heavy? Should we go light? Should we do the, you know, it's the same stuff you deal with at a team level. Three course of actions. Heavy light and the, you know, combination. So their staff is overwhelmed. As a result, they never really generated an order that translated down to Soxent, the T-Soc, for guidance.

The T-Soc never generated an order to the group, like a written order. Everybody kind of peripherally knew what was going on, but there was not a physical written order. So we were very aware of this, and we made a very conscious decision that we're not going to pass that on to our subordinates. We are going to write an order, and it wasn't a bullshit order. Like, I'm the guy that wrote it. It's about 13, 14 pages. And we're doing the best we can to give guidance that we think is worthwhile. And it's not just guidance that I got.

It's our decision of, this is what I need you to do. This is what I need you to do. and we were very specific that we need to get this to the teams quickly so they will have time to do something with it. You know, the same thing you've heard your whole career, one-thirds, two-thirds. I'm going to take one-third. I'm going to give them two-thirds. It takes discipline to do that and not convince yourself, but I'm just going to take a little more time to write a perfect order. So we spent the bulk of July, I gave the teams a warning order and said, do whatever you got to do, sort your shit out, July is yours. come August, you're under our control.

And that was because I needed to write the order. So we also then needed to plan and coordinate. We're going to put teams into isolation. And as you probably know, that's not a normal event. Like as much as we talk about it and you do it in the Q-course, isolating to go into enemy territory, because I'm not using isolation as a generic term for just planning. We're going into old-school isolation.

And we made a very, very deliberate decision at the time. Tenth Group had a beautiful isolation facility over there. we very deliberately were like, we're not going over there. Because we knew if we go over there, we're going to get inundated with daily questions and requirements, and the guys aren't going to be left alone. So we made a crazy decision to go to Pinyon Canyon. Pinyon Canyon, if you're, I don't know if you're familiar with it, it's three hours. You know, it's the Camp McCall to Fort Carson, but it's three hours away.

And there's actually, say it's Camp McCall's not accurate. There's nothing there. There's nothing there. There's no facilities. There's shacks. but like shacks with electricity and nothing else. So we decided we're going to take one company of teams for one week at a time and cycle them through isolation at Pinyon Canyon. We're going to give them a staff mission brief up front at Fort Carson and then put them on buses and drive them out there.

And I make this point, the staff mission brief, I'm going to basically read the order to them and give them a chance right now to ask me questions before we put into planning. just trying to escalate things, you know, get it moving quickly. On the Tuesday and Wednesday of every one of these weeks, and we did it three weeks in a row, Tovo and I would get up at four in the morning, we would drive, you know, our personal cars, the three hours to Pinyon Canyon, we would get out, the staff was all over it. They had the teams prepared two hours per team. And when I described this, it sounds like it's crazy when I'm saying it.

We did two hours per team literally with a five-minute break between the two-hour blocks, and we did five-minute break. between the two-hour blocks and we did five teams a day. And then we got back in the car for the three-hour drive back to Fort Carson. And, you know, because we are getting inundated with questions from groups. So like we're absorbing all that stuff, but we're leaving the guys out there. And I make this point, so if you're familiar with how we do planning special forces, the Tuesday is like what we'd call the Mike Hunter, the concept brief, to just see if you're on track. Did you understand what I asked you to do? Okay, I think you're, you guys seem like you do it. I'll be back Friday for your final brief to us. So we did it again on the Friday, the three-hour

drive, the 10 hours of briefings, three-hour drive back. But the point of this is we didn't make it like an audition. You know, we, and it took, even with our teams, it took a little while to break them of the cycle of, do you understand what I need you to do? Yes, sir. Okay, repeat it back to me. And they'd like read, you know, a whole paragraph. I'm like, in your words, what do I need you to do? And we got them to the point where they felt comfortable dialoguing with us. And I'm like, do you have what you need. Yes, sir. I'm going to ask you, come on, man, don't do that. So we, but But the point to this is, we really almost beat the teams in a friendly way into submission of, you've got to talk to me.

If everything falls apart, do you know what's the most important thing I need you to do? And as goofy as it sounds, we spent a lot of time on the words, like what we were saying. And we stress to them, you know, if you've understood the context of our mission, I need you to continue to threaten the Iraqi army in the north. If you get into a great firefighting, kill a whole bunch of them, but you guys culminate, meaning a bunch of you were killed and you're common and effective, that's in Saddam. favor. He can maneuver south. So not to sound, you know, flipping about it, but I'm like, your mission is to not die. I need you to be a threat. And the teams got that. And that's not the way their brains were going

into isolation planning, though. You know, they were like Americans. They were thinking about attrition. How do I kill as much as possible? Like, your mission is not to kill as much as possible. Your mission is to be a continuous threat that forces Saddam against his desires to stay there and not maneuver, you know, counterattack. That horse multiplier type of thing. And getting the guys to realize this. And like you could almost watch the light bulb go off in their head. If you're in the market for a new mattress,

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Thanks, guys. How was it for you guys? Because obviously, you're not planning in a vacuum, right? You have the entire rest of the U.S. military and coalition forces and everybody else. So how much was changing on your end where you would have to go back to those guys? Strangely enough, CENTCOM, you know, I think, I don't want to make it sound terrible, but like didn't really care what we were doing. They were almost like, hey, look, we're going to fight in the South. That's where the real invasion is.

We got these other things going on. They were almost like, go do your thing in the North. And it's a little bit screwed up because they didn't really dig into what am I asking you to do. They were like, you're going to go in the North and do some stuff. And they argued amongst themselves a lot about what are we doing out in the West, like scud hunting. There was a huge argument about scud hunting in the West. Desert Storm. And that's right. That's important because there was kind of a fifth group's not going to lose the scud hunting mission.

But there wasn't a need for a scud hunting mission. Scuds were not an issue. Firing scuds at Israel were not an issue in this conflict. But putting guys in, you know, gun jeeps and doing area denial to harass stuff in the West, that makes total sense. Right. But so like the words actually made. matter to do you understand what I'm asking you to do so with with regard to us it didn't change from the plan too much circumstances change in a minute where it all kind of falls apart but

they just understood you're going to the north you're going to infiltrate from turkey and I don't really need I don't I don't care that much about what you're going to do because it's going to go great for me in the south I'm probably not going to need you to be honest with I don't mean to hurt your feelings like that's almost the attitude we were dealing with and that's partly why you had to establish a back channel right with the guys that we're in country. That's a little different. Yeah, what you're talking about. So I've got my pilot team in country. And for whatever reason, you know, as the way I say it, somebody between me, someone in the chain of command in the United States military between me and my pilot team is

determining that they need to filter with those guys are sending me. So we had, I can't remember what it was, but I'm going to say it was probably like December. One of the pilot team members had to be exultrated because literally his daughter was having emergency brain surgery. So his name is J.C. He gets pulled out. And I'm aware of this. We know this because we know his family. So we're like, hey, can we speak to JC? And like, no, he's on a compartment at a secret mission.

I'm like, yeah, we all know that. Like, why are you talking to me like that? And we asked for about a week. And it was denied. And literally, J.C. is going back to the airfield to get reinserted. Like, let's say it's a Friday. He's going back at 3 o'clock to the airfield. About 1.30, we're like, okay, enough is enough.

We're meeting J.C. at the airfield. And like, we didn't have permission to do that. We're just doing it. So I roll in and I've got a, I literally have like a yellow pad, and I've got 100 questions. And I start going down the list of what's the answer to this? And he's like, we keep sending you. He goes, we sent you all of this. I'm like, JC, we haven't gotten any of this. So one, we answered 100 questions, which was like gold, really, really important.

And then we established a back channel, an unofficial back channel on the erridium, encrypted aeradium satellite phone to his team leader, Andy Grunland, that now we can talk. And we are finding out Andy is writing on the top of reports for Major Mark Erdovich, and they're not getting to me. And in some cases, the RFIs I'm getting answers to. I'm getting wrong answers. Like Trump, you're getting wrong answers. From official channels. Yeah. So like, for example, there's an airfield. There's two airfields in the north.

Coincidentally, one in the KDP sector, one in my sector. Saddam built them during the Iran-Iraq War. Never had a plane land on them. They've never been used. So our plan is, hey, can we use these airfields? The official work comes down to my, through my channels, no, your airfield is cratered. It's not serviceable. 100% wrong.

100% wrong. So now Andy is now sending me, my pilot team leader is now sending me surveys with pictures of the runway. It's fantastic. Dude's out there sun tanning on it. Yeah. So on Nesson, this is an example of like, what does the pilot team do for me? So we're working with the Air Force and we're like, hey, are you guys going to be cool with us air landing MC130s on these runways?

And to my surprise, the Air Force was like, no. I was like, but I thought you guys are special ops. Like, I've heard stories you're going to land in the desert. They're like, no, we have to still survey them. I'm like, I've got guys on the ground. They survey them and they determine that the thickness of the tarmac is not enough. It's Iraqi standards, not to American standards. So we're like, well, what would it take to land an American plane?

They're like, you're going to need one more inch of tarmac or asphalt. So the pilot team coordinates with the Kurds and they're like, who built this runway? and the guys in that house over there. It's like three kilometers from the runway. So they get a bag of money and they go pay the family. What would it take to put one more inch of asphalt? Now, you know, it is kind of funny to talk about. Like, that guy must be like, this is the greatest day of my life.

Like, finally, the airfield I built 20 years ago, somebody wants me to pay me to put another inch of asphalt on it. And they do. And he's doing it with like one truck and his son. So nobody's really noticing, you know, that him and his dump truck and his, you know, and his steamroller are just doing this little piece. That's how we got the airfield.

to be functional. And the same thing happened in Sam's area. And I mean, just to point out to people, the way this was being handled, I mean, it defeats the purpose of the pilot team doctrinally, right? The pilot teams, there has set everything up for you guys like they were doing with the airfield. If I wasn't getting the information. And pass that information back to you guys. And it's not their fault. It sounds like there's a comma breakdown. You see it later in the story as things start to go badly. Like on unforeseen circumstances, thank God I got the pilot in the ground, who can sort of broker that we're still on board with you or, you know, they can negotiate on my behalf and keep our alliance

functional so that when I don't get to come in, when my main body doesn't get to come in, and I'm coming in weeks later than I expected and we've got to compress the timeline now, I can do that because the pilot team has done the preliminary work. Tell us about getting the main body moved to forward staging in Romania. Okay, yeah. So, as I've alluded, this, what's amazing about this story, I think, besides that I think it's just an incredible story, and it is largely unknown. It has so many twists and pitfalls that make it sound like it's not feasible. Like, you know, I told you what your mission is.

Create a second front in the north. And you're like, okay, that's, okay. By the way, like I said, though, they're fighting each other recently in a civil war. You know, there's all these problems. And we betrayed them previously. And like, okay. Oh, and also Turkey, where the forward staging base is going to be just notified us that they're out. You know, like, what do you mean they're out? We've been smuggling our gear to Turkey

for six months. Sock-Yer has been buying land rivers in Europe six at a time and smuggling them to Diabaker Turkey to stage on our airfield so we could drive across the Turkish border. Our plan was we were going to drive half the teams across the border and we're going to fly half the teams in with vehicles. All of our equipment, heavy equipment, our ammo resupply, all of our stuff is in Diabaker Turkey. And the church's like, not, we're out. You know, which is, yeah, which is like, come on man yeah this is not like you know we lost a weapon right like this is kind of a huge hit right and we're like okay so we got to come up with a different FSB and move all our equipment no they're not giving our stuff back too like okay that's that's a tough one yeah that that's above

my pay grade well you're like I'm prepared for things like we lost a weapon right I'm not prepared for we lost the entire forward staging base on all of our equipment that's a that's a tough one overcome um soccer did some great last minute coordinations and they were able to broker hey, we've got Romania has agreed to stage us. And I always jokingly says, like, most people like Romania, I didn't realize Romania shared a border with Iraq. It does not. It's actually a thousand miles farther away.

So while it's super cool that we are in Romania, it's not exactly solving my problem. So like, what do we do from Romania? And the issue, let me put it this. At the time we get to Romania, we're late. It's like, it's either the end of February or the beginning of March. Right before the invasion. Yeah, literally.

Everybody's freaking out because it feels like Sanam has brilliantly played his chest pieces to negate the entire Northern Front and fight the war he wants a single front war. Like, you know, as the guy who was watching Saddam's strategy, there is, I do have some respect for, he played strategy very well. A horrible person. But, you know, what he did with the pieces he had were freaking brilliant. So it appears that he has now broken an agreement. is only going to be a one front war. And we could be stuck yet again. And the guys are upset

because there's kind of, it's reminiscent of provide comfort. Like, we're going to be stuck just picking up the pieces if this war still happens. Saddam also then notifies the Kurds and says, hey, in a very Joker, Batman-like fashion, there's room for one Kurdish faction in my future Iraq, disgust amongst yourselves. Right. Here's a knife. Yeah. Well, kind of. Yeah. Turned off the lights. Not to hurt anybody's feelings, but like the KDP, the slightly stronger Kurdish faction was like we're interested. The PUK, my group

was like, no, we're not, you know, like my guys stood firm. Yeah. So like, and it makes sense. It's not because like they're, you know, one side's better than the other. The KDP is the, it was the larger faction. They have a stronger history relationship with, negotiating with Saddam, let's say. The PUK was the weaker

faction. So like they knew you guys are, you guys have one road to success and it's through the United States. So like they were all in 100% with us. So while we're in Romania freaking out, the Giustod of Commander, Colonel Cleveland, comes up with an idea and we see an opportunity to slip six ODAs and one B team across the border. There's sort of this like diplomatic, some diplomatic envoy that's going to go like right across the border and speak to the Kurds, like some, you know, U-com diplomatic thing.

