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| Michael Yon: How I got here |
| 2007-03-28 |
| Here’s 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 nobody’s 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 someone’s 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 Iraqi’s 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. We’d gone to high school together in Florida. . . . From Colorado I flew to Florida for Scott’s memorial, where media from as far away as Japan had besieged his mom’s home and camped out front, using the long lenses to try to get photos of the family through the blinds. Media types stalked Scott’s 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 Scott’s funeral from the military people in attendance there: “We’re not getting the full picture of what’s happening in Iraq from the media, you should go, you’re a writer.” . . . Go read the whole thing. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 V: Yon's excellent ... but WE pushed Fallujah to a breaking point? He's trotting out the standard "we can win anyone over to our side" snake eater (Special Forces) nonsense. The real problem in Iraq is civilians who shield guerrillas, either by feeding and housing them, or thronging around them as they flee. An Israeli-style program of demolishing the homes of guerrilla supporters could diminish their base of civilian support. Firing into crowds that are actively shielding guerrillas would reduce the number of people willing to do this. But neither of these things are going to happen. Because the lives of Iraqi civilians are more important than those of American GI's. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2007-03-28 20:44 |
| #1 Yon's excellent ... but WE pushed Fallujah to a breaking point? Didn't the first incident - an engineered classic in which US forces were fired on out of a crowd to ensure an impossible situation for us - happen within a WEEK of our arrival? Unless I've got my facts wrong, that little item smells very off-base .... |
| Posted by: Verlaine 2007-03-28 12:53 |