Embedded in Fallujah, Reporter Dexter Filkins

DATE December 21, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Dexter Filkins discusses what he witnessed and reported
while embedded with a Marine company in Fallujah, Iraq
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Dexter Filkins has been doing some excellent reporting from Iraq for
The New York Times. In a series of articles last month, he described the
street-to-street fighting in Fallujah, where the Marine battalion he was
embedded with rooted out insurgents, getting shot at nearly every step of the
way. He's been covering Iraq since the start of the invasion in March, 2003.
For the past four years, he's been a reporter for The New York Times. Prior
to that, he was the New Delhi bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. He's
covered a half-dozen armed conflicts in such places as Sri Lanka and
Afghanistan. Filkins left Iraq in late November and plans to return after the
holidays.

I spoke with him yesterday. I wanted you to get a sense of his writing, so I
asked him to read an excerpt of his article datelined: Fallujah, November
18th.

Mr. DEXTER FILKINS (The New York Times): (Reading) `The 150 Marines with whom
I traveled, Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, had it as tough
as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot
into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers,
working their way through Fallujah's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on
their backs. In eight days of fighting, Bravo Company took 36 casualties,
including six dead, meaning that the unit's men had about a one in four chance
of being wounded or killed in little more than a week.

The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself and as new
as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems: the eery pop from the cannon from
the AC-130 gunship prowling above the city at night firing at guerrillas who
are often only steps away from Americans on the ground; the weird buzz of the
Dragon Eye pilotless airplane hovering over the battlefield as its video
cameras beamed real-time images back to the base; the glow of the insurgents'
flares throwing daylight over a landscape to help them shoot at their targets,
us; the nervous shove of a Marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as
tracer rounds ricocheted above; the silence between the ping of the shell
leaving its mortar tube and the explosion when it strikes; the screams of the
Marines when one of their comrades, Corporal Jake Knospler, lost part of his
jaw to a hand grenade. `No, no, no,' the Marines shouted, as they dragged
Corporal Knospler from the darkened house where the bomb went off.

It was 2 AM, the sky dark without a moon. `No, no, no.' Nothing in the
combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie
screens. Even so, they often seemed no more real.'

GROSS: Thanks for reading that.

That's Dexter Filkins of The New York Times, who's briefly out of Iraq.

You know, you write, in that November 21st piece that you were just reading
for us, that nothing in the combat that you saw even remotely resembled the
scenes of movies that you'd seen but, even so, that they often seem no more
real. In what sense did being in the middle of the war sometimes seem no more
real than watching movies?

Mr. FILKINS: It's--I wonder if a soldier would tell you the same thing. I
remember getting out of the troop carrier right as we approached at the
outside of the city, and we literally piled out and started walking to the
city. And we immediately came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades. And
it was dark outside, and the RPGs, as they're know, came sailing over this
ridge. And the first thing I thought of was they're shooting bottle rockets
at us and it's the Fourth of July. And that's what they look like. And they
were landing not right next to us, and they were exploding, and people were
getting hit. And yet I felt like I was in a carnival or something. And it's
almost as if you're taken out of your body, and you're standing over on the
side and watching. And it's just--it doesn't seem real.

There was another time when a phosphorous flare exploded all around us, and
everything was burning. And it actually burned through my pack and my
sleeping bag. And, again, I remember thinking, `What's all the excitement
about? This is just fireworks.' And it's strange what your brain does in
those odd moments when you should just be utterly terrified, and, you know,
instead, again, it was--I mean, it seemed like I was a kid at a Fourth of July
picnic.

GROSS: You've covered several wars. Is this the first time you covered urban
warfare?

Mr. FILKINS: It was the first time I covered urban warfare. I have covered
several wars. I was there in Afghanistan for the American war there in 2001.
I came up with the troops in Iraq in March, 2003. I was covering some other
conflicts--it's usually much less intense. People get killed, people get
wounded. It can get pretty scary. You know, I've certainly been shot at.
But to walk down a crowded city street, a dense area like that, where every
single window and every street corner, every rooftop is potentially a place
from which somebody will be shooting at you is just a completely different
experience. And it's terrifying almost at every moment that you're there.

And so we would walk down the street--and I mentioned this in one of my
articles, but from the time that we started, which was 8 PM at night and it
was dark, the combat was continuous, very close range, for the next 16 hours.
So until noon the next day we were being fired at. And they were just popping
out everywhere: behind us, over on the side, over here, over there kind of.
And so it's just the intensity of it, and, you know, your body is just pouring
out all this adrenaline, and it's terrifying, but it's also very, very
exhausting.

