In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

by Sites, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780061228759
• ISBN10: 0061228753
• Edition: DVD
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, Sites talks with rebels and government troops, child soldiers and child brides, and features the people on every side, including those caught in the cross fire. His honest reporting helps destroy the myths of war by putting a human face on war's inhumanity. Personally, Sites will come to discover that the greatest danger he faces may not be from bombs and bullets, but from the unsettling power of the truth.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Blacksburg and Baghdad	p. 1
The Revelation will not Be Televised
Burdens of War: The Mosque Shooting	p. 5
Holiday Hell: Reporting the Tsunami	p. 28
Intermission: Fathers and Sons	p. 37
TV News or the Internet: Do I Yahoo!?	p. 38
Into the Arms of Mama Africa: Rebels, Rape Victims and the Children of War
Somalia: Chew on This!	p. 57
Intermission: Khat Tales	p. 70
Democratic Republic of the Congo: Worse Than the Guns	p. 72
Intermission: Hammering Rocks	p. 82
Uganda: An Army of Children	p. 84
Sudan: The Longest War	p. 91
Intermission: Young Woman and a Log	p. 99
Phantoms of Falluja, Brown Sugar Junkies, Martyrs' Moms and Other Middle East Nightmares
Iraq: What Cannot Be Left Behind	p. 103
Lebanon: Hanging with Hezbollah	p. 115
Intermission: Defendant "198964"	p. 121
Iran: Under the Hijab	p. 128
Intermission: Persians Can Jump	p. 140
Syria: Without Mouths	p. 141
Israel and Gaza: Burned, Blind and Reborn	p. 147
Intermission: Sami	p. 153
The Child Bride, Endless Grief and Music to Disarm to: Lives and Lessons from Europe, Central Asia and the Americas
Chechnya: Art Amid the Ruins	p. 157
Intermission: Bomb U	p. 163
Afghanistan: Smiling Through the Pain	p. 165
Colombia: The Right to Bear Arms	p. 181
Intermission: Email	p. 189
Haiti: Life Without a Net	p. 192
Intermission: The Art of Survival	p. 196
My Asian Odyssey: Tamil Tigers, Nepal Maoists, Karen Rebels and a Missed Moment with the Dalailama
Nepal: Where to Mao?	p. 199
Kashmir: Trouble in Paradise	p. 208
Intermission: Learning to See	p. 214
Sri Lanka: Tiger Don't Surf	p. 216
Myanmar: Oldest Rebels Battle Ugliest Regime	p. 225
Intermission: Missing Chance: Oh, Hello Dalai	p. 232
Cambodia: Does Justice Lie Among Those Bones?	p. 235
Vietnam: Clockwork Orange	p. 245
The Thirty-Four-Day War: Putting the Hole in the Holy Land
Lebanon: Dodging Drones and Dead Men's Pockets	p. 253
Israel: The Equality of Fear	p. 266
My Third-World America: a Wealth of Information, a Poverty of Knowledge
Coming Home: Dreams, Death and the Hardest Truth	p. 283
Epilogue: What Did I Learn?	p. 293
Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1
Email to Yahoo! About the China Situation
Statistics
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

In the Hot Zone
One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Chapter One

Burdens of War

The Mosque Shooting

Falluja, Iraq
November 13, 2004

Sunbeams

The carpet of the mosque is stained with blood and covered with fragments of concrete. Tank shells and machine-gun rounds have pitted the inside walls. The rotting, sweet smell of death hangs in the morning air.

Gunsmoke-laced sunbeams illuminate the bodies of four Iraqi insurgents. A fifth lies next to a column, his entire body covered by a blanket.

I shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.

Yesterday I had seen these same five men being treated by American medics for superficial wounds received during an afternoon firefight. Ten other insurgents had been killed, their bodies still scattered around the main hall in the black bags into which the Marines had placed them.

I was told by the commander of the 3.1 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, that these five wounded, captured enemy combatants would be transported to the rear. But now I can see that one of them appears dead and the three others are slowly bleeding to death from gunshots fired by one lance corporal, I will learn later, who used both his M-16 and his 9 mm pistol on them, just minutes before I arrived.

