Tuesday, November 09, 2004
dispatchesEmbedded in NajafThe twin torments of a departing reporter: survivor guilt and second-guessing.By Alex BerensonUpdated Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Tent C-5, a Dorm Room in the DesertPosted Monday, Nov. 1, 2004, at 1:59 PM PT
Life in Iraq is a hotter version of the movie Groundhog Day, an endless loop where time seems to have stopped. The sky is always blue, the air is always dry, and rain is as unimaginable as peace. A weatherman would die of boredom. (Just after Saddam was ousted, an English-language newspaper popped up in Baghdad, a cheery tabloid produced by American reporters hoping to profit from the reconstruction boom. I remember a forecast from September 2003: "Monday: Sunny, 42 C/108 F; Tuesday: Sunny and hot, 43 C/110 F." The newspaper—I can't remember its name—is gone now, like the reconstruction boom and so much else.)
I like hot weather, which is lucky for me since I spent August in Najaf, an Iraqi city that is home to the shrine of Imam Ali. The Shiites believe that Ali is the rightful heir to the prophet Mohammed, and they revere the shrine, which supposedly holds Ali's remains. I was there as a guest of the U.S. Marine Corps, as an embedded journalist.
The battle for Najaf started in early August, when a Marine unit new to the area confronted guerrillas loyal to Muqtada Sadr. A fierce battle ensued, and the Marine press office arranged for reporters and photographers to fly down to the Marine camp in Najaf, Forward Operating Base Hotel.
Despite the military's love of red tape, embedding is surprisingly casual, especially at the front lines, where commanders worry mostly about keeping their troops alive. We didn't have minders to watch our movements; in fact, the officers at Hotel seemed surprised when we told them we planned to stay a while. They found us a spare tent, C-5, in a cluster a quarter-mile north of their squat concrete headquarters building. The tents slept about 15 Marines each and were identical except for their colors—some khaki, others pale gray. Even the Marines occasionally mistook one for another. We distinguished ours with a water bottle at the entrance.
For the rest of the battle, C-5 was home. We had no running water, though we did have electricity for our laptops and satellite phones. After a couple days, the place looked like a dorm room, strewn with extension cords and jury-rigged electrical outlets. We also had a 6-foot-tall air-conditioning unit. Still, C-5 wasn't about to be confused with the Ritz. During the day, the air conditioning hardly mattered, and when the wind kicked up, the flapping of the tent's walls made me long for Dramamine. I soon discovered that I preferred being outside. Better 120 degrees in the sun than 100 in a canvas-walled oven.
As more reporters arrived and the tent filled up, I wondered whether we would get along. I hadn't shared a room with a stranger since my freshman year of college, and I hadn't lived in a tent since camp. But the situation worked out more smoothly than I expected. The rules were mostly unspoken: We're here to work, not sleep, so anyone working has the right to keep the lights on, although if you can write in the dark, you'll be greatly appreciated. Keep your voice down when you're on the phone (I'll plead guilty to violating that one). Smoke your cigars outside. Pick up your trash—the Marines aren't providing maid service. Don't try to eavesdrop on other people's feature stories. Don't wander around in your underwear. Basically, don't be a jerk, and respect everyone else's privacy as much as possible. I wouldn't say we became best friends, but considering that we lived and worked within arm's length, we got along reasonably well.
After a few days, more embeds arrived, including crews from CNN and Fox, about a dozen people in all. I wondered what we would do if more cable outlets or the networks arrived with their mountains of gear. I needn't have worried. No one else bothered to come. The average Paris Hilton book signing gets more coverage.
The light turnout highlighted just how weak U.S. coverage of the war has become. Part of the problem, of course, is that working in Iraq is so dangerous. I had a close call in Najaf at the hands of a Shiite mob—microscopically close, as a Marine major put it—and I am hardly the only American reporter in that category. In a country where every Westerner is a walking ransom, even driving the streets in daylight is dangerous. So the war is fading off front pages and TV screens, leaving a vacuum filled with rumors, spin, and misinformation.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Marines Don't Want Press, They Want Good PressPosted Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 12:53 PM PT
The funniest, blackest moment of the month came after a funeral for two soldiers—Spc. Mark Zapata, of Edinburg, Texas; and 2nd Lt. Mike Goins, of Copperas Cove, Texas—who were killed when a guerrilla fighter jumped onto their tank and shot them through its open hatch. I hadn't seen a full military funeral before; they are tightly scripted but moving nonetheless. After friends of the men delivered eulogies, the commander of their squad read roll call.
"Pvt. Jones?"
"Present."
"Spc. Ramirez?"
"Present."
"Spc. Zapata?"
"Spc. Zapata?"
Then, for the third and final time, "Spc. Zapata?"
