In December 2003, Jason Crow landed in the Baltimore airport on a Delta flight from Kuwait.
Christmas music played in the terminal. The airport was decorated for the holidays. Families were preparing for holiday travel.
Before the flight from Kuwait, Crow had left Baghdad on a military flight. Before the military flight, Crow’s transport had been ambushed, and a firefight ended in the deaths of several Iraqi soldiers. Before that, Crow led a platoon of Army paratroopers on over 100 combat missions during the U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout 2003.
But once he was back in Baltimore, a rental car company wouldn’t lease Crow a car because he wasn’t old enough.
“It was like getting off of a ship and onto a different planet,” Crow said of the Baltimore airport. “I’m like ‘Listen, I literally just spent almost a year leading a platoon of paratroopers at war for this country, and you literally won’t rent me a car because I’m not 25 yet?’”
Once a different company agreed to rent him a car, Crow was driving on the interstate to Fort Bragg for a special training course. He found himself scanning the roads, as well as the rooftops and windows of buildings he drove by.
“I was just so used to being alert and hyperaware for roadside bombs or snipers or an ambush, and I was just instinctively doing it,” Crow said. “And it just dawned on me that, you know, I had some work to do, basically.”
As the leader of a military platoon, he didn’t have time to think about himself and was more focused on looking after his soldiers, he said.
“You’re so focused on the missions and taking care of your soldiers and making sure their needs are met,” Crow said. “There’s just constant intensity, right? You’re working 16, 17, 18 hour days, and you’re sleeping three or four hours. You’re cleaning your weapons, you’re getting ready for the next mission. It is such an intense pace.”
Crow’s combat experience would be a crucial factor many years later in a different kind of conflict, this time with the nation’s commander-in-chief.
Last month, Crow, now a member of the U.S. House from Colorado, and five other congressional Democrats addressed members of the military and intelligence community in a public video, saying service members can and must refuse illegal orders from the Trump administration. President Donald Trump responded in social media posts to condemn their words as seditious and punishable by death. He called the Democrats, who each contributed to military or intelligence missions on behalf of their country, traitors. He shared a post calling for them to be hanged. Now they’re the targets of federal investigations.
But what went unacknowledged in the response from Trump, who never served in the military, and what grounded Crow’s message with authority is that Crow, a decorated war hero who has received and issued countless commands on multiple battlefields, understands firsthand the nature of military orders.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice says that service members have the right to refuse orders that violate the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law or military regulations. Though the purpose of the Democrats’ video was to remind troops of that right, the Department of Defense is investigating one them, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, for his involvement, and the FBI has requested interviews with others in the video, including Crow.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, pictured conducting aerial reconnaissance in Iraq in 2003. (Photo from U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office)
Throughout his military career, Crow said he always took “compliance with the law and morality very seriously.”
When training his platoon of paratroopers before going to Iraq, Crow sat them down in a room and showed them a scene from the 1986 movie “Platoon” depicting the My Lai massacre. The movie is based on real events during the Vietnam War, and the scene showed U.S. soldiers murdering hundreds of civilians.
“I showed that scene to my paratroopers, and then I led a discussion with them about how that happened, and the emotional pressures and the fear and the anxiety and the loss of humanity that led to those actions and into that massacre,” Crow said. “Because I wanted to get them thinking about who they were and how they would respond to those pressures and those tensions. Because I knew that if I waited until we were in the moment, that that would have been too late. You can never train people in the moment, because the fog of war and the intensity is too much. You have to set the conditions.”
That is part of why he and fellow veterans in Congress put out the video on refusing unlawful orders, Crow said, “to start that discussion and start people thinking about what their obligation is.”
Crow has introduced legislation to increase oversight of civilian casualties in conflict zones. He also cofounded a caucus in the U.S. House centered on protecting civilians. His firsthand experience seeing how conflict affects civilians and witnessing civilian casualties informed that work.
“That’s why I am so committed to making sure that we train people and we enforce the law of war and the Geneva Conventions and making sure that our young folks know what they can do and shouldn’t do, and never losing sight of themselves,” Crow said. “When you take a unit of young soldiers, most of whom are 18, 19, 20 years old, and most of whom have never left home and you put them into a combat zone and you’re there for months and months and sometimes a year, it’s easy for folks to lose sight of who they are and where they come from.”
From ROTC to the front lines
Crow worked in construction to afford college, and enlisted in the Wisconsin National Guard soon after he started school because it fully covered tuition. He took a semester off for basic training and joined the guard as a private.
He went to drills one weekend a month and for two weeks in the summer, and that’s where he discovered that he “loved wearing the uniform.”
“I loved having the patch on my shoulder,” Crow said. “I loved being a part of something bigger than myself, a team, and I really for the first time in my life realized how passionate I was about public service and national service and being a part of something bigger than myself.”
The 9/11 terrorist attacks happened during the first week of Crow’s senior year of college. He switched to an active duty contract, and finished college in May 2002 as a distinguished military graduate of the ROTC. That designation meant he got to choose his branch of the military and his assignment, so he selected the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
Crow went to Fort Benning for infantry school, airborne school and Ranger School, and finished all three before the 2002 holiday season. Ranger School is the Army’s “toughest course,” and hones skills over 62 days “directly related to units whose mission is to engage the enemy in close combat and direct fire battle.”
Crow remembers walking into his commander’s office when he reported to his first assignment in January 2003 and experiencing what he called a “bucket of cold water moment,” when the reality and the gravity of what he signed up for became clear.
“He looked at me and he said … ‘Standing outside is your platoon of paratroopers. We’re going to war in a couple of months. That’s your platoon, train them well, train them hard and don’t let us down.’”
In March, Crow led his platoon of about 50 paratroopers in the invasion of Iraq. They started in Nasiriyah, and then fought in Samawah, which Crow said ended up being a week-long battle, “house to house, street to street.”
The battle of Samawah was the most intense urban combat the 82nd Airborne Division had experienced since World War II, Crow said. That is where he earned his Bronze Star for leading his platoon in capturing the Highway 8 bridge over the Euphrates River.
The unit traveled through various other parts of Iraq before moving into Baghdad, where Crow and his platoon spent the rest of 2003 in counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, then a U.S. Army Ranger, pictured in Afghanistan. (Photo from U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office)
After spending time back in the U.S. for additional ranger training, Crow went on two tours in Afghanistan in 2004 after he was recruited to join the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. The Army’s website says the regiment specializes “in combat missions deep inside enemy territory — a task only the best-trained can carry out in this branch of the elite Special Operations Forces.”
Crow was part of the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Joint Special Operations Task Force assigned to capturing Osama Bin Laden. He spent the year in southeastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan fighting the Haqqani Network.
Now serving on the U.S. House Armed Services and Intelligence committees, Crow, who went on to become a lawyer before seeking elected office, is now tasked with reviewing military actions. After seeing as part of a committee inquiry the full footage of a U.S. strike in September on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, he said he believed a follow-up strike that killed two survivors clinging to boat wreckage was illegal.
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