Writing History as It Unfolds: A Command Historian in Iraq

Historians have the luxury of perspective when looking back to and writing about the past. But how do historians cover the present when asked to create primary source documents for use in the future? How do they write an “official” history for an organization, especially one at war, that will serve as a resource for other historians decades from now? This presentation offers insights into the experiences of a command historian serving with the Multi-National Corps, Iraq (MNCI) in 2009. That summer political and military tensions arose between allies as the Nouri al-Maliki government stipulated that American forces depart Iraqi cities. The task of recording the key events relating to this departure, and the war in Iraq as a whole, fell to a small team of historians who gathered key documents from the MNCI command group, conducted oral history interviews with strategic leaders, and wrote the corps’ “official” history. These historians normally had unfettered access to important meetings and staff planning sessions and were even able to interview top Iraqi officials under the Saddam Hussein regime being held in American-run confinement centers. Yet the training for some Military History Detachments proved somewhat limited. Language and cultural education was not a prerequisite, instruction on how to conduct oral histories with combat soldiers and their leaders was often rushed, and few had any experience on writing an official, organizational history. This presentation thus reveals the challenges of writing history as it unfolds, of leaving behind a historical record that will be meaningful for future historians who will no doubt be dissecting, and debating, the character of a war that in many ways defined the first decade of the twenty-first century.