“A Deck of Many Things”: Reflections on Colin Powell and Iraq, 20 Years Later

by LTC(R) Charlie Faint and MAJ(R) Mike Warnock

Editor’s Note: February 2023 marked the 20^th anniversary of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s now-infamous speech at the United Nations, which is seen as a decisive point in the US decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.  In this jointly-written article The Havok Journal’s owner, Charlie Faint, and Editor in Chief, Mike Warnock, reflect on their very different experiences during their total of 5 deployments to Iraq, and how they feel 20 years after Colin Powell’s speech and the decision was made to send our country to war.

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Charles Faint, US Army (Retired) Iraq:  2004, 2007, 2008
Military Intelligence Officer
5^th Special Forces Group
Joint Special Operations Command

I was excited to go to Iraq. I was glad I didn’t miss my war.

But before Iraq, there was Korea. In the pre-9/11 Army, the Second Infantry Division, Korea is where you went if you wanted to do something “hard” in the conventional force. Korea was indeed a hardship assignment; it was one year on Freedom’s Frontier in austere conditions in an unaccompanied (i.e. no family members) status, facing off against a hostile North Korea. Fortunately, my wife was also an Army officer and given our perceived likelihood of an eventual assignment to Korea we agreed that it was better for us to go together to Korea when we were both young lieutenants versus each going separately later in our careers.

The ”fight tonight” posture of the pre-9/11 Second Infantry Division made for an interesting assignment.  For one thing, we were not allowed to have personal vehicles—i.e. no cars. We had to walk, ride a bicycle, or take a bus or train. Mass public transportation, especially in someone else’s country, was a new experience for me. For another, we had a nightly curfew and limitations on alcohol consumption; something I hadn’t experienced since high school. And even though my wife and I were married—to each other—and lived in the same city, we were not permitted to live together for about the first 18 months of the two years we ended up spending there because of the nature of our respective jobs. 

Our leadership was also a mixed bag, with some good leaders but more than our share of absolute garbage officers and NCOs in important positions. Living in Korea was also a bit of a culture shock; for the first time in my life I regularly used mass public transportation (did I mention “no cars?”) and regularly ate things like sushi and kimchi, and experienced soju for the first time. At 6’5” I was a giant in some of the small Korean towns we visited, and my wife regularly encountered Korean women who wanted to touch her long blonde hair. My wife and I quickly learned to read the Korean alphabet but speaking the language was a whole other matter. Nonetheless, we liked it there enough to sign up for a second one-year tour in order for me to take an assignment as a company commander.
 

The September 11^th attacks happened when I was in command of D Company, 102 MI Battalion at Camp Essayons, a postage-stamp-size compound in the town of Uijongbu, a base that now no longer exists. When 9/11 happened I still had another year or so to go before I would return to the United States, by which time I was sure that I would have missed my war. My frame of reference up to that point was Panama, Grenada, and the Gulf War, all of which ended in a matter of days. We are America; I was sure we’d wreck a bunch of cave-dwelling terrorists in Afghanistan long before I was able to get a piece of the action.

How wrong I was. How wrong we ALL were.

When my wife and I left Korea, we returned to Fort Huachuca for the Military Intelligence Advanced Officer Course, which at the time included a program of instruction at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas called CASSS, or CAS-cubed. To my surprise, the war in Afghanistan was still going on. But surely, it would be over by the time I got through my training and made it to a unit that was actually going to war.

I watched “shock and awe” unfurl with bombs over Baghdad while I was running on a treadmill at Fort Leavenworth. Given how quickly we handled Iraq the last time (my father’s war) and knowing the amount of training that I still had in front of me, I was still sure that everything would be over before it began for me.

I ended up catching a lucky break at the Advanced Course. Because I had already served in Korea and already been a company commander, my assignments manager offered me my pick of available jobs.  The 5^th Special Forces Group sounded like a good option. Not only had my father served in that unit back when he was a Green Beret, but it was also located at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which was a short drive away from my parents and sister in Northern Alabama. And I knew that 5^th Group was already heavily involved in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and with both of those wars about to end, this was probably my last, best chance to not be the only kid on my block without a combat patch.

