Texas Guard Unit Heading Home

My dear friend William J. Hartmann, my former tank crewmate and close buddy of several years, prepped for deployment to Iraq. He served there. Now, he and his comrades from the Texas Army National Guard’s 36th Brigade are honorably returning home.

The Dallas Morning-News recently covered this deployment and return by interviewing the brigade’s Lt. Col. Jeffrey Breor. The following is the paper’s intro to the story:

After almost a year in Iraq, the 3,000 soldiers of the National Guard’s 56th Brigade Combat Team are heading home this month, completing the largest deployment of the Texas National Guard since World War II.

They traveled more than a million miles, providing security for supply convoys and searching for roadside bombs. They built new schools in impoverished villages and helped secure ballots for the country’s historic elections.

And they saw some of their friends and neighbors die.

“Yes, we’re getting to the end of our mission,” said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Breor of McKinney, speaking recently from Camp Tallil in southern Iraq. “But I’m not ready to say we’re done.”

Staff writer Vernon Smith Jr., who spent time with the brigade earlier this year in Iraq, spoke to Col. Breor by telephone about the brigade’s experiences over the last year.

As the full story of the interview requires free subscription (which I have found tolerable), I have waited a few days and posted the rest of the insightful Q&A at the option of the reader.

What is your assessment of the brigade’s performance this year?

The brigade has really stood out. It’s been a shining star for other National Guard brigades that are going to come to the Iraqi theater. One of the things that comes along when you’ve been good at your mission is the higher headquarters sees fit to give you even bigger missions. … There’s probably not a place in Iraq that our soldiers don’t go anymore. We have increased responsibility because we’ve been successful.

How would you characterize the Iraqi security forces’ ability to stand on their own?

I’m really amazed at the amount of progress these guys have made since we’ve been here. … They secured their [October] elections, they have offensive operations going on in the west, they have offensive operations going on in the Baghdad area – hunting down and capturing insurgents. … American and other coalition forces support what they do, but generally, the Iraqi security forces are in the lead of any kind of military operation, and they are winning. …
I don’t want to paint a picture that they are the greatest army in the world because they have a long way to go. But they have progressed a lot further in a year than I thought they would – and it shows.

What have you learned about the insurgency?

The insurgency is hard to define … because it’s not all the same people with the same goal. … They are not a cohesive force, they are a whole bunch of different forces that see attacking coalition forces and see attacking Iraqis as their means to whatever various ends they have. … Some of the insurgents are true al-Qaeda terrorists, or true Baath Party people or former regime elements. Some are thieves, and a lot of them are smugglers. … It’s hard to even find a majority of them who have the same end-state, the same goal.

So can the insurgency be defeated and violence brought under control?

When the Iraqis went to the polls in October to vote on their constitution – and they will go again in December – the insurgency itself really had already been defeated. …
There always have been people here that use gunfire and bombs to try to guide the political process. … I think that’s going to kind of be part of Iraq’s democracy. … I think the insurgency is more about crime and murder than it is about somebody trying to stand up an Islamic government or a government that meets their needs. It’s about power and greed.

Can the insurgency be defeated by military force, or is a political solution required?

I don’t think coalition forces will defeat this insurgency. … I think Iraqi people voting and Iraqi people joining the security forces will defeat this insurgency. And I don’t think it will be defeated this year. I do firmly believe, in the end, the Iraqis will defeat this thing. … It gets beaten at the polls. It gets beaten by government officials who are trying to stand up and provide support for their people. And it gets beaten by a good, solid Iraqi police force and an Iraqi army that can stop and disrupt outside influences.

According to some reports, insurgents are using bigger, more sophisticated bombs in their attacks. What has been your experience with roadside bombs?

There have been isolated reports of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] that are stronger and a little more sophisticated in various parts of Iraq. In fact, one of those was a bomb that killed one of my soldiers in southern Iraq. But I don’t think there is enough of a trend out there to say, across the board, the IEDs are getting stronger. …
The terrorists are gaining some sophistication, and I think they are getting some help from outside sources. … But, again, there are so many different terrorist groups, they don’t all have the more powerful IEDs. And probably 90 percent of what we find is the old-fashioned antique artillery shell wired to a car battery.

On average, how much direct or indirect contact have your troops had with enemy forces this year?

We have a good bit of enemy contact. In the brigade, soldiers engage the enemy somewhere in Iraq virtually every day and every night. But I will tell you we give a whole lot better than we get.

What is the status of your civil affairs/reconstruction efforts?

… Our civil military operations have probably doubled or tripled. We still help them get new schools built. We help them get water supplies improved and built. But it’s not us giving to the Iraqis. It’s us working with the infrastructure and the local sheiks and the local mayors to help them get these things done. … In the sector where a lot of our soldiers live in southern Iraq, we just turned our last mud hut school into a regular school. I see water tanks of pure water going up all around me. … But the key isn’t what is America or a coalition force doing for Iraq. The key is how are we helping them to learn to work within their own infrastructure.

Six 56th [Brigade] soldiers have died during this deployment. How have the platoons and companies coped with the losses?

After the memorial services, I watched the most incredible thing I’ve seen in my life. The platoons came together. I watched them spend probably two to three hours, praying, crying, hugging, supporting each other. … They walked out of there committed to filling the gaps those guys would leave and to honor their memory by doing their mission right. And they have absolutely done that. They are angry – they’re angry at the enemy. They are angry that they lost their friends, but they are absolutely not going to let the enemy beat them.

What’s your sense of the mood of the average Iraqi man and woman in the street?

People are tired of not being safe when they go into a city. But they are not looking at military forces as the problem; they are looking at the insurgents, or at the criminals, or the terrorists, and they are actually starting to take action against them. … They accept what we’re trying to do here. But I don’t think it’s really a matter of American forces winning their hearts and minds. I think it’s American forces helping them stand up and for their security forces to win their hearts and minds. And we’re starting to see that happen.

Currently unbeknownst to my friend Bill, he has a pending mission as one of my groomsmen. Hey, I carried out that mission for him. At least I’ll make up the unexpected burden by having some real drinkage for him at my reception.