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‘Our unit is the transformation’

TIKRIT, Iraq — The second caller of the day sounded drunk. He demanded to know why the Americans had not built new schools or hospitals.

Turns out, he also was blind.

he began losing his sight five years earlier and couldn’t find a doctor.

“Now I can’t see a camel,” he told Lt. Col. Rick Rhyne, who was sitting in a cramped radio studio along with an interpreter and the show’s host, a gregarious fellow known only as Mr. Lebanon.

The blind caller blamed his failed eyesight on the U.S. presence. Rhyne, commander of the 1st Special Troops Battalion, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, told the caller about the new construction and other activities coalition forces had provided that were aimed at improving lives of the locals.

Rhyne and his personal security detail drive through downtown Tikrit, a predominantly Sunni city and birthplace of Saddam Hussein, to the Salah Ah Din province radio station. He uses his air time to explain recent operations, provide updates and take calls from local citizens. The program can be heard up and down the province, from near Balad to Baiji.

There’s always a call about a loved one detained at Camp Bucca. But today, he has some explaining to do.

Four days prior, on March 26, a raid by an unnamed task force on a suspected car bomb maker in a neighborhood on the north end of town left several men, women and children dead and wounded. An AC-130H Spectre warplane had been unleashed after the raiding team took casualties, leaving the two target houses destroyed and a third adjoining home damaged. A local judge who ran to the sound of gunfire at his brother’s house was cut down in the battle. In the morning, STB troops sent in as a reaction force had to douse burning bodies with fire extinguishers.

Rhyne spends the first part of the show explaining the raid and, sure enough, the guy who owns the third house, now missing a few rooms, calls in.

The two had already spoken in person about compensation and the colonel reassures him over the air for all to hear.

“Just have your cell phone on and we will come by your house and pay you,” Rhyne says. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s a done deal.”

A war of information

In a counterinsurgency that relies on informants calling U.S. unit leaders on their cell phones with tips, the radio show in Tikrit is another modern, if simple, weapon against insurgents in the fight over Iraq’s “human terrain.”

While the informants help U.S. forces sharpen their aim on precise locations and identities, the radio show can broadcast information to the public more rapidly than the notoriously fast insurgent network, officers explain.

In closing, Rhyne tells the listeners, “You are more powerful than you really know.”

Because they walk the streets just about every day, Rhyne and his troops are familiar to Tikrit residents, and many now recognize him from the broadcasts, if not from breaking up fistfights as he did on one patrol or for chasing down and pulling over a column of his own MPs for ramming a car that was moving too slowly.

He’s trying to rally the people. In one broadcast, he told them to help keep the insurgents out of Tikrit by identifying them, on the sly.

“Show us a sign. Nod. Point,” he said. “When you do, I can take them off the street.”

Capt. John Gabriel, the battalion operations officer, called the radio show “our No. 1 asset.”

To guard against sniper fire and RPG rounds, Rhyne had a high wall built around the studio. When the concrete blocks were used up and the wall still wasn’t high enough, more blocks were ordered.

A new template

Under the typical brigade combat team template, the elements that make up 1st Special Troops Battalion — signal, intelligence, MP and combat engineers — would have served as support to the BCT.

But when the brigade arrived in Kuwait last October, preparing to operate along the vital main supply route from Baghdad to Mosul in Multinational Division-North, the brigade came up short one maneuver element, leaving uncovered territory.

So in addition to its combat support role to the brigade, the STB was given Tikrit as an area of operations and pushed into the fight. With that, missions changed. The combat engineers put aside the route-clearance mission they’d trained for and took up patrolling neighborhoods in Tikrit and other smaller towns. C Company from 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry, was attached and set up a patrol base south of the city.

And Rhyne, with his PSD, MPs and dismounted engineers, became a constant presence on the streets in and around Tikrit, the provincial capital.

As Master Sgt. Dave Roman, a multi-lingual intelligence specialist put it, “This is the ‘transformation.’ Our unit is the transformation.”

Help from the locals

A Special Forces officer for 14 years, Rhyne is on his ninth deployment, most of them to the Middle East. He got a battalion command in the conventional Army when none was available in his community. He brought the “mission before man” ethos of special operations, drawing some confused reactions from the troops.

“They thought I was Col. Kurtz from ‘Apocalypse Now,’ or something,” he said. “These guys had never done this. They’d never maneuvered elements on the battlefield.”

The battalion, also known as Task Force Spartan, operates out of Contingency Operating Base Speicher in an area where Saddam loyalists and other insurgents and criminal gangs operate, benefiting from sometimes complacent or complicit government officials and security forces.

A new ally to the Spartans are the Sahwa, or Sons of Iraq, also known as Concerned Local Citizens. Credited with tamping down the violence first in neighboring Anbar province last year, the armed locals are spread throughout the country now.

The U.S. pays Sahwa members in Tikrit roughly $340 a month — through contracts with local sheikhs — to provide security checkpoints on the roads. They’re also a good source of information but their helpfulness makes them targets: A recent attack on a highway checkpoint near Tikrit left one dead and several wounded.

Accurate intelligence is the critical element in countering the insurgency. The Americans are constantly battling a long-standing network of friends, relatives and associates who share information by word of mouth and cell phone.

They’ve adopted modern communications with sometimes startling results.

