Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Pentagon: Col. Sam Hartwell

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Colonel Sam Hartwell. Hartwell served in Afghanistan as a part of the Army’s Special Ops Command, he spent time working in the Pentagon with the USD I&S, and has been volunteering in Ukraine since March 2022.

Sam Hartwell:

Well, name Sam Hartwell, rank when I retired was full colonel. I was Army Intelligence. I was commissioned in 1981 after graduating from West Point. Ronald Reagan spoke at our graduation, and I got to shake his hand, one of the great experiences of my life. And so, I was trained as a cold warrior. I went straight to Fort Huachuca for military intelligence officer basic training and some advanced training.

Then, I went on to Korea for two years. The first year was in a strategic intelligence job, and the second year was border duty with a ground surveillance radar platoon. Very interesting time. Nothing really controversial except one incident where the North Koreans blew up a delegation of South Koreans visiting, then called Burma, at the time, killed like 18 guys. And the South Koreans really wanted to go to war against the North because of that, and the commander of Eighth Army, United Nations Command, had to put his foot down and say, "No guys, we can't do that."

And I was also there when the KAL 007 was shot down after it had drifted over the Kuril Islands. That was a tense moment as well. And then we did have one, I guess, defector from North Korea flying a MiG. I think it was back then it was a MiG-17 or a MiG-19. And the air raid sirens went off in Seoul for the first time since the Korean War. So, that was the excitement of those years, 81 to 83.

And then I took an immediate assignment to Germany where I got to Third Armor division, first Brigade Third Armor division, and that was from 1985 up until the end of the Gulf War when I got out of the Army the first time, and I'll get to that in a minute. But from 85 to 91, it was the classic Cold War period. Reagan's Army, General Meyer was chief of staff. That's when we got all the new equipment, the M1s, and so on. And so, 1st Brigade, 3rd AD Ready First, and I was the S2 of 232 Armor Battalion for the first couple of years. We had a sector in the Fulda Gap that was just opposite the main city of Erfurt in East Germany, which is where our primary adversary, the 27th Motorized Rifle Division, was located and then backed up by the 8th Guards tank division, as I recall. Nothing dramatic there.

We did have a couple of very interesting Reforgers. That was the biggest Reforgers in history by the time I left Germany. I guess the main interesting thing that happened during that time, there was a major who had, in Berlin, had broken into a Soviet camp and gotten into one of their new T-80s, I think it was, at the time. But he got caught. He ended up being shot, killed, and when they returned the body, they had just stripped him of everything down to no watch, no clothes, no nothing. It was just typical Russian.

But anyway, so after two years as S2 of 232 Armor Battalion, I transferred to the 533rd MI Battalion, the Divisional Intelligence Battalion, and I had linguists and electronic warfare jammers and such. Did that for a year and a half, almost 20 months in command. And I had some really brilliant young soldiers, male and female, linguists, and electronic warfare specialists. That was a great experience.

Then came the Gulf War, and actually, I had gotten out at that point in Germany. That was 1990, and I stayed in the Reserves in Germany. This is when the Eastern Bloc started falling apart. It was a very interesting time. Just as I had changed command in mid-89, Czech Republic and Hungary just completely fell apart, and peace was breaking out all over, as I remember. And there was that revolution in Romania where they killed Ceaușescu, which was dramatic. And then the Polish government went down. East German government went down. It was an incredible, incredible time. And I thought, at that point, I had made the right decision to get out of the Army and move on to a civilian career. And I got accepted to business school at University of Michigan, where I started actually one semester in 1990, and then came the Gulf War.

I was still in the Reserves assigned to 3rd Armor division, and I volunteered to come back on active duty for that. And by December of 1991, I was back in Germany. We did the Desert Storm, which is an incredible experience as well. I really don't even refer to it as a war. It was more of a live fire exercise really. We were in the far, not the farthest west, but we were next to 1st Armor Division, and 3rd Armor Division went north and then east to cut off the Republican guards. And it was interesting that when we approached these battle positions, which were circular battle positions, tanks in a circle if you can imagine that, we just drove past them, and of course took out all of the ... they were T-62s, and we could, even with M1s, shoot through the berms and still destroy the tank. But the tanks were all empty. These guys had already retreated. And by the time that we actually got to the Republican Guard division that was supposed to be our objective ... it was called the Tawakalna Division. That means “Named by God”, as I recall. By the time we got to those guys, they were loading up their T-72s onto hats, transporters, and we were shooting them off the transporters. So, that was pretty much a joke. We did capture a lot of T-72s, and I got to drive around in some of them. And let me tell you, those tanks ... I'm a small guy. I'm 5'7", 145 pounds, and I felt very claustrophobic in those things. You felt very, very vulnerable. And then it had a ridiculous autoloader, which was funny. I mean, you could get off two rounds, maybe even three, with an M1 before a T-72 could get off its second round. It was just this slow, circular thing that was ... and it had no night vision. And it had these optical sights that were literally from World War II technology. It was incredible. So yeah, that was no fight at all.

