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Life in the Palace: One Reservist's Story
by Christine Smallwood
August 2004
Late last year, the day before Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole in the ground, Drew Techner, a 39 year-old detective from the Philadelphia Police Department, arrived at the air-conditioned Republican Presidential Palace in Baghdad. He had traded his position investigating robberies and assaults from a fluorescent-lit Northeast Philadelphia squad room for chandeliers, gold-painted bathroom fixtures, and a bed inside a bunker whose walls were piled high with sandbags to shield against exploding mortars. He spoke no Arabic, and this was the first time he'd traveled outside of North America. Where in Philadelphia he had earned a commendation for interrogating a single suspect for hours to solve a chain of convenience store robberies, he was now part of a military intelligence operation responsible for tracking threats to the lives of thousands of soldiers.
Although he declined due to security concerns to explain what sort of exercises his intelligence gathering actually entailed, it was his responsibility, Techner says, “to tell the command what the enemy was doing.”
A glance downstairs, below the menagerie of stuffed animals overrunning the first floor of his home, reveals that the gathering and mining and organizing of information is not just Drew Techner's work; it is his life. In his tidy, finished basement, Techner keeps a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a library of 660 cassettes of radio broadcasts from around the world. (He can remember tuning in to Radio Baghdad on his shortwave radio during Desert Storm and hearing Depeche Mode's “Enjoy the Silence.”) He has an audiophile phonograph with built-in settings for listening to his old Decca, Columbia and Cameo Parkway records, some of which feature his father, Joe Techner, on trumpet. (He is gradually copying these to compact disc, he says.) Techner has also, for the past seven years, been researching his great-great-great-great grandfather Colin McLachlan, who fought in the Revolutionary War. He has organized all of the plastic-sheathed records on McLachlan into a soft black binder emblazoned with McLachlan's name and the U.S. Army seal.
“I want to exhaust absolutely everything that there is to know about this man,” Techner says. “I want to write it as a narrative work with all the research laid out chronologically, with footnotes. I want to take my ancestor and use him as a way for people to learn about the American Revolution.” (This passion for genealogy is how he first met his wife, Carin—he and her mother were researching a 500 year-old German ancestor they had in common.) Drinking coffee from a “Go Army” mug, Techner's face lights up when speaking of his military heritage. His service in Iraq is not only a culmination of his fifteen years as a reservist, it is a fulfillment of his family's legacy. After years of researching the campaigns fought, battles waged and struggles endured by his ancestors, he now has his own story to share with 2 year-old Sarah and 5 year-old Joey. When Sarah throws a tantrum, he soothes her by plopping her down at the base of a pile of framed family photographs. She stacks them happily.
“Did the children understand where I was? I know what I did. I explained to them that I was going to Iraq. Hey Sarah, where'd I go away to? Where was I?”
“Iraq,” she responds. “You went to Baghdad.”
Techner nods. “That's right, Sarah. Why did I go over there? What did I go over there to do?”
Sarah isn't sure how to put it into words. Joey looks up, eyes darting sideways. “Catch the bad guys,” he murmurs. The house is very quiet.
Military and police work are both dangerous, Techner says. “But I get the same kind of satisfaction … I like helping people who need my help.”
While Techner was in Baghdad, both of his children had birthdays, and Sarah learned to talk. “I got home and I said to her, ‘You know, Sarah, I missed you.' And she said, ‘I miss you too, Daddy.' The preposition was in there. She had the whole sentence structure. I don't know where she picked that up. For a while, I didn't know the child. It's not easy leaving a family, even if it was just six months.”
Techner has a square head, short, dark hair and extremely long eyelashes. His mind methodically proceeds from one point to another with a persistent regard for chronology and detail. He turns all of my questions into teaching moments. Our conversation wanders from tuning in to the BBC to bartering for a Persian rug to his efforts to restoring his father's trumpet, always returning to the deeds of his forbearers. In addition to McLachlan, eleven of his ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, and one was a member of the Associators, a unit organized by Benjamin Franklin in 1747 that was to become the 111th Infantry—the National Guard unit of which Techner is an alumnus. Only last month he visited Virginia's Old Frederick County Courthouse, where Union soldier William McLachlan, his great-great-grandfather, was imprisoned during the Civil War.
