Jordan Becker: Army Special Forces (10th Group) | Foreign Area Officer

This is the Combat Story of Jordan Becker, US Army Lieutenant Colonel serving as a Foreign Area Officer (FAO) in Paris, France, as a liaison officer to the French Joint Staff.  Jordan began his career in the 173rd Airborne Brigade where he led an infantry platoon in a parachute assault that opened the Northern Front in the Iraq war in March of 2003, followed by an 11-month deployment in and around Kirkuk. While in the 173rd, Jordan led a rifle platoon, a support platoon, and served as an executive officer. Jordan completed the Special Forces Assessment and Selection and the Special Forces Qualification Course, after which he was assigned to 10th Special Forces Group. He served in and around Baghdad as the targeting and current operations officer for Special Operations Task Force – Center, and then commanded a detachment assigned to advise Iraq’s national-level Special Operations Force’s Reconnaissance Troop. In 2008, Jordan’s team operated in Mali in support of Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahel. As a FAO, Jordan served as a military assistant and speechwriter to NATO’s Chairman of the Military Committee, General Petr Pavel, and a Defense Policy Advisor to the US Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador Douglas Lute. Jordan has written extensively on NATO and transatlantic cooperation and his works can be found on Google Scholar. Jordan's next assignment will take him back to West Point to teach the next generation of Army officers. Show Notes: 3:45 - Watching an Air Force Colonel getting ready to jump into Iraq without a weapon or a ruck sack. 4:32 - Description of then-Major Mike Davis and his ODA team securing the 173rd DZ as an SF Team Leader in 2003. 5:28 - Where were you on 9/11? 5:38 - Mark Brzozowski bitten by a brown recluse spider in a ‘sensitive’ area during IOBC. 6:39 - Evan Kohlman was a fellow student at Georgetown on Jordan’s program who wrote a thesis pre-9/11 about the Arab threat. Evan went on to be a news analyst on terrorism and co-founder of Flashpoint. 9:20 - Description of Jordan’s “First time I’d ever bucked the system” 12:10 - Why did you sign up  for the Army? 15:50 - First combat experience at 173rd that Jordan saw was on the DZ after static line jumping into Iraq in March 2003. Front end of OIF. 19:45 - Jordan’s work on Team Repo in Kirkuk was referenced in a short blurb in Assassin’s Gate, a book by George Packer about the war in Iraq at that time. 22:00 - 23:45 - Jordan describes the best moment of his career: being invited to pin E-9 on his former Platoon Sergeant, Mike Barlett, who went on to become a Brigade CSM and recently retired. 32:20 - How do you determine which SF Group you’re assigned to? 49:15 - Jordan takes an SF team to Mali. 53:45 - Closest call or most dangerous experience. 1:00:50 - Jordan describes two moments when he felt like he was “in flow” and really doing what he was supposed to be doing. 1:08:08 - If you could only take one person with you into combat, who would it be? 1:12:46 - Jordan on writing, teaching and Google Scholar page.