From March 2004 through January 2005 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Jack Midyette commanded Headquarters and Headquarters Battery (HHB), 1st Battalion, 113th Field Artillery, part of the 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, North Carolina National Guard, working in the Diyala Province. Although a field artilleryman, Midyette was tapped early on to be responsible for training a headquarters company and a battalion staff from the Iraqi National Guard, originally known as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. In this capacity, he had a wide variety of training and equipping tasks and also began an academy in eastern Diyala for the province's Iraqi National Guard, Iraqi Police and border enforcement troops. Midyette discusses his training of fledgling Iraqi forces in great detail; details their successes and failures and his own challenges in helping them progress; shares a number of interesting cultural experiences; and offers suggestions for how the all-important continuity of trainers/advisors can be better maintained. Midyette closes his interview by talking about his battery's family readiness group and the myriad effects, some of them deleterious, that repeated deployments are having on the US Army National Guard.

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