During the run-up and planning portions of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Lieutenant Colonel Matt Redding served as the division transportation officer for the 101st Airborne Division and, as such, helped move the Screaming Eagles from Fort Campbell into the Iraqi theater of operations. Then, four months into the ground war and once the 101st had settled in Mosul, he became the support operations officer for 3rd Brigade and the 626th Forward Support Battalion. He begins his interview by relating the story of how, were it not for some quick and innovative thinking on the part of the 101st commander, Major General David Petraeus, the division "would have missed the start of the ground war." As Redding explains, the frustrating absence of a "piece of paper that said, 'Go'" meant that the division wasn't allowed to "commit any money to transportation to buy trains or aircraft" in order to get down to the Port of Jacksonville; so to get around that, General Petraeus called an impromptu "training exercise" down there which enabled their equipment, including their 254 helicopters and 4,000 pieces of rolling stock, to make the ships (and thus the war) in time. Redding further details the process and the myriad workarounds and innovations he and his fellow transportation personnel had to come up with to squeeze the 101st into some very tight shipboard spaces. Reflecting on the division's early in-theater experiences, he discusses the reception, staging, onward-movement and integration phase; how the ground tactical plan tracked with what had been planned for; the conduct of major offensive operations; the fact that the 101st was decidedly not 100 percent mobile "despite our claims"; and the major shortage of trucks and fuel that were being redirected to the 3rd Infantry Division and how this impacted the 101st's contributions to the fight. "As the division transportation officer," Redding said, "I caught a lot of heat in the division rear command post because I could not allocate trucks to supply operations because the division was still conducting infantry maneuver by truck. I found myself telling them that based on the priorities that the division had handed down, the trucks have to go to the infantry in order to maneuver them and we were going to have to make due with the small amounts of supply we could move by helicopter and live off that air bridge." Redding then transitions to a discussion of his experiences in Mosul, among the highlights of which was the division's actual journey there from Baghdad when Redding had to appropriate the Iraqi railroad system in order to fully effect the move. He closes his interview with an anecdote that demonstrates General Petraeus' leadership style, a lesson he said he's taking with him to battalion command.

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