GROSS: You say, `We were fired at.' Where were you situating yourself during
the urban warfare that the Marines were fighting and that you were covering?

Mr. FILKINS: (Laughs) Well, I like to say I was getting--crouching behind the
largest person that I could find.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. FILKINS: But I was with the company, so it was about--this company was
about 150 guys. There was a group of about 10 people. The company commander,
who was a captain, Omohundro, who's a quite extraordinary guy--I was with
him, basically, for the most part. He was kind of surrounded by a couple of
guys with radios, a couple of sergeants, people like that. And it was a good
place to be because we were right in the middle of the fight. But at the same
time just by listening to him and following him around, I could get some sense
of the bigger picture. So it wasn't just like I was looking down a straw the
whole time. But--so we actually--company has three platoons with about, you
know, 50 or so people each, and these platoons were often divided up. And
during the course of the fighting, Captain Omohundro would actually often run
from one platoon to the other to deliver orders or just to see how things were
going, and I would be just sort of scurrying after him to get a sense of it.
So I often--it was a good place to be because I often got a pretty good sense
of how the whole thing was progressing.

GROSS: What was the actual specific mission that the Marines you were
traveling with were given?

Mr. FILKINS: It wasn't like, `Go take the hill,' you know, or, `Capture the
bridge.' We, the Bravo Company that I was with, got off of the troop
carriers. And their objective was to enter the town at the north end, which
was a very defined kind of--you know, you cross the street, and then the
buildings start--and march down to this other end of the town, which was a
couple of miles away, capturing some things along the way, like mosques and,
you know, a couple of buildings that--Iraqi national guard building. But we
got to the end of the town on the southern end, you know, eight days later,
and then, I don't know, I remember thinking, `Well, what do we do now?' And
there were other companies and other platoons to our left and to our right,
and so basically what it amounted to was just an enormous sweep through a city
of 250,000 people.

Often the Marines I was with went house to house, into every single house, on
a street, kicking down doors. And we often found people in them who were
armed. And so, again, it was a little different than anything I had been in
before and a little confusing for that reason but very crazy.

GROSS: You write, `Whole buildings, minarets and human beings were vaporized
in the barrages of exploding shells.' You saw things being vaporized?

Mr. FILKINS: I did. I did. I saw many things being vaporized. Typically
what would happen is the Marines would walk down the street, walk down an
alley--say, 50 Marines--and it didn't take long they would come under fire
almost immediately, usually. I mean, they would spend the night in a mosque,
and they would walk outside, and within five minutes they were under fire.
They would fire back. Often they'd fire hundreds and hundreds and thousands
of rounds into a building, say, where they thought the insurgents were hiding.
But often what they would do after 20 minutes and thousands of rounds of this,
they'd call in an air strike, and the whole building would just disappear.

I remember standing on top of a roof of an apartment building one morning, and
we were taking fire from kind of down the street. And then, over in the
corner of my eye, an entire minaret that must have been 150 feet tall just
vanished in a cloud of dust. It would be easy, you know, if you think back to
World War II or even wars that are more recent, you know, to wipe out the
whole city block and hope that they hit the building that they wanted. And
now they can just be a lot more precise.

GROSS: And yet, at the same time, a handful of insurgents hidden in a
building could basically trap the American Marines for hours...

Mr. FILKINS: Absolutely.

GROSS: ...in spite of all the high-tech weapons.

Mr. FILKINS: Absolutely. Totally. I mean, that happened to Bravo Company a
number of times. And I have to say it made me wonder when I heard the
Pentagon say that they had killed between 800 and 1,200 insurgents. Frankly,
I didn't see that many insurgents; I didn't see that many dead insurgents. I
know there were a lot of them out there because we were getting shot at a lot.
But if you take--there was one day, I think it was the second day that we were
in Fallujah, we were held up by what I think was probably a single sniper in a
four-story building across the street. The entire company, 150 guys, was held
up for the entire day.

