My experience with the Press Corps is limited, I don’t get a chance to cozy up to the posh hotels they tend to favor. But what I do know is soldiers, and what it feels like to be on the streets of Iraq. So you can imagine the disgust I felt when the Italian news reports slamming American soldiers started filtering into our little corner of Baghdad. I don’t know the soldiers involved, but before the media gets into fits of hand wringing let me give a little insight from my point of view.
First off, I’m not going to get into Giuliana Sgrena’s political views or whether Italy did the right thing by paying 6 million dollars to insurgents that will surely use the money to kill soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Those matters concern Ms Sgrena and the Italian government respectively, and frankly I am unqualified to comment on either.
What I will say is the streets of Baghdad are mercurial. There are mornings where the steady throb of traffic pulses through the streets like a metal river and others where the hum of people and commerce is torn apart by the earsplitting roar of a VBIED. These wheeled bombs exist for the sole purpose of rending equipment and shredding flesh with impunity. In their wake they leave physical scars on the survivors and mental scars on the community.
Rather then let the insurgents continue to inflict casualties whenever and wherever they want there are checkpoints scattered across Baghdad’s highways to intercept VBIEDs. In most cases these checkpoints are actually two distinct checkpoints, the first manned by the Iraqi Army and the second manned by US soldiers. The Iraqis have shown their mettle in the last few weeks and they have absorbed the bulk of the casualties when VBIEDs attempt to hit a checkpoint. But they aren’t perfect, and so the US troops manning the second checkpoint are always at the ready.
The most important thing to understand about US checkpoints is that soldiers manning them have specific ramp up procedures when they feel threatened. Soldiers don’t just blithely take aim at traffic and fill the air with lead. The procedure drilled into every soldier’s head is to meet the threat with an increasingly forceful response. As the threat escalates so too does the response.
Which brings us back to the threat of VBIEDs. The only warning of a VBIED is a vehicle attempting to rapidly close with the checkpoint – which is exactly what Giuliana Sgrena’s vehicle did. Put yourself in the boots of the soldier manning that checkpoint. You see a vehicle approaching that seems to be gaining speed as it nears. You signal the driver to stop but the car plummets on. You fire a warning shot, and then another into the engine block but the car doesn’t slow. What would you do? Don’t just give a cursory response – think about it for a moment. If you are at work imagine having your life, and the fate of all your coworkers tied to your decision. Would you gamble all those lives by giving the vehicle the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you would, but I’d be willing to bet after seeing the bloody wake of a VBIED you would have pulled the trigger too.
Posted by: Mark Partridge Miner | December 08, 2005 at 15:20
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Posted by: Jamie C | March 08, 2005 at 12:34