Battalion XO in Iraq: Lt. Col. Joseph Kopser

Ken Harbaugh:

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Today, we’ll hear from LTG Harry Kinnard. In this special episode, Kinnard explains how he helped develop the Airmobile Concept, and how it played out during Vietnam.

Lt. Col. Joseph Kopser:

My name is Joseph Kopser. I left the military in 2013 as a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. I was a cavalry officer. Anyone who's not cav would say that I'm an armor officer, but I was a cavalry officer.

It's hard to even remember when I first figured out I wanted to join the Army or the military, but I think there are some seminal moments that tie together my story and how I got to now, and you probably have to go back to the early days of the space shuttle program when it was doing all those landings out in California where they'd take it up on a 747, they'd let it detach and then it would come back to the earth. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's what I want to do. Because I'm a little young in the sense I missed the first walk on the moon, but I was alive for Skylab and all the others, but it was the space shuttle that just so captured me and so therefore I wanted to be a pilot. And I said, well, what's the best way to be an astronaut? Well, you got to be a pilot. Where do you got to go to do that? They're like one of the academies and Air Force is a natural extension. All the way up until the point where I figured out my eyes back in the '80s weren't good enough to qualify to be a pilot.

So I asked around, well, if you can't be a pilot, what do you do in the Air Force? And I got a lot of answers and I let my Air Force friends answer that question. I don't want to prejudge the answer, but it let me know that the opportunities to serve my country would be going through an academy. And that was my route to service. In terms of why I ended up going into the cavalry instead of aviation all has to do with the personalities that I met. Sergeant First Class Bobby Moore, my TAC NCO at West Point, is the best example. His spirit, his panache just attracted me like a moth to light.

He came in fresh off the heels of Desert Storm and he was still ... I think he was still pulling boot sand from Kuwait. And what he explained to me is that cavalry officers and NCOs and soldiers don't normally wait to be told what to do, but instead always try to lean forward in the saddle. And I immediately was drawn like a moth to light to that. In fact, I didn't go aviation, which is what most of my friends thought I was going to go, as an aerospace engineer. But I wanted to be a part of that mentality of we don't wait for others to try to motivate us or tell us what to do. We want to be out front. So it was a great time.

There's a huge difference between the armored force and the cavalry force. In fact, it goes all the way back to the early days of the United States Army when mounted cavalry on horses was indeed its own distinctive branch. The crossed sabers. Obviously tanks hadn't even been invented, cars hadn't even been invented. And so as the cavalry evolved, as the Army evolved, and then we did start to have tanks in World War I and World War II, we kept the horse cavalry all the way up until the eve of World War II until we realized they were not going to be able to work on the modern battlefield of the day. But the ethos of the cavalry, which is to want to be out front, to gain and maintain contact, to be able to sneak and peek and find the bad guys in such a way that allows the larger, more conventional forces to follow on, to be able to finish the action that's necessary. That ethos is 100% who I am as a person

There are countless stories of the shock that occurred when I got to West Point, and I would imagine it's very similar to anyone leaving the comfort of being an 18-year-old in their high school wherever they grew up, and mom and dad taking care of them, to suddenly being thrust into a military environment where you're on your own. And some of my very favorite memories of that early plebe year was even during that first summer. I'll never forget I was such a cheese ball. Hopefully I lessened a little bit of that, but I was always trying to draw attention by trying to ask questions and oh, did my peers pummel me into the ground. Because it's this idea of cooperate and graduate. And you do that by going along to get along in the way of becoming a team. And anybody that tries to raise their hand or say look at me, look at me, is very clearly not understand the concept of teamwork because you're trying to make it all about you.

So that was very quickly beat out of me. The other just countless examples of how different West Point is from a normal college experience. I remember asking on the very first day we ever got a chance to get near a helicopter or flying a helicopter, I looked over at our squad leader and I basically said something to the effect of, "Sergeant, is the campus always this beautiful all the year round?" And he looked at me for two reasons. Number one, I was being a complete cheese ball. And secondly, he says, "This is not a campus. This is a goddamn military insulation. This is West Point. This is an Army post. Get used to that and learn how to be in the Army." So it was all those cultural shifts and all those changes that were a challenge then. They always got me into trouble and stumbles and challenges. But at the same time, it was that indoctrination, it was that sense of belonging that quickly infected me. And here I thought I was going to be a five and fly going back into the civilian world, but I ended up staying for 20 plus years. And in many ways I'm still serving alongside my military brothers and sisters in the work that I do today in retirement.