And over the course of the day, as this guy would take a shot and then he'd go
to another floor and he take another shot and then he'd run down the hall and
he'd take another shot, the Marines dropped--they ordered in maybe a dozen
bombs, several dozen 155mm artillery shells. They fired thousands and
thousands of rounds. They fired rockets into the thing. And so the building
was, like, a smoking ruin. I mean, by 4 PM it was just on fire, and it was
all black. And still, you know, the bullets would come out. And this was one
guy, maybe two guys. And I remember after that long day, some Marines finally
made it across the street and searched the building and didn't find anybody.
And so that was one insurgent or two maybe, and he held up 150 guys for an
entire day.

GROSS: Hm. You know, and you've been describing some of the high-tech
weapons Americans have. One of the things that the Iraqi insurgents were
using was a black flag. To indicate what?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, the black flags in Fallujah were used as a signal, very
low tech--used as a signal to say to other insurgents, `Come to the fight. We
found them.' And I have to say watching a black flag go up was a really
creepy thing. You know, it didn't matter that it was primitive as it could
be, but it was working. And these flags--we'd see these black flags go up,
you know, over a mosque, something high, over a tall building, and then the
firing would start. And so it worked really well. But I have to say that the
psychological effect of it is almost as intense.

GROSS: Because you know it's about to start and you know you're a target.

Mr. FILKINS: You know it's about to start. You know it's about to start.
There was one particular--it was in early evening, and I was with a platoon,
guess it was about 50 guys. We were walking down a pretty narrow alley. The
captain, Captain Omohundro, was in front of me. His radio went off saying,
`There's a carload of insurgents with RPGs coming in your direction.' So
everybody kind of got ready. Radio--two minutes later the radio went again
saying, `There's another truckload of insurgents coming in your direction.'
You know, within five minutes we got into a really horrific firefight. But I
remember that because we had seen the black flags go up and then these
warnings over the radio obviously from some spotter, and then it started. And
it was very chilling.

GROSS: And where did you stay during that?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, typically what we did was we would just find a building.
The Marines would kick the door down, and we'd all go up on the roof. They
were typically flat roofs, and we'd go up on a roof and try to sleep up there.
It was a place from which you could see around you, and you could kind of
protect yourself pretty well. So we didn't get a lot of sleep during the
eight days or nine days of the fighting, as you can imagine. The Marines
often moved at night, which they like to do. A lot of them had night-vision
goggles. The airplanes could be up with their infrared scopes checking out
the battlefield, whereas the insurgents, of course, were more or less blind.
There was no electricity in the city; the Americans had shut it off.

So we often moved at night, and they felt like they had the advantage when
they were doing that. But I have to say that, you know, as a layperson--as a
civilian without any kind of night-vision goggles or anything like that, it
was terrifying to me, moving where you can't even see the hand in front of
your face. And often the insurgents were--when they figured out that we were
coming, they would fire flares over us and light up the whole sky and then
start firing. And that's pretty creepy.

GROSS: My guest is New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins. He's briefly in
the States but plans to return to Iraq after the holidays. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, and he is a
reporter for The New York Times. He's been covering the war in Iraq since the
beginning of the invasion in March of 2003, and he's been in and out several
times. He left there most recently in late November and plans to return at
the end of the holidays and stay till the end of the election.

One of the problems for the Marines that you were traveling with is that
there's a lot of deception. So if they saw a civilian or if they saw somebody
wearing an Iraqi national guard uniform, it didn't necessarily mean that they
weren't an insurgent. So can you talk a little bit about how that uncertainty
affected the performance and the judgment of the Marines?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, it made a lot of them very nervous, I should say, and,
actually, pretty frustrated and pretty angry at times. There was an Iraqi
unit that was more or less traveling with the Marines, and it was, I don't
know, probably 50 guys. And they had kind of very nice uniforms on, brand
new, pressed and starched. And the Marines typically would fight their way
through a city block, really, really hard fighting, taking casualties, people
getting wounded, people getting killed, to the doorstep of a mosque. And then
they would more or less swing the door open, and they'd call in this Iraqi
unit that would then come in their brand-new, clean uniforms. They would then
come in and, quote-unquote, "take" the mosque. That's pretty much what they
were used for. They really weren't used for much more than that.

