BROWN: Still ahead tonight a quiet conversation about a place that's anything but. Reporter Michael Ware joins us after a tour of duty in Falluja.
And later, a different tone entirely, a football game in which silence says volumes about character and teamwork, a break first.
Around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Keep those names in mind for the next ten minutes or so. For a reporter, war is the ultimate story, truth be told. There are triumphs and disasters, heroes and cowards. There are important objectives and policy disasters all before lunch, if there is lunch, which there often isn't.
Michael Ware has been writing war stories for "Time" magazine. He was embedded with a small Army unit in the fight in Falluja and he's back home now for a bit or at least back here in New York, home for Michael being a long ways away. We talked with him earlier tonight.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: In a sentence or two describe the unit you were with.
MICHAEL WARE, "TIME" CORRESPONDENT: During the battle of Falluja, I was with an Army unit, a smaller element within the broader attack but very important. It boiled down to the 3rd Platoon of Alpha Company and what's known as the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment. These are essentially mechanized infantry, young guys who jump out of the back of the Bradley armored vehicles.
BROWN: Nineteen to 25, 26?
WARE: Yes. I mean the leaders of these men, if you call them that are more like (UNINTELLIGIBLE) boys. The eldest among them was 26, perhaps one was 29. The bulk of them were in their late teens or just out of their teens. These really are the youth of America.
BROWN: The day before they went in were you with them?
WARE: Yes, I was.
BROWN: What was it like?
WARE: Pensive, I mean, these men had it drilled into them over and over what it was that they were to expect about going into the dark heart of the Iraqi insurgency. This was the nest or this was the base, not only of the homegrown Iraqi nationalists but this was the central node of the foreign jihadis, the real hardcore.
BROWN: Were they scared?
WARE: Yes. I mean, there's always that fear, I mean that anticipation of battle. I mean, you become so cognizant of your own mortality and these boys aren't immune from that but they do not shy away from it. They swallow it down and press on.
BROWN: Well, there's a difference between being afraid and being -- and cowardice. Those are very different things. You're nuts not to be afraid.
WARE: Absolutely.
BROWN: Guys are going in there, they're shooting at you and they're throwing RPGs at you and there's bombs everywhere. WARE: Absolutely and I have seen in combat in Iraq where you'll be with five or six men and you're engaged with the enemy and there's a fierce firefight and suddenly you'll look down for a moment and there's one man curled up into a ball who simply can't pick up his weapon.
The funny thing is the next day you may be in another firefight and here's the fiercest amongst them. That's something about combat. There's nowhere to hide from yourself. There's no room for pretense whatsoever. And, in Falluja, this really was such a place.
BROWN: They go in. They make their way in. They have all of the power of the U.S. military behind them, air power, big tanks, artillery, the whole deal, and they are facing guys hiding in windows.
WARE: Absolutely. There's guys hiding in what you call rat holes and it's an apt description. There are men who are lying in wait and these were men who stayed behind when all the other insurgents left, when their leadership left, when their comrades departed to move on and fight for another day.
BROWN: They stayed to die?
WARE: They stayed to die. They stayed to kill American boys and to die themselves. Now, there's no greater enemy than that. It's one of the most powerful weapons in combat that is a man prepared to die.
BROWN: People talked about that you'd go around a corner and you didn't know what you'd find. Was it like that?
WARE: Absolutely. I mean, the enemy, death, great harm lurked in every nook, in every cranny. There was one particular moment in the battle of Falluja with 3rd Platoon where insurgents were hiding in a series of houses. We didn't know which one. After searching nine, we entered the 10th. And it was at quarter to 2:00 in the morning. The insurgents weren't in the front room. They were hiding in the kitchen. They allowed these boys to enter the house. And they waited for one of them and then another to step around into the hallway, and then they opened fire.
We're talking six to eight feet away in pitch black. Danger can't lurk any more sinister than that.
BROWN: We'll pick it up there.
We'll take a break. We'll continue with Michael in just a moment.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Continuing for a few more minutes with Michael Ware of "TIME" magazine on the battle of Falluja.
Was it as they thought it would be?
WARE: No. In the end, I wouldn't call it an anticlimax, but it wasn't the Armageddon-style showdown that many were expecting.
BROWN: They came there expecting to -- in some sense, to end it all?
