The War on Terror Begins: LTC Daniel Pace Part I

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from LTC Daniel Pace. Pace served in the U.S. Army, deploying to Afghanistan twice as an infantryman before deploying to Iraq as a company executive officer. Pace then decided to join the U.S. Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, where he did foreign internal defense in places like Columbia, Peru, and Europe. At the end of his career, Pace returned to Afghanistan as a part of Special Operation Forces and oversaw drone warfare.

In this interview, Pace talks about his first two deployments, explaining the intense lead-up, the reality of the situation, moral difficulties, and the difficulties they faced.

LTC Daniel Pace:

So my name's Daniel Pace. I was a 22-year Army vet and I got out as a lieutenant colonel, a Special Forces guy last year in January.

So I joined in January of 2001, which is a weird anticlimactic time when you look back at the whole timeline, but yeah, you ask if there was a trigger, mostly it was I graduated college and realized you actually do something when you graduate college. You have to get a job or function in the world in some capacity and philosophy degree is perhaps not the most marketable option that's out there. And so I thought, "I'm 21. Let's go do something exciting," and I joined the Army and got plenty of that I think.

So I was about as unmilitary as you can get. Really had no thought of joining the military, no thought of doing anything and just hit it on a whim. It seemed like a good idea.

I am a native Texan. My grandfather was in the Navy. My parents, pretty standard Baby Boomer, hippie types, did not join the military and then it jumped back and I ended up going in.

If you remember how that was when we were all growing up, you'd have the mall with the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force recruiting centers right next to each other. I don't know why the Marines were always separate. Maybe there's a message there, I'm not sure, but yeah, we actually went to the Navy. So a buddy of mine, we're a few beers into the day and we decided we'd go join the Navy because we wanted to go to foreign ports and meet girls and have excitement, but they were closed for lunch, because of course, everybody in the military closes from 11:30 to 1:00. And so I just decided to go next door, went to the Army, went and joined the Army instead. And it's a totally nonheroic reason to join, but it seems to have worked out okay.

So I had graduated basic and I was in the infantry at Fort Drum New York on September 11th. So we were still the Army of the '90s. And so a lot of what we did was fight the Cold War enemy and also standard Army stuff, inventories, layouts, formations, a lot of inspections. And that day, we were actually prepping for an inspection, so we were down in the motor pool inventory and camo nets and snow chains and all the other stuff that goes with being in an AT platoon in an infantry unit in Fort Drum. And we had one of these radios set up, like an old boombox-style radio set up on a bucket in the middle of our little cold storage area and we're all just listening to music, doing our inventories, doing our counts. I'm sitting there with a TM reading the parts for this camo net and my buddy's sitting there holding up the parts, so we can get ready for the PL to do a walkthrough. And the music cuts out and everybody's first response is just irritation. Everybody's first response is like, "Hey, why did the music cut out? What's going on here?" And then people slowly start peeling off and hearing what's going on. You realize like, "Oh, is this a joke? Is this real? Is there a plane crash? Why are they making such a big deal about this?" And of course, as the day unfolds, we all figure out what's going on and you start to really get a sense of it and none of us were from New York. For me, the World Trade Center may well have been something on Mars. I just didn't really know what it was. But as people started explaining it, you realize this is downtown, multiple planes are crashing. It turned into a really big deal and we really started to piece it together. We all got put on lockdown. We didn't have the internet, nobody had a phone, nobody had any access to this information. So we were just on lockdown waiting to hear more. And when we finally got to go home, obviously, it turned out to be a pretty big deal. And then three weeks later, we were actually in Uzbekistan, so we got spun up and sent overseas pretty much immediately.

So I'm 21 at the time. The only international travel I have under my belt is Mexico, and of course, I grew up in Texas, so everybody goes to Mexico. And we'd gone to Canada once or twice because that's only about an hour from Fort Drum, but that's it. It's actually funny because you don't realize ... I mean, it's later in my career, you have better access to information. You don't realize how little you knew until you look back on it. You realize that, at the time, I did even know where we were going, right? So we'd had three or four false starts, trips to the airfield, you get ready to go. There's a lot of OPSEC, right?

The whole tone of communication with soldiers and families was very different in 2001 than it became later. It was really that difference between, "Hey, we want to prep you for what's coming up to maintain family relations." Back then, it was really more like, "We're not telling you anything because we don't want to communicate what we're doing to the enemy." And so we really did just play this game of, "Drive to the airfield, come home, drive to the airfield, come home. What are we doing?" And then finally we launch. And so we fly, we go stop. We're in a C-130, so we launched by C-130. We ended up in Delaware. We ended up flying across the ocean in the C-130, which is a long trip. Ended up stopping in Spain, stopping in Italy. And each time we stop, we had access to the TV, right? Because you have to go and get lodging while the crew rests there. And so you're watching the attack on Kabul unfold. You're seeing the initial bombs fall. This is October 6th. And so you're seeing the initial strikes and we really started to piece it together like, "Oh, this is what we're going to do. This is where we're going."