Despite myself, I hoped to hear a voice and not the silence that followed.
The difficulty came at the end of the ceremony, after the hymns and 21-gun salutes. There are no caskets at military funerals, because the bodies are sent home. The dead are represented by a pair of boots and a helmet mounted atop a rifle. To finish the funeral, soldiers step in front of the boots and helmet and salute, one by one. With two companies of soldiers, more than 200 men, paying their respects, the ritual took quite some time. To cover the silence that accompanied the salutes, sappy country music was piped through the public address system—an awkward end to a touching ceremony.
About then, I mentioned to another reporter how moving I had found the funeral. "Yeah," he said. "But the music sucks. I hate it when they play stuff like this." Of course, I was thinking the same thing. But that didn't stop me from razzing him once we got back to the reporters' tent. Two guys died, and you didn't like the music? Did he have other suggestions about how the funeral could have been improved? Would he have preferred longer eulogies? Shorter? The battalion's commanders would surely appreciate his suggestions—they could be incorporated into future funerals. Oh, how we laughed …
We probably sound like a couple of heartless jerks. I would prefer to think that we were just blowing off steam—and, unconsciously, trying to keep a little psychic distance from the troops around us. On the battlefield, it's us and them, Americans and the enemy. We reporters depend on soldiers and Marines to keep us alive. And some of the people we're fighting are so savage that only a saint could stay neutral. Yet embeds sometimes have to challenge our protectors if we are to do our jobs right.
I felt firsthand the downside of being embedded after I wrote an article that the Marines didn't like. The Marines cultivate reporters, advertising themselves as less bureaucratic and tougher than the Army. The Marine motto is, "Every Marine a Rifleman," and even Army officers admit that the average Marine is a better fighter than the average soldier.
But the Marines have a love-hate relationship with reporters. They don't want press; they want good press. They don't like criticism, and they don't like talking about bad news. This attitude was worse than usual in Najaf, because after the first three days of the battle, the fighting was largely taken over by two Army battalions that had been sent from Baghdad as reinforcements. The Marines hated playing host to the Army and abhorred being stuck on the sidelines of their own fight. A couple of days after we arrived, the Marines stopped letting us into their combat operations center. They claimed that reporters might compromise the security of their missions, as if we were dumb enough to jeopardize soldiers' lives—and our own—by giving advance notice of attacks.
Then I wrote an article explaining how the Marines had escalated the fight against Sadr's guerrillas without getting approval from their higher-ups in Baghdad. The decision was hugely risky, given the importance of the Imam Ali shrine, which Sadr's forces were using as a base. The article infuriated the commanders at Camp Hotel, who stopped talking to me.
Under other circumstances, the silent treatment might have made my job impossible. Fortunately, it didn't matter much in Najaf, in part because the other embedded reporters were princes throughout. Though they suffered from their association with me, they kept me informed on those rare occasions when the Marines told them anything useful. And one of the Army battalions—the 1-5 Cav, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division—was also living at Hotel, and its officers were more than happy to talk.
The 1-5 commanders treated us like reporters, not spies. They gave us full access to their operations room, where a dozen officers sat at computers plotting artillery strikes and mapping suspected enemy locations on a giant flat-panel TV screen. Every day—sometimes every hour—they updated us on their battle plans, which changed as the fighting continued and the Iraqi government negotiated with Sadr.
War is politics by other means, or so I've heard, and during the battle of Najaf, politics and war were inseparable. As a military contest, the battle was no battle at all: the finest army in history against 1,500 poorly armed guerrillas. But the guerrillas had the shrine, and blowing up the shrine wouldn't have looked very good on Al Jazeera.
So the soldiers fought very carefully. The combat operations center had to OK the firing of any tank rounds that could land near the shrine; helicopter attacks and airstrikes needed even higher approval. Sadr's guerrillas took advantage of that by staying close to the shrine, where they couldn't be easily attacked. The delays that resulted cost some Marines their lives, though they were less dangerous for the Army. The Army's tanks and Bradleys offered soldiers protection that the Marines, who fought mostly on foot, did not have. Having the protection of a steel hull takes some of the sting out of being mortared when you can't fire back.
That caution extended beyond the shrine. From everything I saw, the U.S. military made a serious effort to avoid killing civilians, a task made easier because Najaf was basically a conventional battle with defined front lines. Most fighting in Iraq is sporadic, and civilians get caught in the crossfire. In Najaf, everyone knew that the area around the shrine was a combat zone, and civilians evacuated as American soldiers closed in.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: In Many Ways, Base Was More American Than New YorkPosted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 5:32 AM PT
The days blended together as the month went on. Every day another big attack was planned, then canceled. The battle slowed down in the giant cemetery where the fighting had begun, but it intensified in the south of the city. I popped on my flak jacket and headed to the front a half-dozen times looking for action, but I didn't find any. I started to call myself the Buddha.
