Marines train new Iraqi SWAT squad

[thedrifter]

Marines train new Iraqi SWAT squad

By Bruce Wallace
Los Angeles Times
Posted November 28 2004

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 pot-holed streets, balaclavas hiding their faces.

The tan-colored masks not only make the raiders appear frightening. They disguise the fact that the men behind them were not Americans at all, but Iraqis.

This is the embryonic Iraqi SWAT team in action, rousing families out of their sleep and rounding men up for questioning about the insurgency tormenting U.S. and Iraqi government forces in towns such as Jabella, south of Baghdad.

The hooded policemen leave their calling card behind: 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 a sort of Iraqi version of "the Untouchables." Marine commanders also have thrown the SWAT team into front-line action in the current campaign of 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, but have lived and trained with Marines at a base near home since August. The close partnership with the Marines is an experiment in trying to inoculate Iraqi security forces against the violence and intimidation that makes joining them so perilous.

For their part, the SWAT team members argue their readiness to lead aggressive 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 living in Hillah, a largely Shiite Muslim town 50 miles south of Baghdad.

"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 had a man killed in action.

"Before that, we had lots of dead," Khadim said. "Maybe 10."

U.S. commanders say they are pleased with the Iraqis' performance.

"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 that serves as host for the SWAT team.

The Iraqis were training at home 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 special forces. His idea was to avoid the plague of desertions and defections to the insurgency that has crippled the development of a homegrown Iraqi security force.

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 said. 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. "I have never had a mission compromised."

Johnson did have to override early suspicions among some of his Marines that they were being asked to baby-sit the Iraqis. The members of the elite force arrived with big ambitions for action in Iraq and found themselves wondering whether their partners would cramp their style.

But the integrated approach has formed 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.

With their exit from Iraq dependent on having qualified Iraqi security forces to replace them, American commanders are pressing the SWAT team into the fight against insurgents. They want the team to earn some cachet with the local population.

But the joint operations also benefit the Marines. The Iraqis give the Americans a bridge across a linguistic and cultural divide that has proved to be a major obstacle to acquiring intelligence. The Americans also can allow Iraqis to carry out sensitive raids on places, such as mosques, they are reluctant to breach.

"We give the Marines cultural information they would not have," Khadim said. "We know the people. The land. How to avoid traps in the road."



The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Army Units Return To Iraq <br />
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution <br />
November 28, 2004 <br />
<br />
Fort Drum, N.Y. - There will be several firsts for the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) when it hits the sand in...

[thedrifter]

Marines Widen Their Net South of Baghdad
Troops Say Offensive Is Vastly Different From Urban Warfare in Fallujah

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 28, 2004; Page A20

FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq, Nov. 27 -- Through the scattered towns and along the dangerous roads of an area that one commander described as "kind of like the worst place in the world," U.S. Marines, British soldiers and Iraqi security forces are waging an offensive they say is vastly different from the urban warfare waged elsewhere in Iraq in recent weeks.

Unlike the massive military push into the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, or similar assaults on Samarra or Mosul, the operation here in Babil province has involved few firefights. It consists mostly of gathering intelligence and launching raids on homes and suspected weapons caches. Insurgents here are not clustered in urban neighborhoods but scattered over wide areas of what many Iraqis call the "triangle of death."

"We have to go out and hunt them down," said Col. Ron Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is conducting Operation Plymouth Rock, so called because it started around Thanksgiving.

Beginning on Tuesday, a combined force of more than 5,000 U.S., British and Iraqi troops has mounted raids in a region south of Baghdad that resulted in the detention of more than 130 people. Most recently, the troops have targeted the dusty town of Yusufiyah, where 856 projectiles were discovered, the U.S. military said.

Officers say those numbers do not reflect the actual scope of the operation. U.S. military officials estimate that they could be fighting as many as 6,000 insurgents in the region, most of them disgruntled and unemployed local residents. Among them are said to be former members of the Republican Guard, a key element of Saddam Hussein's disbanded Iraqi military.

Johnson said the strategic importance of northern Babil stems from its geographic location along major transportation arteries that link Baghdad with southern Iraq and also extend west to Fallujah and beyond. "It's a natural line of drift" for insurgents, he said.

"The problem is all roads lead to Latifiyah," Johnson said, referring to a town near the center of the region.

At least 32 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the region in recent months, executed at illegal checkpoints the insurgents have set up, Johnson said. "These are bad guys," he said. "They don't care who they kill."

In an office in Latifiyah that used to belong to the city's police chief, Ishmael Jubouri contended that the insurgents in Babil cared deeply about what they were doing.

Jubouri, a member of a prominent Sunni tribe from an area south of Baghdad, is the leader of the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the armed groups that the Americans and their allies are trying to defeat. The walls of his office are adorned with portraits of rebels killed in fights with U.S. forces, and banners hung around the former police station call for a holy war against the Americans.

Jubouri said the Islamic Army, which has kidnapped and executed Iraqi security troops, had thousands of fighters trying to force foreign troops out of the country. "The members of the army believe in the language of weapons," he said.

The Islamic Army, he said, sent a contingent of its fighters to Fallujah but withdrew them about a week ago as U.S. and Iraqi forces reestablished control of the city.

"Fallujah was a mistake because it is not possible to fight in a city," he said. "We want to open more than one front in the same time to disrupt the U.S. forces and defeat them at once. The Latifiyah battle will be more successful than Fallujah because we learn from the mistakes done by our brothers there."

Jubouri said there were few foreigners among the Islamic Army fighters. "The Americans think that everyone who fights is foreign," he said. "In fact, everyone who fights is an Iraqi. We have Kurds, Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis."

Intelligence gathered by the Americans appeared to be consistent with Jubouri's claims.

Military officials here said they have seen an influx of fighters and weapons since the Fallujah offensive. Maj. Clint Nussberger, the intelligence officer for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said many of the insurgents were locals who went to Fallujah to fight and then came back. He estimated that between 200 and 500 such fighters returned to the area "with more skills than when they left."

Johnson said the U.S.-led force would take a methodical approach to wiping out the insurgency in north Babil.

Last month, a platoon of Marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen established a new police station in a government building on the southern edge of Latifiyah. Although they acknowledged that they did not control the town, U.S. military officials said they would ultimately take it back from the insurgents.

"I could take Latifiyah in an afternoon, but why am I going to kill innocent civilians?" Johnson said.

Many people in the town said they already feel like they are under attack. The city has no water or electricity, said residents, some of whom described the outages as a form of punishment by the Americans.

Insurgents, their faces covered with scarves and masks, had set up numerous checkpoints around the city where they questioned drivers about their background, religion and destination.

Schools and official buildings were closed last week, and witnesses said there were no signs of police or Iraqi National Guardsmen in the city.

Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16794-2004Nov27_2.html

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Unmanned eye in Iraq's sky gives the Marines a spy
By Tim McLaughlin
Of the Post-Dispatch
11/28/2004
Somewhere above Iraq, a 4-foot-long robotic airplane with a 10-foot wingspan flies over the positions of enemy insurgents and sends real-time video images to Marines on the ground.

At an altitude of 1,500 feet, the camera aboard the ScanEagle unmanned aircraft is capable of making out the facial expressions of enemy soldiers, detecting their cigarettes or even seeing the steam rising from coffee.

ScanEagle was developed and built by the St. Louis-based defense unit of Boeing Co. and the Insitu Group of Bingen, Wash. It can fly as long as 15 hours at a time while burning less than two gallons of fuel.

Since being deployed over the summer, ScanEagle aircraft have logged more than 1,000 hours in Iraq on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for the Marines.

Boeing officials said that they couldn't give specific details about ScanEagle missions but that the planes are saving the lives of U.S. soldiers and noncombatants caught in Iraq's killing zones.

Unmanned aircraft figure to play an increasing role in future battles because the Pentagon sees the planes as an integral part of combat missions. U.S. weapons systems are being developed to have a common operating language so soldiers, ships, submarines, planes and satellites can talk to one another in a battlefield network.

Executives at Boeing, the lead integrator on the Future Combat Systems program for the Army, say unmanned combat aircraft will serve as a complement to piloted planes.

"In general, unmanned combat aircraft will be able to provide the dull, dirty missions that you don't want pilots involved in," said Dave Martin, the Boeing program manager for ScanEagle.

Boeing and Insitu Group received a contract in June from the Marines to provide two ScanEagle mobile-deployment units in Iraq. Each deployment unit consists of several ScanEagle plans as well as the computers, communication links and ground equipment necessary to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance during Marine operations.

Martin said ScanEagle's heavy use in Iraq is unheard of when considering that it made its first flight only two years ago.

ScanEagle evolved from Insitu Group's idea for miniature robotic planes that would fly weather reconnaissance over the Pacific Ocean. Forecasting could be improved because the planes would collect data from areas where weather balloons don't go, said Steve Nordlund, vice president of business development at Insitu Group.

In 1998, one of Insitu Group's robotic planes flew from Newfoundland to Scotland in 27 hours. The plane weighed about 29 pounds and used 1 1/2 gallons of fuel.

Then, before the war in Iraq started, Insitu Group developed its SeaScan unmanned aircraft to serve the commercial fishing industry to spot tuna. The fishing venture has been sidelined as the 50-person company builds planes for the military, Nordlund said.

Next year, Insitu Group plans to introduce a ScanEagle that can stay aloft for 30 hours, Nordlund said.

"Taking the pilot out of the cockpit lowers cost and lowers risk," he said. "That's the perfect unmanned solution. Anything we can do to keep Marines out of harm's way is adding value."

ScanEagle carries an inertially stabilized video camera with a gimbaled eye that allows the robotic bird to track static and moving targets. It doesn't need a runway because it takes off from a catapult launcher. For landings, a 50-foot high pole with a rope snags the aircraft.

Equipped with a global positioning system, ScanEagle flies programmed missions. Its real-time video feeds can be sent to forward soldiers carrying laptop computers made rugged for combat conditions. Also, the images are sent to a ground-control station where intelligence officers can analyze the video and relay it to soldiers in forward positions.

The plane's electronics have expansion slots that allow the military to load various sensors to match its mission, Nordlund said. From a distance, the ScanEagle looks like a large model plane. Martin said it's hard to detect when flying at 1,000 feet.

The plane costs about $100,000 to build, but that doesn't include the ground-control center. Venture capital and Boeing research funds have underwritten the cost of the ScanEagle project, Nordlund said.

Martin said the ScanEagle's price tag will drop substantially once the number of planes in production increases.

"It's being used daily to save people's lives," Martin said. "We know we're making a difference in the lives of our soldiers over there."

Reporter Tim McLaughlin
E-mail: tmclaughlin@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8206

Ellie

[thedrifter]

U.S. Marines ponder future of Fallujah
Associated Press

FALLUJAH, Iraq - As the battle over Fallujah calms, U.S. forces are reflecting on the fight, their often-unseen foes and the future of a city that lies in ruins.

Marine, Army and Iraqi troops opened their Fallujah assault Nov. 8 with massive artillery and air strikes pounding the city before tanks, armored vehicles and troops on foot pushed in from the north.

They battled for days with rebels who had been fortifying the city since April, when planners called off a Marine assault amid widespread outcry over reports of civilian casualties emanating from Fallujah's hospital, numbers that U.S. officers called inflated.


The U.S. military says upward of 1,200 insurgents died in the latest offensive. More than 1,000 suspects were captured, and more than 50 U.S. forces along with eight Iraqis were killed.

Marines are now clearing weapons from the city on the banks of the Euphrates River and preparing for the return of civilians, who once numbered up to 300,000 by some tallies, though U.S. officers estimated that only 50,000 to 60,000 were in the city before the well-publicized attack.

As the fight dies down, Marines are finally finding free time to reflect on the furious battle. The Americans wonder how Fallujah could have devolved into what officers say was a center from which rebels spread bombings, beheadings and attacks across Iraq.

Cpl. Perry Bessant, 21, says Marines are "like a detective agency, coming to investigate, to put the pieces together of what Fallujah was."

"It was a space for so many foreign fighters. I just can't believe the locals tolerated them," adds Bessant, from Mullins, S.C.

"Maybe they were terrified of them. Maybe I'd feel like that too if someone said they'd kill my family," replies Staff Sgt. Alexandros Pashos, 38, from New York City.

New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Oklahoma: The Marines' homes are all a far piece from this central Iraq city in the middle of dusty plain, once dominated by Muslim men in red-checkered scarves and black masks who try to kill the American "infidel" invaders.

When Fallujans do return en masse, they will find many parts of their city in ruins, with bank buildings scorched, mosques bombed, shops destroyed, cars burned, doors to their homes forced open and their cupboards and drawers rifled by foreigners.

"It's going to be difficult putting Fallujah together again, but not impossible," Pashos said. "That is the saddest, to have it all come to this, all these people's homes destroyed."

But even before air and ground assault, Fallujah was poor by the Marines' standards, with many of its people living in mud-brick homes in tight, crowded neighborhoods.

"After we rebuild Fallujah, it will be a lot better place to live," said Wyer, the Oklahoman, "something that was worth our sacrifice."

At one point, a burst of gunfire rattled nearby in southern Fallujah, but the Marines shrugged it off.

"They have no idea what they are shooting at. It's just mental games they play. They know they've lost and there is no way out," says Lance Cpl. Brian Wyer, 21, of Chouteau, Okla.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Published Sunday
November 28, 2004

Bonuses coaxing Marines to re-up




THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
SAN DIEGO - 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 re-enlist.

