Into the Darkness: A Journey of Love, War, and Emotional Freedom by Dave Fielding

Author:Dave Fielding [Fielding, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Windermere Press
Published: 2024-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter SIX

I hit the ground running in Iraq.

Settling in was far more of a pleasure than expected. The accommodations in Iraq I had were outright decadent compared to what I was used to. After Southeast Asia, Iraq felt like the Ritz Carlton.

I got to live in my own little containerized housing unit (CHU), a luxury I hadn’t experienced on any of my deployments with 1st Special Forces Group. I was used to living with host nation troops, which usually meant open-air barracks and the occasional outbreak of dengue or malaria or dysentery.

With the whole CHU to myself, I set up what I needed just the way I wanted. My kit was all ready to go, centrally staged so I could walk out the door in seconds. And I plastered pictures of Gabriela all over the walls. My gear and my girl––that’s all I had, and that’s all I needed.

My mission at work was also simple: kill or capture ISIS and Al Qaeda leadership. That was the sole purpose of the task force I was on, and I got right to it. I was outside the wire the day after setting up my suite at the Ritz.

These were the kind of missions I’d envisioned as a newbie Green Beret. I’d done comparable work in Southeast Asia, but the main fight was right where I was in Iraq and Syria. This was varsity counterterrorism, and it was exhilarating.

They handed me suitcases of money, the most cash I’d ever touched. And I had carte blanche to pursue information that would enable the killing or capturing of ISIS and Al Qaeda members. I couldn’t get over how easy it was.

Southeast Asia had been a bureaucratic blackhole because it wasn’t a declared theater of armed conflict, so doing anything required all sorts of thumb-ups. In Iraq and Syria, we could move at the pace we needed to, which was relentless.

Counterterrorism demands that pace of operations, because the information you get is always fleeting. When you have a bed-down location on a bad guy, it’s never permanent. You have to move quickly, and everyone involved understands that.

Right off the bat, I got into the groove of working long hours. I was out and about till 2 or 3 at night, and then back at it again by 10 or 11 in the morning. That was the routine, seven days a week.

Most of the guys I worked with were SF turned intelligence officers, and that shared mindset and approach made for an easy camaraderie. I was with my brothers; my fellow hood rats. We had friends who knew each other, we’d deployed to the same places, we’d done the same shit.

This wasn’t the disgust I’d felt back in D.C. working alongside senior staff who had never done anything remotely dangerous in their entire career. These were guys cut from the same cloth as me, who understood that the mission is everything. I was surrounded by solid professionals who had similar tactical experience and knew how to hold

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