I worked with Damien Cave for years at Salon, where he did great work for our technology section. Several years ago he decamped for New York and ended up at the New York Times. He’s now reporting from Baghdad.
I’ve been catching up on reading some old papers that I neglected during the frenzy of my book launch. This morning I read his two-week-old piece “‘Man Down’: When One Bullet Alters Everything.” It’s a remarkable bit of eyewitness reporting from Haifa Street in central Baghdad, just outside the Green Zone, where Cave accompanied an American platoon on a sweep. It’s about the difficult choices facing U.S. forces trying to coordinate with Iraqis who are ostensibly leading the mission. It’s about the terrors and horrors facing Iraqi residents of the torn city. But mostly it’s about the choices and emotions encountered by the young American soldiers when one of their sergeants is struck down by a sniper. It is entirely sympathetic to the embattled Americans at the same time it illuminates how futile their effort is.
Perhaps the next time President Bush calls a press conference, the White House correspondents could collectively agree to stop wasting their time asking questions of a leader who will not give truthful answers — and instead, each read a sentence from this article, telling the president a story about what his mistakes have wrought.
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