Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on November 11, 2003, 11:05:19 AM
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A Profound Howl of Respect to our Veterans and Fighting Men:
Thank you for the freedoms we enjoy. Thank you for what you do.
Woof!
Marc "Crafty Dog" Denny
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Here's just one tidbit from today's WSJ:
Why You've Heard
Of Jessica Lynch,
Not Zan Hornbuckle
As Sentiment About War
Evolves, Victims Grab
Attention, Not Fighters
By JONATHAN EIG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When American troops were attacked on April 7 on a road to Baghdad, a battle broke out at a dot on the map Army commanders called "Objective Curly." Eighty U.S. soldiers, expecting little resistance, were met by 300 well-armed Iraqi and Syrian fighters. Grenades and bullets flew for eight hours.
The U.S. counterattack killed an estimated 200 enemy fighters, according to the commanding officer who oversaw the battle. The American team had never trained or fought together, but all its men got out alive. The team was headed by Capt. Harry Alexander Hornbuckle, a 29-year-old staff officer who had never been in combat before. He was later awarded the Bronze Star, with a V for valor, for his efforts that day.
Capt. Hornbuckle's name has never appeared in a newspaper or on television. He has received no book deals, no movie offers, no trips to Disneyland. In September, when he went to see his parents in Tifton, Ga., his mother called the local Holiday Inn and asked the manager to put her son's name -- he goes by Zan -- on the hotel marquee. That has been his most public recognition so far.
He is one of several soldiers who rose to extraordinary heights on the battlefield in Iraq, received honors from the military and returned home to anonymity. Instead, the best-known soldier of the Iraq War is Jessica Lynch, who suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked. She was rescued from an Iraqi hospital a week later.
The rescue and initial reports -- later discredited -- that the 19-year-old had survived bullet and stab wounds and continued fighting helped make her a celebrity. Stores in her hometown of Palestine, W.Va., sold T-shirts with her name on them. Volunteers planted a new garden in front of her house. Alfred A. Knopf, the publishing house, signed her to a $1 million book deal. "Saving Jessica Lynch," a TV movie about her plight, was broadcast Sunday.
Why did she become the individual celebrated in popular culture and not one of the other men and women who distinguished themselves in combat? The answer lies on the home front as much as on the battlefield.
In World War I, Cpl. Alvin York gained fame for killing 25 Germans and capturing 132. In World War II, Second Lt. Audie Murphy was credited with 240 kills and went on to star in the movie "To Hell and Back," which told the story of his bravery.
Military culture still celebrates the soldier who racks up a high body count. But since the Vietnam War, much of the country has tended to venerate survivors more than aggressors, the injured more than those who inflict injuries.
"People didn't want to view Vietnam vets as heroes," says Army Sgt. Scott Hansen, 56, who served as a helicopter-door gunner in Vietnam and won a Bronze Star with a V for valor for his conduct last year in Afghanistan. "I think people went there to survive -- put in their time and move on."
Many modern war memorials, most notably the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, don't include guns at all. In the 1990s, Hasbro Inc. marketed some of its G.I. Joe action figures as "Eco-Warriors" who fought the destruction of the environment. These days, when Hollywood makes a war movie, it often focuses on saving American lives -- "Saving Private Ryan," "Black Hawk Down," "Behind Enemy Lines" -- not killing others.
Changed Image
New technology is also changing the image of the individual soldier. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, much of the military's fighting has been done with missiles and guns fired at great distances. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, followed by wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have involved more close combat.
"There are a lot of untold stories," says Capt. Hornbuckle's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Stephen M. Twitty, who received a Silver Star for his actions that day. "We don't mind not telling them ... . We know and we're proud of what we've done."
He nominated five of his soldiers for Silver Stars and 28 for Bronze Stars with Vs for valor. Capt. Hornbuckle "took on a challenge that most people would steer away from," says Col. Twitty. "He took a chaotic situation and got it under control."
Robert H. Scales, a retired major general who just co-wrote one of the first military histories of the Iraq War, goes even further. Granted special access by the Pentagon to situation reports and dozens of senior military leaders, staff officers and combat commanders, he contends that the battle at Curly was a pivotal one, and if one soldier deserves to be singled out in the Iraq war, "I'd choose Zan Hornbuckle."
But the military today has some discomfort with the stories of individual soldiers. Asked why the Army didn't do more to publicize Capt. Hornbuckle's feats, Richard Olson, a public-affairs officer for Capt. Hornbuckle's battalion, says the thought never occurred to him. "An aspect of a soldier is that he's trained to kill," he says. "And I don't know that the public is comfortable with that."
"There's a funny shift," says John A. Lynn, who teaches military history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We want to fight wars but we don't want any of our people to die and we don't really want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a hero even if she doesn't do much. She suffered for us."
Pieces in Place
As Capt. Hornbuckle and his team prepared for battle on the evening of April 6, all the pieces were in place for their story to become as well-known as that of Pvt. Lynch. Reporters and cameramen from NBC, the Washington Post and Army magazine were told to stay with Capt. Hornbuckle's unit, under the assumption it would be in a safer location than other units.
Soldiers attack the trenches
American forces already controlled much of Iraq, including its international airport, but there were still determined Fedayeen fighters in the capital. Iraq's foreign minister continued to predict that U.S. troops would be expelled. The American commanders decided to make a bold statement.
The plan was to send tanks into the center of Baghdad, securing Saddam Hussein's palaces and other important positions. Commanders were confident they could hold the city as long as they could keep the roads clear to supply troops. The job of securing the main road from the south went to the Army's Third Battalion, 15th Infantry, commanded by Col. Twitty.
Col. Twitty says he identified three intersections on Highway 8 where Iraqi soldiers were most likely to attack the convoys. One of his men, on a scouting mission, dubbed the intersections Larry, Moe and Curly. The nicknames stuck.
But Col. Twitty had only two companies available for the three objectives. He assigned more than 600 men to Larry and Moe, the northernmost points. To defend Curly, where he thought fighting would be lightest, he created an ad hoc team of 80, a group that had never trained or fought together. He asked Capt. Hornbuckle to lead them. The new group was dubbed "Team Zan."
Predictions that Team Zan would meet light resistance did nothing to help Capt. Hornbuckle relax.
"Oh, God, now I'm in charge of this fight," he recalls thinking. "Now I'm responsible for these 80 people and responsible to Col. Twitty for accomplishing the mission."
He hadn't been looking for a fight. Like many young men, Zan Hornbuckle didn't give a lot of thought to battlefield action when he graduated from Tift County High School in Georgia and decided on a career in the Army. Neither of his parents had served in the military. His father is an industrial mechanic at a Miller Brewing Co. plant. His mother, a former music instructor, now teaches adult education. At age 8, Zan took violin lessons. In high school, he worked for a veterinarian.
"Why on earth do you want to go into the Army?" Myric Hornbuckle recalls asking her son when he graduated from high school. "He said, 'Mama, there are people like you, good people who wouldn't hurt anyone, and there are people like Saddam' -- this is 10 years ago he said this -- who'll do anything to anyone. And there have to be people who will stand up and say 'no, you're not going to do that.' "
He enrolled at the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C., splitting the cost of tuition with his parents. He graduated in 1996, married his high-school sweetheart, and joined the Army's Second Battalion, 187th Infantry. Their son Alex was born last year.
Most of his training since college has focused on battle. It became clear to him early, as he went through basic training for officers and Army Ranger school, that his work could be profoundly violent. Still, he says, he had no idea what it would be like to experience combat.
It was just past sunrise as the three companies rumbled up to objectives Larry, Moe and Curly, each about a mile apart. Looking out from the hatch of his Bradley tank, Col. Twitty spotted trenches dug beside the intersections. He picked up his radio to warn his soldiers: "They know we're coming," he said, according to an Army magazine article by embedded reporter Dennis Steele.
Capt. Hornbuckle bandages the leg of Sgt. Maj. Robert Gallagher
But when Capt. Hornbuckle first poked his head from the hatch of his Bradley and surveyed the intersection at Curly, it looked safe. "It was like driving into Atlanta," he says. "It looked like any big city."
There were two- and three-story apartment buildings, a huge factory with a peaked roof, a hotel and an office building. In the center of it all was a cloverleaf intersection, with ramps running up and down from Highway 8.
He ordered his team to encircle the cloverleaf to repel an assault from any direction. There were 22 vehicles in all -- five Bradleys, four armored Humvees, four mortar-firing vehicles and three ambulances. "Wow, that was easy," Capt. Hornbuckle recalls thinking during the first 30 seconds of silence.
Then came chaos: bullets pinging off trucks, grenades kicking up clouds of dirt and concrete, and, he says, noise louder than anything he imagined possible. The Fedayeen were firing rocket-propelled grenades from nearby buildings and driving pickup trucks with machine guns mounted at the back.
At Close Range
The biggest threat came from just beyond the circle of U.S. troops: The enemy soldiers had dug trenches under the highway overpass. The men in the trenches seemed invisible, and they were shooting at close range, Capt. Hornbuckle says. "It was like we kicked over an anthill."
Air support was out of the question. Any attempt to bomb the enemy from the sky would kill American soldiers, too. There would be no help from the forces at Larry and Moe, because they too were under heavy attack. This battle would be fought on the ground, the old-fashioned way, with guns, grenades and mortars.
For most of the morning, Capt. Hornbuckle says he remained atop his Bradley, firing a machine gun with one hand and holding his radio with the other. He was telling the gunner on his Bradley where to aim, coordinating fire among the rest of his team, and reporting to Col. Twitty, who was about a mile to the north.
Col. Twitty says he could tell from the sound of the gunfire coming across his radio, and the tone of Capt. Hornbuckle's voice, that Curly was under heavy attack.
"Can you hold?" Col. Twitty recalls shouting.
"Sir, I think I've got it," the captain shouted back.
But Capt. Hornbuckle was worried. If the enemy coordinated its attack, they would have a chance. By mid-morning, the air was white with smoke. The intersection, he says, smelled of gunpowder and engine fuel. It was 75 degrees. The U.S. soldiers, dressed in Kevlar vests and desert tan camouflage, were drenched with sweat.
"We might shoot on black today," Capt. Hornbuckle recalls one member of his team telling him, meaning that they might run out of ammunition.
Capt. Hornbuckle in battle
Capt. Hornbuckle's outfit wasn't built for heavy combat. Yet now he had a platoon firing mortar tubes in one direction and machine guns in another. Medics were firing rifles when they weren't applying bandages and intravenous drips to wounded soldiers. Even the chaplain was taking aim at enemy positions.
"Keep doing what you're doing," Capt. Hornbuckle recalls telling the men. "You're doing good. We knew we were gonna fight today."
Bullets kicked up dust at his feet as he ran between platoons. During one dash, he says an Iraqi soldier emerged from a trench, lifted his rifle and took aim. "He drew a bead on me and I drew a bead on him and dropped him," Capt. Hornbuckle says. "He was not going to stop me from going home."
A few hours into the battle, Col. Twitty called again to find out how Team Zan was doing. Both men recall the conversation this way: "It's getting serious," Capt. Hornbuckle told the colonel, "but they're not going to kick us off here."
The colonel later made a call to Sgt. Major Robert Gallagher, a 20-year veteran who had been wounded that morning when a shell fragment lodged in his left calf. He had propped himself against a Bradley to take the weight off the leg and continued shooting while Capt. Hornbuckle bandaged his leg.
Col. Twitty says the injured sergeant major told him: "Boss, we need reinforcements and we need them now." Sgt. Major Gallagher didn't return calls seeking comment.
The colonel ordered another company to bring every combat vehicle and all the supplies it could to Objective Curly. Two U.S. soldiers in that convoy were killed -- shot by Fedayeen soldiers. But the convoy got through, "like the cavalry come to save the day," says Capt. Hornbuckle, who immediately relinquished command to its leader, Capt. Ronny Johnson.
The Fedayeen made one more push and succeeded in blowing up five of the 20 newly arrived supply vehicles. Capt. Hornbuckle says he spotted a U.S. soldier firing on a trench filled with about six enemy fighters. The soldier was alone. Capt. Hornbuckle pulled the man away as he fired his rifle into the trenches. Capt. Hornbuckle never learned the soldier's name, but he believes the man would have been killed.
It occurred to him only later, when he replayed the incident in his mind, that he had shot another enemy fighter at close range. "At least I think I shot him," he says. "He didn't pop up anymore."
Capt. Chris Harris, who was at Curly, confirms Capt. Hornbuckle's account of the battle. Even though it was an ad hoc team, he says, everyone knew what to do when the situation grew tense. With no time to wait for detailed orders, soldiers relied on their training and instincts. "People knew what they were doing and didn't stop to ask, 'Is this OK?,' " he says.
Sgt. First Class Vincent Phillips, who led a small platoon of men into the trenches that day at Curly, says he saw a lot of heroes emerge. "We could have lost everything," he says. "There could have been all kinds of confusion about what was going on. But it just came together." He gives Capt. Hornbuckle much of the credit for coordinating the attack.
After an eight-hour fight, Curly was secured. Larry and Moe followed.
TV Images
Back home, two videotaped images became widely associated with the war: the rescue of Pvt. Lynch and the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. These pictures offered the clearest of messages: U.S. soldiers were safe; the war was over; democracy had triumphed.
Objective Curly wasn't ignored. The Washington Post ran a story inside its first section two weeks after the battle. Craig White, the NBC cameraman embedded with the soldiers at Curly, beamed footage back to New York, and the story appeared on several major network broadcasts.
Vicki Hornbuckle saw some of the fight on television -- "The Battle Under the Bridge," some stations dubbed it -- but had no idea her husband had been involved. All the soldiers looked the same. Mrs. Hornbuckle says it was probably just as well that she didn't recognize her husband because she only would have worried.
The public-affairs office at Fort Stewart brags about its heroes from wars past. Members of the Third Division have won 49 Medals of Honor, far more than any other division, spokesmen for the division say. Audie Murphy of the 15th Infantry, which is now based at Fort Stewart, is the most decorated soldier in U.S. military history, they point out.
The Army presented awards to Capt. Hornbuckle and other soldiers from his team in an impromptu ceremony in the Iraqi town of Falluja. The military didn't issue a news release about the event. Even Capt. Hornbuckle's hometown newspaper, the Tifton Gazette, circulation 9,000, failed to note that a local soldier had been honored. "I'm embarrassed to say I've never heard of the guy," says Managing Editor Chris Beckham. The Gazette did put on the front page a story about a local soldier who suffered a leg wound. That tip came from the soldier's parents.
The biggest war hero in Tifton remains Harold B. "Pinky" Durham, who was awarded a Medal of Honor after he was killed in combat in Vietnam. There's a stretch of highway in town named after him.
Paul Johnson, Tifton's mayor, says he had never heard of Capt. Hornbuckle either. "I wonder what we need to do to get the good word down here?" he asked. City manager Charlie Howell pledged to look into the oversight.
Reluctant Hero
Capt. Hornbuckle accepts some responsibility for his anonymity. Medal recipients are encouraged to provide personal information to the public-affairs office at Fort Stewart for press releases. He neglected to do so. When contacted for this article, he was initially reluctant to be interviewed. If he knew the battle in which he fought would receive attention, he says, he would have suggested naming the objectives after something more dramatic than the Three Stooges.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, senior White House adviser Karl Rove went to Los Angeles to encourage film executives to "show the heroism of American armed forces." But movies that followed hardly treated U.S. soldiers as conquerors. In "Black Hawk Down," the mission in Somalia that left 18 U.S. soldiers and more than 1,000 Somalis dead was portrayed as a noble failure. "Behind Enemy Lines" had a good deal in common with "The Jessica Lynch Story"; it told the story of a U.S. pilot who escaped capture after he was shot down over Bosnia in 1995.
"I think it's tougher with modern warfare" to make movies, says director John Lee Hancock, now working on a movie for Disney about the battle at the Alamo. "Older wars were easier because they were more personal. It used to be you didn't fire until you saw the whites of their eyes. Now the only light is an infrared target."
Capt. Hornbuckle returned home in late August to a quiet welcome. His parents, his wife and his 18-month-old son met him at Fort Stewart. A few weeks later, his parents hosted a small party for him in Tifton. Several old high-school friends called to welcome him back.
And that was about the end of it.
"I'm not disappointed," he says. "In your heart of hearts, you know what you did or didn't do. Was it heroic? Yes, it was. But you see so many heroes and you're around them every day ... it keeps you from getting an expanded image of yourself."
Now Capt. Hornbuckle is training a new company at Fort Stewart. And he is readjusting to life at home, where his wife had been taking care of all the household chores he'd once been assigned.
"I've got trash detail now," he says.
Write to Jonathan Eig at jonathan.eig@wsj.com
Updated November 11, 2003 7:52 a.m.
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As a paratrooper deployed currently in Iraq I can say that myself and all of my comrades with whom I have discussed this find the whole Jessica L$ynch situation obscene. She behaved in a cowardly manner during the fight and was captured. What happened to her was unfortunate and I empathize with her. However after her very publicized rescue and following book and movie deals as well as bronze star and medical discharge she expressed anger at the filming of her rescue. We find this hypocritical as she is more than willing to reap the benefits of that publicity. Were it not for the filiming of her rescue she would be just another soldier with a POW medal. :x :x
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:cry:
I have 3 friends overin Iraq/and afghanistan ,I had four but one was one the Blackhawk that got shot down a few weeks ago..
my 2 cents : Nuke and firebomb the entire country then force the remaining people to work in the oilfields as our slaves...sounds harsh?
you should have seen hs mom and dad in tears thats pretyy harsh ,too...
feel free to delete this if you find it offensive,but I find the way this administartion is running this 'war" is pretty offensive
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easy for you to say.
how would you feel if you were in the shoes of those who were oppressed?
how about the innocent Afghan/Iraqi girls and boys who have died or were maimed from all these bombs? have you seen their parents cry on CNN when the US bombed Iraq? why enslave some people who might even be the ones who love your country? is this fair? is this human? is this what your forefathers fought for? innocent until proven guilty? yet you plan to enslave even those who might even have been counting you as their saviour?
please stop being arrogant. stop thinking about righteousness and humanity with an American face. if you think more global, more people will like America and eventually all citizens will feel safer and can travel around the globe without feeling any danger. come to think of it, some Americans don't even feel safe in their own motherland anymore.
I love this country. but I am not blind and ignorant enough not to know that some citizens of this country also have a bad past.
please stop this type of attitude. keep America great for generations to come.
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:evil:
Gee? What about the 3 ,000 people who died on 9/11? :evil:
Were they innocent or infidels? :?:
I take back what i said about enslaving everyone over there... :(
kill them all the world will be a better place
:P
do me a favor and dont respond this discussion is going nowhere and this isn't the proper forum
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So what about the 400,000 Filipinos that died from the American occupation of the Philippines? All because of imperialistic greed? yet Filipinos understood that not all Americans are bad. please do not think of your own country as a saint. every nation has its own skeleton in the closet. and not all citizens of every nation should be punished for what some have done to some people.
How abou the Balangiga incident? didnt your imperialistic ancestor ordered that all Filipino males over the age of 10 should be killed? how about the toxic waste that your bases have left in the Philippines?yet most Filipinos still know that not all of you are bad people and in fact teach them the martial arts?the Philippines even helped your country out by sending troops to the middle east to support your AMerican troops.how would you have felt if some other country left toxic waste in your own backyard? how would you have felt if another country would conduct millitary exercises in your own lakes, sea,and rivers and put your fishermen and their livelihood in danger?
and what about Filipino WWWII veterans who have been promised benefits by Mac Arthur to entice them to join the fight yet have been dying without receiving any to keep "freedom free" for your interests in the Asia Pacific region? they love AMerica.
the world does not owe you anything as much as you don't owe anything to anyone because every country has its own dark past. and if you can't live with that then just dig a hole and live with yourself forever.
I love America. I love the freedoom. But I would like to have the freedom as well to walk around my backyard without being bombed or being kidnapped somewhere in the world because of hate being bred in other people's hearts of some arrogant minds.
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Well judging from your post you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. I just got back from a day of #######and we got our truck stuck in the mud. Well some of those horrible iraqi people came by with a tractor and pulled it out for us. If we'd have had to wait for a wrecker we would have missed chow.
These people here for the most part like us. It's the loyalists to sa@ddam and Al@ueda along with some other groups here that are shooting at us and setting bombs. The funny thing is they all have a mentality that bears resemblence to yours hero.
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TXAbrn:
Thank you for your comments. You may wish to note that I took your comments on Jessica Lynch and quoted them in my newest post on "Army of one and one in the Oven" thread.
I would be glad if you or any other of our troops over there would share what you can (are their military censors on top of your internet use?) concerning the situation. It is hard for many of us back home to know whether the situation is as bad as the media and the President's detractors paint. On the other hand, it is more than a little unfortunate that the President, and we, have gotten painted with honesty problems.
Speaking only as a chickenhawk who has done his best to read thoroughly on the subject (including some non-obvious sources) I begin to grow concerned that things begin to spin out of control.
My understanding is that our true reason to go in was to boldly cut the Gordian Knot of the mid-east. The potential benefits and the risks were great and as we moved forward I supported the President.
If our play in Iraq succeeds, we are out of the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, we can stop Iran from going nuke and fomenting Palestinean suicide killers (we have already stopped Saddam from paying $25k to the families of the killers) and similarly we can stop Syria and then work for peace in Israel-Palestine -- and Iraq can serve as a forward looking example for the Arab world
If we fail-- and many in the region and around the world wish for our failure-- I fear our power will never be respected again when challenged by asynchronous threats. If Saddam flips us the bird as we ride the last tank out of town, methinks things are going to get very hairy around the world.
This certainly has occurred to the Iranians, who arguably can foment the Shiite south to add to the Saddamite Returnists and free-lance Al Qs running loose. Thus at the same time we seek to stop them from going nuke, we need them else the situation spin out of hand.
Thus, as best as I can tell, the key will be the relations between us and the Iraqi people in the Sunni triangle. So far, things seem to be getting worse-- they were the beneficiaries of Saddam, and given our lack of language skills and knowledge of the people and culture, we seem to be reliant on locals who are probably well-compromised by the Saddamites--and now we read things are expanding into previously secure areas and Iraqi cooperation with our efforts is receding in the face of Saddamite assasinations of those who work with us.
Which brings me to your post, mentioning as it does our relations with the Iraqi people. What can you, or anyone else tells us here back home? Are people afraid to back us for fear we will leave too soon? Or do we need to accelerate the pace as the Powell faction of the Bush team seems to favor? Does some of the dissent here at home aid and abet the enemy?
Or?
Woof,
Crafty Dog
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Crafty Dog,
You and I share perceptions for the most part on why we are involved here. However, I do believe that though they may not have been an immedeate threat to school children in Delaware, Ir@q is certainly very important to stability in this region and hence the world. The masses though can't be reasoned with and certainly would not agree to war unless it was under the banner of something the fear and hate (terror).
True it is too that the media distorts what goes on here. I know from first hand accounts how reporters come here and shape what they say we say through the wording of their questions in order to manipulate what we think on a semantic level. That's what the media does.
As for what I am allowed to say: I can't disclose where I am or going or any tactical details of missions, etc. From what I see though the people here like us. They do not like the guerillas. They want their own country and independence so naturally they want us gone asap but they don't hate us. The other day some locals stopped us before we drove by a bomb on the side of a road. They saw the bad guys place it and didn't want us to get hurt. The risk their lives helping us as the bad guys now target them too. Personally I think that now it is no longer a question of should we have come because we're here. Instead focus on how best to get this place on its own power so we can go home. Also, if people really want to do something and make a difference instead of spending five bucks to make a cardboard sign protesting bush why don't they put it all together and buy these kids over here shoes and coats.
Later,
Txabrn
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Thank you.
Crafty
PS: For the record, I did not think that the children of Delaware were in immediate danger from Iraq. Sorry if I gave that impression.
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Woof All:
In the final minutes of the anniversary of the Day of Infamy I share the following:
Crafty Dog
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The Thunder Run
'Are You Kidding, Sir?': Fewer Than 1,000 Soldiers Were Ordered to Capture a City of 5 Million Iraqis. Theirs Is a Story That May Become Military Legend.
David Zucchino, David Zucchino is a Times national correspondent based in Philadelphia.
Nine hundred and seventy-five men invading a city of 5 million sounded audacious, or worse, to the U.S. troops assigned the mission outside Baghdad last April 6. Ten years earlier, in Mogadishu, outnumbered American soldiers had been trapped and killed by Somali street fighters. Now some U.S. commanders, convinced the odds were far better in Iraq, scrapped the original plan for taking Baghdad with a steady siege and instead ordered a single bold thrust into the city. The battle that followed became the climax of the war and rewrote American military doctrine on urban warfare.
Back home, Americans learned of the victory in sketchy reports that focused on the outcome?a column of armored vehicles had raced into the city and seized Saddam Hussein's palaces and ministries. What the public didn't know was how close the U.S. forces came to experiencing another Mogadishu. Military units were surrounded, waging desperate fights at three critical interchanges. If any of those fell, the Americans would have been cut off from critical supplies and ammunition.
Embedded journalists reported the battle's broad outlines in April, but a more detailed account has since emerged in interviews with more than 70 of the brigade's officers and men who described the fiercest battle of the war?and one they nearly lost.
Times staff writer David Zucchino, who was embedded with Task Force 4-64 of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), returned to the United States recently to report this story.
On the afternoon of April 4, Army Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz was summoned to a command tent pitched in a dusty field 11 miles south of Baghdad. His brigade commander, Col. David Perkins, looked up from a map and told Schwartz he had a mission for him.
"At first light tomorrow," Perkins said, "I want you to attack into Baghdad."
Schwartz felt disoriented. He had just spent several hours in a tank, leading his armored battalion on an operation that had destroyed dozens of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles 20 miles south. A hot shard of exploding tank had burned a hole in his shoulder.
"Are you kidding, sir?" Schwartz asked, as he waited for the other officers inside the tent to laugh.
There was silence.
"No," Perkins said. "I need you to do this."
Schwartz was stunned. No American troops had yet set foot inside the capital. The original U.S. battle plan called for airborne soldiers, not tanks, to take the city. The tankers had trained for desert warfare, not urban combat. But now Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), was ordering Schwartz's tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles on a charge into the unknown.
Schwartz's "thunder run" into the city the next morning was a prelude to the fall of Baghdad. It triggered a grinding three-day battle, the bloodiest of the war?and dismissed any public perception of a one-sided slaughter of a passive enemy. Entire Iraqi army units threw down their weapons and fled, but thousands of Iraqi militiamen and Arab guerrillas fought from bunkers and rooftops with grenades, rockets and mortars.
The 2nd Brigade's ultimate seizure of Baghdad has few modern parallels. It was a calculated gamble that will be taught at military academies and training exercises for years to come. It changed the way the military thinks about fighting with tanks in a city. It brought the conflict in Iraq to a decisive climax and shortened the initial combat of the war, perhaps by several weeks.
But when Eric Schwartz got the mission that would prime the battlefield for the decisive strike on Baghdad, he had no idea what he had taken on.
Task Force 1-64, a battalion nicknamed Rogue, rumbled north on Highway 8 toward Baghdad. The column seemed to stretch to the shimmering horizon?30 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradleys, their squat tan forms bathed in pale yellow light. It was dawn on April 5, a bright, hot Saturday.
Schwartz's battalion had been ordered to sprint through 10 1/2 miles of uncharted territory. The column was to conduct "armored reconnaissance," to blow through enemy defenses, testing strengths and tactics. It was to slice through Baghdad's southwestern corner and link up at the airport with the division's 1st Brigade, which had seized the facility the day before.
In the lead tank was 1st Lt. Robert Ball, a slender, soft-spoken North Carolinian. Just 25, Ball had never been in combat until two weeks earlier. He was selected to lead the column not because he had a particularly refined sense of direction but because his tank had a plow. Commanders were expecting obstacles in the highway.
The battalion had been given only a few hours to prepare. Ball studied his military map, but it had no civilian markings?no exit numbers, no neighborhoods. He was worried about missing his exit to the airport at what fellow officers called the "spaghetti junction," a maze of twisting overpasses and offramps on Baghdad's western cusp.
Ball's map was clipped to the top of his tank hatch as the column lumbered up Highway 8. He had been rolling only about 10 minutes when his gunner spotted a dozen Iraqi soldiers leaning against a building several hundred yards away, chatting, drinking tea, their weapons propped against the wall. They had not yet heard the rumble of the approaching tanks.
"Sir, can I shoot at these guys?" the gunner asked.
"Uh, yeah, they're enemy," Ball told him.
Ball had fired at soldiers in southern Iraq, but they had been murky green figures targeted with the tank's thermal imagery system. These soldiers were in living color. Through the tank's sights, Ball could see their eyes, their mustaches, their steaming cups of tea.
The gunner mowed them down methodically, left to right. As each man fell, Ball could see shock cross the face of the next man before he, too, pitched violently to the ground. The last man fled around the corner of the building. But then, inexplicably, he ran back into the open. The gunner dropped him.
The clattering of the tank's rapid-fire medium machine gun seemed to awaken fighters posted along the highway. Gunfire erupted from both sides?AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, followed minutes later by recoilless rifles and antiaircraft guns.
Iraqi soldiers and militiamen were firing from a network of trenches and bunkers carved into the highway's shoulders, and from rooftops and alleyways. Some were inside cargo containers buried in the dirt. Others were tucked beneath the overpasses or firing down from bridges.
In the southbound lanes, civilian cars were cruising past, their occupants staring wide-eyed at the fireballs erupting from the tank's main guns and the bright tracer flashes from the rapid-fire medium and .50-caliber machine guns. From onramps and access roads, other cars packed with Iraqi gunmen were attacking. Mixed in were troop trucks, armored personnel carriers, taxis and motorcycles with sidecars.
The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners ripped into them. The crews could see soldiers or armed civilians in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren't sure. Nobody knew how many civilians had been killed. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming was violently eliminated.
As the column lurched forward, buses and trucks unloaded Iraqi fighters. Some were in uniform, some in jeans and sports shirts. Others wore the baggy black robes of the Fedayeen Saddam, Hussein's loyal militiamen. To the Americans, they seemed to have no training, no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. The machine guns sent chunks of their bodies onto the roadside.
The Americans were suffering casualties, too. A Bradley was hit by an RPG and disabled. The driver panicked and leaped out, breaking his leg. A Bradley commander stopped and dragged the driver to safety.
At a highway cloverleaf, a tank was hit in its rear engine housing and burst into flames. The column stopped as the crew tried desperately to put out the fire. But the flames, fed by leaking fuel, spread.
The entire column was now exposed and taking heavy fire. Two suicide vehicles packed with explosives sped down the offramps. They were destroyed by tank cannons. After nearly 30 minutes of fighting, Perkins ordered the tank abandoned. To keep the tank out of Iraqi hands, the crew destroyed it with incendiary grenades.
By now the resistance was organizing. Fighters who appeared to be dead or wounded were suddenly leaping up and firing at the backs of American vehicles. Schwartz ordered his gunners to "double tap," to shoot anybody they saw moving near a weapon. "If it was a confirmed kill, they'd let it go," Schwartz said later. "If it wasn't, they'd tap it again. We were checking our work."
At the head of the column, Ball was approaching the spaghetti junction. His map showed the exit splitting into two ramps. He knew he wanted the ramp to the right. He had been following blue English "Airport" signs, but now smoke from a burning Iraqi personnel carrier obscured the entire cloverleaf.
In the web of overpasses, Ball found the ramp he wanted and stayed right. He was halfway down when he realized he should have taken a different one. Now he was heading east into downtown Baghdad, the opposite direction from the airport. The entire column was following him.
He told his driver to turn left, then roll over the guardrail and turn back onto the westbound lanes. The rail crumbled, the column followed, and everyone rumbled back toward the airport.
Behind Ball, a tank commanded by Lt. Roger Gruneisen had fallen behind. Some equipment from the crippled tank had been dumped onto the top of Gruneisen's tank, obstructing his view from the hatch. With the emergency addition of Staff Sgt. Jason Diaz, commander of the burning tank, and Diaz's gunner, Gruneisen now had five men squeezed into a tank designed for four.
The gunner had swung the main gun right to fire on a bunker. In the loader's hatch, Sgt. Carlos Hernandez saw that the gun tube was headed for a concrete bridge abutment. He screamed, "Traverse left!" But they were moving rapidly. The gun tube smacked the abutment. The entire turret spun like a top. Inside, the crewmen were pinned against the walls, struggling to hold on as the turret turned wildly two dozen times before stopping. It was like an out-of-control carnival ride.
The crew was dizzy. Hernandez looked at the gunner. Blood was spurting from his nose. His head and chest were soaked with greenish-yellow hydraulic fluid. The impact had severed a hydraulic line. Except for the gunner's bloody nose, no one was hurt.
The main gun was bent and smashed. It flopped to the side, useless. The tank continued up Highway 8, Gruneisen on the .50-caliber and Hernandez on a medium machine gun. They rolled up to the spaghetti junction into a curtain of black smoke?and missed the airport turn. They were headed into the city center.
Hernandez saw that they were approaching a traffic circle. As they drew closer, he saw that the circle was clogged with Iraqi military trucks and soldiers. It was a staging area for troops attacking the American column.
From around the circle, just a block away, a yellow pickup truck sped toward the tank. Hernandez tore into it with the machine gun, killing the driver. The tank driver slammed on the brake to avoid the truck, but it was crushed beneath the treads. The impact sent Hernandez's machine gun tumbling off the back of the tank.
The tank reversed to clear itself from the wreckage, crushing the machine gun. A passenger from the truck wandered into the roadway. The tank pitched forward, trying to escape the circle, and crushed him.
The crew was now left with just one medium machine gun and the .50-caliber. Firing both guns to clear the way, the crewmen helped direct the tank driver out of the circle. As they pulled away, they could see a blue "Airport" sign. They were less than five miles from the airport.
They caught up with the column. They passed groves of date palm trees and thick underbrush, and everyone worried about another ambush.
In the lead platoon, Staff Sgt. Stevon Booker was leaning out of his tank commander's hatch, firing his M-4 carbine because his .50-caliber machine gun had jammed. Enemy fire was so intense that Booker had ordered his loader, Pvt. Joseph Gilliam, to get down in the hatch. As Booker leaned down, he told Gilliam: "I don't want to die in this country." As he resumed firing, he shouted down to Gilliam and the gunner, Sgt. David Gibbons: "I'm a baad mother!"
Gilliam, 21, and Gibbons, 22, idolized Booker, who, at 34, was experienced and decisive. He was a loud, aggressive, extroverted lifer. His booming voice was the first thing his men heard in the morning and the last thing at night.
As Gibbons, in the gunner's perch at Booker's feet inside the turret, fired rounds, he felt Booker drop down behind him. He assumed he had come down to get more ammunition. But then he heard the loader, Gilliam, scream and curse. He looked back at Booker and saw that half his jaw was missing. He had been hit by a machine-gun round.
The turret was splattered with blood. As Gibbons crawled up in the commander's hatch, he saw that Booker was trying to breathe. He radioed for help and was ordered to stop and wait for medics. Gibbons and Gilliam tried to perform "buddy aid" to stop the bleeding.
The medics arrived and, under fire, lifted Booker's body into the medical vehicle. The driver sped toward a medevac helicopter at the airport, just as the physician's assistant radioed that Booker was gone. The assistant covered the sergeant's bloodied face and, not knowing what else to do, held his hand. Booker's body arrived just ahead of the rest of the column, which rolled onto the tarmac in a hail of gunfire. Some of the tanks and Bradleys were on fire and leaking oil, but they had survived the gantlet.
At the airport that morning, Col. Perkins spoke on the tarmac with his superior, Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the 3rd Infantry Division commander. Rogue battalion had lost a tank commander and tank, but they had killed almost 1,000 fighters and torn a hole in Baghdad's defenses.
Blount wanted to keep the pressure on Saddam's forces. He had seen intelligence suggesting that Saddam's elite Republican Guard units were being sent into Baghdad to reinforce the capital. But, in truth, he really didn't have good intelligence. It was too dangerous to send in scouts. Satellite imagery didn't show bunkers or camouflaged armor and artillery. Blount had access to only one unmanned spy drone, and its cameras weren't providing much either.
Prisoners of war had told U.S. interrogators that the Iraqi military was expecting American tanks to surround the city while infantry from the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne cleared the capital. And that was the U.S. plan?at least until the thunder run that morning altered the equation.
Blount told Perkins to go back into the city in two days, on Monday the 7th. Blount wanted him to test the city's defenses, destroy as many Iraqi forces as possible and then come out to prepare for the siege of the capital.
Perkins was eager to go back in, but not for another thunder run. He wanted to stay. He had just heard Mohammed Said Sahaf, the bombastic information minister, deliver a taunting news conference, claiming that no American forces had entered Baghdad and that Iraqi troops had slaughtered hundreds of American "scoundrels" at the airport.
When Perkins got back to the brigade operations center south of the city, he told his executive officer, Lt. Col. Eric Wesley: "This just changed from a tactical war to an information war. We need to go in and stay."
The brigade was exhausted. It had been on the move day and night, rolling up from Kuwait and fighting Fedayeen and Republican Guard units?sprinting 435 miles in just over two weeks, the fastest overland march in U.S. military history. Their tanks and Bradleys were beat up. The crews had not slept in days. Now they had just one day to prepare for the pivotal battle of the war.
The charge up Highway 8 on April 7 was similar to the sprint by Rogue Battalion two days earlier. Fedayeen and Arab volunteers and Republican Guards fired from roadside bunkers and from windows and alleys on both sides of the highway. Suicide vehicles tried to ram the column.
Gunners pounded everything that moved, radioing back to trailing vehicles to kill off what they missed. It took only two hours to blow through the spaghetti junction and speed east to Saddam's palace complex. Schwartz's lead battalion, Rogue, rolled to Saddam's parade field, with its massive crossed sabers and tomb of the unknown soldier. Rogue also seized one of Saddam's two main downtown palaces, the convention center and the Rashid Hotel, home to the Baath Party elite.
Lt. Col. Philip deCamp's Task Force 4-64, the Tusker battalion, swung to the east and raced for Saddam's hulking Republican Palace and the 14th of July Bridge, which controlled access to the palace complex from the south.
The targets had been selected not only for their strategic value, but also because they were in open terrain. The palace complex consisted of broad boulevards, gardens and parks?and few tall buildings or narrow alleyways. The battalions could set up defensive positions, with open fields of fire.
The Tusker battalion destroyed bunkers at the western arch of the Republican Palace grounds, blew apart two recoilless rifles teams guarding the arch and smashed through a metal gate. The palace had been evacuated, but there were soldiers in a tree line and along the Tigris River bank. The infantrymen killed some, and others fled, stripping off their uniforms.
At a traffic circle at the base of the 14th of July Bridge, Capt. Steve Barry's Cyclone Company fought off cars and trucks that streaked across the bridge, some packed with explosives. There were three in the first 10 minutes, six more right after that. The tanks and Bradleys destroyed them all.
By midmorning, Perkins was meeting with his two battalion commanders on Saddam's parade grounds. They gave live interviews to an embedded Fox TV crew. Lt. Col. DeCamp and one of his company commanders, Capt. Chris Carter?both University of Georgia graduates?unfurled a Georgia Bulldogs flag. Capt. Jason Conroy toppled a massive Saddam statue with a single tank round.
As his tankers celebrated, Perkins took a satellite phone call from Wesley, his executive officer. Wesley ran the brigade's tactical operations center, a network of radios, computers, satellite maps and communications vehicles set up on the cement courtyard of an abandoned warehouse 11 miles south of the city center.
It was hard for Wesley to hear on his hand-held Iridium phone; a high-pitched whine sounded over his head. He thought it was a low-flying airplane.
Wesley shouted into the phone: "Congratulations, sir, I?" and at that instant an orange fireball blew past him and slammed him to the ground. The whine wasn't an airplane. It was a missile. The entire operations center was engulfed in flames.
Wesley still had the phone. "Sir," he said. "We've been hammered!"
"What?"
"We've been hit. I'll have to call you back. It doesn't look good."
Rows of signal vehicles were on fire and exploding. A line of parked Humvees evaporated, consumed in a brilliant flash. Men were writhing on the ground, their skin seared. A driver and a mechanic were swallowed by the fireball, killed instantly. Another driver, horribly burned, lay dying. Two embedded reporters perished on the concrete, their corpses scorched to gray ash. Seventeen soldiers were wounded, some seriously.
The brigade's nerve center, its communications brain, was gone. The entire mission?the brigade's audacious plan to conquer a city of 5 million with 975 combat soldiers and 88 armored vehicles in a single violent strike?was in jeopardy.
It got worse. As Wesley and his officers tended to the dead and wounded, Perkins was receiving distressing reports from Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty, a battalion commander charged with keeping the brigade's supply lines open along Highway 8. One of Twitty's companies was surrounded. It was "amber" on fuel and ammunition?a level dangerously close to "black," the point at which there is not enough to sustain a fight.
The Baghdad raid, launched at dawn, was now approaching its sixth hour?well past the Hour Four deadline Perkins had set to decide whether to stay for the night. That benchmark was critical because his tanks, which consume 56 gallons of fuel an hour, had eight to 10 hours of fuel. That meant four hours going in and four coming out.
To conserve fuel, Perkins ordered the tanks set up in defensive positions and shut down. They couldn't maneuver, but they could still fire?and each hour they were turned off bought Perkins another hour.
Even so, time was running out for Twitty, whose outnumbered companies were clinging to three crucial interchanges.
"Sir, there's one hell of a fight here," Twitty told Perkins. "I'll be honest with you: I don't know how long I can hold it here."
Even after Twitty received reinforcements, tying up the brigade's only reserve force, his men had to be resupplied. But the resupply convoy was ambushed on Highway 8; two sergeants were killed and five fuel and ammunition trucks were destroyed. The highway was a shooting gallery. If Perkins lost the roadway, he and his men would be trapped in the city without fuel or ammunition.
American combat commanders are trained to develop a "decision support matrix," an analytical breakdown of alternatives based on a rapidly unfolding chain of circumstances. For Perkins, the matrix was telling him: cut your losses, pull back, return another day. His command center was in flames. He had spent his reserve force. And now his fuel and ammunition were burning on the highway.
On the parade grounds, Perkins stood next to his armored personnel carrier, map in hand, flanked by his two tank battalion commanders. The air was heavy with swirling sand and grit. Black plumes of oily smoke rose from burning vehicles and bunkers.
Perkins knew the prudent move was to pull out, but he felt compelled to stay. His men had fought furiously to reach the palace complex. It seemed obscene to make them fight their way back out, and to surrender terrain infused with incalculable psychological and strategic value.
Sahaf, the delusional information minister, was already claiming that no American "infidels" had breached the city's defenses. Perkins had just heard Sahaf's distinctive rant on BBC radio: "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad." A retreat now, Perkins thought, would validate the minister's lies. It would unravel the brigade's singular achievement, which had put American soldiers inside Saddam's two main palaces and American boots on his reviewing stand.
Perkins turned to his tank battalion commanders. "We're staying."
Lt. Col. Stephen Twitty is right-handed, but early that morning he found himself drawing diagrams with his left hand. He was crouched in a Bradley hatch, holding a radio with his right hand while he tried to diagram an emergency battle plan.
Over the radio net, Twitty had heard the tank battalions in the city celebrating and discussing the wine collections at Saddam's palaces. He was only a few miles away, at a Highway 8 interchange code-named Objective Larry, but he was in the fight of his life. Twitty had survived the first Gulf War, but he had never encountered anything like this.
His men were being pounded from all directions?by small arms, mortars, RPGs, gun trucks, recoilless rifles. The two tank battalions had punched through Highway 8, but now the enemy had regrouped and was mounting a relentless counterattack against Twitty's mechanized infantry battalion.
As he scratched out his battle plan, Twitty spotted an orange-and-white taxi speeding toward his Bradley. A man in the back seat was firing an AK-47. Twitty screamed into the radio: "Taxi! Taxi coming!"
He realized how absurd he sounded. So he shouted at his Bradley gunner: "Slew the turret and fire!" The gunner spotted the taxi and fired a blast of 25mm rounds. The taxi blew up. It had been loaded with explosives.
Twitty's China battalion, Task Force 3-15, would destroy dozens of vehicles that day, many of them packed with explosives. They would blow up buses and motorcycles and pickup trucks. They would kill hundreds of fighters, as well as civilians who inadvertently blundered into the fight. Twitty ordered his engineers to tear down highway signs and light poles and pile up charred vehicles to build protective berms. But several suicide cars crashed through, and Twitty's men kept killing them. Twitty was astonished. He hadn't expected much resistance, but the Syrians and Fedayeen were relentless, fanatical, determined to die.
Twitty saw a busload of soldiers pull straight into the kill zone. A tank round obliterated the vehicle?burning alive everyone inside. The driver of a second busload saw the carnage, yet kept coming. The tanks lit up his bus, too.
From Objective Moe, about two miles north, and from Objective Curly, about two miles south, Twitty received urgent calls requesting mortar and artillery fire?"danger close," or within 220 yards of their own positions. Mortars and artillery screamed down, driving the Syrians and Fedayeen back. But at Curly, a stray round wounded two American infantrymen, and the artillery was shut down there.
At Curly, Capt. Zan Hornbuckle had enemy fighters inside his perimeter. He sent infantrymen to clear the ramps and overpasses. It was dangerous, methodical work. The infantrymen crept up behind a series of support walls, tossed grenades into trenches, then gunned down the fighters inside as they rose to return fire.
The Americans were killing fighters by the dozens, but the infantrymen were getting hit, too. Their flak vests protected vital organs, but several men were dragged back with bright red shrapnel wounds ripped into their arms, legs and necks.
Dr. Erik Schobitz, the battalion surgeon, treated the wounded. Capt. Schobitz was a pediatrician with no combat experience. He had never fired an automatic rifle until a month earlier. Schobitz wore a stethoscope with a yellow plastic rabbit attached?his lucky stethoscope. It was hanging there when a sliver of shrapnel hit his face, wounding him slightly.
With Schobitz was Capt. Steve Hommel, the battalion chaplain. He moved from one wounded man to the next, talking softly, squeezing their hands. Hommel had been a combat infantry sergeant in the first Gulf War, but even he was alarmed. He feared being overrun?there were hundreds of enemy fighters bearing down on just 80 combat soldiers, who were backed by Bradleys but no tanks. Hommel tried to appear calm while comforting the wounded.
Enemy fighters were firing on the medics, and some of them fired back. The chaplain grabbed one medic's M-16 and shot at muzzle flashes east of the highway. Hommel didn't know whether he hit anyone, and he didn't want to know. He was a Baptist minister.
Several miles north, at Objective Moe, Capt. Josh Wright was struggling to keep his perimeter intact. Two of Wright's three platoon sergeants were wounded, and two engineers went down with shrapnel wounds. A gunner was hit with a ricochet. An infantryman dragging a wounded enemy soldier to safety was hit in the wrist and stomach. One Bradley's TOW missile launcher was destroyed. Another Bradley had a machine gun go down. One of the tanks lost use of its main gun.
Wright radioed Twitty and asked for permission to fire on a mosque to the north. Through his sights, he could see an RPG team in each minaret and another on the mosque roof. Under the rules of engagement, the mosque was now a hostile, nonprotected site. Twitty granted permission to fire. All three RPG teams were killed, leaving smoking black holes in the minarets.
By now, Wright had managed to get infantrymen and snipers into buildings north of the interchange. They were able to kill advancing fighters while mortar rounds ripped into soldiers hiding in the palm grove.
Then the mortars stopped. The platoon mortar leader at Objective Curly radioed Wright and apologized profusely. He was "black"?completely out of mortar rounds. He couldn't fire again until the resupply convoy was sent north.
Wright's own men were now telling him they were "amber" on all types of ammunition. Wright wasn't certain how much longer he could hold the interchange.
At Objective Curly, Hornbuckle tried to sound positive on the radio but Twitty could hear the stress in his voice. He asked the captain to put on the battalion command sergeant major, Robert Gallagher. A leathery-faced Army Ranger of 40, Gallagher had survived the battle at Mogadishu, where he had been wounded three times. Twitty knew Gallagher would be blunt.
"All right, sergeant major, I want the truth," Twitty said. "Do you need reinforcements?"
"Sir, we need reinforcements," Gallagher said.
Twitty radioed Perkins and told him he could not hold Curly without reinforcements.
"If you need it, you've got it," Perkins assured him.
Twitty called Capt. Ronny Johnson, commander of the reserve company defending the operations center, which was still burning.
"How fast can you get here?" Twitty asked.
"Sir, I can be there in 15 minutes," Johnson said. It was only about two miles from the operations center to Curly.
"That's not fast enough. Get here now."
Johnson and his platoon raced north on Highway 8, fighting through a withering ambush. With 10 Bradleys and 65 infantrymen, the convoy bulked up the combat power at Curly. They plunged into the fight, stabilizing the perimeter.
At the burning operations center, executive officer Wesley was directing casualty evacuation and trying to build a makeshift command center, combining computers and communications equipment that had escaped the fireball with gear salvaged from burning vehicles. Within an hour, they had fashioned a temporary communications network across the highway from the scorched ruins.
Back in radio communication, Wesley resumed helping Perkins direct the battles. He offered to send the rest of Johnson's company to Curly to solidify the interchange. That left the stripped-down operations center virtually unprotected.
At Objective Larry, Twitty's men were beginning to run low on ammunition. He could hear his gunner screaming, "More ammo! Get us more ammo!"
Twitty had to get the supply convoy to the interchanges, a dangerous endeavor. The fuel tankers were 2,500-gallon bombs on wheels. The ammunition trucks were portable fireworks factories. In military argot, they were the ultimate "soft-skin" vehicles. Worse, there were no tanks or Bradleys to escort them; they were all fighting in the city or at the three interchanges.
Twitty called Johnson at Curly and asked for an assessment.
"Sir," Johnson said, "what I can tell you is, it's not as intense a fight as it was an hour ago but we're still in a pretty good fight here."
Twitty asked to hear from Gallagher. "Boss," Gallagher said, "I'm not going to tell you we can get 'em through without risk, but we can get 'em through."
Twitty put the radio down and lowered his head. He had to make a decision. And whatever he decided, American soldiers were going to die. He knew it. They would die at one of the interchanges, where they would be overrun if they weren't resupplied. Or they would die in the convoy.
He picked up the radio. "All right," he said. "We're going to execute."
Just north of the burning operations center, Capt. J.O. Bailey was in a command armored personnel carrier, leading the supply convoy?six fuel tankers and eight ammunition trucks. He felt vulnerable; he had no idea where he was going to park all his combustible vehicles in the middle of a firefight.
The convoy had gone less than a mile when Bailey spotted a mob of about 100 armed men across railroad tracks. He was on the radio, warning everyone, when the convoy was rocked by explosions.
Near the head of the convoy, Sgt. 1st Class John W. Marshall opened up with a grenade launcher in the turret of his soft-skin Humvee. Marshall was 50?one of the oldest men in the brigade?and had volunteered for Iraq. Marshall had just sent grenades crashing toward the gunmen when the top of the Humvee exploded. In the front seat, Spc. Kenneth Krofta was stunned by a flash of light. Black smoke was blowing through the Humvee. Krofta looked up into the turret. Marshall was gone. He had been blown out of the vehicle by a grenade blast.
The driver, Pfc. Angel Cruz, stopped and got out, looking for Marshall. He saw gunmen approaching and squeezed off a burst from his rifle. Bullets ripped into the Humvee.
The radio squawked. Cruz was ordered to move out. Soldiers in another vehicle had seen Marshall's body. He was dead. The convoy was speeding up, trying to escape the kill zone. A week would pass before the battalion was able to retrieve Marshall's corpse.
As the convoy raced through the ambush, an RPG rocketed into a personnel carrier. Staff Sgt. Robert Stever, who had just fired more than 1,000 rounds from his .50-caliber machine gun, was blown back into the vehicle, killed instantly. Shrapnel tore into Chief Warrant Officer Angel Acevedo and Pfc. Jarred Metz, wounding both.
Metz was knocked from the driver's perch. His legs were numb and blood was seeping through his uniform. He dragged himself back into position and kept the vehicle moving. Acevedo was bleeding, too. Screaming instructions to Metz, he directed the vehicle back into the speeding column with Stever's body slumped inside.
Riddled with shrapnel, the convoy limped into the interchange at Curly?and directly into the firefight. Bailey was trying to move his convoy out of harm's way when something slammed into a fuel tanker. The vehicle exploded. Hunks of the tanker flew off, forming super-heated projectiles that tore into other vehicles. Three ammunition trucks and a second fuel tanker exploded. Ammunition started to cook off. Rounds screamed in all directions, ripping off chunks of concrete and slicing through vehicles. The trucks were engulfed in orange fireballs.
Mechanics and drivers sprinted for the vehicles that were intact. They cranked up the engines and drove them to safety beneath the overpass, managing to save five ammunition trucks and four fuel tankers?enough to resupply the combat teams at all three intersections.
Fuel and ammunition were unloaded under fire. The surviving vehicles headed north to Objective Larry, escorted by Bradleys, breaking through the firefight there and arriving safely.
Twitty felt overwhelming relief. He knew he could break the enemy now, and so could the combat team at Objective Curly. But he still had to resupply Capt. Wright at Objective Moe.
Capt. Johnson, whose Bradleys had escorted the convoy to resupply Twitty, headed north toward Moe. By radio, Johnson arranged with Wright to have Highway 8 cleared of obstacles so that the convoy could pull in, stop briefly and let the resupply vehicles designated for Wright peel off. Then Johnson's vehicles were to continue on, obeying a new order from Perkins to secure the mile-long stretch of highway between Objective Moe and Perkins' palace command post in the city center.
The convoy broke through the battle lines and stopped at the cloverleaf at Moe. But there had been a communication breakdown. The full convoy, including the supply vehicles, pulled away under heavy fire, leaving Wright's company still desperate for fuel and ammunition.
Wright's heart sank. He had been forced to tighten his perimeter to save fuel, giving up ground his men had just taken. Now he watched his fuel and ammo disappear up the highway. But the smaller perimeter also meant Wright could afford to send two tanks to a supply point a mile away that Johnson set up near the palace. There the tanks refueled as their crews stuffed the bustle racks with ammunition. A second pair of tanks followed a half-hour later, bringing back more fuel and ammunition. Wright's men were set for the night.
In the city center, the tank battalions led by Schwartz and DeCamp were holding their ground but still desperately low on fuel and ammunition. With the combat teams at all three interchanges able to hold their ground, two supply convoys were now sent up Highway 8 toward the city center. It was a high-speed race. Every vehicle was hit by fire, but the convoys rolled into the palace complex just before dusk, fuel and ammunition intact. Tankers at the 14th of July circle cheered, and there were high-fives and handshakes when the trucks set up an instant gas station and supply point next to the palace rose beds. Perkins was convinced now that Baghdad was his. He didn't need to control the whole city. He just needed the palace complex and a way to get fuel and ammunition in.
Now he had both.
"We had come in, created a lot of chaos, lots of violence and momentum all at once," Perkins said later. "We had speed and audacity. And now with the resupply, we were there for good and there was nothing the other side could do about it."
The next morning, Capt. Phil Wolford's Assassin tank company would repel a fierce counterattack at the Jumhuriya Bridge across the Tigris River. Rogue battalion would engage in running firefights throughout central Baghdad. At the three interchanges on Highway 8, Syrians and Fedayeen mounted more attacks for much of the day, bringing the China battalion's casualties to two dead and 30 wounded. But the American forces now fought from a position of strength. On the third day, April 9, Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.
On the night of April 7, after a long day of sustained combat, there had been an extended lull at the palace complex and up and down Highway 8. The tankers and the infantrymen sensed a shift in momentum. Some dared to speak of going home soon, for they now believed the war was nearly over. There would be two more days of fierce fighting before Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed. But on the night of April 7, theirs would be a decisive victory, the last one in Iraq for a long time.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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Sorry for the cheesy last sentence-Crafty
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All:
So that no one misses the first, I mention that this is my second post today on this thread.
Crafty
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Leader (U.S.)
For Lt. Withers,
Act of Mercy Has
Unexpected Sequel
U.S. Officer Broke the Rules
To Let His Men Take In
Young Dachau Survivor
By BRYAN GRULEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The two young men stood trembling before Army Lt. John Withers, dressed in the rags they'd worn at the recently liberated Dachau concentration camp. Sores pocked their bony arms and legs. Decades later, the lieutenant would remember how their sunken eyes sought mercy.
But in 1945, near the end of World War II, they posed a problem. Lt. Withers was a black leader in an all-black supply convoy. In violation of Army orders, his men were hiding the refugees. Lt. Withers planned to have the strangers removed -- until he saw them.
They stayed with his unit for more than a year, two Jewish survivors of the Holocaust hiding among blacks from segregated America. The soldiers nicknamed them "Peewee" and "Salomon." They grew close to Lt. Withers. By the time he bid them farewell, they'd grown healthy again.
Mr. Withers never forgot them. Over the years, he told and retold their tale to his two sons. When one son set out to find them, he discovered that Salomon had died in 1993. But Peewee, he learned, was alive.
Unlike Mr. Withers, Peewee had buried his past. His children and grandchildren knew almost nothing about his time in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. When his grandson asked about the number tattooed on his left forearm -- A19104 -- all he could say was, "Bad people put that down."
He couldn't bring himself to talk about it.
Then John Withers reappeared -- and changed Peewee's life yet again.
A bright morning sun shone on the cobblestone square in Starachowice, Poland, as the Nazi soldiers separated the strong Jews from the weak. It was Oct. 27, 1942, a scene reported by historians and survivors. The healthy would go to work building bombs for the Germans. The rest would be piled on a train to the extermination camp at Treblinka.
Izaak Wajgenszperg gave his 14-year-old son a brick to stand on. He said it would make the boy look bigger, so the Nazis might not send him away. Mieczyslaw Wajgenszperg obeyed. Across the square, he recalled, his mother and younger sister disappeared into the crowd. He would never see them again.
Mieczyslaw (MEE-shuh-slav) had grown up in a red-brick house in Starachowice, an industrial town. His grandfather was a banker, and his father exported timber.
After the Nazis invaded in 1939, they moved Mieczyslaw's family and other Jews into an unwalled ghetto, where Jews were expected to step off the sidewalk when Germans passed. They lived there until that October morning when the Nazis tore Mieczyslaw's family in two and put him and his father to work in a munitions factory in Starachowice.
In July 1944, with the Russian army approaching, the Germans put the Jews on a southbound train. Mieczyslaw and his father were deposited at Auschwitz and given blue-and-gray-striped uniforms. From there, the Nazis sent the boy to another camp nearby. His father stayed behind, and Mieczyslaw said goodbye to him for the last time.
Late that September, Army Second Lt. John Withers, then 28, boarded a train bound for a boat that would take him to Europe. Black soldiers rode separately from whites. Stopped in New Orleans, Lt. Withers recalled seeing another train carrying German and Italian prisoners of war. Black porters were serving them.
Salomon and Peewee with an Army soldier in Germany, 1945.
He came from Greensboro, N.C., where segregation ruled, and blacks were expected to step aside when whites passed. Lt. Withers knew he was going to war for freedoms he didn't enjoy. Still, he recalled in an interview this year, "I thought I would be better off if the world subdued Hitler." He had his own dream: leave the South, become a professor and join the American middle class.
He grew up the precocious son of a janitor and a seamstress in a six-room house with three siblings, five cousins and a family friend. His mother bought the children dress shoes instead of work shoes because work shoes announced that you were poor, her son recalled. If neighbors had a Thanksgiving turkey, the Witherses told everyone they did, too, even if their holiday dinner was ham hocks and beans.
As a teenager, John developed a passion for opera, and carried in his pocket index cards he filled with poems, Gospel verse and snatches of literature. He earned a bachelor's degree in social sciences from North Carolina A&T, then a master's degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. He hoped to seek a Ph.D., but funds were scant. And the Army called.
Three years later, he was helping to lead one of the quartermaster truck companies ferrying supplies to the front lines in Europe, military records show. Lt. Withers stood apart from the other soldiers. He didn't smoke, drink or curse. He helped illiterate soldiers write home. He spent a leave in London at libraries and the theater.
He never experienced full-fledged combat. He fretted about returning to Greensboro, where he worried he'd have no job, no money to pursue a Ph.D., no way to escape the South. A glimmer of hope appeared: the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, which was designed to help veterans pay for college. As 1945 dawned, Lt. Withers was determined to take advantage of it. But he had to keep his record clean.
From his labor camp near Auschwitz, where he had been for six months, 16-year-old Mieczyslaw heard the Russian cannons. In late January of 1945, the Nazis marched him and thousands of others northwest. Mieczyslaw wrapped his shoes in paper bags so he wouldn't slip on the snow. Many who faltered were shot, he later recalled.
Note from John Withers II
My search for Peewee and Salomon began with a story my father told me as a child. Even when I was too young fully to understand why, the tale of the two young Jewish boys from Poland clearly held deep meaning for him. Not that he imbued it with any particular moral significance. He never inferred that he or his men had done anything noteworthy in aiding the boys. Still, on occasion, I would catch my father lingering over old photos of the boys and know that he was asking himself: What has become of them? How much he missed his friends!
But to me, as I grew old enough to appreciate it, the story became so much more. Why did these soldiers do what they did? They could have gotten into trouble with their superiors and faced serious punishment. Why had these men -- made callous by war and lives of poverty -- taken these boys to heart? Curiosity welled within me until, eventually, perhaps inevitably, there came a day when my father's question -- what had become of them? -- had to be answered, and I had to answer it.
It took many years of searching -- many years of false starts and disappointments -- before the answer came. There was the sad news that Salomon had died of cancer in Israel some years before. But there also was a moment -- an indescribable moment -- when my father, then 84 years old, descended a plane in Hartford, Conn., and walked stiffly down the long corridors of the airport. He had come to meet a friend whom he hadn't seen in five decades. He did not pause or hesitate or even look around. Instead, he moved directly toward an elderly man with a round face and an unmistakable smile approaching from the far end of the hallway. And suddenly, Peewee, wonderful Peewee, was with him again.
Ask questions or share your comments. Join a discussion with John Withers, John Withers II and Wall Street Journal reporter Bryan Gruley.
He wound up in the "Little Camp" at Buchenwald. In April, he was loaded onto a snow-filled train that zigzagged through Germany and Czechoslovakia for three weeks. He sat on a man who had frozen to death. When he arrived at Dachau, his ribs poked at his skin. He'd been there two days when U.S. troops liberated the camp on April 29, 1945.
U.S. soldiers moved Mieczyslaw and other inmates to an abandoned SS barracks near Munich, he recalled. One day Mieczyslaw discovered that a bag holding his only belongings -- a few items of clothing -- had been stolen. The theft so infuriated him that he left.
Dressed in his ragged prisoner's uniform, Mieczyslaw walked to another barracks where he'd noticed black U.S. soldiers. He had heard that American blacks were poor and, like him, had faced discrimination.
He found members of Quartermaster Truck Company 3512 washing dishes. Using hand gestures and some German, he made them understand he wanted a job.
The men let Mieczyslaw help. That first night he slept outside on a table, he later recalled. The next morning, the soldiers gave him a room with a bed, a bureau, a desk and a window that looked out on a forest. They fed him goulash and bread, and gave him a nickname, "Peewee," because his name was a mouthful and he was about 5 feet tall.
Then one morning, the soldiers told Mieczyslaw -- now Peewee -- that a lieutenant had learned of his presence, as well as that of another Dachau refugee, 20 years old, whom they'd dubbed "Salomon." John Withers, who'd recently been promoted to first lieutenant, wanted to see them.
Quartermaster units had orders to avoid contact with the Dachau prisoners, Lt. Withers later recalled. His superiors worried that supply convoys would pick up diseases and spread them to other Army units. Researchers at the National Archives couldn't locate specific records of such orders but said other records indicate that Army brass were acutely concerned about health risks posed by Dachau prisoners.
Lt. Withers had learned that it was especially important for blacks to follow orders in the segregated Army. He recalled worrying that sheltering Dachau refugees might get him a dishonorable discharge -- and then there would be no GI Bill for him.
He assumed the two refugees were war-toughened men who were exploiting his soldiers' sympathy. So he was unprepared when the soldiers brought Peewee and Salomon. The refugees seemed shrunken and frightened, really just boys, he recalled thinking.
Peewee would later recall that his knees felt weak as he waited for the lieutenant's verdict. He assumed that his immediate family was dead. He was 16. He had no home, no money and no clothing but what he wore. He wanted no more part of the Allies' displaced-persons camps. In the chaos following the war, he had no idea what to do next.
Lt. Withers assumed that Peewee and Salomon would be returned to Dachau, where thousands of former prisoners were still convalescing, according to Army dispatches from the summer of 1945. He'd been to Dachau on a bread-and-milk delivery shortly after it was liberated. He'd seen bodies decomposing in an open ditch, smelled the rotting flesh. How could he send them back?
"Keep them," he recalled blurting to his men. "We're going to take care of them."
In recent interviews, he struggled to explain why he changed his mind. "I think I identified with them very strongly and instantaneously," he said. He said he also risked losing face with his men. "They were willing to take the chance. If I would have overruled them, I would have been on the wrong side of the decision."
The soldiers dressed the young men in fatigues and boots. Washing dishes, peeling potatoes and hosing down trucks with the GIs, Peewee and Salomon picked up English, including a few curse words. The soldiers initially paid them with candy and cigarettes, later with cash.
When white officers came around, Peewee and Salomon ducked into the mess, a closet or a truck cab. On supply runs, they burrowed under tarpaulins in the backs of trucks. In one close call, Peewee recalled, he hid from a military policeman under a tarp while some GIs sat on it.
By the fall of 1945, many Army units had begun hiring local people so U.S. soldiers could go home. Peewee and Salomon no longer had to hide. They were strong enough by then to live on their own, but they stayed with Lt. Withers even as he transferred to Quartermaster Truck Company 3511 in early 1946, and it moved to the Bavarian village of Staffelstein.
At religious services, the young men sang and clapped to Gospel music. They learned to drive and to shoot. They bartered with farmers for hams, chickens and eggs. Peewee tried baseball, pitched horseshoes, posed in a cowboy hat and botched a batch of biscuits. Lt. Withers bought each a watch. He taught them the English words to "Taps."
Peewee and Salomon spent many evenings talking with the lieutenant. Sometimes he read them tales of Greek, Norse and Roman mythology. But mostly they wanted to hear about the U.S., he recalled later. What kinds of jobs could they find there? Could they get rich?
Though he couldn't answer these questions for himself, Lt. Withers told Peewee and Salomon, "Get to the United States and you'll be all right." He didn't speak of race or anti-Semitism because "they didn't need anything negative," he recalled.
Sometimes Peewee, Salomon and Lt. Withers would sing a German drinking song, "So Sind Wir (Such Are We)." Translated, it went:
Such are we
We laugh off the sorrow
Such are we
We do our best until tomorrow
Such are we
And so we shall always be
So come drink a cup with me
And sing such are we
The lieutenant wondered how Peewee and Salomon could remain so happy and gentle after what they'd endured. "They didn't become hateful or hostile in return. They didn't become bitter or apathetic," he would recall. "That was something I've kept with me all my life: that it is possible for someone -- me, anyone -- to overcome the obstacles in his path without losing himself and face prejudice without becoming prejudiced in return."
The day Lt. Withers went home in December 1946, Peewee and Salomon waited near his Jeep in Staffelstein. By then, Peewee had an apartment in nearby Bamberg and a job at a machine and auto-repair shop. He and Salomon presented the lieutenant with a photo album embossed with his name. He gave them each a pen and his mother's Greensboro address. Then they saluted before Lt. Withers rumbled away.
In his footlocker in the back of the Jeep rested a picture-postcard Peewee had given him. It showed Peewee beaming in a U.S. Army uniform, his soft cap at a jaunty angle. On the back he'd written, in English, "To my good friend, Lt. John L. Withers."
Five decades later, the postcard found its way to John Withers's eldest son. John Withers II couldn't get it out of his mind.
He and his brother, Gregory, had been hearing about Peewee and Salomon since they were little. Their father had no stories about ambushing Nazis or shooting Messerschmitts out of the sky. When his sons asked about the war, he talked about Peewee and Salomon.
Mr. Withers told these tales as he, his wife, Daisy, and their sons traveled the globe. After his honorable discharge from the Army, he used the GI Bill and earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He taught at universities in North Carolina and Michigan before joining the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he spent 21 years on assignments from Laos to Kenya before retiring in 1979 to Silver Spring, Md.
Wherever the Witherses went, they carried photographs of Peewee and Salomon. In John II's eyes, the men became like long-lost uncles. He frequently asked his father why he hadn't tried to find them. Mr. Withers said he wouldn't know where to begin. All he knew was Peewee's real name.
By 2000, that was enough for John II, then 51 and the State Department's deputy chief of mission in Riga, Latvia. On vacation in Germany, he'd detoured to Staffelstein and questioned natives about the black Army unit.
He received a one-year State Department sabbatical and began his hunt. The first Holocaust-survivor registers he checked had no record of a Mieczyslaw Wajgenszperg. But an Israeli search agency revealed that Peewee had emigrated to the U.S. or Canada. Then Yad Vashem, the vast repository of Holocaust records in Israel, supplied a catalog of the camps he'd been in: Starachowice, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau. It shocked the elder Mr. Withers, who'd known only about Dachau.
Internet searches on Auschwitz and Buchenwald supplied too many leads to sort through, so John II focused on a place he'd never heard of, Starachowice. That led him to Christopher Browning, a University of North Carolina historian who had collected testimonies of 235 Starachowice survivors. Mr. Browning sent John II to Howard Chandler, a Starachowice survivor in Toronto who had compiled a list of other survivors.
John II called the man one evening in March 2001. Mr. Chandler, whose name was once Chaim Wajchendler, said yes, he had a phone number for Mieczyslaw in Connecticut.
"Oh my God," John II recalled thinking as he scribbled the number. After thanking Mr. Chandler, he dialed. There was a ring, then some high-pitched tones. He dialed again and got the same thing. The number was disconnected.
Had Peewee moved? Or died? John II redialed Mr. Chandler, who said he'd try again. Mr. Chandler called a friend in Israel who supplied a slightly different number. The area code had changed. Instead of calling John II to tell him, Mr. Chandler decided to call Mieczyslaw himself.
A few days later, in Hartford, Conn., a businessman named Martin Weigen received an unusual phone call.
Mr. Weigen and his wife, Margareta, had married in Germany in 1948. They moved to Israel, where Mr. Weigen had relatives, then back to Germany, and then to the U.S., where Mr. Weigen hoped to make his fortune.
After they arrived in 1956, Mr. Weigen and Margareta shortened their surname, first to Weisperg, then to Weigen. Mr. Weigen was Jewish, but he'd never been religious, and he worried that his daughter and son might suffer discrimination. They were raised Roman Catholic, like their mother.
Mr. Weigen worked days at a machinery company and at night helped his wife run a residential-care home they had bought. He left the machinery company in 1976 when he and his wife bought a second care home, where they housed and fed people who couldn't take care of themselves.
Martin Weigen and John Withers embrace at the Hartford Airport.
They lived in a big white colonial on two wooded acres where Mr. Weigen liked to feed the birds. "Isn't the nature beautiful?" he would say in his soft Polish accent.
His daughter, Barbara Bergren, and his son, Edward Weigen, worked with him at his two residential-care homes and at a third that Edward bought. At a cottage the elder Mr. Weigen owned on Long Island Sound, he loved to stand at his bar and brag about his grandchildren.
But he rarely talked about the mother, father and sister he'd lost as a boy in Poland. Questions about his childhood and his wartime experiences were met with halting answers and, sometimes, tears. As he aged, his children worried that his stories might die with him.
Now, on the telephone, Howard Chandler told him someone was looking for him. On an index card, Mr. Weigen jotted a name -- "Wichers" -- and a phone number. He was a little hard of hearing. He wasn't sure who "Wichers" was.
He told his daughter, Ms. Bergren, about the message when she was helping at his office on April 3, 2001. The name "Wichers" meant nothing to her, but her dad seemed eager to call. He listened on one phone while Ms. Bergren dialed another.
John Withers II picked up the phone in his home library in Rockville, Md. Propped on his desk was a framed copy of Peewee's postcard.
"Mr. Wichers?" Ms. Bergren recalled saying.
"Withers," he corrected.
She didn't know that name either. "I believe you're looking for a relative of mine," she said.
John II's heart sank. Was Peewee dead? he recalled thinking. He identified himself, and asked if she was related to Mieczyslaw Wajgenszperg.
"Yes, he's sitting right here," she said, as she and John II recalled the conversation. "But he has a hearing impediment and if it's all right with you, I'll stay on the phone."
Mr. Weigen cut in from the other phone: "You are the son of Lt. John L. Withers of North Carolina?"
"Yes," John II said.
Ms. Bergren turned to see her father. His eyes had filled with tears.
"Dad?"
He whispered: "I know John Withers."
Mr. Weigen wondered if he would recognize John Withers as he waited, three weeks later, at Gate A-1 of Hartford's Bradley International Airport.
They were old men now. Mr. Weigen was 72, with feathery white hair and hearing aids. Mr. Withers, 84, wore a tan cap on his bald head and was shorter now than his old friend. The men embraced.
"Lt. John," Mr. Weigen recalled saying.
"Peewee," said Mr. Withers.
They were inseparable all weekend, holding hands and reminiscing while their families got to know each other. Mr. Weigen had told his children that a black soldier helped him during the war, but he hadn't said much more. His wife had asked more than once why he didn't use the Greensboro address to contact the lieutenant. "He wouldn't even remember who I am," Mr. Weigen said he told her.
Now he showed Mr. Withers yellowed photos from their time together, many of which Mr. Weigen's children and grandchildren had never seen. Nor had they known that Mr. Weigen had been called Peewee. Mr. Withers tried to call him Martin, but Mr. Weigen patted his hand and said, "No, no, John, to you I'm always Peewee."
John II and his wife started asking Mr. Weigen about the Nazi camps. Edward Weigen and Ms. Bergren silently worried that this would be too painful for their father. But with Mr. Withers at his side, Mr. Weigen opened up. Over one dinner that the family captured on videotape, he talked about his childhood and what his father had done for a living. "You ever hear that?" Edward, 43, said to Ms. Bergren. "I didn't."
In the past, their father rarely got beyond generalities before he grew quiet, or his eyes welled. Then his children would back off. "His way of survival was that you can't immerse yourself in that, you have to always move forward," said Ms. Bergren, 53.
With Mr. Withers it was different. Now when Mr. Weigen's emotions got to him, according to Edward, "he'd slow down, take breaths," and then dig deeper into his memories. One day Mr. Weigen told how some food he'd scrounged from an abandoned cellar near Auschwitz made him ill. "Listening to him, you know that this is the first time he has spoken of or thought of it since it happened," Edward said.
He talked about life in the Starachowice ghetto and described his journey to Dachau. He drew a diagram of the first room the soldiers gave him. He pulled out more photos his kids had never seen, including one of him with his sister, Klara, in the ghetto.
With the help of Mr. Weigen and John II, Edward began his own exploration of the past. He obtained the Jan. 26, 1945, list of Auschwitz prisoners transported to Buchenwald, which included his father. He learned that Mr. Weigen had altered his birthdate at Auschwitz to make himself two years older. He confirmed that Mr. Weigen's mother, and probably his sister, had died at Treblinka.
At the 2001 reunion, standing from left, John Withers II and Daisy Withers; sitting from left, Martin Weigen with grandson Christopher Weigen, John Withers and Margareta Weigen.
In the summer of 2001, the entire Withers family attended the wedding of Mr. Weigen's granddaughter in Connecticut. Mr. Withers sent cards, letters and birthday gifts to the Weigen and Bergren children. In e-mails, Ms. Bergren referred to John II as "my newfound brother." In the summer of 2002, Edward and his family visited the Witherses in Maryland. Health problems kept Mr. Weigen from traveling, but this year the families began planning another Connecticut reunion for the fall.
Five weeks ago, Mr. Withers stepped off another plane in Hartford, not for a reunion, but to bury Peewee.
Mr. Weigen died Oct. 16. He was 75. He'd been diagnosed with colon cancer in September. Near the end, Ms. Bergren told the doctor, "He's a Holocaust survivor. He can't suffer anymore."
About 40 people attended his memorial service at a funeral home near Hartford. Two easels and an album displayed photos: Mieczyslaw with his sister and mother on a summer day; Peewee and Salomon grinning with a black soldier named Dave; Messrs. Weigen and Withers hugging.
The room fell silent as Ms. Bergren stood and told how Mr. Withers gave her father "a new beginning." She asked Mr. Withers to stand. "For what you did that year to bring him back to us, we will be forever grateful," she said. "We love you for it."
Later Mr. Withers, 87, rose to speak. Behind him lay Mr. Weigen in a mahogany casket, wearing his favorite sweater and clutching a dried rose from his seaside house. Mr. Withers felt sad and a little confused. He'd thought that Mr. Weigen, as strong as he was, would hold on for a few years.
He smiled and said, "My name is John Withers, and I have known Martin longer than anyone in this room." He spoke of how Mr. Weigen had cheered his men, and how his gentle manner would endure in the two families who loved him. Finally, he recited the lyrics to a song Mr. Weigen had sung when he was simply Peewee, "Taps":
Day is done,
Gone the sun,
From the lakes,
From the hills,
From the sky.
All is well,
Safely rest,
God is nigh.
Write to Bryan Gruley at bryan.gruley@wsj.com
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TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS,
HE LIVED ALL ALONE,
IN A ONE BEDROOM HOUSE MADE OF
PLASTER AND STONE.
I HAD COME DOWN THE CHIMNEY
WITH PRESENTS TO GIVE,
AND TO SEE JUST WHO
IN THIS HOME DID LIVE.
I LOOKED ALL ABOUT,
A STRANGE SIGHT I DID SEE,
NO TINSEL, NO PRESENTS,
NOT EVEN A TREE.
NO STOCKING BY MANTLE,
JUST BOOTS FILLED WITH SAND,
ON THE WALL HUNG PICTURES
OF FAR DISTANT LANDS.
WITH MEDALS AND BADGES,
AWARDS OF ALL KINDS,
A SOBER THOUGHT
CAME THROUGH MY MIND.
FOR THIS HOUSE WAS DIFFERENT,
IT WAS DARK AND DREARY,
I FOUND THE HOME OF A SOLDIER,
ONCE I COULD SEE CLEARLY.
THE SOLDIER LAY SLEEPING,
SILENT, ALONE,
CURLED UP ON THE FLOOR
IN THIS ONE BEDROOM HOME.
THE FACE WAS SO GENTLE,
THE ROOM IN SUCH DISORDER,
NOT HOW I PICTURED
A UNITED STATES SOLDIER.
WAS THIS THE HERO
OF WHOM I'D JUST READ?
CURLED UP ON A PONCHO,
THE FLOOR FOR A BED?
I REALIZED THE FAMILIES
THAT I SAW THIS NIGHT,
OWED THEIR LIVES TO THESE SOLDIERS
WHO WERE WILLING TO FIGHT.
SOON ROUND THE WORLD,
THE CHILDREN WOULD PLAY,
AND GROWNUPS WOULD CELEBRATE
A BRIGHT CHRISTMAS DAY.
THEY ALL ENJOYED FREEDOM
EACH MONTH OF THE YEAR,
BECAUSE OF THE SOLDIERS,
LIKE THE ONE LYING HERE.
I COULDN'T HELP WONDER
HOW MANY LAY ALONE,
ON A COLD CHRISTMAS EVE
IN A LAND FAR FROM HOME.
THE VERY THOUGHT
BROUGHT A TEAR TO MY EYE,
I DROPPED TO MY KNEES
AND STARTED TO CRY.
THE SOLDIER AWAKENED
AND I HEARD A ROUGH VOICE,
"SANTA DON'T CRY,
THIS LIFE IS MY CHOICE;
I FIGHT FOR FREEDOM,
I DON'T ASK FOR MORE,
MY LIFE IS TO MY GOD,
MY COUNTRY, MY CORPS."
THE SOLDIER ROLLED OVER
AND DRIFTED TO SLEEP,
I COULDN'T CONTROL IT,
I CONTINUED TO WEEP.
I KEPT WATCH FOR HOURS,
SO SILENT AND STILL
AND WE BOTH SHIVERED
FROM THE COLD NIGHT'S CHILL.
I DIDN'T WANT TO LEAVE
ON THAT COLD, DARK, NIGHT,
THIS GUARDIAN OF HONOR
SO WILLING TO FIGHT.
THEN THE SOLDIER ROLLED OVER,
WITH A VOICE SOFT AND PURE,
WHISPERED, "CARRY ON SANTA,
IT'S CHRISTMAS DAY, ALL IS SECURE."
ONE LOOK AT MY WATCH,
AND I KNEW HE WAS RIGHT.
"MERRY CHRISTMAS MY FRIEND,
AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT."
This poem was written by a Marine stationed in Okinawa
Japan.
-
the poem above is wrong.
the original poem written, said MARINE not 'soldier'.
i know it's not much, but to a MARINE, the two words make a world of difference.
one lives the Spartan and Samurai ideals,
while the other tries to be all that he can be.
