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- [00:01]
Elliot Ackerman
Over the course of the day, they figured out we were in this one little store and slowly surrounded us. And there was one doorway in and out of the candy store. And by this point, too, we'd also taken some casualties. And I kind of stuck my head out the door and immediately a pkm, that's like a light machine gun kind of ba ba ba ba, like right up the alleyway. And they had it all, had it all dialed in. And I said, you know, if we go out that way, it's suicide. So we had to figure out how to get out of this house that only had one door. And I had a great corporal in our platoon who was a combat engineer. It's like an explosives guy. And he was like, ah, sir. You know, like, I think if we. I got a bunch of C4. This is like a pretty stable house. If we put a bunch of C4 against one wall and we all go to the other side of the house, I can blow out the back wall. We can just go out that way. I said, all right, let's try it. You know, we put a bunch of C4 on the back wall, said a prayer that when we blew it up, the whole house wasn't going to collapse on top of us. And we did. It created a hole, and we kind of came out that way and continued fighting south into the city. For the rest.
- [01:01]
Robert Irvine
From foreign policy and with honor, welcome to I Serve, where we hear stories from service members about their time in uniform. I'm Robert Irvine. Elie ackerman served as U.S. marine for eight years, with multiple tours of duty in the Middle east and Southwest Asia. He received a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart for his time in combat. But his path to the Marine Corps was a little bit unusual. Ackermann didn't come from a military family. He grew up in London, spending many of his afternoons skateboarding on the south banks of the River Thames. But longing for a purpose and meaning in his life drove him to enlist. This is Ackerman.
- [01:44]
Elliot Ackerman
I did grow up overseas, and I think that gave me a little bit of a perspective about what it meant to be an American outside of America. So that sort of gave me a desire to serve rooted in that appreciation. I also had this idea that I wanted a job, or whether I was good at my job or bad at my job really mattered. I wanted to count in that sort of way. And I also wanted a lot of responsibility at a relatively young age, which is something you certainly get in the service. And I certainly founded the Marine Corps And I would say finally, too. I'd always had this innate interest in the military. I was kind of like that kid who never really stopped playing with his GI Joes. So the combination of sort of all of those impulses led me to want to serve in the military and ultimately led me into the Marine Corps. But at the time that I made that decision, service was a little bit of an abstraction. This was pre 9 11, and while I was in college going through the ROTC program that I was enrolled in, that's when September 11 happened. And so the nature of my service became very different. I went from thinking I'd probably be joining a peacetime military to realizing that I was entering a wartime one. And by the time I was finishing my training and heading out the door to meet my first platoon, I already knew I was going to Iraq, which at that point was a hot war. So it was really more of just a shift of expectations in terms of the intensity of what you're gonna be involved in. But ultimately, I mean, I signed up. I signed up to be a Marine. And so the fact that the mission had become much more immediate, it wasn't concerning. I felt ready and trained and was happy that if those were the conditions, I was glad that I would be able to be a Marine at the highest level with the most intense mission. But it certainly caused me to shift my assumptions about what I would be doing. My first unit was an infantry battalion called the 1st Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment. And, you know, that's about 800 Marines. And these units are always in different cycles of getting ready to deploy, being deployed, coming home from deployment. In those cycles, Marines are leaving. They're going to different units. New Marines are coming in. So it's not like the unit is ever just this fixed group of folks. So I show up in my first infantry battalion as they're getting ready to deploy. So new Marines are showing up all the time from, boom, boot camp. You have some of the older Marines who maybe they'd been on the last deployment, but there's this sort of churn of people showing up, the unit reconstituting itself. So when I showed up to my first platoon, I actually got there a little bit late. So most of the platoon was already there. But the newest guys, the youngest guys who just graduated boot camp, they'd maybe been there a month and a half or something, and they didn't all know each other because they came from different boot camp classes. There is this question always in any unit, how do you create the type of cohesion that allows a group of people to accomplish a very challenging and dangerous mission. And a huge part of that is the training you do, the time you spend together, building up the trust that you all know each