NYT: In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War

By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: November 21, 2004

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 18 - Eight days after the Americans entered the city on foot, a pair of marines wound their way up the darkened innards of a minaret, shot through with holes by an American tank.

As the marines inched their way along, a burst of gunfire rang down, fired by an insurgent hiding in the top of the tower. The bullets hit the first marine in the face, his blood spattering the marine behind him. Lance Cpl. William Miller, age 22, lay in silence half way up, mortally wounded.

"Miller!" the marines called from below. "Miller!"

snip

Sometimes the casualties came in volleys, like bursts of machine-gun fire. On the first morning of battle, during a ferocious struggle for the Muhammadia Mosque, about 45 marines with Company B's Third Platoon dashed across 40th Street, right into interlocking streams of fire. By the time the platoon made it to the other side, five men lay bleeding in the street.

The marines rushed out to get them, as they would days later in the minaret, but it was too late for Sgt. Lonny D. Wells, who bled to death on the side of the road. One of the men who braved gunfire to pull in Sergeant Wells was Cpl. Nathan R. Anderson, who died three days later in an ambush.

snip

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/international/middleeast/21battle.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=0cf5024c14909b10&hp&ex=1101013200&partner=homepage

Powerful article....

but i'll give it a kick :kick:

It's hard reading.

They created it.

Ah, hell - what am I saying? I don't want a flame war here. This article isn't about that at all, which is why I think your comment is misplaced. For both sides - soldiers and Iraqis, among others - this war is a tragedy. As always, the ones responsible "hide in their mansions/while the young people's blood/flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud." -Dylan

Nice. EXACTLY.

and according to the man who was ghost writing bushie's autobiography bushie planned to invade Iraq long before he was selected in 2000. bushie wanted to be a "war-time" prez.

Rummy created this mess -- the officers under him created this mess and the soldiers carried out this order -- and they are both victims and guilty at the same time.

Many of the soldiers STILL believe that 9/11 was caused by Saddam -- I've heard them quoted saying that they were in Iraq to get revenge -- just before their invasion of Falluja. They had murder in their hearts and souls -- although this rage they were acting on was based on a lie. Yet they carried out the orders and murdered children, women and men.

When it comes to the willful murder of children -- that's is where I draw the line. I hope that there really is a higher authority that will make all the guilty pay for the murdered lives stolen.

Meanwhile these same sanctimonious son of a bitches are trying to take away women's right to choose -- because they claim -- the high value placed on white folk's "life". So white women's bodies can produce white babies -- and thus must be made to produce the white babies. So what if this denial of control of women's bodies also includes women of color? Give the white men time -- they'll figure out a way around this dilemma -- perhaps bankrolling cheap mobile backstreet abortions?

It's understandable and the story needs telling, but he very connected emotionally. It's hard to imagine that his objectivity is unclouded. Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie screens; even so, they often seemed no more real.

I'm loath to question his motives; there hasn't been enough coverage this close up, but he inserts a personal conclusion at one point that even contradicts his own facts. He writes at some length about the late Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski of Baltimore, MD, then pointedly concludes that The men who fight America's wars seem invariably to come from little towns and medium-size cities far away from the nation's arteries along the coast

This is the heartbreaker; need drives so many of these decisions. It will be too damn bad if the press ends up romanticizing the reality, blood and gore included.

"The guys who stayed, they're all living with their parents, making $7 an hour," Corporal Ritchie said. "I'm not going to be one of those people who gets old and says, 'I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that.' Every once in a while, you've got to do something hard, do something you're not comfortable with. A person needs a gut check."

We will never learn.

additionally this author suffers from a severe case of one-sideitis

Yes, it is sad to have our young people die, especially in this wrong war; yet this author is ignoring all the other contemporary spilled blood, much more blood, of people who don't happen to be all-powerful and omniscient Americans

It is truly sad to hear snippets and what they were planning to do back home; but I'll bet you a million dollars the owners of the other blood shed that day had similar families, similar interests and projects, I'll bet they had goals to rebuild both themselves and their sacred, war-torn country; not to mention hopes for their children.

As did even the "man dressed in a white dishdasha (who)crawled across a desolate field, reaching behind a gnarled plant to hide, when he collapsed before a burst of fire from an American tank."

Yes, a man crawling across a torn field trying to hide himself behind a fucking Plant is, as everyone HERE knows --everyone here of high Moral Values that is-- clearly a dangerous, overt, naturally evil insurgent!
And as such, deserved completely his spattering death, and a death not by just any old army-issue rifle, but a tank shell to call all his very own!
One wonders how the author could tell exactly the difference between this Iraqi's collapsing death over when he was already prone, crawling, and cowering behind a piece of vegetation trying to escape a violent death?

No, no -- no bathos there!
So fuck him.
Which, perhaps, soldiers would have done had he been in Abu Ghraib or indeed any other Iraqi prison...
Indeed, we liberated that poor man.

GO USA!
Mission Accomplished!