In January 2003, Major Doug Brinson - at the time the commander of Bravo Company, 317th Engineer Battalion, supporting 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division - deployed to Kuwait and began intensive training for what soon became Operation Iraqi Freedom. "The things we trained on for engineers," he explained, "were things like breaching exercises, because our primary mission was that we were going to be on the offensive and were going to breach obstacles - and those obstacles were most likely going to be huge tank ditches with mines, minefields, or any types of rubble or disruption in the roads. Those were the big obstacles we thought we would face." Added Brinson: "Our cliché was, 'Mobility is job one,' so our job was to keep everybody moving." Part of an armored task force - 2-69 Armor - once the ground campaign kicked off, Brinson's engineer company moved from the Kuwaiti border eventually into the heart of Baghdad, passing through Nasiriyah, Samawah, Najaf and Karbala and, along the way, mainly set up defensive obstacles in support of advancing units – not encountering or having to blow through the complex minefields they had anticipated. Upon arriving in the Iraqi capital, Bravo Company was assigned to secure the Khadamiyah District. Brinson, who relinquished command on 6 May 2003, discusses the post-major combat missions he received to police up weapons caches and offers some thoughtful insights on the transition to stability and support operations, believing that we “handed their freedoms over too quickly.” Crediting the training his company went through – with, crucially, the same equipment – during Operation Desert Spring in 2002 for the unit’s success when it counted in 2003, Brinson said: “We were trained, the team was kept together, and then we got to go and execute based on that training and based on that same team.”

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