May 5th, 2003
Dear Readers,
I could send you the 15 or twenty comments I've seen about Charlotte Aldebron's "flag" document which I sent out this morning -- I'm happy to say that our newsletter's international readership has helped the article find a new audience.
According to her mother (Jillian Aldebron at aldebron@ainop.com), Charlotte Aldebron cannot get published in her local paper. FOR SHAME!
Instead of collecting up all the comments I have seen about her writing since
I sent that piece out this morning, I want to let you know about two other marvelous
documents she has written [which] I found several copies of already on the
web ([two are] shown below), and suggest that all of you search the web for "Charlotte
Aldebron" and see what you come up with.
I think the major media had better notice this amazing, young, gifted thinker and writer in a big way, and real soon, or they will be embarrassed by their tardiness later. Has Larry King Live interviewed her? Not that I know of, and all the majors seem to ignore her. But I watched a talented 3-year-old ride a skateboard recently! Interesting, but Charlotte's talent is much more useful, unique, and important!
There is no question Charlotte Aldebron is going to change the world in a big, big way. She is already changing it, for the better.
Here are the selections I've found on the web, plus something about what it looks like from the other side of the coin, and a brief discussion of how we get from "point A" to "point B".
Sincerely,
Russell Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
1) What About the Iraqi Children? by Charlotte Aldebron March 6, 2003
2) Peace Rally Speech by Charlotte Aldebron, October 26, 2002 - Augusta, Maine
3) And now for something completely different!
=================
FROM:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/aldebron1.html
What About the Iraqi Children?
by Charlotte Aldebron
March 6, 2003
The following is a transcript of a speech given by now 13-year-old Charlotte Aldebron at a peace rally in Maine.
When people think about bombing Iraq, they see a picture in their heads of Saddam Hussein in a military uniform, or maybe soldiers with big black mustaches carrying guns, or the mosaic of George Bush Senior on the lobby floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel with the word "criminal." But guess what? More than half of Iraq’s 24 million people are children under the age of 15. That’s 12 million kids. Kids like me. Well, I’m almost 13, so some are a little older, and some a lot younger, some boys instead of girls, some with brown hair, not red. But kids who are pretty much like me just the same. So take a look at me—a good long look. Because I am what you should see in your head when you think about bombing Iraq. I am what you are going to destroy.
If I am lucky, I will be killed instantly, like the three hundred children murdered by your "smart" bombs in a Baghdad bomb shelter on February 16, 1991. The blast caused a fire so intense that it flash-burned outlines of those children and their mothers on the walls; you can still peel strips of blackened skin—souvenirs of your victory—from the stones.
But maybe I won’t be lucky and I’ll die slowly, like 14-year-old Ali Faisal, who right now is in the "death ward" of the Baghdad children’s hospital. He has malignant lymphoma—cancer—caused by the depleted uranium in your Gulf War missiles. Or maybe I will die painfully and needlessly like18-month-old Mustafa, whose vital organs are being devoured by sand fly parasites. I know it’s hard to believe, but Mustafa could be totally cured with just $25 worth of medicine, but there is none of this medicine because of your sanctions.
Or maybe I won’t die at all but will live for years with the psychological damage that you can’t see from the outside, like Salman Mohammed, who even now can’t forget the terror he lived through with his little sisters when you bombed Iraq in 1991. Salman’s father made the whole family sleep in the same room so that they would all survive together, or die together. He still has nightmares about the air raid sirens.
Or maybe I will be orphaned like Ali, who was three when you killed his father in the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his father’s grave every day for three years calling out to him, "It’s all right Daddy, you can come out now, the men who put you here have gone away." Well, Ali, you’re wrong. It looks like those men are coming back.
Or I maybe I will make it in one piece, like Luay Majed, who remembers that the Gulf War meant he didn’t have to go to school and could stay up as late as he wanted. But today, with no education, he tries to live by selling newspapers on the street.
Imagine that these are your children—or nieces or nephews or neighbors. Imagine your son screaming from the agony of a severed limb, but you can’t do anything to ease the pain or comfort him. Imagine your daughter crying out from under the rubble of a collapsed building, but you can’t get to her. Imagine your children wandering the streets, hungry and alone, after having watched you die before their eyes.