It's a great question to ask: Why West Point, as expensive as it is, why do we need to keep it when you can commission so many different ways? I would say something very similar to what Colin Powell, who is not a West Point graduate, said about two, three decades ago. And he said that West Point is like the life springs of the United States Army. It is the well springs. It is from where the tradition begins is from where so much of our tradition around professionalism, around the continuity of the study of modern warfare. It's where quite frankly we take everyday volunteer citizens and transform them into leaders of character. And you can do that in a lot of places, but it's special that there are places like the academies to include the Coast Guard Academy, the Merchant Marine Academy, where the sole focus, the only reason why you are there is you know you are going to go for a commission to serve your country. And that tradition to tie together generations I think is important because you can't go anywhere it seems these days in the military world and not meet somebody who had a father who was at the Air Force Academy or now recently in the last couple of decades, a mother that graduated from the Naval Academy. And for me, West Point being the oldest engineering school in the country, being so interlaced by the names that shaped this country. They have a poster in fact that much of the history we teach was made by those we taught. From Grant to Eisenhower, MacArthur, and in modern day names that you'd recognize from the last 20 years. So I definitely am a proponent for it. And the last thing I' ll say ... And there's good reason to critique it and question the taxpayer expense. So much of what we do to maintain the academy itself today comes from private funds and donors and the amazing work of the West Point Association of Graduates, our alumni association, that it's well worth keeping a part of it. And finally I'll say, from a branding standpoint around the world, West Point is synonymous with service to country leadership and professionalism.

The transition from West Point into the real Army was absolutely a culture shock, but it occurred in a couple of different levels so I'll take them in order as they come to me. The first is that at West Point, every single day you are an athlete, you are a scholar, you're in class, you're developing yourself as a person from a leadership standpoint. It's a leadership laboratory 24 hours a day. And to be honest, some of my peers in the Army of all ranks and ages and stages in life didn't necessarily see their world as a constant leadership laboratory. They saw it as a great way to serve their country. They were there for two years or four years or six years and that's awesome. But they didn't necessarily eat, sleep and breathe the military ethos or the warrior profession in the same way that I just assumed everyone did. That's first and foremost.

Secondly, we do live in a cocoon. We live in a cocoon at West Point. And by the way, I'm speaking with 30 years past. Nowadays they do a lot better at getting cadets at West Point ready for the real world by introducing the real world much sooner. But we lived in a cocoon to the point where when I showed up to my first unit, there were a lot of things I had never done for myself. And the first number one thing I'd never done for myself is manage my own time. Sure, I got a couple hours each evening that I got to decide how I'm going to study, where I'm going to study or if I'm going to study, but that's only a couple hours of the day. In the real Army in the real world, every leader at every level has tremendous sway on how they spend their time, where they're going to be. Hopefully they make the right decisions and they're with their soldiers and they're at the critical point of training or the mission, but there's no substitute for that at West Point. You have to be everywhere you're going to be. And that freedom ... And I know for your listeners that weren't in the military, sounds funny to say that the real Army has more freedom than the academies, but they really do.

And then I'd say probably the last culture shock was just the ability to go where you wanted to go. And I don't mean that in terms of with your unit. I just mean like the real world. Travel. Going places. I mean, for four years you really only ever got to go and travel once or twice a semester. You spent a lot of time at West Point. Probably more than some people wanted to. But those were the big culture shocks that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I am so fortunate that I went to West Point in the four years that I did. When we started, it was literally the summer of 1989. It was at the height of the Cold War. We hadn't even invaded Panama. So we do Panama that winter in '89. A year plus later, we're invading Iraq from Kuwait in the first Persian Gulf War. And when we're graduating in '93, we are starting to get involved in Mogadishu. You could see the hints of the Balkan War. You talk about a world turned up on ... I chose Russian as my language because it was the Cold War. Looking back, there's no telling what language I would've been better prepared for over the '90s and the 2000s, but it was an amazing time of change.

Graduating from West Point in 1993 was a time of so much uncertainty that I had no idea what five or 10 years was going to look like because we were taking the peace dividend, the fact that the Soviet Union had been defeated and broken up, and were questioning in Congress how big of a standing military, active duty, do we really need. They were shutting down units left and right. So much so that when I decided my senior year to become a cavalry officer, I got the 11th ACR sticker, which is that same horse symbol, for those that don't know the 11th ACR, that's on the emblem of the Porsche because it's near Stuttgart, Germany and they were in the folded gap and that was their symbol. And it was on my door and I later had to scrape it off because we got word that the 11th ACR was told to pack it up, come back home, and they later went to Fort Irwin at the National Training Center.