The plan is working, officials said. Just two months into the fiscal year, Marine re-enlistment rates in several key specialties are running 10 percent to 30 percent ahead of last year.

Officials are confident that by midyear they will reach their re-enlistment target for riflemen, the "grunts" who are essential to the Marines' ability to assault insurgent strongholds such as Fallujah, Iraq.

In most cases, the young Marines are agreeing to stay in their current jobs for four years. In others, they will be allowed to transfer to jobs that their superiors consider equally vital: recruiters, embassy guards and boot camp drill instructors.

Re-enlistment bonuses are not new. But this year is the first time that the largest bonuses have been aimed at "combat arms" specialties. 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 include intelligence officers and Arabic linguists.

Officers - except in particularly difficult-to-retain specialties such as aviation and law - are not eligible for bonuses.

Sgt. Joey W. McBroom, 30, of Lafayette, Tenn., a rifleman, said that he had planned to re-enlist even without the bonus, but the extra $28,039 "helped my wife to agree." He said 40 percent of the bonus would go into a mutual fund, 30 percent into an account for his children's college, 15 percent into savings and the rest into "a nice wedding ring for the wife, finally."

"The more Marines we have who've been over there, the better off the corps is going to be," said Cpl. William Jones, 22, of Tulsa, Okla., a rifleman who got $19,000. "It's going to cost money, but it will save lives."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Sunday November 28, 06:20 PM

Troops in daring river attack
The Black Watch, US Marines and Iraqi commandos launched a daring speedboat assault near the infamous "triangle of death".

In the biggest operation of its kind so far in Iraq, 130 men raced up the Euphrates river at 50mph in camouflaged vessels, each boat armed with two machine guns and a grenade launcher.

The stealth craft were used to sneak up on an area infested with insurgents and terrorists on the east bank of the Euphrates - just across the water from the Black Watch's temporary base at Camp Dogwood.

There have also been reported sightings of Jordanian terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the same lawless area of north Babil province, some 40 miles south of Baghdad.

The dangerous mission began at dawn. With the sound of the Muslim call to prayer drifting across the river, 50 elite US Marines and 80 Iraqi troops boarded the speedboats to the south of their destination.

Soldiers from Black Watch's B Company hid behind trees guarding the launch area. As the Americans and Iraqis climbed aboard one said: "Good luck. We've got your back."

The boats then hurtled north and Warrior fighting vehicles manned by the Black Watch and the Scimitar light tanks of the Queen's Dragoon Guards patrolled the west bank of the river to protect against mortar attacks and snipers.

Captain Raph Munro, a liaison officer attached to The Black Watch, was the only Briton on the boat raid. After a 20-minute dash up the river, the US and Iraqi forces surged ashore through waist high mud.

They then spent four hours sweeping across several square kilometres of palm groves and fields.

Within minutes they found several small arms caches and documents buried by a senior Saddam Hussein loyalist. They also discovered what appeared to be a severed, partly decomposed human head inside a yellow plastic bag which had been dumped in a secluded gully.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

In the Mideast, many find faith as they face death in battle


By Steve Liewer, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Sunday, November 28, 2004



FORWARD OPERATING BASE MACKENZIE, Iraq — When the back end of Spc. Derrick Lawson’s Bradley fighting vehicle jumped from the force of the explosion, he thought of one thing to do.

“I saw the smoke and the flames, and I knew we’d been hit,” said Lawson, 21, of the 1st Infantry Division’s 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment. “My first reaction was to start praying.”

The Bradley lurched to a halt, its driver already dead. Amid the screaming, shouting, confusion and thickening smoke, Lawson saw his platoon sergeant, Staff Sgt. Metoyer Jordan, struggling with the jammed rear hatch. He closed his eyes and desperately said a second prayer.

Someone answered.

“Then I looked up, and the door was open,” Lawson said, 3½ months after the July 21 attack. “I just jumped out and ran down the street.”

Walking daily through the valley of the shadow of death has not necessarily produced a lot of road-to-Damascus religious conversions among combat troops, chaplains, say. But it has pushed some back toward the religion of their youth.

“Every individual fortifies themselves in different ways,” said Capt. Gary Fisher, 39, of Alexandria, La., the 1-4 Cavalry’s chaplain. “A lot of life’s questions are being asked and answered.”

Lawson spent some time in the hospital recovering from smoke inhalation and burns before returning to duty. He’s had a lot of time to reflect. He attended church with his family growing up in Spring Lake, N.C., but God has taken a more central place in his life now.

“It was a wake-up call. You can go at any time,” Lawson said. “I’m in an environment where, every day, people are out there trying to kill me. (Now) I do things differently. I try to be a better person.”

Sgt. Orville Whitlock, 30, of Lynchburg, Va., is squad leader for a 9th Engineer Battalion platoon attached to the 1-4 Cavalry. On May 5, someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade at his Humvee. Shrapnel injured Whitlock and the four other soldiers inside, but no one died.

“I’m thankful to God that nothing worse happened than that,” Whitlock said. “Before I go out the gate, I say a silent prayer that we get through everything we experience.”

“I pray more in Iraq than I have in years,” said Capt. John Trylch, 30, of Los Angeles, commander of the 1-4 Cavalry’s Troop B “Bulldawgs.”

Spc. Steve Wetmore, 20, of Union City, Pa., serves in Whitlock’s engineer platoon. He said he doesn’t go to church, but he does believe in God.

To hedge his bets, he wears a cross on his dog tags.

Under fire, Wetmore said, he thinks about his job more than religion. Two weeks ago, he was manning a traffic checkpoint when rebels fired mortar rounds directly at their position.

“When we got mortared the other day,” he said. “The last thing I was thinking about was praying.”

Spc. Jose Bartual, 26, of New York City, said he is a nonpracticing Roman Catholic, but he comes from a religious family. He’s been in several intense firefights and survived the explosion of a bomb underneath his armored personnel carrier.

“My 8-year-old niece won’t let a day go by that she isn’t praying for me," Bartual said. In fact, the girl worried so much that after his midtour leave her family told her he wasn’t returning to Iraq.

Sgts. Eduardo Colon and Carlos Torres both are 25 and both grew up in Puerto Rico. Now they both serve with Trylch in the 1-4 Cavalry’s B Troop, based in Schweinfurt, Germany.

Together they’ve dodged bullets and survived roadside bombs. They also share a fatalistic philosophy about life and death and combat.

“I believe,” Torres said, “if it’s your time, it’s your time.”

“I pray to God and whatnot, but I don’t go to church,” Colon said. “But when I get back, I’m going to start.”

