Posted on 06/24/2003 6:10:44 PM PDT by bicycle thug
Floyd Holcom probed parched soil along Kuwait's border with Iraq in March, making sure it would support a tank's churning treads.
Members of Holcom's U.S. Army Special Forces team watched Kuwaiti soldiers cut openings in the border's gleaming steel fence. The desert was eerily quiet.
Then, for three days and nights, the Astoria man and his fellow Green Berets stared in awe as thousands upon thousands of tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and trucks shattered the desert silence. The most powerful fighting machine on Earth thundered toward Baghdad, trailing dust and smoke.
Finally the desert grew tranquil again. The Kuwaitis sealed and electrified the forbidding fence, and the Green Berets of the 911 Team resumed their secret war.
The commandos were old, for soldiers. Holcom, 39, had served in more than 60 countries and had fought in Grenada and Haiti. His teammates, all members of the Washington National Guard, ranged from a 33-year-old physician's assistant who'd never seen combat to a 56-year-old Portland mail carrier who fought in Vietnam.
Unconventional forces played a major role in Iraq, with special operations soldiers fanning out across the country. But American public attention focused on the bombing of Baghdad and the firefights that raged as Army and Marine units raced toward the capital. While hundreds of embedded reporters covered the conventional war, Special Forces teams operated in the shadows.
Until now, little of their story has come to light.
Holcom and his unit -- called the 911 Team, not for the number's emergency or terrorist connotation, but for the detachment's military designation -- spent nine months in Kuwait and Iraq. Four of the Green Berets described their experience after returning to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, for a month's worth of debriefings and preparations for re-entering civilian life.
As conventional forces remaining in Iraq face hostility and combat, the team members offer tantalizing glimpses of what U.S. involvement there could have been -- or could still become. They are reluctant to criticize conventional soldiers, who lack their training and independence, but their experience demonstrates an alternative approach to winning the peace.
Unlike conventional soldiers, the Green Berets on the 911 Team closely interacted with Iraqis. The 11 men, eight of them from Oregon, learned Arabic, building rapport as they shared bowls of rice and mutton in Arab homes. By the end of their time there, the team had reopened a school and formed what they believe was the first local government in occupied southern Iraq.
Today's unconventional warriors, such as Navy Seals, Army Rangers and Delta Force members, operate like mobile special weapons and tactics teams. Like them, the 911 Team was quite capable of storming buildings and taking out enemies.
But even more than younger Green Berets, whose training emphasizes direct action, the old-school commandos were trained to realize the branch's original mission: to build relationships with indigenous people, to collect intelligence and to direct guerrilla groups behind enemy lines.
"In Iraq, you're talking about winning these people over to the American way," the captain who commanded the 911 Team said later. A Tacoma policeman, he spoke on condition that his name be withheld for security reasons. "It's not going to happen in a day. I think some people initially expected it would."
In April after helping to seal the border, the captain and his team drove back to Kuwait City. They restocked their four desert-reinforced Humvees and prepared to depart for Baghdad, where U.S. and British missiles and bombs still pounded the city. Holcom flew to Baghdad strapped into the driver's seat of a Humvee that was chained to the floor of a Special Operations MC-130 plane. He wore a helmet and a bulletproof vest as the aircraft rumbled north.
In the red glow of the shrouded interior lights, the stocky, brown-eyed master sergeant could see a teammate strapped in a second Humvee. The rest of their team soon would follow with the other vehicles.
Holcom carried an M-4 rifle and $60,000 in cash. Like other Special Forces members, he wore no wedding ring and carried no family photos. If he were captured, interrogators could have used knowledge of his wife, Sheryl, a medical technician, and their children, Nate, 6, and Victoria, 4, to threaten him.
Back home in Astoria, Sheryl, 38, scrambled to work full time, to run the couple's nine rental units and to care for the kids. "You try to block them out of your mind; you really do," Floyd Holcom said. "It sounds cold. When I made it through the day, I'd think, 'I hope I get to go home and see them grow up.' "
In Astoria, Holcom worked for an engineering consulting firm, helping to bring undersea telecommunications lines to Tillamook County. Holcom also was managing director of the Ibis Group, an international sales and consulting firm that in 1993 helped Powell's Books open business in Vietnam.
Like other team members, Holcom knew two foreign languages. He spoke Mandarin Chinese and had studied Farsi, the Persian language whose similarity to Arabic enabled him to read and write in Kuwait.
Flying toward Baghdad, Holcom felt that the stint in Kuwait had prepared the 911 Team well for Iraq. After arriving in Kuwait City in September, the team spent a month training the emir's bodyguards. Later they split into pairs, camping in the desert with Kuwaiti battalions along the border.
There they became the U.S. military's eyes and ears. Following local customs, they ate out of common bowls with Kuwaiti troops. They visited Bedouin families in tents, drinking gallons of hot tea.