And so we all thought we're headed toward Afghanistan, but we finally make it to Turkey and then we launched from Turkey and we land and it's dark and we all have our NODs on. We're flying in the back of the C-130. We've got our trucks. We've got our guns. We've got new armor, new helmets, stuff that we just got issued. Nobody wore armor previously. And so we come off the back of this bird and it turns out we're in Uzbekistan, but nobody was real sure. And even once we knew Uzbekistan, nobody knew where Uzbekistan was. You're like, "What does that mean? What is Uzbekistan? Is that near Germany? What is this?" And so we get there and there's very few people there. As you said, we're not the first people there, but the battalion was alerted to conduct airfield security for what became Camp K-2, which was one of the major force projection sites for Afghanistan for the first three or four years. And we just start pulling security. So there's dozers there pushing up berms. They're digging slit trenches. We're in this super flat, moon dusty area in the middle of the night and they're just building this camp out of nothing.

And it was a lot. It was for us. We thought, "Well, we're at war." Nobody knew what war meant. And then we also had no idea where we were or what war really meant. And it was a very exciting time. It was strange, very strange.

I would say the initial response was very much the second like, "Wow, this is exciting. We're going to war. It's exactly what I wanted to do." But within a few weeks, honestly, that flipflopped. We were airfield security. So what that meant is 12 hours of airfield guard and then another six hours of internal guard, guarding your equipment, guarding this, running a checklist clipboard for some of the bigger bases. And you're truly just guarding, standing. There's no showers, there's no chow, right? So you've got MREs. There's no mail. There's none of the amenities you'd see later in the GWOT.

So I would say it quickly went from, "We're at war. This is amazing," to, "This is horrible. What am I doing with my life right now?" Everybody gets ... You get a cold from this moon dusty crap that you're just breathing in all the time and you're still very much pulling security like you're on a field problem in the '90s because really nobody had adapted to this idea that you're on a fob. You've got this security structure in place that allows you to pull less security. No, mostly we just stayed on 50%, 33% to 50% security the whole time we're there. And it became this soul sucking, frankly miserable experience when you're watching these Chinooks fly south, do all this really cool stuff. You know something cool is happening and you know that you're not the one doing the cool stuff. But you have some perspective later. You realize this was your role in the team and it wasn't really that sexy, but it was important in its way. At the time, I did not have that perspective.

That first trip, I would say the biggest lessons I took out of that are just how as I, as a leader, have since tried to communicate with my guys to really understand what it's like to be on the crack end of the whip and understand just how little information trickles down. And so I'd like to think that it's probably made me a little bit better of a leader to try and understand that perspective, to understand that when you say a thing, this is what that thing actually looks like in execution because that could be hard. That could be hard to understand when you say, "Well, we're at this posture. Okay, but what does that posture mean? What's the kind of cost to the individual on that?" And I hope that it's made me a little more mature and thoughtful about how I employ folks, but that deployment, it was not a great time, if we're being honest, but it builds character.

So the second one, much different. So by 2003, obviously, the nation's staring at Iraq, right? Everything is Iraq, everything is what's going in Iraq. There's the invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan became such an afterthought that my wife who was in grad school at the time and said, "Oh, yeah, my husband's in Afghanistan," and she got the, "We still have troops there?" response, which was just hilarious, especially when you look back 20 years later and realize how long we were there. You're like, "Some people were not sure that we were there even by '03," but you have this small footprint.

So we're a battalion, we're returning, we go down to Kandahar and then we project all the way east into this place called Paktika, which is a little province on the southeastern border of Afghanistan. It's right against Pakistan. It's where this tribal and international boundary blur, right? Because you have this fictional place called Waziristan where this tribe of Pashtun own both sides of the border, but then you have the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is very firm from our point of view and very, "You do not cross this." And it created this really interesting situation where you would try to patrol this border, you're trying to create this security, but at the same time, the opponent that you're fighting really doesn't recognize that same boundary and so you end up with a lot of really, really strange situations.

But it was an exciting time. It was very much the Wild West. So you had still pretty low technology from, I guess, the point of view of what we later had. You really had no drones. Comms were still mostly normal RF-driven, so we had good old PRC 119s, the same basic communications that we were using all the way through the mid-'90s. And you had your basic artillery, mortars, close combat aviation stuff and so you're out there patrolling. You're out there trying to search and destroy. I realize now maybe that that was a little futile, the idea that you're just going to drive around and just find bad guys. It seems a little silly in hindsight, but at the time, we were there, we were ready, we were like, "Okay, let's go find the enemy forces. There might be Taliban just in camps waiting to attack us and we'd get them. We'd go and destroy them and do what we were supposed to do."

And so we learned a ton. I would say that deployment and maybe in the Army around that period, you started to see this understanding that the old maneuver warfare, Cold War era tactics, they're not going to work in this approach. People aren't going to close with us. We're not going to have these big set peace engagements. And so how do you search and destroy? How do you engage with the population? How do you separate ... It became counterinsurgency. We started to really understand it as counterinsurgency, but how do you separate the people from the bad guys and how do you then identify and kill the bad guys? And it was very engaging. It was a very interesting deployment to be on and it piqued my interest.

