thedrifter
12-26-07, 01:27 PM
Son of Former Embed Heading for Iraq -- Again
By Dennis Anderson
Published: December 25, 2007 10:00 PM ET
PALMDALE, Ca. Opening my Christmas 2007 email I found holiday greetings from an Iraqi journalist friend in Baghdad. The greetings came from Naseer Nouri of the Washington Post. Naseer is a gentle, witty former engineer who worked in the aviation ministry when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In post-invasion Baghdad Naseer encountered Anthony Shadid, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner for the Washington Post. "I caught the journalism bug," Naseer said.
Naseer, myself and about 30 other military journalists spent a week as fellows in February 2006 at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at University of Maryland, studying "The War at Home and Abroad." We listened to David Rozelle, Army officer and the first amputee to return to combat. We went to the Army War College. In the Oracle bar we raised a glass to hope. While we raised our glasses, terrorists exploded the dome of the Golden Mosque and the streets of urban Iraq ran red with blood for that year and into the next.
At year end in 2007, Naseer remains on post for the Post. His holiday greeting was cheery, just like Naseer. Five years into the Iraq war, Naseer is a living, working testament to hope for the human condition and the cool toughness and optimism it takes to work as a journalist in Baghdad.
If nothing else, optimism -- which always must be tempered with wariness on all things Iraqi -- is revived, even after all this human loss, Iraqi, American, and the Midas treasure horde of credit and credibility that's already been spent.
A little more than a year ago, many of the same journalists -- members of Military Reporters & Editors (MRE) -- gathered at the Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. The MRE journalists heard Gen. David Petraeus outline his blueprint for America's attempt to regain footing against the post-invasion insurgency. The plan came to be known as the surge strategy.
Recent reports from the New York Times and the New Yorker suggest the surge strategy is working. Is it?
The press office of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is relentlessly methodical about generating obituary tributes to slain troops with a California connection. Because so many combatants come from California, the most populous state, and because so many of the killed have been Marines from Camp Pendleton or Twentynine Palms, it meant the stream of death notices was dishearteningly steady for the past three years.
Anyone who crystal ball gazes the Iraq war quickly is proved a fool, but at the end of 2007 the stream of death notices has slowed considerably.
In the second half of 2007, we haven't had a "Killed in Action" notice for a local G.I. or Marine in the paper I edit, the Antelope Valley Press. Small mercies.
In April 2004 on return from my second embed with the California National Guard I returned home to news of our first combat loss, Staff Sgt. Allan Kendall Walker, 28, killed with Marines in Ramadi in the "Ambush of Echo 2/4," recounted by Joseph L. Galloway, dean of American combat correspondents.
There have been a baker's dozen of military funerals in our Antelope Valley communities since that first casualty. One of them, Staff Sgt. Jorge Molina-Bautista, was one of my son's recruiters. His kids took karate in a community class I helped to coach.
One of the local casualties -- Cpl. Ian Wesley Stewart, 22 -- was killed Dec. 10, 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah in which my son also fought. Cpl. Stewart's mother, Dawn, and father, Dana, run a Christian mountain camp for urban youth. Dawn Stewart wrote a Christmas message that never reached her son. It was published in our newspaper for Christmas Eve 2004, about two weeks after Ian Stewart's death.
In the Marines, Ian Stewart learned he was more of a gentle soul than he had supposed. He loved working with Iraqi troops with whom he shared danger and meals.
My son, Garrett, survived the second battle of Fallujah. The battle ran from a few weeks before Thanksgiving 2004 to a few weeks after Christmas of that year. In January 2005, Garrett was in a troop-carrying helicopter in a dust storm. The other big Super Stallion chopper flying formation crashed in the dust storm, killing 31 of my son's comrades, including some he had gone through boot camp with.
My son survived Iraq, but did not escape. Waiting for lists of the dead accounted for nearly the worst 24 hours of a parent's life. For 31 families, it was the worst news.
This past Thanksgiving, Garrett and I visited the family of one of his comrades who did not survive the retaking of Fallujah, the family of Cpl. Michael R. Cohen, killed Nov. 22, 2004, entering a house full of insurgents.