WARE: I'm sure the planners weren't deluding themselves to the degree that this would be the final crunch in the insurgent war in Iraq, but there certainly was a sense that this would be the great showdown.
And it wasn't. And there was some surprise at that. And that struck me. Because I don't understand why they were surprised. I mean, we have seen this, not only from the Iraqi insurgents, but from the al Qaeda-inspired insurgents and the jihadis. We saw it in the battle of Shah-i-Kot in Afghanistan, in the battle against Ansar al- Islam in Halabja in northern Iraq during the invasion. We even saw it in Samarra four or five weeks before Falluja.
This is a guerrilla war. They're never going to confront you head on. They're always just going to wither away and come back to fight you another day, from the flank, from the behind, from above, from below. That's the nature of this war.
BROWN: Let me come back to that point, one or two more things about Falluja. You shot some -- as people are seeing -- some incredible pictures. And when you look at it, it seems totally chaotic. When you're in it, is there a sense of order, or is it as chaotic as it appears to be?
WARE: I mean, combat is a very confusing place. There is a chaos to it.
You don't know where the enemy is sometimes. You don't know how you can react, how you can rally yourselves. You don't know what support you've got. You don't know if you're out there on your own. Sometimes you don't even know where your friends are, particularly if it's dark or it's a close urban environment. It is hard to know where the next man is.
I mean, it's almost impossible to describe. And what it takes, what it invariably demands is for one man in the group to stand up.
BROWN: Who was the guy in your group?
WARE: In 3rd Platoon, there was too men, both staff sergeants. One was Staff Sergeant David Bellavia. And the other one was Staff Sergeant Colin Fitts.
BROWN: So late 20s?
WARE: Yes, 26, 27, 28, I mean, young men themselves, yet with a maturity so far exceeding their years.
And, invariably, it was them that the younger men turned to. And these men, I spoke to them after some of these engagements. Internally, they're as terrified as the boys, yet they can never show this. And I know on one occasion when Bellavia stood up. I knew from afterwards what was going through his mind, that he didn't want to do what he was about to do, to enter this house where he knew insurgents were laying in wait for him. Yet, from what he was saying, you got no hint of that.
BROWN: Just one final big-picture question. You've been in and out of there for two years. You'll be back in there probably sooner than you want. Do you have a sense that, on the military side, progress is being made?
WARE: To put it simply, no. No, I don't. I mean, I don't have any sense of victory or a sense that the coalition, that the West is winning right now.
I mean, it seems to me we're losing ground, figuratively and literally. Just from my own example, six -- nine months ago, I could travel the breadth of Iraq. Sure, it was dangerous, it was risky, but it was calculated. Then that ceased. And I was restricted to Baghdad itself. And the only way I could leave Baghdad was if the insurgents took me and guaranteed my safety.
Now I can't leave my compound. Kidnap teams circle my house. And even in my compound, they mortar, drop bombs on our house. And in parts of Baghdad itself, the U.S. military has lost control. The terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi control entire quarters of suburbs. One of them, Haifa Street, the most famous, is within mortar range of the U.S. Embassy itself. And every day, we're creating more recruits for the insurgents, and every day more young men from outside Iraq, from the Muslim world agree, the disenfranchised, they're rising up and coming to join the fight, to blood themselves.
Right now, we are the midwives of the next generation of jihad, of the next al Qaeda. So the very thing that the administration says it went there to prevent, it is creating. And despite the honor and the bravery and the uncommon valor that I see among the American boys there in uniform who are fighting this grinding war day to day, when I see them dying in front of me, I can't help but think that perhaps they're dying in vain, because we're making the nightmare that we're trying to prevent.
BROWN: It's good to see you. Have a good holiday.
WARE: Thank you very much. It's my pleasure.
BROWN: One of the truly wonderful things about you, I think, is that you understand that you get a holiday and they don't.
WARE: That's very true.
BROWN: They don't.
WARE: There's no let-up. There's no let-up. And it's very hard when you're leaving these guys and you have to say goodbye, because, yes, they don't get this. BROWN: Good to see you.
WARE: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
BROWN: Thank you.
Michael Ware, who is covering the war for "TIME" magazine. Obviously, other people see the situation there differently than Michael. We talk to them as well. But that's Michael's view. And, as we said, he's been in and out of there for two years.
We'll take a break. We'll continue in a moment.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/26/asb.01.html
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