Pfc. Joshua Schmidt, 21, of Sacramento, Calif., arrived in Iraq last spring without religion. But after surviving a mine strike, an RPG attack, and several gun battles, he’s beginning to wonder.

“I was agnostic when I first came down here,” said Schmidt, of the 9th Engineers. “I’d still say I’m agnostic, but I definitely believe he’s out there.

“I’m either damn lucky,” he added, “or somebody’s looking out for me.”


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Communities open hearts to hurt vets


By Sarah Hoffman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Special Report

Paralyzed from the waist down, Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr. couldn't reach the front door of his parents' house in Dale City, Va., when he returned from Iraq in May.
Inside, he couldn't get into his bedroom or the bathroom because his wheelchair couldn't fit through the doors. He couldn't take a shower because his wheelchair was too big for the stall.
"We never really sat and thought about it," said Sgt. Simpson, 28, who was injured in a roadside bombing outside of Tikrit in April. "Then when I got here, I thought, 'How am I going to get into the house, and how am I going to get through these doors?' "
His concerns — and prayers — were answered by a group of local residents and businesses who made his parents' home and yard wheelchair-accessible. Local builders will begin construction on a new house for Sgt. Simpson, his wife and four young sons.
Sgt. Simpson's story is just one example of the ways that a network of local residents, business owners, churches and charitable groups have been opening their hearts, homes and wallets to help rehabilitate members of the armed services who are recovering from injuries in the war against global terrorism.
As of Nov. 6, 318 troops from Virginia, Maryland and the District have been wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some residents are donating food and toiletries to group homes like the Fisher House in Northwest, where disabled troops and their families stay for free as they undergo treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Others help out like the owners of Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse at the Capital Hilton in Northwest, which serves free steak dinners on Friday nights to patients at Walter Reed.
Army Sgt. Rufus Brumfield, 26, of McComb, Miss. said the dinners are a bright spot in his weeks of physical-therapy treatments for a neck injury that he suffered during a riot drill in Germany.
"They make you feel that all the sweat, the hard work and the pain, that people recognize that," he said.
The community's generosity has been a great support system for the wounded troops.
"The way I see it the community is giving back to the soldiers," said Army Spc. Moises Bonilla, who suffered an eye injury in Iraq. "It's also like a relief medicine."
Several days after giving an interview to a reporter for The Washington Times, Spc. Bonilla, 26, a native of Connecticut, was expected to return to his duties in Iraq.

A new home
Rosemary Butcher, an administrative assistant from Montclair, Va. never met Sgt. Simpson.
But she made sure that the soldier and his family wouldn't have to bear the burden of adjusting to a life in a wheelchair by themselves.
Mrs. Butcher, 49, first heard about Sgt. Simpson in her local newspaper. After that, she began visiting him at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond and sent her daughters to see him when she couldn't.
"We do things like that," Mrs. Butcher said. "We read about things, and we just do it."
Mrs. Butcher, whose husband and father are both retired from the Air Force, said her family connections to the military have endeared her to veterans.
"I've always had a special place for them," she said.
After visiting the family's two-story home one evening, Mrs. Butcher realized that Sgt. Simpson's parents, Eugene Sr. and Pearl Simpson, would need help in making their home wheelchair-accessible.
"I thought, 'Here are these two people who are going to have to carry their son into their house,' " she said.
Mrs. Butcher immediately enlisted the help of Prince William County officials and the Manassas-based Project Mend-A-House to make adjustments to the parents' house. Area Access Inc., a Virginia-based disability-services company, donated a wheelchair lift that Sgt. Simpson can use to reach the main floor.
Other local companies donated bags of cement that volunteers used to build a sidewalk that stretches from the front of the house to the back yard, so Sgt. Simpson can easily make his way to the basement where he spends most of his time.
Volunteers also widened the doors to Sgt. Simpson's bedroom and bathroom, and a local Home Depot store donated a wheelchair-accessible shower that was installed in the basement.
Sgt. Simpson said the generosity has helped him recover from his injuries.
"That makes it seem like we do have a purpose [in Iraq]," he said. "It makes you feel really good."
Plans are in the works to build a new wheelchair-accessible home for Sgt. Simpson, his wife and four sons.
Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit group based in Massachusetts that builds handicapped-accessible homes for disabled veterans, recently paired up with the American Legion post in Woodbridge to host a benefit dance to raise money for the new house. It could not be determined by press time how much money was raised.
Local builders are looking for land where they can build the new house, and local companies have donated building materials. The house will be outfitted with entry paths, ramps, wide doorways, lifts, lower kitchen countertops, modified bathroom facilities and other features to make things accessible for a person in a wheelchair.
Like other injured soldiers, Sgt. Simpson said the community's support is crucial for his recovery — and his peace of mind.
"I'm healing a lot faster than [doctors] had expected," he said. "The less stress I have on myself and the more support I have, the stronger I am and the closer I am to building myself back up."

Road to recovery
For 27 recovering troops and their families, the three Fisher Houses on the Walter Reed campus are home away from home.
It's where the injured troops can stay for free and don't have to worry about tending to the everyday things like going grocery shopping or doing laundry. Their only goal is to focus on getting better.
"If you're going through something traumatic, little things become big things," said Army Sgt. Devona Bonner, 32, whose husband Sgt. Robert Bonner, 35, is undergoing physical therapy at Walter Reed.
Donations from local church and civic groups, residents and businesses from across the country help fill the Fisher Houses with love and support. They give that extra boost of confidence the troops need to get back on their feet.
Boxes full of nonperishable food, toiletries, paper goods and toys line the walls of the storage room at Fisher House III. The auxiliary of American Legion Post 270, from Vienna, Va. provides most of the food each week.
Peter Anderson, general manager of lodging at Walter Reed, said local Girl Scout troops have donated boxes of cookies and the Washington-area chapter of the United Service Organizations has purchased Giant supermarket gift cards for the families.
"The list goes on and on and on," he said.
Vivian Wilson, director of the Fisher Houses at Walter Reed, said the generosity has been overwhelming.
"I don't have to purchase stuff like this," she said, as she unpacked a donated carton of eggs on a recent Thursday morning.
Ms. Wilson said there are 12 local residents who volunteer at the Fisher Houses, which was established by the Fisher House Foundation Inc. to provide the comforts of home without the cost of a hotel bill for troops and their families.
The volunteers do chores ranging from organizing the bulging storage room to cooking meals for the residents.
"I couldn't do it without my volunteers," she said. "I couldn't run a successful program and the soldiers wouldn't enjoy the quality of life that they do without my volunteers."
For the volunteers, it's all about giving back to those who dedicate their lives to protecting this country.
A retired businessman and World War II veteran, Bob Steinberg, 78, comes to the house every week from Baltimore to take the troops and their families for an afternoon out on the town.
"I come over every Thursday morning and take the families out shopping, and generally, we have lunch, whatever we can do," said Mr. Steinberg, who's been volunteering at the Fisher Houses since March.
To Mr. Steinberg, it's the least he can do for the young troops.
"I'm not looking for any medals," he said.
Members of the Sunrisers, an adult Sunday school class from the Fairfax United Methodist Church, also come by to visit the troops.
A member of the class has donated his company's limousine and driver who twice a month takes the families on evening sightseeing trips in the District. Other members have organized bus trips and White House tours for the troops.
Mary Branch, 59, a member of the group, said the relationships she has established at the Fisher House are so meaningful that she and her husband plan to spend Christmas there.
"Our friends had invited us to Williamsburg to have Christmas with them, but the more I thought about it, I thought, 'We can go to Williamsburg anytime,' " said Mrs. Branch, of Fairfax. "Spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day ... I just think that it's the very best thing that we can do."

