The Bremer Detail by Frank Gallagher John M. Del Vecchio

Author:Frank Gallagher,John M. Del Vecchio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firebrand Technologies
Published: 2014-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

February 2004

As the time approached for the assembled American and Iraqi diplomats to write a constitution for the new Iraq, a thousand different forces pulled Ambassador Bremer in a thousand different directions. We had several Red Zone missions every day, winding up with meetings at the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) building until late each night. Exasperation began to show on all the diplomats as the divergent groups of Iraqis argued for all their pet projects, each attempting to sway every law and every decision to favor his own special interests. Each day we visited several different politicians before heading over to the IGC, and each evening we witnessed the politicians apparently forgetting the agreements they had made with the Americans earlier in the day.

My guys were dragging ass. The original villa guys rejoined the detail and advance teams after being replaced by the new, designated villa team and were being trained by the advance team leader and shift leaders on how to do their newly assigned jobs. It was like a sports draft where I allowed each team leader to make a selection to fill the holes left by the newly crowned door gunners. Each group had lost damn good guys to the helos. And they were pissed about their degraded operational capacities. Again, being in charge sucked. Hacksaw was happy, but the two guys I relied upon the most—the shift leader and the advance team leader—were pissed off. Some days you just could not win. I just put my head down and went back to work, convincing myself that one out of three really wasn’t that bad. Hell, in baseball I might have made the Hall of Fame.

The selections were finalized, and the train-ups began. Eventually I got to the point where each group had enough bodies to have two squads. I made the decision at this point to split the detail team into two separate entities. Group 1 would work from 0530 to 1500, and Group 2 would replace them at 1500 and take the helm until we took the boss home. We would do a one-week rotation. This way each group got to sleep in every other week. Initially it sounded like a good plan. The problem was the Red Zone runs. My master plan soon evolved into a Red Zone team and a Green Zone team. There was no way I could, nor would I ever, skip a Red Zone move; and after a few Red Zone moves with teams that were not as sound as I felt they should be, I scrapped the original idea of rotations. So I designated a dedicated Red Zone group shortly thereafter. The Red Zone team was made up of my best guys. If we had no Red Zone moves planned, we would split the day.

I also made the decision the drivers were too valuable to rotate. Q and his guys had returned and I needed them to stay as sharp as possible while I was working their asses off. This meant some extremely long days.

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