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I joined the 800th MP Brigade when they were already deployed.

There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.

As I have been saying for more than a year now, turning this vital mission over to the Iraqi people as soon as possible should remain a topic of debate for Congress while relying on our military commanders to set up the timetable.

I knew how many MPs I had assigned to the brigade, how many military prison operations I would be running, but we needed to evaluate how many criminal prison operations we could support.

My first mission is to take care of our troops. I take that mission very personally.

The American surge of combat forces into Baghdad that was ordered by President Bush worked. And there was a calm, a relative calm that descended on the country kind of late 2008. That pretty much held until the last American combat soldiers left at the end of 2011.

Today nearly every combat brigade located within the United States would report that they are not ready for duty. They are at the lowest levels of readiness.

After this urgent protest against entering into battle at Gettysburg according to instructions - which protest is the first and only one I ever made during my entire military career - I ordered my line to advance and make the assault.

Almost immediately, I remember right when Tikrit even fell, a few days after Baghdad fell, there was talks of insurgency, there was talks of jihad and of resisting the American occupiers, and slowly this turned into an organized movement.

I spent several months patrolling Al Dora district in Baghdad in 2006 with the 101st Airborne. It's a tough neighborhood. There's a lot of militias operating there, including a lot of Shiite militias, which are backed by Iran.