Anthony Woods

So I remember coming back from that deployment and I got an opportunity to go to grad school and then go back and teach at West Point, pending successful company command. I was accepted to go to the Kennedy School at Harvard to do a master’s in public policy. And I thought that this would be a really important breather.

When I got to Harvard, all of the sudden I was in a civilian environment without those buddies and close friends who I had just had this very significant experience with. I remember being really kind of out of sorts and depressed. It’s sort of tough to be isolated in a way from the people who know what you’ve been through and so it made for a tougher start.

It also gave me an opportunity to really start thinking about myself and who I was. My entire time in the military up to that point was serving under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy which I think by that point, 13,000 members were discharged. When I was at West Point I think I had a sense that I was gay, I understood what it meant and I knew what it was but I sort of believed, no I’m not going to date or be out. I knew that this is how I was going to go through college and be able to afford college, and so I couldn’t do anything to jeopardize my career in the military or my time at West Point.

But as I went through the military and saw the diversity there, I started to realize, ‘I actually don’t really think my soldiers would care if I was gay.’ So I started to recognize that this policy is kicking people out, but this is a military that doesn’t really seem to need this policy and it’s actually quite capable of integrating people of different backgrounds.

So when I got to Harvard it was like my first chance to kind of realize, maybe I don’t need to be alone and single and closeted and hiding and lying about my identity all the time, maybe that’s not the way to live.

I think part of this came from a time when I did this cross country bike trip. When you spend 8 hours a day on a bike from Outer Banks, North Carolina to San Diego, California, you do a lot of reflecting and I think that I just realized, you know, you can’t run from who you are. Lying to your friends is not right. West Point teaches these very important values, this honor code that you live by and you should live by even when you’ve left that place and then you know I knew within a few years of me going back to teach at West Point and stand in front of cadets and this idea that I would sort of continue to lie to them because there was this policy that the military didn’t need just didn’t really make any sense to me.

I realized that the only way to make this policy go away is to stand up for what you think is right. So I came out to my commander at the time. They did some sort of investigation – I don’t know what in the world that entailed. I guess they interviewed some people to make sure I was telling the truth. And then I was discharged, fortunately it was honorable. And then I was out of the military Dec. of 2008, a little more than five years into my time.

But I realized there was a need to continue to push for this repeal because this didn’t make sense. I never ever took issue with service members or people who I served with. It always was with this policy and what the policy asked LGBT troops to do and to lie to their peers and whatnot. And so obviously advocated for repeal, it was a real honor to do so and I had the opportunity to speak on TV and write OpEds and you know even tour parts of the country talking about this stuff.

It was – I think it took awhile. Barack Obama was elected shortly thereafter and so there was sort of this perfect window to change this policy. The Obama administration was actually somewhat reluctant, you know obviously they had a lot of priorities, a lot of things going on – they were slow to enact repeal. But eventually it came, right?

So I guess that was in December 2010 – it was passed in the lame duck session. That sort of played out over the course of a couple years, and during that time I began this administrative process of actually getting back into the Army. I was excited about the service and I enjoyed that aspect; I wanted to continue serving in some capacity. And so the reserves seemed like a perfectly great way to serve but it took a long time.

It wasn’t actually until I ran totally by chance into General Tammy Smith at a human rights campaign dinner. We ran into each other and I thanked her for who she was and she said good job working on repeal and she said, hey, if you ever need any help to get back in, let me know. She handed me a card and I thought it was just somebody being nice. Turns out she was the Chief of Staff to the US Army Reserves so it was the perfect person who could absolutely help.

So that was on a Saturday, I didn’t read the card right away. I pulled it out of my tuxedo or whatever pocket on Sunday and I read her title and was like oh wow, this person can help, this is insane. Monday, I think I sent her an email. By Friday, I think the process had kicked off and the next week I had orders. But that wasn’t until Dec. 2014, something around that time frame. So it wasn’t until 2015 that I was able to fully get back into the Army reserves. And General Smith actually swore me back in which was a real honor. It was also very cool to do that with my husband.

