Interview with MAJ John Grantz, Part II

Major John Grantz deployed as the assistant S3 for 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division in February of 2003 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In part one of his two-part interview, he begins by explaining that he received no cultural training and, like many others at the time, "just expected to go over there, fight, destroy the army and never even talk to an Iraqi." He deployed several weeks before his unit to plan for the reception, staging, onward-movement and integration of the soldiers and equipment, and spent much of that time wandering around lost in the Kuwaiti desert with buses in tow. He got his first experience with combat in Najaf while tracking the battle covered in Iraqi soda and flies. His battalion jumped a couple times before setting up in Mosul where he took command of Charlie Company in May - the subject of the second part of the interview. He immediately transitioned his company into stability operations, went out on patrols, talked to the local sheiks and tried to improve the quality of life for the Iraqis. He had many tactical lessons learned, but the biggest thing for him was that you need to understand your area and culture and try to see things from their point of view. He believes that we need to do a better job at transitioning from a kinetic mindset to stability operations. "When the Iraqis started looting and their military didn't stand up like we thought they would," he said, "we lost the initiative and it took us a long time to get it back."