The Wars in the Gulf

This is a battle flag of a U.S. military unit involved in Operation Enduring Freedom, which was the first phase of the 2003 Iraq War, beginning on March 20, 2003 and lasting until April 9, 2003. It included twenty-one days of major combat operations, or “shock and awe”, involving 177,174 troops. Of that number, 130,000 were American.

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush declared “the end to major combat operations”. I was embedded with a Special Forces Unit that was tasked with finding weapons of mass destruction. We were first deployed to Basra, but eventually made it to Baghdad. We never encountered any WMD.