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Schools

A Trainer of Iraqi Troops Looks Back, Following U.S. Withdrawal

Rich Ritchie, an Albany Middle School special education teacher, recounts living with and training Iraqi soldiers in 2004 as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve.

Rich Ritchie, who is now a 50-year-old special education teacher at , was a U.S. Army Reserve major who served in Iraq during the Second Gulf War.

We spoke to Ritchie at Albany Middle School to hear about his experiences, in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal earlier this month from Iraq. U.S. forces had occupied the country for nearly nine years, costing $1 trillion (some estimates are higher than $3 trillion) and 4,484 American lives.

In 2004, Ritchie commanded a team that trained members of the Iraqi Army.

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"We lived with 700 Iraqi soldiers," said Ritchie. "We lived on Iraqi bases, not American bases. We had Iraqi food, not American food."

Ritchie led Iraqi soldiers into combat. His soldiers fought against an elusive and deadly insurgency. Dozens of them lost their lives in the effort.

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BEGINNING

In 2004, Ritchie was in the 91st Infantry Division Reserve, in Dublin, CA, when he heard that a team that would train Iraqi soldiers was seeking officers with overseas experience.

After graduating from U.C. Berkeley’s Reserve Officers' Training Corps program in 1981, Ritchie had led an infantry platoon near the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea for a year. In 1985, he had spent several weeks training the Honduran military in emergency deployment.

Ritchie said his overseas experience and a sense of duty propelled him to join the training team.

"I know I can do this job," he recalled thinking. "Hopefully my leadership and my skill set will bring people back alive and make a difference."

TRAINING

During the First Gulf War, from 1991 to 1993, Ritchie worked at an Army recruiting office in Texas. He then joined the Army Reserve and was called up to go to Iraq during the Second Gulf War, in 2003, as a logistics officer with a Coalition Military Assistance Training Team.

It would be his first combat tour.

Ritchie and other training team members spent a month preparing at Fort Lewis, WA, near Seattle. Besides reviewing infantry tactics, the course also featured an Iraqi man who taught about his culture and gave instruction in basic Arabic.

In one lesson, the Iraqi teacher explained that showing the bottom of the shoe was considered an insult in his country. (Iraqis pounded toppled statues of Saddam Hussein with their shoes and, later, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference.)

In Iraq, Ritchie carefully avoided placing his foot on a table or on his knee when meeting with Iraqis.  

A more difficult cultural adjustment for Ritchie was the stigmatization of the left hand. Iraqis shun the left hand because of its use for sanitary activities.

But Ritchie is left-handed.

When he arrived in Iraq, he apologized to his Iraqi partner, Colonel Nasraella, about using his left hand. Nasraella burst out laughing, more amused than offended by Ritchie’s left hand.

INTERGRATING THE IRAQI ARMY

Ritchie and his nine-member training team were first stationed in Taji, a city 20 miles north of Baghdad, in May 2004. They were to train 700 Iraqi soldiers of the 21st Battalion of the 3rd Iraqi Infantry Division.  

The battalion consisted of Iraq’s three main ethnic groups: Shias, Sunnis and Kurds. To inspire national unity, the battalion’s officers were divided between the three ethnicities.

"I was very impressed at the Iraqi military, trying to be cross-cultural and cross-tribal. In a way, it reminded me of integration" in the United States, said Ritchie.

STEPPING IT UP

After one month in Iraq, Richie said his team was ordered to accelerate its mission. U.S. strategists wanted to replace American troops with Iraqi troops, he said.

"We were told at the end of June to step it up because they wanted to Iraq-ize the war," said Ritchie. "The U.S. had been there long enough and there were a lot of soldiers being killed."

Ritchie's team was reduced to six men. Despite the change, he said he was still confident in his team.

He recalled one of his sergeants, whose civilian job had been teaching auto mechanics at a community college.

"His (military) job was to be an infantry soldier but his civilian job...was actually more beneficial to the mission," said Ritchie. "So he was working with the motor pool, showing them (the Iraqis) how to have various vehicles ready, how to check and get supply parts."

FROM TRAINING TO OPERATION

After five months of training, Ritchie and his Iraqi soldiers were deployed 250 miles away to Al Kasik, a village between Mosul and Syria in northern Iraq. When training shifted to combat, Ritchie said one third of the Iraqi soldiers abandoned the battalion.

"They said, 'I don’t want to be here,'" recalled Ritchie. "And guess what? The Iraqi (officers) said, 'OK, leave.' We couldn’t believe it as Americans."

