Excerpt from In The Hot Zone

BURDENS OF WAR: The Mosque Shooting
FALLUJA, IRAQ | NOVEMBER 13, 2004

SUNBEAMS

The carpet of the mosque is stained with blood and covered with fragments of concrete. Tank shells and machine-gun rounds have pitted the inside walls. The rotting, sweet smell of death hangs in the morning air. Gunsmoke-laced sunbeams illuminate the bodies of four Iraqi insurgents. A fifth lies next to a column, his entire body covered by a blanket.
aaaaI shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.
aaaaYesterday I had seen these same five men being treated by American medics for superficial wounds received during an afternoon firefight. Ten other insurgents had been killed, their bodies still scattered around the main hall in the black bags into which the Marines had placed them.
aaaaThe commander of the 3.1 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, told me that these five wounded, captured enemy combatants would be transported to the rear. But now I can see that one of them appears dead and the three others are slowly bleeding to death from gunshots fired by one lance corporal, I will learn later, who used both his M-16 and his 9 mm pistol on them, just minutes before I arrived.
aaaaWith my camera rolling, I walk toward the old man in the red kaffiyeh and kneel beside him. Because he was so old, maybe in his early sixties, and wearing the red headgear, he had stood out the most to me when I was videotaping the day before, after the battle.
aaaaNow the old man is struggling to breathe. Oxygenated blood bubbles from his nose. Another man, stocky and dressed in a long gray shirt called a dishdasha, is slumped in the old man’s lap. While I’m taping, the old man is bleeding to death in front of my camera. I look up to see the lance corporal who had just shot all of them moments before, now walking up to the other two insurgents against the wall, twenty feet away. One is facedown, apparently already dead. The other, dressed in an Iraqi Police uniform, is faceup but motionless, aside from his breathing.
aaaaThe lance corporal says, “Hey, this one’s still breathing.” Another agrees, “Yeah, he’s breathing.” There is tension in the room, but I continue to roll on the man in the red kaffiyeh.
aaaa“He’s fucking faking he’s dead,” the lance corporal says, now standing right in front of the man.

THE EMBED

As a freelance correspondent for NBC News, I embedded with the Third Battalion, First Marine (Regiment) for three weeks prior to the Battle of Falluja, or what the Americans code-named Operation Phantom Fury and what the Iraqi interim government called Operation Al Fajr, or “The Dawn.”
aaaaThe mission has a clear but complicated objective; take back the restive city of Falluja from the insurgents who had been running the place for the last eight months.
aaaaIn the time leading up to the battle, I have developed a good relationship with my unit. The Marines see that I’m a television reporter working solo—shooting, writing and transmitting my reports without a crew—and they tell me they like my self-reliance. I tell them it’s a necessity, because no one wants to work with me anymore. Television news is the ultimate collaborative medium, but by being recklessly aggressive, low on the network food chain (a producer turned reporter) and eager to go it alone to uncomfortable locations, it has not been difficult to convince news managers to let me do just that.
aaaaThe Marines also like the fact that I write an independent war blog, which NBC allowed me to keep as a freelancer, where I post longer, more detailed and personal stories about my experiences. Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, in which he describes the items, both literal and figurative, that each man in a U.S. Army platoon carried on a jungle march through Vietnam, I ask the Marines to show me the same. They pull out rosaries, Saint Christopher medals, photographs of their wives and children taped inside their Kevlar helmets.
aaaaI snap their pictures and post them on the site. Their families, eager for information about their loved ones, come to my blog in droves. They post responses, thanking me for allowing them to see the faces of their sons, husbands, brothers. Soon, however, those messages of gratitude will be replaced with hate mail and death threats.

CAMP ABU GHRAIB

We are on a small, dusty satellite base near Camp Falluja, the First Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters. Like the infamous, scandal-ridden prison, the base is named Camp Abu Ghraib. It is a sprawling compound ringed by dirt walls, large concrete slabs, concertina wire and gravel-filled wire baskets called HESCO barriers.
aaaaIn this time of waiting, when I’ve finished filling my reports for the day, I sometimes jog around the base on a makeshift track just inside the walls. It’s an incongruous but now-common experience to run in the golden light of dusk, passing the guard towers with their .50-caliber machine guns and the brig at a far end of the base quadrant where Iraqi prisoners are temporarily held before being transferred to the real Abu Ghraib prison.
aaaaInside, I see Marines tossing a football, walking to the chow hall, cleaning their weapons. I hear the clank of weights being dropped and a boombox blasting from the tent that houses their surprisingly well-equipped gym. On the outside I see red skies over Falluja as the sun drops to the horizon.

FOUR HORSEMEN

I made friends with three country Marines and a navy medic who provide security for the base—and who, in the course of their duties, confiscated four horses from Iraqi men who came too close to the base with carts, supposedly to collect scrap metal.
aaaaCorporal David Harris, Lance Corporal Kenny Craig, Corporal Lloyd Williams and Corpsman Michael Driver use their own money to pay for hay brought in from Baghdad to feed those malnourished horses. In an effort to recreate a little piece of home, they’re trying to train the cart-hauling horses to be ridden.
aaaaIt’s a risky undertaking. When Craig mounts a horse named Bandit, it quickly turns its head and bites down hard on Craig’s leg. I ask him if the injuries are worthy of a Purple Heart. But Craig is undeterred. He kicks his heels into Bandit’s ribs and pushes him into an enthusiastic stroll around the base.
aaaa“When we ride them around camp, everybody wants to pet them,” says Craig. “Everybody wants to see them. It brightens their day, even if they choose to deny that.”
aaaaThat same night, the four men build a roaring fire in a fifty-gallon metal drum and feed their horses granola bars from MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) packets. I watch as they line-dance to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” in their fatigues and combat boots, bathed in the orange firelight that warms the chilly Iraqi night.

THE FEINTS

Everyone knows the battle is coming, they just don’t know when. In the meantime the Marines conduct operations known as feints, bluffing maneuvers in which they charge up to the city’s edge with armor and infantry, both to fool the insurgents into thinking the real battle has begun and to draw them out of their urban hiding spots to kill them.
aaaaI am assigned to the CAAT (Combined Anti-Armor Team) Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Ryan Sparks, a former enlisted man and member of the Marines’ elite Recon Unit, similar to Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs.
aaaaThe CAAT team consists of Humvees mounted with heavy, squad-operated weapons such as TOW antitank missiles and Mark 19 grenade launchers that can fire belted 40 mm grenades at a rate of sixty rounds per minute.
aaaaA week before Phantom Fury begins, Sparks’s team is assigned to an operational feint on the south end of the city, where commanders believe foreign fighters, possibly from Al Qaeda, are concentrated.
aaaaThe units rehearse the operation in a “rock drill” in which rocks and, strangely, large children’s Lego blocks are arranged on the ground to approximate Falluja’s buildings. Water bottles stand in as minarets for the mosques. Each unit commander involved in the operation, from captains to squad leaders, explains, in chronological order of the event, their mission objective, entry into the operation and exit.
aaaaOn the evening of the feint, I ride in Sparks’s Humvee. As we race across the desert, I shoot video out the front windshield, where my last name, along with those of the three crew members, is written in black marker along with our blood types.
aaaaThere is a loud explosion as an insurgent mortar round lands a hundred yards behind us. Sparks orders his teams to find cover somewhere on the flat desert plains.
aaaa“There it is—right there, Johnson, eleven- thirty.” Sparks directs his Mark 19 gunner to a flash point in the city where he believes the mortar came from.
aaaaThe radio crackles as Sparks listens to the field artillery unit triangulating the mortar’s firing grid more precisely. When another mortar lands nearby, Sparks no longer waits. He orders his squad and those in the other Humvees to return fire.
aaaaIt is, on a small scale, what the Marines had hoped would happen—drawing insurgents out and then springing the trap. Though the insurgent response has been tepid so far—a couple of mortars and small-arms fire—the Marines ramp up the firepower.
aaaaAbrams M1A1 tanks fire their 120 mm main guns; Marine artillery units drop their own mortars; while the CAAT team shoots shoulder-launched Javelin and Humvee-mounted TOW missiles at the outlying houses.