A night out
Every week, Army Spc. Rory Dunn, 22, of Seattle undergoes long hours of physical therapy at Walter Reed.
But on Friday nights, Spc. Dunn isn't a patient; he's just one of the guys.
For the past two months, Spc. Dunn has enjoyed a free dinner at Fran O'Brien's at the Capital Hilton, one of many restaurants and businesses who have reached out to help the injured troops.
For Spc. Dunn, having a place to go to and meeting people are essential to his recovery.
"It's good to meet people and talk again and make friends," he said on a recent Friday night. "There [are] a lot of people in the same boat as me."
Community efforts like those at Fran O'Brien's are making the transition from the hospital bed to an independent life a little easier for injured soldiers like Spc. Dunn.
Hal Koster and Marty O'Brien, co-owners of Fran O'Brien's, began hosting these dinners in October 2003 at the suggestion of their friend Jim Mayer, a peer visitor at Walter Reed who lost both of his legs fighting in Vietnam.
"He came to my partner, Marty, and I last year and said, 'Gosh, I think these guys would heal quicker if they could get out of the hospital for a night,' and he asked us if we would do that," Mr. Koster said.
For the first several months, the restaurant picked up the costs to host the dinners. Now, contributions from companies, volunteer groups and donors cover the restaurant's operation costs on Friday night.
"We got a lot of $20 checks and $10 checks from people," Mr. Koster said. "We even had one little girl send in $6 to buy a soldier a drink."

continued......

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Nearly 70 Walter Reed patients and their families come out to Fran O'Brien's on Friday nights.
On a recent Friday night, music blared as the restaurant's guests mingled around the buffet table. Sounds of laughter and clicking cigarette lighters punctuated the conversations.
The room quieted down when Mr. Mayer gave the dinner's weekly toast.
"To the men and women of our military," he said, raising his glass. "Especially those who serve in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Since January, Matt Rawding, national services officer for the Disabled American Veterans, has been driving a shuttle bus that carries patients to and from the restaurant. He says the sense of normalcy provided by the weekly dinners is important for the injured troops.
"If there's a place for them to have a medium between the hospital and society, this is it," he said.

A happy ending
Two months ago, Lisa McCroskey, 21, of Springfield, Mo. didn't expect to have a traditional wedding ceremony or even a fancy reception.
At the time, her fiance, Army Spc. Aaron Bugg, 20, was undergoing a series of surgeries to save his left leg from amputation and repair a torn artery in his left arm — injuries he suffered Sept. 29 when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee in Riyad, Iraq.
So a simple ceremony at Spc. Bugg's bedside at Walter Reed and a get-together in his hospital room afterward would have to suffice.
However, a group of Georgetown merchants wouldn't have it. The young couple, the merchants said, was going to get married — Washington style.
The merchants donated the wedding cake, flowers, tuxedos, bridal favors and the wedding programs.
The couple, who found each other in eighth grade in Marionville, Mo., tied the knot Nov. 13 at the stone chapel on the grounds of Walter Reed.
"People just band together and say, 'We're going to make it a special day,' " Mrs. Bugg said a week before the wedding.
The Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown opened one of its banquet halls where the couple and their guests dined on pasta, chicken and gourmet desserts, all of which were provided by the hotel. The Buggs also stayed for free at the hotel's Presidential Suite on their wedding night.
Hedi Ben-Abdallah, general manager of the Historic George Town Club on Wisconsin Avenue NW, which provided the wedding cake, said it was the least he could do to thank Spc. Bugg for his service in Iraq.
"It's nothing," he said. "We did a cake; it's nothing compared to what he did."
Preparations kicked into high gear just days before the nuptials when doctors concluded that Spc. Bugg, of Amarillo, Texas, was well enough to go through a ceremony.
Carolyn Wasylczuk, whose paper-goods store Just Paper & Tea on P Street NW donated bridal favors for the festivities, said it was an honor being part of an effort that made the couple's wedding day a memorable one.
"It's wonderful to have all of these people pull together," Mrs. Wasylczuk said. "It's just a lot of fun. It sort of sets the tone for the season I think."
Mrs. Bugg said the community's donations, and the time and energy spent making the day a reality, were a reflection of how grateful it was for Spc. Bugg's service to his country.
"They were so kind and loving and just so interested in Aaron," she said.
Spc. Bugg has since left the hospital but continues to undergo physical and occupational therapy at Walter Reed. That will be his life for at least the next six months.
The young couple is just happy — and thankful — to be together.
"A lot of times," Mrs. Bugg said, "people don't get the happy ending that Aaron and I did."



Ellie

[thedrifter]

A refreshing development in Iraqi town <br />
<br />
<br />
By Ron Jensen, Stars and Stripes <br />
European edition, Saturday, November 27, 2004 <br />
<br />
<br />
ALBU BALI, Iraq — Water — cool, clear and clean — is poured Wednesday...

[thedrifter]

For returning soldiers, age and infirmity becomes an issue <br />
<br />
RESERVE CALL-UP: About 4,400 soldiers from the Individual Ready Reserve have been notified they must get back in uniform. In all, the...

[thedrifter]

Santa Maria Marine recalled as leader, patriot

SANTA MARIA – Joseph J. Heredia had dreamed since high school of joining the Marines, and by age 22 he had already re-enlisted once and was on his second tour of combat duty in Iraq.

It was two months into that second tour that the Marine corporal was wounded on Nov. 10 near Fallujah. He died Saturday in a hospital in Germany with his family by his side, including his wife, Natalia; mother, Monica Diaz; and 16-year-old brother.

"We're heartbroken by what happened," said his father-in-law, Isaac Berumen.

Heredia, who was a motor vehicle operator based at Camp Pendleton, was hit by shrapnel from an explosive. Wounded with him was Lance Cpl. Joseph Welke, 20, of Rapid City, S.D. Both died Saturday.

"He was a leader," said David Parker, Heredia's agricultural economics teacher at Santa Maria High School. "I think of him in class being so excited to graduate and go into the military to serve his country."