I think the one mistake that General Schwarzkopf made was that they tricked us on the ... we said no more fixed-wing aircraft, and so that was part of the armistice, the peace agreement. However, the Iranians started using a helo, rotary wing, to drop ... it was acid, hydrochloric acid, on the Shia who were starting to rise up against the Sunni in the South. And so they started to try to come across for safe haven, and the State Department had issued this blanket decree or order that we were not to accept any border crosses, not to give, essentially, safe haven.

But I was on duty one night, and I got this frantic call from one of our guys in one of the forward positions. And he's telling me, "Sir, we got like 50 or more of these guys. The one guy looks like the Shia cleric, and there's a whole bunch of guys with them, and they're just dressed as civilians. And they're telling us they're being chased, and they're going to be shot and killed. I mean, here, listen, sir." And he holds out the mic, and I can hear the shooting going on. I absolutely said, "Let them across." I had to make a command decision. So I said, "Bring them in." And I told the brigade commander the next morning, and he didn't say anything. And I wondered after that whether he was thinking whether he should fire me or commend me, but he never said anything. Anyway, the result was that those 50 or so guys came in, and we fed them. They stayed for about a week or 10 days, and then when the shooting died down, they went back. So, I'd have to say that was probably my best decision or best thing that I contributed was saving those 50 lives from imminent death.

So anyway, at the end of the Gulf War, I go back to business school, and I finished. I went back to Germany and worked in international banking. And because I was a Russian specialist in the military, then my primary area of responsibility was the former Soviet Union, primarily Ukraine, where I ended up living there for about three years in Kyiv and got to visit all parts of the country. I was working mostly in agricultural finance, but I got to see a bit of everything. I did also travel a lot to Russia. I ended up doing some deals for our bank in the Russian oil fields, way, way out in the middle of Siberia in February where it was about minus 42, which is exactly where Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet. And that was cold, very dry, so it was almost tolerable, but you really couldn't stay outside more than 15 minutes, no matter how well you were dressed. Very interesting time.

So, from 1992 to 2000, I was in the Reserves, but doing this banking business in the former Soviet Union. From 92 to about 2005, Russia was a very friendly place, and I thought it was, economically and culturally, this was a match made in heaven. Finally, we could be friends, because Russia has all the natural resources that Europe and the United States need, and we had all the technology and certain aspects of culture that they wanted.

Now, I said I was in the Reserves during all this time, and the Iraq war starts to ... you can see it coming. And in 2003, I tried to get back on active duty, and they didn't need me until about 2005. And so, finally they let me back on active duty, and I went to Special Operations Command for three years. I did not participate in Iraq. I focused everything on Afghanistan. That was my primary mission. I have some interesting observations and some strong feelings on Afghanistan. I remember at the beginning that a couple of things happened where we made some, I think, absolutely strategic errors. And the first one, I think, was when General Franks had ... we had pinpointed the location of Mullah Omar and his staff. And as it was relayed to me, I was not inside the room, but I knew people at Central Command who were there, General Franks had called in his lawyer and asked, "Can we take out Mullah Omar?" And apparently, the legal advice was that, well, he is considered a head of state. That could be a problem. Right. And I could tell you if that would've been General Schwarzkopf, he'd have said, "Why are you asking me? Why aren't they dead yet?" But General Franks hesitated as I was told, and they put a small missile on this location to see who was actually in there in this building. And, of course, they came out of there, him and his entire staff, jumped in their Toyota trucks, and just in 20 different directions, they were gone. So, it was a missed strategic opportunity to take out the entire leadership of the Taliban. Bad move.

Then the other one that just really troubles me as well is that when we had Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, we knew he was there, and we found out later that he had been wounded from one of these bombing campaigns. And the word was that we wanted to take him out. We knew where he was. We wanted to use US forces. And Secretary Rumsfeld, at the time, said, "No, put an Afghan face on it." Why? I do not get that. It wasn't an Afghan war. It wasn't their war at all. It was our war. And true to form, the Afghans let him out. They were bought off. That was what we understood. Instead of putting some missiles that can penetrate deeply into those caves in that valley ... if it had been me, I'd want to use Napalm on that area and then use some missiles in those caves. It would've been done. That would've been that. But no, it took us 10 more years to find him and then finally kill him.

Now, I'd been on three deployments too, well, no, four or five different deployments for a total of 36 months in Afghanistan from June 2008 until January 2013. My first was with a deployment for SOCOM. It was a short rotation, three and a half months, I think. And then, I went back into some counterintelligence job and counter-fraud work for CENTCOM, mostly in Kabul. But then I also went on another deployment for six months with ISAF in Regional Command South in Kandahar, where I was a deputy for a intelligence fusion center, which was, again, very interesting working with all of the allies. We had the UK, Canada, the Dutch, the Australians, even Romanians, who were very, very good. Romanians were very clever intel guys. That was a great deployment. But most of my time there was spent with DIA as I was technically the second in charge. There was a civilian above me that I, as the Colonel 06, was responsible for all the logistics aspect of our footprint, and we had over 500 folks there, most of them, about 90%, 80, 90% were civilians doing various things.

