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Michael Yon: How I got here
Heres a brief on how I became witness to this war:I grew up in Florida. Joined the army for college money, made it into Special Forces and the same week I graduated from Special Forces selection, was accused of murder after a fistfight in a Maryland nightclub. Those charges were eventually dropped. Special Forces gave me shelter, taught me to speak German fluently and tried to teach me Polish. Among other topics, we studied insurgency and counterinsurgency. I was on two A-teams. We trained to infiltrate extremely deep behind enemy lines, past the point where helicopters could extract us. The exfiltration plan included, Hope to see you again, but nobodys coming to get you. I learned something about my country. We were not the wimps many people seemed to think; we were deadly serious about going into someones backyard when needed. Money was never my master, but a deep-seated curiosity and a desire to explore were strong. After the Army, off to college, worked security for Michael Jackson for a brief period, started a business in Poland, among other things, and I wrote a book called Danger Close. When jets crashed into American buildings and soil on September 11, 2001, few knew the name Osama bin Laden. But as the second jet crushed into the second tower at the World Trade Center, I knew bin Laden was the culprit, and that Taliban were harboring him in Afghanistan. Despite the horror that day, I was relieved. If al Qaeda had possessed deployable weapons of mass destruction, atomic or otherwise, they would have used them. . . . One year after the Iraq ground war had begun, I was in Massachusetts studying cults and working on an unrelated book project, when Master Sergeant Richard L. Ferguson died in a humvee rollover on March 30th, 2004 while conducting combat operations in Samarra, Iraq. Fergy was a fixture in the 10th Special Forces Group, and I had lunch with him in Colorado shortly before he went to war this time. Now he was gone. I still remember how freezing cold it was in Massachusetts the next day when I took a break from writing to watch the midday news. Although David Petraeus and his 101st Airborne had performed brilliantly in Mosul and Nineveh Province, other areas of Iraq suffered less facile stewardship. Fallujah, for instance, which began as Coalition-friendly, had been pushed to a snapping point, largely by us. On the television, below a breaking news banner, flashed a mob of Iraqis dancing and chanting as they mutilated four American contractors. Emails flooded my inbox. One of the murdered contractors was Scott Helvenston, an ex-Navy SEAL and super-athlete. Wed gone to high school together in Florida. . . . From Colorado I flew to Florida for Scotts memorial, where media from as far away as Japan had besieged his moms home and camped out front, using the long lenses to try to get photos of the family through the blinds. Media types stalked Scotts friends, including a friend we shared, Eddy Twyford. Eddy took me to the memorial and funeral, blocking the relentless swarm of media buzzing their politically loaded questions. Some had taken to calling Scott a mercenary; extreme baiting even for tabloid programs. National discourse grew even more aggressively polarized. To someone with my political tin ear, it all required too much translation. There seemed to be little emphasis on honest talk. But even with the pitch so high and intense, I heard the same thing at Scotts funeral from the military people in attendance there: Were not getting the full picture of whats happening in Iraq from the media, you should go, youre a writer. . . . Go read the whole thing. Posted by: Mike 2007-03-28 |
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