An army of one: MAJ Colloton helps build Baghdad

MAJ Kim Colloton got it from the Iraqi engineer not long before she left Baghdad after five months as the Division’s FEST team leader. The textbook, about building technology and mechanical and electrical systems, was probably one of the last foreign source works available to Iraqi engineers after Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979 and sharply curtailed outside contacts.

Its presentation as a farewell gift to the L.A. District High Desert area commander speaks volumes about the gratitude she inspired among Iraqis as she pursued her mission. The team leader supervised a diverse group of Corps civilians, for whom the herding-cats analogy might be an understatement. “It was like making soup,” she recalls. “You can throw a bunch of things in and you don’t know what you’re going to get till it boils down. None of us had ever worked together before, so I was lucky to have a team that could produce results.”

She took on the specific mission to begin reconstruction of 80 police stations in Baghdad and was also asked to help facilitate construction work associated with the New Iraqi Army training facility 20 miles from the Iranian border. “Police were considered corrupt before,” the New York native explains. “Nobody trusted them, they were a bad symbol of the old regime, so their facilities were looted and burned and were in desperate need of repair. Police stations are supposed to be places where you can go to get help—not to be turned away.”

Not only did the police facilities need repair, but the entire police force needed to be retrained—and both had to occur simultaneously.

During a kaleidoscopic tour of duty, Colloton commandeered a kitchen which became famous as a video-teleconferencing center; used Saddam regime money hidden beneath lion’s cages and dog kennels to pay local contractors; lost enough weight to tighten up three belt holes (she later regained one belt hole’s worth); and found time with the team to tour the ancient city of Babylon.

She quickly came to realize the humor behind what one American general said about the whole Iraqi mission: “We’re all operating on the ragged edge of our incompetence and about to be discovered at any moment.”

Originally, the Division FEST team was headed for southern Iraq, but an 11th-hour directive sent them to Baghdad. Colloton was glad. “The main focus was Baghdad,” she says. “The money went to Baghdad. The main leaders were in Baghdad.” As a result, she believes her FEST team tended to be at the cutting edge among other Corps outfits: “They were still doing assessments while we were doing construction.”

From the outset, she and her cohorts had to wing it. Colloton, a former company commander in the 27th Engineer Battalion Combat Airborne, found herself in charge of a bunch of civilians as independent as they were competent. Used to years under the same boss and accustomed to routine, her new charges sometimes chafed at the chain of command.

One typical exchange: “You’re not my supervisor!” “Yes, I am! This is no joke! We’re at war!”

She relied on one-on-one sit-downs to defuse tensions and explain how things had to work. She credits her 11 years in the Army with preparing her for the managerial challenge. “There was no one answer for everybody,” she relates. “Each person had different reactions to what they were comfortable and uncomfortable with. It was a dangerous environment and everybody’s safety was at risk. We had to share information, to synthesize it so we were all moving in the same direction.”

Take moving, for instance. The FEST team first camped in one of the presidential palaces, then were assigned to trailers, finally to the Al-Rashid Hotel. Each move brought more creature comforts, such as air conditioning, but some of the civilians found the drill unacceptable and became agitated. For Colloton, who has pulled tours at Fort Bragg, N.C., Fort Hood, Tex., and South Korea, packing and unpacking were routine. “The pace of airborne operations is fast and furious,” she says. “Long hours, you gotta be flexible and you gotta keep up. The difficulty was trying to transfer that knowledge to civilians.”

In refurbishing the devastated police stations, Colloton, who holds a master’s from Stanford, collaborated closely with Iraqi civilian police, military police, the Ministry of Interior, facility engineers and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). “We were trying to get the Iraqi money from the CPA bank accounts back into the hands of the Iraqis—we needed to get the economy going and get them back to work, so then the military police could go back to doing security.”

She had one close call. While driving one of the team’s Suburbans, she saw a figure roll a green object toward the vehicle. Grenades are green. “Fortunately, nothing happened, but that was the kind of stuff that happened,” she shrugs. “You become almost comfortable with the sound of gunfire—it was the other stuff I kept looking for.”

As a curtain call, after she had extended her tour by a month, Colloton organized the first-ever (at least during Saddam’s tenure) conference among Iraqi engineers. Titled the First National Conference for Construction and Partnering in Iraq, the event was held in Baghdad Sept. 8-9.

During the bad old days, Baghdad dictated all policies, but the conference sought to teach those attending that each governance (province) could now spend its own money on its own projects. Engineers arrived, for instance, from three Kurdistan governances—the first time they’d ever been invited to participate in such a meeting in the capital. At first, a hostile atmosphere prevailed, but by the end of the conference, “people were comfortable with one another,” Colloton says. “They were building relationships in the partnering sessions to work together.”

Colloton evaluates Iraq’s prospects with the gimlet eye of the jumpmaster she once was for paratroopers over North Carolina. “They (Iraqis) have a lot of things to rehabilitate, rebuild and perform maintenance on to get the infrastructure up where it should be,” she says. “Water and sewers in Baghdad need an upgrade to support any future growth. We’ll help them get more organized, more contracting procedures in place.

“We need to give them the ability to get the best quality supplies to rebuild their country. It’ll take a couple of years, and then they’ll be ready to go on their own.”

The daylong trip to the ancient city of Babylon clearly enchanted Colloton. “I realized then that Iraq is special, it is where the Garden of Eden was supposed to have been, right where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers come together. The history is really rich.”

Before she went there, Colloton read the Book of Daniel as background. In it, there’s a verse that captures the spirit of the Coalition mission to the Middle East:

“…And for the majesty that (God) gave him, all people, nations and languages, trembled and feared him; whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept alive; and whom he would he set up; and whom he would he put down. But when his heart was lifted up, and his mind hardened in pride, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him.”