Wow! Battle of Falluja

[Annie]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040731/news_1n31valor.html

 

[5stringJeff]

Those guys are the definition of courage under fire. It makes me proud to live in the same country as those men.

 

[Comrade]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040731/news_1n31valor.html

Nice!

 

[Annie]

Those guys are the definition of courage under fire. It makes me proud to live in the same country as those men.

I think I read a piece by a reporter traveling with them. If I can find it, I'll post it too. He said, all of them were changed, himself too. Moving piece.

 

[Annie]

http://beaconblog.com/beaconblog.php?p=1036&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Opening paragraphs:

Several months ago, during the height of the battle in Fallujah, I posted a story by the L.A. Times about soldiers being baptized in the middle of that hellish city. Included in that post were remarkable pictures like the one above taken by Times staff photographer and 2003 Newspaper Photographer of the Year Rick Loomis. Rick has written about his experience in Fallujah which I have received via email and posted in full below. Also check out his exceptional images he took in Iraq here.

I finally tried to wash the Marine's bloodstains from my pants the other day. It had been nine days since the battle and a daily dose of dirt and dust had all but masked what I knew lay beneath.

>From the relative comfort of "Dreamland", a reasonably secure U.S. base of operations just outside Fallouja, I swirled my pants around in square metal pan containing four inches of precious water. With each spin around the pan, the water turned a deeper brown. And as the stains of Sgt. Josue Magana's blood became more apparent, I thought back to the day he was shot.

At zero five A.M, just before dawn on April 26th, the Marines of Echo Company was ordered to take two homes on the northwestern edge of Fallouja. For the prior three weeks, since Marines had first moved to cordon off city, there had been constant exchanges of gunfire between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area known as the Jolan Heights. After all, this was Fallouja, heart of the notorious Sunni Triangle, home to the root of U.S. occupation resistance.

The Marines had hoped that theirs would be a 'hearts and minds' mission leading up to the June 30 deadline to hand power over to Iraqis. It turned sour after four American contractors were gruesomely killed on March 31st. Insurgents hung two of their burned and mutilated bodies from a bridge that crosses the Euphrates River. And now the Marines found themselves in the position of battling Iraqi bodies instead of winning over Iraqi hearts and minds.

[....]

Closing paragraphs:

I spoke with the mother of Lance Cpl. Austin several days after he died. It took awhile to get the courage up to ring her at her home in New Mexico. There was nothing I could do to bring her son home. Would a phone call from someone in the media infuriate her? All I had to offer her was a photo of her son reading the mail from home that I had shot the day before he died. I thought she might want that as a memory of her son in a place she had perhaps imagined, but would never see.

She received my call and my unpolished speech about her son. "Hello ma'am," I said, "I was with your son on the day he died." She told me how proud she was of him and I started to break down when she told me how if she were there that day she would have carried his limp body out of the house herself. She wanted to have any photo I had, to gather any scrap if information, conversations about him, anything she could hold onto. He was her only son.

A few days later I called Sgt. Magana as he lay in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland. He spoke only in a whisper, and sounded very weak. I was sure he did not remember me holding his hand or talking about his daughter but he seemed appreciative that someone would call him from Iraq. He asked that I tell his comrades he was keeping them in his prayers while they were still on the battlefield. I told him I would.

Those Marines in battle were not the only ones certain to be changed by that day. I liken my desires as a journalist to be similar to the way I like to live my life. I want to get close enough to the edge of the abyss to look in but I don't want to go over. As I knelt over that square pan of water, scrubbing my pants vigorously, the bloodstains of that day did not fade away. They now serve to remind me just how easy it can be to slip over the edge.