Since I made my blogoversary yesterday, I'm going to let another night's work do the talking. Turns out that my piece on Colin Soloway had the bad luck of being finished the day after Baghdad fell, and in the news world, that makes you about as relevant as last week's batch of donuts.
Still, it's a cool piece that would have wowed 'em last week when things were still desperate, unsure, and the ghost of fallen journalists as well as Peter Arnett's career – hovered menacingly in the ether.
So I thought I'd print it here, to give you a little glimpse into a young guy our age, smart but curmudgeonly, stuck in the middle of Iraq, talking to me from the front seat of a Humvee while the dust storms rage in the background.
For those who don't know Colin, let me refresh you: he's an old buddy of mine and Tessa's from college in North Carolina. He cut his journalistic teeth in Bosnia during the Balkan wars, but his breakthrough moment came in December 2001, when he discovered John Walker Lindh - the "American Taliban" - while stringing for Newsweek in Afghanistan. Book deals, frequent spots on Larry King, and a Letterman gig followed - but soon enough, he was back in the Middle East. After a week of swapping around satellite phones ("a shady business," he called it), we finally got to talk the day before Baghdad went "ploink!" So here it is:
Colin, it's Ian!
Hey dude, what's happening?
Are you ready for some Q and A?
Yeah, no problem, man. I've been alternately horribly busy and desperately bored.
Where are you right now?
I can't tell you exactly, but I'm in an Iraqi desert right now, not far from Najaf. Nothing but scorpions, snakes and big-ass lizards.
The signal's so clear, it's crazy.
I know, isn't it a great satellite phone? I'm sitting in the Newsweek bureau, which is the front seat of a Humvee belonging to the artillery.
You sound tired as hell.
I am, but today was a great day, actually I managed to do laundry, hand-washing, and then I got my first shower in over a week.
What outfit are you with?
I'm with the 1st battalion of the 101st aviation brigade, which is part of the 101st Airborne division. It's a little confusing, because it's the 1st of the 101st of the 101st. It's an attack and aviation brigade, so it's made up of Apache Longbows, regular Apaches and Kiowa Scouts, which are basically scout helicopters with a videocamera on top of them, and a few guns on the side.
How are you holding up emotionally?
The biggest emotional strain has been watching and reading about the war from a distance. An Apache aviation unit tends to sit pretty far behind the lines they either support infantry attacks, or they go deep, far behind enemy lines and launch attacks.
The problem with the Apaches is they're two-seaters, and they require two pilots, so there's no way you can ride along with them. All you can do is wait for the pilots to come back and go over the gun footage with you, and talk about what happened. It's great for stories, but you're usually far removed from the action.
Have you gotten a chance to encounter any Iraqi civilians while you've been there?
One the roads, as you're driving by. Anyone who comes by gets checked by "quick reaction" forces to make sure they're not terrorists. I went into Najaf yesterday with a liaison officer to talk to the infantry guys, and it was packed we've been out in the desert non-stop and it was a shock to drive into this town and see thousands of people on the street, everybody waving and giving thumbs up.
So the reaction has been positive?
Yeah, in Najaf anyway, it's been very, very positive. You sort of wonder, in the back of your mind are they waving saying "hey, it's great the Americans are here" or are they waving thinking "for god sake wave! Otherwise they might shoot us!"
Well, there's also the Arabic thing where "thumbs up" actually means "fuck you"-
Yeah, it does, but I think they've learned from TV shows and probably from all the Americans doing it. They're all smiling while they do it, so either they're very sarcastic or they understand it. Almost without exception, everybody was waving, everybody was yelling "Hey George Bush good!"
Do you feel like you're dealing with a cousin of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, in that the troops are behaving differently by your being there and observing them?
To be honest, no. I've been lucky with this battalion. The battalion commander sets the tone, which is, "fine, you're included in everything we're doing. You can do everything except ride in the helicopter." So I'm in on all the planning sessions, all the rehearsals. On the last mission, I flew up in the commanding control helicopter which has all the hot radios and computer screens in it, and tracked the mission.