-
Marine Christmas
T'was the night before Christmas, He lived all alone,
In a one bedroom house made entirely of stone.
I had come down the chimney with presents to give
To see just who in this house did live.
As I looked all about, a strange sight did I see,
No tinsel, No presents, not even a tree.
No stocking by the fire, just boots filled with sand,
On a wall hung pictures of a far distant land.
With medals and badges, awards of all kinds,
A sobering thought came to my mind.
For this house was different, unlike any I'd seen,
This was the home of a US Marine.
I'd heard stories about them, and had to see more,
So I walked down the hall and pushed open the door.
There he lay sleeping, silent and alone,
curled up on the floor of his one bedroom home.
He seemed so gentle, his face so serene,
Not at all how I'd pictured A US Marine.
Was this the hero of whom I'd just read,
Curled up in his poncho, a floor for his bed?
His head was clean shaven, his weathered face tan,
and I soon understood, this was more than a man.
For I realized the families I'd seen tonight,
Owed there Lives to these men who were willing to fight.
Soon around the nation the children would play,
And grown ups would celebrate a bright Christmas day.
They enjoyed freedom each week and year,
Because of Marines like this one right here.
I couldn't help but wonder, how many lay alone,
On a cold Christmas eve, in a land far from home.
the thought brought a prideful tear to my eye,
I dropped to my knees and started to cry.
He must have awakened, for I heard a rough voice,
"Santa, Don't cry, this is my choice.
I fight for freedom, don't ask for more,
My Life is My God, My Country, My Corps."
With that he rolled over, and drifted off to sleep,
I couldn't control it and continued to weep.
I watched him for hours, so silent and still,
I noticed he shivered from the cold night's chill.
I took off my jacket, the one made of red,
I covered this Marine from his toe to his head.
Then I put on his T-shirt of scarlet and gold,
with eagle globe and anchor emblazoned so bold.
"oh Santa, It's Christmas and the country is secure."
One look at my watch and I knew he was right,
Though it barely fit me, I swelled with pride,
For one shining moment, I was a Marine inside.
I didn't want to leave him, so quiet in the night,
The guardian of honor, so willing to fight.
But half asleep he rolled over and said so pure,
"Carry on Santa, It's Christmas and the country is secure."
One look at my watch and I knew he was right,
Merry Christmas my friend, Semper Fi and Good Night.
This poem was written by a Marine stationed in
Okinawa Japan.
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FAR FROM THE FEAST
By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 25, 2003 -- DEAR Pfc. Smith,
Most of your fellow Americans won't think of you today. Some may see a news clip of your Christmas dinner in Iraq, filmed against a backdrop of holiday decorations your unit scraped together. Those who once served in the ranks themselves will think of you at least briefly. And you'll be cherished in the hearts, if not in the arms, of your loved ones.
But most of us won't think of you at all. And that's a wonderful thing.
It's your great gift to us.
Because of you, hundreds of millions of Americans who celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace will spend this holiday in peace themselves, with their loved ones safe and our blessed country secure.
Terrorists may threaten us, but because of you we know they will not defeat us. You stand between us and the dark men who rode into Bethlehem in search of an innocent child.
So forgive us for not remembering you today. We'll be too busy giving gifts and opening them, enjoying the thrilled faces of our nation's children, saying a too-brief prayer of thanks, then eating well and drinking our "leaded" eggnog until the tree blurs ever so slightly.
Because you stand on the rough frontiers of humankind, this will be a day of joy, not nightmare.
We won't think of you. Because you've done such a remarkable job. A nation that must think constantly of its men and women in uniform, that lives in constant dread of the latest news from the front lines, is a nation gripped by fear. But we know that you'll never let us down. Some of history's wounds may be inevitable, but because of you our nation will always survive them.
Because of you, we fear no foreign invasions.
Because of you, those few who do disturb our peace will not disturb it long.
Because of you, we need not dread the tyranny of dictators or murderous ideologies.
Because of you, we need not fear a knock on the door from the secret police.
The only midnight visits we expect are from Santa Claus.
As we celebrate, you're on patrol in Iraq.
You're weathering the winter's bite in Afghanistan.
You're in the Balkans, giving peace a chance.
You're in, literally, a hundred countries, keeping us safe and making safe the lives of those who have lived in fear for centuries.
Your brothers and sisters in the other branches of our military patrol the seas and skies, in service not only to your fellow Americans on this holy day, but helping all of humankind pioneer a future in which despots no longer slaughter the innocents.
You're a long way from home, Pfc. Smith, but your thoughts leap continents and oceans. Your heart is with your spouse, with the children whose joy you'll miss again this holiday season, and with the elders who feel your absence even more strongly at Christmas than they do on the other 364 days of the year.
You're tough. We know that. But those of us who served before you also understand that, even for the strongest heart, Christmas in a foreign land, far from those we love, is hard to bear. Some soldiers keep their loneliness to themselves. Others make jokes. The guys in the unit help each other through the day with small generosities. But "Merry Christmas" still sounds different in an armed camp.
In each Christmas you spend apart from your family, there are moments of longing so wrenching you can hardly stand it - although you don't let on. You're a well-trained, dedicated soldier. It's not just a profession. It's a calling, proud and honorable. You serve history's greatest cause.
But no American soldier wants to fight on Christmas Day.
Yet outposts must be manned, patrols run and convoys escorted. Even on Christmas, you'll roll out of your compound "guns up," alert to those to whom no day is sacred.
God willing, you'll spend next Christmas back in your family's embrace, where you won't have to rely on a brief phone call or a belated e-mail to learn how those dearest to you spent the holiday.
But on that future Christmas, another Pfc. Smith will stand in your place. As others took the weight of freedom upon their shoulders before they passed the burden down to you.
Our history is laden with Christmases lost by the men and women who won our nation's wars, from Valley Forge through Bastogne and on to Baghdad.
Today, it's your turn to carry out your mission so well that those you protect can forget about our enemies for a few hours. And for that same, short, glittering day, we can forget about you, too.
But in those lonely hours when you're off-duty, killing time in your barracks or in a tent, remember that you're keeping the spirit of Christmas alive for many millions. You're giving a glorious gift to every one of us.
On this day that shines so brightly in our hearts, you're holding back the darkness of all the world. Without you, "peace on earth" would be no more than the lyrics to a carol. So, on behalf of those of us who'll forget you on this day, "Merry Christmas!"
Ralph Peters is a retired soldier and an author.
======================
Never Forget
Sent in by Ralph Shuey
The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
my daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree, I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.
My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem.
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.
The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,
But I opened my eye when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
and I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.
A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
perhaps Army or Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.
"What are you doing?" I asked without fear
"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
you should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"
For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts,
to the window that danced with a warm fire's light
then he sighed and he said "It's really all right,
I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night"
"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,
that separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My Gramps died at 'Pearl on a day in December,"
then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of 'Nam
and now it is my turn and so, here I am.
I've not seen my own son in more than a while,
but my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
the red white and blue...an American flag.
"I can live through the cold and the being alone,
away from my family, my house and my home,
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat,
I can carry the weight of killing another
or lay down my life with my sisters and brothers
who stand at the front against any and all,
to insure for all time that this flag will not fall."
"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright
Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."
"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,
"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you've done,
For being away from your wife and your son."
Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
"Just tell us you love us, and never forget
to fight for our rights back at home while we're gone.
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.
For when we come home, either standing or dead,
to know you remember we fought and we bled
is payment enough, and with that we will trust.
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us."
-
Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting
Orders Extend Enlistments to Curtail Troop Shortages
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page A01
Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, an expert on enemy targeting, served 20 years in the military -- 10 years of active duty in the Air Force, another 10 in the West Virginia National Guard. Then he decided enough was enough. He owned a promising new aircraft-maintenance business, and it needed his attention. His retirement date was set for last February.
Staff Sgt. Justin Fontaine, a generator mechanic, enrolled in the Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and served nearly nine years. In preparation for his exit date last March, he turned in his field gear -- his rucksack and web belt, his uniforms and canteen.
Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, an interrogator in an intelligence unit, joined the Army Reserve in 1991, extended his enlistment in 1999 and then re-upped for three years in 2000. Costas, a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Texas, was due to retire from the reserves in last May.
According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"
The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.
"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.
To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike -- a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.
By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have breached the Army's manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that the number of active-duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of stop-loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of exceeding the limit by so much.
"Our goal is, we want to have units that are stabilized all the way down from the lowest squad up through the headquarters elements," said Brig. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, director of enlisted personnel management in the Army's Human Resources Command. "Stop-loss allows us to do that. When a unit deploys, it deploys, trains and does its missions with the same soldiers."
In a recent profile of an Army infantry battalion deployed in Kuwait and on its way to Iraq, the commander, Lt. Col. Karl Reed, told the Army Times he could have lost a quarter of his unit in the coming year had it not been for the stop-loss order. "And that means a new 25 percent," Reed told the Army Times. "I would have had to train them and prepare them to go on the line. Given where we are, it will be a 24-hour combat operation; therefore it's very difficult to bring new folks in and integrate them."
To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice, however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases, a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.
"I'm furious. I'm aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used," said Eagle, 42, the targeting officer, who has just shipped to Iraq with his field artillery unit for what is likely to be a yearlong tour of duty. He had voluntarily postponed his retirement at his commander's request early this year and then suddenly found himself stuck in the service under a stop-loss order this fall. Eagle said he fears his fledgling business in West Virginia may not survive his lengthy absence. His unexpected extension in the Army will slash his annual income by about &45,000, he said. And some members of his family, including his recently widowed sister, whose three teenage sons are close to Eagle, are bitterly opposed to his leaving.
"An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; I am not," said Costas, 42, who signed an e-mail from Iraq this month "Chained in Iraq," an allusion to the fact that he and his fellow reservists remained in Baghdad after the active-duty unit into which they were transferred last spring went home. He has now been told that he will be home late next June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. "Unfair. I would not say it's a draft per se, but it's clearly a breach of contract. I will not reenlist."
Other soldiers retained by the Army under stop-loss are more resigned than irate, but no less demoralized by what some have come to regard as their involuntary servitude.
"Unfortunately, I signed the dotted line saying I'm going to serve my country," said Fontaine, 27, the mechanic, who said he spent "20 or 30 days" fruitlessly researching legal ways that he could quit the Army when his contractual departure date came up in February. "All I can do is suck it up and take it till I can get out."
The military's interest in halting the depletion of its ranks predates the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. American GIs in World War II were under orders to serve until the fighting was finished, plus six months.
Congress approved the authority for what became known as stop-loss orders after the Vietnam War, responding to concerns that the military had been hamstrung by the out-rotations of seasoned combat soldiers in Indochina. But the authority was not used until the buildup to the Persian Gulf War in 1990 when Richard B. Cheney, then the secretary of defense, allowed the military services to bar most retirements and prolong enlistments indefinitely.
A flurry of stop-loss orders was issued after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, intensifying as the nation prepared for war in Iraq early this year. Some of the orders have applied to soldiers, sailors and airmen in specific skill categories -- military police, for example, and ordnance control specialists, have been in particular demand in Iraq.
Other edicts have been more sweeping, such as the Army's most recent stop-loss order, issued Nov. 13, covering thousands of active-duty soldiers whose units are scheduled for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming months. Because the stop-loss order begins 90 days before deployment and lasts for 90 days after a return home, those troops will be prohibited from retiring or leaving the Army at the expiration of their contracts until the spring of 2005, at the earliest.
The proliferation of stop-loss orders has bred confusion and resentment even as it has helped preserve what the military calls "unit cohesion." In the past two years, the Army alone has announced 11 stop-loss orders -- an average of one every nine or 10 weeks.
Often in the past year, the Army has allowed active-duty soldiers to retire and depart but not Guard and reserve troops, many of whom have chafed at the disparity in policies. Some Guard troops and reservists complain their release dates have been extended several times and they no longer know when they will be allowed to leave.
"We don't ever trust anything we're told," said Chris Walsh of Southington, Conn., whose wife, Jessica, an eighth-grade English teacher, is a military police officer in a National Guard unit in Baghdad. She may end up serving nearly two years beyond her original exit date of July 2002, Chris Walsh said. "We've been disappointed too many times."
For many soldiers who had planned on leaving the military, the sudden change of plans has been jarring.
Jim Montgomery's story is typical. Montgomery, an air-conditioning repairman in western Massachusetts, did a three-year hitch in the Army in the '90s and then signed up for a five-year stint in the National Guard. His exit date was July 31, 2003, after which he planned to devote himself to getting his electrician's license -- and to the baby he and his wife, Donna, expected in November, their first.
"I felt like I'd honored my contract," said Montgomery, 35, a beefy, affable man who holds the rank of specialist E4 in the Guard. "The military had given me some good things -- friendships and the opportunity to take some college courses -- and that's where I wanted to leave it."
The Army had other plans. In March, Montgomery's maintenance unit was sent for training to Fort Drum, N.Y. In April it deployed to Kuwait, and since May it has been stationed in southern Iraq. With each move, it became clearer to Montgomery that his July exit date from the Guard would not materialize. The latest he has heard is that the unit may be coming home in April, but even that is uncertain, he said.
Last month Montgomery rushed home on a medical emergency when Donna had complications in childbirth. She and the baby are fine now, but Montgomery is frustrated by his cloudy future.
"Some guys who are Vietnam vets are with us," he said in an interview at his home in Holland, Mass., shortly before he was to return to his unit in Iraq. "They said even in Vietnam, as difficult as it was there, you knew from the time you hit the ground to the time you returned it was one year -- whereas with this it's really up in the air."
Some military officials have acknowledged that stop-loss is a necessary evil. When the Air Force announced it was imposing a stop-loss rule last spring, an official news bulletin from Air Force Print News noted: "Both the secretary [James G. Roche] and the chief of staff [Gen. John P. Jumper] are acutely aware that the Air Force is an all-volunteer force and that this action, while essential to meeting the service's worldwide obligations, is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of voluntary service."
More frequently, the military response to griping about stop-loss is bluntly unsympathetic. "We're all soldiers. We go where were told," said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman. "Fair has nothing to do with it."
Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
-
Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting
Orders Extend Enlistments to Curtail Troop Shortages
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 29, 2003; Page A01
Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, an expert on enemy targeting, served 20 years in the military -- 10 years of active duty in the Air Force, another 10 in the West Virginia National Guard. Then he decided enough was enough. He owned a promising new aircraft-maintenance business, and it needed his attention. His retirement date was set for last February.
Staff Sgt. Justin Fontaine, a generator mechanic, enrolled in the Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and served nearly nine years. In preparation for his exit date last March, he turned in his field gear -- his rucksack and web belt, his uniforms and canteen.
Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, an interrogator in an intelligence unit, joined the Army Reserve in 1991, extended his enlistment in 1999 and then re-upped for three years in 2000. Costas, a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Texas, was due to retire from the reserves in last May.
According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"
The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.
"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.
To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike -- a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.
By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have breached the Army's manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that the number of active-duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of stop-loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of exceeding the limit by so much.
"Our goal is, we want to have units that are stabilized all the way down from the lowest squad up through the headquarters elements," said Brig. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, director of enlisted personnel management in the Army's Human Resources Command. "Stop-loss allows us to do that. When a unit deploys, it deploys, trains and does its missions with the same soldiers."
In a recent profile of an Army infantry battalion deployed in Kuwait and on its way to Iraq, the commander, Lt. Col. Karl Reed, told the Army Times he could have lost a quarter of his unit in the coming year had it not been for the stop-loss order. "And that means a new 25 percent," Reed told the Army Times. "I would have had to train them and prepare them to go on the line. Given where we are, it will be a 24-hour combat operation; therefore it's very difficult to bring new folks in and integrate them."
To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice, however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases, a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.
"I'm furious. I'm aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used," said Eagle, 42, the targeting officer, who has just shipped to Iraq with his field artillery unit for what is likely to be a yearlong tour of duty. He had voluntarily postponed his retirement at his commander's request early this year and then suddenly found himself stuck in the service under a stop-loss order this fall. Eagle said he fears his fledgling business in West Virginia may not survive his lengthy absence. His unexpected extension in the Army will slash his annual income by about &45,000, he said. And some members of his family, including his recently widowed sister, whose three teenage sons are close to Eagle, are bitterly opposed to his leaving.
"An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; I am not," said Costas, 42, who signed an e-mail from Iraq this month "Chained in Iraq," an allusion to the fact that he and his fellow reservists remained in Baghdad after the active-duty unit into which they were transferred last spring went home. He has now been told that he will be home late next June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. "Unfair. I would not say it's a draft per se, but it's clearly a breach of contract. I will not reenlist."
Other soldiers retained by the Army under stop-loss are more resigned than irate, but no less demoralized by what some have come to regard as their involuntary servitude.
"Unfortunately, I signed the dotted line saying I'm going to serve my country," said Fontaine, 27, the mechanic, who said he spent "20 or 30 days" fruitlessly researching legal ways that he could quit the Army when his contractual departure date came up in February. "All I can do is suck it up and take it till I can get out."
The military's interest in halting the depletion of its ranks predates the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. American GIs in World War II were under orders to serve until the fighting was finished, plus six months.
Congress approved the authority for what became known as stop-loss orders after the Vietnam War, responding to concerns that the military had been hamstrung by the out-rotations of seasoned combat soldiers in Indochina. But the authority was not used until the buildup to the Persian Gulf War in 1990 when Richard B. Cheney, then the secretary of defense, allowed the military services to bar most retirements and prolong enlistments indefinitely.
A flurry of stop-loss orders was issued after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, intensifying as the nation prepared for war in Iraq early this year. Some of the orders have applied to soldiers, sailors and airmen in specific skill categories -- military police, for example, and ordnance control specialists, have been in particular demand in Iraq.
Other edicts have been more sweeping, such as the Army's most recent stop-loss order, issued Nov. 13, covering thousands of active-duty soldiers whose units are scheduled for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming months. Because the stop-loss order begins 90 days before deployment and lasts for 90 days after a return home, those troops will be prohibited from retiring or leaving the Army at the expiration of their contracts until the spring of 2005, at the earliest.
The proliferation of stop-loss orders has bred confusion and resentment even as it has helped preserve what the military calls "unit cohesion." In the past two years, the Army alone has announced 11 stop-loss orders -- an average of one every nine or 10 weeks.
Often in the past year, the Army has allowed active-duty soldiers to retire and depart but not Guard and reserve troops, many of whom have chafed at the disparity in policies. Some Guard troops and reservists complain their release dates have been extended several times and they no longer know when they will be allowed to leave.
"We don't ever trust anything we're told," said Chris Walsh of Southington, Conn., whose wife, Jessica, an eighth-grade English teacher, is a military police officer in a National Guard unit in Baghdad. She may end up serving nearly two years beyond her original exit date of July 2002, Chris Walsh said. "We've been disappointed too many times."
For many soldiers who had planned on leaving the military, the sudden change of plans has been jarring.
Jim Montgomery's story is typical. Montgomery, an air-conditioning repairman in western Massachusetts, did a three-year hitch in the Army in the '90s and then signed up for a five-year stint in the National Guard. His exit date was July 31, 2003, after which he planned to devote himself to getting his electrician's license -- and to the baby he and his wife, Donna, expected in November, their first.
"I felt like I'd honored my contract," said Montgomery, 35, a beefy, affable man who holds the rank of specialist E4 in the Guard. "The military had given me some good things -- friendships and the opportunity to take some college courses -- and that's where I wanted to leave it."
The Army had other plans. In March, Montgomery's maintenance unit was sent for training to Fort Drum, N.Y. In April it deployed to Kuwait, and since May it has been stationed in southern Iraq. With each move, it became clearer to Montgomery that his July exit date from the Guard would not materialize. The latest he has heard is that the unit may be coming home in April, but even that is uncertain, he said.
Last month Montgomery rushed home on a medical emergency when Donna had complications in childbirth. She and the baby are fine now, but Montgomery is frustrated by his cloudy future.
"Some guys who are Vietnam vets are with us," he said in an interview at his home in Holland, Mass., shortly before he was to return to his unit in Iraq. "They said even in Vietnam, as difficult as it was there, you knew from the time you hit the ground to the time you returned it was one year -- whereas with this it's really up in the air."
Some military officials have acknowledged that stop-loss is a necessary evil. When the Air Force announced it was imposing a stop-loss rule last spring, an official news bulletin from Air Force Print News noted: "Both the secretary [James G. Roche] and the chief of staff [Gen. John P. Jumper] are acutely aware that the Air Force is an all-volunteer force and that this action, while essential to meeting the service's worldwide obligations, is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of voluntary service."
More frequently, the military response to griping about stop-loss is bluntly unsympathetic. "We're all soldiers. We go where were told," said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman. "Fair has nothing to do with it."
Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
-
Woof All:
I post this one here because I think it helps give a sense of the complexities facing our individual fighting men on the ground in Iraq.
Crafty
=============
FIGHT FOR IRAQ
Before Heading
To Iraq, Marines
Learn People Skills
New Corps Policy Has Grunts Defusing
Mock Riots, Parleying With Protesters
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. -- On a bright winter afternoon in California's high desert, Staff Sgt. Adam Walker gathered his platoon's newest Marines to give them their marching orders for when they get to Iraq: Be nice.
"That's hard for Marines," Staff Sgt. Walker told the young grunts, just four days out of infantry school. "What are you taught in boot camp? Kick ass and kill. That aggressiveness is not going to win in Iraq."
The First Marine Division fought its way from Kuwait to Baghdad last spring, and the first half of the force, some 8,000 Marines including Staff Sgt. Walker's platoon, is slated to return to Iraq in the coming months. They'll likely replace Army units occupying the hotspot city of Fallujah and the rest of Al Anbar province, a volatile Sunni Muslim-dominated area between Baghdad and the Syrian border.
For months, Marine commanders in the U.S. have watched from afar as American and Iraqi casualties have mounted, and they think they know where the Army has gone wrong. So before they ship out, the Marines are undertaking what amounts to a massive deprogramming campaign for their own troops. Put simply, they're teaching them to ask questions first and shoot later.
The plan is a risky one, based on the assumption that even in the areas most hostile to the U.S.-led occupation, local residents can still be won over if American troops treat them with more dignity, patience and understanding. And, the theory goes, as popular support for the U.S. grows, popular tolerance of the armed resistance will fade.
"The vast majority of people just want peace, security, jobs, electricity and the basic things that any people would want," says Lt. Col. David J. Furness, the Marine division's operations officer. "I think we can appeal to that."
Under the rules of engagement, the Marines will still have the right to defend themselves, and officers promise a ferocious response to those who attack them. But the Marines say they will avoid actions that lead to civilian casualties or feed Sunnis' belief that the occupation is designed to humiliate and marginalize them. That means shunning, to the extent possible, massive airstrikes, artillery bombardments, home demolitions and roundups of insurgents' family members. It means that sometimes the Marines will pull back instead of fighting back, if they think a gun battle will endanger or alienate civilians. The Marines say they won't even wear sunglasses when they interact with Iraqis, so as not to appear too intimidating and inaccessible.
Marine commanders believe they validated their theory after the fall of Baghdad in April, when the division moved south to occupy Karbala, Najaf and other predominantly Shiite Muslim areas. Although there have been some major attacks since the Marines left, those cities were relatively peaceful under Marine occupation, and the troops generally enjoyed cordial relations with the local populations, officials and even many clerics. "Our gut instinct is that if we go in there and we do the same things we did last summer, that eventually -- not right away -- we will win them over," says Lt. Col. Furness.
Marine commanders won't criticize the Army in public. Their promised approach, however, is an implicit swipe at the Army's tactics in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where Army units have blockaded neighborhoods, kicked down doors, demolished some homes of those suspected of supporting the insurgency and blasted away with artillery and air strikes.
But the Marines may have had it easy in the south, the Army is quick to point out. Shiites, long targets of Saddam Hussein's repression, are less inclined to oppose the occupation than are Mr. Hussein's Sunni Muslim allies. In the Sunni Triangle, by contrast, the hate runs deep and wide; in November, children kicked the corpses of seven Spanish coalition intelligence agents killed in an ambush.
Some soldiers of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, which has occupied Al Anbar since September, believe the Marines underestimate how hostile many locals are, and how hard it is to strike the balance between staying friendly and staying alive. The troops face frequent ambushes and roadside bombings, which make it difficult to improve the basic services that might convince the 1.5 million Iraqis in the province that life is better without Mr. Hussein. Attackers hide behind crowds of civilians and take shelter in mosques. "Our commanders have done everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties," says Maj. Neil Harper, spokesman for the 82nd. "However, what we do is inherently dangerous, and casualties are sometimes unavoidable."
The division doesn't track Iraqi casualties. But since President Bush declared the end of major fighting in May, the 82nd has suffered 15 combat deaths out of some 9,000 troopers in Iraq. On Friday, insurgents in Fallujah shot down a helicopter, killing a pilot.
The Army has lately tried a variety of softer tactics in the Sunni Triangle to try to win more hearts and minds. The 82nd has begun renovations on a medical clinic near Rawah. In the next several weeks, the division plans to cut back its own patrols in Ar Ramadi and let Iraqi police handle most problems there -- putting a less-provocative, local face on security.
Just after Christmas, when the 82nd called in jets to destroy a suspected insurgents' safe house near Khalidiyah, troops first cordoned off the area to make sure nobody would be injured. The preannounced bombing "displayed to the Iraqi people that established priorities are in place to ensure safety for the innocent civilians in the area," the Pentagon's Central Command says.
Attacks on U.S. forces in Al Anbar have been cut by more than half in the past several months, the Army says. "These are true indicators that we are strongly winning over -- not alienating -- the local population," Maj. Harper writes in an e-mail from Ar Ramadi.
The Marines accept that the Sunni areas will be tougher than the Shiite south. Nonetheless, they say they will go forward with their own approach to winning the peace, implementing the ethos of division commander Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, who borrows from the Hippocratic oath: "First, do no harm."
The division is putting infantrymen through days of lectures and training scenarios in which they're forced to confront the kind of anger, conflict, fear and confusion they'll face in western Iraq. Playing the Iraqis in one round of exercises are Marines from First Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, who dress up in checkered Arab headdresses, called kaffiyehs, and trot out the Arabic phrases they learned during their first tour in Iraq. Some even wear women's black burka robes, their whiskered faces modestly covered and cardboard signs around their necks identifying them as "Female."
Leading the troops are veterans such as 27-year-old Staff Sgt. Walker, of Hendersonville, N.C., who says he has been home from Iraq just long enough to "get a new tattoo and get my wife pregnant."
More than a third of the regiment's 900-strong Third Battalion weren't in Iraq the first time; Staff Sgt. Walker's 29-man platoon in Kilo Company has seven "boots," young Marines new to the Corps. So on a recent afternoon the sergeant was careful to explain the basics, such as why he won't allow his men to use disparaging names for Iraqis, and what the difference is between Sunnis and Shiites. "Maybe think of it like Protestants and Catholics," he suggested.
"Some people will be shooting at you, and some people will be huggin' at you," Staff Sgt. Walker told the men. "Expect both."
Figuring out who's who without getting shot or blown up is the tricky part, as Pfc. Abel Loredo, class of '03 at James Pace High School in Brownsville, Texas, found out during days of training scenarios. In one, the 19-year-old private was providing security when his patrol stopped at the scene of a two-car accident. A crowd looked on as one Iraqi driver beat the other with a flashlight. When Pfc. Loredo approached, a bystander asked him for some water, and the private obligingly handed over his canteen, only to watch the young man disappear with it into the crowd. The platoon's radio operator gave chase alone to get it back, another mistake.
"I was told we were supposed to be nice," Pfc. Loredo explained to his squad mates afterward.
"When they say, 'Be nice,' they pretty much mean, 'Don't be mean,' " explained Lance Cpl. Darren Pickard, a 20-year-old Humvee driver from Merced, Calif.
"Look at everyone as if they're trying to kill you, but don't treat them that way," said Lance Cpl. Lee Eckert, 20, a machine-gunner from Dallas, echoing another of Gen. Mattis's rules.
The next day things got more complex. Pfc. Loredo was the point man on a foot patrol moving through a neighborhood of Quonset huts. The Marines were wearing gear that beeps when they've been hit by laser-equipped rifles and machine guns. The squad quickly spotted a large group of armed Iraqis shooting into the air. Pfc. Loredo held his fire; just as well, since a man soon approached announcing that the crowd was celebrating a wedding in the traditional Iraqi style.
Moments later, however, another group of Iraqis opened fire on the patrol, leading to a gun battle that bogged the patrol down for 15 minutes, far too long to remain in one place.
During the middle of the simulated firefight, Lance Cpl. Jared Grote, a 19-year-old radio operator from Annapolis, Md., shouted at Pfc. Loredo: "Don't shoot unless they shoot at you." With civilians wandering through the neighborhood, the Marines found it hard to know who the combatants were -- and whether to fire on armed Iraqis who were shadowing the patrol, but hadn't yet taken any shots.
By the time the firing died down, Cpl. Mark Juarez, 21, from Floresville, Texas, was on his back with a mock chest wound and two other Marines were dead, out of a 13-man squad.
Bad as that was, it could have been worse. Another Kilo Company platoon was patrolling through a mock marketplace when one Iraqi man popped out of a restive crowd and fired a shot. A separate group of Marines, from Third Battalion's Weapons Company, fired back from the far side of the market. The Kilo Marines didn't know the Weapons Company Marines were there, and soon the two groups were firing at each other, with Iraqi civilians caught in the middle -- just the kind of deadly confrontation that could quickly spoil the Marines' relations with the locals.
"It's going to be a thinking man's war, and the thinking man is going to be the squad leader," said Col. Craig Tucker, commander of the Seventh Marine Regiment. "He's going to have to make that decision in a whole context of political and cultural elements. The decision he has to make is whether to shoot eight guys to get one."
The decision also involves finding ways to defuse an explosive situation. At the gate of a mock Marine base, Cpl. Jason Lemcke, a 23-year-old from San Antonio, suddenly found himself watching a large crowd of Iraqis dancing around a pickup truck, shooting rifles in the air and chanting, "No Bush" and "No Marines." The corporal called in the Iraqi police, a move the Marines believe can calm a situation, and sent his own interpreter to talk to the crowd. But, to Cpl. Lemcke's dismay, the police and interpreter wound up joining the protest.
As the crowd approached the gate, the corporal spoke to the man who appeared to be leading the group. "Tell the people to back up," he said.
"We will no longer back up," the protester responded, inspiring the crowd to push even closer to the razor-wire coils protecting the entrance. Cpl. Lemcke quickly moved back behind some sandbags, and his company commander, Capt. Trent Gibson, turned on him instantly. "Go up and face him, man to man," the captain, a 35-year-old from Palm Springs, Calif., urged.
The guards asked the crowd what they wanted, prompting a torrent of complaints typical of the ones they could run across in Iraq: The Marines had been staring at Iraqi women and shooting innocent Iraqis, the protesters said. And the population was short of food and water.
Capt. Gibson suggested to his men that they offer food and water if the protesters put their weapons away. The plan seemed like the best solution, until Cpl. Juarez came up with a better one: He recalled that he had been given a list of phone numbers for Fallujah government agencies that can provide food, water and medical assistance.
Once they had the phone numbers, most of the protesters dispersed. "There's no reason not to talk to these people," Capt. Gibson told his men.
The Marines "are trained to escalate a situation until we win," the captain said. But "the populace is our center of gravity. They can be either our friends or our enemies. It's our reaction to uncertainty or provocation that decides which one they are."
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com
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OBITUARIES
Aaron Bank, 101; OSS Officer Became 'Father of the Green Berets'
OBITUARIES
By Dennis McLellan, Times Staff Writer
Retired Army Col. Aaron Bank, who led a number of daring missions during World War II but was best known for his postwar role in organizing and serving as the first commander of the Army's elite Special Forces, has died. He was 101.
Bank, who was known as "the father of the Green Berets," died Thursday of natural causes at his home in an assisted-living facility in Dana Point, said his son-in-law, Bruce Ballantine.
During World War II, Bank was a special operations officer for the Office of Strategic Services, the top-secret government agency formed to gather intelligence and organize resistance forces behind enemy lines.
The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, was disbanded soon after the war. But Bank and others were convinced that the Army should have a permanent unit whose mission would be to conduct unconventional operations.
In 1951, the chief of the Army's Psychological Warfare staff, who had been impressed by OSS Special Operations during the war, instructed Bank to staff and obtain approval for the creation of an OSS-style operational group.
In 1952, after Bank and other key staff members had made their case, the Army approved 2,300 spaces for men in a Special Forces unit ? the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) ? at Ft. Bragg, N.C.
"I wanted none but the best," Bank said in a 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "First, they had to be double volunteers; that is, they had to volunteer for parachuting and behind-enemy-lines duties, which takes a special flair, a special type of personality. We had to work up all the manuals and training procedures for demolition, sabotage, new and different ways of handling weapons."
But most important, Bank said, "We had to teach them the classic aim and purpose of their service ? the organizing of civilian natives into guerrilla forces in enemy-held territory."
Bank later wrote a memorandum suggesting that Special Forces soldiers be allowed to wear berets as a mark of distinction. He listed three possible colors for the berets: purple, wine-red or green. But the Army didn't allow distinctive headgear at the time and the idea was turned down.
It wasn't until 1962, four years after Bank retired from the military, that President John F. Kennedy authorized Army Special Forces to wear berets. Kennedy, Bank later said, "picked the green because he was an Irishman."
Today there are about 7,700 soldiers in five active-duty and two National Guard Special Forces groups.
Continued Respect
At Ft. Bragg, which is still the home of the Green Berets, Bank is considered a military icon.
"Col. Aaron Bank is a legend within the Special Forces community," Maj. Robert Gowan, spokesman for the U.S. Army Special Forces Command, said Thursday. "His commitment and service to our country is unsurpassed. He was a man far ahead of his time?. His vision and initiative allowed the Army to create Special Forces as we know them today."
Born in New York City, Bank began working summers in his teens as a lifeguard and swimming teacher. He liked the work so much, he later said, that by the late 1920s it had become something of a career.
"I'd go to Nassau in the Bahamas to work during the winter and then to Biarritz in southern France during the summer," he recalled in the 1968 interview. "It was a plush life."
He was in and out of Europe over the next decade and learned to speak French and German fluently. But in the late 1930s, sensing the inevitability of war, he returned home and joined the Army. By the time the United States entered the war, Bank had been commissioned a second lieutenant.
In 1943, the 40-year-old Bank was serving as a tactical training officer to a railroad battalion stationed at Camp Polk, La. when he saw a bulletin announcing that volunteers with foreign language capabilities would be interviewed for "special assignments."
Once in the OSS, he said, he began a long training course that taught him "to do all the things that regular branches of the service frowned on" ? guerrilla warfare, sabotage, espionage, escape and evasion tactics.
He also learned parachuting. As commander of one of the three-man teams that dropped into southern France before the Allied Mediterranean invasion in August 1944, he and his men posed as civilians and helped French Resistance leaders organize a guerrilla force that blew up bridges, power lines and railroad tracks, and ambushed German columns.
Top-Secret Mission
In December 1944, Bank received what he considered the most extraordinary assignment of his career: to recruit and train 170 anti-Nazi German POWs and defectors who would parachute with him into the Austrian Alps, where they would pose as a German mountain infantry company.
The primary goal of the top-secret mission, dubbed Iron Cross, was to capture high-ranking Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, who were expected to seek refuge in the area as the war in Europe neared an end.
Had the operation gone through and had they been successful in capturing Hitler, Bank told The Times in 1987, "the war would have been over overnight." But in April 1945 ? after three months of training in France ? the mission was scrubbed.
"I never cried in my life, but I damn near cried when they told me it was aborted," Bank said in a 1993 Times interview.
Bank said he had heard two versions of why the mission was canceled. "One was that the American 7th Army was ready to crack into the Inn Valley. And it was a short time later that they did." And because many of the Germans on the mission were pro-communist, he said, he heard that "the State Department didn't want to drop a big team of party communists into Austria toward the latter part of the war."
Hitler, it turned out, was in Berlin at the time; he committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
After the aborted Iron Cross mission, Bank was parachuted into the jungles of Indochina to search for Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. His team located 165 French internees at three different locations in the Vientiane area of Laos.
Bank, who also served in the Korean War, retired from the Army in 1958 and moved to San Clemente.
In 1972, at age 70, he began working full time as chief of security at a private oceanfront community in Capistrano Beach, a job he held until he was 85.
Physically Fit
Extremely fit and vigorous most of his life, the 5-foot-8, 140-odd-pound Bank swam around the San Clemente pier every day until he was 74. He then took to running 40 minutes a day on the hilly streets near his home.
Bank continued a daily regimen of lifting weights, riding a stationary bike, walking and participating in an exercise class at the assisted-living facility in Dana Point until he was hospitalized three weeks ago.
Over the years, Bank wrote two books: "From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces" (Presidio Press, 1987); and "Knights Cross" (Birch Lane Press, 1993), a novel co-written with E.M. Nathanson, author of "The Dirty Dozen."
"Knights Cross" was based, in part, on Bank's real-life exploits with the aborted Iron Cross mission, but the novel had a twist: The mission to capture Hitler is not aborted and Bank's fictional alter ego succeeds in capturing the German leader.
"I think of Aaron as a national treasure," Nathanson told The Times. "He was a gracious gentleman and a dedicated warrior. There would seem to be a conflict between those two phrases, but they went together very well with him."
Bank is survived by his wife, Catherine; their two daughters, Linda Ballantine of Dana Point and Alexandra Elliott of Anaheim; and a granddaughter.
A funeral service, with full military and Special Forces honors, will be held at 1 p.m. Monday at Riverside National Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be sent to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, P.O. Box 14385, Tampa, FL 33690.
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My second post of the day-Crafty
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Race to Get Lights On
In Iraq Shows Perils
Of Reconstruction
Despite Stumbles, Attacks,
Corps of Engineers' Team
Is Finally Making Progress
Col. Semonite's Travel Tips
By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 2, 2004; Page A1
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- When Col. Todd Semonite arrived here last fall to direct a massive push to restore Iraq's electricity grid, his orders were simple: Stress speed over all else.
Hauling in some key generators from overseas proved too slow on ships, so he flew them on cargo planes at several times the cost. He riled Pentagon auditors by allowing his contractors to buy millions of dollars in parts without competitive bids. His haste extended to his armed drivers, who careened along Iraq's clogged highways in sport-utility vehicles at extreme speeds -- both to get around the country faster and to avoid danger.
THE FIGHT FOR IRAQ
"The point is to always keep moving," Col. Semonite said on a recent trip north of Baghdad, as he chewed on a grape Tootsie-Pop, his typical lunch. "It is hard to trigger a bomb accurately to hit a Suburban going 100 miles an hour."
Col. Semonite's team is making significant progress in the race to rebuild Iraq's power system before the planned U.S. handover of power to Iraqis in June. But his experience shows how rebuilding Iraq is proving to be a far more dangerous and expensive task than the U.S. and its private contractors expected. That lesson was on gruesome display this week with the killing and mutilation Wednesday of four American contractors.
The U.S. originally tapped the engineering giant Bechtel Group Inc. to restore electricity in Iraq at a time when the military expected a swift victory and the administration foresaw a smooth reconstruction effort funded in large part by Iraqi oil revenue. Bechtel, like others, so misjudged the dangers of postwar Iraq that it set aside just $500,000 to hire six security guards, compared with the 169 it has today.
By last summer it was clear that the U.S. plan to rely on one civilian contractor with limited funding was not working. Thirteen aging power stations were in various states of disrepair, while looters and saboteurs undermined the system further.
In September, the U.S. sent in Col. Semonite of the Army Corps of Engineers to oversee three additional U.S. contractors armed with almost unlimited muscle and wads of cash -- mostly from Iraqi oil revenue. The group has since installed hundreds of megawatts of new power generation, erected 692 huge transmission towers and strung thousands of miles of high-voltage cable. The Corps' success on the electricity push is one reason the U.S. military, instead of the Agency for International Development, will now guide most of the $14 billion in additional rebuilding work slated for Iraq this year.
But that success has come at a high price. Attacks so far have killed 27 of the Army Corps' subcontractors and security guards, most in roadside ambushes similar to the one that killed the four American security guards in Fallujah on Wednesday. The Corps' work is costing about $900,000 per megawatt of production capacity, while Bechtel's more-deliberate power projects are costing about 30% less. Total spending on the power grid is expected to exceed $5 billion.
Bringing steady power to Iraq's cities is an urgent priority for the Bush administration, as thousands of new appliances pour into the country and factories come on line. For Bechtel, the job began just weeks after Baghdad fell on April 9, when dozens of the company's engineers streamed into Iraq to undertake a range of reconstruction work. It had a broad, $680 million contract from AID, the government agency the Bush administration picked to lead reconstruction.
Bechtel's first two months were devoted to compiling a detailed survey of Iraq's infrastructure, amid tussles with the country's barely functional ministries. Early lists of "vital needs" from the Electricity Ministry included demands for hundreds of Mercedes trucks with compact-disc players. "It was laughable," said Mike Robinson, head of the Bechtel electricity project in Iraq, who arrived in Baghdad May 15.
By late August, with tempers flaring across the country at the slow pace of rebuilding, Bechtel was still debating with the ministry and AID over which electricity projects to tackle. The company had ordered only $2 million in emergency spare parts for the country's dilapidated power stations. "We faced a big problem," said Randy Richardson, head of electricity for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Pentagon-led organization that functions as Iraq's de facto government.
Bechtel says it stands by its work. "People think we were sent to rebuild all of Iraq," says Cliff Mumm, Bechtel's Iraq project manager. "We weren't. We came with a very small pot of money to do very limited work."
Bechtel's work was also hampered by overlapping bureaucracies within Baghdad. Worsening security and the company's own intense caution also kept many of its engineers hunkered down in Baghdad.
On Aug. 25, Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the Pentagon's Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, convened a two-day summit on Iraq's infrastructure at CentCom headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Iraq's electricity woes posed a serious security concern, the unhappy general told the assembled CPA officials and Army brass.
Gen. Abizaid proposed a new approach. "The idea was to move in as we would after a major disaster and throw money and people at the problem to fix it in a hurry," recalls Major Gen. Carl Strock, a senior Army Corps official who attended the meeting.
The new strategy called for boosting Iraq's power generation to at least 6,000 megawatts by June. That's about as much as Washington and its immediate suburbs consume in a day, but nearly twice the country's output at the time. Bechtel's assigned targets -- 445 megawatts of new power and the same amount in revamping of old plants -- wouldn't even come close to the target.
So the group turned to the Army Corps of Engineers. Col. Semonite, a 45-year-old West Point grad who had just returned to the U.S. from a three-year deployment in Europe, got the nod a week later to be the project's on-the-ground leader. Leaving his wife and four children behind in Virginia outside Washington, he landed in Iraq Sept. 15 with about a dozen men. His Iraq team soon gave a nickname to the former ski racer from Vermont: the Energizer Bunny.
While the Corps' effort was getting under way, U.S. officials decided to make an all-out push at plants around the country to boost production above the prewar level of 4,500 megawatts by Oct. 9, the six-month anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. Iraqis did most of the work with whatever they had on hand.
"We worked like crazy, but it was all too much," said Gazi Aziz, a plant manager at the Baghdad South power station, a huge, decrepit electricity plant on the edge of the capital. A few patches were made, and in early October all of the plant's six generators were revved to capacity for the first time in years. The rickety boilers spat out steam and water. Pipes sprang massive leaks. "It fell apart in five days," said Mr. Aziz.
GETTING WIRED
? Despite dramatic progress, Iraqis will still suffer shortages in the hottest months.
? The Bush administration has hired four prime contractors to oversee a total of more than $5 billion in Iraq power work
? The companies, with dozens of subcontractors, have erected 794 huge 400-kilovolt transmission towers across Iraq and nearly 4,000 miles of high-voltage wire.
? Average power production nationwide this week still met only about 75% of the average demand.
? The biggest power gap is still in Baghdad, which may not have full-time electricity until sometime next year.
Source: U.S. Department of Defense; WSJ research
Still, on Oct. 9, a beaming Paul Bremer, President Bush's top envoy to Iraq, strode into a Baghdad press conference to tick off the accomplishments of the first six months. Topping the list was news that three days earlier, Iraq had produced 4,518 megawatts of power -- just above the country's estimated prewar level.
In reality, electricity production had hit what turned out to be a false peak and was falling fast.
About a mile from where Mr. Bremer made the announcement, Col. Semonite's team had set up shop in a white-marble mansion with a pool in the yard and gold fixtures in the bathrooms -- the former home of Saddam Hussein's spurned first wife.
To do the job, Col. Semonite's Restore Iraqi Electricity task force had $1.05 billion, most of it drawn from Iraqi oil revenue. The Corps also had three U.S. firms ready to go under open-ended contingency contracts signed before the war began. Eleven days after arriving in Baghdad, Col. Semonite issued orders for the companies to tackle 21 electricity assignments across the country, a list that soon jumped to 26.
Washington Group International Inc., a large Idaho-based engineering company, would handle projects in the north; Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Cal., the region around Baghdad; and Perini Corp. of Framingham, Mass., the southern third of the country.
Bob Spaulding, the wiry leader of Fluor's team in Iraq, said the pace from the start was unprecedented in his 15 years with the company. "We're being told to do work on a schedule that's twice as fast as we'd do it in the U.S.," he said.
Fluor's biggest job, the Qudas power station, lies at the end of a rutted road about 20 miles north of Baghdad. When the first Corps engineers arrived at Qudas on Oct. 18, it had two working Chinese-built power units producing 250 megawatts, or enough to power a town of about 50,000 people. Another two units sat in crates in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, bought in the late 1990s under the United Nations oil-for-food program but never delivered. Two days later, the engineers broke ground to dig foundations for four smaller units to add another 172 megawatts -- a $160 million project. Fluor's team arrived a week later.
The job would need nearly 12,000 tons of concrete, so Fluor had a concrete plant assembled that could churn out 800 tons a day and brought in a fleet of concrete trucks. The Electricity Ministry provided more than 200 Iraqi workers. The company leased five heavy cranes from Kuwait, including a massive 450-ton lifter that took 25 semitrailers to haul in.
Fluor then scoured the globe to find available generators and transformers for the four new units. The company tracked down two generators in Brazil and sent technicians to cut them off their foundations. Four huge transformers were found in Mexico. Fluor marshaled the rest of the heavy equipment from across the U.S. The company leased a ship, gathered all the equipment in Houston, and got it to the plant by early February.
Getting the two oil-for-food units to the site posed another challenge. Each required its own U.S. military-protected convoy stretching 19 trucks long. Conducted under intense secrecy, the two trips each took six days.
"God, is this beautiful," Col. Semonite said, surveying the Qudas site one morning as Iraqi workers scurried amid a welter of cranes and cement mixers.
Fluor and the Army Corps have cut a few corners in the interest of time, he conceded. They poured foundations in a matter of hours without testing the ground conditions. If equipment had to be airlifted in, they did it, without worrying about cost. "But so far, no snags," said Col. Semonite, whose tour of duty in Iraq ended last month.
In all, the Corps has orchestrated 41 airlifts for power supplies, 20 of which used chartered Russian-built Antonovs, the world's biggest cargo planes.
The Corps team, in its haste, has made blunders. Both the General Accounting Office and Pentagon auditors are now evaluating whether the Corps' contractors stayed within federal procurement rules when buying big-ticket items without competitive bidding or obtaining proper documentation for sole-source subcontract awards. Col. Semonite's deputies gave the work final billing approval, despite strong objections from Pentagon auditors. Officials declined to provide additional specifics on the continuing investigations.
One of 68 towers, 200 feet or taller, replaced to reconnect the southern city of Basra to Baghdad.
In Col. Semonite's trip from Qudas site to the Beiji power station in tumultuous northern Iraq the next day, speed would be of the essence. Getting there meant skirting Samara and Tikrit and driving straight through the town of Beiji, among the most dangerous byways in Iraq.
Bundled in a flak jacket and helmet, Col. Semonite traveled in an unarmored Chevrolet Suburban with two machine-gunners in the front seat, another SUV leading, and three more in back. Six of his eight bodyguards were Iraqis with wooden-handled AK-47 assault rifles. Col. Semonite always made a point of leaving on day trips, even long ones, after 9 a.m. or so on the logic that most roadside bombs were detonated in the early hours of the day. The other rule was to avoid stopping at all costs, even if that meant driving up the wrong side of the freeway or cruising along the shoulder of the road to avoid traffic jams.
South of Tikrit, he pointed out where two Korean subcontractors, working for the Washington Group, were gunned down along the road at the end of November. On Jan. 5, two other Corps subcontractors, both French, died in an ambush near Fallujah west of Baghdad. The task force has also lost 23 Iraqi security guards to other attacks.
"It's a horrible loss," Col. Semonite said, gripping his seat as the Suburban, skirting a traffic jam, nearly veered off the road. "But we can't let the dangers slow us down."
Beiji is Iraq's largest power station, tucked against bare mountains in one of the most dangerous areas of the country. Operating out of a ramshackle trailer with 10 Iraqi employees and one computer on site, Bechtel began small-scale work on the belching, 20-year-old plant in January after months of squabbles with Iraq's Electricity Ministry. The $30 million job is dirty and intricate, involving hundreds of spare parts not easily found on the open market.
Adnan Bashir, a former Beiji plant manager who is now head of Bechtel's Iraqi team at the site, said security worries kept Bechtel's own engineers away for months. Difficulties in tracking down needed parts have impeded the work, too. "It's not much," he said, standing in the Bechtel warehouse in front of a few motors and pumps on a shelf and stacks of insulation.
A team of Iraqi welders had just started refurbishing one of the plant's leaking boilers. Another group in greasy overalls was busy taking apart a turbine inside the main plant.
Bechtel officials don't dispute that the Beiji work was slow to get started but insist that the work will be completed on time this summer.
Up a muddy lane a few minutes walk from the plant, the Army team bustled among 28 trailers housing more than 40 workers from Washington Group and five subcontractors. All had arrived since October. Despite the occasional mortar round from across the river, work hooking up eight mobile generators and transformers was well under way. All of the equipment had been airlifted in from abroad on 14 huge cargo jets.
Col. Semonite, though, would like to see more progress. "OK, when are these going to start coming on line? Tomorrow?" he said, tromping through puddles as three Washington Group engineers tagged along.
The engineers exchanged glances and then one of them said, "Eight to 10 days."
"Oh, come on. Faster," Col. Semonite shot back.
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
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How a Marine
Lost His Command
In Race to Baghdad
Col. Joe Dowdy's 'Tempo'
Displeased Superiors;
Balance of Mission, Men
General's Call Name: 'Chaos'
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 5, 2004; Page A1
Two weeks into the war in Iraq, Marine Col. Joe D. Dowdy concluded the crowning military maneuver of his life, attacking an elite band of Iraqi troops and then shepherding 6,000 men on an 18-hour, high-speed race toward Baghdad.
But no praise awaited the First Marine regimental commander as he pushed into the tent of his superior, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, on April 4, 2003. Instead, Col. Dowdy was stripped of his command, which effectively ended his 24-year Marine career. In a final blow, Col. Dowdy says, the general asked him to empty his sidearm and turn over the ammunition. "He thought I was going to try to kill myself," the colonel says.
Assuming a battlefield command is the pinnacle of a Marine's career. Being removed is near the nadir, exceeded only by a court martial. It's extremely rare for the modern U.S. military to relieve a top commander of duty, especially during combat. Col. Dowdy, 47 years old, was the only senior officer in any of the military services to be dismissed in Iraq. He says he would rather have taken an enemy bullet.
Col. Dowdy's firing was even more unusual because he didn't commit any of the acts that normally precipitate a dismissal: failing to complete a mission, disobeying a direct order, breaking the rules of war. "It was a decision based on operating tempo," says Lt. Eric Knapp, a spokesman for the First Marine Division. He wouldn't elaborate.
The colonel's removal sparked media coverage and intense speculation in the Marine Corps. The reasons for his firing weren't clear, mainly because the colonel and his superiors refused to talk about it. Now, interviews with Col. Dowdy and a score of officers and enlisted men show the colonel was doomed partly by an age-old wartime tension: Men versus mission -- in which he favored his men.
Gen. Mattis and Col. Dowdy personify all that is celebrated in Marine Corps culture. Gen. Mattis, 53, is a "warrior monk," as some of his men put it, a lifelong bachelor consumed with the study and practice of battle tactics. Col. Dowdy is beloved for the attention he pays to his men, from the grunts on up.
The qualities of these two Marines eventually tore them apart. Gen. Mattis, a Marine for 33 years, saw speed as paramount in the Iraq war plan. Col. Dowdy thought sacrificing everything for speed imperiled the welfare of his men.
The dispute was stoked by widespread but mistaken assumptions about how the Iraqis would fight. The desire for speed stemmed from the Pentagon's expectation of a fierce, protracted battle in Baghdad, with far less resistance in other areas. But it turned out that Baghdad fell easily, while the countryside continued to seethe with resistance.
Today, as U.S. forces tangle with an enemy they clearly underestimated, the military still is debating whether speeding to the Iraqi capital was the best way to proceed.
Gen. Mattis declined to be interviewed for this story. His chief of staff, Col. Joe Dunford, says a decision made during combat is impossible to explain now. "It's just one of those things when you try to put the pieces back together, there's no way you can."
Over a plate of chicken quesadillas near his home in Carlsbad, Calif., Col. Dowdy admits to making mistakes. But he doesn't believe any of them warranted his removal. He's proud that only one Marine died under his command. "At least I don't have a butcher bill to pay," he says.
Dust caked the 900 trucks and tanks in Col. Dowdy's regiment when they emerged from the desert March 22, 2003. Two days into the war, the regiment was headed to Nasiriyah, a sprawl of slums and industrial compounds where Col. Dowdy's problems would begin.
Since he was a boy in Little Rock, Ark., the colonel had dreamed of an assignment like this. Commander of the 6,000-man First Regiment for nearly a year before the war began, Col. Dowdy was deeply familiar with the plan for invading Iraq.
With his shaved head and powerful frame, Col. Dowdy looks like the archetypal Marine. His men praise him for treating them as equals, despite the Marines' stratified organization. Departing from custom, Col. Dowdy, a married father of three, invited enlisted men as well as officers to the annual Christmas party at his home. When the Marines were camped in Kuwait in the run-up to the war, Col. Dowdy declined an air conditioner when it became clear that only officers would get them, recalls Gunnery Sgt. Robert Kane.
"As a colonel, he was entitled to certain privileges, but he was the type of man, if his Marines didn't have it, he didn't have it," says Sgt. Kane, who served under Col. Dowdy in Iraq and in East Timor in 1999.
By several accounts, Col. Dowdy was destined to win a general's star after the war in Iraq. "I know people, supporters, peers who think Joe Dowdy is a water walker," says Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general. When Col. Dowdy served under him, "he was the finest lieutenant I had," Gen. Zinni says.
Like many in his regiment, Col. Dowdy lacked extensive battle experience. In 1983, he saw limited action in Beirut, where 241 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing. He served in Somalia in 1993 and 1994, where Marines were on the vanguard of what became a bloody humanitarian mission.
Gen. Mattis mapped the Marines' broad plan for Iraq, which many defense analysts consider tactically brilliant. Two 6,000-man regiments of the First Marine Division were to drive toward Baghdad. Col. Dowdy's regiment was to head to the city of al Kut -- where an 8,000-man contingent of Saddam Hussein's best Republican Guard soldiers were dug in.
It was presumed the Iraqis had chemical weapons, so the plan was to avoid engaging them directly. Col. Dowdy's unit was to act as a decoy, diverting Mr. Hussein's soldiers and allowing the other U.S. regiments to rush in from the northwest through a gap in Iraqi defenses to get to Baghdad.
Col. Dowdy's route would take him through the city of Nasiriyah. Another Marine unit, called Task Force Tarawa, was charged with keeping order there. Pentagon officials assumed the city would offer little resistance because it had long been oppressed by Mr. Hussein. That assumption turned out to be wrong.
Pushing North: The Marine war plan called for Col. Joe Dowdy to speed to the river town of al Kut on a lightly defended route before doubling back and joining the main attack. But Col. Dowdy and his men encountered far more resistance than anticipated, which slowed their progress considerably.
The plan began to unravel in Nasiriyah. When Col. Dowdy and his men arrived outside the city, they found their passage blocked by a massive firefight. Word filtered back that Task Force Tarawa had suffered casualties, including 18 dead. Adding to the confusion was a U.S. Army supply unit, which had mistakenly stumbled into Nasiriyah. Several soldiers in that unit were dead. Others, including Pvt. Jessica Lynch, had been taken prisoner.
Outside the city, Col. Dowdy and his staff debated what to do. Several hundred trucks in Col. Dowdy's train lacked armor, and squeezing through a fierce battle zone would be complicated, especially on Nasiriyah's narrow streets.
A potential 150-mile bypass around Nasiriyah didn't seem feasible. Col. Dowdy wasn't sure he had enough fuel and didn't know what resistance he might face. The First Regiment was stuck.
The halt was anathema to Gen. Mattis, a devotee of a modern military doctrine known as "maneuver warfare." Though Marines have practiced the technique for years, the Iraqi war was its first large-scale test. Instead of following rigid battle plans and attacking on well-defined fronts, this tactic calls for smaller forces to move quickly over combat zones, exploiting opportunities and sowing confusion among the enemy. The technique is summed up in Gen. Mattis' radio call name: "Chaos."
Gen. Mattis had fought in Iraq before, in the first Gulf War. After that, he commanded the Seventh Regiment of the First Division, known as one of the most battle-ready units in the Marines. "I'd follow him again," says Gunnery Sgt. Kane, who fought under Gen. Mattis in Afghanistan. "His whole life is the Corps."
Slight in stature and fierce in demeanor, Gen. Mattis burnished his reputation in Afghanistan, where his men captured an airstrip outside Kandahar. The daring raid cut to the heart of the Taliban resistance. "The Marines have landed and we now own a piece of Afghanistan," Gen. Mattis told reporters there, just a few months after Sept. 11, 2001. The Pentagon scrambled to disavow the remark, but the Marines loved it.
To some in the military, the Iraq war promised the perfect test of maneuver warfare. At the time, the U.S. thought the fiercest fighting would begin near Baghdad and involve protracted urban fighting and chemical weapons. Speed was everything. The 1,000-mile journey to Baghdad, many thought, was just a warm-up.
Stopped outside Nasiriyah, Col. Dowdy says, he wasn't surprised when Gen. Mattis's top aide, Brig. Gen. John Kelly, showed up. The two stood talking on a bridge outside the city, watching the fighting. Gen. Kelly, 53, who has been a Marine for 33 years, had served mostly in academic and administrative posts. "I thought I knew what war was," he says. "It's difficult to imagine if you haven't been there."
Col. Dowdy's regiment had been stuck in Nasiriyah for more than 24 hours. In retrospect, he says he should have been more decisive about moving through the city.
One of the cardinal rules of maneuver warfare stipulates that generals should allow commanders in the field, such as Col. Dowdy, to make tactical decisions. Gen. Kelly says he never ordered Col. Dowdy to move through Nasiriyah and never threatened to remove him from his post. But Lt. Col. Pete Owen, Col. Dowdy's chief of staff, has a different recollection. "When we were stalled out in Nasiriyah, Gen. Kelly came up to me and said, 'If Col. Dowdy doesn't get this column moving, I'm gonna pull him.' "
Late that night, Col. Dowdy decided to move. He gave battalion commander Lt. Col. Lew Craparotta one hour to figure out how to form a cordon of soldiers that would shield the regiment as it passed through the city. Col. Craparotta wasn't pleased. "I don't think next time I want to plan something like that on the hood of my Humvee in the pitch black," he says.
The regiment rumbled through Nasiriyah, past blackened hulks of U.S. vehicles and bodies of dead Marines waiting to be recovered by Task Force Tarawa. It was a sight, Col. Dowdy says, that would remain with him throughout the campaign.
While the other regiments headed north on a four-lane highway, Col. Dowdy's group rolled up a two-lane country road that ran through dozens of villages, brimming with enemy forces. An official Marine account later called it a "running gunfight through the Mesopotamian mud."
The Iraq regime flooded the road with thousands of fighters. Soon Col. Dowdy's men were engaged in battle. A raging sandstorm mixed with rain cut the Marines' visibility to almost zero. The regiment suffered its first casualty when a rocket-propelled grenade blew through a Humvee door and severed a captain's hand, according to men on the scene.
As bullets flew and the captain was being hauled out by helicopter, Col. Dowdy, two days without sleep, slouched in his Humvee, with his staff around him. He fell asleep.
Making their way through Nasiriyah, Col. Dowdy's men passed by hulks of armored vehicles and bodies of Marines. Here, Lt. Harry Thompson of the First Regiment covers up a body until it can be retrieved by another Marine unit.
In wars, commanders fall asleep in meetings, on the radio, even during firefights. Col. Dowdy nodded off for about five minutes, his men say. But his timing couldn't have been worse. As he dozed, Gen. Mattis's top aide, Gen. Kelly, saw the colonel sleeping. Some of Col. Dowdy's men who were there say they believe that made a lasting impression.
Gen. Kelly declines to comment on Col. Dowdy's removal, saying such matters are "sacred ground" that only Gen. Mattis can address. In answer to general questions about the war, he says a battlefield commander's top priority is to "put it all aside and focus on the mission. I've seen a lot of people learn this the hard way."
Two days later, on March 27, 2003, the U.S. Army ordered an indefinite halt to the war to allow supply lines to catch up with American fighters.
Col. Dowdy's regiment was camped about 50 miles southeast of Kut. He had his men capture a nearby airfield so supplies could be airlifted in. The next day, Gen. Mattis dropped by to check on his men -- and was infuriated by what he saw: A cratered runway and a Marine captain sitting on a bulldozer reading a paperback book. The captain said he hadn't been given an order to fix the runway.
A few hours later, Col. Dowdy says, he got an earful from Gen. Mattis, who said he should have made sure the job of fixing the runway was done. Col. Dowdy now says he should have issued a written order. He considered stripping the bulldozer operator of his command, but thought better of it. "If you fire everyone who makes a mistake, pretty soon you're standing there all by yourself," he says.
Despite the misstep, Col. Dowdy was receiving daily praise from Gen. Mattis's staff, according to Col. John Toolan, who was then the general's chief of staff. Intelligence reports suggested that capturing the airport had drawn the attention of Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard soldiers. The Iraqis soon announced their presence by lobbing artillery shells at Col. Dowdy's regiment.
The decoy ploy was working. The other Marine regiments sped on the Iraqis' untended western flank, toward Baghdad, according to plan.
At this point, it could be argued that Col. Dowdy had fulfilled his mission. The war plan called for him to retreat and take a bypass around Kut. Gen. Kelly acknowledges this was the original plan.
But after seeing villagers in the area waving and cheering at the Marines, Gen. Kelly believed an enemy collapse was imminent. "There was so little resistance," he says. "I figured they either deserted or were so far into their holes that they didn't want to fight." On April 1, 2003, the Fifth Regiment seized a bridge near Kut. At that point, Gen. Kelly says, Hussein's once-feared Baghdad Division became "irrelevant."
In an unexpected move, Gen. Kelly ordered Col. Dowdy to head to Kut on a "limited objective" mission. Once Col. Dowdy got there, he was to decide if his regiment should go through the city, which could trim several hours of travel time.
Col. Dowdy didn't think pushing through Kut would be wise. It would be a quicker route to Baghdad, but he thought it would be dangerous. His men had seen fortified foxholes, sandbagged buildings, mines along road shoulders and several thousand Iraqi fighters. With its narrow bridges and urban tangle, Kut looked even more perilous than Nasiriyah. Was saving a few hours worth the risk?
"In war, you have competing demands between men and mission," Col. Dowdy says. "Which one wins out? There's no easy answer."
His superiors confirm that he wasn't ordered to take his regiment through the city. But an aggressive Marine could have chosen to plow through to get to Baghdad faster.
The generals were growing impatient. The U.S. Army had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. On the morning of April 3, 2003, the 15th day of the war, Gen. Kelly called Col. Dowdy to say he wanted the assault on Kut to begin immediately. Col. Dowdy said he was awaiting fresh ammunition and checking a report that the road to Kut was mined.
Gen. Kelly was furious, according to Col. Dowdy. "Those aren't considerations, they're excuses," Col. Dowdy recalls the general saying.
Col. Dowdy says the general continued: "Why aren't you driving through al Kut right now? You know what? I'm going to recommend that you be relieved of command. Maybe Gen. Mattis won't do it. Maybe he'll decide he can get along with a regiment that isn't worth a s-. But that's what I'm going to recommend."
Gen. Kelly says he doesn't recall that specific conversation. He says he appreciated the potential risk to life that driving through Kut would pose. In a recent e-mail from Iraq, where he is serving a second tour, he wrote, "The choice between mission and men ... is never an either-or, but always a balance."
Within an hour or so, Col. Dowdy and two of his battalions moved into Kut. They immediately met resistance, they say, with fighters popping out of doorways and alleys. "My machine gun was going crazy," says Warrant Officer Thomas Parks, a gunner riding in the lead.
The battalions ground to a halt in front of an Iraqi tank, which Gunner Parks hit with a rocket, prompting return fire from the two-story mud huts lining the road. The door of Gunner Parks' Humvee was blasted off its hinges, while lead filled the door of Col. Dowdy's vehicle, according to both men.
Moments later, Gunner Parks glanced back and saw Col. Dowdy sprinting toward a family of Iraqi civilians. The colonel swept up two children and shoved the family into a bomb crater for cover, Gunner Parks says. An Iraqi fighter moving up an alley aimed a machine gun at Col. Dowdy. Gunner Parks shot him in the head. "It took me three tries," he says.
The decision on whether to push through Kut was ultimately up to Col. Dowdy. But in the hours up to and during the fight, he and his staff say they received conflicting guidance. On the field telephone, Gen. Kelly was telling him to push through Kut. But on the radio, division command was urging withdrawal. "There was a lot of confusion," Col. Dowdy says. "Go. Don't go." Gen. Kelly agrees there was discussion about what the regiment should do.
So Col. Dowdy made a crucial decision: He decided not to go through the city. Getting to Baghdad early wasn't worth the risk, he says.
"At that point, maybe you're damned if you do and damned if you don't," says Sgt. Maj. Gregory Leal, the top enlisted man in Col. Dowdy's regiment. "There's no book out there that says, 'This is how you liberate and occupy a country.' "
Around sunset, the First Regiment started moving to rendezvous with the rest of the division via a 170-mile bypass around Kut. Col. Dowdy's men had collected 30 prisoners and, the colonel says, "I felt like taking them up to division and saying, 'Look, g-ddamn it, we hit resistance in Kut, and here's your proof.' "
Headlights on and ducking intermittent fire from Iraqi peasants, the regiment covered the miles in about half the 36 hours it was supposed to have taken. On April 4, 2003, the regiment rolled into Numaniyah, where the Marines had planned to meet. The regiment had completed its mission with ample time to join the assault on Baghdad.
But Col. Dowdy's career was dead.
A helicopter awaited when Col. Dowdy arrived in Numaniyah. Col. Dowdy and Sgt. Maj. Leal climbed aboard. Gen. Mattis had asked to see them. They were flown to the general's camp, about 50 miles away.
When they arrived, Sgt. Maj. Leal says Gen. Mattis took him aside. "How's your boss doing?" the sergeant-major recalls him saying. "I said, 'He's doing fine, sir.' " Then, according to Sgt. Maj. Leal, the general snapped: "You're not engaged enough. You've got four battalions and you're not pressing the attack.' "
"I told the general not to fire him," Sgt. Maj. Leal recalls. "I said, 'Tell me what we need to do and we'll do it.' "
Men under Gen. Mattis's command say he makes decisions quickly and never looks back. Sgt. Maj. Leal says he believes Gen. Mattis had already made up his mind.
Artillery shells screamed overhead and the tanks and trucks of the Fifth Regiment rumbled past as Col. Dowdy made his way to Gen. Mattis's tent. Inside, the colonel sat facing Gens. Mattis and Kelly as an aide served hot tea. The colonel says he knew in his gut that he was about to be fired. "It's like I'm someplace I've never been before," he recalls. "I'm failing miserably and I don't know why."
He says Gen. Mattis began with a sympathetic tone: "We're going to get you some rest." Gen. Mattis brought up the bulldozer incident. Then, according to Col. Dowdy, the general said Col. Dowdy worried too much about enemy resistance and noted his lack of battle experience.
Col. Dowdy says he replied: "I've been fighting my way up this m-f-ing road for the past two weeks." He recalls pleading with Gen. Mattis to reconsider. "Think of my family, my unit," he recalls saying.
It was not to be. When Gen. Mattis requested his ammunition, Col. Dowdy assured him that he still considered himself a Marine. The general relented. Soon Col. Dowdy got on a helicopter to Kuwait. He called his wife, Priscilla. She'd already seen the news on CNN.
Word of his dismissal quickly filtered back to his men. Marines who were there say there was fleeting talk of a mutiny. "I wanted to go with him," says Gunnery Sgt. Kane. "A lot of guys felt that way. If Col. Dowdy said, 'Get your gear, you're coming with me,' I would've gone, even if it meant the end of my career."
In ensuing days, media outlets and Marine Internet chat rooms speculated about the colonel's defrocking. A day or so after his dismissal, Col. Dowdy wrote a letter that was posted on a Web site catering to families of the First Marine Division.
"As all of you are aware ... I am no longer a member of the Regiment," the letter said. "Rest assured, no one, except me is responsible for the reassignment. Priscilla and I will remain loyal to the Marine Corps and to our Division and its very capable leaders." Col. Toolan, Gen. Mattis's chief of staff, took over the command. The regiment went on to Baghdad, setting up in a slum once known as Saddam City.
A few weeks later, Col. Dowdy ran into Warrant Officer Parks, who was heading back to the U.S. like most of the First Division. The colonel arranged for his subordinate to get civilian clothes so he could take a commercial airline and meet his wife in New York. "He called down to command for me and said, 'I got a hero coming, take care of him,' " Gunner Parks says. "Then he got a little choked up, I got a little choked up and I got on a helicopter and left."
Col. Dowdy says he took no joy in his next assignment, as head of personnel at the Marine Air Station in Miramar, Calif. In June, the First Division gave him a performance evaluation. It faulted him for "being fatigued beyond normal" and "not employing the regiment to its full combat potential," he says, quoting from the document. It also said he was "overly concerned about the welfare" of his Marines, according to Col. Dowdy. By policy, the Marines don't comment on performance evaluations.
Last November, for the first time in 25 years, Col. Dowdy and his wife skipped the Marine Corps Ball. The First Division returned to Iraq this spring. Col. Dowdy received permission to retire early, and left the Marines last month. "I think I'm a guy they probably didn't know what to do with," he says.
The issue of speed in Iraq remains in debate. Last fall, the Army War College, a Pentagon-financed school where officers analyze tactics, released a study saying there was little evidence that speed affected the outcome of the war. The stiff resistance outside Baghdad suggests U.S. forces may have done better by moving at a more measured pace, entering more cities, rooting out fighters and leaving more troops in the provinces to enforce order, the report said.
However, in another study yet to be finalized, the military's Joint Center for Lessons Learned says speed was integral to U.S. military success in Iraq. In a speech in February, Adm. E.P. Giambastiani, commander of the Joint Forces, said speed "reduces decision and execution cycles, creates opportunities, denies an enemy options and speeds his collapse."
Retired Gen. Zinni says that, for Col. Dowdy, speed was academic. "The boss is the boss," he says. "If Gen. Mattis feels you need to move faster, then you move faster." Still, he says Col. Dowdy's firing could haunt Gen. Mattis too. "This is not going to add to Jim Mattis's luster."
Sgt. Leal, now stationed in Texas, often tells Col. Dowdy that his reputation will be cleared one day. "I think he'll always be known as the guy who chose men over mission," Sgt. Leal says. "If that's how he's remembered, it's OK."
Write to Christopher Cooper at christopher.cooper@wsj.com
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Woof All:
I rarely read twaddle such as Newspeak, but the following resonates with things I have read elsewhere.
Crafty
====================
@Date: Apr 25, 2004 10:37 PM
From newsweek
The Human Cost
They were sent to fight for their country. But some GIs didn't have all they needed to protect themselves
U.S. Air Force-thememoryhole.org
Resting place: A soldier prepares coffins of U.S. military personnel returning home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware
By Melinda Liu, John Barry and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
May 3 issue - The inaugural mission of the 1st Cavalry's 2d Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment was, in its humble way, a bid for hearts and minds. It was to safely dispose of Iraqi sewage. Having arrived in Iraq in late March, a 19-man patrol from the battalion, traveling in four Humvees, had just finished escorting three Iraqi "honey wagons" on their rounds in the grim slum of Sadr City, where vendors stash eggs and chickens in bamboo crates next to puddles of viscous black mud. ("You're lucky if it's mud," joked one U.S. officer.) Suddenly the street became "a 300-meter-long kill zone," recalls platoon leader Sgt. Shane Aguero, courtesy of gunmen from the Mahdi militia of Shiite rebel Moqtada al-Sadr. The Humvees swerved and ran onto sidewalks, rolling on the rims of flat tires, as gunmen kept up the barrage of bullets. Sgt. Yihjyh (Eddie) Chen, gunner in the lead vehicle, was shot dead. Another soldier was hit and began bleeding from the mouth.
And their trouble was just beginning. Two of the Humvees became disabled. Aguero yelled at one driver to gun the engine to get his Humvee moving. The engine fell out. As they'd been drilled to do, the soldiers set out to strip the disabled vehicles of sensitive items and to "zee off the radio"?to see that codes and equipment don't fall into enemy hands. When another group got ambushed nearby, an enemy round came through the Humvee's right rear door?through retrofitted panels that the soldiers had been told would repel AK-47 rounds. Miraculously, none of the three people inside were hit. Then a third Humvee sputtered to a halt: debris had pierced the fuel tank. "It just wouldn't start; we coasted the last 50 yards out of the kill zone," said its driver, Spc. Dee Foster. At last an armored Bradley fighting vehicle arrived, and its steel ramp opened to scoop him and his buddies to safety.
For the Bush administration it has been a mantra, one the president intones repeatedly: America's troops will get whatever they need to do the job. But as Iraq's liberation has turned into a daily grind of low-intensity combat?and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grudgingly raises troop levels?many soldiers who are there say the Pentagon is failing to protect them with the best technology America has to offer. Especially tanks, Bradleys and other heavy vehicles, even in some cases body armor. That has been the tragic lesson of April, a month in which a record 115 U.S. soldiers have died so far and 879 others have been wounded, 560 of them fairly seriously. Those numbers greatly exceed the tallies in the combat-heavy weeks of the invasion last spring. And the impact of those deaths was felt more fully last week when blogger Russ Kick, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, won the release of photos showing coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Soldiers in Iraq complain that Washington has been too slow to acknowledge that the Iraqi insurgency consists of more than "dead-enders." And even at the Pentagon many officers say Rumsfeld and his brass have been too reluctant to modify their long-term plans for a lighter military. On the battlefield, that has translated into a lack of armor. Perhaps the most telling example: a year ago the Pentagon had more than 400 main battle tanks in Iraq; as of recently, a senior Defense official told NEWSWEEK, there was barely a brigade's worth of operational tanks still there. (A brigade usually has about 70 tanks.)
In continuing adherence to the Army's "light is better" doctrine, even units recently rotated to Iraq have left most of their armor behind. These include the I Marine Expeditionary Force, which has paid dearly for that decision with an astonishing 30 percent-plus casualties (45 killed, more than 300 wounded) in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi. The Army's 1st Cavalry Division?which includes the unit in Sadr City?left five of every six of its tanks at home, and five of every six Bradleys.
A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that many U.S. deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs.
The military is 1,800 armored Humvees short of its own stated requirement for Iraq. Despite desperate attempts to supply bolt-on armor, many soldiers still ride around in light-skinned Humvees. This is a latter-day jeep that, as Brig. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, assistant division commander of the 1st Armored Division, conceded in an interview, "was never designed to do this ... It was never anticipated that we would have things like roadside bombs in the vast number that we've had here." One newly arrived officer, Lt. Col. Timothy Meredith, says his battalion had just undergone months of training to rid itself of "tank habits" and get used to the Humvees. "We arrived here expecting to do a lot of civil works," says Meredith.
According to internal Pentagon e-mails obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Humvee situation is so bad that the head of the U.S. Army Forces Command, Gen. Larry Ellis, has urged that more of the new Stryker combat vehicles be put into the field. Sources say that the Army brass back in Washington have not yet concurred with that. The problem: the rubber-tire Strykers are thin-skinned and don't maneuver through dangerous streets as well as the fast-pivoting, treaded Bradley. According to a well-placed Defense Department source, the Army is so worried about the Stryker's vulnerability that most of the 300-vehicle brigade currently in Iraq has been deployed up in the safer Kurdish region around Mosul. "Any further south, and the Army was afraid the Arabs would light them up," he said.
A shortage of armored Humvees has led some soldiers to secure vehicle walls and floors with sandbags or steel plates. Three widely used transport vehicles:
? THE HUMVEE
? THE STRYKER
? THE BRADLEY FIGHTER
THE HUMVEE
Safety: "Up-armored" models come with reinforced windshields and walls.
Cost: $50,000 each
Military owns: 35,000
THE STRYKER
Safety: Has a thicker steel shell for land?ine safety but is vulnerable to larger explosions.
Cost: $1.4 million each
Military owns: 2,100
THE BRADLEY FIGHTER
Safety: Welded aluminum walls; new model has steel?armor tiles for blast protection.
Cost: $3.17 million each
Military owns: 6,719
Source: Federation of American Scientists, Periscope
Other quick fixes are being rushed in. In Ohio, O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt Armoring Co. says it is flush with new orders to crank out 300 "up-armored" Humvees per month. And Rumsfeld has just approved a quiet plan to fly 28 M1A1 tanks from Germany into Iraq by April 27, NEWSWEEK has learned. The move comes as the military is planning for a final assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. Meanwhile, soldiers are rushing to jury-rig their Humvees with anything hard they can find: bolt-on armor, sandbags, even plywood panels, creating what one senior officer calls "Mad Max-mobiles." But Pentagon sources say many of the retrofitted Humvees cannot take the extra weight, and their suspension or transmission systems fail. Another method is to spray shock-absorbing polyurethane foam?one popular brand name is called Rhino?to the inside or outside of unarmored vehicles.
The biggest problem, perhaps, is that the insurgents?whoever they are?continue to be quick to spot vulnerabilities. It is probably no coincidence that attacks have picked up significantly in April as the Marines, the 1st Cav and other fresh?and untried?troops have rotated in. U.S. bomb-disposal personnel generally succeed in discovering and disarming about half of the homemade bombs that are planted. In March, an estimated 600 to 700 attacks involving homemade devices were either discovered or foiled. In April, one administration source said, as many as 1,000 homemade bomb attacks have been attempted.
The need for more armor?and possibly troops?erupted as an issue on Capitol Hill last week in combative hearings of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. "We are not structured for the security environment we're in," Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told senators and congressmen, including some angry Republicans. As part of his 2005 budget request, Rumsfeld had originally cut the Army budget by 6 percent. But the Army has identified nearly $6 billion in unfunded requests?and more are on the way. "The costs are going to be staggering," says Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who has pestered the Pentagon for months for better estimates. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the House committee that military operations in Iraq are now costing about $4.7 billion a month?a sum that approaches the $5 billion a month (on average) that the Vietnam War cost, adjusted for inflation.
Sen. John McCain says the Pentagon needs an additional division beyond the 20,000 men it is leaving in Iraq for 90-day extensions. Another senator and Vietnam vet, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, even suggested the nation might have to take a long-term look at reviving the draft. Few others went that far, but one knowledgeable Army officer points out that Rumsfeld's standing "stop-loss" order?basically a freeze on retirements?is a "silent draft." It is not expected to be lifted "for the foreseeable future," the officer said. On Capitol Hill, Myers spoke of transforming old field-artillery and air-defense battalions into new units. But the Pentagon has yet to come to grips with its armor crisis?or its human cost.
With Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad, Mark Hosenball and Tamara Lipper in Washington and T. Trent Gegax in New York
? 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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By ANTHONY CARDINALE
News Staff Reporter
BuffaloNews.com
4/26/2004
Cpl. Jason Dunham of Allegany County jumped in front of a hand grenade to save the lives of two fellow Marines in Iraq on April 14.
Dunham, 22, of Scio, died Thursday in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. His death brought to eight the number of Western New York servicemen to die since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Two other Marines were wounded but are recovering.
"All I can say is, this ain't nothing that I wouldn't expect of my son, because that's the kind of person he was," his father, Daniel Dunham, an Air Force veteran, said Sunday. Dunham read from documents received from the military about the circumstances surrounding his son's fatal injuries in Karbala, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad.
"Preliminary reports are that an Iraqi hostile (fighter) departed a stopped vehicle with a hand grenade. When he deployed the hand grenade, Cpl. Dunham put himself between the grenade and his fellow Marines. The two Marines who witnessed the event were also medevaced, so the battalion is still gaining details."
