MAJ Jeffrey Paine served as the headquarters and headquarters troop (HHT) commander with the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry at Forward Operating Base (FOB) McKenzie outside Samarra, Iraq during 2004 and 2005 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In this March 2010 interview, MAJ Paine discusses the austerity of FOB McKenzie when they arrived and his efforts as the landowner to improve the living and security conditions for his soldiers, his constantly changing mission set, and how he and his leader team got their unit past a particularly rough patrol where one soldier was killed and one was badly wounded. MAJ Paine concludes his interview with his most important lessons learned: "First, you have to use your strong leaders regardless of what their branch or MOS or whatever other designation they have is to get the job done. They're not good at what they do because of what their branch is; they're good at what they do because of who they are, and they probably wouldn't be in that position if they weren't a strong leader. The other part that I figured out later was, you have to build those strong leaders. Waiting to put some of my staff sergeants in charge of leading a platoon mission when we thought they were ready in Iraq was the wrong answer. We didn't have any catastrophic results because of it, which is as much luck as anything else, but we should have been doing it during the training. We should have been finding ways to put those guys in charge, to challenge them, to force them to be creative and to find solutions to problems before it was critical."

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