Chasing catastrophe, p.14
Chasing Catastrophe, page 14
That night, we embarked on another push north, driving all night long into the next morning. When we reached the Tigris, we rolled past a bunch of war-weary Marines camped out along the road near the bridge. They were dirty and looked exhausted, some eating chow, others sharing a smoke or relaxing on piles of their gear. Many waved at the camera as we went by.
As we got closer to Baghdad, the landscape started to change, becoming more urban and more crowded. We encountered real traffic, civilian vehicles crowding the road, and locals in robes and headdresses, some waving white flags. We headed off into the farmland on another recon mission. It was hot and dusty, and I did another standup, popped out of the back hatch. I looked and sounded miserable:
“This is by far the longest, hottest, dirtiest, most miserable day we’ve had so far in this embed process. We were up at 11:30 p.m. last night, left our assembly area and began driving. We were up all night long. We couldn’t sleep because we were inside the vehicle and you can’t get comfortable in there.”
We arrived at a sprawling Iraqi training center, about sixteen miles outside Baghdad. It was a long two-story building in the middle of a big flat area and reminded me of a horse-race-track pavilion. We followed the Marine scouts as they carefully approached and entered the building with their weapons at the ready, like a SWAT team making a forced entry, except the doors were all open or unlocked. Inside we found a picture of Saddam Hussein hanging on the wall but no signs of life. The Marines then began inspecting the rest of the base and found huge caches of weapons and ammo. I did another standup for a piece we’d edit later that day:
Behind me are bunker after bunker, most of them filled with ammunition, tank shells, mortars, RPGs, missile launchers, completely surrounding us here. If you look behind us you can see other vehicles with the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, and way off in the distance a large building down there that we checked earlier this morning with Marine scouts as we followed them in, and they found a lot of Iraqi uniforms and other types of equipment, it looked like a garage of sorts. Also it looked like they used it as a control tower for a firing range.
One of the things that struck me was how much of the munitions was simply left behind. The Marines weren’t equipped to carry it all and didn’t always have the time or ability to destroy it all. I have no doubt that some of it (or much of it) was used in the months and years ahead against U.S. forces occupying Iraq, including in the form of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or roadside bombs. They did take out some armored vehicles abandoned on the sides of the road, lighting them up with C-4 plastic explosives or the twenty-five-millimeter chain guns, and we heard rounds cooking off inside some of them as we drove past.
That night our gunner, Sergeant Gwaltney, spotted another Iraqi armored vehicle hidden in a field not far from us, and it was unclear if it was occupied. Captain Custis gave the orders to light it up, and Gwaltney fired numerous rounds before finally hitting and destroying the vehicle, which we inspected the next morning and determined no soldiers had been inside. (We later gave Gwaltney a hard time because his aim was a bit off.)
We also ran into some Iraqi locals that day who were friendly and welcoming, and a Marine translator was brought in so that the captain and others could have a conversation with them, to try to get intel and also warn the men not to approach or interfere with U.S. forces in the area. They shook hands but then we had to get back in the vehicles in a hurry. The captain learned of a friendly fire incident nearby, and we raced to the scene. A Cobra attack helicopter had mistaken one of Alpha Company’s forward deployed platoons for the enemy and opened fire with its twenty-millimeter Gatling gun, wounding two Marines, one of them pretty badly. They called for a medivac, and while we waited, the pilot of the Cobra that had mistakenly attacked landed and came over to apologize to the men he’d wounded, in one of the most moving scenes of the war I’d witnessed.
The platoon commander, Lieutenant John Bitonti, was pissed. Two of his men were hurt, and their LAV was damaged, riddled by the Gatling gun, some of the tires shredded and some of the gear strapped to the sides damaged or on fire. The safety of the men was his responsibility, and he stayed by the side of the more badly wounded man until the medivac chopper arrived and he was loaded into it on a stretcher. We later learned he survived his wounds.
It was another incredibly long, hot, and dusty day, and nearly a month into the embed, we’re growing very, very weary. As we rolled through some random farmland in what looked like the middle of nowhere, searching for the temporary command post (CP), Christian is in another funny mood, so I grab his camera again to record his impressions as we creeped along, hesitantly traveling down a berm barely wide enough for our LAV.
“Words cannot even describe just how dirty I am.” Then he uses some kind of valley girl accent and has a conversation with himself:
“Oh yeah when I was in Iraq I got really dirty, I was so dirty. ‘Oh really that’s cool it was dirty there huh?’ Nobody will ever appreciate or understand or know what an absolute tragedy this whole situation is. ‘Oh really you guys were dirty there? You guys were dirty? Oh, you didn’t shower? Oh that’s gross, wow.’”
At this point I pan over to reveal some farmers with a tractor standing in a group checking us out. It appears our driver is lost or isn’t sure which way to go next.
“Where the fuck is the CP? Do you know where the CP is? Which way to the CP?” Christian jokingly yells toward the men. Then he turns to me and deadpans: “They don’t know where the CP is.”