Dunham began his second deployment in Iraq in September after extending his enlistment to serve as a squad leader with another Marine unit. He enlisted in the Marines after graduating from Scio Central School in June 2000. He was scheduled to complete his service in July.
"Jason's been my hero since the day he was born," his father said. "All my kids are. They never had to do anything to prove that to me."
The funeral will be scheduled later this week after the body arrives home.
Survivors, in addition to his parents, include two brothers, Justin, 21, of Butler, Pa., and Kyle, 15; a sister, Katie, 11; and his grandparents, Patricia Layton of Amity, Murray and Linda Dunham of Arkport, Gerald and Roberta Kinkead of Ridgeway, Pa., and Bernie and Sandy Jackson of Wellsville.
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Marine dies with parents at his bedside
By Rick Davis
The Desert Sunbrown
April 27th, 2004
A corporal who last week became the 30th service member from Twentynine Palms to die in the Iraq war suffered his fatal injuries when he jumped in front of a hand grenade in an attempt to save the lives of his battalion mates, the fallen Marine?s father said Monday.
Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, who was serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, was injured critically April 14 when struck in the head by shrapnel from a grenade explosion during a confrontation with Iraqi hostile fighters near the city of Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad.
The 23-year-old Dunham was airlifted to a hospital in Germany, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He died Thursday with his parents at his bedside. His death was announced Monday afternoon by the Department of Defense.
"All I can say is this isn?t nothing that I wouldn?t expect of my son because that?s the kind of person he was,"Daniel Dunham, his father, said by telephone from Jason?s hometown, Scio, N.Y., a town of 1,914 in southwestern New York.
Daniel Dunham said information regarding his son?s death came from documents supplied by the Defense Department.
He said the documents indicated the grenade was thrown by a suspected Iraqi insurgent and two other Marines who witnessed the incident were wounded, but are recovering.
The news of Dunham?s death came the same day another Marine from his battalion was buried in his hometown.
Funeral services were held Monday for Lance Cpl. Ruben Valdez in San Diego, Texas. Valdez was killed April 17 in Iraq, three days after Dunham suffered his wounds.
An Air Force veteran, Daniel Dunham said Jason, one of three sons, enlisted in the Marines following high school graduation in June 2000 because it seemed like a good fit.
"He's a little more rugged than me and needed to go where the rugged went," he said. "We're all very strong about the ilitary being good for young kids, for teaching discipline and responsibility. Jason?s been my hero since he was born. All my kids are. They never had to do anything to prove that to me."
Dunham, whose military occupational specialty was machine gunner, first served in Iraq last year while assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment based at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms.
He was transferred to another Twentynine Palms-based unit,3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, last fall and deployed with it to Iraq in February.
Daniel Dunham said he understood his son had extended beyond his July expiration of enlistment in order to be assigned duty as a squad leader this time.
"Jason was my son, and also my friend," said Debra Dunham, Jason's mother. "We loved him deeply and will miss him very much."
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And, changing the pace to a piece of silliness:
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The General's Night on the Town with the Crew
During the early 80's, a certain airborne system was deployed to Howard AFB, Panama. The presence of the system, at the time, was somewhat hush-hush, and is often the case with the military, since the use of the system was not yet determined to be a constant thing, everyone involved with it were deployed to Panama on a Temporary Duty status.
The 'front end' of the system was your garden variety C-130. The backend held a surprise - a slide in/bolt on system, operated by a highly trained group of technicians, good for all sorts of things. The technicians were from a seperate organization than the 'front end', and frequently in Panama on a continually rotating basis, so they got to know the lay of the land fairly well. It also helped that most of the technicians were fluent in Spanish.
There came a time when one of the high ranking officers (a Brigadier General - 1 star) of the organization that 'owned' the technicians decided to drop in and 'see how his boys were doing'. The general was no ordinary flag officer. He was a pilot and a bit of a non-conformist - he was known to be a firm believer in the 'work hard, play hard' rule of thumb, and was quite a character. Truth be told, this tale is one of many involving this remarkable individual.
The General shows up, and is briefed on the set-up, makes the standard rounds doing the 'hi, how ya treatin my boys' meet and greets with the local command structure, then has a quiet evening crewresting for the next day - when he went along on one of the sorties. During the 9 hour jaunt, the General fell in with the scurrilous bunch that was one of our crews at the time, and they regaled him with all sorts of tales about life while TDY to Panama. At the time, one of the central fixture of that life was an area known as 'Calle Jota' - J-Street. It was an enclave of bars and nightspots clustered tightly together, amply staffed with regional 'talent' (mostly from Colombia, some from Ecuador) to 'entertain' the crowds which attended festivities almost nightly.
Well, the General decides, 'I'm here to see how my guys are getting along, so I need to get the feel for the entire experience' - and is heartily invited to come along with the crew after the debrief while they go and 'unwind' from the day's mission.
Now, as with a lot of Generals, he had an aide-de-camp along with him, a Major. A particularly prim and proper Major. A non-flying, epitome of a staff weenie, asshole so tight you couldn't drive a sewing needle up it with a sledgehammer Major. He of course thought the idea of the General going out for a night on the town with 'his boys' was just the thing to bring Western Civilization crashing to its knees. But, being astute enough to know that his career hung by the good word of his boss, he decided to take the advice passed on by one of my buddies in an aside "now, the General says he wants to go out drinking with the crew, and he doesn't want some f**kwad babysitter telling him he can't or shouldn't". The Major decided he would retire to his billeting room, to catch up on some paperwork or some such.
So everyone gets cleaned up, loads up on the 'crew bus', a rental Toyota 15 passenger deal, and off they go. And a big time was had by all. The General was introduced to the cheapest rot-gut Rum produced in the Western Hemisphere, a brand named 'Carta Vieja' (Old Cart), served by the bottle with Coca=Cola setups and ice on the side. He was introduced to some of the star entertainers of the various establishments - the local glitterati. He was invited to head up and join a few of the stage performances, and accepted the offer - in the process of one of these, swapping t-shirts with the young lady. He was having a blast, and so were the guys.
But of course, all things must end, and even the bars on Calle Jota have a closing time (around 3 am), so out to the crew bus they all go. On the way to the bus, they passed a street vendor selling 'monkey meat on a stick' - some sort of animal parts roasted over a hibachi grill and sold by the stick. Probably one of the most tasty delicacies available to drunken servicemen the world over. So the General asks the guy running the stand "How much?"
The guy tells him "Cincuenta centavos" (Fifty cents)
"No, no, no...how much for the whole setup.
Uhhhh...
Eventually they agreed on a fair price (about $25 bucks), and the parade to the bus resumes - a buncha drunks with a lit barbeque set. The General sets up shop in the back of the bus, and starts cooking monkey meat sticks for everybody. The back windows are open, and they go cruising back over the Bridge of the Americas, singing, laughing, with smoke pouring out the back of the bus.
As they pull up to the front gate at Howard AFB, the SP on the gate steps out in the road and stops them. He notices the blue, one star insignia in the holder on the front bumper. He looks up and sees a bus full of drunks, with smoke billowing out the back windows. For some reason, this didn't seem quite right to the young Airman, so he motions for them to open the side door, He steps up inside the bus and loudly announces -
"Allright, which one of you fuckin assholes is the goddamned General?"
(from the dark, smoke filled back of the bus) "That would be me, son!"
"Yeah, right, lemme see your ID card, pal"
At this point most of the crew is about to piss their pants and its about all they can do to keep from busting out in howls of laughter knowing what's coming next. The general fishes out his ID card and it is ceremoniously passed forward for the young SP to inspect.
He shines his flashlight on it. The eyes widen to the size of dinner plates. He then begins to imitate a goldfish, just sort of opening and closing his mouth, no sounds coming out, and his head drops, possibly glancing at the stripes he's expecting will have to be coming off of his fatigues now...
Actually, the General follows his ID card up to the front of the bus, and invites the young Airman, who's sure he's going for a remote to Greenland at this point, outside for a chat. The General is a really great people person, and he calms the kid down, tells him that it was perfectly understandable he was suspicious of the odd sight before him, and what an excellent job he was doing keeping the base safe. Within 5 minutes, the Airman was smiling nervously, rendering several salutes as the General got back to tending to his Hibachi, and waved the bus on in for the evening.
The next morning, the General, sans hangover, woke up his aide bright and early, and they caught their flight back to the states.
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SOMETHING THAT DIDN'T MAKE THE NEWS
Maybe you'd like to hear about something other than idiot Reservists and naked Iraqis. Maybe you'd like to hear about a real American, somebody who honored the uniform he wears.
Meet Brian Chontosh.
Churchville-Chili Central School class of 1991. Proud graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Husband and about-to-be father. First lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
And a genuine hero.
The secretary of the Navy said so yesterday. At 29 Palms in California Brian Chontosh was presented with the Navy Cross, the second highest award for combat bravery the United States can bestow.
That's a big deal.
But you won't see it on the network news tonight, and all you read in Brian's hometown newspaper was two paragraphs of nothing. Instead, it was more blather about some mental defective MPs who acted like animals.
The odd fact about the American media in this war is that it's not covering the American military. The most plugged-in nation in the world is receiving virtually no true information about what its warriors are doing.
Oh, sure, there's a body count. We know how many Americans have fallen. And we see those same casket pictures day in and day out. And we’re almost on a first-name basis with the pukes who abused the Iraqi prisoners. And we know all about improvised explosive devices and how we lost Fallujah and what Arab public-opinion polls say about us and how the world hates us.
We get a non-stop feed of gloom and doom.
But we don't hear about the heroes.
The incredibly brave GIs who honorably do their duty. The ones our grandparents would have carried on their shoulders down Fifth Avenue.
The ones we completely ignore.
Like Brian Chontosh.
It was a year ago on the march into Baghdad. Brian Chontosh was a platoon leader rolling up Highway 1 in a humvee.
When all hell broke loose.
Ambush city.
The young Marines were being cut to ribbons. Mortars, machine guns, rocket propelled grenades. And the kid out of Churchville was in charge. It was do or die and it was up to him.
So he moved to the side of his column, looking for a way to lead his men to safety. As he tried to poke a hole through the Iraqi line his humvee came under direct enemy machine gun fire.
It was fish in a barrel and the Marines were the fish.
And Brian Chontosh gave the order to attack. He told his driver to floor the humvee directly at the machine gun emplacement that was firing at them. And he had the guy on top with the .50 cal unload on them.
Within moments there were Iraqis slumped across the machine gun and Chontosh was still advancing, ordering his driver now to take the humvee directly into the Iraqi trench that was attacking his Marines. Over into the battlement the humvee went and out the door Brian Chontosh bailed, carrying an M16 and a Beretta and 228 years of Marine Corps pride.
And he ran down the trench.
With its mortars and riflemen, machineguns and grenadiers.
And he killed them all.
He fought with the M16 until it was out of ammo. Then he fought with the Beretta until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up a dead man’s AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo. Then he picked up another dead man's AK47 and fought with that until it was out of ammo.
At one point he even fired a discarded Iraqi RPG into an enemy cluster, sending attackers flying with its grenade explosion.
When he was done Brian Chontosh had cleared 200 yards of entrenched Iraqis from his platoon's flank. He had killed more than 20 and wounded at least as many more.
But that's probably not how he would tell it.
He would probably merely say that his Marines were in trouble, and he got them out of trouble. Hoo-ah, and drive on.
"By his outstanding display of decisive leadership, unlimited courage in the face of heavy enemy fire, and utmost devotion to duty, 1st Lt. Chontosh reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service."
That's what the citation says.
And that's what nobody will hear.
That's what doesn't seem to be making the evening news. Accounts of American valor are dismissed by the press as propaganda, yet accounts of American difficulties are heralded as objectivity. It makes you wonder if the role of the media is to inform, or to depress, to report or to deride. To tell the truth, or to feed us lies.
But I guess it doesn't matter.
We're going to turn out all right.
As long as men like Brian Chontosh wear our uniform.
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WSJ: PAGE ONE
MEDAL OF HONOR
In Combat, Marine
Put Theory to Test,
Comrades Believe
Cpl. Dunham's Quick Action
In Face of a Grenade
Saved 2 Lives, They Say
'No, No -- Watch His Hand!'
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 25, 2004; Page A1
AL QA'IM, Iraq -- Early this spring, Cpl. Jason Dunham and two other Marines sat in an outpost in Iraq and traded theories on surviving a hand-grenade attack.
Second Lt. Brian "Bull" Robinson suggested that if a Marine lay face down on the grenade and held it between his forearms, the ceramic bulletproof plate in his flak vest might be strong enough to protect his vital organs. His arms would shatter, but he might live.
Cpl. Dunham had another idea: A Marine's Kevlar helmet held over the grenade might contain the blast. "I'll bet a Kevlar would stop it," he said, according to Second Lt. Robinson.
"No, it'll still mess you up," Staff Sgt. John Ferguson recalls saying.
It was a conversation the men would remember vividly a few weeks later, when they saw the shredded remains of Cpl. Dunham's helmet, apparently blown apart from the inside by a grenade. Fellow Marines believe Cpl. Dunham's actions saved the lives of two men and have recommended him for the Medal of Honor, an award that no act of heroism since 1993 has garnered.
A 6-foot-1 star high-school athlete from Scio, N.Y., Cpl. Dunham was chosen to become a squad leader shortly after he was assigned to Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment in September 2003. Just 22 years old, he showed "the kind of leadership where you're confident in your abilities and don't have to yell about it," says Staff Sgt. Ferguson, 30, of Aurora, Colo. Cpl. Dunham's reputation grew when he extended his enlistment, due to end in July, so he could stay with his squad throughout its tour in the war zone.
During the invasion of Iraq last year, the Third Battalion didn't suffer any combat casualties. But since March, 10 of its 900 Marines have died from hostile fire, and 89 have been wounded.
April 14 was an especially bad day. Cpl. Dunham was in the town of Karabilah, leading a 14-man foot patrol to scout sites for a new base, when radio reports came pouring in about a roadside bomb hitting another group of Marines not far away.
Insurgents, the reports said, had ambushed a convoy that included the battalion commander, 40-year-old Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, of Chicago. One rifle shot penetrated the rear of the commander's Humvee, hitting him in the back, Lt. Col. Lopez says. His translator and bodyguard, Lance Cpl. Akram Falah, 23, of Anaheim, Calif., had taken a bullet to the bicep, severing an artery, according to medical reports filed later.
Cpl. Dunham's patrol jumped aboard some Humvees and raced toward the convoy. Near the double-arched gateway of the town of Husaybah, they heard the distinctive whizzing sound of a rocket-propelled grenade overhead. They left their vehicles and split into two teams to hunt for the shooters, according to interviews with two men who were there and written reports from two others.
Around 12:15 p.m., Cpl. Dunham's team came to an intersection and saw a line of seven Iraqi vehicles along a dirt alleyway, according to Staff Sgt. Ferguson and others there. At Staff Sgt. Ferguson's instruction, they started checking the vehicles for weapons.
Cpl. Dunham approached a run-down white Toyota Land Cruiser. The driver, an Iraqi in a black track suit and loafers, immediately lunged out and grabbed the corporal by the throat, according to men at the scene. Cpl. Dunham kneed the man in the chest, and the two tumbled to the ground.
Two other Marines rushed to the scene. Private First Class Kelly Miller, 21, of Eureka, Calif., ran from the passenger side of the vehicle and put a choke hold around the man's neck. But the Iraqi continued to struggle, according to a military report Pfc. Miller gave later. Lance Cpl. William B. Hampton, 22, of Woodinville, Wash., also ran to help.
A few yards away, Lance Cpl. Jason Sanders, 21, a radio operator from McAlester, Okla., says he heard Cpl. Dunham yell a warning: "No, no, no -- watch his hand!"
What was in the Iraqi's hand appears to have been a British-made "Mills Bomb" hand grenade. The Marines later found an unexploded Mills Bomb in the Toyota, along with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.
A Mills Bomb user pulls a ring pin out and squeezes the external lever -- called the spoon -- until he's ready to throw it. Then he releases the spoon, leaving the bomb armed. Typically, three to five seconds elapse between the time the spoon detaches and the grenade explodes. The Marines later found what they believe to have been the grenade's pin on the floor of the Toyota, suggesting that the Iraqi had the grenade in his hand -- on a hair trigger -- even as he wrestled with Cpl. Dunham.
None of the other Marines saw exactly what Cpl. Dunham did, or even saw the grenade. But they believe Cpl. Dunham spotted the grenade -- prompting his warning cry -- and, when it rolled loose, placed his helmet and body on top of it to protect his squadmates.
The scraps of Kevlar found later, scattered across the street, supported their conclusion. The grenade, they think, must have been inside the helmet when it exploded. His fellow Marines believe that Cpl. Dunham made an instantaneous decision to try out his theory that a helmet might blunt the grenade blast.
"I deeply believe that given the facts and evidence presented he clearly understood the situation and attempted to block the blast of the grenade from his squad members," Lt. Col. Lopez wrote in a May 13 letter recommending Cpl. Dunham for the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for military valor. "His personal action was far beyond the call of duty and saved the lives of his fellow Marines."
Recommendations for the Medal of Honor are rare. The Marines say they have no other candidates awaiting approval. Unlike other awards, the Medal of Honor must be approved by the president. The most recent act of heroism to earn the medal came 11 years ago, when two Army Delta Force soldiers gave their lives protecting a downed Blackhawk helicopter pilot in Somalia.
Staff Sgt. Ferguson was crossing the street to help when the grenade exploded. He recalls feeling a hollow punch in his chest that reminded him of being close to the starting line when dragsters gun their engines. Lance Cpl. Sanders, approaching the scene, was temporarily deafened, he says. He assumed all three Marines and the Iraqi must surely be dead.
In fact, the explosion left Cpl. Dunham unconscious and face down in his own blood, according to Lance Cpl. Sanders. He says the Iraqi lay on his back, bleeding from his midsection.
The fight wasn't over, however. To Lance Cpl. Sanders's surprise, the Iraqi got up and ran. Lance Cpl. Sanders says he raised his rifle and fired 25 shots at the man's back, killing him.
The other two Marines were injured, but alive. Lance Cpl. Hampton was spitting up blood and had shrapnel embedded in his left leg, knee, arm and face, according to a military transcript. Pfc. Miller's arms had been perforated by shrapnel. Yet both Marines struggled to their feet and staggered back toward the corner.
"Cpl. Dunham was in the middle of the explosion," Pfc. Miller told a Marine officer weeks later, after he and Lance Cpl. Hampton were evacuated to the U.S. to convalesce. "If it was not for him, none of us would be here. He took the impact of the explosion."
At first, Lance Cpl. Mark Edward Dean, a 22-year-old mortarman, didn't recognize the wounded Marine being loaded into the back of his Humvee. Blood from shrapnel wounds in the Marine's head and neck had covered his face. Then Lance Cpl. Dean spotted the tattoo on his chest -- an Ace of Spades and a skull -- and realized he was looking at one of his closest friends, Cpl. Dunham. A volunteer firefighter back home in Owasso, Okla., Lance Cpl. Dean says he knew from his experience with car wrecks that his friend had a better chance of surviving if he stayed calm.
"You're going to be all right," Lance Cpl. Dean remembers saying as the Humvee sped back to camp. "We're going to get you home."
When the battalion was at its base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., the two Marines had played pool and hung out with Lance Cpl. Dean's wife, Becky Jo, at the couple's nearby home. Once in a while, Lance Cpl. Dean says they'd round up friends, drive to Las Vegas and lose some money at the roulette tables. Shortly before the battalion left Kuwait for Iraq, Lance Cpl. Dean ran short of cash. He says Cpl. Dunham bought him a 550-minute phone card so he could call Becky Jo. He used every minute.
At battalion headquarters in al Qa'im, Chaplain David Slater was in his makeshift chapel -- in a stripped-down Iraqi train car with red plastic chairs as pews -- when he heard an Army Blackhawk helicopter take off. The 46-year-old Navy chaplain from Lincoln, Neb. knew that meant the shock-trauma platoon would soon receive fresh casualties.
Shortly afterward, the helicopter arrived. Navy corpsmen and Marines carried Cpl. Dunham's stretcher 200 feet to the medical tent, its green floor and white walls emitting a rubbery scent, clumps of stethoscopes hanging like bananas over olive-drab trunks of chest tubes, bandages and emergency airway tubes.
The bearers rested the corporal's stretcher on a pair of black metal sawhorses. A wounded Iraqi fighter was stripped naked on the next stretcher -- standard practice for all patients, according to the medical staff, to ensure no injury goes unnoticed. The Iraqi had plastic cuffs on his ankles and was on morphine to quiet him, according to medical personnel who were there.
When a wounded Marine is conscious, Chaplain Slater makes small talk -- asks his name and hometown -- to help keep the patient calm and alert even in the face of often-horrific wounds. Chaplain Slater says he talked to Cpl. Dunham, held his hand and prayed. But he saw no sign that the corporal heard a word. After five minutes or so, he says, he moved on to another Marine.
At the same time, the medical team worked to stabilize Cpl. Dunham. One grenade fragment had penetrated the left side of his skull not far behind his eye, says Navy Cmdr. Ed Hessel, who treated him. A second entered the brain slightly higher and further toward the back of his head. A third punctured his neck.
Cmdr. Hessel, a 44-year-old emergency-room doctor from Eugene, Ore., quickly concluded that the corporal was "unarousable." A calm, bespectacled man, he says he wanted to relieve the corporal's brain and body of the effort required to breathe. And he wanted to be sure the corporal had no violent physical reactions that might add to the pressure on his already swollen brain.
Navy Lt. Ted Hering, a 27-year-old critical-care nurse from San Diego, inserted an intravenous drip and fed in drugs to sedate the corporal, paralyze his muscles and blunt the gag response in his throat while a breathing tube was inserted and manual ventilator attached. The Marine's heart rate and blood pressure stabilized, according to Cmdr. Hessel. But a field hospital in the desert didn't have the resources to help him any further.
So Cpl. Dunham was put on another Blackhawk to take him to the Seventh Marines' base at Al Asad, a transfer point for casualties heading on to the military surgical hospital in Baghdad. During the flight, the corporal lay on the top stretcher. Beneath him was the Iraqi, with two tubes protruding from his chest to keep his lungs from collapsing. Lt. Hering stood next to the stretchers, squeezing a plastic bag every four to five seconds to press air into Cpl. Dunham's lungs.
The Iraqi, identified in battalion medical records only as POW#1, repeatedly asked for water until six or seven minutes before landing, when Cpl. Dunham's blood-drenched head bandage burst, sending a red cascade through the mesh stretcher and onto the Iraqi's face below. After that, the man remained quiet, and kept his eyes and mouth clenched shut, says the nurse, Lt. Hering.
The Army air crew made the trip in 25 minutes, their fastest run ever, according to the pilot, and skimmed no higher than 50 feet off the ground to avoid changes in air pressure that might put additional strain on Cpl. Dunham's brain.
When the Blackhawk touched down at Al Asad, Cpl. Dunham was turned over to new caretakers. The Blackhawk promptly headed back to al Qa'im. More patients were waiting; 10 Marines from the Third Battalion were wounded on April 14, along with a translator.
At 11:45 p.m. that day, Deb and Dan Dunham were at home in Scio, N.Y., a town of 1,900, when they got the phone call all military parents dread. It was a Marine lieutenant telling them their son had sustained shrapnel wounds to the head, was unconscious and in critical condition.
Mr. Dunham, 43, an Air Force veteran, works in the shipping department of a company that makes industrial heaters, and Mrs. Dunham, 44, teaches home economics. She remembers helping her athletic son, the oldest of four, learn to spell as a young boy by playing "PIG" and "HORSE" -- traditional basketball shooting games -- and expanding the games to include other words. He never left home or hung up the phone without telling his mother, "I love you," she says.
The days that followed were filled with uncertainty, fear and hope. The Dunhams knew their son was in a hospital in Baghdad, then in Germany, where surgeons removed part of his skull to relieve the swelling inside. At one point doctors upgraded his condition from critical to serious.
On April 21, the Marines gave the Dunhams plane tickets from Rochester to Washington, and put them up at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where their son was going to be transferred. Mrs. Dunham brought along the first Harry Potter novel, so she and her husband could take turns reading to their son, just to let him know they were there.
When Cpl. Dunham arrived that night, the doctors told the couple he had taken a turn for the worse, picking up a fever on the flight from Germany. After an hour by their son's side, Mr. Dunham says he had a "gut feeling" that the outlook was bleak. Mrs. Dunham searched for signs of hope, planning to ask relatives to bring two more Harry Potter books, in case they finished the first one. Doctors urged the Dunhams to get some rest.
They were getting dressed the next morning when the intensive-care unit called to say the hospital was sending a car for them. "Jason's condition is very, very grim," Mrs. Dunham remembers a doctor saying. "I have to tell you the outlook isn't very promising."
Foto: A Marine kisses a helmet standing in honor of Cpl. Jason L. Dunham during a service at Camp Al Qaim, Iraq.
She says doctors told her the shrapnel had traveled down the side of his brain, and the damage was irreversible. He would always be on a respirator. He would never hear his parents or know they were by his side. Another operation to relieve pressure on his brain had little chance of succeeding and a significant chance of killing him.
Once he joined the Marines, Cpl. Dunham put his father in charge of medical decisions and asked that he not be kept on life support if there was no hope of recovery, says Mr. Dunham. He says his son told him, "Please don't leave me like that."
The Dunhams went for a walk on the hospital grounds. When they returned to the room, Cpl. Dunham's condition had deteriorated, his mother says. Blood in his urine signaled failing kidneys, and one lung had collapsed as the other was filling with fluid. Mrs. Dunham says they took the worsening symptoms as their son's way of telling them they should follow through on his wishes,.
At the base in al Qa'im, Second Lt. Robinson, 24, of Kenosha, Wis., gathered the men of Cpl. Dunham's platoon in the sleeping area, a spread of cots, backpacks, CD players and rifles, its plywood walls papered with magazine shots of scantily clad women. The lieutenant says he told the Marines of the Dunhams' decision to remove their son's life support in two hours' time.
Lance Cpl. Dean wasn't the only Marine who cried. He says he prayed that some miracle would happen in the next 120 minutes. He prayed that God would touch his friend and wake him up so he could live the life he had wanted to lead.
In Bethesda, the Dunhams spent a couple more hours with their son. Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee arrived and pinned the Purple Heart, awarded to those wounded in battle, on his pillow. Mrs. Dunham cried on Gen. Hagee's shoulder. The Dunhams stepped out of the room while the doctors removed the ventilator.
At 4:43 p.m. on April 22, 2004, Marine Cpl. Jason L. Dunham died.
Six days later, Third Battalion gathered in the parking lot outside the al Qa'im command post for psalms and ceremony. In a traditional combat memorial, one Marine plunged a rifle, bayonet-first, into a sandbag. Another placed a pair of tan combat boots in front, and a third perched a helmet on the rifle's stock. Lance Cpl. Dean told those assembled about a trip to Las Vegas the two men and Becky Jo Dean had taken in January, not long before the battalion left for the Persian Gulf. Chatting in a hotel room, the corporal told his friends he was planning to extend his enlistment and stay in Iraq for the battalion's entire tour. "You're crazy for extending," Lance Cpl. Dean recalls saying. "Why?"
He says Cpl. Dunham responded: "I want to make sure everyone makes it home alive. I want to be sure you go home to your wife alive."
Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com
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Woof All:
A friend sent me this:
Crafty
==================
Major Mathew Schram's Memorial Day
Memorial Day is like any other day when you're in an Army at War.
On Memorial Day, May 26th, 2003 at approximately 7:00AM, Major Mathew E. Schram was leading a resupply convoy in Western Iraq near the Syrian border. Major Schram was the Support Operations Officer for the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (out of Ft. Carson, Colorado). He had responsibility for organizing the logistical arm of the regiment - ensuring that the Cavalrymen never ran out of food, fuel or ammo.
Normally, Major Schram would not accompany the convoys as his responsibilities kept him at the main resupply point. However, due to the problems with attacks on supply convoys (i.e. Jessica Lynch's 507th Maintenance Company ambush), he decided to lead this one. He also decided that there was a side benefit to the ride - he would be able to talk with the field commanders and troops that he supported. Major Schram wanted to make sure that his "customers" were happy. Anyone who knew Mat Schram knew that he was obsessive-compulsive about making sure "his soldiers" were taken care of...that's why he was one of the top logistical officers in the US Army.
Major Schram's convoy consisted of eight vehicles - one 5,000 gallon water tanker, two 3,000 gallon water trucks, one water pump truck, two 5,000 gallon fuel tankers, one truck with MREs and bottled water, and Major Schram's command Humvee (bumper numbers: S&T 323, 344, 350, 237, 210, 204, 219, and HQ12).
The convoy was headed North from Al Asad Airbase - Foward Operating Base (FOB) Webster (grid coordinate KC 640 430) along Route 12 to FOB Jenna (KC 360 748). After delivering supplies at Jenna, the convoy would continue on to Al Qaim - FOB Tiger (GT 146 911) which had the 1/3 Armored Cavalry.
At 7:15AM, vicinity KC 6514 6181, Major Schram's convoy approached a ravine where the bridge crossing the ravine had been destroyed. The convoy had to go down the embankment, into the ravine, and back up the other side to get back onto the highway.
Once the lead vehicle started up the far bank of the ravine, the convoy came under intense fire from Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), machine guns, and small arms fire. It was an ambush. Fifteen Iraqi insurgents had been waiting by the ravine.
An RPG hit the lead tanker vehicle, disabling it in the kill zone. It was a perfect ambush set up. If the insurgents could knock out the first and last vehicles, then the entire convoy would be stuck in the kill zone. Bullets flew from insurgents on both sides of the ravine. The insurgent grenadiers were trying to concentrate fire on the last American vehicle to bottle Major Schram's convoy in the ravine. The attackers would then be able to kill the Americans at will.
Major Schram ordered his driver, Specialist Chris Van Dyke, to accelerate from their position in the convoy into the insurgents' positions. Major Schram sent a message to Headquarters for help and began returning fire out of the Humvee. The Iraqi grenadiers recognized the threat and shifted their fire from the rear truck to Schram's Humvee, HQ-12.
Multiple grenades exploded at the front and rear of HQ-12. Specialist Van Dyke was blown out of the vehicle. Once he stopped rolling on the ground, he got up and ran back to HQ-12. He got back in and drove the Humvee out of the Kill Zone.
When he turned to get orders from Major Schram, Van Dyke realized that his Major had been killed. Even though he wore body armor, two 7.62 rounds had gone through his armpit (where there is no body armor coverage) and struck his heart, killing him instantly.
The Iraqi insurgents had fled after they fired their grenades at HQ-12 which was heading for them at full throttle.
Immediately, from a nearby FOB, two Apache helicopter gunships were launched along with a MedEvac helicopter. A Quick Reaction Force from FOB Webster was on the scene in less than ten minutes. Aside from the death of Mathew Schram, the convoy suffered only two wounded. Specialist Van Dyke was wounded in his hand and was able to continue his mission. One other soldier in the lead vehicle suffered a broken femur from the initial grenade attack.
The MedEvac brought Major Schram's body and the injured soldier back to the hospital at FOB Webster. The military conducted a funeral for Major Schram in Iraq. Two hundred soldiers were present. Everyone that knew Mat loved him.
The military said it would take ten days to get Mat Schram's body to his family in Wisconsin. It took less than a few days. Also, in a few days after the ambush, the Army had rounded up all of the attackers and put them in prison.
I was at my desk at work on Tuesday, June 3rd. The phone rang. I looked at the caller ID to see that it was a call from Ft. Leavenworth. I picked it up.
It was John, a friend of mine and Mat Schram's. We had all served together years ago and had stayed in touch. He told me to sit down. I did. He told me that Mat had been killed in Iraq.
After composing myself, we finished our conversation and I promised to see John's wife, Patti, at the funeral. John had to be at Special Operations Command and couldn't make it.
I shut the door to my office, sat back down at my desk and wept for a long time.
At the funeral, Mat's family displayed his last letters and emails that he sent. All were strong, positive messages (sooo very Schrambo-like).
The one part that I left out of this post is that Major Schram's convoy was followed by a car with a Newsweek reporter in it. Once the action began, the reporter and his driver turned and got the hell out of there. If it wasn't for Mat's charge up into the ambushers, they never would have made it out of there alive.
Newsweek never ran a story about my good friend, Mat.
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Too Much, Too Late
Baby boomers heap insincere praise on the "greatest generation."
BY DAVID GELERNTER
Friday, June 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
My political credo is simple and many people share it: I am against phonies.
A cultural establishment that (on the whole) doesn't give a damn about World War II or its veterans thinks it can undo a half-century of indifference verging on contempt by repeating a silly phrase ("the greatest generation") like a magic spell while deploying fulsome praise like carpet bombing.
The campaign is especially intense among members of the 1960s generation who once chose to treat all present and former soldiers like dirt and are willing at long last to risk some friendly words about World War II veterans, now that most are safely underground and guaranteed not to talk back, enjoy their celebrity or start acting like they own the joint. A quick glance at the famous Hemingway B.S. detector shows the needle pegged at Maximum, where it's been all week, from Memorial Day through the D-Day anniversary run-up.
When I was in junior high school long ago, a touring arts program visited
schools in New York state. One performance consisted of a celebrated actress reciting Emily Dickinson's poetry onstage for 90 minutes or so. I defy any audience to listen attentively to 90 minutes of Dickinson without showing the strain, and my school definitely wasn't having any.
A few minutes into the show, the auditorium was alive with student chatter, so loud a buzz you could barely hear the performance. Being a poetry-lover, I devoted myself to setting an example of rapt attention for, maybe, five minutes, at which point I threw in the towel and joined the mass murmur.
The actress manfully completed her performance. When it was over we gave her a stupendous ovation. We were glad it was finished and (more important) knew perfectly well that we had behaved like pigs and intended to make up for it by clapping and roaring and shouting. But the performer wasn't having any. She gave us a cold curtsy and left the stage and would not return for a second bow.
I have always admired her for that: a more memorable declaration than
anything Dickinson ever wrote. And today's endless ovation for World War II vets doesn't change the fact that this nation has behaved boorishly, with colossal disrespect. If we cared about that war, the men who won it and the ideas it suggests, we would teach our children (at least) four topics:
. The major battles of the war. When I was a child in the 1960s, names like Corregidor and Iwo Jima were still sacred, and pronounced everywhere with respect. Writing in the 1960s about the battle of Midway, Samuel Eliot Morison stepped out of character to plead with his readers: "Threescore young aviators . . . met flaming death that day in reversing the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific War." Today the Battle of Midway has become niche-market nostalgia material, and most children (and many adults) have never heard of it. Thus we honor "the greatest generation." (And if I hear that phrase one more time I will surely puke.)
. The bestiality of the Japanese. The Japanese army saw captive soldiers as cowards, lower than lice. If we forget this we dishonor the thousands who were tortured and murdered, and put ourselves in danger of believing the soul-corroding lie that all cultures are equally bad or good. Some Americans nowadays seem to think America's behavior during the war was worse than Japan's--we did intern many loyal Americans of Japanese descent. That was unforgivable--and unspeakably trivial compared to Japan's unique achievement, mass murder one atrocity at a time.
In "The Other Nuremberg," Arnold Brackman cites (for instance) "the case of Lucas Doctolero, crucified, nails driven through hands, feet and skull"; "the case of a blind woman who was dragged from her home November 17, 1943, stripped naked, and hanged"; "five Filipinos thrown into a latrine and buried alive." In the Japanese-occupied Philippines alone, at least 131,028 civilians and Allied prisoners of war were murdered. The Japanese committed crimes against Allied POWs and Asians that would be hard still, today, for a respectable newspaper even to describe. Mr. Brackman's 1987 book must be read by everyone who cares about World War II and its veterans, or the human race.
. The attitude of American intellectuals. Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the
Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead set against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler.
Today's students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like
Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read
documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S.
intelligentsia's No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey,
William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era's leading lights. "The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties." The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. "By one means or another," Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, "most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft."
Why rake up these Profiles in Disgrace? Because in the Iraq War era they have a painfully familiar ring.
. The veterans' neglected voice. World War II produced an extraordinary
literature of first-person soldier narratives--most of them out of print or
unknown. Books like George MacDonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here," Philip Ardery's "Bomber Pilot," James Fahey's "Pacific War Diary." If we were serious about commemorating the war, we would do something serious. The Library of America includes two volumes on "Reporting World War II," but where are the soldiers' memoirs versus the reporters'? If we were serious, we would have every grade school in the nation introduce itself to local veterans and invite them over. We'd use software to record these informal talks and weave them into a National Second World War Narrative in cyberspace. That would be a monument worth having.
Speaking of which: I am privileged to know a gentleman who enlisted in the Army as an aviation cadet in 1942, served in combat as a navigator in a B-24, was shot down and interned in Switzerland, escaped, and flew in the air transport command for the rest of the war. He became a scientist and had a long, distinguished career. Among his friends he is a celebrated raconteur, and his prose is strong and charming. He wrote up his World War II experiences, and no one--no magazine, no book publisher--will take them on. My suggestions have all bombed out.
If you're interested, give me a call. But I'm not holding my breath. The
country is too busy toasting the "greatest generation" to pay attention to
its actual members.
Mr. Gelernter is a contributing editor of The Weekly Standard and professor of computer science at Yale.
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A friend sent me the following piece. Having a box of tissue handy might be a good idea:
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Reagan, the Marines, and a Boy
Here's a story I'd been considering posting for a while, but it wasn't until Reagan's death that I was really motivated to scan it. The following comes from the book "Swift, Silent, and Surrounded", a compilation of stories about the Corps, written and collected by a former Force Recon Marine.
In any case, here's the story, the meaning of which those who hate our military and who hate President Reagan will never understand:
On a spring day in 1983, Marine Staff Sergeant Robert Menke was waiting for a hot enlistment prospect he had talked to on the phone. Hunched over paperwork in the Corps' Huntington Beach California recruiting station, Menke heard the front door open and looked up. In came a boy in a motorized wheelchair, followed by his father. Menke noted the boy's frail body and thin arms. "Can I help you?" he asked.
"Yes," the boy answered firmly. "My name is John Zimmerman."
It took the startled Marine a moment to realize that this was indeed his prospect. "I'm Staff Sergeant Menke," he said, shaking his visitor's small hand. "Come on in."
Menke, a shy man, uncomfortable with recruiting, quickly found himself captured by the articulate thirteen year old youth with an easy, gap-toothed grin. For more than an hour they spoke -of training and overseas assignments and facing danger. The kid loved the Marine Corps. Not a word was exchanged about the younger Zimmerman's condition or the wheelchair.
There was one basic reason behind the visit to the Marine Corps recruiting office that day. From the moment Richard and Sandra Zimmerman learned their fourteen month old son had Werdnig-Hoffman syndrome, a rare neurological disease, they vowed to treat him like a normal child. Told that John probably would not live past age two, they refused to believe he would die. Despite tremendous weakness in his legs and back and susceptibility to colds, John simply looked well. They had him fitted with a rigid body jacket to help him sit upright and took him on vacation trips allover the country. They didn't get a wheelchair for him until he was three. Even then, Richard Zimmerman often carried his son, who weighed around thirty pounds, lugging him through amusement parks, into restaurants and to movies.
Werdnig-Hoffman syndrome victims have difficulty fighting off upper of respiratory problems. Before the age of five John was hospitalized three times with pneumonia, with each bout putting him on the edge of death. Richard Zimmerman believed Chicago's cold winter climate was partly to blame, and in 1975 he arranged a job transfer so the family could move to Southern California. There, the boy suffered fewer bouts with respiratory illness.
John, then six, was enrolled in classes for orthopedically handicapped children at the Plavan School in Fountain Valley. About this time he became aware of the Marine Corps at a week-long summer camp for disabled children. Many of his counselors at the camp in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park near San Diego were Marine volunteers. Each summer John would get to know another Marine through the camp's one-to-one counseling program. This sparked an interest that evolved into a passion.
MORE...
While other children worshipped athletic heroes and rock stars, John gathered every bit of material about the Marines he could find. He plastered his room with Corps recruiting posters, his wheelchair with Marine stickers. His hero was John Wayne. He even dressed like a Marine and, much to his mother's consternation, got a Corps "burr" haircut.
After his initial visit to the Huntington Beach recruiting center, John kept in contact with Menke and Menke's boss, 31 year old Gunnery Sergeant John Gorsuch. Occasionally he dropped by with his father; more often, he phoned to ask questions or just to talk. He frequently devoted his school reports to Marine tactics, campaigns or equipment. When new recruiting posters arrived, Menke or Gorsuch would mail or personally deliver one to John. In turn John built model airplanes, trucks and tanks for his Marine buddies. Though delicate and intricate chores were difficult -and even painful -for him, John would work night after night on the models.
While Marines inspired John, he gave back as much as he got. One afternoon Gorsuch had scheduled seven appointments for potential recruits. Five hadn't shown up, and the other two had to be disqualified. John called to ask questions for a school report. "What's wrong, Gunny," John asked. "You don't sound right." Gorsuch explained. "Ah, come on Gunny," John said. "Look, you're a smooth operator, and for every one you lose you'll get two more." Gorsuch began to laugh. "You're right Johnny," he said. "You know...you're right."
An attempt to move John into a standard fourth-grade class at Plavan failed; because he could not write quickly, he could not keep up. But he made it in the sixth grade after his teachers allowed him to dictate some of his work.
John's family also benefited from his forceful personality. When told something couldn't be done, he would respond, "but did you ask?" Although he realized he probably never could hold a regular job he had no fear of talking with strangers, and figured one day he could help his father, a commercial real estate broker, by making the "cold" call the elder Zimmerman dreaded. As close as he was to his Marine friends, he was even closer to his father. Richard Zimmerman helped his son dress in the morning, helped him with baths and put him to bed each evening.
John rarely talked about the consequences of his disease, but he understood. On a trip to Hawaii in 1982, as the family visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the famed "Punchbowl," John whispered to his father, "I want to be buried here when I die. Can we do it?" Richard Zimmerman was taken aback. "I don't know if it's possible. But sure, John. Sure."
In the spring of 1984, not long before John was to graduate from the eighth grade, his condition began to worsen. His twisted spine was pressing into his internal organs, pinching nerves that sent searing pain through his back and legs. He had difficulty digesting food, and he began to lose weight. But he was determined to attend graduation.
On the night of the ceremony John was weak and nauseated, but to his surprise a Marine sergeant was there to escort him. He and the sergeant led the procession of students into the auditorium. John, thin and twisted, had to use the armrest of his wheelchair to prop himself up. His head, normal size, looked much too large for a body that was deserting an able mind. But to a rousing ovation, he flashed his biggest smile. Then another surprise: it was announced that John was a co-recipient of Plavan's Sergio Duran award, given annually to the handicapped graduate who best overcomes his limitations.
That summer John's condition improved slightly, and he entered Fountain Valley High School in the fall of 1984. During the first semester, however, his condition began to decline again, and his weight dropped to less than forty pounds. While he would have preferred to stay home and sleep, he attended school, confiding to his sister that he went "mainly because it makes Mom and Dad happy."
On New Year's Eve John went into respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital. Gorsuch and Menke visited daily. Realizing their fifteen year old friend's remaining days would be few, they set out to make him a Marine. Menke secured permission to name John an honorary member of the Corps. Then one of Menke's friends penned a one-of-a- kind proclamation. On January 15, in a hospital room crowded with family and Marines, Major Robert Robichaud, area recruiting director, read the document. "By reposing special trust and confidence in the fidelity and abilities of John Zimmerman, I do hereby appoint him an Honorary Marine."
Two days later John looked at Sandra and said, "I'm a fighter, Mom. A helluva fighter." That night, he spoke to his nurses about dying, saying that his only fear was how his parents and sister would fare without him. In the early hours of January 18, John Zimmerman, U.S. Marine, passed on.
In a eulogy at John's memorial service Gorsuch, his voice cracking, said, "Marines learn never to give up, and John definitely had that quality. We have a motto in the Marines, the Latin words for always faithful. This is for Johnny Zimmerman," he concluded. "Semper Fi." After the service the two Marines approached John's casket. Slowly, Menke and Gorsuch unpinned the Marine emblems from their coat collars and gently placed these symbols of fidelity into the casket with their friend.
During the final week of his life, no longer able to talk, John had scrawled a note to his father, reminding him of a promise made nearly three years before. "Punch bowl -will you visit me?" His father nodded. "If that's what you want, we'll do it," he said. In reality, Richard had no idea if it would even be possible. Yet his son's favorite phrase kept coming back to him: "But Dad, did you ask?" Richard looked into the matter and discovered that such cemeteries are reserved for military personnel and their families. Even though Menke had volunteered to give up his cemetery plot, the Veterans Administration would not permit it, or grant John's wish. Richard decided to try again. This time he wrote to California Senator Pete Wilson and learned that to circumvent the rules he would need authorization from the President. The Senator, a former Marine, was willing to help.
"He never had the opportunity to serve his country in the Marine Corps as he so wished he could have," Wilson wrote to President Reagan. "However, his dedication and courage no doubt had very positive effects on many young Marines and civilians..." The President granted the request, and the Marine Corps went into action. At Camp Smith on Oahu, about thirty Marines volunteered for the funeral detail. And on a windy day in the Punch bowl, with the cemetery's flag at half-staff, John Zimmerman was put to rest with full military honors.
Prior to a 21-gun salute, U.S. Navy Chaplain Jack Graham spoke. "Courage isn't limited to battlefields," he said. "The Marines have a saying: 'The Marines need a few good men.' They found one in John Zimmerman.
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Climbing the ropes to ability
Disabled Sports USA is helping injured veterans and others discover the power of an unbroken spirit.
By Tina Daunt, Times Staff Writer
Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva survived stepping on a landmine the first day of the ground war in Iraq, but he spent months in the hospital ? wishing he had died.
Flying shrapnel had shredded his right leg, forcing doctors to amputate it above the knee. His right arm and hand were mangled, and his left leg was broken.
Alva wondered whether he would ever be able to walk again.
"In the beginning, the hard part is not accepting your injury," he said. "You hate life. You hate what happened. You're angry, but you're mostly sad. I can remember day after day and countless weeks of nothing but crying."
At first, Alva was alone in the wards at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and then at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. But as the war went on, dozens of soldiers were brought in ? almost all of them with similar injuries. Alva decided it was time to pull himself out of bed, learn to stand and then walk, with the help of a prosthetic leg.
By winter, the former marathon runner was in Colorado skiing, with the help of a team of Paralympic instructors. Last week in Long Beach, Alva and 25 other Iraq war veterans learned to rock climb, cycle and sail at the annual SummerFest hosted by Disabled Sports USA, a nonprofit group that helps vets and civilians overcome even the toughest disabilities.
"I realize now that anything is possible," said Alva, 33, who is going back to college in his hometown of San Antonio this fall to study sports medicine. "I never believed it at first, but the saying is true: Time really does heal all wounds."
New recruits
Until the war started in Iraq nearly 16 months ago, Disabled Sports served mostly Vietnam veterans and disabled civilians. That's not the case anymore. Volunteers from the group visit military hospitals weekly, offering sports courses to dozens of permanently disabled soldiers. More than 50 vets injured in Iraq have joined.
"We want to help these guys who are coming back from Iraq with some pretty serious injuries," said Disabled Sports Executive Director Kirk M. Bauer, who joined the group 35 years ago after he lost a leg in Vietnam. "Their bodies are protected by their equipment but not their limbs, and that's what's being blown off by these roadside bombs and other devices.
"We want to show them that they can still lead a full life, and sports is an important tool."
The second annual SummerFest in Long Beach provided a mini-vacation for about 100 civilians and soldiers, their families and friends. For four days, the soldiers had their pick of classes, taught by volunteer instructors. Running, wheeling and scuba seminars were held at Millikan High School. On Mother's Beach, a quiet waterway about half a mile from the shore, people gathered in groups of 20 to learn how to water ski, canoe, cycle and rock climb. In the evenings, they met for dinner and took harbor cruises.
Joe Garrett, a San Diego man who was paralyzed from the waist down in a motorcycle accident in 1988, said he was surprised to see so many war vets. "It just blows me away that so many of these guys are coming back from Iraq, injured for life," said Garrett, who has been going to events hosted by Disabled Sports events for more than a decade. "It's sad, but I think it's excellent that they're here."
The participants included several recently injured soldiers, such as Army 1st Lt. Lonnie Moore, from Wichita, Kan., who lost a leg when his Bradley fighting vehicle came under heavy fire near Fallouja on April 6. He and his fianc?e, Melanie Disbrow, arrived in Long Beach on June 27 after leaving Walter Reed's outpatient housing facility at dawn.
The following Monday, Moore and Disbrow teamed to learn how to canoe and sail. On Tuesday, they water-skied.
"Look, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I'm a big man and this injury wasn't a big deal," said Moore, who walks with a prosthesis. "There are a couple times I've really broken down. It gets challenging. But the great thing about being out here is everyone pushes and supports everyone else. It's nice to have a group of people who are going through the same thing you are."
Alva was determined to conquer the rock-climbing wall set up on a road along Mother's Beach. It was not an easy task. He had a hard time angling his prosthetic leg while pulling himself up with his injured hand. He would climb about 6 feet before he would lose his footing.
After several attempts, Alva had drawn a crowd of a dozen supporters, who chanted, "Go Marine!" At 20 feet up, Alva declared victory, grinning at his cheering fans. Strapped to safety ropes, he then eased himself down.
Next it was Army Sgt. Johnnie Williams' turn. The 21-year-old veteran from Tampa, Fla., was left paralyzed from the waist down when the Humvee he was riding in was run off a narrow road 100 miles northwest of Baghdad 13 months ago. He was thrown from the vehicle, which ran over him as it careened down an embankment.
Volunteer instructors lifted Williams into a harness. He used his arms to pull himself up a rope to the top of the wall. It didn't take him long. Williams' mother, Vicky Harris, taunted him. "Let's see you do it again," she yelled. He smiled at her and climbed to the top twice more, where he posed for pictures.
"I just wanted to get out here and have some fun," said Williams, who uses a wheelchair to get around. "I've gotten to the point where I've accepted what happened. You have a choice ? either you can keep on living or just fall down and die. So I just do my best every day."
Harris said it was nice to see her son happy. She found out a year ago, on Mother's Day, that he had been seriously injured in Iraq. At first, doctors didn't think he would live.
"He's a trooper," Harris said. "Some days we had a hard time adjusting and dealing, but I thank God we all made it through. He's doing OK. I'm doing OK?. It's a good for him to do things like this. It inspires you as a person who is looking on and a person who is participating."
Nationwide organization
Disabled Sports USA was established in 1967 in Northern California by several disabled Vietnam war veterans. Now based in Rockville, Md., it has a nationwide network of more than 80 chapters in 35 states. The group offers sports and rehabilitation programs to anyone with a permanent physical disability, including stroke, multiple sclerosis and visual impairments.
Bauer, the executive director, credits Disabled Sports for helping him deal with his own injury after he returned from Vietnam in 1969.
"I lost my leg from a hand grenade during a firefight," he said. "It took six months in the hospital and seven operations until they put me back together again. I contemplated suicide at one point. I was depressed and wondering what was going on in my life. These guys literally dragged me out of the hospital and taught me how to ski in one day. It turned my life around."
Bauer estimates that the group serves more than 60,000 people annually. The veterans attending last week's SummerFest traveled and participated for free, the tab picked up by United Airlines, Paralyzed Veterans of America and the Challenged Athletes Foundation, among other sponsors.
"We are able to teach these soldiers a sports skill up through the beginner level in one day, whether it's cycling, outrigger canoeing or sailing," Bauer said. "They will return home with real confidence in their ability to get back and active again."
Arriving in Long Beach from Colorado Springs, Colo., Army Capt. David Rozelle, who lost part of his right leg a year ago in a landmine explosion, said he was eager to learn how to water ski and scuba dive. Along with Alva, he had participated in the Disabled Sports ski clinic in Breckenridge, Colo., in December.
"When you become disabled, you become adaptive," said Rozelle, who first skied at age 3. "In the case of snow skiing, I needed some wedges in my boots?. By the end of the week, I was again snowboarding and competing in a Level 2 race. It was the real deal."
Rozelle, who was in charge of 140 soldiers as part of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, said he hopes to return to Iraq next year to command a new unit. He was serving as the unofficial "sheriff" of Hit, a city in western Iraq, when he drove over an anti-tank mine in June 2003. The explosion sliced through the middle of his Humvee. Doctors amputated his leg below the knee in a hospital tent.
"Any time you are in combat, you feel powerful," said Rozelle, who attended the event in Long Beach with his wife and 11-month-old son. "You feel no one is going to kill you because you are smarter, you are better trained and you are better equipped. You don't even think about it. Then when you get blown up, you realize how vulnerable you are. What matters the most to me is that I'm still alive."
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WWII Soldier's Heroism Sent a Message About Prejudice
Torrance's Ted Tanouye fought and died for a nation that incarcerated his family.
By Cecilia Rasmussen, Times Staff Writer
On "Hill 140" northeast of Cecina, Italy, on July 7, 1944, a young soldier from Torrance single-handedly wiped out six German machine-gun nests that had pinned down his unit for two days.
He was wounded, but recovered to fight in another battle. Wounded again, this time fatally, he shouted encouragement to his men as he was carried away on a stretcher. "Go for broke!" he cried ? invoking the battalion's motto.
The soldier's heroism was all the more remarkable considering that, from the time he began training until the time he died, his family was locked in an internment camp by the same government he was fighting for.
Tech Sgt. Ted Tanouye was a member of the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which together with the 100th Infantry Battalion became the most decorated combat unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history. That's in part because the soldiers had something to prove to the country that had incarcerated many of their families.
Nobody ever questioned Tanouye's courage under fire. His feat in July 1944 earned him the Distinguished Service Cross, the military's second-highest honor.
But, like at least a score of Japanese American soldiers, he did not receive the Medal of Honor, probably because of wartime prejudice. That was rectified four years ago, when Tanouye and 19 other Japanese Americans received the medal, many of them posthumously.
Now Tanouye will be honored by his alma mater, Torrance High School, from which he graduated in 1938. A memorial in his honor will be unveiled Wednesday across the street from the school, and four vintage U.S. Army Bird Dog aircraft will roar overhead in the "missing man" formation.
Until Tanouye came along, Torrance High's most famous graduate was an acquaintance of his, future Olympian Lou Zamperini, who ran the 5,000 meters in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Zamperini became a war hero after his plane crashed in 1943, stranding him on a raft at sea until he was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese.
A stadium and an airfield were named for Zamperini, who earned the Purple Heart, among other medals. But the honors didn't rest easy. "I always felt bad because Tanouye was the real hero and wasn't honored," Zamperini said in an interview.
Tanouye, a second-generation Japanese American, was born in Torrance in 1919, the eldest of six children. While his parents worked on their truck farm, he spent weekends and a few years after graduation working the produce section at the Ideal Ranch Market in Torrance.
He was working Dec. 7, 1941, when news of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor came over the radio. Friends said he cried.
He enlisted in the Army in February 1942, two days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to intern about 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of the war.
Tanouye and his best friend, Akira Shimatsu, were inducted at Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro while, a few miles away, their families were being put aboard an internment train, bound for an Arkansas camp.
The best friends also wound up in Arkansas, for infantry training. That proved fortuitous; both visited their families before shipping out to Italy.
Independence Day 1944 found Tanouye on the front lines near Cecina. He led his platoon to attack and captured, with precious little cover, a "strategically important hill," as his medal citation called it.
What he did, according to his citation, was this: For two days, his platoon had been pinned down by machine-gun fire. Tanouye crawled forward alone and machine-gunned all the Germans in the first nest. A second machine-gun nest opened fire. He fired back, silencing it.
His left arm injured by a grenade, he refused first aid. He crawled and dashed from cover to cover as he sprayed an enemy trench with bullets.
At last, out of ammunition, he crawled 20 yards to a comrade to reload. He then slithered forward to a fourth machine-gun installation and hurled a grenade. Under fire as he lay on the hillside, he managed to take out two more machine-gun nests.
"His courageous decision to go ahead in the face of suicidal odds, his skillful deployment of his men to keep losses at a minimum, his consideration for them, and his devotion to duty exemplify and reflect the highest traditions of the Armed Forces of the United States," wrote his platoon leader, Lt. Samuel R. Gay.
When Tanouye recovered, he returned to his comrades farther north in Italy. He was sitting in a foxhole Aug. 27, 1944, when he wrote what may have been his last letter to his parents, who were still in Arkansas. He was busy, he said, "dodging artillery fire and bullets," but asked them not to worry. "I'm OK, yet ? only miss Akira."
His best friend had been killed five weeks before while carrying wounded soldiers to safety. Shimatsu received the Bronze Star posthumously.
A few days later, on Sept. 1, Tanouye was crouching to inspect a German land mine along the Arno River when another soldier accidentally tripped the wire. Tanouye took most of the blast, shielding Sgt. Hideo Kuniyoshi.
"If it weren't for Ted, I wouldn't be alive," Kuniyoshi said in a video tribute to Tanouye. Kuniyoshi is flying here from Hawaii for the unveiling of the memorial to the man who died in his stead.
As Tanouye was carried away on a stretcher, Kuniyoshi remembered, he called to his men, "Go for broke!," the motto of the 442nd. Tanouye died five days later.
Seven months later, his mother was temporarily released from the internment camp and taken by military escort to a ceremony in Little Rock, where she received her son's Distinguished Service Cross. Medal in hand, she was returned to the camp.
In 2000, Tanouye's cross was upgraded to a Medal of Honor. "Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it had so ill treated," President Clinton said at a White House ceremony honoring Tanouye, 19 other Japanese Americans, a Filipino American and a Chinese American.
A short video about Tanouye's life will be shown at Wednesday's ceremony, which follows last year's renaming of the Torrance National Guard armory after him. Documentarians Craig Yahata and Robert Horsting pieced together photos and interviews with family members, classmates, military friends and current Torrance High students.
"He wasn't like other sergeants," Pvt. Rudy Tokiwa says in the video. "He had patience and tried to explain things to his men, not just give us orders."
Horsting said that Tanouye, 24, was "one of the oldest in his platoon and he felt he had to protect his men, who were mostly only 18 years old."
Tanouye and Shimatsu were buried in Italy. In 1948 they were exhumed and returned to Los Angeles. Their funerals were held simultaneously at the Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, and they were buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery.
Seven years after Tanouye died, his youngest brother, Yukiwo, serving in the Army, was killed in the Korean War. He was buried on the other side of his brother.
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The IRR: Emptying the Cupboard
July 06, 2004
By George Friedman
Summary
The U.S. Department of Defense is now activating the Army's Individual Ready Reserve for combat duty. Given the inherent problems associated with such a move, it is clear that U.S. war planners were caught in a trap: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "revolution in warfare" has not evolved as expected.
Analysis
On July 6, 5,600 members of the U.S. Army's Individual Ready Reserve will start to receive notices that they are being recalled to active duty. Members of the IRR are generally soldiers who have completed their primary active-duty assignments. They are not part of the regular Reserves or the National Guard, but are simply kept on a list as available for recall. In general, this has been simply a formality. IRR members have been called up on only two occasions: Once was in 1968, following the Tet Offensive; the other was in 1991, in the context of Operation Desert Storm. There have already been some smaller call-ups of essential specialties, but this is the first large-scale mobilization. The Army has indicated that there likely will be more.
The recall is neither routine, nor what the Army would like to be doing.
First, the reactivated reservists will have been out of the Army for several years. They might not be in appropriate mental or physical condition for a tour in a combat zone -- where, according to the Army, most are going to be sent. Since the current plan is to keep them on active duty for no more than a year, there is little time for an extensive conditioning program if the troops are to spend much time in-theater. These are not the forces commanders want to lead if they have a choice.
Second, although this call-up might fix the Army's quantitative problem in the short run, it can wreak havoc in the long run. The volunteer army depends, obviously, on the willingness of people to join. That rests on a large number of variables, one of which is the idea that the volunteer can control his term of service, building it into his or her long-term plans. It has always been understood, in the fine print, that calling up the IRR was possible, and soldiers who are being recalled cannot complain that they did not know -- they can complain only that they did not expect it to happen. However, people who have already served and completed their tours -- and are busy with careers, children and mortgages -- are now going to be sent into combat zones. Their younger siblings, cousins and friends are going to be watching the chaos in their lives and could well decide that, while they would be prepared to serve a given term and even have that term extended during war, giving the Army control over their lives -- and those of their families -- for years afterward is simply not worth it.
The Army, the Defense Department and the Office of the President are all acutely aware of this problem. Nevertheless, they have chosen to go this route. Given the inherent defects of the choice and its obvious potential cost, they did not make this move frivolously; this was something that was absolutely necessary. That said, the question now is this: How did the U.S. Army get into the position of having to make this choice?
The call-up of the IRR in 1968 came in the midst of a crisis surrounding Vietnam. The United States had miscalculated troop requirements and found itself short of critical specialties that it could not make up from the pool of available conscripts. No one planned for the circumstances that presented themselves in 1968 -- or for those that prompted Desert Storm either. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait left little time to redesign the Army's force structure, and by 1991 it was dealing with a surprise. The IRR has been utilized twice, both times in the face of the unexpected. Sometimes it was mismanagement, sometimes reality, but always it was an attempt to cope with the unexpected -- and unwanted -- event. The 2004 call-up obviously fits into this category. The issue is what was unanticipated, and why it was not expected.
The Sept. 11 attacks certainly were unanticipated. This cannot be disputed, although whether they should have been is going to be an interminable debate. However, this large-scale activation of the IRR is taking place not six months after Sept. 11, but almost three years later. That indicates a much broader and deeper surprise than the attacks themselves.
The first surprise had to do with the nature of warfare. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was an advocate of what has been called "the revolution in warfare." This concept is the belief that as technology of all sorts comes online, the need for massed armies will decline. Few would debate that a revolution in warfare is under way. The issue is whether it has matured to a sufficient degree that policymakers can depend on it, or whether it still has several generations to go.
Throughout his tenure, Rumsfeld has been highly critical of the Army. He felt that it was too heavy, in the sense of relying on armor and artillery -- supply hogs that take a long time to get to the theater of operations. Rumsfeld's view of the war against al Qaeda was that it would require very small, very fast and very lethal forces to execute. Rumsfeld was right, but he failed to factor in two things.
The first was that while the deployment of small, fast, lethal forces potentially could take out al Qaeda units and could be used to destabilize nation-states, those units could not be used to take control of those nations. There is a huge difference between shattering a government and governing a country. Indeed, there is little value in destabilizing a nation unless it can be pacified; otherwise, destabilization opens the door to al Qaeda, rather than shutting down the network. Therefore, insufficient thought was given to the problem of pacification -- not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Denying terrain to al Qaeda means being present on the ground in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Rumsfeld constantly tried to find a way to transfer responsibility for the ground to an indigenous government -- failing to recognize that the high-tech destruction of the state creates a vacuum that either is filled with U.S. forces or left in chaos.
Rumsfeld focused on the first phase of the war: regime change. This phase was certainly amenable to the kind of war he favored. But the second phase -- regime construction -- is not at all influenced by the revolution in warfare. It requires a large security force -- and even that might not be enough. Rumsfeld's hostility toward the Army's cumbersome, traditional ways of doing things caused him to make a massive miscalculation: Rather than building up Army ground forces in 2002 and 2003, he restricted the growth of the Army, thereby leaving it short of troops for the prolonged second phase of the war.
Rumsfeld's second surprise was a persistent underestimation of the enemy. In particular, he seemed to genuinely believe that with the occupation of Baghdad, all organized resistance would cease. The idea that there would be people in Iraq who, out of support for the Baathist regime or simple patriotism, would resist the American occupation in an extended and effective way seems never to have been factored into plans. Indeed, when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was very much concerned about extended resistance, argued before the war that in excess of 200,000 troops would be needed in Iraq for an extended period, Rumsfeld attacked him as being alarmist. Rumsfeld failed to plan for occupying a country of 25 million people or policing a city of 5 million people -- both in the face of resistance, albeit relatively light resistance.
Occupying a country or a city takes manpower. That is a requirement -- though not necessarily the only one -- for success. Rumsfeld's view of warfare did not take into account the complexities of occupation. The tension between Rumsfeld and the Army created a situation in which dramatically pyramiding responsibilities for the Army were not met with equivalent increases in manpower.
This is the first global war the United States has waged in which neither the command structure of the armed forces nor the force structure evolved dramatically in the opening years. The fact that there has not been a doubling or tripling in size of the U.S. Army is startling. In spite of the fact that it is involved in a variety of combat operations in remote areas of the world -- and that the enemy can choose to open new theaters of operation that are unexpected (such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) -- the armed forces have not grown substantially in three years.
Rumsfeld apparently thought the war would be easier than it has been, and he believed that technology would be more effective than it possibly could be. The need to occupy, pacify and govern hostile nations was not built into the war plan -- nor is it there now. The fact is that the call-ups from the IRR are Band-Aids on a fundamental issue: The United States is involved in a land war in Asia again, and it is trying to fight that war with a military -- especially an Army -- that was designed for peacetime in the 1990s. It cannot possibly stretch.
The central conceptual problem in Vietnam was that the United States did not want to spend its resources on doing the things that might give it an opportunity to win the war. Having insufficient resources, the United States simply decided that they were sufficient.
In Vietnam, the military had recourse to a draft. It did not work very well. Not only did it create deep social tension between those who served and those who did not, but also a two-year term was not sufficient to master most of the specialties of warfare -- including rifleman skills. Between two years of service and a one-year tour in Vietnam, the military lost its people just when they were learning to do their jobs. The draft -- particularly as it was structured during the Vietnam era -- was the failure point, not the solution.
Two-year conscription is simply too short a period of time to master the specialties the military needs now. Today's military does not consist of cannon fodder, but of highly trained specialists who need two years to begin becoming proficient at their jobs. Moreover, another draft in which half the eligible candidates were exempt would rip the United States apart. Universal conscription creates too large a manpower pool. It creates more problems than it solves. What it needs is an expansion of the volunteer force.
For that, very large sums of money are needed, making it attractive to choose the military as a profession. The problem is that the United States is out of time. The time for this expansion should have been early 2002, when it became clear that al Qaeda would not be easily defeated and that other military campaigns would be coming. Had the Bush administration asked Congress for sufficient money to expand the volunteer Army, large numbers of well-trained troops would be coming out of the chute just about now.
No such request was made. Rumsfeld ignored Army requests for increased manpower, focusing instead on surgical tools for regime change. The force structure did not undergo a quantum expansion. As a result, when the worst-case rather than the best-case scenario came to pass in Iraq -- guerrilla war -- the United States was unprepared for it. It had to reach into the IRR for a few thousand men. The military is, in effect, cannibalizing itself, using up its reserves. Since this war is not likely to end soon, and the IRR is not a bottomless well, it is clear that something will have to be done.
Copyrights 2004 - Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
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This statue currently stands outside the Iraqi palace, now home to the 4th Infantry division. It will eventually be shipped home and put in the memorial museum in Fort Hood, Texas.
The statue was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat, who for years was forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.
Kalat was so grateful for the Americans liberation of his country; he melted 3 of the heads of the fallen Saddam and made the statue as a memorial to the American soldiers and their fallen warriors. Kalat worked on this memorial night and day for several months.
To the left of the kneeling soldier is a small Iraqi girl giving the soldier comfort as he mourns the loss of his comrade in arms.
(http://dogbrothers.com/images/misc/statue.jpg)
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Soldiers Returning from Iraq for R&R Ride in Style
First class pax switch seats with all eight of them on AA flight
Eight US soldiers returning from Iraq to the US for some well-deserved R&R received a very pleasant surprise when they boarded American Airlines flight 866 on June 29 from Atlanta to Chicago.
Every last one of them was offered a trade for their coach seats by first class passengers who preferred to see them fly home up front.
"The soldiers were very, very happy, and the whole aircraft had a different feeling," flight attendant Lorrie Gammon told The Dallas Morning News in Thursday's editions.
Just as the gate agent was about to begin boarding, a business traveller approached one of the soldiers and offered him a trade -- one first class seat for the soldier's coach seat. That started a chain reaction, and when the swapping was all done, "the other two first-class passengers wanted to give up their seats, too, but they couldn't find any more soldiers," Gammon said.
One of the other cabin crew members, Ms. Candi Spradlin, said she was impressed with what she had seen. "If nothing else, those soldiers got a great homecoming," she said.
FMI: www.aa.com, www.amrcorp.com
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"The dumb grunt is an anachronism. He has been replaced by the strategic corporal."
July 20, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Don't Dumb Down the Military
By NATHANIEL FICK
WASHINGTON ? I went to war as a believer in the citizen-soldier. My
college study of the classics idealized Greeks who put down their plows for
swords, returning to their fields at the end of the war. As a Marine officer
in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, I learned that the victors on today's
battlefields are long-term, professional soldiers. Thus the increasing calls
for reinstating the draft - and the bills now before Congress that would do
so - are well intentioned but misguided. Imposing a draft on the military I
served in would harm it grievously for years.
I led platoons of volunteers. In Afghanistan, my marines slept each
night in holes they hacked from the rocky ground. They carried hundred-pound
packs in addition to their fears of minefields and ambushes, their
homesickness, loneliness and exhaustion. The most junior did it for $964.80
per month. They didn't complain, and I never wrestled with discipline
problems. Each and every marine wanted to be there. If anyone hadn't, he
would have been a drain on the platoon and a liability in combat.
In Iraq, I commanded a reconnaissance platoon, the Marines' special
operations force. Many of my enlisted marines were college-educated; some
had been to graduate school. All had volunteered once for the Marines, again
for the infantry, and a third time for recon. They were proud to serve as
part of an elite unit. Like most demanding professionals, they were their
own harshest critics, intolerant of their peers whose performance fell
short.
The dumb grunt is an anachronism. He has been replaced by the
strategic corporal. Immense firepower and improved technology have pushed
decision-making with national consequences down to individual enlisted men.
Modern warfare requires that even the most junior infantryman master a wide
array of technical and tactical skills.
Honing these skills to reflex, a prerequisite for survival in combat,
takes time - a year of formal training and another year of on-the-job
experience were generally needed to transform my young marines into
competent warriors. The Marine Corps demands four-year active enlistments
because it takes that long to train troops and ensure those training dollars
are put to use in the field. One- or two-year terms, the longest that would
be likely under conscription, would simply not allow for this comprehensive
training.
Some supporters of the draft argue that America's wars are being
fought primarily by minorities from poor families who enlisted in the
economic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. They insist that the sacrifices of
citizenship be shared by all Americans. The sentiment is correct, but the
outrage is misplaced. There is no cannon-fodder underclass in the military.
In fact, front-line combat troops are a near-perfect reflection of American
male society.
Yes, some minority men and women enlist for lack of other options, but
they tend to concentrate in support jobs where they can learn marketable
skills like driving trucks or fixing jets, not throwing grenades and setting
up interlocking fields of machine gun fire. African-Americans, who comprise
nearly 13 percent of the general population, are overrepresented in the
military at more than 19 percent - but they account for only 10.6 percent of
infantry soldiers, the group that suffers most in combat. Hispanics, who
make up 13.3 percent of the American population, are underrepresented at
only 11 percent of those in uniform.
The men in my infantry platoons came from virtually every part of the
socio-economic spectrum. There were prep-school graduates and
first-generation immigrants, blacks and whites, Muslims and Jews, Democrats
and Republicans. They were more diverse than my class at Dartmouth, and far
more willing to act on their principles.
The second argument most often advanced for a renewed draft is that
the military is too small to meet its commitments. Absolutely true. But the
armed forces are stretched thin not from a lack of volunteers but because
Congress and the Pentagon are not willing to spend the money to expand the
force. Each of the services met or exceeded its recruiting goals in 2003,
and the numbers have increased across the board so far this year. Even the
Army National Guard, often cited as the abused beast of burden in Iraq, has
seen re-enlistments soar past its goal, 65 percent, to 141 percent (the
figure is greater than 100 because many guardsmen are re-enlisting early).
Expanding the military to meet additional responsibilities is a matter
of structural change: if we build it, they will come. And build it we must.
Many of my marines are already on their third combat deployment in the
global war on terrorism; they will need replacing. Increasing the size of
the active-duty military would lighten the burden on every soldier, sailor,
airman and marine. Paradoxically, a larger military becomes more sustainable
than a smaller one: fewer combat deployments improves service members'
quality of life and contributes to higher rates of enlistment and retention.
For now, expanding the volunteer force would give us a larger military
without the inherent liabilities of conscription.
And while draft supporters insist we have learned the lessons of
Vietnam and can create a fair system this time around, even an equitable
draft would lower the standards for enlistees. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was chastised for saying Vietnam-era draftees added no value to the
armed forces. But his error was semantic; the statement was true of the
system, if not of the patriotic and capable individuals who served.
The current volunteer force rejects applicants who score poorly on its
entrance aptitude exam, disclose a history of significant drug use or suffer
from any of a number of orthopedic or chronic injuries. Face it: any
unwilling draftee could easily find a way to fail any of these tests. The
military, then, would be left either to abandon its standards and accept all
comers, or to remain true to them and allow the draft to become volunteerism
by another name. Stripped of its volunteer ideology, but still unable to
compel service from dissenters, the military would end up weaker and less
representative than the volunteer force - the very opposite of the draft's
intended goals.
Renewing the draft would be a blow against the men and women in
uniform, a dumbing down of the institution they serve. The United States
military exists to win battles, not to test social policy. Enlarging the
volunteer force would show our soldiers that Americans recognize their
hardship and are willing to pay the bill to help them better protect the
nation. My view of the citizen-soldier was altered, but not destroyed, in
combat. We cannot all pick up the sword, nor should we be forced to - but we
owe our support to those who do.
Nathaniel Fick, a former Marine captain, is writing a memoir of his
military training and combat experience.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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A friend forwarded this to me.
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2003 Newspaper Photographer of the Year Rick Loomis. Rick has written about his experience in Fallujah which I have received via email and posted in full below. Also check out his exceptional images he took in Iraq here.
I finally tried to wash the Marine's bloodstains from my pants the other day. It had been nine days since the battle and a daily dose of dirt and dust had all but masked what I knew lay beneath.
>From the relative comfort of "Dreamland", a reasonably secure U.S. base of operations just outside Fallouja, I swirled my pants around in square metal pan containing four inches of precious water. With each spin around the pan, the water turned a deeper brown. And as the stains of Sgt. Josue Magana's blood became more apparent, I thought back to the day he was shot.
At zero five A.M, just before dawn on April 26th, the Marines of Echo Company was ordered to take two homes on the northwestern edge of Fallouja. For the prior three weeks, since Marines had first moved to cordon off city, there had been constant exchanges of gunfire between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area known as the Jolan Heights. After all, this was Fallouja, heart of the notorious Sunni Triangle, home to the root of U.S. occupation resistance.
The Marines had hoped that theirs would be a 'hearts and minds' mission leading up to the June 30 deadline to hand power over to Iraqis. It turned sour after four American contractors were gruesomely killed on March 31st. Insurgents hung two of their burned and mutilated bodies from a bridge that crosses the Euphrates River. And now the Marines found themselves in the position of battling Iraqi bodies instead of winning over Iraqi hearts and minds.
In their initial push into Fallouja, Marines fought to gain a toe hold in the city, and for Echo Company this consisted of three homes and a school, all within 300 meters of each other. This was now Echo Company's base from which to do battle, and the company hoped to engage insurgents known to be operating in this city of 300,000.
Having gained their toehold, they worked to fortify their positions using sandbags, 24-hour a day watch posts, concertina wire and sniper positions. By the time I arrived to be embedded on the 22nd of April, the neighborhood around them was a ghost town. Most residents had fled the fighting, save for one blind Iraqi man next door whom was dutifully being fed by a Kurdish translator working for the Marines.
In the houses and school, Marines had parked themselves and their gear in every room. M-16 rifles delicately perched against the glass doors of a cupboard holding the family's finest dishware. The luckiest Marines claimed the couches; the rest sprawled out on the floors each night.
Walls that once separated neighbors were broken down to allow easy house-to-house access. Doors were taken off their hinges and laid down to bridge the gaps between the roofs of the houses.
On the roof there were gun positions for M-240 machine guns, a larger .50 caliber machine gun and a Mark 19 grenade launcher. Shoulder fired rockets were also stored on the roof for times of need. Small 'mouse holes' were pounded out of the roof retaining wall allowing snipers to cover key positions as well, with the ability to pick off targets at great distances.
Through one such hole is a clear view down 'sniper alley.' The remnants of battle are apparent. A bullet-riddled car abandoned in the middle of the street. Deep craters where parts of the road used to be. Massive chunks of asphalt strewn everywhere and downed power lines sagging across the roadway. The homes on either side were broken and battered by gunfire. The stench of rotting cows and dogs, who met their deaths in a crossfire, could be detected if the breeze was just right. Nothing stirred on this street anymore.
Also in view from the sniper's nests, just across the cemetery, were objectives A and B, the targets of that tragic morning's raid. The two homes, known as A and B, had been in view for weeks, and it was from there that Marine commanders perceived a daily threat.
* * *
One reinforced platoon of Marines crept through the darkened streets, lining both sides. Only a wail could be heard breaking the silence in the distance - it was time for the Muslim call to prayer. Useless with my camera in the darkness, I fumbled to record the ominous sound with a digital recorder. It was too dark to see the buttons so I gave up - the sum of me nothing but a complete liability at this point.
Up ahead, two squads of men were breaching the homes, breaking down doors to clear the buildings, which were directly across the street from each other. Suspected of being used by insurgents, they approached with caution but discovered they were empty. Marines poured inside objectives A and B, taking up defensive positions and on every floor, a set of eyes on guard from nearly every window. Dawn had come and the cobalt blue sky began to brighten.
It was all starting to seem too easy when an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) smacked the front of the house with a thunderous crash. The walls trembled. If the Marines had started to relax, it put them on alert that someone knew where they were. The Marines returned fire with their M-16's and then there was silence.
Once they knew their presence had been discovered, the men further prepared their defensive postures. Mattresses were upturned to cover windows, bags of rice stacked on top of one another to slow speeding bullets headed into open doors. Holes were sledge hammered through the walls at strategic points to make sniper positions. Then, nothing. Sitting. Waiting . Resting. Drinking. Eating. Nothing. No shots. No enemy sightings. Nothing.
Five hours had passed since the start of the mission and Marines were sprawled out on the floor, catching sleep when they could. I visited the roof briefly to eye the sniper positions. Then down to the bottom floor, looking in on sleeping Marines. Returning to the second floor, I spent many minutes trying to perfectly capture on camera the reflection of a Marine in a bullet -riddled mirror. I too, was bored.
The sleeping Marines stirred a bit as shots rang off in the distance. I sneaked a peek out the window, looking across the graveyard toward the mosque. Nothing. There were reports of seven insurgents, scratch that, six insurgents (one was reported over the radio to have been shot by a U.S. sniper) in the area of the mosque. An incoming mortar round hit the house adjacent to the one we are in and a fire starts to burn from within.
The Marine commanders decided that one squad, about 12 men, should respond to the mosque to the shooting from the mosque area and engage the remaining insurgents. So out of the houses and into the graveyard they flooded, keeping space between them as they slowly moved toward the minaret and the mosque on the other side of the cemetery. The minaret loomed high above, offering an unobstructed view and perfect firing position for a sniper to shoot down on approaching Marines. Short bursts of running, two or three men at a time, edged them closer to the mosque. They stopped for a time to take cover behind headstones, their eyes darted between the windows of the mosque and the minaret overlooking them.
There was no movement or firing as they made their approach. It was bright and hot and quiet. Marines quickly moved in to secure the mosque and the minaret, searching hopelessly for the reported insurgents. Curious, I looked around myself but found no shell casings left behind; no blood and no body. There was only a partially damaged mosque, curtains moving in the breeze that was coming through blown out windows. I began to wonder if anyone had ever been there.
Nonetheless, the complex was thoroughly searched and the men trod back through the cemetery and made their way back to the two houses they had taken in the pre-dawn hours. Things were still quiet at the houses and I felt much less exposed than in the moments prior as I had trailed Marines around and over graves at an accelerated pace. Running thorough a cemetery seems a violation of those lying beneath. I was glad to be back in the house.
It was about the moment I felt the most secure and had the least suspicion that the mission would get any more dangerous when all hell broke loose. The Marines were under a coordinated, full-scale attack. Insurgents had crawled and snuck into positions covering about three hundred degrees on all sides. They let loose a continuous barrage on the house. Marines scrambled to their feet to fight back the ambush. "Roger, we are taking heavy fire. You need to orient to east, over the mosque complex," the confident company commander Capt. Douglas Zembiec barked into the radio without a hint of panic in his voice.
The sound was deafening at times. The rumble of machine guns and the returning loud crack of AK-47 rounds flying toward the building pounded in my eardrums. In the next room a Marine fired his machine gun from the second story window. I was watching the seriousness on his face as he fought the onslaught. At that moment a flash of fiery orange enveloped the room. An RPG had scored a direct hit at head level of the Marine I was photographing. So sudden and violent it was, I only have a blurry frame to serve as a reminder. Only the wall of the home saved him from certain death. He was shocked however, screaming as he was knocked to the ground, stunned from the concussion and deafening roar of the grenade.