This is not an adventure movie or a fantasy or a video game. This is reality for children in Iraq. Recently, an international group of researchers went to Iraq to find out how children there are being affected by the possibility of war. Half the children they talked to said they saw no point in living any more. Even really young kids knew about war and worried about it. One 5-year-old, Assem, described it as "guns and bombs and the air will be cold and hot and we will burn very much." Ten-year-old Aesar had a message for President Bush: he wanted him to know that "A lot of Iraqi children will die. You will see it on TV and then you will regret."
Back in elementary school I was taught to solve problems with other kids not by hitting or name-calling, but by talking and using "I" messages. The idea of an "I" message was to make the other person understand how bad his or her actions made you feel, so that the person would sympathize with you and stop it. Now I am going to give you an "I" message. Only it’s going to be a "We" message. "We" as in all the children in Iraq who are waiting helplessly for something bad to happen. "We" as in the children of the world who don’t make any of the decisions but have to suffer all the consequences. "We" as in those whose voices are too small and too far away to be heard.
We feel scared when we don’t know if we’ll live another day.
We feel angry when people want to kill us or injure us or steal our future.
We feel sad because all we want is a mom and a dad who we know will be there the next day.
And, finally, we feel confused—because we don’t even know what we did wrong.
===================================================
2) Peace Rally Speech by Charlotte Aldebron, October 26, 2002 - Augusta, Maine
===================================================
FROM:
http://ww.commondreams.org/views02/1101-06.htm
Published on Friday, November 1, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
Peace Rally Speech
October 26, 2002 - Augusta, Maine
by Charlotte Aldebron, age 12
I’ve been speaking up a lot since September 11. On February 12, I wrote an essay for school saying that we care more about the American flag than about living up to what it stands for. On March 22, I told Senator Snowe’s staff in Presque Isle that you grown ups were hypocrites because you tell kids to solve problems with words, while you kill people in Afghanistan. On March 28, I said the same thing to Senator Collins in person. She told me that because we invaded Afghanistan, little girls can go to school and learn to read. Some choice: learn to read, or have a mom and a dad.
On April 3, the CommonDreams website posted my flag essay. It got lots of attention and was reprinted and read on the radio. I got 800 emails. I was surprised to get such a response because I’d started to believe that solving problems by talking was something only kids had to do, but that grownups could fight all they wanted—like they get to drink and swear, but kids can’t. On May 12, I spoke at the Peace Rally in Bath. On May 20, I talked to Chellie Pingree and Tom Daschle. I suspected that Tom Daschle was not paying attention because, with a glazed look in his eyes, he stuffed my flag essay in his pocket, unread. On June 22, I spoke at the Maine Green Independent Party Convention. Now here it is October 26, and I am giving another speech. That’s a really bad sign because it means we still don’t have peace—in fact, we’re about to go and kill even more people. Well, I’m getting a little sick of hearing my own voice! HELLO—is anyone out there listening?!
I guess my own voice is too small to make a difference. So this time, I’ll add the voices of other children, and maybe together we’ll be loud enough. Children like Ali, who was three when we killed his father in the Gulf War. Ali scraped at the dirt covering his father’s grave every day for three years calling out to him, “It’s all right Daddy, you can come out now, the men who put you here have gone away.” And Luay who was 11 at the time and was glad he didn’t have to go to school or do homework. He went to bed and got up whenever he felt like it. But today he has no education and still hears the explosions in his head.
And the children in Basra, southern Iraq, who today play in the dust while air raid sirens scream around them because we keep dropping bombs. And all the children in Iraq who will never grow up because they have leukemia and cancers from the depleted uranium in our missiles, and they can’t get any drugs or radiation treatment because we won’t let their country have them. I don’t know the names of all these children.
Can you hear our voices yet? I’ll add 10-year-old Mohibollah in Afghanistan, who was out collecting firewood for his family when he found one of those bright yellow soda-can-sized cluster bomblets with parachutes. What child could resist? He ended up with mangled flesh where his left hand used to be.