People are very, very open about what they're doing, about how they feel. Sometimes the colonel will say something and then say "oh god, please don't write that" or whatever, but very rarely. Basically they trust me. There's a lot of griping and complaining in the military feeling that your unit is not getting the missions it ought to get, but it's not a systemic problem or anything like that. I don't report the penny-anny politics that go on within the brigade.
Have you heard about what happened with Peter Arnett?
Yeah. I've not seen the interview, but I think Arnett's a very good journalist, and certainly as far as war correspondents go, he's a very brave guy and really is one of the greats in the profession. But I think his mistake was misjudging the mood in America.
Right.
Arnett was a lightning rod in the last war because he was reporting from Baghdad and giving that side of the story, and he got a lot of shit for that. I think his mistake was not judging what the reaction would be in the states to that. It's not uncommon while working overseas that local TV will want to interview foreign reporters about their perspective. In terms of what he said about the Bush administration's war plans having failed - I think a lot of people were saying that. It was nothing that anybody in Washington wasn't saying. At the time, it was clear that "plan A" where everyone was going to throw up their arms and say "we love America" as soon as we arrived – was not going to work. It was going to be a fight.
Arnett was simply speaking the truth on that. It's not his responsibility to be patriotic or be passive or to make Americans feel better about themselves, it's his job to say what's going on. Ethically, I don't think it was a problem. Journalists go on TV all over the world talking about what the hell they think is going on. Professionally, it was a mistake. If he wanted to keep working for an American network, it was a mistake, given the sort of pressure that they would come under from the administration and the rah-rah crowd. You know, he's going up against Fox and its perpetual boosterism.
Do you feel like what you write may not be "Ameri-centric" enough?
I'm living with a unit, and I'm writing about a unit, so I don't feel any constraints in that way. I simply tell it how it is, but frankly, you're a little bit isolated in the sense that you're living with these guys, you're working with these guys, and you're seeing things through their eyes.
Apache pilots are very sensitive about the whole issue of opinion, because after the last Gulf War their gun camera tapes were scrutinized. They fly low and slow, and they shoot things from pretty close up, and those videos are pretty disturbing. When you shoot someone with a 30mm cannon, their body blows apart, and it's pretty gruesome stuff. As a result, unlike a lot of Air Force hits, their stuff gets looked at very closely.
So are the Americans "team players"?
It's the battalion commander's job to make clear to them that nobody's going to go in [alone], nobody's going to be a hero here, nobody's going to push farther than they're supposed to push. That was really driven home for them, even before their first mission, when the 11th Aviation Regiment went into Karbalah and got the shit shot out of it. Every single one of their aircraft came back with holes in it, except for one which was shot down.
That made it a lot more real for our pilots. The great concern for Apache pilots is to get in too close, to get into what they call a "knife fight" and get caught up in urban fighting, so it gets impressed on them that if they can shoot stuff from a long way away, do it.
What kind of differences are there between the career military officers and the new guys?
Well, I'm in an aviation unit. In the infantry, the focus is on the infantry soldier, because the individual rifleman is the weapons system. So their sergeants and their officers will not eat, will not sleep until their men have been taken care of. In aviation, the focus is the helicopter. The important thing is keeping those helicopters flying. The pilots are mostly warrant officers, and the enlisted soldiers basically maintain and fix the helicopters, gas them up, arm them and keep them running.
And the enlisted men live on a pretty rough schedule, because as soon as those helicopters come back from a mission, they work on those things until they're fixed. They really work their ass off. Pilots want to go out and shoot stuff, but for a lot of the enlisted soldiers, they understand their job is to keep these birds going. Some kids who have come out of the infantry have certainly complained about "the big baby," how the focus is entirely on the helicopter. For some of them it's frustrating, because they fix them and they fly and they break, then they fix them and they fly and they break...
Like being a dishwasher.
Yeah, except on a thirty million dollar aircraft. But some of them are really proud and really happy to be doing it. It's sort of a mix, it's like that in every unit.
Are the soldiers worried about a chemical attack?
