Looking back: A Quarter Century After 9/11
On August 31st, 2001, I landed in Sarajevo. The Army was a much different place before 9/11. We were still on that post cold war high, where the US was on top of the world. Our tactics were still based around the Soviet threat, mostly as a default. We knew that wasn't what the next war would look like, we knew someday there would be another one, but nobody could guess what it would look like.
Bosnia was the hottest thing the Army had going on in 2001. By then it was calm generally though; NATO made short work of bringing stability after the SFOR mission kicked off in 1995. I had spent most of the previous 3 years in Ft. Carson, Colorado, assigned to the 4th Finance Battalion. I was an administrative specialist by trade, which was a job I never wanted, but happened to be the "least uncool" option for someone who was red-green colorblind the day I signed up at the MEPS in September 1997. I chose it because it was a job that existed in every type of unit, so I had the potential of at least going somewhere cool.
While in 4th Finance Battalion I bounced between the personnel and operations offices. I was "good with my hands," so I got a big stack of additional duties like "acting" communications NCO, truck driver, machine gunner, generator operator, mail clerk, etc. I got tasked with so many side jobs that I was starting to get burned out. I remember one field exercise I was driving the 5-ton, carrying the M60 machine gun + my M16 + the spare barrel and tripod because I apparently didn't need an a-gunner, and by myself because apparently I didn't need an a-driver either. I got yelled at because I was taking too long to dismount at a security halt.
One nice thing about working in operations was we were the first to see "taskers," personnel requests for deployments, special assignments, etc. come down from higher HQ. I saw a very intriguing one come down that only listed NATO/SFOR HQ, Sarajevo, looking for a Sergeant in my job code. I was still a Specialist at the time. I had been to the Sergeant promotion board a year before and passed with a nice score, but just didn't have enough promotion points to get promoted. I volunteered for the mission, but my battalion commander denied the request as I was "too essential" to operations.
The tasker ended up going to someone in a sister unit. 10 days before the ship date though, we got another request. Apparently the person who was tasked ended up having their interim Secret security clearance denied, so they had to find someone else. My commander still protested, but the needs of the Army prevailed, and I was off.
CJSOTF
Upon landing in Sarajevo and getting bussed to Camp Butmir, I was picked up by a couple guys in civilian clothes in a Land Cruiser with tinted windows and fake license plates. My new home for the next 6 months was the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. Combined meant we were multi-national, Joint meant we were multi-branch. My assigned role was to be the Commander's driver and also to work in the personnel office. CJSOTF's mission was to provide special forces support to the SFOR commander, who happened to be Brigadier General Petraeus, who years later went on to become director of the CIA. The staff I was assigned to supported an Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA), who conducted the missions.
In most of the Army, the commander's driver serves as the commander's personal assistant, making coffee, managing calendars and meetings, etc. I tried this for about 2 weeks in Ft. Carson before I basically got fired, because quite frankly this was never my forte. Fortunately the CJSOTF commander had no need for such niceties, so I'd just drive his vehicle when he went on a mission, and my day job was in the personnel office. In the picture above, the commander is dead center back row in front of the American flag, and I'm just to the right of him.
My time in the personnel office was also short, but not due to failure. The fact is there isn't a lot of personnel work that happens in a forward environment, so 90% of my job was compiling and sending reports. It took me about 3 weeks to automate this using Microsoft Access, so sending these reports took like 10-15 minutes per day. I'd pretty much eliminated my own job.
A Change of Mission
Less than 2 weeks after landing in Sarajevo we experienced my generation's Pearl Harbor. It was afternoon in Bosnia. We were all in shock. Quiet and seething, not sure what to make of it, even more unsure about what would come next. Suddenly the SFOR mission paled in comparison.
Having mostly eliminated my job in the personnel office, they moved me to Operations, where I worked directly with Master Sergeant Valor. That guy was even cooler than his name, and I made it a point to learn as much from him as I could. To an outsider or someone from conventional forces, a lot of what we did looked frivolous. It looked like a lot of just driving around and talking to people. We coordinated off-site training for the ODAs, so this included things like setting up a machine gun range, CQB shoot-houses, etc. It was a lot of logistics since we were actually building the ranges, but what that actually meant was finding a property owner who was willing to let you go shoot machine guns, putting in a big order at the local lumber yard, buying some junk cars from the local junkyard, etc.
What took me years to appreciate is that we were building a network. On paper it looked like we were gallivanting around, having lunch, telling stories and taking the occasional shots of rakija or slivo, but in practice we had a nice grid of safe houses and intel sources. In a combat zone, your local power players are often the people who own the lumber yards and junkyards, and we had integrated into this power structure. They are also your eyes and ears on the ground.
It didn't take us long to figure out where we fit in the new global war on terror. The Balkans are the crossroads between the east and the west; the primary conflict was between the Serbs of Russian descent, the Croats of Germanic descent, and the Bosniaks of Turkish descent. We were already working with the Bosnian mujahideen, who interestingly enough had links to al Qaeda. To call the situation complicated would be a gross understatement.
We made the most out of what we could do given where we were at, but in truth we were needed more urgently elsewhere. Most of the guys already had their next two years planned out for them, with most of them planning on spending a lot of time in Afghanistan. CJSOTF was given the order to draw-down in December. I volunteered to stay as long as they would let me to help get things buttoned up, but still ended up going home a couple weeks short of the 6 months I'd planned on. About 6 weeks after I came home I began my terminal leave as I transitioned from active duty Army to the Iowa Army National Guard, but a few years later I got my turn in Afghanistan.
A changed world
What was most interesting about living through 9/11 as an adult is watching how much the world changed. Whenever you're deployed it's already a culture shock coming back to a world that has moved on somewhat, but this was really something else. Being in the Army suddenly had a very different meaning. We still hadn't figured out what the next war would look like yet, but suddenly we had a much greater purpose than spit shined boots and soldier of the quarter boards.
Once you feel a call to action this strong, you can never let it go. The mission always changes, but the drive never goes away. Quality consulting and auditing may not sound as sexy as touring eastern Europe with special forces, but I'm every bit as proud of what I'm doing today as any other mission. The real backbone of the US is its supply chain, and Big W is here to keep that backbone strong.
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