He took only a moment to regain composure and assess his emotions. He was clearly pissed. He stood back in the window and began firing with more determination than before. It wasn't long until another RPG crashed into the same position. Insurgent forces were well aware of the Marine's position and were determined to score a kill. The barrels of two M-240 machine guns became so hot from the rapid succession of fire that they melted and seized.
On the roof, another battle was raging. Marines on the roof were in such close contact with the insurgents that the two were lobbing hand grenades back and forth. Shrapnel was shooting all over the roof tearing into Marines fighting there. At least one pickup truck full of 15 to 20 fighters was seen heading into the fight.
At this time, another Marine who had rushed out to a second floor balcony moments earlier yelled, "I'm hit." One of several thousands of rounds fired in the opening 30 minutes of the battle had found its target. He gave an agonizing scream and yelled again that he was hit, hoping someone would rescue him.
Sgt. Nunez threw open the door and rushed out, returning moments later dragging Sgt. Magana across the floor by the grab handle on the back of his flak jacket. Confusion ensued. He was eventually dragged into the room where I was hunkered down. He had been shot through the back and was in severe pain.
While corpsman were concentrating on his injury, I could see that he was beginning to fade. His eyes were empty and began to close. He was mumbling about a letter from his daughter and I'm sure he began to concede that his life could end right there on the floor.
I was compelled to grab his hand and assured him that he would see his daughter once again. I looked him straight in his eye, telling him to look back at me, then squeeze my hand so I knew he was still with me. It was all I knew to do.
I felt caught between being an objective journalist and responding as a human being. I apologized to a news crew that was sharing this horror with , "I have to be a human first," I heard myself saying awkwardly. It was a lesson I had learned early on from a photo professor that had a profound effect on my life.
I shot only a few frames to depict the scene; some right as he was being dragged into the room and then some after he began to stabilize. I felt satisfied that I had both done my job and also done what was right in a potentially life and death situation.
Rounds were cracking off all sides of the building and now a second wounded person made his way to the same doorway. Everything seemed to be unraveling. Here were a group of men, 37 of them in all, that I viewed as courageous warriors, well-trained and well- equipped, and they seemed to be falling one by one right in front of me. I began to wonder: is this it? What if, by sheer numbers and the great desire of those opposed to them, these Marines and myself were about to be gunned down, right here. The stairway to the bottom floor was unguarded from my view. I wondered if all the Marines on the bottom floor were fighting to their last bullets.
For an instant, I imagined the following scenario. As I peered from the doorway, insurgents with AK's are rushing up the stairs, firing at those working on the wounded Sgt. Magana as he lay there in a lifeless state. Three easy kills for the insurgents. What would I do? Would I cower onto the ground, scream "sahafi, sahafi", meaning "journalist, journalist," and hope that at that instant I could separate myself from the Marines. Would I find myself, the barrel of a gun pushing into my skin, begging for my life? Would I be killed instantly, no distinction made, in a hail of gunfire. Or would I pick up a weapon myself and fight for my own life and for the rest of those around me.
These decisions are guttural, instinctive. Every move seems to be analyzed in some split second thought process. When the fight was raging, I was making decisions, based on saving my life and doing my job - in that order.
But at that moment I knew that photographing a gunfight can be like photographing a triple play in baseball. While it's certainly a dramatic moment - a photograph sometimes can't serve to capture the essence of the drama you are witnessing. The pictures of the men shooting out of the window in the next room conveyed little of the life and death intensity of the moment, the sound of gunfire, the smell, the gulping sense of mortality. They could have just as well been during a moment when they were shooting at tin cans in the alleyway.
I knew the bullets were aimed at people who were in turn shooting back at them. But my photographs did not depict the intensity that ultimate sense of risk. But was I going to make a target of myself when at least two men were already shot and RPG's were bouncing off the walls as fast as the men shooting them could reload.
The short answer was no, I would not risk it all for one frame. At this moment I thought of my mom, and how shattered she would be getting that phone call that no mother wants. It would be early morning, in a tiny northern Michigan town, the phone ringing as my mom prepared for work that day. Someone I don't even know would probably deliver the call. No one frame was not worth it.
Just being in this country as a journalist is an elevated risk, I thought to myself. And here I was feeling more exposed to danger than at any point in my career.
A momentary series of thoughts, contemplating the immediate future for myself and those around me, and I was snapped back to the reality of the moment I was already in.
The house was still taking a serious pounding, there were wounded in both the buildings and the insurgents were still bringing a vicious attack. Then I heard a familiar and welcoming sound----two tanks rumbling up the alley. I peered out the only window in that second floor room to photograph them. They were our ride out. But something was terribly wrong. The main gun on one of the tanks was pointed right toward our window. For a split second I thought, "Oh shit, they think WE are the insurgents and they are going to fire on us!"
Friendly fire is a sad fact of warfare and I never believed it possible until I saw it with my own eyes during the march up from Kuwait just 13 months earlier. I wondered if the tanks had been talked onto the right spot, if they knew that those were 'friendlies' staring at them from the window above. I stepped back into the depth of the room, away from the window. A useless move as a main gun tank round would surely obliterate us all no matter where we were standing.
"OK, we are punching out of here now, and we are punching out hard! We are getting everybody out of here ASAP!" yelled one of the commanders standing on the second floor. The tanks were giving us the time and firepower needed to run back down the same alley we had crept through in the pre-dawn hours earlier that day.
The call was made to bring everyone and everything from the top floors down to the first floor. At the same time, the wounded from the building to the north were filtering into our courtyard. Four Marines carried the limp body of Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin into the courtyard. He would be listed as "killed in action" from the fight that day. His heroics would earn him official recognition for his actions - albeit posthumously. Austin, an only son, was shot multiple times in the chest as he attempted to throw a hand grenade from one rooftop to another. Making that throw was the last effort in his life.
Sgt. Magana was already lying on a broken door in the second floor bedroom. The others used it as a litter to carry him downstairs. It was creaking to the point of breaking but made the trip to the bottom floor. Everyone else cleared the rooms and the roof and began to gather in the foyer.
It was a bloody mess. Magana was lying on the door, a look of fear now appearing in his eyes. And Lance Cpl. Lucas Sielstad, merely 18, a wiry but tough Marine by all accounts, had bandages on his right arm soaked through with blood. His pants were ripped by medical sheers from the waist down to treat a shrapnel wound on his leg and he was bleeding from his lip. He looked tired and stunned, but there he was, still standing.
Another Marine came down from the roof with a haphazardly tied rag wrapped around his bleeding head. He was suffering from wounds in at least a couple other places. Still, he was calm and alert, and oddly a bit saddened by not being able to finish the fight.
The move to evacuate called for us to trace our steps back the same way we came. One by one, we hustled through the door into the courtyard. For a moment, I felt like a skydiver taking his first leap out the door of the plane. I felt so vulnerable out there, wishing for the cover of darkness that had offered some protection earlier that morning.
The courtyard was hemmed in by walls 7 feet-high shrouding us from view to anyone on the streets outside. But the Marines were an easy target for gunmen on the second story or rooftops of any of the surrounding houses.
Crouching low and near the wall, my instinct was to run for it. To break free and run, not wait behind all the Marines in front of me exiting in some sort of formation. We were all bunched up in the courtyard and it felt like time was of the essence for getting out of this.
What seemed like hours passed before my turn to exit was in reality probably less than two minutes. One by one we filed out and hustled down the street. I did not know exactly from what direction the firing was coming from - or how much was incoming or outgoing. I just knew it was heavy and I wanted to get back to a place of relative comfort.
My gear seemed so heavy and awkward as I approached the gate leading to the street. And in addition, I was also asked to carry several 203-grenade rounds in a blood-soaked pouch that was taken off a wounded Marine. But when the two Marines in front of me finally moved, I bolted out behind them.
Along the wall we ran beside, about halfway down the block there was a 4-foot gap that offered anyone in the houses to the west a clear shot at us. Any sniper would have to anticipate when a Marine might pass this gap but it made me worry. A scene from the movie "Enemy at the Gates" popped into my head, which depicted celebrated WWII Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev popping off targets at will. Why a movie scene found its way to the front of my head I don't know.
What I do know is that when it was my turn to expose myself for that half second, I hesitated my step so as not to pass with exact same frequency as the Marines ahead of me. The well-trained and well-disciplined sniper waiting for the perfect shot was a figment of my imagination. But the rest of the gunfire all around was real.
We were almost home free, as we had successfully run the gauntlet down the entire block. I could see the school in my view, less than two hundred meters away. When I crossed the street there were three Marines struggling to carry a wounded comrade the rest of the way to the school. One of them motioned me over as I approached their position, slowing my run. He asked me to help carry him the wounded man. For a split second I thought, "Are you crazy, my job right now is to run like hell so I can live to do the job another day."
The split second happened about the time I was grabbing the injured Marine by his right shoulder and arm. Along with three others we ran him to the schoolhouse, a fairly fortified structure. His legs were inside the door two steps up, and I tried to ease him in but he was being pulled too fast from the other end. He escaped my grasp and the grasp of the Marine carrying his other arm. His limp head hit the concrete step with a thud, the least of his problems at the moment.
Several more Marines piled into the schoolhouse. The machine guns on the roof were already wailing away with everything they had. With all the Marines piled back inside the building their fields of fire were clear and they were engaging everything in sight. Several more RPG's pounded the school, as did small arms fire from AK-47's. It felt much safer in the school, with its two-foot thick walls and sandbagged shooting positions covering every corner.
The scene on the bottom floor was that of pandemonium, resembling an ant nest after it's been disturbed. One Marine was running around barking orders "We need more M-16 rounds on the second floor!" Another was shocked, helmet off and head in his hands. The wounded were piled up until a transport Humvee could get through to get the rest of them out. I took a moment to catch my breath and take stock of everything that had happened up to that point. Pure adrenaline had been pumping through my veins for two hours, and my body needed a break.
The wounded were hauled a kilometer or so away, fifteen in all, to a field hospital, which was nearly overwhelmed with the volume. Commanders started sorting out the chaos in the school, with their main mission being to keep their gun positions humming. Suppressive fire hammering enemy positions kept any insurgent advance at bay.
When the platoon stationed in a house 300 meters away gathered in the doorway of the school to make their run back, I joined them. One last run to safety.
As we approached our position I noticed something was missing from the scene. It had marked my landscape for the week that I had been in Fallouja. The minaret, the same one that loomed overhead as we ran through the graveyard earlier that morning, had completely vanished. I was told later on that is was leveled by a tank round after a sniper was reported to be shooting from it.
Inside the house it was not the same optimistic group of people I had been with the day before. All of them looked exhausted. These men had seen battle, and they wore these looks in their eyes. It had silenced them for the moment and I gathered that it had changed some of them forever. They had seen a young man die that day, one of their own, in a brutal death that left his body torn and bloody. They had watched another of their comrades lose an arm from an enemy hand grenade.
It would be awhile before these men would laugh again. I knew these men to be tough and ready, but this shook them at their foundations. The physical and emotional scars would not be quick to heal.
As word of the battle and its damage spread, a Navy chaplain made a visit to the men of Echo Company that afternoon. The solemn faces of over fifty men crowded the room; at its center was simply a mound of dirt. As the chaplain finished delivering words of encouragement, each Marine pushed a lit candle into place into the mound. Soon the dank room was filled with candlelight and void of people as they withdrew to collect their thoughts. I shot just one frame of the last man placing his candle. He bowed his head in prayer as he did so.
That day I spoke with their Captain, Douglas Zembiec. From a roof overlooking the houses we were in that morning he said, "If is wasn't for the valor of those young Marines we would still be over there. They fought like lions. They kept their cool and evacuated the wounded. I get tears of pride when I think of them fighting like that." I could barely converse with him as two Marine Cobra helicopters fired their 3-barrel 20mm guns into those same houses. The clacking roar of the machine gun and firing of hellfire missiles surely demoralizing as well as demolishing any insurgents who might have been rejoicing about the reclaimed position.. Zembiec later added that, "I've ordered men to their deaths, and that's a cross I have to bare."
I spoke with the mother of Lance Cpl. Austin several days after he died. It took awhile to get the courage up to ring her at her home in New Mexico. There was nothing I could do to bring her son home. Would a phone call from someone in the media infuriate her? All I had to offer her was a photo of her son reading the mail from home that I had shot the day before he died. I thought she might want that as a memory of her son in a place she had perhaps imagined, but would never see.
She received my call and my unpolished speech about her son. "Hello ma'am," I said, "I was with your son on the day he died." She told me how proud she was of him and I started to break down when she told me how if she were there that day she would have carried his limp body out of the house herself. She wanted to have any photo I had, to gather any scrap if information, conversations about him, anything she could hold onto. He was her only son.
A few days later I called Sgt. Magana as he lay in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland. He spoke only in a whisper, and sounded very weak. I was sure he did not remember me holding his hand or talking about his daughter but he seemed appreciative that someone would call him from Iraq. He asked that I tell his comrades he was keeping them in his prayers while they were still on the battlefield. I told him I would.
Those Marines in battle were not the only ones certain to be changed by that day. I liken my desires as a journalist to be similar to the way I like to live my life. I want to get close enough to the edge of the abyss to look in but I don't want to go over. As I knelt over that square pan of water, scrubbing my pants vigorously, the bloodstains of that day did not fade away. They now serve to remind me just how easy it can be to slip over the edge.
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Valor defined
Marines confront, overcome the crucible of Fallujah
By Rick Rogers
STAFF WRITER
July 31, 2004
NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
Cpl. Howard Lee Hampton Jr. compared the insurgent assault his Camp Pendleton unit faced in the battle for Fallujah this spring to the violent D-Day landing scene in the movie "Saving Private Ryan." More than 50 Marines from Echo Company were recognized for bravery.
FALLUJAH, Iraq ? The citations for valor read like scenes from a movie, and it's only through cinematic comparisons that Cpl. Howard Lee Hampton Jr. can describe the combat his Camp Pendleton unit saw here in April.
"It was beyond anything in 'Black Hawk Down,' " said Hampton, 21, referring to the movie about the actual downing of two U.S. helicopters in 1993 Somalia and the harrowing rescue operation in which the lives of 18 American soldiers were lost.
"I remember going into the city in the (amphibious assault vehicle) and hearing the bullets hit off the sides.
"When the door opened, I thought about the scene in "Saving Private Ryan" when they were coming up to the beach and that guy got hit right in the head before he ever got to the beach," Hampton said, this time conjuring up the movie account of D-Day during World War II.
"Once we got in the city, we had hundreds and hundreds of people trying to kill us," said the native of El Paso, Tex., recalling how the cascade of enemy shell casings from windows above the Marines sounded like a never-ending slot machine payout.
NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
After braving enemy fire four times to evacuate wounded Marines, Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason "Doc" Duty received a medal nomination that reads, "As bullets impacted within inches of his head, Duty remained resolute in his mission."
"We survived in Fallujah because everyone put the Marine next to him ahead of themselves," said Hampton, an infantryman with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment. "Everyone did so much more than they had to."
More than 50 Marines from Echo Company have been recognized for valor between March 18 and April 26, when they went into Fallujah to root out insurgents after four civilian contract workers were murdered and two of the bodies hanged from a bridge.
The battalion's Fox Company has recommended about 20 Marines for medals.
"My boys are superheroes," said Capt. D.A. Zembiec, the Echo company commander who climbed atop a tank while under fire to guide it to where his men were pinned down. "I got guys with two Purple Hearts still out here working."
Echo Company's role in the battle for Fallujah began April 6, when two platoons ? about 80 men ? were ordered into the northwest section of the city, launching a month of street-by-street fighting that would claim the lives of several hundred insurgents and an estimated 600 civilians.
As word of the violence spread, the media gathered for a closer look.
NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
When insurgents attacked Marines in a house, Lance Cpl. John Flores, 21, stood outside protecting the left flank. Wounded twice, Flores could have left for treatment, but he said he didn't have the heart to leave his fellow Marines.
"One reporter said, 'It can't be that bad,' " recalled 1st Sgt. William Skiles, Echo Company's top enlisted man.
"Well," Skiles recalled, "the Armored Assault Vehicle had just stopped to let the media off when the first (assault rifle) rounds flew overhead. Then came the (rocket propelled grenades). There weren't a whole lot of stories filed that day because the reporters were face down in the dirt."
During the encounter, journalists often asked Skiles, 43, of San Juan Capistrano, for information for their reports about the fighting, but he thought they were missing something.
"I kept thinking: What about valor? Why weren't any of the reporters interested in the valor of our Marines?
"All anyone wants to write about is our dead and wounded," he said, thumbing through military papers that included nominations for Silver and Bronze stars.
Although only a few of the medal nominations have been approved so far, The San Diego Union-Tribune was allowed to review the submissions on condition that no detailed information be revealed.
NELVIN CEPEDA / Union-Tribune
Lance Cpl. Craig Bell said he was so angry after an enemy grenade nearly killed him in Fallujah that he grabbed rounds for his grenade launcher and began blowing up insurgent positions. He estimated that he launched 100 rounds in about an hour.
All of the top medal nominations arose from a single day's action April 26.
It was also Echo Company's last day of heavy fighting in Fallujah before the Marines pulled out under a cease-fire that has created the current stalemate: Insurgents control the city, the Marines control the surrounding countryside.
The day started routinely when Marines searched a mosque that gunmen had been using to direct fire on the Americans.
Finding only shell-casings below the minaret windows overlooking their position, the Marines left the mosque and moved deeper into the city and occupied a few houses.
All was quiet until about 11 a.m., when insurgents killed one Marine and wounded 10 others in a coordinated attack that lasted three hours.
"The minaret that we had just cleared suddenly came alive with sniper fire," Skiles said. At the same time, the Marines in the houses were hit by grenades, rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire from the roofs of adjoining houses.
Within minutes, 100 to 150 heavily armed insurgents attacked in waves. At times, the Marines and the enemy were only 25 yards apart.
The hardest hit Marines were on a rooftop where they were swarmed from three directions by insurgents throwing scores of grenades and firing at least 30 RPGs within the first 15 minutes of fighting. Thousands of bullets peppered the area.
Nine of the Marines were wounded almost immediately.
Aaron C. Austin and Carlos Gomez-Perez, both lance corporals, were on that rooftop and have been nominated for high honors, Austin posthumously.
After the initial barrage, Austin, a machine gunner, evacuated the wounded and then rallied the Marines to counter-attack.
"We've got to get back on the roof and get on that gun," Austin, from Sunray, Tex., is reported to have said, referring to a Marine machine gun.
The Marines returned fire, but as Austin started to throw a grenade, he was hit several times in the chest by machine gun fire.
Although morally wounded, Austin threw his grenade, which hit the enemy and halted their attack.
A memorial to him ? a cement bench ? sits outside the Echo Company barracks at Camp Baharia. Austin was 21.
Gomez-Perez was hit in the cheek and shoulder by machine gun fire while dragging a wounded comrade to safety.
"Ignoring his serious injuries . . . Gomez-Perez, in direct exposure to enemy fire, continued to throw grenades and fire four magazines from his M-16 rifle. Still under fire and with his injured arm, he and another Marine gave CPR (to Austin) and continued to fire on the enemy," read his medal nomination.
Gomez-Perez is recuperating stateside. His age and hometown weren't immediately available.
Marines at another house were also under heavy attack, and four were wounded.
Lance Cpl. John Flores, 21, from Temple City, held a key position outside the house protecting the left flank.
"Around 11 a.m., I heard explosions and I remember a Marine scream," he recalled. "It was a scream I'll never forget, and I hope I never hear again. I had heard the scream before. It was the scream that someone was messed up. It scared me."
Flores said he traded fire with insurgents 20 yards away. When a Humvee arrived to get the wounded, Flores laid down hundreds of rounds of protective fire during a deafening exchange.
"As one of the corpsman ran to the house, bullets hit right behind him against a wall. Everyone said Doc Duty was faster than bullets that day," said Flores, who was twice wounded by shrapnel during the action.
"Doc" is Petty Officer 3rd Class Jason Duty, a 20-year-old Navy corpsman from New Concord, Ohio.
"Despite extreme personal danger from small arms fire and exploding ordnance, Flores remained in his tenuous position, delivering devastating fire on enemy forces as they attempted to reinforce their attack," his nomination stated.
When the Marines pulled back to a safer position later that day, Flores could have left the city to get medical treatment, but he didn't have the heart to leave his fellow Marines.
He doesn't like to think about Fallujah, though he is proud of what Echo Company did there.
"I think I did real good that day, but a lot of people did real good. I was scared, but I just did it," Flores said. "I think about what happened in the city and the people wounded and killed. We think about them a lot. No one from this company will ever forget what we did out here."
Lance Cpl. Craig Bell got mad when he was nearly killed by an enemy grenade. And then he got even.
"You know when they say that things slow down?" asked Bell, 20, from Del City, Okla. "That's what happened when I saw the grenade.
"It was a pineapple grenade with a cherry-red tip," Bell said. "I didn't think they even made grenades like that anymore. It was like something from a World War II movie."
Bell ducked behind a pigeon coop for cover.
He "heard explosions and shooting in real time" while he seemed to drift into space. "I watched the grenade for what seemed like forever until it went off . . . but I talked to Marines later and they said it all happened in a split second."
The blast wounded Bell in the right side and jump-started the clock.
"I thought, 'That's it!" said Bell, a grenadier. "I thought about my wife and daughter and not doing anything stupid. But I was just so angry that he had thrown a grenade at me that I didn't care. I was going to take someone out."
He grabbed ammunition for his grenade launcher and started blowing up rooms from which insurgents were firing, estimating he launched 100 rounds in about an hour.
Despite his wounds, Bell "expertly placed high-explosive around through the windows of adjacent buildings," reads his medal recommendation. "Without his brave actions, 2nd platoon would have been hard-pressed to hold their position and evacuate wounded Marines."
"I was proud to be a part of something so brave and so strong," Bell said. "I know what I did. I saved someone's life, and I know that what other people did saved me."
Not all of the heroics focused on the enemy.
The corpsman, Duty, and Sgt. Skiles were recognized for evacuating wounded Marines while exposed to unrelenting fire.
Duty braved enemy fire four times to load Marines into a Humvee driven by Skiles, who coordinated the rescue.
"I do remember thinking I was in trouble about the third trip because that's when the volume of fire increased a lot," Duty said.
"When we were loading the last guy, they chucked a hand grenade at our Humvee and it hit the hood. It rolled off and didn't explode. I think they were trying to throw it in the back where the wounded were being loaded."
Duty's medal nomination reads: "As bullets impacted within inches of his head, Duty remained resolute in his mission."
Skiles was lauded for evacuating the Marines and for his leadership in combat.
Part of his lengthy medal nomination states:
"Without his courage, his company would not have been able to evacuate his wounded in the expeditious manner ? and more Marines would have been exposed to danger longer.
"Skiles' combat leadership is the metal weld that holds his company together during times of adversity."
It will be weeks, perhaps months, before the Marine Corps approves any decorations, especially the higher ones. By then, the Echo Company Marines probably will be back at Camp Pendleton.
And Hampton will be left with only his memories of what Echo Company did because as he'll tell you:
"They honestly cannot make a movie about what we went through. Every Marine did so much more than what they had to do, from the littlest private first class to the commanding officer. Everyone did so much more."
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Woof All:
My intention for this thread is to focus on our soldiers-- not politics. That said, this article addresses the question of the military going political. One of our country's great strengths has been a military that, on the whole, stays out of politics.
Regardless of where each of us stands in terms of the WW3, the election, etc. this article raises issues that IMHO transcend these other matters.
Crafty Dog
=============================
General Malaise
By ELIOT A. COHEN
August 4, 2004; Page A12
The Kerry campaign has announced its list of retired generals and admirals endorsing their candidate; the Bush campaign will soon produce its list, and no doubt both will mobilize more retired stars for the coming fight. One need not be paranoid about civil-military relations to think this a bad business, reckless on the part of the politicians and destructive on the part of the former flags. By serving as props for presidential candidates the retired generals put at risk the confidence that citizens and officials alike place in the political neutrality of the armed forces. They have every legal and constitutional right to behave this way, of course, as they have every right to make second careers as pole dancers in Vegas. But in so doing they diminish American politics, and damage the national defense.
Out of a 1.4 million-person military, the U.S. has fewer than a thousand generals and admirals on active duty; it is an elite group of men and women who have risen to the top of a remarkably meritocratic system. Once they retire they deserve, and usually receive, a degree of deference and opportunity unmatched by those in other professions. They may wear civvies but continue to go by their military titles (unlike, say, sergeants and captains, who revert to Mr. or Ms. the day after they doff the uniform), and they find a warm welcome in boardrooms and TV studios. When the country is at war, they get a respectful hearing on strategy and tactics. Informally they exert a great deal of influence on today's military, filled as it is with their former subordinates and prot?g?s. They appear prominently in the web of consultancies, advisory panels, Congressional hearings and defense contractors that makes up the informal defense establishment. They carry weight because of their experience, and the expectation that they speak with the voice of disinterested patriotism.
In a way, then, generals never retire. When they become openly political, endorsing one candidate or denouncing another, they create the notion that the military is a constituency -- the unfortunate word reportedly used by the late Secretary of Defense Les Aspin -- rather than a neutral instrument of policy. In 2000, there was far too much suspicion on one side, and glee on the other, at the likely impact of military votes on the outcome of the election. If the public becomes accustomed to thinking of the military as the uniformed equivalent of the National Education Association, it will be treated as such by politicians -- romanced or paid off, marginalized or denounced as circumstances suggest.
The endorsing generals have an effect on the troops. The captains and sergeants get the impression that although more discretion is allowed retirees than active-duty soldiers, there's nothing wrong with a military person articulating partisan views. And from there the leap is not so long to obstructing policies with which one disagrees, while the distance lengthens to becoming a professional who can be relied upon to give objective advice on sensitive matters.
If recently retired generals get into the endorsing business, it must be assumed that a secretary of defense will have, as one of his considerations in promoting or easing out a general officer, the likelihood that today's four star is tomorrow's political problem. That, in turn, paves the way for a flag officer cadre led either by political sympathizers or colorless bureaucrats, which spells death to the brutal but confidential candor that strategic decisions require.
It makes all the sense in the world for retired general officers to offer public commentary on professional matters, although history suggests that even on military affairs that judgment is far from infallible. But as judges of political horseflesh they have nothing over their fellow citizens. If as a class the retired flags had a keen political sense and a keener appetite one might expect them to run for the House, Senate and governors' mansions, or at the very least seek second careers in political journalism, polling, and the party organizations. They do not, and for a good reason: They are not, by and large, very good at domestic politics, and they recoil at its necessary ambiguities and deceits.
Molded by a hierarchic, orderly, technical culture, they have decidedly mixed records at the open and chaotic business of running for office and governing. Which explains why more than one retired general has evinced an embarrassing buyer's regret at endorsing one candidate or the other. There are exceptions, no doubt, to the rule that generals make poor political activists. Who would want to exclude Eisenhower from American politics? Then again, does anyone really think there is an Eisenhower out there? And are the records of Grant, MacArthur, LeMay and Westmoreland so inspiring that retired flags should be encouraged to plunge into politics?
The politicians will woo the flags: In the contest for office, most scruples mean little. As in so many other cases, the burden falls upon the retired generals themselves to hold the line, to adhere to standards of professional conduct that civilians may not even understand. The vast majority of the retired flag officers remain discreetly silent during political campaigns, because they know that partisanship does no good to the armed services or the country. The U.S. has more than enough real battles for the military to fight, and the political neutrality and discretion of our generals is too valuable at any time -- but during wartime above all -- to jeopardize for passing partisan advantage.
Mr. Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor, is author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime" (Free Press, 2002).
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USA - BASIC TRAINING GETS TOUGHER (AUG 09/S&S)
STARS AND STRIPES -- The U.S. Army is making sweeping changes in its
training program for new recruits, reports the Pacific edition of the
Stars and Stripes.
As front lines become less defined, soldiers who have traditionally been
far from the fighting, such as clerks, cooks, truck drivers and
communications technicians, now frequently find themselves in the middle
of the action. With the Army being stretched thin by long-term deployments, soldiers are frequently in combat zones within 30 days of being assigned to their unit, leaving little time for additional in-unit training.
The Army's new training includes more live-fire exercises, urban combat
practice and sleeping in the field.
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Woof All:
FWIW IMHO what is happening now in Najaf could play a pivotal role in IIG establishing itself as a legitimate govt and thus as the mechanism through which the Iraq nation can plan and hold the elections which will return it to full sovereignty.
Our troops' courage, skill, professionalism and blood are what enable all this to happen.
My profound thanks and gratitude to them as I live a free, safe and happy day with my family and friends.
Crafty Dog
==================================
'We Have Been Fighting Nonstop'
Some of the most heated clashes in Najaf have shifted to the streets of the Old City.
By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer
NAJAF, Iraq ? On the top floor of the "Apache Hilton" in downtown Najaf, U.S. Army sniper Paul Buki ended a 24-hour shift by collapsing into a pile of dust, bullet casings and empty military food packages.
From this penthouse perch in a half-built tourist hotel ? seized and nicknamed by U.S. troops ? the Army staff sergeant has an unobstructed view of Najaf's Old City, a historic district in Iraq's holiest city that over the last week has been transformed into a war zone.
With the gold-domed Imam Ali Mosque in the background, smoke and flames rose Tuesday from a building still burning more than 15 hours after the previous night's fighting. Two Apache helicopters swooped down through a deserted street and disappeared behind a three-story building. Mortar rounds, tank cannons and machine guns boomed and cracked throughout the day as U.S. forces battled followers of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr.
"It's been intense here," said Buki, covered in a ghostly white dust after a night spent huddled behind a brick wall, firing at militants and reporting hostile positions from his fifth-floor lookout.
In the struggle to remove Sadr's militia from the mosque, some of the most heated clashes have shifted from the cemetery where major fighting began to a neighborhood of the Old City just south of the shrine.
"We have been fighting nonstop," said Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, whose 800 soldiers have been battling street by street to seize control of the area south and east of the mosque.
In the cramped ancient city, hand-to-hand combat has been unavoidable.
During a raid Monday, U.S. troops swarmed into the basement of a school building now occupied by the militia. The troops were unaware that the militia was using tunnels to move in and out.
Catching each other by surprise, a 240-pound Army sergeant, a native of Samoa, and a 130-pound militia member found themselves face to face, said Maj. Tim Karcher, operations officer of the unit.
"He beat the snot out of the guy," Karcher said.
But during the fight, another militia member tossed a grenade into the basement, killing a comrade and seriously injuring the sergeant, who was evacuated for treatment.
On average, Rainey said, his troops are attacked about three dozen times a day with mortar shells, small arms and rocket-propelled grenades.
"We see a lot of activity during the day," said 1st Lt. Jimmy Campbell, part of the scout platoon based in the commandeered hotel. Not long after he spoke, a militant sniper's bullet pinged into the lobby where troops were hanging out. It hit a wall.
"We're used to it," Campbell said with a shrug. "They never hit anything."
There are no showers and no chow hall. Soldiers eat MREs ? meals ready to eat ? and shower with bottles of water, heated by the 115-degree temperatures.
Out front is a sign, "Apache Hilton," hand-painted by Alpha Company, which inhabited the space before moving closer to the mosque a few days ago.
As Rainey moved his soldiers closer to the holy site, he noticed that the resistance increased. The artillery used in the mortar attacks went from 60-millimeter to 120-millimeter.
So far, no one in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment has been killed in action.
The toll on the neighborhood, however, has been heavy.
It's unclear how many civilians have died; the military does not compile figures. Iraqi Health Ministry officials say dozens of civilians have been killed since the fighting in Najaf resumed nearly three weeks ago.
Though some areas of the city have returned to normal, residents in parts of the Old City say they live in fear. Sidewalks are covered with broken glass from storefront windows. The bombing has exposed interior walls of buildings. A traffic cop's stand lies toppled in the street.
Rainey said that U.S. troops had taken "excruciating pains" to avoid damaging civilian buildings but that it was unavoidable.
"It's like playing tackle football in a hallway," he said.
Over the last day, the militants' resistance appears to have waned, officials said.
U.S. troops were optimistic that Sadr's militia was starting to fold.
"They've stopped maneuvering on us," Karcher said. "We have to go out there and find them."
The militants' tactics are also growing more frantic, U.S. officials said.
Last weekend, militia fighters tied an explosive device to a donkey cart, shoved the donkey into the street and then used a long string to detonate the device from around the corner.
"It's a sign that they're getting more desperate," Karcher said.
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From an internet friend-- Crafty
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Moreover, I've attached a document with an article on pages 3 and 4 which includes a very brief discussion of the Bataan death march. Had the author not escaped from the Japanese when taken prisoner as a boy in the Philippines, doubtless I would not be around today to write these words.
(The document is the May 2003 issue of a newsletter produced by the Ramada Express Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, which is "proud to be the founder and Home of the American Heroes Veteran Program." More at <<http://www.ramadaexpress.com/veterans.html>>, <<http://www.ramadaexpress.com/eagle.html>>, <<http://www.ramadaexpress.com/veterans-program.html>>, <<http://www.ramadaexpress.com/american-heroes.html>>, and <<http://www.ramadaexpress.com/american-heroes2.html>>.)
Back to the Japanese in WWII -- from <<http://history.acusd.edu/gen/st/~ehimchak/POWs.html>> (all bolding is my emphasis):
"In World War II, they did not believe enemy POWs deserved humane treatment, and would not allow the ICRC to inspect the POW camps believing that they were only there on propaganda and spy missions. Their soldiers were taught that capture would bring dishonor to themselves and their families. This partially explains why percentage wise, so few Japanese were captured. They would rather die heroically than live in disgrace. By 1942 only a few thousand Japanese were in captivity versus over 200,000 Allied troops.
While the Allies believed Japan agreed to abide by the 1929 Geneva Convention, they in fact only agreed to do so as long as it did not interfere with their military policy. General Tojo Hideki, Japan's war minister and premier, said in 1942, POWs would be expected to do all that Japan's citizens were do to. In reality their treatment was much worse. POWs were subjected to strict discipline, arbitrary beatings, inadequate food and medicine, and executed if they tried to escape. The Japanese were not concerned about retribution to their own soldiers because they were considered non-persons, due to allowing themselves to be captured. When the Red Cross tried to publicize worldwide about the treatment POWs were receiving at the hands of the Japanese, they denied it. When the Japanese realized they were loosing the war, their abuse became worse and they murdered or caused the deaths of thousands of POWs. They did this because they knew liberation was near and they did not want the POWs to be liberated."
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Nice foto montage
http://www.clermontyellowribbon.com/untilthenflash.htm
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Woof All:
There was a foto of the President with Mike McNaugton on a run together which came with the following email but I don't know how to post the foto.
Crafty
----------------------------------------------
Subject: Fw: A promise kept]
Attached is a picture of one of my best friends in the Army, Mike McNaughton. We were privates together in 1990-1994. He stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, one mile with the president. Not something you'll see in the news, but seeing the president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God bless him.
CPT Justin P. Dodge, MD
Flight Surgeon, 1-2 AVN RGT
Medical Corps, U.S. Army
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Subject: FW: Statement of RADM William L. Schachte, Jr.]
A new voice has been added to the debate over the
circumstances surrounding Sen. John Kerry's first Purple Heart.
William Schachte, who was a lieutenant in the Navy during Kerry's Vietnam tour - and who later rose to the rank of Rear Admiral - has released a statement describing the events of December 2-3, 1968, when Kerry received a minor shrapnel wound for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. What follows is Schachte's statement, in full.
Statement of RADM William L. Schachte, Jr. USN (Ret.)
August 27, 2004
As was true of all "Swiftees," I volunteered to serve in Vietnam and was assigned to Coastal Division 14 for a normal tour of duty. I was a Lieutenant serving as Operations Officer and second in command at Coastal Division 14 when Lieutenant (junior grade) John Kerry reported to us in mid-November, 1968. Lt. (jg) Kerry was an Officer-in-Charge (O-in-C) under training in preparing to be assigned as one of our Swift Boat O-in-C's.
At some point following President Johnson's announcement of the suspension of bombing in North Vietnam in March 1968, we were directed to become more aggressive in seeking to find and destroy or disrupt the enemy in our operating area. As part of this effort, I conceived a new operation that became known as "Skimmer OPS." The concept was simple. A 15-foot Boston Whaler was sent into an area where, based on coordinated intelligence, North Vietnamese cadre and Viet Cong were
expected to be meeting or where, for example, concentrations of enemy forces might be involved in the movement of arms or munitions. We were to draw fire and quickly get out of the area. This would allow more concentrated firepower to be brought against the enemy forces we had been able to identify.
These operations were carried out only in "hot" areas and well away from any villages or populated areas. A Swift Boat would tow the skimmer to the general area of operations, and the ambush team would then board the skimmer and proceed to the designated area of operations. The Swift Boat would be riding shotgun and standing off, occasionally out of sight, to provide fire support and long-range communications. The Skimmer was powered by an outboard motor, and we carried an FM radio, handheld flares, an M-60 machine gun with a
bipod mount, and an M-16 mounted with a starlight scope. If the night was heavily overcast, we brought an M-14 mounted with an infrared scope. We also carried an M-79 single-shot grenade launcher. In addition to our combat gear and flak jackets, we often carried .38-caliber pistols.
The operation consisted of allowing the skimmer to drift silently
along shorelines or riverbanks to look or listen for sounds of enemyactivity. If activity was identified, we would open fire with our automatic weapons, and if we received fire, we would depart the area as quickly as possible, leaving it to air support or mortar fire from a Swift Boat standing off at a distance to carry out an attack.
I commanded each of these Skimmer operations up to and including the one on the night in question involving Lt. (jg) Kerry. On each of these operations, I was in the skimmer manning the M-60 machine gun.
I took with me one other officer and an enlisted man to operate the outboard motor. I wanted another officer because officers, when not on patrol, were briefed daily on the latest intelligence concerning our sector of operations and were therefore more familiar with the current intelligence. Additionally, at these daily briefings, officers debriefed on their patrol areas after returning to port.
On the night of December 2-3, we conducted one of these operations, and Lt. (jg) Kerry accompanied me. Our call sign for that operation was "Batman." I have no independent recollection of the identity of the enlisted man, who was operating the outboard motor. Sometime during the early morning hours, I thought I detected some movement inland. At the time we were so close to land that we could hear water
lapping on the shoreline. I fired a hand-held flare, and upon it
bursting and illuminating the surrounding area, I thought I saw
movement. I immediately opened fire with my M-60. It jammed after a brief burst. Lt. (jg) Kerry also opened fire with his M-16 on automatic, firing in the direction of my tracers. His weapon also jammed. As I was trying to clear my weapon, I heard the distinctive sound of the M-79 being fired and turned to see Lt. (jg) Kerry holding the M-79 from which he had just launched a round. We received no return fire of any kind nor were there any muzzle flashes from the beach. I directed the outboard motor operator to clear the area.
Upon returning to base, I informed my commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Grant Hibbard, of the events, informing him of the details of the operation and that we had received no enemy fire. I did not file an "after action" report, as one was only required when there was hostile fire. Soon thereafter, Lt. (jg) Kerry requested that he be put in for a Purple Heart as a result of a small piece of shrapnel removed from his arm that he attributed to the just-completed mission. I advised Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard that I could not support the request because there
was no hostile fire. The shrapnel must have been a fragment from the M-79 that struck Lt. (jg) Kerry, because he had fired the M-79 too close to our boat. Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard denied Lt. (jg) Kerry's request.
Lt. (jg) Kerry detached our division a few days later to be
reassigned to another division. I departed Vietnam approximately three weeks later, and Lt. Cmdr. Hibbard followed shortly thereafter. It was not until years later that I was surprised to learn that Lt. (jg) Kerry had been awarded a Purple Heart for this night.
I did not see Lt. (jg) Kerry in person again for almost 20 years.
Sometime in 1988, while I was on Capitol Hill, I ran into him in the basement of the Russell Senate Office Building. I was at that time a Rear Admiral and in uniform. He was about 20 paces away, waiting to catch the underground subway. In a fairly loud voice I called out to him, "Hey, John." He turned, looked at me, came over and said, "Batman!" We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, agreed to have lunch sometime in the future, and parted ways. We have not been together since that day.
In March of this year, I was contacted by one of my former swift boat colleagues concerning Douglas Brinkley's book about Senator Kerry, "Tour of Duty." I told him that I had not read it. He faxed me a copy of the pages relating to the action on the night of December 2-3, 1968. I was astonished by Senator Kerry's rendition of the facts of that night. Notably, Lt. (jg) Kerry had himself in charge of the operation, and I was not mentioned at all. He also claimed that he was wounded by hostile fire.
None of this is accurate. I know, because I was not only in the boat, but I was in command of the mission. He was never more than several feet away from me at anytime during the operation that night. It is inconceivable that any commanding officer would put an officer in training, who had been in country only a couple of weeks, in charge of such an ambush operation. Had there been enemy action that night, there would have been an after action report filed, which I would have been responsible for filing.
I have avoided talking to media about this issue for months. But, because of the recent media attention, I felt I had to step up to recount my personal experiences concerning this incident.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.beirut-memorial.org/
October 23, 1983 - A suicide bomber drives a truck into the Beirut Marine barracks, murdering 242 American peacekeepers, while they slept. Simultaneously, another suicide bomber murdered 58 French peacekeepers on a French military base.
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Our best Howl of Respect to our troops in Fallujah (and elsewhere):
While driving along today in peace and tranquility I thought of our troops going into battle today in Fallujah.
I take this moment to thank them, and all the others elsewhere in this struggle, for what they do for all of us.
Crafty Dog of The Unorganized Militia
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Summary
Shortly after its opening strikes, the assault against Al Fallujah moved into a phase in which U.S. and Iraqi troops gained a tactical advantage. The capture of several key points within the city would make it possible for the coalition troops to push insurgents into a corner or, at the very least, divide the city and restrict the guerrillas' movements. The pace of the attack as it continues will reveal the political climate surrounding the military maneuvers.
Analysis
The joint U.S.-Iraqi assault against Al Fallujah has begun. After a lengthy preparation, troops moved quickly from the operation's opening strikes into what seems to be their main thrust into the rebel-held city.
The coalition forces' moves have put them in a position to back the insurgents into a corner. The next maneuvers in the operation depend on whether the insurgents will give up any further ground -- and the rate of those maneuvers will depend on the political climate in the city.
U.S. forces have taken two key bridges over the Euphrates River at the western end of the city. Between the entrances of those bridges is Al Fallujah's largest hospital, which U.S. and Iraqi forces have captured. The hospital has several tactical advantages. As one of the tallest buildings in the city, it provides a good observation point -- especially for troops to watch travelers on the main road through town or on the bridges on either side of the hospital. The capture of the hospital also made it unavailable to insurgents as a base of operations and as a medical facility. Al Fallujah's citizens -- guerrillas and civilians alike -- will have to depend on three smaller hospitals that remain in rebel hands inside the city.
Click here to enlarge the image.
The bridges and hospital were secured, along with a key railhead to the north of the city, just before U.S. and Iraqi forces thrust into two neighborhoods in the city proper -- the northwestern Jolan district and the northeastern Askari district.
Whether U.S. forces intended this effect, the maneuvers they have conducted thus far will put them in a very tactically advantageous position. After seizing the two key bridges -- thereby blocking off the westbound Baghdad Highway -- and pushing south with two assault heads from the northeast and northwest, the U.S.military can push insurgent forces toward the Baghdad Highway running from east to west through the center of Al Fallujah.
That highway is wide enough that close air support assets, such as A-10 attack planes and AC-130 gunships, could be used with little danger of collateral damage. The highway makes a perfect track for strafing attacks against those who attempt to move south across it. There have been reports that during the preparation for the U.S.-Iraqi attack, Al Fallujah's insurgents established a tunnel system in the city -- possibly under the main roads and possibly to avoid just such an air assault.
The scenario of a U.S. "flush maneuver" designed to drive the insurgents south into a "kill zone" -- the Baghdad Highway -- hinges on one simple thing: whether the insurgents can be made to give up their ground and be driven toward the highway. If the insurgents dig their heels into the neighborhoods throughout northern Al Fallujah, they could either repel the U.S. assault or be killed where they stand.
If the military cannot drive the insurgents toward the Baghdad Highway, then it will likely control the highway with air support in an attempt to bisect the city and effectively split the defending insurgents' strongholds. This would help the U.S. forces keep the guerrillas from moving their manpower and heavy weapons from the north to the south and vice versa.
There have not been reports of troops in the southern half of Al Fallujah -- as there were when U.S. troops pushed in from the southeast during the April assault against the city. This does not mean there is no activity in that area; it only means there have been no official statements or other reports about troops in that area. If there is something going on in southern Al Fallujah, it will be some time -- possibly not until the end of the entire operation -- before the activity is made public.
At this point, the initial assault against Al Fallujah is not over, nor has the fighting reached its apex. As of this writing, it seems U.S. forces are maintaining their tactical initiative against the insurgents. However, reports of counter U.S. thrusts or insurgent attacks have not filtered in -- other than an unconfirmed report from Al Jazeera that an Apache helicopter was shot down -- and thus the picture remains incomplete.
The momentum of the maneuvers in Al Fallujah should be noted. The speed at which the assault continues will indicate the nature of the operation's political tactics. A slower assault with more pauses for logistics and rest will indicate more willingness to continue negotiations with leaders in Al Fallujah as the fighting goes on. An aggressive, fast-paced campaign will indicate the opposite -- that Washington and Baghdad are no longer interested in negotiations but want a military victory over the insurgent hotbed of Al Fallujah.
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http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/11/fallujah-again-although-us-military.html
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http://www.thegreenside.com/story.asp?ContentID=11004
Email from Dave - Nov 3, 04
Dear Dad -
As you have no doubt been watching, we have had our hands full around Fallujah. It would seem as if the final reckoning is coming. The city has been on a consistent down hill spiral since we were ordered out in April. It's siren call for extremists and criminals has only increased steadily and the instability and violence that radiates out of the town has expanded exponentially. If there is another city in the world that contains more terrorists, I would be surprised. From the last two years, I just don't see a way that we can succeed in Iraq without reducing this threat. The cost of continuing on without taking decisive action is too high to dwell on.
The enemy inside the town have come to fight and kill Americans. Nothing will sate their bloodlust and hatred other than to kill everyone of us or at least die trying. It is hard to fathom as a Westerner as rational thought would dictate that we will only be here for a relatively short blip in their history and while we are here, billions of dollars in investments will pour in and opportunity that is beyond comprehension will open up for anyone willing to work. This is not Kansas and this enemy does not think like that.
If we build a school or clinic, they destroy it. They would rather deny medical care or education for the children of the citizens who live nearby than to have any symbol of the West in general and America specifically among them. It is hard to comprehend. Frankly, we are done trying.
For eight months, we have been on our chain. The enemy has fooled itself misinterpreting our humanity and restraint for lack of will and courage. For eight months, we have watched Marines, Soldiers and Sailors maimed and killed by invisible cowards hiding behind some wall or in a canal as he detonates another IED. For eight months, we have been witness to suicidal sociopaths driving vehicles laden with explosives into crowds of Iraqis and into our own convoys.
Just last week, we lost another nine Marines killed and an equal number of wounded as the result of some ignorant extremists who was able to convince himself that killing himself and as many Americans as possible would send him to paradise where he could finally get his virgins.
Now, their own ignorance and arrogance will be their undoing. They believe that they can hold Fallujah. In fact, they have come from all over to be part of its glorious defense. I cannot describe the atmosphere that exists in the Regiment right now. Of course the men are nervous but I think they are more nervous that we will not be allowed to clean the rats nest out and instead will be forced to continue operating as is.
Its as if a window of opportunity has opened and everyone just wants to get on with it before it closes. The Marines know the enemy has massed and has temporarily decided to stay and fight. For the first time, the men feel as though we may be allowed to do what needs to be done. If the enemy wants to sit in his citadel and try to defend it against the Marine Corps and some very hard Soldiers... then the men want to execute before the enemy sobers up and flees.
It may come off as an exceptionally bellicose perspective but where the Marines live and operate is a war zone in the starkest reality. When the Marines leave the front gate on an operation or patrol, someone within direct line of sight of that gate is trying to kill them. All have lost friends and watched as the enemy hides within his sanctuary that has been allowed out of what one must assume is political necessity. The enemy has been given every advantage by our sense of morality and restraint and by a set of operational rules that we are constrained to operate under. The Marines feel like their time has come and we will finally be ordered to do what must be done and be given the latitude to do it. Even though the price will be high, there is not a man here that would chose status quo over paying the price.
Every day, the enemy takes more hostages, assassinates developing Iraqi leaders and savagely beats suspected collaborators. I will give you just one recent example that happened last week. One of our patrols was moving down a street when they saw what looked like a fight. The Marines closed with the scene. It was a family that had come to Iraq on religious pilgrimage that was taken hostage and was being taken into Fallujah. The muj stopped for some reason and the father began fighting. The Marines interdicted and captured two of the kidnappers. Two more ran and the Marines could not get a shot without fear of killing/wounding others.
Every day, insurgents from inside Fallujah drive out and wait for Iraqis that work on our bases. Once the Iraqis leave they are stopped. The lucky ones are savagely beaten. The unfortunate ones are killed. A family that had fled Fallujah in order to get away from the fighting recently tried to return. When they got to their home, they found it taken over by terrorists (very common). When the patriarch showed the muj his deed in order to prove that the house was his, they took the old man out into the street and beat him senseless in front of his family.
Summary executions are common. Think about that. Summary executions inside Fallujah happen with sobering frequency. We have been witness to the scene on a number of occasions. Three men are taken from the trunk of a car and are made to walk to a ditch where they are shot. Bodies are found in the Euphrates without heads washed downstream from Fallujah. To date we have been allowed to do nothing.
I have no idea the numbers of beheadings that have occurred in Fallujah since I have been here. I have no idea the number of hostages that have ended up in Fallujah since we have been here. I just don't know that Americans would be able to comprehend the number anyway. Unfortunately, the situation has only gotten worse. There is no hope for any type of reasoned solution with an enemy like this.
Once again, we are being asked by citizens who have fled the city to go in and take the city back. They are willing for us to literally rubble the place in order to kill the terrorists within. Don't get me wrong, there are still many inside the town that support the terrorists and we cannot expect to be thanked publicly if we do take the city. There is a sense of de ja vu with the refugees telling us where their houses are and asking us to bomb them because the muj have taken them over. We heard the same thing in April only to end up letting the people down. Some no doubt have paid with their lives. The "good" people who may ultimately buy into a peaceful and prosperous Iraq are again asking us to do what we know must be done.
The Marines understand and are eager to get on with it. The only lingering fear in them is that we will be ordered to stop again. I don't know if this is going to happen but if it happens soon, I will write you when its over,
Love,
Dave
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Col. (ret) Ralph Peters:
FINISHING FALLUJAH
By RALPH PETERS
November 9, 2004 -- THE most decisive battle since the fall of Baghdad has begun. Thousands of U.S. Marines, Army units and Iraqi government forces have moved into Fallujah. Now we need to finish the job swiftly, no matter the cost in death and destruction, before the will of our civilian leaders weakens again. Stopping even one building short of the annihilation of the terrorists and insurgents would be a defeat. Al-Jazeera will pull out the propaganda stops, inventing American atrocities. The BBC will pressure Tony Blair to rein in our president. Iraqi faction leaders will press Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to accept a cease-fire for "talks."
The weight of the free world is on the shoulders of our Marines and
soldiers - and on the backs of our Iraqi allies. They've got to wrap up
major operations in a week.
We can do it. Our troops are the best in the world. The early phases of
combat last night showed solid intelligence work and adept planning. The
terrorists spent months preparing defensive traps, but our combat
engineers - key members of the team - blew right through the roadside bombs and barricades. We're off to an impressive start.
U.S. and Iraqi forces are attacking on multiple axes, keeping the terrorists off balance. Key sites within the city already have been seized - including a hospital that cared more about propaganda than its patients. Iraqi national forces have performed solidly thus far. A win in Fallujah will mark the birth of their new nation - one that never really existed in the past, when Iraq was held together only through oppression.
Significantly, the main assault began after darkness fell. Following months
of preparatory airstrikes and unpublicized raids by U.S. special operations
forces, the night attack instantly put the terrorists at a disadvantage.
Although our enemies may have acquired a few night-vision devices, our
troops are superbly equipped and trained as night stalkers.
In the irregular wars of the past, the guerrillas owned the hours of
darkness. Not anymore. G.I. Joe is the Midnight Master.
Expect 'round-the-clock ground and air operations that give the terrorists
no rest and deprive them of the initiative. Our troops know how important
this battle is. They'll fight ferociously. The Marines, especially, are
itching for revenge after being deprived of victory for political reasons
last April. They only need to be allowed to do the job right this time.
It's up to President Bush not to let them down. No matter what happens, no matter who complains or balks, no matter the false accusations from
Al-Jazeera and the BBC, our president needs to stand firm until the job is
done. By quitting in April, we created the terrorist city-state of Fallujah.
Now we need to shut it down for good.
Meanwhile, be prepared for media monkey business. No matter how well things go, we'll hear self-righteous gasps over the inevitable U.S. casualties. The first time a rifle company consolidates a position long enough to bring up ammunition, we'll hear that the attack has bogged down. If commanders on the ground decide to shift forces from one axis of advance to another, we'll be told that our troops couldn't make progress against "dug-in terrorists."
If four Iraqi units out of five perform well in battle, but one outfit fails
or flees, we'll be bombarded with reports insisting that our training
program hasn't worked, that the Iraqis aren't really with us, that the
interim government has no grass-roots support (sort of what the Dems said about George W. Bush).
And if Operation Phantom Fury goes miraculously well, we'll be criticized
for waiting too long to go in, for exaggerating the threat and for knocking
over a stop sign with a tank.
The global media lost the U.S. presidential election. They'll do their best
to win the Second Battle of Fallujah for the terrorists.
The truth is that war is cruel. And difficult. And complex. It's never as
smooth as it is in a film or a video game. In real life, heroes get killed,
too - sometimes by friendly fire. Mistakes are made, despite rigorous
planning. The enemy shoots back. And sometimes the enemy gets lucky. Tragedy is war's inseparable companion.
We cannot foresee all the details of the combat ahead. The fight for
Fallujah may prove easier than we feared, or tougher than we hoped. Time will tell. Meanwhile, don't let your view be swayed by the crisis of the hour. Have faith in our troops and their leaders.
In return, I can promise you one thing: If we don't fail our troops, they
won't fail us.
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Here is a woman, married for years, trying to understand why her husband would volunteer to join a National Guard unit that would be going to war. Maybe her thoughts can help others understand what being in the miltary, or having served, is all about.
Marshall-Bowler
Gregory, MI
I didn?t understand until that Sunday evening as we drove down the road. I had tried to get it. I had tried to understand why the man who hated to be separated from me for even a day would be willing to pack up his duffle bag and go to a place that was everything he hated in this world.
My husband is one of a dying breed. He grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in a small town. His address in the town of McMillan was ?Just past Helmer. It?s the white house with the five big maple trees and two Farmall tractors out front.? He was born in that white house, learned to drive on the tractors and spent his childhood playing underneath the maple trees as he dreamed of the big city. He is not a ?city slicker? as he calls me. This man loves the small farming towns and is outside of his element in the city. He hates the heat and can?t live without trees; many trees. The desert and intense heat is not something he has ever had a desire to visit.
When he explained to me that he was planning to transfer to a new unit within the Michigan Army National Guard, I understood why. The unit he had spent the past five or so years was going to be disbanded and made over. He would no longer be a mechanic but a truck driver. A man who even in his off time visits the dairy farm behind us and throws hay for the heck of it, is not a one who can sit and drive a truck all day. So, when he explained he would be changing units, it made perfect sense to me.
What did not make sense to me was the unit he had decided to transfer too. He chose one that he knew was already on alert. I was horrified at best. While alert is not a guarantee of mobilization, it is a fairly safe bet to expect within a short time that unit will receive orders for parts unknown. I asked him why on earth he would voluntarily move to unit that is very likely destined to find itself in the thick of Operation Enduring Freedom. He just looked at me, obviously a bit startled by my horror and explained ?Well, I am going to go anyway, sooner or later. I might as well get it done and over with.?
After over seven years of marriage I know when I am being sold a bunch of bull and this was more bull than he had ever tried selling me before. I wasn?t buying a single word. Get it done and over with; not quite. This was the same man I had to beg, plead and throw a fit to keep from finding a unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan after 911. This had nothing to do with getting anything done and over.
While, I did not understand why he felt the need to do this, I did understand he believed this was something he must do. I hated it and cursed myself as I promised to stand behind him and support whatever decision he had made. We had discussed the various units that had his MOS available, where they had been located, which units he had some contact with during AT, which units he liked and so on. We had also discussed which ones looked good for mobilization in the near future before he made any decision about leaving his old unit. When he asked me where I wanted him to go, I told him not to ask me. I was terrified that any suggestion I made would land him in a unit that would be find itself mobilized, I also did not want to make him feel guilty for doing what he felt was right.
I knew I could not live with the guilt if my input had any bearing on his choices. I promised to stand behind any decision he made and left it at that. It didn?t take long before I was kicking myself for taking such a stand. I wanted to scream, cry and beg for him to choose another unit. As tempting as it was, I knew that if he changed his mind merely to please me, we would both have to live with the regret for the rest of our lives. That kind of regret I can live without.
I spent weeks trying to comprehend why he would purposely put himself in harms way. I asked every question I could think of, never getting a satisfactory answer. I even started to ask other members of the military. Everyone I came across from Vietnam Vets to other members of the National Guard found themselves being questioned about what drives them to head into a combat zone. Nobody could give me an answer that helped me understand.
Many times husband reminded me that while he was in service during Panama and Operation Desert Storm for reasons beyond his own control he never actually left the United States. Being a civilian, this sounded to me like a good thing. He would just smile at me with a look of amusement and say ?It?s all about the patch Honey.? My husband has never been one to worry about awards or patches, but the combat patch was more than one more thing to sew onto his uniform. For him it was something much bigger. If that patch was all this was about, I would happily go to a surplus store and find him one: I knew better.
One Sunday evening after having dinner with our brother-in-law and his wife we were driving home. Somehow we ended up on the topic of my greatest pet peeve: The phrase ?Weekend Warrior?. I have always felt those two words are the most insulting thing one can say to any soldier. I had spent a good part of the past several years as a member of family support for his unit. I knew the men and women of his unit, I knew about their past military history. I knew about the phone call they received the day after Christmas several years before. Their holiday celebrations took quite a turn as they were informed they were being mobilized for Operation Desert Storm. These men and women had served their country in so many ways; they have all gone above and beyond one weekend a month and two weeks a year. They had served in combat and still most American?s had no idea that any of them have ever done anything but assist during a flood or a local crisis.
Somewhere in that conversation my husband had become very quiet. He looked over at me and I could see something in his eyes, something that I had not recognized before that day. He looked at me and began to speak in a voice that chilled me to the bone. The quiet for some reason seemed ear shattering ?A Weekend Warrior but a full time soldier.? I didn?t get a chance to respond this very simple comment that suddenly spoke volumes before he began to explain. ?When I was at PLDC, there was a Colonel there who spoke at graduation.? The look on his face assured that he had my full attention. The man who usually had a glimpse of humor in his eyes was deadly serious as he continued ?He told us that he saw his civilian job as his part time job and the Guard was his full time job. At the time I thought he was crazy. The check I got each month didn?t feed my family or pay my bills. But now??..? There was sadness in his eyes. September 11, 2001 had changed us all in many ways; it had changed my husband?s ideals and his reasoning for remaining a soldier. It had given him a different sense of pride and a much stronger belief in his duty to his country.
My husband didn?t need to finish that sentence; he had actually explained it to me many times and in many ways over the previous 3 years. The man that had been a soldier first in the regular Army and then a reservist with the Guard was in for more than the fun or because he would get a very small retirement in comparison to his retirement from his civilian job. This man is a soldier at heart. It is who he is, it defines him. He is a Carpenter by trade, an incredibly talented craftsman; yet, he does not take even a fraction of the pride in his skill as he does when he puts on his uniform and shines his boots. When a friend questioned his reasoning for choosing a unit that is already on alert he explained. ?The easiest thing in the world is knowing what is right; the hard part is doing what is right.? Finally I understood.
My husband like so many others who give up their weekends and summer vacations to fufill a promise they have made to the citizens of the United States is also willing to take a large cut in pay and separate himself from those he loves to join his other family: The family of fellow Weekend Warriors who no matter where they are, what they are wear or what they are doing are always soldiers.
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An American Hero
More than a few folks predicted that after the elections there would be a shift in the tone of coverage of the Iraq war. Whatever the reason, credit the NY Times for publishing this profile of an American hero, Sgt Rowe Slayton.
FORWARD OPERATING BASE HEADHUNTER, Iraq - Wearing 60 pounds of body armor over his desert camouflage uniform and cradling a black M-4 rifle, Sgt. Rowe Slayton looks every bit the typical Army infantryman in Iraq.
He is not.
An Air Force Academy graduate and former F-15 fighter pilot, then-Major Slayton left the Air National Guard 17 years ago to run his civilian law practice in Denver and rear his six children. But his life changed not long after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when he enlisted in the Arkansas Army National Guard in what he says was an act of patriotism.
Now Sergeant Slayton, 53, is leading three other soldiers young enough to be his sons on an infantry fire team that regularly runs combat patrols in the Haifa Street section of Baghdad, one of the riskiest missions in the Iraqi capital. More than a third of the 119 soldiers in his Guard unit, Company C of the First Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, have been awarded Purple Hearts for being wounded in action since they arrived here in April.
"That's one club I don't necessarily want to join," said Sergeant Slayton, in full battle gear one recent afternoon while his platoon acted as a quick-response force to back up another unit on patrol.
Pentagon officials have been expressing fear that the sweeping call-up of tens of thousands of Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers for yearlong tours in Iraq and Afghanistan may soon cripple recruiting and retention in America's part-time force. But Sergeant Slayton's story echoes those of a small number of other reservists with prior military service who have answered the nation's call to arms.
Military personnel specialists say that his case is unusual in several other ways too: the long gap since his previous service, his willingness to enlist as an Army sergeant after a career as an Air Force officer and fighter pilot and his willingness to volunteer for infantry duty when the Army is searching for every able-bodied foot soldier to battle the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It all raises the question, "Why?" to which Sergeant Slayton smiles and patiently tries to explain, obviously not for the first time.
"This country has been so good to me," he said. "I just have so many things to be grateful for. It's an honor to be here."
<...>
Sergeant Slayton is a self-effacing man who initially declined to be interviewed for this article and agreed only after being assured that his fire-team comrades would be included.
<...>
For a high-flying aviator, the life of a muddy-boots ground-pounder has been an adjustment. "It's taught me humility," Sergeant Slayton said. "I'm not at the bottom, but I can sure see it."
Then again, there are not many Army sergeants whose college classmates are now senior generals in Washington and in Japan.
Sergeant Slayton graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1973. He rose quickly through the ranks, first as a T-37 instructor and then as a pilot in the first operational F-15 fighter squadron at Langley Air Force Base, Va.
But he said he became disenchanted with the military. It was during the Carter administration, and he was frustrated with cuts in military spending and capability. He left active duty to attend law school in Denver, but remained in the Air National Guard, commuting to a unit in Des Moines for seven years.
In 1987, he decided to leave the Guard. By then he was a major and more promotions seemed likely. But the cold war was winding down, and he had never been deployed overseas, much less seen combat. His family and law practice beckoned.
When the Persian Gulf crisis broke out in 1990, he looked into volunteering, but the war ended before anything came of that.
It was not until the Sept. 11 attacks that he again felt the calling. This time, he said, he was determined to find a combat unit. An Air Force recruiter told him that he had been out too long and had lost his officer's commission. "I was too old to fly anyway," he said.
On a trip to his summer home in Arkansas in 2002, he stopped at an Army National Guard armory in Arkadelphia, where a recruiter listened to Sergeant Slayton's story and promised him a spot if he passed a physical exam. That was easy for Sergeant Slayton, a stocky, muscular man with cropped graying hair. After nearly a year of bureaucratic snarls during which the Guard lost his records twice, Sergeant Slayton finally took his oath of service in June 2003 and reported for two weeks of annual training.
The deployment has taken its toll on his personal and professional life, as it has for many other reservists. His law partner married, and he had to close his practice. "Clients don't really like their lawyer being in Baghdad," he said. (Nonetheless, he has filed two appellate briefs from here.)
Sergeant Slayton sent his 11-year-old son, James, the only one of his children left at home, to live with the boy's mother. He said he regularly called and sent e-mail messages to his son, but had underestimated how difficult his deployment to a combat zone would be on James. Despite the danger and hard stares he and his unit get from many Iraqis in the streets, Sergeant Slayton said he still believed in America's mission in Iraq. "While out on patrol recently, I had an older woman walk alongside me," he said. "She kept her eyes straight ahead so no one could see she was talking to me, and she kept thanking me for being here."
An amazing story. There's a picture of Sgt Slayton on the Time's page, complete with DCU pilot and jump wings.
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Guerrilla's paradise
Staff correspondent Matthew McAllester goes with members of the 7th Calvary Division into the middle of Fallujah as they fight core rebels
BY MATTHEW McALLESTER
STAFF CORRESPONDET
November 14, 2004
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- From inside, the sound of an armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenade hitting a Bradley Fighting Vehicle is more tenor than bass, a bang rather than a boom. It produces an immediate cloud of dust and smoke, shakes the entire 30-ton vehicle like an empty beer can and is suddenly over, making the relief of still being alive almost instantaneous and the window of fear negligibly small.
"Go, go, driver, go," Sgt. Calvin Smalley of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment shouted on the radio, as soon as the explosion happened at 10:30 a.m. on Friday.
Specialist Eric Watson, the driver, said nothing. The vehicle didn't move.
"Is Watson hit?" Smalley shouted.
Suddenly, the Bradley roared into motion, taking off at pace as the gunner pounded the nearby buildings with the high explosive rounds on his 25-mm cannon.
"Hey, Watson, you hurt at all?" asked Sgt. Akram Abdelwahab, 28, speaking into a radio handset from the rear compartment of the Bradley.
"I got shrapnel in my ----," Watson radioed back. He drove on a bit more.
"We got a hole about four inches by four inches," he radioed. "I got shrapnel in my leg and in my ----."
That was Watson's second battle injury. He also was injured in the battle of Najaf in August. That's two Purple Hearts for the 22-year-old from Wirt County, W.Va.
Having established that Watson wasn't seriously injured, his buddies proceeded to roast him over the radio, teasing him as they do on a regular basis -- but this time with a sort of grudging admiration for his stoicism. He didn't suggest once that he wanted medical care, and he kept on driving.
"Hey Watson," Abdelwahab, from Spartanburg, S.C., asked him in a baritone, gravelly Southern drawl, "you missing your boyfriends?"
Although Abdelwahab is of a higher rank, Watson gave him a piece of his mind.
Well-equipped insurgents
The battle of Fallujah took on a menacing new dimension for the American military forces on Friday.
One thing more than any other convinced the 2nd Battalion and other U.S. forces early in the day that the forces they were now fighting in the south of the city are the hardcore of Fallujah's insurgents: They were using expensive and up-to-date armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, and they knew how to fire them accurately and in complex ambush formation. That implied considerable financial resources, efficient arms supplies and military experience and training. It had some military commanders wondering whether the rumors of expert Chechen rebels working as commanders in Fallujah might be true.
In total, four tanks and five Bradleys from the 2nd Battalion were damaged Friday by insurgents. None had been damaged before in the battle.
Commanders said they were happy at the progress of the vehicle-based Army units and the mainly infantry Marines working alongside each other,? but noted that the battle remained intense and hazardous for American and interim Iraqi government forces.
"It was a good fight," said Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion. "Little better fighters, little better equipment."
The upsurge in fighting had come with Friday's sun. Apache and the two other armored companies of the 2nd Battalion had left their base just outside Fallujah at 6 p.m. on Thursday, pushed into town and headed south.
There, in thus-far uncharted territory for the American forces in Fallujah, they had encountered some resistance; but as on previous nights, the insurgents proved that they prefer to fight during the day. At night, the Americans can see the rebels through infrared sights. By day, that advantage is erased.
Fallujah in ruins
The center of Fallujah is a shattered place. Rotting bodies in the street fill the air with the stench of death, which comes and goes with the breeze. Chunks of rubble are strewn along roads and sidewalks. Many stores and homes and other cinderblock buildings have huge holes ripped into them by American shells. Bombs have collapsed many roofs.
The electric and telephone wires that line the streets are now twisted spaghetti. There's no power in town and the moon is a mere sliver right now, so at night, the only thing that lights up the streets is the glow of speeding munitions and explosions.
Cats and dogs are the only casual pedestrians in town. On Thursday night, soldiers in one Bradley watched on their infrared screen as three dogs, showing up as dark figures in the green-and-black world of infrared, tore at the flesh of a dead body.
War-torn Fallujah is a guerrilla's paradise. The rubble and the darkened holes of the town's abandoned shells provide great cover. Narrow alleyways and tight-knit housing help their movement. They appear, shoot and disappear. Actually spotting them is a rarity for most soldiers.
"It was like a shooting gallery at a carnival," said Capt. Ed Twaddell, 30, the commander of Apache company, Friday afternoon. "They pop up, they pop down."
With the fighting increasing in tempo, Twaddell, the other company commanders and Rainey decided to initiate a two-pronged attack in a fresh piece of territory south of a road the Americans have named Isabel. It would begin at noon.
The idea of the combined Army and Marine units at this stage in the battle was to keep pushing the insurgents south, killing as many as possible along the way, until they have been swept into the southern reaches of the city, where more American forces awaited them.
At the start of the path that Twaddell, of Jaffrey, N.H., and the other tank and Bradley commanders were about to take was an open area, a sort of courtyard. Three-story buildings stood nearby. A good spot for an ambush.
One officer said later that the insurgents who were hiding there must have been stockpiling weapons and scoping out positions inside the buildings for days, waiting for the Americans to come that way.
"These guys got some organization and did some research," said Smalley, 42, of San Diego, the commander of Apache 14. "They didn't just wing something like this. They're not special forces but I'm sure they've got some kind of training ... They got their financiers, trainers and executors."
The tanks and Bradleys of the 2nd Battalion have their own kind of organization and research, which they believe will prove ultimately successful. In the battle of Najaf in August, Rainey and his officers found that if you park it, they will come.
Sitting targets
Often, Rainey's Bradleys and tanks in Fallujah stay in the same spot for a long time, deliberately setting themselves up as targets in order to attract insurgents. Rainey describes this theory of combat as setting his vehicles up as "bugzappers."
"We got down there," he said on Friday afternoon. "We found the bugs. We're killing them."
It's a tactic that has its dangers. Staying static allows insurgents to get their sites on the vehicles and at various times in the morning mortars sailed out of the sky with unsettling frequency, landing close to the huge vehicles and shaking them, the layers of dust inside floating up into the close air yet another time.
Cultural risk
Another risky part of the American tactics -- although in this scenario the risk is cultural and political -- is the military's willingness to fire on mosques if insurgents fire from them first. No matter the justification of such tactics under international law, images or reports of U.S. soldiers firing on mosques does not play well in Iraq, the Muslim world at large or in many non-Muslim countries around the world, where anti-war feeling is high.
That's a price the commanders are prepared to pay if it means allowing their soldiers to defend themselves fully.
At one stage on Friday morning, insurgents fired at Apache 14 from a mosque. Under the military's rules of engagement, American soldiers are permitted to fire on any of Fallujah's 77 mosques if insurgents shoot from them first.
"They brought this ---- to themselves," Rainey said in the afternoon, visibly upset by casualties his battalion had just sustained. "Every mosque we found weapons inside. They're the ones who don't respect Islam, not us."
Apache 14's gunner shot through every window he could see. He pounded parts of the minaret, splinters of stone flying into the air.
Abdelwahab grabbed the radio handset and listened in to what the commanders were discussing.
An insurgent "hit a tank and the tank shot a main gun round through the mosque," reported Abdelwahab, whose father is Lebanese by birth and a Muslim. "Yeah, we gotta back off at least 300 meters. The Marines are going to drop a 300 pounder on the mosque."
"The main gun round going through there would pretty much wipe them out anyway," Cogil said.
Watson backed the Bradley away from the mosque, but the bomb never came. Officers later said they felt there were too many American vehicles in the vicinity to bomb the mosque without risk of a friendly fire incident.
The morning wore on amid an ever-intensifying hail of mortars, RPG attacks and small-arms fire. It was time for the two-pronged push to the south that Rainey, Twaddell and the other senior officers had planned.
The troops, after experiencing the early attack on Apache 14, might have assumed the worst was over for the day. It wasn't.
Attack on an Apache
At noon, Apache 14 had joined a group of other armored vehicles near the courtyard and three-story building. Suddenly, fire seemed to be coming from all sides.
"Apache 60's been hit," came a tense voice over the radio. Apache 60 was Twaddell's, the company commander. There were casualties, the voice said. "They need evac immediately."
Specialist Scott Cogil knew that meant he was up. He was the closest medic to the scene.
Sitting in the back of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Apache 14, only 50 yards from the Bradley that had just taken a vicious hit from another armor-piercing RPG, 20-year-old Cogil jammed his Kevlar helmet onto his head, grabbed his aid bag and waited for the ramp at the back of the tracked vehicle to lower.
So did four other soldiers, waiting in the near-dark box they had been sitting in for 18 hours, crawling around the streets of Fallujah while the gunner blasted away at insurgents.
With the hum of hydraulics, the ramp started going down. Their faces were tight. For all they knew, some of them, perhaps all of them, might not come back. They didn't discuss what they had to do in those moments as sunlight flooded the vehicle; not a word. The ramp hit the ground and outside there were hundreds of bullets flying around.
"Let's go," one shouted.
Operation rescue
Their M-16 rifles pointing toward nearby buildings, the five young soldiers burst out into a confusing world of noon light, massive gunfire, hidden enemies and injured comrades. They didn't even know which of the other nearby Bradleys they were meant to run to.
They found it.
There was a hole in the rear of Apache 60. Small, about an inch in diameter, but big enough for the grenade to enter the tiny compartment that can fit six soldiers. It had crashed through, searing through the side of an Iraqi-American translator, ripping the left arm off one of the soldiers almost at the shoulder and leaving shrapnel embedded in two others. Blinding smoke mixed with blood in an instant.
Twaddell was in the turret. Soft-spoken, bespectacled and modest, he kept his nerve in the chaos.
"It was very confusing," he said later. "I saw a flash in front of my knee. The turret was filled with smoke. I checked the gunner was OK, popped the hatch."
Twaddell stuck to his radio while his men tended to the wounded. Within minutes, he had organized a group of Bradleys around Apache 60 and Cogil and the other four from Apache 14 were there to help.
Bullets cracked past them and they didn't really know where they were coming from. Everywhere, it seemed.
Cogil found the wounded sergeant already lifted out of the Bradley, a soldier holding his belt tightly around the bleeding stump as a tourniquet. Fortunately, the arm was severed so far up that the major artery in the upper arm was not blown open. Cogil applied a more permanent tourniquet and helped load the wounded soldier into another Bradley.
"He was taking it like a champ, saying 'I'm fine, I'm fine,'" said Cogil, of Rantoul, Ill. The wounded sergeant kept asking if his men were safe as they rushed him out of the kill zone. On the way, Cogil said, boxes of ammunition and other items kept falling on the wounded man. "I felt terrible," Cogil said.
Their job done, Cogil's four colleagues grabbed one of the less seriously wounded men and raced back through the gunfire to their Bradley.
To safety, for now
With the ramp back up, the men sat in silence, breathing heavily, keeping their helmets on.
"That was ... freaky," the wounded soldier said. (His name, and the names of other wounded soldiers, are being withheld to allow them or the military time to notify their families.) "An RPG came through the side."
He stared at the three pieces of metal poking out of his right hand. They glinted in the small shaft of light slicing into the compartment from one of the envelope-sized periscopes in the rear.
"Get 'em back right now," came an officer's voice on the radio. "Let's go back to the train station."
As Apache 14 headed north, the soldier with the shards of metal in his hand stretched it out gingerly, keeping the blood flowing. He looked up and laughed: "It's crazy." Then he bowed his head and put his fingers to his forehead, rubbing them gently as if he were extremely tired.
"We're rolling," Abdelwahab said.
Barely a word was said before the Bradley had rolled past the train station on the outskirts of town and north toward the 2nd Battalion's temporary base in the desert at an old plaster factory.
Back out to battle
Once there, the injured went to the medical aid tent and the rest of the soldiers cleaned the inside of the Bradley and then themselves.
Rainey spoke with Twaddell and other officers. Twaddell "guesstimated" that they had killed about 35 insurgents, that there were perhaps 200 out there in the south still.
The commanding officer, it turned out, had lost another soldier from his corps. A tank had rolled over, killing the man instantly. But overall, Rainey was pleased with the progress his men were making. One of the hit tanks was quickly repaired and returned to duty. A soldier painted "I'm Back" in black spray paint on its front.
"I made him paint it over," Rainey said, laughing. He walked through the fields of powdery dust toward Apache 14. Abdelwahab was shaving. Cogil was dabbing at himself with baby wipes, the closest soldiers here come to a shower. The limping Watson offered to display his rear-end wounds and deflected the usual ribbings.
"Listen," Rainey said. "You guys are doing great ... It's humbling, humbling to be around."
"Thanks, sir," someone said.
Six hours later, they got back in Apache 14 and headed back to the fight.
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What's Wrong With Combat Pay?
By JOHN BERLAU
November 15, 2004; Page A22
American soldiers are risking their lives in Fallujah. No one would say that they don't deserve a special bonus for wearing America's uniform in these embattled times. No one, that is, except many members of Congress -- Republican and Democrat. While these pols fall all over themselves to argue how much they support the troops, they back a policy called "pay parity" -- which sends the message that the soldier risking his or her life in Iraq is just like any other government worker.
"Pay parity" dictates that federal military and civilian workers must get the same percentage increase in pay. The concept has governed in most of the last 20 years of congressional appropriations, but the Bush administration has argued that a special raise is in order for the armed services. The administration's budget for fiscal year 2005 provides for across-the-board pay increases of 3.5% for military employees and a smaller raise for federal civilian workers.
But even with a war on, government employees' unions and many in Congress still make the argument that soldiers serving in Iraq and bureaucrats at the IRS are equally important to the well-being of America. Tom Davis (R., Va.), who represents suburbs of D.C. that many federal workers call home, states that "both civilian and military employees are the government's greatest asset." House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), with a similar constituency, asserts that "Congress and the White House should not undermine the morale of dedicated federal public servants by failing to bring their pay adjustments in line with military personnel." Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, says that ending pay parity would send to federal employees the message "that their work is . . . not as valued, and not as vital as that of . . . military counterparts."
Yet if members of Congress are as concerned about soldiers as they say they are, the message to Ms. Kelley and her ilk must be that, as important as some of the work done by civilian employees is, their work is not as indispensable as that done by the soldiers keeping our country free. Congress still has a chance to change this policy in the lame duck session.
Opponents of pay parity also warn that sticking to existing policy in the coming years could hamper the efforts to retain the best soldiers in the military. They also refute arguments used to support pay parity based on the supposedly large pay gap between federal-civilian and private-sector workers. Rep. Ernest Istook (R., Okla.) points out that over the last four years, pay raises for federal civilians have been double the Consumer Price Index's cost-of-living increase. Federal workers also get the day off with pay on 11 federal holidays, more paid time off than most private-sector jobs provide. And, of course, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan don't get any holidays from being in harm's way.
Besides, in wartime, federal civilian workers should understand why the military should get priority in pay raises. As Ramona Fortanbary, editor of Veterans' Vision, writes, "These patriotic men and women, who after all did choose government service over more lucrative private employment, can and will understand that . . . at times of great demand upon the military services . . . the troops need the money more."
Mr. Berlau is a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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Troops in Fallujah
Are the Best
Since World War II
November 19, 2004; Page A16
The amazing, perhaps historic, battle of Fallujah has come and gone, and the biggest soldier story to come out of it is the alleged Marine shooting. There must have been hundreds of acts of bravery and valor in Fallujah. Where will history record their stories?
Maybe it's just a function of an age in which TV fears that attention spans die faster than caddis flies, and surfing the Web means ingesting information like a participant in a hot dog eating contest. By contrast, Michael Ware of Time magazine has a terrific account this week of one platoon led by Staff Sergeant David Bellavia ("We're not going to die!"), fighting its way through the snipers and booby traps of Fallujah: "A young sergeant went down, shrapnel or a bullet fragment lodging in his cheek. After checking himself, he went back to returning fire." Amid mostly glimpses this week of telegenic bullet flight paths and soldiers backed against walls, I wanted more stories like this. More information about who these guys are and what they were doing and how they were doing it. The commanders in Iraq praise them profusely, and by now maybe that's all these young U.S. soldiers need -- praise from peers.
