Friday, September 16, 2005

In a World of Conflict, the Truth Must Survive  

Kevin Sites’ Blog to Become “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone” on Yahoo!





Mission: Report From Every War Zone in One Year

(From l-r the Hotzone Team, Producer Robert Padavick, Correspondent Kevin Sites, Researcher Lisa Liu)

After the Falluja mosque shooting report last November-I got thousands of hate mails and death threats.

Some went something like this, “Dear Liberal Media Scumbag, I hope the next video clip out of Iraq I watch is an insurgent placing your severed-head onto your back.”

Those voices were a minority, extremists as small-minded and blinded by “righteousness” as the suicide bombers who have murdered thousands of innocent victims in Iraq (including my friend and humanitarian Marla Ruzicka, founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), killed outside Bagdhad on April 16th this year).

I never got an angry email from the unit I was with nor from Marine battlefield commanders who, though, saddened by the incident, knew I reported with fairness and context both on television and specifically, through the use of this blog, in which my November 21, 2004 “Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1” was reprinted and linked to sites around the world.

As difficult as that chapter was for all involved, it provoked dialogue, introspection and maybe in some cases, even positive change. It also highlighted to enemies and allies alike, that America, despite perceived faults, practices what it preaches when it comes to its regard for the sanctity of a free press and its essential role in a democracy.

My belief now, as it was then, is that the cost and consequences of the truth can be enormous-but it can’t be buried or destroyed and must survive, because, as it was so eloquently stated in the pre-amble of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice.”

That may sound as earnest as the syllabus for a journalism 101 class, but it will be the guiding principle for my new project, Kevin Sites in the Hotzone, launching on Yahoo! News on September 26th .

Kevin Sites in the Hotzone will be the nexus that binds mobile, digital newsgathering technology and the global delivery system of the internet to narrative storytelling, putting a human face to the complex issues of violent conflict.

I will report from the field solo, as I often have over the last five years, but will be supported by my “Mission Control” team based in Santa Monica, California.

Our first year goal is ambitious; to cover every armed-conflict in the world within one-year. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies is currently monitoring 31 armed conflicts, with 15-20 seeing recent military action.

Please visit hotzone.yahoo.com to learn more about the project and to sign up for regular updates.

This current site, kevinsites.net, has been dark since January and will no longer be updated-however, all of the postings and photographs recorded here will be transferred to the new site and archived under country names.

Special thanks to John Parres for his early support of kevinsites.net, to David Ulevitch, who has generously provided the server space where it’s lived since it’s inception, to boingboing.net for directing so many readers to us, and most importantly, to the site’s co-creator and producer, Xeni Jardin, to whom kevinsites.net will always be dedicated.

Kevin 11:45 AM

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Black Plastic  

(Bodies near mosque. image: Kevin Sites.)

INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS:

We ride our motorbikes -- my 17 year-old translator Mohammed and me--as far as we can down a rutted, muddy path to the village of Darussalam. We see a fire a little way ahead and stop at a swampy opening of palm trees. Two brothers -- in their early twenties are sifting through the remains of a house about twenty yards across the water from us.

"We're looking for our parents," one says -- before slipping off a downed tree trunk into the muck up to his waist. The others laugh. It seems a welcome sound, if out of place in this ghoulish setting.

Seeing a flat, smoky fire nearby -- I ask what it is.

"A body, but not someone they recognize, " Mohammed translates.

The flesh burns, appropriately enough, like the tallow of a candle and melts slowly into a maze of branches below.

We ride further down the trail -- seemingly deeper into the heart of darkness- -- careful not to run over the many black body bags that line both sides. As we pass, a brownish-yellow foot sticks out of the end of one.

"Ughhh," Mohammed reacts, veering the bike away at the last minute.

Despite being in the epicenter of this disaster -- he had never even seen a dead body prior to yesterday -- when we had walked through the city's devastated marina area.

His family's home was near the hills and had been spared by the Tsunami. Seeing bodies was something he had hoped to avoid, even though now they surround him and every other survivor in Banda Aceh, Indonesia a great army of corpses -- that cannot not be wished away.



(Bodies on trail. image: Kevin Sites.)

BABY SPARROWS:

Today we had been searching for a mass grave in the area, the smell told us we were close -- but instead we found a group of young professionals from Jakarta who called themselves the Islamic Community for Social Help.

They are doctors, lawyers, teachers -- all volunteers clad in rubber boots and surgical masks, focused on doing what few others will, wrestling away from the vultures and worms the remains of the tsunami dead.

