Word: platoons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Outside the wire, the dysfunction ends. On duty, "it's like butter, we're so smooth," says Whiteside. Everyone attributes the unit's cohesion to the man who became their platoon leader shortly after they arrived in Baghdad, Second Lieutenant Benjamin Colgan, 30. He was originally attached to the Tomb Raiders' battalion as a chemical and biological officer, responsible for managing preparations for unconventional attacks. But that position is a desk job, and Colgan, a 12-year veteran of the special forces, longed to be on the streets. "Use my skills," he told Rabena. At the time, the Tomb Raiders...
...break the ice with his new charges, Colgan made a point of hanging out in the platoon's common room--a rare occurrence in military culture, where social separation of officers from their soldiers is still the norm--and asked not to be addressed as sir. Says Talimeliyor: "When we first met, I thought, Man, this L.T., he talks a lot. I thought he was going to be annoying." A former enlisted man, Colgan could relate to the soldiers in his command. "He knew how to talk to the enlisted guys like normal people," says Whiteside...
Colgan was determined to transform the platoon into a combat unit that could handle street patrols and raids on enemy safe houses, neither of which the Tomb Raiders had ever conducted. And so the hooch became a training center. Every afternoon the platoon practiced close-quarters combat and house-clearing techniques in the basement. Colgan rearranged the furniture to simulate different settings and ordered three $300 battering rams for kicking in doors. "Get in loud, fast and violent," he told them, while insisting that they treat those they found inside with respect. "They're young, they're new," Colgan wrote...
...took just three raids, Whiteside says, for the team to gel. Over the next three months, the platoon conducted more than 40 raids on houses of suspected insurgents and former members of Saddam's regime in Adhamiya. In July, Colgan led the platoon on midnight searches of a Muslim cemetery next to the Abu Hanifa mosque, where insurgents were believed to be storing weapons. Colgan instructed the soldiers to bang the lid of each crypt; if it sounded hollow, the troops hoisted the 250-lb. granite slab and looked inside. On its second graveyard hunt, on July 4, the platoon...
Colgan's most valuable asset was his skill at gathering intelligence. "He was better and quicker than anyone else," says Lieutenant Lucien Ilardi, leader of one of the two other platoons in the Tomb Raiders' battery. Platoon leaders usually act on intelligence passed down from their commanders or from special-ops units, but Colgan generated tips himself. He cultivated informants on the streets and dined in the houses of new Iraqi friends. One gave Colgan a gold charm bracelet for the baby he and his wife were expecting. He memorized the names, residences and descriptions of top Baathists. On patrols...