Assigned as the first sergeant of Dragon Troop, 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for two separate tours of duty in Iraq, Master Sergeant Daniel Hendrex, in this interview, provides detailed information on his and his unit's involvement in November 2003's Operation Rifles Blitz. From its very inception, Hendrex found the Al Qaim/Husaybah area on the Iraqi-Syrian border very hostile to American forces, saying it was like "nothing I'd ever seen in Iraq up to that point." Because of its close proximity to the border, Husaybah was a key port of entry and exit for al-Qaeda members and other foreign fighters. As for the operation itself, Hendrex credits aggressive tactics, techniques and procedures with making things much easier on the soldiers. "We weren't just going to sit there and take a pounding from the enemy," he said. "You have this ability - and whenever you fire the main gun on an M1A2 tank in the confines of an urban terrain, it is devastating to the will of the enemy to continue a fight." Indeed, he added, a major second-order effect was that "all of a sudden we had informants." Despite their success, though, Hendrex cautions about the dangers of extended operations: "When we realized we were the only show in town, we really got tired. When you have soldiers in a static guard position for numerous hours at a time, late into the night, even in a hostile place like Husaybah, you're at a diminished capacity." Touching on the effects of high-intensity combat as well, he described these as "10 of the toughest days of my entire military career. We were in contact every day, fighting every day and going out doing these combat patrols. You can sit around and talk about them in an after-action review," Hendrex explained, "but they can't convey the gut-wrenching feeling of every time you rolled out, not knowing if it was going to be your last time." Hendrex also has much to say about the commodity which matters most in fighting insurgents, namely intelligence. "Everybody wants to focus on whether or not we had the right equipment," he noted. "Well, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that we didn't have the intelligence we needed to effectively separate the insurgents from the local populace." Indeed, a key factor in improving their local intelligence and helping bust up insurgent cells proved to be a young Iraqi boy they nicknamed "Steve-O" who, incidentally, became the subject of Hendrex's 2006 book titled A Soldier's Promise. "He helped us understand the culture and how to separate the insurgents without polarizing the local populace that we were there to help," Hendrex said. "He was really the epitome of all the other informants and all the other things we were doing."

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