We follow them as they move deeper into the jungle and the more remote parts of the village. They have been busy. There are black bags everywhere. We pad through a small clearing where two more unrecovered bodies are found; one, a man, lodged face down in a large fetid pool of water created by the Tsunami, the second, a woman trapped within in a cake of debris made of palm fronds, wood and mud.

The men split into teams and slowly, reverently, work at freeing the two from nature's reckless grip -- bodies, like baby sparrows, crushed by a clumsy, eager child.

The man, stripped of clothes, is floating near a patch of reeds. Five wade in to get him. One pulls a large plank from the water and uses it like a lever to loose the suction of mud attached to the body. He slips it under the chest and poles it carefully, feet first into the end of a large black plastic bag the others hold open.

Meanwhile another group is deconstructing the debris pile from around the woman. Only her arm is visible, but with each piece they remove more of her is revealed until twenty minutes later, the body is fully exposed.

They slide a rectangle of plywood under the corpse. As they drag it out on the homemade stretcher I can finally see her face. I look away…but my eyes are drawn to it again. Her top and bottom lips are pulled back in a frozen grimace. It's clear to me that her death was neither quick nor painless.

Now the man's body is being carried from the water to firm ground. His feet are exposed and the white, flesh is beginning to fall away after so many days of being immersed.

Once on shore, the men begin trussing it up in more black plastic. I watch their uncalloused hands, hands not used to such tasks, skillfully wrapping the shape with twine, transforming what had been a violent an chaotic death into something more orderly, peaceful – something that the living could make sense of and that the dead may have ultimately wished for.



(Mannequin in tsunami wreckage. image: Kevin Sites.)

MAKING IT HUMAN:

Later--in another part of town a woman name Rumainur spins around on a slab of concrete crying, "Allah, Allah." It was the place her house once stood before the tsunami. Her sixteen-year-old son Azhari stands nearby, arms crossed. He is confused, angry -- cannot believe the fate that has taken not just his family's home -- but also his older brother.

There is destruction for as far as the eye can see -- just one great plain of splinters, crumbled brick and the possessions that the dead have left behind; a pair of jeans laid out in the dirt almost as if the owner disappeared while wearing them, a brightly-colored dress till on a hangar -- perhaps a mother's favorite, a cracked motorbike helmet -- was it worn by a driver trying to outrun the tsunami?

Mohammed picks up a photo album. It's covered with mud -- the pictures inside ruined. All the years of memories destroyed like the lives they depicted.

A few feet away is an inflated life jacket. I wonder whether if the force of the wave ripped it from the person who was wearing it or whether they cven had a chance to put it on.

The Indonesian soldiers who are recovering bodies here have run out of latex gloves. They improvise by tying black plastic bags around their hands to do mortuary work on a scale they likely never dreamed of.

Near a bridge they are rebuilding, one soldier finds a poster of pop songstress Avril Lavigne. He sees me shooting video and holds it up to be photographed, laughing. It goes in his take home pile. The other soldiers ask me for cigarettes, anything to dilute the stench of rotting corpses.

A smell that is probably hard-wired into our cognitive memory the way a cow can sniff it's own mortality at a slaughterhouse. It is a smell unique to itself in its repulsiveness-- a combination of rotting cabbage and meat and that sickly-sad smell of the geriatric ward. I give the soldiers my last three menthols.

As we walk on -- we pass a group of four bodies bags with a handwritten sign in front of them.

"It says, Mohammed reads, "that the bodies in these bags are all from one family--father, mother, daughter and – a baby," he points to what looks no bigger than a kitchen trash pail liner.

The two larger bags have passports on top of them. He opens them up, reads me their names and shows me their photographs -- making it human again for a moment, the repeatedly incomprehensible nature of this tragedy.




(Mannequin in tsunami wreckage. image: Kevin Sites.)

HOPE ITSELF:

Mohammed's own family -- as every other in Banda Aceh, has been touched by the tragedy. His aunt and uncle's home was swept away by the tsunami -- and likely all three of their young sons with it.

Usman and Dina are distraught, holding up what may be the only proof that the boys ever lived -- digital photographs of them stored on their mobile telephone.

They grasp the phone as if it were hope itself, something, like so many others here, they are unwilling to let go of yet.