“As any military career professional—you don't want to go for 20 years, never having been deployed. Now I've done it, I don't have an empty career. There's also the biblical—the fact that I was in the Holy Land, in the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates. That has a lot of impact on me, in terms of memory. Being a part of history. A major event occurred during my lifetime and I was actually there as it unfolded, and I knew what was going on. That had an impact on me, just like it must have on my ancestors. I've done what they did now.”
Christine Smallwood: How did you find out you'd been called up to go to Iraq?
Drew Techner: Basically, I got a set of orders to go overseas. I didn't even have to sign for these orders. It was a letter in the mail. I've never been overseas in my life. This was the first military deployment in my entire military career. I had thirty days to report, so I had to get my affairs in order real quick. I was finishing up my master's degree, my MBA. And my mother was in a nursing home, and I was in the process of emptying out her house and selling it. I had to do all this, and now I had thirty days to do it. I got it done. I emptied the whole house out, and the house actually sold the week after I left.
So then we got a chartered Delta jumbo jet with a Christmas tree in the middle of the aisle. There were probably 300 people on that plane. The crew was easily brought to tears if you said something, cause they realized that these were the guys that were heading over. They had McDonald's food brought in for us. They had Krispy Kreme donuts. The flight to Kuwait City took thirty-six hours. As soon as we got on the plan there were senior officers, Sergeant Majors, shaking our hands. It felt weird, like something out of Vietnam. In Kuwait City we stayed at Camp Wolverine. It's a lot of dirt. Tent city, you know? About twenty-four hours later, we flew to Baghdad. We arrived at about 9 o'clock at night, and the full moon was beautiful, and it was quiet. I slept in my sleeping bag in the airport field. I didn't know about mortars coming in and rocket grenades. When you get off the plane, the first thing you do is swipe your ID card. That's very important, swiping your ID card, to record you're in country. In terms of being a combat veteran, in terms of pay, everything depends on you swiping that card when you get off the plane.
CS: What was your job in Iraq?
DT: I did military intelligence. I knew everything that was going on. I briefed the United Nations and the Joint Operations Center.
CS: What sort of intelligence do you do?
DT: My job was to know the threat. What's the threat? The threat is the terrorists, the insurgents, the former regime elements. My job was to know about them, what they were doing, what they did, what they're doing now, and what they're planning on doing. I was a reporter in one sense, but I would also provide threat assessments as to what was going to happen. Of course it's impossible for me to give you any specifics, because I was working at a top secret level. They call my job battle captain. I reported to a lieutenant colonel, and above him was a colonel, and above him was an intelligence general, Major General Barbara Fast, two stars. And then above her was a Lieutenant General Sanchez, three stars. And above him would be the Central Command Commander, four stars.
CS: Where did you work?
DT: I worked in Saddam's palace, in downtown Baghdad, formerly known as the Republican Presidential Palace. The palace is grandiose. On the outside it's made of beautiful orange stone imported from Jordan. Inside, all the floors were made of Italian marble and the ceilings were vaulted and very high—you would think the Iraqis were giants or something. There were chandeliers in every single room, even the bathrooms. You probably heard about the gold faucets. Well, a lot of the gold was just painted on. It was cheap, fake, just like the entire Hussein regime and the Baath party. At the north end there's a chapel complex with a mural of all these ballistic missiles being fired. This was all about him demonstrating the power of Saddam. The country is impoverished, trashed. In Kuwait, the whole country is in tight order like Beverly Hills. They're driving these nice cars—American cars, by the way—it's clear they have money. Iraq is impoverished, trashed.
CS: How's the pay?
DT: Well first there's my basic pay, based on my grade and my time of service. That's comparable to my detective job. If you have mortgage, you get a Basic Housing Allowance or BHA, depending on your rank and ZIP code. I'm only paying $745 a month, but the BHA says I get $1,616. And then I got this Family Separation Allowance, to send home flowers and gifts. That's $160 a month. Then there's Hostile Fire Pay and Imminent Danger Pay—together that's $250 a month. So I was making about $7,000 a month.
CS: Even if you work in the palace, you get combat pay?
DT: You can't just work in the palace. You have to walk out to the trailer.
CS: Did you have very much contact with the Iraqis?
