From NYC

Al Asad - Charlie Co. Memorial

Al Asad Airbase, Iraq
02/19/06

Charlie Company started preparing for yesterday’s memorial service more than a week ago. Junior Marines at Firm Base 1 gathered digital photographs on thumb drives of the three Marines killed in the February 6 IED explosion – Corporal Orville Gerena, 21 years old; Lance Corporal David Parr, 22 years old; and Private First Class Jacob Spann, 21 years old. Goofy or tasteless photos, ones with the guys waggling their tongues, flipping victory signs, or otherwise bugging out for the camera, didn’t pass muster with the Company’s senior enlisted man, First Sergeant Michael Wootten, and the officers selecting the portraits to be displayed at the ceremony.

Charlie Company staffers laid out the plan for the simple service last week while running final patrols through Hit and briefing the follow-on unit, a US Army battalion, with intell. and information on the town and the surrounding areas. Wootten rehearsed Charlie Company’s Marines for hours the day before and the morning of the service on this featureless patch of desert, called Camp Lima, here at the edge of Al Asad. His goals were flawless timing, technique, and precision.

The four Marines of the color guard marched until they moved as one. A staff sergeant drilled the seven Marines firing the 21-gun salute. “Concentrate. Say the ditty. Be intense and you’ll get it all together,” he told them. “One and two and three and four and grab and pull and push and grab,” the Marines chanted, narrating each motion of the process as they performed it.  “One and pull and one and port.”

“Movement on both Ps.” the staff sergeant told them. “You’re gonna pull the trigger on P, you’re gonna go back to port on the P of port.”

“With a magazine, blank rounds – Load!” shouted another instructor. “Stand by. Ready. Aim. Fire!” Crack, crack, crack, crack – four distinct reports from their M-16s. Not good enough. The Marines practiced, with and without ammo, until each of the three volleys they fired sounded like a single shot.

Wootten patiently fine-tuned the movements of the grunts arranging the symbolic displays of the dead Marines’ personal gear – M-16 rifle, helmet, boots, and dog tags. Plant the M-16’s bayonet in the sandbag just so and make sure it’s steady and secure, he told them. “Take your time, “ he advised. It’s not a race.

I feared Charlie Company’s officers and senior enlisted men would drill the spontaneity and emotion out of these young Marines before the actual event. The days were cold, the rehearsals long, and the activities repetitive. Turns out, the grunts were just saving up.

Captain Dave Handy, Charlie Company’s commanding officer, opened the memorial. “March on the colors!” The four Marines of the color guard - one bearing the American flag, one carrying the 22d MEU’s colors, and the other two flanking them with M-16s - glided across the hard, damp sand in unison. The Star Spangled Banner played over a crackly PA. The men stopped in front of a single Humvee parked at the center of the field and then pivoted to face a plywood board that had been propped against the vehicle’s grill. Three large color photographs of the dead Marines, relaxed and informal snaps of them in their battle gear, the selects from the First Sergeant’s edit, were mounted on the board.

“They earned the title Marine and they went forward into harm’s way because their country asked them to,” Battalion Landing Team Commander Lt. Colonel Drew Smith said from the no-frills wooden podium. “Corporal Orville Gerena, Lance Corporal David Parr, Private First Class Jacob Spann. US Marines. Good grunts. Loved their families. Served with BLT 1/2. Patrolled the streets of Hit. Put others before themselves. Brave in the face of danger. Cheerful in all weathers. Brothers in arms. They dared all and sacrificed all in the service of their country.”

“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them," read Corporal Daniel Castaneda, from Revelations 2. "They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”

Next, three peers of the dead Marines spoke. Haltingly, these three young men, who are not yet very well acquainted with death, offered eulogies that they had committed to scraps of paper. Lance Corporal Jeffrey McCarty gave the first, for Gerena, his team leader and friend.

“Sometimes he would sit there with me on post, even know he didn’t have to. Whether it be just talking about life, love or food, or just to shoot the shit. He was always there to listen.”

Lance Corporal Kevin Herren spoke about Parr, a member of his team. “The only regret that I have is not knowing him more on a personal level than what I did.”

Lance Corporal Damon Broussard, a serious and thoughtful Louisianan who at 28 is much older than the average LCpl., gave an evocative eulogy for Spann. “I was his team leader when he first got to the fleet and worked with him until the moment he was killed. I won’t stand here and tell you he was my best friend, but I will tell you that I really did like the man, and I respected him.”

“I watched him take shape, from an uncertain boot to a confident Marine…. It isn’t easy, and it takes courage to sit in a turret, partially exposed, and patrol the streets that are ridden with IEDs. Posting security on the roof isn’t the most sought after job, either, but it is necessary, and he did it no matter what came down on us and stayed motivated no matter what. Especially as cold and windy as it was. We would get off of post frozen, toes so cold we could barely walk down the stairs. And we would sit in front of the heater and talk about our plans for when we got home, plans that he will never have the chance to fulfill.”

“I will see him guarding the pearly gates, in the perimeter of God’s great kingdom. And when God calls upon all fallen Marines to fight the final battle between heaven and hell, Spann will be senior to you and me, and I will be privileged to serve under him as he served under me.” Broussard, sniffling and red-eyed, handed the microphone to another grunt, who read the Marine’s Prayer. It ends: “Guide me with light to truth and grant me wisdom by which I may understand the answer to any prayer. Amen.”

First Sergeant Wootten recited the Final Roll Call, beginning with an attenuated list of Marines present. “Here, First Sergeant!” each responded. “Corporal Gerena!” Wootten read. No response. “Corporal Gerena,” he repeated. “Corporal GERENA!” As Wootten snapped to attention, four Marines carrying gear representative of Gerena’s marched slowly and smartly to the sandbags laid out in front of the photos. They performed their ceremonial duties, as instructed and drilled, accompanied by The Marine Hymn. Same thing for Parr, then Spann.Each of the seven-round volleys fired during the 21-gun salute sounded like one big bullet piercing the silence – again, just as rehearsed.

The ceremony ended in just under an hour. The Marines of the BLT, over 1000 of them, filed by the displays, saluting as they passed. After that, grunts, in pairs, groups, and singly, approached the sandbags and kneeled. They prayed, snapped photographs, or just paused, closer to the spirit of the three dead men. “I’d prefer not any cameras on me,” Lt. Col. Smith said as he walked by. I turned away and turned off the camera.

The routine continues for BLT Marines here at Al Asad. An hour or so ago busloads of Marines were hauled over to Navy dentists for their periodic exams. Others have pulled working parties of some sort – a handful of Marines digs a hole outside the Weapons Company tent, either for punitive or practical reasons. Several are on fire watch, making sure the circus-type tents they sleep in don't burn down. The lucky folks are up on Mainside at Subway, Burger King, the Base Exchange, or the AT&T Phone Center. I’m going to catch the shuttle bus and join them up there, maybe even have an expensive latte at the “Green Beans” coffee franchise and just collect my thoughts.

ENDS

Hit/Al Asad Report

Al Asad Airbase, Iraq
02/15/06

Charlie Company has left Hit and settled into temporary digs at Al Asad, an enormous US military installation dug out of and into the western Iraqi desert. It’s safer here than Camp Hit or Firm Base 1, farther away from population centers from which anti-US fighters usually strike and then disappear into. The Marines have shed their flak jackets and helmets. They are cleaning their gear, doing laundry, getting haircuts, showering in well-maintained trailers, shuttling over to the Burger King and Subway on the Mainside of the base, and just generally enjoying the relative security here to the extent that higher will let them.

