NOVANEWS
By Rick Rogers – Front&Center: Military Talk Radio, Host
So there we were in Iraq: a reporter and a photographer embedded with Camp Pendleton Marines in 2004.
We stayed at Camp Baharia, a former Baathist resort nicknamed “Dreamland” and oddly kitted out with a child-size carnival ride and, less oddly, by a lakeside dance floor.
Two months earlier the murder of defense contractors had sparked what would come to be known as the First Battle of Fallujah in April.
The epic, final fight for the city would erupt the following November. We were there during the lull, though it didn’t always feel like it.
On our first day in country just as a lieutenant briefed us on a humanitarian mission scheduled that morning, heavy fighting flared.
The plans changed and we sped to reinforce Marines outside Fallujah getting pounded by torrents of small arms and mortar fire.
The phrase “shot out” announces in-coming enemy fire. Waiting for a mortar to hit are some very long seconds indeed. You might call them bonding moments.
The fighting ebbed and flowed for 8 hours before airstrikes ended it.
In the coming weeks, we got pretty close with the sailors we lived with and the Marines we covered; maybe too close.
An unwritten understanding exists between journalists and sources that some things just aren’t reported – at least at the time they occur. I don’t know if this is for better or worse, I just know that it is.
It was an easy decision not to write about blue movies and booze: It would’ve caused anguish and accomplished nothing except embarrass our hosts.
But sometimes the decision whether to write isn’t so easy.
This is one of those times.
For months now I’ve followed cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans engaged in what looks like escalating carnage here on the home front.
The latest incident just occurred in Orange County, where Iraq veteran Itzcoatl Ocampo, 23, was captured after allegedly stabbing a homeless man to death.
Ocampo is also the prime suspect in the stabbing deaths of three other homeless Orange County men.
Unfortunately Ocampo’s case does not stand alone.
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At a New Year’s Eve party in the Seattle area, police say Iraq veteran Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, was involved in shooting four people. He later is suspected of shooting to death a Mount Rainier National Park ranger. He apparently died of exposure fleeing a police manhunt.
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Last week in Kansas City, police shot to death Robert G. Long, 26, an Iraq war veteran and medic who had threatened officers with a rifle after heavy drinking.
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In the first week of New Year Army National Guard Sgt. William Miller, 45, died in shootout with police in North Carolina, where he lived and had recently returned from his second deployment from Iraq. He had been home three days.
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Two weeks before Christmas, Delaware police arrested Army Staff Sgt. Dwight Smith, 24, and charged the Iraq and Afghanistan vet with first-degree murder and kidnapping.
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Just before Christmas, Wisconsin National Guardsman Pvt. Alan Sylte Jr., 25, is suspected of shooting a police officer, who later died of his wounds. Sylte committed suicide.
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In late November, police arrested Iraq veteran Joseph Scott Shriver, 23, after he allegedly shot an Alabama deputy in the face and wounded another officer.