In fact, one of the interesting things that happened when we did get Osama bin Laden right under my office, we had a biotech unit, and the way that we confirmed that it was Osama bin Laden ... I didn't even know about it. I didn't have a need to know. It was a very, very secret operation. But the SEAL Team Six guys had brought in some DNA and just handed it to our guys and said, "Can you check this out for you? Can you do this in the database? We don't know who this is, but let's see if you can find something." And it took our guys, as I was briefed afterwards, eight hours of checking their databases with what they had in D.C. And they said, "Wow, you got him. Right? That's him, right?" And that's when the SEAL team said, Yep, yep, that was him." And that's how we found out. So that happened right below my office, and I didn't even know about it.

I retired in 2014, March of 2014. And just before I retired, the Crimea happened. The so-called Little Green Man took over Crimea. And I was in the Pentagon. I was working for USDI. It was my last job. After I came back from Afghanistan, I got a job through an old West Point friend and worked in his group in the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. And when Crimea happened, it was one of the saddest days of my military career, I guess, because we were watching this on TV. I don't know how we got this, but we're inside the Pentagon watching it on a special TV. And it was a camera on a naval base, and I think it was probably Sevastopol or Simferopol, but it was a camera that was facing the outside. It was like as you were at the gate of this naval base, looking at the green men coming at you. There was about a half a dozen, maybe eight, absolutely in green and carrying AK47s. And there were two Ukrainian naval officers standing at the gate just with little sidearms, those little 7.62s, with hands on hips. And the one points at the green men and says, "America is with us," in Russian. And it stopped these guys. I remember that vividly. They just stopped. And I thought at that moment, I said, "This poor guy doesn't understand that this command is not going to do a damn thing." And, of course, we didn't. And I just felt like hell because we had signed the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing their sovereign borders. That was signed by us, the UK, and Russia, who has now violated it. And I know the guys in the UK, they were ready to go. They were ready to do something. They always are. We could have easily gone in with the 82nd and a Ranger battalion and just stopped it right there, and the Russians would've retreated back to their bases. And history tells us, from Harry Truman onward, as Stalin told Truman, "I'll keep my agreements if you make me keep my agreements." So, if there was ever a time to confront Russia legally under international law, that was the time to do it. But we let him get away with it, and it proved to him and his people, his security people around him, that these guys are not going to confront us.

And so, within a few months, the Donbas happened, which was another manufactured uprising, so to speak, when, in fact, there were Russian regulars involved. Now, how do I know this? One of my dear friends from West Point, a classmate who was also ... he was a Ukrainian American. He came to Ukraine in 1992 and was working there in banking. We happened to work in the same bank. He ended up joining the Ukrainian National Guard just as a regular private because he didn't want to lose his American citizenship, and there's rules on that. Anyway, he was allowed to join the Ukrainian National Guard. Mark Peslowski was his name, and he was killed in the Battle of Ilovaisk on August 19th, 2014, when the Russian regulars came in in a big way. In fact, his company position was hit just blindsided by a Russian regiment. And so, I went back for his funeral, and in fact, he's buried in Kyiv at the most prestigious military cemetery for special heroes of Ukraine.

So, I've maintained a lot of contacts in Ukraine since then, and I'm continuing on with military career because I'm still doing it in a different way. I went back to Ukraine three weeks after the invasion. I was actually on vacation in Hawaii, and I was living ... I was retired. I was living in Italy, so I flew back on March 10th, 2022. I jumped in my car the next day and drove 24 hours straight to get to a border town on the Romanian-Ukrainian border because I'd had a friend and his wife and their child who were in Kyiv, right in the area where the Russians were attacking heavily. And I told him, as a military intelligence officer, "If they break through, if they cross that main bridge at Irpin, 70% of that force will go to the left, and the other 30% are going to go right past your apartment." And we saw on Facebook everything that was happening at the time. They were just blasting with tanks, blasting apartment buildings for no reason. I said, "You got to get out of there." And by the way, I didn't even know it, but he said, "My wife is on dialysis. She needs dialysis three times a week." I said, "Well, yeah, you absolutely got to get out of there."

Now, fortunately, the Russians did not break through Irpin. The Ukrainians blew up that bridge and stopped them. The heroic stories that I heard from veterans, civilians who fought the Russians, those stories are absolutely incredible. The hair on the back of your neck just stands at attention when you listen to what these guys did, absolutely incredible for bravery there. And by the way, people don't realize it, but there were 14 foreign journalists killed between Bucha and Irpin at the beginning of that Ukraine fight.

When I drove into Kyiv by the time April and saw the damage, the Russian forces had gotten into within six kilometers from the west of Kyiv. They got within six kilometers of the center of the city, and they were trying to take a military headquarters because this is where all the damaged vehicles were that I saw as I was driving into Kyiv. It just amazed me. They must have been offered a ... I mean, I don't know what this advanced force was trying to do. It was very small. But they got in there, and the Ukrainians just plastered them. It's unbelievable, and I'm getting a little ahead of myself. But that family, I did finally get them out of there, and I got the wife and the whole family hooked with an Italian charity, a Catholic charity that was special. Their special mission was only for dialysis patients, and they evacuated them all the way to Rome, which is where they still are, and she's still waiting for transplants for her pancreas and kidney.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Col. Sam Hartwell.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.