President Bush asked each American child to give a dollar to help Afghani children. Here is my dollar’s worth: it is the voice of 6-year-old Paliko who was carried to the hospital still wearing her party dress from the wedding that we bombed for two hours, killing her whole family—by mistake. And 2-year-old Alia, who was dug out of the rubble where her family was crushed when we blew up their village—again, by mistake. Afterward, our soldiers said they were sorry. Among themselves, they called the Afghans "rag heads." Like I said in my flag essay, we are better at caring about symbols than real people.
Can you hear us yet? Our government is paying for educational theater in Afghanistan that teaches kids to fight with pen and paper, not guns, and tells them to “join the educated culture of the world.” They call it the Mobile Mini Circus for Children. The performers are orphans who live just north of Kabul, in an orphanage filled with 2,000 victims of our air strikes, our greed, our comfort. When are we going to join the educated cultures of the world?
Maybe you’ll hear the voices of Palestinian children: Sami, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier the day before his 12th birthday; 10-year-old Riham, killed in her schoolyard by an Israeli tank shell; and 14-year-old Faris, who told his 8-year-old brother Abdel to go home when he followed him out to buy groceries. Abdel refused, so he got to see the tank shoot his brother dead in the street. And the six Matar children, ages 2 months to 17 years—all killed when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made jet dropped a one-ton bomb on their home. The pilot was sent by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who our president calls a "man of peace."
Can you hear us yet? How about the voices of Israeli children? Like 14-year-old Raaya and 2-year-old Hemda, killed with their parents by a Palestinian suicide bomber when they went out to eat pizza; 9-month-old Avia, killed by Palestinians who shot and threw grenades at cars; and the 12 teenagers killed by a suicide bomber at a nightclub. Can you hear us now?
How many more children must suffer or die before you hear us? No offense, but I really don’t want to have to make another peace speech ever again!
Charlotte Aldebron, 12, attends Cunningham Middle School in Presque Isle, Maine. Comments may be sent to her mom, Jillian Aldebron: aldebron@ainop.com
###
=============================================
3) And now for something completely different!
=============================================
Why am I including this? Because I'm absolutely positive that it is as accurate a description of what Marines are really like as you will ever read.
In just a few years, many millions of Charlotte's fellow children -- she's 13 now, and Marines are typically only 18 or 19 years old -- children are all peacelovers, aren't they? -- but millions of them will become, at our beckoning, lean, mean killing machines. And they'll be the best there is at it, and they'll be lovable, good people, practically to a man (or woman). But they will be killers, a force that cannot be stopped when it's put into motion. They will not ask why they are sent to kill and die.
How does this transition happen? How do we lose control of our senses, to become willing killers, in such a short time? Suicide bombers are typically young (see photo circulating around the Internet of an upper body and a young man's head (available on request, it's not for the squeamish (like me))). They're practically all so young!
That is an interesting psychological question. What if only people over 50 were considered old enough to fight? How many wars would the world fight if we didn't sucker young folk into doing the killing for the older generations?
But perhaps the more vital question is this: Who sends people off to war? A religious fanatic? A militaristic madman? An unelected president of a larger country? A vote? A license? A hall pass?
I wonder what Charlotte Alderbron would do if she had control of the entire U. S. Military, and had been elected -- fairly -- to lead them and the rest of the country onward to more greatness?
Perhaps we'll see, some day (I understand you need to be at least 35 to hold the office of President in this country).
-- rdh
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 6:49 PM
Subject: [FRA2000] FW: Simply Semper Fi
By Roger Roy | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted April 27, 2003
The gas mask had hung at my hip for so long it felt almost permanently attached, and I'd gotten to where I'd reflexively reach down to make sure it was there, like checking for keys before locking the car door.
But now I handed the mask and the rest of my issued gear to the Army captain, and he checked off his list: atropine injectors, pants and jacket to my chemical-weapons suit, rubber overboots and gloves. He marked off the list and slid it over the counter, and I signed it.
"You are now officially disembedded," he told me, and I'd been around Marines so much I was almost startled he hadn't said, "Good to go," the Corps' catchall phrase that means you're ready for anything, even if it involves bayonets and a beach that somebody else thinks belongs to them.
I almost mentioned that to the captain, but I figured, he's Army, he wouldn't get it. A few weeks earlier, I wouldn't have gotten it myself.
For more than a month, I'd been, in military parlance, "embedded" with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, traveling and living with the Marines as they pushed north from Kuwait to Baghdad.
