In the Hot Zone

One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Kevin Sites

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780061228759
• eBook ISBN: 9780061745096
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News.

Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity. Personally, Sites will come to discover that the greatest danger he faces may not be from bombs and bullets, but from the unsettling power of the truth.

PART I

THE REVELATION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

CHAPTER 1

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.

I shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.

Yesterday 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.

I was told by the commander of the 3.1 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, 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.

With 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.

Now 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.

The 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.

“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.”

The 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.

In 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.

The 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.

I 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.

In this time of waiting, when I’ve finished filing 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.

Inside, 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.

Corporal 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 re-create a little piece of home, they’re trying to train the cart-hauling horses to be ridden.

It’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.

“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.”

That 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.

I 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.

The 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.

A 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.

The 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.

On 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.

There 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.

“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.

The 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.

It 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.

Abrams 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.

It’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.

Others 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.

“I’m glad you’re safe, dog,” says one of the Marines to Runion, whose head is still ringing from the explosion.

The 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.

The 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.

I feel that I have gained a little trust—but also begin to see the deep-rooted mistrust they have for my profession.

Some of that perception, they tell me, started with their fathers, who served in Vietnam and told them when they were growing up that the ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Blacksburg and Baghdad
• Part I: The Revelation Will not Be Televised
• Part II: Into the Arms of Mama Africa
• Part III: Phantoms of Falluja, Brown Sugar Junkies, Martyrs’ Moms and Other Middle East Nightmares
• Part IV: The Child Bride, Endless Grief and Music to Disarm to Lives and Lessons from Europe, Central Asia and the Americas
• Part V: My Asian Odyssey
• Part VI: The Thirty-Four-Day War Putting the Hole in the Holy Land
• Part VII: My Third-World America
• Epilogue
• Excerpt for Swimming with Warlords
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Sources for Appendix C
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher