Kevin Sites - The Things They Cannot Say

Finally, my thanks to my wife, Anita—whose unqualified support and example of courage and perseverance in the face of adversity inspire me and who is now helping me exercise muscle memory in the habit of trying to do the right thing daily.

I’d like to leave readers with this last passage, which I first read in Chris Hedges’s book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning after coming home from the War in Iraq. It’s a simple but important message, one I hope never to forget:

“We are tempted to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous, and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion.”

KEVIN SITES has spent the past decade reporting on global war and disaster for ABC, NBC, CNN, and Yahoo! News. In 2005, he became Yahoo!’s first correspondent and covered every major conflict in the world in a single year for his website, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. He is a recipientof the 2006 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism and was chosen as a Harvard University Nieman Journalism Fellow in 2010.

www.kevinsitesreports.com

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In the Hot Zone

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Cover photograph by Lucian Read

THE THINGS THEY CANNOT SAY. Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Sites. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2013

ISBN: 9780062099228

ISBN 978-0-06-199052-6

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5.56 x 45 mm NATO is a type of rifle ammunition developed in the United States originally for the M16 rifle but that also fits the M4, both issued to American soldiers and Marines during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, for insurgents in Iraq and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan the primary combat rifle is the AK-47 rifle, which utilizes larger 7.62 x 39 mm rounds.

Glenn Gray wrote in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle , “The basic aim of a nation at war in establishing an image of the enemy is to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from murder by making the former into one deserving of all honor and praise.” Gray enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in 1941, the same day he received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University.

During my research, I discovered that on at least two other occasions Iraqi prisoners were executed during Operation Phantom Fury.

I later independently released the entire raw video of the mosque shooting on NPR’s website.

“Phantom Noise” from Phantom Noise . Copyright © by Brian Turner. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org.

Operation Vigilant Resolve, or the First Battle of Fallujah, began in early April 2004 in retaliation after four Blackwater American security contractors were killed and their bodies burned on a bridge in Fallujah that March. It ended less than a month later with a cease-fire that handed over security responsibilities in Fallujah to a force of Iraqi Sunnis known as the Fallujah Brigade. The brigade was supposedly allied with the American military and the Iraqi government but soon switched sides, joining the insurgents, turning over weapons to them or both. Operation Phantom Fury, or the Second Battle of Fallujah, was about correcting that mistake. With more than thirteen thousand American, British and Iraqi government troops, Fallujah was brought under military control in forty-five days. It was the bloodiest battle of the War in Iraq, with as many as fifteen hundred insurgents killed and more than a hundred coalition troops. Eight hundred civilians were also estimated to have died.

His name, I discovered from Naval Criminal Investigation Service reports, was Farhan Abd Mekelf, and according to the identification found on his body, he was an Iraqi policeman. He was the insurgent executed at point-blank range by a Marine lance corporal in front of my video camera the day after Wold’s fireteam first entered the mosque and confronted the room full of armed insurgents. I was asked a few days later after his shooting by an NCIS investigator to identify him inside his body bag at a storage building at a U.S. military base. I could tell it was him, even though his face was crumpled and collapsed into itself, reminding me of a rubber Halloween mask with a tuft of black hair on top.

Wold’s mother had to give her permission to allow him to join while he was still in high school. He was selected out of boot camp for a special Marine presidential protection unit. He guarded President George W. Bush during his retreats to Camp David.

The police report says it may have been an accident. Wold’s father, Thomas Nelson, was found on an icy road with a broken neck when William was only eleven. Wold’s family says he was unsettled by the death and believed it had been a homicide.

The Mayo Clinic says traumatic brain injury “usually results from a violent blow or jolt to the head that causes the brain to collide with the inside of the skull. An object penetrating the skull, such as a bullet or shattered piece of skull, also can cause traumatic brain injury. Mild traumatic brain injury may cause temporary dysfunction of brain cells. More serious traumatic brain injury can result in bruising, torn tissues, bleeding and other physical damage to the brain that can result in long-term complications or death.” According to the 2008 RAND Corporation study “Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and Cognitive Care Needs of America’s Returning Veterans,” as many as 320,000 of the 1.64 million U.S. troops who have served in Iraq may have suffered some form of traumatic brain injury.