His preferred tactic is to travel to a place that has been in the news, where there's been a murder or a shooting, and then, with a team of helpers, he works "commando-style".
"If you're working with commandos," the colonel advised, "be sure you know where they are".Yet the commandos, who currently number around 4,000 retrained fighters of the old regime, are probably the best of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), along with a similar number in Iraq's revamped regular army.
Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base.
Elsewhere the color commandos work with Dutch bank ING to add its trademark orange to Canadian customers' statements and brighten up mail from MetLife and Genworth.
They had previously been routed by Afghan commandos working with American Special Operations Forces after holding the district for a few days in late May.
In February 1944, with the help of Australian commandos working behind Japanese lines, he was picked up by an American submarine off a New Britain beach.
One of the trawlers, the 150-foot Russian-flagged Volga, was detained in a freezing storm by Australian commandos working from helicopters.
"The hard work of 40 Commando Royal Marines in Afghanistan over the winter has led to impressive progress in the capabilities of Afghan forces as they take on security responsibility, with decreasing levels of assistance from UK and ISAF forces.
Concerned that Al Qaeda fighters may be fleeing into neighboring Pakistan, the American military has doubled the number of commandos working alongside anti-Taliban Afghan forces to about 50 in the last few days, officials said.
The history made in the final quarter of 2001 was not so much in the surprising speed and efficacy of our bombing campaign directed by American commandos working with indigenous troops.
