Kevin Sites - In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

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Also by Kevin Sites

The Things They Cannot Say

Swimming with Warlords

In the Hot Zone

One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Kevin Sites

This book is dedicated to the innocent victims of conflict worldwide. You are not forgotten.

CONTENTS

While I was writing this book, a Korean-American student named Seung-Hui Cho used two handguns to kill thirty-two people and then shot himself on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007. Federal officials called it the deadliest shooting rampage in American history.

The American public seemed riveted to the story. The shared sense of tragedy, though on a smaller scale, seized their attention in the same way the events of 9/11 had; this, we believed, was about us.

In the days that followed, details about the victims began to emerge, the narrative of their lives took shape, they became people rather than the body count of a massacre. The story of their lives allowed us to make connections to them, to feel empathy for their familieschoosing, if we wanted, to send messages of support, moving beyond the role of witnesses to participants in the healing process.

Meanwhile, in Iraq that very same week, 700 civilians were killed in shootings, bombings, executions and other war-related violence. Nearly half of those happened on one day, April 18, including a string of suicide bombings in Baghdad, which took the lives of nearly 200.

And while I watched media coverage of the memorial services for the students and teachers who were killed at Virginia Tech, I was troubled by a feeling that while we were rightfully absorbed by our own national tragedy, we had long been inured to the daily civilian death toll in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.

A violent death and the sorrow it provokes among those left behind is not something to try to equivocatewhether it occurs in Baghdad or Blacksburg. Each victim, regardless of place, leaves a ripple of pain that penetrates families, communities, even whole societiestraumatized by the loss.

But as I watched the images of grief televised from Virginia, I hoped that when our national mourning was over, we, as American citizens, might feel a renewed sense of empathy because of this incidentone robust enough to transcend our national boundaries and inspire us to see the rest of the world.

Kevin Sites

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 mans lap. While Im 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 ones still breathing. Another agrees, Yeah, hes breathing. There is tension in the room, but I continue to roll on the man in the red kaffiyeh.

Hes fucking faking hes 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 Im a television reporter working soloshooting, writing and transmitting my reports without a crewand they tell me they like my self-reliance. I tell them its 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 OBriens 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 Ive finished filing my reports for the day, I sometimes jog around the base on a makeshift track just inside the walls. Its 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.

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