by Michael Fumento on troops in Ramadi. He has now placed a
. You need to read it all to get the in-the-action flavor of the piece. Here are a few excerpts:
Ten days before I arrived, during the night of April 9, 1st Battalion suffered its worst casualties of the deployment in a mini-"Black Hawk Down" situation. An IED flipped a Humvee, killing the driver from D Company. An M-1 Abrams tank went to retrieve it. For good reason, Corregidor has a large complement of tanks and other armored vehicles. Unfortunately, another IED made a lucky strike on the tank, cutting the fuel line and setting it ablaze. The men inside scrambled to safety, but now things got really messy...
So the troops set up a perimeter and waited. As with the real downing of the Black Hawks in Somalia, the burning tank attracted bad guys from throughout the city. They kept pouring into the area to kill the infidels. But with their night-vision equipment and laser pointers, Americans own the night. The enemy came in droves and they died in droves. "The insurgents were so desperate to gain momentum against us that they were literally running into the streets to plant IEDs right in front of us or throwing them over walls," says Claburn. "It was purely amazing." By the time the rounds had stopped flying and the tank was recovered, 30 jihadists were confirmed dead. Disaster had been averted. But the price in blood was high. Two more soldiers from Headquarters Company had died when another IED ripped their Humvee apart. Later the engineers whose job it was to detect and remove IEDs came into Col. Clark's office, apologizing with tears in their eyes. "I told them you tried; you did your best; but you can't get all of them all the time," Clark said....
Right place at the right time indeed. I look where I had been standing exposed to the windows. About where my head had been there's a large pock mark in the opposite wall. The bullet might have drilled me had I remained there; I can't say. Then I see the window. There's a nice clean hole just where my upper right side was – where my body armor has absolutely no protection, much less the new side ceramic plates everybody in 1st Battalion wears. This puts me in a pensive mood. No Killionesque whoops. But there's little time to contemplate my mortality before the order comes to "exfil" for real and start trekking back to the pickup point at a good trot. All quiet on the OP Hotel front. Or so I think. But now it's going to get really bad.
It is the single best article I have read on the war.
1
How would the MSM report this?
"IEDs exploded and tore apart 2 Humvees in the town of Ramadi. Two more American soldiers died in the ensuing firefight and 30 Iraqis were killed in the confusion. An unidentified Iraqi said some were women and children. This brings the total American deaths in the war to 2 thousand (and whatever). The insurgency is growing! WE'RE LOSING, WE'RE LOSING, WE'RE LOSING!"
Am I exaggerating? Well, a little.
Posted by: Oyster at June 12, 2006 09:06 AM (ULAbo)
2
It seems that the Army is moving in on the city. They cordoned it off!:
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=ramadi11&date=20060611&query=ramadi
Posted by: Dan at June 12, 2006 09:44 AM (Z2OsI)
3
We hare being to nice. 300 should ever time a American HumVee is attacked.
Posted by: greyrooster at June 12, 2006 10:06 AM (fDZgg)
4
Wow, this is some good stuff. Would that more Americans could read stories just like these, but the trash covering the war, with a few notable exceptions such as Fumento, are just not up to the task. That, in itself, speaks volumes about our media.
Posted by: jesusland joe at June 12, 2006 10:28 AM (rUyw4)
5
Thanks for the posting of my web-based version. I hope to insert more streaming video into it tonight. As to the "cordoning off" of Ramadi, it's true that for some reason no more embeds are being allowed into the city. Something appears to be up. That said, it would take a massive amount of troops to try a repeat of Fallujah. 1,500 isn't enough. It could be a major "search-and-destroy," but it won't be a "grab-and-hold."
Posted by: Michael Fumento at June 12, 2006 10:55 AM (aOJuO)
6
Thank you, Michael, for great wartime reporting along the lines of Ernie Pyle and other great reporters who followed our troops into WWII. It's a damn shame that so few are actually reporting from the front. Nonetheless, that doesn't take anything away from people like you and Yon and a few others. A job well done, Michael Fumento!
Posted by: jesusland joe at June 12, 2006 12:18 PM (rUyw4)
7
Here's another great piece on the war, by the well known liberal John Derbyshire, at the commie National Review. Some conservatives are capable of admitting error. The whole piece is worth reading:
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.
Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? Here we are—we, the United States—in our fourth year of occupying that sinkhole, and it looks pretty much like the third year, or the second. Will the eighth year of our occupation, or our twelfth, look any better? I know people who will say yes, but I no longer know any who will say it with real conviction. It’s a tough thing, to admit you were wrong. It’s way tough if you’re a big-name pundit with a reputation to preserve. For those of us down at the bottom of the pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war.
Posted by: jd at June 12, 2006 05:32 PM (aqTJB)
8
jd, WTF prompted you to insert this piece of bull into this thread? It's totally off topic. Let's talk about our soldiers. Crap, is there nothing sacred to you? Insert that garbage into another thread that covers our entry into the war. There are only about 10 million of those at any given time on the internet. Crap!
Posted by: jesusland joe at June 12, 2006 07:56 PM (rUyw4)
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So jd, since someone may not agree with you, it means they're incapable of admitting error? And Derbyshire's "opinion" had no place in this thread as JJ stated. Unless he's reporting from Iraq on actual events, it has no place here and continues to be "opinion".
As many people here have openly and readily admitted that many errors have been made, you don't consider them honest unless they join your ranks in wanting to throw the baby out with the bath water. Allow me to predict your response, as you've reiterated it so many times: "The majority of Americans are now against the war." So what? You're part of that majority. I'm happy you have friends. Good day.
Posted by: Oyster at June 13, 2006 06:10 AM (YudAC)
10
I think if you look at comments here, many people have posted stuff that is not directly related. I certainly didn't intend to denigrate our troops. The troops succeeded; the president has failed. We needed a leadership equal to the valor and sacrifice of our fighting men and women. Unfortunately, Bush, Cheney, and Rummy aren't fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as our fighting heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their incompetence, bluster, and meretricious partisanship in the war on terror has made a mockery of their oaths of office.
Posted by: jd at June 13, 2006 09:20 AM (DQYHA)
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