“I don’t think the captain knows where the CP is,” I reply. The driver starts backing up. “We’re about to go in this canal,” I say. Christian is losing it.
“Ohhhh my God,” he says. I pan down as he rubs his arm above his watch, brushing some of the dirt off. “Yup, it’s dirty time!”
The next day we made the very difficult decision to leave the 3rd LAR and join another unit. Saying goodbye was tough. We’d earned these guys’ respect and shared an incredible adventure. But we also knew a transfer made a lot of sense. We’d been discussing the possibility for days, once we learned that our guys weren’t going into Baghdad and instead were making a wide loop around the city and heading north.
Colonel Clardy didn’t really know or couldn’t share what their next mission would be but admitted it would likely not be nearly as exciting as what we’d find inside the city limits. The LAR wasn’t equipped to fight in an urban setting. It wasn’t their mission.
Getting to Baghdad had been Christian’s and my goal from Day One, and while we had bonded with our guys and felt a tremendous sense of loyalty to them and had reported some amazing stories thanks to their service and bravery, we felt we could contribute a lot more to the network if we made it to the capital. Public Affairs agreed and facilitated our transfer to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines (2/23), a big group of reservists out of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City nicknamed the Saints & Sinners.
Before we left LAR, we said our goodbyes to all the guys, including Colonel Clardy. I asked him recently if he was sad to see us go that day. He told me:
Yes. I remember you and I had a conversation at the side of the road. I had no idea what we’d encounter when we went north and you were determined to get to Baghdad but you were part of the battalion. You’d been with us for a while and we considered you one of us, back then and to this day, not just because you were with us but because you acted like one of us. You helped the Marines, talked to the Marines, behaved like you belonged there and they trusted you. It’s hard to earn a Marine’s trust. You have to earn that. You did, and at that point you became one of ours.
Looking back, I still believe it was the right move considering all that we saw and did over the next couple of weeks, but we also missed out on a huge story. A few days after the 3rd LAR dropped us off on the edge of the city, they rescued a group of American POWs, including Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson, the first Black female soldier ever captured in combat.
Colonel Clardy later told me we absolutely would’ve been there when the POWs were found and would’ve gotten the first images and interviews before the POWs were flown out to safety.
I couldn’t believe it when I got the call about what we’d missed. We were really bummed, but we couldn’t be in two places at once and took comfort in the fact that the LAR didn’t do a whole lot between the time they dropped us off and the time they rescued the POWs.
It would’ve been a stale few days, and we of course would’ve regretted not going to Baghdad, where we wound up seeing and reporting on many cool stories before finally heading home.
BAGHDAD
Meeting up with the 2/23 proved difficult. A Humvee picked us up at our designated rendezvous point, transferring our gear from the LAV to the back of the vehicle, and we made our way toward the 2/23 command post at a former Iraqi Republican Guard base in eastern Baghdad, but we had to stop and wait at the side of a road because the 2/23 was in the middle of a nasty firefight that lasted for hours.
Several of the Marines were wounded in the horrific exchange of fire, and it was near midnight when they finally returned to the compound and we could meet up with them there. We were welcomed by Colonel Rick Cooper, a southern California sheriff when he wasn’t serving the Marines, who informed us we’d need to be up again at 5 a.m. because his men would be headed back into town where the firefight took place to try to draw out the enemy and finish them off.
We slept on hard marble floors inside the main building and got up before dawn, got our gear together, and joined the Marines for what turned out to be a long, frightening walk down streets absolutely littered with spent shell casings from the night before.
This was one of our most dangerous missions yet and seemed absolutely insane to Christian and me. We were sitting ducks, walking amongst a battalion of reserve Marines spread out across a few city blocks, actually trying to draw fire from the windows and rooftops of the buildings around us. Colonel Cooper explained if any Iraqis were foolish enough to shoot at his Marines, they’d be revealing their position and the Marines would be able to kill them.
It turned out that this was the only one of the USMC’s nine reserve infantry battalions called to serve in the initial invasion of Iraq. Its members had been called up to Camp Pendleton sixteen months earlier, just after 9/11, to be ready to respond to any more terror attacks in the U.S., and after a full year, they expected to return to their day jobs. Instead, they were told they’d be going to war.
They’d been separated from their families for almost a year and a half and dispatched first to a base far from their homes and then to unfamiliar territory in the Middle East. Most never expected they’d actually be fighting overseas. They were teachers, cops, firefighters, federal agents, salesmen, even casino workers.
One guy designed costumes for strippers. Many of them told us they’d signed up as reservists for the benefits, spending one weekend a month at a base, free to live their lives the rest of the time, taking the risk they’d never actually get called up to go to war.
Many took pay cuts when they started collecting their military salary and some lost their jobs at home while they were away. But we found these part-timers to be as capable as any of the guys we’d been with so far, and we never heard any of them complain. They were focused and determined and had amazing stories to tell.