But the American people, many of them, have been desperate for some vehicle that would let them actively lend support to the troops, or their families back in the States. The Bush administration, for reasons that are not clear, has never created such an instrument. Had they done it, a force would have existed to rebalance the hyperventilated Abu Ghraib story. The White House seems to have concluded that the American people would support a big, tough war almost literally as an act of faith. And they did, but just barely. Neglect of the homefront almost cost George Bush the election.
In service, in Fallujah
The election's one, ironic nod to the nature of the troops in Iraq was the controversy over the draft. Michael Moore traveled to 60 college campuses saying Mr. Bush's opposition to restarting the draft was an "absolute lie." Shortly after, a senior saluted the jolly Hollywood misanthrope and wrote a column for Newsweek denouncing the draft. "We have no concept of a lottery," she wrote, "that determines who lives and who dies." But not to worry, dear. The military brass, to the last man and woman, doesn't want you. Not ever.
The draft ended in 1973. What has happened to the all-volunteer military in the three decades since ensures that no draft will return this side of Armageddon.
Post-Vietnam, the military raised the performance bar -- for acquired skill sets, new-recruit intelligence and not least, self-discipline. The thing one noticed most when watching the embedded reporters' interviews last year on the way into Iraq was the self-composed confidence reflected throughout the ranks. And this in young men just out of high school or college.
It was no accident. Consider drugs. In 1980, the percentage of illicit drug use in the whole military was nearly 28%. Two years later, mandatory and random testing -- under threat of dismissal -- sent the number straight down, to nearly 3% in 1998.
Today recruits take the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It measures arithmetic reasoning, mathematics knowledge, word skills and paragraph comprehension. The current benchmark is the performance levels of recruits who served in Operation Desert Storm in 1990. The military requires that recruits meet what it calls "rigorous moral character standards."
After his August report on Abu Ghraib and U.S. military detention practices, former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger told a writer for this page: "The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II." And more. Unit cohesion, mutual trust in battle, personal integrity and esprit all are at the highest levels in the nation's history, right now, in Iraq. Indeed, the U.S. armed services may be the one truly functional major institution in American life.
Some fear the creation in the U.S. of a military caste, disassociated from the rest of society, or worry about the loss of civic virtue. The bridge across, I suspect, is narrower than many suspect. A 2002 Harvard Institute of Politics survey of college students found that if their number came up in a new draft, 25% would eagerly serve and 28% would serve with reservations. The draft itself is quite irrelevant today. But contrary to the last election's confusing signals about the attitudes of the young, most of them, it seems, are willing to "do something" to protect their country, if asked. It is their elders' job to find a way to ask. The military writer Andrew Bacevich has summed up our current situation nicely: "To the question 'Who will serve?' the nation's answer has now become: 'Those who want to serve.'"
At a ceremony on Nov. 13 at Camp Taji, Iraq -- with Fallujah raging elsewhere -- Army Maj. Gen. Pete Chiarelli presented 19 Purple Hearts for wounds in the battle of Najaf, the big battle before Fallujah. Gen. Chiarelli remarked that George Washington created the Purple Heart in 1782, for what Gen. Washington himself described as "unusual gallantry . . . extraordinary fidelity and essential service."
Essential service. After 20 months of it in Iraq and two hard weeks of it in Fallujah, "service" -- an old idea in a world too busy to take much notice -- is a word worthy of at least some contemplation.
Send comments to henninger@wsj.com
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Semper Fi
The story of Fallujah isn't on that NBC videotape.
Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?
The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat.
Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of London:
"In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month."
When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?
Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.
In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites.
We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.
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http://www.thegreenside.com/story.asp?ContentID=11151
, , ,
The fighting has been incredibly close inside the city. The enemy is willing to die and is literally waiting until they see the whites of the eyes of the Marines before they open up. Just two days ago, as a firefight raged in close quarters, one of the interpreters yelled for the enemy in the house to surrender. The enemy yelled back that it was better to die and go to heaven than to surrender to infidels. This exchange is a graphic window into the world that the Marines and Soldiers have been fighting in these last 10 days.
I could go on and on about how the city was taken but one of the most amazing aspects to the fighting was that we saw virtually no civilians during the battle. Only after the fighting had passed did a few come out of their homes. They were provided food and water and most were evacuated out of the city. At least 90-95% of the people were gone from the city when we attacked.
I will end with a couple of stories of individual heroism that you may not have heard yet. I was told about both of these incidents shortly after they occurred. No doubt some of the facts will change slightly but I am confident that the meat is correct.
The first is a Marine from 3/5. His name is Corporal Yeager (Chuck Yeager's grandson). As the Marines cleared and apartment building, they got to the top floor and the point man kicked in the door. As he did so, an enemy grenade and a burst of gunfire came out. The explosion and enemy fire took off the point man's leg. He was then immediately shot in the arm as he lay in the doorway. Corporal Yeager tossed a grenade in the room and ran into the doorway and into the enemy fire in order to pull his buddy back to cover. As he was dragging the wounded Marine to cover, his own grenade came back through the doorway. Without pausing, he reached down and threw the grenade back through the door while he heaved his buddy to safety. The grenade went off inside the room and Cpl Yeager threw another in. He immediately entered the room following the second explosion. He gunned down three enemy all within three feet of where he stood and then let fly a third grenade as he backed out of the room to complete the evacuation of the wounded Marine. You have to understand that a grenade goes off within 5 seconds of having the pin pulled. Marines usually let them "cook off" for a second or two before tossing them in. Therefore, this entire episode took place in less than 30 seconds.
The second example comes from 3/1. Cpl Mitchell is a squad leader. He was wounded as his squad was clearing a house when some enemy threw pineapple grenades down on top of them. As he was getting triaged, the doctor told him that he had been shot through the arm. Cpl Mitchell told the doctor that he had actually been shot "a couple of days ago" and had given himself self aide on the wound. When the doctor got on him about not coming off the line, he firmly told the doctor that he was a squad leader and did not have time to get treated as his men were still fighting. There are a number of Marines who have been wounded multiple times but refuse to leave their fellow Marines.
It is incredibly humbling to walk among such men. They fought as hard as any Marines in history and deserve to be remembered as such. The enemy they fought burrowed into houses and fired through mouse holes cut in walls, lured them into houses rigged with explosives and detonated the houses on pursuing Marines, and actually hid behind surrender flags only to engage the Marines with small arms fire once they perceived that the Marines had let their guard down. I know of several instances where near dead enemy rolled grenades out on Marines who were preparing to render them aid. It was a fight to the finish in every sense and the Marines delivered.
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November 21, 2004
In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War
By DEXTER FILKINS
New York Times
ALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 18 - Eight days after the Americans entered the city
on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a
minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.
As the marines inched upward, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an
insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first
marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. The
marine in the rear tumbled backward down the stairwell, while Lance Cpl.
William Miller, age 22, lay in silence halfway up, mortally wounded.
"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"
With that, the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a
comrade behind seized the group. One after another, the young marines
dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their
way up the stairs.
After four attempts, Corporal Miller's lifeless body emerged from the
tower, his comrades choking and covered with dust. With more insurgents
closing in, the marines ran through volleys of machine-gun fire back to
their base.
"I was trying to be careful, but I was trying to get him out, you know
what I'm saying?" Lance Cpl. Michael Gogin, 19, said afterward.
So went eight days of combat for this Iraqi city, the most sustained
period of street-to-street fighting that Americans have encountered
since the Vietnam War. The proximity gave the fighting a hellish
intensity, with soldiers often close enough to look their enemies in the
eyes.
For a correspondent who has covered a half dozen armed conflicts,
including the war in Iraq since its start in March 2003, the fighting
seen while traveling with a frontline unit in Falluja was a
qualitatively different experience, a leap into a different kind of
battle.
>From the first rockets vaulting out of the city as the marines moved in,
the noise and feel of the battle seemed altogether extraordinary; at
other times, hardly real at all. The intimacy of combat, this plunge
into urban warfare, was new to this generation of American soldiers, but
it is a kind of fighting they will probably see again: a grinding
struggle to root out guerrillas entrenched in a city, on streets marked
in a language few American soldiers could comprehend.
The price for the Americans so far: 51 dead and 425 wounded, a number
that may yet increase but that already exceeds the toll from any battle
in the Iraq war.
Marines in Harm's Way
The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Bravo Company of the First
Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight.
They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of
the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working
their way through Falluja's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their
backs.
In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties, including 6
dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a one-in-four chance of
being wounded or killed in little more than a week.
The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and
as new as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the
cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city at night, firing
at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the
ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering
over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back
to the base.
The glow of the insurgents' flares, throwing daylight over a landscape
to help them spot their targets: us.
The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as
tracer rounds ricocheted above.
The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and
the explosion when it strikes.
The screams of the marines when one of their comrades, Cpl. Jake
Knospler, lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.
"No, no, no!" the marines shouted as they dragged Corporal Knospler from
the darkened house where the bomb went off. It was 2 a.m., the sky dark
without a moon. "No, no, no!"
Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly
flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.
Mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades began raining down on Bravo
Company the moment its men began piling out of their troop carriers just
outside Falluja. The shells looked like Fourth of July bottle rockets,
sailing over the ridge ahead as if fired by children, exploding in a
whoosh of sparks.
Whole buildings, minarets and human beings were vaporized in barrages of
exploding shells. A man dressed in a white dishdasha crawled across a
desolate field, reaching behind a gnarled plant to hide, when he
collapsed before a burst of fire from an American tank.
Sometimes the casualties came in volleys, like bursts of machine-gun
fire. On the first morning of battle, during a ferocious struggle for
the Muhammadia Mosque, about 45 marines with Bravo Company's Third
Platoon dashed across 40th Street, right into interlocking streams of
fire. By the time the platoon made it to the other side, five men lay
bleeding in the street.
The marines rushed out to get them, as they would days later in the
minaret, but it was too late for Sgt. Lonny Wells, who bled to death on
the side of the road. One of the men who braved gunfire to pull in
Sergeant Wells was Cpl. Nathan Anderson, who died three days later in an
ambush.
Sergeant Wells's death dealt the Third Platoon a heavy blow; as a leader
of one of its squads, he had written letters to the parents of its
younger members, assuring them he would look over them during the tour
in Iraq.
"He loved playing cards," Cpl. Gentian Marku recalled. "He knew all the
probabilities."
More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company
and quietly slipped away. Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski, nicknamed Ski, was a
Bravo Company sniper. For hours at a stretch, Corporal Ziolkowski would
sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40
rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big
and wide, and Corporal Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a
better look.
Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Corporal Ziolkowski was one of Bravo
Company's most popular soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who learned to
shoot growing up in the countryside, Corporal Ziolkowski grew up near
Baltimore, unfamiliar with guns. Though Baltimore boasts no beach front,
Corporal Ziolkowski's passion was surfing; at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Bravo
Company's base, he would often organize his entire day around the tides.
"All I need now is a beach with some waves," Corporal Ziolkowski said,
during a break from his sniper duties at Falluja's Grand Mosque, where
he killed three men in a single day.
During that same break, Corporal Ziolkowski foretold his own death. The
snipers, he said, were now among the most hunted of American soldiers.
In the first battle for Falluja, in April, American snipers had been
especially lethal, Corporal Ziolkowski said, and intelligence officers
had warned him that this time, the snipers would be targets.
"They are trying to take us out," Corporal Ziolkowski said.
The bullet knocked Corporal Ziolkowski backward and onto the roof. He
had been sitting there on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an
area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had
taken his helmet off to get a better view. The bullet hit him in the
head.
Young Men, Heavy Burdens
For all the death about the place, one inescapable impression left by
the marines was their youth. Everyone knows that soldiers are young; it
is another thing to see men barely out of adolescence, many of whom were
still in high school when this war began, shoot people dead.
The marines of Bravo Company often fought over the packets of M&M's that
came with their rations. Sitting in their barracks, they sang along with
the Garth Brooks paean to chewing tobacco, "Copenhagen," named for the
brand they bought almost to a man:
Copenhagen, what a wad of flavor
Copenhagen, you can see it in my smile
Copenhagen, hey do yourself a favor, dip
Copenhagen, it drives the cowgirls wild
One of Bravo Company's more youthful members was Cpl. Romulo Jimenez II,
age 21 from Bellington, W.Va.. Cpl. Jimenez spent much of his time
showing off his tattoos - he had flames climbing up one of his arms -
and talking about his 1992 Ford Mustang. He was a popular member of
Bravo Company's Second Platoon, not least because he introduced his
sister to a fellow marine, Lance Cpl. Sean Evans, and the couple
married.
In the days before the battle started, Corporal Jimenez called his
sister, Katherine, to ask that she fix up the interior of his Mustang
before he got home.
"Make it look real nice," he told her.
On Wednesday, Nov. 10, around 2 p.m., Corporal Jimenez was shot in the
neck by a sniper as he advanced with his platoon through the northern
end of Falluja, just near the green-domed Muhammadia Mosque. He died
instantly.
Despite their youth, the marines seemed to tower over their peers
outside the military in maturity and guts. Many of Bravo Company's best
marines, its most proficient killers, were 19 and 20 years old; some
directed their comrades in maneuvers and assaults. Bravo Company's three
lieutenants, each responsible for the lives of about 50 men, were 23 and
24 years old.
They are a strangely anonymous bunch. The men who fight America's wars
seem invariably to come from little towns and medium-size cities far
away from the nation's arteries along the coast. Line up a group of
marines and ask them where they are from, and they will give you a list
of places like Pearland, Tex.; Lodi, Ohio; Osawatomie, Kan.
Typical of the marines who fought in Falluja was Chad Ritchie, a
22-year-old corporal from Keezletown, Va. Corporal Ritchie, a
soft-spoken, bespectacled intelligence officer, said he was happy to be
out of the tiny place where he grew up, though he admitted that he
sometimes missed the good times on Friday nights in the fields.
"We'd have a bonfire, and back the trucks up on it, and open up the
backs, and someone would always have some speakers," Corporal Ritchie
said. "We'd drink beer, tell stories."
Like many of the young men in Bravo Company, Corporal Ritchie said he
had joined the Marines because he yearned for an adventure greater than
his small town could offer.
"The guys who stayed, they're all living with their parents, making $7
an hour," Corporal Ritchie said. "I'm not going to be one of those
people who gets old and says, 'I wish I had done this. I wish I had done
that.' Every once in a while, you've got to do something hard, do
something you're not comfortable with. A person needs a gut check."
Holding Up Under Fire
Marines like Corporal Ritchie proved themselves time and again in
Falluja, but they were not without fear. While camped out one night in
the Iraqi National Guard building in the middle of city, Bravo Company
came under mortar fire that grew closer with each shot. The insurgents
were "bracketing" the building, firing shots to the left and right of
the target and adjusting their fire each time.
In the hallways, where the men had camped for the night, the murmured
sounds of prayers rose between the explosions. After 20 tries, the
shelling inexplicably stopped.
On one particularly grim night, a group of marines from Bravo Company's
First Platoon turned a corner in the darkness and headed up an alley. As
they did so, they came across men dressed in uniforms worn by the Iraqi
National Guard. The uniforms were so perfect that they even carried
pieces of red tape and white, the signal agreed upon to assure American
soldiers that any Iraqis dressed that way would be friendly; the others
could be killed.
The marines, spotting the red and white tape, waved, and the men in
Iraqi uniforms opened fire. One American, Corporal Anderson, died
instantly. One of the wounded men, Pfc. Andrew Russell, lay in the road,
screaming from a nearly severed leg.
A group of marines ran forward into the gunfire to pull their comrades
out. But the ambush, and the enemy flares and gunfire that followed,
rattled the men of Bravo Company more than any event. In the darkness,
the men began to argue. Others stood around in the road. As the
platoon's leader, Lt. Andy Eckert, struggled to take charge, the Third
Platoon seemed on the brink of panic.
"Everybody was scared," Lieutenant Eckert said afterward. "If the leader
can't hold, then the unit can't hold together."
The unit did hold, but only after the intervention of Bravo Company's
commanding officer, Capt. Read Omohundro.
Time and again through the week, Captain Omohundro kept his men from
folding, if not by his resolute manner then by his calmness under fire.
In the first 16 hours of battle, when the combat was continuous and the
threat of death ever present, Captain Omohundro never flinched, moving
his men through the warrens and back alleys of Falluja with an uncanny
sense of space and time, sensing the enemy, sensing the location of his
men, even in the darkness, entirely self-possessed.
"Damn it, get moving," Captain Omohundro said, and his men, looking
relieved that they had been given direction amid the anarchy, were only
too happy to oblige.
A little later, Captain Omohundro, a 34-year-old Texan, allowed that the
strain of the battle had weighed on him, but he said that he had long
ago trained himself to keep any self-doubt hidden from view.
"It's not like I don't feel it," Captain Omohundro said. "But if I were
to show it, the whole thing would come apart."
When the heavy fighting was finally over, a dog began to follow Bravo
Company through Falluja's broken streets. First it lay down in the road
outside one of the buildings the company had occupied, between troop
carriers. Then, as the troops moved on, the mangy dog slinked behind
them, first on a series of house searches, then on a foot patrol, always
keeping its distance, but never letting the marines out of its sight.
Bravo Company, looking a bit ragged itself as it moved up through
Falluja, momentarily fell out of its single-file line.
"Keep a sharp eye," Captain Omohundro told his men. "We ain't done with
this war yet."
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This from today's Left Angeles Times:
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Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
Troops from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that's short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.
By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer
DO?A ANA RANGE, N.M. ? Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.
The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Do?a Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Do?a Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Do?a Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.
And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.
The concerns of the Guard troops at Do?a Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq.
Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.
At Do?a Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers ? though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.
"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.
"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"
Pentagon and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.
"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back ? they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."
The Guard troops at Do?a Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early ? in January, most likely ? as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.
Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Do?a Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.
The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Do?a Ana, Hubbard said.
"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.
"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."
The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.
They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.
Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.
The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.
"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."
The soldiers at Do?a Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.
Dominguez is a father of two ? including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president ? and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.
"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."
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Fallen Marines
November 25th, 2004
I want to share with you my most recent Air Force Reserve trip. I had decided to go back into the Air Force Reserves as a part time reservist and after 6 months of training, I have recently been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and have been fully mission qualified as an Aircraft Commander of a KC-135R strato tanker aircraft.
On Friday of last week, my crew and I were tasked with a mission to provide air refueling support in order to tanker 6 F-16's over to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. We were then to tanker back to the states, 6 more F-16's that were due maintenance. It started out as a fairly standard mission - one that I have done many times as an active duty Captain in my former jet - the KC10a extender.
We dragged the F-16's to Moron Air Base in Spain where we spent the night and then finished the first part of our mission the next day by successfully delivering them to Incirlik. When I got on the ground in Turkey, I received a message to call the Tanker Airlift Control Center that my mission would change. Instead of tankering the F-16's that were due maintenance, I was cut new orders to fly to Kuwait City and pick up 22 "HR's" and return them to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
It had been a while since I had heard of the term "HR" used, and as I pondered what the acronym could possibly stand for, when it dawned on me that it stood for human remains. There were 22 fallen comrades who had just been killed in the most recent attacks in Fallujah and Baghdad, Iraq over the last week.
I immediately alerted the crew of the mission change and although they were exhausted due to an ocean crossing, the time change and minimum ground time in Spain for crew rest, we all agreed that it was more important to get these men back to their families as soon as possible.
We were scheduled to crew rest in Incirlik, Turkey for the evening and start the mission the next day. Instead, we decided to extend/continue our day and fly to Kuwait in order to pick up our precious cargo. While on the flight over to Kuwait, I knew that there were protocol procedures for accepting and caring for human remains, however, in my 13 years of active duty service, I never once had to refer to this regulation. As I read the regulation on the flight over, I felt prepared and ready to do the mission. My game plan was to pick up the HR's and turn around to fly to Mildenhal Air Base in England, spend the night, and then fly back the next day. This was the quickest way to get them home, considering the maximum crew duty day that I could subject my crew to legally and physically. I really pushed them to the limits but no one complained at all.
I thought that I was prepared for the acceptance of these men until we landed at Kuwait International. I taxied the jet over to a staging area where the honor guard was waiting to load our soldiers. I stopped the jet and the entire crew was required to stay on board. We opened the cargo door, and according to procedure, I had the crew line up in the back of the aircraft in formation and stand at attention. As the cargo loader brought up the first pallet of caskets, I ordered the crew to "Present Arms." Normally, we would snap a salute at this command, however, when you are dealing with a fallen soldier, the salute is a slow 3 second pace to position. As I stood there and finally saw the first four of twenty-two caskets draped with the American Flags, the reality had hit me. As the Marine Corps honor guard delivered the first pallet on board, I then ordered the crew to "Order Arms" - where they rendered an equally slow 3 second return to the attention position. I then commanded the crew to assume an at ease position and directed them to properly place the pallet. The protocol requires that the caskets are to be loaded so when it comes time to exit the aircraft - they will go head first. We did this same procedure for each and every pallet until we could not fit any more.
I felt a deep pit in my stomach when there were more caskets to be brought home and that they would have to wait for the next jet to come through. I tried to do everything in my power to bring more home but I had no more space on board. When we were finally loaded, with our precious cargo and fueled for the trip back to England, a Marine Corps Colonel from first battalion came on board our jet in order to talk to us. I gathered the crew to listen to him and his words of wisdom.
He introduced himself and said that it is the motto of the Marines to leave no man behind and it makes their job easier knowing that there were men like us to help them complete this task. He was very grateful for our help and the strings that we were pulling in order to get this mission done in the most expeditious manner possible. He then said -" Major Zarnik - these are MY MARINES and I am giving them to you. Please take great care of them as I know you will." I responded with telling him that they are my highest priority and that although this was one of the saddest days of my life, we are all up for the challenge and will go above and beyond to take care of your Marines - "Semper Fi Sir" A smile came on his face and he responded with a loud and thunderous, "Ooo Rah". He then asked me to please pass along to the families that these men were extremely brave and had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country and that we appreciate and empathize with what they are going through at this time of their grievance. With that, he departed the jet and we were on our way to England.
I had a lot of time to think about the men that I had the privilege to carry. I had a chance to read the manifest on each and every one of them. I read about their religious preferences, their marital status, the injuries that were their cause of death. All of them were under age 27 with most in the 18-24 range. Most of them had wives and children. They had all been killed by an " IED" which I can only deduce as an [improvised] explosive devices. Mostly fatal head injuries and injuries to the chest area. I could not even imagine the bravery that they must have displayed and the agony suffered in this God Forsaken War. My respect and admiration for these men and what they are doing to help others in a foreign land is beyond calculation. I know that they are all with God now and in a better place.
The stop in Mildenhal was uneventful and then we pressed on to Dover where we would meet the receiving Marine Corps honor guard. When we arrived, we applied the same procedures in reverse. The head of each casket was to come out first. This was a sign of respect rather than defeat. As the honor guard carried each and every American flag covered casket off of the jet, they delivered them to awaiting families with military hearses. I was extremely impressed with how diligent the Honor Guard had performed the seemingly endless task of delivering each of the caskets to the families without fail and with precision. There was not a dry eye on our crew or in the crowd. The Chaplain then said a prayer followed by a speech from Lt. Col. Klaus of the second Battalion. In his speech, he also reiterated similar condolences to the families as the Colonel from First Battalion back in Kuwait.
I then went out to speak with the families as I felt it was my duty to help console them in this difficult time. Although I would probably be one of the last military contacts that they would have for a while - the military tends to take care of it's own. I wanted to make sure that they did not feel abandoned and more than that appreciated for their ultimate sacrifice. It was the most difficult thing that I have ever done in my life. I listened to the stories of each and every one that I had come in contact with and they all displayed a sense of pride during an obviously difficult time. The Marine Corps had obviously prepared their families well for this potential outcome.
So, why do I write this story to you all? I just wanted to put a little personal attention to the numbers that you hear about and see in the media. It is almost like we are desensitized by the "numbers" of our fallen comrades coming out of Iraq. I heard one commentator say that "it is just a number". Are you kidding me? These are our American Soldiers not numbers! It is truly a sad situation that I hope will end soon. Please hug and embrace your loved ones a little closer and know that there are men out there that are defending you and trying to make this a better world. Please pray for their families and when you hear the latest statistic's and numbers of our soldiers killed in combat, please remember this story. It is the only way that I know to more personalize these figures and have them truly mean something to us all.
Thanks for all of your support for me and my family as I take on this new role in completing my Air Force Career and supporting our country. I greatly appreciate all of your comments, gestures and prayers.
May God Bless America, us all, and especially the United States Marine Corps.
Semper Fi
Maj. Zarnik, USAFR
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Today's Left Angeles Times
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Marines Offered Reenlistment Bonuses
Personnel with combat experience and training can get up to $30,000. The goal is for them to keep current jobs or shift to other vital posts.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. ? With the prospect of continued fighting in Iraq, the Marine Corps is offering bonuses of up to $30,000 ? in some cases tax-free ? to persuade enlisted personnel with combat experience and training to reenlist.
The plan is working, officials said. Less than two months into the fiscal year, Marine reenlistment rates in several key specialties are running 10% to 30% ahead of last year.
For example, officials are confident that by midyear, they will have reached their target for encouraging reenlistment among riflemen, the "grunts" who are key to the Marines' ability to mount offensives against insurgent strongholds such as Fallouja.
In most cases, young Marines are agreeing to stay in their current jobs for four years. In others, they are allowed to transfer into jobs considered equally vital: recruiters, embassy guards and boot camp drill instructors.
"No amount of money is too much to retain combat experience in the corps, rather than starting over," said Maj. Mark Menotti, assistant head of enlisted retention for the Marine Corps.
Giving bonuses to encourage Marines to reenlist is not new. But this year's bonus schedule marks the first time that "combat arms" specialties have received the largest bonuses. A year ago, the top bonus for a grunt was about $7,000.
Along with riflemen, machine gunners and mortar men, specialties also receiving sizable bonuses are those critical to success in Iraq ? including intelligence officers and Arabic linguists.
Lance Cpl. Matthew Jee, 21, of Borrego Springs, Calif., received a bonus of $19,000 to reenlist for four years. An assault man with expertise in firing the Javelin rocket, he planned to shift to the intelligence field.
"They need a grunt's view of what kind of intelligence you need when you're out there on the street," Jee said at Camp Pendleton, where he recently returned after seven months in Iraq.
Sgt. Joey W. McBroom, 30, of Lafayette, Tenn., a rifleman, said he had planned to reenlist even without the bonus, but the $28,039 "helped my wife to agree to my reenlisting."
In an e-mail from Iraq, McBroom said he planned to put 40% of the bonus in a mutual fund, 30% in an account for his children's college educations, 15% in savings and the remainder for "a nice wedding ring for the wife, finally."
Another rifleman, Cpl. Anthony Mazzola, 23, of Fort Worth, has more immediate plans for his $21,700. "I plan to take all of my money to Vegas and have a crazy weekend," he e-mailed from Iraq.
The Marine Corps has earmarked $52 million in bonuses for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, up $1 million from the prior year.
Two-thirds of the bonus money will go for Marines reenlisting for a second hitch. One-third will go to enlistees signing up for a third or fourth tour. Officers ? except in particularly difficult-to-retain specialties such as aviation and law ? are not eligible.
The amount of the bonus is determined by a formula involving the length of reenlistment, how early the Marine makes the commitment and a multiplier determined by the commandant of the Marine Corps. Among other things, the multiplier involves a statistical analysis of how much money will be needed to ensure that enough Marines reenlist in a particular specialty.
Take, for example, a sergeant trained in tank warfare.
If the sergeant reenlists for four years, his bonus is determined by multiplying his monthly pay ? $1,817 ? by four. That figure then is multiplied by four, a rate set by Marine officials for his skill. The highest skill multiplier is five. For the sergeant, the bonus computes to $29,072. If he reenlists while in Iraq, his bonus, like his regular pay, is tax-exempt.
For grunts, the bonuses are also a sign of recognition.
Cpl. Steven Forrester, 22, a machine gunner from Centerville, Tenn., said he was "glad they finally realized our job is dangerous." He received $22,796.
Cpl. William Stoffers, 22, a machine gunner from Redding, said the size of the bonus for his specialty was a pleasant surprise:
"I think it's fitting to have this amount because we are put through more stressful things than a normal Marine," e-mailed Stoffers, who is in Iraq; his total was $21,000.
Among combat veterans, there is a sense that they are being paid for having learned things that cannot be taught at the school of infantry. Many are eager to pass that knowledge to others.
Cpl. William Jones, 22, of Tulsa, Okla., a rifleman, received a bonus of $19,000 and now wants to teach Navy corpsmen how to handle combat. "The more Marines we have who've been over there, the better off the corps is going to be," he said. "It's going to cost money, but it will save lives."
Sgt. Deverson Lochard, 23, from Lakeville, Mass., a machine gunner who received a bonus of $23,000, wants to become a drill instructor and, after he becomes a U.S. citizen, an officer.
Like Jones and Jee, Lochard, who was born in France, was in combat at Ramadi and is now back at Camp Pendleton.
"I want to teach junior Marines how to go into combat and come back alive."
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There was a lot of media attention and "outrage" from the usual suspects directed towards the Marine in Fallujah who shot a wounded insurgent, yet so far there has been no mention of the following:
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Here's the CENTCOM press release that has so far generated only yawns from the folks at NBC, CBS, the New York Times and the Washington Post:
FALLUJAH, Iraq ? Marines from the 1st Marine Division shot and killed an insurgent, who while faking dead, opened fire on the Marines that were conducting a security and clearing patrol through the streets here at approximately 3:45 p.m. on 21 November.
For more information, please contact Capt Bradley Gordon, public affairs officer, 1st Marine Division, gordonbv@1mardivdm.usmc.mil
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Marines Train a Secret Weapon on Babil Province
By Bruce Wallace, Times Staff Writer
JABELLA, Iraq ? The Cobra attack helicopters thumping overhead disrupt the predawn stillness of this rural town, agitating the roosters and the dogs. Through the cacophony and a cold rain, troops wearing the signature uniforms of the U.S. Marine Corps' Force Reconnaissance platoon race down potholed streets, balaclavas hiding their faces.
The tan masks not only make the raiders appear menacing. They also disguise the fact that the men behind them are not Americans, but Iraqis.
This is the embryonic Iraqi SWAT team in action, rousing families from their sleep and rounding up men for questioning about the deadly insurgency in towns such as Jabella, south of Baghdad.
The policemen leave behind their calling card: a postcard-size photo of the SWAT team in full gear carrying the message, "Are You a Criminal or Terrorist? You Will Face Punishment."
The flashy raid is aimed at creating a daring image for the 125-man SWAT team, an attempt by their American military patrons to turn them into an Iraqi version of the Untouchables. Marine commanders have also thrown the SWAT team into action in raids across northern Babil province, a push to flush insurgents and criminals out of their strongholds.
Most of the Iraqis in the SWAT team come from the town of Hillah in Babil, and have lived and trained with Marines at a base near home since August. The close partnership with the Marines is an experiment in inoculating Iraqi troops against the violence and intimidation that make joining the security forces so perilous.
SWAT team members argue that their readiness to lead raids is a rebuttal to those who say Iraqis are not prepared to fight for control of their country.
"We are like a family, and we don't care if one of us dies, his brother will rise to avenge him," said Col. Salaam Turrad Abdul Khadim, a former Iraqi special forces officer who recruited his team from the ranks of other unemployed soldiers in Hillah.
"Every time we go on a mission against the terrorists, we are the ones who start the fight," he said. "We prove our courage."
Braving bomb-rigged roads in unarmored pickup trucks, the Iraqis have conducted 30 joint missions with the Marines since August. They frequently go in first and, since hooking up with the Americans, have not lost a colleague in action.
"Before that, we had lots of dead," Khadim said. "Maybe 10."
U.S. commanders say they are pleased with the Iraqis.
"They fought with us, they bled with us, and they'll stick to my side just as my men do," said Col. Ron Johnson, who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is working with the SWAT team.
The Iraqis were training in Hillah with private-sector security firms when the Marines arrived and Johnson invited them to move in with the Force Reconnaissance platoon, the Marine version of the special operations forces. His goal was to avoid the bevy of desertions and defections to the insurgency.
The Iraqis and Americans would eat together and shower in the same facilities, Johnson ordered. He gave the Iraqis American uniforms. He told the Marines to grow mustaches.
Living on the base would not only guard against the Iraqis being kidnapped or killed on the way to and from training, he argued. It would guard against the endemic problem of mission plans being leaked to insurgents.
"You can't say to an Iraqi force, 'OK, we'll meet you at such and such a place at 10 o'clock for the mission' and then just hope they'll show up," Johnson said.
Johnson did have to override early suspicions among some Marines that they were being asked to baby-sit the Iraqis. The members of the elite force arrived with big ambitions for action and found themselves wondering if their partners would cramp their style.
But the integrated approach has led to a bond between the Americans and Iraqis, both sides say, the cultural differences submerged under the daily demands of living and fighting side by side.
"We live together, we eat together, and it has made us close," said Capt. Tad Douglas, 28, who commands the platoon. "We care about each other. There was a day when one of the Iraqis went down in a mortar attack, and one of my guys went out right away to pick him up and carry him to safety."
Another 125 Iraqis are due to join the SWAT force from police training camps in Jordan this weekend, and the Iraqi government plans to see 500 in uniform.
With their exit from Iraq dependent on having Iraqi forces to replace them, U.S. commanders are pressing the SWAT team into the fight against insurgents. They want it to earn some cachet with the local population.
"We need to create some Iraqi heroes," Douglas said. "We need guys who have an elan to them."
But the joint operations also benefit the Marines. The Iraqis give the Americans a footbridge across a linguistic and cultural divide that is a major obstacle to acquiring intelligence. In addition, the Iraqis are able to carry out raids on mosques and other sensitive sites that U.S. forces are reluctant to breach.
Their presence also has surprised some of those whose homes they raided, who are shocked to hear Arabic commands coming from under the hoods of men they assumed were Americans. This fall, a rumor went around Hillah that the U.S. had brought in Israeli soldiers ? many of whom speak Arabic. Khadim laughs at the memory.
Yet perceptions are important. The worry is that Sunni Muslims may come to see the SWAT team as a Shiite weapon. Shiites make up 94% of the Hillah force, while most of the insurgents in the area are Sunnis.
"I don't work that way," Khadim said. He pointed to the casualties his men took during clashes in August with firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's Al Mahdi militia.
"When the war started with the Mahdi army, we killed 42 of their fighters in Hillah in one day ? all of them Shiite," the colonel said softly. "When people look at me, they don't see a Shiite. Everybody sees an Iraqi."
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Just another day--Crafty
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On the wing of an Apache
By Cpl. Benjamin Cossel, 122nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
CAMP TAJI, Iraq -- For two Apache Longbow pilots, the night of Oct. 16 was just a regular night flying a reconnaissance mission around southern Baghdad. A distorted cry for help came across the emergency radio shattering the chatter of all other communications. They recognized the call sign, they recognized the area and a few minutes later, they were in route to perform what would become a heroic rescue.
?I really couldn?t make out at first what was going on. The transmission over the radio was broken up and weak, but I could make out that it was a distress call,? said Lodi, Calif., native Chief Warrant Officer Justin Taylor, an Apache pilot, with Company C, 1st Battalion 227th Aviation Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team.
At first, the transmission seemed as though it might be coming from an U.S. Marine Corps aircraft. The call sign speaking to the downed aircraft was of Marine Corps designation Taylor said. He radioed to Marine Corps headquarters asking if any aircraft of theirs was down in the area, to which the response came back negative. Then a call sign familiar to Taylor and Capt. Ryan Welch, the air mission commander, came across the guard, or emergency channel.
?We?re in zone 43?.? came the weak transmission
?I recognized the area and immediately made the decision that we were going to break from our sector and go over to the area,? said Lebanon, N.H. native Welch. ?Those were our guys on the ground and we had to help. My first thought was we would provide aerial security.?
As the team changed flight paths they notified the USMC aircraft of their intention and called back to 4th BCT headquarters to alert them to their movement. When they arrived on station they began trying to contact the pilots on the ground.
"As soon as we told the Marines what we were doing, a call came up on the guard channel, it was the same call sign but a different numerical designation,? Welch explained.
The wounded pilot explained that the previous pilot was unable to respond, that two pilots were killed in action and that he and the other survivor were trying to make their way to a defendable position but having difficulty as one of the wounded was unable to walk.
?When we flew over the sector, we immediately picked up the heat signature of a burning fire,? said Welch.
?But at first we weren?t sure what it was, it kind of looked like one of the many trash fires you see all over Baghdad,? Taylor added.
Flying over the fire to try and get a better look at the ground an excited call came up.
?You just flew over our position,? the transmission informed.
Welch?s wingman noticed the emergency strobe on the ground and notified Welch of the positive identification.
?Once we had identified the crew on the ground, I made the call that we were going to land and get those pilots out of there,? Welch commented. ?I had no idea of the situation on the ground or what the landing zone looked like, so I informed my wingman to fly a tight defensive circle around our position to provide cover if needed. As we landed and I got all the cords off of me, I looked back at JT (Taylor) and told him, if he started taking fire, get this bird out of here, leave me and we?ll collect all of us later.?
Welch had landed his Apache approximately 100 meters from the crash site, armed with his 9mm and an M4 Carbine rifle he set out to collect the downed pilots.
Welch contacted the pilots and asked if they were ready for self-extraction and again it came over the radio that one of the pilots couldn?t walk, they would need help getting out of their location.
?I basically had to stumble my way through an open field, it was treacherous with pot holes and low brush, I stumbled a couple times,? recalled Welch, ?but I finally came up on the crash site about ten minutes later.?
When Welch arrived on the scene he saw one pilot standing and one sitting, the two had been able to get a fair distance away from the aircraft.
?As I came up on them, I noticed they looked pretty bad, multiple cuts on their face and both looked like the early stages of shock had set in. I called out to Beck (Chief Warrant Officer Chad Beck, 1st Battalion of the 25th Aviation Regiment, 25th Infantry Division attached to the 4th BCT) who was standing, to get him to help me with Mr. Crow (Chief Warrant Officer Greg Crow, also of 1-25 Aviation). It took a few seconds to get Mr. Beck?s attention as he was visibly shaken and dazed.?
As the two got Crow up and began the long trek back, the mess of tangled cords attached to their equipment nearly tripped them up.
?We stumbled initially with all those wires just everywhere? I pulled out my knife and just cut them all away and we took off.?
Carrying two wounded over the treacherous 100 meters to his waiting Apache, Welch said the time seemed to slow down to an absolute crawl as they inched their way back, working carefully not to further injure Mr. Crow.
?We had to move kind of slow,? he explained. ?I swear it probably took us like ten minutes to get back but it seemed like we were out there for hours, I was never so relieved to see JT and my bird sitting there.?
Four personnel, two seats in the Apache. Self-extraction was a maneuver the pilots had been told about in flight school. A maneuver considered dangerous enough that no practical application was given, just the verbal ?Here?s how you do it?
Hanging from a pilots flight vest is a nylon strap attached to a carabineer. On the outside of the Apache there are hand holds bolted on primarily to assist maintenance crews as they work on the birds. But, they also have another purpose -- to be used in the event of a self extraction. The general idea is for the pilot to attach a nylon strap wrapped through the hand holds and then connecting the nylon strap with the carabineer. The aircraft then flies off to a safe location with the person attached to the outside of the aircraft.
?I knew getting back to my bird,? explained Welch, ?that Mr. Crow was in no position for self extraction that I would have to put him in the front seat. I radioed to JT and told him what I intended to do, Crow in the front seat, Beck and I strapped to the outside.?
At first Taylor just looked at Welch, a little surprised at the plan.
?It kind of surprised me at first and then I just thought, ?Cool, that?s what we?re going to do,?? said Taylor.
Beck and Welch worked to get Crow into the front seat as Welch explained what was next to Beck.
?At first Beck really didn?t want to leave, his commander had just been killed and he still wasn?t thinking 100% clear?
?I can?t go, I just can?t go,? pleaded Beck but soon enough he understood the situation and then another problem surfaced.
?The mechanism Kiowa pilots use for self extraction is different then the set up Apache pilots use,? explained Welch. ?But we finally got it worked out, got Beck hooked up and then secured myself to the aircraft.?
Secured and assuming a defensive posture with his rifle, Welch gave Taylor the thumbs up sign and the Apache lifted off.
?I was a little bit freaked out,? explained Taylor, ?you just don?t fly an Apache by yourself, it?s definitely a two man aircraft?
At 90 miles per hour the two helicopters flew 20 kilometers to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Falcon, the closet FOB with a Combat Support Hospital (CSH).
?I only had my night visor on,? said Welch. ?I thought my eyes were going to rip out my sockets and that my nose would tear from my face, the wind was so strong.?
Landing on the emergency pad, Welch and Taylor jumped out and helped medical personal take Beck and Crow inside for treatment.
?One of the medics asked me if I was a medical flight pilot,? chuckled Welch. ?You should have seen the look on his face when I told him, Nope, I?m an Apache pilot.?
The patients safely delivered to the CSH, the two exhausted pilots looked at each other with the same thought.
?We both climbed back into our bird,? Welch said, ?and almost simultaneously said to each other, ?Lets go home.??
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35717-2004Dec4.html
There is a quick and easy sign up to read this extensive and interesting piece on the death of Pat Tillman.
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FALLUJAH, Iraq (Dec. 02, 2004) -- "You're still here, don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today."
As a combat correspondent, I was attached to Company A, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment for Operation Al Fajr, to make sure the stories of heroic actions and the daily realities of battle were told.
On this day, I found myself without my camera. With the batteries dead, I
decided to leave the camera behind and live up to the ethos "every Marine a rifleman," by volunteering to help clear the fateful buildings that
lined streets.
After seven days of intense fighting in Fallujah, the Marines of 1/3 embraced a new day with a faceless enemy.
We awoke November 15, 2004, around day-break in the abandoned, battle-worn house we had made our home for the night. We shaved, ate breakfast from a Meal, Ready-to-Eat pouch and waited for the word to move.
The word came, and we started what we had done since the operation began - clear the city of insurgents, building by building.
As an attachment to the unit, I had been placed as the third man in a
six-man group, or what Marines call a 'stack.' Two stacks of Marines were
used to clear a house. Moving quickly from the third house to the fourth, our order in the stack changed. I found Sgt. Rafael Peralta in my spot, so I fell in behind him as we moved toward the house.
A Mexican-American who lived in San Diego, Peralta earned his citizenship
after he joined the Marine Corps. He was a platoon scout, which meant he could have stayed back in safety while the squads of 1st Platoon went into the danger filled streets, but he was constantly asking to help out by giving them an extra Marine. I learned by speaking with him and other Marines the night before that he frequently put his safety, reputation and
career on the line for the needs and morale of the junior Marines around him.
When we reached the fourth house, we breached the gate and swiftly approached the building. The first Marine in the stack kicked in the front
door, revealing a locked door to their front and another at the right.
Kicking in the doors simultaneously, one stack filed swiftly into the room to the front as the other group of Marines darted off to the right.
"Clear!" screamed the Marines in one of the rooms followed only seconds
later by another shout of "clear!" from the second room. One word told us
all we wanted to know about the rooms: there was no one in there to shoot at us.
We found that the two rooms were adjoined and we had another closed door in front of us. We spread ourselves throughout the rooms to avoid a cluster going through the next door.
Two Marines stacked to the left of the door as Peralta, rifle in hand, tested the handle. I watched from the middle, slightly off to the right of the room as the handle turned with ease.
Ready to rush into the rear part of the house, Peralta threw open the door.
'POP! POP! POP!' Multiple bursts of cap-gun-like sounding AK-47 fire rang throughout the house.
Three insurgents with AK-47s were waiting for us behind the door.
Peralta was hit several times in his upper torso and face at point-blank range by the fully-automatic 7.62mm weapons employed by three terrorists.
Mortally wounded, he jumped into the already cleared, adjoining room, giving the rest of us a clear line of fire through the doorway to the rear
of the house.
We opened fire, adding the bangs of M-16A2 service rifles, and the deafening, rolling cracks of a Squad Automatic Weapon, or "SAW," to the
already nerve-racking sound of the AKs. One Marine was shot through the forearm and continued to fire at the enemy.
I fired until Marines closer to the door began to maneuver into better firing positions, blocking my line of fire. Not being an infantryman, I watched to see what those with more extensive training were doing.
I saw four Marines firing from the adjoining room when a yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade bounced into the room, rolling to a stop close to Peralta's nearly lifeless body.
In an act living up to the heroes of the Marine Corps' past, such as Medal of Honor recipients Pfc. James LaBelle and Lance Cpl. Richard Anderson,
Peralta - in his last fleeting moments of consciousness- reached out and pulled the grenade into his body. LaBelle fought on Iwo Jima and Anderson in Vietnam, both died saving their fellow Marines by smothering the blast of enemy grenades.
Peralta did the same for all of us in those rooms. I watched in fear and horror as the other four Marines scrambled to the corners of the room and the majority of the blast was absorbed by Peralta's now lifeless body. His selflessness left four other Marines with only minor injuries from smaller fragments of the grenade.
During the fight, a fire was sparked in the rear of the house. The flames
were becoming visible through the door.
The decision was made by the Marine in charge of the squad to evacuate the injured Marines from the house, regroup and return to finish the fight and retrieve Peralta's body.
We quickly ran for shelter, three or four houses up the street, in a house that had already been cleared and was occupied by the squad's platoon.
As Staff Sgt. Jacob M. Murdock took a count of the Marines coming back, he found it to be one man short, and demanded to know the whereabouts of the missing Marine.
"Sergeant Peralta! He's dead! He's f------ dead," screamed Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison, a machine gunner with the squad, as he came around a corner. "He's still in there. We have to go back."
The ingrained code Marines have of never leaving a man behind drove the next few moments. Within seconds, we headed back to the house unknown what we may encounter yet ready for another round.
I don't remember walking back down the street or through the gate in front of the house, but walking through the door the second time, I prayed that we wouldn't lose another brother.
We entered the house and met no resistance. We couldn't clear the rest of the house because the fire had grown immensely and the danger of the enemy's weapons cache exploding in the house was increasing by the second.
Most of us provided security while Peralta's body was removed from the
house.
We carried him back to our rally point and upon returning were told that
the other Marines who went to support us encountered and killed the three
insurgents from inside the house.
Later that night, while I was thinking about the day's somber events, Cpl.
Richard A. Mason, an infantryman with Headquarters Platoon, who, in the short time I was with the company became a good friend, told me, "You're
still here, don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today."
As a combat correspondent, this is not only my job, but an honor.
Throughout Operation Al Fajr, we were constantly being told that we were
making history, but if the books never mention this battle in the future,
I'm sure that the day and the sacrifice that was made, will never be forgotten by the Marines who were there.
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All:
The first is a front page piece from today's Left Angeles Times, and the second from the editorial page of today's WSJ.
Crafty Dog
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Weary Guard Seeks to Rebuild
Retention bonuses will be tripled and recruiting expanded as Iraq war strains multiply. Force also seeks $20 billion to replace equipment.
By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON ? The Army National Guard is tripling retention bonuses to counter lagging recruitment and is asking for $20 billion to replace equipment destroyed in combat as it struggles under the continuing burden of the Iraq war, the Guard's top commander said Thursday.
After missing its recruitment goals over the last two months, the National Guard plans to boost bonuses to $15,000 from $5,000 for members who sign up for another six-year stint. Bonuses for first-time recruits will jump to $10,000 from $6,000 ? tax-free for those abroad, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, head of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters at the Pentagon.
The Guard also is boosting the number of recruiters from 2,700 to 4,100 and adjusting its advertising campaigns and slogans away from so-called weekend warriors to appeal to potential recruits who will more readily accept deployment abroad.
The war has collided with the expectations of those who thought that joining the Guard meant serving short periods close to home, near their families and civilian jobs.
The changes announced Thursday underscored the strain the Guard is facing from a protracted war that has required a fourth of its 340,000 members to serve in combat in Iraq. More than 140 Guard troops have been killed in Iraq.
Blum said the extra $20 billion is needed over three years to repair and replace vehicles, radios and other equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan as the service seeks first to replenish and then equip its forces.
"Otherwise, the Guard will be broken and not ready the next time it's needed, either here at home or for war," Blum said.
More than 100,000 Guard members are now deployed abroad, and many complain that they face enemy fire with equipment inferior to that of their regular Army colleagues. The equipment problems only compound growing recruitment and retention weaknesses, commanders said.
"There's no question that when you have a sustained ground combat operation going that the Guard's participating in, that makes recruiting more difficult," Blum said.
The National Guard has faced recruitment and retention problems since last summer. It fell 7,000 short of its target of 350,000 members in September and has struggled since then. The Guard's recruiting problem compounds those of the Army Reserve, which also has failed to meet its goals for the last two months. Together, the two branches of the Army make up 40% of the 140,000 American troops now serving in Iraq.
Blum said some of the Guard's recruiting themes being changed.
"We're not talking about one weekend a month and two weeks a year and college tuition," he said, referring to the time that members traditionally spent on active duty and an educational benefit. "We're talking about service to the nation."
U.S. military officials have expressed concern that the extensive deployments of part-time troops could drive some out of the force and deter others from joining, making it hard to fill the ranks in the future.
Meanwhile, many state officials complain that because the Guard is so heavily deployed in Iraq, its members are unavailable to help with domestic security or natural disasters.
The Guard's ranks have been hit hardest by a drop in the number of former full-time soldiers who exit active duty from the Army and enlist in the Guard. About half of active-duty soldiers traditionally have gone into the Guard after being discharged; the number has recently dropped to about 35%, Blum said.
"Clearly, a good flow of active forces into the Guard and Reserve is something that will benefit the Army, the Guard and Reserve over the long haul," Gen. George W. Casey, commander of the U.S.-led multinational force in Iraq, told reporters Thursday at the Pentagon. "It's something I think we need to pay attention to and continue to encourage and maybe incentivize active forces to continue to move into the Guard and Reserve."
Critics expressed doubt Thursday that the added incentives would solve the problem, which they said was more the result of prolonged deployments.
"When people get out now, they don't necessarily go into the Reserves because they know they'll likely go back out to Iraq, where they might have just come back from," said retired Army Capt. Michael McPhearson of the group Military Families Speak Out, an organization of service members and their families critical of U.S. policy in Iraq. "People know that. And they don't want to go."
The extra $20 billion will have to win approval in Congress.
In seeking the extra money, the National Guard's request would go far beyond the $7 billion in equipment it plans to request in an emergency spending bill to cover the costs of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blum said.
Members of Congress have served as fierce advocates for National Guard units in their districts. Even when the Pentagon seeks little money to reequip Guard units, lawmakers go to bat for federal funding for local units. Equipment problems in the National Guard put Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the defensive when he visited troops in Kuwait on Dec. 8.
Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson said members of his unit were forced to rummage through scrap yards for material to armor their Humvees. The Army since has moved to increase production of armored vehicles.
The question of equipment is particularly of concern to National Guard and Reserve troops because they often work with older equipment, although they represent a significant portion of the U.S. military force in Iraq.
"The Army's equipment is old, but the Guard's is oldest and it's wearing out," said Loren Thompson, defense analyst for the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group.
The equipment woes have provoked concern in Congress, with Republicans as well as Democrats criticizing Rumsfeld. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said Wednesday in a letter to Rumsfeld that she found the issue troubling.
"Given that so many American soldiers have died or been seriously injured in Iraq as a result of improvised explosive devices or in ambushes from rocket-propelled grenades, the urgent requirement for armor protection remains," she said.
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COMMENTARY
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The Army We Have
By BRENDAN MINITER
December 17, 2004; Page A14
A few weeks ago Rep. Duncan Hunter handed me a reason that has largely escaped media attention as to why our troops don't have all the armor they need. It was a piece of ballistic glass the size of a small dinner plate and as transparent as a normal windshield. But as it was four sheets of glass glued together, it was very thick and extremely heavy. In Iraq, this glass is saving lives.
The problem, the House Armed Services Committee chairman explained, is that a ballistic windshield is too heavy for some military vehicles. The window frames simply cannot support it. That means some soldiers are driving vehicles with regular windshields as the bureaucracy figures out what to do.
While the troops wait, he complained, the military could install two-inch-thick ballistic glass, which would likely stop 80% of the shrapnel that penetrates ordinary windshields. But the military is loath to adopt an interim, if imperfect, remedy. It prefers to wait for the "100% solution," Mr. Hunter said. In other words, in military procurement, the perfect has become the enemy of the good.
Mr. Hunter has also pushed the military to give soldiers steel plates they can cut into armored doors. He even made a short video on how soldiers in the field can cut the armored doors themselves (you can view it at www.garybecks.com/humvee/index.html). Somehow the military isn't getting this done either.
These are not the only problems. Mr. Hunter's office figured out a way to help protect convoys by converting a regular truck into an escort vehicle by bolting on a few plates of high-grade steel, ballistic glass and four machine guns. The Army initially said these gun trucks weren't needed. But now a handful of them are in Iraq, with more to be delivered by Christmas.
There have been a few successes, however. Before redeploying to Iraq last March, the Marines put some armor on all the vehicles they shipped over. Through the Rapid Fielding Initiative, the Pentagon distributed a new type of body armor in Iraq. And Rapid Acquisition Authority was signed into law in October, which empowers the defense secretary to go outside the procurement system to meet urgent battlefield needs. But the power has yet to be invoked.
Donald Rumsfeld stirred up a hornet's nest last week saying, "You go to war with the army you have." But he was right. We cannot afford to make George McClellan's mistake in the Civil War, endlessly preparing but not doggedly going after the enemy. Our soldiers deserve the best equipment money can buy. And that includes the best equipment they can use now, instead of waiting around for something better. Sometimes what's good enough today is better than what would be perfect sometime down the road.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. This is adapted from his weekly online column, "The Western Front."
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ANOTHER YEAR AT WAR
By RALPH PETERS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 20, 2004 -- AS 2004 draws to a close, our military can be proud. Once again, our troops de feated our enemies, redeemed the mistakes of our civilian leadership and defied the prophets of disaster.
Iraq will shortly hold national elections. Afghanistan is a functioning democracy, despite the critics who claimed the goal was impossible. Islamic terrorists remain on the run, unable to strike our homeland. And the battle with terror in the Middle East has taken a terrible toll on our enemies.
This was a year of major policy errors and deadly challenges. U.S. election requirements conflicted with military necessity. Troop levels were capped too low. Their civilian superiors prevented combat commanders from taking decisive action, fearing that casualties would become a political football. The terrorists and insurgents put down deep roots while our election campaign dragged on.
But our troops always came through for us, no matter the limits imposed upon them. Whenever they were allowed to fight, they won. Our tragic reverses, such as the disastrous First Battle of Fallujah or the initial rounds of fighting in Najaf, resulted from indecision and miscalculations at the highest levels of civilian leadership, not from any military failings.
Throughout the year, commanders and soldiers reinvented warfare under fire. Old doctrine was cast aside in favor of combat techniques suited to a new century. Urban warfare lessons were studied in the field and combat in cities was revolutionized ? the triumphant Second Battle of Fallujah shattered every historical precedent.
Commanders grasped the paramount requirement for speed when war must be waged under the scrutiny of the global media. The traditional importance of mass ? of having the numbers overwhelmingly on your side ? regained respectability. Even civilian decision-makers belatedly recognized that war cannot be waged by garden-party rules.
As a result, an overwhelming, multi-service force won Second Fallujah in a week, with less than 10 percent of the casualties traditional urban-warfare models would have predicted. The major fighting was over before a hostile global media could undercut our efforts ? as al-Jazeera and the BBC did back in April, during First Fallujah.
If any lesson permeated our military experience in Iraq, it was the requirement to speed the kill, to operate within the media cycle. Operations that once would have stretched over days were condensed to start and finish between midnight and dawn.
On a darker note, it became evident that our strategic failure to mount a robust occupation immediately in the aftermath of Saddam's fall allowed our enemies to retake control of the timetable. An occupation that could have gone relatively smoothly turned instead into an ugly unconventional war that tears at the sinews of Iraqi identity.
There's an old military maxim to the effect that it's difficult to recover from "faulty initial dispositions." By failing to use our power aggressively early on, we only strengthened our enemies.
Had the Pentagon's civilian leadership planned thoroughly for the occupation, allocating robust forces and delegating real authority to battlefield commanders, our casualties would be far lower today and Iraq would be a much more peaceful place. For the sake of our troops, we need to hope that the civilians who send our forces into battle have learned the time-honored lesson that you can't do military operations on the cheap.
Even as our troops have done a magnificent job, they've been run ragged. Our Reserves and National Guard are drained, while our active-duty forces are on an endless conveyor belt to and from Iraq. Desperately needed increases in Army and Marine numbers have been blocked by the secretary of Defense. We owe our service members a better deal than that ? we can at least make sure there are enough of them.
It's going to be a needlessly dark holiday season for hundreds of thousands of military families torn asunder by faulty Pentagon planning. And still our troops maintain high morale. Even as the media made the ugly-but-minor mess at Abu Ghraib prison the event of the year, our soldiers were fighting, winning, building a new democracy and refusing to quit, no matter how difficult the conditions.
Whatever errors their leaders may have made, our troops never failed us.
Now, as 2005 approaches, we need to give the men and women in uniform the support they deserve.
First, this means increasing the size of our ground forces so that we don't have to cripple the superb military we've built over the past generation. This is going to be a long war. There is no excuse for temporizing while soldiers and their families suffer needlessly. There are not enough troops in uniform. Fixing that problem should be our nation's number-one military priority.
We also need to support our troops by keeping faith. Too many of the Washington civilians who couldn't wait to go to war now can't wait to bail out of Iraq. But victory belongs to the steadfast. Iraq's elections can't become an excuse for cutting and running. We have to see this one through.
Our troops are willing. They understand the stakes. The least we can do is to give them the support they need, whether additional numbers or sufficient vehicle armor. To quit when we have come this far would be to mock all the casualties our forces have suffered.
Our troops did us proud in 2004. Let's do right by them in '05.
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Army Program Allows for More Healing at Home
Under the Community Based Health Care Initiative, National Guard and Reserve members can recuperate in their comfort zones.
By John-Thor Dahlburg, Times Staff Writer
OAKLAND PARK, Fla. ? Staff Sgt. Mitch Riviera needs therapy on his left knee and an operation to mend his bad back, enduring and painful consequences of a yearlong deployment in Iraq. But this holiday season, because of a new Army program, the injured National Guardsman hasn't been marooned in a military hospital on some faraway base, but is back home.
"I wake up every day happy," said the 33-year-old mechanic with the 743rd Maintenance Company of the Florida National Guard. "You're just happy to be home."
Under the Community Based Health Care Initiative, wounded or ailing members of the Army National Guard and Reserve are able for the first time to live at home and recuperate while still on active-duty status.
They receive medical care at local Veterans Administration facilities or from healthcare providers authorized by Tricare, the U.S. military's equivalent of an HMO, and are given light duties at a local armory or other military facilities.
The impetus was a public embarrassment for the Army: media reports in 2003 that hundreds of wounded reservists and guardsmen were languishing in barracks as they waited to see doctors or be admitted to overcrowded medical facilities. That was Riviera's experience after his company returned from Iraq in April.
Nearly all members of his unit were allowed to go home, but the staff sergeant said he was kept on base at Ft. Stewart, Ga., for three months, housed in a 16-person trailer as he awaited his turn for medical treatment.
"They were just overwhelmed. They couldn't cope with the wounded people they had," said Riviera, who hurt his back and knee in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, while lugging the heavy tools needed in his job as a front-line mechanic and wearing 80 pounds of "battle rattle" combat gear. At one point, he said, he couldn't walk for three weeks.
"I was disorganized with all the surgery I had to go through" at Ft. Stewart, 400 miles from South Florida, Riviera said. "You're so close to home, but you can't go there, and you can't go off post."
It was his fiancee, Diana Villescaz, 24, of Bakersfield, a legal secretary, who came to his rescue, Riviera said. She heard about the Army's new community-based healthcare program, and sent an e-mail to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush asking for help.
Within 48 hours, Riviera said, he received a phone call from an officer inquiring about his case.
Lt. Col. Bruce Cornelison is in charge of the initiative in Florida, which in March became the first state to implement the program. He called it "an absolutely wonderful improvement," in large part because it gets wounded or injured men and women "back to their families and loved ones."
"An individual cures faster if he is surrounded by his support system," Cornelison, an officer in the Army Medical Service Corps, said from the program's Florida offices in Plant City east of Tampa. "Soldiers were so far from their home, and facilities were being overcrowded."
Offices have also been opened in California, Arkansas, Massachusetts and Wisconsin to arrange for and supervise medical care for 1,335 soldiers in 23 states. The initiative was deemed so successful, and demand grew so fast, that the Army has announced that by April, more centers would be opened in Virginia, Alabama and Utah, expanding coverage to all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
A total of $23 million in funding has been set aside, and nearly 800 additional physicians, nurses, clerks and case managers have been hired or mobilized to help, the Pentagon announced Dec. 6.
According to Col. Barbara Scherb of Army Forces Command, the program's overall manager, the innovation is a response to the new realities of today's Army, where active-duty troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have had to be heavily and repeatedly supplemented by part-time soldiers from the Guard and Reserve.
"It quickly became apparent that we might exceed the [medical] capacity at the installations for these folks" if they suffered the same level of casualties as troops in World War II, Vietnam and Operation Desert Storm," Scherb said. "That's why we looked at establishing something that was community-based."
Since active-duty soldiers typically live on or near an Army base, families and friends can be by their side as they are treated in a location familiar to them. The community-based care program extends that psychological and emotional boost to soldiers in the Guard and Reserve, as well as easing them back into civilian life.
"The quality of the care is really the same as it was before," Scherb said. "The quality of life is the thing that is improving, because they are able to get home and get back with their families."
The National Military Family Assn. is still monitoring how the novel program will work in practice, especially for soldiers who live in remote locales where medical resources may be scarce, said Julia Pfaff, the not-for-profit group's executive director. "We're cautious," Pfaff said. "A lot of these individuals are stuck in this Catch-22 of knowing they can be closer to home, but also having healthcare requirements that are enormous and can overwhelm the system."
For Riviera, an 11-year veteran of the Guard with thick black hair and a ready smile, being home has meant being able to buy diamond earrings for Villescaz (they plan to get married in March) and joining his mother and other family members in Tampa for Christmas. Last Thursday, he had an afternoon date to drive his fiancee, who had a cold, to the doctor. Riviera laughed at the irony of it.
Since coming back to Florida in late June, Riviera has been operated on at a Veterans Administration facility in Miami for a torn meniscus in his knee, and he will learn this month what sort of surgery he needs on his lower back. "The lower disk is gone," Riviera said. "They are probably going to have to fuse two lower disks together."
Two times a week, the sergeant, in civilian life a service technician for a cable company, attends physical therapy sessions at the VA's outpatient clinic in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Oakland Park. There, he is treated with ice and electrical stimulation, and does exercises to strengthen his muscles.
"It's painful, but it's getting the job done," Riviera said. "That therapist doesn't let you slack." At his apartment complex in Davie, he regularly walks in the swimming pool, with the water buoying his body so he doesn't put too much weight on his back and knee.
Not all of the wounded or injured who might want to take part in the program are eligible, Cornelison said.
"It wouldn't make any sense to bring someone home who required constant hospitalization," he said. Before going home, the soldiers spend a few days at a program office like the one in Plant City, meeting their case manager, discussing a treatment plan with a physician and arranging for a duty assignment for the time they will remain on active duty.
At 8 a.m. most days, Riviera reports to a National Guard armory near Fort Lauderdale's airport, where he assists military recruiters with administrative tasks. A third-generation military man, he wants to stay in the National Guard. He will continue on active duty in his current "medical hold" status, he said, until the VA treats his medical problems or decides it can't do anything more.
For the moment, Riviera must be careful even when making the simplest of movements ? like reaching for a bottle of milk.
His immediate goals are to get married, buy a house and start a family. Despite the pain and uncertainty about his back, he seems cheerful and upbeat. He'll be happy, the guardsman said, if he can get 90% of his old physical ability back.
"The rest I'll chalk up to life," he said.
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All:
I debated on whether to post the following in the WW3 thread or here, but wound up choosing here, because ulimately this piece is about the troops-- not Rumbo.
Our gratitude and prayers!
Crafty
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LEARN MORE ABOUT STRATFOR >>
"Rumsfeld should have hit the panic button on Army force structure when the insurgency picked up steam." The Force Structure Problem
By George Friedman
A memo written by Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, head of the U.S. Army Reserve, was leaked to The Baltimore Sun. Addressed to the chief of staff of the Army, the memo stated that the Army Reserve was in danger of becoming a "broken force," due to personnel policies adopted by the Army and the Department of Defense. Helmly wrote, "The purpose of this memorandum is to inform you of the Army Reserve's inability . . . to meet mission requirements associated with Iraq and Afghanistan and to reset and regenerate its forces for follow-on and future missions."
When a three-star general writes a memo containing these words to the chief of staff, and then leaks the memo to the press (it did not arrive at the Sun through telepathy), what you have is a major revolt by senior Army commanders. Helmly may have been more incautious than others, but he is far from alone in his view that the force in general is broken. More directly, if the Army Reserve is unable to carry out its mission, the same can likely be said for National Guard units. This means that the Army in general, which is heavily dependent on both to carry out its mission, won't be able to do so. What the generals are saying is that the Army itself is unable to carry out its mission.
Part of this is a discussion of several procedures governing call-ups and other issues that have not changed since the Sept. 11 attacks. Some of it has to do with the extreme stress that reserve components are experiencing. All of it has to do with a revolt against Donald Rumsfeld and his policies toward the Army, policies that go back to Rumsfeld's view of warfare.
Rumsfeld believes that there is a revolution in warfare under way. As the author of The Future of War, I completely agree with him. However, as I stated in that book, the revolution is just getting under way and will not be mature for generations. It is not ready to carry the warfighting burden of the United States, although it can certainly support it. Until that revolution matures, traditional forces, particularly the Army, will need to be maintained and, in time of war, expanded.
Rumsfeld's view is that the revolution is more mature than that and that warfare can now be carried out with minimal Army forces. In some ways, Rumsfeld was right when he focused on the conventional invasion of Iraq. A relatively small force was able to defeat the main Iraqi force. Where he made his mistake, in my opinion, was in not recognizing that the occupation of Iraq required substantial manpower and that much of that manpower was in the reserves.
He compounded that mistake enormously when he failed to recognize that an organized insurgency was under way in Iraq. Counterinsurgency operations is one area in which the revolution in warfare has made little progress, and Rumsfeld should have hit the panic button on Army force structure when the insurgency picked up steam. In Iraq, Rumsfeld was going to fight a guerrilla war, and he was going to need a lot of infantry and armor to do it. If, in addition to fighting the guerrilla war, Rumsfeld planned to carry out other operations in the region and maintain a strategic reserve, he needed to expand the Army dramatically.
Rumsfeld made three mistakes. First, he overestimated the breadth and depth of the revolution in warfare. Second, he underestimated the challenges posed by counterinsurgency operations, particularly in urban areas. Mistakes are inevitable, but his third mistake was amazing: he could not recognize that he had made the first two mistakes. That meant that he never corrected any of the mistakes.
There is another way to look at this. The United States is in a global war. Personnel policies have not been radically restructured to take into account either that the U.S. needs a wartime force structure or that that force structure must be congruent with the type and tempo of operations that will be undertaken. Not only doesn't the force stretch, but the force is not built to stretch. Hence, Helmly's memo.
Essentially, this memo is an open challenge by Army generals to Rumsfeld, with the chief of staff caught in the middle. The situation is now officially out of hand. If the commander of the Army Reserve says that his command is not capable of carrying out its mission, and says it publicly, there is no way to cover that up. He is either going to be relieved of his command, or he is going to be given the tools to fix the problem. If he is going to be given those tools, then Rumsfeld's view is being repudiated and Rumsfeld has to go.
There is something more than politics at work here. It's called reality. Helmly is right. It seems to me that the handwriting is on the wall. Once the elections in Iraq are completed, dramatic changes will take place. Bush will call for an expansion of the Army and the reserves. In Iraq, U.S. forces will be shifted out of security responsibilities, where they are not effective anyway. And, incidentally, Rumsfeld will retire. Or, Rumsfeld will purge the senior ranks of the Army. Since that is not a viable option, we expect Bush will be forced to act on their recommendations.
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You probably don't know Rafael Peralta's name. If we lived in a country that more fully celebrated the heroics of its men in uniform, you would. He was a sergeant in Company A, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment for Operation Dawn, the November offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which had become a haven for terrorists. What he did on the day of Nov. 15 was an awe-inspiring act of selfless sacrifice and faithfulness to his fellow Marines.
The only way we can honor Sgt. Peralta's heroism is to tell his story and remember his name. What follows is mostly drawn from the reporting of Marine combat correspondent Lance Cpl. T.J. Kaemmerer, who witnessed the events on that day.
Sgt. Peralta, 25, was a Mexican American. He joined the Marines the day after he got his green card and earned his citizenship while in uniform. He was fiercely loyal to the ethos of the Corps. While in Kuwait, waiting to go into Iraq, he had his camouflage uniform sent out to be pressed. He constantly looked for opportunities to help his Marine brothers, which is why he ended up where he was on Nov. 15. A week into the battle for Fallujah, the Marines were still doing the deadly work of clearing the city, house by house. As a platoon scout, Peralta didn't have to go out with the assault team that day. He volunteered to go.
According to Kaemmerer, the Marines entered a house and kicked in the doors of two rooms that proved empty. But there was another closed door to an adjoining room. It was unlocked, and Peralta, in the lead, opened it. He was immediately hit with AK-47 fire in his face and upper torso by three insurgents. He fell out of the way into one of the cleared rooms to give his fellow Marines a clear shot at the enemy. During the firefight, a yellow fragmentation grenade flew out of the room, landing near Peralta and several fellow Marines. The uninjured Marines tried to scatter out of the way, two of them trying to escape the room, but were blocked by a locked door. At that point, barely alive, Peralta grabbed the grenade and cradled it to his body.
His body took most of the blast. One Marine was seriously injured, but the rest sustained only minor shrapnel wounds. Cpl. Brannon Dyer told a reporter from the Army Times, "He saved half my fire team."
Kaemmerer compares Peralta's sacrifice to that of past Marine Medal of Honor winners Pfc. James LaBelle and Lance Cpl. Richard Anderson. LaBelle dove on a Japanese grenade to save two fellow Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima. Although he had just been wounded twice, Anderson rolled over an enemy grenade to save a fellow Marine during a 1969 battle in Vietnam.
Peralta's sacrifice should be a legend in the making. But somehow heroism doesn't get the same traction in our media environment as being a victim or villain, categories that encompass the truly famous Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England respectively. Peralta's story has been covered in military publications, a smattering of papers including the Seattle Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, ABC News, and some military blogs. But the Washington Post and the New York Times only mentioned Peralta's name in their lists of the dead. Scandalously, the "heroism" of Spc. Thomas Wilson ? the national guardsman who asked a tough question of Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld that had been planted with him by a reporter ? has been more celebrated in the press than that of Peralta.
Kaemmerer recounts how later on the night of Nov. 15, a friend approached him and said: "You're still here; don't forget that. Tell your kids, your grandkids, what Sgt. Peralta did for you and the other Marines today." Don't forget. Good advice for all of us.
http://nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200501110730.asp
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THE TRUTH ABOUT WAR
By: RALPH PETERS
IN San Diego on Tuesday, I had the privilege of sitting beside Lt.-Gen Jim Mattis, a Marine who knows how to fight. We were on a panel discussing future war. And Gen. Mattis, a Marine to the marrow of his bones spoke honestly about the thrill of combat. Mattis has commanded at every level. In Desert Storm, he led a battalion. In Afghanistan and then in Iraq, he led with inspiration and courage. Everyone on our panel had opinions about war, but that no-nonsense Marine knew more about it than the rest of us combined.
In the course of a blunt discussion of how our military has to prepare for future fights, the general spoke with a frankness that won the hearts of the uniformed members of the audience. Instead of trotting out politically correct clich?s, Mattis told the truth: "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil . . . it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." The language wasn't elegant. But we don't need prissy military leaders. We need generals who talk straight and shoot straight, men who inspire, and I guarantee you that any real Marine or Soldier would follow Gen Mattis.
What was the media's reaction? A B-team news crew saw a chance to grab a headline at the military's expense (surprise, surprise). Lifting the general's remarks out of context, the media hyenas played it as if they were shocked to learn that people die in war. Combat veterans are supposed to be tormented souls, you understand. Those who fight our wars are supposed to return home irreparably damaged.
HOLLYWOOD'S ideal of a Marine is the retired colonel in the film American Beauty," who turns out to be a repressed homosexual and a murderer. Veterans are sup- posed to writhe on their beds all night, covered in sweat, unable to escape their nightmares.
War does scar some men. Most vets, though, just get on with their lives scratch a veteran looking for pity and more often than not you'll find a supply clerk who never got near a battlefield. And some who serve the soldiers and Marines who win our wars run to the sound of the guns, anxious to close with the enemy and kill him. They may not love war itself, but they find combat magnetic and exhilarating. They like to fight. That's fine in movies featuring Brad Pitt as a mythical Greek hero. But God forbid that a modern-day Marine should admit that he loves his work.
Well, Marines and soldiers don't serve full careers because they hate their jobs. In peace or war, the military experience is incredibly rich and rewarding and sometimes dangerous. Goes with the territory. But for most of the young infantrymen in Iraq, their combat experience will remain the highpoint of their lives. Nothing afterward will be as intense or exciting and they will never make closer friends than they did in their rifle squad.
Gen Mattis may have been unusual in his honesty, but he certainly isn't unusual in our history. We picture Robert E. Lee as a saintly father figure, but Lee remarked that it's good that war is so terrible, since otherwise men would grow to love it too much. He was speaking of himself. Andy Jackson certainly loved a fight, and Stonewall Jackson never shied from one. Sherman and Grant only found themselves in war.
WE lionize those who embraced war in the past, but condemn those who defend us in the present. George S. Patton was far blunter than Jim
Mattis - but Patton lived in the days before the media was omnipresent and biased against our military.
The hypocrisy is stunning Gen Mattis told the truth about a fundamental human activity war and was treated as though he had dropped a nuclear weapon on an orphanage. Yet when some bozo on a talk show confesses to an addiction or a perversion in front of millions of viewers, he's lionized as "courageous" for speaking out. Sorry! It's men like Jim Mattis who are courageous. The rest of us barely glimpse the meaning of the word.
We've come to a sad state when a Marine who has risked his life repeatedly to keep our country safe can't speak his mind, while any professor who wants to blame America for 9/11 is defended by legions of free-speech advocates. If a man like Mattis hasn't earned the right to say what he really believes, who has?
Had Gen Mattis collapsed in tears and begged for pity for the torments war inflicted on him, the media would have adored him. Instead, he spoke as Marines and Soldiers do in the headquarters tent or the barracks, on the battlefield or among comrades. And young journalists who never faced anything more dangerous than a drunken night in Tijuana tried to create a scandal.
FORTUNATELY, Lt. Gen Mattis has three big things going for him: The respect of those who serve; the Marine Corps, which won't abandon a valiant fighter to please self-righteous pundits whose only battle is with their waistlines; and the fact that we're at war. We need more men like Mattis, not fewer. The public needs to hear the truth about war, not just the crybaby nonsense of those who never deigned to serve our country.
In my own far humbler career, the leaders I admired were those who had the killer instinct. The soldiers knew who they were. We would have followed them anywhere. They weren't slick Pentagon staffers anxious to
go to work for defense contractors. They were the men who lived and breathed the warrior's life.
Table manners don't win wars winning our nation's battles demands disciplined ferocity, raw physical courage - and integrity. Jim Mattis has those qualities in spades.
Semper Fi, General!
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace
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I think it's interesting to note the difference between the way the Mattis story has been covered by the MSM and the Eason Jordan story. For those who don't know, Jordan proclaimed at an economic conference that the American military targets reporters for death. An executive at CNN, Jordan and his apologists have been backpedaling fairly furiously since word of his comments began circulating, but outside of the blogosphere Jordan's comments have not received a corresponding degree scrutiny or opprobrium.
There is a tape of the Eason comments in question that for some odd reason isn't being released by the conference's sponsors. Bottom line is we have a respected warrior talking straight and contending with the consequences forthrightly while an influential member of the Fifth Estate hides behind the skirts of fellow travelers. Shameful behavior by folks who otherwise never fail to insert their noses in any out of context manner they darn well please.
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http://www.sptimes.com/2004/webspecials04/medalofhonor/default.shtml
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...t_pe/iraq_armor
Quote:
WASHINGTON - The Defense Department hasn't developed a plan to reimburse soldiers for equipment they've bought to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan despite requirements in a law passed last year, a senator says.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., asked details on the Pentagon's progress setting up the reimbursement program and questioned why it was not in place yet.
"Very simply, this is either negligence on their part, because they were not happy with this when it passed, or it's incompetence," Dodd said. "It's pretty outrageous when you have all their rhetoric about how much we care about our people in uniform."
The Pentagon had no immediate comment.
Soldiers serving in Iraq and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.
In response to the complaints, Congress last year passed Dodd's amendment requiring the Pentagon to reimburse members of the Armed Services for the cost of any safety or health equipment that they bought or someone else bought on their behalf.
Under the law, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations on the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item.
Dodd asked that Rumsfeld provide details on the department's progress. But he also said it was unclear what recourse he has, other than public embarrassment, to force the Defense Department to act.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who repeatedly decried the lack of equipment during his unsuccessful presidential campaign, said the Pentagon needs to move quickly to give the troops their reimbursement and armored Humvees.
"They should be living up to the letter of the law," Kerry said.
The latest emergency spending proposal for the war totals $81.9 billion, including $74.9 billion for the Defense Department. It includes $3.3 billion for extra armor for trucks and other protective gear ? underscoring a sensitivity to earlier complaints by troops.
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Out of today's Washington Post
Checkpoint Iraq: A Tactic That Works
By Bartle Breese Bull
Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page B03
ANBAR PROVINCE, Iraq
As an unembedded freelance journalist in Iraq, I have safely driven through scores of American roadblocks all over this country. I have also spent many hours with U.S. troops as they set up and operate these checkpoints.
At the same time, like other reporters here who don't travel with armies of their own -- and like the millions of Iraqis who either have some money or are brave enough to participate in their country's reconstruction -- I live constantly with the fear of being kidnapped. We see every day the damage done with the millions of dollars that Iraq's Baathist and Wahhabist insurgencies make from that appalling business.
So as investigators try to sort out how U.S. troops could have fired on a car carrying newly freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, wounding her and killing the man who secured her release, I'm thinking about how checkpoints save lives. We don't know exactly what happened at the checkpoint on the way to the Baghdad airport. But I've seen how checkpoints work, and the American soldiers who man them are anything but trigger-happy. They know the consequences of making a mistake.
If the uproar over the shooting leads the Americans to further tighten rules of engagement, that will increase the danger to our troops and make commanders on the ground more reluctant to perform these dangerous operations. As a result, more foreigners and Iraqis will be running the risk of being kidnapped or blown up by suicide bombs.
Traffic checkpoints are an essential tactic in the disruption of terrorism here in Iraq, since car bombers and kidnappers have to use the roads to conduct their criminal business. Apart from certain fixed locations, such as the entrances to the Green Zone or the Baghdad airport, most checkpoints aren't permanent, and they can be set up almost anywhere, in all sorts of situations. Bridges are popular with American commanders, as they funnel traffic. Long highway straightaways are also good, since they provide visibility for both the civilian drivers and the checkpoint soldiers. Sometimes all the vehicles are searched, and sometimes just a few of them.
Anything that makes it harder to spirit a hostage away to the countryside forces urban kidnappers to keep their victims in busy areas, where the likelihood of discovery is far higher. The restriction of movement provides an important geographical focus for search efforts. Indeed, the first thing that local authorities -- American or Iraqi -- do in a kidnap situation here is set up checkpoints. Many times during kidnapping sagas, I've heard Iraqis say things like, "Well, he's probably still in X, because with all these checkpoints, they would never try to move him." For the terrorists, the higher the likelihood of discovery, the less appealing the kidnapping operation becomes.
The details of Sgrena's release and wounding are still in official dispute, but on the street here there's nearly universal certainty that Nicola Calipari, the Italian government agent who died at the checkpoint, bought her freedom with a large ransom. Some Italian officials have intimated as much, though Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told an Italian newspaper that no money changed hands. It's also believed that the Italians ransomed two aid workers last fall. If so, this would mean that the Italian government is giving the terrorists money to conduct more violence even as 2,700 young Italians in uniform are helping rebuild this country.
The word here is that although Calipari had briefed the Americans about his mission, he withheld the details, partly because the Americans disapprove of paying off kidnappers, but more importantly because of the essential factor that foreign media coverage of Iraq usually ignores: the Iraqis. If the Italians paid a ransom, Calipari committed a serious crime in a sovereign state fighting desperately to establish the rule of law and defeat internal terrorism.
Though we may never know exactly what happened, I find it hard to believe that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division just opened fire at a car being driven in a normal, unthreatening manner. The realities of checkpoints in Iraq make random shooting at responsible drivers very unlikely. I'm currently reporting a story on a unit of American soldiers. They're drilled with a stopwatch in the task of setting up a checkpoint -- a "serpentine" of concertina wire, at least three orange cones and, farthest out, a warning sign. These warning barriers are never forgotten, because soldiers are scared of car bombs. The farther out a car has to slow down, the better. You will never see disagreement within a platoon over this basic fact of self-preservation.