The reality, however, was very different than expectations. I languished on staff at 5th Group for several months with no deployment in sight, to the point where I was actively trying to leave Group and go to the 101st Airborne Division because I knew the 101^st (where I had previously served as an Infantry lieutenant) would immediately send me to Iraq. Thankfully that didn’t work out. 5^th Group put me in charge of the Group MI Detachment and later the Group Support Company, and I eventually made it to Iraq for the first of what turned out to be three tours in Iraq, and four in Afghanistan, in support of what turned out to be a decades-long War on Terror.

I wanted war, and I got it.

My first tour in Iraq was with 5^th Group, and my second and third were while I was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command.  I was based at what eventually became known as Camp Syverson, which was named after one of my 5^th Group colleagues who was killed in action in Iraq. I was an intelligence officer serving in special operations units. I never killed anyone directly, and in fact, I never even fired my weapon at anyone. I got shot at just enough to earn a Combat Action Badge and performed well enough to earn four Bronze Star medals over the course of my career. But I was not an “operator” and I was not a senior leader. I was just a guy who was there.

But unlike many of the people who made the decision to send us to war in Iraq, I was, in fact, there.

Because of the nature of my work, I was “there,” either in person or through written accounts that I had access to due to the nature of my job, when a lot of discussions were being had about the war and how it was being run, especially in my last two tours in Iraq. I saw the huge success that our national-level SOF task force, then under General Stanley McChrystal, was having on the ground. And I had plenty of time to think about the war and how we were doing, and more importantly, how well we **weren’t** doing. The latter is why I ultimately decided to leave the SOF community and teach at West Point, where I hoped to make later Army leaders not make the same kinds of mistakes their forebears were making in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I spent most of my time in Iraq on the large forward operating base of Balad. Because of my work, I seldom ventured out, with occasional trips to Basra, Mosul, and of course Baghdad. All of those trips were flights, and almost all of those flights were at night. I did a few covert vehicle movements inside of Baghdad and had one completely uneventful convoy on a main supply route, where I fell asleep upright in a surprisingly-comfy MRAP. But one flight still stands out in my mind. 

On this particular mission, I needed a ride to Baghdad for a meeting with some US and partner nation intel types and managed to hitch a right in a two-helo convoy that was taking General McChrystal down to the same area for one of his high-level meetings. This was the first time I flew in the daytime in Iraq, and the first and only time I flew seats out, doors open, legs out in a Blackhawk in Iraq. This was memorable for me mainly because it was way less cool than I thought it would be. For one thing, even though we were tethered to the interior of the aircraft it felt like I was being pulled out by the wind for the entirety of the trip. For another, I quickly realized that as low as we were, and as fast as we were flying, I was never going to hit anything if we came under fire. So I mainly just concentrated on the scenery, and on not falling out of the aircraft, as we made our way south.

Perceived personal peril notwithstanding, what sticks out most in my mind about the trip was the landscape. Seeing Iraq from the air in daylight for the first time, from this close-up, I remember thinking “Jesus, we fucked this country up.”  Sorry for the language Mama, but that’s what I thought.

It wasn’t a values judgment as much as just an objective observation. I didn’t feel bad about it; wrecking that country was kind of what we came there to do. At first. Before the “nation building” and the sectarian civil war that we pretended wasn’t happening. From our aerial view, I got a good look at the standing pools of sewage, the piles of garbage, the burned-out cars, and the rubbled buildings. I distinctly remember seeing a large pool of standing water that was shimmering green, as if it had a sheen of antifreeze on top of it. Public transportation was a mess, and also very dangerous. Electrical power was intermittent, at best. The government, seen as puppets of the Americans, had lost all legitimacy. People completely stopped seeing themselves as Iraqis—inasmuch as they ever did—and saw themselves based entirely on their religion, ethnicity, and/or tribe. The one thing that was holding the country together, the Iraqi Army, was out of a job and in many cases actively fighting against us. Iraq wasn’t a great place before the war, but we made it worse. A lot worse.