In the same room Mohammed's nine-year old nephew -- also named Mohammed lies on the floor watching television. His parents, both doctors, are also missing and presumed dead. He survived by hanging on to a floating plank until a fishing boat plucked him from the sea,

When photos of his father and mother are placed on the rug next to him -- he just stares at them blankly.

* * *

BATTLE TO SAVE LIVES:

Off the coast of Aceh -- U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopters scramble from the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in a battle which will save lives rather than take them.

Sixteen navy and marine helicopters -- fly five to seven triangulated rescue missions every day -- bringing water from the carrier, picking up food from aid groups on land, finally making quick stops to unload supplies to worst hit areas and transport those with serious injuries.

It is the peaceful end of U.S. firepower in action – but no less technologically awesome--like the Lincoln's shipboard desalinization plant which turns seawater into drinking water at a rate of 90-thousand gallons a day.

And that's critical in this disaster where potable water is more valuable than absolutely anything. One problem: the Seahawks lacks the load capacity to transport to the stricken regions all the water that's made onboard.

The sailor are undeterred, most of whom, volunteer to do this work-- filling jugs, loading food -- in addition to their regular duties.

"It's a lot better than war," says Seaman Bruce Fuentes, topping off the endless plastic jugs on the carrier huge deck before carrying them to the choppers pulsating on deck.

When our chopper lands -- in the hard hit village of Choong, survivors are already waiting and rush it from both sides.

Crewmen are surrounded. Although there is little fear of potential violence, the individuals are clearly focused on the survival of their families and themselves, grabbing whatever they can. Once the precious supplies are in their hands, however, panic becomes relief. Intensity turns into smiles.

Helicopter crewman Dave Chaffee is used to it now -- but he says the first time they landed in Indonesia it was different story.
"All we saw was that they wanted the food and they didn't care how they got it -- I wasn't prepared for that."

After ascending again -- we fly over tithe city of Mulabu -- the area closest to the epicenter of the quake and the most devastated by the Tsunami.

From the sky it look as if it has been leveled by a nuclear bomb. When I can actually make out the outlines of a city it is Alice through the looking glass; ships on highways, trucks in the sea, saltwater marshes on Main Street, houses and cars upside down.

Most are grateful for any help -- but one man tells me the relief efforts are haphazard, at best.

"Rice is delivered one day," he says "but no water to cook it with. Water is delivered the next day, but no kerosene for our stoves."

But the problems of coordination seem natural with so many different nations and agencies swinging into action so quickly.

Despite some early missteps the tempo of relief efforts seems to ratchet up a bit more every day here – a point of pride for U.S. sailors and marines -- a matter of life or death for the thousands of survivors just barely hanging on.

* * *

LAST BEST CHANCE:

In the children's ward of a converted military hospital in Banda Aceh– Azwan sings the Koran to his infant son.

Since the Tsunami -- in which the boy was nearly swept away like so many others -- he has suffered from fever and diarrhea. Medicine helps, but only his Azwan's singing stops the tears.

There are dozens of other child survivors here -- and while the disaster did not take their lives -- it did take a part of them.

Seven-year old Delisa was playing on the beach when the tsunami struck -- a passing boat plucked her from the water -- but only after her leg had been crushed by a wooden beam.

It had to be amputated. She is beautiful girl with an elfin smile and dark brown eyes. She playful rotates here stump from under her nightshirt while eating a bowling of noodles.

But when it comes time to change her dressing -- the pain causes her to cry out uncontrollably. It is a difficult sound for anyone to hear -- let alone her mother, who has sat day after day by her bedside.

Nearby, with his father's help seven-year old Feri walks back to his bed. He is a scarecrow of a boy -- each step as hesitant and painful as if he were walking on glass. Medical equipment is so scarce his IV bottle is tied to the window shade.

"He is all I have left," says his father, Saiful, a forty-year old bus driver. "My wife and two other children are all dead.

Feri is suffering from pneumonia -- he moans in a withering delirium. Saiful looks at him lovingly, drawing his hand across the boy's forehead, trying to stroke his pain away.

Each parent and child here has suffered terrible loss -- physical and psychological trauma that could remain the rest of their lives.

But here in this place where their futures seem so uncertain -- they cling to each other as their last best chance.

* * *

OUTRUNNING THE SMELL OF DEATH:

The next day – Mohammed and I find one of the dozens of mass graves in Aceh province. In the hour we stand over a swimming pool size pit -- we see Indonesian army trucks pull up nine times and unload the body bags. There is no dignity here, but also no alternative. The gate is dropped and the bags heaved over the ledge into the pit -- like garbage.

