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Jack Senneff, now an MBA student at Washington University, led 150 soldiers through Iraq as a company commander, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, Fourth Infantry.“As cheesy as it sounds, I just had a sense that this was what I needed to do—some kind of service, some way to give back,” says Jack Senneff, who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He left for Iraq right after 9/11.
They sat on the Iraqi border for almost half a year. “I think there’d been this upwelling of ‘Hey, we need to do something,’” he says. He flew home in 2002—then back to Iraq in 2003. “When we flew to Kuwait, the lead element was already in Baghdad,” he says. “My division moved up behind them really quickly and took the lead.” They fought their way north through Samarra and Tikrit before linking up with the 173rd Airborne, which had already jumped into Kirkuk. “Along the way, we moved in tactical formation, in Humvees we called California Cruisers,” he says. “We took the nylon doors and top off, and I got my mechanics to weld a bar to the frame, and a guy would stand between the seats with a machine gun. We made different mounting systems over the year, got better and better at it.”
Others have raged about that early, inadequate equipment, now that the newer Humvees have thick bulletproof doors, thicker base plates to diffuse explosions and turret mounts to protect the gunner. “The only frustration I had was with myself for not having thought about it earlier,” Senneff says. “We could have worked on those mounts while we were still at Fort Carson.”
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He’s quick to take responsibility. All of it. “My biggest fault was not saying earlier, ‘Hey, sir, what do we do after that?’” he says. “We overcame resistance, seized a Republican guard compound, seized an airfield in Tikrit, forced surrender of a large element at the Iranian border. Then, up and down the chain of command, we literally said, ‘This was what we had planned—what now?’ My battalion commander said, ‘Guys, I don’t know. Let’s get some presence out there, clean up any resistance that’s still out there, maybe do some rebuilding.’ My company was sent to Hawijah for what my commander thought would be a couple of weeks; he thought the war was about to end. Ten months later, we came home.”
By then, Senneff had learned to split his personality: “Half the time I was thinking tactically, and the other half I was working with local Iraqis to build a new government, hold limited elections, build a new police force, put in a water treatment system.” How’d they fund it? “I’ll probably be arrested for this, but we took the money from captured insurgents. I have no idea if it was legal.”
He spent his first months puzzling over social and political undercurrents; as he got to know Iraqis, he realized the divisions weren’t what he’d expected. “The way people align themselves is much more tribal,” he explains. “We had two major tribes, al-Jaburi and al-Alabati, and then clans, families. In many cases, the tribes bridge the ethnic fault lines of Kurd versus Sunni
and Shiite.”
Originally headed for a military career, Senneff has since changed his mind. (Almost 36 percent of his graduating class at West Point left after their first tour of duty, says Joe Tombrello, the deputy public affairs officer at the academy.)
The worst moments, Senneff says, were when soldiers under him got wounded. “Just one example: I had a soldier lose a leg with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. He’s an awesome guy, a schoolteacher now, incredibly smart. Earlier that day I was going to all the foxholes, checking on everybody, and he and his buddy were off duty playing chess in the bottom of
the foxhole.”
When Senneff came home, he ran a gantlet of therapists screening for PTSD, but he figured he’d find his own way to deal with it. “I was very worried that I wouldn’t seem normal,” he admits. “It’s almost surreal being back. I was working at my new job, in an office, in a suit. There was a big boom—something fell off a truck—and I literally got down on the floor. The guy I was with was like, ‘Wow, dude.’ But it’s muscle memory.”