So how did we get involved in the disastrous Iraq war in the first place? One of the most compelling voices advocating for conflict against Iraq was Colin Powell. The retired four-star general, who served as Secretary of State for President George Bush, was renowned for his integrity and his combat prowess. A veteran of both Vietnam and Desert Storm, Powell had the kind of credibility that the Bush Administration needed in order to win over other countries into his “coalition of the willing.” Many people blame Powell for his now-infamous speech at the UN as the match that lit the fuse for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and they blame the whole war on him.

I disagree.

Knowing what we knew at the time, a legit case could have been made (and in my opinion was made) that Iraq was trying to develop WMDs. Saddam Hussein had, and used, chem weapons in the past.  There were examples of dual-use technical acquisition by Iraq, and some of the initial reports of WMD seemed plausible. Also, Hussein wanted people, especially the Iranians, to think he had WMDs as a regime security measure. He assumed that the CIA would know he didn’t have them. Which, of course, either they didn’t, or they did know but wanted us to go into Iraq anyway. And people forget that we did in fact find chemical weapons in Iraq after we invaded, although nothing on the scale of what we were sold by the Bush Administration, the Intelligence Community, and, yes, Colin Powell.

That’s not to absolve Colin Powell of blame completely. In my opinion, one of the reasons we did what we did in Iraq was because of the Powell Doctrine, which others have summarized as “you break it, you bought it” when it comes to attacking other regimes. That type of thinking engendered a type of paternal ownership that doesn’t come from the typical “bomb everyone and go home” approach that we had in Desert Storm. In hindsight, I think we would have been much better off bombing Saddam back into submission than letting his oil-rich, strategically-placed country fall into sectarian, Iran-dominated ruin.

But hindsight is a luxury we never have in the moment.

Speaking of hindsight, we now know the intel was super-sketch and circular, and that much of the intel community came to the answer that they knew the Bush Administration (and many others outside of it) wanted. So going into Iraq, especially when we were already fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a mistake. But we made things far, far worse, and perhaps ensured that we would never be able to win, by doing the following:

1) De-Baathification

2) Disbanding the Iraqi military

3) Not adequately securing the borders with Syria and Iran

4) Believing in the “Powell Doctrine” of “you break it, you bought it” and

5) Trying to turn a Middle Eastern dictatorship into a Western-style democratic state overnight

In the interests of time, I’m only going to address the first point, De-Baathification, because it may have been the worst mistake we made in Iraq, aside from the one to invade in the first place. For those unfamiliar with the situation, the Baath Party was the ruling political party in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion and occupation in 2003. De-Baathification was a policy of bewildering stupidity that involved stripping all Baathist-affiliated public service of their power and responsibility immediately and in perpetuity.

I specifically used the term “bewildering stupidity” to describe the decision, because current and past history, as well as common sense, dictated that we should take another tack. We left the traditional power structure in Japan–who sucker-punched us in the Pacific and brutalized much of the Pacific Rim–largely intact after WWII. We left the emperor of Japan in place after the war and incorporated literal Nazis into our space program. But people who joined an Iraqi political policy so that they could have a good job and maybe not get straight merk’d by their own government? THAT is where we draw the line?

The civic center in my hometown of Huntsville, Alabama is named after Werner Von Braun, who, in addition to being a brilliant scientist and apparently a highly-likable guy, was also… a former Nazi. And you know what, I don’t have a problem with that, because what was true for the Nazis was true for the Baathists: pretty much anyone who does pretty much anything meaningful under the yoke of an authoritarian regime, does so as at least a nominal member of the ruling party. We learned to differentiate between “Big N” Nazis and “Little n” nazis after the war.  Why couldn’t we have done the same thing with the Baath party?

