thedrifter
12-23-07, 08:42 AM
Witnessing The Iraq War Up Close
Embedded in history with a camera in hand
By Russell Drumm
(12/22/2007) The seed itself, the idea of taking his camera to Iraq as a journalist to get an unfiltered, firsthand view of history, took root in Ralph Dayton’s cotton field, a thousand acres in eastern North Carolina, on the day a Black Hawk helicopter set down there in the spring of 2005.
The idea began to bear fruit in November of this year as Mr. Dayton waited a world away in Iraq in the dark for another helicopter. It was to take him to meet Conlon Carabine in an outpost north of Baghdad.
“The main challenge for inbeds is the military travel,” Mr. Dayton said Dec. 7, just days after returning home from three weeks spent as an embedded journalist with a special Marine Corps unit in the Anbar Province of Iraq, from which Marine Corps Maj. Conlon Carabine had just returned as well.
“There’s no tour guide,” Mr. Dayton said. “You’re manifested when you need a flight to another base. You go ‘Space A,’ space available, standby. Then it’s show time. The helos go at night, after midnight. You wait in a plywood hut, completely black. You have a flashlight in your pocket. You’d be blind without it.”
“A guy comes out to the flight line. Two helicopters slam down. Someone from the flight crew with a glow stick checks the two-digit designation written on your hand in Magic Marker. The helo is airborne. The crew rearms.”
Ralph Dayton is a big man with the strong handshake of a farmer, which is what he was, like many of his East Hampton family members beginning in 1628. Major Carabine is from East Hampton too.
Several months ago, when Mr. Dayton learned that the Department of Defense was encouraging community newspapers to send journalists to the war zone to report on hometown soldiers, sailors, and marines, he approached The East Hampton Star with his plan to seek out Major Carabine.
Mr. Dayton had already sold his farm in North Carolina after 14 years of growing vegetables, wheat, and soybeans, first on 500 rented acres in Sagaponack before moving south to a much larger farm. “I was going to get out of farming by the time I was 50, but the year I turned 40, 2006, I had a grand slam of a year, and decided to get out. I had the option.”
The decision to sell was made, in part, because of a chance meeting. “I was surfing in Costa Rica and met a guy and his sister in a restaurant. He was a Black Hawk pilot just back from his first tour in Iraq, about to go on his second. He was from Norfolk, Va., specialized in extracting SEAL teams.”
Mr. Dayton said he told the man where his farm was and exchanged e-mail addresses. Back on the farm, it was not long before he got an e-mail from the pilot, who had taken an aerial photograph.
“He asked if it was my farm and would I mind if it was used in an exercise. I said it was my privilege to help. They did a pick-up-a-downed-pilot exercise. I heard their stories. They were in Iraq right after the initial invasion. I asked did they ever get shot at. ‘Every day,’ they said. I thought there were stories not getting out to the media. I felt an obligation. If I could, I wanted to add another layer.”
Before becoming a farmer, Mr. Dayton studied political science and history at New York University and earned a law degree from Emory University. He said he was always fascinated with first-hand accounts of historical events by “witnesses to history, people in the thick of it. In school I was a student of history. The most effective ways of documenting it were in letters, first-hand photos. Second-hand stuff gets contrived.”
Mr. Dayton said that after Sept. 11, he would go home after a day of farming and turn on the TV. “I never felt like I was getting the story.” He said he wanted to see with his own eyes what was standing in the way of “the biggest military machine that ever existed.”
The enemy’s level of resistance was obvious, he said, “no matter what your political view.” And he wanted to know how the U.S. military was adapting.
Before he could view the war up close, there were security checks, as well as a course on surviving hostile regions taught by a British firm in Atlanta. The course was recommended because abductions had become a kind of cottage industry in Iraq. “There was lots of first aid and videos on firearms and the damage they do, the different kinds of wounds.”