So I was 100% resistant to COIN as an E-4 and E-5, right? It feels dumb saying it in hindsight, but exactly the reasons you're talking about where we'd been on patrol so many times and you have a car driving up to you, you have a guy with a herd of goats walking up to you and you're expected to make this decision on whether or not to engage this person. You have really no ability to know if it's a bad guy or a good guy until he either shoots at you or explodes. And so to me, initially, the idea of counterinsurgency like, "You want me to get closer to the people who I don't know if are going to kill me and talk to them? Be friendly with them?" In '03, '04, we didn't really even have an interpreter. And so the idea that it was very much an us and a them, right? This is an enemy force. This is Charlie from Vietnam. This is something that we are here to kill. We are here to find the people that perpetrated 2001 and kill these people. We're not really here to secure the population. And so that switch, because I did make the switch, so as a young lieutenant, I think we got a lot better educated on, "Well, you're never going to win doing it this way, sir. So you might want to try something else." And you realize that out of necessity, you really need to shift gears. But as an E-4, E-5, no. No, I was 100% opposed to this idea like, "Hey, I'm in the Army, I'm in the infantry. I'm not a policeman and I'm not working for Caritas. We're here to kill bad guys." And it was hard to overcome that, and it was hard to communicate that down.

I will say that feeling it as an E-4 and E-5, I never felt the dilemma the same way that I would feel it later. I definitely armchair quarterback my own decisions many times later where you're saying, "Okay, we took fire from this hillside. It's appropriate to call a 105 strike on that hillside. We'll probably kill the person that did it." You realize that's not the best way to handle that. You're actually playing into the narrative of the people that you're fighting by saying, "You're a soulless infidel that wants to kill all of the people in this country." And so you realize later the mistakes that you were making doing it, but I would say for the most part for me then, moral dilemma didn't really come up until Iraq, because in Afghanistan, it was still very much in the mindset of, "We're going to kill them, we're going to kill them. Will it work out?" But the only thing it really saved us at that time, I think, is that, Afghanistan, it's so partitioned and it's not a place that's really plugged into the rest of the world, certainly in '03, '04. And so if you made mistakes with target identification or with engaging with civilian population out in the middle of Urgun, Paktika, I don't think a lot of that really trickled out the way that it would just a few years later in Iraq.

That strategic corporal thing really became a thing in Baghdad when you would see any incident would make the international news within a day, and then all of a sudden, the impact of that one decision could be so huge that it could undermine the entire mission. And that became a huge challenge. But '03, '04, I would say, for the most part, we were still mostly pretty sheltered. We could make some mistakes. We could stumble along and not feel too much in the way of consequences, except in the very physical sense of people get killed.

We had these engagements where we had to go up to the border checkpoint with Pakistan and our commander would have to get out and talk to the commander on the other side of the border to just talk about border security. I'm not sure how meaningful any of those discussions were, but that's what we were doing. And from there, we would usually go and patrol up the border to just look for bad guys. I wish I could say that there was a more constructive reason, but I think a lot of times, we were just search and destroy. We're going to go look and see if we have find bad guys.

And so we took our convoy of trucks north up the border. It's nighttime by this point and so we're going up Route Saturn and we've got our NVGs, which is an old PVS14. I don't know if you remember the old binoculars, but basically, it fits over one eye like this and you end up getting a splitting headache over about eight hours. It's an interesting design. So we're driving up this border, I'm sitting there on the 50 cal, we've got one other truck who's got a Mark 19 and assault and we're making our way up the border. And all of a sudden, we just start taking fire from the right. We're still in light-skin trucks, so there's no doors. So we start taking fire. Your immediate reaction is, "What, what, what?" Because you hear it. You hear this snap. It sounds like maybe rain hitting a metal roof at first and you just spin the turret and you start firing back.

And then we start finding out, of course, it's nighttime and I feel bad for my poor PL because the platoon sergeant who'd been in the rear truck starts to immediately assault. He's assaulting up the hill, he's taken a couple of guys, he's running with them. And situational awareness just breaks down, right? At this point, we're shooting back. There's a guy unbeknownst to us with a battle buddy assaulting up the hill to clear this position and that starts to unfold over the radio. It's like, "Oh, okay, I see what's going on." So the PL starts to maneuver the platoon. He drives us up on this ridgeline, which is basically overlooking Pakistan at this point.

We are on a ridgeline at the very eastern edge of Afghanistan looking down into this valley that is Pakistan and we've got our second truck behind us pulled up along the ridge next to us supporting where this dismounted squad is shooting. He's in his engagement with these guys. And so we start shooting. We start shooting at the muzzle flash that we see in the distance. We're engaged in. We get a report that there's been an injury. The PL's trying to talk, but of course, we haven't mastered all this. We don't have EarPro. We don't have any headsets that are integrated with the radio. So he's standing under the barrel of the 50 cal while I'm shooting, trying to have a radio conversation and he's just beat down crushed, right? He can't hear, he can't think because the muzzle blast off this thing. It's just ridiculous.

And so it calms down after a few minutes. The enemy stops firing at us. Again, it's pitch black, right? There's no ambient light, so your ability to see even with NVGs is pretty limited, but we're not seeing any more muzzle flash. And so he starts to develop a situation on the radio, shouting, of course, because he can't hear himself anymore and we find out the platoon sergeant's been hit. He's got his leg shot off and so he's got to get off this ridgeline. And so they take the medic from the other truck. They're trying to get this worked out, but we need to get him into our truck to medevac him. So we pull down, we get back to the road, we load him into the back of the truck. He's in the back. So we have this Doorless truck. He's sitting in the back.