While we definitely needed to take steps to ensure that a Baathist shadow government did not undermine the democratic goals we had for Iraq, we could have done a more-reasonable “De-Saddamification” program that would have eliminated the worst offenders, but largely kept the organizational infrastructure in place to run the country. I’ll use an example:

A favored memento of Iraq for many of the veterans who served there in the early years of OIF was the “deck of cards” that featured the names and faces of Saddam regime officials. It was both a novelty and a useful manhunting tool in the early days of the war, and I still have my deck somewhere in my box of Iraq mementos. Yes, you have to kill, capture, or neutralize the irreconcilables and the worst offenders.  But perhaps you don’t need to run the board and eliminate the whole deck. Perhaps we could have taken the face cards off the board, maybe even down to the 10s and 9s, but left the lower cards in our hands, to help us play the game of running a functional country. Or maybe they were all bad, all the way down to the deuce of clubs, and they all had to be eliminated. But did we also need to take anyone who ever played a round or two with them in the Baath Party version of Texas Hold ‘Em out of the game as well?

To continue the deck of cards analogy, I’m going to use an example from the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which is one of the ways my best friend from childhood, Mike Warnock, and I bonded when we were in high school, and recently got back into as grown men in our 50s. I asked Mike to co-author this article with me because like me he has some unique perspectives on the war in Iraq, and like me, he agrees with my likening my experience there to a certain D&D analogy.

In D&D, there is a magic item called the Deck of Many Things. It’s like a grab bag of everything good and bad that can happen to a character. For example, your character may draw a card that bestows powers, or fabulous magical items. Alternatively, you could summon a devil that wants to kill you or draw a card that conjures an avatar of death itself. You could achieve riches, or you could fall to Ruin, and be stripped of your worldly possessions. You could even lose your soul to The Void.

In the D&D campaign, Mike and I participated in a few months back (which also included a third Iraq vet in the party and was presided over by a fourth), our party encountered a Deck of Many Things. We were all veteran gamers and knew the risks were great. But so were the potential rewards. The first couple of draws went well; I think my character drew the Throne card, entitling him to a small manor and some other useful things. Another character drew the Key card, or was it the Moon? I don’t know, something useful, I don’t remember. But I do remember that one of the other players drew The Void, which meant his character’s soul was sucked from his body and imprisoned. We spent the rest of the campaign trying to get it back.

I think that’s a very useful analogy for our shared experience in Iraq: we hoped for the Throne, but as a nation, our collective soul got sucked into The Void.

One of the most interesting things about the Deck is that draws are voluntary. You can choose to partake, but you don’t get to choose the outcome. That’s kind of how it went down in Iraq; we didn’t have to take a bite of Iraq, especially when we hadn’t yet finished the serving of Afghanistan that was still on our plate. Like my character, a lot of people got rich off of the decision. But like what happened to a friend of mine, a lot of people lost their souls there as well.

And the worst part about it was, we didn’t have to do it in the first place.

So no, I don’t blame Colin Powell for Iraq. At least not entirely. All of us share the blame. And as for my own thoughts about the war in Iraq overall, at the end of the day, I’m more upset about how things ended, than the way they began. Just like my D&D party was with the Deck of Many Things.

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Mike Warnock, US Army (Retired)

Iraq:

2004: 407th Expeditionary Medical Group (USAF)
2009: 14th Combat Support Hospital (US Army)
Operating Room Nurse

I had two extremely different experiences in Iraq, both serving as an Operating Room (OR) nurse. They’re not just different for the obvious reasons such as: being Air Force vs. Army, deploying to Tallil vs. Baghdad, a staff nurse vs. the OR OIC, or that the deployments were five years apart. Each deployment has a tail that comes with it: the context of who I was and where I was in life when I went. Writing about either feels like pulling on a thread that threatens to release a tangled mess along with it.