They land with a solid, dull thud. On one occasion a dump truck simply backs up to the pit, raises it's bed and the bodies slide in. A soldier lowers only one bag -- a small one -- probably containing the remains of an infant or child, gently into hole.

When the job is done a backhoe scoops great heaps of red earth and drops it on top of the bodies -- many that will never be identified. Their family members wondering for the rest of their lives -- which hole in ground holds the body of their loved ones.

When we leave we throttle all the way back -- 40, 50, 60 kilometers an hour -- riding fast trying to outrun the smell of death. But its already become a part of us--locked into the fabric of our clothing.

* * *

NO TENT:

Ibnu Jarir has no tent -- so the 28-year old fisherman must make one. And in this crowded refugee camp in the shadow of a silver mosque on the outskirts of the city -- fifteen people will take shelter under it. Ibnu lost his wife to the Tsunami and says very little while he works.

He busies himself cutting and stretching black plastic sheets over a small plot of ground that will be their only protection from the winter rains. He is skillful in laying out the shelter, pulling the guylines taught, staking them firmly, tying off the awning using strips of discarded wire.


It seems sturdy -- but Ibnu is uncertain how long this black plactic will hold. It's purpose, after all, was not to shelter the living, but to sheath the dead.

-end-

Kevin 9:44 AM

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Paradise Tossed  

(Samson Choi. image: Kevin Sites.)

When Andy Lee and Samson Hoi walked down the dock on Phi Phi Island -- they thought they had arrived in paradise. But the two 26-years-olds from Los Angeles -- had no idea that in just moments they would be swept away by a wall of water created by the largest earthquake in 40 years.

As they headed down the well-worn dirt alleyway toward their hotel -- Lee noticed something strange.




(Andy Lee. image: Kevin Sites.)

"I looked behind me and there was a rush of water," he says, "but only about a foot high. Within seconds it was up to our waists."

That stream became a rushing river -- pinning Choi against a house before sweeping him out to sea. Lee was already in deep water and struggling for his life.



(Upturned ship. image: Kevin Sites.)

"I was terrified, I was in shock," he says, his eyes beginning to well up with the memory. " I couldn't believe that this was the way I was going to die."

He thrashed against the swirling ocean, struggling for breath. He went under once, twice -- a third time and just when he felt he could hold out any longer, he pushed to the surface again.

"I was able to get a half or maybe just a quarter breath of air, but it was enough."

Lee grabbed a buoy nearby and held on tight. When he saw an overturned kayak he swam to it and clung on until someone on a nearby boat saw him and pulled him aboard. Choi had already been rescued.



(Post-tsunami wreckage. image: Kevin Sites.)

As the death toll in Thailand continues to grow -- it becomes increasingly clear how lucky Lee and Choi were. As many as thirteen hundred people were killed in Thailand alone -- many of them foreign tourists, including 12 Americans so far. The U.S. Embassy says they expect that number to increase as more bodies are identified.

In the underground parking garage at Patong Beach Hospital the sickly-sweet smell of death easily overwhelms the smell of street stall vendors roasting skewered chickens and fish on small grills.

One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage -- many of them big enough to hold refrigerators -- built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.



(Destruction in Thailand. image: Kevin Sites.)

Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process -- before the bodies become impossible to identify.

In a well-choreographed drill -- they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo -- almost as if they were trying to rescue the living -- rather than preserve the dead.

On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.



(Coffins bearing digital photographs of the deceased. image: Kevin Sites.)

The pictures are grisly-- bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais –all victims of the earth's unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.

A German man flips through a clipboard with the same pictures. He is looking for his brother. When he gets to a certain page he stops. This was not how he wanted to remember him. He puts down the clipboard and walks to the corresponding coffin number. The lid is removed and he nods.



(Post-tsunami wreckage. image: Kevin Sites.)

Despite his loss -- he is relieved. One of the few with closure, certain about what happened and able to take his brother's body back home with him.

Patong Beach's usually bustling oceanfront Thaweewong Road -- now looks like the apocalypse. A bright yellow speedboat sits in the middle of the street cracked in two like an eggshell, the sidewalk has disintegrated under the sledgehammer force of the water, cars defy gravity posed in every position imaginable with the exception of sitting on their four wheels, and the beach, littered with chunks of concrete has become the road, while the road covered in sand has seemingly turned into the beach. The ocean worm has burrowed through the island and in doing so, turned everything inside out.