And I just remember looking down in this green washed-out NODs and I looked down and there he is. There's this guy sitting there with no leg. He's got his tourniquet on. You could see it. He's just bleeding everywhere and it's this mess and it was just surreal. When you talk about that moment, you talk about that, "I can't believe I'm actually here," moment. And for me, that was 100%. It's just looking down at my NVGs, my PVS14s and seeing him in the back, just bleeding everywhere, tourniqueted up, shouting, screaming. He's having obviously in a lot of pain and we end up bounced back out of there. So we drive back, we set up this medevac. The PL calls it in. We get a bird come in and we get him loaded up and picked up.

And then you're just sitting there at the end, the helicopter's flow off. You're sitting there. You got a bunch of blood in the back of the truck. You can't really see it yet. You can smell it, but you can't really see it because again, NVGs and you're just standing there and it's just this total, what do they call it, post-stress collapse I think it is, where you just feel sleepy. All of a sudden, you almost feel like you're ready to doze off because this was such an enormous crazy last two hours. And then over the next few days, it gets even more because you really start to piece together what could have happened, how it could have gone, what the real stakes at play in this situation were. And it's just a lot to take in. It's a lot for that first time to really understand how significant the event was that at the time seemed just super, "Hey, we're moving. We're doing this thing. It's a thing. Oh, man, this is happening and how this is happening," and it's just crazy. It is unlike any other experience.

We, like all the other E-4s and E-5s at the time, were sitting there just playing Game Boy when we're off duty, right? So we're playing this little videogame where we're shooting rocket, you see each other on the Game Boy and then actual rockets are coming, right? So we're in this place called Shkin, which is maybe 20k from the border. It's really poorly positioned in terms of security and rockets are coming in.

Rockets actually blow up the ASP on this base while we're sitting on our barracks playing this game where we're shooting rockets at each other, but the funniest thing we're thinking is that like, "Hey, man, you want to just stay here and finish this? We got to go back on patrol in two hours. Let's just ... Do we really need to go outside and deal with this?" And finally, you're like, "Okay, let's go deal with it." But it becomes so routine, it becomes such a non-issue and just a normal part of your life that, when you're looking back on it, it could be hard to wrap your head around just how blase you can get about basically almost getting killed all the time.

And in Iraq, it got even worse, because of course then, it's every day, literally every day we're hitting IUDs or having somebody shoot at us and you just stop caring about that, to tell you the truth, it's like, "Whatever, it just doesn't matter anymore. Let's just get this work done. Let's get what we need to do done and let's make it back to the fob and time for chow, because otherwise they're going to close the line and we're going to get a to-go plate and it's going to be cold." And that's worse than the possibility of death at a certain point, which is super strange. It doesn't make any sense in hindsight.

It's so obvious that you drive and you hop in your car and you go stop at the stoplight and you turn right and people pull up next to you because you're on a normal street in America. That is totally different after, let's say 15 months in Iraq where you have ignored every traffic law all the time and the entire premise of how you drive is to say, "I'm going to avoid things that look suspicious, so I'm just going to weave across the road to avoid a pile of trash or a dead goat or whatever. Also, every person around me will stop because my gunner will point a gun at them and make them stop and pull off to the side of the road because the HBEDs are totally a thing and they happen all the time. And you get used to really ignoring all of that and thinking of the entire thing as a very different sort of scenario. Like, "This is a problem I have to negotiate to get to my sector, so that I can conduct this mission. All of this traffic stuff is completely just a side issue that I need to make go away, so that we don't die on the way to work."

You get home, especially on R&R and my wife and I hop in the car in Kansas to go drive to get some barbecue and you don't realize just how weird all this is. You're like, "Wait, I have to stop." She's like, "You need to stop? Oh." So you lock up the brakes the last minute at the red light. You don't realize how nervous you get about a pedestrian just walking on a crosswalk in front of you or how strange it is to have a car parked next to you and you just ... It's nerve wracking, right? So on the one hand, you get very blase about a lot of things, but on the other hand, the lack of control, just being back in the normal world is super unnerving. And so you have this odd combination of not caring at all about anybody's problems, right? And this is bad on relationships, as you might imagine when people are like, "I have this problem. I'm really having this problem negotiating with so-and-so," or, "I have to call the power company because power company ..."

And you don't want to say, "I don't care," but the answer is like, "What are you even talking about? That's not a problem. Who cares?" and that's bad. People don't want to hear that, particularly people you're in close relationships with. But you have to contrast that against the very cold sweat feeling of, "I'm in a crowd, there are people all around me. I don't like people being all around me. They might explode. Why is nobody pushing these people back? Why are they even on me?" and that contrast is super strange. So you get really heightened and spun over to some things and you get really desensitized and numb to a whole host of others.

And I'm sure that's ever all the way gone away, but I think, for the most part, it irons out as you just spend enough time back home and things normalize. Our brains are pretty adaptable, but it could be difficult. It could be really difficult.