When I think about the “Global War on Terror”–my first memory of it, of course, was the morning of September 11, 2001. I was in the Air Force at the time. Our first surgical case was delayed, and when the second plane struck the south tower, surgery was canceled for the day. We all gathered around the TV in the waiting room. When the Pentagon was hit, it felt like we were at war. I called my wife who was home with our infant daughter. We were in the process of getting our cable fixed—she hadn’t seen the news yet. I told her to stay put and had no idea when I’d get home.

Our Medical Group Commander (a Colonel) came rushing into the waiting room, someone called the room to attention. His hands clasped together, he ordered the door to the room closed and locked.

He looked around the room, clearly agitated: “First, does everyone here have at least a secret clearance?” The man was sweating profusely. There were enlisted airmen in the room who didn’t have a secret clearance.

As our commander began to realize this, he feverishly paced the floor, repeatedly stating variations of: “What I’m about to tell you CANNOT leave this room!” He must have said it a half-dozen times.

He looked at each one of us, “I need to see heads nodding that you understand this—what I’m about to tell you is secret information and NOT to leave this room!”

Each of us nodded solemnly in the affirmative, “Yes, sir!”

“The President of the United States is due to land here in less than 30 min—” just then the volume seemed to shoot up on the TV: “Breaking News! President Bush is set to arrive at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana…”

On any other day, it would have been hilarious.

My first military duty assignment was at the 2nd Medical Group at Barksdale, AFB. When President Bush took off from Florida the morning of 9/11, he landed at Barksdale AFB before eventually proceeding to Offutt AFB, Nebraska later that day.

A blanket of fear and anger lay over the country. I recall driving behind a pickup truck that someone had written across the back windshield: “NUKE THE BASTARDS”—and thought to myself “Who?” Who are we going to nuke? There isn’t anyone to nuke… it’s terrorism.

I joined the Air Force (AF) in 1998 as a direct commission officer OR nurse. By that time, I’d already worked two years as an OR nurse at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, NC. It was a level I trauma center and my surgical specialty was neurosurgery. I had joined the AF because the Army was RIFing (Reduction in Force, i.e kicking out) their nurses back then. Being in the AF instead of the Army was already a strike against me. Why? Because I desperately wanted to, in the only way I could, follow in my dad’s footsteps. He’d been a soldier, and part of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) since the early 1980s. But that’s all I knew.

Professionally, he was a blank slate to me. Other than he was a retired MI CW3 (Military Intelligence Chief Warrant Officer 3) and now a DA civilian doing the same job, I had no idea what he did. Dad never talked about his work and he was gone more than he was home. What I did know was the Army was the most important thing in his life and that he deployed regularly. Yet he had discouraged me from joining the military and was even more adamant about me NOT going into MI or combat arms. However, he was supportive of me being a nurse and of joining the AF if I insisted on being in the military. (See “In The Shadow of JSOC”)

When joining the military, you’re permitted to list three preferred duty locations on a “dream sheet.” I put the largest ORs the AF had. As my dad had once told me, I wanted to be “where the action was” and in my world that was a high-speed trauma center like the OR I’d just left. These were perishable skills. But the AF saw it differently. They sent me to a small OR in Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Why? Because the AF had only a few medical centers and wanted to put personnel there who needed that experience. They wanted more seasoned nurses at their smaller ORs that had less support.

My first unit reflected exactly what the Army recruiter had told me [no opportunities]. There were two OR nurses already there, both of whom had been recently RIF’d by the Army and cross-commissioned into the AF. One of them had been enlisted for 12 years then RIF’d after commissioning and serving as a nurse for 3 years—the Army had kicked her out with 15 years of service. Both the major who ran the OR, including his replacement, as well as the NCOIC had also started their military careers in the Army. I quickly learned that it was difficult to make rank in the AF, the ”up or out” mentality dominated the culture and if you couldn’t make the 20 years, they’d kick you out with nothing to show for it. The threat of not being able to make 20 years reigned supreme.

