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Transcript of an oral history interview with William F. "Bill" Lyons, conducted by Sarah Yahm at his office in Boston, Massachusetts, on 10 March 2015, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project of the Sullivan Museum and History Center. Bill Lyons is a member of the Norwich University Class of 1990; his interview includes a discussion of his experiences as an electrical engineering student at Norwich as well as his later educational endeavors and his career as a planner, engineer, and attorney. His military service in Bosnia and Iraq is also a focus of the interview. ; 1 COL William "Bill" Lyons, NU 1990, Oral History Interview March 10, 2015 At his Boston, MA office Interviewed by Sarah Yahm Transcribed by C.T. Haywood, NU '12 March 19, 2015 SY: I am at Bill Lyons' office in Boston. It is March 10? Is that correct? WL: I think so. It's in that range. SY: It's in that range. It's March 10, 2015 and we're going to be doing an oral history interview. So, yeah you were just, you just started telling me before I turned the tape on about how you ended up at Norwich. So how did you end up at Norwich? WL: So when I was about thirteen I decided that I wanted to be in the military, and I wrote a letter to the Marine Corps asking them when I could enlist. And they informed me that I'd have to wait until I was eighteen but they encouraged me to apply for service academies and for scholarships. So I did. I actually started the process to attend the Naval Academy. I was Barney Frank's nominee in 1986 to attend the Naval Academy. But I did not pass the physical, because I have a lazy left eye and color blindness. So that was traumatic in that that particular dream was not gonna come to fruition. And so it just so happened that two doors down from us on my home street was guy named Wally Burke, who's Class of '86 [siren in background] and Skull and Swords and Honor Committee and all that stuff. And Wally's dad and my dad were friends. Wally's dad was a cop and my father was a firefighter and so my father told me about Norwich, but he simultaneously discouraged me because he really didn't want me to be in the military. SY: Hold on one sec— WL: Sure thing. SY: Because I just realized, oops, that I have my questions right over here. WL: Okay. SY: Um so why didn't you dad want you to be in the military? WL: My father was in the Army from 1958 to 1960. He left the Army early. He got a compassionate discharge because his father was in a TB hospital here in Boston. And my father was in Germany at the time and his older brother was in the Army in Germany, and so one of the boys needed to come home to look after the family. And my father quickly responded to that call. Being a city boy he thought all the outdoorsmanship was really not up his alley. And he was a very disciplined, disciplined man but didn't like the constriction of military life so he took the opportunity to come home early so he only served about eighteen months. And it's not so much that he didn't want me to be in the military, he just thought that he didn't like it so I wouldn't like it and um— SY: Did he just like not being told what to do? 2 WL: Yeah I think that's part of it. He ended up raising his most of his siblings, he was a very independent minded person. So he, he was not accustomed to being directed. He was the director. So he was a private and I think he got busted twice in rank from PFC down to private, PFC to private so that should be some indicator of the fact the life wasn't for him. So, ah in the summer of, between my junior and senior year I only applied to one school. I applied to Norwich because having not having the opportunity to go to the Naval Academy I thought Norwich was a great, um, a great opportunity for me to do what I needed to do. And as I was mentioning I was a, awful awful teenager. SY: Oh come on give me some details. How were you awful? WL: I got into a lot of trouble. I was actually, I was a decent student, studying came too easy for me so I never really learned how to study and I got great grades without doing any work. I worked full time after school and on weekends I was the director of custodial services for a florist bran--chain here in Massachusetts. And because I was working full time I had a lot of money and I was actually making more money than my mother who was working full time at the phone company at the time [car beeps]. And that lead to trouble. I was drinking too much, spending too much time not focused on my studies. I totaled three cars my senior year, one of them was an outright explosion, blew my father's brand new station wagon up. So at the end of my senior year my dad had pretty much had it. But the good news is early, I had applied early admission to Norwich and I got in early. So in November of my senior year I already knew I was all set. And had a good side - I knew I was in. And had a bad side because I knew I didn't have to try anymore so it cut both ways. But I knew that Norwich was the right place for me and um… SY: Had you gone up and visited? WL: I had, I went up with my dad for a brief visit. SY: And what was your impression? WL: You know it's kind of hard to remember, but I remember saying to myself, "This is what I'm meant to do." My father on the other hand was like, "Oooh I don't know" [laughs]. SY: So I wonder about that. So what was your dream, your vision of what being in the military was gonna be like? WL: So another little nitnoid fact- I had applied for a Marine Corps NROTC scholarship and I was notified that I was a recipient, and then about two weeks before school started in August of '85, no I'm sorry August of '86, I was notified that I, they had made a mistake and that the scholarship was no longer available because of my eyesight. So I was like, "You already knew that because you screened me out of the Naval Academy." But nevertheless my father, God bless him, he came up with the cash to pay for tuition. And so it, it just all came together. It really came together quickly and the rest is kinda history. I mean I settled in, I wanted at the time to be a Navy officer and after I took two years of Navy ROTC, and then after realizing there was no way in heck I was ever gonna get a Navy commission I switched to Army ROTC. And they said, "You want to commission? Sure you can have a commission." 3 SY: They were like, "We don't care about that lazy eye." WL: Yeah, so they gave me a contract in February of my junior year and gave me credit for my Navy ROTC. And at that time I was turned off the active duty thing. I had kind of seen it and done it at Norwich and didn't feel the need to do more. So I signed a Guaranteed Reserve Forces Duty commission, and took a commission in the Army Reserve. There was also a way for me to guarantee myself military intelligence as a branch because if you're in a military intelligence reserve unit you automatically get a military intelligence commission which is what I wanted. So that part came together quite nicely. The summer between junior and senior year I actually got, of course I went to the Advanced Camp for ROTC, but actually get to go Airborne School for three weeks and that was a, it was a life altering time just learning, learning to redefine what I thought my limits were. Obviously I learned a lot more about what I was capable of doing and that was a, that was a really good experience for me. And I came back to school ready, you know, I was like, "You know what, I gotta finish this school thing up and get my commission and drive on with life," so. [sound of something falling] [laughs]. SY: Sorry. Dropping things. Yeah. So let's rewind a little bit and ask you about being a Rook. Do you remember your first, do you remember your first day? Do you remember the first? WL: I do, yeah, it's funny I showed up for my first day, I had long, blonde hair because I worked in the outdoors all summer and my hair gets kinda blondish in the summer. And I hadn't had my haircut since the beginning of my senior year in high school so it was just about a year since my hair had been cut. Intentionally, you know, I was like rebelling. And my arm was in a sling. I had actually just had been in an accident. I was body surfing off of Singing Beach in the North Shore of Massachusetts, and there was a hurricane at sea. It was beautiful on the beach but there was a hurricane at sea, the waves were just huge. So I was body surfing and a wave picked me up and threw me on the beach and dislocated my shoulder. So that was maybe two weeks before school started. So I showed up with my arm in a sling and my bleach blonde hair and long hair, so I was instantly labeled "surfer boy," which really wasn't apt for me but that's all they knew was a snap shot in time. And I remember the, they challenged me to do pushups with my arm in the sling. And I was in much, much better shape than I am today and I actually did one-armed pushups and that was like the instant challenge I needed to be able to push back. And so I kinda got their instant respect because I dropped and started doing one-armed pushups. And so that was an interesting time, you know, I did everything I could to fit in but you know running was a real challenge with a arm in a sling, so. But I adapted and it was fun. SY: Did they make any exceptions for you because your arm was in a sling? WL: Yeah, you know they were all like, "Oh you don't have to do this now," and I was like, "I just want to fit in. I want to, I don't want to be the kid that's off to the side, you know, getting special treatment." So I worked really hard to fit in. There were obvious, I couldn't do sit ups so that was kind of out of the question. So, but did everything I could to fit in. SY: Do you remember being scared? 