Charlie’s officers and noncommissioned officers are running the junior Marines through their post-Iraq paces. They’re accounting for the Marines’ equipment, checking hair length (no longer than three inches up top, shorter on the sides), and convening briefing after briefing, like Warrior Transition, a talk delivered by a chaplain that aims to prepare troops for the trip home. The basic message: combat stress and its symptoms are not a sign of weakness or unmanliness. Talk to someone if you feel it coming on, don’t just lock down the emotions. Otherwise, they’ll blow up all over you and your loved ones. Today three prolific and hardworking photographers from the MEU’s Combat Camera section, Sergeants Sturkie and Stephens and Corporal Vega, are shooting group photos of the battalion, platoon by platoon. Charlie Co. will hold a small memorial service in a few days for the three Marines killed in the IED explosion more than a week ago, Corporal Orville Gerena, Lance Corporal David Parr, and Private First Class Jacob Spann.

The unit that replaced Charlie got rocked even before all of Charlie’s Marines pulled out. The antioccupation forces, which had launched few head-on attacks against BLT 1/2 during their two-plus months there, uncorked on the new unit. According to senior Marines, the “bad guys” knew change was afoot, and they took advantage of the transition. An IED blast that seriously injured one US serviceman kicked off an attack that lasted hours. According to Marines who were there, the frenzy of bullets and rockets was the most intense they’d witnessed in Hit.

There's always tension when I settle in among officers and staff NCOs. (I lived with Charlie Co.'s command staff at Firm Base 1 and I am living with them hera at al Asad.)  They tend to be wary of the press, both for two main reasons: "operational security"  (they fear I - and journos in general - may report sensitive details about upcoming operations) and political/career concerns. Marines do stupid things all the time - sleep on duty, get caught with stuff they shouldn't have (drugs, booze, other peoples' belongings), generally just fuck off. (aAnd some talk to reporters about all of the above.) Officers and senior NCOs call these guys the "10 percent," the inevitable hunk of "shitbirds" in the ranks that's immune to USMC discipline. Such grunts don't reflect well on the Corps, and they make officers and NCOs look bad, so higher-ups would rather their cock-ups stay private. There are also more serious incidents higher would rather we journos didn't hear about or witness, the operational mistakes that sometimes have tragic results. Lower-ranking Marines talk pretty casually about such things - "lighting up" a vehicle that wouldn't stop at a checkpoint, killing the unarmed occupants, for example, (which has happened). Higher-ranking folks seldom do.

I could fill several books with straight information and undigested stuff but I am still struggling to make sense of it all. I won't, I know, but I will try. I marvel - and sometimes cringe - at the Marines and their strenuous daily efforts to impose rigid American paradigms on this shattered and foreign city and country. A sniper shoots at Marines returning to the firm base from a four-hour patrol, as happened a few days ago. No one sees him, so the Marines round up all the MAMs - military-age males - in the vicinity of the shooting, cuff them, and then interrogate them through a non-Iraqi translator with a loose grasp of English, and whose heavily accented Arabic locals must strain to understand. The grunts treat the "PUCs" - persons under control - rudely and roughly, wrestling them to the ground and cursing them, but they don't hit the men. I feel as if I am watching a bunch of teenagers executing an arrest after watching a season of Cops or Starsky and Hutch reruns. It seems absurd and counterproductive, and such behavior appears to me to bruise Iraqi hearts and minds, not heal them.

The agitated Marines then test the PUCs for gunpowder residue by swabbing their hands and faces with a little patch of adhesive plastic. No residue. They release the men, search a few homes, scaring the shit out of kids and adults, and come up empty handed. The shooter - insurgent, terrorist, bored schmuck, whomever – has disappeared, trailing nothing but a handful of bullet casings. The patrol heads back into base and the next one goes out. Business as usual. The follow-on unit and the citizens of Hit inherit the fallout, as nasty or benign as it may be. But that’s just this civilian’s opinion.

Charlie Co.’s First Sergeant, Michael Wootten, gathers his 200-some odd Marines this morning outside their tents here at Al Asad. The fierce rain that started late last night peters off and the sun rises through abundant clouds.

“There’s one question that I want to address that was brought up already by first platoon, so you’ll have to bear with me,” he begins. Wootten’s commanding voice cuts through the drone of generators and the whipping wind.

“That was, there was no reason for us to be here. There was no reason for Charlie Company or BLT 1/2 to be in Iraq. Now, gimme a show of hands of who was drafted here.” No hands shoot up. “Not one of you was drafted, right? You volunteered to come into the Marine Corps, and I’ll tell you what that means to me and hopefully what it means to you. I joined the Marine Corps because it’s a warrior nation, because we are fighters. We don’t hold back when there’s a fight going on and say, Hey, you know what? I’d just rather turn squares out here in the ocean and hit port calls than go fight the fight. If you feel that way, then I invite you to get the fuck out when your EAS [Expiration of Active Service] is up and go join the Air Force. Oorah?”

“Er!” the men of Charlie reply in unison.

“I know it was hard for you to see the difference because you’re out humping that damn flak jacket three, four times a day, coming back in and collapsing in your rack in your own damn filth and sweat – and some of you who didn’t take a shower for the whole damn time we were out there.” A heartier “Er!” this time - and laughter.

“So it’s hard to see what difference you make,” Wootten continues. The Marine brought a measure of peace to Hit, he tells them, under the leaderhip of the Commanding Officer, Capt. Dave Handy. “Because I’m sure you heard, within 24 hours of you leaving, it went to shit.”

“You showed the people of Iraq the gift of freedom that we give them, because I believe we live in a nation that has everything. Some take the gift, some don’t take the gift. Some spit in our face when we give it to them, but still we offer it. But in no way, shape, or form do I want you to think that it was useless that we went in there because we lost three Marines there, and you’re disgracing them if you even think that. Oorah?”  The response: “Er.”

The First Sergeant then segues into administrative matters – plans for the upcoming memorial and arrangements for liberty calls, upcoming training operations, and the eventual float home to North Carolina.

ENDS

The Hit Report #2 - Smokewagon

At 02:33 I hear the first drops of rain pitter-pattering against the water-resistant shell around my sleeping bag. I wiggle deeper into the bag and go fetal to avoid the inevitable seepage. I will be wet before dawn,both from rain and condensation. This disquieting thought, as much the creeping clamminess, rouse me every half hour until reveille at 5AM.

By then the rain has turned into a soft drizzle. The sun won’t rise for two more hours, and even then it’ll be damn-near invisible.  It is 3 February, the second day of “Operation Smokewagon,” a sweep for weapons and antioccupation fighters through towns, desert, and farmland around Hit. 

The 230 or so Marines of Bravo Company and the 30-plus Iraqi soldiers accompanying them on this mission emerge from their bedrolls. Iraqi Army soldiers – “IAs” in Marine shorthand - rustle up Halal Meals-Ready-to-Eat around their own campfire. Marines rip open regular MREs - “Country Captain Chicken,” “Beef Teriyaki,” and “Jambalaya". Americans hang with Americans, Iraqis with Iraqis.

Calling this arrangement self-segregation wouldn’t describe it adequately, though both groups seem to accept the split. So many things separate the IAs and the Marines – language, culture, training, and equipment - that the division is understandable. It is still lamentable. Few IAs speak English well enough to carry on a conversation with a grunt, and I haven’t met a Marine who can speak more than a few words of Arabic, though each takes a language course before arriving in-country.