And so it was kind of--I wouldn't say it was a joke, but it was--they weren't
doing a lot of fighting, the Iraqis. But as a result, the American Marines
couldn't--if they saw an Iraqi in a military uniform, say, or an Iraqi with a
gun, they couldn't just open fire, as they would be inclined to do in a
situation like that. They had to check out whether, you know, this person was
a friendly Iraqi soldier. And so that caused moments of great confusion. And
there was one particular moment, and it was nighttime. It was very dark. I
was with a platoon of Marines, about 50 guys. We were walking down a
street--turned a corner, and there was a group of Iraqi soldiers--well, what
appeared to be Iraqi soldiers. They were a group of Iraqi guys with Iraqi
military uniforms on. And they--the Americans and the official Iraqi military
had agreed on certain things to allay the nervousness of the Americans, like
every--you should red tape on your arm, and you should wear a piece of white
tape on your leg. They even had the red tape and the white tape.

So the Americans saw--the Marines that I was with saw these Iraqis and said,
`Hey, no problem,' and they waved to them. That was--that only took a moment,
but the Iraqis opened fire. They killed one of the Americans that I was with.
Another guy probably lost his leg. I still remember him screaming on the
ground. And the Iraqis took off. And that was the kind of confusion that was
being sown at the time. And I remember the next day talking to one of the
Marines about it, and he said, you know, `Just because we got to have these
silly Iraqis out here to enter these mosques, it's causing my men to hesitate,
and that hesitation is leading to their deaths.'

GROSS: So there's no one answer to this, but what do you do when you think
somebody might be about to shoot you, but you're not really sure, and you're
not sure if they're friends or foe? I mean, if you do the wrong thing, you've
killed an innocent person, and if you don't shoot a person who's about to
shoot you, you're dead.

Mr. FILKINS: Well, exactly. I mean, that was the essence of what the Marines
were going through just about every moment of every day out there. And there
were a couple of moments when that came into play pretty dramatically. There
was the moment I just described, where they hesitated and they died. And I
should just back up a second and say what was strange about this battle was
that it was an urban fight, and it's a very dense urban area, where the
buildings are very close together and the streets are very narrow. But there
really weren't a lot of people in the city; there really weren't a lot of
civilians. Most of them, I would say almost all of the civilians, 250,000,
had cleared out of the city before the fighting began. In that sense, when
the Marines would shoot into a building or they'd call in an air strike, the
chances were pretty good that they weren't going to kill a lot of civilians.

But that same uncertainty often led to pretty tragic moments. There was a
time, I think it was about the third day that we were there--there was a lot
of fighting going on. And for whatever reason, a family of Iraqis--I think it
was about five people, a man and a wife and their children--had been hiding in
a building where the fighting was going on. And they decided that that was
the moment that they should run into their car and jump in the car and try to
get away. And they did that, and, of course, they drove right into a line of
Marines. And the Marines didn't know who they were or what was going on, and
there was a lot of yelling. They opened fire. I think one of the women was
killed; a couple others were wounded. It was a very sad scene. And, of
course, the Marines didn't mean to do it, and it's really difficult to blame
them for what they did. But that was the kind of confusion that we saw. And
it was just inherent in the environment that we were in, where it
was--everything was so close together. And it was difficult to tell friend
from foe.

GROSS: Dexter Filkins is a New York Times reporter. He's briefly in the
States but plans to return to Iraq after the holidays. He'll be back in the
second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our conversation with New York Times reporter
Dexter Filkins about being embedded with a company of Marines in Fallujah.
We'll also talk about the dangers that are making it very difficult for
reporters to do their jobs in Iraq.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with New York Times reporter
Dexter Filkins. He's been reporting from Iraq since March of 2003 when the
invasion began. Last month he was embedded with a company of Marines in
Fallujah, traveling with them during the street-to-street and house-to-house
fighting. Filkins is briefly in the US and plans to return to Iraq after the
holidays.

Can you talk about how mosques were used during the fighting in Fallujah by
the insurgents and by the Marines and if a lot of the mosques were destroyed
in the fighting?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, you know, ideally, places of worship would not be used in
a battle like this. But I have to say I think that the Marines I was with,
Bravo Company--we were fired on from virtually every mosque that we passed.
And usually from the minarets, the big towers, the kind of spiraling towers,
were almost invariably used by Iraqi snipers. I remember the first--it was
very creepy--the first night that we came in. It was pitch black, and it was
about 8:00 at night. And nobody really knew what to expect. We were getting
fired on almost instantly, but we were really just at the edge of town. And I
could hear the echoes from all the mosques saying, `Al Akbar, God is great.
Prepare for jihad.' And you could hear this echoing throughout the entire
city, and, of course, I had this image of, `Oh, my God, you know, there's
going to be hundreds and hundreds of people coming to greet us.'