Yeah, especially when the war started, they were very concerned. We had Iraqi missiles landing near our base in Kuwait, and just last week they shot down an Iraqi missile just over our assembly area. As the ground forces were closing on Karbala, there was a lot of fear that there could be some chemical attack.
Do you have a chemical suit?
Oh yeah, yeah. For the first ten days, we never took them off. You wore the bottoms, at least, at all times. Which was pretty awful and hot during the day. Nice and cozy at night, actually.
And masks?
Everyone carries them on their hips at all times. I do. I don't really have to follow uniform code, but if I'm moving around, you get used to wearing it. If there is an alert, if there is gas, you've got about eight seconds to get it on. There have been a number of false alarms [around here], but apparently they found some mustard gas in Najaf yesterday - while I was there, but we didn't know about it it was only a kilometer away from us. So when we came back, everyone said "uh-oh, they found this stuff – are you guys feeling okay?" because the effects of mustard gas aren't immediate.
Are they sure it was mustard gas and not pesticides?
I don't think you've heard about the mustard gas yet. It's the real deal. At least that's what the chemical officers [are saying].
On another note, do you think Iraqis will be better off or worse off from this war?
It's tough for me to judge. Having talked to a lot of Iraqis outside Iraq, I don't think the lives of most people can be worse than it was under Saddam. That said, nation-building is a very difficult process... this idea of developing a liberal democracy in Iraq on the cheap is going to be very difficult. It's not a bad goal to have, but the long, difficult trouble is going to be as soon as the war is over and this administration has shown no track record in terms of being willing to stick it out and really commit to nation building. If you look at their record in Afghanistan, it's been dismal in terms of their involvement. Iraq is obviously a lot more important to them, so they may try it.
Americans don't do this sort of stuff very well. We don't deal very well in the subtleties of these societies. I don't see them drawing on the expertise of people who have actually worked on these issues before in Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor. I think they're going to re-invent the wheel a million times, but that's my personal opinion.
Have you been scared since you've been there?
When we were coming up to our assembly area in the desert, when we crossed into Iraq, we were in a large convoy of vehicles. We had no security in the form of infantry or professional killers. We got into Iraq twenty-four hours after the ground war started, and we just tooled on up there with no security. At night you could see Iraqi fire off in the distance, at times ahead of you even, and we were very much aware that we were at risk of ambush.
I asked them "what do you do if we get shot at?" and they said "we just drive." And I was like "we have a convoy five miles long and we're just going to drive through it?"
Pretty much everyone on those convoys agrees we were pretty lucky not have gotten shot up at some point on the road. There were still a lot of dudes running around, out in the desert, coming out of the towns and hitting convoys.
What's your least favorite thing about Iraq?
Once you get away from the Euphrates River valley, which is quite beautiful and green, it's just desert it's dusty, it's hot. We've endured just the most horrible dust storms anyone has ever seen, including guys who had been back here in the last war. Three days of virtual zero visibility where you had to use a GPS to move from helicopter to helicopter, much less go to the latrine. And we were sleeping outside in that.
We think we've had it bad in New York it snowed six inches it's been barely above freezing-
Oh man, well, it's been 100 up to about 110 every day this week. It's been pretty horrible-
How about the people?
Going to Najaf yesterday, it was a shock to see [civilians] again... on the road, coming in, the only people we saw were Bedouin, who seemed reasonably happy to see us. Especially when the American vehicles were breaking down and [we were] abandoning them, the Bedouin were stripping them for parts.
And it's nice to see people in the city saying hey, great, thumbs-up, that sort of stuff. At what point that honeymoon ends, and it ceases to be exciting to see Americans on the street, I think will probably come pretty soon. The worst thing you can do to an American is not love him. The troops like the idea of everyone being happy to have them here, because they know the rest of the world is not particularly happy about having them here.
On to the important stuff: Matt Doherty "resigned" from the [University of North Carolina our alma mater] basketball team-
I know! Charlie Rose told me!
Who do you think should be the next coach?
They should get Dean Smith back, actually.
That sounds like a good idea.
I lived the first twentysomething years of my life with Dean Smith as coach, and I just couldn't think of anyone else.
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Posted by at April 11, 2003 08:37 PM