MAJ Kenneth Gettinger served as a planner with the 3rd Corps Support Command (COSCOM) at Camp Virginia, Kuwait and Joint Base Balad, Iraq during 2003 and 2004 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In this April 2012 interview, MAJ Gettinger discusses the controlled chaos of the initial invasion of Iraq and his role in the advanced party, the issue of personnel accountability when human resources (HR) personnel may not be on the ground in all locations, and his duties throughout the deployment. MAJ Gettinger concludes his interview with the observation, "What I experience right now when people are backfilling organizations aren't the same issues, but at some point in time, we're going to go into a new theater of operations, and all of these things are once again going to come up, there will be nothing established, and we're going to go through a lot of the same growing pains that we went through in OIF I. I hope that my comments can help the next guys when they go into an immature theater of operations get it properly set up quickly."

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