4 WL: You know I--scared is kind of the wrong word in the sense that it was more bewildering like trying to take it all in and understand because people are barking at me from every direction and I'm sure they do that now. All the barking is intended to have that bewildering effect, and it was very effective on me and I was struggling just to focus on what was important and who seemed to be the person that was in charge so I could follow their instructions. And I don't ever remember being fearful in the sense of, you know for life and limb, more just alarmed that I had to keep up with this dizzying pace of things so that I didn't fall behind. Because I had seen kids fall behind and then they get targeted, and then when they get targeted they kind of get drummed out and I didn't want to be that person, so. It was all I could do to just make sure that I wasn't the person getting picked on. SY: So something I've been thinking about, you know not somebody who has a military background, I've been reading a little bit about comparative military training like in, you know in Scandinavia and various different places. So to what degree do you think the Rook training and that sort of boot camp model really does help you when you are in the field later? How much is a residue from sort of previous understandings and how much is it really what's needed? WL: Yeah, I'm a very strong believer in a rigorous Rookdom, and as near as I can tell it's gotten more rigorous. I know they have much more stringent physical fitness standards than we had, and its substantially longer - Rookdom is substantially longer, or at least unrecognized Rookdom is substantially longer. For me I thought it was critical because it really--the basic training model is really about tearing you down so that everybody is more or less equal in terms of their ego and their psyche and and all of the individuality, you know it's all designed to strip all that off and then build you back up in the model that they want you to be in. I thought Norwich was incredibly effective at that, very, very effective. And I think reflecting on that it was really important to me, like I had some really good core values that my father and mother inculcated into me - honesty, integrity, and all those. Hard work, I had a very hard work ethic. And that was all there but it wasn't completely formed. And so my, my ex—my Rook year experience at Norwich was they tore me down to that base level and figured out how to build on it and make it all fit together with my individual personality, but in a fairly structured way. And I think that that, personally I think that made all the difference in my success in life because it preserved my work ethic, it preserved my core values, and then showed me how to take those characteristics and use those to my advantage in business and in the military and in all facets of life, really. So I give Norwich a lot of credit for making me the man that I am. SY: Yeah, interesting. Do you remember sort of a high and a low of your time at Norwich? WL: Yes. So I'll give you the low. I discovered my entire Navy ROTC class cheating on a test. They were in the barracks. I walked into a room, they had the quiz that I had just taken and they were kibitzing about the answers on the quiz. And I said, "Guys, I'm not gonna say anything, but go back, give them the test and tell them you need a different test So that everything's good." And they didn't do it and I, I remember the gut wrenching decision to tell the instructor. And the instructor, I remember him vividly, a guy named Lieutenant Fricke, he said, "Well I didn't see it and I don't, there's no, nothing to suggest that it actually happened other than you." And I said, "Well, I'm telling you it happened." And he said, "Well in the absence of something else to 5 corroborate that there's nothing I intend to do about it." And so I complained to the school. I actually didn't, someday I can dig up all the letters I wrote to President Todd and to Tim Donovan, who I've since become quite friendly with, and I complained pretty vocally. I wrote a letter to the Guidon, complaining that the school wouldn't take action on this and how contradictory to the school's value it was. And that was a very troubling time, that was my junior year I believe. It was a very troubling time for me, I just felt that Norwich didn't rise to the occasion to seize an opportunity to, to live its values and… SY: And what about your peers? Did, they knew you had reported them? WL: Ah you know, obviously a lot of heartache with some of my peers. To this day some of them probably wouldn't say hello to me. I'm okay with that. It's, you know, it is what it is and they are who they are, and I'd rather pick friends that are, share my values. SY: And you acted with integrity so if they can't handle that they can't handle that, yeah. WL: Yeah. The friends that I had are still my friends and so, you know, they got it, they were like, "You did the right thing, so hold your head high and be proud of what you did," so. SY: You know I see that today with students, that they seem torn between two things that Norwich teaches - one is the loyalty to the Corps, right? WL: Yeah. SY: And the other is this idea of sticking up for what's right even if pushes against the group and I'm wondering, that's a really great illustration of that conflict. WL: Absolutely. SY: Did you notice any other conflicts like that? Any other people struggling with that? Did you have other incidents like that? WL: I can't point to any. You now there were rumored to be all kinds of activities on campus that were, were in one sense these incredible examples of loyalty - we'll use the Knight Riders as an example, right, this mythical organization that supposedly existed. And then, so they're loyal to each other, and supposedly to the University, and allegedly worked to the betterment of the University, at least in their own minds. And then of course there's the things that they were accused of doing that some would say that they did do in terms of beating people up that didn't fulfill the you know the model cadet role. And so you know I think that's another example of it. I didn't personally witness any of that, but I heard plenty of the, we call it the rumint, you know rumor intelligence about that sort of thing. I didn't, I have to say in my four years at Norwich I didn't really indulge in that much, so it wasn't an important part of my experience. But I think that in any organization, the Army is an excellent example, there are constant, there's constant tension between loyalty to your brothers and to your service and the integrity of doing the right thing all the time. And, you know, the history of the Army is rife with people that make wrong decisions for the right reasons, if you want to say it that way. And so, you know, it's very, very hard to straddle very important values that span or are in that dynamic tension. And that's a really good example of it. 6 SY Yeah and I think, I'm gonna sort of ask you about that as we go through and talk about your military career when you leave Norwich that theme, because the citizen soldier seems to me be about that, that conflict, right? Especially because you have the Corps and then you a liberal arts education, right? And I talk to professors all the time who are like, "And I'm teaching them critical thinking and they're also learning how to follow orders. And sometimes they don't know in my class that they're allowed to disagree." You know it's like a different mentality, yeah. Okay, so your senior year you get commissioned by the Army? WL: Yes. So that was probably the highlight and I, obviously you would hope that would be a highlight is graduation, commissioning, I think just prior to that I found out that I got an A on my senior project, and that was a huge milestone for me. My, my early years at Norwich were marked by severe underperformance academically. I finished my freshman year at a 1.8. SY: Why do you think? WL: I failed Calc I. That is really bad for Electrical Engineering students [laughs]. So I had to retake Calc I over the summer, but not taking Calc II in my second half of my freshman year prevented me from taking Physics I, and it had a huge snowball effect. So I ended up graduating from Norwich with a 2.32 grade point average which was, I think, the third worst in my class, or it's in that range. [clears throat] My roommate happened to be lower than me so there was at least one lower than me. SY: That's always nice [laughs]. WL He's still still one of my best friends. But the fact that I managed - first of all had to catch up. So I ended up, there was one semester I took 22 credits just to get back on track because I came home from my freshman year and I told my dad that, "I think I need to change majors. This electrical engineering thing, I'm, it's not working out for me." And he said, "I'm paying for the next three years. You can finish up in the next three years. Your best chance of doing that is to stay in electrical engineering. So go back to school and get it done." So I did. I really wanted to change to diplomacy, and it didn't work that way. So I really had to catch up, I really did take a huge course load which of course, you know all my grades suffered when I was spreading myself so thin and trying to do Corps activities, et cetera. SY: Do you think it was also you didn't have to learn study skills in high school? WL: Yeah oh yeah, definitely. I mean Calc I, I was totally unprepared for the academic rigor of Calc I. Just totally not prepared for that, and it showed. So I did, I did the whole catch up thing and so by senior year I actually had a relatively normal course load again. And the fact that I, I think I got a 3.1 my senior year, to imagine that 3.1 still only got me to a 2.32 overall [laughs] should tell you something. But the fact that I got an A on my senior project was just a moral victory for me. And then so you know the crowning achievement of course was commissioning and graduation and everything that went with that. I was only the third person in my father's extended huge Irish family to ever get a college degree at that point. SY: So was your family ecstatic? 