So we were able to convince the Turks that we're going to send a company of special forces as security. The company that gets tagged to do this is Major Pat Roberson, the captain, the former captain who was the last guy out in 96, and six ODAs, three from his company, or three from third battalion, and three from second battalion. They crossed the border, some are on a bus, and some go out in rental cars. For whatever reason, the six team doesn't get across the border because they don't want to break up into rental cars and there's a bit of an argument and they get sent back to Romania. and the Turks kind of figure it out and seal the border. So now we've got two pilot teams, one from Second Battalion, one from Third Battalion, and the CIA folks. And we've got five ODAs and one B team.

That is the force in country. And everybody else is in Romania freaking out that this is as far as we can go. So then one day Cleveland says, hey, to shore the Kurds up, let's put in the two battalion commanders and the two operations officers, which would be, you know, Tovo, myself, and my peers from Second Battalion. So we fly from Romania to Inselik. You know, you're smiling because like there's, that's a crazy story. There's things that you don't expect, or at least I didn't expect what happened.

You know, so like when we infiltrated to Inchrelic, we're in civilian clothes, you know, and it's, to me it's a big one because like Tovo said to me right before we went in, are you bringing a rucksack? And I was like, no. There's no scenario where there's a rucksack on my back. I was like, it's just not happening. I got a small go bag and a civilian-y-looking kit bag. And the C-130 lands, we get off the ramp, and the C-130, like, literally turns around and just takes off. And it's really weird because now the four of us are standing in the middle-less gigantic airfield, and there's nobody around. And we don't know what to do.

And here comes the little airport car, you know, with, like, the flashing light. And it's a golf car. It's a golf car. It's got a Turkish private and an American private. And they pull up to us, and they look at these four crazy civilians on the runway, and they're like, where did you guys come from? And we have no cover story. We literally are like, uh, we're here for the war. We don't know. So they put us in the car.

They take us to the custom shack. They start immediately, like, interrogating us, asking for our passports, our ID cards, whatever. They have them. A guy in the crowd shouts our name out. We assumed he was probably CIA. CIA support, logistic, whatever. And he- One of the runners. Yeah, he basically, like, just, you know, lifts the, you know, like the barrier out of the way,

grabs our passports off the, the scanners. The private's freaking out. and we walk out of the getting a car and leave. The next morning, we drive the 12-hour drive from Insulik to the Iraqi border crossing. And the whole time we're doing this, you know, we're like, oh, we're so getting arrested. We are so getting arrested at the Turkish border. So we're thinking they're either going to confiscate our equipment and send us home, or they're going to arrest us and confiscate our equipment.

And then our main body from Romania is going to infiltrate without us. That's what we're expecting is going to happen. So we're at the border, and I'll just say the CIA low justicians with us do a fantastic job. You know, they're going to, they're going to, it wasn't a plan that they're going to distract the border guards, but they are getting into it with the border guards who are trying to search our bags. And there's an agreement that they wouldn't search our backs. But the Turks don't want to hear it. So they're getting in this big argument.

While this argument's going on, it's a river with a bridge that crosses into Iraq. The piloting from Second Battalion is there in their cars. And I know them on the other, like on the other side. Yeah, like, like 25 meters away. Waiting to receive. Yeah. So we walk around and I'm talking to him and like, what's going on. I'm like, that's not going well. They're going through our bags. They're kind of being, you know, jerks to us. And then I'm the one that said, hey, if they're going to confiscate our equipment,

I'm not going to let them take my pistol and my encrypted radio. So I walk around my bag while they're arguing, and I take my stuff out. You know, I basically sticking under my shirt. When I did that, my colleagues, my three other colleagues were like, I'm going to do the same. So everybody did it. So we all stole our pistols back and our encrypted and bitter radios. And then it kind of dawned on us.

We're like, if we could steal our pistols and our radios, and I think maybe one of the second of ten guys said this. like if you just grab your rucks and throw them in the car, they're not going to chase you. The Turks are not going to chase you into Iraq. Because the Kurds will kill them.

So I was like, good, go get the car. So they literally like back the car up real slow. And the cars, by the way, are all like weird American cars from the 70s. Like it's like old vehicles and stuff like that. So they back the cars up, open the trunk and we grab our rucksacks

and calmly, not freaking out, calmly just put them in the trunk. We get in. And we drive off like five miles an hour. And we're like, we did it. We're in. Now I heard later from, some of my CIA counterparts that, yeah, the Turks freaked down.

We're like, where are those other four guys? To which you're like, what four guys? And they're like, this is, you know, unacceptable. So they sealed the border after that. We all joked that our faces were going to be on the back of Turkish milk cartons. Have you seen these missing children? But that then starts the three-hour drive from that border to second battalion's headquarters. Then we need to get to a place called the Painted Rocks,

which is like a checkpoint Charlie between the two Kurdish factions, where this team is now going to hand me off to Major Pat Roberson and the third battalion pilot team. And I will tell you, it was sporty, because it's late at night or early in the morning, I suppose, like three in the morning. And we link up, and I'm really happy to see Pat. Like I know Pat very well, and I'm like, hey, man, it's good to see. And he immediately goes, we got to get out of here.

I'm like, what's it? He goes, we never do this. And he goes, the longer we stay here, the more likely that somebody's going to take a shot at each other. So I'm like, okay. So we get in the cars with Pat, you know, and his team, and now we drive another two to three hours to the PUK headquarters. Literally the sun is coming up. We've been awake for the better part of 36 hours. And from our, you know, special forces training perspective, and now it's time for the first G chief meeting, action.

You know, and you're like, yeah, yeah, that's good. Let's do it. You know, so like, and they're all like moderately well rested. Like they're up for, it's going to be a packed day. We've got a full agenda for you today. And that's, you know, we can get into it. But the next 72 hours is a world win of education of, okay, let's, we got in way later than we wanted.

Let's make up for it by just working straight for the next 72 hours. And you were like meeting with the Talibanis. So, yeah, my faction was led by Jalal Taliban, no relation to the Taliban. As I often joke that my mom was telling everybody that I worked in Iran with the Taliban. It's close. It's not exactly the same thing. They were great partners. The PUK, as far as I'm concerned, they were excited about working with us, and they were not the bad partners you're trained for in the Special Forces Schoolhouse.

They were accommodating. They were good fighters. They were well organized. They were squared away. They were a pleasure to work with, to be honest with you. And his son and his nephew were both fluent British accent English speakers. And there was two others that were also English speakers of his family circle. That was the glue that connected it all.

Like Bafel Talibani, Jalal Talibani's son was probably the person I interfaced with the most in Lahore Talibani. And they were just, those guys were worth gold. Yeah, Lahore runs the intelligence service, I believe. Yeah, there's just some friction going on in Iraq right now. Oh, that happens over there, not part of the world. Yeah, and unfortunately, I've heard him in Baffle or not on spectacular terms, unfortunately. But I love both of those guys, and I owe those guys a tremendous amount. I think they're both fantastic individuals.

I just want to ask one clarifying question. Did the U.S. ever get all that equipment from Turkey or did Turkey? Yeah, we did. Okay. We did. You know, we'll talk about it, I'm sure in a second, but like the main infill after the United States infilled the main body in a fairly dramatic fashion, Turkey quickly was like, my friend, there was no need for that. There was, because we basically, we'll talk about, I'm sure, in a second, but a C-130 arrived in Turkey with a bunch of bullet holes in it. And Turkey quickly was like, there was.

There was no need for this. It's a misunderstanding. You could have flown over our airspace. All your equipment is right here, too. It just makes more sense. So they released everything. So our stuff now started to trickle into us late. Yeah, it was a little interesting.

And so let's talk a little bit about, like, what kind of the general scheme of maneuver is here, because you guys are having to deal with Halabshah and supposedly a chemical weapons depot up in the north, but also with Saddam's forces. Like, how are you? in Ken Toego thinking Arcanbury

important piece that I didn't talk about so as I jokingly talk about like this is your mission there's a couple of problems there's a couple of you know snags we've betrayed them multiple times before they are in a fragile

ceasefire of their civil war Saddam is very capable you know his equipment is outdated but he's a capable brutal dictator that knows how to crush rebellions and I always joke with my pilot team again Andy Grinland my pilot team leader

as we were communicating, I was like, how's it going? Are the PUK cool working with us? He's like, yeah, the good news and bad news. They're totally cool working with us. The bad news is their real focus is on this violent extremist, Islamic extremist element called Ansar al-Islam that has taken up refuge in the mountainous area

to their rear along the Iranian-Iraqi border. It's affiliated with al-Qaeda. The United States had been keeping an eye on it because, you know, we had intelligence, if you will, that this al-Qaeda affiliated group is experimenting with biological and chemical weapons. So there was an interest in this group. But now the issue is a little bit different that they would love to work with us. But the problem is this group's in their rear area.

And that's the majority of their forces are containing this area. To which we're like, okay, as it turns out, we don't like those guys either. Right. So we joke and we was like, what's it going to take? I'm going to write a number on a piece of paper. What's it going to take to get you guys to go attack the Iraqis with me next week? And they're like, if you can help us, and this is what Andy and I joked about, where he's like, yeah, I just broke it a deal that, you know, we're just going to help them conduct this daylight frontal attack in the mountains uphill to, you know,

against this entrenched fanatical enemy. As soon as we do that, they'll do what we want. I'm like, and it's funny to joke about, but like our attitude was almost like, okay. But, but, I mean, from their perspective, too, like they don't have not, like, that's, that's business as usual a lot of times. I mean, it really is a little legitimate negotiation. like, hey, I'd like to help you the United States, but I do have some other issues that are holding me back. Right. So we're like, okay, well, if we were to make those guys go away,

would you be cool attacking the Iraq? Now, they're like, yes. I'm like, cool. So, you know, Tovo, myself, we're all like, okay, this is what we just agree to. And on top of all of that, this is, oh, and by the way, I don't know how fast we need to do this. And that's a really important point because it's almost like, what do you mean? You know, so many people have combat experience now. What they don't have is experiencing an invasion. And that's a different animal. And I used to teach this quite a bit. When we're doing an invasion, if you think you're going to get the five Ws, like it's at two o'clock on Thursday, you're not getting that. It's not happening. You know, if anybody's watched the movie the longest day, you know, about the D-Day invasion,

and you will notice that the Airborne, the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Commandor don't know what D-Day is. There are, you know, they show John Wayne and the other guys argued. Two-star generals will not know that to the invasion. So if you think, you know, Special Forces Battalion is going to get the inside scoop of when the invasions, you're not. So to recap, the mission you've given me is to create a second front that will tie up Saddam's forces in support of the American invasion from the South. You're like, okay, cool, when do you need me to do this? Don't know. How fast do you need me to do? Don't know. When are you going to put me in? Don't know. So there's a lot of don't knows. And that's cool. So that's when I joke, like the guys, the teams, we gave them the best

information we could, but when we told them things that were very ambiguous, it is kind of fun to make fun of them that they were like, okay. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't know how much time you're going to have to do it. Okay. You might need to conduct that daylight frontal attack in the mountains like this week. All right. And to make it a little more spicy, there were like what, what, two other Islamist factions up in that area? Yeah. I mean, there's actually a bunch of crazy weirdo groups along the border area, but this one is the main one that is a slightly different problem because it is, it legitimately is affiliated with Al Qaeda. Yeah. And what you're referring to on their fringes there's another group the Islamic group of Kurdistan the IGK

and the Islamic it was a four-letter act in my camera the name of it now um there's so there's two other crazy groups on their fringes that are also like just weird weird groups do you think that um saddam like knew about them oh no he didn't care that or did he did he like tolerate that like tacitly like allow them because he they were putting pressure 100% the courage so like we knew that's a great question that's important that's important important in the context of this. We knew there's an intelligence officer from Saddam's, you know, army embedded with them. I used to know his name. I can't remember what it was. We killed him in a strike. And I have no doubt, just like us, that dude doesn't look like an Iraqi. He's probably

grown out of beard. He looks like an al-Qaeda guy to build rapport. He will recite parts of, you know, the Koran that appeals to this group. Like, he is playing this group and keeping Saddam abreast up. They're not getting out of control. They're staying in the Kurdish area. Maybe we're even giving them some money and guns because they are crippling the Kurds from uniting and being, you know. And he's doing that. Saddam, like I said, it's a pretty smart thing that he's doing. Yeah. He hates this group.

There's people asked me recently, like, was Saddam, you know, in league with Al Qaeda, not even close? Yeah. Like, Al Qaeda hates Saddam more than they hate us. And Saddam hates them. But he sees an opportunity to leverage them. So he sends intelligence operatives that look like they're supportive of them. and they're all in. And then they also get to report back that, hey, these guys are doing okay.

They're not getting off the reservation. So that's the way Saddam managed that. Saddam also, by the way, had a bounty on us, which was interesting to learn. And so you've got these intelligence operatives from Saddam's military or the Fedonim, and they are linking up with these crazy groups saying, hey, or they're actually spreading the word to Kurdish population members too. if anyone can kill an American, you will be rewarded. And I think I talked about it in the book.