Long before the Italian incident, orders had come down that deadly force was to be used only as a last resort -- after the failure of obstacles, then flares or smoke bombs or "star clusters," then warning shots, and finally efforts to take out the oncoming vehicle's engine block. These procedures are real. I have seen our soldiers' reluctance to use force and felt the fear it brings. Car bombs cause 30 percent of military casualties.
The checkpoint procedures, which the military calls "fire discipline" and "escalation of force," are designed to prevent soldiers from killing innocent Iraqis who somehow lack the information or common sense to slow down when they approach. Over the period of Sgrena's incarceration, I stood with American troops at various checkpoints between Fallujah and Ramadi in the Sunni heartland of Iraq's Wild West, an area that receives more than 10 times the national average of attacks on American forces. As I finished writing the previous sentence I heard the announcement over the base radio that two members of the combat team I was with had been killed -- by a suicide bomber driving up to a checkpoint. I didn't see that explosion, but I heard it; I had spent much of the day at another U.S. checkpoint not far away.
"Sitting ducks, that's all we are," a 20-year-old combat medic from Texas said to me as we watched Iraqi vehicles thread past the "Alert" sign and through the orange cones and concertina wire of a checkpoint last week. Later, when I asked the sergeant in charge of the platoon if he was enjoying himself, he responded, "Just hanging around waiting to get blown up." This unit has suffered very high casualties, most from car bombs. If any soldiers in Iraq could be expected to be jumpy and trigger-happy, it is the grunts of central Anbar province. But as I watched them run their checkpoint, both before and after the Sgrena incident, they were thoroughly professional.
Driving around this country with Iraqis, including people with quite a lot to hide, I've encountered scores of American checkpoints. Just about everyone knows what to do: You do a slow U-turn and go the other way, you find a route around, or you drive through slowly and wave at the polite 20-year-old from Nashville. In a very small number of cases, one side makes a mistake and something truly tragic happens.
As a foreigner here, I feel threatened by the possibility that the Italian government may have rewarded the kidnappers. But Iraq is not about us foreigners. It is about Iraqis. And it is Iraqis who suffer most from kidnappings and from the transportation of the artillery shells and anti-tank mines that become roadside devices and car bombs. Kidnapping Iraqis has become an almost routine business transaction here. Local businessmen fetch sums of up to $250,000, while the child of an ordinary family might go for $5,000 or even $1,000. It happens all the time, all over the country. Iraqi Christians, being more prosperous than most, are especially victimized by this growing crime.
But since the Sgrena shooting, I've already sensed even greater reluctance to set up these dangerous checkpoints. "The soldiers don't like doing this, the NCOs don't like it, even the colonel doesn't like it," a young officer told me the other day. "These checkpoints don't happen as much as they used to."
Last summer, at the height of the kidnappings of foreign journalists here, I used to go to bed every night imagining a cold kiss of steel on the back of my neck: the first touch of the knife I feared would behead me. But not anymore. Great strides have been made in Iraq, and the progress continues every day. For law-abiding Iraqis, for reporters and for the soldiers who risk their lives to disrupt the bombers and hostage-takers, anything that makes life easier and more lucrative for the criminals is very bad news.
Author's e-mail: bbb@bartlebull.com
Bartle Breese Bull has reported from Iraq for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, Harper's and other publications.
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From Reuters: Army raises enlistment age for reservists to 39
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Army, stung by recruiting shortfalls caused by the Iraq war, has raised the maximum age for new recruits for the part-time Army Reserve and National Guard by five years to 39, officials said Monday.
The Army said the move, a three-year experiment, will add about 22 million people to the pool of those eligible to serve, from about 60 million now. Physical standards will not be relaxed for older recruits, who the Army said were valued for their maturity and patriotism.
The Pentagon has relied heavily on part-time Army Reserve and Army National Guard soldiers summoned from civilian life to maintain troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. Roughly 45 percent of U.S. troops currently deployed for those wars are reservists.
At home, the all-volunteer Army has labored to coax potential recruits to volunteer for the Guard and Reserve as well as for active-duty, and to persuade current soldiers to re-enlist when their volunteer commitment ends.
Maj. Elizabeth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman, said the maximum enlistment age for the regular Army will remain 34. While congressional action was not needed to raise the age for the Guard and Reserve, Robbins said, Congress must approve any change for the active-duty force.
"Raising the maximum age for non-prior service enlistment expands the recruiting pool, provides motivated individuals an opportunity to serve, and strengthens the readiness of Reserve units," the Army said in a statement.
Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said it was possible after the three-year test ends in September 2008 that the Pentagon may consider an enlistment age for Army reservists even older than 39.
Recruiting goals
Recruiters say the Iraq war is making military service a harder sell, and the Army has added recruiters and financial incentives for enlistment.
The Army National Guard missed its recruiting goal for the 2004 fiscal year and trails its year-to-date 2005 targets. The Army Reserve missed January and February goals and is lagging its target for 2005. The regular Army missed its target for February and trails its annual goal.
"Obviously, this decision is being made partly in response to the personnel shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq," said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute.
But he said U.S. life expectancy increased by 40 percent in the 20th century, adding, "The pressure of wartime has pushed the Army to make a change that may have been overdue anyway."
"Anecdotally, our recruiters have been telling us for years that we've had people who are otherwise qualified but over the age limit who have attempted to enlist," Robbins said. "There are physically fit, health-conscious individuals who can make a positive contribution to our national defense."
The Army said the policy applies to men and women, and older recruits must meet the same physical standards and pass the same medical examination as everyone else.
"Experience has shown that older recruits who can meet the physical demands of military service generally make excellent soldiers based on their maturity, motivation, loyalty and patriotism," the Army said.
Krenke said the the change was first considered last fall and approved by the Pentagon last week. She said the Marines, Navy and Air Force had not requested a similar change.
The Army Reserve is made up of federal soldiers who can be mobilized from civilian life for active duty. National Guard soldiers also serve under the control of state governors for roles like disaster relief in their home states.
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Laws Must Protect the Rights of Military Dads
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
When the Iraq war began two years ago, tens of thousands of fathers who serve in the Armed Forces expected hardship and sacrifice. However, they never expected that their children might be taken from them while they were deployed, or that their own government might jail them upon their return.
Military service sometimes costs men their children. The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act provides that if a parent moves a child to a new state, that new state becomes the child's presumptive residence after six months. With the long deployments necessitated by the war, a military spouse can move to another state while her spouse is deployed, divorce him, and then be virtually certain to gain custody through the divorce proceedings in the new state.
Given service personnel?s limited ability to travel, the high cost of legal representation and travel, and the financial hardships created by child support and spousal support obligations, it is extremely difficult for fathers to fight for their parental rights in the new state. For many, their participation and meaningful role in their children?s lives ends?often permanently--the day they were deployed.
In one highly-publicized case, Gary S., a San Diego-based US Navy SEAL, had his child permanently moved from California to the Middle East against his will while he was deployed in Afghanistan after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The 18-year Navy veteran with an unblemished military record has seen his son only three times since he returned from Afghanistan in April, 2002. Meanwhile he is nearly bankrupt from child support, spousal support, travel costs, and legal fees.
To solve the problem, the federal government must amend the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 2003 (SCRA) (formerly known as the Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act) to specifically prohibit the spouses of active duty military personnel from permanently moving children to another state without the permission of the active duty military spouse or of a court. In addition, the UCCJEA needs to be modified to state that the presumption of new residence does not apply if the children are taken in this wrongful fashion.
Also, states must do more to prevent custodial parents from moving children out of the lives of noncustodial parents, except in cases of abuse or dire economic need. For example, last year the California Supreme Court decided in LaMusga that courts should restrain moves that harm children by damaging the loving bonds they share with their noncustodial parents.
While some military fathers face the loss of their children, others face prosecution and jail for child support obligations which their service has rendered them unable to pay.
Support orders are based on civilian pay, which is generally higher than active duty pay. When reservists are called up to active duty they sometimes pay an impossibly high percentage of their income in child support.
For example, a California naval reservist who has three children and who takes home $4,000 a month in his civilian job would have a child support obligation of about $1,600 a month. If this father is a petty officer second class (E5) who has been in the reserves for six or seven years--a middle-ranked reservist--his active-duty pay would only be $2,205 before taxes, in addition to a housing allowance. Under current California child support guidelines, the reservist?s child support obligation should be $550 a month, not $1,600.
A reasonable reader unfamiliar with the wonders of the child support system would probably think ?OK, but the courts would just straighten it out when the reservist gets back?certainly they wouldn?t punish him for something that happened because he was serving.? However, the federal Bradley Amendment prohibits judges from retroactively modifying child support beyond the date which an obligor has applied for a modification. Reservists can be mobilized with as little as one day?s notice. If a reservist didn?t have time or didn?t know he had to file for a downward modification, the arrearages stay, along with the interest and penalties charged on them.
When the arrearage reaches $5,000?a common occurrence during long deployments?the father can become a felon who can be incarcerated or subject to a barrage of harsh civil penalties, including seizure of driver's licenses, business licenses and passports.
In addition, reservists who return from long-deployments often find that their civilian earning capacity is now diminished. This is particularly true for the 6% of reservists who are self-employed, and whose businesses are often destroyed by their absence. Family law courts are notoriously unforgiving of fathers who suffer wage drops. Many if not most will have their former incomes imputed to them, meaning that their child support will not change despite their drop in income. Saddled with mounting arrearages, some reservists will return to fight a long battle to stay out of jail.
Some reservists have their child support deducted automatically from their pay. Once deployed these fathers may lose 60% or 70% of their income and incur huge debts or face home foreclosures.
To date Missouri is the only state to adequately address the issue. During the first Gulf War it passed a law requiring that reservists? support obligations be automatically modified when they are called up for active duty. Other states, including California and Illinois, are currently considering legislation that would help reservists. However, tens of thousands of reservists were deployed before they could file for downward modifications. Only a repeal of the Bradley amendment?already widely seen as bad law within family law circles?can prevent them from facing years of debt, harassment, legal woes or even incarceration upon their return from active service.
Like many veterans, Gary says he was very na?ve about the troubles military fathers face in family law.
?The failure of our leaders in Washington to protect military fathers is a national disgrace,? he says. ?Reservist fathers shouldn?t be turned into deadbeats. And no father should ever, ever lose his son or daughter simply because he served his country.?
This column was first published in the Army Times and Marine Corps Times (3/28/05).
Jeffery M. Leving is one of America's most prominent family law attorneys. He is the author of the book Fathers' Rights: Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved in a Custody Dispute. His website is www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist and a nationally-syndicated radio talk show host. His columns have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers.
Glenn can be reached via his website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
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Subject: Report from Iraq
From: John Bell [mailto:bellj@ramincorp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 11:28 AM
Went to an AUSA dinner last night at the Ft. Hood Officers' Club to
hear a speech by MG Pete Chiarelli, CG of the 1st Cav Div. He and most
of the Div. have just returned from Iraq. Very informative and,
surprise, the Mainstream Media (MSM) isn't telling the story. I was not
there as a reporter, didn't take notes but I'll make some the points I
remember that were interesting, suprising or generally stuff I had not
heard before.
It was not a speech per se. He just walked and talked, showed some
slides and answered questions. Very impressive guy.
1. While units of the Cav served all over Iraq, he spoke mostly of
Baghdad and more specifically Sadr City, the big slum on the eastern
side of theTigeris River. He pointed out that Baghdad is, in geography,
is about the size of Austin. Austin has 600,000 to 700,000 people.
Baghdad has 6 to7 million people.
2. The Cav lost 28 main battle tanks. He said one of the big lessons
learned is that, contrary to docterine going in, M1-A2s and Bradleys
are needed, preferred and devastating in urban combat and he is going
to make that point to the JCS next week while they are considering
downsizing armor.
3. He showed a graph of attacks in Sadr City by month. Last Aug-Sep
they were getting up to 160 attacks per week. During the last three
months, the graph had flatlined at below 5 to zero per week.
4. His big point was not that they were "winning battles" to do this
but that cleaning the place up, electricity, sewage, water were the key
factors. He said yes they fought but after they started delivering
services that the Iraqis in Sadr City had never had, the terrorist
recruiting of 15 and 16 year olds came up empty.
5. The electrical "grid" is a bad, deadly joke. Said that driving down
the street in a Hummv with an antenna would short out a whole block of
apt. buildings. People do their own wiring and it was not uncommon for
early morning patrols would find one or two people lying dead in the
street, having been electrocuted trying to re-wire their own homes.
6. Said that not tending to a dead body in the Muslum culture never
happens. On election day, after suicide bombers blew themselves up
trying to take out polling places, voters would step up to the body
lying there, spit on it, and move up in the line to vote.
7. Pointed out that we all heard from the media about the 100 Iraqis
killed as they were lined up to enlist in the police and security
service. What the media didn't point out was that the next day there
300 lined up in the same place.
8. Said bin Laden and Zarqawi made a HUGE mistake when bin laden went
public with naming Zarqawi the "prince" of al Quaeda in Iraq. Said that
what the Iraqis saw and heard was a Saudi telling a Jordainan that his
job was to kill Iraqis. HUGE mistake. It was one of the biggest factors
in getting Iraqis who were on the "fence" to jump off on the side of
the coalition and the new gov't.
9. Said the MSM was making a big, and wrong, deal out of the religious
sects. Said Iraqis are incredibly nationalistic. They are Iraqis first
and then say they are Muslum but the Shi'a - Sunni thing is just not
that big a deal to them.
10. After the election the Mayor of Baghdad told him that the people of
the region (Middle East) are joyous and the governments are nervous.
11. Said that he did not lose a single tanker truck carrying oil and
gas over the roads of Iraq. Think about that. All the attacks we saw on
TV with IEDs hitting trucks but he didn't lose one. Why? Army Aviation.
Praised his air units and said they made the decision early on that
every convoy would have helicopter air cover. Said aviators in that
unit were hitting the 1,000 hour mark (sound familiar?). Said a covoy
was supposed to head out but stopped at the gates of a compound on the
command of an E6. He asked the SSG what the hold up was. E6 said, "Air
, sir." He wondered what was wrong with the air, not realizing what the
kid was talking about. Then the AH-64s showed up and the E6 said, "That
air sir." And then moved out.
12. Said one of the biggest problems was money and regs. There was a
$77 million gap between the supplemental budget and what he needed in
cash on the ground to get projects started. Said he spent most of his
time trying to get money. Said he didn't do much as a "combat
commander" because the the war he was fighting was a war at the squad
and platoon level. Said that his NCOs were winning the war and it was a
sight to behold.
13. Said that of all the money appropriated for Iraq, not a cent was
earmarked for agriculture. Said that Iraq could feed itself completely
and still have food for export but no one thought about it. Said the
Cav started working with Texas A&M on ag projects and had special
hybrid seeds sent to them through Jordan. TAM analyzed soil samples and
worked out how and what to plant. Said he had an E7 from Belton, TX
(just down the road from Ft. Hood) who was almost single-handedly
rebuilding the ag industry in the Baghdad area.
14. Said he could hire hundreds of Iraqis daily for $7 to $10 a day to
work on sewer, electric, water projects, etc. but that the contracting
rules from CONUS applied so he had to have $500,000 insurance policies
in place in case the workers got hurt. Not kidding. The CONUS peacetime
regs slowed everything down, even if they could eventually get waivers
for the regs.
There was more, lots more, but the idea is that you haven't heard any
of this from anyone, at least I hadn't and I pay more attention than
most.
Great stuff. We should be proud. Said the Cav troops said it was ALL
worth it on Jan. 30 when they saw how the Iraqis handled election day.
Made them very proud of their service and what they had accomplished.
John Bell
Research Analysis & Maintenance, Inc. ( RAM, Inc.)
1525 Perimeter Parkway, Suite 110
Huntsville, AL 35806
Phone: 256-895-8402
Fax: 256-895-8452
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Although it seems that a goodly percentage of the British population has, to use Lady Margaret Thatcher's term, "gone wobbly", the same clearly is not true of the British Armed Forces, which have performed quite well in Iraq.
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A BRITISH soldier who led a perilous bayonet charge on rebels in Iraq has revealed details of bloody hand-to-hand fighting in enemy trenches.
Corporal Mark Byles, 34, who will receive a bravery award for his service in Iraq, spoke publicly for the first time this week of the battle that left three heavily armed insurgents dead.
Cpl Byles, of Portsmouth, England, said: "I slashed people, rifle-butted them. I was punching and kicking. It was either me or them.
"It felt like I was in a dream. It didn't seem real. Anybody can pull a trigger from a distance, but I got up close and personal."
The trench battle ended with three Iraqis dead and eight captured.
Cpl Byles, who entered the trench with four other British soldiers, shot and killed two more insurgents who were firing from a second position.
On May 14, his battalion, known as the Tigers, was deployed to assist ambushed troops near a checkpoint on the main road between Basra and Baghdad.
When the squad's Warrior armoured vehicle was attacked, the corporal and another soldier jumped clear.
They immediately came under small arms fire and grenades. After linking up with four comrades, Cpl Byles identified the enemy in a drainage ditch about 200 metres away.
He said: "I decided the best way to attack was a full-frontal assault. It was my decision to fix bayonets."
It marked the first time British soldiers had gone into battle with bayonets since the Falklands War in 1982. His surprise order horrified his own men.
Cpl Byles, who has a six-year-old son, said: "They were under the impression we were going to lie in our ditch, shoot the enemy from a distance and they would run away.
"But I believe we caught the enemy on the hop that day and we had to take the fight to them."
As they stormed the ditch, Cpl Byles saw about a dozen rebels with weapons.
He said: "The look on their faces was utter shock." The 1st Battalion squad, the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, quickly overcame the insurgents. Only when the adrenalin stopped pumping and grisly reality kicked in did Cpl Byles realise the horror of what had occurred.
He said: "The worst thing was collecting the dead, seeing the damage that I did to those people. Lots of our guys were just 18 or 19 and I had to tell them to treat the bodies like bits of meat, not human beings.
"I got back to camp after six hours on the ground, covered in blood from head to toe. The first thing I did was pull out a photo of my family."
The corporal, who estimated he killed between 15 and 20 insurgents in Iraq, revealed he was still haunted by the faces of the dead.
According to British Army estimates, about 30 rebels died at the checkpoint named Danny Boy, which is 15km south of the lawless town of Al Amarah. The British troops came out of the gunfight almost unscathed.
Cpl Byles has been recommended for a bravery award for his part in the skirmish by platoon commander Lt Ben Plenge, who said: "He showed immense professionalism under fire, bravery in the face of the enemy and strong leadership qualities."
The corporal, who denied he was a hero, said: "I have been an infantry soldier for 13 years. I've done it time and again in training -- it was second nature. I'm just glad I did my job."
The regiment has returned to Britain after seven months in Iraq, where they were attacked 863 times, lost two soldiers and suffered 42 injuries.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299447/posts
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This is from an event that occurred Mar 25 in Iraq. I am not too keen on women in combat, but the woman MP's in this did extremely well. I would have them in my foxhole anytime. They are warriors. From the www.blackfive.net website.
AFTER ACTION REPORT: Raven 42 action in Salman Pak by Col Buzz Kriessel
Over the next few days you will see on the television news shows, and in the print news media the story of a Military Police Squad who are heroes. Through those outlets, I doubt that their story will get out in a truly descriptive manner. I can't express to you the pride, awe, and respect I feel for the soldiers of call sign Raven 42.
On Sunday afternoon, in a very bad section of scrub-land called Salman Pak, on the southeastern outskirts of Baghdad, 40 to 50 heavily-armed Iraqi insurgents attacked a convoy of 30 civilian tractor trailer trucks that were moving supplies for the coalition forces, along an Alternate Supply Route. These tractor trailers, driven by third country nationals (primarily Turkish), were escorted by 3 armored Hummers from the COSCOM*. When the insurgents attacked, one of the Hummers was in their kill zone and the three soldiers aboard were immediately wounded, and the platform taken under heavy machinegun and RPG** fire.
Along with them, three of the truck drivers were killed, 6 were wounded in the tractor trailer trucks. The enemy attacked from a farmer's barren field next to the road, with a tree line perpendicular to the ASR***, two dry irrigation ditches forming a rough L-shaped trenchline, and a house standing off the dirt road. After three minutes of sustained fire, a squad o f enemy moved forward toward the disabled and suppressed trucks. Each of the enemy had hand-cuffs and were looking to take hostages for ransom or worse, to take those three wounded US soldiers for more internet beheadings.
About this time, three armored Hummers that formed the MP Squad under call sign Raven 42, 617th MP Co, Kentucky National Guard, assigned to the 503rd MP Bn (Fort Bragg), 18th MP Bde, arrived on the scene like the cavalry. The squad had been shadowing the convoy from a distance behind the last vehicle, and when the convoy trucks stopped and became backed up from the initial attack, the squad sped up, paralleled the convoy up the shoulder of the road, and moved to the sound of gunfire.
They arrived on the scene just as a squad of about ten enemy had moved forward across the farmer's field and were about 20 meters from the road. The MP squad opened fire with .50 cal machineguns and Mk19 grenade launchers and drove across the front of the enemy's kill zone, between the enemy and the trucks, drawing fire off of the tractor trailers.
The MP's crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the SAW machinegun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two story house off on their left.
Immediately the middle vehicle was hit by an RPG knocking the gunner unconscious from his turret and down into the vehicle. The Vehicle Commander (the TC*****), the squad's leader, thought the gunner was dead, but tried to treat him from inside the vehicle. Simultaneously, the rear vehicle's driver and TC, section leader two, open their doors and dismount to fight, while their gunner continued firing from his position in the gun platform on top of the Hummer. Immediately, all three fall under heavy return machinegun fire, wounded. The driver of the middle vehicle saw them fall out the rearview mirror, dismounts and sprints to get into the third vehicle and take up the SAW on top the vehicle. The Squad's medic dismounts from that third vehicle, and joined by the first vehicle's driver (CLS trained****) who sprinted back to join him, begins combat life-saving techniques to treat the three wounded MPs. The gunner on the floor of the second
vehicle is revived by his TC, the squad leader, and he climbs back into the .50 cal and opens fire. The Squad leader dismounted with his M4 carbine, and 2 hand grenades, grabbed the section leader out of the first vehicle who had rendered radio reports of their first contact. The two of them, squad leader Staff Sergeant and team leader Sergeant with her M4 and M203 grenade launcher, rush the nearest ditch about 20 meters away to start clearing the natural trenchline. The enemy has gone into the ditches and is hiding behind several small trees in the back of the lot. The .50 cal and SAW flanking fire tears apart the ten enemy in the lead trenchline.
Meanwhile, the two treating the three wounded on the ground at the rear vehicle come under sniper fire from the farmer's house. Each of them, remember one is a medic, pull out AT-4 rocket launchers from the HMMWV and nearly-simultaneously fire the rockets into the house to neutralize the shooter. The two sergeants work their way up the trenchline, throwing grenades, firing grenades from the launcher, and firing their M4s.
The sergeant runs low on ammo and runs back to a vehicle to reload. She moves to her squad leader's vehicle, and because this squad is led so well, she knows exactly where to reach her arm blindly into a different vehicle to find ammo-because each vehicle is packed exactly the same, with discipline.
As she turns to move back to the trenchline, Gunner in two sees an AIF***** jump from behind one of the cars and start firing on the Sergeant. He pulls his 9mm, because the .50 cal is pointed in the other direction, and shoots five rounds wounding him.****** The sergeant moves back to the trenchline under fire from the back of the field, with fresh mags, two more grenades, and three more M203 rounds. The Mk 19 gunner suppresses the rear of the field.
Now, rejoined with the squad leader, the two sergeants continue clearing the enemy from the trenchline, until they see no more movement. A lone man with an RPG launcher on his shoulder steps from behind a tree and prepares to fire on the three Hummers and is killed with a single aimed SAW shot thru the head by the previously knocked out gunner on platform two, who now has a SAW out to supplement the .50 cal in the mount.
The team leader sergeant--she claims four killed by aimed M4 shots.
The Squad Leader--he threw four grenades taking out at least two AIF, and attributes one other to her aimed M203 fire.
The gunner on platform two, previously knocked out from a hit by the RPG, has now swung his .50 cal around and, realizing that the line of vehicles represents a hazard and possible getaway for the bad guys, starts shooting the .50cal into the engine blocks until his field of fire is limited. He realizes that his vehicle is still running despite the RPG hit, and drops down from his weapon, into the drivers seat and moves the vehicle forward on two flat tires about 100 meters into a better firing position. Just then, the vehicle dies, oil spraying everywhere. He remounts his .50 cal and continues shooting the remaining of the seven cars lined up and ready for a get-away that wasn't to happen. The fire dies down about then, and a second squad arrives on the scene, dismounts and helps the two giving first aid to the wounded at platform three. Two minutes later three other squads from the 617th arrive, along with the CO, and the field is secured, consolidation begins.
Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rds of PK ammo.
The three wounded MPs have been evacuated to Landstuhl. One lost a kidney and will be paralyzed. The other two will most likely recover, though one will forever have a bullet lodged between second and third ribs below his heart. No word on the three COSCOM soldiers wounded in the initial volleys. Of the 7 members of Raven 42 who walked away, two are Caucasian Women, the rest men-one is Mexican-American, the medic is African-American, and the other two are Caucasian-the great American melting pot.
They believed even before this fight that their NCOs were the best in the Army, and that they have the best squad in the Army. The Medic who fired the AT-4, said he remembered how from the week before when his squad leader forced him to train on it, though he didn't think as a medic he would ever use one. He said he chose to use it in that moment to protect the three wounded on the ground in front of him, once they came under fire from the building. The day before this mission, they took the new RFI bandoliers that were recently issued, and experimented with mounting them in their vehicles. Once they figured out how, they pre-loaded a second basic load of ammo into magazines, put them into the bandoliers, and mounted them in their vehicles---the same exact way in every vehicle-load plans enforced and checked by leaders!
Leadership under fire-once those three leaders (NCOs) stepped out of their vehicles, the squad was committed to the fight.
Their only complaints in the AAR were: the lack of stopping power in the 9mm; the .50 cal incendiary rounds they are issued in lieu of ball ammo (shortage of ball in the inventory) didn't have the penetrating power needed to pierce the walls of the building; and that everyone in the squad was not CLS trained.
Yesterday, Monday, was spent with the chaplain and the chain of command conducting AARs. Today, every news media in theater wanted them. Good Morning America, NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC, Stars and Stripes, and many radio stations from Kentucky all were lined up today. The female E5 Sergeant who fought thru the trenchline will become the anti-Jessica Lynch media poster child. She and her squad leader deserve every bit of recognition they will get, and more. They all do.
I participated in their AAR as the BDE S2, and am helping in putting together an action report to justify future valor awards. Lets not talk about women in combat. Lets not talk about the new Close Combat Badge not including MPs.
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OBITUARIES
Jose M. Lopez, 94; Battle of the Bulge Hero Killed 100 German Soldiers
By Myrna Oliver, Times Staff Writer
Jose M. Lopez, the nation's oldest remaining Latino recipient of the Medal of Honor, who earned the award for single-handedly killing more than 100 German soldiers in a skirmish during the World War II Battle of the Bulge, has died. He was 94.
Lopez died Monday of cancer at the San Antonio home of his daughter, Maggie Wickwire. He had lived in San Antonio since 1973.
On Dec. 17, 1944, the 5-foot-5, 130-pound sergeant was on a snowy patch of ground near Krinkelt, Belgium, when he saw that German tanks and infantry were about to overrun his company. He lugged his heavy Browning machine gun into a shallow hole and started firing, first killing 10 enemy soldiers and then another 25. As the Germans kept coming, Lopez changed positions repeatedly, praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe that he be spared. He stopped shooting only when he ran out of ammunition, and killed so many enemy soldiers that officials stopped counting after 100.
"Sgt. Lopez's gallantry and intrepidity, on seemingly suicidal missions in which he killed at least 100 of the enemy," his citation read when President Harry S. Truman presented him the Medal of Honor on June 18, 1945, "were almost solely responsible for allowing Company K to avoid being enveloped, to withdraw successfully and to give other forces coming up in support time to build a line which repelled the enemy drive."
Modest and self-effacing, Lopez told the San Antonio Express-News in 2001, "You learn to protect the line and do the best you can with the ammunition you have, and I did it."
More than a decade ago, the retired sergeant was one of 10 veterans who returned to their World War II battlefields with Bill Moyers to film the 1990 PBS documentary "From D-Day to the Rhine."
Although Lopez candidly discussed his battlefield terror in the documentary, he also told Moyers: "I believe any man would do the same thing."
At war's end, Lopez remained in the Army and went on to serve two combat tours in Korea. After his military career, he worked for the Veterans Administration.
Although military records list Lopez's official birthplace as Mission, Texas, he was born in the mountain village of Santiago Huitlan, Mexico. He acquired the Texas birthplace listing in 1935 when he bought a false birth certificate to join the Merchant Marine. Orphaned at 8, Lopez lived with a teenage uncle in Mexico and at 13 hitchhiked to Brownsville, Texas, where another uncle lived. He spent several of his teen years picking cotton in the Rio Grande Valley and hopping freight trains to find work around the country.
The scrappy youth happened into a professional boxing career when a promoter saw him win a street brawl in Atlanta. From 1927 to 1934 Lopez was a lightweight billed as Kid Mendoza, building a record of 52 wins and only three losses. He retired from the ring after losing to British fighter Jacque Burgess in Melbourne, Australia, telling the San Antonio Express-News decades later, "I just didn't want to fight anymore."
The boxing career instilled in him a lifelong appreciation for fitness, and he continued to work out three times a week until a few months ago.
Lopez spent six years in the Merchant Marine, leaving Hawaii only three days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Returning to the mainland, he barely escaped arrest when California authorities mistook him for a Japanese man. The following April, Lopez, then 31, enlisted in the Army at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
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Geopolitics, Strategy and Military Recruitment: The American Dilemma
By George Friedman
The United States Army has failed once again to reach its recruitment goals. The media, which have noted the problem in maintaining force levels in a desultory fashion over the past few years, have now rotated the story of this month's shortfall into a major story. In other words, the problem has now been noticed, and it is now important. Of course, the problem has been important for quite some time, as Stratfor noted in late December.
There are, therefore, several dimensions to this problem: One is military, the other is political. But the most important is geopolitica l and strategic, having to do with the manner in which the United States fights wars and the way in which the U.S. military is organized. The issue is not recruitment. The issue is the incongruence between U.S. geopolitics, strategy and the force.
The United States dominates North America militarily against all but two threats. First, it cannot defend the homeland against nuclear attacks launched by missile. Second, it cannot defend the United States against special operations teams carrying out attacks such as those of Sept. 11, 2001. The American solution in both of these cases has been offensive. In the case of nuclear missiles, the counter has always been either the pre-emptive strike or the devastating counter-strike, coupled with political arrangements designed to reduce the threat. The counter to special-operations strikes has been covert and overt attacks against nation-states that launch or facilitate these attacks, or harbor the attackers. Contrary to popula r opinion, launching small teams into the United States without detection is not easy and requires sophisticated support, normally traceable in some way to nation-states. The U.S. strategy has been to focus on putting those nation-states at risk, directly or indirectly, if attacks take place.
Apart from these two types of attack, the United States is fairly invulnerable to military action. The foundation of this invulnerability falls into three parts:
The United States is overwhelmingly powerful in North America, and Latin America is divided, inward-looking, and poor. A land invasion of the United States from the south would be impossible.
The United States controls the oceans absolutely. It is militarily impossible that an Eastern Hemispheric power could mount a sustained threat to sea lanes, let alone mount an amphibious operation against the United States.
The primary U.S. interest is in maintaining a multi-level balance of power in Eurasia, so that no single power can dominate Eurasia and utilize its resources.
In terms of preventing nuclear strikes and special operations against the United States and in terms of managing the geopolitical system in Eurasia, the United States has a tremendous strategic advantage that grows out of its geopolitical position -- U.S. wars, regardless of level, are fought on the territory of other countries. With the crucial exception of Sept. 11, foreign attacks on U.S. soil do not happen. When they do happen, the United States responds by redefining the war into a battle for other homelands.
This spares the American population from the rigors of war while imposing wars on foreign countries. But for the American civilian population to escape war, the U.S. armed forces must be prepared to go to war on a global basis. Herein begins the dilemma. The American strategic goal is to spare the general population from war. This is done by creating a small class of military who must bear the burden. It also is accomplished through a volunteer force -- men and women choose to bear the burden. During extended war, as the experiences of the civilian population and the military population diverge dramatically, the inevitable tendency is for the military to abandon the rigors of war and join the protected majority. In a strategy that tries to impose no cost on civilians while increasing the cost on the military, the inevitable outcome is that growing numbers of the military class will become civilians.
This is the heart of the problem, but it is not all of the problem. The American strategy in Eurasia is to maintain a balance of power. The basic role of the United States is as blocker -- blocking Eurasian powers from adding to their power, and increasing insecurity among major powers so as to curb their ambitions.
Thus, a strategic dilemma for the United States is born. On a grand strategic scale, the United States contr ols the international system -- but at the strategic level, it does not choose the time or place of its own military interventions. Put very simply, the United States controls the global system, but its enemies determine when it goes to war and where, and the nature of these wars tends to put U.S. forces on the tactical defensive.
During the 1990s, for example, the United States was constantly responding to actions by others that passed a threshold, beyond which ignoring the action was impossible. From 1989 onward, the United States intervened in Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, not counting lesser interventions in places like Liberia or Colombia. Nor does it count the interventions and deployments throughout the Muslim world and contiguous areas since 2001.
The grand strategic configuration means that the United States does not hold the strategic initiative. The time and place of U.S. intervention is very much in the hands of regional forces . In some cases, the intervention is the result of miscalculation on the side of regional forces. In other cases, U.S. intervention is shaped by some regional player. For example, Iraq did not expect a U.S. response to its invasion of Kuwait in 1990; Saddam Hussein miscalculated. In the case of Kosovo, a regional actor, Albania, shaped U.S. intervention. In both events, however, given the operating principles of grand strategy, American military involvement is overwhelmingly responsive and therefore, from the U.S. point of view, unpredictable.
Though others determine the general time and place of U.S. intervention, the operational level remains in the hands of the United States. But here too, there are severe constraints. U.S. interventions suffer from a core paradox: The political cycle of an intervention frequently runs in days or weeks, but the time it takes to bring major force to bear is measured in months. That means that the United States must always bring insu fficient force to bear in the relevant time period -- in a kind of holding action -- and contain the situation until sufficient force for a resolution becomes available. Thus, U.S. interventions begin with CIA paramilitaries and U.S. Special Operations Command. At times, these forces can complete the mission. But sometimes, all they can do is prepare the ground and hold until relieved by major force.
Very rapidly, the United States finds itself on the tactical defensive -- lacking decisive force, at a massive demographic disadvantage, and frequently suffering from an intelligence deficit. Even after the main force arrives, the United States can remain in a defensive tactical situation for an extended period. This places U.S. troops in a difficult position.
The entire structure creates another strategic problem. The United States does not control its interventions. It is constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by multiple theaters of operation that outstrip the size of its military force or of its logistical base. Between the tactical defensive and the strategic defensive, U.S. forces must scale themselves to events that are beyond their control or prediction.
The unexpected is built into U.S. grand strategy, which dictates that the U.S. armed forces will not know their next mission. U.S. strategy is reflexive. U.S. operational principles do provide an advantage, but that can bleed off at the tactical level. In the end, the U.S. force is, almost by definition, stretched beyond what it can reasonably be expected to do. This situation is hardwired into the U.S. geopolitical system.
The U.S. force was never configured for this reality. It was designed first to cope with a general war with the Soviet Union, focused on central Europe. After the collapse of the Soviets, the technological base remained relatively stable: It remained a combined arms force including armor, carrier battle groups and fighter planes. All of thes e take a long time to get to the theater, are excellent at destroying conventional forces, and are weak at pacification.
Donald Rumsfeld has identified the problem: The force is too slow to get to the theater in a politically consequential period of time. Getting there too late, it immediately finds itself on the defensive, while the brunt of the early battle focuses on Special Operations forces and air power. The problem that Rumsfeld has not effectively addressed is that occupation warfare -- which is what we have seen in Iraq for the past few years -- requires a multi-level approach, ranging from special operations to very large occupation forces.
Put this differently: The U.S. invasion of Iraq required everything from an armored thrust to strategic bombing to special operations to civil affairs. It required every type of warfare imaginable. That is indeed the reality of American strategy. Not only is the time and place of military intervention unpredictabl e, but so is the force structure. Any attempt to predict the nature of the next war is doomed to fail. The United States does not control the time or place of the next war; it has no idea what that war will look like or where it will be.
The United States has always built its force around expectations of both where the next war would be fought and how it would be fought. From "Air-Land Battle" to "Military operations other than war," U.S. military doctrine has always been marked by two things: Military planners were always certain they had a handle on what the next war would be like, and they were always dead wrong.
The military structure that was squeezed out of the Cold War force after 1989 assumed that wars would be infrequent, that they would be short, that they would be manageable. Building on these assumptions, U.S. military planners loaded key capabilities into reserve and National Guard units, cut back on forces that didn't fit into this paradigm and t hen -- even when reality showed they were wrong -- they tried to compensate with technology rather than with restructuring the force.
Wars have been more frequent since the fall of the Soviet Union than they were before. They occur in less predictable places. They tend not to be brief, but to be of long duration and to pile up on each other -- and they frequently are unmanageable for an extended period of time. The United States does not have tactical advantages with the forces provided.
As a result, the force is deployed far more than planned, troops are forced to rotate too rapidly through assignments in combat zones, and they operate in environments where operational requirements force them too often into tactically defensive situations. That all of this is managed with a force that is drawn heavily from reserves is simply the icing on the cake. The force does not match the reality.
We began by pointing out the goal is -- and should be -- to protect t he American public from war, with volunteers placing themselves between home and war's desolation. This strategic goal, while appropriate, creates a class of warriors and a broader class of indifferent civilians. Given the situation, it will follow that sensible warriors, having done their duty in their own minds, will choose to join the ranks of civilians, while civilians will avoid service.
There has been talk of a draft. That is a bad idea for technical reasons: It takes too long to train a soldier for a draft to solve the problems, and today's soldiers need to be too skilled and motivated for a reluctant civilian to master their craft. Moreover, this is not a force that would benefit from the service of 19-year-olds. Many of the jobs in the military could be done by people in their 40s and 50s, who would bring useful skills into the military. We would support a draft only if it included all ages of men and women who had not previously served. There is no reason th at an accountant in civilian life could not provide valuable military service in Afghanistan, maintaining logistics inventory. The United States does not need to draft children.
Since that isn't going to happen, and since the United States does not have the option of abandoning its strategy, the United States must reshape the force to meet the single most important reality: The United States will be at war a lot of the time, and no one really knows where or when it will go to war. The challenges in military retention or inability to meet recruiting goals mean that the United States continues to recruit children, as if this were the 19th century.
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Ben Stein's Last Column...
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein's Last Column...
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How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts! as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera i! s no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietna mese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve m! edia attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has d! evolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein
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150 U.S. Troops Become American Citizens
Associated Press | July 26, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - They pledged allegiance Monday to a country they were already fighting for, and then the immigrants from 43 countries formally became Americans.
About 150 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines currently serving in Iraq took the oath for U.S. citizenship at Camp Victory, a military base on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Lt. Gen. John Vines, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, presided over the naturalization ceremony as uniformed troops raised their right hands, swearing an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and to perform service in the military.
In 2003, President George W. Bush signed an order that allowed for the speedier process of citizenship to qualified military service members. Under the executive order, U.S. residents who are not citizens but serve in the armed forces during times of hostilities are immediately eligible for citizenship, according to immigration officer Karen Landsness.
Since July 2002, nearly 20,000 military personnel serving in the U.S. war against terror became U.S. citizens.
Spc. Mylene Del Rosario Cunan, who came to the United States from the Philippines three years ago, said she had joined the U.S. Army a year later. She finally became an American on Monday at age 28.
"My parents didn't let me join the Army in the Philippines," said Cunan, from Springfield, Mass., who cried during the ceremony
Specialist Severo Garcia, 24, from Los Angeles, said that with U.S. citizenship, a wider range of military careers would be open to him. Many jobs in the army require a security clearance, which non-citizens cannot get.
Garcia, who moved from Mexico at age 18, said he and his friends used to joke about "la migra," or immigration officers. Out of the 150 new citizens, 25 are originally from Mexico while another 15 are from the Philippines
Nearly all of those naturalized Monday would have qualified for citizenship even without Bush's order, since most of them have lived in the U.S. about three to five years, Landsness said.
It is the second such ceremony held in Iraqi. Besides their certificates, they also got American flags and a certificate signed by Vines showing a picture of the Saddam palace where the ceremony was held.
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http://www.michaelyon.blogspot.com/?BMIDS=17137839-4e534328-81766
While there, take a look around. This is a good blog.
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http://madeucegunners.blogspot.com/2005/10/record.html
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Record
My brigade, the 116th Brigade Combat Team, made up of units from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, New Jersey, and California, currently owns the record for re-enlisting soldiers, out of any unit, Active Duty, Reserve or National Guard, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The 256th BCT, headquartered in Louisiana, held the previous record at over 400 soldiers re-enlisting in-country. The 116th BCT set out to beat that record with a goal of 500, and did on 14 September 2005, with BG Alan Gayheart, Commander of the 116th BCT, ceremonially swearing in SGT Seckel in front of a representative formation of other soldiers re-affirming their commitment to continue to stand ready to protect freedom.
I'm in there somewhere, third row from the back, right-center of the photo. Even I couldn't find myself.
You will notice the photo is labeled "500th Re-Enlistment". As of right now,
the 116th BCT has had 733 soldiers sign new 3 or 6 year contracts.
I venture to say that this is a huge testament to the will of the army. Not
the Army, the organization, but the army, the men and women who wear the uniform, no matter what branch. Knowing the adversity faced in combat, and the need for the constant defense of our nation, and having already experienced hardship, loss, and separation, a momentus number are willing to continue to be counted among the willing.
SCOUTS OUT!!!!!
MDG....OUT.
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Troops Wait for Body Armor Reimbursements
Associated Press | September 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.
For Marine Sgt. Todd Bowers that extra piece of equipment - a high-tech rifle scope bought by his father for $600 and a $100 pair of goggles - turned out to be a life or death purchase. And he has never been reimbursed.
Bowers, who is from Arizona but going to school in Washington, D.C., was shot by a sniper during his second tour in Iraq, but the round lodged in his scope, and his goggles protected his eyes from the shrapnel that struck his face.
"We weren't provided those going to Iraq," he said Thursday. "But they literally saved my life."
He and other soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won't provide. One U.S. senator said Thursday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said he will offer amendments to the defense appropriations bill working its way through Congress to take the funding issue out of the hands of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and give control to military unit commanders in the field.
"Rumsfeld is violating the law," Dodd said. "It's been sitting on the books for over a year. They were opposed to it. It was insulting to them. I'm sorry that's how they felt."
Dodd said men and women in uniform "are serving halfway around the world. And they shouldn't have to rely on bake sales and lemonade stands to raise money" to get them the equipment they need.
Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke said the department "is in the final stages of putting a reimbursement program together and it is expected to be operating soon." But defense officials would not discuss the reason for the delay.
Krenke said the Pentagon's first priority is to ensure that soldiers "have all they need to fight and win this nation's wars."
Others don't see it that way.
"Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough," said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.
The father asked that he be identified only by his first name - Gordon - because he is afraid of retribution against his son.
"I wouldn't have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it," said Gordon. "But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don't support Donald Rumsfeld's idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don't go to war until you are prepared."
Under the law Congress passed last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it "an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden."
In a letter to Dodd in late April, David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel, said his office was developing regulations to implement the reimbursement, and would be done in about 60 days.
Soldiers and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.
"The bottom line is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department are failing soldiers again," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for Iraq veterans.
"It just became an accepted part of the culture. If you were National Guard or Reserve, or NCOs, noncommissioned officers, you were going to spend a lot of money out of your pocket," said Rieckhoff, who was a platoon leader with the 3rd Infantry Division and served in Iraq from the invasion in March 2003 to spring 2004.
Dodd said he is worried the Pentagon will reject most requests for reimbursement. Turning the decision over to troop commanders will prevent that, he said, because the commanders know what their soldiers need and will make better decisions about what to reimburse.
Dodd also said he wants to eliminate the deadline included in the original law, which allowed soldiers to seek reimbursement for items bought between September 2001 and July 2004. Now, he wants it to be open-ended.
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While the Chicken Littles of the chattering classes cackle away, our troops keep doing the Right and the Heroic.
How does it go? IIRC "De Oppresser Liber"
Carry on.
http://www.michaelyon.blogspot.com/?BMIDS=17137839-4e534328-97283
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"Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published January 20, 2006
Sniper rounds
An Army judge advocate general (JAG) temporarily banned Army and Marine Corps snipers from using a highly accurate open-tip bullet.
The JAG, we are told, mistakenly thought the open-tip round was the same as hollow-point ammunition, which is banned. The original open-tip was known as Sierra MatchKing and broke all records for accuracy in the past 30 years.
The difference between the open-tip and the hollow point is that the open tip is a design feature that improves accuracy while the hollow point is designed for increasing damage when it hits a target.
About 10 days ago, the Army JAG in Iraq ordered all snipers to stop using the open-tip 175-grain M118LR bullet, claiming, falsely, it was prohibited. Instead of the open-tip, snipers were forced to take M-60 machine gun rounds out of belts and use them instead.
The order upset quite a few people here and in Iraq who said the JAG ignored the basic principle of every military lawyer that there is a presumption of legality for all issued weapons or ammunition that are made at the military service level at the time they are acquired.
"She forced snipers to use less accurate ammunition, thereby placing U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians at greater risk," a Pentagon official said of the JAG, who was not identified by name. "And she incorrectly issued an order. JAGs may advise a commander, but they cannot issue orders."
After Army lawyers were finally alerted to the JAG's action, the order was lifted and the JAG was notified that the open tip was perfectly legal for use by snipers. However, the reversal was followed by the Army officials' taking retaliation against a sniper who blew the whistle on the bogus order. The sniper lost his job over a security infraction in reporting the JAG.
http://www.washtimes.com/functions/p...9-112132-3551r"
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does this "war" remind anyone else of viet nam? i am not sure we will ever find out the real reason so many of americas young r dying in the desert, but i have an idea....
i just hope the people responsible 4 the lose of life can live with the choices they made.
god bless all who r there, those who returned and rest the souls of those who wont come home.
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http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THISWILLMAKEYOUPROUD.HTML
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business...tory?track=rss Jax firm to produce flexible armor for GIs, marines
By ALEX DOMINGUEZ
Associated Press
February 24, 2006, 10:15 AM EST
BALTIMORE -- A Florida firm has been chosen to produce flexible body armor and other products based on technology developed at the University of Delaware and the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground.
Fabric used in the armor is treated with a solution that stiffens when force is applied, but remains fluid otherwise.
The first products, which will initially focus on protection for law enforcement and corrections officers, are expected to be introduced later this year by Armor Holdings, Inc., a Jacksonville company best known for providing armored Humvees for the military. Body armor vests, helmets, gloves and extremity protection are among the products planned, the company announced Friday.
Body armor fabric treated with the fluid, for example, can resist an ice pick that would normally penetrate the fabric. Tests have also shown the treated fabric is better able to spread the force of an impact over a wider area, said Dr. Tony Russell, chief technology officer for Armor Holdings.
When force is applied, the fluid, which contains nano-sized particles, acts ``more like a solid. It locks the fibers in place and makes them more resistant to penetration,'' Russell said.
``If you take a normal ballistic fabric that's pretty good at stopping bullets and you hit it with an ice pick, the fibers will move out of the way. So what you normally have to do is put more layers to stop that ice pick,'' reducing flexibility that can inhibit motion.
The new technology allows the vest to stop penetration with fewer layers. The treated fabric, meanwhile, has virtually the same look, feel, texture, weight and flexibility, Russell said.
``You may get a little residue on your fingers but it doesn't feel wet to the touch,'' Russell said.
The company hopes the technology will eventually lead to lighter, more comfortable body armor that will cover more of the body.
The technology takes advantage of a property known as shear-thickening, in which fluids become solid when a force is applied. A common example is a paste of corn starch and water. A spoon rested on the surface will slowly sick to the bottom, but if force is suddenly applied the paste can't move to the sides quickly enough.
The technology Armor Holdings will use was developed by the University of Delaware's Center for Composite Materials and the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
University of Delaware professor Norman Wagner said the technology has the potential for new products that will ``provide better protection to those who need it.''
In addition to body armor, potential applications include vehicle armor, bomb blankets, industrial environments and transportation _ ``anywhere you want to protect people against sharp flying objects,'' Wagner said.
On the Net:
Armor Holdings Inc.: www.armorholdings.com
Weapons and Material Research Directorate: www.arl.army.mil/main/main/default.cfm?Action35&Page35
University of Delaware Shear Thickening Fluid site: www.ccm.udel.edu/STF/ Copyright ? 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs2949
Commanding Officer
Posted by Kevin Sites
on Wed, Mar 15 2006, 5:39 PM ET Video Audio Photo Essay
At 29, Army Capt. Chris Nunn commands hundreds of men, millions in equipment ? and a piece of America's foreign policy objective in Afghanistan.
PAKTIKA PROVINCE, Eastern Afghanistan - Capt. Chris Nunn was bitten by a rattlesnake while enrolled in one of the U.S. military's toughest training programs: the Army's elite Ranger School.
Yet instead of washing out, he sucked it up, and was back within 48 hours, limping through the perilous "mountains" phase of the training. He eventually passed the course to earn the coveted Ranger tab.
Adopted as an infant, Nunn grew up on a cattle ranch in Panhandle, Texas, located, of course, in the Texas panhandle. He graduated from the University of Mississippi with a degree in history and entered the army as an officer through the university's ROTC program. He served in Korea as a member of the 2nd Infantry Division and during the invasion of Iraq as a member of the 101st Airborne Division.
He is a self-described "quintessential overachiever," a man who doesn't like to fail. His men even nicknamed him "the Hurricane," for those flashes of anger when people aren't measuring up to his standards.
Capt. Chris Nunn leads a reconnaissance mission in eastern Afghanistan
Now he faces what could be one of the greatest challenges of his life: command of Alpha Company, for the 10th Mountain Division's 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry. Alpha Company currently is posted in the U.S. military's easternmost outpost in Afghanistan, Forward Operating Base Tillman.
I sat down with him in the company's TOC (Tactical Operations Center) to discuss the challenges of commanding hundreds of men, millions of dollars of equipment and a piece of America's foreign policy objective in Central Asia ? all at the age of 29.
KEVIN SITES: 10th Mountain trained very hard before coming here. In fact some people say it was difficult because there was so much time away from home before this deployment. What kind of training were you doing and did it pay off?
CAPT. CHRIS NUNN: We did a lot of shooting. The battalion as a whole shot at least two million rounds. My company did a lot of movement-to-contact training, where you're out actually looking for the enemy. We did a lot of live fire, squad, platoon, company exercises.
We did engagement training, civil affairs stuff, training to meet with tribal elders. [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's cousin even came over and talked to us. We deployed to Camp Blanding, Florida to do more exercises: situation exercises in reacting to IEDs [improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs], giving out humanitarian assistance. I think you learn from the successes and failures of previous units that were here and we tailored our training to that.
There's still people that all they want to do is hunt down and kill people and others who understand the insurgent battlefield better. I think for the next 20 years it's going to be a counterinsurgency battlefield.
SITES: Now that you're here, how is the real life mission different from the one you trained for?
NUNN: It's really not all that different. When we showed up here we really knew where we wanted to go. Six months before I came to Afghanistan I was already e-mailing the company commander that was here [from the 82nd Airborne]. I knew when they had contact [hostile action], I knew when they hit an IED, I knew when they got new hot water heaters. We would talk once a week and e-mail several times a week. He sent me a lot of after-action reports, situation reports, etc. It went very smoothly.
SITES: What surprised you most when you first arrived here?
NUNN: Seeing a Dairy Queen at Bag [Bagram Air Force Base-north of Kabul] (laughs). I guess I was really surprised at the amount of improvement made in four years. I haven't been here before, but when I drove through Kabul, there was a used car lot, cell phones everywhere ? all the improvements that have been made that the Afghans took on themselves. Of course as you go further and further out, there's less of that.
"The first four days we were here we had a significant event every day: the IED, the contact, a rocket attack, and then two more IEDs. At that point I was thinking it was going to be a long deployment."
? Capt. Chris Nunn
It wasn't really anything militarily that surprised me. I think the things that are happening here is because the Afghans are tired of war. They got kicked around for 30 years. They want something different. All we're just doing is keeping the bad guys at bay. Let them build their country.
SITES: You were in Iraq with the 101st Airborne, and now you're here in Afghanistan. Can you compare the conflicts both in terms of what's at stake and how they're being played out?
NUNN: From my perspective, in the initial push into Iraq, we were really awed by the gratefulness of the Shiites in the south. That's what I remember from the initial push to topple Saddam. But once that initial push was over, it became just like Afghanistan. Whatever people believe the reasons were for the war ? the search for weapons of mass destruction, or those who thought President Bush was trying to avenge his dad ? what I remember is this Shiite woman crying and saying 'thank you for toppling Saddam.'
Coming into Afghanistan, it seems to me, from everyone I talk to, they want us here. They want to be recognized as an international country. They don't want to be seen as a safe haven for terrorists. The people that I talk to feel that these guys causing the problems are defaming Islam as well.
There are a lot of similarities but the cultures are different. The Afghans seem more willing to work with us. The impression I had is that the Iraqis looked down their nose at us; they wanted everything right now. Maybe that's just a product of having more infrastructure; they could see more of the world.
I think I prefer this deployment more than Iraq. Maybe because I'm a commander. I just like it better, I like the country better, I like the people better, I'm here with a great unit.
SITES: You're 29 years old and in charge of hundreds of men, millions of dollars of equipment and carrying out a U.S. foreign policy objective. Are there days you feel overwhelmed? How do you keep yourself mentally and physically where you need to be to do this job?
Nunn liaises with Afghan counterparts
NUNN: This is what I wanted to do my whole life. I love it. I'm Southern Baptist ? preachers from that faith feel like they're called to their profession. I feel like I'm called to do this job. There are days you're frustrated you want to pull out your hair, or scared for your boys because they're in contact [hostile action]. But for me it's the best job I can imagine.
The first contact we had was when one of my platoons encountered an IED. Whoever planted it planted it in a sweet spot, we couldn't get eyes on it, we had to get pretty close to see it. I'm in the TOC [Tactical Operations Center] and we heard over the radio ? the IED just detonated.
I thought, "Oh no, it's day one and I just lost some of my soldiers and one of my platoon sergeants." But 15 to 20 seconds later I heard, "We're all OK, we're all OK."
Then the next day we had an attack on Observation Post 4: small arms fire, RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], and 107mm rockets. In fact, the first four days we were here we had a significant event every day: the IED, the contact, a rocket attack, and then two more IEDs. At that point I was thinking it was going to be a long deployment.
There was something else. We had an incident where two children were playing with unexploded ordinance. A girl and her brother were tossing back and forth a 40mm grenade, when it exploded. They brought her here and our medics worked on her nonstop, but she died here on the base. She had an abdominal wound and she was bleeding out ? we couldn't get an aircraft here in time. The boy was taken to Bagram and survived.
We've all seen dead people, but seeing that little girl that was tough ? that was a rough one. There was a lot of frustration and a lot of us felt like failures because ? well, we're the U.S. Army and we couldn't do anything. It had a big impact on all of us.
SITES: A big part of your mission is helping to train and stand up Afghan forces. How is that going?
NUNN: They're better than I expected. I didn't think they'd be that far along. They're doing independent patrols ? they've got a lot of heart. They want to be as good as we are and they're grateful for what we can teach them. They want the respect of being professionals. For example, their mortar team had never even fired a mortar, but we trained them up and now they're integrated into the fire plan.
The biggest challenge is the lack of a professional base. They spent the last 20 years fighting as warriors, not as an organized army. They don't have the institutional base that professional armies have. The NCOs [non-commissioned officers] really want that. They get fired up about learning to use a map to navigate. Whenever someone wants to learn and you give them some knowledge, they just want more. That's the case with these guys.
For complex operations I keep them under my control, but they can do independent patrols, they can do cordon searches. I've seen them doing cache [weapons] recovery. When we got into contact a while ago, one of the commanders took his guys into the field and tried to hunt the attackers down, but he didn't tell me what he was doing ? he just went. I applaud his initiative but I couldn't clear the fields of fire, and those are the kinds of mixed successes we're looking at.
SITES: Another part of the mission is to bring in lawless villages like Guyan, where you were the other day meeting with elders and military and police officials as well as handing out humanitarian aid. But when you left, one of your vehicles struck an IED. What does that say about the challenges here?
NUNN: Honestly, I didn't feel it was a slap in the face. I didn't take it personally. With any size population there will always be people for you and people against you, and some people that are just bad. You just have to expect that when you go into these places.
Harsh terrain in Afghanistan
SITES: You are in command of the most eastern outpost of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. It's an isolated place, in a war in which many people, including soldiers here, feel is forgotten or at least off the radar for most Americans. How do you operate in an environment like that?
NUNN: I look at my job like a doctor looks at his job. It's what I am; it's who I am. I was in the army before 9/11, and it was those heady days of peace when everyone loved everyone and there was no need for an army. We kind of felt forgotten then. But then 9/11 happened and we were needed again.
There's frustration and I guess there's disappointment, because for some reason Afghanistan doesn't seem as important to some as the conflict in Iraq ? and you want the recognition for your soldiers.
I wish that people could see what we're doing ? not just the shooting at bad guys, but also the distribution of humanitarian aid, having tea at endless meetings with elders, or trying to save a six-year-old girl.
If we were in this for the money we'd all quit. And we're not in it for the recognition either, but I wish people could look through my eyes and see my soldiers the same way, and have the pride in them that I do.
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An interesting take on Operation Swarmer. I'm only including the link because there is a lot of formatting with this piece that will not cut and paste well:
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/03/in-plain-view.html
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http://multimedia.rockymountainnews....dstrom&NUM= 1
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http://flf.michaelyon-online.com/article.php?ID=9&PHPSESSID=76f7932704a2838158463c64b53b42e9
http://flf.michaelyon-online.com/?BMIDS=17137839-4e534328-119235
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On Call in Hell
He left a desk job for the front lines of Fallujah?and a horror show few doctors ever see. How Richard Jadick earned his Bronze Star.
By Pat Wingert and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
March 20, 2006 issue - Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here I am. Send me!"
?Isaiah 7:8
Richard Jadick was bored. The Navy doctor was shuffling paper while Marines were heading out to Iraq. Once, many years before, Jadick had been a Marine officer, but he had missed the 1991 gulf war, stuck behind a recruiter's desk. Now he was looking forward to leading a comfortable life as what he called a "gentleman urologist." Jadick, with a Navy rank of lieutenant commander, was 38?too old, really, to be a combat surgeon.
But then a medical committee searching for help came knocking on his door. Because of an acute doctor shortage, they were having trouble finding a junior-grade Navy doctor to go with the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment (the "1/8"), to Iraq. Jadick at the time was one of the senior medical officers at Camp Lejeune, N.C. "Who could we send?" they asked. Jadick thought for a moment. "Well," he said, "I could go."
His friends told him he was crazy, and his wife, a pediatrician nine months pregnant with their first child, was none too happy. But in the summer of 2004, five days after the birth of his child, Commander Jadick shipped out for Iraq. On the plane, he sat behind a gunnery staff sergeant named Ryan P. Shane. A 250-pound weight lifter, the massive Shane turned in his seat to look at Jadick. Slowly taking the measure of the 5-foot-10, 200-pound Jadick, the gunnery sergeant said, "So you're our new surgeon. That's one job I wouldn't want to have with the place where we're going." That night Jadick e-mailed his wife, "What have I gotten myself into?"
The place they were going was Fallujah. In Sunni territory west of Baghdad, the city seethed with insurgents. Jihadists had strung up the burned bodies of American contractors in the spring of 2004, and chaos had reigned ever since. By November, the United States was tired of waiting for the enemy to give up or clear out. "Over the past five months, [we] have been attacked by a faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Fallujah. And we're going to destroy him," said Marine Lt. Col. Gary Brandl on the eve of the attack. Jadick's regiment, the 1/8, was ordered to take what was, in effect, the Main Street of the city. For Jadick, who speaks in a gentle, matter-of-fact voice, occasionally strained by memories of the men he saved and lost, it was to be a journey to the other side of hell.
The night before the assault, Jadick hopped into a command Humvee taking a reconnaissance mission from the headquarters base outside the city. He wanted to see what he was up against. In treating traumatic injuries, there is something known as the golden hour. A badly injured person who gets to the hospital within an hour is much more likely to be saved. But Jadick knew that in combat the "golden hour" doesn't exist. Left unaided, said Jadick, the wounded "could die in 15 minutes, and there are some things that could kill them in six minutes. If they had an arterial bleed, it could be three minutes."
Jadick knew that helicopter evacuations were out of the question: there was too great a risk the choppers would get shot down. Casualties would have to be driven out of the city. It took Jadick 45 minutes to drive from the base hospital, where he would normally be stationed, to the city. Not close enough. Jadick wanted to push closer to the action.
Jadick, along with 54 Navy corpsmen, his young, sometimes teenage medical assistants, moved to the edge of the city as the assault began; the night sky was lit by tracers and rocket fire. The next morning a call came over the radio. A Navy SEAL with a sucking chest wound needed evacuation. A weapons company was heading in to rescue the man. Lacking much military training, doctors normally stay back in the rear area. But ex-Marine Jadick decided to go to the fight. As shots rang out around them, the weapons company ran and dodged down narrow alleyways toward the building where the SEAL lay wounded. Jadick was armed only with a small 9mm pistol. He thought: "If anyone actually gets close to me, I'm going to have to throw it at him." He felt slightly ridiculous, remembering a "MASH" episode in which Alan Alda tried to scare away the enemy.
In the rubble of a shot-up building, he found the SEAL conscious but bleeding badly. "Get me out of here," the man said. Helping to carry the man on a stretcher down the stairs, Jadick could hear rocket fire and shooting. The air was thick with fine dust and a familiar smell: cordite, from gunpowder. He had smelled cordite before at rifle ranges, but never like this. "It just hung in the air," he recalled.
The radio squawked. Two Marines had been wounded in an ambush in the center of the city. Jadick wanted to get his wounded SEAL back to base camp. But the voices on the radio were insisting that the two men down in the ambush were in even worse shape. It was Jadick's call. He loaded the SEAL into an armored ambulance and set off in the vehicle toward the scene of the shooting. He could hear the firing intensify. Jadick wondered, anxiously, if a rocket-propelled grenade could punch right through the ambulance's metal sides.
The ambulance stopped and Jadick peered out at the first real fire fight of his life. There were not two wounded men, but seven. As a middle-class kid growing up in upstate New York, Jadick had avidly read about war, and even applied to West Point. But he flunked the physical?poor depth perception?and went to Ithaca College on an ROTC scholarship instead. He had served as a communications officer in the Marines, but left the corps after seven years, bitter that he had been left out of the fighting in 1991. Attending medical school on a Navy scholarship, he had never seen or experienced real war?the kind of urban combat that can leave 30 to 40 percent of a unit wounded or dead.
"I can't tell you how scared I was," he recalled. "My legs wanted to stay in that vehicle, but I had to get off. I wanted to go back into that vehicle and lie under something and cry. I felt like a coward. I felt like it took me hours to make the decision to go."
But he got up and went. He felt as though he were "walking through water." Desperately seeking cover, he ran to a three-foot wall where the most badly wounded soldier lay. He lifted the man over the wall to safety. "I put him down on the ground, and he was looking at me," Jadick recalled. The man had a gaping wound in his groin. Jadick tried to "pack" the wound, stuffing sterile gauze packages into the hole torn by an AK-47 round, but he couldn't stop the bleeding. Jadick was forced to make the first of a thousand wretched decisions. "I knew I had six other people that I had to work on. So I don't know ..." Jadick paused in the retelling. "I stopped and went on to someone else." It was Jadick's first experience in battlefield triage?forget the mortally or lightly wounded, save the rest?a concept easier to philosophize about than to practice.
Bullets were hissing around him. Afraid of dying, more afraid of failing his comrades, Jadick managed to treat the wounded, to stabilize them and stop the bleeding. As he began loading men into the ambulance, an RPG screamed in?and glanced off the roof without exploding. A second RPG slammed into the wall next to them; it didn't go off, either.
One of the wounded was Ryan Shane?the massive gunnery sergeant Jadick had met on the plane. Shane's abdomen was all shot up. Jadick was unable to lift him, so the sergeant had to crawl into the ambulance by himself. "I made room for him underneath the stretchers," Jadick recalled. But he had to turn away another Marine who had been shot in the foot. There was no more room.
As a urology resident at an inner-city trauma center in Baltimore, Jadick had spent a three-month rotation handling gunshot wounds. But the inside of the darkened ambulance, bathed in red light and blood from the wounded, echoing and rattling with the combat close by, seemed far away from the sterile, scrubbed world of a hospital ER. Working with a medic, Jadick pumped Hespan (a clear blood expander) into veins and tried to pack wounds. One man was dead already. His body, on the top rack, was bleeding all over the patients below him and Jadick, too?"down my neck, everywhere," Jadick recalled.
Jadick was covered with gore by the time the ambulance reached a transfer point. People standing around the medical tent were staring at him, so he rubbed sand on his uniform. "It made it go dark," he said.
It was not yet noon on Jadick's first day in combat. A Humvee rolled up and a big, husky young Marine from Louisiana, Joel Dupuis, jumped out and began rambling on that his friend, Pvt. Paul Volpe, was going to die. Jadick ran with Dupuis to find a young Marine slumped over on the back hatch of the Humvee. Hit in the thigh, Volpe was "fluorescent-light white," recalled Jadick. His pulse was thin and weak; shock was setting in. Jadick figured the Marine had lost more than half his blood.
Jadick looked at Volpe and thought of the Marine who had died and bled all over him. "I can't let this happen again," he thought, "or there's no point in me being here." Turning to a young Navy doctor, Carlos Kennedy, Jadick instructed, "Pack him like you've never packed a guy before." Kennedy used his boot to stomp in the gauze stuffing. Meanwhile, Dupuis, who was a corpsman, found a vein to insert an IV, and a liter of Hespan started pumping into his unconscious friend.
"All of a sudden, it was the most amazing thing," recalled Jadick. "It was like Frosty the Snowman come to life." Volpe opened his eyes, looked up and asked what was going on. When he saw Dupuis's anxious face, he joked, "I'm all right, I can see your ugly-ass face."
Jadick felt the need to get still closer to the battle. Even though Volpe had reached Jadick's aid station on the edge of the city, the Marine had almost died. In effect, Jadick wanted to set up an emergency room in the middle of the battlefield. Loading up two armored ambulances, he convoyed into the city in the dead of night to establish an aid station in the prayer room of an old government building. The night was quiet, save for the drone of a C-130 gunship searching for prey. Jadick and his men found some metal plates in the street, cleaned them and draped them with sterile gauze as trays for his scalpels. They stacked sandbags by the windows. As the sun rose, the silence was broken by sniper fire.
The casualty runs began arriving in the morning, depositing their grisly cargo. Bodies stacked up. At times Jadick couldn't sterilize his instruments fast enough. "You'd just have to throw some alcohol on the stuff and use it again. I didn't get a chance to wash my hands a lot. I wore gloves as much as possible, but they'd get all torn up and my body would just get covered in blood." Jadick was still afraid. "We were still getting shot at, and there were mortar attacks. But now it was OK somehow. Maybe I had gotten used to it, or maybe just calloused."
Kneeling over a wounded Marine, Jadick was startled to see a muzzle flash from a water tower about 50 yards away. He could clearly see a sniper, his face wrapped in cloth. For a moment, Jadick, the former Marine captain, replaced Jadick, the Navy doctor. A truckload of Marines had just pulled up. "Please go kill that guy," said Jadick, and their commander sent them out to silence the man. Jadick had a fleeting struggle with the Hippocratic Oath ("Do no harm") but thought, "At some point, it's either kill or be killed."
Jadick grew close to his young corpsmen, who were frightened, like him, but cared for the wounded like brothers. "If it would help, they would hold a guy's hand. They did those things to provide comfort, and they weren't afraid to do it. That's not something I taught them. They just did it," Jadick said.
Sometimes the corpsmen behaved like the 18- and 19-year-olds they were. Jadick was miffed at one young clerk, in charge of keeping proper records, who had apparently wandered off. Unable to find the man, Jadick began cursing him, when the clerk appeared around the corner. "Where were you?" Jadick angrily demanded. "Well," the clerk said, "some guys were trying to come across through the open gate, so I shot them." Jadick laughed as he recalled the story. "That's a pretty good excuse, so I'll let you go this time," he told the man.
On the third or fourth night, a vehicle pulled up with a badly wounded Marine named Jacob Knospler. A corporal with a rifle company, Knospler had dragged the shot-up Gunnery Sergeant Shane out of harm's way a few days before. Now, fighting house to house, he had been hit in the face with grenade shrapnel. There was a hole where his mouth and jaw had been. He was conscious and crying and trying to paw at his face. "We had to hold his hands and give him a lot of morphine, as much as he could tolerate," said Jadick. Unable to put a breathing tube down his throat, Jadick worried that Knospler would gag and suffocate on his own blood, tissue and mucus on his way to surgery. He jumped into the ambulance with the wounded corporal and, working with a female medic, kept suctioning the man's horribly wounded face. After 30 minutes, they arrived at a transfer station to hand him over to a new doctor. When the doctor saw the wound, his eyes bulged. "Are you going to be OK with this?" asked Jadick. The doctor said yes, and Jadick headed back to the inferno.
That was a bad night, Jadick recalled, but not the worst. A Marine came in shot in the head. Though he was still breathing, his skull was fractured and his eyeballs were hanging on either side of his face. When Jadick removed the Marine's helmet he could feel the plates of the man's skull moving. There was a distinctive, nauseating smell?of gray matter, brain tissue.
The man died, and so did many of his wounded comrades. But there were some remarkable survivors. A Marine walked over to Jadick and said, "Doc, I've got a headache." Jadick saw with a start that there was a hole in the guy's helmet. Gingerly, Jadick removed the helmet?and saw that a bullet had, in effect, scalped the young Marine, separating a flap of skin at the hairline, but not penetrating his skull. "You're pretty lucky," Jadick said. As both men laughed, Jadick stitched him up. "You don't need to be here anymore today," he told the man, and sent him to the rear.
The laughs were few and far between. A Marine arrived with a chest wound. Jadick had seen the man, Lance Cpl. Demarkus Brown, a few days before, when he showed up with a lip sliced by shrapnel. "Doc, do I get a Purple Heart for this?" Brown had asked. Jadick had assured him that he would, sewed up the lip, and sent him back to the fight. Now the man did not seem too badly wounded. He was breathing and his eyes were open. Still, Jadick was unable to get a breathing tube down his throat. For a moment, Brown seemed to perk up when Jadick inserted a needle in his chest for a tube, but suddenly the blood began to pulse out. A major blood vessel had ruptured inside him. The man's blood pressure was so low that Jadick couldn't get an IV line working.
Jadick talked to the man. "C'mon, Brown, don't give up on me," he gently pleaded. The young man died. He had been an especially well-liked leatherneck, tough but cheerful. "To this day, he's the kid I can't get out of my head," said Jadick, as he was interviewed two years later for this story. "It was one of those things ..." Jadick paused and began to weep quietly.
For 11 days, Jadick worked night and day at his forward aid station. In late November, as the area around the government building quieted, Jadick moved his team to an abandoned pickle factory in an industrial area where fighting was still going on. The weather had turned bitter cold, so the corpsmen dug holes in the floor and built fireplaces out of rubble. Jadick worried that the IV fluids might become so chilled that the wounded would go into hypothermic shock. To try to warm the fluid to body temperature, corpsmen had the idea of taping pints to their legs and carrying them inside their cargo pockets.
The wounded kept coming. One hero was Matthew Palacios. Injured, he saw a grenade land beside him. Somehow, he had the presence of mind to fling it back, saving the men around him. Increasingly, the wounded were Marines ripped by booby traps and suicide bombers. The KIAs (Killed in Action) were so mangled that Jadick decided to build a morgue, so his young corpsmen wouldn't have to see the shattered bodies piling up.
The one injury Jadick did not see much of was posttraumatic stress disorder. One Marine had to be sent to the rear, and plenty of men complained that they didn't want to go back out and fight?but they did. The PTSD, Jadick knows, will show up for some men only after they're back home, safe but haunted by flashbacks and memories. "We all had PTSD at some level," said Jadick, who nevertheless has not sought treatment.
By mid-December, Fallujah was secured. It had been the worst urban fighting involving Americans since Vietnam. At least 53 Marines and Navy SEALs died, as did something like 1,600 insurgents. By mid-January, Jadick was home: there was an opening for a urology resident at the Medical College of Georgia. Jadick was eager to see his baby daughter and wife.
Jadick was awarded a Bronze Star with a Combat V for valor. (The medal, pinned onto Jadick in January, is the only Combat V awarded a Navy doctor thus far in the Iraq war.) His commanding officer, Lt. Col. Mark Winn, estimated that without Jadick at the front, the Marines would have lost an additional 30 men. Of the hundreds of men treated by Jadick, only one died after reaching a hospital. "I have never seen a doctor display the kind of courage and bravery that Rich did during Fallujah," said Winn. Jadick still owes the Navy a couple of years as a doctor. He's thinking of staying in beyond that. "Being a battalion surgeon is one of the greatest jobs there is," he says, in his low-key way. "So, sure, I would do it again, yeah."
? 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11787394/site/newsweek/
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COMMON NAME, UNCOMMON VALOR
Written by Ralph Bennett
Since his days growing up in Tampa, Fla. the lanky kid with the slightly mischievous smile had wanted to be a soldier. By this bright morning, April 4, 2003, Sgt 1st Class Paul Ray Smith had more than fullfilled his dream. He had served 15 of his 33 years in the U.S. Army, including three tours of duty in harms way- in the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Now all his training, all his experience, all the instincts that had made him a model soldier, were about to be put to the test. With 16 men from his 1st Platoon, B Company, 11th Engineer Battalion, Sgt. Smith was under attack by about 100 troops of the Iraqi Republican Guard.
"We're in a world of hurt" he was heard to say.
That world was a dusty triangular, walled compound about half the size of a football field, near the Saddam Hussein Airport, 11 miles from Baghdad. Sgt. Smith's engineers or "sappers" had broken through the southren wall of the compound with a military bulldozer and begun turning the area into a temporary "pen" for Iraqi prisoners as U.S. forces pressed their attack on the airport.
While they were working, guards spotted a large Iraqi force approaching their position. The guards called for Sgt. Smith to take a look and as he arrived all hell broke loose. They came under heavy fire from machine gunners and RPG's.
The lightly armed work detail needed fire support. Sgt. Smith called for a Bradley fighting vehicle. The Bradley was on site in short order and attacked the enemy force with it's 25mm Bushmaster cannon. Sgt. Smith and his men took up positions around the Bradley as he called for a nearby M-133 personnel carrier for additional fire power from it's .50 caliber machinegun.
As the two vehicles engaged the Iraqis both were hit by motor rounds and RPG's. Sgt Smith lost his fire power to hold back the enemy troops.
Sgt. Smith could have withdrawn but he was the only thing standing between the enemy and a aid station with combat casualties and medical teams a short distance away.
Under fire Sgt Smith and his men extracted three wounded from the APC. Then Sgt Smith positioned the APC where he could cover most of the compound then he manned the machinegun while one of his men fed the belted ammo. His other men made an assault on a guard tower while Sgt Smith layed down fire on the main forces coming at them now from three different positions. His men reached the tower and took it over but Sgt Smith was shot by one of the Iraqis there in the tower just as the other Iraqi troops started turning back because of the accurate fire of Sgt. Smith. 50 dead Iraqi soldiers lay in the area of the compound. Sgt. Smith's vest had 13 bullet holes in it but he had continued to fire while being hit. The shot from the tower hit him in the neck killing him.
When the Army told his mother her son had died in battle she said "Our name is so common, maybe it's a mistake"
On April 4th, 2005, exactly two years after his selfless action, his wife and their children stood in the White House and was presented with Sgt. Smith's Medal of Honor.
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A Howl of Respect to all who serve:
Memorial Day is always a day for quiet reflection-- all the more so in times of war.
I usually have lots of words, but ultimately on days such as this they seem rather empty.
We thank you.
The Adventure continues , , ,
Crafty Dog
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The Troops Have Moved On
By OWEN WEST
Published: May 29, 2006
NEITHER party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease."
So said Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address, describing a war that put 11 percent of our citizens in uniform and had by that point killed nearly one of out every seven soldiers. That his words are relevant again now is a troubling indicator of our national endurance.
We are at the outset of a long war, and not just in Iraq. Yet it is being led politically by the short-sighted, from both sides of the aisle. The deterioration of American support for the mission in Iraq is indicative not so much of our military conduct there, where real gains are coming slowly but steadily, but of chaotic leadership.
Somehow Operation Iraqi Freedom, not a large war by America's historical standards, has blossomed into a crisis of expectations that threatens our ability to react to future threats with a fist instead of five fingers. Instead of rallying we are squabbling, even as the slow fuse burns.
One party is overly sanguine, unwilling to acknowledge its errors. The other is overly maudlin, unable to forgive the same. The Bush administration seeks to insulate the public from the reality of war, placing its burden on the few. The press has tried to fill that gap by exposing the raw brutality of the insurgency; but it has often done so without context, leaving a clear implication that we can never win.
In the past, the American public could turn to its sons for martial perspective. Soldiers have historically been perhaps the country's truest reflection, a socio-economic cross-section borne from common ideals. The problem is, this war is not being fought by World War II's citizen-soldiers. Nor is it fought by Vietnam's draftees. Its wages are paid by a small cadre of volunteers that composes about one-tenth of 1 percent of the population ? America's warrior class.
The insular nature of this group ? and a war that has spiraled into politicization ? has left the Americans disconnected and confused. It's as if they have been invited into the owner's box to settle a first-quarter disagreement on the coach's play-calling. Not only are they unprepared to talk play selection, most have never even seen a football game.
This confusion, in turn, affects our warriors, who are frustrated by the country's lack of cohesion and the depiction of their war. Iraq hasn't been easy on the military, either. But the strength of our warriors is their ability to adapt.
First, in battle you move forward from where you are, not where you want to be. No one was more surprised that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction than the soldiers who rolled into Iraq in full chemical protective gear. But it is time for the rest of the country to do what the military was forced to: get over it.
If we can put 2003's debates behind us, there is a swath of common ground on which to focus. Both Republicans and Democrats agree we cannot lose Iraq. The general insurgency in Iraq imperils our national interest and the hardcore insurgents are our mortal enemies. Talking of troop reductions is to lose sight of the goal.
Second, America's conscience is one of its greatest strengths. But self-flagellation, especially in the early stages of a war against an enemy whose worldview is uncompromising, is absolutely hazardous. Three years gone and Iraq's most famous soldiers are Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, a victim and a criminal, respectively. Abu Ghraib remains the most famous battle of the war.
Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare ? and the need to cultivate national guardians ? has not. As Kipling wrote, "The strength of the pack is the wolf."
Finally, today's debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.
We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more. We have crossed several rivers and the nation is hoping that ahead lie streams. But if they are oceans, we should heed Lincoln's call: "With malice toward none, with charity for all ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in."
Owen West, a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq, is the founder of Vets for Freedom.
Next Article in Opinion (7 of 8) ?
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Edward Dahlgren, 90; WWII Actions Earned Medal of Honor
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
June 3, 2006
Edward Dahlgren, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for spearheading the rescue of an Army platoon that was surrounded in a German counterattack during World War II, has died. He was 90.
Dahlgren died Wednesday at the Maine Veterans' Home in Caribou, Maine. The cause of death was not announced.
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A sergeant with the 36th Infantry Division, Dahlgren captured more than 40 enemy soldiers and killed several others during fighting at Oberhoffen, France.
According to his Medal of Honor citation, Dahlgren led his platoon to the rescue of a similar unit facing a German advance.
After spotting a number of enemy troops crossing a field toward the surrounded platoon, he ran into a barn and opened fire with a submachine gun. He killed six German troops, wounded several others and thwarted the advance.
Dahlgren's platoon then moved forward to join the other GI platoon.
The two units moved through Oberhoffen until they began taking rifle fire from a house held by enemy troops. Dahlgren dodged their fire as he ran toward the house and lobbed a grenade through the front door. The eight German troops inside quickly surrendered after Dahlgren burst into the house, firing his rifle.
Starting for the next house, Dahlgren was driven to take cover by hostile machine-gun fire. He grabbed rifle grenades and launched missiles into the house, destroying the machine-gun position and killing its two operators.