7 WL: Yeah, so the whole clan descended on Northfield. My father had eleven sisters and brothers of which one had passed by then, so everybody else descended on Northfield. They rented like a whole slew of condos over at Suagrbush and it turned out to be like a weeklong celebration. It was really quite something um… SY: That's awesome. And these are all like working class Boston cops and firefighters? WL: Yeah so my dad grew up in Roxbury and he was a firefighter. He ended up in Natick. He was an outlier, he actually moved all the way out to Natick at the time. One of my uncles was a Boston firefighter; another one was teamster, he drove an oil truck; another one owned a cleaning business. So they were working class people. Proud people. And my father was a very, very bright man but he decided he wasn't gonna go to college so that others could. That was really his decision. And so it was, it was you know it was a celebration of kind of that, "Well finally somebody's gonna move up the middle class," type of thing. So it was great, it was a lot of fun. SY: Yeah, and then what'd you do right afterwards? WL: So my, my orders to my military intelligence officer basic course weren't, didn't even exist yet. I got commissioned and went back into my Army Reserve unit but I had to do my officer basic course, and the next available slot was the following February. So I worked the summer at the tent company where I had been working summers, and then that job ended because the summer ended, and then I went back to work for the florist that I had worked at all through high school. And I worked there until February and then I, so that was kind of interesting working as a electrical engineer as a custodian at a florist company. And then I went to my officer basic course in Fort Huachuca, Arizona for six months. And that just so happened to coincide with the kick off for the Gulf War. So I was, you know, sitting in classes in Arizona trying desperately to try and get released so I could go to the war which is, you know, that's, it was the big show, who knows if there's ever gonna be another one, you know that sort of thing. SY: Oh back in the days when we thought there were no more wars. WL: Yes, right, Cold War was over and the Gulf War was the big show and— SY: Right that was gonna be it, the end. WL: So yeah, so of course they weren't gonna release me because I needed my officer basic course before they released me and then by the time the course was over it was all over but the crying, so. It was such a fast war. SY: And did you know anything about, I mean, did you know about Iraq at that time? Did you know anything about Kuwait? Did you know anything about Saddam? Had that been something you'd gotten at Norwich? Like that geopolitical understanding? WL: Yeah I had no geopolitical understanding from my time at Norwich. I did get a lot of that in the reserves and at the officer basic course. So I had a very, very solid footing on the geopolitical issues kind of as it was happening, I suppose you'd say, but definitely not while I was at Norwich. I was very, I had you know my, my ROTC unit, I was the first sergeant of the 8 freshman company when I was there. And I had no Corps responsibilities, and I had my electrical engineering curriculum. I was the president of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers, the student chapter, so nothing like picking the kid with the lowest cume in your class to be president of the social club. So that really took up my time and ah, there really wasn't a lot of time for much else. SY: Yeah that makes sense. Okay so you're all ready to go and the wars over. WL: Yup. SY: So what do you do instead? WL: So I came home and that was probably a lifetime low point. The economy in late '91 was absolutely atrocious. It was awful. No jobs anywhere. I went on so many attempted job interviews, you know just showing up at companies and filling out an application. And all the tech companies all over New England, and there was just nothing. And I ended up, let's see I sold pots and pans for a little while. I worked in a call center for a little while, and I was pumping gas for five dollars an hour in April of '92, so this was just about two years after graduation, when a good friend of my dad's drove into the gas station where I was pumping gas. It just so happened that the guy that owned the gas station was a selectman and I had run his campaign because my father was very active in town politics, and the guy that pulled in was a very good friend of the gas station owner and my dad. And at the time he was the Deputy Commissioner of Massachusetts Highway Department. And so he looked at me and he said, "Bill, why are you pumping gas? Don't you have an electrical engineering degree?" I said, "Yup. But there's just no jobs." And he said, "Well show up on Monday, you'll have a job." And I was like, "Show up where?" [laughs] He said, "Show up at 10 Park Plaza, that's where the Highway Department is. I'm sure we could use an electrical engineer." So that was my big break. I ended going to work for the Highway Department for two and a half years, and found a home and a career in an industry that I'm, I've been very fortunate to grow up in. And, you know its proof positive that family and your connections are as important as what you know. And that certainly worked to my advantage. SY: Yeah absolutely, and then you gone on, you've got like a gazillion degrees. WL: [both laugh] Well I'm, despite my undergraduate experience I've really come to appreciate learning and growing intellectually. So I've pretty much been in school ever since I graduated in one capacity or another with short breaks. There was my officer basic course, then my advanced course, and then after that you go to the Combined Arms and Services Staff School. And sprinkled throughout there I took some graduate classes at Northeastern, at UMASS Lowell, and then I completed the Command and General Staff College. And I really got bit by the bug, I decided in 1999 that I wanted to go to law school. And I'd always dreamed of going to law school when I was at Norwich but I, with a cume of 2.32 it was highly unlikely that I was gonna get in. SY: Well you also didn't have time to take classes that weren't electrical engineering classes.9 WL: That's true that's true. So, and and I set out to be a patent lawyer to utilize my technical background in the field of law. And in the '90s I worked for a consulting firm called HTSD and they did a lot of Wal Mart related work - site planning and transportation planning, traffic engineering. And I really found a niche presenting to local planning boards. And it just so happened I was elected to my hometown's planning board from '94 to '97, I think. And so I found, kind of found a home, I found a comfort zone with the planning board process. And I was attending a lot of planning board hearings and there would be a big high falutin' downtown Boston lawyer, and there would be a local planning lawyer, and then they'd put me out because I was articulate and could present technical information in a way that lay people could understand it. And I was at that time billing out at about 120 dollars an hour and the [clears throat] two downtown, the two lawyers were well above that, and they just sat there and listened. And so it kind of occurred to me, I'm like, you know, "I can sit there and listen for a lot more money and be happy" [laughs]. So I really decided in my mind that I wanted to go to law school. And so in '99 I left the consulting firm and I went to work for the City of Somerville as the traffic and parking director and worked in that capacity directly for the mayor. And I was in her office one day, at that time I was, I don't know, thirty-one, and she said, "Bill, it's pretty clear to me you don't want to be traffic engineer the rest of your life. You've good political skills, and you've good communication skills, what do you really want to do?" and I said, "Well I really want to go to law school but I don't think I can get in. I have an application pending at Suffolk, you know I just don't have the grades. I did okay on the LSAT." And so she said, "Sit right there." So she went into her private office and then she came out and she said, "You're gonna get a letter of acceptance in three days. Don't embarrass me." So she pulled a string, again it's who you know not necessarily what you know, and I went to law school. It actually took me seven years to graduate because I deployed twice. I deployed in 2001 to Bosnia, and then 2003 to Iraq, and so uh I had to take military leaves of absence for those two. The school was great about it, but. So in 2007, believe it or not, I finally completed the law school program at night. And like I said, you know I've been very, very oriented towards continuing my academic interests ever since then. I did the Joint Forces Staff College, and I did the Army War College, and I did - of course the War College is a master's degree producing program. And then the, I did the master's in transportation and urban systems at North Dakota State University. So it's fun. SY: You have a lot of degrees. WL: Its fun. I enjoy it so you know it's something that I feel incomplete if I'm not constantly studying, learning something. SY: I mean you're preaching to the choir, I have two master's degrees and am gonna go for a third at some point. WL: There you go. SY: I hear you. So let's go back, let's rewind actually, and let's go back to your deployments. WL: Okay. SY: So it's 2001. 