Bafel said to me one time, he told me about this. And our question was, well, how much, what's the reward? And he goes, they haven't said, but they said you will be able to live like a king. And for what it's worth, the day before I got there, the Kurds killed, the Peshmerga, killed a group of people dressed like Peshmerga with fake IDs, trying to infiltrate our area. and I saw that happen later in Halabja, another group, and you got a picture like, Halabja is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

for the big attack against, uh, on Sorrel Islam. You got 10,000 courage coming in here. So, like, nobody knows who anybody is. And if you sort of look like a guerrilla fighter, you're good. And they did still bust guys at checkpoints trying to infiltrate us, you know, largely to kill us as a really interesting dynamic. And then Sam probably, Sam Fattis talked about in his book, they tried to trap some of the intelligence officers.

Hey, why don't you come to the Iraqi side? And Sam would be like, why don't you come to the Kurdish side? Well, but like, yeah, they took fake pictures of dead Americans and pretended they were guys trying to claim the reward that I killed an American, you know, operative. Because like, yeah, Sam was the CIA guy in the north. And he was like playing this cat and mouse game with these Iraqi intelligence officers to the south of him. So, you know, well, I'll let you ask. So before we get into Viking Hammer, I'm one. There's a couple other things I think we've got to talk about if we're going roughly in water.

The air campaign kicks off. Yeah. So as I said, we've got two pilot teams, 580As and one B team, and now me and Tovo and my counterpart battalion commander and ops officer in the second battalion area. We're not feeling good about this. This is not what we expect. Like the force we have is too small. We have none of our equipment. All we've got are rucks, ax and weapons that we carried in.

We don't have the money we said we were going to bring in like because we said we'll bring in $100,000. For whatever stupid reason, the money did not materialize in time for our infiltration. So, like, we're failing on every promise we've made to these guys. And they're being cool with us, but you can kind of see they're like, have we made a mistake? And literally, like, General Colin Powell is talking to the UN saying Saddam has one more chance. So you're like, this could all still really unravel. So we're trying to figure out if there's only 37 of us here, what can we do? And it's really goofy because we're like, okay, one team will go.

do the Ansar attack. The other team will go attack the green line with the Kurds. You know, like this is like the most bare bones, ridiculous plan. And then we find out on March 19th, the shock and awe campaign kicks off. And we, you know, it was a surprise. Like, we did not know it was kicking off tonight. Like, I think I actually saw it on the news. Were they actioning targets that your guys had? No. It had to do with Sonom had fired some rockets at the south, like into Kuwait. and the president gave the order crossed the berm now, let's go. So there was no extended air campaign

like the Gulf War where they bombed for 30 days. Didn't they fire like, was it like 76 Tomahawks in your AO? Oh, yeah. So we always knew part of my plan that I don't have the forces here to do anyway would include 64 cruise missiles to bombard the onslaught area. So now we, so when the air campaign kicked off,

let's say tonight. we're like, okay, it's on. Like, I guess, you know, we all get together. We're like, I guess we're doing this. Like, we're doing what we got. It is what it is. There's a story in the book where I talk about, let's say, I acquired one AT4. The CIA had an AT4.

And I'm like, can I have that? And they're like, yeah, I guess. And they're like, do you have some 5, 5, 6? I'm like, yeah, sure, here's a can. So I give them a can to 5,56. They are like, yeah, take the AT4. Like, what do we care? And I literally turned to ODA 082.

And I'm like, here, I said it's sarcasticly, here, go defend the green line. But I love it because they're like, Roger Boss, I'm like, 1-84. Make it count. That speaks to the sort of mindset that we are. And we also then knew, we're like, if we don't use these cruise missiles, we're going to lose them. So while, yes, my plan was we will have four weeks of planning time with the Kurds, a week of air campaign. Yeah, let's take the cruise missiles tonight or tomorrow night. So we say we would like the cruise missile strikes tomorrow night.

and we start getting target list back that are totally different than the target list we'd sent on. And we were looking at all the defenses, and it keeps coming back, like 30 of the 64 cruise missiles are on the chemical facility of concern. And we're like, yeah, don't worry about that. It's a building.

Like one cruise missile will do it. Stop putting 30 cruise missiles on that. This goes back and forth multiple times, and we keep, somebody keeps changing our target list, and it's freaking us out. So one day we're going through the target list, this and we quickly found out, we're like, what's this? And it's the Pukk headquarters building in Halabja that somebody has targeted. So the night that the cruise missile strikes were going to happen, which, by the way, was Tobo's birthday, he is standing on the roof of the Pukk headquarters in Halabja with his Blue Force tracker, like 60% confident that he's not going to, you know, get a cruise missile to come down on him. And like, we're, like, we talked about this, like, okay, I'm going to stand way over here. Like, normally we were together, but like, we're going to separate tonight. You know, for this reason, if this goes badly, you know, and we're like to the point where I even insisted that somebody, I, on the guy was talking on the radio, like, what is your, what are your initials? What's your name? Because I'm, I'm telling you we are concerned about this target. So the missiles came in. It was somewhat underwhelming. At that point in my life, I had not seen 64, and I didn't get to see them. I didn't get to see the 64 missiles. But I think we all had an idea. It was going to be like super dramatic. The reality is, from where Tovo is, it's like 10 miles away up in the mountain. So, like, it sounded like,

It's going off in the distance, but the Kurds loved it. So we're like, we did something. It was quantifiable. You know, now what? And actually, the team that I sent with the AT4 to the Green Line actually did some pretty good stuff, driving up and down the Green Line. They actually did call some close air support. They got shot at too. They accidentally drew quite a lot of fire, which I only found that out like a year ago doing interviews for this book.

Accidentally. No, they did. Like, no, they trust me, their goal was to not get shot. shot out. And they're probing up to the green line, which doesn't have a lot of good terrain. And suddenly they start taking artillery and like, okay, they see us. They see us. And then they called some close air support. So that at least gave the Iraqis a sense of, okay, there's something on the green line now. It's not a free, it's not a free zone for them. So that's kind of the crappy position we found ourselves in. I will say too, because it's one of my favorite stories

in the book, it's probably the most special forces thing I've ever seen. In this time period where we feel bad. It's not going well. We're like, it's just us. The other guys aren't coming in. We've let these guys down. We're not getting on the legal aid. We're not getting the money. We're not getting the close air support. Three of my NCOs come to me and said, hey, would you be okay if we go out to the Kurdish front lines, front lines in the other direction to go, they want to go be seen by the Kurds because we feel like we've let them down in all respects. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay, no problem. So they throw on Kurdish uniforms. They drive out to the area. And as it turns out Quinson, they're all 18 bravos. One guy's a former mortar instructor. One guy's an 18 Bravo

instructor and the other guy was a former fired, you know, in his previous life to SF, he was a fire direction control officer. So they want to go out there and they want to, and they just want to be seen and talk to the Kurds and inspect their stuff. And when they get out there, the Kurds have some mortar tubes, but they don't really use them. They just kind of like eyeball it. And they talk about how like the tube is Russian, the site on the tube is Chinese and it's hose clamp on and the ammunition is Iranian. And the Iranian ammunition has like extra cheese charges because they're all rotted.

So like there's no sense of like you don't really know what is propelling this charge. So they get out there and they see the enemy. And the enemy has been, the enemy has been just hammering these guys because they have the high ground. So they make a question. They're like, hey, could we would you guys be okay if we shot at that enemy position? To which the Kurds I think must have been like,

oh, check this out. The Americans are about to get killed. Yeah, by all means. So the three of these guys took control of the 82, in the water, they fired around. And I think the Kurds were like, it doesn't go well. If you fire with them, they're going to shoot back. They fired around. The enemy fired around back. It landed. But I think the Kurds were very impressed because the guys, the way they handled it, very, very professional, and they acted like a mortar crew. And the Kurds hadn't really seen that before. So under fire, these guys, one guy's calling adjustments, you know, left 200, you know, whatnot.

And they're doing adjustments. And they do the adjustments. And he's like, hang it. They fire second round. Okay, it's closer, but it didn't hit. Second round comes in, and their round's getting closer. So now it's a gun battle of who's going to win. Well, we won. You know, the third round, they hit their target. And this gun has been harassing this position for months, if not years. They just killed it. And the Kurds saw that, like, holy crap, the crazy three Americans all stood out there under fire and made adjustments and were able to kill the enemy gun before it killed them. So, like, I love these guys. I actually just saw one of these guys in Stooker out last week. they come back that day and in typical good SF fashion like,

okay, don't be mad, let me just say everybody's okay. I'm like, what happened? And like, we killed some of the enemy today. And I was like, okay, tell me what happened. And they, you know, quite frankly, we were pretty happy to send that up like, hey, we had an engagement today with Ansar guys. We killed one of their gun crews. That was, that's the first direct engagement we had like that. And as much as everything else has been falling apart, rapport, the Kurds were like, the Kurds were like, These dudes are legit.

They're fighters. They do bring value even if all their equipment isn't here. It's like a wild game of chicken mixed with cornhole. But that's like the most special force of thing I've ever seen. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So tell us about the ugly baby infiltration. Because while all of this is going on, you still have this issue of getting the main body in.

Right. So the group in Romania, again, it's Colonel Cleveland, just soda commander. Just like our Christmasol issue, he has six MC-130s. allocated it to him. But he kind of knows, if I don't use them, they're going to get pulled soon. So we got to come up with something. So they come up with this insane plan. Let's fly the planes. And they had tried to cross the Turkish airspace multiple times and F-16s turned them back. Like they tried multiple nights in a row. So like let's fly the package to Jordan and let's max the aircraft out with people. Like it's just straight up ammunition and teams. And we're

going to fly to Jordan and then we're going to infiltrate from Jordan along the western long axis crossing the enemy lines, you know, which is really interesting because the enemy, there's several belts of enemy air defense that they're going to fly right over. And they're going to then infiltrate to the two airfields, KDP and PUK. Talking to one of the guys who was a team leader on the flight, you know, it's funny that he said, when we got to Jordan, he goes, I just assumed like we had bombed the shit out of all of those air defenses and like seeded them all. And he goes, I had no idea that the plan was, no, we're just going to turn the lights up and fly real fast and low. And the seats were all ripped out of the plane, so it's pure ammunition cargo down.

It's just dudes and rocks. Yeah, it's like, well, it's like explosives, ammunition, rocket launchers, and dudes. And the six planes take off. Three are supposed to come to my airfield. Three are supposed to go to the KDP airfield. They crossed the border. And it's a pretty, it's actually one of my favorite chapters in the book because I think it's a pretty dramatic story. And what I was able to do this.

Interesting was I was able to get interviews from the air crews and the guys in the back. because I've seen an article from previously from Air Cruz, but this was fusing this is what it was like for the cruise, this is what it was like for the guys in the back. And it's pretty harrowing. And as the story goes, when they briefed it, General Frank's the Scentcom commander in his memoir

says it was the hardest decision he had to make during the entire war to let them do this. Because yeah, the chances of this going catastrophically wrong were pretty good. But the chances of not doing it was the North was taken out as an option. So that's the risk versus gain.

So they crossed the Jordanian Iraqi border. they go tactical, they're blacked out, and they are flying full speed as low as possible. And in some cases, I actually know, talking to one of the pilots years ago, one of the air crew, one of the onboard computers had them as low as 50 feet. Yeah. Talking to the crews, they start taking fire. And they're taking small arms fire. So they're screaming, take it up. They start taking flak. They start taking flak. They take it down. So it's a constant up and down, up.

And these are MC130s, you know, not taking fire, but evading enemy. This is what this aircraft was designed for. And they're largely staggered by about 20 minutes single file. And, you know, it's a pretty dramatic thing. If you've seen an MC130, a fairly large aircraft going full speed, it's significant. And you won't hear it unless you're in line with the direction. So like the pilots talked about seeing gunners cigarette butts in their mouth. That's how low they were flying.

One of the aircraft, all the aircraft took pretty significant fire. One of the aircraft took such fire that it became obvious that if they land this aircraft at the airfield, it's never leaving. And the airfield will then be crippled. So they made a decision. It's actually, I think it's the sixth aircraft in the in the convoy, if you will. They make a decision to do an emergency abort landing to Turkey. And that's pretty dramatic because they notify Turkish airspace. We're landing.

And Turkey's like, denied. You don't get it. We're crashing in your country. They land, I think it's at Insulik. and when they land, fuel is just pouring out of the aircraft. And that's like I said, when the Turks are like, oh, my God, we may have misjudged the Americans resolve on this. That was the Second Battalion Aircraft that landed in Turkey.

So two of the Second Battalion aircraft land in their sector, three of mine land in my sector. And this is probably the second most important point from my perspective about the plan. The way we talked about the plan, I refer to this as the decisive point, very militaristic. It's not my success, but it's the road to success, meaning if I'm successful in this event in my plan, Saddam's ability to stop me has just gone to minimal. Like today, if he, if he, and we're, I should point out, the place I'm with with the Kurds is within rocket range of him. He can, he can maneuver five kilometers forward and fire artillery on my position.

There was one story where we talked about Iraqi jets. The Katushka going in. Yeah, but Iraqi jets also buzzing our position. So like if they wanted to kill us, And they knew we were there. They could. But tonight, when I disperse my ODAs, and I've got about 13 of my 15 ODAs coming in, probably at 12, because I've already got two on the ground.

There's like one ODA that didn't come into later, because they, for a weird reason. Once I disperse them, it's like a virus in a computer. Like, you could kill me on the Kurdish compound. It doesn't matter. My teams are all dispersed. And they know what to do. And this goes back to that isolation planning. because of the way we lived in garrison with our teams.

