Colonel Gregory Gass was the brigade commander for the 101st Aviation Brigade, during both OIF I and II, deploying in January of 2003 and returning home in February 2004. Interviewed alongside his colonel was Major John White, the brigade executive officer beginning in September 2003. As part of an aviation brigade, Gass and White begin by discussing how the harsh desert conditions affected their journey to northern Iraq. According to Gass, "We then went to Iskandariyah, which is the last place the brigade was before it went up north to Mosul. It was extremely difficult from the day we crossed the berm all the way up until the day we left Iskandariyah. Sand and helicopters just do not mix very well. It takes a tremendous amount of effort from platoon sergeants, maintenance officers and crew chiefs to be able to keep aircraft flying. We did, but only because of the great ingenuity of the great 20- and 25-year-old kids out there and their noncommissioned officers who were keeping airplanes flying because they were working themselves to death." Gass and White also discuss stability operations in terms of their role as an aviation brigade. They primarily saw themselves as a support mechanism for those units really doing the stability ops work. One of the brigade's early primary missions was flying reconnaissance and security missions and looking for improvised explosive devices along the routes. They also had a quick reaction force ready to respond to any types of fires along the pipelines started by insurgents. The aviation brigade did run into equipment problems, particularly with not being effectively equipped with the needed aviation parts, apparently because the Air Force would not fly into Qayyarah West: "But what I don't want to do is go out on a limb and say something bad about the Air Force because that is not my point," said Gass. "My point is that the system needed to work where we could get C-130s to land at our airfield. We tried time and time again to make that happen. The only place they would actually land was Kirkuk, and then they finally started landing in Mosul." Both Gass and White candidly explain that they were not prepared for Phase IV of OIF, though they were involved quite a bit in the reconstruction process in Mosul, especially with things like helping with water projects, schools and ensuring that basic needs of the Iraqis were met. Rebuilding efforts were difficult because of the state of the infrastructure, particularly at Qayyarah West.

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