Major Charles Anderson, in this second of two interviews, discusses his deployment as a civil affairs (CA) team chief to Baghdad, Iraq, initially with 1st Battalion, 37th Armor through 2004 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Anderson had been back from a deployment to Afghanistan for eight months when he learned that he could lead his own CA team if he volunteered to go to Iraq then. According to Anderson, "The whole time I was there, I thought I was going to get killed because I kept telling my wife, 'Hey, I can't get out of this. I have to go.'" As part of his predeployment training, he took part in a warfighter exercise which used data from Baghdad four days old, giving the exercise a very real feel. Prior to going to Iraq, it was unclear which team they would replace, but once they arrived his team was attached to Task Force 1-37, the Bandits. Anderson was amazed at the positive reception his team received from the task force commander and his staff. "Anything they want is just like I want it," the task force commander told his people. "Anything you can do to help them, you do it." Within the task force's area, civil-military operations (CMO) were well integrated, local advisory councils were consulted and mentored, and Anderson pursued a goal of making it impossible to drive through the area without seeing improvement projects going on. "CMO is getting out there with the population, letting them nominate the things that need to be done, giving some of them the credit for getting things done and getting behind the effort," says Anderson. "We saw this on the ground there in Adhamiyah. It was the mission of a lifetime." He emphasizes that mobility is as important as protection in the success of a CA team, and given the restrictions on the sizes of convoys, the support of the task force commander is critical. He says that interpreters have played a huge role in American successes because a replacing unit can never have the experience or environmental awareness of a departing unit, and interpreters go a long way to help bridge that gap between rotating units. He points out that traffic control points (TCPs) are one area in which Americans can improve because TCPs are situations where the majority of the Iraqi population is forced to interact with American forces, and if the TCP has poor signs, if the soldiers are rude or threatening, or if the Iraqis feel they've been unfairly treated, the TCP can adversely affect the local opinion. Anderson closes by saying that the public's perception of Iraq and reality of it on the ground are quite different, and that most Iraqis are not terrorists but normal people concerned with work and family.

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