It was an experience that had swung dizzily from rewarding to exasperating to frightening, and now that it was suddenly over I was still sorting through its ups and downs. That night after turning in our Marine-issued gear at the military press headquarters in Kuwait City, I had dinner with a reporter I'd been with since before the war started, Wayne Woolley of the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., who'd been embedded with the same unit. At the five-star Hilton looking out over the Gulf, we ate smoked salmon and fresh fruit and smoked Iraqi cigarettes. We wished you could buy alcohol in Kuwait, and managed not to feel guilty even though we knew the Marines we'd left in Iraq the day before were still eating MREs.
Over dinner, we rehashed our experience and came to a conclusion that would have stunned us if someone had suggested it a month earlier: If we were 18 or 19 again, neither of us was sure we'd be able to resist the urge to join the Marines.
The idea was troubling on several levels. First, practically speaking, we should have known better by then. Being with the Marines meant we'd been through the whole war without a hot shower, learned to consider ourselves lucky when we had a new MRE box for a toilet and occasionally worried we were about to be shot. We'd seen how the Marines had to make do with old or insufficient gear, some of it dating to the Vietnam era. It's hard to argue that willingly subjecting yourself to such a thing isn't a sign of simple-mindedness.
Beyond that, it was hardly a ringing endorsement of our ability to keep our distance from those we were writing about. I'd covered police, courts and politics without ever once wanting to be a cop, a lawyer or a politician.
Fortunately, I'm old enough that our discussion that night was purely academic.
But I think our reaction explains much about the Pentagon's decision to embed several hundred reporters for the war in Iraq, the first time the press has enjoyed such close war-time access to the U.S. military since Vietnam.
Someone at the Pentagon had figured out what we now recognized: No matter what you think of the military as an institution, it's hard not to admire the actual rank-and-file troops.
Who would write glowingly about the Marine Corps bureaucracy for trying to push a convoy of 150 supply trucks through hundreds of miles of enemy territory with too little fuel, too few radios and not enough heavy weapons?
But it's a different story when told from the seat next to a 19-year-old lance corporal at a wheel of a truckload of high explosives who hasn't slept in two days and is just trying to get the mission done.
Before the war, I'd never spent much time with the Marines, and I wasn't sure what to expect when I was assigned to them. I think I understand Marines better now, but I'm not sure I can explain them.
They tend to do things the hardest way possible.
They call each other "devil dog" and say "Hoo-rah."
They are loud and rough. They have lots of tattoos. They'll ignore you or torment you if they think you're a fake. They'll do anything for you if they like you.
They'll believe the wildest rumors. One told me, early in the war, that he'd heard the Army, rather than the Marines, would occupy Baghdad because the Marines "break too much stuff."
Marines tend to think and travel in a straight line.
They have a talent for complaining and swearing that I've seldom seen surpassed.
I heard entire conversations between Marines that consisted of nothing but acronyms laced with profanity, something like:
"Where's your #&% NCO?"
"At the ^*&$ COC for *+$ CSSB."
"We need some #@* LVSs and a couple of *#% MTVRs."
"$*&#."
"Hoo-rah."
Marines get things done. They follow orders. They would sometimes do crazy things if they thought they'd been told to.
Once, during a convoy stop, a young Marine begged us out of an MRE box we'd been saving for a toilet. When Woolley gave him the box, he made a joke about bringing it back, but the Marine thought he was serious.
Five minutes later, the Marine was back, offering the no-longer-empty box back to a horrified Woolley.
It had Gunnery Sgt. Kevin Mlay, who was standing there when the Marine brought the box back, shaking his head.
Marines may not be the smartest, Mlay said, but you have to give them credit for following orders.
That doesn't mean they're afraid to point out that their orders may be, to politely paraphrase an often-used Marine term, messed up.
"That's (messed) up, sir," is a phrase I heard countless times.
I'm sure it was the first thing the Marines said when they saw the reefs at Tarawa or the Japanese positions on Mount Suribachi.
There were endless variations of the phrase -- "Sir, that's totally (messed) up," and "Sergeant, you won't believe how (messed) up it is."
But after complaining, the Marines would do what they'd been told, even if it didn't make any sense.