There are notable exceptions to the segregation norm. There’s the burly young enlisted Marine I met at Firm Base 5 who breakfasts regularly with IAs. He tipped me off to the fresh flatbread they bake and the sweet chai they prepare every morning. As the IAs chatted comfortably, baked and sipped, the Marine hovered around the hot oven. They didn’t seem to mind him at all, and they fed both of us.

Then there’s the earnest Iraqi soldier who seems to enjoy the company of grunts. He tolerates their condescension and crudeness. When a Marine combat engineer fumbled with a Soviet-style machine gun unearthed from a cache hidden in the dirt, the Iraqi soldier took the weapon from him and popped open the receiver with ease. Grudging approval slipped from the lips of several Marines.  “Good work, haj,” one remarked.

_____________________________________________________________________

For the most part, the relationship between Iraqi soldiers and American grunts is uneasy. It cannot honestly be called a partnership. The IA is almost completely dependent on the Marines. Americans have literal power over them – bigger and more lethal weapons; aircraft, artillery, and armor; robust stocks of food, vehicles, and logistical support; functional high-tech communications; vastly superior training; and stable institutions with deep reserves of human capital like the Marine Corps itself. At the most fundamental level, US Marines are backed by the most powerful government in the world, which has arrogated to itself the authority to attack preemptively those it deems enemies, anywhere in the world, any time.  Charged with their orders from the “national command authority” and their generals and colonels, the Marines sweep through the area with absolute confidence, searching homes and detaining "suspicious" locals.

For their part, the IAs have a sort of abstract power on their side – this is their country, after all - but they have no way to make it concrete. US Marines are the law in Hit; the US military is the law across most of Iraq, the Bush administration's reports about the profusion of independent Iraqi Army units and the autonomous government in Baghdad notwithstanding.

The IAs I have watched on missions during this trip and previous ones often perform more like new recruits or disinterested draftees than professionals. Most handle their weapons loosely – muzzles pointed every which way, sometimes at other IAs and at Marines. Some patrol as if strolling across a living room; others concentrate on the task at hand, though it appears they often don’t know what that task is because commands don’t necessarily trickle down to them. They are reduced to following the lead of the closest Marine.

At best, IAs provide basic support to the grunts. They are often called on to search homes alongside Marines. They ask occupants basic questions, but most IAs have trouble conveying the people's meaning to the Marines. Conversations devolve into mime and guessing games. (And real translators are in short supply. Same situation as last year -worse, in fact.) At their worst, IAs are superfluous to American combat ops, warm bodies Marines drag around because higher tells them to.

___________________________________________________________________

IAs and Marines load up their packs on seven-ton trucks as the sky brightens from black to an ashy gray. The rain falls heavily at some moments, lightly at others. No one avoids the wet. At 7AM the Smokewagon sweep fires up. The force slogs through brown fields and short grass for the next five hours. With each step each man creates a wet mud waffle around the soles of his boots.

A little bit after noon, I follow Staff Sergeant David Marino, his radio operator Lance Corporal Adrian Bobadilla, and Navy Corpsman O’Brien Chin down a road toward a long, low concrete building. There's a green expanse of grass growing in the wet field to the right of the building. We gripe about the rain and shift the weight of our daypacks and bulletproof vests from one shoulder to the other. My load is light compared to the grunts. Chin hauls a full combat medical kit; Bobadilla schleps a heavy-ass radio and batteries. They also carry automatic rifles and ammunition. And water.

Then, bursts of automatic gunfire erupt about 50 meters ahead of us, followed by a couple of heavy whumps, grenade rounds. Marino, Chin, and Bobadilla drop to their knees in the mud; I follow their example. Bullets whiz over us from many directions. “Cease fire!,” Marino yells to those shooting behind us, over us. “You got friendlies in front of you! Cease fire!” he shouts.

The shooting is loud and furious and disorienting, particularly to me. This is my first real firefight. I point my video camera at the loudest clump of shooting. I pan to my right toward Marino and his team as they fire rounds into the field at an enemy I can't see. I’m trying to concentrate on the action happening in the viewfinder while keeping my head parallel to the mud.

Marino and his team push up to a shed next to the farm building and tuck into its crevices. I follow, huffing air. “Bob! Comm!” Marino yells to Bobadilla, who unclips the radio’s handset from his shoulder strap and hands it over. Marino listens, and then hands the device back to Bob. They crouch then run into the field.

I point the camera toward to group of Marines and zoom in. One grunt stands over a man who lies prostrate. “You got another bandanna to blindfold this piece of shit?” a Corporal shouts to a squad mate.

I walk up to another group of Marines gathered around a 50ish man. A Marine cleans a bloody wound on the man’s scalp with bottled water. An Iraqi soldier walks up to the man, who lies on his back, and spits on him. Marines shoo him away.

“Sir, you got three dead right over,” Marino tells his commanding officer, Captain Moni Laube as they scan the field. One of the dead men has plastic explosives strapped to his chest, according to Marines on the squad radio. “He’s got C-4 on his chest,” Marino shouts. “You need to move them away from there.”

I walk over to the third body. “He’s dead,” a Marine says to me and anyone else who is listening. “I shot him right in the fucking face.” I see the hole.

Three “enemy KIA” but “there’s more that ran away," Marino confirms. "They can fucking come back,” he warns the grunts around him.

Someone spots something or someone moving in the canal among the reeds.  A wounded, possibly dead, fighter is either hiding or dying.Gunfire erupts again. I peer through the swaying stalks but see nothing. Marino and the Laube spot the body. Marino puts two final bullets into the man. All I see is a spray of blood after the second shot. That’s the fourth and final “enemy KIA”.

I look into the disfigured faces of the dead men and try to humanize them, to imagine who they might have been. I know nothing about them, about their lives or their cause. Understanding something, anything, about them, I think, might make me feel something about the terrible carnage around me. I struggle to conjure images of sons and daughters and wives, but I can’t. The Marine’s bullets, the dead men's eerily unreal gray skin and frozen expressions, plus my own ignorance make it impossible.

I crouch behind a berm with Marino and a squad of Marines.  “Thirty seconds!” Corpsman Chin shouts. Then, Boom! The Explosive Ordnance Demolition team has “blown in place” two of the dead fighters, one of whom wore the suicide the vest. (The other carried a grenade with the detonation pin pulled, Marines said.)  “Stand by for body parts,” shouts a grunt. I don’t hear anything hit the ground after the blast, but as I walk back to the farmhouse, I notice moist coin-size bits of pink, brown, and red glistening in the dirt. I identify one chunk as a piece of liver. Corpsman Chin corrects me. “That’s lung.

“You know what’s awesome, sir?” a Marine asks Marino when the shooting stops. “They didn’t get any of us.

___________________________________________________________________

I am back at Camp Hit, in the Public Affairs tent tearing into another MRE -“Cajun-Style Rice with Beans and Beef Sausage.” Operation Smokewagon ended after four days. Five hundred Marines from Bravo and Golf Companies plus 75 IAs covered dozens of kilometers. Thirteen weapons caches were found. Eight men were detained. Several other Iraqi men were released immediately, among them a fisherman who kept small bags of gunpowder in his home (more effective than a rod and reel); a 16-year-old boy who happened to be near the farmhouse during the firefight; and another 20-something fisherman and his son who were angling near a weapons cache the Marines dug up.

Major Dent of Public Affairs told me yesterday that a tremendous improvised explosive device blew up an up-armored Humvee earlier that morning. It destroyed the rear of the vehicle – “vaporized” is the verb two Marines I spoke with used. Two Marines died at the scene; one died later. The driver of the vehicle was not wounded critically. (Commanders are not releasing the names of the dead Marines until their families have been notified.) The day before that, five Marines were injured on a routine patrol by an IED blast. One of whom the Marines, Justin Reynolds, was injured seriously enough to be medevaced to Germany. Battalion Landing Team 1/2 and the 22d MEU will not return home whole. That's the reality of being a Marine, the First Sergeant from the company that lost three Marines told me last night. His tone was Semper Fi, but his eyes were still wet.

ENDS

Hit Report

Hit, Iraq
31 January 2006

I step through plastic tent flaps into a night that is solid black. To my left, cigarette ends glow orange and move like purposeful fireflies as two smokers gesture to each other. A pair of booted feet appears in a moving circle of light then disappears trailing a crunch, crunch, crunch. I look up. My pupils widen and I see stars that brighten the longer I stand here watching them. The steady whir of SUV-size diesel generators reminds me I am on a US military installation, however, close to nature but not truly in it.

It is calm here in Hit, a small city in western Iraq, at least relative to more dangerous places in Iraq like Baghdad, Ramadi, Taji, and Fallujah, and compared to Iskandariya, where I spent several weeks last year and the year before. I have been in Hit one week. The group I am embedded with, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, just passed its 40-day mark. No Marines have been killed nor have any of their Iraqi Army counterparts. “Contact” with the enemy has been minimal, which frustrates some oorah Marines, but most grunts I have talked to are fine with the lower threat level. 

There have been injuries, however, military and civilian, most of them from roadside bomb blasts. In the early days of the MEU’s deployment, a senior officer was badly wounded when a bomb blew up his vehicle. An improvised bomb tore up a Navy corpsman’s legs as he drove through the area weeks later. He was evacuated to Germany but surgeons couldn’t save his legs. A few days ago a rocket killed an elderly man in his home. The Marines didn’t fire it. They attribute the attack to insurgents, that unquantifiable mass of antioccupation fighters, sectarian killers, jihadis, and straight-up criminals.

Last night I sat in the Combat Operations Center of Firm Base 5, home to B (“Bravo”) Company of Battalion Landing Team 1/2, the MEU’s infantry arm, killing time. A quavering voice reported over the radio that a seven-ton truck had rolled off an embankment. Over the airwaves, a flustered corpsman gave an incomplete and tentative account of the situation. The officer at the other end of the conversation listened, then sternly told the corpsman to go back and get all the facts. Moments later, a senior medical officer broke it down to the officer in appropriately clinical detail – spine injury …  lacerated left ankle … possible broken pelvis…. Two Marines were medevaced to the US base at Balad. Their “injuries were serious enough to leave the theater,” the public affairs officer told me later. Two others suffered less grievous injuries and should return to duty in a couple of days.

Today an Iraqi soldier working with US forces and two kids got shot in an insurgent ambush, the Marines reported. Both children died.  As I said, the calm is relative.

1 February 2006

At 7:00 this morning the air is damp and a cloudy haze joins the yellow brown earth to the gray-blue sky. It’s not cold, it’s cool, low 40s, but the moisture creeps beneath my fleece and my long johns and chills me. “Are we gonna get rain?” I ask a master sergeant puffing a cigar on the “smoke deck” outside the public affairs tent. “Oh, we’ll get some,” he replies. I know the land needs rain but I am not looking forward to it. Rain turns the ground, which is equal parts gravel, soil, sand, and clay, into thick cocoa-color mud. Marine operations step off in all weather. That means sleeping in the mud and wet – no tents or shelter. I am not relishing the prospect.
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Saddam provided the structural guts of Camp Hit. It’s an old Iraqi Army training facility on a large plot of bleak land a few kilometers away from the nearest town. Block-long, two-story concrete buildings form quadrangles that the MEU has stuffed with tents, shipping containers, vehicles, and machinery.  Hesco barriers filled with dirt and stacks of sand bags surround most structures to protect against mortar and rocket attacks. Sensitive and secret areas are ringed with concertina wire, which makes nighttime navigation difficult and potentially painful for gormless people like me. There’s an abandoned and partially destroyed mosque at one edge of the camp and a constantly smoking pit where Marines burn garbage at the other end . Not much else to speak of.

As the sun rises, folks shuffle from their buildings toward the porta-a-johns, shitters in Marinespeak, toting rolls of TP or a tub of baby wipes. Others trudge toward the shower tent with towel and toiletries. A line of Marines and sailors forms outside the mess, a full-on kitchen in a trailer. They wait for the first of two hot meals that’ll be served today (lunch is an MRE or a cup of noodles from a care package). On this morning’s menu: a prefab omelet that’s about twice the circumference of a coaster; a heap of gummy hash browns; two sausage links (beef? pork? who knows?); and a bagel with a shmear of cream cheese wrapped in plastic. After being served, personnel file into the chow hall, a tent pitched on gravel with plywood tables. Beat-up freezers hold beverages. Among the choices are red and orange Gatorade, red Fanta soda, long-life milk (only banana and strawberry today; plain milk ran out a couple of days ago), and nonalcoholic Beck’s beer. This is worlds away from the Army’s deluxe KBR-maintained digs in Baghdad.

Accommodations at the MEU’s satellite camps, the “firms bases,” are even less luxurious. Firm Base 5, Bravo Company’s home, is housed in a former elementary school.  It’s a mini version of Camp Hit but with tighter quarters and fewer amenities. There’s no mess, per se. The Marines rustle up hot meals by heating vacuum-sealed trays of food in hot water. Their shitters are crudely modified plastic port-a-johns. There’s a flap cut out of the rear panel where an end of 50-gallon drum collects what is deposited. Each morning junior Marines burn the waste. One grunt gleefully told me how Bravo’s commanding officer, Captain Moni Laube, his executive officer and First Sergeant did shit-burning duty a few weeks ago.  That did a lot for morale, the young man said with an appreciative nod.

Farther out, there’s the Driftwood, a Bravo Company outpost that’s named for a seedy strip club near Camp Lejeune. Staff Sergeant David Marino, a 25-year-old infantryman I spent time with last year, and his lieutenant, the titular commander, run the platoon there. The platoon, about 40 guys (all men – women Marines can’t serve in infantry companies, but they serve in the MEU and are present in small numbers at Camp Hit) occupies the shell of a half-finished house. Wind blows through cracks in its porous walls. The floor is dirt. Every step stirs up a cloud of fine dust. Since Marines move constantly through the building, the cloud never dissipates entirely.  I spent a night listening to a symphony of deep lung coughs throughout the house and wriggling on my cot to stay warm. Crawling out of my sleeping bag the next morning offered as much relief as the few hours of sleep I stole from the night.

There’s no electricity, so grunts navigate at night with glow sticks and, occasionally, flashlights. They boil sealed chow trays in an ammo can over a fire, urinate into tubes dug into the ground, and crap into plastic bags that they burn.  I raised an eyebrow at the facilities but most of Marino’s guys tell me they love it – not the crapping into a bag, but the freedom of being away from senior officers who tend to be more demanding about certain Marine Corps regulations – principally hair length and beard growth – than Marino and Lieutenant Ryan Bumgardner.