other. And then in difficult situations when orders are given, the people receiving those orders trust that whoever is giving them has their best interests in mind, is someone who's competent, and then they can execute those orders with a full heart. My leadership style when I was 24 years old in command of a rifle platoon that was mostly 1920 year olds and 21 year olds was a very different leadership style than when I was 28, 29 year old captain and my special operations team was a bunch of staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants and very, very senior Marine special operators. So those are two different leadership styles. I think one thing that probably unites them is given the situation as a leader, you sort of know you have to walk a line. And that line is, you know, your Marines, those underneath you, they have to know you and you have to let them in enough so they feel like they can trust you. So that when they get the order in the middle of the firefight, that maybe doesn't make sense to them. They're like, well, I know the lieutenant, he's a good guy, he's never led me wrong. I'm going to follow this and go do it. So you have to let them in. They have to get to know you, but you also have to be apart. There's always going to be a little bit of distance. They don't want you to be their friend. You have to understand how to be both part of something, but also to be a part of it. And that balancing act, that achieving a perfect sense of balance between those two equities is what I was always after. We arrived in Iraq in my first deployment in June of 2004, and probably the biggest event that occurred over that seven month deployment was the second battle of Fallujah, which happened in November of 2004. So we had been in country, you know, for four and a half months by the time the battle begins and had been fighting, you know, my platoon had already had some tough moments and lost some guys. But the biggest event of that deployment was this battle of Fallujah, which was the largest urban battle the Marine Corps had fought since Hue city in Vietnam. It was a kind of classic pitched battle in a city. The entire time we were in Iraq, you know, we, we knew that Fallujah was a problem. Everybody knew that it was a problem from, you know, the most senior general down to the most junior private first class. And we knew it was very likely that over the course of that deployment, we would be called on, along with some of the other battalions that were in country, to clear out the city and fight this battle. So our preparation was. First of all, we were marines, so we're all trained, and we all know how to do. We had been in Iraq at that point for months, fighting. So by the time we're actually in this battle, our platoon, our unit cohesion is very, very good. Everybody knows each other. Everyone's been through some tough moments together and knows they can trust each other. And at that point, then we kind of received our orders for where we were going to go in the early days of the battle, what our objectives would be, how we would tackle those objectives. Objectives. And then we rehearsed. And for us, our first objective was the government center right in the middle of the city. And we rehearsed seizing that government center for probably about a week or two before we did it. But that was Only the first 24 hours of the battle. Then after we seized the government center, we just kept fighting. But at that point, you're sort of doing the equivalent, of course, calling an audible day to day. And that's something, you know, as marines are, we're very good at doing. So when we moved on the government center, there are three companies in infantry battalion. So two of our sister companies had fought about 500 meters into the city to sort of open up a corridor. And our company was in what we call Amtrak space, like armor protection, personnel carriers, amphibious armored personnel carriers. And we then pushed through this corridor 500 meters, went about 500 meters further into the city, and in the middle of the night, seized the government center. And we were sort of prepared for the fact that it could, you know, it would be held, it would be defended, and it really wasn't. And we cleared it out very quickly. It was basically empty. And then our sister company spent the next day kind of trying to fight up, to get even with us, because at that point, we were the deepest in the city of Fallujah. And then when the sun came up, as they started fighting towards us, all the insurgents realized now we were kind of much deeper than they thought we were, and they started fighting us. So we sort of took it in the middle of the night. No one was there. Caught them by surprise. And by the next morning, we were in a run and gunfight for the entire day, sort of surrounding the government center. It's very claustrophobic. Everyone is right on top of other, each each other. And it's a three dimensional battlefield. So, you know, you're looking at buildings above you, the street level, and it requires a great deal of coordination. So I mean, for instance, if I want to call in an airstrike in an urban environment, there's a lot of de confliction that has to happen to make