Most of the Marines were very young, most lance corporals only 19 or 20. That may be why I ran across so many of them who managed to have both a sentimental streak and a mean streak.
I saw Marines who didn't have any extra food or water give what they had to Iraqi children begging on the roadside. But the same Marines laughed like crazy when they heard about a Marine who filled an empty MRE bag with sand, sealed it up and threw it to begging children.
One Marine officer I knew liked to call his Marines "the most demented young people our society can produce." He wasn't really kidding, but he still admired them, and I did, too.
The Marines Woolley and I had been embedded with were in the Transportation Support Group, which included the Orlando-based reservists of the 6th Motor Transport Battalion. They were running convoys of ammunition, food, water and fuel, and fighting wasn't supposed to be their main job.
They were ordered to more or less ignore civilians unless they were hostile. If they took fire, they weren't to stop: Getting the supplies to the front was more important than getting into a fight, especially since the fuel and ammunition trucks in a convoy would have been vulnerable targets.
Their orders encouraged a sort of don't-mess-with-me-I-won't-mess-with-you policy. But if someone messed with them, they were inviting the worst.
Marines return fire with a relish.
At a base south of Baghdad, I heard a young Marine reporting to an officer about how his convoy had taken sniper fire from a mud brick hut near the highway.
Did you return fire, the officer asked, and the Marine told him casually that the Mark 19 gunner had gotten off "about 100 rounds."
The Mark 19 is a sort of machine gun that fires grenades, and 100 Mark 19 rounds would be enough to level most villages in southern Iraq, let alone one mud brick hut.
But the Marines figured anyone who messed with them had it coming.
Maj. Michael Yaroma of Oviedo, like all officers a dedicated student to the psyche of his Marines, told me how he'd found a young Marine tormenting a fly at their base south of Baghdad.
The flies in the desert are big, ugly, biting things, and the Marine had caught one and pulled its wings off. As it tried to crawl away, the Marine poked at it with his finger, asking "How do you like it, huh? How do you like it?"
"What the hell are you doing?" Yaroma asked the Marine.
"He was (messing) with me, sir, so now I'm (messing) with him," the Marine said, and then he went back to his fly.
When the Marines began pulling out of Baghdad last week, replaced by Army units, news reports noted how the Army tended to patrol the city in convoys of Humvees, while the Marines had been on foot and mixed with the locals.
I'd seen it myself. There were times in Baghdad when a few Marines would be on guard at a busy intersection where there were hundreds, even thousands of Iraqis filing past.
Many of those Marines seemed to enjoy the close contact, laughing, waving and joking with the Iraqis the best they could given the language barrier.
But I also knew that none of them would hesitate to light up the crowd if it came to that.
A lot of the Marines I met recognized that their experiences in the war had changed them.
After dark at a camp in Central Iraq, we were sitting with about a dozen Marines, and one of them of them was telling the group about his experience handling Iraqi prisoners, which the unit transported back to holding camps.
The prisoners weren't treated gently, and the Marine was demonstrating how the guards would give them a string of contradictory orders the Iraqis didn't understand anyway, making their point by aiming their rifles at the prisoners' faces.
"We're like, What's your name! Shut up! Stand up! Sit the hell down!"
The Marine was waving his loaded M-16 around wildly and finally Sgt. Rob Anderson told him, "Put your damn rifle down."
The Marine sat down and, after a few seconds, he said, "When I get home, I'm taking an anger-management course."
Everybody cracked up, mostly because they knew he was completely serious.
I found that even officers who had been studying Marines for years still scratched their heads over them.
One fascinated by their quirks was Maj. Jeff Eberwein, an oil-company executive in civilian life who has a degree in medieval literature from Boston College. The books he'd brought to read during the war included Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
Eberwein liked to joke about how Marines did things the hardest way. Since they'd arrived at Camp Saipan in January, the Marines had to wear their full battle gear -- flak jackets and helmets and carrying their weapons -- even to the mess hall and latrine.
I thought the conditions at Camp Saipan were bad, with tents that didn't keep out the dust storms and foul-smelling portable toilets. But it was luxury compared to conditions after the war started.
And the Marines, who had assumed they would be using holes for toilets and eating standing up even in camp before the war, thought it was great they had toilets and a mess tent with chairs.
