Though steeped in pedigree, Mark Odom '87 never thought he'd enter the military. So how did he end up leading battlefield-shifting missions in Iraq?
By Michael R. Gordon
Photography by Benjamin Lowt/VII Network
Standing on the roof of the combat outpost, Mark Odom ’87 peered through the scope on his M-4 rifle at the lush landscape on the outskirts of Hawr Rajab. His squadron had never driven into the town without coming under fire, but he hoped this trip would be a first.
It was August 4, 2007, a typically sweltering summer morning in Iraq, and Odom had risen before dawn to prepare for the day’s mission. He had strapped on body armor and Nomex fire-resistant gloves. He had donned ballistic glasses to protect against flying debris. And finally he had affixed his Kevlar helmet. It was standard kit for Iraq, and no soldier went outside the wire without it.
There was a time when Odom wanted to be a lawyer.
He had majored in political science at Middlebury and gave serious thought to attending law school. Many of his friends had followed this path and had become successful attorneys. Yet Odom did something he never thought he would do: follow his father into the Army. And so here he was, decked out in protective armor and scanning a dangerous landscape in a war-torn country in the Middle East.
I first met Lieutenant Colonel Odom last summer in Iraq, when I was embedded with the troops for the New York Times. As the commander of the 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment, Odom was at the center of one of the most important initiatives to stabilize the country since the invasion: the effort to reach out to Sunni tribes whose ranks included former insurgents.
This new initiative had begun in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, where the tribes had joined forces with the American military to take on Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni insurgent group that was overwhelmingly Iraqi but had foreign leadership. The alignment had spread to Baghdad and points north and south of the capital, including Hawr Rajab, a town that sat astride the infiltration routes Sunni insurgents used to sneak into the Iraqi capital. And Hawr Rajab was squarely within Odom’s area of operations.
On the first day of August, Odom had huddled on the outskirts of the town with two local sheiks (and former insurgents) who had decided to make common cause with the Americans. As they pored over a map of the area, his soldiers took fingerprints and retina scans from the volunteers the sheiks brought with them (the data would be entered into an intelligence database and used to ferret out known terrorists and killers).
Three days later, on August 4, Odom was set to lead two platoons into Hawr Rajab to distribute food and, thus, cement the relationship with the former insurgents. His hope for a fire-free mission, however, went unfulfilled. Within the span of just a few hours, four roadside bombs exploded. They were massive blasts—created by a chemical concoction similar to that used by Timothy McVeigh in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing—and one struck Odom’s Humvee, flipping it over onto its roof.
Several soldiers worked to extract Odom and his gunner from the crumpled vehicle. They used an M-88 wrecker to right it, attached a metal cable to the door to yank it free, and pulled Odom and his gunner out. They were laid out by the side of the road, given emergency first aid, driven to the nearby checkpoint, and medevaced by helicopter to the Combat Surgical Hospital in Baghdad.
At the hospital, Odom was handed a cell phone so he could call his wife before he went into surgery. He reached her voicemail, though, so he rang his father and told him that he was injured but would be okay.
The Army doctors in Baghdad attended to his broken nose; a metal plate was later inserted in his broken left forearm in an operation in Germany. In all, eight soldiers were wounded in the day’s fighting and three killed—the three who had rushed to remove the jammed door on Odom’s vehicle only to strike another “improvised explosive device,” as the military refers to the bombs.
I did not see Odom again until nearly six months later when we met in Alexandria, Virginia, and I asked him about the decisions that led him to join the Army and put him on the road to Hawr Rajab.
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At first glance, it might seem that Odom was preordained to enter the military. His father, after all, is William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general who, during the course of his career, served as a defense attaché in Moscow, as the Army’s senior intelligence officer, and as the director of the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications.
Mark Odom’s early elementary school education was spent at the Anglo-American School in Moscow. As a young kid, he ran around Spaso House, the residence for the American ambassador, where he played football with the ambassador’s son and his friends.