Heredia ran track, played football and was a member of Future Farmers of America in high school, where he also met his wife.

He joined the Marines soon after graduation and had recently re-enlisted, his wife said, so that could remain with his unit and return to Iraq for a second tour of combat.



Information from: Santa Maria Times


Ellie

[thedrifter]

U.S. takes 32 insurgent suspects south of Baghdad
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Reuters/abs-cbnNEWS.com

NEAR YUSUFIYA, Iraq - US Marines said they killed several insurgents and took 32 suspects in a series of actions south of Baghdad on Sunday that included a high-speed riverborne raid on suspected weapons dumps on the Euphrates.

Two Marines were also killed in the region, known as Babil province. A Marine spokesman gave no further details.

Some 40 Marines and 80 newly trained Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos, aided by British soldiers, waded ashore after a dawn race upstream to a point on the east bank opposite Camp Dogwood, where Scottish troops of the Black Watch regiment are based.

While that raid came up almost empty-handed, a total of 32 people were seized in raids forming part of the Marines' six- day-old Operation Plymouth Rock, intended to thwart Sunni Muslim insurgents and launched as a follow-up to the US assault on the rebel city of Falluja, upstream to the northwest.

They also killed several gunmen in a number of incidents, said Marine spokesman Captain David Nevers. Another raid in the area turned up a cache of 512 130mm artillery shells.

This correspondent saw no more than a handful of weapons unearthed by the river during five hours of searching by long lines of Iraqi troops across plowed fields, orchards and palm groves. They found at least three rifles and a membership card for a local man in the now banned Baath party of Saddam Hussein.

Marines said they believed a plastic bag of rotting matter found in a ditch appeared to contain a human head and entrails, although their conclusion was not obvious to others who saw it, including this correspondent. The troops reported the bag's location to their base and left it where it was.

Marine officers had no further word on the find by the end of the day and there was no suggestion it was linked to the deaths of hostages, including foreigners, held by insurgents.

There were no arrests or combat during the raid near the town of Yusufiya, which began with Americans and Iraqis going ashore in waves after short rides north aboard Marine river assault craft traveling at speeds close to 50 knots.

As the search party returned by road to its base, named Kalsu, near Iskandariya, its convoy was halted by a roadside bomb, which narrowly missed a truck carrying Iraqi troops.

As the troops in the halted convoy took up defensive positions, two US vehicles took off at speed. Nevers said later they went in pursuit of two men seen hurrying into a house about 1 km (half a mile) from the main road after the blast.

He said the Marines killed one man they found in the house armed with an assault rifle and detained a second.

They said they found a remote detonator for the bomb, which comprised four 122-mm artillery shells buried in a hole by the road. It was detonated, leaving fragments on the road surface.

Such attacks on US and Iraqi forces are common in the area, which has been popularly dubbed the "triangle of death."

US commanders blame the attacks on local followers of Saddam Hussein, who made the area the center of Iraq's arms industry.

Among the Iraqis killed in the region on Sunday was the driver of a civilian car which failed to obey warnings to slow down as it approached a US convoy, Nevers said. Mindful of suicide bombers, US troops shoot to kill. It was not clear why the driver, whose passenger was detained, had failed to stop.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

U.S. Marines reflect on Fallujah
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Columbia Daily Tribune
Published Sunday, November 28, 2004

FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - At first glance, the U.S. Marines saw nothing extraordinary about a baby crib in the corner of a bombed-out house in Fallujah. But when Lance Cpl. Nick Fenezia threw back the blankets, a Kalashnikov rifle and bulletproof vest lay on the tiny mattress.

"Man, did you have to be just another muj?" Fenezia mused of the baby's missing father, employing U.S. shorthand for Iraq's insurgents - mujahedeen - or Muslim holy warriors. "Couldn't you have stopped shooting at us and watched your baby grow instead?"

U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to fight sporadic gunbattles with rebel holdouts as they clear Fallujah of weapons. On Friday, Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said only about half the buildings in the city had been cleared, even though organized resistance has collapsed.

But as the battle calms, U.S. forces are reflecting on the fight, their often-unseen foes and the future of a city that lies in ruins.

Fenezia, of Red Bank, N.J., also turned up a bayonet, ammunition and a baby photo - all lying amid walls shattered by devastating U.S. firepower.

A burst of gunfire rattled nearby in southern Fallujah, but the Marines shrugged it off.

"They have no idea what they are shooting at. It's just mental games they play. They know they've lost and there is no way out," said Lance Cpl. Brian Wyer, 21, of Chouteau, Okla. "This is nothing, not after the intense battle here."

Marine, Army and Iraqi troops opened their Fallujah assault Nov. 8 with massive artillery and air strikes pounding the city before tanks, armored vehicles and troops on foot pushed in from the north.

They battled for days with rebels who had been fortifying the city since April, when planners called off a Marine assault amid widespread outcry over reports of civilian casualties emanating from Fallujah's hospital, numbers U.S. officers called inflated.

The U.S. military says upward of 1,200 insurgents died in the latest offensive. More than 1,000 suspects were captured, and more than 50 U.S. forces along with eight Iraqis were killed.

Marines are now clearing weapons from the city on the banks of the Euphrates River and preparing for the return of civilians, who once numbered up to 300,000 by some tallies, though U.S. officers estimated that only 50,000 to 60,000 were in the city before the well-publicized attack.

Nationwide elections are scheduled for Jan. 30, but some Marine estimates say Fallujah might not be fully repopulated by then. And on Friday, leading Iraqi politicians called for a six-month delay in the voting because of violence in the country.

As the fight dies down, Marines are finally finding free time to reflect on the furious battle. The Americans wonder how Fallujah could have devolved into what officers say was a center from which rebels spread bombings, beheadings and attacks across Iraq.

Cpl. Perry Bessant, 21, said Marines are "like a detective agency, coming to investigate, to put the pieces together of what Fallujah was."

"It was a space for so many foreign fighters. I just can't believe the locals tolerated them," added Bessant, from Mullins, S.C.

"Maybe they were terrified of them. Maybe I'd feel like that, too, if someone said they'd kill my family," replied Staff Sgt. Alexandros Pashos, 38, from New York City.

New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, Oklahoma: The Marines' homes are all a far piece from this central Iraq city in the middle of dusty plain, once dominated by Muslim men in red-checkered scarves and black masks who try to kill the American "infidel" invaders.

When Fallujans do return en masse, they will find many parts of their city in ruins, with bank buildings scorched, mosques bombed, cars burned, doors to their homes forced open and their cupboards and drawers rifled by foreigners.

"It's going to be difficult putting Fallujah together again, but not impossible," said Pashos. "That is the saddest, to have it all come to this, all these people's homes destroyed."

