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BCT commander wounded in Iraq shares insights

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Regardless of what happened before he got to Sadr City or what happened after he left, Col. B.D. Farris gives his 15 months in the Baghdad slum good marks.

And that comes from a brigade commander who was shot last May while inspecting a wall designed to keep Iraqis safe.

“From what I saw when I left, yes, the surge worked,” Farris said Wednesday.

Farris, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, was talking to officers studying at Fort Leavenworth. He also was to give a lecture Wednesday night at the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

His presentations were part of an effort by Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, commander of Fort Leavenworth, to expose officers to commanders coming out of combat. Caldwell is former commander of the 82nd Airborne.

Farris will soon relinquish his command and move to the Pentagon staff. His soldiers were in the lead of an influx of five brigades sent in January 2007 to Iraq to stem rising violence.

Among those brigades was the 4th Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division from Fort Riley. Those 3,500 soldiers returned from Baghdad’s Rashid neighborhood in April.

Farris said while he was in Iraq, social services improved, businesses reopened and Iraqis took more responsibility for the security in Sadr City and nearby Adhamiya neighborhoods.

One of the strategies was to wall in Adhamiya, a Sunni enclave which had become a safe haven for Al Qaida in Iraq.

The wall provided security against insurgents and Shiite death squads flowing to the neighborhoods, creating choke points that were manned by Iraqi forces. The tactics were opposed by residents, Sunni clerics and followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Though the wall was built primarily at night by soldiers with night-vision goggles, Farris was wounded by small-arms fire during a daylight inspection. He was sent back the United States to recover, but never relinquished command. He returned from a stay at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and brought his brigade home in May.

Violence has flared in recent weeks in Sadr City as coalition units try to build a wall around the sector and a major route traveled by soldiers.

The clashes in Sadr City erupted after an Iraqi government crackdown on armed Shiite groups began in late March. The U.S. military is now trying to weaken the militia grip in the teeming slum and disrupt rocket and mortar strikes on the U.S.-protected Green Zone.

Farris said one lesson he learned was to be patient.

He said working with Paul Folmsbee, the leader of the provincial reconstruction team in his sector, taught him to be patient with the pace at which the Iraqis were moving to establish their government and provide security.

“What I learned is, this is going to take time,” Farris said.

He advises future commanders to recognize that it is their duty to help the Iraqis make progress, not make it for them.

Farris also said they should hone their basic soldier skills. The skills, along with techniques spelled out in the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, will be used with “non-lethal things you can build on” when units get deployed.