Patrols step off from the Driftwood around the clock, as they do from all the MEU’s bases. Commanders at Hit determine times, duration, and route, but the patrol leader has some discretion about how and whom to search.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Marino’s up-armored Humvee chugs through the front gate with a small complement of vehicles behind it. His patrol route takes him through a stretch of desert where a roadside bomb exploded a few weeks ago. Marino climbs out of the vehicle to check the crater the blast made. The other vehicles in the convoy peel off to form a security cordon around Marino and the hole. The truck's noses point away from the crater; turret gunners aim their weapons into the distance. Marino explains that bomb-planters sometimes reuse these holes to lay more explosives, hence the periodic checks.

The convoy rolls through a small cluster of tidy, solid-looking homes. Marino dismounts to make a “house call”.  He asks a man in English if Marines may search his house. The man assents with a tentative gesture, so the combat gear-clad Marines enter, treading on carpeted floors with mud-crusted boots. No interpreter accompanies this patrol, so communication is almost purely gestural. Weapons? “La, la, la” – no, no, no - the Iraqi man responds before understanding the question. He then walks toward an armoire from which the Marines pull a single AK-47. The family is allowed to keep it for its own protection. Women huddle in one room with children. A Marine pokes his head in, takes a few steps inside, then exits.

I have witnessed more than a few dozen house searches in Iskandariya, Musayyib, Haswa and other towns south of Baghdad. I have heard women scream and watched children cry. I have watched MAMs - military-age men – glower at the grunts and Iraqi soldiers who rifle through their cupboards. Here, no one screamed, cried, or glowered, at least not that I witnessed. What I think I saw in these people's faces is resignation and wariness. I saw no obvious joy, though a couple of the kids looked curious and amused. Marines have orders to conduct these invasive and unpleasant searches; Iraqis must endure them.

I chose to follow Marino on his rounds because he is, in my mind, among the best and brightest the Marines – and the US military – have out here. I can’t say I have understood or agreed with all I have seen him do, but I know that he executes orders from “higher,” as logical, odd, or plain stupid as they may seem to be, with humanity. I have watched him address Iraqis with respect during many hours on the oft-attacked streets of Musayyib and here in Hit. And, just as crucially, I have seen him listen. I have watched other US servicemen perform these same tasks without Marino’s skill or compassion - young Americans armed to the nipples bullying Iraqi men who have no option but to submit. Afterwards I have felt as though I had peered into the eyes of the angry and emasculated young men who will be the next generation of anti-US fighters. Staff Sergeant Marino ended the encounter with firm handshakes and candy for the kids.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Beyond routine patrols, the MEU has launched two large operations, Hedgehog, a sweep for weapons and anti-US forces in Hit proper, and Koa Canyon, a 10-day sweep during which Marines covered roughly 70 miles on foot. They unearthed 45 weapons caches, the MEU reported, during searches of homes, palm groves, and desert. They seized thousands of artillery and mortar rounds, which they later blew up, and they detained over 100 people, screened them, and then forwarded those deemed to be insurgents to the US base at al Asad. Of those, 13 were transferred to Abu Ghraib, said Major Eric Dent of Public Affairs.

I have learned once again that media matter to Marines. The Marine Times, a publication not connected to the US government, ran an article quoting several Bravo Marines by name griping about the more onerous jobs they perform at the Driftwood - shitter detail, cleaning the showers, that sort of stuff. First Sergeant Evans, the senior enlisted man who oversees these jobs, was not amused, nor were the officers above him. Several ass chewings followed. (I didn't witness them.)

That night, my first at Firm Base 5, a pair of Marines was found with a handful of pills, ones not issued by a doctor or a corpsman. A Navy doc who examined one of the Marines told a company officer he exhibited “signs of intoxication”. From behind a closed door I heard the fallout - yelling and slamming doors - in the hallway. The First Sergeant, still smarting from the Marine Times story, sequestered me in the Combat Operations Center, the headquarters office, while senior NCOs inspected each Marine’s personal gear for contraband. (None was found.)

A day later I told the public affairs officer, Major Dent, what had happened. He shook his head. By confining me to the COC he felt the First Sergeant had turned a molehill into a potential media mountain. According to the embedding agreement I signed, no one can stop an embed from observing what happens around him, though the DoD does restrict what can be published and when (names of US deaths must be embargoed until first of kin are notified, faces of detainees cannot be published).

Though I chafed at the First Sergeant’s call, I understood it. I could have challenged him but I decided not to. And I found out what was going on by asking the company commander. He stared at me for a few long seconds then told me the basic facts. While the bust held some significance – if these Marines are found guilty, they will be kicked out of the service and may wind up in jail - the drug debacle seemed peripheral. Had they been intoxicated on post, or had their alleged inebriation resulted in casualties, a kerfuffle would, for me, have blossomed instantly into a hard news story

The MEU will leave Hit soon. A handful of these same grunts will return in a few months for their second, third, or fourth pump in Iraq. The Bush administration may be scaling down the US force, but Marines and soldiers will be rotating in and out of Iraq for years to come.

It’s now midday. I sit in the public affairs tent. It’s warm thanks to the industrial heater outside that blows warm air through a fat duct overhead. On one side, flak jackets, helmets, and camera gear cover a cot. On the other, two junior Marines write stories for the MEU’s website on laptops. A civilian photog from Reuters pulls at computer cords and wires. I type and nibble “vegetable manicotti” from a foil pouch, part of a calorie-dense MRE. And I pray ardently for sun over the next few days.

ENDS

Pimp My What?

12/17/05
An electronic "call for entries” from the Art Directors Club wound up in my inbox a few weeks ago. It features a youngish black man wearing a puffy red ‘fro wig. He’s dressed in a faux fast-food costume - part Ronald McDonald, part Burger King. With his right hand, he presents a glowing golden cube to the viewer. “Pimp My Brand” is rendered in bubblish golden type and floats above his head, the letters mingling with his Technicolor ‘do.

(Take a look: http://www.adcawards.org/images/85CFE.jpg)

I opened the email and stared. This is a joke, I said to myself. Aloud. Someone must have hacked into the ADC site and spammed me with this Stepin Fetchit-style gem. After all, how could any New York City creative living in 2005 be so backward as to trade in such stupid clichés? A nameless black man tarted up as a pimp for the Art Directors Club brand? (His uniform bears the ADC logo – in gold, of course.) It’s so circa 1930, so Aunt Jemima. What “creative” organization would be clueless enough to sponsor such work? But the campaign is for real I learned from the folks at ADC.

“I am not a, hypersensitive thin-skinned person of color,” I wrote in an email to officers and board members of ADC. “I am a regular-old black person, writer/photographer/filmmaker, familiar with advertising and pop culture.”

“Your email ad uses a hackneyed stereotype of black men to promote your program,” I wrote, indulging in a redundancy. (What stereotype isn’t hackneyed?)  “It is sad, and I think it speaks more to a discomfort with black men than an appreciation of us … American popular culture so often treats black folks and other people of color as symbols, not as individuals….”

I got a call from Brian Collins, ADC’s vice president, a few hours after I sent the email. He expressed concern about my concerns, and said he’d like to start a dialogue. Instead of "dialogue", I got a boilerplate email from ADC’s Executive Director, Myrna Davis.

“Thank you for taking the time to write to us about the ADC’s 85th Annual Awards Call for Entries,” Davis wrote. “It is important to know what our constituents think -- even, or perhaps especially, when negative -- and your concerned response deserves a reply. Our intent was not to offend, of course, but to comment on a trend that seems to be growing, that is, where mainstream brands are running into the arms of ‘urban culture’ and vice versa.”