But even before air and ground assault, Fallujah was poor by the Marines' standards, with many of its people living in mud-brick homes in tight, crowded neighborhoods.

"After we rebuild Fallujah, it will be a lot better place to live," said Wyer, the Oklahoman, "something that was worth our sacrifice."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marine deserves more than a just lynching
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By Richard Hallcock
The Pueblo Chieftan
Nov. 28, 2004

It had almost been two weeks since he had had a bath or slept on a cot. Every day of that two weeks had been characterized by mortars or rockets exploding around him, unfriendly bullets whizzing and cracking by him. One of those had hit him in the cheek just yesterday. He knew that it was just luck that it had not killed him.

He was only 19 years old and, although he was a U.S. Marine and had been well trained, he was scared. He had been scared every day now for as long as he could remember. But he did his job. He went where his sergeant told him to go, he watched out for his buddies. He was not going to quit, no matter how scared or how tired. And he was not going to let his buddies down, no matter what it cost him.

Just yesterday, a guy he knew was blown away when, looking for information that might help save some lives, he searched a dead bad guy and discovered, too late, that the body was booby-trapped. He knew, too, that sometimes these terrorists waved the white flag of surrender and then opened fire when the GIs lowered their weapons to accept their prisoners. His Gunny had told him never to let his guard down because this enemy does not play by any rules. They were suicidal fanatics and the only way to feel safe around them was when they were face down on the ground, unarmed, hands splayed out, legs spread wide, and under the muzzles of his pals' rifles. Or when they were dead.

That night he and three of his buddies, members of the same squad, had sacked out in the bare living room of a house without a roof. The concrete floor was hard. They managed to catch a couple of hours of sleep but not until they had been able to chase the pictures of blood and bodies and wreckage from their minds, if only temporarily. With the dawn, they got ready to do whatever they were asked to do. Their sergeant told them to go down the road and search out any enemy that might have been left behind and, especially, to check some who were known to have been wounded by a different unit yesterday.

That unit could not then care for them under the pressure of incoming fire and a mission that had to be accomplished.

They found the building and, using the proper procedure for entering a structure which could be occupied by killers, they came into a room in which they found several terrorist bodies. Ever alert to the possibility of a faker holding a grenade with the pin already withdrawn, each man was taut as a bowstring. Rifles cocked and safeties off, they surveyed the carnage. Our young Marine saw movement under a blanket. At that moment he saw in his mind a grenade rolling across the floor at himself and his buddies. He fired without hesitation and he hit his target. There was no grenade.

But there was a television camera and it captured the whole thing. You might think that the cameraman and the reporter would have been grateful as, had there been a grenade, it would have gotten them, too. They weren't. They saw a chance to get their byline on an important story only half of which would be told to the watching public and the networks obliged. What do we then see? A wounded man being executed in cold blood by a U.S. Marine implying to all the world that this is the way Americans fight wars.

There will be an investigation. Hopefully, it will be made by Marines who have been there and who understand very well the circumstances. And, hopefully, the Corps will not be pressured by the politically correct and the anti-military media to sacrifice a good Marine who did only what he had to do.

---Richard Hallock is a retired Army officer, educator and business consultant living in Pueblo West.

Ellie

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Experts stress urban warfare's complexities
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By Carl Prine
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, November 28, 2004

We saw it because the camera was rolling. A young Marine walked into a shot-up mosque in the heart of Fallujah on Saturday, and he shot a wounded, unarmed man.

We heard the yelling. "He's (expletive) faking he's dead. He's faking he's (expletive) dead," then the shot.

We saw the long smear of blood behind the insurgent's slumping body, and then someone said, "Well, he's dead now."

Much of the world has rushed to condemn the Marine rifleman for war crimes. The footage released from a pool media service set up by the Pentagon plays in endless loops on Arab television networks, ginning up popular hatred of the Coalition in Iraq. Human rights groups have condemned the grunt for allegedly violating the Third Geneva Convention, which says that any soldier who shoots a prisoner or denies him medical care is a war criminal.

In America, an equally strong backlash has condemned NBC correspondent Kevin Sites for releasing the tape in the first place, with some angry visitors to his Web site threatening to kill him.

But the complexities of urban warfare, international law and the historical relationship between the press and the military seem to have been buried in the rubble of Fallujah, and experts refuse to paint in black and white what happened on a gray Saturday in a bullet-pocked mosque. Rather than a war atrocity, they see a tragedy, one that's repeated often in the midst of kill-or-die urban warfare, but rarely recorded for television.

"I haven't seen the clip. You don't get much substance off of short television stories," said Russell W. Glenn, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Army and one of the primary architects of America's urban warfare doctrine at Oakland's RAND think tank.

Because of that lack of substance, Glenn and other experts on urban warfare fill in the blanks in the broadcasts, adding context to what people saw. First, there is the immediate battle. What was going around the Marine riflemen before he stepped into the mosque?

It was his first time in the building. The mosque had been seized by a different unit of Marines the day before, and corpsman had treated five wounded terrorists amidst 10 corpses strewn around them. On Saturday, a pyre of Iraqi anti-aircraft ammo near the mosque had started "cooking off," exploding shells through the streets. Reports filtered down to the rifleman's squad that the imposing structure had been retaken by insurgents.

That's not unusual. House-to-house fighting is likened by experts like Glenn to "a fistfight in the dark." Marines quickly take houses and move on, only to see insurgents reoccupy the buildings in the chaos of a fluid battlefield. So they must return and "clear" the building again. On that Saturday, reports from embedded journalists travelling with the Marines indicated the building had been "prepped" for a second assault by tank, machine-gun and shoulder-fired missile blasts.

There were no drones overhead telling them what they would see inside, nor was there a magic bullet they could fire that can tell the difference between friend and foe, armed or unarmed. America's high tech weaponry, so decisive in the open desert, is blunted in what generals call "Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain" -- what the grunts on the ground nicknamed "MOUT."

America's top military scientists have added better weapons for city fighting to the Marine's arsenal over the past decade, including sturdy knee pads for crabbing over rubble and glass; breaching tools that open up buildings and clear barbed wire; and rockets laden with explosives that blow open doors, acting like non-lethal concussion grenades to spare civilians inside.

But experiments designed to replace grunts with robots or to create imaging equipment that "sees through" concrete walls and can tell the difference between civilians and terrorists haven't worked as well.

"Some of the technologies on the wish list, from an engineering perspective, are years and years away from reality," said Andrew Mawn, a top researcher at the Natick Soldier Center in Massachusetts, long considered the world's elite war-fighting research and development facility.

"The MOUT environment is a very difficult environment. The combat is close, personal and brutal. It's hard to design the technology that can be easily deployed to help the individual soldiers, but we certainly do everything we can to help him."