We trusted our teams. We treated them like subordinate commanders, not subordinates that I don't trust. You know, we indoctrinated them with, you understand what I need you to do. And this is one of the, I think, one of the most valuable lessons for anybody reading this book going forward in the future.

If you ever want to exercise decentralized command and control, which we've always said is our thing, you've got to prepare your guys to do it. You can't just flip a switch when it's real. if you didn't raise them that way to have a relationship where, of course, I trust you. And we did that. We did trust our guys a lot. So in the book, I like this story because like when the guys get off the back of the aircraft, I have vehicles that we have wrangled from the Kurds. They're not the vehicles we wanted, but it literally is. Hey, listen. And I know the

the teams. I link up with the team and they're like, they're glad to see me. They don't know where I've been for the last month, which is really cool. I'm like, look, don't have time for this. I want to get you guys out of here. I don't want you to get you to get. artillery, this guy doesn't speak English, but there was an English speaker here earlier today, and he's going to drive these cars to your guerrilla leader's location in, you know, they all have different locations. And it's a guy's wife's car, like, you know, a 78 Oldsmobile that belongs to his wife, which, by the way, like, these are real examples. And the Kurdish guy who gave me that car is like, please, this is my father-in-law's car.

Please get it back to him. Like, yeah, no problem. I promise he'll get this car back. And it would be like a dump truck and a school bus. that's your three cars. I need you to get out of here. And I literally would like, this piece of paper has my Arridium cell phone number on it. Call me when you can. And I love this because, again, it's not, why haven't you called me? Where's a deadly sitrap? There's times where teams, I didn't talk to teams for two or three days. Now, I can see them on Blue Force Tracker, so I kind of assume they're still alive. But I also know, like, a team might write to me and say something like NSTR. And if they say, which nothing's significant to report. That doesn't mean there's nothing to simply to report. that means they don't have time. And, you know, I wasn't like then, get on the radio and you better talk to me. I'm like, okay. You know, and I might shoot a message, are you guys okay? And we could, we can also communicate by satellite pagers we had at that time. But the point being was, it's their mission to run. They're not here to keep me informed. They were prepared to fight an unconventional war. Yeah, truly. And like, the power of this, like, ha, ha, Hasanam, I got

15, you know, I got 15 prepared ODAs with their Peshmerga counterparts spread out over 150-mile area. Good luck trying to stop me. And they all know what to do. They know to continue to be a threat to you. Now, when you say to something like your mission is to continue to be a threat, that's an interesting thing because I didn't tell you to attack this grid cord. I didn't tell you, you have to think, well, what would be a threat today? Is it changing? So they all know, they all have pretty aggressive offensive orders to be as offensive as they can. Not to interrupt, but it's such a change, I mean, for SF, for the conventional army, for everybody, from later in the war when people would stand the jocks watching Kill TV, trying to micromanage what the teams are doing on the team.

And it's, I go back to the issue of it. If you really want to exercise decentralized decentralized, Central command of control, it's really hard if you don't prepare for that and treat guys like that. and technology has made it where it's easier for commander to not do that. And like around 2003, 2004, we suddenly adopted that everything has to be done by Kahnoff now. And I'm not going to say that's not appropriate sometimes. But there are other scenarios where I'm the battle space owner. There's nothing wrong with me telling a subordinate, this is your piece of the battle space.

You own it. Do you understand what to do in that battle space? To which they're like, yeah, I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I know what you want me to do. And I'm like, okay, I trust you. Right. Hopefully you stay alive. I'll talk to you in a couple days. Right.

And they did, that's what made it so successful and powerful. I wasn't controlling these guys. They were firing forget. So let's talk about Operation Viking Hammer, this little wrinkle in the plan that you guys have to square away. Yeah, no big deal. Like I said, it's, you know, just going to knock out a frontal attack in the mountains, uphill, daylight. It shouldn't be an issue. There are how many prongs?

There's really six prongs. And that's the term they use, the accents of a veils. advance. So the plan is they're going to muster 10,000 Kurds. 4,000 are going to be in reserve. 6,000 are going to be the main effort, like 6,000 man columns. And we're going to put an ODA with each one of those. And if you could picture, for people who might not have a picture of what kind of, what am I looking at for terrain? I think Iraq is a desert, right? This is the Rocky Mountain National Park. It looks exactly like the Rocky Mountain National Park. The actual Iranian-Iraq border is 8,000 feet. And that's like, that's where this battle sort of culminates.

And the unsar forces, yeah, they are actually at about four to six thousand feet. Like that's sort of where they're settled in. So these axes are going to each go up like a valley, if you will, and just clear as far as they can. The teams that are really, really good job. And like largely this part of the operation is under our C company, Major George Thieves, who later goes on to command of the group as Colonel George Thieves. He's sort of overseeing this. operation and he's got six ODAs assigned to him.

The teams were really, it was really interesting because they didn't just go up the valleys. They sort of coordinated like, we'll go up the valleys, but somebody will be on the high ground and somebody's being in the low ground. So they could actually coordinate fire to each other, which proved to be super successful. Really, that made a huge difference. It kind of looks like it's 1,000 Kurds, all in pickup trucks. The first hundred of them are going to be dismounted, and they'll have an ODA with them. That's the way this is going to go.

And they are going to fight for 12 hours uphill, you know, picture like flat plains, rolling hills, pretty significant hills, then crazy hills, like crazy mountains. That's what the terrain looks like. And we're going to fight. The fight kicks off. As I said, all of this is being done way faster than we want it. So like the teams have now infiltrated. We spread them out, except the ones that are going to go to Hal Object. We're all going to go to Hal Object tomorrow.

And we're like, okay, check it out. I know I told you you're going to have probably four weeks. to prepare for this. Yeah, it's happening in three days. And the teams again are like, okay, got it. So when it does kick off, it kicks off surprising on time. A lot of people have asked me, were there really 10,000 Peshmerga? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Not a doubt in my mind. Like, I could physically see 6,000 of them from my position. And the way to think of it, the six prongs, it's kind of separated like in two halves. Like there's a northern half and a southern half. The northern half is kind of focusing on get to this chemical facility of concern

in what's called Sargat. The southern element is going after what we think is a foreign fighter terrorist training camp, a place called Dargirchakhan, right on the Iranian border. That's really the two main objectives of advance. The battle goes shockingly well the first day. It culminates as it gets dark. And unfortunately, we're about two kilometers from the Iraq through the Iranian border when it starts to get dark.

And so we sort of culminated for the day. one of my stupid favorite my favorite crazy stories like the guy coming to see you at HQ so there was a team leader a good team leader and he's on the radio and he's talking to me and he's like hey the guy on my left just got killed by a sniper I'm like okay all right cool second later he's like hey the guy on my right just got killed by a sniper and his name Steve and I'm like Steve I don't want to tell you what to do but I think you should change positions you know because I feel like I'm getting another radio call in a minute that says

hey Steve was just killed by a sniper so I'm talking to George Steve's and I'm like, hey, I think we need to tell all the teams, they need to stop fighting and start looking for a defendable position to hold for the night while there's still like 20 minutes of Twilight left. And that's the guidance that we give. Half hour later, we turn around and Steve, Steve Stoll is his name, Steve is standing behind me with a plate of like chicken and rice. And my brain, I'm like, what are you doing? And he's like, we came back down the mountain for chow. And I'm like, what? And he's like, no, no, no, it's okay. And I'm telling this exactly the way this happened.

He's like, it's okay. Nobody, they all, this is the way they do it. Nobody fights at night. I'm like, what now? And it's like, it's like a golf match where we've marked our positions. And we're just going to come back to it later. And everybody kind of agrees like, yes, you keep like an LPOP at your final advance. And don't be an ass. Like everybody, don't like sneak 25 meters forward. Like stay where you mark it. everybody else comes back for chow and then when the sun comes up we'll all go back to those pre-mark positions and we'll resume the battle

and it's a lot of it's because there's tons of minefields out there so that's why nobody fights at night a little freaked out by this but you know okay that's the local custom apparently but as it turns out this is the first day that because Turkey's now opening up

AC130s are now available and we actually get a call in the radio from four AC130s that are like do you have any targets again literally as this is happening one of my sod a our signal intercept team guys comes up and he's like hey we just intercepted a message the enemy's all telling them this is the grid to to muster at so like that's where they're having chow now you know to be fair like if the enemy had acin thirties and they want to bomb me while i meet and chow that's fair game you know i didn't agree that we wouldn't do that But now that I have four AC-130s, and I happen to know where they're having Chao, and the AC-130s are like, do you have any targets? I'm like, as a matter of fact, I do. So, like, we literally, we told these four AC-130s, this is the, this is the enemy's rally point.

You know, I ended up sleeping in a water-filled bunker that night. I had a pretty bad night, but not as bad as them. And I remember listening to, I could hear the AC-130s shooting. We were on like 20 minutes. There was, like, five of us. Tovo was with me. I think George Stevens was. with me. It's like five of us in this bunker filled with water. It's bizarrely ridiculous. And we are rotating half-hour radio watches. Like, you know, you wake the next gap and hand on the radio. Did the Kurds have any problem with that? Like, you guys are breaking the rules here? Honestly, I think they all like went to sleep. Like, if you guys want to monitor your box with the thing, that's your purview. But there's no point to it. Right. So it's like,

it's not quite the sun coming up. It's like that BMT. And we hear the AC 103 say, hey, we're out of rounds. We're pulling off. which I'm like, holy crap. 4 EC-1-30s are out of rounds. It's been a bad night for the enemy. Yeah. So we wake up and it's exactly like you would expect, we're like, oh, man, man. You know, we get our shit back together.

Like, you know, we're like, and Tovo's the one who goes, hey, let's drive up and link up with the lead. Let's go back. Like, if they're all going to drive up there, let's go with them and let's go see what's going on. So we actually join Steve's team. We drive back up to the forward advance. And sure enough, like the enemy is true to their word.

if the enemy spent all night thinking, okay, we've got to make a break for the Iranian border. For whatever reason, they all agree to not start running until the sun came up. And like, we're literally pulling up in our cars and we're like, oh my God, look at it. They're running. Like, you can see them. They're running now and they're running in like knee-deep snow. So, you know, a firefight ensues. The guys are now shooting these guys.

And it's a route as they are trying to flee across the Iranian border. Didn't go well for them. but that becomes like sort of the second day of that battle. The Kurdish forces, you know, in guerrilla fashion, picked up, you know, picked up tons of weapons off the battlefield. And they are fired up. Because you've got to really understand, too. Like, this went way better than I could have possibly even imagined it would.

But this is a historic area for the Kurds. This is the spot where Saddam, you know, did the great chemical attack of Halajadja that killed 5,000 civilians in 1988. So there's a tremendous emotion to this. area. The fact that they've retaken it is an unbelievable victory for them. So like, we made good on our word. And they are not hesitating at all. They're like, oh, we are all in with you. Sanam is next. So of the 10,000, 9,000 of them pick up weapons and they turn around with us. And they are, I mean, the motivation is palpable. Like you can feel we are liberating

the Kurds from Sanam. Let's go. So the other teams that I had on the Greenland at this point now receive these 9,000 well-armed guys. And they're all like, These Americans are incredible. They love to fight. Our reputation is top-notch rapport is just solid. And now it's time for the Green Line fight. And from my perspective, I'm like, okay, I actually can't believe this is working. Like, I can't believe we're still on our timeline.

Like, the Americans got bogged down on a sandstorm. Because if you would ask somebody three weeks ago, like, it's going to take us like four days to get to Baghdad. So we're like, ah, our shit's not going to be a value. Well, it didn't take Americans four days. It took them two weeks. So the Americans haven't reached Baghdad yet. So we're like, okay, there's still a, the expiration date is not passed for us to tie up Saddam's forces, which are still on the green line. Let's go.

So now we start the final phase of the Green Line fight. Can I ask you one quick question about the terrorists, I assume that they were, they were solophists, right? Yeah. Some sort. Like, how do they, like, what do they do in the Iranists? They couldn't have been welcome there. That was interesting, actually. Yeah, there's a good about that.

Iran is like everybody else, you know, you see this in Afghanistan with Pakistan too. It's an alliance of convenience. And having a buffer of crazies between you and the thing that is Iraq, totally permissible. So Iran will support this crazy, Sunni fundamentalist group because it's going to create a buffer. But they will also, just like the Iraqi intelligence agencies, keep them, you know, limited. Right, right. I mean, there was, you're probably referencing it. There was one time we did watch Iranian helicopters drop off ammunition.

And two things I do want to mention, because I didn't talk about the Viking Hammer thing. So the guys did reach the chemical facility. We did find tons of stuff. And people will ask me, well, that has no relation to Saddam. This is an isolated incident. We did find evidence of hydrogen sulfide. We found formulas for VX agent, you know, protective. Like, we found tons of stuff that they were doing, you know, tests with this.

The Dargishikan training camp, this is an awkward one. So when the guys approaching that training camp, they got to the high ground and they got eyes on the training camp. And again, I thought, oh my God, we got them. I can't believe we're pulling this off. The guys are reporting like, they're still in the training camp. They're loading up trucks they haven't evacuated. We got into an argument with the B-52 and a misunderstanding about the rules of engagement. And the B-52 was convinced they couldn't drop ordinance within five kilometers of the border.

I got into a huge argument with them. I'm telling them they're totally wrong. It's not what the rules of engagement for Scentcom are. The rules of engagement were actually very, very liberal. But the whole time this argument's happening, the team is reporting, they're loading onto 20 trucks, and they're driving the one kilometer across the area. So we lost them. And I always explain this. At the time, I didn't know his name.

