Interview with Maj Tim McCulloh

MAJ Tim McCulloh served as platoon leader with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment in Kandahar, Afghanistan during 2002 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), in the brigade operations (S3) shop with a Stryker Brigade in Mosul and Baghdad, Iraq during 2005 and 2006, and in the plans shop as part of Third Army and US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Baghdad, Iraq during 2008 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In this November 2010 interview, MAJ McCulloh discusses his first deployment right after 9/11, the unexpected extension of his second deployment to 15 months, and the changes he noticed in Iraq on his most recent deployment. MAJ McCulloh concludes his interview with the observation, "Hindsight is always 20/20 so you can always say, "Hey, we should have known better. We should have done this. We should have done that." I think, and this has come out a lot in media and professional articles, one of the things we could have done better from 9/11, was act in a better role in advising the civilian government. Ultimately the military is there to do the nation's bidding and to best advise the civilian leadership in terms of how to employ the military. I think there are some critical times when we probably weren't as vocal as we should have been... This is something I've always loved about the Army; the Army is a learning organization. We're very critical of ourselves and ultimately we figure these things out and then we kind of air the dirty laundry and say, "So and so should never have done this. This was a huge mistake. We never should have disbanded the Iraqi Army. We never should have handled the Ba'ath Party the way we did. We never should have done this. We never should have done that." We dialogue about it and we figure out what we should have done and hopefully that knowledge gets maintained to the next time we get confronted by a similar circumstance so history doesn't repeat itself."