Michael J. Totten: After the Battle of Al-Fajr
by John Little on 10/12/2007Michael J. Totten has filed another excellent dispatch from Iraq:
“Were they good fighters?” I said.
“They’re not good fighters,” he said, “but they got a bunch of us. They knew we were clearing every building. And they’d learn from us. Whenever we went to a position we always filled sandbags and stuff like that.”
“And they would do the same thing,” he continued. “They knew that if we couldn’t come through the front door, we’d go through the back door. So they would barricade one door and leave one open. And they’d put a bunker and a machine gun down that main hallway. They would sit in the back corner of a room and soon as you kicked open the door they would just keep firing. So maybe they weren’t very good fighters, but they were quick to adapt and were actually pretty smart.”
“I’ve read that some of these guys injected themselves with drugs,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “we found syringes, different types of drugs. The corpsman tried to explain to me what they were at the time, but I didn’t really pay attention to him. They found a lot of medical stuff like that, but for the most part they were just smart. They basically knew what we were going to do every time. We would clear the house, so all they had to do was wait.”
“Do you talk about this stuff with your friends and family?” I said. I was curious if he, like Corporal Koch, kept the war all bottled up inside to himself.
“If they ask, I’ll tell them,” he said. “It doesn’t really bother me. The more people understand what’s really going on over here, the more support they’ll give us.”
There’s much more, including photos, on Michael’s blog.
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Video: Operation Al Fajr
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