Rappers and simulated hip-hoppers ("Show 'em my motto!") shilling for big corporations is a trend? Huh? It's old news. What's newer and more interesting is the growing number of hip-hop moguls - Master P., Puffy/Diddy, Jay-Z, 50 Cent – who have broken into the mass-marketing game and built multimillionaire-dollar empires. The ADC campaign curiously embraces the shills, the contemporary equivalents of Aunt Jemima, and ignores the moguls.

ADC chief Davis continues her defense of “Pimp My Brand” by citing the campaign's references to MTV’s show Pimp My Ride and to the Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali Esquire covers of the 1960s by George Lois. (Both covers are in a November piece posted on mediabistro -  http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a6115.asp)

Whoa! ADC’s collective ass flaps in the breeze here, though Davis struggles mightily to cover it. First off, to compare their banal "Pimp" product to Lois’s groundbreaking work is absurd and weirdly  self-aggrandizing.

The Lois covers Davis cites – the tight headshot of prizefighter Sonny Liston wearing a Santa Claus hat and the staging of Muhammad Ali pierced with arrows, after the martyrdom of St. Sebastian – are sharply nuanced, timely, and provocative works. The covers capture Ali and Liston as icons and as individuals; they are portraits of recognizable, accomplished, and yes, (to some) fearsome black men, but they are not caricatures. Both covers challenged Esquire’s largely white readership to imagine a “universal” (read: white) symbol recast as a black man.  The covers forced Esquire readers to look at themselves, at their prejudices and their privileges. Lois's covers challenged a racist status quo. The ADC ad reinforces it.

ADC's Pimp My Ride reference is also easily demolished. The MTV show uses “pimp” in its current hip-hop sense, as a verb, to trick out or detail outlandishly. ADC mashes up the term's current meaning with its dated blaxpoitation definition to produce a message that evokes Huggy Bear from Starsky Hutch. The only thing that resembles Pimp My Ride is borrowed name - and the race of the central figure in both products. But PMR’s host, Xzibit (né Alvin Joiner), ain’t no pimp. He presides over the pimping of rides. He's black, he doesn't speak Oxford English, and he's an empathic, emphatic and intelligent man.  Xzibit’s individuality shines through, even on a TV show as blatantly commercial as PMR.

Advertising, entertainment – all flavors of pop culture - reduce real people to symbols. Advertising in particular hunts for shortcuts to the fabled collective cultural psyche to titillate, inform, and, ultimately, sell. Creative advertising taps into what’s new and provocative and distills it. Derivative, lazy, and just-plain bad advertising recycles cliché and stereotype. ADC’s campaign slides into the latter category.

“Pimp My Brand” is a muddled conflation of superficial aspects of hip-hop culture – the lingo, the gold, the in-your-face posturing - with blackness. The model’s blackness is the ad’s salient feature. Otherwise, why not be truly ironic and use a pimply white teenager? This would actually mirror the appropriation of hip-hop by mainstream (read: white) culture. Because – and this is theory, not fact – black equals pimp to the ad’s creators. A black man isn’t a person, he's simply a convenient symbol for a basket of mainstream obsessions with blackness – street cred, gangstaness, pimphood. At worst, the campaign reflects a fear of black individuality. It betrays an anxiety about and discomfort with us as anything more than subjects of their imagination - or as their props. At best, it displays ignorance and laziness.

ENDS

Fallujah Calling

Brooklyn, NY - Jacksonville, NC

A few days ago I got a phone call from Fallujah. A Lance Corporal whose unit I was embedded with was responding to an email I sent him. I had learned from the mother of another Marine that Battalion Landing Team 1/2, the unit he had been attached to on his last deployment, was about to re-deploy, and I wanted to catch up with him before he left. The lance corporal was already “in-country,”serving with a different regiment.

I asked him how things are in Fallujah. “Same shit,” he told me in the oddly matter-of-fact grunt tone I had become accustomed to in Iraq - the same grind he endured in Iskandariyah, a city south of Baghdad where he had been deployed eight months earlier. Patrols were encountering more IEDs and VBIEDs – improvised explosive devices and “vehicle-borne” bombs, he said.

“My vehicle got blown up. Three of my Marines got hurt pretty bad,” he added. I told him to stay safe, and then signed off.

The first time I interviewed the lance corporal, a cocky 19-year-old, he was prone to speaking his mind and to punctuating his remarks with well-timed splats of chewing tobacco spit. This time he didn’t tell me much. I’m a reporter, after all, thousands of miles away - and not in the shit with him.

The lance corporal’s terse report piqued my interest. I logged on and starting surfing websites, including the Defense Department’s site, Defenselink. In minutes I had filled the gap the lance corporal left with a pile of grim facts.

Regimental Combat Team – 8 (RCT 8), the unit he’s attached to now, is smack in the middle of a robust and resurgent resistance. October has been a particularly brutal month in the Fallujah area for the Marines - and presumably for the Iraqi civilians wedged between them and the resistance forces. Each time I log on to Defenselink there’s a new  announcement of a Marine“KIA”(killed in action), either from RCT- 8 or from its parent unit, II Marine Expeditionary Force.

Sergeant Mark P. Adams, 24, a reservist from Morrisville, N.C., was killed during a combat operation in Saqlawiyah, a town just west of Fallujah, a little more than a week before my late October conversation with the lance corporal. Adams hugged his dad, Phillip Adams, so hard right before he left for Iraq, his father “thought his ribs were going to break,” Adams Sr. told Leah Friedman of The Raleigh News & Observer.

On October 21, days before the lance corporal and I talked,  RCT-8 suffered one of its worst moments in its brief deployment (they arrived only in September). Three Marines and one sailor – Corporal Benny G. Cockerham III, 21, Captain Tyler B. Swisher, 35, Lance Corporal Kenneth J. Butler, 19, and US Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Christopher W. Thompson, 25 - were killed near al Amariyah when an IED was detonated near their vehicle. Corporal Seamus M. Davey, 25, was killed the same day near the town of Haqlaniyah, also in a roadside bomb attack. Five KIAs in a single day.  The DoD offered no information on wounded – or on civilian casualties, if there were any.

“We’ve taken some casualties this month and every Marine and sailor knows that this enemy is trying to do everything possible to convince us they can survive—they cannot,” RCT- 8’s commanding officer, Colonel Dave Berger, wrote in a letter to families posted on the Web and dated October 24. “Overall, we are moving forward every week and will not allow the insurgents to set us back.”

But the insurgents continue to kill. Two more Marines from RCT-8 were blown up on October 27. Lance Cpl. Robert F. Eckfield Jr., 23, of Cleveland, Ohio, and Lance Cpl. Jared J. Kremm, 24, of Hauppage, N.Y., were killed by “indirect fire explosion in Saqlawiyah, Iraq,” the Pentagon reported in a typically terse announcement.

And again: “The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom,” said the next press release. “Sgt. Michael P. Hodshire, 25, of North Adams, Mich., died Oct. 30 of wounds sustained from an improvised explosive device during combat operations near Nasser Wa Salaam, Iraq on Oct. 29.”

Fallujah is a largely Sunni (and Wahabi) city about 40 miles west of Baghdad. It’s name has terrible resonance, both for US forces and for Iraqis who once lived in the now battered city, because of recent history as a battlefield.

Marines laid siege to Fallujah in April 2004 after five soldiers were killed along with four American military contractors, whose bodies were mutilated, then hung from a bridge. US commanders  believed Fallujah was a base for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda in Iraq’s commander.