So the mosques were used in every way. I mean, the Marines I was with
searched mosques and, you know, found weapons stores and bomb factories and
everything else. And I was with some guys who were killed right next to
me--with a guy who was killed right next to me in the minaret of a mosque,
shot right in the head. And so I remember--I think it was the first day that
I was there--when it became apparent that these mosques were being used. The
captain that I was with had to get very--he had to put in a very explicit
request to take out the mosque. And that request had to go all the way up,
you know, the military chain of command, and it finally came back several
minutes later. And they said, `OK, we're going to take out the mosque.'

And by--I think it was 24 hours later, after the company I was with had taken
so much fire from so many different mosques that the gloves came off, as it
were, and they no longer needed the approval from, you know, way high up the
food chain. It was, `If you take fire from a mosque, take out the mosque.'
And so as a result of that, the Marines I was with were taking fire from every
mosque that we passed, and so many mosques were destroyed as a result of that.

GROSS: You mentioned the captain who you were traveling with, Captain
Omohundro, and you write about him time and time again through the week: `He
kept his men from folding, if not by his resolute manner, then by his calmness
under fire.' Can you talk about how that calmness was manifested during the
eight days of fighting? What kind of--you know, what his style of leadership
was.

Mr. FILKINS: I should just start by saying that one of the things that
struck me, as a civilian and somebody who doesn't know very much about the
military, is just how young everybody is. I mean, it was just--most of the
soldiers are 19 or 20 years old. You know, they're really just kids. You
know, some of them, their voices have barely changed. And Captain Read
Omohundro was 34, and he was extraordinary. I mean, he had 150 guys under his
command; he's responsible for all their lives.

I remember the first night we got out of the troop carriers, and we're taking
fire from every direction. It was pitch black. There was a unit that was
supposed to be--that we were supposed to link up with. Nobody knew where they
were. They apparently went off in some other direction. Basically, the whole
unit was terrified. I don't think anybody had ever seen anything like this.
Everybody was on the ground; I was on the ground. The explosions were going
off everywhere. They were firing rocket-propelled grenades at us. And I
looked up, and there was Captain Omohundro standing there, really, as if he
were, you know, ready to tee of, you know, on a golf ball. I mean, he was
completely calm. He was talking into his radio. And as terrified--I was
completely terrified, and I kind of looked up and I thought, `Well, you
know'--and it was very reassuring that, `Here's a guy--he actually knows
what's going on here, and, you know, he has some idea of where we're supposed
to be and where we're going 'cause, my God, nobody else does.'

And that happened over and over again, where--scenes of extraordinary chaos,
where the shooting is so loud you can't even hear and you don't know where the
bullets are coming from, and you're under attack from three different
directions. And everybody--I mean, again, these are 19-year-old kids, and
they're incredibly impressive and they're very well-disciplined. But it's
terrifying. And the guys who were typically in charge, the platoon commanders
who were usually--I think they were all about 23 or 24, and Captain Omohundro
was 34--never flinched. And the result of that was the unit never flinched.
And it was really an extraordinary thing to witness.

GROSS: You write about one of the sergeants, Sergeant Wells, who was killed
in Fallujah. And it sounds from your writing that the men really admired him
a lot. How was he killed?

Mr. FILKINS: He was killed on the first morning of the battle. It was about
7 AM. The fighting had been going on at that point for 11 hours--we had been
under fire. The sun was up. The first objective of the unit was to take a
mosque that was--my gosh, it was only about 200 yards into the city, but
that's how long it had taken us just to move that far. We came under fire,
extraordinary fire, from two directions. As soon as we got close to the
mosque, the insurgents opened up, and then the Marines opened up. And it was
this incredible gun battle that just went on and on and on--couldn't hear,
couldn't see.

Right in the middle of this one of the lieutenants or Captain Omohundro gave
the order to take the mosque. And one of the platoons, of which Sergeant
Wells was a member--I think it was the 2nd Platoon--ran across the
street--into the street and up the street towards the mosque. They ran right
into interlocking machine gun fire. And I think 40 guys ran across that road.
And by the time that platoon got to the other side of the road, there were
five Marines lying in the road; one of them was Sergeant Wells. He bled to
death in the middle of the road.