That was one major change. The other was just the fact that we were just going to have so many fewer people, so many fewer posts, so many fewer assignments. Great assignments like Fort Irwin and Fort Ord, right on the water in Monterey just went away. Entire areas of Europe just went away. And so we weren't sure what the next 10 years were going to look like. And lo and behold, 10 years after we graduated in 1993, that was the invasion in Iraq the second time. And maybe we could have seen that coming, but regardless, it was a time of uncertainty in 1993.

The moment of 9/11 for my year group as a '93, especially in the Army, was troubling on so many levels. Not just the obvious loss of life and the tragedy that occurred, but for so many of us, that was our calling. We knew we were going to war and we wanted to be there. And I happened to be a part of a cohort of officers that were in graduate school. I happened to be in Boston at Harvard, at the Kennedy School. I remember it was a beautiful morning. I think it was a Monday or Tuesday morning. I remember waking up going for a run that morning just thinking that life was grand. Got on the shuttle bus with a couple of other Army officers to take it down into ... Because we were living at Hanscomb Air Force Base. Take it into Boston. And we got word during the traffic report, if you remember those traffic on the fives and weather on the sevens or whatever. And sure enough, we found out that a plane had hit the tower. And then by the time we got out of the subway, because we went and transferred in the subway and came out, we heard that a second plane had hit. And that's when we all knew that that was not an accident, that was an attack. We were under attack. And so it was a surreal moment because we knew our peers who were in company command, in true command at the company level, they were going to be deploying with our ... Well, as we felt the pride of being in command. Those were our units that we had just trained up for the last two years and now suddenly they were going to go to war with a different group.

I'll never forget, like it was yesterday, watching a CNN report as they were unloading tanks in Turkey. Because at the time we thought we'd come in from the north. And I saw Charlie 366. I saw my tank that I had spent so much time on the previous two years rolling off of a troop transport or ship transport, and it was surreal. And we watched it on TV and then my follow on assignment was three years teaching at West Point. I volunteered in the summer of 2004 to go over and help as an individual augmentee in Saddam's Palace with the multinational headquarters. It was surreal all right. I know a lot of my friends went into much harder harm's way in those first couple of years.

For any viewer who hears stories like this, who maybe never been in the military or have military family, it's a very surreal thing to try to explain how you want to put yourself in harm's way. You want to move to the sound of the guns. That is literally what you're trained up for. In fact, I had friends, I had family members who said, "Joseph, what ..." Because I volunteered twice. Once in that summer of 2004 and then leaving Iraq, or excuse me, leaving West Point with a teaching assignment, I volunteered for an operational unit that I knew would be deploying me. They said, "You could just hide out anywhere you wanted to in other parts of the Army and never have to deploy. Why are you going to go?" And I struggled for a long time for certain friends and family to explain why and how. And there was this one particular family member and she said, "Why would you want to do that?" And I said, "Well, the closest thing I could explain that you might relate to is as a kid, did you ever play with dolls? Did you ever play house?" And she said, "Of course I did." I said, "Did you ever dream of being a mother?" She says, "Well, of course I did." "Well, this is my moment. Your childhood dream was to grow up and be a mom and have a family. My childhood dream was to serve my country and there's no greater expression of service to country than to volunteer to serve in your military and then ultimately to serve in a combat zone." And my mother especially never really appreciated that. My wife never really appreciated it. My daughters never appreciated it. They could understand it, but they didn't like it for obvious reasons.

So there's really two parts to it that some of your listeners or viewers might appreciate and others would find hard. But I'll never forget the very first time I actually got into theater and that was landing in ... It was either Doha or Qatar. Someplace wherever the Air Force had one of their bases. And we were all in the back of the C130 we'll call it, whatever it was, after we had gotten into theater. Landed at a civilian airport and moved over to the military side. And when we finally, at night, landed where we were going to go, and they lowered that back ramp and I could see, I guess it was the Persian Gulf. I could see the water, but more importantly what I could see was this giant wall of humidity. Just sopping, wet, humid desert air coming at us. And we were in the air-conditioned part of the plane. And I remember those two worlds collided. And I thought to myself right at that moment, that is the perfect metaphor for what's about to happen. And sure enough, we got into theater and soon as we got there, we found out that the next plane in was doing the same corkscrew going down. And for those who don't know, you don't just land the plane normal when you're in a combat zone because that's miles and miles, you're exposed underbelly. So you go way high, get above the airport, and then you just corkscrew all the way down and it'll turn your stomach if you're not ready. And we found out that the very next plane that landed after us took a piece of anti-aircraft fire up below and somebody was killed and they didn't even know he was killed because everybody is asleep or scared or all crunched. And he just stayed crunched up in his position. And that could have been any of us. And so between the initial reaction of the heat and the weather and the temperature or the second reaction of finding out that the very next flight a guy died sitting in the seat close to yours, it was real. It was real in a very big way. And that was what some people call the easy days of the war after the initial invasion in that interim period for about 15 months until the bad guys really got their stuff together. And it was still a dangerous place in early 2004.

