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CNN Live Today
War Stories
Aired May 02, 2003 - 11:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Some of the most dramatic and riveting reporting of the Iraqi war came to you in your living room live from CNN's embedded journalist Walter Rodgers. And Walt is back home from Iraq, and he's with us, as you can see right here on the set. He's going to share some of his stories that we have not been able to talk about up until now.
Good to see you.
WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's nice to be seen, as we say in television.
HARRIS: And in one piece as well.
Considering everything that you went through, I'm telling you, some of the things that you were able to report for us and that you filed for us are just absolutely phenomenal.
RODGERS: Let me give you a little spin on that. I even understated the degree of danger, because I think cardinal sin for a reporter is to lie or hype. So we were in situations which were even more dangerous than I allowed, because I was afraid of overstating.
HARRIS: Well, tell us about the picture we're watching now, from the first sandstorm that you guys had to deal with. Would you say the same thing about that?
RODGERS: Yes, that was very unpleasant, because at that point, they were essentially shooting at us from the edge of the road, and we only had visibility of 75 yards, and that meant that they could come to within 75 yards of the road, which is very close, with a rifle or an RPG, run up and shoot at us.
Fortunately, they didn't do that. They stood off 300 meters, and what they did was fire at the noise of our convoy, the tanks.
HARRIS: Hang on a second, hold that thought. We've got to stick in a break right here. But we've got some more e-mails for you and some more questions we've to talk to Walt about.
So folks, don't go away. We've got to take a break right now.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARRIS: All right, we're going to conversation our conversation with one of our former embedded journalists Walter Rodgers. We also want to keep you informed on something else that we are watching. We are watching here the soon-to-be docked USS Abraham Lincoln. You see there now being turned around there. That's got to be some kind of tug there. It's now being positioned to get ready to dock. And it looks like within maybe a matter of 25 minutes or so, some of those airmen on board will be coming off and rejoining their families who are standing by on the dock. And once that happens, we'll take you there live.
In the meantime, I want to pick this back up, our conversation with Walt.
These men here leaving the arena that you served yourself and served us so well in as a reporter following the marines. I want to get back to what happened with you that night at the sandstorm. You were just talking to us about having someone lying in a ditch maybe 75 yards away from you, shooting into sandstorms.
RODGERS: No, five meters, 15 feet. They were a lot closer than that. That was a different night.
But what -- the most interesting thing about the sandstorm is you can't see anything. People are shooting at all over the place, and they're shooting at you as well, and you first think that that aids the Iraqis, because they can come in so close. In point of fact, that sandstorm turned out to be like a giant smoke screen that protected us, because the Iraqis stood 300 meters, 300 yards off, three football fields away, fired at the noise of the convoy, and couldn't see to take aim. So we were very well protected by virtue of the sandstorm, and the Iraqis were not. That is the soldiers -- these were army soldiers, were in their tanks and Bradleys, and they had thermal imagery, so they could see through the sandstorm and hit the Iraqis while the Iraqis were just firing at noise.
HARRIS: I came in this morning, and I heard some story about an Iraqi that you all stopped to give first some aid to. Tell us about that story.
RODGERS: It was bizarre. We were under fire at the time, and my cameraman and I were doing live shots. But the satellite engineer and the security guard who traveled with us were free at the time. So they walked up to a slightly safer area, where there was a burned-out tank and a burned-out armored personnel carrier, and there were Iraqi bodies strewn on the ground. And all of a sudden Jeff Farwaz (ph), the satellite engineers, sees one of these guys sit up. It's like the scene from a bad movie in a morgue, where a guy under a sheet sits up, and, my God, he's alive. And then the next question, is he going to shoot you? And they went over and checked, and the guy had been in shock. He had been lying there at least five hours. And the AKE security guard that we had been traveling with, Paul Jordan of Australia, holds up an IV thing, and they start pumping morphine into him. Pretty soon this guy was smiling and happy. I mean, three shots of morphine and he was happier than a pig in slop.
