Sad news D-League. My Canadian friend, the war correspondent Matthew Fisher died today. I'll look for an obit and post it here if anyone is interested. He spent decades overseas and reported from at least a dozen war zones.
Here's a small snippet from one of his stories when a USMC unit he was with got ambushed during the 2003 drive to Baghdad...
It was 10 years ago this Wednesday that 200,000 U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq as coalition war planes swarmed over Baghdad at the same moment in a lethal display of “shock and awe.”
As the only Canadian journalist embedded with a combat unit for Operation Iraqi Freedom, very early that morning I was with the U.S. Marine Corps 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, a few hundred metres south of the Iraqi border in Kuwait. Once combat engineers breached Iraqi border defences, the battalion, known as the Wolfpack, was to be “the tip of the tip of the spear,” launching with great speed across the Line of Departure and pushing north as quickly as possible.....
........Waiting in ambush was an Iraqi brigade which included five Soviet T-54 tanks that were closing in quickly along a tree line. I watched through a window the size of a pair of glasses as the Iraqis and then the marines opened up with everything they had. The hiss of rocket-propelled grenades and multiple explosions filled the air. So did thousands of green tracer rounds.
After 20 minutes of intense fighting, “Slingshot!” was urgently repeated over the radio causing Cattabay and the others to groan. I asked what that meant. They replied that we were at such a great risk of being overrun (they used more colourful language) that an airstrike had been ordered on our own position.
Abandoning missions elsewhere, Cobra attack helicopters and dozens of American and British warplanes zeroed in on map grid co-ordinate “18 Northing,” dropping all their ordnance “danger close.” The ground shook, the sky lit up with pyrotechnics and many Iraqi troops were cut down only a few metres away from my perch in Black 6. According to aerial surveillance the next morning, several hundred Iraqis were killed without, incredibly, one American casualty.
Those bridges leading to Baghdad were not taken for several more weeks, but 3rd LAR had had a memorable baptism of fire. And so had I.
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