Earlier that evening I had joined the operators at our compound at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). They came from an Army special mission unit known as “Green,” one of the units that formed the core of the globally deployed special operations task force I now led, Task Force 714 (TF 714). After the team briefed the operation, we drove out of the heavily guarded northwest gate of the airport’s perimeter. We weaved through a serpentine maze of obstacles, laid out like bumpers on a pinball board in order to slow approaching vehicles that might contain car bombs or shooters. Above our vehicle’s windows, dark barrels of machine guns protruded over the security light-bathed HESCOs, refrigerator-size wire baskets filled with earth and rock that served as protective walls.
As we left the relative security of the airport, our small collection of specially outfitted armored vehicles and Humvees got onto Highway 10, which ran west from Baghdad along the Euphrates and out all the way to Jordan. The drive took an hour on the unlit and eerily quiet freeway. At the eastern edge of Fallujah, our single-file convoy slowly exited the highway using the cloverleaf off-ramps. We passed under the same green highway signs with white text and arrows you’d find in any city in the United States. It felt like we were commuting to war.
These operators were unlike other soldiers. They were painstakingly selected, exquisitely trained warriors. Calm but intensely focused, they did not display any nervousness in the vehicle, nor did they engage in the idle chatter shown in war movies. I heard only the low groan of the engine and the periodic electronic beep of the radio set on the dash.
I had worked with operators from their unit on training events and during the first Gulf War, and many of the commissioned and noncommisioned officers were former Rangers with whom I had served. I respected them and wanted their respect. But only four months into my command of TF 714, I was still unsure of where I stood with them. Their demeanor around me was correct but cautiously stiff. I did not lead the operations I went on—and did not try to insert myself into the action. As on this night, I went to observe. Accompanying operators on these missions was essential if I wanted to understand what was happening on the ground in our war against an ever-shifting and increasingly wise network. Critically, in this fight, which only got harder from that night forward, these were opportunities to build relationships and mutual trust with the men and women I led.
We searched and cleared a number of houses that evening. As I climbed the stairs to the second floor of one of those homes, my head came into view of the Iraqis above the landing. Grouped together in the corner and partially illuminated, they turned from watching the operators comb through their belongings to look at me. I’ll never forget their stare. It was controlled, but I sensed pure anger, radiating like heat. Perhaps they understood from watching how the operators reacted when I entered that I was the one who had sent these men with lights and guns to their house that night. Maybe theirs was a more instinctive response of indignation and fright to someone invading their homes. That we were foreigners made the process worse. Theirs was a look I would see repeatedly in the years to come.
The Green operators were being as sensitive as anyone could be when searching someone else’s house. Poise came naturally to them: They were older, in their thirties and forties, and they were seasoned. They did not need to smash things to prove their manhood or to feel powerful. Most were fathers, and that night, as on the hundreds of raids each went on during the war, they couldn’t help but see their own children in the young Iraqis who hid behind their parents’ legs.
But the operators’ care mattered little to the Iraqis, who never ceased glowering. We were big men, made bigger with body armor, it was one o’clock in the morning, and our searching their home was as humiliating to them as if we had stripped their bodies. They had no way of knowing that we too were fathers; without language, there was no chance even to attempt human connection. I knew we needed to do these raids, but I also knew these searches—on top of the lack of electricity and the backed-up sewage and the lack of jobs in a chaotic, post-Saddam Iraq—were producing fury, understandably directed at us. With calculated barbarism, Zarqawi was already at work exploiting our failures, making us look powerless or sinister or both. His disappearance into the dark that night was troubling, but I was consumed with this Iraqi family. Watching them watch us, I realized this fight was going to be long and tough.