Cover Story — May / June 2007
Rules of Engagement
A year with the 101st Airborne in Iraq.
By John LaurenceA
hail-and-farewell party is in full flow at a Spartan civilian restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee. Clarksville is about fifty miles northwest of Nashville and is the proud home of the 101st Airborne Division and its 20,000 soldiers and their families. It is Friday night and, this being a military affair, everyone has arrived by the scheduled start, eighteen-thirty hours. There is no music. The floors and tables are bare.
The sound is the polite roar of voices of about fifty men and women: officers, senior noncommissioned officers, and their wives who are welcoming the new arrivals to the battalion and saying goodbye to those who are leaving before the unit deploys to Iraq in ten days. The drink of choice is American beer and it is being rapidly consumed straight from the bottles.
My camera crew and I are seated at a table next to one of the battalion officers, his wife, and his father–a retired general who has come to say goodbye to his son, a smart, likable young major who graduated as first captain from West Point. After about an hour of nonstop eating and beer drinking, the mood becomes more loquacious. The general shouts some advice over the noise to his son: “It is not a good career move to get a reporter killed while they’re with you,” he says, and then smiles. Everyone laughs and looks at me. I laugh, too. Then the general says as an afterthought, “Unless they’ve been chosen.”
The others laugh lightly. I say nothing. Another hour passes before I get a chance to sit alone with the general. The words have not left my mind. Since covering the Vietnam War, I have suspected that U.S. military personnel have occasionally gotten rid of unwelcome reporters by getting them killed or wounded in combat. It nearly happened to me more than once in Vietnam and Cambodia. Hostile officers sent me on the most dangerous missions, with reconnaissance units, for example, knowing there would probably be casualties. Once, a clearly disturbed major, a public information officer, carried his cocked and loaded .45 pistol everywhere as he escorted me on a combat operation, his eyes wild with excitement. Conscious of the danger, I stuck close to my camera crew and never let the mad major get behind me. Now I ask the general what he meant by that phrase, “Unless they’ve been chosen.” He seems embarrassed to be reminded. “Nothing I saw with my own eyes,” he says quickly. “ It’s just something I heard.” For the rest of the evening, the general does not appear entirely comfortable around me.
My British camera crew and I, soon to be known disparagingly as “the Gang of Four” by the division public affairs officer, have been invited to cover one company, about a hundred soldiers, for the full year of their tour of duty in Iraq. Until now, the U.S. Army has not allowed a film crew to do such comprehensive coverage of a unit. We are being given freedom to cover most aspects of the soldiers’ lives–professional and personal–or, as one officer says, “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” We are making a documentary feature film and this is our first day of being embedded–September 9, 2005. We are funding the documentary out of our own savings so that we can have editorial control. For now, we are getting acquainted with the soldiers. The mood is cheerful, helpful, mostly trusting.
As the camera crew rolls, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel James O’Brien, introduces each of the officers and ncos who is new or departing. (Then the soldier being given his hail or farewell has to make a speech or sing a song. One sings, Jesus Loves Me. “It’s the only song I know the words to,” he explains.) O’Brien introduces us and says, “Welcome to the team.”
The drinking escalates to straight shots of tequila. At this stage, the crew and I make our own farewell. I do not want us to be associated with the possible embarrassments about to take place. A few days later, when I next see the young major, he smiles and says, “Did you ever have such a hangover in your life?”
“Yes,”I say.
From the first day, David Green, Andy Thompson, John Callam-Anderson, and I have been welcomed to the 101st Airborne Division as if we were members of a privileged fraternity. I imagine it is something like being part of a winning college football team. With the exception of the regimental commander, who is suspicious of anyone he does not know, the soldiers seem to accept us. Some of them say they hate the press for inaccurate reporting from Iraq. Many have read a long magazine article I wrote describing this same battalion during its harrowing ambush on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, its subsequent fight for the airport, and its successful occupation of parts of the city. Moreover, they have learned that Green and Thompson, in an act of exceptional journalistic courage, were the first foreigners to reach Kuwait City during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. That they drove into the city in civilian cars six hours before U.S. Special Forces and were broadcasting live pictures of the Kuwaiti liberation celebrations long before anyone else, is considered especially praiseworthy. This regiment, the 187th, is led by Colonel Mike Steele, a warrior giant who was the Ranger company commander at Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, at the battle known as “Blackhawk Down.”
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