October 2003

"You get all psyched up to do a hard mission
and it turns out to be three little girls. The little
kids get to me, especially when they cry."

- Sergeant Scott Blow


PART 1
'This is the wild, wild west'
"With the intel we've been getting, it's probably a house full of nuns," complains an acerbic First Sergeant Clinton Reiss. After a few minutes of banter the ride out into the rising sun is silent. Bandit Troop is hunting an invisible enemy who shoots at the Americans daily. Back home at Fort Carson, Reiss's wife waits for him with their 13-year-old daughter who is angered by teachers who say the war is over.

PART 2
Why we are here
Two-week-old copies of Stars and Stripes newspaper get passed around like porno. The US military authorized paper provides much of the soldiers' news, and they are not well informed about debate back home over the Bush administration's justifications for the war. Anyway, they don't have time to dwell on such things, but rather "believe, and hope, that our leaders sent us here for the right reasons".

PART 3
The locals
"They hate us," the soldiers often say about the Iraqis they believe they liberated. And the soldiers get shot at whenever they enter the bleak townscapes of western Iraq. Yet not all the patrons of a cafe in the city of Subeida are bitter. They now have more freedom. But the word that is most often heard in discussions about the US occupation is "disrespect".

PART 4
Operation Decapitation
Captain Brown is excited. His Apache Troop is going after the guys who shoot at his soldiers on a daily basis. The hardest part of this mission, he says, will be "going in there and pulling some father away from his kids". Nevertheless, he'll do whatever it takes to get his men home to see their own kids. "Hi honey, I'm home," cheers Sergeant Bentley as a tank smashes through the wall around the first house. 

PART 5
The wrong Ayoub
The soldiers of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment are fighting a losing battle. Intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture, send them out on the basis of spurious information, and the troops in the field, despite their best intentions, end up creating enemies instead of eliminating them. Nir Rosen accompanies a frustrated Apache Troop, with their tanks, Bradleys and Humvees, on a mission to capture the not-so-deadly Ayoub.