The War, Up Close and Very Personal

Our troop truck lost its way in a dust cloud at night, somewhere near the holy city of Karbala. It careened across a dirt causeway and plunged into the murky brown waters of a canal. Men pitched headfirst to the bottom, dragged under by the weight of their flak jackets. Heavy boxes of bottled water and rations tumbled down on them. Soldiers hacked away with bayonets at gear straps tangled around their necks.

After several terrifying minutes, 24 soldiers and one embedded reporter were pulled to safety, all accounted for. Some of the men vomited on the slick canal bank. Two had to be revived by medics. A few shivering young soldiers seemed ready to weep as their sergeants berated them for losing their night-vision goggles.

I felt like crying, too. My computer, satellite phones, clothes, tape recorder, cash, notebooks and everything else I carried was lost or ruined.

It was 5:30 a.m. on April 4. Journalistically speaking, I had become what the military calls “combat ineffective.” My military embed, having brought me closer than I ever imagined to the perils of the front, seemed to have ended at the bottom of the canal.

Embedding -- that awkward and ephemeral term for being in the Army but not of it -- is a remarkable contrivance. It can be bent and manipulated by commander or reporter, often to the benefit of neither. It can also provide an exhilarating, if terrifying, window on the unscripted world of men under stress and fire.

Not since the Vietnam War have journalists worked so closely with soldiers in combat. The embed, in which reporters live 24 hours a day with their assigned units, was instituted on a limited basis in Afghanistan after the heaviest fighting had ended. Expanded, it was to be the grand journalistic experiment of the Iraq war, and a departure from the briefing coverage of the Persian Gulf War 12 years earlier. About 600 journalists volunteered.

During seven weeks spent with half a dozen units, I slept in fighting holes and armored vehicles, on a rooftop, a garage floor and in lumbering troop trucks. For days at a time, I didn’t sleep. I ate with the troops, choking down processed meals of “meat, chunked and formed” that came out of brown plastic bags. I rode with them in loud, claustrophobic and disorienting Bradley fighting vehicles. I complained with them about the choking dust, the lack of water, our foul-smelling bodies and our scaly, rotting feet.

At 5:30 a.m. on April 7, precisely 72 hours after plummeting into the canal, I was in the belly of a Bradley, its 25-millimeter cannon pumping out rounds, as an armored column of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division rumbled under fire into downtown Baghdad. And 72 hours after that, I was sleeping on the marble floor of Saddam Hussein’s Presidential Palace.

I saw what the soldiers saw. And, like most of them, I emerged filthy, exhausted and aware of what Winston Churchill meant when he said that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect.”

Getting the Story

Most important, I wrote stories I could not have produced had I not been embedded -- on the pivotal battle for Baghdad; the performance of U.S. soldiers in combat; the crass opulence of Hussein’s palaces; U.S. airstrikes on an office tower in central Baghdad; souvenir-hunting by soldiers and reporters; and the discovery of more than $750 million in cash in a neighborhood that had been the preserve of top Iraqi officials.

Yet that same access could be suffocating and blinding. Often I was too close or confined to comprehend the war’s broad sweep. I could not interview survivors of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. soldiers or speak to Iraqi fighters trying to kill Americans. I was not present when Americans died at the hands of fellow soldiers in what the military calls “frat,” for fratricide. I had no idea what ordinary Iraqis were experiencing. I was ignorant of Iraqi government decisions and U.S. command strategy.

Embedded reporters were entirely dependent on the military for food, water, power and transportation. And ultimately, we depended on them for something more fundamental: access. We were placed in a potentially compromised position long before the fighting began, and we knew it.

Lt. Col. Patrick Fetterman, who commands an elite infantry battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, told me many times that the most lethal thing on the battlefield was his own forces.

For journalists, the greatest enemy was ourselves -- our ingrained human tendency to identify with those beside us. Bombarded with drama and emotions, it was impossible to step back, or to report every story with absolute detachment. We didn’t just cover the war -- we were part of it.

This newspaper, like many, also assigned reporters and photographers to Iraq who were not embedded with U.S. troops. They covered what we could not -- the Iraqi government, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, military strategy, political fallout and everything else beyond our cloistered existence.