Meanwhile, I tried to stay sane in the heat, which mainly meant trying to stay clean. The base had no running water, but near our tents were big wooden stalls topped by red plastic tanks. Three days in, I figured out they were showers, and after that, I tried to shower at least every other day. Because water was scarce, we were supposed to take "Navy showers"—rinse, turn off the water, scrub up, and rinse again. In cold weather, a Navy shower would be no fun, but in 120 degree heat, standing naked and covered with soap feels pretty good.
I didn't expect to spend close to a month at the base, so I had only brought one pair of pants and a couple of T-shirts. I washed my clothes every three or four days, but I'm naturally messy, and within an hour of putting on a new shirt, I was the most wrinkled and frazzled person on the base. By the second week, I had given up, and I traipsed around the base in shorts, T-shirts, and Birkenstocks. The other embeds gave me a hard time, telling me I ought to look less like a surfer and more like a reporter, but I decided not to care. The job was hard enough without wearing a sweaty pair of pants as I shuffled from our tent to headquarters or the chow hall.
Chow was surprisingly good, by the way. We always had plenty of food. Nothing too exotic, more or less what you would see at a Midwestern county fair: hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, lasagna, sloppy joes, fried chicken, fries, mashed potatoes, and the occasional corn dog. Fruit and vegetables too: melon, a salad bar, bananas, oranges, and apples. Dessert was blueberry cobbler, bread pudding, and three flavors of ice cream. Plus Gatorade, Slim Jims, trail mix, PowerBars, and all kinds of soda and juice. On Friday nights, they brought in steak and king crab from God-knows-where.
About the only thing we didn't have was booze. Budweiser showed up in the coolers one day, but the red-and-white cans turned out to be nothing more than a tease, near-beer. The soldiers bitched plenty, but I never heard anyone complain about the food. Anyone wearing a flak jacket in Iraq in August doesn't have to worry about counting calories. And I didn't get sick once.
I had never embedded before, and I found the experience of living on base disconcerting. We were in Iraq, and yet Camp Hotel was in many ways more American than New York. We spoke English and ate American food. No one ever left base, except to go on patrol, and Iraqis were almost never allowed inside. The base didn't get any supplies locally; military and Halliburton convoys trucked in every ounce of water and every gallon of gasoline. We burned our own garbage. We were in Iraq, and yet we could have been anywhere; we could have been in a biosphere on the moon.
And yet the camp had compensations, especially at night, when the sun went down, and the tents and tanks and guard towers glowed in the starlight. A half-dozen high-sided trapezoidal boxes were permanently parked just south of the tents. They were Marine personnel carriers, but in the dark, their strange shapes seemed like relics of an alien civilization left in the desert. Some nights the explosions of Marine artillery echoed across the base, and we could see buildings burning red where the rounds had landed 4 miles south in downtown Najaf. But the fighting generally slowed at night, after the insurgents learned the hard way that night-vision goggles gave American soldiers an insurmountable edge in the dark.
On nights when a big raid or attack wasn't planned, the senior officers slept, and captains and lieutenants ran the operations center, joking and waiting. The front lines have a camaraderie and a simplicity that does not exist at home; women (there are no female Marines at the front-line bases) and families and friends fade away, and survival becomes its own reward. Walking through the camp at night, another day done, I understood Robert E. Lee's famous quotation: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Whale Swallows Me WholePosted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 8:43 AM PT
Though the I-5 Cav, the Army battalion fighting in northern Najaf, long ago gave up its horses for Humvees and tanks, Robert E. Lee would have easily recognized its officers. The unit was commanded by Myles Miyamasu, a lean lieutenant colonel who never seemed to lose his cool or even raise his voice. His sole vice was smoking, so far as I could tell. Maj. Bob Pizzitola was second in command, responsible for overseeing the battalion's command center. He would rather have been at the front lines and told everyone as much at least three times a day, frequently in salty language. Pizzitola spoke quickly, clipping his words. One of my colleagues tried to get him to say "attrited," as in, "We attrited the enemy today," but he never pulled it off.
The man who had the job that Pizzitola wanted was Maj. Douglas Ollivant, the battalion's S-3, or senior field officer. Ollivant didn't seem as though he belonged on the front lines. He had taught at West Point, and he clearly craved the chance for contact with civilians; he showed up in the reporters' tent at night to talk.
Yet Ollivant was smooth and efficient under fire. I saw him in action the last night of the battle, as the tanks and Bradleys of the 1-5 rolled up almost to the shrine of Imam Ali. We had taken a position about 200 yards north, on a wide street that connected the shrine and the cemetery, with six- and seven-story buildings on either side.
