By the time McAnally reached Sulaymaniyah, he'd already spent roughly a year training Iraqi security forces around Baghdad and a stretch after that working as the medic on a Personal Security Detail. Sulaymaniyah was a different assignment with a different gap to fill: the unit had water in its area of operation and no way to work it. No divers. No equipment program. No standard for what a water-capable officer needed to know. If something went into the water — evidence, a victim, a threat — it stayed there, or someone went in without training and hoped.
Building a dive capability from nothing, in a country with no existing program to model it on, meant starting at the most basic level: who could swim, who could be trusted under stress, who could follow a procedure when conditions gave them every reason not to. McAnally spent about a year running the team through the fundamentals the same way he'd later run instructor candidates through the IDC — not by lowering the bar because the circumstances were hard, but by refusing to certify anyone the water hadn't actually tested.
The team was up and running when McAnally moved on to a short-term assignment in a different area, on a separate mission. That's where he was injured — an injury serious enough to end his deployment earlier than he'd planned, with time still left on the clock.
The dive team in Sulaymaniyah didn't end when he left the country. It remains active and fully operational today — the first professional police dive team the unit ever had, still doing the job years after the person who built it went home.
"You don't measure what you built by what happens to you. You measure it by whether it's still standing after you're gone."