War Stories

by Oliver North

  The 4th ID staff had set up a system for meticulously double-checking every informant debrief and insisted on carefully interrogating every captured terrorist. All of Saddam’s many relatives in the region were quietly reminded that there was a $25 million reward for the information leading to the capture of the dictator.

  As we left that afternoon, I wished Odierno a happy Thanksgiving. He thanked me and wished me the same, but added, “If you leave now, you’ll miss the capture.”

  I replied, “How soon?”

  “He’s here. I know he is,” Odierno replied. “He’s been right around here all along. It’s just a matter of days before we find him.”

  I should have stayed—because on 13 December, they did.

  As Ray Odierno predicted, it turned out to be a tip from a relative of one of Saddam’s guards that led to the former dictator’s capture. Armed with the information, 600 U.S. Army soldiers went to investigate a farm outside the hamlet of Ad Daw, just beyond the outskirts of Tikrit. There they found the former despot, bearded and filthy, cowering with a sidearm and $750,000 in U.S. currency in a hand-dug “rat-hole.” The man who had urged his followers to “fight to the death” put up no resistance and begged his captors not to shoot him.

  The troops were euphoric. SPC Michael Tillery, of the 4th Battalion, 42nd Field Artillery Regiment from Alexandria, Virginia, who participated in the raid, said, “All the work has paid off and that one step is finally over—finding Saddam.” Video of the tyrant being examined for lice by a U.S. Army doctor flashed around the world.

  Unfortunately, jubilation at the capture was not universal. European critics decried the “humiliation” of videotaping a “former head of state” being examined in such an “inhumane” way. Others speculated that Saddam would now be tortured to divulge the whereabouts of his weapons of mass destruction.

  In the United States, Howard Dean, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared, “The capture of Saddam has not made America safer.”

  Yet in the month after Hussein’s capture, attacks against coalition forces in Iraq dropped 22 percent. U.S. military officers said that the decline in attacks was proof that Saddam’s capture dampened resistance to the American presence in Iraq.

  Howard Dean wasn’t the only one with a peculiar perception of Iraqi reality. Democratic senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts charged that the war was a lie “cooked up” in Texas. And just two days after Paul Bremer proclaimed, “We got him,” Representative Jim McDermott of Washington accused President Bush of manipulating Saddam’s capture for political purposes. McDermott told a Seattle radio audience that U.S. troops could have captured Saddam “a long time ago if they wanted.”

  Clinton-era secretary of state Madeleine Albright seemed to follow the same line of reasoning. She asserted to Morton Kondracke of FOX News: “Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?”

  Media coverage of Saddam’s capture has been as surreal as the conspiracy theorists’ conjectures. After watching jubilant Iraqis celebrating Saddam’s capture, ABC anchor Peter Jennings saw only sadness and morosely concluded, “There’s not a good deal for Iraqis to be happy about at the moment.” Jennings added that life for Iraqi citizens is “very chaotic . . . beset by violence . . . [and] not as stable for them as it was when Saddam Hussein was in power.”

  The anchors and talking heads pondered Saddam’s situation. CBS’s Leslie Stahl taunted Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld about torturing Saddam. “Would we deprive him of sleep? Would we make it very cold where he is, or very hot? Are there any restrictions on the way we treat him to get him to cooperate more than he has been?”

  NBC’s Katie Couric said Saddam’s capture was only “symbolic.” She’d be proved hopelessly wrong less than twenty-four hours later, as the 1st Armored Division, acting on intelligence secured during Saddam’s capture, rounded up three former Iraqi generals suspected of supporting the terrorist resistance in Iraq.

  In keeping with the mainstream media’s axiom that no good deed shall go unpunished, CBS’s Dan Rather described the Iraqi people as worse off than they had been under Saddam. Introducing a report by Kimberly Dozier in Baghdad, Rather proclaimed that the “result is a population fearful, frustrated, angry, and heavily armed.”