With the electricity cut, the only lights were the stars and the golden dome of the shrine, illuminated by a generator inside. The guerrillas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The Bradleys—a combination tank/personnel carrier that is devastating in urban combat—responded with streams of 25mm shells that glowed red in the night.
When dawn broke, a half-dozen buildings were burning around us, yet the shrine stood unscathed. I will never forget that night, and my only regret is that I didn't have a camera. None of the soldiers did either, and the photographers were with the Marines, a few hundred yards west.
That fighting took place on a Thursday morning. The next day, the two sides reached a cease-fire, after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told Sadr to leave the shrine. And then I had my close call.
I had ridden down from the base to the front lines, the same position where I had been the morning before. The truce had taken hold. Iraqis walked freely from the shrine past the American Humvees. I decided that I would walk down to the shrine to see what was going on. I knew I was taking a chance, because I didn't have a translator with me, and I don't speak Arabic, but I didn't plan to stay long.
Unfortunately, a few minutes later, at the northwest edge of the shrine—out of sight of any American soldiers—I ran into the wrong guy. He decided I was an American spy, and things got very hairy very fast, cease-fire or no. Sadr's guys had watched the American military kill their friends for three weeks, and their blood was up. It's amazing how fast a mob can form. Beyond that, I'd rather not go into details.
But they got me to Sadr's office, and after another rocky hour, I was free. Inshallah, as Muslims often say: It's God's will. The whale swallowed me whole and spat me out; the knife stayed sheathed—who knows why? Inshallah. I say grace now at meals, when I remember.
And that was that. Groundhog Day ended. The cease-fire held. Sadr's guerrillas left the mosque, and the American forces pulled out of the Old City that surrounds it. We reporters said goodbye to the 1-5 and the Marines, the ones were talking to us, and looked for a helicopter north. Three days later, I was having a beer—actually a whole bunch of beers—at the New York Times compound in Baghdad. I never thought Baghdad would look so good.
Ten Marines and soldiers died in the fighting, along with several hundred guerrillas and lots of civilians—though exact civilian casualty counts don't exist. Still, the battle turned out to be a provisional victory for the U.S. military and the Iraqi government. Sadr left the shrine without blowing it up, and he and his fighters seem ready to join the political process.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Survivor Guilt and Second-GuessingPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
Even as the United States took a small step forward in Najaf, Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle went to hell. Western Iraq is now basically out of control. Unlike the Shiites, many Sunnis have no interest in politics or elections, which isn't surprising since they are less than 25 percent of the population.
The Sunni fighters fall into three broad groups: the Baathists, who are mostly secular and want back the power they had under Saddam; the local fighters around Fallujah, who are motivated by both religion and a desire for respect; and the Wahhabists, who are both foreign and Iraqi and who want a holy war. The Wahhabists are the most dangerous of the three. When I think of them, I can't help but think of a line from The Terminator, as Kyle tries to explain to Sarah Connor the danger she faces: "That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.
This strategy is risky, of course. If we go into the Sunni Triangle in force, the casualties will be high, and we may wind up alienating residents past the point of no return. The Shiites in the south may decide to revolt as well. In that case, American forces will be facing a full-scale national insurrection. But I don't think the Shiites will rebel; they know that the Wahhabists and Baathists are not their friends. In any case, our military may have no choice but to act. The insurgents have the initiative now, and Iraqis who are on the fence may go to their side—out of fear, out of anger at the chaos we have brought, or simply to make a buck—unless they believe that the United States can turn things around.
The United States could also just pull out. But that would probably provoke a civil war, as the Sunnis and the Shiites scrap for control and the Kurds declare the north independent. In the worst-case scenario, a regional war might follow, as the Iranians step in to help the Shiites and the Turks try to crush the Kurds.
I left Baghdad about 10 days after I got back from Najaf. I was exhausted, but a lot of me wishes that I had stayed longer. That reaction may seem surprising, but many reporters are sorry to leave. The story is so important. If Iraq collapses, the Middle East will move much closer to chaos. Also, I had survivor guilt: Why should I get to leave when my friends—reporters, soldiers, or Iraqi staffers—had to stay? And I felt I had failed as a reporter, that I should have done more, written better, found the magic key that would show everyone at home the depths of the chaos I saw.
In that, at least, I know I'm being unfair to myself. I did my job as best I could, and if I didn't fully convey the truth of the situation, it was not for want of trying.
