During my first tour in Iraq, from August 2004 to March 2005, I was the public affairs officer for 1st Force Service Support Group (1st FSSG), which was providing logistical support for more than 25,000 Marines and Sailors in al Anbar province. In the early days of my deployment, the mission of the FSSG was "building the mountain," the forward-staged supply stockpile for the next push into the city of Fallujah. The Marines tried once before to clear the city of insurgents, in April 2004, but were ordered to withdraw midway into the mission; now we were getting ready to go back in and finish the job.
My job was to assist reporters who wanted to cover the battle and to facilitate the documentation of the undertaking. Given the insurgents' information operations campaign in the first push into Fallujah—they grossly inflated the number of civilian casualties—we knew it would be important to get an accurate story out to the Iraqis and the rest of the world.
As planning started, I dispatched my deputy, First Lieutenant Robert Shuford, to the I Marine Expeditionary Force Public Affairs planning cell in Fallujah. I remained with the FSSG at its headquarters in Taqqadum. However, it was becoming apparent that many of us would be pulled from our assigned units to support the 1st Marine Division.
Change in Mission
At the end of October, we were re-assigned to Regimental Combat Team-7 (RCT-7). Its mission, alongside RCT-1, was to expel the insurgents from Fallujah and reclaim the city for the Iraqis. RCT-7 was made up of three battalions: 1st Battalion, 3d Marines; 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; and Army Task Force 2-2 (2d Battalion, 2d Brigade, 4th Infantry Division). I remained at the regimental headquarters; Shuford was assigned to 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; my combat correspondents were scattered throughout RCT-7 and RCT-1.
We quickly attracted many journalists who wanted to report on the battle—more than 25 press representatives from 13 news agencies were assigned to my RCT alone. The battlefield was going to be saturated with media. The Marine Corps story would be told not just from our perspective but from the eyes and voices of American and international journalists traveling alongside the Marine kicking down the door.
The first challenge for us was helping a number of reporters overcome their fear of the unknown. The Battle for Fallujah would be unlike the first offensive, from Kuwait to Baghdad; this would be fighting street-to-street and block-by-block. Our ability to safely embed reporters would be heavily tested. Later, a few reporters told me they wouldn't have gone into the city at all if they didn't have Lieutenant Shuford with them encouraging them to do so. Rob was instrumental in facilitating coverage under the most extreme circumstances.
The second challenge was orchestrating ways to move the handiwork of talented photojournalists from the center of the city to higher headquarters and broadcast agencies in the States and around the globe. While the reporters moved with the Marines, the world anxiously awaited the details, the picture worth a thousand words. During the battle I would go into the city to move footage from the battlefield to the rear for release. It was a team effort, a trusted relationship, between the reporters and the public affairs officers. More often than not, I would receive footage in a re-used Meal, Ready to Eat pouch with detailed instructions that was passed along the logistic support trains.
After more than ten days of significant stress and challenges, some reporters asked to move back to MEF headquarters while the units were still moving south through the city. Others were resolute, and stayed with their units into the re-construction phase of the operation; one remained embedded with his Marines for more than three weeks despite getting hit with shrapnel.
Thanksgiving Day 2004
Each day brought its own challenges, but the one most representative of my time in Iraq was Thanksgiving Day 2004—a couple of weeks after the battle had commenced. Although RCT-1 was still pushing south after clearing most of the north with RCT- 7, straggling insurgents and foreign fighters were still active in that section of the city. Marines were clearing houses for the second and third time. It was every bit the "three-block war" General Charles C. Krulak defined when he was Commandant in the 1990s—full-scale battle on one block, peacekeeping on another, and humanitarian assistance on a third. I would hear shooting and see billowing smoke from explosions just a block away; see Marines from our Civil-Military Operations Center coordinating clean-up of the city at another location; and watch our Marines distributing food to civilians nearby. Later, I was thankful to see Marines at a battalion headquarters getting some much-needed rest and a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner.