10 WL: Yup. SY: So can you tell me that story? WL: Sure, in December of 1999 I was alerted that I was gonna get mobilized. Is that right? No, December of 2000 I was alerted that I was gonna get mobilized for Bosnia rotation. And at this time it was strictly a peacekeeping mission and there were actually several opportunities for me to jump off that bandwagon. But once I was starting to go down the path I was like, you know, "I've spent my entire time in the Reserve wanting to someday get mobilized. And here I am, you know, I have an opportunity to get off the train and I just really wanted to fulfill that particular aspect of my life and go on a mobilization." SY: Yeah, what's the desire to mobilize? What was the…? WL: Well I think on several levels. One is you know you get so invested in all that training. I mean if there's one thing the Army is particularly good at is training, constantly training and it's a huge investment. And I felt like I just wanted to realize the return on that investment, on some level. I also felt like the citizen soldier mantra of Alden Partridge was kind of a river running through that whole thing, because at the time the active Army was trying to turn that mission over to the Reserve and National Guard, and it just seemed to me a very logical extension of everything that had been my life to that point. You know it was a peacekeeping mission, it wasn't a combat mission. I had, you know, I don't know how much time you've been in Somerville, it's a tough town so one could say some of what I did there is peacekeeping. And it was, you know, it was it was nation building it was community building and to me that felt very satisfying, it felt like a good match for everything that I had to offer at that time. And I just really wanted to see that through. SY: Yeah. WL: So we mobilized in August of 2001. So there was a nine month buildup of this constantly training and repetitive drills and paperwork. SY: And what was peacekeeping, I mean obviously the mission became different, but what was peacekeeping gonna look like? WL: Peacekeeping was supposed to be having a continuous presence in the communities that had been torn apart by the civil war. In part to provide a buffer between the warring factions, but perhaps more importantly to set the example of how to do things right, to provide that beacon of democracy and hope and and and what, you know, the model of western democracy should look like. So a lot of it was anticipated to be monitoring elections, and providing a presence in the towns so that there was no opportunity for the warring factions to engage in what could be provocative. SY: Weapons or no weapons? WL: Um weapons. SY: Weapons. 11 WL: Yup and there wasn't, it wasn't expected you'd need the weapons and not to split hairs but the Army calls that form of peacekeeping peace enforcement, whereas true peacekeeping is without weapons. And so you can argue one way or the other, you know, what the intended mission was. NATO calls it peacekeeping, we were calling it peace enforcement, but it's because we had weapons. So we mobilize in August. We went to Fort Bragg for a couple weeks to train up with our active duty counterparts, got on a plane on September 10, flew from Fort Bragg to Fort Drum, picked up a whole bunch of soldiers at Fort Drum, and then flew from Fort Drum to Ireland, and then landed in Ireland. And then when we took off from Ireland and flew to Tuzla Main, which is the airfield at the Eagle Base, in that time the attacks in 9/11 occurred. So we landed at Eagle Base, and the whole plane cheered [laughs] because it was the culmination of literally ten months of training. We're like, "Yes, we finally made it. " There was on our plane a whole bunch of reservists from New York, New York City in particular. So when we coasted to the end of the runway we all expected to get off fairly quickly and nothing was happening. So we were all kind of bewildered, you know. And then the post command sergeant major, we didn't know he was the command sergeant major at the time, but the post command sergeant major came on the plane and he said, "I regret to inform of what's taken place in the United States. And gentlemen, ladies, the United States is at war and stand by for further instructions." So me and a bunch of my friends on the plane we were, you know, we kind of concluded in our minds that this was a drill. The Army's prone to coming up with these ridiculous scenarios and saying, "Okay you have one hour to brief the commander on what you would do under these circumstances." So, you know, we're all huddling, "What do we do, you know, what do you think we should do?" And we really had resolved in our minds that it was an exercise. And then not too long after that junior enlisted guy came on the plane and he said, "Okay, we really don't know what's going on in the world but we're in a predominately Muslim country. Everybody is gonna get their ammunition basic load as they get off the plane, and stand by for further instructions. Most of you guys are standing post until all this gets sorted out." So right then we knew it was no kidding. So the kids that were from New York City on the plane were obviously were very concerned about their families, and there were lines set up to use the very few phone lines on base. SY: Hey and we're going. WL: Excellent. SY: Look at that. Okay I feel good about that. Here we go. Okay so you're in the intel business, the mission is changing. WL: The mission changed. My job was to be the requirements manager, which is to determine what things get collected on. And then there are different means of collection. There's foot patrols, which was the vast majority of our intelligence collection. We had aerial intelligence platforms, and signals intelligence platforms, and various other means of intelligence collection. But my job was to figure out which asset would collect against which requirement, and then my boss who was the collections manager, would task out all those tasks to the various subordinate elements. And, you know, I was anticipating that my job would be mostly collecting about economic intelligence, political intelligence, issues related to governance. And it turned out that 12 there was still some aspect of that, but I really had two tasks: one was to help catch persons indicted for war crimes, which was our exit strategy to catch the we call them PIFWCs (Persons Indicted for War Crimes), PFWCs. So one job was to try and track those folks down so they could be captured by Special Forces, and the other job was to do directed patrols in neighborhoods and areas that were the more conservative and known extremist-view Muslim groups. So when Bosnia had its civil war a lot of freedom fighters actually came from the Middle East and from Northern Africa to Bosnia and settled there, married into the community, and so those communities were obviously of great concern to us at the time because we really didn't know what exactly was gonna occur. So that was, that took up a lot of time. SY: And what [coughs] what did you end up concluding about those communities? WL: Um so some, there was some activity there that was responded to appropriately. I was tangentially involved in the, the detention of the Sarajevo group that was trying to break into to U.S. Embassy. And that group actually ended up in GTMO so I was partially involved in the intelligence lead up to that particular operation. And I think that's probably the biggest operation that we were involved in. We were involved in other couple other operations and then on the other side I was very involved in the PIFWC hunting, which I thought was probably one of more rewarding parts of my time there. SY: Yeah I would imagine. Yeah and so what ended up, did you capture some people? WL: Ah yes, whose names they are anymore I can't remember. SY: Right, unless it's Milosevic, I won't remember either. WL: No, we were—the guy that we were really hunting was Radovan Karadžić and we didn't catch him. The French dimed us out and he escaped because the French gave him a heads up. SY: Huh, why they do that? WL: Um, that's a really good question. The French were very sympathetic to the Serbs, and I don't really know why that was but they had a very sympathetic posture towards the Serbs in the conflict. So they caught the guy on his cell phone telling Karadžić to escape and so he made a very speedy exit out of Bosnia. But from that point forward there was some very deep soul searching about who we shared intelligence with and that was a pretty tough thing to lose out on, you know. SY: Hm. You don't think of the French being people U.S. intelligence has to watch out for. WL: Yeah well I mean they're, they're, you know on a geopolitical level they are actually one of our biggest adversaries from a spying point of view. SY: Really? WL: Yeah. SY: Fascinating. WL: Yeah there's all kinds of open source documents on that you can read about [laughs]. 13 SY: Okay I'll go educate myself about that later. Um okay, so that's Bosnia and then there's Iraq. That's 2003. WL: Yeah so I was home for 10 months and the Iraq War was spinning up, and one of my closest friends who was my boss in Bosnia called me up and said, "Bill, we're putting together the band. We're going back, we're going back on active duty. Do you want to come?" And I said, "Well, let me think about it, talk to my wife, see what I wanted to do." And after a lot of soul searching you it just seemed to be the right thing to do to go with people I knew rather than wait a couple of years and be an individual mobilization placement and go with people I didn't know. So, you know, a couple of days' worth of serious soul searching and you know thinking about all that it would mean to my family, I decided to go. So I got mobilized in February of 2003, went to Fort Dix for our pre-mobilization training and activities. Spent about a month there, then got sent to a forward operating base called Camp Virginia in Kuwait, spent another month there getting all of our final shots and getting our vehicles in country and getting ready to go. And then during the ground war we got the go-ahead to go over the berm and head into Iraq. So we had a seventy-five vehicle convoy that took off out of Camp Virginia and convoyed just about twenty-four hours straight all the way to Camp Balad, which had numerous different names over the years, but it was Balad Army Base. And we ended up there for abou--I was there for about a month and a half. When we got there everybody they just said, "Freeze wherever you at, the ground war is over. And now were gonna consolidate on the objectives." And so we stayed there and made camp for about a month and a half. And then there was a call for augmentees to go to Baghdad to help staff up the new headquarters for the theater - the entity was called Combined Joint Task Force 7. So I was deemed not essential to my battalion headquarters. I