Reports from embedded reporters did not dominate newspaper war coverage. They were part of it, giving an intimate look at the 250,000 U.S. troops in the gulf. But the raw reporting emerging from embeds was weighed and balanced by editors against information from other reporters spread far and wide. In that context, embedding provided a valuable contribution.

In most cases, the officers and soldiers I accompanied were too busy or distracted to pay attention to what I was doing. There was no public affairs minder to keep me in line. Not a single soldier or officer I encountered refused to be interviewed. I attended countless intelligence briefings. I listened to radio communications crackle in the heat of battle. I walked through battle rehearsals that choreographed every angle of attack.

Some officers seemed to expect reporters to serve as boosters for their unit’s exploits. A few pointed out that my presence in a Humvee or Bradley deprived them of one more fighting man.

Others strictly interpreted the ground rules all reporters signed, which prohibited us from identifying positions, revealing war plans or describing U.S. combat losses. For instance, I was ordered to withhold information about extensive damage to nearly three dozen Apache gunships in one battle, yet reporters with other units reported every detail.

I quickly learned to push the rules. Under combat conditions, the embed restrictions softened. Without official permission, I moved from unit to unit, trying to get closer to battle. I would stumble onto a unit, seek out the commander, and get his permission to jump aboard. With my greasy jeans and sweat-stained shirt, I felt like a homeless man cadging a meal.

But if I had not abandoned my original unit, I would have sat out the war in Kuwait, where that unit remained for the bulk of the fighting.

After my new battalion plunged me into the canal, I joined a brigade that took me to the core of the battle for Baghdad.

Pinned Down

Along the way, I discovered it is not combat that men detest most. It is the tedium, the petty rules, the filth, and the common soldier’s state of utter ignorance regarding where he is going, when or why.

With the troop truck submerged near Karbala on April 4, the soaked troops and I were dumped onto other trucks already packed with soldiers. Shivering and sleep-deprived, we bounced toward Baghdad for the next 20 hours.

Our convoy was ambushed south of the capital, then lost its way. We stumbled into an idyllic water garden of lilies and marble columns. Under fire and assaulted by mosquitoes, we were pinned down there much of the night, our second in a row with no sleep.

The men cursed and moaned and were ordered by their noncommissioned officers, in bursts of loud profanity, to shut up. But the NCOs also complained bitterly that no one higher up was telling them what was happening.

Just before dawn, the convoy snaked its way to a group of buildings. The troops slept inside on an oily floor for three hours, expecting to take part that morning in the fight to seize Baghdad’s international airport, which they believed was several miles away. But when the men awoke, they discovered they had spent the night at the airport. It had been taken by the 3rd Infantry the day before. And the water gardens turned out to be one of Hussein’s nearby palaces.

The battalion’s commanders knew all this, of course. But word never leaked down to the fighting men.

Ordinary soldiers are constantly foraging for scraps of information beyond their platoon or company, hoarding any precious nuggets.

“What’s the news, man?” was the constant greeting I received from soldiers, and it shamed me to have to confess, usually, that I didn’t know any more than they did. Anyone in the United States reading a newspaper or watching TV had a far better understanding of the war. I was like a scientist squinting into a microscope, oblivious to anything else in the lab, much less the world beyond the door.

At the airport that morning, I walked out onto the tarmac and stumbled upon a convoy of bullet-riddled tanks and Bradleys of the 3rd Infantry rumbling across the runway. The tankers told me they had just completed a harrowing run through Baghdad, killing roughly 1,000 soldiers while losing one tank and an American tank commander.

I sought out the 2nd Brigade commander, Col. David Perkins, and asked to link up with his men. He pointed to the open door of an armored personnel carrier. “We leave in 30 minutes,” he said.

I ended up at the brigade command post on Baghdad’s southern outskirts. Until then, I had spent my time at the battalion level and lower. Now I was privy to the planning of the assault on Baghdad with a brigade about to descend on the capital. My battle fog lifted.

When I was thrown with soldiers into combat on April 7, I wasn’t just a reporter covering a story. I was in effect a crew member of Lightning 28, a Bradley whose gunner was setting Iraqi pickup trucks afire and cutting men in half with ragged bursts from the Bradley’s “co-ax,” its clattering M-240 machine gun.