Civilians were allowed to leave the city – but only after combat started. After less than a week of heavy fighting with antioccupation Iraqi forces, US commanders declared a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations.” A week later the insurgents who had evaporated from the city silently flowed back in. A second round of fighting at the end of April further ravaged the city. Hundreds of civilians were killed, according to sources such as Iraq Body Count.

The US military then turned over the city to an ad-hoc Iraqi paramilitary, the Fallujah Protective Army (renamed the Fallujah Brigade). Unfortunately, the group later showed a deadly propensity for shooting at Americans.

“The Fallujah brigade didn't work,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted to reporters at a September 24 briefing. US commanders “tried, and they're sorry,” he said. THEY'RE sorry, Secretary Rumsfeld said, not I or we but "they". The Fallujah Brigade, a dismal experiment, was disbanded quietly by the US in September.

And that was that – for Secretary Rumsfeld, though not for the then-senior Marine commander in Iraq. Lieutenant General James T. Conway told reporters months later that the April assault on Fallujah may very well have made the area worse, more hostile and more dangerous. On top of that, Conway told the reporters he hadn’t supported the assault, but he went ahead with it anyway. "We follow our orders. We had our say, and we understood the rationale. We saluted smartly and went about the attack." That is what Marines do. Semper Fidelis.

Washington's decision to halt the assault after less than a week frustrated Conway, he said, and other always-faithful Marine commanders on the ground in Iraq. "I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand the consequences of that, and not, perhaps, vacillate in the middle of that,” said Conway, blending candor with caution. “Once you commit to do that, you have to stay committed."

The perilous status quo settled over the city again. Fallujah became “a major guerrilla base used to plan and launch insurgent attacks,” according to Steven Metz and Raymond Millen, writing in the Spring 2005 issue of Parameters, the US Army War College’s journal. “By the summer, it was fully controlled by an array of resistance groups which coordinated their actions through a Council of Mujahideen.

Fallujah - the same city US forces bombed relentlessly in the fall of 2004 when insurgent activity escalated to particularly deadly – and embarrassing - levels. Operation al-Fajr/Phantom Fury, a ground assault, followed the air attack.

"When we win this fight -- and we will win -- there will be nowhere left for the insurgents to hide," US commander General John Abizaid said in November. "We will fight them until there are none of them left to fight." US forces cut off water and electricity to the city. Though aimed at insurgent fighters, the move drove out roughly 200,000 citizens. Combat decimated Fallujah.

“Public buildings, mosques and residences were subjected to assault by air and ground forces,” US Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), an M.D., and Dr. Richard Rapport wrote in The Seattle Post Intelligencer in January 2005.

“Public buildings, mosques and residences were subjected to assault by air and ground forces,” Mc Dermott and Rapport wrote in their withering piece. “The city now lies in ruins, largely depopulated, but still occupied by U.S. forces. Convoys sent by the Iraqi Red Crescent to aid the remaining population have been turned back. Diseases brought on by bad water are spreading in Fallujah and the surrounding refugee camps."

"The means of attack employed against Fallujah are illegal and cannot be justified by any conceivable ends. In particular, the targeting of medical facilities and denial of clean water are serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Continuation of these practices will soon confirm what many already suspect: that the United States of America believes it is above the law.”

The cost in human life and property may have been high – too high for many observers of US actions and tactics - but US commanders cautiously declared victory.“Based on some of the records that we've been able -- and ledgers we've been able to uncover, we feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency and we have taken away this safe haven,” Lt. General John Sattler, commander of I Marine Expeditionary Force, announced a few days later.But the battle for Fallujah wasn’t over – at least as far as the elusive insurgents were concerned. Again, they proved to be terribly resilient.

“Transformed into a police state after last winter's siege, this should be the safest city in all of Iraq,” Edward Wong wrote of Fallujah in the July 15, 2005 New York Times. “Thousands of American and Iraqi troops live in crumbling buildings here and patrol streets laced with concertina wire. Any Iraqi entering the city must show a badge and undergo a search at one of six checkpoints. There is a 10 p.m. curfew.”

Fallujah and the surrounding area, the focus of the US military’s best efforts to crush the resistance and build Iraqi democracy, is once again beset by violent antioccupation forces. Reconstruction programs have started, but they are hindered by insurgent attacks and intimidation. Marines hunker down at Camp Fallujah and launch patrols into the dangerous streets and alleys, hunting an enemy that engages them at will, then melts away. It’s a Sisyphean task, and the Pentagon hasn’t yet figured out what to do next, with strategy or tactics. So the Marines of RCT –8 fill the breach and Fallujans endure.

ENDS

Katrina & Rosie

My colleagues traveled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to cover a standard weather story, to do live shots lashed to utility poles as the wind savaged their coiffures. Instead, these reporters witnessed, in real time, a disaster peel back America’s economic and racial divide. I knew this divide existed before Anderson Cooper or Jack Cafferty told me it did, but it was good to hear these folks acknowledge reality.

I watched Hurricane Katrina approach and engulf coastal Louisiana and Mississippi from a hotel room in Los Angeles, courtesy of CNN and the networks. As a reporter, I wanted to be there. I felt I should be there. But I had invested too much to leave before gathering what I needed. I was already knee-deep – and heart-deep – in covering another catastrophe. So I stayed put in LA.

I was waiting for a phone call from a grieving widow. I had met her husband, Edgar Lopez, a 27-year-old Marine, in Iraq during the summer of 2004. I arrived in LA, his hometown, a day after the first anniversary of his death. Rosie, Sgt. Lopez’s widow, had agreed to sit for an interview, but I was having trouble fixing a time with her. I figured Rosie was having second thoughts about talking.

Rosie and I had spoken in person once already, at her in-laws, but the evening was awkward, and our conversation was brief. She seemed reticent, distant, preoccupied. The kids, Ana and Edgar Jr., had that frantic and unstable end-of-the-day energy. They scuttled about the living room, checking me out one moment, huddling with mom the next. Rosie sat on the couch next to a shrine to Edgar that his mother had assembled from flowers, candles, icons, and photos. In between mothering her beautiful and sensitive kids, Rosie talked.

Edgar and Rosie met in a Chicago club in 1998, Rosie told me. He tried way too hard to impress her - and she wasn't at first. But he kept coming. “He was very persistent,” she said with an unabashed smile – her first of the evening. “I think the persistence was what got me. That’s what I tell everybody. If he wouldn’t have been persistent, we would never have been married, never had kids.” Rosie's smile faded.

“I was always telling him he should have changed what he did – he was in infantry. He was always working, always gone, always training. But I supported it because he loved it. He loved his job. He loved his Marines.”

Edgar made it through the 2003 Iraq invasion. During his second deployment to Iraq a year later Rosie and the kids lived with Edgar’s parents . “We were celebrating Ana’s birthday. She was turning four and we were at the lake and everybody was really happy,” Rosie remembered. "I was going online to email him to let him know how her birthday went when the doorbell rings. And then his mom just screamed." The legendary – and terrifying – Marines in dress blues, the Casualty Assistance Call Officers, were at the front door waiting to deliver news of Edgar's death in an insurgent attack.

Rosie told me she's not political. But Edgar's death has pushed her into a tentative and visceral opposition to the war. “I figured we had no reason being there. And you know, the first time he was there, I mean, I thought that would be it. I never imagined that when he went back for a second deployment that he wouldn’t come back.” She started to cry. Ana, moments away from her fifth birthday, brushed away her mother’s tears, her eyes wide and worried.

