The battalion moved to Silopi in extreme southwestern Turkey, not far from the Syrian border. There, Florer split his men into small groups, distributing them in the camps all along the frontier toward Iran in the east. The SF forces, often operating in three-man teams in areas that could only be reached by air or foot, extended across a 3,600-square-mile security zone established in northern Iraq near the borders of Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The camps were on both sides of the borders, which in the remote, mountainous areas were not well defined (the Turks allowed some camps to be set up just over the line, but only as a temporary measure).
Bill Shaw, then a captain commanding ODA 063 of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, headed a unit airlifted to Turkey as soon as the emergency was declared. Shaw and his team greeted the deployment with mixed emotions. Specialists in military freefall — parachuting into hostile territory — they had spent the war in Massachusetts, much to their chagrin. Next to combat, which they had missed, this assignment seemed a letdown.
"We were excited to have a mission," Shaw observes. "However, humanitarian assistance just did not seem very important at the time."
Attitudes soon changed. ODA 063 landed in Incirlik for a brief rest, then moved with a large headquarters group via helicopter to Pirincikin, a remote border settlement held by about 150 Turkish border guards and surrounded by thousands of refugees. Ten minutes after their arrival at the camp, a Kurdish woman approached the Turkish military commander, crying and begging for assistance. When the commander dismissed her, Shaw and the company commander intervened. They sent two medics to help the woman, whose husband had been shot in the hip. The medics soon had him patched up (Shaw never found out how the man had been wounded).
"Their action gave our unit instant rapport," Shaw remembers. "By the next day, all twenty thousand refugees in the camp had heard the good news: Forty to fifty U.S. Army doctors had arrived."
"They thought we were all doctors when we got there," adds Colonel Mike Kershner, who was operations officer for the 3rd Battalion of the 10th SFG. "It was a little disconcerting to my weapons men at first, because they didn't want to be associated with that."
As it happened in fact, when the Americans arrived in several of the camps, the Kurds kept their ill children and other family members hidden. Medies began going from tent to tent, looking for sick kids. "They didn't really want you, because they didn't trust the medics or anybody else at first," says Florer. "The medics literally had to convince these women to bring their kids out and to help them. Otherwise, they would just die. They would just bury them where they could find a little spot and dig kind of a shallow little grave and put these little kids in it. They were dying by the dozens when we first got there."
For the first few days, SF medics tried to cope with the incredible array of health problems with their own supplies — which were, of course, designed to help a six- or twelve-man team in a combat situation. They were quickly overwhelmed.
Once the units established secure landing zones and road routes to the camps, however, medical supplies began to arrive in large quantities. World Health Organization packages — which typically include medicine, antibiotics, and other necessities for thousands of people — helped stabilize the health situation.
THE CAMP'S
Calling the refugees' makeshift collection of shelters "camps" is a wild overstatement.
Pirineikin was typical. Thousands and thousands of people were packed into a one-hundred- to three-hundred-yard-wide valley. Observers compared it to the scene at a rock concert — without any of the good stuff, and more bad than anyone could imagine.
"The ground was covered with the detritus of their flight," Shaw remembers, "including clothing, feces, and vomit." Trees had been stripped and used for firewood. Most tents were simple tarps four or five feet high. A dozen or more people — children to elderly — could be living in each one. Ground unoccupied by tents was covered with waste and the remains of butchered animals.
As soon as they arrived, SF soldiers generally set up secure areas for sleeping away from the main camp. They stayed in canvas tents, either in small two-man tents or "GP mediums" — general-purpose medium-sized tents that could house several people. In some cases, soldiers set up one-man "poncho hootches" and bunked there. As soon as their perimeters were established — and often before — they went to work.
While the chaos in the camps seemed to invite terrorists (and, of course, Iraqi secret agents bent on mischief), the vastly outnumbered Americans were actually relatively secure. According to SF security analysts, part of the reason had to do with the mission: The Kurds generally recognized that the Americans were there to help; they were grateful for it, and in many cases protective. Various other factors, including close ties with the civilian leadership and local guerrillas, the presence of Turkish military, and not least of all the SF's own firepower, also helped prevent attack.
On another front: The SF units included a range of foreign-language experts, yet not one spoke Kurdish. The troops had to rely on Kurds who spoke English, sometimes surprisingly well, sometimes haltingly. Since the refugees included a number of doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, and other professionals, they often served as translators.
THE SUPPLY EFFORT
U.S. Air Force Hercules transports had been dropping supplies to the Kurds since April 7, at first aiming to provide the refugees with a thirty-day supply of food, water, and other necessities. But the difficult flying conditions and the unfamiliarity of the refugees with airdrop procedures had led to waste and tragedy. Harsh winds in the mountains and foothills blew ordinary parachutes off course; high-speed parachutes could defeat the winds, but often meant the pallets would smash on landing and ruin the contents.
The Kurds were so desperate to get the supplies, they would often run under the falling chute, not realizing that a pallet could crush them. An unknown number of civilians died this way. Other Kurds were killed when they tried to retrieve the supplies from minefields.
SF troops began organizing the supply effort from the camp site, clearing roads for trucks and establishing helicopter landing zones. The first few helicopters in were mobbed by anxious Kurds, creating unmanageable chaos. The SF troops ended that quickly.
"We figured out where the LZs were that we needed to create and then we barbwired them off," Flofer remembers. "That was the way to start to bring order." The Kurds' leaders, meeting in camp councils with the SF commanders, helped allocate supplies, so resources could be distributed in a somewhat organized fashion.
Coordinating the supply pipeline was more difficult. As the relief operation got into high gear, supplies from thirty nations had to be processed and shipped to the front line. The Military Traffic Management Command off-loaded cargo at three Turkish ports, shipping cargo and pallets to a string of bases that supplied the camps. But even as a routine developed and more roads were opened, the sheer size of the operation and the involvement of nearly one hundred relief agencies with their own agendas complicated the effort. Getting any supplies to the camps in the first few days was difficult, but getting the right supplies to the right places was for a while nearly impossible, a classic case of catch-22s complicated by misinformation and a lack of resources.