With my camera rolling, I walk toward the old man in the red kaffiyeh and kneel beside him. Because he was so old, maybe in his early sixties, and wearing the red headgear, he had stood out the most to me when I was videotaping the day before, after the battle.

Now the old man is struggling to breathe. Oxygenated blood bubbles from his nose. Another man, stocky and dressed in a long gray shirt called a dishdasha, is slumped in the old man's lap. While I'm taping, the old man is bleeding to death in front of my camera. I look up to see the lance corporal who had just shot all of them moments before, now walking up to the other two insurgents against the wall, twenty feet away. One is facedown, apparently already dead. The other, dressed in an Iraqi Police uniform, is faceupbut motionless, aside from his breathing.

The lance corporal says, "Hey, this one's still breathing." Another agrees, "Yeah, he's breathing." There is tension in the room, but I continue to roll on the man in the red kaffiyeh.

"He's fucking faking he's dead," the lance corporal says, now standing right in front of the man.

The Embed

As a freelance correspondent for NBC News, I embedded with the Third Battalion, First Marine (Regiment) for three weeks prior to the Battle of Falluja, or what the Americans code-named Operation Phantom Fury and what the Iraqi interim government called Operation Al Fajr, or "The Dawn."

The mission has a clear but complicated objective; take back the restive city of Falluja from the insurgents who had been running the place for the last eight months.

In the time leading up to the battle, I have developed a good relationship with my unit. The Marines see that I'm a television reporter working solo—shooting, writing and transmitting my reports without a crew—and they tell me they like my self-reliance. I tell them it's a necessity, because no one wants to work with me anymore. Television news is the ultimate collaborative medium, but by being recklessly aggressive, low on the network food chain (a producer turned reporter) and eager to go it alone to uncomfortable locations, it has not been difficult to convince news managers to let me do just that.

The Marines also like the fact that I write an independent war blog, which NBC allowed me to keep as a freelancer, where I post longer, more detailed and personal stories about my experiences.

Inspired by Tim O'Brien's book The Things They Carried, in which he describes the items, both literal and figurative, that each man in a U.S. Army platoon carried on a jungle march through Vietnam, I ask the Marines to show me the same. They pull out rosaries, Saint Christopher medals, photographs of their wives and children taped inside their Kevlar helmets.

I snap their pictures and post them on the site. Their families, eager for information about their loved ones, come to my blog in droves. They post responses, thanking me for allowing them to see the faces of their sons, husbands, brothers. Soon, however, those messages of gratitude will be replaced with hate mail and death threats.

Camp Abu Ghraib

We are on a small, dusty satellite base near Camp Falluja, the First Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters. Like the infamous, scandal-ridden prison, the base is named Camp Abu Ghraib. It is a sprawling compound ringed by dirt walls, large concrete slabs, concertina wire and gravel-filled wire baskets called HESCO barriers.

In this time of waiting, when I've finished filing my reports for the day, I sometimes jog around the base on a makeshift track just inside the walls. It's an incongruous but now-common experience to run in the golden light of dusk, passing the guard towers with their .50-caliber machine guns and the brig at a far end of the base quadrant where Iraqi prisoners are temporarily held before being transferred to the real Abu Ghraib prison.

Inside, I see Marines tossing a football, walking to the chow hall, cleaning their weapons. I hear the clank of weights being dropped and a boombox blasting from the tent that houses their surprisingly well-equipped gym. On the outside I see red skies over Falluja as the sun drops to the horizon.

Four horsemen

I made friends with three country Marines and a navy medic who provide security for the base—and who, in the course of their duties, confiscated four horses from Iraqi men who came too close to the base with carts, supposedly to collect scrap metal.

Corporal David Harris, Lance Corporal Kenny Craig, Corporal Lloyd Williams and Corpsman Michael Driver use their own money to pay for hay brought in from Baghdad to feed those malnourished horses. In an effort to re-create a little piece of home, they're trying to train the cart-hauling horses to be ridden.

In the Hot Zone
One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars. Copyright © by Kevin Sites. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars by Kevin Sites
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