I had full faith that service members would be very professional. That faith was very much well-placed because it was very clear that when I rejoined there was no issues, it was kind of a non-issue, people were very respectful and you know you get minor jokes here and there and people make minor comments and whatnot, like sure, and my experience is my own, I can’t speak for literally every other gay and lesbian and bisexual service member but everyone I know has had a pretty consistent experience that’s been mostly positive and very professional.

I look back on this all today, this is now over 20 years, and there’s a lot of cynicism today about where we are as a country and where we are politically. I think it’s that experience at West Point and the army – of meeting people with very different backgrounds and very different political views and realizing that all those things can go away when you bring a group of people together and you focus them on something really important or when you put them in life and death situations. I always go back to this experience in the military and realize that there’s a lot more that unites us and binds us and we too often fail to realize that. In the Army you get a random drawing of enlisted people and NCOs who work for you. And you don’t have a choice. You didn’t read their resume, you didn’t hire them, you didn’t screen them, you didn’t advertise for them, right? It is who they are and what it does is it makes you, it forces you to look for the skills – and you can’t fire them right? So it forces you to look for the best in every single person; because you are going to have to draw that out of all of them, and bring that together in a cohesive way, and build a team, and do something that’s really, really difficult- together. And that makes me hopeful.

I graduated in 2003 as an armor officer and I had orders to go to Fort Carson, Colorado. I was just barely highly ranked enough at West Point where I got the absolute last slot to go there. But then as I was graduating from Fort Knox, someone came to our officer class and said, ‘we need officers to volunteer and take national guard platoons on deployment.’ They needed 14 to step up and do that and I was one of the ones who volunteered. I was also really proud that 13 of the 14 volunteers to go to war were my classmates from West Point.

I met the unit shortly after Christmas in Fort Bragg and we were at Fort Polk by January for a month training rotation, and then we were off on our deployment to Iraq by February of 2004. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going to lead a National Guard platoon from West Virginia. My platoon was mostly white with the exception of one soldier. I stuck out like a sore thumb in most ways – I’m this black Californian who went to West Point who now leads soldiers from the West Virginia National Guard.

But we shed all of our differences, politically, ethnically, geographically. We quickly grew to care for one another and got to know one another very, very well and we were pretty quickly off on a pretty important and somewhat scary journey together. Once we deployed, our mission in Iraq really varied. A lot of training of the Iraqi Army and a lot of convoy escorts. So we spent a lot of time on the road doing a lot of route clearance.. We had a sector with a very large perimeter – we’re talking probably hundreds of square miles per platoon of 16 that we were supposed to be aware of. That deployment was north and east of Baghdad between the Iraq and Iran border. We had a lot more smuggling so you know we set up a lot of checkpoints, did a lot of searching of vehicles and searching of places that we thought were ultimately weigh stations for insurgents who were on their way to support the more kinetic activities that were going on in Baghdad and the larger cities.

We were always sort of on the go but you find ways to just kind of enjoy life – create some normalcy and hang out with one another. Run a lot, work out a lot. I’d probably scream today but you spend a lot of time with this low-cost, low-bandwidth internet cafes. They were pretty strict on not allowing WiFi where the housing area was so I remember sort of making this daily multi-mile walk in 120 degree heat to this very shabby internet cafe. I remember ploughing through multiple seasons of the West Wing on my now very dusty computer. You kind of break up the key elements of daily life, you know?

