Lieutenant Colonel Daryle Hernandez served as the executive officer for 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Al-Rashid district of Baghdad, Iraq, from March 2004 to March 2005 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). When the squadron arrived in Iraq, it found itself responsible for a large area comprising the southwestern portion of Baghdad, to include Route Irish. While initially having to deal with frequent firefights, much of their attention was devoted to units of the Iraqi National Guard, later becoming the Iraqi Army, which Hernandez roughly equates to infantry companies. He talks about the two major civil projects directly influenced by the squadron, particularly a district hospital located near their forward operating base. He notes that they were very well provided for with interpreters, including two who were American citizens with Secret security clearances. He describes the deployment as consisting of three big challenges: gathering the intelligence they needed to operate effectively; coordinating all of their lines of operation into an integrated whole; and the smooth conduct of the Iraqi national elections in January 2005. He explains how the non-lethal aspects of the elections were something for which they were not fully prepared and how he believes that the institutional side of the Army can easily turn the past few years' experience in this area into an effective mission essential task list. He states that the big lessons learned in Iraq were to empower the junior leaders of the squadron and to train them to be adaptive. Hernandez very favorably compares the experience of OIF with Operation Desert Storm regarding communication with family members, but maintains that length of the deployment, not communication, determines the difficulty of the separation. He closes this interview by saying that the United States has a 10-division Army but a 15-division foreign policy.

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