The amazing thing--and this happened time again almost every day--was Marines
would go down wounded, shot or dead in just, really, a storm of gunfire, and
the Marines would turn and run into the fire to get their buddies out, and
it just didn't matter what was being thrown at them. And that's what happened
in this case. There were five Marines lying in the road, all of them shot,
bleeding. Sergeant Wells was still alive. He'd been hit in the leg; he was
bleeding profusely. And one guy after another ran into the road to pull him
out. They didn't get Sergeant Wells out in time, and he bled to death shortly
afterwards. The other four, they got out.

He was, he was a senior--Sergeant Wells was a kind of senior guy in the
platoon, which, I think, meant that he was about 27 or something. But he had
kind of taken a bunch of the younger guys under his wing, and he'd written
letters to their parents saying, `Look, we're going to go into battle, and I'm
going to look after these guys. And they're all good kids, and you don't have
anything to worry about.' So everybody was really close to him and were
pretty shaken when he died.

GROSS: Did you have conversations with the Marines that you traveled with
about death and their fears of death, you know, if they allow themselves to
think about that?

Mr. FILKINS: That's a very good question. The--in the barracks before the
big fight started, it was--I was with one platoon; it was about 50 guys. We
were all, you know, sleeping on these cots, and, again, they're all 19 and 20
years old. And it felt like a high school football team before the big game,
and everybody were definitely nervous, but they didn't sit around and talk
about death and, `What if I die?' and, `Oh, my God, I'm so terrified.' It was
more kind of a lot of joking and kind of towel-popping than anything. And the
strange thing was they were definitely nervous; I mean, you could tell. But
we went into battle, and a lot of Marines were wounded and killed, and they
continued--I should say, I think, in the first week that that unit, Bravo
Company, took 36 casualties out of 150 guys. And I left, and after I left,
they continued to take casualties, and, you know, they're still there.

But the really unusual thing was that they didn't talk about it very much,
almost at all, when one of their comrades went down, unless under, you know,
great prodding from somebody like me when the fighting was over. And I tried
to talk to them about that. I mean, I noticed immediately when one of their
buddies and, you know, obviously a good friend was killed or wounded and taken
away, why wasn't anybody standing around sobbing about it? And, you know, the
answer--and I guess it's an obvious answer--was that, you know, `That's a
luxury that we can't afford right now.' And typically the answer was, `I'll
deal with it when I get home. And there's a time for mourning, but that time
is not right now because we all sit around here and start sobbing about our
dead friends, then we're not going to get anything done.'

It's a very good answer, and, you know, it's probably the only answer. But
it's an odd thing to witness, and you can tell--I mean, you can just imagine
the strain that they're all under and what they're holding back and what,
inevitably, is going to come out when they get home.

GROSS: My guest is New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins. He's briefly in
the States and plans to return to Iraq after the holidays. Last month he was
embedded with a company of Marines in Fallujah. We'll talk more after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins, and he writes
for The New York Times. He's been covering Iraq, going in and out since the
beginning of the invasion in March of 2003. We're talking now about the
battle of Fallujah, which he covered for The Times. And he was embedded with
the Marines.

One of the controversies in the United States now is: Should Donald Rumsfeld,
you know, resign or be forced out, or should he continue as secretary of
Defense? And I'm wondering if any of the Marines that you traveled with in
Fallujah or any of the soldiers that you met before that had any questions
about how the war was being run or whether the war--you know, how the
strategies, the armor or lack of armor--you know, all the questions that we're
hearing about in the States, were the troops raising any of those questions?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, there's--I should make a distinction because you do hear,
usually privately and on occasion--I shouldn't say it's either prevalent or
very often. But among the senior officers in the American military, guys who
are paid and responsible for thinking about big questions and about how the
war is progressing or not progressing, they do ask those questions. And they
are--they have expressed frustration. I mean, I've certainly heard some of
that. You know, `Should we ever have come here to begin with?' And it's
usually a little bit more poignant than that. I remember talking to a
lieutenant colonel, who said, `I'm tired of having to write these letters home
to their mothers saying that, you know, "Your son's been killed, and he was a
good guy." I'm tired of that.' You do hear that from the senior guys.

At the sort of grunt level, you don't hear as much of it. I think it's more
of a--much more kind of visceral frustration. The conditions there are so
difficult. I mean, I can't--it's hard for me to describe them, but I remember
a--I was with the same Marines in the summertime. I went out there to
Fallujah and spent some time with them, and it's 125 degrees during the day.
And, you know, they go out on a patrol, and every time the Marines leave the
gates of their base, their lives are in danger, and, you know, usually on any
given day one of them doesn't come back alive. And so that, inevitably, has a
great effect on morale.