Dahlgren moved to the rear of the house and came under fire from a machine gun in the barn. After tossing a grenade into the structure, he burst in and five Germans surrendered.
But the house was still in enemy hands, and Dahlgren and his unit advanced to clear the dwelling. Entering through a rear window, he trapped several Germans in the basement. He again used a grenade to subdue the enemy forces, wounding several and forcing 10 to surrender.
After securing that block, Dahlgren and a comrade moved on to another street. Hearing German coming from a house, Dahlgren opened fire with rifle grenades, entered and fired several bursts down the cellar stairway. Sixteen Germans surrendered.
President Truman presented Dahlgren with the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor, at a White House ceremony Aug. 23, 1945. The citation that went with the award noted that Dahlgren's "bold leadership and magnificent courage" repulsed the counterattack and saved the lives of American soldiers.
Friends recalled Dahlgren as a humble man who spoke little of his wartime heroics. He once noted, however, that he " ? was afraid before it happened and after it happened. But in battle I just acted on the spur of the moment."
The highly decorated Dahlgren left military service after the war with the rank of second lieutenant. His other medals included the Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor in a ceremony in April.
A native of Woodland, Maine, Dahlgren spent much of his life in the northern Maine community of Blaine, where he worked for the state as a seed potato inspector.
In addition to his wife of 57 years, Pauline, Dahlgren's survivors include two sons, two daughters and a stepson.
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A Camp Divided
As U.S. tries to give Iraqi troops more responsibility,
clash of two American colonels shows tough road ahead.
By GREG JAFFE
June 16, 2006 11:24 p.m.; Page A1
Camp Taji, Iraq
This sprawling military base is divided down the middle by massive concrete barriers, a snaking fence and rifle-toting guards. On one side, about 10,000 U.S. Army soldiers live in air-conditioned trailers. There's a movie theater, a swimming pool, a Taco Bell, and a post exchange the size of a Wal-Mart, stocked with everything from deodorant to DVD players.
On the other side are a similar number of Iraqi soldiers whose success will determine when U.S. troops can go home. The Iraqi troops live in fetid barracks built by the British in the 1920s, ration the fuel they use to run their lights and sometimes eat spoiled food that makes them sick.
The only soldiers who pass regularly between the two worlds are about 130 U.S. Army advisers, who live, train and work with the Iraqis.
For many of these advisers, the past six months have been a disorienting experience, putting them at odds with their fellow U.S. soldiers and eroding their confidence in the U.S. government's ability to build an Iraqi force that can stabilize this increasingly violent country.
Army commanders back in the U.S. "told us this was going to be the most thankless and frustrating job we have ever held, and boy, were they right," says Lt. Col. Charles Payne, who until last month oversaw about 50 Army advisers.
He and fellow advisers say U.S. troops on the American side of the base saddle Iraqis with the least-desirable missions and often fail to provide them with the basics they need to protect themselves against insurgent attacks. "They treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt," Col. Payne says. "The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it."
Col. James Pasquarette, who commands most of the soldiers on the U.S. side of Camp Taji, calls those claims "totally ridiculous." He says he's proud of what the Iraqi units have achieved in the region and has made supporting them his top priority, after ensuring his own troops have the protection they need. But he worries that if the Iraqis are given too much latitude to execute challenging missions too quickly, they will alienate Iraqi civilians with heavy-handed tactics.
He says Col. Payne and his fellow advisers have "gone native."
Though the divide here at Camp Taji is extreme, it reflects a growing friction throughout this war-torn country. No one on either side of the divide expects the Iraqi troops to be trained, equipped or housed to U.S. standards. But if U.S. troops are going to go home, U.S. commanders must allow Iraqis to take a far greater role in planning operations and taking the fight to the enemy, senior military officers say.
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Right now, Iraqi commanders and some of their U.S. advisers say that isn't happening enough. Part of the reason, U.S. officials say, is that widespread Iraqi corruption has made it hard for the fledgling Iraqi government to supply their troops with basics like good food, batteries and fuel. But Iraqi soldiers and their U.S. advisers say the problem extends beyond basic supply issues. They complain that U.S. troops, bunkered down on large, fortified bases, treat Iraqi forces more like a problem than a partner. U.S. forces "don't talk to us," says Col. Saad, a senior Iraqi commander on Camp Taji. The Iraqi colonel, whose family has been threatened by insurgents, asked that his full name not be used.
U.S. commanders counter that there are huge risks to giving the Iraqi army too big a role right now. They worry some Iraqis will leak word of impending operations to the enemy or use military force to settle sectarian scores. Many U.S. commanders say Iraqi forces aren't as disciplined as U.S. troops and are too prone to abuse civilians and detainees.
The debate raises difficult questions for U.S. commanders, as they plot the way forward in Iraq: Should Iraqi units be held to the same standards as U.S. units? What happens when the Iraqis' solution is at odds with the American commander's strategy?
Earlier this spring, the tension between the two sides at Camp Taji reached the breaking point when the Iraqi army brigade that Col. Payne was advising leveled two dozen roadside kiosks. The Iraqi soldiers said insurgent snipers, who had killed and wounded Iraqi troops, used the kiosks for cover.
Col. Pasquarette thought destroying the kiosks would only enrage locals and drive them to support the insurgents. "This was a great day for the terrorists," he recalls telling Col. Payne on the day that the Iraqi army flattened the fruit and vegetable stands.
Col. Payne says the Iraqi army bulldozed the kiosks -- consisting mostly of palm fronds suspended by bamboo poles -- to protect Iraqi soldiers. "When I first heard what they had done, my initial response was, 'I am all for it,' " Col. Payne says. "This is not a law and order situation. This is a war."
Late last month, Col. Pasquarette asked that Col. Payne be dismissed from his position, just four months after the two men started working together. Col. Payne was then assigned to a desk job in Baghdad.
The unit Col. Payne headed is at the leading edge of a major shift in U.S. strategy. Until last summer, the U.S. military saw its primary mission as fighting insurgents. With pressure mounting to bring the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq home, President Bush decided the military's main effort should instead focus on training Iraqis to take its place.
To speed development of Iraqi army forces, about 3,000 U.S. soldiers were placed with Iraqi units throughout the country. The teams live and work with Iraqi soldiers in places such as Camp Taji.
In November 2005, Col. Payne came back from retirement to lead his team. The colonel had served 28 years in the Army, fought in the Grenada invasion and taught history at West Point. He retired in July 2001. A few weeks later, terrorists struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Col. Payne called the Army and volunteered to return. "There was a chuckle on the end of the phone," he says. The Army told him he wasn't needed.
Four years later, with the Army stretched thin by the war, the 50-year-old soldier, who was teaching at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, called again. This time, the Army was eager to send him to Iraq. In November, he was told he had 23 days to report to Fort Carson, Colo., and link up with his unit. His wife was "very unhappy," he says. Col. Payne says he was determined to go. "The nation is at war and all real soldiers want to be where the action is."
Col. Pasquarette, a former college basketball player, took command of his 6,000-soldier brigade in June 2005. Before that, the 45-year-old had attended Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and served as an aide-de-camp to a four-star general.
The two men's troops arrived in Iraq in December 2005 and settled on opposite sides of Camp Taji, a sprawling former Iraqi army base, about 20 miles north of Baghdad. Col. Payne's group consisted of 50 U.S. soldiers, assigned to advise the Iraqi military. His team was one of the few at Camp Taji that didn't report to Col. Pasquarette.
The 2,500-soldier Iraqi brigade that Col. Payne was advising had formed 11 months earlier and had been fighting nonstop. The Iraqis had scrounged all of their tanks and armored personnel carriers -- most of which were at least 30 years old -- from a massive junkyard on the Iraqi side of Camp Taji. When something broke, Iraqi soldiers retreated to the scrapyard where they would pillage rusting hulks for spare parts. Of the $260 billion spent on the Iraq war since 2003, about $10 billion has gone to build Iraqi army and police forces.
The U.S. officers bonded quickly with their Iraqi counterparts. In January, Maj. Michael Jason, who leads one of the advisory teams, was on patrol with a 42-year-old Iraqi colonel when a terrified farmer told them he had found bodies in a field. He then led them to the corpses of 11 Iraqi army soldiers who had been headed home on leave. Each had been beaten, blindfolded and shot in the head. Their Iraqi army identification cards had been taken from their wallets and pinned to their shirts by insurgents who regularly target Iraqi forces.
Maj. Jason, a Roman Catholic, and his Iraqi counterpart, Col. Khalid, a Muslim, kneeled next to the bodies and prayed. The U.S. Army asked that Col. Khalid's full name be withheld for his safety. That night, Maj. Jason, a 33-year-old West Point grad, wrote an email home describing his Iraqi colleague's bravery and sacrifice.
"Col. Khalid's children have to move constantly for fear of their lives. When he goes home on leave, he cannot tell anyone for security reasons. He just disappears. He drives 90 mph with a pistol tucked in the small of his back and his ID hidden. I love these guys, no s-t," he wrote. A month later, Col. Khalid's brother, also an army officer, was kidnapped. Insurgents killed him and dumped his body on his parents' doorstep. Col. Khalid couldn't go to the funeral for fear that he would be assassinated. So Maj. Jason and soldiers in the unit mourned with him at Camp Taji.
In March, Col. Khalid left the battalion for a safer assignment, which doesn't require him to leave the base.
As the U.S. advisers grew closer to the Iraqis, they also grew more frustrated with U.S. soldiers on the other side of the base.
Shortly after Col. Pasquarette arrived at Camp Taji, he beefed up the number of guards and armored vehicles at the gates separating the U.S. and Iraqi sides of the base. "Securing my [base] is my No. 1 mission. I am risk averse here," he says. The U.S. advisers to the Iraqis thought the additional guards and guns were unnecessary and only served to make U.S. soldiers more suspicious of the Iraqis.
When the advisers asked if they could bring an Iraqi colleague to eat with them on the American side of the base, they say they were shocked at the response. They were told that the presence of an Iraqi officer in the dining hall might upset the U.S. soldiers.
"These kids go outside the gate and deal with a very hostile environment. They need a place where they can relax and let their guard down," says Lt. Col. Kevin Dixon, Col. Pasquarette's deputy commander. He says the policy was driven by the bombing of a dining facility in Mosul in 2004 by an Iraqi who had sneaked in.
The advisers felt differently. "We really believe there is a systemic contempt for Iraqi soldiers," says Master Sgt. John McFarlane, a senior enlisted adviser to the Iraqis at Camp Taji. The policy has since been amended to allow advisers to eat with Iraqi officers on the U.S. side if they file a letter in advance with the base's security office.
One of the Iraqi army's primary jobs in the Taji area is to guard water-purification substations that provide most of Baghdad's drinking water. Last summer, insurgents blew up one of the substations, cutting off water for two weeks. To ensure that didn't happen again, Iraqi army units were dispatched by the U.S. to guard the sites. Iraqi soldiers began to take regular sniper fire there.
In January, the U.S. advisers asked Col. Pasquarette for help installing barriers around one of the substations, to shield the Iraqis from snipers. Col. Pasquarette asked one of his units to help. Weeks passed, but help never came. American engineering units were too busy fortifying the U.S. side of Camp Taji and bases around it, says Maj. Martin Herem, who handled the request.
On Feb. 28, a sniper shot in the back one of the Iraqi soldiers at the water station. The soldier bled to death. Three weeks later, a sniper killed a second Iraqi soldier who was on patrol near the water station. Iraqi troops said that both times snipers used the small fruit and vegetable stands lining a nearby road for cover. The Iraqi army couldn't return fire without killing shopkeepers and customers.
When the Iraqi soldiers ran over to ask people who had been shooting at them, locals said they hadn't seen anything. It's dangerous for locals to be seen helping the U.S. Army or the Iraqi army.
The day after the second killing, Col. Saad, an Iraqi colonel in the unit Col. Payne was advising, ordered his men to tell the shopkeepers to empty the vegetable stands. The Iraqi soldiers then bulldozed the stands. Col. Saad says he destroyed the kiosks to protect his soldiers.
When Col. Pasquarette learned about the incident, he was furious. The Iraqis' actions ran completely counter to his strategy. He had told his soldiers to focus less on killing insurgents and more on reconstruction programs designed to win support of the people.
"When you go lethal or destroy property there may be a short-term gain, but there is a long-term loss," he says. He saw the move as a throwback to the Saddam Hussein era when the army was used to quell unrest and inflict mass punishment.
Photoillustration by Stuart Bradford; photos, left: U.S. Department of Defense; photos, right: Getty Images
Because the Iraqi troops operate in his sector, Col. Pasquarette oversees them. He called Col. Payne into his office and demanded that he tell Col. Saad to have his soldiers apologize and pay reparations to the shop owners.
Col. Payne passed along the orders. But Col. Saad says he refused to follow them. "Here in Iraq if someone makes a mistake, you punish them," he says, referring to the shop owners' failure to give Iraqis information about the snipers. "If you give him money, he will repeat the mistake. And he will consider the person who gave him the gift an idiot."
The next day, Col. Pasquarette met with Col. Saad's Iraqi superior and told him about the dispute. The Iraqi general fired Col. Saad. Later that day, three low-ranking Iraqi soldiers, accompanied by about a dozen Americans, passed out the reimbursement forms.
The Iraqi officers in Col. Saad's brigade felt betrayed. On March 21, just before midnight, four senior officers stopped by Col. Payne's office and threatened to resign. "They were furious," says Col. Payne. Two days later, Col. Saad was quietly re-hired.
Col. Payne says he is still angry that neither Col. Pasquarette nor his subordinate commanders talked to Col. Saad to hear his side of the story. "This is a respect issue. These guys don't respect the Iraqis," Col. Payne says.
"Personally I don't think there was anything to discuss," Col. Pasquarette says.
In the days that followed, the relationship between Col. Payne and Col. Pasquarette grew more tense. In mid-March -- about the time the Iraqis flattened the vegetable stands -- insurgents attacked an Iraqi army patrol base in Tarmiyah, a city of about 50,000, a short drive from Camp Taji. One Iraqi soldier from Col. Saad's brigade was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade and another was shot in the head by a sniper. The next day, four of Col. Saad's soldiers died when their armored personnel carrier hit a roadside bomb. The blast threw the turret of the vehicle about 30 yards and lopped off the head of one of the Iraqi soldiers inside, U.S. and Iraqi officers say.
Senior Iraqi officials in the Ministry of Defense were convinced Tarmiyah was a hotbed of insurgent activity. Col. Pasquarette says he was told by his commander in Baghdad to clear the city of insurgents.
Col. Pasquarette and his team spent several days building a plan before he invited Col. Payne, Col. Saad and Col. Saad's commander to the U.S. side to explain it.
The two Iraqi officers were led through a 208-slide PowerPoint briefing, in which all the slides were written in English. The six areas the Iraqi troops were supposed to occupy were named for New England cities, such as Cranston, Bangor and Concord. The Iraqi officers, who spoke only Arabic, were dumbfounded. "I could see from their body language that both of them were not following what was going on," says Maj. Bill Taylor, Col. Payne's deputy.
Once the plan was explained to them through an interpreter, the Iraqis strongly disagreed with it. Col. Pasquarette planned to surround the city with razor wire and set up checkpoints to search all cars moving in and out of the city. U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would then begin regular foot patrols through the city to gain intelligence on insurgents. The centerpiece of the plan was $5 million in reconstruction projects.
Col. Pasquarette argued that the projects would help the U.S. win support of the city's powerful mayor, Sheik Sayid Jassem, who had been detained by U.S. forces in the early days of the occupation for supporting the insurgency. He also thought the projects would turn the people to the side of the new Iraqi government.
The Iraqis favored a harder-nosed approach. They wanted to conduct house-to-house searches and find a way to put pressure on the mayor, who they insisted was still supporting insurgents. They suggested shutting Tarmiyah's business district down for a week. Once the mayor had been cowed with the stick, they favored dangling the $5 million in reconstruction funds.
Col. Pasquarette says the Iraqi approach would have alienated the people in Tarmiyah. He rejected it and stuck to his plan. Although the operation hasn't netted any insurgents, he says people are out shopping and businesses that had been closed are bustling as a result of the checkpoints and foot patrols. The U.S. military is bankrolling a pipeline that will bring potable water into the city, building medical clinics and repairing the main road.
Attacks in the city are down substantially since March, though they have begun to climb of late, Col. Pasquarette says. Still, he says the operation was a success because residents feel safer. He doubts the city was ever really a major insurgent hotbed. "We were all wrong about Tarmiyah," he says.
Col. Saad and Col. Payne say the insurgents have simply moved outside the city's gates.
Gen. George Casey, the top military officer in Iraq, acknowledges it has often been hard for U.S. commanders to let Iraqis take over the fight. "We are so mission-oriented and so focused, we tend to want to do everything ourselves," he says. "It is a constant battle ? . I would hope that when the Iraqis have ideas we try to help them execute them."
Iraqi troops "have never betrayed their U.S. advisory teams," adds Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who is overseeing the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces.
In their four months together, Col. Payne and Col. Saad became close. Col. Payne teased him about a poster on his office wall of two fluffy white kittens, nuzzling next to a dozen roses. "What in the world is the deal with the cat and the flowers?" Col. Payne asked.
"It reminds me of softness and women," Col. Saad replied. He often referred to Col. Payne as "my brother."
Col. Saad confided his worries about his country and his army to Col. Payne. His unit was constantly short of supplies. His soldiers often didn't have enough fuel for their armored vehicles and generators. They also lacked AA batteries to run the night-vision goggles the Americans had given them. He blamed corruption in the Iraqi system for supply shortages. "If you don't have the basics to survive, you cannot be great. You cannot win," he said one evening. Col. Payne threw his arm around the Iraqi colonel's shoulder. "No, but you can survive," he said.
The U.S. says it is helping the Iraqis fix problems that have led to shortages of equipment. The Iraqi government recently replaced the contractor responsible for serving troops spoiled food. Supplying the army is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and "there have been a few cases of poor performance" among Iraqi contractors, says Lt. Col. Michael Negard, a senior spokesman in Iraq. "While the problems aren't huge, the issue's certainly of the highest priority," he says.
Col. Saad has also grown frustrated with the Americans on the other side of Camp Taji. Last month, Col. Pasquarette asked the Iraqis to provide a couple of dozen soldiers to man some checkpoints with U.S. soldiers. The U.S. soldiers showed up at the checkpoints for about a week. Then, without warning, they left the Iraqis to run them on their own, Col. Saad says. The Iraqis, who questioned the value of the checkpoints in the first place, were angry they had suddenly been abandoned.
"Why did they leave? Aren't they supposed to be helping us?" Col. Saad asked Col. Payne.
"I don't know what the hell they are doing," Col. Payne replied.
Col. Pasquarette says the Iraqis should have been informed that the U.S. soldiers were pulling out of those checkpoints.
In late May, Col. Payne began to push the Iraqi soldiers to get out on the offensive. "I am sick of sitting around and waiting to get attacked," Col. Payne told Col. Saad. He asked Col. Saad to cut loose 10 or 15 soldiers that he could pair up with three or four U.S. soldiers to venture out at night in search of the enemy. Col. Saad agreed.
On May 19, soldiers from Col. Payne's and Col. Saad's units set out on their second night patrol. After they stopped a car that was out in violation of curfew, the enemy opened fire on them from a surrounding palm grove. The soldiers fired back, killing three insurgents and dispersing the rest. When the shooting ended, a man stumbled out of a small shack deep in the palm grove. His hands were tied and a blindfold hung around his neck. "Come mister. I am problem," he sobbed in broken English.
The man said he worked as a legal adviser for Iraq's Ministry of Defense and had been kidnapped by men who told him they would slaughter him "like a sheep." The kidnappers were setting up a camera to film his execution, he said, when they heard the soldiers and left him. "God sent you to save me," the man said, as tears streamed down his face. (Read more about the mission.2)
Col. Payne was elated. "The Iraqi army saved a life. It also demonstrated that it will go into the field to find and destroy the enemy," he said.
His victory, however, quickly gave way to crushing defeat. The next day, he was summoned to meet with his immediate supervisor. Col. Payne was relieved of his command and told to move to a headquarters position in Baghdad.
He says he was told that he removed because he was "ineffective" and "lacked the skills necessary to lead [his] team in this challenging environment." An Army spokesman in Baghdad said Col. Payne wasn't relieved for any single incident. He declined to comment further.
A few days before Col. Payne was fired, Col. Pasquarette said in an interview that he thought Col. Payne and his men had grown too close to the Iraqis they were advising and his decisions were too often guided by emotion. "From my perspective, the move was warranted," Col. Pasquarette wrote in an email after Col. Payne was dismissed.
The morning after he was fired, Col. Payne spent the day saying goodbye to Col. Saad and the U.S. soldiers on his team. That evening, he boarded a helicopter for Camp Victory, a massive U.S. base on the outskirts of Baghdad.
"I'm now here in Victory -- an alien environment to me and one I never wanted to be a part of," he wrote in an email. He was able to hold his emotions in check until his helicopter lifted off from Camp Taji. Then, he says, he began to sob. "I simply cannot tell you how much I will miss my team."
Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com5
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U.S. Soldiers
Aren't Guilty
Before a Verdict
The U.S. military needs a PR counteroffensive.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, July 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
We seem to have a new national holiday tradition: No holiday is complete without front-page allegations of an atrocity committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. A month ago, Memorial Day arrived along with Haditha, a place in western Iraq where hundreds of Memorial-weekend news reports said a military investigation had concluded that Marines "wantonly killed unarmed civilians," among them "women and children." This past Fourth of July, along with the skyrockets' red glare came news that a former Army private had been charged in Charlotte, N.C. with committing rape and murder while he was in Iraq. Labor Day awaits.
Rather than let the charges against the private run like a tape-loop over a long, news-dead weekend, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, appeared Fourth of July morning on both NBC and CBS. After CBS's Harry Smith professed himself perplexed at how all this atrocity stuff was happening now, Gen. Pace said that "99.9%" of the men and women in Iraq were serving with honor and promised he would "get to the bottom" of the allegations.
Military specialists will output case studies for years on how Iraq has altered the way war is waged by Americans--on the battlefield and on the home front. Most interesting to know would be whether the war as perceived at home and the war as fought daily by our soldiers in Iraq became two separate realms of consciousness, the former barely related to the reality of the latter.
One benchmark in this process will be deciding which elements of the nation's military past are deemed relevant to taking the measure of this war. Outside the military colleges, the experience of World War II appears to have become largely irrelevant. The controlling benchmark today is whether any American military commitment can evade the vague moral abyss of the Vietnam War. Thus when the Haditha story broke open over Memorial Day it was analogized as "another My Lai," the storied 1968 killing, and cover-up, of hundreds of civilians in a Vietnamese village.
The reason for viewing Haditha through the moral sextant of My Lai is that My Lai significantly altered the political status of Vietnam in the U.S. It became a totem for U.S. behavior in Vietnam. So it is only natural that the My Lai template, however ill-fitting, would be pressed against Haditha to see if this one lurid story would break the back of the entire Iraq enterprise. And so the chairman of the Joint Chiefs shows up on TV the Fourth of July--going on PR offense like any corporate product manager to ensure this isn't the one event that burns down the whole company. Fair or not, these are the new rules of political engagement in wartime America, and the government learns to play by them or risk being rolled off the field.
But what about the soldiers themselves? Nearly anyone who gets sucked into the media vortex--celebrity, CEO, sports hero--becomes mere cannon fodder, so assume the same for GIs involved in abuse or murder allegations. The Marines implicated in the Haditha incident are largely anonymous now, but each is being auditioned to play this war's Lt. William Calley. But first they have to be convicted of something.
The innocence or guilt of the individual soldiers implicated in Haditha or the other alleged abuse incidents is a lower-order concern to those fighting a PR war for the hearts and minds of the American people on Iraq. In the first effusion of media coverage of these events, the impression is weighted toward assuming guilt, and so when the pollsters call to ask about support for the war, the numbers fall. Mission accomplished--unless a Gen. Pace can jump quickly enough on the other side of the public-impression teeter-totter.
That is one kind of modern war reality. But there is another, less visible reality, which one might call, of all things, "justice." Ask Ilario Pantano about it.
Mr. Pantano, who left a successful job in New York City to reenlist in the Marines, was brought up on charges in 2004 of shooting two Iraqi prisoners in the back while serving as a lieutenant in al Anbar province. A year later--after the military's investigation, defense discovery and a military trial--the charges against him were dropped. His accusers were discredited at trial. The absorbing details of the case's passage through the U.S. military-justice system are described in Mr. Pantano's just-published memoir, "Warlord."
Interviews this week with Mr. Pantano, his lawyers and other defense lawyers describe a military-justice system that is tough on the defense, but fair. "Overall it's good," said Mr. Pantano, "but it doesn't feel good when you're inside of it." All of them said, however, that the national publicity that erupts today around incidents such as Haditha raises the bar for the defense.
Phil Stackhouse, who was one of the military lawyers assigned to Mr. Pantano's defense, now works as a civilian on behalf of accused soldiers. "When a John Murtha starts screaming 'cold-blooded murder,' the press will pick up on that," he says, "and it is that much tougher for the civilian defense attorney to counter the public's impression."
Mr. Pantano's civilian lawyer, Charles Gittins, launched a PR strategy, eliciting testimonials of support from other officers and colleagues. In short, they played the strongest card available to a Marine accused of an unlikely mistake in a spotless career--character. "Good military character itself can be enough create reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury," says Mr. Stackhouse.
"You need a PR counteroffensive," says Mr. Pantano today. "In a more nuanced world, it might not be necessary, but it's the only way the system can remain in balance anymore."
All the military attorneys I spoke with said ugly crimes do happen in war. But war at the shooting level is often a complex event. Haditha or one of the others may yet produce a crime or a cover-up. But in the age we live in, rush-to-judgment can become a bad habit. It might be better to wait for a real verdict.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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Vets of '83 Beirut Bombing View Current Ops With Pride, Resolve
By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, July 21, 2006 ? Watching TV coverage of Marines from their former unit helping Americans leave Beirut churns up a host of emotions for former Marines who served there when a barracks was bombed in October 1983.
Marine Gen. P.X. Kelley (left) and Col. Tim Geraghty (right) take then-Vice President George H.W. Bush on a tour around the site of the Beirut barracks bombing two days after the Oct. 23, 1983, explosion killed 241 servicemembers, mostly Marines, at the Beirut International Airport. Photo by Randy Gaddo
Randy Gaddo was a Marine staff sergeant with the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit serving in Lebanon when a terrorist attack in the early morning hours of Oct. 23, 1983, claimed the lives of 241 U.S. Marines, sailors and soldiers. Hundreds more were wounded or disabled when a truck laden with the equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT detonated on the ground floor of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, Battalion Landing Team barracks.
Four days after the attack, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan praised the fallen troops for their sacrifice in helping bring a better future to the people of Lebanon. "We cannot and will not dishonor them ... and the sacrifices they've made by failing to remain as faithful to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of peace as they have been," Reagan said in a broadcast to the American people.
Yesterday, Gaddo and his former boss in Beirut, retired Maj. Bob Jordan, juggled their emotions as they watched televised images of Marines and sailors making good on that promise. Marines returned to Beirut this week for the first time in more than 20 years to help U.S. citizens caught in the crossfire between Hezbollah terrorists and Israeli air and artillery forces.
Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit -- the new name for Gaddo's and Jordan's former unit -- ferried some 1,200 Americans from a Beirut beach to the USS Nashville yesterday.
Gaddo said he felt immensely proud watching the Marines carry out their mission. "They're going in there to bring people out and following on what we established there," he said from his Peachtree City, Ga., home. "It makes you feel pretty proud."
"We're in awe," Jordan said of the Marines. "These young men and women are so professional, so well-trained and so well-equipped. ... Their motivation is so high."
Jordan said he's particularly proud that Marines from 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment -- the first and last unit he served with during a career that spanned almost 30 years -- are conducting the mission.
But Gaddo acknowledged that he's also concerned about the Marines' well-being. "Those of us who were there can picture exactly what the Marines are seeing," he said.
He remembers all too clearly the events of a beautiful Sunday morning 23 years ago when a terrorist truck bomb exploded in his barracks building.
Gaddo, 31 at the time, was a photojournalist from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, S.C., attached to the 24th MEU for the peacekeeping mission in Beirut. He had awakened early to process some film in a makeshift photo lab he'd set up on the third floor of the barracks building. After that, Gaddo had planned to join other Marines in laying plastic sheets and sandbags over a bunker to prepare it for the upcoming rainy season.
But before tackling the day's work, Gaddo headed to the command operations center in a tent about 250 yards away from the barracks to grab a quick cup of coffee. He figures it was that decision that ultimately saved his life. "Another three minutes and I would have been in the (barracks) building," he said.
From the command tent, Gaddo heard M-16 rifle fire, then a blast that threw him back 6 feet from where he was standing. "It was an amazing concussion," he said. "It was like somebody hit me with a two-by-four. I could feel my face being pushed back as the shock wave approached."
Dazed, Gaddo looked over the two- or three-story building that stood between him and the barracks building and saw a big mushroom cloud rising from the area. The leaves had been blown off all the trees. Gaddo realized that he could see the air traffic control tower of Beirut International Airport -- a landmark the barracks building should have blocked from his vantage point.
Suddenly the realization sunk in: the barracks had been hit. "What had normally been a four-story building was down to a story and a half of rubble," he recalled. "The dust was all still rising and it started to all become clear."
Gaddo and his fellow Marines sprung into action, grabbing cots and litters and running toward the building to search for survivors. They dodged incoming sniper fire and worked amid the fires throughout the area, some sparked by exploding ammunition that had been in the barracks building.
"There was a lot of chaos. We were all in shock," he said.
The rescuers struggled to get a grip on their emotions: anger at their attackers, sadness for those lost, and for some, guilt that their lives had been spared when others' had not.
"You go through a whole range of emotions," Gaddo said. "We lost a lot of Marines that day."
Gaddo, Jordan and fellow veterans continue to remember those Marines through the Beirut Veterans of America, a group dedicated to ensuring that servicemembers killed in Beirut aren't forgotten.
As founding vice president of the group, Gaddo is busy planning the "23rd Remembrance" event Oct. 21 to 23 in Jacksonville, N.C., home of the Beirut Memorial. The memorial includes a wall with the names of all those willed during the peacekeeping mission in Lebanon from 1982 to 1984.
The event will include a candlelight vigil at 6 a.m. on Oct. 23, when all the names on the wall will be read aloud. "Reading their names aloud ensures that these men are remembered for their courage and their sacrifice," said Jordan, the group's founding president.
Jordan expressed hope that Americans will remember not just those lost, but also the lessons of Oct. 23, 1983. "We were being tested, and we failed the test," he said of the U.S. response to the attack.
Jordan calls the attack on the Marine barracks "the first skirmish in ... the battle against terror" and said it's critical that the United States not falter in its war on terror.
The United States must work with Muslims to counter the threat Islamic extremists present, he said. "We need to understand that these people believe in what they are doing" and won't stop until they re-establish an extremist state under a supreme Islamic ruler, he said of the terrorists.
"We need to understand that they are willing to die for it and willing to kill us to achieve it," he said.
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Sergeant's Heroism in Iraq Earns Special Recognition
Marine R.J. Mitchell II will receive the Navy Cross, the service's second highest award, for his actions in Fallouja.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2006
CAMP PENDLETON ? His family in the Midwest never doubted that R.J. Mitchell II would do whatever was necessary to protect his fellow Marines in Iraq.
"We were concerned about him, of course, but we always knew he'd take care of himself and the men under him," said Bill Raiser of Lamoni, Iowa, Mitchell's maternal grandfather.
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Just how well Mitchell took care of his men as a squad leader with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment will be recognized here Friday as he receives the Navy Cross for heroism during the vicious house-to-house fighting in Fallouja in 2004.
The details of that Nov. 13 day have surprised even his family.
"He's always been so strong inside, I knew he'd do the job that was needed in Iraq," said Mitchell's mother, Martha Raiser, of Leon, Iowa. "But when you read the citation, it almost seems impossible that he could have done all that."
It was at the height of the assault by Marines on the insurgent stronghold in the Sunni Triangle. Insurgents had learned not to fight Marines in the open, preferring to barricade themselves inside a home, keeping their weapons aimed at the door and waiting for the Marines to break through.
When five Marines became pinned down inside a house, Mitchell charged through AK47 fire and hand grenade explosions to reach the house. He laid down a burst of gunfire to allow a corpsman to treat casualties.
Hit in the left leg by a ricocheting bullet and grenade shrapnel that also disabled his M-16, Mitchell spotted a wounded insurgent reaching for a weapon. He killed the insurgent with his knife and then, limping from his wounds, helped with the evacuation of wounded Marines.
His actions, according to the citation, saved the lives of several Marines. Sgt. Maj. Brad Kasal, who was in the same fight and also received the Navy Cross, said Mitchell was "a leader by example."
"He was very close to his Marines," Kasal said, "he wasn't boisterous or overbearing, but when he needed to speak up or be forceful he was there."
After the battle, Mitchell, 26, was given a Purple Heart, his fourth in two tours in Iraq.
He left the Marine Corps in early 2005 as a sergeant. He is studying motorcycle mechanics in Phoenix. He and wife, Sara, have a baby boy, R.J. III, born in January.
Mitchell downplays what he and other Marines accomplished in what came to be known among combat troops as Hell House. "It was a job, and we did it," he said.
Of the tens of thousands of Marines who have served in Iraq, barely a dozen have been awarded the Navy Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor for recognition of combat bravery by Marines and sailors.
Mitchell's mother and his father, Robert Mitchell of Omaha, Neb., will be at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony on Friday, when Mitchell is set to receive the Navy Cross from Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
"When you put yourself voluntarily in a bad situation, that's pure heroism," Kasal said.
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RAMADI, Iraq (AP) ? He was 5 when he first fired an M-16, his father holding him to brace against the recoil. At 17 he enlisted in the Marine Corps, spurred by the memory of Sept. 11.
Now, 21-year-old Galen Wilson has 20 confirmed kills in four months in Iraq ? and another 40 shots that probably killed insurgents. One afternoon the lance corporal downed a man hauling a grenade launcher 5? football fields away.
Wilson is the designated marksman in a company of Marines based in downtown Ramadi, watching over what Marines call the most dangerous neighborhood in the most dangerous city in the world.
Here, Sunni Arab insurgents are intent on toppling the local government protected by Marines.
Wilson, 5-foot-6 with a soft face, is married and has two children and speaks in a deep, steady monotone.
After two tours in Iraq, his commanders in the 3rd Battalion, 8th Regiment call him a particularly mature Marine, always collected and given to an occasional wry grin.
His composure is regularly tested. Swaths of central and southern Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, are dominated by insurgents who regularly attack the provincial government headquarters that Marines protect.
During a large-scale attack on Easter Sunday, Wilson says, he spotted six gunmen on a rooftop about 400 yards away. In about 8 seconds he squeezed off five rounds ? hitting five gunmen in the head. The sixth man dived off a 3-story building just as Wilson got him in his sights, and counts as a probable death.
"You could tell he didn't know where it was coming from. He just wanted to get away," Wilson said. Later that day, he said, he killed another insurgent.
Wilson says his skill helps save American troops and Iraqi civilians. "It doesn't bother me. Obviously, me being a devout Catholic, it's a conflict of interest. Then again, God supported David when he killed Goliath," Wilson said. "I believe God supports what we do and I've never killed anyone who wasn't carrying a weapon."
He was raised in a desolate part of the Rocky Mountains outside Colorado Springs, "surrounded by national parks on three sides," he says. He regularly hunted before moving to Fort Lauderdale, as a teenager. His brother also serves in the military.
Guns have long been part of Wilson's life. His father was a sniper in the Navy SEALS. He remembers first firing a sniper rifle at age 6. By the time he enlisted he had already fired a .50-caliber machine gun.
"My father owned a weapons dealership, so I've been around exotic firearms all my life," said Wilson, who remembers practicing on pine cones and cans. "My dad would help me hold (an M-16), with the butt on his shoulder, and walk me through the steps of shooting."
Technically, Wilson is not a sniper ? he's an infantryman who also patrols through the span of destroyed buildings that make up downtown Ramadi. But as his unit's designated marksman, he has a sniper rifle. In the heat of day or after midnight, he spends hours on rooftop posts, peering out onto rows of abandoned houses from behind piles of sandbags and bulletproof glass cracked by gunfire.
Sometimes individual gunmen attack, other times dozens. Once Wilson shot an insurgent who was "turkey peeking" ? Marine slang for stealing glances at U.S. positions from behind a corner. Later, the distance was measured at 514 meters ? 557 yards.
"I didn't doubt myself, if I was going to hit him. Maybe if I would have I would have missed," Wilson said.
The key to accuracy is composure and experience, Wilson says. "The hardest part is looking, quickly adjusting the distance (on a scope), and then getting a steady position for a shot before he gets a shot off. For me, it's toning everything out in my head. It's like hearing classical music playing in my head."
Though Wilson firmly supports the war, he used to wonder how his actions would be received back home. "At first you definitely double-guess telling your wife, mom, and your friends that you've killed 20 people," Wilson said. "But over time you realize that if they support you ... maybe it'll make them feel that much safer at home." He acknowledges that brutal acts of war linger in the mind.
"Some people, before they're about to kill someone, they think that ? 'Hey, I'm about to kill someone.' That thought doesn't occur to me. It may sound cold, but they're just a target. Afterward, it's real. You think, 'Hey, I just killed someone,'" says Wilson.
Insurgents "have killed good Marines I've served with. That's how I sleep at night," he says. "Though I've killed over 20 people, how many lives would those 20 people have taken?"
Wilson plans to leave the Marines after his contract expires next year and is thinking of joining a SWAT Team in Florida ? possibly as a sniper.
2006 The Associated Press.
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http://www.davidbellavia.com/about-david/
David Bellavia is a former Army Staff Sergeant who served in the First Infantry Division for six years. His leadership recommended David for the Medal of Honor, and he has been nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross. Both awards are still under review. He has received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Conspicuous Service Cross (New York State?s highest combat valor award), and he was recently inducted into the New York State Veteran?s Hall of Fame. His Task Force 2-2 Infantry fought on such battlefields as Al Muqdadiyah, An Najaf, Al Fallujah, Mosul, and Baqubah. He is 30 years old.
NARRATIVE NOMINATING SSG DAVID BELLAVIA FOR THE MEDAL OF HONOR(originally) DURING OPERATION PHANTOM FURY FALLUJAH, IRAQ
On the night of 10 November 2004 Third Platoon, A Company, Task Force 2-2 IN near OBJ Wolf in Fallujah, Iraq, was ordered to attack to destroy six to eight Anti Iraqi Forces (AIF). 1LT Edward Iwan, the A Company Executive Officer, had identified six to eight AIF who had entered a block of twelve buildings. These AIF had engaged A55 and tanks from Team Tank with automatic weapons and rocket fire. Having a 25 mm cannon malfunction, 1LT Edward Iwan cordoned off the area and called Third Platoon to enter and clear all buildings until the AIF were killed or captured.
The first nine buildings yielded many AK47s, Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers, rockets, assorted ammunition, and flak vests. When they came to the tenth home, SSG Colin Fitts, 1st Squad Leader, led his squad of soldiers into the house, with four soldiers from SSG Bellavias 2nd Squad. SGT Hugh Hall, 1st Squad, B Team Leader and SGT Warren Misa 1st Squad, A Team Leader, established a quick foothold in the interior of the house. When SGT Misa attempted to clear the second room he encountered heavy enemy fire. Two AIF were under a stairwell, well covered behind a three-foot barrier, engaging SGT Misa and SPC Lance Ohle as they attempted to move into the room. At that point, multiple bursts of automatic and semi-automatic gunfire were exchanged from extremely close quarters. As rounds impacted near the entry point of the house, nine Third Platoon soldiers became fixed inside the house. At that moment, fire erupted from a kitchen ground floor window onto the inner cordon in th e carport of the house. At one point, gun fire was being exchanged inside and outside of the house, as a total of three dismounted squads from Third Platoon were in contact.
SSG Bellavia quickly requested a M240B machine gun and a M249 SAW to suppress the AIF under the stairs in an effort to break contact and consolidate the platoon. Rounds from the insurgent side of the wall began impacting through the poorly made plaster. Multiple soldiers were bleeding from the face from flying debris. Two soldiers had glass and metal shards in their face, one soldier had been grazed on the side of his stomach underneath his vest and at least six others were bleeding from some cut or scrape from the point blank fire they were receiving. As two soldiers answered the request for support, it became apparent that the entrance to the building was extremely dangerous from ricocheting rounds.
Rather than place his soldier at risk, SSG Bellavia moved quickly to come to the aid of the squad. He exchanged weapon systems with a M249 SAW gunner and entered the fatal funnel of the room. The enemy was crouched behind the barrier and continued to fire at the doorway of the house where SSG Bellavia was positioned. With enemy rounds impacting around him, he fired the SAW at a cyclic rate of fire, forcing the enemy to take cover and allowing the squad to break contact and move into the street to consolidate. SSG Bellavias actions undoubtedly saved the lives of that squad.
As the platoon gathered outside to get accountability of personnel, two or more AIF engaged Third Platoon from the roof. Rounds ricocheted off the ground and SSG Fitts moved his squad to an adjacent building to over watch the AIF on the roofs. SSG Bellavia grabbed an M16 rifle and headed back to the outside of the house. SSG Bellavia called for a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to come up and suppress the outside of the building. The high walls of the enemy strong point made it difficult at close proximity to get well-aimed 25mm cannon fire into the actual building. AIF again engaged Third Platoon from windows.
After the BFV suppressed the house, SSG Bellavia decided to move back inside the house to determine the effects of the BFV fire and whether the AIF still occupied the bottom floor of the house. He placed two SAW gunners and SSG Scott Lawson into the courtyard as the inner cordon. Michael Ware, a TIME magazine journalist, entered the house with SSG Bellavia.
SSG Bellavia entered the house and told SSG Lawson to stay outside until he was needed in the second room. The only two people that went into the house at first were Michael Ware and SSG Bellavia. SSG Bellavia heard AIF whispering from the other side of the wall. Mr. Ware was told to run out if anything happened inside the second room. The journalist insisted on going into the second room. SSG Bellavia got in a low crouched fighting position and quickly pie wedged the first room and fired his M16A4. The enemy immediately fired back with a belt fed RPK machine gun. SSG Bellavia quickly turned away from the fire. The AIF had fire superiority and SSG Bellavia didnt have time to get off well-aimed shots.
As SSG Bellavia moved again to get eyes on the room and determine the enemy disposition, he identified one of the AIF loading an RPG launcher. Understanding how devastating this weapon could be to his platoon, he moved quickly to eliminate the threat. SSG Bellavia told Mr. Ware to remain in the first room. As debris and smoke filled the room the insurgent with the RPG was killed first near the stairwell. A second AIF with a PKC machine gun fired as he ran for the kitchen. SSG Bellavia shot and wounded him in the back of the shoulder. He was heard screaming from outside the building. At that point an AIF yelled from upstairs. SSG Bellavia quickly realized how many insurgents were in the house. Despite the odds he continued the assault.
SSG Lawson entered the room with SSG Bellavia. He was armed with only a 9mm pistol. SSG Lawson was across the room firing into the kitchen door, and SSG Bellavia was near the doorway of the master bedroom using the stairs as his cover. The wounded AIF was firing back, this time with an AK47. The insurgent was screaming loudly as he fired. SSG Lawson fired an entire magazine toward the kitchen, when a piece of debris lodged in his right shoulder. Thinking he was shot and with only one 9mm magazine remaining, SSG Bellavia told him to leave to get medical aid and to retrieve a shotgun with buckshot and other soldiers. SSG Lawson and Mr. Ware exited the house.
SSG Bellavia realized that his back was facing a room he had not cleared. In order to secure his position he entered the master bedroom of the house. SSG Bellavia heard movement in the room and fired into the dark corners to clear them by fire. There was a closet directly in front of him with six closed doors, and multiple areas of dead space. At that point an insurgent ran down the stairs and started firing into the room. SSG Bellavia moved behind a protruding corner of the wall to acquire cover. Over the loud noise of small arms fire from across the hall, he could hear screaming from upstairs and to his immediate left. Confused and trying to locate if another insurgent was in the corner of the room, SSG Bellavia began to scan the room with his PEQ-2A. Thinking the noise originated from the closet, SSG Bellavia took a few steps to his left and began to fire into each door from left to right. Before he could finish clearing the closet the wounded AIF from the kitchen ran t oward the bedroom door and began blindly shooting at him from outside. Finding his position of cover behind the elbow of the wall, SSG Bellavia fired back. As the enemy fire came closer, he moved his position into the far opposing corner of the room. The AIF exposed his shoulders as he fired into the bedroom and SSG Bellavia fired wounding and then killing him.
He then noticed a closet door was open and he witnessed tracer fire hit the side of the room. Unsure of where the fire originated, SSG Bellavia looked for a target. Suddenly the insurgent on the stairs began shooting at him again. As the wounded AIF turned and exposed his position in the doorway he was hit and fell near the stairs. He was moaning and slowly moved away from the door, mortally wounded. Simultaneously, a closet door opened and clothing flew everywhere, as an insurgent leapt out and fired wildly all over the room. In his rush out of the closet he tripped on something in the closet and the entire wardrobe fell down resting on the open doors. This actually was a benefit to SSG Bellavia as it provided more cover. When the AIF attempted to cross over the bed, he lost his balance on the mattress and was shot multiple times. The insurgent fell to the ground and with his back to the front door, fired an accurate burst directly into the closet and the wall near SSG Be llavia. SSG Bellavia crouched low to the ground, the insurgent was screaming loudly in broken English. Someone from upstairs was yelling back in Arabic. SSG Bellavia responded in Arabic in an attempt to intimidate the men into surrendering. The insurgent then picked himself up and ran out of the room and up the stairs. SSG Bellavia fired, missing the insurgent and then pursued him as he fled up the stairs. Blood was soaked all over the stairs causing SSG Bellavia to slip, nearly catching a burst of AK fire. The wounded AIF turned and shot an automatic burst from the first landing of the stairs but once again missed SSG Bellavia, who was now well behind cover.
Tracking the blood, SSG Bellavia followed the AIF into a room immediately to the left on the second story. He heard the AIF inside and tossed a fragmentary grenade into the room. The blast sent the screaming AIF onto the second story roof. The AIF began shooting his weapon in all directions, until it was empty of ammunition. Bellavia noticed the AIF was seriously wounded in the right side of his body from the blast of the grenade. The insurgent stumbled back into the room and began to dry fire his weapon. As SSG Bellavia scanned the inside of the room, it was quickly filling with thick smoke from burning foam mattresses ignited from the blast. Two AIF could be heard screaming at each other from a third story of the building. Not wanting the AIF to give away his position, SSG Bellavia quickly grabbed the wounded AIF in a choke hold to keep him quiet. SSG Bellavia met resistance as he attempted to quiet the screaming AIF. Bellavia was bit on the arm and struck in the face wi th the barrel of the wounded insurgents small AK47. A .45 caliber pistol shot off against the wall and SSG Bellavia, whose helmet was loosened when it was jarred by the barrel of the AK, began to thrash the AIF in attempts to pacify him. Exchanging blows in the struggle, SSG Bellavia fearing that the screaming insurgent was issuing instructions to his peers upstairs, opened his IBA vest and attempted to use his front sappy plate to forcibly subdue the insurgent into compliance. Hearing multiple foot steps over his position, Bellavia used his Gerber tactical blade and cut into the left side of the insurgent?s throat. Not wanting to discharge his weapon as to give away his position and in fear of the many propane tanks near the wall, SSG Bellavia bled the insurgent with applied pressure as he was spastically kicked and scratched in the melee. Two other insurgents, only feet away yelled to their comrade in Arabic, simultaneously firing their weapons. SSG Bellavia confirmed the insurgent was dead and exited the room as his eyes and the fresh scratches on his face were stinging from the smoke and heat of the growing fire.
SSG Bellavia moved to secure the two doors to his right. Suddenly an AIF dropped down from the third story roof, onto the second story roof. The AIF dropped his weapon as he fell to his knees. SSG Bellavia moved to the window and as the AIF went to grab his weapon SSG Bellavia shot in his direction multiple times, wounding him in the lower back. The AIF was prone and SSG Bellavia assumed he was dead. He moved to the door leading to the roof and found the insurgent straddling a large water tank at the edge of the roof. He shot the remainder of his ammunition into the insurgent?s legs and went back inside to grab a dead insurgent?s weapon. As he moved inside the house the insurgent fell off the roof and into the garden. Moments later, five members of Third Platoon entered and secured the downstairs of the house and yelled up to SSG Bellavia who was still on the second floor.
SSG Bellavia moved to link up with the rest of his platoon. However, before the search could begin for the fifth or sixth insurgent the platoon was ordered to move out of the area due to a close air support mission called in by an adjacent unit.
SSG Bellavia single handedly saved three squads of his Third Platoon that night, risking his own life by allowing them to break contact and reorganize. He then entered and cleared an insurgent strong point, killing four insurgents and mortally wounding another.
__________________
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By VIRGINIA WHEELER
and TOM NEWTON-DUNN,
Defence Editor
A BRITISH sniper waging war on the Taliban is so deadly he has earned a chilling nickname ? The Man Who Never Misses.
The unerring Army sharpshooter has killed 39 rebel fighters single-handedly.
His marksmanship is so lethal that rumours have spread like wildfire through insurgents? camps, causing panic and confusion.
The sniper ? who The Sun is not naming to prevent him becoming a target himself ? is a member of elite 3 Para.
Described by sources as ?the best shot in the Army? he is responsible for over five per cent of the 700 insurgents killed by Paras since British forces returned to Afghanistan.
He is based in the wild Helmand province, where our troops launched a massive assault on the Taliban this week.
A source said yesterday: ?This sniper is truly something else ? a silent assassin.
?In the deadly terrain of southern Afghanistan, where guerilla warfare rules, he has been invaluable. The rumours are sweeping enemy camps that he is the man who never misses.?
The sniper?s actual toll is probably higher than 39 but the Taliban?s tendency to reclaim bodies makes deaths difficult to confirm.
His lethal L96A1 rifle has a range of 1,000 yards and is fitted with electronic sights and laser range-finders.
He works with a partner called a spotter, who locates the target and helps judge wind speed and distance so the bullet travels accurately.
Each day the pair risk their lives away from fellow Paras, taking up covert positions and often lying hidden for as long as ten hours at a time. Once the shot has been fired they need nerves of steel to stay concealed while Taliban rebels wielding rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns desperately try to hunt them down.
The Ministry of Defence would not discuss the crackshot for security reasons.
But he is regarded as one of the most successful British snipers since World War Two.
Earlier this year it was revealed that the Army is creating an elite force of almost 700 snipers, with all 38 infantry battalions required to have an 18-man platoon of sharpshooters by 2008. It will be the first time formal sniper platoons will have existed since the end of the First World War in 1918.
The decision follows the success of British and US sniper teams who have killed dozens of terrorists on recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2003 Royal Marines sniper Corporal Matt Hughes killed an Iraqi gunman from 900 yards with a ?wonder shot? in which he aimed 56ft to the left and 35ft high to allow for wind.
The bullet?s trajectory was calculated by his spotter after he studied the movement of dust in the breeze. And Irish Guards Sergeant Eddie Waring lay on a roof for hours to take out three Iraqis who were laying mines in Basra.
FOUR Canadian NATO soldiers were killed and ten wounded in separate attacks in Afghanistan yesterday.
Three died when rocket-propelled grenades were fired on troops working with local forces to improve security near the city of Kandahar. The other was killed by a roadside bomb. At least 34 civilians were killed or wounded in the day of violence.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006350757,00.html
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http://www.fullnet.net/devotionals/therock.html
http://www.navysealmuseum.com/
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Unreported Valor
August 3, 2006; Page A6
The alleged Marine massacre at Haditha is back in the news this week. Anonymous Pentagon sources told AP that a probe supports the massacre narrative. But Marine Sargeant Frank Wuterich filed a defamation suit against Congressman John Murtha, who on May 17 described "cold blood" killings at Haditha.
Bing West, a former assistant defense secretary, reflected on Haditha in a recent piece about the war's course for the July issue of the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute:
"The Iraq war is being played out against a backdrop of bitter partisan politics in the United States. Of those on the front lines, 70% get out after four years of service, with no long-term benefits. All they want is praise for their valor and service. They want to be able to say. 'I served at Fallujah, Najaf, or Mosul' and be respected for their dedication.
"Their valor is absent from this war because it is not reported. In Fallujah for instance, 100 Marine squads engaged in 200 firefights in cement rooms, using rifles, pistols, grenades and knives. By any historical comparison, this was extraordinary. In Hue City in 1968, there was one fight inside a house. In the entire history of the SWAT teams in the United States, there have not been 200 fights with automatic weapons inside rooms. Yet the courage of our soldiers and Marines in battles in Fallujah, Najaf, etc. received little press notice. Now we face the test of whether the press will place the tragedy of Haditha in perspective, or whether Haditha will unfairly become a false symbol....
"What happens if the youth of America adopt the same fractious attitudes as their political leaders? Who then will serve? In the tone of our criticisms while we are at war, we as a nation should be very careful that we do not undercut our own martial resolve. If we as a nation lose heart, who will fight for us?"
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http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/08/us_army_infantr.html 8-) 8-) 8-)
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14350685/
Mystery 9/11 rescuer reveals himself
Unknown Marine steps forward as one who helped save two NYPD cops
Bebeto Matthews / AP
Jason Thomas of Columbus, Ohio, during visit to New York on Thursday.
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Updated: 5:49 p.m. PT Aug 14, 2006
NEW YORK - For years, authorities wondered about the identity of a U.S. Marine who appeared at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, helped find a pair of police officers buried in the rubble, then vanished.
Even the producers of the new film chronicling the rescue, "World Trade Center," couldn't locate the mystery serviceman, who had given his name only as Sgt. Thomas.
The puzzle was finally solved when one Jason Thomas, of Columbus, Ohio, saw a TV commercial for the new movie a few weeks ago as he relaxed on his couch.
Story continues below ↓
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His eyes widened as he saw two Marines with flashlights, hunting for survivors atop the smoldering ruins.
"That's us. That's me!" thought Thomas, who lived in Long Island during the attacks and now works as an officer in Ohio's Supreme Court.
Thomas, 32, hesitantly re-emerged last week to recount the role he played in the rescue of Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and Sgt. John McLoughlin, who were entombed beneath 20 feet of debris when the twin towers collapsed.
Proof of identity
Back in New York to speak of his experience and visit family, Thomas provided the AP with photographs of himself at Ground Zero. As further proof of his identity, the movie's producer, Michael Shamberg, said Thomas and Jimeno have spoken by phone and shared details only the two of them would know.
Thomas, who had been out of the Marine Corps about a year, was dropping his daughter off at his mother's Long Island home when she told him planes had struck the towers.
He retrieved his Marine uniform from his truck, sped to Manhattan and had just parked his car when one of the towers collapsed. Thomas ran toward the center of the ash cloud.
"Someone needed help. It didn't matter who," he said. "I didn't even have a plan. But I have all this training as a Marine, and all I could think was, 'My city is in need.'"
Thomas bumped into another ex-Marine, Staff Sgt. David Karnes, and the pair decided to search for survivors.
?United States Marines!?
Carrying little more than flashlights and an infantryman's shovel, they climbed the mountain of debris, skirting dangerous crevasses and shards of red-hot metal, calling out "Is anyone down there? United States Marines!"
It was dark before they heard a response. The two crawled into a deep pit to find McLoughlin and Jimeno, injured but alive.
Jimeno would spend 13 hours in the pit before he was pulled free. Thomas stayed long enough to see him come up, but left due to exhaustion before McLoughlin, who remained pinned for another nine hours, was retrieved.
Click for related content
Remembering the World Trade Center on film
Review: ?World Trade Center? a waiting game
Thomas said he returned to Ground Zero every day for another 2 1/2 weeks to pitch in, then walked away and tried to forget.
"I didn't want to relive what took place that day," he said.
Shamberg said he apologized to Thomas for an inaccuracy in the film: Thomas is black, but the actor cast to portray him, William Mapother, is white. Filmmakers realized the mistake only after production had begun, Shamberg said.
Thomas laughed and gently chided the filmmakers, then politely declined to discuss it further. "I don't want to shed any negativity on what they were trying to show," he said.
As for his story, Thomas said he is gradually becoming more comfortable telling it.
"It's been like therapy," he said.
? 2006 The Associated Press.
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Navy officer awarded Bronze Star for deft handling of deadly IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices)
By JACK DORSEY The Virginian-Pilot August 30, 2006
NORFOLK, Va. -- For the entire year he was in Baghdad analyzing more than 1,000 roadside bomb detonators, Benito Baylosis never took a day off.
No one did. And no one complained about it, he said, as they explored the electronic circuits of defused improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
"What we did was that important. You get time off when you go home, or on R & R," he said. Baylosis, 41, a Navy lieutenant commander, came back to his hometown of Norfolk to receive the Bronze Star on Tuesday.
The award cited him for personally handling more than 1,000 IEDs, providing "critical countermeasures" and saving "countless coalition forces' lives."
"He developed and monitored over 136 bombmaker profiles," said the Army's citation, which added that "no one in the U.S. armed forces knows more about enemy IED initiators utilized in the Iraqi theater of operations."
Baylosis, who graduated from Old Dominion University with an undergraduate electrical engineering degree, will return soon to his regular duty station in Naples, Italy, where his family resides.
In Iraq, he headed a team of American, British and Australian military specialists, mainly engineers. He also worked with agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gathering forensic evidence for possible future court cases related to terrorism. The team, operating from Camp Victory near the international airport in Baghdad, examined IEDs, traced their origins and turned over information to help find the manufacturer.
"They are some of the most basic forms, from mechanical to electrical, to remote," he said in an interview. Because of the sensitivity of the work, he could not detail what his team found. Published reports say many devices use garage-door openers or cell phones to activate the explosives.
According to Michael White, who compiles casualty figures of Operation Iraqi Freedom on the Web site icasualties.org, and Defense Department figures, 904 of the 2,087 American service members killed in action in Iraq have died of injuries from IEDs.
Baylosis said he normally specializes in shipbuilding and program management in his job in Naples, but his electronics skills seemed a good match for what he was asked to do. "We felt that the job we were doing did save lives and will continue to save lives as long as we get to do it," said the father of three.
"I think we are making a difference. Obviously, we want to get ahead of the IED maker. We want to be a step ahead of them and with increased security, I think it will eventually get solved. I just don't know the time line."
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Woof All:
A Howl of Respect to our troops who fight religious fascism so that all of us -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Pagans -- are free to speak, free to pray, and free to choose -- rights to which we are all endowed by our Creator.
The Adventure continues!
Marc "Crafty Dog" Denny
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i dont have a a story of bravery or unquestionable heroism.
just 2 words from the bottom of my heart....thank u.
god bless and watch over every man and woman who wears the uniform of our country.
woof,
tpotts
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SEALs Receive Navy Cross
Pair Died Fighting Taliban in Afghanistan
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 14, 2006; A12
Wounded and locked in a harrowing gunfight deep in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains, Navy SEAL Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew G. Axelson laid down covering fire so a teammate could escape -- an act of heroism for which Axelson was yesterday posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the service's second-highest medal.
Fighting nearby, Petty Officer 2nd Class Danny P. Dietz was also mortally wounded but stood his ground in a barrage of fire from 30 to 40 Taliban militiamen who surrounded his four-man SEAL reconnaissance team on June 28, 2005. For his "undaunted courage," as described by the military, Dietz, 25, of Littleton, Colo., also posthumously received the Navy Cross yesterday in a ceremony at the U.S. Navy Memorial.
Families and comrades gathered to honor them on a chilly, gray evening, with flags on ships' masts waving in the breeze. One SEAL, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work, recalled his close friend Axelson as laid back, a golfer and a quiet leader. His voice cracked as he described the inscription Axelson wrote on the back of a photograph of the two men that Axelson's wife gave him after Axelson died.
"But within the willingness to die for family and home, something inside us longs for someone to die beside. Someone to lock step with, another man with a heart like our own," the inscription read.
"I can't tell you how much I wish I could have been there for him," his friend told the gathering.
Patsy Dietz, 25, Dietz's widow, said her husband died during his final mission, only about two weeks before he was to return home. Describing him as a generous man who loved his dogs and who would hand out $20 bills to strangers, she said Dietz had volunteered for the deployment because he believed in the cause. She said he knew the risks that he faced. "Danny and his brothers went towards evil and ran forward and gave their last breath," she said in an interview.
The actions of Axelson and Dietz allowed a lone teammate to escape and survive, and he has also been awarded the Navy Cross, but the military has withheld his name for security reasons because he is still on active duty.
The perilous firefight erupted at 10,000 feet in some of the world's most rugged terrain along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, when the SEAL team probed deep into enemy territory on a clandestine mission to kill or capture a Taliban militia leader. By nightfall that day, three of the SEALs lay dead, along with eight other SEALs and eight Army Special Operations aviators whose MH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed during a daring rescue attempt.
It was the worst death toll in a single day since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and the biggest single loss of life for the Naval Special Warfare forces since the invasion of Normandy in World War II, the Navy reported.
The fatal mission -- Operation Red Wing -- began June 27, when Axelson, Dietz, Lt. Michael P. Murphy and the fourth unnamed SEAL, bearded and camouflaged, were inserted into heavily forested terrain east of the Afghan town of Asadabad to track down militia leader Ahman Shah.
The next day, however, the SEAL team was spotted and pointed out by local residents who were sympathetic to the Taliban. A Taliban force launched a "well-organized, three-sided attack," taking advantage of the high ground to assault the SEAL position using rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, according to an official military account.
"Three of the four SEALs were wounded. The fight relentlessly continued as the overwhelming militia forced them deeper into a ravine," it said.
About 45 minutes into the firefight, Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y., made radio contact with Bagram Air Base outside the capital, Kabul, asking for air support and reinforcements. Soon afterward, the Chinook lifted off with 16 special operations troops aboard on a mission to extract the surrounded SEALs.
The Chinook was escorted by Army attack helicopters, whose job was to suppress enemy ground forces to make it safe for the lightly armored troop carrier to land. But the heavier attack helicopters lagged behind at the high altitude and were outpaced by the Chinook, whose pilots then faced a life-or-death decision: Try to land unprotected in hazardous terrain in a battle zone, or wait while their wounded comrades on the ground risked being overrun.
They chose to land, but as the Chinook rushed into the fight, it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed, killing all 16 men aboard.
Meanwhile, Axelson, 29, of Cupertino, Calif., "ignoring his injuries and demonstrating exceptional composure" urged his teammate to escape, according to the medal citation. "With total disregard for his own life and thinking only of his teammate's survival, he continued to attack the enemy, eliminating additional militia fighters, until he was mortally wounded by enemy fire," it said. His body was recovered July 10 after a massive military search effort in Afghanistan's Kunar Province.
Dietz was lauded for "undaunted courage in the face of heavy enemy fire, and absolute devotion to his teammates" as he remained behind to fight to defend his partners after he, too, was wounded.
? 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091302071.html
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Beach SEAL honored for his sacrifice in Afghanistan
By DALE EISMAN, The Virginian-Pilot
? September 14, 2006
Last updated: 1:29 AM
WASHINGTON - Danny Dietz was a quiet guy, devoted to his family, his dogs and his shipmates in the Navy's SEAL Team 2, a special-warfare unit based in Virginia Beach. The sort who never hesitated to take on extra responsibilities, extra burdens, one of his buddies remembered Wednesday, and who never thought there was anything remarkable about doing it.
Matt Axelson - "Cool Hand Luke" to his friends - was a Californian who loved golf, joking that he planned to hone his game for a career on the Senior PGA Tour once he got out of the Navy.
"No matter how hard I worked at something, he was always better," said friend Dave Albritton, a petty officer first class - but Axelson never boasted .
Under leaden skies and amid the bustle of rush hour on a memorial plaza in downtown Washington, more than 200 of the two men's friends, relatives and shipmates bit their lips and brushed away tears Wednesday evening as they expressed the nation's gratitude for the courage and sacrifice Axelson and Dietz exhibited on an Afghan mountainside last year.
The men were among 19 SEALS and U.S. Army NightStalkers killed June 28, 2005. It remains the bloodiest single day of Operation Enduring Freedom, the war in Afghanistan. Six of the SEALS killed were based in Virginia Beach.
"Heroes are ordinary people who make extraordinary decisions every day of their lives," sai d Lt. Brad Geary, a Dietz friend who spoke at the ceremony.
Their actions in the midst of a firefight with Taliban militiamen allowed another SEAL - the only survivor of the engagement - to escape and earned Axelson and Dietz the Navy Cross, the branch 's second-highest honor. The pair are part of Navy history because of the way they died, Geary said, but "these men are heroes because of the way they lived."
The citations presented Wednesday to their widows, Cindy Axelson and Maria Dietz, recounted how the men and two other SEALS tracking a Taliban leader in rugged northeastern Afghanistan were attacked on three sides by a force of perhaps 40 .
Dietz, 25, a gunner's mate second class, was wounded "in a hailstorm of enemy fire," his citation reads, but he continued returning fire and covering his teammates "until he was mortally wounded." Axelson, 29, a sonar technician second class, also kept fighting despite multiple wounds. "With total disregard for his own life," his citation reads, he laid down covering fire so the one surviving member could slip away.
That SEAL, who has never been identified publicly, was rescued several days later by other U.S. forces and received a Navy Cross earlier this year in a private ceremony at the White House, a Navy spokesman said. The service is still processing the record of the fourth man on the ground team, Lt. Michael Murphy, the spokesman added.
Eight other SEALS and the eight Army NightStalkers killed in the engagement died as they tried to come to the rescue of the four men on the ground. Their MH-47 Chinook helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed as it approached the battlefield.
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/print.cfm?story=110985&ran=211415
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EL CAJON, Calif. ? Sgt. Cameron Murad wanders the strip malls and parking lots of this Iraqi immigrant enclave in the arid foothills beyond San Diego. Wherever he goes, a hush seems to follow.
(This is the second article in an occasional series looking at the experiences of Muslims and the United States military. The final article will deal with one woman?s efforts to enlist and serve. )
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Sgt. Cameron Murad leaves the Kurdish Human Rights Watch offices, where he saw fliers offering six-figure salaries for civilian linguists. He stands by the entrance of a Middle Eastern grocery in khakis and a baseball cap, trying to blend in. He smiles gently. He offers the occasional Arabic greeting. Quietly, he searches the aisles for a version of himself: an Iraqi expatriate with greater ambition than prospects, a Muslim immigrant willing to fight an American war.
There are countless hard jobs for American soldiers supporting the occupation of Iraq. Few seem more impossible than the one assigned to Sergeant Murad. As the conflict grows increasingly violent and unpopular, the sergeant must persuade native Arabic speakers to enlist and serve with front-line troops.
?I feel like a nomad in the middle of the desert, looking for green pastures,? said Sergeant Murad, 34, who is from the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Linguists have emerged as critical figures in the occupation. They interpret for commanders in meetings with mayors and sheiks. They translate during the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. They shadow troops on risky missions. In the pressing search for Arabic speakers, the military has turned to Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States. Sergeant Murad is a rising star in this effort. He has recruited 10 men to the program in little more than a year, a record unrivaled in the Army National Guard.
Still, he is an unlikely foot soldier in the campaign. His own evolution ? from a teenage immigrant who landed in North Dakota after the first gulf war to a spit-and-polish sergeant ? has been marked with private suffering. In boot camp, he was called a ?raghead.? Comrades have questioned his patriotism. Last year a staff sergeant greeted him by calling out, ?Here comes the Taliban!? He remembers a day in 2002 when the comedian Drew Carey visited a base in Saudi Arabia where he was working. During a skit, Sergeant Murad recalled, Mr. Carey dropped to the ground to mimic the Muslim prayer. As the troops roared with laughter, Sergeant Murad walked out.
?I thought about my mom when she prays, how humble she is,? he said.
Yet, day after day, Sergeant Murad sets out to sell other immigrants on the life he has lived. He believes that Muslims need the military more than ever, he said: At a time when many feel alienated, it offers them a path to assimilation, a way to become undeniably American.
It has proved, for him and others, the ultimate rite of passage.
?It?s almost like Superman wearing his cape,? said Gunnery Sgt. Jamal Baadani, 42, an Egyptian immigrant with the United States Marine Corps. ?I?ve got my uniform on, and you can?t take that away from me because I?ve earned it.?
Sergeant Murad has earned it, but with a price. He has changed his name. He has drifted from Islam. He often finds himself at odds with the immigrants he is trying to enlist. To many of them, he is a mystery. He sees himself as a man of unavoidable contradictions: an American patriot and a loyal Kurd; a champion of the military to outsiders, a survivor within its ranks.
Feeling Like an Outcast
The sergeant is six feet tall, but often stands shrunken, his hands politely clasped. He has a long, distinguished nose and wears glasses that darken in the sun but never fully fade, lending him a distant aura.
He plies the streets of El Cajon in a rumbling, black Toyota Tacoma pickup. In the back, he carries stacks of fliers advertising what the Army calls the ?09-Lima? program.
Through the program, speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto and Kurdish are sent to boot camp like other soldiers. They later receive specialized training as linguists, and a majority are deployed to Iraq.
Of the thousands of interpreters working for the military in Iraq, most are civilians under contract, some of whom earn as much as $170,000 a year. But military commanders prefer uniformed linguists because they cannot refuse combat missions and are subjected to more thorough security checks.
They are offered a fraction of what many civilian linguists earn, with salaries starting at roughly $28,000, including allowances. The program?s perks, such as expedited citizenship, a starting bonus and medical coverage, are a major draw, military officials said.
Since the Army created the program in 2003, more than 800 people have signed up. But nearly 40 percent of them have either dropped out or failed language tests or boot camp. Enlistment in the program has improved with the help of civilian Arabic speakers contracted by the Army to recruit.
In California, the Army National Guard is trying the same approach, but with troops. Capt. Hatem Abdine assembled a team of soldiers of mostly Middle Eastern descent to help recruit full time, and brought Sergeant Murad on board last year.
In April, the sergeant arrived in El Cajon. Before his first week was up, he felt like an outcast.
Stacks of fliers and business cards that he had left in grocery stores had vanished. Cashiers who welcomed him on his first visits were suddenly too busy to talk. One manager fled the store. The owner of another shop turned his back and flipped kebobs over a high-licking flame.
?They?re so agitated when I approach them,? Sergeant Murad said. ?Is it because I?m ugly? I don?t think I?m that ugly.?
Nestled in a parched valley, El Cajon drew its first Iraqi settlers half a century ago because of the resemblance it bore to their homeland. The population boomed in the 1990?s when thousands of refugees ? primarily Kurds and Shiites ? joined what had long been the domain of whites and Hispanics.
Sergeant Murad makes his rounds with a truck full of Army promotional items, including a box of T-shirts that state, in Arabic, ?If you can read this? ? and then in English ? ?the National Guard needs you.? He cannot bring himself to wear one.
?To put on that shirt and keep a face free of blush ? it?s just an impossible thing for me to do,? he said
He favors a more subdued approach. He strolls into restaurants and barber shops, as though he were just passing through. He offers a smooth, ?Assalamu alaikum,? or peace be upon you.
A conversation begins. Soon, Sergeant Murad is reminiscing about his hometown, Kirkuk. Then, almost as an afterthought, he mentions his job. ?Call if you know anyone,? he says, offering a card. But the calls rarely come. When they do, recruitment is hard won. In the fall of 2005, Sergeant Murad signed up his first two recruits. Over the next 12 months, he found about 20 other men. Half of them changed their minds. Most often, recruits do not follow through because of objections from a parent or spouse. Others learn of more lucrative opportunities. Store windows in El Cajon are plastered with fliers advertising the six-figure salaries offered to civilian interpreters. Some of the sergeant?s candidates are overcome by fear. A 33-year-old Egyptian man from Hemet, Calif., withdrew from the program in June after watching news from the region on Arabic television channels.
?I know what?s happening over there,? said the man, who would not give his name. ?My kids need me more than the money.?
From late 2002 to May 2006, 172 civilian contract linguists were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, representing 2.6 percent of the roughly 6,500 linguists who worked for United States coalition forces, a Department of Defense official said. None of the 152 interpreters who have served in Iraq for the 09-Lima program have been killed. But that fact carries little weight in El Cajon, where memories of violence linger.
?They came here to live in peace and now you?re asking them to go to war,? said the owner of a bakery on Main Street who had fought against Iran with Saddam Hussein?s army. ?We are full up of the war.?
In the pursuit of trust, it does not help that Sergeant Murad is Kurdish. The Kurds, like the Shiites, are often seen to have an interest in promoting the American occupation of Iraq because of the repression they suffered under Mr. Hussein. The sergeant, who refers to the occupation as ?the liberation,? does not hide his impassioned support of the war, or the fact that he is Kurdish. Sometimes, this backfires. When he told an Iraqi woman at a Laundromat that he was Kurdish, she snapped, ?Saddam was a wonderful president.?
Page 3 of 4)
One afternoon last April, Sergeant Murad dropped by the Main Street bakery, bought a box of chocolates and left another stack of pamphlets behind. He was sure they would be tossed, but seemed not to care. He was feeling giddy.
For the first time in weeks, he had a candidate.
The Sting of 9/11
Sergeant Murad?s path to the United States military began 15 years ago, on a lush meadow in Kurdistan. American helicopters hovered overhead, dropping packets of dehydrated food to thousands of refugees, including Sergeant Murad, his three brothers and their parents. The next day, they reached a refugee camp run by the United States military in Zakho. There, a group of marines was standing guard, hefty, tattooed and smiling. Sergeant Murad, then 18 and rail-thin, thought the men looked like warriors. Soon after, in September 1991, the family arrived in Minot, N.D., as political refugees. A year later, Sergeant Murad got his green card and enlisted in the Army.
?If a person like me isn?t obligated to serve this country, who is?? he said. ?I had to make a decision that this is my country, that this side is my side.?
He entered the military as Kamaran Taha Muhammad. When he got to boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C., he spoke choppy English. He was, and remains, a shy man. ?If a fly looks at me, I turn red,? Sergeant Murad said. But the first time a fellow soldier insulted him, he threw a punch. He fought often enough that he was relegated to kitchen patrol. In time, Sergeant Murad made friends. When he graduated as a light-wheel mechanic, his fellow soldiers cheered. The first few years of his military life went smoothly. He was stationed at a base in Germany. After his tour of duty ended, he found work as the head civilian linguist at an Air Force base in Riyadh.
But on Sept. 11, 2001, as Sergeant Murad watched the attacks on television in Riyadh, he felt a searing angst. The next day, he walked into the dining hall holding a tray, and stopped at a table of officers he knew.
He told them he was sorry. No one responded.
?He didn?t know where he fit in,? said Fernando Muzquiz, 42, now a retired master sergeant with the Air Force.
Sergeant Murad experienced a shift after Sept. 11, both in his relationship to Islam and to America. It was as if a fault line crept through him.
As a Muslim, he felt ashamed.
?I was crushed theologically,? he said. He pored through the Koran, looking for proof that it condemned terrorism. But from the loud speakers of mosques in Riyadh, he heard sheiks praying for the mujahedeen. From Americans, he felt the sting of suspicion. On trips home to Minnesota, where his parents had moved, Sergeant Murad noticed the new attention he got at airports. In Atlanta, a security officer saw his last name, which was still Muhammad, and called out, ?We got one.?
Sergeant Murad wanted to prove his loyalty. He got his chance when the United States invaded Iraq.
By then, he was working in Bahrain as a civilian linguist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. (He had lost his job in Riyadh after taking an unauthorized trip off base, which he attributed to a lapse of judgment.) In Bahrain, he was elated to learn that he would be sent to southern Iraq on a top-secret mission with the Navy Seals. But several days into the voyage, he heard a sailor on his ship whisper, ?Cam is one of them.? Sergeant Murad stopped working for the Navy in March, with his mission in Iraq successfully completed. That month, he changed his name.
?In a way, it was my reaction to say, ?No, I am not the same as this criminal, this coward,? ? said Sergeant Murad, referring to Osama bin Laden. ?I am an American, I am Cam, I am a naturalized citizen.?
Kamaran became Cameron. Muhammad was dropped for another, less conspicuous family name, Murad. The middle name he chose was perhaps most surprising: Fargo. ?I always wanted a connection to North Dakota,? he said.
Even with a new name, Sergeant Murad felt ill at ease back in the United States. He has stopped going to mosques. He no longer considers himself a practicing Muslim. He has few Middle Eastern friends.
?If somebody?s name is on a list, and that person has my name or contact number, I will get harassed,? he said.
The Army, he decided, was the most comfortable place to be. In 2005, he joined the National Guard full time. He is careful to tell potential recruits about the military?s zero tolerance policy on discrimination, and urges them to file complaints should harassment occur.
Still, Sergeant Murad has never filed a complaint of his own. During several interviews, he was reluctant to talk about his negative experiences, saying that he did not want to ?whine? and that all immigrants endure hardship before they are accepted.
Last year, when an instructor at an Army base referred to Sergeant Murad as ?the Taliban,? he laughed along.
?I laughed not to cause trouble,? he said. ?I laughed because I am really getting tired of this. I laughed because I know it?s a hopeless situation. What do you do? You just have to laugh.?
?It doesn?t matter what you think of me,? he said. ?Like it or not, I?m your brother in arms.?
Closing the Deal
The new candidate?s name was Khaled. Sergeant Murad jotted down his number, passed on by the captain. The Iraqi immigrant had called after spotting a brochure about the program, the captain explained. And there was one more thing: the man was on the fence. Sergeant Murad?s job is often one of delicate persuasion. He began by talking to Khaled, who lived near El Cajon, on the phone. (To protect his identity, the military requested that his last name not be published.) By the time they agreed to meet, Sergeant Murad felt uneasy. Not only was Khaled a Sunni; he was from Mr. Hussein?s home province. A stout man with a mustache answered the door. He seemed overweight for the rigors of boot camp, thought the sergeant, and his age ? 39 ? was just short of the cutoff. They stiffly shook hands, and then sat and sipped tea in a tidy, candle-scented apartment. A framed picture showed Khaled, his wife and three children waving from Disney World. Since arriving in the United States in 1999, Khaled had hopped from one low-wage job to another, pumping gas, stocking groceries. Now, he told Sergeant Murad, he had made up his mind. He needed the educational loans the military offered. Still, he was nervous.
?I?m expecting a shock,? said Khaled. ?I?ve been hearing good things, bad things.?
As he does with all recruits, Sergeant Murad warned Khaled that he might be hazed at boot camp, and distrusted by other soldiers. But over time, the sergeant promised, he would make friends.
The two men sat talking until the afternoon turned to dusk. The sergeant gave Khaled tips on how to lose weight, and promised to help prepare him for the English tests. Before parting, they embraced. As Sergeant Murad drove off, he smiled and shook his head. ?This is an Arab from the Sunni Triangle trusting a Kurd with his life,? he said.
Khaled entered boot camp in July and is now in advanced training.
Often, finding recruits is only the beginning of Sergeant Murad?s job. He spends time with their families after they have joined up, reassuring mothers that their sons will eat properly, and helping wives fill out insurance forms. Last April, Sergeant Murad drove to a boxy stucco house to visit the pregnant wife of a 22-year-old Shiite recruit. The woman was worried about her husband?s safety in Iraq.
?The fact that he?s an Iraqi ? it?s unfathomable to these nationals that he would be with the United States military,? she said in Arabic, perched on a couch next to her mother-in-law.
?He is Muslim and in the military ? it doesn?t look right.?
The older woman frowned.
?If it were up to me, I would make you join the military because they freed you from Saddam,? she told her daughter-in-law.
Boot camp had been effective, the mother said. Her son seemed newly disciplined, more mature. There was only one thing she disliked: his limited vacation.
?Just two weeks!? she said. ?Even in the army of Saddam Hussein, this wasn?t the case.?
On a sunny afternoon in August, Sergeant Murad was back in his truck, cruising El Cajon with a fresh stack of business cards. He was learning to avoid certain shops. He waved mockingly at the kebab store as his truck rolled by, no longer concerned about who might be watching. He had come to the conclusion that first impressions counted little. Plenty of Iraqis had misjudged him. Eventually, though, they grew to like him. It was the same with soldiers, Sergeant Murad said. He looked back on his time in boot camp as the ultimate proof that hardship can be overcome, and wary comrades, won over.
?In the end, when somebody gets to know Cam the soldier, Cam the citizen, they always take my side,? he said. ?That?s where my triumph is. The hurt goes away.?
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Subject: Michael Monsoor - Funeral Announcement
Petty Officer Monsoor died 29 September 2006 while conducting combat
operations in Ramadi, Iraq. He was a graduate of BUD/S Class 250 and was
assigned to SEAL Team THREE. Michael was an incredible athlete of quiet
demeanor and dedication. His friends say he matched the "Silent Warrior"
SEAL mentality that was his life's calling. Though he carried himself in a
calm and composed fashion, he constantly led the charge to bring the fight
to the enemy. He distinguished himself as one of the bravest men on the
battlefield, remaining fearless while facing constant danger. It was
Michael's selfless actions that saved the lives of fellow SEALs.