Colin Powell mentions Zarkawi's name like 20-some time in his U.N. speech, that there's this Jordanian al-Qaeda affiliated guy. And at that time of my life, it's just another Arabic name. I don't know who he is. if Zarkawi was there, it's highly likely he was at this site and we lost him. For anybody who doesn't understand the significance of that, Zarkawi comes back into Iraq at some point and creates the thing that becomes al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI. AQI then turns into the thing that is now ISIS. So it's, you know, that analogy of, you know, for loss of a nail, we lost the shoe, for loss of this, it's kind of like that.

So it was a really painful opportunity that we lost there. But from my plan, you know, as much as I wanted to get him. him and do the other things. Getting the courage to turn toward the green line on time was actually my primary function. Right. And so both the CIA and special forces turned towards the Iraqi army at this point. And there are some other things that happen in the middle of all this. Third group comes into your AO, stirs things up a bit, and 173 jumps in.

Yeah. And to give, I'll say third group was given to the just SOTIF as the roundup battalion, because we couldn't get 110 because they belonged to UConn. And that was a clunky relationship. You know, like, you know, I'll poke fun. I'll throw stones at the third guys. They would throw stones back at us that we didn't welcome the one. That's a fair statement.

Like, it was not a good relationship. We didn't understand their capabilities. They didn't communicate well with us. We're at Fort Carson, therefore brag. It was not a good fit. And they didn't get clear mission guidance. What should we do with them? They should have actually been put out in the Western Desert,

very much like Fifth Group was doing south of the Euphrates, like past the German, the Jordanian border. They should have been doing the same thing in the Al Jazeera, Syrian border desert, but they weren't used that way. And that's where they would have been valuable. Some of them got pushed my way. And in this, you know, I told the stories, like they were not particularly useful trying to link up with me

in the Holobja fight because they just didn't, I didn't want guys who just wanted to shoot. Like they didn't do any, they didn't know, they didn't know who was who. They hadn't planned for this. And it wasn't a good relationship. They did have one company, a company of third of the third, assigned to second battalion under Fred Dumar. They did great.

They did a great job with his guy. So if somebody reads this and they think that I'm poking fun at third of third, third of third was bumpy with May. But some of them did really, really good stuff. The 173. The 173 jumps in, I feel like it's as late as the 28th. We had gone to Italy to coordinate with them. They're out of the chenzer, right? 173rd,

Northern Italy, right. Like the European Strike Force. Yeah. Great unit. Yeah. Fantastic unit. Not their finest hour. And I'm sorry.

Like people will get upset when I say that. Like, hey, they're a great unit. I think very highly of them. And they did spectacular things later in the war and in Afghanistan. This was not their greatest moment. We tried to coordinate with them in Italy. They didn't want to work with us. They were very, very confrontational because they were arguing about we should be in charge.

You should be in that kind of thing. Now that they jumped in and jumping in was valid. jumping in is you can unload aircraft faster it's safer for the aircraft it's nothing wrong with their jump but their jump was 40 kilometers from the green line so like second they jumped on the second battalion's airfield completely safe and i don't mean that in a derogatory way like if you don't have to jump on top of enemy you shouldn't the problem was once they jumped they refused to leave that airfield and that airfield was not in danger of being lost like they were insistent that we must hold this airfield. I'm like, the Kurds have the

airfield. It's not going anywhere. The purpose of the jump was to bring in what's called the Merck, the medium response reaction company, you know, out of Savannah. It's four M1s and I think like 111-1-3s. So we're going to bring a mechanized company task force in and, you know, that's the reason for the jump.

Could you have landed it? Yeah, it probably could have because we had already landed stuff on the airfield. But that's not neither here to there. Again, it's that they wouldn't leave the airfield. So when they brought in the mechanized equipment, we suggested go down this highway. There was a massive highway that goes right into Kirk Cook. They didn't take our advice. They started to drive through mountain passes.

Their vehicles broke down and got stuck. And I can say with 100% certainty, none of their vehicles or their soldiers got into the fight. Like, people have told me, you know, oh, you don't know, but I'm positive. There's no way I'm wrong about that. Because I received them after Kirk Cook was seized about 24 hours later. Like I'm the guy that received them on the road to bring them into the city and put them on the airfield. Great soldiers. It's just I think their commander was still exercising a lot of pre-9-11 risk-averse mindset of moving too slowly.

And I mean, I get that. You know, I don't like it, but I get it. So that was really the 173rd's role. And you mentioned the capturing of Kirk Cook and that was kind of an issue too. Like, wasn't there a time where the Army wanted you to like abandon? the city and your so as we're now focused toward kirkook which is uh the main city in the north in my sector we're getting weird responses from centcom like hey you can't go you can't cross the green line which is really really weird because i'm like what did you want me to do like all the

all the iraqis invasion right all the iraqis are on the other side of the green right and to be fair like this is one of these things where words matter and centcom and even later the army's official history of this depicted like your mission was to work with the kurds like No, my mission was not to work with the Kurds. My mission was to threaten Saddam. Right. So there's like, you know, it sounds like a nuance, but it's actually really important. And this is why I also harp on like in planning, particularly in Special Forces Circles.

You can't say things like your mission is to conduct unconventional warfare. That's not a mission. That's a type of operation. It's a method, perhaps. You know, my mission was to tie up the Kurds. My method, or not type of Kurds, type to Iraqis. My method is using the Kurds through unconventional warfare. Yeah.

The commander's intent. Yeah. Otherwise, what are you doing? You're like hanging out on the other side. Right. Right. What happens is if you adopted a mindset of my mission is to conduct unconventional warfare and you just stay there and hang out with the courage. Yeah.

You're like, I'm mission success. Did you accomplish something in the context of a strategy? No. So let's say we're able to adapt because we really have it clear in our minds. What do I have to do? So with what's going on and the Americans are kind of bogged down in the South, there's some things going on like convoys are getting ambushed sandstorms. So we're like, I don't think, and we had been trying hard to get the Iraqis to surrender.

And again, Saddam employed his AR from the Gulf War. He did some really innovative stuff to mitigate the likelihood of surrenders. And we hadn't anticipated that. We assumed just like the Gulf War, everybody's going to surrender. He, I think this is really pretty incredible. He put the word out that, hey, I just want to let you guys know, if anybody surrenders, I'm killing your entire extended family and your neighbors and everybody else.

Also, by the way, everybody get up, take the chair to your left. That's your new division. So like if you had any schemes with your officers to when the time comes where he literally switched division commanders at a staff meeting. So like, you know, General Aziz went to the meeting and General Khalil came back.

So like the chaos, but the control, like he broke every scheme. Right. So we weren't getting. getting a response to our messages that we were pumping through the underground. It was really, really weird. So now we're starting to get the sense of, hey, I don't think Saddam's getting our message that you should not go south. And I like to use those words because, again, Sencom didn't fully appreciate. I can't force Saddam from not going south. I have to compel him

to not go south. I like to explain this. It's like, okay, this is Kirkuk. This is the green line. I'm here. I want to force him to not go south. How do I? I do that from here? I feel like, you just attack him. I'm like, that doesn't prevent these forces from repositioning if he's tying me up with these forces. So I have to compel him that's not in his interest. How do I do that? And I go back, it was my epiphany. It's not through killing his forces. Sanam's totally comfortable with me killing his forces. Like, because forces are expendable. His cities, that's something he needs because the cities have the oil infrastructure. So I always said this. I think Sanam's plan was bloody the American, like making a one front war.

bloody the Americans in the South because the Americans don't have the stomach for combat which was the myth of the 90s and then the Americans will culminate somewhere maybe south of Baghdad maybe north of Baghdad and then I'll pull back to Tikrit I'll still be in charge of the reduced size of Iraq

and then I'll broker a ceasefire with the Americans and I'll still be in charge. That's his plan. It's a good plan and it requires him to like I said bloody the Americans so that's what I'm trying to afford. So it seems like he's not getting my message that we're taking seriously. So we all agree. Okay.

Need to take the cities. And I think that's where, you know, the Turks suddenly like, what are you talking about? You can't take Kirk Cook. And even SentCon was like, don't take Kirk Cook. You're like, guys. And I used to joke that Sencom would be like, hey, that's a terrible idea. Then the Americans would start having trouble in the South. And they're like, hey, I heard you say something about taking her cook. That's intriguing. And I'm like, yeah, we could. And then it would go really badly and take Kirk Cook now. Take her cook now. That's the progression of how it went. so we so from our perspective taking the cities is the thing that will force saddam to stay here right

and to do that it's not just about attacking his forces i have to be holistic and this is really cool because the Kurds are like well do you want us to tell you how we normally do it i'm like yeah i would love to hear that and you know they're they're like well i've only attacked kirk cook twice my dad he's attacked it three times so they brought in what we jocantly called the old Peshmerga, which was cool as hell. Because it's dudes in old pickle suits who were probably like 70 years old. And they got all these maps on their arms. And when they came in and they rolled the maps out, this is where I'm now seeing the power of the underground. They have professionally, graphically mapped every freaking Iraqi position in the entire city. And it's accurate. And it's

coming to us from their underground networks. It's freaking brilliant. So they're like, okay, the first way we think we're normally do it, we cut the highway south of Kirkuk. 30 miles south in a place called 2s. Then we surround it on as many sides as we can. And this is what we did. We cut the main north-south highway. We had three ODAs. Yeah, three ODAs, each with about 1,000 Kurds,

attack from different angles, sort of from the north, sort of from the east, and sort of from the south. I couldn't get a team on the backside. And we were planning on flying a team with a MH-53 tonight. with some Arabic-speaking Kurds on ATVs and our team. And we were going to ride around just blow some stuff up, dump out parachutes out of the pack trays,

and make a lot of noise that would make the enemy think there's paratroopers to your rear. Kirkuk collapsed before we can implement that. But still, we surrounded it on multiple sides, and this is potentially my favorite part of this, mostly through the CIA, we had a lot of subversive activity going on to compel the enemy, their situation.

situation was hopeless. And I say this is a really important lesson. The power of this, killing someone is fairly black and white, but tricking them that their situation is hopeless, like the power of that ability, I now appreciate it. And it's funny because I had read commanders from World War II talk about this. And I just thought it was like, oh, yeah, that's a hat tip to the siops guys. The power of this cannot be overstated. So there's a lot more too than I'm not, I'm not getting into in this just because of the time. But like, we were bombarding the Iraqis with a whole series of exaggerated, not really accurate messages to make them think their situation is hopeless. We paid people to, paid underground members essentially to facilitate graffiti

in certain neighborhoods. We smuggled guns into underground places. We warned, again, through the underground, we warned them to, don't conduct human rights violations. Do not blow up oil infrastructure. We know who you are. We might know who you are, but that's not really, that's not really relevant. I mean, there's that mystique almost all of the world. Where the Americans know everything. Well, and also the Kurds. Oh, right. Okay.

The fear of guerrillas is palpable. It's interesting. Because the fear of air power is black and white. They're terrified of it. But like there is a mystique of these freaking guerrillas appear to be around every corner. Right. And like there's a really crazy story when we first met Talibani, Jalal Talibani, and his commanders, if you will. They presented Tovo with a pistol as a gesture of our relationship.

It's the guys who were here. we're here we'd all be laughing and so like I'd like to give you this pistol as a gift and you know we're like that's really that's really nice of you you stop freaking pointing it at me like this pistol this is one of sonam's elite member's pistol it's it's a gift and I would like to give it to you want to see me cock the hand it was it had a sonam's specific like engraving marking on it's his elite forces and they hand it to it and as soon as they hand it to it to me and like now they were like we're a little bit apart so they

can't hear us. They hand me the pistol and we both look at each other and I just kind of did a check. I'm like, oh yeah, it's loaded. And that was interesting too because we both noted yeah, and I'll bet the guy who loaded that pistol that morning, his day didn't go like he expected. Like that, that bullet that's in there was loaded by the Iraqi commander that they got this from. Like no one, no one between us and them has even thought to clear this weapon, you know, and we're like, okay, cool. So that weapon went into the system. We never saw it. We actually declared it into the American system, never saw it again. Crazy. But the fact that the Kurds are, they sneak up to the Iraqi lines from time to time,

and they do kill guys and come back with a pistol. And there was one particular group of Kurds that were like the elite. They called them the Cobras. And like they were doing stuff where they were coming back every night and they would ask the ODA, like, do you guys want to go with us? And I wouldn't let the ODA necessarily go up on this crazy stuff with them. And they'd come back and two guys back, check out these pistols we got last night. And you just knew, oh yeah. Yeah, that didn't go well for the guys who owe those pistols. So that that fear of the Peshmerga as capable fighters is out there. The subversive efforts, like I said, we're telling them don't conduct crimes. We know who you are. You will be held accountable. And we're also telling you enlisted. Hey, have you seen your

officers lately? I'll bet you haven't because they've all abandoned you. So why are you defending these positions? We really put a lot into that with the attacks and it had the effect that we wanted. on the morning of April 10th, like things, it just, it imploded. Like, Cook was collapsing. Did they surrender? Did they, like, put down their weapon to try and, like, hide? No, they ran. They ran.

They deserted. And like I said, that's stupid that we didn't think about that. Like, we thought, they'll fight or they'll surrender. We hadn't considered, they'll desert and run to Syria, you know, or like the previous Iraqi town and then to Syria. And that was option three. That's what they did. If you had a place, a family place to run to, you did.