So that, particularly the '03, '04 rotation is what drove me to that," and I had great leadership on that one. So I had a really good PL, I had a good platoon sergeant. They saw, I think, potential in me that I did not see. And so they talked me up on staying in the Army a lot. They wanted me to stay in. They really pushed me to stay in. At the same time, my wife was in grad school and so she had been working on her PhD in molecular biology and she'd realized she'd grown apart from academia in our couple of years of marriage and really liked the military life. And somewhere in that mix, we decided that, "I do want to stay in the Army and I'd like to do something different," but what I didn't want to do was stay as an enlisted infantry guy. And honestly, the reason for that, I love the infantry, I'm saying anything bad about them, but it felt like I capped out even as an E-5. I felt like, "Well, I want to have more ability to influence what's going on here. I don't want to just run a team of five guys. That's not how I want to do this. So if we're going to stay in, we need to do something different."

I ended up putting in a packet to go to OCS. I got picked up. I got to go to the Chemical Corps, which was a funny one because you don't actually get to pick your branch. And then I was fortunate enough to get to swap with another guy while I was in OCS. And so he became a Chemo, and I ended up going to Armor School of all things to become to become a cavalry officer. And that was how it happens.

So we graduated OCS. I go up to Fort Knox to do the Armor School, which is super interesting from an infantry guys' point of view. We actually get to drive the tanks and shoot the tanks and you learn about tanks. And I've been a light infantryman. I know nothing about tanks, and to this day, I probably still don't know that much about tanks, except that if you're tall, they're very uncomfortable. So if any of your listeners are tall, I encourage them to not be in the armor community. It's a very uncomfortable place for tall people. But we finished Armor School. We end up going to Fort Riley, Kansas to join the first ID and we're part of this surge brigade, right? So we're a brand new brigade, stood up from scratch and they're just going to fill it up with lieutenants and privates.

The funny thing is that, unlike the rest of the first ID, it's a light brigade and I ended up basically being a dismounted XO in a light cavalry company in a RISTA squadron, which is reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance squadron. And so I'm functionally back in the infantry, which is hilarious after all the tank training, after all everything else to be just right back where I was. But the weird thing about it is, now walking in, I'm actually the company commander, so I'm a second lieutenant. We have 80 privates in the company. I walk in the '05, a guy named Colonel Kreider, who's an excellent leader. He's like, well, "Dan, we don't have a captain for you yet and you're the only lieutenant that's got the prior service time, so you're going to be the commander for now." He's like, "Don't overthink it. It's not really that much. Just go down there and don't screw anything up and listen to the first sergeant." I said, "Okay."

So you walk into this building and I got a first sergeant, I got three platoon sergeants and I got 80 privates and it was just me in charge of this thing. And we had, from there, 11 months to turn this into a functional combat unit and then deployed to Baghdad, which was a very interesting time. And there was a lot to wind at that. So I got right back in and went straight back into the hopper to go back overseas, which actually was not unusual at the time, right? That was just the tone of the Army in that '05 to '08 range.

It’s a very different problem, because all of a sudden, like you said, instead of really just being essentially responsible for your personal risk like, "Hey, whatever, I'll jump up. We'll shoot, we'll do this thing. We'll run, we'll do it. It's fine," it's just me, right? It's just me ultimately that will get killed if I screw this up. And the difference between not only not taking the personal risk yourself and a lot of times, but with saying somebody else like, "Hey, I need you to do this. I need you to do this thing," and knowing that the consequences of that thing could be catastrophic, I will say that that really starts to wear on you. The other side of that balance is the knowledge that you're here to protect this population and so you have this constant balance of, "How much risk do I put myself and my guys against? How much risk do we assume?" versus, "How much risk do I push to this population, which I have mixed feelings about, right?"

On the one hand, they're normal people. We get along with a lot of them. We know these people. 15 months, you spend a lot of time talking to people, but you also know that they know things that they're not telling you. And if they would tell you, then you could solve the problem for both of you. And so you end up, especially as the guy in charge, because it's always everybody looking and saying, "Well, what now, sir? What are we going to do?" and you end up making decisions that are just really hard to deal with at the time, one, because you don't know what's going to happen, but you do know the consequences if you screw it up.

So let me give just a couple examples because I think it illustrates it better. Every day, we're making the decision of, "Hey, there is a house-borne explosive there. We've heard that report that this is an HBED. Okay, I know that, when if that HBED goes off, it's going to kill everybody that's in it. What do we do with that? Do we leave it there? Do we go investigate the HBED? Do we clear the HBED? If I go clear the HBED, it might kill me and my guys. If I don't clear the HBED, some kid might open that door and blow the thing up, kill himself and people in three houses around him." And those decisions start to weigh on you. They really are. I don't want to say they start to get old, but they get this combination of way too familiar and way too comfortable and also just gnawing difficult because you just get tired of making what you perceive as the wrong ones. Even when it all goes right, there's rarely a true right answer. Rarely is there a case when you make the decision and everything goes super peachy and there's no consequences. In that HBED decision specifically, we decided that we would lock the door, we're going to throw padlocks on it and we're not going to go into that house like, "I'm not going to clear this house. I know that my squad leader and the guy who takes with him are going to get killed. I don't want that." And so he was like, "Well, we'll lock it up. Some guy broke into the house anyway, some vagrant who was looking to steal stuff out of the house," because it's an abandoned house and you got the same problems in Baghdad, you have everything else. And of course, he set it off and blew up and then we go investigate the wreckage and you see this dead guy there. You're like, "Well, that's the dead guy." You could say maybe it was his fault, but it doesn't really mean that our decision didn't immediately leave to that guy getting killed. And it gets a little weighty. It gets a little tiresome, especially again, 15 months later.