In 2007, the last Thursday in November, Thanksgiving, fell on Nov. 22, the anniversary of Michael's death. The Cohens of Jacobus, Pa., are among the more than 3,000 families to endure the ache of ultimate loss. Politics of any war aside, Allan Walker, Ian Stewart and Michael R. Cohen are among the mostly young who did, indeed, give the last full measure of devotion. In the way of combat veterans, my son loved the son of Aggie and David Cohen. We all must go on and Aggie relates the pain never subsides.
"I have thought at times, how can I go on? Then I hear Michael speak to me, and somehow, I continue," Aggie Cohen told me. "The pain never leaves."
In the three years since the focused carnage that engulfed an Iraqi desert city the size of my hometown Mojave Desert suburb, it is a fast-forward blur, punctuated by deaths of neighbors and friends -- some of them our neighbors' children. And in the time since my first embed assignment in the post-invasion spring of 2003, it really feels like a million years.
But even with the great number of stories about failure to find WMD and events that raise the specter of war crimes and misbehavior by Americans, troops who serve in Iraq will tell you, "We know we are helping ... we know we are making things better." In the hundreds of troops I've interviewed, from foot soldiers to general officers, the belief persists that accounts of valor or progress are underreported by media.
Not all of that is accurate, but to the troops it feels that way more often than not.
When the odds of continuous combat finally caught up to Ernie Pyle near the end of World War II, he was beloved of troops overseas and Americans at home not for stories about military failure and perfidy, but because he reported honestly about life for those caught in the miseries of death. Officers with a bit of history often wonder aloud where is Ernie Pyle these days.
My son Garrett got home safely, like other combat veterans, a young man made old. He consumed his first legally served beer seven months after the battle of Falluah.
An aspiring writer, last week, he decided to return to service. He joined the National Guard, with assignment to an M-1 Abrams tank company scheduled for a 15-month tour sometime in 2008. "It's not about politics, and it's not about a cause," my son said. "The only cause is serving the nation."
When that Guard company from Palmdale deploys, the Valley Press will cover it again, as the newspaper did in 2004 on the unit's first deployment to what the troops call "The Big Sandbox." As a military father and as an editor who counts the dead and reports the wounded, the end of such reporting cannot come soon enough.
Ellie
By Dennis Anderson
Published: December 25, 2007 10:00 PM ET
PALMDALE, Ca. Opening my Christmas 2007 email I found holiday greetings from an Iraqi journalist friend in Baghdad. The greetings came from Naseer Nouri of the Washington Post. Naseer is a gentle, witty former engineer who worked in the aviation ministry when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In post-invasion Baghdad Naseer encountered Anthony Shadid, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner for the Washington Post. "I caught the journalism bug," Naseer said.
Naseer, myself and about 30 other military journalists spent a week as fellows in February 2006 at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at University of Maryland, studying "The War at Home and Abroad." We listened to David Rozelle, Army officer and the first amputee to return to combat. We went to the Army War College. In the Oracle bar we raised a glass to hope. While we raised our glasses, terrorists exploded the dome of the Golden Mosque and the streets of urban Iraq ran red with blood for that year and into the next.
At year end in 2007, Naseer remains on post for the Post. His holiday greeting was cheery, just like Naseer. Five years into the Iraq war, Naseer is a living, working testament to hope for the human condition and the cool toughness and optimism it takes to work as a journalist in Baghdad.
If nothing else, optimism -- which always must be tempered with wariness on all things Iraqi -- is revived, even after all this human loss, Iraqi, American, and the Midas treasure horde of credit and credibility that's already been spent.
A little more than a year ago, many of the same journalists -- members of Military Reporters & Editors (MRE) -- gathered at the Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. The MRE journalists heard Gen. David Petraeus outline his blueprint for America's attempt to regain footing against the post-invasion insurgency. The plan came to be known as the surge strategy.
Recent reports from the New York Times and the New Yorker suggest the surge strategy is working. Is it?
The press office of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is relentlessly methodical about generating obituary tributes to slain troops with a California connection. Because so many combatants come from California, the most populous state, and because so many of the killed have been Marines from Camp Pendleton or Twentynine Palms, it meant the stream of death notices was dishearteningly steady for the past three years.
Anyone who crystal ball gazes the Iraq war quickly is proved a fool, but at the end of 2007 the stream of death notices has slowed considerably.