had been the assistant S3 battle captain for operations and plans, and so they just said, "Listen you get a whole bunch of extra captains down there at the 325th MI Battalion, cough up two and send them to Baghdad and please send ones with human intelligence experience." So I didn't actually have human intelligence experience, but they sent me anyways. And me and one of my best friends got sent to Baghdad. He ended up being the battle captain of the CJ2X which is Combined Joint, 2X is human intelligence section. And I ended up being the human intelligence operations officer for the theater. And that, phew boy, that was probably one of the most traumatic, interesting, dynamic, fulfilling, every possible emotion you can think of. SY: So let talk about 'em, let's tease it apart. So what's, what's traumatic, what's fulfilling, what's? WL: Well it was a fairly easy job from June, I think I got there June 6, until mid-to late summer, and then the insurgency started. So it was initially really exciting to be in to be involved in the setting up of this new headquarters and the staffing of it and the policies and procedures that went with it and standard operating procedures and writing. We were still doing detainment operations and one of my responsibilities was again was to think about the requirements, what we needed to collect intelligence on from a detainee point of view. And I had a hundred tactical human teams out in the field that were collecting intelligence, and my job was to figure what they should collect on. So I had this huge enterprise that I was working on. I was only an Army captain and it was a huge scope for somebody with very little experience in that realm. And I,14 you know I sip from a fire hose for about two months, and learned a lot, and filled my brain up with a lot of cool experiences that I only learned about in books. And so that's kind of the fulfilling part. And then when the insurgency started we had a commanding general named Ricardo Sanchez, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and he turned out to be perhaps the most toxic leader I've ever met in my life. He would, he would question everybody's performance of their specific jobs without any inkling of what their job actually was. He was heard to say things like, in front of thousands of people in the battle update brief, he'd say things like, "Why are we catching so many people and detaining them, why don't we just kill them?" So that environment bread a lot of, just a toxic environment. And if you're, if you're a malevolent person looking for an excuse to be and have an outlet for that malevolency, that's a license. And, and what that ultimately, in my experience, devolved into was the Abu Ghraib problem. So for me in August, August-September of 2003 we had an interrogation and detention facility over at Camp Cropper which is on Baghdad International Airport, and the international community for the Red Cross came and said, "These are inhumane living conditions. You gotta get these detainees out of here." So working with the MPs we had to find someplace new to put them and it just so happened that the prison, the maximum security prison out of Abu Ghraib - they're actually four prisons on the Abu Ghraib complex - had just begun renovations and it was intended to be used by civi-by the Iraqis for civilian detainees. And, and so we went out to take a look at it at the provost marshal's suggestion, and determined that it would be an absolutely magnificent facility for this. And kind of reflecting on the citizen soldier model, on my team of intelligence guys my driver and NCO in his civilian life was a corrections officer at Rikers Island; and my company commander was the president of state correctional workers in Massachusetts, the Correctional Worker's Union and he was, he was a, correction he was a corrections officer here in Massachusetts. So I brought them with me and I said, "You know we have to find some place to put the worst of the worst, the people we want to interrogate, what do you think of this facility?" And they were like, "This is perfect. This is the right place." SY: What made it perfect? WL: It was, ah, it was well organized, it was clean, it was neat, it wasn't in the bombed out parts, it wasn't in a mud puddle. It was just in immaculate shape because it had been renovated and it was perfectly suited for an interrogation facility. SY: So the thinking in some ways was that it would be humane? WL: Yes. Absolutely that was the absolute intention was to—when you have high level detainees you don't want them to think about anything else other than what you want them to think about. You don't want them thinking about how to escape the mortar attacks at night, you don't want them to—you want them to be thinking about whatever, whatever you're working on with them in terms of intelligence collection. So it was really an optimal facility. And so that was, you know that was a high point in my deployment. It was. I actually have pictures of me behind bars at Abu Ghraib. SY: I saw those pictures. WL: That's the day I picked Abu Ghraib. It was my staff action that made Abu Ghraib happen.15 SY: And they're really chilling in retrospect but at the time, right? And then and then it looks like you're seeing all the remains of Saddam Hussein's prison too. It looks like a lethal injection bottle and signs for death row and so I'm-I was trying to imagine what you guys were talking about when you were walking—there's graffiti, super weird pornographic graffiti. What were you guys talking about when you were exploring that building? WL: You know we'd already been briefed that Saddam executed about 30,000 people at that jail in his reign of terror. And we also knew that some pretty despicable things had happened out there. And so, you know, it was all to us almost surreal to be walking around and seeing all that wild graffiti, and the, you know we don't really know what was in those bottles but you can [laughs], you can make all kind of informed guesses. And then to actually go in the death house which, which ultimately got walled in so that people wouldn't go into it so it could be preserved for war crimes. Um, I mean that that to me was the closest thing that I have ever felt to death because you could smell death. It was it was an awful, awful, awful place. So that, you know, was traumatic on some level but the breadth of the experience for me was just absolutely incredible in terms of the scope of what I was involved in. SY: So let's go back to the citizen soldier idea to the idea of the ethical soldier. So what do you think happened there? What turned it into what it became? WL: So there was this enormous pressure starting with Secretary of Defense - Undersecretary of Defense - all the way down to Ricardo Sanchez: "We need to get more intelligence, more actionable intelligence so we can stop this insurgency." And the pressure, I can't even begin to describe the pressure that these people, these senior leaders were under. And I, I have the luxury now at this point in my career to have a sense of what that strategic leadership's like and how, how difficult it is to manage political expectations and, you know, the realities of a war torn environment. And I guess I can see how a twisted mind can get twisted to the point of losing the ability to be a genuine leader. And that's what happened. At all ranks people that could twist their social values to suit ends that were inconsistent with those values, those people were everywhere. And it permeated all the way down to the lowest level, it really did. I wasn't, I didn't personally didn't meet any of the MPs that were involved in the atrocities that happened at Abu Ghraib. I did know two of the intelligence people that were involved, not on a friendly basis but they were they were junior enlisted and I knew who they were and they weren't bad people, they just caught up in a very ugly situation. And so I think it was that that just that tiered level of toxic leadership that permeated everything - results now, don't care what the cost is. And, and I learned a lot from that experience. I learned, I learned really how easy it is for well-intentioned, well-managed groups to get off track because there's this abject fear and and apprehension about failing. Because you're failing your brothers in arms when they're getting killed every night from mortar attacks and roadside bombs, and so this this constant drumbeat of "Your brothers are dying, your sisters are dying on the roads of Iraq. You have to do something, you have to get this intelligence." And so when people say that enough, and you live through enough depravity, it's not hard to imagine how people can lose it and I think that's what happened. I really do. SY: And now you're a colonel so now you are higher in the leadership. How, how as a leader do you think you can prevent this type of thing from happening again? 