I did have some really good peers and some really good seniors, but the problem is you only get to talk to them intermittently. So we were doing basically shift work. So we're 10 on, 14 off and we would see each other during rips. We would see each other during an occasional day off or have a lunch together and kind of commiserate on some of these issues like, "Man, did you see what happened to so-and-so?" Like, "Oh, my gosh, what happened to you?" Like, "Oh, my gosh, I heard about what happened to you? How did that go?" But between those moments when you can unburden a little bit and just say, "Oh, gosh, what are we doing right now?" there's none of it, right?

You're surrounded by people all the time. You have nothing but people willing to contribute, willing to chime in, willing to talk about the things you would like you to do and you should do and the things you could do better, but at the same time, in the end, it's your problem and you can't really tee it up to anybody else. You're the one. You're the person in sector for 10 hours. It's your decision to make and you can't push it off on anybody else. And I'm sure there are people that are in those positions all the time, but it's an interesting experience for sure. It's a lot to take in, especially when you're 25, right? You're 25. What do you know about any of this stuff? What do you know about, "Oh, gosh, let's not even talk ... We can talk life-or-death decisions. Let's talk about all the other long-term decisions, the big picture decisions that this guy standing there, 'All right, my mission, secure the population, rebuild this piece of Baghdad, go and economically stimulate it. Let's go ahead and restore utilities. Let's go and pick some local leadership.' Okay, I'm 25. I don't really know how the post office runs in my hometown. I'm not really sure how the mail gets sorted and delivered. I'll just go ahead and rebuild this neighborhood. It'll be great. We'll get electricity turned on plumbing. We will deal with that.'" Economically stimulated, we were just given large amounts of cash to pass out to people after listening to business proposals, right? I've done a little more of that since then, 20 years later, but at the time, business proposal, "You want me to go and receive a business ... I got set on fire a little while ago here. Our truck exploded violently. I'm going to go ahead and accept business proposals now and make some determination on who gets 10 grand and who doesn't. And I might take you to jail tomorrow and I don't know, maybe you won't come home for jail because the Iraqi police, you just disappeared."

Balancing all that, this like, "I am Andy Griffith, the small town sheriff who is resolving these strange disputes about a guy who's irritated that his neighbor has a dog that bit his kid and you're like, 'Okay,' but also I have to clear explosives out of your neighborhood before they kill me and my friends. And also I need to weigh in on who is the elected leader of this neighborhood and get power restored,'" is a lot. It's a lot. I think a lot is really the word that captures most this feeling of being there, being the guy, just jotting on the spot, the frontman of American foreign policy and nation building like, "Okay, we'll just do that."

So actually, it's strange because you'd think just listening to probably the first half of this that I had a lot of negative feelings about the whole time, but the reality is, mostly, I remember very positively and I think the reason is because we really got to accomplish, like the first ID in our little section really got to accomplish what we were told to do, which is create security, create some economic civilization, gain the trust of the population, allow the government time to succeed and we did it. Again, this pickup basketball game of a brigade of just people from wherever with really not that much experience thrown into this meat grinder of Central Baghdad did a good job. We paid a lot of price up front, but by the end of it, we really had the trust of the people. The second half of the deployment was really much calmer. We spent a lot more time drinking Fanta and talking to people about those Andy Griffith problems than we did getting blown up because people just didn't blow us up anymore. We finally turned the tide and really convinced our neighborhood, which was heavily Sunni, that sheltering anybody that was going to attack, it'll cost them more than us like, "Hey, look man, I have armor. I have medical treatment. I have a cash right up the street. My guys might get hurt. Your guys are going to get a lot more hurt." And they finally seem to get that and I think they appreciated the sincerity, that our constant presence demonstrated.

The first ID, our boss, Col. Kreider, he had his 24/7 sector, "We're there. We live here. We are here with you. And so we're part of the solution just like you are," and I think that was right. That was 100% the thing that needed to happen and I think it really paid dividends. It's unfortunate that maybe longer term those dividends didn't pay off very well, but I think we really did create the conditions that Iraq needed to turn itself around and I think that the guys can go home and really say, "We did a good job. We really did exactly what everybody asked us to and we had a lot of success doing it."

I went to Iraq with the 1st ID in 2007 and stayed through 2008. So we did 15 months there, as part of the search that General Petraeus spearheaded, to really give the government in Iraq, and specifically Baghdad, the security footprint that it needed to establish governance. So I think, as everybody recalls, a very politically sensitive time for the war, right? We were moving toward an election year. The war had pretty much devolved to the point when it was kind of this festering sore, so we'd gone from winning pretty quickly to just daily losing, right? Daily situations of US soldiers being killed and Iraqis being killed, the media everywhere, all the time, covering that. And it just kept getting worse and worse.

And so, the surge was really brought in to create enough combat power on the ground in Baghdad to say, "Okay, we can get a handle on this, we can establish security in the capital, and if we can do that, then the government of Iraq can get its feet under it, we can get the security forces stood up, and then, give them the ability to provide services to the people," and kind of tamp down a lot of the fuel that the insurgency was using against the government to sow unrest.

