Embedded Journalist: 'I Went Over to the Dark Side'
(Editor's note: This column catches us up on Jules Crittenden's last several days, after he was re-united with his laptop computer and again able to file these reports for Poynter.org.)
Tomorrow, I may get to bathe for the first time in over three weeks, not counting several wipe downs. It would be nice, but doesn’t matter much at this point. You’d be surprised how you get used to it, and when I was finally reunited with my gear yesterday, I was able to throw away my week-old underwear and socks, and change my grease-, dirt-, and salt- encrusted pants.
Yesterday was the day I really wanted that bath. Someone told me they had running water in one of Saddam’s palace guesthouses where the Forward Aid Station is. The track I was with stopped nearby for an hour, and the sergeant told me to go for it. I pulled my kit together. A medic showed me the way to an ornate bathroom with fine porcelain fixtures and left me alone. I stripped out of my filthy clothes, got out my dirty bar of soap, climbed in the tub, and turned the faucet.
Nothing. Shower stall. Nothing. Sink. Nothing.
I felt broken. I could have wept. But if you learn anything from living with soldiers in wartime, it’s that you just make the best of what you have and keep going. I grabbed the package of baby wipes someone had left by the clogged toilet and wiped myself down. I threw on the somewhat cleaner underwear, socks, and pants from my pack. On the way out, the medics remarked on how quick my shower was. I told them it wasn’t running, and they said try the one in front. I said maybe next time, I was done for now. I walked back to where the track was parked in the maintenance area and collapsed on Saddam’s front lawn across the tire of a big deuce-and- a-half truck. I was too god-damned tired to do anything else. We had been in Baghdad four days and things were pretty quiet, but this life is exhausting anyway. I was thinking, i'ts getting close to time to go home.
We had begun preparing for the ride into Baghdad on Sunday night at an assembly area about 10 kilometers south of the city. A Psyops (Psychological Operations) guy was joining us in the fire- support Bradley, and we had to make room for his electronic gear. We stripped out all the unnecessary gear. Ready for the worst, we kept reminding each other that in Mogadishu, it was water and ammo. Out came more personal gear, in went more ammo and water. Then Pvt. Robert Baxter started up the track to move up onto the road, where we’d spend the night. He shifted into gear to move forward. Nothing happened. The mechanics pored over the transmission, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
The Bradley didn’t want to go. I remembered what a photog friend with combat experience once told me. "These things happen for a reason." There was no room on the tanks for passengers.
Later, the fire-support lieutenant informed me that he and the Psyops guy had been assigned to ride in on a lightly armored M113 –- originally not intended to make the trip because it is vulnerable to RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades). I mistakenly assumed that this meant there was no room for me, because he had not said otherwise and space on the tracks is always at a premium. These things happen for a reason.
At 4 a.m. I woke to the sound of the tanks firing up. I was immediately depressed. "F--- it," I thought. "I’m going." I raced up to the road, found the CO’s tank, and asked where I could ride.
"You’re in the 113," he said. I ran back, grabbed my sat phone, my Kevlar, and my body armor. The colonel had told me we would hold the palaces for five hours and pull out, just to make the point. Maybe we’d stay overnight. I didn’t want to jam the crowded M113 with my own electronics gear, so the inverters and the chargers and the laptop stayed back. I wouldn’t see those things or my buddies, Baxter, Smitty, and Sgt. Will, for four days, and only the good graces of the Associated Press, with a similar sat phone and all their charging equipment, kept me in business when Chris Tomlinson, John Moore, and I found ourselves darting around the same RPG- bothered intersection on Wednesday.
Lesson one. Never leave your webgear, and never leave your electronics. Bumming tootpaste to brush with your finger and bumming charges gets old real quick.
The thing about riding into an expected hell of fire is, it's only bad before it starts. Once you’re rolling, you’re rolling and you stop thinking about it. In the M113, we had the big crew hatch open in the back, and I could enjoy the ride, standing up with the lieutenant and the Psyops guy, both watchful with their M-4 rifles, behind the track commander with his .50 caliber machinegun. Sgt. Dan Howison, the track commander, pointed out where his M-16 was hanging in case I decided I needed it.
The shooting started ahead of us. The 1/64 battalion was leading the column until they split off to the west. In the 4.64’s column, there were just five tanks ahead of us, taking the brunt of the Iraqi fire and laying down heavy suppressive fire. In an industrial area in the outskirts, the first RPGs begun arcing over our track, and we heard the clatter of AK-47s.
Ahead of us, we heard the boom of the tanks’ main guns and the heavy thudding noise of the 50s. Sgt. Dan Howison on our 50 began lighting up roadside bunkers and vehicles the tanks had bypassed. We agreed later the Iraqi fire was moderate, and thanked God they have such poor aim. In front of the palace district, the tanks destroyed several recoilless rifles that might have been a serious annoyance to them but would have killed us in the 113. We rolled under the massive arch, the first visible dead Iraqis on the ground beside us, slumped in odd poses like carelessly discarded trashbags on the pavement.