People often ask me if I ever expect to go back to Iraq. I don't know. We have almost reached the point at which the danger to reporters is so great that covering the story in any meaningful way is impossible. I know this much, though: Unless the United States intends to let Iraq fall into anarchy, I'll have plenty of time to go back. Because we've got a lot more war ahead of us.Alex Berenson is a reporter for the New York Times and author of the book The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. He lives in New York City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2108995/
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Tent C-5, a Dorm Room in the DesertPosted Monday, Nov. 1, 2004, at 1:59 PM PT
Life in Iraq is a hotter version of the movie Groundhog Day, an endless loop where time seems to have stopped. The sky is always blue, the air is always dry, and rain is as unimaginable as peace. A weatherman would die of boredom. (Just after Saddam was ousted, an English-language newspaper popped up in Baghdad, a cheery tabloid produced by American reporters hoping to profit from the reconstruction boom. I remember a forecast from September 2003: "Monday: Sunny, 42 C/108 F; Tuesday: Sunny and hot, 43 C/110 F." The newspaper—I can't remember its name—is gone now, like the reconstruction boom and so much else.)
I like hot weather, which is lucky for me since I spent August in Najaf, an Iraqi city that is home to the shrine of Imam Ali. The Shiites believe that Ali is the rightful heir to the prophet Mohammed, and they revere the shrine, which supposedly holds Ali's remains. I was there as a guest of the U.S. Marine Corps, as an embedded journalist.
The battle for Najaf started in early August, when a Marine unit new to the area confronted guerrillas loyal to Muqtada Sadr. A fierce battle ensued, and the Marine press office arranged for reporters and photographers to fly down to the Marine camp in Najaf, Forward Operating Base Hotel.
Despite the military's love of red tape, embedding is surprisingly casual, especially at the front lines, where commanders worry mostly about keeping their troops alive. We didn't have minders to watch our movements; in fact, the officers at Hotel seemed surprised when we told them we planned to stay a while. They found us a spare tent, C-5, in a cluster a quarter-mile north of their squat concrete headquarters building. The tents slept about 15 Marines each and were identical except for their colors—some khaki, others pale gray. Even the Marines occasionally mistook one for another. We distinguished ours with a water bottle at the entrance.
For the rest of the battle, C-5 was home. We had no running water, though we did have electricity for our laptops and satellite phones. After a couple days, the place looked like a dorm room, strewn with extension cords and jury-rigged electrical outlets. We also had a 6-foot-tall air-conditioning unit. Still, C-5 wasn't about to be confused with the Ritz. During the day, the air conditioning hardly mattered, and when the wind kicked up, the flapping of the tent's walls made me long for Dramamine. I soon discovered that I preferred being outside. Better 120 degrees in the sun than 100 in a canvas-walled oven.
As more reporters arrived and the tent filled up, I wondered whether we would get along. I hadn't shared a room with a stranger since my freshman year of college, and I hadn't lived in a tent since camp. But the situation worked out more smoothly than I expected. The rules were mostly unspoken: We're here to work, not sleep, so anyone working has the right to keep the lights on, although if you can write in the dark, you'll be greatly appreciated. Keep your voice down when you're on the phone (I'll plead guilty to violating that one). Smoke your cigars outside. Pick up your trash—the Marines aren't providing maid service. Don't try to eavesdrop on other people's feature stories. Don't wander around in your underwear. Basically, don't be a jerk, and respect everyone else's privacy as much as possible. I wouldn't say we became best friends, but considering that we lived and worked within arm's length, we got along reasonably well.
After a few days, more embeds arrived, including crews from CNN and Fox, about a dozen people in all. I wondered what we would do if more cable outlets or the networks arrived with their mountains of gear. I needn't have worried. No one else bothered to come. The average Paris Hilton book signing gets more coverage.
The light turnout highlighted just how weak U.S. coverage of the war has become. Part of the problem, of course, is that working in Iraq is so dangerous. I had a close call in Najaf at the hands of a Shiite mob—microscopically close, as a Marine major put it—and I am hardly the only American reporter in that category. In a country where every Westerner is a walking ransom, even driving the streets in daylight is dangerous. So the war is fading off front pages and TV screens, leaving a vacuum filled with rumors, spin, and misinformation.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Marines Don't Want Press, They Want Good PressPosted Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004, at 12:53 PM PT
The funniest, blackest moment of the month came after a funeral for two soldiers—Spc. Mark Zapata, of Edinburg, Texas; and 2nd Lt. Mike Goins, of Copperas Cove, Texas—who were killed when a guerrilla fighter jumped onto their tank and shot them through its open hatch. I hadn't seen a full military funeral before; they are tightly scripted but moving nonetheless. After friends of the men delivered eulogies, the commander of their squad read roll call.
"Pvt. Jones?"
"Present."
"Spc. Ramirez?"
"Present."
"Spc. Zapata?"
"Spc. Zapata?"
Then, for the third and final time, "Spc. Zapata?"
Despite myself, I hoped to hear a voice and not the silence that followed.