TOW BACKBLAST

I leave Sparks and run seventy-five yards across the open field to where another CAAT Humvee is shooting TOWs. After several firings, Lance Corporal Joe Runion loads another missile into the launcher; the gunner yells “Fire in the hole” and pulls the trigger. But there is no launch—only a clicking sound.
aaaaIt’s a hang-fire. Runion waits for a full minute, Marine protocol in this situation, before climbing onto the Humvee to unload the faulty weapon. Just as he is about to reach for the tube, the missile fires, roaring to life at its target. The backblast concussion from the rear of the tube knocks Runion unconscious and he falls off the Humvee to the ground.
aaaaOthers in his unit run to his aid, but, remarkably, he shakes it off, climbs back on the Humvee and reloads the weapon. I’ve recorded the entire sequence on my video camera.
aaaa“I’m glad you’re safe, dog,” says one of the Marines to Runion, whose head is still ringing from the explosion.
aaaaThe moment is soon lost. Darkness falls and the fight continues. In my story I report the TOW malfunction and Runion’s stubborn perseverance after being knocked out. I also say that while no American lives were lost in the operation, it did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in manpower and munitions.
aaaaThe next day, after my piece has aired on NBC Nightly News, a few of the Marines from the CAAT team tell me they’re happy that I didn’t use the TOW backblast incident to make them look stupid.
aaaaI feel that I have gained a little trust—but also begin to see the deep-rooted mistrust they have for my profession.
aaaaSome of that perception, they tell me, started with their fathers, who served in Vietnam and told them when they were growing up that the media helped lose that war by reporting only the “bad stuff.”
aaaaI think about telling them that the United States dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in both World Wars I and II combined and that it had a determined foe, one willing to live in underground tunnels and endure the death of millions. It was the enemy who won that conflict, and not news reporting that lost it. I decide it is probably better left unsaid.

SLIPPING THE BIG FOOT

I am on a satellite phone call with an NBC desk assistant who says the foreign news manager, Danny Noa, needs to speak with me. She transfers me to his line and he’s hesitant, then apologetic, telling me that they want to pull me out of Falluja and replace me with their Baghdad-based staff reporter, Richard Engle.
aaaa“That’s bullshit, Danny,” I say, getting angrier with every second. “I’ve been here for weeks, I’ve established a working relationship with the unit. You can’t just yank me out days before the biggest battle of the war.”
aaaaHe listens but is firm—the network wants Engle, NBC’s rising star and future Middle East Bureau chief, in the driver’s seat when Falluja goes down.
aaaa“Danny,” I press my case, “I know Engle is a good reporter and speaks Arabic, but he doesn’t necessarily speak Marine. I’ve been embedded longer and with more units than anyone at the network. This is what I do best.”
aaaa“The Pentagon says we can only have one embedded reporter for the operation,” he says. “You can have Ramadi.”
aaaa“Ramadi? This is where it’s happening right now,” I say. Silence on the other end. It’s no use. I kill the call and think about my options. There do not seem to be many, but I am not ready to just step aside for something that I had worked so long and hard for.
aaaaThe next day I go to Camp Falluja, First Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters, to talk to one of the public affairs officers with whom I had become friendly.
aaaa“Your network called me yesterday,” he tells me. “They said they wanted to pull you out and replace you with Engle.” I nodded.
aaaa“I told them they could yank you if they wanted, but no one would be allowed to take your place. NBC’s embed slot would stay empty.” I smile broadly, realizing the gift I’ve been given. “Guess you’re the guy now,” he says, without expression.