During those tense days of the Cold War, the Americans were regularly monitored and followed. One day, a five-gallon gas can that the Odoms kept on their ninth-floor balcony disappeared: the assumption was that it had been taken to ensure the Americans could not outrun the KGB. It was also a world in which foreign policy was a staple of dinner-table conversation. Family guests included prominent journalists like the Pulitzer Prize-winner Hedrick Smith and other veteran Russia-watchers.
After Moscow, the Odom family moved to West Point, where William Odom taught Soviet politics at the United States Military Academy. A few years later, General Odom was made an aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser.
Brzezinski’s association with the Odoms predated
Washington—Odom’s father and mother met while taking one of Brzezinski’s classes at Columbia University—and he is still a family friend. Odom took an inscribed volume of Brzezinski’s most recent book to Iraq. (“To Lieutenant Colonel Mark Odom—On whom we depend for our country’s second chance!” the inscription reads.)
Odom also came to know Samuel Huntington, the Harvard University political scientist and author of The Soldier and the State, a landmark tome on civil-military relations, who also did a stint at the White House during the Carter years.
Yet for all this, Odom says his father never glamorized the military or encouraged him to join the Army. “I was never pushed to do anything in the military,” he recalled. “In the back of my father’s mind was a great concern that if I came into the military I would have to live with his successes and failures, the positive and the negative, ‘the shadow I have created for you,’ and that this would probably not be a good thing. He was not in favor of it, but he only said so later.”
During his first year at Middlebury, Mark Odom gave little thought to joining the military. He says his most influential professors were an American literature scholar (John McWilliams) and an international relations guru (Michael Kraus, a political scientist and Czech émigré). It wasn’t until a football teammate, Kevin
Conroy ’86, worked out an arrangement to participate in the University of Vermont’s ROTC program and undergo summer Army training at Fort Knox that Odom began to consider the military as an option. (Conroy later went into the Army’s Special Forces.)
With both an ingrained sense that the military was one way to serve the country and a desire to lighten the tuition load for his parents, Odom followed Conroy’s lead. Yet military service seemed to be more of an interlude than a calling: he was still thinking about heading to law school once his enlistment was up.
However strong these thoughts were, they began to fade along the coastal plains of North Carolina. After graduating from
Middlebury and undergoing basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, Odom was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, the major U. S. Army installation in North Carolina that is the celebrated home for paratroopers and Special Operations forces.
Several of Odom’s ROTC instructors at UVM had fought as Army Rangers in Grenada, and Rangers, Odom found, were unlike any people he had encountered in the Army. Their specialty was capturing enemy airfields and conducting raids; they trained intensively; and their noncommissioned officers were among the most experienced infantry officers in the military. When his brigade commanders at the 82nd suggested that Odom consider Ranger school, he didn’t hesitate. After enduring marches through swamps, helicopter insertions, and other exercises, he served as a platoon leader and company executive officer for the 1st Ranger battalion. He subsequently went to Korea as the commander of an infantry company equipped with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and later did two stints as a company commander.
The education of a military officer customarily includes studying at a war college, and Odom chose the British military’s Joint Services Staff College, studying there in 1999 and 2000. While in England, he wrote a thesis on NATO’s intervention in the Balkans. Drawing on Huntington and Robert Dahl, he assessed the chances that Bosnia and Kosovo could transition to a truly democratic form of government. The prospects, he concluded, were not good.
What he did not know at the time was that the Balkans posed a relatively easy challenge compared with the nation-building burden the United States military was about to encounter in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
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In 2003, Mark Odom was stationed in Vicenza, Italy, serving as the chief operations officer for the 173rd Airborne Brigade during the lead-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Traditionally, the 173rd focused on training foreign militaries in Eastern Europe and North Africa, but it would have a key role to play in Iraq.
The Americans wanted to keep the pressure on Saddam
Hussein’s divisions in the north and also to stabilize the oil-rich area after the Iraqi leader was swept from power. The Turks’ fear was that the Kurds would lay claim to oil fields near Kirkuk and use it as the economic foundation for an independent Kurdish state, a breakaway region that would reinforce secessionist tendencies among Turkey’s own Kurdish population.