16 WL: That's a, that's a good question. I've taken the last five years of my career and really focused on mentorship. I sit down with every single officer that I rate or senior rate and I'm, unfortunately I'm one of the rare people that does this. One on one I devote an hour at a time to each and every one of them and really have a conversation about values and how values are the foundation of citizen soldiery, because all my soldiers are reservists, and how values are really the foundation of good ethical leadership. And it might sound weird to have an hour long conversation about values but that time goes quickly when you have people that are engaged in it, and I can tell which ones get it and which ones don't get it. And the ones that get it are the ones that I invest my time in and the ones that just sit there and go, "Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir." "Okay [laughs], you don't really get it, so you know, you're not really on track." And that's how my ratings fall out. So that's my way of giving back, I guess, is to try and identify the people that I think have the moral footing necessary to be a strategic leader. SY: And so [coughs] if you were gonna give Norwich advice about how to train ethical leaders, right, who can who can stand up when things are toxic right, who can have integrity. What advice would you give them? WL: Excellent question. When I was a cadet, not a Norwich cadet, but an Army ROTC cadet and to some extent the Norwich thing, making second lieutenants was kind of a cookbook operation. It was "Here's the recipe. Put him in the box, sprinkle all the dust around him, shake it up, enough will stick. Send him all to all these very regimented courses. Get him smart about how the Army works and stick him in the force." And I think that was, I know that was a very Cold War mentality - shake and baking officers. Today's world is so much more complex. SY: Okay hold on one sec [sirens outside of office, interview pauses]. [interview resumes] WL: So now we live in the age of the strategic corporal, where the lowest private through social media can literally influence the battle. Abu Ghraib is an example of that, those pictures got out. And ah, so you have to teach leaders—it's much less a recipe than it is a crafting. Every individual needs to be crafted. They have to understand the strategic implications, they need to be taught how to think critically and creatively. The very volatile world that we live in with globalization, urbanization, mass communications, climate change—all these things weren't even in our vocabulary when I was a second lieutenant, because we were focused on the Cold War. And now our threats are more likely than not, the future threats are less about kinetic threats, somebody shooting at you, and more like what happens when a city of 24 million people gets hit with a tidal wave. And then what do you do? And you're a second lieutenant and you get put in charge of a bunch of people in that environment. There's no way that you can possibly teach a second lieutenant how to handle every single one of those situations. Whereas when I was a second lieutenant you had a cookbook, you followed the cook book, "Don't deviate outside of this, you'll be good." Now we have to encourage them to look outside of the four corners of their little world and figure out how what's on the right and the left is gonna impact their operation. And, you know, the military talks now not about the unknown but the unknowable. So as an intelligence officer the unknown was pretty daunting. My job was to 17 figure out what wasn't known and how to go know it, how to collect that information. What we talk now about the unknowable, the implication being, you can't know [laughs]. You can come up with various constructs of what that unknowable thing might do, and how you cope with that, but it's literally unknowable, you'll never know. And so that framework has to be driven into the lowest levels because those kid—those are the kids that are gonna make it survive. They're gonna go into villages with people who are living primitively and try and infuse in them our democratic Western values, and help them with development and conflict at the most elementary level. And that is not something you can get out of textbooks at Norwich. You have to go out in the wide world and see that. I love the fact that Norwich has a very aggressive international program now, because that is absolutely - I am utterly convinced that the future of education has to involve an international component so that you see, touch and feel how other people live and have an appreciation for other, other value systems other than Western value systems. SY: Seems like anthropology classes should be required too. WL: Language class, anthropology class. I know it's awfully hard to do that when you have a technical discipline like electrical engineering, but I think that it's we are doing our nation a disservice if we don't educate our children and our young adults to live in an increasingly global world. Insularity is the enemy of America's success, it really is. So I'm utterly persuaded by that. And a little aside - when I grew up in the Army it was all about the Cold War, the Russians were our enemies, anything to do with Russia was like, "ooh." And so just as an example of how things change, in Bosnia in 2002 I had a Russian Spetsnaz colonel - full colonel, I was a captain - I had a Russian Spetsnaz full colonel working for me, doing collection plans for the intelligence that the Russians were doing in their sector. We had a Russian sector. And the guy's name was Colonel Volkov and I befriended the guy, professionally, not personally, I befriended the guy. And we ended up having a very good cordial relationship to the point where on Defenders of the Motherland Day in, I want to say it was February or March of 2002, he invited me to be his distinguished guest at the Defenders of the Motherland parade and ceremony. And I ended up getting placed in the front row right next to the CG, and the CG sat down and he goes, "You're in the wrong place, move back captain, you don't, you're not a distinguished visitor." And I said, "Actually, I am, Colonel Volkov invited me." And he looked at me like, "What? That doesn't make any sense." And Colonel Volkov showed me that cooperation, even in today's environment, is possible, you know when you get down to the human level. He invited us to that event and then held a private reception for us with vodka and smoked salmon and toast and cheese. And then we moved from to that private reception to his group's his little special forces bar on the Russian base and we drank there for like four hours. And then we were all trying to leave and one of the traditions is to cut the patch off your uniform and exchange patches. So I was in the middle of cutting my patch off my uniform and the colonel was looking very longingly at my Gerber knife, it was a very basic folding knife. And I said, "Sir, would you like my knife as a gift?" And he said, "I could never accept," through his translator, he was like, "I could never accept such a generous gift." And I said, "Come on it's a thirty dollar knife," and I put it in his hand. And he goes, "And I must repay you." So he takes me to his private quarters. Now you have to keep in mind I'm on a Russian Army base in the middle of Bosnia and me and this colonel walk off into the woods arm and arm, half in the bag. And I'm gone, and all my 18 colleagues are like, "Where did Lyons go?" So I disappeared for an hour. He took me back to his private quarters. We drank Slobovicz and chatted a little bit down there, and then he reached into uni-his closet and he took his uniform, and he took every badge off his uniform and he said, "Is this a good enough gift?" And I was dumbfounded like, I have now all these Spetsnaz badges from Russia. And I said, "Sure." I'd have taken two, but I'll take it, you know? So I put it in my pocket, we had another shot of Slobovicz and then it occurred to me, "Oh my God, like I've been gone like an hour with a Russian Spetsnaz colonel and if they're not totally freaking out, something's wrong." So we go back and you know frantic, "Oh my God, thank God you're okay." And I went back to Eagle Base that night and I just reflected that a mere three years earlier we were mortal enemies, and to have that experience at that juncture in my life was just remarkable, remarkable. And it just proof positive that whatever today's situation is three years now it is not what you think it's gonna be and and and if Norwich doesn't produce people that can anticipate those changes and be ready for those challenges. You can't know them all, but you have to have the intellectual capacity to cope with them all, to adapt to them all. SY: And not knee jerk prejudices against entire peoples and populations or religions, right? WL: Exactly. SY: Because lo and behold [laughs]. WL: Yup, exactly. So that really opened my mind up to how important it is be, and I used the word agile because you have to be intellectually agile. You have to understand and perceive on a very subtle level all the little changes that are going around the world, and if you're not capable of doing that, you know, we're gonna make colossal strategic mistakes. The strategic corporal is gonna make a big blunder and jeopardize an entire national security strategy. And who better than to do that than citizen soldiers that have one leg in the civilian world and understand things from the civilian populous point of view, and one leg in the military world who have a greater appreciation of military strategy and tactics and operations. I think the citizen soldier brings that dimension to, a very much needed dimension to the national security strategy. And incidentally many senior Army leaders after thirteen years of war get it, they have had reservists in their headquarters and have had one on one contact. I myself, my boss in Iraq was General Barbara Fast, active duty, one star promotable, and I was in her office one day and she was briefing me-not briefing me but, you know, bringing me up to speed on a particular initiative [coughs]. And she says, "What do you think of this?" and I said, "Ma'am I think that's really awful idea." And she was startled, she said, "Nobody talks to me that way. Why do you talk to me that way?" And I said, "Ma'am, I'm a Reservist. If I can't be honest with you than I'm doing something wrong. If you like my advice and change your plan because I was honest with you, then good, you changed the plan in a way that I think is constructive. If you don't like my advice and you say, 'piss off,' I just say, 'good,' because you know I was heard, different ideas were on the table, and I wasn't a yes man." So I said, "Ma'am, you're always gonna get a very honest answer opinion from me. You might not like it but it's gonna be a very honest and direct opinion." And she goes, "You know, I have like twenty majors that work for me" (at this point I was a major). She's like, "You know nobody, nobody gives me honest advice, you're the only one." And from that point forward I was her go-to guy for the "is this a stupid idea or a good idea or whatever." 