Change of Mission (Iraq, 2003)
Yesterday morning, we were going home
This week, 20 years ago…
It’s amazing how your life can change from one minute to the next. Yesterday morning we were gathered in the office talking about going home, thinking that we were weeks away from it, fully expecting to be completely home by mid-October at the latest. I had firm plans for a marathon in November, and football tickets, and just being in Pennsylvania for the fall.
Five minutes later, we are not even halfway through the deployment.
We have been pulled from the mouth of redeployment, and are being sent instead to work with the 82nd Airborne west of Baghdad. We will have a few weeks at Camp Arifjan to refit and reconfigure, and then we head back out for another 6 or 7 months. There are not words to describe how it feels to hear that when we were so close to home…
— from my journal, September 9, 2003 (Tuesday)
Some context…
My Army Reserve unit (the 304th Civil Affairs Brigade) was 7 months into an Iraq mobilization. My subset of the unit, a provisional battalion task-organized for tactical civil affairs missions, had spent a long, hot summer working in Basrah Province in southern Iraq (I was the Executive Officer). A week earlier, we’d reached End of Mission and officially handed things off to the British unit responsible for the area. We were waiting in place for orders to return to Kuwait, expecting to be home soon, when we got the news.
I explained it in more detail to Renee…
What I said 30 minutes ago about being back to Kuwait by Thursday is still accurate. Everything after that has just changed dramatically. COL R-B just called and the Brigade has been given a new mission. We go to Arifjan to refit and reconfigure, and then we go to Baghdad (west of) in support of the 82nd Airborne. All CA tours have been extended to 365 days “in the box”. That means we are probably in Iraq until April 04, and home by May or June.
Sorry to hit you with that so bluntly, but no easy way to say it. LTC Williams, LTC Goebel, MAJ R-B and I were all sitting here in our TOC talking about getting home when the call came. It was like the wind was completely knocked out of everyone, like we had all been gut-punched. We have a meeting with the soldiers in a few minutes, and I can picture the reactions...
No details beyond that — we don’t know what exactly the mission is, or if we will stay together as a battalion or reconfigure into our old functional specialty teams or what. All that we will learn back at Arifjan. Don’t know how long we will be there before we go north, either.
Not good news to wake up to on a Monday morning, and I’m sorry. But we will make it through somehow and eventually it will all be over. I will talk to you again soon — have to go tell the soldiers now.
— from my email to Renee, September 8, 2003 (Monday)
And a couple days later, a brigade reunion, and some more information…
We all made it to Camp Arifjan yesterday with no trouble. The rest of the brigade (minus a few people) is here now too. It is an interesting reunion. Not every team has worked out as well as ours did. There is also an undercurrent of competition going on, like who had it hardest, who got shelled with mortars, who got stoned and mobbed and RPG'd and who had to eat T-rations and who had air conditioning and showers, etc. etc. A little bit of that is fine, and the legitimate telling of stories is fine, but I have a feeling that it will be a difficult task to get these 4 separate groups (Umm Qasr/Safwan, Al Hillah, Karbala, and the rear detachment at Camp Arifjan and Camp Doha) functioning as a single unit again.
COL Beard briefed us this morning on what he knows of the mission (which isn't much, and will be more complete when he returns from the recon he just left on). I said the 82nd Airborne before, but it is really an 82nd HQ with a brigade from the 82nd, the 82nd DIVARTY, and the 3rd ACR. And the area is huge, from just west of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders. It includes Fallujah (where soldiers fired into the crowd back in May) and Ramadi. Basically it is a portion of the Sunni Triangle, plus the western desert.
— from my email to Renee, September 11, 2003 (Monday)
In the grand scheme of things, an additional 6 months away from home is nothing. But when you've already been away for 8 months (or in my case, away for 19 of the past 21 months) and when you have a 6-yr old son at home, it can feel huge in the moment.
Yes, I’m starting in the middle of things with this post — I intended to start writing about my second visit to Iraq much earlier in the year. There have been many fine 20th-anniversary dates I could have used as a trigger:
December 27, 2002: alert (“I called COL Fuoco last night in response to 3 urgent messages he left on our voice mail at home, and he informed me that I’ve been selected as part of a 36-man Advance Party, and we have a briefing Monday night at 1900 at the Reserve Center to learn more. He did say that it is for possible deployment in 1-3 weeks...”)
February 14, 2003: unit farewell, movement from Philadelphia to Ft. Bragg (“This morning was a little rushed and hectic, but I still managed to get that last 20 minutes of time with just them [Renee and Lucas] — in my office, and then a tearful goodbye with everyone leaving the building to load the buses, and then a good clean break as we pulled away (into a snowstorm). I think it is the best way it could happen…”)
March 19, 2003: start of the war (“The war started tonight and here I sit in the Holiday Inn [overflow housing at Ft. Bragg] and feeling very out of it all. I’m busy until now (0140) doing equipment spreadsheets and other things…”)
April 11, 2003: movement to Green Ramp at Pope AFB, on-deck for movement from Ft. Bragg to Kuwait (“Back to the wonderful world of Air Mobility Command flights — we left the motel last night at 0130. We palletized our baggage, got weighed, etc. and we were to the terminal in the waiting/holding area by about 0330 or 0400. It is now 1320 and we are still here — in a different building, but still here waiting. We are now supposed to be on a flight at 1830. Whether it happens that way remains to be seen — flexibility, hurry-up-and-wait, all of those clichés apply here in full measure…”)
April 22, 2003: movement into Iraq (“Well, I'm here in south-eastern Iraq, convoyed here yesterday without incident, and we are now getting established. I'm setting up our operations center, and we have teams out on three different missions in our area…”)
There were and will be others, but here we are in September, and I’ve published nothing about it so far. So I decided this change-of-mission anniversary was as good an opportunity as any to introduce the topic.
This is not something I think about much, or talk about, and it’s been years since I looked back at this period. I haven’t intentionally pushed it away or avoided it, but it was a long time ago and my life has moved on. Even so, it is also always there in the background, just beyond the edge of my awareness. And when I start looking at my photos and reading my journal, there are moments when it is yesterday (or tomorrow), and the feeling of it becomes real and immediate.
I’ve also known from the beginning that I’d eventually write about this war, and even though it still feels politically and emotionally charged, I’m hopeful that I have enough distance from it now to look back at my experiences objectively, and perhaps find some lessons in them. If nothing else, I’m interested in how this period shaped the longer narrative threads of my life as they passed through it.
Running is one of those long-term threads (and a justification for including this topic in this venue, alongside race reports and ultrarunner musings). Before this deployment, I was already firmly settled into my identity as a runner (and already five years and five marathons into the oldest of the many running streaks that are still with me today), and running is one of the main things that got me through.
Running can be a test in itself, an elective “hard thing”. But as I discovered, it can also be a way to get through hard things. It can be an anchor, or a refuge, a consistency that is there regardless of pressures and chaos and deprivation. This is what it became for me then, and it remains so today.
I’m hoping that it can also be a point of entry, or a good lens for this look back — my particular experience of war, from my perspective as a runner. I have a lot of notes — a treasure trove of journal entries and emails and letters and photographs, nearly 400,000 words of contemporaneous material. It feels immense, and I'm not quite sure how to approach it, so I’ll probably just jump in and go exploring.
I’ll try to bring you with me with some updates from time to time — maybe we can find something worthwhile along the way…
☺️