Eberwein did a hilarious version of a sergeant's reaction to any Marine who complained about the mess hall food, which was actually awful.
"Do you think they had strawberry jam on Tarawa, Marine?! Did they have orange juice at Iwo Jima?!"
One day at the big Marine base south of Baghdad, Eberwein and I watched a Marine take a wrong turn with his LVS, a monster all-wheel drive truck, and come up to a ditch with a berm beyond it. The Marine could have backed up a little and turned to avoid the obstacle. But the shortest path was straight ahead, and after sizing it up the driver just gunned the motor and the big truck plowed over it, tires spinning and steel groaning.
Eberwein liked to say that Marines think finesse is a French sports car. But the truth is he admired their single-mindedness to getting the job done. That day as the truck disappeared through the cloud of dust, he just shook his head and said, "Mission accomplished."
But while Eberwein tended to be more reflective than most of the Marines, I came to realize he was one of them.
We were at a camp late one afternoon when one of the Cobra helicopter gunships patrolling outside the Marine positions suddenly began firing.
Marines grabbed their rifles and ran over the berm, hoping for a fight.
In a few minutes, they all came back grumbling: The Cobra gunner must have been only clearing his weapon, and there was nothing out there to shoot at.
Afterward, Eberwein joked about how only Marines would be disappointed that they couldn't get into a firefight.
But he'd been the first one over the berm.
If we reporters often puzzled over Marines, there were things about us that didn't make sense to them, either.
The first two questions Marines would ask us when they found out we were reporters were: Did you volunteer to come, and do you get paid extra for covering a war?
They acted like we were crazy when we said we'd volunteered, even though they were all volunteers, themselves, for the Corps if not for this particular war.
They also thought we were crazy when they found out we weren't paid any more to cover a war than to cover a city council meeting. But I always pointed out that the extra pay the Marines were getting in Iraq was only a couple of hundred dollars a month, scant compensation for being shot at.
A surprising number of Marines, unaware that journalists were forbidden to carry weapons, asked if we were armed.
When we told them the rules prohibited weapons for journalists, more than a few assumed our denials were just to make it seem we were complying with the rules, and that we really had some sort of weapons.
Others seemed almost alarmed for our sakes that we were unarmed. Many insisted on showing us how to fire their M-16s.
After one long, scary night on a convoy in southern Iraq, Sgt. Joseph Gomez had asked me if I could throw. I knew Gomez played baseball last year on the Marine Corps team, so I answered that I could throw about like a girl, why?
He held out a green ball printed on the side, "Grenade, Frag, Delay." You pull the small pin first, he said, then the larger pin, and throw it.
I couldn't imagine ever using the thing, and tried to stay away from the spot in the bed of the truck where Gomez kept it tucked in between the sandbags.
At first, when we'd climb into a truck we'd wait for one of the Marines to move the weapons that were lying around. But after a while we'd just pick up the rocket launcher or M-16 and move it ourselves. Most of the Marines, after we'd spent some time riding with them, would hand us their rifles to hold while they climbed in or out of the truck, and it became so second nature I never thought about it until later.
Maybe that would have made us fair targets. But on the convoys, one of the biggest dangers was snipers, and there was no reason to believe they'd have any idea we were reporters rather than Marines, or that they'd avoid shooting us even if they knew.
The reporters I knew, myself included, didn't expect any Geneva Convention niceties if we were captured, noncombatants or not.
In any case, my sense of security was directly in proportion to my confidence in the Marines around me.
We spent the first week of the war with Marines I came to trust completely -- Gomez and his crew on a truck that provided security for the convoys, driver Lance Cpl. Robert Kissmann and .50-caliber gunner Scott Stasney.
Gomez, whose parents live in Sanford, was only 23, but the others on his squad had the same sort of confidence in him. "He's my daddy," was how one Marine in Gomez's squad described him.
Gomez called his M-16 Marie, after his wife's middle name, and even his choice of wife I regarded as a sign of his bravery, since he'd married his platoon sergeant's daughter, a thought that made even the toughest Marines cringe.
I always figured nothing bad could happen until Gomez had fired his last round, but I was with him during my scariest moment of the war.
On an Iraqi highway south of the Euphrates, during a blinding dust storm, our security truck stopped to guard a stalled truck full of ammunition and guided missiles while the rest of the convoy drove ahead.