When Iraqis fired RPGs -- rocket-propelled grenades -- at the Bradley and peppered it with small-arms fire, they were trying to kill everyone inside, including me.

That is the subtle and insidious alchemy of the embed. The seven soldiers in the Bradley were much more than news subjects. They were fellow Americans fighting desperately to stay alive, and my fate was linked inexorably to theirs.

The strangers launching RPGs at us from bunkers weren’t just Iraqi fighters. They were the enemy.

War is an intensely selfish and personal experience. When I scanned the smoky streets through the Bradley’s tiny glass vision blocks, searching for “Iraqi dismounts,” as the tankers called infantrymen, I wasn’t just recording the scene for a story. I was searching for targets.

Placed in a soldier’s seat, I had been asked by an officer to perform a soldier’s job. He said, “Hey, watch that vision block.”

I saw flaming trucks and shadowy figures in the thick haze, but nothing stationary enough to be targeted and killed. Yet if I had spotted an exposed Iraqi fighter with an RPG aimed at the Bradley, I believe I would have screamed, “Dismount at 9 o’clock!” like anyone else inside. I was relieved that I did not have to make that decision.

In It Together

A Bradley under fire cannot be covered dispassionately, like a news conference or a political rally. The vehicle commander, setting off shattering booms with each cannon round fired into Iraqi bunkers, wasn’t an anonymous soldier to me. He was crew-cut Mark Jewell, a garrulous Marine major, a father of two troubled about missing his wedding anniversary that week.

The Bradley fought its way to a traffic circle near a presidential palace that morning. We watched through the vision blocks as the big guns on the tanks and Bradleys of Cyclone Company ripped into half a dozen suicide drivers speeding across the 14th of July bridge. They kept coming -- wild-eyed men, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, some firing AK-47s from passenger windows.

The gunners inside the tanks and Bradleys kept up a wall of fire, ripping open chunks of roadway with warning shots before pulverizing pickup trucks and sedans and human beings in flaming red explosions. Some vehicles exploded more than once as incendiary rounds set off ammunition or explosives stored inside.

“There’s brains and guts all over that bridge,” Staff Sgt. Anthony J. Smith said with the spare and brutal commentary typical of so many soldiers I encountered.

We sat buttoned up in the Bradley, all hatches locked, as stray RPG and small-arms fire spattered the roadway. Suddenly the main cannon jammed, and Maj. Jewell radioed another vehicle for a repair tool. Minutes later, someone was pounding on the heavy rear hatch. The door swung open to reveal the helmeted form of Geoffrey Mohan, my colleague at The Times, a wrench in his hand.

Mohan had been in the next armored vehicle for the entire battle and had volunteered to deliver the tool in order to step outside to use his satellite phone to call in his story to the newsroom in Los Angeles.

Mohan was a godsend. With my computer and phone lost to the canal, I had no way to send my story on the pivotal battle of the war. Mohan lent me his laptop and phone.

I climbed outside for the first time in two hours. I was overcome by the stench of cordite and the peculiar sour odor of scorched human flesh, the remains of an Iraqi soldier who had been blown apart. His AK-47 and helmet were still there, arranged in a messy still life. His face was contorted in a grimace, but I felt no pity. I wanted to feel compassion for a fellow human being who had been slaughtered, but I could not stop thinking that his RPG could have left me dead on the spot.

Lt. Matthew Hanks noticed an RPG launcher lying in the dirt in a small grassy park a few yards from the Bradley. Then he saw several bunkers.

Close Call

The radio man, Marine Sgt. Dennis Parks, grabbed a flashlight and Jewell’s 9-millimeter Beretta. He volunteered to be a “tunnel rat” and explore the bunkers. I watched him disappear into a hole that had been covered with a sheet of corrugated metal and camouflaged with palm fronds.

Inside the bunker, around a bend in a tunnel, Parks found Iraqi soldiers huddled in the dark, their arms upraised, begging not to be shot. Parks cursed and shouted for help. As he put it later, “My heart hit my [spine] and I started yelling at them” to get out.