I was an individual augmentee the very first time I deployed. Because again, I was in graduate school for the first two years of the war after 9/11, and then I was in a teaching assignment. So given the first opportunity, I raised my hand in the spring of 2004 to try to get over there that summer. And fortunately for me, there were enough former bosses I had that were over there in assignments that were looking for people just because we were still scrambling at that point as an army to figure out how we go from relative peace time to 9/11, to executing a war in Afghanistan, to then suddenly deciding we're going to execute a ground war into Iraq, and units were spread thin, headquarters were spread thin. So anybody that raised their hand was given the opportunity to serve.

Well, I can still remember very, very specifically in the early part of 2001. So George W. Bush had just become president. I think Rumsfeld became his first secretary of defense at the time. This is January, February of 2001, well before 9/11 later in September. And they were then cutting the Army, cutting the military, cutting back, cutting back, cutting back. And I'll never forget, one of the big decisions was to cut supply specialists, cooks. Anybody that Rumsfeld felt at the time wasn't important part of the Army team or the military team. It was just expensive. And so therefore, later on when they leave the military, they have to go through the VA and they'd have benefits and that's just too expensive. We don't want to do that. I remember that was discussions clear as day. So you fast-forward the clock. Few years later, there I am in Iraq in Baghdad, and I remember being driven from the airport in a convoy to the palace, and we were going down Route Irish, I think it was, and the guy driving this vehicle, which was like an armored bus ... I forget what they called it. Maybe the elephant or the rhino or something like that. And he was a civilian. And I asked him, I said, "Well, wait a minute. You're not even in the Army." He goes, "No, no, no. I got picked up by a contractor and I'm over here driving this bus." And I'm like, "Wait a minute. There's a spec four, a specialist from an Army unit with his head up out of the Humvee with his machine gun escorting this. We're inside this vehicle and here you are." And he said, "Yeah, it's a great gig. I'm making a lot of money." And I'll be off on the numbers, but I just remember distinctly, he was making the equivalent of about $20,000 a month to drive that bus to take us in from the airport to the convoy and that E4, E5 and that whole crew in that Humvee right in front of us were making, and still make very little compared to the amount of sacrifice they give to their country. Maybe $1,000 a month back then. And I was so pissed off. And I remember very distinctly going back to those stories in early 2001 where Donald Rumsfeld and the budget teams were just slashing our military down to the bare bones. So for that, I'll never forgive them or certainly won't forget it.

When you know that you are in theater, you are a volunteer, you are there in service to country. And these contractors that were there, nine out of 10 times, they were great people. Don't get me wrong, they too raised their hand. The difference is they were making about 10 times what you were. They were living in much better quarters than you were. They had access to fun and alcohol and travel. And I mean, they were at a dangerous place, don't get me wrong. But in the old days in the military, we called those soldiers, sailors, airmen, who were doing those jobs, and I still got a little burr in my saddle because of it. So yeah, it impacted morale for those that figured out what was going on in that regard.

Well, the job that I had that first summer was two part. I went over there thinking I was going to be doing work as part of the Army's lessons learned program. So in real time at that point, computers are relatively new still to the Army, only about five, six years that computers had really been at the unit level. So they were going to create a team led by a one star general to basically capture as much information in real time about what's going on, interact during the invasion and the year after, so that we could then share those lessons to subsequent units that came in. However, as I started digging into, as any good cavalry officer would, digging into what was going on in the problems, I very quickly identified that one of the problems were that the United Nations elections team that was supposed to be there to help with the January, February of 2005 elections, the first free elections, that they weren't being resourced, they weren't being supported. So I kind of raised my hand in one of the meeting. I said, "We're here for the elections and the transfer of power democracy and yet I talked to some of the UN folks and they don't even have a building to work in. They don't even have computers. Hell, they don't even have air conditioning. How are they going to do their job?" So somebody said get at it. I happened to have from my days at the Kennedy School, a focus on campaigns and elections. So I went and found the elections team, introduced myself, and they said, "Wait. You got a degree in elections?" And I'm like, "Yes." And like, "Boom. Come help us." So by day I was collecting lessons learned, but by afternoon and evenings, because you have 24 hour, seven day a week operations, I was helping the United Nations team get settled working with State Department and all different embassy folks, folks I'd never dreamed of working with or helping out. So it became quite an enriching and eye-opening experience. In fact, the quote on the New York Times later that year or the next year about the elections and the stats that they gave came from the work that we did and so that was a pretty cool part of life to be able to see something you do show up on a newspaper.

