Reflections from the Hot Zone: Iraq, Part II

Phantoms of Fallujah

Note: Reflections from the Hot Zone is an essay that allows me to explore the more personal and emotional dimensions of reporting. It is not a daily dispatch, but a place for me to take a step back, think about the people I've met and the places I've been and try to bring into focus the larger picture.

Phantom Fury
FALLUJAH,

As members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment's Combined Anti-Armor Team and India Company dig in for the night, I listen to their pre-battle talk.

In the Humvee, Lance Cpl. Brandon Burns sits in the canvas sling of his Mark19 turret (a weapon that launches 40 mm grenades like a machine gun), scanning ahead and discussing the Old Testament with Cpl. Steven Wolf, the squad leader.

Wolf, reading his Bible, remarks on how strong a warrior and leader King David had been. But Burns reminds him of David's sins -- sending Bathsheba's husband into battle to be killed so he could take her as his wife.

"It was pride," Burns says, from inside his steel perch. "His pride made him turn away from God."

Their talk is interrupted for a moment by explosions, followed by black and white smoke plumes drifting up from the horizon several kilometers in front of us. Artillery units are registering their mortars in the late afternoon, using both explosive and white phosphorous rounds.

The train station at the northern border of the city is to be the first target. And in the deep darkness of an overcast night we watch as air strikes and artillery rain down on the position.

On a satellite phone I describe to television audiences the bright orange blasts and thundering explosions in the distance: 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs being dropped, the whine of the "Spooky" AC-130 gunship as its mini guns and howitzers level football-field-sized swaths with each pass.

The opening shots of Operation Phantom Fury (later dubbed the Battle of Fallujah) were, I say on the phone, as ferocious as advertised.

One Year Later
Now, on the anniversary of that battle, I am at the Fallujah train station where it all started. It's currently the headquarters for Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines. This night -- with two squads that know of Fallujah only from the two months they've just spent here -- I will patrol the same streets that became a supercharged combat zone last November when U.S. Marines, soldiers and Iraqi army troops reclaimed the city from insurgents. I have not, until this moment, experienced much emotion about being here.

But on this clear and cold night, as I follow the squads across the tracks, through the bombed-out depot and back into the city, I think about the yearlong journey and all of the burdens I gathered up here -- and continue to carry.

After the Softening
Dawn is breaking, but you can barely tell. The skies are still overcast and a chilling drizzle does little to dissipate the smell of cordite in the air. The airstrikes have stopped, and we've advanced into the outskirts of the city. Fallujah seems abandoned; residents apparently are heeding the warning of coalition forces to evacuate the city before the offensive.

Forces begin to pour in from all sides, moving south, block by block. Tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rumble by, stopping, pivoting and firing their main guns down each alleyway at cars left on the street -- a precaution in case they've been rigged with explosives.

The concussion of the Abrams M1-A1 tanks ripples through my body as I push down the street, videotaping the advance. Around the corner on the left-hand side of the street I see the body of an insurgent, the first of the battle. He is on his back, dressed in all black with the exception of a pair of white sneakers.

He is wearing a vest with ammunition pouches, rounds spilling out onto the street where he fell, along with a Russian Dragonov sniper rifle. Strangely, his hands are underneath his head, almost as if he were taking a nap -- if it weren't for the pool of black blood surrounding his body.

The advance through the city seems like it will be quick, with most of the resistance already broken by airstrikes and devastatingly precise Marine sniper teams inserted onto rooftops around Fallujah. But when we pass through the marketplace near Jolan Park, everything changes.

Barking Dogs
Tonight, in the same area, there is no movement, no sound except a few barking dogs. Fallujah has had a curfew for the past year, from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. Of the 150,000 residents estimated to have returned after the battle, no one, it seems, is willing to stir outside after the legal hours tonight.

The Echo Company squads, led by a young first lieutenant named John Bradenhamm, search an empty office building whose lights were still on. There is nothing in the rooms but a few chairs, desks and papers. The search seems like a tiresome exercise to me, and I stand on the roof and look out over the marketplace, trying to imagine it a year before.

Jolan Marketplace
Back then the airstrikes had turned the fruit and vegetable stalls into a twisted maze of wood and metal. It was there, in the passageways of the Jolan marketplace, that the first RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) struck. A young Marine caught shrapnel in the head and was pulled by squad members into a protective enclosure. A Navy corpsman bandaged his head while another Marine propped him up from behind. Through my viewfinder I saw maroon rosary beads dangling from the wounded Marine's pants pocket.

From that point on, the "cakewalk" through Fallujah turned into a frantic fight for survival. We rounded the corner onto a main east-west route through Fallujah that military planners had named "Elizabeth." It's the same street with the infamous bridge that the charred bodies of the American security contractors were hung from after being killed and burned by a Fallujah mob in April 2004. On Elizabeth more RPG rounds struck a wall behind us.

The Marines, believing the shooting came from a nearby building, unleashed a massive barrage of small arms fire, T4 anti-tank weapons, .50-caliber machine guns and even tank rounds.

Killing Box
When they finished, the building was a smoking ruin, but as they turned and continued to move down the street, more RPGs were fired from the same direction. Then insurgent snipers began firing from the north and east, picking off Marines and creating a "killing box" with the RPG gunners from the west.

Lance Cpl. Brandon Burns was one of the victims. The tip of an AK-47 round had penetrated his Kevlar helmet just enough to hit his skull. His blood splattered near the picture of his girlfriend taped to the inside of the Mark19 turret. Burns survived the incident but suffers from some long-term disabilities associated with the injury.

