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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LANCER 6

Jun-13-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

He joined to play ball, but Col. Robert Brown stayed to lead

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By MATT MISTEREK, The News-Tribune

MOSUL, Iraq – It was early the morning of Iraq’s first democratic elections in more than 50 years, and Col. Robert Brown was as anxious as anyone in the Stryker brigade tactical operations center.

After a sleepless night, the brigade’s top leaders had huddled to see the first returns trickle in. They were unsure whether terrorists would fulfill their threat of polling-day bloodshed and Sunni Arabs their pledge to stay home.

“Any voters?” inquired Brown, the 46-year-old commander of the Fort Lewis-based 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, known as the Lancers.

“No,” replied a voice over the radio.

About 15 minutes later, the first report came in from the field: “Two voters!”

Cheers burst out in the control room, but Brown kept cool and grabbed the microphone.

“Find out who they are – Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Christians.”

He got his answer a few minutes later.

“One of the two was a Sunni Arab,” the voice on the radio said.

“Close all the polling sites now,” Brown quipped. “We can report to Baghdad that 50 percent of the voters in Mosul are Sunni Arabs!”

The room erupted in laughter, providing a well-timed stress release.

For Brown, the Jan. 30 election remains the defining event of his brigade’s deployment and a turning point that emboldened Iraqis to stand up against intimidation.

“In November, no one thought it could happen,” he said in a recent interview. “We gave the credit to the Iraqi government, we gave credit to the Iraqi security forces and of course to the people who had the courage to come out. But when it came down to it, this couldn’t have happened without the soldiers.”

His brigade is the muscle behind the counterinsurgency in and around Iraq’s third-largest city. Brown says they have captured more than 4,000 suspected terrorists, including 100 key cell leaders, and spent $17 million on more than 340 public infrastructure projects to help win the friendship of the Iraqi people. [...]


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