Later in our deployment, we were doing our sort of standard early morning route probably just after 6 or 7 in the morning and I remember for whatever reason that day we decided to mix up the convoy order so I was the second vehicle. We were cruising at 45-55 mph down this highway and I remember just looking out the window, scanning the road or whatever, and then all of a sudden, I remember I opened my eyes and the next thing I know I’m looking at what appeared to be just a wall of dirt and smoke and debris and it didn’t make any sense. I almost feel like everything kind of slowed down. It’s also kind of a weird sensory experience. I remember just looking at this wall of dirt and debris and having to kind of wrap my head around, what in the world am I looking at? This is extremely strange and then I realized, well wait a minute, that’s an explosion and there was a vehicle in front of me and I can’t see the vehicle. And then you know I sort of didn’t realize it but everything was kind of silent, and the next sound I heard was me talking on the radio. I was checking on the status of the vehicle ahead of me. It was a complex attack and so the insurgents set off an IED but then they also started firing at the convoy. I remember giving orders to the platoon to fire back but to also push through. The vehicle in front of us, the guys were banged up, a couple of them got concussions, certainly busted eardrums, but none of them permanently damaged. That was the closest I came to losing soldiers was that particular attack. A couple of guys got purple hearts for that and it really shook them up.

It’s interesting looking back on my time in Iraq. I felt like we as a nation kind of rushed to judgement. It didn’t appear that there was much of a connection between 9/11 and Iraq and Saddam Hussein, it felt like the evidence was confirmation biased, everything felt just felt off to me, you know? But I knew that I didn’t want my soldiers to pay the price for what felt like a bad political decision. I think the mission becomes your fellow soldier, right? The mission becomes, I will execute orders and I will carry out missions that are not illegal, unethical, or immoral and first and foremost I’ll be thinking about the safety and wellbeing of my fellow soldiers. I also recognize that soldiers at war can make mistakes and those mistakes can do real damage to innocent civilians and property, so there’s a need to make sure you conduct yourself ethically and you need good officers to do that.

So it became very easy to be really motivated to lead my soldiers well, take care of their wellbeing, bring them home alive, and make sure that we didn’t do anything that we would be ashamed to talk about with our families when we did get home. Over two deployments, that was something that I was really most proud of was the ability to do that and over both deployments, 81 soldiers all of them came home alive.

We got home just shortly after Christmas and I remember constantly scanning the room and constantly looking for violence or danger to unfold without warning. You don’t realize it but your body is sort of like a naturally permanently clenched fist and it takes a long time for that to unwind and unravel and for you to relax. You observe your civilian peers and friends and everyone else, and for them the war was nothing more than something that scrolled by on the bottom of the screen. This thing that felt all-consuming and very important to you and your fellow soldiers was completely unimportant to people back home.

Part of that is a national decision not to fully involve all aspects of society in carrying out American foreign policy. And so it becomes this thing that a very small number of people will do and no one outside the military has to make any real sacrifices. I wouldn’t say that I was mad or cynical but I had this reflection of, ‘huh, I guess what I did doesn’t really matter to other people.’ I remember feeling so out of place as a result of that.

My next assignment was to basically pick up where I left off so I was going to go to Fort Carson, CO and my unit that I was supposed to go to had just left for Iraq. I remember thinking, well, I feel so out of place, I don’t want to stick around. I don’t want to be in the United States.

So I requested a waiver to turn around and join the 3rd ACR in Iraq. I had five months between deployments, and I thought I was well enough rested, I thought I was prepared to go back but the moment I got back overseas and caught up with the unit, what took four or five months to get really exhausted during the first deployment, it probably took one or two months to feel just as sort of burnt out and tired.

When I arrived, the regimental commander of the 3rd ACR was Colonel H. R. McMaster, the hero from 73 Easting who I read about in school. We were this really well-equipped, really highly skilled unit and we were in a much, much more dangerous place in Tal Afar, which was the north west of Mosul. Tal Afar had become this real stronghold for Al-Qaeda and Iraq and other insurgent groups. When I got there, I quickly took over the support platoon, which is the platoon that’s responsible for food, fuel, ammo, logistics, all that sort of stuff.

So I think 64 soldiers were in the platoon and a lot of fuel trucks, which is a scary thing to drive around; I have a lot of respect for guys who can do that day in and day out. There were whole swaths of the city that couldn’t – you know American units could not patrol without immediately coming under fire and so it became very clear that this was a city that could soon be out of control if things didn’t change. So that deployment was where H.R. McMaster and my squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hickey, developed this precursor to what was the clear hold and build strategy. This was 2005, and we built a huge dirt berm around the city. We set up checkpoints and started to clear out the city using psychological operations and pamphlets and leaflets and all that stuff. We made it clear that if you’re still here after x date, you’re saying you’re here to fight. This was I believe at the time a 250-300K city; it was gigantic. We cleared out this whole city and then I think we had an additional unit from the 82nd Airborne join us to sort of plus us up, we had additional squadrons sort of flex resources towards us.

