MAJ Gareth Lintt served with the secretary of the general staff (SGS), as headquarters and headquarters company (HHC) commander with V Corps and with the staff engineering section (G7) at the 1st Armored Division (AD) on three separate deployments to Baghdad and Tikrit, Iraq during 2003-2008 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In this December 2009 interview, MAJ Lintt discusses the lack of pre-deployment training for his first deployment and how that changed and improved, the challenges of arranging visits for various VIPs, and his role in the movement of some generator engines from storage in Aqaba, Jordan to a power plant in Samarra, Iraq for use by the Iraqi government. MAJ Lintt concludes his interview with the observation, "The changes on the ground are huge. Those are almost ancillary to what we're doing there. I think that one of my biggest perspective adjustments is looking at a national strategy, and how that really does drive what we're doing on the ground. A lot of the time, we'd be looking at operations at the division level, and you could see the short-term gains that we had identified; 'Okay, we're going to go in and we're going to clear out Muqdadiyah and Diaylah.' Well, it's not the first time we did that. It wasn't even the second time. So our strategy of clear/hold, clear/hold, clear/hold was working really well. But the build part was lacking. In large part, the U.S. national strategy would drive build, but that was unclear to me. Maybe it was clear to our senior leaders, I don't know. I never got to sit down with them and say, 'So, GEN Hertling, what the hell are we doing here?' [Laughter] It's not that I really have an issue with being there; they send me to Afghanistan, I'll go to Afghanistan, I don't really care. But our political leaders, it's incumbent upon them to identify exactly what we're doing. I don't know if they've done that yet."

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