  Dozier went on to report, “Day or night, these are some of the most dangerous streets on Earth. Desperation drives murder and theft. Iraqis have traded fear of the despot for fear of their fellow man, and U.S. troops seem powerless to protect them.”

  Newsweek compared Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to “Baghdad Bob” for saying that things were not as bad as the press painted them. New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein described President Bush as “a gun-slinging cowboy knocking over international treaties and bent on controlling the world’s oil, if not the entire world.”

  All of this twisted, mind-numbing negativism overlooked Saddam’s horrific record:

  1.Responsibility for two wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands

  2.Raping, torturing, robbing, starving and murdering his own people

  3.Using weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors and countrymen

  4.Attempting to assassinate an American president

  5.Training and supporting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, Muslim Brotherhood, and Abu Nidal terrorists who killed Americans

  Even the most committed followers of Osama bin Laden have to wonder if their bearded leader who wants them to die for his cause would ignominiously surrender—like Saddam did—to save his own skin, or appeal to the mercy of the International Criminal Court to avoid a death sentence.

  Finally, the loopy leftist rhetoric in the aftermath of Saddam’s capture ignored the extraordinary courage, training, persistence, and discipline of the American soldiers who pursued and caught the Butcher of Baghdad. It’s too bad, because they deserve a lot more credit than they are getting.

  During our second trip to northern Iraq, an incident occurred that convinced me Griff Jenkins could no longer serve as my combat cameraman and field producer. It was just after dark in Bayji and we were doing a live feed to Tony Snow’s Sunday morning broadcast on FOX News Channel when an enemy mortar round impacted about twenty yards away. Though we were unscathed, the concussion of the explosion was enough to knock our little satellite transponder off the top of a nearby Humvee. Viewers saw a flash and then nothing but fuzz on their screens.

  Griff quickly reset the satellite equipment and reestablished the link with Washington. Within minutes, we were back on the air and it was clear that no one had been hurt. But afterward, it occurred to me that for Griff’s wife, Kathleen, and little daughter, Madeline, those had to be several very anxious minutes. He had already come through some very close calls during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Several times I’d had to consider how I was going to explain to them how their husband and father had been killed.

  It’s always hard to break up a team—particularly a good one. Griff had been my producer and friend on radio and then TV for more than five years. He is a gifted photographer and cameraman. Technically, he is without peer. When I told him that I wanted him to take a producer position that was opening at the FOX News bureau in Washington, he strenuously objected to being reassigned. But I was equally unwilling to keep putting him at risk on frequent trips into combat zones. Thankfully, the management at FOX agreed and Griff became the producer for Tony Snow’s radio show.

  The entire episode was a learning experience for me. I had led Marines in combat—and I’ve spent a considerable time part of my life with and around warriors. Over the years, I’d written painful “next of kin” letters and met with anguished family members when those I’d served with were killed in training or combat.

  It’s hard enough to have to send such a missive to the families of soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines who are slain serving their county in uniform. But it’s quite another to contemplate having to deliver such
a message to the mother of a young child whose civilian father got killed covering the combatants.

  I resolved that in the future, my field producers and cameramen would have to be either bachelors or those whose children were grown, and that’s the way it has been since. Though we now show up in places like Iraq and Afghanistan like a troup of “grumpy old men,” at least my conscience is a little less burdened.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #45

  2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 1st Marine Division

  Ramadi, Iraq

  Friday, 16 April 2004

  1130 Hours Local

  Last week was the bloodiest week in Iraq in over a year. U.S. Marines and soldiers have been heavily engaged in Fallujah and Ramadi by heavy gunfire and RPG attacks while searching for the terrorists who killed and desecrated the bodies of four American contractors in Fallujah on 31 March. In Najaf, U.S. Army and Marine units are trying to quell an uprising of radical Shi’ites led by Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, a fanatical cleric. So far this month, twenty-one U.S. Marines have been killed and sixty-five more have been wounded.