sure that you're not going to hurt any friendly units. And that can be a real challenge. You know, my experience, experience of, you know, fighting in Fallujah, it was very much sort of block by block, house by house, and a real challenge because oftentimes insurgents would, you know, you would think you advanced and cleared out an area and then they would just move behind you and reoccupy an area that you thought was safe. There was sort of a first phase of that battle, which was about a week, which was us fighting from north to south of the city. And then as we were doing that fighting, all the marines in my platoon, you know, we would talk about this, hey, sir, like, what's gonna happen when we get to the south end of the city? Because they all knew we hadn't killed everybody. You know, there were still insurgents in the city. I kind of said, you know, I don't know, your guess is as good as mine. But I think what they were afraid of and what they anticipated was that the second we got to the south end of the city, we just have to turn around, go back and re clear in the direction that we came from. So when we got to the south end of the sea, that's basically exactly what happened. Got to the south end of the city. We were all assigned a quadra sector. Every building in that sector on a map was given a number. We were just told, go every day and just clear out every single building to make sure nobody's in any of these buildings. We spent about a month doing that early on in the battle. The second day, as our entire battalion is advancing south, our platoon wound up being the southernmost platoon of the battalion. And there's a main highway that crosses Fallujah from east to west called Highway 10. And if you talk to many veterans of the battle and you ask them, you know, where, where were you when you crossed Highway 10? Everybody remembers it was sort of like going over the top in the first World War. Think like a wide, multi lane highway in the middle of city, you know, to run across it under, you know, under fire. But before the Battalion crossed Highway 10 early that morning, they wanted to get one platoon on the south side. So we almost had over early to kind of be eyes and ears. And so our platoon was given that mission. We crossed and set up shop a little bit deeper into the city than we thought. We would be in what was like a convenience store, which got called the candy store. And as the sun came up that morning, the insurgents didn't realize that we were that far south. And we kind of just saw them kind of walking up, you know, to what they thought were their fighting positions, and they. In the morning and then we engaged them. But over the course of the day, they figured out we were in this one little store and slowly surrounded us.
- [12:42]
Robert Irvine
You're listening to I Serve A Production of With Honor and Foreign Policy. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Iserve A Production of Foreign Policy and With Honour. I'm Robert Irvine. We return to the story of Elia Ackermann, who was on a mission to clear out the city of Fallujah when he found himself pinned down inside a candy store.
- [13:12]
Elliot Ackerman
By that afternoon, the entire battalion was still trying to cross Highway 10. We were kind of cut off at that point, and we finally needed to link up with the battalion as they were crossing. And there was one doorway in and out of the candy store. And by this point, too, we'd also taken some casualties. And I went down to that doorway to see if we could get out, and I kind of stuck my head out the door and immediately a pkm, that's like a light machine gun kind of ba, ba, ba, ba, like right up the alleyway. And he sort of had it all dialed in. I was like, well, there's no way we're getting out of that door. So we had to figure out how to get out of this house that only had one door. And I had a great corporal in our platoon, a combat engineer. It's like an explosives guy. And he was like, yeah, sir. You know, like, I think if we. I got a bunch of C4. This is like a pretty stable house. If we put a bunch of C4 against one wall and we all go to the other side of the house, I can blow out the back wall. We can just go out that way and always try to listen to the best idea. And that was the best idea anybody had. It was sort of certainly better than the idea of just running out the front door. Said, all right, let's try it. You know, we put a bunch of C4 on the back wall, you know, said a prayer that when we blew it up, the whole house wasn't going to Collapse on top of us. And we did. It created a hole, and we kind of came out that way and continued fighting south into the city for the rest of the day. Combat, it's a marathon, you know, isn't really a sprint necessarily. A lot of this stuff is taking place over hours and days. And the flute battle was a month. So there are certainly moments and minutes of extreme intensity. But again, it is going on after a while. And then there are little details that sometimes you remember. Like, so, yes, for instance, after the second day of the battle in that candy store incident, combat is so loud just to be heard, you'd have to sort of yell. And I got to the end of the day, and I lost my