I was embarrassed to be in the AF instead of the Army and compounding this was being assigned to a small, outpatient OR—added to this was the threat of getting kicked out. While there, in my off-duty time, I became a volunteer firefighter, took a phlebotomy course at the local community college, became a certified EMT through a local technical college, and eagerly honed my IV-starting skills (thanks to an awesome CRNA who mentored me). I did this in an effort to stay sharp and be of use during traumas or emergency situations while in a low operating tempo environment. Even before 9/11, I saw military service through the lens of war. On September 11th, I already had orders to Elmendorf AFB, Alaska with a report date of 1 November. I’d been at Barksdale AFB for three years, had done my time, and was itching to leave.

I wanted to see the world and wanted to go to a “real” unit. I had wanted to go to Europe or Japan, but my wife did not. It was a bridge too far for her. She was born and raised in North Carolina, so moving to Louisiana had been a big leap for her. When the opportunity to go to Alaska came, it was a compromise we could both agree on: an OCONUS assignment that was still part of the U.S.

On September 11, 2001, as I watched the buildings come down, I was angry, scared, and wanted to go to war. Finally, being in the military would have a purpose. We had to fight back. Mixed into it all, I also felt ashamed. I wasn’t a warfighter. I wasn’t even in the Army. And worst of all I was relieved that we were going to war because I’d probably be able to serve 20 years. The military would need people and that meant job security.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but the relief I felt was also tied to my family. Our first child was born in October 1999 and my wife’s parents had come to visit a few weeks after she was born. Mine didn’t. I remember my squadron commander, a matronly O6 nurse, calling to congratulate me. She was so kind and excited for me. That just wasn’t the case with my own family. Mom visited for a few days about a year later; dad a few months after that, stopping by for a day on his way to JRTC at Fort Polk, Louisiana. It stung. Like a tiny sliver of ice wedged into me.

Military service was paramount, and deployments dominated my childhood. It superseded everything. TDYs and deployments mattered more than anything else. So, on September 11, 2001, I also desperately wanted to go to war. I wanted to deploy. I wanted to matter.

In Dungeons & Dragons, a Deck of Many Things is a mixed bag. Drawing a card brings either a powerful boon or a devastating curse. It’s a magic item well-known for breaking the game because of the disastrous impact drawing certain cards invokes. And there are more negative effects, than positive ones. Literally, the deck is stacked against you. But no matter the odds, the chance to draw something truly meaningful is irresistible for most. It’s worth risking getting your character killed because: why else play the game?

Deploying was my Deck of Many Things. I didn’t care if it was to Iraq or Afghanistan. More than anything, I wanted a close-knit family and to honorably serve in the military. In my conflicted mind, one couldn’t exist without the other; yet one inevitably supplants the other. That was the paradox I knew.

When I watched Colin Powell brief the UN about the threat of Iraq’s WMD program, he struck me as a man who wasn’t 100% confident in what he was saying. There was no conviction in his tone. His words were the polished, but nonetheless hollow, statements of a canned brief. It sounded to me like he was relaying information he didn’t necessarily trust. And when President Bush linked Al Qaeda with Iraq, I don’t know anybody who honestly believed it. But at the end of the day, I didn’t care. When I got to Alaska, I volunteered for everything and got exactly what I asked for. Yet I came away angrier at life than I’d ever been—and wouldn’t fully understand why until almost 20 years later (to be discussed in subsequent articles).

What people forget, and young people didn’t experience, is that we’d instituted a no-fly zone in Iraq and had been hunting for WMDs in Iraq for years before 9/11. Saddam had used chemical weapons on the Kurds and had previously attempted to build a nuclear reactor. Colin Powell, just like my commander on 9/11 briefing “secret” information about the POTUS arriving at Barksdale AFB, moved forward with the information he had on hand.

We invaded Iraq the same way. It’s also how we live our lives.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.