From the Front

Mike Yon is the photographer who took the picture of the soldier holding the dying Iraqi child. It's all over the web, including the front page of his site, but as my mom commented in the previous post "O.K. GH, Warn me when I am going to view a photo like that. Key word, "Kleenex". Why have I not seen that photo on TV? I watch a lot of news but must have missed that story. Hope it is being broadcast in Iraq.

I linked him in a From the Front entry a while back, and I'm re-posting it here.

Mike Yon is an Army vet and the author of the book Danger Close. From the Amazon review:

In 1982, one month after graduating from high school, Florida native Mike Yon joined the Army to earn tuition money for college. At that time, President Reagan had begun channeling massive amounts of funds into Special Operations units such as the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, and Special Forces in response to the calamitous failure of a U.S. Special Ops attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. For a brief time, writes Yon, "the Army allowed kids straight out of their initial military training to try out for Special Forces"--and Yon jumped at the chance. By July of 1983, at the remarkable age of 19, Yon had survived rounds of grueling training and graduated into the Green Berets. One day later, a bizarre encounter in a Maryland bar landed Yon in jail, accused of murdering a fellow patron with his bare hands.

Then tell your friends too.

Update: Perhaps it's old news, but Mike's report on election day (including a bit of that 'sporadic violence') is not to be missed.

Excerpt:

By noon, it was obvious that the terrorists would not own this day. But terrorists were clearly making the effort, killing voters around Iraq. Yet more voters continued to turn out. Lines were forming at some polls.

A US patrol in the Buhriz area of Baquba came under small-arms and RPG attack. The reinforced "Punisher" platoon, led by Lieutenant TJ Grider, consisted of three Bradley fighting vehicles and six Humvees. Punisher had been moving to the Buhriz area, where insurgents were attacking the polling station, successfully preventing voting. American units had been instructed to minimize combat to avoid frightening voters. But since nobody was voting at that station due to the ongoing attacks, Lt. Grider said that the commander of Coalition forces in this area, Colonel Pittard, gave him clear instructions: "If they aren't going to vote anyway, we might as well kill some bad guys."

Punisher was told to kill people who were preventing voting. And the people who were preventing voting started trying to kill Punisher platoon. First came three RPGs, then two more. But Punisher was moving in and swept up through the area, surprising two men who held AKs and had RPGs propped up against a wall. The Humvee gunner killed them.

A Bradley vehicle on the next road reported killing three more, then blew up two cars, which were not supposed to be there. There was heavy shooting during which an American was slightly wounded, but soon returned to duty. The polling station was closed down and moved to another area of Baquba, where voters soon arrived.

I wanted to see the voting hand, so I hitched on the first convoy I could get, which happened to be taking that same CNN crew to another dangerous polling site in Baquba. In fact, of the 40 polling sites in Baquba, some US soldiers were wagering this one was most likely to be bombed.

The CNN crew had only three people, including the correspondent. They were to be dropped off and left at the polling station. I stayed with them. The American Army was not permitted to be stationed at the polling site; this was to be an Iraqi vote. So, the soldiers left us behind in the same neighborhood where I had been accompanying the Army on raids just a week earlier.

An hour passed while voters stretched out in a line perhaps thirty yards long. A second hour passed, and the line remained steady. No bombs, no RPG attacks. But if there were to be any attacks, they might come at the end of the day, to destroy the ballots. The terrorists knew that to destroy ballots was to destroy the elections. Yet the voters were exuberant, as if there was no possibility of attack. I spoke with many people--Sunnis, Shias, Christians, and others were standing in the same lines.

Three police officers handcuffed a large man. They escorted him with great purpose to an abandoned room of the school. I approached to see what was happening. Did he have a bomb?

The policemen, who had been asking me to photograph them for the last hour or two, suddenly told me to stop taking pictures. Naturally, this caused me to pick up the camera and take pictures.

"What did this man do?" I asked an Iraqi official.
"He was, let's say, misbehaving."
Misbehaving? I hadn?t heard any bombs or gunfire at the polling station (not in the polling station, anyway), nor any commotion. What had he done? The official would not tell me.
"Is he a terrorist?" I asked.
"No."
"Is he a criminal?"
"Not exactly."
"Why did you arrest him?"
"Not important, really not important."
"You have arrested a man who came to vote. This is very important. Why have you arrested him?"
Finally, the official embarrassingly explained that the man had grabbed the backside of the woman producer for CNN.
I sensed that he did not want a writer to know what this Iraqi man had done.
"What will you do with him?"
"He will spend two weeks in jail."
"For grabbing the producer?"
"For grabbing the woman, yes."

Eventually, the police conversed with the CNN crew, and released the man.

Another update: Mrs G reminds me we owe a thanks to Fred Schoeneman for introducing us to Mike's blog.