  And while Christian Galdabini—my new cameraman—and I cover the “Magnificent Bastards” here in Ramadi and the units surrounding Fallujah, we’re being treated to news reports of Senator Ted Kennedy unleashing a verbal carpet-bombing on the president of the United States. Kennedy, whose own integrity and judgment have been called into question on numerous occasions throughout his career, used a forum at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank, to charge the Bush administration with “creat(ing) the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon.” Kennedy accused the president of breaking “the basic bond of trust with the American people,” and said that Iraq is “George Bush’s Vietnam.”

  Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia also equated Iraq with Vietnam: “Surely, I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam in this development. Surely this administration recognizes that increasing the U.S. troop presence in Iraq will only suck us deeper, deeper into the maelstrom, into the quicksand of violence that has become the hallmark of that unfortunate, miserable country.”

  What is truly unfortunate is that those hearing this pessimistic rhetoric are the radical terrorists who are emboldened by it. But also listening are the young American fighting men we are with, and it’s disheartening to those who are able to see the news—either on our little satellite transceiver or on television monitors in some of the larger mess halls and recreation facilities around the country.

  Before arriving here, the Marines we are with spent months in predeployment training at Camp Pendleton in California. They had permitted us to cover their specialized training for operating in and around civilian populations—and now we rejoined them to document how they put the tactics, techniques and procedures they mastered into practice. Lt. Col. Paul Kennedy, the battalion commander, in an on-camera interview, described the fighting as “tough.”

  This week during a prime-time White House news conference, President Bush used the same word to describe the recent fighting in Ramadi and Fallujah. It is tough—war always is. During my first forty hours on the ground this time, anti-Iraqi forces haven’t stopped shooting at the Marines, making it more difficult to get around.

  But it’s also evident that the troops we’re with—from the 1st Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, California, and the Army’s 1st Brigade from Fort Riley, Kansas—are indeed “performing brilliantly,” as the president said in his remarks. But the troops we interview express it somewhat differently. “The fighting has been intense, but we’ve been kicking butt everywhere we go,” said a Marine sergeant when we put him on the air.

  Lt. Col. Kennedy makes it clear that he knows his mission. He tells his company commanders to “hunt down” the terrorists who are infiltrating the provincial capital and reminds them that their enemy “can’t stand up to a Marine unit in a gunfight. They aren’t as well trained, lack fire discipline, and aren’t in shape. If you have to . . . send out invitations. Watch out for the IEDs and when they show themselves, shoot straight. Use only the force you need to eliminate the threat. Avoid civilian casualties and keep your comms up. And remember the Division motto: ‘No greater friend—no worse enemy.’ Let them figure out which one they want you to be.”

  Shortly after arriving in Ramadi, his young Marines had suffered six killed and eighteen wounded. But this morning’s firefight produces four enemy dead, nine detainees, and sixteen weapons captured—and two wounded Marines. Among the enemy dead and captured were foreign terrorists and a handful of local Baathist loyalists.

  One of those detained in the operation was a young Iraqi who had been wounded in an earlier engagement with U.S. troops. He had been treated in a hospital and was recuperating in the home of a “friend” when U.S. Marines, with the cooperation of Iraqis in the neighborhood, knocked on the door and took him into custody.

  “One more terrorist off the street and one less bad guy who, later on, could have injured a Marine, sailor, or soldier,” was how the squad leader put it.

  Many of these Marines and Navy medical corpsmen are on a second tour in Iraq. More than a few were only home for five or six months before they turned around, put on their flak jackets and helmets, and returned to Iraq. I asked one, a Marine corporal who had enlisted the day after the September 11, 2001, attacks, why he had volunteered to come back. His answer: “Because we have a job to do that we didn’t finish the first time. In this war on terror, you don’t want to play any more ‘home games.’ We need to play ‘on the road’—and beat them here.” Unfortunately, these aren’t sentiments anyone is likely to see in the mainstream media.