19 SY: So what do you think gave you the chutzpah to be able to do that, to sort of to speak your mind in that context? WL: I think it was a lifetime of of—first of all confidence in your analytical abilities which I, I've always been fairly confident in my analytical abilities. But I think it was the, you know, the lifetime of values thing, the integrity that my parents inculcated in me, and the school inculcated in this this this, "Always stand up for what's right approach." And, you know, the truth of the matter is you know we live in a somewhat political world so you do have to when to pick your battles and not everything can be a fight because that person gets nothing done. But you really have to be perceptive and know when is the right time to speak your mind and make your thoughts heard. And if you're judicious and thoughtful about it you'll get a reputation for being the one that can be called upon to consult with in tough situations. And I, I've been fortunate that that's been the case for me. I've been counsel now to people that I started as company grade officers that are now generals, and it's satisfying and rewarding when somebody calls you up and says, "Hey I got this, you know, this really tough problem, just wanted to talk to you about it, you know. I don't need an answer. I just want to talk it out." And it's very satisfying, it really is. SY: I can imagine, you know it's interesting at this point I've done a bunch of these interviews and in my experience it's reservists and ah helicopter pilots— WL: [laughs]. SY: Who their identity as citizen soldiers is about, you know, standing up for what you think is right even if it is pushing back against authority. And then people who are more Regular Army, that is not their mentality. It's interesting. That's what I've observed so far, yeah. WL: One of my, one of the, my, the deputy intelligence officer for Iraq, he was our boss for a little while, and he was responsible for the day-to-day operations and General Fast was the big thinker policy person. So Colonel Boltz is the guy's name, he's a Norwich guy, Norwich, I want to say '78, '79, Steve Boltz. He's currently the Deputy G-2 for U.S. Army Europe, fantastic guy. So he would come into our—we were behind a purple curtain believe it or not in our little headquarters, and he would come in and he would flip the purple curtain open, and me and my buddy who was Ponce, this guy's name was Captain Ponce at the time, he's now Colonel Ponce. He'd go with his really strange accent, "Ponce, Lyons, tell me the truth, all my majors lie to me and you're the only ones that tell me the truth!" And we'd sit down and we'd have an hour long bull session with this colonel because he could trust us to just tell us the way it was. And when we were flat out wrong, he'd explain it, he'd mentor us and say, "Just because you have the chutzpah to be honest with me. I'm gonna invest in you and, and mentor you." And so Ponce and he actually ended up being very close friends, and Bill just visited him in Europe like just two months ago. And he's just a fantastic guy, fantastic leader. I mean he was the, he's the classic guy who got to colonel speaking his mind but couldn't get to general because he spoke his mind. That's Steve Boltz and I appreciated him for all of that he was a really straight shooting kind of guy. Really, really cool. SY: So it seems like you've seen examples of really toxic leadership and really good leadership? 20 WL: I have, yeah, yeah. SY: And I'm wondering if I have more questions to ask you about that. I mean and you've served, you've served at all your deployments as an officer. WL: I have, yeah. SY: And I guess how do you think the experience is different um for somebody - I mean this is such a huge question - but for somebody who's enlisted. I guess I've been doing interviews in part with some people who've dealt with PTSD and it seems pretty clear that PTSD is more prevalent among enlisted men than officers, and I don't know if that's true or not true but do you have thoughts about that? WL: Yeah, it's not my experience. I think that officers tend to manage and conceal their PTSD because they're expected to. You're expected to be the tough one, the guy that keeps it all together, but there's ample opportunities, ample examples of officers that didn't keep it together. I'll give an example, my, my brigade commander, a guy whose name is escaping me at the time, he had the single largest military intelligence brigade ever assembled, seven battalions. It was huge and he was responsible for Abu Ghraib, the intelligence side of Abu Ghraib. And I remember being summoned to his office and a guy named Jonathan Carpik came to me and he, Captain Carpik, and he said, "Hey Colonel." I can't re—he's the guy pinning the medal on in my picture, and I can't--I'm just drawing a complete blank as to his name. He said, "He wants you in his office." Now he had this little closet of an office, it was literally a closet with a desk in it. And so I went and the door was maybe three inches open and I could hear sobbing inside. So I was like, "Well that's weird." So I knocked on the door and he said, "Come in," and I kind of cracked the door a little bit and he said, "Come on in Lyons." He was visibly shaken, and he looked at me he goes, "You know I never thought I'd say this, but I hate my job and I hate my life." And that was a full colonel in the middle of a combat environment. And if that's not PTSD I don't know what it is. So, you know he clearly was struggling like the weight of the world around him. I myself struggled with survivor's guilt coming home. SY: Can you talk about that? WL: Well I spent about a year in therapy just coming to terms with the various losses. Two guys in my unit got killed, Travis Fredrich and um Gregory Bellanger two, one was a cook that was on a convoy, the other was an intelligence interrogator who was killed in a in a mortar attack. And that was a bit of a loss and I came home and my Norwich class president Rob Soltes was killed shortly thereafter. He was an optometrist on a Civil Affairs mission in northern Iraq and he got hit by a VB IED and he died [coughs]. So those were very traumatic experiences for me, and what it resulted for me was you know those were lives that were lost. And first of all it could have been me and maybe I would have felt better it was me so that their families didn't experience the loss. But it also made me reexamine all of my own priorities in life, like and this is gonna sound trivial and trite, but how can I live better to make their loss worth it? So that's really been sort of the driving force behind my life since then. And then my bo--my roommate in Bosnia, a guy named Harold Brown who's from Bolton, Mass., Army Reservist, he ended up getting recruited by the CIA when we left Bosnia. And he ended up being an intel operative for 21 them. and he is the one of the guys that gets killed in Khost in the movie Zero Dark Thirty. That was what? Four years ago now, Christmas-ish? That was a huge loss, I mean that was very very traumatic. He and I were very close in Bosnia. We stayed close. So I still work with his family and we try to remember him every year. It's a very big loss, so. SY: I also would imagine coming home and then the Abu Ghraib scandal breaking would also be a bit of an existential crisis in addition, right? WL: Yeah. Well I and Ponce ended up being interviewed extensively, ah what's an AR-15-6 investigation, which is an investigation into potentially criminal activity. It's like a precursor to like a grand jury type of investigation. A guy named Major General George Fay came and interviewed us because of Abu Ghraib. And I was interviewed extensively as was Ponce, and you know looking, they were looking deep and desperately to try and find the trigger that caused all that and I mentioned I don't think it was anything specific, I think it was just pervasive. But um, but reliving all of that was very, very traumatic. And I'll tell you probably one of the weirdest things that I experienced in Iraq was at six months under the Geneva Conventions if you are a detainee you are entitled to a review of your detention. And so in August, which was roughly two--six months after the war started, we had to start reviewing all these cases. And I was appointed the guy that was gonna be the intel person coordinating the review of all the files. So there was an MP officer that was reviewing for threats, and there was an intel officer reviewing to determine if there was intel value in that detainee and whether we should keep them for the intel value. And so we were reviewing all these files and we literally had something like 14,000 detainees at this point, and I'm reviewing the earliest ones first because they're entitled to their review. So one of the first manila folders I'm handed, handed has a detainee number on the, you know the little piece that sticks out, index, and a name. And you open it up and there was nothing in it and I go, "Hey anybody have the information on this file?" "Oh no, I didn't see anything." So I called down to the detention center I'm like, "Hey I got this manila folder with nothing in it" [laughs]. And they're like, "Yeah that's all we got." I'm like, "Well how am I supposed to make a decision on that?" you know, "Go debrief the guy and find out what the circumstances of, at least the circumstances of capture were." So somebody goes into the pen and now this guy's been tied up for six months and when they go, "So you know what's the circumstances?" And so he was walking back from the hospital after carrying his daughter several miles to the hospital, dropped his daughter off. On his way home, um, the 3rd Infantry Division captured him because he was out past curfew. Got rolled up, sent to Camp Cropper, then sent off to Abu Ghraib and had spent six months wondering what happened to his daughter, wondering if his family knew where he was, wondering anything. And so, I mean if we didn't make an enemy out of this guy I don't know what would, right? So I reflected a lot of that. That definitely troubled me, you know, as I, as I came home and unwound from the war that. That, you