Team members endured vicious sandstorms that cut visibility to less than four feet. They cleared the routes laid out in the U.S. attack plan, ensuring that coalition forces wouldn't run over their Kuwaiti allies.
Holcom ran patrols, putting more than 16,000 miles on a new GMC Suburban. Team members trained hard, trudging 25 miles across the desert in evasion-and-escape exercises, firing at targets and conducting house-to-house combat drills.
Occasionally Iraqi soldiers approached the border fence and asked to defect. You can't, said the Kuwaitis, the war hasn't started yet.
Once the invasion began, Iraqi Scuds streaked overhead, often blowing up within sight as Patriot missiles intercepted them. The Green Berets pulled on their gas masks, fearing chemical clouds that never came.
"I'd sleep with my gas mask on," Holcom said. "I'd wake up with drool on my cheek and I'd think, 'What will my kids think of me if I die this way?' "
On the flight to Baghdad, the MC-130 began a bumpy approach to the captured airport. As antiaircraft fire intensified, Holcom peered through night-vision goggles at red and green tracers streaking below.
The plane barreled down the runway and taxied to a halt. Its big doors yawned. Over the din, Holcom thought he heard someone yell "Go." He hit the accelerator, but the big vehicle strained at the chains that still held it.
Oh, Holcom said to himself. He must have said, "No."
Sprung loose, Holcom drove the Humvee into Baghdad's smoky night air, swinging wide to cover his partner in the vehicle behind. After months of anticipation, the commandos had arrived.
Holcom checked in with harried U.S. commanders in Baghdad. They pressed him to relinquish the four Humvees for conventional duty up north. But Holcom refused on his captain's instructions. He knew that a Special Forces team without vehicles often draws mundane cleanup assignments.
Soon the captain and the rest of the team arrived. They swapped the Humvees for Toyota pickups more appropriate to their next mission. Their instructions: Occupy a palace not far from the airport, and take charge of the surrounding town.
The 911 Team members walked up to Radwania Palace, an opulent marble edifice that loomed over Abu Ghraib, a town northwest of Baghdad's airport. Fumes from a chlorine plant burning nearby caught in their throats.
The Green Berets walked through the gaudy palace, seized earlier by conventional forces. They examined its white marble staircase and hardwood double doors. They glanced at their tanned, dust-streaked faces in bathroom mirrors framed with gold. They turned gilded faucets on sculpted marble sinks, finding no water.
Tired, they sprawled on couches, grateful for their malaria pills as they swatted aggressive mosquitoes. One team member stayed up late, probing for secret passages that could admit attackers or conceal treasure. Locals would tell the Americans that Saddam Hussein ordered craftsmen killed after they completed each part of the building.
Holcom spread five poster-sized satellite photos on a wooden banquet table and examined the 100-square-mile territory assigned to the team. It extended from the airport west toward the city of Fallujah and included Abu Ghraib's notorious prison.
During the next several days, the Green Berets scoured the area for military sites. They found camouflaged missiles, weapons caches and loaded antiaircraft guns. They called in airstrikes to demolish larger items and used Thermit grenades to destroy the rest.
At the prison, they found a room with hooks on the ceiling. Electrical wires protruded from the wall. Dried blood stained the floor.
Conventional U.S. soldiers, called "Joes," -- as in G.I. Joes -- by the Special Forces, wore vests and helmets, and following orders, kept Iraqis at bay. But the Green Berets, keeping their weapons slung, spoke to Iraqis as much as possible. They introduced themselves with three successive greetings they had learned in Kuwait, kissing men on each cheek and shaking their hands. An Iraqi who reciprocated with a direct gaze and a hand across the heart earned the commandos' initial trust.
Holcom hired a local interpreter. He picked Iraqis to guard the palace. If anything happens to us, he told them, you won't get paid.
The Green Berets drank tea with the guards, following customs they had learned in Kuwait. They held their cups in their right hands and avoided showing the bottoms of their feet, a sign of disrespect.
While other units continued munching military rations, the 911 guys ate two hot meals a day cooked by the guards, who also did the dishes and the laundry. During off hours, some team members watched a year of the "Friends" television show, using a DVD in a laptop.
Sometimes Iraqis approached the Green Berets with information about former Baath Party officials loyal to Saddam. The commandos referred the information to Central Intelligence Agency agents who did, in the words of one team member, "what CIA guys do."
The team members accepted invitations to eat in homes, something regular troops would never do. They got the local firetruck repaired, then used it to deliver water for residents and to douse a grass fire. The team medics treated children with shrapnel wounds.
Gradually, Green Berets made inroads into the community and built rapport, much as their captain might do on his Tacoma police beat. "A cop who just drives around looking for crime, that's one way," the captain said later. "But you've got to talk to people."
The 911 Team members watched one another's backs. They relied partly on their Iraqi guards for protection. And they watched for tell-tale signs of danger -- an absence of children in a crowd, for example.
Looking back, Brent Olson, a team medic and former Ranger, thinks security was sometimes lax. But Olson, an emergency-room physician's assistant from Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, says he feels the gambles paid off.
