Getting It All Down

[USMCRET6391]

Leatherneck | Col Michael D. Visconage | June 26, 2006

Green smoke marked the small landing zone just 30 yards from the main reception hall of Saddam Hussein's Al Azimiyah Palace on the banks of the Tigris River. The zone was big enough for only one CH-46 Sea Knight to land. The second helicopter in the section would need to stage on a sandy spit below the flood-control wall along the river until the two could swap positions.

The air support request from 1st Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment had been for an urgent ammunition resupply. The battalion had swept into Baghdad during the early hours of darkness under heavy enemy fire to secure the Iman Abu Hanifah mosque and the Al Azimiyah Palace compound; by mid-morning they were critically short of both .50-caliber and 40 mm ammunition. The battalion now was conducting final operations to secure the area, but it also had suffered casualties and needed casualty evacuation of its wounded in addition to the ammunition resupply.

Despite sporadic small-arms fire and without attack-helicopter escort, the two aircraft from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 165, call sign “Inchon 40,” under the command of section leader Captain Larry G. Brown, would fly five trips into this still-contested section of Baghdad. Flying just above the rooftops of Baghdad's urban sprawl, they delivered more than 11,000 pounds of ammunition to 1/5, easing its critical shortage. On each lift out, both Marine and Iraqi civilian casualties were evacuated, and on the last flight out of the city, the aircraft transported at least 15 enemy prisoners of war captured during the intense fighting at the mosque earlier that day.

The First-Person Account
For historians, dates are critically important. The April 10, 2003, battle for the Abu Hanifah mosque, the actions of 1/5 and the mission of Inchon 40 will be part of Marine Corps history. For individual Marines, the date of a key engagement, a roadside bomb, providing support for Iraqi elections or the loss of a fellow warrior usually are imprinted into their memories of the fight. But how does the public in general know about this engagement or of the hundreds of others that have taken place since the start of operations in Iraq?

While portions of these stories may be covered by the civilian media or documented in formal unit-command chronologies, the Marine Corps also has a method for capturing battlefield accounts from the individual Marines who took part in the action. This first-person documentation of the fight falls to the Field History Branch, History Division, Marine Corps University and its small cadre of field historians. They are tasked with preserving it for the record, primarily through one-on-one recorded oral-history interviews conducted at the front lines.

For almost 20 years the detachment has been pivotal in documenting accounts of key Marine operations, providing unique and objective historical documentation of the events before, during and after combat. In the opening stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), the Field History Branch mobilized an unprecedented 12 historians. Since then, field historians have continued to deploy to the combat zone in order to provide continuous coverage of Marine Corps operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots in the global war on terror.

“I have been deployed three times,” said Lieutenant Colonel Nathan S. Lowrey, the executive officer of the detachment, “[to] Kosovo with the 26th MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit] in 1999, Bahrain to cover TF 58 [Task Force 58] operations in Afghanistan in 2002 and with Joint Special Operations Task Force North in northern Iraq in 2003.”

Being a successful field historian is more challenging than it might appear. Historians are expected to operate independently and to do their job without getting in the way of the units or operations they are documenting. They also must establish rapport with Marines at every level and in every type of organization to accomplish their mission.

“To do your job and do it well, you have to be where the Marines are,” said LtCol David A. Benhoff, a field historian who deployed to Iraq in 2005. “You're on your own, given broad mission-type orders and essentially need to follow the guns. You have to be able to interact with Marines of all ranks, from the commanding general to the lowest-ranking Marine driving a truck.”

Major commands, unit commanders and individual Marines are essential to this process, not only through their own internal staff efforts to submit factual, detailed command chronologies but also in their support of the small number of field historians sent out by the Field History Branch. LtCol John R. Way, another field historian who served in Iraq, noted the typical reception that he received while documenting fighting in Najaf and later in Fallujah during 2004-05.

“I was received very well and was someone the units appreciated having there,” Way said. “It's really a chance for Marines of all ranks to tell their story. It can be a cathartic process.”

Follow the Guns
As a Reserve unit, the detachment interviews and selects officers and occasionally enlisted Marines who have a combination of unique skills. Ideal candidates have operational and staff experience in their military occupational specialty and often possess advanced degrees in history or a related field. Marines also contribute a wide range of civilian experience to the unit. Over the last three years, Field History Branch personnel have included a lawyer and an archeologist, as well as several teachers, civil servants and business owners.

“We're looking for people who are interested in history, self-motivated and can operate independently,” said Lowrey, who also is tasked with screening candidates for the unit. “We're also looking for individuals who are willing to go overseas and focus on the people who are actually making history happen.”

Being a Marine first is critical to success. While the mission is ultimately an intellectual effort, field historians must travel throughout the battle space, to include forward locations, in order to obtain detailed accounts of specific engagements or the overall campaign. They do this while enduring the same risks and hardships as the units they are assigned to document.

“I've been called a combat gypsy,” Benhoff said. “You take your pack, get on a convoy and head to a unit that's engaged. You take the same risks as the unit that's involved. We've had Marines [historians] out on convoys that have been hit by SVBIEDs [Suicide Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices] in buildings struck by rockets. It's definitely not a low-risk occupation if you're doing it correctly.”