Close, personal and brutal

With so many civilians mixed in with terrorists, missiles, guided bombs and artillery are used less. Tanks often can't rumble over the rubble. Helicopters can't see inside buildings or pursue terrorists through sewer pipes. So a premium is placed on the initiative of units as small as four men scrambling from room to room, often slaughtering their foes face-to-face with rifles, machine guns, grenades and knives.

The official casualty count for the Fallujah siege now stands at 51 dead Americans, 425 wounded, with an estimated 1,200 or more insurgents killed, testimony to the savagery of city fighting.

By the time the Marine rifleman had reached the mosque, he'd gone nearly five days without sleep, and was dog tired from dashing from building to building to avoid Iraqi snipers. Throwing himself through windows, jumping from rooftops and tripping into "mouse hole" craters had left his body bruised, bloody and sore. He had been shot in the face the day before but refused to come off the line. On that same block, a booby-trapped Iraqi corpse detonated, killing one Marine and wounding five others, according to reports from embedded journalists.

Terrorists wearing the uniforms of allied Iraqi National Guard soldiers had ambushed his battalion earlier in the fighting. Other militants had killed Marines while shooting behind civilian hostages and white flags of surrender. In less than a week, the rules for engagement given to every Marine had been modified by lethal experience on the Fallujah battlefield. For them, the fog of war had become very foggy.

"The opposition the Marines face are not playing by the rules of warfare," said RAND's Glenn.

To Glenn, a rifleman entering the mosque faced three options to be weighed in seconds. Perhaps the insurgent was dead, and another round splattering through the body wouldn't hurt him. Or he might have been "playing possum." If the man was clearly wounded and incapacitated, however, the Marine should have taken him into custody so that Navy corpsmen could check on his injuries.

"It's standard practice to hit him again if you're not sure if he's going to kill you. War is not a place where you can take long judgements. You kill him or he kills you. If he didn't shoot him, and the Iraqi got up and killed his squad, he would be portrayed as a guy who made the wrong decision and got his buddies killed," Glenn said.

Glenn insists there isn't a bright line test guiding a Marine in the middle of a smoking, blood-smeared mosque, and there are times when a Marine should deliberately gun down a wounded man, especially if the insurgent tries to unpin a grenade or grab a pistol.

"But combat is seldom so kind as to make situations that unambiguous," he said.

The home front

And that ambiguity isn't well understood by many of the reporters covering the conflict, their producers back home or the audiences who consume their stories.

"The problem with the video that purports to show an American Marine shooting an unarmed man in Fallujah is that it's lacking all context. For much of the 20th century, the audience understood the complexities of war because so many men were drafted to fight. Even in the Vietnam War, you would have a father at the dinner table who could turn to his children and say, 'OK, let me tell you what war is really like and why this isn't unusual.' He had been on Iwo Jima, maybe, or Heartbreak Ridge in Korea. He understood the decisions young men must make, and why, " said David Perlmutter, a professor of Mass Communications at Louisiana State University and a widely published author on how images of war reach the public consciousness.

To help the audience understand what really happened in the mosque, Perlmutter advises the TV networks do a public service and "fill in the blanks." But that's tough, he said, because few producers in post-draft America have the military or combat experience to understand why young soldiers act like they do.


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[thedrifter]

"The video lacked historical context," Perlmutter said. "What sorts of battles have Americans fought over the years? What was the fighting like? Are there times when the enemy acts like he's dead, then kills American soldiers? I know a vet who was on Iwo Jima in World War II. What they did there wasn't so different from what the Marines did in Fallujah. How can we condemn the Marines in Fallujah without also condemning the Greatest Generation for the way they fought wars and, if we were being honest with ourselves, the way everyone has fought wars throughout history?"

"We have two generations of Americans who have ideas about battle that come from TV and video games," added Perlmutter. "Our schools have sanitized the depiction of combat because it's 'too disturbing' for the students. And now the producers want us to judge this Marine in Fallujah? How can we judge anything if the audience lacks the basic historical context necessary to understand why the Marine acted as he did?"

The Israeli solution

Western democracies have long struggled with how to make sense of the graphic images of wars fought on their behalf. Allied and enemy governments often censored battlefield pictures and words during the 20th century's two world wars, and the United Kingdom even sought to control many of the stories churned up during decades of unrest in Northern Ireland. Largely uncensored stories from the long Vietnam War, however, led many military and civilian leaders to blame the press for an erosion of support for the conflict.

In Operation Desert Storm, reporters were largely barred from covering the combat, a policy the military later rued as a mistake. In Somalia, reporters proved they could be waiting on the beach when the Marines stormed ashore, beaming the images to round-the-clock newsrooms from satellite cameras.

But nowhere has the daily spill of bloody images been more prevalent than in Israel and the territories it occupies. The Israeli advice to Americans watching the Fallujah footage: Get used to it.

The modern battlefield reporter can air live footage from anywhere in the world. To Israeli military leaders such as Lt. Col. Amos Guiora, an architect of his military's code of conduct, reporters and lawyers are "intrinsic forms of reality," and any attempt to censor journalists will likely backfire. To him, the U.S. military needs to better understand how journalists think, and prepare their soldiers for the reality of killing alongside a free press.

"The modern media are a reality of warfare. They're embedded. Not only are cameramen and reporters there, but the Internet plays a role in all of this," said Guiora, a visiting professor in international law at Cleveland's Case Western University. "News and images move so quickly that military commanders today must be sensitive to the reality of the media."

Israeli soldiers now train on interactive software Guiroa helped design. The training teaches them to run through a mental checklist when they encounter highly ambiguous situations like the Marine found when he entered the mosque. Part of the training includes understanding the ethical and media ramifications of what soldiers do.

But Glenn remains concerned that military tactics might be guided by the work of uninformed reporters, not the battlefield needs of commanders. He fears the onus is being placed on the grunt in the middle of a firefight, not the reporter behind him, for making split-second decisions. He wants reporters and their audiences to realize that mistakes are to be expected in an urban battlefield, and there's only so much training can do to remedy that.

"Listen, a Marine or a soldier is trained to do things in a certain way on the urban battlefield," Glenn said. "You can train a man for 100 contingencies, but five minutes into the battle you'll run into contingency 101. You train the men so they make the best decisions in seconds, when every decision is life or death. But sometimes, none of the decisions is a good one, so your decision is to do the one that is the least bad.

"That's a reality of war."

Carl Prine can be reached at cprine@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7826.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

God bless our troops <br />
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <br />
By Jeff M. David <br />
The Livingston Parish News <br />
Nov. 28, 2004 <br />
<br />
During this Thanksgiving...

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Back in Wisconsin, Marine rebuilds life and dreams <br />
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By DAN EGAN <br />
degan@journalsentinel.com <br />
Posted: Nov. 27, 2004 <br />
...