The dust and howling wind cut visibility at times to only 50 or 60 yards, and Iraqi trucks and cars would suddenly appear out of the dust, often turning to speed off.
We felt like a whole Iraqi army could be 100 yards away in the dust and we wouldn't know it.
The wind blew dust in my eyes even with my goggles on, and I was standing behind the truck, out of the wind. I wasn't particularly worried until Gomez came back and told me he couldn't see and asked me to take a look at his eye. That was when I realized all my confidence was tied up in him.
His eye was bloodshot and full of sand, and I dug out the worst of it with my fingernail, then washed it out with a bottle of water. It still looked bad but he said it felt better, and he went back to the road.
The mechanics were still working on the truck, and a few more Marines had joined us, when we heard a loud squeaking clatter coming up the road behind us.
We all knew what it was even before someone said it was tracks, which meant armored vehicles.
A day earlier, American Cobra gunships or F-18s would have massacred any Iraqi tanks that dared to venture out, but now nothing was flying in the dust storm.
Eberwein yelled at a Marine to grab the AT-4 rocket launcher from one of the Humvees, but I had no confidence in the little rocket.
Besides, you could tell there were several sets of tracks coming up the road. And I already had a vision of a column of Iraqi tanks coming up the road and was trying to figure whether it would be better to run north or south and how long it would take to get out of sight of the road in the dust storm. I was about to disembed myself on foot.
But when they clattered into sight, the tracks belonged to four U.S. Army Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which were as surprised as we were by the encounter. They stopped suddenly, backed up and crossed the road, keeping their cannons trained on us even as they rolled past and disappeared into the dust.
I managed to snap a photo of the Bradleys just as they came out of the dust, but when I looked at it later the image was blurred, as if I'd moved when I took the shot. I don't think I could blame the wind.
Aside from the fact that the Marine's inclination was to fight and mine was to run, another difference between the press and the Marines is we tended to see things as black and white, sometimes in ways that seemed comical to the Marines.
One night, some Marines had dropped me off after dark at an advance camp for our unit. I was fumbling around trying to unroll my sleeping bag when I startled a Marine who came walking around the command tent, which I was sleeping next to so I wouldn't be run over by a truck in the dark.
"Friend or foe," he asked me, and I had no ready answer. Technically, I was no one's foe, as a non-combatant. And while I'd made friends who were Marines, to call yourself a friend implies some compromise of objectivity
After a long pause I finally mumbled "Reporter," and when the Marine laughed I wasn't sure if it was because of my answer or how long it had taken me to spit it out.
To the Marines, the biggest difference between us was that we were more or less free to do as we wished.
Technically the rules were that we would stay with our assigned unit, and that someone would keep track of us. Our press badges said "Bearer must be escorted at all times."
But within a day of the war's start, we were pretty much free to do as we wanted, jumping on and off convoys and wandering around wherever we could get a ride and find Marines to give us water, MREs and a place to throw our sleeping bags.
We learned to avoid unfriendly officers, and the friendly ones directed us to convoys that were heading closer to the action, even telling us when we should jump off to another unit.
Unlike the Marines, we could dress as we wanted and sleep until we wanted to get up.
But the biggest difference was that we could leave whenever we wished. Many Marines told us they couldn't believe we would stay out there if we had the option to go home.
I think it was the knowledge that we could pull out whenever we wanted that cemented our connection with the Marines.
Just before Woolley and I flew out of Iraq on a C-130 back to Kuwait, we were saying our goodbyes to the Marines at their base south of Baghdad.
Staff Sgt. Charles Wells, a firefighter and EMT for Orange County Fire Rescue, made a point of pulling us aside before our flight.
The Marines hadn't known what to expect when they heard reporters would be living with them, Wells said, and some had feared the worst, that we'd pry into personal details or try to portray them as bloodthirsty baby killers. But Wells told us his Marines appreciated how we'd lived as they'd lived, gone where they'd gone, eaten what they'd eaten, used the same MRE boxes as toilets and slept on the ground they'd slept on.
By then Wells knew we'd understand exactly what he meant when he told us, "You guys are good to go."
We considered it the highest praise.
Yahoo!
===========================================