Part of a 10-man advisor support team assigned to the 7th Iraqi Army Battalion and located principally at the Kirkush Military Training Base and the nearby town of Balad Ruz from March through November 2004, Major Robert Dixon was tasked with a wide range of training, coaching, teaching and mentoring responsibilities. He and his fellow AST members focused on everything from reflexive fire drills and convoy live fires to medical care and cordon and searches, leading up to being deployed in support of Operation Baton Rouge in Samarra - and in this interview he discusses the full range of his experiences. Dixon talks about the availability of interpreters, the general absence of definitive guidance on what to teach and how to teach it, the "very austere environment" they all operated in, and also some of the philosophical differences present within his team itself: "I leaned more towards wanting the Iraqis to do it more," he said. "There was another view out there, though, that said we didn't have time to let the Iraqis do it so we had to take charge." Among the most difficult challenges his team faced was the desertion of a "significant number of Iraqi soldiers" from the 7th Battalion after one of its companies was hit by an improvised explosive device and suffered casualties. "They just walked out the gate and didn't come back," Dixon recalled. "That right there was a big difference. The battalion leadership wasn't doing anything to stop it either. To me, it goes back to these philosophical questions. Do you step in and intervene? Who's in charge of this battalion? You try to talk to the leadership and tell them they can't desert but the leadership is like, 'What do we do? The soldiers leave. We can't stop them.'" In spite of this, though, Dixon said there was a high degree of trust between the Iraqi soldiers and their American advisors, leading him to "never be concerned" about his own safety, "even while we were out in Samarra." Even so, he added, he wouldn't want to go back to Iraq and be an advisor again.

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