When Lieutenant Colonel David Seigel was first alerted for deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was serving as the executive officer (XO) of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment with the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas. He got to Iraq in March 2004 and, by June, had taken over as the XO of 1st Brigade which was based in south Baghdad, specifically the Dora District. Then, in October, he changed jobs again and became the brigade's deputy commander, by this time operating in east Baghdad - Sadr City and the 9 Nissan District - until he redeployed in February 2005. In this interview, Seigel discusses the April 2004 Moqtada al-Sadr-inspired Shi'ite uprising and the fighting in Sadr City itself. As he noted, "the place just exploded. That's when the Mahdi Army was active and Moqtada al-Sadr had his first uprising. It was about one year after the ground war and all of the Shi'a went absolutely crazy. We started off with some high-intensity operations. We fought the Mahdi Army in southern Baghdad," Seigel continued, "and the east side of Baghdad was even worse around Sadr City. We fought those guys and really got control of our area after a couple weeks." He then talks about the subsequent conduct of civil-military operations and infrastructure improvement projects; his assessment of Iraqi civilians who worked on his forward operating base; his changing roles and visibilities in terms of his various jobs in theater; the crucial importance of having armored vehicles in their urban area of responsibility; the "resounding success" that were the January 2005 elections; as well as the myriad of information operations challenges the brigade faced. As Seigel put it, "We did food handouts, supplies, all kinds of talking points for the soldiers and things like that. It all went well. But when it comes down to it we were in a different culture, we were seen as foreigners occupying a country, and it was hard to explain that we really weren't."

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