In this November 2012 interview, MAJ Jonathan Kluck, US Army, Armor, discusses his deployment to Iraq as a Calvary troop executive office (XO) and briefly as the troop commander from March 2003 to September of 2003 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). MAJ Kluck talks about his missions of patrolling the area around Hit, Iraq and securing an Iraqi weapons depot that was a source of illegal weapons in the area. He describes how the insurgency began to heat up and how some of the leadership challenges he faced in theater. He discusses how his Soliders were not trained for the mission they ended up doing in Iraq, but how they were able to overcome and succeed. MAJ Kluck closes his interview by stating, "…be careful about the assumptions you make about the mission you are going to be expected to do in a deployment. We certainly had a lot of assumptions about what we would do and what our role would be and they were mostly wrong."

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