Only after the Cyclone crews had hog-tied 15 prisoners and collected seven RPG launchers, 60 rockets, 40 grenades and 5,000 rounds of ammo did Parks fully comprehend the lethal threat. He was a compact, nimble young man from Michigan, a 21-year-old with uncommon maturity and decisiveness.

“They could have easily killed us all. They could have hit us before we even knew where they were,” he said. He seemed more mystified than relieved.

I survived, but other reporters did not. More than a dozen have died covering the war in Iraq, including Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly, who drowned along with a soldier when their Army Humvee plunged into a canal similar to the one that claimed my troop truck a day later.

Embed access also claimed Julio Anguita Parrado, a gentle, boyish reporter from El Mundo in Spain.

Parrado and I had shared the unnerving experience of listening to Col. Perkins lay out for his staff the plan to smash into the heart of Baghdad with just three battalions consisting of about 970 fighting men, 74 tanks and 54 Bradleys, backed by air and artillery.

It was the night of April 6, just hours before the tanks and Bradleys rolled out from the brigade command post on Baghdad’s southern cusp.

Chilling Assessment

Parrado was disturbed by a chilling assessment from the brigade intelligence officer, Maj. Joffery Watson, of the firepower still in the hands of the Special Republican Guard units protecting the capital.

Parrado approached me afterward, confessing his fear that the mission was too dangerous. He asked whether anyone would consider him a coward if he decided not to go along. I told him that I was afraid, too, and so were most of the soldiers. No one would think poorly of him.

Later that night, Parrado told me that he and a colleague, German photographer Christian Liebig, had decided to stay behind. Aware that I had lost my notebooks and was writing on scraps of paper, Parrado offered me a notebook.

I respected their decision, but I was going into the city. I had come too far to turn back just as the war was reaching a climax.

Soon after I left in the armored convoy, an Iraqi missile screamed into the brigade headquarters. Parrado and Liebig were killed instantly. Three soldiers also died and 17 were wounded, some of them horribly burned by a fireball that engulfed the command post.

My first reaction was shock and grief. It did not seem possible that men I had seen hours earlier were gone, or that a missile had pierced what seemed to be a haven at the rear.

My second reaction -- one that many soldiers admitted they also experienced when hearing of combat casualties -- was: Thank God it wasn’t me. I hated myself, but it was true.

For me, the deaths underscored what may be obvious from afar but is easy to overlook at the front: War is capricious. No decision in combat can be fully rational, and there is no safe place in a war zone.

That war turns men callous was driven home to me again later that day as I sought out Perkins for an assessment of the battle raging through the city center.

I rode to his command post with a medic, Staff Sgt. Luther Robinson, a free spirit from Atlantic, N.C., whose armored vehicle was transporting a wounded Iraqi fighter from one of the bunkers.

The Iraqi, who gave his name as Aziz, was ashen-faced and writhing in pain from a terrible wound to his foot. It hung grotesquely, attached only by ligaments and held fast by a bandage Robinson had applied.

Aziz seemed determined to carry on an idle conversation with me. I had spoken a few words of Arabic to him from my limited supply of phrases. Now I was trying to write my story on Mohan’s laptop.

I found myself becoming irritated at Aziz as he jabbered through his pain. A bloodied, half-delirious stranger, certain to lose his foot and perhaps his life, was trying to make polite conversation in the middle of a battle -- and I was absorbed in a laptop.

To shut Aziz up, I handed him a bottle of water and told myself it was an act of mercy.

At that moment, I noticed an Iraqi grenade resting next to me on the gurney where I sat. An American soldier apparently had taken it from a bunker and left it there. Aziz saw it, too, and he shrugged. I moved the grenade out of his reach.

Outside, a tremendous explosion made the Bradley shudder. Robinson, standing in the hatch, bent down and grinned at me, his face red and smeared with sweat. He hollered: “I love this stuff!”

I understood what he meant. We had been transported from the ordinary and the mundane, and every sound and sight and emotion was intense and brilliant. Each moment seemed infused with a meaning that was difficult to comprehend. And when the battle was over, I felt enormous relief, but also a sense of deflation and an elusive feeling of loss.

After the worst of it, I lived in the Presidential Palace for a week. I watched GIs feed live sheep to the lions and cheetahs in the palace’s private zoo. I roamed the halls and climbed to the roof to inspect four enormous sculpted heads of Hussein mounted there.