Mr. Dayton was headed for the town of Hit (“It’s pronounced ‘Heat,’ but the marines say, ‘Hit’ ”), where Major Carabine was part of a 10-man Military Assistance Transition Team, or MITT, headquartered at a former Iraqi Army base. The base was shared by the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, and the Iraqi Army’s First Battalion, Second Brigade, Seventh Division.
‘The levels of attacks are much lower, yet you still see the flag-draped coffins being flown out on C-130s.’
The trip to Kuwait City was made via Kuwait Airways, the Baghdad leg aboard an Air Force C-130, followed by several helicopter hops that ultimately landed him in Hit. “You know, I forced myself to process any potential fear at least a year before I went,” he said in an e-mail last week. “I had so completely dedicated myself to documenting this conflict that I just tried to be honest with myself and say, Look, if this is not something you think you can handle then don’t even go down this road.”
“To be honest there were times that I felt a gnarly fear-based kind of tension rising up in me, but I just said to myself, You’re as prepared as you can be. Just keep it together, don’t be afraid to ask questions, and press on.”
Mr. Dayton said the level of violence in Anbar Province had greatly decreased during the previous year following operation Steel Curtain, when thousands of marines, soldiers, and sailors joined by 550 Iraqi soldiers routed insurgent fighters, often in door-to-door combat in which Major Carabine had participated.
“When I first got in Baghdad, an Army guy told me that the lower level of violence was proof the ‘surge’ was working. I said, ‘Oh, here we go,’ but I kept hearing it.” On the morning after his arrival in the dark at Hit he walked from his quarters into sunlight and the sight of marines in tan camouflage uniforms who had “a swagger and intensity.”
“Now, it’s quite safe, but not safe enough,” he said. “They still go around in armed convoys.” The marines are trained to hold their weapons at the ready, hand on the pistol grip. They never stand with hands in pockets. “They are trained to engage,” Mr. Dayton said.
Anbar Province is Iraq’s largest, stretching from Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Its population is primarily Sunni Muslim. In addition to having been a conduit for foreign fighters entering Iraq, it became home to the group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, due, in part, to the lack of any other functioning government.
As recently as November, U.S. observers were saying the outlook was bleak for reversing the hold that insurgents had in the area. However, part of the surge plan of 2007 was to send 4,000 marines into Anbar Province to counter the insurgency. Since then, a dramatic ebb in violence has been reported.
Major Carabine offered an explanation this week by e-mail from the Marine Corps base in Coronado, Calif., to which he returned two weeks ago. The reasons behind the ebb in violence, he said, are the growing animosity toward foreign insurgents on the part of local Iraqis, as well as a strategy that encourages the Iraqi leaders, Army, and police to root out insurgents.
During his three weeks in country, Mr. Dayton lived with Major Carabine’s MITT team among members of the Iraqi battalion, whom he described as gracious and hospitable. “The Iraqi soldiers were great. They would have me in for chai. There were little powwows every evening with marines, bonding, building trust, drinking chai, eating with your hands and hubbas, flat bread.”
Despite the language barrier, Mr. Dayton said he got on well. “I’m used to mingling,” he said, recalling two wonderful weeks spent deep in the Amazon region of Peru among people he had been warned to avoid.
He went on Humvee patrols with the marines — “There was not a lot of hanging around. In and out. They never stayed long.” Mr. Dayton said he was not the first journalist to visit the outfit. “They had journalists before who shot in, got a sound bite, and shot out. The marines said they never had someone come out to really tell their story.”
For him, the story came down to “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” He recalled walking through the base one day and stopping in a vehicle maintenance area. “The head of the whole operation was a 21-year-old from Wyoming. They were rebuilding vehicles after they’d been hit by improvised explosive devices, I.E.D.s.”
The young marine spoke about the evolution of armor, the retro-fits. “At the end of the day, it’s young people doing a job and doing it well, if you remove the politics,” Mr. Dayton said.
Major Carabine’s team of advisers were older, in their late 20s and early 30s. Conlon Carabine turned 33 while Mr. Dayton was there. Mr. Dayton explained that the MITT team’s approach stressed cooperation, but with an edge. In the event of violence, the team would gather Iraqi police and Army officers along with the mayor and a religious leader.