know, that haunted me a bit. So, you know, PTSD comes in a lot of forms. Those are my forms. And there are all different forms, you know. It's… SY: Yeah I talked to a guy last week who was in Vietnam and Korea. And in his words he was "cuckoo" after Korea, that's what he said. So he was, he had PTSD after Korea. And he said oddly he healed himself in Vietnam because in addition to you know developing a missile, he 22 personally created these two humanitarian missions. So like they took some rice from the Viet Cong and the Army was gonna burn it and he was like, "Yeah I'm taking that over to that village," right? There was another instance where he took the packing crates and brought it over to build a school. And he said really beautifully that he was able to maintain his sense of himself as an ethical person even though he was doing other things that he didn't feel good about. Because of that he was able to, to not feel so messed up when he got home. WL: Yeah, it's a good outlet. I think everybody, that's really what you need is an outlet. SY: Yeah, and maintaining a sense of yourself, right? WL: Yup. Yeah absolutely. I spent the last—the first—when I was deployed my mayor got voted out of office so I came home to no job. SY: Oh no! WL: So while I was trying to figure what to do a friend of mine said, "Hey, we're gonna start an engineering company. Do you know anybody that'd like to run it?" and I said, "Well, me." So I took that job and the weird thing was for the first two or three months I couldn't do anything. I would sit in front of the computer and stare at it, do internet searches about the war, because I needed the "vig," you know, the excitement of being engaged. And it just occurred to me one day I was like, "I'm a basket case [laughs]. I am totally lost." And that's when I decided to seek counseling because I knew that there was something wrong with me, and it was very standard behavior for somebody that was so amped up 24/7. I worked eighteen hours a day on military stuff and then [snap] gone. SY: Welcome home! WL: Yeah, welcome home, get normal, put a suit on, sit in front of the computer and and build a company. I was like uhh…. SY: Ahh! [laughs] what do I do? WL: So— SY: Did you have that hypervigilance stuff too that a lot of people describe? Like scanning and— WL: No, I, I honestly didn't. I did some pretty crazy stuff in terms of convoying in Iraq, but I never felt like the, and some people describe it to me as sort of the razor's edge experience, like you feel like you're right out on the edge of stuff. I did a lot of convoying in the Highway of Death and I don't know why but it never, and I was very very, I was very attuned to the threat and I did everything that I was supposed to do, but I never felt that particular high. The high I felt was more about working with Special Operators to identify targets, and to me that was the most exhilarating thing that I could do. So I, you know convoyed to Tikrit, and I convoyed to out to Abu Ghraib a bunch of times. I convoyed to Babylon. That was a wonderful experience, I got to explore all the ruins. Oh it was just fantastic experience, just very, very, um, very rewarding to do that. And yeah, I mean I spent a lot of time on my way out to visit other agencies that I 23 needed to coordinate with as part of my responsibilities. And it just never occurred to me, I knew how dangerous it was but it never felt as exhilarating as the other parts of my job. SY: Hm. That makes sense. WL: The other people that worked for me were like, "Why do you go out so much?" you know, "You shouldn't be so quick to go out on these convoys." I'm like, "But it's my job. I need to talk to these people." They're like, "Use a phone." I'm like, "I can't get the same information on the phone, I gotta go talk to these people," so. My driver who was uh, Freddy Klein, who probably would much have preferred that I did not go out. He tried on numerous occasions to talk me out of my road trips but he and I almost met our fate, we got shot at from behind by our own people who discharged a weapon when they shouldn't have, and it went right between us. I was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck and he was sitting in the driver's seat of the truck, went by his ear by about six inches. Yeah it was a pretty interesting day. So that's the closest I came to getting shwacked. SY: That's pretty close [laughs]. WL: It was a big, there was a night we got 57 millimeter rockets raining on us, and so that was another fairly close call. It was quite the experience to say the least. SY: How'd you get that teacup? WL: So, um, when I went to the, I think they call it the Al Faw Palace, it's the the palace that was in the middle of Camp Victory. Camp Victory was actually forming at that time, like they just barely had the perimeter secured when I showed up. And I had this guy who was a Marine Corps Major, a guy named Bob Sirks who was nominally my boss for three weeks or something. And he goes, "Have you been in the palace?" Now the palace was supposed to be off-limits, we weren't supposed to go there. I said, "I haven't." And he goes, "Let's go in." I said, "I don't know." He's like, "There's nobody over there, nobody will ever know." He's like, "I've been inside, it's cool." I said, "Okay." So we, we found a way into the building, I don't even remember what way we got in and it was opulent - gold toilet seats and gold leaf everything. And so he goes, "Hey, let's go in the kitchen." So we go in the kitchen and this huge china set, now this was a palace, one of the many palaces that Saddam used, but this huge china set with the tea cups and everything just left untouched. It's just sitting there. And he's like, "Oh let's get a souvenir." I'm like, "I don't know, you know." He's like, "Oh just a tea cup." So, "alright just a tea cup." So he gets a tea cup and I get a tea cup and he goes, "Now what?" I said, "That's enough for me." And so he took a whole bunch of other stuff and I was like, "Well I got my one war trophy, I'll take this." So that was the tea cup story, and that particular day, again because there was nobody in the palace. There are a whole bunch of pictures in my CDs of being inside the chandelier which is a totally cool experience. There's a chandelier in the pictures and you can actually go inside the chandelier. SY: I somehow must have missed that set of pictures because I—you know what? Maybe there were two Iraq discs and I only looked at one. I'll go back and look later. 24 WL: Yeah, that was cool. And then there's a picture of me on the roof, and there's a hole in the roof so it's kinda like straddling my, I'm straddling the hole. And that's where a JDAM1 went through the roof and then you can see the picture of Saddam's bedroom that's blown to smithereens. And so that one bomb went down three stories and basically blew up on his bed. Of course he wasn't there, but the intent was to target him. And that was really proof positive that I was on the right side [laughs] just to see to see the technological advantage that we had. It was really really amazing. And the rest of the building was intact. It was just that room that was blown up. Everything else, the tea cups were all where they were supposed to be, the, nothing was affected outside of that. I mean it was really— SY: The building wasn't even rattled enough that the tea cups fell? WL: Yeah it was it was totally illus—illustrative of how we were— SY: Illustrative? I never know how pronounce that word, yeah. WL: Yeah you get the message. It was the, technical, technological overmatch was on, you know, absolute display in that, in that particular moment to me. It was really amazing, really amazing. SY: What'd ya think when you were walking though Babylon? WL: You know that was almost surreal. The Marines had kind of secured Babylon to prevent looting, and they hired the chief archeologist of Iraq to give tours. So this guy who was Saddam's chief archeologist showed us around all of the ruins of Babylon. And one of the weird things is that Saddam had—he was very envious of Nebuchadnezzar, the king that ruled Babylon. And he built a huge castle above Babylon to show his supremacy, but he later thought better of it and he wanted his castle built on top of Nebuchadnezzar's castle. So he actually in the process he sank Nebuchadnezzar's castle because it was on filled marshlands. So you can see the sinking process going on because stacked all these bricks with his stamp on it over Nebuchadnezzar's bricks with Nebuchadnezzar's stamps on it. But we saw the procession street where he had all his military parades and civic parades, the Lion of Babylon was still there. We got—I got pictures in front of the Lion of Babylon. It was a very rewarding experience. I can't say that I had a very classical education and that sort of stuff so I was kind of learning it on the fly with the chief archeologist of Iraq, so I guess you couldn't ask for a better teacher than that. It was a very, it was a very interesting experience. Very fun. SY: That's pretty cool. I have to head to Northbridge soon and I want to beat some of the traffic. WL: I got to go pick up my kids. SY: Alright, any last thoughts? This has been a fantastic interview. WL: Oh it's my pleasure. Um no. I, you know I will say that I owe my success to Norwich and to a number of leaders that were Norwich, and weren't Norwich, along the ways. One of my best friends is now a commander of my command in the Reserves, the military intelligence readiness 1 This is an acronym for Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a bomb guidance system. 25 command. The guy's name is Brigadier General Gabriel Troiano. He's not a Norwich guy but he exemplifies the citizen soldier in my mind. He was my boss in Bosnia, he was my boss in Iraq, and now he's a brigadier general and that to me is proof positive that the right values system and the right leadership really does make a difference. It really makes a difference and I applaud Norwich for staying on that path all these years, and I hope that they stay on it. SY: Yeah, hey thanks! WL: My pleasure.