The difficulty came at the end of the ceremony, after the hymns and 21-gun salutes. There are no caskets at military funerals, because the bodies are sent home. The dead are represented by a pair of boots and a helmet mounted atop a rifle. To finish the funeral, soldiers step in front of the boots and helmet and salute, one by one. With two companies of soldiers, more than 200 men, paying their respects, the ritual took quite some time. To cover the silence that accompanied the salutes, sappy country music was piped through the public address system—an awkward end to a touching ceremony.
About then, I mentioned to another reporter how moving I had found the funeral. "Yeah," he said. "But the music sucks. I hate it when they play stuff like this." Of course, I was thinking the same thing. But that didn't stop me from razzing him once we got back to the reporters' tent. Two guys died, and you didn't like the music? Did he have other suggestions about how the funeral could have been improved? Would he have preferred longer eulogies? Shorter? The battalion's commanders would surely appreciate his suggestions—they could be incorporated into future funerals. Oh, how we laughed …
We probably sound like a couple of heartless jerks. I would prefer to think that we were just blowing off steam—and, unconsciously, trying to keep a little psychic distance from the troops around us. On the battlefield, it's us and them, Americans and the enemy. We reporters depend on soldiers and Marines to keep us alive. And some of the people we're fighting are so savage that only a saint could stay neutral. Yet embeds sometimes have to challenge our protectors if we are to do our jobs right.
I felt firsthand the downside of being embedded after I wrote an article that the Marines didn't like. The Marines cultivate reporters, advertising themselves as less bureaucratic and tougher than the Army. The Marine motto is, "Every Marine a Rifleman," and even Army officers admit that the average Marine is a better fighter than the average soldier.
But the Marines have a love-hate relationship with reporters. They don't want press; they want good press. They don't like criticism, and they don't like talking about bad news. This attitude was worse than usual in Najaf, because after the first three days of the battle, the fighting was largely taken over by two Army battalions that had been sent from Baghdad as reinforcements. The Marines hated playing host to the Army and abhorred being stuck on the sidelines of their own fight. A couple of days after we arrived, the Marines stopped letting us into their combat operations center. They claimed that reporters might compromise the security of their missions, as if we were dumb enough to jeopardize soldiers' lives—and our own—by giving advance notice of attacks.
Then I wrote an article explaining how the Marines had escalated the fight against Sadr's guerrillas without getting approval from their higher-ups in Baghdad. The decision was hugely risky, given the importance of the Imam Ali shrine, which Sadr's forces were using as a base. The article infuriated the commanders at Camp Hotel, who stopped talking to me.
Under other circumstances, the silent treatment might have made my job impossible. Fortunately, it didn't matter much in Najaf, in part because the other embedded reporters were princes throughout. Though they suffered from their association with me, they kept me informed on those rare occasions when the Marines told them anything useful. And one of the Army battalions—the 1-5 Cav, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division—was also living at Hotel, and its officers were more than happy to talk.
The 1-5 commanders treated us like reporters, not spies. They gave us full access to their operations room, where a dozen officers sat at computers plotting artillery strikes and mapping suspected enemy locations on a giant flat-panel TV screen. Every day—sometimes every hour—they updated us on their battle plans, which changed as the fighting continued and the Iraqi government negotiated with Sadr.
War is politics by other means, or so I've heard, and during the battle of Najaf, politics and war were inseparable. As a military contest, the battle was no battle at all: the finest army in history against 1,500 poorly armed guerrillas. But the guerrillas had the shrine, and blowing up the shrine wouldn't have looked very good on Al Jazeera.
So the soldiers fought very carefully. The combat operations center had to OK the firing of any tank rounds that could land near the shrine; helicopter attacks and airstrikes needed even higher approval. Sadr's guerrillas took advantage of that by staying close to the shrine, where they couldn't be easily attacked. The delays that resulted cost some Marines their lives, though they were less dangerous for the Army. The Army's tanks and Bradleys offered soldiers protection that the Marines, who fought mostly on foot, did not have. Having the protection of a steel hull takes some of the sting out of being mortared when you can't fire back.
That caution extended beyond the shrine. From everything I saw, the U.S. military made a serious effort to avoid killing civilians, a task made easier because Najaf was basically a conventional battle with defined front lines. Most fighting in Iraq is sporadic, and civilians get caught in the crossfire. In Najaf, everyone knew that the area around the shrine was a combat zone, and civilians evacuated as American soldiers closed in.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: In Many Ways, Base Was More American Than New YorkPosted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 5:32 AM PT
The days blended together as the month went on. Every day another big attack was planned, then canceled. The battle slowed down in the giant cemetery where the fighting had begun, but it intensified in the south of the city. I popped on my flak jacket and headed to the front a half-dozen times looking for action, but I didn't find any. I started to call myself the Buddha.