Mr. Dayton attended one such meeting and described the atmosphere as tense. The marines brought their weapons in with them and local leaders were encouraged to see the wisdom of identifying those responsible for the violence. Mr. Dayton said it was understood that there would be consequences for a lack of cooperation, including disruptive door-to-door searches.
Major Carabine attributed the success in Anbar Province to “a strategy carried out by both the Marines and the Iraqi security forces there.”
“It primarily involves working closely with the local population to defeat the terrorist elements,” he wrote. “Many of those were foreign elements that were very harsh with the population and used fear to gain and maintain control in past years.”
“The local population was certainly fed up with the level of violence, and that is a huge factor. Once the people were convinced that they could remove the terrorists from their cities by cooperating with the Iraqi Army and Marines, then it was just a matter of months.”
Major Carabine is no stranger to urban combat. In November of 2005, then-Captain Carabine was a company commander in the city of Husayba, also in Anbar Province. After a daylong battle, he told a CNN reporter: “With the exception of 30 minutes, it’s been shooting or getting shot at all day.” When he first arrived in Hit, the marines were taking sniper and mortar fire daily.
The Marine Corps major graduated with East Hampton High School’s class of ’93 and from Penn State University in 1997, when he also received his commission as a second lieutenant, having taken the Marine Corps option from the Navy R.O.T.C. program. He has served three overseas tours: the first in Afghanistan and the second two in Iraq.
Mr. Dayton said that the biggest challenge now faced by the marines stationed at Hit and perhaps other parts of Iraq was articulated best by a sign posted prominently around the bases and barracks: “Complacency Kills!”
“You heard some guys talk of how they’d like to start patrolling without body armor. Not the guys I was with. You still have isolated I.E.D, rocket, or sniper attacks. The levels of attacks are much lower, yet you still see the flag-draped coffins being flown out on C-130s.”
Mr. Dayton said he would like to return to Iraq to continue his photographic record of the conflict.
Ellie
Embedded in history with a camera in hand
By Russell Drumm
(12/22/2007) The seed itself, the idea of taking his camera to Iraq as a journalist to get an unfiltered, firsthand view of history, took root in Ralph Dayton’s cotton field, a thousand acres in eastern North Carolina, on the day a Black Hawk helicopter set down there in the spring of 2005.
The idea began to bear fruit in November of this year as Mr. Dayton waited a world away in Iraq in the dark for another helicopter. It was to take him to meet Conlon Carabine in an outpost north of Baghdad.
“The main challenge for inbeds is the military travel,” Mr. Dayton said Dec. 7, just days after returning home from three weeks spent as an embedded journalist with a special Marine Corps unit in the Anbar Province of Iraq, from which Marine Corps Maj. Conlon Carabine had just returned as well.
“There’s no tour guide,” Mr. Dayton said. “You’re manifested when you need a flight to another base. You go ‘Space A,’ space available, standby. Then it’s show time. The helos go at night, after midnight. You wait in a plywood hut, completely black. You have a flashlight in your pocket. You’d be blind without it.”
“A guy comes out to the flight line. Two helicopters slam down. Someone from the flight crew with a glow stick checks the two-digit designation written on your hand in Magic Marker. The helo is airborne. The crew rearms.”
Ralph Dayton is a big man with the strong handshake of a farmer, which is what he was, like many of his East Hampton family members beginning in 1628. Major Carabine is from East Hampton too.
Several months ago, when Mr. Dayton learned that the Department of Defense was encouraging community newspapers to send journalists to the war zone to report on hometown soldiers, sailors, and marines, he approached The East Hampton Star with his plan to seek out Major Carabine.
Mr. Dayton had already sold his farm in North Carolina after 14 years of growing vegetables, wheat, and soybeans, first on 500 rented acres in Sagaponack before moving south to a much larger farm. “I was going to get out of farming by the time I was 50, but the year I turned 40, 2006, I had a grand slam of a year, and decided to get out. I had the option.”
