A combat engineer officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers, Major Ed Chamberlayne is a veteran of two Global War on Terrorism deployments, the first from June to December 2003 to Iraq where he was in charge of a forward engineer support team (FEST), the second from February to June 2005 to Afghanistan where he served as the resident engineer for Bagram. In support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Chamberlayne and his team provided engineer expertise either directly or through reachback to the Corps of Engineers in the United States to V Corps, Combined Joint Task Force 7 and the 130th Engineer Brigade. He himself also assisted the Program Management Office (PMO) of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Considering the development of infrastructure at LSA Anaconda among their most significant projects, he describes the work involved in constructing the corps distribution center among several others. When the rest of his team left Iraq in October 2003, Chamberlayne stayed on for three more months in the PMO, headed by Rear Admiral (Retired) David Nash, and worked as the admiral's aide. While admitting that the CPA was not exactly a squared away organization, he nonetheless explained that it was something that was "formed on the fly, and everybody knew that, and you were getting volunteers from all parts of society, departments and agencies. There were folks from the Department of Energy, Department of State, there were contractors there, retired military who wanted to assist - you name it, it was there. So trying to get an organization like that working together - and everybody has a different agenda - and you're also working in an area that was becoming more and more unsecure. How else were you going to do it?" Chamberlayne also discusses the challenges inherent in having a maximum of 180-day deployments for FEST members. While in Afghanistan, as the resident engineer he was responsible for supervising the construction of $100 million worth of facilities at Bagram to support Combined Joint Task Force 76, projects which included runways and taxiways, a hospital, an ammunition supply point, an entry control point and the joint operations center. Chamberlayne also talks about his extensive work with two major foreign contractors, namely Contrack International, an Egyptian firm, and Zafer Construction, based in Turkey. In addition, he discusses the inordinate challenge posed by the ubiquitous landmine, as well as his role in a FEST that prepared infrastructure at the ports in Turkey in case the country had allowed the 4th Infantry Division to stage there and invade Iraq from the north from its soil.

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