Looking Out on Hostile Territory

摘要

The members of fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, are creeping through the mean streets of Iraq's meanest town when their mission comes in. Intelligence officers at the Marines' headquarters at Firm Base One, at the edge of Fallujah, have zeroed in on an insurgent: a local teacher named Taufiq Latif Saleh, suspected of being the leader of a 10-person bomb-making cell. Fox Company hits two "dry" houses before they find Saleh, a burly, bearded man in a grimy dishdasha. "I am a teacher! I am a teacher!" he protests as the Marines march him out into the courtyard, bind his hands with plastic ties and blindfold him. The Marines order his four young sons to kneel and face the wall as punishment for cracking wise when the troops entered the house. As Saleh is bundled into a waiting truck and taken to a detention facility, Lance Corporal John Hammar, 20, spots the man's daughter in tears and sighs in frustration. "Little kids are crying," he says. "I'm the bad guy now."