In April 2003, Major Wayne Sodowsky deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as the assistant operations officer of the 70th Engineer Battalion, part of 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division - a mechanized combat engineer unit. After doing a relief in place with 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, his brigade took over battlespace in northwest Baghdad. "When it became apparent that reconstruction was going to be the major mission," Sodowsky explained, "I became the battalion civil-military operations (CMO) officer. Within the division there were these Task Force Neighborhood projects and I became the point man on that for the battalion. Since we were co-located with the brigade, I got plugged in there and was fairly involved in that," dealing with transformer substations, water treatment plants and the like. Sodowsky also talks about working with a North Dakota National Guard company that could "build anything," the Task Force Fajr folks from the US Army Corps of Engineers, and his battalion commander who could speak Arabic and was, thus, hugely popular among the local residents. In addition, he tells how the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) at some point suddenly put a stop to all projects their division was doing and the resulting second- and third-order problems that order caused. "Balancing what we could do and what the local populace wanted" was a principal challenge throughout his deployment, as was the transition from combat engineering tasks to those associated with stability and support operations. Sodowsky closes with recommendations on how this gap could be more easily bridged and also describes his encounter with a reporter who was only interested in details about a recent casualty event, not in any of the positive reconstruction projects they were doing.

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