As night falls -- several immigrant men, tailors who specialize in turning out handcrafted suits for western tourists at lightning speed, sit around a makeshift table in front of what's left of their shop. They have only a couple of small lights, powered by a car battery -- but it's still very easy to see they have lost everything.

The owner, Gillan Rai, a Nepalese man married to a Thai woman says he's worried about how he'll support his wife and three children.
He says he's worked his entire life to build his business and in an instant,
it's gone.

"The wave was like a cobra," he says, demonstrating with his hand, "it fanned out before crashing down on us."

One of Rai's employees -- says he just arrived in Thailand a few weeks ago, happy about the prospect of a new job and a new life.

" I don't know what I'll do now," he says, "but I have to work."

Rai holds up a bottle of vodka that the men had been mixing with their colas as they talk. The bottle is scratched and the label torn.

"We found it," he says, "washed up on our doorstep the day after."

He smiles knowingly, the irony not lost. While the ocean has taken away all he's ever had -- it has left him a way to toast his own misfortune.

Kevin 4:32 PM

Sunday, November 21, 2004

Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1  

To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:

Since the shooting in the Mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it as well. As you know, I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat. I've spent most of the last five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a 'gotcha' reporter -- hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it.

This week I've even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist. Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I've gone to play it straight down the middle -- not to become a tool of propaganda for the left or the right.

But I find myself a lightning rod for controversy in reporting what I saw occur in front of me, camera rolling.

It's time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Here it goes.




It's Saturday morning and we're still at our strong point from the night before, a clearing between a set of buildings on the southern edge of the city. The advance has been swift, but pockets of resistance still exist. In fact, we're taking sniper fire from both the front and the rear.

Weapons Company uses its 81's (mortars) where they spot muzzle flashes. The tanks do some blasting of their own. By mid-morning, we're told we're moving north again. We'll be back clearing some of the area we passed yesterday. There are also reports that the mosque, where ten insurgents were killed and five wounded on Friday may have been re-occupied overnight.

I decide to leave you guys and pick up with one of the infantry squads as they move house-to-house back toward the mosque. (For their own privacy and protection I will not name or identify in any way, any of those I was traveling with during this incident.)

Many of the structures are empty of people -- but full of weapons. Outside one residence, a member of the squad lobs a frag grenade over the wall. Everyone piles in, including me.

While the Marines go into the house, I follow the flames caused by the grenade into the courtyard. When the smoke clears, I can see through my viewfinder that the fire is burning beside a large pile of anti-aircraft rounds.


I yell to the lieutenant that we need to move. Almost immediately after clearing out of the house, small explosions begin as the rounds cook off in the fire.

At that point, we hear the tanks firing their 240-machine guns into the mosque. There's radio chatter that insurgents inside could be shooting back. The tanks cease-fire and we file through a breach in the outer wall.

We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"

When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.

The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"

One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.

"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?

"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.

"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.

However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.

For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.

He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information." (This man has since reportedly been located by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service which is handling the case.)

In the aftermath, the first question that came to mind was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?

It was answered by staff judge advocate Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller -- who interviewed the Marines involved following the incident. After being treated for their wounds on Friday by Navy Corpsman (I personally saw their bandages) the insurgents were going to be transported to the rear when time and circumstances allowed.

The area, however, was still hot. And there were American casualties to be moved first.

Also, the squad that entered the mosque on Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack on Friday.

It's reasonable to presume they may not have known that these insurgents had already been engaged and subdued a day earlier.
Yet when this new squad engaged the wounded insurgents on Saturday, perhaps really believing they had been fighting or somehow posed a threat -- those Marines inside knew from their training to check the insurgents for weapons and explosives after disabling them, instead of leaving them where they were and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive.






During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself the day before.

I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report.

No one, especially someone like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you.

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing.

I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole.

The answer is not an easy one.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world.

The Marines have built their proud reputation on fighting for freedoms like the one that allows me to do my job, a job that in some cases may appear to discredit them. But both the leaders and the grunts in the field like you understand that if you lower your standards, if you accept less, than less is what you'll become.

There are people in our own country that would weaken your institution and our nation –by telling you it's okay to betray our guiding principles by not making the tough decisions, by letting difficult circumstances turns us into victims or worse…villains.

I interviewed your Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time-something that now seems prophetic. It was this:

"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here -- because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor -- and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground."

I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

I pray for your soon and safe return.

Kevin 1:37 PM