HARRIS: Had to be pretty dicey for a moment there, I would guess. Something had to be in the back of your mind thinking, uh oh, what is going to happen here?
RODGERS: Well, they were shooting over our heads all the time. And you know, when they were -- when our crew, was a CNN crew, that was trying to give first aid to this guy, the army radioed back and said, bring up a medic, bring up a medical facility to take care of this guy, and the Iraqis were shooting at the thing with the red cross on it.
HARRIS: All right. Boy, tell you something, that would explain quite a bit about what we saw and heard.
Now I want to bring in -- I don't want to monopolize the time this morning, because we have a lot of people out there who have e- mailed you. We asked folks to send us some questions if they had, turns out you're a pretty popular guy.
Let's get to the first one we've got here this morning. This is from Evan in Morgantown, West Virginia: "What for you was the most dramatic experience while embedded with the 3-7 Cav?"
RODGERS: Getting shot at all the time for almost two weeks straight.
HARRIS: Did you ever get used to that?
RODGERS: You get tired of it. You don't get used to it. You say, how much longer do I have to do this? I have proved again and again that I'm not afraid to go into combat. Three days, normally you get to go back to a nice hotel, not when you're with the Army, boy, it's one more battle up the road, so getting shot at is the most dramatic thing. Churchill said there's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed.
HARRIS: Glad they missed. Let's get to the next e-mail. What do we have here next?
This is coming from Terry in Kingston, Ontario. "How did you keep your cool and how nervous were you? How was the experience different from anything that you've done before?"
RODGERS: You keep your cool through absolute tight discipline because you can't allow yourself to be afraid. First of all, it sets a bad example. In the second place, fear is a loss of control, and it's panic, and under no circumstances in life should you ever submit to fear. How do you keep your control? Just tight discipline. Were you afraid? No, I wasn't afraid. I was tense. Even though your anal sphincter puckers up, and sometimes you get sweaty palms and that sort of thing. You say let's drive faster, let's get the 'h' out of here, because we're moving too slowly, and we could get away.
HARRIS: Where do you get that from, Walt? We know the troops that you were with. They are trained to dig that deep, trained to think that way.
RODGERS: People who have it and people who don't. We're all civilians. I can tell you the most interesting thing is, the civilian correspondents at CNN -- me, Ben Wedeman, Christiane, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson -- we've seen more war and combat than these soldiers will ever see in their lifetime. We are old war dogs compared to them. We look at the soldiers say, look at those young puppies.
HARRIS: Did you find yourself in positions where you were advising them?
RODGERS: They would ask our advice, yes, more than a little. And you know, they would say, gosh, I hope I don't have to go through anything like that again. And I look at them and said, gosh, what do you think we do for a living? It's true, it's really is true. The correspondents -- CNN has the finest stable of war correspondents there is. I just rattled them off. Some of them have been wounded, Ben Wedeman in Gaza once.
HARRIS: That's right. As a matter of fact, we were on the air when that happened.
RODGERS: These are brave, brave people, and they know combat better than most soldiers, because they've seen more of it. We can tell whether the bullets are close, whether it's incoming or outgoing artillery. We can even tell by the sounds in the air what they're shooting at. Is it a 7.62, is it a 50 caliber? Is it an RPG? We know that stuff, and that's our training.
HARRIS: OK, that's one of the things that you've got that we wouldn't have. One final comment, not necessarily a question, this is coming from Gary in Cooper City, Florida. "As a U.S. Army veteran, congrats on a job well done. It's my opinion that you all receive a military civilian medal for your bravery. If you are not a military veteran, you are now."
RODGERS: The best people in the unit were not the journalists. They were the soldiers of the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry. They reaffirmed, again, that soldiering is an honorable profession, and it was a real pleasure to see them do their jobs.
HARRIS: You sure acquitted yourself quite well with them. Good to see you. Glad to have you back. Hope to keep you around here in some safer environment for awhile.
RODGERS: Safe is boring.