I think we probably went 30-45 days of sustained operations. I remember fighting alongside kurdish peshmerga. They were incredibly skilled fighters which sort of makes our most recent decision to betray them as an ally really kind of sting. I remember, I think we had about 2,000 Kurdish troops who were fighting alongside us. It was really incredible to see how skilled and capable they were.

The operation was successful and we essentially moved off of our FOB and into the city. We built over a dozen really well hardened checkpoints, compounds within the city, causing my role as a support platoon leader to become much more dynamic. And the strategy worked. We cleared out the bad guys, we moved into the city, and we held it and what that immediately did was made it clear to the Iraqi population that you can actually trust us: If you have information about bad actors you can tell us because we’re not going to go away at night to go back to our FOB, you can trust us to use this information to stop these people. And things really changed significantly from that point forward and I think that’s why it became a model that people like General Petraeus later integrated into his kind of broader approach for all of Iraq.

I grew up with a single mom who raised me working as a housekeeper. It was sort of a lean upbringing when it came to finances and those types of things. My mom shielded me from a lot of the financial pressure she was under, but I was smart enough to realize that she wasn’t going to be able to help me pay for college and I knew that wouldn’t be something that I’d ask her to do.

I grew up just outside of Travis Air Force Base in California and so I had a lot of friends’ parents who were still in the military, and so I had this admiration for military service. I think there was also a strong influence from my mom. She really just enjoyed serving others and liked being helpful and I think I was sort of wired in a similar way. This idea of serving and helping others just sort of permeated how she and I viewed the world and saw things.

During my Junior year of high school, West Point and other schools started to do outreach and I got a letter from West Point – I actually kind of ignored it at first and then my mom said, hey, this is a really good school, you should think about it and I was like, alright, I’ll put it in the ‘good school’ pile. And then they sent a follow-up that they were going to be in Sacramento. And so I went to that presentation and then I remember on that drive back I had this feeling that West Point is the only place I want to go and serving in the military is something I really, really want to do. And that was sort of it.

It’s funny, I actually feel like the discipline aspect of West Point wasn’t really all that jarring. I remember watching this video from West Point – it was like a terrible early 90s production. I just sort of felt like I had seen enough and I knew that it wasn’t going to be fun and it was going to be kind of austere. So I feel like I was prepared for that. Oddly enough I think I wasn’t really well-prepared for the weather. I remember my first winter, the Hudson River froze over; like literally you could walk across it. But it was sort of this horrible metaphor for how oppressive this different environment could be. It’s depressing and isolating and you’re coming of age and figuring things out and West Point by design sort of overwhelms you with more than you can reasonably handle or do.

So it was tough and at times sort of grueling. But in hindsight it was so very necessary and valuable. There’s this melting pot aspect there, people coming together from every socioeconomic rung and background. There’s this need to really understand, appreciate, and see the best in what people bring because their situation in life is not a reflection of their value or worth, it’s intrinsic to who they are. I was exposed to ideas that were counter to what I personally believed and it felt like an intellectually demanding and honest place.

I got to West Point during a time of relative peace, and it was during my Junior year that the 9/11 attacks happened. I remember after 9/11 there was a real sense of fear, like literally the day of. It was still unclear how many aircrafts were in the air and how this attack was unfolding – is more of our country in danger? And you start to very quickly realize that it’s your job to be a part of whatever that response is. So I think even in the most immediate sense you literally wanted to go to Ground Zero and help. I remember George W. Bush’s speech – I believe it was later that night where he addressed the country and there was a line that he essentially says, American military: you’re on notice. And I remember watching that and realizing, ‘wow everything is very real and everything is about to get very serious.’ But we didn’t know how yet.