David French
speaker
3,314 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 19 Sep
David French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.
Appearances
And handling detainees.
And we had a lot of detainees because we were in the thick
our unit was in the thick of the fight for month after month after month.
And in fact, the unit at the end of the deployment received something called the Valorous Unit Award, which is a very high award given to combat arms units that have really been fighting, who had these very tough deployments and very successful.
We actually did clean out Al-Qaeda from our area of operations.
And just to give you one statistic on how successful we were,
when we first arrived in November of 07 to that area, there was about a 25% chance that if you left the gate of our base, a one in four chance you would get attacked by the enemy in some way, a bomb, a mortar attack, rocket attack, sniper fire, ambush, whatever.
So anytime you went out, you knew, just take like a four-sided dice and roll it, and if it came up one, you were gonna get hit.
And then by the time we left, we had been so successful in dealing with al-Qaeda, it was about a 1% chance that when you rolled out of the gate that you would face enemy contact.
So that was a remarkable thing.
And we saw markets come back to life.
We saw people move back into their homes.
We really saw an entire part of Iraq just sort of come back to life where we were.
That's a great question.
So when I came back, I would say, I was always asked, what is it that you learned?
And I would say, I'll say three things.
Number one, deployments are much more difficult than I ever imagined.
That the stress, the strain, the risk, the pain of it all is... You know, we had a little over 700 guys in our squadron.
And by the end of the deployment, you know, I'd have to check with our S-1 who kept track of all of these statistics.
But I believe we were...
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