Early that April, the soldiers from the 173rd parachuted into northern Iraq, a region of snow-topped hills that appeared to jut up out of nowhere. “It was like a scene out of a J. R. R. Tolkien novel,” Odom said. Arriving after several days of snow and rain, some of the soldiers found themselves knee-deep in mud. The brigade’s equipment was flown in over three days in wide-body C-17 transport planes that landed and took off without the benefit of landing lights.
Under the weight of American bombing, artillery raids, Kurdish assaults, and reports that the American forces were rapidly advancing, Saddam’s forces began to crack. Three thousand Kurdish Peshmerga troops raced south to Kirkuk, and the soldiers from the 173rd went along to protect the oil infrastructure and to try to maintain some semblance of order.
When the Americans arrived at the airfield outside of the city, it was clear that Saddam’s forces had beaten a hasty retreat. The anti-aircraft artillery was still loaded with ammunition, and uneaten meals were left behind. The bigger problem was stopping the looting and preventing a vastly larger Kurdish force from evicting the Arabs in the town. “We put companies out in the city to try to gain control of the situation,” Odom recalled. “The time we had spent training troops in Tunisia, Morocco, Poland, and Kosovo had really prepared the brigade. When the soldiers saw a vehicle headed the wrong way, the first instinct was not to blow it away.” A modicum of order was established, but the political disposition of Kirkuk continues to be a lingering problem today.
After the mission in northern Iraq, Odom rotated out of the country, transitioning to the Pentagon for a brief stint with the Joint Chiefs of Staff before being ordered to Fort Richardson, Alaska, with the task of standing up a new squadron. The unit had originally been established to augment the United States’ capability to respond quickly to military situations in the Pacific, but it was clear that it was headed to the Middle East.
The United States military had virtually no excess capacity: everything was earmarked for deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Odom started with a staff of 10 and the understanding that within a year he would be back in the war. “It was not a question of if,” he recalled. “It was a question of when.”
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Iraq had changed since the first heady months of the invasion when General Tommy Franks and the White House anticipated a quick and decisive victory. A Sunni insurgency was deeply entrenched. Many of the militants were carrying out their bombings and terrorist attacks under the banner of Al Qaeda. Sectarian killings were on the rise. The nation appeared to be edging toward a full-blown civil war. (And during this time, Odom’s father, an opponent of the war from the start, had emerged as a vociferous critic of the Bush administration and was urging that American troops withdraw.)
Mark Odom’s squadron numbered only 500, including attached military units, when it arrived in Iraq in October 2006—and it was given an immense 100-square-kilometer area to manage. The population was tolerating, if not supporting, the insurgents, and the region was rife with deep-buried bombs. One was so potent that it destroyed a heavily armored Buffalo mine-clearing vehicle, killing its crew. The crater after the blast was 10 meters wide and 20 meters deep.
Early on, Odom’s squadron had a rough go of it; photographs of the squadron’s growing list of fallen soldiers—its “Denali Heroes”—were prominently displayed at its field headquarters at Falcon Base south of the city. When I first arrived at the base, I was ushered to Odom’s second-floor office, which contained the standard military adornments and also the most extensive library of national security tomes that I had ever seen in the field, including Brzezinski’s work, a book by Huntington, and Raphael Patai’s book, The Arab Mind.
I found Odom to be quite a contrast from some of the boisterous Army officers I had encountered. He measured his words carefully and peppered the discussions with literary and historical references. His long face reminded me of his father, and I thought I detected a hint of his father’s Tennessee drawl. But Odom did not volunteer anything about his family until it was clear that I had guessed the association.
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The surge of reinforcements that President Bush ordered in January 2007 changed the military dynamics. As the additional troops filtered in, Odom’s squadron battle area shrunk to more manageable proportions. His soldiers were able to concentrate on Hawr Rajab—and the effort was repaid.
In Hawr Rajab, Sheik Ali had tangled with Al Qaeda. He wanted revenge for the murder of his father at the hand of Al Qaeda militants and to restore his tribe’s authority over the town. In early July, he asked for a meeting at home with Captain Chad Klascius, one of Odom’s officers and the commander of Apache Troop. (Klascius had played the role of an Islamic insurgent in Army war games. Now he was going to meet one face-to-face.)