HARRIS: That's our Walter. Walter Rodgers, one of a kind, folks. You'll never find anybody like this any place else.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired May 2, 2003 - 11:22 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Some of the most dramatic and riveting reporting of the Iraqi war came to you in your living room live from CNN's embedded journalist Walter Rodgers. And Walt is back home from Iraq, and he's with us, as you can see right here on the set. He's going to share some of his stories that we have not been able to talk about up until now.
Good to see you.
WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's nice to be seen, as we say in television.
HARRIS: And in one piece as well.
Considering everything that you went through, I'm telling you, some of the things that you were able to report for us and that you filed for us are just absolutely phenomenal.
RODGERS: Let me give you a little spin on that. I even understated the degree of danger, because I think cardinal sin for a reporter is to lie or hype. So we were in situations which were even more dangerous than I allowed, because I was afraid of overstating.
HARRIS: Well, tell us about the picture we're watching now, from the first sandstorm that you guys had to deal with. Would you say the same thing about that?
RODGERS: Yes, that was very unpleasant, because at that point, they were essentially shooting at us from the edge of the road, and we only had visibility of 75 yards, and that meant that they could come to within 75 yards of the road, which is very close, with a rifle or an RPG, run up and shoot at us.
Fortunately, they didn't do that. They stood off 300 meters, and what they did was fire at the noise of our convoy, the tanks.
HARRIS: Hang on a second, hold that thought. We've got to stick in a break right here. But we've got some more e-mails for you and some more questions we've to talk to Walt about.
So folks, don't go away. We've got to take a break right now.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARRIS: All right, we're going to conversation our conversation with one of our former embedded journalists Walter Rodgers. We also want to keep you informed on something else that we are watching. We are watching here the soon-to-be docked USS Abraham Lincoln. You see there now being turned around there. That's got to be some kind of tug there. It's now being positioned to get ready to dock. And it looks like within maybe a matter of 25 minutes or so, some of those airmen on board will be coming off and rejoining their families who are standing by on the dock. And once that happens, we'll take you there live.
In the meantime, I want to pick this back up, our conversation with Walt.
These men here leaving the arena that you served yourself and served us so well in as a reporter following the marines. I want to get back to what happened with you that night at the sandstorm. You were just talking to us about having someone lying in a ditch maybe 75 yards away from you, shooting into sandstorms.
RODGERS: No, five meters, 15 feet. They were a lot closer than that. That was a different night.
But what -- the most interesting thing about the sandstorm is you can't see anything. People are shooting at all over the place, and they're shooting at you as well, and you first think that that aids the Iraqis, because they can come in so close. In point of fact, that sandstorm turned out to be like a giant smoke screen that protected us, because the Iraqis stood 300 meters, 300 yards off, three football fields away, fired at the noise of the convoy, and couldn't see to take aim. So we were very well protected by virtue of the sandstorm, and the Iraqis were not. That is the soldiers -- these were army soldiers, were in their tanks and Bradleys, and they had thermal imagery, so they could see through the sandstorm and hit the Iraqis while the Iraqis were just firing at noise.
HARRIS: I came in this morning, and I heard some story about an Iraqi that you all stopped to give first some aid to. Tell us about that story.
RODGERS: It was bizarre. We were under fire at the time, and my cameraman and I were doing live shots. But the satellite engineer and the security guard who traveled with us were free at the time. So they walked up to a slightly safer area, where there was a burned-out tank and a burned-out armored personnel carrier, and there were Iraqi bodies strewn on the ground. And all of a sudden Jeff Farwaz (ph), the satellite engineers, sees one of these guys sit up. It's like the scene from a bad movie in a morgue, where a guy under a sheet sits up, and, my God, he's alive. And then the next question, is he going to shoot you? And they went over and checked, and the guy had been in shock. He had been lying there at least five hours. And the AKE security guard that we had been traveling with, Paul Jordan of Australia, holds up an IV thing, and they start pumping morphine into him. Pretty soon this guy was smiling and happy. I mean, three shots of morphine and he was happier than a pig in slop.
HARRIS: Had to be pretty dicey for a moment there, I would guess. Something had to be in the back of your mind thinking, uh oh, what is going to happen here?