So the prisoners that we were wrapping up were all. foreign fighters, like really stupid young men that came to Iraq to fight the great Americans from from Lebanon, from Syria. Yemen, probably. Yeah. I mean, really, and we're like, oh, that's really funny. Like, none of you guys seem to be from Iraq. And they all had the same totally ridiculous cover story.

They all had the same cover story. They were here to find work in the chocolate factory. Like, that made no sense. But that's like, how did you find your way? They didn't want to say they came to Iraq for the jihad. They came here for work in the chocolate factory. and then got drafted. Right.

As one does. Yeah. Yeah. But so we were aware that the majority of Iraqis in uniform that we didn't kill shed their uniforms and ran, you know, fled. Right. Yeah. It's wild.

And there was this, like, interesting moment where it seemed like you guys understood that you have to get, like, civil infrastructure up and running. Like, you got the electrical grid, like, 70% up. Yeah. That was kind of a fun story. So if anybody ever takes a city, you know, it's weird because you think about the fighting, you think about the fighting. And then, okay, we have it. And it's still chaotic.

Like, things are always on fire. Like, there's no electricity. Things are on fire. People seem to be running around. They're shooting. There's always traces going into the air. So you don't know, like, what the hell's going on here. It's very escape from New York.

Like, that's the way we described here. The sun comes up and the Kurds were super sharp, like the Kurds. they were prepared for this. So they like suddenly bring in 400 uniformed, unarmed, unarmed police officers. They look like road guard, like guys in white spats, white helmet, white plastic helmet, and a road guard vest. And like gloves. And they are at every intersection because the streetlights aren't working. And I got to tell you, like, I would never have thought about that.

And you're like, huh, commerce seems to be working. People are selling stuff. People are going to work because these 400 guys are on street corners. They brought in buses from Soleimania all the way. Integer Cook. Like, they were prepared for this. They brought in like 50 buses. So that the bus... Like public transportation? Yeah. Yeah. So like buses are still running. Um, crowds are all pissed off now. Everybody wants to come and bring their grievances to me. Right. You're the mayor. The big chief. Yeah. No, because we, we set up at the governor's building. So like, de facto, we are,

we are the rule of law. We are the government. And you'll listen to them where the previous government probably didn't. Right. So like, people were cool. They're going to give you a a chance. And it does kind of suck because you're like, okay, what's your deal? Like, he killed my donkey seven years ago. I want him killed. You're like, ah, I'm going to put that on the list. You know, like some of the things were just nonsensical, but some of them are not. And the crowd is out all yelling at us. They're screaming. And there's a guy shaking a ring of keys that looks like a school janitor. He's got like 10,000 keys on this ring. And we're like, what's that dude's deal? So we call this guy forward. And he goes, I am the manager of the power plant. We need to go now.

And he's explained because if we don't go, they're going to loot it. And a comment about looting. You know, we look at looting like, well, lesser people would loot things. Okay, looting is an ugly word. Salvaging is a better word. People who have nothing, like, you know, metal wiring is valuable. Yeah, they pull all the copper wiring out of the walls. Or like, you know, there's a bunch of bricks that are broken in the street here from the bomb that fell.

And if I'm picking up the bricks that aren't all cracked up and you're like, he's looting the bricks, maybe. Or he's taking the bricks. Yeah. You know, so people are taking everything they can. and there is a cultural aspect here that people feel they owe reparations. So they're going to just take stuff. And he's like, we got to get to the power plant.

So like I sent four guys. And we did a lot of that where I would love to have sent a company. I don't have a company to send. So I'm like, hey, you two guys. What are you guys doing? Go with this guy that I just met a minute ago. I have no idea who he is. Go with him to the power plant.

And we did a lot of that kind of stuff. They go to this power plant. And it's like some ridiculous roadrunner old cartoon where it's like a freaking switch where he's like, and when he does it, power comes back on to 75% of the city. And like me and Major Pat Roberson, we talked about this.

Like when that happened, and it sounds stupid to say this, but you could feel, you could feel that everyone's like, and the Americans, we will strike them to, oh, oh, the power's back on. And you're like, what the hell just happened? And everybody now, they can sell stuff,

they can still go to work. Oh, you know, like the desire to fight, like just dissipate it. It was freaking weird as hell. because when the power goes on, the water starts running. When the water's flowing, people can live normal lives. And there's commerce and there's buses and there's police officers. So there was tons of that. Like, get the basic services running and the desire for stupid instability kind of dissipates.

And then we got word from CENTCOM to take down the American flags. We're not occupiers. To which again, we're like, what? Right. And I remember Tova when he came to me, he's like, we need to take the flag down. What do you mean when he take the flag down? He's like, we just got word We can't be occupiers

We need to take the flags down And we're freaked out Because I'm like, you know if we take the flag down This place is going to turn into crazy town Right And to be fair Like we took the flag down And people in the streets

We're like literally looking at us like You're leaving Is it okay if I take this now? And I'm like, I guess it is You know Yeah And that's when it started Started to devolve a little bit

And Baghdad had it worse Much worse than we did In terms of people went crazy because we're like, hey, hey, we are not in charge. I just want to be clear about that. We are not in charge. They really wanted us to be in charge. If we had brokered, here's the rules.

That's all they want it. It's a grace period. You said, here's the rules. All right, whatever. I don't really like you, but you said that. If you get the power running and you get the water running, you get to be in charge. I don't really care.

Like, that's what they wanted. We've talked about this before on the show because, you know, you look at like America's efforts in Japan and Germany Post-World War II and things. like that. And during the GWAT, there was such this, like, we don't want to be occupiers. It's like, yeah, but if you break it, you buy it. So I did talk about this in the book. There was a plan. We had a fairly reasonable, structured plan for how we were going to do this, like my three company commanders.

I had one of them was going to be the liaison to the governor, whoever the governor was. One of them was going to be the liaison to the, you know, first Iraqi corps. And the other one was going to be the liaison to the second Iraqi core. We knew how we were going to transition. There was an organization called Orha, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, a bunch of retired military generals who were brilliant. They really knew what they were doing. We met with them. And I was, you know, I was really enamored because they knew all the names of the cities. They knew all the names of the people. And I was like, this is, this is coming together. And then the next day, we got told, hey, Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld just threw them out of country. They need to go. Because he was

having an issue between him and the State Department. This was a State Department initiative. And we're like, okay, so what's the plan? Department of Defense is going to run Reconstruction. We're like, okay, what's the plan? We don't know yet. But we do know we're throwing those State Department guys out. And like those State Department guys had a good plan. And that's the kind of stuff. You just watch this unraveling.

You're like, what are we doing? Yeah. And around this time also, was it Fourth ID? There's this issue with like surrendering, the Iraqi unit surrendering and they wanted to attack anyway. So we took Kirk Cook, we brought the 173rd in, it took about eight days to hand the one, to hand Kirkuk off to the 173rd.

And then we left Kirkuk. And, you know, the Kurds were like, what's next? What's next? We're like, keep going south. So like C Company was now pushing farther south. And they were making it about as far south as Bakuba, a place called Mandolin. And they bumped into a thing called the MECA, the Moohedral D&L Calc, which is really weird to explain what this thing is. It's a weird cult. Yeah, it's a dissonant elite Iranian unit that fled Iran after the fall of the Shah in 1979. And they found a home in Iraq, which is super weird, you know, considering the history of Iran-Iraq war. But they hate the Iranian revolution. These guys are fanatics for like the pure Iran. So they found a home with Saddam. They have no ethnic ties to the Arab community. The Arab community actually hates them.

So Saddam was able to leverage them as a reserve. Like, if I always say if Sanam used his Republican Guard to keep an eye on the Army, he used the MBK to keep an eye on his Republican Guard. And they were very well trained and very well outfitted. So we bumped into them. They were like the last unit we bumped into. We had a little bit of an exchange. They actually created some casualties on our part, minor casualties from artillery. And then they said, hey, we've been trying to contact you guys.

We want to surrender. And we thought that was, you know, we thought that was bullshit when they said that. But like, no, we contacted two American politicians six months ago and said, we want to fight for your side. We looked into it and confirmed it. It was true. You know, information that would have been useful to know. Right, right.

So now we, okay, it's all cool. We're going to have the tea. We got some food going. They're weird as hell, but they seem okay. And they're like, hey, we'd like to bring something up. We would like the honor of being the spearhead into Iran. Yeah. We're like, let's put a pin in that one for now.

Yeah. That's not really on the table right now. They are, you know, they are. Oh, fanatics. They are the Iranian regime's like number one target. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They are fanatics.

They're serious players. And yeah. Now we are also, by the way, dealing with like elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are crossing the border sneak interact to attack these guys. Like, it's crazy. Fourth ID now, God bless them, have now made it into country. They, you know, they were supposed to come through Turkey and that got turned off. They've now arrived into our sector. And when they arrived, you know, it's like you can almost picture like the SF guy comes walking.

He was like, everybody relax. It's cool. They surrendered. Yeah. And, you know, God bless them. The fourth ID was not happy with us. You know, and again, they were like... They came to war.

Well, there was almost like, USF guys ruin everything. That's funny. And, you know, that's kind of funny, but it's kind of not funny. They were like, get out of the way. We're opening fire. We're like, you can't open fire. And like, if there's a stereotype about us ruining everything, like, we literally like, look, they signed this agreement.

and it specifically says here, this is the real thing. If we're going to attack them, we need to give them 24 hours notice so they can disperse. And they're like, unbelievable. You guys, I feel like, that's the rules we agreed to. It got so bad, it got to a point where we eventually told our teams, I need you to pull out of the camp, I'm not comfortable. I think these guys are going to open fire whether we're in there or not. They didn't, but we got really, really nervous.

Eventually, we were able to like tone it down. we bring them in and then we're like okay uh it's really cool you didn't kill these guys they're your problem now and that's that's about where it started that was the last fighting you know for the most part of of the war like there was some skirmishes but like that was the real last strong because to crit was kind of fallen at the same time period um and that's really where we we transitioned it to now pure stability efforts yeah so speaking of which our government's brilliant uh transition demobilization plan post-war. Tell us about the Peshmerga monitoring operations.

Yeah. So this gets into a really weird part of the plan where we're like sort of ad-living it, if you will. And somebody at the group came up with the idea of, hey, the next phase of this should be Peshmerga monitoring operations. Which I was like, what? Like, we're going to put the Peshmerga into camps and we're going to monitor them. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Because as I was telling you before we started, we're still getting tons of tips where tsunami is. By the way, we did. We did. we got a hundred tips where Saddam is. Some of them were accurate.

Like we learned later, oh, we actually, amidst the hundred tips we got, we actually did get, this one's correct. We got tons of tips of where weapons and mass destruction may be buried or not, but like, we are now not able to run these to ground because someone's saying we need to monitor the Peshmerga, which was super weird. Like, why would we monitor the Peshmerga? They're great. They were our key allies. Along the same time period, we get introduced to an entity called the Free Iraqi Forces, which was really. really interesting. Those Shalabi's guys, right?

Yeah. Which is really interesting to meet someone. Like there's an American colonel from the Department of Defense from the Pentagon. There's some weird American who used to be State Department who's now wearing camouflage. That's really weird. And this individual called Ahmed Shalabi, who's sort of a, everybody knows he's a con man. CIA sort of, you know, put him on notice years ago as persona non grata. But now DoD thinks this guy knows things.

And the CIA is at a loss. Like, this guy's a complete liar. He's going to take you for a ride. And Department of Defense is like, no, he's our guy. So they introduce us all together, and they've got some guys with them with patches in English that say FIF. We're like, what's up with this? And like, oh, these are the free Iraqi forces. We're like, what do you mean?

And like, these are the resistance. And they're 100% shitty mercenaries that Shalabi is paying with money that the U.S. is giving him to create an Iraqi face. To the point, like, even the American colonel that I'm now meeting, he goes, well, the Pentagon we determined we wanted to put an Iraqi face on this conflict. I'm like, okay, just to be clear, I got 50,000, I got 50,000 Kurdish-Peshmerga that are Iraqis, just to be clear about that. And they were like, we didn't know that.

We weren't aware of that. And I'm like, how many of these free, these FIF guys do you have in like 500? And they are all just. Did they, Chalabi? He lived like in Virginia. Like, he came from the States. Did the FIF guys come from the states too? Well, they rounded up tons of like expats that might have been like in England or, you know, some of them.

And actually, it's one of my favorite weirdo stories. So at this meeting, it's not going well. And the Kurds, the Peshmerga, the P.U.K. and the KD.B., they do not like Chalabi, who is ethnically Lebanese, by the way. He's not even Iraqi. And they're telling us, they're telling the CIA and the CIA's like, yeah, I know. They're like, the CIA is like, we told the American government this guy should not be trusted. And he's clearly, you can tell, he's setting himself up to be, I'll be the new leader of Iraq when this is on it. So it's really, really super weird. One of the Kurdish commanders who was near me, a guy named Mullahbaktir, said something in Kurdish that, you know, I always make this joke that I don't speak Kurdish, but I knew what he said.

And he basically was saying, we're not going to tolerate this man. He's causing our soldiers to desert because he's saying he's offering $1,000 a day for anybody who joins the FIS. And he said, we're not, or I think he said, I'm not going to tolerate that. And he put his hand on his pistol. And it's one of my favorite crazy stories because this dude could not have looked more stereotypical guerrilla commander, you know? Big white mustache. Oh, no, yeah, like hard-looking dude.

