A war reporter/foreign correspondent of Afghanistan and Iraq writes of what he sees and experiences.
His words allow you to see in his eyes what was going on, and its not for the squeamish.
The Marines were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to unfold. Its was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the mosques,
rising above the thundery guns.
"The Americans are here!" howled a voice from a loud speaker in a minaret. "The Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques!?
Bullets poured without direction and without end. No one lifted his head.
"This is crazy," one marine yelled to his buddy of the noise. "Yeah," the buddy yelled back, "and we've only taken one house."
And then, as if fromt he depths, came a new sound:violent, menacing and dire. I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant field at Falluja's northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.
It was AC/DC, the Austrailian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled sounds, I recognized the song immediately:
"Hells Bells," the band's celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times.
Four men stepped from the darkness. They were not part of Bravo Company; I hadn't seen them before. They wore flight suits that shimmered in the night and tennis shoes and hoods that made them look like executioners. The four men wore googles that shrouded their eyes and gave off lime-green penumbras that lightened their faces. With the shells exploding I got off the wall and rejoined the captain in the street, shaking in the knees, and I listened to him tell the executioners the location of the snipers. Up ahead, he said. One of the four men mumbled something but I couldn't hear. I couldn't see their eyes through the green glowing but one of them was on the balls of his feet, bouncing , like a football player on the sidelines. Coach, he seemed to be saying, put me in the game.
The four men peeled off into the blackness without a sound. Moments passed and the shelling stopped. And then the sniper fire stopped. We never saw the men again.
quotes from the first several pages
