his task force together from scratch, using 24th MEU as the base element.
This operation confirmed what I have long known: Special Forces is a Renaissance force. During my career, I had supervised, led, and commanded SF troops in the Meo Tribesman program and Khmer Series programs in Indochina, in the attempt to hold the Lebanese Army together in the early eighties, and in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Give them the mission, put them in a difficult political situation, locate them in isolated outposts in rugged terrain, issue them a myriad of missions, both stated and implied, provide them top cover and the proper support, and they will accomplish any mission they've been given.
There arc literally hundreds of stories of children being saved, of the birthing of babies, of food getting delivered at the critical time, of potable water being provided, of adroit handling of conflicts between Kurds and Turks, Kurds and Iraqis, and every other imaginable conflict — family feuds, tribal animosities, disputes between tribal elders, and local political haggling. The constant in all of this is the professional Special Forces officer and NCO. In the camps and in the countryside, the Special Forces soldier kept the lid on volatile situations — always keeping in mind his principal mission of saving the Kurds.
The simple fact is that no other brigade-size element could have gone into the mountains of northern Iraq and southern Turkey in early spring 1991; taken responsibility for 600,000 Kurds; organized a relief effort; stabilized the situation; dealt with the international political and cultural ambiguities; and produced success with no compromise or embarrassment to the United States.
As the task force commander, I knew that our doctrinal manuals did not prescribe how to run a humanitarian operation of that size and complexity; nonetheless it was done in camp after camp in the spring of 1991, and the intelligence, maturity, and adaptability of the Special Forces soldier were the keys. Like the Confederates' Bedford Forrest, we could get to any location in our AOR 'Firstest with the Mostest.' And Colonel Bill Tangney masterfully transitioncd his units from combat operations to humanitarian endeavors and turned seemingly hopeless situations into success stories. That is the acme of Special Forces leadership.
THE BATTLE FOR LIVES
Many of the 10th SFG troops called in to PROVIDE COMFORT during the second week of April 1991 were returning to an area they had only recently left. Lieutenant Colonel Stan Florer had deployed to Turkey at the beginning of the air war against Iraq. His unit's mission was to help provide combat air rescue for downed allied fliers; fortunately, they were called out for only one sortie. Soon after the end of the ground war, the 1st Battalion returned to its base in Germany, where it was assigned as part of SOCEUR.
Within two weeks, Florer was heading back to Incirlik, Turkey, to accompany General Potter as he surveyed the situation.
'We made a visit to the main camp, Shikferan, and it was absolute disaster. The Turks were overwhelmed,' he recalls. 'The mountains were as serious as you can get. They were up there at eight thousand to ten thousand feet on the tops, and there was a lot of snow; it was just absolutely brutal.'
Civilians were living in crude tents and hastily constructed shelters, or no shelter at all. Food was almost nonexistent, drinking water was polluted, and cholera and other diseases were rampant. The Turkish border troops had orders to keep the refugees out of Turkey — orders that were followed by whatever means necessary.
The battalion moved to Silopi in extreme southwestern Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. There, Florer split his men into small groups, distributing them in the camps all along the frontier toward Iran in the east. The SF forces, often operating in three-man teams in areas that could only be reached by air or foot, extended across a 3,600-square-mile security zone established in northern Iraq near the borders of Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The camps were on both sides of the borders, which in the remote, mountainous areas were not well defined (the Turks allowed some camps to be set up just over the line, but only as a temporary measure).
Bill Shaw, then a captain commanding ODA 063 of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, headed a unit airlifted to Turkey as soon as the emergency was declared. Shaw and his team greeted the deployment with mixed emotions. Specialists in military freefall — parachuting into hostile territory — they had spent the war in Massachusetts, much to their chagrin. Next to combat, which they had missed, this assignment seemed a letdown.
'We were excited to have a mission,' Shaw observes. 'However, humanitarian assistance just did not seem very important at the time.'
Attitudes soon changed. ODA 063 landed in Incirlik for a brief rest, then moved with a large headquarters group via helicopter to Pirincikin, a remote border settlement held by about 150 Turkish border guards and surrounded by thousands of refugees. Ten minutes after their arrival at the camp, a Kurdish woman approached the Turkish military commander, crying and begging for assistance. When the commander dismissed her, Shaw and the company commander intervened. They sent two medics to help the woman, whose husband had been shot in the hip. The medics soon had him patched up (Shaw never found out how the man had been wounded).
'Their action gave our unit instant rapport,' Shaw remembers. 'By the next day, all twenty thousand refugees in the camp had heard the good news: Forty to fifty U.S. Army doctors had arrived.'
'They thought we were
As it happened in fact, when the Americans arrived in several of the camps, the Kurds kept their ill children and other family members hidden. Medies began going from tent to tent, looking for sick kids. 'They didn't really want you, because they didn't trust the medics or anybody else at first,' says Florer. 'The medics literally had to convince these women to bring their kids out and to help them. Otherwise, they would just die. They would just bury them where they could find a little spot and dig kind of a shallow little grave and put these little kids in it. They were dying by the dozens when we first got there.'
For the first few days, SF medics tried to cope with the incredible array of health problems with their own supplies — which were, of course, designed to help a six- or twelve-man team in a combat situation. They were quickly overwhelmed.
Once the units established secure landing zones and road routes to the camps, however, medical supplies began to arrive in large quantities. World Health Organization packages — which typically include medicine, antibiotics, and other necessities for thousands of people — helped stabilize the health situation.
THE CAMP'S
Calling the refugees' makeshift collection of shelters 'camps' is a wild overstatement.
Pirineikin was typical. Thousands and thousands of people were packed into a one-hundred- to three- hundred-yard-wide valley. Observers compared it to the scene at a rock concert — without any of the good stuff, and more bad than anyone could imagine.
'The ground was covered with the detritus of their flight,' Shaw remembers, 'including clothing, feces, and vomit.' Trees had been stripped and used for firewood. Most tents were simple tarps four or five feet high. A dozen or more people — children to elderly — could be living in each one. Ground unoccupied by tents was covered with waste and the remains of butchered animals.
As soon as they arrived, SF soldiers generally set up secure areas for sleeping away from the main camp. They stayed in canvas tents, either in small two-man tents or 'GP mediums' — general-purpose medium-sized tents that could house several people. In some cases, soldiers set up one-man 'poncho hootches' and bunked there. As soon as their perimeters were established — and often before — they went to work.
While the chaos in the camps seemed to invite terrorists (and, of course, Iraqi secret agents bent on mischief), the vastly outnumbered Americans were actually relatively secure. According to SF security analysts, part of the reason had to do with the mission: The Kurds generally recognized that the Americans were there to help; they were grateful for it, and in many cases protective. Various other factors, including close ties with the civilian leadership and local guerrillas, the presence of Turkish military, and not least of all the SF's own firepower, also