You know, at least in my mind, he had two bandeleros. Like, you know, like, badass-looking dude. And he goes, and I'm not going to tolerate it. And like I said, I'm not translating any of this, but I'm getting in the body language. I'm like, oh, I know exactly what he said. And the face you just made, I did that. I went like this, and he looked over, and he caught me, like, nodding. And after the meeting, he brings me a plate of food, throws it in front of me, hits me on the arm.

Like, we're buddies now. And I joked. I was like, because he saw that I agreed with his leadership style. Yeah. So I'm talking to Bafel Talibani later, and I said, yeah, I kind of like Mullah Bakhtier. And he goes, yeah, he's one of our best commanders. And he said, I said something like, I like his leadership style. And he goes, yeah, he appreciated you backing him up in the meeting.

And then he goes, he's my father-in-law. And I was like, ah, cool. But that's, I, I enjoy that story because it speaks to how goofy the Pentagon is trying to manufacture an artificial resistance. When I've given you, when I've given you a 50,000 person super effective resistance element that wants to work with the U.S. and has done everything we have asked them to do. And now we're talking about monitoring them. And what's creepy is, you know, these folks, they want to go in. took her cook too. They want to see

Mullah Bakhter actually. There was a town he took called Jolula. And Sincom was like Jolah, you can't take Jol. We've already taken it. You can't take Jolula. You need to pull out of Jolula. And I'm like, okay, just to be clear, Muleboktir drove right to his mom's house who he has not seen in 15 years.

I don't think he's given up Jolula. And Sincom's like, that's not traditionally a Kurdish ryan. I'm like, it is. I'm telling you when we drove in, everybody came out and welcomed us, and he drove right to his mother's house to which she made us all dinner. So that's the Kurdish entity we are working with. Now that we're going into Kirkcook, we're getting stopped at checkpoints, whether it be 173rd or 4303rd. And they're like, do you have a pass? We're like, no, we don't,

we don't have a pass. And they're confiscating weapons from my Peshmerga. My Peshmerga are being very accommodating. They're calling me and they're like, hey, they took our weapons. Can we get our weapons back? The Free Iraqi forces all have government issued ID cards. And the conventionales don't know any better. They have been told the free Iraqi forces are the true resistance here. These Peshmerga are bad. And they're getting some of that from Shalabi. So like it's just, it's terrible.

That leads to some very bad advice of debathification. Where if you were part of the Ba'ath party, you cannot be part of the future of Iraq. Which is like, eh, everybody was part of the bad party. Yeah. You didn't really have a choice. Yeah, right, right. So like we're telling everyone If you were working in the government. You can't be a part of Iraq.

And similar to this, we are continuing to broker, I'll call it, surrender agreements for what it's worth. And we have brokered several of them. But we were legally calling a capitulation because there's a difference. If you capitulate, you can switch sides right now. I can turn your unit around and you can go fight the Iraqis that don't want to capitulate. If you surrender, you know, by international law, I have to demobilize you. I have to take you out of the army.

I have to send you to a prison camp. Oh, interesting. It's bad. So we knew what we were doing. We said, I have a capitulation agreement. I love this because one of the things we did with the underground, we drafted a letter. Like when they knew we were here, we drafted a letter. And then the CIA printed it in Arabic on one side, English or the other. We laminated it. And we sent it with underground couriers to those division commanders and anybody we could send it to. And it said, dear general, fill in the blank, you know, like it was like a, it didn't say that the one you got, but it was like a telemarketing, I think. It said, dear General Khalil, we have personally selected you because you have a good relationship with the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military. Time is of the essence. Your country needs you. Please act now. But time is. limited. And it really said, like, this offer will expire. Yeah.

Contact me by the following means to coordinate the future for your, not just yourself, but your forces. And we're making the point that if you were an Iraqi general or colonel in the Iraqi army today, you will still be an Iraqi general in the army tomorrow. Right. That's the deal we are brokering. And we're starting to make headway with this now. We're getting close to it. Same time when they said, take the U.S. flags down. Now the word comes down, surrender is no longer, it's surrender or die. Capitulations off. the table to which I'm freaked out because I mean I'm literally communicating on the phone with multiple guys who are not there as I joke I'm communicating long distance with this guy he's not in

Kirkuk he's in to Crip and we had an agreement where you Iraqi colonel general will bring in your 5,000 guys and like when you bring him in you'll be able to tell me who the guys aren't cooperating are like this is this is freaking brilliant this is going to be fantastic and you're on you're actually cool with this, you know, that you're going to come in as an Iraqi colonel and you'll be part of the new Iraqi army. And you'll be like, the troublemakers are that guy and that guy and, you know, they're hiding in this town. Like, you know, all the things that I will never be able to tell you who are the wrong people in this town, where they'll tell you like that. Now the word comes down, the capitulations off the table. And it's actually one of the most painful stories that still chokes me up to talk about it. Well, we are communicating with a guy. And I'm doing this through my interpreter and the CIA.

And we tell them, I'm sorry, my friend, this is no longer, the option is no longer, available. And we're saying, I have to tell you, it's surrender or die. And the guy on the other on the phone, I forget what Rankie was either a colonel or a general. And he says, do you know what you've done? Do you know what this means? And I said, I do understand that and I regret it. I am sorry. From my own personal perspective, this is two professionals talking, not two adversaries, two professionals who had to fight each other and we're trying to figure out a way to get to the future. And now we're being forced to do something we don't want to do. Because for him, it was like, his boys are not going to accept surrender because it's like cutting their balls off.

It's not cutting their balls up, but like they're going to be prisoners. Right. They're not going to be private sergeants, colonels. And whoever made this, you know, because we talked about, like, we should just drop fires from the beginning saying, hey, Iraqi army remain in place. Well, I need to say so by that. You're going to get paid tomorrow. Right. It's just going to be us paying you.

Well, and I'm going to come back to it because remember I said we didn't think about deserting as an option. We're thinking they would either surrender or fight. Right, right. And the issue is like if you're a prisoner and you are. are from, let's say you're from Kirkuk. Like, your tribe is from Kirkuk? You're from Kirkuk. When I go to the prison camp, is it going to be in Basra? And we're like, I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. No, and you're like, am I going to be pulled away from my family as a prisoner? And the answer is, you know, maybe. That's not acceptable. And like, I go back to, I don't have you at gunpoint. I can't, I'm not capturing. I'm negotiating with you. Right. So you're 200 miles away and I'm giving you a very shitty offer where yesterday I was like, hey, why don't you come in and you'll still be an Iraqi colonel, captain, whatever you are. You'll still get paid. you'll still have your prestige, you'll still get to stay with your family.

You're like, that's actually pretty good. And they're like, I don't want to keep fighting you. I'm all about showing you the 10% of the Iraqis that are fanatical, that want to go into hiding. So this guy on the phone, when he says, you know what you've done, I said, I do, and I'm very sorry. And, you know, as the exchange goes, and I know I talk about it in the book where he said to me, you know, Salam alaikum, you know, peace be with you. And I said, and peace be with you, my friend. And he said, the next time we meet, it will not be his friends.

and he said, and I regret that. And that's when I said, I actually said, then peace be with your family. And he said, peace be with you. And I mean, we hung up the phone and I was freaking devastated. I was like, what have we just done? This is unbelievable. Now, to your point, a month and a half earlier when the United States was telling the Iraqis to surrender. It's a great story because the Kurds came to us and they're like, hey, why are you doing that?

We're like, what do you mean? And culturally, like, they didn't want to offend us and tell us. what we're doing is wrong. Right. So they hinted at it and you have to pick up the cues. Like, is something wrong? No, no, no. No. They're like stomping the foot. But I heard. We just, we just wouldn't do it that way. And I'm like, what are you talking about? We wouldn't do it that way? And they're like, why do you hate the Iraqis? I'm like, we don't hate the Iraqis. And he's like, but then why did you ask them to surrender that way? And it took about three times to get it out of them. Like, what are you talking about? And like, the message that

you are broadcasting to the Iraqis, clearly written by an Arabic speaker from the Pentagon, not an Iraqi. They're like, the way they described it, it's effeminate. The way we would hear it, it's polite. We thought it would be a professional, polite thing to say, we would like to offer you the opportunity to surrender. The way they hear that is, you think I'm the kind of guy that would choose surrender? You think I'm like a coward? And now they're telling you, they're like, no respecting male could. He can't take it the way you offered it. You're actually taunting him to not take it. He can't.

And we're like, oh, oh, that's a detail that's pretty valuable. Wasn't there also some mistranslation in the sci-off stuff about like instead of lay down your arms, buried them? Yeah. Yeah. Instead, hey, look, apparently Arabic's a tricky language. So instead of telling them to abandon, we told them to bury their equipment. And like, later, if you remember, like, they buried fighter jets and stuff. No, right.

We found fighter jets. People were like, this is so weird. And I'm like, it's really not that weird if you talked to them. They're like, you told us to bury it. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's a hit on the Sobs community on that one. But so this piece, we're like, oh, my God. So we sent the message up to, hey, the underground feedback is the way you're sending the message, it's not acceptable. It can't be taken. We've actually got a message from Conno Lisa Rice back saying, hey, that was really, really valuable. Now, what sucks is a month and a half later, they overcompensated and like, got it, be mean. Surrender or die. We're like, no, not now. That's no. That's what it should have been, you know, again, completely wrong. the scenario and like and I said it because I don't have a guy at gunpoint like because the point earlier would have been in there were like if you tell a man surrender or die a self-respecting man

can accept that my only other option is to die right I have to take the surrender like they're like that makes sense now fast forward where I'm like hey they're 100 miles away I don't have them at gunpoint and it's surrender or die or take off your uniform and flee to Syria or to crit and they're like I'm gonna choose see right and that's where we you know I would say we created an insurgency that didn't want to be an insurgency Right. Well, and the other part of that was, you know, like, I don't know who the brainiac was. They got rid of the capitulation. But how are you going to replace this army like overnight? Like, where all these people, like, you're getting rid of all the train soldiers. And now you just. Yeah. So, I mean, the simple issue there in hindsight. And this is a great role for civil affairs folks. As we're working with the guerrillas, the underground, whatever you want to say, and we're, let's say we're liberating territory. Like, you. You. You want to find people like we found with the keys. Like, who here knows how to run the city?

Who knows how to run the power plant? These are not political figures. They're infrastructure professionals. And if you can find them, just like the Kurds did with the buses and the police, like if you can find them in one city and you get an agreement, like, would you be willing to go to the other city until we can find those people? Do you know your counterpart power plant manager in the other city? And they're like, yeah, sure.

I got them on cell phone right here. You know, if you think that way that our mission is to find people. who can keep the infrastructure running, and that's how we're going to pull this off. And think of it like dramatic surgery. Like, if I rip your chest open, it makes it really easy for me to get in there with my arms and do stuff. Not good for the patient. So as a surgeon, your mindset is if we open you up, we want to close you up as fast as possible. Combat's the same way.

If I'm going to rip this city apart, I want to put it back together as fast as possible. Because the longer it's ripped apart, the more that becomes normal. And it's harder to reconstruct it. And, like, Kirkuk was brilliant. Like, we got Kirkuk up and running super fast. And it showed. Kirkuk stands out in the example of the first city in the north taken, taken 100% by, you know, indigenous forces. And it was also the most stable city very, very quickly.

One story I forgot to mention that I do love. Also because people were like, we were told we'd be welcomed as liberators. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely were. When we rolled into Kirkuk, the fighting was. the fighting was very, very intense right up to the perimeter. Very intense.

And that's when the army sort of collapsed. It didn't just collapse. Like the Army's official history makes it sound like, the Iraqis just collapsed. It's really weird. Nah, it's not that weird. Like the fighting was super intense. And their last fighting positions,

they abandoned them and ran into the city. And they literally ran right into the underground. Like we coordinated that. But as we drove into the city and we were having a hard time with all the civilians wanting to go into the city. Like it was really, really hard to keep the population back from seeing Kirkuk. You know, because many of them were kicked out 20 years ago when Saddam Arabized or, you know, did Arabization of neighborhoods. As we're driving in, the streets were lined where it's hard to navigate my vehicles.

Like, I'm yelling at people to get out of the way. Everyone's cheering. You know, they're getting excited. They see me. It's the first time we put American flags on our sleeves. So I look like a curd. I've got a big mustache. I might be wearing the neck scarf still, but they see an American flag.

and they're like, I'm Riki? And I would say something. I actually said yes in Kurdish. And like I'm watching a guy cry. He's got his daughter. People were ecstatic that this is liberation. CIA counterpart. It's one of my favorite crazy stories.

He jumps out of an intersection. He's got this box with him. And he grabs me and three other guys. And he's like, here. And he's got these American flags, like the kind of you would have to parade. And he gives me a handful. He's like, pass him out. And there's a part of me that I looked there was like, where did you get this box from?

He's like, we brought this. Like, this was part of the plan. We're now handing this box out. and we're going to hand out a couple hundred American flags, and then we're going to drive to the next intersection and do it again and do it again. So everybody sees, you know, thousands of American flags on the streets. It's freaky. And all the journalists now are seeing this and they're like,

the crowd is ecstatic about being liberated. So it creates an optic and everybody now is on board. Everybody sees this. And with regard to the 173 coming in a little bit later, I make this point that for the first two days in Kirk Cook, maybe three days. My guidance to my guys was we switched uniforms the second day. We actually put on DCUs. We shaved our mustaches very deliberately to look like different people.