So I think, as everybody's tracking, Iraq is divided basically into Sunni and Shia. We won't talk about the Kurds, but we'll talk about the Baghdad area is almost primarily Sunni and Shia. So the Hussein government, Saddam's government, was Sunni, but the Sunnis are the minority.

And so, what you saw prior to the invasion is that a smaller percentage of the population, the Sunni population, really controlled most of the resources in Iraq. The Shia population, which was much larger, was subservient to the Sunni. And the Shia population, which has ties to Iran, which was defeated by Iraq in the earlier war, there's a lot of history there, was very happy when we overturned the Saddam government. And that Shia population really took that as an opportunity to try and gain power in Iraq. We established the new democratically elected government there. That government, of course, because it was driven by popular vote, became Shia. And so, what you ended up with in Baghdad is a lot of the old power structure and old wealth was still Sunni, but it was directly opposed to a lot of the new police structure and a lot of the new government architecture, which was Shia.

And so, you ended up in this position where we were nominally supporting the government of Iraq, so we didn't specifically have, as the US government, a sectarian role. We were trying to get peace and stability for everybody, but most of our security partners ended up being Shia people. And so, when you went into a neighborhood like Al Mechanics, before, it had been a fairly wealthy part of Baghdad, and so, it was largely Sunni. But all of the police who were occupying it were Shia. And in some neighborhoods, this balance worked out better. In Mechanics, it really didn't. So by the time we got there, it was a blasted wasteland. So almost every building is destroyed or unoccupied. Everybody's moved out. The people that are left in this neighborhood, they don't come out much in the day. You see lights on occasionally at night, but for the most part, they don't really talk to anybody or do anything.

We try to restore what you think of as normalcy. Propane is a big deal in Iraq. We try to secure the government, while it distributes propane. But increasingly, you realize the entire system that you need to make this run just doesn't exist anymore. So in the example of propane, most of the country uses it to either heat or cool, depending on if they run their power off of it or not. And they use it to cook food, so it's a huge staple item. And Saddam had used a ration card system to, I assume, use that as leverage to make sure that everybody was playing ball if they wanted to get their propane.

But either way, you had to have a card and you had to bring it up to a propane guy and you could have him stamp your card and then, you could get propane. Of course, nobody had cards anymore. The cards were gone, the cards had been stolen, the cards had vanished. And so, these people, the few normal people in Mechanics, wanted to get propane, but when we finally brought in a distributor, they couldn't get it. The distributors from the government wouldn't give it to them. I have to think there were sectarian kind of motives there. I think that there's probably a lot of behind the scenes reasons why they wouldn't give the Sunni people propane, just part of that squeeze play to maintain power and to squeeze the Sunnis out. But either way, it put us in this awkward position of, "Well, do you undermine the existing governmental structure and force them to give propane to people who need it for food? Or do you back up that structure against the population who clearly needs this propane and undermine your relationship with them?"

It felt like very much a lose-lose situation. So we ended up playing this for months. I would say, on the whole, we mostly worked against the local level distributors in favor of providing propane to the people. So we would forcibly distribute propane. But what that did is it burned a lot of relationship capital with those lower level distributors, because of course, we're undermining their system. But if you don't do that, well then, the same people who you're denying propane and now put your face on the, they saw, corrupt government of Iraq are going to absolutely support the people that are putting in explosives at night and firing sniper rounds at you during the day. So we messed with this for a couple of months and honestly never found a great solution.

And I would say that, probably, we got saved by the bell, because the surge ended up bringing in more forces in, which allowed us to kind of further condense our troops into a smaller area. And our battalion was basically just taking like, "Okay, well, you don't own that space anymore, because now, we can put two units where your one unit used to be." And so, they brought in a heavier striker unit with a lot more people to take Mechanics, and they squeezed us into what was formerly the northern piece of the battalion sector into a mahalla series called 838 and 840. And that's really where I would say we got good at counterinsurgency, because now, all of a sudden, we had a very small area. It was about 800 by 1200 meters. So if you can imagine that, it's maybe 10 or 12 city blocks, and it had a couple of thousand people. And that was it.

So we moved into that sector, we lived in it, and for 24 hours a day, our battalion had presence in those things. And so, me and my guys were there 10 hours a day, and we just drive around trying to solve people's problems. So this is an entirely Sunni area. And so, it was super wealthy before the fall. So we had Saddam's cardiologist was there in sector. We had a lot of generals. We had these really kind of high profile people, but what we realized initially is they had all the same problems everybody else did. So the Sunni troublemakers, Sunni insurgents would use this a base of operations to cause trouble for the government elsewhere. And initially, they would just attack us too. So we'd be driving through the sector and hit IEDs almost every day. And so, it's this huge problem you have when you have soldiers who like, okay, well, you're getting bombed, you're getting mostly bombed, not so much with the shooting, mostly IEDs, but every day.

And people start getting really frustrated and irritated. But you know that, if you escalate, you know that, if you start shooting back or using unnecessary force, you're just going to create problems. Because nine times out of 10, the person that you see, the person that you associate with the blast isn't the person that caused it. And they're going to view your retaliation unjustly, and it's just going to feed the message that the insurgency is already feeding them, which is that you're here to cause problems for them and that you're not working in the interests of Iraq. You compound that with the fact that our police are entirely Shia and the population hates them, if anything, even more than us, so you're like, "Well, here we are. I've got to secure this neighborhood. My police partner is worse than useless, because they're not capable enough, but because the population hates them. And I've got to somehow balance not getting killed with building trust with this population."