voice. And so for the remainder of that first week of fighting, anytime I got on the radio, it sounded like, is this Avenger? What? You know, I had this very whispery voice. I'd lost it a bit. Little second day from just from yelling and trying to get people to move around. You know, Other things you remember is people have sometimes asked me, you know, what's it like to be in combat or combat like that? And I say, actually, my biggest sensory memory that I had from many of the firefights I've been in is of my boots being wet. And that sensory memory is. I would often get to the point in a fight where a bunch of things are happening and you're just so immediate in the moment, dealing with everything that's happening. Then I look down and maybe three or four hours have passed, and I've been running around and my boots are wet because I've sweat so much. I've completely sweat through my clothes, sweat through my trousers, sweat into my boots. I only bring it up because there's a physicality to combat that can sometimes be overlooked. Just how much you're asking of your body without even thinking about it, because your mind is so preoccupied with everything else, you don't even realize how much you're asking your body physically in those moments. You know, when I came back from Fallujah, you know, there was very much a war on, and I wanted to stay in the Marine Corps. I had this ambition of serving in special operations, so I wanted to get to one of those units. And I found my way into 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, which is our special operations unit, and wanted to continue on with the mission. So there for me was a sort of very obvious progression from, okay, I was in the infantry. I had a good run in the infantry, Felt like I did a good job. Now I want to Try out for the next team, which is this special operations unit inside the Marine Corps. I was able to go there, have a positive experience there. I'm proud of the work our team did when we were in Afghanistan. And then there was yet another opportunity to go do that same type of special operations work in the intelligence community. And so I wanted to jump on that opportunity. So for me, at each step, it felt like a natural progression in my service and then also just professionally in the trajectory of a soldier Marine's career, and particularly when you get into special operations. What I at least came to realize was that the kind of combat parts of my job, the tactics, the shoot, move, communicate parts of my job, increasingly became the least complex parts of my job. Once you've done it for a while, you kind of realize there's only so many ways to launch the raid. There's only so many ways to go out on the patrol. I understand this. I've got this. The more complex parts of your job, the ones that also become more interesting, are the ones that are much more entrepreneurial. And people don't often connect the word entrepreneurial with military service, but it's extremely entrepreneurial. So by the time I was with the Marine Raiders and later on at CIA, the parts of my job that were the most dynamic, the most challenging, were the parts that involved negotiating with local tribal leaders or negotiating our internal bureaucracy to get funding for a project that was very important for our team, or, you know, figuring out how to talk to other commanders or commanders of helicopter units to get the types of resourcing we need in order to go after the high end targets we wanted to go after. So those are the parts of the job that I think required the most of us as special operators. And we're very, very entrepreneurial. But oftentimes when we think of special operators, we just think of guys with, you know, night vision goggles on, coming in the dead of night and, you know, shooting everybody on a raid. And obviously the tactics of the job are important and you have to be proficient in them. But the most dynamic parts of the job, the ones that ask the most of you intellectually, emotionally, are usually the ones that are outside of the specifics that occur on the battlefield. And that's why they rely on you as special operators. They're relying on your judgment and your creativity, and that's what they're screening for.
- [18:51]
Robert Irvine
After assignment of service, Elliot switched careers to become a journalist. He wound up writing a number of articles and books, including Places and Names on War, Revolution and Returning in that memoir, he wound up making an unlikely connection.
- [19:09]
Elliot Ackerman
Late 2013, I'd been traveling to southern Turkey, and I'd been reporting on the war in Syria, and I was traveling there with a couple Americans who had founded an ngo. And working for the them were a few local Syrians. And one was a guy named. His name was Abed. And I was sitting in our sort of office house one night at the end of the day, and Abed had been. He spent the day down at this refugee camp called the Chakale refugee camp, this little wisp of a town right on the Turkish Syrian border. I mean, the town's actually bisected by a set of railroad tracks. North of the railroad tracks is Turkey, south is Syria. So Abed drives up at the end of the day.
- [19:47]
Robert Irvine
Day.