I mean, I should say that I think, by and large, the morale of the Marines in
Fallujah and the morale of the military at that level, among the sort of
grunts, is pretty high. I mean, they feel pretty good about what they're
doing, and they think they're doing the right thing. But occasionally you do
see some of that frustration.

GROSS: I think the pieces that you wrote about the battle of Fallujah are
really quite extraordinary.

Mr. FILKINS: Thank you.

GROSS: And I was wondering if you read them to the Marines, you know, before
or after they were published.

Mr. FILKINS: That's a good question. No, I haven't. In fact, I just got
done sort of gathering them all and sending them by e-mail. But the
conditions were usually too insane to do anything like that. I mean, most of
these things I was, you know, either--I would turn on my laptop and go inside
of my sleeping bag at night, so the light didn't come out, and kind of try to
put something together, or I would get on the phone--a satellite phone on the
top of a building, you know, usually at, you know, midnight or something and
try to dictate some things.

But one of the things that did happen, which was kind of neat, was I started
getting e-mails--you know, two days into the battle, I started getting
e-mails, which I would download over my satellite telephone onto my laptop
from the parents of and from the family members of guys in the unit. So I
remember I got one from the mother of a corporal saying, you know, `My gosh,
my son's in that unit. Could you please say hi to him for me and I love him
so much? Oh, my gosh, if anything ever happened to him, you know, I wouldn't
be able to bear it.' And so I've--and since then I've gotten a lot of--it
does look like, to me, that most of the families of, if not the, soldiers have
seen what I've written. And so I've actually been contacted by a lot of those
families and particularly by families whose sons were killed or wounded. Very
sad letters, you know, often asking--saying, you know, `I know you were there,
and could you just tell me anything about my son and what his last moments
were like. And did he suffer?'--and that sort of thing. So that part of it
is particularly crushing.

GROSS: I want to quote something you wrote in October of this year, and this
was a piece that was about what it's like to be a reporter in Iraq. And this
was, of course, before the battle of Fallujah. And you wrote, `At The New
York Times, we have spared no expense to protect ourselves. The catalog of
near misses is long enough to chill the heartiest war correspondent. We have
been shot at, kidnapped, blindfolded, held at knifepoint, held at gunpoint,
detained, threatened, beaten and chased.' What's the worse that's happened to
you?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, I mean, I had--I should say that in the battle of
Fallujah, we had a number of close calls. I mean, I've gone through my nine
lives already, I think, as we all have over there. I think the closest one
that we had was in Fallujah. I was with a photographer, Ashley Gilbertson,
and we were in--this was about, I think, the eighth day of the fighting. And
there was a mosque where apparently--the Marines had taken a lot of fire from
this mosque and, in particular, from a minaret that was probably 75 feet high.
And the Marines had fired a tank shell at it and then killed a guy up at the
top. So we were going into the minaret to check out this dead insurgent,
Ashley and I, the photographer. And as we were entering the minaret, a couple
of Marines said, `Nope, we're going to check it out. You know, that's why
we're here,' and went up to the top of the minaret in front of us.

The Marine who was in the front, Corporal Billy Miller, was shot in the face
as he got to the top. He was killed, I think, instantly, and came tumbling
back down the stairs, basically, right on top of us. But--and that was a
horrific scene because he was on the stairs about three-quarters of the way
up. There was an insurgent with a gun up at the top, who was obviously
willing to die. And the Marines, in the extraordinary way that they do these
things, were determined to get Corporal Miller out of there and so then
proceeded to go into the minaret and go up its winding staircase to get him
out, even as this guy was shooting down at them. And then as that was
happening, the unit came under attack from all around the mosque. And so they
finally got Corporal Miller out of there, and then we all had to take off
running to get away from these guys who were attacking. So it was--that's as
close, probably, as I came in Fallujah, but that was a particularly tough
moment.

GROSS: My guest is New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins. He's been
reporting from Iraq since the start of the invasion in March of 2003. Last
month he was embedded with a company of Marines in Fallujah. We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Dexter Filkins. He's a
reporter for The New York Times. He's been in and out of Iraq several times
since the beginning of the invasion in March of '03.