DT: There are children, and they'll stand on the corner and hawk bootleg DVDs and candy bars. They're there all day long, and they're small, some like three and a half years old, and they're very aggressive about it. The day after The Passion of Christ debuted at the movies they were there with bootlegs. And we had, we had what we called the Hajji mart. A Hajji—now, this may be a derogatory name—it's the Arabs, every year they go to the Hajj, where they go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Well, they consider it a compliment to be called a Hajji, but I don't know. Using that term may not be a positive thing. I never really broke it down, so I don't know. For lack of any other name, it was known as the Hajji mart. It's like a flea market. I bought myself a Persian rug, I sent it home, now it's on the basement floor.
The insurgents in Iraq want as much instability as possible. They feel threatened by the coalition's presence and don't want democracy. If the people are pissed off, the insurgents feel as though they have a groundswell. I'd go along the road to downtown Baghdad and you'd see Iraqis lined up for miles just to get a tank of gas, in a country that has the second largest oil reserves in the region. Some of them might think it's us trying to punish them, but it's not. We're trying to restore their electricity, oil, hospitals and basic services, and I think we're going a pretty good job of it.
CS: You're a Philadelphia Police detective—is that why they asked you to do military intelligence?
DT: No, no. One thing about the reserves is that about twenty percent of them are law enforcement or firemen. Overall, it's that same skill set. My personality is to be a detective. I really like it; it's me. I've been with the Police Department for eleven years, and I started out as a foot-beat cop in Center City. In March of 1996, I got promoted to detective and was assigned to the Northeast Detective Division. I'm a line detective, which means I handle everything from retail theft all the way up to homicide.
CS: What kinds of cases do you like?
DT: Every cop could write a book. Over the course of a career, you see everything. You get the front seat to the whole world. There was a case last year—an elderly woman at the Krewstown Shopping Center. She was a widow, living her life very content, able to go shopping every day and enjoy herself. While she was putting groceries in her car, this male and female couple split her head open with a crowbar and snatched her purse without saying a word. They used her credit card to fraudulently purchase jewelry, and the sold the jewelry outright at pawn shops to get the cash to go buy drugs. I was able to recover video surveillance tapes from the jewelry stores and we got identification of the two defendants, and we set up surveillance on the house and obtained search and arrest warrants. They were living in a half million dollar home in Huntington Valley. Heroin. I was able to quickly get the video out to the media, and there was a big response from the public. One of the key things about this case was the fact that I was helping somebody who needed my help. I was helping a 78 year-old woman who was helpless. She had five sons and daughters, and they were all good kids, grown. And they all appreciated the help of the Police Department; I think the response the department gave to this family helped them heal. The department closed ranks—they came together very quickly; we all sought out each other, all of us across the whole department, we worked together as a team and captured these people without any hesitation or reservations.
CS: What's your feeling on how the media represents what's going on in Iraq?
DT: There's a lot of information in the media. I monitored the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Northeast Times. I was able to keep up with what was going on globally all the way down to locally here in my neighborhood, through the computer. Times have changed. I was in a command center, so I had Google, Internet, telephone, television access. I can't say the same for the soldiers that were in maneuvers. A lot of the communication that we do within the military is over email. After all, the Internet was created by the Department of Defense.
CS: Were you ever scared?
DT: At times I was. Not enough to stop me from going about, though. We were getting mortared and rocket-propelled some of the time. You just had to wonder. I was afraid when I went outside the Green Zone to the airport or Camp Victory.
CS: When you left, were people over there optimistic or run-down?
DT: I think it's all of the above. It's an individual thing. Some units there were coming home for a year. Other people wanted to extend, because they were making a lot of money. Not just contractors, but soldiers. Much of it depends on the individual.
CS: How close were you to violence?
DT: On January 18 I was in my trailer, putting on my boots. I was eight in the morning. All of a sudden the trailer just shook and shifted back and forth like it was made of paper. It was weird. I was in the middle of the bomb blast. A suicide bomber had gone to Assassins' Gate and blown himself up, taking nineteen other people with him, all of them Iraqis. There were women and children that were just instantly gone. And to know that I felt the blast and that twenty people's lives were gone … that's sobering. I was pretty upset about it. I experienced loss of life.
There was a blast on New Year's Eve. I can remember the time, 9:18 p.m. at night. I was in my office and this blast of waves came through. A suicide bomber had hit the restaurant in the Palestine Hotel. That was the first time I had felt something like that and I realized hey, you know. I'm here. This is it. I'm not reading the paper. This is it.
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