Meanwhile, I tried to stay sane in the heat, which mainly meant trying to stay clean. The base had no running water, but near our tents were big wooden stalls topped by red plastic tanks. Three days in, I figured out they were showers, and after that, I tried to shower at least every other day. Because water was scarce, we were supposed to take "Navy showers"—rinse, turn off the water, scrub up, and rinse again. In cold weather, a Navy shower would be no fun, but in 120 degree heat, standing naked and covered with soap feels pretty good.
I didn't expect to spend close to a month at the base, so I had only brought one pair of pants and a couple of T-shirts. I washed my clothes every three or four days, but I'm naturally messy, and within an hour of putting on a new shirt, I was the most wrinkled and frazzled person on the base. By the second week, I had given up, and I traipsed around the base in shorts, T-shirts, and Birkenstocks. The other embeds gave me a hard time, telling me I ought to look less like a surfer and more like a reporter, but I decided not to care. The job was hard enough without wearing a sweaty pair of pants as I shuffled from our tent to headquarters or the chow hall.
Chow was surprisingly good, by the way. We always had plenty of food. Nothing too exotic, more or less what you would see at a Midwestern county fair: hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, lasagna, sloppy joes, fried chicken, fries, mashed potatoes, and the occasional corn dog. Fruit and vegetables too: melon, a salad bar, bananas, oranges, and apples. Dessert was blueberry cobbler, bread pudding, and three flavors of ice cream. Plus Gatorade, Slim Jims, trail mix, PowerBars, and all kinds of soda and juice. On Friday nights, they brought in steak and king crab from God-knows-where.
About the only thing we didn't have was booze. Budweiser showed up in the coolers one day, but the red-and-white cans turned out to be nothing more than a tease, near-beer. The soldiers bitched plenty, but I never heard anyone complain about the food. Anyone wearing a flak jacket in Iraq in August doesn't have to worry about counting calories. And I didn't get sick once.
I had never embedded before, and I found the experience of living on base disconcerting. We were in Iraq, and yet Camp Hotel was in many ways more American than New York. We spoke English and ate American food. No one ever left base, except to go on patrol, and Iraqis were almost never allowed inside. The base didn't get any supplies locally; military and Halliburton convoys trucked in every ounce of water and every gallon of gasoline. We burned our own garbage. We were in Iraq, and yet we could have been anywhere; we could have been in a biosphere on the moon.
And yet the camp had compensations, especially at night, when the sun went down, and the tents and tanks and guard towers glowed in the starlight. A half-dozen high-sided trapezoidal boxes were permanently parked just south of the tents. They were Marine personnel carriers, but in the dark, their strange shapes seemed like relics of an alien civilization left in the desert. Some nights the explosions of Marine artillery echoed across the base, and we could see buildings burning red where the rounds had landed 4 miles south in downtown Najaf. But the fighting generally slowed at night, after the insurgents learned the hard way that night-vision goggles gave American soldiers an insurmountable edge in the dark.
On nights when a big raid or attack wasn't planned, the senior officers slept, and captains and lieutenants ran the operations center, joking and waiting. The front lines have a camaraderie and a simplicity that does not exist at home; women (there are no female Marines at the front-line bases) and families and friends fade away, and survival becomes its own reward. Walking through the camp at night, another day done, I understood Robert E. Lee's famous quotation: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
From: Alex BerensonSubject: The Whale Swallows Me WholePosted Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 8:43 AM PT
Though the I-5 Cav, the Army battalion fighting in northern Najaf, long ago gave up its horses for Humvees and tanks, Robert E. Lee would have easily recognized its officers. The unit was commanded by Myles Miyamasu, a lean lieutenant colonel who never seemed to lose his cool or even raise his voice. His sole vice was smoking, so far as I could tell. Maj. Bob Pizzitola was second in command, responsible for overseeing the battalion's command center. He would rather have been at the front lines and told everyone as much at least three times a day, frequently in salty language. Pizzitola spoke quickly, clipping his words. One of my colleagues tried to get him to say "attrited," as in, "We attrited the enemy today," but he never pulled it off.
The man who had the job that Pizzitola wanted was Maj. Douglas Ollivant, the battalion's S-3, or senior field officer. Ollivant didn't seem as though he belonged on the front lines. He had taught at West Point, and he clearly craved the chance for contact with civilians; he showed up in the reporters' tent at night to talk.
Yet Ollivant was smooth and efficient under fire. I saw him in action the last night of the battle, as the tanks and Bradleys of the 1-5 rolled up almost to the shrine of Imam Ali. We had taken a position about 200 yards north, on a wide street that connected the shrine and the cemetery, with six- and seven-story buildings on either side.
With the electricity cut, the only lights were the stars and the golden dome of the shrine, illuminated by a generator inside. The guerrillas fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The Bradleys—a combination tank/personnel carrier that is devastating in urban combat—responded with streams of 25mm shells that glowed red in the night.
When dawn broke, a half-dozen buildings were burning around us, yet the shrine stood unscathed. I will never forget that night, and my only regret is that I didn't have a camera. None of the soldiers did either, and the photographers were with the Marines, a few hundred yards west.
That fighting took place on a Thursday morning. The next day, the two sides reached a cease-fire, after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani told Sadr to leave the shrine. And then I had my close call.
I had ridden down from the base to the front lines, the same position where I had been the morning before. The truce had taken hold. Iraqis walked freely from the shrine past the American Humvees. I decided that I would walk down to the shrine to see what was going on. I knew I was taking a chance, because I didn't have a translator with me, and I don't speak Arabic, but I didn't plan to stay long.
Unfortunately, a few minutes later, at the northwest edge of the shrine—out of sight of any American soldiers—I ran into the wrong guy. He decided I was an American spy, and things got very hairy very fast, cease-fire or no. Sadr's guys had watched the American military kill their friends for three weeks, and their blood was up. It's amazing how fast a mob can form. Beyond that, I'd rather not go into details.
But they got me to Sadr's office, and after another rocky hour, I was free. Inshallah, as Muslims often say: It's God's will. The whale swallowed me whole and spat me out; the knife stayed sheathed—who knows why? Inshallah. I say grace now at meals, when I remember.
And that was that. Groundhog Day ended. The cease-fire held. Sadr's guerrillas left the mosque, and the American forces pulled out of the Old City that surrounds it. We reporters said goodbye to the 1-5 and the Marines, the ones were talking to us, and looked for a helicopter north. Three days later, I was having a beer—actually a whole bunch of beers—at the New York Times compound in Baghdad. I never thought Baghdad would look so good.
Ten Marines and soldiers died in the fighting, along with several hundred guerrillas and lots of civilians—though exact civilian casualty counts don't exist. Still, the battle turned out to be a provisional victory for the U.S. military and the Iraqi government. Sadr left the shrine without blowing it up, and he and his fighters seem ready to join the political process.
From: Alex BerensonSubject: Survivor Guilt and Second-GuessingPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
Even as the United States took a small step forward in Najaf, Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle went to hell. Western Iraq is now basically out of control. Unlike the Shiites, many Sunnis have no interest in politics or elections, which isn't surprising since they are less than 25 percent of the population.
The Sunni fighters fall into three broad groups: the Baathists, who are mostly secular and want back the power they had under Saddam; the local fighters around Fallujah, who are motivated by both religion and a desire for respect; and the Wahhabists, who are both foreign and Iraqi and who want a holy war. The Wahhabists are the most dangerous of the three. When I think of them, I can't help but think of a line from The Terminator, as Kyle tries to explain to Sarah Connor the danger she faces: "That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.
This strategy is risky, of course. If we go into the Sunni Triangle in force, the casualties will be high, and we may wind up alienating residents past the point of no return. The Shiites in the south may decide to revolt as well. In that case, American forces will be facing a full-scale national insurrection. But I don't think the Shiites will rebel; they know that the Wahhabists and Baathists are not their friends. In any case, our military may have no choice but to act. The insurgents have the initiative now, and Iraqis who are on the fence may go to their side—out of fear, out of anger at the chaos we have brought, or simply to make a buck—unless they believe that the United States can turn things around.
The United States could also just pull out. But that would probably provoke a civil war, as the Sunnis and the Shiites scrap for control and the Kurds declare the north independent. In the worst-case scenario, a regional war might follow, as the Iranians step in to help the Shiites and the Turks try to crush the Kurds.
I left Baghdad about 10 days after I got back from Najaf. I was exhausted, but a lot of me wishes that I had stayed longer. That reaction may seem surprising, but many reporters are sorry to leave. The story is so important. If Iraq collapses, the Middle East will move much closer to chaos. Also, I had survivor guilt: Why should I get to leave when my friends—reporters, soldiers, or Iraqi staffers—had to stay? And I felt I had failed as a reporter, that I should have done more, written better, found the magic key that would show everyone at home the depths of the chaos I saw.
In that, at least, I know I'm being unfair to myself. I did my job as best I could, and if I didn't fully convey the truth of the situation, it was not for want of trying.
People often ask me if I ever expect to go back to Iraq. I don't know. We have almost reached the point at which the danger to reporters is so great that covering the story in any meaningful way is impossible. I know this much, though: Unless the United States intends to let Iraq fall into anarchy, I'll have plenty of time to go back. Because we've got a lot more war ahead of us.Alex Berenson is a reporter for the New York Times and author of the book The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America. He lives in New York City.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2108995/