Basic Equipment
What was once done with a pencil and a pad of paper or perhaps a cassette tape recorder now is done with digital technology. Historians use laptop computers, digital recorders and digital cameras to gather information and download it to appropriate computer files. Document collection has become more a matter of searching Secure Internet Protocol Router Web sites, unit shared drives and e-mails rather than of collecting paper copies of frag orders and manifests, as was the case a few years ago.

The Brief History of the Historians
While oral history and the documentation of combat date back thousands of years, S. L. A. Marshall and several others pioneered the use of group interviews to study combat engagements during World War II. These interview-based research techniques continued during Korea and Vietnam. Oral history interviews of combatants also have been the basis for popular historical works such as Stephen Ambrose's book “Band of Brothers.”

While the Marine Corps has had a historical program for almost a century, the present Field History Branch grew out of Mobilization Training Unit (MTU) DC-7, a Reserve unit established after the Vietnam War.

After deploying four historians in support of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, a more formal Individual Mobilization Augmentee (IMA) unit was added to MTU DC-7 in the early 1990s. During the following decade, the IMA Field History Branch grew in size and became increasingly proactive. It now operates closer to the action to document historical events while details still are fresh in the minds of participants.

In Kurdistan, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, historians were deployed to cover the actions of Marines. Within weeks of the opening actions of Operation Enduring Freedom, an artist and historian from the Field History Branch were at Camp Rhino covering Marine forces in Afghanistan.

In addition to historians conducting interviews, the unit also fields Marine combat artists to document operations in a more subjective manner. Artwork depicting Marines in action has been a long-standing tradition. Marine officer and artist John W. Thomason led Marines against the Germans in World War I and became noted for his pen and ink sketches published in “Fix Bayonets,” a series of battlefield stories that he also authored.

More recently, Warrant Officer Michael D. Fay deployed once to Afghanistan and twice to Iraq since 2003 as a combat artist to prepare sketches that he will soon render into full-scale artistic works for the Marine Corps art collection.

Determining when and where to position a specialized resource can be a difficult proposition. Focusing on the lead organization in an operation is usually a good starting point. Likewise, the very nature of the action may dictate the location of the field historian.

Operations such as the air campaign over Bosnia, for example, called for placement of historians with the Marine aviation element in Italy, while stabilization operations in Haiti called for a team assigned to the ground element command. In larger deployments such as the initial phase of OIF, an attempt was made to assign historians to as many key commands as possible.

What Is the Product?
The unit's primary focus is on field operations, specifically the collection and preservation of perishable information that explains the events to Marines, the general public and historians. The measure of success is not only the quality and quantity of the work that a field historian produces but also its relevance. Adequacy of coverage is also pivotal; if historians come back with coverage of what it was like to be a Marine in the front lines but nothing on the staff planning for an operation, the job is incomplete.

Traditionally, the information collected by the Field History Branch is reviewed, cataloged and stored in the Marine Corps archives. This information, in combination with unit command chronologies, is used to write official histories of Marine Corps organizations, specific conflicts or unique periods in Marine Corps history. Recorded interviews are held in an oral-history archive and, once declassified, can be accessed by researchers.

Although the materials gathered may not be utilized for decades in some cases, the job of the field historian remains a uniquely satisfying one. In accomplishing their duties, historians encounter Marines of all ranks who have performed true acts of valor, carried out incredibly difficult tasks or simply related some element of humor or humanity that provides a new perspective on Marines in combat.

For LtCol Benhoff, the experience was typical in that he interacted regularly with Marines who met challenges with courage and resolve.

“This tour has been the highlight of my 20 years in the Marine Corps,” Benhoff said. “The access the field historian has allows us to see the operation from so many different perspectives -- from the top all the way down to the very bottom.”

Planning for the Future
Recently realigned to fall under the History Division at Marine Corps University, the Field History Branch continues to assess the best methods for gathering interviews, documents and artifacts.

Current operations, even for historians, are pushing the limits of conventional information collection, storage and retrieval technologies. Throughout OIF, commands have tended to conduct the majority of their planning and communications via the Internet (often by chat and e-mail), resulting in a large number of operational documents being temporarily stored on computer servers. With some planning and the right equipment, historians now can mine these servers for key documents describing any and all aspects of the operation. At the same time, the tremendous increase in the volume of available information requires new techniques and additional resources in order to screen this mountain of data.

Despite technological advances, the human factor remains key to future success. Commanders set the tone and facilitate the ability of the historian to gather information to tell the unit's history. Historians only can accomplish the mission if they have access to key subordinates and primary staff officers; if they are allowed to attend staff meetings, conference calls and other historically significant events; if they have access to planning and operational-related documents; and if they have the mobility to move about the command and collect individual accounts from the participating Marines.

Recording the Date
As in past wars, the flow of contemporary books and articles on the current conflict continues at a rapid pace. While some of these accounts are more complete or truthful than others, the new generation of Marine veterans can take comfort in knowing that the objective documentation of their experiences will continue throughout the duration of the global war on terror.

Just as April 10, 2003, will be remembered by the Marines of 1/5 and the CH-46 crews of Inchon 40, the dates marked in many Marines' minds are being recorded by the field historians. In the end, this documentation will allow the significance of their actions to be brought into focus as history unfolds.