I found the location of Edgar’s grave in the Los Angeles National Cemetery through the National Gravesite Locator (gravelocator.cem.va.gov/j2ee/servlet/NGL_v1), a website with precise burial information for thousands of vets and relatives interred at Veterans Affairs-run cemeteries. I videotaped his headstone and items left at its base - a family photo, a US Marine flag, a little plastic  Raiders helmet. I spent 30 minutes shooting, and then I just sat, fighting disturbing visions of the Marine, the father, the husband beneath me.

A thin older black man in a green uniform rolled up in pickup truck. He could have passed for one of my grizzled Virginia relations. “That’s not right,” he said to me in a measured but clearly disapproving voice.“What you’re doing’s not right. It’s disrespectful.”

What? I asked.

“It’s disrespectful taking pictures,” he replied.

“I knew the man,” I stammered. “I was with him in Iraq. I knew him. I was embedded with his unit in Iraq. I’m not making some Hollywood Schwarzenegger movie. ” I tried to explain. “I’m trying to honor his memory, his sacrifice.”

The man shook his head. “Were you in the service?” I told him no, but my father was in the Army. Once again he shook his head. Score one for his side, I thought after answering.

“You have permission? You need permission.” He pointed toward a building next to the front gate.

“This is a public place,” I responded, incredulously.

I had climbed into a senseless and unwinnable argument.  My explanations couldn’t penetrate his conviction that I was a scumbag exploiter. I packed up my gear mutely and drove out and away, down Wilshire Boulevard and into the anonymity of LA traffic.

I was pissed, truly upset, that this man was blind to me and deaf to my explanations. To him, I must have been one of those Hollywood low-budget movie types or a film student treading across graves he carefully tended to shoot b-roll for some indie flick.

One day before I flew back to New York I nailed down another interview with Rosie. She assured me that she hadn’t been ducking me. She was slammed, she said, with her new job, the recent move from her in-law’s into an apartment, Ana's birthday party preparations, and the onset of a new school year.

I sat Rosie down in her in-laws concrete courtyard. The kids seemed more at ease with me, though they hovered. Rosie was more comfortable - preoccupied, but more at ease.  I asked her what she would say to President Bush if she had the opportunity to meet him.

“I honestly don’t think I would have anything to say," she told me. “Nothing is going to bring him back, you know?”

More than a year after Sgt. Lopez was killed, Rosie still hasn’t told the kids their father is dead.  “I tell them he’s in the sky, he’s an angel,” Rosie said, “and that’s where I left it." But Ana senses that something is wrong. “I guess I want to be able to be strong enough to tell her without me breaking down, which I don’t think is going to happen."

As I write from the comfort of a Greenwich Village coffee shop on a gray October afternoon, Katrina’s aftermath, the horrific earthquake in South Asia, and the Yankee’s loss to the Angels for the American League championship crowd Iraq off the front page. But the war grinds on. Iraq is still a shambles. The Bush administration’s attempts to bang up a democracy like so much aluminum siding aren’t working. And Americans and Iraqis continue to die.

The 155th Brigade Combat Team, the Mississippi National Guard unit that took over from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in February 2005, has lost 14 men in attacks. (Fifteen Marines from the MEU were “killed in action” during their seven-month tour). Iraqbodycount.net estimates that between 26,457 and 29,795 civilians have been “killed by military intervention in Iraq." And IBC gets specific about what’s happened in north Babil: six people killed by gunfire at an elementary school in Muelha on September 26; six killed on September 25th by a suicide bomber in Musayyib, where I spent three days during the January election; one person killed in a suicide attack in Musayyib two days earlier; three blindfolded bodies found in Iskandariya. (See (www.iraqbodycount.net/database/.) And this is just for the last half two weeks of September, in one corner of the country.

ENDS

Hiatus Over

I have let this space lie fallow for too long. Today, I am a blogger reborn.

For the past eight months I have concentrated on turning video I shot in Iraq into a documentary. (Paying the rent by shooting stills and writing has also occupied many of my waking hours.) It’s been easier for me to handle the largely mechanical chores of screening and transcribing tape than it has been to tackle in print the enormity of my Iraq experience and the ugly specifics of the guerilla war and occupation. I have written only an article or two about embedding with Battalion Landing Team 1/2. (See: http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/storydetail.cfm?ID=2815) But I have thought and written enough to have acquired some perspective.

I have had a tough time reconciling the general absurdity of the American effort in Iraq with the moments of individual courage by Marines I witnessed. They don’t reconcile. Each day in Iraq is a tragic improvisation for US troops and Iraqi civilians, a Sisyphean enterprise.

“One of the most important battlefronts in this war on terror is Iraq,” President Bush told US military families during an August address. “Terrorists have converged on Iraq. See, they're coming into Iraq because they fear the march of freedom.” Actually, the bulk of the insurgency, over 80%, is Iraqi – this from the intelligence officer of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit – not foreign. (I doubt this has changed much since the briefing I got in late January 2005.) Terrorists converge on Iraq to attack the Americans who occupy it.

The bloody on-the-ground reality is upsetting enough, but almost as saddening to me is the resilience of the myths upon which the war and occupation rest  - nation-building, exporting democracy, Saddam’s connection to 9-11 – in the face of naked truth: the illusory foundations and inept planning for the war; the brutal insurgency it created; and a deep Iraqi resistance to foreign systems, and institutions however wonderful, introduced by Green Zone bureaucrats and 20-year-olds with guns.

Two recent books I read and reviewed brilliantly illuminated the US project in Iraq for me, Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War and The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer. Shadid gives voice and dignity to the men and women caught between overwhelmed US troops and the ruthless insurgents. Packer unearths the origins of the war in the paper and vapor trails left American neocons and Iraqi exiles. He documents the ineptitude, arrogance, and willfulness of some US policymakers and apparatchiks charged with creating and implementing Iraq policy. And it's clear from the book –  and his New Yorker pieces – that Packer listened to Iraqis carefully during his many visits.

But curiously, and somewhat dissonantly (cognitively speaking), Packer still supports the US effort to remake Iraq. That a poorly conceived and sloppily executed war of choice borne of cynicism, hubris, superpower desperation, and disregard for life – those of American service members as well as Iraqi civilians - can still be framed as a supportable undertaking is frightening.

Critics of the war must always acknowledge that Saddam was brutal to his own people and those of neighboring countries. I know this; Iraqis in Iskandariya and Musayyib, where a Saddam-era mass grave filled with Shia bodies was discovered, reminded me of this frequently. But the men serving President Bush – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and, to a lesser extent, according to Packer, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - had a history of ignoring the interests of the Iraqi people except when they dovetailed with their own designs. Saddam killed Iraqis, but other Iraqis died because America was a self-interested fair-weather friend that traded with and supported Saddam for years.

The administration launched an invasion based on fudged information without the force structure or strength recommended by senior US military commanders. It has created a spawning ground for terrorism and catalyzed extremists around the world predisposed to hate America for it policies not for its values. US values haven’t really informed our actions in Iraq. Where is the nobility in this? And, more importantly, where does one find the recipe for successful nation building in this swamp?

The myths we tell ourselves, as Americans, need to be reexamined and, where they fail to meet the smell-test of reality, retired. Iraq is not postwar Germany or Japan. Values, democratic and otherwise, can be supported but not installed over the heads of a country’s citizens, Iraq’s after-the-fact elections notwithstanding. Respect for and understanding of a nation's people , their culture, language, and history, are prerequisites for success, particularly in the post 9/11 world age defined by “asymmetrical warfare," globalization, and cultural-religious polarization. These are absent from US policy, and I fear it may be too late to manufacture them.

ENDS