And I told the guys the 70 Americans, there were 70 Americans in the city of 600,000. I need everyone in this city to see an American once a day. So we gritted out the city and I gave ODAs, this is your neighborhood, this is yours, drive up and down every street in your land rovers and make sure they see an American. I need everybody in this city to have seen an American once a day. we did a thing where I did this more than once. We saw journalists across the street and I love journalists.

I think journalists provide a great role. I have many friends who were journalists from that conflict that I have tremendous respect for. But we'd see journalists on the street corner and now we're like, okay, let's do what we talked about. So like, you'd shout to me like,

are we want to put this in the truck? And they'd be like, those are Americans and they'd come running over it and we'd act like, you got us. And we'd act, it was a whole deal. And they're like, oh my God, who are you guys? And yes, to our credit, we're like, we're the American paratrover.

You guys are part of a paratrooper brigade. We're like, yeah, didn't you see us? Where did you guys just come from? We just came from the airfield. No, we're at the governor's building. So we used them to spread the message that there is an American paratrooper brigade in the city. There was not. Everybody in the city had secondhand knowledge of the brigade that is here.

So like around day two, I remember saying the one same way there has got to get in here because I can't keep this charade of any longer. You're doing quick change. We joke. We're going to have to shave our heads to do that tomorrow. We brought them in and they went to the airfield. It was a little bit hard to get them again off to Kirk Cook Airfield. And like I said, it took about a week to get them where you guys got to start going out and patrolling.

Like, they've got to see you. So that's really how Kirk Cook was taken. Talk to us then about sort of the, I mean, demobilization is even the wrong term because Special Forces was in and out of that country for the next like eight years. But what was sort of the conclusion of this operation for you? you guys. Well, so I was talking about, like, we culminated with the MECA. At least my patriotic union of Kurdistan guys, we pushed the Peshmerga monitoring thing. Like, we put a stop to that, that that was nonsensical. And we knew already, we were already hearing bits and pieces of, hey, we're going home. We're going home. And it's a little bit disappointing to me. Like, there was a sense of,

we need to all lose loosely. We need to all go home so we can stay on the summer PCS cycle. Like it freaked me out a little bit because I think all of us thought, like, we all were in it, like, this may take a year. And we were doing really, really well. Like we were having, we were really surprised by our success, frankly. And then we start getting told, hey, we're getting out of here. We're going home. And I will tell you, the majority of at least the team level guys, we're angry, very angry. Because the feeling was we are walking off the field in the ninth inning because we're up by so many runs.

Like, that's the way we felt. So Tovo and I started to talk about, like, what can we do to shore up the success that we've had. hat. So we very much, we grabbed one of the, the Peshmerga guys, like sort of a, he's an Arabic and English speaker. He was one of the Talibani family members. Amage was his name, great guy. And we deliberately took him and we flew to, to Crit, to meet the fourth ID commander, General Orierno, who's a, he passed away a few years ago, but I mean, as good of a general as you get. He was fantastic. We met with him and we're like, hey, sir, thanks for meeting with us. We want to brief you on what these Kurdish guys did. So we,

We gave him, and he was so accommodating. We gave him like a two-hour briefing on every operation they did with us and what they did. And they were like, and this is Amman. He is your emissary L&O. He speaks Arabic, Kurdish, and English, fluent English. So, you know, Ordea Anna was like, wow, this is unbelievable. And he's like, I didn't know any of this. Thank you for bringing me this guy.

So that kind of at least solidified, okay, the PUK are not your problem. Right. And the PUK can help you understand things going forward. the 173rd the 101st came up to Mosul general Petraeus took Mosul he did not get that link up advice

so like he immediately was getting sort of bad advice that don't trust any of the Bath Party members and he got bad the 173 kind of told him not trust the PUK or the KDP and it set him in a not super direction for the first few weeks

101st did a great job Mosul was a much trickier problem set because it's much more of an Arabic, it's a split Arabic Kurdish city where Cook's mostly Kurdish. But that, he wasn't set up for the same success that we set up fourth idea, I think, in my opinion.

And then we got, we got Poleta country. We went back to Carson very, very quickly, felt prematurely quickly. And I was PCSing. And I remember, I think I was home for like two or three days. And one of the teams came to me with like a con-off for scuba training or something crazy. And I was like,

I was like, what are you doing? And they're like, sir, we want to. I was like, guys, let me help you out. Go home, take your leave with your families, come back, clean your equipment, and get ready. I remember one of the guys goes, sir, they promised us we're not going back. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Go home, take care of your family, come back. And sure enough, you know, things started to unravel around August, September,

and the guys all got told they all ended up going back in about October, or not all, but a lot of them started to go back in about October. And that's about when it really started to unravel. You know, there's a section at the end of your book about some of the big lessons learned. We've talked about a bunch of them, I think, during this interview. But are there anything else that we didn't really talk about that you'd really like to tease out of this experience operationally that you'd like to pass on to some of the young guys out there? Yeah, I mean, so much. And thanks for bringing that up.

A couple of things, you know, not to promote my book. But the book has a homepage. If you go to the book's homepage, which is the title, Those Who Face Death.com, one word, no spaces. or Mark Gertovich, no spaces, markgurdivich.com, those sections, it's Annex A and Annex B, are on the homepage. You don't have to buy the book. You can just go there and download the AAR from the operation, if you will. One of them is, Annex A is why we were successful. Annex B is observations about unconventional warfare. Former instructor twice, so I have a very instructor's mindset. And I wrote this, not just because it's a great story that's largely

unknown, not just because I feel like the regiment should know this piece of our history. Actually, the Army should know this piece of the history. I wanted people to be able to learn from the lessons also. So, you know, it's not just a boring book about lessons. Like, I hope it's a, it's in the context of this is a really amazing story. And there's some all pretty valuable lessons weaved in. I could talk about planning and the, you know, the approach to planning at nauseam that would drive most people crazy. But like my original point about the way we approach planning, trusting your guy. making sure the words make sense.

Your mission is an achievement, not an activity. You have to identify what's the achievement that's not going to take place on its own. The power of good leadership, what leadership is responsible for doing. And I trained, I was responsible for officer training in the Q course twice. I take that piece very, very seriously.

And actually, a lot of the team leaders were guys I put through the Q course. What's the role of the officer? you know, the role of the officer is to not just follow orders. He's supposed to be able to have some degree of psychic-like ability to predict or give vision when you don't have perfect information. And I get that. But that's your job.

You know, everybody else can bitch that we don't know what to do. The officer doesn't get that luxury. He still has to say, we're going left. And then with regards to unconventional warfare, there's two things I'll say are my favorite lessons. Guerrilla activity, kinetic activity, powerful. psychological activity or subversive activity powerful put them together it's not like one plus one equals two it's like one plus one equals five it's exponentially powerful when you use those together we didn't talk about it but there's some examples if you recall in the book like with the airstrike where after this really big air strike we sent a message

exaggerating that hey we can kill all of you at any time not true but and we also we integrated that air strike with and we did that air strike yesterday super successful airstrike really coincidental We did that airstrike on that unit because they killed a woman at a checkpoint yesterday. That's actually kind of true, but we exaggerated it to amplify so you should all surrender. I'm trying to get you to surrender. I can kill all of you any time I want, but I'm not because I want you to surrender. That's one that sticks with me is the power of exaggerating to the enemy. Your situation is hopeless.

Younger guys need to know that it's not just about calling close air support and just solving every problem with a $250,000. bomb. That's that's that's that's the power that you're bringing with an indigenous guerrilla force or an indigenous counterinsurgency counterpart. You know, it's much more than just kinetic firepower. There's a bunch of the great lessons in there. I mean, it's I love telling this story because I think it's very, very interesting. And I think as you mentioned at the beginning, my position is unique. I saw the whole of the operation. I'm not, this is not the war story about Mark. You know, there's, I'm in there as a character. You don't really hear a whole lot about me, but it's, but I'm the guy that saw the whole story.

Right. So I can tell you the story from inception to planning to preparation to execution, you know, and then draw the lessons out. And I'll say it this way. This is the instructor me talking. Lessons, I love teaching lessons. When I put all those lessons together, my,

I think this kind of comes across as almost an experiential, you know, almost an experience. So it's not just the seven lessons or eight lessons that are baked in there. It's as if you, the reader, were a part of this operation and now know that experience. That's what I want to impart. on the younger, you know, Special Forces guys or conventional guys.

What made you decide to write the book now? I mean, what came about? Because, I mean, this has like been, it's a Special Forces legend in so many ways, but no one has really, I feel like, come forward and told this story before. You know, originally the number of people who know the entirety of the story, like literally probably me and Tovo, of this particular part of the story. And I posted something a little while back when I announced the book, the book came out last month, almost exactly a month ago. And I was like, this is an example of pro-level procrastination

and pro-level resilience. You know, I've been talking about doing this. When we conducted this, I knew I wanted to tell this story. So like, I was saving documents. I was like, oh, that's a great example. The schoolhouse is going to want to see that. So I was keeping things. I've kept in touch with many of the guys, you know, not a surprise. So it was easy to interview guys and get additional details. Guys were super. I mean, guys were. sharing their maps with me. I'm going over maps with a magnifying glass trying to like see, you know, what's that hilltop number? Recreating the whole Viking hammer thing by hilltop number was crazy. Like that was, that was a bit of research. But it was about two and a half years

ago that I finally, just out of the blue one day, I was like, I'm going to start writing. And I, for anybody who's ever thinking about writing, that's how it starts. Start. You know, I sat down at a laptop in a cabinet in North Carolina on vacation. It was like, I'm going to start writing. And I wrote about two chapters, and that did get the ball rolling. And I'm like, I'm actually doing it. I've actually started it. And it, you know, like all things we know, it might take a long time. It's going to take a lot longer if you don't start. And by starting, I reached an endpoint, and I'm very, very happy with the result. And the feedback has been great. You know, the guys who conducted it, it means a lot when I've had guys, I've had a lot of the guys come back and say,

now my family can understand what I've done. I have something to show my grandchildren and, you know, grandchildren who were in high school or college. And I'm very proud of that because, again, this is not the story of Mark in Combat. This is not my memoir. It's their story. And I've been the keeper of it, and it's been a privilege to hold it. But I can't keep holding it by myself. And the book is available now?

Yeah. You can go to my homepage and order. You can order it on Amazon. You can order it on Barnes & Noble. It's, you know, hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Audio. for the audio, it is me talking. I speak a little quickly sometimes. That was a fun experience, narrating it myself.

But yeah, so all those formats are available. And I said on the homepage, again, some of the portions. Also, for anybody who gets the audiobook, if you go to the homepage, you can download the maps, the photos, and those annexes. That's awesome. The maps are an important piece of it. And the audiobook's great, but you want those maps to understand

there's like 11 maps in there. that talk about where the guys are going and what's, you know, the flow of the battle. Awesome, Mark. I mean, thank you for coming in and sharing your story with us. My pleasure. I appreciate this. I great deal. I read the book last week.

I highly recommend people go and take a look at it. It was good, man. I really appreciate it. Anything else you want to tell people before we get going tonight? I mean, we'll end up talking here for 10 more hours. Should we talk about administration? No, that's good. I will say this.

You know, you and I spoke several years ago. We talked about the force is always evolving and changing, and it was when the Siffs got disbanded, the Siffs in the Crips. In the latter parts of this book, I talked, I returned to Iraq in the epilogue four years later, and I talked about what the coin fight was like. And I felt that was a really important piece to also capture because the regiment had done,

the regiment did such spectacular work in Iraq. I will often joke, and I was with Fifth Group, by the way, for that tour. I will often joke that Fifth Group has the responsibility for causing us to not lose in Vietnam faster. And in some ways, it's the same thing in Iraq. Like, we didn't win the war, but we prevented it from being lost a lot faster. And the work the teams did predominantly fifth and tenth in Iraq, although other groups were there in smaller numbers, was phenomenal. And the SIF and Krif and Kreeze were really important parts of the community. The community is still struggling with those,

but it's not just about what those companies do. It's what those companies bring as they spread that experience out to the rest of the force. And I hope it demonstrated in the back of the book. I'm a former SIF guy. Tovo's a former SIF guy. Jay Klein's a former Sif guy. Andy Gronlin is a former Sif guy. It's like those guys sprinkled throughout the force have a huge impact

in the skills and the operational experience they bring to the force. And it was a big part of our success. Yeah, I think you helped me with some of the documentation and stuff when I was writing my book about, that topic. Yeah, and that's something we, you know, hopefully maybe we'll talk more in the future. Like some of the history of the SIFs, they've, they've done spectacular things that is not largely known.

Were you the one that also, it was you or someone else who passed off the whole thing about how the seventh group SIF got stood up? No, that wouldn't me. Someone else. I mean, that was like, it was like fascinating the way that was all put together. But yeah, that's another podcast. We'll say that for that. Yeah, we'd love to have you back anytime.

It was fantastic. Well, okay, you and I joke this. My mother would be very happy about that. So I'm originally from New York. Super happy to be here, you know, back at home today. Spending time with my family, did all the tourist stuff today. I've re-certified myself as a New Yorker on this trip, so it's been fantastic. Set in traffic.

Took the subway, ate pizza. Okay. Went to the Horse Soldier Memorial. Really good time. I really appreciate it. Great. So, yeah, we'll see all you guys next time. Thank you, Mark.

The book is those. who face death, go check it out. Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Aiz On podcast, and the Highside News Outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Aiz On and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side.

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