The decision to sell was made, in part, because of a chance meeting. “I was surfing in Costa Rica and met a guy and his sister in a restaurant. He was a Black Hawk pilot just back from his first tour in Iraq, about to go on his second. He was from Norfolk, Va., specialized in extracting SEAL teams.”
Mr. Dayton said he told the man where his farm was and exchanged e-mail addresses. Back on the farm, it was not long before he got an e-mail from the pilot, who had taken an aerial photograph.
“He asked if it was my farm and would I mind if it was used in an exercise. I said it was my privilege to help. They did a pick-up-a-downed-pilot exercise. I heard their stories. They were in Iraq right after the initial invasion. I asked did they ever get shot at. ‘Every day,’ they said. I thought there were stories not getting out to the media. I felt an obligation. If I could, I wanted to add another layer.”
Before becoming a farmer, Mr. Dayton studied political science and history at New York University and earned a law degree from Emory University. He said he was always fascinated with first-hand accounts of historical events by “witnesses to history, people in the thick of it. In school I was a student of history. The most effective ways of documenting it were in letters, first-hand photos. Second-hand stuff gets contrived.”
Mr. Dayton said that after Sept. 11, he would go home after a day of farming and turn on the TV. “I never felt like I was getting the story.” He said he wanted to see with his own eyes what was standing in the way of “the biggest military machine that ever existed.”
The enemy’s level of resistance was obvious, he said, “no matter what your political view.” And he wanted to know how the U.S. military was adapting.
Before he could view the war up close, there were security checks, as well as a course on surviving hostile regions taught by a British firm in Atlanta. The course was recommended because abductions had become a kind of cottage industry in Iraq. “There was lots of first aid and videos on firearms and the damage they do, the different kinds of wounds.”
Mr. Dayton was headed for the town of Hit (“It’s pronounced ‘Heat,’ but the marines say, ‘Hit’ ”), where Major Carabine was part of a 10-man Military Assistance Transition Team, or MITT, headquartered at a former Iraqi Army base. The base was shared by the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, and the Iraqi Army’s First Battalion, Second Brigade, Seventh Division.
‘The levels of attacks are much lower, yet you still see the flag-draped coffins being flown out on C-130s.’
The trip to Kuwait City was made via Kuwait Airways, the Baghdad leg aboard an Air Force C-130, followed by several helicopter hops that ultimately landed him in Hit. “You know, I forced myself to process any potential fear at least a year before I went,” he said in an e-mail last week. “I had so completely dedicated myself to documenting this conflict that I just tried to be honest with myself and say, Look, if this is not something you think you can handle then don’t even go down this road.”
“To be honest there were times that I felt a gnarly fear-based kind of tension rising up in me, but I just said to myself, You’re as prepared as you can be. Just keep it together, don’t be afraid to ask questions, and press on.”
Mr. Dayton said the level of violence in Anbar Province had greatly decreased during the previous year following operation Steel Curtain, when thousands of marines, soldiers, and sailors joined by 550 Iraqi soldiers routed insurgent fighters, often in door-to-door combat in which Major Carabine had participated.
“When I first got in Baghdad, an Army guy told me that the lower level of violence was proof the ‘surge’ was working. I said, ‘Oh, here we go,’ but I kept hearing it.” On the morning after his arrival in the dark at Hit he walked from his quarters into sunlight and the sight of marines in tan camouflage uniforms who had “a swagger and intensity.”
“Now, it’s quite safe, but not safe enough,” he said. “They still go around in armed convoys.” The marines are trained to hold their weapons at the ready, hand on the pistol grip. They never stand with hands in pockets. “They are trained to engage,” Mr. Dayton said.
Anbar Province is Iraq’s largest, stretching from Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Its population is primarily Sunni Muslim. In addition to having been a conduit for foreign fighters entering Iraq, it became home to the group called Al Qaeda in Iraq, due, in part, to the lack of any other functioning government.