In one case, a sheikh told Rhyne that he received a personal threat in the scrolling text on the bottom of a music video broadcast from Dubai. For the equivalent of 50 cents, one can place such a public notice via e-mail or text message.

“You can send any message you want,” the sheikh tells the colonel during a meeting in a police station. “Love. Congratulations. Or a threat message in this case.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t thinking it was a love message,” Rhyne replies.

This seemingly endless web of personalities can compromise missions, like a fizzled raid on Easter morning.

The target was a desert farmhouse said to be full of 40 al-Qaida fighters and their long-haired Saudi cell leader. But not only was the “cell” absent, there were no tire tracks, no footprints, no gum wrappers — nothing. An interpreter from Syria said, “It doesn’t look like a cat has been there.”

The once-trusted informant who guided the force so far into the desert was told by the attached Iraqi police element he would be roasted like a kebab and forced to pay for all the gas burnt by the assault team vehicles. It’s a joke. Maybe.

It may not have been the informant’s fault, but after that mission even tighter controls were placed on who knows what.

“We need some good intel, because we went a long way for nothing,” Rhyne tells an Iraqi officer later that day.

Rhyne later tells his leaders to trust no one and start thinking and acting like detectives, to be smart about how they approach people in the street and always gather quality information.

“You gotta start asking the right questions and start putting the puzzle together,” he tells them. “You need facts. Not assumptions or [accepting] exactly what they’re saying.”

As if to make his case about trust, the next morning his patrol is attacked en route to a meeting with a top police official. One Humvee is all but disabled, but no one is wounded.

Pfc. Rene Reyes, who was trained to fix generators, coaxes the limping truck into the police compound. It was his first mission. He’d been with PSD all of an hour.

Constant interaction

Like cooks and truck drivers manning crew-served weapons, Spartan’s combat engineers are also in a new kind of war. On foot patrols through Tikrit, they interview locals and harvest identities with a hand-held biometric database system known as the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, or HIIDE.

Spc. Mark Shingleton, a squad automatic weapon gunner, says the constant interaction with Iraqis is wholly new to the engineers.

“It’s a different game. Last time we had no association with them at all. We were just doing route clearance,” he said during a patrol on St. Patrick’s Day. “We don’t do breaching obstacles or blowing s--- up anymore.”

Pfc. Ellis Branch, also a member of the engineer unit, actually wants to be in the city.

“I like it a lot better. I can’t stand sitting in one truck for more than 10 hours up and down [Main Supply Route] Tampa,” he said. “Being boots on ground feels like you’re accomplishing something.”

Maybe they are. During that patrol, a lawyer in Tikrit told their platoon leader, 1st Lt. Brian Christ, “Wait until you have all the people on your side. Especially your troops right now, they have a good deal with the people. Just keep doing what you are doing right now.”

But there is no unconditional love.

As one Iraqi woman told Christ and his soldiers in her house earlier that day, “I am keen to see Americans, but some are evil. Some soldiers hurt Iraqis. Some behave evil.”

Needed: a break in the action

The pace of operations has left some of the soldiers worn out. While nearly all of them dread the idea of languishing on the base with nothing to do, they rarely get a day off and being back inside the wire means getting ready for the next day.

Following a series of short-notice assignments on top of regular patrols, the frustration boiled over and some of the troops in the PSD registered their complaints one night during an officer-free meeting.

A few days later, Pfc. Francis Magbag, from the Philippines and not yet a U.S. citizen, said morale was not the issue.

“We’re just tired. We need some rest,” he said. “We like what we’re doing but after a while it’s, ‘OK, I need a break.’ ”

More soldiers on the ground would help.

“For this big a task,” he said, “we should have more guys.”

A gunner on his second deployment to Iraq, Spc. That Vo was born in Vietnam and recently became a U.S. citizen.

Leaving the safety of Speicher every day, going outside the wire and coming back every night just wears some of them down, especially the gunners. “Basically, it’s sensory overload,” he said.

Some soldiers are worried about how they will adjust at home, but the veterans already have an idea.

When Vo and his brother got caught in Los Angeles traffic after his last deployment, he just hopped the median and straddled it to the exit. Vo had done it many times as a Humvee driver in Iraq.

With their car half off the road but passing stuck traffic, his brother freaked out.

Vo said, “What? We’ll make it.”

An erratic war

For troops in the STB and elsewhere on their second and third deployments, Iraq has changed and stayed the same. Just the employment of the Sahwa in the Tikrit area is credited with drastically reducing roadside attacks and increasing the willingness of locals to work against an insurgent presence.

But it’s rarely clear who or where the enemy is, and no day ends as simply as it begins. In the fifth year of the war, soldiers enter an environment their counterparts in 2003 may not recognize. Rhyne considers it a war where soldiers must operate in gray areas.

“There are no defined lines in how far you can go with this thing,” he said one night back at Speicher. “It’s going to continue to be this weird fight we have out there.”

Like other parts of Iraq, commanders say attacks in the Tikrit area have dropped dramatically since last summer and fall. American forces are placing more and more responsibility on the Iraqi government and security forces so the U.S. presence can be reduced to “tactical overwatch.”

Rhyne tells his troops the sort of personal engagement the STB does every day in Tikrit will make all the difference.

“People see what you are doing,” he said. “We will win if we continue to do this. We will lose this war, lose this, if we continue to do the same things the same way, getting bigger vehicles, closing ourselves off and not interacting with the people.”