So we got to Nineveh Province in what would've been, I guess, late October, early November of 2007. Or '06. Excuse me. And the reason why that's important is if you go back and look at the timeline of Iraq, it was about that time that the bad guys were getting really good at IEDs. The Iranians had taught them how to make those penetrating IEDs that were really just tearing like hot knife through butter into the equipment that we had at the time, and we were losing a lot of people. And then I forget the details, but it was the two mosques that almost simultaneously were blown up or attacked, and that set off a chain reaction. Then at the time, the multinational ... Man, I'm forgetting some of those acronyms. It's been a while. But NMCI headquarters, that was General Chiarelli at the time, and he said, "I need every single Stryker I can get inside of Baghdad in the surrounding areas.” And so what Nineveh way up in the north ended up becoming was an economy of force mission where they basically said just send one unit up there, a mechanized unit, which was us. We were the Fourth Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. Send our brigade up, bring every Stryker, bring everything else to Baghdad. There ended up becoming 27 or 28 battalion size units inside of Baghdad, leaving only one ground maneuver squadron, and that was 2-7 Cav, up in Nineveh. They even took 1-9, they busted them up and made them mitt and bit team reinforcement. They took 2-12, sent them down south halfway between Nineveh and Baghdad. So we were an economy of force. But here's the cool thing that happened that the bag guys didn't count on is because we put so much combat power down in Baghdad and we had some cool technologies that were allowing us to follow the bad guys.

But the problem is as we tried to follow a bad guy during his pattern of life and they go from one area of Baghdad and the suburbs to another, they'd have to transfer that ownership of that asset or that bad guy to the next zone over. It just got to be hard. And so the bad guys that did escape, because they didn't want to be around 27 combat battalions, they thought it'd be safer to go north to Nineveh, which was where Uday and Qusay, Saddam's sons, used to hang out, and they went where Allah couldn't see them. That's where they had their porn and their alcohol and their gambling because Allah couldn't see them up there. But anyway, so that's where all of the bad guys started to go. What they didn't know is with those same technologies and assets that we used to find the bad guys, we now were no longer confined to just one small battalion area. Now our battalion had the entire Mosul area, so we were just scooping up bad guys big time. So much so General Petraeus essentially had our HHT Commander go back to the States to talk to the MI brigade that was there at Fort Meade or wherever it was in the big black box, and explain what we were doing because our squadron, our battalion was an outsized number. Make it up. Like 20 to one we were catching bad guys compared to battalions down in Baghdad. It's not their fault. It's just that the bag guy would go from one battalion AO into another, and then they'd turn it over, and then by the time we lost them and then ... But in Nineveh, up in Mosul, we weren't going to lose them because there was nobody to coordinate with because we owned the whole area.

I was a battalion XO. Actually at first I was a squadron XO. Then I moved over to a battalion because like I mentioned, they took 1-9 Cav and they busted up do a MIT team. So they moved me over to become the XO in 2-7 Cav. And thanks to Command Sergeant Major James D. Pippen, who's still alive and kicking with us today here in Texas, he saw to it that I got out the wire for a number of reasons. Number one reason is you got to stay relevant and find out what the hell's going on inside of your area of operations. Number two, he knew rightly, and I agree with him, that I had to leave the wire with great regularity because otherwise then the soldiers would just look at me as a big chicken, lose their respect, and then there was nothing to be done from there.

But the third great reason for going out the wire a lot that wasn't necessarily the first or second part, but it was a benefit, was then I got to see ... And again, as the XO, for those who maybe had that job, they know, but for those that weren't an XO, I'm responsible for all the behind the scenes. Coordinating intelligence, assisting with the operations, the maintenance, the medical. You name it, it all ultimately falls upon the staff to fix inside the wire and coordinate all of it. So every time I went out the wire, I learned something new.