You were embedded with the Marines in Fallujah, and you're traveling with
them. You get to know them. All your lives are on the line, and so, of
course, in some ways it would go without saying that you're identifying with
the Marines in a way that you wouldn't necessarily identify with another story
that you were writing. How do you think that affects the coverage, and is
that a problem if you identify with them too much, or does it just make for
really good, empathic journalism?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, it might be a problem. I'm not sure that it was in this
case. I mean, I should say that it's--I've seen a lot of carnage in Iraq, and
I've seen a lot of dead people. And I've seen people die, and I've seen a lot
of bodies and body parts and all of that. But usually I don't know who these
people are, you know, and--whether they're American or whether they're Iraqi.
And to hang out with a bunch of guys, you know, for a couple of weeks and to
get to know them really well and to go through that sort of thing together and
then to see them be killed is altogether a different experience. And, you
know, I found myself being quite broken up by--when some of these guys were
killed because I had gotten to know them pretty well, and, you know, they're
real people and they had families back home and people who care about them.

As far as whether it affects the coverage that we're doing, I--you know,
that's for my readers to judge, I think. But I was certainly--I tried and I
was conscious of that and I did everything I could to avoid whatever it was
that I would--you know, whether it would be cheerleading or getting a little
bit too swept up in the moment. I think the larger problem is just in
the--when you're embedded and when you're walking and traveling with an
American military unit is just making sure that you get the other side of the
story, the Iraqi side of the story. And that's very difficult and one that I
would concede is a problem.

GROSS: You're going back to Iraq after the holidays, and you expect to stay
until the election. When you think about the election happening in
about--What?--six weeks...

Mr. FILKINS: End of January, yeah.

GROSS: Yeah--do you think the country will be ready for an election that
Iraqis and the rest of the world will be able to think of as fair and
representative?

Mr. FILKINS: Well, that's the 64-thousand-dollar question. I mean, the
election, it seems, by all accounts is going to happen on January 30th, and it
also seems inevitable that there's going to be an extraordinary amount of
violence leading up to that. And that violence is being generated by people
who want to wreck the election. And so the result is--and you could see what
happened just yesterday in Iraq. You had simultaneous car bombs near a couple
of holy sites in southern Iraq that killed more than 60 people. You had three
Iraqi election workers dragged out of their cars and shot and killed, shot in
the head, right in the middle of rush-hour traffic in the morning. And so I
think a lot of Iraqis are going to vote, and I think a lot of Iraqis
understand exactly what democracy is and they want it to happen.

I mean--and I think the--amid all of the chaos and shooting and horrific
violence that we see, the one glimmer of hope, I think--and it's just a
glimmer but--is that you've got the Shiite population in Iraq, it's probably
about 60 percent of the country; you've got the Kurds--they're about maybe 20
percent. That's 80 percent of the population that really wants to have an
election and really wants to vote and probably will vote. And so what--the
picture that you have, really, is kind of that vs. the Arab-Sunni minority,
maybe 20, 25 percent of the population, that probably will sit it out in great
numbers. That's the community that's generating the most violence. So I
think the question is going to be--after the election is: What do you do with
this very unhappy, disenfranchised, deeply, deeply disaffected minority?

GROSS: Many American soldiers are getting sent back for another tour of duty.
You're going back to Iraq voluntarily to continue your coverage for The New
York Times. You've had a lot of close calls. It's been pretty harrowing.
What gets you to go back?

Mr. FILKINS: (Laughs) That's a good question. Well, I don't know, frankly.
I mean, the soldiers who are going back, I don't know how they do it. You
know, as tough as it is to work there as a journalist, it's nowhere near as
difficult as it is to be a soldier. I mean, you know, I can leave--you know,
every couple of months I get to leave and come back. And I--we have a pretty
nice house there, and it's not so bad. And these guys are eating, you know,
terrible food, and they're getting shot at and killed virtually every day. So
it's kind of a different thing. I mean, as a journalist, it's just--you know,
this is an epic, extraordinary enterprise, that probably won't be surpassed,
you know, in our lifetimes. And it's just something that is quite--it's quite
incredible to witness and to cover and to be present as history's made and as
this grand enterprise unfolds. And so I guess, in a way, it's addictive.

GROSS: Well, I really appreciate your talking with us, and I wish you good
luck and safety. And I think your writing is great. Thank you very, very
much for talking with us.

Mr. FILKINS: Thank you. Thank you very much.

GROSS: Dexter Filkins is a The New York Times reporter. He's briefly in the
States and plans to return to Iraq after the holidays. Our interview was
recorded yesterday.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.