“That made us nervous,” Kershncr recalls. “We did not want to be in a position where we were responsible or could even be peripherally involved with a dead baby or something. Fortunately, every case we had like that turned out okay. But it made us extremely nervous.
“Our guys were very concerned about the Islamic prohibitions against hanging out with their women, or even looking at their women; and here they’re going to ask a woman to lie down on this camp cot and hike up her skirts.... Invariably the guy that was with her always had a rifle.”
In fact, the Kurds took the pregnant women to the medies—a sign of enormous trust.
The trust the SF troops created was everywhere; the rapport was extraordinary.
In one camp, Major Rick Helfer built a particularly strong working relationship with its Kurdish leaders. One day, the leaders decided to honor him. A thousand kids suddenly ringed the SF perimeter and began chanting, “Helfer! Helfer! Helfer! USA! USA! George Bush! George Bush!”
“My people! yelled Helfer, hamming it up to the other Americans’ amusement. Later, he repaid their praise by dressing head-to-toe in the clothing of a Kurdish tribal elder.
LIFE in the refugee camps could turn hellish in seconds. A few days after the children’s demonstration for Helfer, the same kids were throwing rocks at Turkish soldiers who had come to their camp to steal some of the refugees’ supplies. The Turks locked and loaded, and lined up in firing positions. SF personnel, their own weapons at the ready, rushed between the Turks and the refugees and faced off the Turks—preventing a possible massacre.
Mines—a constant, deadly danger—had been laid along the roadways and in many flat, open areas, stepping off a well-trod path could bring death.
Some children saw them as toys.
“They would go out and collect mines,” says Krueger, “then go to the top of a hill and roll the mines down to see how far they would go before they went off.”
Mines caused many injuries, mostly to kids who wandered into a mined area without knowing it. “I remember an SF soldier running up to the LZ carrying a little boy with a leg that had just been severed,” says Krueger, who gave up his helicopter so the kid would be evacuated to a hospital. “That big burly SF soldier with that little bitty body in his arms. His entire focus was to get him medical attention.”
The danger wasn’t only to Kurds; an SF soldier had to have his leg amputated below the knee after stepping on a mine.
Even relief operations could injure people. CH-47 Chinooks are powerful helicopters, capable of delivering large amounts of food and other supplies. Their massive rotors, powered by huge engines at either end of the aircraft, generate immense downdraft as they land. “It would blow little kids over. They would just go flying like tumbleweeds,” Kershner recalls. “It was no fault of the helicopter. That’s just physics.”
The SF found safer “games” for the kids than collecting mines or watching helicopters land. One favorite involved policing the area. “The guys would give them candies from the MREs,” Kershner continues, “for whoever picked up the most trash or something.
“I went to a camp and there was a medic walking through it, and a little four-year-old kid would follow this medic around everywhere. And if the medic had a free hand, the kid was holding it. I finally asked what the deal was. It turned out that the kid had choked and the medie had done the Heimlich maneuver on him. That had changed his life, and this kid was just attached to the medic.”
It was hard to find a Kurd who was not grateful in some measure to the Americans. One Kurd leader offered Kershner a fourteen-year-old daughter as a wife. “It took me quite some time to convince him that it probably would not be a good idea for me to take a second wife home.”
CULTURE
Americans and Kurds have vastly different cultures. The Kurds’ attitudes to women, children, the elderly, and to male privilege make most Americans uncomfortable—and of course that goes the other way around.
To the Kurds, for example, children counted for very little. Adults certainly valued the youngest members of their society—if the kids needed help, they helped them when they could—but they clearly put a much higher priority on helping other adults, especially the very old. Children were often the last to get food, water, and medical attention. A dead child would generally be buried in a shallow, mass grave; an adult would receive a much more elaborate funeral and separate burial.
“They would abandon the children that were too young or too weak—they would just leave them out to die,” Kershner remembers. “It was a cultural problem for the Americans to accept that they took care of the old people first. But you have to understand the old people were their corporate history—the institutional memory. They were the decision makers. So that was where their emphasis was.”
Attitudes toward women also shocked Americans. It was not uncommon to see a woman carrying heavy loads while men carried nothing at all. Girls were expected to marry as soon as they were old enough to bear children. And when SF personnel tried to show the women how to make a substitute formula for children from rice water, they nearly came to blows with Kurdish men, who resented their dealing directly with the women. Such techniques had to be shown to the men first, who would then teach it to the women—if they decided the women should know it.
While some Kurdish attitudes bothered the Americans, their strong family structures provided a base for organizing relief efforts. The elders were the primary decision makers, and their decisions were normally accepted without dissent. They were therefore the first people with whom to deal.
“If you told an older Kurdish guy, ‘Hey listen, why don’t you get your family together, cause this is what we’re going to do,’ generally speaking he’d get his family together to do whatever you wanted him to do,” Kershner recalls.
“In fact, the Kurds seemed to enjoy working with our guys. And we had real good relationships with them. Whenever you met with them, they enjoyed hearing about your family. They wanted to find out how many kids you had, what they did for a living.... They were very generous people. They would share their last bits with you.”