A couple cool examples. Went out one time with Charlie Troop in their Humvees, and we're rolling along and they're very clear. They're like, "Sir, would you just sit in the backseat and not get into trouble? Because if you get out and get shot, then the platoon leader gets in trouble and then the CO will get in trouble. Just help us out in this Humvee." And I'm like, "Yeah, no problem." So I'm rolling around with them, just going, finding bad guys. And then suddenly, I'd say it was 10, 15 minutes into the ride, it wasn't long, it got to be like 200 degrees in the Humvee. It was so hot. You're just literally sweating. You're trying to drink as much as you can. All the glass windows, the bulletproof are up, and it is like an oven. And I'm like, "Sergeant, what in the world is the deal? Why is it so hot in here? I know you got some kind of air movement, some kind of relief." And he goes, "No. It's been broken. We've had it on the report now for weeks." And I said, "Oh, really?" We get back. I go find the motor sergeant. And I don't remember if it was Charlie Troop or whatever group it was, and I went and found the motor sergeant. I said, "Sergeant, you know that vehicle doesn't have any kind of air, nothing. It feels like a giant oven in there." And he goes, "Oh yeah, that part's just not come in." I said, "I'm glad that you're aware of it because tomorrow morning you're rolling out with Charlie 2-3 and you'll be sitting in the same seat I was sitting in till you figure out a way to be able to fix that vehicle." And guess what? Voila. The vehicle was fixed that evening. The crew came and found me and said, "Sir, I really appreciate it." And it was because of Sergeant Major Pippen making sure I was getting out, I was seeing the problems.

Second one, maybe even a better example, I'm out there with the engineer company and they're interrogating IEDs, which basically means they're trying to find the bombs on the road. And I'm just striking up a conversation with them, and all of a sudden one of the soldiers starts complaining. He's like, "Oh my gosh. There goes EOD again. They're going to get all the credit." And then the other guy goes, "And all the pay." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" And they're like, "Oh, well sir, because they're EOD, they have hazardous duty pay. They get EOD pay." I'm like, "Really? But we're here in this vehicle. We're right next to them, and they're just using the same big old crane going out that you've got. I don't understand." And they go, "Sir, we don't understand either." So I went back and I started a long trail of trying to figure out why the soldiers ... Now, mind you, EOD is dangerous work, but the combat engineers standing next to them in the vehicles next to them, were not getting EOD pay and that just didn't sit right with me. So I spent four or five months fighting the red tape of the Army bureaucracy and about two months before we left theater, found out that all of our combat engineers got all of their EOD and back pay all the way back to the first day they set foot in country. So they got a lot of money coming back to them.

And then on another round, I was riding around in one of those rhinos or buffaloes, whatever the hell we called it. It had the V-shaped hull that we needed to have to take the blast and take them up and out. If you remember, the secretary of defense at the time… Secretary Gates was the new secretary of defense that came in, and when he was briefed on the casualty rates with our Humvees, he said, "Get new vehicles over there as fast as you can." And it was that key phrase, as fast as you can. And they did. They did really well. But I happened to be out with the engineers one day and they were doing some interrogation of some more IEDs. And lo and behold, we had these two Bradleys, these two combat fighting vehicles pull up next to us. And I said, "Hey, Sergeant, why do we have these Bradleys sitting next to us?" They're like, "Oh, well sir, we don't have any armament, meaning a weapon. So because we don't have a weapon, we got to pull them alongside of us." And I'm like, "Well, that's crazy talk because then now our combat power has effectively been cut by a half or a third because now we're all bunched together and the enemy loves nothing more than to have us bunched together. We got to find a solution."

So the company commander at the time, Tim Hudson, he went back to his engineers and came back to me with the solution. He said, "Sir, over there, that vehicle is sitting in the corner of the motor pool nobody uses. It's a Humvee with a crow on top." And a crow stands for a crew remotely operated weapon. It's basically a machine gun that you can fire with a joystick down below looking at a screen. And we never took those vehicles out because the Humvees weren't as good as the other vehicles, the rhinos and the buffaloes. So I said, "Well, what'll it take to get that crow on top of that buffalo?" And he said, "Sir, we'll come back to you tomorrow." So they did. They came back with an idea of how there was actually a ring that was almost cut in the top of a buffalo in the early designs, but they never installed a weapon because of safety, because they didn't test it enough, because they weren't going to get it out.