In the second half of 2007, we haven't had a "Killed in Action" notice for a local G.I. or Marine in the paper I edit, the Antelope Valley Press. Small mercies.
In April 2004 on return from my second embed with the California National Guard I returned home to news of our first combat loss, Staff Sgt. Allan Kendall Walker, 28, killed with Marines in Ramadi in the "Ambush of Echo 2/4," recounted by Joseph L. Galloway, dean of American combat correspondents.
There have been a baker's dozen of military funerals in our Antelope Valley communities since that first casualty. One of them, Staff Sgt. Jorge Molina-Bautista, was one of my son's recruiters. His kids took karate in a community class I helped to coach.
One of the local casualties -- Cpl. Ian Wesley Stewart, 22 -- was killed Dec. 10, 2004, during the second battle of Fallujah in which my son also fought. Cpl. Stewart's mother, Dawn, and father, Dana, run a Christian mountain camp for urban youth. Dawn Stewart wrote a Christmas message that never reached her son. It was published in our newspaper for Christmas Eve 2004, about two weeks after Ian Stewart's death.
In the Marines, Ian Stewart learned he was more of a gentle soul than he had supposed. He loved working with Iraqi troops with whom he shared danger and meals.
My son, Garrett, survived the second battle of Fallujah. The battle ran from a few weeks before Thanksgiving 2004 to a few weeks after Christmas of that year. In January 2005, Garrett was in a troop-carrying helicopter in a dust storm. The other big Super Stallion chopper flying formation crashed in the dust storm, killing 31 of my son's comrades, including some he had gone through boot camp with.
My son survived Iraq, but did not escape. Waiting for lists of the dead accounted for nearly the worst 24 hours of a parent's life. For 31 families, it was the worst news.
This past Thanksgiving, Garrett and I visited the family of one of his comrades who did not survive the retaking of Fallujah, the family of Cpl. Michael R. Cohen, killed Nov. 22, 2004, entering a house full of insurgents.
In 2007, the last Thursday in November, Thanksgiving, fell on Nov. 22, the anniversary of Michael's death. The Cohens of Jacobus, Pa., are among the more than 3,000 families to endure the ache of ultimate loss. Politics of any war aside, Allan Walker, Ian Stewart and Michael R. Cohen are among the mostly young who did, indeed, give the last full measure of devotion. In the way of combat veterans, my son loved the son of Aggie and David Cohen. We all must go on and Aggie relates the pain never subsides.
"I have thought at times, how can I go on? Then I hear Michael speak to me, and somehow, I continue," Aggie Cohen told me. "The pain never leaves."
In the three years since the focused carnage that engulfed an Iraqi desert city the size of my hometown Mojave Desert suburb, it is a fast-forward blur, punctuated by deaths of neighbors and friends -- some of them our neighbors' children. And in the time since my first embed assignment in the post-invasion spring of 2003, it really feels like a million years.
But even with the great number of stories about failure to find WMD and events that raise the specter of war crimes and misbehavior by Americans, troops who serve in Iraq will tell you, "We know we are helping ... we know we are making things better." In the hundreds of troops I've interviewed, from foot soldiers to general officers, the belief persists that accounts of valor or progress are underreported by media.
Not all of that is accurate, but to the troops it feels that way more often than not.
When the odds of continuous combat finally caught up to Ernie Pyle near the end of World War II, he was beloved of troops overseas and Americans at home not for stories about military failure and perfidy, but because he reported honestly about life for those caught in the miseries of death. Officers with a bit of history often wonder aloud where is Ernie Pyle these days.
My son Garrett got home safely, like other combat veterans, a young man made old. He consumed his first legally served beer seven months after the battle of Falluah.
An aspiring writer, last week, he decided to return to service. He joined the National Guard, with assignment to an M-1 Abrams tank company scheduled for a 15-month tour sometime in 2008. "It's not about politics, and it's not about a cause," my son said. "The only cause is serving the nation."
When that Guard company from Palmdale deploys, the Valley Press will cover it again, as the newspaper did in 2004 on the unit's first deployment to what the troops call "The Big Sandbox." As a military father and as an editor who counts the dead and reports the wounded, the end of such reporting cannot come soon enough.
Ellie