And really, that summer, that summer of 2007 and into the fall, it was a super frustrating time for that reason. It's 110 degrees, it's infinite degrees, and you're wearing ceramic cookware functionally. So you get out and you walk around, and you're just blackout hot all the time, trying to stay calm, trying to manage normalcy in this place like, "Okay, they don't have electricity, so let's try to restore electricity." But every night, somebody comes and cuts the power lines or burns down the generator, because they don't want you to return electricity. Because that would undermine their power structure. And balancing that over that summer was really, really frustrating. But I'd say the really positive part about the surge is that, over that summer, the model actually worked.

So the thing we managed to convince the people of is that, every time a bomb would go off, it would do a lot more damage to them than to us. So we're in armored Humvees. Occasionally, they'd injure a guy, occasionally, they'd kill one of our guys, but every time, they'd kill locals or damage infrastructure. And so, we, one, started to conduct a census where we just went door to door and talked to people, "Okay, we just need to understand who's in this neighborhood. We need to understand that they understand that we're in this neighborhood, so that, if trouble happens from this house, they'll know that we know who they are. But too, we need to convince them that we're actually here to help."

And so, we just started sitting down with people drinking Fanta, because for some reason, that's like a bonding experience there, a lot of Fanta. So I actually hate Fanta to this day, because I had so much Fanta. But that's another story.

So we sat down with them every single day, as bombs would go off, bombs would go off, bombs would blow up a piece of a house, bombs would blow up a house in the neighborhood, and we'd explain, "We want the bombs to stop, but until you tell us who does it, until you tell us who's doing it, I can't stop the bombs. You have to stop. You have to tell us who." And over the course of two or three months, that actually worked. At first, we'd get wild accusations. One time, we had a woman, we used a bomb robot to detonate this bomb, and the bomb explosion blew the robot into her yard and damaged her gate. And so, she came out outside and started yelling at our interpreter and asking why we blew up her gate with our robot.

And you just kind of blink, you just look, you're like, "Why would I do that? Why would I fly here to this country and use a robot to blow up your gate?" Anyway, so you explained to her, she doesn't believe it. She's looking for a payout, she wants you to repair the gate. But over a course of a couple of months, that really stopped happening. The people would stop blaming us when the bombs went off and frankly start blaming the Shia for trouble. And so, we managed to convince them, at least in our micro level, that we were on their side, and they started to trust us enough that they'd really turn over information on the people who were causing trouble.

And they gave us the ability to arrest these people. So we would arrest people in droves. At that time, the Iraqi security, I guess the detainee situation was such that you could arrest somebody on almost no pretext. All you needed was somebody to say they were bad, but in general, unless there was enough substantiating evidence, they'd get released within a day or two from US custody. We considered that a huge win like, "Okay, great." So we can take basically anybody who seems like they might be trouble, we can arrest them, and we can know that they'll be treated relatively well. They're not going to get handed over to the Iraqi system. They're going to the US system, and if they're guilty, well then, they'll go away to the Iraqi judicial system and they'll go to prison or whatever horrible things happen to guilty people, especially Sunnis, by the Shia government. But if they weren't, they'd come home. And they wouldn't have been mistreated. And so, they were irritated, but they weren't necessarily irritated enough to really be upset about it. And we found that, over several months, that actually had really positive impact. So the people who we had arrested were wary, because they knew we'd arrest them again.

And so, it seemed like they kind of calmed down and stopped causing what little trouble they did. And the real troublemakers were just gone, because they went to jail and they were gone. And so, really, by late fall, what you found is that we'd kind of achieved counterinsurgency success. The population trusted us enough that they would tell us when something was going wrong. And we, I guess the flip side of that, is we weren't getting killed anymore, because we weren't getting bombed every day.

Now, it had problems, for sure, and I'd say the biggest problem is the same mistake we made later in Afghanistan is that, when you build that relationship directly between the people and you and you kind of cut the Iraqi government out of the mix, because you view them as, frankly, more harm than good, you create long-term problems. So it doesn't take a genius to make the connection between the Sunni relationships that the US built and the Sunni security forces that we built within Iraq, that then somehow ISIS and the emergency of ISIS happened very quickly after we left. You're like, "Well, I think we might've made a mistake there." Honestly, it was a necessary, I think, tactical decision, because there's no way we would've survived and gotten any kind of stability if we hadn't built those relationships with the Sunnis. But in building those relationships directly with US forces, and then, in creating Sunni security forces to kind of supplant the Iraqi police, because the Iraqi police couldn't patrol the Sunni neighborhood, we really built the structure that caused, I think, a lot of problems for the government Iraq later. And so, it was kind of a dirty catch-22. You're like, "Well, I'm not sure we could have done it any differently, but in hindsight, obviously, I'm not thrilled with the way it turned out." But yeah.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Pace.

Next time on Warriors In Their Own Words, we’ll hear the rest of Pace’s story, where he talks about his deployment to Iraq, joining the Green Berets, and the horrors of drone warfare.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to rate and review.

Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.