During his August 2005 through December 2006 deployment to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Douglas Merritt held two positions in the 172nd Infantry Brigade (Separate) out of Alaska - the Stryker Brigade. For the first six months of his tour he was the assistant operations officer for 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry, and for the remainder was the operations officer for 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry. Based in Mosul initially at FOB Marez, Merritt's infantry battalion was responsible for the whole southern half of the city. "As far as the enemy," he explained, "we really caught the conflict right at the beginning of the transition from mostly kinetic operations to stability operations, where it was more getting to know the people, setting up police stations and running elections for the constitutional referendum. The enemy contact was sporadic. That forced us to get really proficient really fast at point target raids as well as targeting. Probably one of the things that developed the most while we were in Iraq was targeting." Merritt further discusses how he and his unit interacted with other services in their areas of operations; the command relationships they had with them; how the joint targeting process worked; as well as the capabilities, successes and failures of Iraqi Army units they worked with. Merritt talks at length about the Iraqi elections which, as he said, "were near and dear to my heart," and about how and why they were eventually able to turn a substantial piece of the area of operations over to the Iraqis, with his unit relegated to merely a "strike force." Referring to his time with 4-14 CAV specifically, Merritt describes what operations were like in some 27,000 square kilometers of southwestern Iraq, including nearly 70 miles of the Iraqi-Syrian border, and counts the squadron's biggest success as being the ability to "break up the battlespace and push responsibility down from the squadron commander to the company and troop commanders and letting them fight and develop their AOs."

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