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #46

  1st Marine Division

  Ramadi, Iraq

  Friday, 23 April 2004

  1400 Hours Local

  The Marines here in Ramadi are continuing a 200-year-old tradition in the United States Marine Corps—fighting terrorists. The Corps’ history of such confrontations dates back to 1804, when Marine 1st Lt. Presley O’Bannon led his men to defeat the Barbary Pirates.

  During an early morning ceremony, 1st Lt. David Dobb was among twenty U.S. Marines who received the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in recent combat. Since arriving “in-country,” 116 Marines in this battalion have received the Purple Heart, and yet over seventy of them have decided to stay in Iraq rather than return home, even though, by consequence of their wounds, they can do so.

  I asked 1st Lt. Dobb, who sustained injuries to his hand, why so many of these young men decided to stick it out even though they’d been hurt. “This is what these Marines signed up to do,” he told me, “and we’re going to see this mission through until the job’s done the way it is supposed to be.”

  Sergeant Kenneth Conde, a squad leader with the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, was leading his unit in a nighttime raid this week when insurgents tried to ambush his platoon. In the intense gunfight that ensued, Conde was hit in the shoulder. His corpsman quickly treated him and he stayed in the fight. By the time it was over, they had killed six terrorists and collected a pile of enemy weapons and ordnance. Conde’s grievous wounds were a free ticket home, yet he decided to stay with the battalion. I asked him why. “There’s no other choice for a sergeant in the Marine Corps,” Conde explained. “You have to lead your Marines.”

  It’s this kind of courage that makes me wonder what some in our media are thinking. A few weeks ago, Andy Rooney, a syndicated newspaper columnist and commentator for CBS News’s 60 Minutes, wrote a column titled, “Our Soldiers in Iraq Aren’t Heroes.” Rooney is part of a team of “journalists” at CBS News who have gone out of their way to protest U.S. policies in Iraq and the War on Terror.

  Rooney, who to my knowledge hasn’t been to Iraq, wrote, “You can be sure our soldiers in Iraq are not all brave heroes gladly risking their lives for us sitting comfortably back here at home.”

  Not heroes, Andy? Meet Lance Cpl. Conyers, a member of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines. On
6 April, Conyers was on patrol with his squad when they were ambushed. “I was out in front at an unlucky moment and took a round to the chest,” Conyers told me, “then one ricocheted off the light pole next to me and hit me in the leg.” The corpsman rushed to Conyers’s side and treated him, and Conyers stayed in the fight.

  In his column, Rooney insists that our troops “want to come home,” and says if he had the chance to interrogate our guys in uniform to prove his point, he’d ask them, “If you could have a medal or a trip home, which would you take?”

  Which do you think Conyers chose, Andy? The bullet Conyers took in the chest was fired from an AK-47. It struck inches from his heart and could have killed him. But because of the plate of armor he was wearing—armor that critics claim either doesn’t exist, or if it did, it wouldn’t work—Conyers is alive. The wound Conyers received to his leg, a “through and through” wound, was his ticket home. But did Conyers take it? Of course not. Of the wound, he told me, “That won’t keep me down.” He said he owes it to his squad to “continue on and fight.”

  Lance Cpl. Conyers is just one of hundreds of Marines and soldiers who, while fighting to defend the American public and liberate the Iraqi people, have been shot, hit, wounded, and treated, only to stay on the battlefield with their units instead of going home. These are remarkable young Americans.

  Rooney complains in his column, “We don’t learn much about what our soldiers in Iraq are thinking or doing.” Well, Andy, now you know—they’re fighting heroically. Want to know more?

  They go on patrol—wearing twenty-five-pound flak jackets and six-pound helmets. They carry another thirty to forty pounds of weapons and ammunition. On longer missions they carry up to seventy pounds on their backs. By day, they’re America’s diplomats—canvassing neighborhoods to befriend the local Iraqis, conducting intelligence operations, and bringing supplies and gifts to Iraqi families and children. By night, they use the intelligence they gather from Iraqis who want the terrorists out of their neighborhoods and conduct raids to root them out of their hiding places.