We are trained to expect all these things going on simultaneously, but it was surreal to see that disparity of events in real life. I kept thinking of the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein—"This is what they mean by Abby Normal," I thought.
Fear of the unknown and more often, fear of the known—death and destruction—were unavoidable. Each time I went into the city I prepared my mind for what I thought I might encounter, hoping that reality would match my imaginings. In some cases it did and in some cases even the well-prepared mind encounters the unexpected. Being swarmed with flies or approached by animals surviving on the remains of insurgents wasn't something I rehearsed in my head. Reality becomes something different at that moment and everything else becomes background noise.
In my view, I was traveling with the most experienced warfighters on the ground, and to me that was the safest place to be. The courage the Marines projected in RCT-7 was contagious. I was confident in my leaders, peers, and subordinates. Without a doubt I knew God had the playbook, I just had to carry out my assignment. There wasn't time to question or ponder the circumstances. I had a job to get done.
Despite encouragement from the Marines for them to leave the city before the battle, some innocent civilians chose to remain. We began seeing Iraqis slowly creep out from the rubble of their homes. Some were trying to reach the safe havens we had set up—our goal was to get them to safety and, by doing so, perhaps gain the support of the Iraqi people. One day, I was standing on the street, and from a nearby doorway I saw three families emerge to get food from the Marines. For weeks these families had been hunkered down in their homes as close air support, artillery, and mortars rained down on their city. I remember thinking about how courageous they were—to come out into the street after the tremendous battle that had just taken place above their heads. But they trusted us, and accepted our food. There were some awkward moments; we were both trying to figure each other out. In an odd way, they were taken by me, and I was taken by them.
I not only needed to support the embedded media, but I also had to ensure the documentation by Marine photographers and correspondents of the battle unfolding before the eyes of the world. We did not have enough reporters to achieve this important objective, so in many cases it was left up to the young Marine with a camera to record the stories of heroism playing out in the cramped houses of Fallujah. (This was equally true during my second deployment to Iraq, when the important, but less-than-spectacular, work of supporting elections did not attract many reporters to our area; it was up to our combat correspondents to document the day-to-day efforts of building democracy at the local level.)
Thanksgiving Day in Fallujah, I met up with a combat photographer assigned to one of the three battalions. He had recently photographed a platoon on the move that had suffered casualties. He didn't say much but offered me his camera. We exchanged few words as he scrolled through the photos. Not much needed to be said; the pictures told the story, a powerful one.
One of my combat correspondents was a young lance corporal named T. J. Kaemmerer. He was a real go-getter, and he treated every task with a "Let's go charge the hill!" attitude. After the battle, he struggled with one story in particular—he knew it was an important one and he desperately wanted to get it right. My lieutenant sat down with him and told him, "Write it from the heart"—and he did. Lance Corporal Kaemmerer got it right and told it as only a Marine who was there could—a Marine who was in the thick of it and alive that day because of the heroism of a fellow Leatherneck. (See "Uncommon Valor", p. 58)
A Privilege to Serve
As a public affairs officer, I have had the rare privilege of seeing nearly every facet of the Marine Air Ground Task Force in action—which means interacting with Marines in every military operational specialty. Whether embedding reporters during operations in Iraq or participating in interviews and press conferences, I have learned more than I ever could reading books or sitting in a classroom. And, in every case, I am amazed by the adaptability of Marines.
Without question, the best part of my job is working with my combat correspondents. It was a privilege to serve with such talented and courageous Marines on both of my tours to Iraq. They are remarkably flexible—able to ride shotgun in a logistics convoy one day, then walk patrol with an infantry squad the next. Most impressive was their ability to seamlessly transition from one unit to another, often with little advance warning or information about the mission or what they may encounter along the way. It is the common bond that Marines share that makes this possible. Yes, they have a camera in one hand, but they have a rifle in the other.