RODGERS: Well, they were shooting over our heads all the time. And you know, when they were -- when our crew, was a CNN crew, that was trying to give first aid to this guy, the army radioed back and said, bring up a medic, bring up a medical facility to take care of this guy, and the Iraqis were shooting at the thing with the red cross on it.
HARRIS: All right. Boy, tell you something, that would explain quite a bit about what we saw and heard.
Now I want to bring in -- I don't want to monopolize the time this morning, because we have a lot of people out there who have e- mailed you. We asked folks to send us some questions if they had, turns out you're a pretty popular guy.
Let's get to the first one we've got here this morning. This is from Evan in Morgantown, West Virginia: "What for you was the most dramatic experience while embedded with the 3-7 Cav?"
RODGERS: Getting shot at all the time for almost two weeks straight.
HARRIS: Did you ever get used to that?
RODGERS: You get tired of it. You don't get used to it. You say, how much longer do I have to do this? I have proved again and again that I'm not afraid to go into combat. Three days, normally you get to go back to a nice hotel, not when you're with the Army, boy, it's one more battle up the road, so getting shot at is the most dramatic thing. Churchill said there's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and missed.
HARRIS: Glad they missed. Let's get to the next e-mail. What do we have here next?
This is coming from Terry in Kingston, Ontario. "How did you keep your cool and how nervous were you? How was the experience different from anything that you've done before?"
RODGERS: You keep your cool through absolute tight discipline because you can't allow yourself to be afraid. First of all, it sets a bad example. In the second place, fear is a loss of control, and it's panic, and under no circumstances in life should you ever submit to fear. How do you keep your control? Just tight discipline. Were you afraid? No, I wasn't afraid. I was tense. Even though your anal sphincter puckers up, and sometimes you get sweaty palms and that sort of thing. You say let's drive faster, let's get the 'h' out of here, because we're moving too slowly, and we could get away.
HARRIS: Where do you get that from, Walt? We know the troops that you were with. They are trained to dig that deep, trained to think that way.
RODGERS: People who have it and people who don't. We're all civilians. I can tell you the most interesting thing is, the civilian correspondents at CNN -- me, Ben Wedeman, Christiane, Brent Sadler, Nic Robertson -- we've seen more war and combat than these soldiers will ever see in their lifetime. We are old war dogs compared to them. We look at the soldiers say, look at those young puppies.
HARRIS: Did you find yourself in positions where you were advising them?
RODGERS: They would ask our advice, yes, more than a little. And you know, they would say, gosh, I hope I don't have to go through anything like that again. And I look at them and said, gosh, what do you think we do for a living? It's true, it's really is true. The correspondents -- CNN has the finest stable of war correspondents there is. I just rattled them off. Some of them have been wounded, Ben Wedeman in Gaza once.
HARRIS: That's right. As a matter of fact, we were on the air when that happened.
RODGERS: These are brave, brave people, and they know combat better than most soldiers, because they've seen more of it. We can tell whether the bullets are close, whether it's incoming or outgoing artillery. We can even tell by the sounds in the air what they're shooting at. Is it a 7.62, is it a 50 caliber? Is it an RPG? We know that stuff, and that's our training.
HARRIS: OK, that's one of the things that you've got that we wouldn't have. One final comment, not necessarily a question, this is coming from Gary in Cooper City, Florida. "As a U.S. Army veteran, congrats on a job well done. It's my opinion that you all receive a military civilian medal for your bravery. If you are not a military veteran, you are now."
RODGERS: The best people in the unit were not the journalists. They were the soldiers of the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry. They reaffirmed, again, that soldiering is an honorable profession, and it was a real pleasure to see them do their jobs.
HARRIS: You sure acquitted yourself quite well with them. Good to see you. Glad to have you back. Hope to keep you around here in some safer environment for awhile.
RODGERS: Safe is boring.
HARRIS: That's our Walter. Walter Rodgers, one of a kind, folks. You'll never find anybody like this any place else.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
