Pressing Issues: Staying Behind to Get the Real Story

By: Greg Mitchell When last we heard from ace Knight Ridder war correspondent Tom Lasseter last autumn, he was planning to wind up his long, award-winning stint in Iraq in late January 2006, and move to Washington, D.C., to work for the KR bureau there. So what was he doing in mid-February, still in Iraq, filing another wrenching dispatch, embedded with U.S. troops in Samarra? What's with this guy? And how does he manage to get all of these stories, and revealing quotes, from military personnel when almost no one else can?

E&P has covered Lasseter several times in the past two years. His story from Samarra caused me to ask him how the latest came about. From Baghdad, he replied that he had been curious about Samarra for quite some time. Was it indeed pacified last year, as claimed by the U.S., or more like still-boiling Ramadi? After expressing his interest to the public affairs chief for the 101st Airborne, he got the OK to helicopter to the city in January.

Lasseter wrote in this e-mail that he was "pretty surprised by the level of destruction in the town." Its population of over 200,000 had been cut in half. Despite being surrounded by a seven-mile-long security wall, it was beset by an increasing number of explosions set off by insurgents.

An officer mentioned to him that a platoon of soldiers was living in an abandoned schoolhouse in the middle of the city. Lasseter told him that's where he wanted to go. "I always try to get as close to the ground as possible ? it gives me a feel for the place that is hard to get while staying at larger, more comfortable bases," he told me.

After hitching a ride to the schoolhouse, or Patrol Base Uvanni, Lasseter spent about a week and a half living with the guys "and going out with them in Samarra on foot or in Humvee. I find it really helpful, especially at the beginning of an embed, to accompany troops on every patrol mission possible. I want to see what they're seeing as they see it and hear what they have to say. It also shows them, in a quiet way, that I'm willing to go wherever they go and not ask for any special accommodations.

"I eat what they eat," Lasseter continued, "sleep when they sleep and when they wake up in the middle of the night, grab their flak vests and rush out the door, I do the same. Sometimes that means sitting in a Humvee and doing absolutely nothing and returning to pass out without getting much in the way of notes. And sometimes that means a big gunfight or a soldier saying something profound about his experience in Iraq.

"It's hard to tell the way things will work ? big raids can produce very little, and a walk down the street can lead you into something big. My approach is to almost always just go out the door with the soldiers and find out."

So what did he find out in his Samarra stay? "Bloodshed is destroying the city and driving a wedge between the Iraqis who live there and the U.S. troops who are trying to keep order," he reported. In one of those brutally honest quotes Lasseter inevitably seems to gather, Maj. Curtis Strange said, "It's apocalyptic out there. Life has definitely gotten worse. ? You see Samarra and you almost want to build a new city and move all these people there."

After much more in this vein, Lasseter described in vivid detail how a .50-caliber machine gun, manned by a 21-year-old Texan name Michael Pena on the roof of the schoolhouse, blasted an unarmed civilian on the street into oblivion. Horrified soldiers rushed to the Iraqi, or what was left of him ? his organs were now slithering out ? and watched him die, as he praised God and muttered, "Why? Why?"

"Haji, I don't know," an American soldier replied, with Lasseter right there.

A few days later, Lasseter found the gunner, Pena, still manning the machine gun on the same roof. "No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn't?" Pena asked. "Because there is no f------ reason."

So we now know how Lasseter got that story. But how much longer will he continue to risk life, limb, and sanity in the war zone?

"I'm not sure," he wrote to me. "I was supposed to leave late last year, but in looking at the year ahead I realized that I am not done reporting here. I would like to devote some time to embedding with U.S. units as the debate continues about troop drawdown in Iraq. This has been true the whole time I've been here, but it really does feel like a critical moment in the American experience in Iraq."

He added, "I think that you have to be there to know it."