So we walked down to the motor pool and there was a contractor there who worked for the company that supplied the crows. And I said, "If you would be so kind, we're going to install that crow over there in the motor pool parking lot on top of that buffalo and these engineers here from the combat engineer company are going to help you." And he goes, "You can't do that." And I said, "Why not?" And he goes, "It's not safety tested." And I said, "You do know that combat in itself is not really safety tested and without a weapon on top, that vehicle is a target." And he said, "Sir, I'd love to help, but I can't." And I said, "Okay. Here's the deal. As the battalion XO, I'm going to authorize them to put that crow on top of that vehicle, and we collectively are going to do our best to get it there. We're going to run the wires, we're going to do our best to get it mounted and we're going to go out. In the event that that weapon doesn't function correctly and one of our soldiers get hurt, I'm going to raise my hand and say I'm the one who authorized it, and I'm the one that needs to take the hit because it was my decision."But in that same report, I'm also going to write at the bottom that I tried to mitigate the risk by coming to you by name." Wrote his name down. "And your name will be in my report. Not blaming you. Just want to mitigate the fact that I came to try to ask if you would help."

And then lo and behold, the next day I go to the engineer motor pool. Underneath the vehicle there was this buffalo. And then underneath that, there were all these feet, and it was like combat boot, combat boot, civilian boot, combat boot, combat boot. You couldn't see their faces. You could just see their legs. And so I squatted down. I said, "Are you helping us install that crow on the buffalo?" He says, "Yes, sir." And so it's that kind of experience, and it's that kind of problem solving you only learn if you're outside the wire. So I'm forever grateful to Sergeant Major Pippen, all the first sergeants that let me travel along with them. And I know I was a pain in their ass because they don't want any more rank in their vehicles than they can get, but they were kind enough to let me travel along with them and learn the hardships and solve some of the problems I saw along the way.

Steve Teggy is a perfect example. He was the Alpha Troop commander. Yeah, Alpha Company commander in 2-7. And his leadership by example, to be able to be one of the very first rifles pointed in the direction of the bad guy, the very first person calling out the commands. It was our first sergeants who even though their official role in combat is to make sure that they're part of the evac and trying to move those folks that are in harm's way that have been injured out of the way and start working with medics, but they were still fighting forward.

In fact, we were talking earlier about my combat action badge. I got that with Charlie Company when I went out because we went out to find a cache of weapons and blow it up. And sure enough, we did our morning patrol and we went everywhere we were supposed to go, and we got there with little trouble at all. I think it was a Saturday morning or something. And got there pretty easy. Laid out all the C4. Found the stash, laid out all the C4 in a couple of minutes. Got everybody back safe. Those in tanks were hatched down. Those of us in Humvees, we were around the corners. And then boom, massive explosion. Well, what that massive explosion did was wake up the bad guys who had fallen asleep at their posts, and they suddenly realized that now the Americans are behind them, inside their AO and has just blown up their stash. And that's what attracted all the RPGs. And I'll never forget the RPGs that bounced, skipped and hit the corner of our vehicle that we were in. And more importantly, just as the gunner is up on the top of the vehicle and he's returning fire and all of that hot brass is falling down on top of me. I'll never forget the TC, the truck commander of that particular vehicle looked reached back and practically grabbed me by the gear, and he said, "Sir, you do not get out. The last thing I do is, again, want you hurt." And again, what he was referring to was all the paperwork, but it's just that sense of he felt the mission, he felt the responsibility, and he was not only going to return fire and engage the bad guys, but deal with this goofball of a major in his vehicle that he had to take around that morning. It's special moments like that that I'll never forget.

Coming back to the States for me was a culture shock after my first opportunity there, but the first time I was there in 2004 was just for the summer. So I only had the summertime period to be away from normal life in the US. And I got to tell you, for somebody working in the headquarters, my life was far more like life in the States than for the soldiers that were in line units. I literally worked in Saddam Hussein's Palace. That's the building we took over. Big giant majestic halls. We had access to computers, we had access to pretty good food, decent food by the way, from all over the world with all the different coalition partners. But it was that reaction coming back that I went from a war zone to my home in less than 24 hours. That was the culture shock. That I could be in harm's way, one mortar away from being dead, one IED from being permanently maimed or injured to being in the comfort of my own home watching TV and drinking beer. That culture shock. And I now know from reading literature, every different type of reaction. Service members go through different reactions. But the fact that there's no decompression time, and we did very little to allow soldiers and sailors and airmen and warriors of all kinds to come off that high hover of the adrenaline of constantly being worried. Even if you were working in the palace, you were still carrying a weapon. You were still out in the streets of Baghdad from time to time meeting with folks, and you always knew that could be your last day. And then suddenly you're watching The Simpsons, drinking beer with no downtime decompression. It was surreal, needless to say.