I had hundreds of rooms to choose from and selected a sunny ground-floor room overlooking a small garden.

When I had stayed up to write the night before, I slipped upstairs in the afternoons to one of the luxurious bedrooms with marble balconies overlooking the palace gardens. There, with the spring breeze carrying the scent of honeysuckle, I found a king-size bed and slept like a thief.

The adrenaline had drained by then, and the soldiers turned anxious and distracted. I felt the same way. There was a void. The battle had focused everyone’s mind on a clearly defined goal. Now we were in the dangerous twilight between war and reconstruction.

The chaplains had soldiers lining up for counseling. They poured out tales of eviscerating strangers with fat rounds from their .50-caliber machine guns.

It wasn’t that the soldiers felt guilty, the chaplains told me later. They had done what they were trained to do but had never fully comprehended what was required to destroy the enemy. This realization troubled them deeply.

I had never seen an armored brigade in action. The destruction inflicted by the tanks and Bradleys was astonishing. But more remarkable was the thorough and businesslike way the gunners went about their work. They were anxious and afraid and stimulated, of course. But they also were focused, methodical and deadly efficient.

“We’re in the business of managing violence,” explained Maj. Mark Rasins, who fought in the city for the 4th Battalion, 64th Armored Regiment.

Embedding taught me much about the way the American military functions under combat pressure. The military loves meetings, and paperwork about meetings. It loves to do things at night, preferably late at night. It spends days planning complex missions, only to cancel them abruptly. It loves to have everyone sit in vehicles with the engines running for long, maddening stretches. It prefers orders to logic, rules to imagination.

Yet with overwhelming air power and just three battalions on the ground in central Baghdad on April 7, the military had ripped out the heart of a major Arab capital with alarming speed.

I did not encounter any soldiers who reveled in killing. In fact, many men told me beforehand that they hoped they would not have to kill. But some laughed and mugged every time they passed an Iraqi corpse whose head had been flattened by a tank, and many spoke in a clinical and detached way of killing other men.

When I asked one company commander about events of Tuesday, April 8, he replied casually: “Uh, Tuesday, yeah. Tuesday afternoon we spent killing enemy dismounts.”

Soldiers wearing chemical suits joked endlessly about the effects of biological or chemical weapons. They laughed about “doing the funky chicken,” referring to convulsions caused by exposure to nerve agents. They nominated one another for “least mission critical” -- that hapless soldier who would be the first one ordered to take off his gas mask after a chemical or biological attack.

In a convoy south of Baghdad on April 4, several soldiers and I watched a pair of A-10 Warthogs destroy trucks full of Iraqi fighters in the hazy distance. My companions were thrilled by the low growl of the planes as they unleashed barrages from their 30-millimeter Vulcan cannons at 4,700 rounds a minute. They cheered and shouted: “Yeah, man! They’re gettin’ some!”

Staff Sgt. Richard Clinton, a muscular Army Ranger, listened to them and said: “Somebody just died right now.”

Pride and Fear

Outside the city of Najaf one afternoon, I asked Lt. Col. Fetterman whether his soldiers admitted to fear before battle. He was preparing to lead his men on an air assault mission, his pistol on his hip and two letters from his wife in his helmet liner.

“Here’s what I tell my soldiers: What makes a man is the counterbalance between pride and fear,” he said. “You reach down and find your pride and overcome your fear.”

Embedded reporters had their own fears -- of being killed or maimed, of missing a story, of being compromised by their craving for access or manipulated by commanders.

Last week, I wrote about five soldiers from the 3rd Infantry who were suspected of stealing $12.3 million from hidden Iraqi caches totaling $768 million in $100 bills.

I knew one of the suspects. He had told me about his children and his quarrels with his wife and his conflicted feelings about living in strangers’ homes and pawing through their bedrooms. His predicament pained me.

There was no question I would write the story. But a staff officer later confronted me, accusing me of tarnishing his unit’s reputation. He told me I should not have reported the thefts, that I was abusing my embed access.

“We don’t need this negative publicity right now,” he said, and I realized that by “we,” he was including me.

*

For previous articles and audio from Iraq by David Zucchino, go to www.latimes.com /embed