Stop and Stare
Now, as the Echo squads move from the empty office building onto Elizabeth Street, I stop for a moment in the darkness and just stare down the street. It is so different now, yet so much the same. Many of the buildings destroyed in the battle remain crumbling ruins.

Piles of rubble are everywhere. But tonight there is no gunfire, only silence. There is also evidence that people once again live and work on this battle-scarred street; that would have seemed impossible to imagine last year.

The fight down Elizabeth Street was just the first day of a battle that would go on for several more weeks. In that time period I saw much that stayed with me for the rest of the year, and will likely stay with me the rest of my life.

The Mosque Shooting
The mosque shooting, a week into the battle, was just one of those incidents, but one that I've had to spend an enormous amount of time writing and talking about. I've been called both a traitor and a hero for reporting the story of a Marine killing a wounded, unarmed insurgent in a mosque -- a story I captured on video. I'm neither a hero nor a traitor. I simply witnessed the complex truths of war, which are nothing if not peripatetic.

In my very first report for NBC and all the subsequent reports, I highlighted the mitigating circumstances of the Marine being wounded days earlier, the practice of insurgents booby-trapping bodies, the heated environment of the battle. But what NBC did not do was show the entire video.

The video told the story more completely than words ever could. It told the story of an unjustified killing. Anyone who has ever seen the entire tape knows that. But airing the story was not about prosecuting some Marine; his own memories are punishment enough. The story is about being loyal to the truth in war -- taking responsibility as a people and a nation for what is done in our name.

Owning Up to the Truth
Supporting the troops, I've learned from them, is about trying to understand what they actually go through during their deployment. They cringe when they come home and people thank them in that hollow way for "fighting for our country." What they've been through is so much more than that. Some of it they are proud of, some of it they are not.

One young soldier wrote me recently to tell me about guys in his unit who were tasked with picking up dead Iraqis after a battle. The body bags were piled onto a truck, and the soldier wrote that one of the guys loading them unzipped each bag and snapped a photo of the body inside.

As a society do we want to just say "thank you" to that soldier or do you we want to try to understand what has happened to him in this war, and get him some help? That's what brutally honest reporting helps us to do (and we can use it to tell the good stories as well; there are plenty of individuals in Iraq trying to do the right thing every day).

Not owning up to the truth, regardless of consequences, makes us hypocrites; it mocks our principles and kills trust.

I saw a sign at the headquarters of Golf Company in Fallujah recently. It said, "If you don't correct a Marine when he's wrong, you weaken him, the entire unit and lower our standards."

The same goes for society as a whole. We have to be strong enough to own up to our mistakes, even when they happen at the worst time.

And reporters have to be strong enough to report them. In my case, far from "getting rich" off the video as some people claimed (I got the same day rate I had always been paid) it was a very tempestuous time in my career. I spent the next six months without a paycheck, even though nearly everyone in my industry thought I had done the right thing. Additionally, I never spoke out once while the case against the Marine was pending.

Look at the Jessica Lynch fairytale and the lies that were told to Pat Tillman's parents after his friendly fire death in

We all have to struggle with our own truths in war -- and for me it is no different -- although my struggle isn't about the mosque killing. That is a choice with which I can and do peacefully coexist.

My Struggle
My struggle came on the first day of the fighting in Fallujah -- just as I was about to turn onto Elizabeth Street with the Marines. My truth is that in the heat of battle I forgot my own humanity, and that is the memory that I must now live with.

Here is how it happened: Coming down the street with the Marines I saw an old Iraqi man lying on his back near the curb. He was wearing a white T-shirt that highlighted the stream of crimson blood that was flowing behind him.

At first, I couldn't see his wound, but as I came closer, peering over him I could see that the right half of his skull had been blown away. It was a sniper shot, clean through his eye. I've seen plenty of death and destruction, but this image shocked me for a moment.

I think it was because the man's chest was still rising and falling. He was alive, still breathing. There was no weapon nearby, but it may have been cleared by advancing Marines.

A Marine in a Humvee saw the man and yelled at the two Marines I was walking with, "somebody put a bullet in that guy."

I assume he was talking about a mercy killing. The man was definitely going to die. The trauma of the injury was too great. He was already bleeding to death.

One of the Marines looked at my camera and asked me if I was going to videotape it if he shot the old man. I nodded yes, that I had to. He said that he wasn't going to do it then, and walked off to join the other Marines, leaving me there with the old man.

I looked at him for a long moment, wondering what I should do. Should I try to bandage him up, even though he was dying, and quickly? Should I hold his hand for a second, a small comfort from one human being to another during his last moments?

Ultimately I couldn't bring myself to do either. Bandaging him, I thought, was futile, and holding his hand, I believed,  might make me seem weak or sympathetic in front of the Marines.

Instead, I left him there and caught up with my unit, looking back once, but soon forgetting about the old man for the next six hours as the Elizabeth Street battle raged.

I made a choice to do nothing for the old man -- not even a reassuring touch. Yet a little while later, I didn't think twice about picking up the end of a stretcher with five other Marines to transport a wounded Burns to a military ambulance.

Helping Burns, it seemed, was easy. There was an empty handle on the stretcher, other people were involved: a need, a reason, a goal, little cost to the effort. Helping the old man in my mind was fraught with peril. I was alone. What would I accomplish? There would be a cost to my action.

And now, I know, there is also a cost for my inaction.

These are the realities -- the choices we make -- black and white plumes of smoke, mists of gray that haunt you like furious phantoms, until you accept their truths.

Here, back on Elizabeth Street a year later with a different group of Marines, I can still feel the phantoms, but like the street itself they have quieted -- barking dogs the only reminder of their presence.

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