After my second tour is when I had the biggest reaction to the change of being home. And what I mean by that is, like I mentioned, in my first tour, I was in the headquarters. Second tour, we were the lone combat battalion in all of Nineveh Province. I mean, it's huge. It's like two or three times the size of New Jersey. It's hard to get context for people if they haven't been to that large part of Iraq. But it was just enormous. And there was always a unit in combat. At least out on the streets. They may not always have been in the fight, but they were always out there, always at harm's risk. And so you therefore always develop that sense of vigilance and then you return home.

I'll never forget, there are two or three examples that just always stuck with me. And some of them are small, but they're an indicator of the larger piece. And one small little thing was whenever I was outside ... Hell, anytime I was outside the wire, much less outside my concrete reinforced CHU, I had my goggles on. It's too easy. Your protective eye pro. Not necessarily the driving goggles, but just ballistic glasses. Just have them on. Because all it takes is one mortar dropping, rocks and shrapnel shooting, and your eyesight can be ruined and you're having a bad day. But when I got back to the States, I wasn't wearing them. And so something as simple as the wind blow and hit my eyes that hadn't really hit my eyes in 15 months, it jarred me. It took me immediately back to a time and place where I'm now looking around to figure out what's going on. That's one small example.

The other thing I'll never forget is, and this is almost humorous, but it speaks to what we were doing. When you're in the streets of Mosul, when you're driving around Nineveh, you're not really going that fast. When we had to move fast, we'd be hauling butt. But how fast could you possibly go on some of these tiny little streets in these alleyways? Even on the highway with all the debris and stuff blown up, you never really went that fast. I'll never forget, I just turned the keys over to my wife for the first couple of weeks we were back. I didn't drive anywhere because it just was unsettling. And I'll never forget, especially as she got ... We were at Fort Bliss at the time in El Paso. She pulled out onto I10 and we were getting up to speed 60, 70, 75, 80 miles an hour. And I remember just stomping down on the empty floor on the pedestrian side trying to find the break because I was just trying to slow down because everything was going so fast. And it took a long time for me to adjust to just those simple things like wind in your face or the speed of a car, and obviously just that idea and knowing that you're safe and quiet.

And then of course, the other weird thing I remember is being in my home, back for the first time, and trying to go to sleep in the quiet. And I was used to having a generator because being the chief of staff of the battalion, I was up near the headquarters shed, and our CHU was right there amongst all the generators. And I just remember the constant chug of that generator. It rocked me to sleep on the nights that I was able to get to sleep easy. And returning home, it was complete deafening silence, and that was hard to get used to.

What my military service taught me, being in the Army, really is three things that still help me today in the civilian world. What I try to pass on not only to my kids, but anybody who asks me that question, because it's really the best question, and it's three parts.

Number one, the military and military service in general trains you as best possible to focus on the mission. Or to say it another way, to focus on what's important. And it allows you to not be distracted by stuff that's not going to add up to going home. To be able to bring all your troops home safely. Or even if it's a training event, so you can at least just get back for chow on time. Whatever the mission is, get out there and do what you were told or asked or ordered to do. That's number one.

Number two, you learn how to work in teams, especially oftentimes with people you really don't like. Life is unfair. You don't always get to pick your kickball team and get all the players that you want on your team. So sometimes you got to fight with or work with in the civilian world, people that you just don't like. But the military makes it easier to understand how to find that common ground. How to take people from all ages and stages and places in life and find commonality and to be able to build a cohesive team.

And then thirdly, whether you were in combat or not, whether you trained for weeks on end away from your family, you faced hardship, you faced stress, and you were tested to a point where hopefully, and I know for me it became true, that you learned not to sweat the small stuff. So that when you did return back to the States, sitting an extra five minutes of traffic because some knucklehead didn't pay attention, the light turned red and then green and then red again, and you missed your light. Well, maybe in other parts or earlier versions of myself in life that might've stressed me out, but I always got to think about the folks that didn't come back or that did come back and didn't have the same life that they had before they went. And so not being able to sweat the small stuff. Don't take yourself too seriously. You learn that in the Army because it's that macabre sense of humor, that even when it sucks, even when you're being shot at, even when you're in dangerous situations, people can still find a way to make jokes and to be able to find the levity in the situation. That's priceless. That's why I don't yell at people when they don't center the PowerPoint on a presentation. It's because I've seen much worse and wouldn't want anyone to have to go through that again. So my military experience taught me to focus on the mission, work well in teams, and not sweat the small stuff.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lt. Col. Joseph Kopser.

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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.