"Risks," the captain said. "Not gambles."
"OK," Olson said. "Risks."
The risks led to a meeting April 21 of a kind that hadn't occurred in decades. The 911 Team captain and his interpreter woke up early and covered the floor of a nearby school classroom with fine carpets.
In the center of the room, the interpreter placed a Quran on a gilded coffee table taken from the palace. Team members lined the walls with pillows. Their guards fired up some tea.
The 911 Team invited the area's 14 sheiks, or Arab family chiefs, to meet in the room. Had any more than three of them met during Saddam's reign, the sheiks said, they would have been executed for conspiracy.
The men, their weathered faces framed by traditional headdresses, sat cross-legged against the schoolroom's scarred walls. They began to argue, not about the war or the future but about old scores and marriages.
When the Green Berets told the sheiks to choose city fathers from among themselves, the Iraqis asked who the Americans wanted. No, no, the soldiers said. It's your country; you choose.
More than an hour of debate produced seven city fathers. The commandos asked the men to pick a leader. They chose an English-speaking sheik educated in Germany.
The sheiks wrote a joint statement that began, in crude translation: "We wish from the coalition forces to be more peaceful."
After the meeting, the city fathers fanned out into the city, encouraging residents to resume their jobs. The 911 Team members, concerned about children on the streets, bought paint and got men to repaint the school, covering anti-American slogans. They rounded up teachers, surprising them by explaining they could teach whatever they wanted instead of parroting a party line.
Iraqis sometimes balked at cooperating for fear that Saddam would return, said Sean Houlihan, a 911 Team engineer. "One thing that hurt us," Houlihan said, "was the fact that nobody knows where Saddam is."
Some Iraqis said they couldn't trust the Americans to stay because they had abandoned those who opposed the regime after the Persian Gulf War.
When Holcom encountered anti-American sentiment, he would seek out an older member in a crowd.
You can fight us if you want, Holcom told them. But you need to make a future for these kids.
Holcom pores over team photographs in a cut-rate Puyallup, Wash., hotel, his base while he commutes to nearby Fort Lewis for debriefings.
Holcom, who shed 25 pounds from his 5-foot-6-inch frame while abroad, wears a golf shirt with the emblem of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. He's shaved the beard he grew in Iraq, but he still sports a trim mustache.
He pauses at a photo of teachers and children standing in front of the freshly painted school.
"This is what should be going on now," Holcom says. "When we left, that's kind of what we thought would be happening."
Holcom's photos of smiling, bright-eyed kids contrast sharply with news images of tense U.S. troops, fingers on triggers, pointing bayonets at the chests of irate Iraqis.
Members of the 911 Team are thrilled to be back in the United States, rejoining families. They are grateful that no member of the seven Alpha Company teams that performed hazardous missions across Iraq was killed or seriously wounded. They are proud of the teams' accomplishments, many of which remain classified. Some of them would deploy again in a heartbeat.
But the Green Berets react to recent developments with quiet disappointment. They don't want to second-guess conventional soldiers, who cleared the way for them and who confront rapidly changing conditions that may confound their training.
Yet some 911 Team members can't help wondering about the city of Fallujah, for example, the scene of some of the worst strife, where they operated safely. Perhaps Saddam's Fedayeen forces moved back in there, or maybe Baath Party remnants set up a resistance.
But they note that U.S. soldiers who were initially targeted in Fallujah had established their headquarters in a school, piling desks in a street as roadblocks. What if the school had been used instead to gather local sheiks? What if teachers had returned to the classrooms?
Holcom turns away from his photographs. It's almost midnight. He's thinking of driving three hours home to Astoria.
The success of Special Forces teams in Afghanistan and Iraq has helped persuade Army generals to increase the ranks of 6,250 active duty commandos and 2,500 National Guard members. For the first time, recruiters are admitting qualified civilians for training. Only men are eligible.
For the 911 Team, the most difficult aspect of their Middle East stint was not knowing how long it would last. Life went on at home without them.
Sean Houlihan missed birthdays and holidays with his wife and three children in Tacoma. Someone broke into his house while he was away, stealing his wife's purse off the kitchen table.
The team's captain departed for Kuwait just days after his wife returned from a year away on military deployment. When he returns to his Tacoma police beat, he'll swing by Houlihan's house on patrol.
Brent Olson plans a proper wedding with his longtime fiancee, Gina. They married in a rushed private ceremony just before he departed.
Holcom heads for his pickup. He wants to wake up in the morning with his wife and kids. He thinks he's done with combat.
"I don't like the actual war part of it," Holcom says. "But to see those kids smile, and to know those kids have a future, to me is worth every day that I spent there." Researcher Gail Hulden contributed to this report. Richard Read: 503-294-5135; richread@aol.com
De Oppresso Liber
So when you ask your old mailman where he's been for the last few months, and he says, "Iraq", maybe he's telling the truth!
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