Each side was apprehensive about the meeting. Ali wanted to bring five armed bodyguards. The Americans were fearful of an ambush and warned that any males with weapons would be shot on sight. It was agreed that the sheik could have guards, but they would be unarmed.
When the meeting began, the sheik acknowledged his insurgent past but offered to work with the soldiers to drive Al Qaeda out. He wanted several thousand dollars in financing. He wanted the Iraqi government to establish a police station in the town, and he suggested that the Americans distribute food to the residents to win their support.
Klascius asked the sheik to provide several names of Al Qaeda insurgents to prove his good intentions. He gave them the names of two members from his own tribe who lived just a few houses away, and the soldiers promptly detained them. The sheik later produced several dozen volunteers who were outfitted in orange reflective belts. The Americans dubbed them the “concerned local citizens.”
The broader question, Odom found, was more political than military. Ultimately, to succeed, the sheiks would need to accept the legitimacy of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and the government would need to include more Sunnis in the security forces and governing structures, or at least give them civilian jobs, steps that would demonstrate a greater interest in accommodation than Iraq had seen in recent years.
“It is like Sonny Jurgensen throwing the ball before the receiver is open because if you wait until he is open, he will be covered by the time the ball gets there,” Odom explained. “So if the ball is in the air now, what political decisions are being made to complete the pass?”
Plenty of Odom’s readings suggested it would be hard, perhaps even impossible, for the Iraqis to reconcile. But the military’s duty was to throw the ball downfield, which was all that the lieutenant colonel needed to know.
August 4 was the day the aid was to be delivered. The American command post near the checkpoint had been fortified with heavy beams and surrounded by heavy barriers to protect it against a suicide bomber. (It was a very real threat. A suicide car bomb had collapsed the living quarters at Patrol Base Dog several months earlier, killing two soldiers.)
There was only one road to Hawr Rajab from Falcon Base, where his squadron was headquartered. The Americans had never driven this road without being attacked. Within a few minutes, a Husky mine-clearing vehicle struck a mine, and its wounded driver was evacuated. Odom’s soldiers made it to the town’s center to distribute the food, but the toll had been high, including the wounding of Odom, the squadron’s commander.
After being treated in Germany, Odom was flown to the United States. He recuperated in Alaska. His battered face was the first to heal, but for several weeks he had severe headaches, the after effects of the concussion he had suffered in the explosion. The pounding in his head was so severe that he spent much of the time staring out the window. Reading was all but impossible.
The biggest blow, though, was the loss of his soldiers. Odom had received that news from Colonel Terry Ferrell, his brigade commander, when he was in the Baghdad hospital. He lost three troopers in one day.
* * * * *
By October, Odom had recovered sufficiently to ask to go back to Iraq and resume command of his squadron. During the next several months, the Americans and their Sunni allies gained control of Hawr Rajab. A series of checkpoints was established and jointly manned by the Sunni volunteers and a company of Iraqi troops that was deployed in the town.
By November, when his squadron completed its Iraq tour, the situation was stable enough that Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second ranking officer in Iraq, was able to meet with town elders and walk through the town. A few weeks later, however, Al Qaeda militants mounted a counterattack. Several dozen fighters sneaked up on a checkpoint and opened fire, killing several Iraqi volunteers and soldiers. In the ensuing melee, they even managed to destroy an Iraqi army vehicle. But the Americans sent a quick reaction force to the town, and the Iraqi military and volunteers fought back. The militants were beaten back; 10 were killed.
Odom seems agnostic at best about Iraq’s chances to emerge as a stable and democratic state, but looks at his deployments there from a professional standpoint.
“When a classmate of my father was killed in Vietnam, somebody asked him why he was fighting in a war he did not believe in,” Odom said. “He responded: ‘Was that the crime, not believing in the war or in letting men go into combat to be led by somebody who is less qualified?’ I have been trained to lead men into combat, and I see that as my job as long as I stay in the Army.”
Odom is slated to go back to Iraq within the next year to command the 2nd Ranger Battalion, elite troops who conduct some of the Army’s more sensitive, if least publicized, missions.
It will be his third deployment to Iraq since the 2003 invasion.
Michael R. Gordon is the chief military correspondent for the New York Times.