When it becomes clear that the Marines are serious about not letting Engle come in to take my place, NBC gets behind me as if I were their first choice all along. I get a bump in pay and—now that I’m going to be a real correspondent, not some one-man-band mutt—they’re going to assign me a cameraman.
aaaaAt first I’m not eager to work with someone else, but when I learn it’s Boston native Kevin Burke, a talented shooter and freelance workhorse who has spent as much time in Iraq as me, I warm to the idea.
aaaaI also realize that I can continue to shoot. Kevin and I can attach to different squads and cover twice as much ground, then meet up at the end of the day.
aaaaWhile I am writing the story script, he can log and rough-edit our video from the day. Later, I will transmit the piece from my laptop using a phonebook-sized satellite modem called an RBGAN (Regional Broadband Global Area Network) to a computer server in Secaucus, New Jersey.
aaaaOther networks, like CNN, which I had worked for earlier in the war, have been sending video by FTP (File Transfer Protocol) like this since the invasion of Iraq. But at the time the Battle of Falluja is about to begin, I am the only correspondent at NBC who knows how to do it and has used it in the past.
aaaaThere weren’t going to be any convenient satellite dish feed points on the front lines when Operation Phantom Fury began, so anyone who didn’t know how to send by satellite modem would be sitting on piles of videotape—unable to file their daily reports. Technology had shrunk the world to a much more manageable size just in time for this battle.

THE MOSQUE SHOOTING

After hearing the lance corporal say, “He’s fucking faking he’s dead,” I raise my camera up from the bleeding old man to the Marine.
aaaaI see him in my viewfinder; he is raising his M-16 rifle and pointing it directly at the wounded insurgent’s head. He peers down at him through his laser scope.
aaaaI don’t know what he’s going to do, but I hope he’s just going to cover him while other Marines search him for weapons. But in this place, already filled with so much death, somehow, in this moment, I sense there will be more. The lance corporal squeezes the trigger, firing a 5.62 round into the man’s head, which I watch explode on my screen.
aaaaHis skull and brains splatter against the dirty white wall he was lying against. After firing the shot, the Marine (whom I have chosen not to name) turns on his heels and walks away.
aaaaThe name of the man he shot was revealed later in an identification card recovered from his body by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The card, ironically, had been issued to the man under the authority of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Falluja. His name was Officer Farhan Abd Mekelf, a member of the Iraqi Police.
aaaaI have seen people killed and wounded in combat, but never like this. Never at point-blank range. It stuns me to the point that instead of jumping up, I continue to videotape from my kneeling position. Maybe it was shock, but to this day, I still can’t understand why I completed the shot sequence, panning back to the old man with the red kaffiyeh after the lance corporal killed Mekelf.
aaaaAfter the shooting, the fifth insurgent, who had been completely covered by the blanket, slowly pulls it down, raising his bandaged hands as he does. Two other Marines in the mosque immediately point their weapons at him.
aaaaThis snaps me out of my trance. Thinking they might shoot him, too, I get up and confront the Marine who had pulled the trigger.
aaaa“Why did you do that?” I asked him. “What’s going on? These were the same guys that were here yesterday. They were wounded.”
aaaa“I didn’t know, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know.” The voice that had seemed so confident just a few moments ago is now filled with unsettling realizations. And then he walks out of the mosque followed by the other Marines.
aaaaThe insurgent under the blanket begins speaking to me in Arabic. He’s the only one of the five wounded who had not been shot a second time by the lance corporal, somehow escaping that fate by hiding under the blanket. Because of the wounds on his legs from the Friday afternoon firefight, he’s wearing only a blue-striped shirt and white underpants; his trousers are in a heap next to the mosque pillar.
aaaaHe tries to talk to me, gesturing with his hands, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He falls back on his upper arms, frustrated and scared. It’s only later, after my video is translated, that I will find out what he was trying to tell me. But it will be more than two years later before I learn the fate of this man, Taleb Salem Nidal, and my complicity in it.

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Omar's Arm (contains graphic images)
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Road to Nowhere -- Marines Cheat Death, Beat Fiat Bomb by Seconds
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Paying it Back in Blood
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Dirty for Dirty: A Grunt's Eye-View of the War in Iraq
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Layla, part 2.
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Things They Carry
Dispatch: Military Vote
Shooting Layla
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Street by Street
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