like DART and the Centers for Disease Control was not at all a bad experience. I learned a lot from the teams advising us. Each of them provided valuable lessons in their specialty areas (water, food, medical care, etc.) that I would use later in missions of this sort.
From the CDC I learned about the nature of diseases — the cycle, the causes, and the treatment… the conditions that lead to them, the signs that diseases are spreading, and what you have to do to prevent that. This was a totally unique experience… and it’s not an instrument you normally find in the military tool kit.
Cholera, for example, is difficult to cure — especially in the case of children. The kids will initially seem to be improving, but they’re really not. They’ll look like they’re getting better; then they’ll sink down; then they seem to be getting a little better; and then they sink down a little more. The process is really a gradual decline, but you’ll find upswings that give you hope. The upswings can fool you.
I also learned a lot from the teams sent in by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). They are not only fine doctors; they are also culturally sophisticated in dealing with refugees and third world peoples. They had serious concerns about the level of care we were providing.
The Kurds needed a great deal of medical help instantly. To fill that need, we brought in what we had — technically advanced military medical units and field hospitals. (I observed a major operation at a Belgian field hospital, where they were doing elective surgery. It was a world-class facility.) Our idea was to come in and lay down a massive effort… really flood the place. But when we pulled out, we’d leave a tremendous void. That is, we were bringing in a level of care that couldn’t be maintained after we left.
By way of contrast: when Doctors Without Borders work within a third world environment, they try to leave something behind that can be maintained. It’s the old idea: You just don’t hand people fish, you try to leave the skill of fishing behind. They know how to leave the skill behind far better than we in the military do. And I took many lessons from this which I used later in Somalia and elsewhere.
Returning refugees to their country of origin was no simple task. The large number of international laws and regulations created to safeguard the rights of refugees generate a large administrative and technical burden. This was the first operation at this level of civil-military coordination; and many lessons learned emerged that would be useful in future operations. For example, I had never known before that there’s a difference between “displaced persons” within borders and “refugees.” Each class has rights, but the rights of displaced people are not the same as the rights of refugees.
Processing all that took a great deal of our time and energy; but it was all necessary. You assume all these people want to go home; but that assumption is not totally correct. Some Kurds did not want to go back. Some were simply too paralyzed with fear to move. We knew they couldn’t stay in the hills. But we couldn’t just herd them into trucks and carry them wherever we thought it best to take them. We had to convince them we would protect them and take care of them before we could get their agreement. It was not easy.
Every single Kurd had to have written documentation spelling out that they weren’t going home under duress and that they understood what they were doing. Forms had to be filled out for each Kurd, and somebody had to fill them. That meant Potter’s guys in the camps had to interview every adult among the 500,000 Kurds and take care of all the necessary paperwork.
Later, each Kurd had to be continuously accounted for — where they started from, where they were at that particular moment, where they would end up. We set up a transit system with checkpoints, way stations, and the like, to keep track of everybody; but of course things didn’t work out the way we planned. Some of the Kurds moved out without telling anybody… just took their donkeys or whatever and went back down the trails. We were losing count. “My God,” Shali told me one day, “I’ve lost 100,000 Kurds. Where have they gone?” We sent recon airplanes to find out, but we didn’t have much luck with that. The Kurds had simply scattered into the hills. We had to trust that they knew their way home.
Over the course of Operation Provide Comfort, eight tasks had evolved for the CTF (and the operative word here is evolved):
1. Provide immediate relief and stabilize the population in place.
2. Build a distribution system/infrastructure for continuous logistics support.
3. Establish a Security Zone in northern Iraq.
4. Construct temporary facilities, i.e., transit centers, way stations, support centers, etc.
5. Transfer the refugee population to the temporary sites.
6. Transition the humanitarian operation to the international relief organizations.
7. Provide continuous security for all aspects of the operation.
8. Enable the ultimate return of the refugees to their homes.
The mission was continually changing. We didn’t just get instructions up front, look at the expected end state, and go and do it. We were probing our way through every stage — often thinking when we reached one stage that we were at the end state. But then we’d see other paths opening that we’d have to follow. Once we’d stabilized the refugees in the hills, we realized we had to move them out of the hills; then we realized we had to put them in a sustainable area; then we realized we had to bring them home; then we realized we had to protect them from the Iraqis. Tasks emerged from other tasks. We were developing them as we went. And we had no idea what the end state would be until we got there.
By mid-June, the Kurds were back in their homes, and we were able to withdraw our ground forces back to Turkey. There we established a temporary base for a ground reaction force just inside the border at a town called Silopi. Though humanitarian airlift missions were no longer required, continuous combat air patrols were maintained over the Kurdish areas, and the MCC remained in the Security Zone. The ground troops left Silopi in July.
On July 24, Provide Comfort I ended and Provide Comfort II began. General Shalikashvilli returned to USAREUR, Jim Jamerson resumed command, and I went back to being the deputy. With the ground troops gone, Provide Comfort became an air operation again. Only the MCC and a CSAR capability remained on the ground.
Now that the air operations had transformed into combat patrols, and the Rules of Engagement gave only Jim Jamerson and me authority to order certain responses to Iraqi threats, Jim felt that I needed greater familiarity with air operations. I was not only thoroughly briefed, but I was taken on a flight in a two-seater F-16 to get a hands-on feel for what the pilots faced. And since we had an aircraft carrier in support, I also flew in a Navy A-6—including a series of catapult shots and traps aboard the carrier. This valuable experience served me well in future joint tours of duty.
Later, when Jamerson left and Brigadier General Glenn Profitt took command, I was asked by General Galvin to stay on to provide continuity.
I finally returned to EUCOM in November.
Provide Comfort evolved into Operation Northern Watch, and continued on for well over a decade until Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.
