Posted on 04/20/2003 8:11:51 AM PDT by Radix
BAGHDAD - A couple of weeks back, when we had returned to the safety of the Najaf desert after the raid on the Euphrates bridgehead, my wife told me over the satphone the people back home were wondering if I'd ever be the same again.
I had already sent back reports of the tank company's first combat, within artillery range of the ruins of Babylon; of angry, weeping women and frightened children on the road by their burning farmhouse; Iraqi prisoners with trembling hands and the young soldier in the ditch staring at nothing, a neat hole just below his temple. I had written of the exhausting two-day-long rapid road march that brought us into Iraq; of our camp life in the desert, the filth, the boredom and the waiting.
Since then I have sent back dispatches about heavier contact; the tragic deaths of civilians who panicked and died when they failed to heed the tankers' warning fire; the wounded Iraqi who kissed the American medic who patched him up.
I've written about the RPG-peppered ride into Baghdad viewed through an open crew hatch of an M113; the sight of hard-core Iraqi Special Republican Guard soldiers being chewed up by heavy machine-gun fire around us, and the smell day after day of their slumped and twisted bodies rotting amid the palaces they defended.
There was the clanking ride through Saddam's rose gardens; the gleeful looting by Baghdadis as their city descended into anarchy and the souvenir-scrounging by soldiers; the cheering of Iraqis who showed every sign that they welcomed this violent change and the disgust of others appalled by it.
There was the obscenity of Saddam's vanity and greed, evident everywhere in a place where money bubbles out of the ground in the form of oil, but where peasants lacked glass windows in their mud-brick huts while their illustrious leader honored himself with heroic statues of himself and crammed his lavish palaces full of expensive liquor and gold-plated guns.
The combat was rarely more than moderate for us. It offered us the thrill of close brushes with death, but it was the Iraqis who did all the dying when A Company, ``The Assassins,'' rolled up in their tanks flying the Jolly Roger flag.
On those recent mornings when it looked like it might all be over, a mild funk would settle in at the prospect that there might be no more action, no reason to stay in this heat amid these swarms of flies and this destruction, eating monotonous meals from foil pouches and accumulating layers of grime upon grime, far from my wife and children. But chaos would prevail, and by the afternoon, we would find ourselves amid some turmoil.
I found out several years ago that action is an attractive flame, though sometimes approached with some trepidation and respect until you are committed, then treated with surprising disregard, as soldiers and reporters alike walked too carelessly through intersections plagued by AK and RPG fire, only ducking when it looked too close, with faith in our body armor and the thought that, ``The world is very large, and bullets, very small.''
On those dull mornings, any prospect of action or forward movement held the promise of offering some meaning to this life in the field.
Peace is the ironic goal of war. The old saying is that soldiers want peace more than anyone else, but soldiers are war professionals who are also eager to practice their craft, until they tire of slaughter and the loss of comrades.
In this conflict, I suspect most on the American side did not reach that point. Many told me they wanted more action, but barring that, they wanted to go home. Others were grateful it had been what it was and no more. This may have been America's hottest war since Vietnam, but Baghdad was not Hue, Mogadishu, Iwo Jima or Shiloh.
As for us, the reporters, action is why we came. No news is no news.
There are some earnest souls here with a sense of indignation, but a lot of those I've met are what my network affiliate pal called the ``war tourists.'' Ours is a business that takes us where intense things are happening, and calls on us to try to convey that intensity.
The execution of that task is a drug that can become a meaning unto itself. Here, in other foreign assignments and back in the states, I have been privileged to enter the intimate places of people's lives, when they are stripped bare by adversity.
At the moment, I'm still here, will still heft myself up on top of the 113 to sleep under the stars and swat at mosquitoes tonight, still eating from foil pouches without appetite. The bodies have mostly been picked up, though that blackened half a human is still lying up a side street and you get a whiff of death from the hedges now and then. The hardships and the hazards of the past weeks are fast becoming flashes of memory.
The GIs talk about what they want to do back home. Coleman, the Georgia country boy who leapt over the irrigation ditch and filled the Iraqi holdouts in it with lead, is looking forward to hunting season. He talks about ``The Legend,'' the wily old stag in his county that no one ever manages to bag.
Smitty is out of the Army in July and intends to lounge around on unemployment for six months before he launches into a career as an X-ray technician. Pasto, the psyops guy who likes talking with the locals, has a wanderer's heart and wants to go to Indonesia. He talks about retiring in Southeast Asia or maybe Kosovo, though he's only 21 and also loves action.
Castillo has been inspired by Saddam's palaces and has big plans for the house he wants to build on his 12 acres on the San Felipe Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico.
Sgt. Jake, the maintenance chief, wants a beer on his back deck. Those with wives and women back home want to be with them. The fathers want to be with their kids.
I'll walk away with the rare privilege of having become close to a good group of soldiers and having ridden with them into battle. The names and faces of all those soldiers and everything we shared in a little more than a month. The experience of riding with a victorious army into the capital of my nation's enemy, into that enemy's own yard. The memory of this strange tour of Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization. Too bad civilization grew up and left home. We missed all the old ruins but saw a lot of new ones.
We'll see if these experiences have changed me. For now they have just made me tired.
I've learned a couple of things about myself: that I can accept the hard truth that sometimes others must die so that I can live; that I can continue to work and function under more trying conditions than I might have thought. I'm still mulling some of these things. Other lessons may emerge.
For now, I want to go home, kiss my wife and kids. I want to play catch with Ian out in the back yard, curl up with little Devon and a children's book, take Alex on a special outing with Dad, and take Buddy, our yellow Lab, down to Coast Guard Hill with the kids for a run.
I want to spend one of those long evenings talking with my wife when the kids are asleep. I want a big frosty mug with a black and tan of Bass Ale and Guinness, with a steak on the grill, on the deck behind our little 1950s ranch in the woods near Cape Cod Bay, surveying all I own, in that place that hasn't seen war for two centuries.
I'll fall back into the routine of covering whatever local news comes across the city desk at the Boston Herald. In a few months, I might get restless, thinking about the dusty, goat-eating regions of the world. My wife is already telling me I can't leave them like this again.
Those who are changed are the families, American and Iraqi, who will never see their sons, daughters, mothers and fathers again, and may not ever know what happened to them. Those who will be changed are those who saw much more intense combat than I did, who saw friends die, who killed at close range and are troubled by it, who narrowly avoided being killed themselves.
I have just been here doing a job, a little different this time, but in this business, everything is about tomorrow.
Editor's note: Jules Crittenden returned home safely last night.
The embedded reporters made it real for me, and I felt a bit closer to my own who was always near this one.
Perhaps, with luck and reflection, a new respect for those who lay their life on the line to protect those things he missed will emerge. We can also hope that respect for the founders dream and vision for this country will grow, however, in the most infertile ground of Cape Cod and the far left North East US, the weeds of liberalism will probably choke him out in time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.