Petty Officer Monsoor was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star (with
Combat V), Purple Heart, and Combat Action Ribbon for his heroic actions in
battle. The interment for MA2 Michael Monsoor will be held with full military
honors at 1200, Thursday 12 October 2006 at FT Rosecrans, Point Loma, San Diego,
CA. Following the burial, a memorial celebration will be hosted at 1400 at
the First Presbyterian Church, 320 Date Street San Diego, CA. Teammates
and friends are encouraged to attend. Uniform for active duty is Service Dress
Blue.
In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that donations in Michael's
name be made to the Naval Special Warfare Foundation, P.O. Box 5965,
Virginia Beach ,VA 23471.
Condolences may be sent to The Monsoor Family, 12562 Safford Street,
Garden Grove, CA 92840.
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NAVY TIMES - October 11, 2006
Congress eyes higher special ops retired pay
By Rick Maze
Staff writer
Congress is laying the groundwork for possible new incentives for special
operations forces personnel that could include a big boost in retired pay.
As part of the 2007 defense authorization bill, Congress has ordered a
Pentagon report about what it could take to improve retention of military
personnel who have special operations forces designations. The report, due
next August, was included at the urging of Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., who
has been pushing for hazardous and danger pays to be counted toward retired
pay for career special forces members. Hayes represents a congressional
district that includes Fort Bragg.
The defense bill was sent to the White House on Oct 5, and is expected to
be signed by President Bush by Oct. 15. Hayes believes that the expense of
increasing retired pay, which could rise by 10 percent or more, would be
more than offset by reducing the cost of training replacements for people
who leave the military.
To help prove his case, Congress is asking for information about how much
has been spent on the training of special forces personnel and the four-,
eight-, 12-, 16- and 20-year points of their careers.
The report also asks what percentage of special operations forces have
accumulated 48 months of hostile fire pay and what percentage have
accumulated more than 60 months, which are possible thresholds for when
incentive pays could be added to retired pay.
Although concerns are growing that career special forces people have been
lured away from the military by higher-paying private-sector jobs, defense
and service personnel officials are reticent to change the retired pay
formula for special operators when there are other military specialties -
such as medical professionals, pilots and nuclear-trained naval officers -
who also receive large bonuses and incentive pays over the course of their
military career. Those groups would also like to see that money added to
their retired pay, which currently is computed solely on basic pay.
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By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer
Sat Dec 23, 1:54 PM ET
Spc. Brent Everson was just a few steps from safety.
The 22-year-old from Florence, Mont., was climbing out of a tank, near the entrance to a U.S. outpost called Sword when a sniper's 7.62-millimeter bullet hit him just above his Kevlar vest, tearing into his shoulder and through his back. He fell back into the tank — wounded but alive.
On the roof of the outpost, Army gunners returned fire. But the sniper probably already was gone.
"This guy knew what he was doing," said Staff Sgt. Jeremy Gann, who like Everson is assigned to Company C of the Army's 1st Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment. "You get some guys with rifles who wake up and just want to take shots at Americans. But they don't aim around body armor," he said, speculating that the sniper's gun had a telescopic sight.
Everson was taken by helicopter to a hospital north of Baghdad and survived. He was the fourth sniper victim since September among 40 soldiers assigned to Sword, a sandbagged mansion in south-central Ramadi. All were hit within a few yards of the outpost.
A problem since the start of the war, soldiers and senior officers say the threat from snipers has intensified in recent months. Insurgent gunmen have honed their skills and acquired better equipment, notably night-vision rifle scopes to target U.S. troops after the sun goes down.
For Marines and soldiers targeted by the gunmen, the shots chip away at their morale, one crack of a rifle at a time.
"People are just tired of this. They're frustrated," said Sgt. Benjamin Iobst, who lives at Sword. "It's like trying to find a fly in a forest."
Iobst said the problem in Anbar Province has become so serious that military experts recently visited Sword to study snipers in the area, in hopes of developing ways to counter the threat.
Lt. Gerard Dow, the highest-ranking soldier at Sword, said Americans usually move through Ramadi at night to minimize the risk. But now some gunmen use night-vision scopes so they can strike anytime.
"We know the best ones have it," he said.
During a week of interviews, soldiers at Sword spoke repeatedly about the snipers outside their gates. Subsequent discussions with Marines and commanders across Anbar revealed that the threat is widespread.
Maj. Matthew Van Wagenen, executive officer of 1st Battalion, 37th Armored Regiment, said Saddam Hussein loyalists in exile in Syria and Jordan have funded training programs for snipers.
"You have simple gunmen getting paid to take shots, but you also have midlevel leadership who can drive all over Anbar, moving in and out of town whenever they want," Van Wagenen said.
The U.S. military leadership in Baghdad has played down the influx of foreign fighters into Iraq, but many soldiers and Marines in Anbar said they believe the best snipers from all over the Middle East travel to Iraq for the chance to drop an American with a single shot.
"We don't even have snipers that good," Iobst said.
Some of the snipers learned their basic craft when they served in Saddam's army. But there's also open concern among Americans that the training of the current Iraqi army — at U.S.-operated camps — is spreading skills that are turned against U.S. forces.
"I don't like the way they fight, but I'd do the same thing if someone was occupying my country," said Cpl. Sean J. Egger, also part of the 1st Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment.
Egger was the gunner atop a Humvee near Ramadi's defunct train station in August. The bullet whizzed past him by inches but struck his machine gun, sending shrapnel into his face.
Safety glasses spared his vision, but Egger will need surgery after he leaves Iraq to remove a half dozen pieces of shrapnel still lodged in his face.
Troops try to make themselves tougher targets for snipers by zigzagging when they walk and never standing in one place for longer than a few seconds.
But the best snipers will wait for hours, often near natural obstacles where U.S. troops might be forced to pause.
They crouch in alleys, abandoned buildings, or force their way into many homes at gunpoint, firing from holes they punch in walls or windows. They also fire from holes in cars. One gang in Ramadi had vehicle with a bumper rigged so it could be lowered for the sniper inside to squeeze off a few rounds undetected.
They shoot once and vanish, picking up their "brass," or rifle casings, and covering the holes from which they fire.
Even when they fail to kill, wounding is enough to disrupt military operations for hours, while the casualty is evacuated.
And the subsequent search for the sniper is usually an exercise in frustration, sometimes impossible to contain.
Shortly before midnight after Everson was hit, 20 Americans and six Iraqi soldiers left Sword to sweep through homes just to the east, the possible origin shot.
Much of Ramadi is without power after dark and the few remaining residents near Sword were huddled by candlelight in their living rooms when the angry soldiers broke down their doors.
"Yes, yes," they breathed with terrified voices — it was all the English they knew.
In some homes, soldiers demanded information through an interpreter without doing much damage. In others, they broke windows, overturned couches and ripped pictures off the wall as they searched. Iraqi troops casually tossed lit cigarettes onto woven carpets.
"You know when somebody comes in and shoots at us! You know who the outsiders are!" bellowed Lt. Dow. "Tell us!"
"I am a taxi driver," stammered Wabeel Haqqay, who lives with his elderly father. "I am gone all day and know nothing."
As is often the case, no one offered any information on the sniper and insisted insurgents come from other parts of the city.
But on the roof of an abandoned house, soldiers discovered a hole, cut into a wall and concealed by cinderblocks. It yielded a perfect view of Sword and was just big enough for a rifle and scope.
A line of soldiers kicked the crumbling brick wall until it gave way.
"Feels good, doesn't it?" Dow grinned.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f...25-2444494.php
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I hope this humble civilian is not out of line relaying some enlisted humor:
The Meaning of Rank
A GENERAL: Leaps tall buildings with a single bound, is more powerful than locomotive, is faster than a speeding bullet, walks on water amid typhoons, gives policy to God.
A COLONEL: Leaps short buildings with a single bound, is more powerful than a switch engine, is just as fast as a speeding bullet, walks on water if sea is calm, talks to God.
A LT. COLONEL: Leaps short buildings with a running start and favorable winds, is almost as powerful as a switch engine, is faster than a speeding BB, walks on water in indoor swimming pool, talks to God if a DA-4187 request form is approved.
A MAJOR: Barely clears Quonset hut, loses tug-of-war with switch-engine, can fire a speeding bullet, swims well, is occasionally addressed by God.
A CAPTAIN: Makes high marks by trying to leap buildings, is run over by locomotive, can sometimes handle a gun without inflicting self injury, dog paddles, talks to animals.
A 1ST LIEUTENANT: Runs into buildings, recognizes locomotives two out of three times, is not issued ammunition, can stay afloat if properly instructed in the Mae-West, talks to walls.
A 2ND LIEUTENANT: Falls over doorstep when trying to enter buildings, says look at the Choo-Choo, wets himself, plays in mud puddles, mumbles to himself.
A SERGEANT MAJOR, FIRST SERGEANT OR A SERGEANT FIRST CLASS: Lifts tall buildings and walks under them, kicks locomotives off the tracks, catches speeding bullets in his teeth and eats them, freezes water with a single glance, HE IS GOD.
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http://s75.photobucket.com/albums/i312/ChrisFry/?action=view¤t=02_FEB_07_ABC_DFW_Welcome.flv
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The following is a case of open mouth, insert foot:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Luke AFB Fly Over
A WAKE UP CALL FROM LUKE AFB, AZ:
A certain lieutenant colonel at Luke AFB deserves a big pat on the back.
Apparently, an individual who lives somewhere near Luke AFB wrote the local paper complaining about a group of F-16s that disturbed his/her day at the mall. When that individual read the response from a Luke AFB officer, it must have stung quite a bit.
The complaint:
"Question of the day for Luke Air Force Base: Whom do we thank for the morning air show? Last Wednesday, at precisely 9:11 a.m., a tight
formation of four F-16 jets made a low pass over Arrowhead Mall,
continuing west over Bell Road at approximately 500 feet. Imagine our
good fortune! Do the Tom Cruise-wannabes feel we need this wake-up call, or were they trying to impress the cashiers at Mervyns'
early-bird special? Any response would be appreciated."
The response:
Regarding "A wake-up call from Luke's jets" (Letters, Thursday): On
June 15, at precisely 9:12 a.m., a perfectly timed four-ship flyby of F-16s from the 63rd Fighter Squadron at Luke Air Force Base flew over the grave of Capt. Jeremy Fresques. Capt. Fresques was an Air Force officer who was previously stationed at Luke Air Force Base and was killed in Iraq on May 30, Memorial Day. At 9 a.m. on June 15, his family and friends gathered at Sunland Memorial Park in Sun City to mourn the loss of a husband, son and friend.
Based on the letter writer's recount of the flyby, and because of the
jet noise, I'm sure you didn't hear the 21-gun salute, the playing of
taps, or my words to the widow and parents of Capt. Fresques as I gave them their son's flag on behalf of the President of the United States and
all those veterans and servicemen and women who understand the
sacrifices they have endured. A four -ship flyby is a display of respect
the Air Force pays to those who give their lives in defense of freedom.
We are professional aviators and take our jobs seriously, and on June
15 what the letter writer witnessed was four officers lining up to pay
their ultimate respects. The letter writer asks, "Whom do we thank for
the morning air show?" The 56th Fighter Wing will call for you, and
forward your thanks to the widow and parents of Capt. Fresques, and
thank them for you, for it was in their honor that my pilots flew the
most honorable formation of their lives.
Lt. Col. Scott Pleus
CO 63rd Fighter Squadron
Luke Air Force Base, Ar
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Troops salute fallen leader
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 27, 2007
A Stryker Brigade soldier paid his respects during a memorial service in Baghdad yesterday for Staff Sgt. Darrell R. Griffin. ( )
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BAGHDAD -- First Sgt. Tito Ferrera stood up straight yesterday, looked out over his troops and started the roll call.
He called out three names, and each answered: "Here, 1st sergeant." Then he called out the name of Staff Sgt. Darrell R. Griffin. Silence.
He tried twice more. Still no answer.
And then, as the soldiers of the battle-hardened Stryker Brigade stood in tears, soldiers fired a memorial salute for the once larger-than-life squad leader, killed by a bullet on the streets of western Baghdad just eight days after his 36th birthday.
"He's one of those people you would never expect that to happen to," said Staff Sgt. Anthony Mersino five days earlier, as word drifted through the gray-covered tents of the Stryker camp that one of their own had died.
This is where the politics stop.
"He was just one of those soldiers, individuals, that everyone will look at -- he is bigger than this war, and one little bullet did it," said Capt. Stephen Phillips, the last person to see Sgt. Griffin alive. He held the wounded man's hand as he was rushed to the helicopter that would take him to a neurosurgeon at Balad Air Base.
Inside the operations center in Camp Stryker, Baghdad, phone calls whipped back and forth, everyone anxiously waiting for any bit of information, any reason to stay hopeful, to not let go.
But within hours, anguish crossed the face of the battalion senior medic Sgt. 1st Class Douglas Wallace as he walked quietly over to the battalion operations officer and handed him a yellow slip of paper. "Time of death, sir."
Everyone in the Tactical Operations Center looked shocked. Sgt. Griffin had been a popular leader, a well-read, hard-talking man, who loved his wife, Diana, and his dog Luna.
On March 21, Sgt. Griffin's Stryker unit was returning from an operation in Baghdad's tough Shi'ite area of Sadr City. As they approached the home stretch, there was a burst of gunfire.
"I got a radio report that is forever marked in my mind," Capt. Phillips, 31, recalled yesterday. The platoon leader had told him simply, "I've got a casualty: gunshot wound to the head." Sgt. Griffin, who typically stood in the hatch of the powerful Stryker vehicle, had taken a bullet underneath his helmet.
Everyone moved. Sgt. Griffin was rushed to Baghdad's top combat surgical hospital inside the heavily fortified Green Zone.
Capt. Phillips didn't lay eyes on his wounded soldier until 15 minutes later when the Stryker group pulled into the hospital. He climbed out of his vehicle and ran the quarter-mile of dusty road to the emergency room just as they were moving Sgt. Griffin on a stretcher into the operating room.
"I saw the wound, and I knew it was grim," Capt. Phillips said. In the meantime, plans were made to evacuate Sgt. Griffin to Balad. The transfer was done in record time, but the squad leader didn't make it.
Capt. Phillips turned away his head and fought back the tears. He took a long drink of water and looked up. It was only hours before the memorial service, when the roll call would be taken and taps played one last time for his fallen friend.
"This [conversation] is good," he struggled to say. "Because I can't cry in front of the men, because tomorrow we go right back into Sadr City." He paused. "I held his hand, as they moved him to the helicopter. I wrote his wife, in a letter of condolence, that I still felt life in him."
There was not much time left to mourn. The memorial was going to start soon, and Capt. Phillips had to get his men back to their base that same night.
"I'll deal with it on my own time, on my own terms," he said. "But right now, there is still work to be done."
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U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)
News Release
On the Web:
http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=10654
Media contact: +1 (703) 697-5131/697-5132
Public contact:
http://www.dod.mil/faq/comment.html
or +1 (703) 428-0711 +1
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
No. 335-07
March 23, 2007
Navy Names New Guided-Missile Destroyer USS Jason Dunham
The Department of Navy announced today that the Navy's newest Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer will be named the USS Jason Dunham, honoring Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, the first Marine awarded the Medal of Honor for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter, made the announcement in Dunham's hometown of Scio, N.Y. "Jason Dunham, the friendly, kind-hearted, gifted athlete who followed his star in the United States Marine Corps, went on to become one of the most courageous, heroic and admired Marines this great country has ever known," said Winter. "His name will be forever associated with DDG 109. May those who serve in her always be inspired by the heroic deeds of Jason Dunham, and may all of us strive to be worthy of his sacrifice."
Dunham was born in Scio, Nov. 10, 1981, sharing the same birthday as the U.S. Marine Corps. After high school graduation, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in July 2000 and completed recruit training 13 weeks later at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C.
Following his first duty assignment with Marine Corps Security Forces, Kings Bay, Ga., Dunham transferred to the infantry and was later assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, based in Twentynine Palms, Calif. Before deploying to Iraq in spring 2004, Dunham was selected to lead a rifle squad, a position that ultimately placed him on the front line in the war against the Iraqi insurgency.
On April 14, 2004, Dunham's squad was conducting a reconnaissance mission in Karabilah, Iraq, when his battalion commander's convoy was ambushed. When Dunham's squad approached to provide fire support, an Iraqi insurgent leapt out of a vehicle and attacked Dunham.
As Dunham wrestled the insurgent to the ground, he noticed that the enemy fighter had a grenade in his hand. He immediately alerted his fellow Marines, and when the enemy dropped the live grenade, Dunham took off his Kevlar helmet, covered the grenade, and threw himself on top to smother the blast. In an ultimate selfless act of courage, in which he was mortally wounded, he saved the lives of two fellow Marines.
In November 2006 at the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia, President George W. Bush announced that the Medal of Honor would be awarded posthumously to Dunham.
During his speech, President Bush said, "As long as we have Marines like Corpoal Dunham, America will never fear for her liberty." President Bush presented Dunham's family with the Medal of Honor during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 11, 2007.
In the spirit of this Marine, the USS Jason Dunham will continue protecting America's liberty by providing a multi-mission maritime platform to lead the Navy into the future.
Utilizing a gas turbine propulsion system, the ship can operate independently or as part of carrier strike groups, surface action groups, amphibious ready groups, and underway replenishment groups. The ship's combat systems center on the Aegis combat system and the SPY-Ld (V) multifunction phased array radar.
With the combination of Aegis, the vertical launching system, an advanced anti-submarine warfare system, advanced anti-aircraft missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Arleigh Burke-class continues the revolution at sea.
For more information on Arleigh Burke class destroyers, visit http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4200&tid=900&ct=4 .
For more information about the naming of DDG 109, contact the Navy Office of Information at (703) 697-5342.
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"Earn them" ... A classroom without any desks..
Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a
Social Studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock , did
something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with permission
of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she
took all of the desks out of the classroom.
The kids came into first period, they walked in, there were no desks. They
obviously looked around and said, "Ms. Cothren, where's our desk?" And she
said, "You can't have a desk until you tell me how you earn them." They
thought, "Well, maybe it's our grades." No," she said. Maybe it's our behavior.And
she told them, "No, it's not even your behavior." And so they came and went
in the first period, still no desks in the classroom. Second period, same
thing. Third period.
By early afternoon television news crews had gathered in Ms. Cothren's class
to find out about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of the
classroom. The last period of the day, Martha Cothren gathered her class.
They were at this time sitting on the floor around the sides of the room.
And she says, "Throughout the day no one has really understood how you EARN
the desks that ordinarily sit in this classroom."
She said,"Now I'm going to tell you." And then Martha Cothren went over to
the door of her classroom and opened it, and as she did 27 U.S. veterans,
wearing their uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a
school desk. They
placed those desks in rows, and then they stood along the wall. And by the
time they had finished placing those desks, those kids for the first time
....I think perhaps in their lives ....now understood how they earned those desks.
Martha said, "You don't have to earn those desks. These guys did it for you.
They put them out there for you, but it's up to you to sit here responsibly
to learn, to be good students and good citizens, because they paid a very
dear price for you to have that desk .....and don't ever forget that."
==============
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/nodesks.asp
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The consequences of Bush-Rumbo failing to increase our military when they should have done so back in 2003-4 continue:
WAR ON TERRORISM | Effective immediately, deployments are three months longer
Army extends war tours
The action affects troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, or those about to be sent there, but not Guard and Reserve units or Marines.
By NANCY A. YOUSSEF
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON | U.S. Army soldiers deployed to Iraq will serve at least 15 months there instead of 12, the Defense Department announced Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the new rotation schedule, which also will affect soldiers sent to Afghanistan, would allow the Pentagon to guarantee units at least 12 months at home between war zone rotations. Without the change, five brigades would have had to return to combat after less than a year at home, he said.
On U.S. Army bases, commanders and families scrambled to determine the effect of the new deployment schedule.
About 100 soldiers from a company of the 705th Military Police Battalion at Fort Leavenworth have been deployed to Iraq since December for a 12-month tour, said post spokeswoman Janet Wray. Her office had not received official word whether these troops would be affected by the extended deployment.
The extended deployments probably will affect about 6,000 soldiers currently deployed in Iraq from Fort Riley, and an additional 3,500 soldiers will be deployed to Iraq within the next year, said Master Sgt. Cameron Porter, a Fort Riley spokesman.
The longer deployments will greatly affect military families, said Michelle Joyner, spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association, based in Alexandria, Va.
“It’s difficult once you start marking two birthdays that are missed or two anniversaries or two holidays — that makes it seem like a much longer time,” she said. “It is a long time for families to be separated, especially while they’re worried about the safety and well-being of their loved one that’s deployed.
“For military families, once the service member deploys, many of us have a mental countdown clock as to when they’re coming home and when they’ll be someplace where you know they’re safe. It becomes very difficult when you’ve adjusted to that, to recondition your thoughts knowing it’s going to be longer.”
Joyner said that extended deployments also might affect families’ practical plans that had been made for celebrating the deployed service member’s homecoming.
“This plays heavily on the children,” she said. “They don’t understand why mommy or daddy isn’t coming home” as scheduled.
Democrats charged that lengthening the time that troops would be expected to stay in Iraq is proof that the “surge” President Bush announced in January is really a long-term increase in troop strength likely to last well into next year. They also called it an acknowledgment that the Iraq war has seriously overstretched the U.S. military’s largest branch.
“The decision to extend the tours of U.S. service members by three months is an urgent warning that the administration’s Iraq policy cannot be sustained without doing terrible long-term damage to our military,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat. “We don’t have to guess at the impact on readiness, recruitment and retention.”
The new schedule is effective immediately for all Army troops serving in or getting ready to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. It does not affect the Marine Corps, whose members are rotated into the war zone for seven months, with six months between tours, or Army National Guard and Reserve units, whose tours will still last 12 months.
Gates said units that had already been extended would not be extended again.
Gates conceded that “our forces are stretched; there’s no question about that,” but said that it was better for the troops to have firm timetables.
Marine Gen. Pete Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the extension was part of a U.S. strategy to give Iraqi leaders more time to find a political solution to violence.
“What we are doing as a U.S. armed force with our coalition partners is buying time for the Iraqi government to provide the good governance and the economic activity that’s required,” Pace said.
Andrew Krepinevich, director for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, a Washington think tank, said the extension is likely to heighten debate in Congress over whether to set a timetable for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing.
Before the Iraq war, the Army’s policy called for troops to serve one year in combat and rest for at least two years before being redeployed.
That rotation schedule quickly fell to the demands of the Iraq war, which has required far more troops than administration officials originally envisioned.
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Call me sentimental , , ,
http://www.flashdemo.net/gallery/wake/index.htm
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I've moved Loyalonehk's post from another thread to here-- Marc
============================================
The video is about 10 mins long but worth the time.
My old Chief sent this link to me today...
http://www.youtube.com/p.swf?video_id=m9Yc3wYJOtI&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//sjc-static12.sjc.youtube.com/vi/m9Yc3wYJOtI/2.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskIMQ2KCcdCGg6OZXz1bwQwi
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Here is more about the good major. He was a very respected man. Killed just a short time ago, May 11th, Blackfive had written about him many times. A genuine warrior, he will be sorely missed. You can read the personal comments about him here. http://www.blackfive.net/main/2004/08/marine_captain_.html
http://www.blackfivhttp://www.blackfive.net/main/2004/08/marine_captain_.htmle.net/main/2007/05/a_lion_falls_go.html
The Fallen Lion - Godspeed Major Doug Zembiec
Posted By Blackfive
"Your son was killed in action today. Despite intense enemy machine gun and rocket propelled grenade fire, your son fought like a lion. He remained in his fighting position until all his wounded comrades could be evacuated from the rooftop they were defending. It was during his courageous defense of his comrades that Aaron was hit by enemy fire.... With the exception of the Marines on Security, every man in the company attended the service. Aaron was respected and admired by every Marine in his company. His death brought tears to my eyes, tears that fell in front of my Marines. I am unashamed of that fact."
- Douglas Zembiec, Captain, U.S. Marine Corps, writing to the mother of Aaron C. Austin, included in Operation Homecoming by Andrew Carroll
Doug Zembiec, Major in the USMC, was known at the "Unapologetic Warrior". We featured him here as Someone You Should Know almost three years ago (must read). In fact, he was among the few that I included when I began that index - he is very "Mattis-like" or, maybe, General Mattis is very "Zembiec-like".
Just a few months before, then Captain, Zembiec led Echo Company into Fallujah. We caught that as part of the Showdown series about Fallujah (link here). Zembiec was leading his unit into combat where most of his men (53) had been wounded, with some wounded two or three times and still in the fight. He talks about his Navy Hospital Corpsmen that kept his men alive (link here).
Zembiec Family Photo - Captain Doug Zembiec, April 2004
It is with tears and a heavy heart that I inform you that Major Doug Zembiec was killed this week. We have lost a true lion, a warrior without peer, a Marine among Marines...from his Bronze Star with Combat Distinguishing Device:
"On two occasions, Captain Zembiec coordinated the actions of the Marines from atop a tank while rocket-propelled grenades and enemy small arms fire impacted all around him. Wherever the battle raged with intensity, Zembiec could be found inspiring Marines to aggressively repel the enemy's determined assault..."
He was already wounded badly before he jumped on that tank. And from the Comments of that long-ago post here, Marines spoke up about Doug:
I served with Capt Zembiec. I was a Scout/Sniper that was with him and Echo Company. I was awarded the Silver Star for my actions in Fallujah. I would Die for this man. I only wish people could see what this man did for his Marines. - Ethan Place
I was one of his platoon commanders at the time, and I know that he earned our respect and admiration. Our Marines couldn't imagine following a different company commander. Major Zembiec will always be an inspiration to me, no matter what I am doing. - Edward Solis
And from members of his unit:
There is no one better to go to war with - Sergeant Major William S. Skiles (Echo Company First Sergeant in 2004)
The love of his Marines and the Corps far surpasses anyone else I know. I don't think there are enough words to describe him as an individual. - Captain Darryl Ayers
He's everything you want in a leader: He'll listen to you, take care of you and back you up, but when you need it, he'll put a boot your... - Sergeant Casey Olson
He's not like some of these other officers: He leads from the front, not the rear. - Lance Corporal Jacob Atkinson
Doug is the prototypical modern infantry officer. He's also not that much different than the officers who led the Spartans into combat... - LtCol Joseph Clearfield
Right now, the Zembiecs are mourning a heavy, heavy loss. Doug's wife, Pam, and 1-year old daughter, Fallyn Justice, are with family members now.
I'll post more information as it comes in. I've struggled with how much to share at this point. I'll let you know if we can help in some small way. One thing for certain, Doug Zembiec would want you to celebrate his life, his time with his family and his time on this Earth as a Marine.
“Day by day, fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it.” - Thucydides, The Funeral Speech for Pericles
Godspeed, Major Zembiec, godspeed...
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From the LAT
The Unapologetic Warrior In Iraq, a Marine Corps Captain Is Living Out His Heart's Desire By Tony Perry. Tony Perry is The Times' San Diego bureau chief. He last wrote for the magazine about reporting from Iraq. August 22, 2004 Anyone who prefers that their military officers follow the media-enforced ideal of being diffident, silent about their feelings, unwilling to talk about their combat experience and troubled by the violence of their chosen profession should skip this story. Marine Corps Capt. Douglas Zembiec is none of these things. Zembiec, an All-American wrestler and 1995 graduate of the Naval Academy, is the charismatic commander of Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division. During the monthlong battle in Iraq earlier this year for the Sunni Triangle city of Fallouja, no combat unit did more fighting and bleeding than Echo Company, and during it all—from the opening assault to the final retreat ordered by the White House -— Zembiec led from the front. He took on the most dangerous missions himself, was wounded by shrapnel, repeatedly dared the enemy to attack his Marines, then wrote heartfelt letters to the families of those who were killed in combat, and won the respect of his troops and his bosses. It was the time of his life, he acknowledged later, for by his own definition Zembiec is a warrior, and a joyful one. He is neither bellicose nor apologetic: War means killing, and killing means winning. War and killing are not only necessary on occasion, they're also noble. "From day one, I've told [my troops] that killing is not wrong if it's for a purpose, if it's to keep your nation free or to protect your buddy," he said. "One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy." For his Marines, Zembiec asks for respect, not sympathy, even as one-third of his 150-man company became casualties. "Marines are violent by nature -- that's what makes us different," he said. "These young Marines didn't enlist to get money to go to college. They joined the Marines to be part of a legacy."
He knows talk like that puts him outside mainstream America and scares the bejabbers out of some people. Modern America is uncomfortable with celebrating those who have gone to war and killed their nation's enemy. Maybe it's because American military hardware is thought to be so superior that any fight with an adversary is a mismatch. Then again, people who feel that way probably have not stared at the business end of a rocket-propelled grenade launched by an insurgent hopped up on hatred for America. Or maybe, like so many attitudes of the press and public toward the military, the queasiness about unabashed combat veterans is traceable to public opposition to the Vietnam War. A cynic I know says that although Americans remember Sgt. York from World War I and Audie Murphy from World War II, the only heroes most remember from Vietnam are Colin L. Powell and John McCain. One helped fellow soldiers after a helicopter crash, the other was shot down on a mission and survived a horrendous POW experience. Neither is known for killing the enemy. An essay this spring in Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, suggested that the ideal of battlefield bravery has been replaced by a culture of victimhood. Navy reservist Roger Lee Crossland wrote that Americans after Vietnam seemed to prefer "safe heroes, heroes whose conduct was largely nonviolent …. "The prisoner of war and the casualty, Crossland lamented, have replaced the battlefield leader as the ultimate hero. Take your own media reality-check. Which is seen more frequently: stories about the potential for post-traumatic stress among U.S. troops or stories about troops who have successfully carried the fight to their enemy? My association with Zembiec started with his one-word answer to a question of mine. It was April 6, the second day of the siege of Fallouja by two battalions of Marines, the "two-one," and the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, the "one-five." A Marine patrol from two-one had been fired on as it ventured just a few yards into the Jolan neighborhood, and the Marines were quickly assembling a retaliatory assault to be led by Zembiec's Echo Company. Marines were piling into assault vehicles—windowless metal boxes on treads that can, in theory, bring Marines to the edge of the fight quickly and without casualties. At the "two-one" camp, Marines were running every which way as the assault was forming up for the mile-long drive to the spot where the patrol had been ambushed. I had never met Zembiec, but by his tone and body language, he clearly was in charge. Accommodating embedded media appeared to be on no one's to-do list. "Do you have room for me?" I shouted as Zembiec rushed past. "Always," he shouted over his shoulder. I piled into one of the assault vehicles and sat next to a Marine chewing dreadful-smelling tobacco and another talking sweetly about his sister having a baby. The ride was bumpy beyond belief; bumpy and scary as continuous gunfire from insurgents pelted the sides of our vehicle with an ominous plink-plink-plink sound. The vehicles finally rumbled to a halt in a dusty field just a few hundred yards from a row of houses where the insurgents were barricaded. The insurgents stepped up their fire from AK-47s, punctuated with rocket-propelled grenades. The Marines rushed out the rear hatch, quickly fanned out and began returning fire with M-16s as they ran directly toward the enemy. Zembiec was in the lead. "Let's go!" he yelled. "Keep it moving, keep it moving!" The battle for Fallouja had begun in earnest, and Zembiec was in the forefront, practicing the profession that's been his heart's desire since childhood. I saw Zembiec periodically over the next weeks. He was supremely quotable and candid. By nature -- and under orders from the commanding general -- Marine officers try to be helpful to the press. Zembiec went a step further. He took time even when time was short. Even when circumstances were grim -- as when a "short round" from a mortar killed two Marines and injured nine others—he was upbeat. His enthusiasm and confidence were infectious. At 31, he still retains a slight boyishness. Like many Marine officers, he has thought a great deal about his profession, its role in the world, and the nature of men in combat. He leans forward when giving answers and looks directly at his questioner. He has a rock -- solid belief in the efficacy of the American mission in Iraq. He seemed to genuinely like talking to reporters, telling them of the successes of his Marines, his plans to push the insurgents to the Euphrates River and force them to surrender or die. It was not to be. After a month in Fallouja, with the prospect of even bloodier combat to come, including civilian casualties, politicians in Baghdad and Washington called for a retreat just as the Marines seemed to be on the verge of success. Political concerns had trumped tactical ones. After Echo Company—and Fox and Golf companies—had withdrawn from frontline positions, Zembiec reflected on what had occurred. In measured tones, without boasting, he sat under a camouflage net in a dusty spot outside Fallouja and answered all questions, and invited reporters to his parents' home in New Mexico for a barbecue. As the Iraqi sun began its daily assault, and the temperature soared to 100 degrees, Zembiec drank bottled water and talked about the fight that had just passed, including what turned out to be the finale, a two-hour firefight April 26 in which his Marines and the insurgents had closed to within 30 meters of each other in a deafening, explosive exchange. Zembiec called that fight "the greatest day of my life. I never felt so alive, so exhilarated, so purposeful. There is nothing equal to combat, and there is no greater honor than to lead men into combat. Once you've dealt with life and death like that, it gives you a whole new perspective." Zembiec joined the Marine Corps to fight. He nearly quit a few years ago in hopes of becoming an FBI agent like his father, because the prospect of seeing combat seemed too remote. But he decided that being a rifle company commander was too good to pass up. Before Fallouja, his only combat experience had been in 1999, when he spent a month as platoon commander of a reconnaissance unit in Kosovo. He had been stationed in Okinawa during last year's assault on Baghdad, an experience that he found enormously frustrating. Marines in Iraq were in combat, and Zembiec was watching the war on television. A broad-shouldered 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 190 pounds, Zembiec is an imposing physical presence even among Marines known for their tough-muscled physiques. He oozes self-confidence ("confidence is a leadership trait") and at meetings with top officers, he never expressed doubts about success. When called to headquarters with other commanders for an intelligence briefing, he seemed impatient to return to his troops and always positioned himself near the door for a quick getaway once the talk was finished. "He's everything you want in a leader: He'll listen to you, take care of you and back you up, but when you need it, he'll put a boot" up your behind, said Sgt. Casey Olson. "But even when he's getting at you, he doesn't do it so you feel belittled." The image of Zembiec leading the April 6 charge had a lasting impact on his troops. Leading by example is a powerful tool. "He gets down there with his men," said Lance Cpl. Jacob Atkinson. "He's not like some of these other officers: He leads from the front, not the rear." Said Lt. Daniel Rosales: "He doesn't ask anything of you that he doesn't ask of himself." To his bosses, Zembiec had the aggressiveness and fearlessness they wanted in a commander. He was not reluctant to put himself and his troops at risk to draw out the insurgents. As Maj. Joseph Clearfield, the battalion's operations officer, said: "He goes out every day and creates menacing dilemmas for the enemy." A quote from Zembiec in a Los Angeles Times story drew a flood of e-mails from stateside military personnel. He had remarked about having a "terrific day" in Fallouja. "We just whacked two [insurgents] running down an alley with AK-47s." Navy Lt. David Ausiello e-mailed that he met Zembiec at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where "the legend began." Ausiello was a plebe (freshman) and Zembiec a senior. "Doug was not a screamer," Ausiello said. "He was a leader, and every plebe in our company knew it. I like to think of him as a gentle giant." Zembiec set the standard at the academy for fitness and toughness, Ausiello said. He also rebelled mildly, on occasion, by slyly shouting out an oddball word while standing in formation, to the dismay of senior officers reviewing the troops. Brig. Gen. Richard Kramlich, upon learning that a reporter had met Zembiec, smiled broadly and said, "He's something, isn't he?" Kramlich taught at the academy when Zembiec was a wrestler. "Everybody's out for blood" in wrestling, Zembiec told the Albuquerque Journal, his hometown newspaper, in 1995. "You better be tough." As Echo Company suffered casualties during the battle for Fallouja, Zembiec counseled his Marines to stay focused. But he never acted as a buddy, never addressed the troops by their first names, and discouraged excessive mourning over the mounting casualty toll. "Pity gets you killed in this profession," he said. With three dead and more than 50 wounded, Echo Company had the largest number of casualties of any Marine rifle company in Iraq. To civilians, the figure may seem horrific, but Zembiec notes that in past wars, it was common for Marine rifle companies to suffer even greater casualties and continue "taking the fight to the enemy." Between firefights, he wrote condolence letters to the families of the dead Marines. He also recommended individuals for combat commendations: "I'm completely in awe of their bravery," he said. "The things I have seen them do, walking through firestorms of bullets and rocket-propelled grenades and not moving and providing cover fire for their men so they can be evacuated…. " He thinks the cliché about troops being enveloped by the "fog of war" is overstated. "It's just the opposite," he said. "You become acutely aware and attuned to your environment. You become like a wild animal. Your vision, your hearing, everything becomes clearer." He is not given to introspection, not even about the April 26 fight in which he led a mission that turned into an ambush. After two hours of fighting, one Marine was dead and 16 were wounded. "I don't second-guess myself or have doubts or regrets about that day, except that lots of Marines got busted up. Not to be cold, but that's the way with battle. It goes with going into harm's way." Only reluctantly did he order a pullback. "I would have stayed there and fought all day but I had [Marines with] injuries," including himself. He was hit in the leg with shrapnel. Born in Hawaii, Zembiec grew up in New York, Texas and New Mexico as his father's career took him to different FBI offices. In Albuquerque -- where his parents make their retirement home —- he loved to hunt deer and bobcat. Military service was a natural career path. His father's friends included men who had served with distinction, among them a Medal of Honor winner. His father, Donald, served in the Army in the 1960s. He is not surprised that his son was in the thick of the action in Iraq. "He's wanted to do this his entire life," he said. "I always thought I saw leadership in him." My own generation of baby boomers went to college in order to express their individuality. Zembiec was searching for something else at the Naval Academy. "It was a culture of hardness and mental toughness and challenge. You're there to be part of a team. It's not about you." He quickly decided to join the Marines. Navy life aboard ship seemed too far from the action. "I liked the idea of the Marine Corps being shock troops. They're combat arms; they're men on the ground." Zembiec's battalion is due back in Camp Pendleton in October. In April, he plans to marry his longtime girlfriend, a sales executive for a pharmaceutical firm, in a ceremony at the Naval Academy chapel. Thoughts of leaving the corps are now gone. His next promotion—to major—might give him greater responsibility, but it would take him away from troops in the field. He jokes about turning it down in order to stay close to the action, sounding nostalgic about the firefights of April. "There was a lot of lead in the air that day," he says of one such fight. Would you want Douglas Zembiec in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Maybe, maybe not. Would you want him on your side if you -- or your nation -- got involved in a street brawl? Without a doubt. He is, as his fellow officers say, a military hybrid of modern tactics and ancient attitudes. "Doug is the prototypical modern infantry officer," Clearfield said. "He's also not that much different than the officers who led the Spartans into combat 4,000 years ago."
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I got this in my work email today from one of the upper management.
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I received this from a retired Air Force Chief. If you actually research its origin, this started in Canada (thus the color red for the Canadian flag) and was to show support for the Canadian troops serving in the Afghan war, but now it is a movement in the US to show support for our troops. I'm wearing red to show support for our troops--I am not politically motivated, I am emotionally motivated because I see so many of our young soldiers sacrificing their lives for this country and this is my very small way of showing these soldiers that I support them...
"We need to remember everyday all of our soldiers and their families and thank God for them and their sacrifices. At the end of the day, it's
good to be an American.
RED FRIDAYS ----- Very soon, you will see a great many people wearing Red every Friday. The reason? Americans who support our troops used to
be called the 'silent majority'. We are no longer silent, and are voicing our love for God, country and home in record breaking numbers.
We are not organized, boisterous or over-bearing. We get no liberal media coverage on TV, to reflect our message or our opinions. Many
Americans, like you, me and all our friends, simply want to recognize that the vast majority of America supports our troops.
Our idea of showing solidarity and support for our troops with dignity and respect starts this Friday -and continues each and every Friday
until the troops all come home, sending a deafening message that.. Every red-blooded American who supports our men and women afar will
wear something red. By word of mouth, press, TV -- let's make the United States on every Friday a sea of red much like a homecoming
football game in the bleachers.
If every one of us who loves this country will share this with acquaintances, co-workers, friends, and family. It will not be long
before the USA is covered in RED and it will let our troops know the once 'silent' majority is on their side more than ever; certainly more
than the media lets on.
The first thing a soldier says when asked 'What can we do to make things better for you?' is...We need your support and your prayers.
Let's get the word out and lead with class and dignity, by example; and wear something red every Friday."
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Historian Reflects
On War and Valor
And a Son's Death
Andrew Bacevich Opposed
Iraq Conflict but, in Grief,
He Still Believes in Serving
By GREG JAFFE
May 26, 2007; Page A1 WSJ
WALPOLE, Mass. -- In late 2004, with the Iraq war raging, Andrew Bacevich's son told him that he was joining the Army.
Mr. Bacevich's son didn't fit the profile of a typical soldier. First Lt. Andrew Bacevich spent his teenage years in affluent Boston and Washington, D.C., suburbs. His father was a professor at Boston University and a prominent conservative critic of the war, writing in some of the country's largest newspapers that the pre-emptive conflict was immoral, unnecessary and almost certain to lead to defeat.
[A B]
But the father was also a retired colonel and Vietnam veteran. He had argued that it was essential that the children of America's lawmakers, professors, journalists and lawyers serve in the defense of the nation. Too often, the affluent and well-educated treat national defense as a job they can contract out to the same people who bused their tables and mowed their lawns, he wrote in his 2005 book "The New American Militarism." That made it too easy for the president to take the nation to war in the first place, and left too few people willing to hold the commander in chief accountable when things went awry, he warned.
So the elder Mr. Bacevich didn't discourage his son from becoming an Army officer. Rather, he helped him.
On May 13, Lt. Bacevich, age 27, was killed by a suicide bomber near Balad, a small Sunni town north of Baghdad.
"Should I have said to my son, 'I don't want you to join the Army'?" the father, who is 59, asks himself quietly today. It is a question that he says likely will dog him for years to come.
Mr. Bacevich, who served in Vietnam from 1970-1971, and his son shared the same square jaw and confident smile. They also shared an "ironic kinship," he says. "In the long military history of the U.S., which has featured many victories and glorious moments, my son and I managed to pick the two wars that stand out for all the wrong reasons," he says.
Mr. Bacevich grew up in Illinois and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His parents both served in World War II, but neither pushed him to go to West Point. "Military service seemed to be a worthy thing to do -- that was the milieu in which I grew up," he says.
He fought in Vietnam and stayed in the Army through the painful rebuilding stretch that followed, serving in tank units and earning a graduate degree from Princeton in history. He and his wife also have three daughters. After 23 years, he retired as a colonel. Mr. Bacevich, who says he registered as an independent, voted for George W. Bush in 2000 but not in 2004.
His son, Andy, who spent his early childhood on Army bases, signed up for the Army ROTC at Boston University. "I think he wanted to do what his dad had done," Mr. Bacevich says. After his second year of ROTC, Andy applied to go to Army jump school over the summer to learn to be a paratrooper. A routine Army medical screening found that he had had childhood asthma, which disqualified him from serving in the military. Mr. Bacevich took his son to Massachusetts General Hospital for a test that his son hoped would show that the effects of the disease had disappeared. Andy failed it.
He finished Boston University and went to work for his state senator, and then for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In 2004, the Army, which was having trouble finding soldiers to fight in Iraq, loosened its standards to allow recruits with mild asthma. Andy enlisted, went through basic training and was accepted into the Army's Officer Candidate School. Mr. Bacevich says he was "inordinately proud" of the fact that his son got his commission by rising through the enlisted ranks and Officer Candidate School. "It was the hard way," he says.
Andy was initially assigned to the field artillery branch, which fires big cannons. But he wanted to be a tank officer, as his dad had been. So Mr. Bacevich called a friend who was a serving general and asked whether it would be possible to move his son. "It happened," Mr. Bacevich says. "Andy drove off in his new black Mustang to the armor school in Fort Knox, Ky."
[Andrew Bacevich, Jr.]
In October 2006, Andy was sent to Iraq as a platoon leader responsible for the lives of 15 soldiers. Around that time, Mr. Bacevich pondered the value of life in Iraq. An Iraqi civilian killed mistakenly by U.S. forces merits a payment from the Pentagon of just $2,500 to his or her family, he wrote in the Washington Post. The family of a U.S. soldier killed in action typically receives about $400,000, he noted. "In launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have wandered into a swamp of moral ambiguity," he wrote.
He never mentioned his son in his writings and asked reporters quoting him in stories not to write about his son, either. "I didn't want to burden him with my political baggage. My son had an enormous responsibility and a tremendously difficult job," he says. When his son called home from Iraq, he often sounded exhausted, Mr. Bacevich says. In February, he spent a two-week leave with his family. He seemed physically drained.
When his son was back in Iraq, Mr. Bacevich emailed him nearly every day with news about his family and Boston sports teams. "I wanted him to know that whatever the stresses he was enduring there was a normal life to which we hoped he would return," Mr. Bacevich says. At the same time, he railed in public even more loudly against the war. "The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times on May 9. "We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off."
Then, on Mother's Day, Andy and his men stopped a suspicious van and ordered the men inside to get out. One of them fired a shot at Andy, who shot back, according to an email to Mr. Bacevich from Andy's company commander. A second man from the van began walking toward Andy and two of his soldiers. The man blew himself up, killing Andy and badly wounding a second U.S. soldier.
Today, Mr. Bacevich finds some solace in small things. His son was out in front sharing the risk with his soldiers when he died. "I would not want to make more of it than it deserves. But, yeah, my kid was doing the right thing, and it took bravery," Mr. Bacevich says.
One of Andy's soldiers recently emailed Mr. Bacevich a photo of Andy that he had taken a few hours before Andy was killed. Mr. Bacevich has studied it for clues about his son. In the picture, Andy is not smiling, but he doesn't look unhappy. "There's a confidence and a maturity that I think suggests that in a peculiar way he found satisfaction in the service he was performing," Mr. Bacevich says.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bacevich was sitting on his back porch when the Army casualty assistance officer assigned to help his family handed him a survivor's benefit check for $100,000. For a widow with children, such checks are a lifesaver. But Mr. Bacevich doesn't need the money. "I felt sick to my stomach," he says. "The inadequacy of it just strikes you."
As a historian and former soldier, he takes clear-cut lessons from the check, his son's death and the broader war. "When you use force, the unintended consequences that result are so large and the surprises so enormous that it really reaffirms the ancient wisdom to which we once adhered -- namely, to see force as something to be used only as a last resort." In the future, he says, historians will wonder how a country such as the U.S. ever came to see military force as "such a flexible, efficient, cost-effective and supposedly useful instrument."
For a father, the lessons are far less clear-cut. When he was writing against the war, which was often, he told himself he was doing the best he could to end the conflict.
Should he have told his son not to volunteer for such a war? "I believe in service to country. I believe soldiering is an honorable profession. There is no clear right and wrong here," he says. "What I tried to do was inadequate."
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The message below was sent to me by a member of ICCF, Johnstuf, and I am grateful to him for doing so. Apparently kids from all over the country have sent in their artwork to say thanks to America's finest. Xerox uses the picture you select, prints YOUR note on it and sends it to our women and men overseas.
Well, I not only checked out the link but sent one off myself. It's so easy even I was able to do it. Just so you know, as one of the selections you have the option of sending your own personalized message, I did.
Prior to sending, check out this page... From The Troops. These folk's really appreciate this and, in all honesty, it is the least we can do.
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Something cool that Xerox is doing
If you go to this web site, Let's Say Thanks you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq . You can't pick who gets it, but it will go to some member of the armed services.
How AMAZING it would be if we could get everyone we know to send one!!! This is a great site. Please send a card. It is FREE and it only takes a second.
Whether you are for or against the war, our guys and gals over there need to know we are behind them...
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Hey, here's the link for AdoptaPlatoon. This is an all volunteer organization. There are many ways to help, look around the site and see what works best for you.
My family and I "adopted two Soldiers at the end of the Iraq War, thank God they both made it home OK. We sent many needed items to them as well as little luxuries. Kool-Aid, Chapstick, and sun-screen were very popular then.
BTW, boxes are free from the USPS and we tried to send a little extra as all GI's have Buddies...
I just signed up again...going the pen-pal route this time. Perhaps there's some other old guy who needs a Buddy... ;D
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I have two more worthy additions so you can choose how you want to help our service personnel. These I got from MedSpec65 over at the Packing 4 Life forum.
The first is an organization that assists the families of our troops here at home; the V.F.W. Unmet Needs Program. According to their site 100% of your donation goes to the families, now that's how to run a charitable organization folks. Oh, by the way, "The Gunny", R. Lee Ermy donates his time and money to this cause.
The second one is Any Soldier. This should also read "any service member" as you can link to any of the five armed services via the site. This is a rather interesting organization started by an Army family whose son, an airborne vet and multiple deployee, would give packages his Ma and Dad sent to others in his outfit. Basically, Any Soldier works the same way. You send a package to a designated service member, who is a volunteer, and that person gives the package to another service member that receives little or NO mail. The FAQ section explains it all people.
Well there you have it, four organizations and multiple ways to assist the men, women, and their families who are doing one hell of a job for us.
Please do what you can and don't hesitate to tell your friends, co-workers, schools and churches about the most excellent organizations.
Thank You All.
__________________
Take Care and Stay Safe,
Ken
NRA Member
Administrator Integrated Close Combat Forum
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VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: G.I. Joe was just a toy, wasn't he?
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ
MORE COLUMNSHollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe's -- well, "G.I." -- identity needs to be replaced by membership in an "international force based in Brussels." The IGN Entertainment news site reports Paramount is considering replacing our "real American hero" with "Action Man," member of an "international operations team."
Paramount will simply turn Joe's name into an acronym.
The show biz newspaper Variety reports: "G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer."
Well, thank goodness the villain -- no need to offend anyone by making our villains Arabs, Muslims, or foreign dictators of any stripe these days, though apparently Presbyterians who talk like Scottie on "Star Trek" are still OK -- is a double-crossing arms dealer. Otherwise one might be tempted to conclude the geniuses at Paramount believe arms dealing itself is evil.
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(Just for the record, what did the quintessential American hero, Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine in "Casablanca," do before he opened his eponymous cafe? Yep: gun-runner.)
According to reports in Variety and the aforementioned IGN, the producers explain international marketing would simply prove too difficult for a summer, 2009 film about a heroic U.S. soldier. Thus the need to "eliminate Joe's connection to the U.S. military."
Well, who cares. G.I. Joe is just a toy, right? He was never real. Right?
On Nov. 15, 2003, an 85-year-old retired Marine Corps colonel died of congestive heart failure at his home in La Quinta, Calif., southeast of Palm Springs. He was a combat veteran of World War II. His name was Mitchell Paige.
It's hard today to envision -- or, for the dwindling few, to remember -- what the world looked like on Oct. 25, 1942 -- 65 years ago.
The U.S. Navy was not the most powerful fighting force in the Pacific. Not by a long shot. So the Navy basically dumped a few thousand lonely American Marines on the beach at Guadalcanal and high-tailed it out of there.
(You old swabbies can hold the letters. I've written elsewhere about the way Bull Halsey rolled the dice on the night of Nov. 13, 1942, violating the stern War College edict against committing capital ships in restricted waters and instead dispatching into the Slot his last two remaining fast battleships, the South Dakota and the Washington, escorted by the only four destroyers with enough fuel in their bunkers to get them there and back. By 11 p.m., with the fire control systems on the South Dakota malfunctioning, with the crews of those American destroyers cheering her on as they treaded water in an inky sea full of flaming wreckage, "At that moment Washington was the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet," writes naval historian David Lippman. "If this one ship did not stop 14 Japanese ships right then and there, America might lose the war. ..." At midnight precisely, facing those impossible odds, the battleship Washington opened up with her 16-inch guns. If you're reading this in English, you should be able to figure out how she did.)
But the Washington's one-sided battle with the Kirishima was still weeks in the future. On Oct. 25, Mitchell Paige was back on the God-forsaken malarial jungle island of Guadalcanal.
On Guadalcanal, the Marines struggled to complete an airfield that could threaten the Japanese route to Australia. Admiral Yamamoto knew how dangerous that was. Before long, relentless Japanese counterattacks had driven the supporting U.S. Navy from inshore waters. The Marines were on their own.
As Platoon Sgt. Mitchell Paige and his 33 riflemen set about carefully emplacing their four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings on that hillside, 65 years ago this week -- manning their section of the thin khaki line that was expected to defend Henderson Field against the assault of the night of Oct. 25, 1942 -- it's unlikely anyone thought they were about to provide the definitive answer to that most desperate of questions: How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 armed and motivated attackers?
But by the time the night was over, "The 29th (Japanese) Infantry Regiment has lost 553 killed or missing and 479 wounded among its 2,554 men," historian Lippman reports. "The 16th (Japanese) Regiment's losses are uncounted, but the 164th's burial parties handled 975 Japanese bodies. ... The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."
You've already figured out where the Japanese focused their attack, haven't you? Among the 90 American dead and seriously wounded that night were all the men in Mitchell Paige's platoon. Every one. As the night of endless attacks wore on, Paige moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.
The citation for Paige's Medal of Honor picks up the tale: "When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machine gun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire."
In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed Brownings and did something for which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move around his flank, the belt-fed gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went.
Coming up at dawn, battalion executive officer Major Odell M. Conoley was the first to discover how many able-bodied United States Marines it takes to hold a hill against two regiments of motivated, combat-hardened infantrymen who have never known defeat.
On a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning, waiting to see what the dawn would bring.
The hill had held, because on the hill remained the minimum number of able-bodied United States Marines necessary to hold the position.
And that's where the unstoppable wave of Japanese conquest finally crested, broke, and began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on an insignificant island no one ever heard of, called Guadalcanal.
When the Hasbro Toy Co. called some years back, asking permission to put the retired colonel's face on some kid's doll, Mitchell Paige thought they must be joking.
But they weren't. That's his mug, on the little Marine they call "G.I. Joe." At least, it has been up till now.
Mitchell Paige's only condition? That G.I. Joe must always remain a United States Marine.
But don't worry. Far more important for our new movies not to offend anyone in Cairo or Karachi or Paris or Palembang.
After all, it's only a toy. It doesn't mean anything.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Black Arrow." www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?kn=arrow&vci=51238921
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Retired Air Force Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and hastened the end of World War II has died. He was 92.
Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend of the family, said that General Tibbets passed away Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. General Tibbets suffered from a variety of ailments, and Newhouse said his health had been in decline in recent months.
Tibbets requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide a protest site for his detractors, Newhouse said.
As a 30-year-old Air Force Colonel, Tibbets drew the assignment to drop the first atomic bomb on a Japanese city in August 1945, in hopes of ending the war. Barely one year earlier, he assumed command of the new, 509th Composite Group, then stationed at Wendover Field, Utah.
Tibbets was already a combat veteran when he took the reins of the 509th. He had served as a bomber squadron commander in Europe--leading the first B-17 mission over Europe in 1942--and flew combat missions in the Mediterranean Theater. Various accounts described Tibbets as the "best bomber pilot" in the Army Air Corps, and his outstanding record prompted his selection to lead the new unit.
Over the months that followed, Tibbets trained his unit for their nuclear mission, although details of the project remained highly classified. The specially-modified B-29s assigned to the 509th were built to Silverplate specifications, the first aircraft designed to carry nuclear weapons. The B-29s were assembled at a Glenn L. Martin Company plant in Omaha, Nebraska, then delivered to the group before it deployed to the Pacific.
Unlike "conventional" B-29s, the Silverplate models carried no defensive guns or extensive armor plating, and their multiple bomb bays were replaced with a single, 33-foot-long opening, designed to accomodate early nuclear weapons. Tibbets reportedly hand-picked the bombers for modification; he named his own Enola Gay, in honor of his mother.
At 2:45 a.m. (local time) on August 6, 1945, Tibbets was at the controls of the Enola Gay as it lifted off from the 509th's forward base on Tinian, in the Marianas Islands. Five-and-a-half hours later, Tibbets and his crew dropped their weapon, nicknamed "Little Boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The ensuring blast and fire killed an estimated 60,000 Japanese, including military personnel, civilians and a small number of allied POWs imprisoned in the city. Thousands of other Japanese died later, from the long-term effects of radiation exposure.
But the mission acheived its objective. After a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, Japan capitulated, averting the need for a U.S.-led invasion of the enemy homeland. By some estimates, that operation would have resulted in millions of American and Japanese casualties.
While the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan grew controversial in the years that followed, General Tibbets--to his ever-lasting credit--expressed no regrets about the mission. As he told an reporter from the Columbus Dispatch two years ago:
“I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing,” Tibbets told the Columbus Dispatch for a story on Aug. 6, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bomb. “We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.”
He expressed similar thoughts in a 1975 interview. He described the mission as "his patriotic duty--the right thing to do."
“I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did,” he said in a 1975 interview.
“You’ve got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal.”
He added: “I sleep clearly every night.”
</SPAN>
Rest in peace, General Tibbets. You will rightfully be remembered as a warrior and a patriot, a man whose willingness to tackle the most difficult of assignments brought and end to a war--and spared millions of lives in the process.
However, it is regrettable that there will be no permanent tomb or headstone to mark the final resting spot of an American hero; unfortunately, those observations about your detractors are painfully correct. Thanks to seven decades of revisionist history and villification, the burial spot of the Enola Gay's pilot would become a gathering point for the kook fringe, lesser men (and women) with no appreciation for your service, rendered in the cause of freedom.
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Veterans Day Profile: Point Man, Roger Helle
“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
“I’m Sgt. Helle’s brother. How is he?” asked Roger’s twin brother, Ron, also an E-5, USMC. “I’m sorry son, but your brother is going to die,” the physician responded tersely. That was July 1970, China Beach, Vietnam.
My friend Roger Helle was 17 years old when he joined the Marine Corps. The product of a broken home, he was very insecure and hoped becoming a Marine would provide him the confidence he lacked.
In February 1966, five months into his first 13-month tour in Vietnam, Roger’s unit was searching for Viet Cong around Gia Le. Roger had walked point for patrols during the previous four months and had been shot once, so his intuition about the enemy’s presence was acutely tuned.
On a night mission to a small fishing village reportedly occupied by VC, Roger and 12 other Marines were moving down a trail lined with dense bamboo. His squad leader had taken Roger’s position as point man, and Roger’s instinct told him the squad was moving too fast along the trail. So urgent was his sense that something was wrong that he wanted to call out, but did not want to betray their position.
In an instant, gunfire erupted and a series of “daisy-chain” explosions propelled Roger and two other Marines over the vegetation into an adjacent rice paddy. As he slowly recovered from the shock of the concussion generated by the explosions, he could see green tracers from VC weapons cutting up and down the trail.
The ambush was over as quickly as it began, and more than 60 VC emerged like ghosts from the bamboo, killed the wounded Marines on the trail, collected their weapons and disappeared.
As Roger regained his senses, he pulled the other two Marines in the water to the edge of the rice paddy. He then pawed around in the muddy water for his M-14, and crawled back onto the trail to check for survivors among the ten remaining Marines—among his friends. The squad leader had taken 29 rounds. There were no survivors.
Roger recovered a radio under one of the dead, crawled back to the water’s edge with the wounded Marines, and called base camp with their coordinates. Within a half hour, Chinooks arrived with quick reaction squads to recover the injured and dead.
The two Marines Roger pulled from the water were evacuated to Da Nang, but died en route.
Roger was the sole survivor of that horrific ambush. There was no consolation for the “survivor’s guilt” he experienced—not the anger, not the nightmares—not for years.
In July 1970, two tours, two Purple Hearts and numerous other decorations later, Roger Helle, now a sergeant and platoon leader for a “killer team,” was walking point on a mission back to a village to destroy earthen tunnels used by the VC for escape and evasion.
Normally, a platoon leader would not take the point position in front of his men; if he was wounded or killed, it could threaten the continuity and survivability of the whole platoon. However, suffering four years of guilt after relinquishing his position on point and losing his entire squad, Roger was not about to ask one of his guys to walk point for what he considered a “mop-up” mission.
Their packs overloaded with C-4 explosives to destroy the VC tunnels, Roger’s platoon took frequent breaks. After one stop, he crossed a field about 50 yards ahead of his platoon to check for booby traps. While scanning the area, he sensed a glint of something in his peripheral vision, coming through the air. A grenade bounced off his leg—and a second later, exploded under his feet, violently impelling him backward and then to the ground.
Roger recounts that the detonation “felt like thousands of volts of electricity surging through my body.” After hitting the ground, he says, “My body would not respond to what my mind wanted it to do.”
Amazingly, he managed to stagger to his feet and wipe enough blood from his eyes to see an enemy soldier, about ten yards in front of him, point his weapon and fire. As the rifle recoiled, two rounds hit Roger, spinning him around and knocking him face down to the ground. As he rolled back toward the light of the sky, he could make out the silhouette of that NVA soldier standing above him. Their eyes met as the enemy thrust his bayonet into Roger’s abdomen.
Just a few seconds, and an eternity, had elapsed.
Roger’s platoon had instinctively hit the ground after the grenade detonated, but six of his men rose up in time to see the NVA soldier over their platoon leader. They fired on the enemy as he withdrew his bayonet, and he dropped a few feet from Roger.
Roger was riddled with shrapnel from the grenade, hit with two rifle rounds and bayoneted. Worse yet, the shrapnel had detonated one of the phosphorus grenades in his demolition bag. His clothing and body were on fire. He managed to get out of his burning flack jacket, but the pain racked his body.
At that moment, Roger says, “I was tired of the killing, tired of losing friends, tired of trying to make sense of the war and my life. I just wanted to die and have all this suffering be over.”
Roger was evacuated to the 95th EVAC Hospital, China Beach, where he underwent numerous surgeries. After six days at death’s door, he regained consciousness long enough to recognize a familiar voice on the ward—that of his brother Ron, asking a physician if Roger was there.
After telling Ron that his brother was going to die, a nurse led him to Roger’s bedside. Ron stood over Roger for a minute, trying to recognize what was left of his brother, and then started to sob, falling to the end of Roger’s bed in grief.
“Your brother is going to die.” The finality of those words were sinking in, as Ron wept, compelling Roger to pray, “God, if there really is a God... if you let me live, I’ll do anything you want.” With that, he fell unconscious again.
In the days that followed, Ron (who also had three Purple Hearts and later received the Navy Cross for jumping on a grenade to protect other Marines) never left the side of his brother. Roger saw many injured men brought into that ward and could only watch as life drained from their bodies. Miraculously, Roger’s condition improved. The road to recovery was long and hard, but 31 operations later, including four to reconstruct his face, recover he did.
Along the way, Roger met his Savior and fulfilled his promise to God—and he has served in full-time ministry since 1978. Indeed, in a war with no victors and replete with death, Roger found victory over death through Christ. He also met and married his wife and ministry partner, Shirley, and they now have two children and three grandchildren.
Today, some 37 years later, Roger appears as robust as a Patriot’s linebacker. He leads a challenging but successful discipleship to young people in the grip of life-controlling addictions. “Life is a gift from God,” says Roger. “What we do with it can be our gift to God.”
Roger’s ministry to others also includes 16 trips back to Vietnam since 1989, where he and “Vets with a Mission” have helped to build orphanages, clinics and hospitals for rural peasants ignored by their Communist government and they have supplied them with millions of dollars of donated medical supplies.
This Christian Soldier understands well the counsel of Ecclesiastes 3:1-3—“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal.” His third book, “A time to kill and a time to heal,” takes its inspiration from that passage, as does Roger.
Regarding Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Roger is characteristically candid: “I have never regretted a minute of my service in Vietnam. That’s because I did not see the war the way the media portrayed it. I saw it through the eyes of the people that I lived with, the people of Vietnam who wanted to live free in peace.”
He continues, “As The Patriot noted years ago in its analysis of the media’s Vietnam war coverage, ‘General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s most decorated military leader, wrote in retrospect that if not for the disunity created by John Kerry, Jane Fonda and their ilk, and promoted by the U.S. media, Hanoi would have ultimately surrendered’.”
Roger adds, “Vietnam will not be a failure if we learn the lessons of that conflict. Politicians cannot run the war—the generals must lead and lead well. The majority of people in Iraq and Afghanistan want peace and freedom, but the media’s portrayal of that critical conflict is just as prejudiced as it was during Vietnam—maybe more so. The Left, with the media’s help, may force the same scenario in Iraq that they forced in Vietnam, with the same consequences for the entire region. The vast majority of our Armed Forces in the region both understand and support our mission.”
To Roger, and to all fellow Patriots who have served our nation with courage and great sacrifice, we offer our heartfelt gratitude. You have honored your oath to “support and defend... so help me God,” as do those on the front line in the war with Jihadistan today. You have kept the flame of liberty, lit by our Founders, burning bright for future generations.
In 1918, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month marked the cessation of World War I hostilities. This date is now designated in honor of our veterans, and a focal point for national observance is the placing of a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
Today, nearly 24 million (eight percent) of our countrymen are veterans. Of those, 33 percent served in Vietnam, 18 percent in the Gulf War, 14 percent in WWII and 13 percent in Korea. About three percent served in Iraq and Afghanistan and other counter-terrorism theaters. More than 25 percent of those veterans suffer some disability.
Please pause with us at 1100 EST this Sunday to pray for all our veterans.
PatriotPost.com
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The Nobel Peace Prize should go to the American soldiers not to some guy who wrote a book.
Amazing when you read stories like this and yet Hollywood chooses to dishonor our troops with their political agenda movies. Like DePalma who chooses to ignore a story like this one and instead demeans all American soldiers with a movie based on the rape of an Iraqi girl by American troops. Well we can send those bastards in Hollywood a message:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809826835/user
And these leftist loons have the nerve to be offended when the rest of us question their patriotism.
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"WHAT IS A VET?"
Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg - or perhaps another sort of inner steel: the soul's ally forged in the refinery of adversity.
Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem. You can't tell a vet just by looking. What is a vet?
He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel. He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.
She - or he - is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.
He is the POW who went away one person and came back another - or didn't come back AT ALL.
He is the Quantico drill instructor that has never seen combat - but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other's backs.
He is the parade - riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.
He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep.
He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket - palsied now and aggravatingly slow - who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.
He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being - a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.
He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known.
So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That's all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.
Two little words that mean a lot, "THANK YOU."
Warner Anderson MD
Chief, Emergency Medicine
Gallup Indian Medical Center
U.S. Public Health Service and LTC, MC Group Surgeon
19 Special Forces Group Airborne
Wednesday, November 11th Veterans' Day
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A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America ", for an amount of "up to and including my life."
That is honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.
Author unknown.
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By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY McClatchy Newspapers
Over the last 12 months, 1,042 soldiers, Marines,
sailors and Air Force personnel have given their
lives in the terrible duty that is war. Thousands
more have come home on stretchers, horribly wounded
and facing months or years in military hospitals.
This week, I'm turning my space over to a good
friend and former roommate, Army Lt. Col. Robert
Bateman , who recently completed a yearlong tour of
duty in Iraq and is now back at the Pentagon.
Here's Lt. Col. Bateman's account of a little-known
ceremony that fills the halls of the Army corridor
of the Pentagon with cheers, applause and many tears
every Friday morning. It first appeared on May 17 on
the Weblog of media critic and pundit Eric Alterman
at the Media Matters for America Website.
"It is 110 yards from the "E" ring to the "A" ring
of the Pentagon. This section of the Pentagon is
newly renovated; the floors shine, the hallway is
broad, and the lighting is bright. At this instant
the entire length of the corridor is packed with
officers, a few sergeants and some civilians, all
crammed tightly three and four deep against the
walls. There are thousands here.
This hallway, more than any other, is the `Army'
hallway. The G3 offices line one side, G2 the other,
G8 is around the corner. All Army. Moderate
conversations flow in a low buzz. Friends who may
not have seen each other for a few weeks, or a few
years, spot each other, cross the way and renew.
Everyone shifts to ensure an open path remains down
the center. The air conditioning system was not
designed for this press of bodies in this area.
The temperature is rising already. Nobody cares.
"10:36 hours: The clapping starts at the E-Ring.
That is the outermost of the five rings of the
Pentagon and it is closest to the entrance to the
building. This clapping is low, sustained, hearty.
It is applause with a deep emotion behind it as it
moves forward in a wave down the length of the
hallway.
"A steady rolling wave of sound it is, moving at the
pace of the soldier in the wheelchair who marks the
forward edge with his presence. He is the first. He
is missing the greater part of one leg, and some of
his wounds are still suppurating. By his age I
expect that he is a private, or perhaps a private
first class.
"Captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels
meet his gaze and nod as they applaud, soldier to
soldier. Three years ago when I described one of
these events, those lining the hallways were
somewhat different. The applause a little wilder,
perhaps in private guilt for not having shared in
the burden, yet.
"Now almost everyone lining the hallway is, like the
man in the wheelchair, also a combat veteran. This
steadies the applause, but I think deepens the
sentiment. We have all been there now. The soldier's
chair is pushed by, I believe, a full colonel.
"Behind him, and stretching the length from Rings E
to A, come more of his peers, each private,
corporal, or sergeant assisted as need be by a field
grade officer.
"11:00 hours: Twenty-four minutes of steady
applause. My hands hurt, and I laugh to myself at
how stupid that sounds in my own head. My hands
hurt. Please! Shut up and clap. For twenty-four
minutes, soldier after soldier has come down this
hallway - 20, 25, 30. Fifty-three legs come with
them, and perhaps only 52 hands or arms, but down
this hall came 30 solid hearts.
They pass down this corridor of officers and
applause, and then meet for a private lunch, at
which they are the guests of honor, hosted by the
generals. Some are wheeled along. Some insist upon
getting out of their chairs, to march as best they
can with their chin held up, down this hallway,
through this most unique audience. Some are catching
handshakes and smiling like a politician at a Fourth
of July parade. More than a couple of them seem
amazed and are smiling shyly.
"There are families with them as well: the
18-year-old war-bride pushing her 19-year-old
husband's wheelchair and not quite understanding why
her husband is so affected by this, the boy she grew
up with, now a man, who had never shed a tear is
crying; the older immigrant Latino parents who have,
perhaps more than their wounded mid-20s son, an
appreciation for the emotion given on their son's
behalf. No man in that hallway, walking or clapping,
is ashamed by the silent tears on more than a few
cheeks. An Airborne Ranger wipes his eyes only to
better see. A couple of the officers in this crowd
have themselves been a part of this parade in the
past.
These are our men, broken in body they may be, but
they are our brothers, and we welcome them home.
This parade has gone on, every single Friday, all
year long, for more than four years.
"Did you know that?
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“Time magazine hasn’t announced its pick for ‘man of the year’ yet, but we certainly know ours: Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq and architect of the surge strategy that is turning the tide in the war. Petraeus formulated a brilliant counterinsurgency plan. He executed it with care and diligence. And when much of the country didn’t want to notice the security gains that the surge had wrought, he took the national media spotlight to defend his strategy and his honor. In all this, he was nothing less than masterly. When Petraues testified on Capitol Hill in early September, much of the media and the Left simply refused to believe that violence in Iraq was down... And the day Petraeus’s testimony began, MoveOn.org ran its infamous ‘General Petraeus or General Betray Us?’ ad. It said that ‘every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed’; that Petraeus ‘is constantly at war with the facts’; and that the general ‘is cooking the books for the White House.’... Hillary Rodham Clinton stopped just short of calling him a liar, saying that to believe his report required ‘a willing suspension of disbelief.’ Less than a month later, however, Petraeus’s critics had been effectively silenced... That the surge has worked is no longer up for debate. On a trip to Iraq the week after Thanksgiving, even John Murtha stated flatly, ‘I think the surge is working.’... That Petraeus has achieved so much in such a short time despite the frustrations of Iraqi politics is a testament to his skill as a strategist and a leader of men. For making victory in Iraq look possible again, and for pulling a nation back from the brink of civil war, Petraeus deserves the praise and thanks of all Americans. With or without a Time cover, he is the man of the year.” —National Review
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We Need a New GI Bill
By JEROME KOHLBERG
January 25, 2008; Page A15
WSJ
New York State Gov. Eliot Spitzer deserves the highest praise for his powerful commitment to the thousands of New York citizen soldiers fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan war theaters. In his State of the State address this month, he proposed guaranteeing a full-tuition scholarship to these heroic men and women, so that they may attend any State University of New York or City University of New York college or university upon their return.
Mr. Spitzer's initiative should serve as a paradigm for what our nation must do for this new generation of veterans. They have sacrificed so much for us. We owe them honor, respect and the opportunity for a brighter future. We owe them a new GI Bill assuring them a college education.
When my service in the U.S. Navy ended after World War II, America welcomed me home with just such an opportunity: the G.I. Bill of 1944. In those days, veterans' benefits were generous -- the old saying was that if you got into Harvard, the G.I. Bill would pay for Harvard. This legislation allowed me to earn a bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College, a business degree from Harvard, and a law degree from Columbia.
I was among the almost eight million veterans -- more than half of us who returned home safely -- who were suddenly able to pay for the college or university of our choice. Many had never dreamed of going to college before the war.
This unprecedented educational opportunity transformed American society, as a whole generation of blue collar workers became engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs. The economy boomed as we entered the workforce with new skills and training that increased productivity and stimulated innovation.
Sixty years after Pearl Harbor, a new generation of young men and women has now enlisted in the service of our nation. Regardless of our political differences about the war, we must be united in deep appreciation of the exceptional sacrifices made by our brave troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. This includes thousands of members of the Reserve and National Guard, most of whom have also served multiple tours of duty half a world away from their homes and families.
Unfortunately, the educational benefits that were available to WWII-era veterans are no longer afforded to today's returning troops. The sad reality is that while the cost of an education has increased, the benefits available to veterans have not kept up. Today, the GI Bill pays just a fraction of the cost of getting a degree.
Consider, for example, that the maximum educational benefit available to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is just $1,101 per month, or $39,636 over four years. Those veterans who served combat tours with the National Guard or Reserves are eligible for even less -- typically just $440 per month. The College Board reports that the average four-year public college costs more than $65,000 for an in-state student, while a private university costs upwards of $133,000.
Moreover, once National Guard and Reserve members leave the military, they are no longer eligible for any benefits. And if service members are discharged because of a disability, their GI Bill benefits are limited to only the equivalent number of months they served, even if their discharge was the result of injuries suffered in combat.
This is as unbelievable as it is unjust.
The severe restrictions of the current GI Bill extend beyond the educational benefit. There is an initial, non-refundable buy-in cost of $1,200 just to be eligible. That is essentially a "combat tax" on 19- and 20-year-olds who are getting ready to put their lives on the line for our country.
Hard as it is to imagine, if they don't use their GI Bill benefits when they return, they never see that money again. Some 30% of veterans don't use any of their GI Bill funds, which translates into more than $230 million going directly into the U.S. Treasury, rather than back to these young men and women.
War veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan must pay tuition, room and board and other college costs upfront out of their own pockets, and then are reimbursed up to their eligible benefit. In addition, benefits used under the GI Bill count against eligibility for federal student aid, with such support reduced if veterans receive any GI Bill funds. And there is a 10-year limit on assistance for current educational benefits.
All these restrictions effectively put the dream of higher education out of reach for far too many of the 1.6 million who have served our nation in the current wars.
I deeply believe that we have a moral responsibility to provide today's returning veterans with the same educational opportunities that my generation received. Mindful of that responsibility, many of us who benefited greatly from the original G.I. Bill have now established a private scholarship fund -- the Fund for Veterans' Education -- to offer the same "full boat" educational opportunities to returning veterans from all 50 states over the next 12 months.
To be sure, this is a limited effort that will only serve a relatively small number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. However, we view our program as a direct challenge to our elected officials in Washington. Just as President Roosevelt and the Congress did in 1944, they must now choose to commit the resources necessary to fund a comprehensive G.I. Bill for another generation of America's brave soldiers.
Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas have introduced legislation that would again make that sacred promise to our returning veterans: A promise that says, if you've put your life on the line to help secure America's future, your own educational future will never be in doubt.
Their legislation is good public policy and it is fiscally prudent. In the long run, a new G.I. Bill will more than pay for itself. As our experience proved after World War II, better educated veterans have higher income levels which, over the long run, will inevitably increase tax revenues. A congressionally mandated cost-benefit analysis concluded that for every $1 invested in education under the original G.I. Bill of 1944, the nation received between $5 and $12 in economic benefits, such as increased tax revenue and heightened productivity.
In my lifetime, the original G.I. Bill was one of this nation's proudest accomplishments and one of its most solemn commitments. We must now renew that commitment to a new generation of men and women who have served our country with extraordinary courage and distinction. In so doing, they will achieve the better lives they so richly deserve. And we will secure a better America.
Mr. Kohlberg, a founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a limited partner of the private equity firm Kohlberg & Co., is chairman of the Fund For Veterans' Education.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-haldane17mar17,0,5082094.story
Robert Haldane, 83; led troops that found Viet Cong tunnels
Robert Haldane, an Army officer who led the battalion that discovered the infamous Cu Chi tunnels during the Vietnam War, died of cancer March 5 at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 83.
Lt. Gen. Haldane was a lieutenant colonel Jan. 7, 1966, when he was in charge of the American infantry contingent of the 8,000-man U.S.-Australian Operation Crimp. His troops came under fire as soon as they landed near a rubber plantation about 25 miles northwest of Saigon and were mystified when the large numbers of enemy soldiers seemed to vanish in relatively open terrain.
Tunnel mystery
click to enlarge
For three days, the battalion combed the area. They found a large trench, cache after cache of rice and salt, a classroom for 100 men, minefields, foxholes and antiaircraft artillery emplacements. The area was clearly home to a regiment-size force, but few Viet Cong were seen. Yet snipers continually harassed the Americans from within their own lines.
It wasn't until Sgt. Stewart L. Green sat on a nail, which turned out to be attached to a wooden trap door perforated with air holes, that an ingeniously camouflaged tunnel entrance was found. Green, a wiry 130-pound soldier, dropped into the tunnel and reported spotting 30 Viet Cong hiding just feet below the U.S. troops.
Haldane ordered red smoke grenades dropped into the entrance, and within minutes, "reports came in from every direction of red smoke appearing from numerous holes in the ground," according to "Infantry in Vietnam" (1967), edited by Albert N. Garland. The smoke didn't rout the enemy, so Haldane ordered his troops to pump in a nonlethal riot control gas. The Viet Cong stayed put. Finally, Green reentered the tunnel with a demolitions specialist, placed explosive charges and hurried out of the tunnel before the blasts.
The tunnels twisted and turned to minimize the effect of explosions and to restrict assaults. They also contained booby traps. Ventilation holes were disguised as anthills. In the tunnels, baskets of grenades hid trap doors to three lower levels. Service records of 148 Viet Cong were found, as well as operating rooms, supply dumps, armories -- everything needed to keep a large fighting force supplied.
The 125 miles of tunnels were later the scene of fierce hand-to-hand combat as American "tunnel rats" fought the Viet Cong in the dark, vermin-infested earth. In Operation Cedar Falls in 1967, 30,000 U.S. troops tried to destroy the tunnels, but historical sources say the Viet Cong used the remaining parts of the underground complex as a staging area during the 1968 Tet Offensive. In 1970, B-52s dropped thousands of delayed-fuse bombs that buried deep into the ground before exploding, which finally ended the tunnels' utility. The remnants of the Cu Chi tunnels are now a major tourist attraction in Vietnam.
Even as the tunnels were being discovered, fierce fighting raged in the area. Haldane was awarded the Silver Star for his actions Jan. 15, 1966, when he rushed an enemy position while under fire to give first aid to wounded troops. The Viet Cong blocked his efforts to evacuate the wounded. His Silver Star citation said that, "armed only with a .45-caliber pistol, Lt. Col. Haldane fearlessly charged the principal Viet Cong strong point, firing his weapon as he ran forward. His dauntless courage inspired his men to complete the assault, and ensured the successful evacuation of the casualties as well as the seizure of the objective."
Haldane served a second tour in Vietnam in 1968 as commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division.
A native of Glen Rock, N.J., born in 1924, Haldane served in the Army Air Forces in England during World War II. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1947 and served in Germany, the United States and Korea before going to Vietnam in 1965.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/18/report-navy-seal-michael-monsoor-to-receive-medal-of-honor/
If this was an atrocity, the MSM would be all over it. Instead our heroes are recognized on blogs and message boards while the MSM largely ignores them.
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edited by Marc to add:
The name may not ring a bell but if you’re a blog reader you’ve heard of him. So valorous were his actions that even a media not inclined to celebrate the heroism of U.S. troops noticed his death when it happened. What kind of man are we talking about here? He won the Silver Star for pulling a comrade to safety in May 2006; four months later he was on a roof in Ramadi with three other SEALs when an insurgent tossed a grenade up. It bounced off his chest and dropped to the floor in front of them. “He never took his eye off the grenade, his only movement was down toward it,” said one of the three. His family will be at the White House on April 8 to receive the recognition due.
There is a clip at the URL as well.