Mike Cerre has been following Fox 2/5 throughout the Iraq war and tonight he returns to the story. At a UC Berkeley conference on media coverage of the war just over a year ago, he said he started working for ABC after making indpendent documentaries for years because as a Vietnam vet he wanted to be a witness to what the Marines in this war were going through.
There is an interview with him from KQED, one of San Francisco's NPR stations.
Excerpt from the Nightline Daily Email for March 29, 2005, "Coming Home:"
Back in November, Sergeant Jason Arellano led a Marine infantry platoon fighting its way into the city of Fallujah. Coalition and Iraqi troops had left Fallujah that spring after four U.S. contractors were killed there and their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge across the Euphrates. Fallujah had become a haven for insurgents and a base for them to launch attacks across Iraq. In November, the U.S. and Iraqi governments decided to retake the city, and Arellano and his men were in the front line of the assault.
...
Back at home, Arellano has found it hard to adjust. His men are still in Fallujah patrolling the city where they'd seen their comrades killed and their Sergeant injured. They send occasional e-mails telling Arellano everything is OK. But that's what he used to tell his family and friends when everything was far from OK.
I went to see Arellano and his mom in Taos to find out exactly what happened, and if the experience has changed him.
Arellano described the moment he was hit. It was like being electrocuted in slow motion, he said. Being driven out of Fallujah to a field hospital, he told the medics to stop giving him morphine so he could feel the pain and know he was still alive. He describes the constant "itch" of knowing your friends and comrades have died. An itch put to the back of your mind because that's what you have to do in battle. An itch that has gotten worse back in Taos.
And he talked about having to kill. That, he says, is something he can't afford to think about. It's something best left in Fallujah.
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