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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
A cameraman criticized by all sides for his video of a Marine apparently shooting an unarmed insurgent inside a Fallujah mosque says he doesn't regret releasing it.
Jun 1, 2005 | "This was a fucking mess, man." Kevin Sites peers at the monitor in the bright California sunlight, trying to make out the images on the screen. But Sites doesn't really have to look. This is his film, his moment; the images on the screen are ones that have come to define his life.
Sites is the journalist who captured the moment when a young U.S. Army Marine shot an equally young insurgent inside a mosque in Fallujah in November of last year. Sites' video, broadcast around the world, caused a storm. For some it showed an American soldier executing an insurgent, proof of the brutality of war, of the U.S. Army and of its soldiers. For others, it highlighted the perils faced by U.S. troops, from booby-trapped insurgents taking cover in mosques to the threat of an embedded liberal media.
For Sites, it posed other questions: of how to reconcile the need for truth and honesty with the sense of responsibility to the troops around him, of how to honor his duty to minimize harm through his reporting.
Assailed by all sides, Sites wrote a memorable explanation of his actions in releasing the video on his blog, "Dispatches From a Life in Conflict." Titled "To Devil Dogs of the 3.1," the text, in turn, was reprinted by media around the world, including this newspaper. Sites, it seemed, had inadvertently become the conduit for debate about the war. Earlier this month, a military tribunal ruled that the corporal involved in the incident should not face charges.
On Sites' laptop, the 12-minute video he shot in the dust of Fallujah plays out its story. Working as an embedded "sojo" -- a solo journalist -- employed by NBC to cover the offensive in Fallujah, Sites arrives outside a mosque with a squad of six Marines. Shooting is heard from inside the mosque, even though the site had been cleared the day before. Another squad enters the building from the rear. Three shots ring out, and a Marine emerges to say that they have found five insurgents and have shot them. "Were they armed?" asks the lieutenant with Sites' squad. The Marine shrugs and wanders off.
Sites enters the mosque. His camera pans around a small room, settling on two bodies lying together, one wearing a red kaffiyeh on his head. Blood bubbles from the man's nose. Off-screen a voice says, "He's fucking faking he's dead. He's faking he's fucking dead." Sites' camera slowly pans across the room until it stops at the image of a Marine, his body made bulky by equipment, standing before two figures lying on the floor. The camera's movement is matched by the barrel of the Marine's M-16 being raised.
As the camera stops moving, so does the gun. A shot rings out. One of the figures is thrown back. The Marine fires a second shot and abruptly turns and walks away. The camera pauses for a moment on the figure lying on the ground. In an almost balletic movement, the figure's leg drops gracefully to the floor. The camera, echoing the stillness of the scene, slowly moves back to the dying man with the bleeding nose. The video ends a few moments later.
Six months later, Sites is still reeling from the effects of the video he shot that day. Tanned and muscled, he exudes the genial, unreserved charm that can seem almost de rigueur in Southern California. Dressed in black T-shirt and jeans, black hair swept back, the 42-year-old talks quickly and confidently about his experiences. He is clear now, he says, about his actions and what happened in Fallujah. But underlying his resolve, there is a sense of anxiety. Did he favor one side over the other? Did he become a pawn for the antiwar movement? Was he swayed by his allegiance to the troops he was embedded with? In trying to present every side of the story, did he lose sight of the story?
Sites, who had been to Iraq many times and had been held captive by Saddam Hussein's Fedayeen outside Tikrit, was embedded with the U.S. Marines for three weeks prior to the onset of the offensive against Fallujah.
"I would sleep in the dirt," he says. "I would do whatever [the Marines] did, and they liked that. We ended up developing this incredible relationship. To the point where people started to criticize me on my blog, [saying] that I was becoming too sympathetic. I was taking pictures of them holding up pictures of their kids. My whole idea was to humanize them."
When his employer, NBC News, tried to replace him with a more traditionally telegenic frontman, the Marines came to Sites' rescue, saying that it was Sites or nobody. So Sites, with his video camera, went to Fallujah and the mosque and one of the biggest stories of the war.
"I knew what I had right away," Sites says. "I called the top bosses at the network, the three news officials that are responsible for foreign news. Got them out of bed. I said, 'I've got something that is potentially bigger than Abu Ghraib. I need you to know that I have it.' I watched the videotape on playback as I talked to them, and I remember my words. I go, 'Fuck, I have it.'"
But even though he knew what he had, and he had made sure that his superiors in the United States knew of its existence, he didn't immediately know what to do with it. His journalistic instincts were tempered by his comradeship with those around him.
"I wasn't thinking clearly as a journalist," he says. "I was still feeling part of a unit, part of some people who have just been embroiled in some serious conflict. I was heartsick, because I just knew that this wasn't good for anybody, not for the guy who got shot, not for that Marine, not for me. I've seen plenty of people get killed. I've never seen anybody get killed like that. I'd never seen what looked like an execution point-blank. I hoped at that moment that it had been anybody else other than me shooting that videotape."