Or even on occasion offer to make the ultimate sacrifice:
“One day,” Dick Potter recalls, “I was involved with the tribal and camp elders in Cukurca Camp, the largest camp located entirely in northern Iraq [125,000 population]. The meeting was heated. The elders were ready to move south, but only if the town of Dahuk was under CTF PROVIDE COMFORT control. At that time, I could not make such a commitment, and so the debate went on for hours.
“As I was leaving, the elders took me out of the tent and introduced me to two young Kurdish men, in excellent health and in their mid-twenties. The elders had heard of President George Bush’s heart problems, and with great solemnity told me that if President Bush, their dear brother in Washington, needed a new heart, these two men were ready to travel to the United States to be heart donors. I thanked the elders, told them that our President had healed, and passed the message back to General Shalikashvili, who I am told passed it to the Chairman, who in turn informed the President.”
The loyalty and generosity went both ways. “Big loyalties were created,” Kershner continues. “If you could have told the SF guys, ‘Well, we are going to leave you in place and you are just going to carve out the country, and we’re going to call it Kurdistan and let all the Kurds live there,’ they would have done it in a heartbeat.”
GOING HOME
As the situation was stabilizing in the camps, diplomatic and political progress was also being made elsewhere. The allied occupation of Kurdish cities attacked by the Iraqis helped stabilize the political situation, and a second round of negotiations began May 7 between Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan Front, led by Kurdish Democratic Party leader Barzani. By this time, roughly 16,000 allied troops were involved in the relief and security operations.
Several firefights between Iraqi and Kurd forces during the first weeks of May led to planning for an allied assault on Dahu
k, one of the trouble spots. But the Iraqi-Kurd negotiations—and possibly a U.S. show of force as the Marines prepared to engage the Iraqis—led to a tentative agreement on May 18, and lessening hostilities.
Refugees began returning to their homes in the northern regions of Iraq.
“First, the Kurdish leadership had to be convinced that it was safe for them to go back home,” says Chris Krueger. Meetings with the various leaders and top American generals, including General Shalikashvili, laid the groundwork. Then came the job of getting the word from the leaders to the refugees, and especially to the Pesh Merga guerrillas guarding the roads and passes.
“Colonel Bill Tangney and I and the chief Kurd in the area got on an MH-60 helicopter and we started just outside of Silopi at the very first camp,” recalls Krueger. “We put the Kurdish leader on a monkey strap and we would fly over the checkpoints, do a hard bank, and kind of hang him out the door, and he would wave at them and they would signal us to land.” On the ground, the leader would tell the guerrillas that it was now time to return home. The trio would then board the helicopter and travel to the next site. They spent the entire day and several hundred gallons of fuel visiting camps and checkpoints.
Within twenty-four hours, the Kurds were on the move. SF units had established about a half-dozen safe routes south and supplied easy-to-read maps showing checkpoints and highways. Among the most important messages on the maps: Don’t leave the roadways, because of the mines. Thousands of maps were handed out and air-dropped in the camps.
Way stations on the southern routes home included hospitals, often staffed by Doctors Without Borders, as well as military personnel. The refugees would stay there perhaps overnight, then move on. Food and water, as well as medical supplies, were available at the checkpoints. “Logistically, we didn’t want another humanitarian disaster, a trail of tears, moving back to their homes and people dying en route,” says Florer.
The way stations helped maintain the Kurds as they returned.
Many simply walked back home. Americans moved many others south by truck on the treacherous mountain roads. Krueger remembers that among the refugees were Kurdish construction firms, whose heavy equipment was used to rebuild—and in some cases, create—roads. The rough roads were hell on the vehicles; U.S. deuce-and-a-half transports would quickly blow out their tires, running through their duals and spares as they navigated south. Tires were often more difficult to come by than fuel, and the troops had to borrow and occasionally beg for spares. A French offer of twenty-five tires was greeted with an offer of canonization by one grateful crew.
“As we went through towns somebody would beat on the roof of a truck and say, ‘Hey, a bunch of us live here,”’ Kershner remembers. “And they’d stop and eight people would get out of the truck and then they’d drive on.
“We’d just truck the people back and drop them off wherever they said they needed to be dropped off.”
According to Kershner, as many as fifty-six Kurds could crowd into the back of a deuce-and-a-half—a space American troops would call crowded at twenty-five. Families tended to stay together when they moved, so fitting upward of fifty people in the back of a truck—or sometimes even more than a hundred in a Chinook—was a necessity.
“They packed everything very nicely and many of them hauled it on their backs,” says Florer. “And just overnight we would look out across the camp and there’d be thousands less people.”
SF units from the camps escorted many of the refugees back into their hometowns, sometimes remaining for a few days. At times, disputes broke out with squatters who had moved into vacant homes; the Americans tended to stand back as the locals sorted out those problems. In the meantime, disputes between the Kurds and Iraqis continued.
As it became clear that the United States intended to pull most if not all its troops out of northern Iraq, Kurds protested. The Americans were their shield against Saddam. But by the end of June, SF units were pulling back to Incirlik, then restaging to their home bases. For many, Inçirlik gave them their first opportunity for a shower in weeks.
