Subject: FW: Update from Beautiful Downtown Baghdad
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
this is really gooooooood stuff...!!!
ALCON:
Another SITREP from the streets of Baghdad...the real
skinny and not the
crap from the Media.
S/F, WVM MudMarine
-----Original Message-----
From: Evans, Edward TAC-Baghdad
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 7:57 AM
Subject: Update from Beautiful Downtown Baghdad
Am guessing all you see on the news media is the same
hype we are
seeing here. They talk about some single violent act and run film of the
last five violent acts. It's not as bad as it looks. So thought I'd
share
this with you this morning.
Last night as I was preparing to head for the barn,
the bad guys threw
three rockets our way, all three impacting inside the Green Zone. No one
injured that we know of. You'll hear MSNBC's Dr. Bob Arnot call them
three
mortar rounds, but he's wrong as usual.
One of them went off as an air burst near the main
parking lot about 1
000 yards from the Presidential Palace (see attached photo). There were
about 100 vehicles in the lot at that time of night, 20 vehicles were
damaged, and no gas tanks exploded. Obviously, they are just pointing
the
rockets in the general direction and hoping they'll hit something.
That's
typical of the gang that can't shoot straight.
<<DSCI0023.JPG>>
Earlier yesterday a small car engaged one of our
Bradley Fighting
Vehicles in small arms fire, one of three Bradleys on the road. When the
Bradley fired back, they abandoned the car and jumped on a truck that
came
down a side road. Apparently it was someone's screwy idea of a three
truck
ambush, because two other trucks appeared and drove at the Bradleys at a
high rate of speed. Now, the Bradley is a highly armored, tracked
vehicle
that can spew grenades off all four corners at once, and automated 25mm
bullets, including HE (high explosive) rounds. The trucks are, well,
trucks.
Result of that encounter, three destroyed trucks, 5 bad guys killed, 5
wounded. An amazing sidelight was that an Army Captain was shot square
in
the head, but he was wearing his helmet, so he has a great souvenir.
Anyway, the numbers of attrition are wildly in our
favor, regardless
of what the news media implies. They are trying really hard to put a
political spin on absolutely everything over here. To us here, they
couldn't
look more ridiculous sometimes with their posturing and postulating.
Instead of sitting back in defensive positions, our
forces here are
now on the offensive, so you can expect to see more violent
confrontations.
But in every one of them, the bad guys are losing men and equipment they
really can't afford to lose. And the Iraqi people more and more are
turning
them in. So we wish the news media would report that, too. The Iraqi
people
want us here, and they wish the Iranians, Syrians and Jordanians would
stay
out of here.
Business is really picking up in the city, they are
cleaning the
streets, rebuilding the shops, and free enterprise is beginning to catch
on,
but slowly. For most of their lives, someone has told them what to do,
how
much they can charge, what they can grow, build, and do. There are
hundreds
of great stories out here, if I were just working for a news agency that
would run them.
By the way, a couple of Iraqi lads learned about
Apache helicopters
yesterday. They had set off an explosion spotted by two Apaches running
north above the highway out of Baghdad yesterday. And right behind the
explosion they saw these two lads on two motorcycles moving at top speed
away from it. The cyclists split up, and so did the Apaches. But one of
the
lads dumped his cycle in his front yard and ran in the house. The Apache
then made his cycle disappear in a puff of smoke and waited on station
for
the ground troops and local police to arrive. After all, he wasn't going
anywhere, this time. Ahhhh, those trigger happy Apache pilots. Bet they
are
the envy of any police helicopter pilot in any U.S. metropolitan city.
Can't
you just see that happening in New York City?