- [19:47]
Elliot Ackerman
That night, while I'm in the kitchen, kind of comes in. He's, like, covered in dirt. He spent the whole day out in this sort of dusty refugee camp. And Abed is a sort of very urbane Damascene man, speaks his English with a British accent. And he comes in and he's like, oh, hi, Elliot. I was like, hey, Abed, you know, sir, how was your day? He's like, oh, you know, I was in a chocolate refugee camp today, Elliot, and I met this guy who I really think you should meet. I was like, okay, well, who's the guy? What's his deal? He's like, well, he fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq. I just feel like the two of you would really get along. And so I sort of laughed with him. But he, you know, he explained to me that he met this guy, his name was Abu Hassar. He'd fought in Iraq during the insurgency. And Abbott sort of pitched me on the idea, well, why don't you go down and you could interview them? And I was like, well, I'd make a good piece. And the idea of the piece was basically two veterans of the Iraq war meet for a cup of tea. But we fought on opposite sides of the war. And so I said, abdul, what do you think I should tell him? Should I tell him that this former Marine special operator wants to, you know, come out and meet him? And I was like, no, that's probably not a good idea. That might spook him. And I said, what should we say? Why don't we just tell him that you're a journalist who's interested in Iraq, and we'll just see where the conversation goes from there. So, you know, we went down and we met him, picked him up. We went and sat down in this cafe. And we went and had tea and Abed was translating for me because I don't, I don't speak Arabic. And if you can remember, we're sitting kind of at this tea shop, like at a. Basically like a picnic table. And, you know, we're talking, we're talking about where he came from. You know, he grew up in a place called Deir EZ Zor in eastern Syria. He was very involved in running guns and fighters into Alhambar province where I fought. And the more that we talked, we built up a rapport. I then sort of said, well, actually, you know, I fought in Iraq as a Marine. He kind of stuck, smiled, said, you know, I thought that was probably the case. And we continued our conversation and the whole time we were having the conversation too, I realized that, you know, as Abu Hussar was sort of talking about the jihad and how much the jihad met with me, it was really annoying, Abed, because Abed had been a democratic activist in the uprising, the Arab Spring in 2011. And at that point, you know, he really felt that his revolution had been hijacked by guys like Abu Hassar. So the more we're talking and the more Abed is getting a little bit annoyed, he finally excuses himself, says, you're not going to go to the restroom. I need a break. We've been out for a couple hours at this point, and I had this notebook between us where I'd sort of drawn a map of Iraq and Syria and Al Anbar Province and just some place names to figure out where he'd been moving around. And when Abed left as intensely as Abu Hassar and I had been talking before, suddenly it kind of got really awkward between us, you know, like the way like we were like two 13 year olds on a date, like we couldn't communicate. And he took my pencil and he goes to one of the places I put on the map and he put some numbers by the place. I kind of looked at the numbers and I was like, oh, my God, like, that's a date. And then he hands me the pencil and I recognized what he was doing. He's like, oh. He wanted me to put a date of where I'd been at the same place. And so kind of like how, you know, we'd once chased each other around the country. Our hands were chasing each other around these maps as you put dates next to place names, trying to figure out if we'd been at the same place at the exact same time. And sitting there with him doing that, I kind of recognized that that was a language, a language of places and dates, that even if Abed had been there, he wouldn't have really been able to translate. And that in some ways, just through that experience, even though we fought on opposite sides, was an experience that had defined both me and Abu Hassar. And we were connected through that experience. As much as we might disagree on politics, you know, we've both been there around the world the same time, and that experience had defined us. Even though we fought on opposite sides of the war, the fact that the war was a shared experience allowed us to sit down with one another and maybe not agree on everything, certainly not agree on everything, but at least allowed us to sit down with one another. There is a real power in shared experience. And whether that is through military service or other types of service, we don't have a society if we don't share anything. And we have to figure out what we share. And oftentimes a good place to start in terms of figuring out what we share is, well, how do we contribute back to the society from which we both come, from which we all come? And that's through service. But service definitely shouldn't be only thought of as military service. Teachers serve, physicians serve. I mean anyone who's doing anything for their community writ large, people in church groups serve, and military members serve. But I think we as a society, it is important for us to be continually aware of the way our social contract with one another might be changing over the years and to also be aware when it is not changing for the better. How we course correct to have a social construct that enables us to have a healthy democratic society. And I think service is certainly and has to be a part of that. Democracy without service isn't really much of a democracy.
- [25:18]
Robert Irvine
Ellie Ackerman is a former Marine raider and a CIA special activities officer. His books include 2034, a novel of the the Next World War, Red Dress in Black and White and Waiting for Eden. You can find the links to his books in the show. Notes I Serve is a production of Foreign Policy and With Honor and our show is produced by Claudia Tate and edited by Rob Sachs. Our production team also includes Susan Forbes and Brian Lee. Special thanks to Elliot Ackerman for joining us. For more great stories of heroism, check out Courage Can Save Us, a brand new book from With Honor CEO and co founder Ry Barcott. Available now. And for more about what I'm up to, visit the Robert Irvine foundation where we're supporting the physical and mental well being of America's heroes and their families through food, wellness and community programs. Next week on I Serve.
- [26:21]
Unknown Interviewee
I was walking down Walnut street in Philadelphia and I saw a partially black Washington number. And it was the deputy chief staff at the White House saying, hey, can you come to Mar A Lago tomorrow to interview for the job as national security advisor?
- [26:34]
Robert Irvine
That's next time on I Serve. I'm Rob Irvine, and thanks for listening.