We passed craters in some of the streets, and spent machine gun cartridges and brass shells were everywhere. At one point, I called in and reported on our mission, and the anchors were incredulous at how dangerous it seemed. It was incredibly unsettling, and I’m not sure I’d been that nervous at any point so far, even during the firefight after we got ambushed. The streets were eerily quiet, and no shot was ever fired that day, but we were on edge the entire time, waiting for hell to rain down on us. We saw residents peeking out windows and some gathered in doorways. The Marines kicked in the door of one of the homes where shots were fired from the night before, and we followed them inside, but they found no one. Whoever had attacked them had shrunk back into the shadows.
We then made our way to a housing complex where Iraqi anti-aircraft guns had been parked between the homes and watched as the Marines explosives team disabled the weapons with C-4. We wound up sleeping in the dirt of an empty lot in the neighborhood, and the next morning saw action when some insurgents or local opportunists tried to drive off in a couple of Iraqi military vehicles that had been parked nearby. The Marines lit up the vehicles with a hail of gunfire, but the carjackers bailed and ran when the shooting started and apparently weren’t hit. One of the vehicles was a small box truck used to control surface-to-air missiles capable of taking out coalition jets.
Minutes later we found one of those missiles on the back of an Iraqi truck, which had a cool-looking green license plate with Arabic lettering that looked like “007.” I managed to remove the plate and stuck it in my pack as a souvenir to take home. Then I shot a standup, holding a large shell in my hand, walking past a disabled and ancient-looking wheeled vehicle with an anti-aircraft gun in the back:
“The Marines are also busy searching for weapons and ammo and finding plenty of it, including six of these anti-aircraft weapons and ten buildings packed with explosives in this one site alone. They say they also found a school filled with room after room of ammo.”
We then went with the company of Marines to the school and were astonished at what they’d found. Christian followed me with the camera as I walked the halls and revealed what was inside the room.
We’re now walking inside the school which has been secured by Marines with the 2nd Battalion 23rd Marines. This classroom, emptied of desks, now filled with cases and cases of RPG rounds, the rocket propelled grenades with the rounds inside, six of them inside each of those boxes, and over here [we walk into another classroom] another one hundred cases, all full of the RPGs, in fact here’s an open case right here, you can see what they look like, these things are lethal. They kill tanks, they kill armored vehicles, and let’s walk over this way because there’s another classroom over here that has even more ammunition.
[Christian follows me down a hallway to reveal the next stash.]
You can see over here some of it stored in the hallway here. Clearly Saddam Hussein and his men knew the U.S. forces would not bomb schools, so this is where they put most of their stuff and here’s another classroom just full of RPGs.
A Marine was standing inside so I did a quick interview with him:
“Sergeant, how dangerous are these rockets?”
“These rockets have been taking out some of our light armored vehicles, our hummers, our AVs, stuff like that. They take potshots at us with them from rooftops and they’re very dangerous, very dangerous to mounted and dismounted troops.”
“This is the last thing you want to see in the hands of an opposition fighter?” I ask.
“That’s right sir, it’s the last thing I want to see or any Marine wants to see, these are by far the most dangerous thing to us that they have, they can get them around very easily, one man can carry two or three of them, they can store them in rooms like this…”
After we finish shooting our story, the Marines say it’s time to head out. I’m shocked. “What about all the weapons and ammo in there?” I ask the commanding officer. “You’re just gonna leave it for locals to take?” I couldn’t believe they’d just walk away from all that firepower that could and probably would eventually be used against them.
He explained to me they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to pack up and haul it all away while completing the rest of their missions. It would also be incredibly dangerous. Any enemy fighter could fire into the building while they were there, and the resulting explosions would surely kill them all.
The same would be true for any vehicles used to haul the stuff. It also wasn’t feasible to simply blow up the school with all the munitions inside because it was in a residential neighborhood and would put citizens and private property at risk. Instead, the Marines trusted some locals to guard the facility and headed back toward base, stopping so their medics could treat some wounded Iraqis.
This was a completely different experience for us. We were now patrolling crowded city streets in Humvees, inside a city still bustling despite the conflict. Most Iraqis would stop and stare at us, and little kids would chase after our vehicles, looking for candy or other gifts. We knew danger lurked around every corner, but we were rarely challenged or shot at.
One morning, after sleeping in the dirt in a neighborhood of unfinished homes, we woke up to learn that the company’s NBC pigeon had been killed overnight, so we did a tongue-in-cheek story about it. I interviewed Major Tom West, a Beverly Hills police officer I became good friends with during my time with the 2/23. We fed the story back live using our satellite dish. I had the microphone in one hand and a feather in the other:
Before the Marines headed into Baghdad, each company was given a pigeon as an early warning sign to alert them if there might be a chemical or biological weapons attack.
Well, the second battalion 23rd Marines pigeon’s name was Kent after their former commanding officer. This was his cage but there was an unfortunate accident overnight and Kent is no more. Major Tom West is here to explain what happened to this very important bird.
“Unfortunately, we did suffer a casualty in the company,” Kent told me with a straight face. “Our first member of the company to be killed in action was a pigeon. Somehow in the middle of the night, an infiltrator came through our lines and got into the cage and devoured Kent.”