Down the broad avenue, the column halted in front of a Versailles- like palace, topped with four gargantuan and very bizarre busts of Saddam in an Arabesque war helmet that caught our attention briefly, but the fire coming from the ditches under roadside hedges distracted us.
It was here I went over to the dark side. I spotted the silhouettes of several Iraqi soldiers looking at us from the shadows 20 feet to our left. I shouted, "There’s three of the f------ right there."
"Where are the f------?" Howison said, spinning around in his hatch. "The f------ are right there," I said, pointing.
"There?" he said, opening up with the 50. I saw one man’s body splatter as the large-caliber bullets ripped it up. The man behind him appeared to be rising, and was cut down by repeated bursts.
"There’s another f------ over there," I told Howison. The two soldiers in the crew hatch with me started firing their rifles, but I think Howison was the one who got him, firing through the metal plate the soldier was hiding behind.
Some in our profession might think as a reporter and non-combatant, I was there only to observe. Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three human beings in the war I was sent to cover, I’m sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I’ll keep the argument short. Screw them, they weren’t there. But they are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism.
When it quieted down, we followed the tanks as they busted through the metal gates of a palace. We clanked through rose gardens, past ornamental ponds, and a playground. I saw the profile of Red Platoon Sgt. Jonathan Lustig, looking intense and intent as always standing high in his tank commander’s hatch, his hands on his 50, as his tank, Achtung Baby, turned down a little lane lined with exotic shrubs.
"There’s Lustig, rolling through his enemy’s gardens," I thought. Lustig said later he didn’t notice the roses. But he did remark that rolling among Saddam’s palaces made him think about Berlin, 1945.
"It was like rolling into the Reich’s Chancellery. The Iraqis weren’t exactly the SS, but they fought to the end. I guess you’d have to say I admire them for that. They stuck to their beliefs and fought to the end."
Later, the Psyops track was sent back to sit with Cyclone Company at the entrance to the palace district, where the tankers destroyed several vehicles that didn’t stop and turn around quickly enough. One civilian car came racing toward us, ignoring the machine gun bursts, and was spun around and burst into flames when a main gun round slammed into its rear quarter. The driver, amazingly still alive, bailed out and tried to take cover behind the car, miraculously surviving a heavy volume of machine gun fire. Howison yelled into the radio that he was raising his hands, trying to surrender. I walked over as the medics’ tracks rolled up. There was a pistol lying by the car, and the middle-aged, heavyset man’s face was black with oily soot, his legs lacerated by shrapnel.
"We looked over curiously, as
gunfire in a war zone becomes routine and doesn’t cause alarm unless it is clearly directed at you."
I picked up a couple of packs of cigarettes lying around the car, and shared them with a couple of soldiers. Everyone had been low and a lot of people had been out for days, and they later went through the bags the Iraqi prisoners left behind to retrieve their cheap, strange- tasting smokes.
We were getting comfortable in the intersection by the big melodramatic Iraqi soldiers’ memorial –- one slumped dead, two looking forward heroically, another looking back to call his comrades forward. We were sitting up on top of the track and eating MREs a little later in the day when more AK fire sounded down by the bridge. We looked over curiously, as gunfire in a war zone becomes routine and doesn’t cause alarm unless it is clearly directed at you. That’s when we saw the flash of an RPG, which cut a bright arc through the air 30 feet in front of the 113. We let out a collective noise to the effect of "Oh s---!" and dove down into the crew hatch.
The tanks opened up with heavy fire, and started working on the date palm-dotted parklands around us, where figures were seen moving around. About 30 Iraqi soldiers later surrendered there, including one whose foot was shattered by a .50 caliber round. Most had chosen to stay in their holes, and there was only one body there.
That night, we all picked out places on the track to sleep. Howison and the Psyops guy, "RJ" Pasto, slept on top, where there are a couple of flat places. The lieutenant and the driver slept inside. I took the ramp, big and flat, and worried more that the local rats or dogs would be attracted to my feet than I worried about enemy fire. That was until I heard what sounded like incoming artillery explosions walking in. I mulled what to do about that, but hadn’t come up with any good answers that also included the possibility of sleep by the time I decided it was tank fire down two different roads. I dropped off.
Thus ended my first day in Baghdad. My fifth night is starting now. I'm got my toothbrush and my laptop back. The threat of Iraqis with RPGs has abated, and the looting has been in full swing for days.
Tonight, there has been what sounds like exuberant Arabic skyshots. Note to self: wear the Kevlar. What goes up, must come down. Now, the radio tells us the Syrian mujahideen have initiated their car- bomb campaign with several failed attempts on the American roadblocks. God, I love this place, I keep telling the GIs.