BEYOND COMFORT
Ground operations connected with PROVIDE COMFORT were effectively concluded July 15, 1991, when the last Marine unit in northern Iraq hauled down its colors and prepared to pull out. Seventeen thousand tons of relief supplies had been delivered; at least half a million people had been helped.
Coalition air units continued to patrol the northern stretches of Iraq from Turkey, enforcing the cease-fire and UN agreements, and some ground units remained in the region to monitor events and deliver additional aid when necessary. Operating under the auspices of Operation COMFORT, over the next five years, allied units delivered another 58,000 tons of supplies to Kurds in their home villages.
On June 22, 1991, Barzani announced that he had agreed with Baghdad on a settlement that gave the Kurds military and political authority over the Kurdistan Autonomous Region. Though other Kurdish leaders were divided over this agreement, an uneasy peace settled temporarily over the region.
Meanwhile, a simmering, low-key war continued between Turkey and Kurds within Turkish borders, but at times this flared into large-scale Turkish actions against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—the PKK. The Marxist Kurdish group had actively opposed the Turkish government since at least 1984 and continues to do so.
In Iran, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) vied for domination in the northern areas of Iraq. In a complicated three-way conflict with the PKK, the KDP eventually aligned itself with Saddam Husseins regime. In the summer of 1996, the KDP and Iraqi forces captured Irbil, a prominent Kurdish city in northern Iraq. The KDP and PUK, which has received support from Iran, still struggle for domination in the Iraqi Kurdish region.
A tragic coda to Operation PROVIDE COMFORT was written in 1994, when two American helicopters were accidentally shot down by American F-15s. The helicopters were ferrying a variety of officials involved in relief and peace work. Though humanitarian efforts continued, changes in the Turkish government eventually forced the United States to disband the relief effort on December 31, 1996.
Air interdiction of Iraqi flights continues under NORTHERN WATCH, paralleling efforts in the south under Operation SOUTHERN WATCH.
DEBRIEF
“Why do we need Special Forces guys to do this?” Stan Florer asks.
“Because nobody else has all it takes to do the job—the capability to organize and direct, together with the security edge. Civil Affairs guys don’t have all that. Our solders are packing an advantage, and they know how to use it.”
Or to put it another way: Fifty armed Americans add an eloquence of persuasion to any suggestion. It’s not so much “You better get your act together or we’re going to shoot” as “Here is a strong, steady, and secure structure within which you can operate. With that in place, you can begin to take charge of your own needs.”
Similar conditions apply in dealings with external relief organizations. These are all fine people, but they tend to run off every which way, and tending to horrendously complex needs in an utterly chaotic situation requires focus, direction, and order.
Carl Stiner points out that the Army‘s—and especially the SF’s—streamlined command structure facilitates getting things done, and getting cooperation from such organizations. “We obviously won’t use force on them, but if they persist in wanting to do their own thing, the CINC can step in and say, ‘I am responsible for this whole area and you are going to comply. And here is the schedule you’re going to operate under if you want security, and if you don’t, you are on your own.”’
“What was interesting about this was its relationship to the larger political picture, a larger connection to DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM obviously, and the combat relationship,” Florer comments. With more than two dozen government and nongovernment relief agencies involved, Special Forces’ ability to work with a variety of groups under difficult conditions proved to be critical. While strict discipline
is necessary for any military operation, PROVIDE COMFORT demonstrated what Bill Yarborough and others long ago foresaw, that flexibility and creativity are a major force multiplier.
The same attributes that make Special Forces soldiers so valuable in combat actions—the ability to adapt to unexpected situations, to use cutting-edge technology to its fullest, to think creatively, to act quickly, decisively, and independently—turned out to be the qualities most needed to help the Kurds in the free-flowing crisis following the war with Iraq.
Training for war goes hand in hand with the battle to save lives. Tomorrow’s SF soldier will continue to find his role in a shadowy territory, where there are few boundaries between armed conflict with bad guys, on the one hand, and working closely and productively with local friendlies, on the other.
“In a way,” Dick Potter recalls, “the Special Forces legacy lives on in that part of the world. If you travel in northern Iraq and visit a Kurdish settlement, you’re likely to encounter children in the ten-to-eleven-year group. Ask the parents and the elders their names. If they were born in the camps on the Turkish border during the great migration, you will find a middle name of Smith, Jones, Swicker, or Gilmore—the Kurds’ tribute to men of the 10th Group, a living honor to the men that saved them.”
FACING FORWARD
During the next ten years, special operations optempo greatly increased, with many more humanitarian assistance missions, and many more missions across the broad range of SOF capabilities. From Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan to Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, they were busy men.
A small sample of what they were doing during that busy decade:
SOMALIA During the ’90s, SOF missions called on them to prevent fighting—or keep the lid on it—more often than to engage in combat. Through no fault of their own, their peacemaking efforts did not necessarily yield freedom from strife, most notably in Somalia, where several special operators on a UN-sponsored peacekeeping and humanitarian operation sacrificed their lives in the fiercest close combat engaged in by American forces since the Vietnam War. Two of the men earned Medals of Honor.