As recently as November, U.S. observers were saying the outlook was bleak for reversing the hold that insurgents had in the area. However, part of the surge plan of 2007 was to send 4,000 marines into Anbar Province to counter the insurgency. Since then, a dramatic ebb in violence has been reported.
Major Carabine offered an explanation this week by e-mail from the Marine Corps base in Coronado, Calif., to which he returned two weeks ago. The reasons behind the ebb in violence, he said, are the growing animosity toward foreign insurgents on the part of local Iraqis, as well as a strategy that encourages the Iraqi leaders, Army, and police to root out insurgents.
During his three weeks in country, Mr. Dayton lived with Major Carabine’s MITT team among members of the Iraqi battalion, whom he described as gracious and hospitable. “The Iraqi soldiers were great. They would have me in for chai. There were little powwows every evening with marines, bonding, building trust, drinking chai, eating with your hands and hubbas, flat bread.”
Despite the language barrier, Mr. Dayton said he got on well. “I’m used to mingling,” he said, recalling two wonderful weeks spent deep in the Amazon region of Peru among people he had been warned to avoid.
He went on Humvee patrols with the marines — “There was not a lot of hanging around. In and out. They never stayed long.” Mr. Dayton said he was not the first journalist to visit the outfit. “They had journalists before who shot in, got a sound bite, and shot out. The marines said they never had someone come out to really tell their story.”
For him, the story came down to “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” He recalled walking through the base one day and stopping in a vehicle maintenance area. “The head of the whole operation was a 21-year-old from Wyoming. They were rebuilding vehicles after they’d been hit by improvised explosive devices, I.E.D.s.”
The young marine spoke about the evolution of armor, the retro-fits. “At the end of the day, it’s young people doing a job and doing it well, if you remove the politics,” Mr. Dayton said.
Major Carabine’s team of advisers were older, in their late 20s and early 30s. Conlon Carabine turned 33 while Mr. Dayton was there. Mr. Dayton explained that the MITT team’s approach stressed cooperation, but with an edge. In the event of violence, the team would gather Iraqi police and Army officers along with the mayor and a religious leader.
Mr. Dayton attended one such meeting and described the atmosphere as tense. The marines brought their weapons in with them and local leaders were encouraged to see the wisdom of identifying those responsible for the violence. Mr. Dayton said it was understood that there would be consequences for a lack of cooperation, including disruptive door-to-door searches.
Major Carabine attributed the success in Anbar Province to “a strategy carried out by both the Marines and the Iraqi security forces there.”
“It primarily involves working closely with the local population to defeat the terrorist elements,” he wrote. “Many of those were foreign elements that were very harsh with the population and used fear to gain and maintain control in past years.”
“The local population was certainly fed up with the level of violence, and that is a huge factor. Once the people were convinced that they could remove the terrorists from their cities by cooperating with the Iraqi Army and Marines, then it was just a matter of months.”
Major Carabine is no stranger to urban combat. In November of 2005, then-Captain Carabine was a company commander in the city of Husayba, also in Anbar Province. After a daylong battle, he told a CNN reporter: “With the exception of 30 minutes, it’s been shooting or getting shot at all day.” When he first arrived in Hit, the marines were taking sniper and mortar fire daily.
The Marine Corps major graduated with East Hampton High School’s class of ’93 and from Penn State University in 1997, when he also received his commission as a second lieutenant, having taken the Marine Corps option from the Navy R.O.T.C. program. He has served three overseas tours: the first in Afghanistan and the second two in Iraq.
Mr. Dayton said that the biggest challenge now faced by the marines stationed at Hit and perhaps other parts of Iraq was articulated best by a sign posted prominently around the bases and barracks: “Complacency Kills!”
“You heard some guys talk of how they’d like to start patrolling without body armor. Not the guys I was with. You still have isolated I.E.D, rocket, or sniper attacks. The levels of attacks are much lower, yet you still see the flag-draped coffins being flown out on C-130s.”
Mr. Dayton said he would like to return to Iraq to continue his photographic record of the conflict.
Ellie