Ritchie and the Iraqi officers debated about the departing soldiers. If Iraqi soldiers were forced to stay, then the new Iraqi Army might be viewed as no different from Saddam’s tyrannical regime. In the end, the Iraqi officers let the departing soldiers go.  

"Well, at least we knew these people (soldiers who stayed) wanted to fight," said Ritchie, who noticed that the most loyal soldiers were Kurdish. "That's better than to get out there and somebody says, 'Help! I don’t want to do this.' That can get somebody killed."

SEARCHING FOR INSURGENTS

When Iraqi soldiers began patrolling Al Kasik, Ritchie said initially they were ignored by the local residents.

"Slowly but surely, the local people would start to come and want to talk," said Ritchie. "Not to me, but to the senior Iraqi officers."

Ritchie said local Iraqis provided useful intelligence, such as who belonged in the village and who didn’t. Al Kasik, said Ritchie, was a transit point for insurgents travelling from Syria to Mosul. In the four months he was there, Iraqi soldiers captured dozens of insurgents.

Iraqi soldiers found cars hidden with explosives and suicide bomb vests. One car’s gas tank was divided into two compartments: one full of gas and the other full of explosives.

"They were getting paid to kill Iraqi soldiers, and if they killed Americans they got even more money," said Ritchie of the insurgents. "So we would find large amounts of money, like 1,500 U.S. dollars, which is a large amount of money for an Iraqi to have."

THE INSURGENCY

The insurgents were a deadly enemy. Ritchie said 23 Iraqi soldiers he trained, including one of his translators, were killed by insurgents.

Iraqi soldiers often died, not during offensive operations, but when they went home to share their pay with their families, said Ritchie.

In one instance, the tailor at Al Kasik's base was supplying the personal information of Iraqi soldiers to insurgents. When some of these soldiers went home to Mosul, insurgents hunted them down.

The targeted soldiers, said Ritchie, were later found dead. Some were killed execution-style, a bullet to the back of the head. Some were decapitated.

"It's frustrating and it makes you angry and sad that this is happening," said Ritchie. "These people were willing to step up. I had the greatest respect for them because they were being threatened and we didn’t have enough people to cover every village and protect them."

A DANGEROUS MISSION

Ritchie's tour ended in December 2004. He said he fulfilled his main goal of keeping his training team safe.

Ritchie said he was lucky. Two weeks before arriving at Al Kasik, two car bombs detonated next to the base’s mess hall and command center, killing scores of Iraqi soldiers.

In another attack, an IED struck a convoy on the same road on which Ritchie had travelled a week earlier. The IED exploded underneath a car carrying an American soldier from another training team. The soldier survived, but lost one of his legs.

Ritchie said he often wonders if the IED could have struck him instead of the other soldier.  

REASON FOR WAR

When I asked Ritchie for his opinion about the Iraq invasion, he gave me a complicated answer.

Ritchie said he believes Saddam Hussein was a threat to national security. But he added that he knows Saddam wasn’t connected to 9/11, and that the intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons program was incorrect.

"Was there a motivation? In my personal private civilian opinion?" said Ritchie. "Absolutely there was a motivation. We needed to stabilize the oil over there."

Ritchie said he hopes the best for Iraq.

"It seems like, now in 2011, things are better out there," said Ritchie. "Is it perfect? No. But is it better than it was in 2004 when I was there? Yeah, I think it is. The sense I got from the Iraqis was they were happy that at least they were going to have a say; they are going to have a choice now."

AFTER THE ARMY

Ritchie left the Reserve in September 2005. He had been a logistics manager at Sun Microsystems from the mid-90s into the early 2000s, shipping refrigerator-sized computer servers to clients in the Americas and Asia. Each computer server, said Ritchie, was worth a million dollars. 

After returning from Iraq, Ritchie wanted a more stable job. At Sun, he worked 80-90 hours a week. His wife, Alexia Ritchie, the principal of , encouraged him to be a teacher.

In 2005, he became a special education teacher at Albany Middle School. He also coaches the middle school’s cross country and track teams.

FROM NATIONAL TO LOCAL SERVICE

Working at the middle school, said Ritchie, fulfills his sense of duty.

"When I left the Army, I felt there was something missing," said Ritchie. "Even though I was working and doing all these things, there was something missing."

In the Army, Ritchie said he was driven by his service to the country. At the middle school, Ritchie said he feels the same sense of service, but at the local level.

"With the Army, I felt very strongly that I was serving my nation and protecting it," said Ritchie. "And in a way (as a teacher and coach), I’m serving my local community by getting to work with tomorrow’s leaders."

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